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.

Yes, LET’S look at the content of Marco Rubio’s speech

Associated Press image

The vast majority of those who claim that crypto-fascist presidential wannabe Marco Rubio didn’t get enough attention to the content of his recent speech on live national television probably haven’t actually listened to or read his entire speech (which you can do here). Having read every word of Rubio’s speech, and having compared it to reality, I can say that he’s damned fucking lucky that the water bottle got all of the attention. 

Associated Press editor Liz Sidoti wrote a column that she (or Yahoo! News) titled “Our Collective Obsession with the Trivial” that is about as original and insightful as was Repugnican Tea Party Sen. Marco Rubio’s speech that she insinuates was overlooked because of the “trivial.”

Every once in a while we pseudo-chastise ourselves about not being serious enough — but then we jump right back into the “trivial” anyway. Let’s face it: We’re never serious about getting serious. And so the vast majority of us who chastise others about not being serious enough, but focusing too much upon the “trivial,” are hypocrites.

Sidoti — who, ironically, is part of the problem that she whines about (the problem of the mass media’s propagation of “trivia”) — begins her column:

Persistently high unemployment. A sluggish economy. Debt. Deficit. Obesity. Fundamental disputes over guns, immigration and the climate. A to-do list that would exhaust even the most vigorous multi-tasker. A meteor in Russia, even.

Yet what created one of the buzziest brouhahas in America last week? Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s inopportune sip of water on live TV.

Enormous challenges pack the nation’s plate, but this country just can’t seem to get enough of the small stuff….

One hopes that we can multi-task, since we’re (even further) fucked if we can’t.

Yes, issues such as unemployment and a sluggish economy, the federal budget deficit (caused in no small part because of runaway so-called “defense” spending by the traitors who comprise the military-industrial-corporate complex), obesity, and global warming persist, although, of course, not all of our so-called “problems” actually are problems; what we so thoughtlessly label (like lemmings) as “progress,” such as indefinite economic expansion — such as the construction of even more strip malls and fast-food chain restaurants and chain stores — often if not usually only contributes to the further degradation of the planet and to the further threats to the future welfare of Homo sapiens and to countless other species and to perhaps even all life on planet Earth. (Indeed, our idea of “economic expansion,” which widely is considered to be “good,” is predicated upon the ideas that the planet has magically infinite resources and that ever-increasing population growth, which slowly is killing us all, is good.)

But those (like AP editor Liz Sidoti) who claim that we’re ignoring the Big Issues and focusing too much on Marco Rubio’s lying-induced-dehydration-related fucktardation on live national television aren’t seriously looking at the content of Marco Rubio’s speech either.

Rubio’s speech — the Repugnican Party’s response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday — was just more trickle-down bullshit (what’s trickling down on us is the plutocrats’ urine), just more right-wing platitudes, just more feel-good, propagandistic, “Go U-S-A! We’re No. 1!”  pap that is right out of the 1950s or before.

If you don’t believe me, read Rubio’s speech yourself, but know that in his speech the man-serpent Rubio lied through his venom-dripping fangs right out of the fucking gate. Here is the beginning of his speech:

Good evening. I’m Marco Rubio. I’m blessed to represent Florida in the United States Senate. Let me begin by congratulating President Obama on the start of his second term. [Right…] Tonight, I have the honor of responding to his State of the Union address on behalf of my fellow Republicans. And I am especially honored to be addressing our brave men and women serving in the armed forces and in diplomatic posts around the world. You may be thousands of miles away, but you are always in our prayers. [Fuck our teachers, nurses and others who work hard every day — it’s only if you’re in the military that your job counts, you see.]

The State of the Union address is always a reminder of how unique America is. For much of human history, most people were trapped in stagnant societies, where a tiny minority always stayed on top, and no one else even had a chance. [Because it’s certainly not that way in the United States today, with a tiny plutocratic minority on top of the socioeconomically struggling masses, is it?]

But America is exceptional because we believe that every life, at every stage, is precious, and that everyone everywhere has a God-given right to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them. [Not content with just delivering the “American exceptionalism” propagandistic bullshit, the dim bulb Rubio even felt the need to actually use the adjective “exceptional.”]

