FoxNuze Hate Bloggers!

So let's see here....

Liberals hate Talk Radio because it's filled with conservative and neo-conservative and theo-conservative hosts who spew how great George W. Bush is for this country and how liberals are destroying it.

And conservatives and neo-conservatives and theo-conservatives now hate bloggers... because liberals are there?



This is some serious messed-up stuff! You neo-cons REALLY need to get your heads out of your asses!

Brutally Honest Rant - 10/25/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Political Failures – Part 3
Audio Transcripts
07/25/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Well for the past two weeks I’ve been going over the list of political failures from the whole lot up in Washington. We’re halfway through this four-part miniseries now, with Part 1 dealing with the failures of the White House, specifically under George W. Bush, and with Part 2 dealing with the Democrats in Congress… specifically in the last six or seven months, but also pretty much hammering in a few things they’ve done or not done in recent years.

Now we’re into Part 3… and now we get to focus on the failings of the REPUBLICANS in Congress.

But before we do that, I have two important disclaimers that I need to get out of the way.

First, as I’ve been mentioning since I started this little miniseries on political failures, I’m not favoring either the Democrats or the Republicans here, because as far as this commentator is concerned they have ALL failed the American people. Liberals or Conservatives, it really doesn’t matter, they are ALL guilty of letting the American people down in their own unique ways.

Second, AS a disclaimer of sorts, I do have to admit that once upon a time I WAS an actual, card-carrying member of the Republican Party. But that was back in the days when the White House was inhabited by a completely DIFFERENT man named Bush, and my reasons for leaving that party had less to do with what was going on in that White House at the time and more to do with what that party was representing at the time… and for the most part still represent today.

And the reason why I’ve separated the failures of the Republican-controlled White House from the failures of the Republicans in Congress is because they each had their own unique failures, and it’s a little hard to crucify the White House for something that isn’t even under their authority to remedy according to the US Constitution. Yeah, you remember that little document, right? The one that our current president allegedly said was just a “goddammed piece of paper”.

Anyway, back to Congress and to the party of the bloated elephant.

I’m going to start by giving the GOP members of Congress a compliment. Actually I gave this to them last week in Part 2 of this mini-series, but it is worth repeating here.

In the past seven months that the GOP has been the MINORITY party in Congress, they have managed to do what the Democrats could not for the past twelve years of GOP dominance. They have managed to keep their act together and stymie the whole legislative process!

The Dems thought that they could take impeachment out of the discussion and simply get away with empty votes of no-confidence or some non-binding resolutions criticizing the Bush Imperium. The Republicans said no to that. They held the Dems to their part of the bargain with giving the Bush Imperium their latest blank check to fund the Iraq War, and then they screwed over the Dems when it came to supporting their sham of a comprehensive immigration reform bill. I mean, you have to give it to them… they stood their ground these past few months even as the President was out there challenging their patriotism.

It makes you wonder, then, where that spirit of rebellion was during the first six years of the Bush Imperium!

Now I’m sure that many of you will think that the GOP’s abandonment of their advertised principles of limited government and supporting individual freedom are serious political failures for them… and once upon a time I believed that as well. I used to think during the 1980’s that they somehow strayed from their path. But in truth, what these things represent is merely false advertising. They KNOW who their core supporters are. They KNOW who and what their base represents and they certainly KNOW what their agenda is. That is the REASON why I left the GOP for the Libertarian Party in the first place! It’s not that they didn’t get the message… I was the one who didn’t get the message… and the message is that these little buzzwords of freedom and limited government that they like to throw about are just that: empty convenient buzzwords. They’re really not failures… they’re just marketing. Or as Donald Trump likes to call it: “branding”.

But here ARE a few political failures of the GOP in recent years.

First of all, without a shadow of doubt, the passage of the Anti-American PATIROT Act, THE single most destructive legislative act and constitutional crime committed by Congress since the Alien and Sedition Acts... overshadowing even the Communications Decency Act… was not only passed by the GOP-ruled Congress, but it was done SIGHT UNSEEN! It wasn’t even put to PAPER and they passed it anyway! That was a HUGE political FAILURE for the American people!

And it’s not that they should have done nothing… because they were being goaded into action on a level that was paramount to having a gun put to their heads… but at the very least they should have waited that extra day or two for the frigging thing to actually come out on PAPER before putting it to vote. It’s bad enough that these guys never do read these bills in the first place, never mind have an ACTUAL reason for not reading them!

And then when it came time to renew certain elements of this law, well they may have expressed their concerns about it, but they didn’t really DO too much to address them! That’s the thing… THESE were the people who had the power to make the CHANGES that they were complaining needed to be made… and for the most part they didn’t. In that regard, they were negligent in their responsibilities as lawmakers to the American people.

That seemed to have been a common theme for the GOP-ruled Congress… in a position to do the right thing, but never really following through.

The whole issue with wasteful budget spending was yet another failure for the GOP-ruled Congress. Sure the great “budget surplus” was going to go away. That was a GIVEN! The people who REALLY KNEW how that surplus came about – including yours truly – were the ones telling people that it wasn’t going to last. It wasn’t going to last because Wall Street – the TRUE source of that surplus – was no long undergoing that roller coaster period of repeated record gains and repeated record losses. But Congress was quick to spend that money anyway. THESE were the guys in the position to keep spending down… and they didn’t!

And yes, the “War on Terror” - or the “War on Islamic Bad Guys” or whatever you want to call it - did not help matters much. But Congress didn’t stop wasting money! In fact some of these losers were bitching and crying and throwing temper tantrums on the legislative floor when their personal pork programs – like the Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere” championed by Senator Ted Stevens – were being considered for elimination.

These are the guys who are supposed to be about fiscal responsibility and yet they’re giving money away like there’s no tomorrow. These are the guy who came up with budget earmarks… items inserted into the federal budget without any kind of vote or discussion about them. And then you turn around and expect fiscal accountability from the corporate world? These guys were NO DIFFERENT than the crooks at Enron!

