(50 million to) 80 million Americans vanish without a trace!

An August 2000 editorial cartoon by progressive Gen Xer Ted Rall. (Another, even earlier ’toon by Rall on this topic is here.)

When I saw a little while ago that the new book The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, which I (probably stupidly) since bought via amazon.com (I just opened the package today), very apparently pretends that those of us of Generation X don’t even fucking exist, I thought of my fellow progressive Gen Xer Ted Rall and his quite correct labeling of us Xers as victims of “generational leapfrog.”

Prompted by what I had read of The Next America on amazon.com, I was going to blog on my thoughts on my generation’s exclusion from the national discussion as though Winston Smith, working at the Ministry of Truth, had simply erased all mention of us, but now, I see, Rall (thankfully) has written a column on the topic, so, at the risk of violating copyright law, I am posting Rall’s column in full at the end of this post (I don’t think that he would mind), because he echoes my thoughts and feelings.

Not only does the title of this latest book about generations of Americans, which sits at No. 239 on amazon.com as I compose this sentence, exclude my generation entirely, but in the preface of the book — in which the author (shockingly!) identifies himself as a baby boomer — my generation is ignored. In the preface, the baby-boomer author, one Paul Taylor, proclaims:

… This book … pays particular attention to our two outsize generations — the Baby Boomers, fifty- and sixty-somethings having trouble coming to terms with getting old, and the Millennials, twenty-somethings having trouble finding the road map to adulthood. It looks at their competing interests in the big showdown over entitlement reform that our politicians, much as they might try, won’t be able to put off for much longer. …

So why has baby boomer (yeah, I don’t capitalize the term, since that might imply respect, which in this case is undeserved) Taylor disappeared (as Ted Rall accurately put it in his latest column) my entire generation?

And let me first interrupt myself to tell you that my generation actually isn’t all that tiny, with an estimated more than 80 million Americans being Xers, for fuck’s sake, while the figure for the number of baby boomers who were born apparently is around 76 million, and it is estimated that about 80 million Americans are members of Generation Y (a.k.a. Millennials).

Yes, there was a baby boom when the boomers were belched from the bowels of hell and into the world from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s (yes, Barack Obama is a [late] baby boomer; we’ve yet to have a Gen-X president [and we very well might not ever have one]), but American population (despite advances in birth control) has climbed steadily since the boomers made their unfortunate entrance, which, I surmise, would explain why all three generations actually have been roughly the same in size, despite Taylor’s assertion that only his generation and the Millennials are worth discussing because they are “outsize.”

(The cover of the book says that it is authored by “Paul Taylor and the Pew Research Center.” Wow. You’d think the folks at the Pew Research Center would have caught the mistake or even the lie that we Gen Xers are so tiny a cohort that we’re not worth discussing. Seriously — this “oversight” has harmed Pew Research Center’s reputation, in my mind.)

Back to what I was saying: So why would baby boomer Paul Taylor exclude my generation almost entirely from his book that is supposed to be a part of the national discussion?

Well, of course it’s easier to discuss only two generations instead of three. So yes, some laziness definitely might have been involved.

But the larger part of it, I believe, is that the baby boomers in general — and we very apparently cannot exclude Taylor from that cohort, based not only upon his age but also based upon his brand of inter-generational politics — long have treated us Xers as though we didn’t exist.

Indeed, one of Ted Rall’s most successful books is his 1998 Revenge of the Latchkey Kids, one of the first, if not the first, Gen-X manifesto.

I was born to boomers and I certainly was a latchkey kid. I won’t go into detail that only will make others (especially boomers) accuse me of being a whiner who blames everything on his parents (for the record, I blame much on them, but not everything on them), but yeah, while the boomers were the cherished children of the American men who had survived World War II and come home to inseminate their wives and while the Millennials were the cherished children (largely if not mostly of boomers) replete with “Baby on Board” signs, we X’ers were, to put it mildly, not cherished. There were no “Baby on Board” signs, no car seats for us. Our parents were not, for the very most part, “helicopter parents.” No, they were more like invisible parents. As Rall stated correctly many years ago, we Xers, overall, were latchkey kids. We were largely left to raise ourselves.

I suspect that this is why we are ignored by the dominant generation, the boomers (almost all seats of power in the U.S. still are filled by boomers, who hold on to their seats of power with death grips, like U.S. Supreme Court justices): they always have ignored us, so why begin to acknowledge our inconvenient existence now?

Also, if any of the boomers are actually even capable of feeling anything remotely like guilt, maybe they have at least a dim awareness that they failed us Xers, their children, miserably, that they are the first generation in the history of the United States to have had it better themselves than their children have had it, and therefore, in order to avoid feeling guilty — because boomers were raised by the so-called “greatest generation” to believe that they are entitled to feel only great about themselves all of the fucking time (a “value” that the boomers seemed to have imparted to many if not most of the Millennials) — they do their best not to think about us Xers at all.

All of my legitimate generational grievances aside, there is no way that you can write a responsibly comprehensive book about the problems that loom over the United States of America without discussing an entire generation of Americans. (OK, to be fair, there are some entries for “Generation X” in the index of The Next America, which I have not read because I just opened the package today, but very apparently the book glosses over Gen X for a much more detailed discussion about the boomers and the Millennials.)

We Xers care about, we are affected by and we affect Social Security, Medicare, retirement security, income inequality, climate change, human rights, social justice, politics, overpopulation, etc., etc., and while millions want to simply ignore us (and so do simply ignore us) because to do so fits their own selfish political agendas, we Gen Xers are right fucking here, tens of millions of us — whether the generation that precedes us and the generation that follows us (and, tragically, they have so many characteristics in common) wish to see us or not.

Now: Here is Rall’s column, with my comments inserted in [brackets]:

I’ve been disappeared.

Erased from history.

Dropped down the memory hole.

(bye)

If you were born between 1961 and 1976, you no longer exist. [Exact definitions of Gen X vary. In my book, Gen X begins around 1962 to 1964. 1961 is a bit early, in my book. And I would extend Gen X at least to those born in 1980.]

Generation X has been disappeared.

The Soviets altered photos to excise the images of leaders who had fallen out of favor, but communist censors went after individuals.

America’s corporate media is more ambitious. They’re turning 50 million people into unpersons. [Again, I see figures that put Gen X at least at 80 million, but even only 50 million people, if Rall’s figure indeed is closer to the actual figure, still is a large chunk of the national population of more than 317 million.]

The disappearing of Gen X began about a year ago, when major news outlets began reducing living Americans to two generations: the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1960) and their children, the Millennials (born approximately 1977-2004).

[I would include 1945, and perhaps also 1944, for the boomers, and I probably wouldn’t start the Millennials earlier than 1980. Again, these generational demarcations vary from person to person. To me, personal characteristics and worldview are important, too, not strictly the year in which one was born, perhaps especially in those generationally cuspy situations. (My husband, for instance, born in 1962, while on the cusp of the boomers and the Xers, has more Xer characteristics than boomer characteristics; otherwise, he wouldn’t be my husband…)]

(Generational birth years are controversial. Many classify the Boom years between 1946 and 1964, but I agree with the demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe’s assessment — and the novelist Douglas Coupland, who defined the term “Generation X” — that people like me, born from ’61 to ’64, called “the most dysfunctional cohort of the century,” identify with the culture and economic fortunes of Xers, not the Boom.)

The unpersoning of X takes full bloom in “Wooing a New Generation of Museum Patrons,” a March 19, 2014, piece in The New York Times about how museums like the Guggenheim are soliciting money from “a select group of young donors already contributing at a high level.”

Take your gum/joint/food out of your mouth before reading further, lest you gag: “Several hundred Millennials mingled under the soaring atrium of the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue one recent frigid February night. Weaving around them were black-clad servers bearing silver trays piled high with doughnuts, while a pixieish D.J. spun Daft Punk remixes.”

According to the Times’ David Gelles (playing the role of Winston Smith): “Across the country, museums large and small are preparing for the eventual passing of the baton from the Baby Boom generation, which for decades has been the lifeblood not only of individual giving but of boardroom leadership. Yet it is far from clear whether the children of Baby Boomers are prepared to replicate the efforts of their parents.”

Gelles’ piece doesn’t contain any reference to Generation X.

Really? Museums don’t give a crap about would-be philanthropists among the millionaires born between 1961 and 1976?

By the way, Xers were into Daft Punk before Millennials were even done being born.

