Don't take people at their word. Don't listen to them when they tell you how to be virtuous.
They're faking it. They don't care about virtue, or you or the common good. They're just taking opportunistic potshots under the guise of sermonizing. They're just a bunch of hypocrites.
This little bit of moral philosophy is drawn from the political events of the past few years.
By now you may, in your naïvely idealistic frame of mind, be hoping against hope that Bobo has finally thrown off his kneepads and decided to take on his masters, or at least the fundamentalist scumbags holding the Republican Party hostage until the Rapture takes 'em all up and the rest of us divvy up their stuff.
Come on. We're talkin' Bobo here, the guy whose collective verbal output roughly equates to the columnar version of gay porn. You really think he suddenly lost his taste for Republican cock?
Over this time, Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator. The president should be summoning us to make shared sacrifices for the common good. The president should care for the poor, and stop favoring the rich. He should make the hard choices and impose a little fiscal discipline on government.
Sometimes you had to walk through Democratic precincts in a gas mask, the lofty rhetoric was so thick. But now we have definitive proof that they didn't mean it. It was all hokum.
Yes, yes. Those insincere Democrats, with their partisan tricksiness, have once again held poor ol' bumbling Mr. Smith by the short hairs, as he tries to make his way through the byzantine pitfalls of mean ol' Warshington, the whole town agin' him, and nobody on his side 'cept his trusty steed Laura. He's tried to be gen-you-wine and sincere, and break bread in good faith with those meanies, and they just won't let him.
It's like the end of Old Yeller all over again, isn't it? Makes you cry at the heartbreak of it all.
This is the typical Bobo setup, so's he can spend the rest of his shit excuse for a column coasting on the usual tropes of Democrat fecklessness and insincerity, as if Bush and DeLay and Hastert have all been doing everything they can in the spirit of fellowship and brotherhood.
Why, it's as if Dick Cheney never told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself. No doubt Bobo thinks Leahy had it coming.
Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff. By embracing the progressive indexing of Social Security benefits, the president has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good. He's asking middle- and upper-class folks to accept benefit cuts so there will be money for the people who are really facing poverty.
He has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks?
Please. He's squeezing the middle class further, and the upper crust just a touch. So what? It's not as if this is going to offset the gains the one-percenters have made with tax cuts and the impending evisceration of the estate tax. Not even close. You think Trump or Paris Hilton are suddenly going to have to go out and produce something of worth because of this? Not on your pastel-colored Speedos, Bobo.
He has made the hard choices. By facing up to the fact that there are going to be benefit cuts, he's offended Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, the supply siders and other important Republican constituencies.
Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit. If monkey butter were lies, Bobo would be awash in man-chowder, permanently adrift in an endless sea of spunk. Perhaps he is anyway; it's not as if he doesn't give these tools a hard-on every time he sets electronic crayon to virtual paper.
Bush can quite easily afford to piss off the orthodox supply-siders -- where they gonna go? Dobson's Spongebob Party? Good luck with that, Friedmanites.
And what about those moderate Democrats? For two decades they've been courageously saying we need to means-test Social Security, so we can focus our resources on those who need it. Now Bush has embraced their view. Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years. Bush could tell them he loved their mothers and they'd invent reasons to be against him. Politics trumps policy.
Again, Bobo is so fundamentally dishonest here, he's surfing on an ocean of choad, catching a gooey wave with every paragraph he writes. Ever since Bush was re-selected by the God Hates Fags intellectual dynamo of the Dobsonite faction, he has dealt with the Social Security issue completely dishonestly, and in bad faith. He has cried "fire" where there is no fire, and won't be for a couple generations. (Would that he cared 1/100th as much about the impending energy crisis.)
Bush has taken his non-existent "plan" to a series of potemkin town halls, unveiling his folksy bullshit in front of a bunch of cherry-picked window-lickers. He has refused to discuss any of the concrete ideas or principles of this plan, because they (and it) clearly are being made up as he goes along. His goons have thrown out even the mildest of protesters; not one single person has been on record as asking anything resembling a skeptical question at a single one of these phony assemblies.
Bush has spent most of the first 100 days of his second term dealing with a "problem" he scarcely bothered to mention during the campaign, in as spectacularly dishonest a fashion as one can reasonably imagine. Even Tom DeLay has admitted that there is no plan.
And Bobo sits and sulks, and wonders why no one wants to play with the neighborhood bully. Well, fuck you, Bobo. This is a nakedly political administration that puts the machinations of the Clintonistas to shame, and you goddamn well know it. They've done nothing but slap and kick and punch the Democrats in the throat every chance they've had, and now Bobo and his scum-sucking ilk want to know why no one wants to play nice.
Bush hasn't even convinced his own party to sign on with his bullshit, and Bobo screws up the goddamned nerve to call Democrats on their supposed petulance.
Fucking gutless jerkoff whore.
The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.
In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity - it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.
All political parties function this way. It is an unfortunate nature of the political beast. Bobo apparently expects the opposition party to just roll over and play dead, heel like a good dog should, even though he knows full well that the Democratic Party faces irrelevance and implosion at this point, if it fails its constituency on this cornerstone issue.
The Democrats have no political reason, nor any practical reason, to capitulate to this nonsense. They have everything to gain by standing and fighting, and absolutely nothing to lose. They are doing exactly what an actual opposition party is supposed to do -- if anything, they should be doing more of it on pretty much every issue.
Bobo, on the other hand, might have to go out and get an actual job eventually, should his masters ultimately lose their little plantation. Good dog, Bobo. Now go get your fuckin' shine box.
I do think that the Dems are missing an opportunity here, indeed the Dems are starting to resemble the PLO in never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
ReplyDeleteBush's proposal IS much more progressive, much more Democratic even, than I would have expected. And SS will be in a crisis in several decades IF nothing is done; the sooner we do something the less pain that something will entail.
The Dems, rather than reflexively crying "Nyet!" should praise Bush for taking the important step of proposing a progressive reform of SS. They should then treat it as a first offer in extended negotiations, BUT the important thing is that we are now negotiating over how progressive the SS tax/benefit should be, and this is new. The Dems should pick up this ball and run with it instead of being merely obstructionist.