"Gingrich 2012: Newt Will Always Love America. Unless it Gets Cancer."

The woman at left in the picture above is Jackie Battley Gingrich; she's standing next to her then-husband Newt Gingrich at some political event early in his long and glorious career. It was a storybook romance: she was his former high school teacher. Sadly, Jackie Battley Gingrich was diagnosed with cancer and in 1980, while she was in the hospital, Gingrich left her so that he could pursue his affair with his girlfriend, Marianne Ginther. Gingrich divorced her while she was in that hospital, and shortly afterwards married Miss Ginther.

Gingrich went on to become one of the stars of the Republican Party as it took control of the House of Representatives in 1994; Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House. He was one of the architects of the right-wing "Contract on America." Even though he himself was cheating on his second wife Marianne, he selflessly pursued the crucial task of prosecuting then President Clinton for his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. It soon turned out that the second Mrs. Gingrich was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, so Newt did the most noble thing he could do, he divorced her and married the young congressional aid with whom he'd been having an affair. Serial adulterer Gingrich is today a strong advocate of what he calls "traditional marriage," exercising his strong moral voice to oppose any steps toward marriage equality for gay Americans. There is no word on whether his current wife Callista has her husband watched or followed. He resigned from public office in 1998 and it's not really clear to me what he's been doing in the 17 years since. He talks a lot on Fox News, apparently, I wouldn't know. He did join the Catholic Church.

According to Wikipedia, Newt Gingrich is an avid dinosaur enthusiast. It's not clear if he believes they were walking around the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve or not, since as we all know "Biblical history is the key to understanding dinosaurs." Gingrich is an expert on colonialism in Africa, especially on the involvement of the young Barack Obama in the anti-colonial Mau Mau terrorist movement.

Today, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich formally announced his entry into the Republican race for president in the 2012 elections, joining a field of candidates unified in their belief that gay rights, not the lack of jobs or the environmental crisis are the greatest threat to America today. You can view his official campaign entry video here on Youtube, though at the end of this momentous day the video seems to have only gotten 322 views. Go Newt!

To hell, of course.



(I can't claim credit for the catchy headline, I've borrowed it from a comment I read on the 'net today. Thanks!)

Gingrich: Mau Mau Obama Threatens White Plantation Owners

Serial adulterer and African history expert (for realz!) Newt Gingrich has been making headlines lately. First he inserted himself into the debate over the downtown NYC Islamic Community Center. Now, in an interview with a neo-con magazine Gingrich has made a barely decipherable pseudo-academic attack on President Obama. As the Huffington Post reports: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asked. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president." If the actual words Gingrich has uttered are absolutely meaningless, they're clearly chockablock with coded meaning.

Without actually calling Obama a spear-chucker, he has simultaneously slandered Obama's nationality (a sop to the racist psychosis now afflicting vast numbers of white Americans), summoned up the memory of the Mau-Mau rebels whose memory in popular white legend is all about violence, and somehow bizarrely suggested that being against colonialism is a bad thing. Unless he is saying that Obama wants to hack at people dressed like Colonials with machetes, which is, come to think of it, possibly what he meant to imply. Run, teabagger, run!

If you watch the videos of teabaggers at their rallies scratching their heads to repeat the inanities they've heard on Fox News or to repeat the bizarre credos of Glenn Beck, you can see exactly who this would appeal to. A pseudo-intellectual who wouldn't dream of using the N word but is looking for a material basis for the tightening of his anus when he thinks about black people would love this bit of academic-sounding blather. It's because of his Kenyan anti-colonial behavior, doctor! These are the people who needed "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to validate their innate hatred of The Jews. They felt it, but lacked the words to talk about it in polite society. How are Gingrich's remarks not a scandal for alleged moderate Republicans? Because if Obama's presidency has done anything in its almost two years, it's revealed the virulence of the racist gangrene that infects white Americans.

For the benefit of Mr. Gingrich, here is the video "Blak Iz Blak", as performed by the Mau Mau. Ok these are not Kenyans, they're actors from Spike Lee's satirical masterpiece "Bamboozled":



Above is the full version of the song; below is the clip that actually appeared in the film. Both are bitterly funny.



They are coming to get you, Newt!

Blogger Craziness

Skynet aka Google's Blogger platform has been erratic and/or down for at least a day. It seems, at least temporarily, to have eaten my ever so witty post on Newt Gingrich. I call conspiracy! Anyway, Blogger seems back up, and I will resume new posts tonight and this weekend. Hopefully the Gingrich post will reappear.

Update: Gingrich post has reappeared and is thus preserved for posterity!

Crunching the Numbers...of Perverts

Every day I look at the stats that Skynet aka Google Blogger provides me with about my blogs. This is an interesting exercise. The first thing you learn doing this is that most people on the internet are looking to get their rocks off. Internet viewers are sex-obsessed perverts. A creepy number of my 114,000+ pageviews are people with one of their hands nowhere near the computer keyboard.

Sometime back I wrote what I thought was an interesting feminist analysis of fashion fascism as observed in Atlantic City, exploring a common thread between the enforced hypersexuality of the Jersey shore look and the repressive Burqa garment. This post consistently scores high on my most popular posts. Finally I noticed another statistic that showed why: one day the high scoring search keywords included "Atlantic City prostitutes." Thus, my legion of thoughtful feminist readers turned out to be a bunch of horny lonely men trapped at conventions and casinos looking for a little paid entertainment. Oh well.

