"See, How the Sun"

Today remains Monday, 29 November 2010.

Read, please, Hope Against Hope, and Hope Abandoned, by Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam (Russian: Надежда Яковлевна Мандельштам, née Hazin; 31 October 1899 – 29 December 1980). Married to the poet, Osip Mandelstam, both of blessed memory.

More # 1

Today is Monday, 29 November 2010.

I’m reading Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, an excellent biography by Anthony Everitt (New York: Random House, 2009).

One of the central points made by the author is quite chillingly germane to the USA/USE situation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hadrian understood that there can be no such thing as an empire which indefinitely expands: an empire must grow no further than to those limits within which it may successfully, over the long-term, exploit its gains. Otherwise, it will over-extend itself, finally collapsing of its own weight, as did the British Empire.

The Soviet empire failed to heed this lesson when it attempted to impose a fully-compliant government in Afghanistan (though that was hardly the sole or even proximate cause of its collapse). The Reagan regime chose to compound the suffering of Afghans by using the Afghan resistance as cat’s paws against the Soviets, building up all manner of warlords and financiers of war (including, of course, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida). The H.W. Bush regime then compounded the error, once the USSR withdrew, by abandoning and ignoring Afghanistan, condemning it to civil war, and opening the door to the Taliban.

The W. Bush/Cheney regime doubled down, attempting conquest of Afghanistan on the cheap (2001- ), resulting in the current crop of vicious, incompetent, and corrupt fiefdoms. It did so because its true interest was the conquest of Iraq, which has gone so swimmingly.

All the very definition of hubris.

Now comes Obama, who acts as if he imagines that more of the-same-old-same-old is just the ticket. The USA/USE is in Afghanistan and Iraq for nothing more than selfish imperialist motives, and causes incalculable human suffering to those long-victimized peoples.

It would be well to recall: what goes around, comes around. If the USA/USE leadership won’t change course because it’s the ethical thing to do, perhaps the people will awaken and force them to do so, out of self-preservation.

I wish I could say I was optimistic.

This Just In

Today is Sunday, 28 November 2010.

The latest Wikileaks document dump demonstrates that the USA/USE diplomatic services do all the nasty things that imperial diplomatic services have always done since the invention of empire.

Oh.

And, in other news: water is still wet, the sky is still blue, there’s gambling in the casino, and publicity-whore Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who wants Wikileaks designated a “foreign terrorist organization”, is still batshit crazy.

I’m shocked, shocked.

We're No. 1!

Today is Friday, 26 November 2010.

'Tis tomorrow in Afghanistan.

Where the USA/USE has just beat the USSR record.

The Sovs only lasted in conquest of Afghanistan for 9 years, 50 days.

The USA/USE is on 9 years, day 51.

Hurrah, hurrah.

Christmas Comes Early!

Today is Wednesday, 24 November 2010.

I'm pleased that a small portion of my Federal taxes may go to a prison staycation for disgraced political gangster and bigot Tom DeLay.

Soap-on-a-rope!

Taking a Ride

Today is Tuesday, 23 November 2010.

If you’re like me, you’re frequently spammed by Internet scamsters. Last month I received such a communication that was so unusual I saved a copy, as follows.

“Dear Sir or Madam:

Thanking in advance your kind attention and felicitations.

Your name is directed to me as a Concerned Citizen who whishes to help his nation-state of birth or origin.

I am Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, senior Commander Taliban. We both know troubles of our two nations-states, and like me you wish to help the kingdom of peaceabilities. Your gov’t has agreed to give me the some of $1,000,000 USDollars, to assist me in expenses to felicitate peace negotiations between USA and Taliban.

Will you help?

Out here in wilds, I have no bank account(s). if you agree to help your country and mine, by having CIA deposit said $1,000,000 millions in your bank account, for further wiring on to me, I will reward your kindness by giving you the 10 per% forwarding fee, or $100,000 U$.

The only catch in the ointment is that as devout man of my chosen creed and/or religion, I am not the car or aeroplanes driving, and there are many hills and vallies to cross in meeting/persuding my Taliban brothers. However, if I had $5,000 US, I know where tobuy a good, used donkey for my travails.

