After a quick gasp, the room gulped silent, and leaned in at the two of us, glancing back and forth between us like a sports bar crowd trying to watch a ping-pong match in 3X fast-forward. Utterly unruffled, Goddard simply flashed his patented politician smile for the cameras then turned to me and, in the epitome of feigned innocence, asked,  ”What makes you say that? I’m not sure what you are talking about.” He grinned, inviting the audience to join him in disbelief.  ”Can you give an example?” he asked and the room turned my way.

After a brief paralyzing instance where I ran through the all-time favorites from that very long list of national issues the Dems had deserted liberals and progressives over (such as Bush war crimes, defunding the national war machine, mortgage relief, Wall Street indictments, and universal health care just to name a quick 5). But I knew he could quickly deflect those as not of his purview.

Desperately seeking an equally compelling AZ state issue, I finally settled the old, and guaranteed ineffective, standby. “Well, how about Prop 203?” [the medical marijuana proposal]?

Anyone want to guess his reaction to me, a volunteer who, for months, had donated hours, and cash, and gallons of gas trucking his signs around my end of the state for this long-time professional politician who promised HE was the best choice to represent my interests?

That’s right, he laughed at me.

And then proceeded to further casually condescend about why the party couldn’t get involved in individuals’ “pet issues.” Two days later Terry Goddard lost by nearly 13% of the votes cast in an election where 60% of those who could vote didn’t, showing that they cared no more for Terry Goddard’s “pet issues” than he did for theirs.

Earlier that week, in a different room full of different people, this time in Bullhead City, I had asked another would-be Dem emperor about his choice of clothing — US Senate candidate, Tucson rich guy Rodney Glassman. I had arrived a bit late, as usual, in this case having been lost, but eventually found the place by spying Glassman’s distinctive full-sized lavishly decorated tour bus in front of a local union hall.

As a devoted Dem volunteer, I had performed similar services and made similar donations of time, cash, and gas for Glassman as well, including one 720 mile round trip, on my own time and my own dime, driving his signs to the farthest northern regions of the state. If the guy was over in our end of the state, I was going to try and catch a glimpse of him just to remind myself of who I was working for.

[Full disclosure -- though it took some time and effort in all honesty, in comparison, my efforts for all of AZ statewide Dem candidates combined were minimal next to this one state senate with this one candidate I absolutely loved. You see, in addition to occasionally carrying and posting signs for those guys, I mostly did volunteer work for my wife Beth's equally Dem doomed campaign, but still ...]

Finding myself without paper during the Q&A portion of Glassman’s final whistle-stop visit, I painstakingly undid one of the numerous donation envelopes he’d showered the room with and carefully wrote out my question. I wanted to get it right.

When I finally got a turn he was halfway towards the front door. “Mr. Glassman,” I asked, referring to my notes. “First, let me remind you, assure you, I am a supporter and have done volunteer work for you for months. I’m not making this question up to embarrass you, but I would really like to know. Right now, the elephant in the room that nobody’s talking about is that the rich are running our country like it’s their own plutocracy, again and again shaping our government to suit themselves at the expense and misery of the public and paying politicians to do their bidding for them. And until we fix that we’re all going to suffer. This problem has a long history in the US Senate, which used to be called ‘The Millionaire’s Club.’ Mr. Glassman, a lot of us are working pretty hard to get you elected, and if you do get elected, how can we be sure you’re not going to turn around and feed at the trough like all the other politicians we send to Washington to protect us?”

Now, audience, you know that look folks get when they discover they just took an unsuspecting sip of sour milk? It only lasted a second, but Glassman got it; the look I mean, though I will never be sure if he actually got my point. For within seconds, he had focused in on the now-folded up donation envelope that still rattled in my hands. His eyes narrowed and he asked, “Wait a minute. Have you donated to my campaign?”

[Full disclosure, once more: My wife, Beth, had funded her campaign for the State Senate seat in LD3 through the state's "Clean Elections" program. Paid for from donations and various state fees, other than taxes, the Clean Election program, one of several across the country, funds qualified candidates who collect enough public support as shown through signed candidate petitions and $5 donations. While the program supplies candidates with a considerable amount of funding (up to $15,000 for their primary campaign and another $25,000 if they should qualify for the general election) the program also limits candidate spending and public donations are kept to $5 max.

Meanwhile, Glassman had run a traditional campaign with no set spending limits and a Citizens' United style interest in corporate donations (not that any Dem saw much of that action this go-round).  As a US Senate candidate, according to Phoenix New Times', James King, Glassman burned through well over a million and a half bucks including $500,000 of his money. As a minor league candidate's eye candy, I had trailed my wife everywhere and had run into Rodney and his donation envelopes at a number of Dem events and had never gotten used to this rich guy trying to get me to give him money.]

However, at that moment that Monday in Bullhead City, unmanned by the intensity of his gaze, I stumbled, forgetting about the very 1st fundraiser, over a year earlier, when I had just met him and against my gut instincts, had handed over a $20 we couldn’t afford. “I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t think so. If I did, it wouldn’t have been much; I don’t generally have much, and further I believe in working for the candidates I believe in, not just throwing money at them.”

This time Glassman wasn’t thrown by the audacity of my hoping to get him to change. He quickly parried with, “Do you know how Obama got elected?” and then raised his eyebrows in expectation.

And though I instantly knew where he was headed, the best retort I could come up with was: “By getting a whole lot more votes than John McCain did, which,” I quickly added, “is what I am hoping you will do. Which is why I just took your signs to Colorado City and Fredonia and Page.”

But it did no good. Glassman simply, lightly, chuckled and shook his head at me as one would a child emoting about his letter to Santa. “No. He got more money than anyone else.”

Then, as fellow working-class Dem volunteers, who had also sacrificed for months for the man, stood close by, Rodney Glassman, the rich guy I was worried about trusting with my efforts and my government, proceeded to lecture me on the meaninglessness of the people who had voted for Obama without the cash that sold the message. At some point along the exchange, I kid you not, Glassman collected a clutch of donation envelopes and started gesturing with them to emphasize his points, the way Robert Dole once did with his pen. He then elaborated on his money woes, as we nodded, felt bad for the guy and promised to keep working hard to help him win.

Eventually, the crowd wandered out front to the tour bus which idled as Glassman explained the rest of his itinerary for this last western swing to get out the vote in good old Mohave County. He offered anyone interested a free ride on his tour bus to Kingman or Lake Havasu, whichever it was. There was some confusion. While we admired the bus and attempted to make favorable comments about the unique music video Glassman put out, which the bus had just appeared in, Rodney reminded us how important it was to beat McCain, how much he needed our help, how hard he was working for us, the middle-class folks that made America great.

Seeing no one had taken him up on it the first time, Rodney repeated his offer of a ride on the tour bus to the next stop for anyone who wanted to go with him. And then he quickly quipped, “Of course, you’ll have to get your own ride home.”

“Of course,” we nodded and he rode away. I believe a couple of little old ladies might have taken him up on the offer. For the most part the crowd dematerialized and I went back in the union hall to help pick up the Glassman signs he’d left behind and collect the unused donation envelopes.

Eight days later, Rodney Glassman would collect less than 35% of the popular vote.

And if I stopped this article here, it would seem like a great laugh and leave every Democrat painted in these broad colors and that would be great for a Republican rag or a simple “I-told-you-so” sour grapes type rant. I could even squeeze in a joke about “how it seemed like across the country the sheep-ple were literally willing to vote for any crap on the ballot as long as there was an (R) beside its name and if you don’t believe me check out the winner of the Senate race in Idaho, I dare you.” And wittily conclude that the worst part isn’t how awful people like Huppenthahl, Horne, Brewer, and Russell Pearce are – and don’t get me wrong they are heartbreakingly horrendous. No, the worst part is that they were what so many people wanted. As a wise man once said, “you could make a pretty good argument against democracy simply by interviewing the voters.”

Or there’s always that other bitter joke it seems we also often have to suffer through; the one that goes, “If they really wanted us to vote, they would have given us candidates.”

But in Arizona in these statewide elections, that wasn’t really true. One didn’t have to see red or blue to see who was right or wrong in this election. Terry Goddard may be professionally trained to have left-side blindness, but he was clearly better than Brewer. Most animate objects and even some fence posts would probably be better than Brewer. And McCain? Come on,  all I have to do is say the guy’s name and I can rest my case.

But when people like Penny Kotterman and Felicia Rotellini, who were honest and earnest and incredibly well-qualified for jobs they had worked for their entire lives to earn, jobs that shape our very lives as Arizonans,  when they lose what should have been slam-dunk elections to party hacks and right wing cranks like John Huppenthahl and Tom Horne by ridiculous margins, there is a tragedy here.

Today when I traveled once more, now taking down signs, on my way home I stopped when I got to my own neighborhood out in So-Hi and gathered a sign for Goddard and one for Glassman, and all the others I had placed at a prominent corner. Across the street, a new billboard lit up the night. It had sprung up in the last two days since the election. It is big enough and bright enough I can even see it from my front porch more than a half a mile away. A stark white and green it simply said, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” and then gives a name and a number in smaller letters. Welcome to the Occupation.

Both in Arizona and America, it’s a tragedy that has come upon us and we’re all going to suffer. We have not yet begun to realize how much we have lost in this election.
But we will.

Have you seen the pics in the National Enquirer? The man is nothing but scared skin and bones. Greed is good he said, then bullied his way to the top only to bring the whole thing crashing down with him. Says money never sleeps? Well, it doesn’t weep for the wicked either, even for those who think themselves winners, till we all fall down.

Greed is good? Why would anyone ever want to teach the idea that greed was good to a population which is supposed to live together? Why did we, the population in question, not question whether we wanted to believe it? How could we be taught to believe greed was good when it is the same thing as when that bully back in the first grade took your money and got away with it because he was so strong and he was so mean? Why have we been taught, as grown-ups, to think of that guy as the good guy?

No matter how much I love my country, no matter how many colored lenses I look through to try and reread the past in a better light, no matter how hard I try to not cringe at the present, I still am left having to say this: America is not a land of the free. It is a land of the slave, where the richest 74 make more than the poorest 19 million. A land not “of,” “for,” nor “by” the people, except as allowed by the plutocrats’ corporate interests. As for the rest of us, bullied and worked and worried to death in chains we don’t even see. America has always been a country where the bullies ran things for their own interests while the rest of us suffered for their whims. This is just another of those times where the rich have got the upper hand and are reaching for our throat.

And then we were told we were supposed to love it and honor its tradition of might making wrong sound righter in the after-fact, no matter how bloody the moment might be. We’ve been sold that it was OK to terrorize each other to get what we wanted; it was the right way to treat each other and the others of the world as long as you waved a flag to sanctify the whole process when you were done. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the impact of bullying in America. Taken as a whole, the role of the bully as a metaphor for America is a terrible topic to behold.

Over the last few weeks I have looked into the face of the topic of “Bullying in America” and it has beaten me down. Like the time last year when I watched Michael Moore’s Capitalism twice in rapid succession and then was too depressed to write, much less laugh, for six weeks. As I contemplated how much power bullies actually have in our society, I became overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem and my probable lack of impact by wielding merely a couple of punch-lines and a few thousand words. Like climate change, and the plutocratic tyranny that runs our world like its marionette, this “battling the bullies” column is probably another case of too little, too late.

But here we go anyway –

Thanks to the recent Anti-bullying week media blitz, half the liberal media, and CNN in particular, throughout the whole month stayed semi-focused on another, slightly different, bullying story — a fresh twist on the continuing tale of the ever-running spate of homosexual teen suicides. Five in One Week and all with plenty of photos. The sad stories and glam photos were rolled out like a poor little black-clad emo parade to celebrate our indifference. Each story told a tale of bullying, of a struggling gay kid hounded to the point of choosing death to end the life of torture.

The favorite one for the media to glamorize was Tyler Clemente, a first semester freshman at Rutgers who literally died from the humiliation of getting outed live via the Internet while doing it with a man in his dorm room. Back in my day somebody might’ve passed a note, nowadays there’s live streaming. Clemente later jumped off a bridge. Buddies promptly claim it was just a prank, and they were just playing. That’s what the bullies always say. Oh, those crazy college kids! It was all just supposed to be in good fun, right?

Now it just so happens that the conjunction of all this gay-bashing is particularly unnerving at this particular time when the Right is ratcheting up its marketing of their own homophobia as a selling point. CNN’s coverage of the apparent wave of teen suicides was a good chance for America to realize what teachers have been telling folks for years. It’s true: our schools are so over-run by social issues we are at a point where it seems it is hard for almost anyone to learn almost anything except for a faulty bare basics of survival: shut up and keep out of the bullies’ way. The cult of bullying has not only weakened our schools, but is dominating our politics and destroying our economy, eating us from the inside with our very own greed.

Teachers may try to work against this social structure that dominates our kids’ worlds, but we can only go so far because the same attitude we try to extinguish in them is the one that dominates their parents’ world. But it is clear the teachers are not winning, and the longer the GOP controls the discussion the less likely they are to be able to do so. Why do they keep telling me greed is good? Why would anyone want to build a society that would operate this way?

Of course, if one wants to be a bully, the current crisis must seem like a field day. Bullies like to keep their victims hungry and sick and ignorant and scared. And aren’t those the four major points of the GOP agenda? End social services, abolish Obamacare, defund education, mass detentions for suspected aliens or terrorists and a theocracy for all. Wrap it up in ribbon and we’ll call it the free market, though everyone I know is a slave to it.

Some say this election could make or break the future of our country right before our very eyes. Some say the Tea Party takeover could be a cover for a fascist coup. I am one of those people. Naomi Wolf was laughed at two years ago when she warned us about the upcoming End of America. But I wasn’t among the laughing.

And as I see the news this month, it feels as if the pinscher is closing. So much of the current increasing bigotry and oppression is based on the rhetoric of racial politics, or sexual politics, or religious politics, or litigious politics; but it’s all just excuses for those who wish to use force to feel free to do so. I mean, come on — everyone knows it’s gay to call someone a faggot, duh. But folks do it anyway ‘cuz it’s so funny, right? And if you don’t think so, you must be queer.

Take the case of the “pretending to be the governor” of Arizona, Jan Brewer, who is hoping to get “re-elected” to that office. Have you seen this train wreck some call a woman? They could use any five minutes of her debate footage as an IQ test. Forget about the whole “laughing at her over her 16 seconds of dead ‘drunk, er, i mean, deer in the headlights’ silence” thing. The times when she’s speaking are way more incriminating. Just listen to any five minutes of Jan Brewer speaking. ANY five minutes. If some silly voter still finds anything attractive about that woman — her words, her attitude, her ideas, or her looks, that person is probably not even intelligent enough to even be capable of the complicated series of tasks involved in completing the process of voting.

Jan Brewer who bumbled into office, mumbled and bungled her way through the job of appearing to only suck a little; who the GOP hated till she got behind SB-1070 and now she’s the little “Jan that can!” THAT Jan Brewer, the bully. Though she’s not the worst of them, it says a lot about Arizona that Brewer is the odds on favorite. But what does she do when her opponent (Terry Goddard) begins to gain a little traction in the polls due to her own ineptitude at fear mongering and personal inability to speak English as if it were her own native language? Then she simply calls him gay. It’s so typical and so tiring and so predictably GOP. It’s all typical bully behavior. No wonder folks die and the society suffers.

But back to the news because the annual anti-bullying week this year was a news anomaly. Somehow five teen suicides of actual bullied-to-death homosexuals made it into the news in the same week. Understand there are thousands of teen suicides each year, so five in any given week is, in fact, a given. Five in one week? Five that they counted. The synergistic media magic beauty part was that this particular week also happened to be the kick-off of National Bullying Prevention Month and, as if by magic, America suddenly, briefly, almost actually cared that kids are getting tormented to death. A growing epidemic finally got its fifteen minutes in a news cycle.

But only after it promised to be forgotten in time for the next news cycle. Though in the meantime, the stats are indeed staggering. Every day one hundred and eighty-six thousand bullied victims don’t even go to school because of the harassment. Each year about 40% give up on school and thousands give up on everything entirely.

Yes, yes, I know, that is just a few more tears in the ever flowing stream. This is just that old “same as it ever was” epidemic tale of bullied victims who always were, and still are, pummeled relentlessly from sea to shining sea, despite the martyrdom of St. Matthew Shepard. Though nobody is willing to lay out a current and complete statistic, the most common figures you can find say the teen suicide rate tripled from the 70s to the 90s, and has, since then, only continued to grow. Suicide has become the 4th most common cause of death in kids 10-14, the 3rd for 15-20 and 2nd most common for 20-25. About 12 out of every 100,000 teens will kill themselves and as many as twenty-five times that number will try.

Our children torment and tease each other every day in every way one can say “you’re gay!” and still they get away with it. Nobody wants to be the baby who wimps out and couldn’t handle a little “playfully” doled out misery. It is the one gift most kids prefer giving. And nobody is supposed to complain because hurting each other is so much fun. Meanwhile most adults look away because they are closet-bullies themselves. It’s the one way the right’s not afraid to come out of the closet. That is the society our children live in. And then we wonder why they do not learn?

Well, as their teacher, I can tell you your kids are learning plenty. They know how to “kill,” “maim,” and belittle their enemies and/or opponents in most major gaming media. They know how to turn a phrase till it cripples and when to relish the sight of pain in others. They know exactly which muscles to twitch when they fake lunge at each other to get that maximum scare effect, which buttons to push to best piss off the world.

