Tag Archives: GOP

Right wing imprimaturs

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Il Duce in a blue dressDid the Neocons flat out buy the National Geographic? It was a brilliant coup.
 
If you were to have asked yourself what periodical has been the most trusted and revered, it would have been the Geographic.
 
Right behind hobbiest zines like Popular Mechanics I suppose, and Hearst’s PM too falls suspiciously in the conservative think-tank stable.

With so much of the world, and the natural word ablaze, the Geographic has avoided showing the flames, maintaining it doesn’t want to take a political stand. (Besides its photogenic depiction of America’s war machine in Iraq.)
 
Everything, even nature, is political. These days, to be a-political means to endorse the status quo. That’s decidedly political.
 
I can see their upcoming take on authoritarian oligopoly: FASCISM: IT’S THE NATURAL ORDER.

9-11, 9-11, 9-11, 9-11

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Want to keep bringing up 9-11 bright boys?At a precinct meeting to suggest planks for the Democratic Party platform, a friend of mine was stuck on 9-11 truth telling. He’d like to write it on a blimp. I agreed but argued, first things first.
 
Anti-war first I said, then a Democratic majority in Congresss, then time to re-investigate 9-11. What condescension. I told him that I thought a truthful account of 9-11 would be too hard to swallow.
 
Since the party convention, and since this summer’s 9-11 breast-beating, I am absolutely certain that I was wrong. Ninety nine percent of Americans don’t work in skyscrapers, nor do they cross the Atlantic on airliners, yet the fall of the WTC threatened their sense of security. The myth of their insecurity has got to fall.
 
9-11 is still the GOP rallying cry. We must take it from them because we will not win an election without decrying their lie.
 
It’s our 9-11 crackpot theory versus their 9-11 crackpot fable. If the simple folk cannot swallow this, do we think they will buy black box voting or our American tradition of malevolent multinational corporate imperialism?

Unfree unfair elections

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Ask a Democrat when you have the chance, to what do they owe their sense of optimism about the upcoming elections? Do they think they can beat Diebold and GOP election administrators this time around?

Really, what went wrong in November 2004, and before that 2000? What could the Democrats do differently this time to win? (If not dismantling black box voting?)

Mexico’s popular candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador expected a clean win in this summer’s election. But the voting machines came up dead even, and then tilted toward the bad guy by a smudge. Sorry Charlie. The Mexican public suspects foul play.
 
Millions of Mexicans are protesting in the street, asking for a recount of the election.
Do the Democrats imagine that they will be able to rally a disenfranchised American public? 		  Mexico City protest

 
Except for Robert Kennedy Jr, a good many ostracized experts, and a growing progressive cognoscenti, few voices in the Democratic Party are even addressing the issue of crooked US elections. When will Democratic candidates and party leaders concede that previous elections have been stolen? How are Democrats to win if they face rigged results?

Instead Democratic Party members are urging us to concentrate on grassroot fund drives.

What kind of idiots do they take us for? To condemn them less cynically, what kind of idots are they? Or, less insulting, are they in collusion with the GOP?

Local Democratic organizers expect the rank and file to do their utmost this time, to walk the streets for the candidates, to contribute their money and their hope. The party is expecting all of us to place our hope in middle-of-the-road issues, nothing too radical for the sake of having a broader appeal in the next election.

Without electronic voting reform, I don’t think we have a chance in the next election. And I think DC Democrats are advocating centrist objectives to keep pertinent issues from the public discourse.

And it looks to me like Democrats are preparing to tell us, after lots of grassroots work, at the close of another lost election, that Rome wasn’t built in a day.

What can be done?

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Knee-jerk patriots accuse critics of US actions of having nothing to suggest by way of alternatives. Indeed pseudo-rivals like the Democrats aren’t speaking any differently than the GOP.

But the answers have been out there and they are quite simple. Noam Chomsky does not take credit for them, but summarized them recently. Here’s what he suggests our country can do to try to redeem itself with the world community:

1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court;

2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols;

3) let the UN take the lead in international crises;

4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror;

5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter;

6) give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres disagree;

7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending.

A Freudian mixed metaphor for the GOP

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elephant gorillaI’ve read it several times now, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room. This would seem to confuse 1) the proverbial 600-900 lb primate (gorillas not named Kong seldom excede 400 lbs) who outclasses everyone else in size and power, for 2) the pachyderm in the room whose relative mass overwhelms our capacity to ignore it, though we try.
 
In this corporate age of Darwinian monopolies, maybe the de facto brutality of alpha-male corporate monopoly has become something the corporate media mouthpieces won’t let us talk about. There’s an elephant in the room, and the three hundred pound gorilla won’t let us talk about it.
 
The gorilla is the elephant is the new metaphor for the GOP.

Congress building lockdown

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Spotted on BagNewsI spotted this schematic on BagNews. He put it together to suggest what thoughts might be foremost in a GOP legislator’s mind right now.
 
I’m wondering how many others are speculating about the chances that the lockdown at the Rayburn Building was orchestrated to cover for the removal of office files into the parking deck.
 
Let’s see: congressman thinks he hears gunshots and suddenly policemen are pointing their guns at everyone, including reporters.