You have to be brain-damaged to celebrate what they’ve just done to you

Associated Press image

Your future is being dismantled, chunk by chunk, by the partisan duopoly in D.C. – but hey, look! There’s Gabrielle Giffords!

No offense, but what does it say that a literally brain-damaged congressperson voted “yes” on your legislation?

But seriously, apparently the “feel-good” “news” story of the day is that Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was capped in the head by yet another white male psychopath/sociopath in Tucson in January, returned to the U.S. House of Representatives just in time in order to give her thumbs-up to the Capitulator in Chief’s latest selling out of yet another huge chunk of the store to the plutocratic and pro-plutocratic right wing.

Reports The Associated Press tonight:

Washington, D.C. — Crisis legislation to yank the nation past the threat of a historic financial default sped through the [U.S.] House [of Representatives tonight], breaking weeks of deadlock. The rare moment of cooperation turned celebratory when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords strode in for the first time since she was shot in the head nearly seven months ago.

The vote was 269-161, a scant day ahead of the deadline for action. But all eyes were on Giffords, who drew thunderous applause as she walked into the House chamber unannounced and cast her vote in favor of the bill.

A final Senate sign-off for the measure is virtually assured on Tuesday. Aside from raising the debt limit, the bill would slice federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion, and perhaps much more.

“If the bill were presented to the president, he would sign it,” the White House said, an understatement of enormous proportions.

After months of fierce struggle, the House’s top Republican and Democratic leaders swung behind the bill, ratifying a deal sealed Sunday night with a phone call from House Speaker John Boehner to President Barack Obama.

Many Republicans contended the bill still would cut too little from federal spending; many Democrats said much too much. Still, Republican lawmakers supported the compromise, 174-66, while Democrats split, 95-95.

“The legislation will solve this debt crisis and help get the American people back to work,” Boehner said at a news conference a few hours before the vote.

The Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was far less effusive. “I’m not happy with it, but I’m proud of some of the accomplishments in it. That’s why I’m voting for it.”

So, too, many of the first-term Republicans whose election in 2010 handed the GOP control of the House and set the federal government on a new, more conservative course.

“It’s about time that Congress come together and figure out a way to live within our means,” said one of them, Sean Duffy of Wisconsin. “This bill is going to start that process although it doesn’t go far enough.”

The measure would cut federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion over a decade — and possibly considerably more — and would not require tax increases. [Emphasis mine.] The U.S. debt limit would rise by at least $2.1 trillion, tiding the Treasury over through the 2012 elections. …

I’m happy that Giffords is doing better these days, but does that fucking erase the fact that, chunk by chunk, my future as a forty-something, as a member of the crew that has to follow with shovels the elephants in the parade that are the fucking baby boomers, is being destroyed by the overwhelmingly self-serving, legacy-ignoring baby-boomer “leaders” in Washington? And that Capitulator in Chief Barack Obama is happily helping them in the name of “bipartisanship”?

Oh, we’re seeing a lot of “change,” all right — the decimation of Social Security and Medicare, which I’ve been paying into since I was a teenager, and other public benefits sure the fuck is a change, just not the change that I’d hoped for, and certainly not the change that President Hopey-Changey Obama had promised us.

But I suppose that I’m a heartless ogre if I am not mindlessly distracted by the “feel-good” fact that Gabrielle Giffords was there to vote “yes” on the further destruction of my nation, to endorse the further widening of the gulf between the rich and the poor in the rapidly crumbling United States of America.

I haven’t blogged on the “debt ceiling crisis” until now for many reasons:

One, I’ve come to expect Barack Obama to sell us out. He consistently and predictably sells us out. He is committed to selling us out. (He always has wanted to be the next Ronald Reagan, remember. He is succeeding spectacularly.)

Two, I’ve always figured that “at the last minute” they (the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — and if you can’t tell the difference between the two, well, don’t feel badly, because most of the rest of us can’t, either) would announce some “breakthrough” “deal,” thus “miraculously” averting “economic Armageddon!”

Three, I’ve always figured that this has been bullshit all along, that this always has been just an elephant-and-donkey show, that the Democrats and the Repugnicans are in bed together and that a “last-minute deal” always was in the script, that the fear-mongering was meant to create the illusion among the masses that there’s actually some struggle for the soul of the nation going on in D.C. — and not, say, the collusion of, for and by two duopolistic parties that don’t give a flying fuck about you or me that’s actually going on.*

Fuck, they even threw The Return of Gabrielle Giffords into the script.

If I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist before (and I wasn’t), I think that I am now.

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*No, this statement is not an endorsement of “Americans Elect.” “Americans Elect” is evil. The Wall Street weasels who have caused our economic collapse are not the ones to turn to for solutions.

(Revised:) Mike Huckabee wins the White House!

Repugnican Tea Party douchebag Mike Huckabee announced last night that he isn’t running for president in 2012, but since he’s busy helping to rewrite U.S. history in order to indoctrinate the youngins, hell, he can just write right now that he won the 2012 presidential election and that he was the nation’s Best! President! Ever!

Many others have covered Huckabee’s participation in the selling of really bad cartoons on “American history” for home-schooled kids (such as here and here, and Rachel Maddow has covered it too). The cartoons are so fucking bad that they appear to be parodies by the creators of “South Park,” but oh, they’re not parodies…

The episode that predictably deifies Ronald Reagan (which notes, among other things, that “he worked against Communism in Hollywood” [not that he was a McCarthyite]) has this nice little image:

Yes, that appears to me to be a knife-wielding, menacing mulatto. In the video he apparently commands the good little white kids (who have access to a time machine, but of course as long as we’re still anti-science we’ll never get to that point): “Give me your money!” Subtle!

(If I had written the little video, I might have had the good little white kids retort: “First show us your birth certificate!”)

The Orwellian right-wing attempt to rewrite U.S. history is nothing new. Glenn Beck has the online “Beck University,” and its home page proclaims, “LEARN REAL AMERICAN HISTORY.” (Also on the home page is a link to a nice little video of Glenn titled “Presidents You Should Hate,” because Glenn’s a good little Mormon boy and God wants him to hate and to tell you whom to hate [you have to subscribe to the website to get Glenn's God-given insight, though...]).

One of “Beck U”’s “professors” — and all of his “professors” appear to be middle-aged to old white men, shockingly – is David Barton, a white wingnut who has thought himself qualified enough to write on rewrite black American history:

I’m thinking that maybe Anita Bryant should write a book on gay and lesbian American history. Perhaps Maggie Gallagher could take some time out of her crusade against marriage between any two consenting adults to be a co-author of the enlightening, setting-the-record-straight (wink wink) historical account.

The radical-right-wing attempt to rewrite U.S. history is chilling, but while I don’t want to underestimate the radical right’s harm to the nation and to the world, I can’t see a day when their “history” ever becomes mainstream. True, our mainstream U.S. history taught to public schoolchildren is whitewashed as it is, more or less teaches our children that the U.S. never can do any wrong (even the many, many episodes of the oppression of minorities are portrayed as just little potholes in the Road to Freedom, you see), but Huckabee’s and Beck’s brand of U.S. “history” is highly unlikely to make it very far outside of its apparent target audience of home-schooling parents.