Boomer/Millennial articles that ignore the existence of Xers have become commonplace. Again in The New York Times, Emily Esfahani Smith and Jennifer L. Aaker perform the neat trick of disappearing one-sixth of the country. Their November 30, 2013, op/ed about “Millennial Searchers” for the meaning of life asks about Millennials: “Do we have a lost generation on our hands?”

Substitute “1991” for “2008” and everything Smith and Aaker write could be, and was written about Gen X: “Yet since the Great Recession of 2008, they have been having a hard time. They are facing one of the worst job markets in decades. They are in debt. Many of them are unemployed. The income gap between old and young Americans is widening.”

Even in an essay about humanity’s search for meaning — and about the downward mobility that defines Gen X — there is only room for Boomers and Millennials.

It’s like our crappy economy and low wages and student loan debt never even happened. [Infuckingdeed. As I’ve noted here before, it’s incredibly interesting that our Gen Xers’ crippling student-loan debt and lack of decent jobs never were considered to be newsworthy at all, but that those problems sure the fuck are today, now that they are affecting the precious “Baby-on-Board” crowd.]

“No one’s talkin’ ’bout my generation,” notes columnist M.J. Fine, a Generation Xer. “It’s hard to think of an era in which people ages 34-49 had less social currency.”

Remember the great coming clash over Social Security between Boomers and Xers? We’ve vanished from that narrative too, not just in a thousand words but over the course of a full-length book: The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown.

It’s not just the Times. In Sonya Stinson’s frivolous “What Gen Y Can Teach Boomers About Financial Planning” in Forbes, Gen X neither learns nor teaches. Gen X doesn’t exist.

Poof!

I saved the worst for last. Courtesy of a sharp-eyed reader, check out PBS’ Judy Woodruff, defining the generations for a NewsHour interview with the author of The Next America:

“I just want to remind everybody what those age groups are, the Millennials, 18 to 33 years old today, Gen X, 34 to 39 [years old] today, the Boomers, 50 — the big group — 50 to 68 [years old], and the Silent [Generation], 69 to 86 [years old].”

In PBS World, Gen X has shrunk. If you’re in your forties, you no longer have a generational home.

Life begins at 40?

[To be fair, I listened to the PBS clip, and in it Woodruff clearly says “Gen X, 34 to 49″ years old. The transcript, however, reads “34 to 39” years old, an apparent typo.]

More like the empty void of generational purgatory, as far as the Boomer-controlled media is concerned.

Indeed, the No. 1 reason that we Gen Xers have been so successfully disappeared is that the boomers have controlled the media, and thus the national discussion, for most of our lives. The powers that be want us to be non-existent, and the powers that be mostly still are boomers and they still mostly control the media, and thus they still mostly monopolize the national discussion.

But actually, as much as I have complained about the unfairness and the insanity of it, I think that I would take my “generational purgatory” (an apt description of Gen X) over the unearned and undeserved attention and rewards that the boomers and the Millennials have received.

Having been left to raise ourselves to such a degree and having been systematically and even institutionally ignored and passed over — and, indeed, having been shit and pissed upon — our entire fucking lives, we Gen Xers have, out of necessity, developed strength, resilience and self-reliance that most members of the pretty fucking awful, overprivileged generations that immediately precede us and immediately follow us never will possess.*

And who wants to be a member of a generation whose collective personality is like that of Nellie Olesen? (OK, the boomers and the Millennials do, but that was a rhetorical question.)

Gen X still rules — not literally, not sociopolitically, but where it really counts — which is why we’re so widely ignored by the two generations that don’t hold a candle to us.

–

*That said, while the boomers have been a lost fucking cause for a long, long time, and will take their generational assholery with them to their graves and urns, I suppose that the Millennials still have enough time to not become just like their baby-boomer examples.

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

Reuters photo

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

 Let’s see:

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

• Threw U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice under the bus when she came under attack from the white supremacists and patriarchs, who rather would see U.S. Sen. John Kerry in the position of U.S. secretary of state, since a white male Democrat is better than any other kind of Democrat
• Capitulated on the Bush-regime-era tax cuts for the rich, having promised over and over and over again to increase taxes on inviduals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000, but actually having agreed to increase taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and families earning more than $450,000  
• Is poised to sell us out on Social Security and/or Medicare in the deferred so-called “fiscal cliff” fight over the federal budget (after all, he and his family are set for life)
• Is poised to name Repugnican former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel as U.S. secretary of defense, reinforcing the meme that Democrats are shitty on defense, and doing something that a Repugnican president never would do (i.e., appoint a Democrat to his cabinet, perhaps especially for defense)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, well.

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

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

See you around, fools.

Thoughts on the Repugnican Tea Party convention I did not watch

Full disclosure: I haven’t watched even one second of the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention that happened this past week. Not even one second of a video clip. I probably will watch a clip of Clint Eastwood’s infamous, reportedly surreal performance later, but in general, for me, watching any of the quadrennial KKK convention is like how it is for the characters in that scene in “Lord of the Rings” in which Gandalf speaks the dark language of Mordor: unpleasant, perhaps even painful.

I will make some remarks, though.

It’s interesting that one of the biggest news items that came from the convention is that two delegates were tossed out for having thrown nuts at CNN camera woman Patricia Carroll, who is a 34-year-old black woman and a native of Alabama, and for having remarked at the time: “This is how we feed animals.”

(Funny — animals throw shit, yet these animals were referring to an actual human being as an “animal.”)

Carroll said of the incident: “This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South. You come to places like this [she apparently was referring to Florida and/or to Tampa and/or to the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention in the Tampa Bay Times Forum] [and] you can count the [number of] black people on your hand. They [white people] see us [black people] doing things they don’t think I should do.”

Carroll also said that such an incident “could happen to me at the Democratic convention or standing on the street corner. Racism is a global issue.”

Racism indeed is a global issue, but I’d be shocked if she were treated like that at the Democratic National Convention. Not that the Dems are perfect — far from it; thus, I’m a registered member of the Green Party — but your chances of facing discrimination at a Democratic crowd are much lower than at a KKK convention.

I mean, come on. Does Carroll really feel that way or does she feel pressure to parrot the false equivalency between the Repugnican Tea Party and the Democratic Party (“Both parties are responsible for/guilty of [fill in the blank]!!!”) that the corporately owned and controlled mainstream media, including her employer CNN, love to spout, despite its demonstrable falsity?

Some have claimed that the “feed[ing] animals” crack was a slam at members of the media in general, and that therefore it wasn’t an incident of racism, but would the apparent white supremacist fucktards have thrown food at a white male camera operator? Fuck no. (Similarly, President Barack Obama has been publicly disrespected by wingnuts in ways that a white male president never would be.) 

The other big news item from the KKK convention was that Pretty Boy Paul Ryan told so many lies during his speech that members of the stage crew had to rush out with a fire extinguisher because his pants had begun to smoke.

I won’t delve into Ryan’s lies, because with Ryan it’s like it is with Condoleezza Rice: How can you tell that they’re lying? When you see that their lips are moving.

I will say, however, that I take issue with Ryan’s remark, early in his speech: “I accept the calling of my generation to give our children the America that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old — and I know that we are ready.”

Um, Paul Ryan is not ready to be even vice president, and certainly is not ready to be president if it came to that, and Ryan wants to destroy Medicare and Social Security as we know it, yet here he is, claiming like George W. Bush used to claim, that it’s vitally important to him to ensure that our young people of today will have what our old people of today have — while at the same time proclaiming that of course today’s young people can’t expect to receive what today’s and yesterday’s old people have received; there will have to be significant cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security. Or hey, better yet, privatize both programs to ensure that the treasonous plutocrats can then loot the Medicare and Social Security funds entirely!

They want it both fucking ways.

They can’t have it both fucking ways.

And it incenses me that Paul Fucking Ryan claims Generation X when Generation X does not claim Paul Ryan.

Generation X is not about aiding and abetting millionaire baby boomers like Mittens Romney in sucking up every last crumb before the greedy fucking baby boomers finally kick off, leaving nothing for those of us who have to follow behind them like circus slaves have to follow elephants with shovels.

Of course, Paul Ryan, like Mittens, is a millionaire. (While Chris Matthews recently quipped that Mittens was born on third base, I’d say that it’s more accurate to say that Paul Ryan was born on third base, while Mittens was born on home plate.)

Both Ryan and Mittens come from wealthy families. Neither is a rags-to-riches story. Ryan isn’t the millionaire that Mittens is, but he is Mittens’ Mini-Me.*

And in his big speech yesterday, Mittens himself proclaimed, in part:

“This president [Barack Obama] can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right. But this president cannot tell us that you are better off today than when he took office. America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith. But today, the time has come to turn the page.”

