Obama’s Round Two already shaping up to look just like Round One

Reuters photo

Then-U.S. Sens. Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel yuk it up in Amman, Jordan, in July 2008. Obama is expected to nominate the Repugnican former senator as his secretary of defense any day now, because “bipartisanship,” you see, means that a so-called Democrat does things that no Repugnican Tea Party traitor ever would do in kind.

 Let’s see:

“Democratic” President Barack Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated for his second term, and already he:

• Threw U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice under the bus when she came under attack from the white supremacists and patriarchs, who rather would see U.S. Sen. John Kerry in the position of U.S. secretary of state, since a white male Democrat is better than any other kind of Democrat
• Capitulated on the Bush-regime-era tax cuts for the rich, having promised over and over and over again to increase taxes on inviduals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000, but actually having agreed to increase taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and families earning more than $450,000  
• Is poised to sell us out on Social Security and/or Medicare in the deferred so-called “fiscal cliff” fight over the federal budget (after all, he and his family are set for life)
• Is poised to name Repugnican former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel as U.S. secretary of defense, reinforcing the meme that Democrats are shitty on defense, and doing something that a Repugnican president never would do (i.e., appoint a Democrat to his cabinet, perhaps especially for defense)

Have I forgotten anything? And again, Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated yet for Round Two.

Your vote for Barack Obama on November 6 was significantly different from what Mittens Romney was offering how?

The most immediate next fight in D.C. apparently will be over Hagel, whose nomination might be announced as early as tomorrow, according to Reuters.

Not that Hagel would represent the first time that Obama sold out those who voted for him where it comes to his selection of the U.S. secretary of defense. Recall that Obama, at the start of Round One, lazily, cowardly and stupidly kept on Robert Gates, who under George W. Bush had replaced war criminal Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in November 2006. Gates stayed on the job as defense secretary under Obama until he retired on July 1, 2011.

My biggest problem with Hagel is that again, a Republican president of today never would put a Democrat on his cabinet (yes, I use “his” because a female Republican president is pretty much an oxymoron), and DINO Obama has sold out the Democratic Party enough as it is.

Yes, I have a real problem with Hagel having referred to former U.S. Ambassador James Hormel in 1998 as “openly, aggressively gay” — we gay men should keep our sexuality strictly and entirely in the closet, just like straight men always do, you see (since when has equality been an American value?) – but I do like Hagel’s reportedly made comments about the “bloated” defense department budget (our national “defense” budget is bloated beyond belief, and mostly represents only the perpetual looting of the U.S. Treasury by treasonous war profiteers) and the insanely disproportionate amount of power and influence that the “Jewish lobby” (I call them the “Israel-first lobby,” because of course not every Jewish American is an Israel firster) has in D.C.

Admittedly, it is unusual for a Repugnican to attack the sacred cows of the military-industrial-corporate complex and the Israel-first lobby, even though both of those sacred cows are milking us dry. And Hagel, himself a veteran of the Vietnam War, also apparently wasn’t enough of a cheerleader for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War — which also is unusual for a Repugnican.

But are there no qualified Democrats whom Obama could nominate as defense secretary?

What’s Obama’s logic here? That as long as his nominee as defense secretary uses the Republican label, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the U.S. Senate will be OK with it?

“This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel,” Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham– who, along with Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. John McCainosaurus, was instrumental in Obama’s caving in on the nomination of Susan Rice – already has declared of Hagel’s nomination.

Not that the likes of wingnutty closet case and chickenhawk Lindsey Graham would approve of any of Obama’s nominees, but why the fuck can’t Obama at least respect those who voted for him by ceasing to kiss the ass of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, who never return the favor in the fucking slightest?

Oh, well.

As I watch Barack Obama for the next four years continue to sell out those who voted for him — and continue, just like Bill Clinton did, to make the Democratic Party more and more indistinguishable from the Repugnican Party (I lovingly think of the two corporation-loving and individual-hating parties as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) – at least I won’t feel nearly as punk’d this time as I did during Obama’s first term, because while I stupidly voted for Obama the first time, on November 6 I cast my vote for the Green Party candidate for president.

As George W. Bush once so wisely declared: Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again!

See you around, fools.

TIME’s lazy, unimaginative choice

TIME magazine’s having made Barack Obama its “Person of the Year” yet again (it first gave Obama that designation for 2008) reminds me of the ludicrously premature awarding of the Nobel Peace Price to President Hopey-Changey-Droney for 2009.

Not that TIME routinely is exactly creative or visionary in its naming of its annual “Person of the Year.” Winning a U.S. presidential election often if not usually is enough of an accomplishment/“accomplishment” for an individual to win the designation. Jimmy Carter won the designation in 1976 and Ronald Reagan did in 1980. Bill Clinton won it in 1992 and even George W. Bush won it in 2000 and in 2004 — and then, as I noted, Obama won it in 2008 and then again this year.

The Nobel Peace Prize selectors are a lot more creative — the only two U.S. presidents to win the prize during my lifetime (I was born in 1968) were Jimmy Carter in 2002 and, as I noted, Obama in 2009. (Well, Al Gore, who actually won the presidency in 2000, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, but he wasn’t coronated as president by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court.)

I fail to see why, other than TIME’s lack of vision or creativity or imagination, Obama was named the magazine’s “Person of the Year” again this year.

I mean, TIME’s selection comes right as Obama apparently just handed over U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice’s scalp* to the KKK, headed by Grand Dragon John “Sore Loserman” McCain, so that the much more acceptable old white guy (John Kerry) can be made U.S. secretary of state instead, and as Obama apparently is poised to sell us out to the Repugnican Tea Party fascists on Social Security, and Goddess knows what other historic Democratic achievements the center-right DINO Obama will dismantle during his second term. (Surely Obama will be a progressive president in his second term, the Obamabots theorized. The gloves will be off! Yeah, right. I’m so glad that I voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on November 6.)

TIME’s 2008 designation of Obama as its “Person of the Year” I can accept. He not only beat Billary Clinton in the protracted Democratic presidential primary season, which was a political feat, but his election as the nation’s first non-white president was at least a milestone if not technically a great accomplishment.

But TIME’s 2012 designation of Obama is just fucking lazy.

True, Obama, given his dismal first term, is damned fucking lucky to have been re-elected. He promised “hope” and “change” but delivered more of the same. Instead of pushing through a progressive agenda when both houses of Congress were in his party’s control in 2009 and 2010, he squandered his once-in-a-lifetime political capital by trying to sing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors — and thus his party lost the House to the “tea party” traitors in 2010.

Obama won re-election last month only because the Repugnican Tea Party dipshits incredibly stupidly nominated one of the most unlikeable people on the planet as their presidential candidate for 2012.

Multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens Romney is so freakishly unrelatable that even many if not most Repugnican Tea Party traitors had to hold their noses while they cast their votes for him (better the despicable white guy than the black guy again), so of course Mittens lost the so-called “swing vote.”

Obama didn’t win re-election because he’s so great, but because his opponent was so unbelievably bad, replete with telling his Richie-Rich donors on hidden camera in May that he already had written off 47 percent of the American people as being lost causes.

Fuck, make David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, who broke the “47 percent” story in September, the “Person of the Year.” He did more to win Obama re-election than Obama did.

Even TIME magazine’s editor seems to credit changing U.S. demographics to Obama’s re-election more than to Obama himself. Reports Reuters:

[TIME magazine] has tapped U.S. President Barack Obama for its Person of the Year for the second time, citing his historic re-election last month as symbolic of the nation’s shifting demographics and the rise of younger, more diverse Americans.

In announcing its annual selection [today], the magazine called Obama the “Architect of the New America.”

“He’s basically the beneficiary and the author of a kind new America — a new demographic, a new cultural America that he is now the symbol of,” TIME editor Rick Stengel said of Obama, who was also selected for the honor in 2008 when he became the nation’s first black president. …

Obama is the beneficiary of demographic changes and the resultant national cultural changes, to be sure — as well as he was the beneficiary of what Howard Dean built in his failed 2004 Democratic presidential bid (indeed, in 2008 Obama rode Dean’s wave right on into the White House) – but how, exactly, is Obama the “author” or the “architect” of these changes?

Um, aren’t national demographic changes a lot bigger than just one individual?

Barack Obama could fart or sneeze and it widely would be called a great fucking accomplishment.

Only in a dying empire, it seems to me, could this be the case.

–

*If you thought that Obama actually was going to defend a person of color from the lynch mob to the death, don’t feel too badly. I also actually thought that maybe this time Obama wouldn’t throw a person of color who is under attack by the white supremacists under the bus, but, of course, just as he did with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, he apparently tossed Susan Rice right under those big wheels.

Because he’s a man of character and courage, you see.

Let’s make him the “Person of the Year” every year!

Four more years (of [largely] the same old shit)!

Reuters photos

I expect little actual progress from the pseudo-progressive President Hopey-Changey over the next four years, but at least during that time I’ll be spared of having to see the Ann-Cunter-like, bleach-blonde harpy Ann Romney trying to fuck us all repeatedly with her strap-on. (Yes, that’s an actual news photo, and so is that one, too.)

Oh, yeah, there was an election on Tuesday.

As I have noted, I voted by mail for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president — yes, practically speaking, as a protest vote – but I knew that President Barack Obama would win my state of California by an overwhelming margin, and he did: thus far in California’s vote counting, Obama has 59.3 percent to Mittens Romney’s paltry 38.4 percent. (Stein, in case you were wondering, is at No. 4, with a whopping 0.6 percent of the state’s vote.)

