As we gratefully watch comet Perry fizzle into the dirty icebag we know it to be, let us pause in panic to contemplate the future of a country in which this abused child grows into a brain and soul damaged man, who then snares (forbid it Jesus) the nomination of a major party likely to win the coming election.
With a nod towards the modern usage, which would have it that one is not a "victim" but a "survivor" of child abuse, I distinguish the two categories thusly:
A survivor has faced the awful truth that one of the two people delegated by providence to comfort, love, and defend him was instead a monstrous caldron of hate and inflictor of gratuitous pain. The survivor has come to understand that his abuse was not some justified recompense for his evil ways, but the manifestation of his parents' disease.
The victim, on the other hand, like Perry, has dealt with the cognitive dissonance of his childhood trauma by erecting a wall of denial, on which he scrawls the graffiti image of an imagined good parent who beat him only to improve his wild ways.
Next week at the UN, Susan Rice will show the world our true values--she will provide international "cover" for an ongoing apartheid regime, when, acting as Israel's patron, we veto yet another Security Council resolution seen as contrary to her interests.
No, this is not some variation on Montezuma's Revenge-this is about today's special election to replace Anthony "I got a package for you right here, little lady" Weiner.
Turner, the Repugnant is outpolling Weprin, the Dem in a district taken 55% by Obama.
Meanwhile, a Socialist Workers Party candidate, Chris Hoeppner, is polling at 4% in the PPP survey.
When last we looked in on the plucky folk of Iceland, they were about to vote whether to take on roughly $6,000 per person by way of making whole the governments of other countries who, in turn, had made whole their own citizens who lost money when Iceland's banks went belly up.
Emergencies can be national in scope and existential in impact (like the Civil War, which prompted Lincoln to take emergency measures including suspending Habeas Corpus (parenthetically, now that Bill Clinton has eviscerated The Great Writ, no one would bother to formally suspend its operation), or geographically and temporally limited, if profound in impact (Katrina).
They have several characteristics common to all, however.
The last vestige of self respect has been stripped. This guy is hapless and hopeless. I pray that he is being blackmailed, because otherwise he is the worst kind of punk. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
William ("I don't need no stinkin' recusal") Prosser, who squeaked back into the Wisconsin Supreme Court in his recent election contest, has been granted a "pass" based, I suppose, upon the awesome discretion that our system grants to the prosecuting attorney in any criminal investigation.
Basically presenting a defense that should properly be the subject of jury deliberation, Prosser confessed to committing a non-consensual touching (the crime of battery) on Ann Walsh Bradley, a fellow Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice.
We have become more or less inured to the horrific statistics that comprise the foreclosure meltdown follies. One mortgage in four underwater, no equity left for the homeowner as far as the eye can see, vast swaths of Detroit given up for dead, etc.
I have become a "one-issue" voter. (well, actually, three issues: No drug prohibition, no imperial adventures, no surveillance state)
As Glenn Greenwald convincingly sets forth, that makes me a Ron Paul voter.
Will I like returning to the gold standard? Probably not too much, but at least I won't be shoveling money down Goldman Sachs gaping maw if it turns out that way.
Thanks, Roberts Court. Thought you were just empowering the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey with Citizens United?
Think again, assholes.
How are you gonna like it when the Peoples' Liberation Army PAC starts spending money throwing monkey wrenches into elections at every level from school board on up?
This dystopian view is detailed in all its terrifying horror by McCamy Taylor at Democratic Underground (h/t Yves Smith for link).
Back story: Around the time Jerry Cimino was founding the Beat Museum, I was urging him to go beyond a simple non-profit and found a church, arguing that when you live in a Christian theocracy, it pays to be a Christian Church.
As consternation sweeps the ranks of Dems in the wake of Wisconsin, and as a back and forth rages on these pages over the prospect of Obama's next campaign, a subtext that may bear some examination is the appropriate frame within which to view the voters who pull a lever adjoining the letter "R"
I should at the outset, for purposes of candor, state the premise I bring to this question.
It seems to me that if you have an annual income below $250k you are a deluded moron to vote Repugnant.
I am transfixed by the