I am so embarrassed by these numbskull right-wing “secessionist” mouth-breathers. Why don’t they just burn the American flag already? I keep an American flag over my driveway (try to keep it in from the rain too, which I don’t see my Republican neighbors doing). It does help my pride stay strong. Republicans have been wrapping the flag around their christian crosses for so many decades it almost feels like right-wingers own the flag. Ridiculous. Like they’re assumed (this canard may be dead after the Iraq debacle) to be “strong on defense.” Please. More like, strong on defense *contractors*.
In fact I’m growing weary of the Afghanistan war. Again, where are the clear objectives? What does victory mean? We need to end that war I think and let the FBI and intelligence services take over the fight against terrorism. Why do we need to occupy entire nations to fight terrorism? It's absurd on its face. Afghanistan and Iraq are hardly the only two failed states in the world. So NOT occupying failed states is a long-standing pillar of United States foreign policy (espoused).
With a government being run by professionals, I don’t think we’ll have the bizarre confluence of events and string of failures that allowed those 4 planes to be hijacked simultaneously, fly freely through the most protected air space in the world, and crash freely an hour later into three of the most American iconic structures known around the world - two weeks after National Security Anti-Terrorist Richard Clarke in The White House AND the head of the CIA go personally to a month-long vacationing Bush in Crawford and personally warn him “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and that chatter was to all-time high levels. And what did Dick “we’ve kept them safe for 8 years” Cheeeeney do about that? Nothing. Nothing. What does Bush do about that? Nothing. Nothing.
When Cheney says “8 years safe” - notice he’s starting after when he let the worst domestic attack since Pearl Harbor happen without a glitch after almost a year in office, after having been Chief of Staff to Ford, after having been Secretary of Defense to George H.W. Bush, after having been Vice President and acting President for a year beforehand - and he has to include the same year since Obama has been elected and effectively in charge - he has to take credit for Obama’s time in office too in order to get his 8 years.
These people are ruthless. And make no mistake - it’s about class, money, and privilege. Witness Sunday's fawning Chris Wallace interview of Cheney, what Andrew Sullivan called, “like a teenager interviewing the Jonas Brothers” - which was widely repeated by other commentators. They wore coordinated clothes I saw, light khakis (the same) and a navy blazer, both of them. Like, so preppy. Like two high school girls calling each other and coordinating their clothes. Fox is a joke. What’s been painful to me is that I saw they were a joke in 1999. It’s been 10 years that I’ve known what they’re doing -- it took the ascent of blogs to empower the non-crazies and to finally start documenting the atrocities in an alternate media.
Until the alternate medium of the blogs, which earnestly began only in 2003, this is how the oligarchs (the true ones, not Glen Beck’s crazy rants) ruled and manipulated.
The rightwing tea-bagging protesters -- "the angry right -- are hilarious. Being angry in loyal opposition is what liberals have been doing for 40 years, though let me clarify I don’t consider myself a political liberal. It’s just with the political spectrum so skewed right, any reasonable person these days could be “liberal” by comparison to what’s been passing as “centrism” ever rightward since Nixon (who by the way made a universal coverage bill offer to a young Ted Kennedy who declined it then and spent the rest of his life regretting it - Nixon, for universal coverage).
I guess that makes me as much a Nixonian as a so-called liberal. I agree with Ron Paul on gutting the defense contractors budget (it won’t compromise security) and legalizing prostitution and marijuana (duh…). Does that make me a Libertarian? I want a strong federal education agency and not leave unequal education to the provincial whims of states and local politics. Does that make me a liberal? I am to the right of Scalia on the 2nd Amendment. Does that make me an arch-conservative? I think there should be a constitutional amendment forcing congress to balance the budget in reasonable periods of time so we don’t have structural deficits for decades like we have -- does that make me a much-vaunted “fiscal conservative”? I strongly know that corporations and their “paid speech” are not “persons” as the supreme court ruled over a hundred years ago, with all the same rights as you and me, human breathing beings. Does that make me a populist?
To all these things, the answer to no. I am none of these things except those that I am in only parts.
This isn’t a battle with two sides.
