With all the well-deserved attention on high-profile down-ticket progressive comers like Rick Noriega (TX-SEN), Andrew Rice (OK-SEN), Darcy Burner (WA-08), Jim Himes (CT-04) and Victoria Wulsin (OH-02), two previously deemed Quixotic, now potential sleeper campaigns here in Iowa haven't gotten a lot of limelight. Rob Hubler and Becky Greenwald have a chance to deliver stunning blows in IA-04 and IA-05 to Bushian hacks Steve King and Tom Latham (respectively), and I wanted to throw a small impetus out to the Kos to help them out.
My occasional editor and raker of muck at DownWithTyranny Howie Klein was good enough to whore my song (below the fold) here last week, and Kossack desmoinesdem, the first and last word on Iowa electoral politics at BleedingHeartland, helped float an impromptu little promotion this week that I thought I'd try here too, just my two cents for the cause — er, as it were.
If you can contribute to Rob and Becky by clicking the above links and if you actually like the attached song, cut and paste your contribution receipt (or, hell, something that looks like it) into an email to my promo guy Ed at ed_genaro(at)yahoo.com, cite this blog, and we'll send you a free mp3 of the song.
One non-disclaimer: I know this thing is harsh. I've already heard some folks say they're given pause by the sentiments of the focused anger of the lyrics. Let me state upfront, I don't apologize for a word of it.
People like George Bush, Steve King and Tom Latham have methodically ravaged this country in the name of a blind, stupid and oddly self-righteous adherence to Dickensian economic orthodoxy, religious chauvenism and war-mongering imperial hubris. More recently, their surrogates have gone so far as to call people who don't subsribe to this fascist cocktail "un-American" — including their dimwitted vice presidential candidate — somehow expecting the rest of us to stand oblivious to the fact that such arcane barbaric worldviews are exactly what ushered us into the economic and geopolitical abyss in which we find ourselves mired.
Not being a politician, I don't give people a pass for this, nor do I have to play at politesse — my only rational solution to crimes so great is imprisonment or execution. I have for most of my life stood against the death penalty — but for men like George Bush and Dick Cheney and their enablers, I might just make an exception. Wearing a suit, having a lot of money and calling yourself a Christian is no defense against having murdered hundreds of thousands and ruined the lives of millons. Very little is, in fact.
My song is a song. It never turned someone's home into a crater because they believed in the wrong god and lived on top of oil. It never pissed away somebody's life savings to make some guy with three luxury yachts another yacht. And if you think the last eight miserable goddamn years have been about anything other than that, you've been sold a Bridge in Brooklyn by linear-thinking pricks like King and Bush. My song is fucking pissed off because I am.
Welcome back to the Blue, Iowa.
The recording is by my band, Matthew Grimm & the Red Smear, and was produced by me and Jason Lewis at Sad Iron Studio in Iowa City, and is copyright-ed 2008 Grimm Reality Music (ASCAP). The video is by Howie Klein. "One Twenty Oh-Nine" can be purchased on our myspace site for 99 cents.