Lee Atwater was a name I heard growing up in the 80s and 90s, but never quite knew why he was so important. Growing up in a Conservative household, I certainly was never exposed to toxicity of his campaign strategies. In fact, the whole Willie Horton was viewed as a brilliant political move by Atwater and company in my household. It wasn’t until years later that I learned just what a blight he was, and just how racist and disgusting that Willie Horton ad really was.

Atwater created a campaign for Bush I that played on the South’s fear of blacks, Liberals and Atheism. Sadly, it worked. Governor Michael Dukakis probably would have been a great choice to be the leader of our nation, and maybe that would have meant not having a President Bill Clinton, or at least for another four years later. However, there also would not have likely been a first Iraq conflict, and certainly there wouldn’t have been Bush II or crusade to get done what Daddy couldn’t.

Lee Atwater poisoned the well of political discourse for years to come, and his ghost still hovers over American politics to this very day. Just ask Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich where they got their ideas to talk about abortion and contraceptives from.

#3: Lee Atwater 

No one has done more damage to the political spectrum in the last 30 years than Lee Atwater. Atwater was the man who  took Nixon’s philosophy of campaigning and ramped it up a million or two notches. If Nixon wasn’t afraid to dip his toe into a pool of dirty ads and nasty personal attacks, Atwater three fucking piranhas into the pool and threw his opponents in.

It was Atwater who ran the first George Bush’s campaign for president in 1988. He played dirty, and he got personal. He went after Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis on issues that as a Governor he’d have no ability to vote on or make legislation about. He attacked Dukakis on every front he could other than the issues of the day.

Why? Because he knew his guy, GH Bush didn’t have a pot to piss in thanks to Iran-Contra. Coming out of that scandal that really did rock the Reagan administration, Bush was seen as one of the many dishonest figure heads in Washington that felt the need to lie and cover up our deal with Iran instead of being open and honest. So, Atwater, seeing this fatal flaw in his candidate, helped create a campaign that diverted all of the country’s focus from the real issues of the day, and instead on whether Dukakis was a good, clean, God fearing man. (Gee does that sound familiar to anyone else?)

Atwater was the mastermind of the modern Republican strategy to smear the moral character of the Democratic candidates instead of asking the American people if they agreed with the candidate’s stances and views. He is the truly evil influence in American Political Discourse that has made it impossible to compromise.

He started the goddamned war, in other words. When he died, I heard Hell opened up an entirely new wing to fit his massive fucking ego into it.

It’s always felt like to me that every time Mitt opens his mouth it sounds like Gordon Gekko from “Wall Street.” I know I’m not the only one to make this observation, but we went ahead and made a video to illustrate our point. I’m 99% certain that this is not only how Mitt Romney feels, this is very close to what his inaugural address would actually sound like.

Think about what the Conservative argument really means. They are saying that until a majority of people wish to give a minority certain civil liberties, that minority should just suffer in silence, and keep putting referendums on the ballots. The problem of course being that there’s a reason they’re in a minority; and that deficit of population numbers would immediately translate into a deficit of votes. Despite voter opinions changing rapidly in the last eight or nine years, the fact remains that the numbers still would reflect gay marriage bills being voted down across the board, and there aren’t many signs of that situation changing any time soon.

More galling though, is what happens if you extrapolate the Conservative argument and apply it to past social inequities. Would Conservatives in the 1860s have preferred that Lincoln pen the Emancipation Referendum instead of just proclaiming all slaves free? Would Conservatives have preferred that Jim Crow laws just keep getting vote into the books by racists in the South? Would they have preferred that the Supreme Court not rule on interracial marriages in Loving v. Virginia, preferring instead to have those same racist voters continually vote to keep prohibiting a basic human right from a segment of the population?

Ultimately, Conservatives don’t see the folly of this line thinking because they still don’t equate racial inequality to sexual orientation equality. They’re still by and large ignorant to the fact that the only thing that separates the Civil Rights marches of the 1950s and 60s from the gay pride parades of this modern era is that fifty years ago it was discrimination based on race, and now it’s based on the gender of the person someone wants to share a lasting commitment of love with. In both cases it’s intolerance and bigoted beliefs that prevent the opposition from seeing the light of day.

