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Corporate Corruption

Being America Costs More

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Did anyone watch 60 Minutes on Sunday? If you missed it, you can watch the clip that supercharged my bitchiness here. I thought I was going to watch a clip on how US corporations use overseas tax havens to get out of paying their fair share of taxes. What I instead saw, was a propaganda piece about how the US should lower corporate taxes in order to keep jobs in America.

Oh where to start expressing my rage?

First of all, jobs will continue to leave the US as long as we have higher human rights standards. As long as we insist on safe, fair working conditions, labor will be cheaper in other places. So if you want to keep jobs in America you would have to turn employees into wage slaves, desperate to earn money in any condition. That’s what the union busting epidemic is about, but that’s another topic. As long as we have laws that protect the worker, we’re going to have higher labor rates. Period, end of story. If you want to keep jobs here, you’re going to have to be prepared to work side by side with your ten year old child for twelve hours a day.

Now that we have one implausible, bullshit argument down, let’s move to the other inane point made in this piece.

For this piece, 60 Minutes interviewed the CEO of Cisco. I give him credit for doing the interview, but everything he said was fucking ridiculous. He was talking about businesses moving to Ireland and Switzerland because they have more “reasonable” corporate tax rates. And he went onto caution the US government that it was driving businesses away by having high tax rates. Honestly, I can’t believe this douchecanoe runs a company. I would expect that a person who runs a company would have more business savvy that this. Okay, that’s not true. I actually have come to expect that people that run companies are know-nothing asshats that inherited their lot in life through luck of birth. But I didn’t always have such bitchy, low expectations of CEOs. They drove me to my low opinion of them by saying stupid shit like, “The US better lower its tax rate, or we’re going to leave.”

Here’s the deal, Switzerland and Ireland can have lower tax rates because the US is taking care of their high ticket item in terms of their countries’ budget. We essentially provide defense for all of Europe. They don’t have to spend as much on defense because we do. Does anyone honestly think that Ireland is prepared to defend themselves in a war with another country? No, of course not! Because if Ireland ever gets attacked, the US will jump right in to defend them. Why do you think the Italians or the French aren’t really leading the Libyan mission? Because the lack the tactical and operational capabilities that the US has. Like it or not, we have the strongest military in the world because we spend exponentially more of our GDP on defense than anyone else does.

Am I in love with this situation? No, but that’s how it is. We are the world’s military. And as long as that’s the case, being America just fucking costs more. Deal with it.

These asshat American CEOs who are oblivious to that fact need to bitch slapped repeatedly until they’re cured of their stupid. In their childish fantasy world, they get to drive around in a Ferrari that they paid Hyundai prices for. Idiots! Honestly, just when I’m thinking that politicians are the dumbest people in America, a CEO pipes up to disprove me.

We essentially have two options for keeping jobs in America, according to our CEOs. We can either go back to the days of treating our workers like shit in order to maximize profits, or we can seriously reduce our biggest expenditures; defense, medicare, and medicaid. The latter two go back to treating our citizens like garbage. All three would put us on a fast (er) track to giving up our position as leaders of the free world.

Is that what these idiot CEOs want? For America to become devolve? No, I don’t believe they do. I just believe that they’re incapable of seeing past the next dollar in earnings.

Being the leader of the free world isn’t cheap. And we’ve spent the last thirty years dropping corporate taxes, and taxes on the super fucking rich enough to have a pretty good idea of where the threshold is for revenue that we need to generate in order to maintain our position in the world.

The smartest thing that Obama can do right now, is to lower corporate taxes. Yes, you heard that right. He needs to lower corporate taxes, but he also needs to make the new rate a flat tax. If he took the corporate tax rate down to a flat 28% and eliminated all right offs, we would bring in more revenue. And it would be a win, because republicans wouldn’t have an argument to make against lower taxes. Right now, US corporations pay around 6.6% of total revenues. That’s just not enough to keep America, America.

Being America just fucking costs more than being anyone else.


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Expensive And Ineffective

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That’s republicanism in a nutshell. Expensive and ineffective describes every aspect of the republican party, but I want to focus on one specific area for this post. Union busting.

