On January 30th, 2007, the always essential Arthur Silber lamented that we seem to have no contemporary equivalent to Robert La Follette in our current crop of elected representatives. The reference is a passing one, most of the way down the essay, which is yet another of Silbert's marvelously lucid, yet simultaneously utterly impassioned, pleas for the U.S. government, and, more important, the U.S. citizenry, to rethink U.S. international policy from an actually moral viewpoint, instead of using the calculated real-politiks embodied in our ongoing, century and a half old "Open Door" strategy.

Reality is reality, and the world has always pretty much sucked, and nations being comprised of men, it seems to me to be wildly idealistic and borderline delusional to expect anything except the most naked self interest from any group of humans, especially rich humans with lots and lots of mindless, gun totin' lackeys. Still, Silbert's reference to La Follette led me to another article on the former Senator, and what I found there reminded me yet again that however dark things may be now (and they undoubtedly are) on the world and U.S. national stages, and however poisoned and corrupted our current national dialogue between citizenry, media, and elected officials may seem, there really is nothing new under the sun. We've been here before; in fact, we've been here over and over again -- led into unnecessary war by the charismatic elected figureheads of shadowy corporate interests whose only interests in American military engagement abroad are strictly monetary.

Yet, when an entirely media manufactured 'war fever' swept over America in 1917, Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin stood up against it:

By the time he was elevated to the U.S. Senate in 1906, La Follette was already a national figure. He soon emerged as a leader of the Senate's burgeoning progressive camp and by 1912 was a serious contender for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination. The fight for the nomination exposed divisions within the progressive camp, however, as La Follette's more radical followers battled supporters of a more centrist reformer who also claimed the progressive mantle: former President Teddy Roosevelt.

The Roosevelt/La Follette split grew more pronounced five years later, as the nation prepared to enter World War I. While Roosevelt urged U.S. participation in the war-the position supported by the nation's political establishment-La Follette emerged as the leading foe of a war he described as a scheme to line the pockets of the corporations he had fought so bitterly as a governor and Senator.

La Follette personally held up the declaration of war for twenty-four hours by refusing unanimous consent to Senate resolutions. From the Senate floor, La Follette argued: "We should not seek [to] inflame the mind of our people by half truths into the frenzy of war." He painted the impending conflict as a war that would benefit the wealthy of the world but not the workers, who would have to fight it. And he warned: "The poor . . . who are always the ones called upon to rot in the trenches have no organized power.... But oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard.... There will come an awakening. They will have their day, and they will be heard."

Those words sounded treasonous to some, and La Follette's constant efforts to expose war profiteers only heightened the attacks upon him. He was targeted for censure by the Senate, portrayed in Life magazine as a stooge of the German Kaiser, and denounced by virtually the entire media establishment of the nation-including the Boston Evening Transcript, which announced, "Henceforth he is the Man without a Country."

As mounting domestic oppression sent more and more anti-war activists to jail, La Follette emerged as their defender, berating his colleagues with the charge that "Never in all my many years' experience in the House and in the Senate have I heard so much democracy preached and so little practiced as during the last few months."
His critics declared that La Follette would never again be a viable contender for public office.

And yet, less than four years after the Armistice, running on a platform that explicitly recounted his opposition to the war and his opposition to imperialism, La Follette won reelection with more than 70 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. And two years later, he earned one out of every six votes cast for the Presidency of the United States.The bolding is my own emphasis; to me, that paragraph more than any other brought home that, indeed, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. For the past six years, we have seen our entrenched corporate media repeating the Administration's most jingoistic, pro-war lies without so much as a twitch of so called journalistic ethics, while simultaneously attacking anyone who dared to dissent from the party line like a pack of ink stained jackals.

And we have seen, to our even greater shame, that our current crop of elected representatives and national leaders responds to this propaganda bombardment with the most scurrilous and cowardly displays of fawning, lickspittle toadyism imaginable. The apparent fear that they might be accused of 'cutting and running', or failing to 'support the troops', has all but paralyzed our newly elected Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

While it is clear that the American people want to see definitive action taken -- our troops recalled from Iraq immediately, our economic woes directly addressed, and our criminal executive and legislative leadership impeached, indicted, arrested, tried, and imprisoned for their crimes -- the representatives we have sent to Washington to carry out this mandate are far too terrified of what the Washington Post or the New York Times might say about them on their op-ed pages, and what impact this might have on the Presidential and general election  in '08, to stand up decisively and take the actions they know they should, and must, if they are to truly serve their electorates.

And, again, those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. From that same article on Fightin' Bob La Follette:

In March 25, 1921, at the age of sixty-five, Robert M. La Follette Sr. took the greatest risk of his long political career. Four years after he chose to lead the Congressional opposition to World War I, La Follette was still condemned in Washington and in his native state of Wisconsin as a traitor or - at best - an old man whose political instincts had finally failed him. But La Follette was not ready to surrender the U.S. Senate seat he had held since leaving Wisconsin's governorship in 1906. He wanted to return to Washington to do battle once more against what he perceived to be the twin evils of the still young century: corporate monopoly at home and imperialism abroad.

The reelection campaign that loomed just a year off would be difficult, he was told, perhaps even impossible. Old alliances had been strained by La Follette's lonely refusal to join in the war cries of 1917 and 1918. To rebuild them, the Senator's aides warned, he would have to abandon his continued calls for investigations of war profiteers and his passionate defense of socialist Eugene Victor Debs and others who had been jailed in the postwar Red Scare.

