Archive for the ‘Conservative’ Category

“This is a big fucking deal”  -Joe Biden.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  -MLK

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

The health care bill passed with some drama.  As it should.

Outside, the wind blows hard.

My favorite part is that they lied without shame and cheated overtly and they still lost with ceremony all around them on worldwide television.  Republicans sucked the other day like they haven’t in decades and it was all on display.  They barked like dogs and continue to whine like toddlers.  Shameless.

I readily confess I don’t have my brain wrapped entirely around this bill and some specifics of the reconciliation language.  I have been paying attention.  I didn’t for a time and then I did again.  I got kinda sick of it all.  It does suck.  The bill.  As in sucking chest wound suck.  A mandate without fierce oversight, a mechanism to not only compete but provide accountability and barometric pressure is pure dumb.

A license to ill.

It was on it’s head already.  I sort of understand the economic imperative behind the mandate but throw us a bone bitches or don’t even bother touching me there.

 

I just can’t help but get caught up in the symbolism.  I know the bill sucks but it does accomplish some pretty important shit.  I’ll defer to the fantastic Ms. Maddow:

“On September 23rd…

• All kids get covered (no pre-existing conditions)
  
• Can’t get dropped if you get sick (no more insurance companies dropping you)
  
• No more lifetime limits (on benefits)
  
• Children can stay on until 26 (coverage up to that age)
  

On January 1, 2011…

• Premium payment reformed (80-85% for medical care) with rebate if you don’t use coverage
  
• Free Medicare preventative care (no co-pays)
  

By 2014…

• Total ban on all pre-existing condition denials
  
• Health exchanges open
  
• End to annual limits on benefits

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

I’m not sure I want to “do” Rachel but I’m positive I want to get her drunk and cuddle.

So yeah, some good stuff.  It’s just that it barely flirts with incentive for fairness via non profit competition.

That’s the part I liked the most when we started this whole thing.  I see it as key.  Public option, extended Medicare, whatever.  Vital.  We have miles to go before we sleep.

Single payer, Universal, whatever label you choose and whomever you choose to accuse,  the richest spender nation on the planet ought to be covering it’s people.  We buy half of all the weapons.  Half of all of them.  Half of all the weapons made for war, we buy.  I don’t think we’re as big as Canada geographically, but our dick is way bigger.  Can you hear me now?  WAY bigger.  We could take Canada in 72 hours without the military.  They don’t have many guns but we do.

What exactly are health exchanges?  We now know they will be open.  How many?  Where?  I’ll assume that’s good news.  A place to trade bandages and syringes.  Do I have to volunteer?  I’m gonna have to choke a bitch.  I’m gonna have to read this bill and the 157 page reconciliation.  I’m working like twelve hours a week and taking a class.  You can see how I’m underwater.

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

It’s a simple problem and the answer is simple.  Shave five or fifteen cents off the defense budget and we can throw in some jobs for infrastructure.  Health care, jobs and mortgage relief.  We spend half the entire global budget on weapons and ten times as much as our nearest competitor.  China.  That there is my idea of Socialism, spending way too much of the people’s money on things they vehemently disagree with.  Wait, that’s Communism.  Isn’t it?  When they can’t afford roof and bread it is.  There is your Goddamn communism.

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

I’m trying to make a point here.  We still are a wealthy nation, despite our recent financial regress.  Much of it was concentrated without equity in the last decade but there is plenty of money right here in River City.  There is no reason, moral or fiscal, we should be denied this right.  It insults my intelligence when anyone complains about paying for it.  They talk about health care being 15 to 18 percent of our GDP.  The defense budget is well over half of every dollar you pay in taxes.  We spend so much fucking money on weapons, it makes the world go round.

Literally.  The world turns because of America’s efforts to be able to kill everyone of us.  Thank God for us.  Don’t piss us off.

Still, I’m impressed and finally proud again of the Democrats.  They pulled it off and scared the crap quite literally out of the obstructionist asstards by supplying them with an example of lockstep so long taken for granted as a fundament in the Republican playbook.  Smoked them at their own game.  Here’s hoping this bodes well and emboldens this heretofore assemblage of invertebrates.  See little Billy, we knew you could do it.  Now get your little ass back out there because the game isn’t even half over.  Be a Democrat for fucks sake.

Now the crazies come out like corpses of Laurel & Hardy with giant red eyed rats speeding off and away from their persons and pockets and folds.  Slack jawed zombies repeating obsolete talking points and swinging scythes.  The Baggers.  The Birthers.  The Hawks, Neocons, Bigots and Bible thumpers.  What an egregious ship of fools.  Obsructionist pricks for infamy.  Avoid their rodent familiars and do not dance with either of any of them.

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

I’ve always thought that being a good loser is important.  I’ve been on the losing end enough to approach being gracious I think.  I’m hopeful that losing has humbled me, it sucks and it shames me but I try to learn and stuff and be polite about it.  The way one loses speaks volumes about one’s character.  If you listened to Boehner on the floor the other night or The Human Shitsmear and Butt Boy Hannity these last few mornings you might think the sky is about to kill you in your bed.

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

These pricks are the epitome of sore losers along with the entire lock step, teeth full of Orios, lime green plastic tumbler full of cherry Kool Aid and rum mouth breathing members of the 1/4 Paradigm.  That was a pretty cool sentence.  If you don’t know about the 1/4 paradigm, categories are on the right on the main page.  Just scroll down.  I have a fairly general theory about relativity and how it applies without bias but with predictable pattern in a sociopolitical context.  I offer a bold constant.

I don’t really know about other countries but I understand very well that one of every four people in this country are ignorant dipshits.  My “1/4 Paradigm”.  In stores near you.

You’d think an invitation was extended to a banquet just ahead of the apocalypse.  You’d think because we passed a weak ass health care bill we were courting Satan himself.  The bill sucks.  Hello irony.  Fuck us in the neck.

The reaction has been of the meanest of spirit and bafflingly irrational.  Childish and callow.  Pointless.  Some fourteen state attorneys general have or intend to file suit.  Futile.  Not going to happen, if any single case enjoys a day in court it will be ashes, ashes and they will all fall down.  A waste of time money and the attention of even the dumbest citizens.  Give me a break.  Might as well piss up a rope.

Children of the corn.

What has my attention is the ugly and still gathering brutal reaction of the great unwashed.

Bricks through windows and awful terrorizing threats directed at our elected representatives that have finally and with courage, attempted the right thing on behalf of us all.  Stupak came around and they went after him like a common enemy.  Cheers Bart.  Those were your people.  An articulate bunch.  Very brave and very cool.

Kucinich is still the king of composure and principal.  What a class act.  I think Maddow and Kucinich should snuggle.  Just then, Dennis’ hot, six foot tall, copper haired, wife with a scorching accent enters the room in a black skirt, pumps and a line up the back of the stocking.  Nobody gets the Kucinich cool like I do.

Cantor’s claim of a bullet is looking dubious.  I bet that little prick is lying.

What frightens me is the virulence and vehemence, the irrational fury of those that would oppose a leap forward.

What makes me sick is the publicly elected officials who foment such dehumanizing disregard for common decency and difference of, or deference for, an opinion.  This is America.  We aren’t ever going to be herded onto boxcars for mass extermination.  If it ever happens here it will last an afternoon, maybe a day.  I’m not referencing irresponsible roundheads like Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck but rather the Boehners, Bachmanns, Cantors, Kings, Grassleys and Demints.  Allegedly responsible representatives who hobby, trade and wage in fear and dangerous incendiary nonsense.

Dirty, filthy immoral bastards who would blow anyone for $20k.  How do these people get taken seriously?  See above.

They deliberately cultivate and collect the same brand of bigoted, racist and ignorant subhuman that so violently opposed civil rights legislation.  Dumbass mouth breathing fucktards.  A handful of those folks have ended up being assassins.  Murderers.

American tradition and legacy is such that justice and liberty for all eventually prevails.  When there is will there is way.

It can take a while and never without a price.  The vulgar and profane consistently manage to extract more than a pound of flesh.  They are arrogant and bereft of humility.  At this pace, there will be blood.

They will go too far unfortunately and their cause will be consigned to history as ill advised and malattempted.  Political leprosy.  Social pariahs.  Just like McCarthy, Nixon and Dumbya’s entire posse.

These people are as ridiculous as they are dangerous.  There will be blood.

Just do the best you can to think peace.  It’s gonna get ugly.

It just might start rural.

All these earth quakes.  Bound to be a volcano.  See what I’m saying?

Health care is no mere privilege but a right that comes with being born human at least.  I believe that.  I always will.

Drinks for my friends.

The far right neocons persist in marginalizing themselves with hate and irrationality, taking with them the entire GOP, Christians, evangelicals, conservatives and moderates.  It’s a spectacle.  A spectacular one.  One buoyed exclusively by vituperative vitriolic invective vehemence.  Pardon me but brainspank literally loves alliteration and it just happens to be entirely true.

I’m trying to tell you it lacks substance entirely.

They’ve abandoned facts and reason completely for fear, anger and hatred.

Republicans used to be wrong, not unreasonably stupid.  Not so unapologetically obtuse.

Misguided perhaps but not insane.

What the fuck happened?  Whatever it was, it took place on my generation’s watch.  The elephantine have always been more racist, a little more greedy, a little too covetous of power and influence, a little too hypocritically pious and a little too lacking in compassion for the plight of the average American. That at least has been my perception.

Over the last two decades however, they’ve morphed into the political equivalent of little Regan from The Exorcist.  Pun firmly and resolutely intended.  Nasty, pea soup projectile vomiting, head spinning, cartoon effigies. When called on their bullshit, they hide behind an ugly wrongheaded nationalism thinly disguised as patriotism.  Naked ugly jingoism.  Ironic the “isms” they so casually toss at the rest of us.

They leave scales like fish wherever they go.  It’s true.

My generation has witnessed the emergence and fortuitous exorbitance of such profound and disgusting dicktards as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck  and Sean Hannity.  Elected representatives like Santorum, Ensign, DeLay, Palin, Dumbya, Grassley, Bachmann, Cantor, Gingrich, Joe Wilson and John Boehner.   Birthers, Deathers, Teabaggers, Tenthers and Twelvers.  Michael Steele, Joe The Plumber, Dick Cheney and Fox fucking news.  Each and every one on this incomplete list of a uniquely American cavalcade of contretemps is a lying, obfuscating, shamelessly and hypocritically unpatriotic goddamn piece of shit.

And they all represent the contemporary conservative movement.  Bear with me, I’m getting at something here.

Worthless, toxic, poisonous entities.  Zero contribution to constructive public discourse.  Absent everything save prurience and avarice.  Giant boulders of sand in a smallish tub of Vaseline.  Kidney stones the size of a thumb in an already inflamed urinal tract.  Ugly and dumb.

Soon, they’ll disavow being mammals.

Take for example the rhetoric over the Nobel.

Some dickhead from Fox, Brian Kilmeade, wonders aloud whether Obama delayed the decision on troop deployment in Afghanistan to better his chances for the Nobel.

The Human Shitsmear announces that the “Nobel Gang have just suicide bombed themselves”.

Some asshat from Redstate said it was part of an “affirmative action quota”.

Glenn Beck thinks the Teabaggers deserve it more.

And The Human Shitsmear says “Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn’t deserve the award.”

Curiouser and curiouser.  Crazier and crazier.  From shrill and scary, to gangs of banshees on meth.

Thus they further isolate themselves and alienate the humane and honest.  As their bubble shrinks, it’s skin grows thicker.  They hear and see less and less of the real world.  Their shared view, ever more myopic.  They inhabit more and more the CAVE dweller acronym.   To wit: citizens against virtually everything.  Get it?

I could spend all day providing egregious example after outrageous foray into overt racism, lies, baseless smears, deliberate distortions, hypocrisy, mean spirited interpretations………but see, I already have.  I have been for years.  I’m not alone.  Not by far.  They are so very afraid and fear is a great force multiplier.

It’s a fact that the number of Americans who identify themselves as Republican is way down and there’s no end to that atrophy in sight.  Disdain for for their lies and misrepresentations grow.  The last two election cycles have borne this out.  Yet The Human Shitsmear still has about 20 million listeners and Fox yet enjoys better than twice the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined.  I can’t help but be ecstatic about the their self perpetuating and therefore self defeating dynamic, but they stall manage to kick a lot of balls and infect substantial consciousness on the way down.

I believe at least 25% of any given population is incorrigibly stupid.  Roughly the number that still supported Nixon.  Roughly the number that still supports Bush.  It’s a fact.  Show me what you’re workin’ with.

Ah but:

“The White House’s battle with Fox News reached a new high on Sunday, when Communications Director Anita Dunn went on national television to blast Fox as a partisan organization that functions as an appendage to the Republican Party.

“Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Dunn told CNN, adding, “let’s not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is.” Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is “undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” -The Nation

Fuckin’ A.

There are those who would say, among them David Gergen of CNN, that the administration can neither afford to engage the FOX network in the context of so many larger issues at hand, and that it is somehow unseemly or inappropriate.

I admit I understand, and even feel that on certain levels, but still I have to call bullshit on it.  This ain’t your dad’s TV News.  There are no rules, no decorum, it’s all changed and these guys are assholes.  They have no integrity, they’re in it for the money and they won’t quit until it stops paying.  Reptiles pure and plain.  They all spend time on a warm rock every day.

Never has a President been so embattled with zero emphasis on policy, ever.  They never ever even bother to introduce or even recognize actual stated, written positions or policies ever.  Ever.  FOX news and it’s cadre of asshole spokesholes is the worst example of journalism in this or any other civilized country.  They are the suicide bombers of the American Media.  They would never die for their beliefs but they willingly fall on swords of stupidity and blow themselves up with combustible bigotry all day long.  The key difference between them and the real thing is the lack of integrity and courage.  Truth and honesty.  The ‘real thing’ being fanatics with the twisted courage of conviction and journalists with truth as their ideal.  FOX falls no where in between even those two extremes.  At the end of the day, they sacrifice their dignity and self respect.  They wake every morning fresh, to plunge into ignorance, reckless hostility and enmity and lie after fucking lie after fucking lie.

For nothing but the filthy lucre.

I’m completely aware of the potential consequence (s) a protracted street brawl between the White House and an entity like FOX and I am fully in favor of this administration taking them on and cleaning their clock.  When they do their damndest to lie, call them on their irresponsible and misleading shit.  You think the brain trust at FOX can even approach the level of intelligence, wit and wisdom in the White House?  Me either.  It’s not like it will be heavy lifting or time consuming.

I know full well that there are way bigger fish to fry but this has a strategic component to it too.  Although the mouth breathers are a minority, they are a sizable and vocal one, and the most obvious and singular ringmaster is…….well, the Cartoon Network and then FOX.

Again, this ain’t your dad’s TV News.

“This ain`t no party, this ain`t no disco, this ain`t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain`t got time for that now”  -The Talking Heads

I believe it to be an absolute imperative of cunning and tactics.  Bring it.  And just maybe, for once, the Democrats will be seen to have a spine and a pair of testicles.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Like punching the bully in the mouth so hard he falls down in front of the bus and the Democrats just once, walk up the steps breathing steam, proud and righteous.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

A composition:

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is painfully obvious.

Republicans are greedy sociopathic reptiles who don’t give a mad fuck about their constituents but love to suck corporate dick.

Democrats are spineless douchebags, who lack the courage to get down in the mud and fight for their constituents but love to suck corporate dick.

Evidence being the massive ongoing struggle for any meaningful legislation despite significant majorities enjoyed by Democrats in both houses of congress.  A pathetic, ridiculous and vulgar burlesque.  Shameful and stupid but an attestation for Democrats being far more inclined to think for themselves or someone else as opposed to conventional party wisdom or lack thereof.

All on embarrassing and inept display.

Libertarians don’t care about anything, they just want commerce to flow.  Anybody who wants to suck dick should be allowed with a particular deference to profit.

If you’ve been paying attention to the main stream media of late, you know that Republicans want to save us from socialism despite not understanding the concept, and Obama’s government lusts like a pizza faced adolescent army in neck braces or orthodontal head gear to takeover our health care so we can be killed off at their convenience.

Meanwhile, Republicans seek to kill pizza faced teenagers or adolescents in head gear for profit if possible.

Libertarians take no exception.

Responsible parents everywhere insist children wear helmets these days.

If you choose the contemporary Republican model,  you see them as unrelenting right wing, neoconservative, intolerant evangelical Christian zealots who are afraid of anything homosexual or any other religion.  You understand that they believe they know better while enduring a fusillade of common sense and science to the contrary.  Book burning and creationism and the like.

Retards at the Roundtable.  Scopes trial as blasphemy and all that.

I remember a time when what was contested was ideas, philosophy and policy.  Discourse was just that.  Polite and respectful.  It was about issues.  Then something happened.  That something was William Jefferson Clinton.  Far from perfect, but charismatic and smart as all get out.  He presided over the longest period of economic prosperity America had ever seen.  He left us with a massive surplus and a balanced budget for the first time ever.

We were cookin’.

The Republicans though, they did hate.  They began to investigate.  Afraid Bubba was Jesus, a special prosecutor named Kenn Starr was appointed to investigate Hillary’s real estate dealings while she was a member of the Rose Law Firm and they came up with dick.  Pun to be intended.  Nothing.  Sand in hand they kept on…… and discovered Bubba got a blow job and so they impeached him.  Never mind that it was none of our business.  They spent tens of millions of dollars, more than on all investigating into the events of 9/11, to shine light on a Jewish woman unable to remove a stain from a dress.

First one ever I hear.

And that is really why we are where we are.  It will all go down as the darkest and silliest period in American history.  Yet it’s sordid smell means we are less likely to forget it than UFOs, Elvis or pick a disease.  Let us hope the legacy will not be merely that of a cautionary anecdote, but rather a lesson about a forest instead of individual trees.  Otherwise, America will not be America come one hundred years from now.

Tom DeLay is on dancing with the stars and it offends me.  He’s paired with Cheryl Burke whom I think is the hottest thing since Georgia asphalt.  Goddamn, the woman is gorgeous.  Delay grins his lying rictus and looks as he has the breath of a sewer rodent.  Creepy with a ‘K’.  I really don’t like this guy and I’m a little jealous.  Never watched the show and don’t intend to but that woman is one ripe gust of feminity

Share a smoke, Make a joke
Grasp and reach for a leg of hope
Words to memorize, words hypnotize
Words make my mouth exercise.
Words all fail the magic prize
Nothing I can say when I’m in your thighs
Oh my my my my my mo my mother
I would love to love you lover  -Violent Femmes

Democrats are communist, anti constitution, caped crusaders who want to steal from anyone who has anything and give it to anyone who has nothing no matter how big of a loser the loser happens to be.  I’m not really a Democrat but I tend to identify with them and that sucks on many levels.  Giant dingbats who somehow manage to keep their self righteousness in place while failing at everything they attempt like pre-pubescent soccer players who get a trophy for simply showing up.

Democrats seem to “fail up”, almost as much as Republicans although not quite so deliberately.  Max Baucus may be shocked to see the hand entirely up his ass and into his mouth via x-ray, but John Boehner would consider it as much business as usual as his spray on tan or morning knuckle and back shave.  I fucking hate that guy.

They are different, Democrats and Republicans, but they are all still politicians.  The qualities they share are a moral and ethical bankruptcy, a willingness to feast on or make a meal out of any cock connected to money, and an instinctual fondness for anything other than the absolute truth.

This is why reasonable reform of any kind, be it health care or of industries financial or military, is in perpetual jeopardy.

Nothing can change until we have reform for our system of campaigns and polling.  Zero corporate money.  None.  Entirely financed by the electorate.  Firm start and stop dates for campaigns and equal air time for candidates.

No meaningful change before that one.

Drinks for my friends.

He spoke clearly.  With confidence and conviction.

Righteous ferocity.

“Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

No more Rope-a-dope boys and girls.  Ha.

“We did not come here to fear the future; we came here to shape it.”

“The danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little”

“If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out.”

“But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the
calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve
it.”

As for the “Deathers”:

“Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.”

And the Republicans.  The Fucking Republicans like Boehner and Cantor and McConnell and Hatch, who sat seething and smirking with turds in their mouths.  Transparent and stupid.  Cantor texting.  What a dick.  The whiplash of your arrogance is on the way.  Half of you will be gone come 2010.  I can’t wait.

Republican Joe Wilson actually shouted “You lie” while Obama assured us that reform will not cover illegal immigrants.  Fucktard.  Our Man flashed anger and moved on without missing a beat.  A superhuman burst of restraint, composure and civility.  A class act Our Man.  Not less than brilliant in the face of callow contemptible disrespect directed at a man who has earned and deserves nothing but respect.  He didn’t miss a beat, wasn’t rattled or even distracted.  We are lucky to have this man leading our country.  Forgive my gushing, but that brief moment reinforced everything I admire about our president.

At the end of the day, Joe Wilson did us all a favor by exposing what jackasses the contemporary GOP are.  Thanks Joe, you’re still an asshole, but I thank you for being one.

He stared down those Republicans.  Watch it.  When he looks to the right on television he’s looking to his left in the chamber.  The irony of where Republicans sit has never been lost on me.  Observe the steel of his countenance and the fire in his eyes.  He was picking them out and staring them down individually.  One by one.  The unspoken question, are you reptiles or humans?  His words and his gestures signaled unequivocally that the blatant ridiculous fuckery is over.

You know Fox news carried some reality show instead of the speech.

Whatever.

He delivered unambiguous  and vigorous support for a public option with some amount of caveat.  We’ll have to wait and see but I welcome the predilection.

Then Charles Boustany appeared on my screen and lied.  The same boilerplate, fear based bullshit.  He spoke as though he hadn’t heard the speech the president had just given.  Actually, given logistical constraints, he obviously hadn’t.  It was a joke sans punchline.  Pathetic, out of touch and he looked a fool as much as Jindal did.  How do they get these poor bastards to do this?

The GOP are famous for exploiting the stupid, often of late towards their own demise.

The Republican party has never looked more like a bunch of dickheads than they did tonight.  They have marginalized themselves with help of an unforeseen catalyst of Barack Obama’s expert political judo.

I have been frustrated for months now at the political calculus from the White House.  The passive taking of blow after blow on the ropes like some cheesy boxing movie.  I was disheartened and becoming bewildered.  Now I wonder if he really did know what he was doing the entire time.  Let them swing and shout, taunt and lie until they trod heavily on their own pudenda and cease to lay leather at all on anything that matters.

Masterful.

He may just be that good.

Wow.

Can one speech, even if before the entire congress and a national television audience (except Fox), function as a game changer for such a momentous and hotly contested concern?  The question on the lips of almost every progressive in America since it was announced.  We shall see.  It is more than incumbent on me however,  to point out that this is no ordinary president.  By that I mean he is extraordinary.  He did exceptionally well tonight.  Tone, nuance, sincerity and an overt sinewy rigor were all on display.

Impressive and I’m impressed.  The character of our country.  The letter from Teddy Kennedy.  He framed it earnestly and effectively as a moral imperative and I have no reservation in declaring him to be absolutely right about that.  Invoking Teddy was an appropriate, as well as emotional homage to a man who declared this the cause of his life.

Obama has once again acquitted himself a very smart man.  A very sensitive man.  An incredibly capable man.  Deft and adroit and not to be underestimated.

Awesome.

He came off the ropes to swing hard and with precision.  An expert boxer against a reckless and stupid brawler.  They retire to their respective corners, our man fresh and with lightning in his eyes and fists furious.  The brawler with legs of rubber, pukes his bloody mouthpiece, head swimming eyes confused as his crew goes to work and dreading the bell.

Todd Westergard, you may have been correct sir.

Show us this until it’s done Mr. President and we are golden.

Well done Mr. President.  Very well done.

Drinks for my friends.

Last night I pontificated vitriolic over the idiots that think President Obama’s address to America’s school children is some sort of socialist plot to indoctrinate them.  It goes without saying it’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.   A shining example of the stupidity, ignorance and racism that still runs rampant in this not so great country.  It’s sad.  It breaks my heart.  I’m not kidding.  It breaks my heart.

The one man who represents most of these moron’s best shot at a better life is vilified by them.  They are programmed, indoctrinated if you will, by those shallow, transparent entities who have their very worst interests at heart. Vicious irony.  Cruel.  The blind and deaf hatred, suspicion and fear sometimes overwhelms even a cynic like me.

I stand in awe.

It’s all about blatant, overt avarice.  Simple.  Plain.  Machiavellian in the most perverse sense.  Sociopathic in it’s indifference.

It moves me.  I can’t help but write about it.  It’s my therapy.  My vent.  My catharsis.

It occurs to me that the difference between liberals and conservatives is profound.  Duh.  Aside from the obvious, I’d like to point out the less than.  Liberals have a tendency to be disgusted with conservatives.  So much so they are reluctant or refuse to listen to them at all.  Yet they are still willing to investigate, seek alternative points of view and even sample the rantings of those irresponsible broadcasters who’s stock in trade is the fomenting of hate and judgment.

Conservatives on the other hand, refuse to listen at all.  To read or investigate.  They do not want to know.  They don’t want to hear or see anything contrary to what they’ve been told.  They don’t care.  They are unwilling to care.  What their icons tell them is better than good.  It is their truth, regardless and despite.  It’s all they need or want.  What lies beyond is confusion, vast tracts of gray between black and white.  George W. Bush was famous for not doing nuance or subtlety.

The great unwashed take orders very well.  They adhere and obey very well because they don’t want to to think for themselves.  Intellectually lazy and spiritually complacent.   To discern or debate confounds them and makes them very uncomfortable.  They have an overriding need for all or nothing.  Right or wrong.  No in between.  From there, the pattern is clear.  God is good, all knowing and all seeing.  God will keep them from harm or even mistake because he is always right.  Follow God and you’re cool no matter what.  You simply cannot wrong if you go with God.  It’s an absolute and the contemporary conservative covets the absolute.

