Electoral Rage

Well, it's official, Bush wins, mankind loses. Let there be no confusion, no recounts, no arguments about tainted ballots or dirty tricks, no question in our collective mind, George W. Bush has a mandate, albeit slight, from the people of this rapidly deteriorating nation to be our President for four more ominous years. As I write these painful words, a dark cloud descends upon all that is righteous and good in this once promising land. My lower intestines wrench like spaghetti noodles wrapping around a slowly turning spork. Pure, chaotic, voiceless rage. Balled fists of white knuckles make typing even more brutishly spastic than usual and panic colleagues with respect for company property. Fleeting moments of it-will-be-ok-ish thoughts are violently stomped out by a reverberating sense of impending doom. That little reddish-black dot in my peripheral vision is flashing and growing larger, as if counting down to something even more cataclysmic - presumably an end to which Bush is the frightful means.

The inevitable question jostles around in my head, eliminating capacity for other thought: How can people living in relatively similar conditions as I do vote this wickedly moronic dickhead back into office? How? Seriously, how? Have they no access to books, no knowledge of history, no innate sense of how atavistically, regressive this country is becoming? Have they no fundamental fucking decency? To those of us burdened by rationality, the transparency of Bush's incompetence, his violent inappropriateness to lead even the tiniest subsection of people, his pure, crystallized, intolerable stupidity makes it all the more difficult to understand. I want to grab those bulky, clueless red states by the sides of their empty metaphorical heads and shake the shit out of them, somehow try to force them to grasp the basic principles of humanity. I want to wake them from their long, thoughtless, Wal-martian stupor. But it's no use, confusion is but a mere symptom, ignorance is their disease. Rational argument can no sooner prevail here than with a newborn child, only a vast amount of education will do, and that requires patience I can no longer afford.

But for all the frustration and disappointment, I am firmly convinced that we, the anti-Bush crowd, have truly only ourselves to blame for this first election of George W. Bush. For all of the posturing on the left, all of the reluctant concessions made, all of the vacuous, self-fulfilled prophetic talk of electability, we have nothing, less than nothing, to show for our decision to proffer John Kerry for President. That decision was the single biggest mistake we could have made to ensure the continued empowerment of the Bushies. Herein lies the painful, irritating rub. We tried to run a watered-down conservative against a real one, and the real thing will always win that battle. We brought a knife to an ideological gunfight. What's worse, we did more than just lose an election. We got so caught up in winning the election, we forgot to be on the right side of the issues. Once Kerry got his first whiff of the Presidential poontang so to speak, the blood rushed out of his head and scoring became the only matter of consequence. We tolerated it, even apologized for it, because we vainly assumed that the goal of beating the idiot trumped all other considerations. There, in the seedy underbelly of justifiable politik, is where we really lost, not on November 2. We were focused on the wrong Goddamn enemy, playing grab-ass with the clueless spokesperson in the lobby while the real assholes liquored-up and sodomized our nation in the dirty backroom of their faux-wood-paneled hunting lodge. The problem is jack-ass Presidents don't change America, ideas, for good or ill, do, and we chose the guy that seemed the most devoid of any - and why, because he could pull 10 or 15 loyal Vietnam vets out of his ass at the drop of a television camera. I mean seriously, did I miss something. Was the idea that George W. Bush wasn't good enough at starting wars? I don't give a flying fuck if Kerry can excavate the rotting toothless corpse of General Washington for a posthumous endorsement, I would have just settled for someone who fundamentally disagreed with Bush. Sure, we would have lost the election anyways, but we might have won the argument. Maybe it's just me, but I think it better to lose big with the right message than lose small with the wrong one.

So what now? Solutions appear as elusive as elected office to progressives. Am I to simply fester for four more years, which in fanatic conservative years will feel more like 30? Should I move to Europe or Canada? How can I continue to live in George Bush's America, when our politics are diametrically opposed, when I disdain everything he stands for? He is adamantly against thought and reason, I am for both; he's unimpressed with literacy, I think its elemental to a good Presidency; he believes that a vengeful God will send dirty homosexual men to burn in fiery Hell for their indiscreetly-tight pants, I lament God's wretched non-existence; he thinks cluster bombing a populated Iraqi city is a viable liberation strategy, I find it to be the saddest of ironies; he thinks that claiming to be peaceful makes one so, I think not starting wars of aggression does. My only hope at this point is that the pendulum gets high enough to the right that the return swing is strong enough to get this country back on track, that is if it doesn't get caught in the muddy trough that is the current democratic party.

