A couple of weeks ago, my comrade Isis hipped me to this pants-pissing hilarious article in Wonkette about this absurdly overwrought portrait by David Bugnon, glorifying recently-deceased rightist “journalist” Andrew Breitbart as a Nordic knight. Posters and postcards of this hysterical tribute were available for purchase at Patriot Depot, your one-stop shop for all your right-wing drama-queen kitsch needs, for the bargain price of $3999.95. (Such a deal! I’ll take two!)
Now, those of you who know me and my work know that there was no way in hell I could ever resist parodying this great heaping sloppy slab of fanboy bilge.
UPDATE: Confirming my suspicions — along with those of Photoshop artists and computer gamers everywhere — it’s been revealed in a subsequent Wonkette report that the aforementioned glorifying painting was, in fact, a third-rate Photoshop mashup composed of an “official” portrait of Little Andrew, the knight from the computer game Assassin’s Creed, and a stock photo of a glowing, leaden sky. This, of course, pushed the whole story from the absurd over the edge into the gloriously batshit.
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Yesterday morning at Lafayette Square across from the White House, David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, locked himself into a cage in a civil disobedience protest against US policies on the cultivation of industrial-grade hemp for use in food and fibers.
Bronner notes that the US is the biggest market on Earth for industrial hemp products, and yet US farmers are cut out of the market; as a result, his company is forced to buy hemp oil from Canadian outfits to the tune of $100,000 per year. Bronner also pointed out the hypocrisy of the Obama government in that as an Illinois state senator, Obama voted twice in support of industrial hemp cultivation, but as El Presidente, he has actively interfered in the rights of states to legalize the growing of industrial hemp, including his refusal to to meet with a delegation from North Dakota, whose government — from the Governor on down — has signaled its wishes to allow its farmers to cultivate industrial hemp.
From about 8am until the DC Fire Department arrived to cut the locks and bolts holding the cage closed, Bronner harvested some of the half-dozen or so industrial-grade hemp plants he had on hand — at .06% THC, smoking it would give you nothing but a headache — sifted the seeds, and used them to demonstrate a hand-cranked seed-oil press.
(Note: Owing to currently-insoluble issues with Vimeo’s new uploading system, I’m forced to revert back to YouTube for the foreseeable future… and yeah, it kinda sucks. Apologies.)
The Abyss
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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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" »
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