“Quote, unquote ‘working people’”

Failed 2010 Republican Senate candidate and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina (“19th Worst CEO of All Time”) is a confirmed failure in both business and politics—an extremely notable failure at that—and yet for some inexplicable reason, her “success” at nearly destroying HP saw Fiorina gifted with a $42 million “golden parachute” severance package when they fired her. (She claims $21 million, conveniently forgetting the other half). Hell, I’d be willing to run HP into the dust for the bargain price of $500,000, less, even, how’s about you?).

Portfolio magazine described Fiorina as “a consummate self-promoter” (A job creator!) who “paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs.” 18,000 people to give you a nice round number.

So why does NBC News keep booking her as an “expert” on Meet the Press? What are Carly Fiorina’s qualifications to have her opinions on the so-called “fiscal cliff” taken seriously? How is Fiorina’s “expertise” measured when SHE, of ALL PEOPLE, makes a statement like this one:

“It is not fair that public employee union pensions and benefits are so rich now that cities and states are going bankrupt, and college tuition is going up 20 and 30%… There is a lot that isn’t fair right now.”

Fair? Who is Carly Fiorina to decide what’s fair or not? How fucking fair is it that an individual rewarded with $42 million for being a total fuck up (during her tenure at HP, the company’s stock lost half its value) is on NBC News whining and pontificating about public union employees? Someone who fired 18,000 workers as she ground a major American corporation into the curb? Yeah, let’s canvass her opinion on the direction the country needs to take!

Hell, Carly Fiorina is so clueless that she even ran as a Republican in CALIFORNIA! I mean, what’s up with that? (Endorsed by Sarah Palin, Fiorina lost by 10 points!) If she’s any kind of expert on anything beside failing upwards then I’m Sean Hannity.

And for the record, 7 of 10 public union employees—like cops—retire on a pension of around $30k a year. Just sayin…

Via AmericaBlog:

So tell me who is really part of the moocher class that corporate CEOs and 1%-ers keep talking about? Are they the people asking for basic healthcare or the people who have enough money to build moats and personal golf courses around their mansions? Another tip off sign of a moocher is that no matter how much they have, it’s not enough and they want more of your money.

Damn if these Republicans don’t always want stuff.

Tee-hee. I’m SO sick of hearing about this fiscal cliff nonsense, but ESPECIALLY from the likes of Carly Fiorina. If they try to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits, there will (finally) be riots in this country (which is why I don’t think anything is going to happen on that front, just “talk”). They need to dump the Bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000 (it’s at least a start) and GUT THE PERPETUAL WAR MACHINE and hey, presto, no more fiscal cliff… Obviously, if they cut back on the war toys, America would be swimming in money.

This morning an email arrived from the Senate’s sole openly socialist member—and I think, a great American—Bernie Sanders of Vermont:

At a time when the wealthiest people in our country are doing phenomenally well, we must eliminate the Bush tax cuts favoring the top 2 percent.

At a time when corporate profits are soaring, we must end the absurd tax policy that allows about one-quarter of large, profitable corporations to pay nothing in federal income taxes.

At a time when the federal treasury is losing over $100 billion annually because the wealthy and large corporations are stashing their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere, we must pass real tax reform that ends this outrage.

At a time when we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, we must cut defense spending.  There is also waste in other governmental agencies which must be eliminated.

This kinda sounds like a better plan than cutting pensions and healthcare benefits for older Americans.

And to Carly Fiorina, why don’t you have some dignity and fuck off. No one, but no one, wants to hear your opinions. NO ONE CARES what you think about the lives of ordinary working men and women and the direction American needs to go in. Go count your mountain of money away from the cameras, safe from the moochers in your gated mansion, stop embarrassing yourself and get off my tee-vee.
 

 
Thank you Steven Otero!

