James Dobson, Jack Burkman & the DC Madam

The Rev. James Dobson, former founder of Focus on the Family, former human being, has been telling evangelicals that if they don't vote to the right that God's going to be angry at them, some such bullshit flowing from his sewer-shaped orifice. Normal people don't take to this swill, but then, there's Republicans, evangelicals, the Aryan Nations crowd, the Tea Party demographic (a very tiny one comprised mostly of middle-aged small business owners), and the Klan. In the backdrop of all this are the lobbyists, war profiteers, criminal banks, criminal management subcultures, speculators, lawyers--the criminals who have hijacked the system--doing their do while the rubes think they're accomplishing something. OK, they are: the dismemberment of their own rights, so there.

I've written on Jack Burkman more than I cared to. He's a good argument for sterilization. What I have concluded is that as a golden tiered lobbyist, media pundit for the right, and whatever hat he's wearing this week attached to his utility-belt, this guy is no good for America or the world. He's not just typical folks, he's up there at the summit, part of the problem, a threat to the Republic. We're all entitled to freedom of association, but these fuckers take it to the breaking point into organized crime. I don't really give a shit if it gets a free pass from all the other criminals in office, it's a subversion of the rule of law. Dobson is telling his flock and anyone foolish enough to listen to him seriously that if they don't vote Republican, forget it, God's going to be angry, watch out, eek, oh, aw. Does this shit ever get tired for these jackapes? Do they think with the primeval part of the brain underneath the cerebellum more often than not? Hey, were it not affecting the rest of the world, fuck if I care, but it is. Burkman is just one more cheerleader on the runaway train called Western capitalism. These clowns have taken us to the edge of the cliff now, whatever's coming is coming sooner rather than later, and it will be big, nothing will ever be the same again. Their reaction? To try to clamp down on the rest of us because they know intuitively that they're the problem, a source of dysfunction, and that this dysfunction is going to wash them out of power soon. They send out the usual clods like Burkamn to distract, divide, to demoralize.

Nothing he or they have to say is going to wash with the majority, however, so they wrap it in religion and patriotism, nationalist iconography, so the rank tasting pill will go down for the slack-jawed crowd. Rawstory had a recent blurb on Dobson, his recent utterances on how we're all supposed to be voting. I posted a comment relating to the cynicism of the Burkman/Dobson relationship since the former has spoken as a representative to the phony preacher man, the founder of Focus on the Family, which in turn created the Family Research Council. It's more right wing attacks on the separation of church and state, but also to get evangelicals to vote stupidly, to vote Republican.

Burkman is a well-known pussyhound who loves fucking almost anything in sight. He's not exactly the model of behavior that Dobson's advocating either. Why would he care? Burkman has promoted him and his agenda, a mutually beneficial one with the GOP, he gets results. Caring about the behavior of others is for the flock--with exceptions like these. Dobson has never come out criticizing Burkman for this behavior.

To believe in nothing is nihilism:

Dobson only cares about temporal power, he's ashen inside. His mouthpiece Jack Burkman was found by multiple researchers in the DC Madam's phone bills--he did a callback to her escort service, so it wasn't a mistake, especially with each instance years apart.

Burkman was given incredible cover by the mainstream press, it was extraordinary, suggesting a media campaign to contain the scandal generally, to contain the damage to the GOP. They couldn't keep a lid on Larry Flynt with Senator Vitter, but they could with Jack. Burkman goes out spouting the same family values garbage as Dobson--for Dobsons in fact. Vitter got an award from the FRC for his work in promoting family values in the Senate, in hotels, with hookers, you know...

Bill Maher had him on his shows so often I question whether they might be friends, something over two dozen. He's not just spouting GOP swill on Fox, hardly. He's all over the place as a "voice of the right." He was a high level campaign adviser to the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign. The media ignored his presence in the phone records because of his other job, a pattern you will find in the phone records: lots of lobbying related entities, individuals, most in defense/intelligence or related contracting, like SAIC or Qualcomm. SAIC is all over the phone records. I think the whole scandal was about influence peddling being uncovered in Hookergate with investigations turning up a lot of stones with the escort services in DC., finally accelerating the investigation in Palfrey. It didn't help that the November 2006 midterms were coming, so someone interim appointed (for other reasons too) Jeffrey Taylor...now at Ernst & Young, who have a revolving door relationship with their executives and those at Qualcomm. There's something major there with Burkman for almost all of the press to uniformly go silent on it. That's because they could with him, not Vitter, not Tobias, etc.

There are more phone records out there, she didn't release all of them. It's possible I have everything, however, as I was a member of the defense as a general researcher, hired at Palfrey's request. I've seen Dan Moldea's findings. There are quite a few more names in them of significance, but patterns are what matter most. That doesn't really fit Flynt's format, he wants hypocritical office holders, they're the ones in his sights. Burkman isn't an elected official, he wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny--probably wouldn't know he was doing something wrong, heh. Word in the Beltway is that he's chasing women all of the time. Then there was the anecdote about him walking around DC (he's a gimp) coming to a Gay Pride parade and propositioning a lesbian couple for sex. The girl put story up on her Myspace page with a scan of his business card, but it was yanked. Wonkette's story on it was also taken down, or at least one or two of them, and so on.

