Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Man Who Won The War

Captain Travis Patriquin,

We hardly knew ye ...

Capt. Patriquin devised a cartoon solution to our challenging and, up to then, failing presence in Iraq. He was killed by an IED in December of 2006, but his ideas, his solutions and his “dumb it down for the politicians” attitude, are uniformly responsible for our national survival and the new trend of undeniable success in “The Sandbox”.

His stick figure presentation, titled “How To Win In Al Anbar” is something no one in the command chain, least of all at The W. House, wants us to celebrate. Your humble Cowboy, long tired of politicians abusing the label “hero”, offers this humble reminder of who the greatest hero of the W. Bush years is. Without him we would not be winning.

Mission accomplished Captain Patriquin.








Thanks for playing

Friday, January 25, 2008

A Poll To End All Polls


An AP poll, January 23rd, determined the following (as quoted):

McCain is the favored candidate of women, men and voters who classify themselves as non-conservative
Clinton still leads among women and men, and non-liberals.

This game is FUN for the first time, in many, many years.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Quote Of The Week


The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and coal products of the present time."

-Rudolph Diesel  (Inventor of the Diesel engine, of course)

1895

Friday, January 18, 2008

The Enemy of A Nut-Job is My Friend

I have started a collection of illegally placed "Ron Paul" signage from the neighborhood. 

I have it, from my usually accurate sources,  that the local high school stoners have joined the 'Bong Paul' crusade due to his "Legalize Marijuana" platform. 

These promising young dissidents obviously enjoy hanging illegal political signage. Your humble host enjoys good political sport. The stoner kids giveth and The Cowboy taketh away....

This my top ten R.P.-inciting list. It was composed while waiting for a red light to turn green adjacent to an illegal campaign sign:

Top Ten Reasons why I love the 9/11 conspiring, vote stealing bastards that Ron Paul's paranoid supporters are always ranting against:

10)  The send The Teams  to kill savages before the reach our shore.

9) They fight about wether 2 or 4 parts per billion is the acceptable limit for toxins in my bath water.

8) My stocks are still up for the 12 months ended January 18th 2008

7) We make planes that don't blow up now, even when crashed so hard the wings are torn apart.

6) Our Doctors still cure more diseases than all the others on the planet combined.

5) Why obsess with Ron when we have TED ?

4) They Killed Elvis, but let Dave Alvin Live

3) Even you paranoid  R. P. freaks would be shocked at how close they watch you.

2) They already have iodine tablets stocked for my family, in case one gets through.

1) One doesn't get through.


Thanks for playing..





Monday, January 14, 2008

After New Hampshire

3:10 To Yorba Linda

The Republican/Fox News machine has made seeding national hatred against Hillary a number one priority for the past decade. Suddenly now the Democratchiks are not far behind in the hunt.  On the road to New Hampshire no one considered a comparison between Hillary and the other most hated candidate in American history. In so doing, they have made the campaign fun again.

The whole wagon train of POTUS campaign sluttery, on both sides, has a lust for some lovable new Reaganesque candidate.  The desire is stronger than the hunger of the undead for flesh. The sentimental Reagan seekers form zombie packs as they wander the streets of primary states.  While many on the left think he has been found. Many on the right cry that he has not.

The one truth both sides embrace is that HILLARY IS THE NEW NIXON, and it is true, but not necessarily, as they hope, because we won't have her to kick around much longer. Any journalist who hasn't tried to understand how she has survived the attacks and why she is still in the game at all, should be punished. Their flaming credentials should be shot off the suberbowl halftime stage, from the same canon that fired Hunter S. Thompson's ashes over the Maroon Bells. Because the answer to that little question is the key to the entire current election cycle. Reagan may have been clothed in a thin cover of teflon, but Hillary is Up-Armored, sandbox heavy.

Speaking of The Good Doctor: You might recall 1968. (When you were two). In that fateful year, coming back from a long decade of nearly unanimous, bi-partisan public hatred, Richard Nixon kicked ass American style. In less than a year he painted the battlefield with the blood of his enemies. His enemies being absolutely every public person from both parties and a small naive parade of horehound independents.

It wasn't these sissy preacher boys we have today, either....

He kicked George H.W. Bush's ass before Easter; He kicked George Romney's Ass; He beat Wallace and Humphrey senseless, simultaneously, in one day. Richard Nixon, the most hated man in American politics, beat Ronald Reagan, the most beloved, like a baby harp seal on an ice floe. Hillary is a lot like him, and people should pay attention before they get knocked down.

Nixon was dark, strange and universally loathed. He never slept and he ate raw meat each day for breakfast. He never forgot that every public and private political figure in America was his sworn enemy. He knew, as a result, that the only people he owed political favors to were the voters who had listened to their survival-seeking hearts when they defied the polls to elect him. 

He ended up doing  what had to be done, for the most part, regardless of partisan arrogance and corporate influence.  He ran a mean White House, and regardless of what your party loyalty forces you to believe about the most hated candidate prior to Hillary, he saved America. He saved your ass before you turned six. 

A Place Called Hopeless

We are almost perfectly hypnotized by the bland timidity and paper bag packaging of POTUS campaign "journalism".  So much so that any instance of ACTUAL HUMANITY causes media dick-heads nationwide to blow their gaskets and spew special alarmist reports about their own ongoing lack of sophistication as observers.

The New Media is a weak and joyless reflector of the aforementioned generic packaging. So when Senator Clinton cried on the eve of the New Hampshire primary it sent shockwaves through the entire system. It was like she used a word that neither O'Reilly nor Blitzer could find in their partisan dictionaries. That curious national feeling in the news after New Hampshire was actually a stiff blast of Oxygen sneaking into the broadband. The early feeds were wrong across the board - the story happened first and was written after.  

Actually, what sparked the voters'  reaction was the modus delecto of Hillary's near-tears moment.  That little lapse exposed a small truth that is too complicated to ever be captured by a mainstream  American  journalist. But voters sensed the themes.

Clinton was upset for the same reason Nixon was when he gave his famous "checkers" speech. Runaway punditry has aided everyone in the fight to break Hillary down.  Her enemies, like Nixon's, need the help, because no one can beat her in a fair fight. Her enemies have sliced a thousand cuts into her American "legitimacy" and political media hacks have provided the razors by allowing her to be the only allowable punching bag. The result is a passive national accusation that the Good Senator is too political to be President. 

Yeah - wait, what?

She is not only perfectly attackable, she is the only one who is attackable at all without accusations of severe political-incorrectness, such as racism, religious prejudice or anti-Americanism. Enough voters will continue to knee-jerk to her because of those very attacks and the distinction of toughness they create between her and the other candidates. 

Likability Is Overrated In The Smoke

Zogby's polls "failed" infamously in New Hampshire because they consisted of a person talking to another person.  Polls happen on the phone, live, in clean well-lighted places. They were conducted in the open, in front of Internet and TV screens. The media grossly forgets, that their screens are not windows to the real world. The New Ballot - boxes may have wifi for ease-of-fix, but as long as they still have the old fashioned curtains, we are gonna be o.k.

The polls "failed" because when the curtains slide shut, a human heart beats alone, one time, with no media and no screens. In that instant enough voters look through the real window. Outside it is a dark and stormy night. Outside the toughest ten years of all of our lives started last week. The markets are trembling and this is no game. Outside, the savages are coming.

That Woman won, behind the curtains, and she will continue to win, because she has an un-nuanced, un-speechified reality of character that only the ancient mariner McCain can possibly try and equal. Senator Hillary R. Clinton is the toughest, meanest, most politically hated mutherfucker since Nixon. She will not apologize for being too political to be President.  YOU my new friend should be grateful for it, because unless you have twenty million in the Cayman Islands - YOU and I are Checkers. We are the dog.  She will destroy every comer when the curtains are closed. And then? 

