Science: Conservatives are stupid

Synchronicity is fun.

As I compose this, the top three most-viewed Yahoo! News stories right now are:

“Low IQ and Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice”

“President Obama, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Share Tense Tarmac Moment”

“Arizona Gov. Brewer Gets Book Critique from Obama”

The first article begins thusly:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience. …

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact [with groups outside of one's own] reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science….*

This is the image that Yahoo! News used with both pieces on Repugnican Tea Party Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s recent obviously orchestrated tiff with President Barack Obama on her home turf:

Associated Press photo

The caption for this news photo reads:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer points during an intense conversation with President Barack Obama after he arrived at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, in Mesa, Arizona. Asked moments later what the conversation was about, Brewer, a Republican, said: “He was a little disturbed about my book.” Brewer recently published a book, Scorpions for Breakfast, something of a memoir of her years growing up and defends her signing of Arizona’s controversial law cracking down on illegal immigrants, which Obama opposes. Obama was objecting to Brewer’s description of a meeting he and Brewer had at the White House, where she described Obama as lecturing her.

Indeed, who is this uppity Negro to be lecturing the white governor of Arizona?

Why Obama agrees to meet with Brewer at all escapes me, since she only uses any meeting with him as future campaign material — and now, to boost her book sales – by supposedly showing her fellow white supremacists in Arizona, the South Africa of the Southwest, how she so bravely stood up to the black president. (Except that he isn’t the legitimate president, right?)

To those Arizonans who believe that Jan Brewer — who appeared to be drunk or otherwise intoxicated or otherwise significantly neurologically impaired during her first and only gubernatorial debate in 2010 (after her incredibly horrible first debate performance she refused to participate in any more debates) – is a great stateswoman, perhaps she does look like some hot shit openly publicly disrespecting President Barack Obama.

To those of us who don’t suffer from intellectual deficiency — and who thus aren’t conservative — however, Jan Brewer looks like what she is: an old, racist, wingnutty hag, a stupid, braying jackass.

I’ve always disliked the term “conservative,” because the vast majority of conservatives are just abject fucking morons. “Conservativism” sounds like a legitimate political school of thought, when, in fact, more often than not it indicates severe intellectual deficiency.

I look forward to the developing science on this topic. (Of course, the wingnuts eschew science — science and facts have a well-known liberal bias, you know – so their feelings shouldn’t be hurt that much.)

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*The LiveScience article is worth reading in full, and the money shot of the article, in my book, is the study’s psychologist’s essential assertion that to associate with groups that are different from one’s own is so mentally taxing that dipshits don’t even bother. This would, I suppose, explain the homogeneity of the red states and the red regions within the purplish and blue states: the dipshits huddle together in their ignorance and fear.

Did Newt Gingrich just swiftboat ‘Massachusetts moderate’ Mitt?

Reuters photo

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, pictured above campaigning in South Carolina, where he decisively was victorious yesterday, now goes on to Florida in his quest to prevent the coronation of “Massachusetts moderate” Mitt Romney as the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nominee.

My bad — I just now watched the Newt Gingrich ad in which Gingrich states, correctly, of course, that “Massachusetts moderate” Mitt Romney hails from the state that brought us supposedly ultra-liberal Democratic presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. (Of course, it’s not the denotation there that is critical to the ad’s effectiveness, but it’s all of the ad’s connotations.)

The ad was talked about primarily as the ad that nails Mitt for speaking French — just like John Kerry does (the ad features brief clips of both of them speaking French) – but the ad in general likens Romney to Kerry and Dukakis and essentially asks how anyone from Massachusetts can be a real conservative.

The French connection (indeed, the ad is titled “The French Connection”) is interesting, however. It serves several purposes, I think: It’s meant to indicate Romney’s supposed otherness and supposed un-Americanness (maybe even treason?) and Romney’s supposed effeteness (the French, after all, are cowardly and weak, no?); and, of course, it’s a great slur steeped in the anti-intellectualism that is so much a part of the American right wing (many if not most of whom cannot speak or write even their mother tongue correctly): He speaks French! Fluently!

It also, of course, speaks of socioeconomic class: John Kerry is rich and John Kerry speaks French. Mitt Romney is rich and Mitt Romney speaks French. They both went to expensive, exclusive Ivy League schools, where they had the luxury of learning French.

This long has been a problem for the Richie Rich wing of the Repugnican Tea Party: How to appeal to the Cooters and Skeeters and Jebs and Jethros — the “tea party” wing of the party whose votes the Richie Riches need in order to win elections – when the Richie Riches are about as far away from rednecks as you’re going to get.

However, up until now, for the most part the Repugnican Tea Party candidates who appeal primarily to the rednecks haven’t openly, publicly assaulted the aristocratic wing of their party, so Newt’s attacks on Romney’s lofty socioeconomic status seem rather novel. (“Kamikaze,” actually, might be the better word for it…)

Apparently Gingrich’s attacks on Romney in the deep red state of South Carolina worked wonders. I mean, Gingrich beat Romney in South Carolina yesterday by double digits, and since 1980, whichever Repugnican presidential primary candidate who won South Carolina also went on to win the party’s presidential nomination.

And if Gingrich wins again in Florida on January 31, it could be all over for Romney. It doesn’t matter how well Romney has been polling in the upcoming primary states as of late; if he widely is perceived as a losing candidate after having lost South Carolina and Florida, it could start a rapid domino effect that will make his previous support in those upcoming states evaporate rapidly – just as it did in South Carolina.

Romney, we know now, didn’t actually win the Iowa caucuses; the state’s Repugnican Tea Party now says that Rick Santorum won, and, as The Christian Science monitor notes, Santorum having won Iowa, Romney having won New Hampshire and Gingrich having won South Carolina “is the first time in modern GOP primary history that three different candidates won those three states.”

This indicates a Repugnican Tea Party that still is in serious disarray and that might not be sorted out for weeks to come. And if Mitt does manage to make it out of primary season alive, he might be so badly damaged that his chances of beating President Barack Obama in November are greatly diminished — and, ironically, all along Romney has polled better against Obama than have any of his primary season competitors.

We know what we would get with a President Gingrich, I think. One of Big Brother’s main slogans was:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Possessing intellect – such as knowing a foreign language — is a weakness, you see, among those who can barely speak their own native English (a.k.a. Newt’s base). And the only way to be “safe” from “terrorism” and other “evil” is to have perpetual warfare against the “evildoers,” which a chickenhawkish President Gingrich no doubt would embrace, just as chickenhawk George W. Bush did. And don’t even get me started on the topic of freedom (freedom, oh, freedom – that’s just some people talkin’…).

President Thomas Jefferson apparently could speak Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish on top of English. “President” George W. Bush barely fucking could speak English. That’s how “far” we Americans have come.

And now, we have in Newt Gingrich a man who essentially would represent a third (and maybe a fourth) term by George W. Bush.

I mean, it’s no accident that upon his recent departure from the race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who also had wanted to continue the policies and practices of the unelected Bush regime – endorsed Newt Gingrich.

P.S. For all of the undeserved shit that First Lady Michelle Obama gets from the wingnuts, I find Gingrich’s current wife, Callista (pictured below in South Carolina last week), to be (like Newt) a fucking skank ho. I mean, when she was his aide she apparently had an affair with Newt for six years while he was still married to his second wife (with whom he’d been having an affair while he still was married to his first wife).

AFP (that’s French) photo

That, and the creepy Callista Gingrich looks just like the femme fatale (there’s some more French!) in Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!”:

Careful! She bites…

Another one bites the dust

Reuters photo

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, shown in South Carolina earlier this week, is to drop out of the presidential race today. Perry couldn’t catch fire even in the backasswards, white supremacist state of South Carolina, polling dead last.

