Week of 12/07/2009

The 2009 Brutally Honest Awards
– by David Matthews 2

It’s hard to imagine that another year has already passed, and yet here it is December already.

Lot of stuff to go over, so let’s get to it…

The Daniel Shays Award for 2009: Glenn “Blood Shooting From My Teary Eyes” Beck - Glenn Beck is probably the biggest fraud you can imagine. Limbaugh, Hannity, Dobbs, Savage… they won’t put on an act like he does. He cries on cue (with a little help from Vick’s Vapor Rub under the eyes), he uses visual aids, he stretches reality in a way that would make Baron Munchausen look like a rank amateur… PT Barnum once said that there’s a sucker born every minute, and now you know where Beck gets his audience from. And now he thinks he can organize rebellions and calls them “political rallies”. Well since Beck fancies himself a student of history, maybe he should look up the person for whom this award was named after to see what happened to people who pull that sort of stunt.

The Whisky Rebellion Award for 2009: Dick Armey and his Teabaggers - Dick Armey is NOT a political outsider. His group is NOT “grass-roots”. Dick Armey is a former member of Congress. His group is a professional PAC. It’s like bringing in an NFL team to a Pop Warner football game and trying to pass them off as a bunch of “really big 10-year olds”. They only thing they want to change is which political party is in charge of things in Washington.

The “Just Shut Up And Go Away” Award for 2009: Carrie “Hysteria Barbie” Prejean - She couldn’t get past the fact that she blew her chances at winning Miss USA. She has no real concept of the First Amendment. She blew the second chance that Donald Trump gave her and then couldn’t figure out why she was dropped on her bony ass. She thinks that intentionally violating the terms of her contract makes her a religious martyr. She’s a victim in her own mind and she feels it’s her quest to make everyone admit that. Oh, and ignore the topless modeling pictures and the sextapes that aren’t really sextapes even though they reportedly feature her doing something that falls in the category of a solo sextape. Tell you what, Carrie… we’ll forget about that part as long as we can also forget about everything else that involves you.

The “Just Shut Up And go Away” Runner-Up for 2009: Former Vice-President Dick Cheney - Someone needs to remind DICK that former Vice-Presidents that he has absolutely ZERO credibility critiquing the current White House occupants over how to deal with Afghanistan. We wouldn’t have to DEAL with this problem if HE didn’t help transition it into the Iraq War. The only time I ever want to hear from him ever again is when (or if) he’s being arraigned in the Hague.

You know, the hypocrisy coming from the cons and neo-cons is absolutely surreal. What’s next… a lesson on how to comply with special prosecutors from Scooter Libby? A lesson on ethics from Karl Rove? A lesson in spelling from Glenn Beck? A lesson on how to eat a pretzel from Bush Junior?

The Political Usurper Award for 2009: Rush Limbaugh - Whether they want to admit to it or not, the GOP leadership HAS been co-opted by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and their supporters. They have allowed the listeners of those trained parrots to bully their way into dictating the direction of the GOP, and whether they realize it or not, it WILL be a detriment for them.

The Bill Frist Quack Award for 2009: Senator Max Baucus - Baucus is the guy spearheading the healthcare reform. He also gets millions in campaign contributions from the insurance companies, Big Pharma, and hospitals. So when asked to reform the whole healthcare system, who do you think he paid more attention to: the people who can’t afford healthcare who need a public option, or the rich insurance companies who think that everyone should be FORCED to get insurance whether they can afford it or not? Yeah I can think of at least four MILLION reasons why he’d side with the rich companies over his own constituents.

The Top Buzzwords in 2009 That Should Never Be Invoked EVER AGAIN With Healthcare Reform - “Opt-In”, “Opt-Out”, “Trigger”, “Robust”, and “Hammer”.

The Bay Of Pigs Award for 2009: Former Defense Secretary Donald “Zen Master” Rumsfeld - It turns out that we COULD have had Osama Bin Laden either in custody or in a body bag back in December of 2001. We knew where he was, we could have gone in and either taken him in or taken him down. All “Rummy” Rumsfeld had to do was say “Yes” to a request for reinforcements. Instead, he said “no”.

Do you understand the implications of this? We could have had this DONE AND OVER WITH by the end of 2001! We could have then focused ALL of our attention on Iraq instead of splitting our attention between two fronts.

All of those the lap-dog apologists of the Imperium who think they can criticize Obama’s recent decision to make a modest troop increase need to explain why we REFUSED to do everything it takes to bring Bin Laden to justice when we had the opportunity to.

The All-Time Quitter Award for 2009: Sarah “Caribou Barbie” Palin - That probably should be “Governor” Palin, but she actually up-and-quit her job. She wasn’t forced out, she wasn’t given a better offer, there was no embarrassing scandal, she just up-and-QUIT! And it wouldn’t be the only thing she up-and-quit this year either.

The Delusional Loons Of 2009 Award: Palin’s Defenders - I shudder to use the word “cult” when describing the people who have pretty much put Palin on an unrealistic pedestal, but it’s as close of a description can one can get. Palin gets the nomination and everyone thinks what a “great” choice was being made before anyone even knows who she is. Then she quits as governor, for no apparent reason other than she wants to make money on the tour circuit and book sales, her acolytes start crowing about how she’s now “unrestrained” and can “let loose”. And when asked about why they support her so, they start crowing about how she “represents things like freedom”. WTF!?!

It’s almost as though the followers were just programmed to have a “fill-in-the-blank” mindset for whomever is chosen, and then run on automatic. “Gumby is so perfect! He’s, like, green and rubbery and can bend back from any kind of movement.” “Lassie is just so perfect! She, like, represents everything that is good and decent in this country.” “It’s good that the can of beans quit, because now it can just let loose and do what it wants.”

And people question why Bill Maher thinks that Americans are stupid!

The Worst Political Tactic of 2009: Neo-Conservative Projection - Projection of one’s faults on others is considered to be one of the signs of narcissism, paranoia, and psychopathy. If you’re fat, you start accusing other people of being fat. If you’re claustrophobic, you start accusing others of being claustrophobic. And in the case of the neo-cons, if you’re afraid of being called a fascist or a Nazi, you start accusing your opponents of being either fascists or Nazis… or you can even accuse them of being both. Sure the two terms aren’t interchangeable, but don’t worry about it making sense, because neo-cons never make sense. Making sense could lead to even more dangerous things like… thinking.

The Lamest Excuse for 2009: “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” - Yes that was the excuse made by the staff of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford to explain why the governor seemingly vanished off the face of the planet. He didn’t really vanish, he just flew to the Southern Hemisphere to stick his wick in his “soulmate”. And then after that kind of talk he thinks he can make it up to his WIFE? In one felled swoop he destroys the very mirage of heterosexual marriage, not to mention the supposed “only purpose” of human reproduction, and then he thinks he can make it up?

The “I Proved David 2 Was Right” Award for 2009: Renegade Senator Joseph Lieberman - It was this time last year that I warned people to NOT TRUST LIEBERMAN. Remember that? Remember when I said that Harry Reid was making a mistake caving to Lieberman? Sure enough, the year wasn’t even over with and he turned on the party he promised allegiance with!

Go ahead, naysayers… admit that I was right!

I won’t hold my breath, though.

The Most Incompetent Member of Congress for 2009: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - For once, Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t even come close! Reid isn’t a leader. He’s a manager. He’s a wheeler-dealer who thinks that he can broker his way through each session instead of doing what needs to be done. If healthcare reform is shelved, you can blame him for letting it happen.

The “My Ego Is Bigger Than My Career” Award for 2009: Lou Dobbs - Once upon a time that would be “CNN’s Lou Dobbs”, but he’s not on CNN anymore… and he can thank his own ego for that. Lou’s ego became a detriment for his career. It wasn’t about “the issues” anymore. It was about HIM discussing “the issues”. The “Birther” issue wasn’t over with until HE determined it would be. The matter of immigration wasn’t how it was being addressed, it was about the fact that HE talked about it. And quite frankly, the only reason why he doesn’t HAVE a show on CNN any more is because HIS EGO wouldn’t let the show just be about the news.

The Biggest Political Non-Sequitur for 2009: “Jobless Recovery” - The Clinton Regime had “New Democrat”, the Bush Imperium had “Compassionate Conservativism”… and right now the Obama people have this BS notion that you can somehow spur an economic recovery while still have ONE-IN-FIVE Americans out of work. This is worse than the mini-recession of 2001 when real wages for most Americans did not go up. At least then it was a shell game. Here the White House is shoving hundred of billions of dollars to institutions without conditions and not even expecting it to produce the results needed - JOBS - to get us out of the Great Recession!

And finally…

The Brutally Honest Award for the Biggest Disappointment in 2009: The Obama Administration - This is an award that I DID NOT want to give, but let’s get brutally honest here… this administration has pretty much squandered a lot of the good faith that it was given in January. They underestimated the scope of the recession. They failed to deal with the issue of unemployment other than to provide a pittance of support to those still looking for work. They failed to corral the abuses of the banks and Wall Street. They failed to bring the lawbreakers in the Bush Imperium to justice. They failed to oversee the handling of healthcare reform in Congress and instead backed a failed plan by the most dubious of Senate leaders.

2009 started off on a high note for the Democrats, but if they are not careful and if they fail to address their faults now, next year will make this one seem like a fantasy.

Week of 11/30/2009

Draft WHO?

- by David Matthews 2

One of the really, REALLY, annoying things about politics of late is this perpetual drive to finish one campaign and begin work on the NEXT campaign, even if it is several years away.

