So I'm gonna keep at it.
My plan is totally illegal. I'm gonna just cut-and-paste like whatever I want from like whatever site I want and then put it on my blog. It amounts to a whole wagonload of copyright infringement. Someone will definitely sue me.
But it's all in fun. And we're gonna learn some stuff along the way I hope.
Most of the time I'm gonna log onto different blogs and say different things and see if people respond to them. My blogging style is sort of bull in a china shop mixed with Ben Franklin so I eat like whole flocks of crow but then blow the crowd away with my science-dropping mouth candy freshness.
Then I'm gonna insert links which will be kind of annoying for your browser having to go back and forth but that's the best I can manage right now. And these links will be amusing but sometimes I'll surprise you with a poignant one here and there. I'm pretty much bitting Colbert's the Word completely but arrrrrrggh, mateeeey! I'm a pirate, who cares!
Or, here's another way to put it, you remember those Captain Morgan ads where there'd be all these young sexy skinny people partying by a campfire or on a boat or something slamming rum like totally horny and one of them has a funny red mustache and the bottom says: The Captain Was Here!
Well I'm the Captain. Pirate journalism. So it begins.
Oh man it's been like half an hour since my last post but man do I have some juicy shit for you! I'm not gonna reveal what website it's from, a smart decision I think. (although I suppose all people think their own decision's are smart) Anyway this guy wrote this ridiculous and totally boring piece so I thought I'd stir some stuff up. People get so angry!
Oh yeah I skipped about a million posts between his piece and my post but, who cares about those anyway.
Don't forget me when I am knee deep in lawsuits! (PS on my blog I ALWAYS WIN!!!)
*****
"Unity" is for Cowards and Fools
by DHinMI
Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 12:13:41 PM PST
This morning I caught a discussion on NPR's Diane Rehm Show with some of the ninnies who attended yesterday's meeting in Oklahoma chaired by former US Senator David Boren. Boren droned on about his wish that the presidential candidates commit now to choosing a bipartisan "cabinet of national unity." Former NJ Governor Christie Todd Whitman prattled on about the importance of finding "middle ground." And when pushed by Rehm on the possibility that the Iraq war was not only a product of partisanship, but also a factor that has increased partisan acrimony, defeated former IA Congressman Jim Leach spread the lie that "the majority of the Democratic party supported it."
I have more respect for Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, David Addington and Dick Cheney than I do for Democratic capitulators like Boren and cowardly Republican "moderates" like Whitman and Leach. Boren, Whitman and Leach shun adversity and conflict. At least Gingrich et al are formidable adversaries.
If the "solution" to hyper-partisanship is to fetishize a flaccid centrism, I'd rather slug it out with the hyper-partisans and let the voters decide between the us and the Republicans. Especially now, as the majority of the electorate has begun to conclude that the Republican party has been captured by extremists and the Democratic party embodies the mainstream of American values, concerns and aspirations, we don't need milquetoast centrism, we need principled partisanship.
I argued a few months ago that there are no bipartisan solutions, because the Republican party, as the evolutionary product of over 40 years of extremist rightwing activism, has become radical and divorced from the mainstream of America:
As [Justice John Paul Stevens] Stevens pointed out in the Seattle schools case, as we see on the Iraq votes, the majority of Republicans are radicals, or are too beholden to their radical leadership, radical money interests and radical activist base to step up and do what’s good for the country. Democrats like Joe Biden, who’ve served a long time in public life, have a hard time recognizing that the Republicans no longer can or care to act in the interests of the country. Therefore, we must recognize that until the Republicans change, the answers to our nation’s most pressing needs and challenges—getting out of Iraq and fixing our foreign and defense policy, combating terrorism, addressing global warming and environmental devastation, changing out energy policy, implementing universal health care, shoring up the economic security of the middle class, expanding opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged, and undoing the damage of the "unitary executive" and the assault on our civil liberties—will not be bipartisan. Demanding bipartisan solutions to our problems requires us to wait for the Republican party to heal itself. We can’t wait, and it’s time all our Democratic politicians and policy wonks and pundits and campaign and strategy people stop expecting the Republicans officials and party leadership to join in and work for the good of the country.
