‘W’ still is for ‘Worst’

Reuters photo

The two George Bushes yuk it up at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which contains a library and a museum, in Dallas today.

It’s interesting that we supposedly now are “re-evaluating” the unelected reign of George W. Bush in the White House on the occasion of the impending (May 1) public opening of his library and museum in Dallas — which, I’m guessing, consists of coloring books, connect-the-dot books, and, of course, many copies of The Pet Goat, and maybe such relics as aluminum tubes and that vial of white powder that were used to justify the Vietraq War, and maybe that dog leash that was on that Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib. (The original plans for World Trade Center: The Ride and the Hurricane-Katrina-themed water park next door to the library and museum were nixed for maybe sending the wrong messages.)

Will any of Gee Dubya’s amateurish paintings be put on display at his museum? It’s funny — Adolf Hitler was a bad artist before he became a fascistic dictator, and Gee Dubya pulled a Reverse Adolf, first becoming a fascistic dictator and then becoming an awful artist.

Seriously — what to say about a presidency that began with a blatantly stolen presidential election (replete with George W. Bush’s brother Jeb in the role of the governor of the pivotal state of Florida and Florida’s chief elections officer, Katherine Harris, making damn sure that Gee Dubya “won” the state) and that ended with our national economic collapse (including a federal budget surplus turned into a record federal budget deficit)?

Between those two lovely bookends were 9/11 (despite the August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” [which, in Bush's defense, he might not even have skimmed, since he was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, at the time]); the launch of the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War in March 2003, using 9/11 as the pretext; all that came with the Vietraq War, such as the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians and American military personnel slaughtered for nothing except for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton’s war profiteering, such as the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors, and such as the bogus war’s massive drain on the U.S. Treasury; and Hurricane Katrina, which struck Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states on August 29, 2005 (the same day that Bush was sharing birthday cake with John McCainosaurus in Arizona), and killed around 2,000 Americans, most of whom were black and so who were expendable.

(If you want a more exhaustive list of George W. Bush’s Greatest Hits, see AlterNet.org’s “50 Reasons You Despised George W. Bush’s Presidency: A Reminder on the Day of His Presidential Library Dedication.”)

The eight, very long George W. Bush years to me were like a series of national rapes. Never before had a president who had lost the popular vote nonetheless been coronated president by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that it was most expedient to stop recounting the ballots in Florida and just declare a “victor” already.

So raped did I feel over this, the largest blow to democracy in my lifetime, that I attended a “Not My President Day” protest rally on Presidents’ Day in early 2001 at the California State Capitol. Not long enough after that, I attended another protest rally at the state Capitol, this one over the impending launch of the obviously bogus Vietraq War in March 2003.

That is the only good/“good” thing that I can say about the George W. Bush years: That the unelected Bush regime’s stunning incompetence and its criminal and treasonous acts and failures to act made me more political than I’d ever been before — indeed, to the point that shortly before the Bush regime launched its Vietraq War, I started to blog in the fall of 2002, and I was more involved in the 2004 presidential election than I’d ever been involved in any presidential election before or since.

I get it that there are certain individuals out there who, because they identify so much with the Repugnican Tea Party, never will admit the colossal failure that was the George W. Bush presidency.

That’s fine. They can, and will, remain in their delusion and lies.

The rest of us, however, know and never will forget that there isn’t enough lipstick on the planet to put on the pig that was the unelected, treasonous reign of our own former mass-murdering dictator*, George W. Bush.

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*A dictator, by my definition, is someone who did not receive the majority of the votes but who takes office through intimidation or even physical force anyway.

Hurricane Karma heads toward Tampa

On August 29, 2005, then-“President” George W. Bush and future presidential candidate John McCainosaurus shared a birthday cake in Arizona on the occasion of McCainosaurus’ 69th birthday. Here is a news photo of that event:

Associated Press photo

Also on August 29, 2005, the very same day, Hurricane Katrina touched down in Louisiana, breaching numerous levees in New Orleans.

In all, there were more than 1,800 fatalities caused by Hurricane Katrina, most of them in New Orleans, even though there had been warning at least as early as August 27, 2005, that Louisiana likely was in Katrina’s path. Indeed, even George W. Bush had declared a state of emergency for regions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on August 27, 2005, yet he still found time to celebrate John McCainosaurus’ birthday a couple of days later. (A “decider” must decide his priorities, you see.)

Hurricane Katrina was a graphic example of how some Americans are considered to be wholly expendable.

Victims of Katrina were criticized for having refused to leave their homes, but where would they go? And when you have little, don’t you want to protect what little you have? Is it that easy to leave your home, perhaps the only home that you’ve ever known?

The class warfare wasn’t evidenced only in the fact that Katrina’s victims disproportionately were black Americans; Barbara Bush, the former first lady and Gee Dubya’s mother, infamously said of the Katrina survivors who were huddled in the Houston Astrodome: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

Seven years later, we now have Tropical Storm Isaac apparently headed toward the Gulf Coast, possibly gaining strength along the way and becoming a hurricane — and hitting the southern tip of Florida on Monday, the first day of the scheduled four-day Repugnican Tea Party National Convention in Tampa:

AccuWeather.com image, August 23, 2012

AccuWeather.com image, August 23, 2012

Where is Tampa on the Florida map?

There it is.

It appears to me that Tampa has a “moderate” risk of being hit by a Hurricane Isaac, while the Florida Keys and the eastern portion of the Gulf Coast are where you really don’t want to be.

What will the Repugnican Tea Party traitors do should Isaac become a hurricane and hit Tampa?

Will they be brave and stand their ground, like the wingnuts like to brag about doing?

Or will they get the swift and effective evacuation that the victims of Hurricane Katrina never got, because they’re mostly lily white and therefore their lives count?

I’m surprised, though, that in the coverage of Isaac I haven’t seen much mention of Katrina. It seems to me that a hurricane hitting Florida during the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention can only remind the nation of how less than worthless the last Repugnican “president” was the last time that a devastating hurricane hit the United States (just as he was less than worthless in preventing 9/11 despite the August 2001 presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”).

And not only are devastating hurricanes often seen as events of biblical proportions — so-called “acts of God” — but the name of this one: Isaac…

In the Old Testament, Isaac was the lad whose father, Abraham, was about to make a human sacrifice, per God’s command, as a test of Abraham’s faith and/or obedience, when an angel sent by God at the last moment stayed Abraham’s knife-wielding hand, sparing Isaac.

Will the Repugnican Tea Party traitors convening at their quadrennial KKK-like convention get such a reprieve early next week? Will they get the knife or will they get an angelic intervention?

We shall see.

P.S. Oh, how could I forget global warming and its effects on the frequency and the strength of hurricanes? Will the climate-change deniers gathered in Tampa get a bitter up-close-and-personal taste of climate-change science? Would that make them believers?

Assorted shit Sunday!

Updated below

Oakland is burning!

Associated Press photo

So hundreds of people were arrested in Oakland yesterday and last night, a night during which some individuals reportedly broke into Oakland City Hall, snatched an American flag, and burned it in protest.

The responses to this incident are interesting.

Stealing a presidential election — that’s perfectly OK. Starting bogus wars in the Middle East that result in the deaths of thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent people and loot the U.S. Treasury of trillions of the people’s tax dollars via the military-industrial complex – that’s perfectly OK. Wall Street weasels causing the nation an economic meltdown – that’s perfectly OK. The housing bubble, the student-loan shark industry, rampant unemployment, global warming caused by corporate greed — all of that is perfectly OK.

But some “thugs” burned an American flag? Intolerable!