Everyone is hip to the fact that the union busting efforts by republican governors all across the country aren’t about balancing state budgets. They’re about eviscerating the democratic party. Everyone knows that with a few exceptions, the lion’s share of corporate political contributions are made to republicans, and the lion’s share of union contributions go to democrats.

A little bit of simple math, coupled with some common sense (there I go with my sunny optimism again) will tell you that the corporate contributions are significantly larger than the union contributions. Union membership in America is 12.3%. That’s if you add up all of the private sector and public sector union members. Unions ostensibly raise their political contribution money from a percentage of dues paid by that 12.3% of workers. Workers that, by the way, earn an average of 59k a year. Corporate contributions come from diverting profits to political contributions. US corporations are at this moment, sitting on two trillion dollars in cash reserves. It’s obvious where the bigger trough of money lies.

These union busting efforts are aimed at drying up the union money to political contributions. You know what that tells me? It tells me that it costs a fucking fortune to get people to buy republican. And for all of the money that’s being spent on selling republicanism, it’s still not working.

In yesterday’s post, I shared a poll that shows that most Americans would take a much more “liberal” approach to balancing our budget than our government will actually take. We see that while republican governors across the country are cutting money for education, Americans would increase the education budget. We see that Americans are willing to raise taxes on both themselves and the filthy rich.

Poll after poll shows that most Americans have “liberal” opinions on domestic issues from abortion, to gun purchasing requirements, to education and gay marriage (that poll moves more and more liberal every year). The only domestic issue where Americans skew “right”, is on the death penalty. We still have a blood lust for revenge, apparently. Most Americans aren’t interested in invading or occupying other countries. The Bush administration had to employ a major shock doctrine offense in order to get Americans on board with Iraq, and even that didn’t last more than five years. The majority of us are not interested in the neocon porn fantasy of world domination.

We are liberal on most issues, despite the shit load of cash that is being spent on selling republicanism, and making “liberal” a dirty word.

On top of the corporate contributions, there’s billions of dollars invested in a giant right wing propaganda machine. There’s Fox News, where Rupert Murdoch was happy to lose money for six years before he ever saw a dime of profit. There’s Rasmussen, a right wing polling outfit that exists so that right wing radio and Fox News can quote “data”. There’s the right wing think tanks like Cato and Heritage whose only purpose is to again, feed right wing media with lies that they can cite, thereby validating each other.

I’ve driven through cities where, when flipping through the AM dial, I’ve come across Rush Limbaugh on three different stations. Three stations carrying the same program? Why would any radio station in America carry the same programming as a competing station in the same market? Because the right wing think tanks are buying up all of the advertising on those programs, in order to ensure that those programs are all that Americans have access to. That system is finally starting to fall apart. Right wing talkers are being pulled from radio stations all across the country, finally. Nobody is fucking listening anymore.

We have a really fucking big, really fucking expensive machine trying to crank out republicans in America. But that machine is failing to accomplish it’s task. You can’t throw enough money at Americans to convince them to want to legislate’s a woman’s uterus. You can’t throw enough money at Americans to convince them to hate people for being gay (anymore). You can’t throw enough money at Americans to convince them that workers should give up their right to organize.

And you know what? The right wing corporate interests know they’re losing. That’s why they’re making a concerted effort to bust the unions. They need to make sure that no money goes to liberal voices, so that they can buy themselves a little bit more time. You think that all of these republican governors suddenly all, independently decided to launch an attack against the unions in their state? No, it’s obviously a coordinated effort. Republicanism is going to collapse. It’s just a matter of time.

Let me be clear, when I say that republicanism is going to collapse, I’m not referring to conservatism. Republicans went horribly wrong when they walked away from every single tenet of conservatism. Republicanism isn’t about smaller government. It’s about big giant government, picking your pocket at every turn.

The tea party emerged as a backlash to republicanism. It had the right idea when it started, but it went horribly wrong when the movement was taken over by Dick Armey and the Koch brothers. But I believe that true conservatives will eventually take the tea party back. Yes, I realize that I just gave the tea party some credit but I am a sunny optimist! Oh, and I look at polls.

Americans don’t want what the oligarchs want and it’s just a matter of time before they can’t fool us anymore.

