Sen. Dianne Feinstein running again

I have yet to see it reported in the mainstream media, but it’s clear that “Democratic” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California (pictured above, I’m pretty sure) is going to run for a fifth six-year term.

I voted for the center-right, mostly irrelevant Feinstein exactly once, in 2000, when I was still pretty new to California and didn’t know much about her. Over the ensuing years I learned a lot more about her, such as how her war-profiteering husband profiteered from the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War that she voted for, and therefore I haven’t voted for her since.*

Feinstein, whose net worth exceeds $50 million (yeah, she’s just one of us!) and who at age 8fucking3 is the oldest (apparently still living) member of the Senate, could step aside and vacate the seat that she has held since 19fucking92, giving a younger, fresher, much more relevant face a chance to represent the great state of California, but why do the right thing?

I knew that Feinstein was running again when fairly recently I started receiving e-mails from her again. (I am on her e-mail list.) Seriously, I can tell you that this is her pattern: It’s radio silence from her for several years, and then, when the next primary election for her approaches (it will be in June 2018), you’ll hear from her.

The e-mail that I received from Feinstein’s campaign today contains this mediocre logo —

— and has small print at the bottom that reads “Paid for and authorized by Feinstein for Senate 2018.”

Sadly, as long as she still lives, Repugnican Lite Feinstein will win re-election. Californians are pretty fucking dumb where it comes to re-electing her.

Hell, they’d probably vote for her corpse, which they essentially have been doing for a while now anyway.

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*Feinstein also supported the unelected Bush regime’s unconstitutional mass spying on Americans, and still supports unconstitutional mass spying by the federal government; called for the immediate extradition and arrest of patriot Edward Snowden for having exposed the unconstitutional mass spying by the federal government that she wholeheartedly supports; supports the death penalty, since millionaires like she never have to worry about ever facing so-called justice; and actually supported the unconstitutional attempt to make the “desecration” of the U.S. flag a criminal act, although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects it (duh).

Feinstein is a real over-privileged, out-of-touch, authoritarian, plutocratic piece of shit.

Don’t know WTF you’re doing? No problem! Become a ‘war president’!

I’d say that “President” Pussygrabber is focusing on military actions right now because he has no fucking clue as to how to handle domestic affairs.

That’s true, but the larger truth, I think, is even worse than that: War is a great diversion from the fact that our corporate overlords – Pussygrabber & Co. and many others – are continuing to rob us commoners blind, through such means as government deregulation meant to increase obscene profiteering, the continuing privatization of the commons and of governmental functions (including, of course, health care, public schools and prisons), and giving even more tax breaks to the rich while the rest of us continue to pay more than our fair share of taxes.

“I’m a war president,” George W. Bush infamously declared in February 2004. Never mind that the Vietraq War that he launched in March 2003 not only was bogus and immoral, but was illegal; the unelected Bush regime committed war crimes, causing the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people in Iraq, giving Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad a run for his money where body counts in the Middle East are concerned.

“War President” Gee Dubya went on to destroy the nation’s economy by the time he left office in January 2009, and, of course, not only did the Vietraq War provide war profits for Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton (and for other war profiteers), but it distracted the masses while BushCheneyCorp and friends freely looted the nation. It was great cover.

This is what it’s about these days when the United States of America goes to war.

That and since Pussygrabber is an egomaniacal man-child who would do anything to get his awful favorability numbers up, expect the remainder of whatever time Pussygrabber has left in the White House to include a shitload of saber-rattling.

Finally, of course, the Pussygrabber administration’s new-found supposedly adversarial stance toward Russia (via Syria) strikes me as a transparent, cynical attempt to try to put to rest the months-long chatter about how Team Pussygrabber has been in bed with Russia (perhaps even literally) even before the presidential election.

When the unelected Pussygrabber administration drops a MOAB on Moscow, then maybe we can believe that the supposed, awfully conveniently new hostility between Team Pussygrabber and Team Putin is real.

‘President’ Pussygrabber sets fascist, deregulatory, anti-government tone

“These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”

Cartoon from The New Yorker

I watched “President” Pussygrabber’s inauguration speech live today out of a sense of obligation to know exactly what toxic propaganda the fascist in chief is spewing into the political environment.

Thankfully it was a fairly short speech, and right off the bat Pussygrabber showed us the direction he’s dragging us in: Gub-mint baaad!

To hear Pussygrabber tell it, the nation’s ills are due to the craven, selfish gub-mint workers in D.C. (federal elected officials and federal civil servants, I presume) who for the past several years have been working for themselves instead of for the American people (I’d thought that it was the Mexicans and the Muslims whom we need to dispose of in order to Make America Great Again, but whatever…).

Pussygrabber huffed and puffed:

… For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished — but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered — but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes — starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you. …*

It’s funny, because I could have sworn that our corporate and other plutocratic overlords, most of them not in government, committed these crimes against us commoners — including by, yes, buying off way too many of those in D.C. — and it’s not that Pussygrabber truly believes that the government hasn’t helped the citizenry enough; no, it’s that the government has helped the citizenry too much, has been too regulatory.

The treasonous profiteers have a harder time treasonously profiteering at the expense of the people and of the planet when the government effectively is regulating bad actors.

Thus, we must put an anti-Environmental Protection Agency guy in charge of the EPA, an anti-Department of Energy guy in charge of the Department of Energy, an anti-public-school woman in charge of the Department of Education, and a white supremacist in charge of the Department of Justice, to name only some of the examples of Pussygrabbers’ having appointed rabid foxes on crack to guard the hen house.

And, of course, the filthy rich — Pussygrabber’s cohorts — want their massive tax breaks, and doing good, beneficial things for the citizenry takes tax dollars; therefore, we must convince the citizenry that the government spending tax dollars on them (even their own tax dollars) is bad.

And of course Pussygrabber and his deregulatory ilk have to falsely frame their deregulation schemes in terms of helping the average U.S. citizen when, in fact, deregulation more often than not harms the average citizen.

It’s all good, though; when the United States of America becomes a complete fucking free-for-all, a treasonous profiteer’s wet dream of deregulation, there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth among the vast majority of those who incredibly stupidly voted for Pussygrabber. (Unfortunately, there also will be suffering for the millions of us who did not vote for Pussygrabber, and about 3 million more of us did not vote for him than did.)

