If you’re a Liberal or Progressive who, at this point, is still furiously bitching about why the Democrats won’t “do something” about all this, then you’re as stupid as you look.
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The other night, a nasty old man got up in front of the whole country and yelled at a chair for upwards of five minutes. Normally, I’d consider this a new all-time low in American politics, except that the Democratic Convention hasn’t started yet.
This was the first time ever in my entire life that I saw a crazy old man yelling at inanimate objects who wasn’t immediately snatched up by the cops and thrown into a psycho ward.
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No, really, it is, at least parts of it.
I was on my way downstairs for a sandwich one late morning last week or so, and I passed by the bedroom, where the DW is catching up on some impresario chores on her laptop while the satellite box is nailed down to MSNBC. As aiways, I stop for a minute or two just to check out what they're emitting, and it's some woman who looked as if she were made entirely of plastic babbling an item about Hill leadership's reaction to the discovery that the US Olympic Team's uniforms had been made in China. Faster than you could say "eight percent unemployment", Harry Reid and John Boehner had crapped their drawers loudly while blurting out carefully crafted Tourette's episodes on the subject of the export of US jobs to China. After offering up this news, the anchorbabe said -- for real, I shit you not -- "At last, something that Democrats and Republicans can agree on."
"...along with war, torture, censorship, warrantless surveillance, assassinations, detention without trial..." the anchorbabe neglected to add.
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OccupyDC Visits the US Chamber of Commerce, 12.15.11 from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.
After years of sucking up to Wall Street and giving out AAA ratings as if they were Cracker Jack prizes — becoming an accomplice in the United States’ economic meltdown — Standard & Poor’s suddenly turns around and knocks an “A” off the United States’ AAA debt rating after the recent debt ceiling pro wrestling match on Capitol Hill. Who’da thunk it?
Am I the only one here who thinks that outfit should change its name to Substandard & Piss-Poor?
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And, while I’m at it… am I the only one who watched the part of the speech where Obama gets all jazzed up about all the amazingly awesome fantastically innovative technological wonderfulness Americans have been capable of and thought for a moment that I was watching a segment of Oprah’s Favorite Things?
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At For Want Of A Nail: It’s Hard to Watch Your Speech When Our Power Has Been Disconnected, Sir…
So, a few days ago, I read about some so-called “post-partisan” or “anti-partisan” or “centrist” or whatever the hell kind of outfit they’re supposed to be called “No Labels” that’s just had its big launch with all manner of bland corporate politicos and media hacks boosting it, including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough — that’s right. one of the most right-wing howlers I’ve ever seen on the tube lending his gushing endorsement to an allegedly “centrist” group. You know when some emerging astroturfers use the phrase “common sense” in their press materials, it’s time to look the fuck out.
“Woodstock For Moderates” I heard it being called; that was such a horrid notion to imagine that there was only one thing I could do, and that was to hit the search engines. As I suspected, it was some weak-assed corporate centrist astroturf outfit being co-led by none other than Mark Penn, the Democrats’ famed Campaign Manager Of Losers and his socialite wife, and dragging along with such glittering moderate luminaries as Evan Bayh and a gaggle of GOP flunkies including former Rudolph Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon and McCain campaign advisor Mark McKinnon (hell, how does he rate?). Along with the eye-glazing politics of “civility” they’re pimping, it sure doesn’t help that they’re still being cagey about who’s signing their checks.
But, let’s just see what Salon was able to dig up…
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that seed donors to No Labels include Loews Corp. co-chair Andrew Tisch, Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich, and ex-Facebook executive Dave Morin.pro-corporate Democrat. Ditto for Tisch, a former tobacco executive who has given money to Sens. Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, and Kirsten Gillibrand over the years. It’s not clear where Morin, a young Silicon Valley investor, is coming from politically...
Ewwwwwww. Lieberman. Bayh. Facebook. Eeeeeewwwwwwww. Anti-partisan, my ass.
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It only got worse after 2004 — the donkey practically throwing herself at the elephant, while acting all coy, like she didn’t even care, the elephant behaving like a cold bastard toward her, while anybody with half a brain in their head knew he really wanted to fuck her brains out. The goddamn’ donkey got even worse around 2008 or so — smarmy coy looks, suggestive touching, soppy goo-goo eyes, all the time insisting there was nothing to it. Finally, about the time of the health care vote, she was all but falling all over the elephant, and it became insufferable. It was all I could do to keep from yelling “for crissakes, why don’t you two just get a room, already?”