After the 2006 Mid-term Election, the political machines were busy churning up candidates for the 2008 Election, and you had “destiny” candidates spinning up the hype that this would be THEIR campaign to lose.

Worse yet is when you have people who decide to “draft” a candidate into the running, especially someone you would think would be “perfect” but for one reason or another has decided to NOT run. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was once considered a “draft” candidate back in the 2000 election, but he backed down.

Well it seems there is a NEW movement to “draft” someone for the 2012 Election, even though it’s not for another three years and even though nobody has actually DECLARED their candidacy yet.

So who would it be, you ask? Maybe someone wanted to give Secretary Powell another shot? Well, probably not in the current climate of the GOP. Powell may be willing to be the scapegoat for the Bush Imperium and the chickenhawk neo-cons, but they sure as hell wouldn’t want him anywhere NEAR a position of power over them.

How about one of the trained parrots of talk radio? Maybe the “godfather” of the GOP, Rush “Oxy” Limbaugh? Or perhaps Glenn “Blood Shooting From My Eyes” Beck? Or Lou “Ignore The Duck Season Sign” Dobbs? He’s certainly looking for employment now that he found himself separated from CNN.

Nope. Those aren’t the names being bantered about. The name being bantered about is CHENEY.

Liz Cheney, you ask? You know, the neo-con attack dog who has been doing everything possible to attack the current Democrat control of Washington?

No, wrong Cheney.

Think DICK!

Yes, DICK Cheney! As in the former Vice-President DICK Cheney. The senile old fart who thinks that the office of the Vice-President is accountable to NOBODY at all! The Wal-Mart Greeter-From-Hell whose favorite rebuttal is a request to do something that you are biologically not capable of doing.

There are people who are SERIOUSLY trying to get the former VP to run for the White House in 2012 (presuming they’re not convicted for trying to launch a coup d’etat first).

Why DICK, you wonder? Because he supposedly embodies everything about the GOP that they’re looking for.

And if you think about it… they have a point. He’s a senile old fart who shoots first and manipulates his victims into blaming themselves. He’s never served in the military but he thinks that he knows more about the soldiers on the ground than the soldiers themselves. He believes that he is immune from responsibility. He keeps everything secret, even his whereabouts, but still wants to know what EVERYONE ELSE is doing. If you really think about it… HE IS the GOP!

But, seriously… WHY?

First of all, remember the last time the cons and neo-cons actually managed to “draft” a candidate into the running? Remember former Senator Fred Thompson? You know, “Law and Order” and “Hunt for Red October” Fred Thompson? Remember how you guys thought he would be the IDEAL candidate in 2008? Yeah, that didn’t go so well, did it? His campaign folded faster than a Flat Tax proposal.

Second… doesn’t that come as a slam on your CURRENT so-called “front-runner” candidates? You know, folks like Sarah “Quitter” Palin, Mike “God’s Anointed” Huckabee, and Mitt “I’m really one of you” Romney. Don’t you think that bringing Grandpa Grumpy back from the old folk’s home is something of an INSULT for the wannabes, also-rans, and never-coulds already looking for that 2012 ticket? It would be one thing if Cheney ran in 2008. Then at least he could be seen as the heir apparent to the Bush Imperium. But not now. Not after taking a break.

Third… let’s get brutally honest here… it is WAY TOO EARLY to be discussing 2012 contenders right now.

The last campaign season was a drag on all of us, and that only lasted TWO years. TWO years full of demagoguery and hateful rhetoric and talks of assassinations and lynching and people getting all uppity because they were characterized as being backwater people who cling to God and guns. And you guys want to extend that to THREE YEARS? Or maybe even FOUR? Why not just go ahead and start grooming people for the 2016 ticket while you’re at it? Or maybe you’re already doing that…

How about you cons and neo-cons put away your little “Fantasy White House League” equipment for now and worry about the 2010 mid-term election? After all, the way that the GOP has been shooting itself in the foot (thanks in no small part to your efforts), there may not BE a party for you guys to hang your hat on by the time 2012 comes around.

Week of 11/23/2009

Life Is NOT A Privilege
– by David Matthews 2

Do you know what’s really repulsive? Someone who is intentionally arrogant and pompous.

It’s one thing to be that way unintentionally. To come off as arrogant and not know it. But when you’re that way and you know it, that’s when there’s trouble.

One of the reasons why the French Revolution was as violent as it was partly had to do with the pompous, self-righteous arrogance of the nobles. When the “Let them eat cake” quote was made public, it didn’t matter if Marie Antoinette said it or not, it didn’t matter if it was said in jest or if she was seriously as clueless as it implied, it was still scornful and pompous and arrogant, and it helped fuel the bitterness and the rage that already existed amongst those that were being forced to suffer simply so Ms. Antoinette and her elite friends could party all the time.

“Privilege” is an elitist term. It means that you didn’t really get where you are because of hard work or talent or skills or because you saved your money. You got it because someone else GAVE it to you. The power isn’t in YOUR hands, it’s in someone else’s.

“We serve at the privilege of the President.”

Sound familiar?

Well to a large extent, WE ALL serve at the “privilege” of someone else when we work for a living instead of working for ourselves. If you don’t own the business outright, then your job is at the “privilege” of other people.

There are a lot of things that are considered a “privilege” in our society. Driving is a privilege. Shopping is considered a privilege. Doing business is considered to be a privilege. How many times have you seen a sign that says “We reserve the right to not do business with you” or something to that effect?

But is LIFE ITSELF a privilege?

According to certain members of Congress and the insurance companies, it apparently does.

One of the key problems that healthcare reform tries to fix is people not having insurance coverage. That’s why this idea of a “public option” or a government-run or government-managed program keeps coming up. Because people have either been dropped from their insurance or because they cannot AFFORD to get insurance.

You see, in the minds of insurance companies, healthcare coverage is a PRIVILEGE. Not everyone can get coverage. They certainly don’t want to be stuck paying out money for people who are just going to get sick all the time, right? This is, after all, a form of legalized gambling, and NO gambler in their right mind ever wants to LOSE.

Now many states have been down this road before when it comes to other forms of insurance like car insurance and homeowners insurance. Some people couldn’t afford it. Others just chose not to get it. The government’s solution was simple: require everyone to have it.

You see, in the minds of our corrupt politicians, having a car or having a home is a PRIVILEGE… one that can be taken away at their leisure. You can’t afford insurance? Then you don’t get to drive a car, or you don’t get to own a home. It’s that simple in their corrupt little brains.

But what about healthcare?

No difference, according to our corrupt politicians. If not having it is a problem, then members of the U.S. Senate want to REQUIRE you to have it… OR ELSE!

This is the glorious plan of Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the guy who was spearheading the Senate side of the reform program. It should be noted that he’s considered the darling of healthcare companies, reportedly receiving millions in contributions from the insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and health services, and they would obviously profit heavily from a government decree that would FORCE people to sign up for and pay for health insurance OR ELSE.

I want you to think about the sheer insanity of this idea. If part of the problem with healthcare coverage is that a segment of the populace cannot AFFORD to get healthcare coverage, how does REQUIRING they pay for it serve as a solution?

Make no mistake, this IS what people like Baucus want us to do. They want to FORCE US to enroll for healthcare insurance even if we cannot afford it! And if we do not or cannot afford it, we face FINES. In other words, we will lose even MORE MONEY that we did not have in the first place simply to appease the demented logic of those that have been bought and paid for by healthcare providers and insurance companies and Big Pharma!

It’s one thing to have a public option, a program that would be funded by the taxpayers. At least then there WOULD be coverage without that ever-prevalent THREAT OF FORCE.

And if you don’t think there isn’t that threat of force, ask yourself what happens after you refuse to pay a fine imposed by the government. You know those police chases you see on TV sometimes? What do they usually get stopped for in the first place? Things like unpaid traffic tickets.

Now when asked about this, supporters of this kind of demented logic justify it by falling back ON the car insurance example. Their rationality is that since they can FORCE drivers to get car insurance, they can FORCE the rest of us to get healthcare insurance.

But there is a HUGE difference between owning a car and getting healthcare insurance… and that is that you can always choose to NOT drive a car. If you don’t have coverage, you can choose to NOT DRIVE. But you CANNOT CHOSE TO NOT LIVE! Or at least you’re not supposed to… because that is called SUICIDE!

And yet let’s get brutally honest here… that is EXACTLY the kind of choice Baucus’ “masterpiece” plan called for! Sure there were SOME “hardship exceptions” that were offered, but the basic rule was that you HAD to get coverage, even if you couldn’t afford it… OR you would be fined, which would mean paying even MORE money that you don’t have in the first place… OR you just had to kill yourself. As disturbing as it may seem, and it is just that… there is no other way around that kind of thinking. It’s either pay money that you don’t have… or just kill yourself.

Worse yet, President Obama, in his joint-session address to Congress and the nation, actually SUPPORTED THE IDEA!

Now I would like to think that, much like his predecessor’s “16 words”, President Obama really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I would like to think that he was simply reading the script that was put before him, and if he really put two brain cells together and put some thought into what he was saying, that he would realize the Machiavellian choice being proposed and would want to change his mind. I’d like to think that he’s smarter than this.

Thankfully… thankfully… there ARE people who saw what was going on and have put in a public option to balance things out. But unless this can be guaranteed by the time it reaches the President’s desk… presuming the whole thing even makes it THAT far… we would have to choose between continuing a bad situation or bringing in something that would make it much worse.

