(also posted at My Left Wing, Daily Kos, and NION)
Have you ever had an embarrassing friend? You know, that guy who is deeply cool but a little uncouth or unkempt. For all his brilliance, insight, and understanding maybe his shoes are sometimes untied, his clothes a bit rumpled, or his shirttails hanging out.
(more over the fold…)
Maybe he goes about with three-days growth of beard, has tattoos, or smells a little funny.
Maybe he’s somewhat indiscreet, has dirty fingernails, or says things like fuck, warpigs, or evil rightwing bastards in polite conversation.
You’ve come to love and respect him but may wince a little should he appear at an inopportune moment because he’s just not easily explained to your more conventional friends.
Being an unabashed member of `the extreme radical left’ sometimes feels like being the embarrassing friend to the rest of the Democrats. The limousine liberals, the Volvo liberals, the champagne liberals, the moderates, the centrists, and the establishment Dems are all a little or a lot embarrassed by their association with us in the wild-eyed wing of the Party. Some of them would probably pay good money to get rid of us (though I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas).
Yep, even a lot of left-leaning Democrats would like to pretend like we don’t exist. After all, it’s hard to be `respectable’ when you have friends like us. You can’t invite us to your soirees; we’re always testing the gravy with our fingers, smoking pot in the bathroom, or chanting ho-ho-ho chi minh at the drop of a hat.
Oddly enough, the right-wingers worship their fringe element (and we all see where that got us) while the leftwing often wishes we would just go away. The irony of this is that as W.R.O.N.G. as the extreme right has been (and who can doubt it?), the extreme left (being their polar opposite) has been just as right (as in correct). And we, of course, are where all of the good left-of-center ideas come from.
We were right about the war in Vietnam. Just like we said, it was all a big lie cooked up by the CIA and the military-industrial complex to enrich a lot of fat cat assholes at the expense of thousands of American families and millions of Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese families. We were right when we said it was illegal, immoral, and just plain wrong.
We were right when we said we couldn’t trust the government to tell us the truth.
We were right back in the 60s when we said we needed alternative energy, an environmentally sustainable life-style, and that we should stop trying to force everyone into the same mold.
But for all we brought to the mainstream culture, they hated us for it – many of them did at least.
Who’s Afraid of Peter Boyle
SNIP
Joe is not a particularly good movie, despite Boyle’s riveting performance. But the film’s argument, though heavy-handed, resembled a book of the time by the radical sociologist Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Slater argued that people loathed and feared the hippies because deep down they knew the hippies were right–“we fear having our secret doubts about the viability of our social system voiced aloud”–and envied their freedom. Joe made Slater’s argument flesh: an attempt to shock viewers into recognizing that all this hating what you desire led to an uncontrollable spiral of violence.
They hated us for our freedom. Who’d have thunk it? That, and because we told them the awful truth, that their way of life was not sustainable. They just did not want to hear it.
They would not listen, they’re not listening still.
Perhaps they never will…~ from Don McLean’s Starry, Starry Night
We were right when we said we needed to curb the excesses of capitalism or the gap between rich and poor would become a divisive and oppressive nightmare.
Sign the tab in certain Midtown eateries and your neighbors’ eyes slide over. Is that a $48,000 Michel Perchin pen? What’s on your wrist – a $300,000 Breguet watch?
In Palm Springs and Bel Air, $100,000 twin-turbo Porsches and $225,000 Ferraris buzz the warm streets. In New York at an exclusive Morell & Company auction last May, a single magnum of Dom Perignon champagne was sold for $5,750. And there are the paintings of course – one evening at auction two Monets sold for $43 million (2). Hotel rooms, anyone, at $10,000 a night? Estate agents in suburbs of Dallas and Palm Beach have advertised baronial homes for sale at over $40 million (3).
These are prices paid by the exceptionally wealthy, the folks who skim the pages of the Robb Report (average annual salary of subscribers: $1.2 million) in whose glossy pages are reviewed the best of everything. In a recent issue a southern plantation is advertised, “everybody’s dream,” at $8.5 million.
We were right when we said that prohibition would not work and that the laws against drugs do more harm than the drugs themselves ever could.
Pot Prisoners Cost Americans $1 Billion a Year
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet. Posted February 10, 2007.The latest numbers are out: nearly 800,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges in 2005. When will the insanity stop?
American taxpayers are now spending more than a billion dollars per year to incarcerate its citizens for pot. That’s according to statistics recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The new report is noteworthy because it undermines the common claim from law enforcement officers and bureaucrats, specifically White House drug czar John Walters, that few, if any, Americans are incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses. In reality, nearly 1 out of 8 U.S. drug prisoners are locked up for pot.
Of course, several hundred thousand more Americans are arrested each year for violating marijuana laws, costing taxpayers another $8 billion dollars annually in criminal justice costs.
We were right when we said that Nixon was a rat and a crook, and that the CIA was running heroin in Vietnam (Note: I had inadvertently cited a bogus rightwing source here earlier. Apologies to all.).
