Chronically Pissed

Live from the Convention (in my living room)

What the hell is wrong with Democrats?

The coverage leading into the Democratic Convention in Denver is overwhelmingly focused on a very bizarre breed—mostly former supporters of Hillary Clinton—who claim that they will not vote for Barack Obama. I just heard an NPR report on anti-war voters who now feel that Barack Obama is not anti-war enough for them. I then turned on MSNBC to find Chris Matthews talking to a group of Clintonite protesters spouting off about a “17-page congressional investigation” which found that Barack Obama had attended a Muslim school in Indonesia. (Pressed for details, it turned out that a “former Congressional investigator,” whom these psychotic bitches would not or could not name, had written this report, which claims that Obama was “registered as a Muslim” at the school he attended in Indonesia. They claim to be part of an 3-million person organization that is going to deny this election to Barack Obama by voting for John McCain. Even Matthews couldn’t resist calling them insane by the end of the segment.)

Do you really want to do this again? Do you really want to nitpick the Democratic candidate again? Have you learned nothing—NOTHING—from the last two elections? Do you have any idea how fucking childish and dangerous your behavior is? I, for one, wish there were an atheist candidate—or at least one that didn’t feel obligated to sit down and answer absurd questions from Rick Warren like “When does an adorable little baby named Johnny get the human rights that will stop a doctor from sucking him out of the womb with a combination vacuum/wood-chipper?” (What does God think about obesity, Rick?) That candidate isn’t available right now, so I have to settle for the one who only panders to the Christian right. I wanted Joe Biden to be at the top of the ticket, but guess what…HE LOST. Poor me. As it happens, the guy who won happens to be a highly intelligent, deeply progressive, liberal Democrat who is more interested in getting me health insurance than in bombing Iran.

America has looked at these two candidates and split evenly as of today, give or take a percentage point or two. Obviously Republicans are going to vote for McCain—although I’d like to think that many of them are ashamed enough to at least stay home on election day. What disturbs me to the core of my being are the so-called Independents and, even worse, the Democrats who can’t bring themselves to support Obama. I am disturbed because there is only one plausible explanation for their mindset: good old-fashioned bigotry. No clear-minded non-Republican could look at these two choices and come to the conclusion that John McCain is the man to get America off the track that 80% of Americans believe is the wrong track—unless they harbor, somewhere in their persons, a distrust or dislike of an African American man with a funny name.

If are anti-war, McCain is clearly not your man. If you are a feminist, McCain is clearly not your man. If you are pro-choice, McCain is clearly not your man. If you make less than $5 million per year (and own less than seven homes), McCain is clearly not your man. But even if you are all those things, if you don’t like black people…well, McCain might just be your man.

If high turnout among non-bigots is the only factor that can put Obama in the White House, I’m afraid that America has already lost, whether Obama wins or not. 

Some Post-Biden/Pre-Convention Thoughts

BARACK & JOE

I loved The West Wing, even after Aaron Sorkin left and the show got a little melodramatic and silly. Rarely did an episode fail to evoke chills, tears, or both. So badly did I yearn for the fiction to be reality—I started season one after Bush was elected—that I often found myself confused about what events were and were not happening in the real world.

What so inspired me was the portrait of a White House in which fundamentally decent people worked tirelessly and fought valiantly for the America they had read about in their fifth-grade textbooks. Their motives consisted—almost exclusively—of an irrepressible, inexplicable devotion to the ideas that are most associated with this nation: liberty, equality, and justice. Sure, ambition played a role, as it always will in human affairs, but it was always subservient to the greater good.

And so, after eight years of leadership by born millionaires—men whose devotion to America has always been trumped by their devotion to capitalism—I found myself in tears this afternoon at the prospect of Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the White House.
These are men whose biographies are comprised entirely of public service. These are men whose lives more closely resemble the lives of 95% of the populace than those of the two current occupants of the White House or that of their opponent, John McCain. These are men who never sought fortunes from the private sector (or married into them), despite having the credentials to do so. These are men whose only discernable, shared motive is their irrepressible, inexplicable devotion to the America they learned about as children.