I wrote an article about the outrageously racist teabagger candidate for New York governor, a fan of bestiality emails, with the intentionally ironic and eye-catching title "I would rather have sex with a horse than vote for Carl Paladino." Always a popular post on my stats: Yes it turns out that a whole LOT of people are hoping I posted pictures of horse sex. Sorry to disappoint. Now get out of that stable and leave the livestock alone. That's abuse, folks.

Some stats are indeed encouraging. Readers like pictures of OWS protests. Pieces I wrote that got picked up elsewhere remain popular reads: being a gay leftist and the piece I wrote on the video game Homeland both got some circulation. My music obituaries are popular.

I haven't entirely figured out why my post about the Oscars which used a picture of Oscar the Grouch snatched from Google has made it so high up in Google search results. A lot of people worldwide are looking for a picture of that grouchy puppet in a garbage can. Day after day for months this image was the top search result and top viewed post here on The Cahokian. I found this a little discouraging actually, cause this post says almost nothing.

But now here's something truly fascinating. For the past two weeks Oscar is no longer the most popular post or search: He has been supplanted by my post about Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery, "Newt Gingrich Will Always Love America. Unless it Gets Cancer," replete with an early photo of him with his first wife and former high-school teacher Jackie Battley Gingrich. It turns out America is fascinated by Newt. Does this mean America will vote for Newt? Are they laughing with him or at him? That is the eternal question. But on a blog where posts about Michele Bachmann's mental illness or the possibility that Mitt Romney participates in Mormon Human Sacrifice have not made a statistical dent, I find it really interesting that Newt is more popular than muppets, prostitutes, or sex with large farm animals.

Speaking of eternal questions: laugh or cry?

An Invitation to Ethnic Cleansing

“Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” — Republican presidential candidate, serial adulterer and alleged intellectual Newt Gingrich in an interview with The Jewish Channel.

I wish I could say I was shocked by Gingrich's comments, which have received pretty wide coverage. But I've had many many arguments over the years with supporters of Israel who have said pretty much the same thing. Forget any logical response to this outrage, like does he therefore suggest Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan are equally undeserving of statehood since they share a similar historical pedigree as Palestine? Nevermind his glossing over of the fact that whatever he chooses to call them the indigenous inhabitants of the land occupied by Israeli military force are currently violently besieged, suppressed, and deprived of their civil and human rights. Nevermind that not so long ago people of his political ilk were blaming the Jews for the evils of the world not fantasizing about the money they could earn by pantomiming prostration before the agenda of a foreign country's entirely questionable political policy.

What game are these politicians playing? Even George W. Bush, for crissake, paid lip-service to the idea that Palestinians deserved recognition of their personhood. The Republican presidential lineup have every last one of them (except far-right nutjob libertarian Ron Paul) been stumbling over each other to be the greatest supporter of Israeli Apartheid of all the rest. It's hard not to see it as a certain extension of the Republicans' formerly blatant anti-Semitism, this cartoonish courtship of a small country and a small American demographic which they imagine to require such outrageous genuflection. It's made even more odd by the fact that notwithstanding a little bit of rhetoric here or there, the Obama administration has proved itself a loyal lapdog of the rightwing Netanyahu government.

"And they had a chance to go many places." Absolutely chilling. Imagine for a moment he's talking about the Jews of prewar Europe, or the Tutsi of Rwanda. Newt Gingrich is an amoral sociopathic monster.

If you have a strong stomach here's a little reality check. Mustafa Tamimi was 28 years old; he attended a nonviolent protest in the occupied West Bank, protesting land seizures by so-called settlers. He was shot point blank in the face with a (US-made?) tear gas cannister. This is video of the aftermath of that shooting. Mondoweiss recounts, "The impact blew off half of Tamimi's face, and when his friends and family cried out in horror, Israeli soldiers laughed and said, "So?".

2012 Election Preview: Inmates from the Asylum of Hate

Shown above is the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Apparently this is where the Republican party has been shopping for its 2012 presidential election candidates. Let's take a quick peek at some of the potentials shall we?

NEWT GINGRICH
Newt Gingrich's first wife was dying of cancer. So he cheated on her with the woman who was to become his second wife. Not to worry, because then he cheated on her with the woman who became his third wife. He was doing all this cheating while attacking then President Clinton for having sex with Monica Lewinsky. He opposes marriage equality for gay people of course. He now says he did all this cheating because he was so focused on patriotism. Also, says Newt, God has forgiven him.

RICK SANTORUM
Rick Santorum has frothy views about America's gay citizens. He thinks the constitution provides no right to privacy, that that therefore, homosexuality, incest, child molestation, and "man on dog" sex (his words) are morally and legally equivalent (and repugnant). He said, "The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society."

MIKE HUCKABEE
Mike Huckabee says Barack Obama grew up in Kenya under the tutelage of Mau-Mau rebels. He seems to have gotten this idea from Newt Gingrich who said it first. He believes gay people are only qualified to adopt puppies, not children. From 2010: "He also affirmed support for a law in Arkansas that prohibits same-sex couples from becoming adoptive or foster parents. “I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family,” Huckabee said. “And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults.” “Children are not puppies,” he continued. “This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?”"

