Barack promised change — and sure enough, things changed for the worse
-Joe Bageant
To Hell with the ‘left’! I am finished, done, disillusioned and over it, the divorce papers have been filed and are now finalized and I am not going back. As of this day, I will no longer allow myself to be affiliated or endorse the ‘left’ in any way, shape or form. So long folks, it was real and it was fun but in the end it was unfulfilling and dare I say, a waste of time and effort. Is this overly harsh? Perhaps it is but the break has to be made and it can no longer be put off. I assure you, this was no hasty decision but rather something that has been a slow and agonizing process, a steady drip…drip…drip.., like Chinese water torture and suddenly the mind goes, the spirit breaks and the ugly reality of the situation cannot be denied or disguised. So to all of my good friends on the left I wish you the very best but I am no longer one of you and maybe I never was, it was never dogma to me only a desire for some sort of social fairness and a fair shot but the American left being a shell of it’s former self with labor broken and the DLC corporatists having taken over the Democratic party it has been reduced to shills for the Democrats and squabbling identity groups each with an agenda that prevents any sort of unity necessary for a mass movement for real change. Sucks but that is just the way it has to be.
During an extended break from over four years of constant writing, activism, some radio and a lot of anger that was being absorbed that was due to health reasons I had some time to reflect and reassess matters and I realized that a lot of what made it necessary to step back was at the root cause of my problems. It was no near death experience or anything but after four and a half years of balls to the wall, take no prisoners warfare against the deranged elements of the right, the Bushreich and the liars, crooks and war freaks who have destroyed this country it was an opportunity to observe for a change. And when peering into that abyss I saw much of what I despised as not unique to the right-wing extremists, they had their doppelganger counterparts who were every bit as cynical, corrupted and morally rotten their own special ways. While I have been heading in this direction anyway, the mass panic over the false flag underwear bomber and the renewal of post 9/11 bloodlust and fear is what finally did it. The ‘left’ and the Obama administration had the opportunity to exorcise these demons from America, to punish the war criminals, bail out the common folks and to stop the mass looting but didn’t so liberalism has failed. Leo Strauss was right after all, liberalism is an enabler of totalitarianism in that it allows it to grow by an utter failure to do what is necessary to behead the snakes on the hydra or to cut the cancer out prior to it metastasizing.
A man whose work I greatly admire and who has the actual credentials to call out anyone that he damned well pleases, author Chris Hedges made me realize that my decision to leave the failure of liberalism was absolutely the right thing to do. His fairly recent piece that earned him much scorn from the courtiers of Obama and the Rahm Emanuel corporatists and their apologists on the left entitled Liberals Are Useless brings it all home and I excerpt from this work by a longtime beacon of morality in our blood soaked and bogeyman infested Fantasy Land:
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
And
What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”
And
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.
I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.
I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.
Brilliantly driven home by Mr. Hedges, I will now excerpt from the great Joe Bageant whose piece The Devil and Mr. Obama is a must read:
As you may know, Obama’s public approval ratings are taking a beating. Millions of his former cult members have awakened with a splitting hangover to find their pockets turned inside out and eviction notices on the doors of their 4,000 square foot subprime mortgaged cardboard fuck boxes. Many who voted for Obama out of disgust for the Bush regime are now listening to the Republicans again on their car radios as they drive around looking for a suitable place to hide their vehicles from the repo man. Don’t construe this as support for the GOP. It’s just the standard ping ponging of disappointment and disgust that comes after the honeymoon is over with any administration. Most Americans’ party affiliations are the same as they were when Bush was elected. After all, Obama did not get elected on a landslide by any means; he got 51% of the vote.
Right now his approval ratings are in the 40th percentile and would be headed for the basement of the league were it not for the residual effect of the Kool-Aid love fest a year ago. However, millions of American liberals remain faithful, and believe Obama will arise from the dead in the third year and ascend to glory. You will find them at Huffington Post.
This frustrating ping pong game in which the margin of first time, disenchanted and undecided voters are batted back and forth has become the whole of American elections. That makes both the Republican and Democratic parties very happy, since it keeps the game down to fighting the enemy they know, each other, as opposed to being forced to deal with the real issues, or worse yet, an independent or third party candidate who might have a solution or two.
Thus, the game is limited to two players between two corporate parties. One is the Republican Party, which believes we should hand over our lives and resources directly to the local Chamber of Commerce, so the chamber can deliver them to the big corporations. The other, the Democratic Party, believes we should hand our lives and resources to a Democratic administration — so it alone can deliver our asses to the big dogs who own the country. In the big picture it’s always about who gets to deliver the money to the Wall Street hyena pack.