SNIP
However, American involvement has gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies have covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines have carried opium, and individual CIA agents have winked at the opium traffic.
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
We were right when we said that Reagan was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a disaster for America.
We were right when we said trickle-down economics was a bullshit greedhead rip-off of the poor.
We were right when we said they were torturing and murdering innocent people in SE Asia, South America, Central America and elsewhere, and that we were training foreign armies to do those things at the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
School of the Americas
The U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), located in Fort Benning, Georgia, is a military training institution focused on training officers from Latin American countries. Since its creation in 1946, some 60,000 Latin American military officers have graduated from the school.
Human Rights Concerns
Many of its graduates have been implicated in serious human rights abuses and manuals used at the school appear to condone if not promote the use of torture. [2] This has resulted in a grassroots human rights campaign to close the SOA, led by the organization SOA Watch. Activists opposed to the SOA often refer to the school as the “School of Assassins” and the “School of Coups.”
Abuses SOA graduates have alleged to have committed include “the death or disappearance of 200,000 Guatemalans and innumerable other atrocities… In Colombia 2 million have been displaced and thousands are still reliving the horrors of their torture – not surprising since, with 10,000 graduates from the SOA, Colombia is the school’s largest customer and has the worst human rights record on the continent.”
We were right when we said that Wall Street, the government, and the military-industrial complex had formed an evil iron triangle that has a stranglehold on our country and is pushing us inexorably into a state of total war to serve their own nefarious ends.
What Did Eisenhower Mean When He Warned of a Military Industrial Complex? Take a Look at the Carlyle Group.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
With Dan Briody, Author of “The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group”They are at the epicenter of the military-industrial-complex-Bush-Cheney-crony-capitalism administration. The Carlyle Group is the model example of the nearly seamless connection between the Bush administration, self-enrichment and companies who receive big government defense contracts.
The roster of Carlyle “consultants” reads like a who’s who guide to government officials of the 1980s, starting with former president George Bush, former secretary of state James Baker, and former defense secretary Frank Carlucci.
The most chilling aspect of Briody’s book is that the political connections and lobbying activities he unmasks are not illegal.
It is a testament to the brain dead mainstream media that the relationship between the Carlyle group and the Bush-Cheney cartel is not a national scandal.
Brady is an award winning journalist who has written for Forbes, Wired, Red Herring and the Industry Standard.
Johnny Cash, a lefty? you may be thinking.
Cash was inspired by the movements of the 1960s and spent months reading about the plight of Native Americans. The result was his record Bitter Tears and the song “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” the true story of a Pima Indian who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima in World War Two, but faced bigotry and rejection when he came home. In the end, “He died drunk one mornin’/Alone in the land he fought to save/Two inches of water in a lonely ditch/Was a grave for Ira Hayes.”
The song rose to number three on the country charts, but many programmers refused to play it. In disgust, Johnny took out a full-page ad in Billboard that read, “`The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine. So is Rochester-Harlem-Birmingham and Vietnam. Where’s your guts?”
He crossed musical boundaries as well, playing Bob Dylan’s songs when it was unheard of for a country singer to play folk music. At the height of his career in 1971, Cash used his TV show as a platform for antiwar protest singers like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.
He performed “Man in Black” on the show. “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down/Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town/I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime/But is there because he’s a victim of the times.”
[ … ]
A story told by Kris Kristofferson probably best sums up Johnny Cash. “I opened for John in Philadelphia a few years ago, and I dedicated a song to Mumia Abu-Jamal,” Kristofferson told Rolling Stone magazine in 2000. “The police at the show went ballistic. After I came off, they said that I had to go out and make an apology. I felt pretty bad, because it was John’s show. But John heard about it and said to me, `Listen, you don’t need to apologize for nothin’. I want you to come out at the end of the show and do “Why Me” with me.’ So I went out and sang with him. John just refuses to compromise.”
We were right when we said the MSM was becoming a propaganda machine.
The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media..
~ William Colby, former CIA director
as quoted by Dave McGowan in his book Derailing Democracy
We were right when we said the religious right was filled more with hatred and intolerance that with love or Christian charity.
You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.
~ Pat Robertson
We were right when we said love is the answer.
“That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.”
~ Joan Baez
We were right when we said workers were being ruthlessly oppressed and unions neutered and pressured out of existence.
We were right when we said the government was spying on American citizens.
We were right when we said we were sending too many people to prison for all the wrong things.
We were right when we said pot wouldn’t hurt a flea, was in fact a damned fine medicine and should be perfectly legal.
Research supports medicinal marijuana
AIDS patients in controlled study had significant pain relief
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post
Updated: 1:28 a.m. ET Feb 13, 2007AIDS patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs — and with fewer side effects — according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot.
In a five-day study performed in a specially ventilated hospital ward where patients smoked three marijuana cigarettes a day, more than half the participants tallied significant reductions in pain.
By contrast, less than one-quarter of those who smoked “placebo” pot, which had its primary psychoactive ingredients removed, reported benefits, as measured by subjective pain reports and standardized neurological tests.
