When the Overweight and Underinformed Get Revolutionary

These are weird times, made weirder every day by the immediacy and explicitness of our media-age. For the last two weeks, I have watched the many you-tube videos showing the creepiest of Americans storming town halls and local recreation centers to let their intransigent voices be heard in cheesy pseudo-patriotic splendor. Unfortunately for these heroic true-blue-ers, it appears that the nefarious mustachioed forces of collectivist evil (i.e. free t-shirted volunteers and inept government bureaucrats) have barred many of the doors. Not surprisingly, chunky down-homey folks reacted as they are wont to do, with flailing, misguided and ill-informed indignation, followed, naturally, by short recap interview spots on Fox News. These are our post-post-modern counterculture revolutionaries. They don't really know how to chant or march per se, but they recite bumper stickers relatively well and have been on Wikipedia just long enough to have a third-grader’s understanding of historical American reform movements and co-opt some misused symbolism. The slightly more disconcerting part, however, is that they are poorly practiced in the ways of non-violent dissent, having done little throughout their largely disaffected lives. Regrettably, it only takes one or two slight shoves by a Popeye-armed plumber with gold-reflective Oakley sunglasses that are, evidently and counter-intuitively, still being made and sold somehow, of a guy that looks exactly like him and their preternatural instincts turn the party all headlocky and strange. But what is the actual root of this well-earned protestation? Well, that is where things get really obscure.

The issue de jour raising the ire of American conservatives is public healthcare. Like so many issues before it, this one too has little or nothing to do with reality or fact. It resides in the much more forgiving and flexible land of our sensationalist-media-caked, blogged and streaming you-tubed, self-indulgent political debate. The utter lack of substance of our current discourse is virtually impossible to overstate at this point. Political theater is hardly a novel idea, but today's version is so surrealistic, haphazard and devoid of substance or merit that it resembles what I can only imagine a Quentin Tarantino high school play would be like. Making it worse, this dumbed-down, trans-continental version of Crossfire exists almost entirely in a political vacuum, without any real arbitrator of truth or factuality to monitor the performance. The sides, if they can be called that, are entirely free to say whatever they want in furtherance of their cause, and there simply is no way to stop it any more. Ideally, one side's arguments would largely prevail on its merits, but the model is so warped and broken that the debate doesn’t even approach the merits. There is no speaking truth the power. It's about speaking emphatic falsity to broad idiocy. This country, and particularly the right, are media-herded political cattle, only shiny objects and loud noises do any good. I suppose I can guess why hardcore conservatives seem to me most susceptible to this brand of marketing. They generally have less information, but care desperately about appearing to be informed (see for reference the entire career of Bill O’Reilly), making them the perfect storm of dangerous stupid. They like the illusion of advocacy without the annoyance of investigation or study. Like the worst of their concentric-circled religious brethren, they can certainly quote scripture, but couldn’t find Judea on a map with both hands.

Truthfully, though, it’s our own fault. We tolerate it, primarily out of some obligatory notion that it’s good for the country and it furthers America’s greatest attribute, dissent. Listen, I am all for a good discussion, even more for righteous indignation when it’s actually righteous, but I am not going to pretend there is righteousness where there isn’t. I am proud to live in a country in which Klu Klux Klan-ers can march on Skokie should they chose to, but I don’t take pride in their existence in the first place, nor do I feel the need to pretend they hold an actual opinion. They don’t. They have a confusion and a problem, but it’s not really an opinion. We may not have many KKK-ers out in the open today, but an identifiable thread of inhumanity still lingers and finds expression elsewhere. You would have to intentionally deceive yourself not to see some overlap between the modern anti-communists, the folks that use Barack Obama’s middle name as some sort of fear tactic, and the "God Hates Homos" crowd. These people are bound irrevocably by fear and hate. They fear virtually everything (immigrants, communists, foreigners, the Hollywood elite, San Francisco, puppies….probably) and hate the existence of that fear. They rail against what they deem to be communism despite some of the most overt contradictions imaginable. They truly, sadly and ironically, believe that Obama, a modern centrist democrat whose entire career has been powered by large corporations and wealthy individuals most assuredly bent on maintaining the status quo, and schooled in the Realpolitik ways of Chicago public service, is somehow, inexplicably, a dyed-in-wool Marxist. It's actually never occurred to them how counterintuitive that is. As Obama cuts back-door deals with monster pharmaceutical companies, bails out over-indulgent banks, hedge funds, car companies and every other powerful sector in the American economy with lobbyists on a speed-dial, savvy political observers in wood-paneled gentlemen clubs on K-Street order another glass of scotch and laugh at the inevitable, unflinching rotation of the political earth. Meanwhile, the intellectually feeble throughout the gritty real-America-land take to the streets like marionettes on strings running from the sausagey, greased fingers of Rush Limbaugh and Dick Army.

