The 2012 "Election" thread

[ninakat]

Bloc Party: Pantomime and Power in the Imperial System
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 31 August 2012 03:31

On Thursday, with media attention focused on the gooberish plutocrat accepting the nomination of one faction of our single ruling party -- the bipartisan Imperial Bloc -- the leader of the other faction took the opportunity to bury a few more cases of state murder.

There could hardly be a better example of how the American system rolls in our enlightened, ultramodern 21st century: garish, empty pantomimes of politics coupled with the ruthless, lawless, brutal exercise of imperial power -- with no accountability, no responsibility, no consequences for the crimes and depravities committed by the elites and their agents and sycophants.

We refer of course to this story in the New York Times: "No Charges Filed on Harsh Tactics Used by the C.I.A." There is little need for further commentary on the story; it speaks for itself -- including the headline, which illustrates, once again, the establishment media's pathological refusal to name the systematic beating, freezing and murder of captives: torture. (Try to imagine what word the NYT would use if, say, the members of Pussy Riot had "died ... after being shackled to a concrete wall in a near-freezing temperatures at a secret [Russian] prison." Would they call that "harsh tactics"? Or if a Syrian prisoner "died in [state] custody in a [regime] prison...where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic." Would they call that "harsh tactics"? Would that be referred to as "strenuous interrogation" by the New York Times?)

But I digress. To be fair, the story tells the basic facts straightforwardly enough. The Obama Administration announced on Thursday that it would not prosecute anyone -- no one at all -- for the murder of two prisoners in American's Terror War gulags several years ago. As the story notes, this move "eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA" under the Bush Administration. Considering that dozens of detainees -- if not many more -- have been killed in detention over the course of the Terror War, this is a remarkable feat of erasure. Killing after killing after killing after killing -- and not a single killer prosecuted by the "Justice" Department of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

No, wait: we do the Peace Prize Laureate wrong in the above claim. The state-ordered, state-approved, state-protected murder and beating and freezing and slamming and stripping and ice-packing and plastic-wrapping of prisoners (many of them innocent people rounded up randomly or kidnapped or sold into captivity by criminals) has in fact produced one prosecution by the Laureate, as the NYT notes.

While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.

There, see! The one CIA agent who revealed the names of people who tortured captives is being prosecuted with the full force of the law, with all the righteousness and moral fervor that we would expect from a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate! There's something that any progressive can point to with pride when he or she works the phone banks and doorsteps for Obama, telling people to support the president and save us from the militarist nutballs and enemies of the truth in the Republican Party.

And yes, of course, the faction of the Imperial Bloc that just nominated Mitt Romney is a pack of militarist nutballs and enemies of the truth. But so is the other faction, which protects torturers, murders people whose names they don't even know based on arbitrarily chosen "life-pattern" details gleaned by robots in the sky, launches secret wars, foments coups, runs "black ops" in dozens of countries all over the world, killing hundreds of innocent people each year, plunging whole countries into chaos and ruin with its 'terror war' and 'drug war' and 'economic war' agendas -- and ferociously prosecutes anyone who tries to smuggle out a few crumbs of truth about the abominable atrocities and self-destructive follies being carried out daily by a berserk militarist system which has no goal other than its own self-perpetuation and the forced domination of others.

And this will go on and on regardless of which faction of the Imperial Bloc wins in November. Yes, there are differences between the factions. The Republicans and Tea Partiers and Koch-heads are more openly racist, are more proud of their willful ignorance, and hate more of their fellow citizens than the Democrats seem to. (Although actually killing innocent Muslims, including many children, all over the world on a regular basis as the Democrats are doing might possibly be construed as being even more racist than, say, protesting the construction of a mosque somewhere. And the persistent belief that maintaining an all-devouring, treasury-bankrupting, globe-spanning military machine that kills people across the earth is a sensible policy that will produce peace and prosperity could be construed by some as willful ignorance on a Todd Akin-like level.)

