My money is on ‘Bootstraps’ Rubio for the Repugnican Tea Party nomination

Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Marco “Bootstraps” Rubio of Florida has a thirst for power that the party’s primary voters just might quench by making him his party’s 2016 presidential nominee. But I don’t see enough Latino voters, most of whom are Mexican American, falling for the bait and switch (Rubio is a right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class Cuban American [which is fairly redundant]) and putting Rubio into the White House in November 2016.

Now that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin wonderfully has tanked, I agree with the many pundits who now eye Marco Rubio as the most likely 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate.

Now that the 40-something Walker — the anti-labor-union one-trick pony who once actually compared members of labor unions to terrorists in the Middle East (because everything comes back to destroying what little is left of our labor unions) — is out of the picture, the 40-something Rubio now gets to be the “fresh face” of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential field.

I use quotation marks there and I have nicknamed Rubio “Bootstraps” because of the 1950s-era if-you’re-not-rich-it’s-your-own-damned-fault-because-you’re-probably-lazy-and-refuse-to-pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps bullshit political rhetoric that spews like poison from this right-wing Cuban American’s fangs as though he had just stepped out of a fucking time machine.

So now Rubio, at 44, is the youngest of the bunch of fascistic presidential wannabes, and so I expect the Repugnican Tea Party ultimately to view him as Their Latino Answer to Barack Obama. (U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the bat-shit insane reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy, is less than a year older than Rubio, but he seems older than that…)

Of course, when you look at the two Latinos who are vying for the Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination, both of them, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, are Cuban-American, which makes sense, since most Cuban Americans are to the right. Most of them are rich white (European-stock) Cubans who fled Cuba some decades ago because their plutocracy and their kleptocracy and their advocacy of insane income inequality (since the inequality benefited them) didn’t fly under the new, much more egalitarian Castro regime — and are the progeny of these former Cubans who have passed down their wingnuttery to their progeny. (Rubio’s parents, it should be noted, immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, a few years before Castro’s rise in 1959, but Rubio, representing Florida, is wholly on board with the right-wing, anti-Castro Cuban Americans who believe that although they relatively are a tiny minority, they should dictate U.S. policy in regards to Cuba.)

While white supremacists don’t differentiate Latinos — a Spanish surname is a Spanish surname, and these racists tend to believe that all Latinos are “Mexicans” (or that, at least, it’s just easiest to just call Latinos “Mexicans” rather than try to sort them all out [much like how Middle Easterners attacked us on 9/11 and Iraq is in the Middle East — close enough!]) — it’s important to note that in 2010, 63 percent of Latinos in the U.S. were of Mexican descent, and only 3.5 percent of Cuban descent.

So Cuban Americans are not representative of most Latinos in the United States, so neither Rubio nor Cruz is representative of most Latinos in the United States.

But again, such distinctions don’t matter to those of the Repugnican Tea Party, who probably ignorantly and cynically will view Marco Rubio as their best shot at trying to reverse at least some of the damage that El Trumpo has done to the party with the Latino demographic.

Most Mexican Americans won’t buy it; the majority of them are quite through with the Repugnican Tea Party, and of course most of them are acutely aware, unlike whitey, of the differences between Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans.

But why do I predict Rubio and not Cruz? Because Cruz is so much of a nut job and a douche bag who can’t win a national election that even most of those in his party recognize that fact, that’s why. Perhaps to a lesser extent it’s also because his state of Texas will continue to be tarnished for a while because the last president who hailed from Texas was so fucking abysmally awful. That George W. Bush was the governor of Texas certainly harmed former Texas Gov. Prick Perry’s two bids for the White House, although Perry himself, like Cruz, is a shitty candidate, so in the cases of Perry and Cruz you can’t put all of the blame on Texas.

Let me list others who can’t and won’t win the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination: Lindsay Graham, Bobby Jindal, Prick Santorum, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Carly Fiorina. None of them (along with Cruz) is averaging even 7 percent in recent nationwide polls. Fiorina is a bit of a darling for the moment, but once more information is released about her — trust me, she ran for the U.S. Senate here in California in 2010 (and lost, of course), and her record and her character are seriously bad — she’s toast. She’s having her Michele Bachmann moment right now. Let her have it, as it’s all she’s going to get. (Well, no, she might get the veep spot. After Sarah Palin, anything is possible.)

So this easy elimination leaves us with Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb! Bush and Marco Rubio, whose average nationwide polling right now is in that order, first through fourth.

It’s not impossible for Trump to emerge the victor, of course, but I doubt that he will. His campaign has money but no substance, and the party establishment wants him eliminated, so I can’t see Team Trump not sputtering out eventually. As some have posited, Trump might make some noise at the Repugnican National Convention, but it’s unlikely that he’ll win the party’s presidential nomination. Again, Trump has flash but no substance, and flash has a short shelf life.

Of course Ben Carson won’t win the nomination. Even if the party’s voters could get over his race in enough numbers to win him the nomination, no president in my lifetime of more than four decades had not been at least a U.S. senator or the governor of a state before ascending to the Oval Office, so that hurts Carson (as well as Trump). Of course, Carson very apparently has been in this only to sell his brand of life-advice bullshit anyway.

Jeb! not only has the Godzilla-sized albatross that is his brother’s presidency around his neck — it’s interesting that Jeb! says that Gee Dubya “kept us safe” when almost 3,000 Americans died in September 2001, the month that followed Gee Dubya’s receipt of the U.S. presidential daily brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”; when almost 4,500 of our soldiers have died in the illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War (more than 3,500 of them combat deaths); and when almost 2,000 Americans were killed by Hurricane Katrina when there had been at least two or three days’ warning before it made landfall that the hurricane could be absolutely devastating — but Jeb! is only mildly more charismatic than is Scott “Dead Man” Walker.

I mean, the use of “Jeb!” perfectly encapsulates Jeb!’s problems: He runs away from the surname of Bush because it’s so politically toxic, and he has to use an exclamation point! in order to try to gin up some excitement for himself.

Even if Gee Dubya’s stolen presidency had been much, much, much better than it was, we Americans never would put three people from the same fucking family into the White House, so it’s unlikely that Jeb! ever was going to break the previous record of two U.S. presidents from the same family (the Adamses, the Roosevelts and the Bushes are the record holders).

So we are left with Marco Rubio, whom the Repugnican Tea Party will view as the perfect 2016 presidential candidate: He’s young and he’s not Anglo, so he’s the Barack Obama of the Repugnican Tea Party. He is Latino, but he’s the “right” kind of Latino — right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class, light-skinned Cuban-American. And again, after El Trumpo has bashed the party like an elephant piñata, the party needs all the help with the Latino vote that it can get, so the cynical fronting of a right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class candidate with a Spanish name will be mighty tempting.

