Response To The Leak Of Diplomatic Cables

I will admit that at first some of these leaked memos revealed by Wikileaks lend themselves to comedy. For example, when I read that Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai was "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts, but instead was easily swayed by the most bizarre stories or plots against him" I said to myself "Sounds like a Fox News fan."

And then on further thought I think that this Julian Assange character needs the comfort of a prison cell where the only Wikileaks that happen occur after others hack their cables into him again and again.

Why You Gotta Call It Black Friday? Oh, It's A GOOD Thing.

On Friday millions of Americans bum rushed the mall to get their hands on a limited supply of some crap, but in this year’s melee, no one died. According to the AOTL Almanac, when no one dies on Black Friday it means another six months of unemployment above 8.5%.

By all news accounts, Friday’s show of shopaholism was encouraging and I could not agree more. The amount of shopping activity indicates that those people with jobs are shopping enough to make up for the unemployed. It really is the spirit of the season.

The uptick in 2010 Black Friday sales was truly unexpected considering we’ve had economy so shitty the country was anger-y. Man, were they angry. They were so angry that three weeks ago they voted the Democrats out of the House of Representatives. Whatever the Republicans were promising it sure did work, and quick! The new Congress doesn’t even start until January.

Well, whatever made everyone so angry, it’s gone. It’s over. Everyone is happy and shopping. So the next time I feel angry I’ll vote for a teabagger and head to the mall.

God bless Americans.

The Others (re-edited)

In an article about the impasse over extending unemployment benefits, one source describes the conflict in Congress this way: "Democrats argue cutting those benefits would hurt the economic recovery. Others argue extending the benefits will provide a bigger incentive for unemployed to remain without a job."

Others argue? Others? Why, who be these mysterious unnamed forces gathering in opposition to the hordes of lazy people living like kings on $300 bucks a week on the government dime? They are Republicans like Jon Kyl, pictured here, of course. Kyl took heat earlier this year for accusing those collecting unemployment of being happy with their situation.

At first I was discouraged with the so-called liberal media for being too afraid to call the culprits of this gridlock by name, but then I warmed to the idea of referring to them as "others" because it accurately portrays them as the detached enigmas that they are. Nothing demonstrates their vast lack of connection from America like this issue and others like it.

It's no wonder how Kyl and his Other colleagues even end up in office. It would be intuitive to assume that people with so much antipathy for the average American could never be elected executioner. Our elected officials are put in office to look after our best interests and if they don't we can remove them. That is the intuitive way of looking at it, but here is what really happens: Kyl and the Others are so appealing to so many because of their allegiance to the wealthy and powerful. If you give people in America the choice between the well-heeled and the underdog, they will go with the well-heeled. Even through their part-time resentment, the underdog is agog with the barons because the rich have the things the rest of us want. In other words we all want to be rich.

The downside is that the wealthy and powerful are not samely in awe with the average American. The privileged use the admiration of the average American to elect the Others to do their bidding. Once elected, the Others give all of their attention to the wealthy and powerful while keeping the workaday headaches at arm's length. And should the rabble find themselves in any sort of peril, the Others essentially blame the victim for their problems, that is, when they aren't using the average American's problems as a cause to blame Barack Obama. Jon Kyl and Others like him can't even hide their contempt for the underdog. Kyl's misspeak earlier this year was leftover ramble from the welfare debate. Now that welfare reform has come and gone the Others are hungry for someone else to openly malign. Why not the unemployed?

What remedies Kyl and the Others do have for the currently unemployed are really handouts for the wealthy and powerful. What the unemployed need, they say, is more tax cuts. By their logic tax cuts not only puts a few hundred bucks in the average American's pockets but gives multimillionaires and billionaires huge windfalls. The wealthy will then turn around and out of the kindness of their hearts create more jobs for the unemployed. This is clearly an agreement the Others have formed with the wealthy on the trust system. There is clearly no obligation or promise whatsoever on the part of the wealthy to honor this little arrangement. The wealthy certainly did not uphold their end of the bargain enough prevent the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

Yet in spite of the failure of their tax cut theory the Others continue to pursue the same tack while expecting a different outcome. They are adamantly opposed to extending additional funds so laid off engineers and firemen, and cops, and teachers can keep their houses while they insist the most important economic order of the day is to get billionaires more money back in April. Again with that?

