Clint, I forgive you

Reuters photo

A disheveled and addled Clint Eastwood performs at the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention — a live-television political disaster along the lines of a sweaty Richard Nixon.

It wasn’t that long ago that I bought the Clint Eastwood-directed film “J. Edgar” on DVD. No, it’s not Eastwood’s best film, and no, as I noted at the time that “J. Edgar” was in the theaters, “J. Edgar,” as a gay-themed film, is no “Milk” (which also was scripted by gay screenwriter Dustin Lance Black) or “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s flawed, but it’s watchable.

I enjoyed Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” too. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s worthwhile.

Even I am fairly too young to remember the “Dirty Harry” movies, so I will remember Eastwood as the director of some good films later in his life.

And I will give him a pass for his disastrous appearance at the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention last night. I will blame instead the fucktards who decided to ask him to appear.

Really, it was like elder abuse to allow the 82-year-old Eastwood to speak on the topic of politics in front of a live television audience.

Let me repeat that:

He’s 82. His mind is not what it used to be, as is evidenced by his rather halting, forgetful — I’ll say it: senile – delivery of what was supposed to be (I guess) comedy.

While an expert on film, Eastwood is about as sharp on the topic of politics* as is Britney Spears, who has a cameo in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” (it was almost as unfair to allow Eastwood to speak on politics as it was Britney).

Admittedly, I have yet to be able to get through all of Eastwood’s latest performance. I watched at least a few minutes of it on Hulu before I had to stop. It was like watching a puppy being slowly run over by a dump truck. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

Finally, again, Eastwood is an expert of film. Not of live television.

I get it, he’s Clint Fucking Eastwood, and who’s going to ask Clint Eastwood to audition for something?

But, as Rachel Maddow fairly dissects the decision to have Eastwood appear before Mittens Romney did last night, Eastwood’s performance was political tactical disaster.

Obviously Eastwood was meant to appeal to the white male set who view themselves as macho and bad-ass and to the bimbos who think that these macho, macho men actually are, well, macho.

He-man Charlton Heston, who used to shill for the NRA (and who, like Britney, also starred in a Michael Moore documentary), keeled over in 2008, and so the Repugnican Tea Party dipshits got Clint Eastwood.

But putting a doddering old white man on live national television right before Mittens was a strategic mistake of perhaps epic proportion. Sure, there are millions of Americans who are OK with the You-damned-kids-get-off-my-lawn! thing, but they already vote Repugnican Tea Party.

Millions of Americans whom we call “swing voters,” I surmise, were turned off by Eastwood’s crusty, cranky, addled performance, which can only remind them of the last grumpy old man whom they rejected, John McCainosaurus.

And instead of talking about Mittens, Americans are talking about Clint Eastwood’s shockingly bad performance.

Thanks, Clint.

Although you said last night that there are plenty of conservatives in Hollywood, you certainly didn’t just help get another wingnut elected to the White House.

It’s almost like you intentionally sabotaged the Mittens campaign.

–

*Eastwood’s first salvo at President Barack Obama was that the nation has too many unemployed people. I will agree with that, and, like Ted Rall, I believe that Obama should have pushed through a strong, FDR-like jobs program when he had both houses of Congress in his party’s control in 2009 and 2010, but the fact of the matter is that it was the unelected George W. Bush whose administration of the nation destroyed our economy, and the fact of the matter is that after the Repugnican Tea Party traitors regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2010 election, they’ve done nothing but oppose Obama (they would have killed any strong jobs program he had proposed) and they have done nothing themselves to counter unemployment, such as through a strong jobs program, so they need to be blamed for our continuing unemployment (and underemployment) problem, too.

But all of this is too nuanced for Dirty Harry, who simply blamed unemployment squarely on Barack Obama.

Herman Cain, the new Moses

Updated below (on Sunday, November 20, 2011)

AFP photo

Shhhhh! God is telling him what to do next!

God wanted Herman Cain to run for president, according to Herman Cain, according to The Associated Press, which recently reported:

Atlanta — Republican Herman Cain said God convinced him to enter the race for president, comparing himself to Moses: “‘You’ve got the
wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?’”

The Georgia business executive played up his faith Saturday after battling sexual harassment allegations for two weeks, trying to shift the conversation to religion, an issue vital to conservative Republicans, especially in the South.

In a speech Saturday to a national meeting of young Republicans, Cain said the Lord persuaded him after much prayer.

“That’s when I prayed and prayed and prayed. I’m a man of faith — I had to do a lot of praying for this one, more praying than I’ve ever done before in my life,” Cain said. “And when I finally realized that it was God saying that this is what I needed to do, I was like Moses. ‘You’ve got the wrong man, Lord. Are you sure?’”

Once he made the decision, Cain said, he did not look back. …

Because he would have turned into a pillar of salt, right?

Anyway, this reminds me of an editorial cartoon that I saw recently that tackles the question of what we’re supposed to do when God has two candidates in the same race. I mean, didn’t God tell Michele Bachmann that he want her to be president? According to the AP, Rick Perry’s wife Anita indicated that God gave her the message that her husband should run for president, so that’s at least two horses that Jehovah has in the race, from what I can tell.

If memory serves, the same ’toon also points out that when the rest of us claim that God talks to us, we are deemed insane, but it’s OK for right-wing Repugnican Tea Party candidates to make such claims.

Not only does Herman Cain have God on his side, but he has his wife on his side. The Associated Press also reports recently:

Washington — Herman Cain’s wife says the claims of sexual harassment against the GOP presidential candidate don’t ring true because he “totally respects women.”

Gloria Cain told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren: “I’m thinking he would have to have a split personality to do the things that were said [he did].” [Um, yeah, that might be it, actually...]

In an interview to be aired Monday during the show “On the Record,” Gloria Cain said she can’t believe the claims he harassed women when he led the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.

“You hear the graphic allegations and we know that would have been something that’s totally disrespectful of her as a woman,” she said. “And I know the type of person he is. He totally respects women.” …

Four women have now accused Herman Cain of sexually harassing them when he led the National Restaurant Association. He has denied wrongdoing and has been trying to move forward in his presidential campaign. …

As Jon Stewart recently pointed out, a man who sexually harasses women at work usually doesn’t share this fact with his wife.

And it’s not like Gloria Cain would have any reason to lie to us, would she? Such as the chance at becoming First Lady?

And, in general, when do you get to use your spouse or other close relative as a character reference?

Oh, and Cain recently blamed Barack Obama for having ended NASA’s space shuttle program, even though it was George W. Bush who in 2004 decided to end the program. Like we can afford NASA anyway. (Let them eat space shuttle wreckage!)

Rachel Maddow’s theory that the Cain campaign is one big practical joke (maybe Ashton Kutcher secretly is Cain’s campaign manager) seems likelier and likelier with each passing news day.

P.S. I have to share this item, which I saw on Joe. My. God.:

Update (Sunday, November 20, 2011): Here is the editorial cartoon that I mentioned above:

Check out more of Ted Rall’s stuff at rall.com.

Four more years (of hopelessness and stasis)!

Associated Press photo

Barack Obama probably has his re-election the bag — not because he’s a good president (no, that’s not a halo encircling his noggin), but because his Repugnican Tea Party challengers are such abject fucktards.

For now, anyway, it appears that all that President Barack Obama has to do is sit back and let the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidates self- and other-destruct — and that we’re going to be stuck with another four more years of President Hopey-Changey, which is only (maybe) a notch above what we’d get with a President Romney or President Perry or President Cain.

No one likes Mitt Romney, probably not even his mother (is she still alive?); Herman Cain has been accused of sexual harassment by at least three women (strike one, strike two, strike three…); and while Rick Perry denies that he was drunk or drugged up when he alternately acted like a drunken frat boy and a drunken, giddy, giggly school girl during a speech that he gave in New Hampshire last weekend, no one believes him. (And actually, it would have behooved Perry to say that yes, he’d had a bit too much to drink and/or had had a prescription painkiller on board rather than to assert, as he did, that that was just his normal, chemical-substance-free speech-giving behavior.)

