Insane inmates; the asylum

I took some heavy flack the other night. My significant other says she felt imprisoned by an untenable ideology for the eight years of the Bush presidency. (We try heeding my grandparents and avoiding religious and ideological discussions across the dinner table at The Possum Den, but I occasionally cave to my impulsive nature and toss out provocative nuggets like croutons.)

“Flack” is a term from War II; high-velocity explosive shells aimed at Allied bombers; when they exploded, the sky would fill with lethal shards.

Pilots from that era described flack as “walking on the shrapnel.” I tiptoed through a politically correct apology for The Manchurian Candidate.

I caught a remark about “two weeks in office, and you’re writing this off. You secretly hope this turns to [crap].”

To quote Rhett Butler from “Gone with the Wind”, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

The inmates have taken over the asylum.

I am up at sunrise yesterday, and some talking head says we’re already at “Stimulus Two.” I have used “jaw-dropper” as a past metaphor, but it never happened…until yesterday. Another trillion dollars? I slammed my jaw back into my skull, and screeched “Those people are insane!”

I have no insightful political commentary on the state of the Union. These people are insane.

I have absolutely no influence over anyone. Whether or not this doomed social engineering project lives or dies on my say-so is irrelevant. I know that collectivism has never worked, and never will. I know that my Dad was grateful to FDR for a make-work job as a forest ranger during The Great Depression, and I know Dad was more grateful he learned radio technology that prepared him for War II and brought him out of the Great Depression standing upright. He put himself through college as a master barber, because cutting hair is recession-proof.

I hope the Obama presidency fails. Don’t dare call me racist; I am blind. I hope it fails because I ask: How can socialism be good for the country? Ayn Rand said it first, and after careful consideration, I am inclined to agree. Collectivism has never worked. Inform me, please: what’s going to change? Is government by committee going to serve me any better than the collapse of capitalist enterprises that can no longer function in today’s economy? A forest fire burns clean. New growth emerges.

I’m a ground-pounder, like my dad. I have the right to disagree with my significant other. I hope this insanity fails. Socialist craziness has never served America well. I don’t worship little tin gods. If I see something significantly insane, I will not beg anyone’s pardon. No one will be well-served by the course of this government. I don’t need two weeks to see that.

Wait five minutes, and wait for the shit-storm to descend. I am no longer family-friendly; I am waiting for the apocalypse. The Manchurian Candidate rules!

Prisons?

I heard a great idea the other day.

My president, whom I no longer cut slack for, is closing that small piece of Cuba that we somehow retain. We keep people there who carry AK-47s, wear civilian clothes, and will kill you and your children as quickly as they can get you in their sights. I’d like to deploy the cliché that some of my best friends are Muslims, but aside from TC from LA, whom I mentored in the 1980s, it ain’t so. I’m finding that the older I get, the less I like anybody. Trust is out the window; be grateful I don’t open fire on you, and there is a pistol in every sock drawer.

John Boehner is rapidly becoming a hero. “Boner” stepped into light the other day when he nominated Alcatraz as the alternative place to send enemy combatants.

The Atlanta penitentiary was built between 1915 and 1917. I have seen long-lost photographs of its rising on Boulevard, in a section of Atlanta that now belongs to housing projects and massive urban garbage dumps.

I have heard every sort of excuse from every variety of psychopath and malfeasant individual. “I didn’t do it!” I have had a busman’s tour of almost every federal prison in the country. I have handed coats out to freezing convicts, patted them on the back, and boarded them on the bus. I have never primarily been a law-enforcement person, but the nature of my old day job required some on-the-spot interviews that took me from Minnesota to Miami. I have talked to some interesting people in my half-century on this planet.

Alcatraz, and USP-Leavenworth, Kansas, are modeled on the design of the Atlanta pen. We are beginning to have all sorts of flashbacks to the Jimmy Carter administration. I am watching president Obama’s approval rating slide downwards from 60+ percent. Oh, we’re waking up to the Manchurian Candidate now, are we?

Atlanta is remodeled now, after the greatest hostage crisis of the 20th century, thanks to Mr. Jimmy’s importation of Castro’s castoffs. If you remember your history, the Marielito Cubans took the place over in the 1980s, after years of torment and bogus news stories from the city’s NBC franchise. The Cubans settled, only a couple died, and USP-Atlanta now houses garden-variety convicts in relatively pleasant conditions.

