Americans are fucking STUPID

A candidate for a Darwin Award is pictured above in Gainesville, Florida. (The dipshit already has been burned in effigy in Afghanistan, pictured below.) “Muslims consider the Koran to be the word of God and insist [that] it be treated with the utmost respect, along with any printed material containing its verses or the name of Allah or the Prophet Mohammed,” explains The Associated Press, adding, “Any intentional damage or show of disrespect to the Koran is deeply offensive.”

Associated Press photos

Chapter 9 of Rick Shenkman’s Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter is titled, “We Can’t Even Talk About How Stupid We Are.”

He notes that the powers that be, including the mainstream media and even so-called progressive politicians, very rarely come out and say it: A huge chunk of Americans are just plain fucking stupid. They should donate their organs now to those who could make better use of them. It would be doing the gene pool a favor.

I’ll say it. Gladly. Which is why, despite my journalism degree, I couldn’t make it in the corporately owned and controlled world of what passes for journalism here in the United States of Amnesia, where the corporately owned and controlled media only dish out to the mediated pigs what comforting slop the pigs want to consume at the mediated trough. (Fuck, I was even censored by the “progressive” AlterNet when I blogged there until my more controversial posts kept disappearing in what I was told were just “glitches.”)

We have the individual garden-variety American dipshits, like “Christo”fascist Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, the leader of a small Pentecostal church who intends to hold “International Burn a Koran Day” on Saturday, the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

How “international” this “event” actually is I am not sure. My guess is that maybe he found some other dipshit in some other country to burn a Koran, and thus it’s “international.” You know, like the “international” support for the Vietraq War, the “coalition of the willing,” which, if memory serves, consisted of the United States, Britain and some island somewhere.

I wholeheartedly support Terry Jones’ First Amendment right to burn the Koran.

Kind of.

I remember learning in media law that one’s First Amendment rights end where others’ safety begins. Gen. David Petraeus, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley and Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs are among the U.S. government officials who have voiced their opposition to (or at least their concern about) “International Burn a Koran Day,” citing possible if not likely endangerment to U.S. troops and American civilians by inflaming the Muslim world by burning copies of the Muslims’ sacred book.

While I’m not sure if what could happen is enough to limit someone’s free-speech rights, um, yeah, sponsoring a “Burn a Koran Day” surely opens up Americans to retaliation by the, um, more enthusiastic Islamists, methinks.

What I was kind of hoping is that Terry Jones, who sorely should be removed from the gene pool for having pissed and shit in it and who should then star in an edition of the Darwin Awards, would be the only victim of any jihadist retribution for Koran burning, but my understanding is that many if not most jihadists don’t really discriminate when it comes to retribution.

I seem to recall that Osama bin Laden himself said that al-Qaeda makes no such distiction, that when it comes to retribution for wrongs done unto the Muslim world by an American or Americans (or even by someone who is supported by the United States, such as an Israeli), any old killed American will do.

Aside from the consideration of how Jones’ wingnuttery and dipshittery probably is putting others at risk, I don’t know exactly what a Koran burning, “international” or otherwise, would accomplish. Jones already has gotten plenty of free advertising for his Podunk, backasswards church (which might have been his main objective in the first place). While burning the Koran might make Jones and his ilk feel better about their miserable selves, it’s not like the Muslim world is going to change anything because some “Christo”fascist mouth-breathers burned a bunch of Korans.

But you gotta love the name of Jones’ church: “Dove World Outreach Center.” Dove. The symbol for peace. Um, yeah….

Then there is mass dipshittery.

The political story of today is that polls show that Americans seem poised to put the Repugnicans back in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives. (Here’s The Associated Press’ take on this and here’s Politico’s.)

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out: The voters of the United States of Amnesia are fucking stupid. To them, George W. Bush wasn’t still “president” less than two full years ago; to them, he belongs to ancient American history already.

There’s no way in hell, even if he had owned his power and had spent his political capital like he should have, that Barack Obama could have turned around the severe damage done to the nation by George W. Bush, who inherited a record federal budget surplus from Bill Clinton when he took office and who left office with a record federal budget deficit with his bogus Vietraq War and his tax cuts for the rich (Google it), in less than two full years.

But Americans are fucking stupid. And they’re impatient and they are, as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently wrote, “spoiled brats.”

Robinson echoes Shenkman when he writes in his column, “In the punditry business, it’s considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”

But that’s as close to calling Americans stupid as Robinson gets in discussing the current schizophrenic state of the American electorate, proving Shenkman’s point that no one dares to call Americans stupid. (“Spoiled” is not the same as “stupid.”)

