Man-crush

Not sure what else to call it.  Yes, the writing and style are phenomenal, but look at the core of that post: the greatest, most obvious example of HIGHpocrisy this country has ever known, maybe ever.  If we can't get KO to join us in what we still refer to as a 'silly little venture', then maybe the estimable Mr. Pierce can do so?  "You think big, you be big, my friend".

For F**k's Sake

Sometimes, far more frequently these days than we care to remember, a four-letter word is the only word that comes to mind when trying to process days like yesterday. 
Four months have passed since our 'year-ending' last entry on the god-awful tragedy in Newtown.  Time does not heal all wounds.  Now we have fresh, new ones.  So just as we inched closer to getting back into standard HIGHpocrisy fare, like dealing with the President's latest middle finger to the people and party that re-elected him, some insane A-hole (or plural, a-holes) decides to ruin a perfectly boring marathon and plunge us back into the 'pit of despair'. 
In the process, s/he or they -- let's go with 'they' for now, it writes better -- also messed with the wrong icon, like they care.  It was not just Patriots Day in Boston, but the anniversary of when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.  All major leaguers wear his number '42' on Jackie Robinson day.  Jackie is one of my personal idols, though he played before my time.  His initials 'JR' are 1 of the reasons I post as J Rollah; a picture of him adorns my faux Facebook page as my profile.  He represents to me all that is good about human nature, and yesterday's perps represent all that is bad.
Maybe someday, if the grief and anger subside, we can get back to our silly little venture here, infinitesimally small compared to the stuff we should be writing about.  We can honor Jackie properly then.  We can strive to live up to the ideals for which we think he stood.  But not this day.  In public, back in his time, Jackie may have taken the high road in the face of such vitriol, but to whoever did this in Boston, all I can say at this moment is, "F**k you!"  For tearing up lives & families, for forcing average citizens to become something they didn't want or ask to become, even for not letting us enjoy a single day, "F**k you!" 
No, I don't feel better yet, it doesn't go away.  Here's to praying that the four-letter word doesn't rear its ugly head so much in the future.  Here's to hoping for that better tomorrow.  Yes, to answer Craig Ferguson's question from last night, I am sick of this sh**! 

Nothing vs. Grief

There is a line in John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off, when high school principal Ed Rooney tries to comfort Sloane Peterson outside the school, because he thinks her grandmother had passed away.  Rooney says, 'between grief and nothing, I choose grief'. Hughes made syrupy teen comedies that spoke to a certain generation, including mine. He might be speechless after last week.
J and Rollah are both parents; we can cry (and have); we can hug our kids (and have); maybe we can have some conversation with them on some level even though we cannot make any sense of the senseless.  We know there is some evil that can never be explained. Otherwise, there is only silence, and heartache. No HIGHpocrisy, no moral indignation. Just numbness. I don't know that I could choose this type of grief, because who knows what the nothing would look like. I pray I never have to make that choice. 

We're so very fortunate, and yet I just want to say good riddance to 2012.  Of all I have seen, heard, and read about these past few days, the closest to my own state of mind -- whatever that is worth -- is this.  God bless us, everyone.  See you next year.

Post-geography

Gotta say, I was not as nervous last week as I might have been, since I was tracking 538.com and Sam Wang long enough to know better.  What a relief not to have to rely on the batshade bubble.  But let's also give ourselves an 'A' for what can best be labeled a post-geography lesson:

In Romney's 2 'home' states, Michigan and Massachusetts, Obama won.  In Paul Ryan's Wisconsin, Obama won.  In Florida, Obama won, eventually (we would have preferred a bit more dominance via Ryan's Medicare-killing budget in the land of the senior).  The electoral map still shows the red & blue states, but let's do something Rs cannot: be honest with ourselves.  Romney could not have won the popular vote if you were looking solely at where the majority of people live!  Leave aside that his only saving grace was a 90-minute side-show in Denver in early October.  Leave aside the fact that he had 0 foreign policy experience for a job that requires a lot more than 0.  Romney beat himself (!), because he was never able to be himself in front of enough voters who lived where he needed them to live. 

