George W. ("Basil") Fawlty
Watching W and his entourage of "yes men" on t.v. is like watching an endless episode of Fawlty Towers. On CNN when asked if his Mexican grandparents settled in the U.S. legally, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "It's unclear." Translation: "No." At least he didn't answer, "I am from Barcelona."
When asked about the latest, but not the last, NSA spying program invading the privacy of Americans, W's boys and girls refused to confirm or deny anything. In other words, they protected their right to privacy or to their right to the privacy of the anti-privacy spying program. Something you can't do - unless you've got something to hide perhaps?
Then there was Talkingpointsmemo.com reporting on how House GOP members complaining of "reports of wiretaps, searches on Congressional grounds, open-ended document requests and demands to interview committee aides" coming from federal prosecutors. So the House Republicans who actually do have things to hide are complaining of an over intrusive federal government acting perhaps outside the law to investigate them. We know most every law doesn't apply to Congress I guess they also don't want the criminal laws to apply either.
So instead of watching Fawlty Towers again tonight, I'll just watch cable news. It's just as farcical.
When asked about the latest, but not the last, NSA spying program invading the privacy of Americans, W's boys and girls refused to confirm or deny anything. In other words, they protected their right to privacy or to their right to the privacy of the anti-privacy spying program. Something you can't do - unless you've got something to hide perhaps?
Then there was Talkingpointsmemo.com reporting on how House GOP members complaining of "reports of wiretaps, searches on Congressional grounds, open-ended document requests and demands to interview committee aides" coming from federal prosecutors. So the House Republicans who actually do have things to hide are complaining of an over intrusive federal government acting perhaps outside the law to investigate them. We know most every law doesn't apply to Congress I guess they also don't want the criminal laws to apply either.
So instead of watching Fawlty Towers again tonight, I'll just watch cable news. It's just as farcical.
posted by Crankyboy at 11:28 AM
4 Comments:
Don't forget to hang up the moose head
Your "bonus" comment a couple entries down reminded me of Tom Toles' cartoon today. Check it out:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/cartoonsandvideos/toles_main.html
d.k.
Good to see you still hanging around this joint. Yep. They hate us for our freedoms. Maybe when Bush gets rid of all our freedoms then they won't hate us anymore?
this soul sucking wall ... Congress comes “like an old-stone savage armed.”
I laughed out loud yesterday when I read Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R., Ala.) words "... Good fences make good neighbors. Fences don't make bad neighbors." “Good fences…” is small enough for a bumper sticker and almost small enough for a Fox news sound bite. But like a nervous student, he didn’t trust the poets’ message, so Mr. Sessions added his own “explanation” that ‘Fences don’t make bad neighbors’ so we’d get the idea.
He was so busy legislatin’ yesterday that he didn’t have time for fact checking, or he would know that millions of school kids all over the world are taught Robert Frosts’ “Mending Fences” as a study of the human heart and how it often hides in fear behind a wall. How much fear mongering must it have taken to pass this fence bill at an estimated cost of $3.2 million per mile, more than $900 million for 300 miles? But we have so many more borders; it must keep Sessions up nights.
I actually remembered Frost’s voice speaking, reciting the poem, from a long ago recording that I must have listened to more than once. I can recall Frosts’ slow, deliberate reading; the intense, gravely voice ‘acting out’ the neighbors’ Maine accent as the fellow goes “like an old-stone savage armed”. Frost was saying that if you WANT to go thru life fearful, ignorant, lazy and brainless, find an easy quote and hide behind it. Frost says, about this neighbor: “He moves in darkness as it seems to me~”
More poetry was spouted by Sen. David “deport ‘em all” Vitter (R., La.), who repeatedly described the “fence” legislation as too easy, an ‘amnesty bill for lawbreakers’. "It sort of reminds me of the famous line 'Methinks thou dost protest too much.' " he said. Shakespeare has already eaten jerks like Vitter for lunch, so I won't comment.
I would like to give Mr. Vitter back another Mending Wall quote:
‘Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'
Mr. Vitter not only can’t understand the human heart, he can’t add, and he can’t manage. His state has received billions of dollars of US tax money, which now appears in less than 1 year to have been corruptly spent and diverted. If he has his way, rebuilding New Orleans after deporting 11 million workers (and their millions of now legal children, and their 11 million spouses) will be a real trick. I know the countries where my last 3 tradesmen were from, do you?
For 30 years legislators like Vitter and his ilk provided NO LEGAL MEANS for safe passage into this country, while they passed treaties that trashed the economies of the lands south of us. He can’t see that 1 & 1 is 2. His poetic skills are those of a huckster.
Vitter is vitriolic. He led the drive to strip from the Senate bill a provision giving an eventual chance at citizenship to illegal immigrants who have been in the country more than two years. His effort failed, 66-33, and the provision survived at least for today, saving us the vision of Grand Pa and Grand Ma being deported in cuffs, while their U S citizen children and grand kids wave good bye.
11 million! Vitter doesn’t even know who “they” are, and he doesn’t care much. He is an ideologue and a dangerous, thoughtless man who thinks he is standing on principle. Good law, good legislation, good management, good governance, that should be his job, but I wonder if he could even be a good dog catcher.
Go out and get registered to vote today. While you are out and about, make an estimate of how many people who serve you may either be here “undocumented”, or have family who are. Don’t freak out. Just say thank you. Because without the 11 million and their families this country would cease to function as we know it now.
Example: The fastest growing demographic in the US is people over 85 years old. Doctor, nursing, home health care, and hospice care for YOUR parents, (and soon for YOU) will most likely come from workers born outside of this country.
Robert Frost:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
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