Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

Haven’t been here in a while. Not much to say, except this:

At some point you have to realize that this is delusional behavior. These guys have been out there so long, repeating the same tired lines over and over again, shaking hands and kissing babies. They don’t know what state they’re in until someone tells them, just before they walk up on a stage, or into a diner, or whatever propped-up common-man setting that the campaign operatives have staked out. Sleep is a memory. None of this is real.

You know that Rick Santorum convinced himself he could win—they all have at some point—but once you get a real taste of it, well, it has to be hard to let it go. Denial is everything. Head down, move forward, next state, next primary. Santorum, much like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, cannot win the Republican nomination, at least not mathematically. They have to know this. So why do they plow on?

Ron Paul has his reasons. He’s building something. It’s a years-long project, and one that may never be fulfilled, if not by his son, Rand. But he’s working on it.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is without reason. That is to say, he is unreasonable; also, unelectable and unlikable, but everyone already knows that. Profoundly. Fundamentally.

Rick Santorum, though, is somewhere else. He has a blinkered vision that allows him to only see what is necessary and what is moral and what is right. It is not uncommon in those possessed by great religiosity to be consumed to the point of delusion. It is not a prerequisite, nor is it rampant, but let’s be honest: America has its fair share of true believers. Just not enough to win a nomination.

Santorum calls himself a Catholic but he is built, as a candidate, more like an evangelical. He has a fever, and the only cure is more sermonizing. He knows what America needs. He wants to help. He thinks he can save us.

This is delusional behavior. Rick Santorum can no more save this country than he can win a general election, much less the Republican nomination. And even if he pads his totals over the next few weeks (he is currently at 278 delegates) they will not magically balloon into anywhere near what he needs them to be. It’s over. The social issues candidate has run out of time. His luck has soured. Only faith can carry him now. He is “irrelevant,” as 2008’s nominee John McCain said today; he would know.

The fact that he made it this far goes beyond any rational explanation—oh, right: Mitt Romney.

What Santorum surely does not recognize, but should, is that he was a placeholder. He was a warm body—a warm, conservative body—and he filled the role that Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann and, for a brief time, Newt Gingrich did: the anti-Mitt. The non-Romney. Other. Anyone But.

Santorum’s social conservatism carried him much further than anyone could have imagined, but it was bound to fail and it could never last: women, after all, still have the right to vote.

In a primary known for its bizarre and deranged savagery, it is now a preordained race to the very bitter end. You want to write, with pun intended, that Santorum is determined to be the last to pull out, but with the cartoonish Gingrich and batty Paul still in, the joke remains holstered. Everyone has lost their mind.

What happens next is sad. We’ll watch the slow recede and see the media turn away, as the rest of the country begins to focus on the general election. Eyes will glaze over at the sight and sound of one Willard “Mitt” Romney, fabricating profusely. And we’ll long for the reality show atmosphere that prevailed for so long, vile and entertaining as it was.

Santorum won’t know it for sure, but he’ll feel something shift underneath him, eventually. Losing in his home state of Pennsylvania, that might ring a bell.

I’m sorry but I find the protectors of child rapists preaching to women about contraception to be a moral obscenity. When all the implicated bishops and the Pope resign, ther replacements will have standing to preach.

- Andrew Sullivan

I’ve been interviewed before, as an indie rock guy or whatever, but never have I been the interviewer. Until now. Check out my interview of Mr. Grassroots, John Presta, he’s the real deal. Obama, Alinsky, and the Chicago Way, all wrapped up in one package. Kinda long, but suck it up.

The latest on the bizarro world of GOP politics:

It was just a week ago that the reality television star and fake presidential candidate was giving a visibly uncomfortable Romney the Las Vegas treatment. One can only imagine the fancy hotel room Trump set him up in, a few chips, the room service—comp’d.

How surprised was Romney when he woke up the next day and found a tiger in the bathroom?

Missing tooth or not, Mitt definitely lost something after the Trump endorsement. His dignity for sure, but also, perhaps, his standing as the frontrunner in the GOP race. Rick Santorum is the latest contestant to rise to the top of the heap after a three-state sweep last night in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado. Whatever happened in Vegas, rolled up and died there.

Read more on the Examiner here…

Not much activity here but you can still find my continuing coverage of the election season over at the Examiner. Today’s article concerned The Donald’s momentous endorsement of Mitt Romney and more:

Romney is not the glib talker that Bill Clinton was or the inspired orator that Obama is; instead there is something…odd, unnatural, disturbing…about the way he speaks. He is not the word-mangler that George W. Bush was—an unreachable bar, most likely—but Romney has a way with not having a way with words.

The ad against him will be one long string: Mitt Romney will bet you ten thousand bucks that corporations are people too and he’s not concerned about poor people but by gosh he likes to fire people, all while singing “America, the Beautiful” out of tune.

The permanent link to my articles at the Examiner can be found here.