HERMAN CAIN
Herman Cain thinks Barack Obama is a traitor. About his directive to the Justice Department to stop defending the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Amendment: "I think it is a breach of presidential duty bordering on treason. The oath of office by the president says that he will protect, observe, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, which means all of its subsequent laws. The fact that he says that he has asked the Department of Justice not to enforce it, to me, is a breach duty as President of the United States." Of course Cain forgets to mention that this a common presidential practice. Even President Reagan refused to defend a legal ruling that Bob Jones University was not entitled to tax exempt status. Cain also claims the Democratic Party supports abortion rights because it wants to kill off all the black babies.

SARAH PALIN
Next.

MICHELLE BACHMANN
She won't say whether or not Barack Obama is an American citizen or whether he is a Christian. And she has some comprehension issues or she is a big fat liar. "And what a bizarre time we’re in, Jan, when a judge will say to little children that you can’t say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it."

DONALD TRUMP
Donald Trump thinks he is qualified to run the nation in these troubled economic times. Because he has filed for bankruptcy three times. This believer in the sanctity of marriage who has been married three times opposes the right of gay people to marry even once. In fact he opposes the extension of any medical or civil benefits to gay couples. And he has a really bad combover.

TIM PAWLENTY
The former governor of Minnesota once vetoed a bill that would have allowed surviving gay partners the right to make decisions about how to dispose of a deceased partner's body. He also believes in cutting the military budget. Well, only the part of the military budget that will be spent on implementing the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Apparently Pawlenty is a strong believer in the sanctity of death.

If I was a gay American I might get a bit of a complex and start being very worried about all this. Oh wait, I am!

Republican Candidates Threaten Cuba

I watched about half of tonight's Republican Presidential debate in Florida. I'm struck by how little these people actually talk about. The debates have been a really bad long-running reality show where they basically accuse each other of all manner of horrible things. They don't discuss their plans, they don't discuss the reasons things are the way they are, they don't discuss any real facts or issues. Except they do make a lot of threats and insinuations. Against each other. Against President Obama. Against black people. Against gay people. Against immigrants.

Tonight they threatened Iran, and, it being a debate in Florida, they threatened Cuba. There was something so visceral in their attempt to outdo each other in their bloodthirsty desire to return the laws of organized crime and plantation rule to Cuba. Well, except for poor Ron Paul, who said the U.S. should leave Cuba alone. Though today I also watched a video clip of him speaking in front of a Confederate flag in 2003 denying that the Civil War was fought over slavery which pretty much cancels out anything he says about anything else at all. The new Republican frontrunner Newt Swingrich basically said the CIA should be going to Cuba to overthrow its government. Which we presume the US has already been trying to do for over fifty years.

The government established by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 has made its share of mistakes, sure. But there is something about what Cuba has managed to do through the course of its revolution that really is meaningful, and that has to do with values and priorities. These start with healthcare and education. It really shouldn't be a surprise that someone like Gingrich, who thinks poor children should be earning their keep cleaning out bathrooms, sees the Cuban reality as a threat. American politicians have never actually cared about democracy in Cuba; they certainly didn't care about democracy when Batista was in power. What they care about is returning the rule of capitalist property relations and US dominance to a country that has dared to reject those things so close to our shores.

There's lots that could be said about the horrible things these candidates keep saying: their bigotries and their swaggering lies, their love of ruthless financial exploitation. Their charade is going to go on for a while, and I for one am not convinced that Gingrich won't be the last man standing.

It's often hard to know where to start when considering just how awful all these politicians are — from both parties. But here's another thing to add to the list. When they talk about attacking Cuba, they're talking about attacking the right of any and every social movement to break free from the clutches of corporate America.

There's only one response for the 99%: Defend Cuba!

"Liberals Love War, Too"

As readers of The Cahokian know, I love quoting things. I've been disappointed of late to find a number of my favorite websites running pieces begrudgingly or even enthusiastically coming out in favor of the American attack on Libya. I am struck by the peculiar lack of imagination on Libya, that somehow in order to support the awakening of the Libyan people, people who should know better are embracing the worst kind of interventionist behavior. We've seen how this story ends countless times, and yet somehow the siren's song of "humanitarian intervention" has seduced a new generation of people. So here I'm quoting at great length a piece which nails exactly what's going wrong here.

I am excerpting below most of a blisteringly angry piece by Margaret Kimberley, editor and senior columnist of Black Agenda Report. Margaret Kimberly blogs as "The Freedom Rider." This piece, "Attack of the Cruise Missile Liberals," went up on BAR today.

"Peace loving Americans are few and far between. The vast majority of our citizens see nothing wrong with their government killing masses of people as long as the rationale sounds high minded and noble.

The love of bloodshed is generally connected with the right wing in this country, but nothing could be further from the truth. The desire for America to dominate the rest of the world is prevalent among most of its citizens, regardless of party affiliation. Those citizens differ only on who they want to see doing the dominating. Republicans are ecstatic when a Republican president drops bombs, sends drones on killing missions or occupies other nations. Democrats are equally enthusiastic when one of their own does the same.

Democratic party reaction to President Obama’s military intervention in Libya is but the latest example of the American propensity to exult over government sponsored violence. Obama, like George W. Bush before him, claims that his intervention, no-fly zone, peace mission (take your pick) is being conducted only for the most humanitarian of purposes. The dead bodies belie the claims of dogooderism but those words have a distinct power for people in this country and will always be used as a pretext for someone dying somewhere on the planet.