One of my favorite sayings of Jesus Christ’s is one of his many slams of the hypocritical religious authorities (the Pharisees) of his day (today we call these hypocrites “Christians”) – in this slam, he tells them, “You strain out a gnat but you swallow a camel.”

An American flag burned: that would be a gnat. The egregious shit that I listed above, the blatant acts of treason against the American people: that would be a camel. And the staple of the American diet is the camel.

The plutocratic traitors and the traitors who aid and abet the plutocrats are damned fucking lucky that the only price that they’ve had to pay for their treason thus far is some relatively petty vandalism.

And for the record, the individuals pictured above look like anarchists to me, and while I’m not slamming the anarchists, I know from personal experience that if you hold a protest, anyone can show up, and that you cannot control everything that might happen at a protest, and that your presence at a protest does not, of course, mean that you personally endorse every sign, every message, every person, every act that might, in the end, make up that protest.

It’s easy (and maybe even fun) to generalize a group of people, but it’s inaccurate and it’s intellectually dishonest to do so.

I mean, the caption for the news photo above reads, “Occupy Oakland protestors burn an American flag found inside Oakland City Hall during an Occupy Oakland protest on the steps of City Hall, Saturday, January 28, 2012, in Oakland, Calif.”

“Occupy Oakland protestors”? How do we know whether these individuals consider themselves to be part of the Occupy movement? Or whether Oakland’s Occupy movement claims them? How do we know that they are not opportunists (anarchists, usually) who showed up at the protest in hopes of doing what they did? How do we know that they aren’t even right-wing plants attempting to discredit the Occupy Wall Street movement?

The right wing would love to make this kind of thing the face of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but that’s propagandistic bullshit. For better or for worse (I lean toward it being for the worse), the majority of OWS’ers are nonviolent.

Of course, the right wing isn’t nonviolent. The right wing and the plutocrats whom the wingnuts support love death and destruction on a massive scale — witness Vietraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the Middle East – that our tax dollars fund.

Massive death and destruction perpetrated by the right wing is perfectly fine, but some relatively petty vandalism perpetrated in protest against the right wing — that’s absofuckinglutely intolerable.

And for the wingnuts to assert that President Barack Obama and the rest of the establishment Democrats fully support OWS — that’s another load of propagandistic right-wing bullshit. Obama took more money from the Wall Street weasels for his 2008 presidential campaign than John McCainosaurus did.

The establishment Dems might be careful not to alienate some of those OWS’ers whose votes (and maybe even campaign contributions) they still might get, but there has been no robust show of support for OWS from the Obama White House, which has been as missing in action in regards to OWS and OWS’ cause as it has been in the fight in Wisconsin to prevent the right-wing traitors there from destroying what’s left of our labor unions.

Oakland is one of our nation’s poorer cities, and at some point in the midst of such egregious income disparity, something has to give. I’m just surprised that what we’ve seen thus far has been all that we’ve seen thus far.

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Multi-millionaire Mitt cannot feel your pain

Reuters photo

Mitt Romney campaigns in Florida yesterday. Gee, maybe the kid’s crying because he can see his future: In November the do-nothing President Hopey-Changey will be re-elected, or Mitt Romney, who is estimated to be 50 times richer than Barack Obama, will be elected to preside over the American economy, which in the Repugnican Tea Party’s book has left way too many millionaires and billionaires behind. 

You should read this little Associated Press article on how Mitt Romney, should he become president, would be one of the Wealthiest. U.S. Presidents. Ever. It begins:

Just how rich is Mitt Romney? Add up the wealth of the last eight presidents, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Then double that number. Now you’re in Romney territory.

He would be among the richest presidents in American history if elected — probably in the top four.

He couldn’t top George Washington who, with nearly 60,000 acres and more than 300 slaves, is considered the big daddy of presidential wealth. After that, it gets complicated, depending how you rate Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Herbert Hoover’s millions from mining or John F. Kennedy’s share of the vast family fortune, as well as the finer points of factors like inflation adjustment.

But it’s safe to say the Roosevelts had nothing on Romney, and the Bushes are nowhere close.

The former Massachusetts governor has disclosed only the broad outlines of his wealth, putting it somewhere from $190 million to $250 million. That easily could make him 50 times richer than Obama, who falls in the still-impressive-to-most-of-us range of $2.2 million to $7.5 million. …

This, very apparently, is the right wing’s answer to the nation’s main problem of insane wealth disparity: more of the same. Who could better feel the socioeconomic pain of the average American than the man whom the experts say would be one of the top four wealthiest U.S. presidents ever?

If you truly don’t know why they’re tearing up Oakland these days, you need to have your head surgically removed from your ass.

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Prick Perry’s getting no love at home

Associated Press photo

Rick Perry refers to his crib sheets during a Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate.

I’d thought that Texans are so fucking stupid that Rick Perry wouldn’t suffer politically there from his disastrous run for the presidency, but apparently Perry hasn’t received a warm homecoming. Reports Reuters:

Austin, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry has gotten a rocky welcome home to Texas, facing low poll numbers and criticism over state expenses related to his failed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Travel for Perry’s security team cost the state nearly $800,000 between September and November, according to a new report from the state Department of Public Safety.

The money paid for airfare, food and hotels for the governor’s protective detail during trips both in Texas and to out-of-state locations such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Manchester, New Hampshire.

The longest-serving governor in Texas history was briefly the frontrunner among Republican presidential contenders, but he stumbled with poor debate performances and gaffes — including his memorable “oops” when he couldn’t recall the third federal agency he wanted to eliminate. He dropped out of the race last week.

His campaign paid many expenses, but the state provides security for the governor and first lady. That’s been the policy in Texas for decades, gubernatorial spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said.

“Governor Perry is governor no matter where he goes,” Nashed told Reuters in an e-mail. “It’s unfortunate that we live in a day and age where security is an issue.”

Democrats say he should repay that money.

“Unnecessary government spending is not just morally wrong, it is criminal,” state House Democratic Leader Jessica Farrar wrote Perry in a letter this week asking him to give the Texas comptroller a check for expenses related to out-of-state campaigning.

A poll of Texas adults released this week by the state’s major daily newspapers showed Perry’s job approval rating at 40 percent, the lowest level in 10 years. Forty percent said they disapproved of how Perry was doing as governor.

Still, Perry has proved politically resilient over the years. Until he launched his presidential bid, he’d never lost an election.

It’s time for Perry to step aside, methinks, and let someone else run the show. (I’m not alone; a recent poll of Texans shows that more than half of them believe that he shouldn’t run for re-election in 2014.) I have to wonder if Perry’s quixotic run for the White House indicates that he is burned out as the red state’s longest-serving governor.

Still, it seems to me, that if he wants to run for re-election again, the Texans will keep him.

I’m perfectly fine with Prick Perry being kept there, too.

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Is it a choice? Does it fucking matter?

Associated Press photo

A same-sex couple kisses in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month after they registered as domestic partners there. The question is not whether these men could have chosen heterosexuality. The question is why any two consenting adults in the United States of America don’t have equal human and civil rights — and why we allow separate-but-not-equal substitutions for marriage, such as domestic partnerships, instead of full marriage rights for all Americans.

So apparently actress Cynthia Nixon (whose work I don’t believe I’ve ever seen) has come under fire for having proclaimed that she has chosen to be a lesbian.

Reports The Associated Press:

Cynthia Nixon learned the hard way this week that when it comes to gay civil rights, the personal is always political. Very political.

