politigootch

Remember This?

2018-02-15T11:11:00.002-05:00

http://politigootch.blogspot.com/2016/

Of course not. Nobody actually read it.

Well a lot's happened since the furor over Trump's impending refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election. He actually backed down and accepted the decision. And graciously too.

What's fun about this article is rereading the section that went:

There is so much handwringing about how this rigged election talk could trigger a

“grievance movement” among [Trump's] tens of millions of followers who will insist

Hillary Clinton is not the legitimate president and is actually a criminal. Wake up.

There are already tens of millions of Americans who regard Barak Obama,

Democrats and Liberals as foreign agents planted among them to bring down the country.

Well it seems the old cliche of being "through the looking glass" has never been more snugly apt at describing our situation. Where Hillary and the Democrats may be a subversive cult out to destroy America, they apparently won't be doing it with the aid of the Russians. Surprise, surprise! It turns out that Putin's dictatorial ruthlessness in snuffing out freedom of thought and any form of dissent is just what the electorate needed after all. And der Trump knew it all along.

Watching the right wing pivot 180 degrees to embrace our elected Republican leadership's dependence upon -- and gleeful implementation of -- Russian autocratic repressive policies after more than sixty years of vilifying and demonizing them (St. Reagan's "evil empire" after all) has been the most breathtaking example of life imitating art I've ever witnessed. When I read 1984 those many years ago the spectacle of a government abruptly switching enemies in the middle of a fight and the enthusiastic embrace of such a sleight of hand by a complicit populace seemed more an exercise in poetic license or suspension of disbelief in the service of plot development than a realistic portrayal of a society living an existence entirely scripted by The Party. And yet...

When do we change the answers on all our Social Studies tests to the question: "Who won the Cold War?"

The Rigged Election

2016-10-21T19:04:00.000-04:00

“A concession isn’t just an exercise in graciousness. It is an act of respect for the will of the American people, a respect that is every American leader’s first responsibility. Whatever our differences we owe each other that respect...”

— Senator John McCain (R-Arizona)

By now everyone has been pretty well saturated with the blowback from Donald Trump’s refusal to pledge to accept the results of next month’s election. Elected officials, political leaders and talking heads of all stripes have been nearly unanimous in denouncing his statement as genuinely undermining American democracy itself. It’s been pointed out a number of times that this is essentially the third election he’s tried to delegitimize, given his persistence in flogging the birther issue to death for the past seven years.

So far the furor has all been about how this attitude is just a symptom of his own bloated sense of self-importance. Personalities as disparate as Lawrence O’Donnell and Lindsay Graham have all psychoanalyzed this as Trump’s refusal to admit personal defeat: “I can’t lose so it has to be rigged.” Even Republicans have been scrambling to distance themselves from the monster they’ve created. Both former presidents Bush have announced they’re voting for his opponent.

Well, as with everything else about his candidacy it’s not that simple or superficial. This entire distasteful episode in American politics is not just an embarrassing farce. It is now the public façade of the edifice the Republican party has been assembling brick by brick since their Southern Strategy of the 1970s.

They have consistently mined and exploited white middle class resentment toward everything from civil rights advances and the economic decline brought about by their own shortsighted policies to women’s and gay rights. They have filled their big tent with fuming angry tribal leaders spouting venom and promising revenge toward all those others who don’t fit their narrow cloistered vision of white America. Their offensive shifted into overdrive in the 1990s with House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s congressional memo instructing house Republicans to characterize any Democratic initiative, policy or individual as corrupt and perversely anti-American. He got more help than he needed from the emerging media wing of the GOP — Right Wing Talk Radio — that further cemented the image of the Liberal Democrat as anti-American in the public perception. It was a short step from condemnation of liberal policies and Liberals and Democrats themselves to delegitimizing their right to participate in governing. They took that step and more and it is one of the Democratic party’s — not to mention the “Liberal Media’s” — greatest failures that they’ve still never called the Right out on it. Instead they cowered and ran from the Liberal label for the next 20 years.

An appeal was made on this blog back during the 2012 election season to people like Chris Matthews to please ask their Republican guests: “Do Democrats, Liberals and Progressives have a legitimate right to participate in governing the country”? (I just wanted to see at least one of them squirm once they got the significance of whichever answer they gave.) The purpose of bringing that up here is that it highlights the unacknowledged fact that this latest Trumpism is not merely a symptom of an unhinged megalomaniac, it is the unvarnished façade of the Republican edifice: Their conviction that only they are entitled to govern, only Republicans have the right to determine the country’s direction. Any opposition is un-American and so it follows that any elected Democrat somehow stole their seat. This is the reason Republicans are constantly crying about rampant widespread voter fraud when there is no credible body of evidence to support the claim. This explains how a Republican candidate for the United States Senate can publicly state that the Second Amendment gives real Americans the right to shoot their Democratic opponents. There is so much handwringing about how this rigged election talk could trigger a “grievance movement” among his tens of millions of followers who will insist Hillary Clinton is not the legitimate president and is actually a criminal. Wake up. There are already tens of millions of Americans who regard Barak Obama, Democrats and Liberals as foreign agents planted among them to bring down the country. Like the party’s inherent racism, bigotry and misogyny, Donald Trump has simply dropped the dog whistles and spoken it out loud.

As for the Republican mandate to unilaterally determine the country’s direction? Just take a look back at the effects of their six years of one party rule under George Bush.

Speaking of questionable election results.

The Coming Follies

2015-02-21T16:10:00.002-05:00

I’ve been hearing a lot since the 2006 midterms about the collapse of the Republican party into a regional special interest group for angry old white guys. I dunno. They seem like they’re getting stronger to me. After turning us into the world’s most resented bully and crashing our booming economy during their six years of one party rule from 2000 to 2006, they managed to roar back into control in 2010 and 2014 by simply refusing to do anything to help the black guy clean up the steaming pile of shit they left for him. Now, things don’t look good for Democrats, let alone Liberals and Progressives in the coming years. Gerrymandering and redistricting at the local and state levels have virtually assured a Republican stranglehold on those governments’ “functioning” for the foreseeable future. At the national level, the right wing media has succeeded in saturating a sufficient number of citizens with enough mistrust and outright hatred of any non-Republican to keep if not the White House, then at least the Legislative and Judicial branches firmly in the hands of the Real Americans of the GOP.

Depressing, I know, so far as progress, our standard of living and simple decency go. But in terms of what the Italians call spettacoli, maybe not so much.

One of the most entertaining things about the GOP has always been the way they consistently overplay their hand and never seem to learn anything from it. Like how they bulldozed Democrats from power in the 90s with Gingrich’s Contract on America and then pulled their bait and switch, swiveling from "fixing" a stagnating economy to shutting down the government and spending 6 years and $60 million of tax payer money publicizing Bill Clinton's sex life. And they’ve been doing the same thing ever since, using the Presidency and House and Senate majorities to regulate citizens' morals, even bullying grieving families into conflating their private and personal sufferings into nationally televised political theater (2016’s up-and-comer Jeb Bush vs. Terri Schiavo’s grief-stricken family). After running against anything the President and Democrats tried to fix Bush’s mess they've been alienating everybody except their base by trimming women’s access to health care they don’t approve of, building walls to keep Latinos where they belong and curtailing everyone else's basic right to vote. Yet they keep getting stronger.

Well, being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I'm thinking that though the future looks depressing in the post-Obama world, it will likely bring some very entertaining spectacles for the rest of us after they succeed in muscling their trickle-down democracy up our asses again.

First, let’s look at the centerpiece of their plan for economic “recovery” from the Obama presidency: the Keystone Pipeline. Now, we all know the arguments – thousands of jobs vs. 35 permanent jobs; environmental disaster vs. job-killing regulations – ok, ok, ok. Yeah, as a Progressive, I’m supposed to be against it. I get it. But stop and look where that pipe actually goes: from Montana through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. These reddest of the red states are represented by a total of 51 Republicans to 14 Democrats in the Senate and Congress combined. They’ve chosen government-is-the-problem hard-liners to represent them in that same government by a better than 31/2 to 1 margin. This is the part of the country that regards our legally elected federal government as a foreign occupying force. There are no fewer than 162 anti-government militia groups operating in this part of the heartland. And every one of these states has opted out of anything to do with improving health insurance for their citizens because it means cooperating with the “President’s socialist agenda.”

I say, let’s pass it. That’s right, fast-track and approve the Keystone Pipeline and let them build it right where they want it. Because…well because it’s gonna leak. It will break, it will seep into the Ogallala Aquafer…the dirtiest kind of oily sludge on the planet will contaminate their drinking water, their rivers, their fishing and swimming holes, their lakes and their homes. Even the homes of the lucky 35 people who still have a job on it after it’s built. And then we’ll get to watch all these we-don’t-need-no-federal-help cowboys standing in line waiting to crawl up Capitol Hill with their 10-gallon hats in their hands. It’ll be better than 1980, when the company running the Three Mile Island nuclear facility sued Jimmy Carter’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission for not regulating them enough to save them from being held accountable for the way they operated their own plant. If the Liberal Media will actually do some reporting on it this time. Close your eyes and picture Sam Brownback explaining to the folks back home how Pat Roberts can't get any money from Big Government to clean all that flammable shit out of their plumbing because he, you know, well he drowned it in the bathtub, remember? I know, I’m smiling too.

