Archive for the ‘Iraq’ Category

So, the Democrats run a lame candidate for Senate in Massachusetts while turning their backs on a nest of Republican snakes.  So, the Republicans simply cater to the lowest common denominator.

Meet Scott Brown.

He posed.  Hairspray on an empty corn cob.  He’s a goddamn lead singer.  How new are you?  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.

Maybe, just maybe if he wasn’t up against cardboard.

I should be angry.  I suppose I am.  Should I be angry at Republicans for being such ignorant, obstructionist asstards, or Democrats for being such paper tiger pantywaste losers?  I feel like being confused, but I’m not.  What I am is disgusted.

“The Republicans are playing chess and the Dems are in the nurses office because, once again, they glued their balls to their thighs.” – Jon Stewart.

Teddy Kennedy held this office for forty seven years.  The lion of the Senate.  I admired Ted Kennedy.  Comity no longer exists anywhere in the Senate.  It went from solid to gas.  The way of the Dodo.  What we have here, is piss all over his grave, equal parts Democrat and Republican.  It will freeze and eventually evaporate come spring.  It will still stink for summers to come.  Them with more mild sensibilities and weaker constitutions will wonder if the reek is merely rotting vegetation.  The dying foliage of deciduous urban landscaping.   Only in the fall.

You and I, along with the forest rodents will understand it to be the odor of personal weakness and the strength of filthy lucre.

And the shit of urban rodents.

No equitable, compassionate health care for the richest nation ever.  Health care is a right, not a privilege.  Yet this crap persists to blow in our faces.  Tens of thousands die here every year because of greed and cowardice and/or no health care at all.  Then there’s them that go broke.  Hundreds of thousands dead in Haiti, not because of an earthquake, but because of decades of poverty and neglect.  Wait til you hear how complicit we’ve been.  Hundreds and thousands die every month in the various wars we conduct.  Plenty of funding there, but no conscience.

We are getting sucker punched every morning out of bed.

I need to remind you that by shaving one tenth off our budget for the military industrial complex, we’d all have health care and groceries forever. Higher education would be free.  No potholes.  No collapsing bridges.  We’d all have enough for the fruit of the month club.  We’d be excited about the pears.

Pete Townshend once said something about ending The Who before they became parodies of themselves.  He was anxious for them not to become a joke.  It’s too late for America.

Since when did a party have to have 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate to scratch their own balls?  How is it that after barely a year under a new administration, a twisted referendum is allowed to hold sway in state like Massachusetts?

This is profoundly and spectacularly ridiculous.

I’m not sure I give a mad fuck.  The only option now is to ram the diseased phallus that is the Senate health care bill down the blistered, milky, puss oozing upper gastrointestinal tract of the house.  It’s a shitty bill.  A mandate to buy but no mechanism for controlling cost or avarice.  A non starter for me.

I’m having a hell of a time giving a shit.  Whatever happened to hope and change?  Does anyone remember laughter?

I am disgusted.  I’m romancing apathy.  Sure, there’s been progress, but on such an infinitesimally incremental level that I’m struggling with what appears to be a wish sandwich.

“Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you, hee hee hee, wish you had some meat.”  -The Chips 1956

This really is stupid.

You give me twenty, maybe twenty five bucks, I’ll make you the best salad you’ve ever had.  I have skills.

Drinks for my friends.

I rocked at Jeopardy tonight.  Even nailed the final Jeopardy question.  Rock of Gibraltar.

Shall we do a little politics?

First up, the alleged war between FOX and the White House.  Here’s my take:  FOX lies egregiously and irresponsibly.  Consistently.  They are shameless propagandists.    Therefore, they lose.  This President or any other has every right to neglect them, ignore them or even cast the occasional aspersion their way.  FOX is full of shit and any thinking, attentive American knows it.  It’s Obama’s prerogative.  It’s just that simple.  I kinda like that he’s dismissing them while saying he’s not losing any sleep over it.

Um, looks like the public option is alive once again.  Harry Reid says as much.  He told us yesterday he has the votes.  Turns out he probably doesn’t.  Olympia Snowe is blanching, or posturing as though she will, as I can’t imagine her blanching any more.  That bitch is pale.  Translucent.  Then there’s Lieberman.  Benedict Fliptop.  The little droopy eyed cartoon jowled prick announced he’d get behind a Republican filibuster on the public option.  You know he’s a former Democrat, now an Independent, allowed to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs by virtue of tacit agreement between he and Mr. Reid that he would play ball on domestic policy.  Just so happens he’s the junior Senator from Connecticut, the finest and most luxurious mall in the country for health insurance corporations.  He’s taken over a million bucks in the last five years from the medical plutocracy.

Without even a conversation, not so much as a memo, Benedict Fliptop should be stripped of his chairmanship and barred from even caucusing with the Democrats.  This should happen yesterday.  He should be made to eat peanut butter and jelly on the steps or dine with his stinky Republican abominogs.  If possible, he should be ejected from his DC residence, have his single payer health care revoked and be issued a shopping cart, a hoodie and fingerless gloves, maybe a few cans of Sterno.  This fucker needs to understand that it’s politicians like him what cause unrest.  His own goddamn state favors a public option by some 68%.  What an asshole.

Let the asshat obstructionists filibuster if the Democrats can’t get their house in order enough to vote for cloture.  Force their hand and make them embarrass themselves and their party on C-Span.  Mr. Reid, you boxed.  You’re tough.  I know because you signed and inscribed your book for me at the respectful behest of my mother.  Bring in the cots, order pizza and throw Senate decorum out the goddamn window, at the same time throw tomatoes and rotten fruit.  Roll up your sleeves Harry, get a nurse for the elderly members.  Make the Republicans actually filibuster.  This is one one of the most important issues of our time.  Popcorn and porn for the junior members and Geritol, sponge baths and plasma for the senior ones.  Do I need to remind you that what happens here is not at your convenience but quite possibly at our abrupt financial inconvenience and physical well being?

I joke but I’m serious.  If it comes down to it and the Republicans aren’t forced onto the floor for days and weeks to read from their favorite children’s books, we will be justifiably far beyond angry.  Shame them.  Make them pay for attempting to prevent what every citizen of the richest country in history deserves.  For five fucking percent of our defense budget this would be a done deal.  Get this done.  How long did you want to be Senate majority leader anyway?  This is a cruel joke.  The debate is for and by the stupid.

If we can pay for these ridiculous wars we can pay for the health and welfare of our people and that’s right out of my mothers mouth.  The very first campaign I ever worked in was for you as Lt. Governor, I think I was seven and you were a “Goldust Twin” along with Dick Bryan.  You simply must do everything you can and give this everything you have, or I will campaign against you next year.

Let’s talk about the war.  You know, that one in Afghanistan where more of our men and women have been killed this year than any of the other seven?  The one Darth Cheney has the prunes to accuse Obama of “dithering” over.  The one he and Dumbya dithered over for seven years and ultimately bequeathed this mess of way too much technicolor that mother Cheney made for us?  Darth Cheney has my vote for most evil, most ineffective, most dishonest and most destructive President never elected in the 21st century.  The epoch is young but we should pray he prevails.

My money is on him and I can only hope it’s how history judges him and his little dog too.

I have to tell you I don’t envy our President.  He inherited a shitstorm of clusterfucks.  The electorate is flirting with disappointment.  The village folk grow restless.  The goddamn unscrupulous Republicans are pouncing on anything that moves even if it’s in the throes of death.  They’re stockpiling pitchforks and fagots (no, like torches).  I admit my own handful of discouragements.

We would do well to remember however, that a mess this size took eight long years to manufacture and the public was complicit for at least five or six.  Most of you have just woken up and are still rubbing the shit dust from your eyes.  We may not be all about a rose garden economically but the entire worldwide system is no longer staring into the mouth of the dragon and withering from it’s breath.  Jobs is what we need but jobs is always the last to appear.  It’s dicey yet, but we are closer to some modicum of meaningful healthcare reform than we have ever, ever been in an effort nearly a century old.  Troops are coming out of Iraq and he’s doing his damnedest to figure out Afghanistan.  There is legitimate effort in Gitmo and I’m not sure we’re done torturing or wiretapping but I know we’re up to far less of it these days.  He’s reaffirmed his promises to the the Gay, Lesbian and Transgender community and I believe he will follow through.

You can’t always govern with the President you’d want, you have to govern with the President you have.  I for one am still absolutely confident we picked the very best man.  There is not a doubt in my mind.

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.

Birthers.

For those of who haven’t heard this nomenclature of dolts, it refers to a small but vociferous group of nutbags who insist, despite all legitimate evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama is not an American citizen by virtue of not having been born in the United States.  Gotta give to them.  Sounds big.

Eh.  Gimme a break.  Like McCain Palin or Hillrod wouldn’t have beat this like a baby seal.

I’ve been aware of them for nearly a year and rightly assumed they were a brand of conspiracy theorists who’s inevitability was matched by  inconsequence.  Now, regrettably, it seems the media has afforded them some attention.  Regrettable for a handful of reasons, the most important could be the silly but vulgar stain the movement visits on an already gore festooned Republican party.

Swinging for the fences.

So there’s a bill in the house, authored by a Republican and sponsored by ten other Republicans seeking to mandate Presidential candidates prove citizenship before being inaugurated.  Redundant methinks.  This bill will end up in someone’s ass long before it sees the floor.

It is raw, desperate and willfully ignorant racism.  Stupid, unfounded, crazy eyed hate.

“The conservative talk show host Michael Medved recently referred to the movement’s leaders as “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” who are “the worst enemy of the conservative movement.”  “It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company,” he mourned.” -Politico

Interesting that journeyman nutbags have issue with these particular nutbags.

On the other hand, world class dipshit Alan Keyes called it, “the greatest crisis this nation has ever seen” and warned of “chaos, confusion and civil war.” -Politico

Sheezus.

What concerns me here, and what may be the salient reason this whole thing is so unfortunate, is the insidious and desperate rage it lays bare.  I’m compelled to draw some frightening but obvious parallels.  I’m neither predicting nor endorsing what I’m about to say so excuse my caveat.  It’s just that these kinds of shrill and intellectually bereft movements provide fertile ground for the gun loving, God fearing wing nut, who sooner or later opts to take matters into his own hands.  These people are around whether we like it or not.  Often the best we can do is not stir them up.

By the way, if there was no religion and they couldn’t be addicted to God,  maybe these people would come to worship the clarinet.  In a few thousand years, the oboe.  Eventually the saxophone.  Sounds nice doesn’t it?

Guns don’t kill people, people do.

Unless there’s an accident.

Give them a really dumb reason and they morph from plain nuts to domestic terrorist in a week or two of  24 hour news cycles.  Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P which stands for personality disorder at the very least.  Already angry and just waiting for a reason.  Probably off the meds because of no supervision or no money.

Tick.  Tick.  Tick.

I’m watching Liz Cheney and The Ragin Cajun, James Carville, go at it on Larry King.  Tonight’s topic comes up and I’ll bet Liz is about to stick her foot in her mouth.  Let’s watch!  She’s all supercilious as she says ‘one of the reasons people are so concerned, is they are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, a President who’s so reluctant to defend us overseas……….fundamentally uncomfortable with a President who seems to be afraid to defend America.’  -Larry King Live

What the fuck?  Are you kidding me?  Instead of calling it what it is, retarded and paranoid, she chooses to offer rationale.  A rationale of fear for our national security.  Pathetic.  The GOP insists on puking down it’s frilly conservative blouse.  Cut to the sins of the father.

Please let this ridiculously stupid cunt run for office.  Please.  She could honor tradition and be Palin’s running mate.  Oh my stars the grandiose buffoonery.  Palin McCain.  I’m so on board.

Given that I’m a bleeding heart, progressive goddamn liberal, I have real reservations about our role in Afghanistan.  The escalation and troop infusions.  Military might can’t ever be long term infrastructure and anchor for a foreign people’s societal and political constructs in their own land.  We are perfectly capable of kicking their asses but what then?  Iraq again with darker facets of Vietnam.

Afghanistan is a far bigger and more lethal power vacuum than was Iraq.  Iraq was stable.  This, the part of the equation Dumbya’s sock puppets ignored.  This, the part of this equation no one is really talking about now.  In fact, no one seems to be talking about that war very much at all.  You know we’re losing lives over there.  You know we’re mowing them down.

It is a movie far worse than you can imagine.  Just watching the movie would change you forever.

These “birthers” do us all a bad service for polluting the national dialog with their baseless and recklessly incendiary crap.  Swift Boaters still wearing paper masks of patriotism.  Traitors.  I wonder what would happen if we tried them.  Bet we’d figure out they’re breathtakingly despisable.

Drinks for my friends.

Robert McNamara shuffled off his mortal coil yesterday.  Ninety three.  Architect of America’s abject folly in Vietnam.  In his time, he was humankind’s most  notorious failure.  He confessed to understanding as early as 1965 that the war was unwinnable.  Without Mac, there’s a chance the world would never have suffered his contemporary, Donald Rumsfeld.

Almost 60,000 dead Americans and some two million dead Vietnamese.  For nothing.  Well north of 4,000 dead Americans and as many as one million dead Iraqis.  For nothing.  A zero sum game with the exception of the enrichment of our military industrial complex.  A serious hole when you look at things as diverse as money and reputation lost.

The 2003 documentary “The Fog of War”, although fascinating, falls limp as a mea culpa.  It serves as more of a rationale for a despondent and tortured man than anything resembling an explanation or apology.  I believe he suffered.  Most people would say it’s lucky to live for ninety three years.  I’ll bet Mac didn’t think so.  He was haunted.  Every day.  He deserved it.

As near as I can see, we’ve learned nothing.  America is still a swamp for this brand of reptile.  Soulless  technocrats in charge of carnage.  Captains Crunch.  Obsolete but we still breed them.  By the hundreds of thousands.  Mac was a far bit smarter than Rummy so he had a way higher body count.  Maybe they’re getting stupider.  Maybe.  But if that’s true, then so are we, because we just got fooled again.

I don’t believe in Heaven any more than I do in Hell.  But if there exists a destination for a soul this guilty, it is my hope he ends up there and that Donny boy Rumsfeld ends his days suffering and tortured just like Mac.

Fuck these guys.  They sucked.

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.

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.

Our man has delivered a budget. That word reads so simple. A budget. It’s more than that. A philosophy. He has huge balls. He’s not here to fuck around. It’s a lot of goddamn money. An unbelievable, unimaginable amount of money. Three and a half trillion at least. History will repeat itself like pi before you and I can realize a number like that.

Hoo ya!

“In keeping with my commitment to make our government more open and transparent, this budget is an honest accounting of where we are and where we intend to go,” Obama said at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House before the budget was officially released. He said previous budgets have “not told the whole truth” about spending and that “large sums have been left off the books,” including war costs that have been funded by separate emergency supplemental appropriations.

“And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home; it’s not how your government should run its budgets either,” Obama said. -truthout.org

It’s spooky ambitous and ideological even. It’s visionary. The symbolism of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is not lost on me. Long term thinking as opposed to thumb in the dyke stop gap chicanery. He’s made the very bold and cold shower honest move of including the cost of our wars in the official accounting of our government’s spending. The first time since we began to wage this unjust war. It begs the question of why it hasn’t been included so far. Did they think we didn’t know? Did they think we didn’t understand they were spending more money than you and I can make?

That all the while the rich were getting richer and we didn’t know?

“I have serious concerns with this budget, which demands hardworking American families and job creators turn over more of their hard-earned money to the government to pay for unprecedented spending increases,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement. -truthout.org

That is a lie. He is a Senator and he is lying. He sucks. His lament was for the wealthy. He presided over what will be the bulk of your debt for the last eight years. He’s an asshole. Google him, you can tell by looking at him. He was the kid you beat up for trying to tax Jello or maybe sell you gum by the stick.

These asshat Republicans have forced us to double down. They act like they left us a pile of chips. They left a pair of red panties on the green felt. Cotton granny drawers XXL.

Get out of the way while we play bold because it’s the only option you left us. Peniswhipdrinks. Go sit by the pool but you can’t put your drinks on your room.

We intend to use the rollback of tax cuts to the absurdly wealthy as our marker. Spreading the wealth around indeed. 80% of the world’s wealth in the hands of 1% of it’s people. Socialism my ass. Looks entirely equitable and ethical to me. Again, you haven’t left us much choice.

Here lies some proof in the moveable feast of the pudding. We spend ten times more than our closest competitor on guns, bombs, missiles and fighting men & women. America is responsible for forty percent of the entire global outlay of guns, bombs, missiles and humans. It’s ridiculous and obsolete. The single biggest component of that expense is humans. The world has changed. The ideology and geography of huge human armies is obsolete. Wars like this are no longer sustainable. If they prove to be viable at all, we will lose them. Good Morning Vietnam. A lesson we should have learned forty years ago.

“WASHINGTON (AFP) — President Barack Obama Thursday unveiled a 663.7 billion dollar defense budget, up a modest 1.5 percent on 2009, but projected a sharp decline in spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming years.”

Somehow under the new administration, it’s ok to photograph and reproduce images of coffins containing our dead service members. You may call the changes so far symbolic, I call them substantial.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. Kansas is no longer Kansas, despite how bad the people who live there want it to be. The world has changed and continues to do so. Pay attention. Nobody is in Kansas anymore.

We need to be as fierce in battle as we are gentle in friendship. I stole that but I don’t remember where.

