So now we have the long-form birth certificate. The 44th President of the United States is a natural-born citizen, and the document was produced amidst a fervor of speculation which has never gone away since being slyly introduced into the campaign arena by some disenchanted and bitter PUMAs. A large proportion of the GOP freshmen Congressmen elected last year doubted that the President was really an American citizen, and their Congressional leaders refused to disabuse them of such a silly notion.
The fact that the President was forced to end such insidious speculation by actually producing his birth document is an embarrassment for America and a blight upon the intellectual reputation of its citizens. The fact that it had to be produced after weeks of outright slander at the hands of a high-profiled American business mogul and reality television star, who’s, allegedly, mounting a run for the Office, himself, smacks of something else entirely.
Donald Trump has often mentioned briefly that he’d like to run for President, but such remarks were always incidental. Trump was too busy shedding wives and businesses to do anything serious in preparation for running for public office – like voting. Yet all of a sudden, for the past month, all we’ve seen is Trump on any and all television networks and chatshows, loudly declaiming doubt about the President’s citizenship. It didn’t matter that everything he was saying was an outright lie – that no one in Hawaii remembered the President as a child, no one admitted going to school with him, that Trump had sent investigators to Honolulu to seek out the elusive birth certificate, that the document was hiding something about who or what the President really was – something sinister.
The only thing that really mattered was that Trump was contributing to the Big Lie school of propaganda: repeating something often enough and loud enough so that eventually people hearing it would come to believe it. Since over 40% of Republicans already believed that the President wasn’t American, not only did these claims further ensconce their belief, they convinced this demographic that Donald Trump was the best and most qualified candidate to run for President from the Republican party.
Some people reckon this is all a publicity act, designed to garner viewers for his television show on NBC; others disagree. On Monday night, Bill Maher, guesting on The Late Show with David Letterman, bet Letterman a week’s wage that Trump was a serious candidate for President. He was doing this, reasoned Bill, simply because he could.
I’m wondering if Trump’s got other motives. I’m actually wondering if Trump isn’t a stalking horse, a smoke-and-mirrors man testing the waters for someone else.
True, since Trump’s emerged, no less than Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney have declared they’re setting up “exploratory committees” – sorta kinda like a cowardly way of wondering what people will make of them as candidates before they actually declare. If people like them, they’ll be bold and go for the prize; if they don’t, they’ll retreat to oblivion and lick their wounds. Ron Paul’s emerged with a committee of his own.
But something else has happened too.
Two days ago, Haley Barbour was the first of the wannabes to announce that he actually didn’t intend to run for President. The former RNC chair and current Mississippi governor has certainly run into some long-term memory problems with regard to the history of race relations in his home state, and he’s an ex-lobbyist and Washington insider, which would mean Haley would campaign, not for change in Washington, but for much of the same old same old. But Haley’s closing the door on his candidacy opens up a couple of other doors as well.
Indiana governor Mitch Daniels has often been pitched by the pundits as a viable Republican candidate for 2012 amidst a field full of hucksters, flip-floppers and certified batshit; yet Daniels repeatedly has said that he wasn’t interested in running, especially whilst Barbour, a personal friend, was thinking about a candidacy. Such was their friendship, that Daniels wouldn’t even think of opposing him on the campaign trail; rather, he’d put his full endorsement behind the Mississippian.
Now Barbour’s out of the race, closing the door of candidacy behind him, but graciously holding a door open for Daniels, should he be so obliged.
Not only that, but there’s also a grassroots movement afloat in certain areas of the Republican party. The Republicans are a party steeped in history, just as the Democrats are. The only difference is that the Republican Party is mindful of history and uses it as a guide, where the Democrats, since 1970, at least, have thrown historical caution to the wind. This particular tranche of the party is harkening back to the election of 1952, when it looked as though their only hope was the ueber-conservative Senator from Ohio, Robert Taft, son of the former President and Chief Justice. Horrified at the thought of such a Rightwinger being the front-runner (in those days, there were such things as moderate Republicans), various party operatives got a movement going that resulted in the drafting of war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest – as they say – is history.
Now there are rumours afloat of an effort to draft Jeb Bush, after looking over the flotsam and jetsam offering themselves up as sacrificial lambs.
What’s this all to do with Trump? I’ll tell you.
Trump blasted on the scene, preaching birtherism from all angles. He took it, shook it and threw it into the mainstream in a way it had never been done so previously. On his way, he managed to make enemies of three such important American icons as Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld and Robert de Niro. Whereas before, birthers were to be scorned and ridiculed, like the preposterous Orly Taitz, now an American business tycoon was echoing doubt and threatening all sorts of investigative action, dominating the conversation in and around serious political discussion shows, amongst other things.
The result is that the President produced the document: to stop the silly season behaviour and shut everyone the hell up. Trump trumpets victory, saying this was all he ever wanted the President to do, and he’s done it. The birthers skulk away to mutter their doubts to themselves and try to come up with something else with which to disqualify the President, searching for yet another euphemism to use in place of the word “black.” John Boehner breathes a sigh of relief, because he won’t have to slap wrists and compromise his principle of not telling people what to think (not that he ever really had any principles in the first place).
And into this somewhat saner arena could step a bona fide, viable and potentially strong candidate in the form of Mitch Daniels … or even a drafted Jeb Bush. Just remember that the last time the Republicans drafted a Presidential candidate, we got 8 years of GOP rule and an introduction to Richard Nixon.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
More Money Than (Common) Sense
Earlier this week, at a private fundraiser for the President in California, an event for which each person attending paid $5000 for the privalege of eating in the same room with the Chief Executive and listening to him address the gathering, free of the toxic news media which follows at his heels, a young woman stood up in the middle of the President’s speech peeled off her top to reveal a teeshirt bearing the smiling image of cri de coeur martyr of the moment, Bradley Manning, and began to sing an ode to Private Manning.
Within seconds, she was joined by the rest of her party at their table, until the lot of them were politely ushered from the room by attending plain-clothes security officers.
The President thanked them for their offering and carried on with his speech.
As protests go, this was tepid. The song was trite, the rhyme awful. It wasn’t even a full-fledged or full-throated protest, in that part of the lyrics stated that the singer and her company would vote for the President in 2012. What was amazing was that these young(ish) people were able to afford a fee which only well-heeled donors were likely to make in order to attend a rally for the President and to contribute to his campaign fund. (That was another oxymoron: They were protesting something for which they clearly blamed the President, yet their song admitted support and, collectively, they’d just contributed a grand total of $76,000 to his campaign kitty). Go figure.
Later on, the young woman in question described herself as a “trust fund brat and sometime artist.” Well. That says everything.
The radical chic have returned to live amongst us. Are you old enough to remember them?
The first time they appeared, forty-two years ago as chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his essay, they’d decided to espouse the cause of Civil Rights – six years after the Act had been signed and almost a decade after the highly publicized demonstrations. This particular clique, led by Leonard Bernstein, Baba Wawa and the mother of the fragrant Katrina vanden Heuvel, decided to throw a dinner party, not for the leading lights of the NAACP or the Urban League, but for the Black Panthers. The original real Black Panthers.
On the afternoon of the day of the festivities, Leonard Bernstein, hosting the event, suddenly realised that his butler and two maidservants were black, so he sent them home and frantically called an employment agency, requesting that they despatch three Latino servants to work for the evening. And when the soiree was under way, the radical chic suddenly found that they were actually sharing the same airspace as real black people, people from the street and from parts of the city they studiously avoided.
Bradley Manning is the pin-up of this generation’s radical chic. It’s highly unlikely that Miss Trust Fund Brat was even remotely interested in what the President had to say about his budget plan in relation to the obscenity Paul Ryan’s trying to hawk, or the state of the declining middle class – a euphemism, I’m loathe to use, because if you work to live, you’re working class, so own the term and live with it. She obviously isn’t thinking of the masses of unemployed or underemployed, of people who’ve flattened their 401K’s simply to get by or people, heretofore, made bankrupt by medical expenses. She probably is unaware of the situation in which her state of California found itself a few yeafs back when state employees were furloughed and paid with IOU’s. She finds the decaying infrastructure of California a nuisance and an inconvenience, but she and her mates have $76,000 to donate to a candidate they heckle in order to be able to get their point across about someone who’s accused of committing an act of high treason.
Whether Manning’s guilty or not is for the courts martial to decide, but the fact that he’s attracting such a high level of extremely wealthy people who part with their money so readily and in such a discombabulated way, says far more about these doyens of the extreme Left than it does of either Manning or any of the things these people “protest.” It would have been far better and benefited Bradley Manning far more if this woman and her cronies had contributed the $76,000 paid for the Presidential evening to Manning’s defense fund, which must be accumulating.
Last week, the day before the President’s speech on the budget, I received an e-mail from Adam Green of Bold Progressives, having subscribed to his newsletter ages ago. The e-mail was frantically advising everyone on the mailing list that the next day, President Obama was about to give a major speech in which he would announce that he was cutting Social Security, Medicaire and Medicaid.
Hurry! Hurry! We had all of 24 hours to stop the President from committing such a heinous act. All we had to do, Green’s letter explained, was send a donation of $5 to his organisation. If that didn’t “stop Obama,” the next step would be for all Progressives to boycott President Obama. The next morning, in the hours leading up to the speech, Green smugly announced that 60,000 people had made donations and pledged to stop the President from cutting these entitlements.
Sixty thousand people paying five dollars apiece … In a space of less than 24 hours, Green had accumulated $300,000. As the Brits would say, that’s a nice little earner. And – oh yes – President Obama, after all, didn’t “cut” Social Security or Medicare or even Medicaid. He made a seminal speech, with Paul Ryan sitting in the front row, where he politely but firmly, trashed Ryan’s handiwork as irrelevant.
But the politics of fear had garnered Adam Green a tidy $300k. Adam’s a graduate of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, known for having a stringent, student-patrolled honour code. Had Adam tried that scam as a student, he’d have been given 24 hours to pack his bags and leave the University. Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect $300,000.
Instead, Green continued fear-mongering. Just because Obama (he never actually calls him “President Obama”) didn’t do that there and then, we’ve got to ensure he doesn’t cut entitlements in the future, so … a request was made for further donations of $5 from e-mailed recipients.
Until that moment, I’d largely ignored Green’s panic-driven screeds as spam, in much the same way I’ve ignored his amateurish political punditry as some remnant of a drunken evening spent in the company of the Jefferson Debating Society for lack of anything better to do; but in reading those two e-mails and thinking about his grifting accumulation of more money than most people see in a year in the space of one day, I had an Oral Roberts epiphany.
If Bradley Manning is the 21st Century radical chic’s Black Panther, then Adam Green is the Left’s Oral Roberts. Growing up in the South of the 1950s, as a small child, I remembered Roberts’s frightening radio rants, which promised salvation, if only you put one hand on the radio and the other in your pocket to reach out the princely sum of $5 to send ol’Oral. Now I’ve come full circle, with Adam Green promising all our social and political wet dreams would come to fruition if only we keep one hand on the keyboard and the other clicking the credit card payment details in order to send dosh to Adam who’ll personally ensure that the Obama horde is stopped at the gate.
My father was a lifelong Democrat, who stuck with the party from Roosevelt, for whom he cast his first vote, to Clinton, for whom he cast his last. Wherever he is, seeing these grifters and shifters from his side of the political equation, parting with money which could be better aimed at other causes, he’d be hard put not to utter one of his many stock phrases: that a fool and his money soon part. It’s just a shame the fools in question all seem to be from the Left, and that these same people are proving to be as unyielding, unthinking and close-minded as their brethren from the Right.
Within seconds, she was joined by the rest of her party at their table, until the lot of them were politely ushered from the room by attending plain-clothes security officers.
