Or: How the battle was lost when they first began working on Health Insurance Reform instead of Healthcare Reform.

New and Improved!

"You kids aren't in there watching commercials, are you?"

"Uhh... yeah."

"What did your mother and I tell you about watching the commercials?"

"That if they need commercials to sell it, it isn't worth buying."

"That's right kids, they're either selling you a price that's too high, or a need that isn't necessary, or a superiority that is superfluous."

"Whatever, Dad."

I know I said television advertisements should never be watched... but watch this and tell me you don't clench up with concern, Jeff-Goldblum-in-Jurassic-Park-level concern, for any woman in your life walking around with something this powerful in her pants:

I'm going to devote 2009 to Cratchitism and laying siege to Waveland.

There's a Machiavellian Plot to Rule the World... In My Pants!
While Your Reluctant Bartender has a personal policy of stringent, non-partisan distrust of all Power Seekers, there is nonetheless bar to be tended. (Whatever that means.)

We could argue that it's a case of fighting fire with fire against the acidic sexism displayed by the candidate himself, described by Herr Doktor Blume in this space just the other day. But no, when we at I Like [image of pie], Spot speculate about the status of John McCain's private parts, we're just cravenly playing the same game that has been played since that one time in the garden of Eden, when God gave Adam the penis bigger biceps than Eve. It's a game whose rules were concisely recorded back in the early 15's by Nicolò Machiavelli when he contrasted "effeminate and cowardly" unfavorably with "bold and brave" in terms of qualities subjects attribute to their rulers.

In the chapter entitled "That One Should Avoid Being Despised And Hated" of Machiavelli's tome The Prince, we find this advice:

It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock...

Which our rulers today certainly take to heart, though not so much as a way to avoid being despised themselves. Rather, it seems they read the chapter heading as something more along the lines of "That One Should Ensure Their Opponent Cannot Avoid Being Despised And Hated." Which in practice is fantastic for Waveland in terms of entertainment value, though on the whole, tends to make a farce out of concepts like "consent of the governed," "will of the people," "representational democracy," ...

While I confess we may have allowed ourselves at I Like [image of pie], Spot! to be prodded into pumping the story, it wasn't here that the topic of John McCain's genitals first came up. It was on no less a forum than Meet the Press, where no less than Tom Brokaw, (though quoting a third party, on the topic of Senator McCain's solution for Social Security,) uttered the words, "This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation." Words which were rebutted by none other than Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman with the unequivocal rejoinder, "John remains all male. There's no question about that." Perhaps Brokaw's complicity is part of a Waveland conspiracy to somehow recapture the dynamic that so enthralled the country during the Democratic primaries: 'Obama is just black black black!' vs. 'She's a man, baby!'*

We at I Like [image of pie], Spot! are only a tiny cog in this big, sexist machine. We regret any confusion that may have resulted from our actions. In no way did we intend to imply that Presidential Candidate John McCain has had a sex change. --Montag.

BONUS MATERIAL:

Where else, we might ask, can we see our current rulers' misguided interpretations of Machiavelli's admonitions on 'effeminate-ness' in action?

...when a prince acquires a new state, which he adds as a province to his old one, then it is necessary to disarm the men of that state, except those who have been his adherents in acquiring it; and these again, with time and opportunity, should be rendered soft and effeminate; and matters should be managed in such a way that all the armed men in the state shall be your own soldiers who in your old state were living near you.

Look, it's the road map for success in Iraq!


*Oddly, 'She's a man, baby!' seems to turn Machiavelli on his head: perhaps "effeminate-ness" isn't the vice he thought it was, so much as the "icky-ness" when a Prince's gender doesn't precisely align with his or her anatomical dirty bits.

Machiavelli, Nicolò (Trans. W. K. Marriott) (1908). The prince. Retrieved August 7, 2008, from The Constitution Society Web site: http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm

1. Yes, in fact, this is a good end run around the gay marriage controversy.

2. No, there is too much ickiness for mere surgery to compensate.

3. Ewww. Wrinkly and gray, flipping and flopping together, waay too much visual! I can't think about it. What's on TV?

Note:After giving your choice, please comment amongst yourselves until I have something that I can cobble a quote out of.

That’s Bonita Granville in “Nancy Drew, Reporter!” arguing with the City Editor of the River Heights Gazette about getting an assignment that has no news content. Those were the days! Today, a lack of news content is exactly what the enterprising young reporter craves, and the job of the City Editor has become part of the duties of the Advertising Manager. But, you ask, how can I become a modern Nancy Drew and break into the lucrative Media-Industrial Complex?

