a letter to the illiterate, A.K.A. tea-baggers

October 27th, 2010 from the wordpress blog fucktheteabagger

Dear bug eaters,

Shut the fuck up. Just for five fucking minutes.

We know you want to end taxation. We know you don’t care that every reputable economist on the goddamned fucking planet has tried to explain to you inbred sisterfuckers that austerity budgets and tax breaks for billionaires and transnational corporations makes joblessness worse, not better. It makes the recession worse, not better. It makes the deficit worse, not better.

Update:  Look at Greece.

But you don’t care what experts have to say, do you, knuckle-draggers, because all you care about is what makes you feel better. And what makes you feel better, apparently, is waddling up and down the street with powdered wigs and little flags and misspelled signs with pictures of the president wearing a turban, and you think that makes your opinion equal to those of educated experts who do research for a living. Don’t you get how utterly fucking bug-stupid that makes you look?

We know you want to drill for oil in Yellowstone and downtown Detroit and fucking Disneyland and two miles down through the fucking Antarctic ice cap and on Mars and every goddamned place you can think of, until the entire solar system is a polluted piece of steaming shit just like fucking Texas.

We know you email each other ape jokes and watermelon jokes and other racist Ku Klux Klan fucking bullshit – just what, less than three years? –  after screaming TREASON! at anyone who dared disagree with George W. Bush, and two years after deciding to tell everyone you’re not actually Republican because that would mean you voted for the moron who destroyed our economy.

Guess what? The 80 percent of us who think you’re a bunch of fucking retarded clowns are sick and tired of hearing about you. The 80 percent of us who think education is actually a good thing are tired of hearing you pontificate about shit you don’t know because you can barely spell your own names.

Like how you think the Internet is a bunch of fucking tubes.

How you think evolution isn’t real because the other monkeys haven’t evolved into people yet.
How you think we’ll still have roads and courtrooms and jails and people checking for e.coli in your WalMart burger meat without paying any taxes.

How you think it’s okay for you to accuse the president of being Muslim without any evidence—and then act like it’s a bad thing if he WAS a Muslim because you loathsome asswipes judge people by what group they belong to—not by their credentials as individuals.

How you hate Affirmative Action until it’s used to give preferential treatment to white students over students from Asia, or preferential treatment to the underachieving white children of the wealthiest donors. What a fucking bunch of racist hypocrites.

How you think lesbians have taken over the public university system—despite the fact that all the trustees and presidents and football coaches and most of the professors and most of the students and every evil fucker in any position of power happens to be in possession of a snow white penis.

How you think unions are the bullies with all the power and all the money while corporations are the victims with none of the power and none of the money, with no incentive to screw you because for some reason you’d rather pay them double, triple, quadruple for the same fucking services your taxes used to provide before they were used to pay for tax cuts to people who own yachts and jets. You dumb fucking idiots.

[OK, this next part is pretty dated, but knowing repiglickins, anything is still possible, candidate-wise] ...

How you think some stupid bitch from Alaska actually knows any goddamned fucking thing about Russia just because Alaska is closer to Russia, than say, the Russian embassy in Washington Fucking D.C., you geopolitically-challenged shit-for-brained nine-year-olds! Meanwhile not a single one of you can say a single specific thing about any specific policy this stupid bitch has ever advocated. But you will of course scream at the top of your lungs that calling her bitch is sooooo wrong because Lord knows you’ve never called Hillary the c-word after wiping the beer foam off the ends of your snouts. What a bunch of misogynistic hypocrites.

Fuck you and your own personal fucking “news” channel, where you’re invited to spew your fucktarded bullshit with Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and the rest of the animal house twenty four hours every fucking merciless day. If they told you the only way to love America was to take a dump on on a downtown street corner, you’d be pushing each other out of the way to be first.

Did you know they laugh at you behind your backs every two weeks when their seven-figure paychecks arrive, you stupid tools?

Liberal media, huh? One million Latinos march for immigration reform in Los Angeles, but on every donkeypissing television station across America all we see is a tribe of twenty assholes in plaid picketing on a street corner in Arizona because they flunked economics AND history in high school and don’t know the first thing about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the history of our court system, OR the history of the last eight goddamned years in this country we love more than you do. Yes, more than you do—because we care enough about it to protect everyone’s freedoms—not just our own. Everyone’s property, not just our own. Everyone’s tax money, not just our own.

What a smarmy drooling circus you fuckers are.

Shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes, just for once. A town hall meeting is not for screamers. No one wants to smell your Cheetos breath from across the room. No one wants to smell the sweat stains under your armpits as you flail, spraying spittle. A town hall meeting is for people to discuss things, not scream. Stop fucking playing the victim when the SEIU dares to use YOUR OWN goddamned town hall tactics against you. Just because most of the rest of us fear all you scary, hooded, screaming, violent bastards doesn’t mean we all have to just sit there and take it. Fuck you. We want you to go away, back to your basements, back to your generators and your canned peas and your mistranslated bibles and your pregnant daughters, waiting for the rapture while you leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

You lost the goddamned fucking presidential election, you bastards.

Go away!

*****

What an absolute joy this essay was to read.  And how frightening that nothing has really changed. 

Proof of that is the latest shit-on-a-stick-dressed-like-candy Rick Santorum and his personal piggybank, Billionaire Sugar Daddy Friess.  If ever there was a reason to impeach 5/4 of the Supreme Court over a mindless suck-ass decision, it was Citizens United which has paved the way for teabagger assholes like Foster Friess and his cronies the Kochs to buy elections.  Of course, Santorum - who well deserves everything Google has done for him - has been quick to slither on over to FUX News and defend Mr. Moneybags.

another rant blatantly stolen from frank schaeffer

As Ryan Lizza writes in the New Yorker: "Obama didn't remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street."

So when are President Obama's critics, people like Paul Krugman and Mitt Romney, going to offer President Obama an apology? Both have often loudly predicted that he made the economy worse and was putting America on the wrong economic path. Both are being proved wrong by the economic comeback we are in. I mention them not to pick on Krugman, who I respect, or even on Romney (who I regard as vapid and bought and paid for by corporate interests) but to make a point: President Obama is going to have the last laugh on his critics, no matter what ideological spectrum they hail from.

President Obama is succeeding in spite of the fact that he's been up against a Republican Party willing to destroy the economy in order to destroy him.
As the New Yorker notes:

"Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, 'It's Even Worse Than It Looks,' they write, 'One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier--ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.'"

We all know the Right's critique of the President has failed. Rush Limbaugh did not get his wish! But what of the Left? The tone of the criticism of the President on lefty blogs has been persistently negative and none too prescient. According to his critics on the Left President Obama "sold out to Wall Street." He didn't "bring the change he promised," he "is just like the Republicans," etc., etc.

And I'm not even counting the shrillest voices on the Left and Right who have accused President Obama of either/or undermining national security -- by being a "secret terror-codling Muslim" -- or using drones to "murder civilians," because "he is just like the Republicans and part of the corporatist elite."

I happen to be a white 59-year-old former Republican. I happen to be a former religious right leader who came to my senses in the mid 1980s and quit the hate and fear religious right machine. (I explain about why I left the religious right in my book Crazy For God.) I also happen to have been one of the most vocal (and one of the first) Huffington Post bloggers. I was blogging there when we emailed in blogs then were called by the person who posted them. I supported then Senator Obama, just about every week during the Democratic primary season in 08. Back then I had lots of company at HP from the top down. It seemed we were all rooting for Obama.

Not anymore. I still blog at HP and other sites like Alternet but have actually been kicked off several progressive sites for continuing to support the president. (No kidding.)

About 6 months into his presidency lots of bloggers at HP and elsewhere seemed to run out of patience not just with President Obama but with reality itself. President Obama "disappointed" them. I stuck with the President because I believed then, and believe now, that he is smarter, kinder, more reliable and morally superior to his critics let alone to the political alternatives. I also know that the presidency is not as powerful as many people seem to think it is including many liberal commentators who claim to live in a fact-based world. I'm grateful if any president can get anything good done at all.

The Left and Right have united in predicting President Obama's failure and even seeming to root for it, if nothing else to prove they were right. So will the "sky is falling" prophets of doom on the Left and Right -- who have made it a national pastime to predict the "failure" of the Obama presidency -- start to climb down now that all their dire predictions are falling flat re the economy (that Obama did not ruin!) and wars ending (that Obama did not start!)?

The wars are ending and the economy is coming back. Good for the country. Bad for the doom pundits of the Left and Right.