And where do the bully-kids learn it? From their Tea Party Lovin’ parents, of course, who bully them around the house all night, so they can bully their fellow kids around the playground all day. Meanwhile they don’t know where Poland is, why the water cycle matters, what a noun is or what a verb does. And neither do their parents. But both generations know how to push their way to get what they want, don’t they? By bullying, of course. It’s the American Way. Babies raising babies and with nobody playing parent, no one learns why it’s bad to be bad. Whether or not you agree that that’s where we came from, it appears to be where we are headed.

Take my current favorite bullying exploit, told in many places, but most engagingly in Josh Holland’s AlterNet article, “Ayn Rand Conservatism at Work — Firefighters Let Family’s House Burn Down Because Owner Didn’t Pay $75 Fee.” Wanna see what that whole “smaller government” thing Sarah Palin loves looks like? Here you go:

It’s the case of a Mr. Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee. The Republican run local government voted to keep taxes low by not operating the county-wide fire department. Firefighting is, you know, one of those basic kinds of government services most Americans say they see as the bare minimum of what they’d expect to get when they pay their taxes. Instead, in addition to country taxes residents in rural Obion County were required to pay a separate $75 fee for fire service.

Long and short of it, Cranick hadn’t paid. The fire broke out in some barrels near his home, then crawled across the field as a brush fire, until it engulfed his home. Cranick watched his life be destroyed in slow motion. He tried to be a responsible citizen and went after the fire with his own resources, but his garden hose just couldn’t handle it. It was a time when he needed his government. And they refused him.

The firefighters came and did nothing as they watched the fire leap from the barrels to his house, utterly destroying it and killing the household pets. Throughout that whole infernal process, and even beforehand, while he was on the phone with 911, Cranick repeatedly tried to pay the fee. But the firefighters just stood by, though eventually they did bust out their hoses when the next neighbor over’s property was threatened. He had paid the fee. They were good loyal Republican firemen, one and all, Tea Party pure.

The firemen knew that the pure beauty of the American “Free Market” system is that capitalism means the only reason to save another person from misery and devastation is if you are going to make some money. Cranick just had to learn the lesson is all, it was nothing personal, just following orders.

To stand idly by and watch a person’s whole life be destroyed when it is in your power to stop it, to listen and not lift a finger while three dogs and a cat are burned to death right in front of you, this is the height of bullying. These are the people we’ve let put themselves in power.

And it is just one of a series of incidents, an epidemic of incidents of bullying across the board. Wall St.’s destruction of America is bullying. The battles over gay rights and abortion: basic bullying. Our foreign policy reduces down to US being the biggest meanest kid in the 5th grade over and over again.

Over and over again, the right-wing call for businesses to breathe free, free from the oppression of government’s supposedly bullying regulations. Over and over the people looking out for our safety, our government, gets cast as a bully and we rally to condemn the bad old “gub’mint,” then remove the cage we use to contain the wild beast we call the free market, and every time we try this, it bites us in the ass. With the Treasury being Goldman Sachs territory, and Wall Street and the insurance industry purchasing congressmen wholesale; everywhere you look bullies are shaping our commerce and every time you look, someone else is getting screwed.

And it’s a vertical monopoly: Bullies Uber-Alles every time and everywhere. Our culture? Movies of violence or cruel comedy, television of barking political attack dogs and “reality TV” that banks on humiliation. Hate screamed rock and thugged up rap. The problem is our society has evolved into a bully society, the intentional product of a bully brained government. This is in no way me trying to pretend this is some strictly recent aberration, or that America hasn’t always been a bully.

Ask the Powhatan, the Algonquian, the Seminole, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Chinese, the Irish, the Hindi, the Black. Ask Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Korea. Sure, in foreign policy we have often been bullies and splendidly bastardly about it besides. Ask Mexico or ask the people of Guatemala what they think of the US right now that it’s been revealed we once used their country as our own little secret real world STD experiment. And when we were too busy being bullies by ourselves, we trained others to do our bullying for us at the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. School of the Americas. What a wonderful sounding name for a place that offers classes in anesthesia-free knee cap removal and comparative genital electro-conductivity.

But until now America at least wanted to pretend we were above barbarity, that we were the good guys. Nowadays, it’s just might makes right. At least in the recallable past, the government and pols, our business leaders and role models, tried at least to appear to be in favor of protecting the weak from the brutish. Now they are all so bald-faced about it.

Take any day from last month’s Democracy Now headlines and one can weave the tale of how the bullies shape our lives. 10/11 sounds good. You can trace the tales of the bullies from story to story. Now that it is coming out that not only did our beloved financial institutions fraudulently raise housing prices so high everyone went broke, then bust, then they bilked us out of billions in bailouts; and then took homes away from four million families. Not only that. Now it turns out that the mass foreclosures they have used to throw our citizens into the streets in pursuit of their corporate profits are also based on fraud. Foreclosures were robo-processed with rewards for the agents who could forge due process the fastest.

As of yet we don’t know how many families were falsely thrown into the street, but instances have shown up in several states and all fifty are currently investigating. Meanwhile the head of Countrywide agrees to paying millions in fines for his misbehavior and joins the long list of banks and big businesses quietly agreeing to fines. Like we needed their permission to hold them accountable for screwing us after having been caught again, caught red-handed bullying the American public. And we have to let them do it because that’s what keeps free enterprise free: the right of the rich to rape the poor.

These are the banks we were told were too precious to our country to risk collapse. These are the banks we loaned money to like a friend. Screwing us over all over again. Defrauding America at every single juncture in this sorry sequence of events. Several state governments have intervened and around the country, folks are calling for a national moratorium on foreclosures. But the federal government says, ‘no, can’t risk hurting our precious banks’ precious bank profits.’ Translation: because the banks are bullies and we don’t want the bully to get mad. Wall Street’s a bear when you piss off the bull.

Meanwhile another 95,000 lost their jobs. As the rich consolidate their capital, there is not enough left for pay checks it seems. And the list of bullies bloodying the public just goes on. Remember, these are just the stories from a single day.

Next up, NY gubernatorial candidate and bestiality fan, Carl Paladino, joined the right wing wannabe-governors’ gay-basher band wagon with the aid of some Jewish religious leaders, who  wrote Paladino an anti-gay script, which he not only read but  defended in separate interviews. Paladino might simply be throwing red meat to his red state fans; but the rabbis were declaring precious principles of their faith. Once again, the supposed god of love apparently hates fags. Odd that those Jewish religious leaders must’ve never heard that it was wrong to persecute people for being different.

Speaking of oppressions Paladino’s rabbis might’ve heard of how about that Ohio GOP congressional candidate, Rich Iott, who out and out unmasks all pretenses of right wing pretensions about their intentions and simply dresses the part of a Nazi Waffen SS officer, the guys who operated the camps. His website recounts their exploits so lovingly it is hard to tell whether he’s recruiting re-enactors or promoting their resurgence.

This is, of course, followed by a bit on the fact Israel is now demanding loyalty oaths as their next step towards a final solution for their Palestinian problem. Then two stories of US foreign follies of bully-dom with a Syrian man mistakenly imprisoned for seven years in Guantanamo Bay and the latest faux pas of one of our Latin American graduates of the School of the Americas, the aborted coup attempt in Ecuador.

Then was the story of Glenn Beck’s disciple, Byron Williams, who went out to shoot up the Tides Foundation to teach us all a lesson and ignite his revolution. Instead he just shot up the California State Police cars in his effort to rid the world of the bad guys. Way to train ‘em, Glenn!

Stuck somewhere in the middle was this shocker of an item: “In what’s been described as the world’s biggest day of climate action, over 7,000 rallies and events were held Sunday in 188 Countries. The “10/10/10 Global Work Party” was organized by 350.org to urge people across the globe to do something in their city or community that will help deal with global warming.” Which is the only time I ever heard about any of that. Why is this the only new source talking about an international event so massive it makes the idea of a Tea Party party, even one as lavish as Beck’s big bash at the Lincoln Memorial, seem paltry?

Well, the truth is we won’t hear about it in the mainstream because you aren’t supposed to be interested. As an American news story that topic’s officially DOA. Climate Change deniers have won the day on that one. American rich won’t give up the profits and the rest of us intend to stay too damn comfortable to ever willingly give that up for the rest of the peasants around the world. They have to do what we say anyway. After all, we are the bully.

The last story of that night was about a dead John Lennon and some awards in his name on what would have been his 70th birthday, if he hadn’t been shot down by a bully.

Of course, you can go through most any day and find stories of the bullies getting ever more brazen: Alaska reporter handcuffed by GOP candidates private guards who had to be rescued by the police. Rand Paul’s boys stomp on MoveOn.org. And Stephen Broden, a GOP Congressional candidate in Texas, who says the GOP should just hold a violent revolution if they don’t get what they want through election. On tape, in a sermon. That’s right, this guy’s a minister. If that guy is the example of the folks spreading the word, it’s small wonder they know neither right from wrong, nor the true spirit of the god of love that they say that they love. Perhaps their god isn’t meant to be man’s friend but his shield.

Welcome to the Jungle. “Kill Teams” collecting fingers for trophies in Afghanistan, Wikileaks revealing our own recounting of torture and mass massacre in Iraq. America is no longer among the 20 least corrupt countries of the world in Transparency International’s annual index. Now we’re 22nd and the countries we’ve been destroying and/or mismanaging for the last couple of decades, Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, are among the absolute worst.

Or for me the story with the scariest bully face, the GOP candidate who most exemplifies what appears to be the new face of the GOP, former marine and admitted murderer, Ilario Pantano. While some will say Amy Goodman’s good liberal authorship can spin some stories, you couldn’t possibly distort the facts in this case to make them more hideous. They are bad enough as they are; and no one is disputing them.

A Tea Party-backed congressional candidate in North Carolina is facing scrutiny for having killed two unarmed Iraqis while serving in Iraq. The candidate, Ilario Pantano, has said he has no regrets about fatally shooting the two at point blank range after detaining them near Fallujah in April 2004. Prosecutors later alleged that Pantano intended to make an example of the men by shooting them sixty times and hanging a sign over their corpses that read “No better friend, no worse enemy.

Pantano did not deny hanging the sign or shooting the men repeatedly after stopping their vehicle at a checkpoint. He admitted to emptying one magazine of bullets into the Iraqis, then reloading and firing thirty more rounds. Despite his admission, the military cleared Pantano of wrongdoing in 2005. He’s now in a tight race with Democrat Mike McIntyre in North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District.

Did you catch that last line? “Tight race”? The people of North Carolina like this sort of thing? How is there hope for America when the people want to elect cold blooded killers to their Congress? And who are the people behind him?

Raw Story elaborates about the support Pantano has been able to get. “Pantano has been able to raise almost $1 million for his campaign. He has received endorsements from the Veterans In Defense Of Liberty, the North Carolina Chapter of Eagle Forum, far-right blogger Pamela Geller, and a number of other conservatives.”

Is this where we’re headed? Recently long time Fascism watcher, Sara Robinson, published her latest report on the ever-threatening “totalitarianism-creep” factor in the upcoming elections, “Fascist America: Is This Election the Next Turn?” and asked, “are we there yet”? Her result? Maybe.

Robinson recognizes the work of Robert Paxton as the authority in the field of studying the process a democracy goes through as one collapses and crumbles into fascism. As she often does, Robinson quotes him extensively. Paxton identifies three final warning signs to awaken citizens to the soberingly real possibility our country is sliding past the point of no return. which an emerging fascist regime has too much power to be stopped:

“1. Are [neo- or proto-fascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?

2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?

3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?”

Yes, yes, yes in all three cases. We’ve let this virus grow inside us and now it’s eating us whole. No matter which way the elections fall, we are all going to lose. If they land even the slightest advantage, then like they did with Clinton, like they did with Carter, the GOP will bully Obama to exhaustion and everyone will suffer while nothing gets fixed.

That’s the best case scenario. If, somehow, the Dems retained some power, you can predict all kinds of retaliation. Bullies aren’t good with being told no. As Sharron Angle notes they’re ready to resort to “Second Amendment remedies.” Are we about to devour ourselves?

Bye, bye, Gordon Gecko. Greed is good, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Thanks for the cancer. Now we’ve all got it. We’re all bullies. It’s the American Way. And just like you, this might be our curtain call.

George Orwell once predicted the future would be a boot smashing a human face. Forever. I fear the future is here –

I’m no fan of Nancy Pelosi either. Take Impeachment off the table and keep the war going after we got you guys elected precisely to solve those disasters? Oh girl, it’s on! Owned by the same people who bought the GOP leadership years back, Pelosi sold herself out as a silent supporter of torture as a member of the “gang of 8,” in 2003 when Congress was debriefed on the coming atrocities in our good name. In fact, I opposed Pelosi so much back in ’08 I even did long distance campaigning for Cindy Sheehan when she challenged the queen of the torture enablers for Cali’s District 8. From where I stand, there’s little difference between her and Michelle Bachman besides the quality of their facelifts.

All those Blue Dog Democrats ought to have their noses rubbed in the messes they made by crapping all over the American public so they could be corporate curs for Insurance industry donation dollars during the health care debate. And don’t even get me started on the Republican-Appeaser-in Chief, Obama himself. The GOP may not be able to find a birth certificate for him that satisfies them; but these days it seems if they dug deep enough they  might find an old RNC membership card of his. So, you see, I’ve got plenty of material on Dems; but on the same week we sent our baby girl off to college and my daughter-in-law brought our baby grandson into this world, I read about birthers bashing babies and it was “game over people” — right wing raging racism trumps left-wing limpness every time.

You’ve heard about the attack of the “terror babies,” right? Oh, they are WAY scarier than anchor babies ever thought about being. You may have even seen that, on successive nights in the recent news cycle, Anderson Cooper and staff had to do battle with successive, progressively deranged terror baby obsessed Texas legislators who were making bug-eyed little chicken claims that Terror Babies were the new Red Menace. Despite the fact that GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert’s argument of credibility was rapidly reduced down to petulantly repeatedly bleating “you can’t say that it couldn’t happen.” And State Representative Debbie Riddle’s behavior was so ugly she makes Jan Brewer look good.

Now that’s the “good news” part: these people got thoroughly and absolutely debunked for the whole world to see. The bad news is despite having the whole assertion of terror babies quickly reduced to international laughing stock, the Texas legislators and their rapidly growing flock have continued to chant: “Beware of the Terror Babies”!

So what IS a terror baby? Why only the most brilliant right-wing Obama deception yet, that’s what. Supposedly all the rage in the right-wing psycho circles, this one is the über-theory that neatly ties together several strands of tea party delusion into one handy carrying case.  The latest brainwash from the right-wing spin cycle goes like this:

Terrorists are smuggling pregnant illegal aliens into the country to have babies who would then be US citizens, which, as infants, would then be spirited back to some terrorism sponsoring host country, to secret Madrasas to be trained in murder, mayhem, and advanced America-hating. Then, as a teen, they would be replanted in the US to quietly wait, expecting to someday serve as a sleeper cell unit which would strike 20-30 years later  because … Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. I may be guessing on the exact details of that last part; but I’m sure that mantra ties in there at some point. By now hasn’t that become the standard GOP signature conclusion for any talking point?

Try it yourself. “Because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.” It’s the answer for everything these days, the reason for any problem if you ask a Republican. You know it, you’ve heard them say it. The GOP will tell you, “it’s wrong to try to curb Wall Street from buying and selling our nation’s very soul” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. Or, “global warming is a hoax” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. “BP shouldn’t be required to finish paying for the Gulf Coast clean-up” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. Or the latest disgust brought back for a second ugly aftertaste of corruption: “Pat Tillman was murdered by his own men and the Army not only covered it up and lied it into a sleazy piece of slipshod right-wing religious  propaganda, and everyone, all the way up to Rumsfeld at least, knew what was going on but they all kept it secret from the American public and keep keeping it a secret still ” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.

I know you get the picture because it is the one they show on the news every day.

These days, it almost even makes the whole idea of terror babies seem … no, it doesn’t, terror babies is still stupid. As if that wasn’t ludicrous enough, we now have to envision the image of  thousands of tiny James Bonds in pull-ups getting their bottles shaken not stirred… because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.

Of course, Gohmert et al., insist they heard about terror babies from “credible” retired FBI agents, even as the active incredulous FBI spokespeople are frantically working to discredit the allegation that such a thing as terror babies could even exist and/or that the FBI has ever investigated, or currently intends to investigate, terror babies of any sort or fashion.  And while this sounds like an idea for a sequel George Romero couldn’t even get produced, the rapid spread of the myth of the terror baby is an ugly harbinger of crap to come.

Seriously, terror babies, while no more based on facts than most of the GOP prevarications, are the most ingenious explanation of the reasons that  “Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on,” yet devised, even if it is the most outlandishly baseless. This is more than just another variation on the crazed illegal immigrant/Willie Horton-style boogeyman, more than just the basic birther conspiracy on steroids … and meth, PCP, XTC, 10 cups of coffee, and airplane glue. More even than the incestuous spawn of such an unholy mating of the birther myth AND immigrant myth. This explains everything: I mean, after all, who is the original terror baby according to the above description?

Why, of course, it’s Obama himself! Whom the GOP have been hating since the day he was born, like they intend to do with terror babies. Speaking of birthers, this recent news cycle also brought us the Bronze Star Birther, Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, a multi-decorated soon-to-retire sawbones  who is no less than “the chief of primary care at the Army’s DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic at the Pentagon.”  

