Archive for December, 2010

I’ve been away on a grueling, albeit rewarding, business trip for the last handful of days and therefore involuntarily blacked out from news and all things political.

I first got wind in an airport bar late the other night.  I welled up a little while reading the crawl at the bottom  of the screen as I nursed my double Hendrick’s on ice.  I smiled to myself.

What I had begun to regard as nearly impossible actually happened.

The opportunity for reason to take pride in my country has been fleeting of late.

On  December 18 2010, the senate voted 65 to 31 to repeal the efficaciously ludicrous policy of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’.

Wow.

LBGT  equality is the defining civil rights issue of contemporary American society.  The obstreperously obstinate opposition to them by Senators John McCain and Kyl  will forever define them as archaic, absurd and obsolete at least in my mind.  Poster codgers if you will, for what’s wrong with this country and it’s most esteemed deliberative body.  Further proof that bigotry and intolerance are and will inevitably be mitigated and forever eroded by social and emotionally intellectual evolution.  If you’re a frequent reader here, you’re familiar with this theme.

Then there’s this asshole in Virginia:

“It’s a distraction when I’m on the battlefield and have to concentrate on the enemy 600 yards away and I’m worried about this guy whose got eyes on me,” the lawmaker, Delegate Bob Marshall (R), told WUSA9. “If I needed a blood transfusion and the guy next to me had committed sodomy 14 times in the last month I’d be worried.” -TPM

Yeah dude, you know how fags and dykes want, can and do ass rape or molest every other human being, regardless of sexual orientation, age or degree of consent, godless heathens that they are.  As opposed to good Christians who never even entertain the notion of fucking anyone or anything they are forbade by their god to fuck or fondle.  As an unapologetic heterosexual, I say to you Mr. Marshall, blow me.  You ridiculous self righteous goofcock.

Yes, racism is still breathing giant lungfuls of air in America.  Not just racism, but nationalism, chauvinism, jingoism, discrimination, misogyny and an abject systemic sclerosis still enjoy way too much gravity and far too many headlines but it is all in a state of atrophy.  Dinosaurs like McCain, Kyl and Marshall are just that.  Soon to be political fossils for us to study and learn what went wrong and why they didn’t evolve and subsequently survive.

They push as hard as they do, they insist so adamantly and vehemently, because they see the writing on the wall.  They refuse to own their own their mutually assured extinction even though their reptilian oblongatas recognize it and instinctually scream for the cortex to do some goddamn thing.  Anything.  And that is why as a group, they so often appear to be such complete fucking idiots.

Jeff Sessions’ opinion on the 111th congress:

“I think it was a disaster” -Countdown With Keith Olbermann

Idiot.

A reporter for CNS News had the temerity to ask Barney Frank about military personnel showering with homosexuals:

“Showering with homosexuals! What do you think happens in gyms all over America? What do you think happens in the House of Representatives?”  “What, what, what do you think goes  wrong when  people shower with homosexuals? Do you think it’s the spray makes it catching?”  “………..I mean, uh, we don’t get ourselves dry-cleaned.” -examiner.com

Loves me some Barney Frank.

I adored Obama’s pride and elation upon signing it today.  “This is done”, he said, pounding his hand on the desk.  Change we can believe in indeed.

“For we are not a nation that says, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” Obama told 500 guests at a signing ceremony at the Interior Department. “We are a nation that says, ‘Out of many, we are one.’ ” -politico44

The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is an authentic manifest.  Significant like nobody’s business.

Wow.

It gives me hope I honestly didn’t anticipate.  It appears that the rush of profound legislative accomplishments (START and funding for 911 first responders and repeal of DADT), occurring over the last few “lame duck” days may have been the intended brass ring I among many saw as a sellout tax deal.  Maybe he does have long game after all.  He’s managed to hand the Republicans an embarrassingly onerous lunch buffet.  Fuckin’ A.

From nonplussed to pleased.

Excellent chess Mr. President.  Good for you.

Happy holidays to you and your lovely family.

The same to all of you who read this.

Drinks for my friends.

I gotta tell ya, I feel for this guy.  The President of The United States. He gets his ass kicked by friends and enemies from the time the alarm goes off to a never so gentle goodnight every damn day.

On the surface his legislative accomplishments are impressive.  Health care.  Financial reform.  He absolutely saved us from a depression and damn near all of it has been payed back.  Yet he has capitulated too early and far too often.  A mandate to purchase health care without a public option, prematurely ejaculated off the table, was just absurd.  Indefensible.  Not good enough.  Financial reform that began as not so John Wayne looking and ended up missing a respectable grill for even a photo worthy grin.

Then there’s the inexplicable and embarrassingly unjustifiable clusterfuck of Afghanistan.  Ridiculous controversy manufactured for things like unemployment benefits, social security and lower taxes for the pigs at our trough but we never talk about the stratospheric defense budget.  Billions spent to kill for no fucking reason.  Proof that too much of America’s politics and policy are dictated by the military industrial complex.

