WTF is the matter with Mittens? He’s a multi-millionaire baby boomer, for starters

Associated Press image

A London tabloid expresses its opinion of Mittens’ visit to London on the occasion of the city’s hosting of the 2012 Olympic games.

The 2012 Olympics have gotten off to a great start — and I’m not even into sports. (Well, men’s diving and men’s gymnastics are OK…)

As others have noted, all that Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney really needed to do in London this past week was (1) to just show up and (2) to not make a total ass of himself. But very apparently, he could accomplish only one of those two objectives.

The mind of Mittens is a terrifying place to explore, but my blogger’s psychoanalysis of Mittens is that his London Olympics trip was meant to underscore the fact that he was in charge of the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City and was meant to show that he — and not Barack. Hussein. Obama. — is the man who should be representing the United States of America abroad. (I hate it when someone like Mittens acts like a shadow president — it’s deeply undemocratic, since we have not elected Mittens to act as our shadow president.)

And the wingnuts’ view of foreign relations, of course, is much closer to George W. Bush’s than it is to Barack Obama’s. And that view is that the United States of America must act like a drunken, aggressive, narcissistic frat boy, treating others in the manner of a complete and total asshole. 

On that note, I just signed on to this open letter to the people of the United Kingdom:

An open letter to the people of the United Kingdom:

We are writing to express our concern over Mitt Romney’s recent comments, and to let you know that he does not represent how most Americans view your great country.

First, we do not believe, as Mitt Romney implied in 2007, that you have become a second-tier nation. Rather, we are impressed at how the United Kingdom has consistently been able to punch above its weight on the world stage.

Additionally, we do not share the opinion which Romney expressed in his 2010 book, No Apologies, that “England [sic] is just a small island,” and that “with few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy.” Please continue sending us your many wonderful products, especially the upcoming third season of “Downton Abbey.”

We look forward not only to the London Olympics, but also to many years of continuing the special relationship between our two nations. Rest assured we will do our level best to prevent Mitt Romney from becoming our next president.

Cheers!

I hope that before the organizers send the letter on to the Brits, they delete that reference to “Downton Abbey”* — that bad joke seems actually to reinforce Mittens’ contention that the UK is not a serious contender on the world stage — but I agree with most of it. (If you want to sign on, you can do so by clicking here.)

Of course, when we state that “we are impressed at how the United Kingdom has consistently been able to punch above its weight on the world stage,” we need to be careful that with such broad statements we are not endorsing some of the UK’s atrocities, which include the subjugation and in some cases even the decimation of the natives of Africa, Australia, India and neighboring Ireland, and which also includes the UK’s government’s support of the Vietraq War, in which the United States and the UK were partners in war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Indeed, if the U.S.’s rap sheet of atrocities is shorter than the UK’s, that’s only because the U.S. is a much younger nation.)

All of that said — and all of that reinforcing  yet another reason why it was an incredibly poor idea for a henchman of Mittens to assert earlier this week that Mittens Romney better understands the “Anglo-Saxon heritage”** shared by the UK and the United States than does Obama — it was incredibly pompous for Mittens, as a guest of the UK, to state his opinion just before the opening of the 2012 Olympics that London wasn’t ready.    

My guess is that such boorish behavior comes from the fact that Mittens is an American baby boomer — as a group, these selfish narcissists vastly overestimate their talents, abilities and worth, and as a group, they know no fucking shame — and from the fact that as a overprivileged (Daddy was chairman and president of American Motors Corporation from 1954 to 1962, governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969, and secretary of U.S. Housing and Urban Development from 1969 to 1973, and Mommy ran for the U.S. Senate for Michigan in 1970, for fuck’s sake) multi-millionaire (from his vulture capitalism) who is used to others sucking up to him, Mittens is uncomfortable in any other role than being the uber-alpha male, the frat-boy asshole on crack.

My guess is that Mittens feels like he’s in charge wherever he is, and that he saw nothing wrong with telling his hosts on the topic of hosting the Olympics: “You’re doing it wrong!”

Of course, again, those on the right subscribe to the George W. Bush School of Foreign Policy, so it’s not like in their eyes Mittens did anything wrong. They want their president to be the biggest bully on the international stage. Unless the U.S. president is hated worldwide, he isn’t doing his job — that’s their credo.

