David Brooks is proof that corporate funding makes you stupid

If anyone needs proof that corporate funding makes you stupid check out PBS on TV & NPR on the radio. What distinguishes them from the networks is pomposity & an aura of intellectualism while they tell you everything you don’t want to know about a news event.

NY Times reporter David Brooks is a regular commentator on PBS news. He has an impressive pedigree, an expensive education, & political grooming by William F. Buckley, Jr. That grooming done him in. With a far less pretentious vocabulary than Buckley & a curious inability to spit it out when he’s talking his viewers are subjected to twitchy commentary chock-full of banalities. Oh let’s be frank: idiocies.

He’s an ugly-assed Zionist who claims Jewish intellectualism & achievement is superior to others. A guy who twitches & mumbles while drooling inanities should give serious thought to making that claim. Tonight the moderator asked him about ISIL. It took him a moment to congeal a thought–if what he says qualifies as thought–but he produced this gem: “The Middle East has always been the Middle East. For 5,000 years it’s been a trouble zone. The Islamic State seems to be a new order, a new order of magnitude, a new sort of threat building on an ideological threat, a unique level of evil even by the standards of the Middle East.” If you put a melody & beat to that you could do the hootchy-kootchy. But don’t try to swing it past political activists who actually know something. If our man was ever subjected to a Q & A session he’d be eaten alive by even simple minds.

Betty Windsor wants to go into hiding and no one blames her

Windsors Feb 13 2015

It’s just so deplorable you can only get important news in the checkout line at the supermarket. Many frugal news junkies no longer pay for internet & just stand in line all day, with one product at a time, so they can find out what’s going on in the world from National Inquirer, Globe, & People magazine. One Texas supermarket has actually set up bathroom stalls & lounge chairs at checkout so people can do their duty, catch up on news, & shop in one fell swoop. What has this world come to!?

Today we find out Betty Windsor wants to give up the throne so she can go into hiding from the shame of her kids. We’re surprised Betty knows shame. It’s heartening so we don’t want to taunt, but what did she expect when she married flatulent Phil? Even in his youth he was no prize package. Now they can’t tell if he’s dead or alive without poking him with a stick & they’ve hired a special vassal to do that.

Betty’s had more than her share of misery with those kids. We won’t even go into Andrew who needs to go from drug rehab straight to a penitentiary. It’s Cammy that’s distressing. They say she’s so eaten alive with jealousy over KKKKaty that she turned to whiskey for comfort & they had to force her into an ashram in India to detox with meditation, medicated oils, & vegetarian foods. We wouldn’t wish an addiction problem on anyone but Cammy needs to give up a lot more than chateaubriand & whiskey to recover. She needs to dump Charlie because he could drive anyone to drink. The only reason Betty is still sober is because she never liked her own kids. Or anybody else’s. That’s why it’s so easy to strip social services, education, & healthcare to pad her coffers. Cammy doesn’t have to ostracize; she & Betty can still play the horses together since it’s the only thing in their lives with meaning. That & Betty’s Yorkies.

Well, according to the Globe, the plot sickens. They report Willy doesn’t want to be king. But that doesn’t make sense. Why is he walking around like he has a pole stuck up his butt & an attitude if he just wants to live plebeian? Globe might be falling for PR here about Willy & KKKKaty. Betty knows if they don’t play that plebeian thing out those republicans will be crawling up her ass with demands for ending moochocracy. She’s walking a thin line here between scandal, perversion, idiocy, & exhaustion. We do wish we could confidently include shame in that litany.

They say KKKKaty is looking forward to being queen. She thinks the food rations may be increased from one biscuit a day to two & she may be able to get a lump of sugar in her tea.

The Janus-ass of US war mongering

Eddie Ray Routh & mother (Routh family:AP)

The trial in Texas of Eddie Ray Routh for the murder of American Sniper (more aptly called American Psycho) Chris Kyle & another guy gives a window into the psychosis that afflicts law, politics, militarism, war propaganda, & all of social life in the US. The ironies in the defense & prosecution of Routh are worthy of the Greek tragedians or Shakespeare but when the drama all shakes out, & if you can get past the burlesque, what remains is the criminal neglect of troubled veterans & the adulation of war criminals.

