the Gun-Toting Liberal

The GTL Goes Around and Around With a Better Class of Right-Wing Folks. Cleaning Gingrich's Floors.

2011-12-02T21:30:00.014-05:00

Responding to an Internet link posted by a right-leaning acquaintance. A new iteration of the ever-present, angry story of the uber-fertile minority mother, pumping fifteen brown welfare babies chock-a-block into the loving bosom of the taxpayer's bank account, the images of which I won't bother to show you... this comes from a very lively exchange with a bunch of well-educated folks on several sides of important issues, who invited me to join them. They are smart and kind, and debate fairly without the kind of sick cruelty the R. Brothers used to engage yours truly in before we immolated in a fricazee of death threats (by them) and de-friending...

A note on the text: My words from the facebook stream are in bold type. Responses are italicized. You will also meet CARSON, BILL and TREY, some new worthy and kind friends.

She could squeeze out another newborn entitlement welfare nightmare baby every 9.1 months for the rest of her fertile days and not do as much damage to our society as one CEO can do in one minute through one unscrupulous underhanded one-minute deal over the phone.

It wasn't poor mamas, or teachers' unions for that matter, that brought the world's greatest economy to the edge of collapse.

It's fun to puff about personal responsibility - and what sane worker is NOT for personal responsibility, BTW?! - get red in the face, et cetera, but the real theft, the REAL sacrilege to the social contract, is not lazy poor people fucking. It's rich corporations fucking US.

Many comments down, the Right-leaners were still carping about personal responsibility, conveniently ignoring the moral failings of people with ivy-league cred and expensive lawyers... so this from earlier this evening:

Hey baby, I'm a social worker. NONE of you know these people the way I do and I'll put my juice against yours on this any fucking day of the WEEK! I have EARNED the right to talk about welfare cheats and baby-making illiterates and so forth from first hand knowledge. I taught junior high and high school in Brooklyn, and went to those same schools too. I work in a DMH (Department of Mental Health) mental health center. I don't need anecdotes on the internet, I have actual patients to conjure up visually. Saw some today, in fact, and lots more next week too, and every week after that.

I'm here to tell you that the vast, vast majority of people on any form of government entitlement payments are TRULY miserable and poor, not faking it when they are judged unfit to be hired mostly through no fault of their own, and sick to the point of almost utter uselessness to any "free market."

Our society needs to be just and equitable, and use the carrot as well as the stick to eradicate the problems of intractable degradation and self-destruction.

There is no organism in nature that exists in a social community wherein the weak exploit the strong; not in nature and not in society. Ever. The strong always prey on the weak. The American experiment was supposed to end that, not perpetuate it under the hoary mantle of "freedom." To suggest otherwise is to dwell in some parallel universe.

Only a eugenicist would say, "sterilize 'em. Fuck 'em. They're a blight on society and should be eradicated, and to throw a nickel at them will only encourage them." Only Ayn Rand would bust out that social Darwinist bullshit. Most reasonable people would keep them out of the gutter, and likely hold their nose while recognizing that a sane society does not engage in survival-of-the-fittest policies the way feudal Europe did.

Entitlement IS A PROBLEM, BILL! We know this! I agree with you!

But the epistemological, ontological, and ideological thrust of the Right is NOT the path to solving problems. It just feels good! Of course baby woman should be better-behaved. but the penny it takes to keep the social safety net underneath her from unraveling is just that, a penny. The real theft is in the billions and now the trillions, and even if you cut off every brown skinned poor person at the thorax and lopped off every testicle borne by yon unwashed of the masses, you would achieve nothing.

Because systemic problems created from the top down cannot be corrected by tightening belts from the bottom up. Besides, it takes a great amount of cruelty to make the people behave. Not even Moses himself could do it.

Breathe, Dave...

Anyway, from the heart of Brooklyn to the bag of shitty townie shake we know as Lowell, I say... mad love cats and kitties. I remain, ever yours,

the Gun-Toting Liberal.

Then a very gratifying response:
Carson Cashman: I think that was the best post I have ever read in this group.

Followed by more praise:
Trey Stahl: I'm here to tell you that the vast, vast majority of people on any form of government entitlement payments are TRULY miserable and poor, not faking it when they are judged unfit to be hired mostly through no fault of their own, and sick to the point of almost utter uselessness to any "free market."..........this is what I really liked....

And then a thoughtful Libertarian response:
Bill Stahl: David W*******, You and I, I being a Conservative with a libertarian bent, and you apparently a liberal, agree on a hell of a lot more than many here would consider possible. I think, as you have stated, we do have a case of the strong preying on the weak. The strong being the politicians that play the class warfare card, using the poor as a lever to pray in the weak, the unsophisticated but sympathetic tax payers and voters.

In my opinion there are as many right wingers as left wingers that would help the helpless. The issue that should be debated is: what is the best way to provide the help. The left insists on couching the debate as a struggle between good and evil, when it is should be a debate over the best way of doing good for the most people.

And finally, my characteristically histrionic though lovable and intellectually cohesive response (ain't I the humblest, O my loved ones?):

Bill, you and I can hang. But if you ask me, the class warfare waged by the powerful and rich since their grinning simpleton goon Ronald Reagan put us all into a torpor of nostalgia, jingoism, fag-hating and red-baiting, is most definitely, objectively, intentional. Old man Bush called it Voodoo until he realized he could get it over the finish line and make out like a bandit. Oh, he shut up then, yes he DID! He was incredulous that Reagan could loot the treasury and tilt the tax code down on the rest of us and we'd thank him and wait for the gold to "trickle down." And then, when the only thing trickling down on us was rancid ideological urine from Reagan's wilted piss-bag, they simply bullied us with the same old shibboleths, blamed it on the poor and the gays and the Commies, and whammo! back to sleep we all WENT.

To corrupt what was once a healthy economic and civil society, to steal from the middle and bottom to feed the gluttonous top, may not seem evil to you, but you'd probably agree it isn't very nice.

And at the end of the day, I reject the crowd who want to turn that miserable, dead-souled, emotionally crippled fraud Ayn Rand into some kind of Mother Theresa of self-determination. Survival of the fittest works in nature evolving balanced ecosystems over eons; in day-to-day practice on the human scale, the apotheosis of Randian evolution would be a ruthless drug cartel. Or the Kennedy family. But then, I repeat myself.

No, Bill, as a Liberal I do not see the debate in terms of good versus evil - that's the religious Right's job. I see it as a puzzlement of civics. The Right, as I understand it, would prefer that the homeless and hungry come to the church door humbly and beg. They believe that large economic and socio-political forces don't actually exist. They believe there is only the steely-eyed, self-disciplined, self-actualizing winner and the inferior, handout-seeking loser. No one was ever a victim of circumstance.

Now, my good friend and future Jaeger-buddy, you know that's hogwash. There is no man lazier or more shiftless than the inheritor of enormous wealth.

The mouths on the Right tell us society as an institution, and they themselves as individuals, should not be forced to care for those who cannot or will not care for themselves and their own. But they ignore the tilted playing field. When every ball magically rolls unassisted into their opponent's net, and the referee's been paid off besides, and he went to their prep school and looks like the grinning face that greets them each day in the mirror, they are blind, blind to their own advantage.

It's not about good or evil. It's about justice, fairness, and an equal journey to the starting line. Make everyone start equal and I don't give a damn who wins. But we're nowhere near that mythical starting line and never were.

Take for example capital punishment: if you have the capital, you don't get the punishment. We Lefties has a problem with that. The Right replies, "take a bath." I'd rather stink than smell like hypocrite ass.

Don't get me wrong; many of my Right-Wing and religious friends give a lot of time and money to worthy charitable causes which it would be foolish not to support and praise, simply on ideological grounds.

But my perspective is that a healthy society does not make people abandon their self-respect and beg at the door of a private institution to have their basic human rights met. When Newt Gingrich says poor children should clean the floors beneath the feet of their better-off schoolmates in exchange for basic survival and an education, he is blind to the cruelty to the human soul such a corrosive arrangement creates. It is nothing new, this moral lecturing by the corrupt and corpulent, this idea that the poor must clean for them and beg them and politely refrain from bothering them. Oh, and also, please, don't kill them in their sleep and drive off in their Lexuses.

This attitude of self-congratulatory self-delusion by the fabulously well-to-do is not new. It existed for thousands of years, it persisted until the United States, praise be to the People in their wisdom, and to the glorious God that is rumored to exist, put an end to it.

Response to a Death Threat on Facebook. Open Letter to a Tea Party American.

2011-09-18T12:27:00.008-04:00

The R****** brothers, with whom I spar about politics on facebook, have stepped over the line and engaged in death threats. During a conversation about his belief in the upcoming total collapse of the economy, M***, threatened that he would "shoot [me] to kill, and hang [my] body from the porch." (That's a paraphrase; I went looking for the comment a moment ago and find that either it is mysteriously missing - or that facebook sucks. Either is possible).

Vanessa, a mutual friend who is both reasonable and generous, but agrees with the R****** brothers on every point of our debates, attempted to restore harmony, and apologized for any disrespect she showed me as an unapologetic progressive. Here is my response:

I'm not one-sided, and that's where I think you've lumped me in with the "problem crowd of Liberals."

But the immediate issue is the contempt and pathological rage the R***** brothers are expressing toward me. If you think their behavior has been as reasonable, courteous, civil and appropriate as mine, fine, we'll agree to disagree and go our separate ways. But there is no evidence to support that conclusion except naked bias - IT IS NOT OK TO THREATEN MURDER. The "us" versus "them" trend runs deep in them. It is not the noblest aspect of human character. It is, in fact, dangerous.

As I continued to explain my point of view, it began to gradually emerge as a general statement of my beliefs about government. Here is the conclusion of my post to Vanessa, which I will consider an Open Letter to all who identify with the political platform of the so-called "Tea Party":

Dear Tea Party Member:

I work very hard and loathe the idea of useless, sponging people abusing the social safety net probably more than you do. Every time a person collects disability when he should and could be working, the needs of the truly deserving disabled person are corrupted by association, and that pisses me off to the nth degree.

I also despise useless, sponging people abusing and corrupting the markets as well. In fact, I like personal responsibility for the healthy and firm, and collective responsibility for the helpless and sick. I like to see work rewarded, and workers motivated by potential rewards.

Private property, including vast wealth, is among others an American right worth fighting for. I am no Communist. I dig money and nice things, too. But we can't keep our hard-earned or inherited wealth unless we also use a portion of it to provide everyone with a real avenue for advancement. This protects not only the poor from poverty, and the middle class from bearing the burden of the poor, but the rich from the guillotine and the garotte.

Justice, equality, and the equal opportunity to strive and succeed have never happened on their own in any society, and must be protected by the collective will of the people. In America we call that collective will the federal government. The rights and privileges of citizenship here are not granted by God or the wealthy, but by the people themselves. The founding fathers were the elites of their day and they wrote this miraculous document that essentially dis-invested them from absolute power and shared it with the hoi-polloi. That had never happened anywhere - and we're at risk of losing it today.

According to the political beliefs of the Tea Party, our entitlement programs are pernicious examples of Socialism ruining the freedom of our nation. I understand that you believe this, too. Fine. One can compromise with those beliefs and achieve something worthwhile. (I personally believe entitlements are not only NOT pernicious, but are in fact the rich's best friend, for the reasons above.)

However, you do realize that your own definition of Socialism defines every wealthy nation on Earth today as a socialist nightmare.

I love America, I love the Constitution, and when all segments of the economy act in more or less good faith, we have the healthy middle class the founders so clearly intended. I love our government. It is - when everyone respects it and compromises for the greater good - the least odious and most trustworthy government on Earth. In America, you don't have to pay a bribe to get a business license or a driver's license or to have your case heard in Court. In America, if I can prove my Mayor or State Assemblyman, my Senator or Congressman is on the take, I can challenge him in Court and he'll have to give up his power.

That is a flat-out miracle which is contrary to "pure" capitalism and "free markets." After all, government is required to punish the bribe-taker. It is miraculous. Essential. American.

Vanishing.

The Tea Party groups prize freedom above all else, principally the freedom from grand federal social entitlement experiments, which in their opinion are unconstitutional. They want to return to the intentions of the founding fathers. But I don't believe the founding fathers would endorse the statement that "if the freedoms we are putting in place eventually result in the rich and powerful owning everything, including access to power and the electoral process - as in England - then we'll just have to endure that as an inevitable result of freedom."

Old Fears Hurt Less. Brace Yourself for More Utopia (GOP Style).

2011-07-29T16:26:00.003-04:00

I dunno, I liked the GOP's old fears better. Commies, busing, flouridation, bra-less women, gays, Roe vs Wade, Medicare, weapons of mass destruction, firefighter unions, the United Nations, hordes of al qaeda lining up at the border of Mexico, fake birth certificates, Kenyan spies in the White House, Sharia Law in Colorado...

I ask you, dear friend: what fun is a party of paranoid rage-aholics when they're yelling about debt-to-GDP ratios?

None of these people ever gave a damn about deficits until the line formed on the Right. Now, according to them, the deficit will kill us all unless we do exactly as they say, immediately.

Been there, done that. There's always a lot to be afraid of, but you could make a nice living betting that the real crisis and the GOP-manufactured one will never be the same. Wonder what odds Jimmy the Greek would have given?

Default on the debt will hurt us lots more than any other plan, including (obviously) more stimulus spending.

How about this: we turn back the clock to when Bush inherited a surplus, undo things he said would lead to prosperity but brought us instead to the poorhouse, and start over. His illegal war in Iraq over weapons he said would kill us all, but didn't exist? Gone. His debunked "trickle down" tax policy? Pffft. A memory. His million-mile fence and hi-tech attack on fruit pickers? Suspended. His subsidies to Oil companies who already have more cash than they know what to do with? Gone. Kaput.

This entire crisis is merely the beginning of the endgame of a long-established Right-Wing plan for society known as "Starve the Beast." Please look it up and learn. It is not a new crisis. It isn't even a crisis. It's Republican Utopia, once again breaching the horizon, heading our way.

Thoughts from the GTL Manifesto (a work in progress), Part I.

2011-07-06T13:21:00.003-04:00

When you have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, it isn't "asking for help" or "relying on government to do what you should do for yourself." It is a free people banding together to solve problems which time and experience have shown not to be fixable by individuals. I could see reviling a monarchy, or a dictatorship, or an oligarchy, or a communist politburo -- but in America, to revile the government is to revile ourselves.

If shameless capitalists have co-opted the government -which they have - that is all the more reason to get involved, vote sensibly, hold politicians accountable, and pay attention to the functioning of government not only in the US but around the world. Perfect it so that it runs efficiently and protects the citizens whose ancestors saw fit to fight and die to create it.

There are bad governments, yes. But there are good ones too, and ones which are in trouble and need the help of the citizens. Many, many of our foremothers and forefathers died so that our government would live. If you want to shit on it, go ahead, but don't for a moment imagine that your opinion is either morally or intellectually superior. It is just an opinion, and many people equal to you in insight and intelligence do not agree with it.

Forming a more perfect union requires people who care to make it better and are not lazy or cowardly, and not those like Grover Norquist, who famously declared he wants to starve the government of revenue, until it's been weakened enough to "drag it into the bathroom and drown it with [his] bare hands."

Welfare, Tea, and Laughs: My Sojourn At the Fringe Continues...

2011-06-19T19:45:00.006-04:00

Some friends of Tea Party temperament and I have been chatting up the Internets again, and one fellow in particular asks some damn fine questions:

David W-------, u mentioned that u believe in the welfare clause [giving the federal government the authority to do practically anything]. If the founders had intended the Constitution to give the federal government all the powers that are implied in the liberal interpretation of the welfare clause, why did they specifically enumerate the powers delegated to the fed govt in Article 1 Section 8? Why bother enumerating and voicing specific powers when the fed govt already has the power to do whatever it wants because of the welfare clause? And why did the founders bother with a Tenth Amendment, if they meant the welfare clause to give the federal government carte blanche?

Here are my thoughts by way of a reply...

All very good questions. And many generations of constitutional law students have debated them, with many more yet to do so - God willing.

Perhaps the founders included the enormously broad welfare clause right up front in the Preamble because they meant to suggest that the general welfare actually IS paramount, and worthy of inclusion in the grandest statement of principles contained in the entire document, and not in the later details.

They framers of the Constitution were not stupid and knew that debates such as this one would rage for generations as a result of its inclusion -- and yet, there it is. Right up front. You ask why the founders bothered with a Bill of Rights if the welfare clause indeed means what it says. I think you've got it backwards. Abraham Lincoln once said, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." The welfare clause reminds us of this fact. What good are separate powers, specifically enumerated, if the general welfare of the People goes unprotected?

I admire your rhetorical skill in making my interpretation of the founding fathers' words seem naive, if not outright ridiculous. It is not ridiculous, however, to suggest that we as a nation have traditionally done a very good job of managing the tension between the elements of the Constitution that contradict, that push and pull against one another. We're not doing so now. We are in the age of the absolutists. Moderates and compromisers are in retreat, out of vogue.

Yet most Americans CAN tell the difference between Canada and the former Soviet Union, for instance. Most people in America CAN discern a firefighter's union from a committee within the Politburo or the KGB. But some of the more heated folks on the Right seem to think that any nation that even attempts to provide robust social welfare services or labor protections is no different than a communist dictatorship a la Josef Stalin. The Tea Partiers are enamored of that rhetoric, as well as any that suggests the current president didn't win his office fair and square or is somehow not "legally" the president.

The Tea Party, in other words, is entering its adolescence, and is feeling its oats, so to speak. They've only just begun to REALLY bring the funny. The Paranoid, Peeved, n' Peculiar are just getting started, so stay tuned for more and more hijinks.

You know who I'm talking about -- they show up on the evening news, pulled over on the interstate for putting homemade cardboard "Live Free or Die" license plates on their cars, resisting arrest and running all up and down the shoulder calling themselves "sovereign citizens" who need not obey the law. They do other funny things, too, like demanding their change at the Piggly Wiggly in gold bullion, or wearing tricorner hats to political events, carrying signs with funny slogans like "Get Your Government Hands Off My Medicare."

Talk with them a little, or their candidates, and you'll find that they have a host of very UN-funny ideas for improving government, mostly by killing it off or letting large parts of it die. They'll shut down the department of education, the federal student loan system, the environmental protection agency, they'll close public colleges and end social security. They'll cease funding for the arts and sciences, for international development, for medical research. Forget about federal disaster relief -- it's unconstitutional, like all the rest --; no federal protections for the disabled, for minority rights, either. Anti-American Commie plots all, just like the gold standard, and flouridated water.

The Tea Party finds the answer to the needs of the People not in any serious treatise on public health, public finance, urban development, sociology, or any other scientific thing, but in the "enlightened self-interest" of Ayn Rand that says the best help you can give people is no help at all.

I believe simply that power corrupts, and for that reason, in every system everywhere, the greatest threat of exploitation comes at the hands of those who hold the most power. The idea of American democracy is that no individual or organization is above the law, that ultimate power rests in the People - the leaders the People choose to represent them. From my point of view, the nation is at far greater threat from our electoral process being bought by the wealthy and powerful and corrupted so it no longer does the people's bidding than from the threat of too much government interference.

I believe that it is not the Status Quo, with it's Medicare and minority rights and student loans and environmental protections, that is woefully out of step with Constitutional Principles, as the ideological Right would have me believe. Instead, it is those who suggest undoing generations of needed legislation that brought equality and prosperity to the vast middle class, who incorrectly identify their own government as the exploiters, rather than the billionaires who game the political system; these are the people who are out of step.

If You Can't Be With The Nation You Love, Love The Intern You're With (or: Moral Lessons from the Newt Gingrich Traveling Hypocrisy Show)

2011-03-27T13:06:00.008-04:00

The more Gingrich talks, the more I like him. He's yet another Right-wing gift that keeps on giving.

Remember a lifetime ago, when this patriotic genius tried to convince the world that, al Qaeda be damned, it was really plump, comely interns who were the real threat to our nation?

Apparently, back in '92, when Newt set his sights on President Bill Clinton for impeachment, and started scouting for an issue or scandal upon which to hang his scheme, the bright idea came to him in a flash: infidelity and lies... if I'm unfit for office, maybe the President is, too!

He set out, a lonely man on a grand fishing expedition, not to catch a nice big trout - an accomplishment that George W. Bush would later describe as his greatest moment as President - but to snare the popular young Man from Hope, his Southern rival for the affections of the nation, in a lie under oath.

Since the man hadn't broken any laws (you mean he didn't kill Vince Foster with his bare hands and make it look like suicide?), and there would therefore be no juicy criminal case, the House GOP needed the kind of embarrassingly private civil suit that produces a lie or two about marital infidelities during a sworn deposition. That, and a sympathetic echo chamber to amplify the idea that a president who would tell such lies about a long-ended affair, under oath, during a non-criminal court case, is therefore capable of telling any lies, capable of any heinous act of treason imaginable.

"It's the principle of the thing," Gingrich intoned somberly, that forced him to act, to rescue our fragile rosebud nation from the dripping jaws of the big, bad, lustful wolf.

It becomes clearer over time that he got the idea for all this from his own divorce cases, which required he give testimony about his infidelities under oath. Since Gingrich has no qualms about forgiving people (read: himself) for their infidelities, as long as they're related to the "passion" of patriotism, we can only conclude that his anger at Clinton only comes from jealousy.

He was just sore at Bill Clinton for getting his hand in the White House cookie jar first!

I can't wait for this turd to run for President. November is very close to Christmas, and, for this moment in time at least, he is indeed the Gift That Keeps On Giving.

To the Republicans Who Would Throw My Family Out In The Street

2011-02-27T13:26:00.002-05:00

A commenter on a friend's facebook page describes my opinions as dishonest.

Don't talk to me about honesty. At this moment my family's very existence is being saved by unemployment insurance, a lifesaver that morons like Rand Paul and his followers think is more destructive to my family than the moral lesson that we are weak and inferior because my wife, a public school teacher, can't magically conjure up some great, high-paying alternative. The idea that she'd rather sit on her ass and collect than work is an insult based on nothing, since you never met her, don't know her, and can't begin to guess at her character.

But don't let that stop you. You never do.

Only on Wall Street can you ruin the world and be rewarded with a big fat bonus. Real teachers, nurses, social workers -- we know reality from fantasy because we can't afford not to.

The fantasy IS the reality to the GOP, just like the ginned-up paranoid fantasy of armed jihadists posing as Mexican fruit pickers so that big business cronies can put up fences that catch no one and produce nothing but political fodder for extremists. Or the fantasy that Saddam Hussein must have somehow been responsible for 9/11. Or the fantasy that the President is a Muslim spy who was born in Africa.

Another whopper of a fantasy is this Reagan worship. This man had some strengths but connecting well with reality was never among them. Trust me, I've read his autobiography and you haven't; it's all in there. Ronald Reagan did the opposite of what his worshipers think he did, but they don't care. In fact, Reagan himself bloated the federal government, expanded its payrolls, while at the same time deriding "welfare queens" as somehow being responsible for the fiscal problems of the nation. It was Reagan who called Medicare "Socialism," and took money from Joe McCarthy as a PAID FBI informant to finger left-leaning writers in Hollywood during one of the darkest and most shameful periods of American history.

These are your leaders, not mine. I don't need a mountain of statistics to remind me that Reagan was a fraud, that Sarah Palin does not know Africa is not a country, and when asked what newspapers she reads to stay informed, replies "I don't know. All of them." She thinks the First Amendment is violated when someone criticizes her, but it's OK to ban books in Wasilla when they don't appeal to her narrow sense of right and wrong.

Your leaders ruined the economy through deregulation, left a mess for the Democrats to clean up, blamed them for the hard choices they were too chickenshit themselves to make, decided that helping people struggling without health insurance protections was less important than handing Obama a "Waterloo."

The Republicans are the ones who explode budgets and balloon deficits. The last balanced budget came from Clinton. How did you thank him for doing what you now say is the holiest job a president can do? You impeached him for denying a marital affair. You Republicans did that, not me. I was an adult. Men have affairs, I said. This is not a state matter. No, you said, his penis his more dangerous than Osama bin Laden, more important than our economy.

It is the Republicans today fighting to keep credit default swaps and esoteric derivatives trading unregulated. It is Republicans in the top 1% who are living in incredible luxury, best ever, better even than a decade ago. The pain is only for the people, and the Left.

The GOP is the party of Ayn Rand, of naked self-interest, and of teabaggers (self-described, not a slur) who promised jobs but instead chose to redefine rape so that a woman with a knife to her throat is somehow considered giving consent and so must carry his child to term. They do this with a straight face while describing themselves as protectors of American freedom. Rapist's freedom, I guess they mean. This is their idea of creating jobs, the plan they campaigned on.

For today's Republicans, a public union giving in on every concession is not enough; they must also commit suicide and cease to exist.

There IS a class war in America. There is blood in the streets and it's only just beginning. It is brutal, savage, cruel, un-Godly, and the wrong side is winning.

Thoughts For Today

2011-02-23T18:43:00.002-05:00

If you love your country you want it to thrive. If you have billions you should be grateful to live in a land where such fortunes are possible to make and keep.

This country belongs to its citizens. Our legal system is as much mine as Donald Trump's. Every time he gets a permit to build something he is asking the people to share their common wealth in allowing him to do so. He has asked for a lot of these, BTW.

