Lovely Beef

I have several definitions of mendacity. One is "wolf cookies". Another is "bat guano". Another -which I am given to in sudden extreme circumstances - is my "Ahhhh...AAAhhhh...BULLSHIT!" sneeze. I've been sneezing a lot lately...

This morning, like most Saturdays, I woke up with the full intent of chillin' online, checking out the prices on the drapes I plan on buying at JCPenney's, watching the weather, chatting with my online friends. I thought that today was a good day to investigate recipes that involve raspberries or strawberries with chocolate, too. It just felt like a fruit-and-chocolate day... having a freezer full of fruit and a shelf of hard-candied and liquid chocolate is comforting. I buy supplies twice a year now, and knowing what I have on hand, and that I can make anything without running to a store, is kinda fun. It was not to be.

I had forgotten that today was the much-touted "Restore Honor" rally in Washington DC. I had a friend send me a live link to it. So I watched. As usual, there were hundreds of thousands of people there - and little media. The MainStream Media likes to pretend that the Tea Partiers and conservatives are small in number, sorta like Jim Jones' adherents or Branch Davidians - just a bunch of kooks who will immolate themselves, or eventually do something stupidly illegal so that they are immolated. I know that they are much more. And what they are should sink dread and fear into any unemotional observer.

Because, you see, much like the AntiWar movement, the Martin Luther King movement, any social movement that stirs hearts and minds, the Tea Partiers have been co-opted. Co-opted by snake-oil salesmen like Glenn Beck, a heretofore unknown who vented spleen and spittle on staunch Constitutionalists as little as two years ago. People like Sarah Palin, who supported John McCain - McCain, who intentionally used her as "th' woman" in his campaign, who is a friend of LaRaza and a notorious two-faced liar. Sarah started out as a maverick and ended up as a mouthpiece for the status-quo neo-conservatives. These two, and many others like them, have worked tirelessly to deny the stark realities that are staring millions in their faces - the realities of job losses, home losses, doubled taxes, increased costs, deflation and inflation that are eating their homes, families, and pocketbooks alive. A bunch of soothing wolf cookies and bat guano spread over the deeply passionate and unthinking masses, who lap it up like chocolate.

While the Tea Party movement started as a virulent protest against a two-party, entitlement-minded oligarchy, it has been neutered and soothed by the neo-cons into believing that the Democrats are the Evil Ones, that only a return to a Republican, religion-based oligarchy can save them. The names will change, but the thievery will remain.

We did the same thing to our bull calf last week. We already have a herd bull, thick-muscled and strong, black as night, hung like - well, a bull - who carries three colors and is naturally polled (dehorned) to breed cows that will be of different colors, but of strong lineage and polled as well. Our bull is going to be our herd bull for many years to come; he has already enthusiastically mounted the cows we bought with him after the cows gave birth to two lovely (and unrelated) calves - a bull and a heifer. A rampant and handsome, born to breed, well-hung young bull was one too many bulls in the paddock - so we banded his testicles and 'nutted', 'steered' him - whatever suits your delicate sensibilities. We will keep him tame, calm him, fatten him, and butcher him when he is full-grown and weighted. You have to do this when you are trying to maintain a line of specificity; the breed traits the bull calf carried (horned, small female udders, only two colors) were not what we wanted to continue in our herd. He will make some lovely beef, though.

And that is what the neo-cons have done to the Tea Partiers; they have seduced them with soft lies, petted and stroked them, lured them into the stalls, flipped them over and slipped bands of glorified promises onto their balls, then turned them loose among the herd, to mouth their platitudes until their balls atrophy and drop off. Then they are ripe for the butchering; the herd bulls will continue their own lineage, undaunted by and ignoring the ball-less, ignorant steers who walk briefly among them, mooing helplessly and ineffectually for their own place at the hay bales.