The place to backpedal, La Follette was told, would be in a speech before the crowded Wisconsin Assembly chamber in Madison. Moments before the white-haired Senator climbed to the podium on that cold March day, he was warned one last time by his aides to deliver a moderate address, to apply balm to the still-open wounds of the previous years, and, above all, to avoid mention of the war and his opposition to it.

La Follette began his speech with the formalities of the day, acknowledging old supporters and recognizing that this was a pivotal moment for him politically. Then, suddenly, La Follette pounded the lectern. "I am going to be a candidate for reelection to the United States Senate," he declared, as the room shook with the thunder of a mighty orator reaching full force. Stretching a clenched fist into the air, La Follette bellowed: "I do not want the vote of a single citizen under any misapprehension of where I stand: I would not change my record on the war for that of any man, living or dead."Where is the contemporary politician with this kind of guts today? Had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton ever even whispered in some locked and shuttered back room that they were considering a similarly unequivocal public statement of their own personal political principles, and a thousand so called 'wise and knowledgeable' campaign operatives would have simultaneous aneurysms. This is not how we do it in politics today, such chin-strokers and hand-flutterers would caution. The presence of the modern electronic media, with its instantaneous capacity to communicate across the nation to members of every different type of special interest group, makes it impossible to get elected to a national office with such uncompromising statements. You will offend too many people, alienate too many powerful interests. You must swaddle yourself in comforting, non-specific aphorisms and emotionally powerful but semantically meaningless buzz phrases. You must always unite, never divide; you must continually reassure, and never, ever offend.

Well, Bob La Follette would have had two words for that sort of political advice, and those two words would not have been "Happy Birthday":
The crowd sat in stunned silence for a moment before erupting into thunderous applause. Even his critics could not resist the courage of the man; indeed, one of his bitterest foes stood at the back of the hall, with tears running down his cheeks, and told a reporter: "I hate the son of a bitch. But, my God, what guts he's got."

...It was this militant faith in the people that enabled him to win reelection to the Senate in 1922 by an overwhelming margin. And this faith guided the Midwestern populist as he embarked on the most successful left-wing Presidential campaign in American history.

Running with the support of the Socialist Party, African Americans, women, organized labor, and farmers, La Follette terrified the established economic, political, and media order, which warned that his election would bring chaos. And La Follette gave them reason to fear. His Progressive Party platform called for government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, easier credit for farmers, the outlawing of child labor, the right of workers to organize unions, increased protection of civil liberties, an end to U.S. imperialism in Latin America, and a plebiscite before any President could again lead the nation into war.

Campaigning for the Presidency on a pledge to "break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people" and denouncing, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan's resurgence, "any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds," La Follette told his followers: "Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty."
Obviously, La Follette did not win his Presidential campaign, and that is all the lesson that contemporary aspirants to the Oval Office like Clinton and Obama are willing, or, probably, able, to draw from his example.

But La Follette's ideas were not defeated. He laid an important foundation of Socialist/Progressive thinking that greatly influenced politics over the next two generations:
The 1924 campaign laid the groundwork for the resurgence of left-wing populist movements across the upper Midwest - the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin. It spurred labor-based independent political action by New York's American Labor Party and other groupings. And La Follette gave inspiration, as well, to those who swung the Democratic Party to the left in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Harold Ickes Sr., a key aide to La Follette's 1924 campaign, would become an architect of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, in the words of historian Bernard Weisberger, "completed the elder La Follette's work."

Roosevelt acknowledged the inspiration of La Follette. But the Wisconsinite's truest heirs were of a more radical bent-people like his sons, Bob Jr. and Phil, who served respectively as U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and governor of the state; Minnesota's Floyd Olson, who was very possibly the most radical figure ever to govern an American state; author Upton Sinclair, whose 1934 foray into gubernatorial politics borrowed heavily from La Follette's 1924 platform and promised to "end poverty in California"; and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a veteran La Follette partisan who nominated the Senator for President in 1924 with the announcement that "I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street, instead of Broad and Wall."
And times do change, and indeed, there are different conditions at work in our society right now than there were in 1924, when La Follette's Presidential campaign was defeated. How hungry do you think the American people are now, after decades of steadily increasing corporate corruption on every level of our government, for a candidate who would run on such a platform?

You may point to Ralph Nader's historic failure in 2000, which common (and incorrect) 'knowledge' dictates did nothing except deliver the nation and the world into an eight year long Dark Age that we as yet see only dim signs we may ever emerge from -- but Nader was a political outsider whom the media hated, who ran as a private citizen and who had no electoral base to build from.  (Nader and his followers are also not even remotely responsible for Bush's success; to lay appropriate blame there, you must look to either the 40 million or so idiots who voted for Bush, or the 4 Supreme Court justices who handed him an election he hadn't actually won.  Nader, and those who voted for him, aren't in the equation.) 

Imagine if Obama or Clinton, or one of the other serious Democratic contenders, was to actually stand up and declare ringingly their opposition to American foreign interventionalism, to corporate cronyism, to political corruption, to everything about our current entrenched political system and its bloated, plutocratic, war profiteer campaign contributors that every American knows on some level is deeply, deeply wrong... yet that none of our politicians ever seems to want to even mention, much less openly confront?

I don't know. Maybe their actual message wouldn't get any TV time, maybe the newspapers wouldn't cover it, maybe the people would never hear what they really had to say. Certainly, any such candidate would be denounced and derided from every political direction by every media outlet known to man.

But maybe... just maybe... the American electorate would respond to this kind of honesty and integrity in the same way as the people of Wisconsin did in 1922.

