Check out the following video and see if you get any feelings of deja vu…
Now, forget for a moment about the guy caressing his shotgun and the other guy claiming that the Democrats are the root of all evil in the world. Also, forget about the scene where the latter suggests that Republicans are the only ones who allow him to say what he wants to say without fear of going to jail (perhaps it’s because he’s a white male traditional family values sort of guy that he’s never had to worry about saying anything too controversial).
Take that ridiculousness out and what are you left with? You got it. President Obama’s election winning message. It’s as if all the Rush Limbaugh fans (who could never hope to have an original thought) got together and did an awkward tribute video for Barack Obama. Gotta make sure you include lots of regular working class people. Throw out the fear mongering of the Bush years and talk about change and hope. Talk about how the little guy’s getting screwed. Talk about freedom to do what you want to do and the government listening to the middle class for a change.
So that’s how they’re going to rebuild their party? By parroting the stuff that worked for the Democrats and hoping everyone will forget the last eight years? It’s like a guy who beats his wife and then tells her, “Baby, ain’t no one gonna love you like I do.” Ha! All the while, images of Ronald Reagan float from scene to scene as if he was their Messiah and they’re waiting for him to rise again! Somehow, I just can’t buy that the guy who brought us the Iran contra scandal would be able to start turning water into wine.
In case you guys haven’t noticed, YOUR FEARLESS LEADER got us into this cluster fuck of an economy. How about holding off rebuilding the party that made it possible for such a complete dumb ass to lead the free world into disaster for just a few months and pitch in. You guys love talking about patriotism, right? Well wouldn’t that involve lending a hand to the guy trying to fix things? He’s not going to get everything right, but he’s trying, damn it, and you’re being a bunch of twits about it because he’s trying something different. Do you really think he wants to fail? Of course not. That means you share the same goal. Because the Democrats are in charge now and you’re not, they’re going to try a different strategy. You’re just going to have to deal with that. Now it’s your chance to be a sober voice of opposition, to point out specific flaws in any of their proposals and get them fixed. That, or you can keep pouting and let them claim all the credit for any progress that is made.
Most of us know the story of Pandora’s Box. Girl gets box and is told not to open it. Girl opens box. Much badness occurs.
I’m sure some government officials are feeling that way about the Citizen’s Briefing Book. Check out the opening page here, where some of the people in charge give responses to the more popular issues. Nothing strange about that – until you dig a bit deeper and find out how to list the issues with the most popular ones on top. And what’s the most popular issue? That’s right, as of January 23, 2009, it’s still marijuana reform.
Now, I’m not saying that President Obama needs to end the many silly years of drug prohibition as his first act of office or even at all. I think we can all agree (even those of us who support an end to prohibition) that he has much more important issues to deal with. And President Obama has made it clear that he does not support an end to prohibition himself, despite having experimented in his youth. He sees it as just that – something dumb he did when he didn’t know any better. Agree or disagree, that’s his opinion. Given that he doesn’t support it himself and it’s so entrenched in American policy that he’d make a ton of enemies if he tried to push any sort of reform in this area through, I don’t think we’re really justified in expecting this to go anywhere. The time for freedom over our own bodies is still to come. Let’s be happy for now with the breath of fresh air we’ve gotten.
However, if President Obama really wants to put his money where his mouth is on “transparency in government”, he should at least recognize the popularity of the issue on the platform his people set up. For anyone who put so much faith in President Obama’s willingness to listen to the people, it’s got to be kind of troubling to see the responses from his staff address the other “top issues” while dancing around that one most popular issue. As embarrassing as it may be, it’s sticking out like a sore thumb when officials are addressing, via video, other top issues which actually received fewer votes. Yeah, it’s a bit of bad PR to recognize that this is what the people used your new democracy tool to bring up, but you’ve got to take the good with the bad.
I still think this will be an age of enlightenment in leadership, thanks to President Obama, and wish him the best of luck. Seeing him win on November 4th of this year hits near the top of my list of favorite moments. But I will be nevertheless a bit disappointed if he does not continue this meme of openness and transparency that he has unleashed and at least recognizes the top issue in his Citizen’s Brief and explains his reasons for not pursuing it.
Could you imagine anyone who didn’t light up even just a little during President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech? And even with all the speculation, can you imagine anyone who would be 100% certain on the very first day of the new presidency that it is doomed to be a complete failure? How about if the prospect of failure was actually the only thing that gave such a person any joy, even if failure meant this already bad economy going completely into the shitter? Strange days indeed when, instead of the expected cartoon villain, we find out that such a person actually exists in the form of the delightfully belligerent Rush Limbaugh, the self proclaimed “Doctor of Democracy”. Check out his Tuesday address to his equally pig headed fans.