Every time a major corporation sues someone for copyright or patent infringement, or breach of contract, etc., it is using our common wealth - the courts, which we all own equally - to do so.

The billionaire uses all the same parts of America that the rest of us do, only in vastly higher quantities. Whether it's consuming more energy from the electrical grid, putting more cars on the collectively-owned highways, using more water, or utilizing the court system more often to address grievances, the rich use up more of this country's shared wealth than the poor. They should pay more because they use more, make more waste, consume more resources, and they couldn't make one thin dime without clean air, water, workable infrastructure, power grids, courts and police to guarantee legal redress...

No, sadly, the rich want socialism for themselves and capitalism for everyone else. Oldest game in the book.

Sunday Morning Politics - GTL Style

2011-02-13T09:20:00.003-05:00

My new facebook friend Paul Erickson comments, "Dave, the way I see Obama is that he is truly a leftist. I think there are certain realities he has to live with being president that cause him to move from his leftist agenda. I don't know what kind of a strategist he is. He's come out on the wrong side of several areas: health care, unemployment, bank bail out etc."

Now, I'm only a guy who cares, not a genius who knows all, and I won't comment on whether or not it's a good thing that my wife's unemployment check has allowed us to keep our house and feed our children since she lost her public-school teaching job. Nor will I attempt to untangle the merits or lack thereof regarding those bank bailouts.

But Health Care is something I do know a lot about. So here's my response:

Paul, here comes a lengthy response, so brace yourself! I'd like you to read it with an open mind...

I work in health care - psychiatric hospitalization, specifically - and have turned people away for lack of insurance and have watched people stumble out of the hospital in tears, untreated, because even with commercial insurance they could not afford their co-pays and deductibles, often in the thousands of dollars.

From the perspective of a front line, boots-on-the-ground health care provider working with at least 15 separate insurance companies every goddamn day, including all the biggest ones, smaller ones, plus Tricare (military), Medicare (federal), and Medicaid (state), I can categorically state that here in Massachusetts the present is orders of magnitude better than the past. And I have heard not one complaint from any citizen, employer, or provider with ANY insurance plan, that the new system is either broken, arbitrary, or unfair.

In fact, time after time, people lament that they wish they had Medicaid because only Medicaid provides the comprehensive services at low costs that they need. Some facilities in my city of Lowell will ONLY take Medicaid, because all other comers are too difficult to deal with and reject too many claims.

Medicaid, BTW, has lower overhead, and is the model of efficiency compared to, say, Cigna, Aetna, Fallon, Harvard Pilgrim, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Modern Assistance, and the mother of all substandard insurances, United Behavioral Health (unfortunately, I am insured by UBH, so I'd better keep the crazy to a minimum). I wish you knew the guilt I feel, having to tell people exactly what their benefits are and how much money they will spend in co-pays and deductibles. It is not what I went into clinical social work to do, and it feels just terrible. Remember, the people who come to me are mostly NOT poor, and have private, employer-contracted insurances they can nevertheless not afford to use in many cases.

In short, The HCR package, imperfect as it is -- as all laws are -- is a great leap forward. Plus, although the Right doesn't want you to remember this, it is a truly bipartisan creation, crafted from ideas born in both Democratic and Republican philosophies and think-tanks. The only reason the Republicans fought it is they wanted it to be "Obama's Waterloo," regardless of its merits or the fact that a few years earlier they pushed the same ideas.

For Obama's opponents - I won't call them enemies, we're all Americans - politics trumped the needs of their constituents.

The Obama Health Care Reform law is modeled in large part on Massachusetts' HCR ("Romneycare") law, with which I have abundant direct experience. The reforms have saved millions of dollars and thousands of lives. I know this firsthand. Also, the same companies that administer the so-called "government" insurance plans also offer identical commercial plans to employers for their workers. The only differences between the two are that the private plans have high co-pays and deductibles, arcane and wasteful administrative procedures, and result in denials of care fairly routinely even when people decide to shoulder the hefty debts they will incur -- and these are the WORKERS, understand, not the poor.

Romney should be proud of his accomplishment. Instead, to win the votes of the "government-is-bad" Republican voters, he will either have to repudiate his proudest accomplishment or spin it as fundamentally different than Obamacare - which it is not.

Irony abounds!

One thing is for certain, and that is that there is no government takeover of anything. No death panels, government doctors, government clinics, packed waiting rooms and long waits for inefficient State-provided procedures. Everything feels and functions exactly as before, but is more equitable and protects us better. The insurers working in the government plans make generous, though regulated, profits, and companies compete zealously for those contracts. The new system balances profits with care in truly laudable ways -- UNLESS ---

Unless you have an ideological bias against government providing health care funding in any situation.

In this instance, and there are plenty of people who feel this way, I have little to say except that I care about my patients and any system that gets them the care they need at lower costs and with greater protections must be good. If government does it better, then it cannot be said categorically that government is "never the solution, always the problem."

In this case, the truth is more complicated than slogans.

Thank you for the pleasure of your ideas and intellect, and the privilege on this fine Sunday morning of debating with a person who so obviously cares for his country and fellow man.

Peace!

Something About a Well-Played Game of Chess...

2011-01-23T22:11:00.001-05:00

The thing I admire most on the Right is the Republican ability to convince us that their biggest fears ought to be ours also. The worker is losing ground faster than an ice sheet in Alaska and the Republicans have them howling about deficits they neither understood nor considered a year or two ago, nor understand today.

Ordinary citizens who have about as much chance of influencing their own economic futures as a fruitbat are screaming for the federal government to take back the stimulus funds that may get them a job next year. The irony, the mastery of it -- absolutely superb!

Furthermore, Republicans are responsible for a huge portion of the debt from back when they were a majority and didn't need a red-meat-issue-of-the-month. The national debt could go to infinity for all they cared, when Bush was president and we lived in Republican Utopia.

Still, ever since they lost the majority in Congress and Obama was elected, they have suddenly become (conveniently) morally bound to slash spending. And where do you think those cuts are going to come from?

Can anyone say, "starve the beast?" This is the Republicans' game and has been for a very, very long time.

And people are buying it!

Financiers are having new boom times and these soon-to-be-former middle-class folks are screaming about the gold standard and the unconstitutionality of the minimum wage.

C'est Magnifique!!

And More! Meet Joe, The Gift That Keeps On Giving...

2010-12-12T10:34:00.003-05:00

This one speaks for itself, no intro necessary. I give you the estimable Joe:

"Dave has a vested interest in the poor, because they make up his livelihood."

Nice try. The ad hominem attack. Last resort stuff. Joe can't attack my facts, so he goes after my motives and integrity. Classic!

You don't pay attention, Joe. The poor do not make up my livelihood any more or less than they make up an oncologist's or primary care doctor's livelihood. I admit anyone with insurance and a psychiatric problem grave enough to force profit-driven health insurance companies to open their bulging coffers and squeeze out a few nickels for treatment. Unless the patient is blessed with Medicaid, a literal lifesaver for anyone lucky and poor enough to qualify for government-funded health insurance, and they get better care that costs less.

And BTW, I'm sure you didn't know this, but the companies administering not-for-profit Medicaid health plans are the same ones who run the fabulously lucrative private ones. There is no "government takeover of health care" underway. The difference is, a poor person's Network Health Plan has top medicine co-pays of $3. A middle-class worker's inferior, for-profit version of the same plan, using the same doctors and the same medication formularies, have top co-pays of $35. Take three medicines a month and you may be hit with a bill for over a hundred dollars, in addition to your hefty monthly share of your plan's premiums.

You don't listen, Joe. You just find the sources you need to back up your pre-existing, ill-informed opinion, then march into battle.

The people I serve are, I will say again and again, the same as me and you, and I've already said that, but you don't listen. Quote whomever you like.

I'm not Don Quixote. If you insist on being a windmill I'll just have to give up jousting with you.

Hey Joe, I Heard You Shot Your Argument Down (With Apologies To Jimi Hendrix!)

2010-12-12T10:09:00.004-05:00

Joe has asked a very good question, straight out of the Gun-Toting Liberal's toolbox for analyzing social problems. He asks, "Who benefits by the existence of a permanent underclass?"

This merry-go-round is going to close soon, as I spent Saturday afternoon in a Quixotic attempt to joust with this human windmill and I don't intend to go around again today. I want to enjoy my weekend before the House Leadership repeals weekends outright as a communist government program.

Ok. Joe asks, so the GTL answers. Here goes:

Nobody, Joe, that's what I've been trying to say. There is no benefit to a permanent underclass, and we should do whatever we can to end it. Why do you always frame an argument in such a way that anyone who disagrees with you must obviously love social pathology and not want to end it?

I’ve been trying to help you, Joe, but you aren't listening. One big problem here is that sore-headed, poorly-defined, anger- and prejudice-based assessments of the problem are not the best starting point. They might work for making fame and oodles of cash for Glenn Beck, Rush Oxylimbaugh, and Bible Spice, but not in the real world.

Why are you getting your information about poor people from ultra-rich media head entertainers? Listen to people who know what they're talking about from first-hand experience. Like me. Hell, if you want a tour of the hated underclass to help you develop an actual first-hand opinion, I'll take a day off and bring you around to the world you have imagined, and you can decide for yourself if the imagined world and the real world align. That'll be up to you. I'll just drive.

Right-wing policies cause far more social problems than they alleviate. So let's solve them. I agree with you 100%. No one benefits from a permanent underclass, Joe, but Officer Krupke was right - no one wants a fella with a social disease.

So let's recalibrate your imagination to to allow a little oxygen and some facts in. Nobody in social services is benefiting like the businessman benefits, unless you consider shelter workers or AFDC social workers on low salaries to be benefiting.

These people don't lay awake at night laughing at the stupid taxpayer. They lay awake worrying if tomorrow they'll come home from the shelter carrying scabies, bedbugs, or worse, as a consequence of doing the right thing and helping not the wealthy and powerful, but the neighbor in need. That, and paying the bills.

I have a masters degree and am the clinical director of a psychiatric hospital program. My education and several thousand hours of training prior to licensing are at least equivalent in effort and sophistication to any financial management training program, but after a decade of success, the money man lives in Larchmont, and I live in Lowell. The finance man, BTW, is a stock character in my depression and anxiety program, and he agrees. What I do is at least as hard as what he does.

Now, I'm not complaining, mind you, and I feel lucky and blessed by the privilege to be trusted by so many people in need and their families. There is definitely a deep spiritual reward. But my Christmas bonus this year, as it is every year, was a ten-dollar Stop n' Shop gift card. Now, I know it'll take more than ten dollars to talk you in from a sore-headed rant, but if you want, I'll give the entire bonus to you if you'll simply acknowledge that you have no direct experience in any of the things you are talking about here.

Feed Me, Joe! (And Feed Me He Does.)

2010-12-11T17:09:00.010-05:00

Damn. I really thought I was gonna convert Joe with that last post. Here's the last part of his reply:

If you're offended by my comparison to slavery, consider this. You are spending lots of other people's money on people who, rather than saying thank you, bitch that they want more, more, more. In doing so, you are teaching not how to fish, rather addicting them to your fish. This you call help. If that's help, I want no part of it.

Oh, Joe.

Joey, Joey, Joey.

You are talking about things you don't really know about firsthand. I am trying to help you see. I am reporting to you from the front lines, as a person equal in drive and intellect to yourself, who has taken the time to wade into the world of human misery and dysfunction firsthand.

Please understand: I know dozens of the people you describe, maybe a hundred, of the perpetually unfit. I know them by their names and faces, and by their medical histories, their family histories. By the luck, good or bad, involved in the conditions and situations of their birth. By their communities, their religions, their education. By their exposure to trauma. By their deepest personal fears, their weaknesses and strengths.

Hear me, O Israel! (I sometimes get grandiose. If you don't like it, read no further. I would NOT blame you in the least).

THERE IS NO PREDATORY UNDERCLASS! THERE ARE NO HORDES OF LAZY, SPONGING, GOLDBRICKING SHIT-HEELS. NO ONE IS SITTING BACK AND LAUGHING. IT IS ALL IN YOUR MIND.

OR MAYBE IN THE AIRWAVES.

Or on satellites. Or in fiber-optic cables. Or in regular, old cables.

Or in print.

Or in texts.

Or in tweets.

Or maybe it's in all of them, all at once, day and night, forever and ever.

Maybe it's in the sources of information you choose to trust!

These people you talk about, the ones demanding more, more, more of our hard earned money. Produce one. Just one.

These gripes from the Right come over and over and over, year in and year out, but are based on no discernible facts. Lazy non-workers demanding more, more, more. Show me one. JUST ONE.

There aren't any hordes of whiners, and this is not the whiner's "mental recession" Republicans told us it was that we're living through. A million foreclosed homes didn't start with whining, but they sure ended that way. It might look like a mental recession from the front porch overlooking the eleventh hole fairway in Palm Beach. Hell, not only is it not a recession, it's boom times. Biggest bonus years ever down at the office, in fact.

They are even further away from the people they condescend to than you are, so why trust them? Trust a primary source.

Trust the Gun-Toting Liberal!

Yee-HAH!

But you are right about this: there will always be people stuck on or clinging to public assistance. So I think we should address the exorbitant benefits you imagine they receive as they kick their carefree heels down the sidewalk to their Cadillacs.

Medicaid.
Food stamps.
Low-income housing at "section eight" rates of a third of their income.
Disability benefits, a thousand dollars a month perhaps, if they can prove they're truly disabled. The system that is used to identify disability fraud, by the way, should be a balm to every conservative's heart. Obtaining disability benefits is extraordinarily difficult, not that Glenn Beck or Bible Spice will ever know that firsthand. I have personally filled out lots and lots of applications and supporting documentation for people who are most often denied "disabled" status. And so has everyone I know professionally. And the story is always the same.

Plus, they have to prove it every year, their disabilities, with written proof from physicians who, I assure you, have a lot more to protect from the consequences of committing fraud than you or I do. Rush Limbaugh probably hasn't hung out down at the social security office, where the people he despises and the programs he derides as wasteful are on public display each and every day of the week. He ought to. He would know what he was talking about, then.

And so would you.

That's about it. Free emergency telephone service, so they can call 911.

Free membership at the YMCA.

A bus pass. Maybe.

Each one of these sorry folks, these gamers of the system, these diseased beings swindling you out of your hard earned pay, is a financial nuisance. A fly. An ant on an elephant's backside. On the other hand, consider the costs of letting them die slowly in the streets, which, you may argue, is their due. And I don't mean the financial costs, which are negligible in a rich country like ours, I mean the costs to our self-respect as a nation.

Indulge me with this. Look at it my way for a moment: tell me about your job and I will trust your expertise, and listen with great due diligence to your insights about it. I will assume, as an intelligent and interested man, you are capable of achieving proficiency in your chosen field and have done so. Sincerely. I mean it. I acknowledge the likelihood that you are not a blight to society in any way, or a burden to the local constabulary, and so forth. An upright man. A Mensch.

Now, please accord to me the same respect.

I know my job too. As well as you know yours, if we're to be mutually agreeable. And there IS a professional field of people whose job it is to interact directly with precisely the people you describe. And I am in that field, and that field is social work.

I know my job as well as you know yours, if we're to be mutually agreeable.

But wait, no.

Come to think of it, you're right.

I'm sorry, Joe. You're right and I apologize.

There IS a seemingly intractable class of Americans who want more, more, more of our hard-earned money, who are never satisfied no matter how much of it they get, who never say thank you, who are "addicting us to their fish."

And you are RIGHT, Man, they're NOT like you and me. They are not hard-working, individually responsible, morally upright men and women like us.

They're out there, all right.

I'll name them shortly, but first I want to rest for a moment with the observation of a very wise man whose name I do not know, who was right when he described these greedy ungrateful, un-American Americans as having "no soul to save, and no body to incarcerate."

Breathe.

Rest.

Relax.

Now here it comes...

The images on your TV are just for show. The sound in your ears is a distraction. The fog, smoke. The real culprit is behind the curtain.

It's big corporations, you #@%&#&$%!

Not all of them. Maybe not even most.

But it is the insatiable greed of the wealthiest people and institutions we have that is killing us, not imaginary Welfare Queens.

Hear me from the front lines! Take my dispatch, Goddamn you!

Again, I know the people you are talking about personally. I bid a good weekend to several of them yesterday. Personally, face to face. And with great sincerity, I may add.

I will not stop trying to help you see, Joe.

I believe in you Joe, and all you other Joes out there.

I will not stop trying.

But this is so much fun, who would want it to stop?

Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions (with apologies to Al Jaffee!)

2010-12-11T15:23:00.006-05:00

Okay. So. If you read my last post you have some understanding of the debate. Here is, in part, Joe's response to my ideas about fairness and wealth:

"Unhealthy societies cost money as well. Back two centuries ago, during the days of slavery, slave owners had a fairly healthy expense of keeping their slaves fed, clothed and housed. They managed to do it in such a way that the slaves had nowhere to go. Does this sound at all like anything that we're doing today with social programs?"

Well the short answer is no. But the GTL ain't about the short answer. Here's my reply:

Joe, I would find your comparison between slavery and a social safety net odious too, if it weren't so funny. Thanks for the laugh and for reducing your own credibility. That's mighty generous of you! Can you bake me a pie too? Boston creme, please. With lots of creme and chocolate frosting. LOTS of chocolate frosting!

Once again, I am talking about millions of people's lives, not what ought to be, in principle, in a theoretical society. I am a social worker and I understand, directly and firsthand in a way you do not - that is to say through direct knowledge and experience - that there IS a sliver of society that falls into an entrenched pattern of dependency, as you correctly identify. Slaves, if you will. Fine. And they sure are ugly to look at, and not just on TV where you see them. It's been my discipline's mission, and my life's work, to ennoble humanity and end that pattern, but not by throwing a drowning man an anvil and lecturing him on my superior swimming ability.

Here's where you and I differ: Because of these inter-generational failures, the obvious outliers of an imperfect system, a paltry fraction of a percent, you would throw out the whole safety net itself. If your stance is not ideologically-driven, why don't you also say we should throw out capitalism because of the free-markets' own sliver of bad actors, like Bernie Madoff, disgraced by his own greed and with the lifeless corpse of his son, dead this morning from suicide, at his feet?

Asking "should a rich man's dollar be taxed twice (or three times, four, etc)?" is a statement about principles. In practice, while the decision to place a higher tax burden on the rich might make them hot under the collar, it does nothing to their standard of living, though it raises EVERYBODY else's. When the rich were taxed at 90% it was still a fabulous ride, a hell of a lot better than being middle or lower class, and the rivers of champagne and fois gras flowed like water. There were Bentleys and blonde dames and fancy restaurants and vast bank accounts and world-wide jet-setting.

There was also infrastructure and good public schools for the rest of us. There was progress in realizing the nation's mission statement (see: Preamble, United States Constitution). That progress has now been reversed. And the tea baggers, the angry admirers of the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs and Bible Spice Mama Grizzlies, are doing their dirty work for them. The only actual billionaires demanding attention without hiding behind PACs and front groups with names like "Free American Taxpaying Freedom-Lovers for Freedom" are begging the rest of us to take some of their wealth back, for the good of society.

You can't believe in fair play and equality without acknowledging that they are not possible without a level playing field. It's the corruption of that level playing field that the rich intentionally obscure with semiotic sleight of hand when arguing policy. They tilt the playing field themselves and then spend a lot of money to trick the players into sending the referees home.

Unless everyone starts at the same starting line, we should not be talking about the finish line; bootstraps and welfare moms and lazy beggars and so forth. The laziest man on Earth is the one who inherits vast wealth. Everyone knows that. Or more importantly, the rich man knows that, and wants us not to.

I'm tired of people using their government-protected rights to free speech to say government sucks. My government does not suck.

I have treated thousands of mentally ill people. Thousands. And most are not at the bottom of society at all, they're people with insurance cards, like you and me. The ones without insurance - in other words, those with incomes too low to afford it, but not low enough to be saved by the safety net - don't show up. They drink or coke themselves to death in quiet desperation in suburban tract homes that look as intact from the outside as the day they were built, while their owners' lives and our society have hollowed out from inside.

It might've been you Joe, who commented in Miguel's space, "what is it about Liberals and suffering?" If not, I apologize. If so, let's be clear: standing by doing nothing while others suffer is not a sign of high moral character. Worse, continually enhancing the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful while AT THE SAME TIME standing by doing nothing while others suffer is just... well... fucked.

Fucked, I say. How ya like my bathos?

Now how about that Boston creme pie?

For Joe, Who Loves Business and Opposes Government.

2010-12-11T09:12:00.004-05:00

Joe, healthy societies cost money. You can't have a safe neighborhood, a stable bank account, reliable electric and telephone service, courts that give recourse to the law equally, schools that prepare kids to become responsible and self-reliant adults, clean water, safe medicines, untainted foods... without lots and lots of money. This is the case everywhere. And almost everywhere, people do NOT have these things.

People on the Right tend to talk about taxes in ideals, as in, "it's not the role of government..." or "people shouldn't rely on institutions..." These are legitimate thoughts and are of course true. They also tend to focus on government waste, inefficiency, lousy programs, etc. as areas to tap for needed funds for the legitimate purposes of government.

But in business, if an idea, a product fails, it gets shut down, changed, or the business as a whole fails. In government, there is no luxury of starting over - or failure, for that matter. You can start a business a thousand times. You can fire workers. Increase, decrease, or eliminate benefits. Change prices. Put profits in foreign bank accounts, thus improving the bottom line.

But we started our government once. And we did a damn good job.

A digression, if I may: I am a social worker. I work waaaay down on the ground where the stomachs and assholes (not the personalities, the actual body parts) dwell. It's not enough to say that government should create the conditions for free markets and then get the hell out of the way. We can't fire citizens no matter how poorly they work or how sick or dysfunctional they become. If we try, they end up costing us more, as social failure is far more expensive than even the most generous nanny state. Even the bottom line supports liberal social policies, when spun out over the long term.

The strong will always devour the weak, as in nature. Except that in nature, millions of years of evolution produced the conditions that prevent the shark from eating every last herring (or whatever), whereas in our business world, it's shark eat herring and herring be damned. Only government prevents the annihilation of the herring. You and I are the herring, BTW.

Jesus, can I beat a metaphor to death or what?

Unlike business, every adjustment in government has to be done while the populace experiences the effects of the failures or successes and vicissitudes of daily progress in real, live time. Also, the mission statements of businesses do not include protecting everyone from injustice or providing for the common welfare. It's hard to make a profit without losers as well as winners.

And it should be so. And it is good -- as long as the powerful are prevented from the outright purchase of government - which, I think we can agree, has more or less happened in America. Especially since "Citizens United," a case that was not about citizens but PACs, and no one was united at all.

The Right tends to think of wealth as achieved in spite of, not because of, government programs. If this were true the whole world would be as wealthy as we are, because the one things that separates America IS our form of government and its specific programs. The irony is that the very protections that keep capitalism from devouring itself and collapsing are the ones which the business class hate the most. If CEOs were mandated to consider a business cycle of, say, two generations, as opposed to tomorrow's stock price or next month's financial reports, the society would be healthier and there would be far greater sustainability. Greater equality and social justice would be a by-product.

The petroleum industry is a perfect example of the disconnect. Only by looking at the short term does it make any sense to pursue more and more oil. We know someday it'll be over, but the markets open at 8:00 on Monday and if the business is to thrive, it has to do so NOW. And, as in any war, in business you go to war with the Army you have, as Rumsfeld once said.

Creating a more perfect union and deriving a steady flow of profits are often in conflict. Which is why both the markets and the government have their own experts, their own proven methods. The canard that a successful CEO is by definition a qualified political leader is just that, a canard. Looked at another way, on December 4, 1933, Joe Kennedy was the greatest criminal drug dealer in America. On December 5, 1933, he was a patriarch of a majestic political dynasty. Quite a transformation, except that the only difference was the ending of Prohibition. The man's abilities and qualities were the same.

I have great sympathy for those on the Right, whose answers to tough problems are simpler and more viscerally satisfying. The problem is, as history tells us, when spun out to their logical conclusions, the strong will always exploit the weak until either revolution, monarchy, oligarchy, fascism, or totalitarianism prevail. Good policies that include a robust social safety net and vigorous regulation of business prevent revolutions of the unwashed masses, and keep the CEO safely and happily in his mansion and boardroom.

And that takes lots of money. Dillinger robbed banks because that's where the money was. We tax the rich for the same reason.

"Who Benefits?" Is Not An Ideology.

2010-11-13T20:41:00.002-05:00

We start on facebook (of course), where I posted, "Letting the arsonists try and put out their own fire is a dumb plan, even for the American voting public. But at least with shared power the Republicans railing against "guv'ment" in general will be shooting at their own feet, too. Shame on grownups in the GOP for entertaining the idiocy of "mama grizzlies" and letting other nutcases into power. Now we'll see if they can tame 'em, too..."

My facebook friend and sparring partner Matthew responded, "sometimes Dave...I cant tell if you are too much into your ideology, hyperbole, or have no clue. lol. said with love."

Okay. Here's my reply, and I hope you'll indulge me...

Of course, Matt. Taken that way too. And be honest. You did not laugh out loud. You should have said LQTM, laughing quietly to myself... but hey, we were on the subject of hyperbole...

Listen, man. I don't have an ideology. I think for myself. I am a member of no party and the only wing I like is the chicken wing, and it better be hot as hell, with bleu cheese on the side, and celery - old school, upstate new york style.

I have until now come down on the side of the worker, as opposed to the person who inherits the company from his daddy. To me this is common sense. Protect the worker and not his bosses' bosses' bosses' boss - not because of ideology, but because his way of life needs protection and his CEO does not. It would be foolish to minister to the CEO's interests. He's doing just fine and always will.

There is no society of organisms in nature wherein the weak exploit the strong. None. It is always the other way around. The middle class didn't get lost somewhere on a road trip. It has been systematically poisoned and destroyed. Who benefited? Answer that, and you have the answer to the big questions.

As far as having a clue... Our nation is in deep trouble, our infrastructure crumbling, our middle class evaporating... but it's the very best of times for some, and they are laughing at both of us. That's a clue. You should take it, too. Said with love, Boyo.

Want to know what happened to your country? Look at who is prospering, and there you will find what happened to your country. There are winners and there are losers. Once upon a time, the American people reasoned that "winner take all" may not be the best approach to creating a stable nation... for this reason, it is no surprise that the "golden age" of America coincided with the heyday of the labor movement, and tax rates far higher for the wealthy than anything the "Commie" Obama harbors in his wildest dreams.

My "ideology" is: we should call things what they are. The American worker is toast. When will our country be healthy again? When the middle class is gaining back the ground they lost. Then, and only then.

And using "who benefits?" to find the source of the problem is not just for your country - it applies to any country, in any era. When systems of great inequality and suffering prevail, look to where the money goes - and there's your culprit. Count up the millions of foreclosed homes, and look at the Wall Street bonuses coming out higher than ever this year. Look who got richer when the economy tanked.

The deregulation folks. The GOP. Wall Street.

Frankly, I don't see hyperbole or ideology or cluelessness in any of this. But LOL?... ... puh-lease!

One More Time, With Feeling... Ed and I Go At It Again.

2010-09-11T12:07:00.007-04:00

Another exchange from facebook, brought here and presented by the GTL for your dining and dancing pleasure:

On Friday morning, September 10, 2010, Ed posted a link on his facebook page, stating: "I am flying the American flag in a moment of remembrance for 9/11."

A commendable sentiment, but with a Jingoistic edge, I thought. I responded, "Fly a flag for all the nations that lost souls on that day, not just ours." Ed responded with a rather sarcastic and puzzling post, "Not sure what other countries were attacked by terrorists on that day, but they should be honored as well."

Here's my reply:

Once again Ed? Nowhere do I say any other countries were attacked on 9/11. Please stop doing this. The straw man routine is crude and disingenuous, not to mention tiresome. My goal in these debates is to try to convince you to consider my opinions and ideas sincerely. To compare and contrast our philosophies and ideas in an effort to arrive at a reasonable set of solutions to real problems -- not to get zingers in and play at innuendo. I realize you are an adept and cunning arguer - but you needn't use a battering ram when a doorbell will suffice.

You're "not sure what other countries were attacked?" Really? You mean you actually think other countries "might" have been attacked on 9/11, you just forgot? Either you're confused, intentionally condescending, or employing a rhetorical flourish intended to mock my statement. I respect your intellect and know you know better. I am being sincere and would rather not be mocked, especially as you are a person who seeks to live by the doctrine of loving one's enemies, and believing that God loves all people, not just Americans.

When Americans are killed in terrorist attacks overseas, we fly U.S. flags at those sites. What is wrong with honoring the dead of other countries on this sad day, in addition to our own? The capitol of the world was attacked. There's enough grief to go around. Plenty of room for everyone.

New Yorkers are America's welcoming committee. If we are to assert our country's glorious exceptionalism in the arena of nations, we should at least be as hospitable to guests (and foreign cultures) as Islam instructs all Muslims to be in theirs.

People from everywhere, Muslims too, were killed on 9/11 -- not by Islam -- but by 19 crazed terrorists. The world as a whole is a colder, harsher place because of their depraved murderousness, and the misguided belief in the superiority of their own religion that fueled it.

Remembering the Dead, and the Living.

2010-09-11T11:03:00.005-04:00

I grew up going to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade on weekends with my father, watching the twin towers rise slowly, one floor at a time over lower Manhattan, from the most beautiful and iconic vantage point on Earth. In hot or cold weather, under cloudy, sunny, or rainy skies, at dusk when the bright window-eyed skyscrapers flecked the river with gold, or on a chilly morning like today's in a bright, brisk wind. These images are framed in my mind as indelibly as the sight of my own hand, now, in front of my face.

Today I want to mourn the loss of these buildings and the thousands who died within them, alongside everyone who lost something - or everything - on that sad day nine years ago. But saddest of all, I want to mourn the loss of the American spirit of tolerance and civic pride, our love of humanity, our belief in the saving strength of our unique form of government, and our embrace of the people of the world who came to New York - and still come - looking for a decent waking life and a better dream for the future.

Today that dream is receding beneath the crushing ugliness of our new post-9/11 culture, the fearfulness that shuts our eyes, minds, and hearts, the re-emergence of the lynch mob as the quintessential group expression of freedom, and the utter failure of the moneyed media to back us away from the abyss and ask us to listen for the quiet voices, the better angels of our nature.

Please remember with me that Muslims also died in those attacks, and that Americans come in all shapes, sizes, cultures and customs. Please remember with me that we are all children of one earth, of one universe, and for those of religious faith, of one God.

I want us to be clean again, purged of hate and fear. I want more than anything for this to be a day to remember love, to feel love, to forgive, and to ask forgiveness.

Where The Hate Comes From... A Liar, Not An Idiot.

2010-09-09T08:18:00.002-04:00

A word on Rush Limbaugh:

Isn't this the man who said it was treason to criticize the president during wartime? This goes beyond criticism into outright paranoid ranting. It's one thing when some rural bumpkin evangelist threatens to burn a Koran. It's another when the most powerful man in radio, who holds enormous influence over the Republican Party and its rabid followers, says this sort of stuff, and is met with silence by the MSM.

Shame on the media whores and hairdos who can't find enough courage to state the truth. And shame on anyone foolish enough to believe this self-aggrandizing weasel. Here's the money quote:

"America was built by people who reject everything Imam Obama stands for, reject everything Imam Obama is doing...Obama's propaganda is the propaganda of failed, dead regimes: the old Soviet Union, Cuba. Obama's railing against capitalism. He's railing against private property...Barack Obama is the antithesis of the founding of this country...Had Obama been around at the founding of this country and had he been known, he would be a joke in American history books today." -- Rush Limbaugh

Thanks to Slate's Doonesbury Daily Dose for the above quote.

Cancer?! Are You Sure It's Cancer?

2010-09-03T16:26:00.006-04:00

Ed and I have been having one hell of a time debating politics on facebook. As part of my pledge to not spill my political seed (as it were) on the dusty ground of facebook, I report here parts of an exchange (with edits) that held my attention for far too many hours this week:

Ed writes:

The US government is a lethargic, cancerous growth that continues to sap the vitality out of the country via taxes and is one of the most inefficient allocator [sic] of resources that exists.

To which the GTL replies:

If our government is a cancer, then the Constitution is the original mutated cell itself. I reject this, in the strongest possible terms. I believe, as the Preamble instructs us both, that the purpose of our government is to always strive toward a more perfect union, without corruption, which protects the welfare of all, and in which any one individual is equal in the eyes of the law to any other.

There is nothing cancerous about the Constitution.

If you think the government is a cancer, then you obviously must not agree that our nation has an exceptional destiny in the world. Remember, the United States of America is not a piece of land (the land was here first). It is not the people (there is no special American "race" or "gene"). The one and only thing that makes our nation great is the government for which the founding fathers devised the blueprint, with its emphasis on individual rights and the rule of law, the system of checks and balances, and the guarantee of equality.

With all due respect, and I mean that sincerely Ed, that kind of inflammatory rhetoric will only convince impressionable types that government cannot be fixed or improved, or worse, that it shouldn't be improved as a matter of principle. Once again, I reject this view, principally because the Constitution itself, in its Mission Statement - The Preamble -- seems likewise to reject it.

The cancer is greed, not government. Your favorite book does not say, "inefficient, bureaucratic government, with its expensive entitlement programs that discourage free markets and individual initiative, is the root of all evil." No. The Bible quite presciently (given how small an amount of money actually existed in ancient times) identifies the love of money as the root of all evil.

And so we know what evil looks like. And no one loves money more than those who choose to make the pursuit of tremendous loads of it their life's work. And the Mecca of those who put money first is Wall Street.

I KNOW you meet lots of people in your line of work about whom you must have serious moral and ethical concerns. I, on the other hand, know only a handful of investment bankers, venture capitalists, insurance executives, etc. Nevertheless, though the sample is small, they all say the same thing, with only slight variations:

Fuck the government.

Fuck the poor.

If I don't want to share I don't have to.

They acknowledge the failure of supply-side "Voodoo" Reaganomics, but want it to continue because it benefits them and their class.

And they all vote Republican.

Are you in, or are you out? With the Rich, or with the rest? Jesus chose his side. What side will YOU choose?

My Friend Ed And I Disagree (and it's ok).

2010-08-24T17:45:00.006-04:00

Ed and I are New Yorkers by birth and met in college. Earlier today he wrote the following about the plans for a Muslim cultural center a few blocks out of eyesight range of the Twin Towers site:

"this cultural [center] does not need to be so close to ground zero. It is not about religious freedom but rather about being sensitive to those who lost loved ones on 9-11."

Here's my reply:

There is no mosque planned for ground zero. None at all. No minarets over downtown, no muezzin calling believers to prayer over loudspeakers... and no line of sight between the twin towers site and Park 51. Also, the people building the cultural center are 100% American, like you, and me. If you don't like the idea of a Muslim outreach and community center-- don't join. When they come for my neighbor, they are coming for me. My Muslim neighbors' freedom is tantamount to my own. Be an American and stand up for the rights of your neighbors.

BTW, loved hanging with you and meeting your beautiful family. Go Bearcats! Go Tau!

Lest one mistakenly conclude that Liberals don't care about what's right, or that Conservatives are the sole custodians of morality in America:

Ted Olsen, Republican legal genius extraordinaire, whose wife died in the 9/11 attack, strongly rejects the idea that banning the cultural center is the proper way to show respect to the memory of our lost loved ones. In fact, we can show the dead our respect by NOT succumbing to racism and religious intolerance. Allowing bigots of any stripe to prevail would be the ultimate disrespect of their sacrifice.

Obama: Christian Racist or Muslim Extremist? The GOP Can't Decide.

2010-08-24T15:45:00.005-04:00

Is ANYBODY in the Mainstream Media fact-checking the paranoid extremists at all anymore?

Remember when the controversy over the President's religion centered on his twenty-five year relationship with the incendiary black preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

I seem to recall the deep "concern" on the part of his GOP adversaries that Obama's membership in Rev. Wright's Christian congregation -- and the pastor's speeches daring to call attention to America's racist past and present -- were proof of Mr. Obama's deep-seated fear and hatred of whites.

The question is almost too obvious to ask (which means of course that no one in the mainstream media has asked it). Nevertheless, here we go:

How can a person with a demonstrated twenty-five year history of Christian church attendance and a close relationship with a Christian minister suddenly become a radical Muslim?

If you're like me, the answer is obvious: He can't. He isn't.

Shame on every media hairdo who lacks the brainpower and guts to cut through the distractions, the flim-flam and lies, and do the sacred job of telling truth to power, and providing the people with the facts they need to fight against the lies of the Powerful.

Wake Up, America!

2010-08-20T11:28:00.003-04:00

There are no Islamic foreigners building mosques at ground zero.

1. The site is not at ground zero, and is not visible from ground zero.

2. The site is not a mosque, it is a community center. Pool, gym, dancing lessons... and some prayer space. Not a mosque. No minarets over Wall Street.

3. No foreigners involved. THE BUILDERS ARE AMERICANS.

Thank God for Al Franken and Keith Olberman, for telling it like it really is.

capitalism. Say it soft and it's almost like praying.

2010-08-13T22:35:00.001-04:00

Matt, I know a lot of people feel we have disastrously veered off course in this country, and they use the language of freedom fighters as if the government had been overthrown by enemies and saboteurs. They speak of unprecedented constitutional crises.

As hard as it may be for people to stomach, the Democrats and Obama (I'm not a Dem, BTW) swept into power fair and square by a margin of millions of votes from a nation desperate for their ship of state, riddled with holes and sinking fast under a thick flak of Voodoo Reaganomics (since discredited by none other than Greenspan himself) and Republican deregulation and derivatives trading schemes, to remain afloat.

To me, the only new or shocking thing about Obama is his race. He is a far more centrist, level-headed thinker than his predecessor. His "socialist" tax plan is to roll back the tax rates to those instituted by Ronald Reagan. Some Socialist!

But I digress. In my view, the REAL constitutional crisis is the total takeover of our government and economy by Big Business and the Rich, who own the media and are by far a right-wing bunch. So they howl about "liberal media" -- a canard to distract us -- while it's their own Limbaughs and Becks and O'Reillys who are the real dominant force... there is a media bias in this country, and it's hopelessly Right-Wing... and instead of holding the Big Business predators accountable, we spin ourselves into hysterics in a stupid "culture war" that leaves the goal totally undefended.

Which works too beautifully to not have been the plan from the beginning.

My political policy is this: whatever strengthens the middle class is good for the country, whatever weakens the middle class is bad for this country. There is no organism in nature in which the weak exploit the strong. Think of that. The powerful, the rich, always go too far -- if no one stops them.

I also appreciate Capitalism. I love it. Really. Capitalism is the greatest economic source of energy in the world. Capitalism is great because it rests on competition. Under Capitalism the businessman says (unless he's not REALLY a Capitalist but a... fascist...?), 'Hey, I'm an energy company. Regulate fossil fuels all you want. Write the strictest pollution laws you can, ones which our great-grandchildren will thank us for. Protect the planet, the oceans, the ice caps. It doesn't matter how costly the upgrades willl be, because we have CAPITALISM! COMPETITION! And Capitalism posits that if I can't figure out a way to profit despite regulation in the public interest-- then someone else who can, WILL! And I won't! And that's okay! That's entrepreneurship!"

Capitalism. Say it soft and it's almost like praying.

Capitalism is like Plutonium: incredibly powerful and capable of creating virtually limitless capacity for expansion (on the one hand), but also highly dangerous and requiring enormous, redundant safety apparatus (on the other hand) in order to not be destroyed by the very power we would harness and control for good.

Capitalism thrives under regulation because regulation protects the market from excessive risk and mitigates the risk of using such powerful fuel. Regulation is also intended to fol the greedy and corrupt wall street raider from doing too much damage. Remove all that protection and we have... Bush economics...in fact, we live today in Republican Heaven... GOP Utopia... because they got what they wanted. Deregulated industry, fear on Main Street, and war all the time.

Why aren't they happy?

I Waste My Blogging Juice At Facebook.

2010-08-13T19:25:00.002-04:00

I have readers, I know, because you come up to me and ask where I've been. Well, the title up there tells the story. I've been spilling my seed, as it were, politically as it were, over on people's comment streams on Facebook. Well, I just posted the following reply to a new friend who firmly believes in objective morality. The subject came up while chatting about Muslims' right to build mosques in American cities. It's edited a little. Hope you enjoy it. Give me some feedback and I'll respond!

Matt, I also like your turn of phrase regarding defending the rights of those who would destroy us. I think this subject is a little wider than one lane and can allow a bunch of opposing ideas to co-exist and still bear operational fruit.

I agree that there are ideologies which seek to destroy our country. In fact, there are lots of groups of Right-wing hotheads in our own country, talking about open war with the U.S. government, and calling on "patriots" to water the tree of liberty with blood. These are invariably sore-headed and benighted white men who feel, perhaps a bit justifiably, that the country isn't as nice a place to to be a white man in as it once was. (disclaimer: I am a white man.) They offer a nice "vanilla" option to our menu of mostly brown terrorists, and interesting "period" clothing too, like the tricorner hat, for example.

To me, these people are more dangerous than Islamists. For one thing, they fit in better (when they take the tricorn off). They also have voting rights and a stake in American culture. If Osama bin Laden walked down the street, we'd recognize him. Tim McVeigh, I'm not so sure.

The question we arrive at, Matthew, is where we decide to curtail these dangerous groups' rights to speak and assemble. As you would surely agree, the Constitution is not a suicide pact and we have the unquestionable right to defend ourselves, and that includes the right to silence a group or arrest their leaders when it is necessary to national security.

That necessity, under our constitution, is decided by the judiciary branch. If the Supreme Court denies your case, it's over. It ends. You stop funding the Contras or torturing gang leaders or water boarding Iraqis or whatever. God bless America.

Even Conservatives can fathom that the constitution isn't "just a piece of paper," despite what their most recent president would have them believe. Taking away a human being's constitutionally-protected rights is no small matter. It is a grave and serious matter. In my line of work (psych hospitals) we can hold you in locked confinement for 72 hours against your will. If after 72 you still wish to be released, a judge comes to the hospital for a hearing. If the hospital prevails, you remain locked in. Otherwise, you are released at once.

In practice, the hearings occur far less often than you would imagine. The hospital usually caves, knowing that the bar at which a judge will take away a patient's right to self-determination is very high. Frankly psychotic people have the same rights we do, as long as they are not a danger to themselves or others. You can wear a tinfoil hat to your hearing and soliloquize about the coming Alpha Centaurian Sex Monkey Invasion and still sleep in your own bed tonight. (Unless the Freemasons get to you!)

So I know how precious the right to speak and assemble is. And we have to tolerate anti-American ideas. To be America, we must protect everyone's rights equally or they are not "rights." We can stop anti-American acts, but not ideas.

That's why America is great. In America, think and say whatever you want, even if what you want is to destroy America. Just DON'T BREAK THE LAW.

Anger Management. The Language of Winners. Even the Venerable.

2010-03-28T10:35:00.011-04:00

All you Tea-baggers out there, consider yourselves on notice:

You have always assumed, perhaps rightly at times, that Liberals won't fight back when you threaten us with violence; that we hate fighting and conflict at any cost and, abject cowards, show up at a gunfight with a knife and a white flag - if we show up at all.

I advise you not to lay too much reliance upon this passel of nonsense today. One gift President Obama has given the Left is permission to feel powerful, like winners. To let the seductive serum of testosterone, endorphins, and victory flow through our veins. So don't expect the same old Liberal welcome when you come to piss down my back and tell me it's raining, when you come bearing bricks and accusations of treason.

Can you imagine: Ignorant, violent thugs breaking windows, cutting gas lines, threatening murder, destroying private property - flouting the most basic laws of civilized society for the protection of life and property - and then lecturing US us on what constitutes patriotism?

How stupid do you think I am?!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you cannot be a patriotic U.S. citizen while violating its most basic laws against violence and protection of private property.

I say you're the fascists, you racist, homophobic, law-breaking criminal scrotum-suckers!

... so remember all this, especially before you come to throw bricks through the
windows of GTL Headquarters.

* * * * *

And to you, my erstwhile fellow Liberals, I would like to say the following:

Wake up!

We WON!!

It is now time to change the vocabulary, to steer the juggernaut of popular opinion with new, powerful phrases, with ringing new language as befits your proud accomplishment. Time for a victory lap around the Semiotic track, and a new set of signs pointing our American millions away from the brink of psychotic collapse, toward greater equality and perhaps even justice.

Even you, Frank Rich, venerable sage of the New York Times, are falling into the language of defeat:

It's not a health care BILL. Stop calling it a health care BILL.

IT IS A HEALTH CARE LAW.

I know this is not relevant to the content of your story in today's paper, Mr. Rich, and I count myself as a grateful fan of your sanity and your newspaper columns. But it is important nonetheless. Critically important. The words you use matter. A lot.

And, as the Right has taught us over the years, who owns the language owns the narrative.

America loves a winner. The health care law will be fabulously popular with voters, and soon.

It is high time for us to be the winners, to feel it, and to name what we won fair and square.

The Party of Bad Behavior

2010-03-23T16:32:00.004-04:00

Think, friends.

Think back to the era when Republicans were in their ascendancy. When radical "conservatives" seized control of Congress, then the White House, then the Supreme Court and the media.

How many Republican offices were vandalized then?

How many screaming Democrats hurled racial or homophobic slurs at elected officials - or accused a president of being a liar, DURING a state of the union address??

How many liberals threatened to use violence to "water the tree of liberty?"

In short, how many liberals felt the need to act out in shameful, degrading and even illegal ways to express their displeasure at having lost a fair fight in a political contest? How many liberals find it easy to disregard the rule of law when they feel justified?

None. Not one.

If we turn off the sound and look only at the behavior, which group is the dangerous one? Which is the saner?

To you mean-spirited, right-wing jihadists - and you know who you are - I say this:

You shame yourself and your party. Given your druthers, you'd shame our whole country, and all Americans.

You may not break the rules because you are losing the game.

A New Speech for our Mos Tone Def President

2010-01-26T07:38:00.008-05:00

Now President Obama is calling for a spending freeze for most social programs, with increased spending for the military and defense-related projects.

And here I was, confusing him with a Democrat.

Who would have guessed a year ago that this man would prove to be just another clueless hack, writing and starring in the next round of gut-churning Republican advertisements and being their most effective "change agent," only not the kind he envisioned?

The President should be saying every day, in every way, from every podium in the nation, that the Democrats are the party that saved the nation from calamity after the Republicans, with eight years of one-party-control bliss - almost sent us careening over the edge of the world.

THAT is the message. I wish this president had the courage of say... John Stewart or Al Franken.

I bring you now to a podium in a crowded gym somewhere in America. President Obama scans the crowd, smiles into the cameras, and begins:

"We saved the country!"

He looks deep into the cameras and speaks in the round, measured, pitch-perfect tones he employed in his campaign so long ago, when fear of real disaster actually woke the people up from the narcotic haze of Republican-fueled patriotism, fear, and consumerism in which we were mired neck-deep.

"Republicans on Wall Street took your home and your job, ruined your retirement in an enormous thirty-year shell game, got filthier rich than you can ever imagine, and now they want you to believe that WE are irresponsible - because we dared to step in and clean up their mess?! Nuh- UNH America, I KNOW you're not stupid enough to fall for that!"

(We may need to presidentialize and de-blackify that statement a little, but you get the idea.)

"Remember the Weapons of Mass Destruction that weren't there, and how we lost a war in one country to go into another, and sent our children to die in Iraq for no good reason?!"

"My predecessor and his people tortured prisoners, guilty and innocent alike, giving Al Qaeda the best recruiting tool they could imagine, AND every other gift on their wish list for eight long years! But thanks to us, the world respects us again!"

"Now they want to say I failed to bring bipartisanship to Washington? Do you really believe that? That I - ME - that I alone failed to bring them to the table?! If you believe that, America, I don't want your vote, give it to Sarah Palin. But thankfully, you are ALL too smart to fall for that line, AGAIN."

"They wanted health care to be my Waterloo, for the agenda you voted me in on to fail! Not ONE SINGLE REPUBLICAN voted against the insurance industry. Not ONE voted against the pharmaceutical industry. Not ONE voted to reduce the deficit by billions AND insure millions of uninsured Americans in one stroke of my pen."

"But they'd have you believe it is my agenda that is the dangerous one. Don't believe that either. Because it's YOUR agenda, America, the one we fought for, and won for, and I will not let go down in flames, as God is my witness!"

"They told you that living wills were death panels. Did you believe THAT?! Of course not. We all want our elderly family members to tell us their wishes if they should become too ill to speak for themselves. I'm proud of the legislation that would help them do that. But these disingenuous opponents of public health turned that into 'death panels'." Are we going to stand for that? Why, these lying Republicans ALL have living wills of their own, as do I and millions of common-sense Americans who care about their parents and grandparents, and their children, who will make those hard choices if we do not do it first in a living will, and don't want needless suffering and expense at the end of life."

"Noooo, no, America. You have got to stand UP. Stand UP with ME and tell them, 'I am not the dumb patsy I was when you lied to me for eight long years of war and busted banks, and ruined futures. I am NOT the scared xenophobe you led around by the nose and tricked into giving up my civil liberties, and in whose name you tortured prisoners and destroyed two hundred years of self-respect as a nation.'"

"Hell NO!"

"They will NOT do this again!"

"I will throw my body into the line of fire to protect YOU, my fellow citizens, from retreating back into those dark days!"

"Hell, NO, America! Stand together, and stand with me, and stand up for the things we fought together for a year ago!"

At Least He's Not A Democrat...

2009-10-27T23:13:00.003-04:00

Asshole of the Year? Read it yourself.

Ted Kennedy, R.I.P.

2009-08-26T07:20:00.002-04:00

Greetings from the wilderness, my friends.

Today is a sad one for American politics. Ted Kennedy has died. Not that you didn't know already.

I have not blogged in many months - for reasons of personal sanity, I suppose - but I have to let you know I'm still here, still observing, still filled to the brim with thoughts and feelings regarding the runaway train of American culture and politics. And that I have to share this sad moment with you, now that Senator Ted Kennedy has died.

In spite of his great wealth, power, and fame, Ted Kennedy was still and will remain in memory a foot soldier in the war to achieve the goals of the Founding Fathers, that we all may live to realize the pursuit of happiness, and that we obtain that elusive state known simply as "liberty."