As Shenkman points out, those of the left and center-left usually go so far only as to assert that the voters are just duped by the lying Repugnicans, and while it’s true that the Repugnicans are fucking liars, it’s a major fucking problem that it’s as easy as it is for the Repugnicans to dupe so many fucking Americans.

Americans need to own up to their stupidity, it seems to me. Although the definition of stupidity might encompass the inability to even recognize one’s own stupidity, there’s nothing stopping those of us Americans who aren’t stupid from calling other Americans out on their stupidity — such as these stupid Americans’ perfect willingness to vote for politicians of the same party that just thoroughly trashed the nation less than two full fucking years ago.

These Americans who believe that the only way to reverse the damage caused by the unelected BushCheneyCorp is to do more of what the BushCheneyCorp did with even more vigor aren’t just duped spoiled brats. They’re abject fucktards. And those of us who are true patriots need to call them that, because if we accommodate their dipshittery even more than we already have, we will only hasten our nation’s demise.

So what if we are accused of believing that we are intellectually superior? The fact of the matter is that some people are intellectually superior to others, and it’s the intellectually superior Americans, not the dipshits, who should be running the show — especially because it’s too taboo to call a dipshit a dipshit.

(Americans aren’t just fucking stupid, I should add; they’re fucking lazy, too. While they’re still protesting in France over the right-wing president’s plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 [sixty-two], would-be Repugnican Speaker of the House John Boehner’s [shudder] plan to raise the Social Security eligibility age to 70 [seventy] isn’t nearly enough to get zombified Americans off of their comfy sofas.)

Wingnuts: Pollution is FUNNY!

At least ever since George W. Bush stole office in late 2000, right-wing fucktardation increasingly has come as less and less of a surprise to me, but still I am able to be surprised occasionally by the abject retards on the right.

Reportedly, the  Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences in Los Angeles, named after environmentalists Rachel Carson and Al Gore and set to open its doors next week, was built over several industrial storage tanks containing toxins that might pose a danger to the school. A nearby gas station also might pose environmental risks to the school.

The reaction of the right to this news?

Celebration.

“As construction crews worked through the weekend to replace the polluted soil [which scientists had said should make the school safe], the irony of [Al] Gore’s name sitting atop a deemed toxic site has proved irresistible to the right,” reports Politico, quoting one wingnut as having crowed, “You really can’t make this stuff up. As such, it’s quite fitting a school be named after these two radical environmentalists that could end up harming the very students that attend it.”

So the same bunch of assbites who support polluting corporations — it’s always been corporate profits over people and profits over the environment to the wingnuts — are relishing the fact that a school has been built over and near possibly harmful corporate waste because this will allow them to continue to poke fun at Al Gore.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

The punch line of this “joke” is that the right wing wants to deliver to us is a world that looks like something out of the uber-bleak film “The Road.” Or “WALL-E,” maybe.

But they’re not traitors or anything for wishing our continued environmental degradation so that they can, in their sick and twisted minds, score some political Brownie points.

Really — the fact that it’s hard to find an environmentally safe place on which to build a school is an occasion for laughter. And leading the chorus of laughter are those who support corporate pollution in the first place.

I fear not that our empire is dying, but that it’s already dead and rotting.

What I did this Labor Day

I don’t think that I’ve ever really celebrated Labor Day until today. That is, done something on Labor Day that actually is related to the labor movement.

Today I attended the California Labor Federation’s annual Labor Day picnic here in Sacramento — in large part to see Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown speak, but also to show my support for the labor movement, which has been diminished since Repugnican Ronald Reagan took the White House in 1980. (And I am a member of one of the unions that is under the California Labor Federation.)

Brown gave an impassioned, energetic speech for which he did not use any notes; I was able to watch him and several other Democratic candidates for office speak to the crowd from only a few yards away from the stage. (The Sacramento Bee’s website posted a videorecorded portion of Brown’s speech here. The Los Angeles Times covered Brown’s speech, capturing his more salient quotes — such as “It’s not a time to scapegoat illegal immigrants or scapegoat public employees,” as Team Nutmeg has done in order to divert the voters’ attention from the plutocrats and the corporatocrats – here.)

Brown’s physical and mental agility, which I had wanted to witness myself, leave me no doubt that he is the candidate who could lead California out of the mess that Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised in the bullshit gubernatorial recall do-over election of 2003 that he’d lead us out of, but which has only worsened under Schwarzenegger’s watch (surprise surprise).

While as a registered member of the Green Party I have had my differences with the Democratic Party — I’m not thrilled with the Clinontesque President Barack Obama, for starters — that the Democratic Party is the much, much better deal for working Americans than is the Repugnican Party is a fucking no-brainer.

Repugnican California gubernatorial candidate billionaire Nutmeg Whitman’s spokesweasel’s response to the unions’ support of Brown was: “The unions have spent more than $18 million to help Jerry Brown. And it’s no surprise that they would continue their investment through these tactics.”