LIFE IS NOT A PRIVILEGE! The very arrogance of certain politicians, no matter the political affiliation, to operate as thought that simple statement was not true only serves to further justify the distrust we have for those who claim to be operating on our behalf.

Week of 11/16/2009

The Armageddon Gambit
– by David Matthews 2

(Writer’s warning: the following article is done completely in jest, and it is best approached as such. Do not presume that any of the suggestions being made should be seriously considered.)

For years liberals have tried to come up with various ways to get rich and powerful people to give up their monies. Often they use a combination of arrogance and the platitude of some “communal equilibrium” to justify it. Sometimes it’s a misguided sense of charity that wins the day, but despite millions upon millions donated, the problems the charity groups CLAIM to deal with somehow aren’t resolved, so the rich and powerful sort of figure that out.

Unfortunately rich and powerful people are greedy and self-centered people. They wouldn’t be rich and powerful if they weren’t greedy and self-centered to begin with. This is why liberals have a hard time convincing rich and powerful people to part with their wealth, because they appeal to a sense of community that the rich and powerful have no real appreciation of.

However I think that I may have come up with the BEST way to convince the rich and powerful to give up their wealth…

Convince them that the world is about to end.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking… this has been brought up over and over again, and usually it’s by some nutcases who read scrolls and invisible numbers and codes in religious documents, or maybe take a little too much LSD and start tripping out, and they supposedly see end days and they go hide in bunkers with dim-witted followers who consider bunkers a step up from their meager trailer park existence.

Guess what? That’s strictly amateur hour material.

Where the bush-league doomsayers fail is that they only have THEIR words and THEIR interpretations. There’s no definitive corroboration that what they are saying will come true. It’s just THEIR word, and if you’re talking about some nutcase who took a lot of drugs when they were younger and was a fourth-grade dropout, then they don’t have too much credibility to begin with.

For this to work liberals need to bring in as many experts as possible. You need to coordinate with as many scientists and seismologists and climatologists as you can to convince the rich and powerful that the world as we know it is going to come to an end. They need proof, and they need proof that even their own people will find hard to refute. In fact you may have to bring their experts into the con for this to work.

Oh, and don’t forget they need to believe that this information is a “secret”. The public will never know about this. If anyone suggests it in the open, then these same experts will immediately refute and reject it outright. This is just for those who “need to know”. Because let’s get brutally honest here... in order for them to believe that the literal “End of the World” is nigh, they need to believe that ONLY THEY will know about it in time to do something to save themselves.

The next thing you need to do is to convince them that you have a way to SAVE them from destruction, because the first instinct these rich and powerful people will have is to find a way to ride out whatever cataclysm is about to happen. And we’re not talking ethereal “salvation” either. No “Rapture”, no biblical calling home of the faithful. We’re talking physical survival. They want to be able to walk into the “new” post-cataclysm world on their own two feet, confident that they survived when the rest of the world didn’t.

For that you need a shelter. You need a special bunker, or a vault, or some sort of ark, or maybe even a combination of these things. Something HUGE… or seemingly huge. Fortunately we have a LOT of abandoned mine shafts and closed-up nuclear silos from those Cold War days. You need to give the impression that these haven’t really been filled up and cemented over.

Once you have them convinced that the end-of-the-world is REALLY about to happen and that you DO have a way for the rich and powerful to survive, that’s when you deliver the hook. And the hook is that you’ll save a “place” for them, but only if they’re willing to give up a sizable portion of their money. Don’t be greedy and ask for ALL of it. They have to believe that, while they won’t be able to take it ALL with them, that they WILL be able to take some of their largesse, so that when they to re-emerge in that “new” post-cataclysm world they will STILL be in positions of power and respect.

Then have them wait. And be sure to update them repeatedly to verify that the “end of the world” is STILL coming and that the masses won’t know what will “hit” them. Be sure to tie in any kind of natural disaster that occurs as being a harbinger for future events.

Presto! Countless billions of dollars eagerly handed to you for whatever government project you want enacted. And if they ask about the spending you can always say that it’s just “cover” to keep the masses ignorant to what’s yet to come.

Now if you’re smart, you’ve convinced the rich and powerful that they have a couple of years to prepare for the end of everything. At least two or three years will suffice. That will impress upon them the urgency to act now instead of waiting. After all, preparations need to be “made”. You give them too much time and they’ll delay giving up their money. You give them too little time and they’ll suspect getting scammed.

The really hard part will come when the so-called “deadline” comes near. If you’re lucky then you’ve convinced your fleeced elites to head to that “safe place” before any sign of bad things reportedly start to happen. You can always come up with reports of certain cataclysms while they’re on their way there.

Unfortunately there will come that point when the fleeced elites will realize that they’ve been taken for a ride. If you’re lucky they’ll be holed up in the “safe place”, being fed a continual supply of doom and gloom, and thinking that the world is in fact coming to an end around them. But at some point they WILL opt to come out of their hiding place and they will be ANGRY if the world is the same as it was when they went in.

However…by this time they will not have the money and power and influence that they once had. They will, at that point, have given up most of their wealth, and the rest of the world will have learned to go on without their influence. They would, essentially, be neutered.

It’s a really great scheme if someone were to orchestrate and organize it. It would deliver countless billions to where it would be needed the most, and it would get those annoying rich people out of the way.

Oh, by the way, there is one last thing that you need to do… you need to make sure that NONE of this EVER goes out to the general public. I know it’s tempting to develop this into some Made-For-Cable feature, or even perhaps a major blockbuster motion picture, but the con won’t work if people suddenly realize that this was all just a farce.

Wait… you mean to tell me they’ve ALREADY turned it into a movie?

Oh nuts. Guess it’s back to using political arrogance and wealth envy.

Week of 11/09/2009

Show Me The Freedoms!
– by David Matthews 2

One of the things that have really bothered me of late has been this cry from conservatives and neo-conservatives about “lost freedoms”. Every time they open their mouths, they cry about “this freedom” or “that freedom” that is lost or threatened by President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

But I have to ask… WHAT freedoms are they talking about?

No, seriously, WHAT FREEDOMS?

Media moonbat Glenn “Blood Shooting From My Crying Eyes” Beck constantly cries over the “freedoms” that are lost, or are being lost, or are about to be lost. He and the other flakes and trained parrots for the GOP are acting as though they are the direct mediums to America’s Founding Fathers… when, in truth, if those Founding Fathers knew what was being done in their name, they would probably pull a “Dawn of the Dead” act just to bitch-slap these flakes silly. They certainly NEED a hard dose of reality after the stunts that people like Beck pull.

So the first question that needs to be asked is WHAT FREEDOMS are supposedly being “threatened”?

If the subject is healthcare, WHAT FREEDOMS are supposedly on the line here?

Sure there’s the talk about the dreaded “Fairness Doctrine”, but that particular neo-con boogie man is something that has been opposed for thirty years now. It’s been brought up over and over and over again by liberals who yearn to silence their opponents, but that’s all that it has been… TALK.

Tell you what, Glenn, you find that legislation or regulation that would reinstate the “Fairness Doctrine” and we’ll fight it together. In fact you’d have people on ALL sides of the political spectrum coming out to FIGHT that kind of legislation or regulation. BUT you’d have to find it first.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have actually CENSORED speech in the past. Remember the needless hysteria surrounded Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “flash”? The congressional hearings, the new censorship laws imposed, the directives to the FCC to crack down on “offensive” material… any of those things ring a bell?

Moonbat Beck wants people to think that “net neutrality” is also a form of censorship. It only works, of course, as long as most people have absolutely no idea what net neutrality REALLY is. For those of you who are more ignorant than a 17^th Century colonist during the Witch Trials, net neutrality would be the one thing that would prevent your Internet provider from blocking the Fox News website, or wanting you to pay extra just to view its streaming videos. You get the picture?

So again… WHAT FREEDOMS are really on the line here?

The “freedom” to choose your own healthcare provider? In many states you don’t have that anyway! Several states just have ONE insurance provider. ONE. And what happens when IT decides you’re not eligible for coverage? Is that what Beck and company call a “freedom”?

Oh… how about the “freedom” of information between a doctor and patient? I’m sure Beck and company would say that THIS is being “infringed” by healthcare reform, right?

UNLESS… the “treatment” being discussed between doctor and patient is something that they could not discuss anyway. Things like… abortion… medicinal marijuana… experimental non-approved drugs... discussions that Beck’s wacky zoo crew friends would RATHER NOT be brought up.

Is THAT the “freedom” that Beck is lamenting over? The “freedom” to BE silenced?

Let’s see… what other “freedoms” that Beck and his wacky zoo-crew friends want to fret about?

The freedom of association, you say? Hmm… which “association” are we talking about? The one between doctors and patients? Doctors and big pharmaceutical companies? Hospitals and insurance providers? Employers and insurance providers? Insurance providers and Americans? Or maybe between Insurance executives, Big Pharma executives, Hospital executives, and their stock brokers, financial advisers, and golden parachutes?

And HOW ARE any of these things “threatened”? Beck and his zoo crew won’t answer that. They’ll just say that it is.

And THEREIN lies the problem! The cons and neo-cons and their wacky zany zoo people like Glenn Beck banter words about like “freedom” without the slightest ounce of PROOF that any of it is actually THREATENED!

In fact Beck and his zoo crew have to actually INVENT so-called “freedoms” to justify their fraudulent claim of them being “threatened”. They have to MANUFACTURE the “right to make a profit” to then claim that it is “threatened”. They have to FABRICATE a “right to own a business” for them to then falsely claim that it is “under attack”.