Turn your TVs off, people. Go talk to someone about Ted, about America, and about each other. If we do that we'll be alright.

Thank you.

Not Your Grandfather's Filibuster

2009-04-30T22:39:00.002-04:00

There's a photo in an old Life magazine from the Great Depression showing two or three exhausted young couples, days into a dance contest, desperately clinging to one another as they try to stay on their feet long enough to beat out the competition for a cash prize.

As the Democrats inch closer to the magic sixty-senator majority, it is useful to remember this: Democrats do not fall in line with one like mind, as Tom DeLay's Republicans once did. Sixty Democrats do not mean sixty votes, and whether Norm Coleman continues to dance on his own grave or lies down in it with whatever semblance of dignity he has left, the Democrats will not be overpowering the Republicans with a phalanx of linked arms and shields just yet.

And so, the filibuster will live.

My old understanding of the filibuster included images like those young dance contestants: bleary-eyed, disheveled senators standing in woozy exhaustion, refusing to relinquish the floor for a vote, blocking legislation they could not otherwise fend off. Images out of Frank Capra, of Jimmy Stewart gone to Washington to fight for the Little Guy. Back then, in the halcyon days, to filibuster was to engage in a marathon of physical and oratorical endurance.

Somehow, the filibuster of modern times has taken on a different, milder meaning. Today, if a piece of controversial Senate legislation leaves committee without a guaranteed sixty votes, it is considered FILIBUSTERED.

Now, the Gun-Toting Liberal loves legislation that undoes the excesses of our would-be corporate feudal overlords. I love legislation that protects the weak from the powerful, the outcast from the mob, the prisoner from his would-be torturer.

And like a tree standing by the riverside, the GTL will not be moved. I want my old filibuster BACK.

What if there were, say, fifty-five guaranteed votes for a worthy piece of legislation, not quite enough to guarantee success, but a clear majority nonetheless?

Instead of crying, "we don't have the requisite sixty votes, so we won't bring it to the floor for debate," fellow Liberals and other democrats ought to just say:

"To Hell with it. Let 'em filibuster."

If the Republicans want to block votes on popular bills regarding medical research, climate change, torture, secret spying, deregulation of major industries, and the undoing of dozens of other toxic talismans of our recent foray into one-party wingnut rule, make them do it the old-fashioned way. Make them talk for twenty-four hours. Hell, make 'em stand there for ten days. Make them fight against the tide of the people's will with their bodies, their sweat, their wheezing, hoarse voices - and do it in full view of the cameras and scribes.

In short, the time has come to call the bluff.

Every opposition party has the procedural right to filibuster, but in recent times only the Republicans have been daring enough to use it so flagrantly, at the drop of a hat they drop themselves. When Democrats were in the minority back in the nineties, and dared to filibuster, dared to shake their dainty little girl-fists at the mighty-whitey-Righties, the GOP ferociously threatened the Nuclear Option - destroying the filibuster outright through cunning procedural trickery and being done, once and for all, with the concept of an "opposition party."

Hard to believe, I know, since Republicans today hold the record on filibusters.

Shameless hypocrites.

So I say, let 'em filibuster all they want. But make 'em do it slow, one spoken word at a time, one speaker, one speech at a time, until there is nothing left to say. Make them kick it old-school, or just kick the bucket.

The Right will never go away, will never quit, will never find a tactic too unscrupulous, or an insinuation too low. Having lost their power we see their lust for power all the more clearly in the bare light of day.

So let 'em fight the tide. Let 'em hold the floor like those desperate, starving, poor depression-era couples, propping themselves up as they dance, dance, dance for the one win that will revive their hopes in desperate times.

Passover Comes Late. Ten New Plagues, Bush-style.

2009-04-16T22:37:00.005-04:00

A comparison of the plagues God inflicted upon the Egyptians and those George W. Bush inflicted upon prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Hebrew Bible plagues
1. blood.
2. frogs.
3. lice.
4. beasts or flies.
5. disease on livestock.
6. boils.
7. burning hail.
8. locusts.
9. darkness.
10. death of the first-born.

Bush Torture Memo Plagues
1. attention grasp.
2. walling.
3. facial hold.
4. facial slap (insult slap).
5. cramped confinement
6. wall standing.
7. stress positions.
8. sleep deprivation.
9. insects placed in a confinement box.
10. the waterboard.

Read here for the grim blow-by-blow. Watch in slow motion as a proud nation debases itself out of fear.

Why does this stuff always come in tens?

The Socialists At Our Door. Utopia Sucks. Reagan's Wrong Revolution.

2009-03-10T18:03:00.006-04:00

The Republican banshee patrol is way out in front howling that Obama is inflicting "Socialism" on an unsuspecting American public.

They seem to have forgotten some very important things.

First, you can't howl about class warfare when you have been waging it against the middle class, successfully, for thirty years. Only hard-core conservatives are angry at the Left. Only Phil Gramm is angry at the "whiners" that make up 99% of our society.

Second, there actually is a philosophy called Socialism, and it isn't whatever Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Amateur Plumber seem to think it is. Socialists believe in abolishing private property. Say to any normal person that Obama wants to abolish private property and they will, quite properly, call you a crank.

There is only one Socialist in the federal government: Bernie Sanders, of Burlington, Vermont. For some reason, as the avatar of the new threat to our existence, no one has bothered to ask Bernie about Comrade Obama and their plan for world overthrow.

Reality matters.

Third, The Right has been calling for deregulation of all major industries for forty years, and they got their wish under George W. Bush. For some weird reason, Americans actually seem able to remember and retain this bit of information.

So Americans realize that we are living in the halcyon afterglow of the GOP's grand experiment in "trickle down" economics and unregulated financial, energy, and investment sectors. We are living in the henhouse they turned over, a decade ago, to the foxes.

Because the GOP has learned nothing at all from their own mistakes, and still demand lower taxes for the rich and big business as a fix for every problem, we can only assume that they stand behind their disastrous policies and are happy with the results. In short, as I have been saying for years now, America today is a Republican Utopia. Will anyone on the Right stand up and say, "we blew it"?

I am also waiting to hear a "conservative" articulate what the country now knows: Ronald Reagan was wrong. Simply, finally, disastrously, wrong. Government must be about solutions to problems the marketplace cannot fix and in fact often creates.

Good government matters a LOT. Reagan told us that government is always the problem. He presented this as a moral conviction that just happened to enrich his supporters and make Liberal values seem not only quaint, but harmful to society.

Finally, George W. Bush and his cadre of power-mad corporate thieves told so many lies, so boldly and shamelessly, that no one believes anything they have to say anymore and won't again for a long, long time. House and Senate Republicans should have repudiated Bush when it mattered. No one believes them when they try it now.

Read Bob Herbert today. The GTL is grateful for this plain-speaking writer's assessment of what ails us.

Greed In America: Their Votes Say No But Their Eyes Say Yes

2009-02-16T22:53:00.008-05:00

There are 535 congressmen and women in the House and Senate.

Obama's stimulus package garnered a paltry three Republican votes in the Senate, and not a single one in the House.

I suggest our elected officials follow this advice:

If you voted against it, don't accept the money. Just say no. Be like your hero Sarah Palin, telling the government off and refusing the money for that famous Bridge to Nowhere.

Except that Sarah Lee kept the money.

A word of warning from the GTL to the GOP: That money is hot. Touch it and get burned.

You've been warned.

America to Republicans: How Can we Miss You When You Won't Go Away?

2009-02-13T07:20:00.005-05:00

Obama shoots - he scores!

The stimulus package is a done deal, and relief will be coming to various sectors of our economy soon.

So why does it feel so unlike a victory, as Paul Krugman points out in today's NY Times??

The recent election was not just a volley in the table-tennis match of Right/left politics in America. It was evidence of a tectonic shift in the consciousness of our nation about what constitutes good governement, and what is indeed "voodoo," "snake oil," or as we like to call it here at GTL HQ, "pure bullshit."

We stand as a nation, hands soiled and blistered, fresh from burying the broken and discredited philosophy which was Ronald Reagan's legacy. "Reaganomics," also known as "supply-side" and "trickle-down" economic theory, lived a rock start's life: live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.

The ascent was spectacular, as the personal fortunes of the richest Americans will attest. But like all addictions, the greed of our business tycoons and their wealthy political puppets burned out in a blizzard of addict-lies, addict-recriminations, and addict-denial.

Today almost all of us understand that Reaganomics was a failure. Tax cuts for the rich and for big business do not result in wealth "trickling down." The average American stands woefully behind his or her grandparents in wages, job security, pension rights, and savings.

It's serious. Very serious.

Somebody forgot to tell the losing side.

The nation is flatlining.

Rush Limbaugh, the new spiritual and policy-making leader of the Republicans, hopes Obama fails in rescuing our nation. He and his cronies believe that the ticket to retaking power for the Right is to let the patient die on the table.

Just in case you were ever going to respect the Republican Party again, remember this moment.

GOP: Party before Country.

What's Good About Bad Times. Why Liberalism Is Not An Ideology (and Conservatism Is).

2009-02-08T08:57:00.012-05:00

One good thing about the current collapse of our economy and society in general is that it plucks us from the realm of debating theories of government and unceremoniously drops us, hard, onto the pavement of reality.

Under Bush and in the wake of 9/11, the Right famously mocked the "reality-based community" for not seeing radical Islam as the new "Soviet Threat Plus" that required all-out war. The Right saw no distinction between the old USSR, with its thousands of nuclear warheads ready to launch at the U.S. and our allies around the world, and Al Qaeda, a small fringe group of violent wingnuts within the larger culture of Islam, who were so unpopular that they had to hide in Allah-forsaken hellholes like Afghanistan and Yemen just to survive.

When reality-based folks dared to mention that no credible intelligence linked Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, and that weapons inspections were working just fine, thank you, the sigh of exasperation on the Right could be heard across the land like the wheeze of a dying giant:

Who cares if Saddam Hussein sought to help Bin Laden or destroy him? Who cares if there really are WMD's? Who cares what the difference is between Shiites and Sunnis? Who cares what's real?

Who cares! Who cares! Who Cares! This attitude eventually reached its comical apotheosis in Sarah Palin's "drill, baby, drill!" rallies, where revelers so thoroughly delighted in angering imagined "elites" with belligerent right-wing nonsense that they completely forgot the real, enormous problems looming over us all, problems that actually need real solutions.

This is why they lost not only the election, but millions of reliable future voters. It seems that scaring people who are already truly terrified about losing everything they have is far less effective than scaring comfortable people who are merely angry, ignorant, and bigoted.

The delusional Republican ideology is not confined to the Bible belt. At the top of the economic food chain this same dismissal of reality allowed the world of extreme financial voodoo to thrive. Giving carte blanche to enormous investment banks and high-flying Wall Street tycoons to create their own speculative instruments, make their own rules, and police themselves fit as nicely into right-wing economic ideology as invading Iraq fit into Right-wing paranoia left over from the fall of the USSR.

Reality, international cooperation, economic oversight, measured investigation and response to problems - in short, the careful business of statesmanship - were ridiculed as liberal holdovers from more innocent, pie-in-the-sky days. Weapons inspections and sanctions were out, secret prisons and torture were in.

Lofty rhetoric always falls before the alter of the Gods of Stomach and Skin, of Empty Pockets and Want. Desperate hordes of formerly-middle-class workers don't have much need for think tanks and policy debates.

Today we teeter on the brink of a new great depression, and the country has loudly stated its desperate hope that our new president will be able to break the partisan blockades and rescue the nation as it hurdles toward a very "reality-based" cliff. And it is the GTL's position that he can succeed, with or without Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and their angry mob of "real Americans."

It occurs to me, as I read the saga of a wounded Republican party, cuckolded by the people's love affair with Barack Obama and held in the sweaty thrall of Limbaugh, that the Left is fighting for the survival of our country and our way of life, recognizing the need to solve actual problems in actual time, with actual human consequences should they - we - fail.

Reality is not ideological.

By contrast, the Right continues to labor in the battle not against economic collapse, starvation, the closing of hospitals for the poor and foreclosures of millions of homes of the recently-not-poor, but against "liberals" and "socialists" on the Left, who were, as we recall, a blip on the radar of American politics when the disastrous policies that brought us to this historic, imperiled moment were concocted.

McCain famously stated during the presidential campaign that Obama would gladly "lose a war to win an election." How shameful that no one called him out on this and beat him about the knickers with a rattan cane like the prep-school bully gone to seed that he is. Especially since, as we now see, the Republicans seem to be clearly articulating their new rallying idea:

"If Barack Obama and the Democrats succeed in preventing disaster, we'll never stand a chance of winning an election against them later. They must fail."

The Republicans' playbook is open for all to see:

We are willing to lose our country to win this war. No, not the war in Afghanistan. Not the one in Iraq. It's the liberal majority here, at home, who is the real enemy.

Party before Country.

The real war, in which we must sacrifice everything our nation has and holds dear, is against ourselves.

What Don't You F****ng Understand, Batman?

2009-02-05T23:47:00.005-05:00

Many thanks to Andrew Sullivan for posting this video. I laughed hard.
I'm finding it hard to like this Christian Bale. I didn't think his performance in the Dark Knight was remarkable at all. But I have to give credit where it's due; here, under RevoLucian's direction - he shines.

It's all funny but it really kicks into high gear at about fifty seconds or so.
Listen to it carefully and answer me: wouldn't this make a good new national anthem?

Let The Payback "Trickle Down." The Lie Of Our Times. There Will Be Blood. He Hopes We Fail.

2009-02-01T09:23:00.008-05:00

If you want to understand where the anger comes from that fuels the GTL to blog away his beautiful Sunday morning, read this article in today's Boston Globe about the closing of a mental health clinic for the poorest, riskiest, sickest members of the community.

It will help you understand the murder of the American economy by ultra-rich sociopaths on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. in its proper terms. For every sleek, oily, alpha-male piece of shit who scammed his way into a corner office in Manhattan and a McMansion in Westchester based on credit default swaps and esoteric derivatives, there's an army of human wreckage who pay the bill in blood when it finally comes due.

Maureen Dowd has the right idea about making these sick, twisted greed addicts return the spoils of the class war they have been winning since Ronald Reagan came along and told them we as a nation didn't have to take care of each other after all. Remember when he said, "there was a war on poverty, and poverty won"? It was somewhere between his other great sayings, "we begin bombing in five minutes," and "Contras? What are Contras?"

Reagan was by turns pithy, clever, racist, anti-worker, and catastrophically horrendous as president - unless you were rich and powerful at the beginning. If you were, you came out of Reaganomics with your fortunes not only intact but metastasized into monstrous private tax-sheltered permanent estates, tumors of the greed cancer upon our collective body that we now have little hope of surviving.

The filthy rich, the corporate insiders, whom W. would famously describe as his "base," came to believe that they could go on developing ever-cleverer schemes for redistributing wealth to the top of our economic ladder without any consequences at all. The benefits for the rest of us would "trickle down."

Trickle down. The lie of our times. The curse of our culture and a diseased philosophy even before it was ever put into practice. "The slaves are starving, so make the masters' portions bigger. Think of the abundance in table scraps!"

Soon people are going to be calling for the blood of the rich. The homeless and mentally ill, the penniless veterans and formerly middle-class poor are going to realize, as Malcom X did forty years ago, that waiting for your enemy to extend his hand in true support and friendship is no substitute for a genuine plan of action.

Make no mistake. People are going to die because of Phil Gramm, deregulation of financial institutions and banks. People will die without medicine or a place to live. People will die of shame at being unable to care for their children.

Maureen Dowd's plan, to force the evildoers of our blasted economy to give the booty back, will never work and would not help the economy one whit, except symbolically. However, when hedge-fund managers begin to fear for their children's lives, start worrying that their maids or drivers might slit their throats in their sleep, a new threshold will have been crossed.

It is right around the corner. I can feel it. Can you?

The GTL doesn't advocate violence. I would prefer by orders of magnitude a bloodless fix to our financial holocaust. But if the architects of the disaster have to 'fess up and seek forgiveness as a precursor to change, don't hold your breath. It won't happen. Even as we speak, Republicans are rallying not to their constituents' aid, but to the swarthy flanks of their philosophical and spiritual leader, Rush Limbaugh, who has come to feel so safe and secure in his own position that he can say out loud what his fellow billionaires are more wisely keeping to themselves:

"I hope he fails."

If Obama can stop the economic slide into oblivion, rescue the American people from the depths of poverty and despair, most of us would think of it as a good thing. Not so Mr. Limbaugh, and as it appears now, wheresover goeth Rush Limbaugh, there goeth the Republican Party. Listen here and make up your mind.

You have yourselves a beautiful shiny day, my friends. But remain vigilant, and as always, keep your powder dry. In the fight for good, for the people of our great land, and in the fight for economic and social justice, it's always high noon, always do-or-die.

Brain Tumor? Chemical Imbalance? Andy Card Brings The Crazy

2009-01-31T11:49:00.005-05:00

Former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card is disappointed because Obama doesn't show the same respect for the Office of the President that George W. Bush, his Dad, and Ronald Reagan did.

They showed their respect by wearing jackets and ties, he says.

So let's get this straight:

It's okay to launch illegal wars, authorize torture, spy on Americans, and reveal the identities of undercover agents as retaliation for unflattering press coverage (plus lots, lots more), as long as you're dressed for dinner.

Is that it, Andy Card?

Am I the one who's crazy? I think showing respect for the Presidency is tied inextricably to protecting and defending the Constitution, honoring the separation of powers, and a host of other things that can be done, as far as I remember, with or without a jacket and tie.

Let me hear you, friends. I'm in need of a reality-based check-in.

I guess this will continue to happen until W. and his gang of thugs are properly shamed and disgraced.

One thing is for sure, if we have to wait for the Democrats to do the right thing, we'll be waiting a Very. Long. Time.

Fast Times

2009-01-24T23:42:00.008-05:00

Those who are saying Obama can't rapidly change our country for the better should ask themselves this:

How rapidly did George W. Bush change our country for the worse?

In my recollection, it happened almost instantaneously.

He performed the coup de grace on our doddering electoral system on the way into office.

He then stood stunned and impotent as cities went down in flames and flood, and ruined our chances of catching Osama Bin Laden with trumped-up war in Iraq and endless deployments. He goaded our financial system as it ran amok, wrecked the American system of checks and balances, gutted the Bill of Rights, and all but annihilated our international reputation for human rights and justice.

And that was only in his first term.

So there's a precedent for swift action. Now we'll see if it works as well for good government as for bad.

It's a good thing W. is a lazy man, or it could have been a lot worse. Just think, these and many other innovations (signing statements, abstinence-only family planning, vice-presidential secession from the executive branch) occurred despite W.'s record-setting presidential vacations: while Rome and Baghdad burned, the man spent one day out of four on vacation. Two full years' worth. "Working vacations," he explained.

It's hard work dismantling a society.

But then came January 20th. Now, in one day, Obama has reversed course on some of the worst policies ever promulgated by any politician anywhere, and though it's uphill from here and there are many nigh-unsolvable problems down the road, today we can feel like the nation finally got a good day's work out of its chief executive.

GOP Follies: Mighty Whitey Brings The Stupid

2009-01-24T12:23:00.010-05:00

"So it's historical because of his skin tone? Isn't that a racist idea?"
- Tom Hoefling, of America's Revival

"Obama is a cult."
- Rush Limbaugh

"When he's inaugurated and the lame don't walk and the blind don't see, there's going to be some gravely disappointed Starbucks baristas out there."
- Tucker Carlson

Oh, where to begin?!

The rage on the Right over their wholesale drubbing in the last election is almost - not quite, but almost - overshadowed by the utter stupidity of their rhetoric. Or perhaps even more so by their ignorance and prejudice about the American people. Or their sheer nastiness and hatred of the new President and those who elected him. Or by their selective amnesia.

Take your pick, America.

Ever since the "referendum on Socialism" - you know, the presidential election - the fever pitch of the anger on the losing side has been approaching health-threatening decibel levels. Ulcers abound. Medicine cabinets are disgorging their palliatives, their headache remedies, their sleep aids, all across Red America.

In these new days of hope, the dysfunction on the Right presents an embarrassment of riches to the alert observer. But since our retirement accounts are gone, our investments aren't worth the paper upon which they're printed, and our basic necessities are costing more and more every day, these may be the only riches we see for awhile. Unfortunately, you can't eat schadenfreude.

But let's continue.

The stupidest and most inane of the above statements, although they are all infinitely and therefore equally stupid, might be from Tucker Carlson.

Carlson is a famous celebrity, a multi-millionaire with glamorous friends, access to the best tables in the finest restaurants in the world, and every luxury and every convenience money can buy at his fingertips. But he's not an elite. The thirty-year old coffee pourer down at Starbucks, struggling to make ends meet on ten bucks an hour, is. This ridiculous meme once held magic, and Joe the Plumber had a grand old time hating a coffee shop worker instead of the robber-barons who bled his country dry.

Fine. No latte for you, Joe Six-Pack. Have another Bud Lite. And by the way, they come in thirty-packs now. No need to gas up the Hummer.

The idea that Democrats and Liberals are elites while jackasses like Tucker Carlson, Billionaire cigar connoisseur Rush Limbaugh, and Ivy-League blue-blood George W. Bush are the Salt of the Earth is so factually wrong, so entirely stupid, that only a dyed-in-the-wool True Believer could buy it. Shame on us that it worked for so long.

But it doesn't now, and somebody forgot to tell poor old Tucker and his ego-bruised cohort.

Fifty-two percent of voters chose Obama. They came from all walks of life, all races, women, men, the young, the old. Soldiers, housewives, teachers, minimum-wage factory workers.

It's true that John "Bomb Iran" McCain locked up the votes of less-educated, white, evangelical, rural blue-collar Americans. Does the Right really hope that someday this constituency -of which they are not remotely a part - will hold the keys to the economy, the nuclear launch codes, the Courts, the very Constitution?

The truth is, Tucker and Rush and Ann and Glenn and Michelle - and W. - hate their constituents as much or more than the "elites" they scream about whenever someone points a camera at them. What coal mine does Tucker Carlson work in, what oil rig does he wrangle? What welding school educated him? What Baptist tent-revival preacher saved his soul? What God-fearing man does Michelle Malkin subordinate herself to?

Nah. All high-grade, nitrogen-rich, fertilizer-ready bullshit. Tucker Carlson, George W. Bush, and every last Republican leader are in fact the elite of the elites, the winners at the top of a very tall ladder of privilege. Harvard, Yale, The Wharton School. Show me a Right-wing power broker who went to Oral Roberts University, Ole Miss, DeVry Tech, or any public college anywhere, and I'll show you... hell, just show me one. 'Cause I don't think there are any.

I want our leaders to be smart. Very, very smart, and to know the world well, not just our little corner of it. I want our leaders to be readers, and thinkers, and consumers of culture. I want them to know their history and literature, their poetry. They should be well-traveled, and able to entertain many worldviews at once. They should know fine wines and how to handle salad forks and speak French and do all the things diplomats do, not because these things are intrinsically important, but because world leaders value civility and aesthetic depth.

Can you imagine Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin trying to hold his own at a State dinner?

To myself: Breathe, big guy. Breathe. We won this thing, remember?

Feel my love, America. Even those of you "Red" folks who, for whatever reason, punish yourself by reading this blog.

Many thanks to Slate for providing the above quotations.

GOP Human Rights Watch:: Haven't The Torturers Suffered Enough?

2009-01-22T07:30:00.002-05:00

The party that gave us Extraordinary Rendition, Enhanced Interrogation, and Total Information Awareness has now become the protector of our nation's delicate and ladylike feelings.

Compassionate Conservatism suddenly abounds. Or rebounds. Read on.

The leaders of our ethically retarded Party-in-Disgrace are holding up the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General because he won't agree to let torture slide.

Satchel Paige once famously declared, "never look back. They might be gaining on you." The Right is running scared, and is determined to rip off all the rear-view mirrors as they careen into the dustbin of history.

And the world is definitely gaining on them, stirring up the shallow graves of the Bush administration and its victims. The claim of Republicans, and sad to say, many Democrats, seems to be, "sure, the president ordered the torture of captives, held them without charges or access to lawyers, had our hapless enlisted grunts set upon them with dogs and electrical shocks to the genitals, with stress positions, freezing cells, nudity, forced homosexual acts, and probably worse. And sure, these are war crimes when anyone but Americans commit them.

Look they say: We did these things. We broke our captives like Humpty Dumpties, and no one will ever put them back together again. But our intentions were good, and that's got to count for something, and it's much more important to move forward than to seek justice and clean our own house. It's not as if these are the Japs or the Germans who waterboarded anyone. It's us. And do we really need to do the right thing here?

This is a new one to the GTL: To Hell with the victims. Haven't the criminals suffered enough?

End of an Error

2009-01-21T07:18:00.005-05:00

R.I.P.
George Orwell
1903 - 1950
2000 - 2008

It's not often we get to lay a famous figure to rest twice. Today it's our pleasure to let poor old Eric Arthur Blair, known to the world as George Orwell, lay back down in his grave for what we hope will be a more eternal rest that the first fifty years' afforded him.

When George W. Bush was installed in the presidency by the Supreme Court in 2000, I responded with two acts: First, I joined the NAACP, figuring that minorities, African Americans in particular, were in for a tough time and could use all expressions of support that well-wishing white Americans could afford. And boy, I was right: as I watched the pasty, angry, pale moon-faced crowd screaming for Sarah Palin and her sore-headed "real" American followers at the 2008 Republican Convention, there were no blacks to be found anywhere. Where had they gone?