What I didn’t expect, however, was that as a result of Tuesday’s election — elections, as they say, have consequences – the California Legislature would be on the verge of having a two-thirds “super-majority” in both houses, the state Senate and the state Assembly.

Wow.

This “super-majority” — if utilized – makes the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the Legislature even more irrelevant than they already were before Tuesday.

Not that the Democrats will use their power, of course. Although “super-majority” power, if used to its full extent, would make even the centristy Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown fairly irrelevant, since the Legislature could override his vetoes, there are plenty of center-right “Democratic” California legislators who could threaten any two-thirds threshold.

And, of course, already Jerry Brown has assured spooked California Repugnicans — whose registrants don’t comprise even a full 30 percent of registered Californian voters (the Dems, on the other hand, have almost 44 percent of the state’s registered voters) and whose party doesn’t hold a single statewide office – that his party won’t do too much to upset them, even though, of course, were the state’s parties’ positions of political power reversed, the Repugnicans would ram their right-wing agenda through ruthlessly.

When George W. Bush was “re”-elected in 2004 with a measly 50.7 percent of the popular vote, he called the election results a “mandate.” A “mandate.”

That’s how the Repugnican Tea Party traitors roll: They don’t care even if they don’t even win the popular vote (recall the 2000 presidential election) — they just want to be in power no matter fucking what. They want to shove their Randian, theofascist, neo-Nazi agenda down our throats whether we, the people, give them our permission, via our votes, to do so or not. (So of course if you’re perfectly willing to steal power even when you lost the election, 50.7 percent would be, I suppose, relatively speaking, a “mandate.”)

Votes remain to be counted, but right now Obama is sitting at 50.6 percent of the national popular vote to Mittens’ 47.9 percent. Obama on Tuesday sewed up 332 electoral votes to Mittens’ 206. Including the all-important Ohio and Florida, Obama on Tuesday won all of the states that he won in 2008 (when he garnered 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes), except for two of them, Indiana and North Carolina, which aren’t exactly solid-blue states anyway.

(Indeed, in eight of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, North Carolina went for the Repugnican, and in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, Indiana went for the Repugnican, so Obama’s win in those two states in 2008 was the exception, not the rule, and his loss in those two backasswards states on Tuesday was the rule, not the exception, even though the pathetically straw-grasping Repugnican Tea Party traitors have tried to make some hay out of the fact that Obama didn’t win those two states again on Tuesday. [Indeed, the bar, when it is set by whites, is always set higher for blacks than it is for whites.])

Cheer up, though, white-supremacist wingtards! Mittens did better than John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin did in 2008. They garnered only 45.7 of the popular vote and 173 electoral votes against the guy with the Kenyan ancestry.

Of course, while George W. Bush in 2004 declared 50.7 percent of the popular vote to be a “mandate” and the fascist traitors who comprise his party talked of a “permanent [Repugnican] majority,” only two years later, in 2006, the Repugnicans lost the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic California U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to become speaker of the House in U.S. history, and then two years after that, in 2008, Barack Obama, the nation’s first non-white president, won a higher percentage of the popular vote than either George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton ever had.

So some caution needs to be exercised before declaring a “permanent [insert party name here] majority,” or even a “mandate” based on not even a full 51 percent of the popular vote, but at the same time, to the victor goes the spoils, and the so-called “leaders” of the Democratic Party need to stop acting like losers even after they’ve fucking won.

(Yes, on the heels of his second electoral victory, Obama still is talking about cooperation with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, even though the past four years have demonstrated amply that you cannot negotiate with such terrorists, because the assumption that they are rational creatures capable of compromise is patently incorrect.) 

The Repugnican Tea Party traitor-fascists act like winners even after they’ve lost, and if the damage that they’ve wreaked upon the nation is to be reversed (if that’s even possible at this point [it very most likely isn't, perhaps especially in regards to global warming]), the Democrats really need to stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m not holding my breath, however.

I expect the next four years to look and feel much like the past four, although I expect things here in California to improve more quickly than they improve – if they ever improve — nationally, since here in California we have demonstrated how to edge the Repugnican Tea Party traitors more and more closely to the endangered species status that they oppose so much.

As California goes, so goes the nation, it has been said.

I hope that that is correct.

P.S. Of course I’m happy that on Tuesday the voters of three states — Maine, Maryland and Washington — voted for same-sex marriage, being the first states to adopt same-sex marriage upon a popular vote, and pushing the number of states that have same-sex marriage from six (before Tuesday) to now nine. (The other six states are Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The District of Columbia also has same-sex marriage, as do two U.S. Native American tribes, apparently.)

The 2008 election results were a bittersweet pill here in California, because although Barack Obama had become the nation’s first black president based upon his ubiquitous campaign promises of hope and change (and to a large degree they were just that – promises — we know now), Proposition Hate had shot down same-sex marriage, which the California Supreme Court had ruled earlier in the year was every Californian’s constitutional right.

If same-sex marriage were put up to a vote again in California today, of course it would pass this time — even though, let me be clear, no one’s constitutional guarantee of equality ever should have to be put up to a fucking vote — and it’s gratifying to see that the Mittens Romney-Pretty Boy Paul Ryan ticket, representing the Mormon cult and the Catholick church respectively, were rejected by the majority of the nation’s voters, since the Mormon cult and the Catholick church were the biggest sponsors of Proposition Hate, in their attempt to shove their brand of theocracy and theofascism down our throats, Taliban-style.

Karma is a bitch.

(Just like Ann Romney is. I am sooooo happy not to have to see her fucking face as first lady for the next four years, by the way. Ann Romney reminds me of an Ann Cunter who actually ate something. Why are so many Repugican Tea Party women bleach-blonde harpies who act like sorority chicks who are getting revenge upon all of us for the ponies that they never got as spoiled little girls?)

P.P.S. For all of their post-election sore-loserism crying and whining, the white-supremacist Repugnican Tea Party traitors are fucking lucky that we are seeing a for-the-very-most-part bloodless, demographic revolution in the United States, and not (thus far, anyway…) the actual bloody revolution that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors deserve to have launched against them, a la the French Revolution.

After all, the “47 percent” that Mittens “Let Them Eat Cake” Romney talked about in May when he didn’t know that he was being video-recorded actually is a bit more than 50 percent, we see from Tuesday’s presidential election results.

I voted for Jill Stein, fuck you very much.

Updated below

AFP/Getty Images

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, photographed in Washington, D.C., in July

It wasn’t a difficult decision. It felt at least a bit liberating, in fact, to fill in with my black ballpoint pen the oval next to her name on my mail-in ballot, and putting my completed ballot in the U.S. Postal Service mailbox yesterday gave me the at-least-mild satisfaction of having an important task finished.

President Barack Obama is leading Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Mittens Romney by double digits in polling here in California. California and its 55 electoral votes, the nation’s biggest prize, are so not up for grabs that neither candidate is airing any TV commercials here. No mailers, either. Nothing that I have seen, in fact, except what’s on the Internet.

The New York Times’ prognosticator Nate Silver, as I type this sentence, puts Obama’s chances of re-election at just a little below 75 percent and Mittens’ chances of winning the White House at just a little above 25 percent.

Fact is, living in a solidly blue state under the undemocratic, winner-takes-all Electoral College system, my vote for president essentially doesn’t count. I could have voted for Mittens, for fuck’s sake, and the outcome in California wouldn’t have been altered one nano-iota. That Obama would win all of California’s 55 electoral votes on November 6, 2012, was a foregone conclusion long ago.

No, of course I don’t want Mormon multi-millionaire fascist Mittens to win, and of course I recognize that the winner of the election will be Obama or Mittens (and certainly not a third-party candidate), which is why this time around I gave Obama more than $100 in campaign contributions — much less than I gave him in 2008, but, according to an e-mail that the Obama campaign put out earlier this month, only about one in 75 Americans has given Obama one single penny, so hey, even the less than $200 that I’ve given him toward his re-election bid is pretty fucking good, comparatively.

But I almost didn’t vote for Obama in November 2008. When I went to my polling place on Election Day 2008, I had it down to Obama or to independent progressive candidate Ralph Nader, and even when I’d just received my ballot I still had to ponder which candidate to vote for, and at the last minute I went ahead and gave my vote to Mr. Hopey-Changey, knowing that he would carry California whether I voted for him or not, but hoping that he would at least try to deliver the change that he’d promised.

And yes, I also felt that I wanted to take the opportunity to vote for the first non-white president of the nation’s history. It gave me at least a little bit of an uplift to know that I was part of that historical event. (Of course, any Obama-related uplift was blunted by the blow of the passage of Proposition Hate here in California, which happened in large part thanks to the big money and the efforts of Mittens’ Mormon cult and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s Catholick church, which, much like the Taliban, seek to shove their theofascist, ignorant, hateful bullshit down the throats of all of us.)

Four years later, it is clear to me that Barack Obama had only said what he’d figured (correctly) would get him elected. Indeed, his take of the popular vote was bigger than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever got.

