I have a meeting with my new manager tomorrow where we will discuss my goals for the upcoming year, my current skill set, and my development plan to make me a more productive I/T professional. After all, I am a highly trained, highly paid, and highly motivated I/T professional. Since I always like to look and feel my best before these meetings, I slammed down a Stoly on the rocks and a half bottle of wine tonight.
So what is the easiest thing to write about when I'm half in the bag? Why not find a Molly Ivins column? I half to be drunk to read her incoherent screeds anyway. So as a public service (So you won't have to read her column in its entirety.) here is a fisk of her latest column.
So the Democrats have a candidate at last, and he is about bent over double with gravitas.
And nuance. Let's not forget nuance.
I think that means he doesn't have a humorous bone in his body. It's a good thing there's at least one serious person in this race; the Bushies are getting sillier and sillier.
This is Molly's world. Welcome to it.
Just when you thought no one could top Education Secretary Rod Paige calling the teachers' union "a terrorist organization,"
And just what is wrong with that? The teachers' unions have pretty much destroyed education in this country. And have you heard the latest bullshit that they have decided to do in the Atlanta Schools? Let's translate Shakespeare into English. I kid you not. The poetry of Shakespeare is just too fucking hard for students to read so they have provided an English translation on the opposite page. Here's an example from Julius Caesar:
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."
And the translation:
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, give me your attention. I have come here to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do is remembered after their deaths, but the good is often buried with them."
Why not this?
Dudes! Check it out! The big guy's dead. All you're gonna hear about is the bad shit he did. The good stuff will be forgotten.
Get thee to a private school!
Dunno Molly. Sounds like educational terrorism to me.
along comes Veep Dick Cheney with this gem: "If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two to three years, the kind of tax increases both Kerry and Edwards are talking about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had."
What's wrong with that?
Uh, in the first place, Kerry and Edwards are not talking about tax increases at all but about repealing part of President Bush's tax cuts
Only to a liberal. I'm now paying this amount of taxes. Kerry is gonna make me pay more taxes under the guise of repealing a tax cut. That is a fucking tax increase!!!!
-- so we would have had fewer tax cuts, not tax increases.
No Molly. If you repeal a tax cut you are increasing taxes!!!!
And in the second place, if losing 2.3 million jobs is "job growth," Cheney is a laugh riot.
And we would have lost a lot more jobs if we had not cut taxes. And the 2.3 million jobs bullshit is just that. Bullshit! Go out to the Department of Labor website and look at the actual statistics.
December 2000 Employment: 135,836,000
February 2004 Employment 138,301,000
It took me 10 minutes to dig this shit up.
We've got a $500 billion deficit this year, and Bush's idea of a solution is to make his tax cuts permanent -- a move that would cost about $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years.
It would be a lot less if Bush would quit spending like a fucking Dimocrat.
Their other helpful suggestion is to redefine burger-flipping as "manufacturing jobs." (Are these people never serious?) And if they can't redefine the problem out of existence, there's always the option of just announcing that bad is good.
That is a Dimocrat specialty. Ya know, like oral sex isn't sex and it all depends on what the definition of is is.
Think how surprised we were to learn from Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers: "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade. … More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's a good thing."
And somehow we have the stongest economy in the world and 5.6% unemployment was a good thing under Clinton, but a bad thing under Bush.
I also like the dodge where Bush claims that the reason there's a $500 billion deficit is because "we're at war." Unfortunately, the cost of Iraq is not even included in the budget. It's going to be a supplemental surprise request after the election.
The reason we have a $500 billion deficit is because Bush and the Republican congress are spending like Dimocrats. Jesus Molly, you should be jumping for joy.
Does any of this strike you as grown-up behavior? Or even grown-up-behavior-related program activities?
Holy shit! We finally agree. The discretionary spending must be curtailed.
The dramatic-upward-cost surprise is getting to be a regular feature with the Bushies. Congress and the prez passed a horrible Medicare drug bill and then, oops, a week later announced that it cost $134 billion more than the advertised $400 billion. That's a 33 percent oops.
What the fuck are you bitching about now? Your party wanted to spend even more!!!
You may consider it churlish of me to still be holding a grudge because at least 45 percent of Bush's tax cuts went to the richest 1 percent of the people in this country, but it's the kind of thing I get reminded of frequently. For example, the news that 375,000 people exhausted their unemployment in January, the highest number ever recorded for a single month, reminds me of that top 1 percent.
Here we go with the tax cuts for the rich. I don't know about the 45% number that she is bandying about, but I already disproved the 2.8 million jobs. I do know that the top 1% who earn 17% of the income pay 37% of the taxes. No wonder they get the biggest cut. They pay the most taxes. And do you know what "the rich" do with their money? They spend it. They invest it. They start businesses that create jobs. It's called capitalism. It works. It's why we are the richest nation on this planet. Even our poor people have color TV's and air-conditioning. Do you hear that France?
One symptom of the fundamental unseriousness of the Bushies is that they never, ever admit they are wrong. Nor do they pay penalties for being wrong.
So Molly how come I never heard any of this griping during the Clinton administration? Clinton went around the world apologizing for all sorts of bullshit that America did before he was elected, but I never heard him apologizing to the White House travel office staff, or about the 1000 FBI files, or to all of his enemies who were audited by the IRS, or to Kathleen Willey, or to Juanita Brodderick, or to Paula Jones, or to the sorry sumbitch at the aspirin factory in the Sudan, or to the goats killed in Afghanistan, or to ... the list goes on and on and on.
It is already a truism that this will be an event-driven election, and the spiraling chaos in Haiti
And that is Bush's fault because ... ?
and and the horrendous coordinated bombings in Iraq
Didja notice that they're not going after Americans anymore?
remind us that it is good to have grown-ups in charge when serious things happen.
Yeah. If Algore were in charge we'd still be negotiating with the Taliban for bin Laden. And with Kerry we don't know which Kerry we would get, the one who was for the war or the one who was against the war. Or the one who bitches about there not being enough body armor for our troops or the one who voted against body armor for our troops. I feel safer with the grownups in charge.
Molly, take some Valium and calm down.
Who says humans can't get mad cow disease?