Nicolas Maduro wins mandate!

Reuters photo

Nicolas Maduro, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor, celebrates his victory in Venezuela’s presidential election yesterday. The sore losers on the right are trying to cripple Maduro right out of the gate by casting unsubstantiated charges of election fraud, just like the wingnuts do here at home.

I say that tongue in cheek. Of course 50.7 percent of the vote isn’t a mandate (the definition of which to me is something like “unquestionably strong majority support,” which, I suppose, would need to at least approach 60 percent), but I am struck by the irony of how the unelected Bush regime (and its friends in the corporately owned and controlled media) called its 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004 a “mandate” while the very same wingnuts say that Nicolas Maduro’s 50.7 percent in yesterday’s presidential election in Venezuela means that the Chavistas are in deep doo-doo because Maduro didn’t do better than he did.

Why wasn’t George W. Bush’s 50.7 percent painted as a problem for his party in 2004 — even though, in retrospect, it seems fairly clear that Bush’s 50.7 percent was, in fact, far from being a “mandate,” actually a harbinger of upcoming presidential election losses for the Repugnican Party?

(Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 was higher than the 47.9 percent that he got in 2000 — when he was defeated by Democrat Al Gore, who got 48.4 percent of the popular vote – but Barack Obama, with his popular vote wins of 52.9 percent in 2008 and 51.1 percent in 2012 [to Mittens Romney's awfully ironic 47.2 percent], earned more popular votes that Bush ever did.)

It fits the right wing’s narrative nicely to assert that Nicolas Maduro is a weakened president from Day One. It wasn’t in the wingnuts’ best interests to assert that Bush was a weakened president, so instead they claimed the opposite — that his 50.7 represented a “mandate.” Bush himself bragged about having earned “political capital” that he was going to spend on a shopping spree.

Indeed, Bush not only spent any “political capital” that he’d actually earned, but he ran up his party’s credit card debt, a debt that still plagues his party. (Not only do the Repugnican Tea Party traitors still talk as though Ronald Reagan was the last Repugnican president, but I clearly recall that even while Bush still sat in the White House in 2008, neither John McCainosaurus nor Sarah Palin mentioned him in their televised national debates or in their public appearances, but also pretended that Reagan was the last president from their party.)

So: If you are a right-wing politician, then your 50.7 percent is a “mandate.” But if you are a left-wing politician, then your 50.7 percent means that the vote was so freakin’ close that you might as well just step aside and allow your opponent to take office instead of you.

Sickly, even many on the left fall into this double-standard bullshit, and, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) noted in November, while Bush’s “re”-election immediately was branded a “mandate,” even though he “won” only 286 electoral votes in 2004, Obama’s win of more than 300 electoral votes in November was “definitely not a mandate.” (After all of the votes were counted, it turns out that Obama won 332 electoral votes in November.)

When push comes to shove, it doesn’t matter whether Nicolas Maduro won a “mandate” yesterday. All that he needed to do was get the higher number of votes — to the victor goes the spoils — and he apparently did that. His right-wing opponent, Henrique Capriles, has demanded a recount, and Maduro has said that he’s fine with every vote being recounted.

Of course, Maduro can’t claim, as the unelected Bush regime falsely did in 2004, that he has a “mandate,” but at the same time he shouldn’t allow himself to be stymied by the right-wing sore losers’ attempts to cripple him right out of the gate. A win is a win, and very apparently he, not Capriles, was chosen by the majority of the people.

(Despite right-wing charges of rampant election fraud in Venezuela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose organization monitors elections around the world, said last year, “As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” [Of course, Jimmy Carter is just a “socialist,” too, so of course he would say that!])

Maduro, no doubt, has his work cut out for him. My guess is that the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, after he had consolidated his political power, in his later years didn’t work as hard for the people as he had in the past (in fairness, though, of course his battle with cancer no doubt slowed him down), and Maduro needs to be more about improving Venezuela than about maintaining a rock-star brand name, especially the Chavez brand name.

Chavez  is gone, and while it’s fine to carry on his ideals — I hope that they are carried on not only in Venezuela, but that they spread to the United States of America one day — it’s a mistake to make a movement about one person instead of about principles, because while principles can be eternal, the flesh is weak and quite impermanent.

As long as Maduro and his supporters refuse to get caught up in the right wing’s bullshit propagandistic narrative that Maduro didn’t really win the election, and as long as Maduro works hard for the greatest number of Venezuelans – as his own person, and not as the clone of Chavez — Maduro can be re-elected in another six years.

In the meantime, all of us on the left, regardless of which nation we live in, need to be vigilant about the double standards. The bar always has been set higher for those on the left than it has been for those on the right, and at the minimum we on the left need to stop cooperating with that bullshit. The wingnuts act like they’re winners even when they’ve lost, and we on the left tend to act like we’re losers even when we’ve won.

And Senor Presidente: That pornstache prolly should go. Just sayin’.

Only a Wayback Machine can save the Repugnican Tea Party now

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors should consider hiring Mr. Peabody as a consultant, and they’ll need to go back to even before 1900…

So the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ talking point now is that in order to win over voters from now on, they have to communicate better.

Wow.