I honestly can’t think of anything else to add to this succinct and elegant analysis — at least not in written words — so, I’m not going to waste time blathering here this time, and just get on with the cartoon:…With both parties fully in the grip of the industrial-financial-military complex of the American Empire they have to serve up shit sandwiches to everyone but they each need their own distinctive flavor of shit in order to differentiate themselves…
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I couldn’t stop being amazed at the plunging quality and the attendant skyrocketing of ignorance and sociopathy among the USA’s “leadership” in the past decade. I and others often wondered just how in the hell we wound up saddled with such a bunch of sociopaths, liars, and thieves? Then it hit me: this bunch wouldn’t be in power now if they hadn’t been put there by You, The People. Yeah, that’s right – you. You, the voters, have shown yourselves to be just as ignorant and sociopathic in a trend increasing upwards since at least the 1980 “election”, climbing steadily into the “zany” category in the Bush I and Clinton years, until it finally sailed off the edge of the Earth and into the realm of “batshit” shortly after 9/11. The “election” of 2008 totally iced the deal for me. This class of hucksters and shysters is in power because You, The Voters, put them there. You complain your asses off about the quality of your “leadership” until you’re blue in the mouth, and then promptly slog off to the polls like zombies, punch a chad for a fresh batch of sociopaths, liars and thieves, then slog off home to fall asleep watching American Idol. The names and faces of the “leaders” and the little letters after their names are different, but they’re basically the same class of sociopaths, liars and thieves. Then, the cycle of bitching/voting begins again, without your having learned a single thing from any of it, like that one really stupid cow in the herd who keeps walking into the electric fence.
And, no wonder, too. Just take a look at yourselves, f’cripesake. Despite Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper showing you Barack Obama’s birth certificate right there on TV, right to your faces – and despite the numerous third-rate forged Kenyan birth certificates exposed as fraud, right there on TV in front of your faces – a buttload of you still think Obama’s not a natural-born US citizen. Despite his having been a servant of bankers and industrialists since forever, some of you actually think that Barack Obama is a Marxist. Despite no evidence, a bunch of you think he’s a Muslim (as if there were something bad about it). Despite mountains of evidence, some of you still think that climate change is a hoax. Even more of you think that the weak, late, lamented “public option” in the healthcare “reform” bill was socialist. Despite the initial study being proven a massive fraud, huge numbers of you still insist that vaccines cause autism. Many of you still think — despite any tangible proof — that 9/11 was a conspiracy, an “inside job” perpetrated by the Bush Regime with the aid of the Saudis and Mossad and Israeli Art Students and all that other crap.
Many of you profess a love for liberty, but are so shit-scared of your own shadows that you’ll fall in line behind the first proposal that comes along requiring you to pose for digital x-ray porn at the airport. Despite reports of events coming largely from NGOs’ press releases and George Clooney on the Today Show, many of you still cry out for intervention by the greediest, most violent, genocidal and hypocritical state on the planet — the USA — in a tiny, half-assed civil war in Africa with the idea of “saving Darfur”, even though you know the only thing the “leaders” you elected care about saving is the massive puddles of oil in the ground under The Sudan.
And, please don’t get me started about the Liberals and Pwogwessives, because I really loves me some busting on Liberals and Pwogwessives. You totally went for Obama because you were so desperate and pants-pissing scared that you couldn’t think of anything else besides the possibility of a President with a “D” after his name who could pronounce the word “nuclear”. It’s not like you couldn’t have gotten onto the Internet and done some judicious search-engine sifting to find out that he was hooked up with the Democratic Leadership Council and had Wall Street and the nuclear and “defense” industries among his largest campaign donors, and seen what a cynical fake the guy was, and how he was basically a Republican. I guess that would’ve ruined your fun, though. Some of you supported Obama because he was a “peace candidate” – even though he waffled on the war and threatened Iran in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convension (or, as I like to call it, his 2008 Democratic Presidential Nomination announcement speech), and even though, in his I Heart Israel Speech at the 2008 Conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, he pretty much gave the green light to Israel to do whatever it wanted to do in Gaza, i.e. bombing, strafing, shooting, torturing, blockading and collective-punishing the living hell out of the place.
Oh, and, what percentage of black voters went for Obama – 90%, something outrageous like that? – even though he never made any commitment to actually improve life for black Americans, though nearly every campaign speech he ever gave was designed to reassure white America that he wouldn’t cause any trouble (especially that horrid Fathers’ Day speech)? It’s as if everybody totally forgot what King and Malcolm X were trying to teach us about house slaves and field slaves, and how to spot a “player”, and how we should judge people by the content of their character rather than their color. They didn’t give a damn’ about his being a corporate tool; they only cared what color he was. I’ll never forget the interview I read on the wire services, with black voters at a campaign stop in South Carolina, where one woman just flat comes right out and says she’s voting for Obama because he’s black. Man, oh, man, how fuxored is that? You don’t care about the campaign contributions from BP and Goldman Sachs, or that he’s going to escalate the war in Afghanistan; you’re going to vote for the guy anyway because he’s black.
Christalmighty. Somebody tie me to a railroad track.
That’s the really sad thing about this cavalcade of crazy: these are people who actually vote in elections in this damn’ country. It’s bad enough that the “election” process itself is rendered illegitimate by the Party’s dirty tricks, distortions, half-truths and corporate cash-whoring, but insult is added to injury when a bunch of greedy, selfish, ignorant, thieving sociopaths are empowered by several million other greedy, selfish, ignorant, thieving sociopaths, who then have the gall to claim that I have no right to complain about the shape things are in because I don’t vote. WTFF? You people helped maintain these bastards in power for thirty years; it looks like you’re the ones who have no right to complain. Losers.
Back when I first got involved in the IMCs and the antiglobalization movement, a common slogan chanted at the protests was “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!” With all due respect to my comrades, I have to disagree. This is what “democracy” looks like.
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