Of course a billionaire never had any intention whatsofuckingever of helping the little guy. After all, he stole his billions from the legions of little guys. (You don’t get filthy rich by working; you get rich via the legalized thievery that is capitalism.)

In short order I expect the nation to go right back to the state it was at the end of “President” George W. Bush’s eight illegitimate years (or worse). I expect another nationwide economic collapse and environmental catastrophes (natural and man-made) for which the government is wholly unprepared and/or unwilling to manage effectively.

And, of course, we’ll probably have at least another unnecessary war; after all, as BushCheneyCorp knew fully well, the war profiteers can’t profiteer without a war, and it’s not that hard to fabricate a casus belli; a relentless campaign of propagandist lies will do the trick, as it did for the Vietraq War.

I mean, Pussygrabber already has started out just as Gee Dubya did: with a stolen presidential election. Nothing good follows a stolen election; a stolen election can be nothing else but a harbinger of doom. An individual who loses the popular vote but who takes office anyway isn’t a democratically elected individual.

And an individual who becomes president with the help of a foreign, enemy nation is a traitor — we’ll see how hard “President” Pussygrabber works to quash all further investigation into his very apparently treasonous ties to Russia and to his apparent puppeteer Putin.

With a patently fascist and treasonous “president” in the White House yet once again — yes, thank you, Gee Dubya, for helping to prepare us at least to some degree for Donald J. Trump — I am happy that I live in California, where regulation by the government makes our citizens’ lives better, not worse (if it decreases some bad corporate actors’ profits, oh, boo fucking hoo), and where I at least somewhat will be protected from the worst excesses from the unelected Pussygrabber regime.

We Californians, who reside in by far the most populous state in the nation and who voted for Billary Clinton over Pussygrabber by a margin of almost two to one, are not having this Pussygrabber bullshit and we plan to resist him the way that the Repugnican Teatards treasonously resisted the actually democratically elected Barack Obama every fucking step of the way.

As unpleasant as it is for me to hear “President” Pussygrabber speak even a short sentence, while he sickens me, as all neo-Nazis do — seriously, listening to even his short inauguration speech, one of the worst ever given, was work for me — I don’t feel that I didn’t do enough to try to prevent a “President” Trump.

From Day One I was a strong supporter of actual populist Bernie Sanders, whom I always saw as more likely to win the White House than the unlikable, corrupt, faux populist, Democrat in name only, Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton.

I gave Sanders’ presidential campaign more than $1,000 over time and spent countless hours writing about him and discussing him with others. I even stood on my feet for at least two hours waiting to see him at a rally attended by thousands here in Sacramento in May.

But in the end, the “Democratic” dead-enders shoved the coronation of Billary Clinton down our throats — even though the nationwide polls, right up to the end of the Democratic Party presidential primary elections and caucuses, consistently showed Bernie Sanders doing much better against Donald Trump than she — and as a result of that colossal collective “Democratic” stupidity, we now have “President” Pussygrabber.

Yes, blame the fucktards who voted for Pussygrabber in the general election, but blame the fucktards who supported Billary Clinton in the Democratic Party presidential primaries and caucuses, too.

Clintonism finally is dead now, thank Goddess, but now we have to deal with “President” Pussygrabber and the damage that he is going to wreak through his systematic dismantling of our institutions in order to benefit himself, his family and his rich cronies.

We survived George W. Bush, but I don’t know whether we’ll survive Pussygrabber.

I only know that I am part of the resistance, even though my conscience is clear and even though I can say, Don’t blame me — I voted for Bernie!

—

*Of course corruption, fraud, waste and abuse and even inefficiency should be rooted out in all levels of government and corrected, and of course in some states and locales (the vast majority of them Repugnican-controlled) the governments actually don’t do the people’s business but do the plutocrats’ business, but on the whole, all levels of government do the citizenry much more good than harm.

Government is all that stands between us peasants and our corporate overlords getting absolutely everything that they want from us and doing absolutely everything that they want to do to us.

This is why “President” Pussygrabber and his ilk want to destroy, or at least seriously cripple, government: So they can get to us more quickly and more easily.

“President” Pussygrabber must distract the angry hordes carrying torches and pitchforks from the real enemy: our millionaire and billionaire corporate overlords like Pussygrabber. Indeed, as the new head of the Repugnican Party, this is one of Pussygrabber’s chief jobs: to keep the faux populist propaganda flowing and to keep publicly identifying the wrong enemies of the people (Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and now, apparently, government workers and elected officials) so that our treasonous corporate overlords can continue to fuck us over blind.

Will the Paris attacks bring back the ‘war on terror’? (The right hopes so!)

Associated Press photo

ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a Paris Starbucks yesterday because the Starbucks’ cups were not sufficiently religious. (Kidding! That’s called political satire. The caption for this news photo is: “Victims lay on the pavement outside a Paris restaurant, Friday, November 13, 2015. Police officials in France on Friday report multiple terror incidents, leaving many dead. It was unclear at this stage if the events are linked.” [It is fairly clear now that they were linked.])

I hate ISIS. Always have, always will, and my general feeling toward the members of ISIS long has been pound them into the sand.

It’s not that the members of ISIS call themselves Muslim; it’s that they oppress and slaughter those who do not share their insane religious beliefs — you know, they do what the “Christo”fascists here at home would do if they could. It’s not the specific religion of the members of ISIS that bothers me; it’s their theofascism, their insane, self-righteous, yes, evil belief that their insane religious beliefs give them the right to treat others any way that they please, in the name of a non-existent “God.”

That said, it’s important not to reduce it to black and white, good vs. evil. It’s important to try to view the entire context.

France, along with Britain and the United States (and Spain and some other European nations), has a long history of colonization and of meddling in the affairs of other nations, including in the Middle East. It’s much more complicated than that the members of ISIS are just “evil” and want to strike out at us “good” (that is, “Christian”) Westerners, because that’s just what “evil” people do: strike out at “good” people. No, it isn’t just that “they hate our freedoms.”