I've communicated with a few of the girls that Jack has...well, fucked. He's not remotely in the Dobson mold in his real life, a very sexual one at that, and he has purchased birth control for at least one of them, the morning after pill. Does James Dobson give a shit? Of course not, Burkman is his hire, his media mercenary, his spokesman, his lobbyist. Burkman cut his teeth working as a congressional staffer during the GOP's endless assault on the also corrupt Bill Clinton, another political operative. Now he's a golden tiered lobbyist. Results. Those are what Dobson wants, gets, and so, he would never admit Burkman was this way unless he had no choice. These people are the lowest form of life on the planet, below the amoeba, lethal mutations. There's a presidency on the cancer...

Expect more on Mr. Burkman in my upcoming account on the DC Madam.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/08/dobson-we-are-in-serious-trouble-with-god-if-we-vote-wrong-in-2012/

Why did they know, and you did not?

I've written about my grandparents on here several times and what wonderful, homespun Populists they were, and not the wacky right wing kind either. That was for their siblings to take up, they're thickos.

My grandmother was literally from the dirt. Her Scotch-Irish parents were monsters who tried to pump their kids with religion, neglected them, and beat them. They were literally hillbillies living in the Ozarks in the 1920s-30s, and they were poor, very poor. I'm pretty certain that my grandmother had her religious beliefs, but she had a very interesting mistrust of "preachers," as she called them. She was an Ozarks Cinderella who went to a "seeing woman" to guess the sex of her one child, my mother, while she was pregnant.

"A preacher should get a real job," she would insist when we even casually talked about organized religion. Was it just her opinion that swayed me against all forms of organized religion? No, it was the experience of it and how inhuman, uncaring and revolting most of it is. I hate virtually all organized religion and look at it as an abomination before all humankind.

"The preacher man doesn't know any more than you do about what comes after this." she would often follow-up with. I couldn't have agreed more with her then or now. What's interesting is that this is a heretical belief, yet she thought of herself as a very religious and spiritual person; she just didn't trust people to do the right thing in groups, and she certainly didn't trust the preacher man. Neither do I, and never will. In fact, I see just about all of them as hopelessly deluded and corrupt, like most people when they're given just a smidgen of power, and ultimately, that's what this series of observations is all about, power and how it makes people who hold it and the people they hold it over to lose their ability to reason. Most of them came pre-damaged anyway and were budding authoritarians before any boss told them what to do. But others think for themselves, reject their upbringing, and grow-up and out of it.

My grandfather lived in rural Kansas. His father worked on the railroad as an engineer, and at one point, the family owned a hotel that burned down during the 1920s. His father was a patriarchal nimrod who rarely communicated with his children other than with his belt or his ring-festooned backhand. By the early 1930s, this idiot was fired from what was a very good-paying job at a time when there were almost none, and dragged his family to Arkansas to be...a dirt farmer, and at a time when family farms were failing. Father knows best. It was a disaster, but somehow he found other work. As far as I can tell, they were typically religious for the time, and he was a stern patriarch who isolated himself to his den and read all the time, the only thing I can give him credit for. Children were to be seen and not heard. As far as I can recall or ascertain, my grandfather finished high school while my grandmother did not.

What did they do for a living? My grandmother picked cotton to buy her wedding dress. They worked in factories for their entire working lives, first in munitions plants during WWII and the Korean War, then various other industrial occupations over the years. They worked very hard at work and at home and were very industrious people, but they weren't intellectuals and didn't have expansive educations. They were just working-class people who did the best they could and treated others as they would have liked to be treated; they followed the "golden rule" better than any other people I have or will ever know in my life. I was lucky: my immediate family on my mother's side weren't users, manipulators, or liars. But the rest of them were, so my grandparents left Kansas after WWII for the industrial North.

Again, these weren't really well-educated people at all, but they were sharp and smart, and they knew the score when they saw it. They were staunch unionists, and they were generally progressive. This wasn't atypical. The fact is that they were--and still are in their death--mainstream America. This is the real America, the good side. From the 1970s when I was a little kid reading about the Great Depression thanks to a childhood illness and a curiosity for human history, my grandparents continued the same mantra until their deaths during this current decade: "You watch: these dummies [most voting Americans] are going to vote the Republicans back in [as a majority], and we're going to have another Depression all over again, they'll make it happen again, you'll see." So they have, so they have.

My earliest memory of my grandmother saying this comes from 1978. Think about that for a minute. This wasn't an economist saying it, this was an ordinary working-class person who actually lived through the Great Depression (for real, the hard side of it) as a child, and therefore, knew what she was talking about. Why would she understand what caused it (lack of proper regulations, as she often told me herself many times) when she never lived with electricity or running-water as a little mountain girl? She bore witness to her era as her husband, and they didn't have dust in their eyes or shit in their ears, they didn't miss much, if anything. They stayed civically and politically engaged their entire adult lives because they knew that if they didn't, catastrophe for future generations was all-but-inevitable since the business jackapes are always waiting at the gates to abuse government. But their kids weren't carrying their share of the load after them and most were ignorant of how things had been before the New Deal and the accomplishments of organized labor. They were critical even of the "union bosses," but had good words for labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the UAW, of which they were both members.

