(9AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
David Axelrod, who as we all know is the third greatest political genius of all time, right behind King Louis XVI and Pharaoh Phukitallup I, who only lasted 2 days, is going to be busy brainstorming campaign slogans for Obama’s rerun for the White House in 2012. I don’t know what he’ll come up with, but I know what the top three slogans would be if the truth mattered . . .
I Am the Way Into the City of Woe
I Am the Way Into Eternal Pain
I Am the Way To Go Among the Lost
Those words, engraved on the archway above the Gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, precede the final words, Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. If Obama isn’t primary challenged, if corporate control over the White House isn’t broken, we can abandon all hope, because this country will keep descending from one level of Hell to the next, until we reach the last and deepest level.
Midway through their journey with Obama, Americans find themselves in a dark wood, for they have wandered from the straight and true. They weren’t led out of the darkness, they were led deeper into it. The relentless beast of corporate power comes against them, step by step, determined to drive them back to where the sun is silent evermore. So vicious is its nature, so ill-bent, it never stuffs its ravenous will enough, but after feeding hungers all the more.
Dante had the poet Virgil to guide him through Hell and lead him out.
We have this guy . . .
From behind the tinted glass of his presidential limousine, Obama surveys the desolation of a wrecked economy, the carnage of endless wars, the expansion of the surveillance state, the resurgence of racist hate, and claims this is what change looks like. This is not what change looks like. This is what Hell looks like.
I’ve heard the arguments against primary challenging Obama. Those who make them claim it isn’t realistic, they speak of party machinery control, of the consequences of an intra-party fight, of the damage it would inflict on the Democratic branch of the Corporate Party, of the dire consequences of splitting that branch, thus handing control of the government back to the Republican branch of the Corporate Party, which never lost control of the government in the first place.
That argument has more flaws in it than Palin has platitudes. Obama is further to the right than Nixon was, across the board, from foreign policy and national security to economic policy. He compliments Reagan, awards Poppy Bush the Medal of Freedom, fights Bush II’s wars, won’t investigate his crimes, won’t stop spying, won’t close Gitmo, won’t prosecute British Petroleum, Halliburton, AIG, Blackwater killers, or CIA torturers, targets Social Security, rips up the Bill of Rights, throws his own base under the bus, and proclaims that Teabagger racists are “as American as apple pie.”
The “lesser evil” argument will be trotted out again and again, but it rings hollow in this realm of the damned, where lies fall like acid rain in a thunderstorm that never ends, where Obama says nothing while madness rages like an epidemic, does nothing while greed crushes everyone in its path, hears nothing as appeals for help echo from one end of this Centrist Hell to the other, sees nothing, even as the fortress walls of “free market capitalism” collapse all around him.
There are realistic realists among us, they have Reality ‘R Us attitudes, self-fulfilling prophecy experience, cave-every-time credentials, and the same message–it’s not time to find our way out of Hell yet. Stay on the lesser evil path, they told us, maybe it’ll start sloping upward somehow. So we endured the second level of Hell, and the third level of Hell, and the fourth level of Hell. Bush took us across the River Styx and into the City of Dis, but it wasn’t time to find our way out yet. Obama led us through all 12 dimensions of triangulation into the Malebolge, and the deepest level of Hell is dead ahead, but the refrain still echoes in the darkness–it’s not time to find our way out yet.
I think it is.
I think it’s long past time.
We have to return to the bright world, we have to find our way out of this Hell, we must climb the primary challenge path, and if that doesn’t lead us out, we must climb the third party path, all the way to the top, without care for having any rest, we must keep going, because if we keep going, we will begin to see the beautiful things that heaven bears, and that will sustain us, it will guide us the rest of the way, and we will come forth from this underworld of greed and endless suffering, to see again the stars.
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The journey wasn’t easy, but no journey worth taking ever is.
It was a privilege to be a part of this community. Thank you, Buhdy. Thank you, On the Bus and Nightprowlkitty. Thank you, ek and Edger and RiaD and Robyn. Thank you, Turkana and undercovercalico, Tahoe and Dharmasyd, Lady Libertine and Alma and AndyS. Thank you to everyone who gave so much to this community in so many ways, who gave it all they had.
Every post mattered. Every word written was from the heart. There was some anger, but it was nothing compared to the love. The anger will be forgotten, but the love will never fade. From Underdog to Lasthorseman, from Pfiore8 to DianeG, from davidseth to Shaharazade, we all spoke out because we care, because we want to see the stars again.
Someday, we will.
I have to admit always blowing it in this venue on any subject relating to race, the sexual thing, this discrimination thing.
A resurgence of racial hate On this I agree because my kids have seen this “protectionism” of minorities and they loathe it. Do I personally like it when people judge others based only upon physical differences or worldviews. Of course not. Do I hate such things as the KKK, apartheid and gay bashing. Sure but I also hate being told what and how to think by social engineering think tanks. Really, it’s not about replicating that chidhood innocence kids have when the naturally play with each other. What good is being diverse if they control your money, your life, your very mind.
Are you then a racist bigot, homophobe or an advocate of multi-culturalism at gunpoint.
at the designated regrouping site 😀
I was all set to argue with you, but I did some thinking first. And then I realized, I really don’t give a crap. What I do support is an independent challenge from the left all the way up to the election.
