the media

So now we have our president-elect. Yeah!  SO happy that he is not McCain.  I just wish he were Dennis Kucinich.

And naturally, today, less than 24 hours after the results of the election are announced, CNN’s Campbell Brown gets on my teevee and solemnly swears that she will remember Obama’s campaign promises. She reads from her list of bullet points in the background (“Tax breaks. Health insurance. Energy reform. Etc.”) and states she and CNN follow him closely and make sure he keeps his word. Because they are doing their job of “keeping them honest.”

So let’s get this straight: after 8 years of the media sitting around idly picking their noses until their heads caved in, while Bush and his gang of thugs trashed the law of the land, broke international treaties, and passed dozens of secret laws without a peep of protest from them, they take one look at the young black president-elect who got his start as a Constitutional lawyer and decide NOW is the time to get all watchdog on our behalf. What breath-taking hypocrisy.

Update May, ’09

Now that Obama has been in office for 4 months, I think that someone (i.e., us) had better watch carefully.  He seems to be continuing with some of the more awful of the Bush policies and adamantly refusing to look into the lawlessness of that administration. This does not bode well for the future.  I suspect that the ongoing Cheney/Obama “dialogues” regarding torture, Guantanamo, and the legalities of same are actually good cop/bad cop routines designed to lull the public.  Cheney looks “wrong” and criminal, which makes Obama look “good” and reasonable – but if Obama continues the same policies of state secrets, military commissions, looting the treasury to enrich the wealthy, preemptive strikes on Middle Eastern countries (do not kid yourself: “Af-Pak”, or the “Long War”,  is about a natural-gas pipeline and oil, not terrorism or American freedoms), if Obama continues these policies and actions unquestioned by the public just because they see him as the “good guy”, we have not changed anything at all.  In fact, it may be the more dangerous to our liberties and freedoms as it comes in the guise of “doing what is reasonable” and is being promoted by such a “nice guy”.

I don’t think, however, that Campbell Brown (or most of the media) is cluing in on what the problem is, though.  I watched her once or twice and then discontinued  as I found her to be anti-Obama for the sake of it, rather than to take a hard look at actual policy.  I, quite frankly, don’t give a rat’s ass if it’s Bush or Obama, a Democrat or a Republican: bad policy is bad policy and lawlessness is just that.

 

Jeebus, help us.

Where is this country going? It’s bad enough that McCain picked that twit Palin and the GOP allowed her nomination to go through.  And that his health insurance plan is guaranteed to cost everyone more money and make the insurance companies raise their rates and lower the number of people they will cover, leaving only the wealthy with health insurance.  And that he wants to freeze government spending, which, when Hoover was in office, directly led to the Great Depression.  It wasn’t funny when he addressed a crowd as “my fellow prisoners”; one doesn’t need to know too much about psychology to recognize that there is some problem going on there – I mean, he was released from POW camp 40 years ago, so where did that artifact come from?  But now we have Joe the Plumber.  Joe, whose name is not Joe and who isn’t a licensed plumber. Joe, who is too dumb to figure out that even if he did buy his boss’ plumbing business (which he never intended to) and even if the business did net 250 thou a year (which it doesn’t), he would get taxed at about the same rate under either candidate.  And if he simply kept his current job (which he intends to do), he’d receive a huge tax break under Obama’s plan and not have to pay for his own health insurance. Joe, who owes back taxes and has been charged with domestic violence, that Joe.  Joe, who now has a publicist and thinks he is going to write a book and make a country music recording (and I am leaving for Hollywood myself because it is high time for me to be discovered), that Joe. I get why Palin repeats Joe’s pithy words all the time (“Joe says Obama’s plan sounds like socialism to him!”) – she’s an idiot.  Okay, if all that weren’t sad enough, yesterday, McCain introduced Joe to a crowd as his “role model”.  He told another crowd he was going to “take Joe to Washington” with him.  What the hell? This is what we’ve come down to?  People in other countries must think we have collectively gone insane.  Now “Joe the Plumber” is qualified to go to Washington and be the role model for a man who has served in the Senate for almost 3 decades?  Joe told a McCain supporter that he thought Obama did not support Israel.  (Now, I personally don’t find support for Israel too compelling, given their human rights record against the Palestinians, but that’s me.  Obama seems to blindly support Israel as much as the next guy in the Senate.)  When asked why he would say that, Joe replied that “well, people can just look at Obama’s record for themselves” – because, of course, Joe has no clue why he said that at all.  It was just a thing to throw out there. Like “socialism”. Fool.
But my point is, this is too stupid to even take any more.  We have entered the theater of the grotesque.
Did you know we invaded Syria’s territory and killed some people the other day?  And we have since invaded their air space repeatedly, leaving them to complain to the UN?  Done the same in Pakistan.  Bush is deregulating everything he can before he leaves office, although one wonders how he can do that with Congress out of session; not only has no-one quite explained that, I haven’t even seen it addressed. Did you know that for the first time, a brigade of our armed forces has been taken from duty in the field and stationed in the US for the sole and stated purpose of “handling civil unrest and crowd control”?
And we have Joe the Plumber giving his pearls of wisdom to one of our presidential candidates. Does this kinda worry anyone else?

