Jeb Bush

Why is this guy smiling?

Because “smug” is a douche bag’s favorite pose.

CNN is reporting today that “Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told an interviewer that he could not say whether or not President Barack Obama is a socialist, and that the president would not have been elected if he had been honest with Americans about his agenda.” And of course the headline is coy and noncommittal too: “Jeb Bush: ‘I don’t know’ if Obama is a socialist.”

Such douchebaggery! Let us count the ways:

1) The word “socialist” is the new “nigger” with Satan, pedophile, and pervert thrown in. It means nothing other than “an evil that maliciously seeks to harm you and your loved ones.” It takes a reasonable sentiment, “you take my house when you do take the prop that doth sustain my house; you take my life when you do take the means whereby I live,” and perverts to be used as a weapon to shut down rational debate.

2) It shuts down rational debate. This isn’t douchebaggery so much as skullduggery or typical politics. If you could manipulate power with reasonable arguments we would live in Utopia or El Dorado. It becomes douchebaggery when you do it in the interests of a few very rich people by appealing to the basest fears of very poor people. Nothing says “douche bag” like getting a woman to say “I want to be raped,” or a child to say, “I love my abusive daddy.” In the same way, it’s pure douche bag to encourage people without health insurance to say, “I deserve to die young, even though medicine could save me, because I am poor.”

It's not fair!

3) Jeb Bush doesn’t give a toss about socialism, or capitalism, or Islamism, or Christianism. He wants to be president. His mommy and daddy want him to be president. They desperately want to save the family name from the justifiable scorn of History. But Dubya completely screwed the pooch. Though it is not inconceivable that a Bush might get elected again to the presidency, it seems highly unlikely that the newly skittish Republican party will nominate a guy whose name is associated with toxic assets, failed wars, lying to the American people, and ten percent unemployment. This makes Jeb Bush mad. So he does what every douche bag in a similar situation does: he shifts the blame onto Satan. OK, by Satan I mean “socialist,” that is, “nigger,” “pedophile,” and “pervert,” anything that is inconceivably evil. You might as well throw in “Yankee,” “urbanite,” “homosexual,” “unwed mother,” “muslim,” and “French” because it’s all the same: something in the world I don’t understand whose very existence calls into question the rightness of my decisions and the truth of my worldview. It doesn’t matter how the evil operates, because the existence of the evil is only a tool to coerce people to join the group, put aside self interest and come in for the big win! And that brings me to the lesson of the day.

A douche bag is one who would destroy the group he depends on to spite the group for not making him leader. 

We all know this kid. He’s the one on the playground who wants to quit playing the game because he’s not winning. He’s all for rules, as long as the rules keep him winning. But once he starts to lose, he wants to break the rules, change them, or get rid of them all together.

Max R from Hidden Hills, CA

Who is the new face of American Douchebaggery? If you could, I would ask you to take a look at Max R from Hidden Hills, CA. Max wrote a comment on David Brooks’s latest Op Ed in the NY Times that was selected by the editors for commendation. Here is Max’s letter:

If the America that President Obama inherited is so awful that we need to change everything about it, why are people around the world trying to get here?

After reading this article, I started doing a little research. Here is a fact that I quickly uncovered about so called income inequity.

Family structure. Over time, the two-parent, one-earner family was increasingly replaced by low-income single-parent families and higher-income two-parent, two-earner families. A part of the top quintile’s increased share of income reflects the fact that the average family or household in the top quintile contains almost three times as many workers as the average family or household in the bottom quintile.

Trade and technology. Trade and technology increasingly shifted demand away from less-educated and less-skilled workers toward workers with higher education or particular skills. The result was a growing earnings gap between more- and less-educated/skilled workers.

Expanded markets. With improved communications and transportation, people increasingly functioned in national, rather than local, markets. In these broader markets, persons with unique talents could command particularly high salaries.

Immigration. In 2002, immigrants who had entered the country since 1980 constituted nearly 11 percent of the labor force (see immigration). A relatively high proportion of these immigrants had low levels of education and increased the number of workers competing for low-paid work.

These four paragraphs above are from The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics by Frank Levy. They are based on U. S. government data available to all especially the President and Congress.

It is laughable that a President that wants to promote education and hard work then presents a budget that punishes people who have done that by redistributing wealth. If more people read their background material, they would in fact find Mr. Brooks a moderate. Many people, including the investors pulling their money from the markets believe the President has gone way to far.

