25 things about me:
1. I’ve done hard time at Angola for jacking-up a bank in Panther Burn, MS and fleeing in a stolen crop-duster, only to be apprehended on Frenchman St. in New Orleans while trying to blend in with a parade of Carmen Miranda drag queens. I think it was the busted watermelon on my head that gave me away.
Not really, but I did get caught stealing candy from the store when I was 4 and my mom made me take it back and apologize to the owner and it was really scary.
2. Weirdest celebrity sighting: In 2006, while waiting to buy some beer and an avocado at a small jungle store in Costa Rica, I found myself in line behind Tom Green of the infamous “Tom Green Show” on MTV. This is a guy who once pretended to hump a dead moose on TV and was allegedly married to Drew Barrymore for a few months. His movie “Freddy Got Fingered” is considered one of the worst films ever made. I said “Hi” and he nodded.
3. I have a pathological aversion to the taste of mint. Seriously. Panic, hyperventilation; I’m a real drama queen if I accidentally bite into a mint chocolate.
4. The three happiest days of my life: 1.) My wedding day, 2.) the Jake Leg Stompers’ first gig at the Station Inn, 3.) The opening of my first major exhibit at Cheekwood
5. I think every Pop group that had a hit song on the radio between Jan.1980 and Dec. 1986 should be sent to Guantanamo Bay and be tortured by having to listen to their own music until they confess their crimes against musical decency. This doesn’t include most of college radio by the way, but Duran Duran never gets to leave no matter how much they beg.
6. My high school years can be summed up with the following joke: “What’s the last thing said by a dead redneck? Hey ya’ll, watch ‘iss”
7. Bars I’ve been thrown out of: 1.) the Gold Rush on Elliston Place in Nashville. 2.) Main St. in Murfreesboro (twice in one night). Both times were because of a friend I was with. He’s now a tenured professor of Anthropology in New York and leading expert on Mayan culture.
8. Some things I’ve photographed: 1.) The Music City Miracle 2.) Tyra Banks’ first year as a runway model in NYC 3.) Dyson’s goal-line stretch in Super Bowl XXXIV 4.) John Lee Hooker on his couch in Redwood City, CA. 5.) 5 presidents 6.) B.B. King standing on R.R. Tracks in Indianola, MS 7.) Cock fights in Indonesia 8.) Bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin standing beside his own tombstone 9.) Street riots in Philadelphia during the Republican convention 10.) The Fisk Jubilee Singers with 19th Century wet-plate camera.
9. Guitarist I’d like to be: Django Rhinehart. Harmonica player I’d like to be: Peg Leg Sam. Singer I’d like to be: Billie Holiday, but I’ll settle for Dave Van Ronk.
10. Embarrassing secret: The Wizard of Oz makes me cry.
11. My grandfather was a carpenter named Cave Moss. His father was Columbus Washington Moss. His grandfather, Fletch, was wounded at Shiloh in the Civil War and his brother cut the bullet out of his leg. My grandfathers’ brother Thurman served time in Federal Prison for bootlegging. He died the day he was supposed to be released.
I used to sit in my grandfather’s lap and listen to the pocket watch that he kept in the bib of his Duck Head overalls. His eyes twinkled when he laughed, which was often.
12. My grandmother, Mary Alice Beard, ate lard, biscuits, and dumplings for most of her life. She died at age 101. It eventually killed her.
13. On the night before my last day of high school, me and Scott B. climbed about 50 feet up a radio tower at school and hung a bed-sheet banner that read “Senior’s Last Day, Class of ’84,” starting a yearly tradition that lasted until they finally dismantled the radio tower. See item #6
14. Things that saved my life growing up: 1.) Music 2.) My Mom and my sister 3.) Gary Herbison 4.) Sheer, dumb luck
15. Favorite foods: 1.) Raw Ahi tuna 2.) Crème Brulee from K. Pauls of New Orleans 3.) Jamaica-curried Opakapaka from the 5 palms, Kihei, Maui 4.) Greasy turnip greens 5.) Cornbread in Sweet Milk 6.) My mother’s English Trifle 6.) My sister’s baked meringue cookies 7.) Roast Beef and fried green tomatoes from Arnolds in Nashville 8.) Day old banana puddin’ 9.) Unagi with eel sauce 10.) Blue raspberry cool pops
16. If I could go back in time, I would be: 1.) H.C. Speir 2.) Honeyboy Edwards 3.) Alan Lomax 4.) Carlo Ponti 5.) Dead by now
17. Records that got me through some hard times: 1.) Pink Floyd “The Wall” 2.) Neil Young’s “On the Beach” and “Tonight’s the Night” 2.) Tom Waits “Heart of Saturday Night” 3.) Bob Dylan “Highway 61 Revisited” 4.)Vince Guaraldi “A Charlie Brown Christmas” 5.) Mozart “Requiem” 6.) John Lennon “Plastic Ono Band” 7.) Billie Holiday-Columbia Recordings 8.) Ray Charles “Cryin’ Time” 9.) Ahmad Jamal “But Not for Me” 10.) George Harrison “All Things Must Pass”
18. I am one hell of a procrastinator. I probably wouldn’t get around to taking the next breath if it wasn’t automatic. (Yes, this is the part where my friends get to give me hell for not getting a book published.)