Anyone who thinks Obama didn't "bring change" fast enough is living in a fact-free dreamland. First, they have no to little idea about how limited the president's powers are. Second, they have no idea what this president in particular faced. We'll get the change promised but it will take 2 full terms and it will never live up to the expectations of the utopian groupies of the Left who thought they'd voted for a messiah not a mere president.
So why has change taken "so long"?
Because:

• President Obama inherited a far bigger economic and foreign policy mess than anyone predicted....
• Many Republicans obstructed our first black president far more ruthlessly (and with racist overtones) than any (sane) person would have predicted...
• President Obama's "friends" on the Left were as shortsighted and mean-spirited as his enemies on the Right...
• And until the Occupy Wall Street Movement came along the President wasn't getting the help he needed from the street to make the unfairness of American life that he's trying to fix into an issue.
The President -- thanks to Occupy Wall Street -- now controls the debate with the handy phrase of "the 1% v the 99%." Occupy Wall Street did more for moving the country foreword and did more to help President Obama, than all the President's lefty critics combined. 

Occupy Wall Street is doing what MLK and the civil rights movement did for Johnson: it provided the heat Johnson could then use to move his agenda forward. Obama too now has the wind of change at his back. 

 Sure, I, like anyone else, wish for more action from the President on many fronts. For instance I wish the President had not been so in love with the idea that we could be moving into a post-partisan world of cooperation. 

  As the New Yorker put it:

"Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics now seem not just naïve but delusional. At this political juncture, there appears to be only one real model of effective governance in Washington: partisan dominance, in which a President with large majorities in Congress can push through an ambitious agenda... Many of Obama's liberal allies have been disillusioned, too. When Steve Jobs last met the President, in February, 2011, he was most annoyed by Obama's pessimism--he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. 'The president is very smart,' Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. 'But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done. It infuriates me.' "Yet our political system was designed to be infuriating. As George Edwards notes in his study of Presidents as facilitators, the American system "is too complicated, power too decentralized, and interests too diverse for one person, no matter how extraordinary, to dominate." Obama, like many Presidents, came to office talking like a director. But he ended up governing like a facilitator, which is what the most successful Presidents have always done. Even Lincoln famously admitted, 'I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me.'"

Given my religious right background I'm one of the President's most unlikely fans. Maybe that's because I really know the alternative-- from the inside. I fear the alternative to the President -- far right loons of the Tea Party/evangelical religious right ilk -- and have never felt I had the luxury of being an armchair lefty critic demoralizing Obama's supporters because he's the only person who stands between the village idiots and us. 

Try Romney and the Mormons on for size if you think Obama has been "slow" to embrace gay marriage! Try Gingrich and the "Christian Zionists" if you think we tilted too far to the far right West Bank settlers and Israeli hardliners! Try the Koch brothers' cronies if you think our president is "owned by Wall Street!"

I know what the stakes are. I know from the inside just how deranged, corrupt and awful the marriage between Wall Street and the unwashed Tea Party/Religious Right anti-abortion, racist, homophobic and misogynist mob really is. I know that these people will buy elections then try and turn America into a theocracy -- on matters of personal morality -- and into an Ayn Rand libertarian and heartless swamp where the 1% eat the rest of us-- when it comes to the economy.

So I've been grateful that a man of integrity, brains and kindness and reasonable moderation (not to mention moderate progressive religious faith) is leading America. I didn't just read about the alternative and "other" side. I was the other side and know what they are capable of.

When we hear that jobless numbers are going down faster than expected, that shoppers spent money over the holidays, that economic forecasts are being revised upward, that we are out of Iraq, that bin Laden is dead, that gays can serve in the military, that Wall Street and the banks are now under investigation, that a woman's right to choose is being protected... it's time for a reassessment of the President's critic's.

And NO I'm NOT saying that any president is above rebuke when you think he's wrong. But fair rebuke is one thing. The endless drip, drip of mindless "disappointed" negativity that has been the hallmark not just of Fox News but has been found on progressive blogs too, is another thing altogether. Enough already! Or at least have the integrity to admit when you're wrong.

The President keeps proving himself smarter than his detractors. More power to him.
President Obama will win in 2012. And 4 years later all that will be remembered about his critics is that they were impatient, deluded and wrong.

Given what was on his plate when he took office and the fact that we're successfully struggling out of both recession and 2 war -- and succeeding -- President Obama is one of the best of the American presidents already. His second term will consolidate that verdict and bodes greatness as his legacy.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is SEX, MOM and GOD: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

can democrats landslide republicans?

by Ralph Nader

I often ask Congressional Democrats these days: "If you agree that your Republican counterparts in Congress are the most craven, corporatist, fact-denying, falsifying, anti-99 percent, militaristic Republicans in the party's history, then why are you not landsliding them?" Their responses are largely in the form of knowing smiles and furrowed brows.