Americans may be starting to get the big picture about politics, money and corporate power. But I doubt it. Given that most still believe the war on terrorism is real, and that terrorists always just happen to be found near gas and oil deposits, there is plenty of room left to blow more smoke up their asses. Especially considering how we are conditioned to go into blind fits of patriotism at the sight of the flag, an eagle, or the mention of “our heroes,” even if the heroes happen to be killing and maiming Muslim babies at the moment. Patriotism is a cataract that blinds us to all national discrepancies.
The entire long-running reality show that was the Obama deception and his administration’s cold and calculated Judas betrayal also has eroded any sort of identity that I had with the ‘left’. This especially goes for the apologists for the same damned things that they wanted to string up Bush by his balls for by cruise missile liberals makes me want to vomit. Really, those who defend Obama for the continuation of most of Bush’s policies, or “kept the machine set on kill” are not very different than the glazed eyed monsters who canonized Bush, the only substantive difference being that they haven’t embraced full blown torture….yet and it’s coming with the mass hysteria that is creeping through this lemming colony.
By choosing to focus on wedge culture war issues no matter how noble the cause may, be the ‘left’ has failed abysmally in only providing gasoline on the fire that is being ignited on the extreme right and this is going to be costly in impossible to overstate terms in the future as a new, ultra-virulent strain of cult of personality, anti-intellectual, Christian fascist vengeful malignancy percolates throughout this country. There is an ideologically driven cataclysm coming and it will have every bit the force of the Nazis, Stalinists or Khmer Rouge and the gutters will be filled with blood, the streets with violence and no guarantee of personal or family safety by the law or militarized police who will protect the wealthy and elites only while the shock troops hunt down liberals, gays and today’s Juden, the Muslims who have been so easily demonized by the Pentagon and the Zionists who seem to have reasserted an ugly but more subtle form of control with the newest blown out of proportion ‘terrorism’. The king of the Israeli fifth column in America, Senator Joseph Lieberman will soon be using his position as head of the Senate Heimat Security Committee to launch witch hunts and hold show trials which will rival those of Stalin and McCarthy and people like you and I will be accused of being ‘terrorist sympathaziers’, the propagand about white al Qaida has already been getting some mileage as the creeping cat feet of fascism march onwards. Just how important are social issues when the task of rolling back American fascism renders all else irrelevant?
Myself and others have warned about the triumphal premature celebrations in the defeat of the extreme right, electoral victories and half measures at silly centrist governance have allowed this vicious hydra to regenerate. The failure of the ‘left’ to generate the cohesiveness necessary in order to form a viable political mass movement and the embracement (no matter how tepid by some) of the corrupted Democratic party and the amateur that is Barack Obama has set up the dominoes perfectly for the perfect storm once the economic collapse finally does occur. The plethora of gay marriage iniatives in the early days of the insipid Obama administration smacked of a sort of arrogance among limousine liberals, as though the enemy had been vanquished and it was time to exact that revenge which would both terrible and satisfying in rolling back the dark ages iniatives or the Religious Right roundheads. But that focus provided cover for the rats that are the corporatists, banksters and lobbyists that rode into power tucked away inside Obama’s Trojan Horse and whose plunder and subsequent fall into public disfavor have driven Democrat and Obama’s poll ratings down faster than whaleshit sinking to the bottom of the sea and allowed the American fascists to regroup and now in the aftermath of the underwear bomber false flag, with the fear fresh anew the sheeple will tolerate ANY police state measures to protect their putrid little lives as they cower and submit.
I have a lot of friends on the left and I mean them no malice or insult in my breaking ranks, they are good people, probably better than I in that they are pure of heart and always seek to build a better society, to nurture and to foster love instead of hate. Sadly though, in the real world butterflies, zebras, moonbeams and fairy tales are just that, illusions when confronted with an enemy that recognizes no rules, decorum, compassion or fairness and when the time comes will happily leave liberals and progressives with only their eyes to cry with..if they are even that generous. You see, my friends never understood the nature of this war, and it is war and only those of staunch spirits, strong stomachs and the righteous tenacity to climb upon that wall and fight the bastards on their own terms are ultimately going to have a chance. As the ‘left’ is comprised today it can be dismissed, laughed at and generally ignored by the rotten bitches, bastards and corporations that run this system and that is exactly what Rahm Emanual, his sock puppet ‘boss’ and the rest of the establishment are doing, they are doing. Liberals and the ‘left’ have this view that ‘we are better than they are so we don’t have to stoop to their level’, but in the end they always lose.