No, wait, I take that back… they were WORSE than the crooks at Enron, because at least we could PROSECUTE the crooks at Enron! We could hold them accountable and send them to prison and take away their cushy homes. Or at least the ones who didn’t die before going to prison. We can’t do that to members of Congress. Even after we kick them out of office for screwing us over we still have to pay for their pensions.

If the Bush tax cuts were such a great thing for the economy, why didn’t the GOP-ruled Congress make them permanent? Why did they continue to put in an expiration date?

Well I know the reason why: because they wanted to hold that over the voters. “Vote for us or the taxes will go up!” And then when the tax cuts expire… which will start to happen soon… and the economy goes down the toilet… which I’ve been warning you folks will happen… you guys get to blame the Democrats for something that they, for once, did not actually do! But you’ll blame the Dems anyway. In fact, the neocon marching orders are to do precisely THAT. I’ve already HEARD people chanting that specific neocon mantra.

I mean, the Machiavellian manipulation here is absolutely diabolical!

Speaking of marching orders… one of the lesser political failures has GOT to be when the Republicans in Congress actually parrot each other using the same talking points over and over and over again. If the catchphrase of the day is “this is nothing more than a cheap stunt”, then you’ll have at least ten Republicans get in front of the podium and use that exact catchphrase WORD-FOR-WORD!

Here’s a quick little piece of advice for all you Republicans out there… when Jon Stewart can catch your little parrot acts and then air them on his nightly show on Comedy Central on a regular basis, then you’ve pretty much lost your credibility. So either get some better speechwriters, or just let Karl Rove do all of your talking for you since he’s already pretty much writing your speeches anyway.

The Republicans’ repeated inability to pass budgets ON TIME has got to be a key failure. If any of these Republicans were in charge of a private business and they pulled the kind of stunt they were doing in Congress, they would be in violation of their own damned Sarbanes-Oxley law. Get this into your heads: the DEADLINE for getting the budget passed is October 1st. That means it has to be PASSED and signed into law by then! It is NOT January 1^st or February 1^st or whenever you feel like it if at all. It is October ONE!

And what was that crap about not even BOTHERING to finish your job this past December? You left rest of the budget-passing job to the Democrats and then actually had the audacity to BITCH about them “dragging their butts”! Guess what… if the Democrats don’t bring that up in their next elections… I WILL, because that is just a sign of GROSS incompetence and negligence! Every single Republican should be ASHAMED of that kind of incompetence! That kind of action in the private sector usually results in lawsuits.

But perhaps THE BIGGEST political failure on the GOP’s record to date is their atmosphere of corruption and graft that was generated in the Congress.

You have the House Majority Leader dictating to the lobbyists on K-Street whom they will hire. You have a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff who gets caught up in some bad stuff and his connections to the GOP hierarchy start to bring a bunch of other people down. You have Bob Ney and Randy Cunningham getting caught in bribery. You have a so-called “family values” champion by the name of Mark Foley resurrecting the 1983 Congressional page scandal and the hierarchy of the House of Representatives bending over backwards to wash their hands of any knowledge of his actions.

And then there is Tom DeLay, Abramoff’s buddy, that same majority leader who bullied K-Street, who catered to the religious extremists in 2005 by turning the local fiasco over Terri Schiavo into a national three-ring circus. The one who helped to manipulate the state legislature so he could have more Texas Republicans in Congress. The same career politician that, when facing an indictment for violating a state campaign law, actually tried to have the ethics rules changed so he could keep his power after being indicted. Ironically it was the SAME ethics rule that was created by the GOP when they first took over the Congress in 1995! THAT Tom DeLay!

Now fortunately DeLay and the rest of his ethically-challenged cohorts are out of office, but let’s get brutally honest here… their actions are and will continue to serve as an indelible STAIN on the whole GOP at least for the short-term and quite possibly for the next few elections. And rightly so! This was the party that came in with promises of fixing the problems of this system, and instead they became the problem.

The Republicans DESERVED to lose in 2006! They actually EARNED that loss through their actions, their arrogance, their elitism, and through their incompetence. They were the ones that set the bar. They were the ones that declared themselves the champions of ethics and morality, and they have nobody but themselves to blame when they failed to measure up to it.

They didn’t just fail the American people, they failed themselves!

And before they can even try to get back even a modicum of additional power, they need to get their act together. They need to go back to those small towns and those small communities that still erroneously believe in those clever empty buzzwords of limited government and individual freedom and personal responsibility. They need to remember what they were selling those people, and they need to actually consider that maybe… just maybe… they should do more than just treat these things as buzzwords.

(Computer – some stuff)
(Fade Music In – “Who am I” by Peace Orchestra)

Well that’s Part 3 of this four-part miniseries on political failures. I’ll be wrapping this whole thing up next week with Part 4.

But the question is… do you know which group that will be? I gave you guys a serious hint about it in Part 2.

Head on over to the blog page at http://d2brutallyhonest.blogspot.com and let me know what your guess is by leaving a comment in the transcript to tonight’s rant.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
------------------------------

Imperium is Giving Hillary the Edge

Was going through the news reports about Hillary Clinton's so-called "spanking" by the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, which essentially accused her of giving aid to "the enemy" for asking about its plans when our forces in Iraq will eventually pull out.

Now I'm not the one calling this a "spanking"... that falls to the so-called "web gurus" who apparently are bought-and-paid-for ass-kissers for the Bush Imperium and who post comments on behalf of Neal Boortz, especially when he's away.  Nice sock puppets, Boortz!

Anyway, I was thinking about this, and the feedback generated by this, and I came to a simple realization...

Whether the Imperium wanted to or not, it just gave Clinton the nomination for 2008... and quite possibly the White House!