At the age of 25, Eddie Ray Routh shot to death Kyle & & another veteran Chad Littlefield at a shooting range in 2013. Routh served in the Iraq War from 2006 to 2010 & was deployed to Haiti in 2010. He was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in 2011. As his behavior spiraled out of control with homicidal threats & violence, drugs & booze, in & out of psychiatric wards, his mother Jodi Routh approached the media-feted Kyle for help–the last person on this earth she should have trusted with her seriously disturbed son. So Kyle took the guy under his wing because helping veterans was part of the schtick he created to make himself a hero in the public eye. What could possibly go wrong?

Kyle, heralded as “the deadliest sniper in American military history,” was a former bronco rider in the rodeo & a farm hand. He had no training in psychology, addiction, trauma, mental illness, PTSD, & he glorified murder. Since he was a thrill-killer, Kyle was never troubled by PTSD. On the contrary, his psychosis was rewarded big-time by media war mongering, including Clint Eastwood’s film, right-wing war mongers & talk shows, & military bloggers.

Apparently in pro-war veteran circles & among right-wing gun nuts, gun therapy is considered therapeutic. Shooting a gun, smelling gunpowder, hearing the crack of gunfire is alleged to trigger a therapeutic response in those suffering PTSD. That must explain why so many veterans are involved in homicidal, even mass murder incidents & why now 22 veterans a day commit suicide. They’re trying to relive the thrill of war. The VA can skip the counseling & meds & just hand them all AK-47s. That’s why Kyle & Littlefield took the deranged Routh to a gun range. Unfortunately he took out his therapy on them.

Defense lawyers claim Routh was psychotic at the time. Kyle’s phone conversations with his wife enroute to the gun range make clear that Kyle thought that too & if anybody would know psychotic, it would be Kyle. But much more damning is that the two cowboy therapists took Routh to a gun range when he was completely drunk. Now that’s nuts!

Prosecutors claim Routh knew what he was doing when he murdered the two guys. And the trial hinges on whether he could distinguish right from wrong. What happened to the PTSD diagnosis? Did his war-generated mental illness disappear sometime between the 2011 diagnosis & the 2013 murder? Was he all cured when he went to the gun range? Media & other war apologists parse the PTSD saying Routh never served in direct combat so it’s questionable he had it. Do you have to actually kill people to get PTSD in a war zone? And why didn’t Kyle have it when he excelled at mass murder? So many unanswered questions; so much baloney.

You knew it had to come up when the extreme right-wing is involved. Here’s where burlesque enters the story. On military blogs & goofball right-wing talk shows they’ve found a Routh link to Islam. They analyzed his facial hair & found it matches the profile of a convert. Examining his military record, they found Routh was a prison guard over “Muslim terrorists” at an airbase in Baghdad in 2007. They claim (without breaking a smirk), “He never served in battle, but spent most of his time looking & talking to Muslims in jail. He could have likely interacted with the inmates & got converted; prison has a higher conversion rate than any mosque.” As the analysis continues, he murdered Kyle & Littlefield because Kyle was a well-known Islamohobe. Whoever said satire was dead never met a right-ring talk show host in the US?

What this kangaroo court of a mentally ill veteran exposes is the vicious treatment & neglect of veterans by the US government who talk out of two sides of their ass about soldiers, lauding them as heroes at recruitment & parade time & then dumping them when they come back with mangled bodies & souls. In the Janus-face of US war propaganda, Routh is one face & Kyle is the other. Routh was chewed up by the war (likely from watching prisoners being tortured according to the CIA manual) & Kyle went on to become a celebrity for thrill-killing.

The only response to this at once tragedy & farce is to join the spring protests demanding US out of Afghanistan! US out of Iraq!

(Photo Eddie Ray Routh & his mother Jodi Routh from the Routh family/AP)