 
New York’s Jonathan Chait has written persuasively on several occasions in the past year about the rather obvious fear and desperation—but not, paranoia, a distinction I think he too kindly makes, but no matter—of Republicans and the importance to the conservative right to win big in 2012, for the reason that it might be their very last chance to win nationally before rapidly changing racial demographics in the American electorate make that all but impossible.

The Republican Party is way, way more fucked than they dared suspect. New findings from Pew Research Survey’s close analysis of the youth vote in the 2012 elections strongly suggests the GOP’s worst nightmare: The rise of an increasingly liberal young electorate that cuts across racial boundaries. They’re even losing the younger white people!

Chait writes:

Among the 2012 electorate, more voters identified themselves as conservative (35 percent) than liberal (25 percent), and more said the government is already doing too much that should be left to the private sector (51 percent) than asserted that the government ought to be doing more to solve problems (44 percent). But this is not the case with younger voters. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, voters under 30 say the government should do more to solve problems. More remarkably, 33 percent of voters under 30 identified themselves as liberal, as against 26 percent who called themselves conservative.

What all this suggests is that we may soon see a political landscape that will appear from the perspective of today and virtually all of American history as unrecognizably liberal. Democrats today must amass huge majorities of moderate voters in order to overcome conservatives’ numerical advantage over liberals. They must carefully wrap any proposal for activist government within the strictures of limited government, which is why Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over, and Obama has promised not to raise taxes for 99 percent of Americans. It’s entirely possible that, by the time today’s twentysomethings have reached middle age, these sorts of limits will cease to apply.

Obviously, such a future hinges on the generational patterns of the last two election cycles persisting. But, as another Pew survey showed, generational patterns to tend to be sticky. It’s not the case that voters start out liberal and move rightward. Americans form a voting pattern early in their life and tend to hold to it. That isn’t to say something couldn’t shake these voters loose from their attachment to the liberal worldview. Republicans fervently (and plausibly) hoped the Great Recession would be that thing; having voted for Obama and borne the brunt of mass unemployment, once-idealistic voters would stare at the faded Obama posters on their wall and accept the Republican analysis that failed Big Government policies have brought about their misery.

But young voters haven’t drawn this conclusion — or not many of them have, at any rate. So either something else is going to have to happen to disrupt the liberalism of the rising youth cohort, or else the Republican Party itself will have to change in ways far more dramatic than any of its leading lights seem prepared to contemplate.

I personally don’t expect to see much of a reversal of fortune for Republicans. They’re a party of silly old men, “morans,” racists, idiots, jingoists and religious fanatics and to many people, this is ALL that their shit-for-brains “semiotic” stands for. How do you go about rebranding the very gestalt of American political stupidity to make it more attractive to young, liberally inclined voters?

I don’t think you can do this. How would that even work?

And which one of these mentally deficient special interest bozo groups that constitute the modern day Republican party will be the first to embrace abortion rights, universal healthcare, gay marriage, Blacks and Latinos, living wages, equal pay for women and the separation of church and state?

It would be like turning on Fox News and all of a sudden Sean Hannity had grown a fucking brain or that Bill O’Reilly woke up wondering if maybe—just maybe, I said—he’s been wrong all of these years? About almost everything?

That ain’t gonna happen…

I’ll leave you with this tasty morsel of Republican idiocy: Rick Santorum is back and he’s got a new cause: Opposing the disabled.

I’m sure this will be a winning issue for Santorum and the GOP moving forward. If at first you don’t succeed, um… pick on the cripples, I guess.

That’s moral leadership, Republican style!
 

 

 
Irony of ironies or just a cosmic coincidence?

Mitt Romney’s share of the popular vote in the 2012 presidential race, when all is said and done, will probably be recorded as 47 percent. Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman has noted that President Obama has actually expanded his portion of the popular vote to 50.8 percent, while Romney has fallen to 47.49 percent, which accounting for rounding down puts his percentage at the magic number of government dependent moochers that he himself estimated, at a secretly taped bigwig fundraiser, would never vote for him.