I could post a litany of reasons why, in good conscience, I could not cast my vote for Barack Obama again, but here are just three of them:

• Obama for the most part just sat idly by while British Petroleum assured us that it had its crude-gushing underwater oil well perfectly well under control. Obama’s inaction was a clear signal to the planet-raping corporations: Do (or don’t do) whatever the fuck you want. The Democratic Party is addicted to your campaign contributions and therefore won’t lift a fucking finger to stop you from destroying the planet.
• Obama had promised before his election that if the right to collectively bargain ever were under threat anywhere in the nation, he’d don a pair of comfortable walking shoes and join the fight himself. Yet when workers in Wisconsin fought for months and months for the survival of their right to collectively bargain, Obama showed his face in Wisconsin not one fucking time. Wisconsinites were on their own, with only very-last-minute support from the national Democratic Party, which was way too little way too late, and resultantly, Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker survived the gubernatorial recall election against him in June.*
• The Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning-for-fuck’s-sake Obama loves his civilian-killing drones, which, if you are awake, alert and oriented, you should find spine-chilling. A recent study of drone strikes by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law found that ”from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 to 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.” Um, yeah, “they” don’t hate us for “our freedom.” And what’s to stop drones from being used against American civilians here at home at some point in the future?

Even without those three things, this one thing is more than enough reason not to vote for Punker in Chief Barack Obama again: Obama’s best opportunity to push through a progressive agenda was in 2009 and 2010, when his party controlled not only the White House but also the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Instead of even fucking trying to deliver upon his promises of hope and change for his base, however, Obama in 2009 and 2010 was too busy trying to sing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress whose only mission was to make sure that the nation’s first non-white president failed. (They even openly had stated that this was their mission from Day One.)

You don’t negotiate with terrorists. You crush them. Which is what Obama should have done.

Obama’s role model, he repeatedly essentially has told us, was Ronald Fucking Reagan, who, in my book, ranks with Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush as the worst three presidents of my lifetime (I was born in 1968).

Obama’s “signature” “achievement,” the so-called “Obamacare,” contains little to nothing that the wealth-care industry didn’t rubber stamp, and even while proclaiming his support of same-sex marriage, Obama still maintains that each state nonetheless should be allowed to decide whether or not same-sex couples’ constitutional guarantee of equality should be honored or denied.

All of this, yet Barack Obama is on our side?

After the 2008 election, Obama and his surrogates called us progressives — the Democratic Party’s (disappearing?) base — “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left.”

I, for one, don’t forget such slights – I helped put you where you are, and then you turn and shit and piss all over me? Really? – and the Obama administration’s incredibly stupid practice of base-bashing is a large reason why I voted for Jill Stein.

Again, of course I hope that Mittens Romney doesn’t win, but if he does, you can’t blame me.

Blame Barack Obama, who promised hope and change but who has delivered only sweet-sounding rhetoric and even base-bashing, and who has presided over the nation as a Ronald-Reagan-loving Repugnican Lite.

And blame the Obamabots – the blind, mindless, amoral Democratic Party hacks – who to this day have refused to hold the center-right Barack Obama accountable for anyfuckingthing only because he wears the brand-name label of “Democrat,” and who continue to actually buy the Democratic Party’s pandering bullshit that the Democratic Party of today actually gives a flying fuck about us, against the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Update: I’d wanted to keep my bullet-pointed list of Obama’s fuck-ups to only three items, but Barack Obama has been such a fuck-up that I found it fairly impossible to list only three of his fuck-ups, so I ended up listing other fuck-ups of his elsewhere in my post, and I want to add a fourth bullet point, a point that I’m surprised that I forgot to include in my original post:

• Early on, Obama appointed Wall Street weasels like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers as his economic advisers, and in 2008, Obama took more money from Wall Street weasels than even John McCainosaurus did — which is probably why Obama rejected the advice of progressive economists, like the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman, who warned that Obama’s “stimulus” wasn’t nearly enough to restore the nation’s economy. All of this while Obama claims to care sooooo much about the working class and the middle class. Again: Whose side, exactly, is Barack “Talk One Way, Walk Another” Obama on?

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*A judge in Wisconsin last month struck down Walker’s union-killing legislation, which was a victory for labor, but a victory that neither Obama nor the Democratic Party had a hand in. And the state is appealing the judge’s ruling, so the fight isn’t quite over quite yet.

George McGovern’s death makes me yearn for real Democrats

Getty Images

The death today of George McGovern, a progressive who ran unsuccessfully against incumbent President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 (and who is shown above right campaigning in 1972 with his first running mate, Thomas Eagleton), only reminds me, shortly before another presidential election, how far the Democratic Party has fallen.

It’s a perverse fact of politics that the possession of intelligence and compassion (concomitantly known as wisdom) often, if not usually, dooms an individual who is running for high public office.

I write that with the death of real Democrat George McGovern* in mind.

I was only four years old when in 1972 Democrat McGovern lost to incumbent Repugnican President Richard M. Nixon in a landslide. A landslide — and look how wonderful Nixon’s second term turned out to be: It was the Democratic Party’s operations that Nixon’s operatives were snooping into in June 1972 in the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to Tricky Dick Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. (Nixon’s remains the only presidential resignation in U.S. history.)

The masses often get it wrong.

I don’t remember McGovern’s presidential campaign, of course. The first sitting president I remember seeing on television was Gerald Ford, who followed the disgraced-by-Watergate Nixon, and I seem to remember seeing a perpetually stumbling and falling Ford parodied by Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Live” more than seeing the actual Ford himself on TV.

I remember seeing also Jimmy Carter on TV, and of course I remember Ronald Reagan and all of those who have followed him. But during Carter’s first and only term, I was an elementary school student who was interested in “Star Wars,” not in politics, and it wasn’t until Reagan’s eight-year reign during most of the 1980s that my political identity started to form.

My father always has been apolitical, not giving a rat’s ass about anything outside of his immediate personal universe, and my mother is one of those “swing voters” who seem to make their presidential picks based upon the logic of a Magic 8 Ball. (My parents reside in Arizona, where they belong, and I in California, where I belong.)

My point in bringing up my parents — which makes me feel like Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka when the topic of his parents is brought up — is to illustrate that neither of them even attempted to influence my own political views, with one of them being apolitical and the other being politically muddled at best, so the fact that I grew into a left-winger in the red state of Arizona, which is not conducive to the development of little “socialists,” suggests to me that a progressive political viewpoint is the natural path of human development, unless that path is obstructed (such as by committed right-wing parents who probably should be committed, a “Christo”fascist social environment, etc.) and the journeyer cannot overcome those obstructions, as I was able to do.

The first presidential race that I remember caring about was the 1984 race. I was in high school at the time, and I supported Democrat Walter Mondale over the re-election of Reagan, and I don’t know if I even could have articulated very well why I preferred Mondale over Reagan, since it certainly wasn’t my parents who influenced my preference for Mondale. If memory serves it was a visceral thing, my visceral, intuitive identification of Mondale as the truly wise (again, the compassionate and intelligent) candidate and Reagan as the poser, the phony.

Of course, in 1984 the very first presidential candidate whom I supported (not with money, because as a minor I didn’t have any [and are minors allowed to contributed to presidential campaigns anyway?], and not with my vote, because I wasn’t yet 18), very much like McGovern had done in 1972, lost to the Repugnican incumbent in a landslide.

Four years later, in 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, whom I supported and voted for as a college student (I remember having to sell my plasma as a starving college student, so I’m pretty certain that I wasn’t able to give Dukakis any money), performed barely better against George H. W. Bush than Mondale had performed against Reagan four years earlier.

Um, yeah, so I wasn’t off to a great start in life in my presidential picks, and for 12 long years as I was politically budding, I suffered through first Ronald Reagan and then George Bush I. (I never will forget graduating from college with a worthless degree but with plenty of student-loan debt during The First George Bush Recession of the late 1980s-early 1990s. These early socioeconomic experiences tend to color your political outlook for life, as the Great Depression very apparently colored my Scrooge-like maternal grandmother’s outlook for the rest of her life.)

Then in the 1990s came pseudo-Democrat Bill Clinton, who, although he benefitted from a rebounding economy (how much of the 1990s’ economic rebound was from his policies and how much of it was from the natural course of economic events I’m not certain), gave us such gems as NAFTA, welfare “reform” and DOMA — oh, yeah, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, because having an intern blow you in the Oval Office never can blow up in your face.

So the first Democratic presidential candidate whom I supported — I rooted for and voted for Clinton in 1992 and in 1996 — and who actually won the presidential election was the so-called Democrat who destroyed the Democratic Party by dragging it so far to the right that the Democratic Party today looks like Repugnican Lite. Yay!

Bill Clinton benefitted from a three-way race in 1992, and won with a plurality, not a majority, of the popular vote, which today’s Democratic hacks forget or ignore. (Dems deny that third-party candidate Ross Perot, who garnered a-very-impressive-for-a-third-party-candidate 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, harmed George H. W. Bush’s re-election bid, but it seems to me that the majority of Perot’s supporters were right of center and that most of them would have voted for Bush over Clinton. [If memory serves, my Magic-8-Ball-wielding mother voted for Perot, and my guess is that had Perot not been a choice, she would have voted for Bush or would not have voted at all.])

I get it that after a string of Democratic presidential defeats — George McGovern, Jimmy Carter (denied a second term), Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis — and after long time in the political wilderness during the Nixon/Ford, Reagan and Bush I years — the Democratic Party apparently wanted to pull away, far away, from the egghead image.

Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Repugnican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956 yet sought (but did not get) the Democratic Party’s nomination yet again in 1960, seems to have been the eggheaded Democrats’ founding father, at least of our modern era, and indeed, Stevenson was the last presidential candidate from either of the two major parties who, despite having lost a presidential election, was nominated by his party to run in the very next presidential election. (These days, losing a presidential election very apparently means that you’ll never get another shot at your party’s presidential nomination again.)

