Coffee houses. The Blind Pig. And one night in the Blind Pig, I got into a terrible brawl. It started when I sat down drunk out of my mind at the Blind Pig piano and started playing a mantra of my own invention. This guy intervened. He said I sucked. I said, "What are you going to do about it?" (a typical male scenario) and the little bastard hit me with an unexpected roundhouse sucker punch. He hit me. It doesn't phase me to hit me in the head. I've got a hard head. It didn't hurt me but what it did was tick off the psychotic demon that's in us all in me and I went demonically mad and began to brutally beat the crap out of this poor slob who I'd never seen before in my life. We ended up in the middle of a city street with me on top of the guy, pushing his face into the asphalt and trying to rub his face off. "I'm sending your ass to Purgatory!" I was screaming. I was raving wildly like a pissed off Alpha male wolf trapped in a zoo jail...groovin' high on shit about killing the motherfucker. It got so brutal one of my friends had to pull me off the guy and hustle me off to his car to get me the hell out of there. We left this poor bastard laying in the middle of the street. That was it for my first coffee house experience.
Coffee houses were first Beatnik places where no alcohol was served, just coffees (I'm sure Starbucks stole the idea from the Beats) and fruit juices. BUT, there were no rules or regulations in terms of what were then called uppers, Black Beauties, Yellow Jackets, Red Jackets, amphetamines, speedballs, and, of course, that beatitudinal high, Mary Jane, weed, mezz, Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, Colombian Red--actually the finest of the early hybrid pots--until Dickless Nixon in the 1970s created what the government called "paraquat pot":
"Paraquat pot"
During the late 1970s, a controversial program sponsored by the US government sprayed paraquat on marijuana fields in Mexico.[6][and Colombia and Panama] Since much of this marijuana was subsequently smoked by Americans, the US government's "Paraquat Pot" program stirred much debate. Perhaps in an attempt to deter people from using marijuana, representatives of the program warned that spraying rendered the crop unsafe to smoke.
However, independent bodies have studied paraquat in this use. Jenny Pronczuk de Garbino, [7] stated: "no lung or other injury in marijuana users has ever been attributed to paraquat contamination". On this topic, D.P. Morgan states in a United States Environmental Protection Agency publication that: "Smoking Paraquat-contaminated marijuana does not result in lung damage as the herbicide is pyrolyzed to dipyridyl (which does not present a toxic hazard) during smoking".
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I remember how our dear sweet government tried to scare hell out of us Woodstock Nation folks by saying paraquat pot would poison our lungs and eventually kill us--it is a herbicide--and trust me, folks, it stopped some true-believer potheads from continuing to be vipers and mezzheads and lollygaggers--though the true-true-true-believer potheads kept hissing away on their way to burning up a hooka packed with top-of-the-crop marijuana buds--those fat smelly dark green buds where the juice (Maninol) has drained down into those buds's heads the potency of the juice making the heads flaming red; magnified it would look like an X-mas tree on fire--a burning spear! Terry Southern called that kind of pot "Red Dirt Marijuana"--and his book of stories by that name, under his real name, Mason Hoffenburg, is a really truly fine book of eccentric but wonderful stories--all obviously written under the influence of that red-dirt Mary Jane, that Mexican creek-bank reefer, what all the Chicago cats used to depend on Mezz Mezzrow for--I'm referring to one of the great pothead-told-to books, Really the Blues--and I'm on a mezzroll as I type this--listening to one of Duke's greatest moments in his career--a comeback moment at the 1956 Newport, Rhode Island, Jazz Festival--one of the greatest moments in jazz--and it happened when at that 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, it actually was in Newport, Rhode Island, then, the Duke called "Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue," and as he adds in the intro, "...separated by an interval by Paul Gonzalves." And Duke was famous for driving poor old booze-soaked Paul Gonsalves into blowing himself sober--and everybody in jazz knew the Duke did that to Paul--made him take chorus after chorus, sweatin' like a dog, sweatin' it out with the cookin' of his saxophone inventions, chorus after chorus. On this great summer day way back then in Newport, R.I., the Duke made Paul blow over 100 choruses--and that solo became one of the most famous solos in jazz. And I note that the Brit jazz critic, Stanley Dance, tried to make it a Duke-Paul bond thing, but, nope, folks, is was just Duke's way of controlling his family, that band. You see, Paul Gonsalves was from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and when I lived there he was at the height of his fame--but he was a mess when he came to town for a visit. The last time I saw the Duke Ellington Band live--it was the year the movie "Carnal Knowledge" was made in the streets of New York City--a couple of years before the Duke died--and they played the New Orleans Suite and Duke set Paul up with a long driving set of choruses, the band swinging like a race horse headin' down the home stretch toward the finish line...sweatin' like old Paul used to have to sweat. It thrills me big time sometimes when I think about what I've experienced in my lifetime--advents--a whole bunch advents--advents of expanding human evolution, a cultural evolution, the origins of an American music for one.
