Somehow This Just Doesn’t Feel Very “Uniting”

Talk about shades of a bygone era.  In a move so right wing in both concept and execution it could have been taken directly from Richard Nixon’s playbook, Unite Blue, the Twitter cult group founded by the Green family, “former” Republican gunslingers operatives paid consultants who worked on the campaigns of some of the more minor GOP candidates over the past few years, has created itself an “enemies list” and guess what?  Yours truly is on it.  Right there at #67.  Not quite up there with being placed on a terrorist watch list by the DHS but hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right?

That’s right boys and girls, I along with dozens of others stand accused of… well let me just present en excerpt from Matt Osborne’s latest piece (read the whole thing at his site) on the Unite Blue/William Talley dustup (Link to the original UB document provided).

Over the weekend, the Cauldron published a bizarre Pastebin document that threatens a class-action lawsuit for cyber terrorism and defamation against nearly a hundred people, including myself. Unable to enact vengeance on random Anons, their focus is on liberals. Tweet or blog about them and you, too can be added to their shit-list. The best part? They will accuse you of dividing the left while they do it.

So there ya go.  You’re here right now in a veritable den of iniquity perusing the evil diablerie of a wicked “cyber terrorist” and “defamer”.  You might want to reconsider reading any further  since the main theme of the fanatics whom Zach Green has elected or allowed to speak for his organization against those who dare speak against it… in ANY way, shape or form…appears to be “guilt” by association and  if nothing else, you may find yourselves on that same little shit list and threatened with class action lawsuits your own self simply for not belonging to Unite Blue and having the damned gall to state your reasons why.

I don’t know who I’m supposed to have committed any “terrorist acts” against since these folks put up and take down accounts like some demented damned rodent playing the heavy in a whack a mole game. Some of them have as many as 6 or 7 different accounts (that have been discovered and counted so far).  For the same reason, I don’t know who I’m supposed to have made terrorist threats to or against. I can’t figure out who I’ve “defamed” unless it was on a couple of occasions when I pointed out that entering a guilty plea in a criminal case is actually saying “Yes, I’m guilty” and carries the same weight as an actual conviction. 

If you’re REAL lucky, like yours truly, you might even find your name listed in one of their fake tweets by one of their fake accounts as I was when some slug calling itself @IbUB2 or Nut Cracker, replete with Guy Fawkes mask avatar and obviously attempting to pass itself off as an Anon, used my name in a false tweet indicating that I had been the one who asked for the doxing of Trina Cuppet.  They responded, using the tactics described described in my third post on the subject ,the more salient points of which which I’m going to excerpt here because nothing has changed.

Tonight I signed on to Twitter and was informed by one of the anti #UniteBlue folks that an organization apparently calling itself Unite Blue Dilemma… apparently everyone was familiar with the alleged organization except yours truly… had posted an article on their home page… shown in the Google search snippet as UniteBlueDilemma.com. There’s not enough in the search snippet to determine if it was favorable or derogatory to the organization and if you click on their listed URL it doesn’t take you to any web site.  It brings you to THIS page… the one you’re reading right now… and you get a 404 error message that the file can’t be found. 

It can’t be found here of course because it was never here in the first place but the entire setup appears designed around making it appear that the article was here at one time but that I took it down. Once again I have no idea whether this crap is being carried out by the #UniteBlue leadership or simply by a couple of overzealous members but if this is what they mean by “uniting” people from the left, then the surer I am I want nothing to do with them. 

Look people… I’m going to put this bluntly and in the same language I’d use if we were face to face.  I don’t give a rat’s ASS whether #UniteBlue exists or it doesn’t and I give an even smaller rat’s ass who belongs to it and who doesn’t.  I have nothing to fear from anyone in the organization… other than childish annoying little bullshit like this anyway… and I goddamned sure don’t post blog entries and then delete them because I’m afraid of what a few little sheep and their shearers think about it.  

I’m 70 fucking years old.  I outgrew this petty little shit about the time I grew up and had to go to work for a living… at 13.  If I’ve got something to say about you, I have no fucking qualms about saying it TO you and I damned well figure if you’ve got a problem with me then you can also have the goddamned balls to say so outright instead of playing these stupid cowardly little games with fake Tweets, redirected URLs, spam blocking [and now hit lists?] and whatever other cute little gimmicks your dumbass Anon wannabe can come up with.

Not going to try to appeal to your maturity or common sense because it’s obvious if you had any measurable level of either I wouldn’t be making this post right now.  Instead, I’d be advising you grow the hell up and try being an adult for a change. If nothing else, the change of pace might do you some good.

And there’s always this:  As some of you well know, karma has a way of catching up eventually no matter how slick you think you are. Sooner or later, you’ll step over some line you don’t even know is there and have someone sniffing your whitey tighties like a dog in heat.  Somehow, I don’t think you’ll be sniggering like a pimply assed school kid in his first circle jerk when that time comes.

I’m pretty sure THIS… more than anything else I’ve said either here or on Twitter itself… is the basis for my inclusion on their inane little list and in the vague and childish little threats of unspecified legal actions by foul mouthed harpies and whiny little mama’s boys they selected to speak for the organization and make posts in the name of it’s members.  Out of pure, unbridled curiosity, I’d really like to know who the “they” was that did the selecting and what criteria they used in the selection process, but that’s just me being nosy.  I am given to understand that at least one of them managed to benefit personally from selling out a friend in time of crisis for money and a spot on the board of directors but I have no idea why or by whom (unless it was Zack Green and that one) any of the others were selected.