Of course, it may be that they simply can't do it... that the paranoids are correct, and that you cannot get elected to a national office anywhere in America these days without selling out, body and soul, to the powerful corporate interests that seem to control every facet of contemporary life.

It may be that no one who reaches Congress, or a State governor's mansion, really can take this kind of position, without immediately being shut down by the real powers of the world. Perhaps everyone who is allowed to hold a so called 'powerful position' of public trust is actually in someone else's pocket. Maybe there really ARE horribly compromising pictures and/or videotapes featuring every powerful man and woman currently alive (and many who are now dead, for that matter) sitting in some secret safe somewhere, just waiting to be leaked to the media if anyone sets so much as one toe off the reservation.

Paranoid though such speculations are, this hypothesis would certainly explain the absolute gutlessness of every politician we have.

In which case, you have to wonder what terrible sin against power Mark Foley must have committed, to reap the punishment handed down to him a few years back... but  I digress.

Still, I have to hope that not everyone is in the bag, and that somewhere out there, we have a modern day Robert La Follette lurking on the political horizon... and that this time, should such a man or woman stand up and pound their fist on the lecturn and declare such principles in so uncompromising a way, the end results would be different.

Can you imagine what the world might be like today, if LaFollette had actually won his Presidential campaign?

As a slightly bitter afterthought, let me say that I had allowed myself to think for a few months there that Senator Obama might indeed be a modern day reincarnation of Senator Robert LaFollette.  Alas, it would seem this isn't so; Senator Obama's recent vacillations and equivocations make it apparent that he's simply another Politician As Usual.

By the way, for those who can't read my new graphic, I apologize.  I had no idea it would end up so small.   You can see it in its full glory here.  And kudos to Sifu Tweety and The Editors. 

You learn stuff.

Everywhere you go, if you keep your brain even partially wedged open, you learn stuff.

Some of what you learn is pleasant, and much of it unfortunately isn't, but that, as they say, is life in the big city.

Here, I've learned that if I write a lengthy expansion of a classic conservative email parable, I'll get 40+ recommendations and lots of positive comments and everyone will love me and say "Yay Doc Nebula you de man!"  And then I will be happy. 

For a bit.

If, on the other hand, I write of my disappointment when a leading political candidate specifically breaks an important, even vital, campaign promise, I'll still get lots of comments, but only single digit approvals, and most of those comments will be from people shrieking and wailing and throwing their ball gowns over their heads at the very thought of anyone anywhere ever saying anything even remotely unpleasant about their favorite Magical Negro.

And that will make me sad.

For a bit.

As with life, then, posting here at TPM is a crap shoot.  If I post the truth as it appears to me, I will be rewarded either with veneration and adulation, or, on the other hand,  excoriation and vituperation.  It seems to depend, as the nameless comic in ALL THAT JAZZ once opined, on the shit you're smokin'. 

All I can do, then, is all I can do. 

Let me tell you a bit about myself, so you will understand why I say the terrible, terrible things that I say.  Politically, I have long considered myself to be an independent minded, free thinking, leftward leaning progressive sort, with a current both deep and wide of truculent libertarianism lurking just below the surface. 

It came as something of a surprise to me, then, to learn, back in March of 2007, that I was, in fact, a left wing extremist.

So, let's set the Wayback Machine for March of 2007.  In that long ago month, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein kindly provided me with a working definition of a "left wing extremist" --

A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:

--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.

Ummm... hmmm.  Let's see.  Have I ever stated anywhere that I believe the United States is a 'fundamentally negative force in the world'... well... there was that previous blog post where I called the U.S. an 'evil empire'... yeah, yeah... okay, that's a big ten-four, good buddy.

--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism. 

Hmmmm.  Well, there was that whole thing where Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State encouraged the radicalization of Afghani Muslems so they would fight the Soviet Union as our proxies... gee, where did I see that...

* * * *

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski
Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*
 
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention.  In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter.  You therefore played a role in this affair.  Is that correct?

Brzezinski:  Yes.  According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979.  But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.  And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action.  But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that.  We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them.  However, there was a basis of truth.  You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what?  That secret operation was an excellent idea.  It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?  The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.  Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [intégrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world?  The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?  Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

* * * *

Oh, yeah, that's where.  Okay.  Let's put a check mark on that one and move on to...

--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.

It... I... well, gee, where do I start with this one?  The Louisiana Purchase, the systematic campaign of terror and genocide against the indigenous races of the North American continent, the annexation by force of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Phillippines, 700 U.S. military bases all across the globe, the World Bank being pretty much entirely U.S. controlled... yeah... sounds like we're pretty imperialist to me.  Is that the major reason behind the invasion of Iraq? Well, that and making sure the price of oil stays high by keeping the Iraqi oil fields largely unexploited, yeah.  So sign me up for this one, too.

--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.

I... don't know what this means.  I think it requires translation.  I suspect it means "tends to blame America for the consequences of its own actions", and if so, well, yeah, I'm climbing in that boat, too.

--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.

Show me an example of capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, and I'll advise as to  how I feel about it.  We sure as shit don't have anything remotely fitting that description here in the good ol' U.S.A.

--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).

American society is perfectly fair to the 1-2% of the American population that currently controls something like 92% of American wealth.  For the rest of us, not so much.

Okay, let me expand on that a little bit.  American society has never been about being 'fair', not in economic terms, nor, for that matter, in any other.  The United States was founded by a group of rich white guys who came to North America because they were sick and tired of being fucked with by the Church and the State back home.  They believed in (among other things) private property, gun ownership, chattel slavery, and the utter immorality of the very notion of an income tax.