The President thanked them for their offering and carried on with his speech.
As protests go, this was tepid. The song was trite, the rhyme awful. It wasn’t even a full-fledged or full-throated protest, in that part of the lyrics stated that the singer and her company would vote for the President in 2012. What was amazing was that these young(ish) people were able to afford a fee which only well-heeled donors were likely to make in order to attend a rally for the President and to contribute to his campaign fund. (That was another oxymoron: They were protesting something for which they clearly blamed the President, yet their song admitted support and, collectively, they’d just contributed a grand total of $76,000 to his campaign kitty). Go figure.
Later on, the young woman in question described herself as a “trust fund brat and sometime artist.” Well. That says everything.
The radical chic have returned to live amongst us. Are you old enough to remember them?
The first time they appeared, forty-two years ago as chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his essay, they’d decided to espouse the cause of Civil Rights – six years after the Act had been signed and almost a decade after the highly publicized demonstrations. This particular clique, led by Leonard Bernstein, Baba Wawa and the mother of the fragrant Katrina vanden Heuvel, decided to throw a dinner party, not for the leading lights of the NAACP or the Urban League, but for the Black Panthers. The original real Black Panthers.
On the afternoon of the day of the festivities, Leonard Bernstein, hosting the event, suddenly realised that his butler and two maidservants were black, so he sent them home and frantically called an employment agency, requesting that they despatch three Latino servants to work for the evening. And when the soiree was under way, the radical chic suddenly found that they were actually sharing the same airspace as real black people, people from the street and from parts of the city they studiously avoided.
Bradley Manning is the pin-up of this generation’s radical chic. It’s highly unlikely that Miss Trust Fund Brat was even remotely interested in what the President had to say about his budget plan in relation to the obscenity Paul Ryan’s trying to hawk, or the state of the declining middle class – a euphemism, I’m loathe to use, because if you work to live, you’re working class, so own the term and live with it. She obviously isn’t thinking of the masses of unemployed or underemployed, of people who’ve flattened their 401K’s simply to get by or people, heretofore, made bankrupt by medical expenses. She probably is unaware of the situation in which her state of California found itself a few yeafs back when state employees were furloughed and paid with IOU’s. She finds the decaying infrastructure of California a nuisance and an inconvenience, but she and her mates have $76,000 to donate to a candidate they heckle in order to be able to get their point across about someone who’s accused of committing an act of high treason.
Whether Manning’s guilty or not is for the courts martial to decide, but the fact that he’s attracting such a high level of extremely wealthy people who part with their money so readily and in such a discombabulated way, says far more about these doyens of the extreme Left than it does of either Manning or any of the things these people “protest.” It would have been far better and benefited Bradley Manning far more if this woman and her cronies had contributed the $76,000 paid for the Presidential evening to Manning’s defense fund, which must be accumulating.
Last week, the day before the President’s speech on the budget, I received an e-mail from Adam Green of Bold Progressives, having subscribed to his newsletter ages ago. The e-mail was frantically advising everyone on the mailing list that the next day, President Obama was about to give a major speech in which he would announce that he was cutting Social Security, Medicaire and Medicaid.
Hurry! Hurry! We had all of 24 hours to stop the President from committing such a heinous act. All we had to do, Green’s letter explained, was send a donation of $5 to his organisation. If that didn’t “stop Obama,” the next step would be for all Progressives to boycott President Obama. The next morning, in the hours leading up to the speech, Green smugly announced that 60,000 people had made donations and pledged to stop the President from cutting these entitlements.
Sixty thousand people paying five dollars apiece … In a space of less than 24 hours, Green had accumulated $300,000. As the Brits would say, that’s a nice little earner. And – oh yes – President Obama, after all, didn’t “cut” Social Security or Medicare or even Medicaid. He made a seminal speech, with Paul Ryan sitting in the front row, where he politely but firmly, trashed Ryan’s handiwork as irrelevant.
But the politics of fear had garnered Adam Green a tidy $300k. Adam’s a graduate of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, known for having a stringent, student-patrolled honour code. Had Adam tried that scam as a student, he’d have been given 24 hours to pack his bags and leave the University. Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect $300,000.
Instead, Green continued fear-mongering. Just because Obama (he never actually calls him “President Obama”) didn’t do that there and then, we’ve got to ensure he doesn’t cut entitlements in the future, so … a request was made for further donations of $5 from e-mailed recipients.
Until that moment, I’d largely ignored Green’s panic-driven screeds as spam, in much the same way I’ve ignored his amateurish political punditry as some remnant of a drunken evening spent in the company of the Jefferson Debating Society for lack of anything better to do; but in reading those two e-mails and thinking about his grifting accumulation of more money than most people see in a year in the space of one day, I had an Oral Roberts epiphany.
If Bradley Manning is the 21st Century radical chic’s Black Panther, then Adam Green is the Left’s Oral Roberts. Growing up in the South of the 1950s, as a small child, I remembered Roberts’s frightening radio rants, which promised salvation, if only you put one hand on the radio and the other in your pocket to reach out the princely sum of $5 to send ol’Oral. Now I’ve come full circle, with Adam Green promising all our social and political wet dreams would come to fruition if only we keep one hand on the keyboard and the other clicking the credit card payment details in order to send dosh to Adam who’ll personally ensure that the Obama horde is stopped at the gate.
My father was a lifelong Democrat, who stuck with the party from Roosevelt, for whom he cast his first vote, to Clinton, for whom he cast his last. Wherever he is, seeing these grifters and shifters from his side of the political equation, parting with money which could be better aimed at other causes, he’d be hard put not to utter one of his many stock phrases: that a fool and his money soon part. It’s just a shame the fools in question all seem to be from the Left, and that these same people are proving to be as unyielding, unthinking and close-minded as their brethren from the Right.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Bill Maher on the Quran burning incident in Florida and the UN murders (...
Bill Maher purports to be a Progressive. Well, is this the voice of a Progressive, or even a liberal? Radical chic, followin' the fashion.
The Confederate in Your Attic
One hundred fifty years ago today, the Civil War began. Please note two things: I said “the Civil War”, not “the War Between the States” or “the War of Northern Agression” or whatever, I said “the Civil War.” The second point is that I am a Southerner. I am a Southerner, who’s always called this war by its proper name since childhood. As a matter of fact, I’ve only ever heard it called “the War Between the States” by one person. That was my fourth grade teacher, and she was a drunk.
I suppose today will mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Even more amazing, is that after all this time, not only are those four dark years in American history still being commemorated, in many ways the war is still being fought.
Let me add a third posit: I am a Southerner, who’s always referred to the conflict as “the Civil War,” and I know, have always known and was always taught that the main reason this war occurred was slavery. No states’ rights, no Southern freedom, just slavery. A fourth posit would be that I learned this fact in every Virginian and American history class I took, and those were taught by Southerners. I have no doubt that, elsewhere in the South, students were taught to avoid the slavery issue at all costs; and if that were the case, they were taught wrong.
I also suppose that today is the day that a great many people in the US, and in particular, on the blogosphere, would love to see most everyone from South of the Potomac, dressed in sackcloth and ashes and doing some sort of atonement. It’s something we live with every day, especially if you log onto the internet and happen upon a usually embarrassing subject concerning Southerners – most generally, concerning people by the name of DeMint or Gomert or Perry or Paul, or – if you’re Virginian – Bob Marshall, which results in a spew of invective from various people who, otherwise, purport to be fair-minded, tolerant and Progressive people, whose mind and hearts don’t contain an ounce, let alone a whiff, of prejudice.
Those fair-minded souls cry out for us to secede again and stay seceded, they deride us for being too dependent on Northern Federal subsidy money. They say we’re dumb. We’re stupid, because most of the states found down this way are red states, whose working class and working poor citizens vote against their interests for the Republican Party. And, dammit, the Democrats want to help them!
Hell, every time a high-profiled Southerner does something stupid, we’re all lumped into one benighted category of shitkicking, inbred inhabitants of Deliveranceland, and the United States should have let us go when we left and be damned.
Please allow me to correct a few misguided assumptions you Northern folk might harbour still about the South. I can’t claim to speak for all Southerners, not even all Virginians, but I’d hazard a guess I speak for a fair few.
First of all, was the Civil War a treasonous act on the part of the South? Most definitely, and its enablers were traitors. Jefferson Davis, an ancestor of the current President of the United States, was imprisoned for several years following the war, and died a citizen of no country, having been stripped of his American citizenship. His widow moved to New York City and became close friends with the widow of Ulysses S Grant.
Robert E Lee, who was also stripped of his citizenship, became president of what is now known as Washington and Lee University. His citizenship was restored, posthumously, by an Act of Congress, during the administration of Gerald Ford. Lee is also a lateral ancestor of the current President.
Many firebreathing Firebaggers today still call for Lee and Davis to have been hung as traitors. You’ll have to blame the United States government of the day, if they weren’t, unless you’d like to see done what the returning English nobility did to the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, and have them disinterred and their bones slung over the boughs of a tree someplace to rattle in the wind. As Lincoln was adamant about wanting as peaceful a period of reconstruction as was possible, it’s highly unlikely he would have called for the blood of either Davis or Lee. Too much had been shed already.
Speaking of which, the United States lost more men in the four years of the Civil War, than they have in any war in which we’ve participated ever since. It’s easy to figure out why – Americans were fighting Americans. Since the Civil War, Southerners have made up a large proportion of the United States army, as well. The great-great-great grandson of Jeb Stuart is an orthopedic surgeon, who served as a military surgeon at Walter Reed. The military offers a career to thousands of young, mostly rural, Southerners – white, black and brown – in dying towns where jobs are few and bad and prospects are even worse than bad. They are the ones who go three or four times to the Middle East and some die there.
Are there people who celebrate a Lost Cause? Probably, but those people are a waning bunch, and most of the ones who truly believe there was any glory and romance in any sort of war are living in Cloud Kookooland and worshipping Aqua Buddha. Anyway, the ones who dress in period costumes and prance about at Secession Balls, most generally vote Republican. How’s that for an oxymoron? The descendents of Confederate Cavaliers and prototypical Scarlett O’Haras are firm adherents of the Party of Lincoln. Jim DeMint’s three times great-grandaddy would most likely beat his ass, did he know of Jim’s party political affiliation.
Most Southerners, however, certainly most Democrats and a fair few Republicans, are pretty sanguine about something that happened so long ago. For most of us, the Civil War ended in 1865. We lost. We’re over it. We just pity the people who cling onto it for something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality and who still look back upon a time they never knew with nostalgia. Yet, we realists also disdain people who take the moral high ground and lump all of us together in the same boat, as if the Civil War and slavery had nothing to do with anyone in the North or the West of the country.
You need to take a look in your attics.
When the Civil War began, the one city outside of the South who was most sympathetic to the Confederacy and slavery, surprisingly, was New York City. New York was the biggest domestic customer for the South’s main product, cotton. In the heady days leading up to the actual beginning of hostilities, immediatel after Lincoln won the 1860 election, New York’s mayor briefly mooted the idea of New York City actually seceding, itself, as a separate entity; before it saw sense and thought otherwise.
And after the war, Confederates left the South. Like a lot of other people, they moved West to Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Oregon, California. That’s why you find chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans in every state, just like the Tea Party. So a lot of people baying the loudest about supposed neo-Confederates and the traitors of the past, should do a little genealogical research. Chances are, there’s a full-blown traitor someplace on your family tree all decked out in gray.