Again, I would ask that you understand that nothing I say here is directed to the apparently thousands of rank and file members who have joined the organization in good faith thinking they were actually doing something that would advance liberal or progressive causes.  I speak specifically to those who are doing and saying those things described above in the name of the general membership. 

The thing the leadership is apparently failing to tell you is that you don’t get to claim the high ground when traveling a low road simply because the vast majority of your members are simply good folks trying to do good for the progressive community when you let the so called leaders of your group engage in the kinds of cheap tactics and dirty tricks described herein and elsewhere.  Otherwise, you’re just another member base for an NRA style organization in which the only only reason rank and file members even exist is to provide numbers by which to support an alleged consensus.  Those leaders were selected… by whom and by whatever process… to speak for the organization and the organization is YOU.  You might want to give some thought to what’s being said and done in YOUR name.

As for me, just call me #67.  I suppose if some of the more vociferous among the UB membership can be so fanatical about groveling to a cult leader as to actually name yourself after him online, I can wear my position on their enemies list as a badge of honor.

- #67 -

 

Me And Twitter

As a decidedly amateur blogger I’ve developed a fairly long list of other bloggers I follow not only because I’m interested in what they have to say about the condition of the world at large and use them as my major source of information, but because I mange to learn something from each of them abut blogging in general and political blogging in particular.

Many of them I know from before I joined Twitter but I’ve also picked up a few good ones there and have benefited from the insights and opinions of a good number of folks who are concerned about most of the same things I am. 

I follow mainly those blogs purporting to be liberal or progressive because I’ve been going through the the info wars with right wingers for almost 15 years now and I’m simply tired of trying to have a reasoned debate with people who look at simple disagreement with their position as an attempt to stifle their right to free speech and for whom empirical evidence in support of one’s position is and entirely foreign concept. (these types aren’t limited to members of the GOP as I’ve found out over the past few months).

I choose the people I follow on Twitter in the same manner.  I have no desire to engage in 140 character pissing contests with right wing nut jobs and therefore tend to follow those who come down on the liberal or progressive side of most questions… or at least appear to… and it’s only been since I joined Twitter, I’ve learned for certain that the old adage about not being able to judge a book by its cover is a definite truism.

As I think do most left leaning Twitter newcomers, I at first tended to follow those whose rhetoric appeared to to be not so much liberal or progressive but simply anti-right wing and of course this meant the usual crowd of “lefties” with the largest number of followers to choose from for my followed list.  That led to following for the most part, people who agreed with the particular philosophies of the “leaders” and eventually my list of people being followed became one including people that, had I taken the time to explore their actual stands on issues important to me a little more closely, I probably wouldn’t have followed in the first place.

I say this because I found that many of the “liberals” I was following were definitely NOT liberals and some of them would have trouble matching themselves up with whatever the accepted definition of “progressive” is this week.  Just as I found people calling themselves liberal or progressive standing adamantly against… for example… changes to Social Security and/or Medicare as a means of “reducing the deficit”, I also found people calling themselves liberals and progressives who not only saw nothing wrong with paying George Bush’s debts on the backs of the elderly/disabled and poor but were actually stumping for it hard… as if they had a personal stake in the outcome.

The leaderof the main little groupie cult… at least on the list of people I had followed… espousing cuts to the safety net for people like me, was, in addition to being wholly in favor of screwing with the safety net,  actively pushing the RW meme that since we didn’t win a super majority… or even a majority… in the house back in 2010, we had to give the Republicans whatever the hell they wanted and they wanted cuts to SS and MC therefore that’s what all GOOD little “lefties” should be wanting too. 

And according to this pompous ass, it was the solemn duty of he and his.followers… as “enlightened voters”… to “educate” the rest of the dumbasses among Dem voters who didn’t look at it that way.  He’s entitled to his opinion of himself of course but my own is that you can’t call out RWs for supporting cuts to the safety net and then support those same “adjustments” yourself, therefore during one of those logically exclusive actions, you’re being less than honest.

I’m firmly on record regarding my belief that anyone who actively promotes right wing positions and uses right wing rhetoric and two bit Tea Party talking points to do so is probably a right winger at best, no matter how many “angry” little tweets and chirpy little hashtags they… presumably in order to impress their groupies with their “leftiness”… direct at the right wing on a timeline that very few right wingers are likely to ever see anyway. 

In my opinion, this guy’s basic goals are not to defeat the GOP and get this country out from under the heel of the ultra right and back on its feet but to persuade those on the left to adopt a more right wing stance… as he has obviously done… and help move the already centrist Democratic party even farther to the right.  As neither a liberal or a conservative I have no real quarrel with the position actually but I think he should have the balls to say so outright.

The other example of  a type I have decided to studiously avoid on Twitter is the “liberal” who plays to his little audience by beating up actual liberals and whose ass seems permanently glued to 2010 and the “failure” of many liberals to vote for a party and administration that had not supported a single one of their positions on anything during the preceding two years.