19. I’m also psychic. I know what you’re up to. You better cut it out or I’m going to tell.
20. I never remotely considered doing anything creative for a living (much less devoting my life to it) until I took a photography class at MTSU in my sophomore year. Being exposed (pardon the pun) to artists like Garry Winnogrand, Emmett Gowin, Robert Frank and so many others changed the course and quality of my life. Thanks to Jim Norton and the MTSU photo school for giving me the self-confidence to pursue a career in photography.
21. Similarly, I never knew I was capable of standing in front of a large group of people and singing, to take that kind of personal risk, until the Jake Leg Stompers. I love those guys more than they’ll ever know.
22. I got a late start in music. Even though I was drawn to it from birth, my Dad only allowed me to be in band one year of middle school because he was convinced it would make me a geek, or worse, gay. He wanted me to play football. Dad died from a diabetic infection that started because of a bad motorcycle wreck. His father wouldn’t let him have a motorcycle growing up. And so it goes.
23. The one event that had the biggest impact on my life was my parent’s nasty divorce and the subsequent involvement of the church (If you grew up in Centerville, you know it wasn’t pretty). Those events made me an independent thinker and for that I am grateful. Exile has a way of focusing the mind.
24. I hate the feeling of walking barefoot with dirty feet on a slick, concrete carport and/or picking up a newspaper or piece of Styrofoam with dried dirt on my fingers.
25. I’m not really a neurotic, middle-aged, bald, redneck from Hickman Co. I’m actually from the planet Tralfamadore and I’ve been sent here to prepare a way for the others with Jug Band music as our primary weapon of distraction. The others will arrive soon to eat your brains. Mmmm, brains.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
On Dinosaurs, Republicans and other Extinct Species:
In the beginning…
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
-Barry Goldwater
The modern conservative movement crawled from the primordial ooze of Goldwater’s 1964 Republican convention speech and spread it’s progeny across the American political landscape faster than Dale Earnhardt at Talledega. It was the Mesozoic era of Big Government Reptiles, but there was a new T Rex in town and he was hungry.
Armed with reductive, razor-sharp statements and an agenda of low taxes, less regulation and the belief that the only true function of govt. is defense, that movement became a full-fledged juggernaut that tore through election cycles like Rush Limbaugh hitting the buffet at Western Sizzler.
Under Nixon’s banner of the Silent Majority, conservative political operatives found their earliest successes by adopting the fear-mongering strategies of the John Birchers and Joe McCarthy, running roughshod over cowering liberals and their squishy inclusive politics. Just imagine a pickup truck flying a confederate flag spinning doughnuts in the lawn during a wine and cheese garden party in the Hamptons: tweedy-types running in terror, aspic flying, and you get the picture.
The conservatives couldn’t win by revealing their ACTUAL strategy, which was to use the diversionary tactics of God, Guns and Gays to hide the fact that they were about to fundamentally restructure the tax code and regulatory environment in a way that guaranteed a return to the Gilded Age: those halcyon days when there was virtually no middle class and the workers were at the mercy of Robber Baron industrialists. When children worked in mills and mines and there was no social security or minimum wage or medicare and it was a survival of the richest. Ah! The good old days!