And when they go out, they go armed to the nines with stupid. Some recent highlights:

They wear confederate flag t-shirts and hold up signs that say “Abolish Federal Government,” no doubt unaware that the preamble to the Confederacy’s Constitution very clearly contemplates the formation of “a permanent federal government” for which it was drafted (or copied really).

They compare Obama to Hitler, because rational people can of course recognize the vast similarities between the Holocaust and Nazi death-squads and a milquetoast house bill that may or may not include a potential option of government paid health-insurance for those citizens that chose it. Hitler rounded up and murdered millions of Jews, gays, artists and the infirm with the militant force of jackbooted thugs and Obama similarly wants to kill all of the old people by the more surreptitious but equally evil route of offering doctors under the public health-plan credit for providing penta-annual end-of-life consulting services for those that request it. I suppose in some gestalt sense of all things being intertwined to one great web of existence, these may be very similar, but in the normal-functioning-brain level of obvious historical comparison, they could scarcely be more different.

They claim that their protest to public healthcare program is a philosophical objection to socialist governmental services, while arguing in the same breath that this program will ruin the most conspicuous of all social public insurance programs – Medicare and Medicaid – all without even the faintest hint of irony. This is what allows them, beautifully and magically, to say things like “Keep the government out of my Medicare.” Honestly, Jonathan Swift couldn’t approximate this level of pure, crystallized ironical genius. An avowed atheism most days, when I see a creepy conservative say something like this on television, I feel the divine elbow of God nudging and fucking with me just a little bit. Like he literally smirkingly says to me, while stroking his long white beard, “watch this shit, I am going to make one of your buddies here make no fucking sense at all.” Oh, we giggle a bit (me and God) and go back to our mutual indifference with one another, but perhaps it does make me feel less alone in the vast expanse of nothingness.

This is what America has come to I fear. The problem is so much more pervasive than this particular issue. Large swaths of this country, simply put, are Sarah Palin-dumb. What’s worse, it’s a country of self-aggrandizing Joe "the Plumbers", who almost literally (as literally as possible given the inherent limitations of the poorly-used phrase) know nothing. I usually feel sorry for people like them, I do. It's not entirely their fault - but society does them no service in pretending to listen to them, any more than it does a blind hooker by letting her drive a Smart-Car on the interstate, or really any blind person for that matter. These people are dangerously unaware of the world, politics and, most significantly, their own gross and violent inadequacy to even remotely comprehend these issues in the first place. Ignorance is never conscious, but usually it’s at least a little insecure. Those days appear to be behind us. Ignorance likes to speak up at the dinner table now, and loudly. He blogs fiercely, writes Op-Ed pieces, has millions of listeners on the radio every day, runs for vice-president and shows off his pulpy gams to the drooling morons the rest of us call rightwing-nuts. This is the mind-numbingly ignorant United States of current America in which I must toil. It's so utterly demoralizing to thoughtful people, that I simply don't see how we can abide it any longer. Honestly, these Palin-ites need less town hall meetings, and more legitimate education. They need to pick up real-life books and newspapers once in a while, and stop deriving their political talking points from the hacks at Fox News or an email thread sent by the biggest moron they and ten other morons know. And most importantly, they need to put down the internet and all the crazy that comes with it. Creepy conservatives and middling rightwing pseudo-politicos absolutely love the internet and its ability to make relevant their previously marginalized credos.

I quite understand that this will seem like elitism, so the better to deal with it frankly. I am not really an elitist, at least in any palpably historical sense. I am by no means wealthy, and not a single identifiable member of my lineage has ever lived on Park Avenue, or owned a home in or on (not sure which) a Cape or Vineyard or a Hampton. My education, though post-graduate, is relatively pedestrian. I am neither terribly fit, nor white-toothy good looking nor exceedingly tall, as traditional elitists indeed once were. But that's really the point. Elitism isn't what it used to be. It actually takes very little in our modern political culture. I can read, and care to. I try to remain thoughtful about things I understand and humble regarding the things I don’t. I don’t feign an undying love of the constitution and the Founding Fathers just so I can carry guns and dislike black people. I try not to randomly pray for shit in the middle of the day. I have little more than what should be a normal educated adult's understanding of the complexities of the world. But, I know just enough to not confuse jingoistic sloganism with patriotism, empty platitudes with righteousness or redundancy with political astuteness. Just enough not to think that a public option healthcare program is communism just because someone less educated than me can say it aloud relentlessly. Just enough not to buy into the over-marketed and trite notion that everyone in the heartland, bible-belt or who hunt moose are “real” Americans, and the fifty million people that live in the greater New York, Los Angeles and Bay Area regions somehow aren't. I know it’s verboten, but truthfully, I don't want moose hunters to be even remotely relevant in national politics ever again. I want them just to keep to being weird and, presumably, hunting moose. Let those of us with some lingering connection to the larger world take care of the important things.