A Quinnipiac University poll taken October 25 through October 31 of more than 2,200 registered voters nationwide with a margin of error of only plus or minus 2.1 percentage points shows Obama beating Romney, Cain and Perry by a margin of 5 percent to 16 percent (with Romney trailing Obama by 5 percent, Cain by 10 percent and Perry by 16 percent).

A Reuters/Ipsos nationwide poll taken October 31 through November 3 shows Obama beating Cain by 5 percent and Perry by 6 percent. That poll has Obama and Romney statistically tied, with Romney at 44 percent and Obama at 43 percent. (With fewer than 1,000 respondents, the poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percent.)

Mitt Romney consistently has done better against Obama in the polling matchups than the other Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes have, but if Romney’s own party isn’t excited about him, it’s difficult to see how the November 2012 general electorate is going to be.

It probably was over for Rick Perry even before his apparently drunken speech of last weekend, however. For at least the past month, national polls at best have put Perry at No. 3, behind Romney and Cain. Both a recent Quinnipiac University poll and a recent Faux “News” poll even put Romney at No. 4 — behind Newt Gingrich. A CBS News/New York Times poll conducted October 19 through October 24 even put Perry at No. 5 — behind not only Gingrich, but also Ron Paul.

But probably the No. 1 thing going against Rick Perry is the No. 1 thing that went against John McCainosaurus in 2008: George W. Bush.

It didn’t really matter who the Repugnican presidential candidate was in 2008; after the eight, long, nightmarish years of rule by the unelected Bush regime, pretty much no Repugnican was going to be elected to follow Bush.

George W. Bush is the Repugnican Tea Party’s Valdemort — you won’t hear his name uttered at a Repugnican presidential debate; if you listen to the Repugnicans, you will think that the last Repugnican president that we had was Ronald Reagan. Not even in 2008, when Gee Dubya still sat in the Oval Office, did the Repugnican contenders utter his name in a presidential  or vice presidential debate. It was as though the past eight years had never even happened.

So here is Rick Perry reminding us of the last governor of Texas who went on to the White House. Even if Perry did everything right — even if there were no Niggerhead and even if he hadn’t given a very apparently drunken speech last weekend — he couldn’t overcome the Gee Dubya handicap, and it handicaps him even more than it did McCainosaurus in 2008, since McCainosaurus isn’t from Texas and doesn’t sound like a Texas hick when he speaks.

This leaves Romney and Cain on the Repugnican Tea Party island. Cain’s “tea party” supporters have thrown their weight behind him, so they’re still in deep denial where the sexual harassment allegations against him are concerned. They’re trying to make him into some sort of martyr (and so is he), but the only fools who are going to buy that bullshit are the fools who already support Cain.

Every black person who is accused of some wrongdoing cannot knee-jerkedly claim that he or she is only being “lynched” as a sort of perpetual get-out-of-jail-free (race) card.  I expect Cain to implode within the coming week to next few weeks.

While the patriarchal, misogynist Repugnican Tea Party sees nothing wrong with the sexual harassment of women — hey, after a hard-workin’, capitalism-lovin’ man has fought his way to the top he should be able to engage in some grab-ass, or at the very least, some verbal grab-ass, no? — the average general-election voter does. Even if Cain could make it out of the Repugnican Tea Party primary season alive (he won’t), there’s no way that he could beat Obama.

November 2012 voters won’t buy Ann “Acid for Blood” Cunter’s stunningly racist recent assertion that “our [the Repugnican Tea Party’s] blacks are so much better than their [Democrats’] blacks.”

(“Our blacks” — that’s interesting. “Our” is a possessive pronoun. So apparently Ann Cunter believes that blacks still can be and/or should be owned.)

As far as Cunter’s assertion that “liberals detest, detest, detest conservative blacks” goes, I detest, detest, detest conservatives — wingnuts. I don’t care whether they are male or female, straight or gay, old or young, white, black, brown, green or purple. If you’re a wingnut, I detest you, regardless of your other demographics.

Cunter’s attempt to slander liberals and progressives as racist because they (we) won’t embrace a candidate who is black but whose world view and “values” system diametrically opposes their (our) own is as pathetic as it is intellectually dishonest.

And the fact of the matter is that the Repugnican Tea Party historically never would have put forth as its presidential candidate a man who had never held even one single elected political office. That the party would even consider doing so now — primarily or even only because the candidate is black, in cynical response to the fact that the current, Democratic president is black – demonstrates that the Repugnican Tea Party remains racist.

And again, black general-election voters won’t be taken in by Herman Cain any more than female general-election voters were taken in by Sarah Palin.

Cunter, in her pathetic attempt to spin the success of Cain within the Repugnican Tea Party, recently asserted that black members of the Repugnican Tea Party are superior to Democratic blacks because while it’s easy to be a black Democrat, black Repugnican Tea Partiers take a lot of flak from their black (presumably Democratic) counterparts.

Yes, Ann with Acid for Blood, when you support the historical oppressors, your cohorts won’t like you (gee, go figure!) – because you are a self-interested fucking turncoat, not because you’re such a courageous fucking soul. Nice try, though, you fucking liar.

Not that the Democratic Party has been great for blacks, not for at least the past three decades anyway — and some have posited, probably correctly, that Barack Obama, not wanting to appear to favor blacks over other races, paradoxically as president has done less for blacks than a white Democratic president would have done – but the Democratic Party clearly has been the lesser of the two evils for blacks for some time now.

Our real struggle is to not have to choose between any evils, but to have the government that represents the best interests of the majority of us.

Sadly, in November 2012 we will have no such choice of a viable presidential candidate who will represent the best interests of the majority of us. Our choice will be Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, most likely.

P.S. Rachel Maddow apparently seriously has posited an interesting theory that the Herman Cain campaign is one big practical joke, or, as she put it, is performance art, that Cain’s candidacy is not a serious candidacy, but is meant to punk us.

While I suppose that that is not absolutely impossible, it seems to me that there is another explanation for Maddow’s supporting evidence, such as the fact that in his first Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, Herman Cain very apparently actually quoted the lines from a song in a “Pokemon” movie as being the lines of a great poet. (Not too dissimilarly, his “9-9-9” tax plan apparently came from “Sim City,” the simulated city-administration video game.)

And that alternate (and, it seems to me, simpler and more likely) explanation is that Herman Cain has lazy, cynical plagiarists working for him.

For now, anyway, I take Cain’s displays of ineptitude, ignorance and lunacy — and his apparent lust for great power despite his woeful lack of qualifications for wielding such power – at face value. If Maddow is right and it all turns out to have been a joke, then ha ha ha, but in the meantime, it is critical that a joke like Herman Cain never gets into the Oval Office (whether the joke is intentional or not).

He was drunk. Or he has a brain tumor.

Associated Press photo

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and current Texas Gov. Rick Perry tangle at a Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate earlier this month in Las Vegas.

Jesus fuck. I’d read Internet buzz that Rick Perry apparently was drunk during a recent speech that he gave in New Hampshire, but Rachel Maddow’s coverage of it pretty much removes all doubt.

Slurring his words, being confused as to what his next word will be, choosing odd and quite unpresidential words and gestures, displaying emotional lability — yes indeed, Rick Perry very apparently was publicly drunk. On videocamera.

If not, perhaps he has a brain tumor.

Something neurological, whether it was alcohol and/or drug intoxication and/or some neurological condition, was going on.

Wow.

Let’s give this guy access to The Button — not.

Team Romney must be absolutely giddy, with it being all over but the (drunken) crying for Rick Perry, and with Herman Cain probably unable to politically survive the revelation that the National Restaurant Association, which he headed in the 1990s, very apparently did give payouts to one or two women who had accused Cain of sexual harassment. No matter what Cain did or did not do, such a payout itself is pretty fucking damaging.

And my guess is that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee kicks himself daily for having bailed out of the race so early.

P.S. Rachel Maddow does not come right out and say it in her piece that Perry appeared to be drunk, as it’s difficult to prove definitively whether or not someone was inebriated, and she and MSNBC no doubt don’t want to be sued. I have no such fear.

Assorted shit

Weiner weirdness

This man-bulge may or may not be that of U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, and this image may or may not have been manipulated. In any event, I’m pretty creeped out…

I don’t much care about “Weinergate,” but I did watch Rachel Maddow’s interview with New York U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner last night, and if I were Weiner’s political adviser, I’d advise him to STFU already. The more he talks, the deeper he digs his own hole.

After watching his interview with Maddow, I suspected that Weiner must (have) be(en) a lawyer, but his profile on Wikipedia indicates that this is not the case (his father was a lawyer, however, Wikipedia reports). But Weiner is lawyer-like in that he apparently believes that if he just throws a bunch of words at you, he’ll confuse you and you’ll just go away, because he’s some super-genius magician who can bamboozle anyone with his stupefying word magic.

From what I can gather from Weiner’s strange interview with Maddow, he acknowledges that the image of a substantial erect penis inside of gray underwear (see above) might be an image of him, but that it also might have been digitally or otherwise altered, and that in any case, regardless of whose erection it is, and whether or not the image of it has been altered, he claims that he never sent the image to anyone, so it was someone else who did it as a “weiner”-based “prank,” ha ha ha ha ha.

You know, maybe it’s just me, but if someone (or if I) had ever taken a picture of my erection, inside or outside of my underwear, I’d know it. For certain. Just sayin’.

In any event, the more that Weiner talks about it, the skankier and creepier he comes off. If he doesn’t STFU already, he just might turn me off from men forever.

–

Mittmania begins!

AFP photo

Well, she seems excited! And so does this little tot:

Associated Press photo

Yawn-inducing Repugnican Party hack Mitt Romney has made his 2012 presidential quest official today.

He has kicked it off by proclaiming that “Barack Obama has failed America,” as though the years 2001 through 2008 never fucking happened. (Yup. We went right from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, you see.)

Obama is far from perfect, and he has reneged on many if not most of his progressive campaign promises, but to assert that any of the Repugnican (Tea) Party traitors who now have their eye on the White House is the solution to the problems that the unelected BushCheneyCorp left us with is beyond insane. (To talk about putting another Texas governor in the White House especially is insane.)

I still expect Romney to win the 2012 Repugnican (Tea) Party presidential nomination, primarily because he apparently is the party establishment’s anointed one — and, as The Associated Press notes, “Romney has built an experienced political team, collected serious campaign cash and crafted a campaign that is ready to go full-bore,” and “While his likely opponents have jostled for the spotlight, Romney largely has worked in private to fine-tune his political machine” – but, as I’ve noted before, Romney is about as exciting as was 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole.

Is anyone on the planet jazzed up over Mitt Romney? Anyone?

When he makes his proclamations, such as that “Barack Obama has failed America,” and when he titles his latest book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness (as though he somehow could take at least partial credit for that “greatness” for which he smugly offers “no apology”), it falls fairly flat. (The paperback edition of No Apology has the new subtitle of Believe in America, by the way.)

Call me awful, but I suspect that Romney’s Mormonism contributes greatly to his blandness, as Mormons are expected to be (or at least are expected to appear to be) squeaky clean and beyond any moral reproach, which makes them more like Stepford wives (and husbands and children) than like real, live, authentic human beings.

And there’s no way in hell that I’d ever vote for an active Mormon of any party, not only because Mormonism is a cult with bizarre, bullshit beliefs, but because I’ll never forgive the patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic, xenophobic Mormon Cult for its participation in the narrow passage of Prop Hate.

–

Why Cain cain’t win

Associated Press photo

Wingnutty former pizza boss Herman Cain and “tea party” whackjob U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann ham it up for the cameras in New Hampshire earlier this week.

Repugnican (Tea) Party presidential hopeful Herman Cain, whose main claim to any sort of thing remotely even like fame is that he used to be the boss of the Godfather’s Pizza chain, has been polling in the double digits among the Repugnican (Tea) Party traitors lately.

Salon.com yesterday wondered aloud why Cain is doing so well in the polls right now, but didn’t go there, so I will: Cain, who is black, is the cynical Repugnican (Tea) Party’s answer to Barack Obama.

How tempting it is to front a black man to “prove” that the Repugnican (Tea) Party is the party for black people! (Indeed, Cain has called the Democratic Party a “plantation” for blacks, and while the Democratic Party hasn’t done nearly enough for blacks as it should have done, to refer to it as a “plantation” is a considerable stretch, especially since the Repugnican [Tea] Party that Cain represents has done even less for blacks than has the Democratic Party.)

But the thing is, with former Repugnican National Committee chair Michael Steele, the Repugnican (Tea) Party tried that cynical strategy already: The Repugnicans elected Steele in January 2009 as a cynical response to Obama’s election in November 2008, and then they booted the bumbling Steele (whose highest elected office had been lieutenant governor of Maryland, that’s how few black Repugnican politicians there are) two years later, replacing him with the party’s traditional white man.

And given that the main problem that the “tea party” traitors have with Obama is that he isn’t 100 percent white, how well are they going to take to Cain, even though on many if not most of the issues he talks like they do?

I suspect that Cain’s supporters are the same party-establishment types who had thought that it was such a swell idea to put Steele at the head of their party. I just can’t see Cain doing very well among the “tea party” se(c)t, whose gatherings look like KKK rallies.

Even if he made it alive out of the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season — which he won’t — every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has been at least a U.S. senator, the governor of a state or U.S. vice president. And Cain hasn’t held a single elected office.

And I just can’t see a significant number of black American voters defecting from Barack Obama’s “plantation” to Uncle Herman’s cabin in November 2012.

Herman Cain doesn’t mean that the Repugnican Tea Party is great for blacks any more than Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann means that the Repugnican Tea Party is great for women.

That the Repugnican Tea Party apparently believes that blacks (and women) will believe otherwise only demonstrates the party’s contempt for them.

Jon Stewart’s Rally for Nihilism

Updated below

These Obama-campaignesque graphics promote faux competing political rallies that may or may not actually happen next month in Washington, D.C.

I love Jon Stewart. Always have. Probably always will. But his faux October 30 “Rally to Restore Sanity” at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (which may or may not actually be an actual gathering, since, according to The Associated Press, no permit has been granted for any such rally) misses the mark.

I’m all for sanity and reason, and I love the fact that Stewart is mocking Glenn Beck’s “Christo”fascist rally to “restore honor” last month at the National Mall in D.C.

But I’m disturbed that Stewart apparently is afraid of proudly wearing the mantle of liberalism or progressivism but instead talks about a “million moderate march” of the “70- to 80-percenters” (Americans whom he claims are moderates, despite the fact that the left wing and the right wing both seem to have the support of at least around 30 percent of the electorate, leaving no more than around 40 percent actually in the middle). 

Stewart, in his Thursday announcement of his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” paints both those on the left and the right as not having lives, and thus they are politically vocal — you know, having nothing else better to do.

You know, we don’t have enough civil and political engagement in the United States of America as it is, so for Stewart to (probably unintentionally) be popularizing political apathy, or at least political nonparticipation, doesn’t serve our nation or the system that we call “democracy,” that I can see.

I understand that most Americans have (to a large degree self-inflicted, unnecessarily) busy lives, but to broadly brush those who do take a stand on political issues as losers with too much time on their hands is harmful, not helpful. Even if I disagree wholeheartedly with the “tea-baggers” (and I do), at least they make time for civic and political engagement, even if I view their gatherings as akin to KKK rallies (and I do). 

Stewart also apparently lumps the likes of the 9/11 “truthers” in with the left, which is a categorical error. A conspiracy theorist may be a leftist, a right-winger, a moderate (as Stewart seems to love so much) or fairly entirely apolitical. A conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory, and it may be politically ideologically inspired or not. (The conspiracy theories about Barack Obama certainly seem to be politically ideologically inspired, as well as inspired by racism and white supremacism, but I see little political ideology in the 9/11 conspiracy theories, which seem to be more about a generic “government” than even about a political party or even about certain politicians.)  

Stewart also apparently lumps in the members of Code Pink, who have worn red paint on their hands at public hearings to give the (correct) message that certain public officials have blood on their hands, with the gun nuts who have thought it a great idea to bring assault rifles to public political rallies. I don’t know about you, but I am a lot more concerned about socially retarded, NRA-card-carrying, wingnutty males carrying assault rifles in public than I am about some pissed-off progressive women wearing red paint on their hands at public hearings.

Stewart in announcing his rally also focuses on the more extreme messages that are put out there. Sure, comparing one’s political opponent to Adolf Hitler more often than not is trite and usually is inaccurate. (One of Stewart’s pre-made signs for his rally, he joked, reads: “I Disagree with You, but I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler.”)

However, to stop at the argument as to whether or not George W. Bush accurately can be compared to Adolf Hitler overlooks the fact that George W. Bush, while he didn’t exterminate six millions Jews and millions of others, was responsible for the deaths of at least tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

And that’s the problem (or at least one of the largest problems) that I have with “moderates” — “moderates” are almost always willing to overlook a certain amount of evil. Six million innocents slaughtered: Baaaaad! “Only” tens of thousands of innocents slaughtered in our name and in the name of “liberation”: Meh — we can overlook that! People die in war! (“But this was a bogus war!” you remind the “moderate,” who then promptly shuts down because he or she no longer wants to discuss politics.)

So I have a problem with Jon Stewart further fostering the already too-prevalent attitude of “I’m too busy to be a politically active citizen,” “Politics is for losers,” etc.

More often than not the reason that “moderates” hate political messages isn’t that the messages are extreme as much as that the messages themselves, being about politics, remind the “moderates” that the “moderates” haven’t bothered to educate themselves about or involve themselves in politics — and who wants to be reminded of their deficits?

Way too many people in the mushy middle, these “moderates,” these “independents,” these “swing voters,” claim that their centrism puts them on higher ground than the left or the right when, in fact, the actual case is that they’re just too fucking lazy and/or wussy to carefully study both sides of the arguments and then pick a side, good or evil.

I see nothing to admire in someone who’s too lazy or cowardly or selfish to pick a side on our most serious, most pressing issues. I see it as an abject abdication of one’s civic duty. (And I’d call it un-American, too, except that political and civic laziness seem to be as American as apple pie and cell phones and SUVs.)

Jon Stewart’s faux right-wing nemesis, Stephen Colbert, has announced that, in response to Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” on October 30 he’s going to hold a competing “March to Keep Fear Alive,” which is a lot closer to how the right wing actually operates than how the left wing operates according to Jon Stewart. (Colbert admonishes us to “never forget — ‘reason’ is just one letter away from ‘treason.’ Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.”)

I can’t help but notice that in the faux October 30 rallies of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who apparently are supposed to be diametrically politically opposed to each other, we see the right wing and the apolitical, mushy middle represented, but we see no real representation of or for the left wing, which is telling. So far to the right has the nation’s political discourse gone, and so much do media corporations (Comedy Central is corporate, of course) fear pissing off the right wing, that Jon Stewart’s “clarion call” for centrism is seen as the counterbalance to the extreme right.   

I get it that ultimately it’s all a joke — Stewart and Colbert appear on Comedy Central, for fuck’s sake — but let’s face it, in this day and age, entertainment and news are so intermixed that the line between the two is so blurry as to be invisible, and millions of Americans get their political “news” from Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central.

And Jon Stewart is telling these Americans that it’s OK to use one’s busy-ness as an excuse to be apolitical, and Jon Stewart is telling these Americans, essentially, that all impassioned public political speech essentially is the same, and that those who participate in impassioned public political discourse are losers who should get lives.

Jon Stewart isn’t promoting democracy or civic and political engagement. He’s promoting (again, probably unintentionally) nihilism.

And we have more than enough of that already.

–

Update: I see that fellow sexy gay blogger Glenn Greenwald has taken on this topic too, and basically he said what I said, only in his more academic style. First and foremost, Greenwald also talks about the false equivalencies between the left and the right that those who proclaim themselves to be centrists/moderates put forth.

I wrote back in May that it was writer John Avlon’s string of such false equivalencies, one after the other, as well as his blatant hearsay that he presented as fact, that prevented me from being able to get into his book Wingnuts. Much of what I wrote about Avlon, unfortunately, could be said also of Jon Stewart. I wrote of Avlon in May:  

About all that [Avlon] points to, in the 18 pages [of Wingnuts] that I was able to stomach, in order to exemplify the far left or the far right are some examples of some political figure, usually George W. Bush or Barack Obama, being compared to Adolf Hitler. Ooooo! Insightful!

However, while skimming through his book, I noted that apparently anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is a “wingnut” for having stood up against the Bush regime’s bogus Vietraq War that killed her son — a war that the majority of Americans now acknowledge, fucking finally, was a bogus war.

Hmmm… A woman’s young son is killed for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton profits obscenely in that bogus war (as do the BushCheneyCorp’s other oily subsidiaries), and because she has the gall to protest her son’s pointless death, that makes Sheehan a “wingnut,” according to Avlon, who, I take it, hasn’t had a loved one killed in the Vietraq War or ever even been in harm’s way himself. 

Overall, Avlon reminds me of a lazy, mediocre parent or teacher who witnesses two children fighting, and, because he doesn’t want to bother to try to figure out what they’re fighting about — and whether one child might actually be in the right and the other child might actually be in the wrong — he labels both fighting children as equally guilty. There. Done with it. Why bother to unravel the facts? And why take sides?

Except that the real world is so much more complex than that, and our crumbling democracy didn’t really need another book put out there to tell people that instead of closely examining the facts and taking a principled stand on important issues based upon the facts, they need to just join the mushy middle, because obviously there’s no difference between the impassioned right and the impassioned left (or, as Avlon calls everyone who isn’t a milquetoast, apolitical, apathetic sleepwalker, the “wingnuts”)….

For Avlon to make the false equivalency between the far left and the far right — to lump everyone who feels strongly about politics together as “wingnuts” — isn’t only grossly inaccurate, but it’s dangerous to our already endangered, dumbed-down democracy.

Those last three paragraphs I could have written about Stewart, unfortunately — and Stewart, too, pointed out that members of both the left and the right have compared a sitting president to Adolf Hitler, as though this were some stunning insight.

Anyway, Greenwald writes on this topic:

I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don’t have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it’s also fine if, as seems to be the case, he’s eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism.

But [an] example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too — the proposition that [George W.] Bush is a “war criminal” — is an extremely poor one given that the general in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.

Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart’s examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn’t born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party.

The claim that Bush is “a war criminal” has ample basis, and it’s deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one’s centrist bona fides.  

It’s admirable to want to apply the same standards to both sides, but straining to manufacture false equivalencies doesn’t accomplish that; sometimes, honestly applying the same standards to each side will result in a finding that one side, at least in that regard, is actually worse.

When that’s the case, a person engaged in truly independent, non-ideological inquiry — rather than the pretense of such — will expressly acknowledge the imbalance, not concoct an equivalency where it doesn’t exist.

By stark contrast, Stephen Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” seems extremely well-focused and on-point.

Yup.

Colbert, because he’s only pretending to be a right-winger, has that pretension as cover, but Jon Stewart just couldn’t bring himself to be a strong standard-bearer for the left. Instead, apparently in order to appeal to the apolitical, he apparently felt that he had to assert quite incorrectly that the left is just as insane as is the right — thus actually undercutting, not strengthening, his position.

Finally, I wrote that “millions of Americans get their political ‘news’ from Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central,” and this article posits that while the old farts get their “news” from Faux “News,” the members of the younger demographic indeed get their “news” from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Holding a journalism degree, I find it incredibly odd, if not sad and pathetic, that Americans who want real news these days have to turn to Comedy Central. (Well, OK, there is MSNBC. I love Rachel Maddow.)

However, it being the case that Stewart has so much influence — regardless of the argument as to whether he should have that much influence — Stewart should wield his influence much more carefully and responsibly. Falsely conflating the left and the right as Stewart has done is reckless and irresponsible, because, while he ostensibly is a comedian, millions of Americans take him quite seriously.

Bumbling Brewer belongs behind bars

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a geriatric Barbie, is shown before the start of her first and last disastrous gubernatorial debate Wednesday night in Phoenix. Brewer’s speaking skills aren’t her worst crime, however; she very apparently has corrupt ties to the private prison industry, and the “breathing-while-brown” bill that she signed apparently was meant to send more business the private prison industry’s way.

Dorothy must have thrown some water on the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Repugnican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, because Brewer had a meltdown on live television.

I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed watching, over and over again, the clip of Brewer freezing on live TV as she delivered her opening statement in her debate Wednesday night with her Democratic challenger Terry Goddard (who now is Arizona’s attorney general) like a nervous elementary school child delivering a book report.

Brewer’s word choice in the debate was as sophisticated as an elementary school child’s, too. This is how she opened before having a painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name: “I have, uh, [long pause] done so much, and I just cannot believe that we have changed everything since I have become your governor in the last 600 days. Arizona has been brought back from its abyss….”

Yikes.

“We have changed everything”? “Arizona has been brought back from its abyss”?

Really?

The rest of the nation is still reeling from the devastation wrought not only by Hurricane Katrina but also by Hurricane George and Hurricane Dick, but under the governance of the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, Arizona is a magical oasis that has been “brought back from its abyss”?

What about Brewer’s other talking point, which is that the “illegals” have put Arizona into an abyss? Is Arizona in an abyss or has Brewer rescued it from an abyss? Which is it?

Brewer clearly isn’t fit to be governor even of Alaska. Her performance at her first and apparently final debate isn’t her only meltdown caught on tape. Rachel Maddow’s reportage of Brewer’s debate meltdown shows that Brewer struggles to speak coherently in public and that when confronted with questions from reporters who don’t lick her lily-white ass, like good reporters should, Brewer bolts like Nevada’s Sharron “Second Amendment Remedies” Angle.

And after her debacle of a debate performance, Brewer has refused to participate in any more debates from now until election day. (Her Democratic opponent has proposed that they have six debates.)

Yeah, that’s the fearless leadership that’s going to bring Arizona out of “its abyss” (or already has brought Arizona out of “its abyss” – I’m so confused…). What Arizona really needs now is an easily addled old woman who believes (as Sharron Angle believes) that the media’s job is to give her free positive publicity.

Years ago, as a reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Arizona in Tucson, I interviewed at some length Brewer’s Democratic opponent, Terry Goddard, who at that time had just been the mayor of Phoenix and was running for the governorship against Repugnican Richie-Rich frat boy Fife Symington III, who went on to beat Goddard but who later was forced to resign the governorship in disgrace after he was convicted of bank fraud in 1997.

I remember virtually nothing of my interview with Goddard (it was, after all, 20 years ago, and I don’t have a copy of the article that I wrote from that interview), but I remember being impressed with how intelligent and well-spoken — and thus virtually gubernatorially unelectable in Arizona — Goddard is.  

Seriously, though: intelligent, competent, honest politicians like Goddard don’t do very well in Arizona. Arizonans prefer crooked dumbfucks like racist Mormon motherfucker Repugnican dipshit Evan Mecham, the state’s first governor to be impeached and removed from office (under a cloud of financial fraud); the felonious Fife Symington III; and Jan Alzheimer — er, Jan Brewer, whose centerpiece for her campaign for the governorship (to which she ascended after Arizona’s elected Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, was tapped to become President Barack Obama’s secretary of homeland security) has been to assert that all of the state’s problems are caused by undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico) — even though a new study from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that illegal immigration to the United States between 2007 and 2009 was about two-thirds less than it was between 2000 and 2005. So illegal immigration is declining, not increasing.

There’s also the interesting angle that Brewer’s campaign manager, Chuck Coughlin, also does the public relations for the Tennessee-based private prisons corporation Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) – which apparently has stood to profit from SB 1070, which the Phoenix New Times appropriately called the “breathing-while-brown” law that the racist, white supremacist Brewer enthusiastically signed into law – and that a federal judge then appropriately struck down as unconstitutional.*

“What’s the big deal with the CCA contributions [to Brewer's political interests]?” the New Times asks and then answers: “CCA operates six prisons in Arizona, three of which house detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

So apparently CCA helps Jan Brewer and Jan Brewer helps CCA by assuring that CCA has plenty of brown-skinned bodies to be incarcerated in its private prison facilities.

(Rachel Maddow also has been reporting on Brewer’s apparently corrupt ties to CCA; she did an excellent report on the matter here.)

Jan Brewer belongs not in the governor’s chair, but belongs behind bars for corruption, even though she only dutifully corruptly follows in the corrupt footsteps of her corrupt Repugnican (redundant…) predecessors Evan Mecham and Fife Symington III.

Even if she weren’t corrupt and racist and white supremacist, Brewer’s refusal to participate in any more debates demonstrates that she is utterly unfit to continue to govern Arizona, which she has made into a national pariah enough already.

P.S. I just saw this at the Arizona Republic’s website:

As for that opening statement, Brewer said in an interview [yesterday] that her mind went blank. “If someone had asked me my name, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them,” she said.

Shit, I was just joking (for the most part) when I referred to Brewer’s “painfully long Alzheimer’s moment of silence in which she appeared not to even be able to remember her own name.”

Apparently, according to Jan “What’s My Name?” Brewer herself, it was no joke.

If Arizonans actually elect this Alzheimer’s special, they’re even dumber that we of the rest of the nation already think they are.

–

*In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times reports:

The U.S. Department of Justice [yesterday] sued a controversial and popular Arizona sheriff, alleging that his department was refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether it discriminated against Latinos while trying to catch illegal immigrants.

The Justice Department said that Maricopa County [which encompasses Phoenix and is not on the border with Mexico] Sheriff Joe Arpaio was the first local law enforcement official in 30 years to refuse to provide documents in a federal civil rights inquiry. The federal government could withhold $113 million in funding from Maricopa County if Arpaio can’t produce records demonstrating that he avoids racial discrimination.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented. It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division…

Arpaio claims that the Obama administration is playing politics, of course, but the L.A. Times also notes that

In the summer of 2008, under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department launched a preliminary investigation into the allegations of racial profiling [by Arpaio's office]. In March 2009, after President Obama had assumed office, the department expanded the inquiry into a full-fledged probe.

What the white supremacists who run Arizona (Brewer, Arpaio, et. al.) – and their white supremacist supporters — apparently don’t get is that each state has to follow federal law, including the federal civil rights laws, and so that Arizona doesn’t get to be the South Africa of the Southwest.

Arpaio, I have to say, is a major racist, fascistic asshole who deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of white supremacist history along with Jan Brewer.

Why can’t Obama get any love?

Reuters photo

A beleaguered President Barack Obama called a last-minute press conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House yesterday afternoon after a self-induced politically disastrous week. Meanwhile, Obama administration betrayee Shirley Sherrod says that she’s still deliberating whether she will return to the Obama administration or whether she could be a more powerful and more effective agent of hope and change from outside of the administration. (I hope that she chooses the latter course of action, that she writes a book and goes on a lecture tour, perhaps.) 

Rachel Maddow (whose stuff I should watch more often) has a piece on how President Barack Obama just can’t get his legislative and other accomplishments acknowledged. She notes that the Beltway has dubbed this phenomenon “the Obama paradox.”

Eh. It’s not rocket science. Let’s look at the pieces of it:

Obama never was going to get and never will get the support of the Repugnicans, something that he knew or should have known even before he was inaugurated. Not only is he a Democrat (at least titularly), but he isn’t a white man. Two strikes and he’s out.

I’m not sure whether Obama’s (rather lame) attempts at bipartisanship were naive or whether they were political kabuki — that is, he knew that he’d never get any significant bipartisan support, but he figured that he’d better put on a good show of trying for it.

Also, because they’ve coined “the Obama paradox,” I’ll coin “the Bush effect.”

“The Bush effect” is the phenomenon in which the president who preceded you was so fucking awful that the presidential bar has been lowered all the fucking way to China. Therefore, in order to be perceived as anything near a Lincolnesque or Washingtonian president, you pretty much have to raise the dead — or at least heal the blind.

Then, there is this phenomenon in which, because American standards have dropped so low, too many Americans want praise and special recognition for just doing their jobs.

This, of course, ties in with the Bush effect, but the fact is that Obama has just been doing his job. (Minimally, that is; the legislation that he’s been able to pass has given too many concessions to the corporatocrats and has not been progressive enough.)

Obama is supposed to lead the nation in a way that benefits the most number of Americans. That’s the job of the president of the United States. (If the POTUS is a Repugnican, then the job description changes: the Repugnican POTUS leads the nation in a way that benefits the richest.)

For Obama to brag about just doing his job is pathetic and sad.

And then there are the Obama administration’s fuckups. The Shirley Sherrod debacle, most recently and perhaps most notably.

As Maddow recounts, Obama yesterday added an unscheduled afternoon appearance before the press corps to recap his legislative accomplishments of the week.

However, even that was a tactical mistake — it only served to underscore the fact that his administration had fucked up royally by knee-jerkedly throwing Shirley Sherrod under the bus at the very first whiff of the approach of the right-wing, white-supremacist lynch mob.

To betray your own supporter, to sell someone who helped to put you where you are down the river – can you go lower than that?

Maybe we should start calling him Judas Obama. (If he kisses you, be afraid — be very afraid.)

Obama’s refusal to dance with those of us who brought him to the dance — we liberals/progressives (I gave him hundreds of dollars [primarily to knock DINO Billary Clinton out of the primary, admittedly]) – has made us disgusted with and deeply disappointed in him.

So Judas Obama gets no love (and never was going to get any love) from the Repugnicans and their “tea-partying,” cross-burning ilk, and because he has betrayed us after snookering us with his promises of “hope” and “change,” he gets no love even from us progressives.

That leaves him only with the “swing voters,” whom I prefer to call the dumbfuck voters.

And they wouldn’t know a competent president from their bungholes. They still believe that George W. Bush legitimately was elected as president in 2000 and that Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11 and had weapons of mass destruction, for fuck’s sake.

So Obama’s only potential allies, that I can see, were those of us on the left.

And he has burned us.

Repeatedly.

Obama finally seems to maybe have something-like-sincerely acknowledged the errors of his ways, but this far into the game, my sense is that it’s probably too little, too late, and that his latest appeal to liberals (which he made just today) rings among the vast majority of us as hollow.

Assorted shit

Why the dick won’t shut the fuck up

Associated Press photo

Gas bag Dick Cheney appears on a political talk show aired this morning in order to (what else?) bash the Obama administration. The Associated Press correctly although too diplomatically deems Cheney’s “public criticism on a successor administration” as “unusual.”

Gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan and I agree on one thing (besides our attraction to members of our own sex): Former Vice President Dick Cheney is still talking, more than a year after he left office, because he’s afraid that he might, just might, actually be prosecuted for his war crimes one day.

Politico quotes Sullivan as having stated in an e-mail:

“Cheney’s unprecedentedly aggressive approach … reflects his own knowledge that he has committed war crimes of a very grave sort, war crimes that at some point could lead to prosecution and will undoubtedly lead to historical infamy.”

“If that becomes the prevailing narrative — because it is true — he will go down in history as a man who betrayed the very core principles of Western civilization out of panic and then covered it up,” Sullivan continued. “So he has to change the subject and launch this kind of PR campaign to throw everyone off the scent….

“Cheney is cornered. He knows justice is coming, and he knows that one day the full truth will come out and there will be no hiding. Until then, he will fight and fight and break every taboo that respect for the Constitution and for civil discourse requires.”

Sullivan has been one of the leading voices criticizing the news media — and Politico specifically — for giving Cheney a platform for his rhetorical blasts in interviews without challenging his premises and also forcing him to answer for his own alleged misdeeds in office….

Cheney isn’t fooling anyone, though, isn’t throwing anyone off of his stench. And by keeping himself in the limelight, he is drawing more attention to himself and to his treasonous war crimes. Stupid.

I mean, George W. Bush, a dumbfuck extraordinaire, is smart enough to keep a low profile, and why is Dick Fucking Cheney criticizing the Obama administration when Al Gore, President Bill Clinton’s veep, didn’t routinely criticize the BushCheneyCorp administration, even though there was plenty to criticize?

(I can recall that Gore only made one fiery speech critical of the unelected Bush regime, in the wake of the breaking of the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors scandal to the entire world community. That speech was quite appropriate, given that it had turned out that Americans had treated Iraqi prisoners, most of them innocent of any crime, in a Nazi-like fashion. I don’t believe that during the eight long nightmarish years between January 2001 and January 2009 Gore made more than one or two prominent speeches in which his main topic was criticism of the BushCheneyCorp, yet here is Cheney, who can’t keep himself off of the Sunday morning political shows.)

Anyway, it isn’t like it was Sullivan who made me see the light of the truth. It was in a post titled “Die, Dick, Die!” in October that I wrote:

Cheney, with his latest act his rant against the Obama administration’s handling of Afghanistan (where he would have proclaimed “mission accomplished” already), is trying to salvage his “legacy” by acting as though he really cares about national security instead of war profiteering (he did deliver his war-profiteering corporation Halliburton the Vietraq War, after all), the pundits are chattering, but my best guess is that Cheney is terrified that he might actually be charged as the war criminal that he is and that he therefore is trying to drum up public opinion to be sympathetic toward his sorry, felonious, treasonous ass should justice actually ever be done and he actually be held accountable for the thousands upon thousands of unnecessary deaths of our men and women in uniform and of innocent Iraqi civilians (and many, many other innocent civilians throughout the Middle East).

I also have to wonder if perhaps Tricky Dick still believes that he is in power; maybe that faulty, Grinch-like, two-sizes-too-small heart of his isn’t supplying his brain with enough oxygen. Politico quotes Cheney as having said, when asked how George W. Bush feels about his outspokenness, “I’m the vice president now — ex-vice president. I have the great freedom and luxury of speaking out, saying what I want to say, what I believe. And I have not been discouraged from doing so.” 

“I’m the vice president now”? Sounds like a Freudian slip to me.

Fuck the filibuster!

Rachel Maddow has called — I think – for doing away with the filibuster.* While she focuses on how boring (but how important) the concept of the filibuster is, and calls for renaming the filibuster, what she seems to be aiming at is doing away with the filibuster altogether.

Maddow notes that the filibuster used to require two-thirds, or 67 votes, of the U.S. Senate, to be overcome. The filibuster threshold now stands at 60 votes.

While I believe that a simple majority is good enough in a democracy — we don’t require a presidential candidate to get 60 percent of the vote — I could compromise and put the filibuster at 55 votes. That is one-half of the Senate plus one-tenth of one-half of the Senate. That seems fair enough to me.

(And indeed, the infamous progressive Democratic U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida has called for a 55-vote filibuster threshold, and you can sign his petition for this more reasonable filibuster threshold at StopSenateStalling.com.)

As Maddow and Grayson note, the filibuster is not contained anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, but is only a Senate rule. Wikipedia notes that Senate rules can be changed by a simple majority vote of the Senate – and that this is what the Repugnicans, during the reign of the unelected Bush regime, threatened to do with their “nuclear option,” to do away with the filibuster, an option that the Democrats thus far have been too pussy to take.

I say: Nuke the motherfuckers. Now. 

The 60-vote filibuster is preventing any progress from being made and has hamstrung the U.S. government.

The 60-vote filibuster reminds me of how the two-thirds vote requirement for the California Legislature to pass the state’s budget has only hamstrung rather than helped my home state’s budget process.

Unfortunately, that ridiculous requirement for a super-majority is contained in the state’s Constitution, and the easiest way to change that would be to amend the state’s Constitution at the ballot box. Many if not most proponents of changing the state’s two-thirds-vote budget-bill requirement are OK with making it a 55-percent-vote requirement instead. I’m OK with that.

Dick Cheney and I actually agree on something!

An Associated Press article on how long it might take the U.S. military to finally stop discriminating against non-heterosexuals reports:

The goal, according to senior defense and military officials, is to avoid the backlash that could result from imposing change too fast. While officials expect resistance from only a minority of service members and believe that it could be contained with discipline, officials fear isolated incidents of violence could erupt as a means of protest.

What does it say of the quality of the individuals in our military that “violence could erupt as a means of protest” against granting equal human and civil rights to everyone in the military?

Actually, though, I don’t think that really is the stupid white men’s concern. I suspect that once again, the stupid old white men are just using our troops as political human shields for themselves. (The members of the unelected Bush regime did that routinely when they tried to morph any valid criticisms of their launching and their handling of their Vietraq War into attacks on our troops.)

It’s the stupid old white men who are far more afraid of the change than are the young people in the military.

Even Dick Cheney, whose daughter is a dyke, has my back on this one. Reports the AP:

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, three-quarters of Americans say that they support openly gay people serving in the military. The 75 percent figure is far above the 44 percent of Americans who said so in May 1993.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, defense secretary in the first Bush administration, said [today] he supports a review of the ["don't ask, don't tell"] policy.

“When the chiefs come forward and say we think we can do it, it strikes me it’s time to reconsider the policy,” he said. “I’m reluctant to second-guess the military in this regard.”

Cheney, who has an openly gay daughter, said he thinks society has moved on from staunch opposition to gays serving in the military.

“It’s partly a generational question,” he told ABC’s “This Week,” adding that “things have changed significantly” since the ["DADT"] policy took effect.

“Partly” a generational question? No, it’s almost wholly a generational question.

OK, so I guess that I still have plenty of disagreement with the dick…

Move over, Margaret!

Speaking of dykes, Wanda Sykes is my new favorite comedian.

I recently bought the DVD of her HBO stand-up special “I’ma Be Me,” which was recorded in Washington, D.C., in August, and my boyfriend and I have watched it twice.

Wanda rocks.

Margaret Cho, a self-proclaimed fag hag, has been the default gay guy’s comedian for some years now, and I still love ya, Margaret, but Wanda is funnier and fresher than you are.

Wanda’s political sensibilities seem to be much sharper than those of Margaret, who, if her autobiographical claims about herself are accurate, apparently spent a lot of years partying before she woke up to the political scene circa 2003 or 2004.

And while Margaret’s material is stale, Wanda’s is new to me.

Wanda comes to her comedy from the perspective of being a black lesbian. (She came out in November 2008, after the odious Prop H8 passed here in California.)

In her HBO stand-up special Wanda doesn’t talk too much about lesbianism — her comedy is much less sexually graphic and less scatological than is Margaret’s — but her take on what it’s like to be black in white America is hilarious and even eye-opening.

“White people are looking at you!” she intones throughout her routine, and while it’s comedy, it rings true. Her bit about finally being able to buy a whole watermelon at the supermarket – now that Barack Obama is president – is hilarious and probably only she could get away with something like that.

Wanda’s riff on pirates (yes, pirates – a reference to when the Somali pirates were in the news) also is ROLF-level good, and the way that she brings back certain themes throughout her routine is masterfully funny.  

Wanda’s 15-minute performance at the 2009 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner probably gave her the most national exposure that she’s ever had, but, as she says right off in “I’ma Be Me,” she had to hold back at the correspondents’ dinner.

She’s much better when she’s off-leash, so to speak, as she is in “I’ma Be Me.”

The only criticism that I have of “I’ma Be Me” is that Wanda uses at least two or three of the jokes that she already used at the correspondents’ dinner. She’s allowed to rehash her own material, of course, but you would think that she would have realized that many if not most of us had already heard those jokes.

Wanda’s facial expressions and her willingness to move around on stage liberally add entertainment value to her already-funny material, and she’s so adorable that even when she chuckles at her own jokes it’s quite forgivable.

You owe it to yourself to watch “I’ma Be Me,” whether it’s still showing periodically on HBO or whether you buy the DVD (such as via amazon.com).

Out to pasture for the McCainosaurus?

There is talk that Repugnican John McCainosaurus might lose the Repugnican primary to his even wingnuttier challenger, J.D. Hayworth, ending McCainosaurus’ stint in the U.S. Senate, which began in 1987.

Reports The Associated Press:

Phoenix – Defeated just two years ago as the Republican presidential candidate and with his bonafides as a true conservative again being challenged, John McCain finds himself in a struggle to get even his party’s nomination for another term in the Senate.

Many conservatives and “tea party” activists are lining up behind Republican challenger and former [right-wing] talk radio host J.D. Hayworth, reflecting a rising tide of voter frustration with incumbent politicians. Only 40 percent of Arizonans have a favorable view of McCain’s job performance.

Faced with his toughest re-election battle ever, McCain has moved to the right on several hot-button issues, like gays in the military and climate change, and has built a campaign war chest of more than $5 million. Former running mate Sarah Palin and newly elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown, both popular with conservatives, are pitching in.

Hayworth, who will officially launch his campaign [tomorrow], began using his talk show on conservative radio station KFYI to drum up opposition to McCain.

“You have a consistent conservative challenger and an incumbent who calls himself a maverick but in fact is a moderate,” Hayworth said, outlining what he views as the central choice for conservative GOP primary voters in August.

McCain is launching his own statewide tour, complete with visits next month from Palin and Brown, who already has recorded calls asking Republicans to support McCain.

The four-term senator and his allies also are taking aim at Hayworth. In December, they filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that the talk show host was a de facto candidate and his radio station was providing a corporate gift by allowing him to campaign on the air. And they’re attacking Hayworth’s 12-year record as a [U.S. representative] representing the eastern suburbs of Phoenix….

Democrat Harry Mitchell defeated Hayworth four years ago, winning the GOP-dominated [U.S. House] district amid a rough national climate for Republicans and questions about Hayworth’s dealings with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Hayworth ran a conservative campaign emphasizing his opposition to illegal immigration, but he was dogged by a reputation for being an angry and combative partisan, highlighted by an editorial in the state’s largest newspaper recommending “Mitchell over the bully.”

Hayworth said he decided to quit the [right-wing radio talk] show and run for [the U.S. Senate] in late January after holding “town-hall meetings five days a week” with his conservative listeners.

They are angry, Hayworth says, about McCain’s history of teaming with Democrats on key issues. In the past decade McCain has worked with Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin on campaign finance reform and with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts on an immigration bill that would have created a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants….

A poll last month by the Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center found [McCain's] lowest approval rating since January 1994, when McCain was in the midst of the “Keating Five” scandal in which he and four other U.S. senators were accused of trying to intimidate regulators on behalf of a real-estate developer later convicted of fraud.

McCain’s once-powerful support from independents is particularly lacking; just 38 percent approved of his performance…. Arizona allows independents to vote in primaries. They could make the difference in a state where 30 percent of the electorate doesn’t belong to a political party….