Via The Washington Post:

By virtue of rounding, Romney’s share of the popular vote will be recorded here and elsewhere as 47 percent, so long as it doesn’t rise above 47.5 percent again.

That seems unlikely. Wasserman projects that Romney’s vote share will actually head more toward 47 percent flat — 47.1 percent or 47.2 percent — because many of the outstanding ballots in the presidential race come from California and New York, which both voted for Obama by a large margin.

And Obama’s popular vote margin, in the end, is likely to be 51 percent to 47 percent.

In actual fact, Obama’s margin of victory is bigger than the elections margins seen by George W. Bush (both the 2000 and 2004 elections), Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Richard Nixon when he ran against Hubert Humphrey in 1968. All had smaller electoral margins than Obama.

Imagine if the Democrats had run a white guy at the top of the ticket in 2012 and some of the “racist” voters—who knows what percentage they represent—didn’t automatically give Romney their support? What would the GOP vs. Democrat tally been in that theoretical instance?

Not that it matters much, anymore, really: The Republicans are gonna be so fucked in 2016, even in the red states, by the rising percentage of Latino voters—just a 1% demographic change in that direction is HUGE in US electoral terms—and well, it’s going to happen. There is nothing they can do about it.

And it’s going to be fun to watch.

 
The not so magical powers anti-tax activist Grover Norquist wields—or at least did wield—over the Republican Party gets satirized by painter Michael D’Antuono who depicted Norquist as a Wizard of Oz-like charlatan:

“He is the lobbyist whose Svengali-like control over the GOP has forbidden them to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich, creating unprecedented gridlock and putting them in a very ‘uncompromising position’ negotiating the fiscal cliff.”

Why do (did?) the Republicans all fear crossing this asshole, anyway? He’s not even rich!

If you don’t know who this guy is, watch this infuriating 60 Minutes story about Norquist and his stranglehold on the GOP from last year.
 

 
Via Buzzfeed

 
What a great title, right?

Just in time for the Aztec calendar to run out (and let’s not forget Christmas, of course) comes Elvis Died For Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine, a collection of Mick Farren’s primal ‘up against the wall, motherfucker’ style of rock and roll polemics. One man’s literary life spent railing against the machine lives between these covers. The hidden history of the twentieth century and beyond. He was there and you weren’t. Listen up, children!

Within these pages you’ll meet the likes of Frank Zappa, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry and Gore Vidal, and steam open correspondence between the author and Pete Townshend. And, much more importantly, you’re about to go one-on-one with a world-class raconteur… If this kind of mess-around seems like your cup of meat, then prepare your relaxant of choice, kick back and dig in. The greasy ’oodlums are at your door.”

—Charles Shaar Murray (from his foreword)

About the Author:
Mick Farren was born on a wet night at the end of World War II. During his long, occasionally hallucinatory, and sometimes hell-raising career, he has published twenty-two novels (including The DNA Cowboys Trilogy). He has also published more than a dozen non-fiction works on topics that range from music to drugs to conspiracy theory (including Give The Anarchist A Cigarette). An unreconstructed rock & roller, he continues to function as a recording artist and songwriter. He has also made detours into anarcho-agitprop like editing the underground newspaper IT, and defending both his liberty and the comic book Nasty Tales through a protracted obscenity trail at the Old Bailey.

He was part of what is now called (by some) the NME golden age, during which time he helped explain punk to people who still thought Rick Wakeman had merit. As a lyricist, Mick’s words have been sung by Metallica, Motorhead, Hawkwind, Brother Wayne Kramer, the Royal Crown Revue, and the Pink Fairies.

Publisher Headpress are offering a very limited stamped, numbered and signed deluxe edition hardback of Elvis Died For Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine, only available from their website, and for the special price of £28 until December 3. There’s also an unsigned hardback edition selling £20, but I sez get yours autographed. Why regret not getting it signed?