Obviously, I have also referenced weight a good deal in this, but I do so for good reason and certainly not to seem body-type judgmental. I point it out for its intrinsic symbolism to the people I am generally describing. I think the world has long been able (me being its rational normal person spokesman for these purposes) to tolerate the lamentations of the indigent and the physically slight. However, the extreme indulgence, the gluttonous Walmart-ian lust, of the average current beefy protestor betrays his alleged plight. When I think of the significant movements of political revolt, I think of a shivering and war-torn Tom Paine sitting by a campfire scribbling of times that try men's souls, I think of great huddled angry masses of Russian proletariat reading obsessively their dog-eared mass-produced manifestos and striving for a better lot in life, I think of sweet cargo-panted campesinos in the Sierra Madre mountains, I think of soot-faced railway workers and miners that haven’t eaten a decent meal in days, and I think of Gandhi wasting away to the bone in the service of his beliefs. Whatever the ultimate cause, we general can empathize with those that bleed, die and starve for it. Today's raging American populist is hardly so romantic. We have traded in William Lloyd Garrison, Eugene Debs and Rosa Parks for Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. My peripheral vision flashing red dots go into overdrive and the inside of my mouth acidifies a bit when I think of Rush Limbaugh as a counterculture head of a reformist movement, or that we live in a society in which Glenn Beck fancies himself an intellectual satirist, or where Sean Hannity is somehow, inexplicably, allowed to even exist.

But this is who America is. Too fat and too vapid to realize we are so fat and so vapid. We are without shame, without apology, and, seemingly more every day, without prospect of redemption. Self-satisfied intellectual liberals, also overfed on their own sense of detached superiority, are left only to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Informative

Christmas' War on Me

It's the holiday season and, according to the FoxnewsHacks and several religious organizations set-up primarily to complain about the secularization of America, we are ballsdeep in the diabolical War on Christmas. Yes, poor Christianish consumers all over America must suffer the heathenistic indignity of being told to have a "happy holiday" when all they really want is a white merry Christmas. Wal-Mart, that well-known bastion of atheistic liberalism, has started using the unpolitically-correct happy holiday greeting under the auspices of being more inclusive of non-Christian freaks, but in reality, so we are told by the pro-Christmas warriors, to piss off its largely Christian consumer base, thereby dramatically decreasing sales of Toby Keith's new holiday CD "All God wants for Christmas is the USA to stick a Patriot missile up some Iraqi ass." Toby is reportedly reeling.

But as much as I like to see people pissed off at Wal-Mart, anyone's who actually living in America today knows that this "War on Christmas" shtick is a chimera. You cannot walk ten feet in any city in the country without tripping over a tackily be-Noeled Christmas tree (which many people seem to cluelessly think was a Christian notion) or being harassed by a Cosby-sweatered, caroling God Squad neurotically obsessed with kitschy songs about the birth of the baby Jesus. Just the other day, I attended a work Christmas tree trimming party where I had to listen to eight of my co-workers sing in various disjunctive tonalities about the little town of Bethlehem, with little or no recognition that I didn't give a shit about said small town. And this is in San Francisco, where we purportedly burn Christians at the stake.

Since Bill O'Reilly and his brethren have been spewing their misguided vitriol all over their seedy airwaves about this non-event of moral decadence, the rational press has defensively chimed in a bit trying to calm everyone down, lest we create a fight out of nothing. Sadly though, what so few seem to be saying is that maybe the few minor changes that are occurring may be a good thing. Apparently it's just me, but when mega-international-corporations begin using happy holidays as opposed to Merry Christmas (even if they are doing it for the wrong reasons), I see it as progress. When a high school in some backwards wasteland in Texas decides to rename the "Christmas break" the "winter break" in reluctant recognition of the fact that not every kid at the school is going to be using his free time to celebrate the ostensible birth of a regurgitated messiah figure, it brings a little holiday joy in to my life. By the way, and I hate to have to point this out since I know both of my readers are well aware of it, the origin of the celebration of Christmas around the winter solstice is of course due to a number of factors, the least of which is the notion that Christ was actually born that day, but rather more likely to coalesce the upstart religion with then-existing popular pagan celebrations, such as the Feast of Saturnalia, the glorification of Mithra and several others. Christianity needed to appeal to the sensibilities of pre-existing crappy religions, which is all well and good for it, but Christians do not now get to pretend they invented the celebration.

