Being a jerk should have consequences

My daughter-in-law and I wandered through an estate sale yesterday. She's looking for a sofa, but there was nothing like that at the sale. We did spend some time sorting through a collection of oddities - an old-fashioned butter cooler, a cigarette box straight from the 40s, a silver toast server. My daughter-in-law found a pair of Mary-Poppins-shoes which fit her perfectly and looked fabulous with her leggings, and in the end that was all either of us bought.

Which is where it got weird. As we walked over to the nice elderly lady with the cashbox, with whom we'd chatted on our way in, two elderly men seated with her started talking loudly about how awful the Obama administration was, and how the IRS was going to be arresting people. "I don't have medical insurance," one of the men said, "and I don't want medical insurance. I think I get better service without it."

My daughter-in-law and I said nothing. It seemed a strange place for a conversation like that, especially one occurring at such high decibels.* We paid and left hurriedly, not wanting to be drawn into an argument with a pair of ignorant assholes. But as we got to the car and out of earshot, I said, "When he gets cancer or heart disease or whatever - and it won't be long now, since he's old - I hope he doesn't come crying to me for his insurance. Fuck him. He doesn't want to pay for it, he can damn well die without it."

We're all pretty sick of being angry, so we didn't talk about it much after my outburst. When we got home I spent the afternoon playing Scattergories and Cribbage with my granddaughter.

Despite my efforts at rising above it, though, I'm still livid. That hatriot nonsense being spewed via right-wing media is so stupid, so blatantly, unmistakeably racist and partisan that to believe it, you have to be pretty damn hateful right from the get-go. Accepting that crap without question amounts to malicious ignorance.

So here's my first proposal**: the law requiring people to show proof of health insurance when they file their taxes goes into effect in 2014. I think it should be amended to state that if you have paid a fine for failure to comply with the law within the previous year, all pre-existing condition limitations will continue to apply to you. That way assholes like Mister-I-Don't-Want-Insurance will be able to bankrupt their families through their final illnesses undisturbed!

Just sayin'.

*This only occurred to me much later. My car, parked at the curb outside the house, carries three Obama bumper stickers left from my days as a campaign volunteer. Maybe the old fuckers noticed them.

**I'm sure there'll be more. I just haven't thought of them yet.

When did this country become so hateful?

Seems to me it started during the Reagan years - the faux-Gipper sure knew how to get that ball rolling, with his Bircher-friendly 'card-carrying member of the ACLU' campaign; his chuckling over the AIDS epidemic and the subsequent decimation of the gay population; his racist and stupid 'welfare queen' crapola; and his repeal of the Fairness Doctrine which set Rush Limbaugh's fat ass and foul tongue free.

Now it all comes to fruition.

I think it's time someone proposed that illegal immigrants be made to wear yellow six-pointed stars. In keeping with the season and all.

Glenn Beck

is a fuckwit. An ugly, racist, narcissistic, psychopathic fuckwit.

That is all.

Wouldn't it be ironic

if Arizona was rejected so thoroughly by the rest of the country for its racist, hateful, police-state mentality that it was retaken by Mexico, and all those redneck assholes with their signs protesting illegal immigrants became illegal immigrants themselves?

Tiene tarjeta de identificación? No? Sigueme.

Heh. Well, a person can dream.

Conventional wisdom.

I really hate it. Conventional wisdom is what the Beltway bozos spout, which the news media picks up, which tells the public what to think, which sets the original idiotic murmurs in cement. And so we all 'know' a bunch of shit which wouldn't be true if we hadn't all been assured that it's conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom once had it that the world was flat. That illness could be cured by bleeding. That flies spontaneously generated from garbage.

More recently the conventional wisdom stated that the American public was not ready for a black President, that Americans opposed health insurance reform, that the Republican party was better at keeping the country safe, that Democrats spend recklessly while Republicans spend responsibly.

Will the conventional wisdom ever catch up with reality? Probably not, or at least not until the clowns inside the Beltway are lured outside for a helping of real life. In the meantime, we must all take care. The liars aren't our eyes, but their forked tongues.

Global Warming

can kill us. So, let's get some legislation passed to slow down our contribution to it. Now.

The record snowfall in Washington, D.C. is a symptom of global warming. Here's how it works: because the earth is warming the seas are evaporating faster, creating more moisture in the atmosphere. This leads to record precipitation events - in other words, rain and snow. Just for fun, google 'record rains.'

Oops, I suppose that explanation has too many three- and four-syllable words to be comprehensible by a doofus like Hannity, who likes to trumpet his ignorance on national teevee, or those Inhofe yokels who got their embarrassingly-red necks into the news by building an igloo for Al Gore.

God, ignorant people are irritating. They should all buy land in Florida and move there right away.

Updated, at last, to correct that word-o I noticed a long time ago - meant to say 'syllable' where I used 'letter'.

Oh, if only.

From Thinkprogess.org:

Bachmann Suggests Critics Of Health Care Reform Will Be Put On A ‘List’ And Denied Treatment

Think of the people who would then have to try to get coverage in a purely private market: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Tom Price, John McCain (That one makes me giddy - the old cancer-surviving fart who's never had any health care but guvmint health care!), Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, a whole passel of right wing bobbleheads and insurance company executives. God, how sweet it would be.

Sadly, it's not true. I had a nice few minutes daydreaming about it, though.