When I saw yesterday that Texas Gov. Rick Perry was polling at only 6 percent in South Carolina, putting him at fifth and last place, I wondered why in the hell he was remaining in the race. He came in at fifth place in Iowa and sixth place in New Hampshire, and if he couldn’t do well in fellow secessionist red state South Carolina, it definitely would be all over for him.

Maybe — just maybe — Perry figured that he’d rather his paltry support in South Carolina go to the top not-Mitt-Romney candidate when South Carolinans vote on Saturday, and that’s why he reportedly is dropping out of the race today. South Carolina, after all, very most likely is the last chance to deny Romney his crown. (Or maybe it wasn’t a bit of actual selflessness at all; maybe Perry just didn’t want another humiliating loss…)

Only about a third of South Carolinans want Mitt Romney to be the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate, but with Perry’s departure, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul remain in the race to split the anyone-but-Romney vote three ways.

I have to wonder if the far right is going to make Ron Paul its Ralph Nader of sorts, blaming Paul’s candidacy for splitting the vote and enabling Romney to win the party’s nomination.

Anyway, I believe that it primarily was a combination of two things that sank Rick Perry’s candidacy: the fact that the last governor from Texas who became president now is He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned even within his own party, and the fact that Perry’s debate performances were disastrous. Overcoming the inevitable comparison to He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned would have been a tall order for Perry, but Perry’s utterly unpresidential presence doomed him.

Let’s just hope that Perry remains politically dead outside of his own backasswards state of Texas.

Golden Globes gets it mostly wrong

Associated Press and Reuters photos

Martin Scorsese poses with his undeserved Golden Globe for best director for his overhyped “Hugo” in Los Angeles last night, and George Clooney poses with his undeserved Golden Globe for best actor in a drama for his role in the overrated “The Descendants,” which also unfortunately undeservedly took the Golden Globe’s award for best dramatic film. The Golden Globes snubbed Steven Spielberg, but at least gave the film “The Artist” the props that it deserves, naming it the best musical or comedic film and naming Jean Dujardin as the best actor in a musical or comedy for his leading performance in the film. (Below are pictured Dujardin, left; the director of “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius, middle; actress Berenice Bejo, far right; and Uggie the dog, far left.)

Reuters photo

I haven’t written a movie review for a while, although I see a lot of movies, perhaps especially at the end of the year, when the Oscar bait is trotted out to the theaters.

Since I haven’t reviewed most of this year’s contenders for the big awards – but have seen most of them — I’ll comment on last night’s Golden Globe winners for film.

First up is the movie that got the Globes’ award for best drama, Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.”

Yikes.

Payne has done so much better than “The Descendants,” such as “Sideways,” “Election,” and even “About Schmidt” and “Citizen Ruth.” That “The Descendants” stars Hollywood golden boy George Clooney and that its director has made better films doesn’t mean that “The Descendants” is worthy of being on anyone’s best-picture list, because it isn’t.

“The Descendants” has some nice visuals — it takes place in Hawaii — and I found the character of Sid to be adorable, but otherwise, “The Descendants” is overlong as it meanders and dawdles, with a plot that is mediocre at best and that never arrives anywhere, leaving its audience waiting for a point that never arrives. I give the film a “B-” at best. (Probably it deserves a “C” or “C+”, since I have little to no interest in viewing it ever again.)

“The Descendants’” competitors for the Golden Globes’ best drama were “The Help,” “Hugo,” “The Ides of March,” “Moneyball” and “War Horse.”

I didn’t see “The Help” because of its shitty reviews, and I have no interest in catching it on DVD.

“The Ides of March,” another George Clooney vehicle, while watchable, also doesn’t belong on anyone’s best-picture list. Clooney, Ryan Gosling and Philip Seymour Hoffman give decent performances in “Ides,” but the script is mediocre and nothing novel, just a rehash of political movies that we’ve seen before. I give “The Ides of March” a “B-” or “C+” also. This wasn’t actually George Clooney’s year.

“Hugo” I found to be fairly entertaining but overrated. Even the wildly talented Sacha Baron Cohen as a quasi-villain couldn’t really save Martin Scorsese’s self-indulgent flick that turns out to be more about the French director Georges Melies (played by Ben Kingsley) than about our young protagonist Hugo. I found the whole automaton thing rather senseless and strange and uncaptivating, and films about filmmaking often are about as good as are novels about writing novels, it seems to me. (“The Artist” is an exception; more on that shortly.)

“Hugo’s” 3-D effects were decent, and the film overall is entertaining, although a bit too long, and overall “Hugo” was just overhyped. Martin Scorsese, contrary to apparent popular opinion, does not shit gold. I give “Hugo” a “B.”

I wanted to see “Moneyball” but never did, so I’ll have to catch it on DVD, but I did catch Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse,” which is far superior to “The Descendants.” My guess is that even if I’d seen “The Help” and “Moneyball,” “War Horse” still would be my pick for best drama from the list of the Golden Globes’ six nominees.

“War Horse,” which garners a solid “A”, is reminiscent of the films of yore (we’ve had plenty of films about World War I and films starring horses or dogs as our protagonists), perhaps especially with its ending scene, which (fairly) has been compared to “Gone with the Wind,” but “War Horse” works quite well nonetheless. I found myself teary-eyed at the end of the film, and that’s fairly rare. And despite the film’s length, my interest in it never waned, which I cannot say for “Hugo” or “The Descendants.” Steven Spielberg still has it.

The Globes unusually has a second category for best picture, best musical or comedy. I have seen three out of four of the nominees in that category. (Not bad, right?)

The nominees were “50/50,” “The Artist,” “Bridesmaids,” “Midnight in Paris” and “My Week with Marilyn.” “Bridesmaids” is the only one that I didn’t see, due to its lackluster reviews.

“The Artist” won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy, and I can’t complain about that. I saw the film this past weekend and it’s best-picture material, a solid “A” (maybe a rare “A+”). A film that mostly is silent and in black and white but can keep the audience’s attention nonetheless is an accomplishment. The protagonist’s heroic dog is a bit too reminiscent of the heroic dog Snowy of Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin,” which I saw before “The Artist,” but “The Artist” is a solid film with good performances and a captivating, clever script.

“The Artist’s” protagonist George Valentin (played by Jean Dujardin), a silent-movie star, at first is an annoying, spotlight-hogging ham but becomes more and more likeable as the film progresses, and protagonist Peppy Miller (played by Berenice Bejo), also a movie star, is mesmerizing, although I don’t know that most starlets of the 1920s and 1930s looked like Bejo does; I’m not an expert on the films of the 1920s and 1930s, but she does look a little out of place. However, Bejo’s charisma more than makes up for that.

“50/50,” which stars Joseph Gordon Levitt, one of my favorite actors, also earns a solid “A,” but its material — a young man diagnosed with cancer – apparently wasn’t novel enough for it to win in its category. Still, “50/50” has some great lines and Seth Rogen does a great job as protagonist Gordon Levitt’s supportive-as-he-can-be best friend. (Unfortunately, in “50/50” Bryce Dallas Howard pretty much plays the same role that she played in the lacking Clint Eastwood vehicle “Hereafter.”)

“My Week with Marilyn,” which I can give only a “B” at best, isn’t a comedy or a musical, so why it landed in this category escapes me. Michelle Williams does as good a job as Marilyn Monroe as she can, but the film isn’t as compelling as it should be, and it’s not very believable that Marilyn Monroe essentially was a drugged-out bimbo who had enough occasional flashes of acting brilliance that an entire film could be cobbled together from these apparently brief and accidental episodes of talent.