And just in case you were wondering, here is a list of the drugs found in Elvis’‘s body when he died, included in the book as a piece of found poetry:

Codeine—at a concentration ten times higher than the toxic level

Morphine—possible metabolite of codeine

Methaqualone—Quaalude, above toxic level

Diazepam—Valium

Diazepam metabolite

Ethinamate—Valmid

Ethchlorvynol—Placidyl

Amobarbital—Amytal

Pentobarbital—Nembutal

Pentobarbital—Carbrital

Meperidine—Demerol

Phenyltoloxamine—Sinutab (a decongestant)

Below, Mick Farren talks about the underground press in London with John Peel in 1967.
 

What could possibly go wrong?

Honestly, I kind of missed the Andrew W.K. boat, but since high school I have always been around a certain subset of ultra-nice party dudes who have followed his career religiously. The guy is seriously enthusiastic and genuinely positive, so his appointment as Cultural Ambassador to politically contentious Bahrain is less of a non sequitur than it might seem. From his website:

This is a tremendous invitation. I’m very thankful to the Department of State for giving me the opportunity to visit a place I’ve never been before. And I feel very privileged and humbled by the chance to represent the United States of America and show the good people of Bahrain the power of positive partying. I can hardly wait for this adventure!

While I doubt W.K. can offer much counsel or insight into the political uprising that’s been underway in Bahrain since early 2011, a guy that humble and engaged with people probably couldn’t hurt. He has pledged to “promote partying and world peace,” and who could argue with that?
 

 
This short film on Member’s Only Gentlemen’s Clubs and London Club Life from 1965, may look dated and even slightly quaint, capturing a world of seedy Anthony Powell characters in run-down, thread-bare, drafty rooms, but in very real terms, little has changed.

The Old Boy’s Network of privilege and power is still very much alive, and the British Establishment is probably now stronger than it has been in decades. Look at the celebrations for the Queen’s Jubilee, or the sofa jingoism of the Olympics, or this week with the failure of the Church of England to vote in favor of Women Bishops, and now today, the appointment of Lord Tony Hall as the new Director General of the BBC.

Hall was chosen by Lord Christopher Patten, whose previous choice for DG had been the hapless “incurious” George Entwistle, the man who was forced to resign after 54 days in office. Now Patten has appointed Hall - without an interview - as the new DG.

Hall is a successful ex-BBC man, who currently runs the Royal Opera House. He may be a decent and honorable man, he may kiss dogs and pat babies, and help old age pensioners across the street, but he is a BBC man, steeped in the arcane and out-dated traditions of a Corporation that is out-of-touch with the reality of life in Britain. His appointment is rather like voting for a Mitt Romney rather than a Barack Obama, it’s a wishful return to an illusory past, rather than moving forward into the present century. Even some of the effusive praise on twitter harks back to an older time - this from broadcaster David Dimbleby:

‘A brilliant choice. It feels like being in the Royal Navy when they were told, “Winston is back!”’

It’s strange that a previous era of strife, hardship, bigotry and division should be seen as commendable. Earlier this year, the up-market Daily Telegraph (of all broadsheets) reported on the analysis of “the make-up of the Lords found that 45 per cent of peers also had a London club such as the Garrick Club, Carlton Club or White’s.”

The [analysis], published in the journal Sociology, also showed the enduring power of Eton and Oxbridge, with around one in 10 of all members of the Lords educated at the Berkshire school whose past pupils also include David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

Dr Matthew Bond, a sociologist at London South Bank University, who conducted the study, said that it showed that, despite reforms, the Lords continued to be dominated by those with “vested interests in traditional status structures”.

He said it showed that: “The persistent hold of the British establishment on the political imagination is not without reason.”
...

Those who went to school at Eton showed a particular propensity to join such clubs, the study found, while they were also popular among this with a background in the military, civil service and the church.

“These groups – hereditaries, males, Old Etonians, Tories and, to a lesser extent, business people – have vested interests in traditional status structures,” said Dr Bond.

