By Andrew W. Griffin

Red Dirt Report, editor

Posted: October 11, 2012

reddirtreporter@gmail.com

OKLAHOMA CITY – All eyes are on … Danville, Kentucky?

Yep, that’s where tonight’s vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan is taking place.

Specifically, it’s at Centre College, a small, liberal-arts school in the Bluegrass State. Moderating? No, not the elderly and confused Jim Lehrer. This time it’s old Obama wedding party pal Martha Raddatz of ABC.

And the president’s advice to his erratic running mate? “Joe just needs to be Joe,” Obama said.

So, we are anxiously awaiting tonight’s debate. It’s gonna be good.

A story on Salon.com, “In ‘Glittering’ return, Paglia lets loose,” Camille Paglia, the well-respected cultural critic and “expert provocateur” announced today that rather than vote on the war pig Obama, she was casting a vote this Nov. 6 for Massachusetts doctor and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

Clearly unhappy with the Democratic Party, Paglia said: “The biggest issue for me is the Obama administration’s continuation of endless war, war, war. I denounced the Iraq incursion before it even happened.”

Paglia lays into the media, saying that their protecting Obama “led to his weakening” and that beyond the endless war, the military and domestic use of drones and “creeping totalitarianism of Obamacare,” (“You cannot possibly expand medical coverage to millions of people without also expanding medical training and funding new clinics and hospitals”) Paglia is outraged how the left has given into the ever-expanding surveillance state.

Says Paglia to Salon: “What in the world has happened to the Democratic Party? Its passivity towards this awful takeover of our lives by a know-it-all government, as shown by the way Obama has governed by constantly going around Congress – appointing czars and one new layer of bureaucracy after another. And hardly a peep of protest from liberals.”

She goes on to compare modern-day Democrats and liberals to “the Eloi” from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. “They’re like sheep,” she said of today’s liberals.

While she said she would have cast a vote for Obama had Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum got in there – “Mitt Romney is a moderate – like Nelson Rockefeller” – she said she is supporting the Jill Stein campaign on the Green Party ticket “in protest against the systemic corruption of my party.”

And Paglia is right. The Democratic Party is incredibly corrupt. Yet, the whole political system is sick and failing. And Obamacare ain’t gonna do a thing to make things better, as Paglia so sagely noted.

A story here in Oklahoma that caught our attention today: “Grove residents urge school officials to rethink policy on Gideons International’s Scriptures.”

The Gideons (reminds me of that old Bill Hicks bit – “Who are the f***in’ Gideons? Ever met one? No! Ever seen one? No! But they’re all over the f***in’ world puttin’ Bibles in hotel rooms …”) mission, among many,  is handing out mini Bibles to school students. They wanted to do that in the town of Grove but someone threatened to sue. A subsequent school board meeting, addressing the subject of handing out Bibles to middle schoolers revealed that parents were cool with it.

One parent said: “I am for anything that puts morals and character back into our schools.”

So, as long as they’re paddlin’ bad kids and getting them to read their free Gideon Bibles, all is right with the world. Forget handing out science books or history books or books that might actually help them improve their grades and knowledge of the real world. No wonder are schools are doing so lousy. They might as well be in church. 

And if you get a chance to see the new Ben Affleck film Argo, note this Death and Taxes story first: “CIA’s ‘Argo’ plot was inspired by Roger Zelazny’s novel ‘Lord of Light.’” It featured a storyline involving “modern Western characters in a Hindu-Buddhist-infused world” and in many ways mirrored Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha.

Copyright 2012 Red Dirt Report