Better yet, they found they could enlist Bubba’s help in returning his family to servitude by scaring the hell out of him! Hey, let’s tell him his American Legion Hall and elementary school is about to be over-run with blacks, socialists, Yippies, queers, feminists, union commie lovers and pot heads that have the audacity to demand equal treatment under the law. (“My God Marge, the exterminator tells me we have an infestation of Hippies in the woodwork!”) Not only that sir, but they’ve come for your daughter!
Ah, the sweet smell of fear in the morning! Smells like Victory! From Nixon’s Southern Strategy all the way up to 9/11, fear is what’s brung us here. It’s been the GOP’s chief export for over 40 years, and the export business has been very, very, good.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
But hey, GOP, c’mere. I got a little secret to whisper in your ear.
It’s over.
Yep. You heard me. It’s really over. You can retire the brass knuckles, fright wig and Lee Atwater playbook and try to find a hole to hide in where the International Criminal Court can’t find you when they come with their war crimes subpoena.
It was an interesting experiment, but ultimately your Utopia failed because, like communism, it didn’t flex under pressure. People have finally started to wise up and peek behind the curtain and see that all that smoke and flame was just a sad show created by a tired old white guy who stayed in power by terrorizing the munchkins.
We tried it all, didn’t we? But for old times sake, let’s review some recent highlights (cue the wobbly screen):
- Trickle-down economic theory that stratified wealth distribution in America back to pre-FDR levels. In 2004, the Federal reserve reported that the wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation's net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1%.
- Pre-emptive war, unilateralism, and sanctioning of torture, leading to pariah status in the community of civilized nations, not to mention violating our core American values.
- Abolishing habeas corpus and the rule of law upon which all modern democracies are founded.
- Return to laissez-faire deregulation of the financial sector that has brought on a global recession (possibly a depression-jury’s still out)
- Destruction of labor laws, unions and much of the social safety net that helped create the middle class in the first place.
- Favoring Fundamentalist Religious teachings in the public schools over science, thereby making our children less competitive in the new global economy (and less intelligent).
- Demanding abstinence-only sex education both at home and abroad, which has, quite ironically, led to more unwanted pregnancies and abortions, not to mention the spread of disease.
As practiced by Goldwater’s followers, extremism in the defense of liberty led to the degradation of the very liberty that it sought to uphold. It would be ironic were it not so tragic.
Shall I go on? I think you get the picture. But I just wanted to you to understand why we’re taking the keys from you now. You’re obviously too incompetent to drive and you’ve done quite enough damage already. You can reapply for your license in a few years. But you better hit the books in the meantime, because the test has changed and things don’t look so good for you right now.
Objects on the map may appear smaller
Just look at that political map that you’ve been treating like a game of RISK all these years. Your beloved party is now extinct on the West coast and the Northeast, and you’re quickly losing the Southwest, Midwest and, hard to believe, the Mid-Atlantic and coastal South.
In a few more election cycles, the GOP will have shrunken down to encompass only the Bubba South and a handful of suburban country clubs and survivalist compounds packed to the basement rafters with King James Bibles, rifles and cans of Spam, surrounded by an ever-deepening Blue map.
When Grover Norquist said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He had it exactly right if you substitute “GOP” for “GVMT.”
The great political philosopher Ernest Hemingway put it this way: "Too many folks don't have the sense to leave a party when the gin runs out.. They just hang around."
Latinos will be the dominant minority group in less than 12 years and the GOP is hell-bent on pissing them off as much as they can. And we’re talking a group that is family-values oriented and staunchly Christian (which should be among the GOP’s core constituency). Oh yeah, but I forgot, they’re flu-carrying Papists that want to take our minimum wage jobs from us.
With friends like these…
What is needed right now is a re-assessment of the “Get Right or Get Out” mentality if the GOP hopes to stay viable in a changing political environment.
What do we have instead? A wild-eyed feeding frenzy to devour the few remaining moderates that the party desperately needs to win over independent voters. RNC head Michael Steele and the (ironically-named) Club for Growth just guaranteed Arlen Specter’s defection to the Dems by supporting a right-wing primary challenger that was polling way ahead of Specter, but would have most likely lost to a Dem. in the general election.
Either way, the seat was likely to turn from Red to Blue, but by God, you were going to make Specter pay for voting for the stimulus bill! Well, Specter’s pretty shrewd and now y’all are screwed and the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority. See how it works? If you hadn’t run off Sen. Lincoln Chaffee in the last mid-terms, you could have gotten a lot of Republican judges confirmed in the last couple of years, but I guess purity is valued over power these days. It’s all part of the GOP’s new “pup tent” strategy.