But the fact is we have only one party, the Imperial Bloc. You may find one faction more distasteful than the other, but both fully support the moral insanity of the militarism outlined above. Whichever faction wins, more people will die horrible deaths -- and no one will answer for it, no one will be prosecuted. And the firestorm of hatred and blowback that both factions of the Imperial Bloc keeps stoking against our country will continue to build. So be clear: if you vote for one of these factions, that is what you are supporting. Perhaps you may feel that such a dreadful moral compromise is necessary; that's your choice. But if so, you should know -- and feel -- just what that choice means.

[Harvey]

Mitt is a glove puppet by name though both are puppets by nature. Question is, can any of us truly say differently? I remain agnostic.

[Twyla LaSarc]

I've been approached at my job very near the local U by people soliciting voter registration. I even wish one poor girl would come by again so I can apologize. Yeah, I kicked the puppy a little and I wish I hadn't spontaneously taken some of the frustration I feel with the system right now out on the poor thing. I was certainly more curt than I had to be.

So I'm supposed to vote for Obama to counter extreme rhetoric from the right. Fuck it. Last term was strewn with broken promises. I now have skin in the game (adult kid just joined the navy) and really cannot help being concerned. If Mitt is talking war with Iran, and Obama starts getting all eloquent and shit about not going there, based on his previous record, what is a girl to think?

As for women's rights and gay marriage, honestly, he doesn't seem very committed. The best I can say is he doesn't actively try to turn back the clock.

Personally, despite my lack of participation, I will be very surprised if Obama doesn't win. Then I predict he'll proceed to do everything Mitt helpfully pointed out.

[82_28]

Dude, junior LaSarc joined the fucking navy?

[Twyla LaSarc]

His own choice. We actively discouraged it, but he'd been talking about it for awhile (not the navy, but that sort of thing). He's getting his school paid for right now, but he hates the options they're giving him. We tried to bargain, Coast Guard, Peace Fucking Corp, academics, but he was pretty adamant. I'm ambivalent about all of it. Most of my male family for generations has done such things and came through it pretty much OK. On the other hand, we are ruled by idiots...

He is a smart kid and has always thought for himself. I gotta trust him on this one. As long as I'm here he always has a place to come back to. I think he just wants to roll the dice, and I can't really blame him.

Edit to add: I think it's because of his ambition to write. It offers some experience with the outside world that he would never get if he were stuck and broke here.

[StarmanSkye]

^^^
Rolling the dice -- It seems like that may be the covert military-recruitment message which is based in-part on exploiting the lousy options available for career & security in this crumbling out-sourced & financialized economy. It gets young people into the Imperialistic system in a kind of pre-emptive default back-ass way for further mind-fuckery faux-patriotic Rah-Rah propaganda.

Not only are we 'ruled' by idiots, but they're incredibly crafty & ruthless sons-of-bitches too with their manipulative 'you're either with us or with the Terrrrorists' bullshit.'

God DAMN 'em.

[JackRiddler]

What the fuck?
http://google.com/movies?near=astoria,+ ... baa6d36b72

[overcoming hope]

What the fuck?
http://google.com/movies?near=astoria,+ ... baa6d36b72

indeed wtf.

[Luther Blissett]

Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan Speeches Make Me Miss George Bush
Matt Taibbi

I didn't watch Mitt Romney's acceptance speech last night. I can't do it: even under normal circumstances, watching politicians of any stripe talk about anything at all makes me unable to sleep. And a convention speech, which is almost always a deeply schizoid address authored by 38 different infighting political consultants and amplified by the heaviest possible doses of network TV's goofball effects and nuclear-powered stagecraft, is generally the most unwatchable of all political performances. So I try always to watch such speeches the next morning, and am just now taking in the Romney address.

The Republican convention in general has been a strange affair. The vibe around Republican politics in general was much happier in the days before the Bush presidency cratered. Republican politics before Bush imploded was a confident brew of guns, Jesus, and Freedom.

