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.

Stormtroopers gone wild! Part 3!!!

Jesus fuck. First, on Tuesday, a tiny 84-year-old woman was among non-threatening individuals pepper-sprayed by the pigs in Seattle:

Associated Press photos

Then, on Thursday, a tiny 20-year-old woman, who also is non-threatening, was blasted with pepper spray by the pigs in Portland, Oregon:

Associated Press photo

Now, closer to home, a pig at the University of California at Davis, which is near my home base of Sacramento, has created the latest viral video. Yesterday the pot-bellied pig casually pepper-sprayed a group of young protesters who were doing nothing but sitting on the ground and refusing to move. Here is a screen grab –

Associated Press image

– and you can watch the video here.

The Sacramento Bee reports that UC Davis’ chancellor has called for a review of the pepper-spraying, but I’m thinking that what really needs to happen is that the cop who did it needs to have his motherfucking fascistic ass kicked. Hopefully, his personal safety is now at stake. He does not deserve personal security.

Our violent pushback against the 1 percent’s routine violence against the 99 percent of us probably will have to begin with their thugs, who are just as treasonous as are the 1 percent, although there’s no reason that we can’t also go directly after the treasonous 1 percent themselves.

It’s time to roll out the guillotines and make some heads roll.

Jon Stewart’s Rally for Nihilism

Updated below

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we have more than enough of that already.

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, Greenwald writes on this topic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup.

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

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

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

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

Why can’t Obama get any love?

Reuters photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he has burned us.

Repeatedly.

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