JOHN

Don’t get me wrong, McCain doesn’t seem to be motivated by money, though it would be hard to tell if he was, given his net worth of $40 million and his wife’s vast fortune. He has an intense, violent, militaristic devotion to America that complicates my efforts to understand him. In 2000, he seemed like a decent, centrist candidate. Today he looks like an empty shell of a man grasping for the prize that he thinks should have been his back when he was younger. In his quest to take the job Bush stole from him (before he stole it from Al Gore), he has sacrificed all of the principles that made his appeal marginally understandable eight years ago. In doing so, he has capitulated to the people in his party who are motivated by money, endorsing a continuation of the BushCo economic policy that has served most Americans poorly.

Yes, he served our country in Vietnam, but so did the clearly insane homeless guy who begs for change when I get off I-95 every day. McCain’s service does not tell me any more about who he is today than does the fact that he had extramarital affairs after coming home from Vietnam and finding that his wife, who had been in a horrific car accident while he was away, was shorter, fatter, and crippled. His service does not tell me any more about who he is today than does his involvement in the Keating Five scandal 20 years ago. All I know about John McCain today is that he has aligned himself inextricably with the policies of George W. Bush. All I know about John McCain today is that he has scampered into the arms of social and fiscal conservatives with reckless abandon and that he seems unable to grasp the economic hardships that most of us are experiencing. All I know about John McCain today is that he is desperately exploiting his status as a veteran at every opportunity. John McCain does not belong in the west wing.

Now I know that it is probably a waste of time, but I have to at least try to address the stupefyingly irrational, circular “logic” of the McCain campaign’s response to Obama’s selection of Joe Biden. Here goes…

They start by saying that Obama has confirmed his weakness in international affairs by selecting Biden. According to this logic, I must assume that if he had selected Michael Phelps, he’d be admitting to a deficiency in winning gold medals for swimming; that if he’d selected Ron Jeremy he would be admitting to a similar weakness in self-fellatio. I thought that the whole idea was to select a running mate who complemented the candidate’s skill set. I wonder whether the McCain camp will accept similar criticism with regards to economic issues if McCain selects someone like Mitt Romney—or whether the selection of someone younger will amount to an acknowledgement that he’s too goddamned old to be the president. Are they actually suggesting that the presidential candidate should select someone who is inferior in every conceivable way—like Dan Quayle? Have they already forgotten George W. Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney—whom I assume these people admire and whose active role in advancing the neo-conservative agenda within the administration they seem to approve of?

They go on to diminish their own candidate by maligning Biden’s 35 years in Washington, apparently forgetting that John McCain has been there for 25 years. They say this undermines Obama’s message of “Change,” which they didn’t approve of in the first place. Biden’s got too much experience and Obama has too little. Let’s talk about that a little…

Too little experience—in what? Foreign policy? Uh, excuse me, but can anyone describe to me the foreign policy credentials held by the conservative messiah, Ronald Regan, when he ran for president in 1980? And dare I remind everyone that George W. Bush had barely left the continent before he ran in 2000? Donald Rumseld has extensive foreign policy experience but not a single fucking iota of sense or humility. Why has the media accepted Obama’s “thin resume” as a relevant factoid to be incorporated into every analysis of this race? Maybe because his resume is verifiable, whereas wisdom and decency are less tangible. It’s safe to say that Obama has a thin resume—less so to say that John McCain is dangerously volatile, not that bright, ethically pliable, and seems to be losing his mental faculties with age.