Americans are not prospering the way they were in the past. And even the most politically disengaged American knows that something is horribly wrong. I think that what we’re seeing in Wisconsin is just the beginning. And I believe that defeating Scott Walker will serve as inspiration to make us realize that we do have all of the power. We just need to use it.

There is not enough money in the world to keep the robber barons in our good graces for much longer. They’re going to have to keep throwing more and more money at the problem, just to buy themselves another month, year, maybe five. But it’s all going to fall apart eventually.

And this isn’t about political parties. Obama’s approval ratings have stayed unimpressive because Americans aren’t seeing the sweeping change they were hoping for.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a democrat or a republican. Americans are going to turn on any politician that supports republicanism. The machine overplayed its hand in Wisconsin. I believe that we’re watching the beginning of the end of republicanism.

I say good riddance. I want to go back to the days of debating conservative and liberal ideas. This oligarch diversion has been bad for all of us. It’s time to move on.

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You’ll Get Groped Because Of The Money, Lebowski

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I’m traveling over the holiday, so my impending TSA grope is naturally on my mind. But before I share my views on our current state of airport molestation, I need to express my thoughts on each step that led up to this.

In the year immediately following 9/11, airport security understandably tightened considerably. I happened to have been flying a lot in the two years after 9/11. While I understood the need for tightened security, I could not understand the way we went about it. Four security check points were set up from the airport entrance to the gate. This might have made sense if the idea was to stagger the step at which everyone’s bags were screened, but that’s not how it went. I happen to have a middle eastern looking last name (probably because I’m Iranian). I don’t look middle eastern. In fact, I get mistaken for Latino, more often than not. For every single flight that I took for two years, I was “randomly selected” for “extra screening” upon showing my driver’s license. This might not have been completely nonsensical, were it not for the way it was done. I was “selected” at each of the four checkpoints between the entrance and the gate so my bag was checked four times while the other two hundred people boarding my flight carried on bags that were never checked. It was an inane and inefficient system that, in my estimation made us less “safe”.

Let me just say that I’m not opposed to racial profiling. Let me explain what I mean by that, before your head explodes. I am not opposed to scientific methods being used by trained intelligence professionals, in order to determine who merits spending our precious little resources to take a closer look at. When done correctly, racial profiling is an invaluable tool in preventing terrorism. For example, any twenty-something year old male coming in and out of the country from Yemen should be looked at by our intelligence agencies. That person is in the most likely group of people to be radicalized, and their frequent travel to the US merits taking a close look at what they’re up to. At the time of 9/11, there was predominantly one kind of terrorist; middle eastern men in their twenties.

If I’m boarding a plane in 2002 and there’s a twenty-something middle eastern man boarding my flight, I want him checked. Call me an asshole, but that’s whose bag I want checked. I don’t want the old Asian woman “specially screened” because in the history of terrorism, there has never been a seventy year old Chinese woman recruited to bomb shit. Screening her is a waste of time and resources, and the political correctness makes me less secure.

Another thing I don’t want, is to have the same bag checked four fucking times. I don’t care if the person holding that bag is in the “terrorist demographic”. When you check that guys bag four times, you’re telling me and the world that you’re fucking incompetent and you’re making me less secure.

I definitely don’t want a TSA screener profiling anyone. We’re talking about tasking someone that falls into the “unskilled labor” category with keeping our country safe. That’s just batshit crazy. These people make $27,000 a year (I know this because I spent 4 months in 2002 recruiting them), may or may not have high school diplomas, and have a grand total of two days of training for their jobs. These are not intelligence professionals. These are blue collar workers. Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against blue collar workers. I’m opposed to giving blue collar workers the type of authority and autonomy that an intelligence professional has earned by investing time in obtaining an education and years training for their job. There’s a reason why we don’t make brilliant recent college grads CEOs right away. Despite their brilliance, they still need years of experience before they’re ready to run a company.

Profiling at the airport would have been understandable for a finite period of time right after 9/11. We were scrambling to improve our national security systems immediately following the biggest terrorism attack in US history. A certain amount of running around like headless chickens would have been understandable. But ten years later? That’s fucking crazy. If your terrorist has made it to the airport, you’ve already failed at keeping the country safe. Terrorism is effectively thwarted by intelligence and policing. Identifying potential terrorists and monitoring their activities before they get to the point of executing their plans is how you stop them.

