Adam's blogbox: Between the Cowardice of the Dems and the Uselessness of the GOP, I Give My Vote to Mel Gibson

I blogged about the two noble people in this post before, and I’m repeating what I said as part of an expanded post.

Question: what is nobility? One may well ask, now that America has lowered itself to the status of some despotic third-world nation from the Middle Ages, with our elected officials passing a bill that gives our President the power to decide whom and how to torture.

I write this because there’s an election coming up, an essential occasion in our noble project of democracy, and I want to remind myself, and you, of our lost quality of nobility -- and of two Americans who actually exemplify it.

I’m not going to mention anyone famous, but that’s all the more reason they need mentioning -- if only because our media are bellyfull of the goings-on of shallow celebrities and even shallower politicians, and a certain boy-stalker, Mark Foley, whose superiors covered for him because they wanted power (i.e. his safe seat) more than they wanted to protect youngsters from dirty old men like them. (Talk about making us feel safe: our pols can’t even make parents who send their page-kids to Congress feel safe.)

One noble yet non-famous American was a young man of 22 in the Vietnam War by the name of Dan Fernandez. A grenade landed amongst the platoon he led, and Fernandez flung himself upon it to protect his fellow soldiers, by smothering the impact of the grenade with his body. The grenade went off and, as Fernandez lay dying, he spoke to his comrades whose lives he’d just saved. "Sorry guys,” he said, “you won't have Danny to look after you now. You'll have to do it yourselves, because old Danny just has to go." With his last breath, this dying man was still thinking of the welfare of his men, and worrying about how they’d make out without his leadership.

The other noble American was a 13-year-old Amish girl. When the deranged killer at their school told the Amish girls he was tying up that he was angry with God, and that they should pray for him, this 13-year-old said, "Shoot me, and leave the others alone."

When I think of our elected representatives, and how the Republicans are finger-pointing at each other over who should've intervened in Mark Foley's page-stalking, and how the Democrats are happy because now they’ve got something to run on, being too spineless to actually stand for anything themselves, I see not a shred of nobility. It seems there isn't a politician alive who could ever be found guilty of the quality of nobility.

And this makes me immensely sad. Our leaders aren't noble. It could be our fault: we don't seem to pick them for their nobility, and in return, they don't ever think of appealing to our nobility either. Only to what is most base in our natures. It is, for example, a policy of the Republican Party to appeal to the gay-hating proclivities of their socially uptight base. They have an actual policy that appeals to hatred. Politics appear to be a conspiracy of the most base and ugly.

Yet I'm still immensely proud of being part of the human race, and of its American sample, because of a young Amish girl who was willing to offer up her life so her friends may live. Her name, by the way, was Marian Fisher. Hallowed be her memory.

Now let’s get down to some politicians’ names. There’s our president, Dick Cheney, and his lackey Veep, George Bush. What noble thing do they stand for? If I hear them right, they’re saying you should vote for their lot because the GOP will make you feel safe, but only if you let them torture people and lock people up for years without charging them with anything.

What a noble idea. They don’t seem to stand for much else, besides not being Democrat, which to them means those people who “cut and run,” and don’t want to “take the fight to the enemy” but prefer waiting for the enemy to do something first before they do anything.

This is their campaign. This is what they stand for. They will make us feel safe as long as we give them the power to torture.

And what do the Democrats stand for? Well, they have a vague feeling of unease about the Iraq War, which they seem unable to express in any coherent language or clear policy statement.

So they stand for nothing.

There is actually plenty our politicians stand for, but they prefer not to tell us. What are the Democrats not saying? They’re not saying that they’re even more clueless about the Iraq War than the Republicans. This war has been going on almost as long as WW2, and still the Democrats don’t know what to do about it. Not that the GOP knows what to do about it either, except to “stay the course,” without being able to tell us what that course actually is. Also, the Democrats are not saying that they’re too cowardly to agree with their electorate, who want us the hell out of Iraq. The Democrats are being sissies because they don’t want the Republicans to call them “soft on terror,” which the Republicans are doing anyway. So the Dems are double sissy cowards.

And what are the Republican not saying? They’re not saying that they’re spending our hard-earned taxes like it’s their personal trust fund to waste. Not only on a stupid war with no discernible good outcome, but also on programs benefiting the oil industry, the drug companies, and rich people in general. Just like the good old conservatives they are, they believe in giving taxes back to the rich and plunging the rest of the nation into so much debt our children’s children will still be paying it down.

So here we are at a really important election, when the polls tell us the House will change hands, and the Democrats might even take the Senate, and neither party has a coherent alternative to the other.

The Republicans have their backs against the wall, and what’s the best they can come up with? That they can make us feel safer in the war on terror?

What is this BS? What war on terror? There is no war ON terror. There is only a war FOR terror. The Iraq War is creating more terrorists than there ever were before. It’s emboldened Hezbollah to stand up to Israel. Every Muslim with eyes in his head can plainly see that our overwhelming military might counts for very little in the end. Israel and the US have turned out to be hopeless at imposing their will on others. You’ve got to be as poor and helpless and weaponless as the Palestinians before the world’s two bullies, America and Israel, can pick on you to any effect. All the money we’ve blown on having the best military force in the world would’ve been better spent on hiring expensive world-class callgirls for Congress to keep them happy instead of being spooked by terror. The smallest nations with some weapons and some will, like the North Koreans or the Iranians, can defy the mighty America as much as they want, and all America can come up is a few helpless squawks.

War on terror? Give me a break. Osama Bin Laden has outsourced his recruitment drive to Bush/Cheney, and they’re doing a heckuva job. They’ve failed at everything else they’ve tried, from reforming Social Security to Katrina, but they’re the most successful recruiters for terrorists the world has ever seen. They say they’ve been fighting terrorism, but meanwhile terrorists from Lebanon to Indonesia are cheering them on, almost unable to believe their good luck in having the President of the United States as their chief recruitment agent. There’s nothing Bush/Cheney can do better than create more terrorists, encourage more terrorism, and strengthen the terrorists every day they’re our Commanders-in-Chief.

What’s more, Bush/Cheney say the terrorists “hate our freedoms,” but meanwhile they’re doing the terrorists’ job for them, by curtailing the very freedoms the terrorist hate. Soon we may have no more freedoms for the terrorists to hate. Given enough rope, Bush/Cheney might turn us into a mirror image of the terrorists they think they’re fighting. Maybe Bush/Cheney hate our freedoms more than the terrorists do; they’re certainly acting that way.

Furthermore, Bush/Cheney also happen to be masterful at getting more people to hate America every day, and helping at least half the human race believe that it’s OK for the terrorists to terrorize us. 60% of the Iraqis say they’re right behind their countrymen who are killing Americans. That’s the country to which America has brought “democracy” – a majority of them want our troops killed. Hurrah, Bush/Cheney!

In short, the Republicans are useless at everything. I wouldn’t trust them to run the toilet concession at a Vegas whorehouse or be in charge of the piles in a warthog’s ass.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, a conservative pundit, says openly on ABC that all the regular Republicans he knows have contempt for their evangelical base, and cynically use the religious right to win elections. In other words, the two other things that Republicans stand for -- the pro-life and anti-gay marriage agendas -- are just ploys to con the evangelicals. Bush/Cheney don’t hate homos – after all, Cheney’s daughter is gay – they just use homo-hatred to suck up to religious crazies. How noble of them.

Now let’s mention the Democrats. These are the guys who didn’t filibuster the Bush/Cheney bill that appointed Bush our Torturer-In-Chief, and that suspended habeas corpus, one of the foundations of our democracy.

A slug or a jellyfish has more backbone than the Democrats, among whom I count Nancy Pelosi and her entire gang of pissant idiots, including at this point even Howard Dean, because having bravely said the Iraq War does not make us more safe a few years ago, he is now toeing the Democratic line of not having any line. The Democrats are scared of standing for anything, because they know the GOP will call anything they say liberal, so they just shut up. There’s more spine in a fresh turd from a flea than in a Democratic politician.

When one Democrat who is in close contact with our Army generals, John Murtha, made the sensible suggestion that we should redeploy our troops to the borders of Iraq because there’s nothing more for them to do there (obviously saying what the generals can’t tell Rumsfeld because they like to keep their jobs), Pelosi & Company backed away from him like he had the halitosis of a crocodile.