If you can loan me this, please reply to me at SCMansour@kabulTalib.org, and I will send you wiring instructions.

Yours for a nice day,

Mullah A.M. Mansour
Senior Commander Taliban”

So, one can imagine my surprise when the lead foreign story in today’s The New York Times concerns an individual who has posed as Mullah Mansour in peace negotiations with USA/USE and Afghan government officials. “It’s not him”, said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

A tip of the hat to America’s intelligence agencies!

For a Lady, On Her Birthday

Today is Monday, 22 November 2010.

Strange Bedfellows

Today is Sunday, 21 November 2010.

When was the last time that Barack Obama, Henry Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Brent Scowcroft, and your author agreed on something?

I can’t remember either.

The current something is the necessity for the immediate ratification by the U.S. Senate of the “New Start” treaty, the arms control treaty between the USA/USE and the Russian Federation.

Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) is holding out for even more porkbarrel spending for “modernization” of American weapons of mass destruction. Kyl and his ilk claim to find Obama’s additional $85 billion over the next ten years to be inadequate. Despite the fact that this would be, for 2012-17, an increase of 1/3rd over the 2010 spending.

I think the actual reasons for this position are clear. Ritual willie-waving by the resurgent Repugnicant leadership. Taking a public crap on Obama. Holding out for flushing even more billions of taxpayer dollars down the nuclear arms toilet, to the benefit of large corporations which will respond gratefully with additional financial campaign support.

Weapons of mass destruction, in the hands of anyone, are a genocidal threat to humanity and the planet. If the Repugnicants won’t immediately vote “yes” for the sake of humanity and the planet, at least let them vote “yes” for the sake of reducing the burden of wasteful Federal spending on American taxpayers.

Censure?

Today is Thursday, 18 November 2010.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) should be censured by the House only after John Boehner (R/T-OH), etc. are expelled for supporting wars of aggression, white supremacy, etc.

The Ia Drang

Today is Sunday, 14 November 2010.

Today is the 45th anniversary of the Battle of Ia Drang (14-18 November 1965) in the Second Indochina War.

The Ia Drang was the first significant combat between major elements of the US Army and the PAVN (People’s Army of Viet Nam, popularly known in the USA/USE as the “NVA”, or “North Vietnamese Army”).

The grand strategy of the American commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, was simple: “bleed the enemy dry” – over time, cause unacceptably-high PAVN losses which would lead to the survival of the Republic of Viet Nam (“South Vietnam”), the USA/USE comprador regime.

The strategy failed because it was built on a falsehood: that Vietnamese nationalism was purely a front for a monolithic International Communist Conspiracy directed by an iron hand in The Kremlin. In the end, the willingness of Vietnamese nationalists to die fighting was greater than the capability of American nationalist leaders to convince the American population to die fighting.

The American leadership believed that their material advantages (including heavy artillery, aerial superiority, and chemical warfare) would exhaust the fighting spirit of the PAVN. However, the Ia Drang demonstrated the value of PAVN tactics: “grab them by the belt and hold on”, that is, so swiftly to close with American forces that only a fraction of artillery and aerial bombardment could be employed, without a high probability of striking American forces as well as PAVN.

Of course, many still maintain that the USA/USE could have won, had “only we not fought with one hand tied behind our back”. Given that the Second Indochina War resulted in 5-6 millions of deaths in fighting, overwhelmingly of Indochinese, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario for American “victory” which wouldn’t have required virtual genocide.
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We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, by Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, is a standard account of the battle.

"Earth, receive an honoured guest"

Today remains Saturday, 13 November 2010.

Most esteemed Jean Le Corbeiller (1927-2010), with whom I had the greatest honour and good fortune to be student and scholar at the Seminar College of The New School for Social Research in New York City, has died.

I shall have more to say. For the moment, let Auden speak for me (from 1 September 1939):

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

"Hoarders"

Today is Saturday, 13 November 2010.

