She's right, y'know. Right as in POW!! Right in the ol' truth gland!!
Fellow lefties, Greenies, Progressives of every stripe, please read the entire article, two excerpts of which appear below. It's not very long. I'll wait. — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) May 19, 2020 The situation of the world is dire, but we still need a chuckle now and then to keep us from (insert preferred method of suicide here). Fortunately, the Democratic pre-primary reality TV series is providing us with a few laughs amid all the WTF and SMH moments. With permission from the author, I present this bit of Seuss-esque anapestic fun that Trudy Hess wrote for the Movement for a People's Party. Trudy and I both contribute to Caitlin Johnstone's Patreon and frequent the secret Facebook group for Caity's patrons. Regarding the text, I have just one quibble worth raising: The Democratic Party doesn't always nominate the world's biggest chump, even for president. Maybe substitute "As always..." in that verse with "Like last time...." As of this week, we can add to Bernie Sanders's bullet-point agenda his own variation of the Green New Deal. If he wins the nomination, we can hope that he will implement it without too much pushback from the two corporate parties; if the Dems nominate someone who doesn't advocate the GND, we can kiss our future as a species toodle-oo. Because I have become more sensitive to accessibility in recent years, I have transcribed the entire poem in the Alt text. This Facebook rant was inspired by this piece posted in The Intercept last night after Trump's Wall Speech.
Last night's televised Oval Orifice address (which, I'll admit, I haven't watched) and the general response to it make me think of Dr. George Lakoff and Caitlin Johnstone. Both these writers have important, Big-Picture things to say about this and related issues—and how the Democrats lost 2016. (Hint: It wasn't Susan Sarandon's fault.) Liberals and progressives have been trying to argue against the border wall using facts, statistics, and reasoning. That's a great approach if you're trying to convince other liberals and progressives. If you're trying to convince conservatives, or win elections against them, or talk to people who don't claim any ideology (Obama/Trump voters), facts and reasoning are mostly ineffective. Too many conservatives and non-ideologues care less about documentable facts than about whether you're telling a good story. Yes, policy should be evidence-based. Not so long ago, in my lifetime, even Republicans believed that. But if you trot out facts and stats in your electoral campaign, you risk losing your audience. This. Such much thisness. Just read it.
And if you doubt its veracity, think back to how many times you read (or wrote) variations on the "Jill Stein is an anti-vaxxer" smear. Those variations didn't even vary all that much. I'd like to believe that Caitlin Johnstone's youthful experiments with psychedelics has helped her in developing that "mental sovereignty" she often writes and talks about. But I'd wager that I know a few psychonauts—or occasional hallucinogenic dabblers—who nevertheless have relinquished that sovereignty, frequently add echoes to the liberal echo-chamber, and vote Democratic mostly out of fear.
I'm glad to know that Dr. Jill Stein has time not only to reply to the barrage of establshment-Democrat hatred she faces in social media, but to generate her share of noise. As of this moment, he is her most recent in a whole chain of tweets spaced about 20 minutes apart.
You'd think she was running for something, or perhaps just gearing up for another campaign. She could lie low and enjoy having made some history, but she's practicing her political medicine both defensively and aggressively instead.
Of course, the more Dr. Stein tweets, the more she invites attack, not just from high-profile operatives like Neera Tanden, but also from street-level Democrats who accuse her of working for the Putin-Trump axis because they can't envision actual Americans of their own volition attacking the Democratic Party from the left. The vitriol of some of the replies to Stein's tweets from aggrieved Democrats is palpable. Fortunately for us in the bleachers, Caitlin Johnstone has collected Stein's exchange with Tanden (minus replies from the rabble) and reproduced it on Medium. "Pwnage" is often in the eye of the beholder, but this beholder believes that Stein pwned Tanden big-time. For confirmation, I noticed that the replies from Team Tanden diminished in quantity and causticity after Stein's "Girl, do you even Google?" burn, and Team Stein's replies smelled like victory. Oh look, Jill just posted another one 20 minutes after the last:
Awesomeness, except for somebody at GNN misspelling "Baraka." Please invest the 34 minutes, more if you need to watch any of it a second or third time to let it sink in properly.
Bob Marley got it right: It's war. Everywhere is war. It has been war for a long time. But now that war is more overt than at any time since the Gilded Age, the time back to which our plutocrats and their elected lackeys are busily bulldozing our society and our politics.
Yesterday's US House vote on the American Health Care Act and the recent introduction of the risibly named Financial Choice Act have delivered a spiteful jolt to my third eye. Even if We the People are not on a war footing, the plutocratic establishment types are, along with their minions in Washington and various state capitals. The top 1% (more or less), through their political puppets and their police, are waging war against poor people, against working people, against people of color, against LGBT+ people, against the natural environment, against anyone or anything standing between the 1% and increased profits. It's 26 minutes and 49 seconds. Invest it.
Don't worry: Jimmy and Caity do not spend the entire time busting Rachel Maddow's chops. They discuss other, mostly related topics. Caity is at her best relating issues to the Big Picture, describing where they intersect, and diagnosing the morbidity of society. I look forward to her getting more such interviews and getting better when speaking off the cuff. Regular followers of dbcgreentx, here or on Facebook, know that I've become a drooling fanboy for Caitlin Johnstone. I'm not going to say she gets everything correct, and sometimes she offers glimpses of a paranoia that makes my own appear mild by comparison. But she's a cracker-jack progressive analyst, writer, and memester, one who traffics in chunks of uncomfortable truth.
In her Newslogue entry this morning, Caity included the photo assemblage below. At left, in case the face is unfamiliar, is Cenk Uygur, Sultan of The Young Turks, proponent of curing the rot in the Democratic National Committee through a grassroots takeover by Progressives. At right, of course, is Green Party standard-bearer Dr. Jill Stein, on whom I have lavished much praise in previous posts. The photo symbolizes how #DemEnter and #DemExit might work in concert to bring about effective reforms and create an opposition party that represents The People. It's a laudable goal, but is it feasible? David Cobb and I agree on a lot. That's partly because, over the years, he has educated me on many topics and preached intersectionality before most of us even had a word for it. We were in agreement before we even met: In the 1990s, we were both independently working to organize a Green Party in Harris County.
One thing on which Cobb and I have recently agreed is that Caity Johnstone rocks our respective worlds. Ms. Johnstone, who has been contributing to Inquisitr almost daily of late, is a converted Sandernista. As a progressive voter, she jumped on the Bernie bandwagon early, rejected Hillary Clinton's candidacy for a host of reasons, and switched her allegiance to Jill Stein and the Greens when it became clear that Sen. Sanders would not get the Democrats' nod. Here's her piece from Thursday on the revelation that Jill Stein has her money in some not-100%-green funds. ZOMG. Hide your kids, hide your wife. |
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