Like most Americans, for me this ideal is personal. My parents immigrated here in pursuit of the opportunity to improve their life and give their children the chance at an even better one. They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn’t inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams. [Gotta love this pro-immigrant rhetoric from the same party that for years now has been attacking brown-skinned immigrants from south of the border, immigrants who have just wanted a better life.]

This opportunity – to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life – it isn’t bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who in turn invest or spend the money they make, helping others start a business and create jobs….*

This is the tired old “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” rhetoric that the right wing just won’t stop spewing. Mom-and-pop businesses for the most part are a thing of the past, having been replaced by the Walmarts with which they just cannot compete long, long ago, yet the Repugnican Tea Party traitors bloviate as though we still live in the days of Mayberry, when, if you wanted to start your own small business and thrive, you could.

In stark contrast to the pretty, red-white-and-blue, Thomas-Kinkade-and-Paul-Harvey-like portrait that right-wing punk Marco Rubio paints of the “exceptional” United States of America, Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just this past weekend posted an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.”

Whether Stiglitz wrote his piece at least partially in response to the thirsty Rubio’s pack of lies I’m not sure, but in his piece Stiglitz wrote (bold-faced items are my own emphasis, and the links are Stiglitz’s):

…Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity. [Rubio and his anti-government ilk actually claim that we should leave it up to the plutocrats to ensure equality of opportunity, because isn’t that what the plutocrats are all about — socioeconomic equality? (It’s always a great idea to put the foxes in charge of the chickens, isn’t it?)]

Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century [has that been the case]. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.

It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to research from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.…

Stiglitz also notes that “the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his [or her] parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.”

That blows Marco Rubio and his “exceptional,” red-white-and-blue bullshit right out of the fucking water of which he so badly wants a swig, doesn’t it? Where is the punk Marco Rubio’s Nobel Prize in economics?

And it’s not just that Rubio is a pandering fucking liar who long ago decided to parrot the right wing’s feel-good lies for his own personal and political gain.

It’s that these lies are harmful because they induce individuals to believe that if they just can’t make it in this vicious, dog-eat-dog, everyone-for-him-and-herself American economy, in which the insane income gap between the haves and the have-nots rivals the gap that we saw back in the 1920s, then there is something wrong with them.

In the right-wing worldview, it’s always the individual who is at fault — never the fucked-up system, which always gets off scot-free. The Thomas Kinkade landscape, even though it’s wholly made up and captures nothing of reality, is always just fine; it’s always the individual who is the failure.

So yes, there is plenty about the content of Marco Rubio’s speech to not only find fault with, but to find to be fairly terrifying, since the lying, pandering Rubio obviously is an ambitious asshole.

So let’s dispense with the myth that Marco Rubio’s wonderful speech was overlooked by the fact that he bizarrely acted as though he wasn’t on live national television, that he bizarrely acted as though if he just pretended that we couldn’t see him do something on live national TV, then we couldn’t. His apparent mindset of juvenile and magical thinking, in which he creates reality, could be a whole other blog post (and might be one day, but not today).

Marco Rubio, like the other dumb punks in the Repugnican Tea Party who have been hailed as the party’s “future,” such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan (who, like Rubio, was parched during his vice presidential debate with Joe Biden, who kicked his punk ass), is only finding out that his flimsy facade won’t withstand the scrutiny of the national spotlight. That’s his fault, not ours.

And I agree wholeheartedly: It’s not about the little water bottle that Marco Rubio grabbed during a live national television address.

It’s about the fact that no one who asserts that we still live in a time that, if it ever existed at all, ceased to exist decades ago, is fit to lead.

You can lead only if you are planted firmly in the present and in the problems of the present — not if you’re still stuck in an episode of “Leave It to Beaver” or “The Andy Griffith Show.”

—

*Again, Rubio’s full speech is here. I find most of it not worth regurging here, as most of it is the same, tired old anti-government, pro-fox-and-anti-chicken and anti-fair-taxation (let’s let the rich and their corporations off from paying a fair share of taxes, since then they’ll just give their tax savings to the rest of us, right?) rhetoric that the right wing has been spewing out for some decades now.