 

there’s something in the water. really.

Okay. I can’t take it any more. Truly, the water in the U.S. has been spiked with stupid pills and all the media and pundits and Congress and we, the people, are drinking it.

Witness the Palin phenomenon: She is an idiot. She has no thoughts whatsoever on any subject, save the idea that she wants to be in a position of power. She cannot speak in coherent sentences, although one would assume that studying journalism for 6 years would lead to a basic understanding of sentence structure and grammar.

Her beliefs are fairly astounding. She belongs to a church (one associated with Joel’s Army) that preaches that Armageddon is nigh, and will be preceded by a war with Russia. Now, belief in the End Days is not unusual in and of itself; what is odd is the contention that we humans can “force” the Second Coming through our own actions. Joel’s Army and its affiliated churches believe that if we start a war (preferably with Russia, although some suggest China will do in a pinch), this will usher in the end-times and God will then begin Armageddon with the “saved” being rescued from the worst of the torments while the “damned” are roasted for a thousand years, followed by the damned being utterly destroyed and Christ’s return to a new peaceful earth. The exact stages and order of happenings is hotly disputed amongst the believers, but the main idea is not. The main idea is what I have a problem with. Oh, maybe the end times will come or are here. Maybe Jesus will return. Maybe even in my lifetime. But the very idea that humans could force God to do anything is bizarre. If one believes that God is a real god – that He’s all-powerful and supreme and all is going according to His plan – why would we flimsy humans then postulate that we can “force” him to take any action whatsoever? And if one believes the Biblical teaching that even Jesus knows not the time, then why assume that WE get to choose the time? What hubris! Not to mention the fact that all this war-talk is completely antithetical to the words of Jesus himself. He warned AGAINST wars and OF wars, but never recommended starting wars. Actually, I think he talked quite a bit about the positive and endearing (to God) aspects of meekness, mildness, restraint, and humility. But maybe that’s just some misprinting in my Bible. While I know Palin plans to offer Alaska as a refuge for the “saved” from the devastation of the lower 48 after her ushering in of the end times through a forced nuclear war with Russia, that is scant comfort. I am not happy with the idea of a vice president who thinks she has a spiritual mandate to push the little red button.

Palin also believes that we should have abstinence-only sex ed, overturn Roe vs Wade, and disallow the sale of contraceptives (as they are a form of abortion). She may have felt this way before she joined the Republican Party, although these happen to also be the official stances of the Republican platform. The Repub platform also calls for refusing to fund any organization that supports abortion in any way, even the United Nations and other international organizations. This means that if the UN does not specifically denounce abortion as an option in all countries, the Repubs would not fund its programs. They would likewise refuse funding to any group that does not support traditional marriage. Further, any physician or health-care provider should be free to deny birth control measures or referrals for abortions based on what his conscience dictates. Hungry little kids in Africa born with AIDS? You can stay hungry and without medicine until your country agrees to outlaw abortion and support only male/female marriages. No food for you! (No access to birth control also means perhaps more little brothers and sisters, maybe even some more born with AIDS, to feed, but we will, um, pray a lot for you, how’s that?) This is not a just Palin platform, as I said, it is in the 2008 Republican platform. The fact that she supports it is perhaps because of her particular religious beliefs; I find it highly unlikely she actually read all 60 some-odd pages of the Republican Party Platform for this year.

Ah, and let’s examine socialism for a moment, shall we? Apparently, Obama is a socialist. Ask any Palin supporter. Mind you, neither she nor they could define “socialism” if you gave them a week and a dictionary, but this doesn’t stop them from chanting the mantra ad nauseam at her rallies. Utilizing our progressive tax system to fund public programs and help the neediest in our society is marginally socialistic in its concept, but it is the way we have done it for a century. A good thing, too, since before we had progressive taxes, we allowed child labor, “madhouses” for the insane and/or homeless, and had no social programs such as WIC, S-CHIP, food stamps, social security, etc. Neither McCain nor Obama are socialists; they both use the tax system we’ve got, just in different ways. In a socialist country, the banks and businesses would be owned by the government, income limits would be strictly curtailed and all profits would be seized by the government for its redistribution. Name a socialist country. (Here’s a hint; France is not socialist. They have some socialistic programs, but are a republic. The old USSR was a socialistic country. See the difference?) Palin’s and McCain’s crowds are equally comfortable and happy repeating, zombie-like, ANY phrase fed to them. “Joe, Joe, Joe,” they yell when Palin mentions the not-named-Joe-who-is-not-a-plumber dude. Yesterday, she made a comment that McCain had recently talked to a supporter named Tito and….the crowd began roaring “Tito, Tito, Tito,” before she even finished her sentence. For all they knew, she was getting ready to say that Tito was actually an Obama plant, or an illegal immigrant or something, but such is the trust of these morons that they assume a pearl of wisdom or a Story of Great Merit to be Passed on to the Generations is about to be imparted to them. Oh, treasure the moment, so you can tell your grandkids that you saw The Palin in person.