It’s true that Barack Obama has been a disappointing president. It was only last night that I finally gave Obama a penny toward his re-election — I gave him an online donation of $30, and that was inspired more from the unfair Repugnican Tea Party attacks upon him, especially this past week, than it was inspired by any hope or change that he’s actually delivered. I may or may not give him a little more money, and I most likely will not vote for him, since he’ll win my state of California and all of its 55 electoral votes in the winner-takes-all Electoral College no matter how I vote, even if I vote for Mittens. We’ll see.

President Obama’s failure is not that he has governed too far to the left. It’s that he’s too beholden to his corporate sugar daddies (he took much more from the Wall Street weasels than even John McCainosaurus did for the 2008 campaign, and then proceeded to put Wall Street weasels in charge of his economic policy) and he has focused too much on this “bipartisanship” bullshit (whether he sincerely believes that there’s any such thing or whether that’s just been rhetoric, I don’t know) instead of taking care of his base — you know, those of us who actually put him in office.

Consequently, Obama has not enacted the progressive vision that he at least implicitly promised us he would. The pro-corporate, center-right Clintonista brand of the Democratic Party has been killing us, just more slowly than has the Repugnican Tea Party.

A real — that is, an actually progressive, and not a Clintonista — Democratic president would have taken advantage of having had the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives controlled by his party in 2009 and 2010 and would have pushed through an actually progressive agenda, not thoroughly squandered it by having tryied to sing a rousing round of “Kumbaya” with the fascists in Congress who never are going to support anything that he says or does anyway (largely, in this case, because of his race).

But if I had to choose between four more years of Barack Obama or four (or even eight!) years of Mittens Romney, if a gun were pointed to my head and I had to choose the lesser of the two evils, it would be Obama, hands down. No question.

Mittens Romney declared in his speech yesterday that “the time has come to turn the page.”

What he doesn’t say is that he wants to turn the page of the American history book back to the 1950s, when women and non-whites had no rights, when gays were arrested solely for being gay or even just being suspected of being gay, when the nation lived in perpetual fear of overseas enemies (real or fabricated, but largely fabricated), when those who disagree with the right-wing fascists were called “anti-American” “Communists” and oppressed (many of them lost their jobs), when there were no environmental protection laws or agencies, when it was easier to suppress the voting rights of the “undesirables,” when, in short, right-wing, “Christo”fascist, (presumably) heterosexual, vulture capitalist, planet-killing, war-mongering white men — like Mittens Romney and Paul Ryan — ran the whole fucking show. 

Indeed, did the Repugnican Tea Party unearth its 2012 party platform from a time capsule buried in the 1950s?

I’m betting that more than half of us Americans on Election Day will reject Mittens’ agenda of dragging all of us back to the time when only people just like Mittens ran the show. The only way that I can see Mittens “winning” in November is if his treasonous, fascistic party is able to suppress enough Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. They’re certainly trying.

And Clint Eastwood — the man has made some good films, but really, if you have to have a senile old man make your case for you, then maybe your case is not that strong.

—

*Wikipedia notes of Paul Ryan:

Ryan was born in Janesville, Wisconsin to Elizabeth A. “Betty” (née Hutter) and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer, and was the youngest of four siblings. A fifth-generation Wisconsinite, his father was of Irish ancestry and his mother is of German and English ancestry….His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan (1858–1917), founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan’s grandfather was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin by President Calvin Coolidge.

Ryan attended St. Mary’s Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team. He attended Joseph A. Craig High School in Janesville, where he was elected president of his junior class and subsequently named prom king. As class president Ryan also gained a seat on the school board, making it the first time he held political office.Between his sophomore year and junior year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald’s. He was on his high school’s ski, track and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He also participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations.R yan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

When he was 16 and working a summer job, Ryan received a worried phone call from his father’s secretary. He came home to find his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed after suffering from a heart attack.His grandfather and great-grandfather also died from heart attacks, at ages 57 and 59 respectively, inspiring Ryan’s later interest in health and exercise. Following the death of his father, Ryan’s grandmother moved in with the family and because she struggled with Alzheimer’s Ryan had to help care for her while his mother studied at college in Madison, Wisconsin. Due to his father’s death Ryan received survivor’s benefits through Social Security until his 18th birthday, which were saved up in order to pay for his college education. …

So Social Security sure worked out pretty well for Paul Ryan. But since he already got his…

Before he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Ryan worked for the construction company founded by his grandfather (Ryan Incorporated Central), and Ryan’s wife was a tax attorney when they met, so again, we’re not talking about an impoverished family here. Ryan’s net worth (due mostly because he married into a rich family) is in the range of $4 million to $5 million — which, again, compared to Mittens’ net worth of more than $250 million, makes Paul Ryan Mittens’ Mini-Me.

Can we abort the wedge issues already?

So if I understand Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, who is running for the U.S. Senate for Missouri, correctly, if a woman is properly reviled enough — which she should be if she has been the victim of a “legitimate rape” — she will have a revulsion-induced miscarriage should one of her “legitimate” rapist’s spermatazoa successfully fertilize one of her eggs, which very rarely happens in the case of “legitimate” rape anyway. Doctors say so, Akin apparently said. On television.

If revulsion-induced miscarriages were a medical reality, wouldn’t thousands of women have had miscarriages every time they saw and heard the likes of, say, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin or Prick Santorum — or, for that matter, Todd Akin — on television?

A little visit to Wikipedia shows that Akin is a 65-year-old white guy (yet another fucking baby boomer) who calls himself a Presbyterian, and his bio on Wikipedia mentions no medical training whatsoever.

Still, despite his possessing, presumably, no female reproductive anatomy himself, and possessing, apparently, no medical training whatsofuckingever, Akin very apparently feels comfortable pontificating upon women’s reproductive choices — even to the point where he’ll just pull shit out of his ass. 

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a staunch supporter of women’s reproductive rights. If I were a woman, I wouldn’t want some “Christo”fascist dictating to my uterus.

But abortion as a knee-jerk wedge issue is beyond tiresome.

Abortion was decided in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade, and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (most of them “Christo”fascists) need to move the fuck on already and let the rest of us have the freedoms and liberties that are guaranteed to us.

But I’m not sure who is worse: the likes of Todd Akin talking out of his toxically patriarchal, misogynist, “Christo”fascist ass or the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic Party, wasting no time at all in firing off yet another “outrage” fundraising e-mail yesterday. Wasserman Schultz’s e-mail, titled “Legitimate rape,” invites you to “Take a stand for women now.”

When you click on that option, you are then immediately taken to a webpage that asks for your name, e-mail address and ZIP Code. When you enter that information by clicking on a box labeled “TAKE A STAND,” you then immediately are taken not to a webpage on, oh, say, women’s reproductive rights, but  to a fucking Obama Victory Fund 2012 fundraising webpage.

The only, or at least the best, way to “stand up for women,” you see, is to give money to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Every time some Repugnican Tea Party dipshit says something stupid and/or fascistic, which is often, the Dems quite predictably fire off yet another of their “OUTRAGE!” fundraising e-mails. What good is a scandal or pseudo-scandal if you can’t profit from it?

Aren’t even the Democratic Party hacks sick and fucking tired of this predictable, craven bullshit?

Abortion is an important issue, but how about global warming and other environmental destruction (such as the British Petroleum oil spill in which the corporate-ass-kissing Barack Obama was less than fucking worthless)? How about reining in the bloated-beyond-belief military-corporate-industrial complex, which wastes trillions of our tax dollars while we are told that we are parasites and that thus the social safety net (what little of it remains, that is) must be annihilated? How about the growing, yawning gap between the rich and the poor? How about our young people, whose future is incredibly fucking bleak? How about preserving the environment for them, and also for them ending perpetual bogus warfare and other bogus military spending for the greedy, treasonous motherfuckers’ war-profiteering, and how about preserving Social Security and Medicare for them and for us members of Generation X and for future generations instead of blatantly stealing the dollars of those of us in Generation X and Generation Y who have been paying into Social Security and Medicare for decades or for years by denying us what we already have fucking paid for?

No, the partisan duopoly doesn’t want to talk about those issues because those are our most pressing issues.

They want to talk about abortion. Ad nauseam.

