Win some, lose some

Posted November 2, 2010, 10:50 p.m.

Associated Press photo

You say Boehner, I say blogging material: Anyway, here Repugnican U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s steel-cold blue eyes well up with tears as he ponders how he’ll abuse his new-found power to further help the filthy rich at the expense of the dipshits who actually believe that the Repugnicans actually care about them (and also at the expense of the rest of us).

Tonight’s election results turned out to be what I’d expected: A win for Democratic Governor-Elect Jerry Brown and for Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer here in my home state of California, a ref — er, a repudiation of Repugnican millionaires and billionaires who want to buy office, at least here on the Left Coast.

I had expected Proposition 19, which would have legalized the use of marijuana here in California, to fail, as polls had predicted that it would. (Marijuana, like same-sex marriage, will be legal in all 50 states one day; we just have to wait for a lot of old fucks to kick off and take their stodgy, outdated beliefs with them to their graves.)

I had expected Proposition 23, Big Oil’s attempt to hamstring the fight against climate change in California, to fail, and it did, enabling California to remain at the forefront of combatting climate change.

And last but not least, I had expected the Democrats to lose some seats in the U.S. Senate but to retain their majority, and I had expected the Democrats to lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The upshot of the Repugnicans winning control of the House is that (1) I’ll have plenty of blogging material for the next two years, as Repugnican Ohio Rep. John Boehner, to me, with those icy cold blue eyes of his (I have blue eyes also, but mine are warm blue eyes, thank you very much), is Evil Incarnate, and (2) the Repugnicans in the House certainly won’t be able to fix the nation’s economy, any more than the same surgeon who botched your operation is the one to fix the damage that he created, and therefore I expect that in 2012 the Democrats will regain the House after the fickle voters swing back to the Dems, and that the Dems will keep the White House, as well as make up for at least some of today’s losses in the Senate. 

In politics, you rarely get everything you want.

Today, in politics we got most of what I wanted — and, I daresay, now the Democrats will fare better in 2012 than they would have had they retained control of the House of Representatives today.

I might not have to move to Canada

On March 25, 2010, I wrote:

So in November, I predict, not only will a majority of California’s voters put “Governor Moonbeam” [Democrat Jerry Brown] back into office, but they will make marijuana legal in the state…. 

It will be like the ’70s all over again….

Don’t get me wrong — Repugnican California guv wannabe Nutmeg Whitman, a billionaire former CEO who never has held public office but wants to buy the governorship of the nation’s most populous state, must be brought down. We can’t act as though Jerry Brown already has won the election. We have to fight (… for our right … to paartaaay!).

But when all is said and done, even if Nutmeg doesn’t make some major campaign-killing fuckup, I expect that the majority of California’s voters, hit hard by the economy brought to them by the Repugnican Party, aren’t going to vote for another fucking Repugnican to lead the state.

Megalomaniac wants us to believe that she’s great because she’s a billionaire. But a majority of Californians, I think, are much more resentful of what the super-rich have done to the nation and to the state than they want to emulate the plutocrats….

My guess is that at least 55 percent of the voters will vote “yes” on the marijuana measure — and that many, many of us Californians will discover a new love for gardening….

(My only concern is whether or not the feds will try to step in and block the legalization of marijuana in California like Cruella de Vil coming for the doobies — er, doggies. I haven’t researched that possibility yet.)

So I can envision a California with a Democratic governor again — and not just any Democratic governor, but Gov. Jerry Fucking Brown — and a state that has legalized marijuana, which should have been legalized long ago and which only those who decry a “nanny state” inconsistently hold should remain illegal….

So how is my crystal ball holding up six months later?

Well, the Los Angeles Times reports that Jerry Brown now leads Nutmeg Whitman by 5 percentage points when until very recently polls had showed them neck and neck for some time. I expect Brown’s lead over Megalomaniac Whitman to hold and to expand, and my prediction is that on November 2 he’ll beat Nutmeg, although probably only by a single-digit win. (If the Democrats weren’t so unenthused by the Obama administration’s broken promises of “hope” and “change,” Brown probably would break into the double digits, I surmise.)

The Times also reports that Democratic U.S. Sen. Barabara Boxer has broken ahead of her Repugnican rich bitch opponent, Carly Fiorina, by 8 percentage points when both of them also had been neck and neck for a while. I predict that Boxer will beat Fiorina, perhaps by double digits.

My take on all of this is that now that California’s voters are paying more attention to the November 2 election, they’re realizing that to return California to the Repugnican Party, which ran us into the ditch in the first fucking place (I mean, as forgettable as the still-amateurish, usurping Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is, he has been a shitty governor, and he’s a moderate Repugnican whom Nutmeg promises to out-Repugnican), is a very, very poor idea.

There are Nutmeg and Crazy Carly in theory – and then there are Nutmeg and Crazy Carly in actuality. And that’s pretty fucking scary.

Finally, a Field Poll shows that California voters are poised to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, supporting the pro-pot Proposition 19 by 49 percent to 42 percent.

Not that this is an issue of huge importance to me, but it’s clear to me (as it is to lefty columnist David Sirota) that alcohol is responsible for far more damage and death than is marijuana, yet the former is legal and the latter is not. (Yes, our laws should be logical and rational.)

And to deny the masses the release of marijuana while our empire continues to crumble because of Repugnican Tea Party dipshittery and obstructionism – that’s just plain wrong.

Of course, the impending Democratic wins in California probably will lower Californians’ demand for marijuana, since the wins will improve Californians’ lives, but still, I don’t want to hear the “libertarians” and other wingnuts lecture the rest of us, those of us who are sane, about the guv’mint staying the fuck out of our lives while they still want to outlaw marijuana, abortion and same-sex marriage.

In any event, I’m just happy, at least for today, that California’s intelligent voters (those who at least know how to vote in their actual own best interests) as of right now outnumber California’s fucktarded voters (those who think that the members of the Repugnican Party are the ones to fix the mess that the Repugnican Party put us into — and that marijuana actually poses any significant threat to our society).

And that after November 2, I probably won’t have to move to Canada, as nice as I hear Canada is.

What’s the matter with California?

Updated below (on Sunday, March 21, 2010)

The Field Poll, California’s most prominent polling organization, released a series of fairly surprising polls this past week that got plenty of media attention here in the nation’s most populous state.

The first poll, released Wednesday, shows that Repugnican gubernatorial wannabe Megalomaniac Whitman, a billionaire former CEO who has pumped tens of millions of her own dollars into her ubiquitous television ads, not only trounces her closest Repugnican rival for her party’s gubernatorial nomination, but holds a three-point lead over Democrat Jerry Brown, the state’s current attorney general and former governor who has no (serious) competition for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

The poll puts Nutmeg Whitman at 46 percent to Jerry Brown’s 43 percent, with 11 percent undecided.