Without absolutes, they flail and flop, sweat and panic.  They are agitated and bewildered because their whole system of belief is under a fire that only logic and rationale can bring to bear.  What follows is desperation, irrationality, lies and obfuscation.  They show up at political events with guns and rhetoric invoking Nazis, communism and Armageddon in the biblical sense.  The only thing they have in the face of an onslaught of truth is what they see as their absolutes; the lie of contemporary Christianity, morality as they define it and the righteousness of their twisted concept of patriotism.

They spew an invective infused jingoism and mediaeval archaic notions of religious superiority.

It’s like battling robots.

By the way, their next actions will be violent.  Violence will be justified in their minds.  They imagine it as we speak.  Many of them on the fringe have already  embraced it.  They shoot doctors don’t they?

This how we arrive at tomorrow.  Our president will address the children of America and simply encourage them to be good people.  Work hard, study hard and dare to achieve and aspire.  That is all.  But the right wing paints it in very broad strokes as something entirely different and I for one understand exactly why.  I’ve just described it to you as best I can.

Without further ado, I give you his words to be spoken tomorrow, so you may judge for yourself the potential of his dangerous and controversial words.  If there is a God, may he help us all.

“The President: “Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.”

“Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book.

Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.”

Drinks for my friends.

I hardly know where to begin.

Just when I think the army of ignorant, mouth breathing retards who oppose all things Obama, consistently and without grace or agility and discrepant against their very own interests, cannot possibly get anymore hypocritically and incoherently shrill, well, they pull down their pants, run around screaming, shitting and pissing themselves.

Now these roundheads are encouraging their children to skip school on Tuesday to save their fragile minds from some evil socialist indroctination by the President of The United States.  You can’t write this shit.

My old friend Gabby put it this way:  “Don’t worry kids, Obama’s not gonna ask you to procreate or practice loading your 45s.  He just gonna ask you to do your homework, which I guess from the conservative stand point, is a horrible thing.  Ok, so all you Republican Kids, just go back to your unprotected sex and guns.”
-Gabrielle Birchack

Racism, ignorance, stupidity and fear are alive and well in America.  It reminds me of leaving wet food as a treat for the warehouse cat at work, only to discover the bowl squirming and glistening with maggots the next morning.  I remember my disappointment and nausea inducing disgust vividly.  It was summer and I was a little saddened that my gesture had been so perverted by some of earths lowest creatures.

Well, it’s summer.

They would have us believe and likely believe themselves, that health care reform will:

1) Ration care, deny treatment to the elderly based on whether a government death panel deems them worthy and deserving.  It will do neither.  Um, by the way, health care is rationed rather egregiously in America today.  Weeks, sometimes months for an appointment with your doctor if you have insurance.  Automated phone voices instruct us that in the event of an emergency, meaning care is needed any more urgently than say, a month, hang up and call 911.  The chances of your insurance paying for the specific treatment, prescription etc. that you and your doctor have agreed is most efficacious is as low as sixty percent in many cases.  People have died and are dying as a result of the insurance company coming between patient and doctor.

Sounds like rationing to me.  It’s not just the uninsured that are going bankrupt or literally dying.  Sounds like death and or bankruptcy panels to me.

2) All illegal aliens, undocumented workers et al. will be automatically covered at our expense.

Guess what?  They already are.  They, as well as uninsured Americans go to an emergency room, as there are laws in all fifty states mandating that no one be turned away from emergency rooms.  We pay for it in higher costs across the board.  It should be noted, there is no provision in any of the bills in committee, that provide for care to illegals.

3) This is just the first step in a government take over of health care.

My first reaction is so what?  We’re the only modern industrialized nation without it and the wealthiest.  Contrary to the opposition’s chronically mendacious bloviating, those people in those other countries are quite happy with the care they receive.  Perfect?  No.  Would they choose to do without it?  In a word, nofuckingway.  Then, the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are tremendously popular in this country, despite both programs being entirely administrated by the government and the appearance that most of the opposition are willfully ignorant of this, reveals the argument to be specious on it’s face.

They use Stephen Hawking as example of someone who would never survive socialized medicine, despite socialized medicine being the best and only reason Mr. Hawking is still with us.  They are full of shit.  Idiots.  Empty blowhards.  Liars.

The stated goal is to increase efficiency and foster competition to bring down costs and end the chronic, unchecked avarice of the insurance and drug industries.

Every year, insurance company profits go up, premiums go up and the the number of insured goes down.  Remember, one way or another, despite the rampant suffering, it’s you and me who pay for those uninsured whether we like it or not.  Some estimates have the price of health insurance requiring half the median income of Americans within ten years.  Are you ready for $20,000.00 plus premiums?

4) We can’t pay for it.

I will admit, this perhaps their most legitimate protest.  But first, I say to you who would tout it, so what?  Remember Reagan spewing the nonsense of tax cuts to none other than our children during a period of double digit inflation, interest rates and unemployment?  Remember your icon telling us that deficits don’t matter?  So why do you care?  Why all of the sudden are you so ardently in favor of fiscal responsibility?  Why so vehemently concerned about the price our children will pay?  I smell political opportunism.  I smell hypocrisy.  You folks stink of intellectual dishonesty.  You folks reek of goddamn stupidity.

I’m a firm believer that increases in efficiency and a slim tax increase on those who’ve prospered so plenteously the last eight years will go a very long way towards funding a program that will improve the life of virtually every American.  Failing that, let me say this very plainly, we could opt to spend somewhat less than the near trillion dollars we spend each and every year to kill brown people overseas.  It’s just that simple.  Kill less brown people and foment life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, including the brown people.  

The fact is, that without a robust public option to not only cover the 50 million who have fallen through the the cracks, but to obviate the greed and vacuum of compassion of the status quo, any “reform” legislation is antithetical and more than likely worse than nothing at all.

See, it will fail to incentivise competition and nothing will change. The simplest and most comprehensive as well as comprehensible way to do this is expand Medicare appropriately.  A walk in the park.

As to the trigger idea that has surfaced of late, I’m calling bullshit on that.  Ostensibly, it would give insurance companies a few more years to clean up their act before a public option would be implemented.  It won’t work.  The dirty greedy bastards will conduct business as usual at best, daring the powers that be to do what they haven’t been able to do for half a century anyway.  A pretty safe bet on their part.  At worst, they will go for broke, wring us all dry in the time allowed, take the money and run, much like the Bush administration and it’s corporate cronies did with everything including the war, leaving a gigantic mess, nearly beyond repair.  For eight years it was open field running for the plutocracy under Dick-in-Bush.  It’s insane to think they’d behave any differently under the same circumstances.  These people care far less about you than your government and that’s a mouthfull.

The real reason for such virulent opposition to health care reform is that it is literally the first, and therefore most important, domino to be tipped.  Should it lose it’s center of gravity, the horror show that is the great unwashed will be subject to any socialist whimsy we in the majority see fit to impose on their jingoistic, empty headed sloganeering asses.

We may choose to prevent bloody mass murders by over armed nut jobs by pressing for incrementally better gun control.  No, we’re not interested in taking your fucking guns away, even though you dress ridiculously to kill defenseless animals.  We may seek to at least make sure that creationism can’t be taught exclusively, but mandate that evolution at least be offered along side it.  We may just, *gasp*, insist that gay people be treated fairly under all aspects of law, including marriage.

The prerogative to get all bold and righteous will be upon us.

We might legalize the demon weed, in order to tax it, better regulate it and keep it out of the hands of teenagers.  Legalize hemp production and we’ve got oil, paper, textiles, plastics, even high protein food, all renewable in twelve weeks, no pesticides and no detrimental environmental impact whatsoever.  We may push to stop imprisoning all non violent drug offenders because we currently incarcerate more people per capita than any country on earth at $30k per.  You can bet we’ll pursue green industry more aggressively because even if we’re wrong about global warming, and we’re not, there’s nothing wrong with cleaning up the water we all drink and the air we all breath.

Our sun vomits more energy in an hour than we use in a millennium.  Might as well work that shit.  It’s free beyond the technology to collect it.

The whole human race can survive without war.

The churches will have to endure a renewed and vigorous scrutiny.  The message will be, get the hell out of and stay the hell out of politics or your considerable largess will be taxed.  Oh, and maybe, just maybe some real and actual campaign finance reform.  I’m getting carried away here but I hope I’ve scared the living shit out of all you neocons and thoughtless, unpatriotic, yes unpatriotic, dittoheads and obsequies followers of Hannity, Beck and O’Reilly.  Let’s be honest, you’re already scared shitless because a half African American, progressive Democrat is your President.

We know why you show up to town halls armed to the teeth.  It’s because you’re stupid and scared.  We’re not at all impressed.

The opposite also applies, should the first all important domino fail to be moved off it’s axis by the will of the people and a pantywaste full majority Democratic administration, any subsequent metaphorical monoliths will be twice as hard to encourage toward a capitulation to gravity.  We will be left with an administration weaker than that of Jimmy Carter and a better than even chance our next president will be some empty headed dipshit like Sarah Palin or crazy eyed Michele Bachmann (God will have whispered in her ear).

This is the first fight and it’s the most important because of the obvious and enormous precedent.  They know it on a sub-genius level almost as well as we do.  Get involved.  Contact your representatives, sign petitions.  You want change you can believe in?  Get up and get out.  This is no time to fuck around.

Drinks for my friends.

The Lion sleeps tonight and forever.  I for one am deeply saddened at his inevitable but still tragic shuffling from underneath his mortal coil.  If nothing else, I’ve been reminded anew of the sheer abundance and magnanimity of his legislative accomplishments.  A profound practitioner of comity and perhaps the fiercest defender of basic human rights to ever serve in what used to be at least, the greatest deliberative body in history.

A force, a  human hurricane of kindness.

Senators McCain and Hatch have take it upon themselves to soil it with contempt and hypocrisy beyond the proverbial pale.  They suck.  To think McCain had the audacity to run for President.  Stupid is as stupid does.

I don’t believe in heaven or hell, armageddon or a Christian God, but for his sake, I do hope Mr. Kennedy is somehow reunited with his so tragically deceased brethren.  I do believe in the soul, and I believe Mr. Kennedy’s to be of the most authentically unadulterated kind.  His passing is every single American’s loss whether they know it or not.

A grand patriarch of Americans needs and wants.  A father and protector.  A good man.

Teddy.

The tragedy for the redneck, great unwashed, is that they fail to realize what he did for them and including their hatred, vitriol and ultimate stupidity.  When made plain to them, they pretend not to care or understand.  Such is the state of filthy willful ignorance in contemporary American politics.  Ugly, shortsighted Americans that purport, at best despairingly, unable to understand the truth.  Hopeless and deliberately imbecilic because they’ve been indoctrinated with a simple shallow fear.  A fear they know and understand to be baseless and without merit.

Fools.  Goddamn fools.  Goddamn fools.

I’m not sure how this is, all the sudden, I’m reminded vividly of a retarded man named Johnny I knew some twenty five years ago.  I recently had the pleasure of spending some time with  him and a best friend for whom Johnnie is his charge.  My longtime friend, Sean and his significant other Johanna, are living with and taking care of, Johnny who is 56 years old and ridiculously sweet and affectionate.  Johnny is well adjusted, poses no danger to anyone but maybe himself and is funny as fuck. Can’t remember whether it was Jo or Sean who shared it with me, but apparently Johnny exclaims “I made it!”, every morning when he wakes.  How cool is that?

Whatever God there is, he loves you Johnny.

From Bob Cesca at Huffingtonpost.com, “Health care reform named after Ted Kennedy must not suck”.  If and when this gets done it better be good if we dare to do it in his name.  Are we clear?

So by the way, any of you assholes on the the right who choose to accuse us of politicizing Edward Kennedy’s death by celebrating his unapologetic liberalism can take a long slow suck on my runny scrotum you stinking cunts.  He was a proud liberal who never succumbed to the right wing stigmatization of the word or the concept.  He was never afraid of it, he embraced it. His record glows with it.  It’s why we loved him.  Piss up a goddamn rope, you misguided obtuse demagogues.  Tread there at your peril.

Not a single one of you dickwads who would take exception, ever voted for any bill, proposal, or amendment he ever put forward for the common man’s health and well being as far back as ’94.  Eat me.  Now is not the time to pretend you would have negotiated.  Simple bastards.  Disingenuous mouth breathers.

Puke on your own shoes.  Don’t even try to define this man as some moderate obsequious compromiser; even you respected him because he stood up to you and told you to pound sand over and over when you chose to abandon reason and logic.

Outclassed.  Way outclassed.