As Nietzsche spoke of fighting monsters and warned of the abyss well it does look back but ultimately humanity is doomed to war, it is out nature and to deny that is the ultimate form of self denial. The best resistance against militarism, the police state and war is coming from the libertarian front, for example Justin Raimondo’s Antiwar.com, I also have long admired the Ron Paul movement for calls for ending the Federal Reserve although I have been more than a bit dismayed to see it so easily co-opted by the corporate teabaggers and the Dick Armey of Darkness, the Palinazis and the idiot buffoon racist Birthers and religious fanatic Birthers and so has one of the founders of the movement. There is however a good deal of misdirected but righteous anger out there that is too easily hijacked and misdirected into the fascist brigades that the ‘left’ has failed to take advantage of to bolster it’s power and rally around some sort of real cause rather than the agendas of identity groups seeking government action to redress a history of injustice.
I have always been an independent with views more compatible with the old left, the labor left and the intense focus on social issues in which the activists ignore basic economic fairness, antiwar, pro-civil liberties matters in order to waste energy tilting at windmills. Let’s face it, no matter how moral that the crusade for gay marriage may be (basically another civil rights fight to eliminate the sad fact that in 21st century America that there are still people who are treated as second class citizens and face institutionalized persecution) – it’s a loser with large demographic blocks that nothing short of a mass die out over a period of a few decades is going to resolve and while it sucks, it’s the truth, shit, millions of morons are ready to launch a civil war because the fucking President is black and until the numbers of these anachronisms are reduced America will always be defined by the hatred of the other, which of course will always be exploited for maximum political gain by fascists. The younger generations do not care about whether one is gay or straight or has a different skin color, they are far more tolerant and acceptable than their parents or grandparents but the reality is that as America is currently constituted this is a loser for the ‘left’ and energy would be better spent in fighting imperialism, economic royalism, a vast for profit prison gulag and a militarized police that is determined to keep it full.
Also, global warming (the carbon footprint is akin to a carbon jackboot stomping up and down on a human face while the speculators get richer than Midas), immigration ‘reform’ and the ugly sort of imperialist liberalism that supports more war, military spending and murder to promote pet causes such as women’s rights and other emotional based malarkey is just intolerable. The Empire is broke, women are oppressed by institutions within our own borders and the cycle of militarism will not be seriously challenged as long as there are cruise missile liberals determined to use force to be Team America global police. I saw an ugliness among too many liberals and progressives during the past summer’s Iranian uprising, the ‘Green Revolution’ not to be confused of course with ‘Green Shoots, or ‘Green Energy’ and the ‘left’s’ piling on the regime of the devil Ahmadinejad only served to reinforce the incessant neocon propaganda and Zionist right-wing warmongering that has the doomsday clock ticking towards World War III. In all liklihood, Israel will attack Iran at some point in the coming year, Obama’s infatuation with the phony war on terror will ensure that the U.S. is sucked in which will be catastrophic but now that the antiwar movement has been marginalized by the foulness that is the Democrat party, now that Cindy Sheehan has served her purpose and been unceremoniously dumped and now that the ‘left’ has once again failed to mobilize around any serious issue that has crossover appeal we are all helpless to stop it.
I will devote my energies to trying to assist whatever remains of the antiwar movement (which isn’t much after most of the larger groups were co-opted by the filthy corporatist Democrats and Raht Emanual), continue to support the abolishment (or at the least auditing) of the Federal Reserve, fight for a reigning in of excessive corporate power, rail against the abuses of civil liberties, the police state, torture and surveillance and the menace of globalization. In a sad land of ignorance and hostility that has institutionalized torture with about half the population being down with it just how long is it going to be until they actually start to torture the other half?
The ‘left’ is too fragmented and there are far too many internal squabbles to mount any sort of a counter-movement against this irrational, ignorant and mean army of darkness that is suckled at the teat of the imperialist warfare state and lives in a world of unreality fed by a lifetime of indoctrination to illusions and lies and I am getting off of that woebegone merry-go-round once and for all before it either kills me or drives me totally fucking batshit.
Revisiting the Tea Baggers: If there has been one group that I have been especially critical of it is the Republican co-opted Teabaggers, as the movement is currently infested with the dregs of American society, foul racists, neo-Nazis, Dick Armey of Darkness operatives, Palinazis, Beckers and religious fanatics my derision of them is justifiable. However, this fails to take into account the fact that there are millions of real pissed off Americans who are mobilizing and just lack the right guidance and knowledge. If you recall, the original tea parties were being held in the darkest years of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil reign of terror and were largely comprised of Ron Paul and 9/11 Truth Activists, this already in existence movement was then used by the establishment Republicans as an exo-skeleton into which they installed the insipid Glenn Beck as the face and promoted relentlessly on RNC propaganda television network FOX. From the intel that I receive there is actually a struggle for identity going on within this movement although you would never know it from the Democrat controlled propaganda organs. So there is some promise in a mass movement that liberals and the left are incapable of producing if the bigots, ignoramuses and operatives can be cast out as misfits, charlatans and shameless opportunists and this seems to be as good a place as any for an independent minded anarchist like me. Hey, Jesus hung with prostitutes, lepers and losers because they could actually be saved right?
