Hellspawn

Tom Tancredo has crawled back into his nativist hole. To think, with that last name, he should end up saying the same thing people said about his ancestors when they were fresh off the boat. What an abject shit.

Speaking of Republicans, Rudy’s disgusting profiteering is coming to light, although nothing seems to stick to this creep among his worshippers. (Breslin had it best, describing Rudy as a little man in search of a balcony.) He’s insinuated himself into the same crony capitalist thugs that make up the oil/big pharma/robber barons Bush calls “his base” (in Arabic, the base is “al queda”). And he whores out his name to two-bit penny stock grifters. What a complete slut. America's Rent-A-Mayor.

Meanwhile, Mit “Schlag” Romney sees dead people. Marching with dead people. Smit’s dad George had a good record on civil rights, which is why he didn’t go any further in the GOP, but Witless claims he saw dad marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and that turns out to have never happened. And that chestnut about Snit’s pulling over the car to cry in joy when the Mormon Church finally recognized that black people were human beings in 1979 (not a typo)? Yeah, I believe that.

Sub prime loansharking

The “sub-prime mess” continues… is it cascading towards an election year recession? The moralists and apologists blame the victims, of course, since that’s how our neo-social Darwinism works. They conveniently ignore the wide-spread corruption pervading the mortgage industry: the loan sharks were riding high, the grifters-in-suits were out in force, the cons were juiced, baby! Their masters, meanwhile, were fattening on the rot: Goldman Sachs is claiming to smell like a rose, touting that they have no write-offs; but that’s because they knowingly sold shit while they bet that it would end up stinking like what it is. Win-win for the Bonus Army, there. The game’s rigged. The national casino is mob-run, only the mob in this case is made up of MBAs from our finest business school, the usual shark-attack of lawyers, and all the politicians in their pocket, who make the thievery legitimate.
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62 filibusters from the Plutocratic-fundamentalist party in the Senate this year. Would that the Democrats had done as much when they were in the minority!

Rice

Condi Rice was wrong about the Soviet Union, her supposed specialty; she denied that the Russian state dictatorship could change itself, and she believed, along with the other military industrialist/national security state players who grew fat on the Cold War and the overestimation of Soviet capabilities, that Gorbachev was faking. She was oblivious and/or clueless about the warnings about Al Queda. She was of course dead wrong about Iraq, which posed no threat of weapons of mass destruction (remember, she said we had to strike before mushroom clouds blossomed over the US). She, along with the other members in the Bush Gang, bears responsibility for the dismemberment and destruction of that country and the death of hundreds of thousands there, as well as the crimes against humanity still being committed in our name. More recently, she was astonished that Hamas won the Palestinian elections. And, of course, she’s stuck like a limpet to the side of a moronic, messianic asshole through thick and thin. Can anyone argue that she’s not a hack?

Today I hear that, miracle of miracles, she has complained about the expansion of another illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem. Finally! But, of course, seven years too late, and certainly not backed up with any stick. In a desperate effort to save her reputation, and the reputation of her capo Bush, for history, she’s pushing hard for “peace” in Israel/Palestine. I put that in quotes because it’s pretty obvious that, via the facts on the ground and the US’s long coddling of the Israeli project to deny Palestinian identity and statehood, that the peace they want is a weak and divided Bantustan-entity under the planes and highways of imperial Israel. It’s a post-modern peace, of course, about perception, and hence doomed.

Like the near-psychotic Clarence Thomas, Rice is symptomatic of the Right’s special form of affirmative action. Desperate for a black face, they’re hurl these very weird, often profoundly angry (in Condi’s case, the vestal virgin act covers a deeply closeted life) people to the forefront, playing up their “story” (for in celebrity-land, biography trumps politics). For Rice’s case, much is made of the fact that she was a friend of one of the four teenage girls assassinated by the Klan in Birmingham in 1963. Little is made of the fact that she hitched her star to the party that inherited the terror-based racist power-structure that the Klan acted as the muscle for.

The breaking news that the CIA has destroyed tapes showing what can only be evidence of war crimes comes just as I’ve been reading about Guatemala in a couple different places. A U.S. supported coup against the elected head of state in 1954 began the long reign of military terror in that nation. The resulting dictatorships killed at least 200,000 and waged virtual genocide against the indigenous Mayan Indians. The military and police were armed, trained, and paid by the U.S. An article in this month’s Harper’s reminds us that these state torturers and murders are also bureaucrats: they kept records of their deeds, and after years of denying that they did so, a trove of them was recently found. Thousands of the disappeared are being returned to memory; history will out. (There’s an exhibition at ICP about archeologists uncovering Franco’s handiwork in a Spain still very leery of examining the years of reaction; Spain remains a potent reminder that fascism was not defeated in 1945; three other exhibits at the same museum also reference the murder of Republican Spain). Meanwhile, a new book by Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? is about the 1998 execution of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a Roman Catholic human rights advocate in Guatemala who was killed just after releasing a large well-documented report on the “civil war” that ended there only two years earlier.