The legacy of Manifest Destiny and the belief in white American superiority effects and infects every policy discussion in this nation. The equation of goodness and rightness with white America holds sway very strongly and sadly not just for white people either... The United States attack on Libya has brought out the worst in this phenomenon. Liberals are gleeful that conservative icon Newt Gingrich backtracked on supporting intervention until the Democratic president actually intervened, but Gingrich is no different than they are.

We now have MSNBC television host Ed Schultz proclaiming “Support for Obama’s Invasion of Libya.” Never mind that Obama has taken great pains to claim that the bombing will be of limited duration and that ground troops will not have a presence there. Schultz seems to be ahead of the president on this one, but his show of support is telling in revealing the true support for American motivations in its interventions abroad. Likewise Juan Cole in an “Open Letter to the Left on Libya” dismisses criticism of the intervention thusly. “I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time,” and adds, “We should avoid making ‘foreign intervention’ an absolute taboo . . .”

Foreign interventions conducted by the United States should be taboo. Our system is not designed to be in any way humanitarian. Its motives are to say the least suspect and no matter how evil its enemies are made out to be, the evidence of past history should make us suspicious of the arguments in favor of war.

The liberal hawks, like Obama, have no concern for Libyan civilians who are enduring bombing, and exposure to depleted uranium shells which create cancers and birth defects for years to come. This is not conjecture, but has been seen in Iraq and ought to be a reason for anyone who claims to be on the “left” to oppose the actions which bring it to pass.

The true anti-war activist, not just anti-Republican activist, has to raise its voice. The true anti-war movement must reawaken itself and hit the streets in the hundreds of thousands, just as they did in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq. That moment can be recreated, and in a deeper, more honest way, now that a Democrat is the head killer in charge."

Read the entire piece at Black Agenda Report. Thanks to Jon for turning me on to this article.

A Nation of Racist Morons?

Coming soon, a combination all-purpose item of headwear!

According to a recent poll, 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. According to the same poll, 43% of Americans don't know what religion he is. Worse, these numbers are sharply up over previous polls. Other polls suggest that a quarter or the American population believes he was born outside the United States.

In the midst of serial manufactured cable-television and internet outrage where the liars of the right-wing propaganda channels (I love that The Field Negro blog calls Fox News "Radio Rwanda") spout utter nonsense, and even allegedly centrist or liberal media routinely feature complete know-nothings and bigoted fabulists as "opposing voices" to add readers, ratings and pageviews, these statistics seem more than a little troubling. And what does it mean that these numbers change toward the wholely fantastic? Who thinks these things? And worse, who changes their mind to think these things?

Though few are willing to say it, it's really clear that to a large number of people "Muslim" is pretty much a form of the "N" word that doesn't require self-censorship. For an overlapping number of people "Muslim" is identical to "terrorist," holding the same demonizing purpose as "communist" used to.

In the ongoing controversy over Cordoba House in New York City, the remarks of those opposed to the so-called Ground Zero mosque say so much more about what these people actually think. We all know Newt Gingrich probably really does think all Muslims are terrorist nazis (setting aside for the moment his problem with terrorist nazis is the "who" not the "what"). But when even professed liberals like the New York State governor Paterson say that the location of Cordoba House is painful to some or controversial they are fundamentally acceding to the belief that all Muslims share in the guilt of 9/11. Here's more polling data: According to the Economist, 53% of Republicans believe that Muslims have no constitutional right to build a mosque where the Cordoba Center is planned, and 14% of Americans believe mosques should not be permitted in the U.S. at all.

There have always been stupid and gullible people. But stupid and gullible people, especially when they are afraid, are so easily manipulated; this is where the danger lies. Alex Kane wrote an excellent piece on his blog lately
about the genesis of the "ground zero mosque" controversy. He compares it to another manufactured controversy, the one over what was to be New York City's first Arabic-bilingual public school. He neatly reminds us that these are anything but groundswells of stupidity: these are issues being manipulated into a froth by far less stupid political forces, chief among them the political supporters of Israel. Again and again the facts about Cordoba House, about Muslims, about Muslim Americans, are set aside in favor of "gut" feelings and prejudices. For some this is ignorance, but for others it is something else.

In the recent lawsuit in California overturning the anti-gay Prop 8 ban on marriage equality there's an interesting parallel. The pro-gay plaintiffs, and the judge ruling in their favor, structured their arguments brilliantly and factually. They explicitly debunked any factual notion that same-sex marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. They showed that the only hand the anti-marriage equality forces are holding is one of prejudice and emotional belief out of step with secular constitutional law. The judgment makes fascinating reading. Yet in the anti-gay forces' rebuttals to the ruling, and in the reporting on the decision by the allegedly neutral media, both these parties do nothing but repeat the arguments that are clearly already anticipated and rebuked in step-by-step fashion by the judge in siding with the marriage equality proponents. There are knee-jerk bigots acting out of ignorance, but there's also something else going on.

Behind that aggressive and increasing stupidity of so many Americans over Obama's birth and religion are forces actively manipulating ignorance into something else altogether. When delusional liars like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin begin to lead these legions of stupidity into the streets, as they plan to do shortly in a march on Washington, DC, to profane the memory of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream Speech," the joke starts to become not nearly so funny.

