Taliban R Us

I’m not an expert on Afghanistan or the Taliban, but when I saw in the news that the Afghan army collapsed like a house of cards in the wake of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after the United States’ military exit after two decades of “nation-building” in the “Graveyard of Empires,” I didn’t blame the Afghans; I just figured that the whole Afghan adventure always has been primarily if not only about members of the U.S. military-corporate complex looting the U.S. treasury via another impoverished nation in the name of “spreading democracy.”

Those juicy gubmint military contracts are just too juicy to ignore!

Further, I surmise that most Americans view the members of the Taliban as ignorant, violent, unwashed hordes, forgetting (or maybe ignoring) that we have such ilk here at home: the American Taliban.

Here, for instance, is a photo of the members of the Taliban after they recently took over the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul:

Associated Press news photo

And here are some pix of the American Taliban as they briefly overtook the U.S. Capitol on January 6:

Getty Images news photos

Actually, it’s probably not fair to compare the Taliban to the basement-dwelling incels and other assorted mouth-breathers and knuckle-draggers who briefly overtook the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

I mean, from the images that I have seen, the members of the Taliban have been much more orderly and organized, and certainly, entirely unlike the American Taliban, clearly they had a fucking plan — and clearly they are achieving their objective of a complete takeover of the gubmint.

This Q-Anon fucktard (redundant) who broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6 wore a shirt emblazoned with “Trust the Plan” —

Getty Images news photo

— but how did that “plan” turn out on January 6 (and since then), other than resulting in a lot of arrests and incarcerations and felony convictions (and seriously beefed-up Capitol security)?

Still, we sane Americans always should be mindful that among us are plenty of troglodytes (such as those pictured above) who would love to impose their backasswards beliefs, including if not primarily their ironically evil, backasswards “Christo”fascist beliefs, on the rest of us.

There would be no vote to make the U.S. a theocracy like Afghanistan is about to become. (And indeed, this is where the “Christo”fascists are with that liberal elitist concept of democracy these days: If they lose an election, no, they actually won it! It was stolen from them! In fact, there is no way that they can lose any election!)

A “Christo”fascist theocracy here at home would be created and maintained not democratically, but via violence.

If we actually patriotic Americans were to allow that to happen.

P.S. Here is Ted Rall’s take on the hypocrisy:

California’s next governor might take office with a minority of the vote — but wouldn’t be governor for very long

Fascist-Repugnican talk-radio host Larry Elder, shown with his buddy former “President” Pussygrabber in a Tweet that Elder posted himself in July 2018 (and again in October 2020), just might become California’s next governor in the September 14 gubernatorial recall election with millions of fewer votes than the number of votes for current Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep his job — but there’s no way in hell that Elder could win election outright in November 2022, which he’d have to do in order to keep the job.

Having lived here in California since September 1998, I think that I’m qualified to state that with each passing year, I’ve agreed more and more with the assertion that the nation’s most populous state inherently is ungovernable.

Nonetheless, the nation’s most populous state has a governor, and soon, the right-wing nut-job minority of the state might be handed the reins of governance.

California has a gubernatorial recall election — the second one since I’ve lived here — on September 14, and, as two law professors correctly and importantly pointed out a few days ago in a piece in The New York Times, we could see the scenario in which current California Gov. Gavin Newsom loses his job by falling just short of the 50.0 percent of the vote plus one vote that he needs to keep his job. Yet thus far, only 18 percent is the highest that I’ve seen for the candidate who is polling the best of the 46 potential gubernatorial replacement candidates who are on the recall ballot.

This means that even if, say, 49.9 percent of the state’s voters elect to keep Newsom in place, a much smaller amount of voters (say, only around 18 percent of them…) could override the wishes of the much higher amount of voters who essentially had voted for Newsom — and put right-wing nut-job talk-radio host (of course…) Larry Elder (the aforementioned front-runner for Newsom’s job, according to the polling) in the governorship.

This is the dream scenario for the increasingly fascist, increasingly authoritarian, increasingly anti-democratic Repugnican Party: rule over the majority by the minority. (Indeed, we saw this in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote yet loser George W. Bush became “president,” and in 2016, when Billary Clinton won the popular vote, yet loser Pussygrabber became “president.”)

Politico reports on this issue: “‘The [recall-election] ballots are out, so I don’t think a judge is going to unwind this [election],’ said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School. A [law]suit could be more ripe after the election, she said, if it turns out that Newsom loses but receives more votes than the winner of the recall.”

Indeed, that’s exactly what should happen if a “new” “governor” is put into place by a smaller number of voters than the number of voters who voted to keep Newsom: it should be challenged in court as unconstitutional, violating the democratic principle that the candidate who wins the higher number of votes is the one who wins the election (any other outcome is blatantly anti-democratic, and yes, for that reason, the antiquated, blatantly anti-democratic Electoral College must go, too).

In the meantime, California’s recall process needs to be fixed so that the will of the higher number of voters always fucking prevails. (Even just requiring a run-off election — instead of allowing a candidate with a small plurality of the vote to become governor — would be an improvement in California’s recall process.) This is, after all, supposedly, a democracy.

Of course, even if fascist-Repugnican Larry Elder becomes the next governor — and his lovely political stances include opposing a minimum wage, opposing the right to an abortion, opposing the idea that there is systemic racism in the United States, and, of course, being a fucking homophobe — he very most likely wouldn’t be governor for very long, and in the quite foreseeable future we even could see the return of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Why?

Because if Newsom is recalled, that doesn’t mean that he could not run for governor again, even in the next cycle, which is next year; he could if he wanted to. And regardless of who wins the September 14 gubernatorial recall election, whoever wants to be governor as of January 2023 must run in the regularly scheduled June 2022 gubernatorial primary election and be one of the top-two vote-getters in that primary election to be able to move on to the November 2022 gubernatorial general election — and then must win that election, too.

I don’t see any Repugnican doing that, not in a state whose voters are 46.5 percent Democratic to only 24 percent Repugnican at last count. Indeed, so deep blue is California that Newsom won election in 2018 by 62 percent to his pathetic Repugnican challenger’s 38 percent, and Joe Biden won California by 63.5 percent to Pussygrabber’s 34 percent.