The actress best known for portraying fiery lawyer Miranda Hobbes on “Sex and the City” is up to her perfectly arched eyebrows in controversy since The New York Times Magazine published a profile in which she was quoted as saying that for her, being gay was a conscious choice. Nixon is engaged to a woman with whom she has been in a relationship for eight years. Before that, she spent 15 years and had two children with a man.

“I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me,” Nixon said while recounting some of the flak gay rights activists previously had given her for treading in similar territory. “A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out.

“I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.”

To say that a certain segment of the gay community “is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice” is an understatement. Gay rights activists have worked hard to combat the idea that people decide to be physically attracted to same-sex partners any more than they choose to be attracted to opposite-sex ones because the question, so far unanswered by science, is often used by religious conservatives, including [Repugnican Tea Party] presidential candidate Rick Santorum and former candidate Michelle Bachman, to argue that homosexuality is immoral behavior, not an inherent trait.

Among the activists most horrified by Nixon’s comments was Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen, whose organization monitors and tries to debunk programs that claim to cure people of same-sex attractions with therapy. Besen said he found the actress’ analysis irresponsible and flippant, despite her ample caveats.

“Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words, and it is going to be used when some kid comes out and their parents force them into some ex-gay camp while she’s off drinking cocktails at fancy parties,” Besen said. “When people say it’s a choice, they are green-lighting an enormous amount of abuse because if it’s a choice, people will try to influence and guide young people to what they perceive as the right choice.” …

While the broader gay rights movement recognizes that human sexuality exists on a spectrum, and has found common cause with transgender and bisexual people, Nixon may have unwittingly given aid and comfort to those who want to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, adopt children and secure equal spousal benefits, said Jennifer Pizer, legal director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and the Law, a pro-gay think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

One of the factors courts consider in determining if a law is unconstitutional is whether members of the minority group it targets share an unchangeable or “immutable” trait, Pizer noted. Although the definition of how fixed a characteristic has to be to qualify as immutable still is evolving — religious affiliation, for example, is recognized as grounds for equal protection — the U.S. Supreme Court still has not included sexual orientation among the traits “so integral to personhood it’s not something the government should require people to change,” she said.

“If gay people in this country had more confidence that their individual freedom was going to be respected, then the temperature would lower a bit on the immutability question because the idea of it being a choice wouldn’t seem to stack the deck against their rights,” Pizer said. …

Although science has not identified either a purely biological or sociological basis for sexual orientation, University of California, Davis psychologist Gregory Herek, an expert on anti-gay prejudice, said Nixon’s experience is consistent with research showing that women have an easier time moving between opposite and same-sex partners.

A survey Herek conducted of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals of both genders bore this out. Sixteen percent of the lesbians surveyed reported they felt they had had a fair amount of choice in their sexual orientations, while only five percent of the gay men did. …

Wow. Why are we even having a discussion as to whether or not same-sex orientation is a choice?

Why should it fucking matter whether or not it is a choice?

What any two consenting adults do with each other is their own fucking business. We claim that we are the “home of the free” — that should settle it.

However, since we’re on the topic, my feeling, from decades of observation and from my own experience, is that for some individuals, homosexuality is quite hard-wired into who and what they are. Homosexuality does not at all strike me as a choice for those male and female individuals who, since they were pre-pubescent, showed signs of latent homosexuality, such as non-gender conformity.

For other individuals, it seems to me, more choice indeed is involved, and it does seem to me that it’s a choice for more women than it is for men, as research indicates. (There has been a lot of research lately on female “sexual fluidity,” and this research indicates that females are more “sexually fluid” than are males.)

Perhaps these individuals for whom homosexuality apparently is not hard-wired have had satisfying-enough homosexual fantasies and/or sexual encounters, and so they stick with members of the same sex, whereas if their early sexual fantasies and experiences had been heterosexual, they might have developed into well-adjusted heterosexuals as well.

Who knows? And again, who cares?

I wholeheartedly agree with Nixon’s assertion, “I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here.”

Those who steadfastly argue that homosexuality could not possibly be a choice for anyone basically are arguing that homosexuality is a birth defect – otherwise, why have to defend it?

I, for one, am not OK with essentially equating homosexuality (or bisexuality) as a fucking birth defect.

We should be arguing for our personal freedom to do what we want to do and to be with whom we want to be — for our equal human and civil rights – and not whether or not homosexuality is “immutable,” which presumes that heterosexuality is the only OK way to be.

Update (Sunday, January 29, 2011, 9:00 p.m.): Via the Los Angeles Times’ website, I just saw this news photo of the exterior of Oakland City Hall that was taken today:

Associated Press photo

Note that anarchists, with their spray-painted symbol, took credit for their handiwork.

The anarchists and the Occupy Wall Street movement are two different groups. True, some of their beliefs and values overlap, but their sanctioned tactics are quite different.

Again, not that I’m bashing the anarchists. They’ve yet to kill anyone, that I’m aware of, and property damage is not the same as violence against human beings. (That and, as I have pointed out, the right wing believes in mass murder, only mostly in other nations, so I certainly am not going to condemn the anarchists, who [thus far, anyway] only commit property damage, while the right wing perpetrates the worst crimes of all, war crimes and crimes against humanity.)

I like that the anarchists have balls (if they lack a certain amount of direction), and they might prove to be great allies against the right wing should all-out revolution ever break out.

Another one bites the dust

Reuters photo

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, shown in South Carolina earlier this week, is to drop out of the presidential race today. Perry couldn’t catch fire even in the backasswards, white supremacist state of South Carolina, polling dead last.

When I saw yesterday that Texas Gov. Rick Perry was polling at only 6 percent in South Carolina, putting him at fifth and last place, I wondered why in the hell he was remaining in the race. He came in at fifth place in Iowa and sixth place in New Hampshire, and if he couldn’t do well in fellow secessionist red state South Carolina, it definitely would be all over for him.

Maybe — just maybe — Perry figured that he’d rather his paltry support in South Carolina go to the top not-Mitt-Romney candidate when South Carolinans vote on Saturday, and that’s why he reportedly is dropping out of the race today. South Carolina, after all, very most likely is the last chance to deny Romney his crown. (Or maybe it wasn’t a bit of actual selflessness at all; maybe Perry just didn’t want another humiliating loss…)

Only about a third of South Carolinans want Mitt Romney to be the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate, but with Perry’s departure, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul remain in the race to split the anyone-but-Romney vote three ways.

I have to wonder if the far right is going to make Ron Paul its Ralph Nader of sorts, blaming Paul’s candidacy for splitting the vote and enabling Romney to win the party’s nomination.

Anyway, I believe that it primarily was a combination of two things that sank Rick Perry’s candidacy: the fact that the last governor from Texas who became president now is He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned even within his own party, and the fact that Perry’s debate performances were disastrous. Overcoming the inevitable comparison to He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned would have been a tall order for Perry, but Perry’s utterly unpresidential presence doomed him.

Let’s just hope that Perry remains politically dead outside of his own backasswards state of Texas.

‘Bomb-throwing’ Ron Paul wins wingnuts’ New Hampshire debate

Associated Press photo

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, left, gestures at front-runner former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during tonight’s Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Romney was polished and toed the party line, while Paul kept it real and wasn’t afraid to buck the party consensus.

I live-blogged tonight’s Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, the first 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate that I’ve watched in its entirety. The live-blogging is below.

I conclude that Ron Paul won the debate, hands down.

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5:59 p.m. (Pacific time): The debate should begin within minutes… I’ve yet to force myself to sit through an entire 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, but tonight I am going to, come hell or high water.