My favorite part is the beginning where the caller says the speech was boring because he couldn’t follow what the President was saying. Meanwhile, the rest of us are thinking: “Finally, a President whose policies and speaking ability aren’t at a level that Rush Limbaugh’s fans can handle!”
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Bloomington, Illinois. Floyd, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, Rush?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Yeah, mega dittos, sir.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: Okay, Bo wanted me to talk about the speech? And provide my feelings on the speech?
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, that’s why we took your call.
CALLER: Okay. I found it very boring. You know, I wasn’t following what he was saying, you know, and everything. And I found myself a couple of times actually drifting off and not paying attention, it was so boring. Also, did you notice at the beginning, maybe I was hearing things, but at the beginning, was the crowd saying, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” Did they do that little chant thing when he stepped up to the microphone?
The Obama teams’s commitment to transparency and interaction with constituents seems to be running strong. Check out their posting of the MPAA’s lobbying issues here. The document itself is scary stuff. It represents a fundamental ideology of most big business these days: socialize the risk and policing of people in the interests of big business and privatize the wealth. Remember when the uber-capitalists used to cry in indignation about any form of government regulation? Well, here it is in black and white: the media giants want more regulation in order to protect a dying business model. There are about 50 comments so far, all of them appealing to the Obama team’s commitment to fairness, justice, and economic smarts. With any luck, not only will the American people avoid more crippling laws on top of the DMCA, but they might even be able to roll back some of the most harmful ones. I hope that more Americans weigh in on this, especially as the MPAA also wishes to put more pressure on countries like Canada to conform to their myopic vision of the entertainment market.
I’m reading Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, which makes a very passionate argument for moving away from the 20th century copyright laws that the big media companies seem to have a death grip on, even as technology pushes onward and these laws seem more and more ridiculous. I thought I’d find some more information on his work and ended up watching this presentation on his site: I find this very interesting for a number of reasons: (more…)
Check out what Rush Limbaugh has to say about Barack Obama’s amazing acceptance speech on Tuesday. I suppose the guy does make his living off of being a hypocritical jackass, so it’s understandable that he couldn’t even wait a day to reflect on one of the most inspirational speeches of our lifetime before critiquing it.
This is one of my favorite parts:
OBAMA: The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.
RUSH: Okay, I remember that bite. Where are we going? He didn’t tell the crowd where we were going, and the crowd didn’t care where they’re going.
Now, before you get too worked up about this, just imagine Mr. Limbaugh applying this same expert analysis to Martin Luther King: “You have a dream?!?!?! What dream? What kind of funny business are you trying to pull here, mister?”
It’s easy to get angry reading a transcript like this, which just reeks of stupid, but you’ve got to put it in perspective. These are the dying gasps of an old system. It’s a system based on anger and hate, and on Tuesday, the majority of Americans decided it had been around for long enough. It’s all the poor guy knows. As Obama was fond of pointing out about McCain, “He just doesn’t get it.”
Let him rant and point fingers. And let’s concentrate on proving him wrong.
Just got a message from Stella at wejustlivehere.com and am happy to put it up:
We’d all love to vote in this election because it impacts us as much as folks who’re just born here. So we put up this site to show what would happen if the millions of US aliens who can’t vote, could.
Just taking a glance at the results, one can see why it would be in the Republicans’ best interest to make gaining your U.S. citizenship difficult. Thanks, Stella!
It’s short and well worth the time to read. But to whet your appetite, here’s my favorite part of the article:
I’ve learned that this election is about the heart of America. It’s about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It’s about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.
The full interview is well worth your time. In it, Kennedy delivers a concise, but passionate and convincing (though, admittedly, I’m part of the choir he preaches to) critique of how, over the last eight years, the Bush administration has squandered the goodwill towards America that had been built up over the years by better, wiser leadership, and how that goodwill might be regained. The man shows an obvious love for his country, both in the way he holds to his ideals and in his anger over the way things have gone. He also (only half jokingly) suggests that Canadians can do their part by sneaking over the border and voting for Obama .
And for anyone scratching his or her head and saying, “What’s with the voice?” here’s a link that explains his condition, spasmodic dysphonia, which affects only the voice box of only 0.02% of the population.
This reminds me of an idea of Sartre’s that I learned in a class on existentialism. Here’s the existentialist definition of a hero: someone who does heroic things. See, existentialists don’t just allow someone to walk around labeling themselves a hero, and according to this philosophy, the best that could be given to John McCain is a “used to be” status. Really… what has he done in the last month but run from every opportunity to show his heroism? No, doing a speech in the rain does not trump being a P.O.W., but it does show in a very visual way how this former P.O.W., for whatever reason, has lost some of his supposed determination and perseverance. And again, I have to bring up the Rolling Stone article that questions whether he even ever truly was the mythical hero that he’s been promoted as. Yes, it is undeniable that John McCain suffered in ways that most of us don’t even want to imagine, and he made great sacrifices for his country. But it is not 1973. He was a hero, like many other P.O.W.’s who are not running for office, but no matter how many repetitions of the story we hear, talking about the past does not make it present.