So, as usual, in November it will come down to the “swing voters.”

I don’t imagine that a huge chunk of them really cares either that Mittens conducted himself like a jackass in London this week, since their area of concern usually doesn’t extend more than a few miles’ radius, but if Mittens gets the reputation as a bumbler on the world stage — because he is — that might cost him a significant number of votes.

We’ll see, but in the meantime, it is instructive, I think, to examine Mittens’ personality traits that have been on display on the world stage this week and to ask ourselves what these personality traits would mean for us here at home should he ever sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

Of course, we Americans just allowed George W. Bush to blatantly steal the White House in late 200o — what bad events possibly could follow a blatantly stolen presidential election? — so of course we can’t write presidential wannabe Mittens off.

—

*I purchased and watched the first two seasons of PBS’ “Downton Abbey,” and my impressions of the television show are that one, while the series is watchable, the first season was better than the second, and that two, “Downton Abbey’s” American target audience seems to be limousine liberals. (That said, I’m quite middle- and working-class myself. I’ve never even been inside of a limo.)

“Downton Abbey” seems to be making structural and institutional socioeconomic equality seem OK because the lord and lady of the manor are fairly decent individuals, are not individually abusive to their servants. Of course, the whole setup — an overprivileged class that is served by an underprivileged class — is abusive, but apparently we are to overlook that.

Thus, again, “Downton Abbey” should be a fave among the limousine liberals, like my baby-boomer uncle, who owns several homes and is a U.S. military contractor but who nonetheless in all seriousness calls himself a “socialist.”

**While I haven’t studied my own genealogy, I suspect that I primarily of am British stock, as many white Americans are. (Wikipedia notes that “German Americans [16.5 percent], Irish Americans [11.9 percent], English Americans [9.0 percent], Italian Americans [5.8 percent], French Americans [4 percent], Polish Americans [3 percent], Scottish Americans [1.9 percent], Dutch Americans [1.6 percent], Norwegian Americans [1.5 percent] and Swedish Americans [1.4 percent] constitute the 10 largest white American ancestries.”)

While there is much about the UK that I admire — such as the incredibly useful and expansive English language, of course — I think that it’s vital to recognize a nation’s wrongdoings as well as its successes. Thus, when Mittens said this in “defense” of his henchman’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” remark, it was not a save: “It [the United States’ and the UK’s shared ‘Anglo-Saxon heritage’] goes back to our very beginnings — cultural and historical. But I also believe the president understands that. So I don’t agree with whoever that adviser might be, but do agree that we have a very common bond between ourselves and Great Britain.”

Yes, among other things, the United States and the UK have in common their colonization of other nations, the raping, pillaging and plundering of other, militarily weaker nations (including, of course, slavery) so that the UK and the U.S. could maintain a standard of living much higher than that of the average member of Homo sapiens on planet Earth. (And for this so-called “Anglo-Saxon” “success” you will get no apologies from Mittens Romney!)

When the British empire waned, the American empire rose up to replace it, and now the American empire wanes.

And you gotta love Mittens’ assertion, “So I don’t agree with whoever that adviser might be.” How much control, exactly, does Mittens have over his own campaign?

Why I don’t blog for the baby boomers

Infanticide suddenly seems like a good thing…

Most people who read blogs probably assume that most bloggers want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible — and therefore, never to (gasp!) offend anybody.

Not me.

I don’t think that I’ve ever come out and said it, but for these past almost 10 years of blogging, I’ve been writing primarily for those in my age group (Generation X) and younger.

If some baby boomers or even older folks read my blog, fine, but if they don’t, perhaps that’s even better, since I don’t write for them. I long ago stopped looking to the baby boomers (generally identified as those born between 1946 and 1964, but to me the cohort really spans from about 1944 to 1960) to be agents of positive change, and I look to those in my age group and younger instead.

Most of my critics turn out to be (I see from their blog avatars) baby boomers. Before I take their criticism to heart, I look at their mugshot avatars. Chances are, they’re boomers (who apparently think that an Internet presence makes them young again [it doesn’t], and who of course have to plaster their faces on their blogs, being spotlight hogs). If they have a bio, I read that, too. Chances are, from their bios I surmise that they’re people I wouldn’t like in person, so it comes as no shock that I’ve written something that (gasp!) offends their delicate sensibilities. (People who act as though they have the fucking right never to be offended in the least bit — they’re interesting. [Psychiatrically, I mean.])