We’ve become familiar with hoarding through “reality” television, usually in cases where the hoarded items are “worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary”, and the more of each of the latter, the better. While this sort of hoarding is obviously a mental disorder, there is a keen resemblance to another behaviour which is highly approved by capitalist society: conspicuous consumption.

(The hoarding “reality” shows are among the most reprehensible of their ilk. As did Queen for a Day in the Fifties, these shows exploit human misfortune and misery to give viewers a sick “pleasure”.)

For example, it’s common for very wealthy persons to own multiple homes, most of which are frequently in “resort”-type areas and are used only a few days or weeks a year. In economic terms, this is obviously foolish behaviour. One would be much better off, in expenditure terms, to rent an equivalent home for the short times one is in a particular locale, rather than carrying the cost of usually-unused space year after year.

However, the latter is entirely the point: to demonstrate that one is so wealthy that one can be absurdly profligate, flushing monies down Mr. Crapper’s invention.

Conspicuous consumption is a social disorder, at least as malignant in its way as is hoarding caused by mental disorders. One may suspect that the latter behaviour may well be reinforced by the former, with the mentally ill unconsciously imitating those socially disordered, collecting that which they can afford: garbage.

Thus, the likes of Donald Trump are every bit as much hoarders as any less-wealthy garbage addict. The difference: the garbage addict isn’t reprehensible, since their motivation is illness. Trump is reprehensible, since his motivation is simple, nasty greed, and exhibitionism thereof.

For Friends, One Departing

Today is Friday, 12 November 2010.

"Where you from, boy?"

Today is Wednesday, 10 November 2010.

My apologies for tardiness in reply. The region in which I live (denoted “Green Country” by marketers of tourism) is unexpectedly enjoying a most beautimous Autumn, with the attendant explosion of allergy irritants that implies.

Many residents of the Old Con-federacy, and I should say many white residents, have traditionally embraced a "peculiar institution" beyond the one for which they’re best known: a truly pathological obsession with birthplace.

For example: moi. Although I only lived in Mississippi the six months immediately succeeding my birth, although I’ve only visited twice since, although I grew up to be a socialist endorser of civil rights for You Know Who, although I not only have Jewish friends, but have dated Jewish women, etc., nevertheless: because my mother’s body was located physically over the Sacred Soil of the Gret Stet of Mississippi at the moment I was born, I’m considered by them to be forever a member of the pack (“herd” would be more accurate), a true Son of the South, a White Male Southerner (WMS).

Every bit as much as the traitor Robert E. Lee.

As for myself, as a rule, I self-identify as a Mississippi native or WMS only when it causes dismay to bigots.

As to the question, “Where you from, boy?”

Born in Mississippi, I then lived in Kansas, Oklahoma, New York, Oklahoma, New York, Oklahoma, New York City, Oklahoma.

When my family moved to NY the second time, in 1959, I was 7, not really old enough to comprehend the racist framework in which I’d been living. When we returned to OK in 1961, I realized that the nazi-style segregation and racist supremacy which obtained in the Old South also ruled in OK, and I determined to have nothing to do with it. I rejected most of the socialization with which I was inundated, and began to comprehend the world for myself, through reading, study, and analysis. That is, I determined to socialize myself, with the assistance of the better minds and hearts of human history.

Thus, while I may have lived in the arbitrary geographico-politico formation known as “Oklahoma”, I’m not “from” that formation. I’m “from” my own choices, informed and guided by the best humanity has achieved.

“Well. Oh well. La-dee-dah.”

Is this a "Birther" thang?

Should Hate Speech Cost?

Today is Monday, 8 November 2010.

“Move along folks; nothin’ to see”.

Having given the victims of terroristic homophobes their 15 minutes due, the capitalist media (CM) is moving on.

Of course, the CM prefers the far-less-incendiary-and-accurate term, “bullying”.

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? I’ll stipulate, as lawyers say, that I’ve already received at least one outraged comment. “There HH goes again! Trampling on the Sacred and Immutable American Language, redefining words, using “terror” to mean something other than A-rabs blowing US up.”

