Anyone who could lick the big C can lick his own hemorrhoids

Bachmann's core constituency. (Wiki Commons)

Try as I might, I cannot find the source of one of my favorite quotes about John Wayne: "Anyone who could lick the big C can lick his own hemorrhoids."

It's a shame, really, because I'm sure Michele Bachmann could use it sometime in her run for the presidency. She's so good at getting stuff wrong, she would be almost bound to use it wildly inappropriately...which is tough to do considering it's inappropriate already. But good for a laugh, anyway.

Which is what, in any reasonable world, Bachmann would cause, riotous laughter. Along with Palin, of course. I admit that I dumped one of my husband's ex-colleagues from FB a couple of weeks ago because the man claimed he liked Sarah Palin. I have no further use for such gullible dummies in my life. Not even for the nanosecond it takes to notice them and dismiss them on my daily FB trolls. When I'm trolling FB, I'm looking to hook up with friends, have a laugh, maybe gain some new information. Neither Palin nor Bachmann fit any of those bills, except when FB friends do something clever in dismissing the Two Whores of the Apocalypse, which fortunately many do with amazing frequency.

Apocalypse. Wait. Did it happen already? Is the United States, especially, living in the aftermath of the destruction of human life as once understood? That would be one answer for the election of Bush/Cheney, one answer for the continuing hollow life of the nation's financial institutions (I think of them as humongous intestines, packed with fecal money, blowing it all out over a group of brain-dead, spiritually rotten husks of men like so much green diarrhea.) It would be one answer for why America's education was permitted by whatever universal forces there are to sink to the level of No Child Left Behind, from which it may well never rise again.

Indeed, considering the apocalypse to already have happened is actually rather cheering. Or perhaps thinking that it is happening now; that's better than thinking that the current state of affairs is reality. The apocalypse is, most simply, the revealing of truths after a period in which they were hidden.

Still, it's hard to credit the idiocy of George Bush being hidden, but it was hidden from millions. And from Diebold computers, since they have no soul in the first place, and the manufacturers/programmers of those computers were not using theirs. (Benefit of the doubt.)

It's hard to believe people didn't understand that every single Republican act, and some by Democrats, since Ronald Reagan was bumbling around the Oval Office, was designed to hide massive enslavement from those being enslaved.

Although Reagan's government made massive strides in the direction of consigning most Americans to serfdom it was not sufficient to enslave the population of the United States financially, by compromising their tiny real estate holdings via home equity loans...

Not sufficient to ensure that future generations would lack the education to recognize disaster as it was visited upon them via No Child Left Behind and the unconscionable gutting of the GI Bill for the Afghan/Iraq soldiers....

Not sufficient to remove even the rudiments of subsistence employment from a great deal of the population, rendering them too demoralized to protest....

No, none of that was enough. It will never be enough for the self-appointed masters of the universe and their stooges (you can plug in the Koch brothers and the Bachmann crowd, but try not to forget the Nazi Bushes, the compromised Kennedy clan, etc. ad infinitum et ad nauseam) until Americans are terrified of speaking out against the evil policies of their own government regarding:

• Health care
• Warmongering
• Human rights abuses by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration)
• Guantanamo
• Fiscal policies that inflict suffering on the jobless
• Educational policies that turn bright children into dumb parrots
• Equal opportunity for all genders, races, religions, etc.
• Immigrants seeking a better life and WILLING TO DO THE JOBS HUBRIS-FILLED AMERICANS REFUSE (Just pointing out what morons the anti-immigration cadre is)

I'm sure there's more. But to get back on track, perhaps Michele Bachmann is precisely what's needed. Perhaps her idiotic pronouncements will ring a bell with those who excused the idiotic pronouncements of that other red-white-and-blue Barbie of a female jackass, Palin.  Maybe this version of cornball, knee-jerk, painted-on patriotism will finally wake them up.

My country right or wrong is possibly a more dangerous statement than any other generally spouted by unthinking Americans. It allows pseudo-patriots--armchair chauvinists with the knowledge of history of my kitchen table--to excuse the inexcusable, the wrong.

