A far healthier turnout than I’d expected was on hand on Capitol Hill today to mark the 12th anniversary of the Patriot Act with a protest against NSA abuse of citizens’ privacy under the Obama Administration.
A coalition of groups ranging from Code Pink and ThinkProgress to the Libertarian Party and FreedomWorks came together for an event that was “not about Left or Right, but about Right and Wrong”. Now, that’s bipartisanship.
Hey, there, US news media consumers! Interested in finding out what else is going on in the world besides the government shutdown? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hah, tough shit. Curious about what’s up in Greece, the Sudan, or Palestine? Too goddamn’ bad, all they’ve got for you is government shutdown news. Like it or lump it, chumps.
For the past day or two, pretty much every US “news” network has been nothing but wall-to-wall government shutdown babble. MSDNC… uhh, MSNBC has been the worst of the lot, with continuous Obamacare pimping overlaid with 24/7 government shutdown hysterics, taking a break only to allow one of their resident windbags, Chris “Baby Eater” Matthews, to plug his new book about his days as a flunkie for Tip O’Neill — at one point, being interviewed by his wife, f’crissake.
All I can say is, thank Allah for Al Jazeera.
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Now, I didn’t actually watch Obama’s Syria speech last Tuesday — the very sound of his soulless, pompous, officious delivery gives me a Hot Dog Burp Of Disgust — but from all accounts, the whole thing basically boiled down to “Aww, FUUUUUUUUU–”
What really gives me a giggle, though, is all the talk from Obummer and his mob about a “red line”. After all, how long has that whole brouhaha been going on over there — two years or so? Then, after sitting around and pretty much ignoring it, President Sparkle Pony gets a bug up his ass and decides we — “we” being the US State and corporate elites — need to “do something”? Christ, that’s rich.
And whose idea was it to start slinging around the expression “red line”, anyway? That’s got to be one of the stupidest expressions to come from inside the Beltway since “reset button”. You know the Washington insiders and punditocracy are really scraping the bottom of the barrel when they start picking up on a phrase coined by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in that third-grade show’n'tell he put on at the UN last year.
For me, that’s a sure sign that the elites have completely jumped the shark.
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I caught this item on Buzzfeed last week, about the near-total silence from the antiwar “movement” about President Sparkle Pony’s desire to intervene militarily in Syria. Almost all the quotes from organizers and activists are full of weak rationalizing about fundraising and contorted tap-dancing around the fact that most of the people who filled the streets in the early ’00s were just pissed-off Democrats who promptly put away their signs and banners and went home when the ‘08 Presidential freak circus kicked off, leaving those of us who really cared about ending militarism — no matter which wing of the Party was doing the bombing, murdering and torturing — high and dry.
The most gobsmacking quote in the whole article — the quote which inspired this cartoon — comes from our old pal, Code Pink founder Medea “Media” Benjamin:
“Those of us still working on this have been mobilizing. The online protests are proliferating. There’s petitions to Obama, there’s calls for Congress to get involved — so many groups from Code Pink to Win Without War to Just Foreign Policy — all have put out calls saying no war in Syria.”
Dear god, what a great, steamy slab of thumbsucking. This makes me want to just bang my head on the desk. Medea Benjamin thinks we’re going to have an effect on policy by “protesting” on the Internet, sending petitions (which will be promptly ignored) to President Sparkle Pony, and beseeching a bunch of greedy-assed sociopathic politicians to act against their own interests. You’d think Medea Benjamin, of all people, would understand that real movements are built — and real change brought about — by real, live, honest-to-god, in-person “street heat”, not by sitting on one’s pasty ass in front of a computer, signing useless Internet petitions, bitching on Farcebook, and remaining essentially invisible to the public and the media.
Christ, I need a drink… or perhaps several drinks. Actually, on second thought — screw the drinks, just give me some friggin’ heroin.
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