What the fuck is going on at 1600 Pennsylvania? What the fuck is going on at Democratic headquarters? One should certainly hope they are doing some fucking planning down there that involves some fucking aggression, anger, and malice toward the right, or once again, we are going to see power slip into the hands of the fucking Republicans—like in 1994.
Guess what they’re going to do? You guessed it—exactly the same thing they did back then: constant trials and inquisitions of Democratic officials, representatives, senators, and yes, certainly our president Barrack Obama. Mind you, like Clinton’s impeachment, none of it will actually pertain to the governance of our country, or address the myriad problems our nation faces.
Republicans know they have no solutions they can offer this nation—their intentions are only to fulfill the wishes of their corporate sponsors. They’ll make their political hay on who people fuck and trumped up ethics violations, pretending to be the moral compass of Washington to sway the fools in the bible belt, while deregulating business, disavowing business and the wealthy of their tax burden, and further unionizing moneyed interests with the powers of government. Who knows? Maybe this time they’ll succeed in privatizing social security and get us into yet another war, while again running the economy into goddamn ground.
One would think that for a party run primarily by lawyers with bachelor’s degrees in Political Science or History, the Democrats might have learned their lesson, but by all accounts, they haven’t. They haven’t gone far enough with any of their reforms, they haven’t given the public a clear portrait of why their road has been so difficult, and they haven’t done enough to energize the middle and lower class.
Of course, in some sense, we should respect the fact that Obama hasn’t used his office to play politics the way Bush did. And no one can deny it has been an uphill battle—the full horrifying, corpulent weight of the vultures in the corporate media have been an echo chamber for Republican interests, spreading lies, misinformation, and malcontent unabashedly, with a greedy fucking smile on their face from ear to ear.
However, the fact remains, that the Democrats have made one key error in their judgment: moderation in their agenda hasn’t accomplished anything that more brazen, and frankly more effective policies, wouldn’t have also accomplished. Look, either way, Fox News and the shit heads they employ are going to bitch, whine, lie, and distort everything that Democrats do anyway. You’re going to get called a socialist or a communist either way, so why not show some real guts and do something to engender support from the largest segment of the voting public: the lower and middle classes. You’re certainly didn’t impress us by immediately selling out the public option for health care, never mind completely ignoring the concept of a single payer system. Couple that with a stimulus package that was way too small to stem our economic hemorrhaging, continued wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that apparently still have no end in sight, and a financial regulation bill that was stripped of any real power, and it appears to the little guy that Pete Townshend was right after all: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
And for all of that, Fox still hates you, the Republicans still don’t want to cooperate in the Senate, and you’ve legitimized the idiots in the Tea Party’s complaints about big, ineffective government, backroom deals, and unchecked corporate power. Now if they weren’t half racist, batshit crazy, or both, I could really get along with these Southern assholes.
When are the Democrats going to understand that you don’t earn respect by asking the guy who fucked your girlfriend and hates you to calm down and be more reasonable? The Republican party, and please, please, know that I am spot fucking on here…The Republican party is LOST—they have no idea what they are talking about, they don’t care how bad the economy gets as long as they can get elected, and I can promise you, they don’t give a shit about anyone unless they can fuck them or give them money.
They are the bad guys. There is no compromise with bad guys. Luke Skywalker didn’t fly his X-Wing over to the Death Star to see if he could talk things over with Darth Vader—he fired his fucking photon torpedoes into the exhaust port and blew those fucking bastards to hell! Who does Indiana Jones hate? That’s right: snakes and Nazis. And he doesn’t try to ask them to be less creepy or anti-Semitic…he fucking burns them, kills them, and steals their biblical treasures so that they can’t use them in their war against humanity. Snakes, Nazis, and Sith lords all like Republicans. They vote for them, donate to their campaigns, and feed them coke and prostitutes (the well known fuel of the Republican party). Hell, they thought about nominating Voldemort for the presidency in 2008, but they weren’t sure how the whole wizard thing would play with the religious right. Thank God Harry put that one to rest.
