RARWRITER.COM™ Presents the...

HOT THIS WEEK

• "King of Bain" - Documentary on Mitt Romney's Private Equity Firm Bain Capital

• Robert Smigel's Lost Ode to the Evil of General Electric

• Riddle This: Do Our Governmental Systems Hinder Mitigation of Harmful Influences to Our System of Government?

• The Achievement Metric - Time for a New Way of Determining Public Policy and Positioning Revenue Spending

• Hide Your Brains! Matthews from the Left! Gingrich from the Right! Blowhard Attack! Or, more to the point...book reviews of "JFK Elusive Hero" and "Valley Forge"

• Art Sampler - An RCJ Review of Art in the Modern Period

• Benicia, California Case Study in Traffic Engineering and Growth Management

• Everyday Heroism - The Penn State Debacle

• How to Keep Things Lousy in the USA

• How Being a Socialist Became a Negative

FEATURES CURRENTLY AT RCJ

Is Belief In God a Sign of Weakness?

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.

No, but it may be a signal for help, and not necessarily in a bad way.

God is a construction of peoples’ need to have an organizing influence in their lives, standards to live by, and some reason to carry on. In all of those ways, God and everything that comes with it – the afterlife, sense of well being and spiritual comfort, and purpose in all things – is truly helpful to people, as various studies have seemed to indicate. Belief is powerful, almost regardless of its details.

That God, and the belief therein, is a signal for help is endemic to the genesis of the subject, if you will pardon the pun.
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Letter to Conservatives: The Party of Wealth – Theirs
 

Sam Broussard - Writer, Songwriter, Musician, member of Steve Reilly and the Mamou Playboys

 www.sambroussard.com

Three of the front runners for the Republican nomination are now just memories, pundit fodder: Huckabee and Trump, and Palin recedes into political tinnitus. But the retiring of all three has one thing in common, and it’s money. Huckabee just bought a huge house in Florida and is enjoying his status and salary at Fox News. Trump is more at home on his reality show. And Palin is enjoying both Fox money and reality TV and will probably be the next Oprah Winfrey, although she’ll never get more than twenty percent of the viewers because only that percentage of Americans can identify with her spunky pride in her ignorance. And yes, she’s pretty.

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We Need A New Party!

Kenny Lee Lewis - Member of The Steve Miller Band, Guitarist/singer/songwriter, Novelist/screenwriter' www.kennyleelewis.com, www.stevemillerband.com

I am a rock star. Ok, ok, I am in a band with a rock star.  I am also a husband, father of three daughters, and a small business owner who pays his taxes like anyone else. I never got into politics until the last election and wrote and produced a non-partisan PSA video for Comcast called “Get Out and Vote” to help assuage voter apathy throughout this ailing nation. I didn’t vote for either one of the major candidates in 2008. I am all about trying to rally everyone to start voting again so we can possibly support a third political party that makes sense. If we can educate and get people out to the polls again, I believe that there could be a groundswell of voters who could turn the tides in future elections.
We need a party “by the people and for the people”. As corny as that sounds, it is a precept that our nation was founded upon and if we are to lift up and resuscitate this
suffocating political system, we are going to need a leader who actually leads rather than folds like a cheap stroller just to please his parties’ special interests.

(Use the link below to read Kenny's entire post (© Kenny Lee Lewis, 2011 - All Rights Reserved).

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The RCJ Posts Issues Questionnaire on Obama - Obama 2012 – Where Do You Stand?

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting firm Rick A Rice Consulting.

The Revolution Culture Journal (RCJ) invites you to participate in a little experiment to help us understand public perception of President Barack Obama, particularly as it relates to enthusiasm for his re-election in 2012.

We have identified 34 issues in U.S. foreign and domestic policy and devised a scale to determine how well respondents feel President Obama is doing with each. Use this link to go to the questionnaire.

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Bechtel’s Long-Term Commitment to Nuclear Disaster

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting firm Rick A Rice Consulting.

Somehow the idea of using nuclear fission, and eventually nuclear fusion, to boil water, produce steam, drive turbines and produce direct current electricity has found its way back into the list of acceptable alternatives as an environmentally friendly solution. This bit of Houdini depends entirely on comparison to power generation through the burning of coal, which produces carbon emissions and is a primary contributor to rising levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) in our choking environment.

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Applying Grover Norquist to Corporation Intellectual Starvation

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting firm Rick A Rice Consulting.

In my career as a consultant, I have all kinds of opportunities to interact with different personality types at different levels of organizations. Some of these are of the kind that might make others feel that life is not worth living, but the advantage of consultancy is that my involvements are focused, short, and generally sweet, and then I leave the office dramas behind for a quick dip into the next kiln of opportunity. I am like a merry mercenary in that way, unexposed to the daily grind of the organizations with which I work.

Staff people, on the other hand, are subject to hierarchical structures and personality profiles, and their critical path issue is: a) whether or not to stay in the roles they are in, given the odds of rising up to a more satisfying position within the organization; or b) to cast their fates to wind, which is the job market.

So much of life happens at the initial sell-in.

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Appointment with Disaster - Republican Domestic Policy

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.

While the rich are enjoying tax breaks they have no need for and U.S. corporations are holding on to record profits, padding their accounts to ensure that this is not their rainy day, but doing little to further the employment and domestic security needs of United States citizens, word comes that we are running out of money to provide help for a growing population of homeless (see the Huffington Post on this date).
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Welcoming the Arab Street to U.S. Foreign Policy

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.

I was all set to thank the progressive Arab world, or at least the 25 percent of it that is situated in Egypt, for taking charge of U.S. foreign policy and forcing it to make sense. Then those pro-Mubarak thugs showed up and shocked the global community back to reality.
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Why Your College Student Can't Read, Write or Even Think

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher, Writer, A&E / IT Consultant

Back a hundred years ago, when I was in college, all the guys who were doing the best in the classes I took all seemed to be Viet Nam veterans going to school on government grants. They tended to stand out because they were older and far more experienced than their classmates. It seems unlikely that they were brighter, but they were fundamentally different in terms of focus and perspective in ways that seemed obviously helpful to them.
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GOP RIP

A Liberal Laments the Reduction of the Republic Party to a Cartoon that Hates Jesus

By Sam Broussard

I’m a 58-year-old lifer musician. I have a full head of gray hair and I’m not overweight yet, so they let me stay. Of course I’m not trying to play metal or country – I wouldn’t be allowed, because those songs address the concerns of younger people. Instead I play an electrified folk music, and that works because folk songs are about all ages of folk. And it’s a little bit of all ages who listens to them.

