BlameBush!

Gerald Ford, Liberal Democrat

I regret that I may have been too harsh in my criticism of Gerald Ford the other day. I was only a child during his Reign of Terror, so my opinion of him was based on what I learned from my American History and Tantric Sex professor at UC Berkeley: Ford = Republican = Nazi. Yes, Ford was a Republican in life, but in death it turns out that just like Ronald Reagan, Ford was more of a liberal democrat than many conservatives would like to believe. In fact, it appears that much of Ford’s history as yet to be rewritten.

In an upcoming biography that Bob Woodward respectfully delayed publishing until Ford’s death would boost sales, he writes that Ford was strongly opposed to Bush’s illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Records also show that Ford was stridently Pro-Choice, Pro-Affirmative Action, and Pro-Same Sex Marriage. In fact, he was a vocal critic of the Church’s stance against homosexuality, and often enjoyed gay sex with Bob Woodward while performing free abortions at anti-war rallies.

No wonder I liked the guy! Ford was a progressive liberal, more akin to Hillary Clinton than George Bush. If they're wise, Democrat leaders vying for the 2008 ticket won’t hesitate to point that out.

FORDitler, Dead at Last

Ronald Reagan. Cap Weinberger. And now, Gerald H. Ford. It's like Christmas for Progressives. Yet judging by the way the so-called "mainstream media" is lavishing praise and adulation upon the man they once dubbed an “affable dunce”, a “stumbling boob”, and “the Godfather of Soul”, you’d think we should all be wallowing in despair that the man who pardoned Nixon finally got what was coming to him.

Yes, I’ll admit that even with my barely concealed glee over the death of another ReTHUGniKKAN warmonger, as well as my with my narcissistic inability to say anything genuinely nice about anybody who doesn’t share my political views, I’m tempted to begrudgingly concede that at least he wasn’t Bush and show a little reverence for the man. But to take the high road now would betray everything I stand for. The reason BlameBush! continually rises above other progessive blogs is that I am never afraid to speak the truth as ugly and fabricated as it may seem.

Ford was indeed Bushlike - perhaps even more so than Bush himself. Let the hate mail fly, but you cannot deny the similarities. The most blaringly obvious is that neither Ford nor Bush were ever elected; both exploiting an obscure Constitutional loophole to steal their way into office. Both were quick to send our tots off to fight overseas, yet neither possessed the courage to put on a uniform and badmouth the nation in a time of war. Perhaps on the advice of their mutual puppetmaster, Dick Cheney, neither Ford nor Bush ever met with Cindy Sheehan, the greiving mother who lost her only son in Bush’s illegal and immoral war for oil. On environmental issues, Ford and Bush were practically identical, neither doing anything to prevent Hurricane Katrina nor lifting a finger to save any Black voters in the aftermath.

Most importantly, neither one of the fanatically religious peeResidents devoted a single penny of federal funds to AIDS research, the single standard by which all presidents are judged. Millions of gay Americans died painful and unflamboyant deaths while Ford putted around the golf course with his rich country club pals. Sadly, their bodies were never found. Perhaps they never will be – or maybe we’re just not looking in the right place. I’d suggest digging around the seventh green at Pebble Beach.

The most striking condemnation of Ford will probably become his own epitaph, yet it came not from a political adversary, but his beloved wife:

"His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country."

Indeed. But thankfully, the long national nightmare is over.

Happy Thanksgiving, You Selfish Bastards!

Thanksgiving! A time for taking stock of all the things in life one is most thankful for, things we typically take for granted all year long. Your friends. Your family. I'm sure they'd all agree with me when I say that thing we should all be most thankful for is the sacred right to urinate in public.

Public urination is as much a part of downtown Seattle as sidewalk vomit, yet it’s a vanishing art form even in our proudly Metro-Natural city. There was a time when a visitor to our shores could enjoy a fine caffeinated beverage at one of our many outdoor cafes while being sprayed with urine by a cackling wino. But the times, they are a changin’. Thanks to society's growing obsession with making a profit, appreciation for our vibrant Homeless Community has taken a back seat to the interests of greedy Seattle shopkeepers who naively insist that deranged street people letting loose in their doorways is bad for business. In words that harkened back to the Jim Crow era, they demanded something be done about those “uppity public urinators”.