We had enough credible intelligence on many of the 9/11 hijackers to indicate that they were suspicious. We failed to follow up on that intelligence. We had plenty of red flags go up on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomber) that we failed to follow up on. The man’s father warned us about him, for fucks sake! In both of these cases, the terrorist should and could have been stopped before ever getting near an airport.

I’m not saying that securing our airports isn’t a necessary part of the equation. It is. But what we’re doing is idiotic. We need to follow the Israeli model of airport security. Here is a great article describing Israeli airport security. They don’t have the long lines and asinine procedures that we do. They don’t have a humiliating and invasive screening process. And they don’t have terrorists boarding their planes.

So why is the American approach so ass backward? Are we stupid or incompetent? Neither (well, not entirely). It’s about the money, Lebowski. We’re geing groped and humiliated because a few people are making a lot of money doing it to us. Michael Chertoff, our barely adequate former head of homeland security is among those making a tidy little profit on this whole deal. He, like everyone else that leaves government, saw an opportunity to make a shitload of money in the private sector so he started the Chertoff Group ten minutes after leaving his government job. The Chertoff Group is a “security consulting firm”. What does he mean by “security consulting firm”? He means, lobbyist for Rapiscan – you know, the company that got paid twenty-five million dollars to install full body scanners in our airports.

He’s not alone. There are dozens of former government officials vying for the hundreds of millions of dollars that are up for grabs in the airport security money trough. Are any of them interested in securing our country in the most effective possible way? No. They’re interested in the money, Lebowski. And how about the government officials that are awarding the big contracts to keep us “safe”. Are they interested in securing our country in the most effective possible way? No. They’re interested in the high paying lobbying job that’s waiting for them after they “award” a company a giant contract.

Our political system is so fucked up that it’s destroying our standing in the world, our economic stability, our national security, and our crotches.

I’m sorry, but if my being groped has to become a profit center, I should be the one making the profit. I should be able to set my terms and my price. And I should be able to pick my own gropers.

Right now I’m a $5 hand job crack whore with a pimp that takes every cent that I make. What do I get in exchange? His assurances that he’s just looking out for me. I just melt every time he whispers, “I’ll take care of you, baby. You’re my #1 ho” in my ear.

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Irrational Greed

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There’s no such thing. I know that you think there is, but there isn’t.

John Kerry docking his boat in another state in order to save $70,000 in taxes. Taxes that incidentally, would  go to pay for initiatives he supports in his own state. I feel fairly comfortable in assuming that he and his wife’s annual capital gains dwarf that $70,000.

Martha Stewart committing the crime of insider trading so that she can make $250,000. Again, I feel very comfortable in assuming that she “earns” more that $250,000 a year in capital gains.

Every single bank executive in America paying themselves record bonuses, while collecting tax payer dollars to save the very institutions that they’re taking those bonuses from. And they did this, all the while knowing how loathsome the world would find them to be.

Charlie Rangel, committing ethics violations that put his re-election at risk (he will get re-elected, by the way), by not reporting rental income from several properties on his income taxes. Charlie, if you can afford to buy multiple properties in two countries, you can afford to pay taxes on the money that those properties generate!

BP not investing $500,000 to make sure they drill in a “safe” way, so that they don’t have to pay out billions of dollars in damages and costs to clean up a huge spill.

Massey energy not investing a few hundred thousand dollars in keeping their mines safe so that their workers don’t die, and they don’t have to pay out millions of dollars in damages.

I can go on and on in listing people taking unnecessary risks to save or obtain money that they don’t need, but you get the point.

Think I’m disproving my own point? Bear with me, I’m about to get there.

The sheer volume of these occurrences committed by people across such a diverse political and social spectrum is proof that greed isn’t irrational. It’s an inherent part of the human condition.

Time and time again, we see people and corporations take unwise and illegal risks to save or earn money that they don’t need. The only conclusion that can be made is that greed isn’t irrational. It’s normal. And the only thing preventing most of us from being excessively greedy, is the lack of opportunity.

