The People's Right to Go Ape-Shit 2

I wrote this 2013 post as a reply to a comment saying that fear of police violence was a factor in people's reluctance to defend democracy. I was also, at the time, inspired by my anger at the treatment of protesters during Wendy Davis's filibuster of an anti-choice bill in the Texas State Legislature a couple of months before. I recalled seeing footage of goons from some Texas police force (state troopers or legislative security of some sort) roughly dragging away (mostly female) protesters when they shouted in anger at the way Davis's filibuster was being illegitimately attacked in bogus rulings from the Speaker of the House.

Futile Musings About Saving The World

It's going to be unseasonably warm here in Toronto for Christmas. There'll be no snow on the ground. I heard it's going to be around 5 or 8 degrees Celsius. I don't think we'll have a "white Christmas" in this part of the world for the rest of my life. (However long that will be.) I recently asked a group of highschool boys if anyone had ever told them that up until the mid-1990's, in this part of the world, if they made an outdoor ice-rink in a public park that it would persist from at least December 1st to February 1st. They hadn't been told that. (One of them thought that would have been "pretty cool." I'm not sure if it was a joke or not.)

UK Elections, "Afghanistan Papers" and Terry Glavin

So I wanted to write about the Washington Post's "Afghanistan Papers" but while I was working up the enthusiasm to do that there was subsequently the tragedy of the Labour Party loss of the 2019 UK election. I literally AGONIZED over which topic to write about. I simply COULDN'T do a post containing two such disparate topics! And I SURE AS HELL WOULDN'T write two goddamned posts! But prayze gord I was saved by Terry Glavin!

You see, I was at work and I wanted to find something to read about Jeremy Corbyn, post-election and google's top-hits for me was something stupid by the National Neo-Liberal Prostiganda's Barbara Kay and then an anti-Corbyn editorial from Maclean's. I decided to skip Kay's effort and read the editorial. Now the thing is that I'd gotten it into my head that this was some editorial written by the magazine's committee representing the magazine as a whole. So I read the ridiculous headline: "Jeremy Corbyn's defeat is a win for the democratic world" and then I skipped the sub-title and went into the actual editorial. By the end of the second paragraph:

The crushing and richly-deserved defeat of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has led the once proud and gallant party of the British working class to its worst humiliation since 1935, should have been sufficient to put a spring in the step of any decent social democrat. It could have been the moment when Labour began to free itself of the Corbynite millstone that has been hanging from its neck since September, 2015.

I could tell this was the opinion of one unhinged, prejudiced individual and not an editorial committee pretending to be "objective." "Who the fuck is writing this dreck?" I asked and scrolled back up. That's when I noticed the sub-title:

Terry Glavin: Britain will not be yanked out of the western alliance. Its leader will not be a man who has counted holocaust deniers among his friends. It’s a victory of sorts.

"Terry Glavin!" I sneered out loud. Then it dawned on me. My post in response to the "Afghanistan Papers" was going to deal with the fact that Canadian governments and media behaved exactly the same way as successive US governments and US mainstream media did. And among those who pretended that we were going from success to success in Afghanistan (and who smeared their critics as "Taliban lovers" and "traitors") was Terry Glavin. Through the miracle that is Terry Glavin I could write about both of these topics and connect them with the slime of stupidity that dribbles from his pen!

[Note: I'm not even going to investigate or bother to refute Glavin's asinine "a man who has counted holocaust deniers among his friends" smear against Corbyn. I've investigated a few of the allegations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and found them all to have been garbage. And Glavin is simply a detestable scumbag so I'm sure it's just more deranged lying on his part.]

Now then, there was a brief flurry of interest a few weeks back when the Washington Post released its "Afghanistan Papers" series. The title they'd chosen was meant to mimic the famous "Pentagon Papers" that had been leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. The "Pentagon Papers" was an internal study of the history and evaluation of US policy during their conflict in Vietnam. It found that the United States had committed numerous illegal actions and that governments from Eisenhower to Johnson had repeatedly lied to the US-American people about their involvement in the war and in the progress that had been made towards their stated objectives. So too, the "Afghanistan Papers" (which I'm not linking to because the Washington Post is behind a paywall because Jeff Bezos didn't become the richest man in the world by giving stuff away) is an internal study of US policies and progress in Afghanistan since they invaded that country 18 years ago. And, just as with the "Pentagon Papers" it turns out that the US government has been lying to the people and to itself for almost the whole time.

I can't say that I was exactly blown away by these revelations. Here's a blog post I made in 2011 mocking the claims that we were "winning" in Afghanistan. Recently, The Mound of Sound looked at the USA's own counterinsurgency manuals and found they were calling for 20 soldiers for every 1,000 citizens in order to effectively monitor communities and suppress insurgents. Canadian general Rick Hillier had insisted that Canada could effectively contain Kandahar Province in Afghanistan with 2,000 Canadian Forces personnel. We didn't. (Though here are posts 1 and 2 containing reviews about the CF's battles with the Taliban for Kandahar.)

Basically (unless you had your head up your ass) it shouldn't come as a surprise that rampaging through a country looking for insurgents; offering bounties to corrupt warlords for finding insurgents; imposing super-corrupt governments on a people; killing as many civilians through air-strikes as were killed by the Taliban; wasting resources on corrupt "development" projects (such as schools that fall to pieces a year after their construction that are staffed with absentee or incompetent teachers who are simply paid placeholders in a corrupt system of patronage); countenancing a police force and military staffed with extortionists, kidnappers, rapists and murderers and etc., etc., will make "winning hearts and minds" difficult, if not impossible. (I mean, unless your a Catholic, institutional child rape tends to be a deal-breaker.)

I remember raising the issue of child rape with Terry Glavin. At the stupid blog where his deranged screechings were posted I asked him FIVE TIMES to comment about the Afghanistan National Police's propensity to rape children. He deleted each and every one of those requests. Without comment. All the while self-righetously braying about how the anti-war left has disgraced itself. Terry Glavin is a gutless, pompous, deluded, obnoxious windbag, hypocritical lying scumbag.

Now then, why did the Washington Post (of all places) publish the "Afghanistan Papers"? I mean, aren't they owned by super-plutocrat Jeff Bezos? The guy who is also a CIA contractor? Well, rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone lays it all out for us:

After all, by WaPo’s own admission it both sought and published the Afghanistan Papers in order to take a swing at Donald Trump. According to the Post it went down this path in 2016 initially seeking documents on Michael Flynn, who was then part of the Trump campaign, after receiving a tip that he’d made some juicy statements about the war in Afghanistan to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). WaPo then made the decision to publish the papers now rather than waiting for its legal battle for more information to complete because Trump is currently in the midst of negotiating with the Taliban over a potential troop withdrawal.