Boren, Leach, Whitman and the rest are blaming Americans' anger and current governmental gridlock on partisanship, when they should be placing the blame where it belongs: the radical right and its Republican allies in Congress and the White House. Boren talked this morning about the "unity" achieved on numerous issues during the Cold War. He's correct that during the Cold War the parties worked much more closely and cooperatively on national security issues. But after the Cold War, Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich unleashed a scorched-earth politics, and Karl Rove refined it to the point that former Georgia Democrat Max Cleland's support of union rights for federal employees to be brought under the umbrella of the new Department of Homeland Security was used by the Republican party to run ads linking Cleland with Osama bin Laden. The Republican party no longer accepts opposition as American; for them, domestic opponents can and are demonized as anti-American.
So, Boren and the other losers waited until now to start preaching bipartisanship?
The American people want solutions, and they are looking to the Democratic party for those solutions. They want to undo the abuses of the Bush administration, not keep just enough Republicans in positions of power to permanently lock in the damage. This election has many, many parallels to the election of 1932, which swept FDR and a huge Democratic Congressional majority in to power and led to the creation of the New Deal, our party's greatest legacy, which created the vast and prosperous middle class. Boren and other fake Democrats more concerned with unity than the good of the country are dupes, because it's exactly this kind of transformative positive partisanship that we need.
To accomplish anything, the next Democratic administration and Congress won't have to work with the Republicans, they will have to prevail over them. To prevail will require people with backbone. We need people who recognize that it was Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol and the Republican party that purposively blocked any attempt at health care reform in 1993 and 1994. It was the Republican party that unanimously opposed Bill Clinton's 1993 budget, which led to the balanced budgets of the late 1990's. It was the Republican party that attacked the foundations of the New Deal and precipitated the government shutdown in 1995. It was the Republican party that in 1998 impeached Bill Clinton, ostensibly because of a blowjob. It was the Republican party that mobilized it's shock troops, lawyers and allies in the media to steal the 2000 election from Al Gore and secure the White House for George W. Bush. It was the Republican party that abetted Bush's lies that led us in to the war in Iraq in 2003. And it's the Republican party that's engaging in rampant and admitted obstructionism to prevent meaningful Congressional action on getting us out of Iraq, passing an expansion of health insurance for children and a host of other issues.
To deal with the Republican radicals in Congress, the think tanks and the media, we need people who are willing to be firm and resolute. We do not need people who seek the "center." Moderation is fine, but "centrism" is catastrophic when the Republican party is so far to the right. The "center" between our two parties is far to the right of the American public, and that's why all current indications are that November will be a blowout election. That apparently scares Boren and his buddies, because now they're acting like a cabinet-in-waiting for Republican Michael Bloomberg, and hoping he will spend some of his $11 billion to muck up the election, keep Democrats from gaining full control of the federal government, and reversing the damage of the last 7 years of the Bush administration.
Ultimately, the problem with the losers who met yesterday in Oklahoma is that they live in fear. They fear conflict, and they are cowards. Leach voted against the Iraq War Resolution, but when did he ever speak out against the Bush administration and his fellow Republicans? Plutocrat Whitman was in the Bush administration, and while she now tries to hold herself above the partisanship of Bush, she blew her opportunity to speak out by resigning over principle. Instead, she claimed the air around Ground Zero was safe and skulked out of DC without speaking the truth about her president and her party. And Boren, where was he when the Gingrich revolution was picking up steam in 1994? He was resigning his Senate seat instead of staying and fighting for the country. The result is that Boren now talks about bipartisanship, while the guy who took over from him, global warming denier James Inhofe, has probably done more harm to the planet than any member of the United State Senate.
Grover Norquist notoriously described bipartisanship as "date rape." That's repugnant, but in the current climate, until the Republican party heals itself and purges the radicals, bipartisanship is stupid. It's cowardly. And if you care about our country and have the guts to look at our politics not as you would like them but as they actually are practiced, right now to preach bipartisanship is preach surrender.
*****
So there was like a million people that commented on that story but I wanted his attention so I went for this really eye-grabbing title:*****
DHinMI, your vendictive piece is despicable
To begin, don't call the "date rape" comment repugnant if you are obviously enamored by it and employing it to rhetorical benefit. That's repugnant, and sexist. I shouldn't have to explain why.
Unity is for wise and brave men, quite the opposite of cowards and fools. Fear and anger is for cowards and fools. Blaming beautiful and selfless concepts for the shortcomings of completely unrelated ideologies is for cowards and fools.
I know many intelligent, passionate, and decent Republicans. The problems facing humanity, the ones that will hit each younger generation progressively harder, will not be solved without their support.
Blame their ideas. Don't blame bipartisanship, unity, or optimism. And don't call these things surrender. To plunge forever into violence, to forever accept a compromised figure of mankind's ideal, that is surrender.