Rosencratz and Guildenstern

"But such officers do the king best service in the end: he keeps them, like an ape, in the comer of Ins jaw; first mouthed, to be last swallowed: when he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again."  Hamlet

With all the political polarization in today's America, there seems to be one universally accepted maxim - John McCain and Colin Powell are decent fellas. Whether you agree with them on a particular issue or not you have to respect them, or so the theory goes. Staunch conservatives admire their congeneal moderation, liberals respect their principled - if misguided - stances. Am I missing something here? How did these two fucks become so goddamn likeable? Every time I start to fall under this tempting misapprehension, I have to remember that each of these two men has stood behind virtually every political disaster for which we have appropriately excoriated George W. Bush. I have to remember the bold-faced lies of Colin Powell in front of the UN, lies that directly contributed to the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi lives - lives we are told are not even worth the time of our nation's most industrious and ever-burgeoning list makers and profilers (my somewhat questionable library reading list they know, but a rough estimate of dead Iraqis is beyond their scope). I have to remember the sight of John McCain stumping for Bush, despite all the torment that the Bush campaign cost his family, out of reverence to his career and his party above his country. These men are much more than pushovers to the coal-powered locomotive will of Karl Rove, they are enablers of the worst sort. They actually lend credibility to Rovism, giving it a glossy statesmanship it so dearly lacks, provided of course that their names can somehow remain unsullied by all of Bush's combustible incompetence. But I refuse to see them any longer as any more than their actual politics warrant. To take a over recited page from Bush's ideological comic book, those who harbor Bush are as guilty as Bush himself! Despite the occasionally charming moments of rationality, in the end McCain and Powell still represent the worst in this great country.

The Kerry Hangover

If the unthinkable occurs on November 2, if the seemingly insurmountable is surmounted, if somehow the conservative nightmare in which we currently find ourselves subsides and George W. Bush is rightfully denied reelection, despite the demands of both Karl Rove and God almighty, the streets of the world will erupt with joyous celebration. As if a great curse had been lifted from us, we shall breathe a collective sigh of relief and give homage to providence for this wonderfully unexpected gift. Enemies in regions of strife will take a well-deserved break from their cyclical hatred to toast to the cleansing of a great stain on history's bed sheet. Flowers and candies will bandy about in a manner heretofore resigned to the seedy dream world of Richard Pearle's dementia. Laughter and cheers may drown out the gunfire, if only for a split second, and it will be, in posterity's eye, a moment of some redemption for America to right itself where it had gone so wrong. But after all of the celebration has drained from our bodies, and all of the optimism has poured from our lungs, we shall wake regrettably to find John Kerry the new leader of the free world. We shall as one wake in a fit of nausea, internal dry heaves and mind numbing perplexity, and bemoan the wretched elixir from which we too liberally drank.

Anticlimax on a short time delay.

For as Bush's tyranny over intellectualism, science, ethics and linguistics comes to a necessary end, so with it our illusions that he was an anomaly misrepresentative of our current polity. Bush has symbolized to most in the world all that is dangerously combustible in the combination of dumb arrogance and unequivocal power. But make no mistake, Bush is far from some atavistic political mutation, he is what he has always been - a man devoted to the ideological causes of his frighteningly broad base. A base that has withstood the contradiction of every age of human enlightenment through time immemorial, only to repackage itself anew and find refuge amongst the spiritually feeble. The fuckedupedness of this country has been borne not from the deranged mind of one pseudo-hillbilly, but from a severe mental illness, conservative fanaticism, that pervades large chunks of the world's populace. Bush is but a tree in the forest of Rovism, and the moment we see him as anything greater than that we only do ourselves and progress a great disservice. Bush the man has never been the real problem. He is merely a grotesque symptom of it - and to my dismay, so too I believe is Kerry.