Maybe next we’ll talk about education and health care.

Drinks for my friends.

We’re fucked.

In the past few months the market has lost forty seven percent of it’s value. Unemployment is a vertical dragrace. A precipitous ascent. These two items represent America’s testicles. The market and jobs is our nutsack. Balls meet vise.

There’s probably not a single business in this country that could weather a near fifty percent reduction in revenue and stay afloat. America, and the globe, are in huge trouble. We are in a free fall. I’m glad I have a place to go. There’s room for my stereo. Barely. Limited growing season, but that might change.

Bill Maher said that he always knew Dumbya had one giant fuck up left in him. Here it is on a platter. The mother of them all. Saved the worst for last. Where are the neocons on this anyway? Where the hell is Dumbya and Darth? Fucking clowns aren’t gonna do shit. They’ll wait it out and then take a walk.

A long time coming. Decades. Any fool with common sense understood our lifestyle wasn’t sustainable. The raw material we consume. The resources we exhaust and the pollution we spew.

I’m a little pissed my generation has to bear the burden. It matters not where the bodies are buried. If your at all curious, check your own backyard. Pervasive.

No one single action will solve this debacle. There is no magic bullet. We are in for a very long night.

Get ready, things are about to change.

Having said that, we need to tip the fuck out of Iraq and seriously slash defense spending. Pay the troops, take care of the vets, maintain infrastructure and walk away from everything else. Sounds drastic and it is, but once the DOW dropped below eight thousand and stayed there, the theoretical bottom disappeared.

This will take a decade at least.

Our Man is bequeathed a shitstorm of extraordinary magnitude. A cat five economic hurricane. I worry that he’ll spend his first term putting his fingers in holes as opposed to being able to move us forward. No matter what, the blood will make it to the stairs. Americans are impatient and stupid and I worry they’ll see it as an ineffective Presidency.

Bleak, bleak, bleak.

I’ve got ER on the plasma with the sound off and see that it’s pretty much the same. I learn US Attorney General Mukasey took a dive at the podium in front of the federalists. I see that gas prices are looking for bottom. This is not good news. Bear witness as the harbingers of doom testify.

It’s not just that we’ll be poorer. My ass is broke. I’ll find my own way out. I can deal with that. It’s the inevitable atrophy of society that gives me pause. Crime and corruption will enjoy a renaissance. We will be less safe from ourselves, never mind the mythical terrorists.

Get ready for an army of homeless. Abandoned vehicles. Fire. Food shortages. Fuel shortages.

See, I’m not looking to lower expectations, it’s just that the complexity and severity of what we all face is a long fast moving train with brakes that will take awhile. We might just aspire to counting ourselves lucky if we’re treading in the same water we are today four years from now. It may just look like a victory come 2012.

It’s bad.

Official brainspank prediction is that markets rebound enough tomorrow to prevent mass suicide this weekend. At least a few hundred points, probably four or five. Get ‘er up over eight.

See what I’m saying?

Drinks for my friends.

How do we do this?

Sure, it was a landslide. By popular vote Our Man won by nearly ten million. Seven points separating him from Doubtfire. Look at the map, more blue than I’ve ever seen. America bleeds red, but her map has rarely been more blue. Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia? 364 electoral votes to 163. A thumpin’.

A shit sandwich on a week old hot dog bun with colonies of green and blue spores. No mayo no mustard, no lube whatsoever. The cheese is hard and sweaty. Flies.

In place is the single most imperative mandate I’ve witnessed in my adult life. For change. For hope. America is loud and clear. We’ve been offered this sandwich says She. We say, fuck this shit.

Torture, rendition, spying on our own without a warrant, indefinite incarceration, election fraud, preemptive war and aggression with nothing but bullshit justification, raids on the public coffers, Habeas Corpus rendered null and void, same deal for Posse Comitatus. A Constitution in tatters. It really does go on and on.

Here’s the sobering part. The reckoning.

Almost fifty nine million Americans voted for McCain. That many citizens of this country giving at least a tacit nod of approval by proxy for all this fuckery. Among them are bigots, racists, people with shitloads of money but without soul or conscience. The ignorant and the evil.

The scared.

We are still badly broken. Prop 8 passed in California. Racism and bigotry alive and well in this land of opportunity. How soon we forget. As recently as 1967, marriage between black and white was against the law in sixteen states. For those who would posit that the the law is the law and now constitutional, that we should let it be, succumb and surrender, I say piss up a fucking rope. I say this, because it is wrong.

Bitch slap: In california it was mormons and the minorities turning out for Obama who pushed prop 8 over the goddamn seawall. Narrow and deep irony. It’s a civil rights issue. Shame on you. Mormons are polluted by stupidity and ingnorance. Blacks and Latinos should be ashamed. Bad form. Hypocritical.

America is still profoundly fucked up.

History shows us that almost every worthwhile struggle starts at the bottom of a very steep hill. This one, no different. It will be ugly. Hearts and lives rent asunder along the way.

We’re no longer at the bottom. I can’t say how far we’ve come, but we are about to find out. Fascinating times. The paradigm shifts. Lava begins to rush.

So, how do we do this? Martin Luther King bequeathed upon us the most valuable and sagacious of maxims; consistent, unswerving, intelligent and righteous resistance. Absent violence of any kind.

There’s a remote chance that by asking them the same question over and over, they will realize how stupid the answer is. Don’t forget to tell them that you are a fiscal conservative. Lots of liberals are. They like that shit, they think they believe in it.

Let’s talk about the ‘scared’ shall we? I’ll be brave and guess that’s the common denominator between a third and half of the the almost 59 million. We need to find these frightened folks and get them a better haircut. Shave them if necessary. Treat them nice. Feed them well. Be kind.

Who doesn’t like pancakes with peanut butter?

A complimentary delousing. Free tupperware and sporks. New socks.

There plenty of fights to be had. Most will be easy to pick. For a lot of us however, our job is to engage. Get involved. No need to be confrontational, talk about what you care about. Keep it on the front page.

Forgive me. I’m serious. Waste no time on the dogmatic idealogues. They’re too far gone. Falwell can tell them to eat the children. He could and they would. Ever look into an evangelical’s eyes?

Find those eyes frozen by the headlights. Buy them a taco. Lead them from winter to spring. They’ll be melancholy for the previous season and nostalgic for the Abominable Snowman. Try to present the new season as fresh and hopeful. Point out the flowers and that animals both wild and domestic are fucking like mad.

Who doesn’t like pancakes with peanut butter?

You can see I’m struggling with this. I’m convinced on an intellectual level I’ve nailed it. Up here on the top floor, I own it. Not only makes sense but it’s wise.

Down below, closer to me gulliver, I’m all about making them pay. Evil or just plain stupid, they deserve some amount of consequence. Pricks. Dipshits.

But that’s no good, see?

The hopeless will resent it, the fearful won’t understand and they’ll hold it against us. Be nice to conservatives, at least until you figure them out.

Who doesn’t like pancakes with peanut butter?

Your mission is to figure them out and determine who is worth your time. Coming soon, a national Adopt a Pants Shitting Conservative Day.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m a proud American. I’m a patriot. Love it or leave it. Don’t you dare criticize. What other reason could you possibly have for objecting to wiretapping and surveillance unless you got something to hide?

Hell, I ain’t worried.

Like I said, I’m a patriot and I love my country.

Fisa can blow me, it always goes south when appointed judges stick their progressive dicks in it. Liberal judges legislating from the bench are not needed in these circumstances. Our government is just trying to protect us. It’s what they do. It’s what they’re there for.

If you can’t trust them, who can you trust?

Liberals need to relax while patriots can feel good about it.

Sure, I smoked a little dope when I was younger, beat up the occasional sissy. That was years ago. I’m a Born Again, so I love everybody now. I say let people do what they want. Within reason. Less government.

Dangerous times call for extreme measures and there’s no more dangerous times than now. The Arabs and the terrorists hate us for our freedom and want to kill us. Islam is a violent and hateful religion. They’re all crazy, you can’t talk to them. Fucking ragheads. Why don’t they just leave us alone? What did we ever do to them?

If it ain’t Communism it’s some Godless sandnigger religion. They say Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. It wouldn’t suprise me. He’s the most liberal member of the Senate you know. He’s friends with terrorists who would kill our own. Sounds to me like he’s one cousin removed from hating America.

What are people thinking? A black Muslim terrorist for President? Over my dead body. It’s why there’s that amendment that let’s us keep our guns. He wants to spread the wealth and that’s socialism. It’s pinko. Every American has the same opportunity, depends on what you do with it.

God created us equal, it says so in the Bible.

Don’t come to me if you’re a crack smoking welfare mom. I work. Don’t cry to me about your son getting involved in gangs. Get him a job. Put his ass to work. I work for a living.