One child who is home-schooled in wingnuttery is a tragic loss — not only will the successfully brainwashed child be unable to function in a world in which his or her backasswards beliefs are in the minority, but the world will have lost a fully functional human being — but the percentage of parents who would expose their children to stupid white male propaganda thankfully remains small. Most parents want their children to be well-adjusted, functional, productive adults.

Anyway, Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and a former Southern Baptist pastor, has indicated that God doesn’t want him to run for president, but I think that even Huckabee, as off of his rocker as he is, knows that his ilk is a dying breed and that he can’t win the White House. White people who hate non-whites, non-“Christians,” non-heterosexuals and non-Americans and who believe that women should be subservient to men are finding it increasingly difficult to succeed on a national political stage because their numbers are decreasing.

The Internet, too, while it contains a lot of garbage, also has made it increasingly difficult for stupid white men and their supporters to keep the masses ignorant by keeping information unavailable to them. The wingnuts no longer can stem the flow of information as easily as they have in the past.

The wingnuts can put all of the revisionist books and videos out there that they want. I wish them luck in “protecting” their offspring from being exposed to what the saner members of the much larger world believe. This is exactly what they want to do, of course, and thus, home-schooling.

This is, of course, the largest logical weakness of such oppressively closed systems: If the system is so accurate, so true, so right, then why must it shut out the rest of the world? Why must it be so encapsulated?

Anticipating this question from the home-schooled kiddies, apparently, one of Huckabee’s “history” cartoons has one of the kiddie characters declaring (at the triumphant end of a cartoon on World War II): “What we see in here [in their time-machine travels] isn’t always the same as what we read in books or see on TV. So what? We know the truth, and that’s good enough for us!”

Wow. That says so much more than I could continue to say right now.

But I will say good fucking riddance to Mike Huckabee, who never will be president of the United States of America* — except perhaps in his really bad propagandistic cartoons for the kiddies.

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*The Associated Press notes:

Ed Rollins, who chaired Huckabee’s 2008 [presidential] campaign and had been talking with fundraisers about a 2012 Huckabee bid, said it would be difficult [for Huckabee] to find another opportunity like this.

“It was all there for him,” Rollins said.

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Red scare redux

 

The Cold War still rages on for some (namely, those who are still living in the 1950s).

This book, a must-have for any home-schooling parent or parent thinking about home schooling, actually is in amazon.com’s top-100-selling books as I type this sentence.

Wow.

It’s interesting. When the wingnuts can’t find any other argument against or criticism of Barack Obama, they resort to racism. When they can’t find any other argument against or criticism of the left, they resort to red-baiting.

Yup. For the treasonous troglodytes among us, the Cold War still rages on, and when they can’t win an argument against a left-winger, they resort to visceral denunciations such as “Communist” or “Socialist” or one of their variations. It’s the adult playground equivalent of calling your opponent a doodoo head.

For all of their blather of “freedom” and “liberty,” the members of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party don’t want our children taught that any other socioeconomic system outside of capitalism is even a remote possibility. Didn’t the actual Communists absolutely forbid that any other socioeconomic system be taught to their children? Didn’t they also wish to brainwash their children, to shackle their minds? So the actual Communists and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are different how?

(Similarly, the members of the Taliban and other “Islamofascists” and the “Christo”fascists here at home have an awful lot in common. The content of their delusional belief systems differ, but their hypocrisy, self-righteousness and their ignorance and evil are the same.)  

Capitalism is a key method of keeping peoples in bondage, so of course the members of the radical right defend it. Especially as the excesses of capitalism have pushed the American empire to collapse, and Americans just might be considering other socioeconomic systems right about now, those who benefit from capitalism on crack want to preserve the status quo that benefits them but harms the majority of the American people.

Capitalism is based upon the idea that when thievery and virtual slavery are committed in the name of capitalism (or one of its variations, such as business), they are good. Indeed, the nexus between capitalism and “Christo”fascism, which also teaches that evil is “good” when “Christians” commit it, is so strong that the two virtually are interchangeable (along with militarism, because God and Jesus love it when we slaughter us some more Muslims!).

Capitalism is based upon the idea that getting filthy rich by paying your employees as little as you can get away — by stealing the lion’s share of the actual value of their labor from them — and by charging your customers as much as you can get away with — by stealing as much from them as you can, too — is good. The key belief of capitalism is that screwing over your fellow Americans (and others) is good. That’s an awfully weak premise for a socioeconomic system, and the capitalists know it.

This blatantly greedy, selfish thievery that is capitalism isn’t called thievery or exploitation or slavery or even wage slavery or the like. It’s called “initiative” or “hard work” or the like, even though most of the rich and super-rich among us don’t actually do much work. (I don’t count protecting and expanding one’s own personal empire as work. I count as work as doing something that is productive, that benefits others.)

But to try to keep us serfs from going after them with pitchforks and torches, the plutocrats repeat this narrative that the rich and the super-rich are rich and super-rich because they are hard workers, and those of us who aren’t rich (the vast majority of us) aren’t rich because we are lazy. And the plutocrats have billions and billions of dollars with which to reinforce this propagandistic bullshit. It’s a good bet that their money is behind the book that is pictured above.

It is critical for those of us who oppose the right-wing traitors’ Orwellian attempt to snuff out Americans’ ability to even think that a better, more just and more equitable socioeconomic system is available to us to counter their red-baiting bullshit when we see it.

If I had a nickel for every time some right-wing fucktard threw the epithets “Commie” or “Socialist” at me, I’d be as rich as the Koch brothers.

But I don’t shrink away from the mindless red-baiting, which is meant to intimidate and to thus shut down the debate.

Yes, I am a socialist. I believe that the best socioeconomic system for the United States of America would be democratic socialism. It’s pretty fucking clear what runaway capitalism has done to the nation (and to the planet, with its melting ice caps), yet the treasonous, selfish individuals who are guilty of economic malpractice (and treason, because they have harmed their own nation) are the same ones who are crowing that what we need now is even more of their brand of capitalism.*

Capitalism is eating itself alive, like a serpent swallowing its own tail. Capitalism is dying because it’s a dysfunctional, defunct socioeconomic model. It brings misery for the masses and excesses for the few.

This isn’t opinion. This is just fucking fact. It’s quite measurable and observable. And it’s not just evident, but is fucking obvious, all around you.

Our children need to be taught facts and reality, not right-wing bullshit. Our duty to our children is to give them the knowledge and the tools that they need in order to make their lives and the world better. Trying to perpetuate the ignorance of the past — such as “creationism”; whitewashed versions of American history that make the conservative, “Christian,” presumably heterosexual white man the triumphant victor and keep women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians” and other historically oppressed groups down; Bible-based homophobia (and other Bible-based hogwash); anti-science, pro-business/pro-profiteering stances such as that climate change isn’t real; and the assertion that any discussion of a socioeconomic system outside of capitalism is “Commie” (which we can’t even define correctly but just “know” is something really, really bad) — is to cripple our children, is to diminish their chances for success in a rapidly evolving world, a world that continues to evolve around us whether we want to evolve with it or not, whether we want to reach for the stars or whether we want to retreat into our caves (you know, to go back to the “good old days,” such as the 1950s, when women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals and non-“Christians” knew their place!).

And I feel sorry for our public-school teachers, who routinely come under fire from ignorant, backasswards, wingnutty parents for not passing down those parents’ abject ignorance and backasswardsness to all of our children.

The effect of this political pressure and oppression from the treasonous fucktards on the right is that all of our public-school children get, at best, a watered-down education that instead of teaching them to strive for solutions to our problems only teaches them to perpetuate our problems, which only ensures the collapse of an American empire that cannot remain competitive in an increasingly globalizing world.

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*Amazon.com notes that Joe Kernan “is the co-anchor of CNBC’s longest-running program, the top-rated morning show ‘Squawk Box.’ Before television, he was a successful stockbroker with top firms such as Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney.” So a former Wall Street weasel sings the praises of capitalism. Oh, what a shock! And amazon.com notes that Blake Kernan is “a fifth-grade student” and apparently is the girl who is pictured on the book cover.

 Hey, why have children if you can’t infect and cripple them with your own sick belief system and use them to make a profit for you?

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The (Jessica) Lynching of Osama bin Laden

Wow. You expected this kind of shit from the unelected Bush regime, with its lies about and cover-ups regarding the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman sagas, but you (or at least I) expected more from the Obama administration.

Until now I have held off on repeating any of the details that have been released regarding Osama bin Laden’s actual moment of death because I was skeptical of them – and for good cause, because now, they are reporting, apparently bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot dead in the head and did not use one of his wives as a “human shield.”

The “human shield” charge especially was repeated all over the corporately owned and controlled mass media, because it fit in nicely with the pre-existing jingoistic narrative of bin Laden as actually being a “coward” instead of a bad-ass — a charge that is probably more false than true and that says a lot more about Americans’ actual collective level of courage than it does about bin Laden’s. (Americans, after all, kill with high-tech weaponry and they usually kill from a distance. [Which makes American killing “civilized,” you see, while the less technologically advantaged “terrorists” often if not usually kill others more closely and personally, which makes them “terrorists,” as does the fact that they're not Americans.])

Anyway, so now the latest word is that bin Laden was unarmed and that the woman who was shot dead along with him was not his wife, but was another woman, and that his wife was injured in the firefight, but was not used by bin Laden as a “human shield.”  

These are just basic facts of what the fuck happened. You would think that the “transparent” Obama administration would have done a much better job of getting out accurate information about such a momentous news event.

And the fact (well, the fact du jour, anyway…) that bin Laden was unarmed raises the legal, moral and ethical question of whether or not he should have been captured and brought to trial instead of executed on the spot. Does a “civilized” nation of “laws” and “order” and “human rights” execute someone who is unarmed, even someone like Osama bin Laden, on the spot?

I recognize the huge problems, including, of course, security issues, that putting bin Laden on trial would have presented. But do we have principles or not? Do we mean what we say in our Constitution about human rights — including the right to a fair trial and the right not to be summarily executed, no matter what it is believed that you have done – or don’t we?

All of this — the initial misinformation about bin Laden’s summary execution, the apparent fact that bin Laden could have been taken alive — makes Barack Obama way too much like George W. (“W” for “Wanted Dead or Alive”) Bush for my sense of right and wrong, and I have to wonder how much of bin Laden’s execution was calculated to benefit Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

I mean, fuck: In January, Team Obama did indeed roll out, as part of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, the lame meme of “We do big things” in the State of the Union Address. Yesterday, Obama said of bin Laden’s execution, “Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do.”

I mean, that looks like a link to me. It’s fairly apparent that Team Obama sat around and pondered: Hmmm… How can we fit Osama bin Laden’s death into our re-election campaign narrative?

Even in this great age of cynicism, that’s some sick shit, in my book.

Again, I’m not crying that Osama bin Laden is dead, but we cannot claim to be a “civilized” nation that respects human rights and laws and at the same time do shit like summarily execute the “bad guys.” (As far as body counts of innocents go, we Americans actually are the biggest global bad guys, but because we’re Americans, we’re fucking saints.)  

And to watch Barack Obama act as though he went over to Pakistan and got bin Laden himself – when that long, hard work was done by other people, including some who apparently put themselves at the potential risk of great injury or death – is nauseating, especially when Obama apparently plans to use bin Laden’s scalp for political gain.

But that is the history of the slimy political opportunist Obama: taking credit for others’ work, such as how he only rode, all the way to the White House, the wave that Howard Dean had created with the left-leaning “netroots.”

Now, it appears, it is the execution of Osama bin Laden that is going to keep Obama in the Oval Office for another four years.

Manufacturing labor-union ‘thuggery’

In its losing battle to destroy labor unions (right after it promised the nation to get the jobs back), the Repugnican Tea Party is using the same old tattered page from its playbook: Play the victim (while being the victimizer).

Drunkard Repugnican Tea Party leader John Boehner proclaimed yesterday in typical Repugnican Tea Party rhetoric, “We’ve given them [unionized public employees] a machine gun and put it right at the heads of the local officials, and they [the local officials] really have their hands tied.” (I am a unionized public employee and I don’t own a machine gun, nor am I into bondage. Just sayin’.)

The wingnuts employ the term “thug” (as in “union thug”) and its derivatives and synonyms ad nauseum in their current campaign of union-bashing.

Of course, it helps if you provoke the members of the pro-labor side. You know, to “prove” what “thugs” they (we) inherently are. Which is what I watched a bunch of “Tea Party” traitors do here in Sacramento at the California state Capitol on Saturday (on which there were pro-labor gatherings of various sizes in all of the states’ capitals in solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin).

I estimate that on Saturday there were at least 1,000 pro-labor protesters at the California Capitol in the second pro-labor rally there within the same week, and about 100 “Tea Party” traitors who also were there, across the street, for no other apparent reason than to provoke the pro-labor side.

(Anticipating the presence of the “Tea Party” antagonists, I brought a sign with me that on one side read: “‘Tea Party’ Traitors’ ‘Founding Father’ is BENEDICT ARNOLD!” with a portrait of the infamous traitor below, and on the other side was featured a graphic of a coiled rattlesnake under which were the words: “DON’T TREAD ON THE WORKING CLASS!”)

From across the street, the “Tea Party” traitors, one of them in a three-cornered hat with a tea bag hanging from it, and at least two of them with bullhorns, heckled us pro-labor protesters for more than an hour and a half. Among many things, they repeatedly played that song with the lyric, “Na na na na hey hey hey good-bye!” (you know, in celebration of their anticipated destruction of the labor unions), rubbed their eyes in order to call us crybabies, and in general acted like the right-wing fucktards that they are.

We on the pro-labor side, among other things, chanted at the “Tea Party” traitors that they are “fascists!” (because they are), chanted “Shame on you!” (for their treason against the working class), and, when the “Tea Party” traitors quite stupidly chanted, “The party is over!”, those of us on the right side of the debate chantingly responded: “The Tea Party is over!”

(At one point, one of the “Tea Party” traitors with a bullhorn actually informed us that we “are living in the past.” Which is pretty fucking funny coming from a “Tea Party” dipshit whose cohort is wearing a three-cornered hat and who [by definition] wants to drag us back to the Dark Ages.)

I don’t assert that the “Tea Party” traitors don’t have the First Amendment right to attend pro-labor gatherings. They do.

But what they do is intentionally provoke the pro-labor side with the hope of getting photos and/or videorecorded footage of someone on the pro-labor side getting physical — and then they post this on the Internet as “proof” of “unprovoked” “union thuggery.”

Which is exactly what they did on Saturday.

Again, I watched the “Tea Party” traitors bait those of us on the pro-labor side for more than an hour and a half, and apparently at one point a member of the Teamsters got into a very brief shoving match with a “Tea Party” traitor.

One of the “Tea Party” traitors captured video of this and put the video clip on YouTube, and the shoving match happens so quickly that if you blink, you’ll miss it.

Of course the “Tea Party” traitor who posted the brief altercation on YouTube posted it without any fucking context whatsofuckingever. You don’t see any footage of the “Tea Party” traitors there relentlessly baiting the pro-labor side. You see only the altercation itself, as though it had occurred in a fucking vacuum. Because if you saw the context within which the altercation happened, the right-wing claim about those “union thugs” would lose its strength.

The mainstream media, too, though, love conflict.

A photographer for the Sacramento Bee managed to get this dramatic photo just before the aforementioned brief shoving match began:

The guy on the left is the Teamster and the guy on the right is the “Tea Party” traitor. Their brief shoving match happened in my vicinity, and I didn’t even witness it, that’s how brief it was; I didn’t even learn of it until after I went home and saw the photo on the Bee’s website (and then the wingnut’s short videorecording of it on YouTube).

While admittedly it’s a great news photo, it certainly isn’t representative of the events on Saturday. I never witnessed anything like this in the more than an hour and a half that I was there.

I don’t know the Teamster who is photographed above, but I do remember seeing him at the pro-labor gathering on Saturday. He did strike me as somewhat of a little pit bull whom you wouldn’t want to mess with, but I have no clear idea of what happened between him and the “Tea Party” provocateur.

And to be fair and balanced, I will report that some on the pro-labor side shouted some things at the “Tea Party” traitors that they (probably) shouldn’t have, such as “cocksuckers!” and (via a bullhorn) an unfunny empty threat that the “Tea Party” traitors had five minutes to clear out (a thinly veiled threat of violence, even though no reasonable person would have taken it seriously).

But as much fun as it might be, you cannot, in fairness, paint all of the members of a group as the same based upon the actions of a few members of that group. Every group of size has its outliers.

Further, when someone’s livelihood is threatened (or he perceives it to be threatened), and you then heckle him about this fact, oh, guess what? He just might respond physically — especially if he is prone to physically acting out when he is angry.

But you don’t get to intentionally provoke someone and then, when he finally snaps and gets physical, claim that he inherently is violent or unhinged or the like and that you are as innocent and pure as the driven snow! Which is what the “Tea Party” traitors have done in this case.**

Frankly, the “Tea Party” traitors who did their best for more than an hour and a half to enrage the pro-labor side were lucky that all that happened was a brief shoving match that they then got to post on YouTube wholly out of context. At one point on Saturday, I truly wondered whether or not the pro-labor side might actually surge across the street and attack the “Tea Party” traitors who were baiting them/us, but alas, they/we did not, and overall, those on the pro-labor side showed remarkable restraint (to the disappointment of the camera-wielding “Tea Party” traitors [real "warriors" for their "cause"], I’m sure).

Tip: If you have a videorecording device (I don’t), it wouldn’t hurt to bring it with you if you anticipate a contingent of “Tea Party” traitors showing up at your event (and if your event is about promoting the public good, then you probably will see some “Tea Party” traitors there to promote their agenda). You at least could show that the “Tea Party” traitors do their damnedest to try to get a violent response to their venom and bile from their opponents.

Many if not most of the “Tea Party” traitors I saw on Saturday were taking photos or video, primarily in order to intimidate us, from what I could tell (it didn’t work), but also they probably hoped to be able to post any photo or video footage of a “Tea Party” traitor being attacked/“attacked” by a “union thug” — you know, like obtaining a scalp.

In a court of law, however, I don’t know how you could claim to be an innocent victim after you first had provoked your attacker relentlessly in the hope that he would attack you. (Judge Judy would slap you upside the head for that kind of shit, methinks.)

And in the court of public opinion, the members of the jury need to know that the “Tea Party” traitors are doing their best to capture photographic “evidence” of all of that supposed unprovoked “union thuggery” out there in order to support the Repugnican Tea Party’s national propaganda campaign that unprovoked ”union thuggery” is rampant — very apparently in order to turn the undecideds against members of labor unions.

Just don’t expect to see any of this “evidence” of “union thuggery” presented within its context of the relentless baiting by “Tea Party” traitors that precedes it.

Because that would fuck up the fairy tales that the treasonous wingnuts are trying to sell.

–

*The Bee’s crappy “reportage” of Saturday’s event undercounted the pro-labor side at only 400 people and overcounted the “Tea Party” traitors at 150. No way was the actual ratio anything like 400:150. It was much more like 10:1. (As I noted recently, it seems to me that the mainstream media don’t hesitate to undercount the center-left, anticipating no real backlash, but probably are terrified to undercount the center-right, and thus inflate their numbers in order to be safe from right-wing backlash.)

**And in others. See Salon.com’s Alex Pareene’s recent reportage on this phenomenon here and here.

This is our BIG T-shirt moment!

The new Team Obama T-shirt is yours for a donation of $25 or more!

Confession: I purchased and I wore a white-lettered-on-black “got hope?” T-shirt before Barack Obama was elected in November 2008. In public. Repeatedly.

That was back when I had hope.

Now, Team Obama, I see from a shameless fundraising e-mail that I received today, is asking us to wear a T-shirt (pictured above) that reads: “WE DO BIG THINGS.” With the “BIG” really BIG.

“We do big things” comes right from Obama’s recent State of the Union address, of course. He ended his address thusly:

…We do big things.

From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That’s how we win the future.

We are a nation that says, “I might not have a lot of money, but I have this great idea for a new company. I might not come from a family of college graduates, but I will be the first to get my degree. I might not know those people in trouble, but I think I can help them, and I need to try. I’m not sure how we’ll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we’ll get there. I know we will.”

We do big things.

The idea of America endures. Our destiny remains our choice. And tonight, more than two centuries later, it is because of our people that our future is hopeful, our journey goes forward, and the state of our union is strong.

Thank you, God bless you and may God bless the United States of America.

Sadly, the State of the Union address apparently now is just a vehicle with which to roll out new empty slogans to slap on T-shirts and other campaign gear.

As I recently noted, “hope” and “change” — or, as Repugnican Tea Party queen Sarah Palin once put it, “that hopey-changey stuff” — doesn’t cut it anymore, so now we have “winning the future” and “we do big things.” (Palin once again has mocked the shameless sloganeering, pointing out that “winning the future” would be “WTF.”) 

What we have with Team Obama, unfortunately, is marketing slogans, not presidential leadership. (And when Sarah “Inflammatory Political Rhetoric Endangers No One But Your Inflammatory Political Rhetoric Endangers Me” Palin is making valid criticisms of you, you’re in trouble.) 

Worst of all where Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address is concerned, the state of our union is not strong, and Obama has neither the stomach nor the balls to seriously confront what I see as the nation’s three main problems (not in a particular order):

• Corporateers whose tentacles now reach into every imaginable aspect of our lives and who won’t stop until they privatize absofuckinglutely everything – and who would charge us for the very air that we breathe if they could.
• War profiteers and others within the military-industrial complex who keep us at perpetual war for perpetual war profiteering. (The members of the Repugnican Tea Party were fine with the BushCheneyCorp’s runaway government spending because it benefited the war profiteers, but any government spending on the people – having the audacity to use the people’s money to benefit them – the ringleaders of the Repugnican Tea Party cannot abide.)
• Millions of baby boomers who are poised to wipe out Social Security and Medicare and other resources, leaving nothing for those who follow them.

These are powerful, intertwined lobbies, and without standing up to these lobbies, there is no solving the nation’s real problems — such as the federal budget deficit, which is caused by runaway spending by the military-industrial complex (with all of its corporate contractor cronies) and by treasonous tax evasion by the corporateers and the super-rich, and climate change, which many if not most of the boomers don’t care about because they figure that the worst of it will come after their lifetimes, and about which the polluting corporations don’t give a shit, because they put their profits far above both people and the very planet itself. 

But standing up to these lobbies Team Obama refuses to do. Team Obama would never offend the boomers or the corporateers and the war profiteers who are destroying the nation, as Team Obama wants their campaign contribution$ and their votes.

Instead, the members of Team Obama wax nostalgic about about “Sputnik moments” and “winning the future” — even while their staunch refusal to confront our real problems dooms our future.

We can’t “do BIG things” when we can’t even do the comparatively little things, such as provide our citizens with meaningful, well-compensated work (no, long stints as cannon fodder in the Middle East don’t count), decent health care that doesn’t put them into bankruptcy, and an affordable, quality college education free of the corporate student loan sharks and the textbook industry butt-rapists that surround our young people, viewing them only as victims to bleed dry. 

It’s enough to make one proclaim: WTF?

Give me socialism or give me death!

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The right wing’s witch hunts during the Cold War and the McCarthy Era involved Communists and homosexuals. Must! Root! Out! The! Enemy!

Today, it’s “socialism!” instead of “Communism!” that the right wing bandies about, and we non-heterosexuals (along with immigrants from Latin America and Muslims and other historically less powerful minorities) remain scapegoats for all of the nation’s ills.

It’s interesting that for all of the wingnuts’ blather about “freedom,” serious discussion of alternative economic systems is so fucking taboo. Here in the United States of America, land of the free only to support capitalism, socialism isn’t an economic system; it’s an epithet meant to shut down any actual serious discussion of socialism.

It’s a pretty powerful way for the capitalistic plutocrats to maintain control, to make the masses think that any other way of doing things isn’t even possible.

If capitalism were so strong and so self-evidently the only feasible economic system, then why does the right wing do its best to stifle any serious discussion about alternative economic systems by branding those of us who wish to have such a discussion as traitors? Um, yeah.

Of course, it’s the millionaires and billionaires, like Rupert Murdoch and his little bitch boy Glenn Beck, who keep stoking the pro-capitalistic propagandistic fires, since Hey, capitalism sure has been good to them! (to the rest of us, um, not so much…).

Capitalism has, in the minds of millions of American sheeple, been equated with patriotism and Christianity — and all kinds of other things, such as militarism, and yes, colonialism (um, why wouldn’t Barack Obama or any other at least semi-sane and moral individual oppose colonialism, Dinesh Dikshit, since colonialism by definition is about the exploitation of the weaker by the more powerful, you fucking moron?).

The right wing, of course, for all of its talk about “looking forward, not backward,” equates socialism and (little-“c”) communism with tyranny and the like, as though we humankind are doomed only to repeat the mistakes of the past, as though we cannot create something new.

Democratic socialism could work quite well in the United States of America, and, if the nation survives the right wing’s attempt to destroy it in an Armageddon that it creates only through its wish for such an Armageddon, probably democratic socialism — which is about what’s best for the most number of individuals (in contrast to how capitalism is about what’s best for only a small number of individuals, at the expense of the majority) — is the only thing that’s going to save the nation.

This news story from the French (socialist!) news organization AFP, though, highlights the propagandistic obstacles created by the plutocratic propagandists that we Americans who want a better future and a better present for ourselves and those who follow us have to overcome:

New Castle, Delaware — Stephen Knotts, a blond, blue-eyed member of the conservative Tea Party movement, is deeply concerned about where he sees the United States heading.

“We are pushing towards European values. Socialism, that’s a European value,” he warns. “Everybody’s kind of zombified over there.” [Gee, has he even been “over there,” I wonder?]

Knotts is one of a crowd gathered at a Delaware shooting club, awaiting an address by Senate candidate and Tea Party superstar Christine O’Donnell.

He is one of many Americans who fear their country is lurching dangerously towards higher taxes and bigger government and cites with fear the experience of France and Germany.

“Sixty percent of what they earn goes for taxes,” he tells a reporter, though the actual figure is closer to 40 percent.

Paul Lamanna, a member of the shooting club who describes himself as a first generation Italian immigrant, is similarly concerned about what he sees as a turn towards European policies in the United States.

“They have communism, they have fascism, they have socialism, even today. I’m not interested in any of that. I’m interested in democracy,” he says.

In neighboring Newark, Delaware, 31-year-old Kevin Thomas pronounces himself “sick and tired of this big government coming in, taking our money, giving it away basically to people who don’t deserve it.”

“We’re building a nation of slackers,” he warns at a campaign event for O’Donnell….

Wow. So the millionaires and billionaires who get bailouts from those of us who actually pay our fair share of taxes aren’t “slackers” — it’s only the working class and the poor who are the “slackers.” Which is exactly what Uncle Rupert wants you to believe, and which is exactly what his legions of Faux “News” viewers parrot dutifully. (Trust Uncle Rupie! He has only your best interests in mind!)

Only the rich deserve even more, you see, while the have-nots deserve even less — because they’re lazy slackers. (It absolutely is not that they are exploited in a ruthless corporatocracy that dipshits like the “blond, blue-eyed member[s] of the conservative Tea Party movement” in the story above stupidly call “democracy.” ["Blond, blue-eyed member[s] of the conservative Tea Party movement” — hmmm… Reminds me of another fascistic movement comprised mostly of the blond and blue-eyed…])

“Everybody’s kind of zombified over there [in Europe],” the blond and blue-eyed “tea-party” dipshit remarks in the news story above, very apparently oblivious to the zombification of millions of Americans by the right-wing noise machine funded by the millionaires and billionaires like something right out of “The Matrix.”

The way that we non-heterosexuals have to get equal human and civil rights is to stand up to the bullies and to counter the propaganda and lies that the wingnuts pump out there. It’s a long, tough slog, but we’re no fucking slackers, and we are winning the war against bigotry and ignorance and hatred.

And the only way that we, the millions of us Americans who are the have-nots and are the living-from-paycheck-to-paycheck and are the just-an-illness-away-from-poverty are going to get a better future and a better present for ourselves is to counter the plutocrats’ blatant fucking self-serving lies that we are the lazy “slackers.”

It’s called projection – the rich are the slackers. And we don’t need them. They need us.

It’s a popular uprising that the rich fear the most, which is why they keep a steady stream of pro-capitalist propaganda flowing to keep the “patriotic” sheeple zombified. (And it’s also why they live behind their gates with their private security.)

You gotta hand it to them, though: The plutocratic propagandists are quite successful — I mean, millions of Americans tolerate, even praise, an economic system that clearly works only for those relative few at the top. Millions of Americans stupidly incorrectly believe that this system of institutionalized exploitation — capitalism is nothing but legalized thievery – one day is going to make them rich, too. (This I call the “lottery mentality.”) Millions of Americans stupidly would defend, to the death, the very same economic system that is killing them slowly.

This slow death these dipshits call “freedom.” (George Orwell put it best when he invented Big Brother’s slogans of “War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.” This is the credo of the Repugnican Tea Party.)

That the filthy-rich powers that be have demonized socialism to the extent that they have demonstrates that it is a clear and present danger to them. If they want you to reject it, there must be something about it that’s quite good for you. 

Only when the majority of us Americans demand democratic socialism — instead of continuing to acquiesce to the pro-plutocratic, pro-corporatocratic, duopolistic partisan charade that we call “democracy” that is incapable of delivering anything even close to hope or change, since it is designed only to perpetuate the status quo of perpetual hopelessness for the majority – will we overthrow our capitalist overlords who call us the lazy slackers while they continue to steal from us.

We Americans, quite to the contrary of the claims of the “tea-party” dipshits in the news story above, could learn quite a lot from the Europeans, perhaps especially from the French, who fucking fight for better conditions for themselves.

Reports The (capitalist) Associated Press today:

Paris – A nationwide strike by major French unions canceled flights and trains and shut the Eiffel Tower [today], disrupting daily life for many and putting new pressure on the government to drop a plan to raise the retirement age by two years.

Unionized train and Paris public transport workers vowed to stay off the job for at least another day, and police said at least 1.2 million people marched in protests against the plan, the largest turnout in four nationwide demonstrations over the last five weeks.

That could be a signal of rising momentum for the movement facing off against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s governing conservatives over its proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

The government has refused to back down, saying the plan is the only way to save the money-draining pension system. Some unions upped the ante by declaring open-ended strikes starting [today], meaning walkouts could drag on for days or even weeks.

The outlook for Wednesday was still uncertain in many sectors, but many workers at the national railways planned to stay off the job, as did some employees of the Paris transport network. Some oil workers pledged to keep up a protest at refineries, and one union warned of looming gasoline shortages.

[Today] hundreds of tourists visiting the Eiffel Tower were ushered away after workers there voted to join the strike.

“The closure of the monument is a symbol,” said Yann Leloir, a striking employee. The tower — France’s most-visited monument — is to reopen [tomorrow] as usual….

This is why the American right wing, led by the millionaires and billionaires, bashes labor unions: because labor unions can accomplish something for the common working citizen. Labor unions can make the playing field more level.

Yet millions of Americans – working Americans – have been brainwashed by the filthy rich into believing that unions are bad for them. No – unions are bad only for the rich.

Change in the United States of America will come. The capitalist center cannot hold. It will not hold.

The only question is whether the revolution for what is right and what is fair and what is just – an end to the exploitation of the masses by the few – will be a bloody one or whether the rich will save their own necks from a repeat of the French revolution here at home.

Otherwise, those torches and pitchforks, methinks, are going to materialize sooner than most would ever guess.

Brown could blow it

Associated Press photo

“We are confident that the Brown campaign is doing the things that need to be done and we’re in the position we want to be in,” Jerry Brown gubernatorial campaign spokesman Sterling Clifford has said of anxiety that Team Brown is doing too little too late against Repugnican billionaire Megalomaniac Whitman’s multi-million-dollar onslaught. (Brown is shown above in Los Angeles last month.) I’d love to take comfort in Sterling’s words of assurance, but then I recall the 2003 gubernatorial recall election and the gubernatorial election of 2006 – and how well the state’s Democratic “leaders” strategized in those…

You would think that California’s Democratic Party “leaders” would have learned their lesson by now.

First, the state’s party “leaders” underestimated the chances of the wooden and woefully uncharismatic Gov. Gray Davis losing the gubernatorial recall election of 2003.

To recap, Repugnicans were able to get enough signatures on petitions to make the recall election happen, in no small part because Repugnican U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, who had his own eye on the governor’s seat, gave $2  million of his own funds to the signature-collection effort – only to see Hollywood action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger become the Repugnican frontrunner in the gubernatorial recall race.

The state’s Democratic Party “leaders” either truly believed that the unpopular Davis would survive the recall election or they were in deep denial. Therefore, they refused to front a candidate for the recall election (and Davis was not allowed to run as a candidate in the election*), apparently believing that to do so would be to admit Davis’ defeat before the recall election even took place.

When then-Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, a Democrat, decided to run in the recall election (in which I voted for him), he was viewed by the calcified state Democratic Party “leaders” as a heretic, and the state party did not throw its support behind Bustamante, who therefore pretty much was on his own.

The top three vote-getters of the gubernatorial recall election were Schwarzenegger, with 48.6 percent of the vote, Bustamante, with 31.5 percent, and another Repugnican candidate, Tom McClintock, with 13 percent. (More than one individual from each of the two major parties was allowed to run in the recall race.)

Davis was the state’s first governor ever to be recalled and only the second governor to be recalled in the nation’s history. (Eighteen states, including California, allow for gubernatorial recall elections.)

Running against Schwarzenegger in the 2006 gubernatorial election was uber-geek Democrat Phil Angelides, then the state’s treasurer. Polls had shown consistently that the dynamic, youthful, John-Edwards-(before-his-mistress-came-to-light)-like Democrat Steve Westly, the state’s controller, could have defeated Schwarzenegger in November 2006 — and that Angelides could not – but in April 2006 the state’s Democratic Party “leaders” stupidly endorsed the charismatically challenged Angelides anyfuckingway, apparently not having learned a fucking thing from the Davis debacle just a few years before. The state party’s endorsement helped Angelides beat Westly in the June 2006 primary election, but by only 5 percent.

I knew that it was over for boner-shrinker Angelides when I was attending the annual Greek cultural festival here in Sacramento in August 2006, and Angelides, a Greek-American, made a surprise appearance at the festival — and no one there seemed to give a shit. If a Greek-American political candidate can’t wow ’em at a fucking Greek festival, he’s fucking toast. (Do the Greeks have their own kind of toast, I wonder?)

Anyway, in November 2006, Schwarzenegger trounced Angelides. True, it was the jock vs. the geek, and in such a matchup the geek almost never wins, but Angelides’ lackluster-at-best campaign didn’t fucking help things. Schwarzenegger won 56 percent of the vote to the Greek geekboy’s pathetic 39 percent.

Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor — it took me years to get used to that — could have been prevented had the state’s Democratic “leaders” fronted a strong candidate (Bustamante or someone else) in the 2003 gubernatorial recall election instead of petulantly acted as though Gray Davis, who is as exciting as is the shade of gray, couldn’t possibly have been recalled.

Schwarzenegger getting a sequel as governor of California in 2006 could have been prevented had the state’s clueless Democratic “leaders” gone with the more popular Westly instead of the nerdy Angelides, whom they apparently wanted to reward for his past years of work for the state party — even though polls showed that he couldn’t take out the “Terminator.”

So now it’s year 2010, and two-time California Gov. Jerry Brown is running for a third term. He has my support. I even have a campaign T-shirt already.

But Democrat Brown is running against billionaire Repugnican Megalomaniac Whitman, whose millions and millions of dollars of her own money (more than $90 million thus far) that she’s pumped into her campaign have allowed her to advertise ubiquitously.

Some pundits have surmised that Nutmeg’s advertising overkill actually will work against her, that it will turn off voters and send them to Brown’s camp. I hope that’s true, but we can’t fucking count on that being the case.

Polls have shown Brown’s lead over Nutmeg deteriorating to the point that the latest poll (a Field Poll) puts Brown at 44 percent and Nutmeg at 43 percent – with almost four full months of campaigning to go.

Yes, the majority of California’s voters should go with the frugal candidate who already knows how to do the state’s top job because he’s already done it.

But times have changed. The “independent” or “swing” vote — which I like to refer to as the “dumbfuck vote” — decides way too many elections these days, and the members of the dumbfuck voting bloc, by definition, don’t make their decisions based upon facts, but based upon their gut. And the gut’s main source of “information” is the tay-vay.

And it’s Megalomaniac who’s all over the tay-vay like stink all over dog shit.

Team Brown, on the other hand, truly appears to believe that Jerry Brown’s name recognition is enough. Brown’s name recognition is considerable, but Megalomaniac Whitman, come November, might just show us that everything has its price if one is only willing to pay it.

“If you’re going to run for governor, you have to do what it takes. You can’t tell yourself or tell everyone else there is some special way for you to do this that is completely outside the norms that apply to everyone else,” the Los Angeles Times has quoted veteran state Democratic strategist Garry South of having said recently of the Brown campaign. (South was a strategist for Westly in the 2006 gubernatorial race and he strategized for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s bid for the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial nomination. [Newsom now is running for lieutenant governor instead.])

I have to agree with South, and although South probably would put it differently, I think that Team Brown woefully has misunderstimated (as former “President” George W. Bush might put it) the power of the dumbfuck vote that Team Nutmeg seemed to realize long ago: Yes, tell the easily duped dipshits the same lies enough, and they’ll believe them. This tactic of propaganda worked wonders for the unelected Bush regime (and the Hitler regime** before it…).

Memo to Team Brown:

Times have changed. We no longer live in the age of the statesman (or stateswoman). Intellectual ability is seen as a fault by as many voters who view it as a strength, it seems to me. (Hell, maybe even more voters view intelligence as a fault than as a strength.)

We live now in the age of Sarah Palin-Quayle – Twittering and on Facebook.

And billionaire Megalomaniac Whitman — to make up for that pony that she never got, or to make up for the fact that she never was made prom queen, perhaps – is dangerously close to purchasing for herself the most powerful post in the state government of the nation’s most populous state. 

It’s past time to fight fire with fire.

–

*The recall-election ballot had two parts: First was the question as to whether Davis should remain in office or be removed from office. The second question on the ballot was who should replace Davis should he be removed. (Those who voted to retain Davis in office still were allowed to vote for a candidate to replace him as governor in case he was recalled.)

**Brown’s having called Team Nutmeg Nazi-like in its propaganda techniques is not wholly unfounded, and I wholly agree with sexy gay blogger Glenn Greenwald’s recent argument that we can’t make all references and comparisons to Nazis verboten, because sometimes these references and comparisons have some substance to them. (Not that Greenwald would agree with Brown’s having called Team Nutmeg Nazi-like. [But he might...])

American history wars

A Patriot’s History of the United States has Glenn Beck’s prominent endorsement on the cover. Gee, do ya think it’s fair and balanced? Why do I suspect that if the American fascists had their way, the book would be required reading for all Americans, perhaps especially in “re-education” camps? Below is the 1980 book that the 2007 A Patriot’s History apparently is a direct response to.

 

Two very different versions of United States history are among amazon.com’s top-selling books as I type this sentence.

The late progressive historian Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present, first published in 1980 and current to 2003 in the revised edition that is available now, is at No. 27 on amazon.com right now, propelled up the list by his recent death. (It probably would be higher, but a lot of us “socialists” who voted for Barack Obama — which would be 53 percent of those Americans who voted in November 2008 — already have the book.) 

And at No. 1 on amazon.com right now, unfortunately, is 2007′s deceptively titled A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror – the title of which appears to be a direct response to Zinn’s tome and which tells you the slant that its two authors (one of whom wrote another book titled 48 Liberal Lies About American History) take and which indicates that if you disagree with the two white male authors’ version of American history, then you aren’t a patriot; in fact, you probably hate your country, hate freedom, and you probably want the terrorists to win!

(Hey, at least Sarah Palin-Quayle’s book has dropped to No. 56; it was at No. 1 for weeks…) 

Now, a wingnut might come back with the “argument” that Zinn and/or his supporters would say that if you disagree with his take on U.S. history, then you’re not part of the “people,” but I don’t think that was Zinn’s intent. His intent, I believe, was to tell U.S. history from the viewpoints that usually are ignored, including from the viewpoints of the downtrodden and the conquered. Well, hell, in his own words, Zinn said:

…[Ours] is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring, and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of us have an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The history of our country, I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make those ideals a reality….

Agreed. Our nation is a long way from fully living up to its stated ideals — we’re still arguing whether or not it is OK to discriminate against non-heterosexuals, for fuck’s sake, and while we are a nation of immigrants, the wingnuts for some time now have been on an anti-brown-skinned-immigrant kick, and what happened not long ago enough at Abu Ghraib was not, as Sarah Palin-Quayle might put it, very American-y, was it? – but to the wingnuts, just having stated those lofty ideals centuries ago is enough.

The Glenn Beck-endorsed A Patriot’s History, I am sure, tells the viewpoint of the powerful and the conquerors – the viewpoint that always has been taught in our schools (as it’s the conquerors who get to write the history), the viewpoint that if a public elementary or high school teacher were to challenge, he or she very well might find him- or herself in hot water.

Did we really need yet another white man’s version of U.S. history? We don’t have enough of the white man’s perspective? Fuck a duck.

I have read much of Zinn’s account of American history, and far from being some foaming-at-the-mouth, anti-American screed, it seems to tell the historical accounts and facts that the wingnuts don’t want to be taught in our schools because they’re not flattering.

Didn’t the Nazis — I know you’re never supposed to bring up the Nazis, but fuck it, I’m going to — teach their young a whitewashed, hypernationalistic version of German history? What’s the fucking difference between the Nazis doing that and Americans doing that?

