“Red State” confessions of a mangling sycophant
Where did Carter’s White House solar panels go?
Readers are probably familiar with the old story about how former President Carter installed solar panels on the White House and how later President Reagan had them pulled down. I always wondered what happened to the old panels, especially after reading that Bush and Cheney both have been busy putting up “energy independent” solar panels all over their private ranches and townhouses in lavish private preparation for life after the oil crash.
I know now where those solar panels went and just how far our Great Leaders are preparing for the inevitable warm – up to a scorched Earth, courtesy one of my most favorite newsletter writers, Alexander Cockburn.
We may be certain of one thing that Cockburn, and all those at CounterPunch will be writing the muck up on our leaders’ many hypocrisies even as the scorched walkabout planet turns upon the hominids.
Then, we may be assured, among the sweating non – air conditioned millions surviving in the much isolated and world hated United States the newsletter will still bring smiles and laughter to the soiled toilers in the fields. Read below and hold that thought in your head of your wealthy relatives all scrambling to make their mansions “energy independent” according to the Busheviks media vaunted Great Leap Forward to another 5 Year Plan for America:
“Bush's substantive policy proposals were a forlorn parade of ghosts: ‘energy independence’, a souvenir of the Carter era of the 1970s, when Carter made a point of wearing a sweater and the White House first ran, at least in part, on solar power. Ronald Reagan made it his first order of business, after taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1981, to tear the solar panels down and ship them off to Unity College in Maine, where they're apparently still working, heating the cafeteria.
Bush has a solar set-up at his place in Crawford, and in his first term, without much fanfare, the National Park Service supervised the installation of a grid of 167 solar panels on the roof of a maintenance shed to deliver electricity to the White House landscape lighting and watering systems. Another solar installation has been helping to provide hot water. A third has been heating the water in the presidential pool.
Three or four years ago, in Santa Monica, I met the man who installed that solar system atop the Carter White House, though I forget his name. He was still angry. ‘It was Reagan's first act,’ he said, gnashing his teeth.”
Mr. Cockburn and his muckraking cohorts have provided me and hundreds of thousands of other readers worldwide; hours and hours of joyful political voyeurism into the life – styles and nefarious political machinations of the high and mighty.
Mucking the stables, an old story of an honorable profession.
We owe him and his staff, even more so than those at The Nation who tend to pooh – pooh vagrant writers for their stable of old reliable cultural thoroughbreds, what support that can be mustered with a subscription.
Let me take the reader back to the late eighties and early nineties of the last century. A never, ever land far from today’s Republican hub – bub.
Return with me back to a time when many a Kansan were still blinking at Reagan’s Iran – contra, when Central American nuns and priests were being massacred along with tens of thousands of peasant commie lovers by Ft. Leavenworth trained officers, before the festering wound of the Clinton’s sexual gossip hooked every voyeuristic “Red State” Podunk in the country.
Before Clinton was impeached for lying about a blowjob and a cigar from an ambitious tape – recording prick teaser.
Before the Holier – than – Thou hypocrites started a prayer circle in every bureaucratic office of the government and every main$tream network news office .
Before cable network news bombed the post 911 minds of every Podunk in the country into a scared herd of ass sucking Busheviks for Big Business, Big Energy and Big Agriculture.
Before the Podunks were let loose to run Iraq’s prisons then convicted and thrown into prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Ks. a lonely hillbilly girl soldier, with infant, was reported on by Matt Tiabbi as:
“Watching Lynndie's defense team play the baby card in her sentencing hearing was like listening to a zoologist explain why Koko the gorilla can't be separated from her pet kitten. Even a crippled life-form such as this, they seemed to be saying, can experience strong maternal emotions. And in their very last appeal they swung for the fences, asking Lynndie to explain for the benefit of the jury a certain picture of little Carter.‘Why'd you pose him in front of the American flag?’ Krul asked, holding up the photo and smiling in the jury's direction.
Lynndie looked at her lap. ‘I guess,’ she whispered, ‘I'm still patriotic, ma'am.’ Then she swallowed and went back to I Am Sam land, drooping her eyes and fiddling with an imaginary something or other in her lap.