As a matter of fact, I can and will shoot down that whole premise of Beck and his zoo crew with one simple question! ONE QUESTION! That’s all that it takes to shoot this whole thing down!

Glenn… if you and your cons and neo-con supporters really and truly subscribe to this belief that there is a “right to own a business” and a “right to make a profit”, would you then vigorously defend my perceived “right” to open a brothel between a Day Care Center and a church?

Glenn? Are you there, Glenn? You and your zoo crew myrmidons all of a sudden became painfully silent. Where did you go Glenn? I thought you were all for my perceived “right” to own a business and to make a profit, Glenn. You mean to tell me that there ISN’T such a “right”? You mean to tell me that not all businesses are treated the same? But that is what a “right” entails. It means it’s something that the government has NO BUSINESS getting involved in! You mean to tell me that there ARE some businesses that can-and-must be outlawed or controlled or corralled through government?

Let’s get brutally honest here… if you want to sit there and scream and shout about endangered freedoms, then you had better be prepared to actually EXPLAIN what those “freedoms” are! You got your chalkboard, Glenn… and you know how to use it… so go ahead and actually LIST which specific freedom is endangered.

You want those of us who REALLY support freedom to support your side, Glenn? Then you SHOW US what “freedoms” are at stake!

You see, here’s the problem: Beck and his zany zoo crew are flipping out over manufactured “threats” to freedoms while at the same time ignoring ACTUAL threats and infringements on REAL freedoms. Where WERE these self-styled pseudo-patriots when the government said that “9/11” was their universal justification for everything? Where WAS that three-pointed cap of theirs when it came to the PATRIOT Act or the FISA courts? Where WAS that reverence for America’s Founding Fathers and for freedom itself before November of 2008?

Worse yet, as long as Beck and his myrmidons are screeching about fabricated “threats” - done pretty much at the behest of filthy-rich insurance companies, hospital administrators, and Big Pharma - they diminish the efforts of those who respond to the REAL threats to freedom in this country. So WHEN the government decides to pull another PATRIOT Act or something far worse in the name of “national security”, those of us who TRULY stand up and oppose it will be compared to Beck and his zoo crew. He and his friends are actually doing the cause of freedom a DISSERVICE!

Glenn Beck does what he does to get attention for himself. This has always been the case, no matter if he’s on radio or TV. You can take the character out of zoo radio, but you can’t take zoo radio out of the character.

I’m not saying that the healthcare programs going through Congress doesn’t have some faults. There are some proposals going through that ARE a threat to personal freedom, such as requiring mandatory insurance without providing a public option. But if you’re going to pretend to side with names like Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, then you had BETTER be serious about it, and you had BETTER provide SPECIFIC instances and examples. Because for those of us who DO take the cause of freedoms seriously, THIS IS NOT A GAME! This is not some talk radio stunt or a shtick to put on Fox News for the sake of ratings.

It’s time for moonbats like Beck to be sent back to the zoo where they belong.

Week of 11/02/2009

What If You Are Wrong?
– by David Matthews 2

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not.”

Famous last words. Or they should be.

Hollywood loves to spin tales of people taking extraordinary steps to do what is right, to save the day, to right the wrongs. No matter how far-fetched the idea or theory may seem, the hero is NEVER wrong about it. The plan will always come through, the fear or concern or suspicion WILL be validated, the idea WILL work.

The hero has every reason to be so cock-sure in what they believe in. They don’t need experience or evidence or proof, they just need GUTS, intuition, determination, and the feeling that THEY ARE RIGHT, and they will win the day.

But what if the hero WASN’T right?

Did it ever occur to anyone how some of the most dramatic stories would have turned out if the hero WASN’T right? What if there WAS no grand conspiracy? What if that hunch WAS wrong? What if the gambit DIDN’T work?

Nobody ever thinks about that. And fortunately in the fantasy worlds of Hollywood, they don’t HAVE to think about it. The hero is ALWAYS right because it SAYS so in the script.

But we don’t live in the fantasy world. We live in the REAL world. And unfortunately for the REAL world, luck is NOT always on the side of the good guys. In fact, the “good guys” are not always “good” to begin with. Sure they may have the right INTENTIONS, but so do most of the things that go horribly wrong.

The key element is RISK. Everything has some measure of risk to it. Action, inaction, decision, indecision, they all have some measure of RISK to them. You can take action, or you can do nothing. Either way there is RISK involved. If you win, you get rewarded. If you lose, you deal with the consequences.

That is how it applies to the vast majority of people in this world. That’s how the system is supposed to WORK.

The problem comes when you have that segment of the populace who DO mess with that system. Who do everything they can to maximize their reward and to minimize - if not eliminate - any and all kinds of consequence.

The great disconnect that exists between Corporate America and the rest of the world is that THEY HAVE changed the rules for themselves. When they win, they win big. They give themselves raises and “retention incentives”, stock options and other perks. But when they lose, they don’t really LOSE. They manipulate the numbers so that it looks like they’re still making money, or at least aren’t losing money. They manipulate those in government so they can outsource or “streamline” jobs to other nations, or bring people in from other nations so they can pay them cheaper than they would have to in the normal business world. They even talk the government into giving them big stinking bailouts under the excuse that they are “too big to fail”.

And when worst comes to worst, they aren’t held accountable for their actions. Sure it may have been THEIR decisions that lead down the road to bankruptcy and dissolution, but THEY can’t be held to account for that! It’s just the “nature of the system”. Sure it can lead to rampant layoffs, the unexaggerated destruction of whole communities, vast economic depression, but THEY can’t be the ones responsible for it! THEY didn’t do anything wrong! It’s just how things are. Things just MAGICALLY happen that way.

And they get away with it too, because they make friends with those who have even more experience in changing the rules to their benefit… those in GOVERNMENT!

Those in government operate under two simple rules:

Rule #1: The government is NEVER WRONG.

Rule #2: When the government is wrong, see Rule #1.

Oh they can hide it, of course. They have plenty of years experience in doing just that. They keep us busy worrying about one fear or another, one threat or another, one convenient “scandal” after another. They play games with political parties, manipulating the rules, doing everything they can to divert attention from the fact that they write themselves more and more immunization from accountability.

Sure “mistakes” can be made, but THEY will never admit to making them. Abuses will happen, but nobody can be held to account for them.

THE ONLY TIME that those in government are held accountable for ANYTHING is when they deem the action to be only for their own self-interests. $90,000 in a freezer is considered “wrong”, but rubber-stamping a $700,000,000,000 program that makes eight banks more powerful and less accountable is perfectly fine and dandy.

They’re always for holding people accountable, as long as THEY aren’t the ones that need to be held to it. They’re always for transparency, as long as THEY aren’t the ones being asked to open up. They’re always for responsibility, but only as long as THEY get to point the finger of blame, and it never seems to fall on THEMSELVES.

Sometimes they soft-pedal it. Sometimes they offer up a “truth and reconciliation commission” that would have no real power and certainly hold no-one to blame. If they feel obliged to have a “special prosecutor” then they may need to toss out a sacrificial lamb… some minor player who will willingly take the fall on some minor charge. Or they’ll insist that we “not dwell on the past”… that we should “move beyond” it all and start anew.

Or sometimes they will brazenly out-and-out refuse to be held accountable for their actions. They’ll dismiss the whole thing under words like “Executive Privilege”, “Legislative Immunity”, or just outright call it for what it is… “Sovereign Immunity”. “Sovereign” as in DOMINION. They are your MASTERS, accountable to no one, not even to God. That is how they carry themselves. That is how they expect us to treat them. To them, government is not “by the people, of the people, and for the people”. Quite the opposite, in fact; the people are supposedly there FOR GOVERNMENT.

Let’s get brutally honest here, the whole concept of JUSTICE itself is PERVERTED whenever you have a group that deems themselves beyond reproach and beyond accountability.

You want to know when corruption in government really starts? It doesn’t start with freebees or the occasional bribe. Those are just pilot fish compared to the whole whale. Corruption actually STARTS when you have those in government who decide that they don’t have to question whether or not they’re doing something right. When they believe they don’t HAVE to justify their actions or account for their activities. It’s not the cop being GIVEN the free coffee or the assemblyman being GIVEN a free meal that makes them corrupt. Businesses give away free coffee or free meals or free newspapers for any variety of reasons. It doesn’t make it corruption. Corruption in government happens when these people believe that these things, and much more, are OWED to them simply BECAUSE they’re in government.

As soon as they believe themselves to be above the rules that the rest of us are bound to, it’s only a matter of time before those with money and influence start cuddling up to them, because they know that they will be the ones to re-write the rules. You take a look at all of the problems we face today, all of the things that are destroying America bit by bit, and you’ll find powerful people using the power of government to put themselves above us, and to put themselves above reproach.

Want to make a quick fortune and don’t care about the consequences? Get government to exempt a whole market out of oversight and let it run rampant. That’s what they did with the price of oil.

Want to make eight banks more powerful than ever before? Give the Treasury Department $700 billion, complete autonomy to spend it as they see fit, and complete immunity from prosecution for lying about how it would be used.

And make no mistake, the problems that we are dealing with right now WILL come back to haunt us in the future as long as we refuse to hold the ones responsible for CREATING them in the first place accountable for their actions.

We need to start asking others “What if you are wrong?” What happens if your hunch doesn’t pan out? What happens if your guess is wrong? What happens if your plan fails?