The other act I engaged in in response to Bush's imperial coronation was to dust off my copy of 1984 and read it thoroughly.

It read like a blueprint for the Bush/Cheney war on language.

War Is Peace.
Freedom Is Slavery.
Ignorance Is Strength.

Big Brother Is Watching You.

These are the big-print deviant ideas we received from Orwell in his warning against a totalitarian future masquerading as democracy. There were many, many more, from the use of a daily "two minutes' hate" rally to keep the anger and fear at fever pitch, to the Memory Hole, where inconvenient facts are spun away and destroyed.

So today Orwell lies once again in the cold bosom of the Earth. When President Obama's pick for Attorney General, Eric Holder, was questioned by Congress and asked his opinion on water-boarding, he responded clearly, and in a very un-Bush, un-Orwell way:

Yes, water-boarding is torture. No, the president cannot make it legal with a stroke of a pen. No one is above the law, international treaties are in fact the law of the land, and human rights do matter, no matter what.

The way ahead will be bumpy, and painful, and not a Utopian ride by any means, but at least we can say this:

The "war on terror" may continue, but in the War on Truth, and the War on Plain Language, the forces of clarity and transparency appear to have held the field. Americans once again.

And that, my friends, is what, in the Hell of war, is known as VICTORY.

Those Americans marginalized by the Bush/Cheney cabal, left out of the boardrooms where real power lay, are pouring back into public view - jubilant, loud, forceful, and unapologetic. Recognized as the "real" Americans they are, and always were.

Good day, America, and remember, no matter what happens, the Gun-Toting Liberal loves you.

And bye bye Bush. Maybe we'll meet again some time, hopefully at the Hague.

Hang Down Yr Head. Mourn with the GTL.

2008-12-18T08:14:00.002-05:00

Today I am mourning the passing of my father, who died yesterday after a recurrence of prostate cancer that overtook him swiftly. He was a fighter to the end, brave and strong.

Here at the GTL, our liberal values of equality and dignity, of fighting back, and the knowledge of human nature that causes politics and greed, come from this man.

Ben Wilensky would give you the shirt off his back, a book from his shelf, his time and kindness. Bottles of wine and whiskey, a grin from ear to ear, an impromptu history lesson. A deep laugh. A wide and bottomless forgiveness.

He would not suffer a fool. He lived his life away from the foolish entrapments of his time.

Our heart goes out to his wife of thirty-five years, my stepmother Millie, the true love of his life. Like an amputee, she will learn to go on with part of herself taken away. We will all support her and each other, and our communities.

We will be refraining from further posts for a week, more or less, while my father settles into his new home in the cosmos and we try to settle into our suddenly diminished lives.

L'Chaim. Shanti.

For now,
GTL out.

It's Gonna Be A Big Book...

2008-12-07T12:15:00.005-05:00

Karl Rove is going to name names.

I can see the reviews now: Too many characters. Too repetitive.

Too depressing?

Rove blames "Bush haters" for never accepting the C-Minus Man as presidential material.

How ironic is it that the party who refused to accept the legitimacy of Bill Clinton, one of the most popular presidents of our time, and who actively fought for his impeachment long before there was any evidence of any high crime or misdemeanor, now absurdly excoriates the 70% of the population who are disgusted with their man for the same infraction.

Clinton was never "really" the choice of the people. He owed his success to Ross Perot splitting the Republican vote, or so the ditto-heads explained. Remember that? So going after him from moment one was fair - it wasn't like he was the "real" candidate of choice... they seem to forget that Bush lost the popular election by over half a million votes and that in the eyes of the world Bush was measurably less "legit" than Clinton ever was, either before or after his impeachment.

Apparently, the Right is out of ammo and desperate enough to throw their own playbook over the ramparts... it won't hurt anyone but may serve as a distraction.

One President At A Time?

2008-12-05T13:47:00.007-05:00

I have owned two Chevys, a '76 Nova and a 1985 Impala; an '87 Nissan Pulsar; an '88 Mazda 323; an '88 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, and a 1998 Toyota Camry. I loved them all in one way or another. But the Japanese cars outclassed ours by a mile.

It saddens me to say that I will likely never buy another American car.

And apparently, I am not alone.

From my perch here in the psych ward where I work, it seems like the insanity in our society is on the outside of our magnetically-sealed double doors even more so than within them.

Today, new miserable unemployment numbers show Americans in free fall all over. Half a million jobs lost in one month, the largest increase in thirty years. We have the CEO's of Ford, Chrysler, and GM sitting humbly in a row before the House of Representatives, publicly shamed in a rolling Kabuki perp-walk across the highways of America, behind the wheels of their own doomed vehicles.

Forcing an incompetent though fabulously rich executive to travel this way is fun, and in better times would cheer us up significantly. But today it's a different story. Today our economy is on the line.

Segments of our economy were already toppling like dominoes before the big three called for their own new welfare program. The bankruptcies and defaults spawned by auto crisis have only just begun. The dominoes will fall faster and faster and millions of people will be left with nothing, no home, no health coverage for their families. True Depression-era poverty seems to be right around the corner if something decisive is not done immediately, and in such a way as to restore to the equation that tenuous tendril of civilization: public confidence.

Barack Obama has some bold ideas for an enormous works project to stimulate the economy from the bottom up and top down simultaneously. We all hope these plans will succeed. But he's right that, at the moment, he is not the the president and can do nothing but draw up plans and, in the words of his opponents, "measure the drapes."

He is quite right to remind us that there is already a man in the big chair.

So my question today, as the descent into economic disaster quickens, is where the Hell is George W. Bush?

The man is still president, and he isn't out of the hot seat yet. Even if W's actual leadership abilities and suitability as president were fictional - and it's becoming clear they were - it is a few weeks too early for the man to drop his pretense of strong moral fiber and calm, mature stewardship. We have seen fleeting images of the man, grinning from ear to ear, shoulder not to the grindstone, barely containing his glee over finally being able to flee Washington for his life, and beat a hasty retreat to his new three million dollar home in comfortingly Red Dallas.

As unbelievable as it may be, there are millions of Americans who need this man to calm their fears and stall what appears to be a perhaps inevitable disaster from gaining momentum.

Where is the man?

JFK Remembered.

2008-11-22T02:21:00.001-05:00

Forty-five years ago today John F. Kennedy was assassinated. We pause to remember his loss and his service to the country.

We also recommend The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh, for anyone who wants to get beneath the carefully-crafted public image and the decades of hero worship.

Let's just say that in JFK's Camelot, there was a new Guenevere every day for the king to play with, at least one, and booze, and lots and lots of medicine for the ups and downs, for sleeping and waking up, and for the president's chronic pain.

When it comes to partying and getting laid, Jack makes Teddy look like a boy scout.

But he didn't go nuclear against Cuba despite a chorus of hawkish advisors clamoring for a show of force, and Curtis LeMay shouting in his ear to take out Cuba - and why not China for good measure?

Kennedy did not succumb to the terrified, paranoid fantasies of a large section of the American population, and launch what we later found out would have likely been a nuclear holocaust.

For liberals, even a gun-toting one, keeping the finger away from the trigger is always the goal. War is Hell, and ought to be avoided, if possible, at all costs.

This sanity of mind, this fearless act of non-escalation in a moment of direst terror, is JFK's crowning achievement, his profile in courage, and the reason the GTL votes a qualified thumbs-up to the Kennedy presidency.

"You know, I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day." - JFK

Palin Brings The Funny.

2008-11-22T02:04:00.003-05:00

This is pure gold. I don't think Stanley Kubrick in his prime could have produced a more absurd and surreal coda to Palin's reality-bending vice presidential candidacy.

I'm not sure which is more hilarious, the turkey-slaughter backdrop or Gov. Palin's moronic responses to the reporter's questions.

Worth Paying Attention To.

2008-11-21T08:54:00.002-05:00

Ahhh. It's good to be back at the GTL HQ shack. The staff and I took a much-needed Bahamas vacation to replenish our psychic ammo reserves following the billion-dollar campaign season and election.

It's good to be back.

I know how worn out everyone is with politics right now so I'll be brief an let you get back to your soap opera or whatever you are using to replace the hustle and bustle of the Big Game.

Simply, today is the last day that the Original C-Minus Man has left to push unpopular pro-business regulations through the OMB and have the 60-day waiting period not bleed over into the Obama administration. Regulations enacted today will be harder for Big O to reverse.

I am not fully educated on these plans but I do know that the Family and Medical Leave Act is being amended according to the corporate wish list: a worker can still invoke the FMLA in order to take an unpaid leave. The change will be that he or she may not use accrued sick time to offset the loss of income resulting from the unpaid status of the leave.

This is asinine and unfair, but entirely keeping with industry's hostility to the FMLA. They fought against it tooth and nail during Clinton's administration, and this change will cause many people to hold off on a leave they may have been saving for. I have met people who "banked" their vacation or "PTO" hours in order to have a surgery, and used these hours to offset the loss of income.

To me this is an example of a worker who is motivated to work and, at the same time, not to starve. "What the hell," Bush says, "let her starve. I'm off to Crawford anyway."

By the way, the GTL feels that the FMLA is one of Bill Clinton's crowning achievements, second only to his honoring Monica's request that he not you-know-what in her mouth.

That's integrity!

First Things First. Weapons Of Mass Instruction. John McCain's Chance For Redemption. Ours Too.

2008-11-10T06:48:00.006-05:00

With eight years of George W. Bush's failures as president and an avalanche of bad policies and ideas laid out for him like rows of gumdrops, President-Elect Obama is the country's Chief-kid-in-the-candy-store as he ponders his first moves as president.

So many wonderful choices! What to pick first?

The GTL has the following priorities in mind: stop the torture before you do anything else. Restore due process. First thing. It is not only the right thing to do, but it will earn Obama immeasurable gratitude and appreciation - love, even - not only here at home, but around the world.

Before he calls an energy summit to discuss new infrastructure, before he meets with military leaders plotting our next strategic moves in Afghanistan and Iraq, before he unveils new plans for a health care overhaul or new tax legislation, there is one and only one action the GTL believes he should take:

Close Abu Ghraib prison, Mr. President-Elect. Close Guantanamo Bay. Restore habeus corpus rights to every individual held in U.S. custody. Begin to undo the damage to our wounded national psyche and our ravaged reputation around the world. Undo the stain to our national identity that has brought new words into the lexicon of American conversation: water-boarding. Stress positions. Extreme rendition. Sexual humiliation. Fear techniques.

Close our prison camps and take down the horrible apparatus of secret detention programs.

If you ask me whether it's worth it to leave our ravaged constitutional protections unaddressed for some weeks while we bring to a halt the sadistic (and ineffective) torture techniques which we as a people have somehow allowed to thrive in secrecy over the past seven years, I say: we'll wait.

First things first.

Obama can prove that American values still exist, and still matter.

Obama should call upon John McCain to lead a campaign against torture as vigorous and far-reaching as possible, and McCain should take the olive branch and run with it. At seventy-two, with a fortune behind him in the hundreds of millions, McCain can rehabilitate his own scarred image whole at the same time showing America and the world our great ability to embrace change, our nimble capacity for dancing to new ideas quickly and with great zest for freedom. Then he can retire the hero many already believe him to be.

Now that we as a people have re-discovered our own most powerful weapons of mass instruction in the global war of ideas, we must share them now, in real time. It's time to begin exporting our best products - justice, equality, sanity.

Close Abu Ghraib.
Close Guantanamo Bay.
Let the water-boards dry.
Let our prisoners see the light of day, and give them due process in real courts.

Show the world our greatness. Show them what we are like when freed from mindless fear. Only then will we be the beacon of freedom we have always been to oppressed peoples everywhere. Only then will be the America the world knows, loves, and has been waiting with baited breath for for the past eight long years.

A Win For The People. A Loss For California.

2008-11-05T12:05:00.002-05:00

Today I am proud of my fellow Americans for their bravery, common sense, and willingness to look beyond the sleaze to elect the clearly more suitable candidate for president.

Barack Obama, the hopes and prayers of the Gun-Toting Liberal are with you!

In one day of record-breaking civic activity, the people of the U.S. have shown the world that the marvel and miracle of the American experiment survives. People are dancing in all corners of the globe (despite the fact that globes do not have corners). An era is over, finally. America is coming back to us, they are saying, backing away from the precipice of totalitarian, of military unilateralism. Becoming again a beacon of hope and possibility.

The era of paranoia, fear and psychological projection, born of right-wing demagoguery, whipped beyond the boiling point by the Al Qaeda attacks of nine eleven, and stoked by endless war, seems to be ending.

Today it feels like a whole new country. And there is a lot to be grateful for.

I am grateful that John McCain is going to do what old soldiers do, and just fade away. I am happy not to have to watch the spectacle of Cindy McCain, steeped in a benzodiazepene fog, clicking her talons against her bronzed and burnished exoskeleton while silently choking back her rage at her angry pipsqueak husband. The Obamas are far easier as a family to look at.

I am grateful that the taxpayers saw fit to give Sarah Palin a one-way ticket back home to Wasilla, where she can surround herself with the "real Americans" she finds so superior to the rest of us. Governor, you can go back to brawling with the other pit bulls down at that fancy hockey rink we bought you with taxpayer money!

Governor Palin can now re-focus her attention on finding a replacement for Senator Ted Stevens, a "real American" who is in "real bad trouble" and may be wearing some "real handcuffs" and sitting in a "real prison cell" soon.

But most of all I am grateful to the people for their return to sanity, to that uniquely American generosity of spirit, away from division and intolerance, toward calm and pragmatic politics. Obama has the power to inspire, and I have been swept up in his lofty rhetoric consistently. But more than that, I trust Obama to think with his head, feel with his heart, listen with his ears, and see with his eyes. I believe Obama is sincere about seeing what is real, living in reality, and fixing real problems in real time. Gone are the days when emissaries from the "reality-based community" were banished from the Oval Office.

Like so many of you, I am overcome with emotion when I think of the African-American journey through history, the justice and promise of our nation denied for so long which is revived today. Whatever happens from now forward, the consciousness of our country is changed forever. A black man has been elected president of the United States!

Sadly, there is a setback for civil rights, and that is the passage of Proposition 8 ending gay marriage in California. Those who can't see the common struggle for equality of all marginalized people will soon have to come to grips with the fact of gay rights are coming, like it or not.

More on this sad coda to a great day in the future. For now, it's time to relax, celebrate, breathe easy, and let the roiling waters calm.

November 4, 2008. 6:15 AM (Update: 7:30 AM)

2008-11-04T06:15:00.002-05:00

The GTL has discharged his civic duty. I voted this AM at 7:05 EDT. A cheerful and uplifting experience. Short lines, neighbors around me.

The optical scanning machine had failed and all the ballots were being stored in the locked portion of the machine itself until a replacement arrived. I was told they would be scanned in en masse shortly by the supervisor.

Several bored police officers sitting at tables or talking quietly with voters, no drama. A bustling bake sale by the kids in the school where the voting took place.

My hardest voting decision was whether or not to buy a donut (I didn't).

I will probably be in media blackout all day. Post comments on your voting experiences and we'll be back tomorrow.

Good luck, America. We love you.

See you on the other side.

Two Days. Poor, Neglected Joe College Student. The Big Lie.

2008-11-02T08:15:00.004-05:00

I for one am insulted by the embarrassing Republican tactic of foisting "Joe the Plumber" on the American people along with his friends, Joe the (insert blue collar job title here), and Joe the (again, please).

Talk about Stockholm Syndrome; Republican leaders yell about Obama waging class war, while hiding behind a wall of their own willing and enthusiastic POWs.

Meanwhile, Joe College has been ill-treated by the Right.

After all, he is the Right's child as well as ours. Think for a minute about the Republican candidates' own families. Most have grown children. I have a hard time imagining Dick Cheney's or Elizabeth Dole's adult children installing boilers and building additions on homes.

So why the hostility to educated folks? To their children? To themselves?

Or is it all a massive con to hustle the working class, who would in reality be better served elsewhere, out of their votes?

You decide for yourself. I already have.

Today the GTL crew is grateful that Joe and Jane College can think for themselves. And we like what they're thinking.

High-Stakes Buffoonery. Defining Heroism Down. The Plumber vs. The Carpenter.

2008-10-31T07:10:00.006-04:00

"Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends."
- Woody Allen

Four days.

I am trying today to spiritually and consciously detach from the thunderous crush of giant forces colliding. As the irresistible force of right-wing desperation bears down on the immovable object of Obama's likely victory, I am choosing to focus my limited time and attention on what really matters to the GTL: the laughs, the stupidity, the moments of high farce.

What choice do I have? Give myself an ulcer?

The morning coffee n' news shows are playing clips today of angry old John McCain, before a sea of pale, angry, white Ohioans, shouting and waving his arms and spewing such nonsense about Barack Obama that Saturday Night Live will have a hell of a time parodying him without accidentally making him seem more rational and less unhinged. A few pitchforks and torches, some sepia tones, and it could be right out of Young Frankenstein:

"A riot iss an ugly sing, und I sink it's about time that ve had vun!"

McCain grew serious - or tried to: "There's a real hero here today, one that I have dedicated my campaign to and that keeps me strong" - this is a paraphrase, so I may be getting the wording a bit wrong - "Joe the Plumber! He's here today! Where is he? Joe the Plumber!"

Now, I'm confused. A hero? Joe? The humble but surly "I-ain't-paying-my-taxes" Joe Wurtzelburger, not actually a plumber, but "a guy who does plumbing" (only a licensed plumber may call himself one)? A hero? Our angry Joe?

I remember this book from my childhood, "A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich." Turns out they were wrong. A hero ain't nothin' but a guy who works on pipes, owes back taxes, and likes to call people socialists without troubling to find out what a socialist actually is.

Or maybe a hero is a real American who thinks all Muslims are terrorists and all blacks are on welfare. He's at the rally, too, why isn't he also a hero? Or a governor who abuses power? Or a Senator who is convicted of seven felonies and arrives home to a hero's welcome and triumphantly resumes campaigning for high office? Hell, with these low standards, even George w. Bush might wind up a hero. Or maybe even yours truly.

Reader! Hey you! You might be a hero too!

I don't know which is funnier, the endless shouting of this bizarre mantra, "Joe the plumber, Joe the plumber, Joe the plumber!, or the fact that Wurtzelbacher wasn't even present at the rally.

This freaky scene is a bathetic redux of the evangelical movement as a whole, always yelling about Armageddon and the second coming and the end times and the lake of fire and all that other happy crap they want to happen to the rest of us while they're eating Chick-Fil-A with the Lord of Hosts.

Today it isn't Jesus they're in a lather about, which is nice for a change. Leave that nice Jewish boy alone, for his sake!

No, they're not yelling for Jesus. He's so second-millennium. Passe, even.

Today's Savior wears a tool belt and shows his coin slot as he prostrates himself before the gleaming altar of the Frigidaire.

Will Joe the plumber die for our sins?

Or is it the other way around?

Six Days.

2008-10-29T20:31:00.002-04:00

Whatever happens in the election six days from now, I want to remember this moment, tonight. I want to savor it and memorize it. It was the moment when a candidate for president finally spoke the kinds of truths and voiced the same fears and concerns for our nation that I have felt for over a quarter of a century.

Barack Obama's extended campaign commercial transcended for a brief moment the familiar politics of our time, the bloody churn of insinuation and character destruction, of "swift-boating" and "robo-calling." And by transcending it, even if only for a moment, it has been rendered broken and obsolete, and the air is clear, and clean, and feels fine.

My first realization, after drying my eyes for the second or third time, was that not once in the entire thirty minutes was I invited to hate or sneer at anybody, to pry the divisions between people further apart, to demonize anyone, to mock anyone's sincerity or question their patriotism. I was able to feel hopeful, and proud.

As a hard worker in this vanishing middle class, I felt dignified, uplifted. I was reminded how tough we are, the Americans struggling to hold onto our futures and our standard of living, to protect and nurture our children even as the ground vanishes beneath our feet. I heard a loud voice calling for a life-rope for the middle class, and was reminded of the dignity of work.

Best of all, not once did Obama criticize or even mention John McCain or Sarah Palin. Not once. He didn't spend ten seconds of his million-dollar half-hour to respond to their slanders and lies about his character, his background, his religion, his associations, his love of country.

Nor did he waste time ticking off the thousand injuries John McCain has inflicted on his own integrity, the ways McCain's once-principled stances have vanished one by one, gone underground, or simply morphed into their own opposites, sold off in the marketplace for votes: The wrongness of President Bush's tax cuts. The bigotry of the Religious Right. The moral necessity of banning torture in our prison camps. The refusal to demonize immigrants. All gone, flip-flopped away like the tricks a performing seal learns to do for a handful of fish.

It takes a strong person with real courage to have as many weapons at hand as Obama did tonight and not use them. We had a glimpse of this defining trait tonight, this decency, this faith in his own ideas. I hope and believe we will see this again soon, not only in the man, but in the president.

Thinking about it now, later in the evening, with the Phillies clobbering the Rays silently in the background, I come to my second realization.

Somehow, despite my best efforts, I have, at least for the moment, let my guard down and done the one thing Obama has been asking me to do for over a year: Hope.

Millions of Americans like me are standing shoulder to shoulder in a skirmish line. I enjoy the feeling, this immense force pulling on me, this swelling of humanity, this mass consciousness, this group-think - even as I know it is fleeting, and dangerous, and corrupting - and addictive.

I stand here, my hard-won cynicism fallen around my ankles, the autumn night sky cold and clear on my face, our wide-open future laid out ahead of me. I call out to you, fellow travelers, across the dust-blown, windy, American playground, from this small corner in history and time.

We are not alone!

Here comes Tuesday. Stand firm. See you on the other side.

Ah, History: The GTL Learns Something New Every Day.

2008-10-29T06:43:00.002-04:00

I have grown pretty sick over the years of hearing so-called "conservatives" crow about what a great president Ronald Reagan was.

To me, this hoary chestnut is the greatest fallacy of our political times. Reagan was a dreadful president. He courted racists with coded "states' rights" language, he broke the back of American labor, he refused to enforce workplace-safety and equality rules, and he actually lobbied the Ayatollah in Iran to keep our hostages in bondage until his inauguration day, so he could triumphantly exclaim, during his speech, that they were on a plane, in the air now, heading home.

Such stagecraft, using the American people as props, came sickeningly to mind in 2003 when George W. Bush used an aircraft carrier, a beautiful sunset, a jet plane, a flight suit, a carrier-full of loyal, fresh-faced American sailors, and that famous "mission accomplished" banner to achieve the same effect.

Calling our adversaries evil, proclaiming America God's country, bringing religious fanatics into public prominence. Crassly manipulating patriotic images that keep Joe Six-Pack drunk on fear and nationalism, unable to think straight, not wanting to. Not my favorite presidents, people.

Most annoying has been the claim, repeated over and over, again and again, that Ronald Reagan "ended the cold war."

Today, in a NY Times article by Thomas Friedman about the U.S.' bargaining position with Iran in the coming presidential administration, comes a more plausible reason for the fall of the U.S.S.R., from a Russian expert on the subject:

"... it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. "

Eureka!

This is big news for me and the gang down here behind the sand bags and razor wire at GTL HQ. Conserving gasoline, driving smaller cars, harnessing wind, solar, geothermal, hydro power - these are the ways to not only clean our planet, keep today's American "petrodollars" at home tomorrow, provide high-tech jobs for millions of Americans and revive our economy, but also to hoist our adversaries on their own petard and thus defeat them bloodlessly.

Best of all, it is a surprisingly understandable and rational history lesson for those of us who remember Ronald Reagan as the avuncular face of a cruel and retrograde political movement, one that has spread through our country like a cancer and finally threatened, at its apotheosis under Reagan's spiritual offspring, George W. Bush, to kill the host outright.

Thanks and a hearty shout-out on this chilly morning to Thomas Friedman, for a history lesson we've been eagerly awaiting for decades.

A Jury of Peers, Just Not His.

2008-10-28T07:26:00.004-04:00

He meant to pay for it.

He didn't know it was there.

He demanded it be taken away.

He thought his wife paid for it.

Misbehaving Republicans have been chipping away at Bill Clinton's mother-of-all-excuses, "I didn't inhale" for years now. There's Senator Larry Craig's "I have a wide men's-room stance," Rep. Mark Foley's "I was abused by a priest as a child," and of course my favorite, national evangelical leader Ted Haggard's "I hired the gay prostitute but didn't have sex with him, and bought crystal meth from him but never used it."

Now this.

Senator Ted Stevens is probably not a bad man. And he may not be too bad as a senator. Perhaps he is a family man as well. And who knows, maybe he's telling the truth about the generator, the appliances, the "massage chair," and other sumptuous goodies which magically appeared, unbidden, in his Alaska home, courtesy of his longtime friend and contributor, Bill Allen.

Maybe, probably, perhaps. He tried to send everything back, but his good friend Bill wouldn't let him. Poor, bullied Senator Stevens. Trapped in his own massage chair of self-pity.

What we do know is that a jury of his peers has unanimously convicted Stevens on all seven felony counts of lying in order to hide a quarter-million dollars' worth of illegal gifts.