There’s another thorn in my side, as well, I’d like to extricate, regarding the South. One of the most vocal people who propagates the myth about the Southerner-as-shitkicker is Bill Maher. To Bill, all Southerners are named “Billy Bob,” are toothless, have sex with their sisters and are Civil War enactors. Maher reserves special scorn for the latter, but neglects to recognise the fact that thousands of people from his home state of New Jersey are also reenactors. That also stands to reason – Civil War military buffs are found everywhere. Who the hell do you think reenacts the part of the Yankee Army?
Most of these people are military history geeks, out for the authenticity. They’re universal. In England, the Cavaliers and Roundheads reenact battles at country fairs and fetes annually. There’s about as much harm in what Civil War reenactors do as what is done by their counterparts in the UK, reenacting another Civil War fought two hundred years previously. In fact, in London, there are two predominant statues in front of the Houses of Parliament.
One is a statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who committed the ultimate act of treason in removing Charles I’s head from his body. The other is the statue of another traitor, George Washington. The sculpture was given as a gift to the British government by the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia – the sort of gift, you imagine the former first colony giving the old imperial power as a proverbial raspberry, whilst the recipients smiled politely through gritted teeth.
I don’t know why there are statues of Confederate soldiers in every Southern town. I suppose such statues denotes honouring traitors, but a lot of the men killed, both North and South, were little more than kids, somebody’s children, brothers, husbands, sweethearts, the usual human fodder from every war. Maybe they were somebody’s memories.
A lot of historians have attempted to talk about this war as more of an exaggerated family quarrel, when in fact families were literally rent asunder during the war. Theodore Roosevelt’s father served in the Union army; his Georgia born-and-bred mother supported the Confederacy in which both her brothers served. One of my great-great-great grandfathers was a Virginia born-and-bred Unionist, who sent his sons North to serve in an Illinois regiment. Another great-great-great grandfather was killed at the age of 30, whilst serving in the Confederate Army.
Heritage is a funny thing. You can’t really do anything about it. You can apologise for it, but how long does an apology last when one apologises for actions done by relatives so far in the past, no one living even remembers the person?
The Civil War was a tragedy. It had the potential to destroy a relatively young country, one founded on the principle of liberty, and whilst it gave liberty to millions of people unjustly shackled in slavery, we all know that another century passed before real equality was achieved, if ever. And if people would stop spitting so much invective, they’d actually see how much the South really has moved on and progressed since those times, although there are forces at work within the United States now, who’d like to take, not only the South but the rest of the nation back to antebellum times.
In the 20th Century, every Democrat elected to the White House, bar FDR and Kennedy was a Southerner. Woodrow Wilson’s father owned slaves, as did both sets of Harry Truman’s grandparents. Lyndon Johnson’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy. As mentioned, Barack Obama has Confederate as well as Irish roots. The South has given us Bill Hicks, Ann Richards and Miss Molly Ivins. It’s given us Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and George Clooney. The South gave America its first African American governer before Derval Patrick was out of grade school. The South was responsible for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Sam Ervin. It’s given us Elvis and R E M.
That doesn’t mean everything good is Southern. We still have our assholes. We still have the legacy of Bull Connor, George Wallace and Lester Maddux. We had Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker. Now we have Terry Jones. We also have to claim Pat Buchanan and Ed Schultz.
We have Jim DeMint and Joe Wilson. And the anomaly that’s Alan West. We have right-to-work, and we promoted nullification – and both those concepts seem to have taken hold elsewhere in the US, so I suppose we’re all Mississippi or South Carolina now. I’d really love to be able to hang my head in shame and say we have Virginia’s version of the Three Stooges in Bob McDonnell, Ken Cuccinelli and George Allen, but these fools are Yankee Carpetbagger remnants. I’ll leave the honour of their upbringings and attitudes to Pennsylvania, California and the Jersey shore, as they were men when they set foot in the Commonwealth, but it doesn’t do anything positive for the South that these men are promoting attitudes and ideas which really should be deader than a dodo.
We have Huck and Newt.
Would I love to see the Democratic party take back and reclaim the South? Of course, I would. The rural poor and working poor in the South were a tranche of the Democrats’ most loyal supporters, until a new breed of Democrat decided these people weren’t worth the bother. Some still think that way today. Books have been written specifically to show the Democratic Party could control government without ever considering the South, as if we are an irrelevancy, as if Southern liberals – liberals, because I think it’s important that Democrats embrace that reliable word once again – hide in the shadows and only make the ubiquitous appearance when their self-proclaimed saviour, Bill Maher, strolls into town.
The Southern working-class and working poor have suffered a thirty-year con by the Republican party, who walked the walk and talked the talk realistically enough to convince this demographic that the Republicans were the real guardians of their values. They effected this with operatives who were local to the areas in which they peddled their political wares. Maybe it’s time we took at least one leaf from the Republicans’ books. It’s going to take time, and it’s going to be a long slog; but it’s a price worth paying and it will pay dividends. The people the Democrats left languishing in the political wilderness forty years ago were the sons and daughters of New Deal Democrats. Maybe if we can get some of those New Deal Democrats back into the fold, we might be able to reap some New Deal legislation.
All we have to do is learn to talk and, more importantly, to listen.
And we all don’t like NASCAR either.
I suppose today will mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Even more amazing, is that after all this time, not only are those four dark years in American history still being commemorated, in many ways the war is still being fought.
Let me add a third posit: I am a Southerner, who’s always referred to the conflict as “the Civil War,” and I know, have always known and was always taught that the main reason this war occurred was slavery. No states’ rights, no Southern freedom, just slavery. A fourth posit would be that I learned this fact in every Virginian and American history class I took, and those were taught by Southerners. I have no doubt that, elsewhere in the South, students were taught to avoid the slavery issue at all costs; and if that were the case, they were taught wrong.
I also suppose that today is the day that a great many people in the US, and in particular, on the blogosphere, would love to see most everyone from South of the Potomac, dressed in sackcloth and ashes and doing some sort of atonement. It’s something we live with every day, especially if you log onto the internet and happen upon a usually embarrassing subject concerning Southerners – most generally, concerning people by the name of DeMint or Gomert or Perry or Paul, or – if you’re Virginian – Bob Marshall, which results in a spew of invective from various people who, otherwise, purport to be fair-minded, tolerant and Progressive people, whose mind and hearts don’t contain an ounce, let alone a whiff, of prejudice.
Those fair-minded souls cry out for us to secede again and stay seceded, they deride us for being too dependent on Northern Federal subsidy money. They say we’re dumb. We’re stupid, because most of the states found down this way are red states, whose working class and working poor citizens vote against their interests for the Republican Party. And, dammit, the Democrats want to help them!
Hell, every time a high-profiled Southerner does something stupid, we’re all lumped into one benighted category of shitkicking, inbred inhabitants of Deliveranceland, and the United States should have let us go when we left and be damned.
Please allow me to correct a few misguided assumptions you Northern folk might harbour still about the South. I can’t claim to speak for all Southerners, not even all Virginians, but I’d hazard a guess I speak for a fair few.
First of all, was the Civil War a treasonous act on the part of the South? Most definitely, and its enablers were traitors. Jefferson Davis, an ancestor of the current President of the United States, was imprisoned for several years following the war, and died a citizen of no country, having been stripped of his American citizenship. His widow moved to New York City and became close friends with the widow of Ulysses S Grant.
Robert E Lee, who was also stripped of his citizenship, became president of what is now known as Washington and Lee University. His citizenship was restored, posthumously, by an Act of Congress, during the administration of Gerald Ford. Lee is also a lateral ancestor of the current President.
Many firebreathing Firebaggers today still call for Lee and Davis to have been hung as traitors. You’ll have to blame the United States government of the day, if they weren’t, unless you’d like to see done what the returning English nobility did to the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, and have them disinterred and their bones slung over the boughs of a tree someplace to rattle in the wind. As Lincoln was adamant about wanting as peaceful a period of reconstruction as was possible, it’s highly unlikely he would have called for the blood of either Davis or Lee. Too much had been shed already.
Speaking of which, the United States lost more men in the four years of the Civil War, than they have in any war in which we’ve participated ever since. It’s easy to figure out why – Americans were fighting Americans. Since the Civil War, Southerners have made up a large proportion of the United States army, as well. The great-great-great grandson of Jeb Stuart is an orthopedic surgeon, who served as a military surgeon at Walter Reed. The military offers a career to thousands of young, mostly rural, Southerners – white, black and brown – in dying towns where jobs are few and bad and prospects are even worse than bad. They are the ones who go three or four times to the Middle East and some die there.
Are there people who celebrate a Lost Cause? Probably, but those people are a waning bunch, and most of the ones who truly believe there was any glory and romance in any sort of war are living in Cloud Kookooland and worshipping Aqua Buddha. Anyway, the ones who dress in period costumes and prance about at Secession Balls, most generally vote Republican. How’s that for an oxymoron? The descendents of Confederate Cavaliers and prototypical Scarlett O’Haras are firm adherents of the Party of Lincoln. Jim DeMint’s three times great-grandaddy would most likely beat his ass, did he know of Jim’s party political affiliation.
Most Southerners, however, certainly most Democrats and a fair few Republicans, are pretty sanguine about something that happened so long ago. For most of us, the Civil War ended in 1865. We lost. We’re over it. We just pity the people who cling onto it for something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with reality and who still look back upon a time they never knew with nostalgia. Yet, we realists also disdain people who take the moral high ground and lump all of us together in the same boat, as if the Civil War and slavery had nothing to do with anyone in the North or the West of the country.
You need to take a look in your attics.
When the Civil War began, the one city outside of the South who was most sympathetic to the Confederacy and slavery, surprisingly, was New York City. New York was the biggest domestic customer for the South’s main product, cotton. In the heady days leading up to the actual beginning of hostilities, immediatel after Lincoln won the 1860 election, New York’s mayor briefly mooted the idea of New York City actually seceding, itself, as a separate entity; before it saw sense and thought otherwise.
And after the war, Confederates left the South. Like a lot of other people, they moved West to Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Oregon, California. That’s why you find chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans in every state, just like the Tea Party. So a lot of people baying the loudest about supposed neo-Confederates and the traitors of the past, should do a little genealogical research. Chances are, there’s a full-blown traitor someplace on your family tree all decked out in gray.
There’s another thorn in my side, as well, I’d like to extricate, regarding the South. One of the most vocal people who propagates the myth about the Southerner-as-shitkicker is Bill Maher. To Bill, all Southerners are named “Billy Bob,” are toothless, have sex with their sisters and are Civil War enactors. Maher reserves special scorn for the latter, but neglects to recognise the fact that thousands of people from his home state of New Jersey are also reenactors. That also stands to reason – Civil War military buffs are found everywhere. Who the hell do you think reenacts the part of the Yankee Army?
Most of these people are military history geeks, out for the authenticity. They’re universal. In England, the Cavaliers and Roundheads reenact battles at country fairs and fetes annually. There’s about as much harm in what Civil War reenactors do as what is done by their counterparts in the UK, reenacting another Civil War fought two hundred years previously. In fact, in London, there are two predominant statues in front of the Houses of Parliament.
One is a statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who committed the ultimate act of treason in removing Charles I’s head from his body. The other is the statue of another traitor, George Washington. The sculpture was given as a gift to the British government by the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia – the sort of gift, you imagine the former first colony giving the old imperial power as a proverbial raspberry, whilst the recipients smiled politely through gritted teeth.
I don’t know why there are statues of Confederate soldiers in every Southern town. I suppose such statues denotes honouring traitors, but a lot of the men killed, both North and South, were little more than kids, somebody’s children, brothers, husbands, sweethearts, the usual human fodder from every war. Maybe they were somebody’s memories.