6:03 p.m.: It’s telling that all six candidates are middle-aged or old white men. These are the faces of the Repugnican Tea Party, no doubt. Anyway, with Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos and some other guy moderating, this apparently is a pretty high-level debate…

6:07 p.m.: All of these fascists more or less look alike to me, but thus far Mitt Romney seems to be doing pretty well, with the exception of his fakey-fake “friendly” voice, which is whisper-like and condescending. Rick Santorum seems to be uncomfortable in his own skin, not entirely unlike how he is parodied by Adam Samberg on “Saturday Night Live”…

6:11 p.m.: The candidates are now singing the praises of capitalism, which they aren’t calling “capitalism,” but are calling “free enterprise,” since that polls better and since capitalism isn’t as popular as it used to be with the 99 percent these days. There was a mention of how dangerous Iran is, which I’m sure we’ll get back to. This “free enterprise” crap sounds just like the portion of a debate I listened to a long time ago, when Michele Bachmann was still in the race…

6:14 p.m.: Ron Paul has called Santorum “corrupt.” Santorum has taken issue with this charge, of course. Santorum also states that he isn’t a libertarian, but that he believes in some government. (Government when it helps the plutocracy, right?)

6:17 p.m.: Ron Paul brags that he has signed only a handful of appropriations bills in the U.S. House of Representatives, that he opposes most government spending. “I am not a libertarian, Ron,” Santorum has repeated.

6:19 p.m.: Rick Perry is on now. He has bashed “corrupt spending” in Washington, D.C., and touts that he’s a D.C. outsider. His claim that he has been the “commander in chief” of Texas’ National Guard, apparently, is risible.

6:21 p.m.: Ah, we’re back to Iran. What’s the U.S. without a bogeyman? Jon Huntsman is rambling now. Sawyer asked about Iran, but Huntsman, perhaps fearing he won’t be able to answer another question, hasn’t answered the question, but has given a little stump speech. Huntsman is as white-bread as Romney is, but maybe that’s a product of their Mormonism.

6:25 p.m.: So Romney has called Barack Obama’s a “failed presidency,” stating that Obama has no leadership experience (I guess that the past three years don’t count), and alleging that Obama hasn’t been tougher on Iran, even though elective war in the Middle East has brought the American empire to the brink of collapse already.

6:27 p.m.: “Iran’s a big problem, without a doubt,” Rick Perry has proclaimed, further claiming that Iran (somehow) threatens our freedom. (It would be the plutocrats here at home who threaten our freedom, but that’s another blog post.) We heard the same thing about Iraq, did we not? That it was a threat to our freedom and our security? Again, it’s apparent that the Repugnican Tea Party fascists intend to use the specter of Iran to scare the populace into voting for them. Will it work again?

6:30 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about chickenhawks, though who gladly send our young off to war when they avoided military service themselves. Paul and Newt Gingrich went back and forth about whether or not Gingrich evaded military service, which would make him a chickenhawk. It’s rare for a Repugnican Tea Party candidate to bash chickenhawks.

6:33 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about how blacks and other “poor minorities” disproportionately are punished by our “criminal” “justice” system (as opposed to whites), including the fact that blacks and other poor minorities are more likely to be executed than are whites. Paul’s rant was a diversion from the question about the reportedly racist overtones of his old newsletter, but it’s rare to hear a Repugnican Tea Party candidate admit that the “criminal” “justice” system is patently unfair and racially biased.

6:35 p.m.: So there’s a break now. Some fucktarded ABC News pundit has called Ron Paul a “bomb-thrower,” but Paul seems sincere in his positions to me. Thus far, Ron Paul is doing the best in the debate, in my book, but as his views are closest to mine, maybe that’s why. I find front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to be yawn-inducing and utterly uninspiring.

6:41 p.m.: Mitt Romney states that he personally opposes any attempt to ban contraception, although he states that he has no idea as to whether or not it would be constitutional for a state to attempt to ban contraception. Romney states that he supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define a marriage as being only between a man and a woman. This makes him utterly unelectable to me, to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution.

6:42 p.m.: Romney states that he believes that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, which also makes him utterly unelectable to me.

6:43 p.m.: Rick Santorum, not to be outdone by Mitt Romney, also states that he also would overturn Roe vs. Wade. These men sure hate women.

6:45 p.m.: The topic now is same-sex marriage. Ron Paul has talked about privacy rights, but I’m not sure of his stance on same-sex marriage. Thus far no one supports same-sex marriage, unsurprisingly, with the possible exception of Paul. Jon Huntsman says he supports civil unions but does not believe that same-sex marriage should be allowed. That’s the coward’s way out, and separate is not equal.

6:47 p.m.: Santorum says that marriage is a federal issue. (I agree. Same-sex marriage should be allowed in all 50 states.) Santorum sounds like he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman only.

6:49 p.m.: Romney has used the bullshit “argument” that same-sex marriage should not be allowed because children should be raised only by heterosexual couples. Studies refute this assertion, and of course many people marry with no intent to raise children. Newt Gingrich essentially has tried to make the argument that “Christo”fascist haters are being oppressed by not being allowed to hate and to discriminate against others based upon their hateful religious beliefs. Oh, well. Gingrich has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to the White House anyway.

6:54 p.m.: Rick Perry couldn’t resist adding that he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage, and he is echoing Gingrich’s “argument” that the poor “Christo”fascists are experiencing a “war on religion.” Really? How about we start throwing them to the lions so that at least they aren’t lying through their fucking teeth when they claim that they are so fucking oppressed because they can’t cram their bullshit beliefs down our throats?

6:59 p.m.: Sounds like Jon Huntsman supports our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Newt Gingrich has used the topic of Afghanistan to bring up the specter of Iran, but, surprisingly, indicated that the problems in the Middle East don’t call for military solutions. Rick Santorum speaks again. He still seems ill at ease. He opposes withdrawing from Afghanistan any day soon, very apparently, because, he says, “radical Islam” is a “threat.” (Funny — I see radical “Christianity” as a much bigger and much more immediate threat to my own freedoms and security than I see Islam ever being.)

7:01 p.m.: Rick Perry says that he disagrees with the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, because Iran will overtake Iraq — “literally” “at the speed of light,” he said. (Really? Literally at the speed of light?) Like the last governor from Texas knew what to do in Iraq… Anyway, Rick Perry isn’t getting much air time, and I predict that his campaign won’t make it to next month.

7:04 p.m.: Ron Paul correctly points out that so many of the members of his party can’t wait to, as John McCainosaurus once put it, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, but that he thinks it’s a bad idea, as the U.S. military already is woefully overextended. (Paul did make an awkward comment about how although the Chinese government killed scores of its own citizens, it was a ping-pong game that “broke the ice.” Again: Awkward…)

7:06 p.m.: Rick Santorum seems like he’s so nervous that he might barf. We’re on another break now.

7:11 p.m.: Still on break. In my book, Ron Paul is winning this debate. However, he’s not mimicking all of the others on key stands (Iran evil, same-sex marriage evil, etc.), so I can’t see him getting even the vice-presidential spot on the 2012 ticket (presuming he’d even want it).

7:20 p.m.: We’re talking about the nation’s infrastructure now, apparently having finished with social issues and foreign policy. Mitt Romney is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead he’s singing yet another insipid paean to capitalism, as opposed to Barack Obama’s “social welfare state.” Newt Gingrich is actually answering the question. Newt says that we have to maintain our infrastructure in order to keep pace with China and India (not because it’s good for us commoners, but because it’s good for business, apparently). Rick Santorum is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead is claiming that corporations are overtaxed and over-regulated. Apparently the Repugs don’t really want to talk about the infrastructure, which the unelected Bush regime allowed to crumble for almost a decade.