That is the sum total of this guy’s contributions to the left… slamming other people on the left.  In his Twitter profile he lists himself as a “lib”… which is a term mainly used derisively by the right… AND a “pragmatic O bot”, two conditions that ought not to be able to coexist in a normal human brain.  Mr. Obama is NOT a liberal. Whatever else you call him, liberal is not a term that describes him in any manner one might consider accurate.  At best, he’s a centrist. 

We have the normal distribution of positions along a straight line, end, middle other end or, referring to the political spectrum, left where the libs live, center occupied by the centrists and right which is the position staked out by the conservatives.  If you consider yourself a pragmatic O bot, meaning that you’ve adopted Mr. Obama’s position in the center then you’ve positioned yourself in the center also.  This pretty much precludes you being a “lib” because libs occupy the the left of the spectrum or line and it’s a universal law of physics that one object cannot be in two places at the same time.  See how that works?  And no, you are NOT some quantum particle so don’t even go there.

This particular Twitter dude and his toadies also use decidedly right wing tactics and terminology to attack the left from their position in the center and it would appear that while most of them pretend to abhor these tactics when carried out by Republicans, they have no qualms about using them on the actual liberals with whom they currently share a party.   

If the liberals… or “emos” or “professional lefties” stay home again in 2014, it will largely be the fault of people like this pompous prick and his little band of sycophantic centrist Dems.  If I were a Democrat… and especially if I were a LIBERAL Democrat… and every time I signed onto Twitter there was a stream of nasty RW style invective blaming me for every ill that has befallen the country and flat out telling me that nobody was going to give a rat’s ass about my opinions or concerns, and all I was good for was to come out every two years and support centrists whose interests were not my own and then slink back to my hovel and STFU until my vote was required again… hell, I might decide to say %&$! it and stay home too… and I haven’t missed a flipping election in 50 years.

None of this is anything new for the dude. He’s apparently been one of the most disliked and made fun of characters on the net since the early/mid 90s when he was a fixture flash in the pan on Usenet.  Some guys just never learn.  As I said not long ago on Twitter, he’s one of those self inflated assholes you wish you could buy for what he’s worth and sell for what he thinks he’s worth because you could retire the deficit with the proceeds. 

Those are just the main two examples derived from my own list of followers/followees which are admittedly fairly limited in scope.  I’m certain that among the millions of people on Twitter there are numerous other examples of “conservative liberals” and they are the ones these two guys have taught me to watch for and try to avoid.  I no longer respond to app generated follows and when I do think I might like to follow someone, I now go to their profile page and read a screen or two of tweets to try and get an impression of their actual line of thought before automatically refollowing as I used to do. 

I definitely avoid commercial private organizations seeking to assimilate me into some huge collective so they can make money.  I generally stay away from “twibbons” and from any groups or cliques that claim to be the only true liberals or the only true progressives or any individual who thinks they get to define “proper” levels of liberalism for everyone else according solely to their own personal opinions. 

I don’t like groups or cliques that allegedly have all the answers for defeating the right (if anyone did we wouldn’t BE in this mess in the first place).  I hate straw man arguments, ad hominem attacks, condescension and I especially stay away from those who look at any form of dissension as personal attacks, either upon themselves, their heroes or their particular group.  Sounds like a laundry list of RW traits, doesn’t it? Nope, sorry.

I don’t care how many followers I have or who unfollows me because I said their dog was ugly.  I’m there to tweet what I think, not what the group or current guru of the week thinks I should think and if you’ve got an ugly dog or your particular emperor is riding around in his birthday suit I may just comment on it so deal with it.

What I do now is separate the issues into three categories based largely on how it affects people like myself… A) good, B) bad, C) get more info… and the category an issue lands in determines my position on it and I tweet or respond accordingly. No worries about what the group thinks or if someone is calling me a RW operative or a traitor to the left or an “attacker” or whatever.  It’s made my life on Twitter so much more satisfying and simple.  I’m actually beginning to like it there again. 

 

The Guys In The White Hats Aren’t Always The Good Guys

Bartcop, one of my all time favorite bloggers, recently had an exchange on his page with a reader who was feeling disillusioned because he was starting to realize that America wasn’t always motivated by altruism when it decided to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries.  Being me, I naturally felt the need to stick my two cents worth in and did so thusly:

Bart:  You were very forthright in defense of the U.S. in reply to the guy who wrote we’ve always been the bad guys and I hope you’ll allow me to be the same.

While it’s not by any means certain that we were always the bad guys a study of the dozens of “minor” wars we became involved in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries… in fact right up to and even beyond WWII… we have very often definitely been carrying the water for bad guys and though the methods and immediate circumstances have changed some, still do so.

A suggested read on the subject of the 20th century “banana wars” would be “War Is A Racket” by USMC Major General Smedley D. Butler, who managed to fight in virtually every damned one of those fracases, receiving multiple purple hearts and two… count ‘em, TWO… Congressional Medals of Honor for his efforts in what history has come to see as minor skirmishes with wild eyed Bolsheviks intent on destroying our way of life from their tent city HQ on some Central American banana plantation.  You said:

 America has semi-run the world over the last 60-70 years.  Think how different the world would be if it was run by Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Kim Jon Dung or Idi Amin or Saddam or Gadaffy – get my point?.  Also, a lot of other countries don’t aloow the truth to be taught at their schools and every newspaper and TV show is run by the government.  As evil as man can be, America could be a LOT worse.