Some of my good friends are blacks. Nice people but I didn’t own them or beat them. What do they want from me? It just so happens, they’re black and I’m white. It’s like I should regret being caucasian. Why should I feel guilt for the way I was born?

If you ask me, the only way to solve the mess is to nuke the whole Godforsaken region. Turn all that sand into glass. Iran too. Let God sort ’em out. Trust in God.

Goddamn right we need change. We’re in a real crisis. Mexicans stealing our jobs. Outsourcing. Fuckin gas through the roof. Liberals want to blame the white man. The American businessman. Good honest Christians who are being taxed and regulated to death for just trying to make a buck and go to church on Sunday in decent clothes.

Leave these people alone so they can create jobs and save this country. They are heroes. They deserve and need that tax break.

All these foreigners need to speak American. Say the Pledge every day including “under God” and respect our God, the one this great nation was founded on. A Christian God.

Why is that too much to ask? A little respect, you know? This is the greatest country in the world. Take off your hat and put your hand over your heart when our anthem gets played.

Call me a redneck, I don’t care because maybe that’s what I am. I love my country and I love Jesus Christ. He was a carpenter you know.

I gotta tell ya just because “Joe The Plumber” isn’t a plumber and his name’s not Joe and he can’t afford to buy the business he works for, doesn’t mean he isn’t Joe Sixpack and a regular American with the same problems we all have.

The Bible says an eye for an eye and that’s why abortion doctors sometimes reap what they’ve sown. I don’t condone it but I understand. Even if it’s rape, it’s not up to us to decide. I mean, a life is a life. The bible says so. Unless of course, if that life has taken another, or sold dope, or is a traitor or a terrorist. Face it, what better deterrent is there than the death penalty?

People should understand that we’ll kill them if they screw up in America. Justice should be swift and mighty. Every war, including this one we’re in now, is for justice and truth and democracy. Even when it’s really hard, America does the right thing. Always.

You know, W. is a good man. He made a few mistakes. All Presidents do. Nobody’s perfect. He cares about us. I feel it. He’s a good man. I’d really like to have a beer with him. I bet he’s friendly and regular. Cheney’s a little spooky but he’s just the brains of the operation.

So whatever about the gays. It’s a choice and there are consequences. We all pay a price for bad decisions and that’s one of the great things about America. Accountability. No way will this American stand for faggots who want to soil the Christian institution of marriage. It’s holy and sacred. Can’t you people just leave it alone? What difference could it possibly make in their lives and their futures?

It’s a symbol. That’s why they want it so bad. It’s just silly.

Show me a homosexual and I’ll show you a liberal. Wanna bet?

It’s like they think it will make them legitimate somehow. Uh, not in the eyes of this patriot.

In a lot of ways, it’s like the French. We saved their asses in The Big One. What have they ever done for us besides sneer and act like we’re bullies and brutes? Overcharge us for wine and cheese. Ingrates. Why do we bother?

Those countries that sell their oil to the Chinese instead of us; it might be time to introduce them to the United States Navy.

McCain fought to save us from communism. He’s got my vote because he’s a genuine hero. This Sarah Palin is sassy and real and they’re both mavericks. I like that. I don’t care how smart Obama is. That’s not was this is about. I’ve always been suspicious of book learning as opposed to street smarts. This guy Obama eats arugula and fish eggs. He went to Harvard. I think his wife did too.

Tea with a pinky out.

By the way, Michelle Obama has been ashamed of America. Only recently proud. Can you believe this shit? Now what does America, the best country in the world, have to be ashamed of?

You know what else bothers me? What does it say to the rest of the world if America elects an African American Muslim for President? The world respects us. We are the example. America is the bar. There’s a ton of responsibility there and we’re gonna be held accountable.

The one thing I can agree with the liberals about is the idea that this country has it’s head in the shitter.

We can’t afford this second guessing and insecurity when it comes too choosing our leaders. A man with over two decades in the Senate. A man who’s crashed four airplanes and is still with us. A woman who shoots moose. A woman who’s been both Mayor and Governor of the wilderness. Both these Americans are patriots.

A woman who doesn’t break a sweat while spending more than twice what most American’s make in a year on two months worth of clothes. She wants to look good for us.

A man who’s not afraid to call his wife a “cunt” in public.

Drinks for my friends.

This will get ugly quick because Doubtfire has nothing to lose. He’s in the suck and losing ground. It will be painful for a cornucopia of reasons. We’ll actually suffer for the inevitable shift of focus further away from legitimate issues and onto complete bullshit.

It’s gonna really piss me off. I can tell.

At issue and as example, something like a hundred and fifty nine thousand jobs lost last month alone. Double the average of monthly losses this year. This is very bad news. Think about it. That’s twice the number you saw packing the stadium in Denver for Barack’s speech at the DNC.

Understand, we need a net gain of somewhere between a hundred and a hundred fifty thousand jobs a month to sustain the zero sum game that accommodates nothing more than population growth and newly elligible workers. Assume this means men and women eighteen and up.

What I’m getting at here is this month alone, the actual net job loss was more like two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand. See, now we’re talking about three, almost four times the people in that stadium.

That’s a shitload of lives.

Don’t forget to add that figure to every monthly job loss report this year. It effectively doubles the figure of seven hundred fifty thousand so far, to about one and a half million jobs lost this year alone. Conservative estimate.

Ten thousand foreclosures a day.

We are in very serious trouble.

Can you hear me now?

Don’t forget the number of Boomers retiring and therefore acquiescing to a fixed income and the rite of passage into drawing from social security, medicare, medicaid etc. To be clear, they’ve paid into these programs their whole lives. They deserve every damn dollar. The Republicans hate these programs and call them “entitlements”. Just like they call their jihad against the average citizen being able to sue the shit out of a major corporation for punitive AND actual damages, “tort reform”. When they whine about “frivolous lawsuits”, they really mean we shouldn’t be able to take the rich to court.

I hate them. I see John Boehner. I hate that guy.

We are hopelessly entangled in wars and caught up in the gears of countless foreign policy debacles. Ten billion a month in Iraq on credit and we’re still obstinate enough to pick fights. No wonder the World thinks we’re assholes.

Whatever.

Still, the contest for our next President is up in the air. Obama’s numbers continue to encourage, but Americans are fickle and stupid. I will never again underestimate the average American’s ability to do the dumb thing.

Our Man will prevail and that’s good, but I shudder at the toxic hazard he inherits. I worry that unless he’s got spheres hanging, of beautifully sculptured cubic zirconia, he’ll end up with the blame for a country rent asunder, the fall of The American Empire. He may ultimately preside over our demise.

I’d still pick him for that. Who better?

McCain would end up a puddle of melted crayons. Maybe a cheap roadside firework.

I loathe that the best choice we’ve had for President in a very long time is to be bequeathed such fragile, dangerous and explosive wreckage. Hard to believe he wants the job at all. I do think he wants it for the right reasons.

In turn, I believe McCain either wants it for reasons he doesn’t understand or, more likely, reasons that are not in America’s best interest. I’m trying to tell you that he’s more than a little crazy. He scares me and his laugh is fucking creepy.

Sarah Palin is not merely an empty suit. She is handsome pinstripes, expensive wool of Italian design, floating in the vacuum of space.

She sucks.

This man, Our Man, might just be able to lead us from the desert. I believe it’s in him so long as it is in us.

Drinks for my friends.

Paul Begala said it of Dumbya about his speech last night and whether there was any resonance. I fell off the couch howling.

He was saying that no one cared. I had to watch the speech in pieces. A yawner. I kept thinking about how close together his eyes are.

The full twelve minutes was empty of anything save for common knowledge and the mashing, over and over, of the fear button. The red one that makes bells ring. He really should just stay out of this. He wields zero influence and has long since squandered any credibility, particularly in matters financial.

A high functioning moron.

And did ya see McCain’s broad with Katie Couric today? You have got to be fucking kidding me. I’m comfortable calling her a broad because she shoots magnificent defensless mammals but ducks the press. This broad is dangerously clueless.

I really hope Doubtfire takes a powder tomorrow night in Mississippi. What a tool.

Washington Mutual took the dirt nap today. Biggest S&L in the country and the largest bank in the history of the world to ever collapse. JP Morgan bought all the juicy debt. I think we got stuck with the rest.

It’s surreal, as it gets better, as in more entertaining, it gets worse, in terms of consequences.

A materialization of the perfect storm. The tempest without flaw that I’ve been predicting for years. There is no joy in being right about this one. It’s stupid and disgusting.

The blame here rests as much on John Q. Public’s shoulders as it does on any head of state, titular or not. We allowed this. We encouraged it with our ignorance, apathy, laziness and cowardice. We are fools on this ship already compromised of buoyancy by failed leadership. Despite the obviating of the inevitable. As we speak, this vessel of American prosperity and potential heads full steam towards the mother of all icebergs.