After the disaster that Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger has been as governor — the state that he promised to “save” from twice-elected Democratic former Gov. Gray Davis has only gotten worse under his watch since 2003 – are Californians really going to allow another Repugnican governor?

Moreoever, are they really going to allow someone to buy the governorship? That’s not an exaggeration – that is billionaire Nutmeg’s game plan. The Megalomaniac has never held any elective office before but wants the top elected office of the most populous state right off.

As governor she would be catastrophic. Already she wants to kill the state’s climate-change legislation that even Schwarzenegger supports and she wants to lay off 40,000 state workers in a state that already has enough unemployment problems and already has suffered enough damaging hits to government services.

As Brown has pointed out, as The Associated Press recently paraphrased him as having put it, “California needs an elder statesman who can broker deals to lead it out of its current fiscal morass, not an autocratic CEO who is used to giving orders.” Reports the AP:

[Brown] said CEOs are used to hand-picking their employees, but a governor must confront an independent and sometimes hostile state Legislature and deal with public employee unions and courts that are constantly second-guessing their decisions.

“The political process is about civic engagement, not autocratic executive decision-making in the corporate suite. The two have virtually nothing in common,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press at his campaign headquarters in a converted warehouse in Oakland.

Yup. The autocratic, spoiled rich bitch Nutmeg is not cut of the same cloth of which good governors are made. She’s much more like the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” — “Off with their heads!” she already has said of 40K state workers — than she is anything like a stateswoman. 

If Californians think that Schwarzenegger is bad — and they do; his approval rating is around 30 percent and about six in 10 Californians believe, correctly, that the state is worse off now than it was in 2003, when he took 0ffice – then they should elect Nutmeg, who knows as much about being governor as Sarah Palin-Quayle knows about being president.

Speaking of stateswomen, Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California can claim that title, but her election to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate seems uncertain.

A second Field poll, released on Thursday, shows the top Repugnican challenger for the Repugnican Party nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that Boxer now holds, Tom Campbell, with 44 percent to Boxer’s 43 percent. When matched up against the No. 2 Repugnican contestant, the Nutmeg-like Carly Fiorina (who also is a former CEO who wants to buy high office), Boxer beats Fiorina by only one point, 45 percent to 44 percent.

Like we really need more Repugnican white men – or more Repugnicans, period — in the U.S. Senate. What the fuck?

It wasn’t that long ago that the stupid white men of and led by the unelected BushCheneyCorp ran the nation into the ground, a stupid white man continues to run the great state of California into the ground, and yet the voters of California are poised to replace Barbara Boxer with another stupid white man (or with a stupid white man in woman’s clothing, like Palin-Quayle is).

I recognize that a lot can change in the coming months before the November 2010 election, but I find these 40-something-percent matchups between the Democratic and Repugnican candidates in the blue state of California to be way too close for comfort.

The culprit, I think, is the same phenomenon that put Repugnican pretty boy Scott Brown into the U.S. Senate for Massachussetts in the wake of the death of Ted Kennedy: the dumbfuck vote, which consists mostly those who identify themselves as “independents” or “swing voters.” They get the bulk of their political “information” from the candidates’ television ads. Because TV commercials are a great source of complete and unbiased information. Every intellectual knows that.

So, if you are just filthy rich, like Nutmeg Whitman is, you can buy office, since your base consists of the dipshits who don’t know anyfuckingthing about politics but who vote anyway.

The third Field poll released this past week (yesterday) perhaps is the most encouraging of the three. It shows that Californians’ favorability rating of President Barack Obama has fallen since he took office, but still remains at a majority, with 52 percent of Californians approving of the job he’s doing. Obama’s highest point among Californians was a year ago this month, when he had a 65-percent job-approval rating.

The poll showed Californians evenly split over Obama’s handling of health care, with 45 percent favoring his handling of it thus far and 45 percent disfavoring it thus far.

Of course, I’m not sure how many of those Californians who disfavor Obama’s handling of health care are wingnuts who buy the health care = “socialism” crap that the wealth care weasels — whose only concern is to continue to profit obscenely from Americans’ pain and suffering — have been pushing and how many of them oppose his handling of health care because it’s not aggressive and/or progressive enough.

After health-care reform legislation finally fucking passes — which apparently will be as soon as tomorrow — we might see increases in the number of Californians who state that they approve of Obama’s job performance and his handling of health-care reform.

And a coattail effect of the Democratic Party actually having accomplished something, and having accomplished something pretty big, might help Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown in the polls, too.

Of course, it’s also important for long-time Democratic politicians like Boxer and Brown not to take their support by the fickle voters of California for granted. It is my impression that California’s voters will vote for a Repugnican in order to punish a Democrat whom they believe takes their vote for granted — even though voting Repugnican almost always is against the voter’s own best interests.

And those who don’t understand politics (those who get their political “information” from candidates’ TV commercials) really seem to believe that the solution always is to just change parties — even if the party they are thinking of switching to just recently trashed the nation and the state.

That problem — abject stupidity — I don’ t have a quick and easy solution for, unfortunately.

Update (Sunday, March 21, 2010):

Today the Field Poll has released yet another poll, this one showing that Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s approval rating has hit an all-time low of 23 percent.

“This is the poorest assessment that voters have ever given Schwarzenegger and is statistically equivalent to the all-time record low job appraisal that voters gave to [Democratic Gov.] Gray Davis shortly before he was recalled from office in 2003,” the Field Poll notes.

The Sacramento Bee quotes Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo as deeming this fact to be “ironic.”

Repugnicans are distancing themselves from Schwarzenegger, claiming that his low approval rating doesn’t really matter because he isn’t really a Repugnican — that is, he isn’t enough of a Nazi for them, even though his father was a Brownshirt…

Great moonbeams think alike

March 2, 2010

Associated Press photo

Jerry Brown formally announced his candidacy for governor of California in a video message on his website today.

“We’re supposed to believe that a rich person who never has held elected office would make a great governor, but look at how great Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned out,” I wrote yesterday in reporting that Jerry Brown would announce his candidacy for the governorship of California today.

This seems to be one of the main lines of attack that Brown is going to make in his battle against billionaire Repugnican candidate Nutmeg Whitman.

Today, in making his formal announcement, Brown said, “Our state is in serious trouble, and the next governor must have the preparation and the knowledge and the know-how to get California working again. That’s what I offer, and that’s why I’m declaring my candidacy for governor.”