Yes, I bring up the ghost of Gee Dubya because I’ll be frank: The United States of America has been rotting from within for many, many years now. This domestic rot started no later than during the Reagan era. “Democrat” Bill Clinton did little to nothing to reverse this rot and decline, and then we had eight long, ruinous years of another George Bush, and now we’re still in another eight years of the Clintonesque/do-nothing/Democratic-in-name-only Barack Obama era.

Thus far in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the main focus, quite appropriately, has been on domestic issues.

Then ISIS goes and attacks Paris, killing at least 127 people. (ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks of yesterday, anyway.)

The French seem prepared to strike back, which is quite human and is understandable, but which quite possibly will start a back-and-forth blood bath that will drag on.

Which will mean that very quickly, the focus in the United States of America no longer will be trying to reverse our domestic rot, but once again will turn toward “terrorism,” because we Americans, first and foremost, don’t want to be bombed or riddled with bullets when we’re out and about shopping for overpriced shit that we don’t need in our mega-malls, drinking our caffeinated hot beverages from our not-Christmas-enough Starbucks cups, or watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster or Oscar bait at a cineplex.

Our chance of being slaughtered by a fellow “Christian” citizen is much higher than is our chance of ever being cut down by an “Islamofascist” “terrorist” (or by an “illegal”), but no matter; we Americans never have been good at calculating actual risks vs. vastly over-inflated risks. (After all, They hate our freedoms!)

I am sorry that dozens of human beings were slaughtered in Paris yesterday. I don’t believe in killing innocents* in order to try to score political points, whether those innocents are killed by “Islamofascist” “terrorists” or by the U.S. military (funny how when the United States government kills innocent people in order to make political gains, which it does routinely, that’s never called “terrorism” [nor is the mass-murderous Israel even capable of “terrorism,” because, like the United States, Israel is “good”]).

While I understand the stance of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists that France and other Western nations are evil because they long have participated in the colonization of and military attacks upon predominantly Muslim nations in the Middle East, the “Islamofascists” apparently also dislike the Western nations more or less equally because the Western nations aren’t backasswards like the Islamic fundamentalists are, such as with their misogyny, their homophobia, their sexual repression and their religious intolerance (including severe but awfully selective scriptural enforcement) to the point of routine violence against “apostates.”

I mean, in its online statement claiming responsibility for the attacks on Paris yesterday, ISIS referred to Paris as a/the “capital of adultery and vice.”

ISIS further declared, “The stench of death will not leave their noses as long as they remain at the forefront of the Crusaders’ campaign, dare to curse our prophet, boast of a war on Islam in France, and strike Muslims in the lands of the caliphate with warplanes that were of no use to them in the streets and rotten alleys of Paris.”

ISIS also proclaimed that France “will remain at the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State.”

My impression is that France is at “the top of the list” for several reasons: One, it has more Muslim inhabitants (percentage-wise) than does any other Western nation; two, apparently there long has been widespread mistreatment of and discrimination against Muslims in “innocent” France; and, of course, France is much geographically closer to the Middle East than are other Western nations (especially the United States, of course), making France, logistically, an easier target for terrorist attacks.

My hope is that things calm down in France quickly, that tit-for-tat bloodshed doesn’t occur, and that the United States of America continues to focus on its domestic crises instead of returning to the days of the unelected, fascistic George W. Bush regime when the “war on terror” eclipsed everything, while the filthy rich continued to get even richer from stealing even more from us, the distracted-by-the-“war-on-terror” masses, and while things here at home continued to deteriorate while we focused on the “terrorists” abroad (yes, the billions and billions of our dollars that went to the war machine — mostly, to the treasonous war profiteers [a.k.a. “contractors”], such as the folks at Dick Cheney’s Halliburton — were billions and billions of our dollars that never went to our public schools, to our streets and other public infrastructure, to our health-care needs, to food, to shelter, to environmental protection, to job creation, etc.).

The Repugnican Tea Party would love for the national discussion to pivot from its current, rare focus on domestic issues and to return instead to the “war on terror.” Because that’s where the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are most comfortable, are most in their fear-based element: spooking the masses by some “enemy” “threat,” be it the often-brown-skinned “illegals” from south of the border or be it the often-brown-skinned “Islamofascist” “terrorists” from abroad come to kill us because “they hate our freedoms.”

This use of trumped-up/Trumped-up fear allows the home-grown, right-wing traitors (and yes, terrorists) right here among us at home to, even literally, get away with murder, to run rampant with their treasonous, right-wing crimes in a nation whose masses are distracted from wildly overblown concerns of harm from without, when the real harm, as almost always, actually is from within.

We truly patriotic Americans allow our nation to return to the right-wing mindset of a “war on terror” at our own peril.

We can stop it.

We simply do what we did not do last time: We stand up and we say: Oh, hell no!

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*Yes, I get it that there are gradations of innocence.

One could argue, as the “Islamofascists” do argue, that merely to be a citizen of a Western nation that militarily attacks in the Middle East is to be guilty by complacency (if not merely by association), that is, the citizens of the Western nations, this line of thought goes, allow their nation’s military forces to strike the Middle East, and therefore, they aren’t innocent, but do have blood on their hands.

However, when it comes to revenge, I don’t believe in group revenge. If an individual grievously harms another individual, I can see revenge being taken upon the individual who actually perpetrated the harm him- or herself. But to hold an entire group of people accountable for harm done to other people whom they’ve never even encountered — harm that was perpetrated by other people whom they’ve never even encountered — is bullshit. It’s not justice. At best, it’s very, very sloppy revenge.

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.”

Obama makes it easy to be Green

Updated below

Unlike both Barack Obama and Mittens Romney, a Green Party president wouldn’t be just a puppet of the corporations.

I yet to have been inspired to give Barack Obama’s re-election campaign a single fucking penny, and I already have cast my (mail-in) vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein for California’s June 5 presidential primary election.

I am not sure which is worse: to have had the unelected Bush regime use opposition to same-sex marriage to “win” “re”-election in 2004, or to have the (at-least-actually-duly-elected) Obama administration use support of same-sex marriage to win re-election.

In both cases, we of the “LGBT” “community” are only being used by the “leaders” of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party in order to raise million$ and in order to pander for votes.