Because we know that many loyal readers of “I Like [image of pie], Spot!” are interested in the ins and outs of professional journalism, today we proud to announce a Masterclass in How To Write For the Wall Street Journal In Three Easy Steps.

And we’ll even show you how we here at “I Like [image of pie], Spot!” use the principles outlined below to write our very own “2008 Election Horserace” story! So YOU will be part of the process!

Writing a story for the Wall Street Journal is easy! You can do it in three easy steps:

1. Come up with an idea!

Let’s take Amy Chozick’s excellent story “Too Fit to Be President? Facing an Overweight Electorate, Barack Obama Might Find Low Body Fat a Drawback” published on August 1, 2008 in the Wall Street Journal. We don’t know for sure where Amy got the idea (a good reporter never reveals her sources – see the sterling example of Judith Miller), but here’s a guess. Six months ago, Onion.com had this story:

As Obese Population Rises, More Candidates Courting The Fat Vote

In it, a “Fat Voter” identified as Daniel Keezer says: If they're interested in my vote, they'll eat the things that I like to eat.

It is just a short step from there to Amy’s slightly less pedestrian prose: Despite [Obama's] visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

And kids, there are literally dozens of other Onion.com stories waiting to be ripped off, including “The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?”

2. Troll for quotations by asking leading questions in anonymous online forums!

Sure, that’s not what “Nancy Drew, Reporter!” would have done! But she was writing before the advent of the internets! Take Amy Chozick, who appears to have posted the following message to a Yahoo!groups forum:

Obama too skinny to be president?
15-Jul-08 06:04 pm
Does anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his "no excess body fat"? Please let me know. Thanks!

Granted, the only responses she got were critical or sarcastic, but that didn’t stop her from culling a response from one of the latter, and ignoring its inherent idiocy: "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.


3. Call up McCain hacks, and give them free column inches.

Remember, this is the Wall Street Journal, the paper that predicted on July 7, 2003 that: "There is every reason to believe that the U.S. will eventually defeat this Baathist-terror counterattack, as completely as it did the Republican Guard in April. " Amy Chozick must have had to really try hard to google flunky Rick Davis' choice quotation: In a memo to reporters explaining the ad, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis wrote, "Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day."

Then you write the story, and you are done for the day. Relax! Have an ice cream sundae! Flip on the tube, and play “Where’s Waldo?” by searching for elusive coverage of the Iraq War. Think about that capital gains tax cut you’re gonna get! Heck, that’s what journalism is all about.

Just for fun, here’s a question we recently posted to the YahooGroups 2008:

To: 2008_Presidential_Elections@yahoogroups.com
From:
Date: Sun Aug 3, 2008 3:37 pm
Subject: Is McCain too 666y to be President?

Alexander's Man of the People (on page 12) reports that John McCain's family nickname is Johnny. Is anyone else worried about the fact that the Book of Revelation tells us to, "Calculate the number of the Beast, for the number is that of a man and his number is 666", and the number of letters in "Johnny Sidney McCain" is 666? Please let me know. Thanks!

An “I Like [image of pie], Spot!” exclusive is sure to follow!

Spoiler Alert!
If you want to enjoy the 2008 political season without knowing the ending,
DO NOT CLICK on the video below!


Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

h/t The Agonist: h/t Corrente: h/t The Onion

---bodiciah t rentlord III

by Cappy Rudyard

Ah was reading the good R. Ailes’s description of the possible third party candidate Mayor Bloomberg:

Yes, what this country needs in a time of recession is the leadership of an equity trader and head of a financial services software company, one who spent close to $75 million of his own money to become a friggin' mayor. Only Rich Uncle Pennybags can save us now. Perhaps he can sell us to the Tata Group.

Bloomberg is said to be worth some 20 billion dollars, and it put me in mind of the third party candidate a century ago. . .

Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, won 2.8 percent of the popular vote. Debs was a fireman turned union organizer and was one of the founders of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Then I thought of a couple of other sharp contrasts:

Who won the Michigan Republican primary?

Mitt Romney headed the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee, but is worth 200 million dollars because he founded a private equity investment firm that specialized in leveraged buyouts.

versus

William Howard Taft served as the Solicitor General of the United States, a federal judge, Governor-General of the Philippines, and Secretary of War before being nominated for President. He is remembered as a “a pioneer in international arbitration and staunch advocate of world peace.”

Who governs California?