Lakin is refusing to take his assigned rotation to the front … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on + an illegal alien with no birth certificate. Never mind the fact that when someone says  they won’t go to war because it is “morally wrong” and based on falsified claims which exploits our citizenry, savages our international credibility and endangers our citizens around the world, those reasons are the reasons of a coward. Say you won’t go to war because you don’t like your boss, they call you a hero. This guy Lakin was a lifer and ready to risk the “distasteful choice” of court martial rather than take orders from a foreigner, an immigrant.

No wonder Republicans want to get tough on those demon terror babies. They mean to show us all and especially those babies who is the boss. But as Illinois Dem Congressman, Luis Gutierrez, recently challenged, targeting pregnant “immigrant looking” women will cause them to shrink away from the medical care they probably need at the time of delivery. Some of those babies will die, either from mothers avoiding the medical la migra, some will die because of it. These are babies, not bombs. And so like Luis, I,  too have to ask of the “Party of No: “Where is your love of children now?”

Thought it was “a child not a choice. “

Or is it only the unborn life of an American child that matters? Other ones aren’t really lives worth caring about? Which is why we can casually bomb the crap out of babies overseas. And these babies, smuggled like balloons of poison hidden inside women, bred to be props of American hating Islamists, they are no different than the duct taped dynamite vests jihadists  wear. They must be eradicated.

Right to life? Or only the right to be hated for having one?

So if the GOP truly says no unborn children of undocumented parents are allowed to be born on US soil, what measures do they intend that can be taken to prevent it? What is it that the GOP suggests when it comes to parsing the finer points of targeting children? Are they talking Abortion? As the Virginia drunk-driver case of  illegal alien, Carlos Martinelly Montano, from Bolivia demonstrates, as so many immigrant haters have made clear, it can take up to two years to deport someone. How are you going to stop that baby from being born? You can’t just say, “Hey, put that back!” once junior crowns. And further, if human life actually begins at the melding of DNA (as the Minnesota GOP state platform recently declared), then the religious right will have to acknowledge the rights of undocumented zygotes the instant they pass onto US soil, even though the fetuses in question would technically be “wet foot” till their water breaks. 

Thus they have to have to revoke the 14th Amendment … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. I surely do not look forward to finding  out where this storyline is leading. But I have a queasy suspicion we’re going to find out.

Among the runners-up this week include:

In 3rd place: Russell Pearce’s flimsy attempt to flim-flam his way around being caught without a clue, jumping on the broken bandwagon of Republicans trying to label the Constitution as “Unconstitutional.” As the sponsor of the incendiary SB-1070, AZ Legislative District 18′s State Senator, Russell Pearce, has leapt to national prominence over his outspoken stance on America’s immigration issue, and become the latest in the series of poster boys for the thinly veiled racism and xenophobia that passes for Republican policy these days. Like Joe the Plumber without the looks, or Palin without the brains.

Pearce has even posted his studied and misquote studded opinions on the 14th Amendment on his website, and thus professes himself an expert. Weighing in on the latest GOP “Wrong is Right and Ignorance is Strength” fad, on prime-time CNN no less, Friday Aug. 6th, feigning massive moral and mental superiority, “Prof” Pearce’s pompous points were precisely punctured by … first, interviewer Anderson Cooper, then debate opponent Paul Begala, and then, after the break, internationally respected Constitutional historian, Eric Foner was brought in to further poke holes in any attempts at a claim of legitimate Constitutional precedent, or functional scholarship for that matter, by the GOP for their recent anti-14th Amendment rant. The 14th Amendment was written to establish the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike, to protect the children of immigrants, in a nation built of immigrants. Imagine that.

Also worthy of consideration in recent news was the GOP push to perpetuate the Bush era rich guy tax cuts. To keep that straight, those tax cuts for the richest 2% of the population that Bush swore we could afford cost us hundreds of billions each year in uncollected revenue and will drive up the deficit by as much as a trillion a year for the foreseeable future according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Now, even Alan Greenspan and David Stockman (Reagan era budget director), with all the due vengeance of reformed whores, have copped to the fact that GOP Congressional leaders are apparently parading around with their pants on fire. Rather than the GOP foisted myth that “Secret Socialist Commie Obama” has been single-handedly destroying our economy, bankrupting us all through all sorts of unnecessary spending;” it’s actually the Bush tax cuts that are the single most important component of our structural deficit and current GOP efforts to continue them is a disastrous mistake … and a deliberate deception. Stockman goes so far as to say, ” Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.” This from a party which has repeatedly claimed an irreproachable reputation for fiscal austerity as a guise to challenge and even derail many of Obama’s efforts.

Yep, those were some great moments in hypocrisy. But there’s no point in further following the Eric Holder model of prosecuting governmental abuses (i.e. “Beating around the Bush”), so let’s get to the goodies: This week’s title, “Morally Wrong,” comes to us from the howler of a quote from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an Obama Republican holdover from the previous administration. This quote was regarding Wikileaks’ recent public posting of years’ worth of US military dirty laundry. While dodging specifics about pursuing charges with the Department of Justice, just yet, Gates appeared to invoke a higher law in condemning Wikileaks and its putative founder, Julian Assange: “There’s also a moral accountability. And that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks.” Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen also manned a pulpit to call out the sinner and took up the call of morality to pillory Assange, claiming the US government had a “moral obligation” to the people in the Af-Pak theater of operations and should be the sole authority when it comes to how much the public should know about the wars waged in their name.

To recap: in late July the international whistle blower website, Wikileaks, released their latest bombshell exposing corruption and conspiracy on a massive scale. Already internationally acclaimed for helping concerned citizens document the misdeeds and cover-ups of various corporations and governments, Wikileaks operates on a simple principle: its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.” In Kenya, Iceland, Thailand, Britain and Australia, for example, conspiracies revealed have rocked nations.

This time their sources had revealed a cache of info on a case of mismanaged war on a massive scale — murder and abuse and misuse of funds at an incomprehensible level: a compendium of more than 91,000 on-the-ground reports of misguided violence, greed, and/or stupidity. Unfortunately the culprits this time were us, as in the US military, in just the latest revelation of our continuingly misguided misadventures in Afghanistan.

To make matters worse, the documents quite clearly revealed a pattern that our supposed best buddy in the war on terror, Pakistan, was actually in bed all along with Al-Qaeda, with the Taliban, and basically with just about every other crank in the neighborhood who hated baseball, apple pie, and/or Chevrolet. Allegations of the Pakistan aiding, abetting, and even being agents of terror against the US have never been honestly addressed ever since 9/11 Truthers were marginalized trying to draw attention to the 2004 UK Guardian article documenting that “General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta” and in the wake of the 9/11 investigation, the US government was trying to hush this revelation up.

A war promoted under false pretenses, perpetuated for profit, and inflicting untold misery and death on the civilian population, and for what cause? Because they don’t like us enough? Our friend in the war is the world’s number one exporter of opium and our other friend works for our sworn enemies. But Wikileaks was not supposed to reveal any of that.

Like Ellsberg before them, Wikileaks’ publication of the low-level “low-threat” (according to the New York Times) military logs, was not likely to endanger the lives of the men in the field nearly as much as it will the boys in the back room. Furthermore, according to CNN, “neither Gates nor Mullen, who appeared on both the CBS program Face the Nation and the NBC program Meet the Press, could cite a specific example of any Taliban attacks based on information from the leaked materials.”

So, to recap, sell a war with lies, under-man it for years to focus on the other fiasco in Iraq (also sold with lies, etc.), partner up with drug dealers and double agents, bomb a stone-age country back to the pebble-age, inflame the region against our country, invoke religious intolerance, and then tolerate and cover-up widespread corruption and abuse. This is the legacy of former Iran-Contra player, CIA/Council on Foreign Relations figure, Robert Gates and the last four years of his war. No wonder he wants to hide it. Meanwhile the guys who report on it are the bad guys, are “morally wrong”?

Ha-ha, I get it! You, Robert Gates, are a hypocrite AND the winner of this week’s title as the author of the “Most Outrageously Hypocritical Political Statement of the Week.”

And the losers? Everyone else.

Don’t know about you, but I’ve spent the majority of this summer’s vacation, as I commonly do, traveling and trying to ignore the nasty national news, which I have now skewered for over twenty years. That’s right, my first column was published in February of 1990.

My, oh my, oh gosh!  How things have not changed!

In that very first column (published by Anthony Smith in his long defunct Zine, The Alternative) I found this paragraph where a fictional government spokesman attempts to calm a worried public over an environmental issue:

While we were standing at the trash pile, a big wind blew by and stirred it all around. I went to pick it up. He said, “No money in that, son. Leave it till it gets so big, no one will ever be able to pick it up, then we’ll hire someone to fail at it and invent them all sorts of inadequate but expensive tools to fail at it with and everyone will stay happy.

And I thought: BP. I thought Immigration.  Health care, drug wars, foreign wars, culture wars, economy where the rich are forever raping the poor then calling them lazy. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Twenty years ago, our country was being run by a Republican media, promoting a Republican agenda at the expense of the general public. And here in 2010, once again, Republican leadership and Republican press have our country in a continuing disaster.

Now right away I know some readers are already up in arms, whipping out their thesauri and honing barbs to sling about “the liberal press,” the Tea Party as the Voice of the People,” and what an idiot I am for not knowing that “Obama, the commie/socialist, secret Muslim, Black Power-White Hating Gun grabbing Revolutionary” and his henchmen, er, henchpersons, Nancy “the Shrew” Pelosi and Harry “the Idiot” Reid are responsible for the train wreck our country’s in, and it’s the Republicans who are trying to save America for the true Americans.

My friends, thanks for the corrections. Save your letters, you must obliviously be Republicans. My condolences. Perhaps there is a cure. If you truly cannot see that the party of “No” is using the same lame techniques to manipulate the ignorant public, then you truly are either a manipulator or ignorant. After twenty years of observation, I would have to say that Republicans fall into three groups: deceitfully greed-driven, vindictively self-righteous, and/or stupid.

Dear angered reader, pray tell which group do you fall in?

Despite my best efforts to ignore their crap, while touring this summer, promoting my new book, Leaving the Empire, I have repeatedly heard tales of Republicans refusing to pay for 9/11 victims and “First Responders,” and delaying unemployment for millions, while they champion a law written to satisfy Russell Pearce’s Neo-Nazi supporters. What kind of person would do that or support somebody else for it?

Must be a Republican.

Every day it seemed, even while traveling, I received emails from folks like Dudley Brown telling me how the evil Obama admin intends to use his evil Homeland Security to steal their guns. I get people like Rand Paul being called American heroes for wanting to repeal the Civil Rights Act. I get supposed sage national politicians decrying proposed restrictions on Wall Street at the same time we discover Wachovia has been laundering hundreds of billions in drug money, but the real problem in America is peasants sneaking across the border to take the slave labor jobs Americans don’t want. What kind of person could spew such vomit? Worse yet, what kind of person would swallow it?

Must be a Republican.

What kind of person would scream bloody murder to try to scandalize a nebbish like Elena Kagan or Shirley Sherrod blindly marching in lock-step behind hate-mongers like Limbaugh, Beck and Gingrich as if they were freedom fighters? What kind of person could listen to Andrew Breitbart and possibly construe him as anything even remotely resembling fair-minded or honest? What kind of person could watch the McCain/Heyward debates and think that either choice was in any way a good one, or for that matter would see Jan Brewer as an attractive candidate?

Must be a Republican (and check that eyesight while you’re at it).

What kind of person would say they were good Christian lovers of Jesus because they approve of madmen murdering doctors to stop abortions from killing American babies, yet demand unlimited funding for our country to kill foreign babies in wars? See what I mean?

As awful a malady as it must be, “Republicanism” that is, one has to wonder: why would anyone choose to be a Republican in the first place? Well, for the rich and powerful, the obvious answer is since the Republican Party is owned by the rich and powerful, it is simply a matter of investing in the home brand. Who champions wars, exploitive energy companies, the health insurance industry and Wall Street? Republicans. Who works to protect them at the expense of the general public? Republicans. Who makes a butt-load off of the profits buying and selling those miseries? That’s right again, Republicans.

Why would some people, actual human Americans, ever support such tripe, when it is clearly out to work against their best interests again and again, year in year out, and has been for as long as I’ve been beating these same dead horses with these same lame jokes? Well, the greedy, deceitful, and the self-righteously vindictive need all the propaganda they can get. If you can get some schmucks to think marching around with the Tea Party is their personal individual and unique expression of their love of their country when it is merely a fad marketed by GOP leader Dick Armey’s Freedom Works for their clients in the health insurance industry, well, it may be greedy and deceitful, but there is no disputing it is damn fine marketing.

Who benefits from getting the people who work to think of themselves as the backbone of our country to envision their Democratic and democratically elected government as an evil enemy that must be thwarted at all costs even when they are doing something good like attempting to pay some 9/11 fireman’s hospital bill. Who could possibly benefit from that?

You got it.  Must be Republicans.

And the ignorant? Why are they supporting this? Well, it is easy to be ignorant these days. With the millions of issues each with their own billions of complexities, it is legitimately hard to know much about anything, much less keep track of everything. Anybody who wanted to distort the news for their own deceitful ends, could fool a lot of fools a lot of the time as long as they made themselves seem fair and balanced loyal Americans. They could be on the wrong side all the time as long as they seemed like the embattled, justly outraged, good guys. What kind of “news” channel would distort the facts to create a false impression of the reality of the world so as to promote the hidden aims and profits of their ownership?

Even the ignorant know I’m talking about Fox News here, right? As was recently reported on Media Matters by Ari Rabin-Havt, “News Corp., Fox News’ parent company’s shareholders [include] Morgan Stanley owns nearly $300,000,000 in News Corp. stock, Bank of New York more than $175,000,000, Goldman Sachs $115,000,000, and JPMorgan Chase nearly $70,000,000.” Who told us Bush was dutifully elected? Enron was unimportant? 9/11 meant Arabs were evil? Or that immigrants were ruining our country by making our beds and picking our lettuce?

Who had the unmitigated gall to sell us that Sean Hannity had any interest in anything anyone else had to say, or that Glenn Beck was an intellectual because he uses chalkboards, that Bill O’Reilly was deliberative or that Rush Limbaugh makes sense to anyone this side of a Vicodin induced haze? Who could support crap like that? Why the only people who ever benefit from Fox News’ “fair and balanced” reportage:

Must be Republican. Deceitfully greedy, righteously vindictive or stupid. Pray tell, dear angered reader, which justification will you wear for your role in helping to feed that elephant that tramples the needs of the many for the frills of the few?

Don’t know about you, but I choose “none-of-the-above” and so I probably won’t become a Republican. What will you do?

For that matter, Walgreen’s is also gay, along with Home Depot, and the entire Presbyterian and Unitarian Universalist Church. In fact, according to the wide ranging assortment of corporate sponsorships backing the crowds and displays at this year’s 30th Annual Pride Day parade in Phoenix on April 17th, being gay is as American as well … the Bank of America.

Unofficial police figures estimate that the crowd for the long-running multi-day Phoenix Pride event at Indian School Park would be over 30,000 and did not dispute that spectators along the parade route and/or participating in the parade that morning exceeded 5,000. When you are talking economies of that scale, many a business is willing to try bi-.

Like Starbucks, there’s a gay on every corner these days and he is not checking out your butt, merely questioning your sorry fashion sense. But the Starbucks at this year’s Pride Day had a guy in a Star Wars storm trooper suit, gave away free coffee, and raised funds to build a water well in Uganda. You know, Uganda? The country where the American right-wing has sent lobbyists to attempt to convince the Ugandan government to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. If that’s the kind of courage that comes from being queer, I hope we all get gay.

And the morning of the Pride Day parade it seems like it — like all of Phoenix could be happy and gay all at once. For a small town reporter in a pink shirt carrying a moderately clever but clearly heart-felt sign, my first trip to a Pride Day parade had me walking with a mince and I was definitely gay to have finished the parade route with only moderate chaffing.

Dozens, I’m serious, dozens of people queer as folk jumped out of the crowds that lined the parade route to get their picture taken with my sign that read, “With Liberty and Justice for All” in rainbow color painted by children.

And I wore the pink shirt to identify with Phoenix Code Pink, which also must be gay. If not, they’d call it “Phoenix Code Some Super-Butch Color to Appear Exaggeratedly Macho.” If Code Pink’s stated agenda, “Troops coming home from all wars” is gay, then I’m gay for that.

These days over on the Tea Party end of the American Main-street there is a lot of talk about a gay agenda. But that morning the closest thing I saw to gay agenda was when these two schedules stuck together front to back.

The queer nation mentality, however, was widely displayed on parade. No wonder the right-wingers were worried. They want to do ridiculous things like love their children unconditionally, dress outlandishly, and love unlimitedly. They wanted to throw darts, hug a lot, and listen to dance music. They wanted to end wars. They wanted to wear fashion disasters that did not involve blue, white, and red — with stars.

And I will tell ya, after some of the train wreck fashion statements I gasped at picketing the Glen Beck rally at the Jobing Arena the week before, I am clear that being around all that gayness left me feeling a lot happier. Glen Beck and his crowd are decidedly not very gay. In fact, they’re not happy at all. And they have reason to be worried and not that the soap gets slippery in the shower sometimes. Turns out that despite all his strident pandering, and all their saber rattling, the newest New York Times poll only gives the Tea Party 18% of the electorate.

Over at Beck’s rally the people yelled at me that “we need to the kill the commies,” when they read my protest sign for the Beck event that read “Insure Domestic Tranquility/Provide for the Common Defense/ These are the Real American Values.” The continuing effrontery and foolish arrogance displayed in a typical encounter with a tea partier has me wondering if the reason the 18th century minded White American males are fighting tooth and nail against change is because they have every right to be afraid of revenge? That they know they have acted like jerks?

