Political Psychic

Daily Rants about Politics

One of my favorites from Thom Hartman. His recital of John Gray’s Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican:

“A Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican”

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn’t think he should loose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FDIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his life-time.

Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electric until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republican’s would still be sitting in the dark)

He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.

He turns on a radio talk show, the host’s keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn’t tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day) Joe agrees, “We don’t need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I’m a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have”.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/thom-hartmann-day-life-joe-middle-class-re

We’ve all heard this before:  “Democrats and Republicans want the same things”

Democrats want equality for everyone.  That’s what our country is all about.

That’s not socialism.  It’s nothing more than being humanitarian.

Dems want fairness – not handouts.  Dems want those who work hard to be rewarded – not abused and kicked to the curb by taking away benefits, job protections and denial of health care benefits.

It’s not rocket science.  It’s common sense.

Here are some hard facts:

Republicans don’t want everyone to have:

• regulations, rules, laws that protect consumers
• health care for all
• advanced education for all
• fair, living wages with union protections and benefits for all
• clean air and water for all
• safe products for all
• human rights for all
• free speech for all
• fire and police protection for all
• everything else required to live a clean, healthy life for all
• equal rights for all
• gay rights for all
• proportionally fair taxes – the more you make, the more you pay

The only thing they want everyone to have access to is guns and ammunition. The very same things that take away life instead of preserving it.  Guns DO kill people – and so do the knuckle dragging idiots carrying them.

They love to play the “blame the victim” game, by insisting that the victims wouldn’t have gotten killed or hurt if they had used a gun, too.

They believe in letting people who can’t work die off so those of us who can work can take their jobs.

They don’t believe in competition between workers – They believe in creating competition between fellow workers to drive down wages and benefits.  This is where our country is at RIGHT NOW.

It’s a “kill or be killed” mentality.

And I think this country has had more than enough of it in the past decade.

So, let me get this straight. It’s not the fact that there are no jobs out there. It’s that I’m somehow not motivated enough because I’m being coddled and spoiled with my incredibly generous unemployment benefits package. Unemployment benefits only pay about 20-50% of what you were making in your last job – which is barely enough to cover rent or mortgage payments, alone. And of course, there’s the cost of gas and food. I am somehow living high on the hog? Even when I’m collecting unemployment benefits??? So they’re saying I’m a “welfare queen” now??

Wow.

I used to make a couple of grand per paycheck. Now it’s 200 a week. Oooooh, ya got me there….I’m sooo livin’ it up on my big fat weekly check!!

I can always…ALWAYS…count on Republicans to come up with the biggest doozies to offend the thinking-class in this country.

Another favorite past talking point was “if you help the homeless and the poor, you’re helping to keep pan handlers, drug dealers and scam artists in business – they’ll never learn how to make a living on their own”. As if being homeless and poor wasn’t bad enough – you have to worry about being labeled a “scam artist” when you ask for help.

And, I especially love hearing them say “I don’t want my tax dollars going toward some bum who is gonna buy drugs with my money”.

So they’re totally fine with paying for wars based on lies and massive fraud and abuse by military contractors.  But helping the poor?  That just makes their blood boil with rage.

I really hate saying this, but…Republicans have ice water running in their veins. That’s all there is to it.  How can these people be so g-damned mean and evil when they are asked to help others? And then they are so blissfully happy when they are told about people across the globe dying from our bombs and military strikes?  Especially when it was all based on lies?  Why on earth is that sooo okay with them??

They talk about post-9/11 moments as if they were golden and beautiful. The only thing honestly beautiful that I can remember about it, which only lasted a month or so, was how everyone was united as a nation and as a global entity. Color and gender, nationality and language, race, stature, class, etc – none of that mattered. Everyone had their flags flying.

However, during that time – and ever since then – it’s been nothing but a paranoid freaky fear festival among Republicans — and we have all suffered ever since. It’s all about keeping people divided – and making sure no one trusts “the other” among us.

Republicans don’t love “unity” when it comes down to who we are as a nation or global force — they only love it when people are united against “the other”. When people are pitted against eachother, treated as if they must view eachother with suspicion and fear, it brings out the worst in all of us.

Republicans don’t want us united – they want us divided. Their motto really is “divide and conquer” – not “united we fall”.

So, going back to my original point…

Instead of helping eachother out, it’s all about fearing the poor, the foreigner, the unfamiliar cultures and lifestyles.

Being unemployed sucks. But I guess that’s not what they want to believe or try to understand. They want to view 10-20% of the country as “the other” – and still call themselves “compassionate conservatives” at the same time.