Arnold Schwarzenegger, steroid-fueled bodybuilder and action movie actor, who is worth over some 800 million dollars.

versus

George Pardee, native Californian medical doctor and Mayor of Oakland. Promoted conservation and education, successfully rebuilt San Francisco after the earthquake and bucked the influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad on state politics.

I'm just an old sea salt, but it doesn't seem like things have gotten better in politics over the last century!

As power shifts from government to corporate hands, elections will increasingly become the domain of the vain rich and celebrities. Save us all, we're being sucked into Waveland.

Well, according to [The Nexus Institute: KITSCH AND THE CRISIS OF THE WEST (pdf!), Rob Riemen said,
"... you will understand that if I talk about kitsch, I’m not talking about bad taste or bad art because if kitsch would be bad taste and bad art, it would not be interesting. Kitsch is much more than this. Kitsch is a form of aesthetics but it relates to ethics, it relates to values as well. And the key thing is that it has the pretension to be real. And so it makes us believe: yes, this is truly beautiful, or this is absolutely important, and this is very valuable, and so on and so forth. But it is kitsch, that is to say, it’s fake, it’s not real or if it was, it’s a lie."

With that in mind please rate the above on the Likert scale of -3.14159 (don't know what that is!) to +3.14159 (definitely Kitsch!).

Cappy Rudyard

Rudyard Percival was born in Bombay, India, and soon moved to Bristol with his parents, brilliant botanical espionage specialists who worked together on an experimental British Navy submersible vessel. Despite rumors that they were victims of a freak accident that involved US Navy Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) transmissions and a tray of genetically altered darlingtonia californica (a.k.a. the “cobra plant,”) Rudyard was told that they both died of severe melanoma. He was then sent to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and was brought up by his uncle, “Cappy” Dick, the chewing gum magnate, and an older cousin, “Bazooka” Joseph Percival-Smythe. Spending his high school years in Shanghai smuggling Maotai across the Taiwan Straits, Cappy became involved in numerous illegal “free lobster” actions and tried his hand at saltwater seaweed farming. He returned to the United States in 2000, intent on the twin objectives of solving the riddle of his parents’ deaths, and stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

In 2008, I vow to:

1. Donate to Common Cause

Once the president is elected ’ere November -- barring a final double cross by the turncoat Cheney -- we will finally be upwind of George W. Bush. At that point, either the president will be a Republican (and I will be shipping out with Barrett’s Privateers) or a Democrat. But here’s the rub. It can get better, but no matter who is elected, it won’t get a lot better anytime soon. So I’m working hard to sink those Republican poltroons ‘til the election, and then working hard to sink the corrupt campaign system starting the next day.

That’s because both parties are dancing to the same mick-ficking piper. It has been years since anyone spoke seriously about reducing military spending or restricting the sales of weapons by US corporations, about equitable funding of public education, about a universal health care plan that doesn’t preserve the prerogatives of the insurance industry. Are these taboo subjects? They are if you want to raise the money needed to contest a national office. Unless there is serious campaign finance reform of the kind that Common Cause stands for, these positions will remain outside the mainstream and the ship of state will stay on its present course, listing toward a hellish corporatist dystopia.


2. Lay siege to Waveland

I have tried for years to find the coordinates to Waveland, the place whose corrupting influence wafts into our lives like so many unregulated plastic factories spewing out chromium-6. My sextant has failed me, but that doesn’t mean it is not possible to cut off their supplies, and starve the arrogant seadogs.

This is just a little place, but it is an alternative port, and by using it you avoid paying the tariffs that fund Waveland. We’re a free port – as is Stump Lane and the other links that Chaplain Montag maintains. So that’s a drop in the bucket. But how do we fill the bucket? Can we set up an alternate internet somehow, just in case the sinister forces that want to impose another wealth-based hierarchy here succeed? Any suggestions?


3. Start a “Miscegenation Now!” movement

Did I mention race? It disentangles itself from the azure, gleaming before my prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. I’m thinking of sailing from this country (where some 5% of marriages are “interracial”) to Brazil (where the population is closer to 50% classified as “mixed race”). For what reason do we preserve these racial borders, only to waste so much effort guarding them? Throw them open, methinks. And if we haven’t figured out how to do that in the century and half since the end of the civil war, it is time to obliterate them!

Mrs. Rudyard has helpfully started knitting a line of “My other child is a Quadroon” tees, which I hope to use to spearhead a guerrilla marketing campaign. Slogans, jingles, and other ideas welcome!


4. Avenge my parents

With the advent of global warming, carnivorous plants are poised to move north, like so many busily-photosynthesizing killer bees. In some lab somewhere, a team of crack military scientists is honing their knowledge of the effect of 76 Hertz waves on those vegetables of mass destruction, poised to unleash their genocidal potential on unwary citizens!

Sure, to them Drs. Fahey and Cunegunda Arroyo Percival were simply “collateral damage” in their quest to spread their ideology du jour across the hammy countenance of an unwitting porcine world. But they are on notice: revenge is a dish best enjoyed while watching Navy scientists unwittingly served to their own murderous plants! And Cappy Rudyard's just the old salt to season them.

What're your New Year’s resolutions?

Thank you Cappy Rudyard. And now, from a distant province of Waveland, this just in via The Orstrahyun.

Rupert Murdoch Admits He Does Tell His Newspapers Who To Back And What To Print

Okay, prepare yourselves, and try not to be too shocked by this revelation :

Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.

...

As regular readers would remember, Murdoch clearly admitted, back in June during his climate change awakening, that not only did he instruct his newspapers to push a certain reality that he favoured, but he could also muster the entire forces of his internet, newspaper, cable and TV empire to push his belief systems onto the world and change not only what they believed, but how they behaved.

Since Reverend Cavendish has taken a leading role in the Giuliani campaign’s “Keep us from losing the lunatic fringe to Mike Huckabee” triage committee, we’ve asked Cappy Rudyard to elaborate on the “Waveland Theory” that was outlined in the comments section two weeks ago.

IMF,S: Thank you for taking the time out to talk with us. How are you?
CR: My casks are bung up and bilge free, guvnor, thank ye.
IMF,S: Cappy Rudyard, can we call you Cappy?
CR: Me ma used to call me Cappy, but twere confusin’ since me pa was also called Cappy.
IMF,S: I see. Turning to the “Waveland Theory” that Old Tom floated last week, could you briefly explain it to our happy band of loyal readers?
CR: It’s like I was sayin’ to Old Tom: Ain’t ye noticed that the laws that govern the television are completely different from a what they used to be? “Black Friday” shopping news can be the lead story on Thursday, on Friday, and on the weekend? That people can talk about such dandy funk as if they be talking about news, and then take a moment about government or war and wink at you the whole time, as if they are saying: “Can you believe we both have to pretend to care about this?” It be a sea change.
IMF,S: If you only watch Fox or CNN. . .
CR: Aye, but it ain’t just them. Cast yer mind to a world in which bad economic news like the dollar fallin’ and the debt risin’ doesn’t effect what goes on in the news. Would such a thing have seemed possible eight years ago?
IMF,S: It does seem a little surreal. But you’re not suggesting a conspiracy?
CR: Nay, Young Master Imfs, I am nay suggestin’ anything of the kind. But even if I were suggestin’ a conspiracy, sometimes there are conspiracies. Ask yourself, can it really be a coincidence that you can re-arrange the letters in “Sandra Dee” to spell “Sad era end”? Instead, I am suggesting that the television is a porthole into another world entirely.
IMF,S: This is the world you call “Waveland”?
CR: Aye, ‘tis that.
IMF,S: So these are not real people we are seeing on our televisions?
CR: Ask yerself: Have you ever met a bugger as completely lacking in self-respect as Chris Matthews? Or a lobcock with as little self-knowledge as Tim Russert? And blowholes like the radio lickspittles – I don’t believe even Bob Louis Stevenson could have imagined a shuddering sphincter like Rush Limbaugh. There ain’t that many barkin’ an’ brayin’ tomfools available, and yet it seems as if they’re the only ones who wander into the studios!
IMF,S: So they are from another planet?
CR: They be from another dimension entirely. How else can ye explain their lack of empathy for human beings dying in far away lands? It’s because they have nought but scorn for our race.
IMF,S: But, why, Cappy? Why spend their time doing this?
CR: Ain’t you figured it out? They are eggin’ us on to destroy ourselves. Look how far they’ve got in such a short time. They are awaitin' our self-destruction, then to swoop into our dimension and eat our radioactive and rat-eaten carcasses like so many tasty hors d'oeuvres.
IMF,S: And are you worried that by telling others about this, you are putting yourself in danger?
CR: Young Master Imfs, I’m already between wind and water. There ain’t nothin’ the wavelanders can do to me that the cat o' nine tails ain’t already done.
IMF,S: Thank you for your time.
CR: I bid you good afternoon, Young Master Imfs! Now, I will go fishing with my friend Colin out on Black Lake.