Give Harris a chance. (Don’t sit this one out, cynics.)

Posted on August 31, 2024 by oddmanout215

American politics, especially now, does not offer us a choice between a party that favors the rich and one that favors the poor. Clinton cannot be called to account by an electorally nonexistent left. We must choose between a party that neglects the poor and one that savages them, between a party that defers to the rich and one that deifies them, between a party that abjectly apologizes for government and one that demonizes it. One party signs a Faustian contract with the devil. The other party offers the contract. Better Faustus than Mephistopheles.

The above is from a piece Garry Wills wrote in 1996 after President Bill Clinton was nominated for a second term at the 1996 Democratic convention. Wills noted with regret the party’s ongoing efforts to prioritize the interests of rich campaign donors at the expense of rank-and-file Democrats. He may have already sensed that the Dems’ embrace of neoliberal ideas — deregulation, globalization, etc. — might help get Clinton elected again but was alienating a large percentage of working-class voters.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit read the article and said, “I don’t know about this Faustus guy, but the election racket ain’t changed much since 1996. We still gotta choose the lesser of two evils.”

“This is no time to be cynical,” I told him. “There’s only one evil person running for president, and it’s not Kamala Harris. The left is still ‘electorally nonexistent’ in this country, but it’s important to make the best of things by electing someone who’s more likely to work for the common good than make common cause with billionaire reactionary pigs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. It’s common sense.”

Swamp Rabbit tugged on his wispy goatee. “What you mean by common sense? Americans knew Trump was a lyin’ hateful fraud in 2016, but he got elected anyway. “

It was a valid point, but I shrugged it off. “People do stupid, spiteful things when they feel betrayed or threatened. They went for Trump in 2016 but rejected him in 2020, and I’m confident they won’t go back to being stupid in 2024.”

Footnote: Harris can be inconsistent but, as the New Yorker’s John Cassidy recently noted, she thinks “being accused of flip-flopping is a lesser threat to her campaign than giving her opponent the ammunition to brand her as a radical.” I’ll buy that; she’s less than honest at times, like all politicians, but she’s clearly pro-choice, pro-labor and even pro-environment, despite backing off from her previous anti-fracking stance. She’s unlikely to sign a contract with the devil. (Trump already did that, long before he went into politics.)

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The solution is fewer cars, but who wants to hear that?

Posted on August 14, 2024 by oddmanout215

The Philadelphia Parking Authority will more than double the price of a yearly residential parking permit to $75 and cap at three the number of permits each household can buy in an effort to better manage curbside congestion, officials said.

Those changes are scheduled to take effect Sept. 1. The base permit price has been $35 since 1983, when Philadelphia’s neighborhood parking program began.

“This here is an outrage,” Swamp Rabbit said as he showed me the news story about parking permit price hikes. “It’s an attack on my God-given right to own as many cars as I can get financing for and park them where I please. Give me liberty, or give me a house in the suburbs where I don’t have to put up with this shit.”

He was joking, I think. He and I live in adjacent shacks near the Tinicum swamp, in a part of Philly so poor and so far south that the city hasn’t yet bothered to extend its parking program here.

I reminded him that he doesn’t own a car, doesn’t like public transit and is too drunk most of the time to ride a bicycle or one of those sneaky little electric scooters.

“There ain’t no room for bikes in this city,” he said. “The drivers would run me off the road.”

He has a point. There are bike lanes here and there, but parked cars line South Philly streets, many of which have room for only one traffic lane. If there are no legal parking spaces the drivers park at street corners or on the sidewalks. But most pedestrians in South Philly and elsewhere seem unruffled by the fact that noisy, polluting cars take up almost all of their outdoor living space. Drivers are even more oblivious to this reality, of course. My hunch is that most of them could get used to seeing corpses swinging from the light fixtures on telephone poles so long as the corpses didn’t hang low enough to block the roads.

“You’re wrong, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said. “They would drive around the corpses, or just knock them out of the way.”