Good job. We should all take a bow. Yes, especially the stupid ones. Couldn’t have done it without them.

Know what alarms me the most about the whole thing? We don’t have the money. It’s preposterous. We are so broke we can’t pay respect. They say seven hundred billion but we’re borrowing ten billion a month for Iraq.

Guess what passed yesterday? A defense spending bill for over six hundred billion. Understand that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not accounted for in that bill.

Start thinking about who you can blow and/or people with extra rooms. Prioritize things like clotheslines, wells and land enough for crops. Don’t worry about propane camp stoves, but a tent, sleeping bags and firearms are all smart purchases. Don’t forget the bullets!

I’m not here to dip your popsicle in dog hair but you need to be on top of this. This shit is realtime. Many of them are shrugging their shoulders with the attitude that it’s one last ass rape before they walk away. They. Don’t. Care. Think Doubtfire does? I don’t. He’s taking an unsanctioned time out. Tried to cover himself by putting Palin out in front today. No luck to be had there. She hit her mouth on the way down.

High comedy.

Both of them made of paper. One born that way, the other worn down to it. Empty shells. Empty suits. A future of mere mediocrity awaits both, regardless of how the election lands.

Barack Hussein Obama will not save us. He will not deliver us from evil. Yet I have every reason to believe that it is within his power to change the direction of this country. That is what I expect. It is why I will vote for him. I must tell you that my optimism is heavily mitigated by my fondness for the truth in the form of absolutes.

There is honesty and lies in almost everything. Black and white, cut and dried is still available, but rare. I respect the gray but seek and heed the black and white. Absolutes.

Here is absolutely the most honest and truthfull thing I can say to you. Barack Obama is your best bet. He is your only bet. Nader and Ron Paul have ceased to matter. Seriously, shut the fuck up. You don’t want to put your money on the other side. Even if you win, you’ll be very, very sorry.

He’s not here to come into your livingroom, solve your problems and go next door to solve theirs. Anyone who claims to do that is a liar. I’m hoping he can swing enough lumber to restore some fairness for Americans despite race or class. I don’t know he’ll do this but I think he can.

I do expect him to get busy on this pointless war.

Drinks for my friends.

Last night, I met a man named Elmer Pinto. He was recovering from an injury. I would describe him as swarthy.

I really like blood orange juice.

My girlfriend, not so much. This works in my favor. The penalty is heartburn.

I’ve become somewhat of a banker. The worst part is the monkey suit. Kenneth Cole baby.

All the sudden I’m doing mad math. That part of my brain is dusty and smells of moths and tadpoles in a bucket of stinking algae.

I’m not at all confused by this financial bronco, bucking and foaming with mad eyes. Destroying everything. I’ve been predicting it for years. It makes complete sense to me. Walk in the park. I understood that under Dick-in-Bush, the idea of an “ownership society” was complete crap. An absolute lie.

Our Man has known it for quite some as well. He’s been talking about this fallacy for years. Same as me. Great minds think alike. We don’t miss the obvious.

I watched Bill Maher tonight and learned that white women in America can be counted on to be abject bimbos, this includes Sarah Palin. Forgive me but this Palin phenomena is inexcusable. It’s a goddamn farce and her pantsuit is as empty as Dumbya’s Armani.

I never cared about the charges of sexism. It’s bullshit. She sucks and anyone with half a brain knows it. I won’t even contemplate an apology. She’s done nothing, been nowhere and doesn’t know shit. I know intelligent people that are buying it. I can’t figure it.

Join me. Be wary of it all. Be suspicious. Be incredulous. At least be fucking confused.

We’ve gone almost eight years under leadership by a suit painfully empty. Painfully empty. No responsible course of action on any major issue. Everything, every aspect of every major issue they chose to engage, has turned to shit. Inept, misguided, out of touch and criminal. Not necessarily in that order. It has all gone to shit.

How did we get here?

On a ship of fools. A trillion fucking dollars and we have no choice. No choice. Exponentially more severe than the S&L nightmare and the tech bubble. We’re hearing comparisons to the Great Depression from the mainstream media. Fuck me. Fuck you. We’re about to be a third world country.

So let’s keep spending a half a billion a day in Iraq. Great idea. For what again? Tell me why we’re there?

Johnny Deregulation and his Prince of peril, Phil Gramm have more fingers in this pie than the entire Democratic party. His suggestion was to commission a study. Yep, Doubtfire took the absolutely audacious and brazen step of proposing we look a bit harder at it. Get some eggheads in here to tell us what we already know. Brilliant.

Krugman on Maher says we’re fucked for a while. Krugman from the NYT and Princeton, is the real deal, tells it like it is. Naomi Klein says we’ve simply moved the disaster from Wall Street to Main Street. A debt that will explode on you and I. Count on it.

This is gonna suck.

Andrew Sullivan looks thinner to me. A gay conservative Republican who talks a lot of sense.

I loves me some Bill Maher. I hear he’s an arrogant prick. I don’t doubt it. A lead singer with lead singer disease. Moving right along.

Then there’s the notion of Mr. Obama for President.

You know, forgive me for oversimplifying, but what we have here is fear. It is fear of guilt. The older you are, the more likely you have participated in actual racism. Maybe you just tolerated it, but the fear among America’s middle aged and older is genuine. Many of them know they have behaved badly and they are afraid. Very reluctant to own it. Get over it you spineless pricks.

There it is. That is what we’re up against.

The idea that they’re willing to buy Sarah Palin and Doubtfire hook, line and sinker is proof of the rampant stupidity that infects them.

It is regoddamndiculous.

I know I’ve been here before. To warn you. Here I am again. To warn you. Help me out here. Let me know you’re listening, Tell me you’re passing it along. Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, work with me? Please.

It just doesn’t get any more important than this.

Drinks for my friends.

Bitches.

Still in the full body condom, America’s moose gutting mom avoids engaging the media like the kid in the Casper costume glimpsing the gang of Metallica wannabes drinking beer and leaning against a Camaro after midnight on all hallows eve. Nose running. With a fuckin pillow case full of The Kind.

She’s afraid and so is the campaign. The polite term is neophyte. The accurate term is wolf slaughtering doe in the headlights.

I hear the next official media exposure will be a gritty, no holes barred interview with Sean Hannity. What we have here is the body condom, a net, some matresses and a fucktard. Sheezus. If Americans are actually this dumb, how does bread end up on the shelves? Produce?

“The fundamentals of the American economy are sound”, now watch while I coin this phrase.

The Malfeasance of Idiocrasy.

That’s really the salient argument here. The catastrophe that keeps giving. We’ve gotta half a billion dollar a day war addiction and the banks are dropping like flies. Big ones. The biggest ones. People are dying.

The Malfeasance of Idiocrasy.

I heard tonight the housing debacle will begin to heal early next year. Bullshit. America has a chronic and potentially lethal fiscal disease. Picture liver and kidney failure.

There is a cure. Might be too late though.

The housing conflagration was merely the first obvious symptom. Pretty nasty boils, but a symptom nonetheless. Not unlike those carbuncles from my last blog. These knuckes of flesh will still be festering and oozing after first thaw.

The disease is another matter. I’m here to talk about the part of the disease that is pure, blind hubris. It’s name is Sarah Palin and she doesn’t know shit. That is exactly why she thinks she can do this, because she doesn’t know shit. She has no fucking idea where she may be allowed to walk.

You’ve got be fucking kidding me.

She’s under investigation, she’s ducking subpeonas. Half the women in her state loathe her. This is ridiculous. The top of their ticket is seasoned, albeit bitterly, and the bottom is a blowhard. She shouts less than nothing. She lies. Bridge To Nowhere anyone? ANYONE? Earmarks, Bueller, Bueller? The plane, the plane? Tattoo?

It’s a goddamn joke half of us are too stupid to get.

Americans are astonishigly stupid.

Know what really chaps my ass? The drooling, sewage vomiting, talking head Republicans. They just make shit up. I’m constantly asking myself how they can sit through makeup etc. and appear on camera fully prepared to utter the words that manifest into sentences and then paragraphs of such transparent, wholesale, sociopathic lies.

Yes, I understand we do it too. It bothers me. I offer this caveat: my side is rarely, if ever as audacious and never as vicious as the Republicans. Have you seen them go after each other? For what it’s worth, my side is not exclusively Democratic, they are always independent thinkers.

Republicans routinely push the envelope of decency and consistently push past the bounds of common sense. Always beyond reprehensible. No ethical imperative. No moral compass.

The Malfeasance of Idiocrasy.

Drinks for my friends.

A cautionary tale.

Had Hitler had not suffered from the delusional ganduer of acute and chronic hubris, we might be speaking German these days. The Germans were way on the nuclear tip. Their rocket technology and know how was far beyond what anyone else understood. They pounded the shit out of London with the V2. They were mere months away from a jet aircraft.