They’ve been communicating quite well, actually. Anyone who has been paying attention should be quite clear on where they have stood. Take the Repugnican Tea Party’s platform that was approved from its last national convention. This is Faux News reporting, too (in August):

Tampa, Fla. — Republicans emphatically approved a toughly worded party platform at their national convention Tuesday that would ban all  abortions and gay marriages, reshape Medicare into a voucher-like program and cut taxes to energize the economy and create jobs. …

There alone, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors alienated most women and almost all non-heterosexuals (there are some self-loathing non-heterosexuals who support the Repugnican Tea Party, but there aren’t a lot of them). There’s no way to “better” “communicate” such stances as that the embryo’s or fetus’ “rights” always trump those of the mother (even, very apparently, in such cases as rape, incest or when the mother’s life would be at risk should the pregnancy continue) or that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to ban same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

Those are the hard-right, misogynist, homophobic and patriarchal stances that the Repugnican Tea Party took in its latest party platform, which wasn’t passed nearly long enough ago for the fascistic traitors who comprise the party to claim now that they just didn’t “communicate” well enough.

It’s not just women and gays whom the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have alienated, of course.

Most of the traitors still are beating up on the brown-skinned immigrants from south of the border, whom they regard as subhuman, much as how the Nazis regarded the Jews and how the Israelis, ironically, now regard the Palestinians.

Ohioan “Joe the Plumber,” one of the poster boys for the stupid white man, who last year ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket (of course) declared in Arizona — Ground Zero for the anti-immigrant bigotry and hatred in the U.S.; indeed, Arizona is the South Africa of the Southwest — in August that the U.S. government should “put a damn fence on the border going with Mexico and start shooting.” Those were the words of a candidate for a federal office.

Let’s not leave out black Americans, of course.

A huge chunk of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors still maintain that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus his presidency is illegitimate — as though if there had been any problem with Obama’s constitutionally mandated qualifications to be president, neither Billary Clinton nor John McCainosaurus, who must have spent plenty of dough on opposition research and who both wanted to be president very badly, would have discovered it and then worked to oust Obama from the 2008 presidential race.

Michelle Obama can’t do anything without being criticized for it by the white-supremacist wingnuts as being un-first-lady-like. What if Laura Bush — or (shivers) First Lady Ann Romney — had announced the Oscar for Best Picture? Would the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have brayed that that was “inappropriate”?

Of course not — because their main problem with Barack Obama and his wife is that they’re blacks who are in the White House.

And even while we have some of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors claiming that they just need to “communicate” “better,” as I type this sentence we have most of the members of the Repugnican Tea Party publicly hoping that the right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court will eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — because despite the fact that the Repugnican Tea Party still advocates measures that keep blacks and other non-whites and other Democratically leaning individuals from voting, such as strict voter identification requirements (in the name of preventing the “voter fraud” that does not exist — that’s in their party platform, too) and insanely long voting lines for black, non-white and other Democratically leaning voters (coupled, of course, with short lines for Repugnican Tea Party voters), race-based voter suppression is a relic from the past, you see.

And if the Repugnican Tea Party traitors can’t suppress enough Democratically leaning voters, fuck it, they’ll just at least try to change the way that we divvy up the electoral votes in the Electoral College, but only in those states that will boost the Repugnican Tea Party. (We’ll leave Texas and the other dark-red states alone, you see.)

It’s clear that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors like, respect and support democracy only when they win/“win” elections. (The quotation marks are for such elections as the 2000 presidential election.) You can’t “communicate” that obvious fact “better.”

We also have Mittens Romney’s comment in October that “47 percent” of Americans are mooches, when, in fact, it’s the 47 percent who voted for Romney who are the takers, while the denizens of the blue states (the “47 percent” whom Romney was referring to) always have been and always will be the makers, supporting the welfare states that are the red states.

Muslims, too, have been bashed relentlessly by the Repugnican Tea Party — aside from advocating the continued mass slaughter of Muslims (such as by incredibly stupidly attacking Iran and by stupidly blindly continuing to support the mass-murderous wingnuts of Israel in their continued Nazi-like mass slaughter of the Palestinians), the Repugnican Tea Party traitors call President Obama a Muslim as a slam — and I can’t see most Muslims ever supporting the Repugnican Tea Party any more than I can see myself ever supporting the Repugnican Tea Party.

As a gay man, am I to just forget what the Repugnican Tea Party just put in its fucking party platform — that my equal human and civil rights guaranteed to me by the U.S. Constitution should be denied to me by an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that specifically singles me out for such discrimination? Am I to just forget that George W. Bush made opposition to same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his 2004 “re”-election campaign? (Speaking of Gee Dubya, am I also to just forget that he blatantly stole office in 2000 and then started a bogus war for which he should be executed as the war criminal that he is?) Am I to just forget that the House Repugnicans right now are spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars to try to keep the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” alive because the Obama administration refuses to defend the blatantly unconstitutional — and thus the infuckingdefensible — act?

Are women just supposed to forget the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ clearly articulated stances on such issues as abortion, birth control, rape and violence against women?

Are Latinos just supposed to forget the brown-skinned-immigrant bashing that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been using to induce ignorant, bigoted white voters to vote for them?

Are blacks just supposed to forget?

“We need to be asking for votes in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we’re asking for the vote from,” Karl Rove (a.k.a. George W. “Bush’s brain”) said just yesterday just in my backyard, here in Sacramento, at the California Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ convention.

How has that tactic been working for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, though?

They fronted Sarah Palin after Barack Obama had picked Joe Biden (and not Billary Clinton or another woman) to be his running mate. The message was supposed to be that the Repugnican Tea Party is the party that wuvs women.