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Beware cat-less ladies who have too many kids

Posted on July 28, 2024 by oddmanout215

We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. — VP candidate J.D. Vance, while running for the Senate in 2021

“Please don’t write about Vance again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “That phony populist ain’t worth the keystrokes it takes to delete his lame emails.”

I rejected his request. “Vance crossed a line by attacking cat ladies. As a proud cat gentleman, I find his remarks highly offensive.”

We were on the front porch of my swamp shack on a nice day, in between heat waves. Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer Victor Cortez was with us, checking up on his unreliable charge.

“Harris could have countered by complaining that cat-less ladies who have too many children are the real menace, but she’s not as mean as Vance,” Victor said. “Or as stupid.”

My cats Thoughts and Prayers licked their paws and nodded approvingly as they lazed on the front steps.

After Victor left, I walked to Vincenzo’s Pizza Jawn for a slice of Sicilian. Tommy Gravers, a former newspaper colleague of mine who later became a test subject for experimental drugs, was at the counter drinking diet soda and looking alarmingly thin. He told me that our time on Earth is like a 20th century sitcom – a promising premise and some amusing initial episodes followed by stagnation, cancelation and many seasons of reruns, with characters so predictable, you know their lines even before they speak. Tommy’s prognosis is iffy, but watching sitcom characters confront the same problems again and again distracts him from thinking about mortality.

“Time has no meaning when I watch TV,” he explained. “Decades from now, Barney Fife’s handgun will still misfire. Arnold the Pig will still win at checkers. The Soup Nazi will never serve soup to George.”

I nodded. “Yes, but will Kamala Harris be the first woman president of the United States?”

“Possibly,” Tommy said, “but she’d better get off to a successful start. If her show gets canceled, there won’t be any reruns.”

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Regarding Trump’s infatuation with Hannibal Lecter

Posted on July 21, 2024 by oddmanout215

“Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.” — Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was wondering about the Republican presidential nominee’s bizarre fixation on Hannibal Lecter, the fictional, flesh-eating serial killer played by Anthony Hopkins in an old movie called Silence of the Lambs. This wasn’t the first time Trump praised Lecter.

“It’s just Trump being Trump,” I said. “He tells a big lie then caps it with an outdated reference from mass culture that he knows will endear him to the ignoramuses who are susceptible to his lies.”

One of Trump’s favorite lies is that the influx of migrants from south of the border is made up of extreme undesirables — rapists and killers, maybe even cannibals. He ranted about migrants in his speech, right before pivoting to the one-liner about Lecter’s dinner preferences. This was to suggest there are many Hannibal Lecter types among the migrants, ha-ha.

“But ain’t he supposed to be a humbler guy, a unifier, now that he almost had his head blowed off by that nutjob in PA?” Swamp Rabbit asked. “That’s what them pundits are writing.”

“That’s just mainstream media bullshit. There’s only one Trump.”

Trump is the guy who thinks testimonials from the likes of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock reflect well on him. He’s the candidate who said “107 percent” of jobs created under Biden “were taken by illegal aliens.” That he, Trump, oversaw “the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” That “Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare.”

He seemed to become more unhinged with each new sentence during his convention speech. His audience cheered and waved placards. Swamp Rabbit said, “Trump’s suck-ups are even sicker than he is. I bet they’d nominate Hannibal Lecter if they could.”

I thought about this for a moment. “That’s impossible, but they’re happy to settle for Hannibal’s alter-ego.”

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Why JD Vance no longer calls Trump ‘America’s Hitler’

Posted on July 15, 2024 by oddmanout215

Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly chosen running mate, wrote this on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign:

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

It seems he ultimately decided Trump is both of those things — a Hitler type and a cynical asshole who could help Vance further his own political career. The irony here is that Vance is at least as cynical as Richard Nixon — note his use of the word “useful” — or he wouldn’t have become so shamelessly loyal to the wannabe dictator who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

My friend Swamp Rabbit called up a recent New York Times interview with Vance, a lengthy piece that shows how much the Ohio Republican revels in being perceived as both a populist firebrand and a staunch opponent of those who don’t believe in the sort of populism that allows for hostility toward Blacks, immigrants and everybody else who doesn’t fit the resentful white working-class MAGA mold that Trump has exploited so successfully.