Rubio — unlike Trump, Carson and Fiorina — has been a U.S. senator or the governor of a state, so he has that going for him, too.

Rubio, like Ben Carson, is a wingnut but can pass (for the low-information/“swing”/“independent” voter) as a fairly sane and decent individual, so there’s that factor as well. (As I noted, Cruz can’t pass for decent and sane, and neither can Jindal, Santorum or Huckabee, or Paul, to a lesser extent.)

And Rubio’s state of Florida is an important swing state; recall that Florida and its 25 electoral votes were pivotal in the stolen 2000 presidential election, when Jeb!, who then was governor of the state, worked with former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and others to steal the presidential election in the state (and thus the presidential election for the nation) for his brother.

All in all, the stars align for Marco Rubio to become his party’s champion for this presidential election cycle.

Could he win the White House?

I don’t think so. The Democrats and those who lean Democratic won’t vote for him, of course, and I don’t think that Rubio’s presidential candidacy could fool enough Latino voters, as much as they would love to see one of their own finally in the White House. Not just because the sulfurous stench of El Trumpo probably still will be lingering enough to damage the Repugnican Tea Party come November 2016, but also because Rubio’s socioeconomic and political philosophy in and of itself is pretty fucking odiferous.

Sanders and Trump represent hope and fear as responses to the nation’s crises

Both are older white men who have interesting hair and who appeal to disenfranchised voters, but that’s where the similarities between democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and fascist Donald Trump end. Presidential aspirants Trump and Sanders appear to be the natural result of the United States’ increasing political polarization and long slide into fascism, with the right trying to strengthen fascism and the left (the true left, not the center-right bullshit exemplified by the Clinton Dynasty and the hopey-changey Barack Obama) trying to destroy it and bring about an equitable system that benefits the highest possible number of people instead of only the plutocratic few at the expense of the masses.

The United States of America is in crisis, as it has been for some time now — arguably, it has been in crisis since its founding (ask the Native Americans, among many others) — and the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump represent the two main responses to crises: hope and fear, the higher response and the lower response, respectively.

Hope and fear as responses to crises come from correctly identifying the sources of the crises and from incorrectly identifying the sources.

Donald Trump & Co. quite incorrectly have identified the main source of the United States’ ills as “criminal” Mexicans who come to the United States to rape our pristine young white women and to drop their “anchor babies” — the brown-skinned hordes whom we must fear and against whom We Must Build a Great Wall.

Bernie Sanders correctly has identified the main source of the United States’ ills as the billionaires who (in no certain order) don’t want to pay workers living wages, who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, who don’t care about workers’ conditions, who want to wipe out what’s left of our labor unions, and who don’t give a fuck about the environment that they devastate for their personal profiteering.

It’s the treasonous plutocrats, not impoverished immigrants, who have been destroying the nation since at least the days of the fascist Repugnican President Ronald Reagan. The vast majority of the wealth of the American working class and what’s left of the middle class has been going upward, to the plutocrats like Donald Trump and his treasonous ilk, not downward to the impoverished, including immigrants from Latin America. (Indeed, if it were, they wouldn’t still be impoverished. The wealth is going to those who are only getting richer and richer, obviously.)

But the “tea party” fucktards, like chickens idolizing Colonel Sanders, refuse to recognize this obvious fact, and, because one day they’d like to be like Colonel Sanders themselves, they worship Colonel Sanders. This is the dynamic that we’re seeing with Donald Trump: He’s Colonel Sanders (no relation whatsoever to Bernie Sanders) and his supporters are the chickens.

Donald Trump appeals to the base ignorance, fear and hatred, the bigotry and xenophobia, of the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging fucktards — most of them white supremacists and jingoistic nationalists, most of whom would say that they are members of the “tea party” (or at least sympathize with it) — who are his followers and who are the psychospiritual (if not in some cases the actual) descendants of the Nazi Germans.

Even though most of Trump’s followers experience financial distress because of him and his fellow treasonous millionaires and billionaires, their lottery mentality leads them to believe that they, too, might become filthy rich one day (um, they will not), and because their juvenile jingoism is so easy to appeal to, all that Trump has to do is pose with a bald eagle and they orgasm.

The rise of Trump can’t be a huge surprise in a nation that has been sliding toward fascism for some time now. Lest you think that I’m tossing around the hippie term “fascism” lightly, know that one scholar defined “fascism” as “the government of the financial capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary slice of peasantry and intelligentsia. Fascism in its foreign policy is the most brutal kind of chauvinism, which cultivates zoological hatred against other peoples.”

Yeah, that would describe a President Trump to a “T.” (Not that he’s the only fascist running for the White House; Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, et. al., are fascists all, and even Billary Clinton is at least Fascist Lite [doing little to nothing to counter fascism is pretty fascist in itself].)

I expect Trump to implode eventually — that is, I at least moderately doubt that he’ll ever sit in the Oval Office — but his current campaign, with anti-Latino-immigrant sentiment as its centerpiece, is chillingly reminiscent of the Nazi Germans’ scapegoating use of anti-Jewish sentiment to gain political power for themselves, no matter the brutal cost to their victims.

I, for one, would not idly stand by while a President Trump and his Schutzstaffel rounded up Latinos for persecution.

Trump leads the fascist, treasonous Repugnican Tea Party presidential pack by double digits in most recent polls, so it’s too early to dismiss him entirely. It seems to me that he could emerge as the party’s presidential nominee, but what I’m hoping is that the party’s panicked establishmentarians push him out of the primary race, piss him off by doing so, and so he runs as an independent presidential candidate, siphoning off votes from the Repugnican Tea Party establishment’s candidate.

Which would be a path to the White House for Bernie Sanders, should he emerge as the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee, as even the Millennial snobs at fivethirtyeight.com recently finally have acknowledged might actually happen. (Interestingly, one of them, in their online debate/discussion, even makes the point that I made last month: since John Kerry came back from the dead after having won Iowa and then New Hampshire in early 2004, winning him the vast majority of the rest of the states in toppling-dominoes fashion, why wouldn’t the same happen for Bernie Sanders?)

Speaking of Bernie, while fear, represented by the face (and that hair) of Donald Trump, is doing well on the right, hope, represented by the progressive agenda of Bernie Sanders, is doing well on the left.

Two recent nationwide polls of Democrats and Democratic leaners have Billary Clinton down by about 10 percent and Bernie Sanders up by about 10 percent in just a one-month period, from last month to this month.

A CNN/ORC nationwide poll taken August 13-16 puts Billary at 47 percent, down from the 56 percent she’d received in a CNN/ORC nationwide poll taken July 22-25. The August 13-16 poll puts Bernie at 29 percent, up from the 19 percent he’d received in the July 22-25 poll.

An August 11-13 Fox News nationwide poll puts Billary at 49 percent, down from the 59 percent she’d received in a Fox News nationwide poll taken July 13-15. The August 11-13 poll puts Bernie at 30 percent, up from the 19 percent he’d received in the July 13-15 poll.

