I Pick Every NFL Game - Week 4

Overall 22-26

I said I pick every NFL game.  I didn't claim to pick them correctly.

Raiders +9 Houston (loss)
Jags +3 Titans (win)
Ravens +1.5 NE (loss)
NYG -9 KC (win)
Washington -7 Tampa (loss)
Colts -10.5 Seattle (win)
Bengals -6 Cleveland (loss)
Bears -10 Lions (win)
Saints -7 Jets (win)
Dolphins +1.5 Bills (win)
Niners -9.5 Rams (win)
Denver +3 Dallas (win)
SD +6.5 Steelers (loss)
Vikes -3.5 Packers (win)

9-5
Overall: 31-31

Trade Offer

I've previously written about my occasional desire to broker a trade with conservatives.  I'm willing, for example, to take all consensual sexual indescretions totally off the table.  Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Sanford, Mark Foley, John Ensign - go nuts.  No more "with the help of my wife by my side and the good Lord above and the fine people of (insert state here) I will overcome my sin" walks of shame.  Sleep with whom you want - answer only to your loved ones.  It's none of my business.  Just like the motto on that 1787 penny. Deal?

By the way, that goes for incest too. 

(You:  Why The Face?  That's a Modern Family reference, which is a show you need to start watching.)

There really are some issues where I'm just like everyone else, when Mackenzie Phillips says she and Poppa John did the bop I'm as viscerally creeped out as you are.  And under her fact scenario, given the drugs and the power relationship between father/daughter, the argument that they didn't have a consensual sexual relationship (even though she uses those words) looks stronger than the argument that they did.  But if you paint for me the following scenario - relatives have consensual sex - I don't have a firm ground to explain why that's wrong other than it feels extra icky. 

Which it does.  And it could be I'm presenting a scenario that doesn't really exist - that given most cultural norms there really isn't consensual incest, some level of abuse or cognitive disorder has to exist in order to get to that place.  I mean, Guiliani married his cousin, so there you go.

Incidentally, first cousin marriage is legal in the state where I reside, Florida, while gays are prohibited from adopting children.  I've seen the forms, there's actually a Are you a Homosexual, Check This Box, spot on the documents.  (Know where gays can adopt kids?  On the sitcom Modern Family.  Which you really should be watching). 

But "icky" probably isn't firm enough ground to take steps to prohibit someone else's behavior.  So, yeah, if it turns out there's a Republican Congressman who, in between votes against raising the minimum wage, happens to be nailing his sister, I'll let that slide too.  I'm minding my own business. 

But that's a previous trade offer. This morning, I'd like to reach across the ideological aisle and offer the following: apparently, there's some body of thought that Roman Polanski should be set free; moreover, there's an attempt to associate those thoughts with the left.  I didn't hear that topic brought up at the latest secular progressive meeting (last week's topic, The War On Christmas - Fighting Them Over There So We Don't Have to Fight Them Over Here) but it could be that I was all tripped out over the birthday cake (last Friday was my birthday, there was carrot cake  - you could put cream cheese frosting on a hammer and I'd eat it.  Which reminds me that you should also watch Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog if you've yet to do so.  Sure, you could ignore my recommendations, but had you just been following my college football picks you'd be rich enough to afford health care in the United States.)

Which sounds like a transition. 

So, here's the trade offer. 

I'll offer Roman Polanski, do with him what you will. 

In return I'd like a public option for health care.

That's it.  You don't have to take that public option if you'd prefer.  Me, I'd like the choice.  And I have health insurance.  Unlike 1 in 3 residents of Houston, for example.  I'll throw in the following - the Democratic Congressman from Florida shouldn't have used the word Holocaust to describe the thousands of Americans who die every year due to a lack of health insurance.  He was making a reference to right wing rhetoric, specifically about abortion, but I've written before that it's time to take the Nazi references out of our political discourse.  There are other atrocities that one could use when referencing behavior.  Tucker Carlson, for example, said last Friday (cream cheese frosting day; somehow, life has spun in a way that I get to spend my birthday with a woman who wears a red bikini and buys me birthday cake; I may sound all rage filled and whatnot, but things are actually pretty terrific in Jividen-land these days. I'm poor but proud, as they say) that the clip of New Jersey schoolkids singing they wanted to help Obama rebuild America was "pure Khmer Rouge stuff".   Sure, comparing 7 million dead Cambodians to  a song seems disproportionate.