For the progressive Seattle City Council, it was a problem for which there were no easy answers. Because of a little thing called “The Bill of Rights”, they couldn’t force homeless people to stop urinating in public any more than they could kick masturbators off the city busses. On the other hand, any ordinances drafted to make the mean capitalists shut their selfish cakeholes would only be shot down by the fascist Supreme Court. So how could we silence the irrational complaints of downtown businesses without doing anything that might encourage homeless people to crawl out of the gutter and get jobs?

Behold, the Crapatron 2000, a completely self-contained and self-cleaning public urinal designed by our European friends to provide a safe haven for the homeless to do what comes natural. The toilets were expensive, yes. But making homeless people comfortable while protecting their privacy and reinforcing their self-esteem isn’t cheap. If business owners wanted the public urination “problem” to be out of sight and out of mind, they would have to pay for it. So Seattle bought five and placed them in areas around town where the stench of urine and feces overpowered the aroma of rotten fish and patchouli.

Problem solved, right? Not quite. Conservatives threw a predictable hissy fit.
Their tiny reptilian brains filled with lies by their hate-radio masters, they claimed that the metallic kiosks would be little more than taxpayer-funded crack houses, and demanded the whole plan be scrapped. As usual, the Right couldn’t be more WRONG. Two years after the first one was installed, the toilets are now so popular that French tourists are using them as vacation homes. That’s good for local businesses who depend on tourist dollars, and even better for the city’s Homeless Community who have gone back to their tradition of crapping in planters. Everybody wins!

Unfortunately, winter is coming. The public fountains will soon freeze over, and the city’s sidewalk cafes will move their tables indoors. Without anywhere to relieve themselves, homeless people are at a serious risk of crawling out of the gutter and getting jobs.

The logical solution would be to install more toilets – preferably heated ones with plasma TV's and surround sound. But at $700,000 a year to maintain, the city can barely afford to keep the urinals we already have. Alas, Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent of Americans - or any tax cuts for that matter - always come at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens.

So as you’re celebrating the Thanksgiving Harvest of Shame with your domestic life partner tomorrow, try not to think about that poor homeless person they found frozen to a mailbox with his pants around his ankles just so you could have a few extra pennies in your precious paycheck.

Spreken Ze Dooch, Rummy?

Rummy is gone at last, but he’s not forgotten. He has yet to stand trial for his crimes, and it appears that he will do so in a German court of law. Fitting, perhaps, for it was at Nuremberg that the last batch of Nazis were tried. I would much rather he stand trial here, preferably after being frog-marched out of the Pentagon and carted through the streets like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. But I no longer have any faith in our corrupt legal system. In a society where a poor Black man gets the death sentence for murdering one measly family while a rich white man sexually humiliates thousands of innocent Iraqis and walks FREE, one can no longer be assured that the hackysack of justice will be served on a level playing field.

That's why we so desperately need the International Criminal Court. Under the ICC, American leaders and military personnel who violate the Constitutional rights of suspected terrorists would no longer be permitted to hide behind the U.S. Constitution. It's a Living, Breathing Document, but it wasn't built to withstand the rampant abuses Repugnikkans have been inflicting upon it since Bush stole the election. The poor thing is stretched way too thin. It's high time we let the International Community take over our justice system, so that we can focus the full power of the Bill of Rights on more important matters - like protecting our children from Ten Commandments displays.

Perhaps one day we will have a President who cares less about U.S. sovereignty than she does about her standing in the court of World Opinion, and Rummy and the entire Bush junta will finally stand before Luis Moreno-Ocampo as our Founding Fathers intended. Until then, we'll have to put our trust in the Germans, a peaceloving people whose long-standing committment to human rights was only briefly interrupted by the unmistakable stench of burning flesh coming from the direction they carted all those meddlesome Jews off to.

Flying the Fascist Skies

If you think you’d be safe from Bush’s iron jackboot of oppression 30,000 feet in the air, think again.

I’m not sure when it happened. Perhaps it was part of the same provision of Bush’s fascist Patriot Act that made cockpits inaccessible to average Americans. But apparently, someone squeaked a law through Congress making it a federal crime to pee aboard an airplane.

I’ve peed on planes, I’ve peed on trains, and I’ve even peed on an electric fence with little more than an angry glance from a passing farmer...and possibly sterility. But a Vermont peace activist was brutally tackled to the floor and arrested for urinating aboard a United Airlines flight from London to Washington DC last Wednesday.