The two independent nationwide polls average 9.5 percent down for Billary in just one month, and 10.5 percent up for Bernie in just one month.

That’s a lot of movement in just one month.

As I’ve noted, I welcome Veep Joe Biden to become a Johnny-come-lately in the race; his support would only further erode the support for Billary, I surmise, and that’s because while he and Billary are closely associated with the disappointing Barack Obama — the answer to Sarah Palin’s infamous, snarky question, “How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out?” is “Not very well, but that’s because the crypto-center-right Obama never actually even tried to actually deliver on his promises of hope and change” — Bernie Sanders, who his entire career in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate has been an independent, the lone democratic socialist, truthfully can say that he’s been outside of the Democratic Party establishment.

Sanders and Trump are only superficially alike in that both of them are surging because a huge chunk of the electorate have had it with establishmentarian, duopolistic partisan politics. They correctly recognize that the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party stopped representing the best interests of the vast majority of Americans long ago.

But, again, the Trump side, in order to stoke up ungrounded fear for political gain, blames the wrong people for our crises — those on the Trump side, as all bullies do, pick on the weaker, on those who can’t much fight back — whereas the Sanders side blames the right people for our crises.

And that fight, which is the right fight, the good fight, is the much harder fight to fight, because our opponents — the treasonous plutocrats (like Trump), who of course would rather have us wrongly persecute immigrants than correctly come after them with our torches and pitchforks — aren’t weak, not financially, not politically.

But they are incredibly morally weak, and they are vastly outnumbered, which makes them defeatable.

We of the left could use the Colonel-Sanders-worshipping chickens on our side instead of on Colonel Sanders’ side, but we continue to fight even for them without them.

Because Barack Obama, Billary Clinton and the rest of the establishmentarian Democrats in name only, despite their betrayals and their failures, haven’t completely destroyed our hope.

P.S. I should note that Donald Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric is, of course, not harmless. And it certainly isn’t amusing. It’s chilling.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, in a piece titled “Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny” (again, to me Trump never has been funny — fascism isn’t funny), writes (links are Taibbi’s):

So two yahoos from … my hometown of Boston severely beat up a [Latino] homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that “Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.”

When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn’t yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, “That would be a shame.” But right after, he went on:

“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”

This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

The thing is, even as Donald Trump said and did horrible things during this year’s incredible run at the White House, most sane people took solace in the fact that he could never win. (Although new polls are showing that Hillary’s recent spiral puts this reassuring thought into jeopardy.) …

That made Trump’s run funny, campy even, like a naughty piece of pornographic performance art. After all, what’s more obscene than pissing on the presidency? It seemed even more like camp because the whole shtick was fronted by a veteran reality TV star who might even be in on the joke, although of course the concept was funnier if he wasn’t. …

So already Trump has demonstrated that he’s a sociopath who should be nowhere near the White House. Of course his hateful rhetoric spurred a hate crime — gee, what a shock that the hate speech of a powerful billionaire running for president actually resulted in a hate crime — but of this hate crime Trump will only say that “the people that [sic] are following me are very passionate.”

This is a man (and I use the term lightly) who shamelessly freely used the freak shooting of a young woman in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico as “proof” that his xenophobic, cruel anti-Latino-immigrant platform is sound, but whose evil won’t allow him to take responsibility for the simple, obvious fact that his anti-Latino-immigrant hate speech — as was entirely predictable — resulted in a hate crime.

This is a “man” who wouldn’t flinch at building concentration camps for the nation’s new scapegoats for the approval of his “passionate” followers who only “love this country” (just as the Nazi Germans were “passionate” lovers of their country).

All of the signs are there. Trump refused to condemn a race-based hate crime that resulted from the fucking centerpiece of his presidential campaign, which is hate speech against Latino immigrants. Instead, he merely called the perpetrators of the race-based hate crime “passionate.”

We ignore the blatant signs of fascism that Trump is displaying for all of us to see at our own peril.

It strikes me that it’s quite possible that should this “man” ever actually make it to the White House, those of us who are true patriots are going to have to get “passionate” and deal with him, as Adolf Hitler needed to be dealt with.

The only good fascist is a dead fascist.

And after Americans just allowed the fascist George W. Bush & Co. to steal the presidency in 2000, we true American patriots cannot just assume that Donald Trump absolutely cannot make it to the White House. The precedent more or less is there.

P.P.S. Here is a frightening news photo of Führer Donald greeting his nearly-all-white adoring supporters in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday:

It looks quite surreal, but it’s quite real.

Of course, with American fascism (like with Nazi German fascism), we have to throw theocracy and toxic “Christianity” in there, too (along with the white supremacism, the jingoistic nationalism and the blind, self-defeating obedience to the titans of capitalism). “Lord Jesus” wants Donald Trump to be president! Of course! How can you argue with that?

Attacks on Elizabeth Warren demonstrate her strength

Reuters news photo

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

Warren fights for the working class while Walker calls us terrorists

Reuters and Associated Press photos

Koched-up Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday, in his braying before the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland (as pictured above), compared the thousands and thousands of Wisconsinites who converged on Wisconsin’s Capitol four years ago to oppose his decimation of the working class and the middle class to the terrorists who comprise ISIS. 

There is a receptive audience to Wisconsin Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker’s recent indirect but sure comparison of members of the working class and middle class who want union protection from the likes of the Koched-up Walker’s billionaire sugar daddies to the terrorists who comprise ISIS.*

That audience, of course, would be the Repugnican Tea Party.

Anyone who would dare oppose the continued decimation of the American middle class and working class by our plutocratic overlords surely is an anti-American terrorist. The hallmark of the teatards, in fact, is that they do the plutocrats’ bidding for them by bashing the working class and middle class.

I saw this with my own eyes at a pro-working-class rally here in Sacramento that was in solidarity with Wisconsin four years ago, in late February 2011, when Wisconsin’s capital was afire with thousands and thousands of protesters trying to protect their livelihoods and families from Walker’s right-wing, pro-plutocratic, anti-populist assault on their labor rights.

The plutocrats, of course, weren’t there taunting those of us who were there at the rally at California’s state Capitol to support labor rights. No, it was the teatards — people (if you can call them that) who hardly are rich themselves (and who very unlikely ever will be) but who think that it is a great idea to help the millionaires and billionaires to destroy what’s left of labor rights and thus to destroy what’s left of the middle class and the working class. These “people” are, of course, in a word, traitors, just as are the plutocrats whom they insanely support against even their own best interests.

This is what Scott Walker represents: Aiding and abetting millionaires and billionaires in their class warfare against the rest of us (while actually claiming that this actually is to our benefit).