Hitler took on Russia in the winter. Napolean made a similar mistake more than two hundred years before. Russia was Hitler’s demise. Napolean’s as well. Pride and stupidity all the way around.

We lost, as a country, over half a million men in WWII. Lives. Russia spent somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty million. Lives. Twenty million lives.

All I know about Korea is it was ugly and we gained nothing. Net zero. Wait, a pretty good TV show. And Kim Jong-il, he’s the best whackjob on the international stage. I bet the military industrial folks were happy.

Vietnam saw us lose over fifty thousand. Lives. Who really knows the number of Vietnamese lives lost? Millions of Vietnamese lives.

Iraq has seen over four thousand American lives lost, but by some estimates as many as a million Iraqi lives. Lives.

I’m telling you this because it’s relative. It’s relevant.

Vietnam was at best, a misguided idea. The bad idea was allowed to become a huge mistake. The only benefit was enjoyed by the military industrial complex. Ike warned us a decade before but it didn’t take.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

I’m just gonna skip to a point. WWII was a bloody, horrible conflict. A proud German populace sought to rise above a flogging by the world after the first big stupid war and ended up wading into cruel and vicious zealotry. Evil reared it’s disgusting head. Japan came along and America had itself a war of epic proportions.

As near as I can tell, we had no choice. What we did was impressive. We mechanized all available industrial capability and trained millions to fight and build the engines of war inside of a few years. America didn’t sacrifice the lives or pay the price other countries did, but we were awesome. Pivotal. We got together as a country.

We still paid a heavy price.

It was a good thing, don’t forget, something for which there was no other choice.

As far as I know, WWII is the last just war we fought.

Let’s talk about this one.

Iraq.

They can’t define victory for this scenario because for an occupation, no defintion of victory exists. How to win an occupation? No answer. If there was a definition of victory to be had at all, it would be the public lynching of Saddam. Found him in a hole. Long time ago. Hung him. Been there, done that. Killed his sons. A shameful hour of amateurism. Sad, crude and ugly.

Don’t go all hawk on me. He was a complete bastard that deserved the taste of his own blood.

You know, war is way more fucked up than any of us who haven’t particiapted can possibly understand. That’s why it’s so devastatingly awful, so tragic and insane when war happens for reasons stupid or none at all.

Reasons for this war in Iraq are bogus or not at all.

Imagine being lucky enough to be one of the millions of Iraqis driven from your home as opposed to perishing inside it. Now, if you have the resources, your only option is a foreign country. The only possible safety. Ninety eight percent of these people didn’t ask for this and don’t deserve it.

It is without a doubt, the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. Most Americans are not even aware of the damage wrought. Cities reduced to rubble and the suffering and the blood and death and the horror. American families never again to see sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers.

The world reels, slaps it’s forehead and collapses into a chair. Much of the world, our fellow humans, don’t understand at all.

For what? WMD? An imminent threat that could come in the shape of a mushroom cloud? These jackasses so goddamn inept they didn’t even bother to stage some miraculous discovery to justify such madness. I was convinced they’d contrive some WMD epiphany.

By the way, where the fuck are Condi and Darth? I get nervous when we can’t see what their up to.

What I’m trying to point out here, is that when war is waged for reasons unjust, the end result will never be viewed as any kind of victory by any definition. It’s impossible. America is in the middle of right this now.

Once again, the only benefit enjoyed is by private military and security contractors, and well, the newest wrinkle in global conflict, big oil and the rest of Dick-in-Bush’s filthy friends. This at the expense of well over ten billion dollars a month when you factor the vigorish. Your children will be be paying this debt and the vig for decades. Ask yourself and your friends for what?

For fucking what?

It’s enough to make me projectile vomit with a velocity that allows for not but a fine mist of regurgitate to spot my liberal pinko blouse. A little soda water and I’m as good as new.

This all brings us to the goddamn surge. Far too much gravitas is afforded here. I’m getting sick and tired of Doubtfire taking credit for saving Iraq. It is not saved, safe or won by any means. What it is, is stupid.

A movement dubbed the “Anbar Awakening” among Sunnis in direct opposition to Al-Qaeda in Iraq began in early 2006. The tribes got together to decide enough is enough. They also announced that “this sucks”. They began to cooperate with each other and America.

The United States Government is paying between a hundred and a hundred and fifty thousand Sunni fighters about $300 a month to abstain from engaging US forces and otherwise stop stirring the shit. Part of the deal includes the Sunnis being integrated in to the emerging Iraq infrastructure and new Iraqi government.

This all pre-dates the surge by six months or so.

The crippling flaw is the the abscence of an emerging infrastructure and a vacuum of new government.

Dick-in-Bush have signed a lease that guarantees participation in this clusterfuck for years to come. We walk away and those Sunnis run amok. Chaos, destruction and the stink of death take on a whole new momentum and meaning.

Maher posits the Americans have become so narcisisstic that we expect our President to be just like us. Stupid and underinformed. It’s not so much about Race with Our Man, Americans are reluctant to vote for anyone smarter than them. Fuck me. I want a President that can whoop my ass in a game of chess, checkers, maybe Monopoly or Chutes and fucking Ladders.

Hey McCain, fuck you and your fucking surge. Tell the truth and stop wearing the one unpopular thing you’ve done in a decade as some preposterous badge of honor. You sir, are an idiot. Not so much for the sheer size of the whopper lies you foist upon us, but I pray stupid enough to underestimate an average American’s capacity for the bullshit they represent.

Stop prentending you couldn’t or wouldn’t sell us out. You already have.

You’re a dick.

My threshold of awe is only consistently breached by the fact that Doubtfire is still competive in the polls. Unbelievable.

Imagine what a third world war will look like.

Drinks for my friends.

First up, Cindy Stepford McCain. Oh boy. Can’t wait.

Out she comes with the whole dam fam minus the Bootlicker and introduces them before dismissing them. She goes to Gustav victims. She speaks like she’s on something. She’s an empty vessel. Maybe her batteries are low. I wonder what she looks like without her face plate.

“If only the Federal Government would get itself under control and out of our way”. She’s boring. Cut to What’s Her Name telling her daughter to “smile for me”.

Sappy, predictable and obvious. Offered in dulcet tones of halcyon. She comes from the house that Anheuser built. She steals mustard packets from fast food restaurants. She always has kleenex on her somewhere.

She manages to highlight the profound lack of substance in every speech thus far at this convention, in stark contrast to the style AND subtance served up by the Democrats last week. No mention of the beleaguered middle class, the suffering poor, health care et al, nor a whiff of what they intend to do about any of it.

Doubtfire is next. I’m looking for policy, metrics, specifics……….

I’m not holding my breath. That’s not to say I’m not touching myself. It’s purely platonic. Intellectual. You know what I mean.

The video introduction is heavy on the POW thing. Ok, I fucking get it. Enough. Oh yeah, and he’s a maverick. Lotsa black folks in the video. Whatever. Talk about a desperate whore for a brand.

He ambles geriatric to the dais. The knot in his tie is mediocre and the garment itself is yellow. Cut to a sign that says you can’t win an occupation. Another cut to a sign that says McCain votes against vets. Chants of USA. He actually mentions Dumbya for keeping us safe or something; offering us proof that although his phallus is withered and dry, his balls touch the water in the bowl.

So far it’s all fluff. He goes on and on. Family, yadda, yadda yadda yadda. He tells us he won’t let us down and he’ll earn our trust. Some grace when talking about Our Man. A little humility even.

Tumescence anyone?

Prosperity and peace is the message as dissenters are manhandled out of the venue. He calls it “ground noise and static” and they laugh. He’s going to stand on our side and fight for our future and he’s found the right patrner to do so. He proceeds to lie shamelessly about her. He’s creepy when he forces a smile after making it a point to lie.

Change is coming he tells us.

Time for a smoke.

He’s gonna veto pork barrel spending. I guess that’s how intends to solve our economic woes. Republicans are astonishingly anti-union.

And then,”rather lose an election than a war”. Fuck me. I’m shirtless so I haven’t ruined my pinko liberal blouse. The communist in me smiles and heads to the bathroom to wash up.

He fights for us he says. He’s nearly as dull as his wife. We’re going to get back to basics. We’re all God’s children and we’re all Americans. A culture of life. As opposed to what? Judges who don’t legislate from the bench. Families and communities. A government that doesn’t make your choices for you.

Uh huh.

Lies about Democrats and taxes. Democrats will close markets. His tax cuts will create jobs. I assume he’s talking about the Bush tax cuts. Good luck with that one Doubtfire. More lies about taxes and healthcare. They eat it up. A bureaucrat will stand between you and your healthcare. Um, ok. That’s different from now how?

Oh, how the great unwashed covet and then adore to feast on the lies.