America HAS pretty much run the world since the end of WWII but the simple fact is that as DDE warned us back in the 60s, it has done so mainly for the benefit of our Military/Industrial Complex and Wall Street and multinational corporations, using our military power… in much the same we it was used during the first three decades of the 20th century to bolster the fortunes of American business interests in other countries.

As for those guys you named off, sure there’s little to no doubt that the world would have fared worse under all those people and I could probably add a dozen more to the list just off the top of my head but so what?  They DIDN’T wind up running the world, we did and that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve run it with the best interests of that world at heart.

And Jeebus knows, in our march to outright Fascism, we’re right smack in the middle of banning the truth from our schools on an almost daily basis, especially in the states comprising the new Confederacy,the war on science and for the substitution of religious dogma for scientific fact also goes on daily and our newspapers and TV networks might not be run by the government but they are damned sure owned and controlled by those same Wall Street corporations mentioned above and for whom our government STILL carries the water (while still retaining the pay and perks they supposedly get for serving OUR best interests).

I personally see faint praise for this country’s past leadership when someone says, “That wasn’t nice.”, and the best response we can come up with is, “someone else would have been worse.”.  A lot of people are suddenly realizing that Native Americans weren’t all brute savages, the “cowboys” didn’t all wear white hats, the guy fighting for a right to make a decent living picking Dole’s bananas wasn’t always a wild eyed commie bomb thrower who was going to walk to LA and kill our kids AND… we weren’t always the good guys.

 

As Twitter Goes, So Goes The Country

I know this blog thing has been hit or miss… if you can call a blog that has few hits and isn’t missed by anybody that… lately but once again I’ve simply lost sight of where I wanted to go with it.  I blame it on Twitter of course.  Everybody blames everything on Twitter. And Facebook, but I don’t express my opinions on Facebook.  Whatever, it’s time to get off the Social Networking as a means to political ends meme and get back on track yet again and see what I can do about staying there this time, the “track” being one of opposition the corporate takeover of the United Stats and the degeneration of the country into just another failed quasi-fascist feudal state. 

The problem with that is that the potential social networking had for being perhaps the greatest tool for societal advancement in history… at least before the Wall Street barons sent the dogs out to get all the mainstream sheep herded back together in their individual little groups and gaggles and marginalize or even demonize those who still cling to the tattered shreds of individuality and free thought that caused them to be social outliers in the first place… has pretty much been negated by not only the mindless bickering and fighting between factions but the just as mindless bickering and infighting between people who are supposedly part of the same faction and therefore on the same “side”.

It’s not easy being a person without a party or even any real ideology to subscribe to in a system that practically DEMANDS one be a part of some group, clique or cult.  This is what happens when we are so busy arguing among ourselves about which group we should or shouldn’t belong to we allow our supposed public servants to become our rulers and abdicate our responsibility for governing ourselves to the elites that… like turds… always manage to float to the top in any society when the people get fat and lazy.

The tendency of modern Americans to band together in easily manipulated little herds is perhaps nowhere more apparent than on Twitter.  Not only is Twitter a microcosm of society at large, it’s where entire political movements consisting of huge numbers of what we called rubes back in the old days gather in their groups and herds, all of them just waiting for some Elmer Gantry style “guru” to come along and “bring them together” into one humungous group and tell them how to organize and channel their passions in the name of that almighty group. The free thinking individuality and self sufficiency that did much to build this country has been largely bred out of a lazy and self satisfied population.  

We Americans are never satisfied with mere human beings as our public figures.  These days, we have to have people we can place on pedestals and not just respect and look up to but outright worship and idolize.  If some if the idols we set up turn out to have feet of clay once we’ve set them up there, we’ll not only overlook that but we’ll go totally postal and destroy anyone who attempts to point it out because that person is committing two cardinal sins.  He or she is casting aspersions upon our particular idol of course but also daring to offer thoughts and opinions that “go against the grain” or more bluntly, failing to conform to the collective opinion of the group. 

This mental or ideological collectivism is often referred to as Groupthink which is defined thusly by Wikipedia:

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.

Loyalty to the group requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions, and there is loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. The dysfunctional group dynamics of the “ingroup” produces an “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made). Thus the “ingroup” significantly overrates their own abilities in decision-making, and significantly underrates the abilities of their opponents (the “outgroup”).

Twitter has never lacked for shepherds ready and willing to take on ‘responsibility” for the flock and they range from A) those who have managed to build little rock star cults around themselves replete with their little bands of groupies who faithfully retweet anything and everything they robotweet and tell them constantly how wonderful they are, right on out to Z) a major cult built around the President of The United States in which he is held in esteem of biblical proportions and the firmest requirement for anyone daring to express an opinion on something he might or might not have done is that “Ye shall speak no evil of our president no matter what he says or does“.  And of course, anything and everything between those two points.

The one common thread in all these semi cult like groups, from the mini idol who turns out to be a convicted major felon to the president himself who often tends to adopt positions that during the last administration would have been considered by his own groupies as decidedly right wing, is that any slightest inkling of opposition to any of these people or any actions carried out by them will bring instant retaliation from their adoring worshipers and sycophants. 

