Archive for April, 2011

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
– Lincoln

It’s interesting, what’s happening.  It’s compelling, what’s going on.  The course of human events never ceases.  I can only pretend to understand it.  I admit it has occurred to me what might happen if I could only influence it.  I would wipe the whole world clean as best I could and start over.  I’d do that in my own life if I could.  I’d take notes and save the best parts, of course.

I can tell you that we have a good President, but in the same breath I have to admit it’s not saying much.  I mean the last guy was a douchebag.  The guy before him was pretty cool but he spent a little too much time pissing in the wind.  I think the contrast between Clinton’s rockstardom and Dumbya’s vanishing act is fascinating.  I’m sure that difference speaks volumes about both them and us.  It’s true that Obama has taken on some pretty spectacular opposition and managed to prevail.  It’s also true that he has folded rather spectacularly before the predictable onslaught of that opposition.  I can’t know his mind but I often wonder what he’s thinking.

Is he so so dispassionate and cynical that logic is his only device when choosing his battles?

He’s smart enough that I’m afraid it is.  He is a product of us.  He’s human after all and he’s only as good as the best we have.  Again, that’s not saying much.  Careful what you wish for.  You get what you pay for.  What we have here is a failure to communicate.  It works both ways.  Still, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  Pun intended.  We not only wanted change, we lusted after it.  We pined for it.  It was a powerful thing.  I said early on that there was no way America would ever elect a black President with the conspicuously unfortunate name of Barack Hussein Obama.

Yet we did.  It happened.

I was wrong.

And we got what we deserved.  A symbol, now a mascot,  in spite of ourselves.

He’s not a bad man.  I’ve said before I believe him to be earnest and decent.  Very smart.  Very classy, but often frustratingly aloof.  Presidents aren’t kings.  They cannot waive a scepter and mitigate prices at the pump and assholes on both sides are foolish for thinking anything of the kind.  Presidents aren’t kings.  They don’t enter the corridors of power and with a mere gesture and bring ongoing wars to a complete stop.  It’s true the previous dickhead started these wars but there were copious quantities of calendar burning fuckery that preceded that mess.  This economic stew of rot,  horseapples, rusty broth, pepper and cat pee took more than a few years to ferment.  And let’s be honest, Clinton rubbed his dick in everybody’s hair.  His only deserved caveat as President is that we were booming in a way we never had before.

That and he executed executive privilege in the Oval without ennui.

Big Bad Bill was guilty of exuberance and less than discrete swordsmanship.  Forgive my naivete for not believing he was some evil bastard.  Dumbya wasn’t evil either.  His crime was stupidity.

Mr. Obama is us.  Hopes.  Dreams.  Change.  Apathy.  Lethargy.  Cocktails.  Bong rips.

Warts and all.

You are what you eat.

His election was an extraordinarily powerful thing.  We did that.  There is no other word for what happened there but “awesome”.

He is now our cross to bear.  Yet he remains our best hope.  Before you consign to wallow in the piss and moan, take a look in the mirror.  What have you done for anyone or anything else lately?  He is us.  That is and should be the point.  Lunch is never free.  Too many well intentioned progressives are waiting for that free lunch because they took the time to get the “I Voted” sticker in ’08.  Grow the fuck up.  How bad do you want it?

What have you done lately?  Do you know who your congressman is?

Wanna know what really blows my tube?  The opposition, for lack of a better word, are a bunch of goddamn asstards.  They’re idiots.  They have so perfected the mercantilism of fear that they’ve begun to fear ……….fear itself.  They have their own Frankenstein monster and they quiver and petrify in front of it without realizing the beast’s evident demise.  Jackasses.  The GOP is off the cliff and the Tea Party drove the wagons.  Every Democrat/Socialist/Liberal/Tree Hugger/Cat Lover/ dog lover/arugula eater/recycler/Tolkien reading vagina, needs to realize what’s already been done on our behalf.

Fer fuck’s sake, these lascivious lipped cashiers have been loose with the lucre for so long that they have literally created an infectious bacteria among themselves that attacks only them.

They are imploding.  They accuse the President of not leading while they suck even worse at it.  They powered into office on jobs and the economy without ever doing fuck all about either while introducing hundreds of culture war bills about abortion etc.  It is the most profoundly stupid bunch of representatives ever elected in my lifetime by either party.  And that by the way, is saying a lot.  These idiots are the real deal.  They are ignorant and amazingly stupid.

As dumb as they look.