A lot of historians have attempted to talk about this war as more of an exaggerated family quarrel, when in fact families were literally rent asunder during the war. Theodore Roosevelt’s father served in the Union army; his Georgia born-and-bred mother supported the Confederacy in which both her brothers served. One of my great-great-great grandfathers was a Virginia born-and-bred Unionist, who sent his sons North to serve in an Illinois regiment. Another great-great-great grandfather was killed at the age of 30, whilst serving in the Confederate Army.
Heritage is a funny thing. You can’t really do anything about it. You can apologise for it, but how long does an apology last when one apologises for actions done by relatives so far in the past, no one living even remembers the person?
The Civil War was a tragedy. It had the potential to destroy a relatively young country, one founded on the principle of liberty, and whilst it gave liberty to millions of people unjustly shackled in slavery, we all know that another century passed before real equality was achieved, if ever. And if people would stop spitting so much invective, they’d actually see how much the South really has moved on and progressed since those times, although there are forces at work within the United States now, who’d like to take, not only the South but the rest of the nation back to antebellum times.
In the 20th Century, every Democrat elected to the White House, bar FDR and Kennedy was a Southerner. Woodrow Wilson’s father owned slaves, as did both sets of Harry Truman’s grandparents. Lyndon Johnson’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy. As mentioned, Barack Obama has Confederate as well as Irish roots. The South has given us Bill Hicks, Ann Richards and Miss Molly Ivins. It’s given us Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and George Clooney. The South gave America its first African American governer before Derval Patrick was out of grade school. The South was responsible for Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Sam Ervin. It’s given us Elvis and R E M.
That doesn’t mean everything good is Southern. We still have our assholes. We still have the legacy of Bull Connor, George Wallace and Lester Maddux. We had Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker. Now we have Terry Jones. We also have to claim Pat Buchanan and Ed Schultz.
We have Jim DeMint and Joe Wilson. And the anomaly that’s Alan West. We have right-to-work, and we promoted nullification – and both those concepts seem to have taken hold elsewhere in the US, so I suppose we’re all Mississippi or South Carolina now. I’d really love to be able to hang my head in shame and say we have Virginia’s version of the Three Stooges in Bob McDonnell, Ken Cuccinelli and George Allen, but these fools are Yankee Carpetbagger remnants. I’ll leave the honour of their upbringings and attitudes to Pennsylvania, California and the Jersey shore, as they were men when they set foot in the Commonwealth, but it doesn’t do anything positive for the South that these men are promoting attitudes and ideas which really should be deader than a dodo.
We have Huck and Newt.
Would I love to see the Democratic party take back and reclaim the South? Of course, I would. The rural poor and working poor in the South were a tranche of the Democrats’ most loyal supporters, until a new breed of Democrat decided these people weren’t worth the bother. Some still think that way today. Books have been written specifically to show the Democratic Party could control government without ever considering the South, as if we are an irrelevancy, as if Southern liberals – liberals, because I think it’s important that Democrats embrace that reliable word once again – hide in the shadows and only make the ubiquitous appearance when their self-proclaimed saviour, Bill Maher, strolls into town.
The Southern working-class and working poor have suffered a thirty-year con by the Republican party, who walked the walk and talked the talk realistically enough to convince this demographic that the Republicans were the real guardians of their values. They effected this with operatives who were local to the areas in which they peddled their political wares. Maybe it’s time we took at least one leaf from the Republicans’ books. It’s going to take time, and it’s going to be a long slog; but it’s a price worth paying and it will pay dividends. The people the Democrats left languishing in the political wilderness forty years ago were the sons and daughters of New Deal Democrats. Maybe if we can get some of those New Deal Democrats back into the fold, we might be able to reap some New Deal legislation.
All we have to do is learn to talk and, more importantly, to listen.
And we all don’t like NASCAR either.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Time to Stand Up to Undermining Political Pundits
I see King of the Craven Assholes, Cenk Uygar – he who, until recently, used to be a neocon – is leading the charge on DailyKos in the “Obama Caved” stakes regarding the budget.
The punditry of the Left has left me agog this week, but as it’s late where I am, I’m saving some brief ire tonight to fire firmly in the direction of Cenk’s more than ample ass.
His idiocy about Obama failing in the budget negotiations knows no bounds, and – as per usual – he has his sheeple following blindly, all polishing up their gratuitous criticism, which is de rigueur for anyone wanting admission to the Obama-Haters-and-Baiters Club, currently occupied by a curious conglomeration of Teabaggers and a certain species of so-called Progressives.
Yes, let’s blame Obama, shall we? Because we all know he could have done so much better at standing up to the Speaker of the House. I mean, look at everytime either of them appeared before the camera – the President, cool, collected and looking a bit weary and irritable in the way a perturbed parent does when presented with a spoiled brat to control. Then there was Mr Speaker, sweating and all aglow in orange preoccupation.
Of course, Cenk, we all know that the President should have just told Boehner and co to kiss his black ass (thus satisfying the desire of your ilk for the President to act in the ghetto manner you so knowing ascribe to your idea of his race’s behaviour) and walked from the room. The government would have shut down. People wouldn’t have received their Social Security checks or their disability or unemployment payments, Federal workers wouldn’t have been paid (many were even told there would be no back pay this time), the troops in harm’s way would be expected to fight for free.
And who knows how long this would have gone on … but hey! Ne’mind, we’d just have blamed Obama for that too. What was the alternative? Give in and defund the EPA and Planned Parenthood, for lesser cuts? At least the President held strong from the beginning in vouchsafing these two federally funded institutions, prime targets in the culture war initiated by the Republicans. Or doesn’t that matter to Cenk and his cronies? I’m beginning to wonder, especially since at least two high-profiled Progressive media bots have even likened rape to “hooey.”
Every week, there’s something new which some 24/7 cable big mouth has to use as a stick with which to beat this President about something else. As if they know better than the man at the helm. Cenk’s got room to talk. He so totally didn’t understand the President’s motives behind his dealings with the Egyptian revolution that Chuck Todd was despatched to his program to calm him down and stop him from embarrassing himself, in desperately trying to convince two guests that Obama meant the opposite to what he’d actually said in a speech.
Really, Cenk, do yourself a favour and go someplace else. Your Obama hatred is so palpable that people are seriously in danger of mistaking it for the wrong kind of prejudice.
And if you’re seeking to case blame and aspersion for this budget fiasco, cop this:-
Try blaming the Democrats first, because this is the 2011 budget which should have been passed last September, as you well know, when there was both a Democratic majority in the House and a bigger one in the Senate. But the fools on the Hill were all too concerned with hitting the campaign trail and trying to distance themselves from the policies they’d passed and on which they’d allowed, in their timidity and detachment, to be railroaded and spun pejoratively by the Teabaggers, that they seriously didn’t have time to pass this budget and punted.
And if that’s not enough for you, try blaming the voters; because it’s they who gave us a Houseful of Teabagging neophytes who’ve turned themselves into the proverbial tail that’s wagging a sniveling dog and a majority of only four Democratic Senators in the upper house, one of whom is Joe Manchin.
And better yet, Cenk, blame all your so-called Progressive friends, you know, the ones who listen to your rantings and whine daily about how much they hate Obama, how he’s done nothing and achieved even less, or – worse – how he’s no different to Bush. And how they took the advice of your friend and colleague Ed Schultz, who, on several occasions, implored the sheeple not to vote in order to teach Obama and the Democrats a lesson.
Yes, Cenk, you and all your cohorts should be made to remember those simple facts whenever you see Eric Cantor’s smirking face on camera.
Or then again, maybe you’re just a ratfucker who needs exposing, himself.
The punditry of the Left has left me agog this week, but as it’s late where I am, I’m saving some brief ire tonight to fire firmly in the direction of Cenk’s more than ample ass.
His idiocy about Obama failing in the budget negotiations knows no bounds, and – as per usual – he has his sheeple following blindly, all polishing up their gratuitous criticism, which is de rigueur for anyone wanting admission to the Obama-Haters-and-Baiters Club, currently occupied by a curious conglomeration of Teabaggers and a certain species of so-called Progressives.
Yes, let’s blame Obama, shall we? Because we all know he could have done so much better at standing up to the Speaker of the House. I mean, look at everytime either of them appeared before the camera – the President, cool, collected and looking a bit weary and irritable in the way a perturbed parent does when presented with a spoiled brat to control. Then there was Mr Speaker, sweating and all aglow in orange preoccupation.
Of course, Cenk, we all know that the President should have just told Boehner and co to kiss his black ass (thus satisfying the desire of your ilk for the President to act in the ghetto manner you so knowing ascribe to your idea of his race’s behaviour) and walked from the room. The government would have shut down. People wouldn’t have received their Social Security checks or their disability or unemployment payments, Federal workers wouldn’t have been paid (many were even told there would be no back pay this time), the troops in harm’s way would be expected to fight for free.
And who knows how long this would have gone on … but hey! Ne’mind, we’d just have blamed Obama for that too. What was the alternative? Give in and defund the EPA and Planned Parenthood, for lesser cuts? At least the President held strong from the beginning in vouchsafing these two federally funded institutions, prime targets in the culture war initiated by the Republicans. Or doesn’t that matter to Cenk and his cronies? I’m beginning to wonder, especially since at least two high-profiled Progressive media bots have even likened rape to “hooey.”
Every week, there’s something new which some 24/7 cable big mouth has to use as a stick with which to beat this President about something else. As if they know better than the man at the helm. Cenk’s got room to talk. He so totally didn’t understand the President’s motives behind his dealings with the Egyptian revolution that Chuck Todd was despatched to his program to calm him down and stop him from embarrassing himself, in desperately trying to convince two guests that Obama meant the opposite to what he’d actually said in a speech.
Really, Cenk, do yourself a favour and go someplace else. Your Obama hatred is so palpable that people are seriously in danger of mistaking it for the wrong kind of prejudice.
And if you’re seeking to case blame and aspersion for this budget fiasco, cop this:-
Try blaming the Democrats first, because this is the 2011 budget which should have been passed last September, as you well know, when there was both a Democratic majority in the House and a bigger one in the Senate. But the fools on the Hill were all too concerned with hitting the campaign trail and trying to distance themselves from the policies they’d passed and on which they’d allowed, in their timidity and detachment, to be railroaded and spun pejoratively by the Teabaggers, that they seriously didn’t have time to pass this budget and punted.
And if that’s not enough for you, try blaming the voters; because it’s they who gave us a Houseful of Teabagging neophytes who’ve turned themselves into the proverbial tail that’s wagging a sniveling dog and a majority of only four Democratic Senators in the upper house, one of whom is Joe Manchin.
And better yet, Cenk, blame all your so-called Progressive friends, you know, the ones who listen to your rantings and whine daily about how much they hate Obama, how he’s done nothing and achieved even less, or – worse – how he’s no different to Bush. And how they took the advice of your friend and colleague Ed Schultz, who, on several occasions, implored the sheeple not to vote in order to teach Obama and the Democrats a lesson.
Yes, Cenk, you and all your cohorts should be made to remember those simple facts whenever you see Eric Cantor’s smirking face on camera.
Or then again, maybe you’re just a ratfucker who needs exposing, himself.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Back to the Future, or Fun with Right and Left. Not.
I was raised by a father who couldn’t abide the Republican Party. In fact, I don’t ever recall a time in his life when he didn’t refer to the GOP collectively as “those god-damned Republicans.” When Mills Godwin, a Democratic governor of Virginia, defected, mid-term, to the Republicans, my father refused to stand as he took the podium in 1976 in order to confer degrees at the University of Virginia. It galled him to no end when I brought home a boyfriend from college, who happened to be a Republican, and he never ceased to remind my mother’s youngest brother, who had a habit of turning up, unannounced, along with his family just in time for Sunday dinner, that the Republican uncle was eating food cooked in a Democratic kitchen.
