It’s (probably) Billary’s if she wants it

Associated Press photo

Recent polls put Billary Clinton (photographed above with Vice President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., in April) at 50 (yes, fifty) or more percentage points ahead of Biden for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and show her beating her toughest potential Repugnican Tea Party challenger, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, an average of 6 percentage points in the November 2016 presidential election. If Billary runs for president in 2016, she most likely will be our nation’s first female president, so it’s too fucking bad that her record indicates that as president she’d be little to no more progressive than the dismally disappointing Barack Obama has been…

Admittedly, I have wondered if Billary Clinton would have been a better president that President Hopey Changey has turned out to be. In 2017 and the following years, most likely, we’ll find out.

Smug individuals point out that Barack Obama for 2008 campaigned as a moderate and that thus the way that his presidency has unfolded could have come as a surprise to no one. My response to that, in a word, is: bullshit.

It’s true that Obama did not campaign as a radical. Crucial to his 2008 victory, I think, was the fact that he didn’t come off as “threatening” to too many white voters, as though once in the Oval Office he’d orchestrate the violent overthrow of the white ruling class by blacks, a revolution that many whiteys, at least in the back of their minds, still fear even today (they’re still talking about the New Black Panthers non-scandal, for fuck’s sake), a revolution that never could be successful any year soon, given the fact that the 2010 U.S. Census put whites at 72.4 percent of the American population and blacks at only 12.6 percent (not to mention the giant gap in wealth and power between white Americans and black Americans as groups).

It’s true that in his first presidential campaign Obama’s mantra was so-called “bipartisanship,” and that his stated goal was that he basically wanted to induce all of us to hold hands around the national campfire and sing rounds of “Kumbaya” until we all dropped of exhaustion.

It’s true that I cringed when Obama repeatedly publicly evoked the name of Ronald Fucking Reagan as A Model President, as though a Repugnican president would publicly praise Bill Clinton or even Jimmy Carter. (The last Democratic president that any of the Repugnican Party set have viewed as remotely OK to praise publicly is John F. Kennedy, probably because he’s dead and because the way that he died made him a bit of a martyr.)

But Obama in his first campaign for the White House also promised “hope” and “change” — ubiquitously and relentlessly — and promised to turn the nation around, promised to undo the damage of the eight long years of the unelected Bush regime.

The word “change” means something, and it does not mean “status quo.” Obama had talked and written about the “audacity of hope.” We were to bravely dare to hope. Just like he claimed he did.

And while Obama never promised to be a left-wing radical, we progressives understood that, politically, he probably couldn’t afford to do so, not if he wanted to actually win the White House, but while Obama was campaigning at least as a progressive lite, Billary Clinton, as her quest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination became more and more desperate, acted as though she weren’t a limousine liberal.

After Obama had taken some heat for having stated during a private fundraiser in San Francisco (!) in April 2008 that some Americans “cling” to their “guns or religion” (which is, um, true*) — audio of which was leaked to the public (probably by the Clintonistas) — the desperate Billary saw an opportunity and so she took some shots: an actual shot of whiskey to show what a bad-ass redneck she actually is, and a shot at Obama, calling him “elitist and out of touch” and remarking, “I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America.”

Jesus fuck, I thought at the time (and still think). Which party’s presidential nomination is it that she wants?

Seriously: Billary was using the same rhetoric that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors were using against her own party. (Well, OK, this was in 2008, before the rise and fall of the so-called “tea party,” but still…) Billary painted Obama as an “out-of-touch” “elitist,” as though she weren’t a carpetbagging Beltway hack herself, and as though the state she had dragged her carpetbag to, New York, were a red state (indeed, New York is bluer than is Obama’s Illinois).

Given Billary’s mad dash to the right as she became more and more desperate in her losing quest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, given her vote for the unelected Bush regime’s obviously bogus Vietraq War in October 2002, and given her husband’s destruction of the Democratic Party through the now-thank-Goddess-defunct “Democratic Leadership Council,” which dragged the party to the right to the point that the Democratic Party and the Repugnican Tea Party now pretty much are the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — two plutocrat-and-corporation-loving parties that, like Coke and Pepsi, are hard for many if not most of us to differentiate — Barack Obama to me was the obvious choice in 2008.

But now, five years later, admittedly, I have to wonder if Billary would have been a better president than Obama has been.

It wouldn’t have taken much for Billary to have done a better job as president than Obama has, given that as president Obama has done little, that he squandered his best opportunity to push through an actually progressive agenda (which was in 2009 and 2010), that instead of tackling the nation’s in-its-death-throes economy head on, he spent all of his initial political capital on “Obamacare” (I have to wonder if he had wanted to accomplish what Billary had tried but failed to accomplish when she was first lady — to reform health care), and that because Obama squandered his initial wealth of political capital, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors regained the House of Representatives in late 2010 and probably will retain it after the November 2014 election, thus ensuring that Obama will have no legacy other than the dubious “legacy” of “Obamacare.”

Would Billary Clinton as president have spectacularly squandered the political opportunity of 2009 and 2010 like Obama, with both houses of Congress controlled by his own party, did?

Sure, you might say, she would have tried again with health-care reform, and perhaps she would have, but at the same time, her husband’s mantra for his 1992 presidential run was the James-Carville-credited “It’s the economy, stupid!”

My guess — and, admittedly, it’s just a guess, just a hunch — is that as president, Billary would have worked to fix the economy first, and then focused on health-care reform later (if she ever took it up at all).

Consequently, my further guess is that had Billary been elected as president in 2008, the Democrats would have kept the House of Representatives after the November 2010 elections, allowing Billary to continue pushing for an actually progressive agenda beyond her first two years in office.

Barack Obama has been such a fucking failure and such a dismal disappointment, and already is a lame duck so early into his second term that already the 2016 presidential speculation has heated up; all of us already are looking to what comes after him, knowing that the rest of his second term will be, at best, a wash.

I mean, Billary Clinton is getting her own fucking miniseries on NBC, for fuck’s sake.

Yes, today.com reports:

Betting on Hillary Clinton’s second candidacy for president, NBC has ordered a four-hour miniseries based on the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state’s life.

“Hillary,” starring Diane Lane [as Billary], will recount Clinton’s life from 1998 to the present and will be written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Courtney Hunt (“Frozen River”). NBC chairman Bob Greenblatt announced the miniseries [yesterday] at the Television Critics Association summer press tour.

“I think she’s one of the most fascinating women of our time and this world,” Greenblatt [said]. “And on the precipice of what we all assume will be her running for president, we think it’s an interesting story to tell with classy producers and a great star.”

The script, which has not been written, will begin with Clinton living in the White House during her husband’s second term and will likely include her second run at becoming the nation’s first female president. It is not based on a book and Clinton is not involved with the project, Greenblatt said. Lane was already attached to the mini-series when NBC bought it, Greenblatt said. …

The miniseries would likely air before Clinton would announce her candidacy if she decides to pursue the nation’s highest office. …

Since Bill Clinton was impeached by the Repugnican-controlled House of Representatives over the (literally…) messy Monica Lewinsky scandal in December 1998 (and was acquitted in February 1999 by the Repugnican-controlled Senate, which could not muster the 67 votes necessary to remove a president from office), presumably the miniseries will begin with the bullshit, uber-partisan Lewinsky affair, but I expect the miniseries to get it over with fairly quickly.

Anyway, I get it that the NBC bigwig is shilling the show, but how, exactly, is Billary Clinton “one of the most fascinating women of our time and this world”?

What, exactly, has this whiskey-guzzling, supposedly “elitist”-hating, carpetbagging, Vietraq-War-rubber-stamping woman accomplished? Does not pretty much everything that she has “accomplished” stem from the fact that she has been married to William Jefferson Clinton?

Would the voters of New York have elected her as their U.S. senator in 2000 had she not first been first lady? Or, like almost anyone else would have been, would she have been rejected by New York’s voters as the shameless carpetbagger that she was?

How is gaining success via your spouse “fascinating”? Or inspiring? And what, exactly, does it do for feminism?

I’m more than ready for our First Female President, but I can’t say that I’m ready for President Billary Clinton.

I’m much more impressed by a woman who made it without having ridden her husband’s coattails. How about my own Sen. Barbara Boxer for president?

I have much more respect for her than I do for Billary. Not only did Boxer have the brains and the balls to vote against the Vietraq War in October 2002, but in January 2005 she had the balls to be the only U.S. senator to stand with U.S. representatives in their objection to the certification of Ohio’s Electoral College votes in light of the serious problems at Ohio’s polls. (Like Florida was crucial to George W. Bush’s “win” in 2000, Ohio was crucial to Bush’s “re”-election in 2004, and like Florida’s chief elections officer in 2000 [Katherine Harris] was openly supporting Bush’s campaign [no conflict of interest there!], so was Ohio’s chief elections officer in 2004 [Kenneth Blackwell].)

Boxer also in early 2005 famously took on then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza “You Know She’s Lying When Her Lips Are Moving” Rice during a hearing in D.C., stating, “I personally believe – this is my personal view – that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell the war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth.” Hell yeah!

When did Billary Clinton ever do anything as courageous as these things?

Much like Barack Obama used to be, Billary to a large degree still is a political rock star, even though, like Obama, she has accomplished little to nothing in D.C. and thus doesn’t deserve the status.

But, just like in a high-school student-council election, it’s popularity, not accomplishment, that gets you into the White House. (Well, unless you’re George W. Bush; when, like Gee Dubya, you don’t have enough popularity, you have swing states’ chief elections officials who are of your party and the right-wing members of the U.S. Supreme Court and your governor brother help you out…)

And while Billary Clinton has little to no actual accomplishment, she does have popularity aplenty.

Billary shows a whopping 50 (yes, a five-oh)-point lead above Vice President Joe Biden in recent polls of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate preference. Biden consistently comes in at second place in only the low double digits. Yes, Billary consistently is hitting more than 60 percent in these polls.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, on the hand, have no clear front runner for the White House for 2016, with not one member of the possible field of Chris Christie, Pretty Boy Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Prick Perry, Prick Santorum and yes, Jeb Bush, able to reach even 20 percent in recent partisan 2016 presidential-preference polls.

And in recent hypothetical matches against Repugnican Tea Party traitors for the 2016 presidential election, Billary handily beats them all. She beats even her thus-far most formidable opponent, Chris Christie, by an average of 6 points. (Recent polls, by contrast, have Biden losing not only to Christie but even to the likes of Jeb Bush…)

In a Bloomberg poll taken not too terribly long ago (May 31-June 3), 40 percent of those polled said they “probably” or “definitely” would vote for Billary if she were the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, while only 34 percent said they “definitely” would not vote for her. Twenty-three percent said they “might” vote for her and 3 percent said that they were “unsure,” so if you give her the support of only half of those individuals (which is 13 percent), that’s 53 percent before she’s even declared her candidacy.

Fifty-three percent is not bad. (And it’s what Obama got in 2008 — 52.9 percent of the popular vote.)

So, while I never have been and never will be enthusiastic about Billary Clinton, whom I consider to be just another Democrat in name only, just another Repugnican Lite, the numbers very apparently are behind her.

Add to this the probability that Billary’s mere official announcement of her candidacy probably would effectively or perhaps even literally, totally clear the Democratic field, saving her a primary fight and thus allowing her to focus her time, energy and money on the November 2016 election, while we’ll probably see another crowded Repugnican Tea Party primary field, as we did in 2012.

Not only will these Repugnican Tea Party candidates have to focus on the presidential primary elections (and caucuses) and the presidential general election, but if they have a particularly nasty primary season, the eventual winner could come out of the process fairly bruised, battered and tarnished.

And my guess is that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ “Benghazigate” bullshit** has been helping Billary more than it has been hurting her, in that those (34 percent or so) who already solidly hate her already solidly hate her, and in that if the Repugnican Tea Party traitors attack Billary viciously and frequently enough, they could induce even unenthusiastic-about-Billary people like me to support her.***

And that’s a feat that only morons of the magnitude of those who comprise the Repugnican Tea Party could accomplish.

—

*The fuller quote is:

“… You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are [going to] regenerate, and they have not.

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. …”

Again, there is a word for these remarks: the truth.

Indeed, the “tea party’s” best accomplishment is blaming the wrong people for the nation’s problems (feminists, immigrants, non-heterosexuals, progressives [a.k.a. “socialists” or “Commies”], labor unionists [also a.k.a. “socialists” or “Commies”], Muslims, et. al.) while those who actually are responsible for the nation’s problems (the plutocrats, corporatocrats [Wall Street weasels and many, many others] and militarists, mostly) get off scot-fucking-free.

**Statistician god Nate Silver, who I hope writes about the 2016 presidential election despite the fact that he soon is leaving the New York Times for ESPN, wrote this about “Benghazigate” and Billary’s popularity back on May 31:

… So, are Americans carefully parsing through the details of the Benghazi attack — and finding Mrs. Clinton more culpable than Mr. Obama?

Probably not. Instead, the decline in her ratings was likely just a matter of time — and if the Benghazi hearings had not triggered it, something else would have.

… It’s easy to be popular when nobody is criticizing you — and there was a long period, from the closing stages of the 2008 campaign through most of her tenure as secretary of state, when Republicans had little interest in attacking Mrs. Clinton directly. Now that Republicans have chosen to engage her again, her numbers are coming down. … This is what happens when a politician returns to being in the partisan fray after having drifted above it for some time.

But if Mrs. Clinton were to run for president in 2016, Republicans would undoubtedly have found any number of other ways to criticize her — from her policy proposals, to concerns about her age or health, to gaffes that she might make on the campaign trail, to controversies recycled from her tenure as secretary of state.

Mrs. Clinton, if she runs in 2016, is highly unlikely to win by the double-digit margins that some polls have given her over prospective Republican opponents. But the same would have been true regardless of Benghazi. The main circumstances in which a presidential candidate wins by double digits are when that candidate is an incumbent running in a time of exceptional economic growth, or when the other party’s incumbent is viewed as having performed terribly. Or, every now and then, the opposing candidate might be viewed as extreme or incompetent, and swing voters will feel as though they have no real choice. …

I expect Billary, if she runs for president in 2016 (and I put it at more than a 75-percent chance that she will), to do about as well as Obama did in 2008 and in 2012 (Obama in 2008 beat John McCainosaurus 52.9 percent to 45.7 percent and in 2012 beat Mittens Romney 51.1 percent to 47.2 percent).

In fact, again, Billary’s polling against the most-popular-thus-far potential 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate, Chris Christie, has her, on average, 6 percentage points ahead of him, and Obama’s average popular-vote victory over his Repugnican opponents in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections was 5.55 percent, which to me suggests that we’re seeing about a 6-percent gap between those Americans who prefer a Democratic president and those who prefer a Repugnican Tea Party president.

This to me appears to be a demographic (and not a situational) gap that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors cannot close, which would explain why they want to further rig our future elections, such as through even further voter suppression (especially in the name of preventing “voter fraud”) to the greatest extent that they humanly possibly can.

***That said, about the only way that I could see myself casting a vote for Billary for president in November 2016 would be if her Repugnican Tea Party opponent, whoever it is, actually were close to winning California and its huge chunk of electoral votes, which is quite unlikely, given that Billary beat even Barack Obama in California’s 2008 Democratic presidential primary election, 51.5 percent to 43.2 percent. She’s quite popular here in California.

However, were Billary’s campaign actually struggling nationally and her Repugnican Tea Party opponent actually within range of winning the White House in November 2016, I cannot, as I type this sentence, rule out holding my nose and giving her campaign some money…

As much as I’m not a fan of Billary, of course, when push comes to shove, I’d prefer her in the White House over any Repugnican Tea Party traitor.

Obama’s Round Two already shaping up to look just like Round One

Reuters photo

Then-U.S. Sens. Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel yuk it up in Amman, Jordan, in July 2008. Obama is expected to nominate the Repugnican former senator as his secretary of defense any day now, because “bipartisanship,” you see, means that a so-called Democrat does things that no Repugnican Tea Party traitor ever would do in kind.

 Let’s see:

“Democratic” President Barack Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated for his second term, and already he:

• Threw U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice under the bus when she came under attack from the white supremacists and patriarchs, who rather would see U.S. Sen. John Kerry in the position of U.S. secretary of state, since a white male Democrat is better than any other kind of Democrat
• Capitulated on the Bush-regime-era tax cuts for the rich, having promised over and over and over again to increase taxes on inviduals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000, but actually having agreed to increase taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and families earning more than $450,000  
• Is poised to sell us out on Social Security and/or Medicare in the deferred so-called “fiscal cliff” fight over the federal budget (after all, he and his family are set for life)
• 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)

Have I forgotten anything? And again, Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated yet for Round Two.

Your vote for Barack Obama on November 6 was significantly different from what Mittens Romney was offering how?

The most immediate next fight in D.C. apparently will be over Hagel, whose nomination might be announced as early as tomorrow, according to Reuters.

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.

Yes, I have a real problem with Hagel having referred to former U.S. Ambassador James Hormel in 1998 as “openly, aggressively gay” — we gay men should keep our sexuality strictly and entirely in the closet, just like straight men always do, you see (since when has equality been an American value?) — but I do like Hagel’s reportedly made comments about the “bloated” defense department budget (our national “defense” budget is bloated beyond belief, and mostly represents only the perpetual looting of the U.S. Treasury by treasonous war profiteers) and the insanely disproportionate amount of power and influence that the “Jewish lobby” (I call them the “Israel-first lobby,” because of course not every Jewish American is an Israel firster) has in D.C.

Admittedly, it is unusual for a Repugnican to attack the sacred cows of the military-industrial-corporate complex and the Israel-first lobby, even though both of those sacred cows are milking us dry. And Hagel, himself a veteran of the Vietnam War, also apparently wasn’t enough of a cheerleader for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War — which also is unusual for a Repugnican.

But are there no qualified Democrats whom Obama could nominate as defense secretary?

What’s Obama’s logic here? That as long as his nominee as defense secretary uses the Republican label, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the U.S. Senate will be OK with it?

“This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel,” Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham– who, along with Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. John McCainosaurus, was instrumental in Obama’s caving in on the nomination of Susan Rice — already has declared of Hagel’s nomination.

Not that the likes of wingnutty closet case and chickenhawk Lindsey Graham would approve of any of Obama’s nominees, but why the fuck can’t Obama at least respect those who voted for him by ceasing to kiss the ass of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, who never return the favor in the fucking slightest?

Oh, well.

As I watch Barack Obama for the next four years continue to sell out those who voted for him — and continue, just like Bill Clinton did, to make the Democratic Party more and more indistinguishable from the Repugnican Party (I lovingly think of the two corporation-loving and individual-hating parties as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) — at least I won’t feel nearly as punk’d this time as I did during Obama’s first term, because while I stupidly voted for Obama the first time, on November 6 I cast my vote for the Green Party candidate for president.

As George W. Bush once so wisely declared: Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again!

See you around, fools.

Perry is scary — and YES, he COULD win the White House

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Tea Party Texas Gov. Rick Perry leads thousands of “Christo”fascist zombies* in “prayer” in Houston yesterday. The widely wildly misunderestimated Perry is No. 2 in recent nationwide polls of Repugnican Tea Party traitors regarding whom they want to be the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate. In most of these polls Perry is only two or three percentage points behind long-time front-runner Mitt Romney.

Every time I hear some smug, “liberal,” baby-boomer “expert” — like Salon.com’s Joan Walsh or MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell — pontificate that Repugnican Tea Party Texas Gov. Rick Perry has zero chance of becoming the next president of the United States of America, I cringe.

While it is true that former Texas Gov. George W. Bush lost the popular vote in the presidential election of 2000 — and that he became “president” only through fraud** — it is chilling that an abject dumbfuck like Bush even came close enough to be able to steal the 2000 presidential election. It is even more chilling that Americans just allowed BushCheneyCorp to blatantly steal that election.

And do we really have good reason to believe that Americans wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, that Americans have learned their lesson, even after all that the unelected Bush regime put our nation through?

I suspect that because “liberal” elites like Walsh and O’Donnell can’t imagine themselves or anyone they know voting for Rick Perry for president, they believe that there’s no way in hell that Perry could muster enough votes even to be close enough to be able steal the 2012 presidential election like Bush did back in 2000.

Methinks that Walsh and O’Donnell and their ilk, to put it as Bush might put it, dangerously misunderestimate the stupidity of the American populace.

No doubt, a Perry presidency would be another disaster upon disasters, but to believe that this fact is blatantly obvious to a majority of Americans is a huge mistake.

Where to begin as to what a Perry presidency would look like?

Someone who claims, directly or indirectly, that he (or she) governs based upon how God instructs him (or her) to govern — well, I see precious little difference between someone like Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann (or George W. Bush) and an “Islamofascist” cleric where it comes to the claim that one has a hotline to God. The only difference I see is that one theofascist claims Islam and the other theofascist claims Christianity. (To be fair and balanced, plenty of Jews are into theofascism, too. Look at Israel.)

No one has a fucking hotline to God. (The fact that there is no fucking anthropomorphic God aside.) One who makes that claim is either mentally ill, delusionally believing that his or her own thoughts and impulses are God-given, or is a fucking liar, purposefully falsely claiming that he or she takes marching orders from God in order to be able to get what he or she wants. (Perry strikes me as belonging to the latter category.)

The past American decade — a lost decade, for sure, and this decade is shaping up to be another lost American decade — has been one of war and war profiteering in the Middle East, which has come in no small part because the United States of America is a “Christian” nation. With a majority of Americans calling themselves “Christians” — without even being familiar with Jesus’ actual words as printed in black and white in the New Testament, so that being a “Christian” in the U.S. is much more about identifying with a tribe or a team than it is about actually being a Christian, if we define a “Christian” as someone who knows and who at least tries to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ — the indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East has been A-OK with most Americans.

It long has been our “defense” spending that is killing us here at home, that has made us a debtor nation. So entrenched are the treasonous looters of the U.S. treasury who comprise the military-industrial complex, however, that when it’s said that we must slash the federal budget, slashing the bloated-beyond-belief “defense” budget rarely is mentioned. Instead, it is programs that actually help Americans here at home — instead of programs that slaughter Muslims and Arabs abroad for the war profiteering and the corporateering of the treasonous, plutocratic few — that are put on the chopping block. 

So — would a President Perry end the wars in the Middle East that have drained the United States of America of its lifeblood to benefit only the blood-sucking plutocratic parasites? If President Hopey-Changey hasn’t done so, we could expect another former Texas governor to do so?

Not fucking likely.

A President Perry would escalate our wars for the war profiteers and the corporateers and would escalate the deep decay here at home. As shitty as things are now, under a President Perry things would get much, much, much worse.

But would that stop Americans from putting Perry into the White House?

No. I don’t think so.

Americans are dipshits. They know so little about politics that when things aren’t to their liking, they just vote for the candidate from the other party.*** They weren’t happy with Gee Dubya’s second term, so in November 2008 they voted for Barack Obama. They aren’t happy with Obama’s first term, so yes, I can see them in November 2012 voting for Rick Perry (or for whomever the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate turns out to be).

In normal times — we haven’t had anything like normal times since the 1990s, so it’s hard even to remember what normal times are like — it is probably true that a radical right-winger like Perry couldn’t make it to the White House, but these aren’t normal times.

George W. Bush got into the White House the first time through fraud (made possible by widespread American apathy) and the second time through fear. The traitors who comprised BushCheneyCorp milked 9/11 for political gain for as long as they could (it probably wasn’t until August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, that BushCheneyCorp no longer could use 9/11 for political gain; by the time Hurricane Katrina hit, the unelected emperor was quite nude).

As our economic meltdown continues — in no small part because the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have done their best to keep the economy in meltdown, because they figure that that is the best way for them to recapture the White House and both houses of Congress — panicky voters are more likely than they otherwise would be to vote for an obvious fascist like Rick Perry.

It is true that Barack Obama didn’t create the nation’s economic mess. He inherited it from the BushCheneyCorp, which for eight long years of nightmarish, unelected rule, wrecked the nation just as Gee Dubya had wrecked the state of Texas before he stole the White House.

However, Obama has handled our nation’s economy shittily. Rather than having enacted left-wing economic policies that have lifted the nation out of an economic ditch before (think FDR), Obama instead has enacted only half-assed, weak-hearted, “bipartisan” measures or he has just given the Repugnican Tea Party traitors the items on their Ayn-Randian economic wish list, such as trillions in federal budget cuts (except for “defense,” of course) without any tax increases for the rich and the super-rich.

In the process, Obama has alienated his own base, something that George W. Bush, as incredibly stupid as he is, never would have done. Obama and his spokesweasels have referred to those of us on the left as “the professional left” and as “sanctimonious.” Obama repeatedly has claimed that he is emulating Ronald Reagan, one of the figures most hated by the left. I don’t remember George W. Bush ever claiming that he was emulating John F. Kennedy. What the fuck?

With Obama working overtime to lick the asses of the “swing voters,” to convince them that he’s not one of the left-wing crazies, but that he idolizes Ronald Fucking Reagan, why in the fuck should the “swing voters” vote for him, then? If Obama is a “Democrat” who is claiming to be a Repugnican Tea Partier, why in the hell shouldn’t the “swing voter” just go ahead and vote for the actual Repugnican Tea Party candidate?

No one respects Obama’s “bipartisanship.” They can only see him for what he is: an unprincipled political sellout who thinks that he’s so fucking smart that he can fool everyone into voting for him, regardless of where he or she sits on the political spectrum.

I surmise that if Obama would stick steadfastly to a side, he’d find a lot more respect — even from many (if not even most) of those who disagree with him. At least they could respect his conviction. No one respects a milquetoast sellout.

But Obama’s unfounded arrogance is infectious. He has plenty of Obamabots, like Joan Walsh and Lawrence O’Donnell, who apparently are in denial over Obama’s weakness, proclaiming that there’s no way that Obama can lose re-election.

Oh, but he can.

Let’s recap:

• Obama has lost his own base, the “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left” who, in addition to voting consistently, actually give money, time and energy to Democratic campaigns (as opposed to those who just call themselves “Democrats” and who maybe consistently vote for Dems)
• Obama, by diddling the “swing voters” so much, has basically told them that he’s so much like the Repugnican Tea Party traitors that they might as well vote for an actual Repugnican Tea Party traitor (as much as 20 percent of the electorate appear to be in the “swing voter” category)
• Probably at least 40 percent of the electorate is going to vote for the Repugnican Tea Party candidate, whoever it is, and would rather die than cast a vote for Barack Obama no matter what he says or does (true, most of these are just racists/white supremacists, but they probably comprise at least a good one-third of the electorate) 

Yet, given all of this, Obama’s re-election is assured?

Yeah, I don’t fucking see it.

And neither, I assure you, does this guy:

Associated Press photo

—

*Photographic evidence for my use of the term “zombies”:

Associated Press photos

**Gee Dubya’s brother Jeb at the time was the governor of the pivotal state of Florida, which Gee Dubya “won”; Florida’s chief elections official, Katherine Harris, had sat on the state’s committee to elect Gee Dubya, in a blatant conflict of interest; and the Repugnican-stacked U.S. Supreme Court decided to just crown Gee Dubya as president, regardless of the American voters’ intent.

***In the voters’ defense, self-interested sellout assholes like Barack Obama don’t exactly help them to see any fucking difference between the Democratic Party and the Repugnican Tea Party, which I have come to think of as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party.

Obama sells us farther down the river

Reuters photo

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

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

Which side is Barack Obama on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the AP,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God save us if Obama finishes what he started.

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

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

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

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

Howard Dean in 2012

Associated Press photo

“[President] Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake,” notes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Um, “almost”?

The buzz within the left-leaning blogosphere and elsewhere on the ’Net  is that the left is done with Barack Obama. Obama’s latest broken campaign promise — that he would not allow the unelected Bush regime’s tax cuts for the wealthy to continue — seems to be the final nail in Obama’s political coffin.

Fuck the left, I hear the chorus of Clintonistas sing, but without the left, what support does Obama have?

The Repugnican Tea Party dipshits always hated Obama and always will hate him because he’s not a wingnutty white man. (Was Obama’s talk of “bipartisanship,” which is imfuckingpossible with the fucking incorrigibly untrustworthy Repugnicans, naivete or political bullshit?)

Now that Obama has lost the left, whom does Obama have? The notoriously fickle “swing voters”? They’re not nearly enough for a presidential candidate to win an election.

Obama is sitting in the Oval Office right now because of the “swing voters” and because he bamboozled enough of us on the left. Without the left, he’s nothing.

I know, I know, I’ve heard the mantra before: Obama never promised the left a rose garden.

Except that he did.

He promised “hope.” He promised “change.”

Clintonesque centrism is not “hope” or “change.” It is more of the same.

Barack Obama has fucked over, repeatedly, those of us on the left. And we’re done with him.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is no rabid revolutionary, but even he this past week wrote:

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

So what are Democrats to do? The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they’ll have to strike out on their own. In particular, Democrats in Congress still have the ability to put their opponents on the spot…

It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs.

Yikes. And yup!

Perhaps Obama’s biggest sin is that he punked millions of young voters who now, because of his betrayals, on one issue after another, might be turned off from progressive political activism for a long time — or even for a lifetime.

Or maybe, just maybe, Obama’s failure to be a Democratic president will spur a progressive backlash.

Maybe, as Krugman seems to indicate must happen, the left will flow around Obama the Obstacle in Chief. Maybe Team Obama will discover that the left is bigger than Barack, that when Team Obama says, “No, we can’t,” the left will reply with a resounding, “Yes, we fucking can! And we will! With or without you!”

In any event, I hope that Obama, who has demonstrated amply that he doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing, will make one wise presidential decision: not to run for re-election.

If obstructionist Obama does not step aside, I hope that he is challenged in the 2012 Democratic presidential primary, as Jimmy Carter was challenged in the 1980 presidential primary.

While I didn’t think (and still don’t think) that 2004 was the year for Howard Dean, I think that 2012 has Dean’s name written all over it. He would have my support in 2012.

In 2008 Barack Obama simply rode the wave that Howard Dean created in the 2004 presidential election campaign — and he has squandered it.

2012 is the year for Howard Dean to reap the benefits of what he began in 2004, and we can relegate the one-term Barack Obama to the sorry footnotes of U.S. history.

Dems finally have some (‘ping-pong’) balls? And Howard Dean for 2012?

Yahoo! News reports today:

Now that the House and Senate have both passed separate health care reform bills, the legislative process shifts to ironing out the differences. This typically involves having a formal conference committee containing members of both the House and the Senate. The goal is to reconcile the two bills, creating a final bill that both chambers will vote on.

In a surprise turn, according to Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic, Democrats intend to employ an obscure tactic, informally known as “ping-pong,” to shut Republicans out of the final negotiations and speed the bills toward completion.

In “ping-pong” the legislation is bounced back and forth between the House and the Senate, controlled by just the Democratic leadership in each chamber and the White House, until a final agreement can be reached.

A game of “ping-pong” sounds great to me. Under the eight long nightmarish years of the unelected Bush regime, the majority Repugnicans in the House and Senate routinely shut the minority Democrats out of the legislative process.

Fuck the Repugnicans, and if the Democrats give the Repugnicans a nasty taste of their own medicine, then hallefuckinglujah!

In November 2008, a majority of Americans voted for Barack Obama and his promise of change; they didn’t vote for Repugnican obstructionism and the Repugnican agenda of putting the plutocrats’ agenda ahead of the American people’s agenda.

Fuck “bipartisanship.” The Democrats should go full steam ahead while they can.

—

I’m happy to see some buzz about former Democratic presidential candidate and former Democratic Party head Howard Dean maybe seeking the 2016 — or even the 2012 — Democratic presidential nomination.

Although yeah, it’s unlikely that Dean would challenge Obama for his second term, what poetic justice that would be if Dean did so — if between now and then Obama doesn’t deliver upon all of that hope and change that he promised us.

Thus far, it looks as though Obama punk’d us, that we’re no better off under him than we would have been under his rival Billary Clinton, and some competition from an actual (that is, progressive and populist) Democrat would do the smug, too-comfortable Obama some good.

If Obama doesn’t turn it around, he won’t get my vote in 2012 (I’m about 75 percent sure that he’ll run for re-election, by the way), and should he actually have a viable challenger in 2012 who is a real Democrat, I’ll throw my support to his challenger.

Memo to the ’Pugs: You fucking LOST

Associated Press photo

Someone needs to explain to the clearly addled John McCainosaurus that the asswipe is not co-fucking-president and needs to explain to the rest of the Repugnicans that in a democracy, losing the election means that you are out of fucking power.

You gotta hand it to the Repugnicans: Even when they are in the minority, even when the majority of the American people have soundly rejected Repugnicanism, the ’Pugs act as though they still have an impressive amount of political muscle to flex.

Reports Reuters:

WASHINGTON – Senator John McCain said [yesterday] that President Barack Obama should [have included] Republicans in his plans sooner if he really [wanted] their support after the bitter debate over the $787 billion economic stimulus bill.

McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, and other Republicans complained they had been left out of negotiations on the legislation by Democrats who hold majorities in both houses of Congress.

McCain said the bill was filled with non-emergency spending paid for with borrowed money that future generations will have to pay back.

“I think that the majority of people understand that this was generational theft,” McCain told Reuters.

[The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the unelected Bush regime’s wholly unnecessary, bogus Vietraq War would not qualify as “generational theft,” of course, because that was Repugnican spending of American taxpayers’ dollars, you see.]

The Arizona senator said many other issues coming up will require a bipartisan effort that he said has been lacking so far from Obama and the Democrats.

“I hope they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “I hope that they will reverse course, and sit down, negotiate from the beginning, so you’re in on the takeoff, so you can be in on the landing.”

McCain met Obama two weeks after the November 4 election and agreed that “Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington” to solve urgent challenges.

Obama initially hoped for an overwhelming majority for passage of the stimulus bill, but the debate quickly dissolved into the traditional argument in which Democrats backed a package more weighted to spending programs and Republicans advocated tax cuts.

Acknowledging scaled-down ambitions for the vote, Obama on Thursday said “I hope they act in a bipartisan fashion, but no matter how they act,” the legislation should help the economy.

The stimulus bill ultimately passed the House of Representatives with no Republican support. It was expected to garner the votes of three Republican moderates in the Senate [and it did].

“No one could view this as having a scintilla of bipartisanship,” said McCain, who has often annoyed his own Republican colleagues by working with the opposition party.

“The message of the election was, sit down and work together. They obviously are not doing that,” he said.

No, the message of the November 4 election was not “sit down and work together.”

The November 4 election was a repudiation of Repugnicanism. You don’t look to solutions from those who were in power for eight fucking years and who nearly destroyed the American empire in the process — any more than you go back to the first incompetent surgeon who botched your surgery in order to correct his botch job. But nice try, McCainosaurus.

When George W. Bush “won” “re”-election by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004, he and his henchpeople called it a fucking “mandate.”

A fucking “mandate.” They didn’t talk about power sharing or bipartisanship. Nooooo, they talked about their “mandate.” 

Miraculously, 50.7 percent of the popular vote was not what it actually was, a squeaker, but was a “mandate” in 2004, but Barack Obama’s 53 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 4, 2008 only can be called a call for bipartisanship and power sharing!

On Nov. 4, 2008, the American people put the Repugnicans out of power and the Repugnicans need to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. And it is the Democrats in Washington who need to tell them to do that, as the Repugnicans told the Democrats to do when the Repugnicans were in power for eight long disastrous years.

And if the Democrats in Washington won’t tell the Repugnicans to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down, then we, the people, who put the Democrats in power, need to do that job for them.