Congressman Boehner made a simple suggestion. If President Obama is so damned intent on closing Gitmo, let’s reactivate Alcatraz. The island is still there; the cellblocks are still there.

Atlanta, Leavenworth, and Alcatraz were what we’d call “supermax” back in the day. Add Marion, Illinois to that list, and the federal death house in Terre Haute, Indiana. America has one of the largest percentages of incarcerated convicts in the world, and I’m hard-pressed to come up with anybody who doesn’t belong there. At least we don’t behave like China, parade them into a stadium during the Super Bowl, and give them a bullet in the neck at halftime.

Nancy Pelosi has superseded Hillary Clinton as the most dangerous woman in America. I have a personal saying: “Those bitches will get you every time.” I am an acknowledged misogynist. I trust no one.

Yeah, close Guantanamo Bay. Move 2,000 hard-core sociopaths around the country. Retain my cadre of lawyers to represent them. And you won the election on your God-given ability to rescue us from what economic crisis?

Madame Speaker Pelosi started shittin’ kittens, pardon my French, the moment Alcatraz was mentioned. It is, after all, anchored in San Francisco Bay. There’s a perfect backyard! Oh, no! Alcatraz is a tourist attraction! We can’t do that!

I think it’s perfect. Keep the tour boats running. Couple of dollars, and you view the rabid killer terrorists. Every tattooed, I-can-be-had mook in Bay City can go one-on-one with the fanatics they love and respect so much.

I am having too much fun with a one-party country. My amusement is only tempered by the fact that people are going to die. You bought it, you pay for it.

Won't get fooled again...The Who

I have been played for a fool. I put something up that a respondent—one of my Constant Readers—quickly pointed out was an internet hoax; a “missing” kid who is either too-good looking or an imaginary net product. I react too quickly; I didn’t want another corpse somewhere.

Okay, I got fooled. Fool me again like the Who song, the shotguns rule. I said my peace about men with guns coming to take control. I’m easy, I’ll go quietly. Not! to quote the vernacular. My bad. John Boorman did a movie called “Red Dawn” in 1984; does anyone remember that Orwellian prophecy? The year passed. And it wasn’t the end of the world. The Jews surrendered quietly to Hitler. Boorman had a shot of a bumper sticker saying “they’ll pry my gun from my cold, dead fingers”, and a Soviet soldier doing just that. We don’t fight Commies, and just for shits and grins I induced Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” on my substitute-teacher high-school class. We all need a good laugh at the world ending. “Auf weidersen!”

I get fooled often. I thought I answered a teenager about Army service and facing the fact that people die. As the British say, this chap may have been having me on. The e-mail is invalid. Anything profound I said about service to country is wasted, and will be used against me like a Miranda right.

There is a lot going on these days. As distasteful as I found him, I voted for the other guy. I am at the point of returning to “The Manchurian Candidate”, “Osama Bamalama” and other negative references. I have never seen America so close to socialism.

You bought him, you pay for him.

Stay out of my wallet, and off my hillside.

I have a few nudges about closing Gitmo, but that seems to be sliding farther back on the priority list.

All bets are off...

Okay, I have reached the breaking point. I only post about every other week or so; like Edgar Allen Poe and Dylan Thomas, I delude myself that I write better when I’ve had a snort or three, and my fine Kentucky whiskey coincidentally gets delivered on a bi-weekly basis. The circumstances of today's news makes me want to drink and forget about the one party rule of this country. Watching the start of the Obama administration, I don’t think I have ever seen a president in so much in trouble since Tricky Dick’s boys got caught wandering around The Watergate without their room keys.

My significant other has trouble with the IRS. I keep urging her to call or e-mail the tax collectors and state that their head [new Treasury Secretary Geithner] doesn’t pay his taxes, so why should she? I meet immense resistance; we both know how the government works. If you actively resist taxes, the government will indeed show up at your door with men with guns, and the SWAT snipers will kill you the instant you tell them to get off your property. President Obama named one of Janet Reno's henchmen/killers for Ministry of "Justice". [That Holder puke.] Active resistance to paying taxes results in having your family ultimately arrested, your property seized, and prison sentences that surpass Cassius Clay’s resistance to the draft in the 1960s. ("No Viet Cong ever called me 'nigger'," but what the Hell.)

