The Wartime Election and the Power of the American Citizen

Today we are talking about politics. I have been a news junkie since that apocalyptic day of 9/11/01. Apoca-what? I’m not a doomsday prophet – the end of one world is simply the beginning of another.

Enough of that talk. Bush is on the ropes. If the media and Democrats had any balls at all Bush would have already fallen ten times harder than Nixon.

The Bush administration has been caught red handed hyping the Hussein/al Qaeda connection which never existed and the weapons of mass destruction angle – specifically the uranium tubes from Niger. The White House is being investigated for leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name in what smells like a classic Rove/Novak tag team in revenge on Plame’s husband for his criticizing the administration for hyping the story about the tubes. Even conservatives are railing against Bush for his drunken sailor spending. We’ve gone from a $230 billion surplus to a $530 billion deficit. To try to combat this, of course, social programs are being cut while we prepare for endless war and blood-sucking on a gigantic scale until we turn the planet to Mars.

THE ISSUES

Iraq

”When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences. Instead of having one Bin Laden, we will have 100 Bin Ladens.” - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 3/31/03

The motives for going into Vietnam were nothing compared to the disgusting criminality of the motives going into this war. We’d like to think it’s all so simple: All of the “Iraqi people” were oppressed under a ruthless leader. Now that the US stepped in and took him out, Iraq will soon become a peaceful democracy because the bad guy is gone. Sounds simple.

Yes. When that tin horn dictator was rooted out of a hole in the ground and planted in a cell, we saw images of cheering Shia in the streets, and left and right wing Americans unite in praise of a good deed done. Meanwhile, Iraq tinkers on the verge of becoming FUBAR, beginning with a civil war that should last a long time. We’re dealing with ancient warring tribes. And it’s impossible to have a valid opinion about this country if you don’t even attempt to have an idea about what’s going on there with the tribes.

If you want to study just one tribe, keep your eye on the Shia. They are the majority in Iraq, oppressed for years by Hussein and his Sunni minority, standing to gain the most from a democracy. Within the Shia there are also powerful militant fundamentalist sects, some simply skeptical, and others endorsing violence on Americans, who are connected with the reining fascist Ayatollahs of Iran. These are the kind of violently moronic monotheists who like to brainwash their followers into flying planes into buildings. The Shiite cleric, Ayatollah al-Sistani, is calling for direct elections. If al-Sistani does not get what he wants from the US and becomes upset, he could raise his hand and the US military would face more attacks from thousands of new enemies. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/beyond/iraqis/shia.html

“We will fight them until we die or they die.” -- Shiite man who was captured and tortured by Saddam Hussein, referring to Sunnis, as interviewed on Frontline.

If al-Sistani gets what he wants, he can very easily be voted president of Iraq, and we just replace one psychotic dictator with another. Only al Sistani could be more dangerous because he believes he is one of God’s chosen people, unlike Saddam, who was more an old school secular dictator influenced by Stalin. Sunni women and children will be systematically tortured and murdered like the Shia and the Kurds under the hand of Hussein, and guess what kids! We’ll have a new nutty bad guy to go to war with!

But that’s okay for Bush and his people. This isn’t the first time this has happened. This is how the war business works. Replace one bad guy with another, invest in bombs, send the po’ folks’ kids to die. Count on criminals in the Bush administration to do whatever’s profitable for the oil industry, because, make no mistake about it, they ARE the oil industry. Hey, in 20 years time one of his idiot daughters will become President and we can have another war with Iraq, completely leaving out the fact that the bad guy we’ll be fighting was a total American-made Frankenstein, just like Hussein was.

al Qaeda

”He has to be willing to do the work and undergo martyrdom for the purpose of achieving the goal and establishing the religion of majestic Allah on earth.” – al Qaeda “training manual” http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/manualpart1_1.pdf

This is our enemy. Remember? Those Saudi guys who caused 9/11, which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with? But all the military technology and blunt force in the world isn’t going to stop some psycho who believes God wants him to kill himself. And I doubt al Qaeda has any hierarchical structure at all. Bin Laden is just a guy with money, who we need to take out, but will make a martyr of in the process. They are autonomous cells based around an ideology that Islam is the one true religion, and Americans are infidels who have soiled the holy land. There’s no way to tell how many members it has because there is no where to sign up. To defeat al Qaeda requires a new kind warfare using clandestine maneuvers and camouflaged propaganda. Enter the thought police, for better or for worse.