So it’s not a huge surprise that Walker recently told the fascistic traitors at the Wingnuts’ Ball (a.k.a. the Conservative Political Action Conference): “We need a leader who will stand up and say [that] we will take the fight to them [he was referring to the members of ISIS] and not wait until they take the fight to American soil. If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same in the rest of the world.”

Wow.

I get it: Walker was trying to make the bullshit claim that somehow his experience as the pro-plutocratic, anti-populist governor of Wisconsin has qualified him to be a leader on the world stage as president (and commander in chief) of the United States of America.

But in so doing, of course Walker compared members of the middle class and working class who have dared to stand up to him and his plutocratic puppeteers to terrorists. That’s probably how he views them personally. If not, at the very least, that’s how his main plutocratic puppeteers, the Koch brothers — whose millions are behind Walker’s political success (well, “survival” probably is a better term than “success”) in Wisconsin — want him to portray those of us who oppose treasonous plutocracy.

(And it’s funny — in a sick and fucking twisted way — that the teatards have attempted to appropriate the American Revolution, which was fought against the oppressive monarchy and aristocracy of Britain, yet the teatards fully support the oppressive plutocrats and aristocrats of the United States of America today. These hardly are revolutionaries. They actively aid and abet the enemy, the oppressors of the masses, which makes them not revolutionaries but traitors.)

It’s interesting that Walker would compare members of the American working class and middle class to the terrorists of ISIS, because I see Walker and his ilk and their plutocratic patrons as evil. They don’t behead people or burn them alive (yet), but the harm that they nonetheless cause to millions and millions of Americans (and millions and millions of others abroad) is incalculable, and, just like the terrorists of ISIS, they sociopathically feel no guilt or remorse over the grave harm that they cause others for their own benefit. And that, of course, is the very definition of evil.

I’ve written before (more than a year ago) that I’d love to see a Scott Walker-Elizabeth Warren matchup in 2016. (I’m not saying that it’s going to happen — I’m saying that I’d love to see it happen.)

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s words for the members of the middle class and the working class are diametrically opposed to Walker’s. Walker & Co. blame the victims; Elizabeth Warren actually stands up for the victims. For instance, I recommend that you watch this video of Warren’s recent opening statement for the Middle Class Prosperity Project (I’m glad that progressives have taken back the true meaning of the word “prosperity,” as opposed to the Koch brothers’ “Americans for Prosperity,” which more accurately should be named Billionaires for More Prosperity for Billionaires, and Repugnican Tea Party Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s bullshit “Path to Prosperity,” which, of course, was only a blueprint to further destroy the middle class and the working class):

Wow. It’s a rare member of Congress — which for years and years and years now has been dominated by the corporation-loving duopoly of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — who speaks like this. Billary Clinton (who, if the Repugnican Party is the Coke Party, is Diet Coke) certainly never speaks like this (or, if she ever does, given her coziness with the weasels of Wall Street and other corporatocrats and plutocrats, her credibility on the issue is nil).

While Koch, Walker & Co. continue to blame our nation’s ills on the members of the working class and middle class who only want to staunch the flow of their — our — blood to the Olympic-sized private swimming pools of the plutocrats, Elizabeth Warren, by stark contrast, correctly identifies and emphasizes the fact that beginning in the 1980s, under the treasonously pro-plutocratic, anti-populist Repugnican President Ronald Reagan, the once-robust middle class and working class have been under continued, decimating assault by the treasonous plutocrats who scream “class warfare!” when the members of the middle class and the working class attempt to protect ourselves from the actual class warfare that the treasonous plutocrats started against us decades ago.

Elizabeth Warren fights for the middle class and the working class when no one else (save only a few others) in Washington, D.C., dare to actually do their fucking job, which is to fight for the greatest good for the greatest number of Americans; Scott Walker, meanwhile, compares the middle class and the working class who are fighting for their lives and their families’ lives to the terrorists who comprise ISIS.

This is a fight in which I’d love to participate. To Scott Walker and the treasonous teatards who support him, I can only say: Bring! It! On! Traitors! We are beyond ripe for another, actual American revolution!

—

*If you are wondering where I stand on ISIS, I oppose ISIS not for the religion that its members claim they adhere to, but I oppose their continued and multiple acts of terrorism, such as their slaughter of scores of those who don’t share their fascistic religious ideology and their destruction of valuable pieces of art, artifacts and architecture that they deem to be “idolatrous” or the like.

In short, the “Islamofascists” of ISIS are doing exactly what the “Christo”fascists here at home would do if they could. It’s not the exact religion (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc.) that is the problem, but the theofascism that is the problem. (And if you want to further reduce that to fascism in general, religious-based or not, that’s fine with me, but fascism tends to have at least some degree of religious backing. It certainly does here in the United States, big-time.)

I can’t deny that I’d like to see the smug, punk-ass “Jihadi John’s” theofascist head on a silver platter, but, again, evil in the form of theofascism certainly isn’t limited to Islam. (“Jihadi John” — seriously. What, did this virgin nerd [whose real name is Mohammed Emwazi] go from being on his computer in his underwear in the basement of his parents’ house to being a “bad-ass” terrorist overnight? And could you be a bigger fucking coward than to tie someone’s hands behind his back, rendering him defenseless, and then behead him, or put him beneath an iron cage, rendering him defenseless, and burn him alive? This isn’t bad-assery. This is fucking cowardice to the nth degree.)

And no, I don’t let the United States off of the hook, either. The treasonous, unelected Bush regime’s Vietraq War, which I vehemently opposed before it was launched in March 2003, has resulted in the wholly preventable and unnecessary deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocents in Iraq, and the U.S. military continues to slaughter innocents in the Middle East (via drone and other technologically advanced lethal methods, which one certainly could call cowardly) and continues to prop up the terrorist state of Israel, which treats Palestinians much like how the Nazi Germans treated the Jews, including slaughtering them by the masses.

(Despite the Israelis’ non-stop claims of being oppressed victims, the body counts always have been insanely lopsided, with far more Palestinians dying than Israelis; the United States of America’s blind support of Israel, with detractors of this deeply insane and deeply immoral foreign policy knee-jerkingly slanderously branded as “anti-Semitic,” is a huge factor behind this evil. [Yes, the Judeofascist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can kiss my fucking ass, as can all of the “Christo”fascist members of the U.S. Congress who believe that it’s perfectly OK to do a treasonous end-run around the democratically elected president of the United States of America by inviting the stinking piece of fascistic shit that is Netanyahu to speak in what is supposed to be the American people’s house, not Netanyahu’s for his campaign purposes.])

U.S. actions in the Middle East, such as the illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War (whose perpetrators should be put on trial for their war crimes and crimes against humanity and punished accordingly, Nuremberg style, as that would be the only fair and just thing to do) and the continued coddling and arming of Israel, provide ISIS and the like-minded with all of the recruitment material that they could ever need.

