morale booster
I wouldn't consider myself an optimist. But I am a survivor, and so I look for things to boost my spirits when I am down. I've moved past wanting to throw dyed uncooked eggs at um...stuff (that was a thought on Friday - it was a bad week) as a festive way to release some of my inner demons etc. Today I stumbled across something that is much more wholesome. It's from my favorite advice columnist, Dan Savage, who also brought us Santorum, a largely scatological term named after US Senator Rick Santorum (etymology is here).
Savage's newest and less excretory political dig is called Impeach The Motherfucker Already. Here's what Mr. Savage has to say about the Impeach The Motherfucker Already campaign:
Spotting an ITMFA button, bumper sticker, or lapel pin will serve as a morale booster for folks who are despondent at the prospect of three more years of Bush—and those folks, recent polling shows, amount to 67 percent of the country. Hell, I know for a fact that it will be a morale booster: I gave a speech last week at the University of Missouri and folks showed up wearing ITMFA shirts and buttons that they had made themselves, which boosted my morale.
Visit www.ITMFA.com to see pictures of men, women, cats, and babies sporting ITMFA gear, order your official ITMFA buttons and lapel pins (for yourself or send one to your congressperson!), and help spread the meme.
3 comments:
Hey Jen,
Yeah, I can't believe he was re-elected. I really can't. I was in shock after. Bush's approval rating was so low. One thing to keep in mind is that the president is not elected by the people. Congress is. Our state governments are, and it is at those levels that people NEED to start paying FAR more attention. E.g., That bitch in Florida who stopped the recount back in 2000? An elected state official.
Moreover, how each state allots its electoral votes is determined at the state level, by the directly elected state government. Currently, most states follow a plurality model, meaning there is no gradient in electoral votes for a state. If Bush won the state by just .5% of the popular vote, he would get 100% of the electoral votes for that state. And he did.
Election rules and procedures and the idiocy of the american public who only pay attention to what is promoted on TV (i.e. not local and state elections) do not absolve millions of idiots for having acted like extreme idiots and voting for Bush. There are three reasons I think most people went out and voted for him last time even though he was destroying our economy, sending jobs overseas, and getting us into viet-raq.
- His administration (i.e. the GOP) made it their job to empower the fundamentalists since being elected. They did not do this pre-election (part one) but certainly afterwards. This gave Bush a solid base of, well, crusading freaks who would agree with him, vote for him, and campaign for him (or at least against the competition) pretty much no matter what he did.
- In part because of (a), there is an imminently exploitable division between the "family values" people and, well, pretty much everyone else. A very large chunk of people lie in the "middle" meaning they really just have no fucking values at all except for those that are easily coopted by consumerism. Since this middle group is programmable, and since there was a mainstream-ized fundamentalist movement already gaining hold, the GOP really just had to come up with the right advertising strategy to get the middle people to fear or hate the people on the other side of the "family values" division. And those people voted. And they voted Bush because they didn't want gay people to get married. This was THE issue in the election. Isn't that horrible?
- The democrats are actually republicans. Ok, not that bad. But we have not seen a candidate yet who is really truly inspiring. I did go see Dean speak at my campus, and he's energetic. And what happened to him? The Dems panicked because he was outspoken and confrontational. He used strong rhetoric, which is really what is needed to motivate an effective campaign against the GOP run "values" and fear based ones. I do not know for sure what the hell is wrong with the democrats. It could be that they are as corrupted as the republicans by the corporate agenda. But I think there is also the issue of not wanting to "rock the boat", as in although they of course want their candidates in office, they do not really want to do it at the cost of having an aware, awake public because that public will not look the other way when they make THEIR backroom world raping deals.
BTW, I've heard the new Canadian PM is a bit of an, uh, well, "conservative". These days I assume that means complete fascist. What's the deal with that?
Love Dan Savage. His latest book is a hoot. But I liked Skipping Towards Gomorrah (or whatever it was called and however it was spelled) best. The best chapter is the one on heterosexual swingers in the Chicagoland area.
J: I'm sure Harper can join the Blair, Bush, and Berlusconi club (No Girls Allowed!). And I think Bush will remember his name after Cheney or Rice perform the "how much oil and natural gas we get from Canada" puppet show.
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