Gay Marriage

”I think that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman." – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

Unlike the radical Christian right, I am of the opinion that all Americans, even homosexuals, should have the essential civil right to suffer for the rest of their miserable lives in the torture and forced celibacy of legal matrimony.

The Economy

”It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” – Frederic Bastiat

Trickle down economics works well for the economy if you’re an upper-class American employer who makes six figures, and will give your employees a raise or hire new people or send your kids to a good college with the money you save with tax cuts. These are the kind of folks who simply worked hard, or maybe got lucky, and crafted a life for themselves worth living. Can’t blame anyone for that, and I can totally understand why they voted Republican in 2000.

Unfortunately, Bush doesn’t care about people like this, much less the middle or working classes. Bush’s people are not your average successful American, they are the giants – transnational corporations with billionaire leaders – who do not invest their tax breaks back into the American economy. These guys will rape America and not think twice by pocketing the tax breaks, take their business overseas, hire 5 year old kids to work in a cheaply-built hazard-prone factory and pay them in rice, then sell some useless product back at an inflated price to a laid off American factory worker who will pay for it with a credit card that the bank will rack up free money in interest on. The working class is feeling it, and if the WTO has it’s way, the upper classes are going to start feeling it too. Again, growth for the sake of growth.

The American consumer is the most powerful in all of this. We decide who gets the money. If we want McDonald’s to put free range, hormone-free, mad cow free beef in their burgers, the American consumer can demand it by not eating at McDonald’s until they do so. If we want our town to look like a unique place in the world, we shop at local businesses and eat at local restaurants and go to local mechanics and shop at local record stores and put Wal Mart out of business. “But Wal Mart is cheaper!” - Then you can sell out the American culture by saving 10 cents on an apple.

”Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.” -- Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Education is the key to saving the American culture. Most people don’t know or don’t care that they are selling out the culture by what they buy. That’s why the government’s public education system is letting giants like Coke and Pepsi into the schools - to reinforce the decline of American culture and the increase in corporate culture. It’s happening everywhere, and it doesn’t have to. But it starts with the realization in every one of us that we are the nation, and everything we do affects the whole, and we control the giants and not the other way around.

The War on Drugs

“Drug dealers don’t sell drugs. Drugs sell themselves.” - Chris Rock.

Another way government is making money off of our tax dollars - http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm. People can get any drugs they want, whether they are illegal or not. But if drugs were legal, how would the DEA and the jails make any money?

Attorney General John Ashcroft launched a full scale attack on plastic tubes and pipes with funny colors on them. He started with those horribly hostile hippie head shop owners and Tommy Chong, that dangerous spiritual leader of the American youth culture. But Ashcroft, warrior of Christ, would not stop there. The youth culture, with the rising popularity of “rock and roll” music and movies about motorcycle gangs and “getting kicks” (the youth code for smoking Marihuana Cigarettes and ingesting Benzedrine), is influenced by a terrible motorcycle gang. So Ashcroft, in his relentless mission to save The Future of America, conducted an extensive raid on several Hells Angels Motorcycle Club hangouts, in which six grams of the poison Marihuana were taken off the streets and away from the children.

So as we can see, Ashcroft is not only a leading cleric of the American Taliban – the extremist Christian Right, he’s also living in the 1960s. What’s next? Will he round up bongo playing beatniks? Will the body of Lenny Bruce be exhumed and jailed in Guantanamo? Stay tuned for the next installment of John Ashcroft’s Neurotic Fantasy World.

Rural America

”I'm 70 years old, and I don't know how many good years I have left, but I think it's totally wrong for farmers to lose their rights to a multinational corporation. I have five children and 14 grandchildren, and do I want to leave them a legacy of a land filled with poison -- or a land without poison?" – Percy Schmeiser, farmer

"We are forced to grow pineapples and bananas for other people, while there is less corn to feed our own populations. It is obvious that we are on the wrong track, that we are abusing our natural resources." - Costa Rican farmer Wilson Campos

You don’t hear about this one much in the debates, but this issue is at the heart of America’s problems. What we are experiencing in agriculture is the literal detachment of Americans from the ground below them by the fallacy that man can dominate Nature. This problem of detachment goes beyond the soil and into our psychology – the detachment of Americans from the soul of America. I’ll be writing more about this one later. Man cannot dominate Nature, whether Nature occurs in the soil or in his very soul.