And then there’s Sarah Palin, riding on the coattails of the myth. John McCain is her own personal Jesus, and she’ll invoke his suffering every chance she gets to boost her own status.
Make no mistake, I think Barack Obama knew the importance of not calling a speech on account of the rain. If we’ve learned anything about George W. Bush, who is the furthest thing from a hero any of us know, it is the advantage of heroic looking photo ops. Obama will have a lot to live up to when he becomes President. Especially now. But if he does, I’m betting that those rain drenched pictures become media favorites.
The thing that a lot of Republicans feel proud about is their supposed pragmatism. And “putting country before party” has been a big winner at McCain rallies. But what does that mean, given Obama’s much better grasp of the issues facing America? The McCain campaign has as much as admitted defeat on the issues, spending the last couple of weeks flailing around for any mud they can find to fling at the Democratic ticket. It’s refreshing to know that there are still a few of those truly pragmatic Republicans around. You can find them at the Republicans for Obama site.
As for the Republicans who have decided to stick with the McCain ticket? Hopefully there weren’t too many who pinned their hopes on Ashley Todd, a woman who figured she’d prove that Obama would be a horrible president by pretending to be robbed and beaten by a fictional African American Obama supporter.
Presidential debates would certainly be more entertaining if they followed this format, though I have my doubts that John McCain or Sarah Palin have anything close to these moves…
John McCain announced today that he loves being the underdog and, “My friends, we’ve got ‘em just where we want ‘em!” And, you know, this sounds like a pretty authentic statement from a guy who thought the U.S. could have won in Vietnam if they’d just stayed a little longer and who doesn’t believe in a time-line for withdrawal from Iraq. With McCain appearing (finally) on David Letterman and Sarah Palin making her debut on Saturday Night Live, it looks like it’s all style over substance from here on in, which is sort of funny when you remember that this is an accusation normally made against Barack Obama. It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for John McCain. It’s like watching your own grandpa make a fool out of himself on prime time TV. You’d like to coax him out of the spotlight somehow. “Grandpa, it’s time for your nap.” But it’s no use. The Republican machine has been brought up to full steam, and it will not even consider the possibility of failure, even if that would mean saving the poor old man some dignity.
As Rolling Stone’s Make Believe Maverick article points out, McCain’s sources of dignity may indeed be fictional. Among the many insights into his history, we find that McCain “had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight” and that it was only his family’s influence that allowed him to fly long enough to be shot down over North Vietnam. Sort of makes the whole POW story a little less compelling, doesn’t it? Now, I’m not sure I trust that Rolling Stone is composed of top notch investigative journalists, but the story does raise a lot of interesting questions about the real John McCain – and he wanted this campaign to be about character, right?
Alas, Colin Powell made sure to deliver another blow to everyone’s favorite underdog today by publicly endorsing Obama.
I like Powell. I’m still surprised that he sticks by the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and is a member of the Republican Party, given that he’s always seemed to be much more diplomatic and responsible than that, but in my mind he makes up for it by giving great props to the guy who will be the next President so long as rational folks can outnumber the idiots at the voting stations.
Some might say that Keith Olbermann is being a bit harsh in this video. Those people would be wrong. I was in absolute disbelief this weekend over comments like this:
Our opponent though, is someone who sees America it seems as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country?
This comment refers to William C. Ayers, who was a radical in the sixties and part of the Weather Underground. He has long since been cleared of any charges to do with what the Weather Underground was involved in, and went on to participate in various charity groups, one of which Obama also took part in.
Enjoy. May the McCain/Palin campaign go down in glorious flames.
Good job anti-mosque folks. You now hate freedom and democracy. The terrorists have won.{ 08/24/10 5:01 PM }
The Overton Window should be required motivational reading for any struggling writer – you'll never be more of a hack than Mr. Beck.{ 08/16/10 9:33 PM }
Who's hungry? (aka: don't flush fat down your toilets!) http://bit.ly/b13VT3{ 07/15/10 3:35 PM }
Pointer no. 4 to tea party folks: real protest movements aren't backed by big business. Can't be against the establishment & part of it.{ 07/09/10 4:41 PM }
Pointer no. 3 to tea party folks from the left: oil companies are being subsidized through your taxes too. Something to think about.{ 07/09/10 4:36 PM }
, which makes a very passionate argument for moving away from the 20th century copyright laws that the big media companies seem to have a death grip on, even as technology pushes onward and these laws seem more and more ridiculous. I thought I’d find some more information on his work and ended up watching this presentation on his site: I find this very interesting for a number of reasons: 
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