Sure, last Tuesday was a great victory for those who believe in social justice and the fairness of the system.  Not just because of Obama.  Lots of other good people won, too.  The estimable Maureen Dowd wrote a longer version of this over the weekend.  It wasn't just 'pass/fail', but we passed with flying colors after all:  mostly blue, with some purple in there for effect.  Welcome to America! 

Time's up

We really tried to capture the essence of the crazy in our prior post, but along comes The Rude Pundit, with his "A Filthy End to the Filthy Campaign of a Filthy Liar".  And that pretty much says it too. 

For the higher-browed (is that even a term?), we also give you the masterful eloquence of one Charles Pierce.  Well worth the reading time.  Money quotes (2):

When you see a lunatic wandering down the sidewalk, howling at the moon and waving a machete, it is not fear that makes you step inside your house and lock the door. It is the simple logic of survival. Fear is what keeps you from trying to tackle the guy and wrestle the machete away from him. And, as much as it may pain some people to admit it, the president is the only one stepping up to do that at the moment. 
... Obama owes the disgruntled. Romney owes the crazy. And that makes all the difference.

We could not resist adding this last number from today's Rude Pundit, one more money quote but read the entry, it's short enough.

Romney has nothing, offers nothing, is nothing, other than white and rich, which is, sadly, to our great disgrace, enough for nearly half the nation. He never had a chance.

Coverage v. Narrative

Paul Krugman wrote this election is a test of the system; Matt Taibbi commented that it should never have been this close; Bob Cesca has wondered why the corporate-owned media has stuck with its narrative of a close race, come hell or Hurricane Sandy's high waters; Steve Benen at The Rachel Maddow Blog has been chronicling "Mitt's Mendacity" throughout the campaign.  Our blog roll alone contains an endless stream of words and deeds by the R ticket that should DISQUALIFY Romney from being President.  And yet here we are, a week out, and you can follow the polls, the pundits, the MSM, anyone you want.  What a country!  Democracy in action!  Except, it's not.

From a purely HIGHpocritical viewpoint, it's easy to spot the most basic of problems: Romney's debate #1 'win' fueled a narrative that Romney was not going to end up the inevitable loser.  Everything he said and did up to that point was a gambit anyway.  But, Obama's and Biden's debate wins [more convincing IMO because they were actually debating real people, not ghosts, who showed up intent on winning too] restored the forecasting numbers, but the narrative went unchanged.  Why? 

McCain-Palin. Romney-Ryan. Not 1 of the 4 belongs anywhere near the White House. Whatever criticisms could be lobbed at the current President, we'll never get that discussion on a national level, because of the cynicism & lying on the part of the major opposition party in our political system, and because of the false equivalence on the part of the MSM.  BTW, that begs the question of when the media is ever going to take a serious look at the Koch-addled influence being peddled?  About the same time as they ask for Romney to release his tax returns, meaning, never.  Tax returns alone = he's hiding something, why is that OK?  How come he gets a pass there?

What about race or religion?  [Hint: Missourah relatives know Romney is a tool, but they will vote for him anyway, since Obama is black. OK, that's more than a hint.]  Why was Romney's Mormonism never an issue, race is OK, but religion is off-limits?  That's HIGHpocrisy.  I stopped reading Sullivan's blog after his hair-on-fire posts but he did write a great one on this topic.  
 

What about character, then?  Romney has lied all year, demonstrably. He doesn't care about fact-checkers.  Pollsters have a liberal bias.  Stats are cooked if they favor Obama.  Chris Matthews tried to tell Steve Schmidt that Romney should apologize to America for being such a complete cynic.  We've said already that Romney has either been lying to the base all along, made more obvious when he switched on 'Moderate Mitt'; while Ryan winks and tells everyone he's conservative enough for the both of 'em. Or, Romney's lying presently to the moderates. Or both. And at the same time. 