And while defending Cordoba House and decrying racist stereotypes does bring up issues of value to those who treasure the fight for civil rights and who fight for a just society, ultimately it's all such a distraction. The issue of Cordoba House is a trifling, unimportant non-issue. There is no legal controversy. New York City governance has done its job and paved the way for the Islamic center to be built, and there are already undisturbed and uncontroversial storefront mosques just a couple more blocks distant from the site of the World Trade Center. The idiots who want to believe Obama is a Muslim--as if there were something wrong with that in the first place--are a minority firmly on the wrong side of peace and progress anyway.

But these issues keep people from focusing on the continuing economic crisis that the Democrats are unable and the Republicans are uninterested in fixing. They keep people from focusing on the need to undercut terrorism by radically changing American foreign policy. They keep people focused on the gotcha game in which liberal and conservative media enable each other while keeping their audiences firmly hypnotized and safely oh-so-outraged while confined to their sofas or mesmerized by their handheld devices.

We will be a nation of morons if we let all this continue.

Look Who's About to Trash the Bill of RIghts (Hint: Not a Republican)

I have major bones to pick with the New York Times, often. But in a series of blogposts today editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal nails the deadly danger behind the National Defense Authorization Act, passing in stealth under cover of more visible bills on the economy:

"For a while, the administration encouraged people to think that President Obama would take a stand against the unnecessary and very dangerous provisions that Congress jammed into the annual National Defense Authorization Act. He threatened to veto the whole bill in order to block new rules that would mandate the military custody of most terrorist suspects, and officially sanction their indefinite detention, without due process. Yesterday, the president backed down, completely." — 'The Sound of One President Caving'

"The first [issue] is whether certain provisions in the law give the president and the Pentagon the power to detain American citizens in a military facility, possibly for life, without a trial. Lawyers I talked to today said that the bill is pure mush in a lot of areas, including this one. The bill does not require military custody for American citizens suspected of membership with Al Qaeda or an allied group, as it more or less does for foreigners. (Note, by the way, that this is all about suspicion, not proof.) But neither does it prohibit military trial or detention of American citizens. It’s stunning that the president is willing to sign a bill that might effectively turn the right of habeas corpus into a mere privilege — even for citizens." —'More Rubble from the Military Detention Cave-in'

When this bill is signed into law, if you don't like this blogpost, all you have to do is accuse me of being an ally of Al-Qaeda and I can be locked away, forever, with no right to defend myself or even ask why. I disappear, legally, and utterly without recourse. If you doubt whether Mr. Obama's government would do such a thing, I think you're quite possibly being very naive. Do remember the late American citizens Mr. Al-Awlaki and son. But even if you think Obama wouldn't do such a thing, what about President Gingrich? President Bachmann? President Romney?

It's been nice knowing you all.

Politicians' Follies

It seems to be the political sweet season. Here's a few must-read links.

Herman Cain Casting Call
Courtesy of We Are Respectable Negroes blog, a chilling Herman Cain video coupled with a leaked casting-call for a Cain commercial. Includes this priceless paragraph:

"7. Arab American with Dog. One person from the Middle East is needed with his or her dog. Preferably, a yellow Labrador retriever or a lovable mutt who enjoys interacting with others. The dog should be a puppy. If it is exceptionally talented and has prior acting experience, an older animal will also be acceptable."

Read the whole post here.

The Important Lies of Anthony Weiner
The underwhelming Weinergate generated some hilarious headlines. But what about the actually important lies Weiner has told? Hint, they're about neither his penis nor whether he sexted his facebook friends.

"WEINER: You can see a difference in the development in the West Bank with 11 percent year over year growth, with no Israeli occupation there either, with increasing access to checkpoints...
COHEN: No occupation in the West Bank, did I hear you right?
WEINER: Yes."

Read the list of his actual lies on Mondoweiss.

T-Paw's Imaginary Economic Plan
Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty entered the Republican race with a plan to oppose gay adoption. And with a plan for full economic recovery achieved...by lowering taxes! Ezra Klein demolishes T Paw:

"This plan isn’t optimistic. It isn’t a bit vague. It’s a joke. And I don’t know which is worse: The thought that Pawlenty knows that and went forward with this pandering, fantasy-based proposal anyway, or the thought that he doesn’t know it, and he really thinks this could work."

Read the whole thing on WaPo. And hey Minnesota, what is wrong with you people? This guy AND Michelle Bachmann?

Breaking: Newt's Rats Jump Ship

As of this posting, Newt Gingrich's campaign team just walked out on him.

"At least Newt wasn't being treated for cancer when this happened."

Hilarious analysis at aplainblogaboutpolitics.

Rick Santorum Doesn't Like Being Made Fun Of

Also recently officially-announced ultra-right wing and ultra-uptight Republican candidate Rick Santorum has a google problem. His program consists of little more than his hatred of gay people. Watch him whine frothily and then read the comments of the gay people who rightfully hate him back at Joe.My.God.