Most often of course, the retaliation will take the form of hateful little tweets and moronic little hashtag zingers.  Or that used to be the case before people came along with the knowledge and the tools to exploit the differences between these various groups for financial gain.  Now it’s a whole new ballgame. Now the war is just as intense between the cliques and subfactions… at least among Democrats (I don’t DO right wing sites)… as it is with the opposing faction itself.

In a future installment we’ll be talking about the NEW style of Twitter guru… the ones who use loopholes and specialized tools unavailable to regular Twitterites to “organize” members… to get their sheep ducks all in a row and gain financially from the bunker mentality of the members of the almighty group and the need to marginalize or demonize any of the “outriders” who don’t conform.  In doing so we of course run the risk of arousing the wrath of the groupies but then I’ve never considered the opinions of groupies as relevant to much beyond the blind adoration of whoever they’re groupies for anyway. 

 

Open Letter To Congress: You Are NOT America’s “Nobility”

Ladies & Gentlemen:

As one of your employers it has come to my attention that there are certain things going on during the course of your employment with our organization that need to be straightened out before they’ve gone too far to reverse, which I fear may already be the case in some of them.

Perhaps the first thing you all need is a stern reminder of who you work for.  We seem to have arrived at a situation that can only be described as the tail not only wagging the dog but attempting to shake it to smithereens. I’m sure you’ll all agree when I say that this can not be allowed to continue.

You were not hired to rule this country, you were hired to represent the people of this country and I’m quite sure that even the most ignorant among you are capable of grasping that distinction.  Well, except for Jim Inhofe, who would require several years of intense tutoring to have the IQ of a brick but that’s a problem for the just as brain dead people in Oklahoma that keep voting for him.

This whole business of fancy limousines, first class air travel, unlimited credit cards and million dollar a year expense accounts has obviously gone to the heads of many of you, creating inflated self images that require continuous infusions of large amounts of cash for their care and upkeep.  To that end, many of you have sought and received sources of additional income that far exceed anything we poor taxpayers can afford and this has inevitably led to a major paradigm shift in your allegiance and loyalty to those who can afford to pay the most for it.

Most if not all of you have managed to amass fortunes all out of proportion to the salaries and benefits you receive for representing your constituents, perhaps the prime example being Senator Addison Mitchell McConnell (R-Koch Bros), who has managed an average take of roughly a million dollars a year over his nearly 30 years of “service” while never once doing anything that was of any significant benefit to either the people of Kentucky or the citizens of the country as a whole. Mr. McConnell (left) could serve as the poster boy for cheap grifters with no redeeming social value , his venality exceeding even that of that of Sarah Palin and the message sent to the rest of the country by his home state of Kentucky, having rewarded his almost defiantly open embrace of graft and corruption with five terms in the senate to continue amassing his personal fortune at the expense of just about everyone else, is not one to be taken lightly. 

I would suggest that if they return him to office yet again in 2014, the rest of us either force the State of Kentucky to secede or, barring that particular form of self deportation, cut off all federal funding to the state and let them seek to do without the money they rake in from the federal government they profess to hate and which exceeds the amount they pay in taxes. 

After all, if we can’t support our immigrant communities who actually work and pay taxes and contribute to our society, why should we support an entire state full of deadbeats who take more than they give and who inflict people like Mr. McConnell and Rand Paul on the rest of us as a matter of routine?

And please, spare us any self righteous bullshit.  What I just said about Mr. McConnell applies to each and every one of you to some degree or other.  Every one of you has, immediately upon taking office, set yourself up as some petty little noble ruling over a personal little fiefdom and spewing little more than contempt and disdain for the “rabble” who labor under the mistaken impression that you work for them.  Some of you may not yet have developed the “eff you” attitude to the degree… or be as open about it… as Mitch McConnell has but the simple fact is that most of you eventually come around to thinking you were elected to rule over us and not to serve us and from there it’s only a short quick step to deciding you’re worth more than we pay and going to work for those who offer more for your services than we possibly can.

And that’s when not only democracy but the entire concept of a “representative republic” dies.

 

How One Independent Sees It

For years now I’ve been making fun of the ignorance and apparently diminished intellectual curiosity of many of the folks in the rank and file at the right end of the spectrum.  I don’t feel a bit bad about it either because those are traits that are not only readily observable but easily quantifiable in the fringe zealots that make up the Tea Party which appears to dominate the GOP today.  One has only to look at the signs they carry in their rallies and spare a glance or two the misinformation they subscribe to and attempt to pass on to the world at large through the social media, no matter how much that world laughs its ass off at them.

As a recovering conservative Republican myself, discovering the depths of ignorance not only displayed by so many right wing working class people but proudly defended, worn as some kind of badge of honor was definitely an eye opening experience. for yours truly.  It took George W. Bush’s first year in office to firm up most of the doubts I had begun to entertain in regard to my choice of parties although those doubts had been wiggling and squirming at the back of my mind since the Reagan days.  I credit Bush Junior with my full awakening to the fact that the GOP was now the party of all that I had joined it to escape back in the 60s when all the racists and bigots and misogynists still trying to fight the Civil War 100 years after it supposedly ended were Democrats. 

