I will miss the perfectly imperfect epic series ‘Game of Thrones’

A still from HBO’s final episode of “Game of Thrones.”

This had to happen, and while the final season of “Game of Thrones” did unfurl too quickly, methinks that critics of the final season are more upset over the fact that the series is over than over anything else.

I believe that I have yet to post a word about the now-concluded long-running HBO series “Game of Thrones,” but I’ve been watching it for years now. I was a holdout for the first four seasons, but then, because of all of the buzz, I caught those seasons on DVD, and then started watching each subsequent season as it aired (via HBO streaming).

I’m not sure why so many fans say they hate season eight.

Yes, the eighth and final season does have a pacing problem. That is, the first several seasons unfold gradually and leisurely, perhaps even too slowly for some, but they solidly establish the characters and fairly carefully chronicle the events.

Things start to pick up the pace in season seven, and then season eight, it’s true, could give you whiplash. Season eight is a bit of (OK, maybe a lot of) Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!

I would love more of it to have been fleshed out, such as Dany’s (Daenerys Targaryen’s) turn to the dark side. There were signs of that possibility pretty much all along, but in season eight, she careens toward the dark side to the point that almost overnight she essentially resembles a medieval she-Hitler.

And, of course, there are logical inconsistencies in season eight. The second felled dragon is shot down by Team Lannister with ease, not with one ginormous arrow, or two, but (if memory serves) with three, yet the third and last surviving dragon, Dany’s favorite, Drogon, apparently can’t be shot down when Dany makes her assault on King’s Landing, and this isn’t explained.

And when Drogon climactically melts the Iron Throne in a fit of sorrow and rage in the final episode, it’s as though Drogon knows that it was her quest for this throne that ultimately killed his “mother” Dany. Have we really anthropomorphized a giant reptile? (True, once we accept the existence of fire-breathing dragons, then we can’t be too picky with logic, but still…)

On another note, I don’t know that illegitimate Queen Cersei Lannister’s death (in episode seven of season eight) is satisfying enough — it seems undeservedly quick for her, given all of the pain and suffering that she has caused others — but the fate of the other characters by the end of season eight seem more or less logical and fair.

I’m fine with Dany’s death. The way that she was going, she had to be eliminated, and she was so deluded that it’s not too inconsistent with her character that she apparently didn’t think that Jon Snow might skewer her. (On that note, it’s interesting that even raging fire couldn’t harm Dany, but a rather simple dagger could…)

Yes, Jon got screwed out of his monarchical birthright (and exiled [although exile seems to suit him]), but because the whole concept of monarchical birthright is eliminated by the (surviving…) heads of the houses of Westeros by the end of the final episode of the show, that takes at least some of the sting out of Snow’s screwing. (And we can acknowledge that “the wheel” finally has been “broken,” albeit not at all in the way that Dany had envisioned it would be.)

It had occurred to me that Bran Stark (the too-repeated moniker “Bran the Broken” makes me cringe; have the disability-rights folks said anything about this?) might end up as the king, and I’m fine with that choice, perhaps especially because that choice was made, more or less, democratically. (That is, it was made by the heads of the houses, not by the common people, which Sam Tarly suggests should be the case but then is promptly ridiculed by his aristocratic peers, even our heroine Sansa Stark.)

I only wish that Bran had been more developed before he was named king. He was fairly developed for several seasons (as much as you can develop a mystic with magical powers, anyway), but then he just faded into the background, and in season eight he returns, but he’s pretty much all cipher, which can wear on the nerves.

The problems with seasons seven and eight — mostly, their fast, let’s-get-this-over-with-and-wrapped-up-already pace — apparently stem from the fact that the showrunners probably should have waited until “Game of Thrones” creator George R. R. Martin had finished all of his books before they began the television series at all.

I mean, Martin doesn’t appear to me to be the picture of great health; all along there has been no guarantee that he’d even live to finish writing and releasing the full series of books, so, it seems to me, starting the television series before the book series was finished was quite risky.

But for all of its flaws, big and nitpicky, what a ride “Game of Thrones” has been! I don’t think that there has been anything on television before it, and I don’t think that we’re likely to see its equal anytime soon. (And spin-offs usually don’t equal their original material, do they?)

“Thrones” not only was a television show, but it became intertwined with American culture. (In my personal vernacular I even use “Game of Thrones” as a verb, meaning to work behind the scenes to try to influence an outcome, usually when you can’t operate in the open, for political reasons.)

An example of how “Thrones” intertwined with American culture is how the objectification and sexual mistreatment of women in the first few seasons was roundly criticized, and in later seasons was curtailed. (Coincidence? I think not; over the years there definitely was a synergy between the show’s creators and the show’s audience.)

For another example, you know that had Jon Snow been made king after Dany had been offed (by Jon!), feminists would have screamed to high heaven. I mean, that would have been too soon after Billary Clinton didn’t become president, no? Why can’t a woman ever run the show? (And if she does run the show, why does she have to be evil, like Cersei, who got to where she did by lying and cheating [including murdering her rivals]?)

On that note (feminism), it seemed to me that both Brienne of Tarth and Arya Stark were displaying some lesbian* (or at least asexual) tendencies, so it disappointed me a bit that both of them ended up with heterosexual love interests, if even only briefly. Must everyone be heterosexual? (There are at least two other bona fide lesbians in the series, though, Yara Greyjoy and Ellaria Sand [OK, the later is bisexual, but still…].**)

It also seems to me that feminists might have been up in arms also had Sansa not been made queen of the North, newly made an independent kingdom, as it had been in the past. I was OK with that choice, but, sociopolitically (in real life), after Dany’s death, didn’t Sansa kind of have to get something? Feminists would have been outraged had she not.

And it was fitting, of course, for Arya to go off exploring at the end. Perhaps there will be a spin-off about her adventures. (In the final episode of the show, if memory serves, Tyrion Lannister pontificates that Bran’s journey is the most interesting of everyone’s, but Arya’s, I think, probably is the most interesting of them all.)

Finally, my favorite character of “Thrones,” I think, was Tyrion. Not only did actor Peter Dinklage do a great job with the character, a basically good guy from a really rotten family, but the character was well developed, even though the character was neglected in much of season eight (until toward the end of the season). And Tyrion has no magical powers or magical beasts at his disposal; indeed, he has had to overcome having been born an “imp” (again, activists, why haven’t I heard you on this?).

After Tyrion, I think, my favorites were sorceress Melisandre and “Master of Whisperers” Varys, who, like Tyrion, are string-pullers. All three of them make mistakes, but overall I find their behind-the-scenes intrigue to be more interesting than the in-your-face heroism and big acts of the likes of Jon Snow and Dany. (Again, though, Arya is interesting, too; she has some in-your-face heroism [she kills the Night King, after all!] and plenty of behind-the-scenes intrigue. [Ask Walder Frey.])

If Bran had been fleshed out a lot more, as I had hoped that he would be, I’d have liked him more, but his statement in the final episode indicating that he had known all along that he would be made king made him seem kind of like a dick. (It does, however, perhaps explain why the Night King specifically was after Bran.)

Alas, “Game of Thrones,” with all of its hits and misses, is over. Yes, as I hinted, there are to be spin-offs. No, season eight does not need to be re-done. I mean, yes, it could have been done better, but it won’t be re-done, so one’s energy is better spent elsewhere (perhaps as by trying to lose one’s virginity and/or moving out of Mom’s basement [Kidding! (Not really…)]).

“Thrones,” like its characters, is imperfect, but like so many of its characters, is unforgettable. It has been a grand achievement of art and culture, the likes of which we aren’t likely to see again for a long time.

While I was glad to have the fates of the ever-dwindling cast of characters*** finally determined, at the same time I’m sad to see the series end — as are, no doubt, even its most vocal critics.

—

*The Advocate had pegged Brienne and Arya as lesbians, too, so shut up.

**As a gay man I wasn’t thrilled that “Thrones'” two biggest gay male characters, Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell, are killed off, but in the end, it’s a television series… And sometimes when a member of a historically oppressed group is portrayed as being victimized, it draws attention to the fact that that group needs to stop being victimized in the real world.

***Shout-out to actor Jack Gleeson, whose Caligula-like villain Joffrey Baratheon (actually 100 percent a Lannister, of course) probably was the show’s most delightfully despicable.

Repugnicans’ war on women is also a war on justice, decency and democracy

So very apt.

I am not a blind feminist — I refused to support Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton for the presidency just because she’s a woman, for instance, and being called a “Bernie bro” by so-called “feminists” did not shame me into giving a penny or my vote to a Repugnican Lite female candidate, and, on that note, I oppose rank misandry posing as “feminism” — but I am a feminist in that I believe in equality for women, who continue to be held down by a patriarchal society.

And, of course, as a gay man I am intimately familiar with how our patriarchal society denigrates and oppresses anything and anyone considered to be feminine, and how it blindly obediently vaunts all things “masculine.”

The fight over the nomination of drunkard and sex criminal Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court is not just about the allegations of his sex crimes in and of themselves, of course, but is part of the ongoing “culture war” in which the right believes that right-wing, straight, “Christian” white men should continue to subjugate the rest of us with impunity.

So important is it to the right wing that stupid white men continue to rule that even Repugnican women (who universally are afflicted with Stockholm syndrome) are now said to be more fired up to vote in next month’s midterm elections than they were before the Kavanaugh fracas.

This is some sick and twisted shit, of course, but then again the Repugnicans are a fucking sick and twisted lot, a true basket of deplorables (I have to agree with Billary on that, although I find her plenty deplorable her-presidential-nomination-stealing-self).

That said, we must continue to fight against the fascists, which includes voting on November 6. They will vote for evil, as they always do; we must vote for good.