Despite these daunting numbers, however, fully expect the fascist-Repugnicans to claim that if Newsom keeps his job, as he probably will, it was only because of “election fraud.” (An election is legitimate only if the fascist “wins,” you see; that is a central tenet of fascism, as we’ve seen played out as Pussygrabber & Co. still fascistically, treasonously and anti-democratically claim that Pussygrabber actually won the 2020 presidential election despite having lost it by more than 7 million votes.)

Newsom could lose his job in next month’s recall election, though; for quite a while now California’s voters have been run through the fucking wringer, as California experiences perhaps an unprecedented number of big problems all at the same time, including wildfires (mostly in the northern part of the state, along with Oregon), recurring drought, a serious lack of affordable housing and rampant homelessness* and, of course, probably first and foremost in most voters’ minds, the never-ending novel coronavirus pandemic that probably would have been over by now had the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing fucktards** not have tried to turn efforts to beat the pandemic (such as by the use of the three available vaccines and the use of face masks) into some backasswards tribal, political statement.

I mean, it’s ironic that the Repugnicans help to create the problem, such as the wholly unnecessary and wholly preventable extension of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then seek to benefit politically from the problem that they helped create, but we’ve seen this page from the fascist’s playbook before, such as with the Reichstag fire (and even with the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, in which Repugnican Arnold “Baby Daddy” Schwarzenegger had had a secret meeting with Enron — and then used Enron’s raping of the state via a manufactured electricity crisis to get himself into the governorship in that recall election).

Whatever California’s big problems are now, however, under a fascist-Repugnican like Larry Elder (who wholeheartedly supports former “President” Pussygrabber, of course), the state would get even worse.

Therefore, of course I’ll be voting “NO” on Gavin Newsom’s recall, probably within the week (I should receive my vote-by-mail ballot within the next few days and probably will mail it back within a day or two).

I’m not wild about Gavin Newsom — I’m a “Bernie bro,” not a Democratic Party hack (indeed, I’m registered as an independent because I have real fucking problems with the pro-corporate, income-inequality-loving-but-nauseatingly-“woke” Democratic Party establishment) — but right now Newsom (for whom I did vote in November 2018) is our best bet to be at the helm of the nation’s most populous state (which, because it has the highest number of people, of course should have the highest number of problems…).

If we Californians think that we have it bad now, all that we need to do is to allow a Repugnican to take the reins — even if for only a relatively short period of time.

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*California has only about 12 percent of the nation’s population, yet has about a quarter of the nation’s homeless. The fascist-Repugnicans like to say that this is because California is an inherently failed state, but no, clearly, homeless people are coming to California from other (I surmise mostly red) states, knowing that much if not most of California not only has a more favorable climate that do most other states, but that California isn’t nearly as mean-spirited toward the homeless as most other (supposedly “Christian”) states are.

**Indeed, it seems to me that Afghanistan right now is being overrun by its own type of teatard/Pussygrabber-loving/Q-Anon/anti-vax animals. Indeed, the only difference between the members of the Taliban (“Islamofascists”) and the “Christo”fascists here in the United States is the content of their backasswards religious beliefs. Otherwise, they’re remarkably similar, including their hatred of democracy, science, logic, reason, human rights, actual religious freedom, etc.

Bowe Bergdahl persecuted for his political beliefs in the ‘land of the free’

U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl is shown in a still of a video of his handover from the Taliban to the U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan on May 31. Bergdahl, who now is 28 years old and was 23 years old at the time of his capture by the Taliban, has gone from being persecuted by the Taliban to being persecuted by the American Taliban, that is, the members of the American right wing who are strikingly similar to the members of the Taliban except that they call themselves “Christians.”

I find it astonishing (I shouldn’t, I suppose, but I still do) that in the reading that I’ve done thus far over the recovery of U.S. Army soldier Bowe Bergdahl, one obvious, overarching fact is not uttered: that his recovery from his five years of captivity by the Taliban in Afghanistan is “controversial” and largely nationally uncelebrated because Bergahl apparently has not been the “right” kind of American soldier — the wingnutty kind.

Since his capture by the Taliban in 2009 — which I wrote about at the time — to the present, bits and pieces of Bergdahl’s pre-captive life have slipped out into the public sphere, and overall the portrait of Bergdahl does not exactly look like that of Rambo: Bergdahl’s parents look like hippies. Bergdahl was home-schooled by his hippie-looking mother. Bergdahl never drove a car, but rode a bicycle everywhere. Bergdahl apparently spent time in a Buddhist monastery. Most damning of all, he apparently took ballet classes.

Perhaps even more damning than the ballet classes, Bergdahl reportedly stated in his final e-mail to his parents before he was captured by the Taliban:

… I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of U.S. soldier is just the lie of fools… I am sorry for everything here [in Afghanistan]. These people [the Afghans] need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid, that they have no idea how to live. We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armored trucks… We make fun of them in front of their faces, and laugh at them for not understanding we are insulting them… I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting…

Well, yeah, it is disgusting. Fuck the hypocritical wingnuts, who condemn others’ evil while they freely and frequently commit equal or even worse evils of their own, under the lie that by definition, an American (and by the wingnuts’ definition, a real American is only a right-wing, “Christo”fascist American) can do no wrong, and who assert that the United States is morally perfect and is God’s Chosen Nation and therefore can do no wrong. The U.S. in fact can do wrong and does it every fucking day.

See, Bowe Bergdahl just wasn’t the right kind of American soldier. He displayed empathy for the plight of the Afghans when instead he should have been much more like his colleagues who premeditatedly brutally slaughtered Afghan civilians or the Marine who urinated on the bodies of Taliban fighters (just like Jesus Christ Himself would have done) — to give just two of many possible examples of how God’s Chosen Soldiers have behaved in Afghanistan. Even the U.S. Army soldier who raped and killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl probably is held in higher esteem by the American right wing than is Bowe Bergdahl.

My guess, based upon what I know of Bergdahl — such as that the county where Bergdahl was raised “has gained a reputation as a Democratic Party enclave” in the deep-red state of Idaho — is that of course Bergdahl didn’t belong in the U.S. military, where sensitive, empathetic, thoughtful, intelligent individuals (you know, those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus Christ instead of just claiming to be God’s Chosen) of course are not welcome.

This is because the U.S. military — which is funded by all of us Americans who have to pay our taxes (myself included, of course), regardless of our own political and religious orientations — is a bastion of right-wing “Christo”fascists.