And we need to pay attention to the answer as well… because it’s one thing to ask “What if you’re wrong?” and be told that they’re not.

It’s another thing completely to be told they don’t have to answer that kind of question AT ALL.

Week of 10/26/2009

Crazy As A Fox... (News, that is)
– by David Matthews 2

At the climax of the movie “Private Parts”, the semi-biographical look at the radio phenomenon that is Howard Stern, the radio executive that was trying to “coral” Stern got the latest listener research and was shocked to find that listeners who loved him and hated him continued to listen to his show for the same reason: to hear what he would say next.

Howard Stern, of course, is an entertainer. He’s a clown. He’s an audio jester. He makes fun of himself and other people. Nobody would ever confuse him with being anything else. You won’t see him on the Sunday talk show circuit talking about the federal deficit or on the financial channels talking about the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Commentators, of which I am one, are a different bird entirely. We ARE known for our opinions. Sure we can engage in some laughs at the expense of ourselves and others, but we’re better known our OPINIONS about current events. Our OPINIONS count. Our OPINIONS matter. It’s our OPINIONS that give us our measure.

So that’s why I seriously begin to wonder when a commentator goes off the deep end.

The movie “Network” is probably the best example of when a commentator goes too far. The movie gives a satirical look at a network anchor named Howard Beale. He starts out rather boring, the typical old news curmudgeon who is fired because of declining ratings. He announces the next night on the air that he plans on killing himself on his final night, and that sends ratings through the roof. He suffers a nervous breakdown, which he considers to be a religious epiphany, and begins a series of rants, including the legendary “I’m as mad as hell” rant. The network executives soon make the show to be all about HIM and all about HIS words, and people pay attention to what he has to say, even if it is crazy.

One has to wonder, though, if Beale didn’t announce that he was visited by God if people would still listen to him. Would the “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” have been carted off to that magical place with padded walls and wraparound jackets and regular medications?

Beale was crazy; there was no doubt about that. His mind skipped town long before he became famous. But what kept Beale going was he empathized with the growing frustration of the masses. The continued feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that most people experience, especially when they turn on the evening news and they hear about a declining economy and terrorism and threats to end the world on a continual basis. Beale, the maniac that he was, tapped into that growing malaise and channeled it and got people to express it. That was the only thing that kept him not only employed, but also out of that place with the padded walls.

But of late I’ve had to seriously ask if that same pattern isn’t being repeated on some of the cable news channels with some of their so-called “rising stars”.

Mind you, I’m not talking about Stephen Colbert. I know he’s being satirical. I get the joke. That’s why he’s on Comedy Central.

I’m talking about people like CNN’s Lou Dobbs. Here’s an example of an over-inflated ego if there ever was one.

Once upon a time Dobbs was the anchor of a show called “Moneyline”. It was about money. Now, twenty years later, the show is still on, but it’s no longer called “Moneyline”. Now it’s called “Lou Dobbs”. Now it’s all about HIM and what HE thinks. It’s all about him promoting his books and his Twitter page and his radio show and whatever his pet cause is for the moment… which is usually immigration and bureaucracies.

But at least Dobbs is only hindered by narcissism. Sure he sees himself as being the only person in the world who can tell the truth about anything except for maybe the time of day, and his condescending arrogance can be unbearable at times, but he still clings to some semblance of sanity.

The same, however, cannot be said of some of the people at Fox News. Specifically of the talk show host who actually likens himself to Howard Beale… namely Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck apparently operates in a delusional fantasy world, one where the Cold War never ended, and Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong is alive and well and has somehow taken over the United States under the guise of the current US President, flanked by Prohibition-era mobsters who wield baseball bats and carry out vendettas against all those who oppose his rule. He brings out charts and graphs to support his delusions, scribbles things on his chalkboard as though he was trying to cobble together some great Theory of Relevance, and not always getting the spelling right. He dissects sculptures in the same way that 1950’s holier-than-thou hucksters played rock music records backwards looking for hidden messages.

As with others of his ilk, Beck suffers from the typical persecution complex. Everyone is “out to get him”… or at least everyone who doesn’t subscribe to his fantasy world. Sadly that’s par for the course for today’s neo-con talking heads. They can pretend to be brave, claiming to be willing to “take a bullet” or “take a beating” from the thugs that only they can see, all in the cause of getting what they claim is “the truth” out.

Also as with others of his ilk, Beck projects his faults onto others. This is actually a defensive tactic, since calling the other person a slut and a whore prevents them from calling you out for actually being one. OTHER people are “polarizing”. OTHER people are “tyrants”. OTHER people are causing trouble. OTHER people are lying. OTHER people are bigoted and racists. Not him. NEVER him.

Even sadder to note: Beck actually YEARNS for America to go back to the time just immediately after the darkest days since Pearl Harbor. He has a hard-on for September 12^th, 2001… back when America was scared and huddled in fear looking towards “daddy government” to protect them. “Daddy government” of course under the firm control of conservatives and neo-conservatives, not under the current tenure.

Now I want you to think about the most personally tragic, shocking, horrific event either in your life or in the life of someone you know. Think about when you were attacked, or robbed, or in a car accident, or when a family member died. Now imagine being told from a stranger that you should be consciously RELIVING that moment all the time. As someone who knows first-hand about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I would be sorely tempted to dish-out some trauma of my own to anyone who would suggest I should consciously CHOOSE to relive those tragic events!

And yet this is what Beck wants America to do! That’s why he’s obsessed with “9/12”.

In Beck’s delusional fantasy world, America’s founding fathers apparently never owned slaves. He believes that “progressives” used to be called “tyrants”, and eventually “slave owners”. Once again his deluded mind fails to recognize that the very concept of freedom, never mind the kind of democratic republic our government was meant to become, was a clearly PROGRESSIVE concept! America’s founding fathers were not “conservative” in any sense of the term as we use it today. The real “conservatives” were the ones in London, sitting at Buckingham Palace and Parliament, sending soldiers across the ocean to secure what they pompously declared was “their property”, which included the colonists themselves.

Beck also believes that certain freedoms have vanished since January. Freedoms like free speech, free press, freedom to assemble, freedom of work, freedom to make a profit, freedom to make medical choices…

I know what you’re about to say… “Hey, wait a minute… there is no freedom of work, or to make a profit, or to make medical choices in the Constitution!” You’re right. There isn’t. But they’re all there in Glenn Beck’s fantasy world. Or they were… until Obama/“Mao” came in with his hypothetical gangsters, and then all of a sudden those “rights” were “gone”.

Makes you wonder when the people with the butterfly nets and the wraparound jackets will be showing up, huh? Well, don’t hold your breath on that.

Because let’s get brutally honest here… it’s all AN ACT!

The crying on camera? Please! That’s Vick’s Vapor Rub placed just under the eyes. The “us-versus-them” “Red Scare” mentality and rhetoric? Walter Winchell. The charts and graphs? Ross Perot, not to mention a few actors in those old atomic testing films best made famous in the movie “Atomic Café”.

But when you look at Beck’s history, you begin to see someone who is desperate for attention. You see someone who has a long history of doing anything and everything to get people to recognize him, be it on radio or later on cable television. That certainly explains his zany antics.

Is he crazy? Sure. Crazy as a FOX! As in the Fox News channel.

And that’s why Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp group will stick with him through all the talk about boycotts and withdrawing sponsors… because as long as Beck continues to play the “Zoo”-style antics that he first honed on morning radio, he gets people talking about him, and if they’re talking about him, he brings viewers to News Corp’s cable news channel. Boycotts don’t last, and sponsorships are a dime a dozen to big corporate news services, but viewers are gold.

Sadly for Beck, though, the attention he seeks is fleeting. And for someone who likens himself to Howard Beale, he probably should remember what happened to Beale when his ratings started to slide that one final time. Then Beale wasn’t even given the luxury of a two-week notice.

Of course this isn’t the movie world, nor is it Beck’s fantasy world. If anything he’ll probably spend his down time like he spent his previous down times… struggling to stay relevant, saying anything to get attention, but eventually he’ll end up being the last thing he will ever expect to be: forgotten.

Week of 10/19/2009

When the Bough Breaks
– by David Matthews 2

The video wasn’t up for very long. Those kinds of videos usually aren’t. The major news services didn’t even bother to mention it. But the websites that were looking for such a video found it and copied it and reposted it on their servers so their viewers knew what was being said.

It had no music with it. No background noises, no voice narration, just a simple visual message. It was a relatively cheap video, the kind you could make with readily available Windows software.

The message was directed at a group of political leaders. All of them, by no coincidence, Democrats. They were all told they had until October 15^th to step down, or else they would supposedly be forced out.

Obviously the deadline came and went. So far nobody has tried to make good on the threat. And hopefully nobody will.

But this was just the latest in a series of threats made against Democrats that went beyond just the hate-filled rhetoric brought on by partisan sour grapes over last year’s election. Not too long ago someone posted a Facebook poll asking people whether or not the President of the United States should be assassinated. It was taken down and is still being investigated, but the rhetoric has certainly escalated.

It was hard to believe that it was just a scant fifteen years ago that this level of hate… and yes it IS hate… reached a point to where a couple of people took it upon themselves to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing not only men and women, but also innocent children. In their twisted minds they believed this act would spark others, and still more others, until the whole country imploded in nasty bigoted riots and anarchy.

That obviously didn’t happen. In fact just the opposite occurred. When faced with the sheer horror of the violence, Americans aligned themselves AGAINST the people behind the bombing. There was no civil war; there was no anarchy.