7:25 p.m.: So little of substance was said on the topic of our crumbling infrastructure. Apparently all of our resources should go into even more warfare in the Middle East for the war profiteers and for Big Oil. Ron Paul is rambling on about cutting spending. Who is going to pay for our infrastructure? Oh, no one, since it’s not important, apparently. Rick Perry is now pontificating about lowering taxes (although without taxes, we can’t have a commons) and is advocating an energy policy of “drill, baby, drill,” essentially, and claims that Texas’ being a “right-to-work” state has resulted in job growth there. The plutocrats love it when the worker bees cannot unionize for better working conditions and better pay and benefits and rights. Rick Perry is evil, and his state’s jobs are low-paying jobs with bad or no benefits, which is why he focuses on the number of jobs, not the quality of those jobs, in Texas. Bad, low-paying jobs in which the deck is insanely stacked in the favor of the plutocrats are great for the plutocrats, but are catastrophic for the working class.

7:26 p.m.: Mitt Romney says that the November 2012 presidential election is about “the soul of the nation.” Indeed. If any of these fascists win, the soul of the nation will wither even further than it has over at least the past decade.

7:28 p.m.: Newt Gingrich has brought up Ronald Reagan. I’m shocked that it has taken this long for the name of St. Ronald to be brought up. (No mention of George W. Bush yet. Not one… Hee hee hee…) Rick Santorum, who still appears to be nauseous, just essentially stated that we don’t have socioeconomic classes here in the United States of America, and that Barack Obama has been trying to stoke “class warfare.” Wow. We are a classless society? When is the last time that Rick Santorum hosted a homeless person in his home, I wonder? And given that Obama took more money from the Wall Street weasels than John McCainosaurus did in 2008, how has Obama been stoking “class warfare” (as Santorum means it)?

7:32 p.m.: Now the topic is China. Apparently China is The Enemy, too, although I’m sure that Iran remains Public Enemy No. 1. Hmmm. Isn’t it the capitalists who sell us out here at home for their own enrichment, rather than anyone in China, who are responsible for our nation’s economic collapse? All of these bogeymen, when the enemies are right here among us…

7:40 p.m.: Another break. Overall, this is a sorry batch of candidates, a bunch of circus clowns, for the most part; Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman seem to be the least insane of the six all-white, all-male candidates. Rick Perry wants to be George W. Bush’s third term, apparently, and again, I can’t see that happening for him; I predict that he’ll be the next to drop out. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum seem to be too similar on the issues for it to matter much which one might ever be president, Mitt the Mormon “Christo”fascist or Rick the Catholick “Christo”fascist.

7:42 p.m.: Damn, this shit is over already!

The winner of the debate, in my book, was Ron Paul. The pundits, not shockingly, are calling Mitt Romney the winner. Gee, if being as insipid as a glass of warm milk makes you the winner, then perhaps Romney won, but Paul showed more spunk and passion and sincerity — and, dare I say it, some wisdom – than any of the other five candidates.

I think the pundits are calling Romney the winner only because they’re fucktards who are going to side only with establishmentarian, orthodox candidates. To them, Ron Paul essentially is a ghost, an invisible man, because he doesn’t say what they think he should say. They don’t really listen to him, but only compare what he’s saying against what his cohorts/“cohorts” are saying, and because he isn’t mimicking his cohorts, and because his views don’t fit neatly into the pundits’ oversimplified worldview, they simply ignore him or dismiss him.

I hope that Paul sticks it out and keeps sticking it to them. He’s the only thing remotely interesting about this crop of backasswards white men who would be president who seem to be stuck in the ethos of the 19fucking50s.

Michele, we hardly knew ye (and other notes on the horse race)

Reuters photo

Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann announces today that her sixth-place finish in yesterday’s Iowa caucuses has induced her to quit her quest for the White House.  

We won’t have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. At least not for a while.

Bachmann dropped out of the Repugnican Tea Party horse race after garnering only 5 percent — sixth place — in the Iowa caucuses yesterday. 

Yahoo! News quotes Bachmann’s communications director as having told reporters of Bachmann, “She doesn’t see where she made mistakes. None of us, you know, see where there were mistakes made.”

Gee, maybe that was their primary problem: their inability to recognize their mistakes. 

I remember when “President” George W. Bush, on at least one occasion before a television camera, struggled to come up with any mistakes that he’d made as “president” when a reporter had asked him to list any.

The inability to enumerate any of one’s mistakes is a pretty fucking serious pathology.

Speaking of Gee Dubya, it is interesting that his name rarely comes up in the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential horse race when he was his party’s last occupant of the White House, for a full eight years.

It is as though extraterrestrials shoved memory-erasing probes up our collective national rectum, completely wiping out our collective memory of the years 2001 through 2008, idn’t it? Indeed, we went right from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, did we not?

Speaking further of Gee Dubya, about the only time He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned has come up this quadrennial go-around is when people have asked if we really want another governor of Texas ascending to the Oval Office.

Speaking of Texas governors, unlike even Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Prick Perry can’t take a hint. Despite coming in at fifth place in the Iowa caucuses yesterday (with only 10 percent of the vote), Perry has proclaimed that he will compete in the January 21 South Carolina primary, where, he remarked, “real” Repugnican Tea Partiers will vote, as opposed to those “quirky” Iowans.

Iowans indeed are quirky, although “quirky” sounds like a dangerously minimizing euphemism for “bat-shit-crazy theofascist.” 

However, Perry should have done better in Iowa, with its plethora of “Christo”fascists to whom he is trying to appeal. If he doesn’t appeal to the “quirky” Iowans, it’s difficult to see him appealing to the Repugnican Tea Party nationally.

The Associated Press reports that Perry today “said voters in South Carolina share his values and that he feels confident he will do well there.”

Share his values? Is that code for Texas and South Carolina both being bastions of white supremacists who long for the “good old days” of the Confederacy? (“Quirky” Iowa, of course, never was part of the treasonous Confederacy, but both Texas and South Carolina seceded from the Union before President-Elect Abraham Lincoln even took office in 1861.) 

Prick Perry had an uphill battle as it was, joining the horse race relatively late and reminding everyone of the last governor of Texas who went to the White House – the “president” who was so shitty that the members of his own party pretend as though his two terms hadn’t even happened – but Perry blew it by acting like a drunken Alzheimer’s patient in the nationally televised debates and in other public appearances.

He might do fairly well in fellow secessionist state South Carolina, but only 11 states formed the Confederacy, and Perry would have to do much better than that to win his party’s nomination.

Perry has only himself to blame for his failure, not “quirky” Iowa or anyone or anything else (with the possible exception of Gee Dubya, of course, for having soured the nation, even his own party, on governors from Texas).

Hopefully, though, Perry will do horribly in South Carolina and we’ll be done with him then.

Ditto for Rick Santorum.

However, at least one pundit posits that Santorum, because he trailed permacandidate Mitt Romney, the party establishment’s choice (indeed, 2008 party presidential candidate John McCainosaurus just endorsed Romney), by only eight (yes, 8) votes yesterday in the Iowa caucuses, might make it even beyond “Super Tuesday” on March 6.

I can’t see Santorum winning the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party nomination. Do the Repugnican Tea Partiers really want to front against President Barack Obama a candidate who lost his last election (his 2006 re-election bid to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania) to his Democratic challenger by 18 percent, which Wikipedia calls “the largest margin of defeat for any incumbent senator since 1980 and the largest margin of any incumbent Republican senator ever”?