Like flag burning and rolling your poop into little balls, public urination is a powerful and under-appreciated form of political expression, popular amongst homeless people and members of the peace movement. Yet the Nazis in the Fascist Aviation Administration insist that dissenting passengers use special “rooms” built onto commercial aircraft expressly for the purpose of urination. It harkens back to the dark days when African-Americans were once made to drink from segregated water fountains, and mobs of angry Republicans lynched every Black man or woman who dared to disobey.

Catherine C. Mayo’s critics have already written her off as a “kook”, but she may very well be the Rosa Parks of public urination - and she won’t be forced to the back of the airplane. Not for George Bush. Not for anyone.

Arrogant Israel in Danger of Losing France's Love

Watching the horrific violence unfolding in the Middle East, it’s hard to believe that only six short years ago the land enjoyed an era of unprecedented peace and tranquility, interrupted occasionally by the sound of an Israeli bus rudely exploding. President Clinton’s Oslo Accords proved that the Israeli people and those who want to eradicate them could live together in harmony, provided the Israelis didn’t mind an occasionally exploding bus ride to work. Unfortunately, Israel’s selfish insistence on constantly defending itself has tarnished Bill Clinton’s legacy, and threatens to engulf the entire region in an illegal and unsanctioned-by-France war.

France has a rich history of working collaboratively with others towards a common goal of peace, and have much to offer the Israelis in the way of spiritual advice. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac has strongly condemned Israel’s “completely disproportionate” use of force, urging it to adopt a more diplomatic, and decidedly French approach to ending the bloodshed. But in the height of arrogance, Israel refuses to unconditionally surrender and commence loading its Jews onto boxcars.

There appears to be no end in sight to their extremist arrogance, either. Today, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert arrogantly defied the international symphony of flatulence and vowed to “fight on with full force” against the peace-loving Hezbollah people;. Perhaps he should ask himself exactly what they are fighting for. The return of their soldiers? Freedom? Their very existence?

What point is existence if you’ve lost France's love?

It's a question not only for Israel, but for the United States as well.

The Plagiarized Lies of Ann Coulter

You don’t have to read any of Ann Coulter's columns or books to know what a hate-fueled orgy of lies, half-truths, and lies they are. I can’t even begin to describe every single lie that she has put to pen in her entire career. Her lies are more abundant than the stars, more plentiful than zits at a Daily Kos convention. Let’s face it: She’s a lying liar who lies. But thanks to the hard work of an ingenious university professym, it now appears that her lies aren't even original, but rather stolen directly from the pages of esteemed progressive publications such as the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Planned Parenthood leaflet, 101 Ways to Hide your Abortion from Mom and Dad.

Determined to find something to attack Coulter for besides her looks, a nonpartisan and incredibly hissy amatuer investigator ran everything she’s ever said or scribbled down since grade school through a state-of-the-art pattern recognition program. What he learned threatened to sour the proudly objective researcher against conservative pundits forever.

According to John Barrie, a Professym of Indigenous Norwegian Prophylactic Juggling at the University of Berkeley, most of the words Coulter uses in her books and columns have been used before, by other writers, and occasionally in the same sequences. In many cases, these sequences are hardly coincidental. As Barrie discovered, Coulter would often take someone else’s words, replace them with her own, shuffle them around, and sometimes go so far as to change the entire sentence structure around to conceal her crime. That’s plagiarism, folks, and leave it up to conservatives to turn it into something dirty.

Dragging civilized discourse into the mud is par for Ann's course, ape-like, back hairs. Coulter, who once wrote that we should invade the terrorist’s countries, kill their leaders, and convert the rest to Christianity, has never apologized to either progressives or the terrorists for her insensitive remarks Her attack on the bereaved 9/11 widows left me angry, bitter, and chaffed in areas I care not to mention. I’ve made no secret of my unbridled hatred for Coulter, with her cottage cheese thighs and ratty, bleach-blonde hair. But now she may be guilty of a crime far more serious than transforming progressive males into catty women, and I could just scratch her eyes out for it.

At Last, a Little Privacy!

Drawing on her experience as the brash, young Watergate lawyer who single-handedly brought down the Nixon White House and gave the world the gift of Jimmy Carter, once and future President Hillary Clinton called for a Privacy Bill of Rights today. Not to be confused with the Right to Privacy that's already in the actual Bill of Rights, the Privacy Bill of Rights will protect our privacy in ways that the Privacy Act of 1974, the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act of 1988, the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, and the hundreds of state privacy laws already in effect never could. Most importantly, it will make identity theft a crime.