It was after 9/11 that I decided to just back off entirely for a while and take stock of the situation regarding the Republican party which had obviously undergone some major changes during the time I had been occupied with a career and raising a family and living my little middle class life.  One of the first things that struck me was the proud ignorance referenced above. Another was the total and vehement refusal to accept any empirical data which might challenge the mindset resulting from that ignorance.

For example, I had one online discussion with a certain gentleman in Georgia back when the leading news paper in San Diego County, the Union Tribune, was reporting that one of the county’s congressmen, Randy Cunningham, had “tearfully” confessed to taking millions in graft and bribes from special interests.  The paper wasn’t accusing the congressman of being a crook, it was reporting his own CONFESSION… in his own words… to being a crook, but that made no difference to my “friend” in Georgia.  He steadfastly refused to believe the congressman was guilty until he heard it from a news source that HE trusted.  In other words, Cunningham saying “I’m guilty” wasn’t enough*. 

I have no idea what it would have taken to convince this gentleman that Mr. Cunningham had indeed committed the high crimes and misdemeanors of which he’d been accused and I’ve often suspected to this day that if he ever thinks of that particular case at all, it’s with the firm conviction that Duke… being a Republican and all… was innocent of all charges and those charges were merely an attempt by the “liberal media” to railroad him out of office.

Another example of course was the “my president, right or wrong” syndrome that afflicted the majority of the rank and file Republicans among the working class. Spurred on by various Astroturf organizations formed by Wall Street banks and corporations specifically for the purpose, “Thou shalt not criticize our president” became the GOP’s eleventh commandment. Daring to criticize or even question any actions orchestrated by Dick Cheney and acted out by our country’s first openly sock puppet president brought you instantaneous condemnation as a liberal commie pinko fag traitor who wanted our enemies… whoever the hell they were supposed to be at the time… to win… whatever the hell we had to win or lose at the time… and America to lose.  The only thing that keeps it from being laughable is the damage such attitudes wound up inflicting on the country, damage from which we are unlikely to fully recover.

But that’s the mindset you deal with when you choose to engage these people in any kind of discussion or debate.  Their minds were made up by the end of Rush Limbaugh’s radio program this morning and remain firmly closed to any and all information that might cause them to have to rethink some of their righteous opinions and convictions.

Now to paraphrase my man Arlo, in perhaps the greatest protest song ever written, I said all that so I could tell you this:  It ain’t JUST the Republicans, folks.  Many membrs of the modern Democratic party and whatever that ideology is that the so called “left” subscribes to these days is… I think they’re calling it “progressive” so as to differentiate themselves from the actual “liberals” whom they hate as much as any right winger ever did and for many of the same reasons… are just as mule headedly planted in their rigid little ideological furrows as any right winger ever was and if you think the “my way or the highway” mentality is an exclusive manifestation of Republican politispeak, you need to think some more because it simply ain’t so.

Today’s “progressive” Democrat is just as firmly locked into the patterns of groupthink and groupspeak as is any of his or her RW counterparts, perhaps even more so in many cases.  One difference (among a relative few, actually) is that they haven’t been able to translate it into a fully national phenomenon the way that the Republicans have but that’s largely because the Republicans and their corporate leash holders control all of the traditional means of disseminating information and use them solely to beat the right wing drums and keep the bubba types stirred up.

The left on the other hand has had to rely on the Internet through self created independent blogs and the building of organizations through social media networks to get their message out and no matter how successful they may have been… or think they may have been… their reach and therefore their effectiveness… has been limited compared to that of the the Wall Street parasites who have never had to actually build anything but instead have always been able to simply BUY what someone else had built.  It’s how they came to control the mainstream media and it’s how they’re slowly gaining control of the Internet, the last real avenue of free exchange of opinions and ideas, also.

And whether you want to believe it or not, that’s where people like Zach Green and his family come in.  Companies like 140Elect have no purpose in existence other than do channel the groupthink/groupspeak in the directions mandated by the highest bidder.  I’m sorry as hell if that pops any bubbles for anyone but you simply don’t charter a damned company and go into the political consulting business because you have some altruistic vision of making America a better place for children and cute little kittehs.

Sooner or later you have to realize that you don’t mean diddly squat to Adam or Zach Green except as a means to an end and that end involves putting money in their pockets.  All you have to do is see who they’ve made their fortune from over the past few years, couple it with the fact that the GOP is rapidly becoming a losing proposition as far as PR and marketing flackery are concerned and you have your answer as to why YOU are suddenly their new BFFs.  The money is no longer to be made supporting Republican losers so the big deal now is to claim to support support (and to have supported all along) Democratic winners even to the point of retroactively claiming credit for gains made by the Democrats when you were actively supporting GOP candidates.

Plenty of other people have gone into the specific means by which Mr. Green and his group of 140Whatever entities have sought to accomplish their chameleon like transition from open strategists for the bad guys to a posse of white hat heroes attempting only to route evil from the hinterlands.  I don’t need to rehash any of it because you’ve all seen it with your own eyes and based your actions on your own interpretations of it. 