Paul Gonsalves blowin' chorus after chorus....
And I could have been sitting in a coffee house while that Newport Festival was going on. I remember Mitch Miller used to do 15-minute live remotes from the Festival on the Mutual Broadcasting (we said "Broadchasing") System--and, yes, I remember listening to these remotes. I even taped one on a Webcor wire recorder; later I transferred it to reel-to-reel and carried it around with me for years until one day it just disappeared out of my life--like so many things I've treasured in my life--one day it's there; next day it's gone...like my marriages.
And us coffee house freaks were so Beat. So down with life. So cool against the heat of the competitive society we were forced to find peace and passivity in. And we smoked our reefer and our hash and Thai sticks and we took our uppers and downers and some of us put the needle in the mainline groove of our arms's big blue veins and some of us were first zoning out on a strange new chemical concoction compounded by a Swiss-transplanted Canadian doctor, Albert Hoffmann. Dr. Timothy Leary later introduced it to the world as LSD. And I remember the first LSD trip I went on. On the strip in Palo Alto, California, at a topless jazz club with a guy named Mitch playing a B3 organ and a topless waitress named Queen Pam lighting my cigars that night with cold fire off her nipples! Cold fire is like the fire from lighter fluid. It burns cool against the skin. A good friend of mine, a psychiatrist who worked with Hoffmann, gave me 4 tabs and I took all four at once. And in Palo Alto, I was tripping away on a magic carpet ride while smoking cigars lit by a beautiful woman's teats, while I stroked her thigh and told her I was an itinerant poet who just had a poem, a trend-breaking poem, published in the Magdalene Gazette, a what-we-called "literary journal," a little magazine--one of those magazines you had to go to City Lights Bookstore to find.
Dr. Albert Hoffman. He gave us LSD. He lived to be 102--he just died 'bout a year ago.
I never considered myself a Beatnik. Nor did I ever consider myself a Hippy, though I looked like a Hippy. By the time I was in college I had let my hair grow anti-socially long and wore it in a pony tail. "That's a woman thing." the Yahoos teased me, "Makes you look like a girl, Wolfie!" Fuck 'em, was my attitude. You see, what I was, and I got this from the Beats, I was a Nonconformist! Nonconformity. And we Nonconformists first we killed off God. Some of us went looking for a replacement God in Asian philosophies and theologies, especially Buddhism. Yep, it was us Subterraneans that started the Buddha craze and not the Beatles. And it was the Mahatma Ghandi who was the "philosophical" guru of the day...way before the Maharishi Yogi and that bunch of fakirs who faked their ways to millions of bucks and hundreds of sweet young hippy girls and boys to fuck in this gullible country.
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Unsigned post. Last one. Followed by an email of this:
I was tired. Frozen in my tracks. Coming outdoors. The phone was ringing in the dog-run barn where I'd set up my office. I was on my pet earth. The phone call! "Who was that?" she asked from the screen porch. "Someone." "Oh, him again, or is someone a she?" It had been someone. She laughed and flipped me the bird. I loved her so I accepted it. "I've got to go into the city." "Why?" "To get a new computer. I want a new computer." "What are you going to use for money?" "I'll get your father to loan me a grand...I've got 500 of my own." "You've got 500?" OK. Enough of my domestic life.
In the city I met a girl named Squiggy.
"Have you ever been to Davenport, Iowa?" she asked me.
"Never."
"Can you find it on the map?"
"Probably if I had, too. Do I have to?"
"No."
She sat smugly. In her fifties. Still very beautiful. I'd heard stories, but I wasn't writing stories this time. She looked at a sheet of paper. "He says you're a good writer."
I met him in Aspen, Colorado, in 1987. He was playing golf with Phil Harris, the old bandleader, heavy drinker, and the man who made "The Thing" famous. I was eating hot dogs with Robert Creeley the poet. "You here to find Hunter Thompson?" Creeley asked me. "No. My family's owned property in Aspen since right after World War II when my father set out to buy as much Colorado land as he could afford." Creeley wasn't interested in my life. Creeley was there to lecture at the Aspen Writer's Conference. A lot of spaced out-type writers were there. One a guy who published blank pages as his poetry. Creeley thought that was clever. I thought it was conspicuously dull, but I didn't speak my piece like I normally do.