A Republican politician's job back then was, if not easy, pretty clear: you bashed welfare queens and free-riders, told tearful stories of fetuses composing operas in the womb, and promised to bomb America's enemies back to the Stone Age. You didn't have to split hairs or hedge bets: you got up on stage, took a baseball bat to liberals and terrorists and other such perverts, and let the momentum of the crowd carry you to victory. You were like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove, riding high with a nuke between your legs, waving your ten-gallon hat at and going out in a blaze of yeeee-hah!!!s.   

Republican politics used to be fun. Even I sort of got into it. When I was undercover working for George W. Bush in a campaign office in Orlando back in 2004, it was a much easier acting job than I expected it to be. You went into the campaign office, sat with the other volunteers, and talked about all the Hollywood actors you wished would keep their damned mouths shut. Any liberal who claims there isn't lots of fun to be had making fun of liberals is a goddmaned liar. Anyway, one of my fellow volunteers back then gave me a copy of Shut Up and Sing – not the Dixie Chicks documentary, the Laura Ingraham book – and that quickly replaced Lawrence Taylor's Over the Edge as my go-to bathroom reader. It was crazy, paranoid stuff, but that sort of politics had a reassuringly simple quality to it; it was dependable, like a rock.

But today's Republican politics are totally confused. The Romney-Ryan speeches were a bizarre exercise in tightroping and hair-splitting. Ryan's speech weirdly went after the Democrats for a plan to cut Medicare that he himself had rejected for not cutting enough – and then in the same speech went after the Obama vision of society that is a "dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us."

The Ryan VP pick was clearly a calculated gamble. Like the Palin pick, it was intended to fire up the base by bringing in a young, fresh-faced politician with hardcore conservative credentials. That would help bring out the red-state die-hard vote for Romney, a onetime pro-choice creator of a state-run health care program who struggled with exactly those voters in his primary battles against the likes of newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

But Ryan's conservative cred derives almost entirely from his strike-hard-strike-first-no-mercy-sir reputation as a ruthless chainsawer of all government-funded "waste," including sacred-cow entitlements like Medicare. If he was coming on board, surely it was to preach the gospel of budget bloodbaths.

So what does Ryan the Vice-Presidential candidate do? He goes to Tampa and spends half his speech doing a Ted Kennedy impersonation, talking about the "obligation we have to our parents and grandparents," pitching his party as the defender of a beloved government entitlement program! "The greatest threat to Medicare," he said, "is Obamacare, and we're going to stop it."

Then, like the Unknown Comic, who used to switch bag-faces mid-routine, he moved right back into his young-Barry Goldwater act, bashing entitlements and the "supervision and sanctimony of the central planners."

Are you confused yet? I was. Is the move here dog-whistling an unspoken promise to the base to slash "entitlements," while somehow retaining Medicare? Or is it dog-whistling an unspoken promise to the base to slash "entitlements," including Medicare?

I couldn't tell. Ultimately I think the answer was actually behind door number three, as in:

My fellow Americans, whatever Barack Obama is doing with Medicare, it's bad, and we promise to reverse it!

(APPLAUSE)

And not only that, we'll go even further in cutting wasteful entitlements from our bloated government budget!

(APPLAUSE)

Does that make logical sense? No. Does it make political sense? Sort of – if your voters either have extremely short attention spans, or they are themselves comfortable with certain minor rhetorical contradictions.

If they're like the Tea Partiers whom I watched in Kentucky lustily cheering Sarah Palin from their Medicare-funded wheelchairs as she railed against government entitlement programs, then a speech like Ryan's works well enough. It just doesn't work quite as well as a speech that doesn't have any contradictions at all – like George Bush's 2004 acceptance speech, cleverly set in post-9/11 New York, in which he promised that electing anyone but himself would result in terrorists running free down the smoldering wreckage of Your Town, U.S.A., followed by prancing sets of gay married actors from Hollywood.

Anyway, when Ryan had the Goldwater side of his paper bag turned to the audience, he railed against Obama's health care program, calling it "two thousand pages of rules, mandates, taxes, fees, and fines that have no place in a free country."