And how can Santorum, whose fundraising and organization lag woefully behind permacandidate Romney’s, catch up now, even if he does get the lion’s share of Newt Gingrich’s and Bachmann’s and Perry’s supporters? (Gingrich came in at fourth place in Iowa yesterday, by the way, which I’d find more encouraging if McCainosaurus also hadn’t come in at fourth place in Iowa in 2008 yet still won his party’s nomination.)

But I can see Santorum dragging the whole mess out, although hopefully not nearly as long as Obama and Billary Clinton dragged out the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential primary season (in which Obama didn’t emerge victorious until June 2008).

Oh, well.

It will, I suppose, provide more blogging fodder, and a prolonged fight between the establishmentarian Repugnicans, represented by Romney, and their “tea party” wing, represented, for the moment, by Santorum, might only swing even more “swing voters” Obama’s way in November 2012.

Obama sucks* and does not deserve to be re-elected, but push come to shove — and you’d have to push and shove me pretty hard — I suppose that I’d prefer his re-election over another Repugnican in the White House. I, for one, have not forgotten the eight long years of unelected rule by George W. Bush.

P.S. How could I forget Ron Paul? He did, after all, come in third place in the Iowa caucuses yesterday (at 21 percent, just behind Romney and Santorum, who were tied at 25 percent), and anyone who makes the top three in Iowa generally is considered to be a viable candidate for his or her party’s presidential nomination.

Well, let’s face it: Paul has a few positions that even progressives like me agree with, and Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald is correct that Paul, while wrong on many if not most issues, has brought up some critically important issues that neither the Coke Party nor the Pepsi Party wants brought up in a presidential campaign. But the bottom line is that Paul isn’t taken seriously even by his own party, so what progressives think of Paul is a fairly moot point.

Ron Paul is treated like his party’s crazy old uncle, and having attained only to the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul never really had a chance anyway. (This was unfortunately true for Democratic Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is treated like his party’s crazy uncle [he was my ideological favorite for 2004, but his nationally presidential unelectability was clear, and so I supported John Kerry, whom I viewed as much more electable] – and fortunately true also for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.)

If Ron Paul wants to run as an independent/third-party candidate, he has my blessing, though. Although many if not most Democrats deny it, it seems to me that the third-party presidential bid of billionaire H. Ross Perot (yet another Texas special) largely was a reason that Bill Clinton denied the first George Bush a second term in 1992.

–

*The Obamabots have easily toppled “defenses” of President Hopey-Changey — you should read Ted Rall’s recent column titled “How to Talk to an Obama Voter (If You Must)” for a list of a few of these “defenses” and why they’re bullshit. Here, I think, is the money shot:

Obamabot Talking Point: If I don’t vote for Obama, the Even Worse Republicans win.

Answer: So vote for Obama. Or don’t vote. It makes no difference either way. Voting is like praying to God. It doesn’t hurt. Nor does it do any good. As with religion, the harm comes from the self-delusion of thinking you’re actually doing something. You’re not. Wanna save the world? Or just yourself? That, you’ll have to do outside, in the street.

But perhaps Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi delivers the most scathing criticism of President Hopey-Changey that I’ve seen (at least in a long time) in his recent piece titled “Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins.” The money shot of the piece, I think, is this (the links are all Taibbi’s and the emphases are mine):

… But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.

Obama’s top 20 list included:

• Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091)
• JPMorgan Chase & Co ($808,799)
• Citigroup Inc ($736,771)
• WilmerHale LLP ($550,668)
• Skadden, Arps et al ($543,539)
• UBS AG ($532,674), and…
• Morgan Stanley ($512,232)

 McCain’s list, meanwhile, included (drum roll please):

• JPMorgan Chase & Co ($343,505)
• Citigroup Inc ($338,202)
• Morgan Stanley ($271,902)
• Goldman Sachs ($240,295)
• UBS AG ($187,493)
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher ($160,346)
• Greenberg Traurig LLP ($147,437), and…
• Lehman Brothers ($126,557)

Obama’s list included all the major banks and bailout recipients, plus a smattering of high-dollar defense lawyers from firms like WilmerHale and Skadden Arps who make their money representing those same banks. McCain’s list included exactly the same banks and a similar list of law firms, the minor difference being that it was Gibson Dunn instead of WilmerHale, etc.

The numbers show remarkable consistency, as Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup all gave roughly twice or just over twice as much to Obama as they did to McCain, almost perfectly matching the overall donations profile for both candidates: overall, Obama raised just over twice as much ($730 million) as McCain did ($333 million).

Those numbers tell us that both parties rely upon the same core of major donors among the top law firms, the Wall Street companies, and business leaders – basically, the 1%. Those one-percenters always give generously to both parties and both presidential candidates, although they sometimes will hedge their bets significantly when they think one side or the other has a lopsided chance at victory. That’s clearly what happened in 2008, when Wall Street correctly called Obama as a 2-1 (or maybe a 7-3) favorite to beat McCain.

The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.

If the voters insist on supporting such a person in defiance of these donors – this might even happen tonight, with a Paul win in Iowa – what you inevitably end up seeing is a monstrous amount of money quickly dumped into the cause of derailing that candidate. This takes overt forms, like giving heavily to his primary opponents, and more covert forms, like manufacturing opinions through donor-subsidized think tanks and the heavy use of lapdog media figures to push establishment complaints. …

President Hopey-Changey can’t even pretend to be on the side of the 99 percent when it’s the 1 percent – the Wall Street weasels and their allies – who gave him many more millions than they gave even to McCainosaurus in 2008.

And it’s the numbers next to the bullet points above that explain why I refer to the Democratic Party and the Repugnican Party as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party: the two are fairly indistinguishable. (I am, by the way, a registered member of the Green Party, and proudly so.)

Desperate Rick Perry takes last refuge of the scoundrel: ‘Christianity’

As is the case with Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, we probably safely can ignore Repugnican Tea Party Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who, like Bachmann, can’t break even 10 percent in recent presidential polls of the members of his own fucking fascistic party. Like Bachmann, Perry would be lucky even to be considered for the Repugnican Tea Party’s vice presidential spot on the 2012 ticket.

Still, Rick Perry’s “Brokeback Mountain”-like anti-gay spot (apparently primarily meant for Iowans, who will caucus early next month) has gone viral to the point that I feel compelled to chime in.

Many have pointed out (correctly) that the jacket that Perry wears in the spot is fairly identical to the jacket worn by the late Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain” –

– and spoofs of the spot abound, including PhotoShop spoofs –

– and video spoofs such as this one, which is Perry’s spot “gay-dubbed”:

Perry deserves to be lampooned. Actually, he deserves worse. He apparently believes that the way to make up for his own glaring deficiencies is to attack an historically oppressed minority group, as though this were the 2004 presidential election (hey, gay-bashing worked pretty well for the last governor from Texas!). Yet the name of Perry’s Brokeback spot is “Strong.” Because yeah, it takes a big, strong, manly man to beat up on gays.

I’ve long suspected that Rick Perry in fact is a closet case, and the video of him giving an apparently drunken speech in New Hampshire in October pretty much confirms my suspicions — in the clip, it appears that Perry is drunk, and that alcohol, the great disinhibitor, brings out what’s deep inside Perry, as he displays much-less-than-macho verbalizations and gesticulations. (As I noted at the time, he acted like a giddy schoolgirl.)

Not that I want Rick Perry on my team — I do not — but if it looks like a queer duck, waddles like a queer duck, and quacks like a queer duck…

But let’s go beyond the image stuff and go ahead and tackle the “substance” of what Perry actually says in his spot. He says: “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

Wow. This is wrong on so many levels. Where to begin?