But I do find Rubio’s “solution” to the problem of massive student loan debt interesting. In his little speech he said:

“When I finished school, I owed over $100,000 in student loans, a debt I paid off just a few months ago. Today, many graduates face massive student debt. We must give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.”

That’s it. That’s his “solution.”

Wow.

Rubio won’t say that treating our college students like cash cows to be milked for decades after they graduate with their often-worthless-in-this-economy degrees is wrong.

He certainly won’t advocate that we, say, divert some of the billions and billions of dollars from the bloated-beyond-belief U.S. military budget — which is just a way for greedy fucking traitors to loot the U.S. treasury under such guises as “national defense” and “national security” — and use it to at least help our college students (say, perhaps, those who earned the better grades in high school) to pay for college.

No — Rubio’s “solution” is to “give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.” Not to save them from the student-loan sharks, you see, but to just tell them about them.

Meanwhile, under Rubio’s “vision,” the student-loan sharks remain free to savage our students, and the student-loan sharks remain the only source of funding that is available to many if not most of those who want to go to college.

This is leadership?

This is what Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, has to say about education and student-loan debt in the U.S. in his New York Times piece:

…Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality. After World War II, Europe made a major effort to democratize its education systems. We did, too, with the G.I. Bill, which extended higher education to Americans across the economic spectrum.

But then we changed, in several ways. While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. [Indeed, the current yawning gap between the rich and the rest of us started under Ronald Reagan, due to his pro-rich, right-wing policies.] Disparities widened between those living in poor localities and those living in rich suburbs — or rich enough to send their kids to private schools. A result was a widening gap in educational performance — the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for those born 25 years earlier, the Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon found. …

Unless current trends in education are reversed, the situation is likely to get even worse. In some cases it seems as if policy has actually been designed to reduce opportunity: government support for many state schools has been steadily gutted over the last few decades — and especially in the last few years. Meanwhile, students are crushed by giant student loan debts that are almost impossible to discharge, even in bankruptcy. This is happening at the same time that a college education is more important than ever for getting a good job.

Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships.

Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don’t. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.

Americans are coming to realize that their cherished narrative of social and economic mobility is a myth. Grand deceptions of this magnitude are hard to maintain for long — and the country has already been through a couple of decades of self-deception.

Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish — and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other — and contribute to economic weakness, as Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has emphasized. We have an economic, and not only moral, interest in saving the American dream. …

We’ve already lost the future



Reuters photos

In character with the “hope” that he dashed and the significant “change” that he never delivered, President Barack Obama last night delivered a falsely positive State of the Union address meant to capture the “swing vote” for his 2012 re-election campaign. The new slogan is “winning the future,” which is meant to make you keep on hoping for that promised change.

I watched President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last night, live via whitehouse.gov (and I even followed along with his prepared remarks, which he followed to the word, with only a few minor exceptions), and my immediate reaction to the “SOTU” was that the Obamanesque slogans of “hope” and “change” — now that they’re defunct because we know that we were punk’d — apparently have been replaced with the equally fluffy but insubstantial “winning the future.”

(Oh, and Repugnican Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson was able to contain himself this time.)

Seriously, though, Barack Obama is far more about saying the right thing, the most politically advantageous thing, than he is about doing the right thing. And the nation’s challenges are far more daunting than Obama let on in his address.

We’re soon to be awash in baby boomers who will be dependent upon us — that’s “dependent” as in “dependent upon Depends” — and we already don’t have the resources to handle the old people that we have now. And the profits-over-people Repugnicans want to undo any gains that might have been made with health-care reform (a.k.a. “Obamacare”).

We can talk all we want about this being our “Sputnik moment,” as Obama put it last night, but with an impending avalanche of dependent senior citizens who can only suck up our already vanishing resources, in the coming several years we’ll have far more sputum moments than “Sputnik moments.”

But hey, bravo to Barack for appealing to the “swing voters” with his new empty slogan of “winning the future” while he continues to alienate his base, those of us of the “professional left.”

Will the “swing voters” give Obama any money for his 2012 re-election campaign, though?

As far as I know, “swing voters” aren’t known for making substantial political donations.

And I’m one disgruntled former Obama supporter — a member of the “sanctimonious,” “professional left” — who won’t give Obama another penny or another vote. (I quite regret that I gave him hundreds of dollars and that in November 2008 I cast my vote for him.)