Reports the Los Angeles Times:

Brown also sought to use voters’ frustration with [Repugnican] Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who came into office without having been elected [to any political office] before the 2003 [gubernatorial] recall [election], to argue against repeating that pattern with Whitman, and to a lesser degree, the other GOP contender, one-term Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner.

“Some people say that if you’ve been around the process, you can’t handle the job, that we need to go out and find an outsider who knows virtually nothing about state government,” Brown said.

“Well, we tried that, and it doesn’t work. We found out that not knowing is not good.”

Oh, snap!

In a poll taken last month, Brown and Whitman were neck and neck, at 43 percent each.

However, Whitman declared her candidacy a while ago, while Brown didn’t make it official until today, so last month’s poll was taken when Brown wasn’t even an official candidate. Further, Whitman, who thus far has put about $40 million of her own money into her campaign, has been spending millions of dollars campaigning already.

I expect Whitman to go down in flames (the flames would be from the millions of her own dollars that she might as well just burn) for several reasons (not necessarily in this order):

• Current Repugnican Gov. Schwarzenegger’s approval rating has been less than 30 percent for months now. And, as Brown pointed out, Schwarzenegger will still be governor when people are at the voting both in November. Schwarzenegger will still be around to remind them how fucking brilliant it was to put a rich “outsider” in the governor’s office in 2003.
• Most Californians correctly identify the Repugnican Party as the party that flushed the nation’s and the state’s economies down the toilet. (Maybe the memories of George W. Bush would have faded if it weren’t for Dick Cheney’s Penguin-like visage on the Sunday morning political television shows all the fucking time.)
• Outspending your opponent is never a sure-fire way of winning office in California. Notes Time: 

[Whitman] also faces scrutiny because of her wealth, which is estimated to be more than $1 billion.

“There’s a history of wealthy Californians trying to start at the top, like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina [who is running against Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer in November], without having paid their dues,” says Lew Uhler, president of the National Tax Limitation Committee, an anti-tax group, who is supporting one of Whitman’s opponents.

It takes a vast amount of money to be competitive in California, but the road to Sacramento is littered with the bodies of failed parvenus: Michael Huffington, the former Republican Congressman and ex-husband of Arianna, blew $28 million on a failed Senate bid in 1994; Al Checchi, a former co-chairman of Northwest Airlines, spent $40 million losing to Gray Davis in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1998; and the businessman Bill Simon, who campaigned unsuccessfully against Davis in 2002.

All of them were seen as overconfident and underprepared, liable to self-destruct when pressed on basic policy questions. Raphael Sonenshein, a political-science professor at California State University at Fullerton, notes that self-made, first-time candidates often imagine incorrectly that politics can be made as efficient, orderly and logical as business.

“While [very wealthy candidates] are usually competitive, it’s not nearly as easy as they think it’s going to be,” he says. “There’s a reason that politics is a profession.”

Afuckingmen.

• It shouldn’t matter, but in the video age, it does: Megalomaniac Whitman is not an attractive woman. OK, I’ll say it: she’s fairly fugly, in my book. We like to think that we’re above such superficial things in elections, but we’re not. Physical appearance no doubt helped such politicians as Schwarzenegger, Barack Obama and Scott Brown. (Too bad Nutmeg didn’t use some of her millions to buy herself a face transplant or something…)
• Besides rolling back state climate change legislation that even Schwarzenegger championed, Nutmeg’s other campaign promise is to fire tens of thousands of state workers. She hasn’t bothered to say which ones. In a state already dealing with unemployment problems, this idea to slaughter sacrificial lambs who aren’t even the cause of the state’s economic troubles doesn’t sit well with most Californians, who already have seen state services drop because of massive budget cuts to state social programs. This also is a sure-fire way to fire up the state’s powerful labor unions, whose support Jerry Brown already has.

Still, one never should underestimate the stupidity of many and often of even most of the voters, who did, after all, elect Schwarzenegger in the bogus 2003 do-over — er, “recall” — election and then re-elected him in 2006.

I plan to help fight to keep Megalomaniac Whitman in retirement from her gig at eBay.

Carly should have her head examined

Associated Press photo

Rich Repugnican Carly Fiorina, who although she never has held elected public office wants to be a U.S. senator for California, is doing nothing to challenge the perception that California is the land of fruits and nuts. Crazy Carly – who recently released a beyond-bizarre, National-Organization-for-Marriage-like attack ad on her Repugnican primary opponent – is shown above in a photo from last month and is shown below shilling for fellow Repugnican John McCainosaurus in 2008. Just like Sarah Palin-Quayle does, Crazy Carly opposes a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own uterus and she opposes equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals, but she expects women to vote for her anyway.

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Carly Fiorina, whom the board of Hewlett-Packard forced to resign in 2005 and who was John McCainosaurus’ top economic adviser when he ran for the White House with Sarah Palin-Quayle and who has been listed among the top 20 worst American CEOs of all time, reportedly has beaten breast cancer, but I suspect that the cancer has metastasized to her brain. In fact, her brain might be more tumorous matter than healthy gray matter.

That would explain her incredibly — really, it’s unfuckingbelievable – bizarre and incredibly bad attack ad against her Repugnican primary opponent Tom Campbell.

I’d thought that they were exaggerating, but then I watched the ad, which truly must be seen to be believed:

I think it’s fairly safe to say that with what has been dubbed her “demon sheep ad” — yes, the ad contains images of an evil sheep with red glowing eyes that is a bit reminiscent of “The Amityville Horror’s” Jodie the Pig:

Reuters video grab

 – Carly Fiorina already has lost her bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

If Crazy Carly actually manages to make it out of the Repugnican primary alive — by pumping millions of her own dollars into her campaign, just as her Repugnican-former-CEO-who-never-has-held-any-elected-public-office-before cohort Megalomaniac Whitman is trying to buy the governorship of California with her own personal fortune — then she’ll die at the ballot box in November 2010.

Nutmeg Whitman and Crazy Carly Fiorina think that the voters of California are fucking stupid. OK, so true, they did elect Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Repugnican-orchestrated gubernatorial recall election of 2003. But even the dullest of Californians now see what a huge fucking mistake that was, and just as California’s women voters weren’t stupid enough to vote for Repugnican John McCainosaurus because Sarah Palin-Quayle was on the ticket, they’re not going to vote for Whitman or Fiorina just because they (presumably) possess the XX chromosomes.

Nor, I believe, are cash-strapped Californians going to take too well to two corporate bizillionaires trying to buy office — and a U.S. Senate seat and the governorship of the nation’s most populous nation, no less — when they never have held public office before, not even city council member.

P.S. Crazy Carly’s campaign’s “FCINO” as “fiscal conservative in name only”?

