Paging Bob Hoskins

By J. Thomas Duffy

Boy, if the PartyofNoicans think this is their idea of a tough guy, no wonder they are so clueless. 

House Republicans Psyche Themselves Up By Watching Ben Affleck Prepare To Beat Some Guys Up 

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the party’s vote counter, began his talk by showing a clip from the movie, “The Town”, trying to forge a sense of unity among the independent-minded caucus.

One character asks his friend: “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later.”

“Whose car are we gonna take,” the character says.

After showing the clip, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the most outspoken critics of leadership among the 87 freshmen, stood up to speak, according to GOP aides.

“I’m ready to drive the car,” West replied, surprising many Republicans by giving his full -throated support for the plan.

The actual line from the scene is “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. We’re gonna hurt some people.”

I mean, he's an okay actor, and they're referring to his role in The Town, but he's probably more defined by Jersey Girl than being a tough guy.

If you want a real tough guy, someone to put the fear of Jesus into you, then you gotta go with Bob Hoskins in the very underrated 1979 gem The Long Good Friday (whose cast also included the great, and gorgeous, Helen Mirren). 

"The mafia? I've shit 'em!" - Long Good Friday final scene


Note, at the very end, the unknown rookie Pierce Brosnan playing a heavy. 

Actually, it might do us all better if Obama effected a little Hoskins: 

"I'll tell you something... I'm glad I found out in time just what a partnership with a pair of wankers like you would have been... A sleeping partner is one thing, but you're in a fucking coma..." 

(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

West world

By Capt. Fogg

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, many of the ugliest Republicans told us that Democrats were "playing the race card" a mawkish cliché which means, I think, falsely accusing them of the racism they do really espouse. In other words, talking anal cysts like Limbaugh were having their pearls of wisdom denounced by the "politically correct" because you can't criticize a black man these days without being called a racist. It's a cheap dishonorable gambit, but like counterfeit money, it can be passed off on an uncritical populace.

An uncritical, astigmatic, angry and greedy American public seems to have had another bit of counterfeit money passed off it. Allen West, the Republican Congressman from the 22nd Congressional District right here in Florida, land of snakes, lizards, Teaturds, pollution and poisonous toads -- Allen West, one chromosome short of a tape-worm, says in his blog:

"I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

Well isn't that special? Indeed it's the one feature of that pretentious Club of Fools that keeps it in business: it allows the mentally under-endowed, cognitively incontinent circus clowns to challenge their betters and to assault us with ideas that don't hold water nearly as well as a worn out douche bag. The giggle gallery in the back of the class, mocking the teacher.

Indeed West, speaking from his teabag-buttressed platform of arrogated biological superiority seems to be of an intellect too limited to have noticed the irony of a black man appealing to the snobbery of the uneducated, ill-informed, probably stupid and definitely angry whites, and offering soothing delusions of genetic superiority in a grotesque parody of white supremacists from Montgomery to Munich. But then, when has any American been too stupid and dishonest to be someones hero?

There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men and there is an armada of those now afloat on that full sea of hate, not only using it for their own purposes but seeking to make it rise further until it drowns the land. Allen West is such a man, a man whom under ordinary circumstances would be a nobody, a flyblown bit of flotsam in a stagnant pool; but because of this tidal wave of fury, he can pretend to be a battleship and his flatus a volley of cannon. He can twist, misuse, misquote and invent, he can put on the white-face and wear a red tie, He can grin like Uncle Tom and mock like a monkey, but while honesty is within reach of all, what he pretends to is not.

Women from Planned Parenthood and the activist group Code Pink "have been neutering American men" he says and making them weak. West tells us this with his genetically based intellect still unaware of Dr. Strangelove and bodily fluids. Perhaps he himself is having problems with his manhood and this talk of virility and gene pools tells a cover story. Perhaps his politics serve as verbal Viagra for the intellectually impotent Representative. But I don't need to postulate such questions, the doctored Obama bumper sticker with the hammer and sickle tell us the whole, sick, sad, disgusting tale. Allan West is a whore. Allen West is Count Dracula's rat-eating Renfield, Allan West is a liar. Allen West, and for reasons probably too disgusting to contemplate, is trying to ruin everything good about the United States of America. So what do I do when I see that sticker? You don't want to find out.

The president, despite all appearances and lack of opposition to corporate abuse and capitalist excess is a "low-level socialist agitator" reciting "Marxist demagogic rhetoric." Is West describing himself again, or is he just grabbing bits from the instruction manual like a tent-meeting preacher with his mouth full of Jesus and a mind full of money? Obama is a Communist to the extent that John D. Rockefeller was a Communist and Bernie Madoff was a capitalist.