Unless and until Conservatives are forced to deal with the idea that gay people are here to stay, and that there is no fundamental difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals outside of sexual attraction, the situation will remain unchanged. Lincoln had to proclaim the slaves free, and the Supreme Court had to strike down Jim Crow laws and regulations against interracial marriage. The reasoning was simple: the Declaration of Independence doesn’t speak of inalienable rights that are granted to all citizens after a vote. The Constitution doesn’t guarantee equal protection under the law to just those who the majority have seen fit to grant protection to. Those documents simply say that all people on our shores, within the boundaries of this great nation, are protected equally, and no one is without being worthy of these freedoms.

So how about we Progressives start demanding that Conservatives put up every single tax loophole up for a vote. Every oil subsidy should be put on a ballot, and the voters of America can decide whether or not to keep funneling of billions of dollars back into the very corporations who have already posted record-high profits in the midst of a massive global economic meltdown. It seems that if they’re going to claim that Corporations are in fact people, those people should be subjected the same scrutiny of rights that we’re subjecting other minorities to these days, right? And make no mistake, there are still far more regular people in this country than there are Corporations, so the minority label fits them quite nicely.

Conservatives are criticizing the President for coming out in favor of gay marriage for many reasons. First of course is their closed-minded and closely-held belief that marriage should only be defined as one man and one woman. But because they know how ignorant that line is starting to sound to a lot of Americans, they’re trying to shift focus back onto the economy. They think Obama is weakest there. Of course, he’s weak there because Conservatives and Obama’s own campaign aren’t giving the President enough credit for the recovery he was able to help create with the stimulus bill, which many economists are now saying just simply wasn’t big enough, but it still pulled us away from the fires of a depression.

Maybe we should let them focus the attention on the economy. The fact is that 30 or more years of Republicans chasing the “Reagan Dream” of economic policy has left us battered, bruised and reeling. They can argue against it all they want, but the numbers show that George W. Bush’s tax cuts, combined with two insanely costly wars depleted the surplus that had built up and plunged us into historical levels of debt. Apparently Conservatives were wanting Barack Obama to ride into town and write a personal check to cover the national debt, because all they can do is criticize him for not doing enough.

Focusing on the economy in the right areas will help expose the true causality of this global financial crisis once and for all: capitalism run amok and banking systems whose necessary regulations, installed since the time of FDR, being gutted. If you think the banking industry has learned its lesson since the bailout, ask the folks who had some of their money tied up in the $2 billion dollar investment loss that JPMorgan just copped to last week.

They haven’t learned their lesson, they’re just trying to appear more sympathetic.

It’s time to put corporate tax rebates, loopholes and shelters under the microscope once and for all. If Mitt Romney had to fight for votes in order to keep his stockpiles of cash protected from income taxes, do you think he’d be as vociferously against gay marriage? The reality of course is that tax loopholes, and anything that has a marked and notable financial impact on the economy and therefore the taxpayers should be put up for a vote. We should be able to decide if we’re going to let money-hungry financiers and corporations continue to fuck us over, and we should stop worrying about who are neighbor is fucking behind closed doors.

Chief Conservative Race-Baiting Specialist Joe Ricketts

Reports are the Ricketts, through his Super PAC which is apparently dedicated to eradicating the scourge of government spending (because fuck infrastructure!), would show the ads in the weeks leading up the Democratic National Convention. The idea of course is that they’d be once again bringing to light the allegations that President Obama is a socialist (who kept the Bush tax cuts in place and helped bail out the banks), an Anti-American (who killed Osama Bin-Laden after George W. Bush had decided that he was “just one man”), and is secretly trying to subvert our nation and install something much different in its place. They actually believe this shit, that’s the astounding part.

If the Ending Spending Action Fund does decide to run this $10 million campaign to try to connect Obama to Wright, hopefully someone will ask Ricketts two very tough questions. One, aren’t you just chumming the same waters that were fished in 2008? Secondly, how is this not making race a central issue of the campaign? Wright is a practitioner in the Black Liberation movement whose stated purpose is to free minorities from discrimination and subjugation. Ricketts and the GOP of course will attack the movement’s economic theories which they claim border on socialism, taken from Karl Marx himself, thereby allowing them in their minds to throw their hands up in the air and say, “What? We’re not playing the race card!”