While this movement is at least temporarily under the control of the vilest of swine that the oligarchy right-wing faction can dig up and who are firing up the dead enders, TV lobotomized zombies and easily fooled and made into useful idiot joiners it must be emphasized that the whole thing is still in play. There is a lot of righteous anger out there and it’s growing by the day and this whole thing could blow up like a MOAB on those who are seeking to exploit it. My very good friend Diane G, a hard core leftist journeyed into the snakepit at a teabagger rally in her homeground up in Michigan last year and found a bunch of pissed off people afraid and being manipulated by veterans and RNC style stooges. The vitriol was real but it was easily misdirected, largely because most of us are nothing more than ignorant sheep and manageable ants but were this sort of energy ever be redirected, say at Wall Street, the Pentagon, the insurance bloodsuckers, the corporations and the real rapists of America then watch the fuck out. The Republicans are playing with dynamite, for every misbegotten and fucked over by the system soul that worship the phony Glenn Beck as though he were some sort of modern day prophet instead of a real life Lonesome Rhodes, a career loser on the ultimate stage whose shelf life is only limited by his own propensity for self destruction there are others who realize that the man is an assclown and a fraud. I have to hand it to Alex Jones who denounces Beck on a regular basis as a tool who has only stolen his shtick and distilled it down for the masses of asses. This is a volitale mix and any foolish GOP huckster who doesn’t realize it is a fool on a megalomaniac level right up there with Karl Rove and the cartoonish house nigger Michael Steele.
One who seems to understand, at least on the level that an elitist swine who has long made a damned good living as a shit salesman for the privileged and connected can is columnist and media figure David Brooks of the phony librul New York Times. While not quite as successful as the pimp of globalization Thomas Friedman, Brooks is a reliable little lap doggie who can always be counted on to yap upon command. His latest piece, The Tea Party Teens is a fine example:
The Tea Party Teens
By DAVID BROOKS
The United States opens this decade in a sour mood. First, Americans are anxious about the future. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. Only 27 percent feel confident that their children’s generation will be better off than they are.
Second, Americans have lost faith in their institutions. During the great moments of social reform, at least 60 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing most of the time. Now, only a quarter have that kind of trust.
The country is evenly divided about President Obama, but state governments are in disrepute and confidence in Congress is at withering lows. As Frank Newport of the Gallup organization noted in his year-end wrap-up, “Americans have less faith in their elected representatives than ever before.”
Third, the new administration has not galvanized a popular majority. In almost every sphere of public opinion, Americans are moving away from the administration, not toward it. The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13.
The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.
The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.
The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.
A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.
The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.
The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.
The movement is especially popular among independents. The Rasmussen organization asked independent voters whom they would support in a generic election between a Democrat, a Republican and a tea party candidate. The tea party candidate won, with 33 percent of independents. Undecided came in second with 30 percent. The Democrats came in third with 25 percent and the Republicans fourth with 12 percent.
Over the course of this year, the tea party movement will probably be transformed. Right now, it is an amateurish movement with mediocre leadership. But several bright and polished politicians, like Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, are unofficially competing to become its de facto leader. If they succeed, their movement is likely to outgrow its crude beginnings and become a major force in American politics. After all, it represents arguments that are deeply rooted in American history.
The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.
Moreover, the tea party movement has passion. Think back on the recent decades of American history — the way the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s. American history is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life.
In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party. It could be the ruin of the party, pulling it in an angry direction that suburban voters will not tolerate. But don’t underestimate the deep reservoirs of public disgust. If there is a double-dip recession, a long period of stagnation, a fiscal crisis, a terrorist attack or some other major scandal or event, the country could demand total change, creating a vacuum that only the tea party movement and its inheritors would be in a position to fill.
Personally, I’m not a fan of this movement. But I can certainly see its potential to shape the coming decade.
Of course Brooks is playing the game, he is another Mockingbird, his suggestion of Jeb Bush protégé Marco Rubio as a potential leader of this movement is just more of the same mental masturbation that we are accustomed to and of course what is more important to the establishment than in keeping Nazi collaborators like the Bush Family and their operatives in power? It is no surprise that these stealthy elitist swine want that little greaseball Rubio, just like they trotted out Glenn Beck to co-opt the Ron Paul movement (and to a large degree crib from the Alex Jones show only run through a food processor for a better consistency of lemming food. This is the game people, Brooks like his cohorts over at the Washington Post like Howie Kurtz (hatchet job on Gary Webb) and Dana Milbank (Skull and Bones) ALWAYS side with the oligarchy all the while denying that such a thing even exists and poo poohing us commoners as so much rabble and tin foil hatters. ENOUGH ALREADY, the JIG IS UP.