She Will Save The Dog.

And I, for one, will be at her inauguration. I am the only moderate American who publicly supported her from the beginning, (which was a long, long time ago...in a galaxy far, far away...) There will be plenty of room for me on the stand. It will be an unnaturally warm winter's day.  I will have a small flask of whiskey but I will only share pulls with Bill. 

Even the rat Carville will be buying me drinks, come the day. You all will. I will become the Innaugaural's  proxy celebratory drunk. A lone revelor, breaking down the stiff and weird new decorum of America for all the world to see. I will have my flak jacket on under my 'respectable moderate cloth coat', upon which I will proudly wear the American flag pin I stole fair and square from Ronald Reagan's oval office. Beneath it I will have a tiny banner, made just for the occassion. That one will be a picture of Nixon and it will say:

Save the Dog. Save the World.


Thanks for playing.
 

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Election Times

Election Times is Come!

Here, at the barn, iTunes is on permanent dedicated access standby, for background music support. The three young 'uns are sent off to the big State College; a dowager's long day theater group; and some kind of secular kiddie care with the new double learnin' and every-day-all-day option. Pure Hawaiian Coffee, by the kilo, is cached in the cupboards. Anchor Steam beer and Old Portero Whiskey  are stacked like cordwood in the halls. 
It's the New Weather now,  if'n  you believe it or not.  Spring come early this year, so if your corn ain't in, you best be dragging you Rose-o-Sharron for that great western Garden of Eden or you'll be croppin tubers afore the bowl day comes.
The official BOAC election watch season has begun....


Wednesday, January 02, 2008

An Open Letter to Iowa

There is sad absence of candidate voices that offer any real connection to a nervous America this season.  Regardless of party loyalties or economic demographics, we share a common tension this week as we watch the early polling.

Publicly we smile and show confidence in our chosen party or candidate, while privately we all mourn a light that has dimmed considerably. Iowans alone may determine who is the next President. This circumstance is a wonder to the remaining 298 million of us.  You will choose based on a campaign media onslaught the likes of which the rest of America has never seen.

But we know.

We know and we grow quiet this week as we watch and we wonder. We wonder if you even live in the same America as we do.

We wonder: Do you see through the posed Life Magazine style head-shots? We wonder, can you sacrifice a vote defined by faith in your religion, to cast a vote for a leader more likely to understand and thus protect the best interests of all Americans of all faiths? Do you parse out the shallow moments of smiling likability to see the rough insolence of effective warfighting global leadership?  Do you have the integrity to cross a line of loyalty, because you know in your heart that what is right is so distant from what is easy ? Can you look through the needle eye and distinguish a wealthy egoist from a humble honorable patriot? Will you in end vote for someone, or will you remain caught up in the storm of allegiance to party clique, and vote against  those you are now so well trained to despise? 

We offer you Iowans our hope this new year. Hope we cannot find in the embarrassment of dissemination our party machinery has become.  We drive through cities that have more cars than your entire state; more jobs; more criminals; more unemployed; more wounded veterans; more advertising signage; more poluution; more arts; more corruption; more greed; more steel; more churches and more sin than all of Iowa (and New Hampshire) combined.

We walk seashores you only see in fleeting visits and from them we watch the sun turn across a horizon shared with our allies, our rivals and our savage foes. We look across the empty place where the World Trade Center was, over a polluted bay to see Liberty's maternal host standing in darkness, shuttered by politicized fear. We watch over the parched borderlands and witness daily a human wave of (almost entirely christian) refugees from failed and failing nations to the south.

We close our eyes, and we feel sad, and we are nervous. It will be a tough year for America. It will be a tough decade. We hope you know that. We want to make certain you do know that we believe in Iowan's ability to choose, and choose well, because, for just this moment, you are all we can believe in.

Thanks for your consideration.