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

Reuters photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But can Walker win the White House?

Oh, hell no. Very most likely not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walker might walk away with his party’s nod for the White House

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Scott Walker (photographed above last week) came in at No. 1 for his party’s 2016 presidential nomination in a recent poll of Iowa voters. Funded by the Koch brothers and beloved by the anti-working-class teatards, Walker apparently has a real shot at his party’s nomination. (At the White House, not so much…)

First off, I loathe Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The recording of him telling a radio host (whom he’d thought was one of the Koch brothers) — among other things — that he also had thought of planting fake labor-union troublemakers among the throngs of protesters in his state’s capital in 2011 in order to discredit the protesters (who were fighting for their collective-bargaining rights) was more than enough to end the slimy Walker’s political career forever, but, alas, Walker the Teflon weasel apparently has a grip on Wisconsin’s voters (well, he has an awful lot of help from his sugar daddies, of course).

Not that the charisma-free Walker’s Koch-fueled political shtick will do well on the national stage, but what does make Walker an attractive presidential candidate to the Repugnican Tea Party set, apparently, is that not only is he a “tea party” darling, but nationally he’s largely unknown. (I have paid a fair amount of attention to what has been going on in Wisconsin ever since Walker took the wheel, gave hundreds of dollars toward the Wisconsin cause [since it has nationwide implications], and I even went to a pro-Wisconsin-working-people and pro-labor-union rally here in Sacramento in early 2011 [at which there was a teatarded attempt to manufacture labor-union “thuggery”], but I’m in the minority of Americans who don’t live in Wisconsin, I’m sure.)

Walker’s biggest draw within his party is that his surname isn’t Bush or Romney or Christie. He is tarnished locally, but in politics, what does tarnish mean if you keep winning your elections? (Walker first was elected as governor in 2010, survived a recall election in 2012, and was elected to a second four-year term this past November. Unfortunately, Wisconsin has no term limits for its governor.)

And as the Repugnican Tea Party traitors hate the working class — even the teatards who are members of the working class (which is, I understand, most of them, if they indeed actually work) hate the working class, just like chickens supporting Colonel Sanders — Scott Walker is a very appealing candidate to them. He took on the labor unions and he won! Woo hoo! More socioeconomic misery for more working-class people!!! Gooooo plutocracy!!! U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!

Bloomberg reports of Walker that

[A] Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, taken Monday through Thursday, shows Walker leading a wide-open Republican race with 15 percent, up from just 4 percent in the same poll in October. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was at 14 percent and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, stood at 10 percent. [Links are Bloomberg’s.]

So, at least for now, Walker has a bump, barely edging out Rand Paul for No. 1 in the top three in Iowa (the first state to hold a contest in the presidential primary season) — a top three that doesn’t include Jeb Bush or Chris Christie. (Mittens Romney, as you probably already are aware, had threatened to run for a third time but recently ruled out a third charm.)

I knew that Walker had presidential aspirations when he put out a book in 2013, and the fact that Elizabeth Warren put out a book last year perhaps — well, probably — similarly has fueled the speculation that she’ll run for president, if not this time then in the future. In November 2013, in fact, I speculated that the 2016 presidential race just might come down to Walker vs. Warren, and I stand by that speculation.

Warren, like Walker, has freshness as a candidate, especially compared to the beyond-stale Billary Clinton. And Warren consistently maintains a No.-2 spot in most recent polling for Democratic presidential preference. Were Warren to announce for 2016, we’d see her poll numbers shoot up dramatically, because the actual progressives who form the base of the Democratic Party (or at least a good chunk of it) are starving for a 2016 presidential candidate who is inspiring and genuine and truly populist, and that candidate isn’t Billary Clinton.

As I noted in November 2013, a Warren-Walker matchup would have my full attention and engagement. It would be a bad-ass battle between an actual populist and a Koched-up pseudo-populist. (And, of course, it would be an exciting opportunity to have our first female president [just not Billary!].)

True, in the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season, Scott Walker just might go the way of those in his party who briefly led in the polls in the 2012 presidential primary cycle but who then sank back into relative nothingness, but again, the fact that he’s largely unknown and thus fresh to his party — and, of course, the fact that he is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who infamously have pledged to spend almost a billion dollars in the 2016 election cycle — make him, in my estimation, the strongest candidate for his party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

Could Scott Walker win the White House? I doubt it, regardless of who the 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate turns out to be.

But if Walker wins his party’s presidential nomination and it appears that he might actually win the White House, that probably would be enough to induce me to hold my nose and support even Billary Clinton, should Warren not run this time and Billary emerge as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

From ‘audacity’ to a whimper

President Barack Obama will go down in American history something like this…

I have to agree wholeheartedly with the assessment by Michael Moore (who has been too absent from the public arena during Barack Obama’s presidency) that the American history books will mention only (or at least primarily) that Obama was the nation’s first black president. It’s sad that history will remember Obama more for the color of his skin than for the content of his character, but that’s his fault, not history’s.

In fairness, the history books also probably will mention Obamacare (for good or for ill or fairly neutrally), but what else is there to say of the Obama years?*

Allegedly with great audacity and with the dreams of his father behind him, Obama came in with a bang – “HOPE”! and “CHANGE”! “CHANGE”! and “HOPE”! – but he goes out with a whimper.

It’s ironic that Obama’s opposition to the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War – which only ever was meant for war profiteering (such as by Dick Cheney’s Halliburton) and for Big Oil to retake the oil fields of Iraq – helped him into office in 2008 and that now Obama seems poised to end his second term with another war in Iraq (and possibly in Syria).

Yes, of course this time (further) war in Iraq (and in Syria ) can be justified, I think. The Islamic Slate (a.k.a. ISIL and ISIS) – at least in its current incarnation as a rapidly metastasizing, deadly cancer – needs to be stopped. The mass murder and the oppression of those who disagree with certain fascist, religious nutjobs – be they “Christian” fascist nutjobs, “Jewish” fascist nutjobs, “Hindu” fascist nutjobs, “Muslim” fascist nutjobs, whatever – should be met with opposition.

Credible news reports are that the Sunni Islamic State has been slaughtering and oppressing Shiites and other non-Sunnis in large swaths of Syria and Iraq. (No, the Islamic State did not become a problem only when it beheaded two U.S. citizens in propagandistic snuff videos.) Any such mass slaughter and oppression anywhere in the world should be stopped if at all possible, regardless of the United States ’ many missteps and failures to act in the past. (And it should not be the United States playing World Cop all of the fucking time.)

As far to the left as I consider myself to be, I do not believe in absolute, blind pacifism. I don’t believe that in most cases force or the credible threat of force should be the first resort, but nor do I believe that force or the credible threat of force should be taken off the table altogether. It can be a useful tool, and sometimes, the only effective one. And my gut response to the Islamic State, frankly, is: Pound. Them. Into. The. Sand. (With that said, gut responses do not necessarily make for sound actual foreign policy, as we learned with the debacle that was the unelected reign of the illegitimate Bush regime.)