John McCain’s much-lauded “experience” involved getting shot down over Hanoi (which may or may not have involved incompetent piloting), not having the sense to drown himself in the ocean before being captured, refusing early release out of pride, realizing that that had been a colossally stupid decision, unsuccessfully attempting to take the coward’s way out by killing himself in captivity, making an anti-American confession—the validity of which may or may not be in doubt due to the fact that it was allegedly coerced out of him via the torture he now supports—and returning home to abandon his crippled wife, who had waited faithfully for him. The balance of his experience, in the House and Senate, is incredibly similar to that of Joe Biden’s, whose experience they are now deriding. Insanity, I tell you.

HILLARY

Finally, I need to say another word or two about Hillary. I refuse to believe the reports of Hillary supporters who have not thrown their support behind Obama. Some of them even claim that they’re going to vote for McCain. If these people actually exist, they’ve clearly lost track of what they were fighting for in the first place. It would be one thing if Clinton and Obama had been ideologically opposed—like McCain and the rest of the Republican field—but this was a contest about personality and character. One of them won. The other didn’t. To put it in Olympic terms, this is roughly the equivalent of some American fans of the Serbian swimmer Milovad Cavic trying to deny the gold medal to Michael Phelps for the men’s 100-meter butterfly because he only won by one 1/100th of a second. It doesn’t matter whether he won by one 1/100th of a second or three days. He won. Gold medal. Shut up and take your silver medal…which, by the way, is not the vice-presidency.

The vice-presidency is not a consolation prize. George W. Bush did not offer the vice-presidency to John McCain; Al Gore did not offer the vice-presidency to Bill Bradley; Bill Clinton did not offer the vice-presidency to Jerry Brown or Paul Tsongas; George W. Bush did not offer the vice-presidency to Bob Dole; Bob Dole did not offer the vice-presidency to Pat Buchanan; Michael Dukakis did not offer the vice-presidency to Jesse Jackson. Shall I go on? I thought not.

It doesn’t matter how close it was. Second place is 2nd place, no matter how you type it. If you’d like to propose a constitutional amendment mandating that the vice-presidency goes to the 2nd place contender, good luck with that. Otherwise, your advocacy is detrimental to the causes that endeared Hillary to you—unless your only cause in life is to see someone with a vagina become the president. If your causes include affordable health insurance, an end to the war in Iraq, the environment, the deficit, the economy, or the rapid decline of America’s image in the world, you need to get on the bus.

Okay…I think I’m done now. For now.

OBAMA/BIDEN NOW

I Say A Little Prayer For You...

Here's some more profound stupidity for you:

Americans' health care costs are skyrocketing, it takes me a month to get an appointment with a physician, emergency rooms are jam packed - and yet a majority of Americans say they prefer God over the words and actions of medical professionals.

Listen people, if that's the case - would you mind staying home and praying, rather than clogging up the hospitals and doctors' offices and driving up my health insurance premiums?

Better yet, how about asking God to do a better job in the first place? I mean, maybe if he actually had any power (or existed) to begin with, everyone wouldn't be dying of obesity, war, famine, disease, murder, drugs, and disaster, thus eliminating the need for these know-it-all doctors with their fancy PhDs, sipping their lattes while they tell you you're going to die of injuries sustained when you wrapped your BMW around a Hummer doing 90 mph while talking on your cell phone and eating a Big Mac.

Actually, they're probably not telling you so much as telling your family while they adjust the tubes in the braindead body that once belonged to you, but which is now being kept artificially alive, while your family's hope is being kept artificially alive by the prospect of divine intervention. If you were a dog, medical advice would be good enough to end whatever suffering you may be going through - in addition to the astronimically high costs that are compounding with every fake breath you take. But since you are one of god's two-legged inventions - the kind that has opposable thumbs and can speak a language that other humans understand - you are likely doomed to the Terry Schiavo treatment until someone comes to their senses and puts a proverbial bullet in your head. Mercy for Eight Belles, prayers for you.

Or how about this charming story:

After denying Javon Thompson food and water for two days because he wouldn't say "Amen" after meals, the 1-year-old's caretakers waited for a divine sign that their message had been heard: a resurrection.