“Marilyn” also suffers, I think, from being too self-referential. Again, the number of films about filmmaking that we’re seeing as of late seems to indicate that the filmmakers have run out of ideas, and so they’re now turning the camera on themselves.

“Midnight in Paris” would have won, I suspect, were it not for “The Artist.” Unfortunately, we’re used to good work from Woody Allen (although he’s made some lackluster films, too), and so he often unfairly is overlooked. “Midnight in Paris,” while not a complete departure from Allen’s past films, is a solid film that earns an “A.”

The Globes’ nominees for best director were Woody Allen (for “Midnight in Paris”), George Clooney (for “The Ides of March”), Michel Hazanavicius for “The Artist,” Alexander Payne for “The Descendants” and Martin Scorsese for “Hugo.”

As I did see all of these films, I can say that I find Scorsese’s win for best director to be disappointing. He apparently was awarded for his past work, because “Hugo” doesn’t deserve best director.

We can cross Clooney, Payne and Scorsese off of the best-director list right off, which would leave us with Allen and Hazanavicius. I probably would have given the best-director award to Hazanavicius, as much as I love most of Allen’s work. “The Artist” is quite an accomplishment and doesn’t deserve less only because Hazanavicius is new to us Americans.

The Globes gave best actor in a drama to George Clooney for his work in “The Descendants,” another mistake. Clooney is popular — I get that — and he is a solid actor, but there is nothing very remarkable about “The Descendants,” which, next to “Hugo,” might be the most overrated film of the year.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see Michael Fassbender in “Shame” (it comes to my city later this month, and I like Fassbender, so I’m there), and, as I noted, I have yet to see “Moneyball,” so I am not sure if I would have picked Brad Pitt or Fassbender, who, along with Pitt, also was nominated for the Globes’ best-actor award. Leonardo DiCaprio was nominated for his performance in “J. Edgar,” but that film (which I rather generously gave a “B”) is so flawed that it probably sank his chances, and I don’t feel that DiCaprio was screwed, not really. Ryan Gosling was nominated for his role in “The Ides of March,” but again, there is nothing special about that film, either.

I’m really fucked where it comes to the Globes’ nominees for best actress in a drama, as I haven’t seen any of the nominated perfomances, Glenn Close’s for “Albert Nobbs” (also arrives at my city later this month, and I’ll probably go see it, even though it seems “Yentl”-ish to me), Viola Davis’ for “The Help,” Rooney Mara’s for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Meryl Streep’s for “The Iron Lady” (which is getting lackluster reviews and which I’ll probably wait for on DVD), and Tilda Swinton’s for “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (which seems to be an awful lot like her role in “The Deep End,” but I love Tilda).

My guess is that Streep, who won the Golden Globe, will end up getting the best-actress Oscar again — only because she more or less looks like Margaret Thatcher. “Saturday Night Live” achieves lookalikes all the time, so really, so what? Word is that “The Iron Lady” fairly sucks, with Roger Ebert giving it only two of four stars.

The Globes’ best actor in a comedy or musical went to Jean Dujardin of “The Artist,” which I confidently assert was a deserved win, even though I didn’t see Brendan Gleeson in “The Guard” or the good-enough-but-overrated Ryan Gosling in “Crazy Stupid Love.” (Really, are Ryan Gosling and George Clooney the only two actors that we have left?) Joseph Gordon Levitt was quite good in “50/50,” and Owen Wilson also was quite good in “Midnight in Paris,” but neither of them, nor the two other nominees, had a snowball’s chance against Dujardin’s performance.

The Globes’ award for best actress in a comedy or musical went to Michelle Williams for “My Week with Marilyn,” although, again, “My Week with Marilyn” is neither a fucking comedy nor a fucking musical, and it was no super-human feat to doll up Michelle Williams to resemble Marilyn Monroe any more than it was to make Meryl Streep look like Margaret Thatcher, for fuck’s sake. It’s too bad that Williams wasn’t given a better script to work with.

I’ve yet to see “Carnage,” which garnered both Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet nominations for best actress in a comedy or musical. I am there when “Carnage” comes to my city, however; the previews look compelling. (I love movies that give us insight into dysfunctional relationships, which is perhaps why I like Woody Allen’s work so much, and I liked Winslet in “Revolutionary Road.”)

I also have yet to see Kristen Wiig’s performance in “Bridesmaids,” but I like Wiig, so I might catch her peformance, which also was nominated for the Globes’ best actress in a comedy or musical, on DVD. Ditto for “Young Adult,” which garnered Charlize Theron a nomination in the category.

The Globes’ best supporting actor went to Christopher Plummer for his role as a gay man who comes out of the closet late in life in “Beginners.” I give “Beginners” a “B+”, but I have to wonder if Plummer was given the award more for his past work than for his role in “Beginners.” I could argue that Kenneth Branagh, who also was nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “My Week with Marilyn,” was more deserving of the award.

The Globes’ best supporting actress award went to Octavia Spencer, whoever that is, for her role in “The Help.” I can’t imagine that Spencer was better than Berenice Bejo, who also nominated for best supporting actress, was in “The Artist,” however, and it escapes me as to why Bejo wasn’t nominated for best actress, since her role in “The Artist” is equal to the male protagonist’s. (I remember when Heath Ledger was nominated for an Oscar for best actor for “Brokeback Mountain” but Jake Gyllenhaal inexplicably was nominated only for best supporting actor, even though his role was equal to Ledger’s.)

The Golden Globes’ winner for best screenplay went to Woody Allen for “Midnight in Paris.” It seems that the Globes wanted to recognized Allen’s film in some way and so gave it best screenplay, but arguably “The Artist,” which also was nominated for best screenplay, should have won. Why “The Ides of March” and “The Descendants” were nominated at all for best screenplay eludes me, as neither is a remarkable film in any way, and George Clooney doesn’t shit gold, either. Again, I’ve yet to see the also-nominated-for-best-screenplay “Moneyball,” but I can live with Allen’s win in the category.

The Globes’ best animated feature went to Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin,” the only film in the category that I’ve seen (the others were “Arthur Christmas,” “Cars 2,” “Puss in Boots” and “Rango.”) “Tintin” is a solid, entertaining film (I give it an “A” or “A-”), perhaps a little overlong but quite watchable, although, in my book, not as good as Spielberg’s “War Horse” (“A” or “A+”). Still, with “Tintin” it’s apparent that Spielberg hasn’t lost his talents, and I have to wonder if the dearth of nominations for Spielberg in the Golden Globes means that he’s going to be given short shrift with the Oscars, too.

Spielberg should have been nominated for, and perhaps won, the Globes’ best director, in my book.

I have plenty of films to catch up on between now and the Oscars, but thus far my picks are “War Horse” or “The Artist” for best picture and Steven Spielberg (for “War Horse,” not for “Tintin”) or Michel Hazanavicius for best director.

At least the Golden Globes ignored the sanctimonious-as-Scorsese Terrence Malick’s God-awful “Tree of Life” (which I gave a rare “F”), and hopefully the Oscars will, too, but the Globes overlooked Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” (which I give an “A” or “A-”, and which unfairly has been compared to “Tree of Life”) – a mistake that, hopefully, the Oscars won’t make.

The two Pricks vie to be the top fascist

Associated Press photo

“Christian” presidential aspirants Prick Perry and Prick Santorum falsely greet each other at an apparent all-white-male “prayer breakfast” in South Carolina today. With “Christians” like these, who needs demons?

Presidential wannabes Prick Perry and Prick Santorum, with the presidential primary election in South Carolina upon us on Saturday, apparently are vying to be the biggest “Christo”fascist in the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary race.

Thank Goddess that neither one of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever sitting in the Oval Office.