Bipartisanship is not cowardly. The best quote I ever heard about cowardice came from Gandhi: "My creed of non-violence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day nonviolent, but there is none for a coward."
That would make a pugnacious, vengeful outlook cowardly.
Bipartisanship is tolerance. That doesn't mean that we must forgo our deepest values. We strive for common ground where through discussion and debate the best views will emerge. That's true democracy. If our values are not bipartisan values then we have not succeeded. That doesn't mean that we accept bipartisanship regardless of consequence, but we understand that ultimately we must understand those that we oppose and would oppose us, that no mandate is legitimate without solidarity. If we are confident that our word is truth, we must believe that the other can understand us, that being human is stronger than any differences that rise amongst ourselves, and that truth will prevail. Therefore we must focus on what unites us.
And get over the Democratic party, please. It smacks of idolatry. There are many shameful things that the Democratic party has done, that Democratic presidents have done, that Democratic congresses have done. That doesn't mean that the Republican party is better. However the common ideology that the supposed division within two party system masks remains both parties' unspoken myth: support for predatory capitalism.
We can't blame the radical right for all of our problems anymore. We must accept our own shortcomings first. As long as the Democrats back neoliberal ideas that gained perhaps their strongest foothold in the world during the Clinton years, they will be working in cahoots with extreme private power and the radical right. But I'm not advocating any particular form of government.
We must strive for a sustainable world. The longer we wait the worse the crisis becomes. Can we achieve a sustainable world through flexible accumulation, or any form of capitalism as we have experienced it for that matter? Can the world continue to prop our rabid, shameful consumption as Americans? I think that nature screams no. Climate change is not false. I don't even mention growing disparity and financial instability, or the perpetuation of homelessness, slums, slavery, sex crimes, and starvation.
So the biggest issue facing our planet is not being addressed by the democrats or the republicans. And that is our unsustainable lifestyles, collectively. And we can never change our collective habits without bipartisanship, not through pettiness and finger-pointing. We must forgive ourselves and one another, and move on. There is work to be done.
by deadondres on Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 01:49:28 PM PST
Obviously You're Too Delicate a Flower...
...to hang around here if you think quoting Grover Norquist about bipartisanship being like date rape is sexist.
Toughen up, and get over yourself.
The revolution will not be televised, but we'll analyze it to death at The Next Hurrah.
by DHinMI on Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 01:54:23 PM PST
Fine I'll explain. Your frustration is telling.
Ad Hominem won't make your logic any less troubling.
Neither does an appeal to authority. Just because Grover Norquist said it doesn't make it any more okay, nor does it absolve you of any guilt from repeating the quote.
I'll explain why your, or Grover Norquists' if you can't even owe up to your own language, logic is sexist. It will be easy, you called it repugnant yourself. Oh, you meant aside from the sexist implications.
Conceptualize date rape. We will say it is between a man and woman although it can surely occur between a man and a man and I imagine a woman and a man.
A man drugs a woman and sexually assaults her. He has committed the greatest violation towards another human being imaginable, next to torture. To suggest that a political action, bipartisanship, can somehow compare to the indecency of date rape is a completely sexist assumption because it marginalizes the real world consequences when date rape actually occurs. The same occurs when negative implications of date rape is applied to a completely unrelated topic. You would never say bipartisanship is the holocaust, would you? Bipartisanship is the trail of tears? Because it is disrespectful to those that actually endured such hideous events.
I didn't call you sexist but the above quote is certainly a sexist expression of language. Don't hide behind some postmodern reasoning that feigns that your use of words and metaphors bears no significance. No true writer would believe that.
by deadondres on Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 02:19:22 PM PST
Like I Said
If reporting what Grover Norquist said about bipartisanship gets your knickers in a knot, and cuts off enough blood to your brain that you conclude that it's sexist to report what he said, you're probably not suited for this place.
The revolution will not be televised, but we'll analyze it to death at The Next Hurrah.
by DHinMI on Tue Jan 08, 2008 at 03:24:57 PM PST
The intelligent discussion must be going on somewhere else.
Adios, badass!
by deadondres on Tuesday, January 08, 2008 4:41:11 PM
Ohhhhh, burrrrned!!! That guy makes we wanna go be a Republican! Who knew liberals were such assholes?
He didn't reply so in my last post I called him a pussy. A sexist pussy.
Till next time dearest friends,
Shalom!
posted by Deadondres at 12:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home