Vance said this in the Times interview: “I think people really, really underrate the sense to which there is palpable and actionable frustration, and I’m always surprised that their assumption appears to be that Trump is the worst, rather than the best, expression of that frustration.” 

Just what we need, another pugnacious hustler pretending to be a spokesperson for the people. Vance is as familiar as the rest of us with Trump’s appalling personal history — the housing discrimination lawsuit, the failure to pay an army of small business contractors in Atlantic City and elsewhere, Trump University and other major scams, the unending stream of documented lies, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, the impeachments, the election subversion charges, the conviction for sexual battery and defamation, the convictions on 34 counts of business fraud, and so on.

“Up means down, worst means best,” Swamp Rabbit said when I asked him to explain Vance’s reasoning. “It don’t make no sense unless you drink the Trump Kool-Aid.”

Footnote: In case you thought Vance might have some redeeming qualities, check out the person he chooses to blame for Trump’s recent brush with violent death: “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Posted in humor, liar, mainstream media, New York Times, plutocracy, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Media help boost felon’s presidential hopes

Posted on June 28, 2024 by oddmanout215

From Salon:

The presidential nominee of one party is a convicted felon, a business failure, an adjudicated rapist in civil court who paid off a porn star and advocated grabbing women by their pu**y if you’re a celebrity because you can get away with it and like it. Is there any condition under which such a candidate should be taken seriously for the office of president? That someone IS speaks volumes about the corruption inherent in our system.

Mainstream news outlets were in their glory this week as they prepped viewers for Thursday’s Biden-Trump debate. Weirdly, much of the advance coverage came in the form of “how-to” stories. CNN ran this online article: “How to watch Thursday’s CNN Presidential Debate.” USA Today served up a similar story. The ever-helpful New York Times offered this: “How Can Biden Win the Debate? Trump? Five Tips for Each Candidate.”

Is this the best they can do? One of the candidates, Donald Trump, has spent years falsely accusing Democrats of stealing the 2020 presidential election. He lied about his role in encouraging a mob to storm the Capitol in an attempt to prevent certification of the election results. He knows he lost the election but has tried to convince various courts to nullify the results.

And yet the mainstream media continue to pretend that Trump is a normal candidate. That he “should be taken seriously for the office of president,” as the Salon writer put it.

“Quit whining,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said as I listed examples of negligence in media coverage of the presidential race. “The media ain’t the enemy. Their job is to cover debates the same way they cover ballgames — who won, who lost, who’s got momentum.”

He was making me angry. “We’re not talking about a ballgame. The media should be reminding voters that one of the candidates rejects the Constitution and would ignore it if he got back in power.”

The TV networks are the worst of the lot, I told him. During and directly after the debate CNN’s moderators should have called out Trump’s lies, as the Associated Press did today. Biden does not want to raise our taxes “by four times.” While president, Trump did not have “the best environmental numbers ever” — the opposite is true. Nancy Pelosi did not oppose the use of the National Guard during the Jan. 6 riot. Again, the opposite is true. Pro-choice advocates are not calling for abortions “after birth,” whatever that means. Trump did not preside over “the greatest economy in history.” When he left office, the economy was a wreck. Biden did not call African Americans “superpredators.” Immigrants are not causing a nationwide increase in crime. Violent crime in this country is actually decreasing. And that’s not even the half of it…

“Settle down,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Biden stretched the truth a couple times, too. Besides, the peeps don’t care about facts, they care about appearances. It ain’t the media’s fault that Biden sounded feeble and looked like he was gonna keel over. It ain’t their fault the stupid Democrats wanted an 81-year-old guy to be their nominee.”

