the liberal electrocuted monkey brigade has gone missing.

David Letterman has always been one of my favorite celebs. I left the Tonight Show off my nightly rounds after they chose Leno years ago - and never looked back. (Larry "bud" Melman is still one of my favorite shticks.) Letterman's humor almost always nailed it for me. Unlike Leno, Letterman not only tells jokes - he IS funny.

So yesterday's clip of his crack about Palin's daughter disheartened me. At first because Palin jokes are just cheap and easy at this point. She's a public figure - she gets what she gets. We ought to BLOWBACK when they go too far - as they often do when TV jokers crack about Sarah Palin. Still, it is a tough business and it seems she knows it.

But the joke was too much for the obvious reasons. It was tasteless - of course. That does not bother me so much. I love South Park after all. I heard it as a slam against Palin, her eldest daughter and A Rod - at first. Hot Air makes the point that since she took her 14 year old daughter, Willow, to the Yankees game - Letterman was, in fact, making a joke at about the rape of a minor. I missed this - though it is obvious.

Massbackwards:
I have to think that if Barack Obama had taken his daughters to a Washington Wizards game, and a conservative television personality made a joke about one of them getting raped and impregnated at halftime by Antawn Jamison, that person might be in the middle of a major shitstorm right about now.

That point can't be argued. We've seen it happen a thousand times. One of the most poisonous aspects of the Obama phenomenon has been the complete disregard of liberals for their own stated values. I assume Letterman leans left - though I have no idea. So finally his bad joke concerns me less than the liberal reaction to it. Letterman puts on a show 5 nights a week. Off base jokes are bound to happen under that pressure. As Ralph Richardson allegedly said on his death bed when asked if dying was difficult: Death is easy. Comedy is hard.

I am not going to get to wound up about Letterman. He should have known better. He should be taken to task for the joke. He should apologize. That is it.

Here's my problem. Liberals went off like monkeys being electrocuted in a cage when Rush L. said he "wanted Obama to fail." As if most off them had not thought and said "I want George Bush to fail." for 8 years. They did. We did. I did. At one point last year even saying Obama was arrogant was called "racist" by the false Lefties with the bullhorns. In fact, questioning Obama on anything inevitability went to "racist!" is a few short sound bites. Ferraro got reamed for telling a simple truth last spring. A black man being a viable candidate WAS a bobble many libs hung their vote on. It certainly wasn't because they knew anything about him. Most didn't.

So where is the liberal electrocuted monkey brigade after Lettermen's joke about rape?

The monkeys are MIA. It was only PALIN after all. You know - she's "white trash" so mocking is A-Okay.

Obama and what his pods have wrought is the ruination of any hope a progressive/liberal movement can survive as anything but a rump, neutered force...(Don't believe me? Where is Single Payer now that we have a "liberal" President? Gone. Flushed. Off the table. I promise you if Hillary Clinton was President Single Payer would be on the table. )

...More than that liberals have flushed their values - values fought for over decades - from abolition to suffrage to civil rights

and sold their souls for a cowardly hack from Chicago who gave them tingles.

On Astroturfing

The most damaging addiction of those on the Left is not taxing and spending - it is condescension.

I must admit, the Tea Parties set for this week have not been of much interest to me until Krugman weirdly joined up with the condescension class bent of looking down their snouts at them. He also misreads the impulse behind the movement. It saddens me to see him participate in what Kunstler calls media "auditing" . The meme in the "liberal" media is that the Tea Parties are either meaningless or sponsored by the DARK SIDE - read: Fox News and ultra Right wingers who live in gated enclaves watching CSPAN while steam comes out of their ears, all the while writing checks to hatchet men. These criticisms from the Maddows of the Media are leveled without the slightest question as to where Chicago Slim's millions came from. A mystery, indeed.

Creating a "movement" with Astroturfing ( public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous "grassroots" behavior,) works if the movement wants to be created. That is - it has a ready audience. At the end of the day people need to show up to the "astroturfed movement". If enough do, it is a success. At that point, there is no contradiction between "astroturfing" and "grass roots" eruptions. If 20,000 show up to the Tea Party on Wednesday in NY it is because they chose to, not because Fox News made them.

My sense is that there is a large audience very willing to hear that American tax dollars are being flushed away and/or spent on saving the fraud class. This is hardly revelatory. Condemning taxes is one of our driving narratives in the United States. The financial fiasco has given this storyline a new life.

I see no difference between what Rogers Ailes and his allies are allegedly doing with the tea parties and what Huffington, MSNBC and David Axelrod did last year with Obama. Creating, then tapping into an audience is what movements are. Leaders tell people what they ought to think - all the time. People then- for the most part - either incorporate or reject the information fed to them. This is not devious in and of itself. Those doing the astroturfing may have devious ends in mind to be sure. The astroturfing rules of the Obama Pods were devious by nature.

- This man is the answer to your frustrations.
- You may not question anything about this man. If you do you are the enemy.
- Anyone opposed to this man is stupid and probably evil.

By those rules the tea party "astroturfing" is positively ethical. Regardless, the proof will be in the pudding. If they are successful it is because they hit a nerve not because they created one to hit.

The alternative to this - dismissing and silencing all such top down organizing - is far worse. I would rather have people acting as if they still believe we live in a republic than sinking and seething into a realization that they may not. Then pitchforks, and later rocket launchers, come into play.

The fact is real grassroots movements rarely erupt in this country. When they do the distance between the eruption and violence is short. I lived through a spontaneous "grassroots" movement in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. No one astroturfed those 4 days. And let's be clear - it started as a race riot - but within 12 hours it was a class riot. In most major cities we are closer to this happening now than anytime in the last 70 years.

If people believe we are being trashed, lied to, ripped off and conned by those taxing us I say: protest. Do it. Imaginatively and peacefully.

What Maddow and the rest really can't abide it not the impulse - it is that conservatives are behind it. I'm quite sure I would not agree with most of the "tea partiers" politics- but I support the fundamental right to protest.

mocking liberals

Linked here is an article mocking liberals.

Yet that's just the sort of "big change" Barack Obama has provided in the two months since winning over the man Democrats derided as "McBush." Even worse for the Left, Obama advisers are now signaling, says the New York Times, "that they may put off renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, overhauling immigration laws, restricting carbon emissions, raising taxes on the wealthy and allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military."

Add in the flip flops we've already seen and on all major policy fronts, Obama has lied, will lie, or is lying as I type.

I want to make clear 2 things:

1. I AM NOT surprised by Obama's rightward shift. I knew he was a fraud months ago. Therefore I never expected real policy changes. Obama was hired to put a new face on protecting the same elites. His behavior fits the D.C. mold perfectly. He is an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks... etc etc

2. As a mostly unreconstructed FDR/Scoop Jackson liberal I am, in fact, gleeful to see the Geffen/Huffington/liberal white guilt/cocktail party/I love the workers- I just don't want them near me/Maureen Dowd types - get mugged and ditched in the alley.

It is so easy to mock this bunch now. They behaved childishly for over a year. It is satisfying to see the fools get thrown into the cold moat.