The White House belittled the study as “a smoke screen,” short on proof of efficacy and flawed because it did not consider the health impacts of inhaling smoke.
But other doctors and advocates of marijuana policy reform said the findings, in today’s issue of the journal Neurology, offer powerful evidence that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of cannabis as having “no currently accepted medical use” is outdated.
“This should be a wake-up call for Congress to hold hearings to investigate the therapeutic use of cannabis and to encourage more research,” said Barbara T. Roberts, a former interim associate deputy director in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, now with Americans for Safe Access, which promotes access to marijuana for therapies and research.
We were right when we said that the government wants to take away our civil rights.
We were right when we said the Republics were bible-totin’ fascists with fake smiles and daggers up their sleeves.
We were right when we said that we all deserve to be freer but that the government intended to make us less so.
We were right when we said that there is something bad wrong with a government that spies on Quakers, peaceniks, and the guy who wrote All You Need is Love.
We were right when we said Bush would be a disaster for America and that the Republics were evil bastards.
The Verdict’s In on Bush
ROBERT SCHEERStop him before he kills again. That is the judgment of the American people, and indeed of the entire world, as to the performance of our President, and no State of the Union address can erase that dismal verdict.
President Bush has accomplished what Osama bin Laden only dreamed of by disgracing the model of American democracy in the eyes of the world. According to an exhaustive BBC poll, nearly three-quarters of those polled in 25 countries oppose the Bush policy on Iraq, and more than two-thirds believe the US presence in the Middle East destabilizes the region.
We were right when we said the Republic Party stole the elections of 2000 and 2004 (a subject we used to not be allowed to discuss here).
We were right when we said some other things that we’re still not allowed to discuss here.
Note: I’m not trying to give anybody a hard time. I’m just pointing out that what passes for acceptable discourse changes over time – and usually goes our way (the extreme radical left way that is).
We were right when we said Bushco should be impeached to keep them from doing further harm to our planet and our country (not to mention other peoples’ countries).
WE WERE FUCKING RIGHT!
And you’re embarrassed by us?
That’s almost funny – except that it isn’t.
Where is the respect? Where’s the love?
Where is the acknowledgement that we are the leading edge of the progressive movement?
When will we get over our embarrassment and give props to those among us who actually have a fucking clue?
“I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want and get it.”
~ Eugene Debs
When will we start listening to the smart people?
When will we recognize their courage and the clarity of their vision?
When will we thank them for leading the way?
Some of our moderate and more centrist brethren need to come down from their high horses.
My advice to the uptight, the moderates, and the centrists is:
Take a deep breath, wiggle your hips, and lighten the fuck up.
Stop being so superficial and judgmental. Stop caring what the wingnuts think of you. Quit letting them set the agenda and call the shots.
Take that Overton window and give it a hard shove to the left.
Embrace your inner leftist and let the chips fall where they may.
If you can’t bring yourself to do all that, at least show a little love and respect for your brothers and sisters who are miles ahead of you (I could have said light-years – but I’m trying to be nice).
After all, you’ll catch up. Even the MSM catches up with us eventually (sometimes anywho). Check it out…
Tomorrow, Tomorrow
There is no better way to support those fighting in Iraq than to guarantee that no more of them die in the service of political miscalculation.
By Anna Quindlen
NewsweekFeb. 19, 2007 issue – Tomorrow. That’s when the United States should begin to bring combat forces home from Iraq. Today would be a better option, but already it’s tomorrow in Baghdad, in the Green Zone fortress Americans have built in the center of the city, out in the streets where IEDs are lying in wait for passing soldiers and every marketplace may be the endgame for a suicide bomber.
The course of this war has been a consistent scene of carnage with ever-changing underpinnings. Uncover weapons of mass destruction, lay hands on Saddam Hussein, oversee elections, teach the Iraqis to police themselves. Bring stability to the region. The last has been an illusion. Over the last year many Americans have finally realized how thoroughly they were sold a bill of goods. The picture of the peaceable kingdom painted by the Bush administration nearly four years ago was that of a country, riven by religious and ethnic violence for centuries, suddenly turned into the equivalent of a Connecticut suburb: town meetings, friendly neighbors, a common purpose, perhaps a shopping mall.
Nearly four years of photographs and footage of dusty corpses, cinderblock barriers, shredded cars and bereaved families, and the absurdity of that view is absolute.No one tries to sell that snake oil anymore. Now the party line is that American forces will get out, but they cannot get out now. They cannot get out now because Iraq would become a place of civil war, of untrammeled violence, of complete chaos.
Iraq has been a place of civil war, untrammeled violence, complete chaos for a long time now. American intervention has not made that better. It has made it worse.
No acknowledgement of course that we on the far left have been saying the same thing for months and even years – actually ever since they ignored our advice not to do it in the first place. Welcome to the enlightened left Anna.
Well here’s one more pearl of timeless wisdom for ya. Now pay attention. We desperately need to impeach the criminal bastards in the Whitehouse post haste – and if we don’t, there will be hell to pay. Mark my words.
And remember where you heard it first.
“Action is the antidote to despair.”
~ Joan Baez