I’m so weary of the stupidity and the vacuum of logic or reason.  The only industrialized country, and by far the richest in the world, that fails, fails again and again, to care for it’s people in the simplest, most fundamental of ways.  I’m sick to death of the tower in place that dictates our basic needs according to profit and the filthy lucre that has poisoned the process for decades.  It’s bullshit and whenever someone, be they elected representative or clueless ideologue, tries to tell you different, you can bet they are far less than than full of shit.  Empty.  I mean empty.

Bet they are corrupt.  Bet they are ignorant and scared.  You can bet they will do no good.

I will never, ever lie to you.  I’m telling you the way it is.

Johnny wakes up and says, “I made it!”.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve gone through a change.  Transformed.  Like menopause.  Suddenly, the Republican Agenda makes sense to me.  I’ve gone from liberal to vacuous.

Seriously.  Work with me here.

Torture makes complete sense in the context of liberty and justice for all.  Dick Cheney and his minions should not be investigated or prosecuted.  They were merely doing their best.  It’s hopeless silliness, not to mention unpatriotic, to pursue any form of persecution of these brave defenders of the American way.  As American’s, we are better than everyone else, we don’t deserve the scrutiny.  We are above it.  God put us here to rule the world and he is on our side.  Our unique responsibility is to rid the world of evil.

We are special.  Jesus tells us so.  The Bible tells us so.

Our qualifications are exclusive and divine.  Christian Americans are The Chosen.

Republicans in particular.

The faithful.

Those who’ve failed to reach their fiscal potential are not my problem, my concern and certainly not my fault.  Maybe God’s will is that they should be left behind.  A kind of religious natural selection.  Ha!  Take that you atheist Darwin lovers.  After all, God only helps those that help themselves.  Christ has no use or patience for the weak or impaired, they are unable to do for themselves and are therefore worthless to the Holy Spirit.  Never give a fish to a Democrat, teaching the worthless to fish is a waste of time. Some have been chosen and some have not.  The Christian way and obviously what the Heavenly Father intended for the Christian nation of America.

The rich should be taxed minimally, if at all.  Wealth drives the modern economy.  They provide the largess for jobs and industry.  They are the chosen.  Thus, their generosity is evident and already in place.  They do far more than the beggar or the homeless can or would.

I’ve come to loath the rotting toothed, stupid and desperate poor.  God has not chosen riches for me but I shudder when I gaze upon the worthless because I know my tax dollars go to prolong their miserable lives.  Poor but obese, they lack the sense to choose wholesome and nutritious food.  They neither know nor care enough too seek proactive medicines or practices and I don’t doubt that’s all part of God’s plan.  That these zombies are allowed to drain the money and resources of American society in general confuses me.  God does work in mysterious ways.

I don’t hate them because God says not to.

America is the land of opportunity.  Always has been.  Those who’ve failed to take advantage of America’s vast and ripe system of free education and abundant possibility are simply beyond hope, especially once they pass the threshold of adulthood.  I work, I have a job, so these greasy, dentally challenged trailer park dwellers, these weak and worthless veterans of our wars who can’t get it together and refuse to do for themselves, make me want to puke.  Look at all the goddamn foreigners that take jobs as convenience store clerks or manual labor workers that take jobs from worthy Americans.  Are these people less capable, less able than honest Americans?  Maybe they are, maybe they’re not.

Falls under not my fucking problem.  All I know is I’d much rather have my tax dollars go towards fighting the raghead terrorists than these wastes of God’s air.  I see these people in wheelchairs sporting an oxygen tank in casinos and I just know my money is paying for them instead of keeping us safe from Satan’s Muslim evil doers.  They should be euthanized like the diseased cat’s and dogs that make a mess of my trash and threaten neighborhood children with a cornucopia of malaise.  Tics, fleas and ringworm.

Ever heard that expression “Kill ’em all and lot God sort them out”?  I’m down with that.  I’m no judge and jury but get them off my block and out of my town.

Sometimes I think Hitler was more on the ball than he gets credit for.  Everyone knows the Jews control the banks and the entire entertainment industry.  You know “The Family” on C Street more or less agrees.  He really was just looking to rid his country of Faggots, Gypsies, Jews and the ethnically impure. Hitler was a Christian too, you know.  He had “The Ultimate Solution” and I think we could take a page or two from his playbook.

It’s a good dose of reality as opposed to the fascism and socialism pinko liberals try so hard to cram down our necks every fucking day.

See, they’re not patriots like me and you.  They love niggers and spics and anyone who isn’t from the Mayflower like us.  They are weak.  They give money to all the dirty and lazy regardless of their color.  Ask me for money on the street, I’ll tell you to get a job you piece of shit.  They wander around pushing their stolen shopping carts full of stolen trash and I hate them.  Their skin a map of rashes, their eyes bloodshot with their hands out and the cloud of foul stink they walk in.  This instead of a job?

Fucking lazy if you ask me.  No excuse.

Christ has blessed my soul with charity but these people have no will or desire and don’t deserve the fish I can afford.  If they won’t die, better off behind bars at $30k a year because they are a menace.  Know God or pay the price.

We should attack and punish those countries who threaten us.  The future of the world depends on the triumph of Christianity over Islam.  They’re heathens and there’s no chance of co-existing with a bunch of towel headed camel jockeys.  Crude and uncivilized.  We have nukes and they don’t.  Time to use them.  Negotiation is pointless.  Turn their the desert into glass.

Take a breath.

I hope you understand that I’m kidding.  I’ve painted a picture for you of what I hate.  It is a caricature for sure.  A broad stroke, the impetus, the catalyst, being a solid month of right wing talk radio and it’s blatant, overt dishonesty.  Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are simultaneously American icons and stains on America’s aspirations and her identity.  What they do everyday is sick, irresponsible and evil.  They and their ilk seek nothing more than to pollute our national discourse so egregiously as to rile the stupid and offend the thoughtful to the extent that they are actually paid handsomely for their treason.  Shining examples of the worst of us.  The physical manifestation of everything that is wrong with American society, patriotism and all our precious ideas.

They are paid handsomely to stir shit.  Disgusting.  I would swing on either one.  I fucking hate these guys.

This blog is dedicated to Teddy Kennedy.  Not perfect by any means, I understand his flaws better than you can know, a lion nonetheless.  A champion of all those I’ve lampooned so harshly here.  The dynasty has ended.  It really is America’s loss.

His passing is poignant and symbolic.  It was with JFK’s assassination that the modern era of brutal politics flooded us.  The subsequent courage of LBJ and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King cemented the vulgar ugliness of right versus left in this once vital and proud nation.  We have fallen from those heights.  Those ideals and those hopes.

In so many ways, we are in the same place.  A half African, half Caucasian man as President.  We are back in that place more than you probably know.  Round headed idiots showing up to Town hall meetings sporting  loaded weaponry enough to slay everyone in front of them.  Adolph fucking Hitler invoked over and over.  There are so many children in America, both literally and figuratively.  I worry so much that despite the election, we are forced to choose between a martyr or Superman.

It would be convenient and gratuitously exculpatory to pontificate here, but I’ll spare both you and me.  Save this:  Both John McCain and Orin Hatch disingenuously lamented the absence of Ted Kennedy from the health care debate in the last day or two, insinuating that his presence would have made a difference.  Fucking pricks.  Shame on you assholes.  You and your ever shrinking party are beginning to trip over your own dicks in your own race for shamelessness.

Public option or bust.

Drinks for my friends.

There simply is no cogent remonstrance to be made for Sarah Palin’s resignation being in anyone’s best interest but her own.  Callow, cowardly and nothing if not character as yet still inchoate.  A better, smarter  politician would have stepped back, done personal inventory and realized her own tempest was precisely that.  Her own.

Instead, she threw in the towel and walked away, blaming everyone but herself.  She did not belong there and that’s not entirely her fault but none of it is mine.

Maybe there was an epiphany.  Maybe she finally realized she was in way over her head.

That would be nice.

Ideally, she could own some some humility, regroup and educate herself on the issues;  a little geography and some foreign policy.  If the content of her character was what her and her mouth breathing Christian conservative base would have us believe, after some sincere and earnest wood shedding, she could rise to the occasion.  Re-emerge a more sober, thoughtful and with luck, a far better informed public figure.

Either way, I suspect she has for all intents and purposes, taken the political dirt nap.  Notwithstanding her rabid enthusiasts, typically of the under informed and aforementioned mouth breathing variety, the pooch has pretty much been gang raped.  The resolute, far right, Christian neoconservative base is in decline.  An accelerated rate of atrophy as it goes the way of the Dodo.

Cheney tried.  He failed.  He will be hated forever.  He dines on live infants.

I’m not too broken up.  Political Darwinism eroding a really stupid and toxic doctrine.  As rapidly as the jackasses ascended, so precipitous is their decline.  Self correction as it should be; kinda vengeful.

Should she choose to run in 2012, her comeuppance will be complete.  Even were she to stage the most spectacular transformation ever witnessed by the instantaneous post technocratic media, she will arrive obsolete.  Redundant.  Too little too late.  She will embarrass herself and her party.  Her mascara will run.  She will remain a sullen runner up to prom queen.  No ride in the magic float.

It’s my hope she tries her hand at something else.  I get the feeling this was her first real ass kicking.  She caved.  Better to know it now, huh?

Sheezus.

My advice to you Mrs. Todd Palin is to pursue entertainment.  Not journalism.  Entertainment.  Broadcasting.  Somebody said something about a talk show.  This your best option.  I would get there soon.  You’ve already got a huge book deal.  Get a radio show.  Start slow.  Learn the business.  You’re not stupid, just not very smart.  You are the paradigm of right wing radio.  Right between G. Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck.  The very exclusive, very elite of the ridiculous douchebags.

Learn to talk to people that are only as smart as you are.  You’ll be so much happier.

So will the rest of us.

Drinks for my friends.

Good evening.

Bill Clinton gave the keynote speech to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee yesterday.

I’m cutting to the chase here with direct quotes.

“Global cooperation is crucial for the survival of mankind…..”

“If we have a chance, it has to begin by people accepting that they can be proud of who they are without despising who someone else is,”

….”we are genetically “99.5 percent the same……..”

“From time immemorial, people have fought over identity rooted in that (half percent),” Clinton said. “We should have spent more time thinking about that other 99.5 percent of ourselves.”

“You teach your children their ethnic heritage; their religious heritage; their cultural heritage with no negative reference to anyone else because it’s the only shot we’ve got to make the most of our interdependent world,”

All quotes from CNN.com

You’ll have to forgive me but these sentiments strike a real chord with me.  Beyond that chord, is a three part harmony and a choral ethereal behind it.  With a Hammond B3 through a tube Leslie cabinet and some tympanies and strings.  Some brass and wood.  French horns and Oboes.  Oooh, and a Moog.

“Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.” -Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

These simple notions explode in my heart.  If we could just live by them, we’d enjoy so much more peace.

John Lennon beseeched us gently to imagine.  To imagine an entire world with no religion, no hell and just the blue sky above.  No country.  No nationalism or even patriotism.  No reason to even covet wealth or profit from famine.

“A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world” -John Lennon

That’s big stuff there.

Then there’s proof we’re almost outta rope.  This is such a simple thing but the climate is getting ever more polarized and violent.  While the right wing frolics in it’s own pudenda, evangelicals are snug as a bug in a rug with the idea they are somehow among the righteous and will somehow live forever.

These folks are stupid.  These folks are mean.  Sheezus.

As cynical as I am, I’m still an optimist.

The latest xenophobic diatribe from the asshole club foolishly denounces the concept of being a citizen of the world.  Newt the Salamander (new nickname alert), mocked it last week in a speech before rotting doddering sycophants.  That’s dumb.  I don’t care what backward crap you subscribe to, if you are reading this, you are a citizen of the world.

Some of you don’t like it.

Tough shit.

Newt the Salamander cracks me up.  The hair of a robust but premature gray talk show host, the face of a caramel and Scotch addicted bigot, the grill of an octogenarian who’s still got some baby teeth.  Thinks he’s got a shot at the head office.  The way he’s shoveling sewage, he doesn’t have shit to say.

Whatever he does say smells like ass.  He packs his jowls with feline fecal tootsie rolls to lend his face symmetry.  I’m really happy I just said that exact thing.  I don’t care much for the Salamander.

Nattering nabobs of negativity want to know Newt’s languor.  How does the Salamander balance the warm rock and the cool water?  Plump and bellicose.

I’d like to have him over for drinks and duct tape him to a space heater.  Make him watch CSI Miami.  Feed him nothing but Slim Jim’s and Dr. Pepper.  He would change his own diapers whilst suspended by a chin strap.  Morticians would be allowed to practice on his pale countenance and somewhat alien bone structure.  I could invite some NBA size trannys.

” George W. Bush left office with a public approval rating under 30 percent. Less than 30 percent of Americans currently describe themselves as Republicans. The amalgam of evangelical Christians, hardcore gun-rights fanatics, anti-tax, anti-immigrant and anti-choice voters who make up the base of the Republican Party amount to less than 30 percent of the overall electorate.” -William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org

Salient point of ensuing article by Mr. Pitt is that it’s own base is reason for the GOP’s demise.  The Sarahs, salamanders and Huckabees are prisoners of their own device.  The once muscular, hard right base of the Republican party, the guns and God crew, are essential for candidates to be allowed to sit at the table, but now a virtual guarantee they’re exempt from being dealt a winning hand.