The comments are great, Brooks is a country clubbing elitist swine masquerading as a journalist and I have long been on his case, check some of these out.
David, thank you for being honest in the last paragraph and admitting that you are not fond of what you call the tea party movement. Republican like you and Democrats like Obama are the same to most of us. You really think that your superior credentials grants you social wisdom and intelligfence. It doesn’t.
And
I, too, feel betrayed by “elite” institutions, policy makers and businesspeople! And I am a relatively well-educated individual.
Globalization has not been a force for good, has not raised poor foreigners, has not benefited average US people, has not benefited any western nations’ national security. Deregulation? Likewise.
Why? Well, I guess, you’d have to ask the “crème de la crème” who have used average limitations and foreign poverty to aggrandize themselves and, thus, lined their own pockets with money at the expense of the broader world. It is an exceedingly short-sighted goal; n’est-ce pas? You cannot fool even them all of the time.
Certainly, globalization and deregulation might have worked. But, really, it seems that something must be done before it is too late. If we do not act to protect our way of life, to prop up the western middle-class and assure our standing, we will cede our place to peoples in whom we cannot trust and invite violent conflict at home and abroad.
And
Who do you think the tea party voters are, Mr. Brooks? I am middle aged, post-graduate degreed and financially independent. I support full gay rights, including gay marriage. I believe in decriminalizing drugs, I believe in being a good steward to the environment, and to the less fortunate in my own community. But, I will probably vote with the tea partiers. I might even vote for one of their national candiates
You want to know why? The Bail-outs.
I will never support a political candidate who voted for or supported the bail-outs, and I will support any movement that is against the politicians who supported the bail-outs. I will donate money to candidate, even in other states, who loudly opposed the bail-outs.
I don’t consider myself a tea partier. I am not a joiner and I’ve never marched or demonstrated. But the bail-outs meant that capitalism and free market rules no longer applied in america. It meant that those with political connections were saved and allowed to grow and prosper, while those who had played by the rules suffered and paid.
This anger at the bail-outs will never go away for people like me. Obama supported the bail-outs. Most of the Democrats supported the bail-outs. Some of the Republicans supported the bail-outs. The real statesman; The politicans who cared enough to do right ; they loudly and vigourously opposed the bail-outs.
If the tea party people continue to be the people who oppose the bail-out people; then, the enemies of my enemies, are my new best friends.
AND
I may add this self-serving oligarchy is picking winners (ask Blankfein of GS, and other bankers), seizing wealth by having their buddies in the right place (Bernanke, Paulson, Summers, etc), while unemployment keeps rocketing up and middle class gets decimated.
The other day I read somewhere that the bailouts under both Obama and Bush most likely transferred more wealth to the rich than the tax cuts under Bush. Just think about that!
Both parties are identical; only the names/ faces change. The nation is slowing waking up to it, which is reflected in the growing popularity of the tea party followers.
I just pray that this campaign don’t get hijacked by some Republican nutcase politician, because this is really about looking for a third voice, an independent voice.
AND
The tea party folks and the political independents have at least one very significant thing in common: members of neither group want to be identified with either of the “established” parties. The rise of a third party is a possibility.
AND
Disappointment with President Obama is clear and justified. There is a defacto war in Pakistan in addition to the fighting in Afghanistan and Irag. Health care reform looks to be a boon to the large drug and insurance companies. The opportunity for serious financinal reform seems to have been lost. The dire need for creating jobs is ignored. Why wouldn’t any movement the promises something different be growing in popularity?
And one VERY IMPORTANT COMMENT which illustrates the problem with this movement, it has been hijacked by elitist payroll swine and foul GOP operatives. Perhaps some principled folks who are disillusioned by the ongoing big con can assist in weeding these swine out.
As long as the Tea Party folks allow Glen Beck and Sean Hannity to be their chief spokesmen, they will remain an interesting but unimportant political footnote.
