Bull Run. I listened to only the first several minutes of Obama's first State of the Union Address, but was struck by this bit:

when the Union was turned back at Bull Run, and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt.

Nobody seems to have picked up on that Bull Run reference. Plainly he was comparing the current behavior of the Republican Party to the treason of the Confederacy, which is completely appropriate. The Republican Party long ago ceased to be the "Party of Lincoln". It is now the Party of the Neo-Confederacy, the white-trash Southern traitors with their Confederate battle flags and gun racks in their pickup trucks — now as likely to be Japanese pickups as American — who are the willing slaves of the rich, in a new, WHITE slavery where the rich own the poor and abuse them with their own, eager complicity. With each economic lash, they perk up,

"Oh yes, master. Please hit me again! Cut my pay! Cut my benefits! Make me pay more of my health insurance! Yes, yes! Higher co-pays, fewer items covered. Make me pay for emergency room care and ambulance service. Yes, yes! Force me to work uncompensated overtime! Increase my hours! Treat me like dirt! And keep your taxes low while raising mine. Buy another house in a gated community to keep me out! Buy a yacht and keep it in a marina I can't even walk thru. Show the world how rich 'We' are, you Good Old Boy! Keep my schools bad so my kids will never wise up any more than I did. And pay me off, buy not just my silence but even my adoration, with the blatantly false pretense that You are Us. Yes, yes, hit me again, harder, harder. I love it! Just save me from the niggers, the faggots, and those Commie pinko bastards in the North, and I'll do anything you say!"

In an email conversation with a colleague in northern England, I pointed out that the behavior of the Republican Party is like the opposition in a parliament trying to bring down the government by vote of no-confidence. We don't have a parliamentary form of government, but, bizarrely, the Republican attempt to bring down this Administration by disciplined, adamant, unified refusal to participate in any legislation the great Democratic majority wants is working to subvert the Administration.
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But such obstructionism works only because Obama is either a secret Republican working against the very things he claims to favor, or the world's wussiest pussy.
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Where's the stick? We see the carrot, but the Republicans aren't biting. They can wait until November. We need a stick. The President has got to start punishing the recalcitrant enemies of the state by moving Government funds and facilities out of their districts, out of their states. There are military base-closings recommended periodically to save money. Close everything in the South. How can Republicans object? They want smaller government, don't they? Fine, we'll downsize EVERYTHING in the South. All Federal facilities that can be relocated to the loyal parts of the Nation will be moved there.
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We might have to leave a NASA launch facility in Florida, just to have a backup landing strip if we continue a space-shuttle program. But Obama wants to privatize space, so maybe we can sell Cape Canaveral and pull all NASA employees and facilities out of that area. All regular NASA operations can launch from southern California and 'land' in the ocean. Launch facilities might have to be as close to the equator as we can get, but Hawaii is farther south than Florida. And the Johnson Space Center's command and control operations don't have to be in Texas. They can be anywhere. Move them to a Northern state, preferably one with Democrats as Governor, both U.S. Senators, and majorities in both houses of the legislature.
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The United States has poured trillions and trillions of dollars into the South, money stolen from the North and handed over to ungrateful rednecks. Yet the South is still the most regressive, racist, homophobic, illiberal part of the Nation, and holds us back generation after generation. It is an albatross around our neck that costs us hugely in every way but militarily. The uneducated — uneducable? — rednecks of the South do volunteer in high numbers for the military. But that doesn't mean the military bases have to be in the South. Move ALL of them to the North. Maybe then the South wouldn't be so gungho to invade countries for the economic benefits such wars bring to the South.
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Obama is far too little the angry black man getting back at the people who made life hell for his people for hundreds of years, and who continue to try to do so to this day.
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Perhaps when the South sees that racist hostility to the current President will bring vast devastation to the South as the North takes back everything it has given to unappreciative Southern scum, they will see the handwriting on the wall and be more cooperative. If not, the loyal parts of the Nation sure could use those relocated jobs.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,374 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM