I voted for Jill Stein, fuck you very much.

Updated below

AFP/Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assorted shit Sunday!

Lowering Arizona (if that’s even still possible)

Associated Press photo

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu declares at a press conference in Florence, Arizona, yesterday that he indeed is gay but that he didn’t threaten his reported former male lover, “Jose,” with deportation if “Jose” didn’t keep his mouth shut about their sexual relationship.

This reads like the plot of a Coen brothers movie (except that it’s a Reuters news story):

A local sheriff resigned as a co-chair of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s campaign in Arizona [yesterday] after he was accused of threatening a former male lover with deportation to Mexico if he talked about their relationship.

In an embarrassing incident for Romney’s struggling campaign, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu denied that he or his lawyer made the deportation threat but stepped down from helping the former Massachusetts governor in the border state.

Babeu acknowledged at a press conference [yesterday] that he is gay and that he had a personal relationship with the man making the allegations, whom he identified only as “Jose.”

“Sheriff Babeu has stepped down from his volunteer position with the campaign so he can focus on the allegations against him. We support his decision,” the Romney campaign said in a statement.

The Phoenix New Times alternative newspaper reported on Friday that Babeu’s lawyer had asked Jose to sign a legal agreement that would require him to keep quiet about his involvement with the sheriff. According to the newspaper, the lawyer also warned Jose that any talk about their relationship could imperil his immigration status.

“All of these allegations that were in one of these newspapers were absolutely false, except for the issue that referred to me as being gay, and that is the truth. I am gay,” Babeu said at the news conference. …

I don’t think that the New Times (a quality news weekly that I used to read when I was [unfortunately...] a resident of Phoenix in the 1990s) wants to be sued for libel, so I tend to believe that the New Times reported the truth.

In any event, what a head case Paul Babeu must be.

The Reuters news story further notes that

Babeu first came to statewide prominence in 2010 when he appeared in a campaign ad for U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee two years earlier, calling for tough immigration measures.

The sheriff, who is a tough law-and-order advocate, was considered a rising star in state Republican politics and a strong candidate to win the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Arizona this year.

Babeu is a strong critic of the handling of immigration issues by the administration of President Barack Obama.

Yet Babeu reportedly took on an male Mexican immigrant as his lover? And he was assisting the homophobic Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign?

Again, what a head case, to publicly be castigating “illegals”* while one of them, reportedly, privately is your lover, and to publicly be supporting Mitt Romney — whose patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic, “Christo”fascist Mormon cult was instrumental in passing Proposition H8 — while privately being gay.

I’m glad that Babeu at least now is out of the closet, so that we can’t call him a closet case as well as a head case, but of course it doesn’t count as courage on his part, since the New Times outed him; he very apparently never would have come out on his own, but would have continued his hypocritical, double-standard charade indefinitely, apparently.

Babeu’s political career in Arizona should be dead — not because he’s a hypocrite and a liar and a coward, which would be good cause, but primarily because he is gay in one of the nation’s reddest, most hateful and bigoted states.

The upshot is that now that he is out of the closet and his political career within the Repugnican Tea Party just died, he should have plenty of time to have his head examined.

P.S. Via the Phoenix New Times’ website, here is a photo of Babeu with his beau “Jose”:

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Maher: Racists break eighth-graders’ code of conduct

Speaking of Arizona, Bill Maher recently did a nice (if rather dated) rant on how members of the treasonous, white supremacist Repugnican Tea Party feel quite comfortable disrespecting President Barack Obama in person, publicly committing acts of deep disrespect that former “President” George W. Bush – who (in my estimation) was more reviled by more Americans than Obama ever has been – ever endured.

(The only public embarrassment that Bush ever endured, to my recollection, was toward the end of his illegitimate presidency, when an Iraqi threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference in Baghdad in protest of the Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, which resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands and thousands of the Iraqi’s fellow countrymen. [Unfortunately, both of the shoes missed their target.])

The two most glaring examples that Maher recounts are Repugnican Tea Party Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer thrusting her talon in Obama’s face on the tarmac in Arizona and Repugnican Tea Party South Carolina U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson screaming out “You lie!” during a live, nationally televised address to Congress that Obama was giving on the topic of health-care reform.

Maher quips that “if Mitt Romney really wants to win over conservative voters, he has to one-up Jan Brewer and spit on Obama’s shoes.”

Maher notes that as much as we on the left skewered Bush during his eight unelected, disastrous years of rule, we respected the office of the presidency and never disrespected Bush publicly in person. This kind of tacit agreement, Maher declares, ”has always worked for eighth-grade girls, and it’s always worked for the United States of America.”

Actually, I encourage the white supremacist Repugnican Tea Party traitors to continue their racist assaults on the president, the man who in 2008 received more popular votes than George W. Bush ever did in 2000 or in 2004, in actual numbers and in the percentage of the popular vote. (Bush garnered only 47.9 percent of the popular vote in 2000 — to Democrat Al Gore’s 48.4 percent – and only 50.7 percent in 2004, while in 2008 Obama garnered 52.9 percent of the popular votes to John McCainosaurus’ paltry 45.7 percent, and no other U.S. president ever received as many popular votes as Obama did.)

Racism doesn’t sit well with the majority of the nation’s younger voters, and as the older white supremacists continue to kick off, the Repugnican Tea Party should continue to go extinct. (Ditto for its patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, which also are killing the Repugnican Tea Party’s future.)

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Team Obama still searching for slogans

Not that I’m a huge fan of Barack Obama. But I have very different reasons for that than do the Repugnican Tea Party traitors.

I voted for Barack Obama in November 2008. Even when I walked into my polling place I wasn’t sure whether I would cast my vote for Obama or for independent progressive presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who of course had zero chance of winning but whose political views more closely match my own than do Obama’s (and whom I’d voted for here in California in 2000).

I had given Obama hundreds of dollars, mainly in order to help him defeat Billary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primary season, and because I knew that of course the next president would be from the two-party duopoly. I didn’t want a third Bill-Clinton (that is, Democratic-in-name-only) term in Billary Clinton, but with Barack Obama we got that anyway.

That Obama would be the first non-white president in U.S. history was a factor (not a huge factor, but still a factor) in my decision to, at the last minute, darken the oval next to his name on my ballot instead of Ralph Nader’s. Nader couldn’t win anyway, and it was at least a little exhilarating, for the first time in U.S. history, to have the option of voting for someone for president other than yet another white man.

And, call me naive, but I more or less believed Obama’s relentless 2008 campaign promises of “hope” and “change” (and their derivatives, such as “Change we can believe in”).

I didn’t expect Obama as president to achieve miracles, but I did expect him to use the political capital at his disposal. Yet, when he had both houses of Congress dominated by his party and when he had the American public’s good will behind him, Obama utterly squandered his political capital during 2009 and 2010, his best years to push through a progressive agenda – that “hope” and “change” that he’d promised us in return for our support of him.

Instead, in 2009 and 2010 Obama focused on not pissing off the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, but trying to sing “Kumbaya” with them – while shitting and pissing upon his base, whom he and his mouthpieces referred to (among other things) as “sanctimonious” and members of “the professional left.”

Smart: Kowtow to those who never will support you, ever, no matter fucking what, and tell those who put you where you are to go fuck themselves. 

Reuters has a cute little article on how Team Obama knows fully well that it can’t reuse its empty 2008 slogans of “hope” and “change” for 2012 without being laughed off of the planet.

Long ago, I offered this snappy little slogan to Team Obama for 2012: Really This Time!

Team Obama, you can have that. No, really. It’s all yours. No charge.

In the meantime, the only way that I could see myself voting for Obama again is if the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate (“Christo”fascist Mormon Mitt Romney or “Christo”fascist Catholick Prick Santorum, most likely, it appears) were anywhere close to Obama in the polls here in California within about two weeks to Election Day.

With Repugnican Tea Party registration sitting at only a paltry 30 percent of registered voters here in California, the nation’s most populous state — and Democratic registration here being at 44 percent — I can’t see Obama losing California, and in the winner-takes-all Electoral College system, if you vote for anyone but Obama in California in November 2012, your vote essentially won’t matter at all, since Obama’s victory here essentially is a foregone conclusion (I put his chances of winning California and all of its electoral votes at least at 99 percent**).

Therefore, my 2012 presidential vote most likely will go to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, if she makes it to the November ballot.

(The U.S. Green Party is to choose its presidential nominee in July, and it will be Stein or Roseanne Barr. I love Roseanne, but she comes to the Green Party fairly late, and I hate it when in elections celebrity trumps political ability, such as happened here in California when Hollywood testosterone flick star Arnold “Baby Daddy” Schwarzenegger became governor and when former basketball star Kevin Johnson became Sacramento’s mayor.

That said, yes, if it came to that, I would vote for Roseanne Barr over Barack Obama. Hands down.)

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*To be clear, I gather from news reports that “Jose,” while not an American citizen, has been in Arizona legally, on a visa. However, let’s face it: when the white supremacists talk about “illegals,” their real problem with these undocumented Mexican (or other Latino) immigrants isn’t the immigrants’ legal status. It’s the color of their skin.

**This model puts Obama’s chances of winning California’s 55 electoral votes at just over 96 percent. It also predicts that Obama will win re-election in November, with 303 electoral votes to 235 electoral votes for his Repugnican Tea Party opponent. That sounds about right to me. I expect that in November Obama will not do as well as he did in November 2008, but that he still will win re-election. (In 2008 Obama won 365 electoral votes to John McCainosaurus’ paltry 173.)

Anyone but Obama 2012

Since “Democratic” President Hopey-Changey Obama’s latest sellout — giving the plutocratic and pro-plutocratic traitors of the Repugnican Tea Party their tax breaks for the rich and the super-rich while slashing the federal budget (except for the war profiteers, of course) — chatter about a Democratic presidential primary challenge to Obama has increased.

There is this food-for-thought piece on Salon.com about Secretary of State Billary Clinton challenging Obama, but the piece is written by someone who says that he doesn’t consider himself to be a Democrat, so I’m not certain of his intent.

While it’s true that Billary’s balls are bigger than Obama’s (but so are a mouse’s balls…) — and, admittedly, knowing what I know about Obama now, if I could do it all over again I would have supported Billary over Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary race – because Obama’s “governing” style is fairly Clintonesque, I can’t see that a President Billary would be a huge improvement over the status quo. (Admittedly, U.S. poverty did decrease dramatically under Bill Clinton, however.)

Still, if it came down to Billary or Obama for 2012, I’d take Billary. I’d switch my voter registration from the Green Party to the Democratic Party in order to vote for Billary over Obama in a 2012 Democratic presidential primary. Yes, Obama is that bad.

But hopefully it won’t come down to a choice between Billary or Obama.

Hopefully an actual progressive will challenge the worthless Obama.

Reports The Daily Caller* within the past 24 hours:

Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and perennial third-party presidential candidate, announced last month that he would work to find a Democrat to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.

Nader now says that a primary challenge is a near certainty.

“What [Obama] did this week is just going to energize that effort,” Nader promised in an interview with The Daily Caller. “I would guess that the chances of there being a challenge to Obama in the primary are almost 100 percent.”

The only question, he said, is the stature of that opponent and whether it will be either “an ex-senator or an ex-governor” or “an intellectual leader or an environmental leader.”

In approximately a week and a half there will be “another chapter of this effort,” Nader predicted.

The Public Citizen founder said he disapproved of how Obama handled recent debt ceiling negotiations, and claimed the deal’s failings prompted this week’s dramatic stock market drop.

“He made a deal that did not provide for a public works project to create jobs all over the country. All he did was he agreed to cut spending,” Nader said. “And that’s what the market is reacting to.”

President Obama “shouldn’t have even had that problem,” Nader said. “When he surrendered the continuation of tax cuts for the rich last December, the least he could have gotten was the debt ceiling increased. He didn’t even do that. So he set himself up for this hostage situation by the Republicans and it’s his own fault. And the country and the workers are paying the price.”

Asked whether the Tea Party movement was responsible for an unsavory resolution to debt ceiling negotiations, Nader responded: “It’s not really a movement. It’s the conservative non-libertarian wing of the Republican Party.”

Nader continued: “Ron Paul is a conservative libertarian. These are the conservative corporatists that have decided they like the brand name ‘Tea Party’ because the press reports on every movement of the Tea Party. So they’ve jumped on the bandwagon and hijacked it.

“There are a lot of Tea Party people, for example, who wanted more revenues. I think the polls showed that half of them wanted more revenues. And a lot of the Tea Party people want to get out of the wars. But its been hijacked by the corporatists.”

Nader said he doesn’t plan to launch another campaign for president, either as an independent candidate or as a primary challenger to President Obama.

In 2000, Nader received nearly three million votes as the Green Party’s presidential candidate. Some disillusioned Democrats blamed him for handing Florida, and with it the election, to George W. Bush.

Nader ran for president in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 as a left-wing alternative to the Democratic nominee, but has decided another campaign is “very unlikely.”

“I’ve done my rounds,” he said.

Part of me is disappointed that Nader doesn’t plan to run in 2012 — because I’d vote for him, very most likely — but another part of me, a larger part of me, is glad that Nader doesn’t plan to run again, since because the 2000 presidential election debacle, he has been a waaay-too-convenient scapegoat for the establishmentarian (that is, utterly spineless) Democrats.

I mean, fuck, Al Gore didn’t even win his own home state of Tennessee in 2000, yet the Dems don’t blame Gore for having been too weak a presidential candidate — nooo, they blame Nader for having exercised his right to run for president, as though he didn’t have that right.

If I could pick Obama’s 2012 challenger, it would be Howard Dean.

He has balls, like Billary does, but I think that he’s much more likely to stand up for the middle class, the working class and the poor than is Billary.

Also, of course, it was the progressive wave that Dean started in 2002 or 2003 that the lazy hack Obama just co-opted as his own and rode on into the White House.  

Dean still was not, in my estimation, the right candidate in 2004. But he’s the one for the job now. And he deserves the job. He probably would be the president that Barack Obama only promised us that he would be.

P.S. Don’t miss this column by Ted Rall. He nails it, as usual. My only addendum is that you shouldn’t vote only if there is no true progressive to vote for. Should a true progressive presidential candidate emerge, or should a stronger Democratic candidate (like Howard Dean) emerge, then you should vote for him or her.

P.P.S. Because California is the most populous blue state in the nation, I think that it’s pretty significant that the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus has called for a primary challenger to Obama. They want to see an actual progressive run on the Democratic ticket in 2012. I’m wholly on board with their effort.

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*The Daily Caller is an outfit by the loathesome wingnut Tucker Carlson, so I don’t necessarily take this piece for gospel, but my guess is that it’s accurate. It sure sounds like the Ralph Nader that I know and love.

Obama sells us farther down the river

Reuters photo

Barack Obama last night hailed the largest, non-military (of course) federal budget cut in U.S. history as a “compromise” (and not a cave-in) and said he hopes for more “compromises” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the future. Goddess save this nation from Barack Obama’s “common-sense” “compromises.”

In December, Barack Obama reneged on his campaign pledge not to extend the unelected Bush regime’s tax cuts for the rich and the super-rich. Last night, Obama caved in to $38.5 billion in federal budget cuts demanded by the Repugnican Tea Party and then announced it as a victory for bipartisanship.

Which side is Barack Obama on?

(That’s a rhetorical question. He always has been, and always will be, on his own side.)

The consensus the morning after is that in the budget fight, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, as usual, won. Reports The Associated Press:

Washington – Republican conservatives were the chief winners in the budget deal that forced Democrats to accept historic spending cuts they strongly opposed.

Emboldened by last fall’s election victories, fiscal conservatives have changed the debate in Washington. The question no longer is whether to cut spending, but how deeply. Rarely mentioned is the idea of higher taxes to lower the deficit.

Their success is all the more notable because Democrats control the Senate and White House.

But more difficult decisions lie ahead, and it’s not clear whether GOP lawmakers can rely on their winning formula. They pushed Democrats to the brink, then gave in just enough to claim impressive achievements, rather than holding the line and triggering a government shutdown that might have yielded far less politically.

The GOP victories came on spending. Their concessions dealt mainly with social issues, where they tried to limit abortions and restrict environmental rules.

House Republicans who care intensely about such social issues may fight harder next time, giving Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, fewer bargaining chips to appease Democrats. Tea party Republicans, some of whom found the cuts too small in [last night's] last-minute agreement, might insist on deeper ones from now on. …

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress know what they want and they go after it, viciously. They are undaunted by the fact that the Democratic Party controls the White House and the U.S. Senate, and they pay “bipartisanship” lip service, only when they are trying to get what they want. The Democrats, on the other hand, are all too happy to give away the store in the name of “bipartisanship,” even though the other side never acts in true bipartisan spirit.

Even when the Democrats were in control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2009 and 2010, they were too timid to spend their political capital, and now that opportunity is lost. It would not have been lost in November 2010 had they actually found their testicles that the voters had handed to them and spent their fucking political capital. But no one respects cowards, and people don’t tend to vote for people whom they don’t respect.

This is a long-standing fucking pattern with the Democratic Party.

We got “President” George W. Bush because in late 2000 Democrat Al Gore was too pussy to fight for the White House that he had won. Gore was too above it all to fight, and in the name of his “bipartisanship,” the nation suffered eight long nightmarish years of the unelected Bush regime. (But Ralph Nader, not Al Gore, still gets the brunt of the blame for this.)

In the name of “bipartisanship” under Obama, the rich and the super-rich got their BushCheneyCorp-era tax cuts extended, and the social Darwinist right wing is realizing its long-standing wet dream of shrinking the federal government down to the size that it can be drowned in the bathtub, so that corporations have no restraints on their treasonous, anti-people, anti-planet profiteering whatsofuckingever.

Barack Obama should be a blockade on the right-wing road to totally wiping out the middle class and the working class, but all that he has done thus far is to present a few “bipartisan” speed bumps.

But trust him, ye ignorant, mere mortal! He has A Plan!

No, he doesn’t. Well, yes, he does: his plan is to continue to sell us out — because we let him.

While Obama can’t be bothered to put up a fight, the right wing incrementally moves the boundaries that increasingly squeeze the working and the middle classes and ensure that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors made ridiculous demands in their federal budget plan, such as defunding Planned Parenthood and defanging the Environmental Protection Agency. They probably never expected to actually get these things, and while the Democrats successfully fought back against those ridiculous demands, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors still got a $38.5 billion budget cut.

According to the AP,

Boehner, a skilled legislator, spent weeks talking with House conservatives who insisted on $61 billion in current-year spending cuts. That was the pro-rated remainder of conservatives’ campaign pledge to cut $100 billion in the 2011 budget year, now half over.

Democrats complained bitterly about the first $10 billion in cuts, but eventually said they could not go above $33 billion. The final deal calls for $38.5 billion in cuts.

Boehner and his lieutenants repeatedly told the adamant budget-cutters, some of them new to public office, that they were getting a good deal. A short time ago, he told them, Democrats would not have considered anything approaching $40 billion. Take your victory and get ready for the next fight, he urged them.

Isn’t that what you do in cut-throat negotiations: Always demand much more than you ever actually expect to get (such as $61 billion), so that what you actually do get ($38.5 billion) is still significantly more than what you should get?

And how tough are the Democrats when they claim that they won’t go above $33 billion but then agree to $38.5 billion?

The Democrats should have stuck to their guns for once and allowed the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to shut down the federal government. Instead, as usual, they caved and they put the Repugnican Tea Party traitors further along their path not to our prosperity, but to our complete and total serfdom to our corporate masters.

And this when Barack Obama is telling us that we should re-elect him so that he can finish what he started.

God save us if Obama finishes what he started.

Our only hope at this point is a strong 2012 primary challenge to DINO Barack Obama.

Howard Dean, where are you? Russ Feingold? Hell – Dennis Kucinich?

Someone, anyone with balls — hell, even if she has ovaries.

Just not Barack Obama for 2012. With “friends” like him “on our side,” who needs the Repugnican Tea Party?

Obama already relegated to mediocrity

At a time when our public-school teachers are getting pink slips, our “representative” government in Washington has given the war profiteers about $1 billion thus far via the Obama administration’s bullshit U.S. military action in Libya.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who I would support over Barack Obama in 2012, according to The Associated Press “said he would offer an amendment to the next budget resolution that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from being used to fund U.S. military operations in Libya.”

The AP notes that “His effort could gain significant congressional support, including the backing of tea partiers, if the U.S. military operation is going full-bore when lawmakers return from their recess next week.”

“We have already spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which descended into unwinnable quagmires,” the AP reports Kucinich wrote his colleagues. “Now, the president is plunging the United States into yet another war we cannot afford.”

If the “tea partiers” are on board with reining in the continued looting of the U.S. Treasury via the bloated military-industrial complex, especially during a time when we’re told that we can’t afford to attend to actual human needs, then, while I diametrically disagree with them on the majority of the issues, I certainly can partner with them in that.

And I agree wholeheartedly that the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Obama ridiculously early in 2009 should be revoked. Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and others have made the call to take the ill-awarded prize back.

Ralph Nader’s statement – and Kucinich’s, too – that Obama’s having launched a military attack on Libya without the consent of the U.S. Congress is unconstitutional and impeachable is spot-on. While I don’t expect Obama to be impeached — yet — the fact that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other war criminals and traitors remain at large instead of being excecuted for their treason and their crimes against humanity, including mass murder, doesn’t mean that the arrogant Obama — who excels only at breaking campaign promises – gets to continue the imperial, unaccountable, above-the-law presidency that the unelected Bush regime began.

Having shit and pissed upon his base for the past two years, it will be interesting to see the change in the percentage of Obama’s campaign contributions that have come from individuals versus corporations from his 2008 presidential campaign to his 2012 re-election campaign.

While Yahoo! News reports that “Obama raised $59 million for his presidential campaign during the first half of 2007,” and that “Obama’s prospective GOP challengers would have to raise $590,000 a day between now and June 30 to match that pace during this campaign,” this seems to assume that the same level of enthusiasm for Obama that existed in 2007 exists now.

Corporations might be enthusiastic about Obama, but progressive individuals like me? I surmise that millions of us progressives who gave him campaign contributions for his 2008 run — based upon his blatantly false promises of “hope” and “change” – won’t give him a fucking rent cent for his 2012 campaign. I certainly won’t. So I surmise that the only way that he’ll be able to match his 2008 take is if he is able to make up for the loss in his base through getting bribes — er, campaign contributions – from his biggest benefactors, the corporations.

Realistically, Obama probably will be elected to a second lackluster presidential term. I could see an impeachment attempt against him in the future, probably a Bill-Clinton-like bullshit impeachment attempt by the right, but perhaps, just perhaps, even a justified impeachment attempt from the left.

What opportunity Obama had — but squandered. With popular opinion on his side and both houses of Congress controlled by his party for two years, Obama did diddly squat.

He could have been a great president. Instead, he already has joined the pantheon of mediocre U.S. presidents.

Time for the Green Party

It’s in the air now — progressives want an alternative to what the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are offering them.

The hope and change that Barack Obama promised us has turned into a disappointment of Clintonesque proportions — and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress this time.

President Obama is a “socialist”? Oh, I wish!

Progressive powerhouses MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, SEIU, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, People for the American Way and other progressive groups have created “Stand for Democracy,” a project whose goal is to “take back our democracy from corporate corruption.” (I urge you to visit the website and pick your top five progressive concerns if you haven’t already done so.)

Are liberals falling out of love with Obama? asks The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today. (His answer, as far as I can tell, is maybe. My answer is Hell yes!)

Jane Hamsher of the progressive blog Firedoglake proclaims in a fundraising e-mail today:

The progressive movement is at a crossroads…. Progressives must now choose: Do we pursue a corporate-sponsored model functioning within the [Democratic Party] that ultimately accepts the party’s goals, or are we willing to fund an independent movement, capable of freely advocating for progressive values from the outside?

It seems to me that the best bet to counter the Democratic Party’s pay-to-play, corporate-ass-kissing, Repugnican-Lite politics is to rejuvenate the Green Party.

Why try to create a new progressive party or movement when one already exists?

The Green Party already is established around the nation, is an international party, and its “ten key values” are right in line with progressivism:

1. Grassroots democracy

2. Social justice and equal opportunity

3. Ecological wisdom

4. Nonviolence

5. Decentralization

6. Community-based economics and economic justice

7. Feminism and gender equity

8. Respect for diversity

9. Personal and global responsibility

10. Future focus and sustainability

In short, the Green Party is antithetical to the “tea party” and the Repugnican Party and represents what the Democratic Party sometimes pays lip service to but rarely or never delivers because it’s too beholden to the corporatocrats and is terrified of losing the dumbfuck (a.k.a. “swing” or “independent”) vote.

If British Petroleum’s ruination of the Gulf of Mexico and the Democratic Party’s impotent response to the crisis doesn’t warrant breathing new life into the Green Party, then I don’t know what the hell will.

I hear the counter-argument: But a strong Green Party will only help the Repugnicans!*

Meh.

Serious competition is the only thing that will drag the Democratic Party from the Clintonesque center to the left. Without serious competition to the Democratic Party, all that we’ll ever fucking get from the Democratic Party is more empty promises of hope and change.

Neither we nor the planet can survive much longer on such empty promises.

–

*I also hear people clamoring: Ralph Nader (the Green Party candidate) threw the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush!

However, the Green Party’s website correctly points out:

The Supreme Court spoiled [the 2000 presidential election]: [Democratic candidate] Al Gore won the 2000 election. [Republican] George W. Bush became president when a biased U.S/ Supreme Court allowed election manipulation by Florida Republicans.

Al Gore Spoiled [the 2000 election]: Gore ran a weak campaign with no clear message. He failed to defeat Bush in the debates and even lost his home state of Tennessee. Millions of Democrats voted for Bush compared to the few hundred thousand who voted for Nader.

Democratic senators spoiled [the election]: When the Black Caucus challenged Bush’s election victory in January 2001, not one Democratic Senator stood up in support. Senate Democrats failed to push for an investigation of the Florida vote debacle.

The Democratic Party spoiled [the election]: For many years, Democrats never objected when officials removed African American and other voters from the voter rolls in Florida and other states. Why didn’t the Democrats sue when 90,000 Florida voters were disqualified earlier in 2000? Why were Democrats (including Gore) silent about disqualified votes in the weeks after the election?

To lambast Ralph Nader for having exercised his American and his constitutional right to run for president is undemocratic and un-American.

I voted for him in 2000 and I wish that I had voted for him in 2008 instead of Barack Obama.

McCarthyism redux is a best-seller

Wow. The jihadists and I are colluding and I didn’t even know it!

So I thank one Andrew C. McCarthy (a descendant of Joseph McCarthy, I wonder?) for bringing this fact to my attention.

McCarthy’s book, titled The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, is at No. 34 on amazon.com’s top 100 best-selling books list as I type this sentence.

McCathy might argue that he’s not conflating fundamentalist Islamists with us members of the American left — I’ll probably never know his arguments, because I’ll never read his wingnutty book(s) — but clearly that’s what he has done.

But there is plenty about fundamentalist Islam that I, a rabid fucking moonbat, oppose.

For starters, I don’t even fucking believe in God.

When you talk about God, I have to ask you: Where, exactly, does God live? On Fantasy Lane right next to the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus?

I don’t care if you’re Muslim, Christian or Jewish, if you believe in a God as some sort of male entity that is omniscient and omnipotent and favors your team over all of the others, I think that it’s time for you to grow the fuck up and to start thinking for yourself.

Then there’s the fact that I’m gay, and that gay men are routinely killed and otherwise persecuted by fundamentalist Islamic extremists.

One of the many things that the fundamentalist Islamist extremists and the American right wing have in common, in fact, is their shared belief that non-heterosexuals should be persecuted — because that’s what the non-existent God wants.

What else? I disagree with patriarchy and misogyny, which, along with the persecution of non-heterosexuals, puts the American right wing a lot more in league with the fundamentalist Islamic extremists than it puts the American left wing.

I also vehemently oppose theocracy, and the fundamentalist Islamic extremists are all about theocracy — as are the American wingnuts, who, to give just a partial recitation of their theocratic wish list, want prayer in our public schools, want it taught in our public schools that evolution is just a “theory” and that bullshit creationism is at least equal to the “theory” of evolution, want abortion outlawed based upon their religious beliefs, and want same-sex marriage outlawed based upon their religious beliefs. 

McCarthy cites Muslims as “sabotaging America,” yet if the American right wing had their way, we’d be living in a theocracy just like the fucking Taliban, something that I and my fellow leftists vehemently oppose. 

About the only thing that I can think of that a jihadist and I would agree upon is that the Muslims and the Arabs of the world have been getting the shitty end of the stick at the hands of the Jews and self-proclaimed “Christians” for some time now.

But even then, to me it’s solely an issue of fairness and evenhandedness, whereas to your jihadist it’s an issue of his (or her) belief that Islam is the Only One True Religion of the World, as the Jews and the “Christians” believe their religions are.

So if McCarthy has insinuated that the American left and the jihadists are in league, as it strikes me that he has, that claim is easily fucking annihilated.

Perhaps what McCarthy is really getting at is that if you aren’t a “Christian” and if you aren’t a right-wing nutjob, then you aren’t a real American, and thus you are trying to “sabotage America.”

This bullshit sells, very apparently.

We have all of these dumbfuck white people all throughout the nation, but mostly in the red states, polluting the gene pool, worried that those who have (in no certain order) different religious beliefs, different political ideologies, different nationalities, different languages, different physical appearances and/or different sexual orientations or gender identities are ruining! the! nation! when, in fact, it’s the stupid white men — the George W. Bushes and the Dick Cheneys and the British Petroleum CEOs and the Glenn Becks – who are responsible for the fact that the American Empire is teetering on collapse.

I imagine all of these self-righteous white fucktards buying books like The Grand Jihad thinking that they’re actually accomplishing something by consuming wingnutty media that only already confirm their ignorant, whacked-out beliefs, when, in fact, all that they’re accomplishing is to make McCarthy and his ilk richer and the nation dumber.

Most of the best-selling political titles on amazon.com are wingnutty titles, and this used to be more distressing to me than it is now. Now, I tend to view it as evidence of the right wing’s death throes. They’re desperate. Things are changing and they can’t handle it. They’re faced with an increasing number of people in the United States of America who don’t look, act, speak and believe like they do, and they’re so fucking insecure that this drives them batty. The Great White Arizonan Freakout is just one example of this.

I sure hope that we on the left are a danger to the continued existence of the American right wing. But Muslims?

Estimates on the number of Muslim Americans range from 1.3 million to 7 million. That’s not a lot of people in a nation of more than 300 million. The 7 million estimate comes from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which one might argue has a reason to inflate its figure of 7 million, since it’s a Muslim advocacy group. I tend to think that the actual number lies somewhere between the Pew Research Center’s estimated 2.5 million and the U.S. News & World Report’s estimated 5 million.

American Jews are estimated to be around 6.5 million, yet, as I have noted, they are overrepresented in both houses of Congress and elsewhere in Washington, such as on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Um, there is one (1) Muslim American in Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who in 2006 became the very first Muslim elected to Congress. 

So we hardly have an Islamo-Manchurian Congress or D.C., as amazon.com’s description of McCarthy’s sad and pathetic little book seems to suggest.

If we really want to be paranoid about a special interest group having a grip on Congress and D.C., we’d be better off pointing a finger at the Jews rather than at the Muslims. But the Zionist/Israel-first lobby busily slanders the Muslim and Arab communities and feigns victimhood (I guess that you can call it a perpetual Holocaust) in order to divert your attention from the fact that the Zionist/Israel-first lobby actually is quite powerful within the United States of America, even driving its foreign fucking policy, for fuck’s sake.

If Muslims drove the United State’s foreign policy, the American right wing would be up in arms, but they’re strangely quite perfectly OK with the Zionist/Israel-first lobby driving the nation’s foreign policy.

And as far as a dangerous left wing goes, Barack Obama is horribly disappointing to us on the left, and a series of news articles, such as this one, have been appearing on this subject lately.

Obama a “socialist”?

Oh, I fucking wish! He’s not even a Democrat — he’s a corporatocrat, a Repugnican Lite.

Obama’s party controls the White House and both houses of Congress and has for more than a year now, and what’s he doing right now? He’s practicing how to appear to be angry! And today he actually said, more than a month into the British Petroleum debacle, that he’s now researching “whose ass to kick.”

Oo!

Obama said he’s going to “kick” “ass”!

I’m so moist — not!

While I wish the president the best of luck with his Mr. Spock- or Data-like attempt to display human emotion, he has a long way to go to get my vote again in November 2012. If I could do it over again, I’d have voted for Ralph Nader instead of for Obama in November 2008.

Fact is, the greatest danger to the United States of America remains the American right wing, which has brought us such wonderful things as 9/11 (Osama bin Laden himself has stated that U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and U.S. support of Israel were major reasons why he masterminded the 2001 attacks [Google it]), the Vietraq War (which was sold to the nation by the unelected Bush regime as retaliation for 9/11, even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11, which the Bush regime knew fully well) and the British Petroleum debacle, the latter two of which Dick Cheney’s Halliburton had a strong hand in. Oh, and Hurricane Katrina. And the largest federal budget deficit in the history of the nation (and Halliburton, with its no-bid war-profiteering contracts, had a hand in that, too — fuck, and even a hand in Hurricane Katrina, since Halliburton is a part of Big Oil, which contributes to global warming, which contributes to stronger hurricanes).

Fuck. The America-hating fundamentalist Islamic extremists only wish that they could inflict just a fraction of the damage on the United States of America that the American right wing has over the course of the past several years. The illegal, immoral, unprovoked, unjust and wholly unnecessary Vietraq War, to give just one example, not only has overextended our military and driven up our federal budget deficit, but it has resulted in the wholly unnecessary deaths of more than 4,400 of our troops since the treasonous Bush regime launched it in March 2003.

My guess is that Osama bin Laden is somewhere in a cave thinking: “Mission accomplished!”

Internet revolution the ONE good thing about the dog shit of a decade that was

The last 10 years really have sucked ass.

First there was the blatantly stolen presidential election of late 2000.

Hey, what harm to the nation could a band of thieves possibly do in the White House for four or eight years? George W. Bush & Co. are whining more loudly for the White House, so let’s just let them have it! In late 2000 that was the mentality of Americans, who, fat and lazy from the prosperous Clinton years, didn’t give a shit that their democracy had been dangerously subverted by Team Bush. Hey, they had things to buy and things to consume!

Bush had lost the popular vote by “only” more than a half-million votes. Close enough! And that his brother was the governor of Florida, the pivotal state that Bush “won” — and that Florida’s top elections official, Repugnican Katherine Harris, also had sat on the state’s committee to elect Gee Dubya — and that the Repugnican-tilted U.S. Supreme Court voted to stop the whole silly recount nonsense; none of that was a problem. Democrat Al Gore was just being a “sore loserman.”

I saw the decade coming. In early 2001 I attended a “Not My President Day” rally at the California State Capitol here in Sacramento to voice my dissent to the Universe. In November 2000 I’d voted for Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, but it was obvious that Al Gore had won the too-close election.

Then there was Sept. 11, 2001, and the months of post-9/11 hysteria. 9/11 was the unelected Bush regime’s Reichstag fire.

Speaking of which, then there was the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust launching of its Vietraq War in March 2003. (In February 2003 I was at the state Capitol again, this time protesting the coming Vietraq War, which the Bush regime might have called “Operation Iraqi Liberation,” except that that spells O-I-L, so they called it “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”) On May 1, 2003, “President” Bush declared “mission accomplished,” but thus far the Vietraq War has claimed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives (these Iraqis were permanently “liberated,” you see) and the lives of more than 4,300 U.S. military personnel. And hundreds of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars that the Repugnicans are perfectly OK handing over to the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, via bogus wars – but not to things that Americans need, such as health care. Because that would be socialism! Better dead than red, but, of course, with the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system, you’re going to be dead anyway.

Then there was Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 to blow away and wash away any and all doubt that it was a big fuckin’ mistake to have just allowed Team Bush to steal the White House in late 2000.

Both Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 killed more than 2,000 Americans each, yet the Repugnicans now are lambasting President Barack Obama — who, if nothing else, actually fucking won the presidential election — because some lonely young dude from Nigeria tried to blow up an airliner but only succeeded in burning himself.

We just can’t trust Obama to keep us safe!, except that thus far he has, and it was George W. Bush who couldn’t keep us safe. But facts have become a matter of opinion in the United States of Amnesia.

But I digress.

After Hurricane Katrina, it was just waiting it out until President Bozo and Vice President Penguin were termed out of the White House.

Barack Obama and Billary Clinton duked it out for months on end during the interminable 2008 Democratic presidential primary season.

Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination and the general election based upon his promises of “hope” and “change.”

Keep on hoping for that big change! That was the theme of 2009.

So yeah, the last 10 years have been a big, steaming pile of dog shit.

But it was an article via AlterNet titled “This Decade Mostly Sucked — Except for the Huge Expansion of the Internet” that made me realize that yeah, there was one good thing about the past decade.

The author of the piece notes:

The Internet is a disruptive technology for our entire species, even if it has a long way to go before it spreads to all humans. The exponential decline in the cost of information brought about by the Internet and mobile phone technology will be, in all likelihood, the top cultural and technological development of our lifetimes. The way this has changed, and will continue to change, our economic, social and mental structures puts it on par with the printing press as an agent of change….

I agree with all of that. Unfortunately, the author then goes on to discuss Net neutrality, which is an important issue, but he misses what I think is the biggest achievement of the Internet: the Internet has been an end-run around the baby boomers, who have been hell-bent upon destroying the nation that they inherited from their spoiling parents (the so-called “greatest generation”) in a fat and juicy state but have sucked bone dry during their too-long lifetimes.

The Internet wasn’t around during most of their lives, so to the boomers the Internet wasn’t that important. It was a mildly useful and/or amusing tool or toy – you can buy stuff on it, you can save money by sending some e-mails instead of stamped letters or instead of making long-distance phone calls, you can look at porn (but you probably shouldn’t, because while they enjoyed wild, uninhibited sex when they were young, the boomers don’t want the generations that follow them to enjoy sex, and since the boomers’ sexual excess brought us AIDS, we can’t).

But the boomers never appreciated the potential power of the Internet.

Until it was too late.

“Inspired” by the multiple rapings to our democracy, starting with late 2000’s theft of the White House, and also “inspired” by the inevitable Vietraq War, which it was clear that the unelected Bush regime was going to start no matter fucking what, I started blogging in late 2002, and millions of others also have been using the power of the Internet this decade to do an end-run around the traditional power structure.

Information is power, and so the informational system is the power system, and we sneaky Generation X’ers (and Gen Y’ers [and yes, a handful of non-evil boomers]) have used the Internet to get around the blockages that the power-hungry boomers placed before us.

Not to get too geeky here, but the human body, when a large blood vessel is blocked or otherwise not functioning, will form a network of smaller, more numerous blood vessels in order to compensate for the lost circulation.

That’s what we progressives have done: gone around the boomers’ blockages in smaller, more numerous ways, such as with blogs and many other new ways of sharing information electronically.

The invention of the printing press indeed made it harder for the powers that be to maintain their power by withholding information from us peasants, and the Internet has expanded upon the success of the printing press exponentially, because while printing presses cost a lot of money, almost everyone has access to the Internet. (Indeed, don’t even get me started on how hard it is to get noticed as a blogger, even if you’re an excellent fucking writer, as I am, because of the crushing number of blogs out there.)

As I said, before the boomers realized how powerful the Internet could be as a tool for the downtrodden to politically organize and to share information that the powers that be would try to keep from us peasants, it was too late; the world had changed irreversibly because of the Internet. The “solid” foundation that the boomers thought they were standing upon had been quietly eaten from beneath them by millions of busy termites.

It’s too late for the boomers who never bothered to join the Internet revolution. The world has changed around these dinosaurs while they’ve remained stuck in the past. (Fuck, I have had boomer “managers” who can’t even fucking touch-type in this, the Information Age!)

So anyway, we end 2009 and the decade with President Obama. Let me remind you that he never was the superhero that many made him out to be, with a big “O” on his chest. Obama simply rode the wave that Howard Dean created in his campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.

Speaking of which, the 2004 election also was a big event of the past decade to me; I’d never been that politically involved before or since, and it was the felons and the traitors of the unelected Bush regime who induced me to become so politically aware and active* — an unintended side effect of their treason and their felonies, I’m sure.

Anyway, even though I always supported John Kerry over Dean, figuring that there was no way that Dean could win the White House in 2004, not with the Repugnicans still rabidly milking the TERROR! cow, I credit Team Dean with having changed forever the way that presidential politics are played, including the phenomenon of individuals’ political donations (including mine) becoming as important if not more important than the fat cats’ political donations.

As 2009 and as the decade come to a close, it’s clear that we progressives — those of us for whom “hope” and “change” aren’t just slogans that you cynically slap on campaign merchandise — have a long way to go, but we start the new year and the new decade with the advantage of having seriously undercut, quietly but surely over the past decade, the biggest threat to our nation and our democracy: the baby boomers.

We did it legally and democratically and, luckily for them, bloodlessly.

So far.

*I became so politically active that, among other things, at one point I got to shake John Kerry’s hand during one of his visits to California (too bad that he didn’t become president), and I also met Cindy Sheehan before she became nationally (in)famous for having camped outside of Gee Dubya’s ranch in Texas in August 2005 in protest of the Vietraq War, in which her young son Casey had been killed. (I will brag that I blogged about Sheehan a full six months before she became nationally known.)

I have to say that Sheehan might be my most-admired person of the decade. I can think of no one else who so courageously stood up against the Bush regime — too bad that Al Gore didn’t in late 2000, or the decade might have turned out quite differently — and she took so much bile and venom for her incredibly brave patriotism.

The war that Sheehan opposed but took so much shit for having opposed is now considered by the majority of Americans to have been a bullshit war. (I doubt that anyone has apologized to her, though, because being an American means never having to say that you’re sorry…)

I give Obama a ‘C’ for ‘Clintonesque’

We voted for Barack Obama in November 2008, but we got another President Clinton anyway.

I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary primarily because I didn’t think that his primary opponent Billary Clinton could win the White House, and also because I didn’t want another Clintonesque (that is, “centrist” — that is, milquetoast) “Democratic” president.

Now, I realize that there is little difference between Obama and Billary — except that I still believe that Billary couldn’t have won the White House, and that if Obama hadn’t won the Democratic primary, we’d have another Repugnican in the White House right now.

Many have pointed out that Obama never promised to be a foaming-at-the-mouth liberal president. Well, if that is accurate, Team Obama certainly never did anything to dissuade the dollars that we liberals liberally poured into Obama’s campaign coffers. If neither Obama nor his team ever promised the starry-eyed moonbats a rose garden, well, neither Obama nor his team ever did anything to disabuse them of the notion that Obama was on their side.

President Obama recently gave his term as president thus far “a good solid ‘B+’.”

Progressive Ralph Nader, whom I almost voter for in November 2008 instead of Obama — and whom I wish I had voted for instead — gives Obama’s first year a good solid “F”.

“He’s been far too concessionary to large corporations, many of which want to block his legislation and many of which are being bailed out by his administration,” Nader said of Obama. “And when you’re concessionary, for the president, the Republicans smell weakness, they smell pliability, they smell the desperation … and when you project weakness, instead of steadfastness, then you facilitate divisions within your own party.”

Yup.

Obama, I suspect, gives himself a “B+” because George W. Bush lowered the presidential bar all the way to China. Yes, if Bush II represents the new normal for the White House, then Obama would get the “B+”, but Bush was an anomaly, not the new normal.

Ralph Nader’s “F” is a bit harsh, though, as Nader represents progressive change that more than 90 percent of politicians are way too petrified to even attempt to attempt. Yes, by Nader’s lofty, idealistic standards, Obama gets an “F.”

With the extreme outliers of George W. Bush and Ralph Nader ignored, I think it’s safe to give Obama a “C.” He’s an average U.S. president: still kowtowing to the corporations and to big money, still putting the interests of the power structure over the interests of the majority of the American people. He made lots of campaign promises that he hasn’t delivered upon. He is, in short, another typical American politician.

If Obama were the only president to campaign one way and to administer in another way and to put the fat cats’ interests above the average American’s interests, then yes, I could give him an “F”, but as it’s just business as usual, I give Obama a “C”. “C” does, after all, mean average.

And “C” also is for “Clinton.” And for “centrist.”

That’s the kind of president that Obama has turned out to be: an awful lot like Bill Clinton, only Clinton was beleaguered by a Repugnican-dominated Congress while Obama has a Congress dominated by his own party, so Obama has much less of an excuse for his “centrism.”

I’d love to give Obama an “incomplete,” with the hopes that he’ll actually earn that “B+” that he claims he has earned, but my hunch is that he’ll round out his one or two terms with only a “C”.

P.S. While looking back at past weekly “This Modern World” ’toons, this one struck me as germaine to this post:

On the anniversary of Obama’s election

Today I received an e-mail from Organizing for America*, the remnants of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, titled “One year ago.” It’s meant to be nostalgic.

 Ah, yes – memories:

It was almost one year ago, on November 4, 2008, that I walked into my neighborhood polling place knowing that I’d vote for either Democrat Barack Obama or independent Ralph Nader, for whom I had voted in 2000 (when he ran for president on the Green Party ticket). Even as I walked through the polling-place door, I still wasn’t 100 percent sure which of the two candidates ultimately would get my vote.

In the end, I ended up darkening, with my black ballpoint pen, the oval next to the name “Barack Obama.” I knew that he’d win California anyway, and in the end I found the opportunity to vote for the nation’s first non-completely-white president to be rather irresistible.

Today, I wish that I had resisted.

Barack Obama has turned out to be pretty much another Bill Clinton — a “centrist.” Which means a coward. An appeaser. A politics-as-usual kinda guy.

There was nothing “centrist” about the eight long years of nightmarish rule by the unelected BushCheneyCorp. When the Repugnicans have the power, they don’t hesitate to use it. Remember when Gee Dubya was “re”-elected in 2004 with only 50.7 percent of the popular vote, but the members of the Bush regime called this a “mandate” from the American people nonetheless?

Here is Obama, having been elected by 53 percent of the people, which by the opposition’s definition, anyway, is a huge ol’ fucking mandate, and here is Obama with both houses of Congress dominated by his party, yet what accomplishments has he made?

That “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Obama reassures his opposition not to worry because thus far into his presidency he’s done nothing — it’s pretty accurate.

While the Democrats, led by the Obama White House, aren’t owning their power, I see that the wingnutty Repugnicans (which, in most cases, is redundant) were even successful in forcing out the Repugnican candidate in a U.S. House of Representatives race in New York state (the special election is on Tuesday and she dropped out of the race yesterday) because they consider her to be too moderate — and I think: Damn, why can’t we progressives force out those “Democrats” who are too moderate?

Instead, we have “Democrats” like Harry Reid and my U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein, whom I have always thought of as Mrs. Joseph Lieberman.   

“Base sends GOP warning shot in NY-23,” a Politico headline reads, and I think, Why isn’t the base firing warning shots at the “Democratic” obstructionists in Washington?

Why can’t we progressives be as aggressive as the wingnuts are? Especially when they’re wrong about just about everything and we’re right about just about everything?

It’s too early to know whether the wingnuts’ victory in New York state in pushing out the Repugnican candidate they deem to be too moderate will help or harm the Repugnican Party in the short term, I suppose, but, it seems to me, pushing out the woman candidate (Diedre Scozzafava) for yet another conservative white male candidate (Doug Hoffman) will harm the Repugnican Party over the long term because, although the stupid white men are trying to fight it, rule by stupid white men is going the way of the dinosaurs in an increasingly diversifying nation. 

That Hoffman is running on the “Conservative Party” ticket doesn’t seem to bode well to me. It was when the Southern racists broke off from the Democratic Party, apparently starting with racist Strom Thurmond’s running for president on the “Dixiecrat” ticket in 1948, that the Democratic Party lost the South.

Should the wingnuts succeed in gaining some third-party strength, it seems to me, this will only help the Democratic Party. As The Associated Press notes, in the 1992 presidential election, billionaire businessman Ross Perot’s third-party ticket (the “Reform Party”), which had a bent to the right, won 19 percent of the popular vote; “Perot vastly altered the dynamic of that contest,” the AP notes, adding, “Democrat Bill Clinton was the beneficiary of that three-way contest, taking away the presidency from [Repugnican] George H.W. Bush with just a plurality of the vote.”

Any third party that might emerge over the coming years that comes even close to the success of Perot’s Reform Party in 1992, it seems to me, probably would stem from white angst and thus probably would siphon away Repugnican votes.

That scenario probably wouldn’t give progressives much leverage, however, because the Democratic presidential candidate could win with a plurality, like Bill Clinton did in 1992.

Those of us on the far left and the far right aren’t really represented in Washington, D.C., however, and I’d be fine with a four-party (or multi-party) system: the Democratic Party could be for those who are center-left, the Repugnican Party could be for those who are center-right, the wingnuts could have their own party (the “Conservative Party” or whatever the fuck they want to call it), and we progressives could have our own party, too — the Green Party, preferably. 

Or maybe it just needs to be a fight to the bitter end, a (bloodless, hopefully) rematch of the Civil War. That seems to be what those on the far right want, and as a member of the far left, I say: Let’s give that to them.

*Remember when the remnants of Howard Dean’s failed campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination became Democracy for America? Damn, are the Obama people copycats… They act like Obama did it all on his own, when, in fact, Obama only rode in on the wave that Dean and his supporters created…