It's no big secret that the Republicans really WANT Hillary to be the nominee.  They DO!  They really DO!  They want to campaign against her so they can campaign against her husband all over again.  They KNOW who she is and where she comes from and what makes her tick.  They have been WAITING for the day when she runs for office, pretending to fear that announcement while at the same time praying every day for it.

They are TERRIFIED of having to deal with someone other than her!  They are TERRIFIED of someone like Barack Obama coming in with charisma and ideas.  They don't wan't John Edwards as the nominee either, but at least he's beatable.  When stuck between a popular Democratic candidate that they know versus one that they really don't know and have to make crap up about, they'll go with the known candidate any day.

But this little zero-sum extremist stunt by this LOSER of a Department of Defense wonk - who probabaly got his reply straight from Karl Rove's playbook - has given Clinton the edge needed to set her campaign apart from all the other wannabees.  She can now set herself not only as someone who is taking on the Imperium, but also as a VICTIM of their zero-sum extremism.

And in today's society, there is no political class more valued and more protected than that of a victim.

Make no mistake, this under-the-boot DoD goldbricker's future will probably soon be better measured by an egg timer, but the political damage that he caused has already been done.  If Hillary wins the nomination and then wins in November of 2008 - and it seems pretty likely right now - the Republicans can personally thank that underthought DoD wonk for handing the Oval Office over to her.

Brutally Honest Rant - 07/18/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Political Failures – Part 2
Audio Transcripts
07/18/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Tonight is the second part of a four-part miniseries of political failures. Last week I ranted on about the failures of the White House, and specifically about the Bush Imperium. Well now I’m turning my attention to the stuff that is happening… or NOT happening… just a little ways up the street from the White House.

Now I’m going to look at the Democrats in Congress. And the reason why I’ve broken down the Congress to their two dominant political parties is because their collective failures are unique. Tonight I’m picking on the Democrats in Congress, and next week I’ll be picking on the Republicans in Congress.

I know there are times when Dems and Reps are pretty much interchangeable, and there’s no great mystery behind it. It’s all done to make sure that those in the status quo will still have their special little programs and have them well-funded. But for the rest of the stuff… well that’s unique to them, and that is what I’m going to be talking about tonight and next week.

Now before we go down that road, I just want to reiterate that I’m not picking sides between liberals and conservatives, or between Democrats and Republicans. To this jaded political cynic, they’re EQUALLY guilty of failing the American people… and whether you like it or not, I KNOW that I’m not the only one who feels this way!

So trust me, if you listen to this little list of political failures and think that maybe I’m being a little too hard on the Democrats, then obviously you haven’t heard last week’s take on the Bush Imperium, or you should just wait another week or so to hear what I have to say about the Republicans in Congress… and for you to figure out who the fourth group is that I’ll be talking about.

So here we go…

Perhaps the biggest political failure that can be attributed to the Democrats is the apparent lack of planning once they have the power they have achieved in Congress. It’s one thing to have power. It’s another to actually put it to use.

And it’s funny too, because the biggest complaint made by liberals is that the Bush Imperium never really had a plan concerning Iraq… when the truth of the matter was that they DID have a plan… and for the most part it worked because Saddam was taken out of power. They just couldn’t figure out what to do AFTER that.

But with the Dems it’s a little bit worse. The Dems pretty much have this attitude as if to say “well, WE should be in charge of this”, but they don’t have any ideas of what to do once they have control.

I’ve been going over the history of the Democrats when they were in charge of Congress going back all the way to the 1930’s, and they all had one thing in common… they all took their lead from their Democratic leaders in the White House. They were only strong when they had a Democratic President leading the way! FDR, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, all the way right up to Bill Clinton… if a Democrat wasn’t in charge of the White House, then the Democrats in Congress would simply tread water until they got someone in there!

I’ve said this before but it’s pretty much true in that you can characterize the Democrats as being lottery winners. They believe that this power is simply HANDED to them, as though it was meant to be.

That certainly explained what happened in 1994, when they actually LOST control of the Congress in that year’s mid-term election. And once they lost it, they really had no plans on getting it back. It was and it has been the Republican’s game from that point on.

So their first political failure is that they lack any meaningful leadership outside of the White House. They had no idea how they got into power in the first place, and it comes as a complete surprise to them when they lose that power.

Let’s think about that for a moment… what happened in 1994 that gave the GOP their power in Congress? You had the Clinton White House mired early on in scandal – namely Whitewater and the Travel Office. You had anemically low voter turnout; maybe twenty percent of registered voters actually gave enough of a care to vote (and yes I was one of them). You had Congressional scandals such as the Lincoln Savings and Load fiasco, the collapse of the House Bank, the rampant check-bouncing problems, and their midnight pay raises. And you had the GOP with this “Contract with America” gimmick, which essentially offered an alternative to the status quo. Those who did vote saw that as a clear alternative. That’s why they won control of the Congress!

Now contrast that with the Democrats in 2006. What happened? You had the GOP-controlled Congress mired in scandal. You had a GOP-controlled White House looking more and more like one run by Caesar Nero, especially after Hurricane Katrina.

And what did the Democrats offer? NOTHING! They didn’t offer any meaningful alternatives to the status quo. The only thing… THE ONLY SINGLE THING… that they could offer the voters was the fact that they weren’t AS BAD as the Republicans! THAT’S IT! They didn’t WIN control of the Congress back, they were HANDED it to them on a silver platter thanks to Bob Ney, Mark Foley, Randy Cunningham, and Tom DeLay.

Now during those 12 years when they were a minority party in Congress, they had an obligation to try to keep the GOP honest. This was especially true during the last six years of the Bush Imperium. Did they? NOPE! Oh they PROMISED that they would! Remember? That’s what they told their liberal base when John Roberts and Samuel Alito were being nominated to the Supreme Court. Their liberal base were worried – and rightly so – that these two would bring the Supreme Court to the conservative side. And the Democrats PROMISED that they would hold these nominees feet to the fire! They would raise holy hell and stymie the process as much as they could. Filibuster! Filibuster!