My country right or wrong totally precludes fixing what's wrong. To fix what's wrong, one must see what's wrong and take action to repair it. But under their cloak of pasted-on patriotism, the John Wayne patriots think it is unpatriotic to say, "Well, my country is wrong about this. I love what the country once stood for; I loathe what it is doing at the moment. Let's fix it."

In the all-or-nothing John Wayne World of Palin, Bachmann, Bush. the teabaggers, Glenn Beck and the other squawking heads of Fox-style TV, you're either with 'em or...you're a traitor.  

That's what it amounts to. We now have a woman standing for the highest office in America, a leading position globally despite Bush's best efforts to trash it, who is so stupid, she can't even get hirelings to put together coherent speeches for her. (See Palin, 2008, etc.) That, I think, is more amazing than the fact that the wench mixed up John Wayne, silver screen idol of the pitiful WWII generation, with John Wayne Gacy, murderer born into and out of America's downward slide to the dark side.

Bachmann. Moron.

But people will vote for her.

Morons.

When the TSA gets into your (dirty) underpants, the American Gestapo has gone too far

Munich airport "security area." Note the overhead chain-link fencing. Can America be far behind? (Wiki commons)

I do not, I cannot, I will not be party to the excesses perpetrated by the TSA. What does this mean? It means there is not one chance in ten million that I will ever voluntarily subject my person to screening at any America airport. Ever.

Nor will I forget that the acronym stands for Transportation Security Administration, a younger brother of Homeland Security (why didn't Herr Bush just call it Vaterland Security, ja?). There is apparently no pretense at journalism at AOL online (now part and parcel of once marginally acceptable Huffington Post) these days. Throughout, the article refers only to TSA. AOL never identifies the organization as the Transportation Security Administration. Does AOL they expect everyone to know what TSA stands for? Or, more likely, are they in league with the devil, Vaterland Security, to ensure that people forget that TSA is yet another evil stepchild of Bush's Gestapo?

The incident that inspired this post concerns the pat-down of a 95-year-old woman, dying of leukemia and wearing an adult diaper as she attempted to visit her relatives before she died. The TSA agent--look, why not just call him/her by the proper name, Sturmbahnfuhrer--found something "wet and firm and they couldn't check it thoroughly," (AOL) and sent the lady and her daughter to the toilets to remove the diaper so it could be checked. After that, the lady did her traveling sans culottes, a second indignity although far lesser than the first.

There is no excuse in the world for this. Are Americans now so terrified of reprisals from the populations they have historically scorned and lately inflicted harm upon that they will accept the abusive treatment of ill and elderly citizens in a ludicrous show of demoralizing force illicitly characterized as protecting the population? If so, the nation has no future; it's future can only be seen in one of two ways: Either it will implode of an excess of hubris among its supposedly elected officials, or it will tumble down from outside forces, leaving a bewildered population too weak--after the past ten years of insult piled on injury piled on insult ad infinitum since Bush took the reigns (yes, I'm using that word purposefully) of power--with equal emphasis on the word took.

Is there still a chance of saving America? I don't know. I think the population is so drugged--some on thankfulness that they haven't been reduced to begging and others on the stultifying need to get through another day with no job, no health care, no hope--that it seems unlikely.

Is anyone smiling in America these days? Are there any random acts of kindness being offered?Would kindness even be recognized and appreciated, or have the inmates aped the jailers, viewing kindness as weakness to be avoided?

I suspect that there are a few smiles, in fact. Mainly among the Bush family, the teabaggers whose own brand of insanity makes any number of peyote-induced freak dreams seem normal by comparison, and the financial operatives who have gotten away with the riches of Croesus, and sent out their bills for more. Oh, and the sadists employed by that division of Vaterland Security known as TSA. That is, the Transportation Security Administration. 

By security, they mean imprisonment in a barbed tangle of convoluted procedures designed to finally strip every ounce of human dignity and resistance from the American people. Unfortunately, it appears to be working.

Got it? While the United States has not yet slammed the gates, they have made getting through them worthy of classical literature, the Odyssey to be precise. Horrors and monsters arise at every turn upon the journey. Travel if you must, but consider walking. It's cheaper, and so far gets you out of the hands of  the Strurmbahnfuhrer.