This guy getting loud across the room was wearing a robin egg blue sweater, a nice sweater. "I don't sweat up here," I heard this guy say. "How did you do?" I asked him. He looked at me contemptuously. "I hate people, stranger. Despise nearly every one I know, especially my friends." "So what. A lot of people hate people; that's nothing new." "Who the hell are you?" "Who the hell are you?" "I did pretty god-damn good, why?" "I play golf myself." "Are you any good?" "I shot a 69 on a Pete Dye course before I left Santa Fe Friday night." "Santa Fe?" "Yes." "New Mexico?" "Yes." "How come I don't know you?" "Since I don't know you then that's why you don't know me." "G.R. Wolfe's the name." "Austin Highchew." We shook hands. His handshake was firm. Stronger than I guessed. "I guess they called you Highchair somewhere back along the line...." "No. No one's ever called me that." "There were some Highchew's in my hometown." "Abilene, Texas?"
That's when I met him. I was living with my wife in Tesuque, New Mexico, that summer, staying at a house owned by a famous organist. It contained a Wurlitzer theater organ in it's ballroom/dininghall. What a house. My wife was painting. She caught on big in Santa Fe because she was kin to Willa Cather in a roundabout way and Santa Fe was still proud of Willa's connection to the city through Mary Austin.
"I lived in Mary Austin's house," he just suddenly blurted out. "I also lived with Will Shuster...well, in his art studio...on Camino del Monte Sol...."
Then I knew who he was. Then I remembered his wife. His wife was a true beauty of a woman. She was snow white in the winter. Then she turned dark brown in the summer. Some said she was a Navajo. A woman in the rental agent where we booked the Tesuque house for the summer said she knew his wife and she was Tex-Mex, Cherokee (she thought) Native American, and Welsh. An American blend, I thought. And then I recognized him. It was his hunched over appearance. He played the piano at one of the piano bars in Santa Fe. With the bass player who used to be with the Lettermen. I remember. The bass player was from Los Angeles and kept saying his friend Shelly Manne was coming to town soon and there was going to be a big jazz scene in Santa Fe one day.
Robert Creeley looked over a sheaf of poems I had submitted to the Workshop contest. Creeley liked one.
"I like this one. 'A Sliver of Glass.' It's cool."
"Thanks." I liked it, too. I'd written it just before I left for Aspen. I was in the swimming pool at the Tesuque house. Yes. It had a swimming pool. Jacaranda plants. Lavender bushes. A lot of birds always in the big back yard. Around the swimming pool. Always birdshit on the diving board every morning.
"A sliver of glass
reflecting
in a pool of blood
showing a man
with a sliver of glass
penetrating him
right between the eyes!"
"I would drop the exclam at the end."
"You know what Scott Fitzgerald said about exclamation points?"
"Yes."
That was that. Creeley was gone and I was alone.
He came over and sat down by me.
"You know Creeley?"
"I'm here for the Writer's Conference."
"Fuck that bunch of squares. I studied with Creeley at the UNM. He's too slim for me."
"Slim?"
"Yeah, not enough thought in his lines--he's a fibber, a jiver, a lollygagger poet, not a real man poet."
"Who's a real man poet?"
"Hilda Doolittle. I love Hilda Doolittle. I still write her love letters addressed to the cemetery where she's buried."
"I've never read anything of hers."
"She was a Moravian. A weird bunch the Moravians. A lot of blood and gore in their hymns."
"I've never known a Moravian."
"I knew them. My grandfather was a New Yorker. He took me to the Moravian flower market one time...I was just a snarly little snotnose tyke but I remember the flowers."
He was there for the Writer's Workshop, too. I looked in the brochure. I saw his name in it. "G.R. Wolfe: 'D.H. Lawrence Writing a Novel With a Wooden Pencil.'" He left a few minutes later. I said we'd probably see each other at the Workshop. "I'm out to bang a famous babe poet while I'm here...sorry, pal, I forgot you're from Santa Fe. Don't let this get back to my old lady. She's mostly part Mexican and she always grabs for a butcher knife when she thinks she's threatened. I had an affair with this Cuban refugee ballet dancer down in New Orleans...." He walked out of the place continuing telling that story to himself.
Later back in Santa Fe, we met in the bar at the La Fonda Hotel right before the end of the summer and my wife and I were moving back east. The La Fonda was still a viable hotel then. He had a beautiful woman with him. I asked if it were Mrs. Wolfe.
"No, no...this is my Jewish princess mistress...a friend of mine's wife...but we're madly in love. She just had her second child, a beauty of a little blonde. We fell in love while my wife and I were visiting her and the new baby in the hospital. She's a hell of a good lookin' woman, don't you think?"
She was. You didn't have to think about it.
So that's how I met this strange dude. G.R. Wolfe.
I left Santa Fe and came back east to work on a novel I'd been contemplating writing for years.
"Hey, I'll be moving to New York City one of these days. I can handle the Apple. My father lived in New York City during World War II. Me and that Jewish girl you met; we'll be moving to the Apple...."
Again he didn't finish. He sent my wife and I off out at the Santa Fe Airport. He handed my wife a little monkey carved out of stone as we were saying good-bye. "That's from China, baby," he said as he handed it to my wife. I saw the charm in his eyes. My wife was Jewish. The sparkle in his eyes as he handed her his gift was evident. "That's a Chinese good-luck monkey. A little god. My famous brother sent it to us one X-mas back in the war years...though hell every year is a war year isn't it?" As we went through the gate out to the twin-engine plane, we passed through the lounge area and I saw a sign on an easel. It was G.R. Wolfe's picture. "G.R. 'The Growling' Wolf will be titillating the ivories and your toiling souls for the next 7 weeks in our piano lounge."
On the plane my wife said, "What a strange man." "That's what I thought when I met him up in Aspen." "You think we'll ever see him again?" "He's the type you do see again."
austinhighchew
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What's Going On?
He's done it again. Our own thegrowlingwolf has done another bunk. We think he's up in Connecticut with an old college friend, a trumpet player. He once propositioned the guy's mother when she visited her son in college. She was a radio personality. A Texas beauty. And the trumpet player was good looking, too. "The little bastard could draw his ass off. I once helped him use a roller device and India ink to do the walls of his tiny rented room...over on Eagle Drive."
We got the above email from the Wolf Man with a brief note saying--"this is the head I want to be transposed with."
What the deuce that means we don't know.
Austin Highchew. Weird name. Not many of them in the USA. Another more familiar form of it is Heitchew. We know nothing about Austin Highchew, though Franny & Zoe have met him. Zoe interviewed him the other day. The horse says he saw a guy who looked like a pest in the office the other day. What kind of pest and the horse said "A gadfly." "That's a Russian novel," we joked. The horse replied, "A gadfly is a fucking pain in a horse's ass; I don't know about the Russian novel."
The Daily Growler was meant to be an illusionary newspaper--failing yes like all newspapers. It was not meant to be a venue for one person, especially a dominating person like the Wolf Man. He promotes himself, and he's quite a self-promoter--as he says, advertisements, even those for yourself, are lies made to look a little like truths, and some of his self-promotions are pure poppycock; yet, it's the dude's insight that makes us tolerate his self-appointment to the The Daily Growler Power Elite.
The Daily Growler was meant to show real life in such a cynical way, no one would trust anybody much less the sentiments and values expressed in a "daily newspaper." The trouble with the Growler is, we are not real, though what we preach is real.
We are mixed breeds. Franny & Zoe are real people. Believe it or not, so's Barrabas Munn-Dayne. thedailygrowlerhousepianist is a real person; a member of the Wolf cadre for 20 years now. NOW. That's the most important word in Growler language. We are the now. On-the-spot commenting. Like jazz in its real state is purely improvisational; even written-out jazz is improvisational. That's the wonder of the riff and blue notes and flatted 5ths and ninths. But we ramble. We are ramblers. The Daily Rambler. Maybe that will be our new name now that we may not be growling anymore.
The music of Charles Mingus holds the key to basic Growler attitude: "Freedom for your daddy...Freedom for your mama...Freedom for your brothers and sisters...But no freedom for me!" Which means, "Go on, live like your free when you ain't."
For instance, isn't it interesting that Britain has confiscated all of AIG's books and assets--in Britain AIG is being charged with fraud. In the USA, We the People have bailed AIG out and have once again declared them legitimate. Those are the kind of ironies Growlers peck on until--it's like OJ used to yell, "Stop beating a dead horse." Only the dead know the real truth. Think about that. That's what The Daily Growler was meant to be. thegrowlingwolf is still not who you think he may be. Don't be fooled. As Felix Greene told a Greene one time, "All Greenes are kin." He hasn't been made yet. First of all, Michael is still probably the most popular boys name ever--there is another name that used to be the most popular boys name and that's the real name. Clue, clue, clue, and still, we don't have a clue who this Austin Highchew is. Really, folks. We are god-fearing girls and boys around here--Molloch we fear--Jupiter we fear--Human beings we cry for. We cry cynically, yes. We cry satirically. We ain't no Onion. The Onion is a bunch of superquick-witted probably television writers. They don't walk down many sidewalks or crawl around on New York City roofs.
Is he in Davenport again? Or is he in Connecticut? He's got his laptop with him. We are left here with nothing to print except pieces of flotsam email that ballyhoos its way into our mailbox.
As our Wolf Man predicted while Obama was running for president, Obama seems to be playing out the deceiver role. Wolf Man called what Obama and the Clintonistas (including Bill and Hill) did to us as "trick bagging." It comes from Krazy Kat and Felix the Cat: Not "What you got up your sleeve?" but "What's in the bag there?" "Tricks." "What kind of tricks!" "All kinds of tricks." There's a Felix the Cat episode where Felix and his trick bag are stranded on an island out in the ocean. Felix simply opens his trick bag and pulls out a boat! Maybe our new name should be The Daily Trick Bag.
OK, we admit, we forced thegrowlingwolf to participate in a blog--they were fairly new and undeveloped at the time when we first started as The Talking Mule--mule and shoes having to do with a recording company and a music production company on Broadway in old Manhattan that is slowly becoming new and unrecognizable Manhattan as the wealthy of the world pour into this once-fair city buying up buildings and land and leases cheap, hedge funds dumping all the monies they stole from We the People into New York City real estate--fuck Wall Street, it's still all about real estate. Land is natural wealth. Capital comes from the land. In land is great wealth. The more land you own, the bigger and better you are than your neighbors, the Joneses. Money is not wealth. Land will always be valuable even during the dry days of total Chaos that are definitely coming soon, as continuously predicted by thegrowlingwolf and some of his anti-Hero preacher types like Brother Jack Van Impe who has predicted Christians departing the coil in December 2012, also a Doomsday, according to the movie Esoteric Agendas.
Recently in the news, Chris Hedges (who we like) has been interviewed incessantly and praised for an article he just wrote on some blog, TruthDig we think, a good blog, about how Obama is "trick bagging" (not Hedges's word) us. Chris and Naomi Klein have now decided we really got hoodwinked (again not Hedges's word) by Obama and the Clintons.
thegrowlingwolf recently went further and said Obama was simply an arm of the George Herbert W. Pappy Bush New World Order and is under orders from Clinton and his worthless gang of thieves to polish over the misdeeds and criminal idiocies of Pappy's worthless son G.W. Bush (now having a natural ball down in Big D--though opinion polls in once rightwing-capital Dallas reveal most Dallasites wish the Bushes would get the fuck out of town), to brush them under the White House carpet and instead say, "Let's leave behind what's behind and look to the future." By ignoring what's behind us, Obama is pardoning G.W. Bush and his whole gang of Reaganite/NeoCon cronies and subtly continuing G.W.'s Neo-Con policies. Obama's biggest trick bag effort is in bailing out the very industries under Bush and Clinton that drove us down--and that have ruined us forever--we are now in such debt, we will never--NEVER--be able to pay it off. The following countries now own us: China, Israel, Britain, Saudi-Arabia, Oman, Dubai, India--they own us lock, stock, and barrel. They have recently successfully shut down our automobile industry--once the most efficient capitalistic industry in this country--they (especially Communist China (a Chinese company is buying Hummer from GM)(no one has mentioned GM's foreign operations, especially their China operations, are making huge profits--but we the people can't touch that money because GM claims since it's a foreign operation it has no obligations to show that money in its US bookkeeping. There is no mention that this bankruptcy relieves GM of all its US debt obligations and leaves it free to now move whole plants (like they did the very efficient GM Wisconsin plant that built motors--GM closed it down and moved it to Mexico, an oligarchy where there are no unions and workers are forced to work for slave wages in unsafe and filthy factories in cess-pools places like Tijuana, a city that is foul from stem to stern, polluted drinking water, polluted air, polluted environment) have in fact stolen our automobile industry. Chrysler being bailed out by Fiat. Why is Fiat, a Fascist car company--their very name is fascist--able to buy Chrysler?--a company that once towered over Fiat like the Chrysler Building was once the tallest building in New York City--for a couple of years at least until the Great Depression building folly--the Empire State Building was built and sat empty for ten years--until WWII came along and saved the nation. That's instilled in these Power Eliters's minds: WAR solves all problems. Obama trusts G.W. Bush's generals and warmongers. He's just put one of the criminal generals in charge of Afghanistan forces! That spells doom for Afghanistan and in turn carries that war over in Pakistan. WWIII is in bloom.
Here's a The Daily Growler post from December 2008:
Monday, December 01, 2008
Have We Been Shucked & Jived?
Obama and the Same Ole-Same OleYesterday I was getting apologetic about bashing Obama. Adelaide Sanford got me thinkin' that she had a point when she said it was an African tradition to gather your backers and antagonists together under one tribal roof and there "reason together." I bought that line yesterday but not today. Obama's pulled one on our hopeful asses. He looks like NOW he's just another plain-ole self-promoting hat-full-of-tricks politician. God-damn him! Why? I've got to ask him a whole series of "whys." His press conferences--like the one today where he announced all these Clinton toadies he's bringin' on board his "transistion" team--are beginning to sound like G.W. Bush press conferences, all bologna and no nutrition. It's same ole same ole Dumbocratic Party politics (the politics of giving into your opponent's agenda)--the Party that's made Obama its lapdog politician. I don't see Obama as being as black and hearing his African roots talking to him instinctually as Adelaide Sanford does. I'm, and I admit it is with reluctance, being pulled in by the feeling there is nothing new under the political sun. Nothing's going to CHANGE!--and Ralph Nader's been saying this all along--for decades now. And Allen Ginsberg said it back in the 1970s--the CIA, the Mafia, the Oil companies, the monopolistic corporations, et al--I call 'em all the Power Elite--rule us with their iron fists of wealth and privilege--they're rich and we ain't--they are the overserved, as Adelaide Sanford calls them.
Here, read old Ralph Nader on the subject of Obama's favoring ruthless, reckless, and deja-vu-Clintonistas by surrounded himself with them. Like War Criminal John Brennan! And Jami Miscik! Holy Smothering Cats! Why Jami Miscik? Why? I scream! Like keeping Robert Gates as DOD head! Why? I scream! Why? Why? Why? And Hillary RodHAM "Hillbilly" Clinton as Sec'y of State! Holy Cow! Why? What qualifies this wife of an ex-President to be anything in any body's cabinet? What qualifies her to even be a senator? She hasn't done a god-damn thing as Senator from New York State except giveaway millions of dollars worth of boondoggles to her and her husband's financial contributors! [Question, Who the hell pays 2 million bucks to hear Slick Willie "Who's That Chickie Over There?" Clinton give a speech?] You surround yourself with jive-ass turkeys and you yourself become a jiveass turkey.
From Ralph Nader:
While the liberal intelligentsia was swooning over Barack Obama during his presidential campaign, I counseled “prepare to be disappointed.” His record as a Illinois state and U.S. Senator, together with the many progressive and long overdue courses of action he opposed during his campaign, rendered such a prediction unfortunate but obvious.
Now this same intelligentsia is beginning to howl over Obama’s transition team and early choices to run his Administration. Having defeated Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primaries, he now is busily installing Bill Clinton’s old guard. Thirty one out of forty seven people that he has named so far for transition or appointments have ties to the Clinton Administration, according to Politico. One Clintonite is quoted in the Washington Post as saying – “This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time.”
Obama’s “foreign policy team is now dominated by the Hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990,” writes Jeremy Scahill. Obama’s transition team reviewing intelligence agencies and recommending appointments is headed by John Brennan and Jami Miscik, who worked under George Tenet when the CIA was involved in politicizing intelligence for, among other officials, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s erroneous address before the United Nations calling for war against Iraq.
Mr. Brennan, as a government official, supported warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition to torturing countries. National Public Radio reported that Obama’s reversal when he voted for the revised FISA this year relied on John Brennan’s advise.
The top choice as White House chief of staff is Rahm Emanuel—the ultimate hard-nosed corporate Democrat, military-foreign policy hawk and Clinton White House promoter of corporate globalization, as in NAFTA and the World Trade Organization.
Now, recall Obama’s words during the bucolic “hope and change” campaign months: “The American people…understand the real gamble is having the same old folks doing things over and over and over again and somehow expecting a different result.” Thunderous applause followed these remarks.
Read the rest of Ralph's article at the great sleptonnews blog:
www.slepton.com/slepton/viewcontent.pl?id=2283
thegrowlingbashingobamawolf
for The Monday Daily Growler
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that's all, folks, for NOW,
thestaff
for The Daily Growler
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