the end of the southern strategy

That's it, over, done. Nigger-baiting in national elections has played out. For the entirety of my life until now, this has been the GOP's plank strategy. Thanks to a shift in demographics that's ongoing and will continue well into the future, America's going to be a predominantly brown nation, thanks mostly to Hispanic immigrants. Think about it: this has been going on since 1968. What Boogeyman is the Republican Party going to find next? Oh sure, terrorists, but that's not going to fit the bill.

No, I think they're basically screwed, but then, so are the rest of us thanks to them and racist American evangelicals (rural hicks, white Southerners generally). We're still heading on the wrong course in our obsession with military adventurism. We still have Citizens United. Ah, and don't think President Obama is FDR--he's not. What he's going to do is tow their line about the national debt, misrepresenting it, making the same claims that fly in the face of accepted economics theory, and we'll continue to have the same problems, albeit with a privatized or non-existent social safety net, and it will have been done by Democratic hands, not primarily Republican ones.

So, great, enjoy the parties for now, but the fact is that President Obama is going to continue to roll back our civil liberties with NDAA, a war on lawful government whistleblowers, and he's going to continue to commit heinous war crimes in the Middle East, North Africa, Africa generally, Asia, and so on, little will change. The missing-ingredient once more is the public holding him accountable, but with partisan tribalism what it is now, forget it. The American public will continue to be on the one hand an apathetic demographic blob, and a bloodthirsty rabble, the dream of authoritarians everywhere.

But at least the Southern strategy is over, done, kaput, and I can watch the assholes that ruined my nation writhe for four more years. None of this is reassuring. Expect the president to cut back on social services and to gut solid programs like Social Security. It's coming, and you're going to own it, because you're just as irrational as the Republicans, dear lockstep Democrats, you're exactly the same kind of morons.

Why we should be happy that the racists are out of the closet

WWW--There's a theme I keep coming across with some of my compatriots on the progressive left, and I think that it's unnecessary: the fear of traditional American racism coming out of the closet. These people are literally the lunatic fringe now, but they're white and they're loud, if not proud (OK, they're that too, just without any basis). The problem--mainly--is our reaction to them, and reaction in itself is the problem, there's too much of it. We need to be more proactive about these people rather than reactive, and that's not an endorsement of Scientology. That's why I support the legal actions of the SPLC and its director, Morris Dees. His targets seem to understand intuitively, as some of the mentally ill do, that he's got their number and that he's using the proper cure. This provokes very dramatic responses.

Just looking at the words behind the anagram tells you where they're coming from at the SPLC: The Southern Poverty Legal Center. I have had great admiration for Mr. Dees and his work for ages, and the key to his work and that of his great staff has been in tracking these groups and bringing them to the attention of the public while going after the very worst, the most dangerous of them, in the courts rather than in the streets where they're only going to be emboldened by physical attacks. Hate movements thrive on the victim mentality, but we should also remember that these folks are victims in their own right, frequently victims of poverty that breeds this form of mental dysfunction. Dees knows that this isn't simply a Southern problem, but an American one, and while it is a bit alarming that these groups have grown in numbers since the election of a black president, it's also a reason to be thankful for the fact that we have one. They're out of hiding and easy targets again, just as they became so in the 1960s. They were always out there, their number haven't really grown.

The Civil Rights movement of that decade (really beginning in the mid-1950s and cresting roughly ten years later) brought the flat-heads out of the woodwork. The ranks of the KKK swelled as they had with the great influx of European immigration during the 1920s and "White Citizens Council" offices sprang-up everywhere...and they lost, badly, to the civil rights workers and activists because history and moral authority weren't on their side. Crucially, the federal government was pressured into action and the FBI unwillingly had to conduct a barely submerged war on the Klan and other hate groups. Indeed, non-violence proved to be a vital tactic, but so too did African-American groups like the Deacons for Justice and the original Black Panthers in the South with their militancy and their rifle clubs, meant to protect black communities from terror tactics. But the real fight was won in the legislative arena and the courts and the laws are still on the books to this day and aren't likely to be rolled-back anytime soon. That's not to say we shouldn't be vigilant, however.

In the 1990s, the late Stokely Carmichael, one of the founders of SNCC and one of the central players in the rise of black nationalism said that the problem had become deeper, that racism had "gone into hiding" and was therefore harder to combat, and he was right. Racism became institutionalized and very much a phantasm, a free-floating force that was almost impossible to pinpoint, let alone to fight with traditional methods. That has changed now that the loons have come out of the woodwork and are now shooting their mouths off, not to mention committing some very heinous acts of violence again. But that's what people do when they're desperate and feel they have no other options. They'd better enjoy the fun while it lasts, because it's not going to for very long.

In other words, they feel very threatened in their racist beliefs and identities, and that's a good thing since those culturally pathogenic personalities can ultimately be isolated and marginalized out of existence. These small, reactive faux-personalities--once again--intuit this and that's when the fear comes, when the ego externalizes its innermost and darkest tendencies. The shadow side externalizing itself can be dealt with by civil society more easily. Now they're visible targets, even their goons they've embedded within the military. But we tend to take these revelations the wrong way, we react, and we become part of the fear. This is a mistake. We know who they are now, we have their number, and it's time to go round-'em-up when they misbehave. We can also make sure that they never come into being by fighting for social and economic justice. Poverty is a breeding ground for this kind of faux-personality.

A recent cross-burning in my community has had some alarmed, but I'm not especially worried. As much as I have a problem with the FBI on other issues, they're good at criminal investigations like this and they're likely to find out who was behind it. When-and-if they do, the perpetrators are going to be dragged into court and could face real jail time if not civil penalties, meaning heavy fines that have shut them down in the past. We should also keep in mind that not all rabid racists are poor and that this is a pathogenic cultural stream predicated on keeping things as they've been in America since the beginning: oligarchical and unequal. The name Tony Zirkle should come as a good example of the privileged racist flake.

Economic elites must become racists by-definition in order to hold onto that power, something that they're more-than-willing to do. The reality is that they're more frightened of the rest of us, these groups, and while it makes them dangerous, they're still marginal. Nonetheless, vigilance and awareness is the key, and now we have the added advantage of visible targets.

Teabagger leader Mark Williams finally taken to task on CNN

WWW--Is he a racist? Are the Tea Baggers generally comprised of the ignorant, and are most of them racists? Absolutely. You think that if they yell "nigger" in coded-language they'll bring back white-skin privilege and get their jobs back? No, I didn't think so either, but apparently many of them think that racial solidarity means something to the rich, and they're mistaken. CNN has given this idiot and his gaggle of racists so much free advertising that it was becoming embarrassing, so they finally had to really be journalists for a few moments and ask honest questions. Williams didn't come off any better than he usually does.

Recently, Mark Williams, one of the founders and leaders of the Tea Bagger bowel movement has called President Obama the "racist-in-chief" (?!) and "an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug." No, nothing in those statements would lead me to think that Williams is either a racist or a demagogue pandering to slack-jawed bigots and racists, not at all. Is this asshole Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith rolled-into-one or what? I'd say they should unfurl the swastikas at these events, but they already have...

Take the second statement: "...an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug." This statement is going to make more sense to people born before the 1980s when the GOP and even some Democrats like Patrick Moynihan were criticizing the welfare state and the recipients of welfare. Never mind that more whites in the Appalachians were on welfare, it was "single black mothers," the real threat to the (white) American family and our future. This is the same cultural matrix Williams is appealing to, besides the old tried-and-true nigger-baiting that's so popular with redneck racists, most of them in the South. You'd think George Wallace was alive and unrepentant again.

The "Indonesian Muslim" part is so obviously racist and xenophobic, pandering to bigoted evangelists, that it really deserves no further comment beyond its relation to the "birther," really part of the same excretion, from the ass of the American South. President Obama's fully-authenticated birth certificate has been online for over one year. It's irrefutable. At that point, you know what you're dealing with has nothing to do with logic or reason, and the needle points once again to racism and an inability to cope with the fact that we now have a sitting African American president. Why?

President Obama is hardly much better than George W. Bush. He's even protecting the last administration in numerous court filings. He's keeping us in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's doing everything humanly possible not to nationalize the major banks, protects their privilege, and is taking us in the same direction that the Bush II administration would have, namely, keeping the same rotten barrel. This will keep the economy crashing for years to come and we're not likely to see a real recovery anytime soon as a result of his corporatism, ultimately the same kind as that of the "Bushies." Let me state it again: he's hardly any different from the last president at all.