That story is brought to you by 1 Mind Ministries, led by a woman who calls herself Queen Antoinette. I don't see what everyone is all worked up about. She was simply putting the beliefs of a majority of Americans into practice, relying upon God to sustain or resurrect little Javon even when any competent medical professional could have told her that was impossible.

Religion: It's all fun and games until little Javon doesn't rise from the dead.

It's a Scandal! It's a Outrage!

For the record, I don’t care what John Edwards did with his dick. It’s none of my goddamned business. It’s none of anyone’s goddamned business except John Edwards, his family, and yet another not-so-cute mistress of a Democratic superstar. I don’t care if he lied to the public about it because it wasn’t our right to ask. If he’d been a moralizing conservative who had devoted most—or any—of his attention to restricting the sexual freedoms of other Americans (while secretly engaging in extramarital, homosexual, and/or prostitution-al sex), I would feel differently, but John Edwards has devoted his time and energy to the socioeconomic betterment of Americans’ lives. His private "failures" are none of our fucking business and we should be ashamed of ourselves for being so enthralled by this story. And if money changed hands to cover this up, the extortionists should be sent to jail and the media indicted as their co-conspirators.

I can barely fathom the spectacle of news organizations covering this as if it were the equivalent of forging documents, fabricating evidence, and lying to the American people into a cataclysmically mismanaged war. All the talk of disappointment and betrayal just sounds surreal to me. The guy did what a majority of married men have done since the dawn of time. He fucked another woman. When will this incredibly common storyline cease to shock people? When will Americans (as opposed to Europeans, for example) stop feigning moral indignation about something that everyone is doing? When will we develop a healthier, more honest attitude about sex—an attitude that is able to reconcile the pragmatic and emotional value of domestic commitment with the simple fact that men will never stop wanting and trying to fuck other women?

I know it’s going to be harder for the women reading this to understand this perspective, even though many of you are fucking around on us too. Sluts. What you don’t understand (because you were raised on bullshit fairy tales that paint a portrait of love that could only lead to disappointment) is that men view and experience sex in a fundamentally different way than you. For whatever reasons—biological, sociological, whatever—sex is nearly always an emotional experience for you. It can be an emotional experience for us, but it can also be, in the words of a great man, “the equivalent of eating an egg salad sandwich.” So while it may look to the outside world as though John Edwards has done something monumentally stupid, on the inside he simply couldn’t comprehend that anyone would really care, or that newspapers would put this in the same column as CHENEY’S OFFICE OUTS CIA OPERATIVE, or TENET ORDERED FORGED DOCUMENT, or BUSH AUTHORIZES ILLEGAL WIRETAPPING OF AMERICANS. After all, he wasn’t going to leave his wife and children—he was just going to fuck this broad seven ways from Sunday, wash up, and go home for dinner. Who cares?

I don’t really mean to get into a full-throated argument for sexual anarchy. I just wish we would turn our backs on this nonsense. Again, it’s one thing to expose moralists for their hypocritical indulgences (see: Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Bill Bennett, David Vitter, et al). It’s another thing to dig into the life of a man who has already dealt privately with the people to whom he is responsible. We shouldn’t be asking these questions and we shouldn’t be listening to anyone else ask them for us. And we don’t need to respond, on cue, with the scripted shock, disappointment and outrage. It’s pathetic…really. Let the Republicans flaunt their alleged moral superiority from their respective brothels and airport restroom stalls while the rest of us focus on more important issues. Don’t validate their faux piety by pretending that this incident somehow invalidates the man’s life and work. Fuck them. If this is “the end of John Edwards’ public life,” it will be because we didn’t have the courage to say “Why the fuck would this be the end of John Edwards’ public life? What does this have to do with the issues John Edwards has devoted his life to? What do we care if he was getting a little ass on the side while he tried to alleviate suffering for millions of people around the world? Hell…what good is trying to alleviate suffering for millions of people around the world if you’re not going to get a little ass on the side?”