So this newspaper series is the happy result of an inter-oligarchic pissing contest. (Johnstone goes on to discuss how ominous it is that it takes an institution as powerful as the Washington Post to be able to extract basic information from the government.

Independent political writer and journalist Ted Rall isn't impressed with the WaPo's achievement though:

   “The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie by omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands of U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of dollars wasted—without media organizations like the Washington Post, which served as unquestioning government stenographers.

            Press outlets like the Post and New York Times weren’t merely idiots used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American voters the truth. ...

What was my reward for being right while everyone else was wrong? Hundreds of death threats. Getting fired by my client newspapers and magazines. It’s hard to believe now but back in 2004 George W. Bush was popular and being compared to Winston Churchill; that was the year that the “liberal” New York Times and Washington Post stopped running my work.

            Major news outlets and book reviewers ignored my books. Editors refused to hire me. Producers wouldn’t book me. Anyone opposed to the Afghanistan war was censored from U.S. corporate media.

Agreed. Because basically anybody who was paying attention (and who wasn't a delusional whackjob like Terry Glavin) would have known all of this already. I'll admit to enjoying hearing about how amoral psychopath Donald Rumsfeld complained about not knowing who the "bad guys" were in Afghanistan. But that's about it. And the fact of the matter is that the Canadian government and the Canadian media behaved just as badly. And therefore we wasted BILLIONS of dollars on this adventure and traumatized, crippled or killed hundreds of our soldiers and did the same to thousands of Afghani people. A-N-D we debased our parliamentary traditions and safeguards to cover-up our complicity in torture with the Afghan prison system.

On to the tragedy of the Corbyn/Labour defeat in the recent UK election. First it's noteworthy that all the neo-liberal scum gleefully pointing out that this was Labour's worst defeat since 1935 could hardly bring themselves to say that Corbyn's 2017 election showing had been Labour's best since their landslide victory in 1945. Most of these pukes (like Glavin) will revert to the false allegations of Corbyn enabling Labour to become an anti-Semite party (if he isn't an anti-Semite himself). You see, people like Terry Glavin hate Arabs so much that they simply swoon over a country that abuses Palestinians, steals their lands and has its military snipers murder innocent men, women and children if they approach the prison walls the Israelis have built for them to protest their treatment.

Aside from the baseless smears of anti-Semitism (along with the laughable fictions of Corbyn being a Cold War traitor or a terrorist sympathizer) why else would shit-head Glavin claim that Corbyn's defeat should "put a spring in the step of any decent social democrat"? I'm not sure, but it's possible that Glavin had his funny-shaped head shoved deeply into his stinking, hairy asshole when "social democrats" like Tony Blair were embracing US-American [illegal] wars of choice and imposing neo-liberalism and austerity on ordinary Britains. Corbyn was the first Labour leader in a long time to have rejected those noxious policies. Perhaps Glavin is ecstatic about the defeat of a man who challenged the NATO alliance that has been wreaking so much havoc around the Middle East and neighbouring lands where Glavin likes to locate his own masturbatory fantasies?

Unlike blithering idiot Terry Glavin, sane social democrats and socialists recognize Corbyn's defeat for the enormous tragedy that it is. It is the product of years of over-the-top smears and assaults (many of them from middle-class errand boys and girls of the corporate state). And it was also (as Ian Welsh tells us) the result of the irreconcilable differences within the Labour Party itself:

What urban liberals don’t seem to understand is that there was a genuine split in traditional Labour voters over Brexit. Progressives in London were Remain; working and middle class voters in Labour’s northern strongholds were for Leave.There was no way to split the difference, though Labour tried. Going Leave alienates London voters and gives the LibDems a chance to eat Labour’s lunch in greater London. Going Remain means losing the northern strongholds....But when you look at the ridings Labour lost, they include a lot of the Northern bastions. Places Labour hasn’t lost in decades. What you see is that the Brexit party (which ran in Labour leaning ridings, but not Conservative ones) made the margin of difference, and often more than it.By going “People’s Vote” Labour lost a big chunk of the north. It’s just that simple. BUT there was no good answer, going “Leave” would have lost a lot of other seats.

Whatever the case, the British voters who voted for serial liar Boris Johnson, or who simply didn't vote for Corbyn, were either witless fools or amoral greed-heads. BREXIT will have a slightly negative impact on Britain's economy; REMAINing would have had a slightly positive impact. More importantly, Johnson's campaign lies about reinvesting in the National Health Service will quickly be abandoned (unless they become a public subsidy to privatized service providers which will be paid for by cuts elsewhere). The foreign wars that Glavin rubs himself out to will continue (at public expense and to private profit). All in all, a bad show.

A Book, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Scheer

Greetings and salutations imaginary readers! Today I feel like mentioning three things: A book I'm reading; Hawaiian congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard; and, finally, something miserable warbling I heard coming out of Andrew Scheer's mouth on the news the other day.

First, the book: James C. Scott's Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

Scott is a political scientist at Yale University. He's got a couple of other anarchist-themed books under his belt. I might check 'em out at some point in the not-too-distant future. But, anyway, this book is a summary of the work of others (people who study prehistoric agriculture, geographic history, and all sorts of other fascinating topics) and a distillation of their recent findings.

The jist of it is that agriculture predated "civilization" by a few thousand years at least. And when the first farmers were "farming" it was more an addition to a multifaceted strategy of opportunistic hunting and gathering and pastoralism. Sedentary farming took place first in naturally rich soils on flood plains such as those of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile and the Yellow River and the Indus Valley. As well, gathering together of large communities (Scott estimates that some pre-civilization towns and rural communities in the Tigris-Euphrates region  reached numbers of 1,000 to 5,000 people, together with their farm animals (and unwanted pests such as lice, rats and sparrows) were already creating disease vectors that would bedevil later walled city-states and which may have been responsible for many of the "collapses" of these societies.