A huge number of us, including Palin, seem to think we were founded as a “Christian” nation and as proof, offer the tidbits that our money has “In God We Trust” printed on it and our pledge has the words “under God” included in it. They mention that we have the “freedom of religion”, not the “freedom FROM religion” in our Constitution. They haven’t actually read the Constitution themselves, of course, but someone (the pastor at their church, I suspect) told them this was a good talking point. Amendment 1 of the Constitution stipulates that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion” and that is a fairly rigorous separation of church and state, as I read it. Palin wants to change the Constitution to recognize the US as a Christian nation. We’ve already had huge portions of our Constitution high-jacked in the last 8 years. Enough of that. I certainly don’t mind any public official being a Christian – I am one myself – but to pretend to espouse Christian beliefs to sell oneself is, well, un-Christian. A true Christian would not lie. In the eyes of God, a sin is a sin; all carry equally His wrath. So to say abortion is a sin, but then to lie, overtly and repeatedly, as Palin does, is to be the same sinner as the person who has an abortion. Mis-use of public funds is theft, and a sin. Wanting to war with every single country that doesn’t agree with us is certainly not the preaching of Christ, who said to turn the other cheek and love our enemies. I have never seen so much hate directed at the rest of humanity as I see from the fundamentalist “Christian” right.

I would have thought her ties to and applauding of the Alaska Independence Party would have made her ineligible for public office in any case. The Constitution stipulates that no-one running for a public office where he will be required to take an oath to uphold the Constitution may have been involved in insurrection or rebellion against same. Surely the AIP, as a party which exists with the sole aim of seceding from the United States, qualifies as rebellion against the Constitution. [Todd Palin, the “first dude”, was a registered member of the AIP for 7 years. Both the chairman and the vice-chairman of the AIP insist that Sarah was a member and only switched her registration to Republican in order to win the mayoral seat in Wasilla and “infiltrate” the political system under a more acceptable party banner. She has attended two of their conventions and has addressed them, with praise “for their work”, as recently as June of this year.] Maybe my Constitution has the same misprints as my Bible?

The media fools seem to think Palin will be the “new face” of the Republican party, that she will run in 2012, that she has “charisma”. I personally cannot believe she wasn’t immediately laughed off the public stage. There is a difference between the charisma of a John Kennedy (the president) and that of a Jim Jones (the religious nut who convinced hundreds of his followers to drink cyanide with him). The fact that Palin has some no-information voters gleefully breathing in her exhale does not make her charismatic – a charismatic leader is able to sway those who DON’T already believe in his point of view. That anyone in the US sees Palin as having a future in politics, or as the next leader of the GOP, is more a commentary on the pathetic state of intelligent discourse in this country and the complete lack of statesmanship we require from our politicians than it is a measure of Palin’s worth. If she is around for a long time, we are truly doomed as a nation. Not because of her positions on the issues, which are peculiar, backward, ignorant and stated in grammatically incorrect English, but because it proves that we have come to totally accept less than even mediocre in our leadership. Our nation is faltering badly, at home and abroad, and that we even entertain for a moment the notion of Palin or Joe the Plumber (some are asking him to run for Congress now) helping to run the country is a frightening indicator of how far we have fallen and just how little we expect from our leaders.

This election just has me grinding my teeth. All the stupids have come out of the closet and they get to vote. And some of them get to talk on TV. Like, in PUBLIC and all.
I suppose ignorance could be corrected with education, but stupid is forever.

 

gop convention

No-one reads this, so I can safely amuse myself with a snark. I read that Gov Palin’s future son-in-law is going to fly in for the rest of the Republican Convention. I say, “Why? And who cares? And why is he suddenly a ‘future son-in-law’ instead of the redneck jerk who got the daughter preggers?” But of course, to be honest, when they nominated McCain, I also said “why?”. Although he WAS a POW, did you know that? And when he picked Palin as running mate, I also said “why?”….well, that’s what I said after I stopped laughing. I mean, c’mon, it has to be a jest, right? A big fat finger to the American public. (Here’s how stupid I REALLY think you all are, I’ll name the most unqualified, most right-wing, ultraconservative cutie I can find and watch y’all vote for us.)

But at least now I know why the conservative base is so rabid about arming everyone in the United States. If you want abstinence-only sex-ed, no planned parenthood teaching, no state-funded birth control clinics or state-funded discussions of birth control methods between doctor and patient (because any form of birth control is in essence abortion), no insurance provided birth control either, no abortions, no funding for clinics or centers that provide any form of welfare to unwed mothers, no funding for welfare period, no civil rights for gays (which relationships, let’s be real, at least don’t result in unwed pregnancies), well, if all this is the agenda, you better have lots of guns around to make sure you can force the goobers to marry the girls they got pregnant.

Then all will be well in the land.

Did I mention that McCain was a POW? Because he was.

note: the above mentioned positions on education, birth-control, abortion and welfare are from the official Republican Party Platform, 2008.