Tag Archives: Tea Party

Political Rants

Faith and credit.

Kind of tired, so these will be brief.

Cruz Control. Here we go again, lurching from crisis to crisis, the federal government sputtering along on fumes once more, its lifeblood of funding drying up. We haven’t had an actual federal budget plan approved in years, just a series of continuing resolutions and last-minute deals. And now, as the federal deficit has shrunk (thanks in part to the blind cuts imposed by sequestration) to nearly half its Mohammad Mossadeghsize one year ago, the party who rules Washington – the tea party-fueled G.O.P. – has decided to drive us over the cliff once again, only this time it’s about ideological, not budgetary, complaints. We must kill Obamacare (and fulfill a long list of other reactionary desires), or the economy gets it.

Ted Cruz is working the reps in the House, but really … the reps should know better. How can you call yourself a conservative and support playing chicken with the debt ceiling?

Good call. Iranian president Rouhani called our own president today, and they had a 15 minute conversation – the first between leaders of these respective countries in more than thirty years. You may not like to hear this, but the reason for this is more about us than about them. We overthrew Mossadegh in 1953, imposed the Shah Reeza Palavi for 25 years, supported Saddam Hussein’s savage attack on them, imposed sanctions that have starved them, sickened them, and prevented them from living a decent life for decades. Small wonder they’re unhappy with us.

Our government’s criticism that they support “terrorism” is ironic at best, cynical at worst. What worse terrorism is there than that which we have practice on them since 1979?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Hair on fire.

Good lord almighty, Fox news must be in pig-heaven right now. Three running Obama administration scandals, each one ten times bigger than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined. This should be a solid excuse for Congress not to do anything about (1) creating jobs and infrastructure, (2) getting our national security state under control, and (3) doing something to fight global warming.

Let’s just examine these, one at a time:

Benghazi. This is bullshit. Quite frankly, the only reason why we are hearing anything about this incident eight months after the fact is because the Republican nominee decided to politicize it on the very day it occurred. Does anyone remember this? Romney jumped all over Obama’s shit because he claimed that the administration’s expressions of regret over that bogus pseudo-porn movie denigrating Muslims amounted to apologizing to the terrorists who blew up the consulate. That prompted the White House to get out in front of the investigation into what had happened … probably too far out in front, frankly. At the time, protests were occurring all over the Muslim world related to that video. They chose initially to come down on that side of what was then a cloudy issue.

Where are the jobs, Mr. Boehner? IRS Targeting of Tea Party groups. Indefensible action on the part of the IRS. Though for all of those whose hair is on fire over this, it should be noted that all of the groups who applied, I believe, were ultimately given tax exempt status. Recall, too, that the IRS harassed anti war groups during W. Bush’s administration, but that wasn’t the end of it. There was domestic surveillance and infiltration of political organizations on the left. There were mass arrests and beatings. For chrissake, they even had the Defense Intelligence Agency spy on the Thomas Merton Center! Given the degree of governmental dysfunction that’s attributable to the tea party, it is a bit hard for me to get overly worked up. Wrong, yes … but on the scale of wrongs, this is kind of puny.

Justice Spying on the AP. Welcome to the national security state! We’ve only been living in it my entire life through. The last administration began the open practice of sweeping up all phone calls and email (not that the NSA wasn’t doing that before W). Bradley Manning is still in jail for telling the truth. This is a major problem, but not surprising, and basically the product of national security policies that have gone largely unchallenged by the now outraged corporate press.

Short answer: Don’t use this as an excuse for continued dysfunction. Mr. Boehner: never mind repealing Obamacare for the 27th time. Where the hell are the jobs?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Chain gang.

The thing that keeps popping into my mind as more details of the president’s budget emerge is the notion of how small-bore our political leaders are about everything. We face enormous problems – climate changes, massive unemployment, deindustrialization, economic inequality, rampant militarism, an out-of-control justice and penal system, rampant gun violence, and so on – and yet our politicians behave like the wizened, stingy little men they are and fail again and again to recognize the scale of what’s confronting us. Obama is no exception, his desire to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the Republicans so overriding that he appears to have forgotten who stood out in the sun, rain, whatever, for hours and voted for him last November.

Think bigger.
Think bigger.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine that a Democratic president, serving in the wake of two decades of steady decline for the poor and working class, would opt for a plan that would cut the meager supplemental retirement checks of elderly people in order to preserve preferential treatment for the nation’s wealthy, who have been doing just fine since the Reagan years, thank you very much. He talks about balanced approaches and shared sacrifice, but what he seems to forget is that the vast majority of us have already carried more than our share of sacrifice. Many have paid with their jobs/careers, others with their homes, their retirement funds. And they are supposed to give up more on top of that? Ludicrous.

This is not a new formula, nor is it a surprise. Obama has been signalling this decision for a few years. He is just following the example of previous Democratic party presidents, particularly that of Bill Clinton, who was a master triangulator and who ruled in a way that assumed the poor, the workers, people on the left, and people of color had no where else to go politically. The only remedy for this cynicism is push back. Politicians respond to public pressure – it there is any “law of gravity” in politics, that is it. Look at how quickly the Occupy Wall Street movement changed the conversation over a year ago. It has since drifted back to austerity and small-mindedness, but that can be overcome. Look at the gun debate, at immigration, at gay rights. There is movement because politicians are looking at the masses of people moving these issues forward.

So… if anyone is going to save the poor, the disabled, the elderly, from a greater level of penury (imposed to service the interests of the rich), it will be us. Make a ruckus…. or they’ll fuck us. That is all.

luv u,

jp