And those are just a sampling from the first 20 or so of the 400 + comments that were left on the so-called liberal, former Judith Miller employing NYT site. Now as anyone with any common sense understands, David Brooks is a fraud, a boot licking pecksniffian puke, a mangy lapdog and an on-call shill for the oligarchy for those bullshit Sunday morning bloviation circuit shows when the establishment trots out the ‘experts’ along with veteran whores like John McCain and his butt buddies Joseph Lieberman and Lindsay Graham to piss down the backs of clueless regular Americans and swear to got that it’s raining. The handful of Sunday morning inside baseball swill drive the weekly media spin on any given issue, ensuring that the now standard left vs. right paradigm stays in place despite the fact that there is NEVER any substantive change in policy nor shift away from the elitist based society that we exist in. It’s all a dog and pony show, a big game of three card monte played on Main Street in a Potemkin Village renamed The Homeland and David Brooks is one of the chief shit shovellers who provide cover for the oligarchy. A man named Carroll Quigley once wrote in his massive historical book Tragedy and Hope that:
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.”
And there may have at the time been some truth in that statement but I doubt that Quigley ever envisioned the thorough rottenness of the political system, especially here in the United States. The necessity to maintain stability in any civilized form of society is not something that can be argued, we have seen through history what happens absent order when demagogues and lunatics can bring violence and suffering to millions based on lingering ethnic grudges and delusions of grandeur. Quigley’s statement relies on the idea that there is some sort of dignity present within the system not the widespread corruption that has us all at the mercy of a predatory state that serves those who have worked with relentless precision for decades to gain a stranglehold on political power through bribery, blackmail, intimidation and even assassinations. Our current two-party system is in the process of branding and yoking us all for delivery into bondage to the bloodsuckers and fiends that have hijacked the republic and turned it into a rancid spoils system with order kept by a burgeoning police state and a veritable gulag system of for profit prisons for all who dare to complain about it.
The one unmistakable aspect of Brooks’ column is FEAR because there IS something in the air and the key is what will eventually come of the tea party movement once the scum has been purged. I have been extremely critical of these people in the past, mockingly critical but I am guilty of generalizations and falling for the media propaganda of finding the most extremist elements and then hyping them as being indicative of all who are involved. Remember the Nixon era and the Vietnam era, it was always easy for the media to find the most radical leftists, the real bomb throwers, dirty hippies and acid juiced freaks and to use them as symbols of the antiwar movement. This of course was a lie, there was widespread opposition to Vietnam throughout the nation and as Nixon found out it extended to none other than Walter Cronkite whose proclamation that the war was “unwinnable” was devastating to the war freaks who nonetheless continued to feed the youth of America into an immoral charnel house to kill and be killed for the benefit of the Military Industrial Complex, the rising shadow government of the rogue CIA and their profiteering off of the illegal narcotics trade in the Golden Triangle and the political expedience of the predecessors to the swine and vermin who are this very day deeply entrenched as enemies of the American people in Washington.
I have recently gotten a chance to correspond with some people who I had not long ago (before the great Obama betrayal and the removal of the scales from my eyes) considered to be foes, nemeses and enemies including a man who I vilified as a “right wing Nazi”. There is nothing like a dagger in the back to assist with a change in perception. While there will always be areas of disagreement ideologically there are common grievances that outweigh all else. Principled conservatives are against big government and with the rise of the Homeland Security state that is just getting warmed up it is easy to understand why. As Barry Goldwater once put it “… a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have” and really, considering the direction that this monstrously corrupt system is growing exponentially and the Caesars that need meat for their ongoing wars just how long do you think it is going to be until confiscations, imprisonment and executions (preceeded by that good ole Jack Bauer style tough love of course) will be reality? The belief that America should mind our own business (wrongly slurred by propraganda pimps as isolationism and equated with the rise of Hitler..yawn) and stay the hell out of the rest of the world is another common cause as is the meddling of the government in the economy (there is a difference here in that I would not oppose government leveling the playing field rather than rewarding the wealthy with political connections) which in the past year has only put Wall Street high rollers back in the gambling business only with house money. I believe that the ‘left’ is making a huge mistake in not reaching out, I mean if Jane Hamsher of Firedog Lake and Grover Norquist (for Christ’s sake) can team up to call for that slimy little prick Rahm Emanuel’s resignation and Alan Grayson and Ron Paul can join forces to demand an audit of the Federal Reserve why not put aside the differences and work together towards fighting something important to all of us?
I recently remarked that Obama is nothing more than Lyndon Baines Johnson without the social programs, I now believe that was wrong, he is more like a modern day incarnation of Woodrow Wilson, warmonger and domestic tyrant whose iron fisted opposition to dissenters destroyed many a life and unjustly imprisoned those who dared to challenge the divine right of American imperialism to murder in the name of God, mother, country and theapple pie authoritarianism that has again reared it’s ugly head in the past decade, not that it ever left.
But I digress, back to my break with the ‘left’….