The irony of course is that this very subject was the inspiration for the  “A More Perfect Union” speech that President Obama delivered in March of 2008, about eight months before he would become the first African-American president in the nation’s history. In it, then Candidate Obama spoke of the nuances of life in America, and that while there were still racial divides, his vision for the country was one in which we work to put aside our differences, and not wallow in them. In the speech, which many attribute directly to giving him the forward push in momentum that would eventually carry him to the White House, Obama directly disavowed Jeremiah Wright’s comments. He called him his “former pastor” and made sure to directly criticize Wright’s comments as “denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.”

What made the “A More Perfect Union” speech so perfect was its overall theme. Basically, if you boil it down, Obama’s comments on Wright were translated thusly:

“We all have friends we know and love but who say and do stupid shit. That’s my relationship to Rev. Wright. I love him, but he says some crazy, fucked-up shit sometimes, fucked-up shit I don’t believe in, by the way.”

But it wasn’t just Obama’s distancing of himself from Wright that made the speech so important, it’s that Obama was able to turn the tables on his attackers. He flipped the script, and used their race-baiting as a means to clobber them with intelligent, progressive thought that simultaneously acknowledged the ongoing struggles of minorities, while still saying the time had come to move past it, to work together and truly make the nation “more perfect.” Obama took a potentially damaging tie to someone on the radical fringe of political thought and transformed it into a moving speech about how far we’ve come, and how much farther we have to come. One day, that speech will be afforded the same historical impact that the Gettysburg Address and the “I Have a Dream Speech” carry.

Oh no, Joe Ricketts, please don’t give our candidate another chance to bat your party upside the head with your own fists, tauntingly asking “Why are you hitting yourself?” 

Ricketts and his Super PAC will most likely downplay the racial implications and focus solely on the economic ones. But this is a long-standing political strategy within the GOP, thanks to one of their Patron Saint of Winning at all Costs, Dick Nixon.  In the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon needed a strong showing from white southerners who up to that point hadn’t exactly bought into him. So Nixon was the first Republican to really use the “Southern Strategy” in which race is not directly brought up, but it’s implied through thinly veiled attacks couched as concern over social issues. Reagan did it too in the 1980 campaign.

No, please Ricketts, don't give us another chance for one of these.

It seems like a really stupid waste of money to go after Obama’s ties to Reverend Wright. Someone whose cranium is not fully embedded in their anus over in Rickett’s Super PAC should pull him aside and show him tape from Obama’s speech in 2008. All Rickett’s would be doing is lobbing Obama a nice, mid-80s fastball that splits the plate in two. Imagine what four years of presidential gravitas could imbue to “A More Perfect Union Part II.” The Obama camp is probably licking its chops, quietly praying for the ads to run. Ricketts and his gang can be painted in the light of those trying to play upon the very racial tensions that Obama’s first speech so eloquently and powerfully begged to be put to rest in favor of real change for the better.

Republicans can grouse all they want about not employing borderline race-baiting tactics in their elections, but there has to be something to the unbelievably numerous attacks on Obama’s very allegiance to the nation in which he holds the highest office. Just this week a Colorado congressman had to apologize and back away from remarks he made, calling into question Obama’s loyalty to the country, saying that “In his heart he knows he’s not an American.” As much as Republicans hated Bill Clinton, there was never a question of his citizenship. They did certainly accuse him of trying to push some kind of socialist policy change when it came to health care and instead asked for an individual mandate (gee, how come they hate the idea around fifteen years later?), but they never outright accused him of being un-American or trying to overthrow the government.

I implore the Ending Spending Action Fund to run these ads. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen President Obama hand the GOP its ass on a silver platter in a speech in front of the nation. 

Not just their bitch, Romney is their bottom bitch. That term is used in pimping, per my perusal one night many years ago of the HBO Films documentary “Pimps Up, Hoes Down,” to denote the prostitute in a pimp’s stable that is his most important and protected whore. That’s the perfect description of Mitt’s relationship to the cocksuckers on Wall Street who brought this economy with an ass hair’s breadth of collapse.

Of course Mitt is their bitch, because he is one of them. He’s running his campaign as the Bain Capital Guy. He’s the guy who successfully turned a venture capitalist group into a multi-million dollar operation. What he’s not so keen on telling everyone of course is that Bain got to where it was by systematically fucking over small companies. He’d buy them, load them up with debt, slash wages and benefits, and then dump the companies and run, often leaving good, honest folks out of work. It’s actually quite amazing that he’s gotten himself to the point that he’s at in his political career now, considering that everyone who’s ever run against him has hit him really hard with the “vulture” capitalism claim.