That line drew genuine cheers from the crowd, especially since it coincided with the ejection of much-despised Code Pink demonstrators from the stadium. But I could swear the cheers were tempered just a little bit at the end when the audience members – even these audience members, even that ridiculous lady wearing the red-white-and-blue "America" vest – slowly remembered that Ryan's running mate had not only proposed but implemented an extremely similar health care program in Massachusetts.

Which brings us to Romney's speech. Romney spent a lot of time talking about his various successes as a businessman. But the only reference to his government experience – his most relevant qualification for this office, remember – came in a moment where he reminded the audience that as governor, he "chose a woman lieutenant governor, a woman chief of staff."

He left out the part where he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a pro-choice centrist who supported the teaching of evolution and the banning of assault rifles. He completely omitted any mention of his own health care program and in fact said exactly two things about health care in the entire speech: he repeated Ryan's line about Medicare, and then promised to repeal "Obamacare." 

On the other hand, he mentioned all the women he hired as governor, and in general spent an enormous amount of time talking about women's issues. Which would be great, if it were not for the fact that the reasoning behind this rhetorical decision is so transparent – Romney added to the traditional Republican weakness among female voters when he chose Ryan, whose other major claim to fame as a hardcore conservative is his uncompromising stance on abortion. Ryan's history here is similar to his history on budget cuts: he made himself famous by going further than other pols were willing to go.

He co-sponsored legislation with Todd Akin (who is about as popular with women right now as flesh-eating streptococcus) called the "Sanctity of Human Life Act," which would have given a human fertilized egg "all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood." (I imagine that before Akin's gaffe, the next planned bill would have stripped those same fertilized eggs of Miranda rights). Moreover, Ryan supported the notorious "Let Women Die Act," which would have refused women access to abortion even if her life is in danger.

So to recap: the candidate himself used to be pro-choice, spoke glowingly of his mother's support of abortion rights in his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, then suddenly became anti-choice in 2006. The VP candidate has been firmly anti-choice his whole career. Yet neither candidate went anywhere near the abortion issue in his speech.

In fact, you could build a walking bridge across the Bering Strait with all the major stuff the two candidates didn't bring up in their speeches. Romney's signature achievement as a politician was his health-care program. Ryan's claim to fame was his budget. But they spent most of their time in their speeches slithering, Catherine-Zeta-Jones-in-Entrapment style, around their own records.



So what did they talk about? The line that astonished me most from Mitt's speech was this one, where he talked about the changes Americans "deserved" and should have gotten during Obama's presidency:

You deserved it because you worked harder than ever before during these years.  You deserved it because, when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out moving lights, and put in longer hours.  Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour, benefits, you took two jobs at $9 an hour…

Are you kidding? Mitt Romney was the guy that fired you from that $22.50 an hour job, and helped you replace it with two $9 an hour jobs! He was a pioneer in the area of eliminating the well-paying job with benefits and replacing it with the McJob that offered no benefits at all. One of the things that killed him in the Senate race against Ted Kennedy were Kennedy ads that reminded voters that Mitt's takeovers resulted in slashed wages and lost benefits. He was exactly the guy that eliminated that classic $22.50 manufacturing job, like in the case of GST Steel, where Bain took over with an initial investment of $8 million, paid itself a $36 million dividend, ended up walking away with $50 million, and left GST saddled with over $500 million in debt. 750 of those well-paying jobs were lost.

What kinds of jobs were left for those fired workers to look for? Well, in the best-case scenario, you might have found one at Ampad, another Bain takeover target, where workers had their pay slashed from $10.22 to $7.88 an hour, tripled co-pays, and eliminated the retirement plan.

So a guy who eliminated hundreds of $22 an hour jobs and slashed hundreds more jobs to below $9 an hour blasts Barack Obama for not giving you the better life you deserved, after you lost your $22/hour job and had to take two $9/hour jobs. Are we all high or something? Did that really just happen?