And we can take some solace in the fact that the Repugnicans must cheat in order to “win.”

The Repugnican presidential candidate won the popular vote only once since 1992 (Gee Dubya “won” “re”-election in 2004 by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote; he had lost the popular vote in 2000, and Pussygrabber also lost the popular vote in 2016).

The majority of the American people prefer a Democrat over a Repugnican, which is why the Repugnicans must do everything in their power to subvert democracy and throw elections their way, be it via widespread voter suppression or via such fascist bullshit as Bush v. Gore, in which the Repugnican-appointed “justices” of the Supreme Court, not the American people, picked the U.S. president in 2000.

And look how much the Repugnicans have had to cheat brazenly in order to shove Kavanaugh through. First, they had to pave the way by reducing the confirmation vote for a Supreme Court “justice” in the U.S. Senate from 60 votes to only 51 votes, which they did for Neil Gorsuch — after they had denied President Barack Obama the right to name a replacement for bloated piece of shit Antonin Scalia even though Obama had had almost a full year left of his presidency.

In addition to his white-male privilege, Kavanaugh has benefited not only from the anti-democratic Electoral College that gave us Pussygrabber and from the craven new simple-majority vote requirement for a Supreme Court “justice” in the U.S. Senate, but also from a fucking sham of an FBI “investigation” into his sex crimes, in which the “investigation” was done within only a few days and in which key individuals weren’t interviewed by the FBI at all.

Just as I never will consider George W. Bush nor Pussygrabber to have been legitimate U.S. presidents, I never will consider Gorsuch or Kavanaugh to be legitimate U.S. Supreme Court justices. Never.

How you got there fucking matters.

What we, the people, need to ensure now is that the Repugnican minority no longer can treasonously cheat its way into dominating us, the majority.

The fascist traitors “win” because thus far we have let them. Indeed, they always have counted on us to do so, because while they are shameless, violent and craven, we lean toward conscience, peace and decency.

We already have the majority; the only question is how much we’ll fight for it.

Best-case scenario: Dems win Senate, decide next high-court justice

APF/Getty Images photo

Two pussy grabbers in a pod: Brett Kavanaugh and “President” Pussygrabber shake hands after the “president” announced Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in July.

I never would predict that the Democrats will win the U.S. Senate back in November as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. (Fivethirtyeight.com right now, as I type this sentence, gives the Dems an 81.3 percent chance of winning back the House, but only a 32.6 percent chance of winning back the Senate.)

Still, after our ongoing long national nightmare, I can dream.

I believe U.S. Supreme Court “justice” nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, that back in the early 1980s, when he was 17 years old and she was 15 years old, he drunkenly sexually assaulted her (gee, can we add under-aged drinking to the sexual assault?).

We already have one known sex fiend on the nation’s high court; we don’t need another. (Nor, for that matter, do we need yet another right-wing white man; the court has not been representative and reflective of the U.S. population forever.)

Because of the statute of limitations, it’s too late to prosecute Kavanaugh, but in most cases 17 years old is old enough for an act to be indicative of one’s character, I believe, and because I believe Kavanaugh’s accuser, I believe that he is unfit to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, his radical-right-wing views aside.

Anyone who can’t understand why a victim of sexual assault would remain silent for years (Ford did recount the sexual assault to her therapist in 2012) probably hasn’t been the victim of a sexual assault. Especially if the perpetrator has power and status, of course a victim easily could choose to remain silent, expecting (often if not usually correctly) to be even further victimized if she or he were to report the incident.

The Anita Hill debacle didn’t happen until 1991; she was treated atrociously, including by perennial presidential wannabe Joe Biden (a DINO) and by soulless mercenary David Brock, who went on to work for/with DINO Billary Clinton (because, you know, she’s a feminist).

If it was that bad for Anita Hill in the early 1990s, how much better do you think that it was for Christine Blasey Ford in the early 1980s? Her perpetrator went to prep school and then to Yale. He had a future, you see; hers, on the other hand, was disposable.

So this is what I’m hoping — dreaming — will happen: Brett Kavanaugh will go down in flames, as he deserves. There won’t be enough time before the November mid-term elections for the treasonous Repugnicans to try to ram through the installation of another Nazi on the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple majority Senate vote instead of the historically required 60 votes (as they did with Neil Gorsuch, whose seat on the Supreme Court is stolen property).

Then, the Dems will take back the Senate in November, and one of two things will happen:

(1) They won’t allow “President” Pussygrabber to put another wingnut on the high court — they will stick to the simple-majority Senate vote requirement that the Repugnicans have felt was just fine for Gorsuch and now for Kavanaugh. (Let the Repugnican traitors have a taste of their own bitter medicine; their “nuclear-option” change in the Senate rules should remain in place.)

The best that Pussygrabber would be able to do in this scenario is to put a moderate on the bench, as Obama was willing to do (with the Senate controlled by the opposing political party) with Merrick Garland.

Or (2) if they really find their spines (which is not nearly as likely as is scenario No. 1), the Senate Democrats will simply do what the Repugnicans did during President Obama’s last year in office: simply refuse to put anyone new on the bench until after the next presidential election. (Yertle McConnell proclaimed that democracy demanded that!)

If the Repugnicans did nothing wrong by depriving Obama of the presidential right to name a U.S. Supreme Court justice in the last year of his presidency, then they will have nothing to bitch about.

I tell you what: If the Democrats actually recapture the Senate in November, a feat in and of itself given the electoral map, and then actually refuse to allow Pussygrabber to put another “justice” on the Supreme Court — finally showing that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander — I probably will switch my voter registration back from independent to Democrat.*

The Repugnican traitors shamelessly play hardball while the Democrats cluelessly try to sing “Kumbaya.” Until and unless the Democrats’ spines finally calcify, they don’t deserve our full support.

—

*I had changed from Green to Democrat to be able to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary, but after the anti-Bernie Democratic National Committee e-mails were released in July 2016, I changed to independent (“no party preference” here in California) out of rage and disgust.

The Democratic Party would have to impress the hell out of me for me to ever join it again.

Billarybots want Liz Warren to be a spoonful of sugar to sweeten the ordeal

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The call of many Billarybots for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to be Billary Clinton’s running mate at least is an admission of how weak a presidential candidate Billary is. But while such a team-up would benefit Billary, how would it benefit Warren and her future political career to be a probably-invisible vice president with probably little to no influence within the second center-right Clinton administration?

There is chatter among the Billarybots now that Queen Billary making Elizabeth Warren her running mate would be the spoonful of sugar that would help the rest of us choke down the bitter horse pill that is Billary.

Billary booster Michelle Goldberg of Slate.com, for instance (although she’s not nearly the Billary booster that Salon.com’s mega-Billarybot Amanda Marcotte is), recently wrote this (links are Goldberg’s):

On Thursday we learned, via Politico, that had Joe Biden run for president, he would have asked Elizabeth Warren to be his running mate. According to reporters Glenn Thrush and Annie Karni, Biden has “recently told associates that Warren would be an equally smart pick for Hillary Clinton.” The Huffington Post reported that several people in the Clinton campaign are also pushing for Warren.

They are right. Choosing Warren would be an uncharacteristically bold and thrilling move for the cautious Clinton, one that would help unite Sanders supporters behind her candidacy while throwing its feminist promise into high relief. Clinton is already playing the woman card; now, to belabor a metaphor, she should double down.

One of the many dispiriting things about this primary season is the degree to which Clinton’s baggage has dampened excitement over the prospect of our first female president. She’s been near the center of power for so long that her possible presidency seems less like a breakthrough than a wearying inevitability.

Further, in order to get close to power, she’s consistently subsumed idealism to realpolitik; her career is littered with grim compromises, from reluctantly backing welfare reform to voting to authorize war in Iraq. Thus some progressive women who enthusiastically support Clinton feel like they have to apologize for it.

Other progressive women who’d like to vote for a female president feel like they can’t enthusiastically support Clinton. Obama’s campaign created an incandescent sense that America was on the cusp of history. That magic is missing from Clinton’s long slog.

If you haven’t said it yourself, you’ve surely heard it: “Of course I want to see a woman in the White House, but…” Warren on the ticket would annihilate many of those “buts.” She would help to neutralize some of Clinton’s very real flaws; it would be harder to accuse Clinton of doing the bidding of big banks while running with Warren, the scourge of Wall Street.

Warren’s presence would give disappointed supporters of Bernie Sanders a reason to rally to the Democratic banner. And by Clinton’s side, she would make it blazingly clear what an epochal moment this is for American women. She’s a choice who could electrify both Clinton’s fiercest progressive critics and her most devoted acolytes.

Of course, an all-woman ticket carries real risk — that’s the flip side of its audacity. Already, Clinton is likely to face misogynist headwinds, and Warren would make them stronger. People sometimes claim that the deep, widespread antipathy to Clinton, particularly among men, is unique to her and has little to do with her gender.

Warren’s political career shows us that this is not the case. When she ran for Senate in Massachusetts four years ago, she was regularly disparaged as both a liar and a crone; the Boston Herald referred to her as “Granny.” We were constantly reminded that while people admired her competence, they weren’t sure they liked her. (One poll found that even Democrats found her opponent, Scott Brown, more likable.) Warren won thanks to a large gender gap: According to a CNN exit poll, Brown won 53 percent of the male vote, but Warren carried 59 percent of the female vote, and women were the majority of the electorate.