But there are only so many rhetorical battles one can simultaneously fight.

So that's the offer.  You get Polanski (I'll throw in Adrien Brody's Academy Award) and this week's Holocaust reference.  We get a public option that will, you know, have the benefit of saving the lives of thousands of Americans. 

Deal?

(Maybe as a small side sports related deal we can do the following - I'll give you Serena Williams - she should have been defaulted from the Open, I don't care at all about the language, but the violent threat is further over the line than the foot fault in question - and in return I want Michael Jordan - his HOF acceptance speech ranks next to Kellen Winslow's from '96 as among my favorites ever.  It was fiesty and defiant - just the way Jordan and most superpremimumelite athletes are behind the curtain.  Jordan spoke the way my guy, Barry Bonds, spoke throughout his career, getting ripped for it all the way along.  The Sports Media Industrial Complex framed Jordan as the ulimate teammate (no matter how many times he punches Steve Kerr in practice) while Bonds was the epitome of selfishness.  Jordan was embraced by corporate America and packaged as superman - while Bonds was framed as a jerk unworthy of a public embrace.  But in his final act on the stage, there was Jordan, effectively saying "I was better than you, better than you, better than you."  I loved it.  It was funny and snarky and raw and real.  My favorite ever version of MJ.  Of course, he got crushed for it.  Because all the media wanted was the guy who sold Nikes.  Oh, did you see that Michael Vick got his Nike deal back?  Apparently, electrocuting dogs/drowning dogs/putting up rape stands systematically torturing dogs for 6 years doesn't mean you can't sell sneakers to children.  It's curious, right - when it comes to steroids - the response from the Sports Media Industrial Complex is "what about the children?" - "what is the message to kids if we allow Mark McGwire in the Hall of Fame?'  But here Mike Vick is getting a shoe deal - and...well, I'm waiting. Edit - well, ask and ye shall receive; while Vick's agent said yesterday there was a deal - Nike said today that there is not a deal.  There you go. )

Your Athlete of the Month - September 2009

Drew Brees.  Not Alfonso Ribeiro.  He just missed.

Runners-up: Jahvid Best, Floyd Mayweather, Jimmie Johnson

9 down.  3 left.  The last athlete of the year for this decade is still up for grabs.

The Body Count

A month and a half ago, I wrote this, arguing that the level of right wing rhetoric had reached critical mass, as they had begun framing Democrats as "evil" - the moral equivalent of terrorists and Nazis. 

Part of that lunacy focused on the Census (as if it were somehow a new occurrence)  which became the mechanism by which Obama would create his concentration camps. Michele Bachmann said the Census Bureau would get information about you from your neighbors if you refused to talk to them, saying "there is a point where you say enough is enough to government intrusion."  Bachmann said the level of government intrusion in our lives is making us "slaves" - said that we are reaching a point of "orderly revolution."  Neal Boortz referred to Census takers as "looters" saying that the Census gathers information "designed to help the government steal from you."

The Census is government intrusion that might justify rebellion.  But Bachmann voted for warrantless domestic wiretapping.  This mirrors conservative outcry against ACORN and simultaneous continued support of Blackwater. Conservative hypocrisy isn't hidden in plain sight; it screams out in bursts of neon. 

And in Kentucky, a Census worker was found naked, bound, gagged, hanged, with the word Fed written on his chest and his Census ID taped to his head.

Nothing will change.  Not a syllable.  In fact, as Bill O' Reilly did when his regular drumbeating reference to "Tiller the Baby Killer" was examined following the homicide of abortion provider George Tiller, the response will be that it's a fascist/socialist/Nazi attempt to silence the oppressed "real Americans".  The response will be, as Oklahoma Senator Coburn said when confronted on Meet the Press with the out of control anti-government rhetoric "we've earned it."

In July of 2008 it was the shootings in the Tennessee church, the murderer leaving behind a four page letter explaining how the church was too liberal in its teachings, that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, that they had ruined every institution in America: 

"If decent patriotic Americans could vote three times in every election we couldn’t stem this tide of liberalism that’s destroying America. Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great Nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is Kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather"

Among the literature in his home, Michael Savage's Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder.  From another Savage book, Savage Nation, came this:

"To fight only the al-Qaeda scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders… Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that’s who.”

Savage isn't alone in this level of violent talk. 

Here's Sean Hannity:

I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.

Here's Rush Limbaugh:

Liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces.

I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for.

Here's Ann Coulter:

We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.

And here's Simple Jack:

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could.


Where are the similar quotes from the stars of the left?  These aren't random blog comments; these are highly compensated superstars of the right, highly advertised and supported through corporate dollars and outlets.  A 10 million dollar sexual harrassment lawsuit payoff here and a drug conviction there notwithstanding.

See, 'cause that's how this gets framed - that somehow "both sides" say extreme things, "both sides" have radical perspectives, that the hatred of Bush was expressed in ways similar to the hatred of Obama.

Where does Michael Moore threaten to kill Republicans?  There are lots of movies, plenty of interviews - where are the death threats?  Keith Olbermann did lots of passionate anti-Bush commentary, where's the clip where he said he should be assassinated?  Ann Coulter said "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." in which of his books did Al Franken express a wish that Fox News would be blown up, its employees killed in the explosion?

There's a term for this sort of rhetoric - Eliminationism, where a democratic exhange of ideas is replaced by violent rhetoric designed to close the discussion of those ideas.  Where an "enemy within" is framed as evil, as needing to be eliminated.  Perhaps you recognize this in the tactics from the town hall debates - designed not to foster discussion - but to end it.  Guns brought as shows of force, of intimidation - implicitly saying shut this debate down, my guns are more important than your ballot box.

Conversation is needed in democracy; one should feel able to freely exchange ideas - once those ideas are threats that speech is no longer geared toward flourishing ideas but ending them.  Conservatives take cover under the first amendment while their words are geared toward ending discussion. 

When Simple Jack talks about a return to how we felt the day after 9-11, I think I know what he means.

We didn't have political debates in the United States after 9-11.  Not any that were allowable.  Our national reaction - that the US was an innocent actor, hated for its freedoms, and that we needed to sacrifice some of those freedoms and adopt a militaristic response, both foreign and domestic, to defeat a nebulous enemy at any cost - was not one from which many could deviate in public life.  Big government, much more intrusive than the Census, in the form of the Patriot Act and suspicionless, warantless domestic telecommunications surveillance, was put in place with virtually no debate.  Big government, much more intrusive than a public health care option, in the form of the jailing and interrogation of terrorist suspects, held without charge, held without lawyers, tortured in violation of US law was put in place with virtually no debate. Big government, in the form of two endless foreign wars, wars which have added far, far, far more to the US debt than any Obama stimulus package, commenced with virtually no debate.  I was teaching US Government at the time, questioning the federal government was characterized as treason by the very same people who, in the wake of Obama's victory, say that if the federal government were to provide health insurance it would be the equivalent of Nazi Germany.

We got another dead body in Kentucky.  That's where we are in America in 2009. 

(Meanwhile, as correctly noted in Newsweek, the Big government right wing US Supreme Court continues to incrementally roll back a century of individual liberties.  And the silence is deafening.)



 

The Weekly Ten - Week 4 College Football Picks

Overall: 21-9
Locks: 3-0

Missouri -7 Nevada (win)
Vandy -7 Rice (win)
Wyoming +3.5 UNLV (win)
Florida -21.5 Kentucky (win)
N Illinois -17 Idaho (loss)
BYU -17 Col St. (win)
Notre Dame v. Purdue (under 60) (win)
Cal v. Oregon (under 58) (win)
UL-Monroe +3.5 FAU (win)
Lock: Ohio St -14 Illinois (win)

Week: 9-1.
Overall: 30-10.  Locks: 4-0.

Consider following me around the countryside.