On the other hand at the Pride Day Parade, people I didn’t know kept running up to me, hugging me and yelling, “Happy Pride!” On Pride Day, this supposed sexually deviant LGBT sin-fest, the worst that happened was I got lei-ed by a family of three, complete with bicycle built for two, who carried signs that read, “We love our children unconditionally,” with hand-rain bowed Os. Their 6 year old’s sign said, “I love my Gay sister and brother.”

You choose.

No. Glen Beck’s behind the times. It’s no wonder America has gone gay, just like America is already Black and is next to swiftly turn Hispanic. In the land where Manifest Destiny once meant a Christian god meant Indian murder and everyone took it in the shorts, at the 30th annual Pride Day parade both the cowboys driving the Wells-Fargo stage and the Navajo Indians (as represented by Ms Indian Transgender, 2010-2011, Kristel Lee) were merely having fun together (some of the best “being gay” to be had and all). And I bet you already thought of biker clubs and classic car clubs were gay? Well, at the Pride Day, the crowd of those types of guys were truly jolly; though you may not want to say, “Hey, gay guy we love you!” to every biker or car nut you see.

Still all joking aside, like the shirt on the chest of my favorite drag king, Fox Malone, read, “Queer rights are civil rights.” Or the sign carried by a member of PFLAG: “I hope one day my children will live in a world or acceptance without feeling afraid or rejected.” I feel the same way about my kids and they’re straight. That’s as American as loving a hotdog or a slice of pie. The sticker the Stonewall Democrats distributed that day best crystallized the meaning of the morning in three words: “Equal Means Equal.”

Of course, when it comes to buying a part in a long-time big time annual downtown pageant that dares to dream all Americans have equal rights and are not only tolerated, but embraced, lots of folks are ready to buy in to selling some dreaming. Gay America is bought and sold America just like everything else these days, except with cuter models.

Macy’s has long backed parades with big balloons, but generally not with this many fishnet hose on so many of the men who held the strings. But if you don’t believe me, check my Facebook photos. (That’s right, I’m inviting you to friend me and check my pics of pecs and pickled people in every color of the Rainbow and generally several at once on a sunny Saturday morning in Phoenix.)

On Pride Day, however, corporate and academic America simply see Americans and their dollars in action. Bank of America’s gays’ green spends just as gaily as at US Airways’ or at ASU. ASU Gay? A fact the folks from U of A have been rumoring about for years. And, just saying, there has got to be some joke available about juxtaposition of the words “gay” and “Cox” (as in Cox Cable, yet another corporate sponsor); but I am sure you have already thought of some.

 And blood we got, though we have spent mountains worth of blood-money to get it. So far, since 2001 (as of April 14, 2010, 10:42 and 43 seconds PM AZ time), the war against Afghanistan has cost taxpayers two hundred and sixty-five billion, five hundred and eight million, three hundred and twenty nine thousand and a steadily mounting mound of change. The lives destroyed and innocence lost has been incalculable.

But it seems when people have a strong religious faith and political power to wreak their will, they are capable of terrible things. The Taliban claimed the statues, not just the ideas they represented, but the very stone, itself, which was the cultural icon for hundreds of millions, if not billions, around the world, that the images, themselves, on that sacred mountain were no longer tolerable to their particular vision of god and had to be eradicated before they could further infect the public.

Despite an outcry from voices around the globe, there was no dissent allowed. The country had become a theocracy, designed to honor what its practitioners believed to be the only true religion. It was as god intended it — the one true church worked hand in hand with the state to destroy all opposing ideas. As one cleric explained, the symbols once revered in that part of the world now “contradict our Islamic beliefs, we would not like to have them any more.”

As elaborate of a setup as that was to introduce this week’s column, I have not come to pillory the Taliban, nor to raze them about some long ago treachery of the past; but to warn of a possible parallel future. Once again strictly religious zealots, socially conservative to an extreme, madly wielding near blasphemous political power are threatening the very symbols of a society, nay, its very way of life. Once again, the stone images of that vision of a better world for mankind, the bedrock of a society, have been carved into a mountainside. Once again the world watches in impotent horror as fanatics attempt to destroy a country’s massive monuments to its sacred ideals.

By now I am sure you’ve realized I am talking about the Tea Party’s relentless efforts to demolish the images on Mount Rushmore — Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington, the top dogs, the final four, the veritable crème-de-la-crème super-duper stars of American presidents. Since they started keeping tabs on this kind of stuff back in 1948, none of these guys have been ranked below 7th place in any major public opinion poll. But so far, three of the four have had their faces blasted off by the Tea Party as being not true enough to the America the Tea Party claims the founding fathers intended. Of course, two of these guys were the founding fathers, but who has time to quibble over details when one has a vision to protect … and another one to destroy.

At this point in history, the Tea Party believe they are poised to rightfully reclaim America for all their supposedly grateful worshipers so long oppressed by the twin evils of government social services and freedom of, and/or from, religion. They may not believe it, but it doesn’t look like they’re right about the rest of us waiting with bouquets. In fact, a New York Times/CBS poll released 4/14/10 reveals that though 84 percent of Tea Partiers believe that “the views of the people involved in the Tea Party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans,” as you may have guessed; however, the reality is actually that “only 25 percent of the general public, however, believe that the Tea Party reflects their views.”

Some polls are claiming that perhaps as many as 28% of Americans are currently claiming Tea Party affiliation, hardly a majority, and definitely not a large enough percentage of the public to insist that their will be law. I know. I was once a member of a group that included 35% American public and even though we protested round the clock and, at times, in groups of millions, the government and the media ignored us. It was March of 2003 and we were protesting that Bush’s claim of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was a lie; and America should not attack Iraq, lest we find ourselves mired in a quagmire of Vietnamese proportions and you can see how well that went.

(BTW, as of 4/15/10, 9:23 and 44 seconds AM, AZ time, that war has cost the American public $717,523,330,929 and counting. And, by the time you finish this article, the combined total of monies spent will have topped a trillion dollars, with trillions yet untold yet to come.)

Meanwhile the Tea Party is preparing an assault of their own, and on April 19, a date non-coincidentally chosen to commemorate the first time Americans took up weapons against their government (the “Shot Heard Around the World!” fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775), to honor or possibly replicate the day. While some may claim such talk is empty hyperbole, their vendors were selling pins calling for armed revolution at the Phoenix Glen Beck rally April 10 (more on that next week). So, on the 15th anniversary of Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the national government in Oklahoma City (also times to commemorate Lexington and Concord, also styled as a legitimate revolt of right wing anger) after 15 months of grumbling, the Tea Partiers will take the ultimate plunge and launch an armed march on DC  … well, the outskirts, to show America they have the right own guns, an assertion none but their own media arm actually question. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for the rest of us, the weapons carrying contingent of the Tea Party has to hold their rally outside the city limits of DC, since the city has a ban on handguns. We will observe a five second pause for those who must choke on this irony.

And now back to our regularly scheduled satire:

Meanwhile inside the Beltway, supposedly over one million right-wingers will rant and rave on the National Mall about how their federal government has no idea of their idea of the Constitution regarding gun rights. Just to be sure, the supposedly embattled Second Amendment reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” To some the “not be infringed part” means any American four-year old (physically or mentally) should be allowed to possess a gosh-darned bazooka if they flippin’ want one and just see what happens if you try to stop ‘em! To others “the well-regulated” part means that gun owners can and should be strictly policed. The vast majority of Americans fall somewhere in the middle, so for most it is not an issue.

Lord knows guns are everywhere.  Though gun fans forever fear that the American government is forever trying to strip them of their weaponry and their fears aren’t reflected by a terribly sparsity of firearms available in America, currently estimated to be about 350,000,000 weapons overall. As a result about 35% of  Americans are ever-ready to kill their neighbors and next of kin at a moment’s notice. And, in fact, those are the very people they most often murder. Of course, since gun owners are the good Americans with a healthy sense of patriotism (as reflected in the respect they give their duly elected president and the taxes which support the country they claim to love) and a strong sense of high moral values, the rest of us have nothing to fear of a gathering of thousands of angry armed people advancing on our nation’s capital.

But before we let these supposedly religious people (who routinely omit the “thou shall not kill,” “steal,” “lie,” “covet thy neighbor’s wife,” or “take the lord’s name in vain” from their personal interpretation of the strict orthodoxy they insist that others follow) treat our nation’s capital the same way they have been treating our national heroes, we should review their cases against our most popular ex-presidents and the majority of Americans for that matter, in order to figure why they hate the faces on Mt. Rushmore so much. Of course, if you talk directly to rank and file Tea Party members they will promise you, they are the true believers. They love their country more than any of the rest of us could even imagine possible and they are not simply about destruction, hatred, violence, cruelty or unfairness. Which is why their various members so frequently call for all liberals, all foreigners, all minorities and all Democrats to be rounded up and exterminated “like vermin” [hyperbole theirs].

That is, indeed, one way to make peace, to kill all your opposition. As biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand (1894-1977) once noted, “Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.” And if you are god, you get to set the rules and no dissent is possible: the people can’t argue with god. They can only be sacrificed for his will, or, if heretics, sacrificed to his wrath. And, boy howdy, has the Tea Party been doing their damndest to kill off the legacy this quartet of presidents, men most Americans had loved with a near religious fervor. If only the rest of us understood the treason and treachery of villains we once thought heroes.

So, let’s recap:

First, curiously, was Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most successful Republican presidents ever, in terms of contemporary and lasting popularity and success in accomplishing his political agenda. Among Roosevelt’s many sins were: his creating the National Park system, building the Panama Canal, and winning a Nobel Peace Prize. We all know what Tea Partiers think of peace and especially of Americans who are Nobel Peace Prize winners: take, for example, King, Carter, Wilson, and now Obama. What else? Well, Roosevelt was also guilty of the shameful heresies of caring about the struggles of the working man, restraining corporate abuses, insisting that companies stop lying to their customers in their advertising and create products that were not hazardous to their health. He established safety standards for workers and players. (He created the NCAA and, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Association, “Roosevelt convinced them that the rules needed to be changed to eliminate the foul play and brutality.”)

Clearly the work of a villain, obviously a liberal, and for a party that claims to be all about liberty, the worst thing one can be is a liberal. Worth noting, from Wikipedia: “Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis, “of freedom”) is the belief in the importance of liberty and equality.” Though, of course, if you can dictate the only acceptable visions of governments and gods, then I guess you can rewrite the definitions of words as well. Even worse Roosevelt eventually left the Republican party (like Tea Partiers appear to be doing) and took a good deal of the GOP with him to create the Progressive Party. Of course, there are a couple of differences between the Tea Party and the Progressive Party of Roosevelt. For one, the Tea Party hates progress almost as much as taxes. They long for a purer vision of America before all those liberals and their damnable progress started mucking things up.

You know back in the day when blacks were for slaving or raping, women were for abusing and misusing, and brown people were for target practice. Back when most of society had no idea of the daily news, and religions were burning people at the stake for questioning the exact count of angels astride a pin. When the wealth and direction of the nation were controlled by the privileged few, when less than 8% of the population was allowed to vote, and your life expectancy was that you would die young, poor, and in debt. Sound like the Tea Party vision of America to a tee.

Another difference, according to historian Ted Van Dyk on Crosscut.com, was that Roosevelt’s radical Republicans, left the party “rebelling against what they saw as their party’s too-close association with big financial and industrial interests.” But Tea Partier leaders are all about the Benjamins. For example, though appalling, mildly liberal by today’s standards, Roosevelt’s intervention the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 did improve miner’s lives. In comparison, Tea Party boasts Massey Energy’s own Don Blankenship who has ended at least 29 miners’ lives and laughed at over 3000 safety violations and $50,000,000 in fines because worrying about miner safety is “as silly as global warming.”

But Blankenship is just one example: Their movement’s organizers and many of the materials are paid for through a lobbying group called Freedom Works, run by health industry lobbyist, former TX rep., Dick Armey, who receives the majority of his funding from big health care and oil interests. The fabulous Koch brothers, bilious billionaire right-wingers, have pumped over fifty million alone into conservative causes and the list just starts there. With donations from big Pharma and big oil to grease their wheels Tea Partiers can now roll roughshod over any non-believer who questions their crude message of absolute liberty to screw everyone over in business and absolute restriction of personal behaviors. Using these kinds of standards, everyone’s an enemy. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a man generally ranked by most liberals and most conservatives as the 5th best president of all time, or as Glen Beck referred to him in his CPAC speech, “a cancer.”

Then there’s Thomas Jefferson whom, as many historians know, could be seen as a comparatively easy target compared Roosevelt. Chronically in debt, famously a slob, an opium poppy grower and probably admirer, a slave owner who kept his dead wife’s black half-sister as his lifelong concubine, and an apparent serial philanderer — there is much to question about the man from Monticello; but most of us tolerate such mischief due to his impressive presidency, his founding of the University of Virginia, and an incidental essay or two.

Their purported near monomaniacal devotion to Declaration of Independence be damned, Jefferson is still a blasphemer as far as the Tea Party is concerned, the Texas Tea Party that is, and needed to be banished not just from their hallowed halls, but from the very pages of American History. Thanks to their position as the nation’s leading textbook buyer and thus market taste setter, the Texas school book mullahs may have marginalized Jefferson nation-wide for the next ten years. That’s right, as the New York Times’ Russell Shorto reported from the Texas state textbook approval process: “Thomas Jefferson [is] no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins …. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone.”

And it’s not as if they are revolted with the list of typically outrageous behavior described above. But if raping your dead wife’s sister whom you’d imprisoned as a sex toy for a couple of dozen years was not offensive enough for them, then just what was Jefferson’s crime? Well, as Shorto quipped, “Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment.” And instead, “Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs.” The Texas Tea Partiers have thrown Thomas Jefferson, the author of our national founding document, completely out of our national history for committing their ultimate sin: not being Christian enough.

Like many of the famous founding fathers (Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and George Washington — to be downright alphabetical about it), Thomas Jefferson was not, in fact, a Christian and worked hard to end the reign of terror the religions of his time imposed upon the citizenry. At the time of the revolution as oppressive as King George was, he had nothing on the various state sanctioned religions in the various colonies. The King’s men could only torture and kill you. The sanctimonious church leaders could do all that AND THEN condemn you to burn in Hell for all eternity.

Jefferson was so proud of his efforts at thwarting the power the church had claimed over the state that on his tombstone, of the three accomplishments he had listed, besides the Declaration and the university already mentioned, he included his authorship of “The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,” omitting the Louisiana Purchase and, in fact, his presidency entirely.

Of course, Jefferson was not the only devil desiring to separate church from state. While it is widely discussed that the Writers of the Constitution gave the issue top billing when they drafted the Bill of Rights; earlier and more profoundly, in Article VI, Madison makes clear that the government of men in America shall not be a tied to anyone’s vision of any one’s god when he concludes by saying, “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Obviously, however, if you are going to brew your new theocracy on intolerance and steep it in a strict Christian allegiance as the Tea Partiers seem intent on, a voice like Jefferson’s has to be silenced. Wiley old scoundrel that he was, it is almost like Jefferson saw it coming when he wrote in 1809, “Our Constitution… has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the consciences of men either attainable or applicable to any desirable purpose.”  Yes, since no men are angels, neither amongst the citizenry nor inside the government, the price of freedom remains eternal vigilance, but it hard to have eyes in the back of one’s head and, with these Tea Party types, it’s to guess who or what they‘ll be attacking next. At least Jefferson wasn’t shot in the back like Lincoln was recently, figuratively speaking, by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

As the Post noted, Governor McDonnell “quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.” To make things even more interesting, McDonnell’s proclamation spoke eloquently of the sacrifices Confederate soldiers made defending the South, while making no mention of slavery. When a furor kicked up over the missing mention, McDonnell’s office claimed it wasn’t “significant,” and fellow southern governor, former leader of the GOP, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour called it a “nit.”

Considering that Lincoln, himself, was among the over 600,000 who died over the issue, it is small wonder that until the Tea Party came along to free us from our foolish ways, most Americans thought slavery was significant and considered anyone who thought otherwise a nit, a nitwit that is.

And so, with Lincoln bushwhacked, Jefferson excommunicated, and Roosevelt roundly pulverized, that leaves only one face on our sacred mountain of Rushmore; and, as noted, armed Tea Party rebels have announced their intention to kick off a second “revolution“ [quotation marks theirs, I hope] by advancing on Washington in a pincer movement. Understand, as of yet, no actual presidential virtual visages, stone or otherwise, have been reduced to gravel … as of yet. Of course, if they find out General George was not only a heretic, but also a hemp smoker, South Dakota might soon be missing a monument.

But like the devastated Afghan Buddhas or demolished statue of the lost leader in the famous Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” the sad part isn’t the loss of the downed stone idol, or even the man or the ideals he represented, but erasure of the very country which once thrived in his image. Sure, the Tea Party tells us they, not we, see the real America, and feel the only true and worthy patriotic love of country. But after blasting off the faces of 75% of our national patron saints, I worry how patriotic they will actually be come this April 19 with Washington in their gun-sights, when they fire their shot heard around the world. 

As of 4/16/10, 2:06 and 45 seconds AM, AZ time, those wars have cost the American public $983,381,287,923 and counting.

That’s right, our hand-picked dictator for the last decade, who is the brother of the world’s leading heroin producer, and is in bed with the world’s biggest junkie, us, a man who treats corruption and bribery as if they were fashion statements, our business partner in crime, who is rumored to sniff a poppy or two himself, a man that is such a kleptocrat even his own citizens have tried to off him four times, that Hamid Karzai, he thinks we Americans play too dirty in when it comes to politics and he wants nothing more to do with us. To hear him tell it one of the Western World’s innovations that America proudly brought to the presumably medieval Afghani electoral process is that we have shown them better ways to cheat.

