A Vacuum at the Top Lifts All Balloons
A vacuum at the top lifts all balloons!
This phrase occurred to me in connection with the American strategy of assassinating Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the result that a lot of old, tired Taliban leaders who were mainly interested in oppressing local women in Af-Pak have been replaced by young and energetic fanatics who act locally (so far) but think (and hate) globally.
A vacuum at the top lifts all balloons!
But meanwhile in the United States, the upper echelons are jammed with just about the most thoroughly discredited, corrupt, and imbecilic elite since Mad King George III and his inbred lords and generals last drooled and ruled from Boston to Savannah.
We're fighting a war in Afghanistan, people!
Nothing stupider can possibly be imagined!
We killed at least one million people in Iraq! For nothing!
We gave $2 trillion to bankers who had gambled away the deposits in their banks!
So it isn't really much of a surprise that the Taliban is winning in Afghanistan, because...
A vacuum at the top lifts all balloons! But meanwhile in America...
Uncle Sam is wearing shit for a hat!
Uncle Sam is wearing a mountain of shit for a hat, and all the rest of us are sinking farther and farther down every day under that mountain of shit!
So what do we need, people?
What do we need?
Let's say it all together!
We need a vacuum at the top!
We need to throw down our discredited, corrupt, and imbecilic elite, all the fat-cats from Hollywood to Wall Street to the White House office where Larry Summers has parked his fat ass, and create a vacuum at the top, because...
A vacuum at the top lifts all balloons!
That about nails it.
September 29, 2009 10:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Nice post, Rootie. It's a fairly literal crowd here, however, so I don't know how far your metaphor is going to fly.
September 29, 2009 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't be a prick.
(Just kidding.)
September 29, 2009 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. Like, if we had a vacuum at the top.... then the sky would get sucked into space.
Or is he saying we should kick out all those fat cat bastards, so their ASSISTANTS could move into their jobs.
September 29, 2009 11:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I thought it was a reference to liposuction.
September 29, 2009 11:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I got a message today from a paternalistic former friend of ours, gasket, explaining that if I didn't use so many naughty words in diaries like this, I could become much more popular and successful in every way, and I wrote back...
Harharharhar!!!
September 29, 2009 8:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
*Sulfuric acid doesn't want to ride with squirrels* Classic, rootie...
September 29, 2009 8:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nice to see the pig, miguelito.
September 29, 2009 11:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
LOL, I knew you'd hear from the pater sooner or later. ;-)
October 2, 2009 7:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Even if a green-gear Canadian gear-head like quinn ever thought for as much as a second about his unpunctuated "questions," it probably wouldn't help much, because the "ASSISTANTS" of fat-cats are just a concept to quinn, and he never met any of them.
But the actual human beings who compose that category aren't slightly inferior copies of their bosses, as quinn imagines, and when Rutabaga Ridgepole spent most of 2003 and 2004 sleeping on sofas and riding the bus to Capitol Hill and Foggy Bottom to lobby for distributed generation of electricity in Iraq, the only people who immediately got the message and tried to help were Republican staffers, including Paul Bremer's stateside secretary and the chief of staff for Rep. Jerry Lewis.
Some of those "ASSISTANTS" actually believe in something, unlike their sold-out bosses, and most of them got their jobs on the basis of talent rather than fundraising or even ideology.
Anybody in Washington except the bosses and their whores would be delighted to replace every fat-cat in Washington with his or her chief of staff, and dismissive categorization of all those staffers by a green-gear Canadian gear-head like quinn is just as stupid as the stupidest Republican talking-point.
September 29, 2009 2:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. A concept. HarHarHarHarHar! Not paying attention, are we Ruta?
September 29, 2009 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
When I was a kid I always loved the name "Foggy Bottom" - conjured up a cool mental picture. Then one day I actually got of the metro just to check it out ... what a letdown. Not *nearly* as disappointing as Chrystal City though!
September 29, 2009 4:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Question for the prophetic boy wonder -
Rahm Emmanuel.
Dick Cheney.
Donald Rumsfeld.
What job have they all had in common?
September 29, 2009 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe he was thinking of the assistants' assistants.
But he did say "some" of them, so I guess we'll have some committee set up to pick the good ones from the bad ones. Democracy was always so messy so no big loss.
September 29, 2009 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wait, don't we already have a vacuum at the top of the atmosphere? For this to work, we gotta ban gravity or gravitas or something.
September 29, 2009 6:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't hink Uncle Sam is wearing shit for a hat; He is wearing a hat of Smoke and Mirrors.
"We gave two trillion to bankers..."
And The Fed won't even tell Congress what happened to the money. I don't even know how many in Congress care, to tell the truth. A few ain't enough.
September 29, 2009 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Now that's a slogan I can believe in!
September 29, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink