Blue State View

2006-07-31T10:01:00.000-07:00

Jerry Tenuto: “Out Of The Blue”
KING GEORGE
and
The MORAL BOUNDARY

(This column appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com the week of July 25, 2006.)

“This bill (H.R. 810) would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of funding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. So I vetoed it.”
-- George W. Bush, King of the United States of America, 19 July 2006

Methinks the time has come to pass that we should veto King George XLIII.

Once again, in a rerun of last year’s archive video op, Georgie held his “White House Stem Cell Panderfest” in a roomful of evangelicals and their “Snowflake Kids” – some of the 128 infants, toddlers and buns-in-ovens who were provided to barren or otherwise child-challenged couples by the zygotes’ originators.

I’ve long held a theory about most barren couples -- natural selection made them unable to procreate for a reason. (Please, before anyone goes ballistic, realize that I used the word “most,” not all.) Without going into great detail, let’s just say be observant and consider the obvious dynamics within such a family, like the parental units’ inability to comprehend “kidthink,” a complete absence of imaginary thought processes throughout, smothering overprotectiveness, or how the youngster(s) dress, behave, interact with other children, and so on.

First, the vast majority of Americans, in the neighborhood of 70% or more of us, want research to go ahead with fresh, viable stem cells rather than “only on embryonic stem cell lines derived from embryos that have already been destroyed,” as King George will allow. Once again, the Theocratic Monarchy trumps our Democratic process, tossing aside the will of the majority in favor of some 20%, the most hardcore of Christian religious fanatics.

The King calls his policy of it’s okay for stem cells created from samples taken from umbilical cords and skin to be used in research, but not unwanted frozen Petri dish embryonic zygotes wasting away in sperm banks, as “balanced.”

Apparently, Georgie never played on a see-saw because, as any four-year-old knows, one side up and the other down is “lopsided,” not at all balanced.

This least nebulous man among men decided back in 2001 that he knows more about the human embryonic journey than virtually all of the Earth’s doctors and research scientists. Pretty good for a schlemiel whose family money bought his way through a C college grade point average… along with everything else in life.

Read my lips, King George: Those embryonic stem cell zygotes are not people.

“Human beings are not a raw material to be exploited,” saith the King.

In this year’s replay of the staged “Panderfest” event Sanctimonious George, along with his most pious Seraphim pair from the Senate Rick Santorum (R-Penn) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan), shamelessly exploited the children one more time. Georgie used them yet again as the ammunition to shoot down H.R. 810, which would have allowed funding for research with existing unused frozen zygotes.

Spake His Excellency, “Each of these children was adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with the chance to grow – to grow up in a loving family.”

Horsefeathers!

Conjecture and speculation.

Smoke and mirrors to muddy the true issues.

How in the hell does George W. Bush know what goes on within the core of any of these families, or what life in their homes might entail?

Just for starters, in some women it takes four or more implants before they go full term. The mothers-to-be are often high-risk to begin with, and have numerous miscarriages. The “science” itself is by no means precise.

Statistics indicate that a significant percentage of children such as these “Snowflake” kids will be abused either verbally, mentally, physically or sexually – or any combination thereof. The odds against them increase in direct correlation to the intensity level of the fervor of the parents’ religious zeal and suppression of social vices.

Has anyone considered the long-term affects of this social engineering project under the guise of Christian soul-making? It’s painfully obvious King George has not; nor have the 256 sets of “parental units” responsible for this concoction of kids.

So, this very process is experimentation, and may be considered destruction of embryos.

What’s going to happen in 20 years when one of these children needs a kidney transplant, but no one in the family is a suitable donor? Or, when there’s an accident and identification is hampered because the DNA can’t be matched?

What about grandparents who will never see or get to know their “grandchild?”

The human psyche cannot be fooled, even by filling up the mind and attempting to confuse it with a lifetime of convoluted misinterpretations of the Old Testament and the life of Christ. The child is going to know that something is missing from his or her life.

How about when the child turns 16 and tells the “parent” that he’s gay, or she thinks praying to Jesus is just a bunch of “hooey?”

Yep. King George XLIII paints a rosy picture while talkin’ outta his ass, meanwhile all these evangelical white folks think it’s gonna be all sweetness and heather from here on out, because they got a Christian Petri dish baby.

We’ve explored this territory before, but it requires another reconnoiter. There are approximately 400,000 unused frozen zygotes around the U.S. in sperm banks. These are the property of the couples that placed them there. The zygotes are unused because these people have all the children they want.

These zygotes belong neither to the Government, nor to the facilities wherein they’re kept.

However, King George XLIII has been attempting to dictate where and how these Petri dish minutiae should be put to use.

Of those 400,000, a mere 128 children have been “cultivated,” zygotes donated by originating parents to like-minded couples incapable of conceiving on their own, or simply wishing to bring more unwitting souls into the family of Jesus Christ. Whatever their personal agenda, it’s kind of scary.

When one considers all the children languishing in orphanages or worse, this method of “adoption” is selfish as well as self-righteous. Oh, did I remember to mention self-indulgent?

From what I’ve seen at these White House gatherings, the vast majority of “parental units” for what King George refers to as “blessed children” are as white as a slice of Wonder bread with its crust removed. Since it takes people of a unique mindset to allow their seed to be gestated and nurtured by others, and it likewise requires folks of an equally singular worldview to bear and raise someone else’s natural offspring, the selection process has to be grueling.

Somewhat akin to the process used in Germany 70 years ago to insure every SS descendant was a perfect Aryan.

To date, of King George’s master plan approximately 399,872 people with unused frozen zygotes have chosen not to allow other couples to have their children. My guess it’s for two reasons right off the top: 1) They don’t want fanatics raising their seed; and, 2) They aren’t insane.

These people most likely considered the ramifications noted above, plus others I may have missed, of this Christian-based experiment in social engineering.

In simple percentages, 99.9997% of the people who have unused zygotes frozen in sperm banks around the U.S. do not wish to have other couples bearing and raising their “kids.”

Thus, only two alternatives are left of what to do with those zygotes: Destroy them eventually, or donate them for research.

Under King George’s policy they would ultimately be destroyed, unless researchers received a humongous monetary gift from some private donor(s).

But, George and his Religious Rightist pals would rather destroy than learn, for it is far more important to eradicate than to put something to positive use. As he said, “I believe that with the right techniques and the right policies we can achieve scientific progress while living up to our ethical responsibilities.

“We must continue to explore these hopeful alternatives and advance the cause of scientific research while staying true to the ideals of a decent and humane society.”

Now, to exactly which “ethical responsibilities” do you think King George is alluding? Possibly it’s the ethical responsibility to lower our infant mortality rate, currently one of the highest among industrialized nations.

Then, there’s the ethical responsibility to make sure every man, woman and child – especially the children – have healthcare coverage. Could that be what George meant?

Sure, the ethical responsibility to use all the knowledge in man’s collective wisdom, along with every device and resource at our fingertips, to do everything possible to end as much pain and suffering for the living, breathing, thinking, viable human beings who are here, now, among us today.

It’s the “ethical responsibility” of the person posing as the president of the United States of America, even if he thinks he has the powers of a king, to stay out of the business of science!

Damn it, George W. Bush! You do not have the right to dictate the quality of life when it comes to medical matters! Neither does Laura!

And I’m 110% certain that if one were to read any version of The Bible, Old and New Testaments, from beginning to end, there would not be one word about stem cells or zygotes or Petri dish goo!

I also think that I’m on solid ground when speculating that if Jesus Christ really is the Son of God, He’d tell you to quit using Him as a scapegoat for your addlebrained plots to stifle medical progress and make your wealthy cronies richer.

Oh, yeah, “staying true to the ideals of a decent and humane society” does not include tearing people away from their homes and families and spiriting them away in the night. These ideals have nothing to do with keeping nameless people incommunicado without charges or representation for months or years.

No “decent and humane society” I ever heard of has ideals that include torture, rape, and murder of innocents.

Proclaimed the King, “If this bill were to become law, American taxpayers would for the first time in our history be compelled to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos. And I’m not going to allow it.”

To hell with the wishes of the people, eh, King George? When exactly was it that you ever gave a rat’s ass for the taxpayers’ money and where it went?

I can’t think of a time when you respected life, either.

As Texas governor George thought nothing of executing 154 inmates in just five years – more than any other Texas governor, averaging 31 per year. He even got several last ones in after the 2000 presidential election.

It didn’t matter it the inmate was mentally retarded, insane, left unable to functionally reason due to combat wounds – if they were on death row and their date came up it was “so long” as far as governor Georgie Bush was concerned.

Following King George’s logic, it’s perfectly acceptable to compel us taxpayers to waste countless billions upon billions of dollars to slaughter tens of thousands of people who are old enough to realize they’re being blown to bits.

Let us not forget all those folks he’s adding to the ranks of the disabled.

However, it is not permissible to invest even a modicum of that expenditure on research to help defeat the most debilitating and painful diseases known to mankind involving the use of certain stem cells.

You are personally responsible for (according to the latest estimates from http://www.unknownnews.net/):
211,000 Iraqi civilians killed, 380,000 seriously injured;
30,000 Iraqi troops dead, 90,000 seriously wounded;
2,560 American military deaths, 39,100 seriously wounded;
3,500 Afghan civilians killed, 6,300 seriously injured;
8,600 Afghan troops dead, 25,800 seriously wounded;
308 American military deaths, 924 seriously wounded.

I sure as hell didn’t ask for my tax money to be thrown away killing Mid-Easterners, while making Halliburton’s and the military-industrial complex’ coffers fatter.

The destruction of embryos for medical research trumps the murder and mutilation of full-sized humans every day. That’s the true Christian thing to do.

Ask any Rabbi.

In the meantime, King George and Lady Condoleezza Rice are sitting on their hands, making no effort whatsoever to attempt some sort of cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel.

Ach, du Lieber, how this Regime does love death.

As long as it doesn’t involve microscopic zygotes. Where’s the fun in that?

His Excellency had more to say: “I made it clear to the Congress that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line. I felt like crossing this line would be a mistake and once crossed we would find it almost impossible to turn back.”

No, Bush was not talking about his fabrications to rouse the Nation into invading Iraq without cause. We crossed the biggest moral line America had ever broached, and Fearless Leader hasn’t a clue as to how to get our brave troops back.

King George is still going on about how immoral it would be to use frozen, unused zygotes to help the most desperately ill among us.

“Crossing the line would needlessly encourage a conflict between science and ethics that can only do damage to both, and to our nation as a whole.”

A true leader would have followed with this statement: Look, I know absolutely nothing about science. Because I have no moral compass, I’ve created needless ethical conflicts these past five years. I possess a stubborn, pigheaded inability to be flexible.

Take all that, toss in my illegal invasions of two sovereign nations that were no threat to us, and I have done immeasurable damage to our nation as a whole on the world stage.

But we’re never going to get that; there’s not a snowball’s chance in Ciudad Juarez that George W. Bush would ever be honest for more than three seconds at a stretch.

Then again, a true leader never would have trashed our Country in the same manner as King George and his Fascist Gangsters.

As I write this, it’s July 20, 2006, the 37th Anniversary of the landing of the Eagle on the Moon. Neil Armstrong became the first human being (that we know of) to set foot on the surface of that satellite, along with Buzz Aldrin.

‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

If we’re ever going to be that great Nation again, if we’re ever going to make another giant leap, we must veto George W. Bush and every scrap of garbage he brought into our White House.

And we need to veto him now, before he gets the new and improved spy on Americans programs in place.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-03-31T10:12:00.000-08:00

Jerry Tenuto: OUT OF THE BLUE
WE’RE NOT ALL THAT STUPID

At a very tender age, when tests proved that young Forrest was possessed of limited intelligence, his Mother philosophically summed it up thusly:

“Stupid is as stupid does.”

As he traveled life’s serpentine, sometimes happy, often harsh, road, Forrest never lost sight of that simple yet valuable maxim.

And his life, as well as the lives of those with whom he came into contact along the journey, were far better off for the kind, non-assuming nature imbued within the man.

Now, I know the “Forrest Gump” analogy has been used repeatedly to describe George W. Bush and his Comedy of Terrors desecration of the United States, the Constitution, and our very way of life. From pundits to essayists, op-ed pieces to cartoonists, one doesn’t need six degrees to equate the 72 IQ hero of Winston Groom’s 1985 novel with our Fearless Leader.

The similarities don’t stop there: They hail from the South, although Forrest was actually born there; they like to run; they would be approximately the same age; both are fictional heroes.

The big problem is that Forrest Gump is far more of a humane, sensitive, compassionate creature than George W. Bush.

Would George have befriended the poor girl who lived in the shack outside the periphery of accepted society? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

Forrest got into university through his own achievement, then earned grades at least as good as, if not better than, those received by George.

Oh, don’t forget – where George was a cheerleader, Forrest actually played football.

During the VietNam unpleasantness, George hid under his bed by day, partied by night, even went missing from flight training. Forrest got shot in the buttocks and still managed to save Lt. Dan.

Forrest took a decrepit shrimp boat plus nothing more than a promise to his fallen comrade, Bubba, and along with the legless Lt. Dan turned them into a multi-million dollar business.

George took any number of companies, well-financed with moneys inherited from Granddaddy Prescott as a profiteer of dealings with Hitler and the Nazi Reichsbank, supported by daddy George H.W. Bush, and throughout the 1970s-1980s ran them from solvency directly into the ground.

In five short years as governor he oversaw the utter ruination of the great state of Texas.

Now, in the same short amount of time as ersatz president of the United States, would-be King George XLIII has done more damage to this Nation and the Planet than even H.G. Wells could have imagined in his worst nightmare scenario.

Where Forrest Gump was a kind soul, George W. Bush exhibits absolutely no compassion whatsoever – except when it behooves his purpose for the cameras.

And there are many times when he can’t even get that right.

Several months ago, when he made an early attempt at an “impromptu” question and answer session with one of his handpicked audiences, someone actually queried him on how many Iraqis had been killed since the (illegal) invasion. King George did his usual slovenly, non-presidential lean on the podium, complete with rolling of the eyes as if to come up with a good response, then casually stated, “Oh, about thirty thousand, I guess.”

I’m taking the liberty of paraphrasing here, but I distinctly remember the number, because worldwide media sources were estimating well above 100,000 by then. And I shall never forget his cavalier, “so what” attitude as he threw the figure out.

The man didn’t blink an eye while making this comment, on camera worldwide, that he had set in motion events which had cost the lives of some 30,000 innocent children, women and men – human beings. Worse, he knew it was a bogus response, at lease 70% short of reality.

They simply are not real to him. Nobody who dies on his watch is real to him, or deserving of his consideration.

The first three days of this week King George XLIII has made three appearances to convince America and the World that not only is the war in Iraq a just war, but the U.S. and its dwindling coalition will be victorious.

Everyone knows in war there are no victors.

That’s virtually all the guy talks about in public anymore – Iraq.

Except when he’s trying to convince Congress it’s a perfectly sound policy to allow “guest workers” in so his Big Biz cronies, already reaping huge profits from outsourcing cheap labor, can circumvent unions by hiring cheap labor right here at home.

That way the Bush Pioneers can make money coming and going while they enjoy their hefty tax breaks – and American workers are forced to settle for lower wages and longer hours.

Forget everything else that we need taken care of within our Nation’s borders.

And he expects the largest chunk of our tax dollars to go to military spending, tossing it away on Rummy’s Follies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I do not want the largest portion of my tax dollars to go to military spending; to be wasted on death and destruction in foreign nations; to disrupt the legitimate governments whom the RoveBush Fascists don’t like; to be usurped for regime change, which is against American law.

Okay, so we invaded Iraq to stop Saddam from launching any of his weapons of mass destruction.

Wait… it was because he had aided and abetted Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda pull off the 9/11 attacks.

No… we bomber Iraq back into the Stone Age because Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Oh, I’ve got it now… we hafta spread Democracy all over the Middle East, because Daddy, Dickie and Donnie are responsible for th’levashun of Saddam and all them other dictators.

Why did we invade Iraq?

It’s the oil, and Bush and his Gang are willing to spill as many pints of blood, American and whatever other nationalities, it takes to acquire the black gold.

The office of president, even if its holder had a 99% majority vote, is not free to make up laws off the cuff. George W. Bush, with the ever-present Herr Oberst Karl Rove and Dark Lord the Dick Cheney buzzing in his ear, has this wrong-headed delusion that with an edge of less than 1%, a gift from Diebold’s CEO and the Ohio Republican hierarchy rather than the will of American voters, he can do whatever he wants.

So on Monday Bush went to Cleveland and spoke at the City Club of Cleveland, where he expected a regime-friendly audience. While painting the usual rosy picture scenario, King George XLIII threw in another of his fanciful tales that can’t be proven. He related the story of Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq of some 200,000 that was an al Qaeda stronghold now cleared out and in the process of being rebuilt by Iraqi and U.S. troops.

Of course, as usual George left some vital information out of his Faery Taele. Such as it’s the only Iraqi city of any size that had been quieted down. He also failed to mention the part about the recurrence of insurgent activity to take the city back.

Funny how Right-wing, Neo-con talk show blowhard Laura Ingraham went to Iraq and the only success story she came back with was the very same tale of Tal Afar.

During Tuesday’s “surprise” press conference, King George again made a throwaway reference to “sure, some people are gonna die” in his war without end. Matter-of-fact, no sorrow or remorse in his voice, no hesitancy.

And promise us a war without end did he, verifying that some future president would have to clean up the mess and bring our brave troops home.

Yet he assures us of victory. All this doublethink makes my head hurt.

The surprise press conference has been traditionally used when a president wishes to make an announcement of unique or emergency stature. Bush calls them whenever Herr Oberst Karl Rove feels the Party needs a boost in the polls.

The polls Fearless Leader never pays any attention to, because he doesn’t give a rat’s ass what the people he has sworn to serve need and desire.

Have you ever noticed how every time George actually does answer a question regarding policy he prefaces it with “I think it should…” or “My feeling on that…”?

It’s always what he wants, never what might be good for the aggregate group.

And what Bush wants is never anything based on reality within the physical time-space continuum of the Earth’s planetary confines.

In short, what he says never materializes unless it results in death and destruction.

What does King George care if two-thirds of the country thinks he’s a complete screw-up?

Virtually every sane and sober adult with access to a free speech newspaper or newscast realizes that Donald Rumsfeld is, and always has been, wholly incompetent to be Secretary of Anything, especially Defense of the World’s most destructive War Machine. Still, upon repeated calls to dump him for someone who is… let’s say, qualified, Bush refuses, saying this 72-year-old fossil “is doing a fine job.”

Geez! Where have we heard that before?

To its credit, even CNN refused to air King George’s speech on Wednesday, adding the comment that it was “just more of the same” of what we’ve heard the past two days.

Of course, it doesn’t help when King George XLIII, Dark Lord the Dick Cheney, Rummy, and their minions, led by dullards such as RNC honcho Ken Mehlman and talk show host Laura Ingraham, blame the media for the horrendous mess in Iraq.

Hey, the media allowed the RoveBush Fascists to have their war, now they, too, are trying to correct mistakes.

There’s a lot of “stupid is as stupid does” to go around, beginning with about half of the people who voted for George W. Bush because he claimed Christianity, or because Bill Clinton proved to be human. There’s even more to go around among those who voted for George W. Bush the second time. Fool me once, shame on me…

And there doesn’t seem to be an end to it.

Yes, I know Forrest Gump is just a character in a novel and a movie.

Nevertheless, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess if Mother Barbara had used that “stupid is as stupid does” bit of wisdom around the Bush mansion some 58 years ago.

Y’think?

As I write this, 1,935 days have passed since the Rehnquist Supreme Court illegally allowed the illegitimate takeover of our Government by the RoveBushCheney Fascists. Impeachment is our legal recourse to deal with Bush, but can we get rid of the rest by tarring and feathering, and running them out on rails?

(This column has previously appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com)

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-03-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

Jerry Tenuto: OUT OF THE BLUE
I’LL HAVE A SIDE OF KARMA

WITH THAT

(This column has previously appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com)

I had a mild run in with Karma the other day. Well, it really wasn’t a “run in,” but more like a nod and a wink.

You may remember that Karma was real big back in the 1960s and ‘70s, thanks to the VietNam unpleasantness and people of the free lifestyle. It’s kind of made a comeback in recent years, although I don’t think the concept ever completely left California.

Lately, Karma has made a big hit on television in the least expected of settings – an unnamed, jerkwater town somewhere in southern wherever.

I’m talking about “My Name Is Earl,” the funniest, most intelligent program about erstwhile poor dumb folks to come along since “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

If you haven’t caught it, and you’re reading this, then you should. Star and producer Jason Lee (you’ll recognize him from all kinds of movies and guest roles) plays Earl Hickey, a bumbling, low-level crook and all-around sleazeball who has pulled some kind of scam on virtually everyone in town since he was a kid.

His even dumber brother, Randy (played to perfection by Ethan Suplee and snubbed by the Emmy mainstream), has been following Earl’s lead throughout life.

These guys are essentially harmless; they’re just on the left side doing anything that would require listening to instructions and punching a time card.

The basic premise, set up in the pilot episode, is that Earl wins $100,000 on an instant lottery ticket, is hit by a car on the way to cash it in, and loses the ticket. While hospitalized he reads the concept of “Karma” and decides to turn his life around.

Earl makes up a list of some 263 things he’s done to wrong people, and upon being discharged sets out to rectify those situations – whatever it takes.

His first lesson is rewarded with finding the lost winning ticket, and he sets out using the money for good.

A rather unique premise for a television comedy, deftly handled with great writing and characters, that is honestly more than funny. This show is consistently a hoot! Plus, it’s a hit, because apparently the network suits haven’t screwed it up.

Now, to my own momentary Karmic experience. We all have them every now and then, you know. What’s good is to recognize and sense these events, no matter how minor, at the moment they occur.

Okay, so I’m tooling up I-55 at a reasonable clip (I’m not gonna write for all the world to see that I was doin’ like 80MPH, because that’s faster than the law allows). In my CD player is one of my personally-made road mixes, crafted to make the miles fly by like my Aurora was just floating along.

The next song to come on is the Eagles’ classic “Take It Easy,” (written
by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey). One of its more famous verses goes:

“Well I’m a-standin’ on the corner in Winslow, Arizona
With such a fine sight to see
It’s a girl, my Lord, in flatbed Ford
Slowin’ down to take a look at me…”

Long story short, just after this song began playing I looked up the road
apiece and, my Lord – it’s a flatbed Ford!

Now, if that ain’t Karma…

Not only that, it was an old flatbed Ford, a real countrified farm type vehicle, circa 1969-71, ancient enough to have been around when the song was first written! It even bore Iowa plates, attesting to its authenticity, with the paint on the hood largely burned off from years of sitting out in blistering sunny summers and harsh winters.

My excitement could not be contained! I immediately called my Son so I could tell him and he would hear the song at the same time as I was passing the truck. He’s kind of into Buddhism, so it worked for him.

(Incidentally, the line is so famous it inspired “Standin’ On The Corner” Park in downtown Winslow, featuring a statue of a guy on a corner and the image of a girl in a flatbed Ford.)

Why, you may be asking yourself, am I filling space with this tale of a Karmic Encounter of the Third Kind?

I guess that it is just my small way of reminding us all that we’ve been putting up with some really bad Karma for the past five years now.

Just as Earl Hickey has devised a way to counteract the bad Karma he’s laden upon his own essence, we need to find a way to reverse the negative forces
which are rendering our Nation into fragmented shards.

George W. Bush could not have been more full of feces as when he called himself “compassionate” and a “uniter,” for the man has proven to be neither.

We are all far too painfully aware of the multiples of tens of thousands killed all over the World for his self-serving ends.

In America we have the tragedies of 9/11/2001 and Hurricane Katrina, just for starters. Some 4, 400 dead and 2,000 missing, with both events being forewarned yet ignored by King George XLIII and his Court.

There are more than 2,300 brave military people, young men and women, far braver than any of the wimp ideologues who sent them under false pretenses to be slaughtered in Iraq. Add another 270 or more dead in Afghanistan. Nearly 34,000 of these young men and women have been seriously wounded fighting a shadow enemy. The reality is, America cannot be certain of any of these figures because we have to rely upon the military to provide them to us.

For good or bad, estimates are some 30,000 Iraqi troops have died these past three years, with 90,000 seriously wounded. The British medical journal The Lancet figures Iraqi civilian casualties at 189,000 dead, 340,000 seriously wounded.

In Afghanistan, deaths include 8,600 troops and 3,500 civilians, with 26,000 and 6,300 wounded, respectively.

The best estimates of figures accumulated to date among Afghani and Iraqi civilians and troops, U.S. troops and civilians, and various coalition civilians and troops within these two theatres of operations are: 234,300 human lives lost; 497,500 people seriously, painfully wounded – a very large percentage undoubtedly maimed for life.

It took Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and King George XLIII a mere three years to accomplish these massive slaughterhouse totals.

Good Lord, they must be proud of themselves! What are they gonna do next? Iran? Syria?

How about the Heartland of America?

The very reason they continue to grip America and our Government in such a stranglehold is their constant mantra-like recital of “gotta keep the evildoers, the terrorists away from our borders.”

What utter hogwash! According to the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, since 1968 across the entire planet terrorists have been responsible for the deaths of 35,593 persons, while injuring less than 88,300.

So, the Bush Fascists are responsible for causing the deaths of human beings at a rate of 78,000 per year, to save us from a threat that might kill 930 people per year – worldwide. And they are maiming 165,833 people annually to prevent a possible 2,323 serious injuries per annum.

Gee, I can kind of see where that makes sense. Don’t you?

Then there’s the Iraqi civil war that the RoveBush Regime insists does not exist. Why, then, have European news services been reporting it for six months?

And now American reporters have finally begun to inquire about the possibility of a civil war. Is that the reason, despite continual denials by Rumsfeld, various generals, et al, the U.S. Forces in Iraq deemed it necessary to launch the most massive all-out air strike in months just today (March 16, 2006)?

Instead of simply being diligent and cautious, and reacting like a true leader, at a normal level of cost to the taxpayer, fiscally off-the-wall King George XLIII has burned up hundreds of billions of dollars in his insatiable quest to lighten gravity’s load. I guess there just weren’t enough inmates on death rows in Texas prisons.

These kill-crazy warmongers and their Big Bizness cronies have absolutely no intention of stopping this madness. Why should any of them care who dies, or how many – ain’t none o’them their kids or relatives. And anyone who actually believes they want anything to do with “democracy” or a “republic” needs to put that bottle of Old No. 7 down and start thinking with a clearer head than Bush and most Republican “leaders.”

While I’m on the subject of leaders, you Congressional and Senatorial Democrats really fried my chicken legs too long. I can’t believe you left Russ Feingold swinging out there in the breeze like a pennant atop Wrigley Field during a prevailing Canadian Northeast wind!

Do something about King George XLIII, already! What does the schmuck have to do, commit murder on live television before you move against him?

Sure, censure is not Impeachment, but look what the GOP did to Bill Clinton just for being lonely. There isn’t a person with access to a communications satellite or the Internet who doesn’t know that George W. Bush has no business sitting in the Oval Office – why aren’t you doing something about it?

I can’t disagree with Feingold’s assertion that Democrats “run and hide” rather than face up to this White House. The complete non-response was appalling, and after Monday’s performance I am ashamed to be a registered Democrat.

What’s going to change if you do nothing?

And, with the exception of Lou Dobbs, you putzes in the mainstream media are letting the Fascist takeover succeed.

Where is Edward R. Murrow now that we need him?

Another thing I recently noticed along I-55 is just one more sign of how much we’ve lost in this great Nation. I was passing a car with Pennsylvania registration, and what we read on the plate disgusted my Son, Pete, and me. I’m certain it has William Penn whirling in his grave, as well.

Our country’s earliest history, yea, its very independence, can be traced back to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. However, here in the 21st Century, in the era of the RoveBush Fascist Regime, does the license plate of that Commonwealth proudly portray the Liberty Bell, or shine with the red, white and blue? Is there any indication whatsoever of its heritage as the Seat of Liberty?

Not at all. Their new plate is made up of some drab, non-descript color combination, and simply says Pennsylvania across the top with the official website at the bottom. How utterly depressing.

Lest there be any more finality to the death knell of our beloved Liberty Bell?

Well, here in Illinois, despite all those Neo-cons (the gay president) and neo-Nazis (the bum that emancipated the slaves) who would demonize his memory, we are still damned proud of Abraham Lincoln! He’s on each and every vehicle, don’cha know.

Okay, let it all go to hell. I’m sure nobody has any children or grandchildren they care about.

Like I asked one of my two best friends, Ken, when he was defending the neverending war scenario: What are you going to be saying in six or seven years and your then 18-year-old son is part of the mandatory conscription?

You don’t really think Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove has any plans of ever leaving the West Wing, do you? Why else would Rove, Cheney and Rummy have all purchased multi-million dollar homes in or near the D.C. area?

We got ourselves in unison and brought some of the good Karma back to the U.S.A. when Nixon left, but lost it again midway during the Reagan years. Let’s work together and bring it on home to stay.

At this writing, it has been 1,928 days since the Rehnquist Supreme Court illegally allowed this illegitimate takeover of our Government by the RoveBushCheney Fascists. If we don’t impeach the entire cabal now, we may never get rid of them.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-03-18T09:31:00.000-08:00

Jerry Tenuto: OUT OF THE BLUE

FOOTBALL IS LIFE?

BAH! HUMBUG!

(This column has previously appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com)

Ask virtually any football coach, and he’ll tell you that football is life. Not all, but most.

It’s unfortunate that the vast majority of players, and even more unfortunate that so many fans of the game, buy into this utter nonsense.

The fact is football is just a game. Invented for the rich, privileged college types by rich, privileged college types, in its infancy football was not intended to include the unwashed masses.

The game was originally played exclusively at exclusive schools for the pleasure of the exclusive set, those who could afford to send their offspring and themselves attend weekly contests.

Until it was discovered how much money could be vacuumed out of the pockets of average, hard working, sweaty, unwashed masses types who enjoyed seeing large men crash into each other and knock opponents senseless.

Especially after the newfound fans had gone through the ritual of the tailgate party and gotten wasted before the coin toss.

For this stroke of marketing genius we have Papa Bear George Halas to thank.

Myself, now, I prefer Baseball, a far more noble and accessible game. (Okay, before steroids.) One that takes considerably more strategy and hand-eye-foot coordination. It’s also more relaxing, friendlier, and (as George Carlin put it) pastoral.

Many football fans utter the trite old phrase, “I don’t like baseball ‘cause it’s too slow.” Do you mean like the five-minute wait for a three-second play in football?

Tape a three-hour football game, edit out all the non-action time when the clock is running, and there might be three to six minutes of actual play left. More often than not, one can predict what will occur when any two given teams are matched up.

In baseball, once the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand anything can happen. It could set off a chain of events that might lead to a six-run inning, a triple play, or any of a number of plays. We never know, and strategizing is always filled with multiple layers of complexities.

Besides, it takes a damn sight more talent to hit a nine-inch orb coming at you around 95 MPH in an arc with a stick of wood, then keep it within a 90-degree framework, than to run into another guy and knock him on his ass. It is accepted by many as the most difficult thing to accomplish in any sport; to succeed is to fail 70% of the time.

The reason, I suspect, why so many football fans find baseball “too slow” is that the concentration factor makes their heads hurt.

As difficult as it is to be accomplished at baseball, most players and coaches seem to be lightheartedly philosophical. Generally speaking, they kind of take it in stride that a guy only has so many playing days in him, and once those have been used up it’s time to hang up the bat and glove.

I have never heard a Yogi Berra, a Dusty Baker, any other manager, coach or player equate the game of baseball with life. Sure, there’s the slogan, “I Live for This.” Many people have iterated the sentiment of love of the game. Wrigley Field has been referred to as the “Shrine” to the game.

And baseball’s been “berry, berry gud” to many guys. Some hang around after the knees go in various field and front office positions; others opt for the broadcast booth. Most, like old soldiers, just fade away.

No sport is life.

Ted Williams knew this when he took time out of his superior baseball career, putting it as well as himself in extreme danger by joining up during World War II.

NFL player Pat Tillman knew this when he joined the U.S. Army after 9/11, leaving behind a multi-million dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to serve his country.

He believed there was far more to life than football. So much so, he trained to be the best of the best – a Ranger.

For his efforts, his diligence, his patriotism, Pat Tillman was slaughtered by his own unit. Now, friendly fire deaths are most often the result of misplaced artillery, mortar or airstrike ordnance, originating from a site unseen by the receiver.

This was not the case with Cpl. Tillman. He was in plain view of his own platoon, huddled behind a rock with them on his clear side.

I wrote about the travesty of Pat Tillman’s death, its immediate and subsequent cover-ups, first by his unit then by the U.S. Army, right here in the May 11, 2005 issue (“Military Follies”). Now, four investigations later, following continued pressure from his survivors, the Army has announced it is re-opening the case for a fifth look into the incident.

Well, if I were to hold my breath for truth from any branch of the Military the result would probably be permanent blindness (which, due to a lack of funds, would not be treatable at a VA hospital).

As I am writing this, Dark Lord the Dick Cheney is being beamed to America (and the World, I suppose) via C-Span after crawling out of his secret bunker to speechify at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It frightens me when a Jewish organization consorts with the likes of Cheney, because it’s doubtful that deep in his heart he’s even remotely pro-Semite.

At one point Dark Lord stated in his unemotional monotone, and I quote, “Ladies and gentlemen, one of the basic truths of the world we live in today -- George W. Bush is a man of his word.”

Having shivered when he said that, I will write the sentence once more to let it sink in: “Ladies and gentlemen, one of the basic truths of the world we live in today -- George W. Bush is a man of his word.”

A basic truth of today’s world? A man of his word? When was George W. Bush ever truthful? When did he ever keep his word?

Still, the scariest part came when the audience rose and applauded in blind allegiance. Like a snake oil salesman Cheney’s peddling fear of Iran and Hamas to cover what this Jewish organization has forgotten they should really fear – Fascism.

He then used the magic word “democracy,” and everyone dutifully stood and applauded. He reminded those in attendance that George promised to keep Israel a free state -- stand, applause. This exercise was repeated with practically every sentence from the side of Dark Lord’s mouth.

This was eerily reminiscent of the masses cheering on Der Fuhrer, and underlings such as Albert Speer who would incite crowds praising the accomplishments of Germany’s great leader, lined up like lemmings at party rallies that pre-dated that nation’s collapse. Only now it’s the Jews, the victims, trusting the new purveyors of “Fuhrerprinzip” and other New World Order doublethink mindsets to “trust us.”

According to Cheney’s rosy scenario, the Bush-led policies have, in the past five years, infested democracy, sic Bushocracy, into at least four Middle Eastern nations. Thus, thanks to Bushocracy it’s spreading like wildfire throughout the region. The audience rose and applauded.

He spoke in mostly simplified gibberish of extremely complex situations, with the preponderance of the truth left out. From Herr Obst Rove on down, this regime is masterful in its non-communicative ability to mention laundry lists of “informational” one-liners, usually at best half-truths, not elaborate on anything at all, yet get the audience to infer by these mere statements that the regime has accomplished, or shall actually do, something of positive note.

To their credit, some of people in the seats were not rising to hail Dark Lord’s ideological baloney. These were older individuals who could remember the horrors of the Shoah, and youths who are too smart for Cheney. The major points that most of the others seemed to be missing are that it is not the province of the U.S.A. to ram democracy down the throats of the rest of the world’s sovereign nations, nor is democracy the solution for all nations.

And who in the hell are Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush to think they are the chosen few who should lead the Planet Earth to total democratic unity? Considering that they act far more like totalitarian dictatorial despotic nabobs, possessed of the most callous disregard for human life and suffering, it certainly isn’t this gang.

I checked out AIPAC’s website. It seemed innocuous enough on the surface, but that worried me a bit. They have no representatives on college campuses, yet there is a strong push to recruit Jewish college students. Why are there no AIPAC people on campuses? Do the schools not want them slinking through the student body?

Or, could it be AIPAC would prefer to avoid the scrutiny of a background check any college would require of an organization requesting bona fide on-campus status?

Between Dark Lord Cheney crawling out to face this group, their overenthusiastic approval of his every utterance, and the huge emphasis on college recruitment sans school sanction, AIPAC has all the earmarks of a Jewish version of the Federalist Society.

The more I scanned the AIPAC website, the stronger the sense that this organization was very big on pressing us into a war footing with Iran. The Dark Lord’s speech, which came on the heels of a typically bellicose speech by John Robert Bolton the previous day, was nothing less than a call to arms against Iran. He even included an assurance that the Bush regime had “all the options on the table” to keep Iran in line with whatever the U.S. and Israel demanded.

What’s worse, this miniscule segment of the Jewish community gets so much focus in the news that to many Christians, Muslims and others they represent all Jews. Just as the small minority of radical Muslim fanatics become the face of Islam to the uninitiated, so too do these hardcore Right-wing AIPAC members become the face of Judaism.

It wasn’t all that long ago that these same putzes used that same “all the options” phrase to let Saddam Hussein know he had better give up his weapons of mass destructions…

So, here we go again, the climate of fear over a situation that is non-existent mixed with rumblings of war to satisfy small interest groups, as an illegal coup d`etat continues along its path of imperialistic Total World Domination.

Meanwhile, King George XLIII and Queen Laura were in India and Pakistan screwing with the delicate balance of worldwide nuclear policy, bringing us ever closer to the brink of total annihilation. I wonder if you caught any of his diarrhea of the mouth. Since all of the photo and sound ops came in the middle of night, America time, we weren’t privy to most of them. But here are a few choice tidbits of which I happened to make note:

“Democracy…”

“Freedom…”

“Democracy…”

“Liberty…”

“Democracy…”

“Free elections…”

“Democracy…”

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." George W. Bush, on the 2004 campaign trail.

What, exactly, is his “line of work?” Fearless Leader? Dictator? King? Speechifier? (He even sucks at that.)

History has shown us, and we cannot – we must not – close our eyes, our ears, our minds to the fact that the more a “leader” spouts words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” “liberty,” and “free elections,” the less those words mean to him. Especially when said “leader” can’t lead, and instead is a puppet who was not elected but one installed for name value while others make the decisions.

If you don’t know by now that Herr Obst Karl Rove and Dark Lord the Dick Cheney are in charge, you’ve been in a coma since 2000. Every member of the Republican Party, either currently in an elected position or planning to run for one, is unable to make any decision without clearance from Rove!

A true, honest leader need not repeat the sacred words over and over and over again. A real president just governs by them. This faux president, who thinks he’s King George, is unable govern so it’s necessary for him to steal power while eradicating the rights of good folks as he goes along.

We’re supposed to fear the “enemy,” unseen and unknown. You know, those rotten “evildoers.” The “enemy” and “evildoers” are neither unseen nor unknown – they control of our Government.

“Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president… ” Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School, September 22, 2002 (compliments to Information Clearing House.com)

We, my fellow Americans and citizens of Planet Earth, are sinking rapidly into quicksand while this Fascist Regime continues its imperialistic march toward world domination. Grab onto a tree limb or root or something!

It has been 1,921 days since the Rehnquist Supreme Court illegitimately allowed this takeover of our Government by the RoveBushCheney cabal. It’s high time we call for Impeachment, and an end of the entire regime.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-03-13T09:04:00.000-08:00

Jerry Tenuto: OUT OF THE BLUE

WAKEY-WAKEY,

MY FELLOW AMERICANS

(This column has previously appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, Texas, and at www.LoneStarIcon.com)

The alarm has rung, America.

The auto-brew cycle on the coffee maker has kicked in.

Ah, smell the coffee. Take a whiff of that fresh-roasted flavor as it wafts through the house.

No, no, don’t roll over and hit the snooze button…

Ah, geez! NO!

It’s time to wake up, America!

Time to demand more from your – our – Government.

Could you not see it coming way back when George W. Bush was first thrown out into the fray as a contender for the Republican nomination as president?

It was clear as oil from the very beginning that he was ill-informed, ill-mannered, ill-read, ill-spoken, and ill-tempered for such a lofty position. The man had never been off the North American Continent, and now was being touted as capable to lead the free world after a mere five years as governor of Texas.

And his record in that position was abysmal at best.

As had been his carefully guarded record at everything else prior to that misadventure.

During his relatively short tenure Texas state finances went from substantially black to bright red. He turned the state’s social and educational programs from quality into some of the nation’s more pitiful messes. In Texas the gasoline now has to be specially refined, at a higher cost to consumers, as compensation for sloppy environmental policies allowed while “ex-oilman” George W. Bush was governor.

He executed more prisoners than any governor in history, never once considering a stay or commutation. In George W. Bush’s prisons, every convict on death row died on schedule – even those with IQs below the level of retardation. To him it was beyond conceivable that a prosecutor might be overzealous, or a witness lied, or the accused just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All this righteousness from a guy who failed at running every company his Daddy ever put him in charge of; a putz unable to get elected to Congress in his own district, despite the dirty trickster machinations of manager Karl Rove.

The way these guys went through money just during the primaries should have warned everyone that Mr. Bush the younger was not adept at being fiscally responsible.

It was obvious that he was a puppet when paraded out as a gubernatorial candidate in Texas, and even more painfully so when brought out of left field to run in the 2000 Republican primaries.

The more he spoke in public, the more it became aware that this Bush was wholly incompetent to lead anything, much less the free world.

Then, it appeared as though he was out of the race when going into South Carolina the far more qualified and able, not to mention reputable, Sen. John McCain of Arizona led the field by some 20 points.

Well, the candidates were preceded by the Karl Rove organization’s well-oiled slander machine. By the time they had finished with the good Senator and his family, the bona fide hero who had suffered for more than five years the hands of the North VietNamese, including time in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, was a sexual degenerate.

According to the RoveCo smear campaign, depending upon which story you chose to believe, McCain had: Spent his time in captivity cavorting in the love nest of an Asian concubine, which produced the love child he and his wife raised as an “adopted third world orphan”; or, he had an affair with their illegal alien maid, producing same child.

Numerous allegations about Sen. McCain, and his family, were spread around the Republican community throughout South Carolina in the crucial days leading up the primary, each one more ludicrous than the last. However, being a state with some of the most seriously flawed Christian influences in politics, a fact Rove banked on, the local yokels bought into the balderdash as verities. George W. Bush was presented as a bona fide born again Man of Christ, thus McCain’s record as a hero was trumped by a schmuck who hid under the bed when he wasn’t partying during the unpleasantness in VietNam.

Well, once Bush had performed a “miraculous” turnaround victory in South Carolina, predicated on what were now becoming Rove’s notorious stock in trade smear tactics, the field was his. If Rove could rain such disaster down upon John McCain’s head, what chance did any other candidate stand?

We all know how things went from there: The questionable vote count in Florida that was never allowed to occur due to the interference of the Federalist Society Court of William H. Rehnquist; the immediate curtailment of personal freedoms by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was only available for the job because he had lost his Senate seat in Missouri to deceased (assassinated?) opponent Gov. Mel Carnahan; how the warnings about a major terrorist threat were ignored, leading to the tragic collusion of September 11, 2001; the Richard Kimble-like search for Osama bin Laden, who may or may not actually be a patsy; the internationally non-sanctioned, immoral invasion of Iraq.

Death and destruction on a global scale.

A new attorney general who considers the Geneva Convention as a “quaint” idea, torture as a viable tool to extract information.

A planet filled with fellow human beings who now hate us.

Interesting how the U.S. media and military are only now catching on to the impending civil war in Iraq. The British news outlets have been warning about it for the past six months. Of course, the White House continues to deny things might not be going so good.

Then, this ersatz president and treacherous vice president refuse to ever admit anything could be going wrong.

Lies and deception to the American people since the first day of primary campaigning.

A federal budget that went from reasonable black to crushing deficit of record proportions.

Absolutely no improvement of internal infrastructure.

A pathetic record of diminished social and educational policies.

Horrendous environmental reversals and costly energy schemes.

One secretive plot after another with, and to the advantage of, the regime’s bloated business cronies.

Invasions upon the privacy of Americans’ electronic communications, without warrants, at the whim of the supreme leader.

A man sitting in the Oval Office, in our White House, who functions under the delusion that he is allowed to do whatever he wishes, to whomever he wishes, whenever he wishes.

And then there are the Congress and Senate, stopped dead in their tracks with majority Republican “leaderships” that are stymied on every issue and misappropriation of Executive Power and Privilege by Herr Obst Karl Rove’s edict: Any GOP member of the legislative branch who dares to defy the White House will be denied both funding from and support of the RNC for the upcoming election.

Every Bush appointee, nominee or crony who appears before a Senate or Congressional committee obfuscates and stonewalls when sworn in, prevaricates when not sworn. By the power of Rove, nothing ever goes beyond any of these committee hearings.

Time and again, Bush gives lip service to “this is going well” and “we’re standing by to provide support for that.” And people believe them road apples. However, the realities of our fantasy-addled non-leader’s inability to govern are that unless you’re one of his megabucks backers nothing’s going well, and, as is the case with any Fascist Regime, these schmoes are not standing by to support.

They just don’t care. Whenever one among them shows concern for their fellow Americans, the rest plow that person under with bureaucracy, blame him or her for whatever went wrong, then throw them out with the trash.

You remember what happened to former FEMA Director Michael Brown. We were all led to believe that he was a complete screw-up, weren’t we?

Well, well, well… by now you’ve seen the tapes. Brownie, just as he stated, was sounding the alarm of serious, deadly destruction about to come down full force, in Biblical proportions that uberChristian George W. Bush should have understood, on New Orleans and surrounding area.

We’ve heard George W. Bush promise all the assistance they would need was at the ready. He then left Crawford, Texas, and headed west – away from the storm -- to party in Arizona and raise campaign funds for the GOP in California.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff went to a destination somewhat north and east of the Gulf of Mexico, an avian flu conference in Atlanta.

By the time George finally did show up to personally look the area over, he was eminently concerned that Sen. Trent Lott’s (R-MS) house would be rebuilt – bigger and better than before – and was looking forward to sitting on the porch enjoying the sunset.

Katrina, the worst hurricane in perhaps 100 years, quite possibly recorded history, virtually wiped out New Orleans, took out huge chunks of Mississippi, and over 1,400 people died. Six months later some 2,000 folks are still missing, tens of thousands remain homeless, and devastated properties and wrecked vehicles that should have been bulldozed by now are left where they landed, providing festering hovels for vermin of all sorts.

The levees are not intact, with just three months till hurricane season.

Still, George W. Bush refuses to believe anybody else in the world, scientist or leader, no matter how expert they are, when he’s told that it’s now past time to stem the effects of global warming.

Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of unoccupied mobile homes contracted by FEMA, at a cost of tens and possibly hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, are sinking into muddy fields in Arkansas and elsewhere. The catch-22 is they can’t be shipped to New Orleans because Federal regulations prohibit putting them on ground where they would be subject to sinking into mud.

This alleged government won’t even get on the insurance companies to settle property claims with the victims.

While all this non-progress is going along within Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf, at least four brave American military personnel are being slaughtered each and every day, and numerous others mangled for life, in the most horrid of manners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, America, you’ve seen the video. You saw George W. Bush sitting at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, being warned about the utter destruction that was about to hit the Gulf region, primarily New Orleans.

You have heard him promise all the help the cities and states needed.

You saw that the help was far too little, much too late.

Nero fiddled why Rome burned -- King George XLIII played with his new gee-tar in Arizona while Gulf residents died and lost their homes.

The polls have finally dropped to a 34% approval rating, or Bush’s core support group. Cheney’s approval is even lower.

At last, most Americans understand these guys are not to be trusted with our Nation’s security.

So, I ask you, America – Where is your outrage?

What more do you need to say “ENOUGH?”

These people stole our White House. They bastardized all four branches of our Government. They have done nothing for the People, not one thing the majority of the People have wanted.

If you haven’t read between the lines, then I’ll spell it out: I’m so damned pissed off I could chew nails!

You should be, too.

Don’t you dare roll over and hit that snooze button! Get your ass up – open your eyes.

America and the rest of Planet Earth can’t take another three years of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, Rumsfeld and the rest! And they don’t deserve more time.

It has been 1,914 days since the Rehnquist Supreme Court allowed this illegal oligarchy overthrow of our Government. It’s high time we take it back.

Richard M. Nixon was tossed out of office for far less, and Spiro T. Agnew left the vice-presidency in disgrace over what amounted to a minor infraction compared to Cheney’s dishonorable, greedy, un-American activities.

Impeach the lot of the George W. Bush and Karl Rove Cabal.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-03-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

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2006-03-06T07:24:00.000-08:00

Jerry Tenuto: OUT OF THE BLUE

I DON’T BLAME JESUS FOR

“CHRISTIAN” POLITICIANS

(This column appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast and at www.LoneStarIcon.com the week of Feb. 28, 2006.)

The past few weeks it seems that I may have been a little harsh on one Mr. Christ who hailed from Nazareth some 2000 years ago, give or take. If anything I wrote brought offense to some readers, please know that was never my intent.

I have the utmost respect for this Man who was the first known as Jesus.

It is they who distort his words, pervert his actions, and shame his existence to suit their own narrow agendas with whom I take umbrage.

Jesus may have been God and Man, as the sweet Franciscan Sisters of the Blessed Kunegunda (I’m not making that up) beat into my head on a daily basis for eight years; He might have been something else altogether, as modern science and “Star Trek” tend to suggest.

Whichever theory is correct, of what we know Jesus always spoke gently and of kindness. At least, that’s what His biographers remembered decades later.

One thing the Sisters were up front about was that the Epistles and Gospels were not set to “paper” until many years after Christ’s time had passed. Unfortunately, far too many fundamentalist, evangelical preachers tend to omit this fact while instructing their congregations as to which righteous candidates they must vote for.

How convenient the fundamentalists’ selectivity in Biblical passages, failing to mention how Jesus looked at a coin and noted folks should leave the business of Caesar to Caesar, the business of God to God.

Hence, because the Roman Catholic Church is pragmatic in its non-verbatim approach toward acceptance of the The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, most evangelicals deny inclusion of Catholics as true members in the realm of the “faithful” Christians.

Not only is that blatantly un-Christian in spirit, it is antithetical to Christ’s own words (taking them as literally as the modern evangelicals): “Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I shall build My Church.” Peter was the first Pope, making him the founder of the Catholic Church of Rome.

There was no other Christian church until Martin Luther protested and broke from Rome in the 16th Century. This is why all non-Catholic Christian religions are called “protestant.”

Here, though, we see the first pitfall in a long list of abominable bastardizations of “your opinion doesn’t count” in the name of Jesus – Americans who belong to the original Church established (allegedly, I’ll admit) by Jesus’ own words are not even considered Christians by religious fundamentalists; folks so addled by blind faith mixed with fear of hellfire and damnation they are possessed of an inability to employ common sense reasoning while misunderstanding their mandatory daily Bible readings.

We know today that our elderly suffer from any number of a wide range of debilitating impairments – strokes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, adult ADD, just to name a few. It’s also pretty much accepted among Catholics that the 12 Apostles were not learned men, and most likely could neither read nor write. There wasn’t a secretary taking notes when Mr. Christ was speaking or performing miracles.

Not that He didn’t truly make brilliant statements and use wonderful parables, mind you, giving mankind a wealth of valuable concepts to ponder and live by. As to the miracles, well, by the time those were actually documented, the remaining loyalists were spread out all over the Holy Roman Empire. So many years had elapsed that all logic dictates the likelihood was few if any who had witnessed Jesus in the flesh would have been around to dispute the accounts.

When considering the life of Jesus Christ, one has to realize there was no mass communication, no formalized system of education existed, and, out of all the thousands upon thousands of people who witnessed Him (Jews, Romans, Arabs, et al), only 11 Jewish followers passed the story along.

At that, the documentation was not forthcoming until at least 20 to 30 years after the fact, when dictated to scribes. So, the possibility arises for errors from lapses in memory.

The various scribes may have misinterpreted events and facts, or added embellishments to make the stories more interesting, creating more misstatements of fact. These stories weren’t inked all at once, but over long periods of time, leading to more flaws in accuracy.

Then there were decades and centuries of copying by hand, translations, numerous deviations based upon religious orthodoxy – Roman Catholic, King James, etc.

Now, here we are in the 21st Century and Jesus Christ has been injected, painfully and wrongly so, into the decision-making process of the United States Government.

Or so some in power have hoodwinked many into believing.

From all we know about Jesus of Nazareth, He was a Man of Peace. He never exactly said He was the “Son of God” – man laid that title upon Him. When queried on the subject, I believe His answer was, “My Kingdom is not of the Earth.”

“Turn the other cheek.” Who are the biggest warmongers in our Government? The guys who get the most political mileage, and voter support, out of spewing chunks about what great Christians they are: George W. Bush; Wayne Allard; Kit Bond; Tom Coburn; Thad Cochran; John Cornyn; James Inhofe; Pat Roberts; Jeff Sessions; et al. These are also the dudes who think torture is a good thing.

Jesus personally ran the moneychangers out of His Father’s Temple. (He said on numerous occasions that God was Father to us all.) Has anyone seen one of these multi-thousand seat mega-churches? Have you been inside one? Some of them are like malls, complete with shops, snack bars, you name it. Then guys like Smilin’ Tom DeLay repeatedly uses the altar and bogus self-serving Christian-based charities to prop himself up as the “Holier-than-any-of-the-other-Guys” Congressman. For the uninitiated, Smiler DeLay was one of the first to hop full-force on the “Impeach Clinton” bandwagon; ran with Jack Abramoff and created the “K Street Project” which made him a multi-millionaire while receiving a paltry U.S. Congressional paycheck; is currently under several indictments, with more possibly to come, making him number one contender for “Most Crooked Politician of the Millennium.”

These schmucks, and others in the cabal, just keep getting richer and fatter off the backs, blood, sweat, fears and anxieties of average, everyday Americans. They are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands – I’d venture a guess at somewhere around 99% or more innocent noncombatants, aka collateral damage. With every death, their personal Earthly fortunes increase. Somewhere King George XLIII and the rest missed the passage about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a man of wealth to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

These Republicans who keep telling us what good Christians they are do nothing to show us that we should believe them. First, Christ was emphatic about how much more it meant to pray alone than in large groups – yet the really, really good Christians who hate Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Blacks, immigrants, anyone else who isn’t one of them, keep building bigger and bigger churches to show everyone precisely how faithful they are.

Christ was instructive about keeping one’s faith to one’s self, as well as caring for the Earth. Yet, wherever I go there is no shortage of overpriced gas-guzzling, road-hogging SUVs and luxury sedans with some sort of Christian sticker or, what really irritates me, license plate. Jesus has absolutely no business on a license plate! Then there are those idiots who wear bloodied Christ t-shirts to places where folks go to have fun, like baseball games and theme parks! (The last time we went to a Six Flags it was noted that these types of clothing had been included in the “inappropriate attire” rules.)

When reading or listening to news sources outside of the U.S., they can’t understand the level of fanaticism that has sprung up here. It’s like a virus, and I myself can, but at the same time don’t, comprehend why so many people allow themselves to be so easily swayed by preachers. Our friends and allies, the average citizens of England, Germany, South Korea, for example, are frightened, as am I, at the effect of evangelicals over Government in the U.S.A.

Do you think for one minute Jerry Falwell or Oral Roberts or many of the others would be so “fervent” if there weren’t huge bucks to be made, not to mention White House and other red carpet invitations? These guys, virtually all preachers who take to the airwaves, have egos and appetites of Godlike proportions in need of constant feeding and sating.

The same is true, possibly more so, with the little guys who run these off-the-wall churches with maybe 100 parishioners, give or take, one finds all over – mostly in small rural communities. These churches generally broke away from already hardcore religious groups because the folks who comprise them didn’t think there was enough harshness in the regular church’s interpretation of The Bible.

I cannot understand how they derive harshness and intolerance from belief in a Man whose message was gentility and understanding. Many religions disallow drink, yet Jesus’ first recorded “miracle” was turning water into wine. The fanatics insist it was without alcohol content, but the Catholic version described it as better than the store bought wine the hosts served.

The funny thing, when one of these extreme Christians tosses out a passage to make his or her point, more often than not it’s from the Old Testament! Say “God,” they reply “Christian.”

And, despite their incessant referrals to the Old Testament, many of them equate Jews with Satanists. As for Muslims, they’re just downright evil beings whom, as Ann Coulter put it, those who won’t convert to Christianity should just be wiped out.

Yes, these are the modern Christians of 21st Century America. It’s sad, but many are throwbacks to the 17th Century. The Republican Party, as led by Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove, planned correctly, banking on a group mentality. The GOP continues to, in addressing not only the fundamentalist Christian issues, prey upon the fears, no matter how irrational and unreal. According to the GOP, the party that cares not one iota about the individual person, Democrats are the godless enemy that will allow evil Muslims to destroy America and take away your way of life and freedoms.

One need only read a history of how the National Socialists stole power in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to comprehend where Herr Rove has taken Amerika so far, and intends to go with his nefarious plans.

Yes, these are good Christians, well-intentioned all, and I’m not disparaging anyone for their religion. Yet, they’ve been Bushwhacked by GOP propaganda, a lame-brained mainstream media, and self-serving preachers into voting for politicians who: Turn other nations into rubble for no good reason; allow the merciless torture of human beings (as long as they ain’t Christians); engage in secret dealings which cost the citizens more and more in taxes and out-of-pocket expenses, while their cronies get richer by the minute; have systematically dismantled our Constitution and severely limited the Bill of Rights; spy upon Americans without cause or warrants; lie on a daily basis; openly alter laws or renege on existing policies as suits their whims and needs; since January 21, 2001 have consistently acted neither in accord with the wishes of the people, nor kept the Nation abreast of the activities in which they have been engaged.

America, it’s time to wake up. The tyrannical rule from which George W. Bush said he was saving the Iraqi people -- killing countless tens of thousands of them in the process, plus some 2,300 American troops to date, while draining America’s financial and military resources to the point where we’re far less secure than in January, 2003 – well, that very same tyrannical rule is spreading across our Nation from the inside.

It began the day Herr Rove fixed the Florida elections, and the man behind America’s Fuhrerprinzip, Cheese Justice William H. Rehnquist illegally elevated the puppet to King George XLIII of Amerika.

But what the hell -- Glory Hallelujah, anyway! Everything George W. bush does, he does in the name of Jesus, don’cha know!

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it…” Milton Mayer -- Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955 (compliments to Information Clearing House)

Shalom, y’all.

Day 1,907 of America Held Hostage – our White House and the Executive Branch overrun by the Karl Rove-controlled Neo-con Fascist Regime.Impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, run the rest of their cabal out of our Nation’s Capital.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-02-25T09:26:00.000-08:00

NO GAY-LOVIN’ JEW LIBERAL
HOLLYWOOD TYPES ALLOWED
By Jerry Tenuto

(This column first appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast and at LoneStarIcon.com the week of Feb. 20, 2006.)

I have a theory as to why so many people buy the RoveBush Regime’s recircling lines of bull dung, and turn a blind eye to the cancerous corruption that has eaten away at Congress.

These good folks are culturally deficient.

What’s one of the biggest cries that comes out of the Neo-con camps?

“Everything in movies and on television is controlled by those Gay-loving, Jew Liberals in Hollywood.”

Right there, you have the finger of hatred pointed toward four groups in one sentence.

Let’s face it, if not for Hollywood we’d have a Nation, and World, totally devoid of those pesky seven deadly sins. Why, there’d be no greed or avarice. Gambling or theft would be unheard of activities.

Nobody would ever willingly engage in any kind of lustful act outside of marriage. Golly, there wouldn’t even be any pleasure in sex – it would just be our duty, a necessity to increase the herd.

Our youth, instead of getting fat and lazy eating junk food while sitting in front of video monitors of various sorts, Heaven forbid, might actually take part in some sort of healthy ritual, such as an athletic endeavor. This could be workable, except not all youngsters are suited to the field of sports, making them targets for the jibes of the more aptly endowed.

So, we’ve now created a group who resent the Adonis and Venus set, not only for how they look and their achievements, but who also detest this physically enhanced segment of society for the higher plateau at which they have arrived.

Being the only game in town, I used to work for what passes for a daily newspaper here in Central Illinois, The Pantagraph out of Bloomington. There was an article in last Sunday’s edition about several local families who decided to severe communications with the outside world via television. Considering there’s only one local paper, Right-winged and heavily influenced by Evangelical Christians, the children involved don’t seem to have much of a chance at openness of thought processes.

Especially when one reads that they are home-schooled, and have virtually no contact with the other children in their neighborhoods.

The adults even said that while at work, when others discuss what happened during last night’s episode of “24” or chatted about the way the White Sox put away game four of the World Series, they were left out.

All three families said that the reasons they had dropped cable or dismantled the dish were because of sex and violence. Even if the show was family-oriented, the commercials often were “R-rated.” That has to be about the most shallow excuse for hiding the outside world from your child that I’ve ever heard.

One parent said his brother, hundreds of miles away, TiVo’s stuff and sends it to him without the commercials. Why doesn’t he just cut out the ads himself?

Where do these people get their news from? What are they going to do when their children turn 18 or 21 and want to interact with real, live human beings?

How can anybody in these households possibly be informed enough to vote?

I’ve known some people, and read about others, who have divested themselves of television. I found this article very slanted, because people sometimes just don’t like the intrusion of the box. Others are so busy they have no time to watch. Then, there are those who watch outside of the home.

There’s something eminently disturbing about people who consider themselves enlightened yet shut themselves and their children off from any knowledge of what in the hell is going on. They turn a blind eye to how the faux leaders of our Nation have created such unprecedented havoc, both internally and internationally, that we now inhabit a Planet that has literally become a powderkeg.

The silliness of their reasoning for removing themselves completely from society is magnified when one notes that we live in an age when low-cost electronic devices exist that make it possible to never have to watch a commercial again.

It was good people just like these who made the tasks of the Brownshirts easy.

I also have friends who, it saddens me to say, have lost touch with the more fun aspects of the cultural world. Some spend too much time in pursuit of paychecks; others have spouses who never shared their interest in comic release or a good bang-bang shoot-‘em-up. And I know a few people who have been hoodwinked and molested by demon rum, which kind of diminishes all interest in anything that requires attention.

These guys have missed some of the greatest war movies of the past 25 years. In fact, they probably haven’t seen any Best Picture Oscar nominee or recipient since “Rocky” won 30 years ago. Ask them about a television show, they haven’t seen it; they watched whatever chick comedy their wife had on. But, their wives don’t even pay attention to “Will & Grace” while it’s on.

And their kids watch stuff in five to ten minute segments.

When you tell them about something you discussed with them three weeks ago, they say you never told them.

But, they are good Christians and they will stand up for every stupid, addle-brained scheme George W. Bush and his Fascist Band of Pirate Rogues come up with.

And they won’t believe one single word when you tell them about Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove -- how it has been he and Dark Lord the Dick Cheney in charge of the puppet King George XLIII all along. Even when you show this to them in writing, they still call it an untruth.

So, it becomes useless to tell them things like as the Vice President of the United States Dark Lord Cheney should have come clean immediately about shooting his buddy rich, influential attorney Harry Whittington, instead of leaving it up to a citizen the next morning, his hostess, rich, influential Katharine Armstrong.

The Corpus Christi Caller-Times was not as sufficient a newspaper to report the incident to as, say, a New York Times, as Dark Lord asserts, considering the fact they wouldn’t have the level of investigative journalists available as a major paper – especially on a Sunday morning. And Cheney’s lame excuse that he had no press person with him was either just that, or pre-planned because he and Harry were accompanied by two women.

Oh, yeah, according to Alex Bennett of Sirius Radio, standing right next to Dark Lord at the time of the shooting was the Ambassador to Switzerland and Lichtenstein, Pam Willeford. Pam and the Dick have been linked together on several occasions, and last June her daughter was named Deputy Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

The Kenedy County Sheriff’s Department found that alcohol was not a factor in the shooting – following questioning of Cheney and other participants the morning after.

Ms. Armstrong originally was very firm in her assertion that there was absolutely no alcohol served at the barbecue, only Dr. Pepper. She was adamant that she doesn’t even drink. Katharine also originally stated she was right there during the entire incident, when Harry got “peppered” by some birdshot. (I just love that quaint little Texas euphemism – up north we call it getting blasted by a shotgun, but what do we know?)

By the time the Dick had his story down pat, did he go to the American news media at large and face us like a real mensch? Hell, no! He did exactly what he did during VietNam and used another deferment, hiding behind the safety of his office.

Dark Lord went to the very organization that started the ball rolling for the RoveBush Regime’s illegitimate takeover in 2000 – he allowed his favorite non-reporter Brit Hume to hold a mock interview on FoxNewsChannel, in the middle of the day, when nobody was watching except retirees and shut-ins. Cheney’s monotone delivery throughout was perhaps the most false-hearted performance since Richard M. Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”

Let’s see, Cheney waited overnight to talk to the police – time enough to sober up and ditch his female companion. His original statement was scrapped by the White House Sunday as sounding “too convoluted,” indicating it was most likely bull. He let Scott McClellan swing in the wind for four days trying to make up excuses for this. When Dark Lord finally decided to face the Nation it was in a sealed environment, as safe for him as he could make it.

Somehow, he managed to come up with a story that nobody else did, one that had every little detail in place. Any fan of “NYPD Blue” or “Law & Order” or “CSI” – or any of the forensic documentaries on Discovery or CourtTV -- knows that’s virtually impossible immediately after the fact, much less four or five days after an incident.

Ms. Armstrong was not as close to the shooting as she had originally stated.

Cheney claimed to have one beer at lunch. Wow, what a revelation. So, anyone who saw him could say he was drinking a beer.

So, Ms. Armstrong had to alter that part of her story regarding the absence of alcohol.

He also mentioned something about going to the house, and being driven around on a tour of the (50,000 acre) ranch for a couple of hours prior to returning to the hunt. I shall leave it up to your discretion to consider what was going down on that warm Southern Texas Saturday afternoon.

Ms. Armstrong seemed to forget this little detail regarding Dark Lord’s absence from the picnic beneath the big old oak tree.

However, if you listen to Bay Buchanan, other Bushite pundits, and the Republicans on the Hill who are misguidedly circling the wagons around the Dick, this is just a little bitty accident, a non-incident that happens all the time. (According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, once for every 33,333 licenses issued – or 30 last year. Since neither Cheney nor Whittington had secured proper quail licenses, this shooting must not count.)

They, like the Republican loyalists, are completely blind to the fact that this is yet another example of the overinflated hubris this Regime has shown time and again toward the Citizenry of our Nation. Cheney, despite being a paid servant of the United States, decided he did not, and does not, have to face up to the People, that he owes us, those for whom he works, absolutely no true accounting.

The entire White House Gang of Rotters think they have an entitlement to do precisely as they feel, and damn the people. We are nothing to them.

This “hunt” was just another weekend romp for the outlandishly privileged wealthy white folks who do not give a rat’s ass about you, me, your children, those thousands dead and homeless in New Orleans, the tens of thousands slaughtered and maimed in the Mid East, or anyone else.

Then, goofy people call C-Span to defend this selfish schmuck with comments like, “Mr. Cheney and Mr. Worthington paid for licenses but the county sent them the wrong ones,” and the most ridiculous one of all, “Remember Chappaquiddick.”

Now, if that’s not comparing a quail to an elderly, rich white lawyer.

They were conned into voting for these liars and polecats based on an alleged faith in Jesus, and a song-and-dance that this bunch of guys and one misplaced woman who never did anything for anyone but themselves were going to restore dignity and decorum to the White House (when it was only shunted aside because of Republican overreaching in the first place). Now that the entire Country, and the World, is about to come crashing down on top of all of our heads, they’re too ashamed of themselves to admit how stupid they’ve been.

Friends don’t let friends apologize for Bush and his Pirate Gang.

I’d take a Village full of Gays, Jews, Liberals and Hollywood types who would be honest and sincere with me before I’d take a gas-guzzling SUV filled with people who’d lie for Bush.

Day 1,900 of America Held Hostage – our White House and the Executive Branch overrun by the Karl Rove-controlled Neo-con Fascist Regime.
Impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, run the rest of their cabal out of our Nation’s Capital.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-02-22T09:57:00.000-08:00

THE MADNESS OF
KING GEORGE XLIII
Posted by Picasa

2006-02-18T09:37:00.000-08:00

GONZO’S BOB AND WEAVE
By Jerry Tenuto

(This column appears in The Lone Star Iconoclast and at LoneStarIcon.com the week of Feb. 13, 2006)

I wonder if Alberto Gonzales has any boxing experience in his background. Watching the Attorney General expertly, blithely bob and weave his way around virtually every question put to him by the Senate Judiciary Committee last Monday (February 6, 2006) concerning the RoveBush Fascist Regime’s policy of electronic spying on American citizens was reminiscent of the “float like a butterfly” style of one youthful Cassius Clay.

For some unknown reason, the normally reliable Committee Chair Arlen Specter (R-PA) did not require that Gonzo be sworn in at the onset of proceedings, a`la the unprecedented courtesy extended the oil pals of Bush #43 and Dark Lord Cheney by Ted Stevens (R-AK). Why Specter let AG the AG slide on this formality is anybody’s guess.

By the way, unfettered by the specter of possible perjury charges the oil big shots lied about their secret 2001 meetings and energy policy plots with Dark Lord the Dick Cheney.

My supposition is if tight with King George XLIII or his Gang of Four one neither be held to truthiness nor sincerity when providing, or dodging, testimony at Senate or Congressional Hearings.

At one point, Alberto invoked the antiquated, lame-brained and paranoid policies ill-advisedly thrown into use by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. These tactics included invasions of privacy as well as restrictions on 1st Amendment Freedom of Speech, resurrected by the current regime. As is the case now, the Wilson White House was enabled by the lunkheaded Supremes of its day.

In another wrong-headed comparison, Gonzo likened today’s supercomputer-generated and satellite-enhanced techniques, dealing with peoples of all nations, to those employed by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War – wherein essentially every participant was an American, and it was virtually impossible to distinguish who sympathized with whose cause.

He also referred to George Washington’s reliance on electronic (?) surveillance, and, as this Rove-controlled Regime loves to do, fell back on the FDR card; this time it was that he used electronic techniques within American boundaries.

What’s the difference, you might ask? Well, we’re not fighting Nazis or Japanese Imperialists, any kind of organized, properly trained and militarily functional Axis-type Wehrmacht. This is not an all out war with an enemy force comprised of a large, mobile military that could strike within our shores en masse. Rather, it is a “war” of our Neo-con Executive Branch’s own design, brewed behind closed doors in a cauldron filled with falsities for their own glory and to amass more wealth.

With the exception of several well-programmed questions from three of the Republican Senators on the Committee, whom to America’s misfortune and chagrin do little more than waste space in Washington, D.C., Gonzo answered nary an inquiry put to him. These three schlubs, all honorable men, I am sure, are among the 9% of GOP loyalists who have upon their desks rubber stamps marked “YES – for Jesus and Bush #43,” and “NO – to American Freedoms.” They also excel at lobbing Wiffle balls to all Bush nominees, tossing live hand grenades at anyone with a true sense of Liberty.

You’ll know them by their names, as they run with the other six usual suspects of lopsided thinking: Tom Coburn (OK); John Cornyn (TX); Jeff Sessions (AL). Here we have three of the nine U.S. Senators who think it’s perfectly okie-dokie to torture anyone our military or intelligence community or executive branch or whomever sees fit. And of 18 members on the Senate Judiciary Committee, thankfully their imprimaturi for King George XLIII to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants - in this instance spying on American citizens - are outnumbered 15 to three in favor of our Constitutional rights.

How is it creeps like these guys get elected to lofty office in the first place?

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

(Lewis Carroll, JABBERWOCKY, from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

Gonzo couldn’t answer questions as to how many people had had their telephone calls intercepted.

Nor could he answer how many, if any, viable leads or arrests had been attributed to this “program,” as he kept calling it.

When asked what was being done with the hours and hours of data the NSA and whichever other unknown agencies were collecting, Gonzo had no idea.

Neither could, nor would, Gonzo tell America if there were any wholly domestic intrusions upon private communications.

He was neither certain of the law, nor how to apply it.

Gonzo couldn’t even come up with a straight answer when Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) reminded him of his denial of any knowledge of such a “program” during appointment hearings in January of 2005.

Since when did it become the function of the Attorney General to run interference for the president and his staff? Does the AG’s job description not read something along the lines of protecting the people of the Nation?

For some seven hours, the Attorney General of the United States sat in front of 18 duly elected Senators, plus anyone in the World who was watching, and essentially denied any knowledge of what in the hell kind of intelligence gathering was going on from the Oval Office, through the VP’s lair of darkness, swirling around unknown agencies, aimed at who knows which American citizens for what precise purpose.

Following non-answer after non-answer ad nauseum, Ranking Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT) apologized to Gonzo thusly: “I’m sorry, Mr. Attorney General. I forgot. You can’t answer any questions that might be relevant to this.”

Here is the whole crux of the matter: WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT THIS REGIME IS UP TO.

Our best guess as Liberal-thinking, freedom-loving, progressive Americans of the homo sapien variety can only be that whatever it is Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove and Dark Lord the Dick Cheney have concocted with this electronic spying scheme is nefarious in the worst possible manner.

These blackguards used a phony reverence in idealogical Christianity to sway voters. They doctored an electorate for votes that weren’t acquired honestly, then made illegal use of the Nation’s top court to seal and finalize their theft of ultimate power.

Next, they allowed the tragedies of 9/11/2001 to occur – still the RoveBush Fascists’ rallying cry -- not unlike the 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which resulted in Germany’s National Socialist Party taking firm control. Their swiftly enacted Homeland Security Act, much like our rushed through Congress at the insistence of Bush and Cheney with no-time-for-in-depth-scrutinization Patriot Act, took broad swipes at personal freedoms such as: Free expression of opinion; right of privacy of postal and electronic communications; right of assembly and association; protection against unlawful search and seizure; individual property rights; states’ rights of self-government.

Don’t the previous two paragraphs seem just a little too familiar?

These ersatz leaders faked a crisis solely to stoke the fears within the lowest common denominator of the public. This was merely an excuse to gain support for the illegal, unwarranted invasion of a sovereign nation on the other side of the Planet for no reason whatsoever (if one doesn’t count stealing its oil and raking in billions in war profits).

When German generals disagreed with the Little Corporal, they were executed or “vanished.” Whichever American generals dared to be honest with the Regime concerning the lack of feasibility in its war schemes were removed from command or publicly humiliated.

The following places could almost be interchangeable – Sudetenland; Afghanistan; Poland; Iraq; France; Iran; Russia; Syria; England…

The miscreants who invaded and overtook our White House created a war, which isn’t really a war in the traditional sense, just so young Georgie could repeatedly call himself “commander-in-chief,” a title I’ve heard no other president use, and tell us how he’s a “war president” with powers far beyond those of mortal men.

An’ he don’t hafta folla the law whenever it gits in his way.

The non-communicative performance Alberto Gonzales presented to the Senate Judiciary Committee, not to mention his every public comment in support of any cockamamie idea King George XLIII gets into his head, is proof positive of the extreme level of contempt this regime has for the regular folks that are America.

There was an observer in the gallery during the hearings who waited until… I dunno, maybe until he’d heard enough bullshit or too much of nothing. Or, perhaps the guy was just hungry and ready to go to lunch. Anyway, he utilized his 1st Amendment right and expressed the opinion that Gonzo was a Fascist.

Sen. Specter was willing to let him stay if he sat down and was no longer disruptive. The gentleman opted to leave, apparently having had his say, or was too hungry to hang around, or both.

The good Senator then sort of apologized to Gonzo, telling him he wasn’t a Fascist.

But we know better, don’t we?

The day after Gonzo took the Senators on an all day merry-go-round ride, King George XLIII and Queen Laura begrudgingly changed their plans to attend the funeral services for Coretta Scott King. Needless to say, they were seriously upstaged, with no effort whatsoever, by everyone else on the dais.

To a small extent, I give him a C+ for moxie – there was no Herr Rove visible to cover his ass.

The erstwhile King squirmed like a six-year-old in his first suit while the Queen of Adding Nothing to the National Discourse sat dispassionately upright, dagger eyes fixed on all speakers with her face scrunched up as if sucking on lemons.

As Jon Stewart quipped on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” the next night, and I also noted privately, Bush was definitely out of his element, surrounded by “a room filled with thousands of people who, outside of the woman on his left and possibly his Dad, didn’t vote for him.”

It really had to fry their green 'maters when one speaker after another used the opportunity to slam imbecilic White House policies, from the illegal, unnecessary wars to massive cuts in social programs to lack of aid for Katrina victims and New Orleans in general.

The biggest blow to Georgie and Laura’s combined, over-inflated ego had to come when Bill and Hillary Clinton received a rousing ovation – and repeated accolades of love -- from the 10,000 good folks who came to honor one of America’s finest women and an undisputed leader in the movement for Civil Rights and equality for all Americans.

And unsolicited pledges of votes for Hillary for President in 2008!

I sincerely believe that Martin and Coretta, together again at last after 38 years, were smiling warmly down on New Birth Missionary Baptist Church as the people gave a voice united to remind the Bushes what America was all about.

Just watching the proceedings, I could tell King George and Queen Laura still weren’t getting it. ‘Tis hard to know reality when you refuse to let it touch you.

On Thursday morning the faux president-who-would-be-king spoke, as usual at a time when most people can’t watch, to the National Guard Association. (For some reason he likes the NGs, and they think he’s just peachy-keen, despite the fact that their membership has been screwed over royally with reckless abandon by the insanity of RoveBushCheneyRumsfeldRice misguided policies.)

As is his standard speech in front of these war-friendly groups, King George read a laundry list of how much spending was gonna to go to what they needed (applause), and they were gonna git this piece a’armored stuff (more applause) an’ that piece a’armored stuff (still more applause).

The sad thing is, these suckers were applauding the King for telling them he was gonna git ‘em the same stuff he and Dark Lord Cheney and Rummy have been telling them they’re gonna have for three years now – and they ain’t got most of it yet.

King George made some half-assed attempts to try to justify his spying on Americans scam by bringing up old news, such as a 2002 plot to attack the tallest building in Los Angeles by Asian terrorists. They were going to hijack an airliner by wearing shoe bombs.

This was one of 10 alleged terrorist plots the U.S. and its allies foiled around the world according to a list released by the White House last October. Typically, there are no real facts to back up the veracity of the Regime’s claim to the existence of these plots.

If there were any “terrorists” involved, they would have been “renditioned” to who knows where, kept incognito, and tortured until there was a confession. Or they died.

And there is absolutely no indication that any wiretapping programming led to these plots that may or may not have existed.

Senate Intelligence Committee members Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), as well as yours truly, were wary of this disclosure considering the timing King George picked. In separate comments they each questioned its validity and viability.

I wonder why we, the taxpaying public, never heard about this before.

Funny how Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was also kept unaware of this dastardly plot against his city – until King George blabbed it on worldwide television some four years later.

(According to a Feb. 9 article in the Washington Post by Carol D. Leonnig, the Constitutionality and legality of Bush’s wiretapping scheme has been questioned by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who presides over a secret surveillance court. Her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, along with at least one top Justice Department lawyer, expressed the same concerns.)

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress in January passed a budget bill curtailing or pretty much eliminating all social programs. Then the RoveBush Fascist 2007 Fantasy Budget came out last week, calling for enough military spending to overshadow any remaining social programs.

Thus, the people funding the Government are getting absolutely nothing back other than Weapons of Mass Destruction – and loss of personal freedoms.

Must I really refer back to Germany of the 1930s?

The RoveBush Fascists have no interest in governance. They only want to rule. And the only people whose well-being they’re concerned with is their white-tie, privileged and powerful base.

In “Magnum Force,” when Inspector Harry Callahan’s partner asked whether they should follow the Mercury or the Cadillac limousine, he replied, “Stick with the money.”

Remember – if they won’t tell us whom they’re spying on, we can’t possibly know whom they’re not spying on.

There’s no way I trust King George XLIII, Dark Lord the Dick Cheney, Gonzo and the rest of that cabal to not spy on Americans as they please.

Can you trust them?

Honestly?

America continues to be Held Hostage with our White House and the Executive Branch overrun by the Karl Rove-controlled Neo-con Fascist Regime.
Impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, run the rest of their cabal out of our Nation’s Capital.
© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-02-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

FDR AND THE KING

By Jerry Tenuto

(This column appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast and at www.LoneStarIcon.com the week of Feb. 7, 2006)

“…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...”

That famous phrase was uttered early on by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933. Although many, yours truly included, have erroneously attributed it to America’s entry into World War II, he was speaking about the raging Depression. It set the tone for the rest of the speech, his next four years in office, and, as fate would have it, the balance of the man’s life.

Being neither oracle nor prophet, FDR could not possibly have known of the impending births of a relatively small bunch of individuals, and the havoc their existences – once brought together -- would thrust upon our Nation and the rest of the Planet.

Neither could he have foreseen the event, just shy of 60 years after his own forthcoming Pearl Harbor, that would open the door for these brigands to put their plot into full motion.

The first thing we have to overcome is false fear that Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove has been seeding American minds and hearts with since 9/11.

As I’ve noted here in this column, during both his speeches to the Conservative 1% privileged folks of New York State and more recently the RNC, the Minister of Pulling W’s Strings has no new ideas to introduce to the voters of America.

Why would the GOP need any? There’s already misaligned voting districts unfavorable to minorities and other Democratic-based demographics; contracts for electronic voting machines hard-wired to deliver pro-GOP votes; voting officials in key precincts who are certain to do their duty and keep the riff-raff out; states like Georgia with new laws, enacted by Republican-dominated legislatures, that make it difficult if not impossible for minorities and poor to vote.

FDR’s line, and I’ve never before read or heard the rest of it quoted, went like so: “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

This is exactly what Rove has counted on, and gotten away with – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. Terror from what? This filters down from Herr Karl through Bush #43, Dark Lord the Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi “But I really am a single, middle-aged Black woman?” Rice, Ken “Can’t Hold a Real Job” Mehlman, and the rest of the war-loving, torture-approving members of the Senate, Congress, the Military hierarchy, to be spread like manure by the mainstream press, then beaten into far too many skulls by the extreme rightist talk radio clucks.

According to one poll I noticed the other day, 76% of Republican respondents are still buying his bullshit that somebody is going to attack us, and it’s a good idea that we send our young adults into Iran to be slaughtered there, too.

What we genuinely have to fear are the Republicans who spout “Constitution this” and “Liberty that” and “our real Democracy” – while in the meantime they’ve got the machinery in high gear dismantling each and every personal freedom that makes America great.

And with each passing second and every shady deal these guys’ money clips just keep getting heavier and fatter.

Tom DeLay has lost his position as House Majority Leader, thank Heaven. So who’s the frontrunner for the position? Roy Blunt, the very guy Smiler Tom groomed to be his Capo. What in the hell kind of reform is that?

While we’re on the subject, it seems that a wise move for the House Republicans might be to get rid of Dennis Hastert as Speaker. He’s not without stink and manure-encrusted shoes from the K Street lobbyist fiasco.

Even when Hastert suggested changing the rules about lobbyists, many within the GOP rank and file went ballistic. These good folks don’t want any reform at all, schmucks like Jerry Weller, the DeLay/Hastert bootlicker of my 11th Illinois District, a taker of Abramoff money, who rubber stamps anything the White House or Smiler Tom says to approve.

Then there’s the other bootlicker in the neighboring 15th District, Tim Johnson.

Tweedledufus and Tweedledufuser.

It will be a much brighter day when the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives is improved by the removal of the two aforementioned wastes of space, and they are replaced with Democratic newcomers Dr. David Gill (15th) and former CIA counter terrorism operative John Pavich (11th), among others.

Also in that speech, FDR took a shot directly at greed and corruption: “Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing…

“Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This nation asks for action, and action now.”

Not one person outside of the Democratic Party has taken an honest stand to address the serious level of corruption that permeates the Republican machine. In truth, it’s more appropriate to call the lot a cabal.

We as a Nation have far more to fear from these incompetents who neither wish to nor know how to govern for the people. There are now four sitting justices on the Supremes who are members of the Federalist Society. It’s sad, but most Americans don’t know that. Sadder still, even more of us have no idea who or what the Federalist Society is.

Short version, the FS was begun in 1982 by Edwin Meese, William Rehnquist, et al, with funding from Richard Mellon Scaife and cohorts to reach out to and recruit young Conservative law students for internships with the Supremes and other prestigious government positions. The intent was to get American courts back to the far Right, to what this small group of individuals considered to be their proper place.

In other words, disgruntled rich white judges, attorneys and politicians who want everything their way. Some of the society’s more famous (or infamous) names include Robert Bork, Ken Starr, Antonin Scalia, John Bolton, Samuel Alito, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, John Negroponte, Michael Chertoff, John Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas (oops, where’d the Black guy come from?).

Look at all we’ve lost since having the power of our votes being counted dismissed by the late, ungreat William Rehnquist:
Nearly 3,000 dead on 9/11 who may not have perished had someone in the White House paid attention or cared; schools going down the tubes; loss of 1st Amendment Rights, especially when it applies to criticizing the Bush regime; no citizen is allowed to hear the faux-president or Dark Lord Cheney speechify in person without signing his or her soul to the devil; money flying out of our pockets and straight into the coffers of the big oil companies in the form of exorbitant profits; all the president’s friends, cronies and contributors getting fat; tax dollars being funneled directed from the IRS to Halliburton and its subsidiaries, as well as the other no-bid contractors; New Orleans.

I caught part of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on C-Span today. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Vice Chair, was giving National Intelligence Director Negroponte a dressing down, expressing his dismay at the complete lack of candor from either the intelligence community or the White House concerning King George XLIII’s warrantless eavesdropping policy. He made some excellent points, including the fact that the excuse for informing Committee Chair Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), a Bush lapdog, yet not the rest of the members for lacking necessary clearances as lame and derelict.

Rockefeller ended his time by inquiring who were all these thousands of people this invasion of privacy has saved. Before going on to the next person Roberts, ever the Bushite and hawk, made a snide comment about all those who weren’t killed on the Washington Bridge.

Where in the hell did that come from? What plot against the Washington Bridge?
Does this fool have any idea how much in the way of high-grade military explosives it would take to even make a dent in that bridge?

Then Negroponte, the career expert at taking what appears to be the truth then making it something completely different, began to speak. Interminably. And he said nothing. For well over an hour. Maybe two. I dunno, I lost track.

It was not Benjamin Franklin, but a contemporary of his, Richard Jackson, who most likely wrote, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Despite the author, the fact remains that he’s Bush #43, not King George XLIII, and has no business listening in on our telephone calls or reading our e-mails.

On the flip side, the president is a public servent and answerable to both Houses, the Courts, and the People. So where are ALL the photos, documents and e-mails the White House has been asked to produce the past five years?

And Dark Lord the Dick Cheney has even less excuse not to come across with documents as requested.

We are the richest, most powerful country in the World. We have the potential to lead on many fronts. But part of the reason we can’t is, as former President Jimmy Carter and John “Saint Jack” Danforth (Episcopal priest; former Ambassador and Senator-MO) there are too many evangelicals mucking up the Government because they can’t distinguish where their version(s) of the Bible ends and where the law of man begins.

And it has become painfully obvious, far too many of these quasi-evangelicals are as corrupt as there are interpretations of the Book.

While reading Roosevelt’s inauguration speech I was impressed by the sheer wisdom of the man. Bill Clinton attempted to display wisdom from time to time, but was forced by the need to reach the lowest common denominator to utilize the KISS method – keep it simple, stupid. Prior to Bill, Jimmy Carter occasionally touched upon brilliance and wisdom; John Kennedy was a wise man and it often shone through in his speeches.

There hasn’t been anything even remotely close to that which might resemble wisdom emanating from anyone who works in the West Wing, including the highly educated Condi Rice, since January 20, 2001.

As a reminder to the Republicans and their continual talk of war, that Democrats are wusses who won’t protect America, here’s what the man who was forced to take on the Japanese and the Germans at the same time (as well as Grandpa Bush, indicted by FDR’s Justice Department for consorting with and profiteering from the Nazis):

“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor – the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others – the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”

Day 1,886 of America Held Hostage – our White House and the Executive Branch overrun by the Karl Rove-controlled Neo-con Fascist Regime.
Impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

DUBYA & THE BISHOP

2006-02-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

(I'd love to take credit for this, but it was sent to me by a friend.)

Provided through the Courtesy of Mr. Lynn Amacher
Original source unknown

Faux-President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit the Methodist Church outside Washington, D.C. as part of his campaign to win back American voters. Bush's press secretary made a visit to the Bishop, and said to him, "We've been getting a lot of bad publicity among Methodists because of Bush's response to the hurricane and the like. We'd gladly make a contribution to the church of $1,000,000 if, during your sermon, you'd say President Bush is a saint."

The Bishop was initially reluctant but thought it over for a few moments and finally said, "The Church is in desperate need of funds. I will agree to do it."

Bush pompously showed up on the next Sunday looking especially smug, and as the service progressed the Bishop began his homily: "George Bush is petty, a self-absorbed hypocrite and a nitwit. He is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel. He has lied about his military record and had the gall to put himself in a jet plane landing on a carrier posing before a banner stating 'Mission Accomplished.' He invaded a country for oil and money, and is using it to lie to the American people. He is the worst example of a Methodist I've ever personally known.

"But compared to Dick Cheney and some members of his cabinet, George Bush is a saint."

2006-02-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

AMERICA NEEDS A LARGE BONE SAW

(This column appeared in THE LONE STAR ICONOCLAST, Crawford, Texas the week of
January 31, 2006)

By Jerry Tenuto

There are two definitions for “gangrene” in my trusty, well-worn Merriam-Webster Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1963 edition), both of them nouns.

The first: local death of soft tissues due to loss of blood supply.

The second, and lesser known, is: a mortal evil.

The adjective tense of the word is “gangrenous.”

Medically, one of the symptoms of gangrene is a foul-smelling discharge, not unlike the stench that hovers over Washington, D.C., excreting from both the White House and the Hill, where Republican plantation overseers rule by dictate.

Another symptom is discoloration, as our nation’s colors turn from red, white and blue to black.

The patient suffering from gangrene may experience persistent or severe pain; a general ill feeling; septic shock – just as the United States has since December 2000.

Treatments include strong medicinal dosing, removal of dead tissue, and quite often amputation of infected limb(s).

Frighteningly, both definitions apply to the greedy Republican leadership who, along with their rubber-stamp “show me the money” lapdogs, have abused their power and subverted their constituents’ trust, thus dragging our Nation to the brink of disaster.

Considering how our deeply infected Executive and Legislative Branches have become gangrenous with this unprecedented Culture of Corruption, the only remedies are removal of the morally dead and complete amputation of those with no conscience.

Because, in reality, the shenanigans that have been going on under the guise of our Nation’s business; what these selfish bastards have been doing to, not for, the citizens of this Country; how the RoveBush Fascists have terrorized the World around us; this determination to raise the office of president to that of “Fuhrerprinzip” (unitary or unilateral executive), thus allowing one person absolute decision-making power with no checks or balances, truly is a mortal evil.

On Friday, January 20, Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove slithered out from under whatever rock it is he hides to address the Republican National Committee at its winter meeting. This is the usual type of forum for the likes of Herr Rove, George W. Bush, Dark Lord the Dick Cheney, et al – friendly faces, no dissenters.

The RNC actually addressed him as the Honorable Karl Rove! Honorable how? It’s not like he’s done anything honorable in his life – he couldn’t even finish college. Lincoln was honorable. Pope John Paul II. Will Rogers. Roy Rogers. Hell, any shady character Groucho ever played was more honorable than Karl Rove. He probably hasn’t been honorable since being in diapers!

This guy’s a professional liar and character assassin, and he’s made tens of millions doing that. Come to think of it, I can see how that’s what the RNC would consider as “honorable.”

In his address, Herr Rove laid out attack plans for the 2006 mid-term elections. Essentially, he’s leading Ken Mehlman and the moneyed troops down the same path as 2002 and 2004 – FEAR!

Who else but the privileged could afford to attend this RNC shindig?

The first part of Herr Rove’s address was a tired retread of Rove’s June speech at the Conservative Party of New York State, beating the drum about the superiority of today’s GOP vis a` vis all previous and existing political movements:

“broad and inclusive” – as long as you’re white, privileged and Christian;
“self-assured and optimistic” – convey a smarmy, jock/fratboy attitude with the assurance that you’re going to beat those pesky indictments;
“forward-leaning and dominant” – we’re leaning over your shoulder and watching your every move, Mr. and Ms. Average American.

Masking the fact that reasoned debate has been stifled by single-party control of
the Executive and both Legislative Branches, he called it “the rise of a great cause.”

The GOP is still taking credit for the demise of the Soviet Union, when it was simply coincidence that the USSR happened to run out of money on Saint Ronnie’s watch. Then America’s own A-#1 Fascist erroneously stated that “today we are winning the war against Islamic fascism.” Takes one to know one.

I don’t see where we’re winning squat. These fools don’t get it, you can’t beat a fanatical religious ideology.

Some more pearls of Herr Rove’s statements born in Fantasyland:

“Republicans rebuilt our national defenses” – then wasted them all in Iraq;
“cut taxes and spurred economic growth” – cut for the 1%ers, then three days later Ford Motor Company announced the losses of 30,000 American jobs (figure in GM’s earlier announcement, that’s 60,000 from just the two corporations);
“ended ‘stagflation’” – yep, pay is going down, prices are skyrocketing;
“limited government growth” – a) refer to national defenses, b) infrastructure improvement is at a standstill since 2001, c) this must have been meant as a joke with the national debt at a record, insurmountable high and growing each second;
“reformed welfare” – okay, so now only white folks get to eat and sleep under a roof;
“insisted on accountability and high standards in education” – crowded classrooms, overtaxed teachers, worn and outdated texts, but they have all children taking the same tests to make sure everyone's in lockstep unison;
“took important steps to protect and strengthen marriage and the family” – DCFS;
“stood up for judicial activism and for constitutionalism” – records show that by and large far more Conservative judges are apt to make activist rulings (Samuel Alito among them) than Liberal judges, and stomping on the Constitution is not standing up for the Constitution.

Herr Rove goes on and on about how we’re a nation at war, and nobody but
George W. “I don’t wanna go to VietNam, Daddy” Bush is the only person capable of leading the Nation to victory, with Republicans the only party strong enough to protect American citizens.

He would have people believe something as idiotic as Democrats don’t understand the danger from these tyrants in the Middle East.

However, the Democrats do understand that. Just as we know all too well the danger festering right inside our own Government from the tyrants who illegally seized our property at 1600 Pennsylvania late in 2000.

We also comprehend that this faux president, nor any other president, has the right to spy on American citizens, or any other human being who happens to be within the borders of the 50 States or Nation’s territories.

That’s part of the same damned Constitution Herr Rove stated his version of the Republican Party stood up for.

However, because we Democrats do not wish to cede our liberties and freedoms to the likes of Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of their gang of rotters, nor sacrifice our sons and daughters to be wasted as cannon fodder in a perpetual war for oil and riches, which are already being divvied up among the same (not one of whom has a son or daughter they will offer up), Herr Ubermeister calls “…them (us) wrong – deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.”

No matter what either Herr Rove, George W., the Dick Cheney, or that mealy-mouthed Attorney General Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says, according to former NSA employee Russell Tice the 1st Commandment of the Agency is operatives “are not allowed to go after Americans.” The duty of the NSA is to deal strictly with overseas communications.

How can there be any way to spin that?

(Mr. Tice, a career intelligence officer, was fired in May 2005 when he offered to tell Congress about the wiretap program. Despite the existence of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Act, he still lost his job. Mr. Tice has yet to be called by any member or committee. His comments were taken from an interview conducted by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!)

Nothing like sitting down, discussing things and working together, eh, Herr Rove?

Rove blathered on about how the American economy has grown tremendously this past year, faster than any other industrialized nation. Why, we’re the envy of the world!

Thanks to the Republican leadership, we owe tons of money to the Chinese, among others. The four-and-a-half million jobs these rich schmucks brag about are mostly low-paying retail and service jobs to replace higher income factory and skilled positions.

Nobody’s talking about the Christmas season past because retail sales stunk. Ford and GM are forced into massive closings and lay-offs because nobody can afford the cars or gas.

Airbus outsold Boeing during 2005, and there seems to be no let up in sight.

What is this cockamamie garbage about “real, disposable personal income is up?” If that were the case, soft spending like movie revenues wouldn’t be down, and all homes would have three computers with HDTV in every room.

