Random Musings on 2010 (5)

And some people said they couldn't ever replace Larry King! Say hello to Piers Morgan (see no. 2).

by Noah

1. Back in September, Fox’s Monica Crowley, former Nixon PR flak, subbing for Bill O’Lie-ley, interviewed Scooter Libby and called the investigation of his role in exposing Valerie Plame an outrageous “ordeal” and went on to say that Libby deserved a pardon and -- get this -- called him a class act! Hell, all he did was out a CIA agent and her network, many of whom are probably missing by now, at the least. Had Libby done what he did during World War II, he would have ended up swinging from a gallows in a penitentiary yard. Funny how it’s conservatives who yap about the degradation of our country’s “moral fiber” and things like that. I guess at Fox treason in the service of greed and politics is no vice.

2. CNN has announced, without a trace of shame, that British tabloid veteran and America’s Got Talent panelist Piers Morgan is the replacement for Bush Crime Family groupie Larry King, thus answering the question “Can it get any worse?” If they wanted to go the lowbrow, vulgar TMZ-paparazzi route, why didn’t they just get Jerry Springer? Personally, I’d rather see Simon Cowell interview today’s politicians and celebs. Or me. I’d make sure to always have a hatchet at the ready.

CNN might do better if it just ran Larry King’s reruns. In reality, watching CNN is like watching a spycam and waiting for something to happen. I gave up in 2004.

3. Would you like eggs with that? Prince Charles, “The Man Who Would Be Tampon” ("I want to be reincarnated as your tampon," he's been quoted as saying to his better half), and his Mrs. Prince went out for a night on the town in the Queen’s Jubilee Rolls. Here, take the keys! The Roller got splattered with paint and eggs. Some of the windows were broken, and Mrs. Prince got poked with a stick, while at least one rioter repeatedly yelled, “Off with their heads.” Didn’t Mummy warn them not to go downtown?

Naturally, the old folks and the upper crust got all in a tizzy about the incident. As a measure of how genteel and polite British youth are, there was a time in England when the Prince would have met a far worse fate.

I bet his dad didn’t even make him wash the car when he got home. Spoiled, I tell you! Spoiled brat!

4. The French government, under rightist Nicolas Sarkozy, wants to raise the retirement age in France two years. In France, you've been able to retire as early as age 60, with a real pension and real health care, if you earn enough work credits over, say, 40 years. Now it would be 62. This would also increase the number of people in the workforce. More people would be competing for what is only a finite number of jobs, which would, it almost goes without saying, lower individual wages. All part of the plan, lower wages and fewer pensions monies disbursed.

Next, due to wages being driven down, tax revenues coming into the French treasury go down. The result? Social services and benefits go out the window. You work all those years, and you’re left holding a bag that has a great big hole in it. You can almost hear the laughter. These government clowns and pranksters! “You’re old. Die now!” Not even a "please."

See if this all sounds familiar when President Obama, his Alan Simpson-led Catfood Commission, and the entire Republican Party talk about raising the retirement age in our country by not two but five years! Nice folks we have in Washington, eh? As I said, you can almost hear the laughter.

In France, they have general strikes. In England, students riot and throw eggs. Here in the U.S., everyone is too busy watching crap “reality shows” and things like American Idol while eating junk food and getting too damn obese to get up off the couch and out into the streets to throw some eggs, for starters.

5. Tiger Woods: The media always offers up as an excuse for the lack of investigative journalism that they don’t have the staff and money to look into what far more serious chicanery politicians and corporate types and bankers are up to, but when it comes to sports figures and celebrities, and their sex lives, the checkbook is wide open and we get assaulted with things like months of Tiger’s idiocy. If the media spent a third as much on uncovering and informing the public on what real ne’er-do-wells like those in Congress, Wall Street, and our corporate boardrooms are up to, we’d all be better off -- and many of them would be in prison for life.

6. Imagine Glenn Beck as a nutbag scoutmaster leading his troupers deeper and deeper into the dark woods, so deep that they’ll never be able to find their way out.

7. Republicans like to consider government services socialism. Their followers belch on about how they don’t want their taxpayer dollars benefiting anyone else. It’s all about the greed and selfishness. But they have no problem saying, “Hands off my Medicare," and they have no problem collecting Social Security. They also have no problem driving on interstate highways or calling the police or local fire department, all of which are funded by taxes somewhere along the line. So what happens when tax revenues go down so much that your local town asks you to pay a fee if you want fire department service? You have to pay the money one way or the other if you want the local FD to put out a fire in your house.