What happened? They wimped out! They caved! They backed down.

So now they’re in power, and almost immediately all of the things that they told their liberal base that they would do, they quickly backed away from. Impeachment? Well new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took that right off the table. Get the troops out? Well they would propose some timetables, and of course the Imperium vetoed it – the second veto in its history – and then the Dems caved and signed on with a compromise that essentially gave the White House yet another blank check for some non-binding non-enforceable benchmarks.

I mean, you can see the outrage building from the liberals over how things are turning out so far with the Dems in charge. Back down? Negotiations? Compromises? They weren’t put in there for compromises! They were put in there to keep the Bush Imperium honest and so far they have been doing a piss-poor job of that!

How about those things they were taking the Republicans to task for right up until November of 2006? Earmarks? No effort to limit those. They’re still getting churned out faster than the US Mint can crank out dollar bills. Cleaning up the “ethically-challenged”? Well I guess we’ll just find out how good Speaker Pelosi is on that promise when Congressman Jefferson from Louisiana has his forthcoming federal trail for money laundering, racketeering, bribery, and a few other nifty crimes.

And then those newly-empowered Democrats had the utter AUDACITY to tell their liberal supporters that “they have no idea what the job entails”. Uh, excuse me jerkoffs, but you Dems in Congress are the ones with the frigging blinders on! You Dems weren’t handed this election-day lottery win because of your “adept understanding of the political system”. Your electorate – remember them? – voted you into power because they wanted CHANGE! And now… get this… you have to actually DELIVER on that!

Imagine that: actually DELIVERING what they promised! What a concept, huh?

And meanwhile the new Republican minority in Congress is doing the one thing that the Dems FAILED to do for the past twelve years! They have managed to stymie the process and mount an effective resistance to the Dems! They shot down the compromise immigration bill, which was crafted as quid pro quo so the Imperium could get their blank check in Iraq. And then when the Dems staged an all-nighter just this past evening over another Iraq withdrawl vote… the GOP minority killed that as well. They have managed to do in six months what the Democratic minority could never pull off in twelve years… they effectively CASTRATED the majority power in the Legislature!

I mean… come on, Democrats… I hate to say it, but let’s get brutally honest here… you guys got BUSHWHACKED! And it was with help from your own damn party!

And you’re probably wondering how that could happen, right? How could you get out-played by a bunch of egomaniacs with delusions of manifest destiny on their minds?

Well that lack of leadership is certainly a key reason why. Oh yeah, you got Howard Dean in charge of the DNC, but he hasn’t even uttered his infamous rebel yell since he got in there. Meanwhile you have all of these braying jackass egomaniacs who all think that their seniority makes them the “logical choice” for leadership. And that’s not counting the folks who are actually in the running for the White House in 2008! Everybody in the Democratic contingent in Congress wants to be calling the shots, and when everybody is doing that, nothing gets done.

Listen, I’ll make this really simple for you Dems… you have three people who should be calling the shots for your party right now. Their names are Dean, Pelosi, and Reed. If you guys can’t get your act together and get your people to fall in line, then perhaps you should find the people you designated as House and Senate Majority Whips and Deputy Majority Whips, and actually HORSEWHIP their sorry asses on your respective legislative floors so we can all watch on C-SPAN! Maybe then you can get the message that the voters have been trying to hammer in!

Next, you have a party that doesn’t really KNOW what they stand for! Apparently it is to support whichever special interest group that contributes the most. You guys think that you stand for civil rights, but let’s face it… prior to 2001, the ACLU declared your icon – Bill Clinton – to be THE most UNCONSTITUTIONAL president in American history! THE ACLU!

Bear in mind as well that some of the most repressive anti-freedom legislation and regulation has come from DEMOCRATS! The “Fairness Doctrine” – which is an abomination of the very word – is being shoved back into life by DEMOCRATS! Censorship by regulation has been pushed on MULTIPLE occasions by DEMOCRATS, most recently by Congressman Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia… A DEMOCRAT! That in and of itself is a blatant violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution and a blatant VIOLATON of the very OATH each and EVERY member of Congress is required to take! As far as this commentator is concerned, Rockefeller and any other member of Congress that signs on to that law are GUILTY OF PERJURY and they should be PROSECUTED and CONVICTED and sent to PRISON on that charge!

You think you Democrats support freedom? If you back thugs like Rockefeller then you don’t know ONE TENTH of what freedom means!

And speaking of which, one of the older political FAILURES that the Democrats are guilty of is one where they will sign onto any kind of repressive moralistic law simply to avoid confrontations with the freedom-hating bible-thumpers. These losers then have the utter audacity to say “well, I don’t support this law and there are some constitutional concerns, but hey, we’ll let the courts decide.” Well guess what? That’s a violation of your oath of office too! “Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution”… THAT is what your oath says! It does NOT say “pass it now and let the courts decide if a law is constitutional later.” Guess what? The courts are tired of cleaning up your crap so they’re fobbing it back to you! And I’ll just leave it at that for right now…

Finally there is the last political failure, and that is the failure to take action when action is NEEDED!

Every single missed opportunity the Democrats have committed since they lost power back in 1994 can all be written off according to them as simply being “ammunition” for the next election. Every time the Bush Imperium or the GOP-controlled Congress proposed some boneheaded measure that they KNEW would be wildly unpopular, the Democrats said NOTHING about it!

It was like they were channeling Gene Wilder from the original “Willy Wonka” movie and saying in a super-low voice “help, stop, police” anytime one of the children were about to do something stupid. They let the opportunity to do something slip because they think that it would only get the people pissed off at the Republicans that much more and help them out on Election Day.

Well guess what? You’re only HALF right. But the other half of the equation is that you actually have to DO SOMETHING to show that you’re a better alternative!

