Everyone is taking a break from the usual pre-election programming to concentrate on Hurricane Sandy, which just blew through Manhattan and is probably soaking my home state of Pennsylvania right now. The news media went into full-blown apocalypse mode for this, with the kind of breathless whirlpool of coverage usually reserved for assassinations or major earthquakes. Even days before, they were sounding the warning claxons about "Frankenstorm" making its way up the east coast and putting a real damper on everyone's Halloween. And is "claxon" an awesome word or what?
Some people are already saying that the unusual trajectory this storm has taken is related to global warming and the huge, unprecedented reduction in the Arctic ice sheet, which alters ocean currents and air temperatures in such a way that big, weird storms which move in new, unexpected pathways will start becoming more frequent. While it's still probably premature to link the two events, I think there is a great deal of truth in the idea that human-caused climate change will alter the planetary weather engine in ways we can't even yet imagine, and more unpleasant things like these loose-cannon superstorms are in our future.
The other big storm of late has taken a temporary back seat to the march of Hurricane Sandy, and that is the presidential election, now just one week away. It seems like this election has been going on for years, and this last week will no doubt be the most intense week ever, with everybody pulling out all the stops when it comes to trying to sway the last two or three undecided voters out there. It's beyond me how anyone could be undecided about who to vote for.
I've heard people on the radio say that there's "not much difference" between Obama and Romney, and that statement completely blows my mind. In my opinion the two candidates could not be more different, both in style and substance. Obama seems so intellectual, so measured, controlled and sincere; Romney so aloof, privileged, entitled and hypocritical. There is little question that given their backgrounds, Obama truly understands what the middle class people, who are in many ways the backbone of this country, have greatly suffered due to the economic collapse of 2008-2009. He really "gets" what they're going through and empathizes with them. Romney, on the other hand, has had every single thing in his life handed to him, coming from a family of privilege and power, and is completely and utterly clueless about what average people have to go through to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Likewise, the vice presidential candidates are quite different. Biden is loud, gregarious, sometimes prone to embarrassing gaffes and misstatements, but given his background you have no doubt he understands what it is like to go through very rough periods in your life and still manage to triumph over adversity using little more than sheer strength of character. Paul "Lyin" Ryan is an uber-nerd, someone who's obviously much more comfortable around masses of fiscal data and reports than around people, and comes up with a witches-brew of spending cuts to government programs which aid the poor, the elderly and students (to name a few) in order to fund massive, unnecessary defense spending and more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy one-percenters, who already have so very much but still want to take more and more.
The differences even extend to the candidates' wives. Michelle Obama is beautiful, sleek, intelligent, articulate and very easy for anyone to relate to. She has such great poise and presence, and in my opinion has been one of the most notable and successful First Ladies in recent history. Ann Romney, on the other hand, is brittle, imperious, condescending, sharp-tongued, elitist and thoroughly unsympathetic to anyone outside of her own socio-economic class. With her fake, painted-on country-club smirk and mannerisms, you just know she sits around drinking appletinis with her wealthy cronies, cackling about how pathetic poor people are and complaining about how hard it is to find qualified domestic help these days who won't expect to be paid more than $5 an hour and won't steal you blind behind your back.
There is so very much riding on what happens next Tuesday, but to me one of the most important is the future of the Supreme Court. Latest prediction is that the President-elect will get to choose at least one and possibly two new Justices, and that will directly affect each and every one of us for decades to come. Right now the Court is split 5-4 in favor of upholding Roe v. Wade, but it would only take one Court appointment to reverse that to 5-4 in favor of overturning it. Then you can absolutely certain that anti-abortion zealots would push a test case through the lower courts and into the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade would be scrapped, sending the abortion question back into the states, where many if not all of the red states would outlaw it completely. That would be an astonishing tragedy and catastrophe for anyone who holds dear the concepts of freedom and government not making decisions in such an incredibly personal thing such as family planning.
Another very important thing, related to the Supreme Court, is their horrific and spectacularly awful Citizens' United ruling, which unleashed a torrent of untraceable, unaccountable money into a political system already mortally choked and corrupted with cash. One of the most wrong-headed and destructive rulings ever, a top priority should be to overturn it, with a constitutional amendment if necessary. The choice of President could not be more important to this vital legislative task. One candidate will fully support reversing the ruling, and other candidate will do everything he can to keep it in place, because as he famously stated, "Corporations are people, too." I will leave it up to my discerning readers to figure out which candidate is which.
Funny thing about these neoconservatives, they will scream unmercifully about how the evil, incompetent and corrupt government is blatantly interfering in everyone's lives and making choices for them, but they are perfectly fine as long as this interference is with the right to abortion, or marriage equality, or any number of personal-freedom issues they personally oppose. They seem to think that government is evil and satanic if it messes with something they believe in, but perfectly fine and proper if it goes after things they don't. According to them, it's okay if government restricts the freedoms of people they don't like, but it is a horrendous abomination if it seeks to restrict their own freedoms and choices.