As I’ve stated afore, “terror” should be viewed as a spectrum of malignant activities, not merely as whose ox is gored, which leads only to the dead end of competing fiefdoms of proprietary victimhood.

As right-wingers are fond of prating, “Ideas have consequences”. Indeed. Whether it’s “Faggots are damned by God!”, or “Infidels are damned by Allah!”, or “Non-Christians are damned by Jesus!”, or “Gooks are damned by Uncle Sam!”, or “Kikes are damned by the White Gentile Race!”, etc.

Homophobic speech is hate speech, an assault on humanity and any decent god or gods there may be, and those with such ideas are welcome to just up-and-move to North Korea, where they really go in for that sort of thing.

When homophobic hate speech is based on passages in the Bible which are put forth as calling for the murder of homosexuals, there is a clear question whether this meets the legal test for being a prohibited incitement to action. Let bigots mutter their filth in the cesspools of their own minds, but they shouldn’t spew forth and encourage violence by others.

Of course, the use of such passages by “Christian” preachers shows what hypocrites and cowards they are, since they don’t have the courage to carry out the judgment they claim their “God” demands. They do, however, create the atmospheres which encourage others to homophobic violence.

Would they spew their hate, if they knew they would spend, say, a decade in prison for doing so? I think not.

Seeing Red?

Today is Sunday, 7 November 2010.

Anniversary of Oktyabr'skaya revolyutsiya.

An Honourable Dissident

Today is Saturday, 6 November 2010.

Seldom will one hear me say a good word for a billionaire, even an ex-billionaire. But sometimes camels do pass through the eyes of needles.

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky is deserving of great praise and support.

Khodorkovsky became wealthy as a result of the infamous “shock therapy” which “privatized” the Russian economy after the demise of the Soviet Union. The hands of no one who became very rich during that period are clean. What distinguished Khodorkovsky was that he built Yukos Oil into a powerhouse with a vision of a company that was run more decently and transparently than many Western companies. Then, he made the mistake of publicly backing the opposition to the new czar, President Vladimir Putin.

Khodorkovsky was convicted on false charges in a show trial, and has spent most of the past seven years imprisoned in Siberia. He has now been convicted on fresh false charges in another show trial, and will no doubt be sentenced, probably next month, to additional years in prison.

In his statement to the court, Khodorkovsky said, in part: “What must be going through the minds of the entrepreneur, or the senior manager, or simply an ordinary educated, creative person, watching our trial, and knowing that its result is absolutely predictable? The obvious conclusion is chilling in its stark simplicity: it is that the siloviki can do anything. [The siloviki are corrupt bureacrats, many former secret police, which are the base of Putin’s power.] Millions of eyes throughout Russia and the world are watching this trial. They are watching with the hope that Russia will still become a country of freedom, and law is above the bureaucrat. Where supporting opposition parties is not a cause for reprisals. Where special services protect the people and the law, and not the bureaucracy from the people and the law. Where human rights no longer depend on the mood of the czar, good or evil. I am not a perfect person, but I am a person with an idea. For me, as for anybody, it is hard to live in jail, and I do not want to die there. But if I have to, I will. The things I believe in are worth dying for.”

Khodorkovsky is no longer a businessman, Yukos and his other possessions having been stolen by the siloviki. He is now something far greater, an honourable dissident opposing a dictatorial regime.

I salute him.
_______________________________________

See The New York Times for more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/business/06nocera.html?_r=1&ref=business
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"The Day After: Analysis" will resume shortly.

The Day After: Analysis 3

Today is Friday, 5 November 2010.

Part of the argument I’m making is that a very unique set of circumstances enabled the election of a Black president in 2008, but that the underlying white racism endemic to many Americans swiftly re-asserted itself, and that this was a large factor in the Repugnicant seizure of control of the House in 2010.

It’s for this reason I compared the reaction of many Americans to a Black president to the reaction I would expect of many Americans in the case of a hypothetical Jewish president. This nation is still nearly at least as saturated in bigotry as in the days when it was still socially acceptable to make publicly the claim that “Communism is Jewish”.