And yet one has to wonder given the outright animosity that has been generated of late if we are not too far off from something like it happening again.

It doesn’t take too much to push the buttons of a person riled up into a frothing rage, whether it is the passion of watching a really intense sporting event, the mechanizations of a political movement, or just a long string of perceived personal injustices and stresses. The sources may differ, but the reactions are still the same. When driven to rage, all it takes is just one seemingly insignificant event to turn that rage into an explosion of violence.

So the question is… if you’re getting people riled up enough to do something stupid, why aren’t you speaking out on the truly horrific?

I understand what the point of the conservatives and neo-conservatives is on this. I know WHY they’re stirring the hate-pot and bringing it to bubble. I know they want people frothing angry instead of being compliant of the stuff going on. They want the faithful focused on 2010, because they think they can repeat the results of the 1994 mid-term elections if they do. They do this because they really have nothing else they can offer to counter what the liberals are doing. Their political horses are either diseased or have broken legs.

But you would think after what happened that they would have a better handle at figuring out the difference between almost a boil and boiling over, wouldn’t you?

They only have to look back to their own party’s history, back to the very FIRST GOP President, to see where this unchecked hate leads.

If you ever get the chance, look up the name Mary Surat, the first-ever woman executed by the United States government for her involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Her connection to the murder was tedious at best, and yet the government, and indeed the masses themselves, were so outraged over what had just happened that they didn’t CARE whether or not she was a woman. They had just finished a grueling civil war and they wanted blood for blood. They wanted the message to be expressed loud and clear that the people behind the assassination of the president were going to PAY. And there were quite a few people who did end up paying for it. Some, like Mrs. Surat, with the hangman’s noose; others with prison sentences.

You can remember what happened after Oklahoma City as well. Tim McVeigh, the man who actually carried out the bombing, was put to death for his premeditated mass-murder. His accomplice is rotting in a jail cell.

This should be a WARNING SIGN for the GOP and those within the con and neo-con circles who are continually stirring this cauldron of venom soup. You would think they would know better, wouldn’t you? After all, they are the ones who carry themselves as though they are the MASTERS of history, as the self-professed CHAMPIONS of heritage and of days long ago. You would think that with their obsessive fixation of the past that they would REMEMBER things like the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays’ Rebellion and what happened to those who stirred those pots up until they boiled over.

Senator John McCain certainly realized what was going on just a little too late in his failed run for the White House last year. Granted, he consciously tethered himself and his campaign to the Bush Imperium, which at that time was in the last stages of its Titanic-like submersion, and his campaign really had little else to go on that differed from the same-ol’-same-ol’. But, even then, I think he still was operating under the delusion that this problem was limited to just one confused little old lady that didn’t know or didn’t bother to check out Snopes.com to fact-check her chain-mail. I would like to think that if he DID know that he would have done something to try to bring civility back to the table so it wouldn’t make the GOP look like a bunch of latecomers to the Reichstag fire.

Let’s get brutally honest here… the GOP hierarchy needs to take ownership of this boiling cauldron, and they need to bring it under control BEFORE it boils over into something they won’t be able to step away from.

There is a difference between spirited objection and out-and-out insurrection, if not domestic terrorism. This is the party that CLAIMS to be all for law-and-order. They should KNOW that difference and should be the FIRST ONES to point it out and not crying “persecution” when other people do it. This is the party that CLAIMS to champion personal responsibility. Well it is high time that they PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH!

Remember what happened after the Ford Theater. Remember what happened after Oklahoma City. More importantly, remember what the sentiment was of the people behind those incidents the day BEFORE them. Your people are AT THAT MOMENT NOW!

You still have a choice at this point. Exercise it, before you forfeit it as well as forfeit any control over the outcome afterwards.

Week of 10/12/2009

Never Mind Exit, Let’s Have An End Strategy!
– by David Matthews 2

One of the easiest ways to ruin a good story, whether it is a movie, a book, or a TV series, is to have a cheap ending.

That’s what the people behind “The Sopranos” did. They had no way they could really end the series after all the things that went on. So they just went to black in the middle of the Soprano Family sharing a basket of onion rings with Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” in mid-chorus.

There are several cheap endings that have gone down in history. We have the “everything was just a dream” ending. We have the “everything was a virtual simulation” ending. We have the “last-minute turnaround” ending. We have the “I’m back from the dead just in time” ending. My personal favorite of cheap endings is the “Who would have thought it” ending, best made by H.G. Wells in “The War of the Worlds”.

Either way, these kinds of endings usually exist because the situation has become so overwhelming that there is no right way to resolve things. The situation is too dire, the enemy is too powerful, the odds are just stacked too much against the hero to win… the audience is on the edge of their seats just WAITING to see how it all turns out… and they punt! And the audience then says “we wasted our money ON THIS???”

Yeah, many a good story has been lost because they couldn’t come up with a decent resolution.

What bothers me, though, is when the same holds true to the real world.

Take, for instance, the Cold War. Did you know that this was the first-ever conflict that America entered into without ANY kind of real objective to FINISHING it? Sure there were flare-ups in places like Korea and Vietnam and Grenada, but those were all considered part of the overall LARGER conflict that was the Cold War.

But what was the GOAL of the Cold War? To keep the Soviet Union from taking over the world? They couldn’t keep their own people FED! The greatest gift you could give a Soviet family in the 1980’s was an 8-pack of toilet paper! The military industrial complex for both sides were on automatic, cranking out bombs and missile and weapons of mass destruction. They saw only TWO options. One involved mushroom clouds and a radioactively-dead planet. The other involved a non-stop game of brinksmanship.

George Orwell’s concept of a state of eternal war and eternal conflict best characterized in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was nightmarish when he wrote the story in 1948, but I don’t think he would envision that the United States and the Soviet Union would bring that very concept about and make it last forty years, much less have designs on making it last indefinitely. And if the Soviet Union did not collapse under the weight of its own failures then that is EXACTLY what we would be in the middle of today!

But that really explains the kinds of problems we are in today with our current conflicts.

We got ourselves into TWO wars. One was in Afghanistan, and that really was a conflict of necessity. The bad guys who hurt us in 2001 were there, being supported by the Taliban leaders who were running that oversized chuck of rock and poppy fields. We went over there, we rousted some terrorist leaders up in their caves, we chased out the Taliban leaders, we oversaw the creation of a new government and the election of new leaders…

And then… what? We pretty much left it hanging, that’s what we did! We kept some forces there but we then turned around and focused our efforts on Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

That doesn’t seem to make any sense does it? Leave one war hanging and then go fight another one, and then not really finish up that war, so we have to stay there as well. Keep our forces spread thin, keep putting soldiers in harms way, keep sending resources to those areas.

And yet it makes PERFECT sense when you realize what the ultimate goal has been for these two conflicts and you tie that in as well to the original Gulf War of the 1990’s.

Let’s get brutally honest here… our military industrial complex has been FIXATED on this concept of an ETERNAL WAR! They have been spoiled from the Cold War and they want to reignite that same feeling in the Middle East. That’s why they’ve been leaving things unfinished over there. Where’s Osama bin Laden? Our previous President said in 2002 that he didn’t know and he didn’t CARE where Osama is! He was more worried about Iraq. Catching Saddam Hussein? That was pretty much a fluke. We weren’t supposed to find him! It’s good that we did, but still it was contrary what we were doing for the past ten years, which was to play a glorified game of “Whack-a-Mole” with bombs.

The basic complaint with military conflicts since Vietnam has always been the lack of a good EXIT strategy. Well how about just having a good END strategy? We had clearly-defined objectives once upon a time, even in the wars we were talked into fighting like the Spanish-American War. We knew who the enemy was, we knew what we had to do, and we did it. We weren’t sidetracked or allowed to engage in “mission creep”, or, in our current situations, “mission neglect”.

Let’s take this from the position of writing a story. So why are we in Afghanistan? Because Osama bin Laden, the man who gave the order to bomb America, was hiding there along with his terrorist friends and his allies in the Taliban. Okay, so we send forces there, we hunt him down and hunt down his terrorist friends and hunt down his Taliban allies and we bring them all to justice, or we put them in a body bag, and then we GO HOME! End of story.

Simple storyline; easy to comprehend, easy to sell, easy to remember, and most importantly it is easy to gauge whether we’ve done what we set out to do.

So why is this so hard for the people in charge to figure out?

Listen, wars should never be considered some complicated never-ending money pit for the military industrial complex. The best way to make wars winnable is to make the objectives SIMPLE and to have an easy-to-understand END to them. And preferably an ending that does NOT involve mushroom clouds and radioactive dead zones. If people have to ask WHY you are still there, then you’ve LOST your objective, and you either get it back on track, or else you will have LOST the conflict. It really is THAT simple!

The truth of the matter is that all wars eventually become stories, because that is what history is. It’s up to the people in charge to determine whether that story will have a good ending, a bad one, or a cheap one.

And unfortunately for them, they do not have the luxury of saying it was all just a dream.

Week of 10/05/2009

Stating the Obvious
– by David Matthews 2

You know, I think I found out the secret to Michael Moore’s “filmmaking genius”.

First, find a subject that everyone knows about. Something that they can all recognize so you don’t have to explain too much about it. That’ll cut down on trying to explain WHAT happened and you can just say that it DID happen.

Second, find a villain. Make sure that everyone knows from day one that this villain is out there and that this villain is EVIL and they are powerful enough to get away with anything they want.