Women didn’t buy it, and probably were insulted that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors think that they’re that fucking stupid. (I was thusly insulted, and I’m a male.) Despite Palin’s supposedly having demonstrated that the Repugnican Tea Party overnight magically became the party of and for women, Obama in November 2008 won a higher percentage of the popular vote than George W. Bush did in 2000 or in 2004, and he couldn’t have done that without women.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors then put Michael Steele in charge of the Repugnican National Committee — as the first black head of the party, in obvious cynical response to the election of the nation’s first black president. (Steele, before he became the head of the party, had been only the lieutenant governor of Maryland. That’s how few blacks are in any real position of power within the Repugnican Tea Party.)

Although on Steele’s watch (from January 2009 to January 2011) the Repugnican Tea Party traitors won back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 (in the “tea party” “revolution”), the Repugnican Tea Party traitors nonetheless dumped Steele in January 2011 and replaced him with white frat boy Reince Priebus — the usual face of the party.

And although the Repugnican Tea Party traitors lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012, on white frat boy Reince Priebus’ watch, just this past January the Repugnican Tea Party traitors nonetheless granted the stupid white man Priebus a second two-year term as head of the Repugnican Tea Party.

As George W. Bush amply demonstrated, the bar is set much, much, much lower for stupid white men than it is for anyone else, perhaps especially for blacks.

Now the Repugnican Tea Party traitors cynically are fronting younger Latino male candidates, such as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, as a presidential hopeful, and, here in California, Abel Maldonado as a gubernatorial hopeful.

Rubio is a 41-year-old Cuban American, and of course Cuban Americans, being (1) the rich Cubans who had exploited others for their own selfish gain before they had to escape from Fidel Castro’s anti-capitalist revolution or (2) their spoiled spawn (such as Rubio), predominantly are right-wingers who believe that the lighter-skinned should continue to exploit the darker-skinned.

Yet almost two-thirds of Latinos in the U.S. have Mexican roots and only 3.5 percent of them have Cuban roots. So how representative is Marco Fucking Rubio of the nationwide Latino community? (But he’s Latino — close enough, right? Is that not how the white supremacists think? Kind of like how 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and not one of them was from Iraq, but let’s invade Iraq because that’s close enough, right?)

Californian Repugnican Tea Party member Abel Maldonado is 45 years old, and while unlike Marco Rubio he is Mexican-American, he couldn’t win even the post of state controller in 2006 or lieutenant governor in 2010. And he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives last year but lost. And he is Californian Repugnicans’ Great Latino Hope.

When will the Repugnican Tea Party traitors realize that the voters can recognize a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Will Marco Rubio (and others who fit his demographic) magically work to win over Latino voters to the Repugnican Tea Party any more than Palin and Steele worked to win over women and black voters?

And is Karl Rove not blatantly asserting that appearance is all that matters when he advises his fellow Repugnican Tea Party traitors “to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we’re asking for the vote from”?

Fuck substance, right? Fuck the Repugnican Tea Party’s continuing history of oppressing certain groups of people, right? Just put a right-wing sellout like Sarah Palin or Michael Steele or Marco Rubio out there and the voters won’t know the difference, right?

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors can find a wingnut or two (or maybe even three) among any minority group and front him or her or them as a candidate. It’s not nearly enough, though, to wipe out decades of the party’s bigotry and discrimination that not only is historical but still continues as I type this sentence.

Perhaps especially when the Repugnican Tea Party then blames its electoral losses on the tokens whom it once fronted and then replaces them with the traditional stupid white men (there was no Palin repeat in 2012 — no, it was two stupid white men on the Repugnican Tea Party presidential ticket, the way that it always had been pre-Palin, and, as I noted, Reince Priebus kept his job as the party’s head even though the booted Michael Steele apparently had done a better job than Priebus did) the party loses even more ground with the groups whose votes it claimed it wanted. You won’t score points with these groups by turning your tokens into your scapegoats.

Even Mittens Romney, for fuck’s sake, reportedly has manned up enough to blame his campaign for his loss in November.

“I lost my election because of my campaign, not because of what anyone else did,” Romney reportedly said on Faux News today.

However, while Romney reportedly quite correctly identified his “47 percent” remarks as being damaging to his campaign — insulting almost half of the nation’s voters on video isn’t a great idea — he also reportedly attributed his loss to the loss of black and Latino voters.

As much as I don’t want to defend Mittens Romney, who would have been a disastrous president, the fact is that there was nothing that his campaign could have done to win over black and Latino voters, given his own fucking party’s disastrous historical relations with those groups.

Actually, I guess that I’m not defending Mittens, because his apparent belief that there was anything that he could have done to magically win over black and Latino voters demonstrates, I think, how stupid he and his ilk believe black and Latino voters are, and how superiorly crafty and clever the white man is, that black and Latino voters are just going to forget decades of bigotry and discrimination at the hands of the Repugnican Party because some white-male Repugnican Tea Party candidate comes up with just the right hocus-pocus, mindfuck rhetoric to hypnotize them into voting for him over their own best interests.

No amount of attempted-Jedi-mindfuck rhetoric and no amount of tokens (like Marco Rubio or Sarah Palin) are going to help the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in future elections. Only a small percentage of the members of the minority groups that historically have been oppressed by the Repugnican Tea Party (and women, of course, are no minority group) are going to fall for this the-foxes-actually-wuv-the-chickens bullshit.

No, what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors sorely need now is a time machine so that they can go back in time – waaay back in time – and treat certain groups of people a whole lot better than they did over at least many decades.

I wish them luck with that.

Four more years (of [largely] the same old shit)!

Reuters photos

I expect little actual progress from the pseudo-progressive President Hopey-Changey over the next four years, but at least during that time I’ll be spared of having to see the Ann-Cunter-like, bleach-blonde harpy Ann Romney trying to fuck us all repeatedly with her strap-on. (Yes, that’s an actual news photo, and so is that one, too.)