Just a lame pair of speeches, overall. They made me miss George Bush. At least the Bush/Cheney/Rove era offered a clear ideological choice – and some pretty passionate, ingeniously-delivered political theater, comparatively. Where's the blood and guts, the bomb-‘em-till-they're-crispy war calls? Where are the screw-the-poor tirades, the "you can pry it from my cold dead hand" guns-and-liberty crescendos? This stuff is pretty weak beer compared to those days.

[Belligerent Savant]

What the fuck?
http://google.com/movies?near=astoria,+ ... baa6d36b72

indeed wtf.

http://gawker.com/5939387/2016-obamas-a ... -movie-for

2016: Obama’s America: Whose America Is This Movie For?
Will Leitch
Last weekend, 2016: Obama's America, an anti-Obama documentary released in roughly 1,000 theaters nationwide, shocked observers by making more money than fellow new releases Premium Rush and Hit & Run, both of which were shown on twice as many screens. It's already the sixth-highest-grossing political documentary of all time—behind four Michael Moore movies and An Inconvenient Truth, actually—and is the highest-grossing explicitly right-wing film ever. (Passing Atlas Shrugged, anti-abortion film October Baby, and that sad Michael Moore satire An American Carol by the wayward Zucker brother.) This took me by surprise along with everyone else, because I had literally never heard of the film until I saw it on the marquee of my local theater.

As a devoted moviegoer, as, dammit, a concerned citizen, I figured I owed it to myself, to you, to get out there and decipher what this was all about. So I went to go see the movie yesterday, at 10 a.m., at the AMC Empire 25 in Times Square.

Let me say up front that I voted for Obama in 2008—even gave money to him, in fact—and plan on doing so again in 2012. Still, I have voted for many Republicans in my life (including Michael Bloomberg, though he probably doesn't count) and thought the whole Chick-fil-A thing was more complex than either side allowed it to be. (Well: I like gay marriage, and I also like the chicken.) I have political views, because I'm a human being, but I find discussing politics, particularly online, a grueling, idiotic process in which people on opposite sides of an issue, rather than trying to actually come to some honest disagreement as to what an ephemeral, essentially unknowable truth might be, assume the other person is an asshole and do everything in their power to try to destroy them.

So I tread carefully here. Particularly when I tell you this movie is horrible.

***
If you were wondering who goes to see an anti-Obama documentary at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday in Times Square, here's yesterday's audience:

• Three blue-haired ladies, two of whom talked throughout the entire film.
• A guy who appeared to be in his early '30s wearing a pinstriped suit, minus the jacket but including suspenders.
• A black guy and a white guy, both young, with beards. They looked like people I might meet again in regular life, and I had the urge to hide from them. They left after about 15 minutes. I assume they were looking for Hope Springs.

2016: Obama's America is based on two books by Dinesh D'Souza, a noted (if not particularly intellectually respected) right-wing scholar who had huge hits with The Roots of Obama's Rage and Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream. He has turned these books into this documentary, which he co-directed, wrote and hosted. Yes, this movie is mostly about Dinesh D'Souza.

Suffice it to say, despite the film's financial success, I am not sure D'Souza has a future in movies, in front of or behind the camera. (Maybe next to it? He might be all right next to it.) As a screen presence, he is limp and empty, the economics professor whose class you always skipped, the one whose earnestness and overly helpful, patronizing explanations seem to disguise a quiet contempt for you and your stupid intellect. When D'Souza is listening to one of his interview subjects, his eyelids droop and his jaw sags, like he's shutting his brain off until the other person is done talking, so he can talk again. Then, when he does, he talks right past the interviewee. He's a compulsive mansplainer.

This is a problem because you see a helluva lot more of D'Souza in this movie than you do of Obama. We learn about D'Souza's upbringing in India, and his education at Dartmouth, and the time he met President Reagan, and this one time at band camp, and next thing you know, the movie's half over.