I could write a book on the fucking baby boomers, but I’ll try to keep this to a blog post, albeit a long one.

George W. Bush (born in 1946) could be the poster boy for the baby-boom generation.

He accomplished nothing on his own, but coasted on his family name. If George Sr. hadn’t been president first, there’s no way in hell that George Jr. would have been governor of Texas and then the second president named George Bush.

Not only that, but George Jr. in 2000 stole office (with the help of his brother Jeb, who then was the governor of Florida, the critical state that George Jr. “won”; with the help of then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who infamously disenfranchised voters by deeming them felons when they were not; and with the help of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, which stopped the recounting process in Florida). George Jr. didn’t even win the presidency outright.

Then, once in the Oval Office, George W. thoroughly trashed the nation, among other things allowing 9/11 to happen (remember the August 2001 presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”?), allowing Hurricane Katrina to kill hundreds of Americans, taking the nation to a bogus war for the no-bid federal-government contracts for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, and giving giant tax breaks to the filthy rich. George W. Bush had received the nation in good shape from Bill Clinton and the prosperous 1990s, and delivered it to Barack Obama in January 2009 on the brink of collapse.

That, in a nutshell, is the baby-boomer modus operandi: inherit your power and your wealth from your parents, squander it selfishly and recklessly, and leave nothing behind for those who follow you, not even the polar ice caps.

Baby boomers unabashedly display a bumper sticker that reads “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance.” (I’ve seen this bumper sticker on cars driven by boomers several times.)

This is supposed to be funny. Ha ha.

Except that the baby boomers’ parents, the members of the so-called “greatest generation,” didn’t spend their children’s inheritance. They gave their children — the baby boomers — their inheritance.

Not so with the baby-boom generation, the first generation in the history of the United States of America that did not care in the fucking least about at least trying to leave things in better shape for those who must follow them.

The baby boomers, endlessly doted upon by their parents, had no problems going to college and getting good jobs. Hell, they didn’t even have to go to college to live well. (Neither of my baby-boomer parents has a four-year college degree, but neither of them during their young to middle adulthood ever struggled with buying homes and cars. My four-year degree, on the other hand, which I worked hard for, was worthless when I received it — along with considerable student-loan debt — in 1990 during the first George Bush recession, and I gave up on having a paid job that allows me to make good use of my skills [without doing evil and without completely being exploited by some talentless plutocrats] and I gave up on home ownership long, long ago.) If the boomers put just a minimal effort into attaining a college degree, a good job, a home, a nice car, these things were theirs for the taking. The members of the “greatest generation” made sure of that.

But do the baby boomers today give a rat’s ass about our young people of today?

Hell fucking no.

This is from The Associated Press today:

The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees. …

Again, when this Gen X’er received his worthless bachelor’s degree in 1990 — a journalism degree, which in the face of mass newspaper layoffs at the time was worthless (and still would be mostly worthless today, although as a blogger it gives me a leg up) — there were not, to his recollection, any news stories about the fact that in the face of the recession, college degrees were worthless, and newly minted college graduates had to take jobs that greatly underutilized their talents and abilities — and struggle with student loans they couldn’t afford to repay. (Massive student loan debt was something that the boomers did not experience when they were of college age and young adults because their parents saw them as young people to be fostered — not as cash cows to be milked dry.) 

It would have been nice to get the media attention then that today’s struggling young college grads are getting today — in my day, for instance, crushing student-loan debt wasn’t seen as any problem whatsofuckingever, since my generation always has been viewed by the boomer majority as wholly disposable, but today, both the Democratic and the Repugnican candidates for president are promising to work on the suddenly-now-obvious problem of crushing student-loan debt — but, I suppose, better late than never. (And ah, well, as my fellow Gen X’er Ted Rall has noted, we X’ers indeed are the “leapfrog generation,” the generation [between the boomers and Generation Y] that has been passed over entirely.)

Why have Gen-X and younger college grads struggled so much in the job market since at least the First Great Bush Recession (circa 1990)?