The Democrats are our contemporary paragons of cowardice, sniveling weasels who run around with their heads cut off by Karl Rove, too scared to stand for anything, as cowardly as the Republicans are useless.

So what is the choice for a voter in November? It’s a choice between one party who creates terrorists and falsely claims they’re fighting them – the useless party -- and another party who stands for nothing – the party of cowards. The only thing our parties stand for is against each other.

What a choice. A pox on both of them. They have failed our country in every way. They are not noble.

Neither is Mel Gibson, but he has my vote. Here’s why.

Number one, Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite, and what we need is an anti-Semite to get the burden of Israel off our backs. The sooner we withdraw our thoughtless support from the Israelis, the sooner they’ll be forced to make peace with the Palestinians, and stop messing them around. The Israelis need to face reality, and if we keep sending them $3b a year, they won’t. If we stop, they will have to face the fact that, if they don’t make peace, the newly emboldened Arabs can give them all kinds of shit, because the Arabs have managed to grow a few extra gonads at long last, now that they see America messing up wholesale in Iraq, and Hezbollah chasing the IDF out of Lebanon with their tails between their legs, so gobsmacked that out of sheer meanness, they sprayed Lebanon full of cluster bomblets in the last hours of fighting, so Lebanese kids can still get blown up after they’ve left. Now that’s nobility for you. The Israelis are really giving the Jews a bad name, this tiny race who can with some justification call themselves the chosen people, having given humankind the most influential folks in history – Jesus, Marx, Freud and Einstein – and also having suffered the most in history, with a third of them genocided in the four years of the Holocaust.

Without us covering their asses, the Israelis may become good Jews again and face up to the fact that within a decade, the Arabs -- led by Hezbollah and backed by a nuclear-empowered Iran – will wipe them off the face of the earth in a second Holocaust, and this time they’ll have themselves to blame. But if they make peace, one of the main reasons for terrorists to exist, will be gone, and we won’t be inspired to invade other countries like Iraq on the Israelis’ behalf. Peace all around, at last.

Number two, Mel Gibson is extremely competent: he does his job as a movie director better than anyone in Hollywood. “Braveheart” and “The Passion of The Christ” have made truckloads of money. America needs competent people. When I think about our current elite – our political leaders, our administration, and our crooked CEOs who get stellar pay even when their companies fail – I notice an extreme lack of competence, and a massive lack of the ability to take responsibility for anything besides the survival of their own padded hides.

Number three, Mel Gibson does what he believes in. Who in America does anything they believe in anymore? About the most principled stand any American in the last ten years has taken is to be against gay marriage. Which doesn’t say much for many in our nation, who are so horrified by the thought of grown men bonking each other up the butt and splooging in there, that they want to appoint themselves as Supreme Commanders of the Male Asses of the Universe.

Last time out, Mel Gibson made a movie he believed in, about the death of his hero, Jesus Christ. Mel Gibson is the only man in Hollywood who’s made a movie he believes in since well, that other Jesus movie, a disaster directed by Martin Scorcese. What Mel came up with was truly surprising: a movie that looks like it was made by an Eastern European art-house maverick, complete with subtitles. Damn, “The Passion of The Christ” actually looks and plays like a real work of art, a fierce evocation of Jesus’ last day on earth, with rent flesh and rivers of blood and awful suffering. But American movie critics, another lot who are incompetent at their jobs, were too stupid to see that. These Hollywood shills are just as useless as our political pundits, who can’t see that the Republicans and Democrats are only interested in hanging on to power by the seat of their lying pants, and have completely run out of ideas or the will to do anything about our real problems, like the sorry state of our public schools or our healthcare.

Surprisingly, Mel’s movie has made him a ton of money, which just goes to show that you can actually be incredibly successful if you do what you believe in, something that has escaped both the Republicans and the Democrats.

So I vote for Mel Gibson. At the moment, he -- and maybe Kinky Friedman -- are the only guys in America worth voting for. The rest are a lousy bunch of useless cowards who in a better, more noble time, would be banished from the Republic to go live in the butts of donkeys and elephants, where the most harm they can do is stink up their own air with some really smelly farts. Damn them to fart hell, is all I can say.