President Obama will join the ranks of Ted Kennedy and Newt Gingrich in driving this point home. As much as Romney claims he’s a jobs creator, his record both as governor of Massachusetts and at Bain Capital proves to be totally otherwise. But Wall Street doesn’t care about that. Wall Street couldn’t give two goddamns about whether Mitt creates jobs, because the only jobs Wall Street truly cares about are its own. Think about it, these are people whose sole job it is to take existing money and turn it into more money. If their money is multiplying like Gremlins who eat after midnight, why would they care about the rest of us?

Romney has promised to not only get rid of the regulations that the Obama team has put in place (you know, those harsh, job-killing regulations that have strangled business in America so much that over three million jobs were created under the Obama administration), he’s going to get them back to the days of Bush II. Think about that for a minute. Romney’s vision of capitalism is one that is completely unfettered, free to fuck over whoever it wants, when it wants. He clearly doesn’t know anything about what caused the Depression in 1929, or the damn-near depression of 2008-2010. Romney is proving that he has no moral compass beyond dollars and cents. Isn’t that kind of thinking exactly what got us in to the predicament we’re in now? People like Mitt Romney are who caused the global economic meltdown in the first place.

Rachel Maddow very brilliantly pointed it out last night on her show on MSNBC. The Bain Capital business model of buy, bloat, dump and run has a truly twisted ending many times. Not only do they kill off businesses, they often leave the U.S. taxpayer holding the bag. As she put it, they put all the risk on the public but take all of the rewards privately. Is it not alarming to anyone else that Wall Street has pulled their backing of President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney? It sure scares the Hell out of me.

Conservatives love to point out that Obama took campaign contributions from a ton of Fortune 500 companies and Wall Street banking and investment firms in 2008. He must be seen as a hypocrite now, right? Wrong.

The American public has a very clear choice, as it turns out, this election. They can choose between a man who took campaign contributions from Wall Street in 2008, but still had the content of character to stand up to them and insist on regulations to protect us from more economic turmoil, and a man who is taking bucket loads of cash from them in 2012, while promising to give them the keys to the candy store. It’s downright disturbing that Mitt got the nomination of his party, let alone the fact the he’ll probably pick up at least forty percent of the popular vote.

If the rise of Mitt Romney within the Republican ranks doesn’t show you just how focused on strengthening the power of the wealthy they are, I don’t know what the fuck will. Just like the GOP’s fight against women’s rights has been well-documented but denied, so to it is with their fight to turn America into a Plutocracy once and for all. It’s not just the fact that Romney has promised to roll back the tide on financial regulations to pre-Obama days that should scare everyone out of their wits. Think about what Presidents have the power to do, specifically in relation to Supreme Court Justice appointments. The court is already in a 5-4 conservative majority. A Romney presidency could appoint another Conservative judge or two, and Citizens United will look like a win for Progressives considering what they’ll be able to get through with an even bigger advantage in the highest court in the land.

Make no mistake, Wall Street the Pimp will do everything it can to protect Romney. In the coming months, they’ll give his campaign oodles and oodles of cash so he can run attack ads against President Obama’s record on the economy. The irony of course being that Obama’s record on the economy is actually quite good, if you consider saving the American Auto Industry, preventing a double-dip recession or even all-out Depression, or recovering all private-sector jobs lost since he took office in 2008 good things. Wall Street will fight those numbers, and send up smokescreen after smokescreen, but the truth will remain that while painfully sluggish, the economy is bouncing back.

Look, I can’t make the decision for you guys. But know this, voting for Romney is like voting for a rapist to be appointed to the Neighborhood Watch as its chief patrolman. In no way, shape, or form is Mitt Romney in the least bit concerned for the average, working class American. It’s why he looks like he’s trying to release a particularly painful and stinky fart every time he talks in front of large groups of us. He will lower taxes for the uber-rich and help create loophole after loophole for the massive corporations who will then turn around and take that extra cash to offshore accounts and tax shelters, that President Romney will help build. He’s bad fucking news for the economy, and it doesn’t take an advanced degree in economics to see it, just an education on what he’s been like his entire life.

Under President Romney, we wouldn’t be told to eat cake, because we won’t be able to afford milk, sugar or eggs.

Here he is on “Real Time” last week. Sorry for the video quality (not mine), and you may want to skip to about 1:00 in.

