George McGovern’s death makes me yearn for real Democrats

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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.

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*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.

Mittens’ Etch A Sketch is at full tilt

Unfortunately, in the United States of Amnesia, you pretty much can “shake it up and … start all over again”* — and to a stunning degree, get away with it.

I watched last night’s presidential debate online as it unfolded live.

While everyone is declaring Mittens Romney the “winner,” I don’t see it.

It’s obvious that the multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens has shifted his message abruptly to the center in order to appeal to the so-called “swing voters” (a.k.a. “undecideds,” “independents,” etc.). It wasn’t nearly long ago enough (it was in May) that Mittens told his fat-cat donors that 47 percent of us Americans can go fuck ourselves that we now can believe Mittens’ claim of last night that he just wuvs every last one of us.

I believe the Mittens of May, not the Mittens of October.

Only when we reduce the presidential debates to pure theater, in which truthfulness doesn’t matter (theater is, after all, fiction), only when we view the presidential debates as entertainment, like a wrestling event, can we say that Mittens “won” last night’s debate.

Mittens lied every time his lips moved – contrary to his claims, a Mittens presidency would look like much the illegitimate George W. Bush presidency did, but we wouldn’t even have Big Bird — but hey, Mittens steamrolled all over senior-citizen moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS (whom Mittens badly wants to fire)! What a bad-ass alpha male Mittens is!

Frighteningly, it apparently is the “swing voters” who (at least largely) decide presidential elections these days, and if you are one of them, you just now are paying attention to the presidential race and you have no idea that just the day before yesterday, Mittens was singing a hard-right tune. If you just first tuned in last night and you believe everything that you are told, indeed, Mittens, from his debate performance — and, like it is with theater, it was a performance – might not strike you as that bad a guy.

Luckily, we need look only to the presidential debates of 2004 – in which John Kerry clearly cleaned dipshit George W. Bush’s clock, yet Bush “won” “re”-election nonetheless – to remind ourselves that a real (in Bush’s case) or imagined (in Barack Obama’s case) poor performance in the presidential debates certainly doesn’t spell certain doom for an incumbent president’s election (real or imagined) to a second term.

I expect Mittens to gain a percent or two in the nationwide polls over the next week, but I don’t expect that boost to last, and I still expect Barack Obama to win re-election. I expect that Obama will have learned from the chatter after his first debate with Mittens and will adjust his game accordingly.

The question remains, however, as to how easily the New and Improved! Mittens can dupe the “swing voters” who just now are paying attention.

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*The infamous Etch A Sketch quote, recall, was that of (former?) senior Mittens campaign operative Eric Fehrnstrom, who in March told CNN, “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 we start all over again.”

When you shake up an actual Etch A Sketch, everything disappears without a trace. Real life, however, isn’t that neat and tidy, yet Team Mittens apparently is going forward with the Etch-A-Sketch plan nonetheless. Indeed, according to the Mittens playbook, we’re even to just erase already the infamous “47 percent” remark that Mittens uttered just back in May.

The handjob-in-a-Bangkok-bathhouse presidential campaign

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

– Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi, May 7

It’s difficult to write about this year’s presidential race, since it’s so substance-free.

We all know what Repugnican Tea Party candidates Mittens Romney and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan are all about: the continued radical redistribution of wealth, from the very many to the very few. (Right-wingers oppose the redistribution of wealth only when such redistribution benefits the many instead of the few. Then, it’s “communism” or “socialism” or some other “anti-American” “evil.”) And Team Romney/Ryan are about the Orwellian, Randian relabeling of those of us serfs who produce for our plutocratic overlords as “parasites” when it’s the plutocrats who are the parasites on the rest of us – not vice-versa.

Class warfare, indeed.

And we all know that President Barack Obama, the lesser of the two evils, won’t/wouldn’t do much more in a second term than he has(n’t) done thus far. An Obama re-election, while not the hell that a President Romney would mean for us, would mean four more years! of whatever the hell it is that you could call these past three-plus years.

So devoid of substance is this presidential race that the narcissistic, shallow, cold-blooded Paul Ryan’s workout routine is considered “news,” and so coveted has been a shirtless pic of Ryan that the gossip website TMZ has put a watermark on the Paul Ryan shirtless pic from six years ago that it managed to find and present to the world:

Thankfully, in TMZ’s online poll, as I type this sentence, 85 percent of the respondents proclaim that the chicken-legged Ryan’s looks will not influence their vote, while only 15 percent say that Ryan’s looks will/would be a factor in their voting decision, and 58 percent of the respondents say that they would not do the nasty with Ryan, while 42 percent say that they would. Seventy-seven percent claim that they would rather get it on with Ryan Gosling than with Paul Ryan, while only 23 percent choose the surnamed Ryan over the first-named Ryan. And asked whether we’ll ever have a President Paul Ryan, 69 percent say no and only 31 percent say yes.

This is what American politics has been reduced to. Just so you know.

This is the result of decades of “infotainment” and celebrity culture and corporately owned and controlled non-journalism poisoning what we still call our “democracy.”

So watered down and insipid all of it has become that we have Mittens Romney proclaiming the obvious as though it were scandalous.

This past week Mittens proclaimed that President Barack Obama is “running [for re-election] just to hang on to power, and I think he would do anything in his power” to remain in office.

Duh.

Most presidents run for a second term, and Mittens has not been running for president since at least 2008 because he wants power?

Yeah, you know, I think that the vast majority of those who run for president want the power of the presidency. (What they would do with that power, of course, is another matter.)

The very definition of “politics” (the broad definition) is the use of power.

Barack Obama is to be shamed for wanting to retain his power, but we are to believe that Mittens doesn’t want the same power? (Or, at least, are we to believe that Mittens actually would use such power for good?)

And what about former “President” George W. Bush? When he ran for a second, unelected term, didn’t he “just [want] to hang on to power”? Or are only Democratic candidates power-mongers?

Such sheer hypocrisy is what it means to be a wingnut or a Mormon, and in multi-millionaire Mittens we have both.

Mittens this past week also proclaimed that Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is driven by “division and attack and hatred.”

Let’s see: The Mormon cult and the Repugnican Tea Party both believe that women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christo”fascists, non-citizens, non-capitalists, et. al., et. al. should be/should remain second- or third-class citizens, and that only right-wing, “Christo”fascist, white, heterosexual, patriarchal, capitalist males should continue to run the show, but somehow that’s not “division” or “hatred” or an “attack” on those of us — who are the majority of the human beings who inhabit the United States of America – who don’t fit those demographics and who disagree that those with those demographics should continue to have an insanely unfair amount of political power in what is supposed to be a representative democracy.

No, when Mittens’ Mormon cult — and Paul Ryan’s Catholick church – actively supported Proposition Hate here in my home state of California, that was an attack, a personal attack on my equal human and civil rights guaranteed to me by the constitutions of my nation and my state.

That was a divisive attack based – steeped – in hatred.

Women should not be allowed to control their own uteri; same-sex couples should not be allowed to be married; “illegals” should be deported immediately (or, as Joe the Plumber, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives for Ohio on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket, recently put it, “put a damn fence on the border going with Mexico and start shooting”); the filthy rich should continue to get richer and the rest of us should continue to get poorer; and Hey, let’s start another war in the Middle East! — as John McCainosaurus hilariously sang during the last presidential election cycle, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!”

But the Repugnican Tea Party traitors and the members of the Mormon cult are nice people, you see, because they don’t use profanity or salty language (like that evil Joe Biden!), and they smile lovingly while they propose to destroy you with such euphemistically named plans as Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” which is only a blueprint for the continued prosperity of the richest among us at the continued expense of the rest of us.

It’s difficult for Team Romney/Ryan to talk substance when their only goal is to ensure that the richest and the most powerful among us gain even more wealth and more power while the rest of us lose even more wealth and even more power than we’ve lost since at least Ronald Reagan’s reign in the 1980s. When you are concealing your true aims – because your true aims are patently evil – there isn’t much of substance for you to say. Thus, you are reduced to such hypocritical, ludicrously insubstantial charges as that your political opponent — wait… for… it… — wants power!

Not that Barack Obama has much more to run on. He promised us, incessantly, “hope” and “change.” Instead, he has delivered much of the same, and has been one of our nation’s most mediocre, most disappointing presidents.

But even that, sadly, is head and shoulders above what the Romney/Ryan ticket offers, and that is catastrophic for the United States of America.

As Ted Rall concludes in his latest column,

If all Democratic strategists have to do to attract progressive voters is to frighten them with greater-evil Republicans, when will people who care about the working class, who oppose wars of choice, and whose critique of government is that it isn’t in our lives enough ever see their dreams become party platform planks with some chance of being incorporated into legislation?

In recent elections (c.f. Sarah Palin and some old guy versus Barry), liberals are only voting for Democrats out of terror that things will get even worse.

That’s no way to run a party, or a country.

Well, I, for one progressive, have refused to give President Hopey-Changey (a.k.a. President Lesser of Two Evils) a single fucking red cent for his re-election, and come November 6, I probably will cast my vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein or maybe even Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate Roseanne Barr.

Throwing away my vote, you say?

No. To vote for the pure, raw evil or to vote for the lesser of the two evils — that would be to throw away my vote.

Can Eddie Munster save Mittens?

Repugnican Tea Party vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said in 2005, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” who was insane and sociopathically selfish and cold-blooded and heartless – and thus she is the social Darwinists’ goddess. In 2003, Ryan remarked that he’d given copies of Rand’s seminal novel extolling selfishness, Atlas Shrugged, as Christmas gifts to his congressional staffers. Now when he is asked about Ayn Rand, Ryan essentially responds: “Ayn who?”

For months, President Barack Obama and Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney remained too close for comfort in nationwide polls, with usually both of them polling at 40-something percent, and usually with Obama ahead, but only within a few percentage points.

Then, something happened: Late last month, Mittens put himself out there, fairly big-time, on the world stage, visiting London, Israel and then Poland. His Rainbow Tour was widely considered, all in all, a gaffe-filled failure.

After that debacle, the nationwide poll numbers did something that they hadn’t done in months: they moved.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken August 2 through August 6 put Obama seven points above Mittens, 49 percent to 42 percent.

Even a Faux “News” poll taken August 5 through August 7 put Obama nine points above Mittens, 49 percent to 40 percent.

A CNN/ORC poll taken August 7 and 8 put Obama seven points above Mittens, 52 percent to 45 percent — which is about what I expect the popular vote to be in November. (In 2008, Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote to John McCainosaurus’ 45.7 percent. I expect Mittens to get no more than 47 percent or 48 percent in November and Obama to get around 51 percent or 52 percent.)

The more that the voters get to know Mittens, the less they want to vote for him, so what to do?

Haul out Pretty Boy Paul Ryan!

What a dreamboat! That smile! Those baby blues! That boyish laugh! Who cares if he is pure, raw, unadulterated evil wrapped in a pretty package?

Actually, a lot of people, I surmise.

I don’t expect Paul Ryan to be much more of a boost to Mittens than Sarah Palin was to McCainosaurus.

Ryan probably isn’t as catastrophic a choice as Palin was, but is Ryan ready to be president should Mittens die and go wherever dead Mormons go after death?

I don’t fucking think so.

Mittens would be an awful president, and Ryan probably would be even worse.

I’ve seen articles on the Internet asserting that in Paul Ryan, Mittens picked his “opposite,” but no, Mittens and Boy Wonder are much more alike than they are different. Both of them are fucking mega-phonies who want to stick it to the poor and the middle class and the working class for the benefit of their fellow plutocrats while they smile at and whisper sweet nothings to us.

Mittens, a Mormon, and Ryan, a Roman Catholic, both call themselves “Christians” when their No. 1 goal is to make the filthy rich even filthier rich and the poorest among us even dirt poorer — despite Jesus Christ’s No. 1 teaching to treat and to love others as we want others to treat and to love us.

Mittens and his Boy Wonder also are the faces of the historical oppression of the rest of us by right-wing white men at a time when historically oppressed groups have more political power than they have had at any other time in the nation’s history. (In that respect, actually, it’s possible, I suppose, that when all is said and done, it generally will be recognized that Sarah Palin was a better choice than was Paul Ryan.)

The only way that I can see the Romney/Ryan ticket winning in November is if the democracy-hating Repugnican Tea Party traitors succeed in their plan to suppress enough Democratic voters to be able to steal the election, as George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris & Co. did in 2000. (Recall that Bush in 2000 lost the popular vote by more than a half-million votes to Al Gore but was then coronated as president by the right-wing, vote-count-halting U.S. Supreme Court.)

But even a Romney/Ryan “win” in November might not, in the end, be for the worst.

A second stolen presidential election by two neo-Nazis who are determined to make all of us serfs might, just might, be enough of a tipping point to spark our long-overdue revolution against our plutocratic/feudal overlords.

P.S. I predict that the announcement of Paul Ryan as Mittens’ running mate will give Romney a boost of no more than two or three percentage points in the polls that we’ll see over the next two or three weeks. I expect Obama in nationwide polls to maintain a lead above the margin of error — that is, at least four percentage points – from here all the way through Election Day.

While the white supremacist “tea party” traitors never have been crazy about Mittens, they really want to get the black guy out of the White House, and the Mittensmobile has been their only vehicle to that goal, so the vast majority of them already have been captured in the presidential polling, I surmise.

Team Blast to the Past proclaims: ‘Arbeit macht frei!’

Getty Images photo

Romney/Ryan 2012! Because right-wing white males have been sorely underrepresented throughout the history of the United States of America! (Helpful household tip!: If you or a loved one has swallowed some poison and you have no ipecac in the house, just use the nausea-inducing image above!)

If Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney was going to pick a significantly younger running mate to try to appeal cynically to the youthful vote, I’d figured that it would be Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who would (have) be(en) a two-fer — a cynical appeal to the youthful vote and a cynical appeal to the increasingly important Latino vote. (Actually, I suppose, a three-fer — Marco is from the Mittens-must-win swing state of Florida.)

Instead, Romney picked Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan — the man of whom Jon Stewart, I can never forget, once quipped that Eddie Munster grew up and became a J.C. Penney catalog model. The left-leaning MoveOn.org remarked in an e-mail to its members today that “Paul Ryan isn’t just a extremist — he’s young, smart and charming. The media constantly describe him as looking like ‘the boy next door.’ He’s the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Yup. Ted Bundy also looked like “the boy next door.” That was how he gained his victims’ trust.

I’m a little surprised that Team Mittens chose Paul Ryan, who strikes me as maybe one notch above Dan Quayle. No doubt Team Mittens wanted Ryan’s telegenic appeal, but Ryan is only a U.S. representative — and U.S. representatives are lower on the totem pole than those who usually are on presidential tickets (current or former governors or U.S. senators, for the most part) – and Team Mittens flushed the concept of diversity right down the toilet by picking neither a woman nor a non-white for the Repugnican Tea Party’s 2012 presidential ticket, but by picking another right-wing white man, a younger version of Mittens, kind of like Batman and Robin, only fighting for evil instead of for good.

Wow.

Is this, the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential ticket, the angry white man’s last stand?

Paul Ryan is most known for being to social Darwinism was Charles Darwin was to Darwinism. Ryan wants to annihilate what precious little is left of our social safety net, including, of course, Medicare, and the rhetoric of the Romney/Ryan team — the evil dynamic duo – in the coming several weeks is easy to predict.

Romney and Ryan will talk about the virtue of hard work, and will implicitly, if not explicitly, proclaim that if you’re not filthy rich, it’s because you’re a lazy piece of shit.

This line of perennial propaganda is the plutocrats’ chief weapon in trying to prevent the masses from rising up against them with torches and pitchforks: telling the masses that their poverty is their own fucking fault.

It’s not that Americans (well, Americans who aren’t right-wing white males, I mean, of course [and can we really even call such people "Americans"?]) are lazy. It’s that the No. 1 goal of capitalism is to maximize profits, and a huge part of maximizing profits is to pay your employees as little as you possibly can. Therefore, at least tens of millions of Americans don’t even earn a living wage.

Mittens’ recent rhetoric that welfare recipients should work perhaps sounds reasonable, but let’s reflect upon the fact that the plutocrats who receive corporate welfare, such as the $700 billion bailout for the Wall Street weasels, certainly didn’t perform any work in return for their welfare, and let’s get fucking real about the kind of work that is available to the “welfare queens”/“welfare cheats.”

Let’s suppose that you have a single mother who is a “welfare queen.” Even if she has only one child, if she has only a high-school diploma (or maybe not even that) and doesn’t have a remarkable skills set (hell, maybe she’s really not that great at anything at all, in terms of what can earn her money in the marketplace), what kind of job can she get to satisfy the Mittenses and the Eddie-Munsters-cum-J.C.-Penney-catalog-models of the world?

She can get, very most likely, a job that pays only minimum wage or maybe just a bit above minimum wage — she can become a wage slave. Maybe she’ll get decent benefits, but most likely not; good employee benefits cut into the plutocrats’ precious profit margins, you see, as does paying an employee even a dime over minimum wage.

After you take out what having her minimum-wage job costs her, such as in child-care costs (which can be quite considerable) and in transportation costs, how much money will she have left? After she pays her rent (or house payment, if she can afford to be living in a house, but she probably cannot), how much money will she have left?

What if she or her child gets seriously ill and she has no health-care coverage, or only shoddy health-care coverage, because her money-grubbing employer doles out no or only shitty benefits?

Is the amount of money that she will have left after she has been forced to work because privileged right-wing white males likes Mittens Romney and Paul Ryan believe that she should be forced to work in order to increase their fellow plutocrats’ profits be worth her inability to be with and care for her child during most of the child’s waking hours?

What if our “welfare queen” decides to pick herself up by her bootstraps and go to college? What then? She’ll still have child-care issues, and perhaps transportation-cost issues, and she still will have less time to spend with and care for her child, and will she be expected to work on top of attending her classes and studying?

Will her college education be paid for, or will she find herself like so many millions of our young people now, who graduate from college with worthless degrees (worthless because there are no fucking decent jobs), and with a shitload of debt owed to the student-loan sharks?

You know, though, Mittens’ recent rhetoric has given me a great idea, an idea that struck me when I read this quote of Mittens in a recent Los Angeles Times news article:

“People who receive payments from the government are going to be required to do work, not as a punitive measure but as a gift. Work is enhancing; work is elevating.” (Emphasis mine.)

This work-related rhetoric reminded me of something that I’d heard before…

And then I remembered the Nazi slogan “Work sets you free.”

The German of that is “Arbeit macht frei,” and this chilling German slogan was posted at the entrances of Nazi death — er, work — camps, such as that of Auschwitz:

Seriously, though, regarding the problem of the cost of child care and transportation for the “welfare queens” and other “welfare cheats” that I mentioned above, I have a modest proposal: If we forcibly put them into “work” camps – and if we make their lazy, free-loading children work, too – then problem solved!

After all:

Work!

Sets!

You!

Free!

Romney/Ryan 2012, I am here to advise you!

Let me be your Goebbels!

Vee must take back zee Vaterland!

Hugo Chavez, convenient devil for a crumbling plutocratic empire

Reuters photo

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speaks at a news conference in Caracas on Monday. If a “devil” like “dictator” Chavez didn’t exist, the right-wing, pro-corporate Repugnican Tea Party traitors and the center-right, pro-corporate, sellout “Democrats” would have to make him up for their cheap political gain.

The Obama and Romney campaigns are arguing over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the corporately owned and controlled mass media report today.

President Barack Obama doesn’t appreciate “the threat” that Chavez is, claim the multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens and his supporters, including Florida’s Marco Rubio, who is only a tool for the pro-plutocratic, Cuba-first wingnuts of Florida whose allegiance is to trying to keep the Cold War alive, not to the welfare of the United States of America.

Team Romney is “scared” of Chavez, as evidenced by how Team Romney has exaggerated the threat that Chavez poses to the United States, the Obamanistas juvenilely have shot back.

Of course, regardless of which corporate bitch wins in November, Obama or Romney, the average American’s socioeconomic status won’t improve significantly, but probably will only continue to worsen.

Of course, neither the Coke Party nor the Pepsi Party wants to talk about that fact, so let’s talk about that Hugo Chavez!

Both Team Romney and Team Obama have Chavez all wrong. On purpose.

Chavez’s greatest “crime” is that he has refused to kiss U.S. corporate ass. He has nationalized his nation’s oil fields, which was dictator Saddam Hussein’s greatest “crime.” (No, the Vietraq War was not about “liberating” the Iraqis from their horrible dictator. It was about liberating the nation’s oil fields for Big Oil, and for the dying American empire to get a military foothold there in order to try to control more of the Middle East’s oil while the American empire continues to rot from within at home.)

Hugo Chavez isn’t a threat to your safety or to mine. He is the repeatedly democratically elected president of a nation who won’t just hand over his nation’s natural resources to Big Oil, the way a good Latin American leader should, so of course the right-wing traitors here in the U.S. have to call him a “dictator,” despite the fact that while George W. Bush was a true dictator, having stolen office despite having lost the 2000 presidential election, Chavez has won his elections fairly and squarely, with international observers saying as much.

Hugo Chavez is demonized by so many fucktarded Americans because he actually is doing his job: trying to achieve the best results for the most number of people in the nation over which he presides. (Contrary to widespread Amerifascist belief, Chavez’s job is not to do what’s best for the corporations and the plutocrats of the United States of America.)

President Hugo Chavez stands in stark contrast to the president of the United States of America, where income disparity is beyond insane and where the president does what’s best for the richest and mostly ignores the rest of us.

The comment of Obama’s that has stirred up the wingnuts is his comment to a Miami television station that “overall, my sense is that what Mr. Chavez has done over the last several years has not had a serious national security impact on us.”

That statement strikes me as true, except, of course, for the fact that the pro-plutocratic, pro-corporate wingnuts define “national security” as the plutocrats’ and their corporations’ ability to continue to profit obscenely all over the globe. The plutocrats’ interests are our interests, and the plutocrats’ interests always are “national security” interests, the plutocrats want us to believe — meanwhile, the richest Americans get richer and the rest of us Americans get poorer, even though supposedly we all benefit when the plutocrats are doing well.

Team Obama, in defending itself from Team Mittens’ lie that the drone-loving, human-rights-hating Obama is soft on national security, has misrepresented Chavez’s influence within Latin America, however.

“People like Hugo Chavez want attention — and that’s exactly what Mitt Romney and his supporters gave him today. Governor Romney is only playing into the hands of Chavez by acting like he’s 10 feet tall,” an Obama spokesweasel proclaimed today.

Really? Hugo Chavez wanted to be made into a political football today by two presidential campaigns that have no intention whatsoever of actually improving most Americans’ lives?

“Hugo Chavez has become increasingly marginalized and his influence has waned. It’s baffling that Mitt Romney is so scared of a leader like Chavez whose power is fading,” the same Obama spokesweasel proclaimed today.

To many Latin Americans who have suffered under American oppression — usually with the U.S. government, including, of course, the CIA, propping up right-wing, actual dictatorships and destroying actually democratically elected left-wing leaders in order to benefit American corporations (as the Amerifascists want to do with Hugo Chavez) – Hugo Chavez is 10 feet tall, it seems to me, and as Latin America continues to democratize, nation by nation, in large part due to the example of Chavez’s bold presidency, to state that Chavez “has become increasingly marginalized and his influence has waned” and that his “power is fading” is demonstrably false.

(Of course, it hasn’t been all of Chavez’s doing. Ever since the Eye of Sauron, which sits atop the Pentagon, changed its gaze from the poor people of Latin America to the poor people of the Middle East a little more than a decade ago, the people of many formerly U.S.-oppressed Latin American nations have been able to make great strides. While George W. Bush’s CIA probably had a hand in the pathetic, failed coup attempt against Chavez by right-wing Venezuelan traitors in 2002, Chavez and other democratically elected Latin American leaders have benefitted greatly from the fact that the evil empire’s Death Star’s military resources have been tied up in the Middle East for more than a decade now.)

That Hugo Chavez is not a hero among the right-wing American oppressors and defenders of obscene income inequality around the globe and the pilfering of other nations’ natural resources for corporate profits is no fucking surprise, but Chavez has plenty of support at home, I’m sure.

“My main concern when it comes to Venezuela is having the Venezuelan people have a voice in their affairs and that you end up ultimately having fair and free elections, which we don’t always see,” El Presidente Obama also told the Miami television station, repeating the pro-plutocratic, right-wing lie that Hugo Chavez has not been democratically elected.

It’s the insanely hypocritical United States of America, of course, that has had rigged presidential elections — the crown jewel of which, of course, is George W. Bush having been coronated by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court even though his opponent had won not only the popular vote but had won the pivotal state of Florida as well — and for Barack Obama to talk about “having the Venezuelan people [having] a voice in their affairs” and “having fair and free elections” – when all that Team Obama’s e-mails fucking talk about is that Team Mittens is raising more millions, so give Team Obama some money now! — is a sick fucking joke.

We, the American people, don’t have a voice in our own affairs, and we haven’t for decades, since everyone in Washington, D.C., from the president on down, is bought by the highest bidder.

If we want such a voice, we’ll probably have to move to Venezuela or to another actually democratic nation in Latin America.

Team Obama mostly ignores issues, pushes utterly uninspiring money race

Wow. Team Obama isn’t even bothering to make false promises anymore. It has become entirely about the dash for cash.

On June 24 I received a fundraising e-mail from Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s “deputy campaign manager,” titled, “We’re getting outspent‏.”

“For the first time in modern American history, the incumbent (that’s us) will get outspent in a re-election campaign — by some estimates as much as 3-to-1,” Cutter whines in the e-mail, asking for a donation of $25 or more.

(Um, why does Cutter have to remind us that Barack Obama is the incumbent? Because we’re too fucking stupid to know what the word “incumbent” means or because where actual progress is concerned, Obama has been so fucking invisible that we need to be reminded that he occupies the White House? Or maybe some combination of both?)

Two days later, on June 26, I received an e-mail supposedly from the Big O himself. “I will be outspent‏” is the title of the e-mail supposedly from Barack.

“I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign, if things continue as they have so far,” he proclaims, asking for a donation of $25 or more.

In the e-mail Obama attacks Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Mittens Romney for Mittens’ fundraising, even though Obama broke all previous U.S. presidential fundraising records in 2008.

“I’ve got other responsibilities I’m attending to [other than fundraising],” Obama proclaims in his June 26 fundraising e-mail, which is an interesting choice of words, because when he was asked where the fuck he was when the labor movement was fighting for its life in Wisconsin, he replied, “I have a lot of responsibilities.”

The president of the United States of America has so many responsibilities, you see, that he cannot be bothered to actually do anything other than to hold the title of president of the United States of America. (And to fund-raise in order to keep that title.)

Fuck, sure, fine, let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the man is busy – but the battle in Wisconsin went on for well more than a year, from the time of the occupation of Wisconsin’s capital by angry throngs of the pro-working-class in early 2011 all the way through the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election of earlier this month.

Obama, as busy as he might be, wasn’t so fucking busy that he couldn’t have done a hell of a lot more in Wisconsin than he did (which was next to fucking nothing).

Obama didn’t do anything in regards to Wisconsin because he just doesn’t give a flying fuck about the labor movement and the working class (except for their votes and their campaign contributions, of course) and/or because he is so beholden to his corporate sugar daddies that he was too terrified to actually stand up in any meaningful, effective way for the working class and the labor movement.*

Anyway, the fundraising e-mails from Team Obama continue. On June 27 I received an e-mail titled “Get onboard” from Julianna Smoot, yet another Obama “deputy campaign manager.” In this e-mail she proclaims, “We know the other side is going to have more money in this race. President Obama will be the first incumbent in modern history to be outspent.” In the e-mail she asks for “$25 or whatever you can” give.

On June 27 I received, at my other e-mail address, yet another e-mail from Smoot, this one titled, “If we’re drastically outspent.” It says, in part:

If we’re drastically outspent in this election, there’s a very good chance we will lose to Mitt Romney.

This is a distinct possibility. The financial landscape in this race has changed over the last few weeks.

What concerns me is the Obama supporters I’ve encountered who don’t understand that this is what we’re facing.

The fundraising deadline this week is a test: Are we going to allow the other side to dominate us, or are we going to prove that elections are decided by everyday Americans pitching in what they can?

In this e-mail, Smoot asks for (“only”) “$10 or more.”

Yesterday I received a fundraising e-mail supposedly from Vice President Joe Biden in which he proclaims:

Tomorrow is the biggest fundraising deadline of this election so far. Romney and the Republicans may outraise us again — you can bet they’ll  have a whole slew of special interests who want to see Romney make good on his promise to repeal Obamacare on Day One. …

Unsurprisingly, in the e-mail Joe also asks for a donation of $25 or more.

Today I received yet another fundraising e-mail supposedly from Obama himself, this one titled, “This is important.” It reads, in full:

Robert –

Today is one of the most important fundraising deadlines of this campaign so far.

We might not outraise Mitt Romney.

But I am determined to keep the margin close enough that we can win this election the right way.

To do that I need your help today.

Please donate $25 or more before tonight’s deadline:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Tonight

The stakes in this election are real. Thanks for all your support so far.

Good week.

Barack

These people are nothing if not on the same talking-points memo: Barack Obama might be the first incumbent president to be outspent in his re-election bid in modern history, so give $25 or more today!

What is most disturbing about these e-mails from Team Obama is that while we might get a throwaway line such as “The stakes in this election are real,” there is no mention in these fundraising e-mails of what the stakes actually are, no mention of the working class, the middle class, the struggling. No mention of how our perpetual warfare for the war profiteers and for Big Oil in the Middle East has destroyed the middle class here at home (because, of course, the drone- and assassination-loving Obama has only perpetrated such perpetual warfare); no mention of the beyond-ridiculous income gap between the richest and the rest of us (which persists in no small part because Obama puts Wall Street weasels in charge of his fiscal policy); no mention of the Homo-sapiens-threatening environmental catastrophe that we face; no mention of the persecution at the hands of fascistic wingnuts that women and minority groups, such as “illegals” and other non-whites and non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals, still experience today in the so-called “land of the free” that values “liberty and justice for all.”

Nope.

All!

That!

Matters!

Is!

That!

Barack!

Obama!

Is!

Not!

Outspent!

By!

Mitt!

Romney!!!!!

The focus on fundraising was bad enough when John Kerry ran for president in 2004.

I remember that when my brother and I organized Meetups for Kerry’s campaign here in Sacramento (quite independently from the actual Kerry campaign), when Kerry was still an underdog, the attendees mostly wanted to talk about the issues that were important to them.

But after it was clear that Kerry, who came back from the dead like Lazarus, was going to win the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, a self-serving Democratic Party hack, who had never attended any of the previous Kerry Meetups, wholly hijacked the Meetups and made them into Democratic Party presidential fundraising events. Gone were the discussions of issues, and all that she did was ask the attendees to give money.

It was because of that deeply negative experience that I was not active in Obama’s 2008 campaign at all, except (stupidly, in retrospect) to give him at least a few hundred dollars (primarily to knock Billary Clinton out of the primary race) and (stupidly, in retrospect) to vote for him.** (And of course I blogged in support of Obama defeating first Billary and then John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin, and I did talk him up with friends, family and associates, for whatever sway I might have over anyone else’s vote.)

This time around, though, I have been unable to give Obama a fucking penny, I could not in good conscience tell anyone else that he or she should support Obama’s re-election (even by just casting a vote for him), and in November I plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president (Obama’s e-mail remark, “Thanks for all your support so far” notwithstanding…).

I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not Barack Obama is outspent by Mittens Romney, because I don’t see what I got in return for the at-least-few-hundred dollars that I gave Obama the first fucking time.

(I already hear the Obamabots’ chorus, so let me respond: “Obamacare,” Obama’s “signature” “achievement,” even assuming that it’s a good thing, won’t/wouldn’t kick in until 2014. Giving Obama credit now for having turned around the healthcare mess is as stupidly premature as was was giving Obama the Nobel Fucking Peace Prize in 2009. [You'll agree with me when the drones are attacking you...])

On the issues nearest and dearest me — such as the preservation of the working class and the labor movement and the reversal of beyond-ridiculous income inequality; stopping the corporate war machine that is only sucking this nation dry in the holy names of “national security” and “national defense”; and the expansion of equal rights for non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals — Barack Obama has been a dismal failure, maintaining the steadily decaying status quo at best.

“Hope” and “change” are what Obama promised. What he has delivered is more of the same.

I still expect him to win re-election, however. I expect him to garner no more than around 51 or 52 percent of the popular vote in November, but a win is a win. (Indeed, George W. Bush didn’t garner even a full 48.0 percent of the popular vote in 2000, which showed us that if one has the right-wing U.S. Surpreme Court on his side, actually, a loss isn’t always a loss, and Bush garnered only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004, while in 2008 Obama garnered 52.9 percent of the vote, which is 2.2 percent better than Gee Dubya Bush ever did.)

The fact that Americans are fairly evenly split between Obama and Romney — most recent nationwide polls show that both of them are at 40-something percent each, with Obama usually no more than a few percentage points ahead of Romney – is, I think, evidence of the fact that the pro-corporate Democratic Party and the pro-corporate Repugnican Tea Party are so similar to each other (I think of them as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) that a good chunk of Americans see no huge difference between the two.

Regardless of which party occupies the White House, the rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer, and the United States of America continues its decline into collapse. A “Democratic” president might slow down that slide a little bit, but the downward slide continues nonetheless.

So: All other things being more or less equal, Presidential Election 2012 will come down to, I think, which candidate is considered by more voters to be more likeable.

Obama, despite his abject failure to use the office of the presidency to benefit the most number of Americans, is considered by most Americans to be more likeable than is the weird-ass Mittens Romney, whose status as both a multi-millionaire and a Mormon*** makes him alien to most of us, because most of us are neither a multi-millionaire nor a Mormon.

Money does not mean everything in an election, which 2010 California gubernatorial candidate Nutmeg Whitman, a billionaire and a long-time personal buddy of Mittens who ran on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket, discovered when she outspent her Democratic opponent Jerry Brown.

Nutmeg spent more than $140 million of her own money in the gubernatorial race, breaking all records for a self-financed political campaign for any elected office in American history. Despite that fact, on Election Day Brown beat her soundly, 53.8 percent to 40.9 percent.

True, in October 2010 California’s voter registration was 44.1 percent Democratic to 30.1 percent Repugnican, which gave Brown a decided edge, but after all of the votes were counted, Nutmeg still trailed Brown by double digits even after she had smashed all previous self-financed-campaign-spending records.

It wasn’t just California’s voter registration statistics that did Nutmeg in. Repugnican Arnold “Baby Daddy” Schwarzenegger, after all, still won California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election even though at the time the state’s voter registration was 43.7 percent Democratic to 35.3 percent Repugnican.

Baby Daddy’s popularity, his status as a testosterone-movie star and his perceived status as a real he-man, and the perception of the then-incumbent Democratic Gov. Gray Davis as a weakling, overcame the difference in voter registration.

After all, many if not even most voters wanted to be like Schwarzenegger — the way that they perceived him to be, anyway.

Similarly, more of the state’s voters in November 2010 wanted to be like Jerry Brown (who still more or less is considered to be a cool cat here in California, for his age, anyway) than wanted to be like the weird-ass, overprivileged Nutmeg Whitman, whose status as a billionaire CEO whose money gets her (almost…) anything that she wants and with a years-long housekeeper whom she apparently cold-heartedly fired for being an “illegal” because she thought that it would hurt her gubernatorial campaign to have an “illegal” as her housekeeper, were things that the majority of California’s voters, especially in our protractedly shitty economy, could not and still cannot identify with and did not and still do not wish to emulate, any more than the majority of the nation’s voters can identify with or wish to emulate Mittens’ purchasing an elevator for his cars or his making jokes about factory workers being laid off (ha ha ha!).

