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.

Yet another massacre from which the sheeple won’t learn a thing

If this guy is elected (or allowed to steal office a la 2000) in November, there will be more massacres. (More Photoshop jobs on this theme here…)

The United States of America is one big dysfuckingfunctional family.

Every once in a while, one of us snaps and kills a lot of people. The rest of us then all act shocked and horrified and say how “senseless” it was (when really we’re primarily just celebrating the fact that we weren’t among the body count), and then we go back to our lives of self-centeredness and greed that will help create the next massacre.

Every time one of these massacres occurs, I write essentially the same blog piece, but fuck it, as long as it keeps happening, I’ll keep writing the same blog piece. So here goes:

James Eagen Holmes, the 24-year-old accused of having blown away 12 people and injuring 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, early this morning, did not — I repeat, DID NOT — develop within a fucking vacuum.

No, I promise you, he developed entirely within a social context.

My guess is that Holmes has some screws loose, but the fact of the matter is that Holmes is just one of millions of young Americans whose nation has failed them beyond miserably.

The Associated Press reports that according to a neighbor of Holmes, “Holmes struggled to find work after graduating with highest honors in the spring of 2010 with a neuroscience degree from the University of California, Riverside.”

Holmes isn’t a drop-out pothead. The AP also reports of Holmes that he “enrolled last year in a neuroscience Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado-Denver but was in the process of withdrawing, said school officials, who didn’t provide a reason.”

Yes, Holmes was a Ph.D. candidate, one of our brightest young people. Neuroscience, for fuck’s sake. Sounds pretty close to a brain surgeon to me.

My guess is that like millions of his cohorts, and like millions of members of my generation (Gen X), Holmes graduated from college with a mountain of debt but with no good job prospects whatsofuckingever.

I, too, graduated (in 1990 — during the first George-Bush-induced recession) with a worthless bachelor’s degree but with student-loan debt, and I, too, initially returned to school (to get my master’s degree, which I ultimately didn’t get) because there were no jobs out there and I didn’t know what else to do. (At age 44, I still am a member of what my fellow Gen-X foaming-at-the-mouth leftist Ted Rall calls the “overeducated underclass.”)

Since the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, who couldn’t blow the Wall Street weasels enough, our higher-education system stopped being about preparing students for good jobs. Those jobs, under the vulture capitalism that Mittens Romney and his ilk perpetrate, perpetuate and defend, have been evaporating from the United States these past few decades.*

The American higher-education system now is about, and for some decades now has been about, handing our young over to the student-loan sharks for their feeding frenzies. Our colleges don’t produce young people who are ready for the good jobs that await them – our colleges instead produce young people who start off in life neck-deep in debt to the student-loan sharks, struggling to survive by taking jobs that are way beneath their abilities.

Starting out like this, many if not most of them never even will catch up, but will lag behind for the rest of their days.

We lie to our youth about the importance of going to college and doing well so that they can get fulfilling, well-paying jobs — jobs that don’t fucking exist and haven’t for some decades now.

Our youth are punk’d royally, so of course they become angry and bitter.

True, not all of them shoot up a movie theater. They just become alcoholics and/or druggies and/or go on Big Pharma’s antidepressants and/or abuse those in their lives and/or immerse themselves in materialism and commercialism and/or become sex addicts or some other type of addicts and/or commit suicide.

Everything is connected, whether we want to acknowledge that fact or not. (And for the most part, we don’t. We prefer what we believe is the safety of our own little bubbles, even though are bubbles are not our own safe houses, but are our own fucking caskets.)

Blowhard Rush Limbaugh recently accused filmmaker Christopher Nolan (“Inception,” the latest “Batman” trilogy, etc.) of, in Nolan’s current “Batman” movie, modeling (or at least naming) Batman’s enemy Bane after Mittens Romney’s vulture capitalism outfit Bain Capital – in order to make a political, anti-Mittens statement.

(Bain, Bane — apparently one-syllable homophones mesmerize great minds like Limbaugh’s.