The real problem is that it is so goddamn politically incorrect to be for anything that can ever be portrayed as a reaction to political correctness. Of course, the world of media hackistry knows this all too well. The discomforting notion that any of us are so pathetically weak as to succumb to the pressure of whiny, yet somehow shadowy, special interests groups shames us into doing just that at the whim of anyone sly enough to wield this great ironical sword. Thus self-conscience doth make cowards of us all. They excoriate anyone who would dare suggest that Christmas and all its ludicrous trappings should be a private annoyance for those masochistic enough to care about it, rather than a public one for the rest of us that do not. They scour the country to find anecdotal evidence of the evil conspiracy to rid our beloved nation of its traditional Judeo-Christian pseudo-moralistic roots - a task made significantly easier in these modern times of internet blogs and email. What they cannot find, they invent. Next, they run a poll asking people whether they are for or against murder and thereby conclude that 85% of our citizens are bible-thumping Christians. They pepper the results with some antiquated quotes from a few of our more spiritually-feeble founding fathers (Tom Paine ever excluded), wrap it all up in a total lack of historical contextualization and work themselves into a veritable lather of traditionalist indignation.

Of course, a few high school principals excluding religious symbols from their schools does not a conspiracy make. It's pure meaningless sensationalism, like shark attacks and white girl kidnappings. But it is par for the coarse and gives the dyspeptic amongst us something to bitch about. The idea that a rash of destructive hurricanes have some relation to global warming is seen as non-sensical, liberal propaganda, while the idea that they are the indirect result of God's intemperance with a perceived rise in moral relativism and gay rights is debatable. This is the frustrating Christian America in which I must live.

Unfortunately, the war is not on Christmas, Christmas is at war with us, or in particular me, and it has been my whole life, tormenting me since my decidedly less relevant birth. As I small child I was bribed into enjoying it with the elated thoughts of three-packs of unsoiled underwear and Changeformers - black-market, generic-brand Transformers for kids with mean-spirited, unloving parents. In school, I was coerced into accepting it as a well-needed break from the monotony of getting the shit kicked out of me by church kids who needed to misplace anger they had at their creepy, overly handsy Church-group leaders. In college, I tolerated it merely for the tastiness of spiked Eggnog cocktails and the far too unlikely prospect of cavorting with co-eds in skimpy Santa outfits, only to maintain my Mary-like virginity in some sort of sick cosmo-teleological joke. (Which brings up a very important question I have long had since I got drunk and passed out at dirty Rita's house: if the holy spirit can impregnate Mary, can he give me the clap? Immaculate transmission perhaps? No, damn that dirty Rita). As an adult, I have absolutely no patience for any of it, and I think it's high time we dropped the whole God-forsaken production and grow up a bit. No more spruce trees, no more non-hot-female Santas, no more wreaths, no more gift exchanges, no more inane caroling, no more shitty X-mas movies perpetuating the talent-illusion that is Tim Allen and, most importantly, no more ham-handed nativity scenes. I say wipe it all away and send it back to the middle ages where it rightfully belongs.

In fact, in this post-9/11, post-Katrina world we live in, I fear a simple war on Christmas may be narrow-minded, utopist, naivete. What we need is a war on religion, nay, even better, a war on God. It's going to be a long road and it won't be easy, but such is the cost of liberty and righteousness. I want God off my dollar bill, taken back out of the Pledge of Allegiance, stripped from the constitution, chiseled from of our monuments, thrown off the television and erased from our collective consciousness. But that's just me, I understand many others don't believe what I do, which I suppose is fine for them if not for their souls.

In 1492, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue and Got Lost Because He Was an Idiot.

Well, its Christobo Columbus day once again and it turns out he is still an asshole. There is nothing better than the obligatory annual celebration of one of the world's great ethnic cleansers, who inadvertently and unwittingly rediscovered several already inhabited islands outside of this country, but which share a quartisphere with us. Which reminds me, just the other day I came up with the law of relativity entirely on my own, does it matter that some old curmudgeon fuck thought it up before I did?

And we wonder why American kids are morons. Could it have anything to do with the fact that our President can barely read, our newest Supreme Court nominee confuses religiosity with brilliance and we honor a gold-whoring racist who spent several years believing that he had found islands off the coast of India? Understanding the real genesis of Columbus Day doesn't change the fact that it no longer makes any reasonable sense to honor this jackass.

Nobodaddy Wants to See Some Bombings

There appears to be a great deal of irrelevant debate over whether Bush believes God personally told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House says that the claims made in an upcoming BBC documentary that Bush told the then Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, that God told him to end the tyranny in Iraq are absurd. Although the White House has been quick to deny that the reborn George ever made the statements, they haven't answered the question of whether Bush believes its true.