An intuitive thinker would guess that the Others would have short political lives for their abandonment of the average American, but the intuitive thinker would be wrong. In the face of tough times, the average American just elected the Others to a majority in the House of Representatives. Yes. The average American was angry at the party who supported emergency relief for average Americans so they elected the Other party who vowed to do nothing but oppose the current president and extend billionaire tax cuts.

Today my dog saw a container of standing water outside and began drinking from it before I stopped him. Every few minutes he would go back to drink more before I had the sense to dump it out. Now I'm not not saying that some people are as dumb as my dog, but, in the words of Bart Simpson, I don't know how to finish that sentence.

Top 10 Alternative Titles for W's New Memoir

By Ray Richmond













10. "I Miss Bein' Presyden (or However the Frig You Spellit)"

9. "I Was a Gooder Presedint Than My Daddy Was"

8. "I Still Say Invadin' Iran Was the Right Thing to Do"

7. "No President Left Behind (Except Me!)"

6. "Dang, What the Hell Was That?"

5. "Hey Look, Laura, I Wrote a Book -- But I Still Ain't Read One Neither"

4. "I'm George, and I'm an Alcoholic"

3. "So Who's Gonna Pardon Me, Huh?"

2. "My Ass From a Hole in the Ground: Scenes From a Presidency"

1. "Well Thank God That's Over"

Chip's Fables

There must be some fable of Aesop where perhaps a chicken or turkey criticizes a wolf for not being a good wolf. The chicken tells the wolf that it should be strutting around a barnyard eating corn and laying eggs and crowing when the sun comes up. Then the wolf eats the chicken and says something Aesopian like “Aha! You do your best at being what you are, and I’ll do my best at being what I am. The moral would be something along the lines of don’t tell someone what to do if you have no experience in doing what it is that they do.

By my last count, there have only been 44 U.S. presidents, only five of which are still living. But for some reason everyone thinks they have a grip on how to do the president’s job better than the current person in the office. That includes me after a couple beers. I basically give the guy good marks though I shrug at what seems to be a lack of a tenacious office of messaging because very few accomplishments sell themselves in the United States of No One Reads The Fucking News. Meanwhile the Republican Death Panel type talk and lies gain traction much better than humility. It seems to me that Obamaco is naïve to this, but, BUT…

I defer to Obama because I consistently believe he is exceptional. When he is seemingly silent while Death Panel type lies abound I think to myself it must be for a reason. He must be choosing his battles. He knows this is chess. It ain’t checkers. He’s lining up his men to play the bishop’s fannypack or the double rook do-si-do. Right? Right? Barack? This is the calm before the ass-kicking, right?

Thinking about it too much does not help. One begins to overanalyze and ponder Obama’s motivation. Just like Bill Clinton’s fatal flaw was asking women out for a White House quickie, Obama’s could be his relentless cool. WHO KNOWS!

Chickens like me have to understand that the man definitely has a plan, in a manner of speaking. Realistically, he must have eight or nine. He is sharp enough that he probably knows what he wants his legacy to be, but unlike an unnamed predecessor, he doesn’t go around talking about it. Maybe he knows he’ll be the Jackie Robinson of presidential politics. He’ll be remembered as the one who played superior while the ones that tried to stop him at every turn will be scorned. When people look back at how his presidency coincided with the use of the filibuster as standard legislative procedure and how people took to the streets to protest his tax hikes after he had just signed tax cuts into law, they will understand just what a fucked opposition he had to deal with.

So for all those chickens yet to be hatched, they will get a fuller story after all the tell-all books have been written and the penitent Mitch McConnells who upon realizing they were going to die soon came clean on how they behaved almost like comic book villains in order to get back at Obama for ever being elected.

So if I know this to be the case, why do I Monday morning quarterback the Obamster? Because I want the satisfaction of seeing some comeuppance for the Fox slander job. And that is my agenda. Obviously it is not his. I guess that is why he’s president and not me.