Oh, yeah, there was an election on Tuesday.

As I have noted, I voted by mail for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president — yes, practically speaking, as a protest vote – but I knew that President Barack Obama would win my state of California by an overwhelming margin, and he did: thus far in California’s vote counting, Obama has 59.3 percent to Mittens Romney’s paltry 38.4 percent. (Stein, in case you were wondering, is at No. 4, with a whopping 0.6 percent of the state’s vote.)

What I didn’t expect, however, was that as a result of Tuesday’s election — elections, as they say, have consequences – the California Legislature would be on the verge of having a two-thirds “super-majority” in both houses, the state Senate and the state Assembly.

Wow.

This “super-majority” — if utilized – makes the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the Legislature even more irrelevant than they already were before Tuesday.

Not that the Democrats will use their power, of course. Although “super-majority” power, if used to its full extent, would make even the centristy Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown fairly irrelevant, since the Legislature could override his vetoes, there are plenty of center-right “Democratic” California legislators who could threaten any two-thirds threshold.

And, of course, already Jerry Brown has assured spooked California Repugnicans — whose registrants don’t comprise even a full 30 percent of registered Californian voters (the Dems, on the other hand, have almost 44 percent of the state’s registered voters) and whose party doesn’t hold a single statewide office – that his party won’t do too much to upset them, even though, of course, were the state’s parties’ positions of political power reversed, the Repugnicans would ram their right-wing agenda through ruthlessly.

When George W. Bush was “re”-elected in 2004 with a measly 50.7 percent of the popular vote, he called the election results a “mandate.” A “mandate.”

That’s how the Repugnican Tea Party traitors roll: They don’t care even if they don’t even win the popular vote (recall the 2000 presidential election) — they just want to be in power no matter fucking what. They want to shove their Randian, theofascist, neo-Nazi agenda down our throats whether we, the people, give them our permission, via our votes, to do so or not. (So of course if you’re perfectly willing to steal power even when you lost the election, 50.7 percent would be, I suppose, relatively speaking, a “mandate.”)

Votes remain to be counted, but right now Obama is sitting at 50.6 percent of the national popular vote to Mittens’ 47.9 percent. Obama on Tuesday sewed up 332 electoral votes to Mittens’ 206. Including the all-important Ohio and Florida, Obama on Tuesday won all of the states that he won in 2008 (when he garnered 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes), except for two of them, Indiana and North Carolina, which aren’t exactly solid-blue states anyway.

(Indeed, in eight of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, North Carolina went for the Repugnican, and in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, Indiana went for the Repugnican, so Obama’s win in those two states in 2008 was the exception, not the rule, and his loss in those two backasswards states on Tuesday was the rule, not the exception, even though the pathetically straw-grasping Repugnican Tea Party traitors have tried to make some hay out of the fact that Obama didn’t win those two states again on Tuesday. [Indeed, the bar, when it is set by whites, is always set higher for blacks than it is for whites.])

Cheer up, though, white-supremacist wingtards! Mittens did better than John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin did in 2008. They garnered only 45.7 of the popular vote and 173 electoral votes against the guy with the Kenyan ancestry.

Of course, while George W. Bush in 2004 declared 50.7 percent of the popular vote to be a “mandate” and the fascist traitors who comprise his party talked of a “permanent [Repugnican] majority,” only two years later, in 2006, the Repugnicans lost the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic California U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to become speaker of the House in U.S. history, and then two years after that, in 2008, Barack Obama, the nation’s first non-white president, won a higher percentage of the popular vote than either George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton ever had.

So some caution needs to be exercised before declaring a “permanent [insert party name here] majority,” or even a “mandate” based on not even a full 51 percent of the popular vote, but at the same time, to the victor goes the spoils, and the so-called “leaders” of the Democratic Party need to stop acting like losers even after they’ve fucking won.

(Yes, on the heels of his second electoral victory, Obama still is talking about cooperation with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, even though the past four years have demonstrated amply that you cannot negotiate with such terrorists, because the assumption that they are rational creatures capable of compromise is patently incorrect.) 

The Repugnican Tea Party traitor-fascists act like winners even after they’ve lost, and if the damage that they’ve wreaked upon the nation is to be reversed (if that’s even possible at this point [it very most likely isn't, perhaps especially in regards to global warming]), the Democrats really need to stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m not holding my breath, however.

I expect the next four years to look and feel much like the past four, although I expect things here in California to improve more quickly than they improve – if they ever improve — nationally, since here in California we have demonstrated how to edge the Repugnican Tea Party traitors more and more closely to the endangered species status that they oppose so much.

As California goes, so goes the nation, it has been said.

I hope that that is correct.

P.S. Of course I’m happy that on Tuesday the voters of three states — Maine, Maryland and Washington — voted for same-sex marriage, being the first states to adopt same-sex marriage upon a popular vote, and pushing the number of states that have same-sex marriage from six (before Tuesday) to now nine. (The other six states are Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The District of Columbia also has same-sex marriage, as do two U.S. Native American tribes, apparently.)

The 2008 election results were a bittersweet pill here in California, because although Barack Obama had become the nation’s first black president based upon his ubiquitous campaign promises of hope and change (and to a large degree they were just that – promises — we know now), Proposition Hate had shot down same-sex marriage, which the California Supreme Court had ruled earlier in the year was every Californian’s constitutional right.