Um, what creative genius thought that up?

You can say “RINO” (Repugnican in name only) like “rhino,” or “DINO” (Democrat in name only) like “dino” (as in short for “dinosaur”), but “FCINO”?

WTF?

Assorted shit

I wish that the whole John Edwards thing would just go the fuck away already. It was way back in August 2008 that I wrote, in a piece titled “Good Riddance, Guy Smiley!”:

I never much cared for John “Permasmile” Edwards. A millionaire trial lawyer who perpetually grins from ear to ear and claims to care sooo damned much for the poor — I always sensed that something about him was, um, off. I could tolerate him, but he never made me moist. 

Thank Goddess that Permasmile never really had a chance at the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, now that he admits that he cheated on his cancer-stricken wife in 2006.

Just when you thought that the Permasmile sleazefest couldn’t get any skeezier, there is this from The Associated Press today:

Raleigh, N.C. – Dealing with a pregnant mistress and a suspicious wife, John Edwards and a close aide agreed by the middle of 2007 to solicit funds from a wealthy widow who had promised to “do whatever it takes” to make him president, according to the former confidant’s new book.

Bunny Mellon, the widow of banking heir Paul Mellon, began sending checks “for many hundreds of thousands of dollars” hidden in boxes of chocolates, according to The Politician by former Edwards aide Andrew Young.

The tell-all account describes how Young took the money and used it to keep mistress Rielle Hunter happy, hiding her from the media and a cancer-stricken Elizabeth Edwards.

Young claims the former vice-presidential nominee later said he didn’t know anything about the cash even though the two discussed the matter and the cash began arriving soon after Edwards made a call to Mellon.

The Politician is due in bookstores Saturday. An advance copy was given to The Associated Press by publisher St. Martin’s Press.

The book has received a lot of attention because of its racy details about the affair, the crumbling Edwards marriage and the candidate’s efforts to keep the paternity of his child with the mistress hidden. John Edwards finally admitted last week that he was the father of the girl, who is now almost 2 years old….

I said good riddance to Permasmile back in August 2008, but now we have stories of Gumpian boxes of chocolates. The man’s political career is over, but he just won’t go the fuck away.

Oh, well; as I noted back in August 2008, at least Baby Daddy Permasmile seems to have proved wrong Ann Cunter, who once called him a “faggot.”

—

Now, all of a sudden, ending discrimination against non-heterosexuals in the U.S. military is a priority of the Obama administration.

It wasn’t that long ago that we dykes and faggots were told that the nation has more pressing issues, that we’d just have to wait.

Why now, then?

I’m thinking that Team Obama wants a progressive win in order to get its base fired up again, and this probably is the quickest and easiest win that Team Obama can achieve within the near future. (Much easier than, oh, say, real health care reform….)

I don’t know why anyone, heterosexual or non-heterosexual, would want to join the U.S. military when the U.S. military hasn’t been about actually defending the nation from actual threats since — when? World War II?

If you have two brain cells to rub together, it will be clear to you that the U.S. military these days primarily is about funneling billions and billions of our tax dollars to the fat cats legally via the military-industrial complex’s perpetual war machine.

The military-industrial complex is about killing innocent individuals in foreign lands, ensuring that the United States is hated around the world, giving the military-industrial complex a constant supply of “enemies,” real or imagined, an excuse for its continued bloated-beyond-belief existence.

“National security” — what fucking Orwellian bullshit. Yeah, to steal billions upon billions of dollars from us, they have to tell us that it’s for our own good (health care, by contrast, is bad for us). Fucking traitors is what they are.

But I digress. My point is: Why do gay men want to waste their gifts that they have to give the world on the military-industrial complex?

OK, for lesbians I can see the attraction of the military, I guess, but for gay men? [Insert dropping-soap-in-shower joke here...]

Still, discrimination based upon sexual orientation in any sphere is wrong, and equal human and civil rights in the U.S. military, such as the U.S. military is, is another step toward equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals throughout the United States in all spheres of the nation.

And it’s about time that the Obama administration accomplish something, for fuck’s sake.

P.S. The Repugnicans are arguing that we can’t change the U.S. military’s current policy of discriminating against non-heterosexuals while we’re still fighting in the Middle East.

Oh, fuck them.

As the Repugnicans want nothing short of perpetual fucking warfare for their defense-contractor cronies, that means that non-heterosexuals would never get equal human and civil rights in the U.S. military if we wait until the wingnuts deem that it is the “right time.” (I wonder if it never was the “right time,” according to the stupid white men, to stop racial discrimination in the U.S. military, too.)

If the members of the U.S. military can’t handle the fact that there are non-heterosexuals among them, then they are too fucking pussy to defend us anyway — even though they aren’t about defense anyway, but are about enabling the war profiteers and basically amount to being thugs for the corporations (a la “Avatar”) paid for by us taxpayers (and corporations, of course, don’t pay their fair share of taxes).

—

Can I sense a trend or what?

After Open Salon created an “open call” for our favorite most underrated actor and I picked Joseph Gordon-Levitt as mine, The Associated Press posted a nice piece about him titled “Gordon-Levitt Goes from ’3rd Rock’ to Sundance Kid.”

According to the piece, Gordon-Levitt has wowed this year’s Sundance crowd with his latest starring role, in the film “Hesher,” as he wowed Sundance last year with “(500) Days of Summer.”

Here’s another gratuitous photo of a shirtless Gordon-Levitt from “Hesher”:

Associated Press image

And after I got my first Open Salon “editor’s pick” — which means that my piece appeared on Open Salon’s home page — for my piece titled “Urgent Memo to Jerry Brown: Be a Scott Brown, Not a [Martha] Coakley,” a Sacramento Bee political columnist wrote a column titled “Will California Be the Next Massachusetts?” He wrote:

U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and the lone likely Democratic candidate for governor, Jerry Brown, are taking their cue from [President Barack] Obama and lashing out at corporate executives, including potential Republican challengers, for leading the nation to economic downfall. It’s potentially potent positioning in a state with 12-plus percent unemployment.

Their Republican foes, meanwhile, are portraying Boxer, who is 69, and Brown, who is 71, as aging career liberals who are part of the problem, not the solution, clearly hoping to capitalize on the angry, anti-establishment wave that Scott Brown rode to victory.

Robert Cruickshank, a Monterey college teacher who writes on the liberal website Calitics, declares in a recent article that Jerry Brown could be California Democrats’ Martha Coakley – the Senate candidate Scott Brown defeated.

Is California ripe for a political shift? Anything is possible in a state as inherently volatile as this one in a year like this one.