If we are so fortunate as to be exorcised of our Boy-Idiot, we will have to face to stark realization that the forces that have trotted Kerry out before us as our presumptive savior have no intention of letting go their real stranglehold on our democracy, and that most of the things that Bush has stood so shamefully for over the last four years will remain the law of the land. Don't get me wrong, Kerry is a vastly better choice than Bush and anyone voting in a swing state should take close notice of those differences, but to pretend that Kerry will foster in a new age of political reformation is a chimera. In fact, I feel quite confident that, no matter who stumbles through the quadrennial recitation of bullshit in front of the decrepit Rehnquist on January 20, 2005, the most important issues facing us today will be as unresolved as ever by 2008 - we will still be deeply entrenched in Iraq, 40 plus million Americans (if not more) will still be without viable healthcare, gays and lesbians will still be deemed second class citizens, vast swaths of unwitting and innocent Arab-Americans will still be scooped up and tossed in jail under the indiscriminate aim of our national security, the tax burden will still weigh heaviest on those least able to shoulder it and millions of lives will continue to be destroyed under the pretense of a winnable drug war - now so hopelessly lost in the widely-cast shadow of that new fantastical and perpetual war. Kerry has so far no answer, not that he has really looked, to these problems. It seems to me that he hasn't been a definitive voice for progressive change since 1971. No, I fear that the best we can hope for from this JFK-lite is political stagnation, a clotting of the bleeding. Bush and his ilk represent a disturbingly regressive trend in this country, one that Kerry (based on what I have seen so far) is in no position to reverse. I can only hope that he can act as a stopgap until such time as someone whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to that trend can rise to the forefront. Or maybe Kerry will shock the world. Maybe the Kerry hangover won't last out the four years and he will become the liberal that the right has long mislabeled him. But I doubt it.

Worst President in History? ..Maybe not

With all of the negative anti-Bush rhetoric flying around, it's important to remember the administration's vast accomplishments - many of which are clearly outlined on Bush's reelection website. It's a lengthy read, so I shall summarize. Since that fateful day in September, Bush has successfully completed the liberation of both Iraq and Afghanistan, as evidenced by the big-ass American army shooting all sorts of shit at will in both; he has drastically rearranged the Taliban and become the number one spokesperson for Al Qaeda recruiting in the world; he altruistically freed thousands of Iraqi citizens from the tyranny of being alive, with that compassionately conservative bombing program known as "shock-and-awe" (residents of Baghdad proper have even described the exploding smart-bombs as little shrapnel kisses blown from 25,000 feet above); he deposed President Saddam Hussein, who although cannot by definition technically be a terrorist (note the "President" before his name denoting his status as the leader of a internationally-recognized sovereign nation) was a real asshole; and confiscated his cool little gun to hang on his wall in the Oval Office next to his "100th Mentally-Retarded Inmate Electrocuted" plaque. He also eliminated Saddam's notorious "torture rooms" and "rape chambers" so that they could be replaced by rooms where people can be tortured in a more acceptablly Judeo-Christian manner by properly-trained United States military professionals and more free market-oriented mercenaries (many of whom took valuable time off from gun shows and hate crimes to uphold these admirable American values). Maybe most importantly, he courageously used all of his 17 vacations and 220 golf rounds over the last three and a half years to single handedly prevent all additional terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. It's just too bad he can't give himself the medal of honor, or can he? And all of these impressive accomplishments while still finding the time to drastically roll back our most basic freedoms, cut healthcare and environmental programs, piss off those silly foreigners with their stupid international law and goddamned multilateral treaties, find innovative ways of funnel pesky U.S. national security secrets to both Iran and Bob Novak, and prove to the world's children the educational gratuitousness of literacy. Bravo Bush!!

The Conservative Dichotomy: The World Hates Us, I Mean Loves Us..Wait..Shit!

