Cheney-Palin 2012: a dream come true

The repugnicants operate on fear. They thrive on it. That’s why they are so afraid of having the 9/11 hijackers tried in NYC. I can’t say for sure if they are personally afraid, or just fearful that the Bush family connections with Bin Laden will be revealed.
But what is more serious is the repugnicant drive to instill fear in the rest of us, the American people. It’s long been an operating principle of the fascist mentality that a fearful population is an easily-controlled one. The more vulnerable we feel, the easier it will be for them to “guide” is in the right direction.
Why else would Dick Cheney violate long-standing custom and keep bashing Obama? Fear.
Why else would Sarah Palin talk about how awful it’ll be to bring the hijackers into this country to be tried. Fear.
To what end? you may ask. I think it’s pretty simple: the repugnicants want a docile yet productive work force. There have been a few comments in right-wing circles lately about how the American work force is overpaid. Compared to much of the less-industrialized world this is accurate. The US per capita income is $40,000 per year. The average Chinese citizen earns $3,000 a year. How much bigger profits would be if we could pay our workers less!
The worst thing for neo-cons is a thriving middle class. In colonial America, it was the middle class – the merchants and artisans – who started the Revolution. Post WWII, the growth of the union movement created a strong middle class that resulted in the 60s anti-war and Civil Rights movements.
The repugnicants are determined to continue the importation of cheap labor from south of the border, and will continue to send ALL our manufacturing overseas. It is decimating the working class. And that’s the way they like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.

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On a lighter note, click here to see the new Cheney-Palin 2012 bumper sticker. It’s in red, and a classy item, if I do say so.

…has a new name. “Traitor Joe.” That may only be funny to people in California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut… and coming soon: New Jersey and Minnesota!

I woke up about three o’clock this morning realizing how much our thinking is imprisoned by the language of others. Case in point ‘Jobless Recovery.’ Even smart people like Thom Hartmann and Economics professors use the term.
Wikipedia defines jobless recovery or jobless growth as “…a phrase used by economists, especially in the United States, to describe the recovery from a recession which does not produce strong growth in employment.”
I think the idea of a jobless recovery just shows how screwed up our thinking is. Why is a recovery only measured by growth in the GDP, or rise in stock prices? If people aren’t working, then it doesn’t matter if the Dow is over 10,000. The economy is still sick.
Calling what we are in a ‘jobless recovery” is like calling a glass of orange juice a “vodka-less screwdriver,” or an empty platter a “meatless pot roast.”

I put together this short video because I’ve been thinking about political caricatures, and how important they are to American politics. One of the first was drawn by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 to urge American independence. Here it is:

Pretty tame compared with some more recent ones, huh?

I’ve noticed with the current spate of Obama-as-[insert your villain here] cartoons floating around, people are shocked, shocked to see such disrespect to our President. But it’s been going on for a long time.
Here’s a cool one from Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly:

In 1871 the Republican New York Times ran a scathing
series of exposés of corruption in the Tammany Hall-controlled Democratic administration of New York City, and Harper’s Weekly and Thomas Nast quickly joined the campaign.
A bloodthirsty Tammany mascot has mauled the Republic, symbolized by Columbia, having broken her shield, the ballot, through corruption. The rotund emperor, Tammany Boss William Magear Tweed, enjoys the spectacle, sitting among other well-known Democratic politicians.
The allusion to the historic slaughter of innocent Christians in Roman arenas—Rome now being the center of Catholicism—was particularly powerful, as was the way Nast drew the rampaging tiger looking directly at the reader, clearly its next victim.
My contribution to this fine tradition… hopefully less tedious than the spate of Obama ones:

At a meeting of conservative activists, this was their reaction upon hearing the news that we had lost our bid to host the 2016 Olympics:

I guess I’m old-fashioned. I thought that real Americans rooted for their country, no matter what they felt about the President. Did the people who hated Roosevelt secretly root for the Depression to get worse? Did they cheer the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?
I confess it makes me a bit sick to my stomach. I didn’t like George Bush, but I would never cheer our country’s failure. Maybe those people really want an Al Queda attack on US soil so they can cheer Bin Laden. “A thousand Americans dead! Whoo-ho!”
A while ago, I would have said that’s bullshit. Now, I wonder.

Florida freshman Democrat Alan Grayson described the Republicans’ health care plan on the floor of the House.

Ohhh… wrong President.

This morning on the Stephanie Miller Show, John Fuegelsang pointed out that when the Dixie Chicks, while in Great Britain, said they were ashamed that Bush was their President, they were called traitors in the right-wing media.
But when Sarah Palin criticizes our President while in Hong Kong, there’s not a peep.
Next to the definition of hypocrisy in the dictionary is a picture of the GOP elephant.
Much better than my Jane Fonda analogy: who remembers her?

Ms. Palin took her show on the road Wednesday, in a speech to CSLA, and Asian investment firm. She criticized the Obama administration’s foreign policy, suggesting it made the US appear weak in the eyes of the world.
In July of 1972, actress Jane Fonda visited Hanoi, North Vietnam.

She harshly criticized the US war effort, saying that we were deliberately bombing the dikes along the Red River to destroy the country.
In 1988 Jane Fonda apologized for her claims and for the photo above, saying she would regret it until she died.
Will Sarah Palin apologize for bad-mouthing our government in time of war?