I’m guessing Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and even John McCain might be next on the Club for Growth hit list. One part of me says “Hey, great, it’s your funeral.” But the other part says “Wait a minute - it’s only through the free competition of ideas in the marketplace of democracy that true innovation is achieved.”
The idea of one party rule is not good for a vibrant democracy. Unless we have intelligent, viable Republicans keeping up their end of the political spectrum, then there is no check on power and the progressives could over-reach just as the Newt Gingrich/Tom Delay/Bush coalition did from 1994-2008.
Progressives can be stubbornly naïve and victims of the echo chamber just as the Right-wingers were. We often think that the nation is ready for changes that it really isn’t prepared for yet (think “busing” and “New Coke.”) I think of political progress as the country dance where you go three steps up, two steps back, but you’re still slowly moving forward.
Time keeps on slipping into the future
But make no mistake; history is on our side. Conservatives fought civil rights for blacks for many years, but now we have our first African-American President. Like it or not, there will be national gay marriage and I’m betting it’ll be sooner than we expect. For the first time ever, A Washington Post/ABC poll shows more people favoring gay marriage (49%) than oppose it (46%). It’s a fundamental civil right and people are beginning to come around to accepting that. History is on the side of progressives, but it never happens as fast as we want and forcing change too early often bites us at the ballot box because we open ourselves to exploitation by the fear mongers.
There are plenty of real criticisms of Obama and the Dems that can be argued in the public forum right now, but what do we get instead? Birth certificate questions? Air Force One wasting jet fuel on Earth day? Something about a teleprompter that I still don’t understand? Bitching about a prime time news conference? People who are receiving TAX CUTS throwing around tea bags to protest raising the upper tax rate to Bush I levels (39%)?
Really? Is that the best you’ve got? Because it’s not playing in Peoria folks! Not when we are confronted by some of the biggest challenges in our nation's history. People need positive action and they want to see their government doing something about this uncertain future. So how are are Republican brethren reacting to our President's bold initiatives?
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is threatening to secede from the union and a third of GOP voters in Georgia favor secession. Didn’t we try that once? Best I remember it didn’t work out so well for those of us who make our home down South. (Then again, I’d LOVE to give Texas back to Mexico, so long as we can keep Austin, San Antonio and Willie Nelson.)
With the Glen Becks, Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys controlling the Republican Party’s image now in the face of a power vacuum on the right, it’s going to take awhile to get the party viable again. Then we have minority Senate leader Droopy Dog (Mitch McConnell) and minority House leader Dr. “NO!” (John Boehner) making their periodic gloomy appearances that seemed to be designed to make the president even MORE popular.
But thank GOD for Rep. Michelle “Democrats cause Swine Flu” Bachman of Minnesota and Gov. Sarah “Carribou Barbie” Palin of Alaska. They are the gift that keeps on giving. To quote Stephen Colbert (whom most conservatives don’t realize is doing satire): “Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!”
So, GOP, you want to beat Obama in 4 years? Than get rid of the anger now. There’s only two ways to win. Either pray for complete catastrophe to strike in the form of an economic meltdown or terrorist attack (why do you hate America?), or find a candidate that will out-shine Obama’s personality and calm demeanor (good luck!). Those are the only two options: Catastrophe or Charisma. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long vacation in the wilderness.
Pack a lunch and a warm sweater. Write often. Say ‘Hi’ to your Mama and them.
In the beginning…
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
-Barry Goldwater
The modern conservative movement crawled from the primordial ooze of Goldwater’s 1964 Republican convention speech and spread it’s progeny across the American political landscape faster than Dale Earnhardt at Talledega. It was the Mesozoic era of Big Government Reptiles, but there was a new T Rex in town and he was hungry.
Armed with reductive, razor-sharp statements and an agenda of low taxes, less regulation and the belief that the only true function of govt. is defense, that movement became a full-fledged juggernaut that tore through election cycles like Rush Limbaugh hitting the buffet at Western Sizzler.
Under Nixon’s banner of the Silent Majority, conservative political operatives found their earliest successes by adopting the fear-mongering strategies of the John Birchers and Joe McCarthy, running roughshod over cowering liberals and their squishy inclusive politics. Just imagine a pickup truck flying a confederate flag spinning doughnuts in the lawn during a wine and cheese garden party in the Hamptons: tweedy-types running in terror, aspic flying, and you get the picture.