But that's not good enough, and to prove it, look at how little they yell about the wars (hey, they're killing infidels, darkies); the lies that got us into them; the use of torture on terror suspects (more fun with darkies); the U.S. Attorney firings and the politicization of the Department of Justice; all the scandals involving white Republican incumbents; the revelations of FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds; the warrantless wiretapping program; the atrocities at Abu Ghraib; the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004; the atrocities at Guantanamo; the clear unconstitutionality of the provisions of the Patriot Act; and on, and on, and on. And today, Obama's calling to keep most of the worst provisions of the Patriot Act. Will any of these morons speak out against it? Of course not, it has nothing to do with the fact that he's black.

That's because they don't have any problem with these moves towards authoritarianism, they just hate the "nigger" who had the temerity to win a democratic election. This is because they are anti-democratic, totally irrational, and criminally-minded, that rich soil for tyranny. Williams is standing behind these recent, racist comments. It's like Ma and Pa Kettle calling the pot black...and "nigger," "socialist," and "fascist" (they would know) for good measure. It's time to shut these bastards down, now. There are limits to freedom of speech and they've gone too far. But let law enforcement take care of them once they really start acting-out, because that's coming. As a matter of fact, it's already begun.

On the dumbbell parade (the 9/12) march numbers and your lazy asses

Washington D.C.--Was it 2 million, as many--uh--parade goers and their tax-cheat backers want us all to think? Nope. Not even close.

Reasonable estimates coming from the police and even the conservative Washington Times has it at around 70-75,000. That's not the real problem. The numbers don't mean anything, it's the sprawl of yelling zombies, spouting terms they never learned anything about in civics class: "Socialist!" Yet--and to underscore their extremism--Obama's in-the-pocket of big pharma and the insurance companies anyway. No, it's because he's black and that their party lost the election, the Republican Party, that other party of big business. Also, they're incredibly ignorant individuals who are easily swayed by the message of fear. That's what we call an idiot, incidentally, a fool.

And who's paying to cart all the tards around? The aforementioned big businessmen and women who declared war on the average person, and therefore, the social contract, long ago. America's sinking, but these morons are too stupid to see the man on the hill running everything into the ground. No, instead, it's the "niggers," the "faggots," phantasm-like "socialists" (yet they never refer to Sen. Bernie Sanders as one, and he is), "communists," and a lot of other terms that aren't applicable outside of science fiction and The Turner Diaries. What supporters (70% of the public, easily dwarfing these loud-mouthed dunces) of single payer are waiting for is beyond me, I guess they're all on Facebook fucking around...ahem. The fact is, these crazies at the town halls are the minority, they're just very loud and they have corporate backing in many cases, if not having been pushed there by these same faceless forces through propaganda. Yet, where's the majority? Something needs to be done, and done now about these yelling geriatrics and racists, these fools.

In other words, if you support single payer, you need to get off of your collective dead-asses and do this: go down to your congressional representative's office and hold a vigil, and not just for one day, for a long, long time if necessary. Write them and call them incessantly until they start doing what we--the majority--want them to do on health care. These jackapes are being scared and even paid to come out and threaten, yell, and intimidate the rest of us into apathy and silence and it's working. They are the minority, we are the majority, and we want socialized medicine. Period. There is nothing left to say after you know that statistic of 70%, and some stats are higher than that.

And young people: what the fuck are you assholes waiting for? Are you retarded? Stupid? I can assure you that you're not going to live forever. Just look at some of you coming back from the Middle East in body bags. And for what? Once again, to make some faceless investors richer. To do nothing about this and to just apathetically take it or buy into it is to be less than a slave. After that, one begins to deserve everything that flows-out of that arrangement. There literally are no words, because after that, widescale violence becomes inevitable with the collapse of the social contract, that agreement we all have to band together as a society to care for one another rather than to murder each other. What are societies for? I bet you cannot answer that question.

Now, that's how stupid you're all being by doing nothing. It doesn't get any lower than that.

But if you really want to get to the crux of this stupidity, it's the American South again, the old Confederacy of Dunces that was never able to function within a democracy and still isn't. If you look at the outlays of the elections since the American Civil War and the voting patterns that drag America into a jaded authoritarianism, it's the South doing it again and again and again. Stupid is as stupid does. We could very well end up with another Civil War, it will have been just as avoidable as the first, and the South will have created the majority of the mess once again. We're seeing the cost of this stupidity writ large and we will reap chaos and destruction from it if we don't start making this a participatory democracy. There's only one way to do it, we all know how, and it's time to get off our asses and into the town halls and the streets to counter these incredibly moronic assholes, there is no other way. Democracy isn't a microwaveable pizza. Do it, hit it, go, now. Quit playing with yourselves.