As frightening as the notion that Bush thinks he speaks directly to the almighty may be, I have to question whether this is really a revelation. Bush certainly has made his devotion to Christ well-known and has claimed before that his actions are based primarily on his faith. Certainly no one questions whether Bush is an ostensibly religious man, although his motives to be so are certainly debatable. I absolutely love dilemmas such as this though, because it puts moderate Christians in a very awkward position. They are forced to pretend that Bush is speaking metaphorically when he truly isn't and, in fact, often can't due to an inability to grasp the concept and because metaphors make his brain hurt.

However, is it really any more insane to believe that God would ask our current slow-witted President to invade some country than to think he debated Abraham the pros and cons of infanticide or sent an Israeli snake-oil salesman (which may or may not have been himself or his son or both - that eternally unsatisfactory Athanasian solution) to wander around Judea and Samaria with his desertbilly entourage or that he actually gives a shit whether you use his name in vain and yet neglected to explain when and what that entailed? If God was communicating through the heavens to us lowly mortals, as true Christians must certainly believe he at least a few times did, why wouldn't he talk to George W. Bush? In fact, to the world's everlasting shame and Jesus' cringing embarrassment, Bush is probably the number one pseudo-Christian in the world that God would speak to if he were so inclined to tortuous conversations, if only because Bush is currently the most powerful man on earth and what not.

In addition, it would be strangely naive to assume God, at least the version to be found in the old testament, would not counsel our mad George in support of imperialistic wars of aggression. He has always had a fondness for them in the past, as they continually help to line the pews of his congregations and of coarse make begrudging converts of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves inside a foxhole - at least if the cliches of so many armchair warriors are to be taken as true.

But let us assume that the big G did not tell Bush to invade anyone. So what? Someone obviously did, lest it was simply an unfortunate coincidence that virtually every known neoconservative championing the Iraq invasion over the last decade somehow found foreign policy positions in this Administration. If I had to guess, I would say that someone just led Bush into an empty room in the west wing with a trail of Cocoa-puffs and that old prankster Richard Pearle, hiding in the closet, did his best "God-voice" through the White House PA system and was all like "Dubya, why don't you invade, that means attack, Iraq in March, it's the country that's just like Iran, but with more oil...ah, just ask Dick to show it to you on a map. Anyways, you should invade them in the name of peace and justice because contradiction is good politics, Saddam tried to kill your Dad and because I want you to….ooohh....ahhhh. Oh, and do this and I will forget all about that dead hooker incident." George: "you know about that?" God (winking): "Know about what George?" Bush: "Uh, that thing you just mentioned about the hooker.." God: "Yeah, no, I know, I was showing you how I forgot about...oh never mind."

Plus, even if George can hide behind the asininity of a divine mandate, what's Congress' excuse? Did the Senate and House hold a conference call with God before they all voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution? I don't particularly care who the giant asshole, metaphysical or not, telling the idiots in Washington how to most swiftly ruin the world, I just want them to stop listening. The problem is God is a notoriously unpredictable bastard and he absolutely loves fucking with people. You have to treat him like so many war-praising, jingoistic, thoughtless media pundits who love so dearly to hear their own voices in the service of faux-patriotism, you just have to tune him out.

"Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and belched and coughed,
And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering
Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."
[William Blake]

Here Your It Miers - Bush Nominates Crazy-Ass White Lady to Supreme Court

What the fuck is the White House up to now? Harriet "Seriously, Where the Hell Did I Come From" Miers nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States? Oliver Wendell Holmes just literally rolled over - very slowly mind you - in his separate but equal grave. As orgasmically satisfying as it is to watch conservatives throw Napoleonic tantrums all day about this nomination, I just cannot believe that the Bush administration has miscalculated their base's response so badly. Something is decidedly amiss in DC and it smells a lot like Karl Rove's creamy, hairless ass, which, incidentally, smells a lot like a rat. This absolutely has to be some kind of evil genius ploy. How else to explain such an inexplicable nomination, one that pleases neither conservatives nor liberals, nor any other pleasable or identifiable political faction for that matter - other than Harry Reid (who is acting freakishly like Miers is his grandmother) and "The Texas League of Single Old White Ladies for Essentially No Independent Political Agenda in America" of course, who are claiming this as a huge victory for "perplexing non-eventism." Hell, even moderates can't figure where the high and mighty middle ground is yet. Who is this old woman we are all asking ourselves? Other than an uncomfortable love for black eyeliner and gaudy Church attire, what are her passions?

