November 10, 2012

Response to Karl Rove's claim that Obama won by "denigrating" Romney's character

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So, Rover, you claim that the Obama campaign is guilty of voter suppression because it questioned Romney's character and painted him as a vulture capitalist.

Rover, all the Obama people had to do to accomplish that was play back the video tape of Romney speaking on YouTube.

Mitt the Twit lied with the frequency of your former client, Bush the Frat Boy (who never made a factual statement that contained the word Iraq). While it is true that The Twit was recorded surreptitiously while saying it, no one from the Obama camp twisted his arm to make those remarks about nearly half the American people being lazy moochers who feel entitled to government handouts. That remark was made to an audience of billionaires who feel entitled to taxpayer bailouts. That's also pretty much the message in the post election analysis from your pals on Fox News. Bill O'Reilly even added a racist remark in his take and moaned how white males don't have the influence they used to have. Ah, those were the days, eh, Rover? when state and local governments imposed literacy tests to keep poor people from voting and the Ku Klux Klan lynched any poor blacks who thought out loud about voting. Now you've got crooked state legislators in debt to the bribes large campaign contributions from the Koch brothers to pass voter ID laws, crooked Secretaries of State in Ohio dreaming up creative ways to keep blacks and latinos from voting and crooked Governors in Florida to purge the voter rolls and cut early voting days. Your charge that the Democrats suppressed Republican votes is idiotic. Is irony so lost on you that you can say such a stupid thing over public airwaves and expect intelligent people to believe it?

You know what, Rover? I think Obama would have won a free and fair election by a wider margin than he won with the shit you and the Koch brothers and Jon Husted and Governor Slick Rott tried to pull off. You guys are nothing but a bunch of fascists who hate democracy and send brown shirts to polling places to intimidate voters who aren't white.

As for The Twit's business experience, it was a business that measured success by companies bankrupted and jobs lost rather than making any positive contribution to sustainable growth. I'm not saying that The Twit did anything illegal, just immoral and harmful to working Americans. Bain Capital is the kind of enterprise that no healthy economy can afford. It is the kind of enterprise that can be found praiseworthy only in the sophistry of Ayn Rand where robber barons like The Twit and Jaimie Dimon are Nietzshean Übermenschen who have an existential right to treat us peons like shit because they're just better than we are.

Let me give you and Mr. Ryan, whose intellectual growth was stunted when as a teenager he read Atlas Shrugged, the inconvenient truth that robber barons are not better than the peons who make them rich. They need us more than we need them, and nobody needs Bain Captial any more than anybody needed Enron.

The Twit didn't need anyone's help in appearing like a low character born in a high place with few positive achievements to point to in his past. He did that all by himself and you, Rover, have a real talent for finding such people.

Your time is over, Rover. Now go crawl under a stone and write a self-serving work of fiction that you will call your memoirs.

November 6, 2012

My case for Obama for those who are less than enthusiastic about him

I, too, have been disappointed with President Obama in many ways, but voting for him (or, if you please, against Romney) was not a difficult decision.

I'll take it this far: I do not believe America will survive a Mitt Romney presidency. That statement is not intended to be hyperbolic. The Republican plan is to "win" the election through voter suppression, cut taxes on the very wealthy and raise them on the very voters they suppressed. Taxation without representation is as much tyranny today when the Republicans do it as it was 240 years ago when King George did it. Private citizens will be expected to give up their rights and government benefits and get nothing in return. The income gap will widen, more middle class workers will slip into poverty and the Wall Street bankers will continue to fleece the public and party like eighteenth century French aristocrats. The deficit will go up and the only solution that will be considered is more austerity. The children of the lower classes, including what is left of the middle class, will be expected to fight and die in pointless and ultimately unwinnable resource wars waged for the benefit of robber barons. That state of affairs can only be maintained with a police state. The hope and dream that was America will be as dead as Thomas Jefferson.

Some may say that four more years of President Obama won't be any better, but on that I beg to differ. Perhaps the Wall Street bankers, like the Bush administration war criminals, will continue to go unpunished, but under Obama the social safety net has remained in tact and even expanded somewhat under that which reactionaries derided but is now more universally hailed as Obamacare. Women's rights have been protected under measures such as the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Abortion will remain safe and legal. No Democrat will ever vote to privatize Social Security or voucherize Medicare and few will even think out loud about a national right-to-work bill. When President Obama leaves office after the election of 2016, many problems will remain, especially if the House of Representatives remains under control of racists, misogynists and corporate fascists, but things will not collapse and might even be at least marginally better.

I would be more encouraged if the President ditches his Wall Street friendly economics team and replaces it with people like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman and replaces the feckless Eric Holder with an Attorney General who will prosecute war criminals, robber barons and industrial polluters. However, to paraphrase an unrepentant war criminal, we vote for the candidates we have, not the ones we wish we had.

November 4, 2012

The Republicans have not won a free and fair presidential election since 1988

They're not going to win one this year.

The following actions will invalidate any Romney "victory":

• Voter ID laws aimed at suppressing the votes of minorities and students.
• Election day "poll watching" by "citizen journalists" intending to intimidate voters.
• The endless attempts by Ohio's crooked SOS to throw roadblocks up in front of voters, the mysterious "computer glitch" that dropped a number of newly registered voters from the rolls and the "experimental software" he ordered put in voting machines.
• The purge of the voter rolls initiated by Florida's crooked governor.
• Use of unaccountable voting machines manufactured by a company owned by candidate Romney's son.
• Use of voter registration firms which either registered only Republican voters or actually destroyed the registration forms of Democrats.
• Attempts by employers to intimidate employees into voting for Governor Romney, at the Governor's urging.
• Huge spending by right wing billionaires taking advantage of the Citizens United decision, which has been used to buy advertising that contains false information such as the "Jeep is moving to China" spots.

The United States is a democracy, not a mere republic. Democracy has always been a part of American culture. It is what Tocqueville observed and that to which Walt Whitman wrote praises in robust free verse. To organize attempts to suppress voting in manners like those described above is blatantly anti-American.

We will know the election has been stolen as soon as the networks declare Romney the winner. The moment that happens, we should reach for our pitchforks and light our torches. We allowed a stolen election in 2000 and the nation suffered for eight years under yoke of tyrants who botched the effort to capture Osama bin Laden in order to fight a completely unjustified war against Iraq and opened the treasury to corporate cronies. We cannot allow this to stand again.