It’s not just the economy, although the greedy, get-mine-and-get-out boomers fucked that up, too.

It’s the boomers’ sheer numbers — 76 million of them, according to Wikipedia — that alone would create at least some amount of scarcity in the American job market (and indeed, the majority of the plum jobs have been taken by the boomers for decades now), but their sheer numbers are coupled with the fact that, unlike the generations before them, they refuse to leave the fucking stage when their act has long been over. The boomers view their jobs just like the U.S. Supreme Court “justices” view theirs: We’ll have to pry their cold, dead fingers from their desks.

Other generations of Americans knew when it was time to hand over the reins. And they handed them over. Not the boomers.

Witness baby boomer Madonna (born 1958), whose latest big video has her playing a high-school cheerleader. She’s fiftyfuckingthree. It apparently kills her to fucking pass the torch already. And she’s typical of her generation, thinking that she’s some hot shit acting and trying to look decades younger than she is, when in fact, she’s just fucking pathetic, refusing, like Peter Pan, to grow the fuck up already.

With the baby boomers we have and will continue to have a nation full of old people, but not old and wise people.

Baby boomers whine that they can’t retire because they can’t afford to retire. Bullshit. Most of them can afford to retire — it’s that they want to live in excess and opulence (“enough” isn’t in their vocabulary) and it’s also that, whether they will admit it or not, out of their egotism they must believe that we younger folk can’t get along without them.

As Wikipedia notes of the boomers (emphasis mine):

One feature of boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about ….

Yes, indeed, all of that rhetoric from the boomers in the 1960s about changing the world, and boy, have they. They fought against the Vietnam War, only to create the Vietraq War themselves. (Apparently the only reason that they opposed the Vietnam War was to save their own skins. They were perfectly OK, however, with bogus warfare in Iraq. After all, it was someone else doing the dying for the baby boomers’ profits.) The American empire, which is being sucked dry by the vampires who comprise the corporate-military-prison-industrial complex (the majority of them boomers, of course), is on the brink of death, and even the North Pole is melting. The baby boomers ushered in change, indeed.

The baby boomers are the first generation of Americans in the nation’s history who are leaving things much worse off for the generations that follow them.

Before the boomers it always had been the American ideal that the current generation in power leaves things in better shape, not in worse shape, for the generations that follow them. And congratulations, boomers; your generation very apparently is the one that, history probably will record, destroyed the American empire. You fucked it all up on your watch.

Point out these obvious truths, and the boomers almost invariably will tell you (the post-boomer) how “Angry!” you are, as though you’re defective for being angry about obvious injustices.

No, when you are being raped in the ass with ground grass for lube, you have every fucking right to be ANGRY!

The boomers are taking everything with them, shamelessly — and even bragging about it in their “funny” bumper stickers.

Here’s another cheery story from The Associated Press today (emphases mine):

Social Security is rushing even faster toward insolvency, driven by retiring baby boomers, a weak economy and politicians’ reluctance to take painful action to fix the huge retirement and disability program.

The trust funds that support Social Security will run dry in 2033 — three years earlier than previously projected — the government said [today].

There was no change in the year that Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run out of money. It’s still 2024. …

At age 44, I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare since I began working when I was a teenager, but I don’t expect to see a fucking penny of either. The baby boomers are poised to blatantly steal my money — and slam me for being “so angry!” while they do it.

The boomers are leaving those of us who follow them with less than nothing, but we’re supposed to think that they’re great fucking people nonetheless. (Or, at least, we’re supposed to keep our fucking mouths shut while the boomers screw us over like no other generation in U.S. history has screwed over the next generation ever before.)

That’s part of the baby boomers’ mass narcissistic sociopathology — they are a “special” generation, indeed — and the reason that I put the “greatest generation” in quotation marks is that I don’t see how you can assert that the parents who created the most spoiled generation in the nation’s history comprise the “greatest generation.” No, in producing the baby boomers, the members of the “greatest generation” fucked up big-time. It’s almost impossible to overstate what awful parents the members of the “greatest generation” were. Regardless of what their intentions might have been, the results of their parenting have been catastrophic for the nation — and for the world.

And the boomers’ bumper sticker sums up their credo, their manifesto, indeed, their raison d’être, neatly: “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance.”