If same-sex marriage were put up to a vote again in California today, of course it would pass this time — even though, let me be clear, no one’s constitutional guarantee of equality ever should have to be put up to a fucking vote — and it’s gratifying to see that the Mittens Romney-Pretty Boy Paul Ryan ticket, representing the Mormon cult and the Catholick church respectively, were rejected by the majority of the nation’s voters, since the Mormon cult and the Catholick church were the biggest sponsors of Proposition Hate, in their attempt to shove their brand of theocracy and theofascism down our throats, Taliban-style.

Karma is a bitch.

(Just like Ann Romney is. I am sooooo happy not to have to see her fucking face as first lady for the next four years, by the way. Ann Romney reminds me of an Ann Cunter who actually ate something. Why are so many Repugican Tea Party women bleach-blonde harpies who act like sorority chicks who are getting revenge upon all of us for the ponies that they never got as spoiled little girls?)

P.P.S. For all of their post-election sore-loserism crying and whining, the white-supremacist Repugnican Tea Party traitors are fucking lucky that we are seeing a for-the-very-most-part bloodless, demographic revolution in the United States, and not (thus far, anyway…) the actual bloody revolution that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors deserve to have launched against them, a la the French Revolution.

After all, the “47 percent” that Mittens “Let Them Eat Cake” Romney talked about in May when he didn’t know that he was being video-recorded actually is a bit more than 50 percent, we see from Tuesday’s presidential election results.

‘Mean’ Uncle Joe beats the Boy Scout at the starting line

Reuters photo

Vice President Joe Biden smiles dismissively at a boyishly overeager liar Paul Ryan during tonight’s vice presidential debate, which was easy to call for Biden not even a full 15 minutes in.

It’s not even a full 15 minutes into the vice presidential debate as I type this sentence, but already Paul Ryan is coming off as a juvenile. It’s that boyish, whiny voice and those boyish expressions — Ryan comes off as a fucking Boy Scout – which might work for him in our youth-worshipping nation if the topic weren’t as serious and mature as foreign policy.

Joe Biden, coming off as experienced and smiling dismissively as Ryan lies, is kicking Ryan’s ass, and there probably is nothing else that I’ll need to write.

Ryan needed to show that we could trust him as president of the United States if it came to him becoming the president of the United States.

Not even a full 2o minutes now into the debate, Ryan has failed to do that.

I do find it interesting how the female moderator, ABC’s Martha Raddatz, is doing a much better job than PBS’s Jim Lehrer did.

Is she just more assertive than Lehrer? Or are Ryan and Biden unwilling to steamroll over a female moderator? Or is it some combo of the two?

At any rate, she’s doing what she should be doing, which is not letting Paul Ryan get off the hook with his bullshit the way that Lehrer allowed Mittens Romney to do when he debated President Barack Obama last week.

Update: As I type this sentence, Joe Biden is addressing a final topic, that of abortion. Wow. Biden — whose response is that he accepts his Catholic church’s pro-life doctrine but could never himself “impose” that view on a woman, who has the right to make decisions regarding her own body – blew Ryan (whose stated stance is that abortion should be allowed only in the cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger because of the pregnancy) out of the water, and there goes the women’s vote that dumbass pundits claimed was swaying toward the Mittens/Pretty Boy ticket.

Update: The debate is over. Kudos to Martha Raddatz for a job well done, and I have to wonder if the topic of women’s rights would have come up at all had a male moderated.

Joe Biden probably didn’t have to be quite as aggressive as he was, but if aggression was such a fucking bonus for Mittens Romney, then why would it be such a liability for Joe Biden?

Is it that right-wingers are allowed to be aggressive, but left-wingers aren’t allowed to be? That there is a double fucking standard there? (A: Yes, there is.)

Finally, again, Paul Ryan just isn’t presidential. Not with that whiny, adolescent voice, his fakey-fake, wide-eyed expressions, his over-practiced, memorized (and thus insincere-sounding) rhetoric, and really, I see twentysomethings walking around with that duck’s-ass hairdo that the fortysomething Paul Ryan wears. (No offense, twentysomethings, but I don’t want you sitting in the Oval Office, not even the most precocious among you. There is so much to be said for life experience, especially in the so-called leader of the so-called free world…)

Call me shallow, but it seems to me that, for better or for worse, it is these impressions — certainly not tedious policy details – that sway the American voters, and thus it seems to me that Joe Biden accomplished his mission of halting Team Mittens’ post-first-presidential-debate momentum.

P.S. Here is the Reuters photo that already has become iconic of the 2012 vice presidential debate:

Reuters photo

Again, I expect to hear all day tomorrow how “mean” Old Uncle Joe was to poor widdle Paulie Ryan, even though Mittens Romney’s flat-out prickish debate behavior was called a strength. And this from the corporately owned and controlled mass media that supposedly have a left-wing bias.

Let me be clear, though: Joe Biden won the debate not because he can talk over people, but because he demonstrated that he is fit to assume the presidency if it came to that, and he demonstrated — with plenty of help from Paul Ryan — that the himbo/he-Palin Paul Ryan is not.

Can Eddie Munster save Mittens?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haul out Pretty Boy Paul Ryan!

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

Actually, a lot of people, I surmise.

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

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

I don’t fucking think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Team Obama mostly ignores issues, pushes utterly uninspiring money race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert –

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

We might not outraise Mitt Romney.

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

To do that I need your help today.

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

https://donate.barackobama.com/Tonight

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

Good week.

Barack

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

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

Nope.

All!

That!

Matters!

Is!

That!

Barack!

Obama!

Is!

Not!

Outspent!

By!

Mitt!