It is too bad, but perhaps inevitable, that history should become so politicized, that is has become about indoctrination rather than about telling, to the best of our ability, the truth.

The telling of history was a central point of George Orwell’s 1984, with the totalitarian government of the novel rewriting even recent history to suit its political desires.

History, and how it is told, matter.

I wouldn’t read A Patriot’s History first and foremost because I wouldn’t read anything endorsed by Glenn Beck, who, I am fairly certain, is the anti-Christ. I mean, isn’t that how the anti-Christ is said to be? Able to sway the masses with his talk of purity and piety even though his soul is as black as pitch?

And again, I wouldn’t bother with something like A Patriot’s History because it’s the version of U.S. history that we’re all already familiar with: White Americans are God’s chosen. They’re all about courage and bravery and independence and freedom and liberty and democracy and puppies and kittens, they can do no wrong, blah, blah, blah, hand me something in which I can vomit, please.

Traditional U.S. history is, in a nutshell, feel-good history. It isn’t about reaching the truth of what actually happened; it’s about feeling good about oneself and one’s nation. Worse, it’s about brainwashing the sheeple about how great their lupine overlords are and is part of the long process of beating the sheeple into submission to their overlords.

Nor do I believe in, as we progressives are accused of by the right, feel-bad history.

Problem is, anything that contradicts the traditional myths that are passed off as American history is labeled, immediately, as “anti-American” or the like. 

I believe in acknowledging what the United States of America has gotten right and what it has gotten wrong. Declaring independence from the British monarchy, for instance: right. Smacking down the pro-slavery South in the Civil War: right (but we Northerners should have finished the job…). Defeating Hitler and his allies hell-bent on world conquest in World War II: right. Decimating the Native Americans and stealing their land in violated treaty after violated treaty: wrong. Slavery: wrong. Interning Japanese Americans during World War II: wrong. The Vietnam War: wrong. Allowing the White House to be stolen in 2000: wrong. The Vietraq War and the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors: wrong. The election of the nation’s first non-white-male president in 2008: pretty cool.

We weaken, not strengthen, the nation by continuing to pass off jingoistic lies and half-truths and whitewashing as American history. You can’t fix weaknesses whose existence you won’t even fucking acknowledge.

A Patriot’s History: More of the same.

A People’s History: At least you get another view, a more complete picture, an idea of the nation’s weaknesses that need to be addressed.

Which is the more patriotic? To work to improve one’s nation, especially to ensure the expansion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and liberty and justice for all, or to claim that the white-male geniuses created a perfect nation and that there is no more work to be done?

Pot calls the kettle ‘radical’

Media bias can be subtle. But there it is.

Take this from The Associated Press today:

A radical American imam on Yemen’s most-wanted militant list who had contact with two 9/11 hijackers praised alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as a hero on his personal website [today].

The posting on the website for Anwar al Awlaki, who was a spiritual leader at two mosques where three 9/11 hijackers worshipped, said American Muslims who condemned the attacks on the Texas military base last week are hypocrites who have committed treason against their religion.

Awlaki said the only way a Muslim can justify serving in the U.S. military is if he intends to “follow in the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

“Nidal Hassan [sic] is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people,” Awlaki wrote.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, is accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 in a shooting spree [on] Thursday. Hasan’s family attended the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., where Awlaki was preaching in 2001.

Hasan’s mother’s funeral was held at the Falls Church mosque on May 31, 2001, according to her obituary in the Roanoke Times newspaper, around the same time two 9/11 hijackers worshipped at the mosque and while Awlaki was preaching.

Awlaki is a native-born U.S. citizen who left the United States in 2002, eventually traveling to Yemen. He was released from a Yemeni jail last year and has since gone missing. He is on Yemen’s most-wanted militant list, according to three Yemeni security officials….

Wow. So we are more or less associating Hasan with 9/11 because Awlaki has praised Hasan on Awlaki’s website and Awlaki might have known some of the 9/11 hijackers. Irresponsible.

But most of all, I have a problem with the casual use of the word “radical.”

What a loaded term, “radical.”

I just Googled “radical,” and the first online dictionary definition of the word “radical,” as the AP story above uses it, that I see is this:

3 a : marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional : extreme b : tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions c : of, relating to, or constituting a political group associated with views, practices, and policies of extreme change d : advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs <the radical right>

OK, so maybe we accurately can call Anwar al Awlaki “radical,” but what about the United States of America?

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 Arab/Muslim hijackers – 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon – attacked targets on U.S. soil, killing under just 3,000 people.

In response, the unelected Bush regime (stealing a presidential election — that’s pretty radical in my book) launched wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush regime did not treat 9/11 as what it was — terrorist attacks — meaning that you hunt down the terrorists responsible for the attacks – but instead repeatedly called it a “war,” a la Big Brother in 1984. (Just repeat a lie often enough…)

The U.S. may declare war on another nation legally only when that nation has provoked a war. The U.S. had no legal grounds on which to go to war with Iraq, which is why the Bush regime gave the United Nations Security Council — which had refused to rubber-stamp the Bush regime’s Vietraq War like a good little Security Council should – the middle finger and in March 2003 invaded Iraq anyway, against the United Nations’ wishes.

That seems pretty radical to me — to launch wars upon Iraq and Afghanistan, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, when those nations didn’t even have any of their citizens participate in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

And it’s pretty fucking radical to expect Muslims and Arabs not to have a problem with this illegal, immoral, unjust, unprovoked and indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims and Arabs on their own land. 

I don’t blame Hasan for having had a problem with it, because I have a problem with it, and I’m not even Arab or Muslim. I just have a conscience. (And I can reason and I have some idea of what actually is going on in the world because I don’t watch Fox “News.”)

Killing people when it is not in clear self-defense is radical, whether the killers are “Islamofascist” suicide bombers or shooters like Hasan — or members of the United States military who continue to kill innocent civilians throughout the Middle East to this day. (It’s still killing even if it’s high-tech.)

I agree with the “radical” Awlaki that Hasan apparently “could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people” — that seems rather obvious — and it is my understanding that the conflicted Hasan tried to leave the U.S. military, but that the U.S. military not only would not release him, but decided to ship him off to Afghanistan.

Smart!

If we are going to argue that Awlaki or Hasan is “radical” or “insane,” then we also should take a look at the actions of the United States of America, which only continues to fuel the flames of the “war on terror” that it claims it wishes to extinguish. That is radical and that is insane.

(Of course, it’s debatable whether the powers that be want the “war on terror” to ever end in the first place; it’s great business for the war profiteers and the oil mega-corporations.)

It’s pretty radical that I, who do not subscribe to Islam or Christianity (or the other Gang for God, Judaism), am caught up in the war between the three feuding bullshit religions whether I want to be or not, because with the launching of some nuclear missiles, this “holy” war could change things radically for every living thing on the planet.

It is the media’s job to tell us what’s going on — not to take sides and to get us also to take sides in “holy” wars.

If the AP is going to refer to those outside of the United States who act beyond the pale as “radicals,” then it should start referring to those within the United States who act beyond the pale as “radicals” as well.

You know, to be fair and balanced…