The Obama campaign earlier this month released an incredibly pandering five-minute re-election campaign video in which the Obamanistas act as though all throughout his first term Obama has been fighting fiercely for the LGBT community when, in fact, his fairly recent “breakthrough” announcement that he finally has “evolved” and now supports same-sex marriage — even though he had proclaimed that position way back in 1996 in Chicago, and even though he still maintains that each state should be allowed to decide the issue, meaning that we will continue to have gross inequality and unfairness and injustice throughout the nation — came quite late in his first term.

Yes, the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a good thing, but let us recall that it was “Democrat” Bill Clinton who gave us “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the first fucking place, as well as DOMA (the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which the Obama administration does not defend in court, but which remains the law of the land).

The Dems are our friends? They enact awful, discriminatory, unlawful/unconstitutional legislation, and then want to take credit and want praise for reversing it? Really? Really?

And “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, someone who doesn’t see why anyone of any sexual orientation would aid and abet the criminal U.S. military in the first place, someone who recognizes clearly what a fucking racket the U.S. military is — it’s not about actual “defense” or “national security” nearly as much as it is about funneling the contents of the U.S. Treasury (billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars) to the pockets of the traitors who comprise the military-industrial-corporate complex. (Well, the nation’s treasury is empty these days, so what they’re doing is making sure that those of us who have to follow them inherit a mountain of national debt.)

The members of the U.S. military these days primarily serve as the thugs for the corporations to exploit other nations’ natural resources — thugs that we, the taxpayers, pay for, even though it’s the plutocrats, and not we, the people, who get the lion’s share of the spoils of the wars that we, the people, pay for.

(The Vietraq War, for instance: Saddam Hussein’s real crime was not that he tyrannized his people, but that he nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Now that the people of Iraq have been “liberated,” so have the nation’s oil fields — for Big Oil. No one in Iraq died for freedom or for democracy or for puppies or for kittens or for butterflies or for marshmallowy goodness. No, all of them died primarily for the profiteering of Big Oil and the profiteering of the military-industrial-corporate complex, such as Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton, which couldn’t profiteer without a war, so the unelected BushCheneyCorp gave it a war from which to profiteer, using 9/11 as a pretext, much as how the members of the Nazi Party had used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to ram their right-wing agenda down their fellow countrymen’s throats. Happy fucking Memorial Day, by the way, and it’s so awfully nice to know that we of the “LGBT” “community” now are “free” to be cannon fodder in the plutocrats’ war profiteering that we call “national security” and “national defense” and the like.)

I suppose that I digress, but I like — well, I love — what Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi had to say earlier this month about Presidential Race 2012:

…But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It’s just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. …

This is exactly the John Kerry scenario. Kerry was never going to win, either, and everyone pretty much knew that, too. [No, actually, I, for one, thought that Kerry had a pretty good chance, having recognized that an incumbent president usually is difficult to unseat, and I still suspect that Kerry actually would have won the pivotal state of Ohio, and thus the White House, had the election in Ohio not been overseen by the Katherine-Harris-like Kenneth Blackwell.] But at least in the Kerry-Bush race there was a tremendous national debate over the Iraq war, which many people (incorrectly, probably) thought might end more quickly if a Democrat was elected.

This year, it’s not like that. Obviously Republican voters do hate Obama and genuinely believe he’s created a brutally repressive socialist paradigm with his health care law, among other things. But Romney was a pioneer of health care laws, and there will be dampened enthusiasm on the Republican side for putting him in office. [No, they hate Barack Hussein Obama primarily because he’s black. The “Muslim” and “socialist” charges are just code words for “nigger,” which you can’t utter in the public domain anymore without repercussions. Let’s be real about that fact.]

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. [Absolutely.]

In other words, Obama versus [John] McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. [Emphasis of that money shot is mine, although the money shot of Taibbi’s piece actually might be his hilarious but fairly accurate assertion that this year’s presidential election “will be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse.”]

George Bush’s reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama’s first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it. …

That, to me, is the main reason that I’m not at all excited about this cycle’s presidential race: Both Obama and Romney indeed are calculating centrists. But since the Repugnican Tea Party has succeeded in moving what used to be the center to the right, that makes both Obama and Romney, in my book, center-right candidates. Romney is a bit more to the right than is Obama, but not enough to see the two as much more different from each other than are Pepsi and Coke. The tiny plutocratic minority will continue to do well while the rest of us, the vast majority of Americans, will continue to suffer, regardless of which calculating centrist wins in November.

Obama panders to the left now and then — when he or his spokesweasels aren’t calling us such things as “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left” — but it’s his actions, or lack thereof, that I pay attention to, not his words, especially after his words “hope” and “change” fizzled specfuckingtacularly.

Speaking of Obama’s lack of actions, on June 5, not only will California hold its presidential primary, which will help Mittens finally get the 1,144 delegates that he needs to be the Repugnican Tea Party’s official presidential candidate (he has 1,084 delegates right now, according to Politico), but Wisconsin will hold its gubernatorial recall election.

Unfortunately, as I type this sentence, intrade.com puts Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of surviving the June 5 recall election at 92.6 percent.*

That’s in no small part because Barack Obama and the national Democratic Party have been conspicuously missing in fucking action where the fight for the right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin has been concerned. Wisconsinites have been on their own since early 2011, after Walker took office and gave tax breaks to the state’s plutocrats and announced that it was the state’s public-sector labor unions that were the cause of the state’s fiscal problems.

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said this: “And 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 will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet Obama has yet to appear once in Wisconsin to stand up for the Repugnican-Tea-Party-beseiged members of the working class and the middle class there. The national Democratic Party has thrown some money Wisconsin’s way at the very last fucking minute, too late to make much of a difference, if any difference at all (Scott Walker’s corporate sugar daddies have thrown many more millions his way than the Dems in Wisconsin have had available to them), but now, I suppose, the national Dem Party can say, and will say — well, actually, it has said — that it did something in Wisconsin, even though this has been just a repeat of the Democratic cowardice and incompetence and sluggardry that we have seen before.**

I remember the debacle that was California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election all too well: The state’s Dem Party was in incredibly stupid denial that its uber-uncharismatic incumbent governor, Gray Davis, might actually lose the Repugnican-orchestrated recall election, which more than anything else was just a do-over of the 2002 gubernatorial election that the Repugnicans had lost, only this time they would front as their candidate against Gray Davis testosterone-movie-star Arnold “Baby Daddy (We Know Now)” Schwarzenegger. Because of their denial, the state’s Dem Party elites staunchly refused to rally around another Democratic candidate to run against Baby Daddy Schwarzenegger. To do so, the Dem elites rationalized, would be to admit Davis’ impending defeat.