The problem with the unelected Bush regime’s Vietraq War, again, is that of course it never was meant to “liberate” the Iraqi people from the evil Saddam Hussein (who was a “good” dictator until he stopped taking marching orders from the American elite, which then made him a “bad” dictator) – unless you want to call the more than 100,000 Iraqis who died as a result of the Vietraq War “liberated.” No, it was meant to further enrich the cronies of the BushCheneyCorp.

Such treasonously crying wolf, of course, makes it all the harder to sell the American people on military action in the same region, even when military action actually is called for this time – as President Obama surely knows right about now.

And, of course, while the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (redundant) never met a war that they didn’t love (as long as it’s others who are doing all of the dying, of course), they’ll find ways to criticize and condemn Obama no matter how he conducts things militarily in the Middle East. Because if the president is a white Repugnican guy (even one who got into the White House without even having won the highest number of votes of the American people), then to criticize his military actions abroad at all is nothing short of terrorist-lovin’ treason, you see, whereas if the president is a Democrat, and especially not a white, male Democrat, then to criticize his every fucking move is one’s God-given patriotic duty, you see.

So, of course, Obama can’t win, no matter what he does or does not do, but he should have known this political fact from Day One, and so from Day One he should have pushed through a progressive agenda instead of having tried to persuade the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to join him in “Kumbaya” around the campfire in D.C. (You don’t even bother to try to negotiate with terrorists; they cannot be reasoned with.)

Yes, I do believe that having assertively pushed a progressive agenda in the first two years of his first term would have been a winner for Obama. Had he even tried to have delivered upon his campaign promises, he could have been something like the second coming of FDR. He entered the White House with that kind of support behind him, more or less.

Yes, reportedly a majority of Americans deem Obama’s presidency to have been a failure, but these polls that are unflattering to Obama, it seems to me, widely are interpreted, incorrectly, to mean that the majority of Americans embrace the right-wing worldview. But if a pollster were to ask me (or any other actually progressive American) if Obama’s presidency has been a success or a failure, I (or he or she) would say, without even having to think about it, a failure – not because I at all agree with the right-wing worldview and agenda, but because I believe that Obama utterly squandered his chance, especially in 2009 and 2010, to push through an actually progressive agenda, while both houses of Congress still were held by his own party.**

Whereas the unelected Bush regime spent “political capital” that it never even fucking had (I remember when the Bushies called Bush’s “re”-election by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004 to be a “mandate”), Obama was too timid or too lazy or too stupid (or some combination of these things) to even touch his actual stockpile of political capital in 2009 and 2010, and his failure to have done so will go down in history (history that is thoughtful and critical, anyway) as one of the biggest missed opportunities by a U.S. president to accomplish the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of Americans.

And I judge Obama’s presidency to be a failure because, of course, you judge a politician based upon his or her actual accomplishments in office compared to the campaign promises that he or she made in order to get elected to that office. (Yeah, as cynical as I might be, I’m still not ready to let any politician off the hook for having violated, blatantly, his or her own campaign promises.) Based upon his own relentless campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” of course Obama’s presidency – which has delivered primarily more of the same, not “hope” or “change” – has been a failure.

Of course, pretty much any Repugnican president – John McCainosaurus, Mittens Romney or any other Repugnican – would have done even worse in the Oval Office than Obama has done (except, perhaps, for the 1 percent, for the richest Americans), but that doesn’t let Obama off the hook with me; I judge Obama by actually progressive Democratic (that is, actually Democratic) standards, not by the low bar that has been set by the right wing (probably especially by George W. Bush). And speaking of the devil, of course Obama has been a better president than Gee Dubya was – for starters, Obama actually was democratically elected in the first fucking place, for fuck’s sake – but saying that President X is or was better than was “President” George W. Bush is saying exactly nothing.

And how is Obama poised to end his second and final term? At (further) war in the Middle East, with a new/old enemy this time, the Islamic State. (I write “new/old” because just as the “tea party” is comprised of the same old fascists who were around long before they started to call themselves the “tea party,” the Islamic State apparently is comprised, largely if not mostly, of the same old Islamofascists who were around before Obama ever took office. Of course, it was the Bush regime’s woefully-misguided-to-put-it-mildly Vietraq War, more than anything else, that contributed to the genesis of the Islamic State that we see today.)

I have to wonder if Barack Obama is trying to do Billary Clinton a favor right now, trying to make the Democratic Party look Tough! On! Terrorists! — just in time for the 2016 presidential election. But if more war in the Middle East (and exactly how it should be executed) is going to be the centerpiece of the 2016 presidential election, don’t the chickenhawk Repugnicans play the war card a lot better than do the Dems?

Because of that, how could the Dems expect to win the White House again in 2016 by posing as warhawks, as Billary already appears to be doing?

Didn’t someone once remark that when given the choice of voting for a Repugnican candidate or a “Democratic” candidate who acts like a Repugnican, the typical voter will vote for the genuine Repugnican?

The theofascist Islamic State needs to be checked, for sure, just as would any other insane group of murderers and fascists at home or abroad, but at the same time, potential blowback from military actions that always should be considered aside, Team Obama and Team Billary need to be careful, methinks, not to give the war-drum-beating chickenhawks of the Repugnican Tea Party political validation – and thus political victory – by also beating those tired, old war drums (only less convincingly, in the eyes of the voters, than the chickenhawks do) between now and Election Day in November 2016.

—

*Obama lost me, forever, after he just fucking sat on his hands while British Petroleum filled the Gulf of Mexico with millions of barrels of crude oil in 2010, and after he failed to visit the state of Wisconsin even once in early 2011, when Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker successfully attacked the right of the workers of the state to collectively bargain.

Candidate Obama had promised in 2007: “Understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you, as president of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that someone’s standing in their corner.”

Again, Obama showed up in Wisconsin not once. In his first term Obama failed to lead on a huge environmental issue and he failed to lead on a huge labor-rights issue, part of a pattern of failure that his presidency has been. (As I have noted, while I [stupidly] voted for Obama in 2008, I did not vote for Obama again in November 2012, but voted for the Green Party candidate instead.)

**Indeed, I’m not the only leftist who deems Obama’s presidency a failure; the Washington Post notes of its own (with ABC News) recent nationwide poll that “Those saying Obama has been a failure include one in four Democrats (25 percent), nearly three in 10 liberals (29 percent) and the vast, vast majority of conservative Republicans (92 percent). Nearly one in five liberals (18 percent) say they feel ‘strongly’ that Obama has been a failure.”

Political future of Repug thug in a suit should be grim

Reuters photo

Repugnican U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm, who might want to consider a switch to playing football, is shown in D.C. earlier this month.