Former “President” George W. Bush is one motherfucking dipshit, but the one thing he never did was alienate his own base. Bush might have tried to play to the center sometimes, but he never abandoned those who brought him to the dance.  

At any rate, I might write more about Obama’s speech of last night, but frankly, when the man moves his lips these days, all that I hear is the crafty rhetoric of promises that already are broken even as they are spoken.

I, for one, just can’t hear him anymore.

Samuel Alito, judicial activist

I love the wingnuts’ pathologically hypocritical accusation that judges who disagree with their oppressive, retrogressive, anti-democratic, anti-American views — and who actually stand for the American principle of liberty and justice for all — are “judicial activists.”

Not the majority of the American voters, but the wingnut-stacked U.S. Supreme Court, chose the nation’s president in 2000. If that isn’t the epitome of judicial activism, I don’t know what the fuck is.

Now, the same 5-4 skewed-to-the-right U.S. Supreme Court, in order to help the dying Repugnican Party, has ruled, against a century of legal precedent, that corporations may funnel unlimited amounts of money to political advertisements.

But that’s not judicial activism or anything.

Both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden have pointed out that the court’s ruling allows — or would allow, if Congress cannot correct the court’s error through legislation — foreign interests to influence our elections for their benefit. To allow that to happen smells a bit like treason to me.

U.S. Supreme Court “Justice” Samuel Alito, a BushCheneyCorp appointee who is, of course, one of the Gang of Five, apparently pulled a silent Joe Wilson during President Obama’s State of the Union address last night when the president correctly criticized the court’s radical-right ruling.

“Alito made a dismissive face, shook his head repeatedly and appeared to mouth the words ‘not true’ or possibly ‘simply not true’ when Obama assailed the decision … in his State of the Union address,” The Associated Press reports.

Oh, fuck you, Samuel Alito!

You don’t uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. You’re a fucking judicial activist for the wingnuts.

Hopefully one of the wingnuts on the nation’s highest court will retire or drop dead soon and we progressives will start to see 5-4 decisions in our favor — that is, in favor of democracy and in favor of the principle of liberty and justice for all, not just for stupid rich white people.

Seriously fucked-up national priorities

Yahoo! News reports today:

With the president’s State of the Union address coming up on Wednesday, the White House appears to be struggling to find its feet. Republican Scott Brown’s surprise victory in liberal Massachusetts has dominated the national conversation in the last week and made Obama’s goal of signing health care reform impossible before the big speech.

Now, even Obama’s apparent attempt to soothe voters’ budget-deficit concerns by proposing a three-year freeze on some federal spending is being met with ridicule from both the right and the left.

The plan Obama will propose breaks down as follows:

• Freeze discretionary spending on non-security-related programs and government agencies whose budgets are set annually by Congress. Affected programs could include subsidies for farmers, child nutrition and national parks.

• Exempt from the freeze would be budgets for federal entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as the budgets for the Pentagon, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and foreign aid.

The administration claims this will save the country $250 billion over the next decade, or about 3 percent of the $9 trillion deficits the U.S. is expected to accumulate over that period.

Conservatives have mocked the freeze as not doing nearly enough to get to the root of the country’s economic problems…. Liberals aren’t happy either, arguing that less government spending will slow economic growth, and that cutting government services will harm those in need.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the freeze “a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for.” … 

Agreed. The Obama administration is so beholden to the military-industrial complex — of which the Israel-first lobby is a huge part* — that it would be exempt from a federal spending freeze.

Make no mistake: the Repugnicans are fine with taxing and spending — as long as those tax revenues goes to the war profiteers (most of whom are stupid rich white men) and not to the things that the American people actually need.

The federal budget deficit hit a record fucking high under George W. Bush because of the unelected Bush regime’s looting of the U.S. Treasury via its bogus war in Vietraq. The wingnuts made not a peep of this reckless spending that put the nation’s economy in the toilet.

But when the Obama admininistration wants to give some poor schoolkids some free or reduced-cost school lunches, that’s — gasp! — socialism! Because slaughtering children abroad (nip those little “Islamofascist” “terrorists” in the bud!) is a much higher national priority than is taking care of our children here at home, obviously.