They understood that you must be eternally vigilant against corruption in all its forms, especially political, since the government at least is theoretically capable of being held accountable, while corporations are not without that reasonably clean and strong government. Yes indeed, they supported the New Deal. If you ask--and you'd better do it fast now--anyone with sense who lived through that era (and I mean really lived through it and can remember it) and they'll tell you what an "idiot" Republican President Herbert Hoover was for his inaction during the worst years of the Depression, and it was common currency with these folks. Most of them used far less polite words for him, even decades later.

Why do you think it took five decades to create a "Republican majority" (that rapidly imploded)?

Why, then, did my grandparents "get" it--that you don't blindly accept authority at its word and that another Great Depression was coming when so many others claim not to have? First off, many of these people today--these "experts"--were part of the corruption on Wall Street, in Congress, the White House, and in our Courts, so they're either lying or were too close to it to see anything except dollar-signs. My grandparents were just working-class people who saw the reality on the ground and knew bullshit when they read, heard, or saw it, and the GOP was always bullshit to them. They learned the lessons of their time. The truth is that the baby boomers lived through unprecedented prosperity and forgot these lessons and were slow learners when it came to constructively taking on an oligopoly that's running this nation into the ground while simultaneously destroying its soul, its spirit. Like any generation, they've overstated their accomplishments.

It didn't take a genius to see all of this coming. The cheap credit, the wholesale deregulation of the business and financial sectors by both major parties, and a runaway corporate crime spree and war profiteering, made the mess we're in inevitable. Only a ten-year-old or someone very old could have seen it--at least someone who wasn't or isn't an old fool. The rest tend to be a glob of self-serving, brainwashed turds. It takes a good education to become indoctrinated by a bad system, just ask the Einsatzgruppen units that slaughtered Slavs and Jews on the Eastern Front during WWII (but do it quick). Most of them were college educated. A fool with a degree is a still a fool, and an criminal sociopath will always be a criminal sociopath regardless of how much you shave and primp them and put them in a nice, new suit. But there are good people in this world. Not only were my grandparents warm and kind to me and my family, they were smart and actually gave a damn about their neighbors and society. This is why democracy works. The average person is smarter than the leadership and the loud-mouths they rook in to drown everyone else out. They are the real threat to America, forget terrorism.

None of this is to suggest that learning is bad. Quite-the-opposite. But you had better learn where you come from if you want to know where you're going. How can you know where you are, when you don't know where you've been? It's not hard to understand why children are so troubled about having an identity: we're not giving them one, we're not transmitting the lessons of the past to them enough. People must know who they are and where they come from to be whole, to be reasonably at peace with themselves. In these areas, we're failing our children again, and again, and again, in our assembly line educational system. We can always do better, and we should always keep trying to make a better world for the babies as well as the adults. What is a society for if not for us all to band together to help each other survive? To suggest, for example, that there's no need for a safety-net for the unemployed is antisocial, sociopathic, so it must come from the business community and high finance. Find yourselves and where you have really been.

American Elections: The Skinny

A'murka--We are a nation of apathetic voters. Granted, after Watergate, it's been hard to believe the system here is anything but utter bullshit, a joke. Agreed. But the subsequent voter apathy hasn't made things any better, has it?

That's how Ronald Reagan and the rest of the jackapes that have come afterwards (and before that) have gotten into office . When Reagan ran in 1980, the voter turnout was in the 20-percentile range. Reagan won less-than-half of that, which means that less than 10% of eligible voters elected him. That's not a mandate at all, and calling it "the Reagan revolution" was apropos--then-and-now.

The 2006 midterms show some hope that things can change: we reached the 30-percentile range of voter turnout. That's still not very good, but it's going to have to do. Only the American people can bring about the loss of the franchise (the right to vote) now. When you have that range, a candidate like George W. Bush is only getting 10-15% of the actual range of eligible voters. No mandate there, which is OK with the Republicans, though they never let that stop them. That should tell you something about them and their attitudes towards democracy.

The GOP and the DNC feed on your poor response to your own cynicism of our political and economic system. There is nothing more irresponsible than not voting in a democracy. If you don't really care, why hang around? Why have children? Why not stay in bed and eat ice cream all of the time?

But enough about Mississippi--we all need to vote. And that's not going to be enough: you must start to and remain active in the political process for life. It's the most responsible thing to do. Otherwise, you have no credibility whatsoever. Part of the current crisis is all the dodging of responsibility and accountability we've all engaged in over the last 30 years.

This situation must--and will--end. Responsibility isn't just for the rest of us either: it means everybody, or democracy and reasonable law and order and vacant words without meaning. If you don't understand this, you don't understand democracy and why it's preferable to other systems of government. So, what are you supposed to do? Get off your dead-asses, get informed (decide for yourself), demand accountability of politicians and yourself and your neighbors, and REGISTER TO VOTE.