That, I think, is what Team Obama should be focusing on if Barack Obama wants to win re-election: Not on the fucking money race, which indeed, Obama might not be able to win this time, but on how much Mittens isn’t just like the rest of us.

Mittens is an overprivileged, out-of-touch freak who should not be put in the Oval Office, and while it’s too bad that Team Obama can’t run on Obama’s accomplishments, since he hasn’t found it necessary to even partially deliver on his 2008 campaign promises until his fourth fucking year in office, at least Team Obama has Mormon multi-millionaire Mittens’ freakishness and Obama’s “likeability,” which, if exploited enough, should get Obama his second term, even if he only ekes by.

–

*Obama said of the battle in Wisconsin that eventually saw Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett lose to Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 gubernatorial recall election:

“My goal has always been if we can bring parties together, there are ways that we can manage through tough fiscal decisions whether on the federal level or at the state level, but make sure that everybody is a part of it and everybody is doing their fair share, nobody is carrying the entire burden of sacrifice. I think that’s what the American people are looking for – balanced approaches that take everybody’s interests into account.”

Jesus Fucking Christ, in year four of his woefully unremarkable, disappointing first term, Obama still is talking about holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors.

Um, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want to annihilate what little is left of our labor unions. That is their goal. Their goal is not to “make sure that … everybody is doing their [sic] fair share, [that] nobody is carrying the entire burden of sacrifice.” Their goal is to make damn sure that the haves get even more and that the have-nots get even less.

You cannot take a “balanced approach” with an insane opponent who has no interest whatsofuckingever himself in taking a “balanced approach.” All that you can do with such an opponent is to crush him. You don’t negotiate with terrorists.

**Even then, I was not sure, until I actually completed my ballot, whether I was going to vote for Obama or vote for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. If I could do it over again, I would have voted for Ralph Nader again, as I did in 2000.

***No, Mittens’ Mormonism certainly isn’t off limits, just as Obama’s being called a “Muslim” very fucking apparently was not off-limits for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors. Fuck. Obama isn’t a Muslim, but Mittens is a fucking Mormon, and I’m hard pressed to say which group of patriarchal, misognyist, homophobic theofascists I’d prefer to have in charge of the White House: the cabal of stupid old evil men in Salt Lake City or the fucking Taliban.

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.)

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*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.

Obama’s ‘Etch-A-Sketch’ moment?

So this exchange between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev was caught on a live microphone today:

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this – this can be solved, but it’s important for him [incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin] to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

Is this going to become Obama’s “Etch-A-Sketch” moment? That is, is Obama going to be pilloried for playing the game of politics the way that it is played?

A spokesperson for Mittens Romney was criticized for having simply pointed out the obvious fact that a fall presidential campaign is different from the primary season presidential campaign — duh.* If you don’t tailor your message to your audience — and the national audience is very different from a deeply partisan audience — then you’re a clueless fucktard who is going to fail with your audience. (Thankfully, it is Prick Santorum’s apparent refusal to modify his far-right-wing, “Christo”fascist message that will prevent him from ever sitting in the Oval Office.)

Not dissimilarly, Obama was uttering an obvious political truth: that a U.S. president has a degree of freedom in his (or, someday, her) second term that he (or she) does not have in his or her first, when re-election still is a consideration. It’s not Obama’s fault that a U.S. president is granted only two four-year terms and thus is a “lame duck” in his or her second term. As much as the wingnuts love to blame everything on the nation’s first black president, that political constriction is what he inherited.

Those who don’t recognize these obvious political realities are ignoramuses, and those who do recognize them but who nonetheless attempt to use them as political weapons are hypocrites unless they are trying to change the current political climate themselves. (And, of course, they’re not.)

Still, it’s not as though Obama has carte blanche in his second term. (I can’t see myself voting for President Hopey-Changey again, but I believe that he most likely will be re-elected.) Obama during his second term still would have the consideration of keeping the Oval Office in the hands of his own party come November 2016, so while his second term would give him more political wiggle worm than he has had thus far, I don’t expect a second Obama term to be much more aggressively progressive than has been his first term (which is a huge reason why I’m not giving him a penny this second go-around and why I very most likely will not give him my vote a second time).

Obama will prove to be, I surmise, far more cautious in his second term than was “President” George W. Bush, who bragged about the shitload of “political capital” that his 2004 “re”-election “win”** supposedly gave him, even though Bush had garnered only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004.

While Bush sat on his laurels during his second term as the unelected-but-U.S.-Supreme-Court-coronated monarch of America, Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 pretty much swept away his party’s chances of keeping the White House come November 2008. (Recall that on the day that Katrina made landfall in the Gulf Coast, August 29, 2005 — and would leave more than 1,800 confirmed dead in its wake – Bush was in Arizona having birthday cake with John McCainosaurus to celebrate the latter’s 69th birthday, even though forecasters had predicted at least two days in advance that Katrina likely was to be devastating to the Gulf Coast.)

In his second term I expect Barack Obama to be much more vigilant than that.

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*Of course, given Mittens’ reputation as a flip-flopper, the Team Mittens spokesperson could have chosen his words much better than to have uttered: “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.”

It was quite foreseeable that the “Etch-A-Sketch” comparison would boomerang.

**The pivotal state of Ohio probably was stolen in 2004, just as the pivotal state of Florida most definitely was in 2000.

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.

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*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.”