Essentially, NAFTA needs to be abolished, the American consumer needs to be educated to buy American, and middlemen between producers and consumers of food need to be reduced if not eliminated altogether. The land is being poisoned by chemicals and the nutrients are rapidly being depleted while world population is overflowing. The conventional American farmer is being forced from his land and with him the soul of American culture, and the government’s solution is subsidies – essentially paying farmers to grow more food than they can sell. The agricultural structure must be radically changed, and again, it’s up to the American consumer.

THE CANDIDATES

Dr. Howard Dean

Somewhat progressive, would have been a godsend for the sorry state of healthcare in this country, but Democrats stopped supporting him because he hollered and made a weird shrieking noise in Iowa and it scared people. Pussies. He’s perceived as an “angry Democrat” - is that supposed to be bad? After having to put up with bland dorkos like Al Gore and Gray Davis (possibly the most boring name of all time), a fired up psychotic is exactly what Democrats need. With all the ammo the Democrats have on this administration they have been playing wiffle ball. Dean might be out of the race before this article goes up. – Update Dean is gone.

John Edwards.

For all my Pennsylvania readers, I wish you could be here to witness the puppy love only rivaled by Romeo and Juliet that the NC media is displaying for this local boy from Raleigh. It’s quite touching and almost sad.

The guy leaves a taste in my mouth like grits with nothing on them. He’s a bland, Southern version of Bobby Kennedy, which could be the sole reason he’s getting support from Democrats and showing some promise with Black voters. Mark my words: He’ll be Yankee, Lincolnesque Kerry’s VP pick in order to win the South.

Wesley Clark

Clark’s an amateur when it comes to politics, but the Democrats needed a guy like this, a four star General, to come out and tell the obvious about how much the Bush administration fucked up in Iraq. He’s an Arkansas-er, so he could be Kerry’s VP pick to win the South, but Edwards is more popular and Kerry already has an edge on Bush with the military record issue. I think Clark would be a better VP because we could use a great military mind in the White House, and if that hopeless imbecile Quayle could do it a political amateur can too.

Dennis Kucinich

This is my guy. I’m on his mailing list. He has the most balls of any candidate, and is the most progressive. He grew up dirt poor and a few times lived out of his car with his family. If you kids want a working class hero, Dennis is your man. Look at him. The most he’s ever done in the primaries was probably 2 or 3%. Gephardt and Clark and Dean were more popular than him, and they’re gone. He’s like Rocky – going the distance in a losing cause...

When you get a working class man in office, you can depend on the fact that he’ll actually work, because he’s not accustomed to having someone else take care of him. You won’t catch a guy like Kucinich jacking off on his ranch in Texas for a month in wartime. You only need a mild love for your country and a tiny bit of respect for the troops to realize how fucking arrogant it is to go on vacation while real Americans die in a war that didn’t have to happen.

Mike Hudson from 70s Cleveland punks The Pagans mentions Kucinich on his website. “Cleveland in the summer 1977 was a fun and cool place to be. The mayor of the town, Dennis Kucinich, was barely in his 30s and was the closest thing to a Communist you could ever find in mainstream American politics. He thwarted a plan that would have sold the municipal lighting company to private interests -- using the slogan ‘Power to the People’ -- thus incurring the wrath of the city's banks, which stood to make a killing on the deal. This would eventually lead to the banks foreclosing on the city, and Cleveland became the first major municipality to go into default since the Great Depression. The mayor's brother, who was somewhat mental, retaliated by actually going out and robbing a bank!” http://www.geocities.com/pagan_pages

That kicks ass. If Kucinich ever gets nominated, I hope his brother will be his running mate.

Kucinich isn’t a Communist though. Not that the “C” word scares me, because A) I know what the definition is, and B) the government gets taxes out of us one way or another in capitalism too.

