"To
announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or
wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is
morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore
Roosevelt, 1912
IT'S
TIME TO STOP EATING SHIT
AND PRETENDING IT TASTES
LIKE APPLE PIE
I
am not pro-Democrat when I am expressing anti-Republican
views.
I am not pro-Republican when I am talking smack about Democrats.
It's a thinker ain't it? But recently I decided to get
off the fence and say:
"Howard Dean doesn't suck." Yeah, you heard me...
I
always believed that the desire to be a politician should
automatically disqualify you from the job. But Howard The
Doc is starting to chip away at my cherished cynicism.
A politician who appears to have values, commitment and
a message? Am I high?? Is this the sixties??? Yup. Fried
Wire endorses Dean. So you can stop reading now if you're
the kind of Stepford voter who thinks three GOP activists
competing to find the best synonym for traitor while discussing
Dick Durbin on Faux News constitutes debate. Shut the hell
up! Some people are trying to think around here.
However much the Bush bots will rant and smear, Dean just might prove to be Karl
Rove's worst nightmare: a guy who is finally making the Democratic package sellable.
It's enough to make Cheney foul his Depends.
Public opinion is changing in Dean's favor because the party is starting to listen
to the people again. He is building an honest party, shaped by public interest,
as a true opposition to Bush's party of corporate self-interest duct-taped together
with lies and duplicity. While the Democrats have a rock-solid foundation, Bush's
power base and his appeal to the American people will soon prove to be as flimsy
as an outhouse in a tornado. Just ask any non-committed Bush voter why they voted
for Bush and they'll probably reply, "because there wasn't really anyone
else." That's because the GOP's M.O. has always been to neutralize the credibility
of the opposition (by fielding Kerry, the DNC made that a no-brainer in 2004)
and to stifle all debate so that Bush gets through by default.
Republicans
could never win elections if they were to be honest with
the people, but the Democrats could never lose an
election if they were to be honest. Even with John Kerry,
Diebold (or Diablo as my spell check aptly suggests) and
the Ohio Secretary of State stacked against them, the Democrats
still came within a 2% whisker of winning in 2004. So when
I hear Bush use the phrase 'landslide', I picture not a
forest of mighty pines cascading down the side of a mountain.
I think more bonsai.
In the coming years we will wonder how Bush managed to get away with his
crass shell game for so long and why so many rubes fell for the bullshit.
But now the cycle is finally turning: Bush's approval rating has already
fallen by nearly 10% to 47% since November and in California, Schwarzenegger's
approval rating has tanked to a new low of just 31% (5% below Gray Davis
immediately prior to the Republican putsch in Sacramento).
A lot of people are getting sick of eating shit and pretending it tastes
like apple pie and, much as Karl Rove would hope not, the majority of Americans
are starting to miss those old concepts of justice, compassion and fairness.
'We the people' are getting tired of being asked to take our moral cues from
thieves and liars and we're sick of working to support the parasitic rich
and the culture of corporate welfare. It's time to stop voting ourselves
out of power and time to stand up. I wish Howard Dean the best of luck, but
in the name of sanity, dump Liebermann. Oh, and
no screaming dude.
VIVE
LE DURB!
"If liberty means anything
at all, it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell
Dick
Durbin pictured (much) earlier as Serpico.
You know a guy's right when
half the country hates his guts.
"If
I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an
FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners
in their control, you would most certainly believe this
must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags,
or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern
for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was
the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."
Dick Durbin speaks
to the Senate floor (June 14, 2005)
"At a certain point you have to take well-founded allegations as proven
in the absence of a clear explanation by the government concerned. The fact the
U.N. investigators have been denied access for so long is an indication that
there are certain conditions they want to hide from the public."
Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur on torture
The Pentagon says it is holding 520 men in Guantanamo, mainly detained in
Afghanistan.
Only four have been charged with anything.
(Reuters)
In
a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Durbin read
aloud from an FBI agent's e-mail detailing the mistreatment
of an accused Al Qaeda prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay
detention center. Knee-jerk reactionaries nationwide
seized their opportunity to slam Durbin as a traitor
until he was forced to apologize. But he did not apologize
for the substance of what he said, he apologized for
unintentionally giving right wing attack dogs like Limbaugh
and the phony 'support our troops' hypocrites a field
day.
In relation to the ongoing persecution, I'm with Durbin for having the balls
to stand up and I'm with the guy I read on Yahoo! (below) for expressing
the kind of patriotism that demands correction of the things that diminish
our nation. This is what the tribalistic dipwads who are trying to claim
the sadly degraded concept of patriotism as their own would never understand
in a million years.