Then-Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, apparently recognizing that Davis indeed might lose, ran against Schwarzenegger in the recall election, but he did so on his own, without the support of the state party. Had the state party supported Bustamante, or another viable Democratic candidate, he or she might have won the recall election.

It’s incredibly fucking difficult to support a party that absofuckinglutely refuses, repeatedly, to fucking fight for you in return for your support.

Should Scott Walker survive his June 5 recall election, I will chalk that up in no small part to the fact that Barack Obama utterly reneged on his 2007 promise to “put on a comfortable pair of shoes” and join “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain” — “because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

We workers do deserve to know that somebody is standing in our corner, but nobody fucking is — at least no one who actually can win the White House in November.

However, I’d much rather vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein again in November, even though of course she can’t win the White House, than to vote again for Barack Obama, to continue to be punk’d by the party that claims that it loves me so much — but that can’t show me such “love” unless it can then use me in its fundraising efforts immediately thereafter.

P.S. Disclaimer: I have been registered with both the Green Party and with the Democratic Party. Currently I am registered with the Green Party, in large part because I can’t stomach the Democrats’ pseudo-progressivism, their unwillingness to fight the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, and the party’s ever-increasing move to the right. Background:

In 2000 I voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader for president because he was the candidate whose platform most closely matched my own beliefs and values, and because it was obvious that Democrat Al Gore was going to win all of California’s electoral votes anyway (and, of course, he did).

In 2004 I supported and voted for Democrat John Kerry, primarily because preventing a second term by the unelected Bush regime was my No. 1 priority, and Kerry early on struck me as the strongest candidate to put up against Bush. (Of course, the spineless, incompetent Dems didn’t let me down; when it was announced that Kerry had “lost” the pivotal state of Ohio, Kerry couldn’t concede fast enough, and shortly after the election, word came out that Kerry had not spent millions of dollars that he’d collected, millions that might have made a difference in the outcome of the election.)

In 2008 I still was not sure, as I entered my polling place, whether I would vote for Barack Obama or whether I would vote for Ralph Nader again. I knew that Obama would win all of California’s electoral votes anyway, just as it was a foregone conclusion that Gore would win them in 2000 and that Kerry would win them in 2004. (Until we get rid of the Electoral College, millions of Americans’ votes for president won’t really matter at all.) At rather the last minute, I blackened the oval by Obama’s name.

That is a mistake that I won’t make again, unless, perhaps, by some miracle it actually looks like Mittens Romney might win California. (That, of course, will not happen.)

Update (Monday, May 28, 2012): Oops. I wrote above that Mittens should seal the deal on June 5. Actually, Mittens is expected to finally reach 1,144 delegates tomorrow, when Texas holds its presidential primary. If for some reason Mittens does not get enough of Texas’ 155 delegates — Reuters reports that he needs fewer than half of those to reach the magic 1,144 — then he would get the remaining delegates on June 5, when California and four other states hold their primaries. (The very last state in the presidential primary season is Utah, which doesn’t vote until June 26.)

—

*As I type this sentence, intrade.com gives Mittens Romney only a 38.7 percent chance of winning the White House and gives Obama a 57.4 percent chance of winning re-election, which seems about right to me, about 40 percent to 60 percent.

**While I have yet to give Obama another penny for his re-election — I gave him hundreds of dollars in 2008, primarily during the 2008 Democratic primary fight because I believed that as president he would be significantly more progressive than would Billary Clinton — I have given hundreds of dollars towards the recall elections in Wisconsin, because that, to me, is where the real fight has been, and because, as I noted, the Wisconsinites for the very most part have been on their own, having been abandoned by the Obama administration and the national Democratic Party.

It’s past time to reel in our stormtroopers and shrink the Death Star

There comes a time when you should see things clear [sic]
Free from my innocence, there is no circumstance too severe
Only the need for us, for us to believe again
There is a time, temptation’s on the run
Dreamer, you’ve had your way
Soldier, you’ve had your day in the sun
Now it’s time for us to begin again

Le Bel Age
Only our love will remain
Le Bel Age
Close to the truth once again …

— Pat Benatar, “Le Bel Age”

Please forgive my incredibly cheesy ’80s reference, but I’ve always loved that line: “Soldier, you’ve had your day in the sun.” (I don’t know that that the “dreamer” has had his or her way; I suppose that we need to know what it is, exactly, that the said dreamer dreams.)

At least since after Sept. 11, 2001, “hero” worship — worship of the mostly white male members of the U.S. military, law enforcement and, to a lesser extent, firefighters and emergency medical personnel — has gripped the nation.

Never mind that it’s the blowback from our military “heroes'” actions in the Middle East (where they were sent by stupid, white, filthy rich, greedy white men) that brought us 9/11 in the first fucking place.

Blowback is quite real. Take the 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them reportedly children, who reportedly were mowed down by one or more American stormtroopers today in what Reuters calls a “U.S. shooting spree.” Their relatives won’t want revenge against the United States of America?

Shit like this — the stuff of which 9/11 was made — happens, and then when shit like 9/11 happens, American fucktards scratch their heads and ask, “Why do they hate us so much?” (They then conclude that “they” hate us for our “freedom” and our “democracy” and our general lily-white goodness.)

So the endless loop — endless until we sane, actually patriotic Americans put an end to it or until the American empire collapses completely — is that the U.S. war machine slaughters innocent people in the Middle East, there is predictable retaliation in the form of “terrorism” (it’s never called terrorism when the U.S. military or the military of an American ally, such as Israel, slaughters innocent people), and then the members who comprise the U.S. war machine claim that their existence — indeed, their expansion — is necessary because of the global threats! (Never mind that they are the ones who are creating any actual threats.)

Yet a nauseating pro-military, pro-“hero”-worship meme that ABC News rolled out recently is that the members of the U.S. military are “the other 1 percent,” and that the rest of us just don’t appreciate them enough.