And speaking of Obamacare and health issues, we have another George W. Bush Memorial Supreme Court case to look forward to in its upcoming second chance to gut the Affordable Care Act. Once Chief Justice Roberts makes it up to his sponsors by engineering a pro-King verdict we'll have the opportunity to make some popcorn, grab a couple of beers and sit back to watch Chris Christie, John Kasich and Scott Walker explain to their millions of constituents how they're better off being uninsured and uninsurable like they were before. Pre-existing conditions and health care cost related bankruptcies are among the Right's most cherished family values and these rising stars of the GOP will be the tip of the spear in the fight to preserve them from the President's Socialist assault. Theirs is the kind of populist heroism that's always fascinating and fun to watch.

And how about when President Cruz appoints Priscilla Owen to the Supreme Court and Roe vs. Wade is finally overturned taking that huge step toward returning us to our path as a Christian nation? Abortions will no longer be performed in these United States and all those babies will be born into loving caring families. Except for those terrified early adolescent teens and impoverished single women who’ll go looking for their local coat hanger clinic. Imagine the Republican party’s talking points for the subsequent ballooning health care costs to their clamoring Tea Party base who still don’t get that what you don't pay for at the Federal level you pay for at the State. That would be the same State level that refused to accept Medicaid expansion because, you know, Obama. And speaking of ballooning health care costs, instead of only 3 percent of American children being delivered with birth defects, by how much do you think that percentage will increase in the absence of safe, clean abortions? So rather than costing the US economy in excess of $1.4 billion a year in medical treatment and insurance, the cost of dealing with this sudden windfall of babies with incurable, untreatable birth defects will multiply exponentially as well. Visualize the ripple effect on the US economy and the particularly entertaining results we'll get to see in all those red states refusing to buy into Obamacare’s destructive government takeover of healthcare. Not only will God be smiling down upon us as a nation but rape victims will finally learn how to dress appropriately and Republican state and national primaries will become a hell of a lot more fun (and way less predictable) to watch than Project Runway or IFC Cage fights. (For my money, though, I’m betting the insurance industry’s actuaries have already decided for President Cruz that Roe vs. Wade will simply cost them too much to overturn. And besides, killing babies is too big a stick for beating the Left with to give up especially now when people are starting to ask out loud when all that money’s supposed to start trickling down to the rest of us.)

And how about the big one, Climate Change? Now, admittedly this one will take a little longer but the states most impacted by rising sea levels will be Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina (with the most regressive statehouse troglodytes east of the Mississippi), South Carolina, and even Chris Christie's New Jersey. Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Jeff Sessions and Niki Haley will most certainly be gone by the time things really heat up, and I’m sure it’ll happen too slowly for Senator Inhofe to have to do the explaining but right now, even as I type these words, Young Republicans on some college campus somewhere in America are learning and practicing the intellectual contortions that will enable them to continue dismantling huge portions of the government, keep what's left choked and dysfunctional with parliamentarian subterfuges and media manipulation and then maintain a consistent winning record running against this very government they've so deftly neutered. Just knowing my kids have this to look forward to in their future brings a twinkle to my eye and reassures me that the Republican party will continue being the All American obstruction to progress, peace and fairness that it’s been since St. Reagan revealed to us that Government is the devil. Yes, our kids will have to face the consequences of unpredictable and rapidly escalating climate disasters on a crumbling physical and economic infrastructure, but watching the Republicans demonize any efforts to fashion a government capable of dealing with them and how they sell their destructive obfuscation to their complicit victims...well, that's some real entertainment, that is.

Gaza

2014-07-25T15:15:00.002-04:00

Try this experiment: Google “Palestine.” Or “Palestinian history,” or “Palestinian culture.” What you’ll get is an indecipherable mess. You’ll have your pick of literally millions of sites filled with people arguing about when, where, by what authority Palestine came into being and even whether it actually is a country at all. Whatever you can find about them is completely colored by whatever non Palestinian site is doing the writing.

I’m old enough to remember the ’67 war. And the ’73 war. And all the other ones since. I’m not a historian and claim no special expertise on the history or issues of the region. All I can tell you is what I’ve learned watching the dismal news from this miserable part of the world for the past 50 years: There would be an Israel without the Palestinians but without Israel the Palestinians wouldn’t exist. An Israeli has a culture, a history of scholarship, industry, literature and the arts. A Palestinian simply hates Israelis. Benjamin Netenyahu may be a belligerent bully but that is the basic truth behind his statement that Israelis use missiles to shield their citizens, while the Palestinians do the reverse.

One of the biggest pieces of this tragedy is that by now the Palestinians have plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Israel. But this is all they are, all they have shown themselves to be to the rest of the world: a loose group of refugees with no defining national identity except their visceral, blind hatred of Jews, Israelis and the Israeli state. The Palestinians have invested their entire sense of national identity with a sick and sickening eagerness to embrace the role of Israel’s victim on the world stage.

I agree, Israelis shouldn’t be provoking them with constantly building new settlements in places meticulously calculated to piss off the most people. And yes, it’s certainly an asymmetric conflict with Hamas’ crude hand held popgun rocket launchers no match for Israel’s vastly superior arsenal of sophisticated weaponry. But to locate those ineffectual cut rate military “assets” under your schools and hospitals, then proudly display your dead children for the international media betrays a collective mental and emotional “sickness” that makes it difficult for even the most even-handed and sensitive westerner to feel any sympathy for your cause. We get the kind of nationalistic dehumanization that would make a people celebrate the deaths of their enemies’ children but when you dance in the streets celebrating the deaths of your own?

However factual the claim may be, it does appear that the more Palestinian dead the West sees piling up on its TV screens, the more divided they become in their attitudes toward Israel’s role in the conflict. And it appears the Palestinians are trying to exploit this as part of their strategy. But I gotta tell you, Sami Abu Zuhri, you guys are not thinking this through. If you’re actually happy about gradually dividing international opinion about Israel piling up your dead kids on top of your weapons caches, then your venomous hatred has not only blinded you it’s rendered you pretty fucking stupid as well. World opinion would immediately and universally condemn Israel if they were expending this kind of gross firepower on the factory you just tried to build to provide jobs for the listless unemployed young men whose idleness you can just continue to conveniently blame on Israel and the West. If it were a fledgling economic infrastructure you were trying to create to make your home even a little more economically viable, the UN would draft a proposal denouncing Israel’s actions by dinner time. And if you guys cheered and passed out candy to your kids on 9\11, just think of the parties you could throw at the Great Satan’s predicament when that happens.

Oh what’s that, the occupation has made it too difficult to gather the resources for economic development? The Israelis have made it impossible to improve your conditions with its brutal stranglehold of your border crossings? Gee, you still manage to get the material you need for weapons and bomb-making. You’re a pretty ingenious, industrious and well-coordinated bunch when it comes to acquiring what you need to kill people. But channeling your citizens’ energies and talents into creating a useful community asset in defiance of the world’s support of Israel’s domination… well like I said earlier, I’ve been watching the news from your miserable part of the earth for fifty years and it’s gotten easier every day to see why it’s always bad. In that same time period the world saw another conflict just as bitter, hate-fueled and intractable as your sorry mess get resolved simply because the parents of dead children got together to stop it. You just have to love your kids more than you hate each other. So here’s another thought, how much damage you think you might inflict on Israel’s standing in the world if the news reports showed them holding up shipments of tools, sand, lime and sheetrock? It’s not as flashy as parading your dismembered children across our tv screens but what it lacks in color it’ll make up in economic value. Because here in America and the west we’re Capitalists. We believe in progress, industry and the free market. We might not give two collective shits about a few limbless brown kids but damage a functioning privately owned source of revenue and they will have fucked with the wrong marine then.

Like I said at the outset, whatever you can find about Palestinian statehood or national identity is pretty much the projection of the writer (myself included). So maybe it’s time for the Palestinians to fill that vacuum with something other than their own orgiastic exhibition of victimhood.

Oh, and any pro Israeli folks who might have stayed with me thus far, you might want to try this little experiment: Google "American Evangelical Christians." See how prominently a sovereign Jewish state figures in their agenda. That enemy of my enemy bullshit is bullshit.

Thank You Hobby Lobby

2014-07-05T12:38:00.000-04:00

So the nightmare scenarios unfold.

I like the Scientologist not covering antidepressants, the Jehovah’s Witness not paying for blood transfusions and the Christian Scientists not paying for anything. But my personal favorite is the one that could happen to me: my employer hires a new administrator who decides my three interracial children should not be covered for anything because the Bible says miscegenation is immoral and any illness would be God’s just punishment for my sin. Hard to say what’s worse: All the terrible things that religious zealots have now been empowered to do to the rest of us or listening to them preening and crowing about their victory for religious freedom. There’s more blowback on the way too here and here. The slippery slope is now in the rear view mirror folks. We’re in the shit.

But when you really think about it, maybe this isn’t going to pan out the way everybody thinks. I’m not so sure it’s as good as the Right thinks or as bad as the Left believes. Let’s speculate:

A furniture manufacturer in North Carolina won’t cover anybody who’s gay because they just lost their fight to fire them outright. A chicken processing plant won’t cover anybody who’s Catholic because they object to Papists. A Saudi Arabian consortium gains a controlling interest in GM. They instruct their insurance provider that any ailments traceable to alcohol or pork consumption will no longer be covered. Nobody covers Jews anywhere for anything. A group of Catholics in the chicken place sues in court for unfair discrimination. A group of Fundamentalist Protestants working at the furniture shop sue because they don’t think the Catholics should be covered by their employer. Muslim employees of GM sue because they don’t want anything covered for the Infidels. Jews start suing everybody.