She appears to be everything that John G. Roberts was not, unqualified, unknown and unpredictable. Roberts was an ideal pick for the White House because his legal record and resume was unassailable. He certainly had an impressive amount of trial experience with the Supreme Court, even if almost always on the wrong side, and he could reliably fall back on the "just representing my client" card for any unsavory bits of rightwing craziness he may have said in the past. Even if Roberts was presented with a memo in which he stated that black people had smaller brains than whites or that torturing gays can be good training exercises for our soldiers when not at war, he could simply deflect those political asteroids towards his then client, Ronald Reagan, where they would be immediately burned up in Reagan's flaming helio-atmospheric aura of political invincibility. Having watched most of the confirmation hearings, even I found Roberts frustratingly likeable. His mildly disturbing conservative ideology and handsy cub-scout-troop-leader creepiness was overshadowed by his ultra nice-guy reasonableness and his finely polished Harvardian uber-competence. With his round, overly-attentive, tumescent-eyed face, his mellifluous Midwesterny Christianiness, he had the look of a newborn Republican baby just squeezed out of the dusty, hateful womb of Barbara Bush to gasp in fright at the nefarious and multi-ethnic world for the very first time. Roberts face radiated a preternatural innocence like some innate Darwinistic defense mechanism to ward off the bloodthirsty fangs of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee from his exposed jugular. At one point during the hearings I am pretty sure that Chuck Schumer wanted to jump over the dais and hug the shit out of Roberts and somehow try to re-civilize him as if he were a newly found wolf-child - "Come on John, you are a smart guy, you can see how fucked up it is to force poverty-stricken women to have babies they can't raise, can't you? Johnny, admit it, NASCAR sucks doesn't it?" Most importantly though, Roberts really did know constitutional law backwards and forwards, mostly backwards, whether or not he gave a fuck about those it affected.

Miers, on the other hand, has no judicial experience to look to and so it seems very few statements to illuminate her potential judicial philosophy on the bench. Her most controversial statement to date, as if in an effort to preemptively disclaim any intelligence of her own, that she considers George W. Bush to be the most brilliant man she has ever met! Oh yes, suddenly freaked-out reader, she was talking the same George W. Bush that's currently our President. Extreme loyalty to George W. Bush is scary enough on principle, but this country is in some truly deep shit if Miers has to call Dubya at the ranch in the middle of one of his famous digging in the dirt sessions to get his thoughts on a constitutional question of law before ruling. But, I think here is where we find the real answer to this nomination. I believe this nomination is a very specific reaction to the great Sandra Day O'Connor debacle of 1981. O'Connor, a relatively conservative judicial figure nominated by Reagan, back-fired on the right because eventually she decided that her commitment to her job and her own ideology overpowered her loyalty to her benefactors. The best way to avoid a similar incident, nominate a deeply entrenched political crony who is completely unqualified for the post and, consequently, passionately devoted to you and your agenda - someone lacking any political inclinations of their own. My bet is that the young Brooks Brothers boys in the West Wing are frantically calling every wingnut in the beltway right now to assure them that Miers has explicit instructions to vote in all matters with Justice Scalia. The right already has the ideology they want on the Court, now what they need is a little lubrication. They need another yes-man, or yes-woman as it were. Clarence "Pubes" Thomas is already up there to give some desperately-needed African-American mojo to their cause, Roberts has just given them some intellectual and constitutional credibility, now Bush has added the last piece to the puzzle, some pseudo-women's-rights credibility wrapped up in a five foot two public relations package, but more importantly, a guaranteed fifth vote. They have essentially just taken the swing out of the swing vote.

The problem though is that the conservative punditry wants a controversial ideologue more than it really wants an additional vote, as that's the only way we get to the impending culture war they have been so endlessly pining for. They want to watch the left squirm a bit. Nobody likes to catch a dead fish, you want a little fight to make it worthwhile. At some point though, I think they will, reluctantly, get on the same page as the Administration on this one. They still have a long confirmation process to talk about assless-pantsed homos leering at their children and the ACLU's infamous Sunday night fetus-death cocktail parties. The Democrats best bet, of course, would be to attack Miers on her glaring lack of qualifications for the job, something difficult for the Republicans to counter since it became the keystone theme of Roberts' confirmation. However, they will be wary of doing so for fear that, if they do in fact court-block Miers, the White House will put up a much more gratuitously rightwing nominee in response. But I think they need to be careful of getting too excited about the negative response of Republicans. Although almost always true, just because Rush Limbaugh is against something doesn't make it righteous. I just can't buy the notion that George Bush is cowering to the political pressure from the left to avoid a fight. After Iraq, tax cuts, stem-cells, Plamegate, Katrina, does it seem credulous to anyone that Bush in his final term is really scared of pissing off liberals? The angle isn't completely clear here yet, but its there somewhere, hiding underneath Miers' purple, pleated Gospel gear. Maybe its nothing more complicated than Bush rewarding someone for having the gargantuan balls to call him brilliant in public.