We are in confusing times, and so yes, I can see California’s voters making stupid (that is, self-defeating) choices at the ballot box in November 2010, but I surmise that Boxer’s re-election is surer than is Jerry Brown’s getting another crack at being California’s governor.

I think that the title of “aging career liberal” sticks to Brown — who still is haunted by the retarded, unfair moniker of “Governor Moonbeam” – much more than it does to Boxer, but again, if Brown doesn’t act like Martha Coakley did, like his win is inevitable, then, well, I think that he’ll most likely win. His most likely Repugnican challenger, billionaire Megalomaniac Whitman, is truly repugnant, which should be a big boon to Brown.

Debate on pregnant U.S. soldiers misses the point, as usual

I just read a column by yet another apparent self-loathing woman — you know, the kind of woman who thinks that Sarah Palin is just great, you betcha! — on the topic of pregnant U.S. soldiers. The piece (of shit) is titled “National Organization for Irresponsible Women,” and it’s penned by she-wingnut Mona Charen.

The crux of Charen’s column is this paragraph:

Feminists, above all, should recognize that when a woman takes an oath as a soldier, she has freely undertaken extraordinary responsibilities. If she becomes undeployable and has to be sent home (the unavoidable consequence of becoming pregnant), someone else must serve in her place. The Army loses a valuable investment, and the unit is left vulnerable.

Wow, has Charen imbibed the Kool-Aid or what?

First of all, a human being is a human being. Not an “investment.” Not a thing.

It is sick and twisted that the capitalist United States of America has turned even human beings into commodities — yet claims at the same time to be “Christian.”

And it’s interesting that the pro-military wingnuts are so fucking “pro-life” — except when the woman is an “investment” of the stupid white man’s military. Then, she is chattel.

Memo to U.S. women: You are allowed to get pregnant only when the stupid white men give you their permission to do so. (But you knew that already, didn’t you? You have the pope, the Repugnican Party, Faux “News,” the Mormon cult, et. al., et. al. telling you your place every fucking day, don’t you?)

And, women, you have the likes of Mona Charen, head of the National Organization for Sellout Women, working for the stupid white men to help keep you in line, as though you were living under the rule of the Taliban.

You betcha.

But even all of this misses the main point, which is that the U.S. military is not worth joining in the first fucking place.

The U.S. military stopped being about defense a long, long time ago. Now, the U.S. military is only the avenue through which the stupid white men pillage and plunder the U.S. treasury. This wholesale looting of the treasury by the military-industrial complex is called “defense,” which, of course, is “in the national interest,” because that, you see, justifies the looting of public billions by private interests.

Again, the question isn’t whether or not it’s OK for women to get pregnant while they’re in the U.S. military.

The question is why in the fuck any woman would want to join the U.S. military in the first place, when by doing so she is not serving her country, but is serving only the war profiteers.

Nor do I understand why gay men and lesbians want to join the military, when anyone with half a brain cell could see that the U.S. military stopped being about defense years and years ago.

But so brainwashed are most Americans that they actually view the U.S. military as the protector and the expander of freedom and liberty and democracy, even when the illegal, immoral and unjust Vietraq War, which thus far has benefitted only corporations like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors remain recent history.

I have cringed lately when I have seen Christmas sentiments extended to those “serving” overseas for our “freedoms.”

They’re not serving us or our freedoms. They’re serving the profiteering of the military-industrial complex, to whom they are only “investments.”

If we perpetuate this sick and twisted thinking, that the U.S. military actually is about expanding freedom and liberty and democracy, instead of recognizing what it’s really all about — war profiteering and expanding the power and the profits of the corporations for whom the U.S. military acts as thugs (thugs paid for by us taxpayers, not by the corporations, of course) — then we will go the way of ancient Rome. Assuming, of course, that we haven’t reached that point of no return already.

P.S. Charen also writes with her poisoned pen that “it would be nice if [feminist U.S. senators, including my senator, Barbara Boxer] thought of themselves as representing the interests of the nation from time to time, and not just as compliant mouthpieces for interest groups. Do any of these liberal senators ever lift their sights enough to recognize that an army is not a social welfare agency?”

There’s that “interests of the nation” bullshit again. Does Charen really believe that the military-industrial complex is about our “national interests”? Is she truly that fucking deluded? Or does she want to continue to personally profit from the exploitative stupid-white-male system that she so dutifully supports?

Speaking of which, how can Charen blast feminist U.S. senators for being “compliant mouthpieces for interest groups” when Charen herself is a compliant mouthpiece for the military-industrial complex? (Do hypocrites recognize their own hypocrisy or is the nature of hypocrisy such that hypocrites are utterly unable to recongnize their own hypocrisy?)

And are there more women in the United States of America or are there more members of the military-industrial complex in the United States of America? So who is representing the interests of more Americans, then: these “femi-Nazi” U.S. senators whom Charen blasts — or Charen and the other defenders of the corrupt military-industrial complex?

Memo No. 2 to U.S. women: You aren’t more than half of the American population now. You are now just another “interest group.” Your bud Mona says so! And she can’t be wrong because she actually gets paid to write a column!

Finally, yes, I agree with bitching and moaning bitch Mona on one point:  the U.S. military should not be ”a social welfare agency.”

The trillions of dollars — mine and yours — that go to the bloated U.S. military-industrial complex instead should go to Americans’ needs (food, health care, shelter, the creation of meaningful jobs, education, environmental protection, etc.) instead of to the stupid white men’s military-industrial complex’s greed.

Would Jesus Christ spend billions and billions of the American taxpayers’ dollars on the military-industrial complex’s greed or on human beings’ needs? Um, yeah.

The anti-Christian Mona Charen supports the sick system that makes people so financially desperate that they see no other alternative than to join the U.S. military because all other jobs have disappeared (and because a college education has become woefully unaffordable for most Americans), and then she blasts these poor people for their desperation.

We should ship Mona off to Afghanistan, since she cares so fucking much about our “national interests.”

And we don’t have to worry about her getting pregnant, because what man would touch a cold bitch like she?

Boxer already has won re-election

Associated Press photo

Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, chair of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, speaks during a news conference in Washington, D.C., today on the climate-change talks in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, her would-be Repugnican successors are focusing on the scandalous! fact that she actually asked someone to address her as “senator”!

The 2010 election is almost a year away, but I think it’s safe to say that U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer is going to win re-election.

This from The Associated Press today:

Washington – The widely played video clip of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer reprimanding a general for calling her “ma’am” is the gift that keeps on giving for the two Republicans hoping to challenge her next year.

