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2013:
NASA
anticipates large solar flares, possibly as large as the 1859
flares that fried telegraph lines throughout the U.S. and Europe

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FEATURES CURRENTLY AT RCJ
Are You A Slave? A
Brief History of the Subject Suggests "Probably"
Moses, Wall Street,
Human Nature and Grover Norquist
Concepts of Resistance - The RCJ Provides a Road Map for the OWS
Movement
Lance Henriksen -
World's Greatest Actor in Reflective Mode
Conspiracy - A
Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the New World Order
Elections
2012
What Does
it Take to be President?
Rating the U.S. News
Readers
The Antidote
to Michelle Bachman
Ship
of Fools - Why Won't We Save Ourselves?
White House Solar Bomb
What Is Happening to
Us?
The Cloud - What
It Is
Background on Afghanistan
Economics 101
Global Economic Risks
Islamic Definition
Middle East
Second Amendment Remedies
Sam Broussard - Republicans
Treason
Why All the Zombies?
Gun
Rights
Leadership Chronicles

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.
Read Post -
Comment

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.
Read Post -
Comment
_______________
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).
Read Post -
Comment
____________
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.
Read Post -
Comment
____________

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.
Read Post -
Comment
___________

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.
Read Post -
Comment
___________

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).
Read Post -
Comment
___________
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.
Read Post -
Comment
___________
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.
Read Post - Comment
___________
|
GOOD VISITS: Sites |
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SAM BROUSSARD
-
FOR DISAPPOINTED AND/OR ANGRY
REPUBLICANS
I have been knowing Louisiana singer /
songwriter / musician / writer Sam Broussard off and on for something
like 30 years. He produced and played on my first studio recordings. He was also
my guitar mentor for a time, and I learned a huge amount from him. He shared
generously his experience with song construction and design. He is a guy I
admire, someone who has always impressed me with his brains, talent, and the
courage of his convictions. He isn't shy.
Sam and I are both "liberals," whatever that
means, but we took really different views of the 2008 presidential elections,
even while swimming up the same stream in more or less the same direction. He
likes Barack Obama a great deal more than I do, and also dislikes John McCain a
great deal more than I do. He really dislikes Sarah Palin, whom I enjoy
just because she stirs the pot. Even while finding her a bit of a "whack job," I
find things to admire about her, not the least of which was the pluck she showed
in being picked out of Alaska - which is about as remote and out of the
mainstream a place as you can imagine - and performing admirably in that unreal
situation, like a prom queen who somehow gets a leg up and takes a bold, full
stride into what I suspect will be her "brave" new world of national Republican
party politics.
Sam doesn't find much about McCain and Palin
to like, and in this piece he lays out, in great detail, his points of view. It
is a rant, but an entertaining one if you are a political junky like myself.
Go to
www.sambroussard.com
to learn more about Sam and read and listen to his works. He's an old grump, but
sort of an American treasure and I am always thrilled to have Sam represented at
www.rarwriter.com
.
- RAR
______________________________________________
Published May 26, 2010
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.
|
Editor's Note: The
following article by Sam Broussard first ran in the February 2009 Edition of
RARWRITER.com, shortly after the inauguration of President Barack Obama. |
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.
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©Rick
Alan Rice (RAR),
June, 2010
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