The “Christo”fascists have taken over our military, and we, the majority of the American people who in the past two presidential elections have soundly rejected the Repugnican Tea Party agenda (which includes jingoism, militarism and the total disregard for the humanity of the peoples of other nations), need to take back our military from the minority right wing.

So vicious — and yes, dangerous — is the American right wing (again, fucking fascists is what they are) that apparently Bergdahl’s hometown of Hailey (the seat and the largest city of the aforementioned Blaine County) canceled a scheduled homecoming for Bergdahl later this month for safety reasons, with the primary concern apparently being not potential trouble coming from locals, but from those (i.e., wingnuts) coming from elsewhere to cause trouble, and, of course, Bergdahl’s hippie-looking father has received death threats.

This is what we can expect from the American wingnuts who claim to be followers of the peace-loving and hatred-and-violence-eschewing Jesus Christ. They are fascists (I cannot emphasize that point enough), and it’s just as important to fight the fascists here at home as it has been to fight the fascists abroad.

I do not assert that Bowe Bergdahl is perfect. Whether or not he deserted his unit in Afghanistan neither you nor I know for sure, because neither you nor I was there, and if he is formally accused of desertion, then he is entitled to the due process to which you and I also are entitled. He deserves not to be branded as a deserter without first having had the chance to defend himself in a formal and fair process.

If Bergdahl did desert his unit in Afghanistan, does that change my view of him?

No.

Bergdahl’s biggest “crime,” you see, is that he apparently actually followed the teachings of Jesus Christ — you know, such as to love one another as you love yourself, to love your “enemies,” to practice peace and love instead of war, etc.

To the “Christians” who fill the U.S. military, Bergdahl is a criminal for having refused to be blindly obedient to the anti-Christian, immoral “mission” in Afghanistan of subduing yet another nation of people who have committed the crime of not being just like us Americans.

The only thing that I am aware of for which I perhaps can fault Bergdahl is that he apparently knowingly joined an organization with which he very apparently was incompatible in his temperament, values, worldview and the like.*

But then again, the continued existence of such an evil, anti-Christian, pro-killing-for-plutocracy organization as the U.S. military is our collective fault, not his.

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*As I noted in 2009, it’s quite possible that Bergdahl joined the U.S. military (in 2008, apparently) because he didn’t know what else to do with himself and his life.

It’s not like the United States of America has much to offer its young adults, whom for the most part the powers that be (most of them baby boomers or dinosaurs like textbook warhawk John McCainosaurus) don’t care about, except when they can be useful to the powers that be, such as wage slaves in dead-end minimum-wage jobs, the victims of student-loan sharks, and cannon fodder in bogus wars for the plutocrats’ profits (which both the Vietraq War and the way overlong war in Afghanistan have been).

On Robert Gates, I told you so

Um, yeah, this was as avoidable as it was predictable…

So former Obama administration Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has written a book in which he has said some unflattering things about President Obama, probably primarily, or even only, to try to sell his new book. (Why be secretary of defense if you can’t get a book deal out of it?)

Reminds me of the old frog and scorpion tale.

I wrote these things about Robert Gates back in the day:

From September 2009:

… [Robert] Gates should go. The American people elected a Democratic president and here is a Repugnican “president’s” secretary of defense held over from the unelected Bush regime’s bogus wars. I think that President Obama retained Gates primarily in order to try to prove that Obama isn’t a pussified commander in chief. Ironically, though, Obama’s retention of Gates proves exactly that Obama is a pussified commander in chief, that he puts what some fucktards think above doing the right thing, which is to dump Bush regime holdover Gates. …

From February 2010:

… Obama never should have kept on Gates, who was defense secretary under George W. Bush. Obama probably did that to look “bipartisan” and/or not “soft on terror” or the like, but it was a mistake. …

From January 2013:

… [Barack Obama] is poised to name Repugnican former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel as U.S. secretary of defense, reinforcing the meme that Democrats are shitty on defense, and doing something that a Repugnican president never would do (i.e., appoint a Democrat to his cabinet, perhaps especially for defense) …

Not that Hagel would represent the first time that Obama sold out those who voted for him where it comes to his selection of the U.S. secretary of defense. Recall that Obama, at the start of Round One, lazily, cowardly and stupidly kept on Robert Gates, who under George W. Bush had replaced war criminal Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in November 2006. Gates stayed on the job as defense secretary under Obama until he retired on July 1, 2011.

My biggest problem with Hagel is that again, a Republican president of today never would put a Democrat on his cabinet (yes, I use “his” because a female Republican president is pretty much an oxymoron), and DINO Obama has sold out the Democratic Party enough as it is. …

I stand by my assertion that Obama’s having chosen Repugnicans as two of his three secretaries of defense has only given the impression that the members of his own party are clueless on defense, and that this thus obviously has not helped Obama’s party.

It wasn’t “smart” “bipartisanship”* on Obama’s part to keep Gates on as secretary of defense and then, after Democrat Leon Panetta held the seat for less than two years after Gates, to replace Panetta with Hagel. It wasn’t a stroke of brilliance, a la Abraham Lincoln’s “team of rivals.”

It was as brilliant as was the frog who agreed to give the scorpion a ride on his back across the pond.

P.S. The assertions in Gates’ book that have been leaked/reported thus far aren’t all that earth-shattering, which is why I haven’t bothered to expound upon them, but perhaps the most interesting one is Gates’ reported assertion that Barack Obama, while supportive enough of U.S. troops, never was enthusiastic enough about the war in Afghanistan.

What the fuck?

Why should Obama ever have been enthusiastic about the war in Afghanistan — which is not called the “graveyard of empires” for nothing — that the war criminals of the unelected, treasonous Bush regime began (belatedly, after they illegally, immorally, unjustly and unprovokedly invaded Iraq) and that Obama inherited?

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*“Bi-” means “two,” and in the term “bipartisanship” it connotes “both ways,” and no Repugnican president has ever selected a Democrat as his secretary of defense. Ever.

However, four Democratic presidents — Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — each appointed a Repugnican as his secretary of defense for at least a portion of his presidency.

This is what “bipartisanship” means in the United States: the Repugnicans give the Democrats not an inch, but the Democrats give the Repugnicans a mile.

And this is yet another factor, but probably the largest factor, that makes it so difficult to have any respect for the Democrats: their utter lack of respect for themselves (and, by extension, their constituents).