Third, find victims. Yes, victims as in PLURAL… because this is where most of your time will be spent. You need names and faces and pain. Lots and lots of PAIN. Physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain… and if you can show visible damage and suffering, then that’s gravy.

Fourth, host the whole thing as a quasi-fool. Be sympathetic and understanding around the victims, but also be sure to be buffoonish around the people you paint as villains. They need to feel that you’re impotent instead of important so they won’t be threatened as you’re exposing the truth. Be sure to make grandiose statements and gestures. Not only will they make great comedic fodder, but they will serve as great material for your film trailer.

Now take all of that and wrap it into a movie and then slap on a catchy title, and then you too can bring home an Oscar.

There you go… I just saved you seven dollars in box office costs and fourteen dollars in popcorn and soda if you were so inclined to watch Moore’s next movie instead of waiting for it to air on the premium cable channels or come out on DVD.

I remember watching Michael Moore’s first movie “Roger and Me”. I spent most of the time wondering why I even bothered to watch it. Calling it “Roger and Me” is like calling the whole “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy “Frodo and the fourteenth Orc”.

If you haven’t seen it yet, basically it was about people suffering and corporate executives getting rich. There I just saved you some Netflix money.

In fact you can apply the same formula to all of his previous movies.

“Bowling for Columbine”: people getting killed while gun makers get rich.

“Fahrenheit 9/11”: paranoid people making themselves sick worrying about fear while politicians get powerful and contractors get rich.

“Sicko”: people getting sick and dying while insurance executives get rich.

And now we have the upcoming “Capitalism: A Love Story”, which will deal with corporate executives getting rich while average Americans lose their jobs and their homes and their pensions.

But the sad part is that this “love story” is something that has been going on repeatedly. Take “AIG” and substitute “Enron”. Take the banks and substitute the Savings and Loan companies. Take Wall Street and substitute the automakers or the insurance companies. It’s really all the same argument. Corporations get fat and wealthy, average people lose their livelihoods. The “Great American Dream” has become “The Great American Robbery” and there’s NOTHING that can be done about it!

And really that’s probably the most annoying part of Moore’s movies! He spends a LOT of time showing misery and despair, showing wealth to the point of encouraging schadenfreude, and at the end of it all he just LEAVES us all hanging. Why bother? All I have to do is turn on the cable news channels and wait for one of them to air their “special” on the whole issue and see the exact same thing without the comedic overtones!

At least when Bill Maher did “Religulous” he pointed out the weird wacky things that people DID NOT know were going on in the name of religion. Sure he did so with some comedic and condescending overtones to them, but these also weren’t presented as problems in need of solutions like Moore has been fixated on.

And then when asked what SHOULD be done, Moore sits back and smiles and says “oh I’m just a humble filmmaker… I’m not a politician… I don’t know what needs to be done… I just think that something needs to be done.” Right. That’s like Harold Hill from “The Music Man” sitting back after singing about the “evils” of billiard halls and saying that he was just a humble instrument salesman.

Let’s get brutally honest here… Michael Moore is apparently the master at stating the obvious and making some coin off it as well. And unfortunately for the hard-working American, this is NOT what we need!

We KNOW what’s been going on in this country. The air-fluffed ego-driven media has been very good at showing the misery of the masses and the fortunes of the elite. We KNOW who the bad guys are in this matter! We KNOW how things got this bad!

That’s not to say that there are some people who NEED to know these things. For instance, the studio executives need to know why we’re not showing up at the movie theatres anymore for that ten-dollar barrel of popcorn and half-jug of soda and are instead hitting up Hulu.com for free movies. The company executives overseas who make those really cheap appliances probably also need to know why we’re not going to be too quick to buy that HDTV that will expire right after the warrantee does. Certainly the people who can afford to be at the Cannes Film Festival on a regular basis would like to know what happened to “The American Dream”, but I worry that they won’t get the message. I’m sure they would be wondering what happens at the end and why the greedy executives and the corrupt politicians weren’t being chased like Frankenstein’s monster by the torch-wielding villagers. The short answer to that question is that (1) we can’t afford the torches and (2) Frankenstein’s monster did not have an army of soldiers and attorneys to protect him from accountability.

Documentaries, of course, don’t have happy endings. Just that the film is DONE with is usually considered the happy part. And because this kind of stupidity and insanity is repetitive, it guarantees that Moore can continue the formula for ever and ever, painting greedy executives as bad guys and showing suffering middle-class Americans as the victims without EVER wanting to resolve things afterwards. And in fact if there WAS a just resolution to this kind of inequality, then it would pretty much end Moore’s filmmaking career.

And then who would be making that much-needed documentary on our school systems entitled “Stupid: Is We Learning Yet”?

Week of 09/28/2009

Backing the Wrong Ism
– by David Matthews 2

In every story featuring the character of the underdog, there is either a betrayal or else a general skepticism. The underdog is always seen as never being able to win. Not against the champion. Not against superior army. Not against the unstoppable horde. Not against the government.

But then comes that moment when the skeptic realizes that they were actually WRONG. They didn’t take the underdog’s abilities or heart into account. Maybe the underdog wins, and maybe the underdog loses, but ultimately the underdog NEVER FAILS.

For instance, in the movie “300”, the Spartans were outnumbered 3333 times. And yet they still fought down to the last man. The Greeks, the priests, the leaders that were bought and paid for by the Persians, they all believed that the Spartans would fail. But they didn’t get it. The 300 Spartans that fought knew that they were going to die, and in fact they hoped that they would die in battle, but they also knew that their deaths would inspire the rest of Greece to stand up to the Persian Empire. They lost, in terms of their lives, but they didn’t FAIL in what they were there to do. They proved the Persians were not unstoppable.

So too is America’s underdog being underestimated and betrayed.

For the longest time, America has been lead about by its nose on a LIE. A LIE that says that America is about one thing… money.

This is actually something that has been going on for a little over a century now. The concern has always been about “big money” and big corporations and big banks. We’re spending BILLIONS of dollars to bail out BIG corporations. Wall Street’s finest of banks and insurance companies and lenders got the bulk of that money. Corporations that GOT that big BECAUSE the government approved of their continual mergers. Big banks became bigger banks, and then became megabanks. Corporations merged together in ways that would be illegal in half the states in the country if such mergers were performed by humans. And then when they got to be too big to be self-sustaining, they went back to that same government and said they were “too big to fail” and went begging for - and got - huge bailout funds with no strings attached.

But look at what has happened as a consequence. Millions of Americans, convinced that they HAD to get a home, have LOST their homes through foreclosures. What are they getting? The only help from the government has been a program that actually is far more PENALIZING than anything the banks offer! Wall Street gets billions without conditions while YOUR street gets the shaft!

Millions of Americans are without jobs. For every job opening there are at least SIX people out of work competing for it. That’s the highest ratio that has been seen in almost eighty years. And yet big businesses are still being allowed to export (“streamline”) jobs to third world nations or to get visas to bring in people from third world nations to work job openings. Big companies give their executives raises and bonuses. The unemployed only get extensions to their unemployment coverage, which are not enough to pay the bills, which forces them to tap into either savings that they DON’T have (or lost because of Wall Street) or go so deep into debt that if they DO manage to get another job they’ll be putting every penny they have INTO paying off that debt. Wall Street gets bonus buffets… YOU get the scraps that fall on the floor, and you’re told to be grateful for even getting that.

Meanwhile, state and local governments are losing tax revenue. Every home that gets foreclosed upon is another source of local revenue that is eliminated. Every job that is lost is one less consumer that would have available money to spend on local goods and services. Do you REALLY think that people that are forced to tap into their savings or go deeper into debt would be willing to dine at restaurants or be lavish in their spending? Do you think they would be able to take trips or buy a new car?

There’s a REASON why the liberals keep on wanting to tax “the rich” besides for wealth envy, and that reason is because if things don’t change, those are the only folks who will have any money left TO tax!

The problem is simple: our government is backing the wrong group!

Our government has been operating under the delusion that capitalism would keep this country going. Just keep the big-wigs happy and profitable and the rest would just take care of itself. Only it’s not, is it?

These are not the same days as the Great Depression. We live in a GLOBAL economy now. And the approach we took eighty years ago didn’t really work. It actually took a WORLD WAR to get our economy back on track then. We have a hard enough time trying to juggle peace-keeping forces around, never mind get into yet another conflict.

Let’s get brutally honest here… what’s good for capitalism is not necessarily good for the country!

Look at what’s happening with the big corporations that are getting huge stinking bailout funds. They’re busy doing everything they can to paying off that bailout money BEFORE the government decides to start putting in conditions. They’re not hiring people. They’re not changing their ways and shutting down the things that they did that PUT them in their predicament in the first place. They’re just getting themselves off the dole so they wouldn’t be forced to do something they don’t want to do.

Capitalism is only interested in one thing: success. It has no interest in whether or not Main Street thrives if it can find a way to continue to make a profit without it. And the larger the business in question becomes, the less reason it has to care if Main Street even exists.

On the other hand, government NEEDS Main Street (not to mention YOUR street) to thrive, if for nothing else than to have a steady stream of revenue that it can pilfer to fund all those pet projects of theirs. It can’t do that if a growing segment of the populace is losing their homes, losing their pensions, losing their sources of income, and aren’t able to pay taxes. They can only “tax the rich” to a certain point before “the rich” either find ways to get around it or they just up and leave to find some place more appreciative.