Teabaggerism may assert until it’s blue in the face that it’s not racist, but I won’t buy that, until the Baggerati provide a more plausible explanation of why they swooningly embraced lily-white Reagan and the Two Bushes when the latter and their myrmidons and their policies were responsible for creating 2/3 of the National Debt, and then suddenly saw the Debt as an apocalyptic threat only once a Black became president.

Another large factor was that many, and perhaps most, Americans suffer from a form of Goldfield Syndrome, the fictional memory disorder afflicting Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates. That is, they act as if they believe that, in terms of causation, the cosmos begins anew every morning. Thus, they act as if, once Obama was inaugurated President, all the economic woes of the country were his responsibility, in terms of causation. They act as if they forget that the Crash of ’08 was the culmination of decades of toxic Repugnicant economic policies, particularly those originating during the Reagan regime.

Perhaps Obama should be presented with a t-shirt: “I saved capitalism from a Second Great Depression, and all I got was this lousy Republican-dominated House of Representatives”.

The Repugnicants claim that they wish to reduce the National Debt, yet they’re hot to increase deficits by continuing the W. Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans, precisely the people who don’t need the extra cash.

This is indicative of one of the reasons that the bi-partisan approach that Obama seems to favour is doomed to failure. The economic policies of the Repugnicant elites lead toward killing the goose (the working classes) which lays the golden eggs. The policies of the Democratic elites tend toward nurturing the goose to lay more golden eggs. There can be no compromise solution between two such antithetical approaches.

History shows that Repugnicants virtually always choose the lowest of roads and take no prisoners. I believe that the pursuit of the bi-partisan chimera lulled Obama & Co. into a tepid electoral strategy. The proof of their political tone-deafness is in the crow pudding we’re now obliged to eat. It’s hard to conceive that the outcome would have been worse had a strategy of vigor and fire been pursued.
________________________________________________

I saw a clip of election comment by William Bennett, far-right ideologue and former Secretary of Education, who also flushed hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of dollars of his family’s money down his gambling habit. Bennett said that John Boehner would be leader of “one sixth” of the Federal government.

Hmm. Presidency, Supreme Court, Senate, House … oh: Vegas and Atlantic City.
________________________________________________

Yes, Oklahoma voters approved a State Question forbidding state courts from considering or using Sharia law, a practice frequently rampant. The same question also forbids considering or using international law. Seems to have slipped voter minds that much international law is made by treaties to which the USA/USE is signatory, and therefore has, constitutionally, the force of law, regardless of the prejudices of Oklahoma voters.

Sigh.
________________________________________________

60% of Oklahoma voters also elected Republican Mary Fallin as governor. Fallin claims to be a fiscal conservative whose motherhood was a qualification for office. (Her female Democratic opponent is neither a mother nor a "mutha".)

When Fallin was Lt. Governor, she was discovered by police, in the dead of night, on the shore of an Oklahoma City lake, parked in the back seat of her taxpayer-funded official auto, in closest proximity to her taxpayer-funded state trooper “body”-guard/driver. The latter claimed that he was “comforting” Fallin because of her troubled first marriage.

Is that what the kids call "it" these days?

Locally, she's known as “That Fallen Woman”.

Interlude

Today remains Thursday, 4 November 2010.

The Day After: Analysis 2

Today is Thursday, 4 November 2010.

Is the USA/USE “ready” for a Jewish president?

I seriously doubt a Jew could be elected, given the hordes of stealth anti-Semitic “Christians”. The non-stealth type is the garden variety, spewing “kike”, “Hebe”, “Abie”, “Christ killers”, etc. By “stealth” I mean those who support Israel as a nation-state, but only because they fancy that its existence is one of the factors which must be fulfilled before the “Second Coming” of Christ.* After the purported return, all those who don’t meet the standards of right-wing, non-universalist “Christians” will be damned to hell forever, including and especially all Jews, thus achieving an eternal Final Solution and the ultimate Holocaust (Shoah).