The last Democratic egghead who lost — but who, surreally, actually won — a presidential election was, of course, Al Gore, who in 2000 won 48.4 percent of the popular vote to George W. Bush’s 47.9 percent, for a difference of more than 500,000 votes.** Only in the United States of America could the candidate who won fewer votes be made — crowned – president by the U.S. Supreme Court and his cronies (such as his brother, who was governor of the pivotal state that he “won,” and the chief elections official of that state who made damn sure that he “won” it), and this is yet another of those wonderful, deeply anti-democratic events during my lifetime that has shaped my current outlook.

So Al Gore’s win/loss in 2000 might have been the death knell for the eggheaded Democratic presidential candidate, but isn’t there some middle ground between a Bill Clinton and an Adlai Stevenson?

You might argue that President Barack Obama more or less fills that middle ground, since he’s known as both intelligent and non-nerdy (and, importantly, highly unlikely to be blown by an intern), but today we have Obama in a race for re-election that shouldn’t be nearly as close as it is, and probably wouldn’t be as close as it is had Obama spent his first two years in office actually delivering upon his ubiquitous 2008 promises of hope and change while both houses of Congress were controlled by his own party, a rare alignment of the stars that never should be squandered, and that even George W. Bush, dipshit that he is, did not squander. (Nor did Bush II, dipshit that he is, shit and piss all over his own fucking base, which seems to be the Obama administration’s and the Obamabots’ favorite fucking pastime.)

In Barack Obama, other than in empty rhetoric and false promises, we see precious little of the spirit of George McGovern that used to infuse the Democratic Party. In Obama we see instead the cynical, opportunistic, center-right spirit of Bill Clinton, an approach that the modern Democratic Party argues is the only approach that works, yet in actuality has no track record of effectiveness.

Again, in my book, Bill Clinton won in 1992 in no small part because of “spoiler” Ross Perot, and again, in 1992 Clinton garnered a plurality (43 percent of the popular vote), not a majority. (The only other president during my lifetime who garnered not even a full 44 percent of the popular vote was Richard Nixon in 1968, the year of my birth.)

Clinton again failed to get a full majority even in 1996 (he got 49 percent of the popular vote), and in his 1996 (and pre-Lewinsky) re-election bid he benefitted from having an incredibly wooden Repugnican opponent in Bob Dull — er, Dole — and he benefitted from a strong economy, which, again, I am not certain how much resulted from his economic policies and how much resulted from the natual ebb and flow of the nation’s economy.

Let’s reflect upon the fact that Barack Obama garnered 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, which was better that Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever did in the elections from 1992 through 2004. Obama’s 53 percent in 2008 bested Jimmy Carter’s and John F. Kennedy’s take of the popular vote, too.

How did Obama do it?

Again, he ran on a progressive (if too-vague) platform of hope and change. That was the bait.

Obviously, if Obama hadn’t perceived that that was what the majority of Americans wanted, that wouldn’t have been what he promised.

That progressivism is what the majority of Americans wanted, and that progressivism is what Obama Version 2008 promised (even if gauzily), even though his hacks (the Obamabots) love to engage in historical revision and deny that fact, but what Obama has delivered as president is just more Clintonesque, center-right, “bipartisan,” Repugnican-ass-licking bullshit, replete with Billary Clinton as his secretary of state and Bill Clinton as his current campaign surrogate.

So the news of George McGovern’s death early this morning at a hospice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at age 90 only underscores for me, with another presidential election only a little more than two weeks away, the fact that the Democratic Party of today is only a shadow of what it used to be.

I lament that the only presidents named George whom I got during my lifetime are surnamed Bush, and I have to wonder how George McGovern felt about the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who turned the Democratic Party into the center-right, corporate-ass-licking, lesser-of-two-evils monstrosity of a fundraising machine that it is today.

And I can’t see how I can honor the memory of George McGovern by blackening the oval next to the name of Barack Obama on the mail-in ballot that sits just yards from me right now as I type this sentence, yet unmarked.

–

*Wikipedia’s entry on George McGovern reports, in part:

George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922-October 21, 2012) was a historian, author and U.S. representative, U.S. senator and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election.

McGovern grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota…. [After he fought in World War II] he gained degrees from Dakota Wesleyan University and Northwestern University, culminating in a Ph.D., and was a history professor. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956 and re-elected in 1958. After a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 1960, he was elected there in 1962.

As a senator, McGovern was an exemplar of modern American liberalism. He became most known for his outspoken opposition to the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He staged a brief nomination run in the 1968 presidential election as a stand-in for the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.

The subsequent McGovern-Fraser Commission fundamentally altered the Democratic presidential nominating process, by greatly increasing the number of caucuses and primaries and reducing the influence of party insiders.

The McGovern-Hatfield Amendment sought to end the Vietnam War by legislative means but was defeated in 1970 and 1971.

McGovern’s long-shot, grassroots-based 1972 presidential campaign found triumph in gaining the Democratic nomination but left the party badly split ideologically, and the failed vice-presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton undermined McGovern’s credibility. In the general election McGovern lost to incumbent Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Re-elected senator in 1968 and 1974, McGovern was defeated in a bid for a fourth term in 1980.

Throughout his career, McGovern was involved in issues related to agriculture, food, nutrition, and hunger….

Wikipedia also notes that anyone running against the incumbent Nixon would have had an uphill battle anyway, but after high-profile Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey and other Democrats declined to be McGovern’s running mate, McGovern picked U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, whom McGovern later replaced with Kennedy clan in-law Sargent Shriver after Eagleton’s history of treatment for mental illness came to light, casting doubt on his fitness to handle the presidency if it came to that, and raising doubts about McGovern’s judgment.

Wikipedia notes that Team McGovern didn’t vet Eagleton thoroughly and that Eagleton and his wife intentionally kept Eagleton’s hospitalizations for mental illness from McGovern. Bloomberg notes that less than a week after McGovern had proclaimed that he supported Eagleton “1,000 percent,” he replaced Eagleton with Shriver.

Bloomberg notes that McGovern later wrote in his autobiography, “I did what I had to, but the Eagleton matter ended whatever chance there was to defeat Richard Nixon in 1972. In the minds of many Americans the Eagleton episode convicted me of incompetence, vacillation, dishonesty and cold calculation, all at the same time.”

Bloomberg notes that “The Eagleton misstep ushered in today’s rigorous vetting of potential vice presidential candidates,” which doesn’t really explain what happened with Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin, but whatever…

**You might argue that the last Democratic egghead who ran for president actually was John Kerry in 2004, and while he does hail from Massachusetts, a la egghead Michael Dukakis (indeed, Kerry was Dukakis’ lieutenant governor), Vietnam vet Kerry ran such a war-hero campaign (the “swiftboaters’” defamation of him notwithstanding) that, in my estimation, anyway, he fairly escaped being branded as an egghead.

Reading between the conventions’ lines

Reuters photo

Repugnican Tea Party Speaker of the House John Boehner shakes the hoof of right-wing New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan after Dolan gave the closing prayer at the Repugnican Tea Party Convention in Tampa, Florida, on August 30. Not to be outdone in wingnuttery, the Democratic Party had the right-wing Dolan also give the Democratic National Convention’s closing prayer, in which Dolan expressed his and the Catholick church’s opposition to abortion and to same-sex marriage. Yet the shameless Democratic Party hacks cry foul when those of us who are sane and who reject evil pieces of shit like Dolan claim, correctly, that the two right-wing, pro-corporate parties (which I can think of only as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) are becoming more indistinguishable from each other day by day.

About the last thing that you want to pay attention to at the Coke Party’s and Pepsi Party’s quadrennial conventions are the politicians’ speeches.

The vast majority of political speeches are just shameless propaganda, false proclamations of actually giving a shit about the average American, and are not an actual reflection of reality (what it has been, what it is now or what it will be).

No, you look for other clues at the partisan duopoly’s conventions to inform you as to what’s really going on.

The two things that you have needed to know about the Repugnican Tea Party convention are that a black camerawoman for CNN had food thrown at her by white delegates and was referred to as an “animal,” and that an addled, doddering, grumpy old man who wants to take us back to the 1950s (or before) in a way-back machine still is the face of the Repugnican Tea Party. (It was John McCainosaurus in 2008, and Clint Eastwood this time.)

Of course, if you watched any of the Repugnican Tea Party convention coverage (even just brief clips, as I did), you saw, as the camera panned across the convention attendees, that it was a sea of lily-white faces. Seriously, why don’t they go ahead and don their pointy white hoods already? We all know that they want to.

I’ve seen only snippets of Mittens Romney’s acceptance speech. He wore way too much makeup, which only made him look even faker than he already comes across, and his whisper-like, condescending, faux-compassionate voice makes me want to hurl.

This man is a multi-millionaire Mormon. He cares only about his fellow millionaires and his fellow Mormons. If you believe otherwise, then there is something seriously the fuck the matter with you and your grasp of reality.

I don’t need to listen to Mittens’ words. I have only to listen to the strong voice within every time I see even a brief clip of Mittens: This uber-phony man is evil. He has to be phony because if he showed us his true self, enough of us would be repulsed that he’d never win the election. It wouldn’t even be close enough for him to steal it, as appears to be his party’s game plan, a la 2000.

Not that the establishmentarian, Clintonesque Democrats are much better.

I haven’t bothered to watch even a brief clip of Barack Obama’s convention speech. Why? What would be the point? We know what we’re going to get with four more years of Obama: more broken promises, more of the same, more concessions to the corporations and to the right wing, more excuses as to why Obama absofuckinglutely refuses to head an opposition party, which is what the Democratic Party used to be until the slimy baby boomer Bill Clinton destroyed it, as the greedy, corrupt, talentless baby boomers have destroyed or are about to destroy all of our nation’s best institutions (including, of course, Social Security and Medicare. [They destroyed even capitalism, too, but of course, capitalism needed to be destroyed]).

