Cranky Bear On Why The Mueller Fetish Needs To End

[Editor's Note: I am tired and in need of rest, so I decided to let my impolitic friend Cranky Bear take the reigns for a bit.]

Cranky Bear here, with a bug up my ass and a beer in my hand. I am going to keep this short and sweet so I can talk some sense into you thick skulled folks out there.

Today came the news that the Mueller probe will likely be wrapping up soon. I am hardly surprised, since with Barr in as Attorney General the writing was on the wall. The report will be released to the Justice Department, then it will be buried, since it does not have to be released publicly. Since Mueller is looking for indictments, rather than abuses of power, and since he has not had enough time to clear those high legal hurdles, the report will likely find that lots of people lied, but there will be no smoking gun. This will be used by the right wing to claim the whole this was a sham. In fact, the report will likely end up bolstering Trump's position because he and his flying monkeys on Fox News will just say "See, SEE! They found nothing!"

You better get prepared for this.

You need to be, because too much false hope has been dumped into this investigation. Why? Because even after all that has happened, even after the rigged elections, after conspiracy with the world's foremost exporter of fascism, after children were stolen from their parents, after trans people's rights were taken, after the president of the United States became a promoter of stochastic right wing terror, after all of this, the majority of people who oppose Trump are still too goddamned lazy to get off of their asses and actually DO SOMETHING!

They prefer to believe in a deus ex machina. A lot of them are so detached from reality and have watched so much West Wing that they think deep down that the system actually works. The brain worms from their civics lesson indoctrination back in school have finally eaten away at everything. Mueller allows them to sit on the couch, watch Maddow every night, and cheer along like they are watching their favorite baseball team.

This is bullshit and needs to stop. We all know that Trump has already committed crimes, he's been a criminal all of his damn life. We know he is corrupt, we know he is using his office to enrich himself, we know he is selling out the country to foreign powers. We fucking watched him do it on live television in Helsinki last summer! You don't need some Republican lawyer to tell you this, or to validate what you can see with your own two fucking eyes.

I just hope these people can stop hitting the crack pipe of American exceptionalism long enough to realize that unless we get out into the streets and onto the picket lines none of this is going to change. If you can't put your body on the life, be prepared to kiss your ass goodbye. Cranky out!

A Pep Talk From Cranky Bear

[Editor's Note: I have been quite busy lately, and so I have decided to hand the reins over to my friend Cranky Bear. Warning: he is a lot less civil than I am. Right now, I think we could use that.]

Hello all, Cranky Bear here, drinking coffee and ready to give you all a taste of my mind.

A lot of you are really upset today. After all, the Supreme Court just decided to kneecap public employee unions, and Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Yesterday they affirmed gerrymandering and the ability of crisis pregnancy centers to misrepresent themselves. Shit looks pretty bleak.

This is all coming while the government is still holding immigrant children in cages. Just a couple of weeks before, the dotard despot effectively ripped up the postwar alliance system. He is also waging a trade war that is already costing jobs in this country. We are living in dangerous dark times.

Which is why you fuckers have to get up off of your asses and FIGHT!

Yes this sucks, but translate your fear and concern into action, dammit!

When the other side loses, do they engage in fatalism and hopelessness? No, they go out there and relentlessly keep trying to push their agenda forward. After Obama won the presidency they unleashed the Tea Party. As long as we are chickenshit we will lose because we are up against awful people who will stop at nothing to win. They blocked the Garland nomination, they are suppressing votes, and they are relying on the electoral college to maintain minority rule. They have absolutely no fucking shame about going against the will of the majority because they don't give a shit about democracy.

A lot of this is down to our mistaken belief that history is on our side due to our righteousness. Sorry folks, history doesn't give a shit about morality and nothing is inevitable. The tides of history turn only when people MAKE them turn. And as a student of history, I can assure you that shit has been worse than this before. That's not an invitation to fatalism, that's an invitation to FIGHT!

The lying fuckwits and craven crony capitalists and wacko Christianist theocrats up against us are actually few in number. They derive their power and influence from filthy lucre, and also from a pervasive propaganda machine. The thing is, the level of commitment possessed by your average Limbaugh and Fox devoted chodes is pretty damn limited. They might lose their shit when they see a black athlete daring to protest police violence, but they won't do much about it rather than buy another asinine "blue lives matter sticker."

We are younger than them. We are more devoted than them. We are motived by seizing the future, they are still wedded to maintaining a non-existent past. We can win, but first we have to commit ourselves, we have to organize, and we have to stop fucking around. For liberals this means no more West Wing-inspired insipid bullshit about civility. There's no being civil with people who want to wipe you out. For Leftists this means no more purity test bullshit and especially no more standing on the sidelines and sniping rather than getting your damn hands dirty. For all y'all, remember while you are coming up with excuses to not fight, there are children being held in cages in this country every minute of every day. Your bullshit is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

If we are going to fight to win we need to commit ourselves to being in the streets, to striking, to talking to our neighbors, to voting, to canvasing, to running for office, and above all to ORGANIZING. The Fox/Limbaugh chodes will vote for Trump no matter what. Their support of his human trafficking and hostage-taking is proof of this. Stop trying to convince these people to change their minds. They are lost. They are not to be convinced, they are to be defeated, and in that fight, no quarter should be given.

We need to get out there and tell people why they need to care. And please, no more of this "when they go low, we go high" horseshit. Fight to win or don't even bother to fucking fight at all. Times are hard and getting harder. Things will get worse before they get better, but they will only get better if we get out there and make it happen. To quote the speech in Mrs Miniver: "this is the people's war, our war! Fight it then! And may God defend the right."

I'll be in the streets on Saturday, I hope to see you there.

Cranky out

Cranky Bear Says You Don't Need To Fight With Your Conservative Family This Thanksgiving (Or Find Common Ground, Either)

[Editor's note: my friend Cranky Bear hasn't written here in awhile. His last piece was pretty controversial, and ruffled a few feathers. Anyway, I'm too exhausted to write, so I let him say his piece.]

Cranky Bear here folks, coming at you while having some coffee and chocolate to keep my mind strong.

