"Highlights Of The Cain-Gingrich Debate": The Shortest Volume Since "History Of German Humor".

HOLY crap, I taped this thing. Then I tried to watch it. Y'know, part of me secretly understands that even hack journalists--and "hack" may actually be the collective noun for a herd of journalists--are underpaid, at least those who are forced to view something like this, which must, at some level, be like some vile and malevolent god forcing you to watch a highlight reel of the ritual vivisection you'll be undergoing every twenty minutes for all Eternity once you reach your Reward.

First, it was hosted by US Representative Steve "Not Even the Smarmiest Wingnut Named King in Congress" King; I barely made it through that. Is there something in the Constitution which requires Iowa be represented? Practically the first thing out of his mouth was "Something-or-other Lincoln-Douglas debates". After a few minutes and a large cognac I started watching again, and was rewarded with the folksy little tale of how much his new granddaughter ("Reagan Anne") was born owing the Federal government. I stayed for the graph of its growth over her young lifetime, when she, by the way, will be paying no taxes but will be operating as a write-off, and was rewarded by King explaining to the audience that it could've been made to look much worse if his fucking staff had just jiggered the scale the way he asked somebody to tell them to.

Tell ya what, Steve: consider what it would have looked like if the scale was such that we could all see just what that money was going for. Little Dutch will have her own aircraft carrier by middle-age.

Then came the discussion of the explosive growth of Federal spending. This time we went with a pie chart, since even the Teabagger audience might've noted how a timeline corresponded to King's own tenure in Congress. And this, sadly, was where I just gave up.

Three guesses.

Right the first time! Because we start off talking about "Entitlements" vs. "Discretionary spending", with an eye to gulling our audience--not that a broad cross-section of white Houston exoburbian Teabaggers required any--about what's a work here. Social Security and Medicare "entitlements" are no less subject to Congressional oversight than "discretionary" Defense spending; we might note, for one thing, which side of that equation has proved vulnerable to attack. When you make the Social Security Slice look the same size as the Military, you kinda sorta elide the part about how the former is a Trust, paid for by taxpayers who are in the system, up to a certain, artificially-low level of their income. "Defense" is paid for by every taxpayer, hasn't gone begging for a COLA increase since Pearl Harbor, and the last time anyone suggested it might be cut in some small fashion resembling, I dunno, a Distant Glimmer of Reality we showed 'em what a portion of that overkill was for. King eventually got around to noting that Defense was an equal-sized slice of the pie, assuming you fell for the optical trick, but that in his opinion we didn't wanna go cuttin' that, unless we wanted Ruskies pounding on the door tomorrow morning. I believe this is referred to in Iowa as an "airtight case".

I'm sorry. I this point I turned the damn thing off again, considered hitting "Erase", left it intact, went back, and flipped through Lincoln and Douglas trying out new ideas for their next books, to the genial fellow-feeling of the hall. You can have your money back.

How'd we get here? Yes, indeed, how did we get to where a reptilian carnival barker and the James Brown of cardboard pizza empires--and not the good James Brown; the one who shot at people for using his towels--are a) running for President, and b) able to draw a crowd of 800? I mean besides the fact that we let Georgia back into the Union too easily?

But the bigger question is how'd we get to 1946? The narrative is a fake; we know the narrative is a fake. The enormity of deceitful wars--funded not by us, but by Reagan Anne King--and laissez-faire looting of the financial system are less important than Godless Socialism, the same way we conveniently ignored the rise of Nazism, and the First World War which it rode to power, and set off to win the Battle of Light vs Dark with a little help from German rocket scientists and medical technicians. Y'know, a lot bigger question than "Who takes Herman Cain seriously?" or "What does a Gingrich candidacy tell us about an uncaring God?" is how it is that this crap gets repeated ad infinitum without contradiction. Defense is at least 50% of the Budget, and it buys us a more bloated bureaucracy than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and France, combined. For nothing, or nothing like what is claimed. Social Security is vital, vital to vast swathes of America, and even Texas. Who th' fuck is it so important that we bomb?

Can't somebody make any of these guys answer a real question?