October 2007 archive

The Veil Is Getting Thin

As I went out walking this fall afternoon,
I heard a wisper wispering.
I heard a wisper wispering,
Upon this fine fall day…

As I went out walking this fall afternoon,
I heard a laugh a’laughing.
I heard a laugh a’laughing,
Upon this fine fall day…

I heard this wisper and I wondered,
I heard this laugh and then I knew.
The time is getting near my friends,
The time that I hold dear my friends,
The veil is getting thin my friends,
And strange things will pass through.

…anonymously authored poem from this website

I think we can all agree that any nominee of the Democratic Party is going to be more receptive to progressive initiatives, make better appointments and nominations, and run the Executive Branch more competently than any Republican.

What I am far more concerned about is-

• The Continuing Occupation of Iraq
• The Erosion of our Constitutional Liberties
• The Congenital Criminal Corruption in D.C.

The solution to these concerns is not in the White House, but at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue- in the halls of Congress.

Through both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last 30 years the level of incestuous self absorption by the Beltway Bozo Pandering Pundit Political Media Elite, the Fatheaded Sissies and Whiny Bloviators, the Arrogant Asskissing Acceptors of Access, the So-Called “Serious People” with their Mindless Masturbatory Illusions of Self Importance and Constant Cacophony of Condescending Calumny and Lies has increased to levels not seen since the Gilded Age.

Like gilding their Inflated Pompous Balloon Egos are micrometers thick.  They need a good prick, and I am one.

I think we need to be devoting our time and energy to producing a dominant Democratic majority in Congress and within that a Powerful Progressive Caucus.

Anything else is not going to produce the results we want.  Primary, primary, primary.  Punish the Media with your eyeballs, emails, and money.  Not a dime to the Corporate Enablers, sit on your ass and vote with your wallet.

Or indulge yourself in the amorphous meanderings of your particular cult of personality, whatever.

Wishing for a strong man (or woman) on a white horse is delusional dreaming.  Working with others to produce a profound change in direction is quite something else and one or two elections and lucky breaks won’t do anything but delay the damage and I’m so very tired of being the little Dutch boy with my fingers in the dike.

So everyone with a blog or a newspaper is writing about the “debate” held tonight by the Democratic candidates for their party’s nomination for President.  But I’m not.  I didn’t watch it.  Sure, I was at work while it was going on, and could not have done so.  But I have been home for several of them, and proudly ignored them.  Because the “debates” are a sham, about little of substance, and won’t make much of a difference anyway.

We can all remember the vast attention paid to the Presidential debates in 2004, as well as many of them previous.  But the “victories” of Kerry over Bush in the debates then did not matter, and no matter how much we venerate the “You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy” moments of debates, debate results don’t matter much, except for in a single area.  The Swift Boat ads trumped whatever success from the debates Kerry had.

The only way that debates matter, particularly in the primaries, is that it can help determine not who any of us will vote for, but who gets major financial supporters.  Because you can blow it by having a terrible debate performance, and the money will not go to a candidate who has blown it.  And you can maybe pick up some money from a surprisingly strong debate showing; Mike Huckabee has finally seen an uptick in donations after repeated “strong” performances in the eyes of the press.

So I went looking for pumpkins today.  There is a nice farm a mile or two away that offers hay rides and pumpkin picking.  The farmer was very nice, he had moved here from out west and was trying his best at agri-tourism.  His farm is rather large, he rents acreage out to other farmers and grows his own veggies, corn, pumpkins etc.

One year the farmer decided he’d like to add a snow tube ride in the winter months to help him pay the mortgage.  He did his research and on the government’s website found that snow tubing was a certified agri-tourism business.  Enter Joe Bruno’s local thug, the existing town supervisor, Herrington.  Herrington also runs a large farm and has done his best to squeeze out other farmers, then sell their land to corporations like Wal*Mart.

Remember back before the congressional elections last November? Remember how so many well-wishing rightwing pundits were so full of concern that they offered all kinds of advice to the Democrats about what they needed to do in order to appeal to the American electorate?

Remember how utterly, fantastically wrong all of those concern trolls were? Yeah. What a shock.

It can be safely said that the November 2006 elections clearly demonstrated that whatever a Republic advises Democrats to do “for their own good,” or “for the good of the country,” Democrats should do exactly the opposite.