They kicked Britain off the continent and set up their own government and that government was never about being 'fair', whatever the hell 'fair' means.  The government they set up was about common defense and interstate commerce, and the governing documents they wrote denoted a very long list of things that the government could never, never do to United States citizens... by which, our Founding Fathers meant, white landowning males, and their property, which included by definition, all the non-white, non-landowning males and pretty much all females.  

None of this is 'fair'.  You could pulverize all of human history and sift through it like bread crumbs for the rest of your life and you would never find a bigger, more arrogant bunch of snobby class-centric elitist pricks than the American Founding Fathers.  They had no desire for, nor intention of setting up, a 'fair' society; they wanted a government and an economic system that would support, protect, and defend the already entrenched and wealthy land owning interests.  And that's what they (and the rest of us) got.

So, yeah, I guess I can put my initials next to this one, too.

--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.

Well, I'd say they are the fault of the entrenched and wealthy property owning interests, which enjoy living in a world of enormous economic class distinctions, because it allows them to live very very well off the labor of others, and feel snotty about it, too.  But if you want to boil all that down to 'society', well, sure, what the hell.  I'll buy that for a dollar.

--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.

Shenanigans!  When even an asshat like Rush Limbaugh knows full well that the U.S. is a representative republic rather than a pure democracy, I have to assume that someone like Joe Klein is aware of it as well.  (If he's not, he should be fired and TIME magazine should give his job to me.) 

Which is to say, we are a representative republic, in theory.  That theory these days is largely obsolete; in actual practice, we are currently pretty much a tyranny.  Some may disagree simply because Homeland Security hasn't shown up at their door and sent them off to some secret prison to be interrogated for being an enemy combatant... yet... but it could happen in the next five minutes, and there is nothing  you or me or anyone else can do about it once it has.  That smells like tyranny to me.  Those who disagree are cordially invited to take a big whiff of Jose Padilla next time he shuffles by in leg irons and tell me what it smells like to them.  Boneheads.

--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.

I like John Brunner's definition of evil, which is basically, anything that treats human beings as chattel, is evil.  This is essentially what corporations are all about -- treating everything in the world, including human beings, as marketable, fungible assets.  To me, that seems pretty evil, yeah.  And it is an incontrovertible part of corporate existence, so, yes, corporations are evil. 

--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.

Well, I believe the sonsofbitches do their best, but on my good days, I hope to jesus they aren't quite all the way there yet.

--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.

Um... you're going to have to give me an example so I know which kind of 'conservative sources' you're referencing.  Conservative sources who believe in small government and taxes on consumption instead of income and a non-fiat economy I'm willing to listen to. 

On the other hand, if you're using 'conservative' to mean "AAARRRGGGHHHHH FAGGOTS AND NEGRAS AND LIBRULS AND WETBACKS AND GODDAM FURRINERS ALL SUCK AND SHOULD BE DEPORTED AND KILLED AND LOCKED UP AND TORTURED YEEEEEAAAARRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!"  and all that other hateful white power shit, then yeah, all those turd monkeys can kiss my ass, backwards, forwards, and upside down.

--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Hey, I mock nearly any one of faith, if one of their articles of faith is "There's an invisible Scoutmaster In The Sky who loves me unconditionally despite the fact that I want to have everyone who disagrees with me locked up, tortured, deported, and/or killed".  

Now, if you add in there that these 'people of faith' use their 'faith' to justify  denying other people the right to (a) decide which medical procedures they will and won't have, and (b) get married to whomever they choose, then, you know, I say they're asparagus and I say the hell with them.  And if that's dismissive mockery, well, juck 'em if they can't take a foke.  Or something. 

--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.

I don't know if I regularly use harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives, but I sure as fuck will break into some serious cocksucking vulgarity in response to idiotic horseshit like, I dunno, a fucking drug addict like Rush Limbaugh demanding that that all drug addicts but him be immediately executed, or a she-troll like Anne Coulter calling a Democratic candidate for President a faggot at a major conservative gathering and getting a for the love of Christ standing ovation for it. 

Show me pictures of Iraqi kids with no arms or legs or newlywed Marines with melted faces and I'll get positively goddam abusive with the fuckheads responsible for that shit, too.

Those who do not like this; I have an ass, I presume they have lips; apply as necessary to resolve the issue.

Oh.  Um... yeah, yeah, I guess I qualify for this one, too.

This is a partial list, off the top of my head--additions and subtractions will be carefully considered.

No, no, I think this is a fabulous list.  Honestly.  I had no idea I was such a nutjob, but I'm delirious at the validation.

If readers would like, I'll give you my definition of right-wing extremism next week.

No need, I've done that for you.  Where was it... oh, yeah.  Anyone who thinks that people who disagree with them should be (a) locked up, (b) tortured, (c) beaten in public, (d) executed, or (e) any/all of the above, are extreme right wing nutballs.  You can tell them from the extreme left wing nutballs, because while we believe many things that are actually true regardless of how offensive you find that actuality, we do not advocate anyone being locked up for refusing to subscribe to our belief system, much less such people being beaten, tortured, deported, or executed.  

P.S. It would be wildly stupid for me to get into a pissing match by naming names.

One man's 'wildly stupid' is another's courageous honesty, but, y'know, WTF, Joe,  you're a dipshit anyway.

I won't go there...And bear in mind, the characteristics above should be regarded as tendencies, not cast-in-stone beliefs.

In other words, you don't need to REALLY believe any of these things all that strongly for the Joe Kleins of this world to dismiss you completely (but not harshly or with vulgar language, cuz he's too cool for all that shit, yeah buddy); he'll dismiss you completely if you only kinda-sorta believe one of them.  Sweet!