There can be little doubt Karzai already knew a trick or two when it comes to dealing dirty; but if Bush-Gore and 2004 are how we export democracy, no wonder so many other nations complain that the “democracy” we bring them is damaged on arrival.

Now to hear Karzai tell it, the Afghanis want back the flowers they never threw at us and want to be left alone to grow more opium for them to sell to us. Even though our military has admitted that curbing Afghan opium production is counter to their mission, Karzai is saying the Taliban are beginning to look like a better date to the prom than us. Nine years in and our image has shriveled from initially unbidden unwelcome “liberators” all the way down to the imperial quagmire keepers and designated dopefiends.

How is it that truth, justice, and the American Way are losing out to the same drug dealing religious zealots who once blasted the crap out of a pair of internationally revered giant 2000 year old Buddha statues carved into a mountain side, because Buddhism didn’t live up to their purity standards? America couldn’t be that far off the mark, could we? How could we have possibly made ourselves look even worse to the Afghan people than those guys who would rather a woman die in agony from a curable malady than be touched by a male physician, who would rather throw acid in a woman‘s face than have her go to school? There’s no way we could be worse than those guys.

Truth, justice, equality, opportunity, fair play. That’s what America believes in, right? How could it be the Afghanis aren’t in love with Americans and our American ideals?

Perhaps, it has to do with the fact that those ideals are mere marketing slogans we repeat as mantras to keep the reality of the American disasters we’ve created tolerably anesthetized. We may call those words our ideals but we are not living up to them, yet expect every other country to bow and scrape as if we were the jewel of the earth.

I know that over at Fox they’ve hardly had a moment to cover it, what with all the air time required to adequately create Tea Party fabrications that are clever enough to temporarily delude someone with a fifth grade education; but this week the international and liberal news media have been a-boil over yet another case of US military atrocities in Afghanistan.

This week they have uncovered yet another military cover-up where US soldiers “accidentally” shot five more innocent Afghan people including two pregnant mothers. Then in a gruesomely inept attempt to conceal their error, the soldiers violated the bodies of the dead Muslim women by cutting the bullets out and hiding them, then they swabbed the wounds out with alcohol to destroy evidence, and even concocted a canard about the women being stabbed to death before the US forces got there.

In the PR campaign the completely concocted incident was framed as another case of Afghani barbarity, yet another selling point on why we need to be there. You can almost hear the rationale as they made that one up: ‘Oh, if only our boys had been there in time they could have protected the poor women from such acts of senseless violence.’ And so on. As CNN reported it, a U.S. official claimed, “the women had been shot ‘execution-style’ and that the killings had ‘the earmarks of a traditional honor killing.’”

Boggles the mind, huh? Add to it that this revelation comes the same week American mainstream media is doing their best to marginalize the latest US Iraq War Atrocity, a media bombshell that exploded when the whistleblower website, Wiki-Leaks presented info at the National Press Club and posted an instanta-viral video of US helicopters … let‘s call it “engaging” with reporters from Reuters, to the tune of eleven dead, including a passerby who stopped to render assistance and got himself and his children shot up for his kindness.

This was also an honor killing in a way. The audio portion of the actual video including the voices of the helicopter gun crew. And you can tell they are honored to be murdering in the service of their country and listen how well their behavior honors us:

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street. A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!” Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses. And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.” And so on.

The Wiki-Leaks video, titled “Collateral Murder,” runs almost 18 minutes and is said to be but the first of a series of leaked videos of deadly displays of US excessive force. With as previous hits such as Abu Ghriab and Fallujah already in the can, this long running big-budget production, “American War Abuses in Arab Lands” appears to have more episodes than The Simpsons and, like its predecessors, should be a hit at madrassas world wide.

Dan Froomkin’s Huffington Post reporting covered both the incident itself and the furor that has erupted from Wiki’s leaked video of the actual 2007 incident. As usual, as the controversy has unfolded, the military knew exactly which enemy to most target to counter the damage they had done: they blamed the whistleblower and declared that the Wiki-Leaks website, “represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.” That’s a government working hard for the common good, their own good.

At the time, the military issued a standard press release which the New York Times parroted–US personnel ‘were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in for reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing firefight, the statement said, “the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.”

Of course, that whitewash was generated by Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, commander of the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment. He’s the guy who “told ESPN that the reluctance of Tillman’s parents to accept the military’s story that he was killed by enemy action, rather than friendly fire, was the unfortunate result of their lack of Christian faith.”

As you may recall Pat Tillman, AZ Cardinal football hero, patriotically set down football to join the military to honor his country early in the war. He quickly soured on the war in Afghanistan, prepared to speak out against it, even started contacting reporters and Noam Chomsky, of all people, and promptly caught a bullet between the eyes. Friendly fire. What a lovely term for murder. The story the military and their lapdogs the press told migrated farther than a runaway teen with a hundred dollar bus ticket. Wikipedia summarizes the shifts the story took as our government reluctantly admitted the truth:

“The Army initially claimed that Tillman and his unit were attacked in an apparent ambush …. An Afghan militia soldier was killed, and two other Rangers were injured as well …. A more thorough investigation concluded that no hostile forces were involved in the firefight and that two allied groups fired on each other in confusion after a nearby explosive device was detonated …. On July 26, 2007, the AP received official documents stating that the investigating doctors performing the autopsy suspected that Tillman was murdered.” And Tillman is only one of a string of “mysterious battle field deaths.”

According to a 2006 USA Today story as many as 40% of the deaths reported to surviving families were filled with distortions.

For us here in the US, American war corruption (pick a flavor–Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, Triple Canopy, or last month’s latest poster boy, Col. Kevin Davis) is but an annoying distraction between commercials. Like most of our dealings with all the narco-states America favors with our dollars (both in the form of military aid to “stamp out the evil scourge” over there and being their number one customer over here), places like Vietnam in the 60s, Nicaragua in the 80s, perennial favorites Mexico and Colombia and now the poppy capital of the world, thanks to none other than the policies of George W Bush; tolerating the local corruption is just part of doing business. But in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the way America does business is a daily slap in the face.

The American public is routinely told we need to have faith. Though it may take decades and trillions America will rebuild Afghanistan in our own image. A drug fueled economy, corruption in high places, phony elections, and religious fanatics trying to control everything while the supposed watch dogs look the other way? We may already be there. And after spending 10 years in bed with the drug dealing Karzai brothers, it appears the flowers they’ve been greeting us with have been poppies all along and we’re the ones who are hooked.

No, this has been an exciting week for Capitalism folks, as in the economic enterprise that supposedly sails our ship of state through the stormiest of seas. If only we believe. If only we believe and remove the shackles of unfair unfree trade. Once again that definition of Free Trade: anything Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh agree is good for business and they always agree with their bosses.

Broken down to its nuts and bolts: Capitalism means you screw people over as hard as you can for as much as you can. If they lose their homes, die from lack of medical service, or find themselves treading water next to a drowning polar bear, it is not your problem if you can successfully deny it through litigation. OR, that other popular definition for capitalism: provide as minimal a good or service as possible all the while convincing your customers that they are happy. OR, the one most of us live through: essentially slavery, except they also get to torture you with math problem you’ll never solve: how can you afford to live on the little bit you make. And the capitalists will tell you loud and long how they have done you a favor by inventing this system and your place in it; but most of all theirs.

By those and numerous other standards, 2009 has been a very good year for capitalism. This year saw the number of billionaires in America nearly double at a time when the rest of the world lost over five trillion dollars. Where did the money go? Up the ladder. It’s the famous trickle up theory made famous by Reaganomics loving neocons way back when. There are now 793 billionaires in America. That’s a lot of billions that had to go somewhere, such as away from our schools and roads and healthcare. But it sure made a lot of millionaires a whole lot richer.

In fact among the factoids amid this week’s news flotsam is that the 400 richest people in America got 30 billion richer. Whew. At a time when 3.5 million more homes are expected to go belly up, it warms my heart to know the money is safe.

Look how much happier we all are now that they have our money and not just our houses, but our taxes too. With a year like this, it is hard to keep straight which example of unfettered capitalism is the most audacious, so I personally have taken to breaking down my list to a week-by-week basis. With several outstanding examples of why this paradigm has been good for society in the current news cycle there are so many choices to be dazzled by.

To hear the right-wingers blog about it, the biggest news this week is that the entirety of global warming is a hoax and that every scientist everywhere who does not propound that Jesus dated dinosaurs is part of a conspiracy to ruin petrodollar profits and thus screw over Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and several Bushes all at the same time and that, sir, is Un-American.

Those of you who know that Rush is always right also knew it all along that it’s all those phony lying lefties that cooked up this whole fake global warming thing and now they have been busted. Sure.

Where is my Hummer? Can I get it to reduce my mileage to like 5mph, maybe 3? And why not if there’s no global warming? Maybe you can get it rigged up to run on clubbed baby seal?

Anyway, all that was good red meat for the anti-environmentalists around the country. Except the opposite side, the folks who say that quote scandal is a classic misdirection, folks who say it’s all a conflation and intended to distract the public support away serious commitments at Copenhagen’s Climate Change Conference, happen to be the majority of the world’s scientiests who are hoping we as a people will wise up before we destroy our planet beyond recognition.

They explain that the accusations being hurled against the emailing climate scientists in question are intentional outlandish distortions of language and intent. By the way, backers of the emailers include their bosses, and John Roberts, the CNN reporter sent to talk up the teapot into a tempest and even Bill Nye the Science Guy doing his level best to debunk the global warming would-be debunkers. The CNN coverage of the controversy was a load of bunk to be sure. But as Roberts noted, finishing his coverage, by the time the experts sort it out, Copenhagen will be over and Exxon-Mobile can continue to make billions by destroying our future for the mere cost a few hackers and a couple of bribed talking heads spreading a little doubt.
Capitalists win!

Over in the Banking sector which has been so inspiring this last year when it comes to doing dirt unto others and calling it good clean profit, many folks are impressed with Bank of America’s announcing they are attempting to return their TARP money so they can award themselves more profits and bonuses. But I am partial to that other Bail Out Powerhouse AIG. In “Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food,” Yasha Levine’s not-that-astonishing expose on AIG going all 3rd world on the poverty stricken of Rural Kentucky. Taking a page from the Bechtel rape of Bolivia’s water supply back in 2000, AIG subsidy Utilities, Inc. acquired the water supply for poor mountaineers who barely keep their families fed and then jacked their rates by more than 51%. Phony, erroneous and repetitive billing ensued. Kidding aside these are people whose per capita income is 13,000. Through the rate hike and working out the “bugs” in their new billing system, AIG nets an additional 3/4s of a million and all they had to do was torment a few more poor people. Why not, they’re good at it, they’re capitalists.

But my choice for This Week in Capitalism’s “Just Getting Down to the Brass Tacks of it All” Award for cutting to the essence of capitalist values, at least the espoused capitalist values of our captains of capitalism in the press and the pubs of America … well, it actually goes to Mexico. That’s right, the people who were once held as farm animals and concubines for their Spanish missionaries have now gone that ultimate last mile for capitalism, cut labor costs completely and just kidnapped themselves a bunch of slaves right in the heart of the biggest city in the world. That’s right, December 4th the Associated Press, among others, reported that a factory in Mexico City that disguised itself as a rehab center was actually kidnapping people off of the streets then forcing them to work 16 hour days making shopping bags and clothespins. One hundred and seven people were rescued having been found working as slaves and 23 suspects allegedly working as their overseers and guards were taken into custody.

And I say, well what happened here? Why has the free market failed capitalism? People need their cheap plastic bags and clothespins and business man has a right to make a profit doesn’t he? Of course that’s not that different from the occasional corporate faux pas here in America where dozens of undocumented immigrants happen to be working in the same meat packing plant, or restaurant, which just happens to be owned by some big American business: like Tyson, like McDonalds, like Swift.

Like another Swift might once have suggested, next thing you know the capitalists will be selling us our own babies to eat. Why not? It’s pure capitalism in motion. They don’t have to pay for the labor. They don’t have guarantee the product. They don’t have to protect the consumer. Yipes, if the capitalists ever figure out how to make a buck on this, we’re doomed.

If you are still reading, I will type more.

In the recent major news there were two stories of public figures with Muslim sounding names responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. I am, of course, referring to Nidal Hasan and Barack Obama. The case against one seems simple, but is not; and the case against the other seems outlandish, but is quite simple. So, as a long time peace activist, I would advocate that one of these men is a terrorist.

As surely most of the media-fed world knows, Nidal Hasan is the US Army Major, a military psychiatrist no less, who treated returning GIs for PTSD, until he himself went nuts and shot up half of Fort Hood, TX in early Nov. Thirteen dead, thirty wounded. Hasan made Harris and Klebold look like amateurs, which of course they were. Hasan wasn’t a major by accident. He had worked himself up through the ranks and gone back to college and earned an MD. He won service medals for fighting in the Gulf War and the “War on Terror.“ All of which sounds good, until he starts shooting up the place.

While there is no doubt that his actions, and the media reactions it triggered, have terrified the nation, there has been a subsequent wave of news about the murderer that has tried to paint him as a terrorist, an Islam-o-fascist as the phrase goes. There can be no doubt in looking at the man’s life, he was a devotedly religious man who grew revolted at the carnage he was forced to face from his patients. As should any religious man when faced with tales of violence, cruelty and depravity, in particular happening for a cause itself that he felt wrong. The rules about killing are fairly clear in most belief systems.

However taking vengeance into one’s own hands put one above or separate from that religion. It’s not serving god, but playing god, a role we would want no man to have.

While Hasan’s actions clearly could qualify a person as a religious fanatic, if it were indeed religion that drove him to it, and, it is well known it is always a good idea to keep the weapons away from the religious fanatics, it does not make that person part of an international terrorist network, or a member of a sleeper cell or another representative of this crazy killer religion and so we have more proof on how we have to hate the Muslims. Like we used to be told we had to hate the Jews.

Think of all the Gentiles who have done evil things. Perhaps we should hate them too and that would just include everybody, since we are still being shown all the reasons we should hate Blacks, Hispanics and Indians all the time.

But I digress.

In Mark Ames’ chilling AlterNet article “The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete … If It Weren’t for Archives,” there is a different picture much of the media would like you to forget. Ames’ compilation of original and subsequently revised major news coverage of the Ft. Hood Shooting reminds us what we already knew the second we heard the news of a lone gunman shooting up his workplace, in this case a military base. It’s the tragic case of a loser who loses it. In this case he happened to be trained in small arms.

Hasan was a faltering officer doing a well documented slow public decline. He was religiously, emphatically, against the war, he was appalled by the same stories that were devastating his patients. His personal life sucked, his performance evaluations were going downhill. He was trying to report his patients for war crimes, because, of all things, they were reporting war crimes and he told people it was driving him crazy. He was fighting his deployment tooth and nail and obviously exactly the wrong guy to send to the war front and in typical military snafu, that’s exactly where they insisted on sending him. And he went postal. Stupid us.

Remember all the calls about why didn’t anybody catch the warning signals? It was because there were so many for so many years that the military ignored. It’s not because he was deep double agent, part of some super-secret Al Qaeda spy ring operating out of the same Falls River Mosque attended briefly by two of the 9/11 highjackers. That would be simply guilt by association. By that rationale then the Bush family would be terrorists because they were in bed financially with the Bin Laden family, as in Osama. In fact George Bush, Sr. was doing business with them that very day of Sept. 11, 2001 and that does not make him a terrorist.

The Bushes, both father and son, have been well proven as terrorists in their own right. Once again we need to set some terms here: WMDs? No. No WMDs. Never Happened. It was a deception the administration put upon America to sell us the war. Saddam = 9/11? Pure BS. Even though at one point as many as 70% of the public swore it was true and thought President Bush had told them so, it was never true and he officially denied it in the press the day after the 5th anniversary of Sept. 11. Look it up.

If you’re still with me then follow this: As FAIR will document exhaustively for you, the Bush admin knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and Hussein was never linked to Al Qaeda and yet over 900 times they quite intentionally mislead the public to believe to get us to believe it in the lead up and first year of the war.

So, it’s a war of aggression. It’s a war sold on lies. It is a war that is wrong and while there are tons of reasons speculated as to how or why Bush did it, there can be no doubt he made America a terrorist. We needlessly destroyed another country to attack a misrepresented image of a man. Though of course Hussein was a terrorist to his own people, he was not a threat to us. He was a target Bush trained America to attack by lying to us.

It is an ugly truth, a shameful truth and until we act to correct it, we perpetuate the crime. In America we have the luxury of blaming our president; but a country at war is every citizen’s shame. To the rest of the world, it is America, the terrorist. Until we correct this great wrong, it is hard to prove them mistaken. Why do they hate us? It has Nothing to do with our freedom, and lot to do with their chains.

So here’s my argument: If Bush was a terrorist and awful and wrong to wage this war he sold us on lies, how could Obama not also be guilty if he continues Bush policies. The dribble of public relations style cosmetic restoration of civil rights and cessation of hostilities dried up it seems. Obama sides with Bush on torture a little, Guantanamo a little, Iraq a little, domestic spying a little. A little here, a little there, it kind of adds up.

And now a surge in Afghanistan? If you can risk an spare 40,000 US soldiers and not have to return your Nobel, how many can you spend and still walk away with an Oscar?