Taxes aren’t evil Grover, and they aren’t “Spending” as you so ignorantly claim they are. Sure, taxes are the revenue source for a government, but that revenue stream helps to pay for infrastructure. In case you’re wondering, Grover, that infrastructure includes roads, hospitals, Federal education grants. Or as you like to call them: unnecessary shit. No one is more in favor of a Plutocracy than you are, Grover. You know full well that if we did what you want, and we abolished all taxes, our country would fall apart, and the collective wealth of our nation would rest with a small but tremendously powerful minority of rich people and corporations. Sure, our country already fits that description, but a Norquistian Universe would not allow for any way to climb out of that ditch.

He’s a con-man, Grover Norquist. He doesn’t want to abolish income tax to put money back into the pockets of the Middle Class. He wants to abolish all taxes to keep and grow the powerbase of his own slave masters. He’s a tool himself. A very powerful too, but a tool nonetheless. Never in history has a government been able to sustain itself with zero taxes and zero spending. Governments have to spend money. This isn’t even up for debate. We don’t live in the early 1800s anymore, Grover. There are billions of people in this country that need access to the things that our taxes provide, and they are fucking entitled to them because we’re not supposed to be a country of assholes.

I don’t get that line of thinking that Norquist and his fellow Conservatives love so much. They take the old axiom of “Life’s Not Fair” and wallow in it. They say “not only is life not fair, but we’re going to make it as hard as possible too, so get used to it, plebe.” They have this almost sociopathic belief that if life is made excruciatingly hard on people, they’ll have no choice but to go out, get a job, and contribute to society, so there’s no need for a social safety net.

To people like Grover Norquist, poor people dying in the street only present a problem for those who have to clean up the corpses. He’s probably got a friend in the bodily remains removal industry too, so it really wouldn’t bother him at all. What I’m saying is he’s a massive fuckface.

Grover Norquist is the personification of all that is truly revolting and vile about the Conservative movement. On last week’s “Real Time,” he actually played dumb and pretended that he had no idea that the nations that were implementing austerity measures were seeing massive public backlash and change of leadership. Like a stereotypical Conservative, his head was buried in the talking points and rhetoric that things like “facts” meant nothing to him. Norquist is so hell-bent on the destruction of the Middle Class that even when presented with proof that his way of thinking is extremely dangerous and has never worked out well, he pushes on, amassing more and more signatures on his God forsaken pledge to never raise taxes even if Jesus Christ himself tells us to.

But what really sent me into a blind fucking rage on Friday night was when Norquist showed his true colors. In criticizing the Obama Administration’s performance, he said that the Obama recovery wasn’t good enough. In fact, the words he used were “one of the worst recoveries in history.” Stop and let that shit soak in for a second. Think about what he’s really saying. Here, I’ll break it down for you:

1. President Obama did orchestrate an economic recovery
2. The economic recovery wasn’t good enough for Grover’s tastes.

I thought my fucking ears were going to explode. I couldn’t believe what this little man was saying. He was actually giving Obama credit for saving the economy, but it wasn’t fast enough. That’s like Yankee fans saying that some of their team’s 27 championships weren’t as good because it took them seven games to win it. It exposes more than anything what Norquist’s real agenda is. It’s not curbing taxes for the good of the Middle Class. It’s about keeping the rich as rich as possible and therefore scoring a political victory for the Republican party.

Maher’s point about government jobs, which Norquist completely side-stepped, is also a very key tell for Grover. His entire existence hinges on how the Federal government is just too damn big. It’s too big, and it spends too much. So why isn’t he a) sucking Obama’s dick for cutting over half a million public sector jobs or b) factoring that data into the unemployment numbers (which would drop the effective unemployment rate to 7.1%)? The answer of course is simple as can be. Doing either of those two things would show that Norquist is willing to give credit where it’s due, and since he’s obviously just a shill for the Republican agenda, he can’t actually give President Obama any credit for anything. If Grover’s wife was diagnosed with cancer and Obama himself discovered the cure, Norquist would refuse to treat his wife, saying the cure was probably discovered on the backs of the tax payers.

All this time I thought the Republicans were Norquist’s bitch, but as it turns out, he’s just a whore for the GOP.

So I’m choosing to take away from that appearance what Grover actually did say: President Obama orchestrated an economic recovery, thereby fixing what George W. Bush had broken.

Thanks, Grover!

By now we all know the stories about Mitt Romney’s gross hazing of gay kids when he was a teenager. In typical Right Wing style, someone has now dug up “dirt” on Obama, relaying a story from the President’s own memoirs about an incident when a young Barack was in elementary school.

To whichever site I stole this from, THANK YOU.

What it boils down to is that Obama was one of two black kids in school and he was actually being teased in part racially, because a ton of kids were making fun of him, saying he was the boyfriend of the black girl in the school. Being an immature and embarrassed kid, he reacted incorrectly and pushed the little girl in order to “prove” just how much he didn’t consider himself her boyfriend.

Somehow to the Right Wing this was the same as Mitt Romney ruthlessly, and with forethought, brutalizing a closeted homosexual and pinning him down, cutting off chunks of his hair. They’ve got to be fucking kidding us with this story, right? Do they really not see the difference between what Romney did and what Obama did?

No, of course they don’t. They have been programmed by Fox News to not think.

It’s no different, really, from the attacks that the Right Wing made to counteract the story of Mitt tying his fucking dog to the roof of his car. They couldn’t see the difference between the two stories, when clearly a small child in a foreign country without any real control over what he’s fed is in no way comparable to what Mitt did  to his dog.

The truth is that neither dog story really matters all that much and both sides went into unnecessary hysterics over it. But the fact the Right Wing juggernaut saw the Obama eating dog as a kid story as a counter to the Romney story really does demonstrate a fundamental lacking in contextualization. The same can be said of the bullying story.

There really is nothing in common between the two stories, other than they both involved the candidates when they were kids. What the President did as a child, many well-adjusted, and even compassionate people have done. We’ve all made stupid mistakes as children; that’s what being a child is about. But we haven’t all premeditated a borderline hate crime, which is precisely what Romney did.

If Romney did to your kid, what he did to that closeted gay kid in high school, would you be so quick to forgive him Right Wing? 

We all fucking hated bullies growing up, unless you were one. And yes, kids have a tendency to form into cliques anyway, but the reality of the situation is that Romney still shows no remorse for what he did. Obviously President Obama does, thus he put in the book and talked about his feelings then and now directly. Romney just gave a few creepy giggles and tried to spoon feed a line of bullshit about not knowing the kid was gay.

It’s also kind of sad to think that Conservatives are so in the mindset of “Anybody But Obama” that they would go against their natural gut instincts and vote for Romney. He’s the very epitome of everything that went fuck-all-crazy in this country financially. He didn’t get rich working hard. He stayed rich after his Dad got rich, maybe working hard, we’re not even sure about that. 

Taken from the GOP Playbook.

Then again, it’s not really all that hard to believe that they’d sacrifice their own better judgment. These people actually believe that President Obama is a Communist. And when you hand them a dictionary, turned to the page that has the definition of “Communist” on it, clearly demonstrating how much of a Communist Obama isn’t, they plug their ears and run away. They need to buy the snake oil. They need to drink the Kool-Aid.

The bottom line is that Conservatives are scared. They see their way of life being threatened by popular opinion moving away from them on many key issues. Over the last ten years sentiment on Gay Marriage has shifted dramatically as more and more people realize they have gay friends and relatives, and seeing them denied civil liberties isn’t what they want, or what they think the country should be doing. People are waking up to the income inequality and seeing first hand that indeed it is the super rich and Corporate America who are profiting at record high levels while so many Americans struggle to keep the lights on at all.

They’re scared, and so they try and demonize the man. They question his birth status. They question his loyalty to the country. They grasp at every conspiracy theory and thread of lies to try and discredit him…and the scary thing is they could succeed. That is why Obama making the announcement on gay marriage was so important. That’s why Obama coming out in favor of initiatives that guarantee equal pay and equal access to health care for women is so important. Every vote will matter in this election, and President Obama is just helping to draw an even thicker line between himself and Romney.

Sometimes you can tell a lot more about a man by how much he’s changed. Then again, if there’s one man who knows about change, it’s Mitt Romney…at least when it comes to his positions on key issues.

While it’s certainly true that Stalin and Mao were ruthless and capable of perpetrating terrible Human Rights violations, and even a hippie like me can’t excuse those things away, let’s take a deeper look at all the other rhetoric of the Cold War. The truth is that the differences between the evils of Communism, and the state of affairs in a country where Capitalism has been used and abused to the point that it has supplanted Democracy with Plutocracy are really very few.