Yes, I got that long, long ago. Consequently, I stopped looking to the boomers long ago. The ones who created the colossal mess aren’t the ones to fix it. The boomers exist to cause problems, not to solve problems, and to consume, not to produce. They are the problem, not the solution. They are, essentially, dead to me. That’s why I could give a flying fuck if a single baby boomer ever reads a single blog post of mine.

I look not to the boomers, but to my fellow members of Gen X and to those poor souls who have to follow us. (I’d thought that my generation had it bad, but today’s young people are even more screwed, apparently, than has been my generation. They do have one thing that my generation didn’t have, however, and that’s a national conversation about how badly today’s young people have it.)

We, the post-boomers, are the clean-up crew. It’s not a job that we wanted. It’s a job that the boomers have forced upon us.

What the baby boomers probably should do while those of us who have had to follow them perform the incredibly difficult work of cleaning up after their decades-long wholesale trashing of the nation is shut the fuck up and be very thankful that the national conversation has not yet turned to the elephant in the room, to the root of our nation’s problems: the baby boomers and the increasing burden on the nation that they are. And that we post-boomers have not yet begun to seriously discuss a much, much better use for the baby boomers: something along the lines of Soylent Green.

Raise THIS, baby-boomer bitches!

Associated Press and Reuters photos

Repugnican U.S. Rep. John Boehner of Ohio (photographed above in Washington, D.C., earlier this month), a member of the get-mine-and-get-out generation, wants to raise the age of eligibility for Social Security retirement benefits to age 70 for Americans who have at least 20 years to go before retirement (that would be Generation X’ers and Generation Y’ers and those who follow the Y’ers). Boehner also wants these future Social Security recipients (including yours truly) to have to prove their (our) need for Social Security checks. Don’t worry about the baby boomers, though — they’ll be well taken care of.

Like I needed yet another reason to despise John Boehner, the Repugnican minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Not only is Boehner (pronounced like bay-ner, not like boner, by the way…) a fucking baby boomer and a fucking Repugnican, but his steely-cold reptilian eyes always have given me the fucking creeps.

Boehner’s latest kick is his suggestion that the minimum age for receiving Social Security retirement benefits be raised to age 70 for those Americans who have at least 20 years left until they reach retirement age — and that these future Social Security recipients must prove that they need the Social Security checks before they can get them.

So the baby boomers, the get-mine-and-get-out generation, get it all — they get to collect Social Security retirement benefits as early as at age 62 and they get to collect these benefits even if they’re millionaires.

Under the Boehner plan, we of Generation X, however (and those who follow us), get fucked up the ass by the baby boomers. Like we always do. With ground glass for lube.

But we’re supposed to love the baby boomers. Love them.

I recently visited with my baby-boomer uncle. I always generally have liked him and considered him one of my favorite relatives, but during our recent conversation he referred to himself as a “socialist.” And he meant it; his political philosophy is progressive. He always supported and still supports Barack Obama. (Which is not to say that the labeling of Obama as a “socialist” is anything like accurate, because it is not. Obama is a Clintonista, not a socialist.) 

Yet my uncle the “socialist” is a contractor for the U.S. military, even though he acknowledges that the bloated military-industrial complex is not sustainable, and even though, he also acknowledged, the last necessary war that the U.S. military fought was World War II. He also lives in a gated community among golf courses in Tucson, Arizona — and he acknowledged that this lush community is not sustainable, being in the middle of the fucking desert but using so much water.

My uncle, to my knowledge, has no intention of changing his lifestyle before he dies, acknowledges that his lifestyle is not sustainable, yet calls himself, without any discernible hint of cognitive dissonance, a “socialist.”

And he’s one of the better baby boomers.

I’m so often called — almost exclusively by baby boomers — “angry!” As though that were a bad thing. (My baby-boomer uncle and my baby-boomer aunt both told me during our recent visit that they can’t read my blog because I’m so “angry.” [I wonder if they’ll read this…])

It’s easy for the members of a generation who had just about everything handed to them on a silver fucking platter and who are leaving not a crumb behind on that silver platter for those of us who follow them to criticize us Gen X’ers (and Y’ers) for being so “angry!”

In France, the young people are protesting right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Yes, from 60 to 62.