Folk musicians who pay attention to the lyrics tend to be liberals. (Some of the guys I work with don’t pay attention to lyrics, and they’re not liberals. One of us shoots squirrels in his yard and eats them. I don’t have a problem with that.) Like actors, folk singers strive to become the person who is telling the story, to stand inside their shoes so we can do a good job. That takes compassion, period. No, liberals don’t own compassion, but we tend to have the kind that says We’re all in this together, and All means All of us, not just the ones I approve of. Now that’s tough, and not for the faint of heart. There are people who don’t deserve to live, but principles exist that I’m committed to, damnit, and they require me to think really hard about what I would do if I were King. What are these principles, you ask?

Thanks for asking. Well, I could borrow a set of rules from anywhere ... let’s say any of the major religions. I could cheat and borrow the Buddhist set of recommendations for a happy life, but one of their monks once told my sister and I, “You should find Osama bin Laden and kill him! Kill the root and you destroy the tree!” He was right, but we thought that was funny. I could borrow from the Mormons, but I read that even their own high-up prophets and such don’t believe their own bizzaro shit – and forget the polygamy; let’s talk blood atonement and after-death conversions! Or I could borrow from the Bahá’i faith, maybe the only cool religion: they don’t take money from non-Bahá’i, they won’t tell you about their religion unless you ask, and they aren’t allowed to get involved in politics. Isn’t that refreshing? Yes, it’s tempting to borrow a rulebook from such hipsters, but I’ll just go middle-of-the road and borrow Christianity. We’re largely a Christian nation, right? We got other stuff, but Jesus runs a streak through our major groups of Blacks, Euro-whites and Latinos.

The Christian rulebook has all the usual Forbids: adultery, murder, stealing, lying, God shopping etc. And then there’s the Be Nice stuff: feed the poor, take care of each other, don’t be greedy, don’t be an asshole etc. The reward is called Heaven, the Or Else is called Hell. You know all this. It’s the Be Nice stuff I want to apply to some recent news items.

Christian Politics: So let’s take a look at politics these days as it relates to Christian principles. I’m going to use confrontational terms to describe the three opposing sides because they fit.

Democrats or liberals are historically accused of weakness on national security and a tendency to install big government programs that give away the money of hard working people to lazy people, generally by raising taxes. In this accusation, the typical Democrat, or liberal, is a bleeding heart who wants the government to force you to help other people, and furthermore is blithely unaware of just how dangerous the world really is – he is not a realist. In Christian terms, his desires to help the poor are consistent with the Good Book. If he’s trying to force you to help the poor by cooking such a directive into our governmental bodies, well that’s a secular issue related to Majority Rule. Just like there’s nothing in the Bible telling you to avoid wealth, there’s zip in it about a fairly elected, ruling majority choosing to have that kind of government (or Supreme Court) by which all must abide.

The Republics or conservatives generally oppose that ideology. They want the freedom to be successful unencumbered by rules and/or regulations, aka the Way of the Jungle or survival of the fittest – a major aspect of Darwinism, which American Christian fundamentalists oppose. This view favors the individual over the collective, and may the craftiest individual win. Therefore if Wall Street wants to sell crap that they know is crap to Grandma’s pension fund, fine, let the buyer beware.

The “neocon” wing of conservatism wants America to slap back hard when we’re attacked or insulted, although they apparently don’t care if the wrong person is slapped. This wing – and now the bulk of the Party – uses simple propaganda cobbled together from John Wayne movies to appeal to the animal part of us that fears dangers from Outside, of which there are plenty if one only has the eyes to see. And so of course they see themselves, quite literally, as realists.

Here I choose to mention the relation between the verbal American political bullshit – as practiced by either party – and the primary technique of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Goebbels perfected “The Big Lie,” which is the technique of repeating something so often that people come to believe it. It has a different name over here: The Politics of Perception. Basically, one creates the perception that, let’s say, Obama is a socialist, and then repeats it for months, and presto! Simple minds believe it. (There’s also a strong link to the music business and advertising, but that’s another story.)

Christianity has something to say about that, but back to the rugged individualist thing and governmental impediments to success. Jesus did say that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” This resonates with Paul’s assertion that selfishness is the opposite of love. Put it all together and it means that if you become successful, don’t turn around and spit on the little people who helped you get there; it’s Not Nice. I know a lot of conservatives who are not selfish, but the ideology itself has come to be perceived, justly or not, to care very little for the have-nots. It’s only a perception, true, but if it was false there would be a lot more Blacks and Latinos voting conservative. (Latinos in particular are socially conservative.) For their part, conservatives say they’re against laziness, not poverty. This may be true, since such large numbers of industrious Asians identify themselves as conservatives. And many poor whites are conservative for this reason, probably because they fantasize rising to wealth, and in that case won’t want government intruding on the fantasy.

Basically, when you have nothing, our government is percieved to be a Giver; when you have more than you need, it is seen as a Taker. Depending on where you’re standing, the government is either Socialist or not Socialist enough. If you like to bitch at Obama, this is why he just smiles when you do.

Moving on to the Tea Party movement, it’s basically an extension of both the Republic Party’s romantic love for individual freedom and of the fear of those who would take it away. They are, for all practical purposes, exclusively white conservatives similar to the Republics, but they differ by taking their fear into a fantasy realm, like an Xbox character who is literally surrounded by evil on all sides. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that Osama bin Laden is the true godfather of the modern teabagger movement. He scared them into focusing on their fear so well that they’re looking next door for its source. Oh, and their brand of Christianity is not an issue. The teabaggers don’t feel any need to involve religion in their movement. Or Spellchecker.

Thou Shalt Not Lie: So we have these three groups, and although the compassion that Jesus preached seems to be a hardwired part of the Democratic platform, no party seems to embody a direct attack on the Christian principles they all claim to uphold,. But there is one little problem: the Ninth Commandment. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Lying.

The Democrats lie all the time – they’re politicians, and to them lying is not just a way to get to the top of the heap but a debater’s trick of learning how dumb his opponent is. And it’s the politician’s main weapon of manipulation, the debater’s way of swaying the audience – again, if the audience is dumb. Simple minds are a the air that propaganda breathes. Critics of Democratic policy will tell you that liberals dangle the sweets of social programs before you, but those sweets will rot your teeth; they are deceptions, lies. Myself, I happen to like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the right to unionize to protect against unfair wages, consumer protection from unfair corporate deception and nickel-and-diming us to death, the Glass-Steagall Act that (maybe) would have prevented the Wall Street Calamity and all the other proposals and programs that have emanated from that Party and seem (to me, at least) to describe how a Christian nation would behave toward its citizens. If the citizens don’t like it, they are free to vote towards a different kind of Christian-inspired governing philosophy. But I don’t mind paying for the benefits that result from what I consider to be a decent set of civil commandments. I think that each of us being our brother’s keeper is what separates us from savagery, which is the strong taking from the weak. The old critics would tell you of all the encumbrances that regulations impose on all manner of business practices, the firing regs, the safety regs, all the regs – but the more recent critics will tell you that these rules and anything that smells like them are robbing you of your “personal freedom,” a term recently invented by propagandists that doesn’t mean much. Personally, I feel as free as I ever did, period, which is pretty damn free. Also, I notice that when sign-carrying conservatives are directly asked how their personal freedoms are being eroded, they sputter incoherent nonsense. And none of them, to my knowledge, have publicly put their money where their mouths are and refused the benefits of those godless social programs. So I have concluded that the criticism of the bumbling fools called the Democratic Party are fairly baseless, and the Party itself isn’t that far from the basic Christian principles that form a huge part of our democracy’s foundation.

