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Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" -- "I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!" |
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Thursday, April 16, 2009Bay Area 'baggingEveryone thinks the San Francisco Bay Area is 100-percent liberal, but there were tea party rallies all over the place yesterday, including San Francisco and San Mateo, each of which had about 250 people. See? We're just as stupid and confused as the rest of y'all. Don't have anything to say on the spectacle of Teabagging Day that hasn't been said. But I do find it disturbing how quickly a lot of right-wingers have lost their minds now that the Republican Party has lost control of the White House. Barack Obama has been president for three months, and already we have citizens and TV commentators who don't know what fascism is calling him a fascist, more people than ever who don't know what socialism is calling him a socialist, Glenn Beck pretending to pour gasoline on a guest and light him on fire while addressing the president, a rise in right-wing extremism, confused white people starting militias and the governor of Texas threatening to secede. WTF? Say what you will, but liberals were pretty well-behaved during the Bush presidency, at least until the Iraq War, when the name-calling began. Despite the controversy surrounding his election, Bush got a pass for the most part prior to 9/11, at which point the whole country rallied around him. It was only after people began to suspect he was exploiting 9/11 for political purposes and going to war with the wrong country that things turned sour. As Matt Taibbi notes, it's hard to fathom that the source of the tea party protestors' anger is not the Wall Street bailout or the AIG bonus mess. The elites who ruined the economy are getting trillions of dollars without any real strings attached? That's actually infuriating. Instead, the teabaggers' rancor seems to be directed, if there is any coherent focus at all, at Obama's economic stimulus plan, which their low-wattage brains interpret not as an uncontroversial method for injecting demand into the economy but rather as the beginning of some vast socialist experiment. Never mind the fact that the massive economic intervention currently underway began under President Bush, with TARP and the untold billions the Fed has lent out. (Or the fact that Obama, as Taibbi points out, has bent over backwards to avoid natonalization or meaningful reform of the Wall Street culture.) And of course they're concerned about being taxed too much, even though Obama has lowered taxes for Americans making less than $250,000. .: posted by hornswaggler 8:37 AM| |
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