No, really, it is, at least parts of it.

I was on my way downstairs for a sandwich one late morning last week or so, and I passed by the bedroom, where the DW is catching up on some impresario chores on her laptop while the satellite box is nailed down to MSNBC. As aiways, I stop for a minute or two just to check out what they’re emitting, and it’s some woman who looked as if she were made entirely of plastic babbling an item about Hill leadership’s reaction to the discovery that the US Olympic Team’s uniforms had been made in China. Faster than you could say “eight percent unemployment”, Harry Reid and John Boehner had crapped their drawers loudly while blurting out carefully crafted Tourette’s episodes on the subject of the export of US jobs to China. After offering up this news, the anchorbabe said — for real, I shit you not — “At last, something that Democrats and Republicans can agree on.”

“…along with war, torture, censorship, warrantless surveillance, assassinations, detention without trial…” the anchorbabe neglected to add.

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Continue reading "Based On A True Story" »

I first heard the lame Liberal rationale for voting against their values and interests — “holding my nose” — during the infamous “election” of 2000. In the decade or so since then, my reaction to that gutless cop-out has gone from outrage to annoyance to mild amusement to hysterics.

In every instance, my question — still awaiting an answer — has always been the same: how much longer are you going to sit still for the Democratic Party’s abuse? What are you going to do when the stench gets so bad that holding your nose doesn’t work?

The brain-dead philosophy of Liberal America — “holding your nose” and voting for “the lesser evil” — has yielded absolute zero in terms of any benefits. In fact, Liberals’ continued insistence on voting against their interests pretty much fits the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

So, you can imagine my shock and chagrin when I saw this recent article by Sam Smith — normally a bastion of sanity and clear, independent thought — advocating an “Obama One Night Stand” Movement, published at his Progressive Review. I didn’t know whether to laugh until I pissed myself, or to go lay down on a railroad track.

If you insist on reading Sam’s statement of capitulation to lesser-evilism, I strongly urge you to remove any cups of coffee or sleeping cats from the vicinity of your keyboard — and if you’ve just taken a sip of coffee, swallow it immediately. You’ve been warned.

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Continue reading "Hold Your Nose!" »

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.

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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.

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…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" »