Being an anarchist, Scott has a critical view of the supposed "glories" of ancient civilizations. Aside from the fact that "permanent" stone structures ("permanent" in that they left evidence of their existence for later archaeologists to find) such as walls and buildings, also meant crowded, foul and pestilent living standards, the fact is that palaces signified social inequality; writing and counting probably had their origins in the need for "statistics" (information about the STATE, such as population, grain harvests, etc.,) which meant coercion and exploitation. In short, the earliest states (like most later ones) were built on human exploitation.

Scott hypothesizes that these civilizations were grain/cereal-based because grains ripen on a more dependably uniform basis; they can be easily seen growing in the fields and they could be transported relatively cheaply after processing. All these attributes are beneficial to those who would assemble and move this resource. So far as the people who actually grew the grain, cereals provided fewer calories per input of work than many other food sources. Cereals were therefore grown to benefit the rulers of states rather than the needs of the producers.

There is a lot here for libertarians of whatever persuasion to like. And some reviewers feel obligated to point to the blessings of civilizations for those of us in the present day who enjoy them. Reading the book simply as an expression of an idea based upon evidence, as this review does, is the best attitude to take towards it.

Next up: Tulsi Gabbard.

Ms. Gabbard is, as I've said before, an odd duck. Raised in an extremely conservative Hindu family, she signed up for the US military after 9-11. Going to Iraq as a medical officer she saw the violence and the futility of the Occupation. She says she also saw there the deleterious impact of religious fundamentalism. (I'll speculate that this was due to the rise of sectarianism and extremism in general on an Arab society that had been primarily secular under socialist and later, Baathist ideology.) Both of these experiences made her re-think her allegiance to US foreign policy and the imposition of one's religious views on society. Gabbard apparently still holds conservative personal views but her actual voting record on LGBT-issues is now very good.

During the early years of Barack Obama, Gabbard was seen as just the sort of new Democrat the party was looking for. A woman of colour and a veteran, she seemed to tick-off all the boxes. Gabbard gained the support of progressive Democrats (and the hatred of amoral, hypocritical, centrist Democratic Hillary-bot fuck-faces) for resigning from the Democratic National Committee complaining of their rigging of the primary process for Hillary Clinton (subsequently validated by Wikileaks) and went on to endorse Bernie Sanders for president given that Hillary Clinton was a warmongering asshole who loved to put the troops in harm's way just so she could close her eyes and imagine all the brown people being slaughtered.

Gabbard has been criticized for being friendly with the murderously Islamophobic Hindu nationalist Modi of India. (Publicly though, she's done nothing more than any other mainstream US politician has done, which is to make friendly, neutral noises about the prime minister of a huge country.) She's been criticized for past statements condemning GLBT people. She's been criticized for constantly advertising her status as an active-duty military officer. She's been criticized for having met with Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad during a visit to Syria. Smug, arrogant asshole Jeffrey St. Clair of "CounterPunch" criticizes her for doing all of these things while being female.

Now, don't get me wrong. There's a lot to criticize Tulsi Gabbard for. And if I were able to vote in the Democratic primary it would be for Bernie Sanders. But she is the most consistently anti-war candidate out there. She has the courage of her convictions. She will say what she feels with little fear of the political ramifications. She will actually call US-backed rebels "terrorists" because that is what they are. She straight-out punctures US propaganda about the conflicts in the Middle East. She destroyed the presidential aspirations of the cynical, corporatist Kamala Harris by simply listing "achievements" from Harris's record.

To some shit-assed Hillary-bot, these are mortal sins. But who cares what they think? Not me. I encourage Gabbard to stay in the race. Here's the thing. I don't relish talking about the physical appearance of a female politician. I don't think it's relevant to the job they're going to do. But the popularity of Justin Trudeau, .... the appeal of Barack Obama, ... the interest that was shown for the ridiculous Sarah Palin, ... the sad fact is that when a political party can find an attractive package to sell to people, they'll do so and it will work. While she might have been scarred by acne earlier in her life, Ms. Gabbard is now a very attractive individual with considerable poise and a pleasant speaking voice. Her physical presence, plus her veteran status, plus her visible minority status, plus her controversy (which wouldn't, on its own, be enough to merit pop-culture interest in her) are what enable her to get on mainstream shows such as "The View" or "Stephen Colbert." And when she gets on those shows and condemns the regime-change wars directed by monsters in Washington, she reaches millions of US-American viewers who wouldn't have been exposed to such clarity of thinking. She reaches ten times as many people as Jeffrey St. Clair will reach in his entire life. And, being attractive, being a veteran, ... these things alone will make her listeners more sympathetic to her anti-imperialist views.

If she is a latent Islamophobe, ... well, that would be regrettable. But ask yourself; if you were living in Lebanon right now, which would you prefer: A US politician with Hindu Nationalist sympathies who will NOT finance an armed Jihaadist rebellion/civil war in your country? Or some DLC corporate Wall Street/MIA shill who has been trained to show "tolerance" to Muslims, while all the while raining death and destruction down upon them?

Finally, a look at pathetic overgrown altar boy Andrew Scheer.

Now, in his job as propagandist for the Liberal Party of Canada, Montreal Simon does tons of work bashing conservatives (including Andrew Scheer) to the extent that you'd think the Conservative Party was actually in power in Ottawa. But they're not. It's the Liberals who are backing murderous sanctions on Venezuela, and applauding the slaughter of indigenous people in Bolivia, and running roughshod over indigenous people here in Canada, and propping-up the petro-pushers and etc., etc. ... So why should I talk about the loser Andrew Scheer?

Well, yeah, as Simon says, they're dangerous. A party of cretins, closet-cases, con-artists, creeps and Cro-Magnons. (Apologies to Cro-Magnons. Alliteration made me do it.) The Conservatives bear paying attention to.

But the reason I'm talking about this spineless, corrupt mediocrity is because I heard him (on the TV in the cafeteria at work) bleating about how hard the Liberal government is making it for oil industry investors in this country. This made me think how sadly debased our politics are here in Canada. We have a Liberal government that couldn't meet stephen harper's carbon emissions targets; that uses the police to impose a pipeline route on the sovereign territory of a First Nation that doesn't want it; that found $4 billion to bail-out a US-American company that didn't want to continue with its pipeline of bitumen (and the Toronto Bay Street parasites who'd invested in the project). And none of it is enough for Canada's "conservatives." From the ignorant, bigoted assholes in their yellow vests all the way up to Scheer himself; these imbeciles pretend that the only thing hindering investment in Canadian tar is the Liberal government. Not the low prices for oil. Not the reality of global warming. Not the constitutional obligation to obtain the consent of the affected First Nations.

