Lie Down with Dogs

Strung Ducks: Tea Baggers by any other name (Wiki Common)

There must be a simple way to break through the mental fog of the Baggers.

Possibly clichés would work. Clichés are simple. Most people know what they mean. Maybe we should offer the Baggers some clichés they could use in lieu of brains. Maybe that would help one of them blaze a new trail, prevent them making a president who inherited a huge can of worms from being the fall guy to the previous president, that “ordinary guy” they so admired, despite (or because) of his being a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

For example, here’s the very first I’d like to present for their consideration:

You reap what you sow.

Teabaggers need to reap what they sow

OK, Baggers. This means that if you give stinginess, you will receive stinginess in return.

Example: You want to deny benefits to those who are out of work because of the greed you so admire.

Think about this: If you end up out of work, you will be denied assistance if there is any truth underlying that cliché. And truth underlies most of them. Moreover, because your admiration of greed is tinged with abject fear that what you think you worked for will be taken from you,* I expect divine justice would require that you all become panhandlers, preferably in a state or city with no tolerance for the down-and-out. I’m thinking Texas, Arizona. Places like that. Except they are too warm. So maybe the Dakotas, where winter would actually be problematical.

Do you still want to deny relief to others to save what you think you worked for? You do? OK. Let’s move on and try again.

Flea-bitten Baggers

Next cliché:

If you lie down with dogs, you’ll get some fleas.

This means that by becoming door mats for the unprincipled wealthy, such as the Koch Brothers, John Bonehead, Bachmann et al, you are likely to end up scratching in misery as they move off to a new, clean bed and you are left behind with the “fleas”―the nasty little bad parts of blindly following greedy, unprincipled jackasses they forgot to tell you about. This would include being caught along with everyone else when the financial system implodes, and ending up in the gutter when the taxes you pay as an enormous percentage of your income are increased yet again to ensure that rich folks’ taxes fall from the pitiful rate they pay now to virtually nothing. But then, no one ever lost money betting Baggers were not as dense as a London fog.

Do you still want to be in bed with the likes of the worst of the Republican Party? With fleabags like Rick Perry? It’s only a matter of time, of course, until he disappears in some legal ignominy or other because he’s already got one hand on the chicken coop.

Bunking with Mongrels

But you Baggers still want to be in bed with those mongrels? OK. Here’s another one:

Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

This seems to be what a lot of Baggers are doing, trying to stick with the Republican Party, which it knows gave us two wars, a tanked economy and a bad rep all over the known universe (in addition to No Child Left Behind which is reason enough for any god one might posit to smite the US into oblivion). But what didn’t happen is that the US didn’t open its doors to the less-advantaged; it slammed them, thereby circling up the Koch Brothers' Mercedes and the Bagger’s Golfs. It didn’t join the rest of the civilized world in various treaties concerning the environment and international criminal tribunals, thereby making the US safe for those who would rather waste plastic bags because who cares if tortoises choke to death, and safe for George Bush because―heh, heh―now they can’t haul him in front of a world court for crimes against humanity and get him judged by a bunch of panty-waist Froggies or something.

So Baggers, what if you actually understood that plastic depends on oil, and oil is precisely what you’re afraid of losing to such an extent that you permitted George to finish his Daddy’s war games. Except of course he didn’t finish it because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially if the apple is rotten and can’t roll.

There really is no reason to continue, except for the hope that even one single Bagger will have a lightbulb go off in his/her head, and understand. It might only take one. After all, birds of a feather flock together. And, as similar in their idiocy as Baggers are, if even one of them changes his/her tune, it’s likely the rest will go along like strung ducks.

* This refers to Social Security. They all believe it is insurance, a sort of annuity, to which they contributed and should therefore reap the rewards of their insurance investment. Wrong as a screen door in a submarine. Americans pay F.I.C.A., but what they pay doesn’t go into a fund with their name on it. It goes into a general fund. Perhaps they failed to note all the pundits warning that the Social Security fund would run out. How could it run out if it was individuals’ earmarked funds? It couldn’t. Someone could abscond with it, a sort of governmental Bernie Madoff. But run out? No.  Americans pay F.I.C.A. because, with the force of both law and arms, the United States government says they must. It does not say they must get anything back. It is at the whim of Congress that people get Social Security, a whim-based program that also determines what they get and when they get it. Did the Baggers work hard for their Social Security? No. They worked reasonably for their parents’ Social Security, since each generation is contributing to the payouts of the generation already receiving the handout. Who’s paying for the Baggers? Their children and grandchildren, and the Baggers really don’t give a rat’s ass whether it requires half their salary just as long as the Baggers never miss a meal on their next trip to Florida.