The biggest news from last night’s State of the Union address, pathetically, was the post-address thuggery by a Repugnican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York.

U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm, very stupidly on camera, threatened a significantly smaller male TV news reporter who had dared to (try to) ask Grimm about Grimm’s current legal and ethical troubles, especially involving his campaign finances, “If you ever do that to me again, I’ll throw you off the fucking balcony” and “I’ll break you in half like a little boy.”

Pro football player Richard Sherman, as Salon.com’s Joan Walsh has pointed out, recently has been termed a “thug” — the opinion of many is that if you are black (as Sherman is), you are more likely to be called a “thug” than is a white person who has engaged in the equivalent behavior, and that “thug” thus is a coded racist term — and I remember well that the wingnuts routinely called union members “thugs” when union members dared to fight to preserve their rights in the aftermath of Repugnican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on workers’ rights in early 2011.

While “thug” certainly can be used as a thinly veiled racist epithet, the members of the right wing in general, in my observation and experience, deem those who act with assertiveness (physical or not) with whom they disagree as “thugs,” whereas those with whom they agree are almost never “thugs,” no matter what they do.

How about the “Brooks Brothers riot” in Florida on November 19, 2000?

As Wikipedia recounts, on that date

Hundreds of “paid GOP crusaders” descended upon South Florida to protest the state’s recounts, with at least half a dozen of the demonstrators at Miami-Dade paid by George W. Bush’s recount committee. Several of these protesters were identified as Republican staffers and a number later went on to jobs in the Bush administration.

The “Brooks Brothers” name reinforces the allegation that the protesters, in corporate attire, sporting “Hermès ties” were astroturfing, as opposed to [actually being] local citizens concerned about [vote-]counting practices.

The demonstration was organized by Republican operatives, sometimes referred to as the “Brooks Brothers Brigade,” to oppose the recount of 10,750 ballots during the Florida recount. The canvassers decided to move the counting process to a smaller room and restrict media access to 25 feet away while they continued. At this time, New York Rep. John Sweeney told an aide to “Shut it down.”

The demonstration turned violent, and according to the New York Times, “several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff’s deputies restored order.” Democratic National Committee aide Luis Rosero was kicked and punched. Within two hours after the riot died down, the canvassing board unanimously voted to shut down the count, in part due to perceptions that the process wasn’t open or fair, and in part because the court-mandated deadline was impossible to meet. …

Keep in mind that Bush officially “won” Florida, and thus the White House, by only 537 votes.

Would any Repugnican on the planet call the “Brooks Brothers riot” what it was, which was a mob of fucking thugs trying — and apparently at least partially succeeding — to influence the outcome of a presidential fucking election in their favor through the use of intimidation (the threat of harm from physical violence) and actual physical violence?

No, to the Repugnicans, especially those of the “tea-party” ilk, this incident was wholly justifiable, because its goal was to put George W. Bush in the White House even though Al Gore had won more than a half-million more votes than Bush had.

Similarly, there is no justifying the shit that the thug Michael Grimm pulled last night.

It’s understandable that Grimm was not pleased to be asked by a TV news reporter about an issue that could threaten Grimm’s political future. And Grimm has claimed that he had been promised by the local TV news outfit that the question would not come up.

But even if that is true, it doesn’t justify his threat to “throw” the reporter “off the fucking balcony” and “break [him] in half like a little boy.” (My understanding is that such verbal threats constitute at least a misdemeanor.)

We can expect such language from football players, I think — I mean, let’s get real; NFL players are essentially modern-day gladiators –but can we excuse such language from so-called statesmen?

Grimm initially apparently refused to apologize, stating, “I verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect, especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor. I doubt that I am the first member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won’t be the last.”

Well, actually, Grimm just might be the first member of Congress ever to have threatened to throw a reporter “off the fucking balcony” and “break [him] in half like a little boy.” On camera, anyway.

And I find it funny that Grimm, who apparently lacks all self-awareness, should fault anyone else for lacking “a certain level of professionalism and respect,” when he certainly rather graphically displayed such a lack last night. 

My guess is that other members of Grimm’s pathetic party since spoke to him, because the latest statement that Grimm has issued is this:

I was wrong. I shouldn’t have allowed my emotions to get the better of me and lose my cool. I have apologized to Michael Scotto [the TV news reporter whom Grimm attacked], which he graciously accepted, and will be scheduling a lunch soon. In the weeks and months ahead I’ll be working hard for my constituents on issues like flood insurance that is so desperately needed in my district post-[Hurricane] Sandy.

In the end, I suppose, it will be up to the voters of Grimm’s congressional district to decide his fate in November.

If those voters have a brain cell among them, Grimm’s political future indeed is grim, and ironically, his on-camera blow-up probably has done him far more political damage than he would have sustained had he just manned up and answered the fucking question, even evasively and using the usual politico-speak, such as he used in his belated, apparently begrudging apology.

In the meantime: A “thug” is anyone of any race or any political ideology who uses intimidation (the threat of violence) or actual violence to try to obtain his or her objectives. (Admittedly, women rarely are called “thugs,” although I believe in equality of the two sexes, so I see no problem with the designation being made for women.)

So, indeed, if Richard Sherman is a “thug,” then Michael Grimm most certainly is also.

P.S. Of the State of the Union address itself, I don’t have much to say. Barack Obama has a solid history of lofty rhetoric but scant political results. And I still blame him for having squandered his political capital thoroughly in 2009 and 2010, thereby helping the Repugnicans regain control of the U.S. House in November 2010 and thus handicapping his presidency ever since.

I already am looking past Obama and forward to the next president, frankly, as are millions of other Americans, I’m sure.

Chris Christie has become the Repugnicans’ bridge to nowhere

Reuters photo

An aide to Repugnican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie very apparently orchestrated lanes of the George Washington Bridge, pictured above, to be closed in order to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, for not having endorsed Christie’s gubernatorial re-election. The bridge, which connects New Jersey and New York City via Fort Lee, is one of the busiest in the world.

Any Repugnican, including the teatards, who celebrates the probable political downfall of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is a moron. (Well, they’re all morons, but still.)

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want Chris Christie or any other Repugnican, teatard or not, anywhere near the White House, but recent nationwide polls have suggested that Christie is the only member of his party who can beat Billary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, in November 2016.

A CNN/ORC poll taken last month had Christie beating Billary by two percentage points, 48 percent to 46 percent. No big deal, you say, but Billary garnered anywhere from 52 percent to 58 percent against all of the other Repugnican candidates in the poll, including Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Prick Perry, Marco Rubio, Pretty Boy Paul Ryan and yes, Prick Santorum.

A Quinnipiac University poll also taken last month showed Christie beating Billary by one percentage point, 42 percent to 41 percent. No big deal, you might say again, but in that poll, Billary beat every other Repugnican — Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul — by 7 percent to 13 percent.