It is fair to say that D'Souza's cinematic instincts aren't necessarily those of a born storyteller. The best way I can describe his narrative technique is to explain the movie's most hilarious scene. It's early on, and D'Souza is recounting, via voiceover, a debate he once had on Stanford's campus with Jesse Jackson. (D'Souza has a thing with Jesse Jackson; he shows up, like, seven times in the movie. Is it still 1988?) He talks about how Jackson claimed, in their debate, that racism was less overt than it used to be but still existed, bubbling under the surface.

While D'Souza's telling this story, the movie shows us a black guy walking into a bar full of white people. He sits down at the bar between two white guys and, just as D'Souza's relaying Jackson's message that race is a larger part of society than we want to admit, the two white guys flat get up and walk away from him, right out of the room. Everyone in the bar then looks at the black guy, accusingly, menacingly.

Oh shit, right? But then D'Souza hits the moral of the story. He tells us, still via voiceover, that what he told Jackson back then was that in his experience, racism had been mostly eradicated. While he's saying this, while the words are coming out of his mouth, the two white guys come back to the bar and ... give the black guy a birthday cake. It was his birthday all along! Everyone in the bar then gives him a standing ovation. It turns out this bar wasn't full of crackers who instantly sprint out of the room when you sit down, black guy. It was just your birthday! Surprise! White people love you!

(Honestly, this scene really has to be seen to be believed.)

Finally, the movie gets down to Obama, and D'Souza's narrative capabilities don't help him out much there either. Best I can tell, his argument is that Obama got his entire political worldview from his late father, who D'Souza claims was an anti-colonialist, anti-American, racist terrorist drunken black guy from some crazy black-guy country. Hence, Obama hates America and is part of some secret plot launched by his father to take down the country from inside the very belly of the beast.

You might have spotted a few plot holes here, perhaps centrally the fact that Obama only met his father once, when he was 10, and therefore didn't have that much time for input on matters of colonialism and eventual Manchurian Candidate sleeper cell-ism. But D'Souza goes all the way with this: He claims the "Dreams from My Father" of Obama's autobiography of that title were, in fact, dreams of taking down America. The primary evidence of this is a paper Obama Sr. wrote in 1964 saying that America was sometimes overly forceful in its foreign relations. (No word if Obama Sr. made Young Obama read the tract when he was 10, or instead, you know, gave him a basketball or something. BUT THE IMPLICATIONS ARE CLEAR.)

Later, D'Souza even claims Obama's mother—who died of cancer when her son was 34—had these same anti-American sensibilities, which is a pretty nice thing to say about a lady who died 10 years before her son ever ran for national office. I'm not even sure what any of this is supposed to mean. I certainly hope I never find anything my father wrote when I was three years old, because I will then of course have no choice but to blindly follow that document's orders for the rest of my life.

But D'Souza, to his credit I suppose, seems to really believe all this bullshit: that Obama isn't just the wrong person to be president but is actively trying to take us down from within. Because of something his Dad, who you may recall left Obama fatherless at birth, may or may not have written five decades ago.

D'Souza has all sorts of weird theories, though, and none of them makes sense together; it's all sinister "doesn't it seem fair to wonder?"-type implications. He interviews some random student at the University of Hawaii who claims that the people of Hawaii have always considered rebelling against the lower 48. He argues that Obama wants to raise taxes and also that he is purposely trying to bankrupt the country. He blasts Obama for not taking better care of his half-brother even while the half-brother (who realizes immediately it was a mistake to agree to this interview) keeps saying, "No, I'm fine, I'm fine, seriously, stop that." He goes off on this tangent about Obama hating the moon or something. My favorite is when he claims that Obama "sees Al Qaeda leaders as anti-colonial freedom fighters like him, his allies in their global worldview." Well, that's a theory!