So it’s perfectly fine for billionaire bitch Megalomaniac Whitman to spend more than $100 million of her personal wealth in her egotistical quest for the governorship, even though she’s never held any elected office before and usually couldn’t even be bothered to vote. (And such obscene personal wealth is created only by paying your employees much less than the value of their labor and charging your customers much more than the value of your product or service, by the way — this legalized thievery is called “business” or “capitalism.”)

But for the organizations of the common worker to spend even a fraction of what Nutmeg has spent is horrible, according to the multi-million-dollar Whitman machine. We workers should just unilaterally disarm ourselves and allow all of the millionaires and billionaires like Megalomaniac Whitman buy office so that, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney turned the nation over to Big Oil, they can use our governmental apparatus to help all of their already-filthy-rich buddies. (Nutmeg’s message to us union members apparently is something along the lines of “Surrender, Dorothy!” [And our little dogs, too!])

I love it when Repugnicans claim to be populists, claim to care about working people, but also bash unions, bash the organizations that actually support working people. We working people, finding power through our unions, the most effective way that we can, are just a “special interest,” you see.

Think about it: in the Repugnican world view, labor unions are bad. (Not too surprising, I suppose, since to the Repugnican Party accessible health care also is a huge evil. ["Socialism"! "Tyranny"!] And to want to do something even about global warming — the North Pole is literally melting away, for fuck’s sake – also is horrible, since it cuts into short-term corporate profits, which, to the Repugnican Tea Party, are even more important than is the continued survival of Homo sapiens.)

To be sure, in the past there has been some wrongdoing by some union leaders — power corrupts — but the overall contribution of the labor movement has meant better working conditions for everyone, including the abolishment of child labor, much safer working environments, workers’ benefits, and the institution of the weekend, for fuck’s sake.

I wholeheartedly agree with Washington Post columnist’s E.J. Dionne Jr.’s conclusion that “We should miss labor’s influence more than we do.” While I’ve given up on the baby boomers — they’ve turned to shit everything that they’ve touched, have thoroughly squandered their inheritance from the “Greatest Generation,” including the healthy labor movement that their parents handed over to them* – it is incumbent upon us members of Generation X and Generation Y to revive the labor movement, which has been chipped away at since the Reagan years.

And if you are an average working American and you actually vote anti-labor Repugnican, you are a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. If you actually buy the Repugnican Party’s populist rhetoric despite its actual record of delivering for the common working American, you pollute the gene pool.

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*While George W. Bush is the quintessential baby boomer, having attained (through cheating) a high post for which he was utterly unqualified (and then using that post to benefit only his cabal of cronies), that is what we can expect of a Repugnican. Baby boomer Bill Clinton, as a Democrat (in name only), had no excuse not to resuscitate the labor movement during his eight years in office.

Bumbling Brewer belongs behind bars

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a geriatric Barbie, is shown before the start of her first and last disastrous gubernatorial debate Wednesday night in Phoenix. Brewer’s speaking skills aren’t her worst crime, however; she very apparently has corrupt ties to the private prison industry, and the “breathing-while-brown” bill that she signed apparently was meant to send more business the private prison industry’s way.

Dorothy must have thrown some water on the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, because Brewer had a meltdown on live television.

I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed watching, over and over again, the clip of Brewer freezing on live TV as she delivered her opening statement in her debate Wednesday night with her Democratic challenger Terry Goddard (who now is Arizona’s attorney general) like a nervous elementary school child delivering a book report.

Brewer’s word choice in the debate was as sophisticated as an elementary school child’s, too. This is how she opened before having a painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name: “I have, uh, [long pause] done so much, and I just cannot believe that we have changed everything since I have become your governor in the last 600 days. Arizona has been brought back from its abyss….”

Yikes.

“We have changed everything”? “Arizona has been brought back from its abyss”?

Really?

The rest of the nation is still reeling from the devastation wrought not only by Hurricane Katrina but also by Hurricane George and Hurricane Dick, but under the governance of the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Arizona is a magical oasis that has been “brought back from its abyss”?

What about Brewer’s other talking point, which is that the “illegals” have put Arizona into an abyss? Is Arizona in an abyss or has Brewer rescued it from an abyss? Which is it?

Brewer clearly isn’t fit to be governor even of Alaska. Her performance at her first and apparently final debate isn’t her only meltdown caught on tape. Rachel Maddow’s reportage of Brewer’s debate meltdown shows that Brewer struggles to speak coherently in public and that when confronted with questions from reporters who don’t lick her lily-white ass, like good reporters should, Brewer bolts like Nevada’s Sharron “Second Amendment Remedies” Angle.