Thus is the ultimate contraction in the conservative point of view - as long as government is doing what I like (or conversely, attacking things I don't like), it can have free rein and untrammeled authority to do whatever it pleases. But just let the government try to do something to curtail something in which they fervently believe, for instance, gun control - outlawing the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons comes to mind - then people scream that government is a vile, cancerous conspiracy hell-bent on destroying the very fabric of this nation. Government-provided farm subsidies could not be more "American", but affordable health care is "socialist." It is this cultural and political schizophrenia, this infinitely subjective cherry-picking of what is right and what is wrong, that ultimately dooms neoconservative thinking to the intellectual trash-heap.
One week to election day, and is Hurricane Sandy a metaphor for the shitstorm that may be released on this country as a result - one that will last not a couple of days, but for four long years.
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label socialism. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Stupidworld
This has really been the political Summer of Stupidity in this country. It's so depressing to see so many people being as stupid as they can possibly be, and not having one whit of shame or regret about it.
Last month we had the ridiculous spectacle of the town hall meetings held by members of Congress in their home districts during the August recess. Programmed by right-wing talk radio dirtbags such as Rush "Mount Flabmore" Limbaugh and the obviously mentally ill Glenn Beck, the legions of their illiterate followers fanned out across this nation and turned what had usually been a relatively civilized forum for the exchange of ideas into a hysterical shouting match, with fat, sweaty Midwesterners screaming at the top of their lungs to get their own obnoxious ideas across and suppress anyone else with an opposing view. Their conservative puppet-masters conveniently omitted the basic concept that those tactics are barely appropriate for belligerent three-year-olds who have been denied their basic right to Hostess Twinkies, but for adults to indulge in this behavior instead of confronting the deadly-serious issue of out-of-control health care costs, it is not only obnoxious and shameful but also extremely self-centered and disrespectful. How incredibly sad and pathetic those people are, who can find no other way to make themselves heard other than to shout down any opinion other than theirs. They claim to be "patriotic" but in fact what they are doing is a very un-American thing: keeping others from expressing their viewpoint through bullying and intimidation. They are ignorant right-wing dupes with tiny brains and big mouths. Throw in the selfish, piggish attitude a lot of them have about "I have health insurance and I'm sort of happy with it, so screw everyone else" and you become acutely aware of how many idiotic, mean-spirited and utterly classless people infest every town and city in this country.
A by-product of all these loud-mouthed morons is how "socialism" has become such a conservative buzz-word. All of a sudden health-care overhaul has become a thinly-disguised attempt to turn the world's most powerful democracy into a socialist state. Crazed old people are seen carrying signs around screaming "No Government Health Plan!" HELLO? Do any of these senile old geezers even have a clue as to what Medicare is?? Medicare IS government-run health care! You want government out of your health care? Fine - then RIP UP YOUR MEDICARE CARDS! I usually have a fair amount of sympathy for the elderly because I will be one of them very soon. It's okay to be old, but it's NOT okay to be old and stupid, and that's what a lot of them are. They believe whatever nonsensical hysteria they hear on the news media and start stampeding like a panicked herd of lemmings.
Even worse than that was the reaction to President Obama's speech to school students yesterday. The right-wing in this country is so completely obsessed with sabotaging everything that Obama does that they somehow spread the story around that the President was going to talk to school children and indoctrinate them into his "socialistic policies." For God's sake, it was the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES encouraging school children to stay in school and do well! What the hell is "socialistic" about that?? Instead of focusing in on this message, which normal people consider to be kind of important, conservatives made a big to-do about children being "forced" to listen to the speech and how the President was going to use it to make political points. In many places parents were given the choice of sending their children to school or keeping them home, as if the parents were smart enough to make that decision. I heartily applaud a Chicago school official who got on TV and said there will be no "parental choice" when it comes to the speech, children will come to school and they will LISTEN to the speech, and if parents objected they can just get over it. Instead of letting the children see and hear an inspirational message from the very articulate Leader of the Free World, the only thing a lot of them saw was the ignorance and bigotry of their own parents. How freaking lovely.
Then you have the abysmally stupid and detestable Sarah Palin who automatically starts blathering enormous amounts of crap if she gets within ten feet of a media outlet, just like a toilet that keeps backing up sewage into America's bathrooms. On the eve of the President's address on health care to a joint session of Congress, she inexplicably brought up her reviled and widely-discredited notion of "death panels" which in her pathetic little mind will be set up to decide if terminally ill or elderly people will live or die. I'm not going to go into what a despicable, loathsome waste of human flesh Sarah Palin is, because I've made that perfectly clear in at least six other postings on this blog, but if there is any person who deserves to burn in hell solely on the merits of the magnitude and depth of her all-consuming stupidity, she is that one. How someone so incredibly MORONIC can keep spouting her idiocy on a national stage is completely baffling to me, and as far as I'm concerned shows how broken and damaged the national media is, and how very badly it serves to advance informed debate and intelligent reasoning in this country. I rank anything Palin says on a par with those two other pointless media whores, Jon and Kate Gosselin.