While I suspect that the McCainosaurus will beat Hayworth, who I remember only as a fugly, goofy-looking

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local television sportscaster when I lived in Phoenix more than a decade ago, it would be hilarious if the McCainosaurus were to lose the Repugnican primary to a tea-baggin’, mouth-breathing, Sarah Palin-Quayle-like stupid white guy whose main platform, like that of Repugnican former U.S. Rep. Tom “Bring Back the Literacy Tests!” Tancredo, is to beat up, like the ignorant bully that he is, on powerless, brown-skinned, “illegal” immigrants, who, as Wanda Sykes correctly points out in “I’ma Be Me,” aren’t criminals, but who just want to make a better life for themselves. (I would tell her joke, but I don’t want to spoil it for you; you’ll just have to watch “I’ma Be Me.”)

*Wikipedia’s entry “filibuster” states:

A filibuster, or “speaking or talking out a bill,” is a form of obstruction in a legislature or other decision-making body whereby one attempts to delay or entirely prevent a vote on a proposal by extending a debate on that proposal. A popular saying is “filibuster it to death!”

The term “filibuster” was first used in 1851. It was derived from the Spanish [word] “filibustero,” meaning “pirate” or “freebooter.” … 

Sarah Palin-Quayle, grand dragoness

“Tea party” convention headliner Repugnican Sarah Palin-Quayle greets adoring supporters in an excellent PhotoShop job.

President-wannabe Sarah Palin-Quayle wrote this in a public relations — er, opinion – piece for USA Today before fellow radical-right Repugnican Tom Tancredo, a former U.S. representative from Colorado and former presidential hopeful who has used or at least tried to use xenophobic, anti-Latin-American-immigrant sentiment for personal political gain, opened the “National Tea Party Convention” in Nashville, Tenn., on Thursday:

Their vision is what drew me to the Tea Party movement. They believe in the same principles that guided my work in public service — whether I was working on the PTA and city council or serving as a mayor, commissioner or governor. I look forward to meeting some of these great Americans this weekend.

Probably at least in part because she’s no longer in public office, having quit her job as governor of Alaska before she served even one full term, Palin-Quayle apparently thought it sufficiently safe to appear at the Wingnut Super Bowl in Nashville today.

Other Repugnican elected officials who are still in office decided not to appear the “tea party” convention, afraid that some wingnut might say some really whack shit at the convention that would reflect poorly upon them. Or maybe the Repugnican National Committee made that decision for them.

In any case, some really whack shit was said at the convention, right off.

This is what Tancredo (who, like fellow wingnuts Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia* [both U.S. Supreme Court "justices"], is an Italian American; now that their families got to immigrate to the U.S., we should hermetically seal our borders, you see) said in his opening speech for the convention on Thursday:

“…And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think [that] we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. [Big applause from his audience.] People who could not even spell the word “vote” or say it in English [more big applause] put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House — [his] name is Barack Hussein Obama.” [More applause.]

You can watch the clip on Rachel Maddow’s show here.

So Tancredo, who is able to say whatever he wants to say because his political career is dead anyway — really, you can’t be a one-trick hater-pony like he is and get anywhere — has bashed the 53 percent of Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. He has alleged that because of low intellect and ignorance and/or a language barrier, Obama is our president.

That’s pretty fucking funny, since wingnuts are notorious for being fucktards. Like this one:

(I should note that I Googled “get a brain morans,” and from what I can tell, the viral images of the white-trash fucktard with that sign apparently are authentic images of an authentic wingnut.**)

And, as I noted waaaaay back in 2002, the same fucktarded haters who call for a “civics literacy test” (actually, “civics test” is just fine; there is no need to add the word “literacy” in there) for those from other nations (usually from nations within Latin America, since their skin usually is brown) or even for fellow American citizens (that is, black Americans) could not pass the same fucking civics test that immigrants must pass to become an American citizen. (Seriously — see how many of the questions you can answer correctly yourself!)

Knowing his background, Tancredo’s hateful remarks yesterday most likely were aimed, at least primarily, at those from Latin America who want a better life, but his remarks are reminding those who know their U.S. history of the literacy tests that once were used to prevent black Americans from voting. Notes Wikipedia:

As used by the states, the literacy test gained infamy as a means for denying suffrage to African Americans. Adopted by a number of Southern states, the literacy test was applied in a patently unfair manner, as it was used to disenfranchise many literate Southern blacks while allowing many illiterate Southern whites to vote.

The literacy test, combined with other discriminatory requirements, effectively disenfranchised the vast majority of African Americans in the South from the 1890s until the 1960s. Southern states abandoned the literacy test only when forced to by federal legislation in the 1960s…. Since the passage of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, black registration in the South has increased dramatically.

So Repugnican former Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi in 2002 publicly mused that the nation would have been a lot better off had segregationist Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948, and now, Repugnican former Rep. Tom Tancredo muses that he sures misses the good old days of the literacy tests.

And, as I have noted before, calling Obama a “Muslim” or insinuating that he is a Muslim by stating his middle name of Hussein, is simply code for “nigger,” as is “socialist.” (“Committed socialist idealogue,” then, would mean “biiiiig nigger.”) And the name Hussein, of course, is associated with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which is meant to associate Barack Obama with the “evildoers” of the Middle East. We whiteys are to be just as afraid of the niggers here as we are to be afraid of the sand niggers who hate us for our freedom, you see.)

But when you say that the “tea party” “movement” is all about (or at least largely about) white supremacism, the wingnuts crow that you’re wrong. But listen to the “tea party” convention crowd’s reaction to Tancredo’s racist, xenophobic clarion call for a “civics literacy test”; the crowd eats it up.

After Rachel Maddow shows the clip, she quips, “Although to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant; they were sort of, a little bit muffled by the — you know, the white hoods.”

Yup. The “white hoods” joke is appropriate, but I believe that Maddow was kidding; it is clear from the clip that Tancredo had a doting audience, clapping and laughing and whooping in response to his comments.

So when Sarah Palin-Quayle, the keynote speaker of this weekend’s “National Tea Party Convention” in Nashville, gushes about the “tea party” “movement,” as she did in USA Today –

Later this week I’ll head to Nashville, where I’ll have the honor of speaking with members of the “tea party” movement. I look forward to meeting many Americans who share a commitment to limited government, common sense and personal responsibility….

– it’s bullshit.

Things like “common sense” and “personal responsibility” and “limited government” are the “tea party” “movement’s” stated raison d’être (hey, look, this American who cast his vote for Barack Obama not only can spell the word “vote,” but he can mix it up with a foreign language sometimes, too!), and those things sure sound good — but the “tea party” actually is about white supremacism and patriarchy and misogyny and “Christo”fascism/theocracy and militarism (to spend any of our tax dollars on people instead of on war profiteers is deemed “socialist”) and xenophobia and jingoism and homophobia and ignorance and fear.

The “tea party” is comprised mostly of stupid, backasswards white men who can’t get over the fact that rapidly changing demographics in the United States of America are making it more and more impossible for the stupid white man to have the political control of the nation that he used to have.

There are some fucktarded white women, like Palin-Quayle, who support these fucktarded white men, but the “tea party” “movement” irrefutably is stupid-white-male driven. 

The “tea party” “movement” represents a small slice of the American electorate, and even that small slice is melting just like the polar ice caps are melting. Just as the “tea party” fucktards deny that the ice caps are melting, they seem to be in denial that their existence is endangered, too. They have become the dinosaurs that they don’t believe in.

So you have the “National Tea Party Convention’s” opening act, Tom Tancredo, call for a “civics literacy test,” and you have Palin-Quayle gushing about how great the “tea party” “movement” is before she goes to Nashville to be the keynote speaker at their first national convention.

How can we not associate Palin-Quayle with the rest of what has gone on at the Wingnut Super Bowl this weekend when she herself has chosen to associate herself with it?

—

*Well, Scalia’s father was an immigrant from Sicily and his mother was born in the U.S. to Italian immigrants. (Sicily, Italy — close enough…) Alito’s father was an immigrant from Italy. Wikipedia says of Tancredo, “Both sets of his grandparents emigrated from Italy.”

So it was OK to let all of these Italians and Sicilians into the United States, you see, but we need to keep the Latin Americans, especially the brown-skinned ones, out.

**I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this image, however: