I had this flash of inspiration from a post by my comrade Owen Paine, who writes for Stop Me Before I Vote Again, where he quips in his trademark beat poetic fashion:

yes the ever more empty “fatal center”
where all hope plunges down and down toward citizen despair
and corporate joy

If you’re like me, you’ve heard the blabbing heads on TV mention the Democrats “reaching across the aisle” and “moving to the center” so goddamn’ many times it makes you want to put your head through a plate-glass window.

If you’re also like me, you do a massive facepalm every time the Democrats attempt another ill-advised and entirely lame “reach across the aisle” and end up being screwed, blued and tattooed by the GOP yet again. You’d think by now the Dems would have learned something about how “the Center” is a great bottomless time and energy-sucking maw of Hell, but apparently they have the learning capacity of a housefly — and if you know anything about houseflies, you know that’s damn’ near absolute zero.

With that in mind, I present the Democratic Party attempting to “move to the center” and “reach across the aisle” and having what I call a Wile E. Coyote Moment. You know how, in those old cartoons, the coyote is chasing the road runner across the top of a mesa, and the road runner — traveling at near supersonic speed — rockets effortlessly over the edge and across the gap to the top of the neighboring mesa while the coyote, recklessly following him, gets about halfway across and suddenly realizes he’s way the hell out there in the air all by himself, and right in that moment he thinks to himself “what the fuck am I…” just before he begins that long fall? Well, kind of like that.

11×17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 600kb.

Continue reading "The Abyss" »

Anyone out there who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention knows by now that American politics are — not to be too blunt about it — really, really fucked up. And, nothing’s more fucked up in American politics right now than the way most media hacks and astroturfers define and obsess over “the Center” and whine about “the war on moderates”. After the US mid-term elections of 2010, US media pundits spent endless hours discussing how the Democratic Party needed to “move to the Center” — neglecting to mention, of course, that moving to “the Center” would require them to move to the right. In the wake of the recent elections in Greece and France, the chattering heads on American TV pissed their pants as they desperately asked “will the Center hold?”.

Lost in all of this is the fact that over the past twenty years or so, the “Center” in the US has been moving steadily to the right. President Drone Strike, who’s spent his entire term falling all over himself to suck up to right-wing cranks like John Boehner, is persistently labeled a “centrist” by the media. Rightist whackjobs like Sean Hannity label pro-corporate status-quo mouthpieces like CNN and the New York Times “the Leftist media”. Bland, toothless institutions like the Democratic Party, MoveOn and the AFL-CIO are tagged as “the Left” by the media and, in the meantime, people and organizations with real, actual Left beliefs and values are… which brings us to the inspiration for this large and extensively-researched infographic.

36×15 inch 150dpi .jpg image, 1.5mb
36×15 inch 72dpi .jpg image, 576kb

…and here’s more centrist hilarity from December 2010:
“No Labels: Not Left, Not Right, Not Nothing”.

Continue reading "The American Political Spectrum: an Infographic" »

As I emerged from my REM sleep early last Wednesday morning, the first thing I heard was footage of President Sparkle Pony announcing his “support” for gay marriage on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. Also — as per usual — as during the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster two years ago, President Sparkle Pony sat on his ass for weeks before being dragged kicking and screaming into speaking up on the situation. Like his speech on Deepwater Horizon, his day-late-dollar-short announcement on gay marriage was tepid and lukewarm, full of vaporous, non-committal tap dancing — in other words, classic Obama.

For some otherworldly reason, following President Sparkle Pony’s mealy-mouthed announcement, the mainstream media — along with, of course, vast swaths of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans/Whatever America — practically crapped its pants with excitement. This was especially great news for the media, who had a ready-made excuse to spend the next week avoiding all discussion of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, the indefinite detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, the health care debacle, and a host of other more important issues. This was also good news in the context of the current Presidential Freak Circus, as it finally gives the Romney and Obama campaigns something to disagree on.

So, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my heartiest congratulations to GLBTW America, for so cleverly diverting the attention of the People, the ruling class and the media away from far more important issues to your goddamn’ lame-assed hot-button bullshit culture-war pissfight.

Next week: flag burning!

11×17 inch medium-res grayscale .jpg image, 668kb.

Continue reading "Just Married" »

Remember back during the ’08 Presidential Freak Circus, when everybody was talking about how Obama was a “blank slate” where his acolytes could project any ideas they had about who they thought Obama was (regardless of what he actually was)? What do you mean, “no, me neither”? C’mon, gang…

Well, aaaaanyway… I’d almost forgotten about that “Obama is a blank slate” business myself, until a couple of weeks or so ago, when one of “Mittens” Romney’s key campaign advisors mentioned that the Romney campaign and his conservative principles were like an Etch-A-Sketch, and that you “…can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

So, yeah… Obama’s a blank slate you can put anything on that you want and then erase it, and Romney’s like an Etch-A-Sketch that you can… well, put anything on that you want and then erase it.

Jeezus, I just love the spectacle of American Democracy.

11×17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 552kb.

Continue reading "Blankness You Can Believe In!" »