Michigan, Madison, Ohio, Florida,  the Ryan Budget.  Six GOP state senators are facing recall in Wisconsin.  Most of them will go down along with Scott Walker and by then his little dog will be long gone.  Who’s up for a walk in the park?  The asshats are getting pummeled for their preposterous policies by their own people on their own turf.  It is changing.  The divide is narrowing because they have over stepped, over wrought.  Arrogance, avarice and hubris are no longer the paradigm for getting your balls tongued in America.  That shit is over.  The plain folks on both sides see it for what it is.  Class warfare.  The Republican intelligentsia consistently fails to notice.  It’s the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.

This thing could be half over if you people wanted it to be.

Drinks for my friends.

I am, in general, a fan of Barack Hussein Obama.

He’s far from perfect, or some liberal messiah, but I do believe he’s an American citizen and a decent man.  I’m not at all furious about a Muslim darkie that wasn’t born here.  Count me as at least intellectually adroit enough not to give a whistling fart about all that.

I’m just not worried about it and the people that would have you worry about, don’t worry about it at all either.  These people giggle while they jerk the chain of the great unwashed.  They snicker when the issue pollutes any earnest discourse.  Their only mission is to piss on the flat rock of our politics.  They probably care less than we do although they’re definitely motivated more by racism than anything else.

Suspension of disbelief.  The laudable goal of any work of fiction.

I don’t care about the dipshits that seek to make it an issue.  Donald Trump just recently went in all the way up to his hips.  I’m quite sure that anyone in The Donald’s position could do what the Donald does.  He’s no savant, what he is, is an incredibly accomplished blowhard.  I’m confident he’s an opportunistic asshole.  His own hubris has eclipsed any wisdom he may have once had.  No wonder he’s unable to afford any respect for man so much smarter than him.  Donald Trump is a goofecock idiot and I hear he’s never even taken a drink in his life.  Forgive that for being a red flag for yours truly.

You know, he’ll never ever run for president.  His impetus is pure self aggrandizement.  His insipid television show has yet to be renewed so he’s out there prostituting his own absurdity to advance his brand.  He’d wear a red miniskirt and garish makeup, like Rudy Giuliani, if it translated into to ratings or any measurable quantity of attention.  Same class of whore.  His dog is named racism.  His pony is named fear.  Show me a birther and I’ll show you a frustratingly underinformed bigot.

What I wonder is why we even pay attention when the lint on my balls, or the toilet tissue remnants from my ass crack,  threaten to run for president.  Donald Trump is a fucking cartoon of his own device.  So is Ann Coulter and Rush Limbuagh.  Millions of people bother with this shit and I can’t help but wonder why.  You can discover ugly and egregious things about Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney in a heartbeat but they still suck oxygen from the national discourse.   Are this many of us this fucking stupid?

Yep.

Neither Coulter or Limbaugh or Trump, will ever  bother to run and whether Huckabee or Romney are smart enough to understand it or not, they have no hope of ever being chief executive officer of the United States of America.  They will embarrass themselves and quite a few others in the attempt.  It’s not going to happen.  Conventional wisdom;  GOP gots nobody.  Not one viable candidate for 2012.  It’s a vulgar but comical burlesque.  A carnival waged by and for dystopians.  A cavalcade for dentally challenged, brainfucked losers, miscreants and charlatans.  No one with a chance, despite the naivete and consummate idiocy of so many that walk among us.

Ha!

So what are we doing here?

Lamentably, a big part of it is our own slack jawed fascination with pure but empty spectacle.  It sort of straddles the mentality, and I’ll bet the very ethic and demographic, of great American pastimes from professional wrestling to NASCAR or the NFL.  Pop to hip hop.  MMA to NBA.  Nothing wrong with any of these things unless taken as otherwise directed.

I spend a lot of time contemplating this woefully distorted, obscenely myopic political culture of ours.  From where I sit, it’s tragic that such uniquely American entertainment has so insidiously interloped into our politics and sensibilities.  A disenfranchised populace has embraced hero worship to the extent that a penchant for naked , unquestioning idolatry, deliberately, and with an eye towards bling, misinforms our zeitgeist so thoroughly.  Underestimate it’s impact, the cancerous influence thereof and the damage it does at your peril.  Just last week, Dodger fans beat a Giants fan so viciously he exists in a medically induced coma as of this writing.  The contemporary culture war currently waged manifests in the murder of abortion providers, demonizes teachers, police and firefighters.  Some asshole burns the Quran, resulting in dozens of innocent deaths.  Such ethics seek to and succeed as dangerous and often lethal catalyst for jingoism and nationalism, xenophobia and ignorance so profound as to be cause for celebration.

It’s arduously frustrating bullshit masquerading as American exceptionalism.  There is no moral symmetry here.

