Stuck on a Wall Street Wilderness Road

In case you are looking for facts to support the results of the 2008 presidential election, you might include this one: The History News Network surveyed 109 professional historians recently and 98 percent said that Bush’s presidency was a failure. Over 60 percent rated Lurch as the worst president in American history.

Another reason might be in this monologue line by David Letterman before the debates gradually thinned the Republican ranks. He said the ten candidates looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.” They were all white. All “good” Christians except for one suspect Mormon. All wearing dark blue suits. All wearing red ties. All with flag lapel pins made in China.
And on top of these Lee Atwater-Karl Rove clones was the record of the Great Decider with his sidekick Darth Cheney Vader.

Here was the Lurch administration that tricked us into a bizarre, nonsensical urban guerilla war against Iraq—and another war against the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.

John McCain kept talking about winning the Iraq War during his campaign. This country still doesn’t understand that we lost the Iraq War the minute we captured Baghdad and protected the Iraqi Oil Ministry against all forces foreign and domestic.

And Rumsfeld said, “Stuff happens” while allowing Shiites and Sunnis to loot everything from the Saddam Hussein government and from each other.
Who is the real winner of the Iraq War? Iran, of course.

Who said these Middle Eastern “raghead” camel drivers who have survived 5,000 years of tribal conflicts, numerous invasions and Crusades by the West, 1,400 years of religious warfare—topped off by drilling holes in one another before beheading each other—are dumb? Start with Lurch, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Rice and the rest of the neocons who kicked over the Islamic hornet’s nest.

Even Lurch’s former press secretary Scott McClellan (who ended up voting for Barack Obama) wrote that Bush lacked inquisitiveness and a sense of curiosity besides surrounding himself with sycophants and yes-men and women. On top of these shortcomings, McClellan wrote that Lurch was surly, petty, vindictive—and never reconsidered or compromised unless driven to an absolute wall. Maybe we would have been better off if the Great Decider had flipped coins to make decisions.

That’s why the Republicans lost the election.

The Justice Department That Turned Into Skinheads and Latin Kings

And then we had the Justice Department of John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales with the morality of the South Carolina KKK and a Los Angeles street gang.

It spied KGB-style on American peace groups, religious organizations, and political protesters while violating Constitutional rights and other laws of the land. It hunted for “voter fraud” wherever they lost an election and fired U.S. attorneys if they couldn’t find any.

This administration created the horrors of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib by saying that the Geneva Convention was obsolete, that torture could be used to seek the “truth,” even if the tortured would say anything to stop it.

This administration has become so “anti-American,” using the words of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann, that forty cities and towns in Vermont, the “Freedom and Unity” state and the home of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, have passed resolutions proposing impeachment of George W. Bush.

Many Vermont communities passed resolutions opposing the Iraq War, calling for a federal investigation of the use of the Vermont National Guard in such illegal conflicts, and urging immediate withdrawal from Iraq.
Vermonters also passed resolutions opposing the excesses of the Patriot Act and its assault on Constitutional rights and the privacy of the individual. Or are Vermonters whose statehood goes back to 1791 anti-American and Bush is right?

That’s why the Republicans lost.

Can We Solve the “Obama Recession?”

The guy who said he had half of his brain tied behind his back, Trash Limbo, gave me a good laugh the other day when he proved it. He said that we are now in an “Obama Recession!”

According to Trash, Sean Hannity, and all the little male and female right-wing clones polluting our atmosphere, all of the problems over the last seven and one/half years were Slick Willie Clinton’s fault! Now it was Obama’s fault. Geez, wasn’t George W. Bush squeezed in there someplace? I know we really want to forget the eight disastrous years, but it make take another eight years to put the country back on track.

The free market-free trade philosophy of the Republicans has imploded for the second time in a century. It’s not as serious as the 1929 crash yet, when investors jumped from windows and went splat and 25 percent of the workers in this country were unemployed.

Studs Terkel, the Chicago activist and writer who just died, wrote often of desperate conditions in the working class during the Great Depression. His description of how a thousand men fought over four jobs open in a sugar refinery is a riveting story of despair.

There is an outside chance, with the greed and incompetence shown by Wall Street, Washington, and corporations like GM, we may be going down that road. Studs was blacklisted during the Joe McCarthy years but he never shut up. His biggest regret, he often said, was the fact his wife had a bigger FBI file than he did!

Is Buying Stuff Cheap Always Best for the American Economy?

I would hope that some politician or businessman could explain the ramifications of this piece of American free market and free trade in this true story about a power plant in Afghanistan.

There’s no doubt we have been losing the Afghan War for seven years but this doesn’t excuse this deal. The American taxpayer is footing the bill for improvements to the Kajaki Dam, southern Afghanistan’s biggest hydroelectric project.

In the end it’s a $500 million project to help bring more power to 1.8 million people. We are installing a new 200-ton hydroelectric turbine along with new distribution lines and substations. We bought the new turbine from China.

With all of the hydroelectric power in this country we had no American company we could depend upon to make this turbine? Did we spend American taxpayer dollars on Chinese engineering and manufacturing because it was “cheaper?”

We put American workers on the sidelines so we could buy “cheap?” Whatever happened to fair markets and fair trade for American workers and manufacturers?

After decades of free markets and free trade our biggest export to China is used cardboard. They have to have something to fill their ships returning to China after dropping off all that stuff labeled “Made In China” at Los Angeles and Long Beach. The two cities are main distribution points for Chinese products going to the WalMarts, K-Marts, and Targets to be sold to people in low-paying service jobs.

That’s why the Republicans lost the election.

The Party of Wall Street, Big Banks, Rednecks, and White Evangelicals Waiting for the Rapture

I see the Republicans who are left have their new talking points and playbooks filled with the statement: “America is a still a center-right country!”

That’s BS. It’s as simple as counting the votes. Democrats now make up 39 percent of the electorate, Republicans 32 percent. Democrats outpolled Republicans 52 percent to 48 percent among Independents. Center-right? Baloney.

A reporter covering the Sturgis, South Dakota biker rally noticed that the corporate types with expensive Harleys always had a luscious “Biker Babe” hanging on their shoulders and every word as they blatted around town. The reporter asked a local about that situation.

The local said, “These rich guys from New York and LA fly their bikes in, and to impress the other bikers they hire “escorts” to ride behind them. It’s all a big masquerade. They seem to take pride in having fake ponytails and wearing T-shirts with this biker-saying on the back: “IF YOU CAN READ THIS THE BITCH FELL OFF.” This seems to be a metaphor for Republicans who will do anything to get elected but are failures in actually governing a society.

That’s why the Republicans lost the election.

Why Did Obama Get 95 Percent of the Black Vote?

Republicans are complaining that blacks discriminated against whites in the 2008 election when 95 percent voted for Obama. Yes, they did. Here’s why.

A black woman from Grenada, Mississippi, gave this reason in a letter to USA Today: “When I was about 12 my mother would take me and some of my brothers to the doctor’s office. We had to sit in a small area designated for blacks. On the left were whites. We were not permitted to cross to that side.

Toilets and the one water fountain were labeled ‘Whites Only.’ Mother had to bring water and something to eat for all of us because when we went to the doctor’s office, we stayed all day. They waited on all the whites before they waited on us, no matter how sick we were. I remember my mother saying that one day there would be a black president. I won’t be there to see it, she said, but I know it will happen.”

That’s why the Republicans lost the election.