The fact that this whining, deluded and/or cynical dipshit is the leader of the opposition and his reality-free ravings get a hearing on our news channels speaks volumes of how primitive and useless we are as a society.

Well, that's all I had to say really.

Postscript:

And, two days later, Andrew Scheer resigns. Seems there was a "slush fund" or some damned thing or other, whereby Andrew of the Speaker's Residence and Stornoway and the $200,000 a year that is all the sweeter when your housing is paid for, was sending his kids to private school using Conservative Party of Canada money. This was the party that balked at paying $90,000 to cover Mike Duffy's fundraising expenses (which [sigh!] let's not forget, these charlatans had ALSO tried to put on the public's dime); but somehow they missed Scheer paying private school tuitions with their money?

It seems more likely that there had been more than a few winks and nods about all this and now that the malcontents are seething and Andy wasn't retreating, that they've used these "revelations" to push him out. Scheer could probably say that the party always knew about this, thereby making them look bad, but that would also burn his bridges with them. And, perhaps, there's more they know about him.

Of course, that's all idle speculation on my part. The end result is that the party with the grassroots of moronic bigots and christo-fascist closet-cases is going to be expected to barf-up a "socially moderate" con-artist. Which doesn't seem bloody likely. Fucking losers.

Hopelessly Brainwashed

Recently, my already low opinion of humanity's collective intelligence took another hit as I witnessed the collective response to Donald Trump's claims to be removing US troops from Syria. Now, obviously, I'm opposed to Trump having given Turkey's Erdogan a green light to invade Syrian territory and engage in ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. Trump is both an idiot and a monster. The only good thing that I can say about Erdogan is that he's not afraid to stand up to the USA, unlike the needlessly craven boot-lickers who control Canada's Liberal and Conservative parties. I'll let the inimitable Caitlin Johnstone summarize the flaws in the center-to-left response to Trump's actions:

Whenever you see anyone arguing for keeping troops in Syria that aren’t there with the permission of the Syrian government, this is all they’re really supporting: a campaign to annex a strategically valuable location into the US-centralized empire. This is true regardless of whatever reason they are offering for that support. And notice how all the different reasons we’ve been inundated with all appeal to different political sectors: the oil and Iran narratives appeal to rank-and-file Republicans, the humanitarian arguments appeal to liberals, and the Kurds narrative appeals to many leftists and anarchists like Noam Chomsky. But the end result is always the same: keeping military force in a location that the empire has long sought to absorb. 

By providing many different narratives as to why the military presence must continue, the propagandists get us all arguing over which narratives are the correct ones rather than whether or not there should be an illegal military occupation of a sovereign nation at all. This is just one of many examples of how the incredibly shrinking Overton window of acceptable debate is used to keep us arguing not over whether the empire should be doing evil things, but how and why it should do them them.

So you see? It doesn't matter about your merited concern for the Kurds. There are other ways to protect the Kurds. (Like an international consensus to respect a rules-based system of international law perhaps?) But no, otherwise intelligent people with decent morals are lining up behind keeping US troops to protect the Kurds or (ridiculously) counter Russian or Iranian influence. What the HEY, ... I'll also link to Ms. Johnstone's further reflections on narrative control that she wrote after the link above:

It’s just like the illegal US occupation of Syria. US troops need to be in Syria because of humanitarian concerns. US troops need to be in Syria because of chemical weapons. US troops need to be in Syria to stop ISIS. US troops need to be in Syria to counter Iranian influence. US troops need to be in Syria to counter Russian influence. US troops need to be in Syria to protect the Kurds. US troops need to be in Syria because of oil. There’s a different reason for every ideological echo chamber.

But take away the narrative soundtrack and what do you have? US troops staying in Syria. That tells you what this is actually about.

And, to me, this is all so very, very depressing because of the titanic levels of ignorance, delusion and amnesia that is on display here. My younger readers might not remember, but from 1950-something to 1975, the USA was involved in a bloody, sordid exercise in imperialism called (in the USA) "The Vietnam War." Mass democracy in the USA had only really been a "thing" since the 1930's really. (Women got the vote in 1920. Blacks were voting in the northern states in significant numbers around the same time.) Social inequality was decreasing with the rise of trade unions and Keynesian "full employment" policies. A generation grew to maturity in the 1960's who hadn't known widespread poverty and insecurity. And many of them did not want to be drafted into a war they didn't support. So they mobilized to stop the war. Other people were opposed to the war on principle and, obviously, they protested against it too. There were a number of reasons large numbers opposed the Vietnam War and this opposition played a small part in restraining US government escalation of the war and, later, a small part in the climb-down from the war. (The largest influence had been the willingness of the Vietnamese to fight and die for their independence with the material assistance of the USSR and China.)

Long Litany of LIberal Loserdom

Adding the blog "Lawyers, Guns, & Money" to the rogue's gallery of stupid liberals. Like the scribbling obsessive who writes at "Driftglass" and the insane, shit-head, lying, delusional, all-around-bad-person "Jackie Blue" who supervises "Montreal Simon" and makes sure he stays on message for the Liberal Party of Canada, ... LG&M is simply incapable of processing just how unpopular and out-of-touch their parties and their policies are.

I used to like the blog (and, like all liberals, they're far better people, morally and intelligence-wise) than their conservative counterparts [I'm going to have to make an exception for the detestable, deplorable "Jackie Blue"]; but over time I started to notice a general animosity towards Jeremy Corbyn. And that's a clear sign of insanity. Then people in the comments section there started freely tossing around the baseless smears of anti-Semitism and also tried to make his republicanism and his disdain for Britain's nuclear weapons program as if they were personal failings.

The also can't seem to fathom the appeal of Tulsi Gabbard. Now, Ms. Gabbard is a strange figure. She was raised in an ultra-conservative Hindu family (which, I believe, bordered on cult-like) and joined the US military after 9-11 fully believing in the rightness of the USA, and evils of Muslims and LGBTetc., types. Exposure to the brutality and folly of the US occupation of Iraq, as well as to the repressiveness of fundamentalist religious culture made Gabbard change her views about US foreign policy as well as on the regulation of morals. (Gabbard remains a traditional conservative on a lot of things but does not let that impact her voting record on LGBT issues.)