Texas Gov. Prick Perry, who wants to represent the third and maybe even the fourth term of George W. Bush, has proclaimed that to denounce the recently revealed incident of U.S. Marines having urinated on the bodies of their kill in Afghanistan is to have “disdain for the [U.S.] military.”

That exactly is what the criminal members of the unelected, treasonous, fascistic Bush regime did: They equated any criticism of their profoundly bungled military policy or of any of their military failures (such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) to wholesale attacks on our troops by America-hating traitors. And that is the same tack that Perry is trying to take now: Barack Hussein Obama, you see, according to Prick Perry, actually hates our troops. (Well, Obama does send them off to their pointless deaths as nonchalantly as George W. Bush did, but that’s another blog post.)

“Obviously, 18-, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that’s what’s occurred here,” Perry dismissively said today of Goldenshowergate, adding, “What’s really disturbing to me is the kind of over-the-top rhetoric from this [the Obama] administration and their disdain for the military.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta should not have condemned the desecration of the dead, which the Geneva Conventions forbid, you see. The Associated Press reports that Perry today “said the Marines involved should be reprimanded but not prosecuted on criminal charges” — even though they violated the Geneva Conventions, for fuck’s sake.

Prick Perry’s knee-jerk right-wing, jingoistic “defense” of Goldenshowergate unintentionally raises more questions than it puts anything to rest.

Why do we have “kids” in the U.S. military when, as Perry correctly states, “kids make stupid mistakes all too often”?

Why do we entrust such highly sensitive matters to “kids”?

Is it because older and wiser individuals will know that they are being exploited? Is it that it easier to send kids — with their false sense of immortality and their naive trust of authority – to their pointless maimings and deaths in the bogus wars for the profiteering of the stupid old rich men who so casually send our kids off to be maimed and traumatized and to die for their personal fortunes?

I can assure Prick Perry that President Barack Obama hates our troops just as much as “President” George W. Bush did. If Obama did not, he would never put them in harm’s way only for the benefit of the war profiteers of the military-industrial complex and the corporateers, such as Big Oil.

Obama promised “hope” and “change,” but there still is plenty of death and destruction in the Middle East that benefits only the war profiteers and the corporateers. But apparently for Prick Perry, there isn’t enough death and destruction for the obscene profits of the 1 percent.

Not to be outdone in hateful jingoism by Prick Perry, former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Prick Santorum – the evil stooge for the pedophilic Catholick church led by Pope Palpatine who fancies himself a “Christian” and is who is so hated by his own state that he lost re-election by a record margin there in 2006 – has declared that no one should condemn the assassination of a 32-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist last week.

This is (was…) 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who, according to the Iranian government, was murdered in a car bombing in Tehran on Wednesday:

Associated Press image

Whoever killed Roshan is guilty of the murder of a young father. There is no getting around that, whether Roshan’s murderers turn out to be the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (as the Iranian government reportedly alleges); Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, Mossad; or even – who knows? — fellow Iranians who for whatever reason or reasons wanted Roshan dead. While I suspect the CIA or Mossad (or both), it’s not impossible, I suppose, that even the Iranian government killed Roshan.

But to hear “Christo”fascistic assbites like Prick Santorum make such pronouncements as “Our country condemned it [Roshan's murder]; my feeling is we should have kept our mouth shut,” is nauseating.

Of whose assassination would Jesus approve?

Further, both the United States and Israel apparently have nukes.* What if the Iranians assassinated an American or an Israeli nuclear scientist on American or Israeli soil? That would be an outrage that might even be cause for all-out war, no? Why, then, is it perfectly OK for the United States or Israel to assassinate others on foreign soil?

And why is it that the United States and Israel may have nukes, but that any other nation may not? Why do the United States and its partner in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Middle East, Israel, get to determine who may and may not possess nukes in the Middle East?

This blatant hypocrisy and double standard and self-righteousness is why the United States and Israel are so hated in the Middle East, and why we have seen perpetual warfare there (and blowback here at home, such as on September 11, 20o1).

There is a lot about Iran not to like, such as its oppression of women and non-heterosexuals and those who don’t submit to the nation’s theocratic rule, but this patriarchal (and misogynist and homophobic) theocratic rule is exactly what the war-mongering, patriarchal theofascists here at home — such as Prick Santorum and Prick Perry — would love to establish for themselves right here.

And not to let Mitt Romney off the hook; a Mormon president would be a huge mistake. Although Romney’s Mormonism instructs him to pretend to be more civil than are his political opponents and to be falsely nice while in actuality he supports a great deal of evil, if we are going to elect Mitt Romney as president we might as well just move the nation’s capital from D.C. to Salt Lake City and put the control of the nation entirely in the claws of the cabal of stupid old evil white men who rule the Mormon cult, who are no different in (malevolent) spirit from the patriarchal, totalitarian clerics who control Iran and other “Islamofascist” states.

It speaks volumes of the evil of the Repugnican Tea Party that its presidential aspirants claim to be such great “Christians” but are supportive or dismissive of such evils as assassination — murder – and desecration of the dead (although, as I have noted, it’s a much, much larger crime to murder someone in the first place than it is to then disrespectfully treat his or her corpse).

How about we assassinate Prick Perry and Prick Santorum and then piss on their corpses, since such acts, according to them, are perfectly acceptable?

You know, I don’t call myself a Christian – in large part because evil people like Prick Perry and Prick Santorum and Mitt Romney call themselves “Christians” – but it seems to me that Jesus Christ’s core teaching that anything that you would not want done to yourself you should not do to anyone else is pretty fucking sound.

If “Christians” actually followed Jesus’ teachings, then we wouldn’t witness things like bogus warfare and mass murder and war crimes and crimes against humanity and assassinations and torture and desecration of the dead.

I can guarantee you that if an actual Christian — someone who actually followed Jesus Christ’s teachings as contained in black and white in the New Testament – ever ran for president, I would vote for him or her enthusiastically, but no actual Christian will win the presidency in November 2012 because no actual Christian is running.

And nor could I see a majority of the people of the United States of America ever actually electing an actual Christian president, since the majority of Americans are not only comfortable with, but very apparently want, a certain amount of evil in their leaders. After all, the vast majority of people want their leaders to be just like themselves.

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*Wikipedia notes that Israel refuses to confirm or deny whether or not it possesses a nuclear weapon. I assume that Israel does. Indeed, with the billions of our U.S. tax dollars that go to the parasitic, war-mongering Israel, I’d be surprised if Israel doesn’t have nukes.

Bogus warfare is the real pisser

Reuters image

In this viral video grab, four U.S. Marines reportedly are shown urinating (or pretending to urinate?) on the bodies of at least three vanquished members of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Rick Perry has a problem with gays serving in the U.S. military. (Of course, whipping it out in front of other dudes and looking at their goods too seems a bit gay to me…)

So apparently some U.S. Marines urinated on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan. On video. After the Abu Ghraib Little Shop of Horrors (which was perpetrated by just a few bad apples, you know), this should come as no surprise, and I’m confident that it’s only one of many such episodes that we’ll never find out about.

The self-serving, U.S.-Treasury-draining traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex assure us that we have our troops in the Middle East for our (the taxpayers’) protection against terrorism, but of course viral videos of U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Middle Easterners whom they’ve just slaughtered makes us much more likely, not less likely, to be targets of future (attempted) acts of terrorism.

I find it darkly hilarious, though, to hear anyone assert that dead people should be respected by not being urinated upon. Gee, it seems to me that that much, much larger crime is to have snuffed out the individual whose sovereign nation you have invaded in the first place. I mean, about the last thing that a corpse has to worry about is being urinated upon.

