Sentential Links #181

Warning: these are all political, except for the last one. I'm in one of those moods.

:: I'm sorry to have to say this, but I really hope the teabag woman who thinks this is a great system, loses her health insurance and has to go get her health care in an animal stall. If she's lucky enough to even get that. If she believes charity health care in soaking wet tents once a year is a mark of a well functioning market, she is so stupid she deserves it.

I'm not sure anymore if some of these people are even human.

:: When Teabag Joe and Jane show up at a health care town hall, they garner sympathy because they look like a regular frustrated person. Whatever their message is, it gains credibility because they’re not a career politician, they’re wearing shoes that don’t match their pants, and they seem genuinely angry about something. And in a debate about our personal health, that goes a long way. And this makes me wonder - why has nobody in the vaunted Obama operation, nobody holding any of these town halls, tried to contextualize their positions by using actual real people who want or need universal health insurance? Michael Moore found a bunch of people - sympathetic people - and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but he’s fat. (Remember when Bill Clinton made the GOP look like a bunch of tools at the State of the Union by citing one of his invited guests, a guy who had aided the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and saved lives on that day, and then after the guy's unanimous standing ovation, dropped the fact that the guy was now broke because he worked for the government and the GOP had just shut down the Federal government? Yeah, good times. I'll never forget the look on Trent Lott's face when he did that. Maybe Obama will figure this out eventually.)

:: There are only two outcomes here. Either we get very good at spotting and stopping these attempts at a brownshirt takeover the minute they crop up; or they're going to get very good at public intimidation, and keep ratcheting it up further toward outright violence and goon rule. That's how it's going to be for the rest of this administration. The sooner we resign ourselves to the zero-sum nature of this fight, the sooner we can get on with getting good at it.

:: There’s a bizarre love triangle among the Republican party, the media, and the lunatic right-wing fringe, and it’s not going to end well for anyone involved. The Republican party is dooming itself to long-term irrelevance by alienating the young and non-white; they may even be setting themselves up for primary challenges from nutjobs. The media is losing what credibility it has by parroting teh crazy. And the lunatic right-wing fringe is headed for an inevitable series of “Sister Souljah” moments when Republicans wise up and realize they have to denounce the teabaggers.

:: Nixon, after becoming Ike's vice president, said Republicans "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America" in the White House. Civil rights leaders were accused of being a Soviet plot. The Civil Rights Act was believed to be intended to "enslave" whites. A prominent right-wing radio host insisted that JFK was building a political prison in Alaska to detain critics of the administration. When FDR proposed Social Security, the conservatives of the era not only screamed about "socialism," but told the public Roosevelt would force Americans to wear dog tags.

These were all fringe, radical arguments at the time, and were ignored as insane by responsible journalists. No one in America would turn on the evening news or pick up the morning paper and read about pathetic right-wing conspiracy theories. If Fox News existed at the time, Sean Hannity would be doing special reports on each of these unhinged ideas, and Americans would be told that they were worthy of discussion.

:: “Let me get this straight: they show up at public events, try to derail real discussion of the issues by being loud, belligerent assholes, and get on the news? Unbelievable. They stole my bit.” – Westboro Baptist Church minister and flamboyant gay activist Fred Phelps

“Jesus Christ, Mom. I’m like a year old and have downs syndrome and even I know that’s bullshit.” – Trig Palin

“Iz in ur Oh-Arr, yoothanizin ur gramma.” – Universal Health Kitteh

“They’re actually having a debate about this? What the fuck is wrong with them?“ – Pretty much every non-US citizen in the entire world

:: This was not a museum: it is a haunted house. It is a carnival ride. It shows throughout in the layout — the rubes are supposed to be shuttled through efficiently, get their little thrills, and exit so the next group can make the trip. If they'd had a few million more, I imagine they would have invested in tracks and little cars and turned it into the Creation Ride. The creators of this place wouldn't recognize a museum if they woke up in the middle of the Smithsonian on a bed of museum maps with a giant sign saying "MUSEUM" in front of their faces and an army of docents shouting directions at them. They seem to have gotten all their information about how a museum works by visiting Disneyland. (There's probably some kind of correlation between the state of the health care debate and the fact that the Creation "Museum" is doing bang-up business.)

:: Science fiction is eternal; it is the demigod cousin of literature itself, a cat with an infinite amount of extra lives. Long live science fiction. (Huzzah!)

All for this week.