So here’s what we need to do, progressives and Democrats: stomp on the throat of the Republican party. Put them down, dig a 6 foot hole big enough for Rush’s fat fucking face, bury them in a steel coffin, weld it shut, and then fill the hole with concrete. No more waffling, peacemaking, or compromising. We’re done. If someone watches Fox News, you should laugh them out of the room—the facts and the truth are always on our side. If someone talks about the deficit, ask them whether or not they support spending more than the rest of the world on our military budget, or if they support the billions of dollars in tax breaks Republicans have secured for oil companies and the wealthiest Americans. If they talk about freedom, ask them why according to Republicans and the Supreme Court, the rich are far more free than the rest of us, or why Republicans don’t support the DISCLOSE Act, which would lend transparency to campaign donations. If they talk about the economy, why haven’t Republicans been out front on getting a larger stimulus package, and why have they held up unemployment benefits and food stamps, when both liberal and conservative economists agree that every dollar of unemployment/food stamp spending generates nearly $1.75 of economic activity.
I’m not all that happy with what we’ve gotten out of our Democratic government these past two years, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what the Republicans are going to give us. The fact of the matter, however, is that if we lose this fall, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. You simply can’t waffle your victory. You have to take it—violently, if the need arises.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Old Man Assholery (earmuffs)
So for some reason recently, Paul Allen decided to fire Blazer’s GM Kevin Pritchard, arguably one of the best in the business, the architect of the current Blazer squad, the man who made the trade to bring Brandon Roy to Portland. Not that it was surprising—it had long been rumored that Pritchard was on his way out, due primarily to the tenuous relationship he had with Allen.
Now Blazer fans are left with several questions. First of all: why? And if that can be answered, then why in this manner? The way in which Pritchard was dragged through the mud, and then forced to prepare for a draft he would never take part in, was at its best, disgraceful. After all, if Pritchard was so good at evaluating talent, i.e. preparing for the draft, then it goes back to the first question: why was he fired? Isn’t evaluating talent one of the primary jobs, if not the primary job, a GM has? More puzzling is this: assuming Pritchard wasn’t that good at his job, or that there was someone else out there who was better, why wouldn’t Allen have brought that person in to conduct the draft, rather than forcing Pritchard (who according to Allen must be an inferior GM), to do all the grunt work with his job hanging in the balance?
The answer to almost all of these questions is quite simple: old man assholery (pronounced: ass-hul-eree). Old man assholery is a case where you have an old man with way too much power making terrible decisions using outdated ideas and rationale. Instead of making the best decision possible, based on data, projections, and the best information available, the old man goes back to what he knows best: stubborn gumption and a self righteous belief that he knows best and everyone else can go to hell.
It usually begins with some bullshit story about how he accomplished some nominal goal by sheer will, like how in ought-4 he beat the older kids at shucking corn by practicing for hours in the bathroom with his mother’s lotions to develop hand speed, and how this led to him to build a great career and provide for his family, and on and on and on. The thing is, it is almost always the case that the old guy was at one point a great person, but now he’s just falling back on how things worked in the 50’s, rather than adjusting to the new age.
The truth is, there is nothing wrong with old man assholery when the old man isn’t in charge of making consequential decisions. We love grandpa’s that say whatever they feel like—what they say is often extremely humorous, and well, they’re old, so they have a right to say it.
But when that old man is in charge of a professional franchise, like Paul Allen, or Al Davis, or worse, an entire sport (Bud Selig and David Stern), terrible things can happen. I mean, Al Davis still thinks that the way to win football games is to get a quarterback with a huge arm and have him chuck the ball down the field to the fastest black man available. There was a time when that worked…but not anymore. Or take baseball’s commissioner Bud Selig’s resistance to instant replay, and his refusal to reverse the terrible call that ruined a perfect game. His justification was that baseball is a game that values the human element—yeah, you’re right Bud, we do, we value the players, and they are human. But we don’t value an umpire who makes a terrible call and ruins history, and we don’t value hanging that guy up to dry when we possess the technology to get the fucking call right.
And ultimately, we owe it to old man assholery that we have a terrible economy, and nothing ever changes in politics. I love how you hear all these fucking dinosaurs talking about how they hate the deficit, how all these crusty old bastards don’t want to give people health care, how Obama’s a socialist, and all this bullshit. But ask them about how their last visit to the doctor went, and who paid for their last surgery so they can listen to Rush Limbaugh for a few more years. Medicare. Who pays for them to buy these goddamn scooters so they can piddle around for FREE. Medicare. Also known as you and me, the taxpaying public. You’d think they could at least extend us the courtesy of allowing us to have free health care too, but you’d be wrong. Why? Old man assholery. The NRA, the war on drugs, our dependence on foreign oil, our bloated military budget, supply side economics…all due to pure old man assholery.