To make a long story short, the folks at LG&M simply can't see why Gabbard has to be so vocally indignant about the Democratic Party leadership who corrupted the 2016 primary; who support regime-change wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and who cynically use Saudi-backed fundamentalist extremists to fight these wars; who coddle Wall Street criminals and meddle in Latin America to support corrupt oligarchs. And, being unable to process Gabbard's views on the total moral and intellectual bankruptcy of their party (because, after all the Republicans are worse!) they can only sneer at her and mock her. (Don't get me wrong: Tulsi Gabbard has a lot of baggage. But she speaks for a lot of US-Americans in her opposition to the bloody imperialism of US foreign policy and the corruption of the Democratic Party.)

Today, LG&M has posted an entire article about a deluded, fanatical Republican supporter. She becomes unhinged trying to get some super-corrupt, oily Kentucky slimeball re-elected as Governor after it appears he's going to lose. The thing is, these Democratic Party dead-enders might be more intelligent and decent than the Republican Party base, but their partisan fanaticism is just as deep and delusional as their counterparts.

The same can be said for the whining shit-bag "Driftglass" and his stupid vendetta against Glenn Greenwald, or for the deplorable "Jackie Blue" and her screeching about "purity ponies" as she blindly supports the racist, imperialist, corrupt, corporate tool Liberals. And this inability to shake themselves free from their tribalist nonsense, and the way they deliberately warp their thinking so as to make themselves incapable of seeing what's right in front of them, is yet another reason for why humanity is doomed.

EDITED TO ADD:

Oh yeah. So, the recent brazen right-wing coup in Bolivia: The liberal assholes at LG&M were spending more time stupidly condemning Evo Morales for running for a fourth term than they were condemning the racist, lying shit-for-brains US puppets and pukes who have seized power. Because that's the party-line from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC propaganda outlets that these idiots get their talking-points from.

And you won't find any mention at Montreal Simon's blog of Canada's shameful participation in this abomination, nor any remarks on the sickening hypocrisy wherein Liberal Trudeau and Crystia Freeland impose murderous sanctions on the country of Venezuela for imaginary crimes while welcoming the new government of Bolivia as it massacres indigenous people in the streets.

CNN [more than] a Week or Two Ago ...

NOTE: SOMETHING ELSE DREDGED-UP FROM THE "DRAFTS" FOLDER ...

So I thought I should post something today. And I remembered I'd wanted to post something a week back but never got around to it. What was it? I remembered.

So I went to the gym after work and in the change room the TV was playing CNN. A bunch of talking heads were discussing Trump's reaction to Robert Mueller's recent press conference wherein "Saint Robert Mueller of WMD Lies" told everybody that he never exonerated Donald Trump. There was Russian meddling, and Trump did try to obstruct Mueller's investigation of it. (Mueller explained that he's not allowed to charge a sitting president with anything, so he couldn't just accuse him of obstruction because that would be unfair. It would be unfair because the accusation would just sit there and, not being a legal "charge" Trump would be unable to challenge it in court and thereby clear his name. It would be unfair to do that to Trump. And Mueller is a fair, principled, straight-shooter. So he didn't accuse Trump of obstruction in the report. He just did it at the press conference.)

Now, Trump being Trump, when he'd first heard about the Mueller investigation it's reported that he said that he was "fucked" and that it would be the end of his presidency. This sounds plausible because Trump knows he's a con-man with a lot of criminal deals in his past. But Mueller was only investigating Trump's collusion with Russia. He wasn't looking into Trump's business dealings. And since (as MUELLER CONCLUDED) Trump hadn't colluded with Russia, the main focus of the subsequent report was that there was "no collusion," and that this, combined with Mueller's lack of investigation into Trump's corrupt business dealings, it looked to Trump as if he'd escaped unscathed.

Relieved, and desiring to look magnanimous, Trump pronounced Mueller an honourable man and said that the process had been fair and he was quite happy.

But, in the early days of the investigation, Trump made noises about trying to stop it. He asked people around him if there was some way that he could fire people or what-not. Repeatedly, he was told "no." What I'm trying to get at here is that there's smoke that looks like it came from a fire called "obstruction." But it's not as clear as that.




Anyhow, to bring to an end this ancient piece of writing that I started a long time ago, suffice to say that Mueller identified moments during his investigation when Trump appeared to be trying to obstruct it. Some Russiagate partisans have twisted things to make it seem like Trump's alleged obstruction is the reason for Mueller's being unable to indict any US citizens for collusion. But this is just not so. Here's an article about where Trump's actions could be construed as obstruction. None of them show Trump successfully blocking Mueller from investigating anything to do with collusion. (Other than an attempt to lie about the meeting with Russian nationals at Trump Tower, which Mueller independently concluded was a nothing-burger.) As I said at the top of this post, Trump knows that he's crooked and so he's justifiably scared of investigations. He's also a moron in many ways who doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut (or his dick in his pants or his hands to himself).

But as Mueller concluded: NOTHING points to any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Putin's Kremlin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. Therefore, in that regard, Trump is NOT a "traitor." He is NOT a "Kremlin puppet." He is NOT a "Russian asset." This whole thing has been an exercise in the Democratic National Council to use anti-Russian xenophobia to distract US-Americans from the reality that the neo-liberal "Washington Consensus" is massively unpopular with the people of the United States and that is the reason why Trump squeaked out an Electoral College victory against the "Washington Consensus" candidate Hillary "Bat-Shit-Crazy" Clinton.

The thing is, all of this stupid nonsense from the dearly departed Russiagate bullshit scandal which occupied over two years of breathless coverage, pushing more important topics ["more important" in many ways but not the least being that they were REAL as opposed to imaginary] out of the news-cycle, never stopped being stupid nonsense. The reporting on this particular spat between Trump and Mueller as I saw it on the tv-screens at the gym (almost the WHOLE TIME that I was there) was a microcosm of the whole abomination.

Trump's idiocy itself was being characterized as calculated lying. Mueller's dodgy behaviour was portrayed as the height of probity. The dispute over obstruction of justice was being used to insert credibility into the bullshit charges of collusion and "Russian meddling." And the end result of the entire farce was to drive Russiagate partisans deeper into their asylum of hysteria and delusion; to further convince Trump's blinkered supporters that he was, indeed, the victim of a "witch-hunt" conducted by the FAKE NEWS media and the corrupt Democrats; and to further shred the credibility of the mainstream news media.

And I wish I didn't have to write about that crapola. But so many otherwise intelligent people bought into that total drivel and I think it's symptomatic of the reasons why our species is doomed. If intelligent people can be made (through partisan derangement, gullibility, self-delusion) to believe in complete bullshit like this, ... what hope is there for civilization?

