October 17, 2008
Plungin' like stones from a slingshot on Mars
That would be the force effects of the following screed from John Perry Barlow, a true maverick (a wave of that flag to the impassioned Aiko Annie):
Ten years ago when I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School, I was on a panel with Senator Ted Kennedy and my tragically late sidekick John Kennedy, Jr. The focus of our discussion was determining when the Internet would likely have the pivotal role in shaping a presidential campaign that television had assumed in the 1960 election of their brother and father. Oddly, for a couple of guys who were deeply suspicious of Cyberspace, they both thought this would happen much sooner than I did, possibly as early as 2000. I said it would be a decade at least. It has now been a decade. And this will now be that election.
Among the many lines of division at contest here - between the 50's and the 60's, between football and frisbee, between a high regard for education and a contempt for it, between weed and whiskey, between Monotheism and Pantheism, between love and fear, between greed and responsibility - is the contest between the highly cybergenic Obama and the apoplectic old race-bating, fraudulently heroic, tail-hook gunning, womanizing, pathologically gambling, unindicted Keating 5 co-conspirator who is literally treasonous enough to possibly entrust the American republic during its darkest hour to a woman who has great legs and cheekbones, combined SAT scores lower than either one of mine, and who, with her "First Dude" were helping lead, until recently, the Alaskan Independence Party, a powerful pro-secession movement. (Imagine Lincoln choosing Jefferson Davis as his first running mate and you get the idea.)
McCain, that disgraceful curdle-brain, that grimacing little tantrum of spoiled Naval nepotism whose greatest military accomplishment (if you don't count crashing three multi-million jets while on joyrides, and contributing to a deck fire that almost sank the Forrestal} was getting in getting shot down and breaking under torture, spent the first part of the debate whining about Obama's low blows and then informed the women and children of America that his opponent had promoted an Illinois law that now legally requires doctors to refuse medical treatment to any child who somehow survives an abortion attempt. Given the abortion methods I'm familiar with, I'm inclined to think such a child would also survive the flame-throwers they'd be using against him toward the end of the movie.
But among his other qualifications for being a 21st Century President , Senator McCain remains proud that, like both Bushes before him, he is computer-illiterate and that he makes his wife Cindy deal with all that.
I thought George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had made me ashamed to be a Republican. But McCain and Palin have pretty well completed the job.
However, since God is merciful, McCain probably doesn't know what I'm talking about. He's watching the campaign on television where he's presented with an edit of reality that is far less damning to him and his campaign than the one I've been watching on the Internet. John McCain is blessed indeed to be spared the online version of himself.
On the Internet, he would see the "people's edits" immediately, like the YouTube condensation of all 3143 of his eye-blinks during last night's debate into a thirty second segment, or the highlighting of his reference to Obama's "eloquence" in a fashion that left no doubt that this was his painfully polite euphemism for the vile effluent one can squeeze out of an fast-talking sack of lying shit when he talks about the "health" - a word McCain enclosed in finger quotes - of the baby murdering "mother", who is unable to accept that a child is the natural punishment for her coozing around in fornication, which is pretty much all these black Muslim terrorist baby mamas do, if you know what I mean.
If he watched the much more elaborate coverage of the campaign on the Internet, even McCain would have to be in awe of the fact that Senator Obama has shown almost superhuman dignity, humor (as opposed to sarcasm), and that quality that Hemingway defined as courage, "grace under pressure" even while being carpet-bombed, first by the Clintons and now the McCain/Palin Golem, with six months of sucker punches, lies, trivialities, the guilt of distant or even non-existent associations (often involving black people behaving ungracefully), and now, finally, the direct incitement of murderous intent in crowds spiked with many people who are insane with racial hatred, well-armed, and trained by their government in the accurate use of long-range weapons.
He would have seen the look of enlightened acceptance on Obama's face tonight when McCain fiercely declared his pride in the people who attended his rallies, including, presumably, the ones who shout "kill him" and "off with his head." As he pronounced his appreciation for these unmasked Klansmen, someone like me who doesn't have an abused wife he can use as a computer interface could, with a slight enhancement of certain frequencies, make clearly audible the dry, cold wind that was whistling through McCain's dentures.