The conservatives couldn’t win by revealing their ACTUAL strategy, which was to use the diversionary tactics of God, Guns and Gays to hide the fact that they were about to fundamentally restructure the tax code and regulatory environment in a way that guaranteed a return to the Gilded Age: those halcyon days when there was virtually no middle class and the workers were at the mercy of Robber Baron industrialists. When children worked in mills and mines and there was no social security or minimum wage or medicare and it was a survival of the richest. Ah! The good old days!
Better yet, they found they could enlist Bubba’s help in returning his family to servitude by scaring the hell out of him! Hey, let’s tell him his American Legion Hall and elementary school is about to be over-run with blacks, socialists, Yippies, queers, feminists, union commie lovers and pot heads that have the audacity to demand equal treatment under the law. (“My God Marge, the exterminator tells me we have an infestation of Hippies in the woodwork!”) Not only that sir, but they’ve come for your daughter!
Ah, the sweet smell of fear in the morning! Smells like Victory! From Nixon’s Southern Strategy all the way up to 9/11, fear is what’s brung us here. It’s been the GOP’s chief export for over 40 years, and the export business has been very, very, good.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
But hey, GOP, c’mere. I got a little secret to whisper in your ear.
It’s over.
Yep. You heard me. It’s really over. You can retire the brass knuckles, fright wig and Lee Atwater playbook and try to find a hole to hide in where the International Criminal Court can’t find you when they come with their war crimes subpoena.
It was an interesting experiment, but ultimately your Utopia failed because, like communism, it didn’t flex under pressure. People have finally started to wise up and peek behind the curtain and see that all that smoke and flame was just a sad show created by a tired old white guy who stayed in power by terrorizing the munchkins.
We tried it all, didn’t we? But for old times sake, let’s review some recent highlights (cue the wobbly screen):
- Trickle-down economic theory that stratified wealth distribution in America back to pre-FDR levels. In 2004, the Federal reserve reported that the wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation's net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1%.
- Pre-emptive war, unilateralism, and sanctioning of torture, leading to pariah status in the community of civilized nations, not to mention violating our core American values.
- Abolishing habeas corpus and the rule of law upon which all modern democracies are founded.
- Return to laissez-faire deregulation of the financial sector that has brought on a global recession (possibly a depression-jury’s still out)
- Destruction of labor laws, unions and much of the social safety net that helped create the middle class in the first place.
- Favoring Fundamentalist Religious teachings in the public schools over science, thereby making our children less competitive in the new global economy (and less intelligent).
- Demanding abstinence-only sex education both at home and abroad, which has, quite ironically, led to more unwanted pregnancies and abortions, not to mention the spread of disease.
As practiced by Goldwater’s followers, extremism in the defense of liberty led to the degradation of the very liberty that it sought to uphold. It would be ironic were it not so tragic.
Shall I go on? I think you get the picture. But I just wanted to you to understand why we’re taking the keys from you now. You’re obviously too incompetent to drive and you’ve done quite enough damage already. You can reapply for your license in a few years. But you better hit the books in the meantime, because the test has changed and things don’t look so good for you right now.
Objects on the map may appear smaller
Just look at that political map that you’ve been treating like a game of RISK all these years. Your beloved party is now extinct on the West coast and the Northeast, and you’re quickly losing the Southwest, Midwest and, hard to believe, the Mid-Atlantic and coastal South.
In a few more election cycles, the GOP will have shrunken down to encompass only the Bubba South and a handful of suburban country clubs and survivalist compounds packed to the basement rafters with King James Bibles, rifles and cans of Spam, surrounded by an ever-deepening Blue map.
When Grover Norquist said, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” He had it exactly right if you substitute “GOP” for “GVMT.”
The great political philosopher Ernest Hemingway put it this way: "Too many folks don't have the sense to leave a party when the gin runs out.. They just hang around."
Latinos will be the dominant minority group in less than 12 years and the GOP is hell-bent on pissing them off as much as they can. And we’re talking a group that is family-values oriented and staunchly Christian (which should be among the GOP’s core constituency). Oh yeah, but I forgot, they’re flu-carrying Papists that want to take our minimum wage jobs from us.