This whole deal is political theater to give you that golden opportunity to cop-out and do nothing--and I know full well you're all looking for it. Do it. Now. Go. Find your congressional representative's office this weekend and go to his office personally and tell them you want single payer. If they're not going to support it, tell them that not only are you not going to vote for them, but that you're going to campaign for their opponents, that you're going to tell all of your friends and family not to vote for them. Know someone who should run for office but hasn't ever bothered? Push them, get them to run as an independent who will support this agenda of single payer care for all. No excuses, do it. Do it now, otherwise you're also intellectually incapable of functioning in a democracy, and that's about as low as it gets.

Obama's in their pocket, it's about race, ignorance, unwarranted fear, and lost elections:

http://www.citizensforethics.org/file /20090904%20-%20Summary%20of%20Health%20Care%20Visits.pdf

GOP Rep. Joe Wilson, douchebag

WWW--You'd think last night's speech took place on April 10, 1861. Huh? Yes, the moronic big health recipient shot his mouth off last night during president Obama's speech on health care reform as though he was Brigadier General G.T. Beuaregard, shelling Ft. Sumter--only this time, he didn't take four long years of fighting to "apologize."

"You lie," he stammered in crackerese, and it was the come shot heard around the world--or at least in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of big pharma and the hearts of the insurance robber barons. "Render unto Caesar" never meant going down on him--after all--and Wilson's Caesar salad, his masters, are corporate and plutocratic ones. It really had nothing to do with immigrants getting health coverage at all.

A longtime friend said to me a few months ago something that I take to heart and consider very seriously (I'm paraphrasing him) : "Southerners--in general--are intellectually incapable of functioning in a democracy." I agree with this strongly. My family on my mother's side comes from Kansas and Arkansas--they left for a reason, and the aforementioned was a large part of that reason, or the lack thereof. There was nothing to stay behind for at the end of WWII, and it wasn't just about jobs, it was about a backwards culture that doesn't want to change.

Wilson's inappropriate outburst was a pathetic violation of decorum and I believe strongly that its intent was symbolically racialist, not merely because he's a whore who's owned by the insurance and big health care-related corporations and trusts. I believe Wilson was put-up to what he did by his own party because of the state he's from, a place dear to the heart of sundry evangelicals and the emotionally retarded throughout America since it's where the American Civil War stupidly began, and it was over another lost election, what Marx called a "slaveholder's rebellion." The white-trash South is going to be that red-headed stepchild of America for as long as the air is breathable and before the planet really starts hitting back. But Marx was correct: the Civil War was childish, regressive, and anachronistic.

Indeed it was, and there was nothing noble about it, the Confederacy-be-damned. There's a better word for what the firing on Ft. Sumter and Wilson's outburst constitute (or rather, don't): the childish throwing of a tantrum, a fit by the mentally-challenged. Apparently, South Carolingian didn't find their governor Sanford embarrassing enough, so they elected a whole gaggle of losers from the Fellowship. But wait, it gets better, much better.

Wikipedia has had to put a lock on Wilson's page, similar to what happened with Sen. David Vitter's page when I and others were attempting to add pertinent information to it that was factually correct. I know, unfair, especially when someone's powerful, then it's heretical, a travesty. But, never mind, these pages of the unaccountable powerful have hired gatekeepers (some simply acting on their own) who act like sleeper agents to guard them and block further content that might be deemed (by them) "controversial." Before all that, I never cared for Wikipedia, never respected them, and never will, they're redundant, go use academic sites for information.

Wilson is the poster child of a dysfunctional democracy, but then, so is the entire GOP and most of the Democratic Party. Their constituents? A foregone conclusion, but at least most of the dumbbells out there are going to get a very painful civics lesson. No, Joe Wilson never lies, and he never chopped down that cherry tree, since it never existed anyway. To be sure, the GOP and morons like Wilson are speaking in a coded language predicated not only on plutocratic criminality, but also a regressive race-baiting. In other words, Wilson's going to be "out-niggered" before long, expect the language to coarsen. Racism is flushing itself out behind the facade once again, which is a good thing. It's easier to hit it once it's out in the open, the tipping of the hand, the curse of the terminally stupid.