{"id":5061,"date":"2005-08-25T09:08:49","date_gmt":"2005-08-25T13:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/5061.html"},"modified":"2005-08-25T09:08:49","modified_gmt":"2005-08-25T13:08:49","slug":"good-morning-all-you-east-coast-liberals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/good-morning-all-you-east-coast-liberals\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Morning All You East Coast Liberals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver<\/a><\/p>\n

As Michael Crowley, who\u2019s guest-blogging for Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo<\/a> said this past Monday, \u201cI know that discovering a guest blogger at your favorite site can be like showing up at a ball game to find the star player benched with a pulled hamstring.\u201d But then, how else does a Minor Leaguer get brought up to The Show mid-season if some star doesn\u2019t pull a hamstring? Fortunately, our friend The Carpetbagger is merely out of town, no limping involved, and it\u2019s only for two days. <\/p>\n

So… now you\u2019re putting up with me, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver: certified Hollyweird Liberal screenwriter, fan of old airplanes<\/a> , Chief Ranter at That\u2019s Another Fine Mess<\/a>, former professional political noodge (great basic training for Hollyweird), and Head Litter Box Cleaner for the thundering feline herd here at Le Chateau du Chat in Los Angeles. <\/p>\n

Rather than rant about the daily grind as bloggers usually do, I\u2019ve decided I would take this opportunity to go beyond the day\u2019s headlines and the week\u2019s battle and talk about the stories that have the potential to be much more scary for all of us than anything I ever wrote in \u201cThe Terror Within.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ever watched a dark cloud form – way off on the horizon – and get bigger as it moves closer, bringing a storm you know you need to batten down the hatches for? Growing up in Colorado, I was used to this phenomenon at a young age: one could see thunderstorms out on the horizon – as they grew closer, moving across the plain, it was possible to see the lightning flashes, then to hear the echoing thunder, then to experience the drop in temperature, with the first droplets soon whipped against one\u2019s face by the growing wind, followed by the drenching deluge when you didn\u2019t pay attention to the warnings and seek shelter. <\/p>\n

Dark clouds have been forming out over our national horizon for quite awhile now. It\u2019s entirely possible to see the flashes of distant lightning and hear the echoing thunder over the cacophony of voices crying out about the daily news from the war in Iraq.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the possibility of a flu pandemic that could literally alter the state of human existence on the planet; the oil crisis may be asking people to choose between filling the tank and putting food on the table for a long time to come; the coming housing bubble may knock the pins out from under our \u201cgrowing economy\u201d as I read that housing here in the Lower Left Corner is now considered 50 percent overpriced; four senators – three Republicans and one Democrat – have just returned from Point Barrow, Alaska, and have publicly stated they now believe the Arctic is melting.<\/p>\n

Eight hundred-odd years ago, Europe was in the midst of the Hundred Years War. The Catholic Church had rid the continent of cats suspected of being witches\u2019 familiars. Everyone was too busy to notice the Norway rats coming down the mooring lines of the cargo ship just arrived from Istanbul in Rotterdam harbor, and no one thought to pay attention to the rats\u2019 fleas. But within twenty years feudalism was on its last legs as the surviving lords in their castles found there weren\u2019t enough serfs left to bring in the harvest, while the priests found people no longer believed them. The result was the end of the Middle Ages, the coming of the Reformation, and the revolution of the Renaissance that ended a thousand years of religiously-imposed ignorance and superstition since the fall of Rome. All because of the fleas no one could take the time to worry about.<\/p>\n

RIIIIIIING! Is that the class bell I hear? It\u2019s time to start worrying about the fleas, folks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver As Michael Crowley, who\u2019s guest-blogging for Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo said this past Monday, \u201cI know that discovering a guest blogger at your favorite site can be like showing up at a ball game to find the star player benched with a pulled hamstring.\u201d But then, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}