Sarah Palin Said Something Unintelligible
Oh wait, I was posting news.

stop the planet, I want to get off

apparently I am an alien who was kidnapped by earthlings and raised among them. however, now I'm hoping the mothership returns to pick me up soon because I'm no longer finding my anthropological studies of earthling behavior very interesting. it seems that earthlings, and a closely related subspecies, republicans, have values, experiences, and identities quite different than my own. I'm grateful to the mothership and the brave alien scientists who placed me here for making sure that the food, water, and atmosphere here on earth was compatible with our own back home on the planet, well, whatever it's called, but they failed to check for other toxic incompatibilities.

one of the blogs I read regularly which is quite interesting, is Joe. My. God. There's been a feature lately about this guy Dirty Sanchez--um, er, Matt Sanchez--a fairly unattractive and very shallow ex gay pornstar now hanging out with the likes of Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich. this pornstar is a typical mirror-gazing narcissist who is now denouncing Columbia University's student body for being leftist. he's a marine, apparently thinking now that he's spent years shooting jizz for the entertainment of gay men he'd like to go kill some Arabs. with my fellow gay men (and the bears who who are well represented by JMG) I'm horrified by this fellow. but more than that I'm horrified by what he represents. The ridiculous "facercise" exercises, the unappealing pornography, the unappealing over-gymmed body, the shocking right-wing politics, I can only draw the conclusion that I belong to an alien culture and have been accidently left here among this nation of narcissists.

I watched an episode of American Idol. Untalented narcissists caterwauling and whining. Each time I saw someone's so-caled singing praised I wondered how my own idea of actual musical talent could be so different than what America--hmmm perhaps I shoud bring back Amerikkka--seems to enjoy. Surely on my own planet singing is pleasant and tuneful: this alleged talent is apparently overly influenced by some earth-based viral contaminant.

Then there's Bravo TV. Often entertaining. Well, like watching a train wreck or a bad accident on the freeway. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Workout. Top Design. Who ARE these people? How did they get their heads trapped so far up their own sphincters? Do these people live their whole lives thinking absolutely....nothing? Perhaps global warming has overheated their brains and caused irreversible damage?

I could go on and on. I'm not sure if the alien overlords read blogs, but if you do, dear overlords, please send the Mothership soon, and hurry! Beam me up!

Ron Paul Is A F*cking Nutbag... Who Cares If He Claims to Oppose War

I've seen some great things attributed to the Ron Paul campaign. That sign with the reversed "LOVE" in "REVOLUTION" called out? Genius. The notion that the U.S. should not be marching around the world dictating policy? Laudable. A desire to bring troops home from Afghanistan and stop sending a fortune to Israel? I'm down with that. But you know what? It doesn't fucking matter one bit.

Because Ron Paul is a right-wing, anti-gay, anti-choice, racist, conspiracy theorist NUTBAG. This is plain to see. Obvious from hearing thirty seconds of the man speak. Clear as day from the actual historical record revealed in a simple google search.

And yet there are legions of Ron Paul supporters twisting themselves into pretzel shapes trying to excuse his disturbing history of pandering to the far-right fringe. There are armies of pseudo-intellectual morons trying to make sense of his calamitous economic ideas. And there are unfortunate crowds of young white people trying to focus on his anti-war appeal while pulling the blinders closer to avoid seeing how close this man stands to those other folks on the Republican stage like anti-gay scum Rick Santorum, deranged fantasist Michele Bachmann who actually runs a business that tortures gay people, racist narcissist Newt Gingrich, and tool of big business Mitt Romney.

I could post facts about how Ron Paul has denounced Civil Rights laws. I could link to stories about how his Iowa chief of staff is a veteran of anti-gay hate groups. I could bring up his ties to the John Birch society. I could repeat what his former staffers say about his unwillingness to use a gay man's bathroom. I could link to stories that challenge the distance Paul claims he has put between him and the scandalously racist newsletters of two decades ago. I'm not going to do any of that. These stories are not hard to find. If you are not busy pretending not to see these things you will find them in ten seconds on the internet.

The Mitt Romney machine has been very very busy demolishing each of his Republican competitors one by one, and they are surely a force behind the sudden media scrutiny of Dr. Paul. But I think given Ron Paul's ground operation he could still do quite well in the upcoming Republican Iowa caucuses. In truth I don't really care who the Republicans go with...they're all horror shows beyond the pale. But I have acquaintances (who should know better) who are actually suckered in by the bizarro-world Ron Paul delusion. I find it sad that people outside the rarified club of bigotry and hateful ignorance that is the Republican party should find themselves strolling down such a doomed path of bad thinking. Actually it doesn't make me sad; it makes me furious.

Libertarianism is a cult-like ideology that elevates selfishness into an economic and political theory. Key to Libertarianism is its omission of a class analysis (the same class analysis rudimentary to the nascent concept of the 99% expressed by the #OWS movement). And there's a good reason for that: because Libertarianism isn't egalitarianism, it's rich-ism. It's about a system where the rich and wealthy are unfettered in their exploitation of the rest of us. With impunity. It's worth repeating: If you want to visit a Libertarian paradise, visit Somalia. I am not exaggerating.

There are Libertarians and Ron Paul supporters running around in OWS, for sure. But take a deeper look. They do not actually want the same things the rest of us want. What the Libertarians are doing is filling an ideological vacuum: given the history of Democratic Party betrayals (hello, Mr. Obama) and the failure of the Marxist left to (yet) emerge from its historically discrediting Cold-War defeat, Libertarians are talking systemic changes and ideological solutions, even if the substance of what they're talking is absolute nonsense.

The 2012 election is still eleven months away. A lot will happen in that time. If I've learned anything from the last year it is that voting for President once every four years is a sad substitute for actual democracy. I think the optimism that so many felt with Obama's rise, and the subsequent reaction to the failure of that rise to actually bear the sweet fruit that many of us hoped for is one of the factors that has contributed to the Occupy Wall Street awakening. The challenge of the next period is to sustain the momentum of last year, to make an alternative to the electoral trap feasible, to show what real direct democracy is. We can aim higher than choosing the best of the worst to predictably disappoint us.

Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian who loved puppies. If you're looking in a library for books about Hitler, I'll make an educated guess that "pet care" and "cookbooks" are probably the wrong places to look. When the books are written about Ron Paul, I'm certainly not saying they will be on the shelves next to books about Hitler, but they sure won't be on filed under "anti-war" either.

If Ron Paul sometimes sounds like a fucking right-wing nutbag... it's because he is one.

Tony Soprano for President?

Chances are, if we have friends who consistently lie to us, we tend to wall off that relationship, finding minimal space for remnants of friendship that won't lead to danger or disappointment. A friend who steals things from us is soon to be disinvited from visiting, and one who openly commits violence against others is soon apt to be held at arm's distance lest their gaze and physicality be turned to us. We like to surround ourselves with people who make us laugh, who share the bounties of open hearts or engaged minds. We respect people who make achievement seem easy, and are glad for useful advice that is the fruit of sagely earned or learned wisdom and experience.

Isn't it amazing that so many people cast aside these logical behaviors when deciding whom to listen to in the public square? How we tell ourselves that it's okay to put time-honored strategies for self-preservation out of our heads? That we must submit to betraying our every instinct to choose not what we want but what we dislike less? And truthfully this is only half the story. For a great many people, a political system based on poisonous exploitation and oppression transforms the values that we would recognize as normal, empathetic and humane into a corrupt sociopathology dominated by heartlessness, selfishness, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and rationalization.

Last year at the White House correspondents' Association dinner, President Obama joked about teen idols the Jonas Brothers: "Sasha and Malia are huge fans but, boys, don't be getting any ideas. I have two words for you: predator drones." A friend pointed me to this cartoon from vastleft.com:



This refers to a story mentioned on the OpEd Page of the NY Times about a community meeting in Pakistan: "During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.... When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned the official American position: that these were precision strikes and no innocent civilian had been killed in 15 months. My comment was met with snorts of derision. ...At the end of the day, Tariq stepped forward. He volunteered to gather proof if it would help to protect his family from future harm. ... [But on] Monday, he was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile."

Obama's joke isn't so funny now, is it? I voted for him: I advocated voting for him, and I thought I was keeping my eyes open. And sadly, there was never any chance that the 2008 election would lead to a less horrible moral conundrum than the one it lead to. It is probable that the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin would have been even worse. Not that it mattered so much to Tariq.

Consider Herman Cain, the right-wing Republican businessman with the unlikely honor of being somewhere near the top of the heap of the Republican presidential primary. It's been revealed that he was repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, that is, of being a sexual predator using his power as a rich businessman to make life uncomfortable for women working under him. While all the facts of this story have not yet been aired, the evidence strongly suggests not the story of a philandering politician consensually consorting with someone randomly extracurricular to the embarrassment of his spouse, but a man engaged in non-consensual harassment of his employees. Cheating on your spouse is not against the law. But sexual harassment is. And yet a portion of the Republican electorate is not shunning Cain like normal people would do, but actually rallying around him.

Or there's the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, also running in the primary. A couple months ago he accused his fellow candidates of being heartless for his policy of offering some social benefits to the children of undocumented immigrants. "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they've been brought there by no fault of their own, I don't think you have a heart." This small modicum of human decency was too much for the Republican electorate, and Perry was forced to apologize. "I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate."

There's pseudo-intellectual Newt Gingrich who, as we've discussed before, has twice ditched ailing wives for healthier mistresses and told outrageous racist lies about Obama. There's Michele Bachmann who has told nothing but fantastic lies in her entire political career and makes government money off the discredited fake-therapy of trying to convert unhappy gay men to heterosexuality. There's Rick Santorum and his unhealthy obsession that the small percentage of gay people in society are at the cause of everything "wrong" with it. And there's poor pathetic Mitt Romney who Republicans are desperate to avoid voting for because even they can see his utter moral emptiness and total vacuity of principle.

These are people I would not invite across the threshold of my front door. Why are we in the position of thinking our only choice is to vote for one of them? Even the ones we convince ourselves are the "good guys" are narcissistic sociopaths. Earlier this year I wrote a defense of lesser-evil voting. I wrestle with this constantly. At this moment I still imagine myself voting for Obama again next year...if only because I fear how much more damage the Republicans could do to civil rights laws. This, knowing that his second term is as likely to be as full of betrayals and disappointments, and of lost children named Tariq, as his first was. Knowing it was a mistake to trust him to be different than his predecessors at the helm of the American state.

But it's why I feel such hope in #OWS: finally here is a flicker that it doesn't have to be that way. Politics isn't all about elections, and elections don't always have to be the way they are today. What if people stopped being willing to vote for sociopaths? Or for would-be child murderers or aspiring rapists? Or valued smart people instead of bigoted morons and village idiots? Or together organized and took for ourselves what is rightfully, morally, our own. The elections — the choice between evil and more evil — become less important, when we create alternatives, when we're actively engaged in changing the fundamental problems and social relations not just hoping they'll get better in time.

Because we really are all in this together. We don't have to pretend Democrats or Republicans represent us, because they obviously don't. We can find our own voice.

We know how a fairytale marriage to Kim Kardashian ends. We know what happens when you place your trust in Tony Soprano. So how come here, back in the real world, we don't know how to change the channel?