Giving this here Tweety thing a try!

I never wanted to be a grumpy old man, especially at only age 45, but, after having resisted* for a long time now, yesterday I sent my very first “Tweet” out to the Universe, probably only to be, as Hedwig put it, “internationally ignored.”

My first Tweet yesterday was this:

I’d MUCH rather that my tax dollars pay for Chelsea Manning’s sex change than for another bogus war in the Middle East!

Today, this:

Wingnuts have savaged Chelsea Manning, who killed no one, but find a way to forgive Robert Bales, who murdered 16 Afghan civilians. Sick!

The first Tweet was easy, but the second was more difficult, because I had a little more to say, and so I had to condense it into Twitter’s 140-character maximum, for which — it is true — there is no forgiveness. (I am tempted to change my Twitter username to Procrustes, but I’m sure that it’s already taken…)

Anyway, I frequently leave comments on news items and other postings on the Internet, and some of them are pretty short, so I should be able to do the Twitter thing.

Whether or not I’ll have any following is another matter, but since I’ve been blogging since 2002, I haven’t lost too much sleep over how much of a readership I do or do not have, so it probably won’t be any different with Twitter.

Oh: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, in case you haven’t heard, slaughtered 16 Afghan civilians inside of their homes in cold blood in March 2012. Today he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

I’ve seen wingnuts offer all kinds of defenses for him in the comments sections of news stories.

As I Tweeted, it’s sick: Chelsea Manning, who has not killed anyone or even demonstrably caused the death of anyone, is shown no mercy even by many (if not even most) of those who call themselves liberals, no doubt in very large part because of Manning’s gender issues, yet if you’re a “macho,” presumably heterosexual and gender-conforming white guy, especially a soldier or a cop, in the eyes of public opinion, anyway, you can get away with murder — with mass murder, even.

White male over-privilege is, in my estimation, staggering.

The only “defense”that I can offer for Bales is that it’s grossly inequitable that he’ll have to spend the rest of his life in prison for his having committed mass murder while the much, much worse mass murderers — George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, yes, Barack Obama, et. al., et. al. — not only won’t spend a minute in a jail cell, but most of them will enjoy cushy retirement benefits at our expense.

Anyway, if you truly can’t get enough of me here, I’m at Twitter at @robertdcrook.

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*My main point of resistance to Twitter has been my concern that in a society that already is dumbed down enough, discussing important topics in 140 characters or fewer is going to make the American collective intelligence even worse.

However, Twitter hasn’t yet overtaken all other forms of communication, and to me seems more to supplement than to supplant public discourse.

And we all love a good zinger, something that, hopefully, I’ll get better at composing…

It’s past time to reel in our stormtroopers and shrink the Death Star

There comes a time when you should see things clear [sic]
Free from my innocence, there is no circumstance too severe
Only the need for us, for us to believe again
There is a time, temptation’s on the run
Dreamer, you’ve had your way
Soldier, you’ve had your day in the sun
Now it’s time for us to begin again

Le Bel Age
Only our love will remain
Le Bel Age
Close to the truth once again …

— Pat Benatar, “Le Bel Age”

Please forgive my incredibly cheesy ’80s reference, but I’ve always loved that line: “Soldier, you’ve had your day in the sun.” (I don’t know that that the “dreamer” has had his or her way; I suppose that we need to know what it is, exactly, that the said dreamer dreams.)

At least since after Sept. 11, 2001, “hero” worship — worship of the mostly white male members of the U.S. military, law enforcement and, to a lesser extent, firefighters and emergency medical personnel — has gripped the nation.

Never mind that it’s the blowback from our military “heroes'” actions in the Middle East (where they were sent by stupid, white, filthy rich, greedy white men) that brought us 9/11 in the first fucking place.

Blowback is quite real. Take the 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them reportedly children, who reportedly were mowed down by one or more American stormtroopers today in what Reuters calls a “U.S. shooting spree.” Their relatives won’t want revenge against the United States of America?

Shit like this — the stuff of which 9/11 was made — happens, and then when shit like 9/11 happens, American fucktards scratch their heads and ask, “Why do they hate us so much?” (They then conclude that “they” hate us for our “freedom” and our “democracy” and our general lily-white goodness.)

So the endless loop — endless until we sane, actually patriotic Americans put an end to it or until the American empire collapses completely — is that the U.S. war machine slaughters innocent people in the Middle East, there is predictable retaliation in the form of “terrorism” (it’s never called terrorism when the U.S. military or the military of an American ally, such as Israel, slaughters innocent people), and then the members who comprise the U.S. war machine claim that their existence — indeed, their expansion — is necessary because of the global threats! (Never mind that they are the ones who are creating any actual threats.)

Yet a nauseating pro-military, pro-“hero”-worship meme that ABC News rolled out recently is that the members of the U.S. military are “the other 1 percent,” and that the rest of us just don’t appreciate them enough.

Really? Really? The U.S. military is bleeding us dry of our tax dollars — and because of this obscene military overspending we are watching our empire crumble as did past empires that overspent on their militaries — but we civilians owe the members of the U.S. military even more?

This is the deal: China, which is second in the world in its military spending, spends only one-sixth of what the United States spends on its military. This is what world military spending looks like:

The United States easily could more than halve its military spending and still maintain its undisputed global military dominance. At this point — the point on which the American empire teeters upon collapse — I would accept even a one-third reduction in U.S. military spending (for now), with those funds returned to domestic spending in order to save the fucking empire.

But we are told by the pro-military wingnuts that we must have this level of military spending, even though millions of Americans cannot afford health-care costs (health care never should have been made for-profit), even though our public schools continue to crumble and our teachers don’t have the funding that they need (they pay for many things out of their own pockets), even though almost no American (except for the actual 1 percent, the plutocrats) feels any retirement security, even though we have plenty of homeless people in our streets, and speaking of which, our streets are disintegrating and our bridges are falling down.

But even though the U.S. military is bleeding the United States of America fucking dry, ABC News quotes one veteran as having said, “‘It’s hard not to be a little bit angry when you see the tremendous sacrifice that some have paid in this war’ while others have been completely unaffected.”

No, the 99 percent of us have been quite affected by the right wing’s wars of choice in the Middle East for the benefit of the oily war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, which received no-bid contracts for the wholly unnecessary war in Iraq that the treasonous, unelected Bush regime delivered for Halliburton and the other oily, war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp. (No war, no profits, so indeed, BushCheneyCorp created a war.)