“In their social characteristics they also closely mirror popular conceptions of an establishment which have featured in popular discussions of the British power structure since the 50s.

“If they do not have a monopoly over elite positions, they at least have a formidable presence.”

This “formidable presence” is what links Tony Blair’s working-class father’s move from Glaswegian Communism to middle-England Toryism, with Eton-educated David Cameron belief that elitism in education will mend Britain’s so-called “broken society.” This “formidable presence” isn’t tradition - it is the maintenance of an out-dated, misogynistic, divisive and malfunctioning Establishment.

Members Only is a fine snap shot of club life in the 1960s, which moves from gentlemen’s clubs to casinos and then onto the bohemian hang outs, such as the Colony Room (look out for the legendary Muriel Belcher) and jazz clubs, where a young Annie Ross performs.
 

 
When the artist Sig Waller was a child, she experienced intense fever hallucinations. It possibly explains something about her paintings, which are beautiful, brightly colored, fluid, dreamlike, visions of reality. I find her work addictive, and am drawn back, time and again to certain paintings - paintings which seem as if she has made real some fragment of my dreams.

Waller’s first major exhibition was in 1996, and since then she has exhibited her paintings across the world. Her work is fabulous, intense, politicized yet often darkly amusing. There is a great intelligence at work here, which can be seen in such varied series as: Dreamlands (1999-2001) a series of channel-hopping images taken form television; Hotel Romantica (2002), sensuous paintings based on a pack of nude playing cards, which was stowed away on the Apollo 12 spacecraft during its November 1969 voyage to the moon; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2011) a series of paintings examining different forms of protest; which ties in with Burning Desire (2102) a series of paintings based on mobile ‘phone photographs of the Tottenham riots in 2011.

Sig (originally “S.I.G.” or “Spectrum is Green” from Captain Scarlett and the Mysterions) Waller divides her time between Brighton and Berlin, and is about to start an artist’s residency in Italy. I contacted Sig to find out more about her life, her inspiration and her childhood.

Sig Waller: ‘I grew up mainly on the Gower Peninsula near Swansea, Wales. My parents were foreign intellectuals - my father an American historian who dressed like a tramp and my mother an obsessively Francophile, German psychologist. Our house had no TV or telephone; pop music was banned, as were cinema visits. The only contact my sister and I had with popular culture was via comic books and story cassettes sent from Germany. We spent a lot of time at our grandparent’s house in the Saarland and I grew up bi-lingual with my mother’s French-influenced regional dialect as my first language.

‘My mother was horrified by life in South Wales and tried to create her own “Little Germany” within the walls of our house. This resulted in me reading Gothic tales in old German script dressed in Bavarian costume while my classmates wore t-shirts and watched Top of the Pops.

‘When I was 8 there was a period when I experienced some quite intense fever hallucinations. At the same time, I had Hauff’s dark tales swirling around in my head and this came to form the root of my fascination with the macabre and the grotesque. Stories such as “The Tale of the Hacked-off Hand” or “The Tale of the Ghost Ship” are still with me today.

‘One of my most formative childhood experiences was that of alienation. If a kid is different, the other kids will point and I got used to being pointed at. Later things changed and my parents got hip, dragging us to experimental theater performances and art movies. I remember the day I told them I wanted a record and their dumbfounded reaction. Prior to this, I’d been secretly listening to music on a small transistor radio in bed. Surprisingly, my mother entered into the spirit of things and started buying Brian Eno records and taking us to the ICA. At around this time I began to dye my hair and decided that it was okay to be different.

‘When I was little I wanted to be a clown or an artist. I loved Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and was fascinated by the idea of the circus but as I was also quiet and shy I must have decided that art was the better option. I spent hours studying reproductions of paintings and imagining my future life as an artist. I didn’t think I was very good at drawing but held onto my fantasy and at around age 13 something strange happened and suddenly I could draw. I then spent most of my adolescence listening to obscure music, drawing and nurturing my teenage melancholia.