Our Doomed Species

NOTE: This was an old, unfinished effort that I decided to dredge out of the "drafts" folder and post just for the hell of it. I added a word about the recent coup in Bolivia and one or two other things and that's about it.

The pathetic dissembling of the "Russia-gaters," as they try to pretend that Mueller's report might somehow still vindicate their moronic and self-destructive conspiracy theory is interesting in so far as it provides real-time evidence of brains struggling to fit reality to their ideologies. In fact, since the implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, these useless liberals have becoming increasingly more desperate. They allowed themselves to ignore or rationalize Barack Obama's numerous crimes against humanity and democracy. They convinced themselves that the murderous, racist, corrupt incompetent Hillary Clinton was THE BEST CANDIDATE EVAHHHHH!!!! whose Electoral College defeat can only be attributed to external causes. (Ian Welsh pointed out a long time ago that all sorts of things contributed to HRC's humiliation, but that discounting the legacy of Democratic neo-liberalism and Hillary's personal awfulness is a colossal blind-spot.)

Current Reading

Just some of the latest stuff I've been reading.

First: Calypso by David Sedaris [SPOILERS BELOW]

If you don't know already, David Sedaris is a wildly popular US-American humo[u]r writer. I've read four of his other books and I've enjoyed them all. Calypso is a little bit different from his droll, dry, absurdist, hilarious (at times) usual fare. In this one we're given some of the darker aspects of his family and his reflections on the realities of ageing.

For instance, ... haunting most of the book is the spirit of his sister Tiffany, who committed suicide. Tiffany Sedaris is described as a difficult person who had obvious mental problems. Towards the end of her life she lived in squalor, engaging in dumpster-diving and making art out of found-objects. On the internets you can find other sources who say that David Sedaris does her a disservice in his description of her and that she was a beautiful, creative spirit. But Sedaris doesn't claim to be the last word on who his sister was. He describes her as he knew her. And it's pretty obvious that he isn't writing with pride about how the last time he saw her he closed the door in her face when she showed up at one of his book readings.

We learn that Sedaris must have gotten much of his talent for observation and story-telling from his mother as he recounts how all the children lingered around the dinner table after eating to listen to her tell her stories about the people and events she'd experienced during the day. She'd also offer her observations on their own stories. But then Sedaris informs us that his mother became an alcoholic in her last years. That she was an embarrassing raging drunk. Sedaris has already told us how his mother died of cancer when she was 62, but in Calypso he begins to reflect on the fact that he's closing in on 62 himself. One day soon he'll be older than his mother was when she died.

Finally, Sedaris tells us about his father. Previously his father has been described as a devastatingly witty fellow. He was an IBM engineer in the 1960s. He still is (in his nineties) a jazz music aficionado. Sadly however, like many an older white male, he's become a consumer of right-wing rage TV and radio. Moreover (and one of the reasons for his mother's drinking) he's been a hoarder for decades. The Sedaris household was a dilapidated shambles. All the rooms crammed with papers and junk his father had brought home. It's bizarre how his father is obviously still a highly functioning individual while engaging in this nonsensical behaviour.

This is a touching, sad book that still manages to make you smile. Sedaris's response to finding out about "fit-bits" or describing himself as looking like a hand-puppet when wearing a shirt three-times too long for him. Whatever their "eccentricities," Sedaris's parents created a very original set of kids.

Next up is Robert Dallek's Franklin D. Roosevelt: a political life.

This is one of the first general histories of FDR following the release of the personal papers of his cousin and confidante Margaret "Daisy" Suckley who died in 1991 at the age of 99. FDR played his cards very close to his chest for his entire life and very few people knew him. He has occasionally been referred to as a "sphinx" for his inscrutability. Suckley's correspondence gave historians the first glimpse at the inner Roosevelt; his stresses and strains, agonies, intimacies and his passions.

Dallek's book was my first reading of FDR's life in its entirety so I really don't have anything to compare it to. But I will say that it makes me more sympathetic to the man. Roosevelt can obviously be criticized for being an elitist and an imperialist who preserved the inhuman system of capitalism. But it also has to be said that he was a few steps in the right direction for social justice and the welfare state. And, given the strength of reactionary forces in the USA then (and now) he was probably the best that anyone could seriously have hoped for. Reading a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt I found out about several times when FDR purposely confounded the progressive ideas of his wife and her supporters. But reading Dallek it's clear that while he wasn't as forward thinking as his wife, his personal views were farther along than his public utterances.

For instance; he was fairly sympathetic to the labour movement. But the famous sit-down strikes by the Congress of Industrial Organizations were extremely unpopular with both the business class (obviously) as well as the general public. Roosevelt appears to have been perfectly willing to simply let both sides work it out between themselves and would have been happy either with the status-quo or (more importantly) victories for labour. But he couldn't say this. When asked for his opinion he attempted to avoid the question, but was eventually forced to say "A pox on both their houses." This was actually politically courageous because (as I said) public opinion and ruling class opinion) was definitely on the side of business. By saying what he said FDR showed that he would not take the side of employers against workers. However, saying this infuriated CIO leader John L. Lewis whose organization had given large sums to Roosevelt's 1936 re-election and now felt betrayed.

FDR's apparent conservatism was really political prudence. The forces of reaction were far too strong. Considering the hostility of the owners of the media, most of the business elites, and the Southern racists who comprised the strongest bloc within his own Democratic Party, FDR achieved as much as he could and probably more than anyone else could have at the time. And he did it successfully enough to win an unprecedented four presidential elections. (Although without the war both the voters and he, himself, would probably have preferred he be only a two-term president.)

But Dallek missed a few important things. The one that stands out the most was his failure to mention that FDR and Eleanor met while she was working at a settlement house in New York City. He was impressed and charmed by her work among the poor and she, in turn, was impressed with his stated desire to help improve social conditions as a politician. This patrician devotion to social justice was one of the building blocks of their early relationship.

I also just re-read Ernest R. May's Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France. I read it again because it's extremely well-written as well as being about a very important topic. Also, the first time around, all of those new German and French names and bureaucratic institutions overtaxed my soggy brain and I felt the need to give it a second go.