With friends like these…
What is needed right now is a re-assessment of the “Get Right or Get Out” mentality if the GOP hopes to stay viable in a changing political environment.
What do we have instead? A wild-eyed feeding frenzy to devour the few remaining moderates that the party desperately needs to win over independent voters. RNC head Michael Steele and the (ironically-named) Club for Growth just guaranteed Arlen Specter’s defection to the Dems by supporting a right-wing primary challenger that was polling way ahead of Specter, but would have most likely lost to a Dem. in the general election.
Either way, the seat was likely to turn from Red to Blue, but by God, you were going to make Specter pay for voting for the stimulus bill! Well, Specter’s pretty shrewd and now y’all are screwed and the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority. See how it works? If you hadn’t run off Sen. Lincoln Chaffee in the last mid-terms, you could have gotten a lot of Republican judges confirmed in the last couple of years, but I guess purity is valued over power these days. It’s all part of the GOP’s new “pup tent” strategy.
I’m guessing Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and even John McCain might be next on the Club for Growth hit list. One part of me says “Hey, great, it’s your funeral.” But the other part says “Wait a minute - it’s only through the free competition of ideas in the marketplace of democracy that true innovation is achieved.”
The idea of one party rule is not good for a vibrant democracy. Unless we have intelligent, viable Republicans keeping up their end of the political spectrum, then there is no check on power and the progressives could over-reach just as the Newt Gingrich/Tom Delay/Bush coalition did from 1994-2008.
Progressives can be stubbornly naïve and victims of the echo chamber just as the Right-wingers were. We often think that the nation is ready for changes that it really isn’t prepared for yet (think “busing” and “New Coke.”) I think of political progress as the country dance where you go three steps up, two steps back, but you’re still slowly moving forward.
Time keeps on slipping into the future
But make no mistake; history is on our side. Conservatives fought civil rights for blacks for many years, but now we have our first African-American President. Like it or not, there will be national gay marriage and I’m betting it’ll be sooner than we expect. For the first time ever, A Washington Post/ABC poll shows more people favoring gay marriage (49%) than oppose it (46%). It’s a fundamental civil right and people are beginning to come around to accepting that. History is on the side of progressives, but it never happens as fast as we want and forcing change too early often bites us at the ballot box because we open ourselves to exploitation by the fear mongers.
There are plenty of real criticisms of Obama and the Dems that can be argued in the public forum right now, but what do we get instead? Birth certificate questions? Air Force One wasting jet fuel on Earth day? Something about a teleprompter that I still don’t understand? Bitching about a prime time news conference? People who are receiving TAX CUTS throwing around tea bags to protest raising the upper tax rate to Bush I levels (39%)?
Really? Is that the best you’ve got? Because it’s not playing in Peoria folks! Not when we are confronted by some of the biggest challenges in our nation's history. People need positive action and they want to see their government doing something about this uncertain future. So how are are Republican brethren reacting to our President's bold initiatives?
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is threatening to secede from the union and a third of GOP voters in Georgia favor secession. Didn’t we try that once? Best I remember it didn’t work out so well for those of us who make our home down South. (Then again, I’d LOVE to give Texas back to Mexico, so long as we can keep Austin, San Antonio and Willie Nelson.)
With the Glen Becks, Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys controlling the Republican Party’s image now in the face of a power vacuum on the right, it’s going to take awhile to get the party viable again. Then we have minority Senate leader Droopy Dog (Mitch McConnell) and minority House leader Dr. “NO!” (John Boehner) making their periodic gloomy appearances that seemed to be designed to make the president even MORE popular.
But thank GOD for Rep. Michelle “Democrats cause Swine Flu” Bachman of Minnesota and Gov. Sarah “Carribou Barbie” Palin of Alaska. They are the gift that keeps on giving. To quote Stephen Colbert (whom most conservatives don’t realize is doing satire): “Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!”
So, GOP, you want to beat Obama in 4 years? Than get rid of the anger now. There’s only two ways to win. Either pray for complete catastrophe to strike in the form of an economic meltdown or terrorist attack (why do you hate America?), or find a candidate that will out-shine Obama’s personality and calm demeanor (good luck!). Those are the only two options: Catastrophe or Charisma. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long vacation in the wilderness.
Pack a lunch and a warm sweater. Write often. Say ‘Hi’ to your Mama and them.
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