Make that Change

The political center of America has been moving decidedly to the right for decades.

Actual liberals have been all-but banished from the Democratic Party.

Ask yourself, do we have any heroes in America like Marek Edelman, who left us this past October? Uncompromising and fierce, even in the face of death, even in the face of the scorn of his countrymen and allies?

The Democrats will not get their shit together on issues like marriage equality or reproductive rights and they have caved on every economic issue there is.

The Clinton 90's heralded an era of Democratic Reaganomics.

The Democrats are now on the wrong side on the death penalty, the war on crime, the war on drugs, and more or less every other aspect of both our foreign and domestic policy.

Gains are small and usually immediately taken away. Resistance is met with either scorn, or muscle.

We, the left, caught a great deal of grief from the Democratic Party when we dared to refuse to support Gore and Lieberman who might as well be Republicans.

I’m sorry, but you can’t move that far to the right and then complain that the left has abandoned you.

And anyone who has spoken out in the last eight years, from Ward Churchill to Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks can tell you what it’s like be responded to with simple, brutal, unmoving force.

And now, we are at a crossroads. Did we really mean what we said when we voted for change, or are we just jerking off?

Are we pissed off enough about this recession to demand that the people we just put into office reverse the past 28 years of systematic deregulation that led to this whole mess?
The hubris of the last eight years, the prioritizing of power over party, and party over country has imploded the Republican Party and we have been given a magnificent opportunity. It would be a crime to waste it. But the Democrats have indeed wasted the opportunity.

They could not get meaningful health care for all Americans even with a Super-majority in both houses. You know why? Because they didn't fucking try!

They talked of bi-partisanship as if it were the primary virtue for any politician. As if making friends with the enemy were more important than principle.

They've put Blackwater into Pakistan for Christ's sake!

No more. I've come to a crucial decision. When you choose between the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

Go ahead and tell me I'm throwing my vote away.

But from now on, every vote will go to a Socialist, Green or Independent candidate.

I used to think the Democrats' problem was weakness. Now I see that it's a lack of conviction.

And for the record, to you, the Democratic Party, you left us. Adieu.

Because There's Nothing Better To Talk About

Am I the only one enjoying the audacity of Santelli, fucktards, et. al. are trying to pass off what started on the floor of the stock exchange as a populist movement?

Christ.

Fuck Your Tea Party and Fuck You Part Deux

I really want to avoid overstatements here because I think this shit is important and I want those of you who disagree with me to finish reading this. So, I’m going out of my way not to alienate anybody.

So, this post is brought to you with a limited amount of swears.

Aside from the ones in the title. I have some restraint, but I’m not Jesus.

And aside from my taking a quick moment here to reaffirm that I firmly stand by my characterization of Rick Santelli as a ginormous fucktard of a walking abortion.

I’d also like to reiterate my call for help on spelling the non-word ‘ginormous.’

Little help?

Here’s the thing. I really didn’t hear anybody calling the Tea Party protestors on April 15^th on their shit.

Where to begin?

Okay, I’ll just choose a random jumping-off point.

Um, this is not at all in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party.

First off, that was not an attention-grabbing gimmick.

Second, that was about taxation without representation. Whereas President Obama was elected with a mandate.

And boy is he ever representing.

These things that he’s doing that you have such a big problem with, they are nothing more than the promises he ran on.

We the people chose a President who said that he was going to increase taxes on the upper class and corporate America and give the lower class a break.

You can call it socialism if you like, (and believe me, I do like) but it is what we voted for.

As an aside, I have to say that watching these people meltdown, throwing tantrums in their impotence isn't just gratifying. It's actually good for your soul.

Some restriction has to be put over the unbridled, hedonistic capitalism that started this whole mess we’re in.

So exactly why Obama isn't just doing exactly what we asked him to.

Now on to the underlying racism found at some of these protests.

The worst sign I saw was from one of the tea parties here in Kansas City. I’ve been trying to locate an image of it on the web for a few days now, but I can’t find one.

Basically, it’s a caricature of Obama with gigantic, exaggerated lips over a banner that says, “Beware of Dog.”

You’d think that the racism of the twenty-first century would be a little more subtle than that. Here are some of the other signs from these rallies.

“Obama’s Plan White Slavery.”

“The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens.”

“Our Tax $ given to Hamas to kill Christians, Jews and Americans.”

This might be my favorite, given the irony of insinuating that Obama is giving aide and comfort to our enemies and overlooking Bush’s close, intimate, almost homo-erotic relationship with the Saudi Royal Family.

“Obama. What you talkin’ about, Willis!”

And let’s not forget the calls for the lynchin’ of Obama’s allies.

Now am I trying to say that everyone involved in these tea parties are racist? No, but I am saying that none of them seem to be going out of their way to condemn the fringe wackos.

The Young Turks posted an exceptionally enlightening rant about the tea-bagging protestors and their rhetoric.

To sum up, speaking up about this president scant months after you were screaming that anyone who opposed YOUR President hated America and wanted to offer comfort and aid to our enemies sounds disingenuous to say the least.

Has it been so long that we've forgotten what actual tyranny looks like? It's been like three months for Christ's sake.

To those of you who’ve been talking about the erosion of our liberties and about tyranny, why don’t you come back after the biggest country music group in America is banned from the radio pretty much all around the country and has their career wrecked because they criticized Obama.

Until that happens, sit the fuck down and wait your turn, which thankfully is like 19 months away.

As long as we don’t listen to the right, and why would we, since they’re in the minority, we can make a pretty good chunk of our agenda a reality in 19 months.

Yes, we can.

Fuck your tea party and fuck you

It was the screaming fit, the tantrum heard all up and down the news agencies this week. CNBC’s Rick Santelli sounded off. He’s pissed, as we all are and he had a few things to say.

“How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really wanna subsidize the losers’ mortgages? Or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?”

He goes on to say that, “This is America. How many of you wanna pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.”

Well, I actually don’t wanna pay for that now that you mention it, you ginormous fucktard of a walking abortion. Rick Santelli, I understand your indignation, but I have to ask, where the fuck were you when this last administration gave hundreds of billions of dollars to the very people who created this mess?

They not only gave them obscene amounts of money, but they did so with no provisos, no strings, no rules, and no accountability. In other words, they gave the banks the money in the same spirit in which the financial industry in America has wrecked our economy.

You really wanna go after this new administration? Are you actually suggesting that the responsibility for this shit we’re in rests on an administration that’s weeks old? Really?

Did I miss your tirades against Regan, Bush the 1^st, Clinton and Bush the 2^nd? And yes, I am including Clinton in the list of those responsible. I know that he’s been running around lately like a chicken without a head protesting his innocence, trying to convince us that none of the blame rests on him.

Well, that in and of itself is a big part of the problem. We haven’t been selecting leaders who are willing to be accountable for anything.

What the Jesus happened to “The Buck Stops Here?” Mr. Bill, you helped move the Democratic Party and the political center of our country decidedly to the right, especially on economic issues, so while the erosion of our economy wasn’t quite as pronounced during your eight years in office, you have to accept some of the blame.

But back to Santelli. Is it really less responsible to bail out the middle-class who overspent than it was for Bush to bail out the banks who cynically preyed on the overly-ambitious public?

The banking industry has been pushing an agenda of deregulation for decades now and, predictably to anyone who understands human nature, particularly greed, as the oversight and management of the world of finance has crept back, the people who make the decisions have been increasingly behaving more and more badly.

And is there anyone out there who hasn’t figured out that when conservatives talk about smaller government, they aren’t talking about more freedoms for you and I, but eliminating any and all rules that keep corporate America in check?

So, why are you wasting perfectly good smug rage and self-righteousness on the middle class when it could be better spent on those who are going to be okay no matter what the economy does and really should’ve known better before they contributed to this mess?

This most recent bailout package is first, the most modest yet and second, goes directly to helping citizens, not corporations.

So yeah, some of the people who are benefiting from this last stimulus plan don’t really deserve it, but if deserve really had anything to do with it, we would be forcing the mothers of the people running the financial institutions that benefited from the first bailout to go back in time and get abortions.

So, Rick Santelli, fuck your tea party, fuck your mother and fuck you.

It's the economy, fucknuts.

You can’t fix everything by throwing money at it.

I happen to agree with that sentiment.

However, money problems can be solved with money.

Also, this is your mess we’re cleaning up here, so enough whining.

We’ve undergone 28 years of systematic deregulation, resulting in a disproportionate slice of our economy made up by the banking and financing industry.

In other words, we’ve been pushing money around for so long that we’ve lost the art of basing our economy on actual goods and services.

When so much of our economy is solely financing, you get to the point where our wealth is, for lack of a better word, imaginary.

Still, Republicans had a lot to say this week about Obama’s gigantic package. (huh-huh.)

“There are billions and tens of billions of dollars in this bill which will have no effect within three, four, five or more years or never.” Sen. John McCain (R) Arizona

“This is a kind of sugar high. You put a lot of spending now. You’re going to crash. You’re going to be in recession.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R) Arizona

First, McCain, was that supposed to be funny? What, are you throwing in to be the next Don Rickles?

Second, we’re in a recession now, fucknuts.

Second, do you guys need a few minutes to get your stories straight?

We have McCain telling us the problem is that the stimulus package doesn’t focus enough on the short term and Kyl telling us the problem is that the stimulus package focuses too much on the short term.

Why don’t you pricks sit down, figure out what you need to say and get back to us.

I will say this. Watching these guys implode is entertaining and laughter is good for the soul.

And I just want to add that for years, we've heard that Marxism is a nice idea, but it only works on paper.

Maybe we should starting saying the same about unchecked capitalism?

I'm just saying.