The book is described by its author as a re-examination of ideas presented in an earlier French work titled Strange Defeat written in 1940 by Marc Bloch. In that work, Bloch describes the failure of (among other things) the French high command, who had failed to understand the transformation of warfare since 1918. In Strange Victory, May argues that France wasn't really all that ill-prepared for war in 1939 and that Germany wasn't all that better prepared. Given the forces on either side, the French and the British had good reason to believe in eventual victory. What produced Germany's "strange victory" was a daring strategy of a feint through Belgium with the main armoured thrust going through the Ardennes Forest, combined with French and British intelligence failures to recognize the signs that this was going to happen, and, furthermore, the failure of the French to quickly respond to the new reality when it was obvious.

May makes it very clear that the war could have been over with a defeat for Germany in 1940 if only a few things had been different. (And that therefore, the world would have been a very different place.)

Next I've read Toronto writer Jess Taylor's Just Pervs.

This is a collection of short stories about women's sexual and romantic lives. I'm introducing some female characters into my graphic novel and I've decided that I should read women writers rather than rely on my own half-assed observations of female behaviour and portraits of female characters by male authors.

Taylor is a good writer. Good at describing urban interiors and states of mind. And sequences too I guess. The story that moves from a party boat to an apartment to a pharmacy just flows right along.  I could picture all the small apartments and Toronto bars as she described them. The themes are generally grim. About unrequited love, bad choices, insecurities, delusions and failures.

Finally, I'm almost halfway through E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.

I should have read this book a long time ago but it wasn't on my university reading lists and for one reason or another I always put off reading it independently. It's a monumental work of over 800 pages detailing the political and social and economic aspirations and realities of ordinary people in late-18th and early 19th-century British people, from agricultural workers to textile workers to skilled artisans and shopkeepers. I'm not sure what I could say that hasn't already been said more eloquently by other reviewers over the last 70 years. I'll just say that it is eminently readable and comprehensible and scholarly.

So that's what I've been up to lately.

Liberal Minority Government

The best that could be expected. Justin Trudeau's Liberal majority has been reduced to a minority government. Now the Liberals will have to govern with the consent of at least one of the other parties. At the very least they will not be allowed to be so arrogant as to attempt to pass legislation so abhorrent to all the other parties so as to trigger an election. On the other hand, the other parties (other than, perhaps, Scheer's Conservatives) will themselves be leery of forcing another election. I suspect that Trudeau will first try to govern alone.

It doesn't seem likely that the Liberals can be forced to pass electoral reform. Together the NDP and the Greens don't have the votes to force the combined Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois to eliminate the unfair advantage that FPTP gives them.

Good to see that Maxime Bernier's Nazi Party didn't win any seats and that the Fuhrer himself failed to win in his own riding.

Conservatives will probably whine about how their party got more of the popular vote than the Liberals did. But they whine all the fucking time about anything and everything anyway. If you add up the NDP and the Green Party votes it's clear that Canada remains a social-democratic country with at least some sense of environmental and scientific reality.

I guess that when all is said and done though, nothing has really changed. Back in the days of Harper, the Liberals pretty much went along with the harpercons' corporate agenda. The Justin Trudeau Liberals can continue to pass the corporate agenda with Scheer's Conservatives supporting it.

Is Scheer out? It doesn't matter one way or the other. The shortage of any sort of talent among the Conservatives works in his favour. But his own mediocrity and uselessness means he's not irreplaceable himself. Whether he stays or goes as party leader won't change the fact that they're almost all a bunch of deplorable idiots.

Liberal Hysteria & Hypocrisy

Partisans of the Liberals are insane. For this entire election they've been shrieking about how opponents of the Conservatives have to vote Liberal or else they'll be splitting the vote. If you don't vote Liberal it will be YOUR FAULT if Scheer's Conservatives win a majority and subject us to a four-year nightmare of Jason Kenney/Doug Ford/Stephen Harper proportions. You see, if you vote Green in your riding and so do 4% of the voters in your riding, and the Liberal candidate only gets 28% of the votes to the Conservative's 31%, that means you helped elect that Conservative. And if you vote NDP and so 8% of the people in your riding, well that means the lesser evil lost and the greater evil won. AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!!!!

This is the way that our antiquated "First-Past-The-Post" (FPTP) electoral system works. In Canada, the present political scenario goes as follows:

10% realize that human beings need the natural world in order to live and have therefore decided that the Green Party is who they'd like to vote for.

15% of us believe that social justice, economic justice, ecology, etc., are important and would like to vote NDP.

35-40% of Canadians are vaguely pro-welfare state, and are totally down with multi-culturalism and GLBT rights. Some of these people also entertain delusions about needing to protect wealthy entrepreneurs from being fleeced by lazy poor people. And anyway, they've always voted Liberal. So they'd like to vote Liberal.

25-30% of Canadians think this country was built by hardworking, white Christian people (okay, okay, ... they're not racist or anything, and some of those immigrants are hard-working too and they're welcome in this TOLERANT society, ... especially when they're socially conservative!) and that it's a goddamned CRIME when criminals and moochers and bleeding-heart liberals want to punish success and tax decent, god-fearing Canadians to pay for bullshit like hospitals and schools and roads and medical care for veterans, ... speaking of veterans, ... HEROES! ... Canada has a noble martial history of being slaughtered and slaughtering back in World War I and all the way up to the clusterfuck in Afghanistan ... and well, you get the picture. These people vote Conservative. And also, rich people who laugh all the way to their own banks at these stupid rubes vote Conservative as well as own the fucking party.

5-10% of this country are racist dumbfucks and they don't care who knows it. (Well, some of them sorta care because they could get fired for being so racist. But just wait until they've turfed all those "politically correct" faggots and get to run this country the way it should be run.) And, also, global warming is a Chinese plot because that famous fat old guy with the spray-on tan and the yellow comb-over who wants to fuck his own daughter (who is, let's face it, a "nice piece of ass" just like her father said she was) said so. And these people are voting for Maxime Bernier's Canadian National Socialist Worker's Party. Because the Liberals aren't pro-Tar Sands enough for them and the Conservatives aren't racist enough for them.

I seem to have lost the point of this post. Tell you what. Just go to this post by Montreal Simon where I actually tried to engage him and his deranged co-blogger, and read how all these fucking Liberal Party idiots simultaneously scream about vote-splitting while trashing any talk of electoral reform.

If somebody needs to have the contradiction in that explained to them, they're probably too far gone.