For years, I’ve been under the impression that it already was a crime, but apparently I was wrong. I guess that it was just some sort of social taboo, frowned upon but entirely legal. Under President Hillary, identity theft will finally become a serious violation of an actual law, officially defined, on the books, and as rigorously enforced as our immigration laws.

The Privacy Bill of Rights will also protect average Americans from having their personal information collected without a court order. There will be exceptions, such as for digging up dirt on Republicans, but those are exactly the people the Privacy Bill of Rights is designed to protect us against. Indeed, if the Founding Fathers could have foreseen the constant assault on our civil liberties by this fascist administration, they would have written the Privacy Bill of Rights themselves and stapled it to the back of the Living, Breathing Constitution along with the Patient’s Bill of Rights, the Worker’s Bill of Rights, the GI Bill of Rights, the Cell Phone Bill of Rights, the Pet’s Bill of Rights, and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgendered Students' Bill of Rights. But thanks to Bush’s refusal to allow stem cell research, the Founding Fathers are long dead and no longer able to grant us more exiting rights, nor even express their desire to do. So in their infinite wisdom, they’ve bestowed Hillary with the power to speak for them, and it is a task from which she does not waver.

The GOP will, as usual, attempt to quash the Privacy Bill of Rights. Anything that has the word “rights” in it tends to make them squeamish. They'll probably say that the provisions against eavesdropping will hinder their ability to prevent terrorist attacks. Hillary is handing out free rights and all they want to do is go on fighting their silly War on Terror. But there are ways to stop terrorists without prying into their private lives. President Hillary will show us how, if we simply have the courage to open our minds and let her.

Bush Uninterested in Ordinary Americans

Bush used the stolen platform of his politically-biased weekly radio address to lash out at critics of his Domestic Spying Program on Saturday, strongly insisting that he is NOT listening in on the phone conversations of ordinary Americans.

Gosh. I guess we're just not interesting enough for you, Shrub. I guess the lives of ordinary Americans are far too boring for an important man such as yourself to even be bothered with. Obviously, you’d rather listen to what Osama Bin Laden has to say than the wants and needs that millions of average and below-average Americans express through their telephones every day. You're outta here in a couple years anyway, right? It's best to just ignore us and go right on catering to your Big Oil Buddies.

I haven’t been this ticked off since the FBI admitted they don’t really give a damn that I read an unusual amount of Judith Krantz. But I shouldn’t be surprised by Bush’s indifference, I guess. After all, this is the same man who slammed the White House door in Mother Sheehan’s face, and publicly confessed that he had no intention of ever seeing Brokeback Mountain. What does he care about the lives of ordinary Americans? Why would he want to waste his time listening to us? He’s far too busy waging his illegal and immoral War on Terror to be concerned with Aunt Gertrude’s recipe for crab bisque.

Bush Opens New Torture Frontier

This week, Bush announced plans to send 10,000 National Guardspersyns to our southern border to help stem the tide of what some call “illegal immigration”. He assured us that their role would be a purely supportive one, their activities restricted to carrying the Border Patrol's softball gear and handing out Gatorade between innings. But let's not fool ourselves. The troops are headed to Mexico for one reason and one reason only: to torture people.

Torturing people is, after all, what our troops do best. And if there's one thing Mexico has plenty of, it's people. Every year hundreds of innocent men, women, and teddy bear-clutching children with big puppy dog eyes like that velvet painting I picked up in Tijuana pour across our border in search of the American Dream, but now they will find only the stinging humiliation of mishandled Qurans, forced lap dances, and pig-piles of naked Chicanos three miles high. To our murderous troops, these helpless innocents are not human beings who deserve compassion and respect, but merely nameless Latino gonads ready to be hooked up to portable telephones in a fashion reminiscent of Jingus Khan.

Democrats on The Hill are concerned. With most of our troops already torturing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands more watching Blacks drown in New Orleans, they worry that a prolonged deployment to Albuquerque might be stretching our military too thin - like beef in a Taco Bell Burrito Supreme. But their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

Obviously, Bush doesn't give a damn about our troops. Vicente Fox's torture chambers will remain open, under new management, and an American Flag.

Thursday night is Ladies Night and Well drinks are always $2 on Wednesdays.