Tag Archives: republicans

Political Rants

Week that was (redux).

Okay, I’ve been out of commission for a few days, taking comprehensive exams for a master’s degree in lethargy. (Hard to study for, actually … I keep falling asleep.) And though I’ve been quiet, very quiet for the last couple of weeks, I have been paying attention to what’s going on out in that wacky world of ours, and I have a thing or two to say about it. Just bet you can’t wait to hear it! Harumph!

Mr. Benghazi himselfBenghazi. Really? I mean, really? The republicans are on this Benghazi thing again? Why? Because the Affordable Care Act may not be as good a campaign issue as they thought? I keep hearing this trope about how awful it is that four people were killed. Yes, it’s awful. But Libya is a war zone. And these people make more noise about those four lives than they ever did about the more than 4,000 Americans that died in their Iraq war. How about we hold someone (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) accountable for that first, then maybe look at Benghazi (right after Afghanistan)? If magnitude counts for anything, Benghazi shouldn’t even be on the list in the first place.

Let us pray. It’s official – public meetings can be opened with some kind of Jesus prayer. Thank you, Supreme Court and, yes, George W. Bush, who replaced the then-dying William Rehnquist with another reliable young conservative, thereby locking us into reactionary decisions from the Court for another generation. I love the way proponents of prayer in the public square frame this as a freedom of religion issue. For crying out loud, YOU CAN PRAY ALL DAY LONG IF YOU WANT TO. When you do it in a public meeting, representing an institution of government that should have no association with a particular religion whatsoever, you are just cramming it into people’s faces and undermining their trust in the impartiality of government.

Nigerian abduction. Well, it took long enough for the press to talk about this, but they are finally giving it the coverage it deserves, thanks to a groundswell of anger from the grassroots. For a couple of weeks after this abduction, I kept thinking, where is this story? Our press tends to keep its distance from stories in Africa, unless they are real blockbusters. It’s just as well that there is some people power behind this … maybe that will bring about some meaningful  change in Nigeria.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

White hats.

Ladies and gentlemen, Cliven Bundy has spoken, and mainstream conservatives are now running for the exits.

Well, his hat's in the right place.I use that term “conservative” in the very expansive sense that is in common usage now, descriptive of the type of “conservative” who appears to favor facing off against federal law enforcement officers with firearms. That’s the kind of conservative we saw praising Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his militia-inspired neighbors as he took his somewhat bizarre and incoherent stand against the Bureau of Land Management. It was the classic reactionary fairy tale, and our friends at FoxNews, the Drudge Report, and Limbaugh central sucked it up with great relish and spewed it out over the airwaves so that everyone in America knew the name of this rambling, aged, white-hatted patriot.

I’m no fan of extreme police tactics (like, for example, the violent dispersion of Occupy Wall Street), but pulling guns on federal agents is a serious matter, and I was flabbergasted over the past couple of weeks that I would need to explain that fact to people who term themselves conservatives. Of course, it seems that they didn’t make a very close study of the man they were raising to the level of Paul Revere, as it seemed to come to them as quite a surprise when he piped up with this little gem about African Americans:

They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.

Okay, I may as well just say it. Not only is this guy a racist, he appears to be suffering some form of dementia; perhaps early stage Alzheimer’s. I think the latter condition may play a role in his lack of the ability to conceal the former. I would almost feel sorry for him, frankly, were it not for the fact that he’s bilking the federal government for a million dollars in back grazing fees and fines (note: the fees are very, very reasonable) and apparently content to start the equivalent of a modern range war to keep from parting with his cash. (It’s not hard to imagine what would happen to black people in, say, Philly if they were to try something similar.)

My advice to the Feds is this: the man has bank accounts, doesn’t he? Do to him what you are doing to the Russians and the Iranians. Freeze his assets until he complies. No guns needed for that.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Beer hat politics.

This past week, on The Daily Show, Patrick Stewart made an appearance as the Chinese moon probe “Jade Rabbit,” complete with ludicrous spacecraft headgear. He was reading the strangely lyrical farewell message advanced by the Chinese government as having come from the probe. Now, that was funny, but I’m afraid it barely meets the level of ridiculousness attained by political pundits now deployed across all media, busily framing in this fall’s election as a bounty-in-waiting for the Republicans and basically a replay of 2010.

Punditus domesticus

Here we are, nine months from casting the first votes and it starting to sound like the election’s already over. Part of the problem is that the 24 hour news cycle has a voracious hunger for news that’s easy to report on. The horse race of political contests is a particular favorite, so election season never, ever ends. The moment 2012 was settled, the pundits were talking about 2014 and even 2016. Now the talk is constant about the upcoming mid-terms, and how historically the president’s party does particularly badly on second-term midterm elections. Nothing can ever be different. Rinse and repeat.

It’s like they’re planting this beer-hat on all of us, with blinders on either side. This is what you can expect, they say. Just drink your beer and don’t deviate from the usual course. People don’t turn out for mid-terms, they tell us over and over. People aren’t interested in politics or governance, we are reminded. Move on, people – nothing to see here.

Reactionary politics at any level relies on the non-participation of the majority of the electorate. The pundit class actively encourages this non-participation. The only defense for the rest of us is to get actively involved in the mechanism of politics. There are a million different ways of doing this, from participating on the precinct level in local party politics to working with your neighbors and broader community on specific causes. But the minimum bar for this is to vote, under any and all circumstances. Especially …. especially when they don’t want you to.

And trust me … if you are non-white and living in a now-red state, they don’t want you to. All the more reason to do it.

luv u,

jp