People can’t even save for their retirement!

The only industries showing large profits are those that are in bed with the RoveBush Fascists – oil, retail lending, and the war machine. These businesses are raking it in by the boatload, all with Government assistance (including some very helpful decisions by the Supremes).

Americans are in debt to retail lenders to the tune of hundreds of billions, amounts that can’t even be calculated. This isn’t even including mortgages and vehicles.

If they’d ever land the jet somewhere unexpected and cruise the countryside, these incompetents might notice the factories and farms that are out of operation. Not that any of them would care.

The bottom line is, there isn’t one single person among the Republican leadership, and especially in the White House, who feels your, my, our pain.

The first time I remember hearing “Hail to the Chief” being played was during the funeral for slain President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, bushwhacked in Dallas, Texas, by people and interests who were not really Lee Harvey Oswald.

Or Harvey Oswald Lee. Or Oswald Lee Harvey.

Or whatever in hell the poor schlub’s name was.

(An astute reader once suggested I should use “bushwhacked,” not murdered or assassinated. I guess the word does make more sense. It’s pure Texas, and the first syllable seems to hold some clue to the truth.)

This morning, as George W. Bush approached the stage at Kansas State University for the first in a weeklong series of RNC planned lovefests, “Hail to the Chief” came across loud and clear.

The combination of that song and that man being in the same space at the same time makes the hairs at the back of my neck stand straight up. Despite several medications, my blood pressure rises; my skin crawls.

Were there ever a person who did not deserve to have “Hail to the Chief” played in his honor, it would have to be George W. Bush, the two time never-elected president of the United States.

As I write this, George W. Bush is blathering on in front of the typical, RNC-friendly audience at Kansas State. It is the first road speech in the Republican Party’s 2006 campaign to continue its stranglehold on the United States Government, and Herr Rove’s continued dismemberment of our Constitution.

The advertised message was allegedly the regime’s sorely bungled War on Terror.

So Georgie dropped the September 11 reference in the first 30 seconds.

And, as has been the practice of Herr Ubermeister’s Maschinen von Propaganda, the date was inserted repeatedly throughout this pep talk.

Iraq. Insurgency. They can’t beat us – militarily. We will win. Blah, blah, blah.

Georgie kept repeating the pre-2004 campaign mantra over and over… and over again.

How about “my Daddy fought the Japanese, now I talk peace with the Japanese leader.” Impressive. Of course, not one word as to how he stayed home and partied right through the unpleasantness in VietNam.

Then George W. Bush added the rose-colored glasses view that he and his worthless gang of greedy, self-serving handlers were laying the foundation for future American Presidents to be able to talk peace with all world leaders.

Because he was bringing the freedom and liberty that all people across the Planet so desperately desired.

George W. Bushocracy.

How Right-wing does a state university have to be to host an event where a sitting president (phony or otherwise) appears in front of an audience of select college Republicans and thousands of military personnel in uniform?

I found the entire set-up, and setting as it was, to be frightening. Had this taken place at my alma mater, or most other colleges, there would have been a hue and cry that would have scared the bejesus out of even the soldiers in attendance.

Uniformed soldiers have no place on a state-sponsored campus, especially to attend what essentially was a political rally.

Then there are Dark Lord the Dick Cheney’s speeches to the privileged. I love how he always includes the same four mantras: Democrats are reprehensible (whenever they call the regime on its fabrications); torture good; eavesdropping necessary; and his catchphrase, “I like ties in the Senate, because whenever I vote we win.”

That means the 1%ers win.

Trouble is, whenever he votes, the vast majority of Americans lose.

Hint to foreign nationals: Just sign over rights to your nation’s oil and other natural resources to Cheney now and save yourself the suffering

I would like to share the following quote from Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) (as posted on the Information Clearing House website):

"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider... the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think... for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about... and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated... by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us...

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'... must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing... Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone... you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father... could never have imagined."

Duck and cover, World citizens, when King George XLIII unleashes his war toys on your sovereign nation so that you might live free – if he doesn’t blow you to bits first.

Funny how Rove, Bush and Cheney completely ignore any of the extensive, pervasive corruption running rampant throughout their party. Can anybody say indictments? These guys sure can’t.

It’s almost as though they have insider information that no one, including Herr Rove, is going to take a fall. Must be that “self-assured and optimistic” thing he mentioned.

Why should impeachment proceedings against a president who really isn’t a president hinge on just this illegal spying on Americans rap?

Even though he began doing it prior to 9/11.

Geez, there should be more than enough reasons since November of 2000 to make any number of strong cases against the puppet prez, and Cheney, as well.

And nobody less than you, Herr Ubermeister Rove. You’re about as patriotic as sashimi on Thanksgiving.

America has three serious wounds that have been festering for 1,879 days. We have suffered from these vile, odious scourges for far too long.

We must amputate these gangrenous mortal evils before they bury us all.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

2006-02-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

Rightwingmediaosos – A BLIGHT UPON AMERICA

(Originally appeared in The Lone Star Iconoclast the week of January 2, 2006)

By Jerry Tenuto

Back in March, I introduced you to my old pal Ken (not his real name).

Ken and I have been as thick as thieves since being stationed together in Germany. That was 1976, a lifetime ago.

He’s a hell of a guy, closer to me than my own brother.

Ken’s guided me through some pretty difficult times; I like to think he’ll call on me whenever help is needed.

And I love him.

I’m not talkin’ Brokeback Mountain kind of love here, but a familial, mutual respect that transcends friendship.

Hugging is okay, but only when fully clothed; no touching between the breastplate and knees, nor kissing on the lips.

In 2000, Ken wouldn’t even consider voting for George W. Bush, or any candidate from either of the “two equally guilty parties.”

He made a silent protest by tossing his vote away on Ralph Nader, a wholly wasted effort, especially in Illinois.

I’m really not sure whom Ken voted for in 2004.

What I do know is that for someone who regularly claimed strong dislike for the Army systems, and bucked its authority at every turn, he sure has done a 180-degree about face.

The festering boil on the nose of America that is the RoveBush Fascist Regime has entered pretty much every conversation we’ve engaged in since some time before the 2004 election debacle.

Methinks Ken’s intellect hath been subjugated through laving with an agent of excessive cleansing strength, a poultice of such puissance wherein all logical conception becomes perverse and reversion is a road fraught with strife.

In short, my good friend suffers from too much AM talk radio, FoxNewsChannel and MSNBC, or extreme “Rightwingmediaosos.”

It doesn’t help that he spends all day, every day, five days (sometimes six or seven) a week, semi-incarcerated with a bunch of Central Illinois good ol’ boys and wimmins in the middle of nowhere.

That’s no place for a University of Illinois graduate from Chicago to be stuck.

It’ll definitely do strange things to the mind.

Like the conversation we had on his Christmas evening, my first night of Chanukah.

One topic that came up was torture.

My take was that we live in a democratic society, where it’s common belief that torturing another human is wrong.

Ken said that he’s perfectly okay with our government torturing people. It’s one way to keep us safe.

Says I, most of what the torturers get out them is false information.

He said that doesn’t matter. They’re enemies of our country.

Who are these enemies of our country? asks I.

The people they’re taking prisoner and torturing, responds Ken.

Okay, I say, all these hundreds of poor schleps that some nameless United States government agency, in its infinite wisdom, pulled out of their houses, then were blindfolded and swept away to another country, “renditioned” is the new gentler term, to be kept incommunicado, beaten and abused for months, even years, sometimes killed, only to be sent home with an, “Sorry, mistaken identity, our bad.” There’s nothing wrong with that?

No, says Ken. We’ve been doing it for years.

What? When? I inquire.

I read it on the Internet, he replies.

So I asked Ken if he remembered what middle 20th Century regime it was that kicked in doors and pulled people out of their homes at random, to be dragged away to the unknown without cause -- the same reason that made it necessary for us to have even been stationed in Germany?

(Since this conversation took place, it has come to light that “renditions” were begun during the administration of President Bill Clinton, about 10 years ago. There were, however, several differences: Clinton’s goal was to root out and destroy al Qaeda, which he left to the pros at the CIA; captured individuals were bona fide suspects, not innocents caught up in blanket dragnets as dictated by the RoveBush and Dark Lord Cheney fanatics; captives were transported to friendly countries and turned over to local authorities, rather than kept in U.S. facilities or interrogated by CIA personnel.)

Then the wiretap crap came up.

Ken said it was perfectly all right with him.

Look, I responded, I didn’t spend seven years in the Army so Dubya could play King George XLIII and his gang of draft-dodging, layabout rich evildoers could run our Constitution and Bill of Rights through a shredder. Remember, this country had its own insurgents who ran the King’s soldiers out what, like three times about two hundred years or so ago.

Well, I was in the Army nearly four years, says Ken, and if Bush wants to order wiretaps it’s okay with me. He’s not gonna tap my phone. And Mr. Clinton had his own wiretap situation.

Here you go again, Ken, bringing in Clinton when it doesn’t mean a damned thing! Clinton’s “wiretap situation” was Linda Tripp breaking the law in Virginia or wherever – a state law. Clinton had nothing to do with that wiretap! Why is every defense of George W. Bush an assault on somebody named Clinton, whether or not it has any bearing on the subject? Because that’s the only argument the Right-wing Neo-cons have! Why do you buy their convoluted bullshit!?

The president has the right to order wiretaps.

No, he doesn’t! It’s against the law, plain and simple. Bush thinks that he can just make this stuff up as he goes along, that as president he has unlimited powers. He wasn’t even honestly elected, Ken! Now, they’ve found evidence of taps beyond the original thirty or so Bush admitted to. Lots more.

We spoke of many other things that evening, but for some reason Ken just will not see the errors of Bush #43’s ways.

That need not be a permanent condition. It is possible to bring him back from the dark side.

Hope springs eternal!

We need to get help for our friends and family who once were able to think logically and reason through everyday situations with common sense. Only a fool would deny that there have been myriad rotten goings on within our White House these past five years.

Or someone who’s had their brain scrubbed white by the Ultra-Conservative hate media – “Rightwingmediaosos.”

In truth, what have these slugs done for the internal workings of our Nation? Most Children Left Behind? Ted Stevens’ $250 Million Bridge to Nowhere, Alaska? Ted Stevens’ other $250 Million “Ted Stevens Bridge” in Alaska? The new and improved New Orleans?

The worse alternative is to say “It’s always been like that” or “The Democrats aren’t any better.”

That’s exactly what the Neo-cons want, keep the status quo. It’s much easier to burrow into the ecosystem of American life and culture and disrupt it from inside while nobody’s paying attention.

Which is precisely what’s been happening since William H. Rehnquist paid back Saint Ronald Reagan and Daddy Bush by illegally installing Spurious George as presidential poster child.

Take up the fight. I don’t mean a fight with fists or weapons, that’s their way. Our fight utilizes brainpower, hearts, words, deeds – take a stand for your country, for your family, your children and grandchildren, for your friends and your pets: Stamp out
Rightwingmediaosos
before it stamps out the free America we all knew and loved through the 20th Century!

I MISS THE SIXTIES

2006-02-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

By Jerry Tenuto
(Originally appeared in THE LONE STAR ICONOCLAST the week of March 1, 2005)

I miss the '60s...

Not in the same way I miss being able to enjoy munching popcorn at a movie or peanuts at a Cubs game. Nor like the gratification of laying solid wood on a high fastball or the good sting as a sinking liner dies in my leathered right palm.

Time, in its own dispassionate yet wise way, has distanced me from such pleasures.

What I miss about the Sixties is the personal approach.

Take protest, for instance. Was it really so long when ago people actually got off their cushions or futons or back pockets (empty as these might have been), ventured outdoors, commingled with other human beings, and publicly expressed themselves?

Imagine — face-to-face communication between real, live people in a unified effort to achieve a common goal. Americans stepped up to the plate and took their swings at social ills and injustices.

So, what happened when the people spoke out?

There was violence, there was more injustice. There was blood in the streets and on college campuses all across our Nation. Mayors, governors, police chiefs and National Guard commanders used every tool and weapon available to stifle their countrymen. Even one President, the soon-to-be deposed Richard M. Nixon, had the FBI and Air Force Intelligence keeping tabs on dissenters who dared to exercise their 1st Amendment right to Freedom of Expression.

Blacks marched as they sang, "We shall overcome." Many white people marched and sang right along with them. Numerous Americans were beaten and thrown in jail together. Some of them died... together. One of those who died was a childhood friend of a young Condoleezza Rice. In the end they overcame.

There was also a war. A most unpopular war. This war was so unpopular, in fact, that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and numerous cronies of this administration pulled whatever strings it took to stay away.

The aforementioned excluded, college students, veterans and young adults all over America took to the streets and campuses in open disapproval of the war and governmental agenda.

People, mostly kids, were beaten, jailed, and shot, even killed, for doing their patriotic duty: Expressing displeasure with unjust policies and an insane war.

It truly is amazing how everything that evolved in the Sixties, all the events that resulted in social reconstruction, seem to have zipped right past Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld. They have led us right back into the same place we were 40 years ago, a war with no purpose or end.

And it really baffles one as to how and why Condi, a victim of racial terrorism in Mississippi circa 1962, would associate herself with these rich white guys.

So, where are the protesters? Why are there no college students marching on the ROTC building?

They're all sitting in their dorms or cushy apartments, playing video games or watching DVD's or surfing the net. They don't live like college kids did 40 years ago. If you were fortunate enough to have a car it was a beater, now student parking lots are overrun with $25,000.00 SUV's. Dormies had maybe a refrigerator and a small stereo, today add a microwave, computer, color TV, bigger stereo, VCR, more, more, more.

Off-campus housing used to mean a cramped apartment or ragged trailer, sparsely furnished. Now it means a luxury town home with all the amenities.

Heck, roommates don't even talk to each other anymore. Scrounging a couple of bucks for beer has become a lost art as well, because everyone has money, an ATM card or a credit card. There seems to be some motivational correlation between social activism and empty pockets.

There was a protest at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale about a year ago. Now, SIU has long been known as a bastion of progressive thinking and free speech. However, one young woman began a movement denouncing the school as being "anti-free speech" because a group or individual is required to sign up in advance to use the Free Speech Area, a policy that has worked for three decades. Essentially, what she wanted to do was hold her protest any time she felt like it and interfere with the freedoms of others.

Here we are in the 21st Century and the post-slacker generation has morphed into moles. They stay hunkered down in their own little electronic worlds and have not really developed proper communication skills.

There is a severe drought in social ability and societal awareness. They get their news from the Internet, most coming from bloggers and precious little of it accurate.

So, what's to protest?

There's no draft. The war's way over in the Mideast and doesn't affect me.

Why should I vote?

DO WAL-MARTS BREED VIOLENCE?

2006-02-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

DO WAL*MARTS BREED VIOLENCE?
By Jerry Tenuto

(Originally appeared in THE LONE STAR ICONOCLAST the week of January 16, 2006.)

As a personal protest against greed, both corporate and that of useless blood kin, I did not set foot inside a Wal*Mart store throughout the entire holiday shopping season.

Truth is, I haven’t entered a Wal*Mart for any reason whatsoever in some 10-12 weeks now.

Oh, there are the occasional treks to Sam’s Club for mass quantities of our favorite paper towels and t-p; a reasonably-priced yet excellent organic whole bean Brazilian coffee not found anywhere else; delicious and devilishly low cost fresh bakery muffins; plus the incidental this and that we know from savvy shopping are true bargains.

But I ain’t a-goin’ into a Wal*Mart agin unless it becomes an absolute necessity.

Virtually all those things we used to go to Wal*Mart for at “everyday low prices” aren’t really as low as they want us to think.

The dishwasher liquid we prefer is cheaper every day at Menards, the do-it-yourself center, even less when it’s on sale. It can often be acquired for less than the WM price if we pay attention to sales at the local supermarkets.

The same it true for headache tablets, shampoo, snacks, just about anything WM sells.

You only need be an informed shopper.

Why, the two of packs of Fruit of the Looms I bought at Target a couple of weeks ago cost less than the last bundle purchased at WM.

Alas, a huge part of what makes shopping at WM so unpleasant isn’t just its own internal totalitarianistic structure; rather it’s that the majority of its clientele seem to be wholly uninformed as to the intricacies of judicious shopping.

These lemmings follow a simple strategy, as laid out in many WM television ads, of the more they buy at Wal*Mart the more they’ll save.