Largely because of the astronomical costs of the Vietraq War (and also, of course, because of his tax cuts for the wealthiest among us), while George W. Bush inherited a record federal budget surplus from Bill Clinton, Bush handed over to Barack Obama a record federal budget deficit.

Americans who have been unemployed and who have lost their homes and who can’t afford decent health care (and for whom a college education is pretty much a financial impossibility) don’t need to be lectured to by any bitter veterans that they haven’t sacrified enough. They have. We have. We have sacrified ridiculously more than enough to the U.S. war machine, and while the mostly-white-male objects of “hero” worship expect us to get on our knees and suck their dicks (or maybe they want us to play dead and they can then urinate on our “corpses” — that certainly seems to be their fetish), the members of the female-dominated professions, such as teachers and nurses, whose sacrifices also are immense, not only go unappreciated and unrecognized, but are told by the stupid white men that they must continue to suffer budget cuts and have their unions eliminated so that they lose altogether what paltry remaining rights that they have.

(I used to be a nurse in the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system. I can tell you that with chronic understaffing and other lack of resources due to capitalistic greed, and with patients [most of them baby boomers] feeling entitled to the best health care possible even though most of them put themselves into the hospital because of their selfish, greedy, irresponsible lifestyle choices, going to work felt very much like being in a war zone — so again, nurses and teachers need no fucking lectures on the topic of self-sacrifice from egomaniacal G.I. Joes.)

If American veterans want to be angry for what they have been put through — and I suppose that they should be angry — then they need to be angry at the plutocrats who sent them unnecessarily to war in the first fucking place — and not at us civilians who pay for these military misadventures that are initiated by the treasonous, chickenhawk plutocrats who cannot empty the U.S. Treasury via the military-industrial complex fast enough.

And you know, I was one of millions of Americans who protested during the run-up to the Bush regime’s launch of its bogus Vietraq War in March 2003. Yes, I was at the California State Capitol at an anti-imminent-war rally in early 2003. I knew that invading Iraq was a horrible fucking idea, that it was a bogus war that was about to be launched by the treasonous, unelected Bush regime, and I registered my protest.

But at that time we progressives who opposed the impending Vietraq War were branded by the pro-military wingnuts as lunatics or “terrorist”-loving traitors or both.

And today, these pro-military wingnuts are telling us that we’re not sacrificing enough for the bogus warfare in the Middle East that we opposed from Day One.

And it’s interesting: The members of the U.S. military predominantly come from the red states, and the denizens of the red states are always accusing others of being parasites. They’re the hard workers, and we of the blue states are the slacking parasites on their hard work and their sacrifices, according to their narrative, yet it has been the case for years that the blue states get back significantly less from the federal government than they pay into it, while the red states get back significantly more than they pay into it. (I wrote about this fact here way back in April 2009.)

I assume that the calculations that show that the red states actually are the parasites on the blue states factor in the federal tax dollars collected from the blue states that go into the U.S. military and then are diverted predominantly to the red states, but if not, then the parasitical relationship is even more severe than it has been reported.

In any event, upon examination what emerges is the truth: Which is that the red states, appropriate to their assigned color, are blood-suckers — ticks, fleas, leeches — while we of the blue states, appropriate to our assigned color of oxygen-deprived, near-death blue, are the host, and not fucking vice-versa.

The right-wing fascists love the U.S. military because whatever they do not understand or they do not like or agree with they wish to destroy, and because of their ignorance they are fearful, and because they are fearful, they glorify the capacity to kill those of whom they are afraid. Fearful idiots — not truly brave and loving individuals — glorify guns, bombs and other means of killing people.

And, of course, there are millions of traitors — from big-time military contractors all the way down to individual soldiers — who feed at the trough that is U.S. military overspending. They are traitors because they don’t care that U.S. military overspending is destroying their own nation; they just want their gravy train to keep on chugging. To justify their continued looting of the U.S. Treasury — to continue to rob us blind — they have to invent perpetual “threats” and “national interests,” when the real interests sure the fuck aren’t national, but quite personally financial.

Religion has played a role, too, of course. Most members of the U.S. military, most of them being from the “Christo”fascist red states, identify themselves as “Christians,” even though, perversely ironically, Jesus Christ was all about nonviolence (turn the other cheek, he taught, not gun down your opponent and then piss on his corpse). These “Christo”fascists are having their little crusade in the Middle East, slaughtering Muslims left and right, but why should atheist taxpayers like me have to fund their fucking crusade?

Prick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and their “Christo”fascist ilk whine that the U.S. government “persecutes” “Christians” and that there should be no separation of church and state in the United States, but when the U.S. government is sponsoring their anti-Muslim crusade, I don’t see any real fucking separation of church and state.

Indeed, the U.S. military is rife with “Christo”fascists like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, who, The Associated Press reports, “first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights [and then] declared that he wouldn’t follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.”

This is a photo of the traitor Stein, out of his pointy white hood:

He looks just like all of the other embittered right-wing bald white guys, like “Joe the Plumber,” who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio:

(Yes, apparently “Joe the Plumber,” a.k.a. Samuel Wurzelbacher, had someone write a book for him. No, he is not expected to win the election in November, and very apparently “the American dream” is that right-wing white guys maintain the control that they’ve had since the nation’s inception. A “dream” for the stupid white men, I suppose, but a fucking nightmare for the rest of us, such as women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians” and non-fascists. [And civilians in the Middle East, of course…])

So: My — our — federal tax dollars don’t go things that we need, such as health care, education, infrastructure maintenance and environmental protection, but go instead to the U.S. military, where blatant traitors like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein proclaim that they don’t have to follow the orders of the nation’s first black president. On our dime.

Any member of the U.S. military who dared to publicly announce that he or she would not follow George W. Bush’s orders would have found him- or herself in knee-deep shit. He or she would have been expected to keep any dissenting political opinions to him- or herself or to be disciplined, but obviously Marine Sgt. Gary Stein and his treasonous, fascistic ilk feel that the U.S. military is only an arm of the American right wing, and thus only Repugnican Tea Party presidents are to be obeyed.

