He was putting Current on the map - which is what progressives everywhere have needed! Our pushback against Pox Noise, since MSNBC feigns progressive programming and only delivers four nights a week and partially on Fridays. And otherwise, daytime is an unruly hodgepodge with far too many republi-CONs getting far too much face time, and then prison shit almost constantly all weekend. How is THAT serving the much neglected progressive audience?

Dear TheMastersNemesis -

First of all, thank you VERY much for your service! And you served at a very difficult time in our history. I'm old enough to remember - looking at Year 59 for myself in a month and a half.

Second, thank you for your perspective. Many of us who are civilians feel as you do but we don't have that horrifying personal experience you do. Nevertheless I've been speculating about what would happen to us as a country if the GOP has its way, and I, too, keep coming up with Somalia as you've mentioned here!

I am a veteran only of the war on women. Hardly the same as what you went through! But I sympathize! And I remember how many times we all railed against the utter hose job you veterans were forced to swallow at the hands of the thoughtless, greedy, small-minded, dry-drunk bushies. Don't know if you came passing through here when we were railing against bush/cheney for that scandal at Walter Reed! I can't believe we would treat our veterans that way, especially while being led by a bunch of pansy-ass panty-waists who never served and who had other priorities and/or drank, snorted, and partied their way through a truncated stint with the Texas Air National Champagne Squadron. And I feel like ALL of us Americans owe folks like you a huge collective apology for taking your names, your service, and your sacrifice in vain. I think it's damn near criminal!!!

Anyway, I view the GOP as an opportunistic infection, increasingly resistant to the anemic political antibiotics our side seems able to cobble together. As a retired journalist it galls me to see the bad guys so fearfully adept at the message war. Their ideas such but they're great at selling them. Our ideas are great but we are almost embarrassingly naive about the need for promotion, PR, and yes, crass flat-out salesmanship. That's why we're about to lose the health care reforms that we all worked so hard for, because too many of our dumb-ass gullible naive Dems still can't get it through their cement heads that you need to go out there and sell the damn thing, and sell it relentlessly - as though your very life depended on it. I think they must view it as somehow beneath them. And that's a damn shame, because it's basically ALL THERE IS anymore, and all that's important. Coming in with the too-little-too-late "oh gee, well, maybe we should tell them what they're gonna lose if this goes down" - FUCK! WHY didn't they think of this as soon as Obama got down to business on his first day in the Oval Office????

I just shake my head in disgust, dear DU friend.

I grew up learning about a Jesus Who loved "the least of these," and hung out with the outcast and the downtrodden and the sick and the shunned, and Who drove the koch brothers of His day OUT of the Temple (instead of bowing and scraping and whoring to them). I grew up thinking we all need to band together and take care of each other. I reached motherhood feeling verified in my belief that, as Hillary Clinton eventually wrote, it DOES take a village.

It hurts my heart to see the country I love co-opted by hooting yahoos whose fundamental basis for their discontent is that there's a black guy in the Oval Office and he's not the janitor. And I hate what that says about our country. I hate hearing how people from overseas talk about how racist and intolerant our country is - as viewed from the outside. I hate them. I hate their anger. I hate their divisiveness. I hate their racism. I hate their intolerance. I hate their nosy fundamentalist crap, their jackbooted stomping on those less fortunate, their sexism, their shoving their narrow religious views down our throats, and in women's cases, up our vaginas, while yowling and whining about tyranny and no freedom and how they want their America back. How far back? They never say, do they? But we all know what they mean.

They are the single worst, most disgraceful, most UN-Christian, most damaging influence in our country. I wish they'd all go move to Somalia. It's the kind of nation they dream of! And leave our beautiful, open, inclusive, tolerant America to the rest of us good guys. They are a disease, a cancer on America, and I wish they'd all shut up and disappear.

At most this guy would probably only pose a danger to anyone by falling on them or breathed on them hard. Looks like he probably couldn't stay standing up by himself. Ordinarily you're cuffed too, but they evidently determined he was unarmed and not a serious threat. And they got a free concert in the process.

I loved this! PROBABLY because I've just been SO very angry for several months now, because of the various elements of the war on women. Also, the rise and the clout of the fucking teabaggers that's metastasized like some horrible cancer and has led to this active and virulent erosion of civil rights and voting rights and privacy rights and workers rights EVERYWHERE seems to have come to a really disgraceful head and gnaws at me more than ever. I've been more upset and angry and frankly terrified than I've ever been - by how the political landscape has devolved and the increasingly divisive and tyrannical timbre of the public discourse now. I wrote a column about that a few years ago, back when I was doing that full-time. I called it "The Meaning of America" - and its premise was the we're just turning noticeably mean in this country. We've become a lot meaner (and certainly not leaner), mean-spirited, angry, hostile, bitter, divisive, verbally toxic and destructive. It's really awful! I'm gonna be 59 in a few weeks, and I can NEVER remember people being this mean and cruel and nasty!

Shit. So some dumb silly thing like this is perfect to change the subject for a few moments. They don't call it comic relief for nothing.

I think scorched-earth is a good thing.

If our Dems are too lazy, stupid, or naive to wage a messaging war, then I guess it's up to US.

I'm just frickin' tired of our side carrying feather dusters to gun fights.

Zimmerman's nose looked nice and straight, no blood - ANYWHERE, no crookedness, no nothing.

What about the wet shirt all covered with grass? Didn't see anything. Didn't see any fabric of his clothing that looked wet or messed up. Where was this? Was the grass just mowed and the clippings not carried away? You'd have stray blades of grass loosening and shedding off him here and there all over the place. None. Where were signs of scuffle on him. Nothing disheveled in the least! Why would he be able to walk upright and with a regular, normal gait after having been in a scuffle like the kind that's been described - wouldn't he be limping a little, or walking with some delicacy? Or maybe a bit bent over or favoring one side or other? Hell, a single workout at my old kickboxing class routinely left me a hobbling pile of wreckage afterwards! Zimmerman looked like he was strolling over to get a cup of coffee across the street.

Seemed pretty damn clear to me, looking carefully at the video I saw. And yeah, there's nothing on the back of his head but what little hair was left after a buzz cut. Seems to me with extremely short hair, you'd be able to see signs of injury, scuffs, cuts, blood - no longer hair present to conceal it.

And it's incumbent upon us, the civilians, to know the individual requirements imposed in our states, because of course they vary widely state-to-state. INFORMATION AND TRUTH. And we damn well better get it out there, spread all over everywhere, if we're to have any chance at all in November. We DARE NOT trust our naive, gullible "representatives," many of whom we should just start calling "roll-overs," to go on offense and do it on our behalf.

Or how to win the PR wars. After all this time. After all these hard-learned lessons. Sorry - I misspoke. The folks on our side CLEARLY haven't "learned" anything. And most distressing of all, most of the people on our side don't think it's even a priority!!!!

What utter bullshit. These stupid naive know-nothings were born yesterday? They truly don't understand who and what they're up against? They're THAT gullible??!?!?!?!?!? They haven't seen enough evidence and enough proof?

I keep hearing, from Democrats, various versions of "the American people will understand!" WRONG! "They'll know!" WRONG! "They'll see the benefits and they'll get it." WRONG! "They'll see the benefits and they'll understand!" WRONG! "They'll see how health care reform has helped them, and ... " WRONG! "Those benefits will speak for themselves." WRONG! And my newest favorite: "The American people aren't stupid." WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!!!!