Romney!!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Breitbart goes to hell

 

Associated Press photo

Wingnut Andrew Breitbart died today, and I celebrated the news. (The racist, right-wing fascist is shown above in October 2009.) Breitbart and I had some things in common – he was a white man with blue eyes, and so am I, and he keeled over at age 43 (I’d thought that he at least was pushing 50), while I just turned 44 yesterday — but that’s all that he and I had in common.

Why do people act as though people who were major assholes in life suddenly somehow become angelic in death?

Wingnutty slanderer and white supremacist Andrew Breitbart, whom I always thought of as Archie Bunker Jr., was a piece of shit who, long before he reportedly died this morning, should have donated his organs to someone else who could have made much, much better use of them.

Breitbart kicked the bucket just a day after my birthday, but it was a great belated birthday gift nonethless; truly, when I read the headline this morning, I was elated. Breitbart and his kind seldom seem to die young, but seem to live forever, fueled by their spite (Pope Palpatine comes to mind).

When evil people like Andrew Breitbart do die young, it’s a boon to humanity. Statistically speaking, Breitbart could have lived to do even more damage for more than the next 20 years.

Andrew Breitbart was not, as Texas Gov. Prick Perry said of him, a “mighty warrior!” (Sarah Palin also called Breitbart a “warrior.”) Breitbart was a fucking liar and a fucking coward, a self-serving race-baiter and scandal-monger without whom the world is much better off.

Breitbart’s crimes against decency and morality were many, but probably his worst crime was his selective editing of the video of a speech that former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod gave at an NAACP fundraising dinner in March 2010.

Breitbart’s selective editing of the speech made Sherrod, who is black, look like an anti-white racist, when, in fact, her speech was about the evil of all forms of racism. Sherrod, who knee-jerkedly was fired by the beyond-pathetic Obama administration before she had received anything like due process — the Obama administration, apparently terrified of being accused of favoring black Americans, loves to throw black Americans like Sherrod and Van Jones under the bus at the very first whiff of a hint of an impending lynching by the KKK – sued Breitbart for defamation last year. The slanderer croaked before the defamation suit could run its course through the court system.

Breitbart was also known for having brought the world lurid images of former Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, who resigned as a result of the petty sex scandal that should not have been the end of his political career. (Weiner did nothing illegal, and the matter was between him and his wife, but the craven Democrats [well, DINOs] in D.C. couldn’t distance themselves from him enough. This was yet another instance of Democratic caving in to the right-wing fascists.)

Those are the two things that Andrew Fucking Breitbart was most known for: slandering Shirley Sherrod as a whitey-hating racist and exposing Anthony Weiner’s wiener. Yeah, that’s the stuff of a “mighty warrior!”

Really, if Prick Perry and Sarah Palin are praising you, then you are one fucking worthless asshole.

Had Andrew Breitbart fought to improve the lives of the many, instead of to aggrandize himself, if he had fought the plutocratic powers that be instead of helped them to carry out their agenda in which the filthy rich few benefit at the expense of the many, then we could say that he was a “mighty warrior,” but again, he was no such thing; he was a pathetic fucking coward.

And before you leave some stupid fucking, wholly predictable comment slamming me for “speaking ill of the dead” or the like, know that Wikipedia notes that “In the hours immediately following Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, Breitbart called Kennedy a ‘villain,’ a ‘duplicitous bastard,’ a ‘prick’ and ‘a special pile of human excrement.’”

Some “mighty warrior,” indeed. Andrew Breitbart in death deserves no better than what he gave in life.

And, unfortunately, it’s not just his fellow KKK members who are proclaiming nice things about Breitbart. The hypocritical millionairess Arianna Huffington, the pampered princess who fancies herself a progressive who stands up for the little guy against the “pigs at the trough” even though she raked in millions of dollars on the backs of unpaid writers for her website The Huffington Post, gushed:

“I was asked many times this morning for my thoughts on what Andrew meant to the political world, but all I can think of at the moment is what Andrew meant to me as a friend, starting from when we worked together — his passion, his exuberance, his fearlessness. And above all, what I’m thinking of at the moment is his amazing wife Susie and their four beautiful young children. My love and thoughts are with them right now.”

Fuck you, Arianna. You could have just kept your mouth shut. (Many if not most evil people throughout history have had families — that simple fact doesn’t make them and their deeds any less evil.)

That Huffington calls Breitbart a “friend” — indeed, I think, we can judge people by the company they keep.

Anyway, now, if James O’Keefe would just die…

The wingnuts’ very bad day

Updated below (Wednesday, February 8, 2012)

Wow.

So the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled that Proposition 8 — the anti-same-sex-marriage measure that passed by a small majority in California in November 2008 after a hateful, lie-filled campaign by the right (financed largely by the Mormon cult and the Catholick church) – violates the freedoms guaranteed to Californians by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, a.k.a. the Equal Protection Clause.*

Sure, the case will go to the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, but even if the current right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court rules that banning same-sex marriage is not unconstitutional, the composition of the court will change over time, and one day same-sex marriage will be legal in all 50 states.

These things take time — it wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Loving vs. Virginia, that no state may outlaw mixed-race marriage.

And it was in 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence vs. Texas that, per Wikipedia, “private sexual conduct is protected by the liberty rights implicit in the due process clause of the United States Constitution.” Yet it was just in 1986 that the same court had upheld “sodomy” laws in Bowers vs. Hardwick. The court reverses itself all the time.

Also today, anti-choice wingnut Karen Handel resigned from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation after the foundation took well-deserved truckloads of shit for having decided to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood — a decision that Handel denies that as the Komen foundation’s vice president for public policy she influenced, but that insiders say of course she did.