Woe is the poor Republican party; besmirched, mocked, disdained, stranded on an island of righteousness in a sea of depravity and moral relativism. Waves of prurient, God-taunting degradation crashing upon their be-haloed heads with only the fibrous moral density of their bones to keep them from going under. A vibrant flower in a cesspool of.... well, you get the idea. Oh yes, make nary a mistake it's a bitch being a hard-nosed, kick-ass, stand-up-for-what's-wholesome conservative in today's world. And no one knows this better than that poor bastard George W. Bush, always catching flak from, among others, the lascivious, hateful, liberal media (who, when not drinking herbal tea, counting their silver pence and sodomizing young men, are at all out war with the White House). Everyone shits on poor George, but luckily for America, when God (using the Supreme Court presumably as his hand) appoints us a President, he picks a sturdy "One." And better yet, he goes out and gets himself an old sinner, someone who can comprehend the true debasement of the American left. Who better than a spoiled rich kid who snorted lines of coke off of the taut nipple of a Houston hooker to properly oversee the jailing of millions of disenfranchised blacks for doing their drugs without the benefit of Presidential patriarchism? Who better than a privileged National Guard absentee to send troops to their death under the overstretched banner of a religious mandate? Somehow though, to the Right's amazement, these glorious qualities are lost on the great masses of valueless liberals, who conspire to tear old W. and his fellow heartland heroes down by any means possible.

But how does all of this heroic little guy bullshit square with the oft-repeated notion that the crazy Left is drastically out of touch with real America? How does the well-publicized notion of the "liberal media" square with Fox's subtly immodest slogan of America's News Channel? How can Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity be the biggest stars in political talk radio and still be drowned out by that great liberal echo chamber? Do the Washington Times, New York Post and Wall Street Journal think of themselves as fringe papers? Do Bill O'Rielly and Joe Scarborough really qualify as alternative, even indie, programming? It seems the Right can't make up their collective mind (if it may be called such a thing) whether they are the voice of the people en masse or the place for the special few faithful to find refuge from the rest of us. They are perpetually torn between playing the consummate underdog overachievers, little political Rocky Balboas as it were, and feigning utter shock at the elitist disconnectedness of the Democrats, or worse - actual liberals. How can such cognitive dissonance continue? By living a delusion. By cultural gerrymandering. By imagining that those living in the bulky red states are the real Americans and every heathen living in New York or Los Angeles (don't even get me started on San Francisco) have sadly forgotten what this country is all about. They live in a dream world where bible-belt cowboys are somehow more representative of America than any "Hollywood liberal" could ever be, despite the fact that most Americans don't actually wear cowboys hats, have never rustled cattle, and don't give a flying fuck how many payload tons the latest Ford truck can carry. In this sense, it appears that our cultural imagery is as misrepresentative as our democracy, disproportionately diminishing the relevance of the vast throngs of immorals living in our various Babylonian metropolitans. I can only hope that one day we will all rise up and make these neanderthals as marginalized as they have long clamored to be. Let us make underdogs of them yet.

None Dare Call it Treason

Ronald Reagon died earlier this week and today I awake to censure for not respecting his death enough. The media is pouncing on anyone with the gall to suggest that Reagon was not a full-fledged saint, under the guise of respect for the dead. They are peddling the notion that all of our countrymen, whether you liked Reagon or not, should be thankful for his service (as if our distaste was based on some personal vendetta). But its absurdly pretentious to say its not about whether you liked Reagan or not. Of course it is. For example, I can tell that most of the media does. It takes no more than a 4th grade education to notice the fundamental difference between the weeklong eulogizing of Reagan and the quick sweeping-over of the death of Nixon. Not because one served their country less than the other, but because Reagan has become a mythological figure in the eyes of the conservative movement in this country -the man who took the government from all those whiney, spineless liberals and handed it back to the free-market - and Nixon, well, was Nixon.

Unfortunately, I don't beleive we owe anything to Reagan, he served at our displeasure, not vice versa. A Nicaraquan immigrant whose parents were murdered by contra forces that Reagan shuffled money to, a father who saw his son taken by AIDS while Reagan dutifully ignored the epidemic or any other citizen of the U.S. who felt the negative impact of greater disparities in wealth and drastic cutbacks of basic social programs during his years do not owe a goddamn thing to Reagan except his or her well-earned indignation. The Presidency of the United States is a serious fucking job, one that affects in some way virtually every living being on the planet. That makes it a spectacular burden and responsibility. Many people, myself included, believe that Reagan not only negelected that responsibility, he bent it over and raped it in the ass. If Reagan wanted universal praise for his public service following his death, he should have sought to use that service to the benefit of a much larger group of people than he did.