What Goldenshowergate has to teach us is not that our stormtroopers shouldn’t piss on the dead (although, of course, they should not). What the scandal emphasizes (as did the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) is that we have no fucking reason to remain in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, in the first fucking place.

It’s bullshit that — as happened with Abu Ghraib — we solely blame the young men (and sometimes young women) in the U.S. military whose juvenile actions further tarnish the international reputation of our nation, but that we allow the treasonous war profiteers who put these young people in places they never should have been put in the first place to get away scot-free.

And nor should we let off the hook the enablers of the treasonous war profiteers, which would include, of course, President Barack Obama, whose hands, despite his relentless promises of “hope” and “change,” are covered in the blood of scores of innocent people of the Middle East.

P.S. The Associated Press surreally notes: “A presidential statement described the act as ‘completely inhumane’ and called on the U.S. military to punish the Marines.”

Again: Apparently, according to the Bushbama administration, it’s perfectly OK to slaughter someone, but to then urinate on his or her body is “completely inhumane.”

And again, the White House wants peons punished while those who actually are responsible for our bogus, illegal, immoral wars in the first place go unpunished and unscathed — indeed, they keep laughing all the way to the bank with billions and billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars.

P.P.S. My bad: The AP story that I linked to in my “P.S.” above very apparently was reporting on a statement made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, not on a statement made by Obama. (What a disingenuous statement by the treasonous Karzai, however, who sold his nation out to its Western occupiers and overlords long ago.)

However, the fact remains that the so-called outrage that we’re seeing in the U.S. over the incident isn’t about the fact that our stormtroopers are slaughtering people, but that they urinated on their kill. And hell, even that probably isn’t what bothers most Americans — what bothers most Americans, probably, is only that the highly unflattering video was leaked…

And indeed, while we can expect the peons (um, should we say “pee-ons”?) of the Marines to be punished for the video, those responsible for the fact that the Marines were there to pee on slaughtered people will get off scot-free, no doubt, and President Bushbama still is the world’s war criminal in chief.

P.P.P.S. The video can be seen here. In the video I can see only two of the Marines, the one at the far left and the one who is second from right, apparently actually urinating, and I believe that it is the one on the far left who quips in a high voice, “Have a great day, buddy!” The other two Marines seem to have shy kidney or are just pretending to pee. One of them, toward the end of the clip, makes reference to a “golden shower,” ha ha ha ha ha.

Pissing on other dudes — Jesus, are all of our Marines a bunch of closet cases, even though they can be out of the closet now?

‘Bomb-throwing’ Ron Paul wins wingnuts’ New Hampshire debate

Associated Press photo

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, left, gestures at front-runner former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during tonight’s Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Romney was polished and toed the party line, while Paul kept it real and wasn’t afraid to buck the party consensus.

I live-blogged tonight’s Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, the first 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate that I’ve watched in its entirety. The live-blogging is below.

I conclude that Ron Paul won the debate, hands down.

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5:59 p.m. (Pacific time): The debate should begin within minutes… I’ve yet to force myself to sit through an entire 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, but tonight I am going to, come hell or high water.

6:03 p.m.: It’s telling that all six candidates are middle-aged or old white men. These are the faces of the Repugnican Tea Party, no doubt. Anyway, with Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos and some other guy moderating, this apparently is a pretty high-level debate…

6:07 p.m.: All of these fascists more or less look alike to me, but thus far Mitt Romney seems to be doing pretty well, with the exception of his fakey-fake “friendly” voice, which is whisper-like and condescending. Rick Santorum seems to be uncomfortable in his own skin, not entirely unlike how he is parodied by Adam Samberg on “Saturday Night Live”…

6:11 p.m.: The candidates are now singing the praises of capitalism, which they aren’t calling “capitalism,” but are calling “free enterprise,” since that polls better and since capitalism isn’t as popular as it used to be with the 99 percent these days. There was a mention of how dangerous Iran is, which I’m sure we’ll get back to. This “free enterprise” crap sounds just like the portion of a debate I listened to a long time ago, when Michele Bachmann was still in the race…

6:14 p.m.: Ron Paul has called Santorum “corrupt.” Santorum has taken issue with this charge, of course. Santorum also states that he isn’t a libertarian, but that he believes in some government. (Government when it helps the plutocracy, right?)

6:17 p.m.: Ron Paul brags that he has signed only a handful of appropriations bills in the U.S. House of Representatives, that he opposes most government spending. “I am not a libertarian, Ron,” Santorum has repeated.

6:19 p.m.: Rick Perry is on now. He has bashed “corrupt spending” in Washington, D.C., and touts that he’s a D.C. outsider. His claim that he has been the “commander in chief” of Texas’ National Guard, apparently, is risible.

6:21 p.m.: Ah, we’re back to Iran. What’s the U.S. without a bogeyman? Jon Huntsman is rambling now. Sawyer asked about Iran, but Huntsman, perhaps fearing he won’t be able to answer another question, hasn’t answered the question, but has given a little stump speech. Huntsman is as white-bread as Romney is, but maybe that’s a product of their Mormonism.

6:25 p.m.: So Romney has called Barack Obama’s a “failed presidency,” stating that Obama has no leadership experience (I guess that the past three years don’t count), and alleging that Obama hasn’t been tougher on Iran, even though elective war in the Middle East has brought the American empire to the brink of collapse already.

6:27 p.m.: “Iran’s a big problem, without a doubt,” Rick Perry has proclaimed, further claiming that Iran (somehow) threatens our freedom. (It would be the plutocrats here at home who threaten our freedom, but that’s another blog post.) We heard the same thing about Iraq, did we not? That it was a threat to our freedom and our security? Again, it’s apparent that the Repugnican Tea Party fascists intend to use the specter of Iran to scare the populace into voting for them. Will it work again?

6:30 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about chickenhawks, though who gladly send our young off to war when they avoided military service themselves. Paul and Newt Gingrich went back and forth about whether or not Gingrich evaded military service, which would make him a chickenhawk. It’s rare for a Repugnican Tea Party candidate to bash chickenhawks.

6:33 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about how blacks and other “poor minorities” disproportionately are punished by our “criminal” “justice” system (as opposed to whites), including the fact that blacks and other poor minorities are more likely to be executed than are whites. Paul’s rant was a diversion from the question about the reportedly racist overtones of his old newsletter, but it’s rare to hear a Repugnican Tea Party candidate admit that the “criminal” “justice” system is patently unfair and racially biased.

6:35 p.m.: So there’s a break now. Some fucktarded ABC News pundit has called Ron Paul a “bomb-thrower,” but Paul seems sincere in his positions to me. Thus far, Ron Paul is doing the best in the debate, in my book, but as his views are closest to mine, maybe that’s why. I find front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to be yawn-inducing and utterly uninspiring.

6:41 p.m.: Mitt Romney states that he personally opposes any attempt to ban contraception, although he states that he has no idea as to whether or not it would be constitutional for a state to attempt to ban contraception. Romney states that he supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define a marriage as being only between a man and a woman. This makes him utterly unelectable to me, to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution.

6:42 p.m.: Romney states that he believes that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, which also makes him utterly unelectable to me.

6:43 p.m.: Rick Santorum, not to be outdone by Mitt Romney, also states that he also would overturn Roe vs. Wade. These men sure hate women.

6:45 p.m.: The topic now is same-sex marriage. Ron Paul has talked about privacy rights, but I’m not sure of his stance on same-sex marriage. Thus far no one supports same-sex marriage, unsurprisingly, with the possible exception of Paul. Jon Huntsman says he supports civil unions but does not believe that same-sex marriage should be allowed. That’s the coward’s way out, and separate is not equal.

6:47 p.m.: Santorum says that marriage is a federal issue. (I agree. Same-sex marriage should be allowed in all 50 states.) Santorum sounds like he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman only.

6:49 p.m.: Romney has used the bullshit “argument” that same-sex marriage should not be allowed because children should be raised only by heterosexual couples. Studies refute this assertion, and of course many people marry with no intent to raise children. Newt Gingrich essentially has tried to make the argument that “Christo”fascist haters are being oppressed by not being allowed to hate and to discriminate against others based upon their hateful religious beliefs. Oh, well. Gingrich has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to the White House anyway.

6:54 p.m.: Rick Perry couldn’t resist adding that he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage, and he is echoing Gingrich’s “argument” that the poor “Christo”fascists are experiencing a “war on religion.” Really? How about we start throwing them to the lions so that at least they aren’t lying through their fucking teeth when they claim that they are so fucking oppressed because they can’t cram their bullshit beliefs down our throats?

6:59 p.m.: Sounds like Jon Huntsman supports our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Newt Gingrich has used the topic of Afghanistan to bring up the specter of Iran, but, surprisingly, indicated that the problems in the Middle East don’t call for military solutions. Rick Santorum speaks again. He still seems ill at ease. He opposes withdrawing from Afghanistan any day soon, very apparently, because, he says, “radical Islam” is a “threat.” (Funny — I see radical “Christianity” as a much bigger and much more immediate threat to my own freedoms and security than I see Islam ever being.)

7:01 p.m.: Rick Perry says that he disagrees with the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, because Iran will overtake Iraq — “literally” “at the speed of light,” he said. (Really? Literally at the speed of light?) Like the last governor from Texas knew what to do in Iraq… Anyway, Rick Perry isn’t getting much air time, and I predict that his campaign won’t make it to next month.

7:04 p.m.: Ron Paul correctly points out that so many of the members of his party can’t wait to, as John McCainosaurus once put it, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, but that he thinks it’s a bad idea, as the U.S. military already is woefully overextended. (Paul did make an awkward comment about how although the Chinese government killed scores of its own citizens, it was a ping-pong game that “broke the ice.” Again: Awkward…)

7:06 p.m.: Rick Santorum seems like he’s so nervous that he might barf. We’re on another break now.

7:11 p.m.: Still on break. In my book, Ron Paul is winning this debate. However, he’s not mimicking all of the others on key stands (Iran evil, same-sex marriage evil, etc.), so I can’t see him getting even the vice-presidential spot on the 2012 ticket (presuming he’d even want it).

7:20 p.m.: We’re talking about the nation’s infrastructure now, apparently having finished with social issues and foreign policy. Mitt Romney is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead he’s singing yet another insipid paean to capitalism, as opposed to Barack Obama’s “social welfare state.” Newt Gingrich is actually answering the question. Newt says that we have to maintain our infrastructure in order to keep pace with China and India (not because it’s good for us commoners, but because it’s good for business, apparently). Rick Santorum is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead is claiming that corporations are overtaxed and over-regulated. Apparently the Repugs don’t really want to talk about the infrastructure, which the unelected Bush regime allowed to crumble for almost a decade.

7:25 p.m.: So little of substance was said on the topic of our crumbling infrastructure. Apparently all of our resources should go into even more warfare in the Middle East for the war profiteers and for Big Oil. Ron Paul is rambling on about cutting spending. Who is going to pay for our infrastructure? Oh, no one, since it’s not important, apparently. Rick Perry is now pontificating about lowering taxes (although without taxes, we can’t have a commons) and is advocating an energy policy of “drill, baby, drill,” essentially, and claims that Texas’ being a “right-to-work” state has resulted in job growth there. The plutocrats love it when the worker bees cannot unionize for better working conditions and better pay and benefits and rights. Rick Perry is evil, and his state’s jobs are low-paying jobs with bad or no benefits, which is why he focuses on the number of jobs, not the quality of those jobs, in Texas. Bad, low-paying jobs in which the deck is insanely stacked in the favor of the plutocrats are great for the plutocrats, but are catastrophic for the working class.

7:26 p.m.: Mitt Romney says that the November 2012 presidential election is about “the soul of the nation.” Indeed. If any of these fascists win, the soul of the nation will wither even further than it has over at least the past decade.

7:28 p.m.: Newt Gingrich has brought up Ronald Reagan. I’m shocked that it has taken this long for the name of St. Ronald to be brought up. (No mention of George W. Bush yet. Not one… Hee hee hee…) Rick Santorum, who still appears to be nauseous, just essentially stated that we don’t have socioeconomic classes here in the United States of America, and that Barack Obama has been trying to stoke “class warfare.” Wow. We are a classless society? When is the last time that Rick Santorum hosted a homeless person in his home, I wonder? And given that Obama took more money from the Wall Street weasels than John McCainosaurus did in 2008, how has Obama been stoking “class warfare” (as Santorum means it)?

7:32 p.m.: Now the topic is China. Apparently China is The Enemy, too, although I’m sure that Iran remains Public Enemy No. 1. Hmmm. Isn’t it the capitalists who sell us out here at home for their own enrichment, rather than anyone in China, who are responsible for our nation’s economic collapse? All of these bogeymen, when the enemies are right here among us…

7:40 p.m.: Another break. Overall, this is a sorry batch of candidates, a bunch of circus clowns, for the most part; Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman seem to be the least insane of the six all-white, all-male candidates. Rick Perry wants to be George W. Bush’s third term, apparently, and again, I can’t see that happening for him; I predict that he’ll be the next to drop out. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum seem to be too similar on the issues for it to matter much which one might ever be president, Mitt the Mormon “Christo”fascist or Rick the Catholick “Christo”fascist.

7:42 p.m.: Damn, this shit is over already!

The winner of the debate, in my book, was Ron Paul. The pundits, not shockingly, are calling Mitt Romney the winner. Gee, if being as insipid as a glass of warm milk makes you the winner, then perhaps Romney won, but Paul showed more spunk and passion and sincerity — and, dare I say it, some wisdom – than any of the other five candidates.

I think the pundits are calling Romney the winner only because they’re fucktards who are going to side only with establishmentarian, orthodox candidates. To them, Ron Paul essentially is a ghost, an invisible man, because he doesn’t say what they think he should say. They don’t really listen to him, but only compare what he’s saying against what his cohorts/“cohorts” are saying, and because he isn’t mimicking his cohorts, and because his views don’t fit neatly into the pundits’ oversimplified worldview, they simply ignore him or dismiss him.

I hope that Paul sticks it out and keeps sticking it to them. He’s the only thing remotely interesting about this crop of backasswards white men who would be president who seem to be stuck in the ethos of the 19fucking50s.

Michele, we hardly knew ye (and other notes on the horse race)

Reuters photo

Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann announces today that her sixth-place finish in yesterday’s Iowa caucuses has induced her to quit her quest for the White House.  

We won’t have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. At least not for a while.

Bachmann dropped out of the Repugnican Tea Party horse race after garnering only 5 percent — sixth place — in the Iowa caucuses yesterday. 

Yahoo! News quotes Bachmann’s communications director as having told reporters of Bachmann, “She doesn’t see where she made mistakes. None of us, you know, see where there were mistakes made.”

Gee, maybe that was their primary problem: their inability to recognize their mistakes. 

I remember when “President” George W. Bush, on at least one occasion before a television camera, struggled to come up with any mistakes that he’d made as “president” when a reporter had asked him to list any.

The inability to enumerate any of one’s mistakes is a pretty fucking serious pathology.

Speaking of Gee Dubya, it is interesting that his name rarely comes up in the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential horse race when he was his party’s last occupant of the White House, for a full eight years.