Before she went to the Komen foundation, the Repugnican Tea Party’s Handel had run for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-choice platform (never mind that the issue of a woman’s right to an abortion was settled waaay back in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade) and had received the endorsement of fellow wingnut and misogynist Sarah Palin.

Today is a great victory for women and for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals.

The treasonous, ignorant and hate-filled wingnuts among us hate the ideas of equality, of liberty, justice and freedom for all, but the ideals of equality, of liberty, justice and freedom for all — and not just for the oppressive wingnuts — march on nonetheless.

–

*The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Updated (Wednesday, February 8, 2012):

Wow. Yesterday also was a bad day for the wingnuts because the utterly unelectable Prick Santorum came in at first place in all three Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary contests yesterday in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Gilded Boy Mitt Romney came in at second place in Colorado and Missouri and third place in Minnesota.

A protracted Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary fight can only help Barack Obama. Indeed, the media have been reporting that Obama’s favorability ratings are up, and that the latest polls have him beating all of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential contenders in hypothetical matchups.

Again, yesterday was a pretty bad day to be a wingnut.

P.S. Prick Santorum’s attacks against Obama are pretty fucking hilarious, such as this one: “He [Obama] believes he’s the smartest guy in the country and he should tell people what to believe and how to live their lives.”

Yet it’s the Catholick Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascistic cohorts who want to ban abortion – and perhaps even contraception – and decide who may and may not get married, and otherwise cram their backasswards, patriarchal, misognyist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-science worldview down our throats.

But nooooo, it’s Barack Obama who wants to “tell people what to believe and how to live their lives.”

Ding, dong, the wingnut’s gone (or, Newt’s great day)

Reuters photo

Herman Cain today in his exit speech in Atlanta blamed everyone but himself for the implosion of his Repugnican Tea Party presidential bid. Indeed, though, Cain dreamed the impossible dream: to dream that one could become president of the United States of America with not just a few skeletons, but an entire mausoleum of skeletons, in his closet.

Jesus fuck, did Sarah Palin’s people write Herman Cain’s exit speech?

I watched most of Cain’s pathetic exit speech live, and mostly it consisted of Cain blaming the media (and the “political elites”) for his own downfall and claiming that protecting his family is so fucking important to him.

If Cain’s family were so vital to him, he would have kept his paws to himself all of these past many, many years, and Cain’s real problem with the media isn’t that the media have been so unfair to him, but that the media have dared not to perform as a public relations firm for him — the way the media are “supposed” to, according to the uber-egocentric Palinesque worldview.

Ironically, despite his arrogant claims that the evil media have taken away The People’s Clear Choice for President (Herman Cain, of course), that Cain refuses to take substantial personal responsibility for anything — but prefers to blame the media and others instead — demonstrates (aside from his serial sexual harassment of women, of course) that he is utterly unfit for high political office.

It was interesting to listen to Cain spin his collapse, however. Later today I might find the transcript of his exit speech and write more, but one of the top things that he said that sticks out in my mind is his ludicrous claim that he is bailing out while he still was within the top four choices for the 2012 presidency: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.

While that technically might be true, it’s technically true only because President Hopey-Changey has no actually progressive primary opponent within his own party, unfortunately, and in recent nationwide polls of Repugnican Tea Party dipshits, Cain indeed has been at No. 3 behind Gingrich and Romney, but he has been averaging only around 15 percent.

Having the support of only around 15 percent of the members of your own party isn’t exactly a position of strength, even if it does technically put you in the “top four.”

Cain sure knows his audience of dumbfucks, though, the fucktards who actually buy utterly unqualified candidates’ claims of persecution by the media and who love to hear unqualified right-wing candidates whine about their supposed persecution at the hands of the “political elite.”

Would you want your surgeon not to have gone to medical school along with all of those other “medical elites”? Would you want your surgeon’s intellectual capacity to be no greater than your own? No? You want your surgeon to be an experienced expert? What are you, an elitist?

Why is it that in every other area of life, we expect people to know their shit, to be experts, to have earned their positions, but so many of us are perfectly OK with abject dumbfucks holding the highest political office in the land?

You sure want your surgeon to know what he or she is doing, but you’ll hand The Button to anyone?

In his speech today, Cain tried to spin his utter political inexperience as a strength. No, it has been one of his biggest weaknesses that he doesn’t know how the system works (such as that China has had nukes since the 1960s and that the U.S. Supreme Court indeed has the final word on every matter of U.S. Constitutional law) yet still feels qualified to hold the most powerful political post in the nation (indeed, probably in the world, for now, anyway).

Hopefully, the trend of blaming the media (and others) for one’s own utter unsuitability for office has crashed and burned along with the derailed “Cain train.” It was risibly pathetic when Palin tried it, but now it’s just pathetically pathetic. And hopefully the trend of rabid, suicidal anti-intellectualism that we have seen within the Repugnican Tea Party — starting perhaps most notably with Gee Dumbya Bush — is on its way out, although I’m not holding my breath on that.

Despite the fact that he already is a political corpse, Herman Cain defiantly announced today that  he “will not be silenced” — you know, the way he apparently had thought that the multiple victims of his sexual harassment were silenced by fear — and that he is “not going away.”

That might technically be true, too.

No one will forcefully silence Cain or make him go away.

Rather, he’ll just fade back into the relative obscurity from which he came. He might still be talking, but very few people still will be listening.