A whole bunch of President Obama’s nominees have been disqualified for their respective offices because, like me, they resent paying taxes. My significant other just started a new job; I know a W-2 and withholding taxes [i.e. pocket-picking] are part of the arrangement.

And they’re going to spend her money on what?

It’s her money, damn you! She should be allowed to have a say in what it’s spent on. The faulty science of global warming, cable converter boxes, and new sod divots for the DC mall, and wads of cash for the election-stealing PAC ACORN should not be on the table. I pay nothing in federal tax because of my disability, but that does nothing to soothe my outrage at the extortion of other good Americans.

I heard valid arguments that $500K salary caps are fair for Wall St. executives who go begging for federal dollars. I remember little of what I was taught in college, but one word leaps to mind: socialism. The state controls the means of production. Yeah, it’s still private ownership, and those fat cats are not comporting themselves well, but they are feeding into the frenzy of Left Coast values that knows no end and will result in America becoming an emasculated European copy of failed socialist/secular values. If I had the brains to run a legitimate Wall St. corporation with successful investments, or even the criminal enterprise of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, I’d be a happy camper. Hell—I watched a documentary about the North Hollywood BOA failed robbery in the ‘90s, and the much-televised shootout—I have to admire to sociopaths because they were saying they’d go down like gunfighters, and despite the fact that a lot of my friends are law-enforcement people, you have to hand it someone who sticks to their word. The bad guys died.

My point is, they scored $300,000 on that one hit, and over a million on another, and thought it was small change. They were angry. Can Messiah Obama possibly write me a check for $250,000? I will invest it wisely, through my broker Ed Jones, who hangs out in a phone booth in Times Square. ["Eddie here..."] I’ll pay my taxes, including dog parks in California and Frisbee golf courses in Texas.

I heard the “stimulus” package had been revised. Then I heard it had gone from $800B to $915B. Those are billions, kids, with six zeroes, to trillions. That’s $915,000,000,000. A billion is one thousand million. A trillion—which we’re looking at now for a starter—is one thousand billion. I may have my zeroes wrong; I was never any good at math. I hand my gold to Eddie Jones in that phone booth in Times Square and hope he comes through for me.

Send me a blue government check for a few hundred thousand. I’ll invest it happily, produce jobs (someone has to push my wheelchair around), and hire a few people—mostly illegal aliens, like the rest of the Presidential Cabinet—and be glad for the trickle-down.

I remember very little of what I was taught in college. One of the few things that stuck was a definition of socialism: the state controls the means of production. Pay for success by being beaten down and penalized. Yeah, capping CEO salaries at 500K appeals to what’s left of my help-the-people instinct. I have no doubt that we’re in trouble, the ramifications are reaching the distant Possum Den on the mountain. No one is immune. I have the left-handed instinct to punish the robber-barons with class warfare.

On the other hand, if you want a true economic success, give America a chance as the last superpower, and quit sweating the small stuff. Rule #1: 95% of everything is small stuff.

Before I forget his name—as I inevitably will—I want to quote Reverend J. Lee Petersen, a black minister. He referred to President Obama as “The Messiah” in a far more sarcastic way than I can ever summon. His repeated references to “The Messiah” reduced me to helpless giggling. I am not alone in my skepticism. I feel vindicated. An African-American repudiated Obama.

He’s out there naked. President Obama likes to relate to Abraham Lincoln, among others. Lincoln earns a place of respect in my home because he, too was out there naked, and kept the country together. It took a long time to overcome the heritage upbringing about the War of Northern Aggression, and a lot longer to understand Abe Lincoln. I think I have an adequate grasp on today’s issues.

I don’t care if Obama is blind, purple, green, or somewhere in between. I want an adequate government, and though I’ve tried to pour cold water over people a lot more resentful of Obama than I am, they resist and I am having my doubts.

I caution Constant Readers who have taken me to task. I made a promise. I’ll give you one chance to reply. We are getting inside the “100 days” zone. I have kept silence and played dead like all marsupial mammals do.

This is rapidly ending. My opinion, in the words of Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane, “doesn’t mean shit to a tree”.

I am getting ready to revert to “Osama” as a pseudonym for Mr. Obama. I was partisan during the election, and now that he has won fair and square—except for paying election-stealing ACORN off, let’s not go there yet—I kept my promise and gave him a chance. What I see is rampant socialism, spending, and repaying debts to the Far Left. All bets are off.