Political Absurdity in Review

by Michael K. Smith

The recent flap over Rush Limbaugh's "slut" remarks once again featured a boycott movement designed to remove an ignorant blowhard from the public air waves, as though punishment of objectionable speech were the proper response to grotesque (election year) propaganda. But if objectionable speech is to be banned rather than debated, why all the liberal fuss when Phil Donahue was removed from the air for opposing the 2003 Iraq invasion? Aren't advertisers entitled to be offended at comments that aid and abet a brutal dictator's continued reign (Saddam Hussein)? Or do liberals have a monopoly on speech codes?

The alleged necessity for Limbaugh's removal is all the damage to "women and girls" from his obnoxious sexist slander. Aside from the principled issue of freedom for the speech that we hate, without which free speech is a fraud and a sham, there is the obvious fact that taking a misogynist off the air has never been demonstrated to do anything to eliminate the relentless sexist imagery and commentary constantly spilling forth from the corporate mass media. Anyone who doubts this need only count the number of female crotch shots we are regularly subjected to in the visual media, not to mention the standard media assumption that women's value resides exclusively in their sexual attractiveness and willingness to go to bed with men. Limbaugh called someone a slut? Big deal. The corporate mass media constantly characterizes all women as secretly desiring to be sluts.

Furthermore, in terms of sheer destruction, "free trade" enthusiasts do far more damage to women and girls than all of Limbaugh's broadcasts put together. These champions of private profiteering at public expense classify the immense labor of mothering children as nothing more than a private hobby, by definition entitled to no public support, while the male-dominated war industry is rewarded with gargantuan public subsidies on the ridiculous pretext that making war enhances the general welfare. Concerned about damage to women and girls? Then ban capitalism.

But we can't even ban capitalism in medicine, which is a pre-requisite to public health, and which every other industrialized country besides the United States realized decades ago. Debate over Obama care (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) centers on the governmental tyranny involved in forcing Americans to purchase medical insurance. Meanwhile, of the private tyranny of Health Mafia Organizations that price-gouge the middle class and leave the diseases and injuries associated with poverty largely undiagnosed and untreated, not much is said, and even less done. The message is clear: Profit is sacred, and American lives, expendable. Oh happy day, change is here at last.

The whole Obama care discussion now before the Supreme Court strikes one as a pilot project to develop a Comedy Central show, perhaps to be called, "Three Stooges Squared" (Three squared equals nine; there are nine justices on the Supreme Court - ed.) Allegedly the seat of nearly divine wisdom, the Court long upheld the view that blacks were only three-fifths human, as stated in the U.S. Constitution, and more recently has insisted that the private corporation, a legal abstraction, is more human than biological men and women when it comes to human rights. So incorporate yourself and drive in the carpool lane, since a driver and his founding corporate documents constitute two people under the law.

The "conservatives" on the Court (reactionary jingoists - ed.) are concerned that if Obama care can mandate that Americans purchase medical insurance it may lead to unlimited federal authority and the extinction of personal liberty. During oral arguments Justice Antonin Scalia asked in apparent seriousness what would prevent the federal government from requiring all Americans to buy broccoli.

Naturally, there is no discussion of Constitutional over-reach when it comes to Obama's presumed authority to assassinate Americans with no recourse to due process of law, which Attorney General Eric Holder insists is a presidential prerogative, as long as the president designates his targets as "terrorists" before he kills them, an infinitely elastic category if there ever was one.

In fact, personal liberty is held hostage to corporate power and Israel fanatics in every dimension of contemporary American life, and the problem is not government over-reach, but government abdication of its Constitutional responsibility to promote the general welfare, which only once in a blue moon can be expected to coincide with the profit needs of the planet-spanning conglomerates that virtually own the government, and never with Jewish supremacist politics.

Instead of pointlessly debating a mandate to make Americans buy crappy insurance, the government should simply extend the socialized medicine it gives to every member of Congress to all American citizens. Note that the government doesn't badger Congress members to spend their food money purchasing second rate medical insurance, but rather, extends them high quality socialist care as a permanent entitlement, alongside a more than adequate salary. If this is right for government officials, why isn't it right for the American people?

Social or Anti-Social Media?

"If we want to save life and humanity, we are obliged to end the capitalist system."   Bolivian President Evo Morales

We hear and read that the economy is rebounding – again – and this during a multi billion dollar presidential campaign. Gee. Threats of more foreign wars are also unrelated to politics , nor are the signs of mental and physical breakdowns in our military which shouldn’t worry anyone now that the economy is rebounding. Again. Unfortunately, the corporate perspective from which everything is looking so good still rules our consciousness but among many subjects of the system, critical thinking is advancing. Though sometimes very slowly, as when decent people are swept up in emotional tsunamis by a manipulation device called social media.