Let’s fucking face it already: Neither of the two major political parties is willing or able to tackle our most pressing problems. Whatever the two parties might have been in the past, all that they are now is fundraising machines — and they use visceral social issues and fear of the other party to (try to) get us to give them our money and our votes.

And we allow this state of affairs in a so-called “democracy.”

It seems to me that we have the “democracy” that we deserve.

—

*Actually, a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology concluded that:

Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.

Granted, this study was published in 1996, but I can’t see that much, if anything, has changed since then. (Human ova are still fertilized in the same way, to my knowledge…)

Why I don’t blog for the baby boomers

Infanticide suddenly seems like a good thing…

Most people who read blogs probably assume that most bloggers want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible — and therefore, never to (gasp!) offend anybody.

Not me.

I don’t think that I’ve ever come out and said it, but for these past almost 10 years of blogging, I’ve been writing primarily for those in my age group (Generation X) and younger.

If some baby boomers or even older folks read my blog, fine, but if they don’t, perhaps that’s even better, since I don’t write for them. I long ago stopped looking to the baby boomers (generally identified as those born between 1946 and 1964, but to me the cohort really spans from about 1944 to 1960) to be agents of positive change, and I look to those in my age group and younger instead.

Most of my critics turn out to be (I see from their blog avatars) baby boomers. Before I take their criticism to heart, I look at their mugshot avatars. Chances are, they’re boomers (who apparently think that an Internet presence makes them young again [it doesn’t], and who of course have to plaster their faces on their blogs, being spotlight hogs). If they have a bio, I read that, too. Chances are, from their bios I surmise that they’re people I wouldn’t like in person, so it comes as no shock that I’ve written something that (gasp!) offends their delicate sensibilities. (People who act as though they have the fucking right never to be offended in the least bit — they’re interesting. [Psychiatrically, I mean.])

I could write a book on the fucking baby boomers, but I’ll try to keep this to a blog post, albeit a long one.

George W. Bush (born in 1946) could be the poster boy for the baby-boom generation.

He accomplished nothing on his own, but coasted on his family name. If George Sr. hadn’t been president first, there’s no way in hell that George Jr. would have been governor of Texas and then the second president named George Bush.

Not only that, but George Jr. in 2000 stole office (with the help of his brother Jeb, who then was the governor of Florida, the critical state that George Jr. “won”; with the help of then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who infamously disenfranchised voters by deeming them felons when they were not; and with the help of the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, which stopped the recounting process in Florida). George Jr. didn’t even win the presidency outright.

Then, once in the Oval Office, George W. thoroughly trashed the nation, among other things allowing 9/11 to happen (remember the August 2001 presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”?), allowing Hurricane Katrina to kill hundreds of Americans, taking the nation to a bogus war for the no-bid federal-government contracts for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, and giving giant tax breaks to the filthy rich. George W. Bush had received the nation in good shape from Bill Clinton and the prosperous 1990s, and delivered it to Barack Obama in January 2009 on the brink of collapse.

That, in a nutshell, is the baby-boomer modus operandi: inherit your power and your wealth from your parents, squander it selfishly and recklessly, and leave nothing behind for those who follow you, not even the polar ice caps.

Baby boomers unabashedly display a bumper sticker that reads “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance.” (I’ve seen this bumper sticker on cars driven by boomers several times.)

This is supposed to be funny. Ha ha.

Except that the baby boomers’ parents, the members of the so-called “greatest generation,” didn’t spend their children’s inheritance. They gave their children — the baby boomers — their inheritance.

Not so with the baby-boom generation, the first generation in the history of the United States of America that did not care in the fucking least about at least trying to leave things in better shape for those who must follow them.

The baby boomers, endlessly doted upon by their parents, had no problems going to college and getting good jobs. Hell, they didn’t even have to go to college to live well. (Neither of my baby-boomer parents has a four-year college degree, but neither of them during their young to middle adulthood ever struggled with buying homes and cars. My four-year degree, on the other hand, which I worked hard for, was worthless when I received it — along with considerable student-loan debt — in 1990 during the first George Bush recession, and I gave up on having a paid job that allows me to make good use of my skills [without doing evil and without completely being exploited by some talentless plutocrats] and I gave up on home ownership long, long ago.) If the boomers put just a minimal effort into attaining a college degree, a good job, a home, a nice car, these things were theirs for the taking. The members of the “greatest generation” made sure of that.

But do the baby boomers today give a rat’s ass about our young people of today?

Hell fucking no.

This is from The Associated Press today:

The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees. …

Again, when this Gen X’er received his worthless bachelor’s degree in 1990 — a journalism degree, which in the face of mass newspaper layoffs at the time was worthless (and still would be mostly worthless today, although as a blogger it gives me a leg up) — there were not, to his recollection, any news stories about the fact that in the face of the recession, college degrees were worthless, and newly minted college graduates had to take jobs that greatly underutilized their talents and abilities — and struggle with student loans they couldn’t afford to repay. (Massive student loan debt was something that the boomers did not experience when they were of college age and young adults because their parents saw them as young people to be fostered — not as cash cows to be milked dry.) 

It would have been nice to get the media attention then that today’s struggling young college grads are getting today — in my day, for instance, crushing student-loan debt wasn’t seen as any problem whatsofuckingever, since my generation always has been viewed by the boomer majority as wholly disposable, but today, both the Democratic and the Repugnican candidates for president are promising to work on the suddenly-now-obvious problem of crushing student-loan debt — but, I suppose, better late than never. (And ah, well, as my fellow Gen X’er Ted Rall has noted, we X’ers indeed are the “leapfrog generation,” the generation [between the boomers and Generation Y] that has been passed over entirely.)

Why have Gen-X and younger college grads struggled so much in the job market since at least the First Great Bush Recession (circa 1990)?

It’s not just the economy, although the greedy, get-mine-and-get-out boomers fucked that up, too.

It’s the boomers’ sheer numbers — 76 million of them, according to Wikipedia — that alone would create at least some amount of scarcity in the American job market (and indeed, the majority of the plum jobs have been taken by the boomers for decades now), but their sheer numbers are coupled with the fact that, unlike the generations before them, they refuse to leave the fucking stage when their act has long been over. The boomers view their jobs just like the U.S. Supreme Court “justices” view theirs: We’ll have to pry their cold, dead fingers from their desks.

Other generations of Americans knew when it was time to hand over the reins. And they handed them over. Not the boomers.

Witness baby boomer Madonna (born 1958), whose latest big video has her playing a high-school cheerleader. She’s fiftyfuckingthree. It apparently kills her to fucking pass the torch already. And she’s typical of her generation, thinking that she’s some hot shit acting and trying to look decades younger than she is, when in fact, she’s just fucking pathetic, refusing, like Peter Pan, to grow the fuck up already.

With the baby boomers we have and will continue to have a nation full of old people, but not old and wise people.

Baby boomers whine that they can’t retire because they can’t afford to retire. Bullshit. Most of them can afford to retire — it’s that they want to live in excess and opulence (“enough” isn’t in their vocabulary) and it’s also that, whether they will admit it or not, out of their egotism they must believe that we younger folk can’t get along without them.

As Wikipedia notes of the boomers (emphasis mine):

One feature of boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about ….

Yes, indeed, all of that rhetoric from the boomers in the 1960s about changing the world, and boy, have they. They fought against the Vietnam War, only to create the Vietraq War themselves. (Apparently the only reason that they opposed the Vietnam War was to save their own skins. They were perfectly OK, however, with bogus warfare in Iraq. After all, it was someone else doing the dying for the baby boomers’ profits.) The American empire, which is being sucked dry by the vampires who comprise the corporate-military-prison-industrial complex (the majority of them boomers, of course), is on the brink of death, and even the North Pole is melting. The baby boomers ushered in change, indeed.

The baby boomers are the first generation of Americans in the nation’s history who are leaving things much worse off for the generations that follow them.

Before the boomers it always had been the American ideal that the current generation in power leaves things in better shape, not in worse shape, for the generations that follow them. And congratulations, boomers; your generation very apparently is the one that, history probably will record, destroyed the American empire. You fucked it all up on your watch.

Point out these obvious truths, and the boomers almost invariably will tell you (the post-boomer) how “Angry!” you are, as though you’re defective for being angry about obvious injustices.

No, when you are being raped in the ass with ground grass for lube, you have every fucking right to be ANGRY!

The boomers are taking everything with them, shamelessly — and even bragging about it in their “funny” bumper stickers.

Here’s another cheery story from The Associated Press today (emphases mine):

Social Security is rushing even faster toward insolvency, driven by retiring baby boomers, a weak economy and politicians’ reluctance to take painful action to fix the huge retirement and disability program.