So even though I have Republican friends, I really don’t have any love lost for the Republican party, in general. And this present reincarnation of them, in particular.
What’s really angered me is the fact that the government is about to be shut down because neither side can come to agreement about the budget, but the real disagreement isn’t fiscal, it’s idealogical. I suppose history will refer to this budget crisis as the “Abortion budget,” because that’s the real sticking point in all of this kerfuffle. The Republicans in the House, led by Luddite Mike Pence, are using abortion and women’s preventitive health rights as a stick with which to beat the Democrats, holding them ransome to a cause they’ve sought to pursue for forty years.
Until recently, this was really a non-starter. It’s only since the rise of the Tea Party movement that these cockroaches, funded by the real Kockroaches, have even deigned to seek light. This tactic, this de-funding of Planned Parenthood, is part and parcel of a party devoid of ideas and driven by sheer, mean idealogy. Ever since the Republicans took power in the House of Representatives in January, supposedly reflecting the will of “the American people,” they’ve done sweet Fanny Adams.
For all his bluff, bluster and teary-eyed talk about the American people having spoken, John Boehner hasn’t begun to address the much-promised issue of jobs; rather, he’s actually thrown the unemployed on the scrapheap and promised them company, with that off-the-cuff and callous remark about the proposed Republican budget being responsible for the loss of 700,000 jobs.
So be it … Amen … He gave his flourescent orange blessing to the generation of the workless, whom he can only identify as “workshy.” His life is the classic tale of poor white Yankee shanty trash, who’s pulled himself up by the bootstraps to a reasonably successful life – achieved by gratuitous bootlicking of superiors with money and influence – who turns on others of his social origins as abject failures. Dickins would have been thinking of John Boehner, or his ancestor, when he created the character of Uriah Heep.
No wonder he drinks to the point that his skin reveals incipient liver damage, and he cries on a dime. Alcohol abusers tear easily. And now he, like many other most probably moderate Republicans, is craven to the demands of the Tea Party’s most dangerous nutters. Why? Because he fears for his job. His job.
If he doesn’t play ball according to their rules, he’ll get primaried in 2012, by a candidate of their choice. As will any number of other Republicans, even the ragtag bunch who are seriously thinking of running for President. It’s almost a game of whoever veers the most to the Right being declared the winner, but what a dangerous game it is.
These people want to deny poor and working class women the right to preventive healthcare. With Planned Parenting’s defunding goes their only recourse to breast and ovarian cancer screening, as well as birth control advice. Defunding that organisation with the palliative assurance that the individual states will take up funding such services is just a shoddy sleight-of-hand. We all know how any state with a Republican governor would disperse those funds. What an insult to people’s intelligence, and what an insult to women!
Even more of an oxymoron is the fact that in many of the red states, a fair number of women who take advantage of services offered by Planned Parenthood, probably voted for these people, in good faith because these Tea Party candidate types are people of faith, people who held the same values they did, or presented themselves as such.
The Republicans have made this budget all about abortion, and, no matter what the outcome, that wedge issue will raise its head again in 2012, because the next general election will be all about culture war, simply because the Republicans are devoid of any original ideas as to how to deal with our 21st Century problems, and so the 2012 battle is to be one waged for the collective soul of America - whether it’s to be the America of mom, apple pie and white men in power for time immemorial, or whether we have a future of diversity with the real meaning of E pluribus unum becoming the defining norm.
Already, since the election of the first African American President, we’ve seen racism re-emerge on both Right and Left, in varying degrees of subtlety. A Teabagger carries a poster of the President as an African chieftan; the Left call him “the Affirmative Action President.” Newt Gingrich refers to the President as a Kenyan; Jane Hamsher calls him “bugaloo Bush.” Tea Party controlled school boards in certain states virtually reinstate a system of racial segregation, whilst the 10 most segregated cities in the United States are all found up North, including New York City and Los Angeles.
With this assault on Planned Parenthood, we’re seeing women’s rights being systematically destroyed, not only by the men in power (and not just white men, if you count the benighted Alan West), but also the mean girls’ sorority championed by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Already two GOP Presidential contenders have said that, if elected, they would work towards the repeal of the repeal of DADT.
Nostalgia for the past is one thing, but this is ridiculous. Ridiculous and dangerous, considering the corporate powers who are empowering these dolts from the Right in their pursuit of days of future past, but it’s food for thought.
At the end of all this, the government will probably shut down, and the President will probably cop the blame for it, thanks to the machinations of the media, and the equanimity of hate emanating from the Right and the Left. But let’s put the blame where it really should lie. This is all down to the fact that we are lumbered with a Republican House and a decreased majority in the Senate. As someone else said yesterday, all that stands between us and the Thunderdome is the President and four Democratic Senators (and three of them are Joe Manchin, Bill Nelson and Mary Landrieu.) So the real blame for the fact that we’re about to achieve government shutdown, lies with the voters who empowered this majority in the House … and as much as the voters who chose not to vote and, thus, gave tacit permission to these clowns to wreak havoc.
And that’s a blame shared equally by the extreme Right as much as the extreme Left. I hope Ed Schultz’s ears are burning.
So even though I have Republican friends, I really don’t have any love lost for the Republican party, in general. And this present reincarnation of them, in particular.
What’s really angered me is the fact that the government is about to be shut down because neither side can come to agreement about the budget, but the real disagreement isn’t fiscal, it’s idealogical. I suppose history will refer to this budget crisis as the “Abortion budget,” because that’s the real sticking point in all of this kerfuffle. The Republicans in the House, led by Luddite Mike Pence, are using abortion and women’s preventitive health rights as a stick with which to beat the Democrats, holding them ransome to a cause they’ve sought to pursue for forty years.
Until recently, this was really a non-starter. It’s only since the rise of the Tea Party movement that these cockroaches, funded by the real Kockroaches, have even deigned to seek light. This tactic, this de-funding of Planned Parenthood, is part and parcel of a party devoid of ideas and driven by sheer, mean idealogy. Ever since the Republicans took power in the House of Representatives in January, supposedly reflecting the will of “the American people,” they’ve done sweet Fanny Adams.
For all his bluff, bluster and teary-eyed talk about the American people having spoken, John Boehner hasn’t begun to address the much-promised issue of jobs; rather, he’s actually thrown the unemployed on the scrapheap and promised them company, with that off-the-cuff and callous remark about the proposed Republican budget being responsible for the loss of 700,000 jobs.
So be it … Amen … He gave his flourescent orange blessing to the generation of the workless, whom he can only identify as “workshy.” His life is the classic tale of poor white Yankee shanty trash, who’s pulled himself up by the bootstraps to a reasonably successful life – achieved by gratuitous bootlicking of superiors with money and influence – who turns on others of his social origins as abject failures. Dickins would have been thinking of John Boehner, or his ancestor, when he created the character of Uriah Heep.
No wonder he drinks to the point that his skin reveals incipient liver damage, and he cries on a dime. Alcohol abusers tear easily. And now he, like many other most probably moderate Republicans, is craven to the demands of the Tea Party’s most dangerous nutters. Why? Because he fears for his job. His job.
If he doesn’t play ball according to their rules, he’ll get primaried in 2012, by a candidate of their choice. As will any number of other Republicans, even the ragtag bunch who are seriously thinking of running for President. It’s almost a game of whoever veers the most to the Right being declared the winner, but what a dangerous game it is.
These people want to deny poor and working class women the right to preventive healthcare. With Planned Parenting’s defunding goes their only recourse to breast and ovarian cancer screening, as well as birth control advice. Defunding that organisation with the palliative assurance that the individual states will take up funding such services is just a shoddy sleight-of-hand. We all know how any state with a Republican governor would disperse those funds. What an insult to people’s intelligence, and what an insult to women!
Even more of an oxymoron is the fact that in many of the red states, a fair number of women who take advantage of services offered by Planned Parenthood, probably voted for these people, in good faith because these Tea Party candidate types are people of faith, people who held the same values they did, or presented themselves as such.
The Republicans have made this budget all about abortion, and, no matter what the outcome, that wedge issue will raise its head again in 2012, because the next general election will be all about culture war, simply because the Republicans are devoid of any original ideas as to how to deal with our 21st Century problems, and so the 2012 battle is to be one waged for the collective soul of America - whether it’s to be the America of mom, apple pie and white men in power for time immemorial, or whether we have a future of diversity with the real meaning of E pluribus unum becoming the defining norm.
Already, since the election of the first African American President, we’ve seen racism re-emerge on both Right and Left, in varying degrees of subtlety. A Teabagger carries a poster of the President as an African chieftan; the Left call him “the Affirmative Action President.” Newt Gingrich refers to the President as a Kenyan; Jane Hamsher calls him “bugaloo Bush.” Tea Party controlled school boards in certain states virtually reinstate a system of racial segregation, whilst the 10 most segregated cities in the United States are all found up North, including New York City and Los Angeles.
With this assault on Planned Parenthood, we’re seeing women’s rights being systematically destroyed, not only by the men in power (and not just white men, if you count the benighted Alan West), but also the mean girls’ sorority championed by Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Already two GOP Presidential contenders have said that, if elected, they would work towards the repeal of the repeal of DADT.
Nostalgia for the past is one thing, but this is ridiculous. Ridiculous and dangerous, considering the corporate powers who are empowering these dolts from the Right in their pursuit of days of future past, but it’s food for thought.
At the end of all this, the government will probably shut down, and the President will probably cop the blame for it, thanks to the machinations of the media, and the equanimity of hate emanating from the Right and the Left. But let’s put the blame where it really should lie. This is all down to the fact that we are lumbered with a Republican House and a decreased majority in the Senate. As someone else said yesterday, all that stands between us and the Thunderdome is the President and four Democratic Senators (and three of them are Joe Manchin, Bill Nelson and Mary Landrieu.) So the real blame for the fact that we’re about to achieve government shutdown, lies with the voters who empowered this majority in the House … and as much as the voters who chose not to vote and, thus, gave tacit permission to these clowns to wreak havoc.
And that’s a blame shared equally by the extreme Right as much as the extreme Left. I hope Ed Schultz’s ears are burning.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Where's the Base?
I always hated math in high school, mostly because I disliked the teacher; but I need to qualify that and say it was actually “higher maths” I hated – the second year of algebra and trigonometry. Prior to that, I was really rather good, especially in geometry.
If I remember nothing more from my geometry course, I remember this: that the base of a triangle is its broadest part. “Base” means that bit of a triangle or a building that supports the structure at its lowest level. It grounds or anchors said structure, so it must be that the base of a movement grounds or anchors said movement.
Now this is what I don’t understand: Poll after poll after poll has been taken throughouth the US, and consistently, the findings conclude that a full 20% of people polled identify themselves as either liberal or progressive, whilst 40% consider themselves moderate. We also know that roughly 40% polled call themselves conservative, and whilst the Tea Party element is truly proving itself to be more or less a fringe element, it’s pretty safe to say that the base of the Republican party consists of socially conservative religious people. So how can the media claim that the Democratic party’s base consists of a minority of voters. That’s really like turning a triangle upside down, but then, in a converse sort of way – considering the current Democratic kindergarten – wibbling, wobbling and falling is pretty much normal behaviour for its base.
Actually, I think the so-called progressive base of the Democratic party is something created in the mind of the media and promoted by them to feed the progressive addiction of not thinking critically. Many of these people seem to have forgotten the way our country was structured, by the Constitution, to govern – that each branch of government has certain obligations and duties and each branch keeps a rein on the other two. It’s why the President can’t legislate and has to keep himself above the petty squabbling of the politicos on the Hill. It’s also why those same politicos can effectively nullify an executive order.
But then, in our simplistic, time-saving, convenience-laden world, it’s all too easy to blame the President, especially this one.