Reports The Associated Press:

Paris – The front lines of the latest French protest against raising the retirement age revealed a remarkable sight: Not the slightest wrinkle, not a single gray hair.

Brandishing “Save Our Pensions!” banners, students who haven’t even entered the job market yet are already worried about what happens when they leave it.

Welcome to France, where workers’ rights are so deeply entwined into the culture that even teenagers are unsettled about plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, which is still among the lowest in Europe. The reform protest brought nearly a million people out into the streets across the country Thursday.

Young people fear they will lose the most from President Nicolas Sarkozy’s pension reforms, which aim to cut France’s ballooning deficit and make the money-losing pension system break even starting in 2018….

Shit. American young people are too busy texting to stand up against the baby boomers who are destroying their future. It’s pathetic.

Boehner (whose name I wish were pronounced like boner), even while proposing to fuck over royally my generation and the generations that follow mine, accuses the current Democratic “leadership” in Washington of “snuffing out the America that I grew up in.”

Oh, please.

It’s not the Democrats who are snuffing out the nation in which I was born in 1968 and in which I grew up.

It’s the fucking baby boomers who are destroying the nation. (Indeed, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who could be poster children for the baby-boom generation, started the nation’s destruction long before the black guy ever made it to the White House.)

It doesn’t matter whether they’re Repugnicans or Democrats, because even when they call themselves, in all seriousness, socialists, the way that the baby boomers live their lives demonstrates that they don’t give a flying fuck about the fate of those who follow them.

I think the reason that the boomers love to call me “angry” — as though this actually is going to shut me up — is because they’re terrified that anger sometimes leads to action.

What kind of action?

Well, why should we younger Americans just allow the baby boomers to continue to bleed our nation dry?

What if we decided, instead of just passively accepting our unfair and unjust treatment, to nip the baby-boomer problem in the bud?

Yeah, it just might come to that.

I hope that it does.

P.S. The French have so much more than Americans do because they fight the powers that be. The guillotines of the French Revolution, I understand, are always in the backs of the mind of France’s power elite.

Guillotines just might solve the nation’s problem of the baby boomers sucking up all of its resources, leaving future generations fucked.

I am reminded of that great line of Brad Pitt’s in Quentin Tarantino’s film “Inglourious Basterds.”

To paraphrase: “We’re in the boomer-killin’ bidness! And bidness is a-boomin’!”

Arianna Huffington, case in point

Self-important baby boomer (I know, that’s redundant…) Arianna Huffington thinks that you care how much sleep she gets each night. I know that I sure the fuck don’t.

I’m on a roll with my anti-baby-boomer crusade, so let me next discuss baby boomer Arianna Huffington as an illustration of some of the things that I’ve been talking about.

I have noted before that even liberal baby boomers suck to at least some degree.

Huffington is a case in point.

Huffington doesn’t pay the people who contribute to her website, The Huffington Post (estimated to be worth as much as $200 million), although she sure bashed her fellow money-grubbing swine in her book Pigs at the Trough.

Huffington herself — who used to be married to millionaire Repugnican Michael Huffington, until he came out of the closet, and who espoused right-wing ideas and values before she turned to the left — sure the fuck isn’t hurting, from what I can tell, but she can’t — or rather, won’t — pay her writers.

Huffington’s latest kick is her “Sleep Challenge 2010,” in which, I guess, her point is that women don’t get enough sleep, and so she’s trying to get more sleep and she’s going to tell us all about it.

Here are excerpts from her post on day four of her “Sleep Challenge 2010”:

…I’ve yet to meet my challenge goal of getting eight hours of sleep a night. But I’ve gotten close — getting seven and a half hours each of the last three nights.

And I’m already seeing the benefits, such as starting my day feeling like one of those horrible “rise and shine” people you normally want to throttle when you are among the sleep-deprived. And I’m hitting the ground running, minus the morning mental fog….

…Another luscious sleep aid: the yummy pink silk pajamas I just got as a gift. Just putting them on made me feel ready for bed — so much more than the cotton T-shirts I usually wear at night. These pajamas are unmistakably “going to bed clothes,” not to be confused with “going to the gym clothes.” Far too many of us have given up on the distinction between what you wear during the day and what you wear to bed. Slipping on the PJs is a signal to your body: time to shut down!

