Monday, December 3, 2007

Sunday Surrealism

Oh good grief - take one Sunday to venture forth and hit multiple grocery stores and markets, and the entire world tilts on it's axis while you're out!

A new Des Moines Register poll upset the apple cart for both the Democrats and the Republicans. For the first time, Barack Obama has inched ahead in what is still a statistical dead heat. But the real surprise was on the Republican side, where Huckabee is firmly in the lead at 29% - up from 12% in October.

KKKarl Rove continued his stunning rewrite of history on Sunday. You might recall that the Charlie Rose viewing audience last week watched as his nose visibly grew while he said with a straight face that the administration didn't want the AUMF vote to happen when it did, right before the 2002 midterms. He repeated the lies yesterday, with added fabricated detail! Now his delusions have manifested themselves in a false construct of reality that makes that meanie Daschle the warmonger, not the pure goodness that is George aWol Bush! Daschle stopped laughing long enough on Monday to push back on the Bill Press Show. Worth noting: Even loyal Bushies Fleischer and Card threw his moldering carcass under the bus.

And isn't it time that someone took Senator McCain's hand and led him off the stage, settled him comfortably into a chair and fetched him a nice bowl of pudding? McCain is giving Rove a run for his money in the revisionist history area. For a couple of weeks now he has been peddling the line that the political reconciliation didn't happen because "there are no Thomas Jeffersons in Iraq." In some versions, he asserts that Saddam Hussein killed them all. (No, Senator - reconciliation didn't happen because Iraq is a lawless state with deep ethnic divisions and hatreds, and cataclysmic change in that nation was quite literally akin to turning a bull loose in a china shop.)

Then there is a huge financial mess unfolding in Florida, and the taxpayers may end up adding a new verb to the lexicon: Jebbed.

But the most surreal story of all was the one about big business pushing their agenda on the feckless failure, trying to get all manner of goodies bestowed upon them, their shareholders and their coffers - they want reforms to such frivolous and popular things as the Family and Medical Leave Act which protects workers from termination while they are treated for illnesses, and mandates that employees be given time off when a family grows via birth or adoption. In my career, I was a shift supervisor in healthcare and clinical lab settings. I have both accommodated and used FMLA, and on balance, it's a good law. Neither I nor my crew abused it. It does not need to be "fixed." CAFO's (concentrated animal feeding operations) are looking for exemptions for the waste generated by these huge factory farms.

What makes self-serving push so surreal is that for months, Democrats have been the primary benefactors of the campaign largess of big business.

They don't even try to cover up the craven any more, do they? But...doesn't plutocracy much spell the end for all once-great civilizations?

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