Reply #23: Oh gee whiz, gosh golly...

[warren pease]

...Oh my... why can't we all just get along? Well, here's one reason:

"That is reprehensible, and if you consider that "progressive", you've been taking lessons from the other side."

You may have noticed that the other side -- let's be accurate and call 'em reprehensible bastards -- wins an inordinate amount of the time. You may have also noticed that I'm not remotely interested in losing to these pricks over and over again, if only because I've had so very much practice already.

Plus which, I'd have to be among the top 1 or 2 percent of American elites to benefit from the policies and programs and insane tax structures they've managed to co-opt the entire federal government -- and every compliant aparatchik who gets sucked into it -- to do their dirty work for them, perpetuate their strangle-hold on a once-proud democratic republic and make damn sure everybody understands who's running the show around here, lest somebody get a little too uppity for easy suppression.

The great stink about the "death tax," draconian usurpation of individual rights and liberties as they try to play it, is the product of agitation on the part of 20 families. That they all happen to be so filthy rich that they literally have no idea how rich they are to the nearest billion may have something to do with the power they're able to wield in their own behalf. The bribocracy doesn't run on air, you know...

The pure of heart, however, spend a hell of a lot of their time lying in the streets, bleeding from every cranial orifice and maybe a couple more, trying to get their legs to work again after the robocops have run through the crowd, batons twirling and slashing, blood flying and spattering everybody within four or five yards, people everywhere choking on toxic gas, people shot with rubber bullets (which can still kill at close range if aimed above the belt), people tased into comas, choke holds reducing polite, middle-aged women to gasping, bug-eyed caricatures... That's how the other side plays the game and they're not fucking around.

Nor should you be, but there are many people who can and do wield enormous power by revealing secrets, whistle-blowing, ratting out their corrupt bosses or simply talking to five strangers a day on the phone, until the multiplier effect guarantees that every Venutian, Europan and Io-an has heard the message three or more times. Overkill, I know, but what the hell...

OK. Consider yourself un-goaded. You may just make it after all. If not, best wishes either way.

And how about that Prince Fielder. He's got Cadillac medical insurance, yaah, yoo betcha. There isn't an MRI or CAT scan in the world closed to Prince. Somebody will always authorize it, no matter how ridiculous and improbable and ineffective it may be.

You... me... maybe not quite so fortunate in this country, here caged within the planet's largest monument to pure bullshit and apparently more than happy to continue killing 22,000 people -- or more -- every single year because only in the US is lack of medical insurance a capital crime.

You think about that when you decide what's "reprehensible."

Personally, I no longer have time to be polite, and "the public option" is about as progressive as calling a black man "nigra" instead of "nigger," then claiming solidarity with "the movement."

I remember listening to Lester Maddox one enchanted evening decades ago on Dick Cavett's late night show, watching him wield that famous axe-handle he used to keep his lunch counter free of Negroes and other "aught-sighd ad-jit-taturz," while big Jim Brown the former football player glared at this little slack-jawed idiot like a panther deciding which side of his face to save for dessert...

You just can't buy entertainment like that any more. But every now and then, the DU boards come close.



sf/wp

(The aught-sighd ad-jit-tatur formerly known as Warren Pease now writing as Steven Franklin cuz that's kinda like 2/3 of my real name, eh? Close enough for gummint work.)



Edited for accuracy: Maddox and Brown were on Dick Cavett's show, not Carson's.