You see, here’s what happens… you see something messed up with the GOP and you say nothing, hoping that the people will remember it come Election Day. Then they do something else messed up, and again you say nothing. And this happens over and over and over again. Then Election Day comes along and the people say “Well the GOP was really screwed up, but what did the Democrats do about it? They did nothing! They didn’t speak up. They essentially allowed it! Why should we reward that?” So guess what? Your supporters stay home because they’re just as disgusted at your inability to speak up as they are about the messed up things the GOP did! That is another form of political FAILURE.

Remember how you Dems got into power in 2006. You didn’t WIN it. You were handed it because your GOP counterparts were seen as the WORSE of the two parties!

You know, you only get ONE chance to make a first impression. Once that chance is shot, you can’t go back and do it over again. Believe me, there were plenty of times where I wished I could correct some first impressions.

Likewise, the Democrats in Congress had only ONE chance to prove that they really were the agents for change that they claimed they wanted to be. THIS was it… and they blew it on useless non-binding resolutions and compromises. Now they have to work overtime to prove that they are still worthy of that power after next year’s elections.

And if, by some chance, they end up losing that power in 2008… well then just like the GOP, they will only have themselves to blame for it!

(Computer – some stuff, but you won’t care because you won’t listen anyway no matter how many times I criticize you about it.)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Well that’s part two of this four-part look at political failures. As you can probably figure out, next week’s look will be at the Republicans in Congress. They actually have a few unique failures all their own that I’ll get into.

And if you were paying attention, you probably caught wind of which group I’ll be lambasting in part four. I think you’ll find that my scathing commentary on them will be very original.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
------------------------------

Ever wonder why it's called Red BULL?

Well the folks at Wired News have actually cracked the deepest darkest secret imaginable... the one that you've been wonder about...

Does Red Bull REALLY give you wings?

Well, no, but it does give you something else... SPIT!

No, I'm serious! Check it out!

Taurine
Also known as 2-aminoethanesulfonic acid, taurine was originally isolated from bull bile in 1827. Now made synthetically, it is the magical elixir said to bring out the kitesurfing extremophile in any Web-surfing nerd. Taurine's actual effects, while not as drastic as the hype, are pretty wide-ranging, even from the amount found in a single can: Not only is it an inhibitory neurotransmitter (in some cases acting as a mild sedative) and an age-defying antioxidant, it even has the potential to steady irregular heartbeats.

BULL SPIT!

Well that's not all it has, but I'll let you find out the rest of it on your own.

Meantime, after going over those ingredients, maybe I should try some too!

Calling BS on Boortz

Okay, I gotta call BS on Neal Boortz on this issue... He starts out on his online "Neal's Nuze" with this little gem: (emphasis as seen on his website)

First ... let's review. For the edification of The New York Times, which refuses to identify terrorists as Islamic or Muslim, and for the new British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who has instructed his government to not use the word Islamic or Muslim in connection with terrorism .....

... not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims!

BULLS#1T!

I've got three words for you Boortz... let's see if they register in your brain:

ERIC ROBERT RUDOLPH

Remember him? 1996 Olympic bombing? Women's clinic bombing? Nightclub bombing? Same guy. He wasn't a Muslim. He wasn't some spoiled bored Jordanian looking for infamy. He was a born-and-bred, Made-in-the-USA CHRISTIAN TERRORIST!

How about three more words, Boortz... let's see if they register as well:

CLAYTON LEE WAAGNER

Sound familiar? It should. Remember during that whole Anthrax scare when people were sending envelopes with phony Anthrax messages. Mr. Waagner was one of the guys who got caught sending in dozens of these messages to women's clinics. WHY? To cause fear and terror. He was a CHRISTIAN TERRORIST!

Hold on there, Boortz, hold on, because I got three more for you:

ARMY OF GOD

Ever hear of them? Yeah, that was the group that came up after Paul Hill was convicted for his murder of a women's clinic doctor. Both Rudolph and Waagner claimed affiliation with them!

Care to guess what kind of action they advocate, Neal? Come on, take a guess.

Can you say TERRORISM? Sure you can!

And here's the funny part, Boortz... these guys would certainly NOT be considered Muslim! In fact, they are avowed CHRISTIANS!

So don't give me that crap about "all terrorists are Muslim", because that's is just plain BULLS#1T! AND YOU DAMN WELL KNOW IT!

Get your damned bald head out of the bigotry barrel and start using those little gray cells for more than just writing books.

Brutally Honest Rant - 07/11/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Political Failures – Part 1
Audio Transcripts
07/11/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Well tonight I have the first of a four-part miniseries about political failures. This is my list of things that I hate about our current political system.

Now before I get into this list, I want to get a few things out of the way…

First of all, this miniseries is broken into four parts so I can go down my list of things that I think each group has so far failed to do. I don’t want you to think that I’m giving any group any kind of preferential treatment, because right now I’m thoroughly disgusted with ALL of them.

Second, I KNOW that I’m going to piss off some folks in going over this list, because I’m going to be pointing fingers at pretty much the whole lot in Washington. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, neo-conservatives… nobody there is safe from my scrutiny.

So if you’re one of those people… and you know who I’m talking about… who gets pissed off when I start talking trash about certain parts of the Washington crowd and fire off angry emails, take a deep breath, count to ten, and wait a week, because I’m hitting both dominant political factions.

So here we go…

The first group in Washington that I have to talk about is the executive branch… the White House. And YES that includes Vice President Dick Cheney! But I’ll get more into that in a bit.

I have to say that when it comes to the White House under George W. Bush, I have given them plenty of slack. I didn’t start out like the liberals did by saying that the GOP “stole” the election back in 2000. It was a fiasco all around, and part of me was GLAD that Al Gore didn’t win it. I gave them plenty of opportunity to prove my political skepticism wrong. I gave him four years of proving me wrong. That’s four years more than I gave Bill Clinton, and that was long before I even got INTO online commentary!