Why the hell is Bitchy pontificating human nature on her political blog? Because I’m making the point that libertarians, republicans, conservatives, teabaggers, and Milton Friedmanites are complete idiots.

Trickle down economics is a childish philosophy that completely discounts human nature.

When rich people get tax breaks, they take that money and turn it into more money whether they need it or not. They save it, and they stockpile it. When the poor or middle class get a tax break, they spend that money thereby creating more jobs.

I’m sick and tired of hearing the Friedman philosophy. It’s stupid on its face, and it makes me Bitchy. And when I get bitchy, the only relief I can find lies in calling you for the idiot that you are for perpetuating such an obviously disprovably myth.

Stop advocating for the people that have the means and opportunity to be greedy, and adopt some greed for yourselves. They (like me) think you’re dumbfucks for supporting them anyway.


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Corporate Dumbitude

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I use the word dumbitude because corporations today are dumb. And to rub salt in the wound, they’re dumb with a really smug attitude.

Since America is essentially a corporate owned entity at this point, we have been dragged down to a level of unspeakably dumb.

Look at how BP is dealing with the oil volcano in the gulf. Dumb. They have no fucking idea how to stop the geyser from spewing millions of barrels of oil into the gulf. Six weeks into this nightmare, and they’re using the same ineffective techniques that failed forty years ago in this situation. Rachel Maddow did a great segment highlighting this a couple of nights ago. It’s not just BP. It’s the oil industry at large. It’s obvious that in the past fifty years, these assholes haven’t invested a single dime in developing ways to deal with potential disasters. Their R&D investment has been limited to figuring out innovative ways to get to oil that they were unable to get to in the past. So now we have a situation where the world is watching massive amounts of oil filling up the gulf of Mexico. We’re all watching in disgust and horror. And as our disgust brews, our appetite for offshore oil drilling is evaporating.

Dumb move, oil industry. BP isn’t the only oil company working on this in the gulf right now. They’ve all got engineers working with BP to try and plug this thing up because they know that every day that this continues, our disdain for the industry grows. Thank you Congressman Ed Markey for making sure that the public has access to a live video stream of what’s happening in the gulf. Having access to that video ensures that our vitriol won’t dissipate anytime soon.

Not spending money on safety measures or R&D to figure out effective ways to deal with oil spills is dumb because it will cut into long term profits. It’s dumb because each time one of these oil disasters happens, our appetite for alternative energy grows. We may forget this incident and keep going the way we were, but maybe the next one will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I don’t know how many more of these need to happen before we get there, but we WILL get there.

The part that really incenses me in this whole thing, is listening to the smug CEO. He honestly still believes in his own brilliance. He thinks he’s brilliant because his accounts payable department is at this very moment, cutting giant contribution checks to every single United States congressman and senator. Mary Landrieu has had to hire several new staff members, just to carry bags of cash from BP’s offices to hers. He thinks he’s brilliant because he will contribute a weeks worth of BP’s profits to politicians, who will then in turn, limit BP’s liability from hundreds of billions of dollars to hundreds of millions. It will be a smart investment on his part. He will literally be paying pennies on the dollar on what this should cost BP. That doesn’t make him brilliant. It makes him a bully. And this strategy may work this time. It may even work for the next couple of times, but the public eventually will put its foot down. And even if we never do, we will get to the point where we’ve run out of oil.

The dumbest thing about the oil industry is that they’re not putting any money into developing renewable energy. There’s no reason why their livelihoods have to depend on a finite substance. If IBM operated the way the oil industry does, they would have spent millions of dollars to convince the public that computers were dangerous, and that we need to stick with our typewriters. The oil industry is unbelievable dumb in it’s short term thinking.

They’re dumb in the same way that the financial industry is dumb. It’s all about squeezing out every nickle this quarter, with no thought whatsoever toward next year. The financial industry is going to bury this country in the next couple of years. When I say bury, I mean that 2008 will look like the good old days compared to what’s coming. They’re dumb because this pyramid scheme of funneling all of the money to a handful of people at the top has been played out over and over again by various societies. It’s always ended in a crumbling of that society. You can’t have a culture with no middle class. It’s never, ever worked and it never will. Plus, ours is a culture of self entitlement. I believe than when pushed far enough, Americans will revolt before accepting a fate of becoming wage slaves to a corporate master.