Why the rise of Cain

Associated Press photo

Herman Cain rants and raves in Talladega, Alabama, yesterday. Recent polls have him at the top of the Repugnican Tea Party field, and indeed, as the photo below of him campaigning in Alabama yesterday apparently demonstrates, many of the overwhelmingly white “tea party” dipshits find him to be acceptable, since he’s not an “angry” black man who poses a threat to white rule.

Associated Press photo

Maybe the “tea partiers” aren’t racist after all, since Herman Cain is leading even perennial Repugnican frontrunner Mitt Romney* in some recent polls, some are positing.

No, that’s not it.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential contender Herman Cain is more or less acceptable to many (if not most) of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors because he sides with the white conservative argument that if blacks and others are struggling — and they are — then it’s their own damn fault. Cain promotes Ayn-Randian social Darwinism — which contradicts everything that the (little-“s”) socialist Jesus Christ taught, but these right-wing fascists call themselves “Christians” nonetheless – which is why so many conservatives find Cain to be acceptable. If he were preaching actual social justice, like Cornel West does, it would be an entirely other story.

And to many if not most of the plutocrats and their supporters, wealth trumps race, in this day and age. Sure, white conservatives prefer that if you are rich you also be white, but so long as you are rich — and support the capitalistic oppression of the non-rich – to some degree it can be overlooked if you aren’t white. So Cain has that going for him.

Another huge factor of Cain’s current success is that for some time the Repugnican Tea Party cynically has tried to match Barack Obama with brown-skinned Repugnicans (of which there aren’t many), such as former Repugnican National Committee chair Michael Steele (who was selected to head the party shortly after Obama took office in January 2009) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. “See! We’re not racist!” is the entire point of that cynical exercise.

This campaign button that was for sale at Cain’s appearance in Alabama yesterday – which, admittedly, may not have been produced by the Cain campaign but may have been produced by some opportunistic independent profiteer –

Associated Press photo

– fairly blatantly compares Cain to Obama, apparently primarily because they’re both black men. That seems to me to be a rather perverse form of racism in itself.

It also presumes that most voters are incredibly stupid. (To be sure, a great many of them are, but probably most of them are not.) We were to believe that the selection of (anti-choice) Sarah Palin as John McCainosaurus’ running mate signified that the Repugnican Party is feminist, too — as opposed to the clearly anti-feminist Democratic Party, which chose Barack Obama over Billary Clinton.

Women voters didn’t buy that bullshit, and I wouldn’t expect voters to buy it that Herman Cain is good for the majority of blacks (or for the rest of us who aren’t rich) any more than Sarah Palin is good for women.

There’s also the dumbfuck factor. Just as wingnuts loved the English-challenged George W. Bush so much because he gave them hope that fucktards like they also could be president or otherwise make it big one day, Cain, with his oversimplistic bullshit, such as his “9-9-9” plan (which reminds me of an enraged Adolf Hitler screaming, “Nein! Nein! Nein!” in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds,” and which, I understand, first was introduced to us in a video game called “SimCity”), appeals to the dumbfucks, who also believe that things are much simpler than they actually are, and that highly complex problems can be solved with simple solutions or even just simple slogans. (Simple minds think simple thoughts.)

Finally, Cain also has going for him the factor that actually also worked in Barack Obama’s favor, and that is that Obama did not have a long history in national politics before he ran for the White House. Obama was a relative unknown, having been elected to the U.S. Senate only in 2004, for fuck’s sake, before he became president in 2008, not even having finished out his six-year Senate term.

Cain has held no elected office at all, which, I suppose, makes him an even bigger unknown that Obama was — and thus, on that measure, an even “stronger” presidential candidate than Obama was, if being unknown is a strength. (Only in the crumbling American empire could it be.) Of course, the wingnuts’ blind faith that an unknown like Cain possesses even the bare minimum competence to be president of the United States (I mean, I don’t think that he could get all of his presidential policies from video games) is about as smart (in retrospect) as was our progressives’ blind faith that Obama the unknown actually would fulfill his ubiquitous campaign promises of “hope” and “change.”

I still expect Mitt Romney to secure the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination. Cain’s surge now is attributable not only to the factors above but also to how much Southerners don’t like Mitt from Massachusetts and to how, as another blogger put it, when he has to speak in a debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who apparently was supposed to have been the South’s Great White Hope, turns into Porky Pig. (The inability to speak coherently seemed to work in Gee Dubya’s favor, but not in Perry’s. Go figure.**)

But, just as the Repugnicans cynically paired McCainosaurus up with a woman to show how “inclusive” the Repugnican Party is, I could see a Romney-Cain ticket for 2012.

In fact, I’d almost bet money on it.

P.S. I visited Cain’s official website’s store, and I don’t see the button that is pictured above. Again, I suspect that the button was produced by an opportunistic independent profiteer, as were these buttons, very apparently, which are available via cafepress.com, which apparently has no standards of decency whatsofuckingever:

 

Nice.

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*A recent Faux “News” poll put Cain at four percentage points ahead of Romney, as did a recent CBS News/New York Times poll.

**Also, the Repugnican Tea Party acts as though the eight, long, nightmarish years of the unelected reign of the BushCheneyCorp never even fucking happened. I remember well that the McCainosaurus-Palin ticket never talked about George W. Bush’s “accomplishments,” but only talked about Ronald Reagan, and the current crop of Repugnican Tea Party presidential contenders also are reaching waaaaay back to the Reagan years and acting as though George W. Bush had never been president.

I surmise that this Gee Dubya stigma is hurting Perry, who, the Repugnican Tea Partiers fear, correctly, is way too reminiscent of the last governor of Texas who went to the White House.