Liberal Forum

The Leftwing Noise Machines Flying Monkey Award of the week:http://leftwingnoise...thtub-ring.htmlPerhaps because his parents carelessly named him after a famously dull president, or perhaps because as a de trop libertarian in the swinging 60s, he was shunned by loose hippie girls, Grover Norquist has always been, well, odd. Being born into corporate wealth, he never had to work a day in his life and never held a real job. Instead, driven by too many Ayn Rand novels and the unknown demons of highschool gym class, he furiously knocked on doors for Nixon as a lost and angry Young Republican. After coasting through Ivy League, he hung out with the felonious Oliver North deep in the Reagan Whitehouse basement, eating pizza, genuflecting to icons of the Gipper, and plotting ways to send arms to the nations sworn enemies. He worked with Gingrich during the serial divorcees early burglary years in Congress to make sure single mothers had even less swag to raise their numerous lazy children. For most of his life he has fondled guns, literally and philosophically, which play a large role in his insecure writings about how the Takings Coalition (code for welfare queens, code for poor nonwhites and/or latte-sipping liberals) are out to get him and his Leave Us Alone Coalition of rich tennis buddies from the tony suburbs of Boston where he incubated his youthful resentments and trust funds. But thats nothing compared to Norquists pathological obsession with lowering taxes on Paris Hilton and other put-upon people like himself, obliviously flying over the world of gainful employment to protect our freedoms. A visionary whose vision is scary. Indeed, it invokes the Holocaust, as this eldritch interchange with the usually phlegmatic Terri Gross about the estate tax, shows:Grover Norquist: I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust.Terry Gross: Excuse me. Excuse me one second. Did you just . . . Grover Norquist: Yeah?Terry Gross: . . . compare the estate tax with the Holocaust? Yes, he did. Like a deranged Mr. Howell in your hut, Norquist goes into frenzy at the mere thought of the superwealthy paying taxes to support a society that includes what he ominously calls the Takers, the zombie-like lower classes who wander the burning jungles of his rightwing Gilligans Island. His life work was to conjure up various faux populist anti-tax organizations, bankrolled by a loose confederation of billionaires and tax cheats, the most notorious of which being Americans for Tax Reform, a particularly nasty cabal conceived out of Reagans brain (or what was left of it), dedicating to undermining American civilization. With his Blackberry overheating with tweets to every quantumly weird conservative in the nation, from the larcenous Jack Abramoff to NRA president and lethal boyscout, Ron Schmeits, Norquist runs the anti-tax department of the Right-Wing Noise Machine the way Jason would run a hockey team. Lets not overlook his famous quote, which is an homage to his hatred of American democracy and his unhealthy interest in kitten-killing skills: My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.In short, reading Norquist curricula vitae is very much like being dragged through a dark tarry tunnel. Reason enough to present him with a lifetime-achievement Flying Monkey Award, if we had one to give. But frankly all would be forgiven even the Bush taxs cuts (did I mention he behind that bit of national hara-kari) if he would at least have the decency to avoid pure Absolut Vodka hypocrisy, by supporting the end to ethanol subsidies, the most inane federal giveaway to Mega-agribusiness in the history of the world, which has the added benefit of being completely immoral in that it adds to world hunger. You would think that the ethanol giveaway would at least be part of the Big Government meme to be drowned in Norquists ample bathtub. But no, in what amounted to a colonoscopy into a soul shrunk with sickly adoration of corporate America, Norquist came out this week raging that the end of ethanol subsidies would in fact be you guessed it a wicked tax increase. Predictably no rational person took him seriously, which means the entire Republican delegation in Congress did. Now, Republicans who signed his covenant not to increase taxes on the rich (purportedly in blood), were deemed liars by an outraged Norquist, if they so much as even poured corn syrup into a fruit drink without a subsidy. Even the billionaire brothers Koch, the original dark twin wizards of Tea Partydom, found this perplexing and wrote a letter supporting the free market. But to no avail. Once the Norquistian papal bull had issued, Tea Party Occupied Congress clicked their heels and got back to heady business of cutting spending on those 8-year-old Taker children, and exporting just a little more of the joys of hunger to children everywhere. For this, and for a lifetime dedicated to feeding the worst instincts of the rich like meal worms to geckoes, the Left-Wing Noise Machine bestows the Flying Monkey Award on chubby highschool-haunted Grover, subject to a 7% transfer tax.