— Max R, Hidden Hills, CA

The eight paragraphs above are a concise distillation of douchebaggery as it was developed by douchebag philosophers from Lee Atwater to Rush Limbaugh. For any non-douchebags in the audience, let me decode it for you following Mr R’s argument paragraph for paragraph:

1. America is exceptional. The proof is immigration (see paragraph 6 to understand the full force of Max’s doucebaggery.)No matter what we do, even if it is a crime and the entire world howls about its injustice, foreigners will still want to live here. That is to say, if America does it, it can’t be wrong. (Think of Nixon’s statement in the Frost interviews that if the President does it, it’s not illegal. Now think that if the President can’t commit a crime he is above the Congress and the Courts, and now think about John Yoo and the unitary executive theory.)
2. Facts are easy to understand. They don’t require any critical thinking. That is why after only a little research you can discover the plain truth. For more on this point of view see Sarah Palin and anyone who uses the phrase “no-brainer” more than once a lifetime.
3. Families are organizations of workers. In a real family human individuals have concerns out side of creating wealth. Sometimes they want to read a book, or work in a service industry job at the mall because all their friends work there. Sometimes they don’t care as much about being an entrepreneur as they do about not getting fired. In a douchebag’s family everyone works for the douchebag, and they measure their success by his success. This goes for people not in the douchebag’s family too. They give him their labor (or money) for the honor of being close to and associated with the successful man. (See “cult of personality” from Bernie Madoff to Ronald Reagan.) 
4. Technology is the cure for what ails ya! Part of what makes America exceptional (as opposed to, say, Japan, Europe, India, and China) is our ability to create new technologies. These technologies have made us more healthy, stronger, smarter, and better than the generations who lived before us. (Never mind the spike in cancer, stress, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes for all humans but particularly for those in the advanced West.) Only losers and crybabies aren’t excited to see the new suite of Microsoft products available at Wall-Mart. People who embrace this truth become rich, and those who don’t buy into it are punished by poverty.
5. National and global markets make people rich — just take a look around! Globalization only has upsides, not downsides.
6. Immigration (NOT a part of globalization) is a situation in which poor brown people want to come to the greatest country in the world to cynically sponge off what’s left of our welfare state. Before immigration the poor brown people were imported by nascent capitalists to do back breaking, unpaid labor and then sponge off our welfare state.
7. Critical reading is for pussies. (See #2 in this list.) If someone wrote it down, and it sounds like what your dad told you, it is indubitably true. 
8.  People who do not love the flag, Ronald Reagan, and our armed forces are Socialists. That is, they want to punish the virtuous rich (who may have inherited their wealth and not worked a day in their lives) by taking their money in the form of taxes and giving it to the poor brown people in the form of a government check to assuage the Socialists’ guilty consciences. Obviously the poor brown people will spend this money on heroine and producing babies out of wedlock.

In short, douchebaggery assumes that one man — The Great White Man — was created by God in his image to organize the labor of poor people (brown people are, by definition, poor) whether they like it or not. To resist the moral authority of this pyramid of wealth creation is to commit the highest treason, worthy of death and torture. (See Ann Coulter’s remarks on Gitmo.)

Jim Geraghty Reporting: Douchebag!

Behold America! The face of a new generation of doucebags!

Jim Geraghty of the National Review has almost as many chins as his hero Rush Vinegar-and-Water Limbaugh. But that in itself isn’t enough to make him America’s Next Top Douchebag. Rather, his rhetorical stylings in the National Review earn him the Douche Scouts merit badge for baldest liar. Here’s the winning passage:

Here’s the thing: If Rush is an “addict”, then the President of the United States is a “cokehead.”

Both men have had issues with consuming mind-altering substances in violation of the law in their past; both have overcome those past experiences and gone on to lead productive and successful lives. (Rush, in fact, managed to do so while overcoming a near-miss with a loss of hearing, a torturous development for a man whose entire livelihood is in radio.)

As I’m sure Jim knows, doing a couple of lines is very different from extended use of heroine. As much as the moral(ly bankrupt) right would like to think any habitual action is addictive (I’m personally addicted to oxygen — can’t get enough), everyone knows that drinking coffee is not necessarily addictive, and it probably won’t kill you. But tell that to a devout Mormon! Your doctor (assuming you can afford one now that you’ve lost your job) will tell you more than 10 drinks a week is alcoholism, but to get you on your feet again they’ll prescribe Lexapro, an anti-depressant that requires months to wean you off should you decide to live “drug free.” (Remember the episode in To Kill A Mockingbird where the old lady had to be weaned off her painkillers — that is, heroine?)

