AN AMERICAN NIGHTMARE - FROM RUDE PUNDIT

TO RUDE PUNDIT'S BLOG

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Will Wreck Your Pathetic Ideology:


Tell you what, motherfuckers, when dead people are left to rot in the sun because of the incompetence of the federal government, when corpses are floating in the streets, when the President passively ignores the pleas of the governors of Gulf Coast states, when entire neighborhoods have been physically destroyed, when the federal government strands tens of thousands of people without food or water, when the federal government starts to blame the local governments, when the President praises the work of a failed, incompetent bureaucrat while a major city rots, then you can say that this is Barack Obama's "Katrina."

But until this happens, good, sweet conservative bags of fuck who need so desperately to drag this president down, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a corporate-created disaster, and it actually serves to demonstrate, starkly, and with a semen-like sheen, as if the ocean floor is in the midst of a prolonged sweet crude ejaculation, the utter failure of deregulation and the bullshit notion that capitalistic enterprises can police themselves when it comes to safety and environmental standards, whether it was, in this case, BP or Transocean or whoever. In other words, once again, as with so many things, this is about your ideology belly-flopping, much like, you know, when Katrina showed how years of neglect of the levees would lead to a nightmare.

So now Bobby Jindal, formerly of the "states can solve problems" crowd, is coming to the federal government with his hands out like a New Delhi beggar with leprosy. Hell, Haley Barbour already knows the routine. Bob Riley's about to discover that money from the fed ain't so bad now. Bow and scrape, assholes, as an environmental catastrophe that's coming your way is gonna destroy jobs, tourism, and wetlands.

Right now, as the Rude Pundit writes this, the booms that were set up to protect the beaches in Alabama and Mississippi are failing. They're being blown onto shore by the winds, by the waves. Dead things are washing up, too. The fishing's been halted. Pretty soon, the white, white sands, the Aryan beaches of the Redneck Riviera are going to get dingier and dingier looking, even more than when swarms of UA kids head there to vomit in the sun on spring break.

Yes, some day soon, a man with his Gulf Shores timeshare, probably a proud and loyal teabagger, will look out over his balcony during the two weeks a year he takes his family on vacation and see the bits of black that are rolling up onto the shore. And he'll wonder, even if they do everything they can, why the feds couldn't clean it up sooner. Then he'll go inside and watch Hannity or listen to Limbaugh tell him that his taxes are too high and that business, not Washington, can solve all his problems.

Notes Regarding the Feasibility of a Minor Revolution, Part 2: Embrace the Leap:

Ask any man you know who recently decided to finally come out of the closet. There's such agony in denying what you know is true, that your marriage is a sham, that your desire for a male asscozy for your cock is making you ache with desire, but you can't, alas, you just can't betray the life you've lived for so very long. Sometimes, you have to know when to leap, when to go beyond the psychological roadblocks that hinder you time and again, and you just gotta be able to seize the moment and take that leap and discover the wonders that lie over the chasm. Maybe your wife leaves you. Maybe your best friend reveals he's gay. And then you can't look over the edge. You just have to see the welcoming arms of some hung Tom of Finland pantsless biker dude awaiting you on the other side.


President Barack Obama has been handed a golden opportunity in the convergence of catastrophes that have happened on his watch. Goldman Sachs, Massey Energy, and BP have all demonstrated that the deregulation chickens have come home to roost and to shit in our nests. And here's the kick in the taint: chances are that they were all acting within the law. Even the most flagrant of the trio, Massey, used the appeals process set up on safety violations to delay and delay taking the necessary measures and paying the goddamn fines so that lives might have been saved. It was all legal, man. Let's not even get into the clusterfuck of loopholes and rules and sub-rules and what-the-fuck-ever allowed Goldman Sachs to make money by dicking over its investors and laundering the cash through a third party.

And BP? Those fuckers (and the oil rig operator, Transocean) benefited like corrupt cops at a whorehouse in the way they abused the ludicrous, worthless self-regulation system. Does the phrase "police themselves" actually have any meaning? Because, see, if the Rude Pundit were to police himself, he'd say, "Well, gee, RP, as long as you only have just a little pot, coke, and ecstasy on hand and the goat you sacrificed for the blood orgy didn't suffer much, we can overlook it all. Don't kill any people, and we're good."

Now we're learning that, because of the criminal-favoring damages-cap on lawsuits, BP may only be on the hook for $75 million in economic losses for the entire Gulf region. That's like the budget for CEO Tony Hayward's ball-waxing. Oh, no, an entire fishing industry, tourism, and marshes will be destroyed, but at least Hayward will have to live with a hairy scrotum.

Last week, the Rude Pundit posited that Americans need to have someone to hate. You can say, "Scapegoat," but that seems way too mild for the frighteningly visceral extremes in which our populace indulges its feelings towards politicians, immigrants, and So You Think You Can Dance? contestants. So we on the left need to re-direct that potent energy of the masses towards the most obvious target: corporate entities that operate without care about people, the environment, or the nation. Seems easy? No, fuck you. It's not.

Don't put on your Mao jacket yet, for there's a catch. There's always a catch, no? It has to be done in a way that can't be labeled as "socialist" or whatever word people wanna misuse these days. The method is simple, and you have to suck it up, comrades: there has to be a case for good capitalism versus bad capitalism.

What is that, you ask? And how does this involve the President? That, of course, shall be discussed in Part 3.