‘My first truly artistic (and coincidentally also comic) act took place in the baby cot, where I – left unattended – picked up one of my baby-poos and using it as a colouring stick, expressively daubed at the bars of my confinement. This event has been recounted to me on many occasions, usually in the presence of a new boyfriend, so it must be true.

Paul Gallagher: Tell me about Art College?

Sig Waller: ‘I was barely 18 when I moved to London to study Art and Art History at Goldsmiths. Back then the art college was at the Millard building in Camberwell and that place had an incredible atmosphere. I remember one afternoon, a guy came into the bar with a pistol and yelled, ‘Everybody get their hands up,’ and everyone just ignored him, it was that kind of place. People were generally too busy polishing their egos to notice the guy with the gun.

‘I started going to warehouse and squat parties and halfway through my first year at college I began living in squats. I continued with this life for the next 7 years and this gave rise to my interest in protest and rebellion.

‘While at college I began to paint with oils and use elements of my clothing in my work. I would walk around with slogans pinned to my back and these would eventually make their way into my paintings. One of my jackets became part of a painting too – I wore some very strange outfits; I guess it was a kind of performance I was engaged in, though it was more organic than contrived.

‘After college, I stopped painting and started making hats and other fluffy rubbish and selling these through markets and designer shops. I also did a Photo / Video foundation course, worked on music videos and animation and wrote a few film scripts.’

Paul Gallagher: From college, you moved to berlin, why and what happened?

Sig Waller: ‘I’d been fascinated by Berlin for years, its new wave and industrial music scene excited me and so many things seemed to be happening there. I first went to Berlin in 1989, just after The Wall came down and was there over the New Year, which was an incredibly intense experience. In 1995 my friend Volker Sieben invited me to live in his run down studio complex in Brunnenstrasse in Berlin-Mitte, so I packed my bags and drove there with a car full of fake fur, which I was going to turn into stuff to sell.

‘In 1996, I moved into a place on Reinhardstrasse, which was a stone’s throw away from the Reichstag. A new project space called C4 opened round the corner and in early 1998 I curated Blut & Blumen (Blood and Flowers) there. This marked a turning point for me as I began to revisit my childhood dream of being an artist. Some months later, I had a solo show at the Tacheles and painted my first oil paintings in 10 years.

‘In late 1998 I moved back to Brunnenstrasse, which is where I painted my extensive Dreamlands TV-zapping series which I showed as part of the Z2000 Festival in Berlin and also in New York in 2001. The flat on Brunnenstrasse was documented in a book called Berlin Interiors: East meets West.’

Paul Gallagher: What inspires you?

Sig Waller: ‘Dark things inspire me. And things that make me laugh. I find the combination of dark and funny particularly inspirational but I am also interested in art history and cultural theory; junk and found materials; chance encounters; future studies and science fiction; fairy tales, horror and the paranormal; expressionist cinema, cult movies and television; and obviously books and the internet are an endless source of inspiration, as are conversations with artists and friends…

‘Some of my work may appear to be quite militant, this is because I find a lot of political issues quite infuriating, so in a way my work is also a form of personal anger management and these more radical pieces are an expression of some of that rage.

‘Right now I’m feeling inspired by needle-crafting grandmothers everywhere, by all the people who spend hours making stuff in their living rooms, by my son’s infallible sense of humor, by the encouragement of others and by the many great and wonderful artists I’ve stumbled across over the years whose time has yet to come.

‘I’m also still a fan of Kippenberger, his work resonates to this day and a lot of the art I’ve seen in the past 20 years is simply imitation Kippenberger.

Out of the exhibitions I’ve visited recently, I found the Deller show at the Hayward the most engaging. Art can be political, but on some level it should also be enjoyable.
 

 
More from Sig Waller’s life and art, after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Dude’s really letting himself go. Look at that hair… the rumpled shirt… those wrinkled trousers… and he’s pumping HIS OWN GAS?