I’m not a Democrat anymore — I re-registered as a Green when I acted on the browbeating and voted Democrat in the last election — where it mattered in any operative way to vote Democratic.
It was the last time. The last time I’m voting for a lesser-of-two-evils candidate because the other guy is just so evil.
Depending on what happens in the next year, primarying Obama may destroy the Democratic Party. Certain groups of people have gone all in on him. Right wing centrists and most in the African American community have put all their chips on President Obama. Non-disaffected liberals are slowly abandoning him, but not at a rate that would make it possible to either defeat him or pull him substantially to the left. The unconditional support President Obama gets from within the Democratic Party all but guarantees that he will both be a one term president and will not understand until the very last day and maybe afterwards what is killing him politically.
But I am no longer a Democrat. Their own survival as a political party is in their hands. I have not for a long time had any delusions that the Democratic Party could be substantially reformed from within, at least while President Obama is in office.
To limit any left populist challenge to President Obama to primarying him is to not get the job done. Fear of defeat, and possibly not even that, is the only tool remaining. If he is allowed to return to his corporate Republican loving ways after any such primary is to not get the job done.
No, the choice needs to be put squarely on both Obama and the Democratic Party all the way up until election day. With even 5% leftist support for an independent candidate, the Democrats cannot retain the White House. Winning is not the point at least in the 2012 contest. The contest is to TEST — to see whether there is any scenario under which the prospect of political non-survival can budge the Democratic Party from its destructive Republican pandering ways.
And for it to be a good test — it has to go on all the way until election day.
Primarying him is not something I really disagree with — since it starts that process and as of now I really have no fear about weakening the Democratic Party. Yes, it would weaken Obama’s election chances – but as I thought about it, I realized, I’m no longer a Democrat and I would care about this — ’cause why? It just should not be the end of it.
I’ll see ya ’round the campfire.
(Im karenr at FDL)
keep writing.
Sometimes, I think about Abu Ghraib — it was not just torture, it was the utter degradation that was perpetrated on the victims, reducing them to a hideous mockery.
For sheer want to understand what happened to Obama early on to have caused him to continuously cow to the Republicans and their criminal snifflings, I have, at times, thought of him as a victim of Abu Ghraib, minus physical torture — like giving a medal to G. H.W. Bush, to make him act/do perversely of all that he was “against,” to make him continue to bow and bow, was to make a mockery of him and render him impotent. It is no lie that the Republicans have been hell bent on his destruction from the onset of his tenure and they are still at it.
Someone sent me this: Whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar
Whatever the case, we are at the juncture, as you put it!
Thank you, Rusty!
And then 3rd party him afterwards.
for I don’t know how many times now…
“You can only see the stars in the dark!”
Kinda makes the dark worthwhile now and then, no? 😉
Star Light Star bright,
The first star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.
…as usual. And the thought is right om also
…and comments, ( Bono’s quote or maybe Edge).
shit has hit the fan in Miami – or make that 1936 Facist Germany where the police arrest people to make money and all courts are controlled by U Miami lawyers and the USPS now enforces the Patriot Act. Dropping off the grid pretty much entirely, as am afraid for life.
Last time I was here Rusty pissed someone off and when I asked the editors why, I got no answer. Figured out how to download all his (is he a he?) essays but never had chance to read them with my total life and 3 degrees being destroyed since 3/1/10. Lost everything, but kept the stuff that will be wikileaks on WWII.
Anyway, it appeared that the problem was a Palestine / Israel discussion.
Now I come back (internet cafe left a computer open – only reason I am here I am that broke) and Rusty posted but he is leaving again.
I want this person involved in some stuff I will be doing in the future because HE WRITES WHAT I THINK AND MAN, IF WHAT I DO WORKS, I WANT HIM WORKING WITH ME – because this person can really write and shares my political standpoints so well I think he is mindreading!
and maybe he’s a she? no clue. right now trying to get shit out of condo before it’s sold at courthouse and I can’t even tell you who is foreclosing. This is another fucking book. I will be the publisher, too many products to go thru the reg channels.
so please Rusty – tell me where the fuck I can find you in about two months. here’s an email address [email protected]
let’s make some $ off the man, and without their systems at all – I was an MBA insider and man do I have dirt and skills and my parents have the greatest WWII stories ever heard = 11 separate properties off that alone. no fucking shit. just had presented to major producer before the cop attacked me then the shit REALLY hit the fan. several other franchises. want not to be rich but fund own company with copyrights that provide jobs to tormented killer vets. No one gets rich but everyone eats. been working on it for 4 years – almost there guys – almost there.
but meanwhile, I got to finish the experience of living in sheer terror of my own country – you can’t write what you don’t know – and now I can write of great depression like my parents experienced. This one we are in will be as long but the war that results will be civil – here as well as abroad. the sweetness is that the rich can’t fight, but there will be more pain for all
stay the fuck out of Florida guys – Cuba is safer…When Fidel starts making more sense than Obama, then you know it’s time to go…
Rusty – please leave data – I really have no time to search net for you – and I have never gotten the hang of the blogging thing – frankly it is too dangerous for me – I am the woman behind the curtain – don’t want a “paper trail” ever unless I control the paper
Rusty1776 – the best goddamn writer on the internet in my humble fucking opinion – you kept me sane during the Obama betrayal. This is first time in life I did not vote. Fucking Rubio? Sink and Scott – the lesser of 2 corp criminals? This is the USA? God help us!