Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, January 16, 2011

Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash -- Sara Palin Essay

By John Ballard


Another heads up for what may be a cult following of this writer. I like his style, but that's just me. He puts into plain language what many are thinking. This one's not too long, a little over two thousand words.


Sarah Palin stands for something all right: the victory of right-wing dumbfuckery in America. We're dysfunctional because we have more influential idiots in our nation than any other industrialized nation has in theirs. You have to ask yourself what kind of a nation elevates dumb-brunette loons like Michele Bachmann into our government and raging moonbats like Glenn Beck into our punditry and considers a celebrity airhead like Sarah Palin a viable presidential candidate. Anywhere else they'd be laughed out of public life, but here they're heroes. It's like the Attack of the Zombies, or the Rule of White Trash. Half the nation is not embarrassed by these blithering lunatics, and the other half puts them on TV.

***


These Tea Party people don't believe in government because they don't believe in America. They don't believe in the sharing, caring America of the common good, of taking social responsibility, of helping each other, of being my brother's or sister's keeper, of using government to get rich people to help poor people instead of the other way round. For chrissake, America is its government, and if at the moment, we're a plutocracy instead of a democracy, we should help save our government from Wall Street and all the other bastards who milk and bilk us. The government shouldn't be shrunk; we should make it big and smart enough to control Wall Street on our behalf.


The logical extreme of being anti-government is to start shooting members of the government. The shooting of Gabby Giffords is all of a piece with Republican anti-government propaganda; a domestic counterpart to their neocon foreign war pathology.


***


The warmongers are on the right, the peaceniks on the left. Unfortunately, the warmongers have always been the majority. Our killer majority even includes our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Obama. This is the same man who gave a brilliantly moving speech at the Tucson Memorial -- maybe the best speech from a pol since the Gettysburg address IMO -- on the day that Palin released her video, inadvertently showcasing her all-about-me-ness against Obama's all-about-us-ness. She aired her video on the day of Obama's speech to show that she could be more presidential than him. Believe it or not, the Wacky Wingnut of Wasilla tried to best Obama at the oratory game. This has got to rival the arrogance of an ant colony trying to gang-bang an elephant. She and her ilk turned out to be the dinosaurs; Obama was their meteor.




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