The trust funds that support Social Security will run dry in 2033 — three years earlier than previously projected — the government said [today].

There was no change in the year that Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run out of money. It’s still 2024. …

At age 44, I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare since I began working when I was a teenager, but I don’t expect to see a fucking penny of either. The baby boomers are poised to blatantly steal my money — and slam me for being “so angry!” while they do it.

The boomers are leaving those of us who follow them with less than nothing, but we’re supposed to think that they’re great fucking people nonetheless. (Or, at least, we’re supposed to keep our fucking mouths shut while the boomers screw us over like no other generation in U.S. history has screwed over the next generation ever before.)

That’s part of the baby boomers’ mass narcissistic sociopathology — they are a “special” generation, indeed — and the reason that I put the “greatest generation” in quotation marks is that I don’t see how you can assert that the parents who created the most spoiled generation in the nation’s history comprise the “greatest generation.” No, in producing the baby boomers, the members of the “greatest generation” fucked up big-time. It’s almost impossible to overstate what awful parents the members of the “greatest generation” were. Regardless of what their intentions might have been, the results of their parenting have been catastrophic for the nation — and for the world.

And the boomers’ bumper sticker sums up their credo, their manifesto, indeed, their raison d’être, neatly: “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance.”

Yes, I got that long, long ago. Consequently, I stopped looking to the boomers long ago. The ones who created the colossal mess aren’t the ones to fix it. The boomers exist to cause problems, not to solve problems, and to consume, not to produce. They are the problem, not the solution. They are, essentially, dead to me. That’s why I could give a flying fuck if a single baby boomer ever reads a single blog post of mine.

I look not to the boomers, but to my fellow members of Gen X and to those poor souls who have to follow us. (I’d thought that my generation had it bad, but today’s young people are even more screwed, apparently, than has been my generation. They do have one thing that my generation didn’t have, however, and that’s a national conversation about how badly today’s young people have it.)

We, the post-boomers, are the clean-up crew. It’s not a job that we wanted. It’s a job that the boomers have forced upon us.

What the baby boomers probably should do while those of us who have had to follow them perform the incredibly difficult work of cleaning up after their decades-long wholesale trashing of the nation is shut the fuck up and be very thankful that the national conversation has not yet turned to the elephant in the room, to the root of our nation’s problems: the baby boomers and the increasing burden on the nation that they are. And that we post-boomers have not yet begun to seriously discuss a much, much better use for the baby boomers: something along the lines of Soylent Green.

You have to be brain-damaged to celebrate what they’ve just done to you

Associated Press image

Your future is being dismantled, chunk by chunk, by the partisan duopoly in D.C. — but hey, look! There’s Gabrielle Giffords!

No offense, but what does it say that a literally brain-damaged congressperson voted “yes” on your legislation?

But seriously, apparently the “feel-good” “news” story of the day is that Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was capped in the head by yet another white male psychopath/sociopath in Tucson in January, returned to the U.S. House of Representatives just in time in order to give her thumbs-up to the Capitulator in Chief’s latest selling out of yet another huge chunk of the store to the plutocratic and pro-plutocratic right wing.

Reports The Associated Press tonight:

Washington, D.C. — Crisis legislation to yank the nation past the threat of a historic financial default sped through the [U.S.] House [of Representatives tonight], breaking weeks of deadlock. The rare moment of cooperation turned celebratory when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords strode in for the first time since she was shot in the head nearly seven months ago.

The vote was 269-161, a scant day ahead of the deadline for action. But all eyes were on Giffords, who drew thunderous applause as she walked into the House chamber unannounced and cast her vote in favor of the bill.

A final Senate sign-off for the measure is virtually assured on Tuesday. Aside from raising the debt limit, the bill would slice federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion, and perhaps much more.

“If the bill were presented to the president, he would sign it,” the White House said, an understatement of enormous proportions.

After months of fierce struggle, the House’s top Republican and Democratic leaders swung behind the bill, ratifying a deal sealed Sunday night with a phone call from House Speaker John Boehner to President Barack Obama.

Many Republicans contended the bill still would cut too little from federal spending; many Democrats said much too much. Still, Republican lawmakers supported the compromise, 174-66, while Democrats split, 95-95.

“The legislation will solve this debt crisis and help get the American people back to work,” Boehner said at a news conference a few hours before the vote.

The Democratic leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was far less effusive. “I’m not happy with it, but I’m proud of some of the accomplishments in it. That’s why I’m voting for it.”

So, too, many of the first-term Republicans whose election in 2010 handed the GOP control of the House and set the federal government on a new, more conservative course.

“It’s about time that Congress come together and figure out a way to live within our means,” said one of them, Sean Duffy of Wisconsin. “This bill is going to start that process although it doesn’t go far enough.”

The measure would cut federal spending by at least $2.1 trillion over a decade — and possibly considerably more — and would not require tax increases. [Emphasis mine.] The U.S. debt limit would rise by at least $2.1 trillion, tiding the Treasury over through the 2012 elections. …

I’m happy that Giffords is doing better these days, but does that fucking erase the fact that, chunk by chunk, my future as a forty-something, as a member of the crew that has to follow with shovels the elephants in the parade that are the fucking baby boomers, is being destroyed by the overwhelmingly self-serving, legacy-ignoring baby-boomer “leaders” in Washington? And that Capitulator in Chief Barack Obama is happily helping them in the name of “bipartisanship”?

Oh, we’re seeing a lot of “change,” all right — the decimation of Social Security and Medicare, which I’ve been paying into since I was a teenager, and other public benefits sure the fuck is a change, just not the change that I’d hoped for, and certainly not the change that President Hopey-Changey Obama had promised us.

But I suppose that I’m a heartless ogre if I am not mindlessly distracted by the “feel-good” fact that Gabrielle Giffords was there to vote “yes” on the further destruction of my nation, to endorse the further widening of the gulf between the rich and the poor in the rapidly crumbling United States of America.

I haven’t blogged on the “debt ceiling crisis” until now for many reasons:

One, I’ve come to expect Barack Obama to sell us out. He consistently and predictably sells us out. He is committed to selling us out. (He always has wanted to be the next Ronald Reagan, remember. He is succeeding spectacularly.)

Two, I’ve always figured that “at the last minute” they (the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — and if you can’t tell the difference between the two, well, don’t feel badly, because most of the rest of us can’t, either) would announce some “breakthrough” “deal,” thus “miraculously” averting “economic Armageddon!”

Three, I’ve always figured that this has been bullshit all along, that this always has been just an elephant-and-donkey show, that the Democrats and the Repugnicans are in bed together and that a “last-minute deal” always was in the script, that the fear-mongering was meant to create the illusion among the masses that there’s actually some struggle for the soul of the nation going on in D.C. — and not, say, the collusion of, for and by two duopolistic parties that don’t give a flying fuck about you or me that’s actually going on.*

Fuck, they even threw The Return of Gabrielle Giffords into the script.

If I wasn’t a conspiracy theorist before (and I wasn’t), I think that I am now.

—

*No, this statement is not an endorsement of “Americans Elect.” “Americans Elect” is evil. The Wall Street weasels who have caused our economic collapse are not the ones to turn to for solutions.

WHO is demonic and mob-like?

Updated below

Associated Press photo

The new face of terrorism? The latest political-ideologically motivated murderous rampage was committed not by some “demonic” liberal, but by yet another paranoid, bigoted, stupid white man who, among many other wingnutty things, opposes the immigration of people who aren’t just like he is, including those who aren’t “Christian.”

When is the last time that some liberal went on a political-ideologically motivated murderous rampage here in the United States of America?

According to the American right wing, acts of violence committed by left-wingers are commonplace. In her introduction* to her subtly titled book Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America, wingnutty whackjob Ann Cunter proclaims that “The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic”; “A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group”; and “The Democratic Party is the party of the mob…. Democrats … are the mob.”

She goes on:

The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes — as yet — but uses a more insidious means to incite the mob. The twisting of truth, stirring of passions, demonizing of opponents, the relying on propagandistic images in lieu of ideas — these are the earmarks of a mob leader.

Gee, I don’t know. It seems to me that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are much more like the mob than are the Democrats, and that Cunter’s definition of mob-like behavior describes the behavior of her and her fellow Repugnican Tea Party traitors to a “T” (that’s “T” for treason).

The Democrats just let George W. Bush treasonously steal the White House in late 2000 — meanwhile, there were actual mobs of Repugnican operatives in Florida who did their best to disrupt the ballot counting at ballot-counting sites, which to me sure the fuck amounts to treason — and then the Democrats just let Bush treasonously launch his illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War in March 2003. (Thousands of our troops have died for the unelected Bush regime’s repeated lies about its reasons for having launched the Vietraq War. If that isn’t treason — to launch a war that is good for the profiteering of a relative handful of corporate war profiteers but that is disastrous for the nation as a whole — then I don’t know what the fuck is.)

There were some protests against the blatant theft of the White House and the launching of the bogus Vietraq War — I attended them — but they were nonviolent and thus they were non-threatening to the powers that be. (I’d have written “the powers that were,” but these powers essentially still are, so I’ll leave it at “the powers that be.”) Thus, the protests were ineffective. (Nonviolence, as the right-wingers know, often if not usually is ineffective, which is why they often embrace the use of violence for achieving their political aims.) 

And indeed, the unelected Bush regime was able to get its bogus Vietraq War for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp in large part because of the mob-like, toxic national political atmosphere that the Repugnicans had created in the wake of 9/11, in which to disagree with the unelected Bush regime on just about anything supposedly amounted to treason and supposedly aided and abetted the “terrorists.”**

Democrats dangerous? Democrats ready to put wingnuts’ heads on pikes?

Fuck, I only wish! (Just as I only wish that corporate-ass-licking capitulator in chief Barack “Hope and Change” Obama actually were a socialist.)

Speaking of mobs, it was the “tea party” traitors who disrupted the congressional town halls to discuss the Obama administration’s (pseudo) health-care reform. It was a nationwide coordinated attempt by the right wing to disrupt the town halls that was reminiscent of the coordinated attempt by the right wing to disrupt the ballot counting in Florida in late 2000. The right-wingers hate democracy except when democracy goes their way. (And even when democracy doesn’t go their way, they’ll treasonously steal an election if they can get away with it.)

Now that’s mob activity. I only wish that the waaay-too-easily-cowed Democrats would engage in actual mob activity when it comes to things like stolen presidential elections, the launching of bogus wars for corporate war profiteering, and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ current plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and to eliminate, as much as is possible, taxes for the rich and the super-fucking-rich — because surely the remedy for our nation’s economic woes is to make the poor even poorer and the filthy rich even richer.

Another quote from Ann Cunter before I move on: In her intro to her latest collection of venom, bile and blatant lies, she also notes, “It is official Democratic policy to appeal to the least-informed, weakest-minded members of the public.” Um, isn’t that Faux “News'” mission statement? And isn’t that Cunter’s bread and fucking butter, appealing to the least-informed, weakest-minded members of the public? If millions of so-called Americans weren’t paranoid, abjectly ignorant, bigoted, self-righteous and hypocritical mouth-breathing fucktards, Cunter couldn’t keep selling her demonic books. 

It’s hard to tell whether Cunter is someone who hypocritically projects her own evil onto others like she’s on crack or if she’s an outright liar for pay (very good pay, apparently). What she at least appears to desire, however, is an Ayn-Randian “utopia” in which everyone whom she disagrees with has been eliminated. And because she apparently fears that the left wing might one day purge the nation of the right wing, that the left wing might beat the right wing to it — even though the modern American left wing has shown itself to be pathetically unable to accomplish anything big and routinely lays down and plays doormat to the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (Sure, Gee Dubya, we’ll just give you the White House; sure, Gee Dubya, we’ll just give you your Vietraq War; sure, John “Cry Me a River” Boehner, we’ll just give you your cuts to Social Security and Medicare and your tax breaks for the rich and the super-rich) — she has written a book telling her fellow wingnuts that the liberals are gearing up to put their heads on pikes. (Or, again, she’s lying and she knows it. Hard to say which…)

While I can’t think of a single instance of an actual liberal actually having gone on a murderous rampage over his or her political ideology, Norway this past week was rocked by a white-male wingnut who went on a murderous rampage over his right-wing political ideology.

Reports Reuters today:

Sundvollen, Norway — Norway mourned [today] 93 people killed in a shooting spree and car bombing by a Norwegian who saw his attacks as “atrocious, but necessary” to defeat liberal immigration policies and the spread of Islam.

In his first comment via a lawyer since his arrest, Anders Behring Breivik, 32, said he wanted to explain himself at a court hearing [tomorrow] about extending his custody.

“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” [lawyer] Geir Lippestad said.

The lawyer said Breivik had admitted to Friday’s shootings at a Labour party youth camp and the bombing that killed seven people in Oslo’s government district a few hours earlier.

However, “he feels that what he has done does not deserve punishment,” Lippestad told NRK public television.

“What he has said is that he wants a change in society, and in his understanding, in his head, there must be a revolution.” …

More information about terrorist Anders Behring Breivik will come out, I’m sure, but it’s interesting that Ann Cunter very apparently shares his core right-wing beliefs on such issues as “liberal immigration policies” and “the spread of Islam.” I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Breivik is familiar with Cunter’s work.

The picture of Breivik above shows him to be a young white guy. Murderous thugs or terrorists aren’t supposed to be squeaky-clean-looking conservative blond white guys. Nope. They’re supposed to be black or Arab or Muslim (or some combination thereof).

I have to wonder if Breivik’s brand of terrorism — and, because he’s a right-wing white guy, are the wingnuts here at home even going to acknowledge that Breivik is indeed a terrorist? — is the new (white male) face of (domestic) terrorism. (I specify “domestic terrorism” because the white male face long has been the face of global military terrorism, although, of course, here in the United States it’s never considered to be terrorism if the U.S. military [or one of its wingnutty allies, such as Israel] commits state-sanctioned terrorism.)

Reuters notes that Friday’s “violence, Norway’s worst since World War II, has profoundly shocked the usually peaceful nation of 4.8 million.”

If a white male wingnut can slaughter 93 innocent people in the name of his political ideology in a nation that (until now, anyway…) has enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most peaceful nations on the planet, what might we expect here at home?

While Ann Cunter blathers on about Democrats seeking to put the heads of American wingnuts on pikes, it was a white-male wingnut who apparently agrees with her on the core issues who in cold blood slaughtered dozens of mostly teen-aged members of his nation’s Labour party, which is roughly equivalent to the United States’ Democratic Party. (I can only say “roughly equivalent” because the establishmentarian Democratic Party, since Bill Clinton, has been drifting further and further to the right to the point that it really can no longer be called “liberal.” Even calling it “centrist” is a stretch, since it’s more center-right than it is center-left.)

While Cunter blathers on about Democrats being violent, it was an apparently right-leaning young white man, Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head (and shot six others dead) in Tucson in January.*** Oh, and this was after Repugnican Tea Party (then-)queen Sarah Palin had posted this image on the Internet, in which Giffords had been indicated on a map with a gun-sight crosshairs:

Yes, it’s the Democrats who are mob-like, certainly not the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, whose presidential aspirants actually think it’s perfectly OK to post mob-like hit lists of political opponents on the Internet. 

I’m not advocating that we actual liberals seek out the white male wingnuts and pre-emptively put their heads on pikes because they are ticking time bombs ready to start shooting into gatherings of people whose ideology they oppose (I could list several examples of their potential targets, but I don’t want to give them any ideas) and to start bombing government buildings a la Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was yet another right-leaning white male terrorist (and who might have inspired Breivik; I suppose that we’ll find out).

Should the white male wingnuts start mimicking Anders Behring Breivik (and Timothy McVeigh and Jared Lee Loughner and…) here at home, however, I wouldn’t rule that out.

My general feeling is that if the treasonous wingnuts want another civil war, then we should give them one — and annihilate them this time, instead of actually help them with reconstruction, only so that they could continue to drag the nation down to this day.

In the meantime, however, it’s quite easy to lay waste to the claim that it’s the liberals who actually are “demonic” or “mob-like” when it’s the wingnuts who always actually have committed the lion’s share of the killing of innocents and other mob-like behavior.

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*No, I have not and I will not read Cunter’s entire book. I’d never contribute a single fucking penny toward her poisonous and treasonous right-wing propaganda. The intro to her book, if you want to read it, is available at amazon.com.

**I use quotation marks because it’s only others who kill for political gain who are “terrorists,” even though the United States slaughters far more innocent civilians in its pursuit of its own political (well, corporate) objectives than does any other nation, hands down.

***Loughner appears to be insane and his political ideology (what we know of it, anyway) therefore is muddled, but he inarguably meets the profile of the alienated, angry, dangerous young white man whom we have come to know and love. And certainly his target, a female Democratic lawmaker, sure looks like, symbolically, at least, an assualt on the liberal and the feminine by the conservative and the masculine. With a gun, of course, because the alienated, angry, dangerous young white men sure love their guns. And aren’t they exactly the ones who should possess their own home arsenals?

Update (Sunday, July 24, 2011): I’ve done a lot of reading on Anders Behring Breivik. It’s quite interesting. Apparently we know that he was inspired by at least one American white male wingnut — Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” portions of whose manifesto Breivik reportedly simply lifted for his own lengthy manifesto.

Breivik reportedly signed his wingnutty manifesto as “Andrew Berwick,” which suggests that he identifies with the Anglo(-American) brand of winguttery, even though he is a Norwegian nationalist who apparently wants to see Norway (and indeed, all of “white” Europe) purged of people who don’t look and believe like he looks and believes, much like the Nazis of Nazi Germany wanted to purge Nazi Germany of its “undesirables” and the anti-immigrant, xenophobic, misogynist, patriarchal, homophobic, capitalist/anti-socialist, Islamophobic “Christo”fascists (and some right-wing Jews) of the United States (who, with rare exceptions, such as Repugnican Tea Party presidential aspirant Herman Cain, also are white supremacists) would love to purge the United States of its “undesirables.”

The world — its demographic make-up and its balances of power – is rapidly changing, and the stupid white men who always have been in charge of the show (at least in Europe and in the United States) — and their supporters – are coming unglued. Suddenly they are the “victims” — even though no one is victimizing them and they continue to victimize others.

Finally, you should read Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the definition of the word “terrorism.”

As Greenwald points out amply, to hypocritical Americans (and, I suppose, to some hypocritical Europeans and Israelis as well), it’s only “terrorism” when a Muslim does it. And I mean literally — to many, the very definition of “terrorism” necessitates that it is an act committed by a Muslim, because, very apparently, “Christians” (and Jews) are, by definition, incapable of committing terrorism. (When you are God’s chosen, you can do no wrong, apparently. Especially if your skin is white.)

This discussion of the definition of “terrorism” reminds me of how George W. Bush used to toss around the word “civilized.” According to Bush, the Muslim “terrorists” (oops — that’s redundant!) are not “civilized,” while the “Christian” (and Jewish) residents of the United States of America (and the United States’ partner in crime, Israel), by definition are “civilized” – even though in my lifetime the “civilized” “Christians” and Jews of the United States and Israel have slaughtered far more innocent Muslims than vice-versa.

(The tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis whom the United States of America has slaughtered since March 2003 in the Vietraq War in retaliation for the roughly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11, 2001 — even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11 — is in line with the insane disproportionate amount of killing that we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the Israelis whine that they are “victims” when, in fact, every time there is an Israeli-Palestinian flare-up, only a handful of Israelis die in comparison to the large number of Palestinians who die as a result of the military aid that the United States gives Israel.

Yeah, the United States and Israel — God’s chosen nations, dontchya know — are “civilized.” Right. Just like Anders Behring Breivik is civilized.)

Newt has been Trumped

Even a casual political observer can see that it’s already over for Repugnican Tea Party presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich, who seems to have flamed out about as quickly as did Donald Trump (whose presidential aspirations, I’m guessing, never were serious).

The only question now is when Gingrich will acknowledge that it’s all over.

In one week, Gingrich has been skewered for having criticized Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Pretty Boy Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare — after all, Eddie Munster cum J.C. Penney catalog model Ryan is being groomed to be the party’s next Ronald Reagan (although there sure seems to be an awful lot of Next Ronald Reagans…) — and Gingrich was even the victim of a public attack with fairy dust.

Gingrich has been raked over the coals for having told the truth about Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare. Gingrich, on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” called Ryan’s plan “radical” “right-wing social engineering.”

How you back away from such a strong statement as that I don’t know, but the Repugnicans now are reporting that Ryan and Gingrich have kissed and made up, no hard feelings, blah blah blah.

While Gingrich has been lambasted for not having marched in lockstep with the Repugnican Tea Party, even Paul Ryan seems to recognize that he’s politically toxic, as he decided earlier this week not to run for a U.S. Senate seat in his home state of Wisconsin that because of a retirement is up for grabs in November 2012. (I had wanted to see a showdown for the Senate seat between Ryan and fairly progressive Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, but alas, that is not to be…)

Yesterday, Gingrich was “attacked” during a book signing in Minneapolis by a young man who proclaimed, “Stop the hate!” and sprinkled him with glitter:

Associated Press photo

(I’m, um, guessing that the young man is gay and that he was making a statement about Gingrich’s homophobia. To the young man I say: You go, girl!)

I have a feeling that if he keeps campaigning, Gingrich is going to be embarrassed like this frequently.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gingrich keeps on going. In polls taken over the past month, Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump occupied the top four slots of Repugnican Tea Party presidential favorites, so with the two of them having dropped out* within the past week, this pretty much leaves Gingrich’s toughest competitors Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, and Palin hasn’t announced that she’s running.

But Gingrich has not only the present, but has contemporary American history, against him. Since Dwight D. Eisenhower, no U.S. president has not been at least the governor of a state, a U.S. senator or U.S. vice president before moving on to the Oval Office. (Take that, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul!)

While Mitt Romney isn’t widely loved among the Repugnican Tea Party, I still expect him to emerge as the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nominee.

Increasingly, it seems, no one else wants that job.

P.S. I finally watched the video of Gingrich’s beglittering, and yes, it was a harmless protest against Gingrich’s history of homophobia.

“Nice to live in a free country,” Gingrich remarks falsely as he brushes away a shitload of glitter from the table on which he’s been signing copies of his book after the protester has been escorted away.

Why is it when wingnuts make statements like that, that they just love freedom, especially their opponents’ freedom, they’re just not believable?

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*A wingnut recently left a comment stating that I’m ignorant for having stated that Barack Obama’s having ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden was meant to boost Obama’s political standing, but not long after bin Laden’s assassination, both Huckabee and Trump bailed out, so, it seems to me, yes, bin Laden’s killing certainly coincided at least with the period of time in which Repugnican Tea Party candidates need to be deciding whether or not they’re going to run against Obama.

Donald Trump, president of pettiness

When I wrote that I hope that Donald Trump runs for president, I didn’t mention that Trump’s “platform” thus far has consisted — solely, as far as I can tell — of questioning where President Barack Obama was born.

I didn’t mention that because (1) Trump couldn’t win the White House anyway, no matter what; (2) Obama’s birth certificate is an uber-non-issue; and (3) my previous post on Trump was about political strategy, not about the fucking birth certificate.

But now that Obama himself has released his full, long-form birth certificate, I’ll finally write about the fucking birth certificate.*

First of all, the die-hard “birthers” aren’t going to accept the full birth certificate or any document that Obama might put forth. They are going to continue with the conspiracy theories with which they have so much of an emotional, irrational investment. They reject Obama with every white supremacist fiber of their being — primarily because he’s half-black — and no document on the fucking planet is going to change that.

This is fine. These conspiracy theorists are a whackjob minority. Minority. Obama didn’t need to release his full birth certificate in order to win re-election. I might argue that in the political long term, the better political strategy might have been for Obama to allow the crackpots to continue to stew, increasing his chances for re-election in 2012.

Those who never would vote for a black person for president never would vote for a black person for president anyway. Those are votes that permanently are lost to the white supremacist/racist Repugnican Tea Party.

It would have been better for Team Obama to continue to allow the “birthers” to turn off the undecideds, it seems to me, since it’s the undecideds (a.k.a. “swing” or “independent” voters) who — as amazing as it is that anyone could even be undecided — who apparently determine presidential elections these days, terrifyingly. (Well, when the radical right-wingers on the U.S. Supreme Court aren’t deciding the “winners” of our presidential elections, that is, of course.)

And then there is Trump.

“I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue,” Trump trumpeted in response to the release of Obama’s full birth certificate.

Trump already has demonstrated that he’s way too fucking petty to be president of the United States of America.

With the nation’s economy still in shambles — with China expected to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2016, with the Repugnican Tea Party’s “path to prosperity” being a disastrous plan to allow the rich and the super-rich pay even less in taxes than they already do and to destroy Medicare, and with neither of the duopolistic parties seriously talking about seriously cutting the bloated budget of the military-industrial complex, which would be key to solving the nation’s federal budget deficit — we have had Donald Trump stating that he feels “honored” to have played “such a big role” in the “issue” of where Barack Obama was born.