But as far as taxes go, guys like Kucinich like to use public funds to help the public. Guys like Bush cut programs that aid the public so they can give American tax money to global oil and military companies like the corrupt-as-hell Halliburton and DynCorp, make policy that gives billions to these companies (Iraq War), then invest and collect from these companies after they get out of office. Hell, Cheney doesn’t want to be Vice President anymore. He’s had more heart attacks than the Chicago Bears superfans. He wants to get the hell out, cash in on his policymaking and spend the rest of his life duck hunting with criminal Supreme Court Justices like Scalia. But he’s got to stay with Bush now. Georgie’s on the ropes, even being criticized by conservatives for his spending and his blubbering Meet the Press interview. My god, political entertainer Bill O’Reilly even admitted he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction.

Dennis Kucinich could be called a visionary. His website has the balls to talk about things like the “spiritual sense of the essential interconnectedness of all living things.” He doesn’t have a “belief system” – he has vision of reality. Bush and most politicians can say they believe in God and go to church. But where is the nobility in that? All most politicians tell you about their faith is that they stand in a certain building for an hour on Sunday and talk to an invisible man every night before bed.

Reading Kucinich interviews and speeches reveals the man’s genius and depth of his patriotism and love for this country. He wants to abolish NAFTA and the WTO, which would be great for the American working class and American farmer. Unlike Kerry and Dean and most Democrats, Kucinich never pussed out on opposing the Iraq war to look “patriotic”.

I think the only thing I disagree with him about is that he’s a total pacifist. Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Kucinich just don’t sound right. War is necessary sometimes. 99% of Americans still support the destruction of al Qaeda. But a guy with the integrity of Kucinich, who isn’t so gung-ho about selling this country out to a few corrupt global companies which get us involved in bullshit business wars in the first place is the kind of guy we need. He’d have to have a strong military VP like Clark though.

But he’s too short and ugly or something, so people don’t think he’s electable. I’m voting for him in the North Carolina presidential primary, which was delayed until July because of redistricting problems and wouldn’t have counted anyway, had it happened in it’s original date in May. But it’ll be good for my conscience knowing that I actively supported the guy, even though he doesn’t stand a chance.

John Kerry.

The next Democratic candidate for President, no doubt. After Dean’s anger horrified the media, people scrambled for their next pick. Lots of anti-Kerry activity is popping up on the right, which smells exactly like Karl Rove. An intern affair rumor was denied by the woman in question. A photo which ended up on the pages of the New York Times, putting Kerry right next to the Jane Fonda during the Vietnam War protests, was debunked. http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/kerry2.asp Obviously, they don’t have anything on this guy yet.

The Democrats will win this election if they stop focusing on stupid shit like Bush’s military record and stick to the issues. Any of the Democrats could destroy Bush in a debate. Hell, my three year old nephew could destroy him. In the 2000 election Rove and the Bush campaign kept pussing out on debates with goddamn AL GORE. If you can’t debate AL GORE who the hell can you debate? And in the three debates that happened, if Gore didn’t put you to sleep, you noticed that Bush looked like the dipshit we know him to be, then the softballers in the mainstream media kissed his ass in their mind-numbing wrapup shows because junkies like Limbaugh invented the myth of the “liberal media” so the extreme right could keep raping this country and any investigation into said rape has to be the fault of the “liberal media”.

I don’t even know how Bush got nominated in the first place. The Republican primaries in 2000 were between Dubya, a spoiled rich boy and failed oilman who never had to work a day in his life, and John McCain, a war hero who spent five years of his life as a POW in Vietnam, always championed Republican ideals such as small government and low taxes and would have been an amazing post 9/11 president. Instead, registered Republicans voted for the dipshit who couldn’t even name four world leaders in four major countries in a TV interview. If I was a Republican, I’d vote against Bush in November and nominate someone with integrity in 2008.

I think it’s important to vote, even though Bush is passing laws to get highly suspect voting machines to the polls, but that’s an article for another time. And even if you hate all the candidates, I think you should at least go down there and write-in someone or something to let your voice be heard. The American citizen, especially at this moment in history, is the most important entity in deciding what the future of humanity will hold.

”The people of this country must realize that they have a great responsibility in the sphere of international politics. The part of passive spectator is unworthy of this country and is bound in the end to lead to disaster all round." - Albert Einstein, 1921

Register to vote here http://www.fec.gov/votregis/pdf/nvra.pdf