The good Senator expresses no shame. In fact, defiance would be a more appropriate descriptor for his affect in light of the outcome of his trial. For those who see courts as crazed agents of left-wing, un-American conspiracies, this verdict comes as no surprise. The party that would foist Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court has never particularly appreciated courts in general. When you're pilfering or scamming or picking pockets or deregulating industries, the last thing you want is honest verdicts in court. You prefer to be tried in the court of public opinion, if at all, where you own the cameras and the airtime.

Senator Stevens will seek an appeal, but nothing we see in this trial screams injustice. For the moment, we have to assume the guilty verdicts, all seven of them, will stand. The slim reed his spokespeople are waving is that he could not get a fair trial in Washington, D.C. because everybody there hates Congress.

And things are better in Alaska?

Given Stevens' multiple-felony conviction, and Sarah Palin's own proven problem abusing power in the "Troopergate" fiasco, the question of the moment is, "is there a single Alaskan politician who is not on the take, or bullying innocent public servants out of their jobs?"

Another thought: It has been hard for all but the angriest evangelical GOP party faithful to put their credibility on the line to support Sarah Palin. Will they now have the chutzpah to line up behind Stevens? At a certain point, defending a crook becomes an embarrassment, or evidence of group psychosis. I believe we've long passed that point with today's GOP.

Senator Stevens may not back off his unrepentant pledge to soldier on and continue his re-election campaign. From where the GTL stands, doing so would turn an unseemly corruption scandal into a masterpiece of bathos. However, if Alaskans see his defiant denials as "Mavericky" behavior, and continue to support him with their votes, the only question that remains is,

Can a man with handcuffs on get one hand on the bible and the other high enough in the air to be sworn in?

Small Town Values At Big City Prices

2008-10-22T07:04:00.003-04:00

Sarah Palin spins around the clock to convince us she's the aw-shucks-just-folks nominee from small-town "real America."

Sure she is. If you believe that I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

This morning on NBC comes the news that the pit bull herself is not content with lipstick; the Republican party has spent over $150, 000 on clothes from high-end stores for her to wear on the campaign trail.

Wonder what the other hockey moms will say: Sarah's puttin' on airs?

But the best - or worst - is yet to come.

When it comes to providing basic services to the middle class and poor, or helping provide health insurance for millions of uninsured Americans, Governor Palin howls like a banshee about "socialism" -- a word I would give a hundred dollars to hear her even attempt to correctly define (this is a woman who could not correctly explain the role of vice president to a young school child).

The Sarah Palin we see on TV is cut from whole cloth - and not the high-quality cloth her party has wrapped her in from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Now we find she has quietly made her home state's beloved small government a little bit bigger, making the taxpayer pick up the tab for over twenty thousand dollars' worth of airplane tickets - for her children.

Millions of Americans are losing their homes, savings, health care, retirement accounts - but helping them isn't the government's job, according to Sarah Lee Moose-Musk and those adoring white men of the GOP trying to get a glimpse under her skirt at her speeches.

Providing free air travel for "real American" children to go to work with their mommies is.

What will be next?

Can't wait to find out.

Joe the Plumber vs. Bob the Builder. Class War Erupts, Mass Casualties Predicted (Mostly From Chinese Lead-Painted Toys).

2008-10-16T07:46:00.002-04:00

Okay here's my confession: I could not finish watching the third and final presidential debate last night. I had a stomach ache, went to bed knowing the pundits and bloggers would have the long knives out to slice and dice the debate for me.

But I did watch enough to hear the phrase "Joe the Plumber" about twenty times. It made me think of the persistent leak under my downstairs sink and the money I owe my real plumber (his name is Matt, not Joe) and, well, that kind of election-cycle stress can be bad for my health. Same image comes up when I think of the Republican mantra phrase, "trickle down."

As I ran and hid from the second half of the debate, the image I could not get out of my head was not of Joe the Plumber, but his spiritual brother and fellow tradesman, Bob the Builder.

Now, I know we're treading into class-warfare territory here, but I'm pretty sure Bob makes a lot more money than Joe, certainly much more than the $250,000 that Obama would set has the threshold for tax increases.

Half of Bob's fortune comes from those dang Chinese-made toys. Let's raise our coffee cup and toast lead-free paint in toys and the man who has the guts to stand up to our largest creditor and say, "no lead, please!" (See, we have to say "please" to the red Chinese now or they'll cut off our line of credit. "Tough talk" on human rights? Not anytime soon.)

I'll have more thoughts on this subject later.

Here's an interactive site that makes me LOL! Enjoy it, you crazy Mavericks! Love to all my fellow humans, even my next-door neighbor with his "McCain/Palin yard sign!

McCain Shows Us His Nuts. The Golem Rises. You. Yes, You. You Are Responsible.

2008-10-12T08:13:00.010-04:00

This leaps out at me this morning from the front page of the paper:

“I think there have been quite a few reporters recently,” said Mr. McCain’s closest adviser, Mark Salter, “who have sort of implied, or made more than implications, that somehow we’re responsible for the occasional nut who shows up and yells something about Barack Obama.”

Here in a nutshell is the problem with McCain's campaign. They have run on innuendo and paranoid smears, implying Barack Obama is simply not a real American, not a Christian, likely a Muslim, and probably a terrorist, like the people he "palls around" with.

Now they seem surprised that "Joe and Jane Six-Pack," who they celebrate for their lack of sophistication, and praise for being the opposite of educated "elites," actually believe what they have been told: Obama IS an Arab. He IS a Muslim. He WAS educated in a religious Islamic school; he IS a terrorist.

So, you, Mr. Salter yes, you, and John McCain are responsible. Who else would be?

To the McCain campaign, these are strategic talking points designed to peel away voters to their side. But after a six-pack or two, Joe and Jane, fresh from not studying politics, or economics, or finance, or international relations - or anything, since education is after all a badge of "elite" snobbery - don't see it that way.

They believe what they're told!

John McCain knows Barack Obama is no terrorist. He knows his campaign is distorting his association with William Ayers, and that there is no "there" there. He knows that Obama voted against one military spending bill for the same reasons he himself voted against another, for political reasons, not because he isn't a "real American." I believe that McCain knows he was lying when he told us Obama would willingly lose a war to win an election.

The McCain campaign has followed this dangerous and divisive strategy because they have no other compelling reasons for you and me to vote Republican. McCain and his party have been so wrong about so much, for so long, that the friction of reality has truly ground the spin machine to a shrieking halt.

Mr. Salter, Poo-Bah of the McCain campaign team, now blames the media for creating the Golem they in fact have conjured into existence. Instead he should congratulate himself that the propaganda campaign has been so effective, at least with the base. The real problem with calling Obama a dangerous terrorist is not that it's a lie, it's how ugly the sight of "Joe Six-Pack," terrified and screaming for blood on the evening news, has been.

When a losing campaign has to do damage-control over its own successful propaganda, the writing is truly on the wall.

This is a greater problem than just an election-cycle problem. If, after November, a fourth of the country still believes the new president is a terrorist, someone sooner or later may attempt some kind of daft "rescue." There is a word for a violent, paranoid person who tries to bring down a president - the word is Terrorist.

Obama may be using some of those new-found presidential "war-on-terror" powers sooner than he might have thought, and much, much closer to home.

* * * * *

Last year John McCain told the Wall Street Journal, "You are interviewing the greatest free trader you will ever interview, and the greatest deregulator you will ever interview."

Republicans have for decades promised economic prosperity based on the now-discredited idea that industry regulations are unnecessary, and that free markets could regulate themselves. Putting aside the amorphous call for the return to "family values," this has been the centerpiece of the GOP's economic platform since Ronald Reagan.

"Call off the cops," Republicans told us, "we promise not to steal." Lots and lots of us have been flabbergasted over how successful they were in creating the perception that government had no place in business.

It has been a boondoggle from the start. Industry boomed and the productivity of workers skyrocketed, but workers saw their real wages stagnate, their union power evaporate, their good-paying jobs go abroad. Their anger was legitimate and understandable, and was effectively channeled by the GOP "values conservatives" away from the source of their problem and onto "liberals."

The word "Liberal" has had some rehabilitation recently. The Gun Toting Liberal feels a great deal of satisfaction in this. Liberals treat the country better when they are privileged enough to control its government. Liberals never demand less scrutiny of their plans, because we don't need to.

Liberals understand the basic rule of economics, the law of Supply and Demand that says, "no matter how you regulate industry, it will always make a profit - so go ahead and protect society from the excesses of industry." Europe figured this out ages ago. We have yet to do so.

Maybe now we will.

Postscript: The GTL must be on to something when Frank Rich hits the same theme at the same time!

Mobs and Monsters. McCain's Golem. A Picture and a Thousand Words.

2008-10-10T20:55:00.007-04:00

Not a good day for John McCain and the Republican Party.

This evening's viewing of CNN shows an uncomfortable and embarrassed McCain trying to talk a near-hysterical town-hall crowd of supporters down from a paroxysm of fear and rage over the likelihood of an Obama win.

One particular wild-haired older woman, seen only from the back, tries with all her might to put into words the inchoate panic she feels at the thought of this Barack Obama as president: "he's... he's... [wait for it] ... an Arab," she practically whispers.

I thought she was going to say "nigger." I really did.

How did McCain react? First, he took the microphone away from her. No surprise there. Watching the exchange on Youtube, you can practically hear McCain's brain whirring: "NOT good. I can't go down in history as the leader of an ignorant, blood-thirsty lynch mob... gotta rein them in... and quick."

He tried. He changed his body language, softened his posture. He reminded the all-white crowd that this was supposed to be a battle of ideas between two distinguished senatorial colleagues, not a race war sparked by lies and innuendos. Obama is a decent and worthy leader, he told his panicked supporters, a family man who would make a fine president.

They booed him. He called for calm and dignity and his own supporters booed him.

Die-hard Republican voters want a leader who will stoke their fear, validate their prejudices, lead them to greater acts of impulsive anger, not one who tries to calm and reassure them.

They don't want McCain. They want Sarah Palin.

John McCain, in stoking the paranoid fears and racist undercurrents of his supporters, the "base" of the Republican Party, has created a Golem that is rapidly twisting out from the grip of his control. In order to subdue the Golem he has to undo his own campaign's message. He has to praise and dignify the humanity of his opponent. In attempting to control his base, McCain has no choice but to nullify what remains of his own campaign strategy, and campaign for Barack Obama.

* * * *

The zeitgeist on the Right is unmistakable: McCain may be the candidate, but Sarah Palin is the star. Did you see her smile as she dismissed the Media as a bunch of Elites, and then told Katie Couric she reads all the newspapers, every day?

Don't you love the deliciousness of her audacity - did you see her wink? Did you hear her call herself a foreign policy expert because she sees Russia from her state? She sees the moon! She's an astronaut! She knows nothing and is damn proud! What an all-American gal! Gee whiz, she makes ya feel good, don't she?!

Sarah Palin is a fantasy right out of Karl Rove's dirtiest wet dream; a sexy, snarling pit-bull for the cause of mockery, crowd-manipulation and character-smear. She can put her hand on the bible and lie about anything. She sells - and drinks - the Kool-Aid like a true Republican. In better times, happier times, she could've out-W'd Bush himself.

But the country today is tired, and can't get it up for Rove's emotional porn any more. They'd prefer sweet dreams, no more nightmares. The orgy is over.

The Alaska legislature released its report on their investigation of Sarah Palin's "Troopergate" behavior today.

As it turns out, even before we knew her name, Palin was a bully who abused the power of the Governor's office. The investigation was bipartisan, and was begun months before she was picked for the Republican ticket. She and John McCain produced every argument they could think of to suppress this report from coming out before election day, but thankfully they failed, and the truth is now known.

It is unclear how this development will affect the presidential race. One thing, however, is clear to all of us down here at GTL headquarters: it will not help Senator McCain bring the Monster he has created under control.

We began this post with a picture. We end it with a thousand words... more, actually. Read them if you need the details.

Weird times, friends. Keep your powder dry.

A Rose by Any Other (Middle) Name

2008-10-08T18:01:00.002-04:00

I support Barack Obama. I think he's the better of the two presidential candidates, the stronger thinker and the greater gentleman. I also happen to believe he is ten times tougher, calmer, and more resilient than John McCain. I have been nervous in previous posts over his unwillingness to get down into the gutter with his opponents, but it is a gamble that has paid off handsomely in terms of poll numbers, and left many of us feeling clean for a change besides.

Thank you, Senator Obama!

I despise the dirty tricks Republicans since Lee Atwater have used to take political power and screw the American people. But I have to break ranks with my fellow Left-leaning writers and pundits when they wring their hands over Republicans' latest gambit in the sleaze wars: calling Obama by his full name.

Most people know by now that Obama's middle name is Hussein. It's hardly worth mentioning at this late date. The fact that his opponents are doing so only underscores their desperation and lack of real ideas or creativity.

Americans are not responding to the bloody red meat of Rovian campaigning any more. I guess they feel like government not only isn't always the problem, but sometimes is the only solution to enormously difficult problems. Turns out when you turn the heat up, voters recognize the need for reality-based leaders with actual knowledge and experience.

So my opinion is this: it's his name, his real name, the name his parents gave him. He has nothing to be ashamed of. Barack Hussein Obama is a true patriotic American and public servant in the finest sense.

The rest of the world sees Obama's success as progress, and it is.

So let Sarah Lee Moose-Musk call Obama by his real name as if it alone, and not his ideas, were evidence of his unfitness for office. let the hang-'em high crowd go after him.

Let 'em all shout it. It only diminishes them.

39 Days Later.

2008-10-07T08:22:00.000-04:00

Senator McCain announced his choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate on August 29.

Why Isn't The Media Asking Sarah Palin The Tough Questions At Her Press Conferences?

Because she hasn't had any.

Not a single one.

Not since George W. Bush has a candidate so successfully manipulated the press and avoided questions.

Will you let the Republicans do it again?

Can you afford to?

Oh How The Gun-Toting Liberal Loves Free Speech!

2008-10-05T10:51:00.005-04:00

I sent a modified version of one of my recent posts about the bailout package to the local newspaper as a letter to the editor. I was gratified that they printed it, although they didn't notify me in advance and I had no idea it was there until my pharmacist mentioned it a day or two later. I never got to see it on paper.

An odd thing happened when I went online to see it: there were comments! I read some and of course they were the usual angry paranoid mudslinging rants and so forth. Well, what could I do? I leaped right on in and braved the insults to keep my level head and cheerful love of my fellow man well-represented.

Then a marvelous thing happened. As the days passed, commenters showed a little rationality, calmed down, ceased the name-calling, and actually apologized to each other!

I felt like Nelson Mandela! Or Oprah Winfrey! Or Martin Luther King, Jr.!

(And I don't mean I felt black, all you race - baiters! You can see I'm joking around, giddy with humor this fine Sunday morning, can you not?)

I would love it if you took a look for yourselves. This really perked me up.

it also brings me to another political crisis here in Massachusetts I feel passionate about avoiding.

Read it.

The GTL loves you, America.

The following appears as my response to the comment stream generated by my letter to the editor of the Lowell Sun on Friday, September 26, 2008. I've cleaned it up a little, removed a typo or two):

Now this is what I like to see -- my letter to the editor sparked some heated, I would argue turgid - mud-slinging, and now, a week or so later, people in my comment stream are behaving like decent human beings to one another.

I feel so proud!

Now, please hear me on my new concern:

Please vote NO on Question 1, the push to eliminate the Massachusetts personal income tax. It would decrease state revenue by 40% over two years.

"You never miss your water 'till your well runs dry."

There is an article in today's Sun about the dire need for child protection social workers -- DSS has changed its name to DCF, by the way -- as cases have skyrocketed and social workers cannot keep up unless they inject their own time and resources, nights, weekends, to cover the explosion, which they do. It soon will not be enough to meet demand.

Sports figures and hotel heiresses are not heroes. Social workers are. Find a couple and buy them dinner.

Here in our beloved Lowell, DCF social workers' caseloads are exploding and are approaching the point of being unmanageable. Thankfully, there is a rescue plan to inject 5 million dollars into the DCF budget.

However, due to the sudden economic crisis, Governor Patrick may have to scuttle this rescue of the most sacred, most important element of any society or government, the protection of children from rape, murder, physical abuse and torture.

Imagine if we lost 40% of the revenue which is already not enough to cover basic services across the state.

I am donating my time to making calls and canvassing against this reckless proposal, which, by the way is supported by neither the Republican nor Democratic state party. It originated with Carla Howell, our loopy libertarian ideologue. Did you vote for her? Well, don't now.

I will end with a list of services our taxes pay for, but before I do remember this: If this turd of a proposal passes, the pain will be immediate and will hit you, your family, and all of us (well, not you New Hampshire-ites).

More Massachusetts children will be beaten, raped, and murdered, or at the very least, neglected. Schools and firehouses will close. Gangs will proliferate, even in comfy suburbia. Police budgets will go down.

It will be immediately apparent that Question 1 was a fool's errand based on hostility to taxes, even as they directly benefit and protect our communities.

Remember this: if Question 1 passes, it will hurt. BAD. And no politician, and I mean NONE, will ever be willing to stand up and say, "it was a bad idea, let's re-introduce a 5% income tax." Such a move would be political suicide and would never win.

Some things your tax dollars do which will be reduced by 40% :

Pothole repair
Keeping schools open
Snow removal
Highway safety
Police protection
Streetlights (some towns are turning theirs off even now)
Student/teacher ratios in schools
Special education services
Services for the mentally ill
Day care for the working poor
Gang reduction initiatives
Firefighting (has your town closed any firehouses? Mine has - imagine 40% more closures)
Services for the blind
Ambulance service
Flood control
Monitoring elections
Health insurance for the poor and elderly

I could go on and on but it's Sunday and I've got things to do.

Once again, this comment stream does my heart so much good, as I sit in my chilly house, my heart strings are warm and plucked.

Stand with me and your neighbors. Vote NO on Question 1.

The Pit Bull

2008-10-03T12:05:00.002-04:00

It seems Sarah can memorize her lines after all.

Who knew?

The bar was set shockingly low for Sarah Palin at last night's debate, and with good reason. For a week she had been beaten senseless night after night by that hard-hitting colossus of investigative journalism, Katie Couric, whose basic ninth-grade civics questions left Palin flummoxed, either stuttering incoherent sound bite fragments or simply remaining silent.

McCain's own people were worried. What if she couldn't answer a simple question, like, "what are the three branches of government?" or "how many justices are there on the Supreme Court?" - or that her mangled answers would make W's soundbites ("I know how hard it is to put food on your family") sound like the Gettysburg Address?

I think we can all agree. Sarah Palin exceeded our expectations on these meager criteria. She can indeed walk and chew gum at the same time.

But more than that, she seemed to enjoy the bloodsport of the thing, even though most of the blood in the ring up to that point was hers. She spoke directly to America. She looked into the camera and betrayed not a shred of fear.

Only a person with a narrow, rock-steady worldview could show that kind of poise and self-confidence with so little to back it up. It was surreal, and unsettling - terrifying, even - to see her happily sparring with "O'Biden," as she referred to Joe Biden at one point.

For his part, Biden was calm, pleasant, and self-controlled. He understood the stakes and was not about to be caught in the national spotlight beating the intellectual daylights out of a sweet, pretty, aw-shucks-ain't-I-cute North Country hockey mom with a pregnant teen-aged daughter and newborn Down-Syndrome baby boy waiting back home. With blood in the water he circled but did not go in for the kill.

But all this begs the issue: Did Palin demonstrate any qualifications for high office other than bluff and swagger? Did she demonstrate mastery of any real material that a president might need?

Hell, no.

But she showed up, and looked good, and didn't cower in a fight for which she was woefully unprepared. She got in the ring with an apple-cheek smile on her aging-beauty-queen face and read her lines like a pro.

In another time, a happier, easier, former time in America, Sarah Palin might just have been able to pull it off. From where I stand, she might have even been able to out-Bush the master of make-believe, W himself.

Palin may not know a thing about the world, and she may have no idea what the Supreme Court is for, and she may think Thomas Jefferson wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, but she does know this: a pit bull brings down its prey by clamping onto the jugular vein, never looking back, and never letting go.

Their Politics, Their Women.

2008-10-01T06:56:00.000-04:00

The more Sarah Palin speaks, the more amazed I am that anyone would put their integrity and judgment on the line to vouch for her suitability for high office. At this point, I would not vote for this woman for PTA president at my daughter's elementary school, let alone for the second-highest office in the U.S. government.

And yet there are those who will forgive anything, even a woman who can't name a single Supreme Court decision aside from Roe vs. Wade, and when asked what newspapers or periodicals she reads to inform her of world events, pauses and replies, "all of them," but can't name a single one.

McCain is the new mega-Bush. His politically-motivated cynicism has a direct analogue in the Bush White House: the President's nomination of Harriet Myers for the Supreme Court.

If there is anyone out there who will still carry an ounce of Bush's water for his nomination of Harriet Myers, and is willing to come on this blog and do so publicly, I will personally congratulate him for his courage and audacity, if not his judgment and credibility.

My intuition tells me that in a few short weeks Palin will be in the same category as Myers and there will be no one left in her own party leadership willing to expend a drop of political capital on her.

We shall see.

Postscript. I just googled Ms. Myers and apparently I am not the first to make this connection.

The Audacity of Nope. Waiting For Sarah.

2008-09-29T16:38:00.002-04:00

Well, it's official. The proposed 700 billion dollar Federal bailout of Wall Street has gone down in flames. At the final call, the vote in the House of Representatives stood at 228 - 205.

To think, John McCain made the almost - sacrifice of not really suspending his campaign, not flying to Washington immediately, and not reading the original three-page bill crafted by Henry Paulson until three days had passed, all for nothing.

Of course, McCain did take decisive action: He milked the narrative like a Guernsey cow.

Proclaiming himself Cavalry, he planned to gallop into Washington, into the House of Representatives, and bring his fellow Republicans there to heel in service of country over party, getting a rescue bill passed come Hell or high water. He would provide some real leadership (cuckolding John Boehner in the process) and give cover from the assault by Republican voters back home for this deeply unpopular bailout.

Well, Very Old Ironsides shot nothing but blanks today as the House GOP rigidly refused to absorb any political heat for a new, more measured version of the bill, which would have given the people some measure of justice and control over the dispersal of the billions.

But it gets better - worse, I mean. The failure of the Right to clean up after their own messy orgy of greed is not the most interesting facet of this object lesson about the goose that lays the golden egg.

John Boehner himself now says that, despite the fact that Nancy Pelosi was able to cough up 140 Democratic votes for the bailout, and he himself produced an anemic 65 Republican votes, it was House Democrats playing politics - as - usual to the detriment of our great nation.

Don't blame our party just because they avoided this bill like the plague, he seems to be saying, blame the Democrats who voted for the legislation for its failure. This logic is more than absurd; it's Sarah Palin absurd.

Of course, the Right's pundits are out there spinning, spinning, spinning away at this monster of a failure on their own side. My prediction is: No way. It won't go over. The people are not that stupid. We have found the bottom of the Americans' credulity.

Democrats are not Liberals. If they were, I would become a Democrat. But today the Democratic party stepped forward and showed some cajones. 60% of them signed on to the proposed legislation, and girded themselves for the withering criticism of Main Street. Far fewer, less than 50% of Republicans showed that kind of courage.

Fortunately, the GOP has courage and audacity to spare. Sarah Palin has hunted big game before, and stared the Russkies down, to boot.

She'll know what to do.

See you Thursday, Governor.

The Morning After. The GTL Apologizes. Good News For Reality.

2008-09-27T11:29:00.000-04:00

Like Gregor Samsa, I awoke this morning from uneasy dreams, having gone to restless sleep after the first presidential debate last night.

I handed the first debate to John McCain for not seeming crazy and not getting angry. He managed to get in a few tried-and-true zingers to Obama's character which seemed to hit their mark. But amazingly, the people, for the first time in decades, did not warm to the angrier man, but to the better ideas.

CNN has some encouraging results, which indicate that the GTL may have to raise his expectations for the judgment of our wonderful nation and its registered voters.

Republicans have traditionally won elections through smears, mockery, naked contempt, and successful attacks on the character and manhood of their opponents. They have used dirty tricks like voter disenfranchisement in poor urban centers and jamming Democratic phones on election day.

Let's also never forget their successful thirty-year campaign to paint their carnal greed as the seemingly principled "philosophy" of deregulation and trickle-down economics, which the first president Bush rightly recognized as "voodoo" before he realized it just might fool enough of the people to bring about a serious redistribution of wealth to himself and his country-club cronies.

But mostly their triumph came due to mastery of the condescending sound-bite. To my amazement, these snippets of ridicule almost always seemed to meet their mark. A perfect example, and one which I refer to frequently, came in the 2000 race between Al Gore and George W. Bush:

Bush told the assembled audience, "My opponent has hired a consultant to tell him what kind of clothes to wear. Can you imagine? A grown man hiring someone to tell him what clothes he should wear?!"

I thought, "Oh, my God. He's going to win."

And I was right. In one sleazy and hypocritical put-down, Bush had erased in the minds of the public decades of public service by Al Gore and replaced them with an image of a hapless, clueless, scared sissy. It didn't matter that Bush had a phalanx of his own consultants and powerful spinmeisters creating the presidential W out of whole cloth.

With all this in mind, I watched the debate last night looking for McCain to stumble seriously, forget basic facts, or otherwise reveal his cognitive limitations. I was also hoping that Obama would skewer McCain with his own self-contradictory statements on abortion rights, the economy, the Bush tax cuts, and all the other things this so-called principled senator has flip-flopped on in his lust for the Big Chair.