However, a set of circumstances can be imagined within which a temporary confluence of voters might suffice to furnish the requisite electoral votes. But: could a Jewish president govern? I seriously doubt it, because such a president would surely arouse the stealth anti-Semites (concentrated disproportionately in the right-wing in general and the Repugnicant Partei in particular), who would exert their maximum efforts to obstruct such a president’s agenda.

Sound familiar?

In 2008, through a particular set of circumstances, a Black was elected president. (These circumstances included, but were not limited to, widespread dissatisfaction with the lethally-clownish Bush-Chainy/Chainy-Bush regime, the Crash which began in September of that year, and a Repugnicant candidate notably unsuited by morals, policies, judgment, and temperament.) The backlash was swift: the psychotic-strength ravings of birtherism, the depiction of a centrist Democrat as a Marxist socialist, the attacks on the bailout/rescue/stimulus which prevented a collapse of the global financial system and a Second Great Depression, the nostalgia for a failing healthcare system, etc. And the Teabaggers using government spending and the National Debt as code words for “nigger”.

All leading to Repugnicant-generated gridlock, and hordes of white voters trooping to the recent polls like lemmings, blindly voting against their own economic and social best interests.

Could this have been averted? For months, I’ve been pointing out that Obama and his crew clearly didn’t understand the nature of the Repugnicant threat. The Repugnicant leadership has fewer-than-no scruples, and can only be fought no-holds-barred. Instead, Obama played the role of a poorly-conceived ivory tower intellectual, failing to barnstorm the country. Which is one way of saying that Obama ain’t much of a practical politician or a political thinker.

In terms of raw candle power, Obama is obviously head-and-shoulders above W. Bush as a thinker. (But then, so is my cat.) However, Obama gives every sign of having chosen to be possessed by the same sort of narcissism and complacency as W. Obama seems to have assumed that, since his policies and positions were so obviously and radically more correct than those of the Repugnicants, the vast majority of voters would naturally fall all over themselves in a rush to agree.

In what alternate universe?

Had Obama and company the lofty political skills they imagine they posses, and fought a scorched earth campaign instead of a toddle, the outcome might have been different.
______________________________________

* For those keeping scholarly score, “Second Coming” isn’t a Biblical term. The word so mistranslated is parousia: literally, “coming alongside”, a different kettle of fish entirely.
______________________________________

Thanks to “Voter” for your reading and comments.

To say that the policies of the GOP are repugnant isn’t schoolyard name-calling (if I called GOPers “faggots” or “pussies”, that would be), but a highly-informed ethico-political analysis and judgment which just happens to be correct. To suggest substituting “WTF” for “GOP” is sarcasm, an ancient and honourable political device. As to ‘human nature”: please define and prove the definition, and why it is immutable.

Yes, I did vote, and, as usual in the benighted state of Oaklahoma, all my candidates lost. If noting that the Repugnicants were supporting white supremacists and anti-Semites such as the Pauls for office isn’t enough to motivate people to vote, I doubt an overt appeal and begging on my knees would have sufficed.

Quite frankly, I have nothing but the proper disrespect for any political party which so blatantly and gleefully embraces race and religion hate.

The Day After: Analysis 1

Today is Wednesday, 3 November 2010.

I’ve been quoting this from Dietrich Bonhoeffer for 40 years now, and it’s sadly still timely. “It’s not that people are born stupid, but that they are made stupid, by the impact of overwhelming power which profits from their manufactured stupidity”.

Granted that Americans are subjected to a set of hegemonic socialization pressures unique in the history of the world: not only malformation through a capitalism-enslaved educational system, not only misinformation by the most advanced and ubiquitous media complex, not only battered by a twisted and suffocating political system, not only the insidious effect of corrupt and corrupting social mores, not only the realities of social ostracism, financial ruin, and even imprisonment for those who too boldly or effectively dissent and resist, but also the seduction of history's richest payoff in lifestyle for selling out, submitting, and oppressing others.

But: a whipped dog should not love its master. But: adults are adults, and those who voted for the failed and wicked policies of Republicanismo must accept responsibility for that wicked choice. I’m tempted to say, and then turn my back: the hell with you, live with the plague you have brought upon your houses, you deserve any and every suffering you receive as the result of your choice, you have sown the wind and rightly shall reap the whirlwind.