Makes my teeth ache.

My impression is of of a thoughtful and principled man with heart and courage but no real desire to swing as hard as the opposition.  When the Republican thug drops his hands in confusion and surveys the crowd for his mob rule constituency and bullshit moral equivalency, our man checks himself and does not throw the vicious uppercut and go to the body.

He stops swinging altogether.

The truth is the tax deal, the “compromise”, is a little more vanilla than bad or good.  It’s just there.  Ambiguous.  Ambivalent.  Business as usual.  Same fecal.  Same dais.  Different day of year of your Lord.  I am confused as to why the Democrats have chosen to erupt just now.  I mean it’s not what we need but that means it’s the same as every other hollow victory.  Like anybody couldn’t see this one coming.

Still, why does this president keep rolling into the wet spot?

His instinct is kind.  He doesn’t covet the spill of blood.  He does not possess the eye of the tiger.

When his pause gives way to a fusillade of blows landing on his own countenance, he glares from his corner between rounds at his supporters for not appreciating his blinding skill but implores their disgust for not swinging hard when it matters.  It’s telling.  This for an instance  evaporating, his crowd, his majority, to be thinned before the fight is over.  He lost the midterms dramatically and decisively.  The people that put him in the ring smell his weakness.  His opponents taste it.

Chum in polluted water.

The fight is about to double in ferocity and stupidity as Boehner assumes control of the house.

Do your teeth hurt?

It’s not as though he’s not tough or smart.  It’s just that he’s not mean.  My father told me, and I’m sure he’s right as he was quite the brawler and very wise, it’s not the toughest or the most skilled man that wins a street fight, it’s the meanest.

And that’s where we are.

The opposition is mean enough to lie, obfuscate and distort the truth to their own people.  They do it ALL the time.  Their own constituents reflexively vote against their own best interests in support of policies, practices and ideologies that consistently result in their own suffering only to be led by the ridiculous bastards they support without question into blaming it all on the other side.  It’s brevity is fucking brilliant.  Talk about cutting to the chase.  What a way to keep them guessing just enough.  Foment fear and confusion and the world is not merely your oyster.  It’s your baby killer.  Your socialist.  Your godless pagan.  Your Muslim, Jew or Catholic depending on the decade and the agenda.  Your nigger, spic, chink or wop, depending on the century.  Your lazy unemployment beneficiary, welfare or medicare recipient today.  Your homeless bum child molester smelling of piss and costing us all money with the shopping carts they steal and the food stamps we give them.

Fuck that.  The average American wants to work.  For the dignity, the self sufficiency and the money.

Our man is not nearly mean enough.

They would have you bring an assault rifle to a peaceful exchange of political ideas.  They won’t condemn or even admonish your bursts of violence against anyone not like you, provided you’re a white Christian.  They will applaud and celebrate your words of hate and intolerance as long as they are patriotic by their very narrow definition.  They will absolutely praise your lack of intellectual curiosity and willful ignorance.

They themselves are afraid.  That’s how they do it and certainly how they justify it.  Fear.  They want to share their fear and distrust.  So they do.  They want to make you just like them.  Afraid.  Confidence is bad.  Thinking for yourself is communist.  Your own mind is, well how can it be your own mind?  What right do you have to your own mind when the axis of evil wants to kill you and your children in your beds just like the latest weather pattern on a slow news day?  You know, the terrorists.

Thank God we have high radiation body scanners that allow TSA agents to laugh or marvel at my package.  I breathe easier knowing that if they can’t see pictures of it they get to touch and fondle it for themselves.  Yes. in some cases the pictures will lead to a groping.

The restrictions on your personal fluids and the size of ziploc you use in order to fly commercially these days will never ever stop a single terrorist and are fucking absurd.  Never.  Ever.  Stupid is as stupid does.  We are all stupid.

America.

What a country.

Is there anything left in that bottle?

The very people who endorse and support this shit have not a goddamn clue about concepts like personal freedom, privacy and liberty and they are somehow piloting our national discourse.  The filthy stinking rich are about to see their completely unjustified, fiscally disastrous, tax break extended into a presidential election cycle where chances of it being reversed are even more remote and we’ll be borrowing even more foreign lucre to pay for it.

I’m okay for borrowing for the middle class and the poor……….but doing as much for the rich and the wars kinda chaps my ass.

I dare anyone to justify the extension of the the George Dumbass tax cuts to the wealthy.  The people who can’t be bothered to allow their largess to trickle down.  The people who don’t need it and don’t deserve it.  The people who have far more to do with a desperate condition than them that suffer from it.

When are we gonna call bullshit?  Our man at the top clearly lacks the sack, but he’s not entirely culpable.

We are the problem.  We are the answer.