It is as though extraterrestrials shoved memory-erasing probes up our collective national rectum, completely wiping out our collective memory of the years 2001 through 2008, idn’t it? Indeed, we went right from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, did we not?

Speaking further of Gee Dubya, about the only time He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned has come up this quadrennial go-around is when people have asked if we really want another governor of Texas ascending to the Oval Office.

Speaking of Texas governors, unlike even Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Prick Perry can’t take a hint. Despite coming in at fifth place in the Iowa caucuses yesterday (with only 10 percent of the vote), Perry has proclaimed that he will compete in the January 21 South Carolina primary, where, he remarked, “real” Repugnican Tea Partiers will vote, as opposed to those “quirky” Iowans.

Iowans indeed are quirky, although “quirky” sounds like a dangerously minimizing euphemism for “bat-shit-crazy theofascist.” 

However, Perry should have done better in Iowa, with its plethora of “Christo”fascists to whom he is trying to appeal. If he doesn’t appeal to the “quirky” Iowans, it’s difficult to see him appealing to the Repugnican Tea Party nationally.

The Associated Press reports that Perry today “said voters in South Carolina share his values and that he feels confident he will do well there.”

Share his values? Is that code for Texas and South Carolina both being bastions of white supremacists who long for the “good old days” of the Confederacy? (“Quirky” Iowa, of course, never was part of the treasonous Confederacy, but both Texas and South Carolina seceded from the Union before President-Elect Abraham Lincoln even took office in 1861.) 

Prick Perry had an uphill battle as it was, joining the horse race relatively late and reminding everyone of the last governor of Texas who went to the White House – the “president” who was so shitty that the members of his own party pretend as though his two terms hadn’t even happened – but Perry blew it by acting like a drunken Alzheimer’s patient in the nationally televised debates and in other public appearances.

He might do fairly well in fellow secessionist state South Carolina, but only 11 states formed the Confederacy, and Perry would have to do much better than that to win his party’s nomination.

Perry has only himself to blame for his failure, not “quirky” Iowa or anyone or anything else (with the possible exception of Gee Dubya, of course, for having soured the nation, even his own party, on governors from Texas).

Hopefully, though, Perry will do horribly in South Carolina and we’ll be done with him then.

Ditto for Rick Santorum.

However, at least one pundit posits that Santorum, because he trailed permacandidate Mitt Romney, the party establishment’s choice (indeed, 2008 party presidential candidate John McCainosaurus just endorsed Romney), by only eight (yes, 8) votes yesterday in the Iowa caucuses, might make it even beyond “Super Tuesday” on March 6.

I can’t see Santorum winning the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party nomination. Do the Repugnican Tea Partiers really want to front against President Barack Obama a candidate who lost his last election (his 2006 re-election bid to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania) to his Democratic challenger by 18 percent, which Wikipedia calls “the largest margin of defeat for any incumbent senator since 1980 and the largest margin of any incumbent Republican senator ever”?

And how can Santorum, whose fundraising and organization lag woefully behind permacandidate Romney’s, catch up now, even if he does get the lion’s share of Newt Gingrich’s and Bachmann’s and Perry’s supporters? (Gingrich came in at fourth place in Iowa yesterday, by the way, which I’d find more encouraging if McCainosaurus also hadn’t come in at fourth place in Iowa in 2008 yet still won his party’s nomination.)

But I can see Santorum dragging the whole mess out, although hopefully not nearly as long as Obama and Billary Clinton dragged out the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential primary season (in which Obama didn’t emerge victorious until June 2008).

Oh, well.

It will, I suppose, provide more blogging fodder, and a prolonged fight between the establishmentarian Repugnicans, represented by Romney, and their “tea party” wing, represented, for the moment, by Santorum, might only swing even more “swing voters” Obama’s way in November 2012.

Obama sucks* and does not deserve to be re-elected, but push come to shove — and you’d have to push and shove me pretty hard — I suppose that I’d prefer his re-election over another Repugnican in the White House. I, for one, have not forgotten the eight long years of unelected rule by George W. Bush.

P.S. How could I forget Ron Paul? He did, after all, come in third place in the Iowa caucuses yesterday (at 21 percent, just behind Romney and Santorum, who were tied at 25 percent), and anyone who makes the top three in Iowa generally is considered to be a viable candidate for his or her party’s presidential nomination.

Well, let’s face it: Paul has a few positions that even progressives like me agree with, and Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald is correct that Paul, while wrong on many if not most issues, has brought up some critically important issues that neither the Coke Party nor the Pepsi Party wants brought up in a presidential campaign. But the bottom line is that Paul isn’t taken seriously even by his own party, so what progressives think of Paul is a fairly moot point.

Ron Paul is treated like his party’s crazy old uncle, and having attained only to the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul never really had a chance anyway. (This was unfortunately true for Democratic Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is treated like his party’s crazy uncle [he was my ideological favorite for 2004, but his nationally presidential unelectability was clear, and so I supported John Kerry, whom I viewed as much more electable] – and fortunately true also for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.)

If Ron Paul wants to run as an independent/third-party candidate, he has my blessing, though. Although many if not most Democrats deny it, it seems to me that the third-party presidential bid of billionaire H. Ross Perot (yet another Texas special) largely was a reason that Bill Clinton denied the first George Bush a second term in 1992.

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*The Obamabots have easily toppled “defenses” of President Hopey-Changey — you should read Ted Rall’s recent column titled “How to Talk to an Obama Voter (If You Must)” for a list of a few of these “defenses” and why they’re bullshit. Here, I think, is the money shot:

Obamabot Talking Point: If I don’t vote for Obama, the Even Worse Republicans win.

Answer: So vote for Obama. Or don’t vote. It makes no difference either way. Voting is like praying to God. It doesn’t hurt. Nor does it do any good. As with religion, the harm comes from the self-delusion of thinking you’re actually doing something. You’re not. Wanna save the world? Or just yourself? That, you’ll have to do outside, in the street.

But perhaps Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi delivers the most scathing criticism of President Hopey-Changey that I’ve seen (at least in a long time) in his recent piece titled “Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins.” The money shot of the piece, I think, is this (the links are all Taibbi’s and the emphases are mine):

… But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.

Obama’s top 20 list included:

• Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091)
• JPMorgan Chase & Co ($808,799)
• Citigroup Inc ($736,771)
• WilmerHale LLP ($550,668)
• Skadden, Arps et al ($543,539)
• UBS AG ($532,674), and…
• Morgan Stanley ($512,232)

 McCain’s list, meanwhile, included (drum roll please):

• JPMorgan Chase & Co ($343,505)
• Citigroup Inc ($338,202)
• Morgan Stanley ($271,902)
• Goldman Sachs ($240,295)
• UBS AG ($187,493)
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher ($160,346)
• Greenberg Traurig LLP ($147,437), and…
• Lehman Brothers ($126,557)

Obama’s list included all the major banks and bailout recipients, plus a smattering of high-dollar defense lawyers from firms like WilmerHale and Skadden Arps who make their money representing those same banks. McCain’s list included exactly the same banks and a similar list of law firms, the minor difference being that it was Gibson Dunn instead of WilmerHale, etc.

The numbers show remarkable consistency, as Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup all gave roughly twice or just over twice as much to Obama as they did to McCain, almost perfectly matching the overall donations profile for both candidates: overall, Obama raised just over twice as much ($730 million) as McCain did ($333 million).

Those numbers tell us that both parties rely upon the same core of major donors among the top law firms, the Wall Street companies, and business leaders – basically, the 1%. Those one-percenters always give generously to both parties and both presidential candidates, although they sometimes will hedge their bets significantly when they think one side or the other has a lopsided chance at victory. That’s clearly what happened in 2008, when Wall Street correctly called Obama as a 2-1 (or maybe a 7-3) favorite to beat McCain.