Correction:: Sean Hannity is a ideological extremist and a bully.

He's an effing jack ass, too.  Thanks for playing our game.

 Atrios may or may not be an ideological extremist--I was wrong to say he was, since I don't know enough about him--but he sure is a purveyor of extreme and terminally smug rhetoric.

I don't know if Atrios is an ideological extremist, either, but 'smug' is endemic to the blogosphere and the pundit class in general.  'Terminal' is a thoughtless, kneejerk misuse of the language in this context; a great many people writing and voicing their views on a great many subjects are smug, but none of them (perhaps unfortunately) are going to die of it.  And from what I've read, if anyone was going to die of terminal smugness, Joe Klein would be in Cheyne-Stokes respiration right now... and probably so would I, smug, supercilious asshat that I am.

Readers' Bottom Line: There are no lefties left.

I am King!

 There are no socialists left.

I hear there are a few in Sweden,  Norway, and the Netherlands.  Maybe a couple down in Cuba, too, I dunno.

No one has ever assumed that "corporate" equals "evil."

It's like that old Trident chewing gum commercial, where the hot former Olympic figure skater says "Who wants gum?" and all the kids starting waving their hands frantically.  Which is to say, when Joe Klein advises that "no one has ever assumed that 'corporate' equals 'evil', I immediately start waving my hand vehemently while screaming "I do!  I do!"

No one has ever said that America was an aggressive, imperialistic power in the world.

Joe Klein clearly needs to get out more.  This blog, and this one, and this one, and this one over here all say that America is an aggressive, imperialistic power all the time.  Honest.  

No one has ever accused anyone of "blaming the victim" when it comes to crime or poverty.

I... ::staring into space, mumbling to myself:: No, I can't understand this one, either.  I'm moving on.

No one--certainly no one in the blogosphere--has ever mocked Roman Catholics.

Well, I've mocked Roman Catholics when I felt they deserved it, but I'll mock anyone, including myself, so I most likely don't count.

Jeez, that's a relief.

Happy to help.  Any time, really.

Anyway, while I have always suspected I must be an extremist of some sort or another, I had no idea I was this extreme.  I am deeply grateful for the information.  Does the position have a salary?  Or is it merely titular?  Either way, I am proud and honored, and I humbly pledge to never let my constituency down.

We are the American people, strong and proud.   White and black, brown and yellow, man and woman, adult and youngster.  Brother, sister, father, mother, uncle, aunt, grandparent, grandchild.   We are Irish and Scottish and German and French, we are gentile and Jew, African and Asian, Dane and Swede. We are the end product of history's greatest ethnic smelting process. 

We are Catholic and Protestant, believer and agnostic, Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Wiccan and six thousand other religions and creeds and belief systems as well.  We have faith, or we have no faith; we are idealists and cynics, we are Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, Libertarians, independents, progressives, socialists, communists, objectivists, everything and nothing. 

We believe in a day's work for a day's pay, an  honest job for an honest man, in hard work and clean living.  And we believe in something for nothing, that it's better to be lucky than smart, and that you never give a sucker an even break. 

In God we trust, all others pay cash.

We are the rich white men who first declared independence from the imperial yoke, and we are the poor black men and women they owned.  We are the red men who were pushed off their land to make way for the railroads, and the yellow men who built the railroads at gunpoint and in chains, and the white men who slaughtered and enslaved in pursuit of, and then sold tickets for and rode on, those railroads. 

We are the soldiers who slaughtered in trumped up wars to increase American territory, and we are the brown people of Mexico and Hawaii who were murdered in those wars, and we are the poor men who bought the cheap beans and pineapples that resulted from those wars and the rich men who profited from those sales. 

We are the labor leaders whose skulls were broken on picket lines, and the Irish cops who swung the night sticks.   We are the flower people who burned their draft cards while chanting "Hell no, we won't go" and we are the riot shielded peace officers who lobbed tear gas in response.  We are protesting college students, and the National Guardsmen who gunned them down.   We are the Quakers who refused to be sent off to combat, and the MPs who locked them up in Leavenworth.   We are the men and women of color who refused to sit in the back of the bus any more, and the thousands of others who marched along side them, and we are the racist crackers who turned firehoses and loosed vicious dogs in response.   We are the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, the Weathermen and the FBI.

However much we may hate the Illinois Nazis, we are the Illinois Nazis.

 We are not Iraqi, or Iranian, but someday we may be, and then, we may be ashamed at what we once did to ourselves, but for now, those people aren’t our people, and thus aren’t really people at all, so we really don't care all that much.

We are the American government, which is by the people, for the people, and of the people.  We are the voters and the voted on, the successful and the also-ran, the incumbent and the challenger, the winners and losers, the high and the low.

We are those who know the secrets, and those who are ignorant of their very existence.  We are those who vote to go to war, and those who actually go.  We are the people in charge of our children’s safety, who prey on those children in Internet chat rooms while sitting on the floor of Congress.  We are those who pay bribes, and those who take them, those who peddle influence and those who purchase it, those who break laws, and those who decline to prosecute.   We are the activist judiciary, the unitary executive, the mostly supine legislature.   We are those who impeach over acts of adultery, and refuse to impeach over crimes against humanity. 

We did not have sex with that woman, but we believe strongly in the rule of law.

We triangulate and count the cost, we hoard our political capital and choose our battles.  We stand on principle when it won’t cost us votes, we stall investigations and classify reports.  We rig the vote, we cage the polling lists, we demand ID to prevent vote fraud. 

We believe in old time religion and San Francisco values, we support the troops and we stay the course, we swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, and then we vote to get rid of habeus corpus.

