OK...I guess it's about time for my first Dkos diary.
I have my own weblog ...It's Jes' Fine Out here...and I have been posting on Dkos for a couple of weeks.
I occupy a rather unique place in this society...I am a male of primarily Northern European descent (Celtic division) who has worked in the decidedly multi-racial, multi-cultural area of Jazz and Afro-Cuban music in NYC for going on three decades, and my job has taken me through all levels of society in the United States as well as in South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.
This experience has taken me WAY left of center politically.
And apparently way left of the CENTRIST left that appears to be primarily represented on this weblog and others like the Democratic Underground, etc.
But I've got news for y'all.
It's time to get radical.
Now by this I emphatically do NOT mean bomb throwing, barricade manning, cop bashing "radical". That is a liberal myth whose time passed when the `60s proved that a "revolution" of that sort...the kind that last happened in Russia almost 100 years ago...simply will not wash in a modern, mechanized, mass media controlled society.
The Permanent Government has the twin weapons of mass destruction AND mass deception under their control, and those people that they do not succeed in hypnotizing they will crush physically if and when they are directly and violently confronted.
But folks...wake the fuck UP!!!
I have read screed after screed here about how unfairly the mass media has done this and that, how lame the Ratpublicans are, how "our" brave Democratic leaders will fight them tooth and nail in the Senate, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Tune in to another station, people.
Station WTFU.
Wake The Fuck Up.
The corporate media has been in the Permanent Government's pocket since they whitewashed the JFK assassination nearly half a century ago.
In the last four years ALONE they have:
Allowed the theft of the 2001 Presidential election through vote fraud in Florida.
Ignored SERIOUS evidence that 9/11 was not what the Warren Commission XXII...err, I mean, the "9/11" commission...said it was.
Cooperated in the insanely dishonest buildup to the illegal and murderously badly thought out Blood For Oil War in Iraq. (Soon to be appearing in theaters near YOU if you are not careful.)
Ignored the even MORE in-your-face-if-you-only-had-the-eyes-to-see-it theft of the 2004 election.
And now you are acting outraged and surprised that they have essentially ignored the hijacking of the press by the same people?
Give me a BREAK!!!
And the mainstream, Democratic leadership?
I'm telling you...I know STREET people who were hip to the bullshit runup to the Iraqi war.
Nearly illiterate, never-watch-the-news junkies.
And we (You, actually...) allowed the Democratic Party to throw a quasi-Ratpublican lovefest in Boston to nominate a man who was so inept and/or dishonest and/or fearful that when the election was stolen right out from underneath him in Ohio and members of his OWN PARTY (John Conyers for President!!!) tried to get the nation to look the plain facts in the face...HE WENT ON A EUROPEAN JUNKET!!!???
A man who...along with just about every other major Democratic leader...voted in favor of Blood For Oil and then voted AGAIN for MORE money to pursue the tactic?
And now you're talking about Hilary and Reid and Barack Obama...another jive turkey, Afro-American division (Trust me...you'll find out. Tricky Dick redux...)...and the rest of the Blood For Oil cartel as our potential SAVIOURS??
Speaking as if Al Franken, Bill Maher and the Daily Show are going to lead the way to a brighter tomorrow!!!
Have you left the HOUSE, recently?
Have you left whatever middle class neighborhoods you frequent, gone out into the real America (read "majority" America) with an AM radio turned on and an ear to the Fox News/CNN TV that plays over and over again in almost every Dunkin' Donuts, bank branch, doctor mall waiting room and in most living rooms in the country, 24/7?
Have you read Joe Bageant? Please do so if you haven't...http://counterpunch.org/bageant07052004.html has a good representative sampling of his work. SON OF A
LABORING GOD Gettin' down and dumb at Burt's Tavern is all you really need to know about the subject. Or read his Counterpunch article Crank Reflections on the 4th of July. Would Somebody Turn Off That Goddamn Radio! for more reflections on this general truth.
The so-called "left wing media", from Air America right through PBS and the blogs are just a bunch of assistant choir preachers.
Much of what they are SAYING is correct...in a whiny sort of way too often, but correct...however the whine, the sophomoric humor, the class (and implicitly CLASSIST) wiseguy elitist attitudes...forget about it. If you can't reach the man who listens only to the sports talk stations, the woman whose dial is always turned to mainstream news or Rush Limbaugh...you don't have a PRAYER.
And that is just about where I came in.
Two weeks ago, when it appeared for a quick minute that the Guckert/Gannon thing might have some traction outside of the blogway (And you think that the area inside the D. C. BELTWAY is isolated!!!???), and that the blogs had finally "worked" outside their elitist 2% or 5% or even 7% of the population, I thought maybe I'd duck back inside the centrist left and see what these good people were up to.