Identifying the nation’s most pressing problems, and then acting to solve them — isn’t that the main role of the president of the United States of America?

Thus far, all that Trump has done is jumped onto the nutjob bandwagon.

Of course, being wealthy himself, and with his future being fairly secure, why should he care about what the rest of us care about — the nation’s economy and the security of our future (including, of course, protecting Medicare from the raping, plundering and pillaging of the profiteering privateers)?

Donald Trump has the luxury of being able to focus on petty political myths.

The rest of us have much, much bigger fish to fry.

The one glaring hole in all of the Obama conspiracy theories — I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again — is to actually believe that after the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars that both Billary Clinton and John McCainosaurus had at their disposal to conduct opposition research on Obama in their own quests to win the White House in 2008, there was something damaging about him — and something pretty big — that their investigators/researchers failed to find. This is rather unfuckinglikely.

Obama’s die-hard haters are going to remain his haters. He needs to write them off if he hasn’t already.

Instead of trying to appease the haters who never are going to cast a vote for him anyway, Obama should be groveling on his hands and knees for the forgiveness of and for the support of members of the “professional left” like me who don’t plan to vote for him in November 2012 or to give him a fucking penny toward his re-election — not because we are wrapped up in racism-inspired conspiracy theories, but because we’re still waiting for that “hope” and “change” that he promised us back in 2007 and 2008.

P.S. This is a gem. The Associated Press reports that:

In a statement after Obama spoke [about the release of his long-form birth certificate], Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the issue a distraction — and yet blamed Obama for playing campaign politics by addressing it.

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy,” Priebus said. “Unfortunately, his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority — our economy.”

I’m often not sure if Priebus and his ilk are liars or are insane.

Clearly, Donald Trump — not Obama — has been making Obama’s birth certificate into an “issue.”

To blame Obama for responding to the “issue” is to blame the victim, which seems to be the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ favorite pastime, such as how they blame the working class and the middle class for the nation’s economic collapse instead of the treasonous Wall Street crooks who still remain free.

And the assertion that the Repugnican Tea Party — which especially during the eight, long, nightmarish years of unelected rule by the BushCheneyCorp allowed the Wall Street weasels to loot the treasury — truly cares about our economic recovery is like the assertion that the incompetent surgeon who seriously botched your surgery really cares about your health. (And to assert that handing Medicare over to the profiteering private wealth care weasels and that to reduce the taxes for the rich and the super-rich even more is going to help the economy is like having that incompetent surgeon who amputated your wrong leg “fix” the problem by amputating all of your limbs.)

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*If you are interested in background on the birth certificate brouhaha, The Associated Press gives this fairly good backgrounder:

The short-form [birth] certificate [that] Obama’s campaign released in 2008 is a legally recognized document, the one Hawaii residents receive when they request proof of their birth. Anyone who wants a copy of the more detailed, long form document must submit a waiver request, and have that request approved by Hawaii’s health department.

Obama submitted his waiver request last week, asking for two certified copies. His personal counsel, Judith Corley, also submitted a letter on Obama’s behalf, saying the president was asking for a waiver so he could make the certificate publicly available and relieve the burden on the health department by the numerous requests it receives for records of his birth.

Hawaii’s health director, Loretta Fuddy, responded with a letter of own dated April 25, approving the waiver request. Corley traveled to Hawaii to pick up the documents and carried them back to Washington on a plane. The documents arrived at the White House around 5 p.m. Tuesday.

The White House has released copies of each of the letters.

The newly released [long-form] certificate is signed by the delivery doctor, Obama’s mother and the local registrar. His mother, then 18, signed her name (Stanley) Ann Dunham Obama.

The form says [that] Barack Hussein Obama II was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, within the city limits of Honolulu.

There’s no mention of religion. It says his father, Barack Hussein Obama, age 25, was African and born in Kenya and his mother was Caucasian and born in Wichita, Kan. Obama’s mother and the doctor signed the certificate on Aug. 7 and 8.

Hawaii’s registrar certified the new photocopy of the document provided to the White House on April 25, 2011.

Eddie Munster vants to suck our blood

Putting yourself in the public spotlight is risky. You might succeed spectacularly. Or you might have Jon Stewart remarking of you on his show that he didn’t know that “Eddie Munster grew up to be a J.C. Penney catalog model.”

Indeed, Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, with his widow’s peak, indeed resembles the little Munster —

— which at least one individual pointed out as early as January.

But worse than being compared to Eddie Munster would be being compared to vampiress Sarah Palin, and I have the feeling that Paul Ryan is going the way of Sarah Palin: an individual in his or her 40s with presidential aspirations who isn’t all that bad on the eye but whose wingnutty policies are for shit and who just isn’t ready for political prime time.

As I have noted, very apparently the Repugnican Tea Party thought that they could put Paul Ryan’s pretty face on their wet dream of privatizing (and thus destroying) Medicare and ensuring that the rich and the super-rich never pay their fair share of taxes again — and that Paul Ryan alone was enough lipstick to put on that monster pig.

But thus far, the majority of Americans apparently would prefer to keep Medicare intact and to make the rich and the super-rich pay up rather than to gush all over Paul “He Works Out, You Know!” Ryan.

But Rep. Ryan apparently thinks that he’s some hot shit, taking on the president.

In case Ryan didn’t notice, his Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker-like tactics aren’t going over very well in his own home state right now, so why does he believe he has a strong political base from which to take on Barack Obama?

The uber-cocky Ryan has accused Obama of being a “campaigner-in-chief” for publicly having taken exception to Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare and to make the rich richer, and indeed, Ryan is brazenly denouncing everyone who doesn’t embrace his so-called “path to prosperity” that gives the rich and the super-rich even more tax breaks while soaking the working class, the middle class and the poor even more than they have been soaked over the past several decades. (So it is a “path to prosperity” — just not our prosperity!)

And it’s ludicrous to hear Ryan accuse Obama of being political, when of course Ryan is being at least as political, and, as they are both politicians engaging in politics, of course they’re being political. (Of course, the charge that the other side is being “political” isn’t meant to denote that the other side is engaged in the struggle for power, which is the very definition of engaging in politics, but is meant to connote that the other side is being unreasonable, that of course the other side would agree with your very reasonable proposal(s) if he or she would just be reasonable instead of “playing politics.”)

On the heels of calling Obama political (in a bad way), Paul “I’m Rubber and You’re Glue” Ryan announced that Obama’s denunciation of his plan to destroy Medicare and further enrich the rich has only strengthened the Repugnican Tea Party’s support of Ryan’s plan in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Oh, please. The stupid white men who comprise the majority of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the House of Representatives support Paul Ryan over Barack Obama? Shocker!

Paul Ryan’s idea of destroying Medicare and enriching the rich isn’t “bold” or the like. It’s a colossally shitty idea is what it is. Not only is it horrible public policy (and, I will add, anti-Christian) to allow the wealth care profiteers to shamelessly profit even further from Americans’ pain and suffering via the bloated wealth care-industrial complex, but to attack Medicare is as politically smart as it was for George W. Bush to attack Social Security.

Nor is it OK to assure current oldsters that they’ll be OK, but that the rest of us are fucked where Medicare and/or Social Security is/are concerned. I’m 43 years old and I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare since my teens, and I want both benefits, fuck you very much, Mr. Ryan; you’re not going to fuck me up the ass — no matter how much you look like a J.C. Penney catalog model.

Cutting the bloated-beyond-belief budget of the military-industrial complex and making the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes, as I have noted, will keep afloat Medicare, Social Security and other government programs that benefit the majority of the American people instead of further enrich the rich.

So of course Ryan’s “path to prosperity” — his own prosperity and that of his right-wing ilk, not yours and mine — does not include cutting the “defense” budget or making the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes.

Which demonstrates that he’s not serious about resolving the federal budget deficit. He’s serious about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. He’s a radical-right-wing ideologue, not a problem solver, especially since his proposed “solutions” would make the problems worse, not better.

Unfortunately, Ryan seems to represent a reliably red congressional district. He won his seven two-year House terms with an average of 64 percent of the vote, so he probably would be very difficult to unseat, even in Wisconsin, in which the Repugnican Tea Party is under fire right now.

However, Ryan’s deceptively titled “path to prosperity” can be relegated to the dustbin of U.S. history, where it belongs, and hopefully, he’ll never rise any higher than the U.S. House of Representatives, where he essentially is just a saner-seeming version of Michele Bachmann.