My synopsis: These guys are fucked and it’s all their fault.

Will Pitt rocks.  Like a hurricane.

As much as I loathe the great unwashed, I sincerely wish they’d wake the fuck up and smell the world along with America’s place in it.  They nearly screwed the pooch when they were in power last time and now they are poised to do their worst despite being the minority.  Irrational fear, ignorance, prejudice and unwillingness to judge a man based on the content of his character, but rather his religion, political affiliation, culture or social beliefs, has the whole movement flirting with obsolescence.

The Republican party is a parody of itself.

They have begun to eat their own.  They drag their party moderates toward a house still fully engulfed instead of even entertaining the idea they are less than absolutely right about everything.  Frustrating to watch.

It has always been true, always an imperative, but now it’s damn near an emergency; we must get along.  Share the world.  Humankind can no longer afford to relinquish reality and truth while clinging to individual interest and willful ignorance.  The fomenting of hate by right wing media is not just reckless and irresponsible but is literally a menace to society.  I’m not here to suggest we revoke the first amendment rights of fucktards like The Human Shitsmear (Limbaugh), Hannity, Coulter, Glenn Beck, O’Reilly or even the Cheneys.

Fight fire with fire by using your own rights under that same amendment to drown them out.  How hard would it be for every American who loathes Rush to storm his phone lines regularly?  Sunday afternoon in the park.  We could do it from facebook and myspace.

What then, of the example by the Iranian people this weekend over the travesty of their national election?  They took to the streets.  I understand that the chronic malfeasance of our ’00 and ’04 elections was not nearly so obtuse.  We are guilty nonetheless, for behaving.  Not nearly enough ‘what the fuck?’

They are furious and showing courage.  Point to me the American who doesn’t cheer this struggle.  These people are ass pissed as they should be.  This is incredibly good stuff.  Anybody looking for inspiration or even an example?

As I write this I watch dickheads go swine stupid downtown over a goddamn basketball championship.  Now that’s blind shithouse irony.

I have it on mute but LAPD are going paramilitary and scaring the crap out of them.  Herded like cattle and KCAL9 cuts to commercial.  Lean it up against what’s happening in Iran right now, that’s all I’m saying.

Drinks for my friends.

So Newt Gingrich declares he’s not a citizen of the world to applause by the most prominent collection of misfit toys ever to gather on an annual schedule.  John Voight, the same whackjob who melted down on public airwaves a few years back over his superstar daughter Angelina Jolie’s estrangement, called Obama a false prophet and told us America is weaker.

Newt also told them the brand new economic plan has already failed.  This, despite news today that ten banks are set to repay almost ninety billion in stimulus money.  This,  despite it being way too early to tell.

This blog is for you Lo.  I understand that Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.  The big picture is far more convoluted than most of us know.  It is far greater than the sum of it’s parts.  Both sides have bodies buried and there’s no innocence in Washington; I am not a Nuclear Playboy.

It’s just that people like Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich, whom I adore, have no real chance at influencing seminal policy, much less posturing for the highest office in the land.

You see this administration as a glass half empty.  I’m not ready to go there yet.

When was the last time a President of the United States told Israel in front of the world, in an Arabic Muslim nation, that her actions were intolerable?

You graciously offered an article on the similarities between Bush and Obama for this particular context: http://www.internationalpoliticalwill.com/2009/06/heard-it-all-before/

Ironically, it’s context that Will is ignoring.  Just about every speech by Bush that Will cites took place inside our own borders.  I commend him for his research acumen, as he’s painstakingly culled all these examples of congruence from over six years of lexicon, far more muted and less specific than that of Obama’s single speech in a Muslim country delivered to Arabs.

It’s a manufactured duck and weave befitting a high school research paper.  No score here Lo.  Your man Will has written a fluff piece.  I’ve taken it upon myself to post an edited version of this critique on his blog.

You know I hope, that I have immense respect for you.  Thanks be that you’re far better informed than most.  I wonder if you haven’t taken the wrong fork on your philosophical/ideological path.  You’re energy and intelligence is lost on wanna be demagogues  like Ralph Nader who only run for office out of hubris and the obstreperous notion they may upset a close election.  If Ralph Nader truly wanted to make a difference he would position himself politically to do so.  Perhaps an earnest and sincere attempt at a cabinet position or a prominent non-profit.

Ralph Nader may be as full of shit as the next guy.

And you my dear, would be better served by getting on board with a society and an ethic that is changing.  Just because I support Obama, doesn’t mean I can’t bitch at him.  It gives greater license to do just that.  See last night’s blog.

I’m not, by any means, hook, line and sinker.  He’s not perfect, I own that.  But in a few short months he’s managed to fundamentally change the way the rest of the world looks at us.  Take the recent elections in Lebanon as an example.  The amount of influence he brought to bear is debatable but there’s no denying he brought some.  This is big stuff.  He’s the best thing we’ve had in a very long time.  Work with me here.

Don’t look away, there’s plenty to see.

Drinks for my friends.

“And I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum.” -Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America.

Awesome.

Honestly, I teared up.

I am so very proud of my President and my country.  Our Man was amazing today.  He said things no American President has ever said.  And they were all true.  I was transfixed.  Enchanted.  Slack jawed.  I’m grateful I was alone, just in case I drooled.

It’s worth pointing out that in light of the elaborate smear effort to paint him as some sort of extremist Muslim conducted during the Presidential  campaign, his speech in Cairo today was goddamn courageous.  Beyond that, it was an overt in your face to his neoconservative right wing Christian critics. You know, the ones that so desperately want you to believe that we’re in the middle of some war that is ultimately about our God being able to beat up their God.  The ones for whom ridiculous dogma and apocryphal ideology trump compassion, reality and common sense.

“More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

“So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Oh man.  That’s the shit right there.

“As the Holy Quran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.  That is what I will try to do today — to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.”

There it is.  We are all just people.  Humans first and foremost.  How breathtakingly refreshing.  How important and authentic.

Obama quoted John Adams: “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”

This notion, so widely held, that America is at war with a religion or an ethnicity or even a geographic region is so very wrongheaded, so perspicaciously misguided, that most Americans, along with too much of the world, have no realistic understanding of just exactly what is happening and why.

It’s understandable, given the litany of lies we’ve been force fed, and our own failure in laziness and apathy to not even bother to investigate for our own edification, the absolute crap the media has foisted upon us so irresponsibly, so relentlessly and for so long.  The failure of journalism in America is mirrored by the doppelganger of breakdown by Americans ourselves, to question what we’re told, to challenge what we are led to believe.  Exactly why we are in this mess.

Willful ignorance.

“The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism — it is an important part of promoting peace.”

As an agnostic,  I am moved  to say Amen.

“Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world……….Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

Sheezus.  Wow.  In Cairo, Egypt.  An incredibly bold admission about the abject failure of American policy.  I can’t tell you how impressed I am at this honest confession by Our Man on the world stage.  It’s true, America fucked up by invading Iraq.  We screwed the pooch.  Shame on us.

“And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles. Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.”

Of course I was aware of these steps by Our Man, but his restating of them beneath and behind the proscenium of a stage in front of the entire world is nothing less than golden.  And again, the admission of just how far this once great country has strayed, is so brave and nakedly honest, that I am at a loss for words.

He recounts these events, these egregious mistakes, because his intention is to put them behind us by reconstructing our integrity and pride with honesty and transparency, whenever and wherever possible.

Then, he swung the mother of all haymakers:

“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

“It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.”

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.  This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Unbelievable.  Finally.  A sitting American calls Israel on it’s shit.

This is change.  I can’t speak for you, but this is why this man earned my vote.  It is why I didn’t hesitate to hope.  I believed him then.  I believe him now.  I believe in him.  As I write this, I am inspired and awfully proud.

This speech will no doubt be read, remarked upon and lauded for decades.

This guy is so fucking cool.

Drinks for my friends.

I hope you’re not yet tired of me railing against all things Dick Cheney.  I know I’m not.  History will will estimate him to be nothing more than a misanthropic war criminal.  Besides that, I admit again that it’s morbidly cathartic.  What began as an effort on his part to rewrite history and burnish his legacy, has morphed into a risible rhythmless boogie of dodging bullets fired at his feet by truth empowered gunslingers.

Today he tells us that there was never any evidence of a connection between 911 and Iraq.  Um, no shit.  This despite his persistent insistence that there was ample evidence, long after it was thoroughly discredited. He said:  “pretty well confirmed” that a 9/11 hijacker met with Iraqi intelligence officials before 9/11. -thinkprogress.org

Understand how deliberate this dog and pony show was.  In the ’04 Presidential election, over 70% of people who voted for Bush/Cheney believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the attacks on 911.  One could rightfully argue that these two assholes were re-elected by and large because Americans believed their lies and the spell of fear they so successfully instilled.

You gotta love the great unwashed.

He also tells us that those memos he wants declassified don’t necessarily prove, as he claimed just days ago, that torture saved thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of lives, but rather the entirety of the interrogation program did.  What the hell does that mean?  Olbermann wondered if he was referring to instances like the fact that we gave sugar free cookies to a diabetic terrorist.

Then, he has the audacity to blame his lies on George Tenet.  That’s right, the infamous dickhead in charge of the CIA at the time, who said that making a case for invading Iraq to the American people and the world was a “slam dunk”.  As if to say, it wasn’t his fault because that’s what Tenet told him.

After months of pressure and obtuse harangue by Dick truly and his mob.

For his part, Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It’s gets better.  He now claims we missed 911 because of former terrorist czar Richard Clarke.  I suggest you read Clarke’s book on the matter.  One of the very first insiders to be overtly critical of the reckless and ideologically driven Dick-in-Bush administration and the Keystone Cops approach they took to every single circumstance after that fateful day.  If Clarke is to be believed, and I believe him, he had been ringing the bell since day one.  The book is titled “Against All Enemies” and it’s a page turning indictment of the whole crew, from Condoleezza Rice, on up.

While you’re at it, pick up of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s book, “The Price of Loyalty”.  An astounding glimpse into the pre-911 days and the Bush administration’s determination, even then, to to invade Iraq.

What baffles me is how so many talking heads, Dan Rather included, seem wont to purchase that at the very least, Cheney is sincere, that he believes what he says.  No sale here.  He’s a charlatan and should be tried and convicted for war crimes.  Every prediction has been wrong.  Every “fact” he’s ever foisted has been a lie.  The idea that this prick is able to command a single American’s attention on any public airwave, makes me want to puke in technicolor.

Here’s where we are.  No WMD.  There never was and there remains no credible reason to tell Americans it was…..was.  No connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.  No connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussien and the events of 911.  Again, never was and no credible reason to tell Americans there was.  Nothing, no symbiosis between a secular dictatorship and an extreme religious movement.

No was.  None.

Here we are.  Not a single fucking reason for invading a sovereign country that posed no threat to us or even it’s neighbors in the foreseeable future.  No reason for killing hundreds of thousands if not more than a million innocent people.  No reason for displacing millions of innocents.  No reason for the deaths of thousands of proud American men and women.  No reason for the incalculable grief visited on millions and millions of fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers across the entire planet.  No goddamn reason at all for any of it.

No was and no is.

I usually endeavor to bring a little humor to you the reader, while drawing your attention to the horrible events that surround us all in this world.  Forgive me, this just isn’t funny.  There’s nothing funny about it.  It’s all tragedy kids.  A long slow, brutal and still developing nightmare that will disturb the world’s sleep for decades because Richard Bruce Cheney was somehow allowed to have far too much influence on the course of human events.

More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for a consummately unjust war with Iraq.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the abject and utterly reprehensible torture America visited with malice and viciousness on America’s “enemies”.  More than any other human, Richard Bruce Cheney is culpable for America’s woefully reduced standing in the world.  More, than any single other human fucking being, Richard Bruce Cheney is responsible for the hole that we are now at the bottom of.

One of the prevailing messages of the Obama administration is to look forward and therefore not dwell too zealously on our recent past.  It is ever more apparent to me that however wholesome and well intentioned such sentiments are, they are naive and for lack of a better adjective, simple, in an increasingly complex world.

Richard Bruce Cheney shits where he eats.

Hold Dick Cheney responsible.  Show the world that accountability is still a respected idea in America.  Prosecute this prick.  In so doing, we will demonstrate the best we have to offer as a first step, to ourselves and the rest of the planet.

Fuck this guy.

Drinks for my friends.

If Dick Cheney’s lips part at all, he’s lying.

I’m nurturing a man crush for Senator Carl Levin after he bitch slapped Darth Cheny and his little dog Liz with what I’m certain will be the facts.  You know those classified torture memos Darth and Liz persist ad nauseum in referring to? The ones they say prove torture works and saved hundreds of thousands of lives?