The tax cuts? A drop in the bucket of what needed to be done. I was pissed off over how the two rebate checks were provided for as well. They weren’t rebates on PAST taxes; they were an advance payment over our FUTURE tax refund – if we got one. Sneaky bastards. But, hey, I let that one slide because the rest of the package was going to help us all out in the long run.

Unfortunately, they stuck an expiration date on it. But having that in there, and keeping it intact, was really the fault of another group that I’ll get into in part three of this series.

The first political failure for the White House was their handling of the so-called “War on Terror”.

Now it is one thing to be alert, and to be prepared, and to actually DO something about terrorism; it is another thing entirely to use fear-mongering as a wedge to get what you want. And “9/11” was used as the universal catchall phrase to browbeat and intimidate and silence any criticism of the White House and their policies.

You can’t question the White House... because of “9/11”. Any bill they send to Congress needs to get passed, and passed immediately… because of “9/11”.

The USA PATRIOT Act, the 21^st Century equivalent of the Alien and Sedition Acts, was passed by Congress SIGHT UNSEEN because of “9/11”. And if you questioned any provision that HAPPENED to leak out or was proposed, you were accused of aiding the terrorists! Anyone remember John Ashcroft’s McCarthy-like threat to anyone who questioned the White House about – to use his words – “the phantoms of lost liberties”? Turns out they weren’t really “phantoms”, were they? Oh but that didn’t matter either… because of “9/11”.

That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the tenure. Authoritarian, evangelical, arrogant, self-righteous, my-way-or-we-all-frigging-DIE. It didn’t matter what the issue was… runaway federal spending, bailing out the airlines, cracking down on corporate abuses, everything became a “9/11” issue. And if you questioned the White House on ANY of these issues, then your very love of this country was challenged!

And yes, that even included the recent discussion on immigration reform, where the president himself had the utter audacity to question the patriotism of the very CONSERVATIVES that have been his water-carriers all these years, not just biting the hand that fed his ego, but essentially bitch-slapping it.

Disagreement and dissent became de facto CRIMES, and that, in and of itself, is the biggest of the political FAILURES committed by this White House.

How this White House dealt with Afghanistan is yet another failure. The initial assault and takeover of that country was masterful. But then we let the Taliban run away instead of exterminating them like the vermin they are, and then we let the local tribal chiefs – who had previously pledged their undying support for Osama bin PigBastard – to bring Osama in, and then we had to watch as they pulled a Three Stooges act and LET him escape. We should have turned that whole area into the world’s biggest crater, but we didn’t. Instead we have a President who actually said that he doesn’t really “think much” about the fact that we haven’t caught Osama yet. THAT, I find quite disturbing for someone who has sold us this notion that we should sacrifice everything that America’s founding fathers set up because of “9/11”.

Iraq is another issue. I have said in the past and still believe today that going there was inevitable. I wished that we had dealt with Afghanistan first, but that wasn’t my call to make. In fact, we got goaded into it. But we got there, and we won the war. That was something I actually compliment this president for doing. He didn’t stop with just some bombs here and there and some ground troops as his father did and as Bill Clinton did. He actually got rid of Saddam Hussein.

Now we have a hard time winning the peace. And here is where the real failure comes in, and where the White House is losing supporters right and left: we have a president who does not want to tell us when our job there is done. We were sold on this idea that this was going to be a cakewalk. We’d go in, kick ass, get Saddam out of power, put a new government into power, and then that’s it and we’d go home. That is what the American people were sold on.

Instead, we have a president who has sent troops there for two, three, and even four tours. The time home gets shorter and shorter and the time there gets longer and longer. Anyone who remembers the old movie “Catch-22” can tell you that isn’t a good thing. The White House doesn’t really put pressure on the new Iraq government to their part to “stand up” so we can “stand down”, and they are actually comparing our stay there to the fifty-plus years that we have been in guarding the De-Militarized Zone between North and South Korea. If the president wants to know why he’s losing support for Iraq from all corners, THIS is why!

All the American people want to know is when this is no longer our burden to bear. It doesn’t have to be a calendar date, but at least tell us what REALISTIC CONDITIONS are needed for us to start bringing troops home. This president’s inability to convey that to the American people in a way that they can understand is a serious political failure for him.

For someone who said just the other day that he didn’t want to be a “war president”, George W. Bush certainly appears to enjoy playing it to the hilt.

Obviously how this White House handled Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is a HUGE scathing failure for them. I’m sorry that Mother Nature didn’t check with the White House schedule to hit when the President wasn’t on vacation, but at a time when solid leadership was NEEDED, President Bush instead went to a fundraiser in San Diego and got guitar lessons from Esteban. The effects of Hurricane Katrina were literally felt all across the country, but the President felt it was better to spend his time raising political money and clearing brush and getting bike tips. Leadership was needed at that point – and not just in areas directly affected by the hurricane – and leadership was lacking. That will always be a significant failure for this White House.

We have a White House that is obsessed with secrecy for their business affairs, and yet at the same time has systematically destroyed any kind of privacy for other Americans. They say “trust us” when it comes to their actions, but they obviously don’t hold the same trust for us. Identity theft is a serious issue, and could easily be considered a major security issue for this country, but trying to validate and reinforce any kind of privacy for the average American is next to impossible because the White House wants to be able to look into OUR lives without any kind of accountability or limitation. And then they turn around and stonewall any attempt by others to look into THEIR own activities, saying only that they haven’t “broken any laws” and that we should just “trust them” on it. Guess what that’s called? It’s called HYPOCRISY!

And now, of course, we have a White House that is mired in SCANDAL. A White House that thought nothing of trying to get a political crony like Harriet Meirs appointed to the Supreme Court. A White House that asserts that it did “nothing wrong” and broke “no laws” when they leaked to their friends in the media the fact that Valerie Wilson, aka Valerie Plame, worked in the CIA, but yet did everything in their power to keep the knowledge of those players away from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. If they did “nothing wrong”, then why did Scooter Libby work so hard to conceal that from the special prosecutor, and was willing to go to PRISON for it? I haven’t seen this much brain-twisting since “Twin Peaks” went off the air.