But none of that happened. And McCain did get to follow the old formula created by Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, and others on the Right.

So naturally it appeared to me that McCain had carried the debate, even as Obama held his own. As a frequent visitor to this page commented, "it was a tie, and a tie is a win for McCain."

Thank you, America. I apologize for underestimating you.

All my love,

The Gun-Toting Liberal.

Post-script: I have been asked to make my first political speech, in Lowell, Massachusetts, next week. I will be speaking briefly against Question One, a referendum to eliminate the state sales tax.

Wish me luck.

Live Blogging the Debate

2008-09-26T21:29:00.002-04:00

Twenty-five minutes into the first debate and I am struck by the bloodlessness of Jim Lehrer's questioning. "Where do you stand on the bailout package?" is not a good start.

For one, no one knows what is IN the bailout package.

Second, all of Washington is saying that the injection of presidential politics into the bailout planning is unhelpful and in fact disruptive to the delicate process going on now in Washington.

Jim Lehrer seems to be asking question as if he were sitting in his own living room and indulging his own curiosity. It appears that he wrote them all this afternoon.

Neither candidate is particularly impressive here.

9:33 PM Another question about the current crisis and how each man will govern in light of it.

We're bogged down in question 99% of Americans don't understand. And the slogging is slow.

To my mind, McCain is restraining himself and actually seems more on his game than Obama.

Round one goes to McCain.

Jim Lehrer has got to broaden the questioning. How we got to the current financial calamity in Washington is what he should be focusing on.

9:38 Ah. Obama scores a hit: "John, your president is responsible for the out-of-control spending etc.... you supported him 90% of the time..."

9:39 We're talking about Iraq now. Maybne the worm will turn.

UPDATE
9:50 The people can judge. Obama stresses the folly of the Iraq war. McCain stresses the success of the surge. Let's hope the people keep their eyes on the ball.

McCain continues to do better than I expected, Obama less so.

9:53 McCain is in his element when he talks about war. Americans will listen to his take on troop levels. He accuses Obama of wanting to attack Pakistan. Makes Obama seem unstable.

The McCoward Files: Pachyderm Turns, Donkey Stands Firm. McCain Feints. Obama Fights.

2008-09-25T07:01:00.002-04:00

"We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself."

-- Republican Party platform, 2008

Their core principles are wrong and they know it. You know it too.

So why on Earth would you vote for them?

Now John McCain is "abandoning his campaign" to run to the plush safety of his D.C. office and hide. He says he'll "help" correct the problem he was insisting didn't exist a week ago, and which he's been working to make possible for his whole career.

Thanks but no thanks, Senator. I think the message when he arrives should be, "John, you sure look tired. Why don't you sit down, relax, have a Fresca, and let us do the work?"

"Really."

"No, really."

Ronald Reagan had the good sense to take a nap when the action went over his head. John McCain awake is dangerous. He should learn from Reagan's example.

McCain also wants to cancel the presidential debate tomorrow night. Something about the crisis being too important to let the people see him defend his tainted political philosophy, or something.

If you think that makes any sense at all then you really have been drinking too much Kool-Aid.

I say he's a coward, running from the schoolyard rather than face the fair fight he instigated with an opponent he thought he could defeat with smears, lies, and insinuations about insufficient patriotism and questions about his background.

Friction may not have killed the spin machine, but suddenly Americans are interested in politics and taking their civic responsibilities seriously. A little late, but seriously.

Reality is responsibility.

The Financial Crisis: My Simple Math. The Score.

2008-09-24T06:39:00.001-04:00

Math is not my strong suit but here goes.

Mortgage Deregulation. Billions in bad paper everywhere. Some take massive profits. Shady mortgage-backed securities collapse.

Someone needs to put massive amounts of money back into institutions or a crisis in confidence will destroy the economy.

The taxpayer pays. (That's you and me.)

Score:
Capitalist Thieves: 1
American Citizens: 0

The Savings and Loan debacle in the eighties pales in comparison to the scope and corruption of the current disaster, but there are things in common: John McCain was formally rebuked for his role in the Keating Five scandal, and a member of the prominent Bush family, Neil Bush, was also elbows-deep in the fiasco that eventually cost billions to clean up.

Talk about Voodoo economics. Maybe you can tolerate these so-called Conservatives, but all this compassion is killing me.

Dispatch from Republican Utopia: Reality Bites McCain.

2008-09-22T21:38:00.005-04:00

Unexpected good news here. The American people actually seem to remember which political party spent forty years pushing the ideological belief that deregulation of industry is not only sound business, but a moral and patriotic imperative.

If the people don't forget, and if don't they get lulled back to sleep with sedative-laced red meat and lullabies courtesy of Karl Rove and his All-Star Fox Network Band, then John McCain is toast in November.

Only a deep collective sleep, or mass amnesia, can save him.

Meanwhile, McCain's double half-gainer flip-flop on the matter of Wall Street greed could have earned him a gold medal in diving at Beijing. There he is, yelling louder, getting angrier and angrier, demanding re-regulation of insurance and mortgage companies. But at whom is he angry? The wreckage of our economy lies at his feet, deregulated, as per his wishes. Perhaps he is mad at his timing, or maybe his bad luck?

Old men should not do these kind of calisthenics. And for the sake of the world, would someone please give Senator McCain a mental status exam? Based on his erratic behavior, belligerent nonsense, chronic misstatements, and poor judgment lately, it is clear McCain is in cognitive decline -- but the rest of us?

What's our excuse?

Pickpockets and Politicans. Our Fearless Journalists (or, Hard Questions Aren't Hard To Answer If No One Asks Them).

2008-09-21T08:09:00.014-04:00

Poor John McCain. Poor, poor, Senator John McCain. Poor old flip-flopping, tap-dancing, stuttering, Republican John McCain. Poor old lying, twitching, sweating, trembling, confused, desperate, Washington-insider John McCain.

No one should have to repudiate a lifetime of strongly-held principles overnight, especially a presidential candidate, and especially one who cannot run on his party's accomplishments and is forced to run on "character, not issues."

Goddamn timing. If only he'd been elected in 2004. If he'd won then, he'd be retiring now, and the broken economy he did so much to ruin would not even be on the news. In that time of war and fear, his war-hero story would be all he needed.

Today John McCain's future, his only hope, really, rides on the possibility that investigative reporters will not do their jobs and will not ask hard questions about our current economic collapse. Hard-hitting questions like, "how did this happen?" or "whose idea was this deregulation?" or "who's going to pay to clean up this mess? or "could this have been prevented?" You know, the questions reporters used to ask, which they never ask anymore, about anything.

In other words, he ain't doing too bad. As long as no one watches "the View."

Here's a way to understand the reality of our current situation, and the reason for John McCain's massive, Alaska-sized flip-flop on economic policy:

A pickpocket hangs around the train station stealing wallets and watches. Eventually the complaints from commuters pile up and the police set up surveillance, a small sting operation, and the crook is captured. He is marked, no longer invisible, unable to ply his trade. He does some time and leaves town.

But public opinion changes and new officials are elected. Crime is no longer the focus of Republicans' disapprobation - government's attempt to control free markets is. The large police presence in the train station is bad for business, for tourism, new leaders say, so the police go elsewhere. A new ethic emerges: "government isn't the solution, it's the problem."

The pickpocket comes back. This time, there is no one to stop him, and he steals with abandon, shouting "government stifles the entrepreneur!" as he makes off with even more loot.

Only later do we find out that the television ads, the radio spots, and the direct-mail pamphlets that convinced the people to elect anti-government candidates to the government were paid for by... the pickpocket himself! But it's too late. Our money is gone, and the thief got away scott-free. He even got to keep the money.

Then he went into politics.

Deregulation, like many Republican ideas - such as privatizing social security, for one example - is a massive scam and has been all along. Corruption being the end as well as the means, Republicans by necessity became effective image-mongers, manipulators of the under-informed. They succeeded fabulously at replacing their public image as rapacious robber-barons with one of religious piety and concern for the least among us.

A tiny, elite clique of Americans with nine or ten-digit incomes convinced a majority of Americans that fundamentally redistributing the wealth of our society directly to them was a selfless and Godly act.

To them I say: I admire your chutzpah. Now give me my country back.

I will not be using the past tense to describe John McCain's overnight conversion to liberal progressive economic policy, since I don't believe he actually believes the things he is now saying.

John McCain defines himself as "primarily a deregulator." This means he wants less government regulation of industry. He wants to remove regulations that were established decades or centuries ago to protect the economy and the American people from rip-offs and scams by shady and corrupt business leaders. Apparently these regulations hurt profits.

He claims to be sincere. He wants the government to leave corporations and banks and insurance companies and mortgage companies and investment houses and global financiers alone - because free markets are rooted in American liberty, not because he is in the pocket of industry leaders who are dying to cut corners, make deals in the dark, and line their pockets at the expense of the people.

I am convinced he believes he's doing the right thing. But this is not only not good enough, it's exactly the reason why he can't be allowed to be President.

The McCain campaign, in the desperate attempt to ensure no one looks backward at how we arrived where we are, is now in full whirling-dervish mode, creating the new "reality" as fast as the old one implodes.

The new narrative: we're rolling up our sleeves and fixing the economy, and we're too busy to figure out what went wrong. So don't ask.

Part Three: The Soft White Underbelly.

2008-09-14T11:23:00.003-04:00

Part Three

So I ask you my friends, why do we find ourselves no further beyond the sickening charade of lies and character-smears from the Right that foisted master-of-make-believe George W. on us as our president back in 2000 and again in 2004? Why do so many of us want to sleep as our house is burning?

There is only one answer:

Sin. Wickedness. Guilt. Deep down, we Americans still want to be punished. Eight years of Bush, five years of war, an economy in shambles and it turns out we still believe what the Christianists say, we're a nation of sinners and need to be punished some more. We are not yet clean enough to come to our senses.

More later.

Part Two of Three: Know Your Known Knowns.

2008-09-14T11:19:00.005-04:00

In Part One we set forth reality as the GTL sees it, and pledged to keep our eyes and hearts open to everyone and all possibilities in this dark political season. In Part Two we take an inventory of our understanding of the basics of the Republican candidates. None of what I say is intended as a character smear or a half-truth. I will gladly debate any and all points contained here with anyone.

Let's review our situation, the "known knowns," as Donald Rumsfeld might call them.

What do we know about John McCain?

We know he won't reverse the Bush Doctrine of invading first, asking questions later.

We know he won't get us out of Iraq but may get us into Iran.

We know he won't end Bush's war on the middle class.

We know he will make the Bush tax cuts permanent even though he once said they favor the rich unfairly and he opposes them.

We know he won't protect women's rights as he once pledged to.

We know he won't reach out to other nations to re-establish moderate diplomacy.

We know his top economic advisors think the economy is fine and we're a nation of whiners.

We know he opposes helping all but a few of those Americans who are losing their homes.

We know he can't remember how many homes his wife's inherited wealth has bought him.

We know he doesn't know how to solve the mortgage crisis.

We know he is very rich, and has done fabulously well under the Republican leadership he claims to not be a part of.

We know his "Drill, Baby, Drill" energy policy is at best a "psychological" fix.

We know it is a disastrous energy policy that will stifle innovation and leave American industry in the dust.

We know global warming does not worry him as much as offending the Religious Right does.

We know he swore to avoid dirty politics then accused his opponent, a fellow U.S. Senator, of being willing to lose a war in order to win an election.

We know he has flip-flopped and embraced the "agents of intolerance" he defied in his last presidential race, in order to get the votes of the religious conservative "base" of the Republican Party.

We know that he opposes the comprehensive Twenty-first Century G.I. Bill that all veterans' groups endorse -- because it was not written by a Republican.

We know his son will not need a G.I. Bill to get his education when he comes home from Iraq.

We know he won't cast the neoconservatives out of power but in fact has come to rely on them more than ever.

We know he is a loyal Republican through and through who voted with President Bush 90% of the time.

We know he has yet to figure out how the Internet works, and email.

We know he has had melanoma several times as well as other health problems that could be exacerbated by stress and that the presidency is a stressful job.

We know he is older than Ronald Reagan was when he took office.

We know that even a vigorous seventy-two-year-old man is past his prime.

We know he said experience was the key issue in the presidential race, then chose an inexperienced running mate because he thought she could help him win the election.

And what do we know abut Sarah Palin?

We know she is proud to be a "pitbull with lipstick."

We know she knows nothing of the world and never thought to even obtain a passport until 2007.

We know she considers herself a foreign-relations expert because the barren, arctic reaches of her enormous state border the barren, arctic regions of Russia.

We know that, although her proximity to the Russians is the source of her foreign policy experience, she has never spoken to a Russian leader, or a Russian governor - or a small-town Russian mayor -- about anything.

We know she has never met a foreign head of state, period.

We know she falsely said she was against the earmarks for the Bridge to Nowhere.

We know that she lobbied hard for the Bridge to Nowhere until embarrassment in the public eye made her back off.

We know her line "I said to Congress, 'no thanks for that Bridge to Nowhere,'" gets roars of approval in all her campaigns speeches.

We know she kept the money.

We know she is aware that abstinence-only sex education does not work but supports it anyway, for religious reasons.

We know she will fill Supreme Court vacancies with far-right justices who will nullify Roe vs. Wade.

We know she needs weeks behind closed doors to prep for questions other leaders can answer easily based on their experience.

Salvaging the Truth, the Nation, and (Perhaps) My Soul. First of Three Parts.

2008-09-14T00:44:00.007-04:00

It's Go Crazy Time again in American politics.

Let's go back about a year. It was evening in America and we were waking up from a long Rip-Van-Winkle nap from reality to find our house was on fire. Our debts were spiraling out of control. We were being evicted from our homes. Our children were still not home from the wars we had somehow gotten ourselves into during our restless unconsciousness.

We were modeling democracy for the world by torturing the guilty and innocent alike in secret prisons. We were confusing poor, undocumented Mexican factory workers with dangerous terrorists, and ignoring the thousands of new, very real terrorists our mistaken policies were creating around the world. We were the laughingstock of a terrified planet.

Even as the foundation of our liberty cracked and the edifice of our greatness teetered, we were still giving the last few pennies of our children's milk money to the fabulously wealthy as a reward for setting the fire.

But we seemed to be waking up. We had realized that electing leaders based on their ability to distort serious issues, lie shamelessly, pray to Jesus loudly in front of the cameras, mock their opponents, and assemble truth-mangling hit squads was not going to produce an Abraham Lincoln or FDR anytime soon. We were coming to consensus that "swift-boating" was a bad thing, even when it felt great, and had decided not to do it anymore.

But then, to paraphrase Al Pacino, "just when I thought we were out, they pull us in again."

If the last two weeks are any indication, we as a people just may vote to ignore the flames and go back to bed. Who knows what will await us when - if - we wake up again.

So I am seeking a separate peace with my nation's group fantasy. The GTL will find his serenity, even if the rest of you all go mad. I am working on my New America Project: Love everyone. Share what I have. Talk to anyone honestly. When I get angry, look at my anger from the outside and not feed it. Show respect for those who show me none in the knowledge that to do otherwise is suicide to my soul.

When the hurt beast that is trying to drag us down to Hell rears up in front of me I will remember and try to embody the words of Rilke in the third Duino Elegy:

gently show him daily a loving, confident task done,
-- Guide him close to the garden, give him those counter-balancing nights . . . . . . Withold him . . . . . .

Coming: Part II: an inventory of known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and maybe a migraine

Just a Thought...

2008-09-12T14:35:00.001-04:00

Anyone have an opinion on this:

What about Obama and Biden on an Alaska barnstorming tour? Big cities, little towns, visit local libraries... old-fashioned shoe leather politics, baby-kissin' and handshakes.

I agree with Jack-of-all-thumbs that attacking McPalin right now may not be wise for O-Biden, but with better policies and real respect for the middle class, what does Team Obama have to fear? Get out there, take all comers, answer all questions. Give the media a taste of real straight talk.

Just like they did it in St. Paul in August: take the fight into the heart of the other guy's territory.

Part of Palin's success recently is her newness on the national scene. Anyone can project any traits onto her that they imagine are there: A busy mom like me. A woman in a man's game like me. An athlete, a PTA member, a churchgoer like me.

In Alaska they know Sarah Palin, and plenty of people have had serious misgivings with her behavior in office, as mayor and as governor. As mayor of Wasilla she tried (unsuccesfully) to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, who was president of the Alaska Library Association at the time. As governor, she tried to use her power to get her sister's ex-husband fired from his state trooper job.

A dose of northern exposure may do Obama a world of good, and strike a blow for the truth at the same time.

Like Losing? Let Lies Lie.

2008-09-12T07:20:00.003-04:00

Maybe the Republicans are right, that issues and past performance don't matter. Maybe "character" is the issue.

If it is not in your character to vigorously defend yourself and the country that you love from lies and smears, and if you're afraid to put your whole self - body and mind - on the line for the sake of truth and the people you seek to lead, maybe you don't have what it takes to lead a country.

That John McCain and Sarah Palin are patently unfit for the White House is obvious to me. McCain - too old, too unstable, has flip-flopped on every important issue, is selling a Maverick image he pawned years ago for a taste of power. Palin - whooee, not enough gigabytes on the internet to go there, would ban books like the Taliban if she could, thinks being a sassy Christian hockey-mom is a suitable substitute for knowledge and experience.

But what if Obama won't fight back? What if this unstoppable, up-from-downtrodden Brother for the People doesn't stand his ground in the American Schoolyard and face down the bully? And what if the media do their usual absentee routine?

What then?

I left the Democratic Party years ago for their confusing, self-neutering willingness to be bullied and punked. "Independent" sounded good compared to that mess and still does. I have always said that if and when they get their fight on again, I will go back. Still waiting.

The Liberals who inspire me were fearless labor leaders, tough-as-nails fighters for equal rights and justice. Obama talked like them at first and better find that voice again. He will never NOT be the better choice. But who cares what he is if he can't win a brawl with a wounded old man and his dog?

Thoughtful Readers. My Cup Runneth Over.

2008-09-11T07:31:00.002-04:00

From a comment a reader sent to my email:

2 reasons why the pic of Sarah Palladin is an old photo and likely real, not a new photoshop output, they don't make Schlitz at the present time and haven't for several years. Reason 2 - she has older glasses frames in the photo, not the trendy stop sign (octagon) shape she has been sporting lately. Therefore the photo is several years old and genuine. (Old = genuine, like me.)

Hmmm. Worth thinking about. I will be interested to see how this story evolves. As an old literature professor said, "fiction is a lie that tells the truth." In my opinion the photo captures the reality of Palin, even if it isn't actually genuine.

Show Me The Sanctimony. Alaskan Pork, Kosher-Style.

2008-09-10T23:30:00.006-04:00

Republicans have always been able to gain enormous traction with the general public by mocking the pet projects "Tax-and-Spend" Democrats waste their money on. They whip crowds into frenzies over ridiculous-sounding research projects.

The people buy it and pick up the narrative: Democrats throw vast sums of tax money at foolish pie-in-the-sky ideas, then tax you senseless to pay for them. Republicans won't waste your money. They'll cut taxes and give your money back to you.

And the people believe. And they vote Republican.

Then the Republicans deregulate industry and rob the country blind.

When there's finally nothing left their schemes collapse and the people bail them out while the CEO escapes with millions in a private jet.

Republican Utopia.

They've done a number on the American people that would make a Kosher butcher envious - I mean, not one drop of blood left.

And of course, Republicans have pet projects of their own.

The surpluses Bush inherited are now enormous deficits. But still we hear warnings of Tax-and-Spend Democrats who want to take your money.

I wish I could put some of this manure on my garden - it's potent stuff.

It turns out reality matters. Crooks are bad for the country after all.

Who knew?

The Dignity of High Office

2008-09-10T06:53:00.005-04:00

Waking this morning prepared to be positive, I am greeted by this photo emailed by a friend. I question whether it's authentic, although there is no reason why it would not be, based on my understanding of Governor Palin's "maverick image."

I admit, Palin looks better brandishing a rifle than Cheney (then again, so do most people). The question is, who is she going to shoot in the face?

Speaking of veeps and guns, I offer a link to a GTL post from February 2006 that I hope you will enjoy in nostalgia with me. It has nothing to do with Dick Cheney's drunken hunting crime (excuse me -- "accident"). I just remembered the title, which made me laugh when I wrote it, and makes me laugh now.

Sunny and cool this fine morning. And not just the weather.

The GTL Brooklyns Up. Follow Me.

2008-09-09T23:28:00.006-04:00

I spent today whining at work like a typical liberal asswipe. "We're gonna lose," "we're losing," "what's wrong with our country?" Sarah is a phoney, and she's so mean! McCain gets some poll traction and wah wah wah. Boo effing hoo.

Then I came home and watched a few moments of campaign advertising and news and there they were, the Republican foot soldiers, marching, marching, marching on, shamelessly catapulting the propaganda. Smiling. Invigorated. Almost gleeful, as if they'd invented a hybrid Ferrari that runs on hot air and bullshit from their own bodies and were driving it pell-mell through the protected habitats of the top half of the endangered species list.

These are people whose new campaign mantra is "Drill, Baby, Drill!" So goddamned what if new oil drilling in Alaska won't do a damn thing to help America, even ten years from now when the first drops will flow? Who cares? Who CARES? Who wants to fix anything? Not them! They just want the taste of blood, the slap of entrails along their flanks. The hot dust, the whine of the engine, the demolition-derby rush of adrenaline.

It occurred to me moments ago that the Right are in it for the blood lust, perhaps even more than for the win. To tell you the truth, I don't think they even enjoy the governing, they only truly enjoy winning. Sure, they'll use the office to reward their friends, but their friends are already rich and powerful. They don't need to go to Washington to stay rich.

So it's not for any burning need to take office, to run things, that they fight the way they do. Campaigning is simply what they do best and they love it the way Patton or Stonewall Jackson loved battle. Just get OUT there, make it WORK, beat those voters SENSELESS and get those friggin' votes! This is the American schoolyard, now go and steal their goddamned lunch money!

The Republicans have very little to offer but they make every last ounce of it fly. This is a party so wedded to moral decay and moribund ideas that their favorite ice cream flavor is rust. But man, do they ever enjoy the game. And it's this love of the bloodsport of politics, the joy of scorched earth, the smell of napalm in the morning, that Americans respond to. We're ready to elect a psychotic bully, and keep on electing psychotic bullies, as long as they can bring some triumphalist sadism to the game.

Even if our own interests are the first to get tossed over the side.

So. What do we the Liberals do in the face of this?

With all due respect, the only way to win this thing is to love the game. Bill Clinton did. He lived in campaign mode like a phoenix in fire. It was his genius. The more shit they threw at him, the more it slid off, the more powerful he became. He left office as loved as when he arrived.

We have to Brooklyn up. We need to raise Hell. We need to laugh those dangerous psychos into the ground, we need to dance, we need to celebrate our wonderful reality testing, our love for each other, our generosity, our sanity -- our values. Read Bob Herbert's column in today's paper. He and I think alike, though he gets paid for his writing, while I give it away for free.

Many of you know and understand me well by now. Despite this blog name I hardly ever carry a gun. I do not belong to the NRA. I am the GTL because I can, and because I am filled with love and I say it loud. No one can call me a bleeding heart or a punk or a patsy because I love my fellow man. It gives me strength.

I am here to remind you all what I forget from time to time and need to remind myself: Liberals are powerful, we can make noise, and smoke, and a mighty concussive force. And a joyful noise.

So tomorrow - no whining. Tomorrow I sing.

"Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." - Che Guevara

Clarity Comes

2008-09-09T07:52:00.000-04:00

Just a flash, then more on this later. As I ready for work and the stories flow from NPR and the Today Show, I am struck that the election this year is a real watershed event.

My new headline for the election:

ELECTION 2008: REALITY vs MAKE-BELIEVE

A cursory examination of every McCain campaign assertion, and the actual record of Sarah Palin, shows that the Republican win-at-all-costs fantasy machine is still humming along full-bore.

I wrote a post entitled "friction kills the spin machine" many moons ago. Guess I was wrong, or too optimistic, or both.

If buying into the fiction that gave us George W. Bush, Iraq, torture, trillions in debt, the death of Habeus Corpus, and the collapse of our banking system (to the great benefit of the super-rich) didn't wake us up, maybe nothing will.

Maybe nothing will.

More later.

Palin' in Comparison: Truth vs. Narrative

2008-09-07T12:14:00.001-04:00

Many thanks to Dan W. for providing the link to this fascinating story. Let's hope the facts can pierce a hole in the narrative the McCain team has so far successfully put forward regarding his double-down bet on Sarah Palin as his veep choice.

If the author of this email is not on the Today Show this week and present by invitation at the first presidential debate later this month, it would be a tragic waste.

Thought for the Day:

"Another tax cut for the super-rich. That'll show bin Laden we mean business." - Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Quotes of the Day

2008-09-06T08:41:00.000-04:00

I am going to try to post one or more thought-provoking quotations each day or so. Feedback will be appreciated!

For Saturday, September 6, 2008:

“Naturally the common people don’t want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

~ Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag, Nazi Party, and Luftwaffe Commander in Chief

or was it Karl Rove?

My Perverse Homeostasis.