The court system becomes paralyzed with suits and counter suits all alleging infringement on our constitutionally guaranteed religious right to exclude everybody we don't like from having anything we feel they shouldn't have. The courts have to choose which laws to ignore and which to follow, anti discrimination laws or pro religious bigotry statutes. These back their way up to the Supreme Court and Antonin Scalia has a stroke trying to read them all and untangle the legal knot he tied with his Hobby Lobby decision. He dies in the emergency waiting room while the hospital administrators are trying to determine if he’s excluded from coverage because he’s a Papist or because he's an Italian. President Paul declares the date of his death a National Health Care Free Holiday on which absolutely no American citizen connected to the Health Care Industrial Complex has to work and if you split your head open on a rusting factory gate you’re just shit out of luck.

Finally, the corporate CEOs get together and decide they’ve had enough and sue all their employees. In a unanimous decision, the Court agrees with the corporations that if their employees want religiously acceptable health care they should get it from their churches. “Let Dolan put it where his fucking mouth is,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes in her majority opinion.

And why not? Why should employers be in the health care business in the first place? Who’s the genius that put those two together and where can we find him? Our religious leaders, the nation’s moral compass, when faced with the logistics of actually carrying out Christ’s call to heal the sick shit their pants and then do what all the rest of us less-holier-than-them do in an ethical conundrum. They blame the federal government for its ineptitude and inaction and call on it to fill the vacuum.

Smells like public option to me.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

2014-07-05T01:43:00.000-04:00

That the most recent trends in anti Obama criticism have become so increasingly unhinged in their desperation has provided an abundance of comic material to his supporters. (There’s no point in wondering what those in “the center” are thinking since I haven’t met anyone of them in years.) How is anyone supposed to listen to John Boehner talk about suing the President over his use of executive orders or Michelle Bachman and others describing his actions as “king-like” when the facts bluntly show that characterization to be a hypocritical lie? Or how can anyone possibly listen to John McCain, Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney claiming to have presciently foretold the failure of the President’s policies in Iraq when back in 2002 then-Senator Obama predicted that the Bush administration’s adventure would result in just such unforeseeable chaos as is occurring now? And how can anyone entertain their charges of failure of leadership when, if you read that 2002 speech, you can hear a fledgling international statesman cautioning against a hasty leap into a centuries old quagmire while all three of them couldn’t put our children in harm’s way fast enough and couldn’t contain their excitement at the opportunity to do so? Viewing attempts to counter these criticisms is akin to watching Bill Nye arguing with climate change deniers and Creationists or any educated person arguing with a holocaust denier: in the end you just feel more frustrated while they gain something that passes for legitimacy among a populace growing ever more illiterate politically, historically and scientifically.

While a lot of those on the left are laughing, the fact that this kind of contemptuous carping has to be treated as serious debate should be alarming. The Republicans hold the House and will probably keep it in November while very possibly gaining control of the Senate. This means impeachment, pure and simple. Whatever the end result for the man and the legacy he deserves, the consequences for us are enormous. You can forget about legislation or governing. After four years of the most useless unproductive congress in history, the final two years of the Obama presidency will be consumed with exactly the kind of spectacle the Republicans have decided is the only role left to government: Bloodsport. The bestial cockfighting that Republican politics has degenerated to. (Anyone remember the President’s resistance to his more ardent left wing supporters back in 2009 to open hearings into Bush and Cheney’s handling of the war, their outing of active CIA agents and torture, because he wanted his administration to move forward and govern together with our friends across the aisle?)

Rather than laughing at these rants, though certainly imbecilic enough, maybe we’d be better served looking more closely at them for what they are, the most recent feverish symptoms of the underlying right wing illness: Obama Derangement Syndrome. And maybe we should look more closely at the disease itself because while it’s tempting to sit back and enjoy the misery of those friends across the aisle it might just be proving to be more life threatening than a simple case of the clap infecting those who deserve it.

There’ve been a lot of facile explanations for the Right’s irrationally rabid hatred of a man who has been, after all, elected President twice by large margins, certainly larger than George Bush ever enjoyed. What’s the deal? He’s everything Republicans lecture the rest of us about. Actually born into meager circumstances (unlike George Bush or Mitt Romney) he bettered himself through hard work, perseverance and intelligence without the benefit of inherited wealth and the entitlements of family connections. He’s a church-going family man, a faithful husband and a good father to two beautiful children. He exemplifies everything Republicans say they stand for. Yet they accuse him of being a Muslim (even though being one, by the way, is perfectly legitimate, legal and reasonable) and of being a radical who hates America because of the ravings of the Christian preacher whose church he attended for twenty years. (Which begs the question whether he was there to convert Reverend Wright to Islam or the other way around.) He’s been accused of being a terrorist because some other guy who used to be one forty years ago donated $200 to his Senate campaign. His birth certificate is not really his birth certificate because he was born in Hawaii, which is part of Kenya, which is a foreign country. And of course the big reason everybody hates the guy so much, the Left is fond of saying, is because he’s black. Or at least not white. Not all the way.

But maybe there’s something else that’s causing ODS. You could feel it beginning back in 2007 and ‘08 as time was dragging the decayed carcass of Bush’s presidency over the finish line. It started even before Obama won the nomination. At the heart of ODS is the inner realization by everybody on the right, at some conscious or unconscious level, that the Bush presidency was a catastrophic failure. And I can hear the whining, here we go blaming Bush again. It’s been six years already, enough. Nope. The mess that presidency left will be with us for at least a generation. (Iraq is only beginning whatever path he and Cheney set it on, a path which could actually lead to a solution first floated by Joe Biden, of all people. Think you’ll be hearing anybody use the word “prescient” to describe Joe Biden?) Bush inherited a booming economy and if not a peaceful climate, at least an absence of open warfare. We were still the world’s only superpower and the rest of the world looked to us for leadership. And he inherited a government surplus. He left behind a smoking crater. The worst economy in seventy years with mounting government debt. The lowest, most negative international standing since the world news was dominated by black and white flickering images of American planes napalming grass huts in Southeast Asian jungles in the 1960s. An overstretched, exhausted and unwelcome military bogged down in not one but two foreign entanglements. And a significant portion of a major American city reduced to a muddy debris field.

But this is actually bigger than just George Bush. The right instinctively understood that the cast of clowns parading through the farce his presidency turned into had laid bare the utter bankruptcy of Republican ideology. Relieving the wealthy of their responsibility to the American community did not result in any largesse trickling down to the rest of us. Whatever trickled, trickled up. The rising tide pretty much swamped all but the biggest boats. Government was not the enemy after all. Instead it turns out it had been what was holding us together. Until 1980 anyway.

And with this realization came the decision, conscious or instinctive, that no matter who followed George Bush to the presidency he (or she) would be transformed into the most reviled public figure in living memory by the sheer volume and viciousness of their criticism. No matter what his successor actually did or said the Right was determined to keep that individual an object of scorn and derision from the moment the votes were legitimately counted and the choice of the president was taken from Scalia, Thomas and Alito and given back to the electorate. Every circumstance of his life, including his very birth would be twisted into some indication of a flawed, even malicious character. And here I agree with even his most ardently racist critics: That he was nonwhite was never really a factor, it just made it easier to enlist the bigots and Luddites who might have been dissuaded from the Right wing cause with a higher minimum wage and health care for their kids.

The Obama presidency has been flawed, as has every other one. But there have been important accomplishments as well, chiefly the apparent turnaround, however tenuous, of the economy (if anyone really wants to call 52 consecutive months of private sector job growth -- the longest in history -- a tentative recovery I’ll concede the point just to save time) and the initiation of a health care reform process that will finally begin to stanch the thirty year long hemorrhaging of the middle class. Don’t forget, these were carried out against the stiffest, most venomous obstruction ever encountered by a sitting President. (While George Bush enjoyed six years of one-party rule from 2000 to 2006. You know the Republicans miss those heady days in 2004 when the only things left on the agenda were converting Social Security into a Wall Street slush fund and diverting the population by hunting down and purging the last few government Liberals left in the judicial branch in places like Oregon and Massachusetts.)

And for all of you in the “both sides do it” false equivalency club: Yes Bush encountered incredible opposition and derision from his political enemies on the Left. But name the elected Democratic senate leader who publicly announced that his party’s chief priority (before national security, job creation, health care, infrastructure, education and the environment) was to prevent George Bush from gaining a second term. Name the elected Democratic congressional leaders who met the night of Bush’s inauguration to plan to oppose and obstruct any initiative he chose to launch from the White House. How many times after taking the House in 2006 did Democrats vote to repeal Bush’s unpaid for Prescription Drug Program? Name the sitting Democratic Congressman who during a nationally televised State of the Union Address called George Bush a liar to his face. (When you come up with that one, I’ll reward you with your very own Joe Wilson “You Lie” memorial extended ammunition clip.) Name the Democratic party officials, candidates and elected legislators who called either for the violent overthrow of the federal government under Bush or participated in talk of his personal assassination. Send me a picture of people brandishing assault weapons and waving threatening signs at a Bush public appearance. Remember all those clever Pray for Bush bumper stickers so popular at the start of his tenure? And how many Democratically controlled states saw a rise in actual secessionist movements in response to the Supreme Court's appointment of George Bush to the presidency in 2000 or his 2004 win enabled by the manipulation of voting machines and practices in Ohio? No President in modern history has encountered the kind of mindlessly hateful opposition seen by this one.

Since thirty-four years of conservative Republican policies have decimated the middle class and started our republic down the road to decline President Obama, Democrats, Liberals and Progressives and all those who still believe in the power of Government to be a force for positive change have an increasingly legitimate and important role to play in governing the country. The Right wing onslaught of rabid attacks on our elected leader are calculated to lead to impeachment, which is calculated to keep government dysfunctional. And since Republicans can no longer run for anything, a dysfunctional government is all they have left to run against.

New Quote of the Day

2013-08-08T09:56:00.000-04:00

Just another Orwellian inversion that rationalizes fucking the poor from today's Compassionate Conservative. Seriously, who actually wants his smiling portrait posted next to this supercilious bile?

And since Christian Conservatives can cherry pick whatever they want from the bible to justify bullying the rest of us into submission to their prejudices and hatreds smoke this in your pipe and put that in:

Deuteronomy 15:7-11

“If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart and you say, ‘The seventh year, the year of release is near,’ and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and you be guilty of sin. You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him, because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.’

Asshole.

I Told You So

2013-07-25T09:35:00.000-04:00

I hate to say it but I told you so.

As we come upon the dog days all the pieces are falling into place for another Republican-engineered debacle. Once more the used-to-be routine business of running the country is about to be hijacked by a band of radicals bent on bringing our society to a grinding halt unless they get what they want. Or at least unless they prevent the people they dislike from getting what they want. And what the radicals want is the dismantling of the one entity that keeps us from becoming an epic Technicolor wide screen version of the Balkans: our duly elected federal government.

We used to be the envy of the civilized world. In the aftermath of the city-razing catastrophe of World War II that rendered almost the entire European continent a dazed refugee camp, we brought the planet back from the edge of social and economic disintegration. After the wholesale destruction and deadly havoc resulting from unrestrained conflict between ethnic and political groupings our wholly disparate yet united states worked together to forge a new economic engine that rebuilt a devastated hemisphere and eventually spawned a global economy. And we did it by ensuring that everybody had a stake in that progress. We created a social contract that included everyone from a geographic and ethnic jumble that made the Europeans look homogenous.

On the one hand we had the Free Market: Capitalists unfettered by any centralized direction of their resources and innovations. And on the other we had liberals who made sure the progress they made was regulated to prevent over exploitation of resources and included opportunities for all participants at every level of the ladder. When confronted with our greatest inequities we expanded that contract in the 60s to include people of color, women and the handicapped. All of this managed through the Federal Government and its resources.

Then came 1980 and our President, the “great communicator,” informed us that with everything confronting the country our one big “problem” was this same government. Now we’re being manipulated and controlled by his disciples whose only goal is to take the one government that inspired the Western world through thirty years of the Cold War and “drown it in the bathtub.”

We worked our way to the top of the heap from the forties through the sixties, leapfrogging over the Soviet Union by hammering out compromises and accommodations between owners and workers, unions and management, lefties and righties, whites and blacks. It wasn’t all kumbaya and group hugs. We never felt we had to like each other but just acknowledged that since we had to live together we might as well minimize the conflict and make deals. In fact, growing up in the fifties and sixties I got the impression that that was the “American” way: Tolerance, acceptance, respect and cooperation.

Quaint.

Now we’ve got a major political party whose single fundamental principle is that the other side has no right to incorporate their own beliefs as a component of their citizenship. Since the 80s, Republicans have been tapping into right wing loathing and paranoia by demonizing Democrats and Liberals, characterizing them as having no legitimate say in governing the country. While this may have been a winning strategy in the short term it has finally backed them into a corner: How can you compromise with "the devil" and remain true to the believers who sent you to Washington? This isn’t rabid frothing at the mouth from the fringe any more, it’s become the official party line. And since the election of the black guy, this extremism has gotten outright dangerous.

They have fashioned a perennially winning strategy — there are always angry people out there willing to vote for someone as angry as they are — but at the same time they've rendered themselves incapable of governing, a process, again, that requires tolerance, acceptance and compromise.
When you add this to the fact that the Bush presidency exposed the self-aggrandizing ineptitude of a sustained "governing" program built solely on excluding your political opponents from meaningful participation, it's to be expected that when one of those opponents begins to effect positive change the reaction will be shrill hatred and mindless opposition.

"Governing" as we've always known it has been corrupted by more than just money and poisoned by more than just racial bigotry. I listed the American values I was raised with above. Which ones are these avowed “patriots” holding the rest of us hostage to?

Queers: A vignette for the times we live in

2013-06-30T15:14:00.003-04:00

So these two guys (we’ll just call them Larry and Moe) are sitting in a bar across from each other at a booth. The remains of a just finished meal between them. They’ve just gotten a couple more beers. On the TV screen over the bar, the announcers at CNN or Fox or MSNBC are announcing and discussing the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Prop 8 and therefore allow same sex marriages in California. Larry starts curling his lip in disgust and shaking his head in disapproval.

“This is wrong,” he says.

Moe: “What’s wrong?”

L: This gay marriage thing. I tell ya it’s wrong.

M: Yeah it is queer… (he chuckles at his own joke)

L: Nah, I’m serious. We shouldn’t be doin this.

M: Ahh why not, why shouldn’t they be as miserable as the rest of us? (this time he laughs out loud at his own joke)

L: Yeah, see, that’s part of the problem right there. You think it’s funny, you’re making jokes.

M: So? What else ya gonna do? Ya gonna get all pissed and miserable an start chewin the inside a yer mouth over it? You think yer gonna stop this?

L: Well I ain’t gonna just sit back an laugh about it.

M: So wattaya gonna do?

Long pause, Larry thinks it over, drinks some beer.

L: Well I don’t know what I’m gonna do, I just know it ain’t right.

M: They’re all grownups , they can do whatever they want. They ain’t hurtin anybody.

L: Yeah they are!

M: Who? Who they hurtin if they wanna get married to each other?

Larry thinks it over again.

L: Me.

M: They’re hurtin you.

L: Yeah, they’re hurtin me.

M: How?

L: How?

M: Yeah, how? How does what a couple queers in San Francisco do hurt you here?

Larry takes another slug of beer while he thinks it over.

L: Well I think it’s wrong. I think it ain’t right.

M: Who says it’s wrong?

L: Me. It’s wrong. See, I just said it. (now it’s his turn to chuckle at his own joke)

M: Oh I see, you say it’s wrong so they can’t do it.

L: Ahright, it ain’t just me. God says it’s wrong.

M: When did he say that?

L: I dunno it’s inna bible or someplace.

M: Well I ain’t no authority but I’m pretty sure it don’t actually say those exact words. Besides, so what if it does? Not everybody believes in the bible. Not everybody believes in the same thing as you or me.

L: Well they don’t have to but I believe it and if I think it’s wrong I’m supposed to say so, right? Ain’t I supposed to speak up when my religion says something somebody’s doin is wrong?

M: Well think and believe whatever ya want, just don’t expect everybody else to buy it. They got a right to do whatever they want just like you do.

L: Well it hurts me that people are doing something my religion says is wrong. They’re saying what I believe is wrong. There, that’s it: They’re denying me my religious freedom telling me I gotta shut up while they do the things they do. I got rights too, ya know.

Moe sits a long time thinking. Has some beer. Larry sits drinking, feeling like he got his point across. After a while Moe gets up from his seat. He’s got his ketchuppy steak knife in his hand. Instead of proceeding to the bathroom, he slides into the seat right next to Larry. In fact he forces Larry right up against the wall pinning one of his arms back against his side and he grabs Larry’s other hand and forces it down on the table. He holds the sharp greasy knife-edge right over Larry’s little finger.

L: Wha’… Whattaya doin?

M: I ever tell ya about my religion?

L: Whattaya mean, we went to Catlick school together. Twelve years.

M: Yeah, but that ain’t my religion now. Lemme tell ya what my religion now says. My religion now says that whenever somebody else tells me I gotta do what their religion says, I get to cut off one of their fingers. No wait, that's wrong. My religion says I HAVE TO cut off one of their fingers.

L: That ain’t no religion.

M: Yeah it is. It’s my religion. You telling me I can’t practice my religion the way I’m s’posed to? Now I gotta cut off two.

L: Two?!

M: Yeah, one for sayin I have to be against queer marriages because of what your religion says, and the other for saying I can’t follow my own religion and cut off one of your fingers.

L: Ahright ya made yer point.

M: Not yet I ain’t.

L: Cut this shit out!

M: Tell you what. My religion is merciful. I won’t cut off the thumb or the index finger. The first time. You need those and I want you to see the merciful side of my beliefs. I’ll just do the pinkie and ring finger. Ready?

L: Goddamit, cut it out!

M: You’re telling me I can’t practice my faith.

L: You can’t cut off my goddam fingers, no!

M: I have to cut ‘em off. God says so.

L: God never said that!

M: Well maybe not to you. Listen the harder you struggle here the worse it’s gonna be. Just close your eyes and… you know… pray.

L: “Y- you’ll go to jail for Chrissakes!