We know that while of course Mittens would be worse than would be Obama (except for Mittens’ fellow Mormons and his fellow millionaires, of course), the prospect of another four more years of Obama is nothing to be excited about.

There were two stand-out events at the Democrats’ convention that, for me, tell me what I really need to know about the party. And again, you won’t find this shit in politicos’ propagandistic speeches.

First, there was Barack Obama once again capitulating to right-wing and “Christo”fascist criticism, demanding that the Democratic Party’s platform, which the delegates had already democratically approved, be changed to add the word “God” and to add that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

As I wrote, the selfish, anti-democratic actions of the convention’s chair, the slimy Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, were repugant. Clearly Villaraigosa didn’t have the two-thirds voice vote by the delegates that he needed for the alteration of the platform to pass, but he shoved the changes to the platform down the delegates’ throats nonethefuckingless.

The Los Angeles Times today published Villaraigosa’s “defense” of his repulsive actions. He said:

• “It was a lot of ado about nothing.”
• When he was told that others didn’t hear a two-thirds voice vote, he replied smart-assedly, “That’s nice to know. I was the chairman and I did, and that was the prerogative of the chair.”
• “It’s more a media concern than a delegate concern. I can tell you this — the president of the United States said, ‘Wow.’ The president said, ‘You showed why you were speaker of the California Assembly.’ The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that.”
• “The president of the United States and the leader of my party asked me to do this, and so I’m proud I have a president who believes God and Jerusalem should be in the platform, and so do I.”

What a fucking weasel Antonio Villaraigosa is. To call a blatantly anti-democratic move “decisive” is sick. No, Villaraigosa, you are not “decisive.” You are a fucking self-serving coward.

And it was not “a lot of ado about nothing” and not only a “media concern.” (Blaming shit on the media is quite Palinesque of Villaraigosa, however.) It was the hijacking of the platform that already had been democratically approved, and that is a serious matter. I’m not even a registered Democrat — because of slimeballs like Villaraigosa I’m a registered Green Party member — and I wasn’t even there, but when I watched the clip of Villaraigosa’s actions, I was incensed — as were many delegates who were there, for whom the lying Villaraigosa pretends he can speak. (It wasn’t a “delegate concern” — because he says so!)

“I was the chairman and I did [hear a two-thirds vote], and that was the prerogative of the chair,” Villaraigosa huffed. Bullshit. He did not hear it, which is why he had to hold the voice vote three fucking times (watch the clip yourself), and so when he claims that he did hear it, he fucking lies, but then immediately after his lie, he inadvertently tells us the truth: “that was the prerogative of the chair.”

I’ll translate that from the weaselspeak that Villaraigosa speaks into English: “I was able to abuse my position of power and trust, and so I did so. Fuck you for even questioning my authority.”

And then, Villaraigosa does even more quite inadvertent truth-telling: “The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that,” and “The president of the United States and the leader of my party asked me to do this, and so I’m proud I have a president who believes God and Jerusalem should be in the platform, and so do I.”

Well, yes, indeed, Barack Obama (and, if Villaraigosa is telling the truth — it’s hard to know, because he’s such a fucking liar — Joe Biden and even Michelle Obama) wanted Villaraigosa to ram the last-minute, “Christo”fascist- and wingnut-placating changes to the party’s platform down the delegates’ throats, and so Villaraigosa the shameless fucking sellout dutifully did so.

But that is a “defense” — that he pleased his puppeteers? That makes what he did OK?

And what does it fucking matter what Barack Obama and Antonio Villaraigosa believe? The party platform already had been democratically approved by the convention delegates. Why bother to have the delegates at all if they can be overriden by power-drunk autocrats like this?

I’ll never give the slimeball Antonio Villaraigosa my vote even for dog catcher. He has demonstrated his character amply.

As has Barack Obama, of course.

Not content that he had alienated enough of his base by anti-democratically using his tool, the fool Villaraigosa, to change the party’s platform against the wishes of the delegates (who clearly are just window dressing, if that), Barack Obama decided that it would be a swell fucking idea to have the right-wing, anti-choice, anti-same-sex-marriage Catholick Cardinal Timothy Dolan give the closing benediction at the Democratic National Convention.

The “Christo”fascist Dolan said these two things in his “benediction” to the Dems:

• “Thus do we praise you [he's talking to "God" here, you see] for the gift of life. Grant us the courage to defend it, life, without which no other rights are secure. We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected.”
• “Empower us with your grace so that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing of life and community.”

If you claim that these are not thinly veiled references to the Dark-Ages Catholick church’s “Christo”fascist stances on abortion and same-sex marriage, then you are a fucking liar or you are a fucking moron. (Or both.)

Dolan also talked about “freedom” and “liberty” in his “benediction” (“bene” is from the Latin word for “good,” but Dolan is evil, so to call it a “benediction” is a contradiction), but in Dolan’s and the Catholick church’s worldview, women may not have the freedom and liberty to make their own fucking reproductive choices, and same-sex couples shall not have the freedom and liberty of marriage equality, but are to be continued to be treated as less than equal human beings, as they have for centuries.

“Freedom” and “liberty” are reserved only for those who agree with Dolan and the right-wing, dying dinosaur that is the Catholick church under the command of Pope Palpatine, you see.

Know that this is how much brazen contempt Barack Obama and the ossified Democratic Party (the best of which it can do is wheel out the right-wing fossil that is Bill Fucking Clinton every once in a while) have for you: to invite a known — a well-fucking-known — right-wing, misogynist, homophobic, patriarchal piece of shit like Timothy Dolan to give the closing “benediction” of the Democratic National Convention.

Barack Obama isn’t concerned in the fucking least about delivering for his base.

He never fucking has been and he never fucking will be.

Barack Obama is way too busy catering to the right wing, you see, pushing the Democratic Party further and further to the right, making it more and more indistinguishable from the Repugnican Tea Party, and his stance toward you is the same arrogant, power-drunk stance that Antonio Villaraigosa has toward you:

Fuck you.

It’s his prerogative.

What are you going to do about it anyway?

Mittens on the topic of money for nothing (he’s an expert)

Reuters photo

Corporate welfare queen Ann Romney enjoys watching her horse compete in the Olympics in London today (seriously), while in the United States today, her hubby Mittens extolled the value of “good, hard work” – for the rest of us.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney, whacking the perennial political piñata that is the “welfare queen” or “welfare cheat,” declared today that President Barack Obama has reversed the “great accomplishment” of former President Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” and declared, “If I am president, I will put work back in welfare. We will end a culture of dependency and restore a culture of good, hard work.”

Wow.

Let’s talk about “good, hard work” and a “culture of dependency” — a plutocratic elite who blatantly steal hundreds of billions of our tax dollars via such things as bogus warfare, which benefits the likes of Big Oil and the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton (which was granted no-bid federal contracts for the Vietraq War that Cheney pushed), and corporate welfare, such as the hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that were just handed over to the “too-big-to-fail” Wall Street weasels as their reward for having tanked our nation’s economy.

That kind of welfare — corporate welfare — is perfectly OK to the treasonous, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class right wing.

We can give hundreds of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars to those who already are filthy rich (who, being the Benedict Arnolds that they are, pay as little in taxes themselves as they can get away with).

But we can’t give a fucking penny of our own tax dollars to those poor and working-class Americans who supposedly just don’t want to work.

Welfare can be for a person only if we define a person as a corporation.

Gee, just how hard, do you think, does the typical multi-millionaire like Mittens Romney actually work?

Do you think that Mittens ever scrubs a toilet or mops a floor? Or ever even makes his own meal? Does his own laundry? Does he even drive himself anywhere?

Yeah, Mittens has it hard. He’s a hard worker. He does good, hard work.

I tell you what: Mittens Romney has not done tens of millions of dollars’ worth of actual work.

No. He has been the beneficiary of a sick and fucking twisted socioeconomic system that allows a few — especially those who, like Mittens, were born into wealth and privilege – to steal the wealth of the many.

The only way to become a multi-millionaire is to fuck people over. You pay your employees much less than the value of their labor and you charge your customers much more than the actual value of your product or service. That’s how you get rich. Not through good, hard work.

It’s legalized thievery is what it is.

The last thing that our plutocratic overlords want is for us, the masses, to realize that it is they, the plutocrats, who are our real enemy, the real drain on our nation, so they tell us that it’s actually the weak and the powerless who are destroying this nation: immigrants who want a better life for themselves, same-sex couples who want the equality that is guaranteed to them under the U.S. Constitution, “welfare queens” or “welfare cheats,” Muslims or those who look like they might be Muslims (especially as evidenced by their use of a turban), et. al., et. al.

No, I tell you, it is the strong and the powerful who are destroying this nation. The weak and the powerless are just trying to survive. They are not the enemy.

However, in the supposedly bad-ass United States of America, it’s popular to pick on the powerless,* including and perhaps especially the poor, even though we supposedly are a “Christian” nation and Jesus Christ’s Number One teaching is to love one another as we love ourselves and to take care of the least among us, including, of course, the poor, and of the rich, Jesus remarked that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mark 10:25).

Multi-millionaire Mittens is a “Christian”?

Not if we define a “Christian” as someone who actually follows the teachings of Jesus Christ.

If Mittens were a Christian, someone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ, he would forego the houses and the cars and the car elevator and the thoroughbred horse in the Olympics, and he’d use his millions (well, our millions that he stole from us in the system that is rigged against us) to help out some people in need – instead of kicking the poor while they already are down for his own personal political gain.