Of course, the “Batman” comic-book character of Bane was created in 1993, well before Mittens ever decided to run for the White House, but mere facts never stop the likes of Grand Dragon Daddy Limbaugh and his fans.)

It was at a midnight showing of the latest “Batman” installment, “The Dark Knight Rises,” that James Eagen Holmes committed his massacre, and yes, it seems to me, there is a Bain connection here: It is vulture capitalism run amock that created the socioeconomic context within which this latest massacre occurred.

As insane income inequality grows, the pain and suffering of the poor and the middle class and the working class increases, and yes, some of the victims of vulture capitalism do snap and act out.

The only thing that’s shocking is that we don’t see a whole fucking lot more of it.

James Eagen Holmes very apparently snapped under the pressures of the oppressive socioeconomic system that not enough of us fight against. If enough of us did fight against it, our oppression at the hands of the filthy rich, treasonous few would stop.

Instead, way too fucking many of us, such as cops (the taxpayer-funded security guards of the plutocrats, who, of course, pay no taxes themselves) and members of the U.S. military (a.k.a. cannon fodder for Big Oil), and, of course, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, insanely side with our oppressors instead of with their fellow oppressed.

Better to curry favor with the oppressors, the rich and the powerful, than to be one of their victims, right? Of course, cops and soldiers and “tea party” dipshits are just as much victims as are the rest of us. These fools are the plutocratic oppressors’ tools, whether they realize it or acknowledge it or not.

Of course I don’t advocate massacres in movie theaters — I see a lot of movies myself, including at the Century Theatres in my area** — but it nauseates me to hear the same old predictable bullshit that the American sheeple bleat when massacres (Columbine, 9/11, this morning’s, etc.) are in the news.

We don’t understaaaaaaand, the sheeple bleat.

Yes, the sheeple do understand, at least dimly, at least on some level.

It’s that they don’t fucking care.

If they did, they’d have to change.

And that might even mean — gasp! — having to fight.

The sheeple secretly would prefer more massacres of other sheeple.

P.S. Of course the Mittens and President Hopey-Changey campaigns had to weigh in on today’s massacre. They have to pretend to care about us, you see.

Mittens’ statement was:

“Ann and I are deeply saddened by the news of the senseless violence that took the lives of 15 [sic] people in Colorado and injured dozens more. We are praying for the families and loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense grief.  We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime will be quickly brought to justice.”

“Senseless” violence. Right. A brilliant young man can’t find decent work in a nation that doesn’t give a flying fuck about him and sees no future for himself and so he snaps. “Senseless.” Makes no sense at all. None whatsofuckingever. Happened just out of the blue. Randomly. Just one of those things that no one possibly could even begin to explain.

Look how quickly Mittens was to pounce upon the idea of ”justice” for the perpetrator.

It’s funny, because if those truly responsible for today’s terrible crime actually ever were brought to justice, Mittens and his treasonous, plutocratic ilk would be behind bars, where they belong.

But they can rest easy.

So-called “justice” is meted out only to the 99 percent of us, and almost never to the 1 percent.

If you kill a dozen people, like James Eagen Holmes apparently did today, and are a member of the 99 percent, you at least will go to prison.

But if you are a mass murderer and are among the 1 percent, like George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice — or yes, like Barack Obama, who loves assassinations (with and without the use of drones) and who loves keeping the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex happy with billions and billions of our tax dollars that aren’t going to the things that we need, such as job creation, education, health care, environmental protection and infrastructure improvements – you are allowed to run loose.

It’s not just within the arena of the military-industrial complex that mass murderers go free. Corporations’ profits-over-people practices routinely kill scores and scores of innocent people, yet the corporatocrats get off scot-free — even though corporations, according to the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, are “people.”

“Justice.”

Indeed.

Why would, how could, anyone snap in this oh-so-fair-and-just United States of America?

–

*The No. 1 goal of capitalism is not job creation, as the Repugnican Tea Party traitors among us proclaim. The No. 1 goal of capitalism is profiteering. Fucking duh.

Labor is expensive. Under American capitalism, if you can replace your American workers with machines or with other automated systems and/or outsource their jobs to sweatshops overseas, you do so in order to increase your profits.

The vulture capitalists are not job creators. They are wealth aggregators, as fucking evidenced by the fact that over the past several years the wealthiest have gotten even wealthier while the jobs have dried up and rest of us have gotten poorer.

If these treasonous plutocrats were job creators, there would be jobs.

There aren’t jobs because it isn’t about us. It’s all about them, the 1 percent.

**I will see “The Dark Knight Rises,” by the way. I love Anne Hathaway and the character of Catwoman, Nolan is a good director, and Tom Hardy is a hunk (OK, even though as Bane his face is obscured), so I’m there. I just generally avoid trying to see blockbusters on opening weekend.

You are much more likely to be killed in a car accident, or killed by a car while crossing the street, that you are to be shot dead in a movie theater.

Traitor Rove parrots WMD ‘oopsie’ lie

Is “Bush’s brain” Karl Rove, like Dick Cheney, afraid that perhaps he might actually be held accountable for his treason and his war crimes in pushing the illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War?

Reports The Associated Press:

Republican strategist Karl Rove says in a new memoir that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq badly damaged the Bush administration’s credibility and led to dwindling public support for the war.

The former White House political adviser blames himself for not pushing back against claims that President George W. Bush had taken the country to war under false pretenses, calling it one of the worst mistakes he made during the Bush presidency.

The president, he adds, did not knowingly mislead the American public about the existence of such weapons.

In Courage and Consequence, Rove … calls the 2003 invasion [of Iraq] the most consequential act of the Bush presidency and a justifiable response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, even though al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, not Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, were responsible.

In the run-up to the war, Bush and his national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney, attempted to link Saddam to the attacks as a way to build support for the invasion.

“Having seen how much carnage four airplanes could cause, Bush was determined to do all he could to prevent the most powerful weapons from falling into the hands of the world’s most dangerous dictators,” Rove wrote….

Bullshit.

The unelected Bush regime wanted to invade Iraq even before Team Bush stole the White House in late 2000. 9/11 was just an excuse to do what they’d wanted to do all along, as the Reichstag fire was the Nazis’ excuse to do what they’d wanted to do all along.

The traitors who comprised the Bush regime knew fully well that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, but they pushed the lie, fucking relentlessly, to justify the March 2003 invasion, which the United Nations Security Council had refused to endorse.

The traitors of the Bush regime blamed the non-existence of the WMD on the ineptitude of the intelligence community (it was “bad intelligence,” you see), when, in fact, the case is that the traitors of the Bush regime twisted the intelligence to try to justify the invasion.

(Remember Colin Powell with that vial of powder, ominously talking about anthrax? And the talk of the “smoking gun” coming in the form of a “mushroom cloud”? And the forged documents about yellowcake uranium from Niger that Bush even mentioned in his 2003 State of the Union address? Um, yeah...) 

In his book Rove even defends the Bush regime’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, for fuck’s sake, the AP reports.

Rove, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, all of them (yes, Colin Powell, too!) who took the nation to war on false pretenses, resulting in the deaths of thousands of our soldiers and in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, are war criminals, mass murderers and traitors.

They deserve to hang just as Saddam Hussein hanged, but as I’m against the death penalty, even for them, for their war crimes, their crimes against humanity and their treason, they deserve life in prison.

We owe nothing less to the thousands of our young people whom they sent to their pointless slaughter in the sands of Vietraq for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp.

Top 10 Wingnuts Whose Deaths I’d Celebrate, 2010 Edition

Glenn Beck is No. 1!

The May 2007 death of Jerry Falwell inspired me at that time to compose a “Top 10 Wingnuts Whose Deaths I’d Celebrate List.” It seems to be that time of year for top-10 lists, and the great news that Rush Limbaugh is in the hospital for chest pains has inspired me to revisit and revamp my list.