Take the Gitmo kerfuffle, which is being blatantly presented in the press and media as the President reneging on a campaign promise, first to close the facility, and then to try all its inhabitants in the civil courts. Well, that’s another part of the Big Lie propaganda which seems au courant throughout our media-driven lives these days.
All of us remember that seminal moment when the President signed the executive order effecting the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year’s time, back in 2009, as his first act as President. In fact, throughout the 2008 campaign, that was one campaign promise both Obama and McCain pushed. The problem ensuing was basically logistical: Where would all these prisoners be housed until they were either tried or released? In fact, George Bush, the man who created the monster, had actually released some Gitmo prisoners, several of whom had rejoined their old Al Qaeda buddies.
Maybe some, if not all, of us remember the debate which raged throughout the spring of 2009 regarding the fates of these prisoners and where they should be housed post-Gitmo. Basically, the public, fuelled by the media, adopted a NIMBY approach – “not in my backyard.” When a disused maximum security prison in Illinois was put forward as the best and most logical place to contain these men, no less than Dick Durbin, DEMOCRAT, from the President’s home state, led the charge against that action. Apparently a maximum security facility in the United States isn’t enough to withstand the incomparable might of Al Qaeda – certainly not in the country where prisons are a big and effective business.
And maybe some, if not all, of us remember the following autumn, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, arguably the most important prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay and the mastermind of 9/11, would be tried in a civil trial in New York City, where his most devastating atrocity occurred. Almost immediately, some – if not all – of us remember Mayor Bloomberg lauding this decision. Who can forget Holder’s forceful rendering of this announcement, when he repeated the name of New York City twice, for obvious emphasis?
To say the all-controlling media were impressed with this decision would be an understatement, but almost immediately the backdraft began – led by Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, DEMOCRATS, of New York. Their chief concern would be that the cost would be far more than the city would be able to support; there was also the concern regarding businesses and private residences in the area where the trial would take place – access issues and losses of revenue. There would be congestion problems with traffic, coupled with a veritable circus caused by the convergence of the world’s media; then add to that the security risks, with the threat of, possibly, another Al Qaeda attack.
The list went on, whilst the DOJ searched for alternative venues for the trial and the Republicans pressed the argument about how these men should be tried by military tribunals. Pennsylvania was mooted, and Virginia, but both echoed the chorusof fright, uncertainty and doubt led by Schumer and Gilibrand.
The gist of the whole Gitmo saga was simply that it was railroaded and the President blind-sided by what was possibly the only genuine act of bi-partisanship ever engendered by this Congress of cowards and fools.
Yet, it’s all too easy and disingenuous to blame the President and brand him a coward and a caver.
Well, I suppose he did cave on this one, because he reversed his former stand and authorised military tribunals to be the method of trial for these prisoners, including the star event concerning Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Some, if not all, of us will remember how when the President announced this, earlier this year, he made a point of remarking that he had grave reservations about this procedure on two points, but Congress in their infinite wisdom and in waking from their slumber and remembering their role in the system of checks and balances, had rendered any thought of a civil trial virtually impossible.
In the meantime, the President’s running for reelection, and various pundits, reincarnations and natural inheritors of the old radical chic are managing to nudge and wink and subtly imply that there should be a primary candidate for the President. They’re worried, you see, about his abandoning his base for the more moderate of the party.
Do these people have a death wish for Democrats? Because by any mathematical calculation, 20% isn’t a very solid base. The people pushing the myth of Obama as the first post-racial President-cum-the Progressive’s singular disappointment are the natural successors and trust fund children of Tom Wolfe’s radical chic, the ueber rich, super-cool cafe society types who adopted Civil Rights seven years after the fact as an enhancement to their cutting edge image by supping with the real Black Panthers, who saw them for the phonies they were. The closest the ladies-who-lunch liberal pundits come to people of colour is when they’re seated at a discussion table on MSNBC with Eugene Robinson. The only Latino they know is Bill Richardson. The poor is only a vague idea, the working poor and working class morphed into the middle class at the end of the 1970s, and any Southerner is always a racist.
And Obama’s such a disappointment, because instead of getting John Shaft in the Oval Office, they seem to think they’ve got the lovechild of Dr Cliff Huxtable and Fred Sanford. So they’ve got this incessant need to tell and tell stridently what the President should do. They have to remind him of the dire consequences, should he abandon his so-called base. And when he doesn’t listen and achieves something far better than they ever imagined he would, they never recognise this; instead, they move onto the next point of criticism, or they sulk until the point that they can only see their talking point within the framework of the larger equation.
It’s always easier to rationalise that the President caved on extending the Bush tax cuts because they, personally, don’t know anyone who’s unemployed or a part of the working poor. It’s easier to ignore the fact that there’s a Republican majority in the House who pretty much stymie any imperceptibly progressive legislation. In fact, they’ve spent the past four months trying to undo everything that’s been accomplished under the previous Democratic majority, which – for the moment - is impossible, because there’s this slender majority of 4 Democratic Senators in the upper house, one of whom is Joe Manchin, which really makes the majority three.
This is why the silly rant issued by Bill Maher at the end of Real Time this past week about the President taking a stand and pushing for the repeal of DOMA, simply because Dick Cheney, Cindy McCain and Jenna Bush had spoken out in favour of gay marriage. Dick Cheney’s always believed in same sex marriage, but only because his daughter is gay. Otherwise, he’d be no different from any rank-and-file conservative. Besides, neither Cheney, nor Mrs McCain nor the Bush baby are in a position to legislate the repeal of this odious law. They are private citizens, with private opinions and little influence. In fact, I doubt Cindy McCain has any influence over the old maverick, himself.
I don’t know what the President’s opinion of same sex marriage is. I would imagine, open-minded individual that he is, he favourably views the repeal of this act; but pushing for this now is a non-starter, as long as such legislation has to be approved, first, by the House of Representatives. That just ain’t gonna happen, as long as the Speaker’s on a buzz from his martini, the birthers and the baggers are getting restless; and while it’s ok for the Republican majority leader to introduce a piece of legislation that’s a slap in the face of the Constitution in abnegating the upper house’s existence, should the President try a dictatorial style (so favoured by many of the Progressive Left), he’d be impeached, which would make the strange bedfellow pairing of Darrell Issa and Dennis Kucinich very happy.
The truth is, the radical chic set of society play-politicos who “reformed” the Democratic party 40 years ago, threw the real base under the political bus, only to have them rescued and nursed back to health by the very party who, formerly, were their rabid enemies: the Republicans. And they coddled and comforted them just enough for Stockholm syndrome to set in.
So let the inverted triangle that’s the Democratic base continue to totter, let them come up with a patsy who’ll primary the President, and let them then be recorded in the history annals as the reason the Democratic party was rent asunder irreparably in the election of 2012.
If I remember nothing more from my geometry course, I remember this: that the base of a triangle is its broadest part. “Base” means that bit of a triangle or a building that supports the structure at its lowest level. It grounds or anchors said structure, so it must be that the base of a movement grounds or anchors said movement.
Now this is what I don’t understand: Poll after poll after poll has been taken throughouth the US, and consistently, the findings conclude that a full 20% of people polled identify themselves as either liberal or progressive, whilst 40% consider themselves moderate. We also know that roughly 40% polled call themselves conservative, and whilst the Tea Party element is truly proving itself to be more or less a fringe element, it’s pretty safe to say that the base of the Republican party consists of socially conservative religious people. So how can the media claim that the Democratic party’s base consists of a minority of voters. That’s really like turning a triangle upside down, but then, in a converse sort of way – considering the current Democratic kindergarten – wibbling, wobbling and falling is pretty much normal behaviour for its base.
Actually, I think the so-called progressive base of the Democratic party is something created in the mind of the media and promoted by them to feed the progressive addiction of not thinking critically. Many of these people seem to have forgotten the way our country was structured, by the Constitution, to govern – that each branch of government has certain obligations and duties and each branch keeps a rein on the other two. It’s why the President can’t legislate and has to keep himself above the petty squabbling of the politicos on the Hill. It’s also why those same politicos can effectively nullify an executive order.
But then, in our simplistic, time-saving, convenience-laden world, it’s all too easy to blame the President, especially this one.
Take the Gitmo kerfuffle, which is being blatantly presented in the press and media as the President reneging on a campaign promise, first to close the facility, and then to try all its inhabitants in the civil courts. Well, that’s another part of the Big Lie propaganda which seems au courant throughout our media-driven lives these days.
All of us remember that seminal moment when the President signed the executive order effecting the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year’s time, back in 2009, as his first act as President. In fact, throughout the 2008 campaign, that was one campaign promise both Obama and McCain pushed. The problem ensuing was basically logistical: Where would all these prisoners be housed until they were either tried or released? In fact, George Bush, the man who created the monster, had actually released some Gitmo prisoners, several of whom had rejoined their old Al Qaeda buddies.
Maybe some, if not all, of us remember the debate which raged throughout the spring of 2009 regarding the fates of these prisoners and where they should be housed post-Gitmo. Basically, the public, fuelled by the media, adopted a NIMBY approach – “not in my backyard.” When a disused maximum security prison in Illinois was put forward as the best and most logical place to contain these men, no less than Dick Durbin, DEMOCRAT, from the President’s home state, led the charge against that action. Apparently a maximum security facility in the United States isn’t enough to withstand the incomparable might of Al Qaeda – certainly not in the country where prisons are a big and effective business.
And maybe some, if not all, of us remember the following autumn, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, arguably the most important prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay and the mastermind of 9/11, would be tried in a civil trial in New York City, where his most devastating atrocity occurred. Almost immediately, some – if not all – of us remember Mayor Bloomberg lauding this decision. Who can forget Holder’s forceful rendering of this announcement, when he repeated the name of New York City twice, for obvious emphasis?
To say the all-controlling media were impressed with this decision would be an understatement, but almost immediately the backdraft began – led by Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, DEMOCRATS, of New York. Their chief concern would be that the cost would be far more than the city would be able to support; there was also the concern regarding businesses and private residences in the area where the trial would take place – access issues and losses of revenue. There would be congestion problems with traffic, coupled with a veritable circus caused by the convergence of the world’s media; then add to that the security risks, with the threat of, possibly, another Al Qaeda attack.
The list went on, whilst the DOJ searched for alternative venues for the trial and the Republicans pressed the argument about how these men should be tried by military tribunals. Pennsylvania was mooted, and Virginia, but both echoed the chorusof fright, uncertainty and doubt led by Schumer and Gilibrand.
The gist of the whole Gitmo saga was simply that it was railroaded and the President blind-sided by what was possibly the only genuine act of bi-partisanship ever engendered by this Congress of cowards and fools.
Yet, it’s all too easy and disingenuous to blame the President and brand him a coward and a caver.
Well, I suppose he did cave on this one, because he reversed his former stand and authorised military tribunals to be the method of trial for these prisoners, including the star event concerning Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Some, if not all, of us will remember how when the President announced this, earlier this year, he made a point of remarking that he had grave reservations about this procedure on two points, but Congress in their infinite wisdom and in waking from their slumber and remembering their role in the system of checks and balances, had rendered any thought of a civil trial virtually impossible.
In the meantime, the President’s running for reelection, and various pundits, reincarnations and natural inheritors of the old radical chic are managing to nudge and wink and subtly imply that there should be a primary candidate for the President. They’re worried, you see, about his abandoning his base for the more moderate of the party.