That’s not Christian. That’s quite anti-Christian.

Not that Barack Obama is any fucking angel.

Team Obama will not be accused of going easy on the “welfare queens/cheats,” you see, and so also today, Obama’s mouthpiece Jay Carney declared that Team Mittens’ claim that Obama is trying to roll back Bill Clinton’s cold-blooded, right-wing welfare “reform” is “categorically false” and “blatantly dishonest.”

With “friends” like these so-called “Democrats” in our corner, who needs the fucking Repugnican Tea Party?

Seriously — the economy is our nation’s Number One problem (outside of global warming, of course, which makes pretty much every other problem that we might have pale by comparison), and we have both the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate and the Democratic Party presidential candidate fighting over which party will stick it to the poor the most, which party will kick those Americans who already are down and out the hardest.

We’re fucked.

Unless we revolt.

And soon.

When the system fails you this fucking miserably — when both parties of the partisan duopoly are against you and for the rich — it’s time to replace the system.

Not to “reform” the system — but to scrap it and start over.

This system is irfuckingredeemable.

–

*We never launch one of our imperialistic military invasions on a nation that actually can defend itself, do we?

No, we bomb a comparatively defenseless nation like Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan and then applaud ourselves, even though our “victory” is like that of an NFL team over a junior-high-school flag-football team.

Obama makes it easy to be Green

Updated below

Unlike both Barack Obama and Mittens Romney, a Green Party president wouldn’t be just a puppet of the corporations.

I yet to have been inspired to give Barack Obama’s re-election campaign a single fucking penny, and I already have cast my (mail-in) vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein for California’s June 5 presidential primary election.

I am not sure which is worse: to have had the unelected Bush regime use opposition to same-sex marriage to “win” “re”-election in 2004, or to have the (at-least-actually-duly-elected) Obama administration use support of same-sex marriage to win re-election.

In both cases, we of the “LGBT” “community” are only being used by the “leaders” of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party in order to raise million$ and in order to pander for votes.

The Obama campaign earlier this month released an incredibly pandering five-minute re-election campaign video in which the Obamanistas act as though all throughout his first term Obama has been fighting fiercely for the LGBT community when, in fact, his fairly recent “breakthrough” announcement that he finally has “evolved” and now supports same-sex marriage — even though he had proclaimed that position way back in 1996 in Chicago, and even though he still maintains that each state should be allowed to decide the issue, meaning that we will continue to have gross inequality and unfairness and injustice throughout the nation – came quite late in his first term.

Yes, the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a good thing, but let us recall that it was “Democrat” Bill Clinton who gave us “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the first fucking place, as well as DOMA (the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which the Obama administration does not defend in court, but which remains the law of the land).

The Dems are our friends? They enact awful, discriminatory, unlawful/unconstitutional legislation, and then want to take credit and want praise for reversing it? Really? Really?

And “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, someone who doesn’t see why anyone of any sexual orientation would aid and abet the criminal U.S. military in the first place, someone who recognizes clearly what a fucking racket the U.S. military is — it’s not about actual “defense” or “national security” nearly as much as it is about funneling the contents of the U.S. Treasury (billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars) to the pockets of the traitors who comprise the military-industrial-corporate complex. (Well, the nation’s treasury is empty these days, so what they’re doing is making sure that those of us who have to follow them inherit a mountain of national debt.)

The members of the U.S. military these days primarily serve as the thugs for the corporations to exploit other nations’ natural resources — thugs that we, the taxpayers, pay for, even though it’s the plutocrats, and not we, the people, who get the lion’s share of the spoils of the wars that we, the people, pay for.

(The Vietraq War, for instance: Saddam Hussein’s real crime was not that he tyrannized his people, but that he nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Now that the people of Iraq have been “liberated,” so have the nation’s oil fields — for Big Oil. No one in Iraq died for freedom or for democracy or for puppies or for kittens or for butterflies or for marshmallowy goodness. No, all of them died primarily for the profiteering of Big Oil and the profiteering of the military-industrial-corporate complex, such as Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton, which couldn’t profiteer without a war, so the unelected BushCheneyCorp gave it a war from which to profiteer, using 9/11 as a pretext, much as how the members of the Nazi Party had used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to ram their right-wing agenda down their fellow countrymen’s throats. Happy fucking Memorial Day, by the way, and it’s so awfully nice to know that we of the “LGBT” “community” now are “free” to be cannon fodder in the plutocrats’ war profiteering that we call “national security” and “national defense” and the like.)

I suppose that I digress, but I like — well, I love – what Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi had to say earlier this month about Presidential Race 2012:

…But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It’s just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. …

This is exactly the John Kerry scenario. Kerry was never going to win, either, and everyone pretty much knew that, too. [No, actually, I, for one, thought that Kerry had a pretty good chance, having recognized that an incumbent president usually is difficult to unseat, and I still suspect that Kerry actually would have won the pivotal state of Ohio, and thus the White House, had the election in Ohio not been overseen by the Katherine-Harris-like Kenneth Blackwell.] But at least in the Kerry-Bush race there was a tremendous national debate over the Iraq war, which many people (incorrectly, probably) thought might end more quickly if a Democrat was elected.

This year, it’s not like that. Obviously Republican voters do hate Obama and genuinely believe he’s created a brutally repressive socialist paradigm with his health care law, among other things. But Romney was a pioneer of health care laws, and there will be dampened enthusiasm on the Republican side for putting him in office. [No, they hate Barack Hussein Obama primarily because he's black. The “Muslim" and “socialist" charges are just code words for “nigger," which you can't utter in the public domain anymore without repercussions. Let's be real about that fact.]

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. [Absolutely.]

In other words, Obama versus [John] McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. [Emphasis of that money shot is mine, although the money shot of Taibbi's piece actually might be his hilarious but fairly accurate assertion that this year's presidential election “will be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse."]

George Bush’s reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama’s first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it. …

That, to me, is the main reason that I’m not at all excited about this cycle’s presidential race: Both Obama and Romney indeed are calculating centrists. But since the Repugnican Tea Party has succeeded in moving what used to be the center to the right, that makes both Obama and Romney, in my book, center-right candidates. Romney is a bit more to the right than is Obama, but not enough to see the two as much more different from each other than are Pepsi and Coke. The tiny plutocratic minority will continue to do well while the rest of us, the vast majority of Americans, will continue to suffer, regardless of which calculating centrist wins in November.

Obama panders to the left now and then — when he or his spokesweasels aren’t calling us such things as “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left” — but it’s his actions, or lack thereof, that I pay attention to, not his words, especially after his words “hope” and “change” fizzled specfuckingtacularly.

Speaking of Obama’s lack of actions, on June 5, not only will California hold its presidential primary, which will help Mittens finally get the 1,144 delegates that he needs to be the Repugnican Tea Party’s official presidential candidate (he has 1,084 delegates right now, according to Politico), but Wisconsin will hold its gubernatorial recall election.

Unfortunately, as I type this sentence, intrade.com puts Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of surviving the June 5 recall election at 92.6 percent.*

That’s in no small part because Barack Obama and the national Democratic Party have been conspicuously missing in fucking action where the fight for the right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin has been concerned. Wisconsinites have been on their own since early 2011, after Walker took office and gave tax breaks to the state’s plutocrats and announced that it was the state’s public-sector labor unions that were the cause of the state’s fiscal problems.

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said this: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet Obama has yet to appear once in Wisconsin to stand up for the Repugnican-Tea-Party-beseiged members of the working class and the middle class there. The national Democratic Party has thrown some money Wisconsin’s way at the very last fucking minute, too late to make much of a difference, if any difference at all (Scott Walker’s corporate sugar daddies have thrown many more millions his way than the Dems in Wisconsin have had available to them), but now, I suppose, the national Dem Party can say, and will say — well, actually, it has said – that it did something in Wisconsin, even though this has been just a repeat of the Democratic cowardice and incompetence and sluggardry that we have seen before.**

I remember the debacle that was California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election all too well: The state’s Dem Party was in incredibly stupid denial that its uber-uncharismatic incumbent governor, Gray Davis, might actually lose the Repugnican-orchestrated recall election, which more than anything else was just a do-over of the 2002 gubernatorial election that the Repugnicans had lost, only this time they would front as their candidate against Gray Davis testosterone-movie-star Arnold “Baby Daddy (We Know Now)” Schwarzenegger. Because of their denial, the state’s Dem Party elites staunchly refused to rally around another Democratic candidate to run against Baby Daddy Schwarzenegger. To do so, the Dem elites rationalized, would be to admit Davis’ impending defeat.

Then-Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, apparently recognizing that Davis indeed might lose, ran against Schwarzenegger in the recall election, but he did so on his own, without the support of the state party. Had the state party supported Bustamante, or another viable Democratic candidate, he or she might have won the recall election.

It’s incredibly fucking difficult to support a party that absofuckinglutely refuses, repeatedly, to fucking fight for you in return for your support.

Should Scott Walker survive his June 5 recall election, I will chalk that up in no small part to the fact that Barack Obama utterly reneged on his 2007 promise to “put on a comfortable pair of shoes” and join “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain” — “because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

We workers do deserve to know that somebody is standing in our corner, but nobody fucking is — at least no one who actually can win the White House in November.

However, I’d much rather vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein again in November, even though of course she can’t win the White House, than to vote again for Barack Obama, to continue to be punk’d by the party that claims that it loves me so much — but that can’t show me such “love” unless it can then use me in its fundraising efforts immediately thereafter.