What I’m trying to tell you is that you should beware of anything the knuckle draggers get so excited about.  Like Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann or Islamophobia.  All these things are just like the other in that they deliberately and recklessly foment hatred.

Beware of any political party, elected official or candidate that seeks to vilify teachers, cops, firemen because of their unions.  When they try to tell you that’s why we’re broke, they are lying.  They are fucking lying.  We are not broke.  There is plenty of money.  It’s just that we outspend every other nation on earth by a ratio of ten to one on the ability to kill people who piss us off.  A trillion dollars a year on “defense”, more intelligently known as the military industrial complex.  We incarcerate more people per capita than any nation on earth.  GE is the largest corporation in America and they don’t pay a dime in taxes.  In fact, they got 1.8 billion in tax credits last year.  Exxon is the most successful company in the history of humankind and they didn’t pay any taxes last year but received billions in subsidies.

Anyone reading this realistically paid more actual money in taxes than the largest and subsequently most profitable businesses ever on earth.

How do you like them now?

Anymore questions about where the money is, where it goes, who has it and who doesn’t?

We’re so intellectually bereft when it comes to the word socialism that we look past the fact that we now privatize profits and socialize debt.  That social security, medicare and medicaid, despite flaws engineered by greedy politicians are incredibly successful  and popular programs.  That they are indeed socialism and that they aren’t the reason for our deficit.

Beware when any political party endeavors to execute the same against any specific religious faith except maybe Scientology.  Forgive me here, they’re all whacky but to exclude them is hypocritically weak.

Beware whenever the goddamn Republicans impugn a particular ideology.  They don’t fear it.  It’s merely a tool to elevate your fear.

As a result of our apathy and lethargy in the last election cycle, there’s a whole new blistering crop of governors engaged in raping the middle class.  They slash and burn education, social programs and opportunity for the have nots by bellowing that they are the problem when the truth is those monies are proven by study after study to be efficaciously spent and represent an infinitesimal portion of the fiscal problem that is not really a fiscal problem.  For every dollar spent on unemployment benefits, 1.6 six dollars comes right back, immediately into the economy.  Investment in education is far less instantly gratifying but way more important for our long term prosperity.

If you didn’t know this, trust me when I tell you they do.  They get it.  They are acutely aware.

It’s all a distraction while they wage the most vicious campaign of class warfare since anyone reading this got a crack on the ass from a doctor to get their lungs working.

Understand that they aren’t stupid or misguided.  They want to handicap all these things because they don’t share the average American’s vision.  They shudder at the thought of a car in every garage, a chicken in every pot.  They don’t want for us to succeed or even compete as the most powerful nation on earth ever again.  As far as they’re concerned, the rise of our middle class was errant, aberrant and a huge mistake.  What they want is to marginalize as many of us as they can so they can maximize profits by forcing us to join the lowest common economic denominators of the rest of the hemisphere  so we rapidly devolve into a third world economy.

It’s why they wake up every morning with wood.

The Tea party, so recklessly adept at jerking the entire GOP so far to the right,  will be marginalized soon partly because not a single serious thinker gives a mad fuck about The Donald, The Birthers or the Tea Bags.  We’re actually done here.  Trump was the last nail in the coffin because nobody serious takes him or is hair seriously.  Let’s move on.

Really.  The Republicans can’t deal with anything but lockstep and baggers are a serious bummer when it comes to all that.  But I digress.

Yeah, I know Obama just caved on Gitmo.  It really chaps my ass.  This budget fight is a regoddamndiculous circus with every Democratic capitulation being met with Republicans pushing the goal post further back.  Deep water drilling goes on.   Ours wars show little sign of waning and even less reason or efficacy.  Really hard to watch them herding cat’s so disastrously.

But I have hope and reason to believe we have taken the fork too often less traveled in recent times away from such nonsense as evidenced by the actions of the people in various mid-western states in opposition to the overt power grabs being attempted by Republican legislators and executives in those states.  My hope and proof is in the groundswell occurring in those states.  Recall signatures are piling up precipitously, with or without mainstream media attention.

I do believe the fuckery in the middle east, I mean the mid-west, is sobering evidence that a sleeping giant has stopped swiping at the snooze button and begun to wipe the eye boogers away.  It is a very powerful force and fear is an amazing force multiplier.  So is anger and people are getting pretty pissed.  Change is coming from the only place it can, the bottom.  The people.

We cannot afford to wait for 2012 to hold Democrats or Republicans accountable.  Every elected official in this country needs to feel the hot breath of ferociously frustrated and fed up constituents.  The Tea Party is a joke, we can deliver the punch line by showing them just what a grassroots movement looks like and what it can accomplish.

Drinks for my friends.