Before I go on, here I will state that I have no problem with the Republican Party; it’s just almost completely gone. I miss it. Zombies are now in their skins. Now, back to the Ninth Commandment.

Define propaganda any way you want, it’s still lying. Disingenuous, truth-twisting, dissembling – whatever, it’s lying, the end. The Republiq Party has been marvellously successful with its fear-based propaganda. If Karl Rove is a genius, it’s only because he knows how childlike so many adults really are, how quickly we hear again the monster in the closet or under the bed – and more importantly, how many of us long to be John Wayne, Rocky Stallone, spaghetti Clint Eastwood or any Xbox guy with a light sabre. Karl knows well that millions of Americans are now afraid, their reptile brains on constant Orange Alert. Apparently the election of a half-black man with a name easily associated with terrorists has put their panties into a very tight wad, thereby causing their xenophobic bone to throb at a higher frequency. They imagine that Obama wants to take away their guns when in fact he signed a law allowing us all to visit our national parks in a state of slap-leather armed readiness. Other Republiq tactics, such as the unbelievably outrageous lie that the Health Care Bill wants to “kill Grandma,” have been swallowed whole by millions upon millions of these frightened Americans. (It’s okay if Grandma’s pension goes bust – tough luck, Grandma! Freedom watered with blood and stuff!) Unfortunately for the Republiquans, they failed to anticipate that the bullshit they borrowed from the teabaggers would be so heartily believed. It appears that there was a pre-existing hunger for it. The frightened were so frightened that they looked upon the Propagandists and saw them as being part of the problem, a bunch of career politicians unwilling to go far enough to save them and their children from the Red Menace in the White House – but far too willing to sell out Main Street for a few coppers in the coffers. The smart ones among the the frightened correctly noticed that establishment Republiqwans like Mitch McConnell were cynically appropriating their own rhetoric much like Madison Avenue borrows rock music to sell sugar drinks to young people. So now the Party is splitting at its conservative seams as its moderates face stiff opposition from fundamentalists.

Profound Fear: It might be good to mention here just how smart Osama bin Laden was. His style of combat is to instill fear profound enough to erode the foundations of our democracy, which he believes to be a weak, flabby thing. He assumed correctly that Americans would respond to a visually symbolic attack like 9/11 just like Arabs and Persians would. We, of course, don’t think we’re anything like those easily excitable people who like to carry guns in the streets, but really, we’re all the same when we sense danger lurking behind every shadow and in the ruins of the monuments to ourselves. He knows it wasn’t that long ago that we carried guns in the streets, and how many of us yearn for those days. He knew just enough about psychology’s analysis of the most primitive or animalistic part of our brains. He knows the stories that thrill and chill all of us everywhere, the comic book plots involving strangely dressed people from Outside who want to enslave you and your mother and marry off your children to a vile cult. (The irony is that’s sort of what he wants to do, although he thinks it would be an improvement.) He believes that we’re too weakened by pornography and big bellies to maintain a constant vigilance for any length of time, whereas he and his followers are used to it, knowing that either a quick or patient death will reward them with virgins writhing at the ends of their collective bloody manhood, while we will spend ourselves broke fighting shadows real and imagined, fighting among ourselves deciding who leads the counterattack. Our own government will overreact and begin robbing its citizens of those personal freedoms in small, insidious ways that will build up over time and lead to a tyrannical state. Not bad.

The Republiquans know how to cynically use all this fear to win elections, but, as mentioned, it’s backfiring. Reasonably sane Republiquans like Arizona’s McCain, Utah’s Bennet and Florida’s Crist are in trouble for not being conservative enough, but look: Do those worthy moderates speak up when Arizona conservatives are pushing a law allowing guns in restaurants and bars? No, they’re enjoying the spread of conservatism across America even though it’s a strain dumbed down to cretinism. They lie when they claim to agree with the cretinously misspelled signs and even make up brain-damaged slogans of their own. So instead of speaking out against frightened fourth-grade brain stem urges, they’re quiet. Instead of speaking to the part of the population that’s smarter than a stem cell and less prone to violence than a drunken dockworker who just ate gunpowder, they’re quiet. They’re supposed to know how to stand up and say, “You know, a law that allows people to bring guns into bars just might not be too smart.” They’re supposed to stand up and say, “Let’s not use the rhetoric of violence; Obama’s a moderate, not a communist. Let’s be reasonable so we can get something done.”

Democrats are weak only when they respond to criticism. Oh, and that time when they ran an authentic war hero fluent in two languages against a draft dodger who can’t speak English – that was pitiful. Otherwise they’re not soft on national defense and will start a useless war almost as quick as any Republiquan, but when it comes to responding to accusations that they want to kill Grandma, they’re worse than pitiful, they’re pussies. They try to speak plainly, but it comes out in sentences longer than “they want to kill Grandma,” and who can follow any sentence longer than that? While Repuque sentences are marvels of obfuscation and Gabby Hayes cowboy bravura, Dem sentences are so long that the average news watcher needs to rewind to the beginning and start over. No Democrat understands this problem except Clinton, but the bastard got an out-of-wedlock blowjob – probably a good one, a presidential one – which apparently means that his facts are the wrong facts. The rest of them prattle on in perfectly reasonable terms that no one listens to except people like themselves. Worse yet, they don’t know it’s happening – and neither does the media, the people asking the questions: I remember distinctly, either the day after the election or the day of the coronation, Mitch McConnell was asked how he planned on responding to the olive branch of peace that Obama was extending to his side. He replied, “If he wants to put forth Republican ideas, then fine.” Such a brief, down to earth statement of negative statesmanship, and only slightly longer than “our way or else.” I thought it would be scarfed up by the media as the very beginning of the fight, but they forgot about it.

Republican Stewards: As I said earlier, I’m not against conservatism. The GOP has given us some good stewards of democracy. I like conservative throwbacks like Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough and especially David Frum, and I personally know a highly admirable, principled Republican now running for Congress. They’re just too few, and the new Zombies have developed the skill to effectively propagandize the way no Democrat can. They even use reason better. I saw Tom Tancredo today talking about the Arizona immigration stance, and he said plainly, “The Democrats want the Latinos for their votes, and Republics want them for the labor.” The clarity of his statement exceeded that of the question asked. So as I proceed, to try to remember that I’m talking about authoritarians – not Republicans – who have taken over a once reasonable political party and supplanted its philosophy with a hunger for power that has as its intent to rule and dismantle a despised government for the benefit of themselves.

If you vote for them you’re a Tool, and I’ll prove it. About a half an hour into writing this I received the Official Republiquan Senate Leadership Survey.

First: it’s so Official that it commands me several times in stern, authoritarian language in bold type to not destroy the survey. I’m told it’s registered in my name, and then, underlined, “must be accounted for upon completion of this project.” This is the most basic authoritarian behavior. It is the language of pressure. It speaks to you like the Tool they hope you are, the Obedient Soldier. I almost goose-stepped involuntarily, but I slapped the urge away like Dr. Strangelove restraining his urge to Seig Heil.

Authoritarians: Here’s some scientific evidence about authoritarians: while not all authoritarian personality types are on their country’s right wing, every one of them in the United States is. The instinctive recognition of that is why so many honest Republicans now call themselves Independents. That’s not the bad news. The bad news is Second: On the back of the document below the contribution checkboxes for $25 – $500, there is this checkbox you can choose: “No, I do not wish to participate in this Survey, nor do I wish to make a donation to help the Republican Party. I am returning my Survey Document along with a contribution of $11 to help cover the cost of tabulating and redistributing my Survey.” It wouldn’t occur to me to include that choice on a political survey. That takes gall. They’re pretty sure that enough of you Tools will send it in. They think that the chances are so good that even though a fellow party member may want to neither contribute nor fill out the survey, he or she will be stupid enough to give them $11 to tabulate a BLANK survey.

Breathtaking. It makes me wish that one could actually bottle a fart and mail to someone. However, I would gladly send them that sum if I knew that they would “tabulate” exactly how many people neither answered nor contributed but sent in the $11, and then “redistribute” that figure to me.

That’s what they think of you. You’re an obedient conformist to the platform without a shred of independent thinking. Which is evidenced by the wording of the questions, some of which contained lies that they knew a carelessly uninformed Tool would believe.

And here’s some other choice bullshit from their survey: Obama Democrats want higher taxes (like Reagan’s), the Democrat’s plan of “retreat-and-defeat in the War on Terror” (like Afghanistan), the “media smokescreen” (like Fox blowjob journalism), and it goes on and on. Stop the “Obama Democrats’ aggressive push to expand the federal government into every area of our lives and businesses that will create a bloated welfare-state with sky-high taxes, limited freedoms, and a culture of dependence.” I didn’t know welfare state was hyphenated, but Cornyn knows best, he of the secret meeting with Wall-Street. I don’t know, I just don’t feel the federal government expanding into every area of my life; I guess you have to have that extra xenophobic bone in your head to really feel it, or be massively disappointed by your kids or needing to blame someone else for something, oh, I don’t know .... perhaps your own failure to be Lloyd Blankfein or your out-of-work status caused, no doubt, by Obama and not the profit incentive of cheap foreign labor. But my favorite survey quote is this: “Because it is cost-prohibitive to send a Survey to every registered Republican in your area –– your answers and those of a few other good Republicans will represent the views and opinions of ALL Republicans living in your voting district.” First of all, although I can’t remembered how I’m registered it certainly isn’t with them – goose-stepping aggravates my sciatica – and second, a few days later I get a another NRSC survey from “John McCain.” His asks for $15 to tabulate a blank survey! It’s so cost-prohibitive to send out this stuff that they send it to me twice. A traditional Repuquaidas’ argument is that government is ineffiecient. They’re right, it’s horrible. So does the National Republican Senatorial Committee hold itself up as the alternative? “Vote for us – we’re just as annoying.”

I don’t like Democrats; did I mention? My new reason is that too many of them are beholden to large corporations for campaign contributions – the elimination of which, by the way, is the only way to seriously reform Washington. But the Reparrghs stand firmly with corporations in their quest for growth by whatever means necessary, up to and including squeezing the common people dry. I take that personally. That’s what I’m fighting here. It’s hard to see the governmental reduction of my personal freedom when my health insurance premium is so large yet buys so little. Both entities, the corporations and the Repoñions, claim in speeches and ads to care about people, the land, our country – all that. A few of them actually do (unless it’s a smokescreen), but the majority of those two entities are concerned only with money and self-preservation. If you believe otherwise, you’re a gullible patsy, a Tool, an enabler of your own reduction to Customer Only status. You have drunk the Koolaid, eaten the popcorn, and your cowboy hat is on too tight.

Let’s talk here, just me and the Tool; you non-Tools feel free to listen in.

Failed Crap: Okay, Wall Street firms sold crap to people that failed, and they knew it was going to fail. Some of them were betting that it would, and accordingly insured the crap heavily (thus destroying their insurance company). The tactic is legal if hardly ethical or Christian, but it shouldn’t be. Then the global economy was put at risk by all this nastiness, and it remains so today – but have cheer, Wall Street had the personal freedom to risk the global economy. Now, on the eve of destruction, Bush, then Obama, took the advice of a bunch of Repoobs named Geithner, Summers, Paulson and Bernanke, and gave your money to float those bastards, and you hate Obama for it. You’re hating the wrong person, but nevermind – or I suppose you would rather have had Wall Street’s personal freedoms invaded? Obama took your money to protect Wall Street’s freedom – what price personal freedoms, right? It’s just money, yours and your grandchildren’s ... every now and then Wall Street’s personal freedoms need to be watered with the blood of your sorry-ass bank account and your children’s college fund, right? Freedom, dude! Personal Freedom! ... So the smart guys are still selling those derivatives as you read this; they haven’t quit putting all of us at risk – which apparently is what you want. After all, if we regulate them, next they’ll be regulating you, since you and Goldman Sachs have so much in common. Some Democrats want to stop all this kind of stuff, and they’re trying. That’s what we pay Congress to do, right? National defence.

It’s complicated, but I just painted the picture accurately.

Now here’s another picture: The fat cat Rebootlick with the cigar – you know the caricature. Use Donald Duck’s Uncle Scrooge if that works better, or Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. You just know that those characters care way more about their money than they do about you; they don’t care if you live or die. Those fat cats are being attacked by liberal, freedom-hating members of Congress for tanking their companies, and John Boner or my own personal whoremonger David Vitter or Tool-preying Limbaurghh or Latter Day Beck are telling you That’s not the Cowboy Way. (Right about here, let’s play a game: who does Mr Burns play golf with; Democrats or Reputzes? Even cartoons get it, Tool, why don’t you?) And in this all-too-true scenario, everybody’s white except Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neil, who’s long gone with a $200 million goodbye package after letting Merrill’s colon explode on derivatives. So with liberal financial reform looming over their fat heads, who is doing their best to make sure that no real reform happens? Earlier in March of 2010, Red (secret communists?) Senators McConnell and Cornyn attended a meeting with dozens of Wall Street heavies. And when I started writing this, they and their comrades back in the Senate were, for the third day, not just obstructing a bill that would try to forbid the games that came close to ruining us, but obstructing the very debate over the bill. You may like it that your Party is encouraging armed rebellion against our half-black president, but that secret meeting ... what does that look like? Ask yourself. That conservative members of Congress are fighting for your best interests? That they know how you feel, that they’re regular folks like you? Look, Tool, it’s as obvious as 2+2=4 that Repootlicks are the point Tools of Wall Street. Ergo and therefore, and .... ahem. I’m not telling you there is no God because I don’t know. But I am telling you that a vote cast for those monsters from outer space is a vote against your own best interests.

Cartoon Image: Here’s my personal cartoon; picture it: a hill with a pile of gold at the top. Two naked people are climbing, while a third has attained the gold and is kissing it. That man is Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. Behind him is Mitch McConnell with his nose up Lloyd’s ass. Behind him, the last person has his nose up Mitch’s ass? Who is that last person?

You.

Wake up, smell the roses, and vote for Mitch!

There are progressive Republicans who are hardly Zombies, but they’re very quiet, and no one sends them checks for $11 or $15. I think they should be louder but mostly they’re keeping low. You can Google “teddy roosevelt Republic,” or progressiverepublic. Those people own the traditional conservative philosophy; they’re fine folks and a damn sight better than some Democrats I could think of. But those people you’ve been voting for, Tool, are not Republicans. They are authoritarians wearing suits and flag pins, and they don’t care whether you live or die, tomorrow or now. And they don’t give a shit about Jesus.

So. In summation, it looks to me like the Democratic Party, while suffering from corruption related to money, disorganization, message mishandling and mealy-mouth disease, has been at the forefront of all the programs that most closely reflect the central tenets of Christianity.

The party that is in-name-only the Republican Party has, through an almost total lack of imagination and ideas, chosen to follow its far right wing, encourage its violent rhetoric and even try to parrot it. It holds up its opposition to a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body as evidence of a Christian core (sounds Muslim to me), but most of what it actually does is either about money – the Goldman Rule – or opposing biblical concepts – the Golden Rule, and the spirit of much the Sermon on the Mount.
The Tea Party is a loose organization of individualists that has chosen to abandon their parents as the cause of the deep, dark fears that trouble their psyches and replace them with the federal government. They claim that Obama, who has expanded gun rights to allow them in national parks, is coming to take away their guns. As to their adherence to basic Christian principles, well, if they’re going to take stances like that, who cares? They are an inarticulate group of frightened people who can’t spell. I personally think there’s a lot to be afraid of, but it helps if you can name it outside of the realm of phantoms.

WHY THIS ARTICLE WAS FILLED WITH A CERTAIN INSULT

Yes, I have intentionally mangled the word “Republican;” maybe you noticed.

Besides propaganda, the GOP has engaged heavily in insult, of which they employ two types. Type 1 describes a size. They don’t just tell lies, they tell whoppers. Lies so large that only sixty million Americans have gullets gullible enough to possibly swallow them. Yes, it takes a special person to believe that our government wants to kill your Grandma or that it’s tyrannical or otherwise robbing you of your “freedoms,” but let’s not flatter ourselves, because twenty percent of any population will believe anything a person like Glen Beck says – all he needs to do is preface it with “I’m one of you,” which is crap since he’s a Mormon with a yearly salary of two million dollars for feeding you such bullshit. I’m not special enough to believe what comes out of such a mouth, but you might be. If you fall for what Beck says, you are in all probability possessed of the authoritarian personality type, and I’ll leave it up to you to research it and understand for yourself why our wealthy propagandists feel safe in aiming so high at you when they lie, why they are so certain that so many of you will parrot the most ridiculous things they can make up. Understand yourself at least as well as Glen understands you!
The Type 2 insult is the goading kind, the in-your-face disrespect. This is what I’m doing when I mangle the word “Republican.” I’m doing it deliberately, like they do when they say “Democrat Party” instead of the traditional “Democratic Party.” (I can’t explain nuke-yular.) If you’re a reasonable Republican, I want you to know how it feels to be insulted like that, I want you to speak up and tell your leaders to behave like adults and not taunting children. But almost none of you are doing it, because you’re a pussy. Pussy, pussy pussy. Another example of the Type 2 insult is the work of consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein, who taught the Party to demonize the word “liberal” and to pronounce it with disdain, as if they were saying “wimp.” Finkelstein married his male partner in April, 2005 in Massachusetts, so I’d like to remind the Re-Pubic-hair-icons that they handsomely paid and obediently obeyed the directives of a man who can regularly be found with a musky yet familiar odor on his breath. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I have a Republican friend who believes that both the Left and the Right have gone too far, and she would despair of my different spellings of her party’s name. She’ll probably never read this, but it grieves me just the same because I have enormous respect for her and her highly principled conservatism. But I don’t think that the left has gone too far. True, we did the Hitler thing to Bush because we believed that thousands of American soldiers – and innocent Iraqis – were dying for nothing. You can’t get angrier than that. Nevertheless, the Hitler/Bush thing was an unfair comparison, because Bush wasn’t that smart. (However, the Cheney/Goebbels thing was dead on.) And Representative Alan Grayson did say that the Republican’s Health Care solution was “they want you to die.” Okay, that was over the top, but! as a man who knows a thing or two about health care companies, I will state that their idea of the perfect customer/enrollee is one who pays the premiums, stays healthy, then one day is run over by a bus without incurring any expense on their part. Yes, they want you to die without using what you paid them for; the essence of the insurance industry is that gamble. But Grayson’s comment can’t compete with the joy that McConnell, McBoner and even McCain get from the violent rhetoric that they help inflame. Things like that shouldn’t happen in America.

What other egregious untruths has the Left spouted? It’s hard to compete with “they want to kill Grandma,” the birthers, the accusations of socialist, communist and tyranny, he wants to take away our guns, I could go on and on. Next, Obama caused the oil spill.

I’m a conservative. I want to conserve and improve our nation’s Scriptural heritage of caring for the weakest, poorest, oldest and less gifted among us with the relatively painless sacrifice of the more fortunate; I want to oblige our noblesse. I want to conserve our tradition of not attacking countries that haven’t attacked us, our vitally important tradition of not torturing our prisoners, our Constitutional directive that all men are created equal and all means All, our tradition of public education, and I support the libertarian views that gays rob me of nothing and have the same rights that I have, and that women have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. I want to conserve most of all our tradition of believing that we’re fairly smart without it being threatened by the dark forces of violent, incoherent rhetoric and that most sinister threat to freedom, the Idiocy of Fear.

SB

Copyright © Sam Broussard 2010. All Rights Reserved.

How politics works: You find a candidate who appeals to you on a very basic level. You then develop an immediate tendency to believe everything that person says. Sound familiar?

Do I believe everything Obama says? No, I’m not that stupid. I looked at the people running and went for the smarter one and his smarter running mate. I chose the guy with one house. The guy whose modest wealth is mostly from two books he wrote. The guy who writes the words that come out of his mouth. I similarly rejected Bush – as you should have done – from the moment I was aware of him because he seemed to be a dumbass who could really get us in trouble. You, however, see things in terms of conflict through the lens of fear. That’s not unreasonable, but such a view makes you prefer a cowboy to lead you instead of a smart person. We can’t have people who read books running our country, God help us.

Speaking of cowboys, I saw “W” the film with my family. We walked out. It wasn’t an unfavorable portrait of the man, but it wasn’t an interesting film, either. It couldn’t be, because its subject wasn’t.

Obama the bad guy: It’s true that nobody on your side said he’s bad, just a radical, a friend to terrorists, a socialist and a communist, but ....What if Obama had chased a lovely heiress 18 years his junior after his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash? Forget that. What do you honestly think would happen if Obama had been found guilty of an ethical violation, an abuse of power à la Palin? Be very honest. You may probably think she’s innocent and this was all a dirty trick. If you think she’s innocent, I refer you to the first two sentences in the above “How Politics Works.” If you think it was a dirty trick, I refer you to the below, “Obama gathered $660 million.”

Obama gathered $660 million for his campaign: The size of our donations to him can only be seen as a measure of the disgust – or in my case, the rage – millions of Americans have for the domestic and foreign calamity and downright meanness of the modern GOP. True, that money appeared because:

Obama broke his promise to McCain on accepting public campaign financing: Obama’s people say it wasn’t a promise, just an idea, and besides it was public financing: the average donation from the public was $86. But if it was a hard promise and he broke it, well, who do you think he learned this trick from? It’s a dose of your own nasty medicine, so suck it up and stop whining about this insult, which I hope it was. Not to McCain personally, but to the party of which he is the standard bearer. I like to think of it as a big Fuck You on my behalf, because ever since people like DeLay and Gingrich appeared, your party has been behaving very badly and calling me names. Your party did little more than get lots of innocent people killed. Your party didn’t govern; it ruled. I would be happy to listen to a list of its accomplishments and compare them to its failures.
So, I’m sorry about the nasty trick, but it was brilliant compared to your nasty tricks – Obama out-nastied you – and your party deserved it.

Big government: I don’t care if it’s big or small, I want it to work. I don’t care if I have to pay taxes if I get something back. McCain & Palin said that we should be the ones who decide how it’s spent; I heard them say that. When has that ever happened? I don’t know exactly what Obama will do with my money, but M&P and J the P will spend it staying in Iraq. My tax dollars have been fueling that monumental mortally stupid enterprise for over half a decade. If you’re happy with your tax and gas dollars and the blood of your neighbors going to the Middle East then you’ve gotten your money’s worth. But you need to remember that McCain’s honor is founded on conflict in distant geographies.

Palin has an interesting slant on the conservative complaint about government. It goes like this: Government is bad and should only do infrastructure, maintain a military, and collect a few taxes to pay for it. Oh, and it should help out families with special needs children.

Big Government is bad: Yes, it is. Newt Gingrich used to illustrate this quite effectively in his talks defending private enterprise. He would ask the audience if they checked their ATM receipts against the balance; no one raised a hand. Then he would ask if anyone had trouble with the IRS. Lots of hands, point taken, government bad, the unfettered market good.

The unfettered market has crashed and forced fiscal conservatives to bend over quite far and perform the unnatural act of socialism by throwing your money and borrowed Chinese communist money to corporations and their overpaid executives. Bend over, Newt, and spread ‘em. It’ll only hurt for a few years. But, pleasant as that is to contemplate, let’s forget that and go back to Newt’s comparison. The IRS doesn’t do such a good job because it’s a collection agency for the government. It’s just a normal, enormous business with a complicated job that involves interaction with every adult American and American business. It makes mistakes like you would if you ran it. And let’s contemplate the voting machine companies. Some of them are still suffering the same problems that they had eight years ago. They’ve had eight years to repair them, but apparently that’s too hard or expensive. A bank, however, is much more on top of it because it’s money taking care of money. That’s frankly more important in our “mature” capitalism. I’m not slamming capitalism here, I’m just pointing out that in our “refined” capitalism, taking care of money is more important than taking care of democracy.

Winning with honor and victory in Iraq: Honor: Fine, all we have to do is bring more than a hundred thousand people back to life. That’s about the size what needs to be done to repair our honor. I call this the Lazarus Theory of Honor. (There is an alternative: time combined with a lack of childish behavior like starting wars that deplete our military and piss everybody else off.)

Victory: It’s an idiotic statement. Iraq was a mistake. You do not correct a mistake and then call that “victory.”

We are surrendering to terrorists: That’s a Palin quote that I love, student of Goebbels that we both are. I don’t want to use the B word, but when a woman used it to refer to Hilary Clinton in a question to McCain, he smiled. Your guy finds it amusing, says it’s okay for me to use it, so ... Look, bitch, no one is surrendering to terrorists, but someone is going to regroup the military for two powerful reason that you’re too dumb, too much of a follower to get. 1. Our readiness against attack is lacking due to an executive error. 2. We need the troops in Afghanistan where the problem originally was and still is, not in Iraq dying for a terrorist recruitment poster.
McCain was right about the surge: So? I think the necessity of it is the more pertinent point.

Oh, and there was this Sunni Awakening. Ask McCain what a Sunni is when he awakens.

A lot of people voted for Obama just because he’s black: So? When did that become unfair? Was it the day when sitting down to dinner with a Palestinian made one a supporter of terrorism and an enemy of Israel? That was indeed a strange and sad day in our history, so maybe that’s when it happened.

What’s really wrong with Sarah Palin: I won’t bother with a list here; I’ll just choose my major one from it, and it’s this: she says “nukular.” The Convention teleprompter phonetically spelled it “nu-clear,” but Sarah had her own agenda by golly, even as early as then. So she said nukular. This means so many bad things that it boggles the mind. Again, I’ll only choose one of them: it means she’s identifying with Bush, and that means, oh God, so many things, but I’ll choose just one: she’s aligning herself with someone who caused a world of trouble from not being smart, and that’s just so wrong.

I feel like I’m talking down to you and I don’t mean to, but why can’t you understand these things? They’re so obvious. Eleven trillion in debt – much of it to a communist country, huge government, a failing economy from greed and lack of oversight, a preëmptive war against a country that didn’t attack us ... I can imagine a reasonable person favoring preëmptive war, but Bush was an unsmart, destructive choice for this country and Palin is intentionally identifying with him by adopting his garbled speech; she’s parroting a defective mind, which is creepy. Why can’t you see that?

