Perhaps that's the point

If the composition of government will always be regarded by Broderist bipartisanship fetishists as an even 50-50 split, why have elections?

Dick Cheney Appreciation Night

You've got to hand it to the guy. By defiantly defending his participation in crimes against humanity, he dares mealy-mouth reformists, Serious thinkers and play-nicers to continue plowing the ship of empire right through the iceberg which is now plainly visible for all to see. Previous American war criminals at least kept their activity out of the press long enough for establishment historians to edit it out of the textbooks. But this guy is putting it right out there, making the apologist scribes look even more venal in defending him from The Hague than any genuine anti-imperialist ever could.

Crass warfare

BroadSnark:

Here’s a hypothetical situation.

You work in a town with one factory. You need your job. Moving to another town, starting your own business, or getting some other means of survival is not an option at the moment.

One of your coworkers (let’s call him Bob) is a racist, sexist, homophobic SOB. You are a black lesbian (let’s call you Michelle) who, for obvious reasons, does not get along with Bob.

You and Bob have found yourself in a situation. Your employer (let’s call him Dick) is planning on cutting your salaries in half and doubling your work load. Dick is counting on the animosity between you and Bob preventing any collaboration to thwart his plan. Dick has his eye on a lovely yacht that he will be buying with your recouped wages.

What do you do here? Take the cut in pay? Move into your car? Live on Ramen noodles? Or do you find a way to work with Bob to fight Dick?

ladypoverty:

The working class has one option to further its interests, and it is not in finding common cause with the ownership caste of the country, but in reconciling the differences within itself and striking at the economic heart of its enemy -- in the workplace and within communities -- where all class power is fundamentally derived.

There's a reason why a great many successful liberation movements--in the USA prior to 1970 and around the world to the present day--has held that success in winning equality for an oppressed group won't come without a component dedicated to fighting against imperialism and in favor of broad economic justice. This is important to remember as the current exploding fad in American public history of remembering the struggles of women and ethnic minorities--we are in Black History Month, after all--is trying to extricate these elements and retroactively jam these movements into accepting the contemporary neoliberal utopia of a post-racial, post-gender free market Pax Americana.

The reason is this: As long as people understand innately--as they will-- that they are getting unjustly worked over by the economic system they are in, they will be looking for someone to blame. Without organizing themselves as a class, that blame will usually fall on someone deemed to be less powerful on more vulnerable. Women, blacks, immigrants, whatever looks like a division to be exploited; it will be a whack-a-mole cycle of blame until the real culprit can be identified.

Unfortunately, such an organization may require temporary tactical alliances with people who have not yet combed through magazine advertisements unlocking the racial symbolism. But if the liberation movements of the past could understand this, why are our current batch of liberals so squeamish?

Did not do the research

Shorter Mahablog:

• Anarchists and right-libertarians both hate government, therefore they are exactly alike. Also, the USA and USSR were on the same side in World War II, ergo FDR was a Stalinist.

Maybe this will help.

All-American zero

Despite laying off hundreds of workers in recent years, Focus on the Family--much ignored around these parts lately--is laying out as much as $4 million on a Super Bowl ad featuring golden boy Tim Tebow and his mother with what will presumably be an anti-abortion message. Being the nice guy that I am, I think even fundamentalist Christians should have jobs. But there'll be pie in the sky when they die, at least. CBS has accepted the ad, reversing it's prior policy, and the policy of all networks regarding Super Bowl commercials, of not airing what it deems political "advocacy" ads, likely as a result of discovering that big game ad revenue is not recession-proof.

It's hard to imagine exactly what the backers hope the ad accomplishes; even if the Tebow story is believable, there's the jaw-droppingly-obvious-to-non-insane-people conclusion that, hooray, the woman had a choice about what she wanted to do. And that's before they realize the grotesque logical result of the story, which is apparently that anti-choice nuts think all women ought to endanger their lives to bring forth the holy fetus, where good Christian conservatives will proceed with ignoring its well-being until it reaches employable age.

There's little more to be written about Tebow which hasn't already been said about the most media-fellated jock in the history of sports. Alas, the Great White Hope of a nation doesn't seem to have the kind of skills needed to continue his residency on your television set as a professional. His power-running quarterback shtick is just what professional football teams were looking for...in the 1920s. Perhaps that's why he is taking this unusual career step. While there are certainly no shortages of pious professional athletes, very few wade into the water publicly shilling for contentious social issues. Pro sports are big business, of course, and ownership doesn't want to alienate the customers, meaning athletes of any kind of political sympathy typically stick to promoting bread-and-butter non-controversial charities approved by the leagues. So Tim Tebow looks at his future life carrying clipboards and decides now's the time to make his mark while the last live snap he took is still a recent memory. Or maybe he's that delightful breed of arrogant virtuousness who believes he can be the heroic proselytizer where his forbears have failed. Watching him flounder will be delightful.