Look, I get it. It is important to respect one’s elders. And there are a lot of wonderful older people that are rational, sharp, and wonderful parents and grandparents to us. But at some point, when terrible decisions are impacting my life, and the lives of the people I love, I’ve got a right to be mad at the people that are making those decisions. So at some point, we’ve got to say a hearty “fuck you” to these old assholes, put them in a home, and get some people in power who are capable of acting rationally.
Now Blazer fans are left with several questions. First of all: why? And if that can be answered, then why in this manner? The way in which Pritchard was dragged through the mud, and then forced to prepare for a draft he would never take part in, was at its best, disgraceful. After all, if Pritchard was so good at evaluating talent, i.e. preparing for the draft, then it goes back to the first question: why was he fired? Isn’t evaluating talent one of the primary jobs, if not the primary job, a GM has? More puzzling is this: assuming Pritchard wasn’t that good at his job, or that there was someone else out there who was better, why wouldn’t Allen have brought that person in to conduct the draft, rather than forcing Pritchard (who according to Allen must be an inferior GM), to do all the grunt work with his job hanging in the balance?
The answer to almost all of these questions is quite simple: old man assholery (pronounced: ass-hul-eree). Old man assholery is a case where you have an old man with way too much power making terrible decisions using outdated ideas and rationale. Instead of making the best decision possible, based on data, projections, and the best information available, the old man goes back to what he knows best: stubborn gumption and a self righteous belief that he knows best and everyone else can go to hell.
It usually begins with some bullshit story about how he accomplished some nominal goal by sheer will, like how in ought-4 he beat the older kids at shucking corn by practicing for hours in the bathroom with his mother’s lotions to develop hand speed, and how this led to him to build a great career and provide for his family, and on and on and on. The thing is, it is almost always the case that the old guy was at one point a great person, but now he’s just falling back on how things worked in the 50’s, rather than adjusting to the new age.
The truth is, there is nothing wrong with old man assholery when the old man isn’t in charge of making consequential decisions. We love grandpa’s that say whatever they feel like—what they say is often extremely humorous, and well, they’re old, so they have a right to say it.
But when that old man is in charge of a professional franchise, like Paul Allen, or Al Davis, or worse, an entire sport (Bud Selig and David Stern), terrible things can happen. I mean, Al Davis still thinks that the way to win football games is to get a quarterback with a huge arm and have him chuck the ball down the field to the fastest black man available. There was a time when that worked…but not anymore. Or take baseball’s commissioner Bud Selig’s resistance to instant replay, and his refusal to reverse the terrible call that ruined a perfect game. His justification was that baseball is a game that values the human element—yeah, you’re right Bud, we do, we value the players, and they are human. But we don’t value an umpire who makes a terrible call and ruins history, and we don’t value hanging that guy up to dry when we possess the technology to get the fucking call right.
And ultimately, we owe it to old man assholery that we have a terrible economy, and nothing ever changes in politics. I love how you hear all these fucking dinosaurs talking about how they hate the deficit, how all these crusty old bastards don’t want to give people health care, how Obama’s a socialist, and all this bullshit. But ask them about how their last visit to the doctor went, and who paid for their last surgery so they can listen to Rush Limbaugh for a few more years. Medicare. Who pays for them to buy these goddamn scooters so they can piddle around for FREE. Medicare. Also known as you and me, the taxpaying public. You’d think they could at least extend us the courtesy of allowing us to have free health care too, but you’d be wrong. Why? Old man assholery. The NRA, the war on drugs, our dependence on foreign oil, our bloated military budget, supply side economics…all due to pure old man assholery.
Look, I get it. It is important to respect one’s elders. And there are a lot of wonderful older people that are rational, sharp, and wonderful parents and grandparents to us. But at some point, when terrible decisions are impacting my life, and the lives of the people I love, I’ve got a right to be mad at the people that are making those decisions. So at some point, we’ve got to say a hearty “fuck you” to these old assholes, put them in a home, and get some people in power who are capable of acting rationally.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)