Recently in Tennessee a family and their local fire department watched their home burn to the ground because the additional charge had not been paid. This family lost their four pets and everything else in their house.

What happens when a whole block or town burns to the ground due to Republican greed and wealth redistribution? Where does the money go? Not for local education, that’s for sure. New York tried it this way back in the 1700s, a time the Repugs would like to take us back to. What happened then? The whole city burned and burned and burned. Such a policy may go into effect in your town, but it won’t be changed until that local mansion on the hill complete with its stolen art collection and all the Republican master’s closet full of high heels are reduced to ashes.

8. One of my favorite quotes of the year came from Stephanie Miller:

“Rich people pay Fox people to get middle class people to blame poor people.”

9. You can’t make this stuff up, but Fox does. The L.A. jetpacks for cops story was a case in point. Sourcing the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid, Fox ran all the way with a story about the city of Los Angeles buying $1 billion worth of jetpacks for its police, fire department, and emergency services people. Nothing seemed odd about this story to the brainectomy patients at Fox & Friends. Only when a couple of callers called in to tell them the story was a joke did they correct themselves. One has to wonder who hired these morons. Could they have even filled out applications?

It all reminds me of Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell’s (a Fox favorite) claim that the government was making mice with “fully functioning human brains.” Apparently, though, someone is doing the opposite and making humans with fully functioning mouse brains, then giving them jobs at Fox.

Then there was the “Obama Is Cracking Up” story. This was a great example of the inmates in the asylum accusing the sane people of insanity. In this case, Fox didn’t make it up; they just borrowed someone else's made-up news because they thought it nicely fit their wackoid agenda. Fox Nation was running with a story from The Onion, the satirical paper-website, about President Obama cracking up and sending out a rambling 75,000-word e-mail to the entire nation. The article even included a bit about the e-mail being so large, at 27 megabytes, that it couldn’t fit in the mailboxes of millions of Americans. No matter to Fox. If you want to believe something, just believe it. And we wonder where Teabaggers learned their approach to life in these times.

Let’s not forget Fox’s annual “War on Christmas” insanity. This year even the NBA was an evildoing anti-Christmas enemy to those who live in Foxworld. Why? It seems the NBA had six games scheduled on Christmas Day. Never mind that they've had games on Christmas Day since the 1950s.

Are firefighters in Foxworld supposed to stay home too, or just say, “Call back tomorrow”? I didn’t see Fox go off the air on Christmas, so does that make them anti-Christmas too? Does all of this indicate that right-wing loons will soon start consuming themselves? Sooner or later your hate has to run out of targets, when you’ve gone after everybody and everything under the sun, doesn’t it? What’s left when you only have yourselves to hate?

I’m thinking of starting a “Guns for Fox” day. My organization will collect guns and deliver them to Fox so that they can be ready when they start accusing each other of being part of the “War on Christmas.” Hey, I’m just being compassionate.

10. What’s in a campaign promise? During the 2010 campaign, Repugs pledged to ban earmarks. In a prime case of Washington follow-through, the new compromise tax bill contains $8 billion in them. Check the link to see some of the fabulous earmarks. Hey, what’s $8 billion? Also, five of the ten points in the latest Republican “Pledge to America” are violated by provisions in the tax compromise bill.

11. Finally, there’s this thought on President Obama. He might as well join the Republican Party at this point. He clearly wants to do in Net Neutrality and Social Security, and it might be nice to see the Republicans so conflicted about having to do a 180 on their 24-hour hate speech, run a black dude for prez, etc. That’s why it would never happen, of course, but the idea of seeing assclowns like Limbaugh and Hannity et al. simply explode would warm my heart.

NOAH'S YEAR 2010 IN REVIEW

10 Random Musings (1)
2010, Looking Back: To Republicans, It Was So Much More Than Just a Speech to Kids
Random Musings on 2010 (2)
Random Musings on 2010 (3)
Random Musings on 2010 (4)

Republicans in Their Own Words --

Quotations of a Party on Crack, 2010 Version
Part 1, The Unemployed
Part 2, When Cousins Marry

And don't forget 2009's 12 Days of Christmas Scorn.

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