The problem is: the suffering from those wicked choices falls even more heavily upon the innocent, who must not be abandoned.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Election Day

Today is Tuesday, 2 November 2010.

Election Day.

It’s tres apropos that the first returns tonight should appear from Kentucky, where Rand Paul, Repugnicant/Teabagger, is running for U.S. Senate. Appropriate, since Kentuck is where the GOP (or should we start calling it the “WTF” – comments, please) has stained its escutcheon by endorsing a white supremacist. (And we all know how deucedly hard it is to get stains out of an escutcheon, even with OxiClean and a ShamWow.)

Well, what else does one call a fellow who believes that, enshrined in the Constitution, is the power for states, cities, towns, counties, and villages to deny Constitutional rights on the basis of skin colour, etc.?

A family value no doubt absorbed at the knee of his father, the odious white supremacist Rep. Ron Paul. Given that Ron is also a proud anti-Semite, one must wonder about the son. After all, Rand has never repudiated Ron.

Boo!

Today is Monday, 1 November 2010.

Thank you, “wondering”, for your comments on yesterday’s column.

I’ve never been so naïve as to contend that all Democrats are personally saints, and that all Republicans are personally demons. It’s not “about” persons.

As a party or movement, the Republican Partei, and its dupes and stooges such as Teabaggers, serve wickedness far more consistently, and in a far greater degree, than does the Democratic Party.

The hypocrisy of the Repugnicant Partei is breathtaking. Its leaders know full damn well, that the mightiest and wealthiest capitalist empire in the history of the world requires a Big Government for its administration and direction. By actions during dominances of the RP (Raygun and the Bushes), 65-70% of the present National Debt was created, not exactly the epitome of Limited Government. The RP simply aims its love of regulation and intrusion into, for example, bedrooms, not boardrooms.

The RP was primarily responsible for wars of aggression in Indochina, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, southern Africa, etc., and the hundreds of millions of murders, mutilations, and other sufferings thus created. You don’t accomplish that with Low Taxes and a Government-So-Small-It-Can-Be-Drowned-in-a-Bathtub.

The economic policies of the RP, ever devoted to the nourishment of the moneyed elites, were largely responsible for the Great Depression and the Great Recession. (The moneyed elites thank the Little Suckers who obligingly vote against their own best interests.)

In 1964, the power of Southern white racists in the Democratic Party was finally being broken. With breathtaking cynical opportunism, the Repugnicant Partei enthusiastically embraced 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who cheerfully championed the “inalienable right” of the several states to deny the humanity and Constitutional rights of Blacks, thus becoming the White Peoples Partei.

More recently, the New York Repugnicant Partei refused to refudiate Carl Paladino as its gubernatorial candidate, even when it was revealed that he’s “sexually” aroused by videos of females being raped by horses. The Nevada Repugnicant Partei refused to refudiate Sharron Angle, even though she voted against screening public school volunteers to bar child molesters. The Ohio Repugnicant Partei refused to refudiate a Congressional candidate who enjoyed role-playing Nazis.

The Repugnicant Partei consistently embraces homophobia, myriad forms of nativist bigotry, etc.

Voting for a Repugnicant candidate, irrespective of individual qualities, only serves to strengthen a morally-corrupt party.

The Democratic Party? For all its faults, the lesser of two evils, indeed.

Tomorrow is the Day of the Dead. Tomorrow, let a stake be driven through the heart of the Repugnicant Partei.
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On a personal note to “wondering”. “Old?” Depends on one’s prejudices regarding age. “Tired?” I would say constantly fatigued by struggle against the wickedness of con-servatism in general and Repugnicantism in particular. While showering, I tend toward the arias of Cio-Cio San; I have always found “We Are the World” to be cloying and trite, as I also find “Do They Know It’s Christmas? (WhyTF Should They Care?)”. (I also sing Neil Young.) While “liberal” in terms of generosity, I am now and have ever been a radical leftist politically.