Oh, and one more thing…

If you’re wondering about why conservatives are all for giving tons of money to foreign countries. They’re not doing it out of love or compassion. They are doing for the exact same reasons a loan shark would do it: to kick you down when you can’t pay it back. Republicans and crisis are like insurance agents turned ambulance chasers. They want you to call them the hero – but you realize they are the bad guy when they demand 30% interest on that 90-day million dollar loan. Read “Confessions of an Econonmic Hitman” if you don’t believe this.  If you’d like to read excerpts of the book, read it here.  Here’s a Wikipedia summary on it.

Oh, and one more thing.  The most frightening thing to a Republican is an educated public.  This is why they’re rather have a bunch of uneducated goons filled with hate fighting their battles, instead of a civilized and educated public that will more than likely vote for a Democrat instead of a Republican.  If you haven’t heard yet, Kansas City just voted to shut down half their schools due to budget issues.  Instead of trying to cut corners on waste, they shut the schools down instead.  That should help them create more impoverished, uneducated goons to fight their battles.

Ugh…

I still love Obama…but I feel like he’s like one of those parents that lets their kid(s) terrorize others, running through the aisles at Wal Mart and Target, pulling merchandise off the shelves, etc, while the parent pretends not to know what’s going on – and is actually too frightened to punish these monsters for their bad behavior. Someone who is literally so afraid of being called a poor leader, that they in turn become exactly what they’re afraid of.  The bad behavior continues, while the frightened parent continues to offer candies and bribes to make the little monster shut the hell up.

The Republicans scream and yell the most dishonest, offensive, and outrageous statements, repeating them ad nauseum, even going as far as calling the mainstream media “liberal” whenever it tries to correct them on their lies. (The media is in fact right wing and extremely corporate-owned, which is why their lies constantly go unchallenged). Obama and the Democrats seem to simply ignore these screaming imbeciles as if they were nothing more than white noise, while the rest of us in the real world have to put up with the result of their lies. The results usually turn up in casual conversation with neighbors and friends repeating the lies as if it were doctrine.

Obama needs to take the Republicans in the back room and let the beatings begin.  There is absolutely NO excuse for allowing such unforgivable behavior from the right wing to continue.

On a side note…

The Dems need to cull the herd in their own party and start demanding real progressive action.

The Blue Dogs keep putting up with the lies from the right… and then they won’t take action until the damage has been done and corrective actions become laughably ineffective.

I don’t mean to be so rough on my beloved Dems.

Afterall, the Dems don’t have the power of a mainstream media to support their statements. The Republicans scrubbed all of the FCC regulations which once required news media organizations to actually tell the truth. Clinton helped the Republicans when he allowed giant media conglomerates to take over smaller media outlets – thus creating the stronghold that Fox News has today. We went from having tons and tons of independent media news outlets – like newspapers, radio stations, etc that were privately owned – to media outlets that are all owned by less than a handful of different organizations — ABC, NBC, Fox, etc. In the end, you end up with a vacuum where facts go to die – and info-tainment is the norm.

But back to my point… The Dems need to grow a set and help Obama find a spine…because you certainly can’t expect anything good to come from a screaming eight year old monster child Republican.

The moment we let the Republicans control the arguments, we let them place doubts in our heads about who we are as a party.

We let them doubt ourselves on abortion, single parenthood, genderhood, homosexuality, infidility, spending, taxes, you name it, they control the argument.

Hell, I’m surprised we haven’t started scratching our heads on evolution and global warming.

The media might be on the Republicans’ side of the argument – but that doesn’t make them right about ANYTHING.

Yelling louder doesn’t make you correct.  You can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts.

Clinton really dropped the ball when he kept denying his affair with Monica Lewinsky.  If he had only said “so?” or “it’s private, my family and I are dealing with this”.  In other words, if we had simply separated the job from the private life, we would’ve all been better off.

It’s not hard for them to control the argument, even when they are wrong.  They own and control 90% of all domestic media – print, radio, television, etc.  If you want to find out anything about what’s going on, factually, you have to go to the liberals for information

If you want to be pounded to a numb, mindless, non-thinking neocon, well you simply turn on any “news” channel in any part of this country, and you’ll hear what THEY want you to hear.

Politically, they are masters.

But they are not academics or experts in any field, except deception.

It sounds crazy to say it, but it’s true.

If you don’t fight off the nonsense, you end up finally backing down and forcing yourself to somehow agree with them.

I have been fighting this for the past decade – and I keep wondering when everyone else will, too.

The rightwing conveniently creates arguments that favor their point of view.  In their mind, if they didn’t see it happen, it never existed.  With that kind of thinking, you end up with flat-earthers who refuse to believe anytyhing other than what the simpleton idiot on TV said, then it must not be true of an “expert” challenged it.

It’s really easy to dumb someone down if you yell at them long enough.

They’ve proven this point over and over again.

What we need is to finally wake up and take back our dignity.

Refuse to be bullied – and start sticking up for ourselves.

If you don’t stick up for what’s right (which in this case, is the left!), then you won’t have anyone left to stick up for you.

