Political Porn, American-style
Aha! Gotcha! Now that I have your attention…
Perhaps it’s merely because I’ve been spoiled by the interactive world wide web but I could never understand the appeal of most television. Take the Food and Travel Channels, where our taste buds and other senses get tantalized by electronically beamed and pixilated images of food being eaten and exotic locales visited by other people months or years ago.
Pornography is another mystery to me. How illogical is it to be coaxed into libidinous feelings by watching other people generally better-looking than you having sex in positions that you haven’t been able to assume since the Carter administration?
The same goes for those C-SPAN 1, 2 and 3 junkies, God love ’em, those who willingly winnow through endless hours of middle aged and elderly pre-pensioners loitering and aimlessly milling around the floors of Congress in their hideous outfits, hoping against hope of catching that infrequent but ultimately rewarding full blown nutty that bloggers talk about for years.
Just as their poor soulmates at Newshounds, who voluntarily watch Fox so we don’t have to, vicariously thrill to the legendary room-spanning money shots of Ron Jeremy and Peter North and other ejaculatory mutants, many of us can’t help but watch in real time our lumbering legislative process as if we the people are actually involved in our democracy, as if we still control things after our votes are cast. It’s political porn at its most elemental level.
John Cornyn leading the charge yesterday to condemn the now-infamous Moveon ad on David Petraeus is just such an example of the non-interactive political porn that leaves the logical, thinking bystander out in the cold and yearning for a hot shower and a vigorous tooth-brushing with a street sweeper.
Let's just deny ourselves for a moment the consolation that the Senate's actions, and Bush's monkey-cymbal clapping of it at his pathetic clown show of a press conference soon thereafter, succeeded in only, 1) Making the ad even more infamous than it already is, even more deeply embedding a valid point to a wider audience than originally intended and, 2) refilling Moveon's coffers literally overnight to the tune of a half a million dollars. Because bigger issues ought to be addressed here:
Now, I trust that ole JP need not remind you what Cornyn’s home state is and where the initiative for this condemnatory vote very likely originated. The movement to condemn the Moveon ad went far beyond merely condemning Moveon.org. It was a gigantic, Dick Cheney-class “Fuck you!” to 3.2 million liberals, the first amendment and by extension all 300,000,000 plus Americans who, until September 11, 2001, were protected by it.
Now, if there was a God and if He hadn’t died of apoplexy about six years ago, a politically rabid assclown like Cornyn would be straitjacketed and shitting in the same corner of his rubber room at Bellevue like a huge human ferret. We’ve come to expect this from Republican pricks like Cornyn, a guy who had no problem a couple of years ago coming this short of calling for the murder of “activist judges” when the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote that we couldn’t execute kids just over the age of 14.
We all know how contemptuous Republicans, especially neocons, are regarding the Constitution, particularly the first and fourth amendments (provided it’s still there for them when they need them). I can easily see all the Republicans getting on the same page to slam our rights to free speech, freedom of the press, the right to peacefully assemble and to petition.
What hurts is that so many Democrats had signed on for this sick, silly shit, 22 to be exact plus Holy Joe Lieberman, because they were too afraid of being slapped with the “liberal terrorist-sympathizer” brush, even though the Moveon.org ad had nothing to do with terrorism any more than did the invasion of Iraq itself. This august list includes the names of at least five freshman senators that we’d voted in just last year with high hopes that they’d actually help end the war, plus the chairman of our Senate Judiciary Committee. And the vote, incredibly, got through the Senate Majority Leader.
So, essentially, this was a strongly bipartisan message to the American people that they don’t want to hear what we have to say and will officially condemn our words and opinions if it doesn’t jibe with Bushian dogma. And just in time for the latest Zogby poll that shows Congress’s approval rating is down to 11%, or nearly one third of George Bush’s, an opportunistic, predatory asswipe who thinks nothing about using generals and retired generals with some credibility left to use as human countermeasures in his propaganda campaigns and has even less of a problem in tearing through reputations that take decades to earn as quickly as porn stars go through cum wipes.
As I said, we’ve come to expect this kind of puerile behavior on the part of Republicans who simply don’t have the sense to open their nostrils and recognize a war when it goes bad. We oldsters had seen this in both parties during Vietnam and we’re seeing it now. But it hurts when the Democrats, well, betray us.
And while I wouldn’t go as far as to call John Kerry hypocritical in voting against the condemnation, it is audacious when you compare this to my senator passively standing on a stage in Florida just days ago and watching with his mouth open like a dead codfish a student get tasered simply for exercising his right to free speech, especially when his intercession almost surely could’ve helped broker a better outcome. His after-the-fact condemnation did nothing to help that student and only put in my mind the “tsk tsk’s” we heard from George Allen last year after Mike Stark was manhandled by Allen’s goons.
Plus, one if left to wonder why, over three years ago, Kerry didn’t publicly deplore at the Democratic convention in Boston the abominable “freedom cages” that essentially mass-tasered the first amendment by keeping protestors out of Kerry’s and the delegates’ line of sight and even out of earshot.
Let's just say, when one remembers these two isolated yet relevant incidents. that it kind of subtracts from the intended nobility of the equine Kerry's "Nay."
It’s this kind of comfort with and even dependence on insularity that will forever brand Kerry and those like him with the cold, distant elitist tag that has so far been successfully avoided by the much more accessible and human John Edwards and, surprisingly, Al Gore.
In all honesty, I expect better of a veteran who’d earned three Purple Hearts in being commissioned to defend our constitutional rights, rights for which he wasn’t tasered or shunted behind chain link and barbed wire for using when he’d protested the war before Congress in 1971.
Thanks to reader Cherie, these are the names, phone numbers and snail mail addresses of the 22 Democrats and Lieberman who’d voted to taser the first amendment, plus the three cowards who didn't want to commit themselves during a presidential election. Send them some love and if you happen to live in the states with the freshman senators, remind them of that old saying they have in Texas (they may have it in Tennessee but they have it in Texas, too) of “Fool me once…”
Baucus, Max- (D - MT)
511 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.2651
Bayh, Evan- (D - IN)
131 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5623
Cardin, Benjamin L.- (D - MD)
509 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.4524
Carper, Thomas R.- (D - DE)
513 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.2441
Casey, Robert P., Jr.- (D - PA)
383 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.6324
Conrad, Kent - (D - ND)
530 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.2043
Dorgan, Byron L.- (D - ND)
322 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.2551
Feinstein, Dianne - (D - CA)
331 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.3841
Johnson, Tim - (D - SD)
136 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5842
Klobuchar, Amy - (D - MN)
302 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.3244
Kohl, Herb - (D - WI)
330 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5653
Landrieu, Mary L. - (D - LA)
724 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5824
Leahy, Patrick J.- (D - VT)
433 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.4242
Lieberman, Joseph I.- (ID - CT)
706 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.4041
Lincoln, Blanche L.- (D - AR)
355 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.4843
McCaskill, Claire- (D - MO)
717 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.6154
Mikulski, Barbara A.- (D - MD)
503 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.4654
Nelson, Bill - (D - FL)
716 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5274
Nelson, E. Benjamin - (D - NE)
720 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.6551
Pryor, Mark L.- (D - AR)
255 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.2242353
Salazar, Ken - (D - CO)
702 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5852
Tester, Jon - (D - MT)
204 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.2644
Webb, Jim - (D - VA)
144 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.4024
NON-VOTING
Biden, Joseph R., Jr.- (D - DE)
201 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.5042
Cantwell, Maria - (D - WA)
511 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.3441
Obama, Barack - (D - IL)
713 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
202.224.2854
