Month: September 2012 (Page 3 of 3)

As I’ve often said, I’m really into the Christian bible. That is to say, I enjoy listening to or reading biblical scholars discuss interesting minutiae and I find the literary and linguistic history fascinating. As well, I like to read items about and by crazy Christians. But it still strikes me as odd when the Google Ads seem to be targeting me with ads for Christian dating and such nonsense. Isn’t it weird, too, that Christian dating is apparently such big business? Shouldn’t the church serve as the ideal place to meet potential mates? And if the supposed “man upstairs” wanted you to get hitched, isn’t this the sort of service “God” is supposed to provide? Doesn’t preemptive self-segregation effect social insularity as well? Of course, that is rather important to the Jeebus Kooks of the world.

I didn’t watch too much of the Republican National Convention. I saw the Clint and Willard speeches, but didn’t see either Mrs. Willard or Paul Ryan. In addition, I saw snippets that were quite interesting. I have already commented on both the Invisible Obama speech and the Shout-Down-the-Meskin incident (to people wearing cowboy hats, all Spanish speakers are illegal immigrant Mexicans). But one thing difference I found striking between the RNC and the DNC is that the latter was almost annoyingly cheery. Much has been written on the relatively monochrome crowd at the RNC and the diversity of the DNC, but I was considering more the source of their enthusiasm.

Look at the faces of the two different crowds while shouting the obnoxious “USA! USA! USA!” chants. In Charlotte, those faces were goofy and silly and appeared to be having a good time. In Tampa, they were sinister and serious, and appeared to only be having a good time in a mean-spirited way.

If I had to boil it down to a couple of images:

Two different ways of performing obnoxious “USA! USA! USA!” chant: angry and aggressive (RNC Tampa, above), or with some semblance of dignity (DNC Charlotte, below)

I only wish the picture on top could more reflect the audience reaction to the bellicose attempt to shout down a small middle-aged woman for the crime of having a Spanish accent. Some joined the mean-spirited cacophony, while others mouthed the words with a look of confusion while looking around for any sign of what the hell was going on. It is interesting that the two angriest groups were the baseball cap wearing group in the picture and the cowboy hat wearing contingent from Texas. Too tight, perhaps?

I just read an article in Rolling Stone. It was from Matt Taibbi. I’m nearly certain that if I regularly consulted a health care professional, that person would advise me against reading anything written by Matt Taibbi. The article was titled Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.

You must read this. Prior to today, I had not fully appreciated the kind of business Bain did.

Now I do.

There is no reasonable way to describe it. Instead, Taibbi must resort to mafia terminology:

“Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the ‘bust-out,’ in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. ‘That’s all it is.'”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/matt-taibbi-mitt-romney-bain-rolling-stone-2012-8#ixzz25NiXpm00

Now I understand. And it makes such sense when concatenated with the “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” For those with an IQ in the double digits, I’ll remind you that the one kind of entity that can be drowned in a bathtub is something defenseless. Like a child. Aye, that is the sort of creature Grand Poobah of the Republican Party Grover Norquist is. Yes, indeed, our own personal Quisling has vowed to destroy our government. The first, as Lincoln so eloquently put it,

government of the people, by the people, for the people

shall indeed perish from the earth. In a bathtub. At the hands of men like Willard “Mitt, because Willard sounds like a name for the sort of nerd I would have had my henchmen beat up for me back in college” Romney.