No, this high water mark of anti-government anger that produces foul and foetid things like Allen West and the Tea Party has little to do with genetics and everything to do with our national ignorance and our manufactured delusions; both fed and cultivated by the people who reap benefits in their billions and trillions by subverting the values of civilization and setting the dogs on the ever expanding masses. It's an old story, but in our new version, not all the dogs have four legs.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Craziest Republican of the Day: Allen West

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He wasn't being crazy when he was criticizing Newt Gingrich for proposing the return of "poll tests," but he's generally one of the craziest and most extreme Republicans around, and he's been at the crazy again in recent days attacking President Obama over Israel:

In West's typical hyperbole, he said [Obama's] speech was the "beginning of the end" of Israel and mysteriously accused Obama of giving Islamists a "Pavlovian-style" reward. But in a statement quoted by the Broward County New Times [on Wednesday], West took things further than any Republican lawmaker yet, invoking Hitler and accusing Obama of "nefarious" intent toward Jews:

In reviewing history, I would say Sir Neville Chamberlain was naive in his negotiations with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. However, when one examines the state of affairs in the Middle East, including the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation pact, increase of rocket/mortar attacks from Gaza, the definitive Hamas Charter statement vowing the destruction of Israel, and the Hamas condemnation of America for killing Osama bin Laden... I cannot attribute this incompetent statement to naivete, but rather to conscious, nefarious, and malicious intent.

Of course, this is "an ignorant or intentionally dishonest interpretation of Obama's speech and the facts of the Middle East situtation." (And, yes, he spells Hitler's name incorrectly.)

And it is simply ridiculous, if predictable from the likes of West, to suggest that Obama is anti-Israel, or that suggesting, as Obama did, that the pre-1967 borders be taking as a starting point for negotiations signals an opposition to Israel's very existence. As the New Times explains:

Obama never once said Israel ought to withdraw to its "pre-1967" borders. He said that the division of land between Israel and a future Palestinian state would take the 1967 borders as a template and would be modified by land swaps. The words "pre-1967" never passed his lips. (In his speech, Obama also roundly decried Fatah's association with Hamas. West doesn't mention this, presumably because it would tarnish Obama's new image as the Jew Killer In Chief.)

How Obama's cautious, conservative stance on Israel is "unconscionable" is anyone's guess. It's precisely the approach advocated by every American president for a generation. The only way Obama's prescription is "unconscionable" is if a two-party solution is itself "unconscionable" -- which West firmly believes. Yet, like Obama's statements of unyielding support for Israel's security and his condemnation of Hamas, this goes unmentioned in his remarks.

And so you see, West is anti-Obama but also anti-Palestinian, and so he's attacking Obama, and doing so by lying about what the president actually said and actually supports, for working towards a sustainable peace in the region that includes not just a secure Israel but a Palestinian state that is itself similarly secure in its territory -- and not just "peace" on Likudnik Israel's terms, a "peace" that would allow Israel to keep all the post-1967 land it occupies.

A genuine peace agreement will require concessions on both sides. Obama knows that. But West, like Netanyahu, and like many in the American pro-Israel lobby, refuses to compromise, or to concede anything at all, which he crazily likens to appeasing Hitler. And that means he opposes peace, or at least that he doesn't give a damn about the Palestinians. Given his history of scapegoating Muslims, it's hardly surprising that that's the case.

(photo - with more on West's craziness)

Newt Gingrich makes Allen West look good

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It really does take a lot to make right-wing Tea Party Rep. Allen West (R-FL) look good, but The Newt did just that by calling for the return of so-called "poll tests" and thereby allowing West, a black man, to point out, rightly, that such tests were used to deny the vote to blacks during the Jim Crow era:

THINK PROGRESS: Over the weekend, presidential contender Newt Gingrich came out and said he'd like to see some sort of poll test, throwing out the idea that maybe voters ought to have a certain standard knowledge of American history in order to be able to vote. What are your thoughts on that?

WEST: That's going back to some times that my parents had to contend with... I think that we need to do a better job educating our young men and women in school, but we don't need to have a litmus test, no.

West may be an anti-Muslim bigot, but he's certainly not a self-hating racist. Give him that at least.

And as for Gingrich, well, his utterly appalling proposal speaks for itself. He's supposedly an historian. And apparently he'd like to return to an ugly time in American history to make sure that "undesirables" (to him and the GOP) can't vote.