Five Before Chaos

As much as I wanted to keep quiet, I can’t.

At first, I thought I’d freak out, but then a few things occurred to me. First off, Scott Brown’s got three years. He’s a friggin’ wingnut teabagger, something, to his credit, he kept pretty well hidden during this campaign. When he actually starts opening his mouth, other than the angry white guy demographic, he’s not going to be too thrilling.

Second, as to this “Dems losing their supermajority” stuff. It’s not like they’ve been able to accomplish shit with 60 votes, so what the hell’s the difference? Bush got just about everything he wanted, even with a minority, fer chrissake.

What’s scary is that Dems will continue not to learn from this, completely misreading this as “we need to be more conservative” instead of “we need to actually take off the gloves, grow some sack and accomplish something good”.

I think there’s a silver lining in those teabaggers who now smell blood in the water. As I said, Brown, due to both Coakley sitting around with her thumb up her ass, and the relatively brief nature of the campaign, (not to mention him being dismissive or denying the teabaggery), was able to conceal how batshit insane he really is. In next year’s elections, they’ll be of the more normal variety, which gives people a better chance to look at the records of who they might be voting for.

The Dems are gonna get their asses kicked, regardless. In my almost 39 years of life, I can’t think of a bigger example of such deep, prolonged incompetence demonstrated by an organization.

And so the outrage fatigue continues. Peter Daou has an excellent bit on all of this at HuffPo that you should take a look at, too.

I know, y’all probably thought you’d never hear me mention those spaghetti westerns again now that Fistful of Pasta is alive and kicking (which has been going quite well, incidentally). But I just wanted to share something with you that would be of interest to anyone either into cinema and/or political theory, in particular European political history of the later 20th century (yeah, you, Wes).

One of my contributors, a Dutchman living in Belgium by the name of Simon, has written an excellent essay about how the political climate in Italy was highly influential on the directors of many of those spaghetti westerns. It’s actually a pretty in-depth lesson in history and politics, much more than I can easily sum up in a few paragraphs here, so go and have a read for yourself, here. And as an added bonus, the words Bush, Clinton, Obama, and McCain are nowhere to be seen in it.

UPDATE: additional thoughts at the bottom.

NOTE: the database at my server host was having some problems for a bit, which unfortunately I learned after spending an hour writing this post up and then losing it. So here’s stab #2. Also, for those of you checking back on this thread, I went back and divided it into two pages, ‘cuz it’s so freakin’ long.

Yeah, it’s been a while. Last week, I went off in to fundie-bashing land and got sorta distracted. It’s so fun, and so easy, isn’t it? So for you nutty people that still find what I have to say marginally amusing, hop below the fold for my latest thoughts on the election, interspersed with my philosophical ramblings. I’m hoping to get a discussion going here from all sides, something that’s been occurring more frequently here at FBC, a welcome development. Righties and radicals, join in please. Its a long one, so crack a beer or go get a cup of coffee, you’ll need it.

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I have to say, even though I still think it’s way too early to be focusing on the ’08 elections, and my biggest fear is probably a Hillary presidency, I am enjoying the hell out of watching the GOP continue to self-destruct at so many levels.

First, there’s the Congress and Senate. So many of them are digging in their heels on supporting Bush and the war, it’s making me seriously think that the conventional wisdom that politicians are only concerned about being reelected is very wrong. They’re setting themselves up for an electoral bloodbath in ’08. It really seems that the goal here, as some have already stated, is to keep the war going until Bush is out of office and let the next president clean up the mess. But you can tell they’re getting nervous when Foghorn Leghorn himself is starting to talk about timetables. But what makes it funny is they still have the wingnuts like this one leading them around like a bull with a nose ring.

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