 

How does that help this once-great nation as a whole, when we're still trying to recover from 2 unfunded wars and tax cuts for the rich?  We don't know, we don't have answers.  We have theories, above, and wishes, that maybe these last 2 acts of a desperate, shameless shyster will finally put him back in his rightful place?!  All we can say before this election that ends a campaign unlike any other in history, is what Sgt. Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues: 

Hey, let's be careful out there.

Debate #3, 'gangnam style'

OK not really.  There is actually a lot of HIGHpocrisy to be found in Monday night's final debate, starting with the most basic: it was supposed to be about foreign policy.  Romney/Ryan = 0 experience, so of course the R had to keep talking about the economy.  Maybe that might have been OK, too, except that Romney said many of the exact same things he had already said in the prior two debates, literally, and verbatim.  I know how to create jobs, I know how to get the economy going, I know how to lead, blah, blah, blah.  Except, you never say "how" you're going to do any of those things (worse, how you even know you can).  And no one asks him how, either.  More on the failed media narrative in our subsequent entry.

So, the debate should not have been.  On substance, that was not a debate: no Russia (thankfully, no "Russia from my house"); some China; lots of Middle East; too much Israel.  No climate change, no drug war, no Africa as developing continent. No real debate on drones.  No Euro crisis.  In a sane world, in a normal plane of existence, when the President would bring up the 2 wars that the last R started, without paying for them, the other guy would reply with an actual answer.  That would be quite democratic, but we're a laughing stock on public discourse.  How do we know that?  Because there's a ticket with 0 foreign policy experience being taken seriously. 

And yet, almost as many people supposedly watched #3 as #2s and 1 (about 60 million people, about 1/5th of the country's population, almost all of whom had already made up their minds).  So, debates matter, right?  Well, before the 3rd one, Rollah read a brief post on another site (!), that Romney was tied on the topic of FP via some random poll.  That had to be a joke.  Nothing has happened, Romney has said nothing, done nothing, that would trigger a rise in his FP standing.  He's still at 0.  Not Ground Zero, just 0, 00, and lots more 00000000s.  OK, then, so maybe debates don't matter, even if they should?  A la Bill Murray in Meatballs, "all the really good-looking girls are still gonna go out with the guys from Mohawk, because they got all the money."

We also think The Rude Pundit was on the mark, when he wrote yesterday,

"4. On substance, then, it was a fairly useless debate, as have all the debates. On style, though?If Obama had been as clueless, pandering, and flop-sweaty as Romney, pundits around the country would have said that they're getting ready to cover a Mitt administration. However, since it was the Democrat who won, most will say that Romney didn't do too badly. That's bullshit. Romney lost big time. It was embarrassing at times how little a major party candidate seemed to know or care about the rest of the world. Romney acted like Sarah Palin, a talking point machine who couldn't string together a proposition or thought. He looked like Nixon on meth, sputtering, useless, and, goddamn, so sweaty. He tried to shift to moderate mode again, but this time Obama was ready and he repeatedly called Romney out on it, at times eviscerating Romney. He tried to shift to domestic policy, and Obama went right along with him, kicking his ass every step of the way.
And when Romney wasn't trying to say that Obama was wrong, he was positively feckless. He either agreed completely with Obama or he threw out a word or two that made it sound like he had just looked up, say, Mali on his smart phone. As for any alternative to anything Obama was doing, Romney's sole plan seems to be that he'll be there and not Obama, and somehow, through Mormon magic involving the castrated balls of the eunuchs in the Tabernacle Choir, no doubt, America will seem stronger with a man named Willard in charge.

Based solely on our high standards for HIGHpocrisy, the end result of the debates was this: when Romney lied in #1, but Obama didn't push back, Romney was presidential and therefore the winner. When Romney lied in 2 and 3, but Obama called him out, Obama wasn't Presidential. Got that? [We want to keep believing that the media will wake up in time, not to ask any real or tough questions, they won’t, but just to look around and say, OK, we’ve let this go on long enough, it's time to stop messing with people’s lives.] Maybe the best outcome we can hope for would be for the wingnut base to feel as demoralized as Dems did after #1.  If they don't turn out, Obama wins. Then debates matter.