I have had it with the ‘left’ or what passes for it today, all of the fighting, the activism, the hard work and the heartache and for what? So that the DemocRAT party can sell us all out with a ridiculous farce of a health care reform bill that does nothing but deliver all of our asses into bondage to the insurance industry parasites? So that not only can the war in Afghanistan be escalated at the expense of any domestic resuscitation of the dying economy but additional conflicts in Pakistan, Iran and now Yemen can be opened? So that the Obama administration behind arch-criminal Rahm Emanuel can sip from the gold-plated money spigots and bestow government largesse on their crooked buddies in the financial services industry and on Wall Street? So that the ultimate indignity of seeing the Pope of Hope, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who used his acceptance speech as a forum for justifying more imperialism, wars of aggression and murder now resort to the same phony war on terror rhetoric of the Bushreich in sowing the seeds of fear in this diseased country of cowards? Congratulations liberals, while sitting at the card table continuing to double down on a pair of threes in the hope that your pathetic grasp on political power can be preserved while you flush every principle down the toilet while leering TSA goons are salivating over the prospect of masturbating themselves into unconsciousness at the naked little boys and girls that they will be ogling on those fancy new airport full body scanners. Pat yourselves on the backs, your cultural crusades are garbage, just as much rot as your counterparts on the extremist right and you too have never met a war that you couldn’t justify when it served YOUR interests and all of that unchecked power that is massed in the surveillance state, well it’s just not so important to fight it when your guy’s ass is ensconced upon the throne at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
What is really the difference between Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, blow job loving pothead Bill Maher, Rachel Mad Sow [sic] or poor old Mike Malloy, slowly and painfully going mad, eaten alive by his anger at not being able to stop any of this, a veteran of the psychic wars who as the BOC song goes has used up all his weapons and is helpless and bereaved – and my two cents worth of free advice to him is to just get the fuck out of this all, raise your daughter, enjoy your family and fuck the left, it’s just not worth it. Now the degeneration of the media darlings of the ‘left’ into nothing more than shills for the new order is as pathetic as it is predictable, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga once allegedly wrote a book called ‘Crashing the Gates’, but that is just too much work for once full of piss and vinegar liberals and progressives, now that they have won a few elections it is far easier to just have the castle master install a doggie door. Maddow, a damned good reporter whose nightly gig at MSNBC is as telling for a former Air America queen as the exiles of Randi Rhodes and Malloy into the wilderness is now dependent upon her ability to use her nightly platform to denounce intolerant bigots and buffoons and rail against phantoms like the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. Now I am very aware of the JBS history and dare I say that the current incarnation isn’t the great satan that it is portrayed as by some on the left. Hell, I am actually a lesser member (I don’t pay for the full ride) because I see more action from the JBS against the incursions of the fascist police state than I do from MoveOn and many of the other co-opted organs of the Democrat party. They came out against Bush’s abuses of the constitution and they do the same against O-Bushma and when I send out letters to my ‘representatives’ through their website I get responses, unlike from anything on the left which is simply laughed at by those in office, so toothless, neutered and ineffective have they become. There are some damned fine people in the John Birch Society despite some of the misguided crusades of the past and might I remind the liberals that the Democratic party’s history is not simon pure with racism, wars, Woodrow Wilson’s jihad against dissent and FDR’s internment of loyal Americans of Japanese descent in camps.
Again I digress….
While I have never been accused of being politically correct by anybody I fully support total equal rights for gays including the right to marry, my only problem is the focus on this rather than in a full effort to defeat fascism. I have many gay friends and as a former military member I knew closeted gays during my time of service and would rely on them any damned time over some dipshit Republican chickenhawk but the Democrat establishment is cynical, transparent and exploitative in their treatment of gays. It is pitiful and patronizing and the way that the powers that be on the ‘left’ use gays (they shit all over them and roll out set for life Rachel as some sort of nightly balm as though it suffices for the lashes on their backs) is exactly how the Republican faction of the money/war party jerks the chain of the Jesus freaks for their support for a vicous agenda that would crucify the long-haired troublemaker in a New York second if he were to return to earth tomorrow. That much was apparent when Obama rolled out the false prophet Rick Warren for the inauguration, too bad that Strom Thurmond wasn’t still alive or he could have made an official appearance as well. It’s a big tent with the DemocRATs, and it’s filled with clowns, geeks and hucksters, I mean fucking fat Eddie Schultz for Senate? Can it get any more surreal – and the ‘left’ has the audacity to complain about Fred Thompson, Curt Schilling or Arnold ‘son of a Nazi’ Schwarzenegger?
In fact the entire bogus system is a veritable self-licking ice cream cone (I borrowed that term from somewhere but I can’t remember) whenever the inflammatory distraction that is abortion is thrown into the ring and both sides immediately revert to their primal selves like the fucking caveman in Altered States and forget everything but a craving for fresh bloody meat. A pox of terminal, knee-jerk idiocy in America is the coin of the realm, my time spent in blogmark has taught me that one very important lesson if nothing else.