When they're being force-fed a constant stream of negativity and criticism and distortions and lies, it wouldn't matter if Obama and all the Dems arrived at their front door with checks made out to pay for ANY of their most drastic healthcare needs for the rest of their lives! They'd STILL believe the propaganda instead of their own lying eyes. They've been trained by now, over some 30 years of carefuly crafted and shrewdly delivered CONservative propaganda to vote against their own interests because, well, that trickle-down stuff will SURELY trickle down to them someday if they just keep believing. God will provide. The GOP way will make them all rich. And there won't be any more of those annoying blacks and brown-skins or uppity women getting in their way. It'll be magic! A nice, white America like a lot of them grew up believing in while they watched "Ozzie and Harriet" and believed that was how it was or should be, and how it must always continue to be. When "the little woman" stayed in the kitchen and only left the house to go grocery shopping or to the PTA, and African-Americans were - well - out of sight and out of mind unless they were shoeshine men with their sidewalk shoeshine stands, or washing your car at the car wash where you didn't have to tip them if you didn't feel like it. And Hispanics were like Bill Dana and that old "dumb Mexican" "Jose Jimenez" comedy routine of his - that is, when they weren't waiting tables and you didn't have to tip them much anyway - they should be grateful to have those jobs. Better when they were in the back washing dishes so they, too, were out of sight and out of mind and because of that you didn't have to tip them either - OR feel guilty about not doing so.

That's the America they want "back." They want to go "back." Back in time. When they really didn't have to believe that all men were created equal - and note the slogan says "all men," and no women need apply. Especially when everyone knows they just shouldn't be bothering their pretty little heads about such things anyway. And gays? Hey, nobody around HERE is gay! It's Communism!!!!

That America is long dead, thank goodness. But it won't stop these bastards from wanting to resurrect it again. And trying their damnedest to make sure it happens.

And with ALL of that, for all these years setting up VERY painfully obvious templates based on a long track record of consistently bad behavior, these dumb-asses on our side keep getting "caught off-guard." UNBELIEVABLE.

Total anarchy.

No government.

No laws or regulations.

Pirates running amok.

A few robber barons with all the money and power, unchecked.

Millions of poor, starving, and homeless - and hopeless.

Guns all over everywhere, unrestrained.

Sounds like GOP Heaven.

make things better is to see them get a whole lot worse and then people will rise up and rectify it.

Well - not necessarily. Because when you couple that with the FACT that the propaganda war the bad guys have been waging successfully for decades has taken its toll, what you really wind up with is a populace that's become so beaten down that there is no gumption for fighting back. You have the drumbeat, over many years, of "oh, they're ALL crooks." Or "they're ALL the same." And people start to believe that after hearing it parroted to them over and over and over and over and over, over a factor of YEARS, that soon enough, all that repetition starts making it a truism. People begin to believe it and don't question its validity because it's been drilled into them, nonstop, for YEARS, while at the same time there's been NO push-back. When all you hear is one side, and you don't hear anything from the other side, something in you is led to conclude - "well, nobody's saying anything different - so it must be true then."

Example: the naive idiot John Kerry - when the swiftboaters started attacking. Anybody remember that? He held back. Took the high road. Was just SURE that people would somehow KNOW, or SEE, or UNDERSTAND. Decorated, wounded war hero and all that. And he was probably told - don't say anything because you'll just give it legs and keep it going. And he believed and sat on his ass. And with NO push-back from his side, he got rolled. Because the other side did not stop and did not give up and kept attacking - with NOTHING pushing back or refuting, until it was too late. The public conclusion? "Well, he's not saying anything - maybe he has nothing to say? Must be true then. Otherwise he'd be fighting back. What's he hiding?" And by the time he finally woke his sorry ass up and smelled the bullshit, it was too late. He was covered in it too deep to dig out, and the message stuck because he did NOTHING to refute it until it was too late, and the damage was done. For God's sake, John Kerry went TO WAR! Did he treat the enemy there like that? Did he just feel like trusting that those other guys with their guns and grenades and stealth WEREN'T gonna keep fighting because they'd just somehow understand that he was a good guy? For God's Sake!!!!!

The continuing naivete on our side just makes me want to vomit!!! We're about to get rolled on health care reform - after all that fighting and struggle and years of effort. Because NOBODY on our side thought the bad guys would never give up. And we're about to get rolled on a woman's right to choose, too. Because NOBODY on our side thought the bad guys would never give up. We're already getting rolled on voters' rights, because NOBODY on our side thought the bad guys would go there or try that - it just isn't right! It isn't moral! It's not based on any truth or evidence to support "voter fraud"! BUT the bad guys DO these things anyway. We expect them to act and think and react like we do. They don't. And until our side gets that, we're gonna keep getting rolled. Count on it.