Republicans Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore are trying to capitalize on the exchange by making it a key ingredient of their fundraising efforts and attempts to recruit grassroots support. Both campaigns say the video revs up a GOP base that already has long-standing animosity toward Boxer, among the most liberal members of the Senate.

Whether it will have currency beyond next June’s Republican primary, when the winner will have to appeal to a much larger and more diverse audience, is an open question.

During a hearing last June, Boxer interrupted Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers in mid-sentence: “Do me a favor?” she said. “Could you say ‘senator’ instead of ‘ma’am?’ It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it. Yes, thank you.”

Boxer said the general was not offended by her remarks, but many in the GOP clearly were, including the two Republican challengers.

Former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina thought the exchange was so memorable that it prompted her to create a website titled CallMeBarbara.com, which she uses to raise money and keep in touch with supporters.

Campaign aides said they could not quantify the site’s appeal, except to say it has received thousands of hits and led to thousands of dollars in donations.

The campaign of state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore juxtaposed the Boxer clip with an Austin Powers movie frame showing the Dr. Evil character upbraiding those who dare refer to him as “Mr. Evil.” The 30-second video has generated more than 108,000 clicks on YouTube. It’s been one of the campaign’s most popular tools for reaching out to potential supporters.

Barbara O’Connor, professor of communications at Sacramento State University, said the use of Boxer’s comments from the hearing will no doubt fire up the GOP base during the primary campaign but probably will not hurt the third-term senator in the general election. Jobs, health care and other bread-and-butter issues are expected to take precedence….

Um, yeah.

To give just one example, while Fiorina never has held elected office but just wants to buy office (and the governorship of the nation’s most populous state at that), like so many Repugnicans do, and while DeVore is just another stupid white man who stupidly believes that Californians at this point in time want to replace Boxer with a stupid white man, Boxer has been at the forefront of combating global warming. (Fiorina and DeVore, of course, being Repugnicans, would put profits over the planet.)

Um, yeah, I’m a lot more concerned about scientists’ projection that the Arctic could be ice-free in less than a decade than I am that Barbara Boxer — gasp! — actually asked some general to call her “senator”!

The fucking Repugicans fucking fiddle while the polar ice caps melt. It’s fucking great.

Those who hate Boxer are going to hate Boxer. Those of us Californians who love her are going to love her, and no rich bitch trying to buy office or stupid white man is going to get our vote for the U.S. Senate over Babs.

And what, exactly, was Boxer’s “crime” in asking the general to call her “senator”? She was not deferential enough to a man in the military?

Oh, fuck that shit!

I smell sexism — and fascism.

Barbara Boxer nor any other American citizen or elected official is required to fall at the feet of anyone in the U.S. military.

Anyway, the AP also reports:

Registered Republicans represent less than a third of California’s electorate. Women, who vote in greater numbers than men in California, may well see Boxer’s statement as a demand for equal treatment….

Boxer said her opponents’ focus on the exchange says more about them than it does about her. She’s not about to apologize.

“Once in 17 years that I’ve been a senator, I asked a witness to call me ‘senator,’ because we were having a back and forth and I kept saying ‘general’ and he kept saying ‘ma’am’, and it went ‘general,’ ‘ma’am,’ ‘general,’ ‘ma’am.’ And I thought, you know what, this is one of those times we ought to call each other by our titles,” she said in an interview.

Boxer’s strategy for dealing with the fallout is simple: Let her opponents talk about the exchange while she focuses on talking about jobs and other priorities. It’s her way of conveying to voters that she is focused on the issues they care about while her opponents are focused on petty issues….

Fiorina and DeVore already have demonstrated their pettiness and political naivete amply. They might be in touch with California’s wingnut minority, but they’re grossly out of step with the California majority that elected Barbara Boxer for her third term in the U.S. Senate in 2004 with 58 percent of the vote to her Repugnican challenger’s 38 percent. In 2004 she earned more than 6.9 million votes, more votes than any other candidate for the U.S. Senate ever earned in the nation’s history, and more votes than any other candidate ever won on the California statewide ballot.

Palin-Prejean 2012!

Carrie Prejean starts to leave Larry King’s show because he asked her a question that he wasn’t supposed to. Prejean, like Sarah Palin, represents a faux victimization that only harms, not helps, women. (You know that Prejean is a good Christian, by the way, because she wears that cross.)

So Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin are what’s left of the Repugnican Party — well, except for Glenn Beck.

What do Prejean and Palin have in common? A lot, with the exception that no Palin sex videos have yet to be discovered. (And I’m really, really hoping that there won’t be any Beck sex videos…)

Both Prejean and Palin have books out (as does Beck…), only Palin’s book is doing much better than is Prejean’s: Amazon.com has Palin’s book at No. 1 and Prejean’s at No. 6,712 — yes, at No. 6,712 — as I compose this sentence.

(Porn star Jenna Jameson’s book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star is at No. 56 on amazon.com right now — I swear – so what I’m thinking is that Prejean needs to follow the logical course of her “career,” which is to do professional porn, since she’s already done amateur porn. Then, perhaps, after she has had success as a professional porn “actress,” for which she’s already had her tits artificially enlarged, she finally can sell some books!)

If you think I’m awful for comparing Palin and Prejean, Prejean makes the comparison herself. This is from her pathetic recent interview with Larry King:

KING: You characterize yourself as being “Palinized.” What do you mean?

PREJEAN: Well, you look at Sarah Palin and Congresswoman, you know, Michele Bachmann, they are relentlessly, you know, torn down by the liberal media. I mean, they’re wonderful women. They’re intelligent. They’re great mothers. They’re brilliant. And yet there’s this double standard that conservative women are fair game to be attacked. And it’s not right. And it needs to stop.

KING: Doesn’t the conservative media tear down liberal politicians?

PREJEAN: Not to the extent that liberals do to conservative women. I think that they get away with it. If you look at Keith Olbermann, for instance, I talk about it in my book, some of the things that he says on his show about conservatives, if Sean Hannity or if Bill O’Reilly said anything like that about a liberal woman, like Sonia Sotomayor or Michelle Obama, he would be off the air. And there is this double standards and Americans are now exposed to it.

KING: But the conservative media commentators denounced Sonia Sotomayor as a racist, Hillary Clinton as a bitch and a liar. Laura Ingraham recently accused Nancy Pelosi of having do everything but sell her own body to get the health bill passed. You must condemn things like that.

PREJEAN: Look at the things that they said about Sarah Palin and her children. I mean, it’s unbelievable. The attacks are still coming. And, you know, when they’re not happy with the message, Larry, what do they do? They attack the messenger.

KING: Well, you don’t see that it happens on both sides?