The left is at this moment in history busy disintegrating into a pool of illogical, conflicted toxic goo, the stench of terminal denial is as thick as the skulls of those who still deceive themselves that Barack Obama, the chess-master is just setting it all up to fall exactly right, like Michael Jordan in his prime tearing down the Piston defense with a cold and methodical precision, going through them to borrow from General George S. Patton “like shit through a tin horn”, it isn’t going to happen chumps. You voted for change and all that you got was a slicker version of William Jefferson Clinton who presided over NAFTA and the other anti-American trade deals like some peckerwood kahuna in years of yore swindling Injuns out of vast amounts of land for beads and baubles made out of paste. Slick Willie, I might add was a key in the corporate media consolidation that has allowed for the most kick ass propaganda machine since Goebbels and along with his Wall Street buddies sowed the seeds for the economic catastrophe that Obama and his financial ‘dream team’ now shoveling money into at the expense of the peasants in order to fill their campaign coffers for 2012.
Bill Clinton never should have been impeached for that vendetta by fascist fanatics like Richard Mellon Scaife and Kenneth Starr and their ilk over a fucking blowjob, the list of actual impeachable crimes started with giving Poppy Bush and his Iran-Contra cohorts a get out of jail free card. That little failure to enforce the laws came back to haunt us all for the American Reichstag Fire – 9/11 and the PNAC and every bastard mutation that evolved out of the afterbirth of Iran-Contra resurfaced to ensure that their dirty little coup d’etat and the eternal wars and subjugation has been out screaming TERRORISM ever since and now Americans must submit to having failed police officers who are just competent enough to latch on with TSA drool over their naked bodies and have the full power of the state to haul whoever the fuck that they want to into a private ‘screening’ room.
So now in early 2010, the second decade of the New American Century we are once again being cowed into a state of perpetual fear by a tyrannical government long ago taken over by blood barters and moneychangers and forced to give up even more of our dwindling liberty for temporary ‘security’. What in the fuck happened to this country? In the space of a decade it has become the largest colony of cowards, sheep and lemmings in the history of the planet.
Loose the Rats: I remember once when I was in my early twenties, a certain restaurant that I had worked for had become so intolerable that there was a parting of the ways (mutual of course) regarding employment. Well, said restaurant naturally had a pretty high turnover rate so myself and a fellow former wage slave conspired one night over many a beer (and I must admit a bit of weed) to seek revenge against the owners. We would go in on a stealth mission and create a disturbance that would be guaran-fucking-teed to cause maximum chaos. So we went to a local pet shop and purchased two live rats which we smuggled in during peak hours in our backpacks and while we swilled a few beers in a booth in the back, ate chicken wings and were generally looked at as scum by our former co-worker wait staff we had a hard time not pissing our pants. Well, when we were finished, we paid our bills and let the rats out of the backpacks and just left the fucking place….we never knew what happened and that was the beauty of it. Maybe the rats caused a total scene and a mass evacuation and maybe business was forever wrecked for those satanic pricks who owned the goddamned place – somehow I doubt it because the damned place stayed in business. Perhaps though, the owners found the rats first before they ran off the paying customers and caused a pox of word of mouth advertising that was up there with the Bubonic Plague and changed their ways, I don’t know and shit, I really don’t know exactly were I am going with this little thread so I digress…..
Maybe the moral of the pet shop rats is that it was a shock that could have actually have been naïve enough to think that such a futile and stupid act would have changed hearts and minds but that was back in the 80’s when things were different and there was still some semblance of actual fucking sanity in this rotten shell of a country, back when it was STILL POSSIBLE to avoid the coming forced anal probes by militarized Darth Vader police goons in local shopping malls. Nothing that I was ever going to do on the left, much like loosing the rats on those miserable, skinflint, authoritarian pricks who ran that shithole of an eatery was going to do a damned thing to change anything or any body, it was just plaintive wails from planet shit directed at the choir…amen.
So to those on the ‘left’ who I have joined in battle with over the years only to realize that it is ultimately a futile struggle I say good luck and may your efforts bring fruit and some degree of satisfaction so long as they do not conflict with mine. I am going it alone from this point onward, bound by no loyalty to ideology, faction or any group, that only belongs to those who are allies the bigger fight at hand now. I would implore you who are able to transcend your past prejudices, ideals and indoctrinations to become a bit less dogmatic and much more pragmatic in reaching out to those who not only can be saved but who also are trying to break free from their own conditioning.
The future depends on it.
Just my two cents
EE
The Great American Lemming Farm 