Of course the commutation of Scooter’s prison sentence – another slap in the face of the judicial system – was another sign of political failure. And conservative have absolutely, positively NO JUSTIFICATION WHATSOEVER to invoke Bill Clinton’s midnight pardons as an excuse for this. Clinton waited until the last minute of his tenure to pardon people like Susan McDougal, and they WERE wearing prison orange when it happened! Bush Junior didn’t even wait for Scooter to make it to the jail before he decided to overrule the judicial system and free him. Sure it was well within his right to do that, but that still doesn’t MAKE it right.

And these are supposed to be “moral” people! They’re supposed to know better! They’re supposed to know the difference between having the right to do something and being right in doing it.

We have a Vice President who invokes executive privilege to keep his clandestine energy meetings secret, and then, through his shyster lawyer, claim on the very same subject that he’s not even a member of the executive branch of government! And because of those clandestine energy meetings, we got stuck with a real LEMON of an energy policy in 2005.

And speaking of that lemon of an energy policy… REAL leadership doesn’t mean conducting still more endless research! And it doesn’t mean setting fuel efficiency standards that are so abysmal and covering for an unrealistic timeframe that they become meaningless. Bush Junior should have gone to those automakers and told them they had until January of 2009 – NOT 2012 or 2020 – to get the fuel efficiency levels up! And to hell with the showcases with all the alternatives – get those alternative fuel vehicles OUT of the photo-ops and INTO the garages of the American people! SAYING that America is addicted to oil and actually DOING something significant about it are two different things, and so far on this subject our White House is just spewing empty words and pushing meaningless policy.

Let’s get brutally honest here… what we have right now is a White House that is desperately trying to stay credible and relevant. They know that they don’t have to run for re-election again, so they feel that they don’t have to care about the American people. All they have to do is keep pissing off Democrats, keep from getting convicted or impeached, and tread water so that they can leave on schedule in January 2009.

It’s understandable, then, why the media and the politicians want us to be thinking about the 2008 elections already. They don’t want to have to deal with the current White House occupants for the last two years of their tenure, and watch them tread political water and weasel their way to that magical day of January 2009 when, just like their predecessors, they can breath a sigh of relief when they can board Air Force One for the last time and realize that they got away with all that they did.

And that’s all that matters to them right now. This is all just a game to them. It’s all about how much they can get away with without getting impeached. They don’t have to care about anything else. All that matters is passing the time away, supporting what little of their base is left, and continuing to spread this myth that they are the greatest thing to happen to the political arena since Ronald Reagan left office. It would all be laughable if not for the fact that this is not some lame Comedy Central sitcom.

(Computer – Some appropriate clips on the subject. Too bad you’re too lazy to hear them. They’re cute.)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Well folks, like I said, this is just Part One of this four-part look at political failures. And before some of you start accusing me of being a liberal, you might want to wait another week… because Part Two will deal with the Congressional Democrats. If you thought my criticism of the Bush White House was harsh, you haven’t heard anything yet.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
------------------------------

Brutally Honest Special - 07/04/07

Brutally Honest Special: We Live in Dangerous Times
Audio Transcripts
07/04/07

[Start Program]

Good afternoon everyone… I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Normally at this time I do a weekly rant to talk about the things going on in the world. But because today is Independence Day for the United States, I decided to do something a little different and a little special.

Today I took some time and recorded a new song. This is a mixture of my audio rant and some original music, and I URGE everyone to not just read the lyrics but to also LISTEN to the song itself.

Let me know what you think about this song by posting your comments over at the weblog page, which you can find at http://d2brutallyhonest.blogspot.com and I hope all my U.S. Brutally Honest supporters have an enjoyable 4^th of July holiday.

(Computer – “We Live in Dangerous Times” – by David Matthews 2)

“We Live in Dangerous Times”
– lyrics by David Matthews 2

We live in dangerous times.

We live in a time where we convince ourselves that we live in the freest nation in the world, and that we should be PROUD of that achievement. And then, in the same breath, we complain that we are, perhaps, TOO free.

We need to give up some of that freedom for decency and for morality and for little children. We need to give up some of that freedom for security and patriotism and nationalism. We need to give up some of that freedom for peace. We need to give up some of that freedom because somewhere in the world somebody is pissed off about that freedom.

We live in dangerous times.

We live in a time where theocracy is dressed up as democracy and sold to us as destiny. A time when virtues are measured, not by their applications, but by their origins. Belief is more valuable than fact. Blind zealous obedience is more important than rational arguments. Bigotry and hypocrisy are considered character traits.

We live in dangerous times.

In the middle of the 20^th Century, during the darkest times of human activity, the leader of the freest nation in the world said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

At the start of the 21^st Century, during a period of equally dark times, the leader of the freest nation in the world, and those who pledged their personal allegiance to him, said that we should ALWAYS be afraid, and not just of fear itself. That we should stifle all dissent out of that fear. That we should bite out tongues and hold our criticism of our leaders because of that fear. That we should give up that which makes us the freest nation in the world BECAUSE of that fear.

We live in dangerous times.

We live in a time where we have the greatest personal controls for the media that we use, and yet we have those in government, and those who support government, who are advocating for even more OPPRESSION over that same media we use. Who complain that the tools are not there, and then when they are, they complain that the people are too fundamentally incompetent to know how to use them.

One hundred radio stations reduced to being endless commercials with the occasional musical break. One thousand channels of boring, repetitive, prefabricated mush, reduced at times to a level that even children find ridiculous. One billion websites censored or sanitized, and if you want something that is not sanitized then you either have to pay extra for it, or find some way to steal it.