P.S. Disclaimer: I have been registered with both the Green Party and with the Democratic Party. Currently I am registered with the Green Party, in large part because I can’t stomach the Democrats’ pseudo-progressivism, their unwillingness to fight the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, and the party’s ever-increasing move to the right. Background:

In 2000 I voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader for president because he was the candidate whose platform most closely matched my own beliefs and values, and because it was obvious that Democrat Al Gore was going to win all of California’s electoral votes anyway (and, of course, he did).

In 2004 I supported and voted for Democrat John Kerry, primarily because preventing a second term by the unelected Bush regime was my No. 1 priority, and Kerry early on struck me as the strongest candidate to put up against Bush. (Of course, the spineless, incompetent Dems didn’t let me down; when it was announced that Kerry had “lost” the pivotal state of Ohio, Kerry couldn’t concede fast enough, and shortly after the election, word came out that Kerry had not spent millions of dollars that he’d collected, millions that might have made a difference in the outcome of the election.)

In 2008 I still was not sure, as I entered my polling place, whether I would vote for Barack Obama or whether I would vote for Ralph Nader again. I knew that Obama would win all of California’s electoral votes anyway, just as it was a foregone conclusion that Gore would win them in 2000 and that Kerry would win them in 2004. (Until we get rid of the Electoral College, millions of Americans’ votes for president won’t really matter at all.) At rather the last minute, I blackened the oval by Obama’s name.

That is a mistake that I won’t make again, unless, perhaps, by some miracle it actually looks like Mittens Romney might win California. (That, of course, will not happen.)

Update (Monday, May 28, 2012): Oops. I wrote above that Mittens should seal the deal on June 5. Actually, Mittens is expected to finally reach 1,144 delegates tomorrow, when Texas holds its presidential primary. If for some reason Mittens does not get enough of Texas’ 155 delegates — Reuters reports that he needs fewer than half of those to reach the magic 1,144 — then he would get the remaining delegates on June 5, when California and four other states hold their primaries. (The very last state in the presidential primary season is Utah, which doesn’t vote until June 26.)

–

*As I type this sentence, intrade.com gives Mittens Romney only a 38.7 percent chance of winning the White House and gives Obama a 57.4 percent chance of winning re-election, which seems about right to me, about 40 percent to 60 percent.

**While I have yet to give Obama another penny for his re-election – I gave him hundreds of dollars in 2008, primarily during the 2008 Democratic primary fight because I believed that as president he would be significantly more progressive than would Billary Clinton – I have given hundreds of dollars towards the recall elections in Wisconsin, because that, to me, is where the real fight has been, and because, as I noted, the Wisconsinites for the very most part have been on their own, having been abandoned by the Obama administration and the national Democratic Party.

In which I actually defend Team Mittens

Associated Press photo

Prick Santorum (pictured above campaigning in San Antonio, Texas, today) says that while Mittens Romney’s campaign promises are written on an Etch-A-Sketch, his are written in stone. Prick can stick to his “Christo”fascist “principles,” but he can’t also have the White House, because most recent national polls show that he doesn’t have the support of even a full one-third of his own fucking party. 

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum is such a fucking dick that he makes me almost like Mittens Romney. Almost.

The latest in the fight for the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination is Etch-A-Sketchgate, in which a member of Team Mittens stated recently during a CNN interview on the process of presidential campaigning: “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

That more or less is true. Primary elections are for the party’s base, but whoever makes it out alive from the primary season then faces the national audience, which is quite different from the audience of party stalwarts. If you run in the primary season significantly to the left or to the right but don’t change your game at least somewhat for the general election, then you’re going to have a hard time getting the votes of the “swing voters,” those fucktards who don’t know good from evil and who apparently make their voting decisions based upon the results of a Magic 8 Ball.

While the Democratic Party sold out its (former?) base long ago, and thus even their primary-season fights aren’t all that remarkably left of center — I remember Barack Obama promising to preside a little to the left of Billary Clinton during the protracted 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary season, but neither candidate ran as a stark raving mad moonbat (and Obama ended up presiding just like a Clinton anyway) – the Repugnican Tea Party still is home to plenty of far-right-wing nutjobs like Prick Santorum.

Team Prick can slam Team Mittens all that it wants, but the “Etch-A-Sketch” quote was meant to capture the political reality of the difference between a primary presidential election campaign and a general presidential election campaign, and I highly doubt that the utterer of the quote truly meant to claim, as Team Prick is claiming, and as the Democratic Party hypocrites* are claiming, that Mittens will become a whole new person for the general election campaign.

I don’t expect Mittens, in fact, to handle himself much more differently in his general election campaign than he has been handling himself thus far. I expect his bland, milquetoast, safe, say-nothing approach to continue. I expect him to continue to keep his references to religion minimal, not only because he wants to win the votes of the “swing voters,” but because, I suspect, he doesn’t want to draw any more attention to his Mormonism than he absolutely has to.

The openly “Christo”fascist Prick Santorum, on the other hand, can claim until he’s blue in the face that he’s going to stick to his guns until the bitter end; he’ll never be president of the United States of America (unless, God forbid, he ever should make it to the vice presidency and the president should die or become incapacitated or resign or be removed from office).

Prick recently declared that Repugnican Tea Party primary voters “are not looking for someone who is the Etch-A-Sketch candidate [but] are looking for someone who writes what they believe in stone and stays true to what they say.”

While Prick Santorum might believe that he’s Moses 2.0 with his campaign promises written in stone by The Hand of God, there’s no fucking way in hell that a presidential candidate who promises to rid the nation of the “evils” of contraception and of “obscene” pornography that has been available to Americans for years and years now is going to win the White House in 2012. These two positions of Prick Santorum alone make him utterly unelectable to the general electorate.

Prick can stick to his “principles” and continue to slam Mittens as “the Etch-A-Sketch candidate.” Since Prick can’t win, all that he’s doing is ensuring Barack Obama’s re-election.

Barack Obama doesn’t deserve re-election. Not because he’s the “socialist” that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors claim that he is, but because he isn’t, because he broke his campaign promises of “hope” and “change” and instead has brought us, to a large degree, only more of the same. He still coddles Wall Street — he can’t make enough Wall Street weasels his advisers and cabinet members — and he still sucks the cocks of the treasonous members of the military-industrial complex, who treasonously are destroying the American empire via their bogus warfare for their treasonously greedy war profiteering, and the rich and the super-rich still aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, and labor unions remain under assault while corporations are doing just fine.

But just as Obama — who before his election to the White House in 2008 had accomplished nothing remarkable during his short time in the U.S. Senate – simply rode the anti-Repugnican-Party, pro-Democratic-Party wave that Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean had created in 2004, and rode it all the way into the Oval Office, all that Obama has to do to win re-election in 2012 is nothing. The Repugnican Tea Party dipshits are doing all of the work for him, just as Howard Dean unwittingly had done.

Barack Obama has been a fairly shitty, disappointing president, but he has been, indeed, if nothing else, one incredibly lucky man.

–

*I say “hypocrites” because Obama certainly hasn’t delivered upon his relentless 2008 campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” but instead squandered 2009 and 2010 — his best opportunity to push through a progressive agenda, when both house of Congress were controlled by his own party — dissing his base of “sanctimonious” members of “the professional left” while trying to engage the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, whose support he never was going to have, in a rousing chorus of “Kumbaya.”

It’s past time to reel in our stormtroopers and shrink the Death Star

There comes a time when you should see things clear [sic]
Free from my innocence, there is no circumstance too severe
Only the need for us, for us to believe again
There is a time, temptation’s on the run
Dreamer, you’ve had your way
Soldier, you’ve had your day in the sun
Now it’s time for us to begin again

Le Bel Age
Only our love will remain
Le Bel Age
Close to the truth once again …

– Pat Benatar, “Le Bel Age”

Please forgive my incredibly cheesy ’80s reference, but I’ve always loved that line: “Soldier, you’ve had your day in the sun.” (I don’t know that that the “dreamer” has had his or her way; I suppose that we need to know what it is, exactly, that the said dreamer dreams.)

At least since after Sept. 11, 2001, “hero” worship — worship of the mostly white male members of the U.S. military, law enforcement and, to a lesser extent, firefighters and emergency medical personnel – has gripped the nation.

Never mind that it’s the blowback from our military “heroes’” actions in the Middle East (where they were sent by stupid, white, filthy rich, greedy white men) that brought us 9/11 in the first fucking place.

Blowback is quite real. Take the 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them reportedly children, who reportedly were mowed down by one or more American stormtroopers today in what Reuters calls a “U.S. shooting spree.” Their relatives won’t want revenge against the United States of America?

Shit like this — the stuff of which 9/11 was made — happens, and then when shit like 9/11 happens, American fucktards scratch their heads and ask, “Why do they hate us so much?” (They then conclude that “they” hate us for our “freedom” and our “democracy” and our general lily-white goodness.)

So the endless loop — endless until we sane, actually patriotic Americans put an end to it or until the American empire collapses completely – is that the U.S. war machine slaughters innocent people in the Middle East, there is predictable retaliation in the form of “terrorism” (it’s never called terrorism when the U.S. military or the military of an American ally, such as Israel, slaughters innocent people), and then the members who comprise the U.S. war machine claim that their existence — indeed, their expansion — is necessary because of the global threats! (Never mind that they are the ones who are creating any actual threats.)

Yet a nauseating pro-military, pro-“hero”-worship meme that ABC News rolled out recently is that the members of the U.S. military are “the other 1 percent,” and that the rest of us just don’t appreciate them enough.