An online phenomena about Invisible Children recently caused an offline tragedy among Invisible Adult Mentalities. The same social media that help provoke changes among people seeking democracy also offer opportunities for an opposition to maintain an anti-social minority’s control. By using new manipulation devices they can confuse massive populations in seemingly individual ways that feed into self obsessed, ego centered consumers of culture. Personal messages for individuals who are urged to share them almost without limits can be even more persuasive than older one-way mass broadcasting media. But even as they help bring people together texting, tweeting or twiddling in ways  still not understood by most users of electronic devices, they offer advantages to controllers of this system taking an increasing toll on the planet and all it’s inhabitants. The time to heed the words of Morales has never been more urgent.

Present campaigns to militarily intervene in Syria and attack Iran are stress signs in a global economy wildly enriching fewer people while reducing greater majorities to indebtedness, warfare and poverty. Popular confusion is not only due to major corporate media but also to weapons of mass disinformation that can be sent directly into our heads by the new social media. And  whether in the Middle East or the Middle West, suffering increases for many so that a few can live in luxury.

Palestinians continue to endure an apartheid settler state financed with massive tax payer aid from the American public, but no tweeted online miracle seems to bring that information into the personal lives of celebrities and millions of other people with no lives of their own but to follow celebrities.

Meanwhile, the supposed rebirth of the auto industry in the USA is entirely due to a tax payer financed public bailout of a private industry which has hired many new workers, but at half the wages of its old work force. In Tel Aviv , Detroit or Wall Street this is great for minority investors but it’s bad for a global majority. And that is how all alleged foreign threats and supposed recoveries in stock markets should be seen: they profit very few at enormous loss to the great majority and in doing so they increase danger to everyone’s future.

The American election will offer voters their usual choice of lesser evil and thereby guarantee continued evil, but needed social policies to transform reality will not be on the ballot. Calls for public banks, a maximum wage, a tax on wealth, health insurance for all, much more social spending and much less warfare waste, will continue to come from outside what is called mainstream politics but is really two wings of one corporate party representing minority capital. The  understandably angry majority divided into a tea party , an occupy movement and mistaken identity groups needs to ultimately find common ground in shaping a democracy that meets the needs of an entire population and not just a cabal of billionaires. That may seem impossible to people schooled in double standards , elitist division and contempt for others but most of them are neither believers in nor can they ever be practitioners of democracy. They support the minority rule of master race/chosen people doctrines with cosmetic language to cover that reality under a cloak of perverted democratic politics and the patriarchal religion of capitalist free markets.

Domination over public thinking is fading, even if not at a fast enough speed to assure a positive outcome. But once people gain control of their lives, their communities and their  environment, progress can be achieved far more quickly than the regressive destruction that has taken so long to reveal its cause. What is most important is that democracy seekers not succumb to the terrible negativity of social doctrines that thrive on division, opposition, combat and profit for national minorities only at tremendous loss to the global majority.

This capitalist political economic disease has brought humanity to a point of no return, but one that also offers a road to a better world for all and not just some. That will take real democracy which isn’t something we murder foreigners to achieve but  have to create in our own homelands by organizing and uniting with fellow citizens. This calls for more respect than we have been anti-socialized to give one another but once we realize individual freedom is not possible in isolation but only in community it may not be so difficult to achieve.

First, the talk of war must be stopped before it leads to actual war, and the power of minority money over the global system must be countered by the power of majority people. That will not happen as the result of a November election and certainly not by allowing social media to be used for anti-social purposes,  but it needs to happen soon.

Let God's Justice Reign?

"The god of the Holy Bible - so much adored in the United States and elsewhere - is ferociously vindictive, neurotically jealous, intolerant, vainglorious, punitive, wrathful, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sadistic, and homicidal. . . .were we to live literally by God's eternal and unchanging word as recorded in the Bible, we would have to execute homosexuals, adulterers, fornicators, and masturbators. We would have to stone to death those offspring who are given to drink or gluttony, or who disrespect their parents. We would have to kill rape victims who fail to cry out loud enough and exterminate people who violate the Sabbath. We would be obliged to execute those who take the Lord's name in vain or who proselytize for other deities or who have been labeled a witch. We would need to slice and tear the foreskins off all male infants; assassinate family members if they take up with false gods; suppress all other religions because they are ipso facto erroneous; instruct the millions held in involuntary servitude around the world to serve their enslavers faithfully because all authority stems from God; and launch genocidal military attacks against heathen nations that do not honor the one true deity of the West.

"We also can feel free to sell our daughters into domestic servitude and treat family members like mortal enemies should they encumber our own religious development in any way. We may own slaves captured from nearby nations (not just Mexico but even Canada). But we dare not taste shellfish or pork, and we must avoid all contact with women on the days they are menstruating . . . "

-----Michael Parenti, God and His Demons

Obama Apologizes For Murders, Commends Killer For Not Urinating On Victims

President Obama phoned his condolences to Afghanistan but pointed out that the murderer of sixteen innocent victims had not urinated on any of them. "Plainly, civilized treatment of the dead should not blind us to the fact that a horrible crime was committed, but how many other nations would breed homicidal soldiers who could exercise such self control?" he asked the shocked Afghani president who was heard to mutter " death to the dumb half white cracker" under his breath.

