Daring Depravity

In the Movie Back To School with Rodney Dangerfield, his character Thornton Mellon owns a series of “Tall and Fat” Stores, and his motto is “If you want to look thin, hang out with fat people”

Barak Obama is having a similar time right now, as he cruises to re-election.  No left wing challenges and no competent right wing challenger have left him along for the ride.  He is winning just by showing up and not sticking his foot so far in his mouth that he chokes on it.

He will never be called to account for punishing his left wing supporters, eroding civil rights, ignoring labor, the environment, and supporting indefinite detention mostly because Mitt Romney is so incompetent that Obama doesn’t really have to try.

I guess all it takes to look competent is to stand on a stage next to Mitt Romney and say, do you want some of this?

So, there is hope that he will accomplish some good for the country in his second term, but I for one am not holding my breath.  Instead we will get free trade, neoliberal policies, moderate war hawk international stances, and a continuation of where we are now.

Part of that blame lays at the feet of the Republicans, but really it is the Democrats fault.  They won’t push for good policies, just for their own re-election.

But, standing next to Romney, Obama looks like Einstein, Socrates, and George Clooney all rolled into one.

This past week on Real time with Bill Maher (who I mostly enjoy) he premiered a new premise to justify racism, the “9/11 Liberals. Like usual Maher was very good on class politics, and straight up ridiculous and racist when it comes to Islam.

In his magical world where history and simple cause and effect do not exist, highly politicized and violent forms of Islam are representative of the entire religion, and have no context and backstory. There is no mention or credit given to the US government for igniting the now burning flames of violent Islamic extremism. Instead there is willful ignorance.

In many ways this sounds like the old question of “why do they hate us?”. The answer is both simple and known. “They” hate “us” because the US government for years brutally suppressed democratic movements and propped up dictators all over the world. Violent Islam’s power began with US foreign policy.

Take Iran, whose secular democratic government was overthrown by the US, due to a desire for natural resources for US business interests. This led to a resentment and a movement which culminated in the violent overthrow of the puppet government, and to the rise of a very violent, right wing form of Islam.

Instead, for these “9/11 Liberals” History began on 9/11/2001, the day the world changed.  Why were we attacked?  It was because one religion is particularly more violent than another.  They hate our freedom, our secular western society, and our ideas.

Hitchens, Maher, Rushdie, and other Liberal hawks ignore the history of over 50 years of the US arming Islamic warriors all over the world, and then ask why are all these people armed and mad?

The simple answer is that US foreign policy created the current situation that we are in.  These “Liberals” are far too informed to not know this, instead they are at best willfully ignorant and at worst use these trends to justify their blatant racism against Muslims and brown people.