Self-explanatory (Wikimedia Commons)

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.

Obscene health insurance profits ready to harvest

Sick People Praying for Recovery by Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1300-1366)

Photo by Doruk Salancı. Wiki Commons.

When I was a child, if we went to the doctor for a sore throat or measles, my mother wrote a check. It was for ten dollars. Granted, that was the 1950s and early 1960s, but even in the late 60s, I recall going to my mother’s doctor for a sore throat when I was home from college. The charge had gone all the way up to $20. It sounds like peanuts although it was a bit more like real money then. But it wasn’t ridiculous real money. Last time I went to a doctor….oh, wait….there virtually is no last time. In the 1970s, when health care costs began to get out of hand, I discovered homeopathy. And I have used it, almost exclusively, ever since.

I am not going to get into a debate about whether it works or doesn’t. For me, it works. Best of all, it is cheap. Every year, once a year, I would spend $150 to see my homeopath. He would assess my health, provide remedies as needed, and I’d go away…never to need a doctor for another whole year. If I did get some little bothersome thing in the interim, he would send me the remedy. I travelled some distance to see the late Dr. T.C. Cherien, a doctor like no other, a doctor who comes along once in each person’s lifetime and against whom all others are measured.

Zithromax, miracle for $100 bucks
So, having not found a replacement, I have on occasion had to depend on an AMA doctor friend of mine who would see me for nothing  and prescribe a remedy for a strep throat, zithromax, a well-tolerated antibiotic that even my basically allergic systems tolerate. And it only costs about $100 a pop. For five little pills.

I have no idea what my doctor friend charges for a visit, but it can’t be cheap. I can guarantee that it’s more than the current equivalent of $10 or $20, the office visit charge in the days before insurers figured out they could really rape us by including incidentals and not just the major medical events that were the intention of insurance in the 50s and 60s.

Of course, most people who work at good jobs in major corporations are covered by insurance. As a freelancer for nine-tenths of my career, I couldn’t afford health insurance on the open market. But because I ate well, exercised (albeit on horseback, over fences, from which I had a couple of emergency room visits), saw a chiropractor and a homeopath―and had another friend who is a dentist and adjusts the bill to suit my current income to a point―I have never been in the dire straits most Americans who work for themselves or work at low-paying jobs are in.

USA: Third world health care and longevity

And we are in dire straits. Writing in the New York Times on Oct. 5, David Leonhardt noted:

We don’t live as long as people in Canada, Japan, most of Western Europe or even relatively poor Jordan. Misdiagnosis is common. Medical errors occur more often than in some other countries. Unique to the developed world, millions of people have no health insurance, and millions more, like many fast-food workers, are underinsured.

This was in response to McDonald’s and its expensive, virtually useless hourly worker health insurance, and the fact that Mr. Obama’s national insurance reforms may exempt such plans.

It’s better than nothing, some claim.

No it’s not, claim others.

Here’s the real problem; it is national INSURANCE, not national health care.

Until the United States―mainly, but not limited to, the GOP, the Teabaggers, the cranially challenged fundamentalist capitalists and others―understands that inserting the profit motive into health care is unethical, immoral, and inhumane as well as unworkable, nothing will change. It is unworkable, that is, in every respect except one: obscene profits created on the suffering of millions.

Let me repeat that: The health insurance industry in the United States creates its obscene profits on the suffering of millions.

That may be capitalism, but it is also spiritually bankrupt in every sense of the word. It is especially bankrupt in a nation that claims so vociferously to follow the teachings of Christ, who said that whatever one does to the least among us, we do to Him.

I’m not a Christian, but I do believe Jesus of Nazareth was a prime example of existential goodness, goodness because right is preferred over injustice, because order is preferred over chaos, which leads only to destruction.

America has planted the seeds of its own destruction in so many fields. In the field called Health Care, the plants have withered and may not be able to be revived.

On the other hand, in the field marked Thoughtless Cruelty in Support of Obscene Riches, the bumper crop is harvested daily, only to disappear into a great maw of even more obscene conspicuous consumption, adding insult to exceedingly grave injury.