We marvel at our technology, always hungry for the next convenient item. The better phone, the next operating system, the faster Internet connection. But nobody ever thinks about privacy; until at last you realize that your personal life has become someone else’s fishbowl. And only then are we outraged about it and try in vain to slam on the brakes of this runaway train powered by hype.

We live in dangerous times.

Our very names are up for sale, sold repeatedly by banks and private companies and by those whose very fortunes were made off the marketing of our names. These companies and these banks then have the audacity to hold US responsible when our names are used by those who drive us to bankruptcy or to commit crimes in our names. They tell us that WE let them do
it, when they knowingly hide their duplicity in words that would give Shakespeare a stroke.

Hiding somewhere in that mountain of doublespeak and crafted in microscopic fine print is the bill of sale for your very life… if only you knew where it was.

We are told that our lives are meaningless unless we are in debt. Pay off that debt and you are told that you need to get back into debt. And all for what? A bigger house? A newer car? A longer vacation? The latest video game? A better TV set?

The American Dream was originally about self-sustenance. It was about independence. Now it is about going into debt, and staying in debt for the rest of our lives… and believing that THIS is somehow what freedom is all about.

We live in dangerous times.

We live in a time where we deify our celebrities and our athletes and our politicians. We put them on pedestals and turn them into gods and tell them that they are not like us and that don’t have to follow the same rules as the rest of us. And then we get outraged when they do just that.

Equality used to be the coin of opportunity; now it is the expected bill of sale. We don’t want equal opportunity anymore. Now we just want equal results, even if we don’t make the same effort for it.

We live in dangerous times.

We live in a time when words like “freedom” and “liberty” are reduced to being nothing more than convenient buzzwords. To where “freedom of” is overruled by “freedom from”. To where offending someone is an inexcusable and unpardonable crime, but crimes paramount to treason are tolerated, justified, and even excused. To where “choice” is reduced to only the “acceptable" options. And who decides what choices are allowed? Why it is the very people who think that we should have no choices at all.

We live in dangerous times.

We live in a time when people are led to believe that they don’t have to worry about the bigger problems down the road. We’re told to forget about them, because we’re only just a few years away from the end of everything anyway. Who cares about rising oil prices and runaway budget deficits? Why worry about corrupt politicians and out-of-control bureaucrats? Why be concerned with government agencies that will soon be too expensive to sustain and too politically caustic to eliminate? Why care about abuses of government power? Armageddon is coming, and all we need to do is to just look busy.

We live in dangerous times.

And maybe some day we will wake up and realize what is being done to us, and for us, and in our name. Maybe then we will remember what those convenient buzzwords really mean. Maybe we will be able to find some way to put a stop to these dangerous times before they get much worse for us… and before our dangerous times truly become our “end times”.

One thing is for certain… these dangerous times won’t go away on their own.

(Lyrics from “We Live in Dangerous Times” by David Matthews 2, produced by Get Brutal Productions, 2007. All rights reserved.)

(Fade out)

[End of program]
------------------------------

Blog Against Theocracy: Season of Faux Patriotism

Since we are in the latest blogswarm for Blog Against Theocracy, I thought I’d bring up something that I’ve mentioned before…

We are currently in the Season of Faux Patriotism. It starts on Memorial Day and carries on through to Labor Day. This is the time when politicians at all levels of government wrap themselves up in the American flag and then proceed to deface it by declaring themselves how much of a “patriot” they are and how much they think the rest of us SHOULD be.

In the past, the Season of Faux Patriotism has been highlighted by repeated attempts to get a Constitutional amendment passed that would prohibit flag burning. Fortunately the removal of many of the conservative and neoconservative influences in Congress has made that harder to pull off, but the threat is still there.

But even without that, those who practice Faux Patriotism continue to hammer in this idea that blind fanatical obedience to government is somehow an American virtue. This is often done during the Fourth of July, which celebrates when America’s founding fathers were absolutely AGAINST such things!

So how does theocracy play into this season of Faux Patriotism? Simple. For the phony patriots, religion is a major tool for mass conformity.

Organized religion preaches blind obedience to the masses. It encourages people to go through the motions just for the sake of going through the motions. It tells people that YOUR personal opinions are irrelevant, and that the opinions of the INSTITUTION (of which their minister, priest, pastor or other holy leader represents) is all that you need to be concerned with.

That’s power! And that’s the kind of power that politicians want on their side!

So what they to do is merge God and country together. They convince people that America is great, not because of its freedoms, but because GOD SAID SO! They preach that the freedoms that are our birthright are really nothing more than “privileges” that can be taken away if we say or do something to “offend God”. They write laws based on that belief, saying that GOD’S LAW trumps anything our founding fathers would have wanted for us. They argue endlessly that without THEIR religious beliefs incorporated into government, civilization itself collapses.

It’s all done to seize power and to destroy any kind of resistance to THEIR personal rule.

I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret: I’m not an atheist, but I have more respect for them and for what they believe in than I do for most theists! Do you know why? Because when they set down what they believe is right or wrong, they actually incorporate some THOUGHT behind it. They can’t say “because GOD says so!” For them, something is right or wrong because THEY believe that it is. And because of that, I think atheists are far better citizens, because they have a better chance of actually adhering to what THEY believe is right or wrong versus what is DICTATED to them by others.

But of course, that’s an INDIVIDUAL concept… and that is something that a power-hungry politician absolutely DOES NOT WANT to see!

Like I said, I’m not an atheist, but my beliefs are my own. That is the ultimate definition of what Freedom of Religion is about, and I know that you cannot get there if you don’t have the Separation of Church and State to keep one religious belief from trumping all others. And that’s also why I abhor politicians who try to take away my beliefs and override them with someone else’s through laws and regulations. I don’t care if the tyrant is Muslim or Christian, elected or appointed or anointed, if they act to deface freedom, they earn my bile and they earn my fervent opposition to their cause.