'Mixed Reviews' For Bush's Health Care Cuts? What BS!

Your nearly frozen correspondent got a bit warm above the clavicles while reading Christopher Lee and Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post on this fine cold Sunday morning.

They were selling a piece of obvious fiction called "Bush's Proposed Health-Care Cuts Get Mixed Reviews" and saying things like:

Depending on whom you ask, the budget that President Bush proposed last week will save or sink Medicare and Medicaid, two popular programs that, along with Social Security, threaten to swamp the federal budget as the baby-boom generation retires.

And I was thinking: BS!! BFS!! It's the MF Pentagon and the BS tax cuts for the filthy rich that threaten to swamp the bloody federal budget! Of all the despicable bloody BS!

It's the GWOT -- a BSWOBST at that !! -- that's eating up our bloody budget, you loony MF stooges, that and George MF BS Bush's signature act of treason: wartime tax cuts! These are the things that threaten to swamp the bloody MF federal budget!

But no! That's not right either!! These two things have already swamped the bloody MF BS federal budget, you bloody F BS-mongers! And it's all part of a comprehensive, long-term, mostly-secret and thoroughly evil plan that you would be mentioning right now if you had any...

Don't get me started. Just think of Grover MF Norquist and his vicious MF BS about shrinking the government till you can drown it in a bathtub ...

Now think of Karl BS Rove and his favorite tactic: truth by inversion. How hard would it be for Karl BS Rove to come up with a diabolical MF plan to shrink the federal government by spending scads of money ... by pouring it right into the pockets of the people who put him in office in the first place?

It wouldn't take long for a slick-talking sociopath like George MF BS Bush to sell that plan to the fat and bloody ignorant American MF public, using a campaign which -- irony of ironies -- targets one of the groups it hurts the most: mid- to low-income Evangelical Christians with undiagnosed Cranial Rectal Disorder!

Bush, citing the need for fiscal responsibility, proposed reducing by $101 billion over five years the spending growth of the two health programs, which serve 93 million people and will cost the government $564 billion this year.

And well it should be MF controversial, you bloody MF AH scribblers! Where are the real reporters? Imagine writing about George MF BS Bush "citing the need for fiscal responsibility" without a historical comment! That's the perfect place for a little historical context, eh what?

After six years of not being able to pronounce "fiscal responsibility" -- much less spell it -- the twice-unelected so-called president, now pretending to work with a bunch of spineless donkeys in Congress, discovers "fiscal responsibility" for the very first time, decides the sick and elderly will bear the brunt of it, and maneuvers to place the blame for this outrageous travesty at least partially on the newly elected donkeys.

BS! BFS! When does this MF BS stop? When do we get to see a bloody donkey who's willing to kick up his furry little hind legs and say "ENOUGH!! All this robbing from the poor and giving to the rich has got to stop NOW!!"

And what happened to the merest shred of fairness in reporting? Look at what passes for "balance" in the next paragraph:

Budget experts call the plan one of the most significant efforts in years to rein in federal spending on entitlement programs. But health-care providers and advocates for beneficiaries call the proposed cuts arbitrary and say they would exact an unaffordable toll on a big part of the nation's health-care system.

Did you notice how finely-crafted that first sentence is? It doesn't threaten Ming pottery, but listen: Who could argue with budget experts? Is anyone against significant efforts? Who wouldn't want to rein in federal spending? And entitlement programs certainly have a bad name in the CMSM lately, so in fact every phrase in that sentence was heavily loaded.

On the other hand, it says here the cuts would be arbitrary and they would exact a toll on a big part of the nation's health-care system.

The nation's health care system? What about the people? What about the bloody F people? Get out of here with your weak BS, you MF scoundrels! Toll on the system my sweet MFA!!

Some day, hopefully soon, the middle- to low-income Evangelical Christians -- who have nothing really, other than their doctor bills and their pharmacy bills and their kids -- will finally look up and see the cheap sleazy MF scoundrels they've put in office getting ready to start another war, and they will tremble. Or if they don't, they should.

Because soon their kids will find out that there are no MF jobs and there is no chance of bringing in any more MF jobs (jobs? no, sorry! American jobs outsourced! sorry, Americans! global progress!!)

And there won't be any unemployment or job-training or welfare or health-care (entitlements? sorry! we had to rein in the federal budget!) and they'll soon find out that their only viable economic options involve choosing one of the various ways in which they can risk their lives in some Godforsaken country whose name they cannot even pronounce, let alone spell. And that'll be that!

The only jobs left will be temporary till-death-do-us-part gigs in the Front Row of the Empire, where their kids -- and your kids, and mine -- will patrol the perimeter as professional pawns in the endless, pointless and mostly bogus generational struggle against the demonized other -- the nameless, faceless, and ultimately invincible enemy which the vicious lying warmongering Fisto-Crashists like to call islamofascism.