Here’s an interesting assessment by a non-partisan group, of the American Power Act that was recently proposed by Kerry and (gag) Lieberman. They basically conclude that if passed, this bill would create an average of 203,000 jobs per year. They estimate that the oil industry would lose 72,000 jobs per year, but that the US would pick up 165,000 jobs in nuclear energy, 19,000 in renewable energy jobs, 28,000 jobs in biofuels, and 96,000 jobs in clean coal.

The oil industry are fucking idiots for not taking the lead in developing new energy sources. I believe that silicon valley will eventually innovate the oil industry out of business. By the time the oil industry shifts from their bullying tactics to jumping on the bandwagon, it will be too late for them.

The corporate dumbitude that we’re experiencing may well bring the US off its superpower perch. It’s too bad, because the founding fathers actually did a pretty damned good job of creating viable democracy.

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Idiots or Assholes?

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I’ve been stunned by the circus that is the BP oil spill repair efforts. Seriously, it’s been like watching Pinky And The Brain plot to take over the world.

First we had the original accident, which was so unlikely to ever happen, that it was hardly worth doing inspections on the safety equipment designed to kick in if something does go wrong. And then when, against all odds, something did go wrong, the equipment (which went untested) shockingly failed to work. Once that happened, we watched BP’s brilliant engineers come up with a plan to stop the oil geyser on the fly, because there was no emergency plan in place. What did they come up with? They tried to slip a giant condom over the geyser. A plan which, by the way, even they didn’t think would work. When the condom failed, they decided to try a smaller condom! One that would just cover the tip. I’m not sure how one concludes that an extra small condom will get the job done when the XXL trojan didn’t work, but to no one’s surprise, this didn’t work either. The next plan is to clog the leak up with garbage. No, I’m not kidding. They have named it the “junk shot”. I wish I had the type of imagination to make this shit up.

There was a senate hearing into the matter last week, which was hilarious before it even began. We’re going to watch the lawmakers that lobbied for the loosening of regulations on the oil industry “get tough” on oil executives? Seriously? Predictably during the hearings, all three of the companies involved (BP, Transocean, and Haliburton) pointed the finger at the other companies. This, by the way, is going to be the strategy for how they’re going to stave off paying one nickle in damages for decades. The one thing that all three companies could agree on is that no one could have seen this coming.

This seems to be a common theme in America these days. One day you’re a brilliant and successful CEO of a very large company, touting your genius to every politician that you can buy. The next day, after something goes horribly wrong, you suddenly become clueless, an idiot that never saw it coming. We saw all of the bank CEOs transform themselves from genius to idiot. None of them could have seen the financial collapse coming. Angelo Mozilo (of Countrywide infamy) embraced his idiocy so vehemently, that he spun his sister (Lori Mozilo) into such an empathetic fervor, that she wrote this blog for HuffPo. She seems lovely, doesn’t she? I mean it. She seems like a lovely person that has bought her brother’s bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Congratulations Angelo, you’re an asshole that turned his sister into an idiot. Well played. I have to wonder, did these people adamantly profess their stupidity to the board of directors of their companies when they were negotiating their compensation packages? And will any of them be so wracked with guilt for being so over compensated (given the fact that they’re idiots), that they’re going to return the piles of cash that they made to the shareholders?

This tactic isn’t limited to CEOs who find themselves in trouble. This tactic of stupidity is everywhere. When people try to step in line in front of you, they always feign cluelessness for “not having seen you there”, or for not understanding why 30 people are lined up in a designated area. Oh, there’s a line? We see it when someone cuts you off on the freeway so that they can make the offramp. They didn’t cut you off because they’re assholes, they cut off because they didn’t see you there.

It’s the, “I’m not an asshole, I’m an idiot” defense. Personally, I’ve had about all I can take of this. Why does this work? Where did we get the idea that idiot is better than asshole?

Does anyone out there find an idiot less contemptible than an asshole?

I am of the opinion that an asshole that uses the idiot defense is the most loathsome kind of person on earth. But that’s just me. I own up to my assholiness when it’s deserved. Why doesn’t anyone else?

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