The vast majority of the criticism I see and hear regarding the presidency of Reagan is in response to glorified versions (if not outright lies) of his Presidency. Those have to be answered with reality, whether Nancy likes to hear it or not. As we speak, Republicans are attempting to rename as many airports as possible in Reagan's name, put him on the dime and/or 100 bill, and add his graven image to Mt. Rushmore. Lack of criticism, for fear of being disrespectful, is the only lubrication these assholes need. Now is the time when conservatives will attempt to memorialize Reagan's legacy for all posterity, our silence will do no more than allow history to be rewritten to serve their purposes and undermine ours. Contrary to what many think, history can be a second in the making and people still die every day as a result of Reagan's myopic policies. We don't have the fucking time to wait decades to debate their merits.

I excoriated Reaganism when Reagan was President, after he left office and all this week. Unfortunately, the 12 years of his and Bush I's Presidency (and every day since then) fell far short of enough time to resolve those compliants.

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." George Bernard Shaw

Fiscal Conservatism

I have grown so powerfully annoyed with every straight-faced, strong-jawed politically reasonable Democratic nominee vainly claiming the paradoxical title of "social liberal, fiscal conservative." I would venture that the two descriptions are mutually exclusive (based on my understanding of the phrase, fiscally conservative). That is, they favor (i) a nearly "flat-tax" (because it's "fair", at least, based upon the grade-school understanding of the notion), (ii) minimal spending on educational and social programs and (iii) corporate subsidies (read welfare for the rich - because baby-Jesus knows we have to protect our biggest businesses so that the benefits trickle-down to the underlings, notwithstanding the direct conflict with free-market capitalism). The problem with those policies, other than their apparent disconnect from good economic theory, is that they make social-liberalism necessarily impossible. The problem is that poverty, and its repercussions: crime, disease, starvation, etc., is already a tax on the entire society, but one, which, by definition, weighs heaviest on the poor. Thus, social taxation is already regressive, and fiscal-conservatism exists only to exacerbate it. This is anything but socially liberal; it’s atavistic and socially irresponsible. How can generally well-educated people ignore basic logic, or history for that matter, which has confirmed, if there was ever any doubt, that growing disparities in economic well-being simply cannot last and will have to be confronted one way or the other. In the prescient words of Rage Against the Machine: "hungry people won't stay hungry for long!"

Conservatives (fiscally or otherwise) have always been behind politically (its the natural outcome of conservatism), and they will continue to be. In fact, I think history can be simply defined as the proving of conservatives wrong, their ideology slowing giving way to the realities of progress. It’s just a matter of time and circumstance. Progressives, not ironically, come up with progressive ideas, conservatives bitch and moan about how things were different/better when they were young, how it's just not fair, charge us with utopist naivete, and then a century later fold and pretend they were on board the whole time. Just imagine if you could describe our current government to some fiscally conservative Republicans from the turn of the 20th century (i.e. McKinley), he would think we were all socialists. Describe our new national education program ("Leave no middle-class white kid behind"), nationalized prescription-drug bill ("Leave no voting senior citizen behind"), or our national faith-based programs ("Leave no potential convert to Christianity behind"), and George W. Bush would seem like Leon Trotsky.

Presidentially speaking, I think Kucinich is far and away the best candidate. However, he's shackled by his reasonableness, and will be relegated to the role of primer for future real-liberals (he's the Adlai Stevenson of the early 21st century). The rest of them (Sharpton and Brown excluded) are all just water-downed conservatives. Dean's a little better than the rest, but not much. The wrestling scream was the best thing I have seen out of him so far. That being said, any of them would be an indescribably vast improvement on the current administration, and will likely have my reluctant vote.

Kerry's Pansy-Ass Gunshot Wounds

It seems that every bored, ex-military conservative in the bible-belt with a working knowledge of the satan-inspired internet has decided to devote entire websites to the unpatriotic service of Kerry in Vietnam, and, more particularly, the insignificance of the wounds Kerry suffered there. Even worse, in a shocking turn of events the boys at Newsmax appear to agree. Look, even Jack Kelly is outraged.