The moral and ethical fabric of America is fraying, but it’s not godless liberals that are responsible, it is without a doubt the self righteous, family values, overtly pious and zealous hypocrites that tirelessly wear at it in the name of preserving it.  How do you trust them that would lie to themselves?

And we are just not mean enough.

Know what a teabagger’s worse nightmare is?  A liberal with a gun and a brain both bigger than his.

Let’s get this party started.

Drinks for my friends.

The electorate.

The whole diverse aggregate gives me pause.

Lots of dipshits.

Exactly what kind of country are we when our elected representatives can even stage a fight about continuing the egregious enrichment of the already too wealthy via a government complicit in unconscionable concentration of wealth long since institutionalized, while simultaneously getting away with jerking the carpet from beneath our middle class when they very simply cannot find a job because the jobs just aren’t there?   Five people for every one job. Every dollar in unemployment remuneration is an immediate dollar sixty spent in local economies while every dollar given in tax breaks to them that have plenty amounts to about thirty cents for our national economy.

The tax cuts for the rich have already cost us dearly and will add $700 billion to the deficit over the next decade.  Our wars cost us at least ten billion a month.  But we demonize the unemployed, unions and teachers without ever talking about our insane megalomaniacally drunken defense spending.   It never comes up that we damn near outspend the rest of the world.  Instead the dialog is driven by “Entitlements” like Social Security and Medicare.

Proof of stupid is our war economy.

Fareed Zakaria said something like it’s not policy, it’s math.

Exactly.

Trickle down economics my ass.

If you buy any single argument in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy while opposing the extension of unemployment benefits for those they deliberately victimized, your entire head resembles a dirty ass to those of us with any amount of common sense and compassion.  You’re quite likely dumb as a stick, willfully ignorant and I loathe you.

It’s true the difference between Democrats and complete assholes narrows by the hour.  Democrats are fond of seeming to stand for something while vehemently pontificating in favor thereof.  Yet they’re infamous for caving and compromising to gain nothing while willingly playing a zero sum game and selling out or at the very least acting worthless and weak.  Stumbling leadership.  Wholesale lack of efficacy.  Disorganization.  Absence of conviction or courage.  Embarrassing inability to legislate with even a modicum of authority despite a majority in both houses and the presidency.

Losers.  Punks.  Low T.

Okay, that’s not entirely true but perception is nine tenths of reality because Democrats couldn’t sell ears to the deaf.

Republicans on the other hand are consistently able to be stupid, contradictory and hypocritical.  Yet they still steer wheel with foot firmly on the gas of our national agenda.  Republicans routinely sell binoculars and telescopes to the blind.  They blaspheme in unison.  They applaud each other and delight in doing so.  It’s like they know they suck and they don’t care.

Democrats suck but at least they make a show of giving a shit.

Are Americans stupid?  Yes.  Are we fools?  Yes.  Are we paying attention?  I seriously doubt it.  Do we believe just about everything we see, hear or read?  Apparently.

What’s that spell?

Campaign finance reform.

What if each and every candidate had the same amount to spend, the same amount of media access and were somehow held more culpable for the truth of their message?  Could a fortuitous artifact of that be the great unwashed being forced to be more accountable and responsible for their own opinions?  What if it forced them a little further down the lane of paying attention?  Like reading and understanding The Constitution before claiming to be all about it while demonstrating abject ignorance of it to the obvious end of actually denigrating it?

What if all the lobbyists lost their jobs?

That wouldn’t suck.

What if it forced a potential player into some amount of shoe gazing introspection about qualification and intention?  At the very least it just might preclude the Meg Whitmans from the already vulgar burlesque.

What if the media was somehow inspired to be more, dare I say, fair and balanced?

I have this Utopian notion about a Utopian notion.

Like the media would take it upon itself to be a little less sensationally  streptococcus because  some sweeping new campaign finance reform passed.  I’ll be on the front porch carving my first name into my left foot ’cause I’m right handed.

The thing is, this issue of of campaign finance reform should be the issue of the day.  It is the antidote for at least a cod piece load of this bullshit.  The corruption and avarice of our elected mannequins won’t ever be eliminated but can it be mitigated?

It could be.  It has huge potential gravity for a following of the sensible but pissed off.  That would be me at least.  It really is of the nucleus of everything that’s jacked up about how we’re governed.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

See, it just can’t be about wealth.  It can’t have anything to do with it.

Solve this one and it has tentacles.  Legs.

I’m waiting for monkey’s to emerge and then launch from my butt trailing fire and plumes, cackling and whooping.

C’mon.  Are you sick of this shit?  There are at least four health care lobbyists for every elected representative on the hill.  That’s just one of a myriad of special interests that are there to give anything but a mad fuck about what we Americans need and deserve.  There are tens of thousands of them.  I guess this all makes me a socialist.  Forgive me, I just don’t have a problem with that.

Drinks for my friends.