I also made sure I had my Blackberries (yes, I have more than one!) charging far, far away from my bed so I could avoid the middle-of-the-night temptation to check the latest news — which these days usually includes word on which Democrat is announcing his retirement and which Republican is accusing Obama of being “soft” on terror….

…My daughter is heading back east today, so my biggest challenge going forward will be my coffee consumption. All my friends know what a coffee addict I am — and will appreciate how tough it’s been to stick to my new vow not to have a drop of coffee after noon. So far this week I’ve tried and failed to keep my vow — that’s why I’m going public with it. Can you please be my Caffeine Police? If you see me drinking coffee after noon, you have my permission to take it from me — even if you have to pry my fingers off the cup!…

Are these the frantic rantings of a grown woman or of a fucking teenager?

There is nothing on the planet more pathetic than a baby boomer trying to be young and hip again.

It would never occur to me, a Generation X’er, that anyone would give a flying fuck about how much sleep I get every night, how many Blackberries I own (but for the record: zero), what I wear to bed, or that I’m trying to kick my coffee habit.

Arianna, get a fucking grip.

The polar ice caps are melting. We don’t give a fuck that you’re trying to kick coffee or that you just love your pink silk jammies. Nor do we need to hear you brag about how many electronic toys that you can afford to own because you don’t pay your writers.

Again, even the most liberal and progressive of the baby boomers — and even those who weren’t even born here in the United States, like Huffington (she was born in Athens, Greece) — are annoyingly self-centered and selfish.

That Arianna Huffington is one of the good ones — that speaks volumes of the problem of the baby boomers.

‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams fires opening salvo at the baby boomers?

“Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams for the first time, to my knowledge, has taken the baby-boom generation head on in his strip for today:

(The full-sized strip is at the end of this post.)

The “pointy-haired boss” of “Dilbert” for years has been the quintessential baby boomer, utterly clueless and incompetent yet in charge of the whole show nonetheless — and in possession of wildly exaggerated views of his own competence, talents and worth.

The title character of Dilbert, I do believe, is a member of my generation, Generation X (which is probably why I’ve always loved “Dilbert”). Dilbert incessantly struggles to do a good job despite the obstacles that his incompetent baby-boomer boss puts in his way.

Today’s “Dilbert” strip has Asok, a member of Generation Y, I believe, flat-out telling the “pointy-haired boss”: “Your [generation] has destroyed the hopes of my entire generation.”

Yup.

Not that the boomers give a flying fuck that they are the first generation in the history of the United States of America that didn’t give a shit about leaving the nation in better shape for the next generation than the nation was when they inherited it.

I would say that the boomers’ mentality always has been “Get mine and get out,” except that they always got not only what was theirs but also what wasn’t theirs, but what belonged to their children and to successive generations. Like cancerous tumors, the boomers just can’t get enough at the expense of the whole (that’s why I’ve also thought of the boomers as Generation Swine), and their greed has brought the entire nation — indeed, the entire world — to the brink of collapse. 

Ironically, the boomers apparently thought that things would collapse right after their deaths, but their unbridled, hordes-of-locust-like greed has been such that we are seeing the catastrophic results of their utter selfishness and irresponsibility sooner (as in now) rather than later.  

The boomers’ legacy will include such things as stolen presidential elections, bogus wars in the Middle East (only perpetuating the terrorist threat from there for years to come) and environmental devastation (including melting polar ice caps, for fuck’s sake) and economic devastation that will affect generations to come.

There are exceptions that are far and few between, but even the most progressive boomers tend to show central boomer traits, such as materialism (even their “spirituality,” such as “The Secret” bullshit, is about materialism) and a refusal to acknowledge the damage that their generation has done to the generations succeeding them.

I wonder if Adams is going to continue the discussion, and I wonder if a larger national discussion about the worthlessness of the baby boomers is going to follow.

I hope…

P.S. The Wikipedia entry on Scott Adams notes that he was born in 1957 — which makes him a baby boomer. He is one of the rare exceptions, one of the few boomers who will admit that the baby-boom generation dropped the ball on the American dream, which is that each generation would make things better for the generations that follow it.

When we finally round the boomers up for Carousel (or maybe for Soylent Green [or for both]), perhaps we can give Adams an exemption…