Right-wingers are bullies – and we need to stand up to them.

When you listen to a rightwing talk show, it becomes immediately evident that they don’t care about what’s right and wrong – but about right and left.  And to them, everything left is wrong.  I laugh when I see the tagline on Fox’s “Fair and Balanced”.

Sometimes you can make bullies go away by ignoring them.  But the worst ones don’t.  These aren’t kids we’re dealing with.  These are adults who’ve learned how to never back down – how to manipulate every story to make sure they get everything they want (even if it’s not what they deserve).  To them, it’s all about winning, no matter how.  I’ve learned in life that the only way you can make a bully go away is by really standing up to them.

And we’ve forgotten how to do that.  We try so hard to be nice and accommodating.  But what we need to do is to stick up for ourselves by seeing through their phoney fake outrage.  Their false arguments.  Their offensive blame the victim mentality.  These guys use every argument in the book to get out of taking responsibility – and they KNOW it.  They’re masters at it.  And we’ve got fight them – We’ve got to call them out on it and refuse to remain silent.

We need to stop backing down and start standing up to them.

For starters, we need daily reminders of what we stand for.  We are liberals.  We care about making sure everyone and everything on this “boat” called a planet is treated with respect and fairness.  In a nutshell: Liberals want a “we” society.

Rightwingers want a “me” society – a survival game of the fittest, where the strongest celebrate their conquests and the weakest are thrown to the wolves.
Our culture celebrates and rewards the wealthiest, unruliest, and most manipulative.  And for the weakest, we’ve been taught to either blame the victim or ignore those we don’t want deal with – the sick, the poor, and the wronged.

In our culture, we know that it’s wrong, but we’ve learned that nothing bad happens if you simply “go with the flow” and let bad things happen to those who may not deserve it.  Lefties have been trained to simply accept bad things that happen to good people.

We’ve become numb.

This has been going on now for the last 30-40 years.  It started when we started accepting the denegrating the Hippy of the 60′s and 70′s.  Someone would say “you dirty hippy” or “go get a job” and we’d feel bad to be associated with someone like that.  When I was a kid, hippies were an inspiration to me.  They truly cared about everything and everyone.  And when someone spoke badly of them, I sided with the hipppie.  It made my stomach turn to see such beautiful people treated so badly.

In my heart, hippies were misunderstood, much the same way Native Americans were – who were wrongly labeled as savages and such.  The movies “Avatar” and “Dances with Wolves” have done a beautiful job at reminding people of who they were, and still are today.  There needs to be a movie about the Hippy.  At least one that doesn’t paint them as jobless drug addicts with conspiracy theories.

To me, hippies were extremely educated, colorful, non-violent, passionate people – who were often vegetarians – who cared about every aspect of society.  From the fallen trees to the slaughtered and forgotten.  And they weren’t afraid to get out into the streets and protest.  They weren’t afraid of anything.  They stood up to police dressed in riot gear, shielded on horseback, and proud of being a-hole jackboot thugs.  Hippies had heart and passion.  And they certainly weren’t the same kind of lefties we’ve got today, trying to make peace with the cons on the right who do nothing but spread fear and false statements.

Today’s Tea Party is the only group of people who seem to get any kind of police protection – and they’re out there being illiterate, angry racists who refuse to have rationale conversations with you.  Half of them are getting VA care or are on Medicare, screaming about the need to stop government-run healthcare.  The irony of their arguments could fill a book.  And, yes, they get police protection for their KKK-lite rallies.  No riot gear protection from these folks – save that for the peaceniks and do-gooders at the lefty silent marches and rallies.

On a side note – I recently heard a story about someone who was outside of the Tea Party Nation event in Tenessee, where Sarah Palin was speaking.  A man was standing there with a sign about Obama being a “muslin”.  He tried to explan to the misinformed man that Obama was not Muslim – and that if somehow he were, we should try to have a more open mind about othere cultures.  Well, guess what happened next?  A police officer came right over to him and told him that he needed to “leave these people alone” – that they have a right to speak out in public.  The officer pulled the guy aside and said, took all of his information, that he was going to let him go “with a warning”.  A warning….for the guy who was trying to peacefully point out an error in fact.

How can we stand up for ourselves when we can’t even get the law on our side?

How do you stand up and demand justice when our culture and laws now favor the very people who hate government the most??

The answer, to me, is in the misunderstood Hippy.  They stood up for human rights, equality, and justice, the environment and labor, even when they had nothing left to lose.  There were so many who were willing to stand up for what was right.  Now, we simply accept being made fun of.

Imagine what we could’ve prevented if we had refused to accept the words “get over it, you lost” when they stole an election?

Imagine what could still been done if we had refuse to back down when we hear another arugment from a rightwinger about why should give them another chance.

It’s to stand up to the bullies.

It’s time.