TLP: Bitter, Party of One
by ilene - September 15th, 2010 8:33 pm
TLP: Bitter, Party of One
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
You have to think someone’s worried to reach way back to Westward Expansion to make a (weak) political point. But, hey, the Democratic National Committee is paying Tim Kaine to do something.
Still, is this really the way to react to the Tea Party surge?
"What we’re seeing in the Republican Party is that they invited the Tea Party in and it’s turning into the Donner Party, in some instances, because they’re turning the energy and the ferocity against each other," said Kaine in response to a question by the Huffington Post, referring to the infamous group of 19th-century American pioneers who eventually had to turn to cannibalism to survive. He added that the divisions have given Democrats "some great opportunities in races that we wouldn’t have absent the Tea Party candidates."
I don’t know. My recollection is that the Donner Party waited until people weredead to eat them. Seems like this is something more like the Darwin Party, where the strong survive and the weak go home. Or whine like bitches.
And, hey, doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that the Democrats complained incessantly that the GOP’s "Big Tent" claim was B.S. Maybe it was. Hard to make that argument now, even if the tent is full of party crashers.
Our Turn?
by ilene - March 29th, 2010 8:21 pm
Very dismal forecast from our friend James Kunstler, he writes so beautifully but I hope he’s wrong. – Ilene
Our Turn?
Courtesy of James Howard Kunstler
Nations go crazy. It’s terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the sway of a sociopathic political program. We behold the carnage and devastation left in the wake of that episode, and decades later you still can do little more than shake your head in bewilderment.
China had a psychotic break in the 1960s in its "cultural revolution," provoked by the mad neo-emperor Mao. He sent cadres of Chinese baby boomer youths rampaging across the land, turned every institution upside down, and let millions starve. Mao’s China lacked the ability then to export this mischief, but enough of his own people suffered.
Cambodia was the next humdinger of a national nervous breakdown when the Paris-educated classic marxist Pol Pot decided to make the world’s biggest omelette by cracking a million eggs. He took everybody wearing eyeglasses, everybody who appeared to have a thought in his or her head, and sent them out to the bush to be worked to death, or shot in ditches, or disposed of otherwise. The mounds of skulls remain to tell the tale.
Lately we’ve had the Hutu-Tutsi genocides in Rwanda, the craziness in former Yugoslavia, the cruelty of Darfur, the international suicide-bomber craze (including today’s blasts in Moscow). Surely, I’ve left a few out… but these are minor episodes compared to what be coming next.
Am I the only one who senses it might be America’s turn to go nuts? I don’t mean a family squabble, like the Boomer-Hippie-Vietnam uproar that was essentially an adolescent rebellion against bad parenting in the national household. I mean a genuine descent into madness, with the very high probability of persecution, violence, murder, and mayhem — all more or less sponsored by various authorities and institutions.
The Republican Party is doing a great job in provoking such a dangerous episode by making consensual governance impossible in a time of awful practical problems and challenges. They’re in the process, right now, of transforming themselves from…