Take, for example, the ultra-specifically titled "Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth," and their damning claims that Kerry spent an inadequate number of months in the cushy Mekong Delta, ran (away, mind you!) from enemy gunfire, made up stories of his own war crimes (for presidential empathy presumably) and arranged for medals to be awarded to himself for what appeared to at least half of the doctors in Southeast Asia as mere non-fatal wounds. These thoughtful organizations and noble armchair warriors help the rest of us understand just how pussy a shrapnel-inflicted flesh wound can be (a pussyness only exacerbated by Kerry's Clintonesque efforts to evade said shrapnel) and the unfitness for Presidency resulting from such pussy flesh wounds.

Far too as yet unshot to make my own determination as to Kerry's war record, I must restrict my analysis to the less salient question of when the Presidential election became nothing more than a battle over who suffered greater injury in a war. Shall this be the only standard by which we measure our candidates? If so, why not throw out the elections, find the toughest, meanest, most-decorated soldier alive and appoint him lifetime emperor. Or, maybe only those people who have had every male member of their family in combat should be allowed to vote at all, like this freak.

By the way, how does Bush measure up to these difficult standards? While Kerry was play-fighting in the Epcotian sector of Nam, Dubya was embroiled in an epic battle with cocaine, hookers and the guy taking attendance at the Texas National Champagne Brigade. I truly believe that Bush is the worst President in a century, but I never begrudged him for not fighting in Vietnam, because I never deemed it a requirement of a good President. I was more concerned with him being a complete moron, a concern which has proven decidedly valid. We desperately need to rethink our priorities in this country.

Bush Hatred and the Pitfalls of Political Relativism

There is a new ideology, if not a full-fledged personality trait, taking this country by storm, Bush Hatred. A single-issue third party is carrying its dire message from besieged town to besieged town, "the idiot must go!" There is no greater cause du people, or any ideological stance more well earned. Those who occupy the margins of the political spectrum are always loathed by their counterparts, so its no great revelation that we zany liberals despise such a right-wing zealot, but Bush has gone much further, he has found a way to unite millions of Americans against him; liberals, centrists and misguided conservatives alike. While Bush Hatred is a completely appropriate response to what is likely the worst presidency in the last 100 years, it is not without its failings.

John Kerry, our recently anointed democratic contender, is easily the greatest beneficiary of Bush Hatred. Our disgust with Bush has severely clouded our judgment of Kerry. He certainly does not reflect the values of most of the "real" progressives in this country, but when juxtaposed with Bush, he comes across as Eugene V. Debs. Bush has that effect on moderates. But, as a wise me is just now saying, "A people so desperate for water, will drink it from the gutter." We must remember that Kerry voted for No Child Left Behind, the inexcusable Patriot Act and, most importantly, the Iraq war resolution. Not exactly pushing the liberal envelope. And yet, this is the same record that has earned Kerry the label of one of the Senate's most liberal members and assault from the Bush campaign. Only in a polity this irrevocably fucked up, could a man like Kerry be awarded that dubious distinction - one he is now running from like a republican politician from a draft. The real assault should come from those of us who are actually looking for some positive change in this country, not the right-wingers. How does a guy who cannot even disagree with Bush on these fundamental issues be our answer to him? The response that is invariably given: Electability.

That's the power of Bush Hatred, and the danger of political relativism. Electability becomes the most overused catchword of the electoral season. And so it is once again confirmed that American-style free-market capitalism has completely subsumed our political scene and commoditized our politicians. In this sense, politics is as irrational as the stock market (and Kerry our tulip craze?), it's not whether we think a candidate is any good, it's whether we think vast throngs of other rabble will. So we tell ourselves we must elect the most electable guy and chase our collective tail until November. With this ingenious strategy, the best, and worst, we can end up with in 2005 is an elitist, skull and bones frat boy, beholden to corporate backers, whose against gay marriage and will help push "free trade" to the brink of the world's geopolitical and environmental tolerance.