Like my friend from Georgia, your mind is made up that having a #UniteBlue hashtag attached to your opinions somehow makes those opinions into something more than they were in the “old days” when you tweeted them without it (Psst! I don’t know if you’ve noticed but quite often your opinion, bolstered by the hashtag is immediately and totally canceled out by a diametrically opposed opinion also sporting the hashtag, which calls into question the advantage of even including it on your posts since you’re obviously not united at all, at least in your messaging). To summarize a few pregnant points in support of my own position(s).: 

• You’re letting a purpose formed Astroturf Llc determine the direction in which you’re going to take the fight based on its own highest ROI… if indeed there is ever going to be a fight (So far, I haven’t seen a willingness on the part of progressives to do anything but compromise with the common enemy and spew right wing epithets at anyone actually calling for a fight).
• Many of you have convinced yourselves that multiple retweetings of Mr. Green’s robotweets and those of the groupies he’s gathered round himself in the guise of some kind of advisory board, are somehow more powerful than simply saying what you think in your own words. 
• You’ve committed yourselves to the defense and support of people who in no way deserve the kind of homage you’re paying them including at least one to whom you (and a few thousand others) were worth exactly $250 (21st century equivalent of 30 pieces of silver?), the betrayal of a friend and the promise of being a mover and shaker among millions of “organized” progressives once 140Elect was firmly in control. 
• You’ve allowed defense of 140Elect to become the primary reason for #UniteBlue’s existence and I simply fail to see how that’s supposed to be helping the cause… but then maybe I just don’t understand what the “cause” is.  In doing so, you’ve turned a blind eye to the tactics certain of your members have chosen to use in defending the organization from it’s detractors even though you have loudly denounced what you considered to be the same kind of tactics when practiced by the right (#TGDN among others).
• Last but not least, I’m finding the “MY president right or wrong” syndrome not only still alive but actually flourishing among many of you, as a large segment of progressive democrats… or “pragmatic O-bots” as they’re called by their liberal opposition… seek to stifle any attempt to question, much less criticize anything our president chooses to do or not do, no matter it’s effect on the person raising the question.

There are numerous other examples, lots of them, but the above should be enough to convey the essence of what I’m trying to say.  In doing all these things, you have in many ways become pretty much the mirror image of those you profess to be “organizing” against. 

Many of you… egged on by people with agendas that might not be positioned as “leftward” as you like to think… have joined with the right wing in pure unadulterated hatred of Liberals… ostensibly because they didn’t vote the way you demanded that they vote in 2010 and therefore you hold each one of them personally responsible for the losses suffered by YOUR party which they simply may have felt was not their own.   Whatever the case, your hatred is no more plausible than that of the right.  The fact is that if they HAD come out in 2010 and voted straight Democratic, the people fomenting the hate and discontent would simply come up with another reason to hate them because hating liberals is necessary to their own agenda. 

About that, I have this to say:  I’m not a liberal and I’ll vote in every election I’m alive to vote in and it won’t EVER be for one of today’s modern style Republicans… but I can damned well understand why some folks, feeling that no candidate supported their best interests, elected not to bother and if you ever come at me with the hate and venom you spew at them, I’ll simply tell you go off in a dark room somewhere do rude and probably physically impossible things to yourselves, which I suspect is the message the “libs” were trying to deliver no matter how much I feel they picked the wrong way to do so. 

And you can also rest assured that if a serious candidate ever arises whom I feel has my best interests at heart… no matter WHAT he/she calls him/her self… I’ll happily and without compunction break my (currently 5 year) string of voting a straight Dem ticket in every election and not even blink an eye over it. 

I’m actually beginning to think the fact that I don’t seem to fit into either “side’s” little predetermined mold a prudent position to remain in given the fact that neither side seems to give a rat’s ass about the situation I find myself in due to the machinations and “multidimensional chess games” that have replaced a simple scrutiny of each situation in the light of whether it’s right or wrong.  I still like to do that little “think for myself” thing and if that pisses anyone off, I’m OK with that.  Yup, it’s GOOD to be an independent.

 

To Bubba And His Big Ol’ Gun

Well, I think I might have myself back in my little niche on Twitter… you know, the one where I’ve managed to piss off just about everyone on just about every side of every question.  That’s good though, because if I pissed you off, at least you had to think about whatever it was you got pissed off about and I’ll settle for that.

On a far more serious note though… when the Newtown Massacre happened, I made myself a promise… this time I was NOT going to forget.  This time it was going to be different and I was going to find some way to make some small measure of difference in the national dialogue that I knew was going to ensue.

Disclaimer. I’m a lifelong gun owner, shooter and former NRA member who has no interest in “coming for your guns” or in any way restricting your right to adequately protect yourselves and your families. 

I didn’t set any impossible goals for myself nor did I did I develop any delusions of grandeur… or delusions of anything else for that matter… to the fact that world was waiting breathlessly for the pearls of wisdom that only I was going to be able to deliver.  I just vowed to do whatever little thing I could do within the scope of my own limitations to see that it never happened again.  Have to admit, I haven’t been too successful.  Haven’t been able to even convince Democrats we need to do whatever’s necessary to end the carnage. 