Kim Jong-Il and the U.S.: Of Tyrants Great & Small

As the whole world knows now, the "Dear Leader" of the self-proclaimed Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-Il, died this weekend.

By all accounts Kim, the son of North Korea's first leader Kim Il Sung and the father of the supposed next leader, was a dictator who didn't stint on his own luxury while his country suffered the effects of international isolation — much of it self-inflicted — in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Starvation, malnutrition, poverty, and technologically backward conditions are said to be the rule in the northern half of the Korean peninsula.

With his chubby, gnomish build and his poofy bouffant hairdo, Kim was easily caricatured; the personality cult built on his father that was grafted onto his own relatively gloryless history seemed to outsiders as particularly bizarre and forced. The rule of Kim's Workers Party is by most reports brutal and harsh; while Kim's taste in fine liquors seems corrupt and despotic. Defended politically by a homegrown nationalist ideology with only tenuous links to the Marxist-Leninist ideology that spawned it, the DPRK is big on mass spectacle, dramatic gesture, preposterous claim, and closely guarded secrecy. Once a technological overachiever, North Korea fell behind the South in most areas excluding perhaps weapons technology: under Kim Jong-Il the DPRK seems to have developed working nuclear weapons.

I don't expect history to be particularly kind to Kim Jong-Il. But that said, I'm finding much about the blogosphere's celebration of his passing to be a self-righteous frenzy of pro-imperialist propaganda.

Even satirical website Gawker called out the internet commentariat for its widespread promotion of the song "I'm so Ronery" from the animated film "World Police: Team America" that features a puppetized Kim Jong-il character: "Twitter Relates to Death of Kim Jong-il By Endlessly Referring to Stupid Racist Song."

Amidst all the encomia for a new era in Korea and for freedom for the people of the DPRK, one must ask the question, who exactly will be bringing that freedom to the north?

Because here are truths that should not be overlooked: for the past sixty years North Korea has been parked between the three most powerful military nations in the world. The American military fully occupies South Korea with massive military might including nuclear weapons aimed right at the people of the DPRK. Goaded on by the US the South Korean military has a long history of provocation against the North.

On the radio this morning I heard a government official of the DPRK, distraught over Kim's death, defending his country against its international ill repute. One of the things he said was that the U.S. that threatens his country is one of the worst human rights violators in the world. It came across as a laugh-line, a punchline to show how removed from reality the North Koreans are. But put yourself in their shoes. There is plenty of evidence that the scale of American tyranny dwarfs anything that the DPRK is capable of, especially when you consider how the U.S. treats the world around it as its exclusive reserve.

During the American war on Korea, two million Koreans were killed; including hundreds and hundreds of thousands of civilians. While history doesn't point to any clean hands in that conflict, the U.S. is absolutely guilty of thousands of war crimes against innocent civilians, and the South Korean dictatorship propped up by the U.S. for years after the war ran death squads against suspected Communists in the south.

Consider the wave of repression in this country against #OWS encampments. Students and workers beaten and gassed with chemical weapons? That wasn't in Pyongyang.

Consider this angry OpEd piece in the New York Times this weekend, by a law-abiding, gainfully-employed young African-American man named Nicholas Peart who has been repeatedly stopped, harassed, frisked, and thrown to the ground by the NY city police as part of the "stop and frisk" campaign that sees all young black men as potential criminals: "It feels like an important thing to be part of a community of hundreds of thousands of people who are wrongfully stopped on their way to work, school, church or shopping, and are patted down or worse by the police though they carry no weapon; and searched for no reason other than the color of their skin..."

Consider this fact also reported in the New York Times: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners....The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison.... "Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror," James Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. "Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons." Prison sentences here have become "vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared..."

The U.S. has overthrown or helped overthrow the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya in the past decade. It attacks people with utter impunity in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. It supplies weapons to repressive governments around the world: weapons that are actually used, as in Egypt and Palestine. If you were in the DPRK wouldn't you feel threatened?

The U.S. has a habit of portraying the rulers of countries it doesn't like "madmen," or "insane." This as half of our own country prepares to rally around someone like Newt Gingrich? It's easy to call attention to Kim Jong-il's eccentricities. But isn't that just awfully convenient? The U.S. learned long ago that if you dehumanize your enemies you can eliminate them as carelessly as they do with stray kittens at the Humane Society.

The DPRK is a one-party state. Do you feel that our acclaimed two-party state, our supposed democracy, actually represents you? I sure don't.

Life is probably much easier in the United States than in the DPRK. The fact that this is the richest country in the world, courtesy of the exploitation of the world's resources, kind of helps make that so. It's true I can write this blog here while I couldn't in Pyongyang: But we'll see how seriously the government starts applying before the NDAA makes that no longer true. The NDAA is certainly full of repressive laws that Kim Jong-Il would love. Not sure what that makes Barack Obama...are you?

Anyway my point is not to glorify North Korea, nor to lionize the late Kim Jong-Il. He's certainly not my dear leader.

But it's not that simple. Don't believe the hype. The so-called "Free World" is about as accurately named as the "People's Democratic Republic" of Korea. This isn't the occasion for gloating. We in the U.S. have serious work to do before we can be calling the kettles of the world black.

Our enemy is here at home, first.

Image shows a sheet of stamps from the DPRK, 2011, showing achievements of Kim Jong-Il.