In the last few years I've kept seeing all these takes on the internet telling liberals and progressives who come from conservative families that they are supposed to fight with their family members at holiday gatherings, or else they are somehow cowards unworthy of the cause. The argument goes like this: if you can't challenge your conservative family members, who can you challenge? And it also goes like this: you're in their family, so you're the kind of person who can change their mind.

These takes are invariably written by people who are not the progressive minority in a conservative family. If they were, they'd know just how ridiculous their arguments are. I know, because I have been pretty openly opposed to the politics of most of my family for the past twenty-five years, and shockingly, I haven't changed anyone's mind by disagreeing with them. A lot of folks don't seem to get that we HAVE BEEN FIGHTING against long odds for a long time. Usually political "conversations" in these contexts involve getting ganged up on by everybody else in the room. Those folks also tend to blend their arguments with a healthy dose of elder condescension. It turns out that a younger family member who perhaps does not live in the same region anymore is the last kind of person able to change their mind. The discussions end with them feeling confirmed in their beliefs, rather than questioning them. In these circumstances avoiding political discussion is a perfectly fine thing to do. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Of course, I do draw the line at openly expressed racism and bigotry, I just won't let that shit slide, and neither should you.

The way I see it, my energy is best spent not getting red-faced and angry while stuffing turkey in my mouth with my beloved family members. I am not interested in "winning" arguments at the dinner table. (Or even having them in the first place. I want to enjoy their presence and be happy!) My efforts are aimed at my neighbors in my own community, and getting them to get out there and vote for the right things and the right people. I save my energy for the streets and for letters and phone calls to politicians. My objection to their malfeasance matters a lot more than getting apoplectic over a relative arguing that tax cuts for the wealthy will bring prosperity for all. In fact, our emphasis on Thanksgiving political fracases and not on the work of everyday political engagement is having a negative effect on us. I don't want to beat my family members in verbal arguments, I want to defeat the politicians and the ideas that they support.

While you should not feel any kind of obligation to fight with your conservative family members, neither should you listen to the takes that say that you need to find "common ground" or "understand where they are coming from." Yet again, the people with those takes don't actually understand the dynamics of how being progressive in a conservative family works. We have been hearing their side of things for our entire lives. In fact, we were raised in their politics, meaning that once upon a time we bought into it to a greater or lesser extent. I "understand where they are coming from" because they used to be me. I know enough to know I can love them and still absolutely despise the people they vote for.

I know that they think their way and I think mine and we aren't going to convince each other otherwise. What I can do is fight hard for the things I believe in, in a variety of contexts. I can teach my students this country's real history. I can organize my neighbors. I can knock on doors for candidates. I can call and put pressure on elected officials. I can get my body in the street and protest. I don't want you to "call out" your reactionary uncle. I want to you to join the general strike when the shit goes down. Because trust me folks, that's the call we are going to be asked to answer pretty soon.

Cranky Bear On The Current Crisis

[Editor's Note: my irate and impolitic friend has been sending me missives and manifestos from the Cranky Compound for months, but he'd been banned from the site after his last, extremely inflammatory post. I've decided, for sentimental reasons, to have him back.]

Hello there, Cranky Bear here, stone cold sober and in a fightin' mood. Today the magnolia and honeysuckle stench of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III wafted back into the Senate chambers as he obfuscated and lied yet again about his contacts with Russian government officials. This all happened while Senate Republicans were working on their version of the AHCA bill in secret, which it appears that they might put up for a vote before it can even be read.

Now the Crankster here is hardly surprised. As I have tirelessly, time and again tried to get through your thick skulls, the Republican Party is merely the vehicle for an extremist gang of right wing ideologues that will stop at nothing to make their ridiculous ideas a reality. They are right wing Bolsheviks for whom the ends always justify the means. Witness the wave of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and flood of dark money. They know it is not popular to give the rich massive tax cuts, but that's what they want, and come hell or high water, that's what they're gonna get.

Their supporters, fed on a constant diet of lying propaganda and bullshit from Fox News and talk radio, will never, ever turn on the party and its de facto leader, Donald Trump. Those in the liberal bubble have no way of comprehending just how much these people hate and define themselves against their political opposition. They think they are the "real America," and their opponents anti-American. That framework can be used to justify all manner of sins, and it certainly helps to justify breaking the law to maintain power.

There is only one thing to be done, as that is to fight like hell to win in 2018. I don't just mean Congress, I also mean state houses and governorships. In way too many "blue" states conservative radicals have instituted voter suppression, attacks on universities, and destruction of the social safety net. The only way to keep gerrymandering in check is to be in charge of the state legislatures. Those races are vital. They need our time and our money. It is blindingly obvious right now that the only forces keeping Trump in check are the courts and the people. The courts stopped his travel ban, but only after the people took to the streets. WE have it in our power to do something, but we actually have to DO SOMETHING.

So if you spend a lot of time opining on Twitter without ever calling your reps or attending a protest, you need to knock the fuck off. If you are still litigating the election of 2016, you need to knock the fuck off. If you only pay attention to presidential races, you need to knock the fuck off. If you are spending all your time and energy pining for Bernie in 2020, you really need to knock the fuck off. 2018 or bust. If enough of you won't process that essential fact then we as a nation are well and truly fucked.

Cranky Bear out!

Cranky Bear Weighs In

[Editor's Note: My rather impolitic friend Cranky Bear has not been heard from on this site in awhile. The election result has prompted him to come out of hibernation, and send me this missive from his compound.]

Hey gang, it's the Crankster here with a bottle of porter beer in my hand and a rage in my heart. I've long told y'all that this country is a headin' down the track to disaster, but shit, I didn't expect it to go down like this.

For years now whenever I've wanted to point out the wrong turn American society has taken since the Reagan Era, I've always trotted out Donald Trump as the ultimate example of what our corrupted, materialistic values have begot. The fact that a man so vulgar, crass, and immoral could be lionized and admired for over three decades was proof that we were living in a sick society. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the man so reflective the garbage values of late capitalism would end up getting elected president. He is a mirror of what America has become.

And so the hand-wringing and chest beating has begun, and you know what, I want it to end. The blame game is a luxury that we can't afford. In any case, he won the election through voter suppression and the electoral college, essentially through undemocratic means. THAT should be the focus, we can leave the internal fighting until some point where our heads aren't all on the goddamned chopping block.

What we have to do is fight, and to fight long hard and potentially to give what Abraham Lincoln called "the last full measure of devotion." I don't mean to alarm y'all, but we are looking authoritarian rule right in the face. Trump is a man with zero understanding of the checks and balances of the government, and more importantly DOES NOT CARE. Like a typical CEO he values loyalty and obedience above all, and thinks political dissenters can merely fired like so many malcontented employees. His first statements on Twitter after getting elected were to attack the New York Times and to attack the protestors in the street. One of his flacks threatened Harry Reid with legal action for daring to criticize him, and his minions have tried to delegitimize the protests against him. Like a typical authoritarian ruler he has surrounded himself with family members and die hards, no matter how incompetent or clueless.  Most importantly, he is prepared to make a man beloved by literal Nazis, Steve Bannon, his closest advisor.

All the while the Quislings and Petains in the Republican establishment have bowed down to the strong man. Trump insulted McCain's bravery as a Vietnam POW, then came crawling back. Trump read out Lindsay Graham's private phone number so that he could be harassed, and he came crawling back, too. This is the typical strongman tactic of humiliating a man in public in order to politically "own" him going forward. That's why Trump belittled Christie and joked about his weight after he joined the Trump train. In the fight to come there will be very, very few on the other side of the aisle willing to turn on Trump, no matter what he does. If this election has taught me anything, it's that their hate for their perceived enemies matters more than any principle they have. When people start disappearing in the dead of night they will secretly be ecstatic. So many people in power who are supposed to be on our side will be shocked, but too chickenshit to fight with the vigor that is needed to win.

Neither will the media be any help in the coming struggle. With Fox and Breitbart, Trump will have two state media outlets, one ruling cable and one ruling the internet. Another thing this election has taught us is that facts and evidence are inconsequential, so Trump will use these outlets to unleash a tidal wave of horseshit, obfuscations and lies that will show up in your reactionary uncle's Facebook wall unless you haven't mercifully unfollowed him by that point. The remaining media will face a choice: access or no access. Those choosing access will try hard not to offend the Great Leader. Those not choosing access will be banned and lose the ability to have much of a public voice. They will be harassed and sued. In any case their voice will be drowned out by the shadow state media. As in Putin's Russia, only those already critical of Trump will take the time to find the media critical of him. There will be no need for official censorship.

We only have ourselves, folks. So stop fucking around! Back in the election, were you knocking and doors and organizing? No! You were refreshing 538's home page and biting your nails. STOP THAT SHIT NOW! Get out into the streets! You have time to binge watch a new season of the newest HBO tits and violence prestige show? Guess what, you have time to get your Congresscritter on the horn and give them a piece of your goddamned mind. If you can afford that daily latte you sure as shit can afford to give Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ACLU, and many other fighting organizations some of your dough.

And we may lose, but we cannot, must not go down without a fight. When your are old and gray and the young ones ask what you did to stop the march of Fascism, what the hell are you going to tell them? We've spent years asking ourselves what we would do if an authoritarian regime would come to this country, well know's your time to see if you really meant what you said when it was only theoretical. The other side knows there's a war on. It's high fucking time that you acted like it, too.

Stop backbiting. Stop grandstanding. Stop snarking. Stop hemming and hawing, for fuck's sake.

FIGHT

FIGHT

FIGHT

Cranky Bear out.

Cranky Bear Has An Election Pep Talk For Us

[Editor's note: after a long week of work I am exhausted and will hand over blogging duties to Cranky Bear, my rather passionate and impolitic friend. Cranky's views do not necessarily reflect those of this blog or Werner Herzog's Bear.]

Cranky Bear coming at you, with a big ass bottle of imperial oatmeal stout, because sometimes the Crankster feels like being sophisticated. Well folks, this it. Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. A lot of folks are understandably worried about this. Hell, I am too. A crypto-fascist who has brought white supremacy, hatred of Muslims, and nativist eliminationism into the political mainstream and is now one step closer to the presidency is certainly someone to be worried about.

But here's the deal. A lot of y'all are worrying in the wrong ways.  I hear you say "Oh my God, Trump is gaining in the polls! Oh my God, lotsa Bernie voters are going to stay home in the general election! Oh my God, Trump keeps lying/saying bigoted things/acts like an ass, but his campaign isn't sunk yet!"

Y'all are worrying wrong because you're doing it so damn passively. To paraphrase US Grant's words to his subordinates about Lee: stop worrying about what Trump is doing, and worry a lot more about what you're gonna do to him.  Stop worrying about Trump becoming president, because it ain't gonna happen if you do what you need to do.

He won't be stopped by John Oliver or Samantha Bee. He won't be stopped by being caught in a lie, because everything that comes out of his garbage mouth is a lie. And he sure as shit won't be stopped by fighting with him on Twitter, as much as I enjoy Elizabeth Warren's sparring with the orange pumpkin of doom.  He won't be stopped by arguing with that dipshit you haven't talked to since high school on Facebook. Nope, he is going to be beaten when we all go out and organize organize organize until election day, when we and all the people we've organized go vote and turn this racist braggart into the thing he claims he'll never be: a loser.  All this other shit just don't matter. Get off yer ass, fer Chrissakes, and take to the goddam streets.

Are you people Democrats, or what? Your party used to get out the vote like a fucking champion. While I don't endorse the policies of Richard J Daley, a lot of his spirit was there in Chicago this spring when folks showed up and let Trump know that they would not be having his shit in their city. On your turf get your people out there and to the polls and the state level results will follow. If you're in deep red territory rally the troops and get them to keep the faith.

The Republicans can given you a massive opportunity on a big bright shiny platter, and you're wringing your little hands about it.  Fuck that. There has never been a more unpopular man to get the presidential nomination of a major party. So you love Bernie and don't like Hilary and don't want to get out the vote for her? Well I don't care.  Cut the shit and big on your big girl/boy pants and do what needs to get done. How the fuck else is your "revolution" gonna happen if the Congress is still being run by ideologues whose ideas are to the right of Attila the Hun? I mean, deep down, don't you want to wipe the smug look off of Paul Ryan's face? Even if you aren't crazy about Hilary, that'll certainly be worth it, right my Berniebros?

Put down your damn phone. Get off the fucking Twitter. Get off your Cheetos-enhanced asses and knock on some goddamn doors for a change. Let the orange shitlord and his hairpiece talk as much shit as they want, you go out and organize and BREAK him and the sycophantic assholes in his party come November. Make Mitch McConnell's turkey waddle chin quiver as he cries bitter tears of defeat. Be able to taunt your racist uncle on Facebook the day after the election. Trump and his army of troglodytes have put away the dog whistles and have come out of the sewers to openly proclaim their bigotry. MAKE THEM PAY.

Cranky Bear Has Had It With The Hate Against Refugees

[Editor's Note: My impolitic friend Cranky Bear has emerged from this week to send me a new missive about the opposition to Syrian refugees. I have held off on publishing it, but now think that his brand of profane anger is what's needed right now.]

Hello cats and kittens, Cranky Bear coming at you here with a pot of black coffee and righteous anger seeping through my pores.  I have seen a lot of awful shit in my time on this earth when it comes to this nation's politics.  I remember the Reagan years' happy face on top of human misery. I remember the hysteria after 9/11 and the calls to war by our feckless idiot of president and how people actually listened to this lobotomized manchild.  I have seen the rise of the Tea Party and have witnessed the racist backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement.  Nothing could prepare me, however, for what has happened this week.

We are seeing fascism, pure fascism red in tooth and claw openly shouted from the rooftops by elected officials and contestants for the presidency.  On Monday Republican governors fell over themselves proclaiming that their states would categorically refuse Syrian refugees, with Christie taking the cake by expressing banning orphaned toddlers and babies.  They did this because they know it is a winning issue to stir up hatred against Arabs and Muslims because it appeals to their base of resentful white dipshits who don't know their own assholes from a hole in the ground.  Say what you want about the godawful Dubya years, he at least had the human decency to decry attacks on Muslims and Arabs in America.

In the last couple of days this sorry-ass situation has become positively fascistic.  Donald Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he "wouldn't rule out" closing mosques and creating special identification badges for Muslims.  Other Republican elected officials have mentioned rounding up refugees and putting them into camps as a viable option.  What is especially striking is that America wasn't even attacked!  This hatred and paranoia has been building up for years, and now a convenient excuse has been found to unleash it.

Make no mistake, a large number of Americans actively hate Muslims and would like to see them eliminated from American society.  I have often thought that if Dubya had ordered all foreign-born Muslims to be sent to relocation camps in the aftermath of 9/11, the public would have gone along with it.  Hell, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, has used the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II as a positive example!  

These fucking people make me sick, but they aren't the worst.  No, these politicians are simply opportunistic hacks trying to appease the garden variety dumbshit fuckwits who post their godawful Facebook memes and actually fucking listen to what the pig fuckers on Fox and talk radio are telling them. These people, ordinary fucking people, are what's wrong with this country. They spend their lives in complete fear, defending the cops who shoot black people while hiding behind the gates of their lily white suburbs. They collect their Social Security checks while bitching about "welfare queens" and "takers."  They think that the very presence of Muslims in this country is some kind of affront to their Christianity, and they get super paranoid and angry about it.  A lot of these people are people I grew up with, and honestly, fuck them. They should know better.

Fascists don't fall from the sky or grow out of the ground. They are regular people who have given themselves over to a diabolical ideology. I've long thought that 15-20% of Americans are fascists in sympathy, and that if they were told that a military coup would overthrow president Obama and install Christianity as the official state religion would jump for joy. In times of strife and terror Republican politicians have learned that they can maintain their position by appealing to hate and fear.  They did this in the last presidential election they won, in 2004, by going after gays and whipping up fears about terror.  With political homophobia now unpalatable to the larger electorate, they have doubled-down on Islamophobia.  This is how they manage to add to their fascist support, by appealing to the lizard brain fears of the run of the mill fucknut crackers who think the terrorists are going to blow up the Arby's in their shit-ass cookie cutter tract housing suburb.  (They are scared to death of the Muslim boogeyman but apparently not of the Type 2 diabetes from the Big Gulp they're chugging while scarfing down fried garbage.) Once upon a time conservative pols tried to send out dog whistles, but now are just full-on, shamelessly appealing to the worst kind of hate these shitbags possess.

For years we have looked back at the refusal to accept Jewish refugees in the 1930s and the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s and thought "how on earth could people do such terrible things? I am glad we are so enlightened nowadays!" You know what, we're not.  We are a nation dominated by hateful, fearful, stupid ass bigoted morons. In the 1930s most Americans feared and hated Jews, in the 2000s, I am afraid that most Americans fear and hate Muslims.  That is the "middle America" and the "Heartland" that so many praise, which are really a massive crock of dog diarrhea. Fuck "middle America." Fuck the "Heartland." Fuck "real Americans." Fuck them all. They aren't worthy to lick a refugee's shoes. Cranky Bear out.

Cranky Bear Asks America To End Its Football Addiction

[Editor's note: It has been a long while since I have received a missive from my friend Cranky Bear, who appears content to live the quiet life in his compound and to stay above the fray of world affairs.  Cranky has also been sneering at my more domesticated lifestyle, calling me "soft" and a "sell-out."  However, after such a long silence I have received a message in a small microfilm canister via carrier pigeon, and would like to share it with you.]

Hello folks, Cranky Bear here with a cup of strong coffee in my hand and an axe to grind.  Last week marked the beginning of football season, and the sport seems to be a bigger part of our culture with each passing year.  College football coaches are often the highest-paid public employees in their respective states, and even the least nerdy among us participate in fantasy football.  NFL games have become reliable TV ratings bonanzas, and the Super Bowl is the most watched event in a given year.

I do not see this as a good thing.

All sports work within a social context, and football's context has changed to an extent that it is a national bloodsport that embodies so much of what is wrong with American society.  In the first place, playing the game has been shown to cause catastrophic brain trauma and all kinds of ill effects stemming from it.  Other players lucky to have their brains intact end up unable to walk, and are at a higher risk for ALS.  New rules adopted by the NFL will likely only make a dent in the problem, and even under these rules fans and players complain that the game isn't being played the way it ought to be.  Fans want the big collisions, and defensive players want to make the hardest hits that they can.  It would be easy to dismiss these feelings and say that the game must be reformed.  However, I take them at face value as proof that the game can only be played "right" when it is dangerous, and is therefore incapable of reform.  We will all be better off if it just goes away.

In our tight economic times, football is also a major economic drag.  High schools pour money into practice fields and expensive equipment, money better spent on actually educating students.  Our universities are struggling and slashing departments left and right, but they still build new athletic complexes, luxury boxes in the stadium, and pay coaches millions of dollars.  Several cities have been held hostage by their NFL franchises and extorted money to build new stadiums where perfectly good ones already stood.  The NFL is a "non-profit" organization that makes $9.5 billion in revenue, pays its wretched commissioner tens of millions of dollars, but does not pay a single red cent of federal income taxes.

Speaking of Goodell and the NFL, football is run by the biggest pack of shysters and liars that you'll ever see.  The NFL denied the facts on concussion when they knew they were true, it held back on punishing Ray Rice for spousal abuse, and has fought to stiff players whose bodies were broken in the service of amassing wealth for the owners and their cronies in the league office.  The case of Ray Rice demonstrates a disturbing tendency by the powers in college and professional football to protect the perpetrators of violence and sexual assault.

The NCAA, which manages college football, is even worse than the NFL.  They still peddle the stinking lie that big-time football players are "student athletes" who shouldn't be paid, all while rolling in the dough that they generate.  Have you ever seen the type of colored blazer wearing philistine who regularly occupies positions on bowl committees, events that rake in dollars made by the unpaid workers on the field that the people are paying money to see?  These well-fed respectable men about town act as if those young athletes owe them a living.  College football is nothing more than a giant wage-theft racket dressed in the romantic garb of "tradition."

Even worse, football is a vehicle for militarist propaganda.  The NFL colluded with the military to turn Pat Tillman from a skeptical soldier killed by friendly fire into a super-warrior martyr to recruit more cannon fodder.  The NFL takes every opportunity to associate itself with the military and praise its every action.  There has probably never been a more effective use of propaganda since World War II than Whitney Houston's rendition of the national anthem at the Super Bowl during the Gulf War, complete with military jet flyover.  Football's very language and ethos self-consciously recalls war, from the "trenches" on the front "lines" to the "field general" behind center and on the sideline.  Whether consciously or unconsciously, it encourages the people of this country to be obedient to their military leaders and to keep from asking questions until the body bags have come home and reality has set in.

Last but not least, football as a sport isn't all that great.  It is a game suited for television and rather underwhelming in person, but on television there are more commercial breaks than interesting plays in a given game.  The NFL in particular has become a dry, technocratic exercise about as inspiring as an annual earnings report.  Give me basketball's free-flowing poetry, baseball's cerebral contemplation, or soccer's athletic beauty any day.  Fuck football and every inch of its turgid violence, you can have it.

Re-post: Cranky Bear Pines For the Commonwealth

Editor's Note: My angry and impolitic friend and frequent guest poster Cranky Bear has not sent me one of his missives in quite awhile.  Perhaps he'a already in hibernation for the year, or is starting to mellow out with age.  In any case, the recent manufactured budget crisis has got me thinking about whether the United States would be better off in a parliamentary democracy.  Cranky actually wrote about this topic way back in early 2011, and it still seems all too relevant today.

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Cranky Bear here, hyperactive with espresso in his veins (this machine is the best Christmas gift I could have hoped for.) I've been thinking long and hard about the horrific events in Tuscon, and in the spirit of the moment, I will tone down my normally acidic vitriol. I find that when caffeine rather than booze is my drug of choice I cuss a lot fucking less (but never give it up completely.)

I've spent two years watching the Tea Party buffoons claim the legacy of the Founders, to the point where some of them want to restrict the vote again, and crow that this country is a republic, not a democracy. (Of course, these things are not mutually exclusive, but complexity of thought has never been a teabagger attribute.) As I said in my debut post, this country has a long history of violent, racist populism. Its current practitioners like to say they are "the people," but they really mean something more to the German word "Volk" with its connotations of racial community.

Anyone with half a brain is aware of the schizoid nature of the American Revolution and its legacy. Thomas Jefferson wrote the words "all men are created equal," but he was also a slaveholder who very often proclaimed the inequality of races. Although the revolutionaries claimed to fight for freedom, they did not intend freedom for all. It was the British, not the colonists, who encouraged slaves to leave their masters and protected their freedom. (Dr. Johnson put it best at the time, "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?") It was the British, not the colonists, who wanted to limit the slaughter of Native Americans, one reason the colonists were fighting for independence! Although modern conservatives like to claim Tocqueville as an apostle of exceptionalism, they forget his scathing critiques of America's hypocrisy in regards to the treatment of Native Americans and African Americans. These contradictions, which great people like Dr. King and others have tried to unravel, remain with us today.

If you compare the political culture and strength of mythologized nationalism of America to its wealthy peer nations, the differences are striking and alarming. For example, could you even imagine anything like the Tea Party in contemporary Canada? If a political movement in modern-day Germany used the talk radio rhetoric of insurrection, "second amendement remedies," etc., it would be anathema. Any politician spurring that movement with talk of "real Germans" or "don't retreat, reload" would become a pariah and would be kicked out of any of the four major parties (Left and Right) for saying such things. Because of their history, Germans are aware that violent rhetoric has consequences. Our history ought to teach us that lesson too, but because most of the public views our history as one long string of victories for freedom, we never will. After Vietnam there was a window of opportunity where the triumphalist narrative could have been laid low, but it passed.

This is why I now think what to most Americans is unthinkable: America would be better off if it did not achieve independence from Britain. It would have been ideal if right after Lexington and Concord the British leadership offered self-governance for America in exchange for continued loyalty to the crown. We like to think that our nation's war for independence was some kind of great blow for human liberty, making America a beacon of freedom to the world.

Bullshit.

The American Revolution did not extend freedom, it merely formalized freedoms that already existed, and did little to challenge the racial, class, and gender inequality of colonial society. Yes, Americans got to rule themselves, but the Canadians basically managed to do the same thing after a rebellion in 1837.

I am well aware of the horrors perpetrated by the British Empire during the 19th century, but they were no worse than those committed on the American frontier. The British also happened to abolish slavery thirty years before the United States, and did it without massive bloodshed. Two court cases provide an apt comparison: those of James Somerset and Dred Scott, both enslaved men who sued for their freedom in court.

We all know what happened in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision: even though Scott had lived on free territory for much of his life, he was denied his freedom. Furthermore, the court ruled that black people simply did not have any rights vis a vis whites. Somerset's case dates all the way back to the 1770s, and his circumstances were remarkably similar. He had lived as a slave in England, and when his master tried to take him back to the Caribbean, he resisted. In Somerset's case, the court ruled that there was no precedent in English common law to uphold slavery, and all slaves in England were thus emancipated. This was in 1772, a full eighty-five years BEFORE Dred Scott. Yes, the English participated the horrific slave trade, but they did finally ban it in 1806.

We like to tell ourselves that America is a uniquely free place, but our history simply does not bear that assertion out. We have not had equal voting rights for even fifty years! (The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, for crying out loud.) We love to pride ourselves as an egalitarian society whose top echeolons represent a kind of meritocracy. Any trip to this nation's many ghettoes, barrios, Indian reservations, dying rural towns, and trailer parks ought to confirm George Carlin's immortal quip, "It's the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

And in the midst of an economic hurricane austerity is the order of the day. The investment bankers who got us into this mess are back to giving themselves record profits, but here in Texas, where 25% of the population lacks health insurance, the sate is slashing Medicaid instead of spending a single cent of its $9.4 billion "rainy day fund." I'd say the current situation qualifies as a fucking downpour.

The reasons, of course, are blindly ideological, a belief that government is somehow inherently evil. Which brings us back to the American Revolution. The Tea Party, which is merely an echo of a long-established tradition of violent, nationalistic, Herrenvolk populism, has reinterpreted the American Revolution in its favor. The radical Right sees America as a nation where "the people" must always be ready to raise arms against "tyranny," which they interpret as any government expenditure that might somehow help out somebody else.

Like the masses who supported Andrew Jackson, who ethnically cleansed the Cherokee, they support government action when it benefits themselves or is used to slaughter brown people. These supposed libertarians support the maintenance of the biggest war machine in history and its war of choice in Iraq, they supported the warrantless wiretapping of the last administration, they voiciferously oppose closing down an illegal prison at Guantanamo Bay, but if the government tells insurance companies to abide by new regulations, that's tyranny! They claim to be against entitlements, but see no hypocrisy in drawing Social Security, Medicare, and in having gotten their boost into the American middle class via public education.

So I ultimately agree with James Madison, who promoted the Constitution's ability to tamper down faction and keep the ignorance of the masses in check. I just think that the Commonwealth would have been a much more effective restraining influence on the violent populism that dares to claim the mantle of freedom. Instead of our unwieldy system, with its Senatorial "holds," the ridiculous electoral college, and a legislative body where Wyoming gets the same number of representatives as California, we might have a proper Parliament, like most of the rest of the democratic world.

Cranky Bear Holds Congress in Contempt

Note: My friend and associate Cranky Bear has been sending me plenty of missives by carrier pigeon over the last few months, but I have been trying to make this site less profane, and more professional.  However, in the aftermath of Congress' vote yesterday, his is the abrasive voice that needs to be heard.

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Cranky Bear here, sipping bourbon and about ready to blow my stack.  Good old Cranky has been pretty desensitized to the braying idiocy of humanity and its tendency to be its own worst enemy.  However, there are times when even I am surprised at the base stupidity of our elected dipshits.

In case you didn't know, ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks for the purchase of guns.  They find keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of psychopaths, domestic abusers, and convicted felons to be such a common sense proposition that most people think we already have such safeguards in place.  Only if that were so.

I honestly can't think of any issue where 90% of the country agrees.  Hell, there are probably 15% who are so irascible that they don't think baby kittens are cute, or hold that the Star Wars prequels were superior to the originals.  Normally when the public lines up so definitively behind an issue our Congresscritters get so overanxious to please their constituents that the queue to the grandstand goes around the block.  For instance, just witness how public hysteria in the aftermath of 9/11 led to the horrifyingly sweeping PATRIOT Act.

Congress hasn't been too slow to act when it wants to, despite our assumption that it's incapable of action.  For instance, Congress managed to pass a massive giveaway to the evil motherfuckers at the Monsanto corporation in the dead of night as if by magic.  Corporations are people, after all, and furthermore, to quote Orwell's Animal Farm, "some animals are more equal than others."

If Monsanto needs legal protection for its nefarious deeds, fine, but if twenty innocent first-graders are torn to shreds by bullets fired from a weapon meant for the battlefield by a psychopath so loopy that his actions came as little surprise to those who knew him, that's just their tough fucking luck.  Next time pack some heat, assholes.

Those who voted against background checks might object to that characterization of their stand, but as far as I can tell, they are motivated by one of three factors: 1. Licking the ass of the gun lobby in return for blood money 2. An insane interpretation of the second amendment that makes it easier to buy an assault weapon than to register to vote 3. Absolutely craven fucking cowardice when it comes to standing up to the rabid gun nuts.  Their votes are based on either corruption, stupidity, or fear, which are never good reasons to do anything.

I am not so naive to think that our country is really a democracy, but I think that yesterday's events ought to have finally torn the mask off for anyone who had any doubts.  The overwhelming will of the people for a common sense reform of a system that leaves tens of thousands a year dead from gun violence was no match for a powerful demagogic lobby representing a small faction of shit fer brains whack jobs that's got wads of dollars bills it can peel off.  At least we won'y have to argue anymore whether our system is a catastrophe or not, just on whether it is merely fucked up, or Lindsey Lohan fucked up.

Well Congress, I do have to give you some credit.  Your approval ratings are just south of those for root canals and urinary tract infections.  It seemed it would take a miracle to get them to go any lower, but you actually figured out a way to do it, namely to ignore the vast majority of the people you supposedly represent, so you could prevent any solution to the bloody violence that claims new lives everyday.  Congratulation-fucking-relations assholes, I thought it couldn't be done.    

Cranky Bear Takes on the Super Bowl

[Editor's Note: I'm enjoying some family time this weekend, so I thought I'd turn the reins over to my friend Cranky Bear, who has been chomping at the bit to get one of his missives published.  As usual, I claim no responsibility for what follows.]

Hello y'all, Cranky Bear here with a glass of smooth Portugese table wine and a plate of pasta puttanesca to warm my belly on a cold February night.  Tomorrow is our nation's most popular unofficial holiday, the Super Bowl.  It is a holiday that represents much that is rotten and awful in American society, and I am here to deliver a sermon on this theme.

We live in a society debilitated by consumerism, marred by violence, stupefied by mass media, made flabby by gluttony, and politically stunted by mindless, jingoistic nationalism.  The Super Bowl puts all of these things in a big, bombastic package.  It all seems to have very little to do with its ostensible purpose, which is to decide the champion of the National Football League.  There are masses of people who don't give a flying fuck about who's actually playing, and are waiting to see what commercials are airing.  (Yes, we are so consumerist in our outlook that advertisements have become entertainment.)  Others are just amped for a Sunday of eating seven layer bean dips and bacon-wrapped little smokies washed down with large quantities of beer.

Super Sunday itself only comes after two full weeks of unremitting hype.  "Media week," the extra week off between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, is an inescapable torrent of inane story lines, stupid questions, and idiotic speculation.  Even more so that presidential elections, the run-up to the Super Bowl exposes the complete utter fucking vapidity of national press.  It is such a ridiculous spectacle that there is even media coverage of media week itself as its own phenomenon.  It's America's uselessly shallow post-modernism at its most empty and soul-sucking.

As true sports fans know, the Super Bowl has long been a let-down when it comes to on-field excitement, especially after two weeks of media saturation.  Growing up, it seemed that every year brought a new blow-out.  Yes, there have been exceptions, like the 1991 Giants-Bills game that ended with Scott Norwood's wide right field goal try, or the Giants-Patriots in 2008 tilt that turned on David Tyree's famous "helmet catch."  However, more typical is the Stan Humphries-led Chargers getting vivisected by Steve Young's 49ers 49-26 in 1995.  Many of the games that look close on paper were actually snoozers.  Other sports have a lot more excitement in their championships.  Nothing in the Super Bowl has ever come close to matching Magic Johnson's last second mini-skyhook at the old Boston Garden in game four of the 1987 NBA finals or Kirk Gibson's home run to win game one of the 1988 World Series.  I doubt anything ever will.  In both of those games I felt giddily stunned, as if the world had fallen off of its axis.  Nothing in the Super Bowl, not even the Tyree catch, has made me feel.

The Super Bowl is hardly worthy of a sport that is America's most popular, but that popularity increasingly perplexes me.  The NFL is a carnival of technocratic violence, of men with impossibly large bodies smashing into each other again and again and again.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the physical and mental toll of the game destroys the lives of players and their families.  The game has become so specialized and strategized that individual excellence is increasingly hard to find, apart from a small number of players who are endlessly touted in the mass media.  And to a greater extent than other professional sports, NFL players like to spout off about how God enabled them to win the big game.  There is perhaps no more prominent platform for the spewing of the narcissistic "by this sign you shall conquer" brand of idiot American religiosity.

Worst of all is the Super Bowl's (and NFL's) exploitation of jingoistic nationalism.  The NFL was just as complicit in turning Pat Tillman from a doubting soldier killed by friendly fire into a larger than life he-man used to gin up support for our misbegotten adventure in Afghanistan.  Once the real circumstances of his death emerged, the league was more than happy to play up its associations with the military while letting Tillman's name drop from the conversation.  Each year seems to bring plenty of flag-waving and tributes to the military, complete with jet flyovers and bombastic renditions of the national anthem.  At home the people stuffing their fat fucking faces full of buffalo wings can feel like they've taken a moment to "think about the troops" without doing a goddamned thing to contemplate the misery and death that our nation's wars have caused and still do.

It's only appropriate, I guess, that this year's display of empty-headed national pride will be taking place in the New Orleans Superdome, site of one of this country's greatest shames, the treatment of victims of Hurricane Katrina.  I wonder if anyone will bother to think much about that, beyond some maudlin sentiments to wash down the guacamole and bean dip.  How soon we forget such things, and fuck the Super Bowl for perpetuating our nation's moronic, soulless way of being.

Cranky Bear Tells Red State Moochers to Shut Up

[Editor's note:  From time to time, when I am tired and need a break, I post one of the many missives I receive on an almost daily basis from my friend Cranky Bear.  I have been putting them aside recently, and after many entreaties from him, I've decided to give Cranky the reins for a day.]

Hello folks, Cranky Bear here with a coffee and a cannoli made in one of the Garden State's many fine bakeries.  It's only appropriate to take pride in my urban New Jersey home, since I write to you today of the obnoxious entitlement and mooching exhibited by rustic Red Staters.  They take much more than they give to the federal government, and then turn around and attack the people and regions who pay their bills.  For a pretty egregious example thereof, check out today's New York Times, where several Wyoming residents complain that president Obama won reelection by bribing the votes of racial minorities and white youth with government dollars.  Evidently, according to these self-styled hardy individuals cut from the free soil of the wild West, the moochers and the takers are leading the country to ruin.

To which I call "bullshit!" with my loudest Jersey snarl, the one I reserve for the dopes who carry on loud cell phone conversations in the designated quiet train cars on New Jersey Transit.  Wyoming gets more grant money per capita THAN ANY OTHER STATE IN THE COUNTRY!  Here in New Jersey, we only get back about sixty cents for every dollar we contribute to the federal government, the lowest percentage in the entire country.  Wyoming gets back $1.11, a net gain, yet they're the ones bitching about "takers."  Notice too that some of the leading net receivers of federal money are such "government tyranny" hating states like Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, and Kentucky.  And yet we have to hear secessionist fucktards in these states bitch and moan night and day about the supposedly bad deal they get under the current system.

Please please please just shut the fuck up before you embarrass yourselves any further.  Either do that or give New Jersey its money back before opening your grits holes.  You might have heard that we had a pretty bad storm here in these parts, and need some money to help repair things.  Representatives from your states have taken enough time to get their mouths off of the federal government's teat to threaten to hold funding up unless they get some concessions.  Fuck that.  When we ask for the money, it's only giving back what we already gave you fuckers.

Yet we're not the ones bitching.  Why?  Because we believe that we are members of a larger society, which you don't buy into.  You think that it's everyone for themselves, that any government redistribution of wealth is "socialism."  Fine, then.  Put your (meager) money where your big fat mouth is, and enjoy life without all those government subsidies.  Or maybe you can just stop your stupid bitching for a change.

A Labor Day Call to Progressives (A Guest Post By Cranky Bear)

[Editor's Note: Devotees of my old blog may remember Cranky Bear, a rather impolitic friend of mine who is not shy about speaking his mind. I thought that my blog change would keep ruffians like him out, but since I am taking this Labor Day off to relax before a hectic week, I'll late Cranky have the spotlight.]

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Cranky Bear here, with a rocks glass of straight sweet brown bourbon at my side, the tangy flavors of aged Kentucky gold on my tongue and ready to shake you namby-pamby liberals up for a change. Labor Day is a special holiday in the Cranky Compound when I can celebrate a past when the Left improved the lives of the American working and middle classes rather than engaging in tedious narcissism. I do enjoy me some "slow food," especially kielbasa from the traditional Polish butcher down the road, but shopping at farmers markets and driving a Prius is not doing diddly squat to avert our slide into a fearsome Gilded Age of high unemployment and the enrichment of the robber baron class. It's just one more goddamned consumer choice that reinforces our consumerist mindset, the thing that's rotting civic duty and social justice.

Take a long hard look at the following clip, wouldja? Lord knows Ted Kennedy wasn't perfect, but unlike most supposed liberals these days, the man actually FOUGHT, and fought for the right things.



Nowadays the consensus is that his primary run in 1980 was divisive and harmed the Democratic Party. I heartily disagree. He was trying to revive the real Democratic Party, which Carter had betrayed by selling out labor, pushing deregulation, and prioritizing inflation over unemployment. The horrific spike in interest rates by the Fed under his presidency slayed inflation (but too late for Carter's 1980 campaign), but did untold economic damage to people on the margins of poverty. (It also helped get Ronald Reagan elected president and solved the inflation problem for him with the economy recovering in time for the 1984 elections, one of the lesser known of the most significant economic policy decisions in this country's history.) Ever since 1980, the voices of those who shared Kennedy's passionate dream have faded, with perhaps only Bernie Sanders left in Congress to continue it.

Thirty years later we have another Democrat in the Carter mode in the White House who is similarly straying from the urgent need to provide employment and ease the economic pain of those not lucky enough to sit at the top. Like Carter and Clinton before him, president Obama likes to present himself as above politics, and to appeal to the middle by running down his own base. Any time the president raises the issue of social inequality, the Right's propaganda organs scream "class warfare" like the braying asses that they are. Usually this leads the president to retreat rather than to double down. After all, there IS a class war going on these days, but only one side is bothering to fight it.

Let me be especially frank here. The labor movement is the backbone of the Democratic Party, and has been so since at least the New Deal. On election day nobody gets the voters to the polls like the unions, and nobody is more willing to take to the streets when necessary. Remember what happened in Wisconsin last year? Walker went after unions because he knows that they are the one group on the Left with real money, and money in our current political system is power, the only power that matters. Remember the response? These are people who fucking FIGHT. Labor's demise at the hands of globalization, job migration to the South (a phenomenon made possible by federal funding of highways), and what amounts to the legalization of union busting has gone hand in hand with the erosion of the Democratic Party's grassroots support. The nouveau Democrats at the party's levers of power since the 1970s have seen it fit to be centrist by doing the bidding of what passes for capitalism's conventional wisdom. To wit: NAFTA under Clinton, deregulation under Carter, and a health plan that is a boon to private insurance companies under Obama (a plan that is Romney's write large). Guess what assholes, you helped kill off your most vital constituency. And let me not let labor's leaders off of the hook, either. You fuckers got fat, corrupt, complacent, and removed from the concerns of the rank and file.

A goddamned economic and political hurricane is currently ravaging the working and middle classes, we are truly in the fight of our lives. Right now, the same people who scream "class warfare" then turn around and cry their eyes out about the 50% of Americans who are too poor to be able to pay federal income taxes, as if they, not the billionaires who pay a lower percentage than their secretaries, are the real cheats. And these fuckers control the public discourse. Liberals, progressives, whatever the hell you want to call yourselves, what is your fucking problem? Get off your asses! Are you irritated at the president's tendency to fold under Republican pressure? Well fight their narrative, and put some of your own pressure on him, for fuck's sake! Are you scared or something to tell people that corporate America is rogering them with the red hot poker of laissez-faire capitalism? Or are you so wrapped up in your low-impact lifestyle and lip service to the right causes that you've forgotten that politics is a street fight, not a parlor game?

People are suffering, they are frustrated and looking for answers. Democrats, now's the time to ask yourself an important question: what do you believe in, anyway? As far as I can tell, the Democratic Party has completely failed to answer that question. They won't figure a solitary thing out until those of us at the grassroots level give a swift hard kick to the party's big old DLC butt.

Let me provide one answer, just so you know what I mean. I believe that it's a disgusting travesty that people in Newark and Camden are being murdered because the authoritarian fat fuck who's the governor of New Jersey would rather grandstand for the national GOP than provide funds for local governments to provide enough police officers to keep their streets safe. People are fucking dying so that millionaires in New Jersey don't have to pay a slightly higher income tax rate. Maybe it's time to be frank about the costs of "austerity" and to end the fiction that it is any way a "shared sacrifice." Since the victims are poor and black, nobody outside of these communities seems to give a fuck. If the supposed progressives out there aren't moved by these travesties to get pissed off and push for some real change, I fear that Ted Kennedy's dream may finally be dead.