He offers a follicle of policy without specificity. We’re on to education. His answer is a choice for parents as to where they send their children to school. Good luck with that John. Don’t try to fix it, walk away. Privatize it. That’s breathtakingly stupid in light of the egregious impact deregulation and privatization has visited upon the struggling and downtrodden.

You know, your base, fuckhead?

Good show Bootlicker.

He’s gonna battle big oil. Is that despite the money he takes from them? Drill baby, drill. Again, a modicum of policy in the broadest and most ambiguous of terms.

Terror, terror, terror. Russia and more Russia. International lawlessness. Ha! He knows how the world works. He knows how to secure the peace. He hates war. Good to know.

Vietnam.

Time for a smoke. And a cocktail refresh.

I’m getting sleepy. More POW stuff. War stories. Again, respect an admiration but enough is enough. It’s not a qualification for President. I’m sorry, it’s just not. It’s a courageous story. He may be a better man than me or possibly you, but in light of all else that is requisite, it’s simply not enough.

It makes him suspect.

The camera finds a sign with the word maverick spelled wrong.

He wraps it up with some sentimental euphoria, the balloons and confetti drop and the families take the stage and they play Barracuda by Heart. Wonder how Anne and Nancy feel about that.

Who cares. I give him a D minus. He barely passed. I am not impressed.

At least What’s Her Name was entertaining.

“Don’t let your sly eye ricochet off the silver in a hobo’s pocket”. -Colbert

Drinks for my friends.

It is wholly appropriate for the velocity of the RNC to be so compromised by a hurricane falling to land on the Gulf Coast almost three years to the day after a hurricane named Katrina did the same. The response, to that storm, which Republicans fucked up so badly, it’s become a stain on the party and an avatar of of their compassionless failure and clueless ineptitude.

They didn’t even know how bad they’d screwed it up until it was almost over. By then, they didn’t care.

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” Karl Rove, -TPM

How convenient it morphed into a reason for preventing Dumbya and Darth from bearing witness; pariahs both in their own party. A little gift from Mother Nature to the Republicans. They clearly weren’t looking forward to that kind of steerage. Nevermind the cartage.

Laura Bush gets up and kicks it off by touting the unfunded mandate we know as “No Child Left Behind”. She says that apparently some fifty million people now live in freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sheezus. First huge lie.

Still, I kinda like her. She has an absent minded dignity that’s a little infectious.

I only say that because somewhere, I have sympathy for her.

Next, we get Dumbya on the satellite. More POW bullshit. Standard bogus boiler plate lies. Empty words from an empty suit. Requisite references to 911. Yawn. I’m reminded for the millionth time that his eyes are too close together.

Thankfully, both speeches are brief.

Lotsa empty seats.

Well then, it’s the obligatory tribute to Reagan. A man who became the catalyst for the devastation of America’s middle class. A man who brought Russia to her knees by outspending them at the expense of America’s workers and the enrichment of the military industrial complex and therefore, the wealthiest among us. Trickle down economics my ass.

Reagan sucked. Why do Republicans insist on being so gay for him?

Fred Thompson’s speech blows. Sarah Palin. What a joke. He tells us the choice for her as VP has panicked the Democrats. Good luck with that. It does crack us up. What a tool. He touts her ability to “field dress a moose”. Do I need to highlight the obtuseness of that? I hope not.

We hear more about Doubtfire’s time in Vietnam. I respect his service and his sacrifice, but that’s where it ends with me. I’m impressed. But that’s it. He gives credit to Republicans for balancing the budget and rebuilding the military. Good luck with that too. He’s lying. The second huge lie. I think that was a guy named William Jefferson C.

John McCain will not feel the need to apologize for America. Arrogance. Then, what has become beyond trite and cliche, the tax scare and abortion. Republicans are still that stupid. Fred Thompson is that stupid.

What’s up with all the empty seats?

All the crowd can manage to chant is USA. They can’t seem to wrap a rythm around two syllables or four.

I guess Benedict Fliptop (Lieberman) is up next. Oh boy. I really hate this guy.

He goes to the economy and terrorism right away. He takes a swing at unity. The camera pans to Gingrich a handful of times. Curious. The camera finds a Black guy standing and clapping. Bonus.

Colbert would demand an Asian.

Lieberman tells us he’s a Democrat. Bullshit, He’s an Independent. Democrats abandonded him because he’s an idiot. Whatever. His speech is completely empty. No substance. I see a Democrats for McCain sign but ‘Democrats’ is spelled wrong. Take what you will from that.

I must tell you that although I’m an aspiring pacifist, I fantasize about punching Benedict Fliptop in the mouth. Hard. A haymaker. What a douchebag. The only reason he’s there is because he wants war to continue, he wants it to grow. All I see is a man who cares far more about Israel than he does America. I loathe him.

They have nothing. The Repubilcans have shown up to a firefight with those cool Star Trek toy guns that shot little plastic discs. Remember those? If not, please substitute squirt guns in your mind’s eye.

What we have here, is a failure to communicate.

There’s some post convention interviews on the floor as I leave CNN’s coverage. A group of delegates from Texas all dressed in matching outfits. They say they are proud of Dumbya for what he’s done for pro life issues and faith based institutions. They say it was painful to applaud to applaud Bill Clinton.

Forgive me here, but you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. All that goes on in the world every goddamn day and that’s the top of their goddamn list?

By the way, Campbell Brown rocks. She pissed on Tucker Bounds’ lunch. She did it with restraint and discretion and still cleaned his clock because he was woefully unprepared. I guess it cost Larry King a McCain interview tomorrow night. What a pussy is Doubtfire.

The demonstrations and the arrests continue to gain mass and attention. This may end up being half the story.

Drinks for my friends.

Ever since the bastard visited the worst kind of yellow journalism on Ahmadinejad last year, I’ve had a black place for him in my mind. I’m no fan of that shit Ahmadinejad, but Pelley’s questions were pregnant with flawed assumption and bullshit jingoism.

I enjoy 60 Minutes. Often brilliant. Yet, Pelley in particular, when reporting on all matters of war and foreign affairs, consistently misses the point. He did it again tonight. He grilled a soldier who’d never seen combat, thrust into the hottest of zones, over his actions and command in Haditha, Iraq after a vehicle in his convoy had been blown sky high and his men had come under fire in an urban enviroment.

Within minutes, his unit had killed twenty four Iraqi civilians.

Within minutes.

It happened that fast, so yeah, mistakes were made.

Pelley plumbed the depths for an explanation of the recklessness and the degree of remorse. Of course, Robert Wuterich was more than sorry, but he said that under the conditions he could not imagine doing anything differently. It was chaos.

Wuterich will face courtmartial for the events of that day.

He said something like he never intended to go murder people in their houses, it’s what happened as he acted according to the way he was trained. He did not intend to be responsible for the deaths of twenty four civilians.

I’m not excusing it or them, I’m just saying it was close to impossible.

Whatever.

It’s all completely beside the point.

Dick-in-Bush are the criminals. Condi and Rummy et. al.

By some estimates, over a million Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of American military operations in Iraq.

So, somebody please explain what the point could possibly be for prosecuting a soldier for murder under the circumstances they found themselves in. Circumstances our President and his cavalcade of greedy neoconservative douchebags have immersed our soldiers in. Sunk them in, so that many can barely breathe.

This is fucked up. America seeks to prosecute soldiers for a split second decision when they are surrounded by an enemy that is indistinguishable from the populace. A child, a woman or an old man may be pregnant with fifty pounds of exposives under traditional garb.

Congruent to Abu Ghraib, where guards were persecuted and prosecuted for an ethic of permissable torture and degradation that originated and was fomented in the highest corridors of power of the United States military authority.

It’s a goddamn joke. And it makes me want to puke. Engineer the clusterfuck and then hold the actors you cast in the ridiculous play responsible for the words you put in their mouths and the deeds you script in black and white.

Man, I hate these guys.

Where do they hope this sort of precedent will lead? Irresponsible. Unconscionable. Stupid and entirely without accountability or compassion.

They have destroyed everything. The trust and will of the world and the will and trust of the people of this country, undermined and sick.

Thus far, accountability has gone as far as soldiers and guards. That, boys and girls, is really bad news.

Allow me to recommend “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” by Vincent Bugliosi.

Forgive me, but how many morons are holding out for McCain? Seriously. You people are killing me.

Drinks for my friends.

is ridiculously hot.

What we have here, is a letter. A forged letter. A letter penned by our CIA at the behest of our White House.

The letter was intended to allow Dick-in-Bush, both hands empty of WMD, to save some face. Oh, and to continue propagating the fear so masterfully wielded ’til now.

This, after unilaterally invading a sovereign state that posed no threat to us. The neocons were looking to avoid the visual of nothing but empty sand running through their fingers.

Of course, there’s the eighty billion dollar oil surplus in Iraq. Wanna bet who gets that? I bet we won’t hear shit about it after tommorrow.