At this point, I must pause and ask any other digeratum who zoomed into the Senator's forehead pulse at such moments: Who do you want answering the phone at 3:00 am in the White House: someone with unassailable poise and courage or someone whose rage-readiness and blood pressure make him a fine candidate to pop a valve, thus creating the scenario in which the more blink-resistant President Palin returns the call at 3:45 am?
Who do you want salvaging the economy, someone who believes that if the government is going to recover what Bush's and McCain's cronies looted from the public treasury, the very rich will have to pay some taxes, or someone who believes that we can spend extravagantly on war, greed, weapon systems we don't need, and subsidies for our friends, while taxing only the middle class and the poor?
Finally, if McCain were watch this on the Internet, he would have known better than to make a certain Joe the Plumber the unanimous winner of tonight's debate. Apparently, Senator McCain caught a short network soundbyte of Senator Obama's exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher in Ohio last week. Whatever it was, it allowed McCain to think he could get away with claiming that Senator Obama would deny Joe the fruits of the American Dream, since Joe would have to give his money to Senator Obama who would then "spread the wealth around" presumably to other people of his own shiftless kind. Kind of like Washington Hussein Stalin.
However, if you click on the link I've attached to Joe Wurzelbacker's name above, you will see the full 6 minute discourse between Obama and the supposed target of his communist exploitation, as McCain characterized the hapless Joe.
In fact, what you will see will make you proud to be an American.
You will see a presidential candidate stop and take the time to explain more and in more respectful detail about his tax program to a single plumber from Ohio than McCain has ever explained anything - besides misrepresentations of Obama's resume - to the entire American public during the length of this campaign.
(Thanks to McCain, we know more about Obama's perfidious porkpie of a 3 mil planetarium projector - which McCain still thinks is an overhead slide projector - than we know about McCain's entire economic recovery plan. And certainly more that the payments and favors he took from Charles Keating to keep the regulators off Keating's Arizona S and L which, by some estimates exceeded $3 million and kept them at bay just long enough for the Lincoln Savings and Loan to eat the life savings of many retired investors before requiring the Federal Government to bail it out with $3 billion.)
But I digress. I come to praise Obama, not bury McCain (who is doing a fine job already). Anyway, If you watch the whole "Joe the Plumber" segment, you will see Mr. Wurzelbacker listening skeptically but with equal respect to Obama and providing his own knowledgeable addenda. It is the kind of conversation you can't imagine a president being willing or able to have with a citizen in public. This president will, and in so doing, he will encourage the existence the citizens as worthy of that critical role as Mr. Wurzelbacker appears to be.
Unless, of course, one of those supporters in whom Senator McCain takes such pride leaves one of those rallies just amped enough by their "tough" campaign style, a pint of Jim Beam, a terror of terrorists, and his abusive daddy's fury at all things brown that he'll haul out his "Elk-erator": that .270 Weatherby Magnum which, when he's using his own hand-loaded rounds with the 130 grain bullets and the extended casing length generates a 3200 fps muzzle velocity quite sufficient to drop a trophy bull at 400 yards, or, for that matter, to blow ol' Hussein Obama's nappy smart-ass head right off his skinny-ass Armani-wearin' body.
If that moment comes, hope will really die in America, I think, and hope for America will die in the rest of the world.
But right now hope is alive and well and winning. While fear, hate-mongering, and war-lust look moribund, querulous, profoundly mean-spirited, and almost blind with blinking.
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America," a book more timely now that when he wrote it in 1835, "America is great because she is good. If she ceases to be good, she will cease to be great." This is the moment when we get to choose which she will be. Watch the whole YouTube exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber and you will know that we are still good.
Then watch the clip on the Internet from four days ago when a Christian pastor named Arnold Conrad opened a McCain/Palin rally with this little invocation that fails to inspire a thoughtful patriot or a true Christian or anyone like me with a degree in comparative religion, but which was, nonetheless, well-received by the crowd and the principal speakers. Rev. Conrad said, "There are millions of people around this world praying to their God -- whether it's Hindu [not a God], Buddha [also not a God], Allah [Arabic for God] -- that [Obama] wins for a variety of reasons. And, Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because, if that happens, they're going to think that their God is bigger than you." Then you see how fragile and stupid our goodness has become.