In May 2007 my list of Top 10 Wingnuts Whose Deaths I’d Celebrate was as follows:

1. Dick Cheney

2. George W. Bush

3. Karl Rove

4. Donald Rumsfeld

5. Rudy Giuliani

6. Ann Cunter

7. Rush Limbaugh

8. Pope Palpatine

9. James Dobson

10. Pat Robertson

My Top 10 Wingnuts Whose Deaths I’d Celebrate for 2010 are (drum roll, please):

1. Glenn Beck

2. Dick Cheney

3. Sarah Palin

4. George W. Bush

5. Rush Limbaugh

6. Karl Rove

7. Pope Palpatine

8. John McCainosaurus

9. Benedict Lieberman

10. Tie: Carrie Prejean and Prick Warren

New to the list are Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, John McCainosaurus, Benedict (a.k.a. Joe) Lieberman, Prick (a.k.a. Rick) Warren and Carrie Prejean.

As I’ve noted before, dry drunk Beck has a face that I’d like to punch. I know that Dick Cheney has done a lot more damage to the nation and the world than Beck has, but I really, really, really hate Glenn Beck. He is pure evil — a mixture of stupidity, bigotry and arrogance that is unmatched in the wingnut world. My hatred of him is visceral.

George W. Bush also has done a lot more damage to the nation and the world than Sarah Palin has, but I fucking hate Sarah Palin and everything that she stands for. (OK, Levi Johnston is a hottie. If he ran for president I might consider him.)

Bush and Cheney are a little lower on the list than they used to be because they’re out of office, but Cheney is above Bush on both lists because we all know that he really pulled the strings.

Karl Rove remains on the list because he and fellow Gee Dubya puppeteer Cheney Cheney are still appearing on television all the time criticizing the Obama administration. If they’d just go the fuck away, like Donald Rumsfeld and Rudy Giuliani did, they might not still be on my list.

John McCainosaurus didn’t appear on my 2007 list because I didn’t expect him to get the 2008 nomination, but he did. And because he also keeps criticizing the Obama administration, as though the BushCheneyCorp had done a great job from early 2001 to early 2009, and even though the American voters picked Obama over him by 7 percentage points, McCainosaurus makes this year’s list.

The pope just refuses to die — I think that sheer spite, his desire to drag the entire world back to the dark ages, keeps him going — and he goes up one notch this year. (I know, you think it’s awful that I include the pope, but he and his backasswards wingnutty views fuck up millions of people around the globe.)

Benedict Lieberman needs no explanation if you have been paying attention at all. I heard that Al Gore stated that he doesn’t regret that he’d picked Benedict as his running mate for his 2000 presidential run. I don’t believe that.

Dropped from the list are James Dobson and Pat Robertson, about whom you don’t hear much anymore, and in their place is Prick Warren and Carrie Prejean, who (along with Sarah Palin) seem to be the new faces of the remnants of what passes for Christianity for way too many Americans. I hate Prick Warren and Carrie Prejean, and since they have so much in common — the whole faux Godliness thing — I put them at tied for 10th place.

You might be surprised that Ann Cunter has dropped from the list. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I still fucking hate Ann Cunter. But Glenn Beck seems to have knocked her out of the limelight entirely.

So I would put her at No. 11, except that this is a top-10 list.

Maybe next year, Ann.

P.S. If you think that I’m missing anyone or you’d make any changes to my list for 2010, feel free to leave a comment below.

P.P.S. I will make a pre-emptive strike and state that I am immune to any criticism that my composing such a top-10 list is “inappropriate.” I mean, oh puhfuckinglease if you think that there aren’t a bunch of people the wingnuts would want dead, such as Nancy Pelosi, Michael Moore and, of course, Barack Obama (but not because he’s black, of course!).

P.P.P.S.: Honorable mentions for 2010: Joe Wilson, the fucktarded U.S. representative from South Carolina who yelled out “You lie!” during President Obama’s nationally televised address to Congress on health care, and Meg Whitman, the billionaire bitch who is trying to buy the governorship of California (the gubernatorial election will be in November 2010). I imagine that we Californians will hear a lot more from her in the coming months. What we’ve heard from her thus far (she has declared war upon state government workers and the environment) has been nothing short of pathetic.