All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of justice.

And the beatings will continue until morale improves.

We are mostly unaware of the ironies implicit in every action of our political system. 

We believe in change, and we should, because we are seeing change right now.  Change That We Can Believe In is all around us; it is the change from “I will filibuster any bill that contains retroactive immunity for the telecoms” to “National security trumps immunity and I will vote for this bill even if it contains immunity”.  And we can like it, or lump it, because in November, we can vote for the liar we like a little less than the liar we like a little more, or we can vote for the liar we like a little more than the liar we like a little less.

We, The People, the American people, the Great Unwashed, are being bent over the table and greased up for another major screwing, and what is the prescription for our ailment, the solution to our problem, the new direction forward?

We can bite the pillow and take it like grown ups.

Yes.  Yes, We Can.

Because, you know, doing anything else might actually cause us some serious discomfort. 

At least we're used to being screwed by politicians and their promises.

Hell, some of us seem to have learned to like it.

 

 

 

So my conservative uncle forwarded another email to me.  This one features a supposed resignation speech by George W. Bush.  Such a thought is, of course, far too good to be true; I suspect the Secret Service is going to have to drag Bush out of the White House kicking and screaming in January 2009.  Still, it's a fun idea, so I read the supposed speech with relish:

The speech George W. Bush might give:

Normally, I start these things out by saying 'My Fellow Americans.' Not doing it this time. If the polls are any indication, I don't know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you're really not fellow Americans any longer.

I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.

The reason I'm quitting is simple. I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.

Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media. Polls show that the majority of you think the economy is in the tank. And that's despite record numbers of homeowners, including record numbers of MINORITY homeowners. And while we're mentioning minorities, I'll point out that minority business ownership is at an all-time high. Our unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton administration. I've mentioned all those things before, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.

Despite the shock to our economy of 9/11, the stock market has rebounded to record levels and more Americans than ever are participating in these markets. Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.

We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this 'blood for oil' thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would've already seized Iraq 's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this 'Bush Lied; People Died' crap either. If I were the liar you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.

Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named 'Clinton' established that policy. Bet you didn't know that, did you?

You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to out spend and out-tech them.

That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the b______s are all over the globe.

You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.'

Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops. Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy. Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well FedEx a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.

In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol. I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.

I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads. So I quit. I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient house down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.

Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.

So that's it. God bless what's left of America. Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, well .....

And I think that's just great.  I really do.  But it seems like a rough draft to me.  It seems... incomplete.  So let me try to punch it up a little, and add a few things that this draft omitted:

Normally, I start these things out by saying ‘My Fellow Americans’.  Just like, y’know, ol’ Tricky Dick used to.  I dunno why.  My speechwriters like him.  I think he was a pussy.  I mean, he got caught doing illegal wiretaps and such, and denied it, and had to resign in disgrace.  Why would you do that?  I say, you get caught doing something illegal, you just say it ain’t illegal if you’re President!  Well, I guess he did try that and it didn’t work for him as well as it is for me.  Like I said, a pussy.

 Anyway.  I ain’t sure y’all are really my fellow Americans any more.  My fellow Americans are duck hunters and cheese eaters, corn growers and spud mashers.  My fellow Americans drink beer, and even snort a little coke once in a while… okay, only kiddin’ about that, hell, I can’t remember if I ever snorted coke or not.  Whatever.  The point is, my fellow Americans drink beer.   They drink a LOT of beer.  I mean, a great big HUGE fargin’ shi – er, crapload of beer.  Those are my fellow Americans.  And most of you people ain’t them.  I don’t know who you are.  Commies or somethin’.  Lib’ruls.  Whatever.

 Anyway, I quit.  Yeah, that’s right.  And it’s not to avoid impeachment or prosecution or other big words I can barely say and sure as hell couldn’t spell right if my life depended on it, no sir.  Because there have been no impeachable offenses from this office, and no breaking of any laws.  Well, okay, I lied us into a war and I outed a deep cover CIA agent and I’ve been spying on all of y’all for years, especially the goddam Democrats.  And there was some vote fraud in 2000 and 2004.  And I signed off on all this illegal torture of captured Iraqis.  And there’s been a buttload of covert stuff that the NY Times ain’t found out about yet.   But dammit we’re at war and the Constitution says that when we’re at war the U.S. President can do anything he wants, kinda like one’a them there Caesars of old, or maybe, well, like Saddam Hussein.  Except he was a pussy.  And I’m not.  What I’m saying is, when the President does it, it’s legal.  So there hasn’t been any lawbreakin’.  So suck on this, Democrats.  Okay.

 So the reason I’m quitting is simple.  It has to be or I couldn’t understand it.  I’m fed up with you people.  Frankly, you’re all gettin’ on my last nerve.  I mean, seriously, WTF?  Don’t you understand what’s goin’ on in this once great nation of ours?  Don’t you even care?

 Lemme spell it out for you.  Polls show the majority of you think the economy is in the tank.  This is bs, a bill of goods you’ve been sold by goddam Democrats and the liberal media.  The economy is great!  Rich people have never been richer. And all them minorities out there are doing great, too.  Under my Administration we totally deregulated the entire banking system, and lots of minorities got mortgages and capital investment small business loans.  Now, sure, they are most likely all gonna lose their houses and businesses as the entire financial system falls apart, but the point is, they never would have had those houses or businesses in the first place if not for my Administration’s enlightened economic policies. 

Also, our Unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton Administration.  Of course, I hate the Clinton Administration and even a dummy like me can see that claiming we’re doing great by comparing ourselves to the Clinton Administration makes no sense whatsoever.  Especially when we aren’t doing great, we’re barely doing as well.  But never mind, I’m moving on.