Kind of like following George W. Bush’s “stay the course” thinking to wrack and ruin.

Nor do WMers in general understand the “shop neighborly” concepts of respecting another’s space and don’t block the damned aisle so nobody else can get through.

Thus, by avoiding Wal*Mart you reduce your chances of getting rammed into by ignorant, inconsiderate schlemiels, or their brats, who use the carts as though it’s a practice course for the demolition derby.

And the noise level – OY! In any WM the cacophony is enough to make me want to rip off my ears!

If there’s a given in every Wal*Mart store, I can guarantee the piercing wail of somebody’s young’n screaming bloody murder. Worse yet, the usual methodology of the alleged “adult” in charge for quieting the poor youngster is often a public display of corporal punishment… the result being an increase in screaming volume with extension of duration.

(Please note: I am not by any means affixing the preceding commentary to all Wal*Mart shoppers. Neither do these behaviors occur exclusively in WM stores. Nevertheless, during some 32 years of observation, it has come to my attention that WM does attract more than its fair share of folks who simply have no idea how to act in public venues, or within city limits.)

Being a “warehouse” style store, lacking walls to break down sounds, there is absolutely nowhere one can go to escape such wailing. The acoustics of all WMs are designed to effectively echo these screams throughout the entire premises, at a pitch guaranteed to pierce human eardrums and make all forms of headache remedies fly off the pharmacy shelves.

Then there are the neverending “announcements” over the world’s most gratingly designed public address system. As a broadcaster, I can safely say I’ve never been in a Wal*Mart store where anyone has keyed in the microphone who was vocally qualified to do so.

It has long been my firm belief that before being placed in a position where one will be allowed to speak on any store’s PA system, it is necessary to pass an irritant test. Only those individuals who surpass a specific level of aggravation, blood pressure elevation, and/or nerve damage to the subject listeners get to use the microphone.

The more sibilance (overemphasized hiss) and popped Ps the better.

My gripes go beyond Wal*Mart’s unwillingness to give employees: Access to union options; full 40 hour weeks; living wages; real-world benefits such as insurance and vacations; proper lunch breaks; and other sundry proprieties as granted every person on American soil in the Emancipation Proclamation.

This discontent with WM exceeds its strong-arm tactics in demanding suppliers meet low-ball purchase offers.

I began to wean myself from Wal*Mart when I read an article estimating that each of Sam Walton’s layabout heirs made 771,000 times as much money as the average American. (I had no way to substantiate the accuracy of the figure, mind you; rather, it was the principle that these people are so ungodly rich just for being born yet do absolutely nothing that steamed me.)

Meanwhile, this greed-infected corporation has the unmitigated gall to play Guardian Overlord of The 1st Amendment by censoring specific books, CDs and movies it deems “unwholesome.”

I wonder… did Mr. Fred Rogers ever teach children to say “hypocrite?”

I don’t mind Tom Hanks or Sean Connery making $20 Million or so to be in a movie, or say Carlos Zambrano $3 Million to pitch for the Cubs – they’re talented, plying a craft while doing something people enjoy. Better they get the money than the suits.

But, as long as little of my money finds its way into the pockets of the useless Walton heirs, then there you go.

Now, there’s one more thing that’s been stuck in my craw for some time – kids and violence.

I have my own little theory about this.

Being a suburb of Chicago, we didn’t have real guns, not even the BB variety. Most guys had air rifles, sure, but the only real guns around, as far as anyone knew, belonged to two police officers who lived in the neighborhood.

There’s no adult I can even think of back then who was a hunter.

When we were growing up, though, most of the kids in my neighborhood had arsenals. Mattel made the best guns, before it became the girlie company of Barbie. (I guess making weaponry for the VietNam fiasco was too lucrative.) There were Mattel Fanner .50s and Winchesters, later replaced by Shootin’ Shell Fanner .50s and Winchesters. We even had Shootin’ Shell Snub-Nose .38s with shoulder holsters that actually hid under our coats.

There were also Tommy guns, grease guns, and battery-powered .50 caliber machine guns; M-1 carbines as well as .45 automatics. I still have a working lifelike Luger. Somebody even came out with a replica M-16 during the early days of VietNam (little did I know then I’d soon carry a real one).

Geez, we had grenades, knives, WWII uniforms, cowboy gear, the whole nine yards.

We grew up watching violent television on a daily basis: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp; Gunsmoke; Wanted-Dead or Alive; The Rifleman; Combat!; M Squad; The Detectives; all kinds of old Warner Brothers movies, sometimes pre-code.

The movies we saw in theatres had their fair share of death and mayhem, too.

There was never any trouble in our neighborhood. No fighting, no stabbings, no break-ins, no assaults. The only two kids who got into serious police trouble, repeated breaking and entering for cigarettes at stores at least four blocks away, were a pair of brothers who never played with toy armaments. (One of those families that moved around a lot, they were gone in a year or so.)

One kid who didn’t play with guns wound up getting a girl “in trouble” in 12th grade and had to get married right out of high school; another became an alcoholic in his 20s.

As far as I know, none of the aforementioned watched the violent television shows, either.

All around my neighborhood it was pretty much the same story – the kids who played with toy guns and were allowed access to violent television and movies grew up to be quiet, mostly college educated, and sensitive toward girls and women. Your basic nurturing types.

The guys who weren’t allowed to play with guns, could not fantasize, whose outlets were sports only, they became Neanderthalic meatheads.

More often than not their fathers drank heavily, and didn’t get involved in the kids’ sports activities. These dads were heavy-handed, often mean, toward their entire families; they made snide remarks about, sometimes at, kids from other homes whom they perceived to be better off.

This anger passed through their sons to kids who did nothing to them. For example, because all they got for Christmas might be clothes, the Neanderthals-in-training would pick fights with the kids who got toys simply for that reason.

As adults these clods became the next wave of women and children beaters.

And the chain just keeps adding links.

So, in my humble opinion, perhaps we should take a fresh look at these alleged “studies” concerning television violence begetting violence. It might serve everyone to learn the agendas of the so-called “experts” conducting the various research projects.

Take, for instance, the tale of the Texas young’n who derived great glee in blowing up frogs with fireworks. He eventually became ersatz president of the United States, somehow, and abused his powerful office by illegally ordering death and suffering -- blowing up countless tens of thousands of innocent people.

The reality is it takes considerably more impetus than exposure to violence on television to spur a youth on to violent acts.

One way is to smack your child for crying while in a Wal*Mart, instead of taking a moment to cuddle that young human being and stopping the tears with some love and patience.

Perhaps in doing so you’ll refresh yourself on the ins and outs of public civility and social awareness.

L’Shalom.

© 2006, The Lone Star Iconoclast

CONSPIRACY THEORY

2006-01-30T10:24:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2006 1:13 PM
Conspiracy Theory
By Jerry Tenuto

(Originally published in The Lone Star Iconoclast, Crawford, TX and on www.lonestaricon.com the week of Jan. 23, 2006)

Hillary Rodham Clinton was right on target about 10 years ago when she stated that there was a “vast right wing conspiracy” to bring down her husband Bill’s Presidency.
As someone who had provided legal assistance for the Nixon prosecution, the Junior Senator from New York was in a unique position to know just what the Conservatives were about.
Well, the Neo-cons, led by America’s premier voice of hatred toward anyone named Clinton, not to mention all Democrats, all Liberals, and anyone who would dare think freely with an open mind, Ann Coulter, mocked her as being loony.
Consider some of the key players bent on the ruination of William Jefferson Clinton throughout the 1990s: From the good elected folks, Newt Gingrich; Trent Lott; Tom DeLay; Bob Barr; Henry Hyde; Lindsey Graham are but a handful.
Then there were those never voted in to squat, the likes of Pat Robertson; Jerry Falwell; James Dobson, and the other wealthier-than-God Superevangelists spurring all hardcore Christians on to believe that the Clintons were evil incarnate.
Who could ever forget Linda Tripp?
How about Ken Starr and his ludicrous waste of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars just to find out President Bill was lonely and weak of the flesh? Or the daily leaks from his “behind closed doors” investigations?
I have absolutely no doubt that somewhere, somehow Herr Ubermeister Karl Rove had his slimy fingers in the pie, too.
At the head of the Clinton-Haters were the self-righteous extremists, the Ann Coulters, the Robert Bennetts, and especially the Rush Limbaughs – those of privilege who became disgustingly wealthy by way of spewing hatred and fomenting seditious, venomous allegations at the Man From Hope, all members of his family, and his friends.
It was a well-coordinated attack on the mostly unsuspecting American people and our Constitution. Camouflaging their motives with Juh-ee-zuss and the Bible, these Right-wing Neo-con Fascists passed their spurious gutter trash into the mainstream media through carefully placed tidbits of “information” in the only sources that would buy their blather, a handful of Ultra-Conservative publications, talk radio, and the Neo-con’s own propaganda machine, FoxNewsChannel.
The conspiracy was splayed open and laid bare by the very same young, idealistic journalist who had authored the anti-Clinton tripe. After being enlisted by Coulter and Company, then duped into writing bullshit articles for a right-wing rag, he discovered the truth and published a book denouncing these self-serving crumbs.
We remember other players, including Paula Jones and several disgruntled Arkansas State Troopers, all compensated for their accusations by the Coulter crowd. Hollywood glory-seeking attorney Gloria Allred, who never met an innocent man or a guilty woman, came out to hitch her caboose to Ms. Jones’ train wreck.
It seemed Bill couldn’t have a conversation with a woman, lest she would accuse him of improprieties; that phenomenon in itself had become a cottage industry. Dig a little, and these women never had witnesses yet were usually put on display by Coulter or some hardcore Rightist organization.
Even FBI Director Louis Freeh, whose recent book shows obvious disdain for Bill Clinton, was not doing his best for the needs of our Nation. Estimates were that at times he engaged as many as 5,000 Agents in the Starr Witch Hunt to bring down a Presidency.
Yet, he manages to make the former President the fall guy for all of his inadequacies as FBI head honcho. Go figure.
Don’t you think that, if not distracted chasing down the President’s peccadilloes, some of those 5,000 Agents might have figured out why suspected members of al Qaeda were taking flying lessons?
But, as we look back, was it specifically Bill Clinton the Neo-cons wanted out so badly?
I don’t think that he, personally, was exactly what frightened them.
It was what Bill symbolized, what he was.
Anyone similar to Bill would have sent the Neo-cons into a frenetic spin.
Bill Clinton was the little guy who grew up in less than favorable conditions, overcame the hardships of his youth through brilliance mixed with charisma, and the privileged types never expected him to unseat their sitting President, George H.W. Bush.
(The white ties never expected the other Texan, Ross Perot, a “real” Son of the Lone Star State, to get more than half as many votes as the incumbent Bush #41.)
Clinton was an unknown quantity. He wasn’t rich; owned no property to speak of; was Democratic governor of a relatively small, “backward” Southern state. Bill had no real experience in D.C. politics; believed in people; any ties he had to big business were not the same bunch as the Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the aforementioned.
It truly frightened the bejesus out of the white tie set that the guy now at the top was not one of their own. And, he was smart – a genuine Rhodes Scholar – probably sharper than the entire kit-and-caboodle of his detractors combined.
I’m not looking for the man’s canonization to sainthood like the GOP has done with Ronnie (they all think he really was George Gipp). Bill was as good a President as he could be while suffering slings and arrows from the day his hat was tossed into the ring, and would have been better with a reasonably cooperative, bi-partisan Legislature.
To the Conservatives, Clinton’s ascendancy was a huge “yield” sign, if not played right perhaps even a complete halt, in their three decades of machinations toward complete Governmental upheaval and control.
Because these are people who couldn’t care less about doing the people’s business.
From the very day Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992, the Right-wing extremists unleashed their attack propaganda. They went at him every way possible, starting with Gennifer Flowers.
Daddy Bush was such an ineffective president, Ross Perot struck just the right nerve, and it was impossible to keep Bill out of the White House.
So the Neo-con slime machine did the next best thing: It tainted Bill Clinton so badly that the Dems in the House and Senate suffered in the 1994 midterms.
As soon as Newt Gingrich, Smiler DeLay and their ilk took over the Congress, what was the first thing they did?
These hypocrites began looking for a way to run Clinton out of D.C.
When they couldn’t stop him from besting Bob Dole in 1996, the race was on to find some way to impeach the President.
Well, we all know how that went.
I believe the overall plan was once Bill was gone, it would be far easier to run roughshod over former Senator Al Gore, whom the Republicans deemed a lightweight.
Unfortunately for Newtie, there was a backdraft. He wound up leaving Congress in disgrace. Bob Barr, freshman Congressman elected in Georgia essentially on an “impeach Clinton” platform who lead the charge, lost his seat.
There’s no doubt where Tom DeLay and some of the other hypocrites are headed.
We all know what resulted from the “Government of the Highest Bidder” deceptions of 2000 and 2004.
In 2000, the GOP couldn’t have an honest guy like John McCain actually run for president — he had a good shot at winning, then quite possibly would have done something about the corruption. So, as soon as he got too far ahead in the primaries for a dunderhead like George W. “Fool me… can’t fool me again” Bush to overcome, Herr Rove buried his campaign with the most foul of uncivil prevarications and deceptive practices.
What the RNC needed to present to the public was a poster boy. Someone who could be twisted and turned to suit the party’s whims, who will look like a leader because he’s full of braggadocio and big talk – like the coward of the county he truly is.
How many people who voted for George W. Bush in either election do you think had any notion whatever that he lost when Turd Blossom trotted him out as candidate for Congress? The good people of his district didn’t even want him as their representative!
However, Young Georgie was just what the RNC leadership ordered. I once read an opinion that Bush probably doesn’t tie his shoes in the morning without Herr Rove’s assistance – I’d like to add zipping up his pants to that assessment.
With Dark Lord the Dick Cheney as Vice President calling the shots; Donald Rumsfeld wholly clueless on military matters; Condoleezza Rice talking down to anybody and everybody as if we’re all morons, plus never once giving us the straight story, wife Laura keeping his toes on the line so he doesn’t look utterly stupid; and the rest of the West Wing cast of players in this tragedy, George W. Bush remains as insulated from reality as any human being ever could be.
The trouble is, as the alleged Leader of the Free World he’s not supposed to be distant from reality.
I would assume that somewhere in the manual, under “Job Description for The President of The United States” it is required that the person holding that position be aware of what in the hell is going on around the world; that he or she be far more concerned with the health, welfare and safety of America’s citizens than its corporations and the CEOs thereof; and, that the person in that important position not go around pissing off the leaders, and peoples, of every other nation on the Planet.
And that the President clean up corruption in our Government, not foster its proliferation and prolongation.
The henchmen of the white tie conservatives, in the guise of good Christian soldiers, nest in the White House, as well as sit on the Republican side of the aisle in both the House and the Senate.
Their goal is to make the Federal court system as Christian as they claim to be.
Thus, the D.C. Republicans spew epithets about what God wants our Country to be, and how they legislate through divine guidance. Meanwhile, they’re picking the pockets of American taxpayers with one hand and reeling in money by the pound from special interest groups through lobbyists with the other; at the same time they’re stomping our Constitution and Bill of Rights straight into oblivion.
Yes, Hillary was right.
There was a vast Right-wing conspiracy. They took control of Government through dubious means.
Just as she was right when remarking that the Republican leadership “runs the Congress like a plantation.”
They see themselves as the “massahs,” the privileged few. The Congressional Democrats are not their equals, but lower in stature.
As are we everyday typical Americans.
Once again, people are giving Hillary crap about this statement.
Nobody important, though, just the white tie set’s henchmen, that white guy exclusive Neo-con Conservative Republican club on the Hill.
And Ann Coulter, I’m sure.
So Mrs. Clinton needn’t worry.
Let’s shut down this “Culture of Corruption” before the end of the year.
Come November, vote these lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’, four-flushin’ Republican bums out!
Day 1,872 of America Held Hostage – our White House and the Executive Branch overrun by the Karl Rove-controlled Neo-con Fascist Regime.
Impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
(Jerry Tenuto is an erstwhile Philosopher and sometime Educator. He holds a BS and MA in Communications from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Depending upon your taste in political stew, you can either blame or thank Jerry for his weekly “Out Of The Blue” feature in The Lone Star Iconoclast.)
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