M: God’s law supersedes man’s.

L: You’ll go to jail?

M: I’m ready to pay the price for my religious beliefs. You can’t tell me I can’t follow God’s law… now hold still…

Moe presses gently but firmly down onto Larry's pinkie finger with the edge of the knife. Just when it's about to break the skin:

L: Ok. I get it.

M: Get what?

L: I get it. I get IT! I ain’t stupid.

Moe relaxes his grip and slides back. He goes back to his seat and has some more beer. Larry does all the stuff you would expect to get back his composure. He takes a good drink of his beer.

M: So ya wanna talk about abortion?

Quote of the day

2013-06-28T23:49:00.001-04:00

Probably for the same reason that smug self satisfaction is now considered a virtue while poverty, sickness and hunger are vices.

-- gootch

2012-08-09T18:56:00.003-04:00

Townhall.com

According to The One's logic, Olympic gold medalists didn't earn their success.

(This is reprinted here from my FaceBook account)

OK, I just can’t keep my mouth shut about this one any more.

First, here’s what “the One” actually said:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Here’s fact number one: The passage “…you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen…” refers not to the business “you” built, but to the “…great teacher somewhere in your life…this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive…” and “…roads and bridges…[that] “Somebody invested in…” and finally “…the internet…” at least partially created by “…government research…” Again, it’s a fact that the passage in question refers to communally funded and built facilities that all of us depend on for our livelihood and well being.

Fact number 2: Back in September of 2011, Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren had already made a notable speech saying very much the same thing:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Actually, fact number two is really a couple facts rolled into one: fact, Elizabeth Warren said very much the same thing, and two, each of the assertions made in the passage is a fact of life. Bridges and roads, police and fire protection, trained and educated work forces; these are all things paid for out of the common weal. Yes, the businessman pays a portion of those taxes but so do the rest of us. It’s part of the community in which we all live. Together.

But lest this appear too one-sided, Mitt Romney’s speech to the Olympian athletes at the 2002 games in Utah had something very similar to say about our interdependence:

You Olympians, however, know you didn't get here solely on your own power. For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them. We’ve already cheered the Olympians, let’s also cheer the parents, coaches, and communities.

And by now, everyone has heard his more recent words reacting to the President’s speech:

[President Obama] describes people who we care very deeply about, who make a difference in our lives, Schoolteachers, firefighters, people who build roads. We need those things. We value schoolteachers, firefighters, people who build roads. You really couldn't have a business if you didn't have those things. We pay for those things. The taxpayers pay for government.

The portion of the speech right after this segment is an attempt to paint Mr. Obama into a different corner by ascribing a different meaning to the President’s words, but the fact here is that both men said the same thing:

President Obama: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.
Mitt Romney: “You Olympians, however, know you didn't get here solely on your own power. For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided…”
President Obama: “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.”
Mitt Romney: “We value schoolteachers, firefighters, people who build roads. You really couldn't have a business if you didn't have those things.”

Spin all you like, both men said the same thing, both believe in the same sense of community. I’m sure I’ll hear all about how the President has “demonized success and successful people.” He has demonized no one. He applauds success and hard work the same as Mitt Romney does. When you put their words side by side it’s objectively demonstrable that they both believe in the same work ethic that generates wealth and security in an American system that is exceptional in its opportunities for achievement and reward. It’s also objectively demonstrable through side-by-side comparison of those same exact words that both men are appealing to the common bond between us as members of a community. None of this is to say that individual success is necessarily "communally brought about," it's just that nobody creates anything in a vacuum. We're all responsible for our individual choices and their consequences, but with that in mind, try building that successful plumbing business in Somalia where the last thing you have to worry about is government regulation or taxation.

The image of either candidate as a threat to this system and community is in the subjective eye or judgment of the observer. And it is demonstrably false in that same side-by-side comparison of their exact words. Instead of characterizing the other candidate as an ominous threat out to destroy our way of life maybe we should be asking who’s profiting from our being at each others' throats over such an utterly fictitious distortion?

Cardinal Timothy Dolan: Voice of Moral Authority

2012-05-31T13:14:00.001-04:00

Catholics are in full rebellion against President Obama. That’s right. The Catholic Church has joined the ranks of true mainstream Americans in their fight against the ever encroaching Socialist regime of the country’s first Mau Mau President.

And Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York is leading the charge. In recent months, his eminence has cut quite the figure on the national stage standing up to the federal government’s repression of Christ’s message by opposing our legally elected President's attempt to provide health care for sick people who can’t pay for it. Despite the prelate’s affable demeanor he’s turned out to be a formidable opponent, quick to call the President out for his oppressive imposition of federally mandated law on American citizens. The Popes have long since decided for their flock that any form of birth control (or anything else that makes sex merely pleasurable) is mortal sin, and the government has no right to force Church owned or managed businesses to provide the opportunity for such temptation to its employees, regardless of the fact that these entities operate in the free market along with everyone else in the country. Never mind that “rendering unto Caesar” bullshit. This is America.

The Church and its leaders have always been consistent and constant in their opposition to anything that breaks God’s Commandments and makes our nation a more secular hell. The Bible clearly says “Thou shalt not kill.” That means no abortions, ever, regardless of the mother’s health, or whether she was raped by her father. When things like that happen, you “make lemonade.” (And speaking of killing, who among us can forget their principled stance against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? Not to mention the Church’s universal opposition to the Viet Nam adventure.) ... (For that matter, who can remember them?) And in the spirit of Christ, the Cardinal displayed nothing but compassion for those true victims of the President’s failure to endorse the “One Man One Woman Marriage” stance: all those queers who are going to hell because they don’t believe what he believes. And of course, there was the Cardinal’s “act of charity” in Milwaukee, when he paid a pedophile priest $20,000 to go in peace. Or to just go. His subsequent denial of doing so is a model of Christian humility for the rest of us. To compare the sanctity and compassion of that charitable act with the government’s attempt to force Catholic employers to pay money for women’s health care when it could also be used to enjoy sex, is a sign of how far on the path to evil our country has drifted under its secular leadership.

Seriously, is it just me or has the selective intrusion of church leaders and spokespersons into the culture wars completely undermined their credibility as moral authorities and finally exposed just how politically calculated — and motivated — their sense of "absolute" morality is?

An Open Plea to Chris Matthews...

2012-05-13T21:48:00.000-04:00

…Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow, David Gregory, Gwen Ifill, Wolf Blitzer, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams and just about anybody else who gets the chance to interview political candidates and elected officials over the coming months.

Or, lets call this a Maybe Now? Redux. There’ve been some pixels and ink dedicated lately to the issue of partisan intransigence in the House and even the Senate. Initiated by an op-ed piece in the Washington Post last month by nonpartisan congressional historians Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, a number of writers, pundits and other public figures have alluded to the unwillingness, inability or just plain refusal of Republicans in elected office to compromise with Democrats in order to pass legislation. Some Republican candidates have been outspoken in their belief that their refusal to compromise is one of their strongest virtues.

I’m singling out Matthews in the title because Hardball has long been one of my favorite opinion shows and because he does a better job than most figures in his profession of cutting through an interviewee’s smokescreens and getting to the truth. He does this by refusing to accept answers at face value, and not treating their stated assumptions, prejudices or any unsubstantiated claims as facts. It’s this kind of incisive but even handed journalistic inquiry that is the only real hope of untangling the knot that our current government finds itself tied up in.

Obviously, Democrats will blame the current impasse on Republicans and Republicans will point to examples that put the onus on Democrats. But journalists have the tools and the opportunity to untangle the mess, exposing obfuscation and posturing while identifying genuine efforts at consensus building and problem solving.

The first question that has to be asked particularly of Republicans was suggested in the earlier post on May 4: “Do you believe that Democrats, Liberals and Progressives have a legitimate say – a legitimate right to participate – in governing the country?” The answer to this simple question will have profound implications for everything said afterward in the interview and for that individual’s subsequent words and actions. If the answer is “yes” then the follow-up question will have to be “Well what’s wrong with compromising then?” If the answer is “no,” follow-up questions can go directly to the heart of how they could possibly expect to get anything accomplished in a legislative body populated with people whom they regard as unfit to govern.

As long as our media outlets remain a welcoming platform for Republican legislators to simply excoriate their Democratic counterparts and ideas while repeating their own unchallenged bumper sticker talking points, they remain under no obligation to perform the duty they were sent to Washington for: to govern the country.

This doesn’t have to mean hunting down and harassing only Republicans. By all means, ask Democrats the same questions. But I have to say I got a damn good idea how different the answers will be: One need only read over a certain former Republican Speaker of the House's "memo" to his fellow legislators instructing them in the language they should use when describing their Democratic counterparts to gauge the respect GOP lawmakers have for their colleagues across the aisle. Besides, for thirty years, I’ve been cruising the radio dial, listening for the Liberal Media’s twisting of American ideals and strength of purpose. What I’ve heard is Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage and O’Reilly characterizing Liberals and Democrats as perverts and degenerates, nothing less than genuine enemies of America and of decency itself. Now that they run the Republican Party and dictate to their elected officials, how much does anyone think the GOP can actually accomplish as long as there are any Democrats left in government?

And further, how long will it take and -- more importantly -- how much will it cost, for the GOP to get rid of them all?

Insidious Moral Relativism Strikes Again

2012-05-10T18:10:00.001-04:00

Right Wing pundits, commentators, theorists, champions and other gurus have for years belittled and denigrated their leftist enemies with the charge of "moral relativism." That cynical immoral "interpretation" of the Ten Commandments in order to justify whatever their narrow political objectives required at the moment. Proof of the moral bankruptcy of the left and all its adherents and sympathizers. The Ten Commandments are explicit, not open to interpretation and all moral choices are easily dictated by following these simple prescriptions to the letter.

Nowhere was this high handed judgment of everyone they disagree with more bombastically displayed than in Ross Douthat's May 9th column in the New York Times. The very title "Obama's Marriage Maneuvers" -- let alone the article itself -- was another self righteously scorching indictment of the President's utterly cynical playing of the gay marriage issue for political gain. According to Mr. Douthat, the President's refusal to take the moral high ground and plainly state his generally known support for gay marriage exposed him as just another craven, cynically driven politician afraid of alienating crucial blocs of voters.

Of course within hours of publication the President appeared on ABC News and in an interview with Robin Roberts declared his unequivocal support for the right of gay people to enter into same-sex marriage. Shedding his noncommittal "evolving" position on the issue and making such a forthright pronouncement was precisely the act that Mr. Douthat characterized in a roundabout way as taking a moral stance for something he believed in rather than engaging in political obfuscation for short term gain.

And Mr. Douthat's response to the President's action? Just get a load of his blog entry from later that same day. Again, the title will save you the time: "The Success of the Gay Marriage Movement." In other words, the President made his announcement to appease the mounting pressure from gay rights activists.

So let me get this straight: Yesterday morning the President was exposed as a cynically calculating politician afraid of alienating crucial blocs of voters by refusing to take the moral high ground and plainly stating his support for gay marriage and today his plainly stated support for gay marriage has exposed him as just a cynically calculating politician caving in to a crucial bloc of voters. See the pretzel?

Wow, no wonder the right wing moral absolutists are ordained by God to lead our nation out of its moral turpitude.

Maybe Now?

2012-05-04T12:55:00.000-04:00

I said in my inaugural essay this would be a once-in-a-while thing didn’t I?

Maybe, at long last, there’s going to be a shift in the ongoing national “dialogue” that actually begins the process of a genuine “course correction” for the Republic.

Some articles have appeared recently in the media that finally address the glacial slide to the right we’ve endured since 1980. The first was an op-ed piece in the April 27^th Washington Post by nonpartisan congressional historians Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem. OK, it doesn’t sound nonpartisan but if you read the article, you’ll see that it is an accurate description of the GOP’s evolution over the past 30 years. Since then, both Paul Krugman and Timothy Egan writing in the New York Times have referenced the article to make their individual points about some current issues and how they’ve been affected by Republican intransigence in the House and Senate. This humble writer found it heartening to see serious pundits stop beating around the bush in the name of even-handedness and call things for what they are. But it has to go further and people like Chris Matthews, James Gregory, Chris Wallace, Brokaw, Couric, Gwen Ifill, Blitzer, et. al., have to pick up this ball and start running with it.

If we're ever to have a genuine national "dialogue" (as opposed to dueling monologues) on the problems of partisanship, government size and function, social and economic policies, then journalists, commentators and -- especially this year -- debate moderators are going to have to start asking Republican candidates and office holders one simple question: "Do they believe that Democrats, liberals and progressives have a legitimate say in governing the country?" It's a simple "yes" or "no" question. (Just like O’Reilly always asks!)

If the answer is yes, then the right wing media machine can be confined to where they belong – the unproductive, name-calling fringe -- and responsible Republican legislators can be free to engage in the process of governing with some political cover for their constituents at home who disagree with a vote or position they take. And ideologues of all stripes will finally be held accountable for their intransigence and refusal to compromise. If the answer is no, then the general public will have a clear picture, at last, of one of the root causes of a great many of our current problems.

Ideological purists, who see no legitimacy in other schools of thought, cannot govern a pluralistic nation. That’s what we are and will continue to be long after they give us citizen-tracking implants and fill the Rio Grande with crocodiles. And the Republican who points out Obama’s legislative failures when he had a majority in both houses only proves the point: this is a Republican problem. Democrats accept differences in thinking and political discourse. They have it within their own party, much to the frustration at times of their base. They understand what it means to advance an agenda through compromise with -- and accommodation for -- competing points of view.

That is called governing. It’s actually the point of winning elections.

Sons, Fathers and Mau Maus

2011-03-25T09:13:00.003-04:00

Okay, I’m late with this. But foreign events have so overtaken the national consciousness that once again something that should be at the forefront of our national “dialogue” is passing under the radar.

Both Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee want to beat Barack Obama and be the next president (and both of them would settle for one out of two). A couple of weeks ago before the tragedies, natural and manmade, in Japan and Libya these two national representatives of American Conservatism were momentarily in and out of the media strobe light publicly characterizing the current elected President of the United States as a-bone-through-the-nose Mau Mau savage lurking in the White House bushes readying an attack on Western (White) Culture.

Mr. Gingrich said, “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions] … That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” While Mr. Huckabee had this insight to offer: "one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American ... his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."

Right off the bat, I find this confusing: I distinctly remember hearing exactly the same thing as I was growing up on the cusp of the rural American Midwest and the industrial Northeast in the 1950s and 60s, white America’s Golden Age. Both my parents were white (although I’ve since learned that, being of Italian descent, we are not Caucasian but Mediterranean). Nevertheless, I remember being taught by real white people in grade school that up until World War II, the English were quite proud of the fact that “the sun never set on the British Empire,” and that they did, indeed, control and exploit worldwide holdings from Canada to Africa to India and Australia. And as I remember, people who have empires are called “imperialists.” So I also inherited a perspective from my sort-of-white working class parents that here in America, “the British [were] a bunch of imperialists who persecuted [our great] grandfather[s]," although, in point of fact, all my literal great-great-grandfathers were actually in Italy at the time. (Maybe, since the steel mills were still open and they needed the cheap labor, everyone just wanted us not-quite-whites to feel included.) I also remember being taught by white people that our rebellion against the British Empire was known among the educated elite as the American Revolution and that the leaders of this particular revolt were not called Mau Mau’s but “Patriots” and “Founding Fathers.” Now, I’ve not formally studied History beyond the High School level like Mr. Gingrich, so I guess he must be able to parse some political or cultural nuance from the “Empire-Imperialist” terminology that’s going over my head.

As for Mr. Huckabee, I would be confused, too, about his version of our President’s childhood since there’s no factual record of his having been in Kenya in his early life despite the fact that his father was born there. The President’s records and personal memories indicate a childhood ranging from Hawaii to Indonesia just like my own memories and records indicate a less peripatetic childhood in the depopulated, rusted crater we now nostalgically call the “Heartland.” As I said, I would be confused except that Mr. Huckabee is from Arkansas where Science and Faith are still seen as antithetical. And when presented with the arbitrarily manufactured choice of a “worldview” based on factual evidence or one based on faith, he has chosen the latter.

To me, all of this fairly begs the question of whether these gentlemens' analyses of the President’s worldview would be better understood if scrutinized using the very same criteria they’ve judged the President by –- inherited attitudes.

Mr. Gingrich, like Mr. Obama “lost touch” with his father at an early age. Having been raised in Southern Pennsylvania by a single mother could he have been exposed to and influenced by the beliefs and goals of one of that area’s local “tribal” or “clannish” groups, The Keystone Knights? (A group that interestingly enough has ties to Arkansas, Mr. Huckabee’s home state.) I’m not passing any judgment here on anyone’s attitudes or beliefs. I’m not. I’m just asking if it could be argued that only if you understand the visceral fear for the future of white Eurocentric culture, can you begin to piece together Mr. Gingrich’s and Mr. Huckabee’s actions? Perhaps that is the most accurate, predictive model for their behavior.

Mr. Gingrich eventually migrated with his mother and adoptive father to Columbus Georgia where he graduated from Baker High School in 1961. He has cited a trip to Verdun France during those years as “changing his life,” inspiring a lifelong passion for “sacrifice” in the interest of the common good. Since he has described himself as so impressionable during those years, so susceptible to events as “life changing,” perhaps we should keep in mind the part that Columbus, Georgia played in the Civil Rights Movement at exactly this time. Perhaps the documented instances of what were called “Citizen’s Councils” and the use of local laws and statutes to prevent federally mandated integration are an indicator of Mr. Gingrich’s perception of people of color, especially when he sees them in suits and ties reading and writing. Perhaps that is another accurate, predictive model for his behavior?

In the case of Mr. Huckabee, when we consider his remarks about the President’s attitudes toward the white British -- attitudes inherited from his African Mau Mau father and grandfather -- perhaps it would be illuminating to recall the instances of African American enslavement existing in some Arkansas counties up into the 1930s, a time when his parents and grandparents were in their own highly impressionable, formative years. As a good Christian who honored his father and mother, respecting their beliefs and attitudes, wouldn’t his view of the enslaved black race’s liberation at the end of the Civil War in America be very different than ours? Even today the Civil War is being feted everywhere in the South as the noble defense against the Northern War of Aggression, the one that made slavery illegal in Arkansas and ended black folks’ status as property. Might one ask if Mr. Huckabee’s attitude about that would be very different from ours because he could have grown up hearing that the freed black slaves were a bunch of enraged savages plotting revenge on the white race because of their enslavement by his grandfather’s friends and neighbors?

Now, I know what any thoughtful reader will say to this little exposition: It’s a vile pack of accusations thinly veiled as rhetorical questions based on assumptions pieced together from disconnected facts, coincidences, innuendo, prejudices and, maybe, outright lies. This disgusting display is a public embarrassment to American political discourse and has no place in a sincere civic dialogue about national priorities and choices. In fact its only conceivable intention could be to tap into irrational fears and hatreds in order to smear the good names and reputations of two decent, public figures who’ve overcome adversities and obstacles to lead productive lives -- genuine exemplars of the American Dream -- simply because I disagree with their political views.

And that would be a very insightful critique.

Searching for a Metaphor

2011-03-11T11:38:00.008-05:00

It seems we’ve come to one of those junctures, one of those points in time, a confluence of events when things can go one way or the other. Again.

A “resurgent” Republican party that’s been swept back into majorities at the congressional and state levels has inserted that rising surge into another hornets’ nest. While the GOP can always be counted upon to come back from any defeat meaner and badder than before, they are currently orchestrating a breathtaking display of the fact that they can also just as reliably be counted upon to overplay their hand. And any observer would have to admit that these past two months have been spectacular. As political offensives go this one has all the shrewd subtlety of a drunken bellyflop into the country club pool at the Membership Drive Cocktail Social. Riding into office on a promise of “jobs, jobs, jobs,” we’ve seen a bait and switch so naked, so bald, so in our face that, if any sense of objectivity is maintained, it’s actually pretty funny. After the Democratic controlled “lame duck” session passed an extraordinary slate of social, foreign policy and financial legislation – including all the tax cuts for the rich called for by Republicans to stimulate the economy (resulting in unemployment decreases in less than half the states, and increases or stagnation in the rest) – we’ve now seen a coordinated offensive aimed at rolling back what’s left of the rights and protections of the smoking crater that was the middle class.

“Mr. Boehner where are the jobs?”

Now thirty states are seeing some form of anti-abortion, anti-choice measures being railroaded through their assemblies, including, of course the Georgia Peach, HB1, calling for the death penalty for any woman who suffers a miscarriage. Planned Parenthood is about to be put down. Then there are the real headliners: The anti union laws currently being stuffed down the throats of Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and a slew of other states. Originally sold as a necessary sacrifice to balance the budget, Wisconsin Republicans finally stepped out from behind the curtain while the Democrats were in Illinois reuniting with their spines and tore the budget pretense right out of the bill pushing through its substance, the part that strips unions of any right to bargain. In case you’ve been off somewhere drinking tiger’s blood and haven’t noticed, that’s caused a commotion we haven’t seen in this country in a very long time.

“So where are the jobs?” Dunno, but on top of hundreds of thousands of economically stressed Americans chanting and marching in the streets we’re also being treated to Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, two GOP Presidential contenders actually trying to sell the notion that they’re better qualified for the presidency because “Obama’s a Mau-Mau,” and Mr. Gingrich’s passion for this country is so great it can only find its full expression between the legs of someone he’s not married to. And don’t forget Peter King (R-NY) the former IRA fundraiser and weapons procurer who’s now convening witch hunts into the political and spiritual leanings of American citizens from a religion he doesn’t like. Everyone’s seen and heard these things, I’m simply listing a bunch of highly publicized facts. Now, “where are the jobs?”

Dunno, but here we are with this amazing spectacle unfolding and my real problem is finding the right metaphor as I prepare to watch the Democrats pounce on yet another incredible opportunity handed to them once again by the blatant Patrician arrogance of the Republican Party.

One possibility that leapt immediately to mind, perhaps as a nod to local inquisitor Congressman King, is game 6 of the 1986 World Series. Tens of thousands of Reagan Democrats are marching in the streets all over the country having finally been handed their pink slips by the Party of Prosperity which feels apparently that they have no place else to go since this legislation effectively strips the Democrats of their last organized support. They’ve been had, again and again, and they’re finally pissed. Progressives, Liberals, Pundits and other big mouths are screaming for recalls, recounts and strikes! We’re hearing Pearl Harbor allusions to the awakened dragon or giant or giant dragon, the American Worker, and he thirsts for justice. People are talking about “tipping points.” To me all this pandemonium resembles nothing so much as that low, bouncing grounder sputtering down the first base line to where Barak (Bucky) Obama crouches uneasily, nervously fumbling with his glove. “This is it,” I remember saying to whichever one of my ex wives I was with at the time, “watch, Boston’s gonna win the world series.”

Or maybe this should be a little more high-brow than baseball. Instead of popcorn, peanuts and a pitcher’s mound it’s just a single earthen barrow near a leafless tree in a desolate landscape. Two non-descript characters (call them Progressives) sit near the tree, waiting. A couple of times a young boy enters, stage left, with a message – cryptic, enigmatic – more questions than answers, time stands still … we wait …

Nah, that’s not it.

How about picturing all of us who voted Democratic as a nervous young parent watching his small child wobbling down the sidewalk on his two-wheeler for the first time without training wheels. The sun reflects crazily off the shiny blue oversized helmet as the kid careens unsteadily, almost drunkenly toward the busy four-way intersection. “C’mon babycakes,” you can’t help but yell. “Remember your promise, you can do it!”

I got it. I got it. How about there’s a thirty-year train wreck of Conservative financial policies inexorably eroding the living standards of what had been the economic engine of the entire goddam planet finally culminating in the eight year reign of a boy King installed in office by his wealthy fathers’ wealthy friends. Let’s say he’s so petulantly arrogant in the certainty and virtue of his ignorance that he uses the entrenched power of these narrow self-interested oligarchs to start two wars on Dad’s credit card while emptying the treasury for all the family friends, accelerating the rate of national decline into a headlong spiral. A substantial majority of the American people become alarmed and vote a young opposition leader gifted, surprisingly, in the arts of both soaring oratory and hard-nosed pragmatism into the White House along with “veto-proof” majorities in both houses, empowering them to band together to begin rolling back the narrow short-sighted policies enforced on the rest of us by a generation of self aggrandizing hustlers and pimps.

Oh, wait. That’s not a metaphor.

Capitalism

2011-03-06T13:00:00.005-05:00

Okay, I get it. I finally get it.

I’ve been on the wrong side for over forty years. I suppose it’s because I came of age during the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights movement at the zenith of what was the “Left” in American politics before the Ohio National Guard and Mississippi State Police opened fire and we fled the scene scattering off to business school. I was an impressionable kid and I believed in what we’ll just call the “JFK/Peace Corps” version of America. Like most sad, pathetic middle-aged men I’ve been desperately clinging to that fleeting pristine vision like the memory of my first girlfriend’s chubby thighs coyly disappearing under that little plaid Catholic school skirt.

But in the last few days, with the events in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana it finally sank in. Our system is called Capitalism. Capital • ism. Duh. Sometime in the last year or so of his life, George Carlin made an appearance on the panel of Bill Maher’s Real Time program (and I cannot find a clip of this particular performance anywhere on the web). He dumbed down the origins of the political terms “left” and “right” so that even I was able to understand them: In France before the revolution, the landed aristocracy sat at the king’s right hand while the populace, the rabble, sat at his left. Hence, our government’s shift to the right over the past thirty years has been a shift toward a government that protects the ownership of property — capital — rather than the protection of the rights of individuals. In actual fact, I realize it’s been a shift back to the protection of property.

Ours has been, since its inception, a capitalist society. It’s made up of those who own the capital, the revenue-producing property, the factories and industries, and the financial assets that grease those mechanisms. In a capitalist society individuals who don’t own – people who work -- are a natural resource not unlike bananas, mineral deposits or oil and gas reserves. And like all natural resources people reach the point of diminishing returns: They get sick, old, educated, organized or otherwise too costly to be useful. So capital has to be withdrawn and reinvested in newer, underdeveloped places where fresher, unspoiled reserves of lumber, iron ore, sorghum and human beings can be found and exploited. It makes perfect sense and I admit I’ve been an intolerant ideologue to have willfully chosen not to understand that all these years.

In fact as today’s GOP leaders go on Tea Bagging the rest of us, they are more than likely correct in their insistence that the Founding Fathers would find them much more in line with their vision of America than their left, left-of-center, centrist and right-of-center counterparts. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned large, productive plantations that generated enormous wealth derived from tobacco and cotton produced by the labor of more than two hundred literally enslaved human beings. John Adams was a highly successful, affluent, self-made lawyer with a thriving practice that included getting British soldiers off on all charges after they'd shot some fellow American activists dead in the streets. His cousin Samuel was a tax collector for the British government who used his knowledge of the tax codes to help Boston area entrepreneurs “hold onto” their capital. But the personal wealth of the Founding Fathers aside, the biggest indicator of their vision for America – the elephant in the room, as it were – is the fact that only property owning males could actually vote in the land of the free. Tea Party Nation president, Judson Phillips, has already gone on record calling for a return to that fundamentalist practice. Perhaps he’s right.

I suppose I actually have been anti-American in thinking of the events in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana as a struggle for working families’ rights. They are, rather, simply part of the necessary stage of owners and investors withdrawing their capital from one over-mined market in order to invest it in other, fresher venues. And it’s actually the duty of our government to either protect these capitalists exercising that right or just get the hell out of the way. Scott Walker, John Kasich and Chris Christie are simply doing their jobs. A unionized workforce is a resource that has become too expensive for our capitalists to continue tapping.