We truly patriotic Americans — who fucking fund the U.S. military in the first place — need to reel in this treasonous bullshit quickly. I see precious little difference between the supposed “subversive,” “Communist” infiltration of the U.S. military during the McCarthy era and the actual subversive infiltration of the U.S. military by the right-wing, white supremacist “Christo”fascists today.

It’s not their fucking military. It’s our fucking military, and it’s insane that we fund them only so that they then can bite the hands that feed them.

We progressives need to man up, so to speak, and demand that politicians, perhaps especially those who call themselves “Democrats,” stop being cowed by the pro-military, “Christo”fascist right wing and stop being the Pentagon’s little bitches. The stupid-white-male-dominated Pentagon (the “Death Star” that I made reference to) should answer to us, the people, and not vice-versa.

Military overspending must be contained before the American empire collapses completely. To be complicit in the empire’s collapse is to be a fucking traitor. There is no way around that.

I don’t want the members of the U.S. military to be unemployed. We have enough unemployment. I want a great number of those employed by the U.S. military to be re-employed, but this time in capacities that help the taxpayers of the United States of America — and not the greedy, treasonous actual 1 percent, who are the only ones who really benefit from the perpetual bogus warfare that they impose upon the 99 percent of us for their own treasonous war profiteering.

These re-employed, redirected individuals from the U.S. military can be engineers, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, scientists, construction workers, architects, cooks, environmentalists, artists (yes, we need art much more than we need more bombs and fighter planes), whatever they want to be that they are able to be, and those services are worth paying for.

American stormtroopers urinating on corpses and mowing down innocent civilians in the Middle East as a by-product of obscene war profiteering — that, apparently, is what the pro-military right wing wants.

That’s not how I want my tax dollars spent, and the progressive vision, I argue, is infinitely better for the United States of America than is the apocalyptic “vision” of the pro-military “Christo”fascists who tell us progressives that we’re just not sacrificing enough for them.

‘Christo’fascist Prick Santorum is being crucified in the nationwide polls

Reuters photo

Butt Juice Boy apparently could be reacting to his latest national poll numbers, but this photo was taken on February 14, when he still had a significant lead over perma-presidential candidate Mittens. That lead since has evaporated, thank (the non-existent, Zeus-like, Judeo-Christian) God.

Stick a fork in him; Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum is just about ready to be added to the heap of not-Mittens who peaked and then fizzled.

At the height of his ascent earlier this month, Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed Santorum a full 10 percentage points (36 percent to 26 percent) ahead of Mittens Romney, who has been running for president for the past century or so.

The most recent Gallup daily tracking polls (those taken within the past week), however, show Santorum and Romney in a dead heat, with each of them garnering 29, 30 or 31 percent. If the trend continues — and I expect it to — then Santorum will go the way of Herman Cain, Prick Perry, Michele “Eyes Like Deer’s in Headlights” Bachmann and Newt Gingrich.

While the Repugnican Tea Party traitors clearly still aren’t enthused about Mittens, they also seem to be concerned that there’s no way in hell that Prick Santorum can win the White House.

Their concern is justified, as Santorum’s hard-right “Christo”fascist proclamations continue.

Santorum of course insists that President Barack Obama should not have apologized to the people of Afghanistan after it was made public that multiple copies of the Koran were burned there by the U.S. military, reportedly by mistake.

Reports The Associated Press today:

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum criticized President Barack Obama’s apology for the burning of Korans in Afghanistan, adding that Afghanistan should apologize to the U.S. for the deaths of four U.S. soldiers during six days of violence sparked by the incident.

“There was nothing deliberately done wrong here,” Santorum said [today] on ABC television’s “This Week.” “This was something that happened as a mistake. Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that [was] deliberate.”

More than 30 people have been killed in clashes since it emerged Tuesday that copies of the Muslim holy book and other religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field, a large U.S. base north of Kabul. Protesters angry over Koran burnings by American troops lobbed grenades [today] at a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan and clashed with police and troops in a day of violence that left seven international troops wounded and two Afghans dead.

“The response needs to be apologized for by (President Hamid) Karzai and the Afghan people for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake,” Santorum said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.”

The president’s apology suggests that there is blame and that the U.S. did something wrong “in the sense of doing a deliberate act,” Santorum said.

Santorum says that rather than saying he was sorry, Obama should have only acknowledged that burning copies of Islam’s holiest book in a trash pit was wrong and taken responsibility for the incident, “but to apologize, I think, lends credibility that somehow or another that it was more than that.” …

Big tough guy, Butt Juice Boy is! Being an American means never having to say that you are sorry! Fuck yeah!

The fact is that the United States’ war machine has occupied the sovereign nation of Afghanistan for more than a decade now. The people of Afghanistan just want the United States’ stormtroopers out of their fucking country already — as would we Americans if our nation had been occupied by a foreign power for more than a decade.

We don’t need to remain in Afghanistan; it’s that the treasonous, thieving weasels who comprise the military industrial-complex must fabricate national security threats in order to justify its existence, which sucks trillions of dollars — our tax dollars — from the U.S. Treasury. No supposed national security threats = no continued kaaa-ching kaaaaa-chiiing for them.

After more than a decade of having occupied Afghanistan, the members of the U.S. military should know by now to be very careful about how they handle copies of the Koran. That Korans were burned even reportedly inadvertently at this point in the occupation shows, at the minimum, the gross insensitivity of the occupiers toward the occupied.

The burning of the copies of the Koran isn’t, of course, solely or even primarily what the people of Afghanistan are protesting right now. It’s their decade-plus occupation that they are protesting, and in their nation’s occupation far more Afghanis have died than have Americans, who shouldn’t still be in Afghanistan in the first fucking place.

And while Santorum hypocritically proclaims that “Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that [was] deliberate,” the killing of Afghanis by members of the U.S. military for the past several years now in most instances certainly hasn’t been a mistake, but has been deliberate, and while Santorum calls on Afghanistan to apologize to the United States for the recent American deaths there, the United States almost never apologizes for those whom it slaughters, justifying even the slaughter of innocents as just an unfortunate part of the “war on terror” and the “spread of democracy.”

Perhaps Prick Santorum is right, though. The United States shouldn’t apologize to the people of Afghanistan — it should just withdraw from their nation. Now. Just as President Hopey-Changey had promised during his 2008 presidential campaign that we would. (The recent slaughter in Afghanistan, to me, only underscores the fact that our continued occupation of the nation is just another of Obama’s broken campaign promises.)