Check it out.
Looks to me like Rover and his pack of herd dogs turned THAT mini-stampede right back into the ol' corral.
Big dogs.
HEARD dogs.
So...where do we go from here?
Back to our so-called leaders?
Hilary?
Please.
Even if she WASN'T a card carrying centrist, as far as the working class majority is concerned (men and women both) she is simply a female who couldn't keep her man and got bossy behind it.
Not a CHANCE.
Small K kerry? (I refuse to ever capitalize his name again after his shameful capitulation and then his REcapitulation later during John Conyers' vote fraud hearings. Bad ENOUGH that he hired a John Ritter lookalike as his running mate and then proceeded to middle of the road it right down to the END of the road.)
John kerry???
OH, wouldn't the Permanent Government love THAT!!!
So who have we got?
I can only see one choice, and the odds on HIM are about 7 to 3 against.
Howard Dean.
Why?
Because he is REAL.
Because he opposed the war ON MORAL PRINCIPLES and only lost the nomination because the corporate press chose kerry under orders from the left wing of the RIGHT wing. (Better known as the Democratic Party as it was constituted at that time.)
Because he is a MASTER fund raiser and/or a fine enough executive to know the difference between a Terry McAuliffe or Donna Brazile and a hole in the ground through which elections are lost. (That is...there IS no difference.)
Because he communicates true passion when he speaks rather than some politically well thought out series of grunting points.
And because on some level he is the ONLY national Democrat who the great working class majority would not throw bodily out of their favorite neighborhood bar if he walked in and started to try to talk sense to them without a well armed escort.
They'd see through patrician Small k in a working class minute.
Hilary would remind them of all the boss women they would like to forget...men and women ALIKE feel that way about her.
But there is something of the banty rooster about Mr. Dean.
Trumanesque.
Y'get the feeling the buck WOULD stop at his desk.
I wrote in response to another diary here recently:
------Whoever first stands up in public and forcefully says in good old American English "I am goddamned mad and I'm not going to take this shit any more" will win in a landslide."
Forcefully AND honestly...no acting allowed.
No in-jokes, no fluffing around the edges, no clever double entendres or convoluted arguments about this, that and the other thing...just the unvarnished, plain truth of the matter, spoken from the heart and repeated over and over and over again.
Because another thing that you will find if you hang out for any appreciable length of time in that lovely mythical bar that exists in every town and city in these United States is that the people IN that bar are ALSO some goddamned mad. They are mad that they have to work twice as hard as their fathers and mothers did, yet they seem to have less of everything; they are mad that their beer seems to have lost a great deal of its taste, that their cars break and they can't fix `em, that they feel as if they have less and less security on EVERY level...work, medical, retirement, savings...madder than hell.
The Ratpubs have succeeded in harnessing that anger...an anger that was largely caused by their policies in the first place ...and in turning it against their own enemies, both foreign AND domestic.
Brilliant...!!!
A perpetual motion machine, socio-political division.
Brilliant.-------
I can't say it much better than that.
I also wrote that "If Howard Dean took that `ARRRRGHH!!' thing away from Rover's dog pack...if he said `You're damned RIGHT I was mad!!! And you should be TOO!!!'...he'd be way ahead of the game."
And there it is.
Consider these things well.
Every time you hail Harry Reid for some "courageous" act he takes...
Every time you applaud Barack Obama and Dick Durbin for appearing on a no-risk-to-their-right/centrist-career-as-a-democratic-pol, politically correct podium...
Every time you laud Ms. Clinton as "The potential saviour of the party..."
REMEMBER ON WHICH SIDE THEY VOTED...AND CONTINUE TO VOTE...IN THE BLOOD FOR OIL SCAM.
And think AGAIN.
You want to reach the working class...of EVERY race and color...in this country?
Think about this "joke" first.
____________________
A D.C. guy decides to drop into his favorite local neighborhood bar and have quick one in the afternoon.
Goes in...dark, almost empty as usual that time of day. He sits down, orders a beer, and suddenly notices that the only other two patrons look to be George W. Butch and Donald Rumsfeld, huddled way over at the far side of the bar deep in conversation.
He doesn't want to get in the way...looks around, no Secret Service presence that HE can see...and decides to mind his own business. I mean...even the rich and powerful need a break once in a while, right?
However...well into his third cold one, he thinks he overhears the phrase "Two million Muslims incinerated." He's feeling a bit looser now, and decides to go investigate a little.
He walks over to where the two men are sitting and says "Uhhh...excuse me. Fellas, but aren't you President Butch and Secretary Rumsfeld?"
W. looks around, and with that lovely light touch he reserves for those who promise no immediate profit to him he says "Yeah. What's it to ya?"