What bullshit, I thought. This girl goes off to fight a war but instead bangs some creep who she sees torturing people by the dozen every night; she's stupid enough to get her picture taken in the act of humiliating a whole race of people, inspiring an entire generation of martyrs for Allah and causing an international scandal -- and now we're supposed to go easy on her because she wraps her demon love child in an American flag?”
The above was just too funny to leave out.
I know lots of fellow Podunks who would have carried out the same stupid orders of the commanders and never protested one bit about it.
Republicans, as conservatives, did have some intelligence before the gatekeepers allowed the Jesus howlers to take over their political discourse. Does anyone remember those times, before the nation crapped in their collective pants after 911 and frightened themselves into electing paranoid, devious business executives to power?
Wave that Bible in the air, claim to have a direct telephone line to God and run for office. Do they remember anything before the last “Reality” television show?
When Kansans kept religion at the pulpit and sex in the bedrooms, all thought they were good “cloth coated country club” Republicans with a little dog who tried to limit themselves to 2.2 kids at home.
I remember.
The original purchase of my subscription to CounterPunch came after I noted a small falling out Cockburn had with members of the bourgeois elite’s Wall Street Journal.
Immediately afterwards, within months really, I noted (and duly subscribed upon Alexander’s printed recommendation) to his weekly installments in the famous Anderson Valley Advertiser, Boonville, California.
I must confess a subscription history with both periodicals that has been less than honorable.
Having had to learn in true “Red State” fashion to do everything in war “on the cheap” I subscribed to all above and managed a veritable periodical library in my newspaper office for several years.
I also sent along a free subscription to Alexander of my newspaper to The Nation’s New York headquarters and never received a reply.
Being one of the most ardent readers in Kansas of “the best political newsletter” I remember quite clearly each lapse in my subscription to the pricey pages mailed to me every other week more than a decade ago.
And fretted listening to my close friends and neighbors whining of my subscription costs which I always reminded them of while reading my copies from the mail.
My newspaper offices to Frankfort’s Alternative Index always had copies of Cockburn’s writings laying around for local farmers and friends to scan while typesetting their adverts. The friendly crusty farts in bib overalls used to howl in outrage at Cockburn’s peek – a – boos into their leaders political closets.
The newspaper and press was failing when I bought it and it failed miserably through the three years I dragged it’s aged subscribers through; organic farming, Gulf War I, local big newspaper bias, countercultural earthquakes and tales of hemp prohibition.
How I learned about Body Armor in Kansas
I subscribed for several years until the Christian Taliban in Missouri and Kansas forced me with my wife underground as she performed abortions for thousands of women in “Red State” Kansas. We moved from shack to shack for over nine years, as American religious fanatics firebombed and murdered doctors, nurses and patients across the country; and the police at federal and local level sat on each other’s hands.
Christian vandals at Kansas State University where my wife worked then as a doctor at the campus medical clinic, painted graffiti and stickers in the bathrooms, phoned anonymous bomb threats and generally cowed her campus medical colleagues into “persuading” her to resign.
I should have written Cockburn back then, instead I phoned Bruce Anderson who offered a place to stay in California, if we decided to quit banging our heads on the political wall of Kansas Know – Nothing and found a way to haul the 18,000 lb. printing press out there.
Instead I left the faltering small newspaper business, renewed my subscription to Cockburn’s newsletter, crawled into a rented moving van, and left the only profession I loved.
Dumb, Distracted & Delusional: cheeky Republicans needing body armor
While many fellow Podunks in the “Red States” chaffed during the “sensitive” time poor President Bush and First Lady Laura endured at Coretta Scott King’s funeral recently, I made note of how loudly my fellow Kansas Podunks protested the impoliteness of it all; the great rubbing of political shit in the Republicans’ faces from a southern Christian pulpit.
Chris Simcox, founder of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps was on Washington Journal on C-SPAN Thursday, February 09, 2006 and declared that “free health care” exists for illegal immigrants, and also that the southern border was being guarded by “law abiding” Christian citizens.
All those nut cases I encountered while guarding the Kansas abortion clinics appear to have either went off to kill and be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, or south to the porous border to stem the brown hordes flooding into the country.
Good riddance.
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