In every company that’s sold out from underneath employees who have dedicated years, sometimes decades of their lives, you see a similarity. In every instance of a venture capitalist swooping in, flooding a recently bought company with debt and forcing massive layoffs, there you see a similarity. In every instance of a single mother working twelve-hour days to support her kid while a billionaire pays a lower effective tax rate than she does, you see a similarity.

The truth that Conservatives want to hide from the poor, white folks who continually vote for them is that they have no intention of making the distinction between poverty-stricken Americans and those living in Communist Russia in the worst of economic times very clear at all. In fact, can we really say that Corporate America hasn’t inflicted upon the nation the very same impossible living conditions that we were all warned were the tactics of the Red Army?

The answer to that hypothetical is no, in my opinion. The older I get, and the more abuses of capitalism I see, the more I see a sad, sad irony. That irony is that in fighting to protect us from the scourge of massive inequality that creates terrible living conditions under Communism rule, we ignored the Capitalist Predators that came in guns blazing and knocked out the pillars of regulation that made Capitalism so great in the first place.

Let me be clear, I’m actually not a Communist, though my detractors would surely love to pin me as such. I do believe that under the right controls on natural human greed, Capitalism can be a beautiful and productive economic system. The period of time after World War II through about 1972 or so were periods of prosperity the likes of which hasn’t really been seen since.

We were happy to be peaceful again, and we were ready to put our veterans back to work. Then Kennedy challenged us to go to the Moon, and we put every scientific resource behind that challenge. The results were technologies and products that literally changed the way live was lived.

During this period of explosive growth and financial strength, we had much higher tax rates, and yet the Upper and Middle classes didn’t clash like they do now, and the promise of climbing the socioeconomic ladder from Lower to Upper wasn’t a pipe dream. There were examples of it happening all over the place.

Now though, more and more we’re seeing what really happens when Corporations, whose sole purpose it make money, and piles of it, take the reins and deregulate and bust unions up to the point that workers have almost no rights anymore.  It’s hard to imagine that Jefferson, Madison and Adams all figured that “We The People” should be read as “We the People and Our Multinational Corporations.” Corporations are not people. They cannot go to jail. They cannot die in wars. They cannot vote. Oh wait. Yes they can.

There was a reason that we gave our work force the right to unionize, to protect those unalienable rights that our Constitution guarantees. At some point our governing bodies realized that Capitalism was turning employers to brutish thugs whose first thought was the almighty dollar and the health and well-being of their employees was a distant finisher in that race.

There used be a time when there was a bond between employer and employee. It was understood that the employee would be loyal and dedicated in exchange for a decent wage and as comfortable a lifestyle as sensible spending and saving could afford. Now, the Middle Class is so ravaged by the implosion of the housing market and the banking systems that we have a class of people who could never save themselves from mounting debt and lack of income.

At the same time that Capitalism was being abused to the point that we’re at now, Conservatives in Congress and the White House were lowering tax rates and de-funding key infrastructural programs, leaving us in no condition to transition our work force from agricultural to industrial to technological and service based. The reason we have such high unemployment rates is simple: we stopped giving a fuck about education and the Middle Class lifestyle and started buying the bullshit that Republicans were selling about giving the rich more money so they could create jobs and trickle down their wealth upon us.

Oh, they ended up tricking down on us. They trickled unemployment, massive student loan debt and a lack of respect for intellectualism. 

We dumbed-down our populace and convinced them that as long as the Dirty Commies weren’t running the global political theater, everything would be fine. We were told that the Free Market would correct itself magically because that’s what markets do. Because you know, they aren’t run by human beings whose very nature is to take, take, take, right?

So the question still stands, what exactly is the difference between the “evils” of Communism as told to us by our Cold War leaders and the state of the decimated, pillaged and abused Capitalism we have now?

You tell me.

Everyone. The answer is fucking everyone.

Then the dummy goes and “apologizes” about the pranks, but says “Oh, I didn’t know that any of my victims were gay!” So how does Mitt show real remorse for being such an undeniable dickhead his entire life? He comes out against gay rights the very day that President Obama took the boldest historical move on the same issue. In other words: he fucked it up, big time.

This is the kind of thing that those of us who are watching this race carefully (so we can viciously make fun of him) were dying to get to. The other Circus of Idiots who were running against him in the Republican primary helped expose his Gordon Gekko alter-ego, so now we all know what a money-loving, tax-doding cocksucker he is in business. But to see that he was just as much a douche when there was no money involved is just icing on the goddamned cake.