Prick Santorum is full of shit, of course, that Obama’s apology for the Koran burnings “lends credibility” to the idea that the Korans were burned intentionally. When one nation offends another, an apology often if not usually is in order. (It is, after all, what Jesus would do.)

The only problem with Obama’s apology is that it means nothing, that it rings pretty fucking hollow, in light of the fact that the United States still occupies the sovereign nation of Afghanistan.

Apologizing almost always is the right thing to do, but don’t expect bad-ass Prick Santorum to apologize to the Netherlands for his recently having pulled it completely out of his santorum-filled rectum that the Netherlands, as a cost-cutting measure, routinely involuntarily euthanizes old people who don’t wear bracelets that read, “Do not euthanize me.” Indeed, he falsely claimed to his audience of fearful wingnuts that half of the Netherlands’ instances of euthanasia are involuntary — that is, murder — and that therefore the elderly in the Netherlands avoid hospitals, lest they be snuffed out at the bean-counters’ command.

Yes, let’s put the boy genius Prick Santorum in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Let’s!

Not content with alienating every other nation on the planet, Prick Santorum also very apparently wants to subject all Americans to his brand of hard-right-wing Catholicism, despite the fact that no more than a quarter of Americans identify themselves as Catholic.

Reports The Associated Press today:

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said [today] that he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, adding that he was sickened by John F. Kennedy’s assurances to Baptist ministers 52 years ago that he would not impose his Catholic faith on them.

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in an interview from Michigan on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The First Amendment means the free exercise of religion and that means bringing people and their faith into the public square.”

Santorum’s latest foray into the hot-button, faith-based issues that so fire up the party’s evangelical base comes as his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, begins to pull ahead slightly in the state of Michigan, where [Romney] was born and raised.

Both Michigan and Arizona hold their primaries Tuesday. …

Beyond Michigan, however, Santorum’s startling stances on social issues like birth control and religion are getting the most attention countrywide.

He’s been unapologetic about some of his more controversial remarks, even reiterating [today] his past remarks that Kennedy’s 1960 speech in Houston made “me want to throw up.”

“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? What makes me throw up is someone who is now trying to tell people that you will do what the government says,” Santorum said. “That now we’re going to turn around and impose our values from the government on people of faith.”

America is all about embracing diversity, he added. [Unless, of course, you are a non-Catholick, a self-respecting woman or a non-heterosexual, among others.]

“What we saw in Kennedy’s speech was just the opposite, and that’s what’s so upsetting about it,” he said.

No, the problem that Prick Santorum — who, just like Dan Quayle, is no John F. Kennedy — has with JFK is that JFK did not promise to move the Oval Office to the Vatican — like a “good” Catholick “should,” and like Prick Santorum would do should he get his “Christo”fascist claws on the presidency.

But it’s true that separation of church and state in the United States never has been absolute. I actually agree with Prick on that point, but again, for very different reasons. I mean, despite the concept of the separation of church and state, we still have “In God We Trust” on our currency and our pledge of allegiance still contains the phrase “one nation under God.”

We Americans who aren’t fans of Prick Santorum and his ilk have yet to have a U.S. president who didn’t at least on occasion evoke the name of the Judeo-Christian, non-existent, Zeus-like deity, and we have to endure the “Christo”fascists’ insane theocratic rhetoric at the national level at least every four years.

The “Christo”fascists like Santorum claim that they’re not allowed to practice their backasswards religions when, in fact, the reality is that their theocratic bullshit is shoved down the throats of us who don’t want it far more often than it ever is the other way around.

While it is clear what kind of president Santorum would be — Pope Palpatine’s puppet (he virtually admits this himself) — it is not entirely clear to me what kind of president Mittens would be in terms of attempting to shove his own religious beliefs down the nation’s throat.

Knowing what I know of Mormons (I lived among them in Arizona), I can’t see Mittens not being beholden to the cabal of stupid evil old white men in Salt Lake City. A tenth of Mitt’s millions, after all, goes to Salt Lake City, as the cult requires. Mormons’ No. 1 allegiance is to be to the cult — not to the country. However, having been the governor of a blue state, it very well could be the case that Mittens just has the sense to keep his mouth shut about his plans to essentially move the nation’s capital to Salt Lake.

I won’t take the risk of assuming that Mittens would be less “Christo”fascist and theocratic than would be Prick. Both of them are unacceptable as president, and I’m not alone in believing that: Barack Obama beats both of the “Christo”fascists by a comfortable margin in most recent nationwide polls.

Thank God.

Bogus warfare is the real pisser

Reuters image

In this viral video grab, four U.S. Marines reportedly are shown urinating (or pretending to urinate?) on the bodies of at least three vanquished members of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Rick Perry has a problem with gays serving in the U.S. military. (Of course, whipping it out in front of other dudes and looking at their goods too seems a bit gay to me…)

So apparently some U.S. Marines urinated on Taliban corpses in Afghanistan. On video. After the Abu Ghraib Little Shop of Horrors (which was perpetrated by just a few bad apples, you know), this should come as no surprise, and I’m confident that it’s only one of many such episodes that we’ll never find out about.

The self-serving, U.S.-Treasury-draining traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex assure us that we have our troops in the Middle East for our (the taxpayers’) protection against terrorism, but of course viral videos of U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Middle Easterners whom they’ve just slaughtered makes us much more likely, not less likely, to be targets of future (attempted) acts of terrorism.

I find it darkly hilarious, though, to hear anyone assert that dead people should be respected by not being urinated upon. Gee, it seems to me that that much, much larger crime is to have snuffed out the individual whose sovereign nation you have invaded in the first place. I mean, about the last thing that a corpse has to worry about is being urinated upon.

What Goldenshowergate has to teach us is not that our stormtroopers shouldn’t piss on the dead (although, of course, they should not). What the scandal emphasizes (as did the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) is that we have no fucking reason to remain in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, in the first fucking place.

It’s bullshit that — as happened with Abu Ghraib — we solely blame the young men (and sometimes young women) in the U.S. military whose juvenile actions further tarnish the international reputation of our nation, but that we allow the treasonous war profiteers who put these young people in places they never should have been put in the first place to get away scot-free.

And nor should we let off the hook the enablers of the treasonous war profiteers, which would include, of course, President Barack Obama, whose hands, despite his relentless promises of “hope” and “change,” are covered in the blood of scores of innocent people of the Middle East.