PREJEAN: I think that it’s important for women to stick together. I think that’s the biggest thing. And I think that there definitely is this bias against conservative women. It’s fair game. And if they don’t like what you have to say, they have to attack your personal life. And that’s what we’ve been seeing. It’s very consistent.

Oh, puhhhfuckinglease. If you put yourself in the public spotlight, like both Prejean and Palin have done, you can’t complain that the public spotlight shines on those parts of your life that you wish it wouldn’t.

Especially when you claim to be such a great fucking upstanding “Christian” (which includes hating fags and dykes, just like Jesus did/does, of course!), as Prejean does, you can’t expect your hypocrisy (such as breast implants and amateur sex videos) not to be exposed.

When I watched the Prejean-Larry King clip with Prejean ostentatiously wearing her Christian cross pendant, as though she actually exemplifies what Jesus Christ taught, I wanted to vomit.

All that Palin and Prejean do is cry “victim.” How, exactly, does this victim mentality empower women? And is their incessant whining about the “liberal media” enough to elect the likes of Palin to positions of power? Aren’t you supposed to have actual accomplishments, not just bogus claims of victimhood? 

Prejean is full of shit when she claims that women on the right are given worse treatment than are progressive women. And women on the right usually are attacked because they are fucktarded and mean-spirited, not because they are women.

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are “brilliant”? Well, consider the source of that assertion. No doubt Prejean considers herself to be “brilliant” as well.

I recall the incredibly vicious attacks on Cindy Sheehan by the right. (The majority of Americans now agree with Sheehan, of course, that the unelected Bush regime’s Vietraq War was dead wrong.)

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and my only truly Democratic U.S. senator, Barbara Boxer, constantly are villified by the right, as was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor (primarily because she isn’t a conservative white man), yet here is Prejean whining about what supposedly horribly unfair treatment she and Palin have received. She’s even coined a verb for it: “Palinized.”  

What Palin and Prejean and their ilk really want is for progressive women to be crucified while wingnut dingbats like Palin and Prejean get a free pass — lest they scream “sexism.”

Why won’t Palin and Prejean just go the fuck away, even though the McCainosaurus-Palin-Quayle ticket tanked at the ballot box a year ago this month and even though Palin and Prejean both, to my knowledge, are unemployed, except to peddle their books?

Because of Americans’ love affair with white trash, that’s why. We haven’t seen Palin’s nasty bits, as we have Prejean’s, but we are promised that soon we’ll see Palin’s grandkid’s baby daddy’s pee-pee on playgirl.com.

That’s why Palin and Prejean endure: because Americans just can’t get enough of stupid.

I don’t expect Prejean to be around much longer, and I don’t see that Palin-Quayle ever will make it to the White House. Still, I believe that it’s a mistake to misunderestimate, as our last “brilliant” “president” would put it, how popular stupid is in the United States of America.

Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean appeal to the fantasy of millions of fucktarded Americans that they, too, can become famous one day, even though they have attained absofuckinglutely nothing. It’s the American dream, to attain to heights that you never earned and don’t deserve. (It was, I think, the “brilliant” “President” George W. Bush who started that trend.)

Still, though, Palin and Prejean (and Glenn Beck) do represent an ever-shrinking segment of the U.S. population: the misogynist/pro-patriarchal, white supremacist, “Christo”fascist, xenophobic, homophobic, pro-bogus-war, anti-social-program, anti-environmental (not necessarily in that order) set. They are vocal, but they are going extinct like the dinosaurs they don’t believe in.

The Repugnicans think that just because they can front a she-Nazi or two, the majority of the American voters won’t see that a Nazi is still a Nazi, male or female, Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin.

“I think that it’s important for women to stick together,” Carrie Prejean proclaimed on Larry King.

Because getting breast implants in order to compete in the Miss USA pageant is what feminism is all about! As is the anti-abortion stance of both Prejean and Palin! Yes, women of the United States of America, these brilliant women are on your side!

Prejean already is dead in the water, so she might as well go ahead and make that pro porn, and Palin is riding high right now only because of her book. She’ll fade. You betcha.

And even if she didn’t, she and her ilk just don’t have the numbers anymore. It’s not even close enough for the Repugnicans to be able to steal presidential elections anymore, like they did in 2000 and again in 2004.

The demographics are their death.

But it doesn’t hurt to help the demographics along.

GREAT: MORE Jewish ‘victimization’!

Updated below

AFP photo

Oy vey: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., photographed above in 2003, was shot up today by some crazy old hater.

Saturday evening I remarked over a friend’s birthday dinner that they make too damned many movies about Nazis these days. Because they do: “Valkyrie.” “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” “Defiance.” “The Reader.” Etc. Etc.

I didn’t say that they make too many Holocaust movies. I said too many Nazi movies. I hate Nazis and there are too damned many movies featuring them; and because of their extremeness, it’s just too easy to make Nazis your film’s villains. And is there no other topic to make movies about? And do they not make Nazi movies primarily with Oscars in mind?

But the fact that I said “Nazi movies” didn’t stop the Jewish baby boomer across the table from me from going apoplectic over my remark, as though (1) I were attacking Jews and/or minimizing (or perhaps even — gasp! – denying!) the Holocaust and (2) as though he had experienced the Holocaust himself.

I’m so fucking sick and tired of the Jewish mentality of victimhood. Too many Jews like to hit others over the head with what I call the “‘H’ club” (“H” for “Holocaust”).

You (the non-Jew) are supposed to feel immediately horrible about yourself in the presence of someone who is the descendant of someone else who suffered horribly some 65 to 75 years ago.

And hell, you don’t even have to have had an ancestor who suffered in the Holocaust to be able to claim victimhood by proxy. You just have to be Jewish.

And hell, I don’t think that you even have to have been born Jewish; I think that you even can be just a convert to Judaism and still be able to walk around hitting unwitting others over the head with your “H” club for fun and profit.

So anyway, this is my sentiment, and then today’s news is that some old white supremacist and anti-Semite opened fire at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. today, shooting and wounding a guard.

Hell. Open a museum dedicated to victimhood, and yes, you’re likely to attract a crazy hater now and then, and one crazy hater shooting up a place that enshrines hatred is not indicative of systemic victimhood.

You know, as a gay man whose equal human and civil rights were shot down by a slim majority of voters in November, I’m no stranger to oppression.

Gay men were persecuted by the Nazis in the Holocaust, too, but I don’t go around clubbing people with my “H” club.

And it’s hard to buy that the Jews still are such victims when the Israel-first lobby runs U.S. foreign policy, for fuck’s sake, and when the Israelis still are decimating the Palestinians, whom they treat as the Nazis used to treat the Jews: like animals it’s OK to slaughter.

