Instant "patriot"! Just add asshole!
I'm so PROUD
of my country -- NOT!
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." -- Samuel Johnson
"... I beg to submit that [patriotism] is the first [refuge of a scoundrel].” -- Ambrose Bierce
The United States of America is at its lowest point of my lifetime of almost 40 years, yet one of the "debates" of the presidential election season is who is more proud of his or her county. Is this a presidential election or a fucking junior-high-school pep rally?
And what, exactly, do we Americans really have to be proud of?
Let's see: BushCheneyCorp blatantly stole the 2000 presidential election while fat and lazy Americans sat idly by. (Surely it didn't matter, in such a close election, who the next occupant of the Oval Office would be! Let the Repugnican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court "justices" decide!) BushCheneyCorp then started the bogus Vietraq War, which was billed as retaliation for 9/11, which the Bush regime failed to prevent, even though it had been warned the month before.
The Vietraq War has brought us such wonderful things as (not necessarily in this order) the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors; almost 4,000 dead American soldiers, slaughtered for nothing except for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney's Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp; and those God-awful "Support Our Stormtroopers" magnets in the shape of a yellow ribbon on all of the gas-guzzlers that are destroying the planet. Not to mention the billions and billions of American taxpayers' dollars that have been stolen from the U.S. treasury by the subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp via the bogus war in Iraq, billions and billions of dollars that could have been used to strengthen the nation -- such as through strengthening our schools, providing health care to needy Americans, improving our infrastructure and cleaning up and protecting our environment.
While he was at it destroying the United States of America, "President" George W. Bush thought that he'd threaten the survival of the very planet itself by refusing to allow the U.S. to do anything about global warming.
The Vietraq War and the "war on terror" have made Americans less safe, not more safe, from attacks in the future, because the Vietraq War and the "war on terror" have made Americans a lot more enemies, and BushCheneyCorp's wars for the war profiteers have overextended the U.S. military. The U.S. economy is on the verge of collapse. I expect the baby boomers to wipe everything out, including the Social Security and the Medicare funds that I've been paying into since I was a teenager. And oh, yeah: global warming, too.
Anti-American terrorists only wish that they could do just a fraction of the damage to the United States that the treasonous members of the unelected Bush regime have done.
But wait! George W. Bush & Co. wear little pins depicting the U.S. flag on their lapels! No, they're not election-stealing, murderous, war-profiteering, future-generation-screwing, planet-killing traitors! Why, they're patriots!
Yes, no one asserts that just because you wear a fucking Mensa pin you're a fucking genius, yet for some fucking reason simply wearing a pin depicting the U.S. flag is seen as proof positive of uber-patriotism.
Poor Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, our next president -- who will be selected by the majority of the American people, not by the Repugnican-appointed "justices" of the U.S. Supreme Court -- actually has to face such bullshit as criticism that he's not patriotic enough because he doesn't wear a lapel pin depicting the U.S. flag* and because he once -- gasp! -- allegedly was caught without his hand over his heart during the national anthem (the penalty for which, of course, should be execution!)!
Again, the U.S. is on the brink of economic collapse and its military is so overextended that should the U.S. face a real military threat -- and not the threat that Iraqi babies posed to it (hey, those babies would have grown up had we not shocked and awed them!) -- the U.S. would be in deep shit, but our "serious" "political" "national discussion" is about who is and who isn't wearing little lapel pins depicting the U.S. flag.
Oh, yes, I'm so fucking proud to be an American! Surely this is what our Founding Fathers had in mind and what all of our soldiers in all of our wars died for: so that we could strain out teeny-tiny gnats yet gulp down big ol' fuckin' camels!
And how are things in "the melting pot," the Bastion of Tolerance that is the United States, doing?
Well, poor Barack Obama, an American citizen since birth (he couldn't run for president if he weren't), had the misfortune of being Photographed While Wearing a Turban** in his ancestral land of Kenya in August 2006, making him look -- gasp! -- suspiciously Muslim!:
Associated Press photo
And look! Speaking of camels, here he is with a camel during that same trip!:
Associated Press photo
Well, if that isn't proof positive that Barack Obama actually is an al-Qaeda operative, then I don't know what is!
You know, this isn't really about the idea that Obama might be some al-Manchurian candidate. It's about Good Old-Fashioned American Racism, about the fact that while it's not acceptable within most circles, even within many if not most circles within the red states, to openly use the "n" word, it's perfectly OK to use the "M" word (Muslim). "M" word = "n" word. (There. I cracked the red-state code for you.)
Finally in relation to Barack Obama, who deserves so much better than he's getting, we apparently have to worry about whether or not someone is going to try to assassinate him.
Mind you, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the two men on the entire planet who are the least worth protecting, yet they are the two best-protected men on the planet.
If we can keep Dick and Bush so safe, why can't we keep Barack Obama safe?
If anything happens to Obama, you will know that it's because he's black, because in the United States of America, while whitey is well protected, it's still wide-open season on blackie.
So no, I'm not proud of my nation.
I'm not proud of the fact that the fascist, treasonous, murderous dictator (a dictator is an unelected tyrant) George W. Bush is called a "patriot" because, despite the damage that he has wreaked upon not only the United States but the entire fucking planet -- damage that will take decades, if not generations, to repair -- he wears a little lapel pin depicting the U.S. flag.
I'm not proud of the fact that despite its protests to the contrary, the United States remains a racist nation to the point that we are even talking about the safety of an African-American presidential candidate while the safety of the stupid white men in the highest positions of power isn't even in question.
I'm not proud of the fact that Americans have sorely lost their way, that while they wave their little bought-at-Wal-Mart-made-in-China U.S. flags, they don't have a fucking clue about what their nation's democratic ideals really are, and that if Satan wore a pin of a little cruficix on his lapel, they'd call him a Christian.
*Notes The Associated Press of Flag-pin-gate:
In October, Obama told Iowa television station KCRG that he decided to stop wearing a U.S. flag lapel pin during the run-up to the Iraq war because it had become "a substitute for, I think, true patriotism."
"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest. Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great and, hopefully, that will be a testimony to my patriotism," Obama said.
It was the hysterical post-9/11 jingoism -- during which the U.S. flag was used more as a threat, an instrument of intimidation, than anything else -- that ruined the flag as a symbol of true patriotism for me.
But all that Obama has to do is point out that the likes of Toe-Tappin' Repugnican Sen. Larry Craig, shown in his police booking mug shots below, love to wear a U.S. flag pin on their lapels...
Surely, since he has that pin on, Craig was tappin' against terror! Or something like that...
**"Everybody knows that whether it's me or Senator Clinton or Bill Clinton, that when you travel to other countries they ask you to try on traditional garb that you have been given as a gift," explained Obama, who shouldn't have had to explain. The Associated Press further reports:
In a teleconference with reporters, retired Air Force Gen. Scott Gration, an Obama adviser who accompanied the Illinois senator to Kenya two years ago, said the senator was there to learn how tribes were organizing themselves.
"And in the course of this, Senator Obama was given an outfit and as the guest that he was, the great guest, he took this outfit and they encouraged him to try some of it on," Gration said. "It was a thing that we all do."
In December, two Clinton Iowa volunteers resigned after forwarding a hoax e-mail that falsely said Obama is a Muslim possibly intent on destroying the United States. Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ and says he has never been a Muslim, but false rumors about Islamic ties are circulating on the Internet.
Again, in "the melting pot," Obama shouldn't have to declare his Christianity like a German had to declare his loyalty to Nazi Germany. God save the United States of America.
8:37:48 PM 
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