They have to say that; it's the only way they can do Empire without a Draft.

And they'll win the hearts and minds as well as the warm bodies of all the mid- and low-income Evangelical Christians with undiagnosed Cranial Rectal Disorder, right along with all the other warm bodies they need, because whether or not we're all gung-ho about the Holy Bogus Imperative of wiping out Monolithic Global Islamofascism, we all have to eat, don't we?

And if there are no other MF jobs, that'll be because these vicious MF BS-mongers have been shipping them out of the country ever since they started implementing their long-term plan to turn our more-or-less moderate democratic republic into a totalitarian military-police state.

But there's still no bloody MF money, and it's BS to blame it on entitlements. The secret -- the open but deadly and therefore mostly unspoken secret -- is that there's no bloody MF money because your friends and your relatives and your neighbors and your co-workers, and all the stupid MF people you honk at and swear at every day on your way to work -- and all the people they know and love and work with and swear at, and so on, and on and on -- all those people bought all that BS!

And they sat on their couch and watched NASCAR or they went down to the corner for a beer or they did a thousand and one other things, and while nobody but the Fisto-Crashists were paying attention, our collective future was stolen right out from under our noses, in broad daylight -- on television, even!

And now, Little Georgie -- Little Georgie MF BS Bush -- wants all the MF money this suddenly-BS country can borrow, just to pay for his Excellent Adventures. And we're getting it in the MF ear -- again! -- from the GD WP, which IMVHO no longer deserves the privilege of using my MF initials.

What BS! It's no wonder I'm getting a little warm above the clavicles.

And that's putting it mildly!

Is America Doomed? Fisto-Crashism On The March

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
-- Matthew 10:36

Yesterday we were talking about the dangers of the so-called "Conservative" so-called "Christian" so-called "Right", and their malignant hybrid of politics and religion.

Today I have a riddle for you...

What is the most insidious and pervasive threat we face as a formerly free nation? Global Warming? Terrorism? George Bush? Osama bin Laden?

If you said "None of the Above", you and I may be on the same page, because I'm still thinking about Fisto-Crashism.

You may not know it yet, but there are Fisto-Crashists in your city or town, probably in your neighborhood, maybe in your own family. But nobody knows about them; you can't even find them with Google. (Click here to search for "Fisto-Crashist"!)

Guess what? That's the way they want it.

The Fisto-Crashist movement began with the merging of Christianity and Fascism -- an unspeakably wicked marriage of Faith, Hope, Love and Pure Evil, which many people call "Christo-Fascism". But then they twisted it.

And now the name is even more appropriate, in more ways than one. We've already been seeing the Iron Fist; we'll be seeing more of it soon unless I am much mistaken. And whether we prefer to admit it or not, we all know The Crash is coming, too.

Fisto-Crashists approach the Looming Global Crisis Of Unspeakable Scope with all bets hedged.

They claim to believe that nothing on Earth matters at all because they'll soon be whisked away in The Rapture and never have to worry about anything ever again. But they act as if nothing on Earth matters as much as who controls the oil.

Here's Chris Floyd:

Chris Hedges -- the former NY Times war correspondent who was essentially booted from the paper for daring to question the wisdom of the Dear Leader in launching an unprovoked, criminal war of aggression against Iraq (although we gather that the Times, like so many other Establishment worthies these days, has now had some second thoughts of their own about this escapade) -- has written a powerful new book about one of the greatest threats the American Republic faces today: the extreme Christianists who have allied with the Bush Faction militarists to birth a uniquely American style of fascism.

I've been tracking this movement myself for more than 30 years now, from the time my late brother and I used to gape, slack-jawed in appalled amusement, at the crazed rantings of late-night TV fringe preachers named Falwell, Robertson, Bakker and others. It seemed like a bad joke then -- but at the same time, I could see their bizarre brand of supposed Christianity -- with its blustering belligerence (War on the Russkies! War on the Ay-rabs! War to save our Panama Canal from the, er, Panamanians!), its condemnatory and exclusionary zeal, its arrogant self-righteousness, and, even then, its overriding obsession with sex (a topic never once addressed by Jesus in the Gospels), especially homosexual sex (remember Anita Bryant?) -- was beginning to make inroads among the people around us. Even our grandmother -- as gentle and tolerant a soul as could be imagined -- had been scared into sending money to these hucksters to help them "save" American society from the bogeymen of their imaginations and their twisted lusts.

Over the years, I watched with growing horror as these freaks from the fringe marched steadily to the center of American politics, making the beast with two backs with the worst elements of the Republican Party. Robertson went from curing goiters over the airwaves to running for president; Falwell went from squirming explosions of homosexual panic to prayer breakfasts in the White House; the dinky, late-night TV shows grew into international media networks worth billions of dollars. And the crank notions of divinely sanctioned militarism, aggressive obscurantism, blistering intolerance and virulent hatred of the personal freedom that lies at the heart of the American dream of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," all became the official policies of the ruling faction of the United States government.

The hour is actually late to try to turn back this tide, but Hedges is bringing his considerable literary gifts and extensive learning and real-world experience to the fight for the Republic. His recent article in Truthdig gives a good overview of the concerns addressed by his new book, American Fascists. (How's that for plain talk?) He tells more in a recent Truthdig interview with James Harris and Robert Scheer...

And here's a brief snippet from that interview:

Chris Hedges: Truthdig Interview

I look at the religious right, the radical religious right, those people who want to create a Christian nation, as a mass movement. I don’t give them much religiosity at all. I think they have acculturated the Christian religion with the worst aspects of American imperialism and American capitalism.

They prey on the despair of tens of millions of Americans in this country who have been completely disenfranchised and shunted aside with the creation of this American oligarchy. That is the engine of the movement.

These people, their lives have become train wrecks, their communities have been physically obliterated with the flight of manufacturing jobs, or they live in these soulless exurbs, in places like Orange County, with no community center, no community rituals—you know, they don’t even have sidewalks. And they’re lonely, and they’re alienated, and they’re lost. And that’s the fodder that demagogues use to amass totalitarian movements.

And they do that by offering these people a world of magic, of belief in destiny and miracles and angels, that Jesus has a plan for them. And they essentially remove them from the reality-based world. That’s what creationism is about.

And everybody who’s written about despotic movements, from Hannah Arendt to Karl Popper to Fritz Stern to Robert Paxton, cites this despair as being the kindling that allows despotic, totalitarian movements to tear apart the open society.

So for me the radical Christian right is very much a manifestation of the inequities and the injustices that plague American society.

We now live in a country where the top 1 percent control more wealth, or have more wealth, than the bottom 90 percent combined. The absolute destruction of the working class -- and much of my family has been a victim of this -- has now been accompanied by an assault on the middle class.

So anything that can be put on software, from engineering to finance to architecture, can get outsourced, where it’ll end up in India, where they’ll work for a third of the wages, with no health insurance, no benefits. These kinds of assaults against the working and middle class are absolutely deadly to a democratic state.

I haven't been giving you many links so far but you'll find plenty of them near the bottom of this page. You can read as much or as little of the linked items as you want, of course; very few readers will have the heart to keep reading once they get an idea of what's happening here.

If you want the short form...

Beware the Fisto-Crashists!

Don't let them fool you with their political and religious doublespeak. They can lie out of both sides of their mouths at the same time. And they do.

Some people think the Fisto-Crashists are betraying the principles symbolized by the cross and the flag, but I'm not one of them. I agree they're contravening the laws (and neglecting the wisdom) expounded in the Bible and the Constitution. But in my opinion they can't betray any principles because they never had any principles in the first place!

Of course, this doesn't stop them from abusing cherished national and religious symbols. They'll wave the flag and wear the cross, or wear the flag and wave the cross -- whatever fools the people best.

Fisto-Crashists believe in simple and similar approaches to virtually every problem (and even some things that aren't problems).

They don't see anything wrong with beating their wives or abusing their kids, so why should they care about other people's kids, let alone other people's wives?

They don't see anything wrong with turning a free society into a police state (as long as they control the state!), and they don't see anything wrong with bombing, invading or otherwise destroying other countries, more or less at will.

We have ignored them to our great detriment. We continue to ignore them at our peril. The time is very late.

The Fist is here already.

The Crash is coming soon.

And our only choices are to Fight Fisto-Crashism NOW or Get Used To It FOREVER.

~~~

[LINKS]

Chris Floyd:
Storming Heaven: The Rise of Pseudo-Christian Fascism

Amazon dot com:
Chris Hedges: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America (Hardcover)

Truthdig Article:
Chris Hedges: Christianists on the March

Truthdig Interview:
Chris Hedges: The Christian Right’s War on America

[FURTHER READING]

Jeffrey Sharlet: Jesus Plus Nothing

Anthony Lappé: Meet 'The Family'

Katherine Yurica: The Despoiling of America: How George W. Bush became the head of the new American Dominionist Church/State

[AND FINALLY]

On a personal, Biblical, note:

I am constantly amazed by the hypocrisy of people who claim to believe every word of the Bible is literally true -- the inspired Word of God -- and yet manage to ignore the fact that the Bible tells us not only how to live our lives:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

-- Matthew 5:3-9

but also how we -- as individuals and as a nation -- should should conduct ourselves:

Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Thou shalt not covet [...] any thing that is thy neighbour's.

-- Exodus 20:13-17

May the Almighty and Everlasting God have Mercy upon their Souls.
But may He Smite them with a Terrible Swift Sword FIRST!