Tag: OH

Lesser evilism : Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a golden ticket winner!

Over at truthdig.com, Peter Scheer (Robert’s bro?) rails for lesser evilism:

Being an American citizen and having the right to vote-assuming your state hasn’t stolen that right through a felony charge, a voter ID law or a shifty election machine-is like having a golden ticket. The president of the United States is, for better or worse, the de facto emperor of the world, and you’re possibly one of a minority of people who gets to pick him.

[your enfeebled, minority rights to vote for “de facto emperor of the world” will not be wasted in this democracy…No, sir. ]

Voting isn’t simply a civic duty or a right; it’s a jackpot, one that corporations, political parties and perhaps the ruling elite are constantly trying to take away from you. The choices you make, and that includes the choice not to be involved, will decide where the bombs fall, where in the developing world the HIV drugs get distributed, how poor you have to be to get health care and whether someone whose life experience amounts to horse racing is put in charge of managing our government’s response to natural disasters.  

What a jackpot!  What a golden ticket!  You decide “where the bombs fall.”  

I identify with those progressives who say it is evil for President Obama to send robots across the night to bomb whole villages because someone’s name was added to a secret list we’ll never see. I think it is disgusting that a country that sings of the free and the brave would lock up and essentially torture Pvt. Bradley Manning for courageously defying the faceless imperial beast, as he is alleged to have done. President Obama has done many things in four years that make me grind my teeth.

Scheer leaves no clues as to whether this is vicious satire or not, but I admit to thinking the worst; so I’m climbing out of the interrogator’s window altogether while they freshen their coffee.

Driftglass liberals: Unaware of history since Jan. 2009

Like their mouth-breathing brethren, today’s liberals love to stand up on the chairs and denounce the depredations of conservatives.  And rightly so, as far as it goes.   Outraged liberals have excellent retrograde memories, but seem to have suffered an inability to form new memories since the election of Prez Oh, Brother!

It only takes one example out of many to demonstrate that liberal outrage against conservatives turns out to be nothing but sham outrage, fake, phony, fraudulent partisan bullshit.

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Remember the Bush tax cuts?  Now they are the Obama tax cuts.  The historical trends of wealth distribution are bad enough, and getting frightfully worse; indeed they are hitting asymptote under Obummer! Where’s the liberal outrage?  Aside from a handful of principled stand-outs, we got squat.

We could write a friggin encyclopedia on Oh, Brother!’s horrendous criminal record on war crimes, financial giga-crimes, civil liberties atrocities, but fuck all that.  Lefties know all that.  Ignoring the harsh realities like the fucking historical revisionist hypocrites that keep your outrage meters pegged in the past, while being blind to the present, makes you no better than Andrew Sullivan.  Worse, even.

It’s not the party in power that’s the problem, but the entire imperial wealth pump. The inchoate partisan tub-thumpers refuse to believe their lying eyes.

Wouldn’t I love to see driftglass wield his flame thrower wearing a blindfold?  Sh-yah, crispy neo-liberal Democrats and comatose corporate Attorney Generals are tastier than you’d imagine, but partisans are too busy humpin’ a dead horse at Manassas to notice.  

On the Ground in Ohio

cross-posted from Sum of Change

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COLUMBUS, OH: I am on the ground in Ohio, here to cover the protests for the couple days that I can afford to be away from DC. Today, despite a persistent rain, demonstrators lined the sidewalk outside of the Capitol Building in Columbus to voice their opposition to Senate Bill 5 which threatens state employees’ bargaining rights. Today’s protest was a lead up to tomorrow, when thousands are expected to descend on Columbus.