Personally, I pray to God and Allah and Atman and Jaweh and the Great Spirit and the Holy Who Knows and whatever else you want to call That For Which All Names and Assumptions Fall Short that goodness will survive this moment and that, in 30 years, we will look back on the next three weeks and know that, at a dark time, the American people, sick of fear, war, greed, bigotry, torture, wastefulness, and a diseased fixation on the past, rose up and voted for hope and love and the future. They voted for Barack Hussein Obama and Joe the Plumber's true American dream. Which started to become real for the first time.
And nobody got shot except maybe the very, very few who had it coming. Most of who are presently in the mountains of Afghanistan getting in the American heroin crop.
I truly believe America is at a fork in the road as Barlow illustrates. So even though I had/have issues with BHO, and even though I know my vote won't likely mean shit in terms of Georgia's contribution to the Electoral College, I just can't, after reading this most excellent memo, pass up the opportunity to lend a hand to history.
Labels: John McCain, politix, President Obama
May 27, 2008
C'mon people now
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For those of you who share my passion for politics, I highly recommend recent features by two of my favorite writers. Both have given me much to think about regarding the national election in November, not the least of which is the possibility that, despite my contempt for the DNC, I may not vote third party as anticipated.
James Wolcott's latest in Vanity Fair offers a balanced account of the problems the Democratic Party is headed into (as a Hillary voter, no less). He nails the fact that all of the primary scrapping is, partly, just another thing in a long line of Democrats giving a major pass to the Bush administration's dirty deeds.
Over at Rolling Stone, the always astute and often causticly hilarious Matt Taibbi gives his take on the Obama-Clinton duel. Taibbi leans toward Obama but certainly doesn't give him a pass, a minority stance in the starstruck media which, along with the fact that he gets paid, likely irks the shit out of all the HuffPo suckers.
Two juicy excerpts for the busy/link averse:
WOLCOTT
Cheney’s sarcastic “So?” (when an interviewer mentioned that two-thirds of the American people thought the war in Iraq wasn’t worth fighting) was a spit in the eye of not only the American people but of the critics of the Iraq policy whom he could treat as irrelevant, and why not? Since 9/11, he and the president had had a free hand and played it for all it was worth. Four thousand American dead is a small down payment to make for a permanent imperial presence in Iraq, and John McCain promises to be a stalwart caretaker of the desert franchise, girding his eyebrows to fend off naysayers and quitters. What really twists the intestines into a knot is knowing that Democrats will probably be as ineffectual going after McCain as they’ve been for these last seven years of sagebrush theater. Top Democrats and media flunkies have been both idly and actively complicit in McCain’s maverick identity getting a Holy Ghost makeover. Hillary and Bill Clinton have taken turns polishing McCain’s hood while Joe Lieberman pals around with Big John as if they were touring in La Cage aux Folles, two old queens taking in the sunset. As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler blog decried, “The RNC [Republican National Committee] (and the rest of the conservative world) would never have tolerated the sanctification of some Big Major Democrat of McCain’s type. But liberals and Dems have stared into space as McCain has been endlessly vested with sainthood.” Democrats have pulled their punches for so long that they know only how to hit themselves in the face, earning the reputation for masochism that gives Dick Cheney a good chuckle each night at bedtime as he’s being packed in ice.
TAIBBI
Obama's real weakness is that nobody really knows yet what he's all about. He is running as a symbol of a new politics, a politics somehow less disgusting and full of shit than the old politics. But if it were to get out that he's not that —that all he is is the same old deal dressed up in black skin and a natty suit —then he quickly morphs into a different kind of symbol, a symbol of how an essentially bankrupt political system can seamlessly repackage itself to a fed-up marketplace by making cosmetic changes, without altering its basic nature. There have been disturbing signs along that front, from the accusations that Obama aides called his anti-NAFTA stance "just politics," to his angry stumpery against a Maytag plant closing even as he pals around with Lester Crown, a Maytag board member who raised huge sums for his campaign. Right now, Obama has millions of voters thinking Santa Claus really does exist; but if he keeps getting caught turning the usual tricks with campaign donors, attention is going to shift away from his heroic image and toward the prosaic reality, which in politics is always grubby and depressing. And with that, his value as a symbol will evaporate, and Christmas turns into just another holiday with those same relatives you hated every other day of the year.