I’ll be contributing some 2012 campaign analysis over at the Examiner, starting with this one on the debate last night:

The latest twist came in the form of a Gingrich ex-wife (no. 2) spilling the beans on Newt’s desire for an open marriage back in the late 90′s. For the record, Newt denied the story and made sure to zing the messenger, CNN’s John King, for having the gall to ask him about the day’s biggest story. The reprimand was a rare complaint by Gingrich toward the media elite—his geniality and likability are growing with each new day on the campaign trail—and King chose not to ask him whether his lofty condemnation of Bill Clinton during the impeachment trials could be considered hypocritical.

I don’t know if any more people read that site than do this one but what the hell.

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.
Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.
So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.
The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.
And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.
The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.
In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.
Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.
- THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

A quick thought about Barney Frank retiring: the descriptions of him all seem to settle on the idea that he was a bully of some sort, a gruff, brow-beating jerk who frightened everyone around him. I don’t doubt it. I certainly wouldn’t argue against it. It’s probably what made him so effective in his job. But, as much as I enjoyed his public displays of sarcastic disdain toward right-wingers and fools in general, if you asked me whether he would make for a good president my answer would be absolutely not. Furthermore, would he be remotely electable, even by half the country?

No way. Not a chance. His is not the temperament that achieves the office of the presidency. Forget that he’s gay, or Jewish, or whatever. That personality alone disqualifies him. You know it and I know it, we’re not blinded by ideological hopes and dreams. Come on!

So. It’s quite obvious, isn’t it? He is the Newt Gingrich of the left.

An old-fashioned kegger. I spent a long time last night reading posts on a Facebook group dedicated to all of the people who’ve died from our high school (a loose span of early to late 80s). There were a lot of people. Some died back then and some just recently. We’re all around or just barely in our 40s. So, that was depressing.

It’s probably unfair to kick him now but…here at The Booze Cabinet–even in times of great hiatus–we never falter in patting down the dirt gently on top of a well-deserved political grave. In this case, Mr. Cain’s. That brain-freeze on Libya topped Rick Perry’s oops moment…almost! Oh, he’ll be fine–Republicans love that shit! Here’s my impression of a GOP primary voter:

“Did you hear the stupid shit Cain said today?”

“Yeah, I did. Goddamn liberals reported it, didn’t they? I gotta contribute more money to his campaign!”

“And that Perry, he sure stepped in it, huh?”

“Oh yeah he did! Fuckin’ lamestream media. How much do you think he needs today?”

Dumb as rocks. And hilarious. But Cain, he’s smart. His show is gonna be huge on Fox next year, premiering right around election time! They’re gonna call it “9-9-9nnnnightcap with Godfather Cain.”

But I was just saying about him, that “this is a guy who would refuse to come clean on anything, a guy who would not take questions if he didn’t have to, mega-micro-managing control freak.”

Just to prove it, my man HERman canceled an interview because he didn’t want it to be taped, which would then allow people to see the stupid shit that came out of his mouth and replay it over and over. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

I regard the current actual Pope as an accessory to child-rape, as I do Paterno. But their paternal authority within religious institutions allowed them to carry on

– Andrew Sullivan

I’m glad that at least two of the people I respect have made this connection. Seemed kind of obvious to me.

I’m having a hard time masking my contempt, not only at the candidate Cain but those who support his mockery of the American political process (easy to mock, I know). I can remember why I liked Obama in the first place: he seemed reasonable. He showed signs of being sensible and knowledgeable. No small thing. He had limited experience, less than Hillary Clinton, but it was balanced by his sense of calm and intelligence (not that Clinton didn’t display similar qualities). Mostly, Obama did comport himself as an ignorant ass. Wow, what standards. Compared to most of these guys (and gals) yes, that is a useful consideration (Newt Gingrich–is there a bigger ass than he?).

These chumps, Perry, Bachmann, that dimwit Palin, they seem to revel in their ignorance and yet–that’s what garners support for them! Cain, to me, is an truly abhorrent figure, a dickish CEO with little regard for women and a proud tendency for supreme control of his surroundings. This is a guy who would refuse to come clean on anything, a guy who would not take questions if he didn’t have to, mega-micro-managing control freak. Right-wingers love that shit.

Has any recent major presidential candidate shown as little mastery of the basics, when it comes to policy matters, as Cain? He’s shown his limitations time and time again, from debates in which he can’t articulate his policy preference on Afghanistan, to his cluelessness on the so-called Palestinian “right of return,” to his contradictory stands when it comes to abortion and a willingness to trade GITMO prisoners for hostages, to his (unconstitutional) declaration that he would not appoint a Muslim to his cabinet or a federal judgeship, to his inability to defend his 9-9-9 tax plan. Yet some defenders of Cain actually celebrate his lack of knowledge, portraying it as a virtue, a sign that he’s an outsider, a non-establishment figure, authentic, the appealing anti-politician.

Well, not all right-wingers. This is Pete Wehner, a rare conservative voice of sanity (on this topic alone). But these guys on the right are loyal to a fault. What an understatement! Loyal to a fault-line. Finding self-awareness with Republicans is like retrieving a contact lens on a crowded dance floor. It never happens but once in a revolving disco ball ecstasy-fueled blue moon.