OK, first, I suppose, we need to define the word “Christian.” To me, the word means “one who is familiar with and who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

By my definition, of course, Rick Perry and his ilk are not Christians. They are ignorant, fearful, violent (at least violent at heart and violent in spirit if not also physically violent) haters who are bound together not by anything remotely like love, but by their ignorance, their fearfulness and their hatred of the same “out” groups, such as non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians,” non-whites, non-Americans, non-wingnuts, et. al.

Also fundamentally, we need to ask why Perry is conflating non-discrimination within the U.S. military and our children’s ability to “celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” Perry’s “logic” here is as clear as is the “logic” of the “Christo”fascist fucktards who protest at U.S. military funerals, claiming that God kills U.S. soldiers abroad because the United States is too permissive on homosexuality. (What? You don’t see the clear link?)

We also need to look at Rick Perry’s utterly bogus claims of victimhood. “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” he whines, although anywhere from around 60 percent to 75 percent of Americans call themselves “Christians.” This is a persecuted minority? Yeah, you know, I, for one, haven’t seen a so-called “Christian” tossed to any lions recently.

Speaking of which, there is no fucking “war on Christmas.” I am so not a Christian (well, I agree with Jesus’ teachings that no one follows, but I certainly don’t identify with the fascistic hypocrites who call themselves “Christians”), but I give Christmas cards and Christmas gifts every year. Christmas is pretty deeply ingrained within the American culture, and affects you whether you identify yourself as a Christian or not.

If anyone has been destroying Christmas, it is those who have commercialized it, who have sucked every drop of spirituality from it in order to make a buck, and they enjoy the full support of the “Christo”fascist Repugnican Tea Partiers, so if anyone is destroying Christmas, it’s the wingnutty fascists who hypocritically blame others when, as usual, it is they who are to blame.

Anyone who wishes to celebrate Christmas in the United States of America may do so — but not with public funds (at least in the blue states, which for the most part honor the separation of church and state). That’s fair and that’s just. The same “Christo”facists who want to use our public funds to shove their own religious beliefs down everyone’s throats would go ballistic if those same public funds were used to promote another religion, such as Islam. And how would the “Christo”fascists feel about Muslim prayers in our public schools?

Yeah, fuck the “Christo”fascists.

Perry also remarks in his spot, “You don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday” — is this Perry’s admission that he just calls himself a “Christian” since it’s good politics in the backasswards “Christo”fascist state of Texas? Is this Perry’s admission that he knows about as much about his own claimed religion as he knows about the U.S. Supreme Court, which he believes has eight justices, and not nine?

Speaking of Christianity, anyone who actually has read and comprehended the words of Jesus Christ as contained in the four gospels would oppose the very existence of the U.S. military, since Jesus taught love and peace and turning the other cheek – not bombing and gunning down and torturing and otherwise maiming and killing and inflicting pain and suffering upon others.

Jesus also said not one fucking word on homosexuality, at least not as recorded in the four gospels.

Obviously the holiday of Christmas was invented after Jesus’ death, so we can’t say that Jesus was pro-Christmas and still claim sanity, and this is what Jesus had to say about the public prayer that Rick “The U.S. Supreme Court Has Eight Justices” Perry claims is so central to Christianity:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” [Matthew 6:5 and Matthew 6:6]

Jesus clearly repudiated public prayer as being something that only hypocrites practice and instructed that his followers should pray in private.

We have all of these so-called “Christians” here in the United States of America, and I don’t believe that in my almost 44 years I’ve actually met any more than a handful of them, not by my reasonable definition of a Christian.

Rick Perry certainly isn’t a Christian. He’s just an apparent alcoholic closet case, a self-loather who has wanted the presidency of the United States of America to fill the endless black void that is his soul, and he has demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to persecute the already persecuted in order to get there. Just like Jesus would do, right? And just like Adolf Hitler and his henchmen did.*

–

*No, the Hitler comparison is not out there. The right-wing, fascistic/pro-corporate, “Christian” Nazis killed thousands of gay men, just as the American Taliban – the “Christo”fascists here at home, the majority of whom are aligned with the Repugnican Tea Party – would do if they could. Hitler’s political tactic was to whip up hatred of minorities (Jews, gays, gypsies, Communists, et. al.), and that’s what the politicians within the Repugnican Tea Party do also (with hatred of Muslims, gays, “illegals,” “socialists,” et. al.).

Four more years (of hopelessness and stasis)!

Associated Press photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barack Obama’s one-term presidency seems fairly unavoidable

Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush both lost re-election primarily because of a shitty national economy. How will “underdog” Barack Obama avoid their fate, even with his “vision”?

So the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to look like a hybrid of the 1980 and the 1996 presidential races.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the people of the nation if they were better off, under then-President Jimmy Carter, than they were four years previously.

Today, President Barack Obama freely proclaims that Americans are not better off now than they were four years ago, giving the Repugnican Tea Partiers an early Christmas gift.

Obama proclaims that the 2012 presidential election will be about “who’s got a vision?”

“Vision” doesn’t pay the average voter’s bills, however, and I can’t see what Obama’s “vision” thus far has accomplished — the constitutionality of his “signature” legislative “accomplishment” of health care “reform” is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its current term – but whatever.

Obama also has found a way to make the nation’s economic collapse all about himself, proclaiming himself to be the “underdog.” Why are you worrying about yourself when you should be focusing on Barack Obama?

These statements, apparently meant to bolster Obama, only demonstrate how out of touch with the common American he is.

And it certainly doesn’t help Obama’s re-election chances that the same young people whom he apparently lied to in order to get into the White House are now filling up Wall Street and other metropolitan areas protesting his solidarity with the Wall Street weasels and other treasonous corporatocrats and plutocrats who tanked our economy.

Obama’s best shot at re-election is that the Repugnican Tea Partiers pick the worst candidate that they possibly could, a candidate so manifestly awful that he or she makes Obama look like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That candidate would be Texas Gov. Rick Perry, but Perry seems to be imploding.

While Perry might have survived Niggerheadgate — he could be criticized fairly if his family hadn’t changed the racist name of the Texas property after they bought it, but it appears that they did — the scandal/“scandal” has cast a spotlight on other aspects of Rick Perry, such as this, as reported by The Associated Press today:

Austin, Texas — Eleven years ago, when the NAACP stepped up a campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouses and other government buildings across the South, it found an opponent in Rick Perry.

Texas had a pair of bronze plaques with symbols of the Confederacy displayed in its state Supreme Court building. Perry, then lieutenant governor, said they should stay put, arguing that Texans “should never forget our history.”

It’s a position Perry has taken consistently when the legacy of the Civil War has been raised, as have officials in many of the other former Confederate states. But while defense of Confederate symbols and Southern institutions can still be good politics below the Mason-Dixon line,
the subject can appear in a different light when officials seek national office. …

Yup. What plays well in Texas tends to wither on the national scene.

I’m fine for never forgetting our history (indeed, we forget it at our own peril), but the Confederate flag, like the word “nigger,” belongs in the
history books – not on public display, except perhaps at a museum (ditto for the swastika). Besides, the white supremacists who run the state of Texas make damn sure that the publishers of the history textbooks used in the state’s schools don’t offend white (or “Christian” or heterosexual or capitalist or…) sensibilities, so what’s the problem, Ricky?

The Repugnican Tea Partiers seem anxious to identify their champion to go up against Obama, with more and more red states moving up their primary or caucus dates. I doubt that Perry has time to recover in an ever-contracting Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season. If he were eloquent he might be able to get past Niggerheadgate, but the fact that he has a penchant for stumbling into incoherence during nationally televised debates bodes ill for him.