The truly amazing thing about this development of course is that Republicans are still going to back him. They’re still going to vote for the smarmy, grey-streaked son of a bitch. Why? Because Barack Obama is black going to subvert America’s institutions and rip the very Democracy on which our country is built apart. Now, not only is Obama a Socialist/Communist/Fascist/Muslim who wants to impose Sharia law and make us a Socialist country (I swear, it hurts just typing this shit, and it’s all things they actually say about the man!), now he wants to give the gays the right marry?!

The reason it won’t effect Mitt Romney’s chances is that the Republican party is so combative, so divisive, and so unwilling to change that they would rather put a man in office who has done nothing but trample over every good and decent person he’s met to get ahead, a man they know is a complete asshole, then let Obama have another four years. Mark these words: if Obama does succeed in November, and if we don’t hand control of the House back over to the Democrats, the witch hunt is on. Yes, they will find something to bring up on on Impeachment charges, and they will do everything they can to undermine his second term.

Don’t believe me? Think I’ve gone all hyperbolic? Ask Bill Clinton about what happened when he won in 1996. All of a sudden a personal indiscretion becomes national headlines, and we’re having Congressional hearings on what exactly oral sex qualifies as on the sexual activity spectrum. I was in a household at the time that hated Bill Clinton, because that’s what they were told to do, by Rush Limbaugh and Bill Buckley and George Will. And any other Right Wing media mouth piece who was on at the time.

They all painted Bill Clinton as not only the worst President, but the worst human being on the planet. Now they’re doing the same thing with President Obama. What’s really galling is the way the Right has managed to vilify so many great men, simply because they were Democrats. Going all the way back to Jimmy Carter, and probably beyond. But Carter was the first Democratic President to just get absolutely shit on by the Right Wing. He was called stupid, simple-minded, too idealistic to be a good head of state.

Mitt Romney, Most Likely to be a Douchey Wall Street Cretin

The reason this was happening of course was the nation was still smarting from the ass-raping it took at the hands of Richard Nixon, and Ford was just a puppet, his presidency a footnote. So in order to rebuild the brand, in order to do massive clean-up in the wake of Hurricane Dick,  they had to go on the attack. Carter was at worst a victim of circumstance, and yes he was extremely head-strong and idealistic. But compared to the lies, treachery and deceit at the hands of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, really, who looks like a worse person now?

And to just add insult to injury, Conservatives will look you square in the face and tell you they’d rather have fifty George W. Bushes before they get one more Barack Obama, or one more Bill Clinton. But the truth is that both Clinton and Obama get this treatment because they scare the Right. They scare them because they are charismatic, forthright, good human beings with real, Progressive ideals that actually would move the country forward into the future, instead of backwards into the 1850s.

The irony of course is that the Draconian fiscal and social policies that Romney trumpets as being the road to recovery are truly to be feared. A Romney administration would be a thing worthy of intense and debilitating terror.

Unless you’re white, believe in some form of Jesus, don’t want gay people to be happy, and have a fuck-ton of cash. Then Mitt’s your guy.

*Not an actual revelation, though there’s still lots of time before November.

The genius that is Bristol Palin.

The 10 Best Reasons to Tell
Bristol Palin to “Shut The Fuck Up”

#1: You’re like, what? 19 years old? Shut the fuck up.

#2. I want to buy you a dictionary app for your iPhone, and teach you how to spell “Moron” so you can look it up and see your picture next to it. Shut the fuck up.

#3. Seriously, you’re like fucking 12. Shut the fuck up.

#4. Remember how dumb your mother is? Now subtract 30 years’ worth of life experience. That’s you. Shut the fuck up.

#5. On behalf of the entire planet Earth, let me assure that no one wants to hear your opinion on anything. Shut the fuck up.

#6. You were on “Dancing With the Stars.” Shut the fuck up.

#7. There’s an old axiom that I think applies here. “People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up.”

#8. So you’re telling us that Obama is trashing the sanctity of marriage by supporting the rights of two consenting, responsible adults to get married, regardless of their sexual orientation; but that you didn’t by making a baby with a man-child with an IQ that hovers around your age? Shut the fuck up.

#9.You made a baby with Levi Johnston. Shut the fuck up.

#10. Shut the fuck up.