Really? Really? The U.S. military is bleeding us dry of our tax dollars — and because of this obscene military overspending we are watching our empire crumble as did past empires that overspent on their militaries — but we civilians owe the members of the U.S. military even more?

This is the deal: China, which is second in the world in its military spending, spends only one-sixth of what the United States spends on its military. This is what world military spending looks like:

The United States easily could more than halve its military spending and still maintain its undisputed global military dominance. At this point — the point on which the American empire teeters upon collapse – I would accept even a one-third reduction in U.S. military spending (for now), with those funds returned to domestic spending in order to save the fucking empire.

But we are told by the pro-military wingnuts that we must have this level of military spending, even though millions of Americans cannot afford health-care costs (health care never should have been made for-profit), even though our public schools continue to crumble and our teachers don’t have the funding that they need (they pay for many things out of their own pockets), even though almost no American (except for the actual 1 percent, the plutocrats) feels any retirement security, even though we have plenty of homeless people in our streets, and speaking of which, our streets are disintegrating and our bridges are falling down.

But even though the U.S. military is bleeding the United States of America fucking dry, ABC News quotes one veteran as having said, “‘It’s hard not to be a little bit angry when you see the tremendous sacrifice that some have paid in this war’ while others have been completely unaffected.”

No, the 99 percent of us have been quite affected by the right wing’s wars of choice in the Middle East for the benefit of the oily war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, which received no-bid contracts for the wholly unnecessary war in Iraq that the treasonous, unelected Bush regime delivered for Halliburton and the other oily, war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp. (No war, no profits, so indeed, BushCheneyCorp created a war.)

Largely because of the astronomical costs of the Vietraq War (and also, of course, because of his tax cuts for the wealthiest among us), while George W. Bush inherited a record federal budget surplus from Bill Clinton, Bush handed over to Barack Obama a record federal budget deficit.

Americans who have been unemployed and who have lost their homes and who can’t afford decent health care (and for whom a college education is pretty much a financial impossibility) don’t need to be lectured to by any bitter veterans that they haven’t sacrified enough. They have. We have. We have sacrified ridiculously more than enough to the U.S. war machine, and while the mostly-white-male objects of “hero” worship expect us to get on our knees and suck their dicks (or maybe they want us to play dead and they can then urinate on our “corpses” — that certainly seems to be their fetish), the members of the female-dominated professions, such as teachers and nurses, whose sacrifices also are immense, not only go unappreciated and unrecognized, but are told by the stupid white men that they must continue to suffer budget cuts and have their unions eliminated so that they lose altogether what paltry remaining rights that they have.

(I used to be a nurse in the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system. I can tell you that with chronic understaffing and other lack of resources due to capitalistic greed, and with patients [most of them baby boomers] feeling entitled to the best health care possible even though most of them put themselves into the hospital because of their selfish, greedy, irresponsible lifestyle choices, going to work felt very much like being in a war zone — so again, nurses and teachers need no fucking lectures on the topic of self-sacrifice from egomaniacal G.I. Joes.)

If American veterans want to be angry for what they have been put through — and I suppose that they should be angry — then they need to be angry at the plutocrats who sent them unnecessarily to war in the first fucking place — and not at us civilians who pay for these military misadventures that are initiated by the treasonous, chickenhawk plutocrats who cannot empty the U.S. Treasury via the military-industrial complex fast enough.

And you know, I was one of millions of Americans who protested during the run-up to the Bush regime’s launch of its bogus Vietraq War in March 2003. Yes, I was at the California State Capitol at an anti-imminent-war rally in early 2003. I knew that invading Iraq was a horrible fucking idea, that it was a bogus war that was about to be launched by the treasonous, unelected Bush regime, and I registered my protest.

But at that time we progressives who opposed the impending Vietraq War were branded by the pro-military wingnuts as lunatics or “terrorist”-loving traitors or both.

And today, these pro-military wingnuts are telling us that we’re not sacrificing enough for the bogus warfare in the Middle East that we opposed from Day One.

And it’s interesting: The members of the U.S. military predominantly come from the red states, and the denizens of the red states are always accusing others of being parasites. They’re the hard workers, and we of the blue states are the slacking parasites on their hard work and their sacrifices, according to their narrative, yet it has been the case for years that the blue states get back significantly less from the federal government than they pay into it, while the red states get back significantly more than they pay into it. (I wrote about this fact here way back in April 2009.)

I assume that the calculations that show that the red states actually are the parasites on the blue states factor in the federal tax dollars collected from the blue states that go into the U.S. military and then are diverted predominantly to the red states, but if not, then the parasitical relationship is even more severe than it has been reported.

In any event, upon examination what emerges is the truth: Which is that the red states, appropriate to their assigned color, are blood-suckers — ticks, fleas, leeches – while we of the blue states, appropriate to our assigned color of oxygen-deprived, near-death blue, are the host, and not fucking vice-versa.

The right-wing fascists love the U.S. military because whatever they do not understand or they do not like or agree with they wish to destroy, and because of their ignorance they are fearful, and because they are fearful, they glorify the capacity to kill those of whom they are afraid. Fearful idiots — not truly brave and loving individuals – glorify guns, bombs and other means of killing people.

And, of course, there are millions of traitors — from big-time military contractors all the way down to individual soldiers – who feed at the trough that is U.S. military overspending. They are traitors because they don’t care that U.S. military overspending is destroying their own nation; they just want their gravy train to keep on chugging. To justify their continued looting of the U.S. Treasury — to continue to rob us blind — they have to invent perpetual “threats” and “national interests,” when the real interests sure the fuck aren’t national, but quite personally financial.

Religion has played a role, too, of course. Most members of the U.S. military, most of them being from the “Christo”fascist red states, identify themselves as “Christians,” even though, perversely ironically, Jesus Christ was all about nonviolence (turn the other cheek, he taught, not gun down your opponent and then piss on his corpse). These “Christo”fascists are having their little crusade in the Middle East, slaughtering Muslims left and right, but why should atheist taxpayers like me have to fund their fucking crusade?

Prick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and their “Christo”fascist ilk whine that the U.S. government “persecutes” “Christians” and that there should be no separation of church and state in the United States, but when the U.S. government is sponsoring their anti-Muslim crusade, I don’t see any real fucking separation of church and state.

Indeed, the U.S. military is rife with “Christo”fascists like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, who, The Associated Press reports, “first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights [and then] declared that he wouldn’t follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.”

This is a photo of the traitor Stein, out of his pointy white hood:

He looks just like all of the other embittered right-wing bald white guys, like “Joe the Plumber,” who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio:

(Yes, apparently “Joe the Plumber,” a.k.a. Samuel Wurzelbacher, had someone write a book for him. No, he is not expected to win the election in November, and very apparently “the American dream” is that right-wing white guys maintain the control that they’ve had since the nation’s inception. A “dream” for the stupid white men, I suppose, but a fucking nightmare for the rest of us, such as women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians” and non-fascists. [And civilians in the Middle East, of course...])

So: My — our – federal tax dollars don’t go things that we need, such as health care, education, infrastructure maintenance and environmental protection, but go instead to the U.S. military, where blatant traitors like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein proclaim that they don’t have to follow the orders of the nation’s first black president. On our dime.

Any member of the U.S. military who dared to publicly announce that he or she would not follow George W. Bush’s orders would have found him- or herself in knee-deep shit. He or she would have been expected to keep any dissenting political opinions to him- or herself or to be disciplined, but obviously Marine Sgt. Gary Stein and his treasonous, fascistic ilk feel that the U.S. military is only an arm of the American right wing, and thus only Repugnican Tea Party presidents are to be obeyed.

We truly patriotic Americans – who fucking fund the U.S. military in the first place – need to reel in this treasonous bullshit quickly. I see precious little difference between the supposed “subversive,” “Communist” infiltration of the U.S. military during the McCarthy era and the actual subversive infiltration of the U.S. military by the right-wing, white supremacist “Christo”fascists today.

It’s not their fucking military. It’s our fucking military, and it’s insane that we fund them only so that they then can bite the hands that feed them.

We progressives need to man up, so to speak, and demand that politicians, perhaps especially those who call themselves “Democrats,” stop being cowed by the pro-military, “Christo”fascist right wing and stop being the Pentagon’s little bitches. The stupid-white-male-dominated Pentagon (the “Death Star” that I made reference to) should answer to us, the people, and not vice-versa.

Military overspending must be contained before the American empire collapses completely. To be complicit in the empire’s collapse is to be a fucking traitor. There is no way around that.

I don’t want the members of the U.S. military to be unemployed. We have enough unemployment. I want a great number of those employed by the U.S. military to be re-employed, but this time in capacities that help the taxpayers of the United States of America — and not the greedy, treasonous actual 1 percent, who are the only ones who really benefit from the perpetual bogus warfare that they impose upon the 99 percent of us for their own treasonous war profiteering.

These re-employed, redirected individuals from the U.S. military can be engineers, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, scientists, construction workers, architects, cooks, environmentalists, artists (yes, we need art much more than we need more bombs and fighter planes), whatever they want to be that they are able to be, and those services are worth paying for.

American stormtroopers urinating on corpses and mowing down innocent civilians in the Middle East as a by-product of obscene war profiteering – that, apparently, is what the pro-military right wing wants.

That’s not how I want my tax dollars spent, and the progressive vision, I argue, is infinitely better for the United States of America than is the apocalyptic “vision” of the pro-military “Christo”fascists who tell us progressives that we’re just not sacrificing enough for them.