So successful has the military-industrial complex’s self-perpetuating propaganda been that Obama is afraid to take the complex on, although he has claimed that he didn’t become president just to kick our most pressing problems into the future.

Well, some U.S. president sometime — and sooner rather than later — needs to confront the bloated military-industrial complex and say: Enough!

Yes, we need national security. I’m all for national security.

But I vehemently oppose bombing and occupying foreign nations that not only never did anything to the United States but couldn’t even have done anything to the United States only in order to inflame anti-American hatred — only in order to ensure that we have plenty of enemies to ensure bullshit justification for the perpetuation of the military-industrial complex’s mega-budget.

These traitors of the military-industrial complex make us more unsafe by unnecessarily creating even more enemies abroad and then screaming about all of our enemies abroad from whom they have to save us. This is what Big Brother did in George Orwell’s 1984: ensure a constant supply of enemies, fake or real, to justify stealing the people’s resources from them, induce them to tolerate going without because supposedly their government was using the lion’s share of its — of their — resources to protect them from imagined or real harm from without.

(The wingnuts’ propaganda has been so successful that many Americans are terrified of things that would help them — such as health care reform — but don’t think twice about the fact that the nation’s wealth is being funneled to a bloated military-industrial complex, since the thieves can’t empty the U.S. Treasury outright.)

If you are as pissed off about our woefully misplaced national spending priorities as I am, you can go to TrueMajority.org to “tell Congress not to clap when Obama proposes [during his State of the Union speech] spending $100 billion on the war in Afghanistan while freezing spending on everything else.”

Maybe, if Obama says during his speech that we need to put these additional billions and billions of our dollars into bogus wars for the war profiteers, some sane member of Congress will yell: “You lie!”

*Israel is the No. 1 recipient of U.S. foreign aid; apparently the Repugnicans want the Israeli children, not American children, to get those free or reduced-cost school lunches…

Brown is the new white!

Associated Press photo

Look! This brown guy is a Repugnican!: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (shown above) was chosen by the Repugnicans to deliver their response to President Barack Obama’s quasi-State of the Union address because the Repugnicans won’t be outdone by the Democrats where it comes to hipness. While the woman-hating Democrats didn’t choose Billary Clinton as the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, for instance, the uber-hip Repugnicans chose rabid feminist Sarah Palin-Quayle as John McCainosaurus’ running mate. Because the Repugnicans are progressive!

Every time the Repugnicans want to counter President Barack Obama, it seems, they counter him with a relatively younger, brown-skinned Repugnican (of whom there are precious few).

Late last month the Repugnicans chose former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, as the new chair of the Repugnican National Committee, and they chose Repugnican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is of Indian descent, to give the response to President Obama’s quasi-State of the Union address tonight.

The Repugnicans can’t attack Obama on the grounds of his substance or his popularity — about two-thirds of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance thus far and approve of the economic stimulus package — so they try to match Obama’s physical appearance and demographics by trotting out some younger, brown-skinned guy who sold his soul to the Repugnican Party.

“Look! We’re as hip as the Democrats!” the Repugnicans — whose party is going the way of the dinosaurs that they don’t believe in — are saying.

Since the Repugnicans refuse to go on substance, I guess that I will, too. I won’t go into the details of Obama’s quasi-State of the Union address or Jindal’s pathetic response, except to say that it’s pretty fucking funny to hear a Repugnican call the economic stimulus package “irresponsible.”

Because clearly, the past eight fucking years have demonstrated amply that the Repugnicans, who have the support of only about a third of the nation right now, are all about responsibility.

P.S. OK, if you want substance, I’ll explain it yet once again: the Repugnicans’ problem with the economic stimulus package is not that it is the “irresponsible” spending of tax dollars; after all, Repugnican “President” George W. Bush ran up the largest federal budget deficit in the nation’s history, in no small part because of the bogus Vietraq War that he launched in March 2003 for the war profits of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp.

No, that’s not irresponsible, to steal hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury and hand it to stupid rich white men via the bogus war in Vietraq — while the nation crumbles.

Spending the taxpayers’ dollars on things that the taxpayers actually need, such as job development, education, health care and infrastructure — now, that is the height of irresponsibility!