"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Sisterhood is powerful....well, maybe not so much
Posted by Jill | 5:35 AM


Friends are friends, but when push comes to shove, your family is your family.

My sister and I were estranged for decades. It wasn't her fault at all, it was all mine. I resented my sister for years. I resented her because she was the pretty one, the musical one, the talented one, and I was nothing but the funny one. Now funny is something that can stay with you forever, but when you are eight years old, or ten, or twelve, or twenty-two, and you have been told your whole life that you are NOT pretty, you are cute and funny -- and it's made clear that cute and funny are definitely NOT as valuable as pretty, it's easy to get sucked into a vortex of anger and resentment. After all, who WOULDN'T be besotted with a child like my sister? She WAS pretty, and photogenic, and musically talented, whereas I was just this weird kid who preferred to stay in my room alone and make dollhouse furniture out of construction paper than be outside with neighborhood kids who were just going to tease me for being weird anyway.

It was never about anything my sister ever did. Try as I might, I have no memories of her ever being anything but nice to me. The only photographs of my early childhood where I'm smiling are the ones where I'm with her. So I'm not sure exactly when the resentment came about.

I remember her comforting me in her car the night before her first wedding while I sobbed uncontrollably. I was wretched because the guy I was dating would not make a commitment, and here she was getting married, and in my mind it was all because she was prettier than I was and things just seemed through my warped eyes to come so EASILY to her. What a selfish thing to do, to make the night before your sister's wedding all about YOU -- and yet that's what I did to the sister who hitchhiked home from college in Indiana to see me in my high school play.

Many years later, when my mother's husband became ill, Lynn tiptoed gingerly back into the family fold, for she had been estranged from our mother for years as well. It was then that the long journey towards reconciliation began. It hasn't always been easy. I will always have a lot of guilt about how I hated her all those years for no reason other than thinking that if I just disliked her enough, that our mother would make ME the favorite. And she still has issues with a lot of what I did. But we've been talking it all out for over a decade now, and when Mr. Brilliant was diagnosed with cancer in March, she immediately stepped up to the plate to help -- to make phone calls, to find resources for help, and to just be there.

That Lynn has been willing to forgive and forget has been the greatest gift I have ever or will ever receive.

And so, when I read about Liz Cheney throwing her lesbian sister Mary under the bus as part of her cynical run for Senate in Wyoming, I felt sick to my stomach. It's one thing for an unhappy child whose mother was already sunken deep into depression by the time she was born to hate her prettier sister who appeared to a child's eyes to be the favorite. It's quite another for a middle-aged adult to be willing to sacrifice this most precious bond in order to garner votes from a bunch of ignorant yahoos in the name of political power. When you're even more soulless and heartless than Dick Cheney, that's really saying something.

Mary Cheney's marriage is not a bargaining chip, nor is it an opinion about which intelligent people of goodwill can disagree. What Mary Cheney has is a family -- as much a family as yours and arguably more of a family than mine was in my formative years. That anyone can even think of not ferociously defending a sister with whom is supposedly close as part of politics makes Liz Cheney a particularly vile sort of ghoul -- one that makes the father-without-a-pulse who spawned her look like Mother Teresa by comparison.

I know it is bad juju to wish ill on other people, but I find myself hoping that if Liz Cheney is ever in the situation I was, with a sick husband and a high-pressure job, exhausted and scared and not knowing where to turn, that HER sister says, "Sorry, honey, but you're on your own." It would be no more than she deserves.

As for my sister? Thank you, Lynn, for being my rock and for your forgiveness. I love you, Sissy.

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Saturday, October 31, 2009

Word.
Posted by Jill | 8:47 AM
Lawrence O'Donnell eviscerates obvious 2012 Republican Presidential hopeful Liz Cheney on Countdown last night for trying to paint Barack Obama's meeting of caskets of war dead at Dover Air Force Base as a photo-op:



O'Donnell can be a bit overly-earnest at times, but here he is 100% spot-on. Liz Cheney ought to be ashamed to herself, and so should her soul-sucking zombie of a father.

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Monday, September 28, 2009

Because Sarah Palin turned out to be a train wreck, and because they have no one else
Posted by Jill | 5:45 AM
Who are the Republicans going to run for President in 2012? With Mark Sanford having fallen from grace, and Newt Gingrich not catching on because too many people DO remember 1994, and Tim Pawlenty trying to paint himself as Jefferson Davis along with Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin proving to be every bit the train wreck we knew she was, the Republicans are left with Mitt Romney, who will give the Christofascist Zombie Brigade fits, or -- whom?

The Wall Street Journal thought that Dick Cheney should run, but since The Dickster's health is questionable (especially without a regular supply of freshly dead human souls to feed him) perhaps another Cheney, equally adept at lying and fabricating and bellicose rhetoric against everyone east of Greenwich Mean Time would fit the bill:
Liz Cheney looks nothing like her father, but it is clear who he is. She was introduced as “our favorite vice president’s daughter” at a recent gathering of conservative women here. She kept invoking him in her speech, conveying his best regards, and likes to share cute stories about Dad trying to master his new BlackBerry.

Like her father, Ms. Cheney speaks in understated, almost academic cadences, head veering down into her notes. She also shares his willingness to pummel President Obama in stark, disdainful tones, not so much criticizing as taunting him.

“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”

By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.

Liz Cheney is “a red state rock star,” declared Rebecca Wales, one of the organizers of this event, the “Smart Girls Summit.”

“The future of the Cheney message,” added a conservative blogger who goes by the name of Fingers Malloy (a rare man in this crowd, and even rarer, one with a Mohawk). He also called her “one of the fresh faces of our movement.”

The Republicans are desperate, and only when they're desperate do they bring out the women. The continued adoration of Sarah Palin by so many Republican men even after she's proven herself to be nothing more than the aging beauty queen and aspiring stylista on other people's money that the sane among us always knew she was shows just how clueless they are. Put something with tits out there, their thinking goes, and we'll get the women and show how with-it we are at the same time.

But I think we underestimate the money machine behind the right wing, and how much the military-industrial complex has to gain from a return to a Cheney foreign policy. Liz Cheney may look like her mother, with that blonde sunniness that hides an appallingly empty heart, but her worldview is decidedly that of her father. She both literally and figuratively is Cheney-in-a-dress.

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