Bear in mind that we’re not talking about communism or socialism here, folks, we’re talking about putting an emphasis back on INDIVIDUALISM! We’re talking about the smallest of special interest groups. Collectivism is willing to write off whole segments of the group just for the “greater good” to survive. That’s what businesses do when they start shipping jobs to third world nations or finagle governments to allow them to import employees from other nations. Only the “greater good” that they are pushing for is their own.

It is in the government’s best interest, and yes I am talking about government at ALL levels, to get as many individuals back on their feet and back into paying taxes as soon as possible! And no I’m not talking about the government GIVING people jobs, but rather encouraging businesses to HIRE people here instead of going elsewhere.

Governments large and small have been backing capitalism instead of individualism, and that is to their detriment as well as to our own. History is replete of instances where such a preference has come back to hurt those in power, from the Boston Tea Party in Colonial America to the first Russian Revolution of 1917 to the Great Depression to the Iranian Revolution all the way up to and including the US Presidential Elections of 1980, 1992, 2000, and 2008. In fact there is nothing that ruins even a good presidential administration than when it underestimates the effect the economy has over its constituents. Just ask Jimmy Carter if you don’t believe me. Ignore that history at your peril!

Capitalism is all about the coin. The coin is a powerful tool, but it is not the end-all-be-all of society. Governments that are representative of THE PEOPLE cannot use business as a substitute.

Week of 09/21/2009

The Manchurian Protesters
– by David Matthews 2

In the world of comics, one of the most despised villains is a character called Darkseid. Famed cartoonist Jack Kirby created the character as the embodiment of evil, ruling over a world that is devoid of individuality and hope. Although human in appearance and mannerisms, the people of the planet Apokolips were considered nothing more than animals. “Hunger dogs”, as Darkseid described them. A dystopian society to the fullest; where the horrors of Dante’s Inferno are considered luxuries.

Every so often there would be someone who would stand up to the will of Darkseid. He would be seen as a savior to the masses. He would give them hope and let them dream of a better life. He would inspire them to throw off their shackles and to rise up and take on the soldiers of Apokolips. He would lead them to a great gathering place where he would tell them that they would then get rid of Darkseid and bring freedom to the people… not hunger dogs, but PEOPLE!

And it would be at that point that Darkseid’s soldiers would arrive and slaughter everyone assembled, leaving only the person who led them there alive, who would then be praised by Darkseid for doing exactly what he was told to do. This would be yet another one of Darkseid’s plans to weed out the vestiges of hope that exist in the masses and to extinguish it completely, leaving nothing but misery and despair, which Darkseid relishes in.

Sounds despicable, doesn’t it? Something only a depraved mind would come up with, right?

Well that’s the nature of evil.

But what if there’s more truth to this than fiction?

I’m sure some of you have heard of the term “Manchurian Candidate”, even if you never saw either of the two movies or the book that it all came from. Basically it’s about a sleeper agent that is conditioned by outside forces to act only when the time is right, and then to stage a coup and take over. The candidate would be the “ideal” one to lead given his sterling record.

Some people have already invoked that term in regards to our current President, Barack Obama. They firmly believe that the “plot” has already been hatched and that the “sleeper” has already been put in power.

But what if we’re not dealing with one well-conditioned “sleeper”, but rather with a group of “sleepers” that have been gradually conditioned not to stage a coup, but to sustain the status quo? To essentially create despair and misery here in the real world?

Okay, ponder this little scenario: you have general discontent. People are not happy with what is going on in government. They want change, and they feel like they are being marginalized. They feel like they’re going overboard with what life is constantly dictating they NEED to do. The message is out there that government is weak, government is impotent, government is corrupt, and they’re blind, dumb and DEAF to the plight of the ordinary hard-working American. They believe that those in government are fixated on satisfying their own egos than in actually doing anything significant. That’s the message they’re expressing.

And then in comes these GROUPS. Not just ONE group, but a whole phalanx of groups. They go by different names and some of them have these really vocal spokespeople. They all wrap themselves up in patriotic colors and use patriotic language and they speak in simple terms to the masses. They stroke the egos of the masses and reassure them that they’re NOT imagining things. They ARE being marginalized. They ARE feeling left out. They ARE being ignored. And, no, it’s not fair, and, no, it’s not right, but THEY will be on your side, won’t they?

The seduction is done so deftly, so skillfully subtle, that they don’t even realize what has happened. They’re promised change. They’re promised that they’ll be heard. They’re promised that they will be respected. They just have to be patient and be loyal and things will happen for them. They WILL have what they want.

But the funny thing is… even when they do everything that is asked of them, things really don’t change. The system still works against them. They are still getting ignored and marginalized. In fact, if anything, they are getting marginalized and ignored quickly and more frequently and even worse than before.

And then they’re told there is this “enemy” that wants to destroy everything they have. An “enemy” that makes the same kind of promises, gives the same kind of speeches, but everything this “enemy” does is to destroy the masses. They are not getting what they want or need because this “enemy” is stopping them. They have to stand up to this “enemy” and fight this “enemy” and oppose everything that this “enemy” stands for. THEN they’ll have what they were promised earlier.

It is the perfect protest group; idealistic, loyal, and willing to make any kind of sacrifices for the cause, including sacrificing their own expectations.

Sound familiar?

Now think about this: you know all those conservative and neo-conservative voices out there that LOVE to talk about the small business owners? They ADORE small businesses, don’t they? They idolize small businesses. No, seriously, they do. They put small businesses on pedestals and demand that we WORSHIP them.

Funny thing though… NONE OF THEM WORK FOR SMALL BUSINESSES! They all work for Clear Channel, News Corp, Cox Communications, Time-Warner… all of which are big corporations. And their chief sponsors are not small businesses either. They’re major corporations and multinational banks. Do you see small businesses in any of this?

Oh but they’ll talk the talk, won’t they? They’ll talk about how we need to help out the small businesses owners in this country. They’ll talk about how we NEED small businesses owners to keep jobs in this country.

And yet they had no qualms about having the lion’s share of the 2008 bailout money go to big corporations. Let’s bail out the banks and bailout AIG and bail out Freddie and Fanny, because they’re all “too big to fail”.

How ironic… they glorify small businesses but then bend over backwards with money that isn’t theirs to support the businesses that are “too big to fail”. And if anyone asks about it, they’ll just blame “the enemy”. It’s all the fault of ONE senator and ONE Congressman... even IF they weren’t in power until very recently.

Now add this into the equation: you ever hear of the FairTax Plan? Great plan. Would completely revamp the way we look at taxation. The group behind it has been pushing for it since 1995. They’ve had rallies, books on the subject, even talk show hosts and presidential contenders pushing for it. It keeps on getting proposed in Congress and it gets hundreds of sponsors and co-sponsors.

And yet… it never gets out of committee. It doesn’t even come up in the committees and sub-committees. All of those sponsors and co-sponsors, people that think this is a really GREAT plan, and yet it doesn’t make it out of the committees and sub-committees, never mind make it to the floor of either the House or Senate.

In fact, when President George W. Bush wanted Congress to explore tax reform, the very first thing that his advisors said was that they WOULD NOT include the FairTax Plan into ANY discussions! And nobody complained! All of that support… all of those promises made… for what? To keep the tax system the same as ever.

Congress changed political allegiances twice since 1995, and yet despite all of the talk and all of the promises and all of the rallies and demonstrations and books, this great idea to reform the tax system is STILL not any closer to becoming a reality!

And the same applies to pretty much EVERY kind of reform measure proposed.

Look at political reform. Outlaw one tactic and the people behind it find ways to get around it. Let’s ban robot-calling… except for OUR robot-calling. OURS is “too important”. Let’s outlaw the special interest advertising… but not OURS. Let’s ban certain kinds of campaign contributions, but we’ll write in exemptions for the national conventions.

Everyone wants a third political party, or so the polls and public sentiment so decree, and yet the rules are changed to prevent a third party from ever getting any kind of mainstream voice. There are DOZENS of third-party choices out there, but nobody wants to pay any attention to them because they supposedly “can never win” even though they may have overwhelming support.

Why not support those groups? Because they are told that it is more important to stop “the enemy”. They have to stop “the enemy” from gaining any more control over the process. MAYBE in a few years after they make sure that “the enemy” has been defeated they can talk about a third party choice… but not right now. The stakes are just “too high” for them to even consider it.

Let’s get brutally honest here… we in America are getting PLAYED! We ARE being deceived! We ARE being conned on a level that is unprecedented in human history. WE ARE living a lie!

Change and reform are presented to us like a siren’s call. We’re lured in, convinced that we can make a difference, and yet we end up supporting the very people who have prospered off the status quo, and thus have no incentive to actually CHANGE things like they promised. We may be upset about it, but we won’t do anything about it, because we’re conditioned to believe that we NEED the status quo in place to fight off “the enemy”.

The ultimate intention is really no different than the grand schemes of Darkseid, or, for that matter, of the villains in the 1975 movie “Rollerball”. It’s all designed to destroy hope and dreams of a better life. The people who are behind these grand schemes, the ones in power, dangle hope and change before us knowing full well that as long as they are the ones behind it, it will never happen. And to convince you to abandon hope and change, to prevent you from going behind their backs and bringing in the change that they DON’T want, they have a ready-made “enemy” for you to hate and despise with all of your might.

The major power-brokers, the ones fueling these protest rallies, are your real enemy, but you’ll never recognize it. They have whipped you and they have conditioned you like Pavlovian dogs to follow your Master’s commands, but you’ll never admit to it. It’s just easier to live in the delusion than it is to accept that you’re a pawn.

That, too, is just part of their game.