This is all pretty tough to take—most of the movie is at the debate-team level of the comments below a Yahoo! front-page post—but it'd be easier if at least D'Souza were audacious enough to capture one's attention, let alone hold it. This is not a Rush Limbaugh broadside, delivered by a gifted entertainer who knows his medium. The movie is plodding and meandering and inept and, most of all, completely lacking in even a modicum of humor; not only does the movie not contain a single joke, I'm not sure D'Souza knows what a joke is. Michael Moore can be nearly as intellectually dishonest—nearly, but not entirely, to be clear—but at least he can slow down every once in a while and toss in some levity between polemics. I bet all the other Young Republicans at Dartmouth made fun of D'Souza a lot.

When the film was over—it's 88 minutes and feels like 888—everyone shuffled out of the theater, the two old ladies still chattering (one did applaud), the guy in the pinstripes looking depressed as he urinated next to me afterward. As with Moore's films, I wonder whom this movie is for. If you're a partisan loon like D'Souza or Moore, you'll cheer and vote the same way you were going to anyway. If you're sympathetic to D'Souza's or Moore's political beliefs but intellectually honest, the movie is so full of bunk that you have to hope it doesn't hurt your cause. And if you feel the opposite of Moore or D'Souza or are undecided, the last thing this movie would do would change your mind.

The reason this movie exists is the same reasons all movies exist: to make money. D'Souza has done that; he'll surely rack up even higher speaking fees at right-wing events now than he did before. That's the one honest thing about this movie, the part at the beginning where you hand over the ticket price.

There's surely a case to be made against re-electing Barack Obama this year. But if this is the best the opposition can do ... man, Obama's gonna be just fine.

[8bitagent]

It was very weird to see mixed messages at the RNC. Mccain: We must stay the course in Afghanistan! Clint Eastwood: Obama needs to bring our boys home!(huge applause)
Freaking schizophrenic. I know the Alex Jones/Ron Paul effect has been minimal on the GOP en masse...so when did they start getting all anti war? Romney and Ryan certainly aren't.

Yeah I saw "2016: Obama's America" on the marquee of all the theaters near me. I do like *some* right wing produced 'documentaries'.
I liked Maafa21(even tho I support modern Planned Parenthood), World Net Daily's 2000 documentary about TWA Flight 800, some of Alex Jones documentaries(until he gets into the anti illegals/climate change theory stuff) Heck I even liked some of Ben Stein's "Expelled" movie.

If youre going to go into theories on Obama...why hasnt anyone done one on the alleged association with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the early 80's or alleged influence by Brzezinski neo liberal think tank types...or about how the same banks who funded Mccain were contributing to his 2008 election. Or how Obama filled cabinet positions with well known wall street crooks?

[DrVolin]

After all those speeches, Romney must be kicking himslef that he didn't go with Rubio.

[Luther Blissett]

Is it really Romney's choice?

[ninakat]

Join Up!
By James Howard Kunstler
on September 3, 2012 8:55 AM

Meet the new third party in national politics: Reality.

Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is actually happening in the world. Reality doesn't need to drum up dollar donations from anyone. Reality doesn't have to pander to any interest group or subscribe to any inane belief system. Reality doesn't even need your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government.

In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the Republicans and Democrats are already dead. They choked to death on the toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions animated only by the parasites that feed on and squirm over the residue of decomposing tissue within the dissolving membranes of their legitimacy. Think of the fabled Koch brothers as botfly larvae and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association PAC (SIFMA PAC) as a mass of writhing maggots.

These are desperate days in the republic. Between the two empty spectacles of the official party nominating conventions, a terrible nausea rises in the collective gorge of the swindled body politic. The putative contest of ideas is a dumbshow in a hall of mirrors. None of it avails to reduce, mitigate, or even acknowledge, the tensions that may tear this country apart, in particular the web of fraud that shrouds all the operations of money and banking - which is to say: the fate of everything the nation thinks it has invested in itself and its future. In the USA of 2012, anything goes and nothing matters. Reality has a different view of where this all ends and how it will work out.

Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:

The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered a long-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.

The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates, and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges, and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements: civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.

The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread. This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are able-bodied.

The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage. By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.

The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be found today. The two major parties also favor the application of war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders - i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says. Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.

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[DrVolin]

Is it really Romney's choice?

I was being facetious