P.S. The Associated Press surreally notes: “A presidential statement described the act as ‘completely inhumane’ and called on the U.S. military to punish the Marines.”

Again: Apparently, according to the Bushbama administration, it’s perfectly OK to slaughter someone, but to then urinate on his or her body is “completely inhumane.”

And again, the White House wants peons punished while those who actually are responsible for our bogus, illegal, immoral wars in the first place go unpunished and unscathed — indeed, they keep laughing all the way to the bank with billions and billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars.

P.P.S. My bad: The AP story that I linked to in my “P.S.” above very apparently was reporting on a statement made by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, not on a statement made by Obama. (What a disingenuous statement by the treasonous Karzai, however, who sold his nation out to its Western occupiers and overlords long ago.)

However, the fact remains that the so-called outrage that we’re seeing in the U.S. over the incident isn’t about the fact that our stormtroopers are slaughtering people, but that they urinated on their kill. And hell, even that probably isn’t what bothers most Americans — what bothers most Americans, probably, is only that the highly unflattering video was leaked…

And indeed, while we can expect the peons (um, should we say “pee-ons”?) of the Marines to be punished for the video, those responsible for the fact that the Marines were there to pee on slaughtered people will get off scot-free, no doubt, and President Bushbama still is the world’s war criminal in chief.

P.P.P.S. The video can be seen here. In the video I can see only two of the Marines, the one at the far left and the one who is second from right, apparently actually urinating, and I believe that it is the one on the far left who quips in a high voice, “Have a great day, buddy!” The other two Marines seem to have shy kidney or are just pretending to pee. One of them, toward the end of the clip, makes reference to a “golden shower,” ha ha ha ha ha.

Pissing on other dudes — Jesus, are all of our Marines a bunch of closet cases, even though they can be out of the closet now?

‘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.

—

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.

Sprinting toward another American revolution

Oh people, look around you;
The signs are everywhere.
You’ve left it for somebody other than you
To be the one to care.
You’re lost inside your houses;
There’s no time to find you now.
Your walls are burning and your towers are turning;
I’m going to leave you here and try to get down to the sea somehow….

Those are the opening lyrics of the oldie “Rock Me on the Water.” Written by Jackson Browne in the early 1970s, those words seem especially appropriate for today.

Today we learned that the highest number of U.S. troops — 31 of them — that have died in one day in Afghanistan in the past decade have died after “insurgents” shot down their helicopter. (If we were defending our own home territory from foreign military occupation, we would be “freedom fighters” or the like, but anyone who resists American military occupation is an “insurgent” or a “terrorist” or the like.)

Of course, we Americans only care about American deaths. We don’t care about the many, many, many more “insurgents” and “terrorists” whom our own stormtroopers — er, troops — have slaughtered in the Middle East over the past decade, since the “other” is not fully human. (Yes, you have to dehumanize a human being first before you can not give a flying fucking shit about his or her slaughter. That’s how evil works.)

President Hopey-Changey Obama — who had promised to get us out of Afghanistan — issued the exact same kind of response to the needless death of 31 American troops in Afghanistan that George W. Bush would have. Reports The Associated Press:

President Barack Obama mourned the deaths of the American troops, saying in a statement that the crash serves as a reminder of the “extraordinary sacrifices” being made by the U.S. military and its families. He said he also mourned “the Afghans who died alongside our troops.”

Really? If he truly cared that much, then why the fuck hasn’t he honored his campaign promise to get us the fuck out of Afghanistan?

His response, though, is yet another example of why I say that our nation is ruled by the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — that the significant difference between the two is difficult to distinguish.

See, it’s not about the fact that our “leaders” are corrupt and inept, that they still have us mired in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, where billions and billions of our tax dollars are being funneled to war profiteers while here at home, our credit rating just got downgraded for the first time in our nation’s history.

We sure the fuck could use our own fucking money here at home right about now, but the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex would rather to continue to steal our nation’s wealth — our wealth — via their bogus “defense” operations. Their personal financial situations are just fine — as is President Hopey-Changey’s personal financial situation, and the personal financial situations of the members of Congress who absofuckinglutely refuse to do what’s best for the highest number of Americans (which can only be defined as treason) —  so fuck the rest of the millions and millions of the rest of us Americans.

But no, see, it’s all about the “extraordinary sacrifices” made by our troops.

How about our fucking so-called leaders make some extraordinary sacrifices? No, they would rather leave the extraordinary sacrifices to our young men and women who are too naive about the ways of the world to know that the last just war that the U.S. military fought was World War II, for fuck’s sake, and that as members of the U.S. military they are not protecting “freedom” and “liberty” and “democracy” and puppies and kittens or doing anything nearly as noble as all that, but that they are only cannon fodder for the treasonous, uber-greedy war profiteers and the corporateers who want to loot the U.S. treasury via “defense” spending and want to steal other nations’ natural resources and profit obscenely from them, which is made possible only after U.S. military invasions and occupations.

And those young men and women in the U.S. military who do know that war is a racket find themselves at a loss for any other employment than with the U.S. military. They are fairly socioeconomically trapped where they are.

But if you criticize the plutocrats’ wars, then you are accused of attacking our troops — even though it’s the plutocrats who treasonously are sending our troops off to die and to be maimed in wars that benefit only the plutocrats. (If our wars in the Middle East of the past decade were meant to benefit all Americans, then why, oh why, are most Americans in dire economic straits? That’s because the spoils of war never trickle down. Only piss trickles down.)

No, I am not attacking our troops, who are just pawns, who also are victims of the treasonous plutocrats, victims just like the thousands and thousands of innocent civilians whom they slaughter in the Middle East. I am attacking the treasonous plutocrats who are destroying our nation whose heads belong on pikes.

And yes, President Hopey-Changey is among the treasonous plutocrats. He promised us that he would use the power of the office of the president of the United States of America to raise all boats, but all that he is done is to help the plutocrats buy bigger and bigger yachts.

As George W. Bush once put it, you are for us or you are against us. You are for us working-class, middle-class and poor Americans, or you are for the plutocrats — and against us.

Oh, we are long overdue for a violent revolution here at home.

A nonviolent revolution will not cut it. Violence is the only language that the plutocratic traitors who are driving our nation into the ground understand.

A violent American revolution is coming, regardless of what you or I have to say about.