It’s possible, then, that Warren could exacerbate rather than ameliorate some people’s — particularly some men’s — resistance to Clinton. As T. A. Frank points out in Vanity Fair, social science research shows that when minorities team up to form a duo, they are judged in more stereotypical terms than they are individually. “If this is a reliable dynamic, then it means that Clinton is seen by voters first and foremost as a Democratic presidential candidate, and not simply a female,” Frank writes. “But if she were to pick Warren as a running mate, gender could start to color many people’s views much more.” …

[Clinton] is not going to win this race by persuading white men who are uncomfortable with women in power. She will do it by turning out the Obama coalition, probably adding more married white women to it. Warren can help her do that. She’s shown that she’s eager to, leaping into the Twitter fray against [Donald] Trump.

If a vice presidential candidate’s job is to attack, Warren is ready. Watching her go after the short-fingered orange chauvinist from now until November will be a pleasure. The fight for the first female president should be a joyful feminist crusade, one that progressives can join without reservation. Warren can make it one.

I agree with some of what Goldberg has to say, and it’s refreshing to witness a Billary supporter actually publicly acknowledging that Billary is not an exciting candidate. Billary’s being an uninspiring candidate — demonstrated by the fact that thus far democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has won 19 states and has won 1,437 pledged delegates to Billary’s 1,717 (45.6 percent to 54.4 percent, a gap of only 8.8 percent) — long has been the elephant in the donkeys’ room.

What is disappointing about Goldberg’s piece is that she apparently primarily attributes the lack of enthusiasm for Billary to the fact that Billary has been around so long (well, if Goldberg’s primary attribution isn’t actually supposed misogyny, that is; charges of misogyny are peppered, predictably, throughout her piece). But Billary Fatigue is only one piece of the puzzle.

Hell, I’ll even ignore the piece of the puzzle that I could label the “Clinton Scandal Fatigue” piece. A much larger piece of the puzzle than how long she has been around on the national stage is Billary’s long history of political opportunism and flip-flopping, such as how she publicly called herself “moderate and center” just back in September 2015, but now calls herself a “progressive” since she’s running against the actually progressive Bernie Sanders, who has done quite well for a “fringe” candidate.

(A more concrete example of Billary’s famous flip-flopping is her miraculous embrace of a $15-an-hour minimum wage only after both New York and California adopted a phased-in $15-an-hour state minimum wage when her current presidential campaign always has supported only a $12-an-hour federal minimum wage — and still does on its website.)

Billary’s being a multi-millionaire who certainly wouldn’t want to even try to try to try to live on $12 an hour herself and who demands hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech and her having been part, with her hubby, of the now-thank-Goddess-defunct Democratic Leadership Council, which turned the Democratic Party from the people’s party to the corporate weasels’ party, are other huge pieces of the puzzle as to why so many of us who lean left of center don’t like and don’t trust Billary.

Billary has said that Bernie isn’t a real Democrat when she really should look into the magical mirror that she surely possesses like a Disney villainess. (Actually, I’m sure that she has, and when she asked the mirror, “Who is the most Democratic of them all?” the mirror answered, “Bernie Sanders,” which no doubt sent her into a flying-on-her-broomstick rage.)

But the Billarybots don’t like to discuss these inconvenient truths.

Instead, they frame quite-legitimate opposition to Billary as misogyny, which apparently does a lot to relieve their cognitive dissonance that their “heroine” actually is just yet another self-serving political asshole, but which harms the cause of feminism because the so-called “feminists” defend abject slimebags like Billary Clinton, whose center-right socioeconomic politics harms women and families here at home and whose right-wing war hawkishness harms women and families abroad — yeah, that’s really feminist!

Indeed, the “lean-in” “feminism” of today is “feminism” that has become twisted into women demonstrating that they can be just as big as assholes as can men; they can be just as selfish and ruthless, just as financially and politically corrupt, and they can kill just as many innocent people in military actions in a show of “strength.” Woo hoo! “Feminism”!

Since liberalism became warped as “neo-liberalism,” which actually is just conservatism masked as something good, we can call today’s “feminism” “neo-feminism.”

And dragged into this stinking mess should not be Elizabeth Warren, whom I consider to be a true feminist, not a neo-feminist.

Sure, Warren could help Billary greatly in the likability and progressive credibility departments, but what would Warren and her future political career get out of it?

Most of us Berners — and again, thus far 45.6 percent of us who have participated in the Democratic Party presidential primary elections and caucuses have chosen Bernie over Billary — would be disappointed, I surmise, were he to become Billary’s running mate (something that I don’t see happening, as I really don’t see Billary asking him, and I rather doubt that he’d accept even if she actually did ask him).

Most of us Berners would, I surmise, view Bernie’s agreeing to Billary’s running mate as his selling out — big time — on his progressive principles and promises.

Why, then, would we feel much, if any, differently about progressive Elizabeth Warren joining Billary on the ballot?

Leave it to a neo-feminist to see it (a Billary-Warren ticket) as an issue of matching biological sex rather than of matching political philosophy; Warren should join Billary because they’re both women, you see.

And this also gets to how much power the vice president of the United States of America actually has, which is not much; the vice president pretty much sits back and either hopes or dreads that the president dies or otherwise no longer can serve in the capacity.

It gets to the public visibility of the vice president, too. We’ve seen little of Joe Biden over the past seven-plus years. He wonderfully wiped the floor with Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s limp body in the vice presidential debate of October 2012 and he vowed to take on cancer in his last year in office after his son died of brain cancer a year ago this month at age 46, but other than that, how much influence Biden has had on the Obama presidency has not been very clear. If he’s had significant influence on Obama, it’s been behind the scenes, for the very most part.

There is no reason to believe than any vice president to a President Billary would have the power to induce her to run a progressive presidential administration, given Billary’s center-right record, given how power-driven and stubborn she is (except, of course, when political expediency induces her to flip-flop, but of course, no matter what she says, she always acts within the center-right, and given how not even a year ago she proudly publicly proclaimed herself to be “moderate and center.”

Given all of that and the historical weakness and the historical invisibility of the vice president, no, for this Berner, Billary picking Liz Warren as her running mate would not “be a reason to rally to the Democratic banner,” as Goldberg conveniently and magically believes.

It’s not that simple, and we Berners are not that simple and stupid. That Team Billary would believe that adding Elizabeth Warren to the ticket would be the magic bullet only further demonstrates the contempt and the condescension that the Billarybots have for us Berners — who are progressives before we’re Berners and who reject Billary Clinton for very good reasons, paramount among them the fact that she’s not even an actual (that is, progressive) Democrat, but is a Repugnican in sheep’s clothing.

To be clear, I have no problem with two women, even two white women, on the ballot for president and vice president. One, I care primarily about a candidate’s politics; his or her demographics are secondary or tertiary or even further down than that on my list. And two: Fuck, the Obama administration marks the first time in our nation’s history that both the president and the vice president were not white men. (When I voted for Obama in November 2008, it felt good to be part of that history, even though Obama turned out to be only a Caretaker in Chief, the one thing that Sarah Palin actually has been right about: that he’s been President Hopey-Changey.)

If two white men on the presidential and vice presidential ticket were OK for more than 225 years of our nation’s history, then I’m fine with two women and even two white women on the ticket, even though the conventional wisdom as of late is that you mix up your demographics; in 2008 John McCainosaurus picked a woman as his running mate and Barack Obama picked a white man, for instance. (Mittens Romney for 2012 reverted to the historical pattern of two white men, of course; my guess is that his patriarchal and historically white supremacist Mormonism was the largest factor in that retrograde choice.)

In a nutshell, again, my primary problems with a Billary-Warren ticket are that Vice President Warren wouldn’t have nearly enough influence to ameliorate President Billary’s deep neo-liberal tendencies and that Warren would harm her reputation and credibility as a progressive by agreeing to be the center-right Billary’s running mate.

Better for Warren to run in 2020 or 2024 or 2028, methinks, at the top of the ticket, than to run with Billary now.

I’d be fine with Elizabeth Warren being Bernie Sanders’ running mate. (Well, probably more like “ecstatic” than just “fine.”) Their genitalia don’t match, but their political philosophies do. Not only would President Sanders allow Vice President Warren much more of a voice and visibility than the vice president ever gets (exempting grand puppet master Dick Cheney, of course), I surmise, but she’d be his natural successor.

Billary would just use Warren to get into the White House, and then, after that, do you really think that Queen Billary ever would allow Princess Warren even the opportunity to step on her regal cape? No, Billary would treat Warren like Cinderella; she’d keep her tucked away from public view as much as possible.

Unfortunately, we apparently are quite unlikely to see a Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren ticket, because the blind, self-serving Democratic Party hacks are poised to incredibly stupidly make Billary Clinton the party’s presidential nominee, even though presidential match-up polls show Bernie doing twice as better against Donald Trump as does Billary.

Real Clear Politics’ average of the presidential match-up polls right now has Billary at only 5.7 percent ahead of Trump, with Bernie 13 percent ahead of Trump. The Huffington Post’s average of presidential match-up polls right now similarly puts Bernie at 13.4 percent ahead of Trump and Billary at only 5.8 percent ahead of Trump.

If beating presumptive 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nominee Donald Trump in November is the goal, then Bernie Sanders has a compelling argument for the super-delegates to pick him over Billary during the party’s convention in late July.

Unfortunately, I fully expect the lemming-like super-delegates to follow Queen Billary right off of the cliff at the convention. She is, after all, the rodents’ Pied Piper.

And also after all, Queen Billary never really can lose. If nothing else, we always can ascribe her predictable loss in November entirely to “misogyny.”*

P.S. It’s worth nothing that Elizabeth Warren is the only Democratic woman in the U.S. Senate who hasn’t endorsed Billary Clinton. One writer argues that this is why Team Billary wouldn’t pick Warren, but I disagree; if Team Billary viewed Warren on the ticket as being beneficial enough, they’d ask her.

The real question is whether Warren, if asked, would say yes or no. Hopefully, she would have her wits about her, realize that Team Billary only wants to use her, and say no. Even Oh, hell no!

P.P.S. Jeff Greenfield, writing for Politico, points out that whoever would be President Billary’s vice president would be “the most marginalized vice president in a generation.” (Ditto for President Trump’s veep, he writes.)

“Neither Trump nor Clinton is likely to allow his or her vice president anywhere near the center of power,” Greenfield posits, adding:

… The challenge is different for a prospective Clinton running mate — and one that no past veep has ever faced. Yes, past vice presidents have found themselves in a battle for the ear of POTUS with key White House aides and Cabinet members.

But they’ve never had the challenge of competing with a presidential spouse who also happens to be a former two-term president.

Indeed, in many ways, Bill Clinton would be a near-perfect choice to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate. His political skills are unmatched; he knows the dangers that confront any White House as no one else possibly can; he’s even got a track record of working with an opposition Congress — something that neither of his successors can match.

Yes, there’s a pesky issue of whether the 22nd Amendment bars a two-term president from running for veep, and one of the Clintons would have to move back to Arkansas to avoid risking the loss of New York’s electors (constitutionally, electors can vote for only one of the two national candidates from their own state).

But the point is that Bill’s credentials — even as first spouse — make him a formidable power source that would confront any real-life vice president. …

The issue isn’t Billy Boy’s supposed greatness (and speculation of him being Billary’s veep is ridiculous, although he very well might end up as her de facto veep) as much as it is how much he would let Billary’s actual veep have any power. And that is not much.

Elizabeth Warren would want to stay far, far away from this fucked-up drama.

—

*A post-mortem “analysis” of a Billary loss in November also, of course, quite predictably would put blame on Bernie Sanders for having “weakened” Billary when she’s obviously inherently weak. The neo-feminists would continue to ignore Billary’s glaring weaknesses and blame “misogyny” instead.

And most of the neo-feminists’ attacks on Bernie Sanders and on us “Bernie bros” is, ironically, flat-out misandry — it’s just the flip-side of misogyny. How dare a man run against Queen Billary? How dare he criticize her at all, even though that’s what you do in a competitive political campaign? How dare any man — or especially any woman — support a male presidential candidate over the female candidate? (That was a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway: For pretty much the same reason that a man or a woman rejected Sarah Palin.)

With narrow Nevada win, Billary is one step closer to losing the White House

Las Vegas Sun/Associated Press and AFP photos

Billary Clinton celebrates her relatively narrow win in today’s caucuses in Nevada. (Of course Billy Boy is there, since she needs all of the help with likability that she can muster.) However, Bernie Sanders beats or at least ties all of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential contenders in match-up polling, whereas Billary in match-up polling loses to Ted Cruz and to Marco Rubio — and even to John Kasich. The lemming-like Billarybots fairly clearly have us all headed for a cliff.

Unfortunately, apparently Democrat in name only Billary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses today. With 82.7 percent reporting, Politico reports as I type this sentence, it’s 52.4 percent for Billary to 47.5 percent for Bernie — a difference of just under 5 percent.

The Billarybots can celebrate today, but Nevada demonstrates that about half of the Democratic Party and those of us who lean toward the party don’t want Billary as our standard-bearer in November.

And yes, the state of Nevada apparently is fairly representative of the nation as a whole. As Wikipedia notes of Nevada:

Nevada has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1912, except in 1976, when it voted for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter. This includes Nevada supporting Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and Democrat Barack Obama winning the state in both 2008 and 2012. This gives the state status as a political bellwether. Since 1912, Nevada has been carried by the presidential victor the most out of any state (25 of 26 elections).

Nevada also is a purple state — yes, Obama won it in 2008 and 2012, but George W. Bush won it in 2000 and 2004. Its governor is a Repugnican and one of its two U.S. senators is a Repugnican. So a blue state it ain’t.

Considering that fact, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders did well in Nevada today.

Billary very most likely will win the South Carolina primary a week from today, and so apparently she gets to go into “Super Tuesday” on March 1 having two clear wins under her belt (Nevada and South Carolina) to one clear win for Bernie (New Hampshire) and a tie (Iowa, although of course the Billarybots won’t admit that Iowa was a tie).

“Super Tuesday,” on which 11 states hold primary elections and caucuses, will be a real test for Bernie, but whether Bernie ultimately wins the Democratic Party nomination or not, that he has done as well as he has thus far demonstrates that Billary Clinton is not a strong candidate.

Billary is going on her surname and the widespread belief that “it’s her turn,” as well as the belief of the New Feminists that women who don’t vote for other women like they’re told to go to hell (one wonders: Did this “feminist” fatwa also apply to the likes of Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina?), but the one critical thing that Billary doesn’t have is very much enthusiasm among the electorate, which probably will put the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate, whoever it turns out to be, into the White House if Billary is the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee.

If you think that I’m just being a “Bernie bro”/Chicken Little, know that while Billary beats Donald Trump in polling match-ups (but only by about 3 percentage points), she loses to Marco Rubio (by almost 5 percentage points) and even to Ted Cruz (and get this: John Kasich beats Billary by more than 7 percentage points).

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, in the match-up polling beats or at least ties ALL of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidates. (He beats Trump by almost 8 percentage points, beats Cruz by almost 5 percent, ties Rubio and beats Kasich, although admittedly not by a lot.)

Chew on that fact, Billarybots!

So yes, it’s quite possible that Billary wins the Democratic Party nomination but then loses in November. Not only is it quite possible, but I’d say that it’s more likely than not to happen if she wins the nomination.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, after eight years of “socialist” Barack Obama, will be a lot hungrier in November than will the Democrats. They will vote.

If Billary wins the Democratic Party presidential nomination, I — and many, many other Berners — won’t vote for her in November. That’s all that there is to it. And I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.*

The Democratic Party has become a shell, a husk of its former self, a pro-plutocratic, pro-corporate Repugnican Lite Party, and I cannot and I will not support it as it is now.

I am a registered Democrat now only so that I can vote for Bernie Sanders when California finally has its primary in June. (Even if he has dropped out of the primary race by then, if he still is on my primary-election ballot, I’m still voting for him.)

Billary Clinton at a “town hall” recently criticized Bernie Sanders’ past criticisms of “Democratic” sellouts, saying, “Maybe it’s because Senator Sanders wasn’t really a Democrat until he decided to run for president.” (She was booed by the audience, deservedly.)**

Bernie isn’t an actual Democrat but Billary Clinton is? Oh, really?

As a true progressive his entire time in Congress, I’d say that for some decades now Bernie Sanders has been one of only a relative handful of true Democrats in Congress. Center-right sellouts like Billary use the label “Democrat,” but true Democrats they are not.

Billary the uber-harpy can entertain herself and her “fem”bots with her bullshit charge that she’s the true Democrat. Fuck her. I’m not voting for her, giving her a penny, or supporting her in any way whatsofuckingever.

Unlike the legions of Billarybots, who are too fucking stupid to vote in their own best fucking interests, I, for one, will not help Billary Clinton to screw me, the common American, even more than she and her Democrat-in-name-only ilk already have, at least ever since she and her DINO husband turned the once-progressive Democratic Party into a slightly paler imitation of the Repugnican Party in the 1990s.

Fact is, come January 2017 I’d rather have a Repugnican Tea Party president than a President Billary. I’d rather deal with the obvious wolf than the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

If it takes another disastrous Repugnican Tea Party White House administration to finally drive a stake through the heart of The Vampire Clinton, then so be it.

I want the Democratic Party back, and it won’t come back with Billary Clinton in the White House.

—

*Fact is, if Billary is the Democratic Party presidential candidate, in November she will win my very blue state of California and all of its 50-plus electoral votes anyway. Therefore, my vote already doesn’t count, not really.

All of the fucktards who quite ignorantly would say that by refusing to vote for Billary I helped the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate to win sorely need Civics 101, including education on how the U.S. president is chosen by the Electoral College (which sorely needs to be abolished), not by a popular vote.

**For years my party registration has alternated between the Green Party and the Democratic Party, and that’s because the Democratic Party establishment makes me want to vomit.

So when Queen Billary slams Bernie for not embracing the craven Democratic Party establishment, which hasn’t deserved our support for many years, she slams millions of us Americans who are left of center and who want to vote on the Democratic Party ticket but who are disgusted with how far to the right the Clintons and their DINO ilk have dragged the party, which once stood for progressivism and for good, but which now stands for regressivism and for greed.

Time to panic, Bernie supporters?

Associated Press photo

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders reacts to supporters during an appearance in Davenport, Iowa, last week. Reports of Bernie’s political death have been greatly exaggerated; I can see Billary Clinton imploding like Howard Dean and I can see Bernie rising like Lazarus like John Kerry did in 2004. In any event, I have a novel, even revolutionary, idea: Let’s let the people caucus and vote! Let’s let the people decide!

Billary Clinton has had a decent month (at least so we’re told). The corporately owned and controlled media pronounced her the “winner” of the October 13 debate, even though post-debate focus groups and online polls showed Bernie Sanders to be the clear winner.

This month Billary had Katy Perry perform for her, while Bernie Sanders was impersonated by Larry David proclaiming (as Bernie) that he owns only one pair of underwear and not only doesn’t have a superPAC, but doesn’t even have a backpack, and thus has to lug everything around with him (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!).

This month Billary survived her “Benghazigate” inquisitors, which, for some bizarre reason, widely has been seen as some sort of “accomplishment” for her. As “Benghazigate” always has been trumped-up bullshit anyway, what, exactly, did she accomplish?

No matter; when you’re Billary Clinton, you don’t have to have any actual accomplishments; you have the surname, and for many if not even most of those who call themselves “Democrats,” that’s enough.

Bernie Sanders apparently maintains a slim lead over Billary in New Hampshire, but Joe Biden’s belated announcement that he isn’t running still hasn’t taken full effect in the polling. Therefore, I’m not panicking over the polling that gives Billary a wide, double-digit lead over Bernie in Iowa right now. The post-Biden dust still hasn’t settled in the polling. We’re going to have to see.

That said, yes, I’d say that if Bernie doesn’t come in at No. 1 in New Hampshire or in Iowa – if Billary comes in at No. 1 in both states – no, I don’t see Bernie recovering from that.

Should Bernie win Iowa and New Hampshire (I still expect him to win New Hampshire, but I am concerned about how he’s doing in Iowa right now), we could see Billary collapse, but I don’t expect her to give up; I expect her to do what she did against Barack Obama in 2008, which was to keep going for as long as she could (indeed, the 2008 Democratic presidential primary fight ran all the way to June 2008).

In the meantime, to anyone who is predicting Bernie’s loss to Billary already, I say:

• The first voting (in Iowa on February 1) is still more than three full months away. Billary, apparently way too high on undeserved praise from the corporately owned and controlled mass media punditry, keeps making offensive and untruthful statements (characteristic of her 2008 run for the White House), such as that the odiously homophobic Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that her hubby signed into law actually was meant to staunch the bleeding where LGBT rights are concerned, and that Bernie Sanders is sexist! (Women who shamelessly mendaciously play the feminism card for personal and political gain only hurt the feminist movement; Billary should be ashamed of herself, but, as she amply has demonstrated over the many years, she is unburdened by anything remotely resembling a normal human sense of shame.) Also, the FBI is still investigating Billary and those involved in her home-brewed e-mail server. A lot can happen in the political world in three months.
• Two words: Howard. Dean. Howard Dean for a long time was the “inevitable” 2004 Democratic Party presidential nominee. Only he imploded spectacularly in Iowa in early 2004, coming in at third place, behind both first-place winner John Kerry, whose moribund campaign had come back from the dead like Lazarus on crack, and behind second-place winner John Edwards. In the end, the only state that Dean won was his home state of Vermont. (No, that Bernie also is from Vermont doesn’t mean that he’s destined to share Dean’s fate, and yes, I can see Bernie making a John-Kerry-like resurrection after he’s already been written off as politically dead.)
• Four words: Donald Trump. Ben. Carson. These two “men” have topped the Repugnican Tea Party presidential polling for a while now, yet few who truly know anything about political science and U.S. history really see either of them ultimately gaining the party’s nomination. (Neither has held elected office, and never in my lifetime of more than 45 years has anyone made it to the White House who had not been at least a U.S. senator or the governor of a state.) Why would it be that Donald Trump and Ben Carson can fall from their lofty perches, but Billary can’t fall from hers?
• Finally, but certainly not the least importantly: Let the fucking people vote and caucus! Let the people decide! If Bernie Sanders ultimately comes in at No. 2 to Billary Clinton, so be it, but it’s to be decided by those voting and caucusing – not by the punditry. Not even by me (although it should be…).

The only thing that we Bernie Sanders supporters have to fear is fear itself. The Billarybots would love for us to become dispirited and thus disarm (yes, that’s a pun on Team Billary’s lame attempt to make gun control a big issue [funny, it hasn’t been until very recently that Billary ever made gun control a big issue; the timing of her new-found “concern” is awfully interesting]).

The corporately owned and controlled media would benefit much more from long-time corporate whore Billary Clinton sitting in the Oval Office than they would from democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, so when they report that Bernie can’t win, consider the source and ask yourself if the corporately owned and controlled mass media care more about your welfare than they do their own.

We Bernie Sanders supporters must ignore the naysayers, who have a right-of-center agenda of their own, and continue to support him as we have been. I just gave him another donation, for instance, and there’s no way in hell that I’m ever casting a vote for Billary Clinton, no matter what bile and venom spews from the mouths of the Billarybots.

Repugnican Tea Party’s post-2012 ‘autopsy’ sorely needs an autopsy

Associated Press photo

“Christo”fascist presidential wannabe Ben Carson, who doesn’t want to be left behind in the far-right-wing Parade of Hate that is the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary fight, today proclaimed that no Muslim ever should be president of the United States. (Carson has yet to come out against theocracy by “Christians”…)

Remember the post-2012-presidential-election “autopsy” of the Repugnican Tea Party? The clarion call for a kinder and gentler party so that the fascists would stop losing presidential elections by offending the majority of Americans?

Let’s see:

Since that “autopsy,” we have had Donald Trump refer to immigrants from Mexico as criminals and rapists whom We Must Keep Out of the United States with A Great Wall.

We have had Carly Fiorina lie about the existence of a grisly abortion video as well as by doing so perpetrate and perpetuate the blatant lie that most abortions are late-term abortions. Per the Centers for Disease Control (for the last year for which data is available):

The majority of abortions in 2011 took place early in gestation. In 2011, most abortions (91.4 percent) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions (7.3 percent) were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer (1.4 percent) were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation. In 2011, 19.1 percent of all abortions were medical abortions.

So per the CDC, more than 90 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester. I surmise that the majority of the 19 percent of abortions performed for medical reasons account for those abortions performed past the first trimester. Yes, the life of the mother overrides the life of the fetus when it unfortunately comes to that.

Further, per the CDC, the number of abortions performed in the United States fell from 2002 to 2011, representing “historic lows.” Abortions in the U.S. have been dropping, not increasing. (But even if they’d been increasing, abortion rights are protected by the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled decades ago.)

But Carly Fiorina demonstrates amply that women are men’s equal, at least where it comes to shamelessly lying through her fangs for personal political gain — even though her blatant lies hurt many real people.

Although Fiorina in junior-high-school fashion called Donald Trump out during their last debate for his apparent misogyny by having commented negatively about her looks in junior-high-school fashion, Fiorina herself in 2010, during her disastrously losing campaign for Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat for California (replete with The. Worst. Political. Ad. Ever.), in junior-high-school fashion was caught on a live television camera criticizing Boxer’s hairstyle as being “sooo yesterday.”

Only women may immaturely attack other women’s looks, you see. That’s “feminism.”

We have had Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz rush to the side of Kentuckian “Christo”fascist Kim Davis, who became the “Christo”fascists’ “hero” for having refused to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the nation’s highest court ruled in June that same-sex marriage is protected by the rights enumerated within the U.S. Constitution.

Yes, Kim Davis is a real Gandhi, a real Martin Luther King Jr. (to whom Huckabee actually compared Davis, even though MLK had been jailed for fighting for people’s equal human and civil rights, whereas the “Christo”fascist Davis had been put in jail for her refusal as a government official to honor people’s equal human and civil — indeed, constitutional — rights; yeah, MLK and Kim Davis are just two peas in a righteous pod!).

So let’s see: After the “autopsy” calling for a Repugnican Tea Party that alienates fewer groups, the party has alienated Latinos, the largest non-white racial group in the nation. They have alienated women, who comprise just more than half of all Americans. They have alienated us non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals and our close allies (surely, that would comprise at least 10 percent of the nation).

The anti-labor-union, anti-working-class, pro-plutocrat Scott Walker, who for years now has had the billionaires’ hands up his ass like a sock puppet, has alienated the (admittedly shrinking) population of Americans who belong to labor unions and those who love them.

Yes, in his increasing desperation (he was supposed to be a front runner for his fascistic party’s presidential nomination, you see), he has vowed to destroy all federal government labor unions — indeed, all unions throughout the nation, if he can. (He’s been saying this at least since May, but no one’s really been listening, since the charisma-free Walker has yet to catch fire on the national stage and very apparently never will. [Although if he literally wants to catch fire on a stage or anywhere else, that’s perfectly fine with me.])

But seriously, it’s too bad that the “cause” of destroying labor unions that the Koched-up Walker exploited for his own personal political gain (at great harm to many other people) in Wisconsin hasn’t translated nationally; no, the group of people on whom we’re hating and turning into scapegoats for all of the nation’s ills today primarily is Latino immigrants. As Carly Fiorina might put it, Walker’s anti-labor-union rhetoric, which he’d thought would take him right to the White House, is sooo yesterday!

The electoral loss of these groups of Americans alone is enough to doom the Repugnican Tea Party to the dustbin of U.S. history, where it belongs, but that’s only a partial list, of course.

The group to hate du jour — literally today, this day — is Muslims.

Donald Trump of course declined to correct a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging fucktard who at one of Trump’s Nazi/KKK rallies recently declared that “we have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”

Donald Trump never is going to take the high ground, people. He’s a modern-day Adolf Hitler wannabe. When did Hitler ever correct any of the white supremacist, jingoist, xenophobic, fascistic haters who surrounded him?

No, these are supposed to be rallies of the like-minded.

(Whether or not Trump actually believes his own neo-Nazi rhetoric is fairly pointless; the damage that he is causing by trying to bring about a neo-Nazi Party of which he is the leader/Führer is done whether he truly buys his own hate-filled, far-right-wing bullshit or not.)

Not to be outdone in hating on Muslims, Ben Carson, the very odd combo of retired neurosurgeon and abject “Christo”fascist who for a while now has been in second place in the polling for the Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination, today issued the fatwa that no Muslim should be president of the United States of America because Islam is antithetical to the U.S. Constitution.

Never mind that it rapes the U.S. Constitution in the ass with ground glass as lube to assert that one’s mere membership in a religious group is enough to disqualify him or her from running for office.

What about Mittens Romney’s being a Mormon? Frankly, I personally find the idea of a U.S. president who is a practicing Mormon to be more disturbing than the idea of an American Muslim president.

I say that because it depends on the individual whom we’re talking about. I have little to no doubt that Mittens Romney’s allegiance first and foremost is to the cabal of old white men who run the theocratic Mormon cult in Salt Lake City. I have little to no doubt that Romney personally puts the Mormon cult and its theocracy above the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. government.

That’s how Mormons are raised. Their very lives depend upon it, as their families’ acceptance of them hinges on their obeisance to the cult. When your physiological and other basic human needs (Google “Abraham Maslow”) depend upon your obeisance to the cult, you’re going to obey the cult.

How many American Muslims truly wish to impose Sharia law on the United States, if that is what Ben Carson was blathering about today? I haven’t known many Muslims — which probably is because they are only about 1 percent of the American population (and about a quarter of them are native-born black Americans who have converted to Islam) — but I don’t see that they have nearly the numbers necessary to impose Sharia law on the United States of America even if 99.999999999 percent of them wanted to.

I surmise that most American Muslims aren’t radical, but are fairly moderate to even fairly secular. Really, how could they stand to live in the United States if they weren’t?

And as a gay American man, I am not seeing Muslim government officials refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. I’m seeing “Christo”fascist government officials refusing to do so, so I’m much more concerned about a “Christo”fascist takeover of the U.S. than I at all am concerned that Sharia law ever will become the new law of the land.

There are far, far more “Christo”fascists in the U.S. than there are “Islamofascists.” It would be a mistake to ignore the homegrown “Christo”fascist domestic enemy while focusing instead on the supposed “Islamofascist” “threat.”

I much would rather see a secular Muslim in the White House than I’d ever want someone like Ben Carson or Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz (or Mittens the Mormon millionaire) in the White House. Because the issue isn’t nearly so much the content of the religion that we’re talking about, but how much one who is in power (or wishes to have more power) wishes to impose his or her religious beliefs upon the rest of us.

That is the problem — when theofascists just can’t/won’t keep their hateful, insane, dangerous dogmas to themselves, but wish to shove them down our throats, a la theocrat Kim Davis and those who publicly support her, including theocratic Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes.

Where it comes to religion I am equal opportunity; I couldn’t support a right-wing Jew for president, either, because I can’t see a right-wing Jew keeping his or her right-wing religious ideology out of his or her governance.

Bernie Sanders, my chosen 2016 presidential candidate, was born to Jewish parents, but from his biography I gather that he’s quite secular, that he understands how critical is the separate between church and state, so he doesn’t frighten me in the least. I don’t see at all that Sanders has a hidden agenda of imposing Jewish law (which, I guess from my quick Internet research, is called “halakhah”) upon the land once in the Oval Office.

(Oh, God — I probably just gave the wingnuts [and perhaps even the Billary Clinton campaign] an idea… Jews, by the way, are no more than 2 percent or 3 percent of the American population, so I don’t envision a Jewish takeover of the nation, either. [Mormons are only about 2 percent of the American population, but they’re homegrown and they’re significantly more fundamentalist and theocratic than are American Jews or American Muslims, in my observation and experience.])

At any rate, regardless of my views of someone’s religious affiliation, he or she may run for the office of president of the United States of America if he or she meets the qualifications and requirements laid out in the U.S. Constitution, none of which is a religious test.

Realistically, at least up to today in U.S. history, no candidate who has not at least has claimed affiliation with Christianity has made it to the White House, so while there is no religious test imposed on the presidency by the Constitution, of course there is one imposed by public opinion. The Constitution may not get to discriminate, but of course all of us voters get to discriminate at the ballot box. (Indeed, voting is all about discrimination, in the broader definition of the term, which is “the ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment.”)

Just as Ben Carson and his ilk never would vote for a Muslim (while hypocritically having no problem whatsoever with the fact that throughout our nation’s history you must at least have claimed to be a Christian in order to be elected president), I never would vote for a “Christo”fascist and theocrat like Ben Carson or Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz or Prick Santorum, all of whom are running for the White House on the Repugnican Tea Party side, along with other right-wing nut jobs who if they aren’t religious themselves are careful not to alienate the “Christo”fascists, whose votes they want. (Yes, even Donald Trump pays lip service to the ” Christian” “God,” even though he apparently thinks that he is higher than that deity.)

I’m not Muslim — I don’t believe in a Zeus-like deity any more than I believe in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy, so I’m not Muslim, Jewish or Christian — but I have a real fucking problem with any minority being shit and pissed upon and made into scapegoats by far-right, white-supremacist, nationalist thugs, as was done in Nazi Germany.

This truly patriotic American says to that, a return to the sociopolitical environment of Nazi Germany here in the United States of America: Over my dead body.

P.S. While the Repugnican Tea Party traitors always will be Islamophobes, I expect the focus of their hatred to return soon to “the illegals,” that is, to Latino immigrants (and, by extension, to Latinos in general). This is because there are far more Latinos in the U.S. than there are Muslims, so Latinophobia is an easier sell than is Islamophobia (many more right-wing white Americans routinely see Latinos than routinely see Muslims), yet Latinos still are outnumbered significantly by whites in the U.S., so the white right wing considers it still to be safe to bash them.

Also, of course, I expect Donald Trump to remain in the race for a while, and I don’t expect his main focus of hatred (which is something like the evil gaze of the evil Eye of Sauron) to switch from Latinos to another minority group.

The Repugnican Tea Party does indeed have a Big Tent — its adherents hate Latinos and most other non-whites, feminists, progressives, non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, intellectuals, labor-union members, Muslims and other non-“Christians,” non-capitalists, pacifists, et. al., et. al. — but I expect anti-Latino-immigrant sentiment to remain the centerpiece of the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential race. I do believe that His Royal Highness the Trumpster has set the tone for his party for this presidential election cycle.

Sooooo NOT ready for Billary

Reuters photo

The centerpiece of the presidential campaign of Billary Clinton — whose actual record is that of having collected titles instead of actually having accomplished anything — is that she is a woman, when even the wingnuts were poised to possibly put Sarah Palin in the White House in 2008. Billary has nothing except for her co-option of the “Democratic Party” label and the probably-fatal lack of imagination of today’s Democratic Party, which apparently sees nothing wrong with center-right political dynasties.

“Hillary Clinton Is About to Launch the Most Boring Presidential Campaign in Years,” a writer for Vice.com proclaims.

I wholeheartedly agree. This launch is scheduled to happen today.

Billary already was old news when she lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama. Recall that she came in at third place in Iowa in January 2008, behind the now-disgraced John Edwards at second place and Obama at first. True, it was close — Edwards got 30 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 29 percent, but, as Wikipedia correctly notes, “Clinton’s surprising third-place finish in the popular vote [in the first contest of the primary season] damaged her image as the ‘inevitable’ nominee. However, she remained upbeat, saying, ‘This race begins tonight and ends when Democrats throughout America have their say. Our campaign was built for a marathon.'”

In that marathon — and it was a marathon; it wasn’t until June 2008 that Billary conceded to Obama — Billary acted like the cocky hare, while Team Obama knew, like the tortoise knew, that slow and steady wins the race, as Obama carefully cobbled together delegates from regions around the nation that Billary apparently felt she already had in the bag and/or could afford to lose.

Billary also acted like a major asshole (I’d say “bitch” or perhaps even “cunt,” but that would be sexist, so I’ll be entirely equal-opportunity here) the more desperate she became to try to beat Obama. Although the states of Florida and Michigan had violated the Democratic Party’s rules and held their primaries too early — risking having their delegates not being allowed to cast votes at the convention, as the party had warned them might happen — and even though Obama had not even appeared on Michigan’s primary ballot, Billary insisted that she be given the delegates for the two states even though the two states clearly had violated the rules of the game (and again, even though Obama had not even appeared on Michigan’s ballot).

In April 2008, Billary, pathetically desperately trying to cast herself as one of the good old boys in the red-to-purplish states in order to scrape together some more badly-needed delegates, infamously referred to Obama as an “out-of-touch” “elitist” (based on remarks that he’d made at a fundraiser in San Francisco that were secretly recorded and were reported out of context; Team Billary really pounced on this opportunity to call Obama a limousine liberal, when Billary is the Queen — King? — of the Limousine Liberals).

I, for one, never forget a politician’s stunning display of low character. Either of the two crimes that I just mentioned — Billary’s tacking to the right and trying to appeal to what would become the “tea-party” set in order to try to beat Obama in the 2008 primaries, which was treasonous to the Democratic Party (which is what the Clintons always have been about: dragging the Democratic Party further and further to the right and further corporatizing it so that today it looks like Repugnican Lite), and her blatantly anti-democratic, power-grabbing demand that she simply be given the delegates for whom Obama did not even compete* — disqualify Billary from the Oval Office, but taken together, there is no question that the incidents amply showed Billary’s true colors.

There’s no way in hell that I’ll give this woman a penny, much more my vote.

As I noted, Billary was old hat in 2008, but now, seven years later, she’s still on the kick that we should put her in the Oval Office primarily because she’s a woman, because it would amount to Billary cracking “the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”

The 67-year-old Billary largely is living in the past, apparently acting out her own old wounds; she apparently wishes to keep the glass ceiling alive primarily for her own benefit.

I’m not convinced that in 2015, years after Billary’s 2008 run, the American voters have a problem with putting a woman in the White House, despite Billary’s apparent claims of being the victim of sexism and misogyny.

In fact, in 2006, 92 percent of Americans said in a CBS News/New York Times poll that they’d vote for a woman for president if they believed that she is qualified. (In fact, that 2006 poll found that “Men are actually more likely than women to say the country is ready for a woman to be president. Sixty percent of men say so, compared to 51 percent of women.” [!])

True, in 2006 apparently no more than 60 percent of those polled believed that a woman would be elected president in the next decade, but in early 2014 a Rasmussen poll found that 77 percent of respondents believed that a woman would be elected president in the next 10 years.

So Billary can’t factually claim that she is up against the same level of sexism that she might have been in 2008.

But I don’t believe that Billary was fighting against sexism in 2008; in 2008, as she still is today, Billary was fighting against (in no special order) her own utter lack of charisma, her record of having held titles (first lady, U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state) instead of having actually accomplished anything, her nauseating sense of dynastic entitlement (as I said, in the 2008 marathon she was the hare), and her stunning low character (to the list of examples of which I’ll add the fact that she kept her State Department e-mails on her own server entirely under her own control [control freak much?]).

However, it’s so much easier and so much more convenient to ignore one’s own glaring shortcomings and falsely claim that he or she is a victim based upon his or her mere membership in an historically oppressed group of individuals. (Vote for Hillary or you hate all women!)

I criminally have dragged my feet here in pointing out than in 2008 even the Repugnicans cast their vote for the ticket of John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin. Given the fact that McCainosaurus was 72 years old when voters went to the polls in November 2008, there was a good chance that had McCainosaurus won the White House, we would have seen a President Palin, especially if McCainosaurus had eked out a second presidential term. (The life expectancy for an American white male is around 76 years. The oldest president in U.S. history, the execrable Ronald Reagan, was almost, but not quite, 70 years old when he was inaugurated in 1980.)

So given that even the wingnuts were poised in 2008 to potentially put the first woman in the Oval Office (albeit via the vice presidency), for Billary to claim that it’s a novel idea today is bullshit.

And it can’t boost Billary’s chances for 2016 that a Pew Research Center study released in early 2015 showed that “In all, 38 percent of Americans said they hope that a woman is elected [president] in their lifetimes, while 57 percent said it doesn’t matter to them.”

My stance is that I’m fine with having our first female president — just not Billary Clinton, who has demonstrated amply over many years that as president she would be lackluster at best. (And, of course, I could write a whole separate piece on how beyond fucked up it is that the American national political imagination is so bankrupt that we still have presidential candidates with the surnames of Clinton and Bush.)

The quality of the presidential candidate trumps his or her possession of the XX or the XY chromosomes, just as it does other superficial considerations, such as race, national origin and sexual orientation.

I want the most progressive president that we can get — period.

During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary season I supported Obama over Clinton, hands down, and race and sex had nothing to do with it; I perceived Obama as the more progressive politician of the two (and I still do, although perhaps that’s not saying much, given how much Obama squandered his political capital, especially in the critical years of 2009 and 2010).

As I have noted, my pick for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination is U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who probably isn’t running (it’s unlikely but not absolutely impossible that she’ll run). However, even if a yet another white male candidate emerges as a viable candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination (and if Warren doesn’t run, as probably will be the case), if he strikes me as progressive enough, I will support him, as much as I’d like to see Warren in the White House.

For diversity’s sake I’d love the 2016 Democratic Party standard-bearer to be Warren, who is a woman and progressive — a real Democrat, not the self-serving, dynastic DINO sellout that Billary is — but always, when push comes to shove, I’m going to support the most progressive candidate, regardless of his or her demographics.

Except for Billary.

If it comes down to only Billary — if she faces no viable challenger for the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination — then I will sit 2016 out. I will not participate in the fucking charade that Billary Clinton would make even a minimally acceptable president.

And I don’t think that I’m alone.

Most Democrats won’t admit how boring and unexciting the charisma- and character-free Billary is — she has co-opted the “Democratic” label, and they won’t go against the label in “polite” company — but the enthusiasm that Billary cannot and will not/would not instill within the Democratic Party base cannot bode well for the party in November 2016 if Billary is the party’s presidential candidate.

If Billary wins the nomination next year, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors will be much more enthusiastic than will be the Democrats in November 2016, and thus the members of the Repugnican Tea Party will turn out in droves to vote, especially after having been, in their sick and twisted minds, exiled to the wilderness during the eight-year run of the Communist Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama.

The brick wall is right in front of the Democratic Party, in plain view, but I expect the Democratic Party to be true to itself and drive right into it nonetheless.

After all, monarch Billary tends to get what she wants — whether it’s good for the rest of us or not.

P.S. I just watched “Saturday Night Live’s” clever and rather scathing (but deserved) cold open from last night. I always have suspected that Tina Fey’s spot-on Sarah Palin hurt the McCainosaurus-Palin ticket, and I have to wonder if, similarly, Kate McKinnon’s spot-on Billary Clinton is going to hurt Billary.

P.P.S. How could I have forgotten to mention Billary’s vote, as a carpetbagging U.S. senator for New York, for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War in October 2002?

It was, as a Huffington Post commentator has put it, probably the most important vote of Billary’s U.S. Senate career, and she wholly fucked it up. She did not vote for what was wise or what was right, but voted in the way that she calculated would most benefit her politically. (Twenty-one Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted no to the 29 Senate Democrats, including Billary, who voted yes, so it’s not like Billary had to vote yes; and the one Repugnican in the U.S. Senate at the time who voted against the Vietraq War, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, now is considering running for the White House as a Democrat.)

As the Huffington Post commentator notes of the October 2002 vote to give the Bush regime authorization “to unleash military force against Iraq at any time, without further consultation with Congress, let alone a declaration of war”: “The disastrous impact of that hideous example of strategic miscalculation is still with us, witnessed by the tectonic convulsions ripping the Arab world, and the rise of the Islamic State, which emerged out of the cauldron created by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

Not to mention the more than 4,000 U.S. troops killed in Vietraq, the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died because of the Vietraq War, and the cost of the Vietraq War to the U.S. taxpayers of more than $2 trillion — all of this at least in part because Billary and her craven ilk caved in to the post-9/11 hysteria which the unelected Bush regime used like the Reichstag fire.

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*In  the end, Queen/King Billary pretty much got her way, unsurprisingly. As Wikipedia notes:

None of the top candidates campaigned in Florida or Michigan. The events were described in the media as “beauty contests,” and voter turnout in both states was relatively low when compared with record-high turnout in other states. Nevertheless, Clinton claimed wins in Florida and Michigan, and she flew to Fort Lauderdale on the night of the Florida election to thank supporters for what she called a “tremendous victory.” [Gee, reminds me of someone else who falsely claimed a victory in the state of Florida…] 

As the primaries continued, various groups tried to negotiate a resolution to the standoff between the [Democratic National Committee] and the state parties. The Clinton campaign advocated first for the results to stand and then for a new round of voting to take place in Michigan and Florida, while the Obama campaign deferred the matter to the DNC, while expressing a wish that the delegations be seated in some form. On all sides, Democrats worried that a failure to resolve the problem could lead to a rules or credential fight at the convention and low Democratic turnout in the general election in November.

On May 31, 2008, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee voted unanimously (27-0) to restore half-votes to all the Florida delegates, including superdelegates. The Michigan delegates were also given half-votes, with 69 delegates pledged to Hillary Clinton and 59 to Barack Obama; this proposed change [passed] by 19-8.

Michigan and Florida had flouted the pre-established rules and should have suffered the consequences. And how Billary was awarded more delegates for Michigan than was Obama when Obama hadn’t even appeared on the ballot escapes me, other than more evidence of the fact that the Clintons are fucking bullies with a colossal sense of entitlement — indeed, they wish to be a Dynasty.

Attacks on Elizabeth Warren demonstrate her strength

Reuters news photo

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has the stuff of which U.S. presidents are made, which is why she has plenty of detractors. (And she really rocks purple. Just sayin’: I want eight years of a purple-wearing president.)

Reading Yahoo! political commentator Matt Bai’s recent column on why he believes Vice President Joe Biden should run for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination, I was stopped cold by Bai’s casual, cavalier remark that besides Biden, “There’s [Vermont U.S. Sen.] Bernie Sanders, who’s an avowed socialist [as though there were something wrong with that], and Elizabeth Warren, who sounds more like a Jacobin.”

I recalled that the Jacobins were associated with the French Revolution, but I couldn’t recall exactly what they were about, and so I looked them up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia notes of the Jacobins, in part: “At their height in 1793-94, the [Jacobin Club] leaders were the most radical and egalitarian group in the [French] Revolution. Led by Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794), they controlled the government from June 1793 to July 1794, passed a great deal of radical legislation, and hunted down and executed their opponents in the Reign of Terror.”

Wow.

For all of the right wing’s bullshit about “class warfare” — which, conveniently, according to the right wing’s playbook always is waged by the poor against the rich and never vice-versa — Elizabeth Warren actually has not called for a violent revolution.* She has called for a return to socioeconomic fairness and justice, which is more than reasonable, especially given what has happened to the American middle class since at least the 1980s, during the reign of Reagan (another reign of terror from history, not entirely metaphorically speaking). But if you can’t win an argument these days, you just accuse your opponent of being a terrorist (not entirely unlike Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent comparison of Wisconsinites standing up for their livelihoods to the terrorists who comprise ISIS).

Matt Bai makes only one other brief reference to Warren in his screed about why, in his estimation, Biden should run for president for 2016: “Biden’s a middle-class champion who makes the case for economic fairness with more conviction than [Billary] Clinton and less vitriol than Warren .”

I agree that Billary has little to zero credibility on the issue of socioeconomic justice, but if you Google “vitriol” you will see that it means “cruel and bitter criticism.”

Wow. Warren is passionate, absolutely. She’s one of the relatively few passionate and progressive elected officials in D.C., and passion is a normal response to socioeconomic injustice that is deep and widespread. But when has Warren ever been bitter and/or cruel? WTF, Matt Bai?

I’m not the only one who has recognized this. I was pleased to see soon later that Salon.com writer Elias Isquith wrote a column on Bai’s drive-by bashing of Warren and on the establishment’s fear of Warren — fear of Warren because she actually threatens to upend the status quo in Washington, D.C., the status quo that is toxic for the majority of Americans (and much if not most of the rest of the world) but that is working out just fine for the denizens of the halls of power in D.C. (which would include Bai, whom Isquith refers to as “the star pundit-reporter and longtime communicator of whatever the conventional wisdom of the political elite happens to be at any given time”; I would add that Bai is a mansplainer par excellence as well).

Isquith, too, takes issue with calling Warren a “Jacobin,” and Isquith compares a quotation of an actual Jacobin (the philosophy of whom is that “[the] policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror. … Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs”) to a quotation of Warren (one of my favorites):

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

This statement (from August 2011, when Warren was running for the U.S. Senate) is eminently fair and reasonable — I’d call it “common sense” if the wingnutty fascists hadn’t already bastardized that term for all of their harmful ideas and opinions.

Why the establishmentarian attacks on Warren, whose actual words and actual record have nothing whatsofuckingever to do with what her detractors and critics claim about her? Isquith offers a plausible explanation (links are Isquith’s):

… The first and most obvious reason is that Washington is, to put it gently, a swamp of corruption where many influential people live comfortably — thanks to Wall Street. Maybe they’re lobbyists; maybe they work in free-market think tanks; maybe they’re employed by the defense industry, which benefits greatly from Wall Street’s largesse. Or maybe they’re government bureaucrats who find Warren’s opposition to the “revolving door” to be in profound conflict with their future plans.

My second theory is less political and more prosaic. Another reason Bai and his ilk find Warren discomfiting may be her glaring lack of false modesty and her disinterest in keeping her head down and paying her dues. Because despite being the capital of what is nominally the greatest liberal democracy on Earth, Washington is in truth a deeply conformist and hierarchical milieu, one where new arrivals are expected to be neither seen nor heard until they’ve been deemed to have earned their place. And while Warren may want to be seen as a team player, what she cares most about is reining in Wall Street. If she deems it necessary to accomplish her primary goal, she’s willing to step on some toes and lose a few fair-weather friends. …

I would add that patriarchy, sexism and misogyny certainly play a role, too. It might not be conscious in all cases, but I surmise that because every single one of our 44 U.S. presidents thus far have been men, there is an ingrained cultural, even visceral, belief among many, many Americans — even women — that the U.S. president should be a man. Thus, the likes of Matt Bai is rooting for Joe Biden; Bai’s support of Biden apparently stems, in no tiny part, from the fact that Biden is yet another older white man.

The U.S. president should be, in my book, the candidate who both is the most progressive and the most electable, and right now that candidate is Elizabeth Warren. That she happens to be a woman is great, as we are woefully overdue for our first female president.

Presidential preference polls consistently show both Warren and Biden to be Democrats’ second and third choices after Billary Clinton (who, after E-mailgate, might slide in the polls of Democrats and Democratic-leaners; we’ll see).

Joe Biden probably would be an acceptable-enough president – I’d certainly take him over a President Billary – but given his age (he’s 72 years old today and would be 74 were he to be inaugurated as president in January 2017, making him the oldest president at the time of inauguration in U.S. history [even Ronald Reagan was a spry 69-going-on-70 years old when he took office in early 1981]) and given his reputation as a hothead, I don’t know how electable Biden would be.

And while in fairness the vice president doesn’t get to do very much, what has Biden done over the past six years?

Biden’s age doesn’t bother me — if you can be the job, I don’t much care how old you are — but it would become a campaign “issue.” And while perhaps it’s not fair to Biden as an individual, it’s pathetic and sad and deeply disappointing that in our so-called “representative democracy,” our 45th president would be yet another white man, for a string of 44 out of 45 U.S. presidents being white men.

Elizabeth Warren is a twofer: an actually progressive Democrat who is electable as U.S. president, and thus also potentially our first U.S. president who is a woman.

Attacks on Warren by the shameless, worthless, self-serving defenders of the status quo are to be expected; when the voters hear and read what Warren has to say, versus the bullshit that the establishmentarians spew** about her, they will, I believe, put Warren in the White House, where she belongs.

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*For the record, I don’t rule out the use of violence in a revolution. Our plutocratic overlords never rule out the use of violence (state violence, usually) against us commoners. Unilateral disarmament is bullshit.

I’d much prefer a bloodless revolution, of course, but again, when the enemy doesn’t rule out violence, you shouldn’t either.

**Similarly, were most Americans actually informed about what democratic socialism actually is all about, they probably would embrace it, which is why it has been so important to the establishmentarians and the wingnuts (really, “wingnut” is too-cuddly a word for right-wing fascists) to lie about what socialism is all about.

Such a dog-whistle word has “socialist” become, indeed, that Matt Bai simply dismisses Bernie Sanders’ entire being in one fell swoop in just one phrase (“an avowed socialist” — gasp!).

Thank you, Matt Bai, for so courageously doing your part to discourage all actual thought in the United States of America!

Walker might walk away with his party’s nod for the White House (Part 2)

Reuters photo

Wingnut Scott Walker (photographed above about a week ago in Washington, D.C.) tops recent polls of Repugnican Tea Party presidential preference in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Those traits of his that his party’s base sees as bonuses, however, would be deadly to him in a national race. 

Sure, it’s still just a bit less than a year before the first 2016 presidential primary season contests begin in Iowa and then New Hampshire (Iowa’s caucuses will be on January 18 and New Hampshire’s primary will be on January 26), but Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is maintaining his momentum for his party’s nomination.

In a recent poll of New Hampshire voters, Walker came in at No. 1, with 21 percent, followed at second place by Jeb of the Bush Dynasty, with 14 percent.

After a first-place win in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, the front runner’s momentum exponentially snowballs, so Walker must be happy about how he is polling in Iowa and New Hampshire right now (No. 1 in both states).

Prognosticator/god Nate Silver, meanwhile, gives Scott Walker and Jeb Bush each a 25-percent chance of winning the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination.

(Silver also, unfortunately, gives Billary Clinton a 78 percent chance of winning the Democratic Party’s 2016 persidential nomination, with Elizabeth Warren at a distant second place, with a 7-percent chance. [If Warren actually were to announce, I think, we’d see her polling jump.])

Jeb Bush’s challenges, of course, include the fact that the last “President” Bush (I have to use the quotation marks, since George W. Bush never was elected legitimately in the first place) was one of the worst presidents in our nation’s history (we still are recovering from his debacle in Iraq, replete with the resultant blowback that is ISIS, and from the economy that he thoroughly wrecked) and the fact that Jeb is considered to be too liberal by his party’s far-right nut jobs.

Also, Jeb’s been out of elected office for a bit more than eight full years now, adding weight to the argument that he’s running primarily because of his surname.

Walker’s biggest challenge (aside from the fact that he is an evil, heartless, soulless, lying, thieving, colossal asshole bought and paid for by the Koch brothers and other plutocrats) is his lack of charisma; however, none of these qualities that we sane individuals would consider to be negatives (such as being evil, having no charisma and being the plutocrats’ puppet) should harm Walker in the Repugnican Tea Party primary season (where, in fact, these qualities are considered to be bonuses).

Walker tosses around the word “God” enough and mouths enough 1950s-era platitudes about Capitalism, God’s Chosen Economic System (despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary), to keep his party’s deeply fucktarded base of “Christo”fascists, pro-plutocrats and jingoists happy (and, of course, his whiteness appeals to his party’s white supremacists, of which there are many).

And while Walker is despised by many if not even most in Wisconsin, to the majority in his party, even though he’s just yet another stupid white man running for the White House, as a presidential contender he has that fresh-car smell (as Barack Obama might put it).

But can Walker win the White House?

Oh, hell no. Very most likely not.

The fairly-charisma-free Billary Clinton (who, indeed, very most likely will win her party’s 2016 presidential nod if Warren stays out) is a giantess of charisma compared to Walker, and the national electorate as of late has been rejecting right-wing white men, such as John McCainosaurus and Mittens Romney. Those of us who aren’t right-wing white men (and that’s most of us Americans, and a growing number and percentage of us Americans) are sick and fucking tired of these stupid white men running the show. (Which is why it’s necessary for the millionaires and billionaires to buy elections and for the Repugnican Tea Party to pass legislation in the states ensuring that only the “right” people are able to cast a vote.)

Also, the centerpiece of Walker’s politics has been his relentless attacks against the working class and the middle class, to blame them (us) for his state’s (and, presumably, the nation’s) economic ills. He has been able to make this work in Wisconsin, with the help of his billionaire sugar daddies, but in a nation that still is recovering from the economy that the last Repugnican occupant of the White House destroyed, a candidate whose political history has consisted of blaming the victims of our economic problems for our economic problems won’t go over very well on the national level.

And, of course, there is, I believe, a hunger for our first female president. While I wish that our first female president were an actual progressive, and not a sellout DINO-weasel like Billary Clinton, with a Billary Clinton presidency, at the minimum we could say that finally, a woman was in the Oval Office (and not as a secretary or as first lady).

The fact is that our system of “democracy” has become so corrupt, and our collective political imagination has become so fucking bankrupt, that it indeed is fairly easy to predict, a year out, how things are going to pan out in Iowa and New Hampshire in January 2016.

Scott Walker will, I believe, emerge as his party’s 2016 presidential candidate. While Nate Silver gives Walker and Jeb an equal chance, no one, that I can see, has the appetite for a third Bush presidency — except, perhaps, for those whose surname is Bush.

And Billary will, I believe, emerge as her party’s candidate — unless Elizabeth Warren jumps in soon. If she does, she has a fighting chance, but if she doesn’t, it’s all Billary’s, for better or for worse.