What’s that all about? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think ole Mitt had himself—gasp!—a Starbucks… maybe even two of them!

Trentas, from the look of things…

Via Redditor mkb95

 
In Rick Perlstein’s excellent article The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism, the author of the classic Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America discusses the odd world of mail order conservative fundraisers who prey on gullible older people, parting them from their pensions by agitating them with nonsense.

This revealing text of a 1970s conservative fundraising pitch originated from Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich’s “Free Congress Research and Education Foundation”:

Dear Friend,

Do you believe that children should have the right to sue their parents for being “forced” to
attend church?

Should children be eligible for minimum wage if they are being asked to do household
chores?

Do you believe that children should have the right to choose their own family?

As incredible as they might sound, these are just a few of the new “children’s rights laws” that could become a reality under a new United Nations program if fully implemented by the Carter administration.

If radical anti-family forces have their way, this UN sponsored program is likely to become an all-out assault on our traditional family structure.

Perlstein’s analysis of this sort of goofy vintage mail order entreaty is, uh, right on the money, so to speak…

Following the standard scare-mongering playbook of the fundraising Right, Weyrich launched his appeal with some horrifying eventuality that sounded both entirely specific and hair-raisingly imminent (“all-out assault on our traditional family structure”—or, in the case of a 1976 pitch signed by Senator Jesse Helms, taxpayer-supported “grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior”; or, to take one from not too long ago, the white-slavery style claim that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood”).

Closer inspection reveals the looming horror to be built on a non-falsifiable foundation (“could become”; “is likely to become”). This conditional prospect, which might prove discouraging to a skeptically minded mark, is all the more useful to reach those inclined to divide the moral universe in two—between the realm of the wicked, populated by secretive, conspiratorial elites, and the realm of the normal, orderly, safe, and sane.

Weyrich’s letter concludes by proposing an entirely specific, real-world remedy: slaying the wicked can easily be hastened for the low, low price of a $5, $10, or $25 contribution from you, the humble citizen-warrior.

These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.

OUCH. He nailed it. And this sort of practice continues thirty years later, not that the come-on message has become any more intellectually sophisticated, because it hasn’t…

From Fox News, to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck on the radio, not to mention Internet conspiracy theorists like Breitbart.com and the lowest of the low, WorldNetDaily, the reichwing mediasphere is all about keeping people ill-informed, stupid and fearful.

Having a large audience who doesn’t know shit from shinola is a big plus when you’re flogging exorbitantly over-priced gold coins, half-priced Ann Coulter books and prepackaged food rations that require no refrigeration and remain edible for up to four decades in your nuclear bomb shelter.

Like Rick Perlstein, I subscribed to a number of far-right mailing lists myself when the Tea party movement first exploded onto the scene (Obviously these emails provide great fodder for a blog like this one to poke fun at). The best ultra-conservative daily emails, by far, I think, come from WND, mainly because editorially speaking, it’s probably the dumbest and most comically paranoiac of all the major reichwing blogs—and yet, conversely, WND is the best organized from a business and e-commerce standpoint.

There’s a comically formulaic structure to the WND emails—I get about a dozen per day—they’re as strict and singsong as limericks, usually posing the subject line’s topic in the form of a burning question like “Guess which one of Obama’s Commie BFFs will be named Secretary of Assassinating Conservatives? Michael Savage spills the beans!” or some bullshit like that. (As I’ve been typing this, a new one has come in: “HOW OBAMA CAN BE STOPPED IN ELECTORAL COLLEGE Exclusive: Judson Phillips offers constitutional means to put Romney in office Jan. 21”)

And then there are some links to a new “Bible Codes” book revealing the identity of the Antichrist (who can this mysterious “BO” character be???), an “explosive” DVD expose about Barack Obama being a homosexual crackhead or pricey dietary supplements that you can take and then throw away your insulin shots forever!

The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism (The Baffler)