Do these people have a death wish for Democrats? Because by any mathematical calculation, 20% isn’t a very solid base. The people pushing the myth of Obama as the first post-racial President-cum-the Progressive’s singular disappointment are the natural successors and trust fund children of Tom Wolfe’s radical chic, the ueber rich, super-cool cafe society types who adopted Civil Rights seven years after the fact as an enhancement to their cutting edge image by supping with the real Black Panthers, who saw them for the phonies they were. The closest the ladies-who-lunch liberal pundits come to people of colour is when they’re seated at a discussion table on MSNBC with Eugene Robinson. The only Latino they know is Bill Richardson. The poor is only a vague idea, the working poor and working class morphed into the middle class at the end of the 1970s, and any Southerner is always a racist.
And Obama’s such a disappointment, because instead of getting John Shaft in the Oval Office, they seem to think they’ve got the lovechild of Dr Cliff Huxtable and Fred Sanford. So they’ve got this incessant need to tell and tell stridently what the President should do. They have to remind him of the dire consequences, should he abandon his so-called base. And when he doesn’t listen and achieves something far better than they ever imagined he would, they never recognise this; instead, they move onto the next point of criticism, or they sulk until the point that they can only see their talking point within the framework of the larger equation.
It’s always easier to rationalise that the President caved on extending the Bush tax cuts because they, personally, don’t know anyone who’s unemployed or a part of the working poor. It’s easier to ignore the fact that there’s a Republican majority in the House who pretty much stymie any imperceptibly progressive legislation. In fact, they’ve spent the past four months trying to undo everything that’s been accomplished under the previous Democratic majority, which – for the moment - is impossible, because there’s this slender majority of 4 Democratic Senators in the upper house, one of whom is Joe Manchin, which really makes the majority three.
This is why the silly rant issued by Bill Maher at the end of Real Time this past week about the President taking a stand and pushing for the repeal of DOMA, simply because Dick Cheney, Cindy McCain and Jenna Bush had spoken out in favour of gay marriage. Dick Cheney’s always believed in same sex marriage, but only because his daughter is gay. Otherwise, he’d be no different from any rank-and-file conservative. Besides, neither Cheney, nor Mrs McCain nor the Bush baby are in a position to legislate the repeal of this odious law. They are private citizens, with private opinions and little influence. In fact, I doubt Cindy McCain has any influence over the old maverick, himself.
I don’t know what the President’s opinion of same sex marriage is. I would imagine, open-minded individual that he is, he favourably views the repeal of this act; but pushing for this now is a non-starter, as long as such legislation has to be approved, first, by the House of Representatives. That just ain’t gonna happen, as long as the Speaker’s on a buzz from his martini, the birthers and the baggers are getting restless; and while it’s ok for the Republican majority leader to introduce a piece of legislation that’s a slap in the face of the Constitution in abnegating the upper house’s existence, should the President try a dictatorial style (so favoured by many of the Progressive Left), he’d be impeached, which would make the strange bedfellow pairing of Darrell Issa and Dennis Kucinich very happy.
The truth is, the radical chic set of society play-politicos who “reformed” the Democratic party 40 years ago, threw the real base under the political bus, only to have them rescued and nursed back to health by the very party who, formerly, were their rabid enemies: the Republicans. And they coddled and comforted them just enough for Stockholm syndrome to set in.
So let the inverted triangle that’s the Democratic base continue to totter, let them come up with a patsy who’ll primary the President, and let them then be recorded in the history annals as the reason the Democratic party was rent asunder irreparably in the election of 2012.
Monday, April 4, 2011
The Democrats as Scorpions: Always Stinging Their Collective Ass
So the President’s running for re-election. That should come as no surprise to anyone. Most Presidents aspire to a second term. Only natural, and we, as Democrats, should be pleased. Whatever you say, he’s accomplished a lot – more than his previous two Democratic predecessors.
So that’s that then. We should all rest happy in our beds. After all, we have a candidate, ready and waiting for whatever political personage the other side thinks to throw at us.
Only we’re not, are we? Come on, hands up, all you people, allegedly from the Left, who are wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ for a great white hope to rise up from the ashes and primary the President. Do I hear the Pumas wailing in the wilderness for Hillary to change her mind? How about Alan Grayson? He’s sending out duns for contributions, with the flyer “Elect Alan Grayson” attached – only he doesn’t say for what position he wants election. Do I hear Dennis Kucinich, preaching his interpretation of the Constitution to read that the President needs impeachment?
I was born two years into Eisenhower’s first term. I barely remember Kennedy’s election. I cast my first vote as an 18 year-old for George McGovern in his landslide defeat of 1972, during my first year at college. I can honestly say that at no time during my adult life can I ever remember a Republican party in such abject disarray and without any cohesive direction or guiding principle other than to undo maliciously any and all previous work accomplished by the Democratic Party, and this President in particular, since the Obama Administration inherited the shitstorm left in the wake of George W Bush and his merry men.
Immediately after the 2008 election, the media, who purport to know these things better than we, pronounced the Republican party dead in the water and rotting. Less than a year later, however, that selfsame media were all over the phenomenon that was the Tea Party like the proverbial bad rash. We know now, even with the debacle that occurred in November 2010, that was all an illusion. They, the media, and their corporate masters wanted us to believe in the power of the populist movement on the Right, even whilst some amongst them were exposing the real corporate roots of the monster, and we swallowed it like a bloated trout swallows bait.
The Tea Party is and was as strong as the media made them. Fox hired their poster girl, Palin, but various and sundry so-called Leftwing pundits, even those who retreat behind a comedian’s mask, constantly gave this willfully ignorant woman more airtime than she deserved, never ceasing to cite her, almost on a daily basis. They leant credence to her shallowness and made her a force to be feared.
Certain areas of the Democratic party, instead of fighting back against the Tea Party and their rhetoric, all of which was based on Big Lie propaganda and the relentless promotion of it, sought to vent ceaseless criticism in the direction of the President, himself, remorselessly for the entire first two years of his tenure. At first, this exercise was piously explained as an effort to show the lock-step Right that the Left was free to criticize their leaders, when they deserved it; that this criticism was intended to be constructive and was entirely for the purpose of guidance. We were “holding his feet to the fire,” making him perform to our specifications. How many times did we hear this explanation?
We heard it so many times that we were unaware that we were actually criticizing absolutely everything the President did or didn’t do, parsing every word he uttered and then screaming every word we demanded that he say, but didn’t. Nothing he did was enough to the point that we got confused about what it actually was he was trying to do, and we confused ourselves to such a point that many of us ended up believing and still believe that he’s accomplished nothing. It’s so ridiculous that many on the Left are so graceless that they’d rather choke than admit when significant achievements are actually attained by the President in the way he sought to attain them.
It’s not the President’s fault that he addresses us as adults and expects us to respond in kind, when the majority of this country are spoiled children dependent upon instant gratification. Change you can believe in is often slow, almost imperceptible change, to the point that such change becomes the norm before anyone originally opposed to it realises anything is different. Slow change means lasting change.
So two years were wasted rounding on the President whilst a fringe element that actually embarrassed normal Republicans ran rampant. They were handed power in 2010, and now a lot of people – possibly many who voted for them – are experiencing buyers’ remorse. Just look at events unfolding in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana if you want proof.
Now, the Democrats are being handed what any sane person would recognise as a sure-fire victory in 2012 – a second term for the President, a chance to strengthen the majority in the Senate and to recapture the House.
Not only are the Republicans fielding a veritable ship of fools hoping to vye for the GOP nomination in 2012, they’re actually falling apart at the seams in the House they won last November.
At the moment, the potential Presidential candidate the GOP might offer the people could come from the likes of Sarah Palin, mistress of syntactical malapropism and eternal mean girl; Michele Bachman, history and geography revisionist, who would have us believe that the Founding Fathers didn’t rest until they’d eliminated slavery and that the first shot fired in our quest for independence occured in New Hampshire and not Massachusetts; Mike Huckabee, the “aw shucks” parson, who’d force us all at gunpoint to digest an intellectual diet administered by a sinister Dominionist faux history professor; Mitt Romney, commonly known as “Flipper,” but not as cute or clever; Newt Gingrich, trailing three wives and numerous ethics violations; Rick Santorum, homophobe; Herman Cain, living proof that a black man can aspire to the KKK; and Donald Trump, born-again birthe, corporationmeister and reality television star.
Did I forget anyone? Oh, yes! Tim Pawlenty, or rather PeeWee Herman pretending to be Tim Pawlenty, who panders to the Tea Party by introducing himself as “Tea-Paw.”
Pretty damned sickly, and in a normal world, the current President could easily beat anyone of that motley crew with a modicum of support from his party; but I seriously doubt he has such support – certainly from very few currently in residence on Capitol Hill and definitely not from a particular tranche of his own party.
Too many elected Democrats in both Houses have been too quick to demand that the President interpose himself directly in the job they’re elected to do – legislate. Like everyone else, they’re looking for a weird combination of Mr Goodbar crossed with Big Daddy. And the supporters keep on holding those Presidential feet to the proverbial fire.
We’re less than a week away from the first government shut-down since 1995. Most of us remember that. It left egg on the face of Newt Gingrich and proved, once more, that Bill Clinton really, really was the Comeback Kid. But Bill Clinton’s not in the White House. We’ve got a President whom his own alleged supporters are too ready to blame for everything that goes wrong, aided and abetted by a shallow and deliberately misinforming media. More importantly, we’ve got a weak and timid Speaker, nursing a drinking problem that’s no real secret and desperately trying to perform responsibly whilst pandering to the fringe minority of his party which is proving to be the tail wagging the dog. If there’s a government shut-down, as much as some of us realise that the fault lies squarely with the intransigence of the Republicans, our media masters, with a little help from various and sundry elected Democrats and a lot of complaining from many of the Progressive base, will only make the GOP’s whine about the shut-down being all the fault of the Democrats a perceived truth.
The events of last week should have been an epiphany for the Left, but it wasn’t. On the one hand, we had Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, introduce a bill that not only had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but also was blatantly unconstitutuional, as it purported to make legislation passed only in the House become the undisputed law of the land. When Cantor announced to an assembled press corps on Wednesday, his intent to introduce this legislation, not one member of the media covering Capitol Hill shouted out in protest against the total constitutional ignorance of such an act. More importantly, Cantor’s Speaker, John Boehner, stood silently in the background, to the right of Cantor, and expressed no surprise, no disbelief and no consternation at such a wantonly disgraceful act.
Indeed, the only media person who pursued this affront vociferously was Lawrence O’Donnell, who had formerly worked as a Congressional aide, and who obviously knew more about the real Constitution than anyone currently working in the media and certainly any elected official on Capitol Hill. When the bill was introduced on the floor of the House on Friday – appropriately April Fool’s Day – fourteen Republicans recognised it for the non-entity that it was, and voted against it, including such wingnuts as Ron Paul and Louis Gomert, the Gomer Pyle of government.
And speaking of the Pauls, Rand Paul was causing quite a stir, rivalling Dennis Kucinich, in darting to and fro, telling all and sundry about the illegality of the President’s participation in the Libyan no-fly zone initiative. Once again, O’Donnell stepped into the fray, the only media voice reminding people, again and again, that Rand had voted unanimously, along with the other 99 members of the Senate, on March 1st, on Senate Resolution 85, which called for the installation of an no-fly zone, for humanitarian reasons, over Libya. The Resolution was sponsored by such liberal lions as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders. Rand Paul not only voted for this resolution, when an MSNBC producer actually rang his office to query this, she was met by a very young and very adolescent receptionist, being audibly coached in a blatant lie by a senior staffer, trying to justify the Senator’s support for this resolution as something that really didn’t count at all.