Burn Rove, Burn

Oh, how glorious it is to watch Scott McClellan squirm under the relentless questioning of the suddenly awakened White House press corps, and to imagine even more uncomfortable anxiety going on in the seedy west-wing offices as Karl Rove shleps his soulless body around barking orders at misguided Yale grads to do something, anything, just find him a fucking terrorist attack to exploit. As if snapped out of a Katie Holmesian trance, the press corps actually seems mildly interested in a story not spoon fed to them from the Administration's all-powerful press communication machine. Maybe they felt a little well-deserved shame at the idea that one of the national press' biggest hacks in Judy Miller inadvertently becoming its biggest martyr. And now, at least until they are frightened back into their proper place, we get to watch Scottie and George W. tell us they simply will not comment on an ongoing investigation - after happily commenting several times during the last year on it - in their usual ironicless tone.

We should enjoy the show now while it lasts, because it will be fleeting. If the last five years has taught us anything it should be that Karl Rove and the administration will weather this storm and emerge virtually unscathed. Hell, they will probably use this scandal as a pretext to invade Syria or to elect Jeb Bush President or to somehow have a law passed that forbids blacks from serving in Congress. The point is, it's not wise to start underestimating Karl. Listen, any person with even the slightest amount of political savvy knew that Rove was involved in the Plame leak the moment it happened, so this is really no great revelation. It was an obvious political move on the part of the White House (as convincing the American people that war is necessary always is), and Karl Rove is the political wing of the White House. I simply cannot imagine that Rove tolerates leaks of that caliber to happen without his express consent. Hell, Rove keeps his hand so deep up each of his puppet's asses, he doesn't even let his prize moron go to a debate without being wired up.

But for now at least, we get to be delighted by the tortured defenses of Karl from the rightwing pundits. John Gibson, a Foxnewswhore with a curiously familiar shtick, thinks that Rove should get a medal for the leak rather than potentially go to jail (let us put aside the matter of why John Gibson's medal-awarding threshold is so low - he probably thinks I deserve the congressional medal of honor for telling this homeless guy on the bus this morning all about Valerie Plame). The editorial boys at the Wall Street Journal tend to agree, as they applaud Rove for simply telling America the truth about Wilson - because lord knows we all gave a flying fuck whether his wife suggested he go the Niger or not. I know I did, under the arbitrary notion that you can't trust what anyone whose wife attempts to get them a job. Why are we to be incredulous of what Joe Wilson has to say about Iraqis purchasing yellow-cake because his wife suggested the CIA send him (she doesn't run the fucking place, someone else there must have agreed that it was OK as well)? First of all, its more than just a little bit suspect when the Administration claims concern over Valerie Plame's role in Wilson's assignment - Do they actually expect us to believe that they are strong opponents of nepotism? If they believed that, George W. Bush would still be lying in a pool of his own vomit in a downtown Houston motel after a long-night of jenga and hooker sex.

Apparently, Rove, a well-known defender of truth and justice in America, was simply correcting a dangerous misapprehension by leaking the information. It's a shame he didn't take credit for his altruistic deeds earlier than now, when Scott McClellan was saying how ridiculous it is to suggest he had anything to do with it. If only they could of anticipated the right wing's current spin job, they could of really set it up this heroic whistleblower bullshit better. The point they are all so purposely missing though is that is doesn't make the slightest difference whether Rove was leaking the information for sheer revenge or to protect America from the lying scourge that is Joe Wilson. If he outed a CIA operative intentionally, it was illegal and he continues to be the monstrous asshole we always knew he was. The preferred tactic now is to argue about whether Joe Wilson did in fact understate his wife's role in him being sent to Niger and whether he was anti-war. Crazy-ass John Gibson even referred to him as a peacenik (despite his support for the first Gulf War, his support of several republican causes and his wife's role as an undercover CIA operative) as if that matters in the slightest bit. Only in America can a begiantspectacled albino loudmouth newsgeek like John Gibson (see below) use the word "cojones" on national television with complete sincerity and call a guy like Joe Wilson a peacenik without getting the shit kicked out of him in the Fox news parking lot.

Yes, this guy:

Based on historical precedent, the best way for Karl to get out of the current morass is to remind the American people how fucked up the right wing is on some other hot button issue, like appointing Supreme court judges, and we will forget all about this Plame nonsense. Scottie will tell everyone that George wants a brilliant, tough strict-constructionist who will not legislate from the bench, will then appoint a right-wing lunatic that likes to wipe his/her ass with the Bill of Rights and the media, as predicted, will grab firmly a hold of the next rope and let go of this one. Or Karl could just get Robert Novak to kidnap some white girl and we will all forget how to spell CIA.