Senator Levin said last night that Darth and his little dog too, are full of shit.

“When former Vice President Cheney said last week that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few sadistic prison guards” acting on their own, he bore false witness. And when he said last week there was no link between the techniques used at Abu Ghraib and those approved for use in the CIA’s secret prisons, he again strayed from the truth. The seeds of Abu Ghraib’s rotten fruit were sown by civilians at the highest levels of our government.” -Daily Kos

“Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction. Mr. Cheney has made other false statements. For instance, his claim that the techniques used on detainees were the “same exact procedures” used on our own people in the SERE training regime. That could not be farther from the truth.” -Daily Kos

Booya!

Bear in mind that Levin is no partisan firebrand and certainly not an ideologue.  Level headed, reasonable and very well respected on both sides of aisle, when Carl speaks, people listen and they are inclined to believe him.  In contrast, the Cheneys’s aren’t exactly the picture of sartorial splendor.  Dick is the most accomplished and prolific liar to ever sit at the second highest level of our executive branch.

Man I hate this fucker.

In the post Dick-in-Bush era, Darth Cheney has taken it upon himself, with earnestness, to incite and maintain the market for debate over all egregious actions and policies of his administration, despite legitimacy, credibility or even relevance.  My guess is that history will judge this man with an earned but graceful combination of malice and impunity.  He is without question evil and black of heart; his legacy will suffer accordingly.  It is my sincere wish that his charred and diseased cardiac will endure long enough to afford him a fulsome mouth full of what he has wrought and the disgrace he deserves.

It’s ironic that we’ve arguably heard more from this prick in the last few months, than his entire reign as puppet master and dark lord.

He got hammered, shot a man in the face, and somehow orchestrated for his victim to apologize for the inconvenience.  Who would even attempt to question his prowess for malignancy and obfuscation?

With such a thorough biography of lies and deceit, what will it take for America to stop listening to this vainglorious asshole?  No amount of pride or shame seems enough to compel him to shut the fuck up and disappear.  Are we a nation of masochists?

Fuck this guy.

I confess to a certain vulgar delight in writing about him.  Such an easy target.  So obviously flawed.  He is nothing if not compelling in a macabre sort of way.  I love to loathe him and perhaps that’s his appeal.  I can only hope it’s that simple.  Whatever the case, I’m certain his post Vice Presidential fifteen minutes do far more harm than good to the causes of conservatism and Republican ideology.  Perhaps he unwittingly performs a profound favor by not yet letting America forget just how much his administration sucked.

Drinks for my friends.

http://www.truthout.org/052209R

Cut & paste.  It’s unbelievable.  It scares me.

Darth Cheney.

I cannot countenance who we are.  I can’t stand what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.  I can’t stomach those who would defend these bastards and the actions they so relentlessly try to sell us as performed on our behalf.  For our safety, they tell us.

This is bullshit.  These are egregious crimes.  These people are lying.  The media pads around it with careful feet on deep pile Berber, giving them their say.  People died in custody of the United States government.  The sickest aspect?  They probably expired whilst we pursued our efforts to extract reason for a war that Darth fucking Cheney knew was complete crap.

Bullshit.

Despite all this, we still have to suffer through the airtime the mainstream media affords this lying, disgusting evil jackass who spent his eight years in office doing his damndest  to pervert, distort and destroy all things that allowed Americans to be proud.

I bet this guy is hung like a gnat.  Had a giant safe in his office.  Kinda the bureaucratic equivalent of a big stupid truck in the ‘burbs.  See what I’m saying?

Look, I’m not naive.  Any American who’s lived with eyes wide open for the past handful of years, understands all too well what the Dick-in-Bush regime has done in our name.  What chaps my ass with such profound cheese grating efficacy, is that this pinhead Cheney, is allowed for a single second to utilize public airwaves in an attempt to mitigate, in such an obvious fashion of puerile necropsy,  policies and actions that have indelibly stained us all. 

Actions and policies, for which he should clearly be behind goddamn bars.

It’s crap.  Elaborate falsehoods.  Complete shite.

The neocons and this dickhead Cheney in particular, are attempting to rewrite history as we let them into our living rooms every evening for such dubious ends.  Man, I hate these guys.  In the words of Reverend  Jeremiah Wright, “Goddamn America”.  Any asshole who even attempts to change the elaborate and true path of human events past, should be muzzled and pelted with rocks and garbage.

“They pelted me with rocks and garbage”.

History is sacred and Cheney will do his best, but his legacy will ooze a vile, stinking sewage.  Not even gulls will go near it.  The EPA will get involved.

Write your local network affiliate, tell them you don’t want to see the vulgar and vile visage of this man or any of his lackeys on your television anymore.  Lying to you and impugning the efforts of the man we elected by an unprecedented majority to right the wrongs his administration and office so recklessly and relentlessly pursued and wrought.

I’m all for free speech.  But not if what you say on our air is an incendiary lie.  It is crying fire in a crowded theater.  At the very least the crawl underneath should go bold and all caps when he lies.  Cheny’s kinda soft spoken so it would be like someone yelling from underneath.  I’ll call Rupert.

We, America, tortured.  We killed people in our charge.  Worse, we killed hundreds of thousands and visited life altering suffering on millions for no good goddamn reason.  I’m ashamed of my country and you should be too.

Who are we?  What have we allowed ourselves to become?

This tumor is us.

This parading of a simple dog and a forlorn pony is contemptible and absurd.  Stand up.  Be an American.  Do not tolerate this man man and his lies.

We are so much better than this.

Tell Rush Limbaugh he can blow me.

I’m trying to tell you something and you should listen.

Drinks for my friends.

Hello,

Fuck this guy.  Cheney is a vacuum of credibility.  A black hole.  He is a liar and a thief.  He and his cronies profited immensely from the war in Iraq by engaging in fraud perpetrated on our own troops and we the people as often as not.  Haliburton and KBR.  You think this guy gives a mad fuck about you?

Yet he deigns to flatter us with his opinions by the hour, or so it seems.  Who exactly does he think he is?  What new arrogance is this?  Dude, you were the Vice President and most of us agree you sucked.  Go away.

The CIA isn’t exactly a pillar of truth, justice and the American way these days.  They, both the CIA and Darth, deliberately “fixed the facts to fit the policy” that led us into one of the most unjust wars in history.  Can you say Downing Street Memos?  Nonexistent yellowcake uranium or mobile bio weapons labs that turned out to be balloon trucks?  The Keystone Cops in color.

This guy gets on TV.

They tortured in fact, to gain and supply reason and rationale for that very war.  With every fiber of my being and every ounce of conviction I can summon, I say fuck these guys.  Furthermore,  I invite Dick Cheney, with zero respect due, to shut the fuck up and go away.

Or, we get to waterboard the prick bastard.  I’ll settle for either and sleep soundly.

Dear Dick, You suck.  Please vanish.  Go gentle into that hot cave.

Fear, fear fear.  This is a mess created by our former arsonist laureate, the Dick-in-Bush administration.  “…if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear, we will make more mistakes…..” -President Barack Obama.  Cheney calls Our Man’s policies, “recklessness cloaked in righteousness”.  I can’t help but wonder just what Darth Cheney knows about righteousness.

The past administration swore up and down that we did not torture.  Upon that lie of extraordinary magnitude becoming as common as the knowledge that one should avoid using motorized garden shears for personal grooming, they try to convince us that torture kept us safe, was justified and wasn’t really torture but “enhanced interrogation techniques”.  My guess is Cheney’s next career will be in real estate.  You know, bridges, swampland, timeshares in Baghdad, that sort of thing.

Or maybe the latest incarnation of Swamp Thing.

I am in awe that this douchebag Cheney is able to command any attention at all.  Why is anyone even listening to such a notoriously full of shit, black hearted blowhard?  Why?  He’s been wrong about everything, caught in more lies than Baron Munchhausen and he should be in goddamn Leavenworth.

It’s all smoke and mirrors.  It’s all they’ve got.  Fear wrapped in the worn gauze of  some obsolete notion of security.  That’s it kids.  There’s nothing more to see here.  It is exactly as it appears.  Move along please.  Please.

Understand, this man, our President, has more on his plate than you can possibly imagine.  The tasks he faces every morning require superhuman effort, attention and acumen.  Most of what our man struggles with in the shower, the great unwashed are willfully ignorant of.

This guy is inside a cat 4 tornado and he doesn’t need Dick Cheney’s irrelevant shit right now.  If Darth were an actual patriot, he would pull a fade starting now.  Cheney, of all people is intimate with the toxic pile he and that little monkey left behind.

This subject of torture has become far too convoluted.  Too nuanced even.  It’s simple.

Torture is immoral because it is cruel and inhumane.  At the very least it pollutes the soul of anyone who orders it and any who would administer it.    We must understand that these people, these candidates for and of torture, are human beings.  Right or wrong, these people believe what they believe just as fiercely as we do.  Under the last administration, anyone who believed differently than you or Sean Hannity, could literally be tortured for disagreeing, whether they knew shit or not.

Surveilled.  Wire tapped which means computer tapped.  ……..anything you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law……..

Torture is unethical because the result is at best dubious.  With resolute men, the decision about what they are willing to disclose, even when faced with death, has already been made. Count on such men to spew crap when tortured.  It’s useless.  Even the economy of the concept is bankrupt. They think it’s a game of Stratego.

Drinks for my friends.

Republicans are a hot mess.

This poor bastard, Sgt Russel, and the five brothers in arms he felled. All the families too. A big bag of tragedy for no good reason. Not that all involved weren’t brave committed men who’d sacrificed for America more than we can comprehend. All the more sad.

It’s just that it didn’t have to happen. A man on his third tour of hell lost his shit. It seems so random but it’s not. He was in treatment for “stress”. These guys are fucking tough. They are crackerfuckingjack. They tipped Iraq over in weeks. Lots of things are very wrong with this story.

A badass soldier whom I presume was sane before he arrived, killed his own, not just his own, but his fellow soldiers. The antithesis of anything like heroic bravery. Almost as curious as it is tragic. PTSD. A political potato of some heat. Inconsistent to nebulous in terms of definition or perception. Through the roof nonetheless. Our veterans are struggling on a scale we’re not even aware of.

This is a gift from the Bush administration that will keep on giving for years to come.

Just like Vietnam!

The dude does not abide and neither do I. This is insane. See what I’m saying?

I really need for you dear reader, to concentrate here. I’m going to cut and paste a news item from today below, and I want you to compare and contrast the news I’ve written about above with this actual piece that appears below inside quotes. All I will say is that I think the two issues at hand are symbiotically entwined:

“In an interview on Fox News, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney sharply criticized the new administration for agreeing to release photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration.

“I think it is really appalling that the administration is taking this step,” she said in the interview. “Clearly what they are doing is releasing images that show American military men and woman in a very negative light.”

“I have heard from families of service members from families of 9/11 victims this question about when did it become so fashionable for us to side, really, with the terrorists,” she continued. “You know, President Obama has a lot of rhetoric about support for American military families, support for our men and women who are fighting for us overseas. But if he really cares about them, then he wouldn’t be making such an effort to release photos that show them in a negative light.” -CNN

Ok, I can’t help it. Liz Cheney you stupid fucking cunt. What about this whole egregious clusterfuck do you not understand? You actually seek with all gallows composure to spin this tragedy into some lame evidence that the Obama administration attempts “….to side, really, with the terrorists”?

In a war started by your father without reason?

Look up her name and insult her personally. Liz, you ignorant slut. You have betrayed your country and if Olberman or Stewart did the same schtick I swear I just turned on the glass teat.

Time for a fireside interlude. Picture me with a blanket over my legs in a wheelchair beside a crackling hearth:

A tale related by an excellent friend.

This story is about a man named Donald.

Donald farts in the car, back on a sweltering day. Turns out to be a withering expulsion, weakening the senses of the propagator. He’s impressed by his own ability to generate an odor that would be a captain of any industry. So inspirational that he wonders about his own health.

He then ventures into a video emporium of the strip mall variety. He feels the build. Pressure in his lower abdomen. And it’s hot. It’s temperature is like heat from a crack in the Earth. As though his bowels are about to volcano.

The gastrointestinal expulsion is nuclear but not cacophonous.

He’s grateful he’s not shat himself.

Get my drift? More or less silent but indisputably toxic.

He understands the affront he’s just committed. He flees to the right, past the first few letters of the alphabet. He works his way quickly to the D’s and F’s. Doctor Detroit to Fargo.

A fresh couple enter the emporium. They immediately ventiure into a cloud of Donald’s anal vapor in the A through C sectiion. They are apalled and disturbed. Their faces are an ugly mask of assault and disgust.

This is Donald’s story.

Drinks for my friends.

It would be nice if we could simply choose our own channels. If I don’t pay my bill, Direct TV shuts me down in a heartbeat. I call them on the phone, arrange payment and within thirty seconds, access to like three hundred channels is restored. I don’t believe for a second that making individual choice available to customers isn’t possible.