Despite the shock to our economy of 9/11, the stock market has rebounded to record levels.  Well, okay, to be fair it’s bounced up and down more than Madonna’s head in Spike Lee’s lap, but it’s probably up right now.  I mean, flip a coin, right?  Anyway.  With any luck, the whole thing won’t crater spectacularly until me and Laura got our stuff out of the White House and back on the ranch.  So that’s all right.

Now there’s been a lot of whining about high gas prices.  High gas prices ain’t a bad thing.  Not if you’re heavily invested in oil futures, anyway.  And if you’re not, well, who cares about you?  Screw ya, that’s what I say.  What are you going to do about it? Not drive?  As if.   Pretty soon you’re going to wake up and realize that the only thing to do about high gas prices is let my buddies drill any goddam place they feel like drillin’.  And that won’t bring gas prices down because, well, we work with OPEC to make sure prices stay high.  So you’re screwed!  Just keep forkin’ over your cash, and be glad you live in America.  If you were some goddam towelhead you’d be eatin’ depleted uranium bullets for dinner. 

We face real threats in the world.  Threats like, winning this goddam war in Iraq and bringin’ the Iraqi oil fields online and oil prices actually droppin’ for a while.  You got any idea what that would do to my stock portfolio?  Maybe you don’t know it, but all my oil buddies have been conspirin’ to keep the Iraqi oil fields undeveloped since 1925.  Saddam finally got fed up with that crap and decided he was going to pump as much as he wanted, so we had to do somethin’.  But if we win this war over there, then all of you ungrateful sonsabitches are gonna expect cheap gasoline.   And I can’t have that. 

As for this ‘Bush Lied, People Died’ crap, look.  I could pretty easily have had WMDs planted in Iraq if I wanted to do that.  I mean, I could have had the CIA or the NSA or some Special Forces group do that and I would absolutely have gotten away with it because nothin’ ever goes wrong when I try to pull crap like that.  I  mean it’s not like the New York Times would find out about that nonsense in a heartbeat or anything.  Anyway.  I didn’t do that.  Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.  I mean, I ain’t never admitted that me and Vice President Cheney pretty much ordered the intelligence services to massage their data for us, or that I wasn’t willing to listen to anything I didn’t wanna hear.  And I ain’t admittin’ to it now.   So forget all that.

Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs.  Well, okay, nobody else in the UN did, but screw those pansies.  Foreigner pansies.  A lot of you people believed it.  Mostly because you’re stupid and you trusted us.  Wait.  Did I say that out loud? Never mind.  A lot of other people believed it.  Only that smart ass who was married to that hot blonde CIA agent didn’t.  And who listens to him?  Nobody.  So shut up.

Also, it was a guy named Clinton who established regime change as our official U.S. policy in Iraq.  He just did it like a pussy.  It was up to me to go in with guns and get it done.  I mean, not me personally.  But as Commander in Chief, it’s like I did it personally.  All of it.  Okay, not the bad stuff.  Just the stuff where I shot a lot of towel heads and pulled that big statue of Saddam down.  Yeah.

You people need to understand that we face a unique enemy.  They ain’t like Commies.  Commies were evil, but sane.  These guys are evil and crazy.  They want to die.  They don’t care if they die.  They like to die.  They need to die.  And we make them die.  We do it real well.  We… what was I saying?  Oh yeah.  They want to die and they want YOU to die and they’re all over the place.  And I’ve been trying to keep you safe.   So keep gassin’ up and shut your pie holes.  I mean, Jesus.

You should be grateful they haven’t gotten more of you here in the U.S. since September 11.  But you’re not.  That’s because you got no idea how hard everybody works to keep you safe.  And that’s because every time you see airport security at work they look like dimwits who don’t know what they’re doing, and every time you hear about one of these “terrorist ops” we stopped, well, it’s like fifteen morons in Florida that the FBI entrapped in the first place.  Or some lame ass plan to bomb an airport that even Maxwell Smart wouldn’t believe in.  You know, it seems like you people used to be more gullible.  I miss those days.  Good times.  Good times.

Anyway, I told you it would be a long fight.  And you got no patience for that.  Just because our troops are getting maimed and dying and we’re not taking equipping them right or takin’ care of them when they come home busted up or takin’ care of their families and we keep extendin’ their tours, plus, we tortured a lot of goddam towelheads, you’re tired of this and you want it to stop.  Plus, you actively support those who help the enemy.  Every time you fill up your gas tank a big whoppin’ cut of that money goes straight to Arab terrorists.  No, wait.  That’s not what I meant to say.  It’s every time you buy the New York Times.  Yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.

In this day and age, it’s easy enough to find the truth.  It’s all over the Internet.  And I hate that, which is why we’re tryin’ to regulate the hell out of Internet content.  But it’s okay because most of you would rather just watch AMERICAN IDOL anyway.  Which is on Fox.  Mmm.  I love Fox.  Anyway, you people are really stupid.  Too stupid to leave a city that’s below sea level when there’s a hurricane approaching.  Of course, all them deputy sheriffs from neighboring towns holding the bridges at gunpoint might have had something to do with it.  I dunno.  I got a helicopter.

I could say a lot more, but I figure that it would all go over your heads.  Forty million of you, anyway, who were stupid enough to vote for me twice.  And the rest of you are gettin’ too goddam smart for me.  So I quit.  I’m goin’ back to Crawford.  Well, not really, my family has bought up a lot of land down in South America, right over one of the biggest remaining aquifers of clean water in the world.  No extradition.  But y’all can look for me all you want in Crawford.  Heh.  Dummies.