There are laws on the books forbidding any American intelligence agency from distributing false propaganda or disinformation in any territory controlled by the United States including, of course, all fifty states.

A guy named Tahir Jalil Habbush, chief of Saddam’s intelligence.

A Pulitzer winning author who wrote the first real book detailing events behind the curtain of Dick-in-Bush, “The Price of Loyalty” (January 2004), about Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Good book. The tip of the iceberg.

He wrote another book. It’s better than the other one. “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism”

What is known:
The Bush administration ordered the CIA to fake a hand written letter from this guy Tahir Jalil Habbush to Saddam hisself. The letter details all things that never actually occured. It was meant to be proof that Hussein was pursuing the production of nuclear weapons AND that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al-Qaida.

The “memo” was dated July 1, 2001. It was written late in 2003. It says that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta “received training in Baghdad for “attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy” but also carefully noted the arrival of a “shipment” from Niger via Libya, presumably of uranium yellowcake, the sole export of that impoverished African country.” -salon.com

It’s complete bullshit. Beyond an elaborate falsehood, it is an egregiously distorted fabrication with nothing but a symbiotically enhanced affair between avarice and malice as impetus and catalyst. I may have just puked in my mouth a little.

Man, I hate these guys.

This all happened on George Tenet’s watch. He, along with Franks and Bremer, recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom. These two facts make Tenet a pock-faced scumbag.

Ladies and Germs, this is your government. This is your government on greed and lust of all things power.

At this point, I’d like to invite any backward ass Republican to explain to me what concerns he or she the most. Just what, beyond this little snippet of potentially embarrassing information, might cause unrest among you?

Is it oil?
Sorry, they fucked that up.

Is it the economy?
Sorry, they fucked that up too.

The enviroment?
Bad news boys and girls.

Health care?
Ehem. Whoops?

National Security?
Fuck me.

The entire geopolitical dynamic from debts and deficits to human rights and respect?
Um. Fuck. Me.

Drinks for my friends.

What we have here……is a huge celebrity. Worldwide. Global. Looks like it’s a problem. Our Man, by virtue of charisma, an absolutely uncanny ability to communicate, to orate a fresh and hopeful message, not just to Americans, but a good number of this planet’s citizenry, may have doomed himself for being so goddamn adept at showing us there is a better way.

Two hundred thousand plus showed up in Berlin.

What a shame, that so many of have grown so cynical as to stare so arrogantly into the mouth of this gift horse.

What a shame, that upon finally being presented with the real deal, so many many of us can’t help but be convinced that he must be an elitist. An arugula eating snob because he talks to the people of the world like adults.

I confess, I like arugula a lot. My favorite is a dish with perfectly grilled polenta, a thick vinegarette and a generous amount of gorgonzola. I get it to go and put a little Bob’s on top when I get home.

With the exception of the Bob’s, the other ingredients would probably lead most of the great unwashed to assume I’m an enthusiastic pole smoker. Were I to mention that it pairs well with a nice blanc de blancs, well then, I’m sure they’d be willing to assume the worst, that it’s not the only salad I’m willing to toss. Whatever.

They would be right. I don’t imbibe penis, but have no problem with those that deign to do so, regardless of gender. It goes without saying, I encourage and applaud the females. I am a progressive individual in both thought and deed.

I love sushi and crave caviar.

I believe health care should be free or at least affordable for the people of the richest country on earth. I think we should stop shaking our fists at countries that disagree with us. In fact, I really would prefer that we stopped bombing all the brown people. After all, the back of the most formidable military in the history of the world has been rent asunder by that very policy.

We should do our best to stop sucking our planet dry and instead utilize what the universe offers for free. The sun and the wind and the tide.

Know what else I like? Risotto. When prepared with care, it is like the most delicately textured pasta imaginable, in the unlikeliest pellet form. Mushrooms. Get it with mushrooms and aged parmesan.

I think we should legalize most drugs. Tax and regulate them to eliminate the criminal infrastructure and mitigate the astounding numbers of incarcerated that we pay for on top of the ridiculous “war on drugs”. On the other hand, it may suprise you to know that I’m thinking maybe anyone dealing meth or in the business of propagating it, might be better off dead.

Ever had a perfectly BBQ’d pork chop with a really good zinfandel?

You know what really chaps my ass? The erosion of our civil rights and liberties. FISA. Posse Comitatus. The Patriot Act. Amendments One and Four. All of the aforementioned have been severely and egregiously advanced in the last seven years while we voluntarily popped our thumbs into our asses and looked the other way because we were scared.

The most successful society in the history of humankind allowed itself to be frightened by it’s own so thoroughly, it’s literally frozen at the wheel. A deer in the headlights.

Both. Ha!

Try this:
Find a place with good, thin shoestring fries. Squeeze a lemon over them. Apply salt, preferably from the sea. Dip in mayonnaise and/or ketchup. I’m not a big beer drinker but most beers work well with this. Stick to lighter ones. Hefe weizen, pilsner and most authentic lagers work nicely.

I’m going to hold out two hands. You’ll need to pick one. Fair warning, in one hand is the very aggressive sale of fear and doubt. Let me know if you want me to tell you which hand it is.

I’ve started eating chili cheese fries. So far, Carl’s sets the bar.

I hear Cheney won’t be at the convention. Fuck me, that’s funny.

Drinks for my friends.

I want to talk to all of you but I don’t know why. I don’t think I’m lonely, I don’t get lonely.

Boredom. That’s it.

I’ve rediscovered the IFC and Sundance channels.

My life is kinda on pause. I’m waiting for things. Things I anticipate will transpire soon. I’ll be allowed to do more things. In the meantime, I should probably take out the trash.

When I was a kid, I was pretty good friends with a guy who went on to murder another man’s wife and then himself. I really liked him. Very cool and he never took things too seriously. Mike Walsh.

My memories are so vivid, I wonder if the atrophy of my senses with age is the reason life seems so two dimensional sometimes.

I’m watching the original Halloween on the IFC. The acting is but a single layer of corrugated cardboard, it plumbs the depth of cheese. I love this shit. Mike Walsh was crazy about it. He said it scared the fuck out of him the first time he saw it.

He strangled the married woman, went home and stuck a gun in his mouth.

I babysat some kids for a couple on my parent’s bowling team once. I actually lost track of the little girl. They were wrong to trust me, I was too young. I really can’t remember how it turned out so it must not have been that bad. They paid me.

I like hanging plants.

Remember when Bob Dole ran? That shit was funny.

I adore William Shatner.

I’m enamored of a full bustline.

I’m at the age where the decision to get drunk has become a walk in the park.

I finished the first draft of my novel. I’m having difficulty. It’s done but it haunts me. It haunted me while I was writing it; it is very dark and violent. There seems to be a lot left over.

I’m gonna have to start another one.

We’re a hundred days out from the general election. A glance at the electoral college map tells me we’re sitting kinda pretty. Oh boy. I’m hopeful. I’m cautiously optimistic. I have confidence. I’m not trying to forecast a blowout, but I believe the electorate has but one sensible choice.

It does speak volumes about America that this anything but a done deal. Whenever I think I don’t understand it, the weight of comprehension forces me to the ground face first and tries to hog tie me. In a time when I’m not allowed to take more than eight ounces of toothapste in a ziploc bag with non-negotiable dimensions on a commercial flight, freezer bags make much better sense for travel, it seems ridiculous.

Or does it?

No, it doesn’t. Very little public awareness, much less rage, over the recent FISA bill passed into law. Near zero attention paid to the demise of the Posse Comitatus Act. The Clear Skies initiative, No Child Left Behind. What I’m pointing out here is the plethora of things the average American doesn’t know shit about.

Never heard of it.

The media is complicit and that frustrates me, but nothing chaps my ass more than the laziness and apathy of the average citizen.

We live in a time when any excuse for being underinformed is fucking lame. Dandelion Salad, Truthout, The Huffington Post, The Daily Show even CNN. In less time than Bowflex would have you believe it takes to look like a superhero each day, you can be well informed.

I beseech you. As a liberal, I encourage you to study, to learn, to fucking pay attention.

Now I understand if you’re reading this, it’s not likely you’re an unapologetic dipshit.

Maybe you know a few. That brings us to the point. Engage them. Gently. Be friendly. Non confontational.

Remind them we’re not after the guns. Enlighten them by being personally opposed to abortion but point out it will happen anyway so let’s just keep the coat hangers out of it.

If they seem receptive, float a few more balloons. Agree that at the very least, healthcare is too goddamn expensive. Remind them how insane gas is and that the banks are beginning to look like dominos.

Once you have the pony at the watering hole, casually toss out the war thing. Point out it’s ten billion a month and we’re kinda fucked over here. After that, you’re on your own.

Remember, the first goal of any salesman is to make friends.

Drinks for my friends.