Instead of focusing on these totally dishonest and irresponsibly acts by the Republican party last week, instead of bringing them to the forefront in defiance of the media, the Progressive Left still nitpick, criticize and second-guess the President’s every move. It’s now come to the sorry situation that, if they don’t have a media stick with which to beat him about the head, they go about making stuff up. It seems they’ve learned well from Arianna Huffington, as much as they try to distance themselves from the ratfucker that she is. Some – at least one, blogging on the Daily Kos – have taken a leaf from Huffington’s Jayson Blair Journalist of the Year, Sam Stein, and created a potential situation from nothing more than the rantings of one Glenn Beck, who seems to be targeting Presidential advisor, Samantha Power, in a new witchunt.
In a blog posted on Daily Kos on Sunday entitled, “Obama, Don’t You ******* Fire Samantha Power!”, this person ranted and railed against the fact that, on the strength of Beck’s latest obsession, the President might even be thinking about sacking Power, when nothing in the media, not even by Stein, had emerged even speculating about this. And this came in the wake of yet another blogger demanding that Elizabeth Warren mount a primary campaign against the President.
I was weaned on the Democratic Party, by parents born with the Democratic gene as part of their DNA make-up. I seriously don’t know now, which is worse – the Tea Party blindly allowing themselves to guided to perdition by the Koch brothers, or the Progressive Left, espousing a hatred of all things Obama that would rival that of the Teabaggers. We really cannot see the forest for the trees.
If, for some reason, the White House is lost in 2012 – and that reason would most likely be a primary challenge – then the country really is lost. The scorpion is an insect which kills itself by repeatedly stinging itself to death with its tail, and that’s the sort of political suicide being effected by the Democratic party, especially when we continuously miss the lemons being thrown at us by the Republicans at our own expense. If the dark side regain the bully pulpit in 2012, we won’t see a Democratic party in power for a generation, and we’ll be increasingly demonised by corporatists and dominionists, whose intent is to create a theocratic nation of ignorant and undereducated serfs.
But ne’mind … we can always blame Obama.
So that’s that then. We should all rest happy in our beds. After all, we have a candidate, ready and waiting for whatever political personage the other side thinks to throw at us.
Only we’re not, are we? Come on, hands up, all you people, allegedly from the Left, who are wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ for a great white hope to rise up from the ashes and primary the President. Do I hear the Pumas wailing in the wilderness for Hillary to change her mind? How about Alan Grayson? He’s sending out duns for contributions, with the flyer “Elect Alan Grayson” attached – only he doesn’t say for what position he wants election. Do I hear Dennis Kucinich, preaching his interpretation of the Constitution to read that the President needs impeachment?
I was born two years into Eisenhower’s first term. I barely remember Kennedy’s election. I cast my first vote as an 18 year-old for George McGovern in his landslide defeat of 1972, during my first year at college. I can honestly say that at no time during my adult life can I ever remember a Republican party in such abject disarray and without any cohesive direction or guiding principle other than to undo maliciously any and all previous work accomplished by the Democratic Party, and this President in particular, since the Obama Administration inherited the shitstorm left in the wake of George W Bush and his merry men.
Immediately after the 2008 election, the media, who purport to know these things better than we, pronounced the Republican party dead in the water and rotting. Less than a year later, however, that selfsame media were all over the phenomenon that was the Tea Party like the proverbial bad rash. We know now, even with the debacle that occurred in November 2010, that was all an illusion. They, the media, and their corporate masters wanted us to believe in the power of the populist movement on the Right, even whilst some amongst them were exposing the real corporate roots of the monster, and we swallowed it like a bloated trout swallows bait.
The Tea Party is and was as strong as the media made them. Fox hired their poster girl, Palin, but various and sundry so-called Leftwing pundits, even those who retreat behind a comedian’s mask, constantly gave this willfully ignorant woman more airtime than she deserved, never ceasing to cite her, almost on a daily basis. They leant credence to her shallowness and made her a force to be feared.
Certain areas of the Democratic party, instead of fighting back against the Tea Party and their rhetoric, all of which was based on Big Lie propaganda and the relentless promotion of it, sought to vent ceaseless criticism in the direction of the President, himself, remorselessly for the entire first two years of his tenure. At first, this exercise was piously explained as an effort to show the lock-step Right that the Left was free to criticize their leaders, when they deserved it; that this criticism was intended to be constructive and was entirely for the purpose of guidance. We were “holding his feet to the fire,” making him perform to our specifications. How many times did we hear this explanation?
We heard it so many times that we were unaware that we were actually criticizing absolutely everything the President did or didn’t do, parsing every word he uttered and then screaming every word we demanded that he say, but didn’t. Nothing he did was enough to the point that we got confused about what it actually was he was trying to do, and we confused ourselves to such a point that many of us ended up believing and still believe that he’s accomplished nothing. It’s so ridiculous that many on the Left are so graceless that they’d rather choke than admit when significant achievements are actually attained by the President in the way he sought to attain them.
It’s not the President’s fault that he addresses us as adults and expects us to respond in kind, when the majority of this country are spoiled children dependent upon instant gratification. Change you can believe in is often slow, almost imperceptible change, to the point that such change becomes the norm before anyone originally opposed to it realises anything is different. Slow change means lasting change.
So two years were wasted rounding on the President whilst a fringe element that actually embarrassed normal Republicans ran rampant. They were handed power in 2010, and now a lot of people – possibly many who voted for them – are experiencing buyers’ remorse. Just look at events unfolding in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana if you want proof.
Now, the Democrats are being handed what any sane person would recognise as a sure-fire victory in 2012 – a second term for the President, a chance to strengthen the majority in the Senate and to recapture the House.
Not only are the Republicans fielding a veritable ship of fools hoping to vye for the GOP nomination in 2012, they’re actually falling apart at the seams in the House they won last November.
At the moment, the potential Presidential candidate the GOP might offer the people could come from the likes of Sarah Palin, mistress of syntactical malapropism and eternal mean girl; Michele Bachman, history and geography revisionist, who would have us believe that the Founding Fathers didn’t rest until they’d eliminated slavery and that the first shot fired in our quest for independence occured in New Hampshire and not Massachusetts; Mike Huckabee, the “aw shucks” parson, who’d force us all at gunpoint to digest an intellectual diet administered by a sinister Dominionist faux history professor; Mitt Romney, commonly known as “Flipper,” but not as cute or clever; Newt Gingrich, trailing three wives and numerous ethics violations; Rick Santorum, homophobe; Herman Cain, living proof that a black man can aspire to the KKK; and Donald Trump, born-again birthe, corporationmeister and reality television star.
Did I forget anyone? Oh, yes! Tim Pawlenty, or rather PeeWee Herman pretending to be Tim Pawlenty, who panders to the Tea Party by introducing himself as “Tea-Paw.”
Pretty damned sickly, and in a normal world, the current President could easily beat anyone of that motley crew with a modicum of support from his party; but I seriously doubt he has such support – certainly from very few currently in residence on Capitol Hill and definitely not from a particular tranche of his own party.
Too many elected Democrats in both Houses have been too quick to demand that the President interpose himself directly in the job they’re elected to do – legislate. Like everyone else, they’re looking for a weird combination of Mr Goodbar crossed with Big Daddy. And the supporters keep on holding those Presidential feet to the proverbial fire.
We’re less than a week away from the first government shut-down since 1995. Most of us remember that. It left egg on the face of Newt Gingrich and proved, once more, that Bill Clinton really, really was the Comeback Kid. But Bill Clinton’s not in the White House. We’ve got a President whom his own alleged supporters are too ready to blame for everything that goes wrong, aided and abetted by a shallow and deliberately misinforming media. More importantly, we’ve got a weak and timid Speaker, nursing a drinking problem that’s no real secret and desperately trying to perform responsibly whilst pandering to the fringe minority of his party which is proving to be the tail wagging the dog. If there’s a government shut-down, as much as some of us realise that the fault lies squarely with the intransigence of the Republicans, our media masters, with a little help from various and sundry elected Democrats and a lot of complaining from many of the Progressive base, will only make the GOP’s whine about the shut-down being all the fault of the Democrats a perceived truth.
The events of last week should have been an epiphany for the Left, but it wasn’t. On the one hand, we had Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, introduce a bill that not only had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but also was blatantly unconstitutuional, as it purported to make legislation passed only in the House become the undisputed law of the land. When Cantor announced to an assembled press corps on Wednesday, his intent to introduce this legislation, not one member of the media covering Capitol Hill shouted out in protest against the total constitutional ignorance of such an act. More importantly, Cantor’s Speaker, John Boehner, stood silently in the background, to the right of Cantor, and expressed no surprise, no disbelief and no consternation at such a wantonly disgraceful act.
Indeed, the only media person who pursued this affront vociferously was Lawrence O’Donnell, who had formerly worked as a Congressional aide, and who obviously knew more about the real Constitution than anyone currently working in the media and certainly any elected official on Capitol Hill. When the bill was introduced on the floor of the House on Friday – appropriately April Fool’s Day – fourteen Republicans recognised it for the non-entity that it was, and voted against it, including such wingnuts as Ron Paul and Louis Gomert, the Gomer Pyle of government.
And speaking of the Pauls, Rand Paul was causing quite a stir, rivalling Dennis Kucinich, in darting to and fro, telling all and sundry about the illegality of the President’s participation in the Libyan no-fly zone initiative. Once again, O’Donnell stepped into the fray, the only media voice reminding people, again and again, that Rand had voted unanimously, along with the other 99 members of the Senate, on March 1st, on Senate Resolution 85, which called for the installation of an no-fly zone, for humanitarian reasons, over Libya. The Resolution was sponsored by such liberal lions as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders. Rand Paul not only voted for this resolution, when an MSNBC producer actually rang his office to query this, she was met by a very young and very adolescent receptionist, being audibly coached in a blatant lie by a senior staffer, trying to justify the Senator’s support for this resolution as something that really didn’t count at all.
Instead of focusing on these totally dishonest and irresponsibly acts by the Republican party last week, instead of bringing them to the forefront in defiance of the media, the Progressive Left still nitpick, criticize and second-guess the President’s every move. It’s now come to the sorry situation that, if they don’t have a media stick with which to beat him about the head, they go about making stuff up. It seems they’ve learned well from Arianna Huffington, as much as they try to distance themselves from the ratfucker that she is. Some – at least one, blogging on the Daily Kos – have taken a leaf from Huffington’s Jayson Blair Journalist of the Year, Sam Stein, and created a potential situation from nothing more than the rantings of one Glenn Beck, who seems to be targeting Presidential advisor, Samantha Power, in a new witchunt.
In a blog posted on Daily Kos on Sunday entitled, “Obama, Don’t You ******* Fire Samantha Power!”, this person ranted and railed against the fact that, on the strength of Beck’s latest obsession, the President might even be thinking about sacking Power, when nothing in the media, not even by Stein, had emerged even speculating about this. And this came in the wake of yet another blogger demanding that Elizabeth Warren mount a primary campaign against the President.
I was weaned on the Democratic Party, by parents born with the Democratic gene as part of their DNA make-up. I seriously don’t know now, which is worse – the Tea Party blindly allowing themselves to guided to perdition by the Koch brothers, or the Progressive Left, espousing a hatred of all things Obama that would rival that of the Teabaggers. We really cannot see the forest for the trees.
If, for some reason, the White House is lost in 2012 – and that reason would most likely be a primary challenge – then the country really is lost. The scorpion is an insect which kills itself by repeatedly stinging itself to death with its tail, and that’s the sort of political suicide being effected by the Democratic party, especially when we continuously miss the lemons being thrown at us by the Republicans at our own expense. If the dark side regain the bully pulpit in 2012, we won’t see a Democratic party in power for a generation, and we’ll be increasingly demonised by corporatists and dominionists, whose intent is to create a theocratic nation of ignorant and undereducated serfs.
But ne’mind … we can always blame Obama.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
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