In the meantime a few thousand more people… many of them children as usual… have died as a direct result of firearms in the hands of people who shouldn’t have been entrusted with anything more deadly than a rubber spoon, whether it be because they couldn’t control their awn animalistic impulses or because they were too damned stupid or lazy to keep their weapons out of the hands of small children and blatant nut cases.

Our government has done exactly what it always does in cases like this when it was either too chickenshit to face down the merchants of death… or too bought off… they milked it for all they could get out of it politically and then, waiting until they thought we were distracted by the hundred other ways in which we are being forced daily to pay the price for the lifestyles of the rich and not always famous, they tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug.  Didn’t work this time.  Seems I’m not the only one who didn’t forget.

Harry Reid is once again making conciliatory noises in the face of criticisms for trying to avoid standing up to the gun lobbies, promising votes on the three major provisions that the public appears to consider most important… a ban on military style assault weapons that have no function other than to kill other human beings, detachable and extended magazines that turn these firearms into weapons of mass destruction capable of killing a schoolroom full of first graders and six adults in something like 3 minutes or so, and universal background checks for all purchasers of firearms, a measure designed to help keep firearms out of the hands of those most likely to use them to shoot up the nearest neighborhood theater, shopping mall or school.

But this obsession with having the biggest most badass gun on the block is not going to go away and sooner or later we need to face up to the question of whether this is something just ingrained… bred if you will… into a certain kind of person or if much of it is based on a totally false image and some horribly false assumptions that are being deliberately fomented and fostered by those that profit financially by the fact that we have almost reached a point where there is one gun for every man, woman and child in the country even though approximately 2/3 of the people don’t own any.

In fact, recent studies have shown that 2/3 of the firearms in the United States are owned by 1/3 of the population and that 2/3 of the guns in this country amounts to 1/3 of all the guns on the entire planet. Even given the breakdowns of “normal” sporting weapons (hunting rifles, shotguns, etc.) and given that sales of military style assault weapons are skyrocketing, even a conservative estimate of the number of those types means that there is a HELL of a lot of WMPDs out there.  How many guns can you “protect yourself” with at one time anyway?

We Americans tend to be somewhat myopic when it comes to the ills that have beset our country since the turn of this century, most of which, like it or not, have ben presented by extreme elements of the right wing.  That’s to say, we all have our own private little agendas and even though those agendas may overlap and pass back and forth through each other over the course of time, we tend to emote most strongly about the issue or issues that most affect us directly.  For some it may be the proliferation of assault weapons while for others it might be racism and bigotry or rape and women’s issues or immigration reform. 

We fail to see that all of these issues and more are part of an overall mindset based mainly in our far distant past origins.  European white people are simply the most hateful, misogynist self centered, greedy and… worst of all paranoid/schizo… people ever to walk upright.  The white races of northern Europe have done very little during the several millennia they’ve been in existence other than roam throughout whatever their confinement envelope has been at any given time, raping, looting and pillaging, taking anything and everything they felt entitled to which was… like David Koch says today… all of it. 

They fought among themselves for hundreds of years to establish their little pecking orders and decide who or was going to be the HMFIC and the very moment they were able they started exporting their brand of what would eventually come to be known as capitalism throughout the world.  They were able to do this simply because they made damned sure they always had the biggest, baddest and most efficient killing machines in whatever era they happened to be in at the time and an overwhelming urge to take whatever anyone else had simply because they had the means to do so.  The world belongs to he with the means to take it for himself… he with the biggest rock, the sharpest stick, the strongest bow, the biggest gun. And it’s been that way ever since. 

By this means, the people of a relatively small island kingdom off the coast of what we now call France came to rule the largest empire in the history of man, eventually holding dominion over a fifth of the world’s population at the time as well as almost a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. 

And of course, these are the people that eventually gave birth to the United States of America and bequeathed upon it that sense of manifest destiny and the intrinsic belief that it was not only the right but the duty of the white man to rule over the other “lesser” races.  This dogma provided the agenda by which the British Empire would, by the early part of the 20th century, hold sway over half a billion people and is the primordial basis for the unspoken belief among many that they need a bigger gun to make them feel like a bigger man.

You can talk all you want to about self defense and safety and security and all the usual NRA pap but come on Bubba, the only REAL reason for having a gun that can kill two dozen people in less than two minutes is so you can kill two dozen people in two minutes, am I right?  And the only reason for wanting to be able to do that is so that you can impose your will on the guy that doesn’t, am I right again?.  Doubt me? 

If so take a look at all the pictures of of your “everyman” pants crapping hero, Ted Nugent masturbating his favorite toys and uttering “tough guy” threats against our elected officials.  That’s who the NRA has chosen to be the face of gun owners everywhere, including gun owners like me who get tarred with the same brush broken down old has been publicity whores like him do.  

The rest of it is nothing but pap for the masses to try to convince them you and your big gun are no threat to them when the statistics are making a liar of you daily and thousands of American citizens WITHOUT assault weapons and 30 round clips… a huge number of them innocent children… are dying every year so YOU can feel like a big shot, impressing your like minded friends and intimidating your “lessers”. 

The only person you really need an assault rifle and a 30 round clip to protect yourself and your family from is another guy… just as paranoid as you are… with an assault rifle and a 30 round clip and the only people I would need such a weapon to protect myself from is the two of you.  I’d rather not have to deal with it if you don’t mind.