The guy, emboldened by his couple of beers, says "Well...I couldn't help overhearing...did one of you two guys say something about `two million Muslims incinerated?' "
Butch looks at him, pauses for a minute, and then says "Well, yeah...what the hell...you're a taxpayer, right? I was just telling Don here my newest war plan. We're going to blow up two million Muslims and one blonde with big tits."
The man is completely taken aback, and manages to stammer out..."Wh..wh..why one blonde with big tits!!!???"
And Butch turns to Rumsfeld and says "See, Don. I TOL' ya. The two million Muslims ain't gonna bother them at ALL!"
_
_____________________
Don't talk down to them about what will happen in 20 or 30 years.
About Social Security or the eventual collapse of the almighty American dollar. For many of them, the damned dollar has collapsed ALREADY and they STILL voted for President Butch and his gang of professional fool handlers and yes-creatures.
If they have been so desensitized by continual corporate media consensus/hypnosis that it doesn't matter much to them about the fate of the Iraqis one way or another, then TELL THEM ABOUT THE BLONDE WITH THE BIG TITS.
Their own sons and daughters.
Their husbands and wives, their families their friends.
Not what's going to happen to them in 20, 30, 40 years.
What is likely to happen to them NOW.
Tomorrow.
Next week.
We are standing on the edge of a precipice that leads only down, down, down, my friends.
Attack Iran/Syria, and we are done with "Conventional War".
Too many Muslims to kill one at a time.
They'll need nukes.
They are going to need shock and awe to the MAX.
Draft or no draft...and a draft would be bad enough...eventually they'll need nukes or at least SOME other WMDs. (Which we have by the metric ton, by the way.)
And they'll USE them too.
Tell them THAT and see what happens
And once THAT genii's out of the bottle...fuggedaboudit!!!
Then where's your boy is in Pisspot, OH or wherever?
Up the creek and standing in a puddle of pure fear, I think....he will be if he's got at least some remnant of a brain left in his head after watching network TV for 20 or 30 years, anyway.
It ain't ABOUT money or financial security or so-called "health care"...which is a broken system anyway, bought and sold by Dr. Big Brother and the Pharma/Insurance Holding Company...
IT'S ABOUT HIS ASS, GODDAMMIT!!!
The FIRST person to succeed in communicating this information to the people of America in a manner to which they can relate will break this administration completely.
If the PermaGov doesn't kill him first, of course.
Y'pays yer money and y'takes yer chances.
I'd rather pay mine to someone who is shooting for the bullseye instead of pussyfooting out there around the edges.
How about you?
Howard Dean offers a genuinely radical approach to big politics in the United States.
Radically DIFFERENT.
Grassroots oriented rather than corporate sponsored.
Internet savvy rather than climbing on the wagon at the last minute.
And...this is the clincher as far as I am concerned...morally based.
He seems to have at least some concept of the fact that morality is simply the distillation of thousands of years of human experience, that it is a SURVIVALIST tool, that something that is "immoral"...like this criminally unjust war in Iraq, like the lying, cheating, stealing, murdering tactics of the current administration...is eventually counterproductive to the survival of those who indulge in it.
And he has the courage to take a stand against the mainstream tide when that tide is running the wrong direction.
He got his ass kicked for the attempt last time...but here he is, trying again.
He may have been successfully co-opted by the DemocRATS by being kicked upstairs to the chairmanship of the DNC, but do not underestimate him. He made a pragmatic choice...chair the DNC or start a new party...and took what he thought was his best shot.
His best shot at a sort of moral revolution, which is the only thing that is going to save our fat American asses in the long run.
There comes a time in human affairs when a line must be drawn. We are in the midst one of those times, and anyone (or any group) that does not draw that line is eventually going to be swept away by the tide of history and human evolution.
If your congressmen and your political party do NOT go "all Gannon, all the time"...AND "all anti-Iraq War, all anti-the current administration, all anti-theft and anti-murder"...then you simply have the wrong congressmen and party. They are wrong tactically; they are wrong strategically; they are wrong in a MORAL sense, and if you continue to support them despite all the evidence to the contrary, then you are very simply...a fool.
Don't wait for these people to act in your behalf...they have quite literally gone over to the dark side no matter what they think they are doing, and they are not going to take any real, effective action.
Draw your OWN line, and FIGHT!!!
Liberal my ass.
Time to get RADICAL.
Do something RADICALLY different.
Like reform the Democratic Party from the inside out.
If you do not...we are all doomed to a fate at least as bad as that of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Bet on it.
And it won't take any 20 or 30 years, either.
Time moves fast, these days.
Have you noticed?
Later....
J.F.
