Politics
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[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 4, 2010 by admin in Politics
Sunday, July 4th, 2010How Barack Obama taught me that irony is a sorry kind of slapstick.
 I hope the world can handle all the peace and democracy we keep delivering them |
It’s painfully ironic for me to become as cynical as I have about Barack Obama, especially in light of the fact that his remark on the campaign trail that “Cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom” was one of the things that helped inspire me to vote for him. I know now – and I did deep down inside then – that in spite of his promise of no permanent bases in Iraq (the kind of language that Bill Clinton loved using), and his implied intention to get America disengaged from wars of aggression abroad, there is absolutely no way his presidency means America’s withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. RNC chairman Michael Steele’s bizarre proclamation that the war in Afghanistan is a “war of Obama’s choosing” doesn’t surprise me at all either; Steele confirmed his ignorance back in April when he played the race card by saying that he and President Obama have a slimmer margin of error because of their race. Which of course left him wide open to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs saying “I think Michael Steele’s problem isn’t the race card, it’s the credit card“, in reference to Steele’s lavish personal expenses as RNC chair. No, Steele’s idiotic statement fits nicely with a long tradition in politics of creating a problem while you’re in office, and then blaming the new guy when you’re out. Much like Vietnam was perceived as Nixon’s war even though LBJ had every chance to end it, and much like Carter was blamed for the Iran hostage crisis even though – as apalling as the likely truth is – it was Republicans who engineered the hostages’ extended captivity, Barack Obama will almost certainly inherit the two wars the Bush administration started as part of his own legacy; the GOP has already done a pretty good job (via tea partiers) of pinning the bailouts of the Bush era on the Obama administration even though they were legislated before Obama was even in office. Read the rest of this entry »
Just What IS The G20, And Who Is Protesting It?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 28, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, June 28th, 2010Judging by the damage done to Starbucks and American Apparel last weekend, the protesters mostly hate crap coffee and hipsters. And is the G20 creating the new world order? Maybe.
 Whatever the G20 is up to, it gets their fans more excited than Detroit Tiger fans in 1984 |
If you don’t feel like you have a clear idea of what the Group of Twenty really is, you’re not alone. More than half the people randomly surveyed on the streets of New York recently had no idea either. Is it a luxury car? A high-powered handgun? A French supermarket chain? A group of avant-garde Belgian artists? While the answers to all those questions are “yes”, we’re talking about the G20 that met in Toronto over the weekend. And the answer to what that G20 is is a little more complicated. If you’re a little more on the paranoid side, you’re probably convinced that it’s the public face of the mysterious Bilderberg Group, and that it’s an evil cabal engineering the demise of the US Dollar and planning a global currency so that its members (essentially bankers and multibillionaires) can take control of the global economy, and thereby have secret control of all the nations of the world. And who knows; you may be right. In spite of the Group of Twenty’s wall-to-wall media coverage, we still mostly only hear about how much their meetings are being protested, not what they’re actually planning. I personally don’t get a warm tingly feeling about the organization; if you look at the member list, you’ll note that the US representatives are two of the geniuses – Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke – that spin back and forth through the revolving doors of Wall Street, the Treasury Department, and the Fed Bank, and can largely be given credit for getting the economy in the mess it’s in in the first place. Which should be reason enough to protest them. But seriously, what are the protesters protesting? Judging by the damage done to Starbucks and American Apparel, they mostly hate crap coffee and hipsters. But this piece on SocialistWorker.org probably sums it up with the least hyperbole I was able to find, and it boils down to this: the G20 is a handful of bankers and world leaders that no-one has asked to get together and decide that they know what’s best for over 6 billion people, and they haven’t shown in the past that they really have anyone’s interest in mind but their own. And who exactly are the protesters? Well, it’s hard to tell, because the Black Bloc strategies used by the more violent ones dominate media coverage, to the extent that the more “wingnut” sources perform in-depth shoe analyses to imply that the black bloc protesters are actually cops. But if you visit a site like TorontoMobilize.org, it appears the bulk of the protesters were Toronto-based organizations of women, people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, the working class, queer and trans people, and disabled people, and that they just may have some legitimate complaints. Read the rest of this entry »
Are You Too Stupid To Vote?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 22, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010A government “of the people, by the people, for the people”? Are you kidding? Have you talked to “the people” lately?
Are you too stupid to vote? Or just rationally ignorant? I think historically politicians have banked on the former. And frankly, I think there’s a viable argument that democracy isn’t working in America because, well, you’re a retard*. A fact that – in better times – lent a certain humor to politics. Personally, I’ve lamented the apparent demise of truly funny political satire for some time now; Hunter S. Thompson
Why Is The American Political Process So Darn Serious?
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on June 1, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010Maybe American politics would benefit from some British style jeers and snarks.
 Just think of how much more fun Dick Cheney would be with a wig. |
As I pondered today’s Supreme Court ruling that in order to invoke your right to remain silent, you have to not remain silent, I was reminded once again that I no longer live in the country that I grew up in, but rather, a vaguely Orwellian version of it. I mean, it doesn’t get more “double speaky” than having to speak to affirm that you’re remaining silent, right? It’s a strange feeling to live in a new country without having gone anywhere. I don’t know if I like it. But it gets me pondering other nations’ governments. I mean, imagine if our leader stepped down gracefully whenever he screwed up. Or if the vocal outbursts typical of the British House of Commons were the norm in congress instead of the appalling exception. We’d probably watch a lot more C-Span. Especially if it meant we’d have some hope of hearing snarks like those of Winston Churchill in the last century like “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter“. Because you know that’s what most politicians in Washington are really thinking these days.
There’s An Elephant In The Room
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 26, 2010 by admin in Politics
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010The GOP’s mascot is an excellent symbol for the dysfunctional oblivion of America these days.
There’s a big elephant in the room we call America, and it’s making me a little uneasy. Although I joked recently that a monkey would be the perfect mascot for the American voter, it had never struck me until today how appropriate the GOP’s mascot is if you can pause and view the nation as one big dysfunctional family. After one of the most self-righteous and elitist administrations of my lifetime gutted the economy and destabilized the world in general with their clearly ill-conceived agenda, we now have to listen to former Bush buttboys like Karl Rove implying that the BP spill in the gulf is somehow “Obama’s Katrina”, as if a man-made and Bush-enabled catastrophe can somehow be compared to a hurricane and a shockingly inept and profoundly unqualified FEMA director. And this is just the most recent glaring example of the self-deceit of a typical GOP supporter these days. Don’t get me wrong, I hardly define myself as a Democrat; what makes me even crazier is that this kind of self-delusion seems to cross all party lines when it comes to economics. Have you noticed that as huge segments of the global economy skid into the ditch, what mostly is going on is that people in general and the media in particular keep acting like somehow the trillions in imaginary money that the world is loaning itself is somehow going to materialize later in some magic fairy bank of the future? To me it feels like the global economy is a cartoon character that just skidded off a cliff and hasn’t fallen into the abyss because it hasn’t looked down yet.