As much as I never want to see a President Perry, it seems to me that Barack Obama’s best chance for re-election would be if Perry emerges as his opponent. Recent nationwide polls show Obama beating Perry in a hypothetical matchup by three or more percentage points.

Those same polls, however, show former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Obama within only one to three percentage points of each other, with Romney beating Obama by two percentage points in at least two recent nationwide polls. (I define “recent” as taken within the last month.)

A while back I likened Mitt Romney to Bob Dole, the incredibly wooden and uncharismatic Repugnican Party presidential candidate of 1996, the year that Bill Clinton fairly coasted to re-election.

Against Bob Dole II, Obama would be assured re-election, I thought back then, but back then I’d also thought that the nation’s economy would have shown some improvement by now.

However, the economy shows no signs of improvement between now and Election Day in November 2012, and so my money is on the 2012 presidential election looking like a cross between the 1980 and the 1996 presidential elections: Yes, the Repugnicans will front an uncharismatic candidate whom (unlike was the case with Ronald Reagan) no one is excited about, but, given the shambles that the economy is in, the uncharismatic Repugnican candidate (Mitt Romney, in case that isn’t clear) will beat the Democratic incumbent. The voters will be that thirsty for the change that was promised to them in 2008 but that never was delivered: that they’ll drink sea water, even though drinking sea water will kill you even faster than will plain old dehydration.

Many progressives whom Obama punk’d in Round One with his hollow promises of “hope” and “change” won’t bother to vote in November 2012 at all, having no progressive presidential candidate to vote for. If they do hold their nose and vote for Obama in November 2012, because of their lack of enthusiasm they certainly won’t talk up Obama’s re-election like they talked up his initial election, and if they give Team Obama any money in Round Two, they certainly won’t give as much as they did in Round One.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, on the other hand, I surmise, want a Repugnican, any Repugnican, back in the White House more enthusiastically than most of Barack Obama’s (former) supporters want four more years! This enthusiasm gap, I believe, is the biggest threat to Obama’s re-election.*

But, of course, the Obamabots — those invididuals for whom Barack Obama can do no wrong and who have some excuse for virtually all of his miserable failings – will blame Obama’s November 2012 loss on those of us who are actually progressive, who instead of selling out our progressive
principles steadfastly stick to our progressive principles (among which is not the idea of supporting the lesser of two evils). Some of them will even stoop to calling us “racist.” Some of them already have started doing that.

All of that completely fucking ignores, of course, the fact that Barack Obama, early in his presidency, did what even dipshit George W. Bush damn well knew better not to do: to shit and piss all over your base, to extend the middle finger, repeatedly, to those very same people who got you into the White House in the first place.

Competent historians, I believe, will identify that as Obama’s biggest mistake: having shat and pissed all over his base.

Had Obama followed the progressive economic advice that his base gave him from Day One of his presidency, the nation’s economy would have improved. But by trying to win over those whose support he never was going to gain in the first place through his countless “bipartisan” capitulations, by trying to make everyone love him to death, Obama sealed his own fate.

If Barack Obama actually manages to eke out re-election 13 months from now, I will be shocked.

I once expected him to be like Bill Clinton, easily fending off a challenge to a second term by a snooze-inducing Repugnican challenger. But now I expect Obama to be like Jimmy Carter, a one-term Democratic president. Especially when Obama freely publicly admits that we’re not better off now than we were four years ago.

–

*Lest any Obamabot try to deny that there even is an enthusiasm gap, a nationwide McClatchy-Marist poll taken less than a month ago asked, “Do you definitely plan to vote for Barack Obama for re-election as president or do you definitely plan to vote against him?” A whopping 49 percent declared “against him,” while only 36 percent declared for him, with 15 percent declaring that they aren’t sure yet. I surmise that the lion’s share of those 15 percent in the end will vote for the Repugnican Tea Party candidate.

Wake me up on September 12

AFP/Getty Images photo

The owner of an investment and public relations firm stumbles away from the stricken World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. While we are seeing plenty of images like this one these days, we certainly aren’t seeing images like this one, an Iraqi girl whose parents were blown away by American stormtroopers in 2005 (you know, because of 9/11) –

Chris Hondros/Getty Images photo

– or, of course, one of the many wonderful images that came out of Abu Ghraib (which I think is Arabic for “a few bad apples”) prison in Vietraq, like this unforgettable gem, circa 2004:

Seriously, though, no nation does rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness like the “Christian” United States of America does rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. We! Are! Number! One!

So the 9/11 decennial already has begun, with cheesy (redundant…) 9/11-related retrospective pieces already having been appearing in the mainstream media, but the worst of it should come next week, as the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, approaches.

As Ted Rall points out, we Americans have learned virtually nothing from 9/11, and this is evident from the woe-is-us fest that we’re seeing now.

And as Glenn Greenwald (also) points out, of course part of the self-serving, mawkish 9/11 commemoration that we won’t see is any official mention of the fact that the U.S. government first supported (and armed) the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden before it declared them enemies or any official mention of the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis whom the United States slaughtered in the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, which the unelected Bush regime launched in March 2003 using 9/11 as a pretext, even though not a single one of the 19 9/11 hijackers was an Iraqi (15 of them, in fact, were from Saudi Arabia, as was Osama bin Laden, but the U.S. power elites and the Saudi power elites remain great oily buddies).

Greenwald concludes his piece by noting that

… the fact that victims of American violence over the last two decades have easily outweighed, and continue to outweigh, those of the Dictators and Terrorists whom we so vocally despise is nonetheless an extremely important fact that should shape our understanding of 9/11. But as usual, that’s another fact that will be “left unsaid” [in the 9/11 decennial commemorations].

What 9/11 signifies most for me is nothing like American victimhood, since the United States hardly can claim to be a victimized nation (9/11 was only blowback for longstanding U.S. oppression in the Middle East), or “patriotism” (which is just jingoism or fascistic nationalism), but it marks the lost decade of 2000 through 2009.

That decade started out swimmingly, with the blatantly stolen presidential election of 2000. What possibly could have gone wrong by just allowing a bunch of right-wing, pro-plutocratic, pro-corporate chickenhawks to steal the White House?

Then there was 9/11, then there was the Vietraq War, then there was Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 – which the unelected Bush regime was prepared for as well as it had been prepared for 9/11 (recall the August 2001 presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”, and forecasters had predicted Katrina’s landfall at least two days in advance) – and then there was Barack Obama promising “hope” and “change” to a weary, Bush-whacked nation in 2008.

In 2009, with the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate all in Democratic/“Democratic” hands — his best opportunity to push through a progressive agenda — what did President Hopey-Changey accomplish? Jack fucking squat. And in 2010? Ditto.

And now we are in 2011 and where are we? We are pretty much right back where we were back in 2000: the Repugnican (Tea) Party presidential frontrunner is the Big-Oil-ass-lickin’, “Christo”fascist-lovin’, dipshit governor of Texas, and the Democratic presidential candidate will be a reportedly intellectual (“elitist” in “tea party”-speak) but rather uncharismatic guy who has been in Washington for a little while now.

And yes, I can see another Texas governor going to the White House in January 2013, whether he steals it and Americans just fucking let him, a la 2000, or whether he actually wins the 2012 presidential election fairly and squarely.  Americans are that fucking stupid.

But can they — we — survive two lost decades in a row?

Fuck. Maybe I should have titled this “Wake me up in 2021.”