Really? Really? The U.S. military is bleeding us dry of our tax dollars — and because of this obscene military overspending we are watching our empire crumble as did past empires that overspent on their militaries — but we civilians owe the members of the U.S. military even more?

This is the deal: China, which is second in the world in its military spending, spends only one-sixth of what the United States spends on its military. This is what world military spending looks like:

The United States easily could more than halve its military spending and still maintain its undisputed global military dominance. At this point — the point on which the American empire teeters upon collapse — I would accept even a one-third reduction in U.S. military spending (for now), with those funds returned to domestic spending in order to save the fucking empire.

But we are told by the pro-military wingnuts that we must have this level of military spending, even though millions of Americans cannot afford health-care costs (health care never should have been made for-profit), even though our public schools continue to crumble and our teachers don’t have the funding that they need (they pay for many things out of their own pockets), even though almost no American (except for the actual 1 percent, the plutocrats) feels any retirement security, even though we have plenty of homeless people in our streets, and speaking of which, our streets are disintegrating and our bridges are falling down.

But even though the U.S. military is bleeding the United States of America fucking dry, ABC News quotes one veteran as having said, “‘It’s hard not to be a little bit angry when you see the tremendous sacrifice that some have paid in this war’ while others have been completely unaffected.”

No, the 99 percent of us have been quite affected by the right wing’s wars of choice in the Middle East for the benefit of the oily war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, which received no-bid contracts for the wholly unnecessary war in Iraq that the treasonous, unelected Bush regime delivered for Halliburton and the other oily, war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp. (No war, no profits, so indeed, BushCheneyCorp created a war.)

Largely because of the astronomical costs of the Vietraq War (and also, of course, because of his tax cuts for the wealthiest among us), while George W. Bush inherited a record federal budget surplus from Bill Clinton, Bush handed over to Barack Obama a record federal budget deficit.

Americans who have been unemployed and who have lost their homes and who can’t afford decent health care (and for whom a college education is pretty much a financial impossibility) don’t need to be lectured to by any bitter veterans that they haven’t sacrified enough. They have. We have. We have sacrified ridiculously more than enough to the U.S. war machine, and while the mostly-white-male objects of “hero” worship expect us to get on our knees and suck their dicks (or maybe they want us to play dead and they can then urinate on our “corpses” — that certainly seems to be their fetish), the members of the female-dominated professions, such as teachers and nurses, whose sacrifices also are immense, not only go unappreciated and unrecognized, but are told by the stupid white men that they must continue to suffer budget cuts and have their unions eliminated so that they lose altogether what paltry remaining rights that they have.

(I used to be a nurse in the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system. I can tell you that with chronic understaffing and other lack of resources due to capitalistic greed, and with patients [most of them baby boomers] feeling entitled to the best health care possible even though most of them put themselves into the hospital because of their selfish, greedy, irresponsible lifestyle choices, going to work felt very much like being in a war zone — so again, nurses and teachers need no fucking lectures on the topic of self-sacrifice from egomaniacal G.I. Joes.)

If American veterans want to be angry for what they have been put through — and I suppose that they should be angry — then they need to be angry at the plutocrats who sent them unnecessarily to war in the first fucking place — and not at us civilians who pay for these military misadventures that are initiated by the treasonous, chickenhawk plutocrats who cannot empty the U.S. Treasury via the military-industrial complex fast enough.

And you know, I was one of millions of Americans who protested during the run-up to the Bush regime’s launch of its bogus Vietraq War in March 2003. Yes, I was at the California State Capitol at an anti-imminent-war rally in early 2003. I knew that invading Iraq was a horrible fucking idea, that it was a bogus war that was about to be launched by the treasonous, unelected Bush regime, and I registered my protest.

But at that time we progressives who opposed the impending Vietraq War were branded by the pro-military wingnuts as lunatics or “terrorist”-loving traitors or both.

And today, these pro-military wingnuts are telling us that we’re not sacrificing enough for the bogus warfare in the Middle East that we opposed from Day One.

And it’s interesting: The members of the U.S. military predominantly come from the red states, and the denizens of the red states are always accusing others of being parasites. They’re the hard workers, and we of the blue states are the slacking parasites on their hard work and their sacrifices, according to their narrative, yet it has been the case for years that the blue states get back significantly less from the federal government than they pay into it, while the red states get back significantly more than they pay into it. (I wrote about this fact here way back in April 2009.)

I assume that the calculations that show that the red states actually are the parasites on the blue states factor in the federal tax dollars collected from the blue states that go into the U.S. military and then are diverted predominantly to the red states, but if not, then the parasitical relationship is even more severe than it has been reported.

In any event, upon examination what emerges is the truth: Which is that the red states, appropriate to their assigned color, are blood-suckers — ticks, fleas, leeches — while we of the blue states, appropriate to our assigned color of oxygen-deprived, near-death blue, are the host, and not fucking vice-versa.

The right-wing fascists love the U.S. military because whatever they do not understand or they do not like or agree with they wish to destroy, and because of their ignorance they are fearful, and because they are fearful, they glorify the capacity to kill those of whom they are afraid. Fearful idiots — not truly brave and loving individuals — glorify guns, bombs and other means of killing people.

And, of course, there are millions of traitors — from big-time military contractors all the way down to individual soldiers — who feed at the trough that is U.S. military overspending. They are traitors because they don’t care that U.S. military overspending is destroying their own nation; they just want their gravy train to keep on chugging. To justify their continued looting of the U.S. Treasury — to continue to rob us blind — they have to invent perpetual “threats” and “national interests,” when the real interests sure the fuck aren’t national, but quite personally financial.

Religion has played a role, too, of course. Most members of the U.S. military, most of them being from the “Christo”fascist red states, identify themselves as “Christians,” even though, perversely ironically, Jesus Christ was all about nonviolence (turn the other cheek, he taught, not gun down your opponent and then piss on his corpse). These “Christo”fascists are having their little crusade in the Middle East, slaughtering Muslims left and right, but why should atheist taxpayers like me have to fund their fucking crusade?

Prick Santorum and Newt Gingrich and their “Christo”fascist ilk whine that the U.S. government “persecutes” “Christians” and that there should be no separation of church and state in the United States, but when the U.S. government is sponsoring their anti-Muslim crusade, I don’t see any real fucking separation of church and state.