A McClatchy-Marist poll also taken last month showed Billary actually beating Christie by 3 percent, 48 percent to 45 percent, but in that poll, too, Christie fared much better against Billary than did any other Repugnican, all of whom lost to Billary by 10 percent to 23 percent (true, it was Sarah Palin who lost to Billary by 23 percent, and Palin very most likely won’t be running in 2016, but still…).

True, Christie would have had to overcome the right-wing extremists — well, they’re nutjobs; even “right-wing extremist” doesn’t capture their depravity, and even “nutjobs” doesn’t capture how dangerous they are (there are plenty of harmless nutjobs), so probably “fascists” and “‘Christo’fascists” are the best terms for these Orc-like “people” — to win his party’s 2016 presidential nomination, but I think that he could have done that.

Before now.

Before the news that, as The Associated Press has put it, “e-mails and text messages suggest that one of Christie’s top aides engineered traffic jams in the New Jersey town [of Fort Lee] last September to punish its Democratic mayor.” The AP adds:

… The messages do not directly implicate Christie, but they appear to contradict his assertions that the closings were not punitive and that his staff was not involved.

The messages were obtained by The Associated Press and other news organizations amid a statehouse investigation into whether the lane closings that led to the tie-ups were retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing Christie for re-election last fall.

“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Christie deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly wrote in August in a[n e-mail] message to David Wildstein, a top Christie appointee on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

[Reuters reports that Wildstein’s e-mail reply was: “Got it.”]

A few weeks later, Wildstein closed two of three lanes connecting Fort Lee to the heavily-traveled George Washington Bridge, which runs between New Jersey and New York City.

Beyond the specifics of the lane closures, critics suggest the incident reflects a darker side of Christie’s brand of politics that contradicts the image he’d like to project as he eyes the presidency. …

“This completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge,” Christie has proclaimed, adding, “People will be held responsible for their actions.”

While I find it very difficult to believe that any of Christie’s staffers would have been so brazenly bold as to orchestrate something so large without Christie’s knowledge, if not also his consent, at the bare minimum, even if Christie is telling the truth, which I very much doubt, Bridgegate seriously calls into question Christie’s ability to keep his own flying monkeys in check.

Gee, what would President Christie do if he failed to get someone’s endorsement for his re-election? Send a killer drone after him or her?

I agree with the AP’s assessment that a criticism that could be made of Christie is that Bridgegate reveals “a darker side of Christie’s brand of politics that contradicts the image he’d like to project as he eyes the presidency.” Indeed, he reminds me of the revengeful Richard Nixon.

All of this said, while I can’t stand Billary, and while I doubt that as president she’d be significantly more effective or progressive than Barack Obama has been — and so I still hope that she faces a strong, actually progressive challenger for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination — of course I’d rather see Billary in the White House, if that is unavoidable, than Chris Christie.

And Chris Christie was his party’s best path to recapturing the White House.

But now, he has become his party’s bridge to nowhere.

P.S. Yes, Christie’s probable political ruin perhaps might help the likes of presidential wannabe Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whom I despise probably even more than I despise Christie, but Walker is fairly unknown outside of Wisconsin, and could he beat Billary? I doubt it. I could see him winning his party’s 2016 presidential nomination, but I can’t see him winning the White House.

Warren-vs.-Walker deathmatch in 2016?

The release of this book yesterday can only fuel speculation that Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has presidential aspirations. While I loathe the man (who is a man only in the strict, dictionary-definition sense of the word), a presidential match-up between progressive Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and the pro-plutocratic Walker would, I surmise, be awesome.

Many if not most say that it’s way too early to start speculating about the November 2016 presidential election.

I mostly disagree with that.

Especially if you haven’t been anointed by the D.C. establishment, as, say, Republicrat Billary Clinton has been, you probably need all of the campaigning time that you can get between now and November 2016.

And if Barack Obama had delivered substantively on the “hope” and “change” that he relentlessly and ubiquitously had promised during his campaign for 2008, and if we hadn’t all given up on him already because as president he’s been so fucking lazy and worthless (at best), we (especially us progressives) probably wouldn’t already be looking past Obama and forward to 2016.

All of that said, the latest 2016 presidential speculation is that Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker might run for his party’s presidential nomination.

The release of Walker’s (probably ghost-written) book — Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge (reminiscent to me of the smug, pseudo-triumphant title of Mittens Romney’s No Apologies) — yesterday should only fuel speculation that he’ll be a 2016 contender.

(Walker reportedly says that “his new book … is not a campaign book [right…] but that he’s not ruling out a run for president in 2016 or promising that if re-elected [as Wisconsin governor] next year he’ll serve out his term.”

Walker also reportedly stated recently that the 2016 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nominee must “be an outsider,” adding, “I think both the presidential and the vice presidential nominee should either be a former or current governor — people who have done successful things in their states, who have taken on big reforms, who are ready to move America forward.”

Walker just coinky-dinkily, in his mind, anyway, matches that description.

So there you go.)

Could Walker win the White House?

My guess is that no, he could not, but the fact that Walker was elected governor in 2010 and survived a gubernatorial recall election in June 2012 in a state whose denizens cast the most number of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since at least 1988 suggests, at least on the face of it, that the smug, heartless, union-busting, Koch-brother-loving/pro-plutocratic Walker might be a stronger 2016 contender than many if not most realize.

I can’t really see Walker doing well in the national forum, as I don’t detect a milligram of charisma in him, but he is a masterful liar, doing the bidding of the billionaires who fund him while pretending that he does everything in the best interests of the commoner.

That is, of course, how the “tea party” operates: excuse the “hard-working” billionaires who have been dismantling the middle class for some decades now — and blame and punish instead the working class and what’s left of the middle class for all of our socioeconomic ills.

Pathetically, that shit actually sells, especially among right-wing and right-leaning stupid (by definition) white men, the Joe the Plumber types, and other similar types (most of them, though, poor, white trash) who think that it’s a great idea for the chickens to support Colonel Sanders, and who apparently are too fucking stupid to realize the simple, basic, obvious fact that they, too, are chickens.

A Elizabeth-Warren-vs.-Scott-Walker 2016 presidential contest would be, to say the least, interesting.

It would be a battle by proxy between us progressives and the “tea-party” dipshits, a battle between us progressives, who fully realize that it’s the Wall Street weasels and other assorted plutocrats and their supporters (like Scott Walker) who have been destroying the nation (many of us found a voice in the Occupy movement), and the teatards, who are too fucking stupid to realize that we of the working class and the middle class are not actually the enemy, but are the victims of our plutocratic overlords.

Such a battle would have my full engagement.

If the uniquely uninspiring and uncharismatic and waaay-overrated Billary Clinton actually got the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, however, you pretty much could count me out.