There are answers that are more specific to account for the large election losses in 2010, the loss of the House of Representatives to John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and the prospect of losing the House and the Senate this November. Chief among them is that the two parties are vigorously dialing for the same commercial dollars to finance their campaigns. The resultant inhibitions and self-censorships bring the parties' real agendas closer together, erasing the bright lines that make elections clearer choices for voters.
Here are eight initiatives that could landslide the Republicans in November's Congressional contests. It starts with a ringing declaration that recalls the legendary labor rally challenge: "Whose side are you on?" With the two parties often seen as Republicrats or DemReps, due to the lack of credible, distinct differences on military, foreign policy, trade, agribusiness, energy and corporate crime/welfare subjects, among others, such a proclamation of "we the people" helps frame the details of this fresh approach, as follows.

First, resurrect the old Democratic Party's historic safeguarding of federal minimum wage and labor laws from Republican dissolution. It is astonishing that, since the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, there have been so few high-profile champions in Congress for restoring the minimum wage - now $7.25 per hour - to its inflation-adjusted level of 1968 which today would be $10.00 per hour. That long overdue move would pour tens of billions of dollars into job-producing consumer demand during this recession. It would end a decades-long windfall for employers who have been increasing their prices and salaries while receiving many tax breaks during that period. To objections from the curled-lip House Republican Eric Cantor, the reply is: "You don't believe workers in your district should make as much as workers made 44 years ago when their productivity was half what it is today, Eric?"

The scholar who showed that keeping minimum wages current doesn't cost jobs is Alan Krueger, now President Obama's chief economic advisor. In 2008, Mr. Obama himself pledged to push for a $9.50 minimum wage by 2011.
Second, announce the filing of legislation that declares immediate drafting of all able-bodied and age-qualified children and grandchildren of all members of Congress any time that branch or the president plunge us into another war. Besides forcing Congress to pay attention to its Constitutional responsibilities to declare or not declare war, this legislation would ring with the authenticity of responsible humble servants becoming part of the risk presently hoisted on a few million, mostly low income, families.

Third, cut the huge, bloated, wasteful military budget, really end the wars, and switch the expected savings into repairing and renovating America through a public works program all over the country with good-paying, non-exportable jobs.

Fourth, shift much of the tax burdens to activities we do not like, such as pollution, huge Wall Street speculation, corporate crime waves and profits from systemic product waste. Even Exxon/Mobil supports the idea of a carbon tax, which would help the environment. The motto: tax what you burn before you tax what you earn.

Fifth, announce a national energy conversion campaign based on efficiency and renewables. The only true energy independence comes from the sun in its many manifestations. This will create more local employment and small businesses down to the community-neighborhood levels. Goodbye to the toxic fossil fuel and atomic energy cartels.

Sixth, crack down on corporate and governmental violations of our Constitution and laws. No more no-fault government and no-more no-fault big business. If the law is to be observed in the streets, then it must be observed in the suites. People are being pushed around, disrespected, defrauded, injured, and given the runaround from arrogant corporate bureaucrats using nameless, robotic and tyrannical "fine print" barricades. There have to be accountabilities that the abused citizens can invoke.

Seventh is a proposal to establish a national complaint-handling system using the internet to help consumers, taxpayers and workers, for a change. You got a beef with your insurance company, bank, energy company, pension fund, cable company, hospital, telephone/gas/water/electric utility, or some government agency you can't get through to file your complaint.
A complaint-handling system will save billions of hours wasted on just trying to get through, much less getting your complaint heard. It will also be a good way to aggregate complaints to detect patterns for policy-making and enforcement corrections. Patterns lead to deterrence, fewer complaints, and fewer dollar losses. What a way to show sensitivity to the daily irritations and frustrations of the American people!

Eighth, create a democracy movement based on simple facilities for people who choose to band together in various roles. In return for what you the taxpayers have had to spend to bail out and otherwise privilege these large companies, the Democratic party can press for inserts in their billing systems and other corporate carriers inviting you to voluntarily join and contribute dues to a nonprofit staffed with full-time champions of your causes as consumers, patients, workers and taxpayers (inserts could also be sent in the communications from tax collecting agencies) directly accountable to you. No results, then no dues next time, and no taxpayer subsidies. These facilities would shift some power from the haves to the have-nots.

Imagine the public discussion, excitement and participation these eight proposals would provoke. Previous non-voters along with regular voters would see they have a stake in these elections and that one of the major parties at least wants to be on their side, and strive to earn their trust by empowering them directly.

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