Dennis Kucinich reading the Top Ten list on Letterman. Clever, but here’s my advice:
#11: Adopt every plank of the DLC’s platform, then once elected, claim amnesia.
#12: Body snatch a steroid-ravaged mysoginist. The women will love you and the men will respect you no matter what you say. For that matter, any GQ pin-up type like the one fronting for the New America Foundation will suffice. Just don’t be too gay. Get your swagger down as if your package weighs a ton, thump your chest once in a while to remove all doubt, and make smoldering eye contact with a few panting groupies in the audience. Bob your head when caught by the men as if to say, am I the man, or what? George comes alive in these moments. When he grabs the podium with both hands after making a particularly violent proposal, is he sealing it with a hump? You know he wants to stick his tongue out but the coaching must have paid off.
Is it me or are the social democrats manning the ramparts readying to defend a new wave of humanitarian interventions should Kerry be elected?
I notice that The Washington Monthly has redesigned its site and is now featuring the ever accomodating musings of blogger Kevin Drum. Apparently he’s thrilled to bring along his audience to a publication that features Mickey Kaus as a contributing editor and describes him as a brilliant mind. A real step-up on the ladder of success, congratulations. Kevin firms up Sharon’s higher rung position by renegotiating his precarious weight, regretfully spoiling everyone’s fun by breaking his usual code of silence regarding that stuff going on in Israel long enough to say he too finds Ariel’s recent actions ‘troubling‘.
If your center-right conversion still needs fine tuning hop on over to Amy Sullivan’s new digs where she gets tough on progressive constituencies, whoever they are, and wherever they may be cloning.
She slaps them around for such “extreme” positions as seeking an alternative to job outsourcing, claims that faith-based vouchers, a programme that has no established record of success, are a good thing that teacher’s unions should get behind because they’re popular with African Americans[?], then backhands the black community for “throwing hissy fits” when ignored by the Democrats.
“Enough with the melodrama” she writes.
I never was one to keep an opinion to myself, tossed from two Catholic elementary schools for that very reason. I don’t consider it a badge of honour, okay I do, but it’s more a testimony to the real experience that befalls individualists who from an early age feel compelled to lock horns with alleged humanitarians who reserve the right to send to hell anyone who doesn’t surrender to their revisionist world views.
And I fully support giving tax credits to people who want to send their children to religious schools, just as soon as they figure out how to offset any rise in my taxes when the addition of their lumbering buses adds more wear and tear to public roads as they travel to and fro along their spiritual paths coughing out their toxic fumes. Not only that, but if they don’t have to pay into the public school system, why should childless people and those who don’t currently have children in the system be forced to support it?
Thankfully I wasn’t forced to go to Catholic high school where my old friends became more promiscuous than I ever dreamt of being, achieved infamy for hosting the wildest drunken and drugged out parties in town, and on average, were no more successful academically than their public school counterparts. Their parents simply had more money to finance their push to the next educational level.
And that’s really the rub, isn’t it? Call me crazy, but I’m still living in the America where the white child of an atheist millionaire fares much better in society than the child of a poor black fundamentalist, no matter how many prayers the latter says in school.
Here’s an idea. Take the money you’re pouring into this military industrial complex and its chieftans offshore accounts in order to make economic slaves of the people in Iraq and elsewhere and rebuild your own country. Certainly the current arsenal will ward off the evil doers while we dig out of our ruins and they just might be less willing to attack a country that minds its own business. Tear down every one of the public housing prisons you built to warehouse the people you now contend will achieve success through the power of prayer. Trust me. They already know how to pray.
Bring up to code and beyond every school in their district and burn every historical reference in them. Replace the dreck with a curriculum representative of what’s really happening in the world and the true role the not so perfect or altruistic United States has played in its crumbling and explosive demise instead of forcing propaganda on the not so stupid children you hope to enlist as cannon fodder in your upcoming pre-emptive strikes.
Technical schools. There’s an idea that used to get some attention. I know dozens of people who enjoy a comfortable living working as plumbers, electricians, tool and die makers, etc. 60% of college graduates move back home, for among other reasons, lack of job opportunites. That puts a new spin on one of my Sister Mary’s favourite admonishments, “you’re just too smart for your own good“.
Not only will you be growing a well-adjusted generation who would much rather be working and building a home than facing incarceration for giving in to temptations only saints in a similar environment would rise above, you might even witness a prayer or two of thanks along the way.
Edited @ 5:16am 03/25/04