Invisible Children Online Phenomena:Thinking Adults Offline Tragedy

New Twitbook film viewed by twelve billion people in fifteen minutes reveals heart rending story of African - black  booga booga - evil monster and his mob of several hundred - black booga booga - monsters who kill children and must be stopped by U.S. military aid to an African regime also black - not quite as booga booga -  with aid supervised and under the control of civilized, white, missionary position assuming people who will  once again and as always straighten things out for poor, uncivilized and needy black  Africans who will all mostly die, starve, get AIDS or worse if the west doesn’t intervene.

Film makers will conduct an online sale at Gee-Bay in which bridges, highways and downtown buildings in the USA will go to Americans who donate the most money to the fund for gullible well meaning folks with so much idle time they can watch half hour films about Africans while showing complete disregard for their suffering pets.

Obama Quietly Prepares For Fellatio With Netanyahu

Solemn Duties To Be Pursued Without Fanfare, Aides Say

Fulfilling one of his more delicate responsibilities, President Barack Obama will perform fellatio on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the Democratic Party convention this summer, and not at next year's Super Bowl, as previously reported by Legalienate's intrepid reporters. The change of venue reflects the White House's keen interest in winning the crucially important contest for Jewish money before November, which requires a spectacular media event well before the Super Bowl.

Although the President insists he is an admirer of Netanyahu, and has long desired "a position on the Prime Minister's staff," members of the Washington press corps are secretly referring to the event as "the ultimate sacrifice." Foreign journalists are jokingly calling it the first "head-to-head" talks in the history of the presidency, although purists contend that George Herbert Walker Bush beat Obama to the punch by vomiting in the lap of then Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa in 1991.

Attempting to defuse Republican charges that he has striven to "delegitimize Israel," the President will begin his preparations this week in a meeting with Monica Lewinsky, where he is expected to broach the subject of "presidential kneepads." Lewinsky's kneepads, currently on exhibit in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institute, are apparently unavailable to Obama, which, journalists say, should quiet hysteria about the president's allegedly unlimited powers.

Biologists report that Obama's subservience to Israel is similar to submissive behavior in the animal kingdom. Appeasement displays are commonly found in species that are well armed and social, such as carnivores. The ritualistic displays typically incorporate infantile behavior, as when wolves roll over and beg for food, and baboons present their buttocks to the dominant animal prior to copulation. Obama's futile begging for nanosecond "time-outs" in Jewish colonization of Arab land appears to fall into the same category, though it is considered unusual for the stronger party to beg for mercy from the weaker. Experts say that the phenomenon is a variant of the House Negro Syndrome, in which a deracinated black man becomes so identified with his master that he no longer has an independent ego.

Psychologists insist that Obama's clinging helplessness and abject docility in the face of Netanyahu's boundless contempt for him are evidence of such ego-obliteration, with the support and reassurance the tactic offers in an election year serving to compensate for the loss of self. In technical terms it is known as "dependent politics disorder," which is characterized by a craving to subordinate the needs of one's own nation to those of another country, surrendering responsibility for major areas of policy, as in Obama's eagerness to let Israel bomb Iran. The fundamental desire is to be kicked, and then patted on the head for having invited the kick.

The prognosis for those afflicted with the disorder is extremely poor, as masochists craving for acts of increasingly abject subservience tend to seek out psychotic figures to appease and placate. These, in turn, demand increasingly outrageous demonstrations of submission, leading almost inevitably to personal and social catastrophe.

Democrats Utterly Useless

"Sometimes when I watch the Washington Democrats in action, my mind goes back to the tragically incompetent British general staff of World War I, ordering assault after gigantic assault, only to see their armies annihilated one after another. But still they kept at it, ordering up another round of the exact same thing, playing by the gentlemanly rules of combat, never doing anything remotely clever, and always completely surprised when the other side introduced them to twentieth-century warfare in some brutal new way."

"It is that same blindness, that same fixed thinking, that we see in the strategizing of the Washington Democrats. No one among them seems to have wondered if bailouts might be done in a different way, or foreseen that Republicans might not play by the debt-ceiling rules. They try what Clinton tried; they are astonished to see it fail. And so they try it again. The Washington Democrats will no more acknowledge the possibilities of other tactics than they will abandon Georgetown and move en masse to some burned-out quarter of Baltimore. . . . ."

"It is not hard to think of ways that Obama and Company could have stopped the resurgent Right in its tracks, had they wanted to. To begin with the most obvious, Obama and Company could have put themselves at the forefront of populist anger against Wall Street rather than making themselves the embodiment of the cronyism the public despises. They could have captured the outrage of small business by promising to break up the big banks or resuming antitrust enforcement. Another tactic might have built on the well-known facts that Tea Partiers hate NAFTA, and that they're hardly alone; why not announce that it's time to reexamine the nation's disastrous free-trade deals? Still another: As everyone knows, the newest Right has enjoyed amazing success spreading fears that liberal economic moves will automatically erode basic freedoms. Why not undercut this silly idea instead of allowing it to fester? End the Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program. Demand the reregulation of Wall Street and the repeal of the Patriot Act."

-----Thomas Frank, Pity The Billionaire