As if all that wasn't bad enough, we can throw in the birther controversy earlier this summer, where so many unapologetically misinformed, brainless people got convinced that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Add to that the usual detritus that regularly washes up on our pop-culture shoreline, where people who should know better insist on doing really ridiculous, embarrassing things without any indication that they've given the slightest amount of thought or consideration for how it's going to look on the world stage. Aided and abetted by a soundbite-driven media who are much more interested in publicizing dumbness and bad behavior instead of reasoned, thoughtful action, it does seem that so often the really stupid, ignorant people are taking over. And that will spell the end to this country quicker than any Al-Qaeda terrorist could ever hope for.
Last month we had the ridiculous spectacle of the town hall meetings held by members of Congress in their home districts during the August recess. Programmed by right-wing talk radio dirtbags such as Rush "Mount Flabmore" Limbaugh and the obviously mentally ill Glenn Beck, the legions of their illiterate followers fanned out across this nation and turned what had usually been a relatively civilized forum for the exchange of ideas into a hysterical shouting match, with fat, sweaty Midwesterners screaming at the top of their lungs to get their own obnoxious ideas across and suppress anyone else with an opposing view. Their conservative puppet-masters conveniently omitted the basic concept that those tactics are barely appropriate for belligerent three-year-olds who have been denied their basic right to Hostess Twinkies, but for adults to indulge in this behavior instead of confronting the deadly-serious issue of out-of-control health care costs, it is not only obnoxious and shameful but also extremely self-centered and disrespectful. How incredibly sad and pathetic those people are, who can find no other way to make themselves heard other than to shout down any opinion other than theirs. They claim to be "patriotic" but in fact what they are doing is a very un-American thing: keeping others from expressing their viewpoint through bullying and intimidation. They are ignorant right-wing dupes with tiny brains and big mouths. Throw in the selfish, piggish attitude a lot of them have about "I have health insurance and I'm sort of happy with it, so screw everyone else" and you become acutely aware of how many idiotic, mean-spirited and utterly classless people infest every town and city in this country.
A by-product of all these loud-mouthed morons is how "socialism" has become such a conservative buzz-word. All of a sudden health-care overhaul has become a thinly-disguised attempt to turn the world's most powerful democracy into a socialist state. Crazed old people are seen carrying signs around screaming "No Government Health Plan!" HELLO? Do any of these senile old geezers even have a clue as to what Medicare is?? Medicare IS government-run health care! You want government out of your health care? Fine - then RIP UP YOUR MEDICARE CARDS! I usually have a fair amount of sympathy for the elderly because I will be one of them very soon. It's okay to be old, but it's NOT okay to be old and stupid, and that's what a lot of them are. They believe whatever nonsensical hysteria they hear on the news media and start stampeding like a panicked herd of lemmings.
Even worse than that was the reaction to President Obama's speech to school students yesterday. The right-wing in this country is so completely obsessed with sabotaging everything that Obama does that they somehow spread the story around that the President was going to talk to school children and indoctrinate them into his "socialistic policies." For God's sake, it was the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES encouraging school children to stay in school and do well! What the hell is "socialistic" about that?? Instead of focusing in on this message, which normal people consider to be kind of important, conservatives made a big to-do about children being "forced" to listen to the speech and how the President was going to use it to make political points. In many places parents were given the choice of sending their children to school or keeping them home, as if the parents were smart enough to make that decision. I heartily applaud a Chicago school official who got on TV and said there will be no "parental choice" when it comes to the speech, children will come to school and they will LISTEN to the speech, and if parents objected they can just get over it. Instead of letting the children see and hear an inspirational message from the very articulate Leader of the Free World, the only thing a lot of them saw was the ignorance and bigotry of their own parents. How freaking lovely.
Then you have the abysmally stupid and detestable Sarah Palin who automatically starts blathering enormous amounts of crap if she gets within ten feet of a media outlet, just like a toilet that keeps backing up sewage into America's bathrooms. On the eve of the President's address on health care to a joint session of Congress, she inexplicably brought up her reviled and widely-discredited notion of "death panels" which in her pathetic little mind will be set up to decide if terminally ill or elderly people will live or die. I'm not going to go into what a despicable, loathsome waste of human flesh Sarah Palin is, because I've made that perfectly clear in at least six other postings on this blog, but if there is any person who deserves to burn in hell solely on the merits of the magnitude and depth of her all-consuming stupidity, she is that one. How someone so incredibly MORONIC can keep spouting her idiocy on a national stage is completely baffling to me, and as far as I'm concerned shows how broken and damaged the national media is, and how very badly it serves to advance informed debate and intelligent reasoning in this country. I rank anything Palin says on a par with those two other pointless media whores, Jon and Kate Gosselin.
As if all that wasn't bad enough, we can throw in the birther controversy earlier this summer, where so many unapologetically misinformed, brainless people got convinced that Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Add to that the usual detritus that regularly washes up on our pop-culture shoreline, where people who should know better insist on doing really ridiculous, embarrassing things without any indication that they've given the slightest amount of thought or consideration for how it's going to look on the world stage. Aided and abetted by a soundbite-driven media who are much more interested in publicizing dumbness and bad behavior instead of reasoned, thoughtful action, it does seem that so often the really stupid, ignorant people are taking over. And that will spell the end to this country quicker than any Al-Qaeda terrorist could ever hope for.
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