New Pope, Same Old Pap-acy

White smoke billows towards the sky over St. Peter's Basilica, but no my now-giddy reader it's not because the millions of Catholics throughout the world gathered in the square, came to their collective senses and decided to get ass-drunk on the blood of Jesus and reject the lunacy that is Catholicism by reducing its seat of power into a giant bonfire. No such luck I am afraid. Instead, the greatest cult left on the face of the earth has appointed itself a new leader. "Oh, how wonderful, maybe the Church will adapt to more modern realities under new leadership" you naively query having not caught any legitimate news on the subject and relying entirely on my insight for reference. Wrong again fair reader. Just a couple of weeks after his procrastinated death, Pope John Paul II, a relative moderate, has been replaced by Pope Benedict XVI, a conservative fanatic, as the official leader of the Church of Organized Regressive Thought.

In truth, this should come as no surprise to my educated readership of one. Fanaticism is cyclical and perpetuated by conflict and strife. With the world teetering so tenuously on the brink of international chaos, this is exactly what we should have expected. I can just imagine the internal politicking going on in the Sacred College of the Cardinals of the Sacred Sanctity of Religious Freaks deciding that if the world is in fact aiming to destroy itself, the Vatican better well have a loud-ass dog in the fight. No one wants to be a spectator in a potentially civilization-ending Kulturkampf. And who better than the "Pitbull" or the "Enforcer" or the "Douchebag" or whatever the fuck he is genially referred to as when he condemns entire societies to burn in the fiery pits of hell. Only in a world this cynically anachronistic can our most visible theocratic organization appoint an orthodox clergyman nicknamed the "Enforcer" to lead a Church based primarily on the teachings of a pacifist and progressive without the slightest hint of irony. I'm am not saying that there is no room on this big planet for wishful-thinking, utopist hippies of questionable hygiene (Christ), or that there is no room for staunch, angry, former Hitler-youth fanatics (Ratzinger), there is plenty of room for both. I am just saying I would like it better if the latter couldn't co-opt the former while erasing any trace of his actual ideology.

I admit Pope John Paul II was no saint, but at least in the later years he was tempered by a healthy dose of oldman cluelessness. So, we could attribute uncomfortable truths such as John Paul's dislike for homosexuals to harmless, curmudgeon kookiness. But Ratzinger, with his black, bottomless ocular cavities, his grouted-on scowl, his raw Germanic aura of disgust for all things unCatholic, his shameless track record of separatism and hatred, we simply cannot tolerate. I mean did I miss something? When did it become acceptable to be a rightwing German again? The Catholic church has long been remarkable in its disconnect from rational thought - such as the decision that millions of innocent Africans are better off dead than with Satanic pieces of plastic touching their engorged genitals - and Ratzinger is simply another example of this.

My hope is that Ratzinger can do for organized religion what George W. Bush is so successfully doing for the republican party, illuminating the creepy fundamentalism inherent in it for those who somehow have managed not to notice. I await with great excitement for Pope Benny's first couple of speeches after inauguration to hear his ideas on the moral relativism of interracial dating, the need for increased security precautions like frisking and body cavity searches against potential terrorist alter boys and the hidden Marxist dangers of Buddhism. It should be quite a pope show.

The Trials of the Stache

There are moments, rare though they may be, when you have to be at least reluctantly impressed by this administration's giant metaphorical testicles. John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations? What the fuck, was Michael Savage busy? What about Oliver North, I hear he is looking for a decent nine-to-five gig between playing night-vision-goggled grab-ass with America's heroes overseas? Maybe I am being a little nitpicky here, but doesn't hating the underlying principle of an organization preclude you from working there? Obviously not. It's almost as if, and here is where you have to be slightly impressed, the administration tried to locate the person least appropriate on earth for the job and appointed him. I thought Negroponte was some kind of a bad joke, but now they're just fucking with us. Other than out of hypnotic deference to Bolton's mysterious and monstrous mustache, why would anyone within the international political community take him even slightly seriously? It's not that his ideological positions are remarkable for a Washington hack; it's just that they might be less appropriate in those great sissified halls of the pinko U.N. Some there might disagree a bit with some of Bolton's main arguments - i.e. that international law is for homos, that the Security Council should be four countries lighter, that all of the African countries' seats should be moved to the back row of the general assembly and that the 10 floors housing the ambassadors of the non-Israeli Middle East countries be vaporized to bring freedom to future generations of Arab ambassadors (I know, I am not sure exactly how it works either). What progress can we expect from a man that has to build relationships with those he clearly despises? I presume that is the very point - to make the U.N. the gridlocked, ineffective organization that Bolton has long claimed it to be. Can this administration do more to show how little it gives a shit about the U.N. First they bug your offices, then they send Colin Powell with some shitty pictures of mobile homes, childishly forged documents and a healthy lack of ethics to lie to your over-diversified faces and, as if that wasn't enough, they appoint the loudest, most ludicrously-mustached, critic of the fundamental premise of international multilateralism as the host ambassador. Baseod on this strategy, I shall be waiting with baited-breadth for a call from the Vatican to be the next Pope.

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.