And after her debacle of a debate performance, Brewer has refused to participate in any more debates from now until election day. (Her Democratic opponent has proposed that they have six debates.)

Yeah, that’s the fearless leadership that’s going to bring Arizona out of “its abyss” (or already has brought Arizona out of “its abyss” – I’m so confused…). What Arizona really needs now is an easily addled old woman who believes (as Sharron Angle believes) that the media’s job is to give her free positive publicity.

Years ago, as a reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Arizona in Tucson, I interviewed at some length Brewer’s Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard, who at that time had just been the mayor of Phoenix and was running for the governorship against Repugnican Richie-Rich frat boy Fife Symington III, who went on to beat Goddard but who later was forced to resign the governorship in disgrace after he was convicted of bank fraud in 1997.

I remember virtually nothing of my interview with Goddard (it was, after all, 20 years ago, and I don’t have a copy of the article that I wrote from that interview), but I remember being impressed with how intelligent and well-spoken — and thus virtually gubernatorially unelectable in Arizona — Goddard is.  

Seriously, though: intelligent, competent, honest politicians like Goddard don’t do very well in Arizona. Arizonans prefer crooked dumbfucks like racist Mormon motherfucker Repugnican dipshit Evan Mecham, the state’s first governor to be impeached and removed from office (under a cloud of financial fraud); the felonious Fife Symington III; and Jan Alzheimer — er, Jan Brewer, whose centerpiece for her campaign for the governorship (to which she ascended after Arizona’s elected Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, was tapped to become President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security) has been to assert that all of the state’s problems are caused by undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico) — even though a new study from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that illegal immigration to the United States between 2007 and 2009 was about two-thirds less than it was between 2000 and 2005. So illegal immigration is declining, not increasing.

There’s also the interesting angle that Brewer’s campaign manager, Chuck Coughlin, also does the public relations for the Tennessee-based private prisons corporation Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) – which apparently has stood to profit from SB 1070, which the Phoenix New Times appropriately called the “breathing-while-brown” law that the racist, white supremacist Brewer enthusiastically signed into law – and that a federal judge then appropriately struck down as unconstitutional.*

“What’s the big deal with the CCA contributions [to Brewer's political interests]?” the New Times asks and then answers: “CCA operates six prisons in Arizona, three of which house detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

So apparently CCA helps Jan Brewer and Jan Brewer helps CCA by assuring that CCA has plenty of brown-skinned bodies to be incarcerated in its private prison facilities.

(Rachel Maddow also has been reporting on Brewer’s apparently corrupt ties to CCA; she did an excellent report on the matter here.)

Jan Brewer belongs not in the governor’s chair, but belongs behind bars for corruption, even though she only dutifully corruptly follows in the corrupt footsteps of her corrupt Repugnican (redundant…) predecessors Evan Mecham and Fife Symington III.

Even if she weren’t corrupt and racist and white supremacist, Brewer’s refusal to participate in any more debates demonstrates that she is utterly unfit to continue to govern Arizona, which she has made into a national pariah enough already.

P.S. I just saw this at the Arizona Republic’s website:

As for that opening statement, Brewer said in an interview [yesterday] that her mind went blank. “If someone had asked me my name, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them,” she said.

Shit, I was just joking (for the most part) when I referred to Brewer’s “painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name.”

Apparently, according to Jan “What’s My Name?” Brewer herself, it was no joke.

If Arizonans actually elect this Alzheimer’s special, they’re even dumber that we of the rest of the nation already think they are.

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*In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times reports:

The U.S. Department of Justice [yesterday] sued a controversial and popular Arizona sheriff, alleging that his department was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether it discriminated against Latinos while trying to catch illegal immigrants.

The Justice Department said that Maricopa County [which encompasses Phoenix and is not on the border with Mexico] Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the first local law enforcement official in 30 years to refuse to provide documents in a federal civil rights inquiry. The federal government could withhold $113 million in funding from Maricopa County if Arpaio can’t produce records demonstrating that he avoids racial discrimination.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented. It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division…

Arpaio claims that the Obama administration is playing politics, of course, but the L.A. Times also notes that

In the summer of 2008, under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched a preliminary investigation into the allegations of racial profiling [by Arpaio's office]. In March 2009, after President Obama had assumed office, the department expanded the inquiry into a full-fledged probe.

What the white supremacists who run Arizona (Brewer, Arpaio, et. al.) – and their white supremacist supporters — apparently don’t get is that each state has to follow federal law, including the federal civil rights laws, and so that Arizona doesn’t get to be the South Africa of the Southwest.

Arpaio, I have to say, is a major racist, fascistic asshole who deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of white supremacist history along with Jan Brewer.