And by the way, do Democrats say “Republick Party?” If you people want respect during your retreat into rethinking what exactly you stand for, I urge you to remind your Republican representative, should you have one anymore and should he or she be prone to this divisive identifying with the illiterate, to go back to the vocabulary base and gentlemanly conduct of his or her betters in the Goldwater era. The political atmosphere was rough and tumble back then, but it wasn’t childishly stupid.

What’s really wrong with Sarah Palin Part 2: She’s no more of a Republican than I am. She has no allegiance to your political party and knows as close to nothing about it as is possible for a governor of a state. She has no allegiance to conservative ideology, and has displayed enough famous ignorance about major policy to illustrate her lack of curiosity. She’s a Republican of convenience; Alaska is full of rugged individualists of a conservative bent, and Sarah want to be their leader. Listen to her talk. It’s all about her. It doesn’t bother her at all that she was the major drag on her ticket and the major reason for her party’s loss – she blames it on the media. She could care less that Republicans lost because it’s not her loss – it’s her launching pad into public awareness, and it gives her at least four years to hit the books, to bone up on what a Republican is. She doesn’t give a shit about what party occupies the presidency as long as she gets a shot at it.
Mark my words: she’s going to ruin your party, and it won’t be long before you, too, call her a bitch.

What’s really wrong with Sarah Palin Part 3: “I’m not going to participate in any of the negativity,” she said the day after the election. Bitch, you were the source of most of it. When your supporters yelled out “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” at the mention of Obama’s name, did you say anything?

“The angry rhetoric at Sarah Palin's campaign events was cited by the Secret Service as a contributor to a spike in the amount of death threats against Obama.” – The Telegraph UK.

McCain, having genuine honor I'm told, shamed you on the basic human level and would have said something to those mental eunuchs as he did on several occasions.
But what struck me yesterday was her total lack of feeling as she talked. She uttered line after line like a talking machine, no pauses, her own Palin Party talking points, each reasonable-sounding on the surface but pure gibberish spun from the clever wheels of her mind and designed to flummox unclever people while making her appear confident.

Obama’s judgement: He only got really nasty once, stayed decent the rest of the time, and he won. That public campaign financing thing, I admit that was really, really nasty, but it was a superior judgement call that allowed him to vastly out raise McCain. Also, he chose Joe the Biden, who, gaffs aside, is smarter and more experienced than Palin and understands policy terms like “Bush Doctrine.” And he can pronounce “nuclear.”
McCain’s judgement: He got really nasty, stayed that way, and it didn’t work. He misjudged that such a style would only appeal to the base while pissing off a lot of the independents he needed to win. Also he chose Palin, who is the biggest reason given when people were asked why they wouldn’t vote for him. Bigger than Bush. Palin’s appeal has also been to the base, which has proven useless; the base wasn’t going to vote for Obama anyway. And finally McCain misjudged by abandoning the McCain he used to be; instead he pretended to be a partisan and went for the base, the hard right. That was a strange decision because the base is at most 30% of the population. He stayed still.

Obama the socialist: As the campaign wound down to its End Days, its Rapture, there was nothing left for the GOP to throw at Obama except this. They were desperate and willing to risk looking like the hypocrites they were, given the monolithic governmental corporate bailout for that McCain supported. As I write this, Paulson is on TV explaining the second AIG bailout right after a report that AIG spent close to a half million on a lavish seminar for executives and independent brokers. Why don’t those executives just walk around with swords and shiny pompadours? Why don’t I mention the hypocrisy of the elitism attacks?
This is a typical nasty trick, and I can prove it. Yesterday I saw McCain on TV; he was asked if he really thought Obama is a socialist. He said no. I know you don’t like him much, but that was the only reason why you should. Your guy said it’s not true. End of discussion.
And if that’s not the end, the fact that we’ve already arrived at socialism through a corporate bailout designed by Republicans is my alternate end of it. Obama said, “When you don’t guard against excess, government has to step in in a much more burdensome way.” You should be for Guarding Against Excess, like overspending on your own credit cards and monitoring the greed of the bank that issued it, etc., and we’re going to make that the new call to arms for American patriotism for the next four years at least. After the names you’ve been calling me for my dissent against the Iraq war, it’ll be a breeze. You can put up with it.
Oh, I have second alternate end of the discussion:

What’s really wrong with Sarah Palin Part 4: Alaskans get a healthy check every year from oil revenues. Corporations take Alaskan oil and are made, by the government, to pay each Alaskan a substantial sum. I’ve been there three times; in the early eighties every adult got seven or eight hundred dollars every year. That was a good chunk back then. What do you call that, huh? You call it spreading the wealth. And if I want to call Sarah Palin a socialist pig, it’s logic from your side that allows me to do it. Sarah, you’re a socialist pig. You’re not a pitbull with lipstick, you’re a commie pinko with a dipstick.

Thanks!

Here’s a paragraph from journalist Hendrik Hertzberg, reporting in the November 3rd 08 issue of the New Yorker:

“For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist – Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine – that “we;re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.”

Obama the Muslim: Oh please. I don’t think you fell for that, mostly because you’re reading this. That trick was designed for people who can’t read and other brain-damaged members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Sadly, I know someone who believes this, and more sadly, we probably all do. I’m sorry, but only stupid people fell for it. The people who promulgate it know it’s not true, but they know that even stupid people have a vote in this great country. I wish they didn’t. Immigrants have to read the Pledge of Allegiance or something; maybe voters should asked to define the basic meaning of the word “pledge.”

I’ve always thought that the Party closer to the central messages in the Bible was the Democratic Party. You know, all that stuff about “what you do to the least of my brethren you do to me,” and that admonition that we are our brother’s and sister’s keeper. How about the Sermon on the Mount? Let’s face it, there’s a streak of communism running through the Bible if you want to squint that way. It says we should take care of each other, and being a student of Goebbels and Republican campaign attacks I can twist that toward communism if I want. Evangelicals support communism. There. The other day I heard Tom DeLay call Obama a communist. But Tom’s a Christian, isn’t he... then he’s a ...

Obama the Radical: Okay, I just saw the ad from goptrust.com, and here’s some information that I know you need. One aspect of this story completely mystifies me, but I completely get the rest of it and you don’t.

I’m a liberal, and that means that I try to be open-minded. I listen to Fox news sometimes, and I read books by conservatives; I’ve read Milton Friedman among others. I don’t read liberal tracts or listen much to left wing radio because I know what they’re going to say. Liberals are not a choir that needs preaching to about things we already agree with. We don’t need cheerleaders like Sarah. That’s why Obama can sit in a church and listen to and befriend a preacher he sometimes disagreed with, and that’s why he will incorporate Republicans into his cabinet. He understands that he doesn’t have all the answers and – unlike some people – he’s against estrangement. He doesn’t dislike conservatism or Republicans, never says a bad word against them, he just disagrees with some mean ones who want to divide us. He can be in a room with someone saying terrible things about America or Israel and not want to start a fistfight. In the same way, is there anything wrong with having curiosity about our enemies? Shouldn’t we know something about a people before we take over their country? It would have helped, you think?. Does it make sense that, in order to fight terrorists, it’s sensible to listen to their complaints and therefore learn what makes them tick? Yes it does, because you can learn how to craft advantages. I know this and I’m a guitar player. Is there something irrational, illogical, unreasonable, unpragmatic about that? Of course not. It reduces the potential of swinging wildly and accidentally hitting the guy’s wife. It lessens the possibility of a gunfight breaking out in the saloon and maybe killing the dentist next door. It allows you to aim and fire instead of shooting from the hip.

But the cowboy movie says that being careful and prepared makes you a pussy. Tell that to Colin Powell.

Now here’s the part I don’t get. I’m having trouble defining “radical.” Someone please tell me what cowboy movie you’ve all been watching so I can avoid it. There’s apparently a radically insidious virus that creeps out of the screen and infects people with a disease that causes them to walk out, find somebody who’s different, and shoot him.
That’s animal behavior. When we see it in a human we call it things like “low class,” and “trashy.” Or we say, “he gets belligerent when he’s drunk.”
The anchor woman on Fox News questioned the Obama’s fist bump as a possible terrorist signal. That’s being drunk on the Koolaid passed out at the cowboy movie. That’s un-American. That’s low class, trashy. Radical.

Obama said we’re better than that. It terrifies me that he was wrong for eight years.

McCain is a better man: McCain may be a good guy. He told that woman that Obama isn’t an Arab. The old McCain came through own when confronted by a creation of his own party’s bullshit. It was premium bullshit invented by your people and you know it. Did you keep silent and hope that it would work? And I know he hated saying when asked pointblank that Obama wanted to teach sex ed to kindergarten kids. I saw McCain say “it’s true” – it wasn’t someone else in a McCain mask – but I trust that he hated saying it. However, if he’s gonna say he believes that particular steaming pile then I’m free to believe that he had a sordid union with a black teenager and fathered a black child.

McCain fathered a black child: It’s true. Your people told me it’s true, so how can it not be? Decency won out and this offensive man lost the election. Justice triumphs in America, as it should and always does.

McCain is not Bush: Maybe, maybe not. But the whack job Palin is.

An Obama campaign attack ad you didn’t see: “Soon you will see some nasty ads against Senator Obama. But don’t let someone with more houses than he can count talk to you about economics. Don’t let the people who insinuated that McCain fathered a black child lecture you about character through McCain’s mouth. Don’t let those same people who call McCain’s choice of running mate a whack job tell you that he has the better judgement – he hired them. However, if you like being told what to think by such people and if that’s the tone you want set for your patriotism, then by all means vote for McCain.”

Why you didn’t see it: It’s not a nice ad, and Obama is a nice guy. If you think that such a character trait automatically makes him a pussy, then you’ve been allowing someone else to do your thinking for you.

What your Party should do for the future: While I’m sure you don’t hold him in high regard, Bill Maher said something you could ponder. He said he’d like to see the Party return to what it was in the Goldwater era, which was “pro-business, not anti-intellectual.” This is what I would also like to see. When did America become a country where having grown up poor, read a book, gone to Harvard, become a community organizer and a liberal make your patriotism suspect? When did having – excuse me, being deserving of – a fine education make an American an “elitist,” someone out of touch with other Americans? Education is valued in this country; it’s expensive and shouldn’t be a political disadvantage – that’s insane. You should immediately reject these tactics on patriotic grounds. And you should realize that you lost the bulk of the South as a dependable voting block because more educated Americans are moving into it, thus helping the South realize that they’ve been swindled into voting against their own best interests. And when did America become a country where sitting down to dinner with someone you disagree with creates an immediate suspicion of anti-Americanism? It shouldn’t have come to this, not as a way of winning elections. We bitch about it when we see it in other countries. You and I call those people assholes, and we say it in broad daylight.

What does the huge voter turnout mean? It means that slightly more than half of all voting age Americans are sick of the divisive, with-us-or-against-us schoolyard politics that caused over three thousand American dead in the Middle East; it means an end to the downright meanness aimed at patriots like myself by the bunch of jingoistic authoritarians that have taken over the noble philosophy of conservatism. It means the end of the cynical misuse of Christianity. It means the end of the cowboy movie, which wasn’t very good.

Anger: Your people turned out in droves, too. You weren’t as disgusted, as sick to the core as we were but really, it wasn’t possible for you to be as angry because you think that over three thousand American soldiers died for a reason and we don’t. My anger, my rage, is therefore much, much bigger than yours.

I hope all this helps with your anger, resentment and disappointment. If not, try out some of that Christian empathy that is the very soul of the Bible and imagine how I’ve felt for the last eight years – no, longer than that, ever since Newt Gingrich got into the House, ever since Clinton’s crucifixion for helping that woman brush her teeth, ever since the GOP got taken over by authoritarians like Gingrich and DeLay and dead Lee Atwater, the “happy hatchet man” who mentored Rove and founded the nasty, insulting politics that has become the Republican style of winning elections. Again, Obama never said anything bad about conservatives or the Republican party; instead he ran down the years of Bushism and McCain’s allegiance to it. What he doesn’t like – and most Americans agree with him – is having conservative philosophy “... kidnapped by an incompetent, highly ideological subset of the Republican Party.” That subset has been wrong for the country we love. It’s been too full of mean-spirited crap. Y’all keep liking that crap and liberals will keep winning elections. Elizabeth Dole tried it on Kay Hagan in North Carolina, running an ad that claimed Hagan is an atheist (she’s a Sunday school teacher, for Christ’s sake!) with a faux “Hagan” voiceover saying “there is no God.” It was a tight race before the ad. Dole lost. Why? Because it’s 2008 and most people don’t like assholes.

Evolution!

Take heart, I’ll be suffering some for the next four years. I might go deaf, which would be a shame for a musician. But at least I won’t have to listen to the diseased Sarah Palin spout that devolved nastiness out of her ... she shore has a pretty mouth, now that I think of it.

Oh that was nasty! I’m so bad. Look, I’ve just had to listen to the words “Joe the Plumber” too often. Such repetition is for stupid pop songs.

I was unwell, the last eight years have been trying, but I’m getting happier now. Try to enjoy my happiness. - SAM BROUSSARD

SB

Copyright © Sam Broussard 2010. All Rights Reserved.