The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.

If the voters insist on supporting such a person in defiance of these donors – this might even happen tonight, with a Paul win in Iowa – what you inevitably end up seeing is a monstrous amount of money quickly dumped into the cause of derailing that candidate. This takes overt forms, like giving heavily to his primary opponents, and more covert forms, like manufacturing opinions through donor-subsidized think tanks and the heavy use of lapdog media figures to push establishment complaints. …

President Hopey-Changey can’t even pretend to be on the side of the 99 percent when it’s the 1 percent – the Wall Street weasels and their allies – who gave him many more millions than they gave even to McCainosaurus in 2008.

And it’s the numbers next to the bullet points above that explain why I refer to the Democratic Party and the Repugnican Party as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party: the two are fairly indistinguishable. (I am, by the way, a registered member of the Green Party, and proudly so.)

Four more years! (Of paralysis and stagnation…)

Reuters photo

WTF is the matter with Iowa? Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum — known primarily for having his surname usurped to describe a sexually oriented substance — campaigns in Sioux City, Iowa, yesterday. Although Santorum has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making it to the White House, Iowans reportedly might make him their No. 1 choice when they caucus tomorrow.

It has been amusing watching the wingnutty “Christo”fascists trying to crown their anti-Mitt-the-Mormon candidate. Texas Gov. Prick Perry had his day in the sun before he gave an apparently drunken appearance in New Hampshire in which he acted like a giddy schoolgirl, and Herman “Grab-Ass” Cain also seemed to be the perfect anti-Obama (as uber-harpy Ann Cunter herself remarked of Cain, “our [the Repugnican Tea Party's] blacks are so much better than their [the Democratic Party's] blacks”), until his star finally came crashing to the ground. Even Newt “Blast from the Past” Gingrich appears to have fizzled out already; he himself says that he won’t win Iowa tomorrow.

Now there is talk of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who lost his last election (his senatorial re-election bid in 2006, in what Wikipedia says was “the largest margin of defeat ever for an incumbent Republican Senator in Pennsylvania”), possibly winning the Iowa caucuses tomorrow.

So what if Santorum does? Establishmentarian candidate John McCainosaurus came in at fourth place in the 2008 Iowa caucuses yet went on to win his party’s presidential nomination nonetheless.

Mitt Romney is expected to win in New Hampshire’s primary on January 10 regardless of what happens in Iowa tomorrow, and if he wins Iowa, too — and he might — then it’s all over for the anti-Mitts.

It is fairly safe, I think, to bank on a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in November 2012.

Prediction market data now give Obama almost a 54 percent chance of winning re-election.

That sounds about right to me. Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008 to McCainosaurus’ 46 percent, and while Obama’s base is demoralized (while I gave him hundreds of dollars and my vote in 2008, I, for one, won’t vote for President Hopey-Changey again in November 2012 or give him another fucking penny), the Repugnican Tea Party fascists aren’t exactly excited about Mitt the Mormon from Massachusetts, either.

Obama will, I predict, eke out an undeserved re-election, and we’ll have four more years of paralysis and stasis, another four years of gridlock and stagnation.

Generic, but no actual, Repugnican beats Obama in the polls

It’s interesting: A majority of those Americans polled recently say that President Hopey-Changey doesn’t deserve a second term (he doesn’t), but when Barack Obama is pitted against the Repugnican Tea Party front runners — when the choice is made much more real — suddenly a second Obama term apparently doesn’t seem so bad after all.

An Associated Press-GfK nationwide poll taken December 8 through December 12, for instance, found that 52 percent believe that Obama should be voted out of office in November 2012, while only 43 percent believe that he should be re-elected.

The same poll, however, found that only 42 percent would vote for Newt Gingrich, while 51 percent would vote for Obama over Gingrich. The same poll found that Obama barely would beat Mitt Romney, 47 percent to 46 percent.

A Reuters/Ipsos nationwide poll also taken December 8 through December 12 similarly found that Obama would beat Gingrich, 51 percent to 38 percent, and that Obama would beat Romney, 48 percent to 40 percent.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal nationwide poll taken December 7 through December 11 found that 45 percent said they probably will vote for the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate in November 2012, while only 43 percent said they probably would vote for Obama.

Yet in the same poll, Gingrich garnered only 40 percent to Obama’s 51 percent, and Obama beat Romney by a hair, 47 percent to 45 percent. (Also in that poll, Obama soundly beat Ron Paul, 50 percent to 37 percent).

A USA Today/Gallup nationwide poll taken December 6 and 7 had similar findings: Obama barely beat Romney, 47 percent to 46 percent, and beat Gingrich definitively, 50 percent to 44 percent.

Yet a CBS News nationwide poll taken December 5 through December 7 found that 54 percent believe that Obama should not be re-elected, while only 41 percent believe that he should be.

What gives?

Well, for one thing, it’s incorrect to assume that only those who lean to the right believe that Obama shouldn’t be re-elected. I’m a foaming-at-the-mouth leftist, but if a pollster were to ask me whether President Hopey-Changey deserves a second term, my answer would be Oh, hell no. (The Wall-Street-coddling, war-mongering, Constitution-violating Barack Obama is a “socialist”? I wish!)

Obama & Co. have alienated the “professional,” “sanctimonious” left, very apparently craving the votes of the “swing voters” more than the votes of the actual left. Of course, give the “swing voters” the choice between an actual Repugnican and a Democrat who acts like a Repugnican (President Hopey-Changey, for instance, can’t sing the right wing’s icon Ronald Reagan’s praises enough), and they will vote for the actual Repugnican, but in November 2012 we will find out how smart Team Obama’s strategy of shitting and pissing all over its base has been.

It seems clear that Mitt Romney has the best chance of unseating Obama, but it remains to be seen whether the Repugnican Tea Party voters will focus on ideological purity or on general-election electability in their primaries and caucuses that are to begin shortly.

I remember the fight for the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination: Those who focused on ideological purity supported Howard Dean, while those who focused on electability (like I did) supported John Kerry (who, in my estimation, still did better against George W. Bush than Dean would have; I love ideological purity, but to me at the time, preventing a second disastrous term of the treasonous, unelected BushCheneyCorp was more important than was ideological purity).

We’ll see whether the Repugnican Tea Party set will choose their Howard Dean or their John Kerry, so to speak. If they choose Gingrich (or even Ron Paul), then Obama’s re-election is fairly assured.

If they wisely choose Romney, however (I say “wisely” because the point of elections is to win them, not because I have any love for Romney [I'd never vote for an active Mormon for any office, since they're all theocrats who answer to the cabal of evil old white men in Salt Lake City]), then, the polls indicate, it will be a close presidential race.

And Team Obama might just find out that its strategy of believing that those of us on the left have nowhere else to go was fucking suicidal, because, it seems to me, if we leftists withhold our support of Obama, as I am doing (I’m not giving him my vote or a fucking penny), Mitt Romney just might win in November 2012.

If a Romney victory means finally teaching the smug Democratic Party establishment sellouts once and for all that no, they cannot shit and piss upon their fucking base without repercussions, then perhaps it would be worth it.*

–

*Not that I’m holding my breath, of course. Instead of focusing on what an awful, uninspiring, milquetoast presidential campaign Al Gore ran in 2000 — he didn’t even win his home state, for fuck’s sake — the Democratic Party hacks instead blamed (still blame) Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

History has demonstrated that the pseudo-progressive hacks who call themselves Democrats don’t learn, but only blame actual progressives for their own miserable electoral failures.