All of that said, if I could do it over again, I might not have made the remark about the fact that they are making too damned many movies about Nazis these days in front of the Jewish baby boomer who wears a tacky holographic Star of David pendant around his neck for the whole world to see what a poor fucking “victim” he is. (I guess that I need to go out and get my tacky holographic pink triangle and wear it around my neck in order to be able to emotionally and socially manipulate others, too.)

But the Jewish victimhood thing needs to stop. Firstly, possessing a perpetual victimhood mentality doesn’t help any historically oppressed minority group; it only keeps that group down. Secondly, using the Holocaust for personal, political or social gain today spits in the faces of those who actually did suffer in the Holocaust, and it degrades and cheapens their involuntary sacrifices at the hands of the Nazis (about whom they really need to stop making any more movies). And thirdly, as I stated, it’s hard for me to look at how much power the Jews, as a relatively tiny group of people, disproportionately wield in the world, and still be able to call them victims, like I’m supposed to do like a good little goy or risk being labeled a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite.

You know, it seems to me that if you hate the Jews and really want to bring them down, you should treat them as nicely as humanly possible — thus eroding their bullshit claims of perpetual victimhood, which they use, rather effectively, to get what they want.

Ironically, the old coot who shot up the Holocaust Memorial Museum today only helped to bolster the image of the Jews as the perpetual victims, and in so doing he only shot his “cause” in the foot…

Update: The media are reporting now that, unfortunately, the security guard who apparently was shot by the 88-year-old white supremacist and anti-Semite James Von Brunn has died. The security guard is being identified as Stephen T. Johns, whose age I haven’t seen given yet.

Von Brunn was shot but survives, which is too bad; the wrong guy died in the shootout.

Update (June 11, 2009): So otherwise fairly intelligent people are asserting, or at least implying (such as here and here), that the Department of Homeland Security’s fairly recent report on the threat of homegrown right-wing terrorists has been validated by yesterday’s shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.

Wow.

You wouldn’t call just one illness or even a handful of illnesses a “pandemic” and probably not even an “epidemic.”

Yet one shooting by one old crackpot hater who apparently acted alone validates the Department of Homeland Security’s report on the threat of homegrown right-wing terrorists?

The security guard who was killed yesterday by the white supremacist and anti-Semitic geezer at the Holocaust Memorial Museum was black, the media are reporting. I’m guessing that the guard wasn’t Jewish, but the shooting, because of its location, is further bolstering the Israel-first lobby’s victimhood status nonetheless. 

Aren’t there hate crimes, including murders, against gay men, lesbians and other non-heterosexuals every fucking day in the United States? Why isn’t that talked about as a widespread problem, but the shooting death of one person is?

Because the right wing is anti-non-heterosexual, don’t hate crimes against non-heterosexuals count as homegrown right-wing terrorism?

Not that historically oppressed minority groups need to engage in battles as to which group is more oppressed — I’ll never forget that many blacks, such as Jesse Jackson, have asserted that rights for non-heterosexuals are not civil rights, for instance — but please.

When you look at historically oppressed minority groups in the United States, Jews overall are doing pretty well, I think, and thus I see no need for their continued assertions of systemic victimhood (except, of course, that such bullshit assertions continue to get them even more).

All of that said, I want to make it clear that I oppose anti-Semitism if we define anti-Semitism as the hatred of an individual solely because he or she is Jewish.

I judge individuals based upon their words, deeds and political ideology (in which I include their moral beliefs and values), not their religious affiliation, even though I am not crazy about Christianity, Islam or Judaism or pretty much any organized religion.

Both of my state’s U.S. senators, for instance, are Jewish.

(So 100 percent of my state’s U.S. senators are Jewish, while only about 3 percent of my fellow Californians are Jewish.  A total of 14 U.S. senators, or 14 percent of the U.S. Senate, are Jewish; there will be 15 Jewish U.S. senators once Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race is finally decided, as both Democrat Al Franken and Repugnican Norm Coleman are Jewish. Jews comprise no more than 2 percent to 2.5 percent of the American population, yet they are wildly overrepresented in high political office. Two of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, almost a quarter of them, are Jewish. But nooo, American Jews are such powerless victims!)

Anyway, as I was saying, I love Sen. Barbara Boxer. While I haven’t agreed with her 100 percent of the time, I think that because of her consistently progressive views and votes, she truly can be called a Democrat.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, however, whom I unfondly think of as Mrs. Joseph Benedict Arnold Lieberman, I cannot stand; she is a DINO (Democrat in name only). Her husband, Richard Blum, profited from the Vietraq War that Feinstein voted for, for starters. (Boxer, on the other hand, wisely voted against the unelected Bush regime’s Vietraq War in October 2002.)

Boxer also was the only U.S. senator with the cajones to speak out against the fixed presidential election in the pivotal state of Ohio in 2004.

I’d much rather have Boxer as president than the waffling, slick, trying-to-please-all-people, I-regret-that-I-voted-for-him Barack Obama, hands down.

And the list of Jews I find hot (JILFs, I call them) includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart and “Saturday Night Live’s” Andy Samberg. And, as I just alluded to, I love Jewish liberals; some of the finest liberal minds are Jewish.

It’s the right-wing Jews I can’t stand, those Jews who scream “Jewish victimization!” but who have no problem with the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed in the Middle East by Israel and who supported the plunging of the United States into the illegal, immoral, unprovoked, unjust and wholly unnecessary Vietraq War, which resulted not only in the unnecessary deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, civilians and soldiers, but also depleted the U.S. treasury and stretched the U.S. military thinly, as well as making the United States and Americans even more hated around the world than they were before Sept. 11, 2001. 

The members of the Israel-first lobby in the United States are, by definition, traitors, for they put outside interests above the interests of their own nation.

P.S. To be fair, many also are pointing to the recent assassination of abortionist George Tiller in Kansas as further proof that Homeland Security’s report about the threat of homegrown right-wing terrorism was right on target.

I’m just not so convinced that these incidents of homegrown right-wing terrorism, as wrong as they are, are more than the number of them that we could expect anyway, statistically speaking. Again, a few events don’t make for an epidemic or pandemic, in my book.

And I still have a problem with the fact that hate crimes against non-heterosexuals don’t garner nearly as much outrage as do hate crimes against other historically oppressed minority groups.

I mean, from what I can tell, not a single Jew was killed yesterday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, but the Jews are getting tea and sympathy over the tragedy nonetheless.

P.P.S. How could I have forgotten the iconic Harvey Milk in my list of Jews I love? I love the man, and, as I have written, I want to see a Harvey Milk Day in California.