2008-09-05T07:06:00.005-04:00

Paul Krugman hit the nail on the head this morning in his op-ed piece in the Times. The Republicans, the ultimate elites, the ultimate Washington insiders, the ultimate enemies of the middle class - are appealing to the nation's anger and resentment by splitting their own character traits off from their group and projecting them onto the Left. Then they attack.

George Orwell said, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Friends. If we as a people do not wake up from the disease of fantasy and make-believe and address the very real problems that threaten us today, the game is over.

The Right is right about one thing: there is a culture of elites in this country, who truly do have contempt for real Americans' values. They cannot fathom our pain, or our fear that the American Dream is slipping out of our grasp. They think we're a nation of whiners and that, as long as big business is skimming the cream and the people live in a constant state of fear, everything is fine.

Mitt Romney got a great guffaw of derision from the assembled crowd in St. Paul when he mocked Al Gore and suggested the nation could save energy by "keeping Gore's private jet on the ground."

They loved it.

But Gore doesn't own a jet. That didn't matter.

Why? Why can an arena full of people be so easily turned into a political lynch mob by nonsense and lies? Wasn't America supposed to be different?

If we can solve the problem of why it didn't matter, and bring this game of high-stakes make-believe to an end, we might just be okay after all.

Reality hasn't mattered to the Republicans since Ronald Reagan quadrupled the size and expenditure of the federal government behind a mantra that Democrats were for "big government" and "tax-and-spend."

Some very smart people have actually bought into this nonsense, and for many years, too. Even liberals sometimes allow this fiction to stand. And if they can, anyone can.

You can.

The fact that reality didn't matter in 1980, or in St. Paul on Wednesday night, chills me to the bone. And the fact that the feckless mainstream media won't do anything about this disconnect from reality heats me back up with anger.

So at least I achieve a perverse kind of homeostasis.

If real multi-millionaire elites, like Mitt Romney, and real big-city reprobate strike-three divorcees like Rudy Giuliani, who could not care less about the sanctity of his three marriages, can convince us that they are the salt of the Earth, protecting the little guy from value-less, snooty Democrats, we are sunk.

And I mean sunk.

Giuliani On Fear

2008-09-04T11:51:00.000-04:00

Rudy Giuliani told the crowd in St. Paul last night that the Democrats were "afraid to use the term 'Islamic Terrorism.'" The Dems pledged to fight terrorism, just not Islamic terrorism. That makes them weak and afraid, see. Sorry, Rudy, but making that dog hunt will be a a stretch even for a master truth-mangler like you.

The good news about the right wing is that they always project their own inadequacies and deep feelings on others and then ridicule them. Once you know the formula, they are very easy to understand.

There is fear abroad in the land. The Republicans fear having their clocks cleaned by Obama.

Psychological projection aside, there are words the Right fears more than any that the Left may be avoiding. Their fear is so palpable that these words were not uttered once in three days of the Republican National Convention, and only once last night, in the not-ready-for-prime-time slot filled by Mitt Romney.

What words are they afraid of saying out loud?

George.

W.

Bush.

Why vote for a party that tries to disavow their own leader?

Come on, people, is there any Kool-Aid even left in the pitcher?

Sarah Palin and the RNC Convention. Yesterday is the New Tomorrow. Whitey Ascendant. Teen Booty-Call Redefines Family.

2008-09-04T07:08:00.000-04:00

Having blogged about the come-hither charms of Sarah Palin, based only on her reputation and the raft of carefully-chosen still photos presented by the McCain campaign to the media, I felt I had to watch her convention speech last night and see what she is really like in motion.

I came away disappointed and very uneasy. No more steamy fantasies about her for me. She seemed creepy -- sassy and yet intolerantly provincial at the same time, with about as much gravitas as a high school student council candidate. Imagining her as our chief executive, or even as our number-one ambassador to the world, made me feel cold all over. If anyone could possibly garner less credibility on the world stage than George W. Bush, here she was.

As an effete east-coast intellectual, I almost choked on my latte as I watched the video of the audience ("crowd" would be too generous, given all the empty seats).

The GOP has clearly abandoned their pretense of inclusiveness, their attempts to make their party look like the real America. Amid an ocean of pale skin, neck wattles, receding hairlines, odd hats and ill-fitting clothes, and seemingly finger-painted "Hockey Moms 4 Palin" signs, I counted fewer than five blacks, and almost as few young people. Compared to the crowd at Obama's convention, the RNC seemed to proclaim that the future belongs to... the past?

But creepier still was the constant return to the image of various members of the Palin family holding and caressing the famous Down's Syndrome infant the candidate courageously decided not to abort, or so goes the heavy-as-lead narrative. I'm not sure why, if her campaign wants her family left out of the public eye, they would insist on inflicting the image of the baby being passed around like a plate of nachos.

I also want to be first on the record in saying that the hapless high-school kid that knocked up Palin's daughter Bristol is NOT a member of the Palin family, no matter how many anti-reality spells the Republicans try to cast over the arena.

What the hell was this Young Stud of the Klondike doing onstage?! Whose idea was that?! Over here we have Obama, his wife and daughters, and over here... Palin, her family, and... a kid who got laid!

See hypocrisy's genitals! See family re-defined! See the vice-presidential statutory baby-daddy!

Look, if Bristol were my daughter, impregnated in an illegal, premarital, underage booty-call, I would be chasing that kid off the stage with my beloved lightweight aluminum Smith & Wesson .38 Special, not foisting him at the septuagenarian McCain for the Least-Comfortable Hug Ever. (Or was it a handshake? By that time I was so numb McCain could have sunk his incisors into the kid's neck and drank his blood and it would have failed to shock me.)

Whither abstinence, Wasilla? Thither thou goest, America?

Young Levi Does the Bristol Stomp. What's At Stake in '08. Jacoby Gets It Right (sort of).

2008-09-03T18:04:00.007-04:00

Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe today, says, "Ambiguities may muddle the 2008 campaign, but not when it comes to abortion. The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life."

Although we fall on differing sides of the debate, Jacoby clearly states something we all must remember as we head into the home stretch toward November:

The upcoming election will be - and ought to be - the mother of all abortion rights battles. Enough finagling and finessing, enough prevaricating and posturing. The candidates are either "fer it or agin' it," and the consequences of our choice will ring throughout the nation for generations to come.

Let's begin by being clear about one thing the Right would just as soon forget:

Abortions happen.

Legal or illegal, safe or dangerous, throughout recorded history women have always, and will always, seek abortions. And by the way, when Republicans get into office, abortion rates skyrocket. It's true. Look it up.

Abortions will happen, and gambling will happen, and drug use will happen, and gay affairs in bathrooms at airports will happen, and all the social ills your pastor warns you to avoid will keep on keepin' on. They are as human as greed, gluttony, or karaoke (unfortunately). The salient question is whether we deal with them as adults in a real world, minimizing their ill effects on society, or as make-believe players who think (for example) that somehow teaching nothing at all about sex will keep youngsters like Bristol Palin from getting knocked up.

(By the way, the rich will always be able to get safe abortions. If you think a McCain, Bush, or Kennedy will ever see the bent side of a wire hanger, you know as little about America as you do about human nature. It's the rest of our daughters, sisters, girlfriends and wives we need to worry about.)

Regardless of the Conservatives' self-proclaimed "compassion," don't expect exceptions for victims of rape or incest if McCain and Palin emerge victorious. If abortion is murder, it's murder. Period. A baby from incest at age eleven is no different than one lovingly conceived on a virginal bride's wedding night.

To confuse matters further, both John McCain and Sarah Palin support the death penalty. So much for the sanctity of human life.

An Obama administration will reverse the erosion of women's rights the so-called "pro-life" faction has achieved since the Christian Right infiltrated American politics in the eighties. He will, through legislation and Supreme Court appointments, cement the rights to clean and competent medical care women fought for and gained over the past century in terms of how they deal with unwanted pregnancy.

A McCain administration will strip those protections away, change the course of women's reproductive health, and send thousands of women and girls into a retrograde history-book nightmare of back alleys and illegal abortion mills when they want or need to end a pregnancy.

Banning abortion is a deceptively simple ideological fix for a very complex, real-world problem.

From the Levees of New Orleans to the Levis of Wasilla, reality punctures ideology every time.

Headlines We'd Like To See: Part One

2008-09-02T07:55:00.005-04:00

They shoot commercials, don't they? Here are some taglines and/or headlines you should be seeing, but probably won't:

REPUBLICANS SUPPORT PREMARITAL SEX

ABSTINENCE-ONLY FAILS IN ALASKA

ABSTINENCE: BETTER THAN NO SEX AT ALL

MURPHY BROWN WAS RIGHT - REPUBS OFFER APOLOGY TO EIGHTIES SITCOM CHARACTER

Strike Up The Band. Cue The Jets For The Fly-Over. Here We Go Again.

2008-09-01T09:30:00.002-04:00

I like reading Bill Kristol early in the day, before eating or drinking, so that when the bile rises, as it inevitably does, there is less of it.

But today I am happy with Kristol's New York Times op-ed piece, and I'll tell you why. Here is the salient paragraph:

The Palin pick already, as Noemie Emery wrote, “Wipes out the image of McCain as the crotchety elder and brings back that of the fly-boy and gambler, which is much more appealing, and the genuine person.” But of course McCain needs Palin to do well to prove he’s a shrewd and prescient gambler.

If my instincts are right, the American electorate has had it up to here with choosing fly-boys and gamblers for president. Knowledge, experience, and maturity have redeemed themselves fabulously in eight short years. If John McCain is worried enough about being perceived as an out-of-touch "crotchety elder" to exchange that persona for one of a reckless and impulsive fighter-jock, it makes the case against electing him that much stronger.

In 2000, Al Gore was the known quantity, the policy wonk, the Washington insider with decades of legislative experience. George W. Bush was the gutsy, daring, "outside the beltway" choice.

Today most Americans wish Gore had fought more forcefully for the office the people chose him for. We know deep down that he would not have staffed the government with unqualified, know-nothing cronies or thumbed his nose at longstanding allies and the United Nations. Many believe that a Gore administration would have gone after Al Qaeda on day one, and the 9/11 attacks would likely not have happened at all. There is more than enough evidence to suggest this.

Most importantly, Al Gore would not have invaded Iraq.

It seems the height of stupidity for Mr. Kristol, and Senator McCain, for that matter, to remind us of gutsy, risk-taking fighter pilots, of President Bush standing before that highly-orchestrated backdrop of a navy battleship at dusk, in full battle gear, proclaiming, "mission accomplished" in Iraq.

Today's Republican neo-conservatives, tasting their own blood in the 2008 electoral waters, somehow seem compelled to remind us of better days, when another gambling fly-boy's shameful and disgraceful jaunt into make-believe leadership had yet to be exposed.

Dinner in Republican Utopia: Pork and Half-Baked Alaska, courtesy of the Trickle-Down Vixen

2008-08-31T09:37:00.011-04:00

"But David, wasn't she a model? Doesn't that score her a few points?" - Lew, Comments section

Someone has been calling Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a VPILF. I'll leave that one out there as it is.

I will not deny that Palin possesses some weird, intoxicating radiance. Illuminated by church-light, bathed in calm self-assuredness, possessed of creamy skin and strong thighs, she exudes a perfect olfactory blend of Eros, Thanatos, good clean girl's locker-room sweat, crisp linen, Shalimar, gunpowder, and moose-musk. No wonder John McCain can't resist her. She's the opposite of his meal ticket, his beer-baroness wife Cindy, with her famous trowel.

When I think of all the qualified, serious women in government who might make a good vice president - on both sides of the isle, mind you - I can only conclude that John McCain, as well as the Republican Svengali patrol that brought us the Original C-Minus Man, must have utter contempt for the people, and for the seriousness of higher office.

People who believe that government is always the problem and never the solution (thank you, Ronald Reagan) obviously cannot be trusted to make government work. After all, honest and efficient government would only hurt their ideology and create their own downfall.

Why Americans staff their government with people who want it to fail is the great mystery that the rest of the world can't fathom, and the Right wing's success at perpetuating their diseased ideology is a triumph of Orwellian manipulation. Only when things collapse around us and we find out what a Republican Utopia actually feels like to live in do we seem to come back to our senses.

Republicans famously denigrate the "reality-based community," as if reality were only an option, not a rule. Reality irritates them because it exposes their bankrupt morals and rampant greed, not to mention their gross incompetence.

Whenever reality cracks the paranoid, right-wing psychosis, when the treasury is finally empty and the cemetery full of our young brave dead, the people always return to sanity. And they always, always reject right-wing ideology.

If you love your country, you love the people. If you love the people, you want them to thrive, the middle class to be strong, the poor to be lifted from poverty, the rich to be held to a decent moral standard. If you love your country you are alive to the fact that we are all in this together and should care for one another.

If you love your country you do not turn it over to enormous corporations and foreign investment cartels, and you do NOT deregulate industries so that their CEO's can loot the common wealth with impunity. You do not wave the bible while robbing the poor.

John McCain used to agree, and before he jettisoned his integrity, he famously bucked the Evangelical trend in his own party. Regarding their multiple bigotries, he called the Christian Right "agents of intolerance." Today's McNasty, however, is a far cry from the McCain who partied with Busta Rhymes on MTV eight years ago, when he was a mere sixty-six year old presidential candidate. These days, he questions his opponents patriotism and chooses a running mate who vows to destroy women's reproductive rights as much as he himself once vowed to protect them.

An honorable patriot does not surround himself with lobbyists while pretending to be these very lobbyists' worst nightmare. True patriots do not flippantly commit our brave young men and women to toil in the lap of death when we "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran." True patriots do not hire consultants who wear thousand-dollar suits and smoke fifty-dollar cigars by the country-club pool while lecturing the rest of us about patriotism and sin.

And true patriots would never invoke Jesus' name to meet their power-mad, blood-lustful ends.

All this notwithstanding, if Sarah Palin invites the GTL out to the range for some smoke-and-hot-brass therapy, and a whiff of her come-hither, Miss Congeniality charms, you'll all have to forgive me.

Because I'm going.

The Gun Toting Liberal Scores His First Comment In Months!

2008-08-30T21:25:00.000-04:00

Thanks, Flamsey. I thought no one read my li'l Ole Blog! Right on, Flamsey!

Half-Baked Alaska

2008-08-30T16:44:00.000-04:00

John McCain says that "not [being] from Washington" is the main qualification for his VP choice, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin.

If not being from Washington qualifies you to be a hair's breadth from the oval office, then there are maybe a hundred million qualified Americans for the job.

And, one might rightly ask, if not being a Washington insider is so preferable in choosing a candidate, what business do we have electing John McCain, with over a quarter-century as a beltway insider?

If, as Alaskan Republicans claim, Governor Palin's selection is "good for Alaska," which I highly doubt in the first place, what about the other 49 states? Surely they deserve a candidate good for them, too?

It has been said that we are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. Here's a fact: John McCain chose Governor Palin without even going to Alaska or sending his search committee. He simply does not know her. Period. Had he vetted her more carefully, he would have found that she is embroiled in not one but two scandals at home, both involving cronyism and bullying from the corner office. One is nakedly personal, involving her misguided attempt to soothe her sister's personal feelings about her ex-husband. The other is about what most corruption is about, money.

Nice.

The scrutiny the Governor brings to Alaska will be good for the hotel industry, as reporters descend en masse to dig the dirt, but that may be the end of it. If you'll recall, heightened scrutiny did nothing for Geraldine Ferraro. Also, prior to her scandal-plagued governorship, Ms. Palin was the mayor of a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. There are more children in the school systems of medium-sized American suburbs than there are citizens in Wasilla. The press will certainly be impressed by how little there there is there.

Republicans are going to have a tough time keeping a stiff upper lip as they put their personal credibility on the line for Ms. Palin. Unfortunately, it will take something stronger than a deep swig of Kool-Aid to brace them for this odious task.

Sentimientos, sufrimientos

2008-08-29T22:50:00.000-04:00

"Dejeme decirle, a riesgo de parecer ridiculo, que el revolucionario verdadero esta guiado per grandes sentimientos de amor." -- Che Guevara

Voodoo After All. Utopia At Last. Something To Whine About.

2008-07-13T11:58:00.004-04:00

Turns out that Bush was right.

No, not that Bush. His father.

Once upon a time if you suggested that the way to ensure Americans' prosperity was to lavish the wealthiest citizens and corporations with tax breaks while breaking the back of organized labor and opening up international markets to free trade, you'd be laughed out of the room.

Even the wealthiest individuals and corporate leaders had to temper their rhetoric at first. This was the time when people like George H.W. Bush, seeking the people's votes, slammed Reagan's ridiculous fringe economic ideas as "voodoo economics."

Later, when it seemed that the people could indeed be flim-flammed by a mix of outright lies, patriotic mumbo-jumbo, and insinuations of weak-kneed liberalism, the pretense dissolved and everyone at the top bellied up to the table and helped themselves to a big ol' slice of the pie.

At its peak, greed came out of the shadows altogether. While real wages stagnated and American families, feeling the pinch, went from one job to two, then to three, then to none, a new gilded age of obscene excess emerged.

Now it seems that the bloom is off the rose. Republican Utopia, while fabulously successful at the country club, is not holding its own in the court of public opinion. That trickle-down, deregulate-everything mantra that Reagan rode to power on was exactly what his vice president called it: voodoo.

Or maybe not. Maybe, as McCain's economic brain, Phil Gramm, says, we've simply become a "nation of whiners." "I can't feed my family," we whine. "I can't heat my home," we whine. "I can't afford my medicine," we whine. "My son is dead in Iraq and I'm beginning to think it really was all about oil," we whine.

"It was about oil," Scott McLellan replies.

"Don't listen to him," his former best friend George Bush whines.

Phil Gramm hangs out with people who made out pretty damn good in the last few years. The winners. The architects of our current Republican Utopia. Of course the rest of us seem like whiners to him.

Someone ought to get some whiners together, fill a few minivans, show up at his doorstep, his friends' doorsteps, with some persuasive arguments. Rouse the family from their beds. Line them up on the lawn. Present the arguments. Show the evidence. Ask, whence redress? Our children and grandchildren are going to pay for all that voodoo, remind them. What are these young ones, shivering in their jammies on the fresh-mowed lawn going to pay?

We'll hear some whining then.
.

Is There Snow In Heaven?

2008-07-12T08:37:00.001-04:00

Tony Snow is dead. May he rest in peace.

The Gun Toting Liberal is not sentimental when it comes to death, I'll have you know. I am not among those who develop critical amnesia when a public figure passes this vale of tears. Death is the purchase of us all and no one is entitled to a free pass for his actions while on Earth.

So while I am not happy about Mr. Snow's passing, I won't lie and tell you that I loved this man.

When charming, good-looking men with great hair and gleaming, straight teeth stand up and lie, when they parse terms for torture and defend a fundamentally dishonest and corrupt administration, they damage our nation, our people, and our credibility in the eyes of the world.

Today our nation - and the world - is suffering because of people like Mr. Snow and their willingness to play handmaiden to the great benighted scoundrels of our time.

Watching Mr. Snow on television, I was occasionally struck by the idea that this man might be likable, even charming, had his words to the cameras not represented poverty, death, and despair for all but a few of the wealthiest and most cynical Caesars of our time.

But suppose, like Lee Atwater a generation ago, Snow had plumbed his soul as he prepared to launch it toward the starry dynamo. Would he have found the choices of his life wanting? Would his soul be ready for eternity? Would he be able to meet his creator knowing that he had done his best to protect the least among His children, that he had used his great power to bring love and protection to the powerless?

Would he have about-faced, and mea culpa'ed, and played every last desperate ace he had, like Lee did?

Would Snow melt into (At)water? We can go to the videotape, as they say, to answer this for ourselves. Speculation is not necessary.

And now it's too late for the tall man with the great teeth and hair to take any of it back. May he get his deserved portion in the afterlife, whatever that may be. Nothing more and nothing less.

And may we get ours, America.

You are, as ever, my great love, my beloved country, my brothers, my sisters, my children and elders. We are all God's children and I am doing what I can. I shout to you across the windy playground of our sorrow. Can you hear me?

Peace.

Eat This. Amnesia 101. Our Dumb Congress.

2008-07-10T08:00:00.002-04:00

Laws are like sausages, they say. If you're a fan of either, you should not watch them being made. Now, I like eating sausages as much as the next greasy-blooded, corpulent American. I know how they're made and eat them anyway. I am also a fan of good and honest government, which has been talked about but never made, and I watch that process closely, despite the queasiness it brings.

The law is a sausage you eat at at gunpoint, and I want to know what's being crammed down my gullet, even if I can't stop it from happening. No one can, the theory goes, since we live in a land "of laws, not men."

But that was before. They will say, "before nine eleven," but to me the real change came while the twin towers were still standing; to me it's, "before Cheney and Bush."

We now live in the era of the presidential signing statement. Time after time, in hundreds of cases, the C-Minus Man in the offal office signs a bill into law and then attaches a letter to it saying, "Dear America, go screw yourself. I'll enact this law but I ain't following it. Good luck trying to make me."

And yet we still go on making those damn sausages.

The current Democratic-led Congress is playing out like one of those horror movies where the nubile young woman escapes the clutches of a sociopathic killer and then, instead of running like Hell for the nearest police station, she sits down ten feet from her unconscious assailant for a good cry, while not even bothering to keep her eye on the maniac to make sure he's really down for good.

Our assailant is not down for good, America.

So now we are treated to the spectacle of the Democratic Congress caving in on the only chance we as a nation were likely to get to hear who in Bush's circle devised the massive program of illegal, unconstitutional spying that the large telecommunications companies knowingly facilitated under executive-branch pressure. Given immunity from lawsuits over civil rights violations, Verizon et al will never have to divulge who came to them in the night and asked their help in gutting the constitution.

But that's not what the GTL is sad about today.

You see, the Democrats are at it again, laying down, showing their bellies, not even fighting, and it's sad to say that Obama is right in the thick of it. He'll call the legislation a compromise. Sure, there'll be no justice for the fourth amendment, he says, but the new legislation creates stricter measures on what the president can and cannot do. A little something is better than a whole lot of nothing.

Forgive the vulgarity I am about to use, but there's no better language to say what's coming:

Picture the sunny summer day in the near future when Bush steps to the table in the Rose Garden to sign this shitty piece of legislation into law. Cameras will flash and the corporate media will dutifully report how the Democrats held his feet to the fire, not over the telecommunications companies' complicity in warrantless spying on Americans - that's over, that was the compromise - but for the future "protection" of our "guaranteed rights."

Bush will sign it. It tells him What He May Not Do, or more accurately, What He Must Stop Doing. He will sign it with a smile. The sausage, the gleaming, steaming, tubesteak of freedom
will emerge into the sun.

The president will sign the law, then attach the signing statement daring the country to make him follow it - which he never will, let's face it, America - then he'll grab that glistening sausage, bend us over -

and shove it right up our ass.

Keep your powder dry, America. The real changes we've been hoping for are not yet here.

Logic, Republican Style

2008-07-01T16:00:00.000-04:00

Frankly, I'm only listening with half an ear to the latest dust-up involving Wesley Clark and his opinion of whether John McCain's military experience is relevant to his abilities as a potential President.

McCain's supporters now claim that his status as a veteran and former POW make him off-limits to criticism, and that to suggest otherwise is not only an insult to the good senator, but to the military in general and all who serve in it, not to mention generations of veterans.

But simple logic tells us this: If military service by itself qualifies and enables you to become president, then there are hundreds of thousands - millions - of qualified candidates out there abroad in the land.

I would settle for one.

Just as every poodle is a dog, but not all dogs are poodles, every candidate should be a war veteran (so they say), but NOT EVERY WAR VETERAN IS A QUALIFIED CANDIDATE (so says the GTL).

Remember your basic logic, people.

I for one am thankful that there are men and women who are willing to serve their country through violence and risk. They deserve our gratitude, respect, and help in later life. They put themselves in harm's way and are willing to die for our nation. Think of that. They have so much trust in our country.

Most of us mistrust politicians, don't believe most of what they say. Not them. These individuals are willing to kill or even die when a politician in Washington, D.C. tells them to. That takes some kind of guts, some kind of courage. The GTL stands in awe of such bravery.

But that doesn't mean they'd all make good presidents.

John McCain wants a free pass from scrutiny based on his war record. I say the war was over a long time ago, we did not win, and the large forces that brought us Vietnam are no longer in play. The world has changed.

More relevant than his life as a war hero is what John McCain the man and the senator has done in the intervening four decades, and what he would do as president.

It is our duty as citizens to figure these things out before election day, and then vote. There is too much at stake not to.

Know the Future, Blog Reader. The GTL Prognosticates.

2008-06-28T17:09:00.003-04:00

I want to be first on the record to make these predictions:

1. After leaving office, George W. Bush will become Commissioner of Baseball.

2. He will hold this title until his passing, becoming one of the greatest commissioners since Kennisaw Mountain Landis.

3. Bush will be a far better and more honorable man as the figurehead of Major League Baseball than he was as president. Still corrupt, but better and more honorable, relatively speaking.

It is his calling. His birthright, even. He is dreaming of it already, now, while still in office. Fantasizing about a job he can really enjoy, one with real responsibility - baseball is the national pastime, after all - but without so much hard work, so much thinking.

Mark the time and date. 5:19 PM on Saturday, June 28, 2008.

We're gonna win a prize for this.