But unlike whatever his name was in Orwell’s 1984, my I-love-Big-Brother moment has not been a sublime epiphany. I don’t feel any sense of relief or release flooding through me. Maybe I just don’t like to admit I’m wrong, that I’m on the losing side. Maybe I’m too old to leave everything and everyone behind and move to France. And I guess because I’m not that smart instead of feeling enlightened, I actually feel more confused.

For instance I understand and actually agree that capitalism, being the freedom to exercise one’s right to acquire property and wealth, is how the smartest and the best of us rise to the top and realize their fullest potential. I now acknowledge, as I’ve heard it described before, that ethics and morality don’t enter into it: Capitalism is the human equivalent to that natural selective process in the animal kingdom, the survival of the fittest. But doesn’t “survival of the fittest” call to mind a kind of bluntly unthinking, blindly amoral drive for self-preservation that reduces every other living, sentient being on the planet to either an obstacle, a tool or a source of protein? Doesn’t the very phrase conjure up one of those National Geographic high-res video clips: The gray opaque sheen on a crocodile’s eyeball clamping its jaw indiscriminately down on what could as easily be a domestic pet or a small child as a wild bird? (I had been saving this particular metaphor for a post on marriage and ex-wives but I just couldn't wait.) Couldn’t it just as truthfully be called “survival of the meanest?” In fact isn’t the “Animal Kingdom” really just a kinder, gentler euphemism for “Christ, they live like animals, the biggest and baddest eat all the littler ones, they piss in their drinking water, shit where they eat and when there’s nothing left, they move on to despoil the next puddle on the savanna?”

Yes, capitalism is our version of survival of the fittest, just like in the Animal Kingdom. But when expressed toward other people, aren’t the phrases “you live like animals” and “you’re an animal” loaded with loathing and visceral disgust, meant to be the worst insults we can hurl at one another? Right there on a par with “you’re left-of-center?”

How do you say “I surrender” in French?

A Post Post

2011-03-05T13:19:00.001-05:00

As an addendum to this blog's debut post (Here Goes) the Republican Party's open contempt for working people was put on display again by one of Wisconsin's legislators on the March 3rd edition of MSNBC's Last Word program hosted by Lawrence O'Donnell. Check out Republican State Senator Glenn Grothman's derisive belittlement of his own constituents' struggle to make their voices heard in what they have been led to believe by their grade school civics classes is their State Capitol building. (No wonder Republicans are so upset with public school teachers.) Senator Grothman is rapidly establishing a major presence in this humble blogger's pantheon of those right-wing demigods whose every word and action just can't help but publicly display the Republican sense of entitlement to and outright ownership of the organs of government. How dare these teachers, firefighters, cops, snow plow drivers and garbagemen -- these commoners -- camp out on the polished marble flooring between the proud portico of the state capitol building and his carpeted, oak-paneled office? (Okay, okay I don't know what his office looks like or what the building's flooring actually is. Just think of the building materials cited as metaphors for the decorum and gravitas we, the people, like to invest in our public institutions.) It's a long clip, about fourteen minutes in all and the whole thing is very revealing and important but the GOP patrician disgust at the little people starts around 6:55 or so. Anyway, give a lookie.

Congressman Broun's Town Hall Meeting

2011-02-28T01:08:00.002-05:00

It’s old news now – almost non-news, for all the attention it’s gotten -- that at a town hall meeting with Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga.) on February 22, barely six weeks after six people were killed and Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, a constituent brought down the house with his question about when someone was going to shoot President Obama (who is also, incidentally, the father of two young children -- anyone else here old enough to remember little Caroline and John-John?) The congressman’s “handling” of the incident has been documented. I certainly won’t bore anyone with my own opinions on the matter (this time). The subject is, after all, pretty “loaded.” Instead, let’s just revisit some facts:

Last fall, Joyce Kaufman, the chief of staff for the election campaign of Alan West, Republican Congressman from Florida, made a public speech promising to lead a violent rebellion against a House of Congress and a Federal Government not controlled by and not reflecting the policies of the Republican Party. Congressman West himself stated that the aim of his supporters should be to make his Democratic opponent "afraid to leave his house." During the same campaign season, Stephen Broden, a Republican candidate for the United States Congress, said publicly that his constituency should pursue "armed insurrection" against the duly elected Federal Government should Republicans fail to win back control of the House in the election. Earlier in the year, during the Health Care Reform debate, Representative John Boehner, now the Republican Speaker of the House and third in line to the presidency, declared that a Democratic representative from his home state would be "a dead man" back in his district if he were to vote with Democrats and against Republican interests. Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman has called on her constituents to be “armed and dangerous” in their opposition to Democratic Party initiatives. Sharron Angle was the Republican Party's candidate for the United States Senate from the state of Nevada when she encouraged her fellow Republicans to pursue "2nd Amendment remedies" should she lose a legal election to her sitting Democratic rival. Sarah Palin was the Republican Party's candidate for Vice President of the United States and after losing a fair and legal election exhorted her fellow Republicans "not to retreat but to reload" with a graphic featuring snipers' crosshairs over legally elected Democrats' seats. One of those symbols was over Ms. Giffords.'

These are not the rants of isolated nut jobs or "fringe" elements. These are documented statements from the local, state and national leaders of one of our two mainstream political parties espousing civil violence against members of the other party. As to the future, the RNC is being very discriminating in screening potential candidates to see that they fit the profile of those already in positions of leadership. In the meanwhile Democrats and Liberals (along with a Republican judge, a nine year old child and four other participants at a Democratic Party rally) were shot to death last month. Liberal activists have been shot and killed in Tennessee; Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider (abortion rights being a Democratic Party priority) was murdered in Kansas in 2009, and a building in Texas housing Federal IRS offices was the target of a suicide plane crash last year.

Could an observer of the side-splitting Q & A from Congressman Broun’s town hall meeting be faulted for wondering if the Republican Party and its constituency are still not satisfied?

Here goes

2011-02-27T21:23:00.001-05:00

Welcome to Politigootch. Right off I have to tell you this blog's title is something of a misnomer. While started up originally to vent my spleen on matters political, I feel I also owe it to my readers to bestow upon you my insights on many different topics as well. So if you stay with me you can also expect to read posts about our social and cultural environment, movie and book reviews and all manner of thoughts on the arts, visual and performing. Just don't expect them to appear with any regularity. I might have something to say about sports once in a while too but I have to confess I'm not so knowledgeable there. The blog's title comes from a nickname my father used to call me when I was a small child and he wanted to scorch my ass. Feel free to leave comments or whatever but I don't know how to do this and I don't know how fair I have to be so I'm not making any promises.

Oh, and I'm not putting my real name anywhere yet until I see just what kind of snakes and spiders come out of this hole.

First, there's this business in Wisconsin. I've been reading online articles by Paul Krugman at the New York Times (Wisconsin Power Play February 20, 2011) and on the Huffington Post (Wisconsin Protests: Tens Of Thousands Turn Out In Madison Against Anti-Union Proposal) and their comments, and I think these merit my own column and since I'm now a blogger, here it is:

On the Thursday, February 17th, edition of MSNBC's Hardball program Wisconsin Republican State Senator Glenn Grothman, when explicitly asked by Chris Matthews, bluntly and unequivocally stated his opposition to public labor unions having even the right to collective bargaining. The question was asked and answered within the context of establishing the core issues at stake in the state's current budget crisis. The fact that a Republican legislator can advance that opposition in such a matter-of-fact manner with no subsequent reaction anywhere in the media afterward is an indicator of just how far the country has veered toward rule by an elite upper class oligarchy.I can remember Reagan era Republicans repeating the "rising tide raises all boats" platitude as an underpinning for their anti-union, deregulatory, tax cutting "trickle down" philosophy. This was a morally bankrupt self-serving lie then and now. Every time workers, unionized or not, have tried to better their condition and share in the soaring corporate profits of the past thirty years, they've been vilified as greedily blocking growth and hampering economic development. Meanwhile the corporate beneficiaries of loosened regulations and tax cuts have systematically dismantled our nation's manufacturing base and shipped it and what had been up until then, our capital overseas.

As if their intention had ever been to "raise all boats."

I tried posting the bit below on Keith Olbermann's new FOK News site but I didn't make the cut. It's ok, he's still a hero to me.

For over thirty years (since Reagan’s first inauguration speech, actually) corporations have exploited legal and ethical loopholes to transfer thousands of jobs and billions of dollars offshore avoiding taxes and accountability to the American public. (Just think Michael Moore's debut film Roger and Me from 1989 and multiply that by every corporation in America.) The CEOs who run these companies are lionized as savvy businessmen, exemplars of Free Market Capitalism, deftly outsmarting an overreaching government bent on stifling creativity and growth. But according to some of the comments on the articles mentioned above when the local garbageman figures out how to game the system to doubledip on his chickenshit* $48k a year job he’s declared a harbinger of socialism, an enemy of the state out to cripple the economy and bring down the Republic.
*that is, compared to, say, Goldman Sach's bottom line

Time was when the real crime in America was getting caught. Now it seems the only criminals are those who simply think too small.

And by the way, those bloated pension funds that Scott Walker and Chris Christie are crusading to relieve taxpayers from pissing away their hard earned money into? They're not paid into by any taxpayers. Except for the Union members themselves.