Oh, yeah, and Cheney’s quittin’ too.  That means Pelosi is your new President.  Well, it doesn’t, cuz I’ve issued about eighteen different Executive Orders totally changin’ around the order of succession, and I can’t remember who gets it after Dick.  No, wait.  I think if I resign and Dick resigns, Dick automatically becomes President.   For life.  Also, if anyone else wins a Presidential election, Dick still becomes President.  Executive orders are great things.  But anyway.

 So that’s it.  God bless what’s left of America.  Some of you know what I mean.  The really drunk ones.  The rest of you… well… like Bluto Blutarski said, I recommend you start drinking heavily. 

 And you better listen to him.  He’s pre-med.

If I were the king of the world, I tell you what I'd do...

Or, rather, if I were U.S. President...

I'd want to do many specific things, but in general they all come down to, seeing to the fair collection and redistribution of wealth and resources.  Which is, honestly, government's only real and valid purpose, anyway.

More specifically though, I would:

*  Begin immediate troop withdrawals from Iraq, as well as any place else where the native populace doesn't want our troops stationed. 

*Appoint a lot of special prosecutors to investigate government corruption on every level. 

* Declassify everything Bush and Cheney classified and start faxing documents to every media outlet in the world. 

* Tell the IRS to start looking hard at American corporations doing business overseas, and especially at overseas accounts and transactions. 

* Overhaul the Federal tax code so anyone can understand it without hiring an expert.

* Crack down hard on every single for-profit special interest that has spent a great deal of money lobbying the Federal government for special favors in the last 20 years. 

* Design and implement a decent universal health care plan.  Having worked for over a year in FSA administration, I think I'd start with giving every U.S. citizen an FSA cash card pre-loaded with $10,000 that could only be used for medical expenses.  It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a good first step.

*  Recruit some really good forensic accountants, give them special prosecutor powers, and have them start a comprehensive, utterly transparent audit of the Federal budget system. 

Now, many of these are initiatives that would simply get hopelessly bogged down in our near-entirely corrupt, special interest controlled Congress.  However, any President foolish enough to even try that last one would get a bullet in the head, stat.  Most likely from  somebody in the Secret Service who's actually on the NSA payroll.

But, still, it's something that has to be done.  It won't be, probably not ever, but if we're ever going to have a chance at really cleaning up our government, we have to open the books.  Not in any half assed, okay, we'll take a look at some programs but we're going to completely ignore other stuff way, either.  We have to do it for real.    We need to know what we've been spending our money on.  We certainly have a right to.

As to other specific policy proposals I'd like to make -- I'd like to see the Federal government buy every house in America that has been on the market for six months or longer, and then give those houses away to combat veterans and/ or their surviving families.  Kind of like EXTREME MAKEOVER: HOME EDITION on a massive scale. I'd like to issue an Executive Order requiring every elected and appointed official to submit to a polygraph test and answer questions written by their constituents, no more than twice a year, for, say, a hundred questions per session. 

That last bit would get me shot not only by covert NSA agents in the secret service, but by Congressmen and Senators, too.

In addtion, no more political advertising on the public airwaves.  I'd like to create another C-SPAN channel and give Congress access to something like a public access TV studio.  They would do all their campaigning for free from there. And to the inevitable 'What about freedom of speech?' questions, I say this:   There is no freedom of speech on the public airwaves; we regulate content on every broadcast TV channel there is.  If the government can tell private citizens what they can and cannot say or show in commercial advertisements and commercial programming, we can sure as hell regulate political speech.  Those who scream 'freedom of speech' for paid political attack ads that are mostly crap anyway can do so, but they also will then need to allow FOX to  put on AMERICA'S UP AND COMING PORN STARS, or let Budweiser advertise their beer with topless models.  And if that's indecent, then what the hell is lying to the American people about who they should and shouldn't elect to positions of authority over them?

I'd also like to see Congress work a little longer and a little harder, too.  And I'd like to appoint a citizens' board that reviews all government salaries, perks, and proposed pay raises... or, no,  lets just put that stuff up to a national referendum.  In fact, I'd like to see a great many things taken away from Congress and the Executive Branch and put up to national referendums. 

Maybe we could let the people vote on when to end wars... not declare them, that should stay with Congress, but, say, if we've been in a state of active aggressive war for 12 months, then the people get to vote on whether we continue with it, or we get the hell out.

We also need to get serious about anti-trust laws, especially as regards our print and broadcast media.  Several huge media conglomerates need to be broken into tiny little pieces.

I'd also  like a serious review of any kind of top secret technology the government may have that hasn't been released to the public.  I sincerely doubt we actually have working fusion or functional anti-grav, but maybe we do and the economic Powers That Be are sitting on it because, as Westinghouse once said to Tesla, there's no place to put the meter.  If we have the technology to solve our energy crisis, or to let people have safe flying cars, well, fine.  You move ahead.  Stalling progress because somebody's stock market portfolio is going to take a hit doesn't work for me.

There's a lot more I'd like to try to accomplish, were I elected President... for one thing, I'd have a You Can Call Me List, instead of a Do Not Call List... something people could register on, if they wanted telemarketers to call them, with the understanding that, if your number isn't on that list and a telemarketer calls you, the phone company bills that company for the call and sends you a check.  I think that would be a much more effective way of dealing with professional nuisance callers. 

And I could keep typing this stuff forever, but this list will do to be going on with.  None of it's ever going to happen, regardless of who I vote for.

But I can dream...