Indeed, the U.S. military is rife with “Christo”fascists like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein, who, The Associated Press reports, “first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights [and then] declared that he wouldn’t follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.”

This is a photo of the traitor Stein, out of his pointy white hood:

He looks just like all of the other embittered right-wing bald white guys, like “Joe the Plumber,” who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Ohio:

(Yes, apparently “Joe the Plumber,” a.k.a. Samuel Wurzelbacher, had someone write a book for him. No, he is not expected to win the election in November, and very apparently “the American dream” is that right-wing white guys maintain the control that they’ve had since the nation’s inception. A “dream” for the stupid white men, I suppose, but a fucking nightmare for the rest of us, such as women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians” and non-fascists. [And civilians in the Middle East, of course…])

So: My — our — federal tax dollars don’t go things that we need, such as health care, education, infrastructure maintenance and environmental protection, but go instead to the U.S. military, where blatant traitors like Marine Sgt. Gary Stein proclaim that they don’t have to follow the orders of the nation’s first black president. On our dime.

Any member of the U.S. military who dared to publicly announce that he or she would not follow George W. Bush’s orders would have found him- or herself in knee-deep shit. He or she would have been expected to keep any dissenting political opinions to him- or herself or to be disciplined, but obviously Marine Sgt. Gary Stein and his treasonous, fascistic ilk feel that the U.S. military is only an arm of the American right wing, and thus only Repugnican Tea Party presidents are to be obeyed.

We truly patriotic Americans — who fucking fund the U.S. military in the first place — need to reel in this treasonous bullshit quickly. I see precious little difference between the supposed “subversive,” “Communist” infiltration of the U.S. military during the McCarthy era and the actual subversive infiltration of the U.S. military by the right-wing, white supremacist “Christo”fascists today.

It’s not their fucking military. It’s our fucking military, and it’s insane that we fund them only so that they then can bite the hands that feed them.

We progressives need to man up, so to speak, and demand that politicians, perhaps especially those who call themselves “Democrats,” stop being cowed by the pro-military, “Christo”fascist right wing and stop being the Pentagon’s little bitches. The stupid-white-male-dominated Pentagon (the “Death Star” that I made reference to) should answer to us, the people, and not vice-versa.

Military overspending must be contained before the American empire collapses completely. To be complicit in the empire’s collapse is to be a fucking traitor. There is no way around that.

I don’t want the members of the U.S. military to be unemployed. We have enough unemployment. I want a great number of those employed by the U.S. military to be re-employed, but this time in capacities that help the taxpayers of the United States of America — and not the greedy, treasonous actual 1 percent, who are the only ones who really benefit from the perpetual bogus warfare that they impose upon the 99 percent of us for their own treasonous war profiteering.

These re-employed, redirected individuals from the U.S. military can be engineers, teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, scientists, construction workers, architects, cooks, environmentalists, artists (yes, we need art much more than we need more bombs and fighter planes), whatever they want to be that they are able to be, and those services are worth paying for.

American stormtroopers urinating on corpses and mowing down innocent civilians in the Middle East as a by-product of obscene war profiteering — that, apparently, is what the pro-military right wing wants.

That’s not how I want my tax dollars spent, and the progressive vision, I argue, is infinitely better for the United States of America than is the apocalyptic “vision” of the pro-military “Christo”fascists who tell us progressives that we’re just not sacrificing enough for them.

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

Associated Press photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not fucking likely.

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

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

No. I don’t think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, but he can.

Let’s recap:

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

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

Yeah, I don’t fucking see it.

And neither, I assure you, does this guy:

Associated Press photo

—

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

Associated Press photos

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

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

Sprinting toward another American revolution

Oh people, look around you;
The signs are everywhere.
You’ve left it for somebody other than you
To be the one to care.
You’re lost inside your houses;
There’s no time to find you now.
Your walls are burning and your towers are turning;
I’m going to leave you here and try to get down to the sea somehow….

Those are the opening lyrics of the oldie “Rock Me on the Water.” Written by Jackson Browne in the early 1970s, those words seem especially appropriate for today.

Today we learned that the highest number of U.S. troops — 31 of them — that have died in one day in Afghanistan in the past decade have died after “insurgents” shot down their helicopter. (If we were defending our own home territory from foreign military occupation, we would be “freedom fighters” or the like, but anyone who resists American military occupation is an “insurgent” or a “terrorist” or the like.)

Of course, we Americans only care about American deaths. We don’t care about the many, many, many more “insurgents” and “terrorists” whom our own stormtroopers — er, troops — have slaughtered in the Middle East over the past decade, since the “other” is not fully human. (Yes, you have to dehumanize a human being first before you can not give a flying fucking shit about his or her slaughter. That’s how evil works.)

President Hopey-Changey Obama — who had promised to get us out of Afghanistan — issued the exact same kind of response to the needless death of 31 American troops in Afghanistan that George W. Bush would have. Reports The Associated Press:

President Barack Obama mourned the deaths of the American troops, saying in a statement that the crash serves as a reminder of the “extraordinary sacrifices” being made by the U.S. military and its families. He said he also mourned “the Afghans who died alongside our troops.”

Really? If he truly cared that much, then why the fuck hasn’t he honored his campaign promise to get us the fuck out of Afghanistan?

His response, though, is yet another example of why I say that our nation is ruled by the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party — that the significant difference between the two is difficult to distinguish.

See, it’s not about the fact that our “leaders” are corrupt and inept, that they still have us mired in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, where billions and billions of our tax dollars are being funneled to war profiteers while here at home, our credit rating just got downgraded for the first time in our nation’s history.

We sure the fuck could use our own fucking money here at home right about now, but the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex would rather to continue to steal our nation’s wealth — our wealth — via their bogus “defense” operations. Their personal financial situations are just fine — as is President Hopey-Changey’s personal financial situation, and the personal financial situations of the members of Congress who absofuckinglutely refuse to do what’s best for the highest number of Americans (which can only be defined as treason) —  so fuck the rest of the millions and millions of the rest of us Americans.

But no, see, it’s all about the “extraordinary sacrifices” made by our troops.