Speaking of "too far gone," please entertain yourselves with the hysterical rantings of Simon's detestable co-blogger as she lashes out at every leftist topic imaginable, spewing liberal talking-points and smears and innuendos about "Bernie-bros" and "Corbynistas" and everything else under the sun and calling me a terrorist of some sort or another.

Another Dismal Election

Who is it going to be? The pro-corporate, pro-Tar Sands, pro-imperialism, pro-austerity, pro-inequality, pro-etcetera-lots of bad things Liberals?

Or the pro-corporate, pro-Tar Sands, pro-imperialism, pro-austerity, pro-inequality, pro-racist, homophobic, christo-fascist Conservatives?

Or the semi-pro-corporate, pro-Fracking, semi-pro-imperialism, excluded by our electoral system NDP?

Or the pro-corporate, pro-Tar Sands Greens?

Or the racist fuckwads of shit-head Maxime Bernier's Canadian National Socialist Party?

Let's face it; these parties are representative of just how fucked our society is. We're dominated by capitalism, which at its base is an inhuman system. We're a society based upon the theft of Native lands. We're a cultural and economic colony of the USA. (At least English Canada is, culturally.) And, there's a lot of stupid, or ignorant, or both people in this country. Racist, deluded, hypocritical, selfish.

Perhaps all those activists who don't care for electoral politics are right. Perhaps their extra-parliamentary marches, demos, forums, websites, actions, etc., are the way to go. Except for the fact that they've shown themselves to be pretty much useless. Occasionally every party but the Conservatives (and sometimes even the Conservatives) feel obliged to mouth words to make people feel good about them. But does anything ever really change? There are some limits on the depredations of the oligarchy, but will it be enough to stave off the ecological nightmare that is looming over us?

I think we need to articulate a clear, achievable vision for this country. One that speaks to individuals' self-interests while also putting a halt to our more insane, destructive behaviour. And this must be accompanied by a clear plan for how to get there. Everything else is just spinning wheels.

Simon and Jackie Go Crazy

So, I visited Montreal Simon to read his latest post, which was a condemnation of the Scheer Conservatives and their fans who are bringing USA-Repugnican style hatred and violent rhetoric up here. It started off well with a picture of some sub-literate right-wing moron holding up this ridiculous (and frightening) hand-made sign:

I've said on numerous occasions that stupid people must have the same right to vote as non-stupid people. But there needs to be gatekeepers to prevent the rise of stupid ideas and rage-fueled political movements from having any prominence greater than the level of three city blocks. Alas, for reasons of selfish cynicism our media and corporate elites see fit to pander to these cretins and stir them up. As well (who's kidding who?) from their own behaviour and the words that flow from their mouths, pens, pencils, keyboards, many among our elites aren't all that intelligent either.

Montreal Simon goes from trashing right-wing assholes calling for Trudeau to be "hung" (or run over by a truck) for taxing them, for verbally acknowledging global warming, for admitting Syrian refugees, for marching in PRIDE parades, and etc., ... where was I? .... Oh yeah, ... Simon goes from condemning those assholes to conflating them with progressives who yell at him for buying the TMX pipeline (so as to bail-out the Bay Street parasites who invested in that bitumen project) and praises Trudeau for asking his supporters (booing the guy) for tolerance as he lets his security drag the man away.

Immediately afterwards Simon mentions a guy who threw an egg at Trudeau during a climate march in Montreal, but it's unclear from the Global News video what that guy's agenda was. Personally, I've never gotten too incensed about ordinary people throwing pies (or, now, eggs) in the faces of politicians.

"What if that pie/egg had been a gun or a bomb or a knife?!?"

Yeah. But you're missing the important point that it wasn't a gun or a bomb or a knife. It was a cream-pie/egg. You could just as well shriek that the hand of someone extended for a handshake could have been holding a gun. But it wasn't. The person sticking their hand out to a passing politician just wants a handshake. Just as the person with the pie wants to make a statement and not kill anybody.

Simon then starts his spiel about how Justin Trudeau is the most activist politician fighting climate change EVAH!!!! because of his carbon tax and his investments in renewable energy industries. But, if Simon were honest (or not honestly ignorant) he would know that this is mere tinkering and that it is all cancelled-out by his continuing to develop the Tar Sands. Which is par for the course for a liberal politician. They're the masters n' mistresses of using empty words to gull their deluded followers. They "feel your pain." They "want to see all people rise to their full potential." They "don't want to see anyone left behind." They say the things we want to hear in order to get elected and continue to say those things as they enact policies that contradict their flowery words.

The end result of political cowardice and deliberate deceit by politicians like Justin Trudeau is going to be the extinction of most of the earth's life-forms. It will AT LEAST mean the deaths of tens of millions of people. Given this, it was justified for that protester to yell at Trudeau for his sickening devotion to the TMX pipeline. And it is the height of stupidity to conflate environmentalists with legitimate grievances with Islamophobic, racist, right-wing homophobic shit-heads threatening all their adversaries with murder. (Notice how that protester at the Liberal rally stayed right where he was and didn't make a step towards Trudeau.)

And, of course, the first "commentor" was Simon's in-all-but-name co-blogger "Jackie Blue." I haven't (and won't) read her entire densely-packed, extended comment. But she basically says that leftist "shit-disturbers" are as big a threat (to "rational centrists") as right-wingers. Now, given the evidence from Simon's own post, anyone not an idiot can see that isn't true. She then goes on to whine about the progressives who didn't vote for mass-murderess, corrupt scumbag Hillary Clinton. Because "Jackie Blue" continues with the bullshit story that she's a US-American and she continues with the bullshit belief that Hillary Clinton wasn't a murdering scumbag.

Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War you stupid fuck! She voted for a war based on obvious stupid lies. The war she voted for has KILLED ONE MILLION IRAQIS and maimed and traumatized millions more. And that's only one of her colossal "mistakes" that she made while servicing the oligarchy and becoming a multi-millionaire herself. And it was Hillary's own sense of entitlement that led her to rig the Democratic primary to defeat Bernie Sanders and thereby bring on the presidency of Donald Trump. Hillary gave us Trump you imbecile!

As a species, we have to do the hard work of overthrowing his rotten, inhuman, ecocidal system. And the longer that (mostly decent-minded) people like Montreal Simon pledge hysterical allegiance to hucksters like Liberals, the longer (and perhaps TOO LATE) will it take to start that job in earnest.

(I'll end by saying that I probably won't be voting. My riding is a contest between the Libs and the Cons. And, from reading this article, I'm pretty much deflated about my choices anyway.)