Oscar for what? Impersonating George Bush, terrorist. As Oscar winner Michael Moore reported and Jon Stewart skewered on the Daily Show, shortly Obama is now quoting Bush nearly line by line. Moore simply compared Fox News transcript of the Obama speech announcing his surge to excerpts from various Bush speeches. Obama: “We Did Not Ask for This.” Bush: “We Did Not Seek This.” Obama: “New Attacks are Being Plotted as I speak.” Bush: “At This Moment … Terrorists are Planning New Attacks.”

It is almost too comic, if only it were funny. But here’s the truth. If Obama sends more soldiers then more soldiers will die and the war will still be wrong and, unlike the recession, those war dead, including his extra American soldiers, will be his.

If Obama is imitating Bush then he is being a terrorist and it has nothing to do with the sound of his last name. Of course, now that Obama’s hired back Dana Perino, Bush last days press secretary, who would be surprised what happened next.

Whatever it is, I pray it gets better. I am so tired of being America the terrorist.

“Democrats Rising, we’ve had our say/Washington’s changing, what a great day/With Obama in the White House, all the world is praying/ that for eight years he’s staying ….”

At this time when the national GOP requiring “purity tests” and loyalty oaths, it seemed like a small request, but somehow I balked.

We were in the banquet room at the Hotel Brunswick on a Saturday night after a long day of Democratting for the awards dinner of the League of Democratic Women Voters. It was the capstone event after a day of caucuses and speeches. My wife a teacher turned novice political candidate was about to receive an award and possibly campaign donations. I had walked in with a dark beer on draft and the crowd was taking up the tune.

“…He has won the No-bel Peace Prize, Now, we’ll all see whether we can live in peace together/ Zip-pi-ty doo-dah, zip-pi-ty ay.”

There’s young Ron Glassman, a giant of a man with a mile-long resume and potential powerhouse senatorial candidate whose exploratory campaign is trying to net 10,000 AZ contributors before he intends to declare against John McCain; or, at least wait till Jan. 2010 to officially announce his candidacy, less as a Tucson city councilman Glassman would have to resign according to AZ election laws. Glassman’s singing with gusto, his handlers gathered around him in color-complimenting outfits and in a pretty fair harmony. Nearer to the door and not to be outdone Attorney General candidate Felecia Rotellini, beneath her busy business woman’s scarf, is pumping her arms in rhythm.

And there was my sweet loving wife, Beth Weisser, bravely chasing after the tune. Essentially an independent until the GOP blatantly self identified as an enemy of the state, in particular our education system, Beth had thrown herself into the hornet’s nest of AZ statehouse politics to challenge current state senator Ron Gould on everything from haircuts to tax cuts, but mostly on education funding. She’s one of a handful of locals I recognize. While not quite the James Carville and Mary Matalin of our time, Beth is a centrist-progressive and I’m from the “Kucinich wasn’t even left enough for me” crowd.

In a town and a county that typically skews 65% Republican, my wife is much more in keeping with the majority of local Dems who challenged Bush ideas, and state GOP party ideologues. Though Kingman herself boasts fewer public Democrats than militia chapters, the party faithful from around the state had schlepped to town and filled up the room to reach out to Mohave County. County Dem leaders showed up in their regalia. The award winning Dem volunteer duo of Mitch and Susan Smith were in from down in Fort Mohave. Kingman’s mother-son team of Mary McLaughlin and Patrick Gonzales were there through the day though Patrick was elsewhere that night. Plus there were all the other Dem faces from around the state that I’m supposed to be remembering. The lyric sheets were on the table at each placemat in the rows of banquet tables that fill the hall.

And everyone was singing and several were looking at me.

“… He is trying to fix our health care; and the wars around us/the e-con-o-my that hounds us … Democrats Rising, What a Great Day!”

And, in all honesty I did not succeed in joining in the song. Well, not wholly.

Like the majority of people in this city, this county, this state, but not in this country as a whole, I am not generally a Democrat. I am not one to support blatant war criminal thieving would be dictators, so I haven’t been able to support the GOP for quite some time. But the Dems have been no bed of roses either. As a true liberal, there is much about the mainstream approach of the Democratic party that I find obstructionist, shortsighted, or even farcical.

That’s not to say I haven’t given them my time on issues over the decades, however. In fact, shilling for the Democratic Party was the first political thing I ever did. I would have been nine then, it was the eve of the presidential election in 1968. I scrawled “Humphrey-Muskie Are our Man [sic] Nixon-Agnew Garbage Can!” on the street in front of our house in chalk thinking that would make all the difference, which it did not.

Since then it is true, I have championed most every Dem against most every Republican in most every election I’ve encountered where party mattered. I wrote pro-Clinton anti-Bush material in ‘92 and pro-Gore anti-Bush material in 2000. I volunteered with the Dems for their presidential campaigns in both ‘04 and ‘08, though neither candidate was the one I wanted. It wasn’t the first time either. I found Carter ineffective and thought the only thing truly Democrat about Clinton was his libido.

But now, I have taken the whole Dem-love thing to a new level and am actually in bed with a prominent local Democrat — my wife. Still, like George Washington I emphatically oppose political parties, though like the rest of America two hundred and thirty some odd years afterward, I am held their hostage. Washington feared that when political activists drew together to promote their own agenda that that’s what they would do and the needs of the people would become secondary to the men’s efforts to further themselves. And pretty much since Washington’s demise in 1799 we have suffered exactly that fate.

As a younger much more idealistic thirty year old, I was once offered a job to report on the Illinois State Legislature. I lived in the capitol, Springfield, IL, which is definitely a company town, with 35% of the metro workforce employed by some government agency. Reporting on how the legislature made the whole thing work seemed like it was going to be such a cool job. I got into work at 9am that first day and had quit before 3pm.

Both sides of the aisle were loathsome. Petty egos, controlling the lives of the public through their caprice, posturing, and self aggrandizement. Sent to solve crises, they perpetuated them. Sent to represent the public, they handcuff our access, ignore our pleas, make backroom deals, condescend and grandstand away most true progress they could have achieved. Sent to be the solution, they become the problem.

Democrats as much as any. It is a two party lock in this country. Like they say “clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right.” In fact the only good thing I can say about the party as a whole is that at least it is not the Republicans.

Between Reagan and the Bushes most any safeguards the public had from predatory businesses and a war-profiteering economy were stripped away. Plutocrats have been raping the rest of us and now the global economy is on life support, while the right wing have been holding us in position so they can get a better aim for god and country. Rights made shambles, our integrity as a country squandered, our economy destroyed. America the beautiful has become America the train wreck. And then when we elect one party to throw the bums out, in most cases, they replace the faces but not the policies. At least I knew with my wife that wasn’t going to happen …

Which is why, when Beth opted to become a Democrat, then a candidate and challenge Ron Gould for the state senate seat in LD3, I shuddered for a second, then threw in with her and started attending events where donkey butt is considered a fashion accessory. Though a longtime political pundit myself, when we do Dem deals I am strictly the arm candy, only the candidate‘s spouse. It was fun to roll along in the auxiliary role like that. I actually spent much of the day volunteering with the Penny Kotterman campaign for Superintendent of Public Education.

One of the main issues of the party meeting and the talk of a variety of caucuses was a proposed change to the party bylaws which would have allowed the party to essentially ignore the rural corners of the state in favor of a tri-annual state party meeting schedule aligned along what was called “the I-17/I-10 Corridor.” Seems several central party members in the central state areas — Tucson/Phoenix/Flagstaff — considered it a hardship to attend meetings out in the rural corners of the state such as Yuma, Bisbee or any place in Apache or Mohave County.

Party dismay over travel time showed in the attendance numbers. Last quarter’s party meetings in Flagstaff filled a huge auditorium of over 300 and hosted luminaries like soon-to-be Dem gubernatorial candidate Secretary of State Terry Goddard and President of the Navajo Nation, Dr. Albert Hale. Of the 640 some odd party delegates from around the state, only 152 arrived for the Kingman convention, far short of the 272, or 40% that should have been present for the assembly to conduct business. However more than 300 proxy votes were sent in with those that did attend. Through out the day you could tell how many votes each delegate was responsible for the proxy of according to how many nametags he or she wore around their neck. Some’s necks appeared to be bowed from the weight as if hoisting accordions.

However despite pressure to urbanize the party outreach efforts from some, the party that presumes to represent the power of the people, democracy itself, will now continue to represent all the people of AZ, even the ones who don’t conveniently live in Maricopa County. When the issue was put before the delegates assembled for the afternoon meeting, the voice vote on the issue wasn’t even close. APD wants all Democrats, even the ones who don’t live in Phoenix. Many say it is the only way the party will ever achieve that holy grail they pursue every election cycle: to turn AZ Blue.

As one local Dem called out in the Progressive Democrat Caucus that morning, “The party already wins in metropolitan areas. Until you work on all 15 counties the way Howard Dean set up the 50 state strategy of fighting in each state, not just some of them, until you work to change the mentality throughout the state and not just in the cities, Arizona will continue to think like a red state. The best you will do is give AZ a blue stripe, but it won’t become a Blue state.“

National party strategists are hoping that the Copper State democrats can pull it together for the 2010 mid-terms and are watching AZ as a “likely to flip” state by 2012. Though both political parties are suffering from the recession, the Dems claim to be out raising the state GOP by a 2 to 1 margin. To be sure, throughout the day the state party members seemed optimistic that they were a party of change and change was on the way.

They act as if just because Obama’s in the White House, the Democratic Party was large and in charge, despite the fact that nationally the GOP with the help of the media, as they did in Carters’ time and in Clinton’s, manages to derail any progress their president tries to make. And despite the fact that in the state itself, the Republican party out and out ignores any overtures toward negotiations with the minority Dem party and runs roughshod over any opposition. The AEA, aka the state teachers association, recently filed a lawsuit against the new education budget which includes policy changes designed to limit free speech and punish teachers for actively opposing ed budget cuts throughout 2009.

AZ GOP leaders contend the state does not need public education and several have been caught in private school funding frauds. Meanwhile in addition to millions in cuts, new policies which just went into effect on Nov. 24, strip away teacher seniority and tenure, and penalize teachers for political activism. Lord knows what they will make of this column.

Any AZ Democrat honest with himself would tell you the Dems are not in charge around here … yet. The last eight years damaged the party in ways a few pundits cannot dismiss away and the GOP leadership keeps tarnishing the brand. With continuing outrages from earlier GOP offenses and the outlandish statements made by Republicans during the Obama administration, it is safe to speculate the GOP could marginalize themselves out of relevance within a couple of election cycles, even in traditionally conservative areas such as the cowboy state West. AZ is a red zone. Kingman in particular I might add. The opening Friday night of the convention dinner parties popped up around town and some Kingmanites, in typical red-state redneck fashion, did not take it well. At the Dambar, when a local big booted big hatted Kingman cowboy found out the Democratic Party in that very building, he hissed , “Sheesh, Democrats. That’s all we need.”

I, ever the antagonist, piped in, “That’s right. Democrats ARE what we need.” As he and his buddy and their wives all stood aghast I rushed them a little. “Democrats, yes! After the last eight years of our president making our country a war criminal, after our state GOP destroys our people so their rich friends can have a tax cut, Democrats are exactly what we need. Peace and love, man, peace and love.”

At which point his buddy spat me an expletive and shot me the finger as they left. The ADP may be ready to reach out to Kingman, but Kingman still has a long way to go to be ready to reach out to the ADP.

In the meantime, Del, can we work on that song?

Same joke as last week, I am NOT talking about the lynch mob-like crowd scene on the National Mall that was literally choreographed by and for Fox “News” last week on Sept. 12, but the current, equally valid, environmental protesters being pre-harassed by the Pittsburgh PD in advance of this Thursday’s G20 Summit.

Quick reminder: This week economically devastated working class Pittsburgh hosts this year’s annual “G20 Summit.” Leaders of the world will dine on fine foods, couch their agendas in terms that sound magnanimous, size up the new American president, and, if possible, discern the best way to be on America’s best side. Let’s face it, even though China and India are doing blockbuster business in the way of catching up, the US is still the driving economy of the planet. For now.

The G20 Summit is the US’s turn to hang with the best of the rest. The G20 are the countries with the 19 biggest economies in the world plus the European Union en bloc. Long ago and far away, the group used to be a much more exclusive “G6,” also the even luckier sounding “G7,”and, after some entourage adjustment, the more sporty “G8.” Full disclosure: in an earlier feverish bid for inclusiveness back in ’99 they shot all the way up to the sonorous “The G33,” but backed off down to awkward sounding “G22,” which didn’t quite have the ring to it, so two more nations were jettisoned, and there you have it.

Working together, these nations’ economies control about 85% of all the money in the entire world. And their meetings have long attracted world class protests, but not in Rustbelt Pittsburgh, thus the crackdown. Racist posturing, propagandist pandering and mounds of trash on the National Mall to denigrate the president in as vulgar terms as possible = good clean fun for loyal Americans. Groups of environmentalist protesters staging street theater to try to draw attention to the catastrophe unfolding as we ignore Global Warming = clearly anti-American who thus need to be surveilled, and have their vans unlawfully searched and seized.

A lot of environmentalists hope to set the stage at the Summit for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It’ll be the first time in a long time that the rest of the world could possibly look to an American president in hopes of leadership in dealing with the pollutions that are poisoning the planet. Previously the Bush presidency played the bad boy and had scorned calls for stricter regulations on carbon emissions. At one point, in typical Bush fashion, he even mocked the assembled body and laughingly called himself, “the world’s polluter.”

Much of the world is wondering, with the rightwing holding Obama to the ropes, will there be hope for any environmental progress? The cultural warfare we’re engaged in as a nation over health care is just the warm-up for the battle we’ll see the Right put up when America tries to adjust our self-destructive addiction to pollution. Already the rightwing/Big Oil cabals are engineering the next set of protests Tea Party type Americans will be suckered into. Already they are working to challenge the president in so many ways that he can’t accomplish much beyond working to defend himself. As Yogi Berra once said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Just as had happened in 1993 when Clinton came to power, like they had successfully done to Carter over a decade earlier, the right wing organized an all-out assault on the democratic president’s agenda in health care and energy. In Clinton’s case the onslaught took down both his plans for universal health care and energy consumption tax to regulate us off of fossil fuels.

The rest of the world has been waiting for us to join in the effort to keep the planet from choking itself to death. But they could be waiting a long time more if the Right has anything to do with it and it looks like they do. Just as the rest of the civilized world realized long ago that, as Tory MP Tony Benn so delightfully phrased in the Michael Moore movie, Sicko, “If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.” It’s such a basic principle of human, one could even say Christian dignity, and still, look how not-far health care reform has gotten since the Right kicked up the noise machine. Here’s what’s next.

Oil corporations have already practiced staging Astroturf fake energy protests, in Houston no less, where oil company workers were shipped in for the protests, paid their company wages for being there and actual protesting citizens were kept out; and then the event was billed as a spontaneous citizens’ uprising at the American Petroleum Institute’s Energy Citizen event.

And as phony as that is, I just imagine Glen Beck will soon be leading the charge for a December 7th Club or something like that to ‘drop the bomb’ on Obama’s energy policies. And the rest of the world will keep watching while America continues to over-pollute, over-consume, underfund our education, over-fill our prisons, over-export war and weapons, undercut our own health care and overly congratulate ourselves for our freedom.

Meanwhile, while we weren’t looking, we’re losing another war. As of Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, TV news anchors and commentators talk about Afghanistan as if America’s chances are already over. The Taliban have virtually regained control of the country and if we want the control back, it’s going to take four times the manpower and four decades to do it. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had heartily concurred in the call for more troops. You remember Karzai, the former Unocal employee we installed in power within months of Sept. 11th 2001? The guy who recently claimed a reelection victory in an election widely recalled as a fraud. That Karzai. Well, Karzai still has that all that Unocal pipeline project to protect; so you can bet when it comes to getting an army to fight off Taliban, he would much rather borrow ours than create his own.

Currently the best estimates say that if we had the political will to send in 600,000 troops and to have generations of them stay there for 40, count ‘em, 40 years, then we might make some headway. Sounds like a mighty big amount of political will. But these days, most Americans barely have the political will to get out of bed in the morning, unless, of course, they’re being fueled on hatred of all things Obama. So, here’s the silver lining in all this:

That Afghanistan War is likely to go down the tubes too, once the Right Realize they can hate him for that as well. Iraq was Bush’s war to lose, and lose it he did, but Obama is likely to have Afghanistan taken away from him. When right-wingers can claim to be patriotic by calling for an end to “the Awful President’s Illegal War,” then you’ll know peace will soon be at hand.

Oh yeah, I wasn’t talking about the current goof, South Carolina Republican, Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson. The latest in the long line of GOP buffoons to attempt to make their name by calling the president names? No way! Addison Graves Wilson is as much a “Joe Wilson” as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was a plumber. I was talking about an actual American hero. Let’s face it, the GOP section’s audience reactions to Obama’s big Health Care Speech Wednesday were anything but heroic. If that was the crowd representing me, I’d hide. No wonder they keep those people in the back row. You saw the kind of behavior that gives neighborhoods a bad name.

The current politician in the news, the latest “brave patriot Republican” to do the brave patriot thing–of hurling insults from afar while in a pack of sullen buddies acting tough in the balcony–is not the kind of Joe Wilson I think we should remember. Joe Wilson is a cool name. It shouldn’t be squandered on jerks in the peanut gallery. Whether you agree that the president lied in saying that government money would pay for immigrant healthcare, or should I say continue to pay for government health care, is beside the point.