How about our fucking so-called leaders make some extraordinary sacrifices? No, they would rather leave the extraordinary sacrifices to our young men and women who are too naive about the ways of the world to know that the last just war that the U.S. military fought was World War II, for fuck’s sake, and that as members of the U.S. military they are not protecting “freedom” and “liberty” and “democracy” and puppies and kittens or doing anything nearly as noble as all that, but that they are only cannon fodder for the treasonous, uber-greedy war profiteers and the corporateers who want to loot the U.S. treasury via “defense” spending and want to steal other nations’ natural resources and profit obscenely from them, which is made possible only after U.S. military invasions and occupations.

And those young men and women in the U.S. military who do know that war is a racket find themselves at a loss for any other employment than with the U.S. military. They are fairly socioeconomically trapped where they are.

But if you criticize the plutocrats’ wars, then you are accused of attacking our troops — even though it’s the plutocrats who treasonously are sending our troops off to die and to be maimed in wars that benefit only the plutocrats. (If our wars in the Middle East of the past decade were meant to benefit all Americans, then why, oh why, are most Americans in dire economic straits? That’s because the spoils of war never trickle down. Only piss trickles down.)

No, I am not attacking our troops, who are just pawns, who also are victims of the treasonous plutocrats, victims just like the thousands and thousands of innocent civilians whom they slaughter in the Middle East. I am attacking the treasonous plutocrats who are destroying our nation whose heads belong on pikes.

And yes, President Hopey-Changey is among the treasonous plutocrats. He promised us that he would use the power of the office of the president of the United States of America to raise all boats, but all that he is done is to help the plutocrats buy bigger and bigger yachts.

As George W. Bush once put it, you are for us or you are against us. You are for us working-class, middle-class and poor Americans, or you are for the plutocrats — and against us.

Oh, we are long overdue for a violent revolution here at home.

A nonviolent revolution will not cut it. Violence is the only language that the plutocratic traitors who are driving our nation into the ground understand.

A violent American revolution is coming, regardless of what you or I have to say about.

Bin Laden’s death changes nothing

Updated below

Associated Press photo

There is no shortage of bogeymen for the war profiteers and the war hawks anyway. Like Big Brother in 1984, the United States always has an enemy, and if there isn’t a real enemy, an enemy will be fabricated.

So news is coming out now that Osama bin Laden is dead. I knew that the wingnuts would spin this into much, much more than it is (little more than a symbolic, rather than much of a practical, “victory”), but I wasn’t expecting NBC’s correspondent Richard Engel to spin it the way that he did.

Not to pick on Engel, because I’m sure that we’re going to hear variations on the same theme from the members of the same corporately owned and controlled mass media organizations that were fucking cheerleaders for the Vietraq War, but I just listened to him state that now that bin Laden is dead, the American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will know why they were there, and now the “war on terror” is over (he said something close to that if that’s not exactly what he said).

Oh. My. God.

OK, the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been there for the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. No war, no profits. The unelected Bush regime gave the war profiteers their war. Oh, and the whole oil thing, too, of course — which is why they called it Operation Iraqi Freedom instead of Operation Iraqi Liberation.

Bin Laden and 9/11 were just an excuse for the radical right-wing traitors to do what they’d wanted to do all along. For instance, Project for a New American Century, a right-wing think tank, was pushing for the full-scale invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein when Bill Clinton was still president, and members of that very same think tank ended up in the BushCheneyCorp’s cabal after the stolen presidential election of 2000. (Google it.)

Not that Osama bin Laden is/was a great guy. Bin Laden and company killed just under 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. But since then more than 6,000 U.S. and coalition troops have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them in Iraq, but Iraq had absolutely fucking nothing to do with 9/11, so how — how — can anyone assert that Osama bin Laden’s death makes the whole Vietraq War, in which more Americans have died than died on Sept. 11, 2001, worth it? (Yes, it’s a fucking fact: via his bogus war in Iraq, George W. Bush killed more Americans that did Osama bin Laden on American soil.)

And after the United States has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in Iraq alone since 2003, how can we declare the “war on terror” to be over? For us to do that, we’d have to assume that none of the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who had loved ones slaughtered by the United States will ever attempt to exact revenge.

Since the Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust invasion of Iraq in March 2003 — using 9/11 and non-existent weapons of mass destruction as the justification — the U.S. has far more enemies in the Middle East than it did before Sept. 11, 2001. And that’s just the Iraqi body count. The U.S. continues to slaughter civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan pretty much every day.

This makes us safer from future (attempted) terrorist attacks?

And is the corpse of Osama bin Laden really worth the hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that have been funneled to the war profiteers via the bogus Vietraq War?

Will bin Laden’s body get us back those hundreds of billions of dollars not just squandered, but stolen from us? Will his death resurrect our economy, including easing our federal budget deficit, a huge chunk of which is due to the expense of the bogus Vietraq War?

Bin Laden’s death won’t improve things here in the U.S. any more than Saddam Hussein’s death did.

We can celebrate all we want that ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead, but the wicked witch’s death won’t stop the collapse of the American empire.

That so many of us Americans apparently so stupidly believe that one man’s death is worth the thousands of lives and the hundreds of billions of dollars that we blew through first in order to get it is a sure sign that our empire’s collapse is close at hand.

Update (Monday, May 2, 2011): The Huffington Post gives this as the Richard Engel quote that I referenced:

“This [news of bin Laden’s death] is nothing less than breathtaking,” said Richard Engel, reporting from Bengazi, Libya. “This ends a chapter — the global war on terrorism that has defined a generation, which has defined the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan and Iraq. So many people, so many soldiers have been waiting for this moment.”

I seem to remember Engel having made a stronger comment to the effect that now our soldiers know why they have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I heard his remark live via the Internet and I didn’t write it down.

Again, the so-called “war on terror” is not over, and Iraq never had anything to do with bin Laden. For a major television “news” network correspondent to reinforce that myth is journalistic malpractice.

And I don’t even believe that “So many people, so many soldiers have been waiting for this moment.” I believe that the vast majority of Americans had, until now, mostly forgotten all about bin Laden.

I’ll give Engel a bit of a pass for having been caught up in the moment of the breaking news, but fuck.

P.S. For more commentary on this, see my mirror blog at Open Salon, where there is more discussion than there is here.