Anthropology alert

Those who are interested in the everyday life of the average red state citizen should read this New York Times story about an upstanding Republican D.A. in Texas. See him prosecute drug users. See him inject himself with methamphetamine before his secretary. See his secretary turn him into the feds. See his ex-wife, interviewed at the Yellow Rose in Dallas, tell of finding crack, cocaine, marijuana and various other drugs around the house or in the barn during their Christian marriage to each other. See how his drug use, alcoholism, and racism were known before he was elected to the D.A. position. Here’s a swatch of dialogue that is pure Bush culture:


“Four years later Mr. Roach [the D.A.] beat Mr. Mann by 6 votes in a Republican primary marred by charges of fraud, and then beat him again - by 21 votes - after a court ordered a new election. He went on to win the general election.

Mr. Mann said the voters were chiefly swayed by Mr. Roach's highly popular family, particularly his stepfather, Weldon Trice, a beloved high school football coach.
Mrs. Roach said their lives slid badly downhill in late 2003. She found glass smoking or snorting implements, foil packets with a burn hole, and white powder and a razor blade in their barn and spied on her husband sniffing something.

Mr. Roach said of his downfall, "It just presented itself."

He said that in July 2004 he had come across a glass pipe that Texas troopers had overlooked in searching a seized car. "A girl called it a crack pipe, so I assumed there was crack in it," he said. He took it home. "I happened to be having a bad day, so I smoked it in the barn," he said.”

And talking about those bad days – how about those projected deficits? The WP had a cute story about what it will take, when Bush leaves office in 2009, to mitigate the effects of having poured some trillion into the pockets of the pirate class, aka the rich and the super-rich, looted the social security system, destroyed environmental protection, and of course engaged in the mass murder of Iraqis and the correlative murder of some thousands of American soldiers. It turns out that these fine things cost more than pocket change

“If Congress were to pass Bush's Social Security plan and permanently extend his tax cuts, the budget deficit would bottom out at $251 billion in 2008, then climb steadily to $335 billion by 2015, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and the House Budget Committee's Democratic staff. Those figures assume, however, that Bush will secure all of his proposed spending cuts, that he will need no more emergency war spending and that there will be no changes to the alternative minimum tax, which Bush and other politicians want to rewrite to keep it from affecting more middle-class families in coming years. The AMT originally was designed to make sure wealthy people couldn't avoid paying some taxes.

With a fix to the AMT, deficits in a decade would likely reach $650 billion to $700 billion, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). "The days of being everything to everybody are quickly coming to a close," he said, adding that a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts would make it politically impossible to borrow the full cost of a Social Security fix. "We have to look at the deficit in a holistic way."

Not factoring in the cost of the war is decent of them – but you know, when you throw a barbecue, you have to buy the steaks. So throw in an extra 200 billion, and you do get a cool trillion deficit. That is a thing of beauty in itself. The question is: will the free ride be over? For the swarming imbeciles who inhabit the red states, itchy to vote for any Christian jihadist to come along, have experienced that sweetness of life that comes with buying binges at the mall and repeated viewings of The Passion, the pills from the internet and the spiritual advice from the infomercial which makes up their inner and outer lives up to now. They have their maxed out credit cards and their tax refunds and their medicare and their social security coming together in a nice harmonic convergence, keeping the housing activity bubbling in suburban Atlanta and Birmingham, and providing the comfortable conditions in which they can take time off and debate the real questions, like designing a school curriculum to maximize the cretinization of their children. However, will the Goths be waking up, in a few years, to discover that the good times are over? And what will they do, since they do control the government and will for the foreseeable future?

This is something blue state progressives should take seriously. Now is the time to slash taxes on the federal level; to radically lower Fica, to make sure that nobody in America who makes under one hundred thousand dollars is sending more than five to ten percent of that money to the Federal Government. Time to wake up and shift the onus of taxation to the states, since we see what the bozos in the Federal Government are doing and will be doing with that money, and it is nothing progressive. We see the Niagra ahead, and the ship of state, aka le bateau ivre, heading for it.

Mostly likely, there will be no waking up, and we will go over the edge with the milksap Dems wringing their hands and talking about moral values. However, lets try to be optimistic and envision, from Massachussetts to California, the blue states setting up their own social welfare networks, unplugging from the Snopes. Yes, let the Goths hunker down in their uncouth conclaves to untangle the knots of creationism, as is their wont, while their odious representatives in Washington make sure that they become, en masse, indentured servants of the credit card companies. The South has always had a fondness for indentured servitude...