Let's have "Grovelin' Joe" Barton's smug puss on every lamppost, billboard, and TV screen in the land

"If anything I have said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."

-- Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), the GOP man of the hour, yesterday

by Ken

So Rand Paul is feeling sympathy for Congressman Joe. Says he knows what it feels like to be at the bottom of a pile-on. The part he leaves out is that they both got there by being so indiscreet as to say things they actually believe.

As to Joe's "apology," we don't have to venture far into his misconstruction zone to figure that the only thing he might possibly be sorry about is getting caught saying what he means. I'm not even persuaded of that -- it seems clear that he was dragged kicking and screaming to Apology Corner by his shocked and panicked fellow right-wing loons, who are just as wacko ideologically but sane enough (even if just barely) to understand that there are things you mean that you just don't say in public, especially not at certain times.

The timing question is important. After all, our Joe has spent his entire career sucking at the teat of the Texas petroleum-extracting industry, and has never felt any need to apologize or pull his punches. After all, it wasn't that long ago that Ted Stevens was still riding high as chairman of the Senate energy committee, and didn't he revel in bringing in his buddy the energy CEOs for the purpose of licking their dicks?

It's the American way, or at least the way for a lot of Americans. People like Joe looked on and cheered as his high-powered friends encouraged us to become their slaves, and did everything in their considerable power to make sure we would never be seriously tempted to try to escape their death grip.

I see a lot of nonsense being spewed on the right about how our Joe's unfortunate gaffe is obscuring other Republican points, and this of course is pure bullshit. There are no other Republican points. The people who agree with Joe but are smart enough to keep it to, or at least among, themselves have only one point: We live to be slaves of megacorporations who lubricate us with their shekels. You know, just the way Jesus taught.

Now if there were such a thing as a Left-Wing Noise Machine, no right-winger would find it possible to go anywhere or open his/her mouth without having Joe's apology to BP blaring away. And of course it wasn't a gaffe of any sort -- it was just this worthless piece of fecal matter saying just what he believes. He and his kind ought to be reviled by anyone with a minimal sense of decency.

Just to visit the fact of the matter. Every time a BP talking head open its mouth, it acknowledges responsibility for the Gulf catastrophe and it swears on its dear mother's grave that it will pay the costs. So anyone who claims that BP was victimized by an overweening President Obama is either too stupid or dishonest to be entitled to an opinion and should immediatly and permanently shut the hell up, pending the availability of brain transplants. I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, folks, but your brains are garbage -- you might try dynamite therapeutically.

Partly this is difficult for right-wingers to understand because it involves the concept of responsibility, and this is a concept they are wholly unable to apply to themselves, even though they should probably be apologizing for every breath the draw into their fetid carcasses. American right-wingers are consequently incapable of understanding, not having achieved the intellectual development of a slow four-year-old, that accepting responsibility also means accepting consequences. Consequences are what right-wingers wish to inflict on people who have working brains and consciences, whom they understandably loathe.

The notion of Barack Obama as some sort of imperial tyrant is itself so grotesque as to be hilarious. That milquetoast, whose apparent first principle of politics is that the politics of the possible is that which can be achieved without making rich and powerful people seriously unhappy. The only people Barack the Meek jumps ugly on are progressives, the prime target for the inspirational rhetoric he periodically unleashes, which some of us have been foolish enough to believe is intended for any purpose other than show.

Recently that lying turd George Will wrote a column warning about the repercussions of Obama's assumption of absolute authority. He should have been fired on the spot for writing such nonsense if only because it was so preposterously out of touch with reality. These people are so timid about using what little power they seem aware they have that they're at the mercy of everyone they perceive as "bigger" than them.

But the dishonesty of that sniveling pile of filth George Will goes much deeper. Oh yes, he's here to warn us about abuses of power, but while those fuitives from hell Bush and Cheney were gathering unto themselves unaccountable powers beyond the dreams of the most overweening tyrant in human history, did that stinking turd Will utter the slightest peep of objection? How could he while he was leading the cheering? This should permanently disqualify him as a "commentator." All he is is an unusually slimy and credibility-free propagandist, and another tool of the very same rich and powerful gangsters the Obama adminstration worships.

Of course you now how, er, mutually unsympathetic rival churches can get even when they're officially worshipping the same "god."

With regard to BP's accountability, the only question, as we were discussing the other day, is how you maintain it. And a nice chunk of cash in an escrow account as a down payment seems to me an utterly reasonable way to go about it.

In normal times it's hard to get ordinary folk worked up over the insanity of allowing certain groups of people to extract wealth from people who work for a living by virtue of their "ownership" of earthly resources. In times like those, the Joe Bartons of America meet little embarrassment as they flaunt their bought-and-paid-for subservience to their energy-industry masters. Maybe corruption on that scale makes you stupid, and that's why it hasn't occurred to Joe that these are not exactly normal times for the petroleum-extracting industry.

So I say, make Joe the poster boy for right-wing greed and selfishness. Let him take on himself some of the job that the Obama campaign was too feckless to take on: educating the country to the reality of right-wing governance, that it's turning the country over to packs of gangsters and thugs and lunatics and imbeciles.