RRrrrrrant

OK, I did not get the stupid email in question. Fortunately, my father FINALLY quit sending me this sort of crap after I let him have it awhile ago. Actually, he still sends something stupid now and then, but they're not as absurd, irrational or idiotic as they used to be. Still, the rant below was posted on Daily Kos, and it sums things up pretty well.

The email came to my box with the note, "This will probably piss you off..."

Thanks for sending it then; I really love to be pissed off.

The video was some asshat out in Vegas who runs a casino and wants to tell us how badly the American government has failed...and of course, the usual suspects from my dad's email circle all had to chime in and say how right he was and how bad Obama is, etc... ad nauseum... So I replied...

So let me get this straight, the great recession is government's fault, the uncertainty of the American business climate is government's fault, the fact that we are pissing away 12 billion a month in an illegal war for no good reason other than to make money for oil companies is Obama's fault, the fact that when Bush took over we had a record budget surplus and in his 8 years he LOST net jobs (as compared to population growth) and ended up with more deficit in 8 years than we had had in the previous 200...and somehow this is Obama's fault? Jesus Christ. If you sat through the last 8 years and watched the Constitution shredded, our treasure wasted on a war we were LIED into, and the wages and wealth inequity gap get just as big as it was before the Great Depression and then you get mad at liberals, there ain't much I can do for you.

But for starters, what do YOU THINK is going to happen when the top 1% own 33% of everything in America and the top 10% own approximately 65% of it? Who is left to buy all the useless shit that we have to consume just to prop up the economy? Through the combination of union busting, outsourcing, and the ever-shifting tax burden from the rich to the middle class over the last 30 years, the middle class has had to borrow money for the last 3 decades to keep up with the cost of living. Inflation outpaced job earnings over the last 30 years. Think about that. If you don't see that there have been systematic problems in the country for almost as long as I have been alive, you need to start paying attention. They engineered policy to keep interest rates low to make it cheap to borrow money, and that's how we ran America...that's how we HAD to run America because working people were not making enough to make ends meet. So we borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. And then the bill came due. Hey, this is kind of funny! Did you know that Bush raised the debt ceiling 7 times while he was in office? That's like...almost every year he was in office,right? And you want more of that?

So to recap, Bush financed two wars on a credit card by selling debt to China...and NOW you are pissed off about government spending? Bush LOST net jobs...and NOW you are pissed off about jobs? Bush and the republican congress drove the car into the ditch and Obama tried to pull it out, and NOW you're mad? Now? You sleep-walk through the destruction of habeas corpus, through tax dollars spent on torturing people, through illegal and unconstitutional wire-tapping of America citizens, (and this shit is still happening because now it is JUST THE WAY WE DO THINGS HERE. THANKS!) through illegally outing an American spy for a political grudge, through the deregulatory enabling of Enron, Worldcom, and the shredding of Glass-Steagall (when they did the same thing with savings and loans we got the S&L implosion of the 80s...so we deregulated banks and got the banking implosion of the aughts. Which part of that is difficult to understand?) Your email circle slept through all of that, and NOW they get mad. Unfuckingbelievable.

Here, have some fun facts about wages in America: http://www.businessinsider.com/... Look through the slide show and tell me what you see. Rich getting richer, everyone else getting poorer.

Now some dipshit who owns a casino is going to lecture me about financial responsibility? A casino owner is going to lecture me about the proper use of my money? Really? Some asshole who is moving his corporate headquarters to China so he won't have to pay any taxes to America, a system whose government-subsidized roads and airlines supply him with an endless supply of morons who will gamble away their money at his resort? Give. Me. A. Break. If it were not for federal and state money supplying them with water, do you think they could even live out there in the FUCKING DESERT? Fuck him.

The reason we have an oil spill in the gulf, the reason the economy collapsed, and the reason we have wasted so much money in Iraq (did they find those WMDs yet?) is because government did NOT do its requisite job of oversight and regulation. The market is not rational...PEOPLE are rational. That is, if you are the guy who realizes that he can rip people off for billions of dollars and not get in trouble for it, you will, every single time. That is a cold, rational decision, the products of which we are suffering through right now. When you give regulators jobs to "regulate" and then tell them sort of tacitly that the market is infallible and that they should not interfere, you get this: http://www.dailytech.com/... People making 200k a year (paid by taxpayers) to watch porn in their offices instead of doing their jobs. Then, the failsafe for republicans is they can turn around and say, "See! Government doesn't work!" Right, because those assholes are systematically trying to destroy it. You drive the economy into a ditch we have not seen since 1930, and then you bitch about Obama spending tax money to try to fix it? Where is the disconnect here exactly? Do you think McCain would have done a better job? Sarah Palin? For fuck's sake, if she is our savior we're in big trouble (even though she does read ALL OF THE MAGAZINES). Drill baby drill? That's your platform? HA! Then Bobby Jindal is going to bitch because the federal government is not helping them enough? Just drill some more and remember when you said this: "We oppose the national Democratic view that says the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government. We believe the way to strengthen our country is to restrain spending in Washington, to empower individuals and small businesses to grow our economy and create jobs." Yeah, Bobby, this is deregulation come home to roost. Suck it.

Then to cap it all off, every email forward your friends have sent in the last 8 years has been false. (Remember, these are the "rational" republicans, not the naive and emotional democrats!) I mean, republicans are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own realities. Everything that you guys are passing around and getting all worked up about is, you know, pretty much a lie created specifically to manipulate you into being angry.

Do I seem pissed? I have to tell you, it is not just because of some douchebag casino owner. It is because there seems to be two kinds of people in America: people who try to make America better for the greatest number of people on one side and people who lie, deny scientific evidence, and try to kill you for being a democrat on the other. In case Fox hasn't been covering it, there was yet another murderous patriot last week on the hunt for liberals. He was going to go shoot up the ACLU in San Francisco because Glenn Beck put it in his mind to. He was going to go kill liberals...liberals like me. And every time your friends fire off another email full of lies, the world gets a little less safe for people like me. And that is why I am pissed.

There, rant done.

You can find the original rant by clicking here.