On a personal note, SOMEONE is going to have to pull unity out of their ass to avoid passing up an unprecedented opportunity for Democrats to capitalize on what is likely to be massive voter turnout this November. This whole "I'll vote for McCain" bullshit is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. What the hell good are Clinton supporter's "I told you sos" in the face of four more years of Republican veto power?
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Labels: Elect Shit Sandwich, John McCain, politix, Vote for Giant Douche
March 26, 2008
McBush
"In remembrance of the 4,000 brave men and women who sacrificed everything for us -and the two men who would continue this great tragedy, despite the cost to our soldiers, our military, and our nation. "
- Nico Pitney at Huffington Post
Senator John McCain looks to be the Republican Party's nominee for president, so in the interest of helping undecided voters who may be considering a pull for the GOP this November, let’s examine some facts* about the Senator’s record on the Iraq war. While McCain has presented himself as a maverick and a critic of the war, a close read shows that his position has consistently matched that of the Bush administration.
Before The War:
McCain said that a policy of containing
“I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.” [CNN,
McCain co-sponsored the Use of Force Authorization that gave President George W. Bush the green light - and a blank check - for going to war with
McCain has constantly moved the goal posts of progress for the war—repeatedly saying it would be over soon. “But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily.” [MSNBC,
McCain argued Saddam was “a threat of the first order, and only a change of regime will make
McCain echoed Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s rationale for going to war. McCain: “It’s going to send the message throughout the
During The War:
McCain echoed Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s talking points that the
McCain praised Bush’s leadership on the war. McCain: “I think the president has led with great clarity and I think he’s done a great job leading the country...” [MSNBC, Hardball,
McCain voted against holding Bush accountable for his actions in the war. McCain opposed the creation of an independent commission to investigate the development and use of intelligence leading up to the war in
McCain defended Bush’s rationale for war. Asked if he thought the president exaggerated the case for war, McCain said, “I don’t think so.” [Fox News,
McCain praised Donald Rumsfeld two weeks after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal broke in April 2004. Asked if Rumsfeld can continue to be an effective secretary of defense, McCain: “Yes, today I do and I believe he’s done a fine job. He’s an honorable man.” [Hannity and Colmes,
McCain repeatedly supported President Bush on the Iraq War - voting with him in the Senate, defending his actions and publicly praising his leadership.
At the 2004 Republican National Convention, McCain, focusing on the war in
“The terrorists know that this is a very critical time.” [CNN,
“Overall, I think a year from now, we will have a fair amount of progress [in
“We’re either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months.” [NBC, Meet the Press,
McCain opposed efforts to end the overextension of the military that is having a devastating impact on our troops.
McCain voted against requiring mandatory minimum downtime between tours of duty for troops serving in
McCain was one of only 13 senators to vote against adding $430 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans. [Vote #98,
McCain has consistently opposed any plan to withdraw troops from Iraq, repeatedly voting against a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq [Vote # 322, 11/15/05; Vote #182, 6/22/06; Vote #181, 6/22/06; Vote #182, 6/22/06; Vote #182, 6/22/06; Vote #252, 7/18/07; Vote #345, 9/21/07; Vote #346, 9/21/07; Vote # 362, 10/3/07; Vote # 437, 12/18/07; Vote #438, 12/18/07]
McCain called proponents of a congressional resolution opposing the troop surge in
McCain has consistently demonized Americans who want to find a responsible way to remove troops from
“I believe to set a date for withdrawal is to set a date for surrender.” [Charlotte Observer,
McCain continues to maintain that the occupation of
McCain has been President Bush’s most ardent Senate supporter on
Asked if the war was a good idea worth the price in blood and treasure McCain said, “It was worth getting rid of Saddam Hussein. He had used weapons of mass destruction, and it’s clear that he was hell-bent on acquiring them.” [Republican Debate,
The Future:
McCain now says he sees no end to the presence of
“Make it a hundred” years in
“A thousand years. A million years. Ten million years. It depends on the arrangement we have with the Iraqi government.” [Associated Press,
So please, fence-sitters, don't be responsible for bringing four more years of this nightmare to bear. A hat tip to Archer for the link to the mosaic.
Labels: analysis, Bush, dead bodies, John McCain, Lies and Lying Liars, terms of enragement, violence inherent in the system, war