Maybe not, I told him. But it is their fault that, once again, they’re helping legitimize the most villainous and dangerous presidential candidate in American history.

And that’s no lie.

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Climate-change glass is half-empty — and leaking

Posted on December 31, 2023 by oddmanout215

So what are we supposed to make of the end-of-year stories regarding the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP28)? Mainstream media outlets, desperate to put a positive spin on the event, chose to call it a success even though the deal reached by the participating countries recommends “transitioning away from fossil fuels” but doesn’t directly call for a phaseout of those fuels. 

Washington Post put on its happy face and said the COP28 delivered “a historic deal” and “an unlikely breakthrough on fossil fuels.” A New York Times story announced that “the world agreed to move away from fossil fuels.”

But in another Times article, the science writer David Wallace-Wells noted that “The question isn’t about whether there will be a transition, but how fast, global and thorough it will be. The answer is: not fast or global or thorough enough yet, at least on the current trajectories, which COP28 effectively affirmed.” 

Wallace-Wells included this reminder:

Not very long ago, this was a future that terrified us — the world beyond the goals of the [2015] Paris agreement looking tremendously bleak. Now, we are not just coming to accept that future but, in some corners, applauding it as progress.

“Pretty damn nu-anced, ain’t he?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “I think he’s saying this is one of them glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situations. Depends on how you look at it.”

“Give me a break. The glass is half-empty, and it’s leaking.”

I pointed to concluding remarks by the president of COP28, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, who congratulated himself and other participants “who came and made the COP a success.” Meanwhile, the United States continues to be the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, and China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, continue expanding their coal industries.

And Al Jaber, the head of the UAE’s state oil company, continues to make oil and gas deals with any and all countries that want to jump on the oil barge with him.

It’s probably not on his list of favorite words, but you have to admire the Al Jaber’s chutzpah.

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Jingle this: the 2023 alt-Xmas playlist

Posted on December 26, 2023 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit looked puzzled when he checked out my Christmas playlist. “What’s up, Odd Man? I ain’t never heard most of them tunes.”

“That’s because you only get to hear the standards, and most of them suck, ” I said.

I told him I just got back from working an outdoor event where a dozen-or-so Christmas standards were wafting through the sound system, over and over. “Little Saint Nick” followed by “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” followed by “All I Want for Christmas Is You” followed by “Holly Jolly Christmas,” and so on. Stick a fork in them, they’re done. I left as early as I could.

“What you got against “Holly Jolly Christmas?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Burl Ives sounds like Santa Claus.”

I made a face. “He sounds like a serial killer. Mariah Carey and Andy Williams are worse, I’ll grant you that, but my point is why play the same crap every year when there are thousands of Christmas songs. Why can’t we just toss out the corny ones?”

He looked at me funny. “You should have that Mr. Grinch song on your list. You remind me of him sometimes.”

Footnote: Two favorites on my 2021 playlist — “Christmas in the Ghetto” by James Brown and “Run Rudolph Run” by Chuck Berry — were left off this list to make room for other oddities. Merry Christmas Week, and may peace be upon your head!

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Climate deniers, lobbyists pollute COP28

Posted on December 8, 2023 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit and I were reading news stories about the COP28 summit, where some attendees from around the world are seeking solutions to global warming but many others are just spreading misinformation.

I clicked on a NY Times article and said, “Here you go, this pretty much sums it up.”

Climate activists like Greta Thunberg were targeted by Chinese state media, which accused Thunberg of calling for an end to the use of chopsticks and denounced her as a “Swedish princess” after she pushed for more emissions reductions from China. 

Back in January, Thunberg had looked at the setting for this year’s COP — Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil exporter — and decided to skip it. She figured the fix was in.

Good call.