Citizen Geraghty is pulling the oldest and lowest trick in the rhetorical book: equate two things that have a surface similarity but are profoundly different in degree as a way of minimizing the impact of the worse offense. Rush was a drug addict; Obama was not. Rush is morally corrupt because he thinks he’s above HIS OWN LAWS; Obama is forgiving because he recognizes his own weaknesses — and has overcome them. Geraghty is a douchebag — not only because he writes for the National Review (which would be cause enough), but because he can lie out of both sides of his mouth at once.

The American Douchebag is dead! Long live the American Douchebag!

American Douchebag Mark Ciavarella

I feared that in an Obama America the American Douchebag would be running to Russia or Riyadh to join their soul-mates. Fortunately for me and mah blog it was an unfounded fear. Rush stepped up to the plate just in time to show how deeply hypocritical is the American Douchebag by saying he hoped the Obama presidency would fail. If anyone of any stature had said that they hoped president Bush would fail, Rush would have been the first to send them to Gitmo to be interrogated by Jack Bauer.

• Always remember the first rule of Douchebaggery: When you do it, it’s a crime. When I do it, it’s my priviledge.

Non-douchebags have a word for this attitude: Corruption. You might also call it hypocrisy, but why dress up an old sow like Limbaugh if you don’t have to? Non-douchebags believe in fairness, equality under the law, and justice. Douchebags think might makes right.

So I am going to list — by name — the most spectacular douchebags in America and their crimes for your reading pleasure here on my blog. But my aim is not to shame a few “bad apples.” My aim is to show the world that douchebaggery is a philosophy, however incoherent, that has been around for a long time, one that has gone through some surprising changes over time, and one that has brought us to our current state of degradation, brought us to the verge of economic and political ruin, brought us back to the future of douchebaggery!

Item one on the evidence table is the curious case of Mark Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan. The right dishonorable judges from Luzern County, PA had a reputation for being tough judges. They didn’t coddle weakness, and they acted as though mercy was a “personal virtue.” In their rigor and severity they resembled others with the same douchebag philosophy. But unlike their mullah soul mates, these guys refined their douchebaggery to a level of perfection you could only find in Bush era America: They put kids in jail for money.

Imagine the scene: a slimy, overweight, mustachioed man who runs the “youth detention center” — a.k.a. for profit juvie jail — slips into Ciavarella’s office past a woman in the waiting room who is crying into a wad of tissues. He takes a seat on an overstuffed leather chair in front of the honorable judge’s desk.

“What can I do you for Bill?” says Ciavarella.

“Just here to thank you keeping the streets safe Judge.”

“That’s the role of strong government Bill.”

“And the role of private enterprise is to incarcerate the bad guys efficiently and at a low cost to the state,” says the slimy man with a smirk.

“I couldn’t agree more. How is our business venture in Florida this month?”

“We’re all making profits Mark. I think the dividend this month will be twenty thousand.”

“Good to hear Bill,” says the corrupt judge as he leafs through some of the cases on his docket: A girl accused of slandering a teacher on MySpace, a high school sophomore who took a punch at an upper-class-man who picked on him every day at lunch, a sixteen-year-old busted with a joint in the glove box of his car. He made his decisions on their incarceration in a split second — six months for the first two at Bill’s privately run detention center, a year for the last one. All of the money to house, clothe, and feed these three would come from the taxes of the childrens’ parents, and a percentage of that money would go to redecorate his kitchen.

“Well, I just wanted to stop in and say ‘hi’ and tell you about your dividend. I’ll catch you later.”

“Good seeing you Bill.”

Outside the judge’s door the mother of the young woman, who is about to lose any chance of going to a good college or getting a good job, sits and weeps. She knows Judge Ciavarella is known as the hanging judge on the juvenile circuit.

Read the rest of the story here!

American Douchebag: Rush Limbaugh

Who’s the biggest douchey bag in all America? R-U-S-H, L-I-M-B-A-U-G-H!

Do you have a not so fresh feeling in your cooter America? Flush out your plumbing with America’s premier douche, Rush Limbaugh. He’s full of vinegar and somethin’ else — what it is, don’t smell too pritty! He says ‘Bama is scared of him — hell! we’re all scared of him! Big, fat, deaf old junky as he is, you should be headed for the hills if he comes knockin’ atcher door. This is a saaaaalute! To the greatest hero of American Douchebags, Rush Limbaugh!