But here’s the point as to Wilson’s lie remark: Right now if a person goes into an emergency room and needs care they get it. Just to double check, do you, dear readers, prefer hospitals to deny folks service in the emergency rooms?
Think about it.

If the answer is “no,” you are not the kind of goon who would leave the sick and wounded to die in the streets. Then you have to see that currently, “yes,” the desperately poor and sick get their emergency room treatments as a government treat, citizenship or no. Again the question: leave the sick and dying to rot on street corners because of immigration paperwork?

Do we really want hospitals denying folks service and leaving them to die on the sidewalks. Imagine the fumigation bill that entails to keep downtown areas tourist friendly. If you’re down for that sort of thing, then the rest of America, the majority of Americans btw, though not the majority of Americans shown on TV these days, the majority is right to work against you. But to Wilson’s point: Are there provisions in the health care bills Obama was discussing that set up new protocols for paying for undocumented immigrants? No.

And the fellow, I shan’t call ‘gentleman,’ from South Carolina knew that. Like a herd of jocks over in the corner misbehaving at a school assembly, the Republican supposed leadership paced, taunted, and puffed themselves up, until somebody went too far. And, just like they say, everybody thinks it’s funny until someone gets caught. And now it’s freaking hilarious, right?

Again think of the kind of person who looks up to such behavior. If you’re argument’s good, you don’t have to be a jerk to make it. If you’re wrong being a jerk about it just proves it. Is that the kind of person you’d look up to: the rude jock telling fart jokes while the principal was talking about the cancer fund? It’s not the kind of image I’d want representing me.

Now the real Joe Wilson was very much not a jerk when he told his president off. Of course, back then the president was Bush, it was 2002, and he was illegally assembling fake evidence to prosecute a case for an unnecessary and illegal war. Award winning diplomat, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, was the “go to guy” on Africa, having served under numerous presidents in African postings going back to the mid 70s. When the Bush propaganda machine was ginning up the war on Iraq, Wilson was sent to verify what was already widely considered as a false accusation that Iraq was buying uranium ore from Niger, the famous false “African Yellowcake” story, the press let us ignore.

At first Wilson followed protocol and reported that the story was false through proper channels. By the way at the time, that was what the CIA was saying about Iraq and nuclear weapons as well. But some speech writer somewhere was in love with the phrase, “the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud;” so Bush goes ahead and makes the assertion anyway with his famous “16 words” from another presidential speech delivered to the joint Houses of Congress.

After the speech and after Bush got to start his war, you know the one we’re still fighting, the real Joe Wilson also called his president a liar for all the world to see. It wasn’t just a cheap catcall from the bleacher seats either. In fact he didn’t even use the word “liar” anywhere in the text of his piece. Instead Joe Wilson proved it. In a thoroughly documented article published in the July 3, 2003 edition of the New York Times, Joe Wilson published a piece called, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” demonstrating that the Bush admin knew better when they claimed Hussein was pursuing, not even having, merely pursuing, nuclear weapons. Now in this case, since the president knew something wasn’t true and said it anyway, that makes him a … well, you get the point.

In response back then, a GOP admin to a Dem troublemaker, staffers for the vice president’s office wound up taking the fall for leaking to the press that Wilson’s wife was a CIA covert agent, one with a thoroughly blown cover these days. Though the trail led straight to Cheney’s desk, henchman, Scooter Libby, eventually stood trial and was found guilty of obstruction of justice. As many have noted, exposing the identity of a secret agent in a time of war is the kind of thing folks have faced firing squads for, Bush instead issued a partial pardon.

So we have one situation where a certain Joe Wilson, a fierce supporter of Strom Thurmond and member of a Confederate loyalist group that seeks to justify slavery, I mean, the kind of guy who makes such an ass of himself that the entire GOP ought to swap the Dems for the donkey logo, who calls out “You Lie!” when he’s lying himself. And in the other situation we have a man with a lifetime of distinguished diplomatic service (winner of three different State Department Distinguished Service Awards), who researches the issue thoroughly, risks his career and, ultimately his wife’s life, to speak out at a major untruth, not a quibbling misrepresentation.

I think it’s clear which Wilson deserves to be thought of as a regular Joe.

Yeah, I didn’t think it was funny either.

But at least one atheist group did, as Tara Lohan reported 9/02/09 on Alternet.org, an organization calling itself Earthbound Pets has offered to take care of Raptured Christians’ pets if the second coming came to past. With this being the day that so many the hard core Evangelical Christians have been looking forward to, to have their literally “holier-than the-rest of our” behinds raptured on out of here up to heaven to sit among the chosen 144,000 who sit on the right hand of God and get to hang with the J-man himself while the whole world roils in the torments brought by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and so on.

Insignificant, comic, glorious or absolutely terrifying depending on where you stand in the sliding scale from seriously Christian to seriously non-Christian, today, 9/09/09 is one of the most horrifying days for some true believers, certainly the worst since 6/06/06, when the gods unleashed that horror of horrors, the remake of The Omen and it was so scary it was in fact a bomb.

I’m not surprised if you haven’t kept up on the latest Revelationist lore; but some people do. Some folks take this more seriously than the Super Bowl and are expecting a hell of a light show. Maybe you personally are not a Revelationist, but you shouldn’t ignore the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world are living their lives expecting that the Beast, the anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon are soon to be their future dominatrix. Talk about making it hurt so good.

So, if you are not one of the true believers who thinks that today is the day that Obama is going to detonate the world and your little pumpkin patch is among the 144,000 most earnest, then joke lightly on your Christian brethren today, my fellow Americans, you will have no idea of the terror some of our fellow citizens might be feeling all day today. There are so many things to fear.

Like the number 144,000, a darn small eye of a needle to shove a rich man through. Once upon a time, i.e. 1st century AD Judea, 144,000 of the most devout Christians was somewhat selective but a fairly encompassing number of the number of potentially anointed. You could probably even get away with being somewhat of a slack-tivist martyr and still find a ticket in coach. Nowadays, there are something like two point two billion folks around the world who claim to be Christians all competing for a berth in steerage when the Rapture Express lifts off. The math breaks down to only one out of every 15,277.8 Christians will get a golden ticket. It’s enough to have kept the fans of LaHaye and Jenkins up all night planning how to decorate their little piece of heaven when their kingdom comes. And, apparently wondering who will take care of their pets.

Some people will say, ‘why do I pick on these poor people, just trying to practice their religion? Why make it about religion?’ My answer is, of course, I never would want to tease about somebody’s religion. Except, of course, when that religion wants me dead.

But like other vengeful gods throughout history, the Christian god has been used to brutalize the multitudes and the god of Revelations intends to throw a whole bunch of us into a lake of fire. This is how he will show his brotherly love for mankind. Percentage wise, none of us have more than a .0000020571% chance of making it to heaven. That’s some pretty slim odds even for Vegas casinos, even when the fix is in. Sounds like the kind of guy our US government leaders should work against if they were indeed looking out for the people. But sad to say that is rarely the case.

Every since the founding deists created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; some Christians have been working on tweaking the rules so they can gain more power. It must be the ones unfamiliar with the passage about the meek inheriting the earth.

In recent history, many of our American Christian religious and political leaders have been openly Revelationist, believing that god’s will is that they should do all in their power to bring about the biblical Armageddon. Two of the most notable would be Billy Graham and his acolyte George Bush. In comparison to destroying the entire planet for the sake of a population the size of Gilbert (though perhaps with better malls), it makes Jeremiah Wright’s little “Goddamn America” dance seem downright silly.

Unless of course you believe you are one of the chosen, one of the very, very few to be chosen. If you are one of those elite then everyone else is expendable, right? In America alone that’s something like three hundred million eight hundred and fifty-six thousands Americans killed, making their fantasized for 9/09/09 something like 102,285.333 times worse than the real world 9/11. So many terrifying thoughts shredding the nerves of poor Christians as they try making their way through 9/09/09 today, which is indeed 666 … if your sense of the whole world is upside down. Like:

What if they’re the ones driving when the Rapture hits and their cars wreck and kill others or even their family. Can lawyers get a hold of the area code for heaven? What if you get Raptured, but your honey does not? Can you borrow one of a Moslem martyrs’ forty-nine virgins? What if you get to heaven and the only other family member that gets there is that one uncle you always hated and he wants to pal around? What if the rest of your family goes, or that annoyingly overfriendly Buddhist down the street is actually the good soul that gets Raptured and it turns out you weren’t nearly as holy as you thought?

And don’t forget the ever pressing issues of whose going to feed Fido and clean the cat box?

But most of all the question that will torment some Christians today is the thought that has terrified Christians for Millennia: what if the whole thing’s just wrong and you and all you devout ancestors have been duped and used as tools? As another foretold date comes (and hopefully) goes unfulfilled, many Christians may have their entire worldview shaken today and have to face up to a different Revelation: the Copernican one—that they and their god are not the center of the universe.

Which makes them only about five hundred years behind the times.

Let’s pray they hurry and catch up.

I practiced my question in the air, to my dogs, at my wife and on the phone with people. I tossed in bed with it in my mind till I wrote it in my journal, then made sure I arrived at the Assembly of God in Kingman, AZ on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009, one hour and forty-five minutes early (as the manual advises—that is the right-wingers’ disruptors handbook as written by Astroturf experts to disrupt, divide and deflect news coverage of townhall meetings when Democrat Congressmen came home for August break, those overweeningly upright fake Patriots, actual big pharma lobbyists, Dick Armey’s Freedom Works).

Once inside, I meticulously hand copied my question onto the required form for the nice local lady from the Republican Women’s group and then had her double-check to make sure it was legible.

Then, as the sprinkling picked up to a drizzling, I went back to the corner of Gates and Stockton Hill Road, the access most would take to Trent Franks’ “Come to Jesus and Learn to Hate Healthcare” Meeting and I set up my protest. Before long the rain blew so hard it melted some people’s signs and streamed from the bill of my “Impeach Bush” ball cap. I stood with a war hero, two mothers and their teen children. And it rained.

We didn’t plan anything and nobody told us what to do. We were there, each because we believed the tone of the healthcare rallies around America where right-wing disruptors had destroyed discussions was the wrong tone for a thinking headed political opposition–because we hoped quietly convey our messages to the stream of cars that filled the church parking lot. We too wanted our voices heard.

My signs, a repeat, “Insure Domestic Tranquility … Promote the General Welfare …,” “These Are the Real American Values” and a new one, “Why Does the GOP Keep Selling Us Fear, Greed, & Hate?” blew in the occasionally gushing winds, but not so much even the gray haired were unable to read them well enough to flash me a feeble finger.

Meanwhile as the rain poured, I practiced my question.

I’d poured over Frank’s voting record as detailed at Vote Smart, a website Franks somehow failed to recommend when he was asked about a good place to check that record in his Saturday afternoon church revival, occasionally billed as a townhall meeting. Franks also couldn’t mention Congress.org another less complete but well regarded source for congressional info used by millions across America. Franks’ lack of answer on that question was telling. That question had come from one of his fans, not me. My question was this:

“Mr. Franks, you are part of the same crowd who sold us the George Bush Administration with its WMD deception that led to the deaths of over a million people, that sold us tax cuts which created massive deficits, which have crippled our economy, which sold us the stripping of American liberties in the name of security. As a millionaire you have worked very hard to help the wealthy at the expense of the many, and that appears to be what you are doing now. When our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world with worst record among developed countries for actually helping the sick and the poor, here you are feverously working to spend more on weapons, but not on saving lives. My question for you is this: with such a long and distinguished record of doing what is wrong for America, why should we trust you now?”

As duly reported in the Mohave Valley Daily News, for the most part I was drowned out by booing shortly after the WMD deception clause. To their credit both Rep. Franks and the reporter from the Kingman Daily Miner did their best to follow me through the yelling. Here’s what KDM’s Suzanne Adams thought I asked, “Rep. Franks, you’re part of the same group that during the Bush administration sold us on weapons of mass destruction, tax cuts that led to massive debts and the stripping of American liberties in the name of so called security. Right now we have a health industry that works against taking care of its citizens and you’re working to maintain that status quo. Why should we trust you now?”

Which is accurate enough for me. I couldn’t even hear my own speaking. One of the nice Republican ladies, the one who had seen to it that I got a turn with a question after watching me hold my hand up for about 30 minutes, suddenly, and understandably, turned fire-eyed, somewhere around the line about tax cuts and deficits; and she leaned into me so fast that I pulled back a bit. “You’ve got one minute,” she whispered just above a hiss.

With that kind of noise and hatred around you, a minute is a very long time. I don’t think I lasted twenty seconds.

This was after we’d already witnessed the “good citizens” of Kingman amble on for paragraphs about the prestige of their own backgrounds, the glories of their faith in Mr. Franks and Jesus, or the umpteen ways they, personally more than anyone else in the whole world knows Obama has no birth certificate. But as if a dream came true, I actually got my question asked. At least this one part of America worked this one time like they teach us to believe in schools.

And, for an instant Franks flinched. But, it turned out his answer was better still.

(Next, PART 2: Rev. “Right’s” Hell House: the 33 Minute Hate)

A call: “Tell me what Democracy looks like?”

And an answer: “This is what Democracy looks like!”

We were angry. And, history has shown, we were right to be. By that point the train of abuses had already been long and bitter. The lies about WMDs had long been thoroughly debunked—as we said they would be. And the country we’d claimed we were saving, we were clearly hellbent on destroying. The torture scandals were coming out. The Halliburton scandals were coming out. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were already dead, killed in our beloved country’s name and the mission that had supposedly been accomplished a year earlier had already devolved into full-blown quagmire—as we said it would. As Cheney also once said it would, before setting out to create just that.

Millions around the country and ten of millions around the world had already been protesting, marching, signing petitions, demanding their fair voice in the public arena of ideas and steadily been ignored. We’d been branded traitors for telling the truth. So when the Republican National Convention came around in the August of ’04, once again tens of thousands, some said hundreds of thousands, took to the streets to tell our leaders, “We object.”

Tell you what Democrcy looks like? That is what Democracy looks like. And today, as I look back on the groundswell of passion, inventiveness, mobility, and anger at that time, I never would have imagined I would see anything like it, albiet on a lilliputian scale, by the right-wing of our country and never over anything as shallow as the selfish impulse to refuse to aid our fellow man. Nor would I have ever expected to see such love of hatred, such glee in condemnation, such lust of violence or such openly treasonous behavior from the same people who used to scream death threats at me because I wore a peace sign.

Fast forward five years and as the astroturf grows long on the “healthcare rebellion” of the fall of 2009, this past Monday I took my wife and daughter to see Obama and what we saw were ugly Arizonans instead. Whipped up by the fake grassroots efforts of Dick Armey and his junta of goons, enflamed by a propagandist media machine so toxic it makes Radio Rwanda seem tame, a thousand or so anti-healthcare reform activists surrounded the three thousand person pro-healthcare reform rally, taunting us with hatespeak for over four hours.

Quite impressive. The igonrance was astounding and so was the danger level.

I personally do believe that health care should be a universally provided service, like police care, or fire care. And so when the temperature rose into the low 100s by mid-morning, I carried water to both sides of the street because when it’s that hot, water is healthcare, preventive healthcare. Unlike the Republican leadership currently disgracing Arizona’s reputation the way Bush once did to our country’s, I also believe education should be a universally provided service.

And so, though I disagree with your message very much, I’m willing to give you some schooling.

First and foremost, “because you’re stupid, that’s why!” is never going to be regarded as a cogent argument in any debate. Spending three hours designing an elaborate sign that wittily insults Democrats, but which you cannot defend when politely asked about is no way to sway people. Simply chanting “Read the Bill” also does not qualify as an in-depth explication. And since it implies that the all the chanters actually did themselves read each and every page of every version of the several bills out there. It makes them look pretty silly in the hundred degree weather to be standing there with so many of their pants so obviously on fire.

And to angry people on both sides … Shut up. For those on the left side of the street, shouting with vengeful glee, “WE are the Majority!” does not guarantee the other guys are wrong. Remember? The majority once thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, though we told ‘em and told ‘em no. They also once thought Saddam did 9/11 and that George Bush was a good man. Being in the majority doesn’t mean you are right; it just means you can be swayed.

And you guys on the right? Please. These same people advocating violence and hatred to solve problems today are the folks who hated the 60s protesters for acting up during Vietnam. The folks carrying guns to the rally this past Monday are the same people who a year ago were calling for the extremination of Bill Ayers because he’d tried to use violence to stop America’s other great shameful war. And all Monday’s group wanted was to not pay taxes, especially if it was going to help the sick.

Is that the image you want for yourself? Probably not. Christians steer clear of this healthcare debate: not wanting to take care of the sick and the poor is guaranteed to make you look like a hypocrite.

Next, distance yourself from the angry nutjobs. It discredits your whole movement. I want to immediately acknowledge as I walked both sides of the street, still wearing my peace signs, I talked to several clearly passionate but also clearly spoken people who made the effort to communicate fairly and I learned once again that there is a lot of common ground between the left and the right when it comes to the problems we see in this country. Imagine what all we could accomplish together if you weren’t so intently busy calling us all those names they keeps telling you to call us.

If you really want people to think of you as good Americans, then when those nutjobs come around whipping up your anger to the point you want to hit somebody, tell them to go away. They are making you all look nuts. And, who knows but that they could be agents of the current COINTELPRO operation. You guys remember Operation COINTELPRO?

Started in the 60s, COINTELPRO was/is an effort to discredit and demonize anti-war/political opposition groups by infiltrating them with folks who would incite violence, embarrass, disrupt, divide or disorganize the group. Operation COINTELPRO and its subsequent generations have been implicated in protester misbehavior and violence in every anti-war movement since then and in the WTO mayhem in Seattle, as well the protests at both the 2004 & 2008 RNCs. Besides, do you really want to be associated with the ugliest of those images? Is that actually your impression of the American way?

If you really think the guy with the diapered donkey hung in effigy yelling demeaning epithets face to face with an opposing crowd of two thousand actually make your cause look noble, better check the old think machine because it’s obviously malfunctioning.

Also, and I’m sure you already know this, carrying weapons to a healthcare rally is clearly not about healthcare or freedom, it’s about threatening. We know it, you know it. Pretending it’s about your right to have a gun in Arizona only makes you look like a liar. It’s about being so scary your opponents are silenced: it’s a message—if you annoy me too much I’ll shoot you. No, it’s not about self-defense when you’re the one doing the bullying. It’s called assault with a deadly weapon. After all, it is an assault rifle. And no, no stampeding herd of deer were likely to attack us that morning in downtown Phoenix thus require the twenty shot clip and backup pistol on your hip, so you can’t call it hunting either. We know what you wish you were hunting and in America that’s not called patriotism, it’s called murder.

If your message is good, you won’t need to act badly to convince others of it. Speaking of which, the whole Hitler thing would really be comic if it weren’t so pathetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did it too; but we were comparing Bush to Hitler for taking millions of lives, not saving millions of lives. Get a new slogan, that horse won’t run.

And lastly, you people who claim you hate socialism, better face it, a government at all, any type, is a socialist enterprise. Everyone of us protesters there that morning, both the pros and conned, all rode on roads built on the public dime, were protected by military and police forces paid for with taxes, and enjoy parks, schools, standard weights and measures, sewage systems and a host of other luxuries of the supposed developed nations. If you choose to live in society, you are part of the socialism.

The Preamble to the Constitution establishes the goals for the new government it was designed to create. The media and the GOP leadership as well have been quite willing to forget that insuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare are both among our highest goals and both clearly socialist. For that matter, “For the People, Of the People, By the People” is the epitomy of socialism. And if you aren’t willing to work for those goals, then who is the real anti-patriot?

2. Right-wing protesters whose unfurled American flags are in the position to look like swastikas.

3. A rich mom is dragging her child away from staring at a poor person. The mom is also tipping the valet some coin change for bringing their car around. The mom says, “charity begins at home.”

4. A little touchy (maybe over a line): or white guy w/ a crew cut is pointing at the TV where Sotomayor is being confirmed and he’s screaming, “I knew that N____ would hire a racist!”

5. Homeless guy sleeping under newspaper w/ the headline, “Goldman-Sachs Executives to Receive 11 Billion in Bonuses” He murmurs, “Knowing they’re safe helps me sleep at night.”

6. On the same theme: kid sleeping in a cardboard box is enviously looking through a fence at a shaggy dog sleeping in a doghouse.

7. Very cartoonish: a fat guy is floating in a dingy in the shape of the USA, around him are others floating in the water and they and the waves they make are in the relative shapes and positions of you know, South America, Africa and Asia and so on. He’s got mounds of supplies all around him. He says, “If there was only more room i could let some of you ride along.”

8. An Arab is fallen in barbed wire in the shape of a crucifixion, that’s the scene on TV. The scroll says, “Afghan Civilian Death Toll up 25%.” The viewers say to each other, “Those people are so godless.”

9. Middle class guy is standing in front of his foreclosed home between two streets. On one side a limousine is coming towards the front of the picture. On the other nondescript dark figures are walking off carrying all their worldly possessions. He yells at the poor people, “Look at the mess you made.”

10. Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck in a radio studio: on the wall it says “RADIO RWANDA.” On a calendar it shows April 1994.

Infidels, non-believers, berserkers, in short, followers of Islam had gained control of the Holy Land and our armies were proving helpless against them. Though most of us had only heard of the fabled Holy Land , we were continuously exhorted that it was worth dying for. The people there had the wrong beliefs. It’s like they weren’t even people at all.

Across the land a cry rang out and the simple people, the children, the innocent and guileless rose up to take the matter into their own hands. Surely their purity of spirit and true faith in the Lord, our very Christian god, would overcome the heathen whereas our weaponry had not. The sheer power of our unwavering belief in the rightness of our Christian god would surely be enough to overcome any lesser beings’ superstitious hocus-pocus over their tawdry talismans.

So we massed, in our anger and our righteousness, first to Genoa , then eventually around to Marseilles, where in 1212, two kindly merchants at tremendous personal sacrifice agreed to help us in our final leap of our noble crusade, and so, like lemmings we boarded their ships . . .

Never to be seen again. Sold as slaves the thirty thousand European peasants and youth who took part in the fabled “Children’s Crusade” disappeared from history into a fate generally imagined to be “worse than death.” And those two “kindly” merchants of Marseilles, the Halliburtons and Raytheons of their day, were in cahoots with the bogeymen Muslims all along and sold the questing Christians for a clear eyed profit. In some versions of their legend, the merchants are later captured and hanged for a plot to kidnap a king, but that would be in a world where the wicked get punished and the kind are redeemed.

A place decidedly not the Obama America of 2009, where banks are rewarded for impoverishing the rest of us and religious war in the Holy Land is still framed to demonize the Muslim. Though Muslim religious extremists are blamed for inciting violence in the name of their vision of god, America steadfastly and incrementally has retrofitted our military to march onward as Christian soldiers. Because, after all, our Christian religious intolerance is so much more sanctimonious and thus justified than any other religion’s zealotry.

Now with the stage duly set by last week’s news item of Muslim guys plotting to launch RPGs at a synagogue, this week a Muslim convert guy is accused of shooting up recruiting station in Little Rock . And in the same time and news cycle, ironies of ironies, in the latest of what is appearing to be an inexhaustible series of right-wing gun users intent on lighting up America like it was their personal amusement park, an abortion doctor has been shot and killed in his own church in Kansas, by yet another right-winger following orders from his minister du jour, in this case Bill O’Reilly.

As the day to day gun violence of American life begins to approach Bruckheimer-esque levels, I think it is safe to say, or rather unsafe to say, that the shooting war for the post-Obama America has now openly begun. And, as the summer thrill season heats up, it seems our box office isn’t the only aspect of the public arena enthralled by angels and demons.

Of course the advantage the rest of Europe had in 1212 over America today is that the Christian fanatics and opportunists who comprised the thirty thousand or so that took part in the crusade walked out of their society, not among it. The Holy Land was a lot farther away from their day to day life than the religious war that is on the edge breaking out right here at home, in racially and religiously mixed America .

Also, modern day America is a whole lot bigger than Europe of the early 1200s and even though Christianity is in decline here, and thus feeling embattled, there are still millions more American Christian zealots ready to kill for their love of man, with most of them living near most of you.

Good luck, America , welcome to Marseilles 1212. Simply follow the kindly merchants who will lead you on your way. Perhaps your faith will set you free . . .

In Bush’s case that base had been the millions of deluded mainstream, other-wise moderate, Christians who were shamed by their rabid evangelical brethren into voting for Bush because, no matter what else, the man kept saying he believed in the sanctity of life. W, of course, went on to prove this sentiment by blocking stem cell research and killing one point three million Iraqis.

In Obama’s case, it means, as it has since the Rev. Wright days, jettisoning any and all whose press begins to compete with his own. Lately gays have been making too much noise, somehow believing that as Americans they had a right to draw attention to injustices, but Obama has been steadily distancing himself from gays ever since he decided the demographic that follows Rick Warren looked sexier in a voting booth.

While the GOP supposed “big tent” turns out to barely big enough to be a bathing suit for Rush Limbaugh, the coalition that put Barack Obama in the Whitehouse was even a greater mix of elements than the man himself. Basically last fall Obama was supported by everyone who felt the GOP and Bushco had betrayed them, in other words the clear electoral majority of the American public. But bit by bit, Obama has tossed away the various special interests groups who gave their hopes to him. At the time it seemed like the man had won himself a mountain of hard-earned political capital. Nowadays it seems like he’s at a roulette wheel staking it all on the banks will come up in the black, but so far the only numbers we’re seeing are “00”.

Bush had once started out claiming to be a “uniter,” then quickly opted for the far easier “you’re either with us or against us” routine, narrowing his message till eventually even most Americans began to realize why the rest of the world detested him. Once upon a time we endured Obama’s tortured prose about how great everything would be if we would only put him in office. Now we’re expected to put up with it as that office stealthily prepares to exonerate all of the Bush era torture pros.

It seems to be a trend that won’t stop continuing until one day we’ll turn on our TVs to Obama awarding W himself a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here’s hoping Obama doesn’t feel the need to take it quite that far, but after his 1st hundred days of evolution who can tell where Obama will wind up. I heard Cheney is looking for a running mate.

Reversing himself on taxing the rich, on the environment, on ending the war quickly, on tightening the screws on executive compensations, on releasing info on Bush era prisoner abuses, now he’s even bringing back Bush-era military tribunals and again turning his back on gays. The man has changed sides more often than the serve at a tennis match. As each passing day of these second hundred days further defines him, it is beginning to look like the only kind of liberal Obama is really aiming to work for are the neo- kind.

Not that Congress, the Democratically controlled Congress that is, have helped him much. After making sure they forced the public to sacrifice to keep billionaire bankers in their cushy penthouse offices, they then turned their back on American homeowners, all the while taking care to make sure bank execs didn’t get their feathers ruffled by too much scrutiny of the bailout spending. Now this week Congress has watered down the credit card protections bill AND refused to close Guantanamo Bay, or technically, is refusing to fund the 80 million dollar plan to allow the inmates housed there to be imprisoned on US soil; so yet another Obama promise turns into a mouth full of dust.

Cowing to one of the most obscenely outrageous, “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” campaigns in recent memory, your government has decided our US prison system is not secure enough to jail criminals. While this begs the question, “well then what about the other 2.3 million some odd others already housed in US prisons.”

Of course Cooper is probably unaware of the conditions in US prisons. Cooper is just now finally learning that Nancy Pelosi knew and tacitly abided by Bush era torture policies. As could be predicted the revelation is causing Cooper to flex his patented scowl muscles. Of course judging by the content of a fistful of recent CNN primetime segments it appears Cooper just now discovered pot. Poor Anderson Cooper, who knows what sudden shockers tomorrow’s headlines will bring, or how long it will take Anderson Cooper to find out.

But the problem is this time Old Larry got the goods, the real deal, the Baghdad Bunker Buster of addictive substances, the stuff you’ve been waiting for. The stuff your mom said to not even look upon. Absolute poison, if you ingest it you will die. You know I’m talking Twitter. It’s the new crack — one hit, you’re done for, addict for life, and here’s comes old Larry with a straw to suck up the cerebellum slurpy.

Translation: As I type this I am getting the impression Mainstream Media, er, at least CNN, is consciously trying to Twitter-fy my brain, trying to get me and mine hooked on the latest marketed fad, fully well knowing, as I do because I saw it on their channel, that Twitter destroys all it touches.

Or so says the fine folks at the National Academy of Sciences. Straightforwardly, in an advanced publication, in a summary that runs quite a bit longer that 140 characters, concerned scientists are now warning America, and the rest of the world for that matter, that Twitter desensitizes you, demagnetizes your moral compass, destroys your ability to feel empathy, in addition to creating several other zombie-like moral effects that make a person all the more easy to control and to tolerate outrageous violence.

Luckily CNN was on the scene with a modem and a TV camera before the entire nation fell into drooling zombie-dom. In fact, you’d think they were our heroes. Once more, just to clarify, on April 14th , both on that evening’s scroll and in the expanded headlines, and still available on their website, CNN quite clearly reported, with scientists they presented as credible, that Twitter can be more dangerous to our country than a whole host of Osamas.

Then — as can generally be expected in a comedy — they turn right around and market the crap out of the very product they bashed with a whopping 129 different articles about Twitter in their online archive, including some artificially manufactured “funny” business masquerading a supposedly interesting supposed human interest series of clips and digressions involving Larry King as a comically rendered full-blown Twitter-holic trying to tweet up or out tweet all comers.

CNN loves Twitter the way Fox loves its Tea Parties. These days, catching Larry King pitching Twitter on his show has become as common as catching Wilford Brimley hawking adult home health care and just about as phony. After all, what is the message behind posting a news article condemning a product, then providing it with free ad time, as Larry King’s shows have recently become?

Twitter: it’s bad for your brain, why don’t cha try it kiddies?

Sunday April 19th King sank to his new low regarding this naked marketeering of the magic Tweetie- Tweet- Tweet, bringing on as guests a studiously post-Punked Ashton Kutcher, Sean Piddly-Puff Coombs, Queen Oprah herself, a remote of Jimmy J-Dawg Fallon failing to seem sincere and the ever ubiquitous, ever artificial Ryan Seacrest literally phoning it in. What could bring so much stellar “talent” together on a Sunday night? Well, guess what? All of them were shilling for Twitter.

That many celebrities pushing a drug and it becomes a new cocaine. Like gangster rap, like chat rooms, Goth fashion, punk, hippies, like rock in roll itself, like TV, like whatever the next new drug is that we’re always not supposed to like even as we’re being taught to. Mainstream media has always made itself a fat dollar selling us stuff they tell us we should be ashamed of ourselves for enjoying. Even AlterNet is in on the game, following the fad with well over 120 articles of their own on the subject. This is just the latest step in our culture-makers’ ongoing efforts to keep us lazy and stupid, at least dumb enough to be their adherents. They are hoping we will stay stupid long enough so they can get the next war set-up.

Word on the street is they’re resuming casting for the next Hussein.

Right about now, Barack Obama could sure use some Hussein. And no, I’m not talking about his middle name. The purpose of this column is not to make lame jokes about our president’s middle name. (Besides that one I mean.) No, the purpose of this column is to ponder who will get the part of the New Hussein. You remember Hussein, right? Saddam Hussein?

I ask if you remember because we Americans aren’t so good at remembering history; which is why we spend so much of the time having to repeating it. To prepare this article and see what I remembered about Hussein I went looking for my earliest reference to fabled Iraqi Strongman and I found one in a piece from back in January of 1991 called “I Go to War”:

“The real reason we’re at war with Hussein isn’t that he didn’t buy American when we gave him money for guns, that’s for sure. The real reason is that we TV generations are stupid. We can’t remember any of the lessons that sneak out through the networks unless they’re talking about cool new ways to consume or not consume whichever is the current fashion. We don’t even know how to think and don’t have the patience to learn. The war is breaking us into three camps — those who find war wrong, those who find war right and those who find war boring.

“Once the majority of a population finds mass murder and systematic destruction of a culture too boring to consider and just wish they could find another channel to watch, and then we can wage continuous war with one stooge or another for the rest of all time. Of course, even if somebody figures out scam, we can always just stop the current war and start a new one. Long as our economy is so based on military issues, it doesn’t matter what the people might think, the national budget is going to require wars on a regular basis to keep itself afloat. People are so pissed off with current conditions it isn’t hard to make them want to fight somebody.”

And so on, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Just change out a name or two and that same passage could’ve been written about either Bush or, more and more lately it seems, Obama. If we’re unlucky, it could be written next year. If the dogs on the right and those blue dogs that trail them for scraps actually start to catch a little skin one these days while nipping at his heels the new Hussein could be debuting as early as next month.

Is there a Saddam in your future? For longer than I’d like to remember Saddam Hussein served as America ’s favorite bad-guy love/hate relationship. He was so easy to hate, yet for 25 years it was like we dated the guy. For the first ten years for sure he was a bastard. But doggone it, he was our bastard in the Middle East, so everything was all right. When he did bad things, like passing gas, we forgave him Despite the fact that during our 21st Century Iraq Occupation we would help make sure he was put to death for that very act, back-in-the-day successive US governments forgave Hussein for gassing his own people. Turns out it was our gas in the first place and Saddam only knew how to use it because we taught him how.

Then when Bush the First needed an enemy in the way that any floundering president needs a good enemy, to hide son Neil’s S&L scandal, Saddam became our favorite Boogey Man. They sold more pictures of Saddam than Satan for a while there. It got to the point Trey Parker and Matt Stone could poke fun of Saddam’s absolute demonization in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut. Four years later Bush Jr. would recycle that hatred to sell us his phony war. Junior managed to get himself another five years of kicking around Saddam before we accidentally let the Iraqis kill him. Good ol’ Saddam, the kind of guy you’d love to hate. His legend really comes to life now that he’s not around to enjoy it.

But with Saddam so dead, Obama is in the market for a new international whipping boy. As luck would have it, the recent news cycle brought two applicants for that coveted support role: “Guy we hate so much we don’t mind spending billions and spilling millions to go to war with him because he so very much sucks.”

Ladies and gentlemen it looks like Obama is celebrating Earth Day by recycling, recycling Bush-era Boogeymen, I mean. Among the top contenders for the role of “guy who gets his ass kicked, but has a lot of close-ups” are: another South Park alumnus Kim Jong-Il, of late returning to his old ways of tossing around war threats and then there’s the ever detestable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps the one person in the world who could make Israel look sympathetic.

One thing’s for sure, if things begin to get rough for the current admin, as they once did for Bush, as they did for Clinton, as they did for Bush I, and on and on, you can bet Barack Obama will find his very own Hussein soon enough.

And if we don’t stop Larry King now, by then America will be too Twitter-fied to care. But I promise dear reader that Larry King is not going to slurp up my brains. I’ll fight, I’ll resist, I paint protest signs, “I have no time for Twitter!’

Thank you for your time America. Excuse me now, while I go check my Facebook . . .