I’d do the networks, they should be free and I’m a news junkie, including FOX, CNN,and MSNBC. Part of my addiction is to monitor the mainstream. Comedy Central, HBO and Showtime for movies, excellent series’ and boxing. One local affiliate. They all suck but I need access to at least one local news outlet. Maybe some nature channels, IFC and that other one……..

I need to step off this topic for awhile. You who read me regularly understand I am wont to do.

I am moved by this President. He takes complex questions and answers them with intelligence and nuance. He talks to us and explains himself with an earnestness and sincerity that make plain his need for us to understand. He does want to include and engage the lowest common denominator. I believe I’d be remiss were I not to point out the glaring contrast between Mr. Obama and our previous President, who catered to and exploited the lowest common denominator almost exclusively.

Our man was asked this evening, what about his first one hundred days suprised, enchanted, humbled and troubled him the most, on live television. He answered adroitly, compassionately and honestly. This is the kind of question that would never even be allowed under the Dumbya regime. Were such a question somehow allowed to slip through, trust that Dumbya would have stuttered, paused and visited abuse of malapropisms to hitherto unseen depths of national embarrassment.

He’s a primate at best.

His eyes are too close together.

I couldn’t help but remember Clinton. He would appear on television in the middle of our dark years and answer any question by framing it’s context, explaining the variables and then recommending a course of action so expertly that you knew he’d wrestled with it until he understood the issue thoroughly and had arrived at a solution that he grasped completely and had no reservations about endorsing. The man was flawed but he was whip fucking smart and he gave a shit. He was a lighthouse in the dense fog of Dick-in-Bush.

First 100 days? I’ll give Obama a B+. Not bad for his first semester midterm. About what I expected and I’m pleased. My biggest concern is the financial swamp thing. I can’t really pretend to understand it. It goes without saying I don’t have an opinion worth sharing. I will tell you that the more I learn and understand, the more I wonder about moving somewhere I can have a garden.

Those fuckers left us hanging. Cheney won’t shut the fuck up and neither will Rove but have ya heard from Dumbya? The barn door was banging at the start of the storm when those three bastards ran out. Man they were bad news.

Say our man gets us to 911 of this year without a domestic terror attack of similiar scale. Will you then shut the fuck up about your keeping America safe audacity? Allow me to date myself by saying you people sound like a broken goddamn record.

Some advice. The sky has been falling for some time now. You just looked up. You just noticed it could really crack you hard. By the way, if you did just notice all this, part of this is your fault. So anyway, settle down.

What we really need is for you mouthbreathers to be calm. Don’t stir shit up. Try not to shoot fellow humans. Stop turning out like zombies for corporate lobby funded tax protests when you’ll all do better under what you’re marching against. Have some dignity. Pull your pants up.

More of my advice to you is to wade back in. Forego ideology and sincerely look at what progressives are attempting to do here. Find fault with the policy or find flaw with the process. Stop dropping the ‘socialist’ bomb and find a way to participate. Start rolling up your sleeves and stop crapping your pants.

Hannity and Limbaugh are the clown princes of the conservative stagnation and they will be your demise.

Drinks for my friends.

Cable is out. Chose not to pay the bill.

What people fail to understand is that Obama cannot afford to even address this issue of guns, to do so would ignite an already hot pile of insanity. These fucks, these crazy zealots, are lying in a puddle of their own excrement waiting for Obama to utter the words “gun control”. It will be an excuse for them to snap.

Patient but dumb.

Wouldn’t be prudent.

Most of you are just stupid enough to not understand how dangerous you are. It really bugs me.

Sorry boys and girls. The issue of guns will see no play this season. Understandably so methinks.

Unless assholes keep shooting shit up. Give it a rest already. I refuse to to fear this.

I got comic books on the brain. I bought a thousand bags & boards and five long boxes the other day. For the last three days I’ve bagged and boarded. Surreal. Amazing nostalgia. I adore comic book art. My collection is perfectly preserved. Exactly the way I left it. Beat up books are still beat up books, but pristine ones are still pristine.

Crazy. I touch each one as I place it on a board and manuever it into a bag and I remember reading them, almost everyone of them stirs something in my head and there’s over a thousand. Damn. They were gathered with care as well as abandon. As I rember them, I understand they have informed me as much as they are going to.

They are everywhere in my apartment now. Leaning or stacked, grouped by title. Huge swaths of Ironman, Spiderman, The X-Men, Daredevil, Avengers, Fantastic Four……The Flash, Superman, Batman, The Justice League……….Star Trek, Adam 12, Richey Rich, Zoro and Archie……Boris Karloff, Ripley’s……….Swamp Thing, an assload of MAD magazines, Heavy Metal, Conan and Epic.

An amazing historical capsule. Late sixties to early eighties. The breadth and diversity of my collection affords me permission to brag and be proud because I was a child when I assembled it.

My folks are heros for packing them, storing them and delivering them to me when I bought my first house.

The way they smell and the way they look and my absolute romance with them when I barely had opinion about anything. I began to obsess when I was twelve. I was twelve.

John Byrne, Jim Starlin, Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor Smith, Frank Miller…… Jack Kirby

Life is so sticky I feel the need for a bath about every hour. Sign of the gypsy queen. As thick as an old Supertramp record.

Everything I ever did you could hear the fucking kick drum.

The kick drum is lichen on a boulder.

When I was a kid there was lichen on boulders.

Primus grooves way hard.

My sincere advice to you is to Sail the Seas of Cheese and clean your house.

A little Tommy The Cat will cure whatever ails ya. I’m also a spokesperson for Alka Seltzer and fragrant pinecones.

Anyway, today Michele “We’re Running Out Of Rich People In This Country” Bachman (R-MN), by far the biggest assclown in the US House of Represenatives, gracelessly attempted to infer that flu epidemics somehow only occur under Democratic administrations. See if you can follow her logic:

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter…….” -Huffington Post

The Human Shitsmear had this to say:
“[E]verywhere Obama is spreading Obamaism, there is a deadly disease taking place, either in the TARP community or in the newspaper business … Obama goes to Mexico — they have an earthquake. Obama goes to Mexico — get pig flu,” -wowwowwow.com

Awesome. Do the math. You’ve got an evil humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winning philanthropist, and our current President, a nefarious community organizer and two, count ’em two, outbreaks of flu related to pigs of all things. Oh, and, they’re both Democrats. I bet they used the same lab. It’s probably deep in the basement of some Red Cross shelter or maybe a Salvation Army thrift store.

Sheezus! That’s iron clad. A slam goddamn dunk! But wait. The original swine flu epidemic occured under Ford. I feel dizzy. I think I smell yellowcake uranium……my vision is clouded by pockmarks not unlike those littering the visage of George Tenet.

In late March 1976, President Gerald Ford emerged from a meeting with 27 health advisers with an ambitious request: “I am asking every man, woman and child in the country to get an inoculation this fall.” -dumpbachman.blogspot.com

It’s fair to say I love to loathe this woman. I adore her stupidity. I covet her retardation.

Why, just the other day she deigned to lecture Congress about Carbon Dioxide. She posited over and over that it’s a natural gas. She’s right about that but then so is the methane in my flatulence. What’s the point? She’s sure it can’t be bad for us because it’s from “nature”. She goes on to inform the esteemed deliberative body that there exists not a singly study proving this natural gas is harmful to humans. Five syllables Michele, asphyxiation.

She gives truth to the concept of failing upward:

In response to a question from host Chris Matthews, Bachmann said on the Oct. 17 show that she was “very concerned” that Obama “may have anti-American views” and that the news media should investigate the views of members of Congress. -Miami Herald

Hello McCarthy.

Then there’s Arlen Spector. Booya! I’ve always thought this guy to be inconsistent but obviously of his own mind. He confuses though not predictably. Maybe he actually has his own mind. Just can’t tell with these damn white collar tweekers.

Franken will get to sit and Spector makes sixty. A nice number. The Democrats, should they choose to act in concert, will have a majority immune to fillibuster. It’s something they rarely do regardless of whether they’re formidable or not. I’m not about a lockstep majority in the Senate but we need to be able to swing haymakers and roundhouses. Change won’t take unless we land some.

Homogeny is not a given among the jackasses.

Whatever. What these two stories point to is serious structural damage in the GOP. Take Mehgan McCain’s remarks:
“Karl Rove follows me on Twitter. That’s creepy, and ” Later, she wrote: “I can’t shake the fact that Karl Rove is following me-it can be creepy. So watch out.” and “Call it savvy marketing, but I find it disingenuous,” she said. “And it’s a bit weird to think his people-not even Rove himself-are following me.” -CNN

This thing will heat up. It will be a battle of the titans. Not so much between Democrats and Republicans but a contest between progressive and ignorant. Between smart and stupid if you will. Pro peace, pro choice, not fooled by creationism or abstinence, unafraid of gay people, tired of organized religion in our face rational humanists, versus desperately afraid war pigs that believe shit like Democrats are responsible for the fucking flu.

Guess who wins.

Drinks for my friends.

I felt compelled to share this. It really is remarkable.

Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for John McCain while speaking to Log Cabin Republicans today, had this to say:

“There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage,” Schmidt, who was McCain’s campaign manager, told the group. “I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one’s liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. In a marriage, two people are completely responsible to and for each other.”

He added: “If you are not willing to accept and faithfully discharge those responsibilities, you shouldn’t enter the state of matrimony, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you’re straight or gay. It is a responsibility like no other, which can and should make marriage an association between two human beings more fulfilling than any other.” -CNN

Gorgeous. Eloquent, fluent and beautiful.

This kind of thinking and honesty is precisely what the Republican party owes America.

Yep, I said “owes”. Given the damage the Republicans have wrought the last three decades and particularly the last eight years, well, I feel they are beholdin’ to the rest of us.

Mr. Schmidt also had this to say:

“If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party,” Schmidt declared. “And in a free country, a political party cannot be viable in the long term if it is seen as a sectarian party.” -Huffington Post

Hallelujah! Pun intended. Wow. This is one man who understands what the future of the GOP will look like if it has one. I am impressed. Social issues such as these, as opposed to those of policy, are our biggest divide. To table such concerns, might could be an envelope for allowing vibrant philosophical debate to once again rise to the watermark of legitimate. Without such violent and vigorous clouding and muddying of what is actually an important and vital set of issues, this country stands a real chance of moving forward and so then, does the rest of the planet.

America was never intended to be the world’s police anymore than it was to be the world’s moral arbiter. We’ve become mired and lost in that as a nation and have as consequence, lost our way on the world stage. It is exactly because of this that we are estimated by every other State to be anything from silly to hypocritical to lethally wreckless.

Guilty as charged. We are all of those things.

Far too long we’ve neglected tragedies that demand our attention and devoted it instead to situations that were barely our business. A lumbering giant, recklessly careening, who’s size and stature shrinks by the day.

A modicum of humility is therefore in order.

But wait, there’s more:

Hugo Chavez said to Obama today, “Eight years ago I greeted President Bush with this same hand. I’d like to be your friend.” -Fox News

Let the record show it was an interlocking opposable thumb shake. A ‘bro’ shake. I like this guy Chavez, he called Dumbya “The Devil”.

On Cuba, Obama said:

“decades of mistrust” must be overcome, but noted that he has already loosened restrictions that limited Americans from traveling to visit relatives in Cuba and from sending money to them.

Obama lifted all restrictions Monday on the ability of individuals to visit relatives in Cuba, as well as to send them remittances.

That may be just the beginning. “I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues — from human rights, free speech and democratic reform to drugs, migration and economic issues,” -CNN

This comes a day after Cuban President Raul Castro said he was prepared to discuss “everything, everything, everything” with the United States. -CNN

The neocons will no doubt bristle over this. I anticipate high comedy for my witness. Yet, this is the change we voted for. The one we Americans turned out in overwhelming numbers to endorse. We are beginning to understand that saber rattling is far from our only option. It’s stupid to assume that’s all we have to offer countries in our own hemisphere who pose no military threat to us whatsoever.

We could probably kick Venezuela’s and Cuba’s ass on any Thursday afternoon. That’s not the point.

The same way our opinions about our own citizens must change, so does our thinking about the rest of the world. Our bigotry and bias has led us to this precarious point in human history. America has within her reach, the potential to allow itself and the rest of humanity to progress beyond and above where we find ourselves now. If we can only learn to accept and tolerate a little more ourselves and then, the rest of the world.

See, I’m not here to endorse torture, terror, fascism, dictatorship or anything resembling. I’m trying to tell you that we’ve been going at this assbackwards. Archaic and absurd.

All good change comes from inside. We are all people, humans. We all bleed and suffer. It’s time to abandon the notion that to prevail, other humans must suffer and bleed.

Mr. Steve Schmidt has said and done a wonderful, cognizant thing.

Drinks for my friends.

A trifecta of issues have been chapping my ass of late.

ITEM ONE:

Is there a more appropriate term for the completely contrived “protest” by whackjob flat-earthers other than “teabagging”?

Methinks not.