Before the politicians and diplomats even got to Dubai, they were fighting over whether to “phase out” or merely “phase down” fossil fuel usage. Many of them say they’re committed to stopping “unabated” fossil fuel usage, but that essentially means they won’t oppose fossil fuel companies that vaguely commit to using carbon capture and storage techniques to offset the pollution they cause. The fact that capture and storage technology is outrageously expensive and far from being perfected doesn’t seem to bother them.

COP28 is a huge event — 84,000 attendees — infested with lobbyists set on protecting the interests of fossil fuel companies and the countries that sponsor them. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and other sincere advocates of wind and solar energy are caught in a bind. They must either play ball with the countries that will use loopholes to avoid full commitment to fossil fuel alternatives — the United States is one of them — or give up on the idea that the world can reach the goal of net zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050.

Kerry was recently put in the awkward position of having to make excuses for Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, the COP28 president, who also heads the UAE’s national oil company. The sultan said there is “no science” supporting those demanding a phaseout of fossil fuels. (This from a guy who’s hosting a summit on global warming!) Kerry said that the sultan’s remarks need “clarification.”

“Okay, I get it, we’re all doomed,” said Swamp Rabbit, who had been listening to me complain that the 28th annual conference of the parties was little more than an exercise in greenwashing. “Why don’t you just admit there ain’t no way clean energy fans are gonna win the war against them moneygrubbers who won’t give up on fossil fuels till all the oil and gas and coal is burned up?”

“Because I’m not quite ready to believe it’s true,” I replied. “And because I don’t want to make you happy by admitting you might be right.”

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Kissinger, Zsa Zsa and ‘all them dead peeps’

Posted on December 4, 2023 by oddmanout215

I was on the porch of my swamp shack, reading the online Washington Post. Swamp Rabbit dropped by to hit me up for beer money. He was two dollars short of a six-pack.

“Check this out,” I said, pointing to a detail in Kissinger’s obit that amused me. “He went to dinner with Zsa Zsa Gabor, drove her home and was making a move on her when his beeper went off. It was Richard Nixon. Before Kissinger could get ‘to first base’ with Zsa Zsa, Nixon ordered him to ‘come back immediately’ to the Western White House.”

I scrolled through the story. “And how about this,” I said. “According to the Post writer, Kissinger ‘made tabloid headlines’ with Jill St. John when the two of them ‘inadvertently’ tripped an alarm one night at St. John’s Hollywood mansion.”

Swamp Rabbit looked unimpressed. “Who’s Jill St. John? And Zsa Zsa what’s-her-name — ain’t she the one starred in that TV series with Arnold the pig?”

“I think that was Zsa Zsa’s sister,” I said. “The point is that Henry the K had an active social life. He was dating stars and ‘stunning starlets’ when he wasn’t working as secretary of state and national security adviser.”

“You mean when he wasn’t ordering U.S. planes to carpet-bomb Cambodia, or backing Pakistan’s slaughter of them Bengalis, or stirring up dirty wars in Central America, or helping overthrow democracy in Chile, or ‘greenlighting’ Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor that killed more than 200,000 peeps. And that ain’t even the half of it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The pudgy little shmuck invented a playboy persona for himself, which helped avert attention from the fact that he was a war criminal, indirectly responsible for something like two million deaths. The New York Times said he ‘proved mesmerizing as a media figure.’ I’m agreeing with you, dummy.”

I explained to him that the world is a big chessboard and Kissinger was a chess master and the rest of us just pawns in his game, to paraphrase Bob Dylan.

“It ain’t right, Odd Man. All them dead peeps, but that evil furball lived to be a hundred years old.”

I’d put Swamp Rabbit in a dark mood, it seemed. “Here,” I said, handing him two twenties. “Buy yourself a whole case of beer if you feel that bad.”

Footnote: Evidence exists that Kissinger realized early on that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. But he played a big role in sabotaging peace talks in order to help get Nixon elected president in 1968 and re-elected in 1972. One can only wonder how many lives were sacrificed to ensure Nixon’s victories and Kissinger’s continued presence in government and the gossip columns. You won’t see any estimates in the mainstream media.

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