“the insertion of one man’s sack into another person’s mouth. Used a practical joke or prank, when performed on someone who is asleep, or as a sexual act.” -UrbanDictionary.com

I love this shit.

In effect, they will protest the single largest tax cut on America’s middle class, working poor and impoverished in our history. They will actively lament an increased tax burden on America’s wealthiest five percent that still ends up being less than what their sacred small government charlatan Ronald Reagan imposed.

These people are idiots.

Not only does it pervert and vulgarize the original defiance by colonists who orchestrated and participated in The Boston Tea Party, it’s a knock kneed, anti-intellctual parody of genuine patriotism. I’m here to tell you these fuckers heads are as round as the average potato. Think pineal.

The lockstep conservatives have chosen the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. They are retarded and unable to wipe their own snot bubbling noses and drool weeping, recessed chins. Pathetic.

No one but Fox News seems to notice. Can you say ‘marginalized’?

ITEM TWO:

Looks like the GOP is resolute in blocking the release of actual legal opinions produced by the Bush administration’s OLC (Office of Legal Council), regarding torture. There are in fact three such memos issued by the OLC, one of the highest legal offices in the land, permitting and allowing for, under the auspices of American legal authority, the sadistic treatment and physical violence upon captured individuals in violation of Geneva Conventions as well as human decency and longstanding American ideals related to the treatment of prisoners of war.

Actual legal opinions proffered by the Bush administration that are apparently so profound and disgusting that Senate Republicans are willing to engage in blackmail to prevent their being released to media and the public.

“A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward…” -Scott Horton, The Daily Beast

Fuck me running.

They all stood right in front of us and swore up and down that America does not torture. That we don’t kidnap and “render” to countries that attach electrodes to the genitals or nearly drown “detainees”. That we don’t beat and humiliate or emasculate. They are fucking liars. And now, sitting members of the Senate, the world’s ‘greatest deliberative body’, openly engage in foul and despicable brinksmanship designed to keep the official sanctioning of that truth from our citizens.

Fuck you John Yoo. Fuck you Alberto Gonzales. Fuck you Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. There is nothing and no things any of you could possibly do to right this wrong you all so willingly and zealously fomented and encouraged. The stain you leave will be visible for centuries and the damage you have wrought will be your legacy long after worms have consumed your rotting corpses and shat them into soil.

ITEM THREE:

Al Franken.

Hey Norm Coleman. Shut the fuck up and start looking for a job. Al Franken didn’t clean your clock but he won. Have some dignity or maybe some vanity. Sheezus. You lost. Everyone agrees. Have you no shame? A whip smart comedian bested you in a public contest. Ten out of ten dentists agree, time to look for a job. Maybe you could be Michele Bachmann’s pool boy.

This shit is ridiculous.

Drinks for my friends.

A colleague and I had a mildly intense but friendly conversation about politics the other day. I’m hoping I disabused him of few ridiculous notions but I doubt it. Maybe I gave him pause on one or two matters. I may never know. Interesting guy. Very bright, very calm and very friendly.

I really like my little department at the bank. It doesn’t suck that Skippy’s gone.

So, same colleague tells me he agrees with Warren Buffet’s remarks this morning. I wasn’t aware of what he said but told my friend that I thought Buffet was a bright guy. He characterized what he’d heard as Buffet saying that the Obama administration should limit it’s focus to issues economic and stop using the power of majority to ram a liberal agenda down the throat of congress.

I thought to myself, less than fifty days in, and we’re being accused of precisely what Republicans have been audaciously guilty of for the last eight years, plus twenty.

Oh the humanity.

Here’s what Buffet said:
Warren Buffett, an Obama supporter, famously described the economic crisis as an “Economic Pearl Harbor” — but now says Congress, especially the GOP, has failed to adopt an appropriately unified “Dec. 8th” mentality. -politico.com

“The minority really do[es] have an obligation to support things that are clearly designed to fight the war in a big way,” Buffett said. “I think the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and realize you need one leader… I think the [Democrats] should not use it … to roll the Republicans.” -firstread.msnbc.msn.com

I asked my friend if he thought Obama’s executive order today lifting the ban on federal funding for stem cell research was an example of the gratuitous Liberal agenda. His answer was, “absolutely”.

In other news:
The daughter of Republican Sen. John McCain called President Obama “the hippest politician around” – then complained that being a member of the GOP is “about as edgy as Donny Osmond” and blasted conservative commentator Ann Coulter as “offensive” and “radical.” -nypost.com

This sort of betrayal pleases me to no end. I wonder how long before she’s forced to walk it back a little. It won’t be long before daddy starts to forget.

Doesn’t Meghan McCain have a big rack?

Also, the practise of organized religion is on the decline. Some 86% indentified themselves as religious in 1990. These days it’s around 75%. Salient point here is that’s a long way to go. We need it closer to fifty-fifty. I’d feel better.

Last but not least is Our Man’s signing of the executive order today. Not only is it an economic opportunity and therefore part of a much bigger picture, but it’s intended to help “restore scientific integrity in government decision making.” -whitehouse.gov

“Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.” – President Barack Obama -whitehouse.gov

See what I’m saying?

Drinks for my friends.

Just recently Our Man announced another welcome reversal from Dumbya era policies.

Along with closing Gitmo, ending torture, bringing troops home, allowing tax cuts for the wealthy to expire and no more raids on medicinal marijuana, Obama announced a lifting of the ridicilous restrictions on government funded stem cell research.

Hoorah and in your face bitches.

I’m looking at change. I’m looking right at it.

So today, Sunday, this tool who’s been on my radar for some time, Eric Cantor (Republican Whip) had this to say, “Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let’s focus on what needs to be done,” – CNN

Hey Cantor, how is this a distraction? Why are the economy and potentially life saving scientific techniques or methodologies mutually exclusive? What kind of simpleton are you? One who’s so clueless as to imagine himself to be fighting for a baseless retarded principle? Or, so cynical as to pander impudently to right wing Christian whackjobs by fomenting ignorance and fear?

No secret that Cantor has been one of the most shrill Republican voices pissing on any and all of Obama’s economic proposals and policies.

White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes: “Advances with regard to science and technology help advance our overall national goals around economic growth and job creation,” she said, adding, “I think anytime you make an effort to try and separate these pieces of the puzzle, you’re missing the entire picture.” – CNN

Well said.

Cantor also said: “Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs,” Cantor said. “We don’t want that. That shouldn’t be done. That’s wrong.” – CNN

Fear, ignorance and proof that Cantor either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or at the very least, doesn’t think Americans do.

Government has very little judicature to be palavering over the morals or ethics of scientic research, save maybe for defense and national security. See how I just bitch slapped you with the irony? Did you like it? Call me daddy.

We would do well to remember that history provides plethora example of scientists and philosophers jailed or executed for telling what they knew to be the truth. We are not the center of the universe. We are not the center of the solar system, the sun is. The earth is round. Germs are really small.

I will paraphrase the local NBC affiliate coverage by telling you that opponents of stem cell research fear the destruction of human embryos and that the government will now be responsible for loss of human life.

Here are the motherfucking facts. We’re not even talking about embryos, we’re talking about blastocysts. I microscopic ball of about thirty cells, four or five days fertilized by in vitro fertilization only. In vitro fertilization is about numbers. The more eggs sperm conquer the better the odds. What I’m trying to tell you is that the blastocysts that don’t get used are discarded. Thrown away. The ones we want for research, end up in some strange receptacle with a scary symbol on it.

The entire controversy is over what has been biological waste until tomorrow.

Eric Cantor, fucktard that he is would have you believe that he’s not the one doing the distracting. Methinks he doth protest too much. Me also thinks he’s a jackbooted, lockstep Republican who’s just stupid enough to not see his base eroding.

Why behave in public if you’re living on a playground? – DLR

Two names: Bill Frist and Rick Santorum. Mumbling stumbling fucks, welcome to the clubhouse Mr. Cantor, sodas are free.

Drinks for my friends.

The Republicans have been putting on quite a show lately.

It is with limp wristed Liberal delight that I watch a cavalcade of blowhard conservatives stumble over their own dicks. I should point out I’m wearing my frilly liberal blouse to give you a better visual. No boots but a handsome silver tiara.

RNC Chair Michael Steele used the words “Ugly” and “Incendiary” when discussing Rush Limbaugh on D.L. Hughley this weekend.

Did I mention my artfully encrusted codpiece?

It speaks volumes about the current state of the Republican party that Michael Steele says what he thinks in a candid moment about Rush Limbaugh and then back peddles, getting tangled up in his own phallus while attempting a mea culpa for the pleasure of the notorious Human Shitsmear.

Weak and stupid.

Some suggest we only launch against the Shitsmear for the sake of ‘strawman’ tactics. Villify Rush and prove our priorities have nothing to do with substance and policy. Nope. Ring the buzzer. We are here to expose him for being full of shit. He’s a loose lipped caricature stomping the stage to regurgitate talking points and rigid ideology back to the great unwashed like a carnival barker.

He is here for the stupid. The base.

Rush Limbaugh wields more influence and therefore more power than any single other Republican. Think about that. He’s not a journalist, he’s not a pundit, he’s not a politician, he’s an entertainer. When a disingenuous, hypocritical bloviating drug addict speaks…………..wandering clueless Republicans listen.

Then there’s the notion that Republicans can contemporize conservative ideals by by applying them to “….urban-suburban hip hop settings.” -Michael Steele/The Colbert report. The show went on to include Michelle Bachman (R. MN.) telling Steele that “You be the man”.

Sheezus. This is fucking pathetic.

After nothing less than renting our once proud nation asunder, the Republicans are desperate to remake themselves in any way, by any means possible and put as many miles as possible between them and their wreckless sins of avarice and division.

News flash. The likes of Limbaugh and Coulter cannot possibly lead you people out of these woods. They are your problem, no chance of them playing part in a recipe for the magic poultice. Their baseless vitriol, the fundamental components of which are hate and fear, will only further poison your message and perception. We are encouraged by them to view all Republicans like racists still clinging to the mantra of seperate but equal.

The Human Shitsmear obviates that you just don’t get it.

You people are idiots.

Drinks for my friends.

I go back and forth with this guy once in awhile. Sometimes I have to go looking for something to make me mad. Trust me it’s rare.

This is what set me off:

“Never once have I felt it necessary to impugn the character or the intelligence of the writer of a blog I visited. But then I’m not a liberal moron. . .
I also don’t understand the compulsion felt by so many of the liberal persuasion to post such obscenities as to embarass a drunken sailor on shore leave. But, as I said, I’m not a liberal moron.” -Dewitt

He’s referring to me.

Here’s my response:

Here’s where your problem starts: “liberal moron”. Many of us think you’re a “conservative moron”. For what it’s worth, it’s more insulting than something like ‘dipshit fucktards’.

You think that you’re somehow not subject to, or deserving of criticism because you shy away from expletives and therefore enjoy some immunity from being called rude or ignorant or hateful.

The truth is, I’ve read some of the most shallow, hateful vitriol and blatant generalizations on your blogs as I’ve read anywhere.

See, I think you’re a narrow minded old man that is both afraid and confused. Having said that, I don’t imagine you to be a bad guy, just tragically misguided.

Hot bigot love.

In his next blog he says:

“No matter how noble Obama’s intentions, the world will not respond nobly, and we shall learn once again that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Bad things will happen in the next four years.

Obama’s “Peace At Any Cost” foreign policy will be a monumental disaster. Folks in the middle east are already dancing in the streets. Al Qaeda has not struck US territory for seven years. That will change. Soon.” -Dewitt

Translation: We’re on a highway to hell and an attack is imminent because we elected Obama.

By the way, this will be different from the first year of the last two administrations how? Sooner or later we’re gonna get hit again, with any luck, this time our own government won’t be complicit.

Then, douchebaggery ensued:

“My fellow Americans, on November 4, 2008 a sizable majority of you went into voting booths across America and elected Barack Hussein Obama; a black man who had made a career of race hustling, who sat in a racist church for twenty years, who actively worked with domestic terrorists committed to the destruction of the USA, and whose election campaign was to a large degree based on White Guilt and accusations of racial intolerance.” -Dewitt

Translation: You elected a slick talking racist nigger, who seeks to destroy America and he got past you by playing to your enormous guilt for being white, priveledged and superior.

I gotta tell ya Dewitt. That’s fucking disgusting. One hundred eighty goddamn degrees out of phase. You suck.

But wait, there’s more:

“The final bastion, that last vestige of institutionalized racism in the USA, is the black community itself. (The very existence of a “black community” proves it’s racist nature.) Isn’t it time to outlaw the Congressional Black Caucus, the United Negro College Fund, and the NAACP? How long shall we tolerate these obviously racist constructs with their blatant prejudice against white people?” -Dewitt

Is it just me, or does He just not get it? Is it just me, or is Dewitt an asshole?

He responds:

“You just can’t speak without profanity and insults can you? You really do need therapy!” -Dewitt

No shit, that’s what he said.

There’s all kinds of them out there.

Talk to me.

Drinks for my friends.