So, a bunch of Republicans have been spending an astounding amount of money getting into game shape for over a year in anticipation of primary season. On the advice of their inner circle, most of them go the extra yard and hire personal trainers, highly paid specialists called “President Coaches,” who teach them how to appear reasonable and presidential. This is no easy task, since most of them are I’ll-stand-the-whole-way-in-the-subway-rather-than-sit-down-next-this-frightening-person crazy. There are good reasons why these people have “handlers.”

Clearly, these President Coaches are taking the wrong tack here, trying to smooth out the rough edges of the Rocky Mountains This is as impossible a task as our former President Bush The Younger, who set the bar for crazy presidents, has given himself in retirement; clearing all the brush in Texas. Trying to do a makeover of an insane person is as nuts as they are. The coaches need to play to their candidate’s strengths, not reinvent them, and their main strengths are their strident ignorance coupled with obvious insanity, but a good coach uses the players he has, not the team he wishes he had. What is needed is bold thinking, some off-the-wall campaign slogans and promises that will make one raving lunatic stand out above the rest.

Their whole theory of winning the 2012 Presidential World Cup is that President Obama is so weak in the polls that America is in the mood to elect a crazy and dangerous president just for spite, so why not me? Why bother to coach that kind of exuberance out of a candidate, that raw lust for the game? Instead, the challenge is to somehow convince the people that abrasive insanity and willful ignorance are essential presidential attributes in these trying times. Maybe try some of these attention-getting slogans:

VOTE FOR ME OR YOU’RE A LIBERAL PUKE!

THE BILL OF RIGHTS:  A BURDENSOME SET OF ENTITLEMENTS!

I WON’T KILL ANYONE THAT DON’T NEED KILLIN’!

I CAN SEE CHINA FROM MY YACHT, AND IT’S NOT PRETTY

LETS CHANGE THE NAME OF THE COUNTRY TO “BIG DAWG OF AMERICA!”

AMERICA IN CRISIS: ARE THE POOR DOING ENOUGH?

HATE THE SIN, KILL THE SINNER!

GOD WANTS AMERICA TO KILL HIS ENEMIES!

MEMO TO FRANCE: THANKS FOR THE STATUE, BUT KEEP THE POODLES!

KEEP THE GOVERNMENT’S HANDS OFF OUR FARM SUBSIDIES!

WHEN THEY OUTLAW JOHN DEERE CAPS, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL WEAR JOHN DEERE CAPS!

VOTE FOR ME AND I’LL BE PRESIDENT!

I’M LOUDER, AGRIER AND MORE UNPREDICTABLE THAN MY OPPONENT!

GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES, AND I’VE HELPED MYSELF TO EVERYTHING THAT WASN’T NAILED DOWN!

SCIENCE, SHMIENCE, WINTER IS TOO COLD ANYWAY!

THE TEA PARTY – RESTORING AN AMERICA THAT NEVER WAS!

THE TEA PARTY – GOOD ENOUGH FOR ALICE IN WONDERLAND, GOOD ENOUGH FOR AMERICA!

A DISCO BALL IN EVERY HOME!

DON’T LOOK NOW, BUT THE PRESIDENT IS A BLACK GUY FROM KENYA!

VOTE FOR ME OR RISK GOD’S FIERY WRATH!

ONLY LIBERAL PUKES KNOW WHERE ALL THE COUNTRIES ARE!

IT’S TIME TO ROLL BACK SOCIALISM – FIRE THE FIRE DEPARTMENTS!

THE ONLY GOOD TERRORIST IS A REVENUE-PRODUCING TERRORIST!

AMERICA FIRST, RIGHT AFTER WE DESTROY OUR PRESIDENT!

BEING RICH IS GOD’S STAMP OF APPROVAL!

THE TEA PARTY – FOSTERING CRACKERS’ ILLUSIONS SINCE 2008!

So the corporations sued and lost a bunch of times (not all courts are crazy) and appealed all the decisions against them all the way to the Supreme Court, spending many, many millions of dollars in the process. Corporate lawyers argued that, just like any other citizen, they were entitled to spend their money as they see fit. The fact that corporations are not human beings but businesses didn’t stop grown men and women from arguing that they indeed were.

Well, as luck would have it, today’s Supreme Court is dominated by Major Corporate Stooges, so it was decided by the Final Word in American Law that corporations could indeed buy all the elections they darn well pleased, because, you see, they were people just like you and me after all!  As absurd as this sounds, this concept has actually been embraced by Republicans, and the leading GOP candidate for president just reminded a voter that “Corporations are people, my friend!”

We beg to differ. There are many things people can do that corporations cannot do, things that define us as people. Can corporations do these things? You decide:

Get laid in the back seat of a Mustang.

Get a tattoo saying “Geraldine 4 Ever” on your neck.

Breathe.

Wiggle their ears.

Feel hungry.

Go to a baseball game.

Take a good crap.

Get arrested.

Catch a cold.

Be responsible for one’s own actions.

Flirt with the waitress.

Care.

Play bagpipes.

Apologize.

Repay loyalty.

Vote.

Write a poem.

Hold hands.

Dance.

Shoot the breeze.

Sing.

Stay out all night.

Make a film.

Get married.

Paint a portrait.

Stare into space.

Laugh.

Love a baby.

Write a book.

Go skinny dipping.

Fart.

Think.

Drive cross country.

Masturbate.

Go on a diet.

Tell a joke.

Kiss.

Get shot out of a cannon.

Wiggle your toes in the sand.

Rock out.

Die of cancer.

Fall head over heels in love.

Enjoy a sunset.

Babysit.

Read the funny papers.

Look a man in the eye when delivering bad news.

Climb a tree.

Play Scrabble.

Watch an episode of Law & Order that you’ve seen 3 times but you like the Lenny Briscoe character.

Go to Coney Island.

Read the handwriting on the wall.

That’s like Larry deciding he wants to be Moe, or in Biden’s case, Curly! That just won’t do, and the Cheney Administration only highlighted this recipe for disaster. This country was not built on having talented, high-profile Vice Presidents. Quick, name 5 memorable VPs! No? Okay, how about 3? See what I mean? They just don’t register. Traditionally, the only time you hear about one is when a President dies in office and he takes over, a guy no one voted for and who no one wants to see running the show.

Look at the piss-poor record of Vice Presidents when running for President. Few make it, simply because they have spent 4 or 8 years not making a difference, relegated to we’ll-call-you-if-we-need-you status, maybe breaking a tie vote in the Senate every couple of years, and the rest of the time making speeches to 4H Clubs and attending the funerals of state leaders we didn’t like all that much.

Joe Biden was made for this minor league crap, but this Larry all of sudden wants to be a Moe and is making way too much noise for a VP! See, the problem here is that Biden has run for president himself a few times, and didn’t get very far, but that didn’t dissuade him from thinking he could be The Man. No friggin’ way! The voters told him that time and again, but this old bag of hot air refuses to read the memo.

Time for a new Larry: Yours truly! I will be more than happy to melt into the background and do very little. Hell, the salary is great, the perks even better, and a great lifetime pension too! Why ask for more? There’s a Vice Presidential Mansion with a nice pool to live in, an office with a large staff to help you do nothing, a bunch of Secret Service Agents running interference for you and and the use of Air Force 2 to travel the globe spreading good will and judging wet T-shirt contests in Brazil!

What’s not to love? Why ruin a sweet gig like this by working extra hard in a job designed for a lazy but jovial old fool? That’s me! I promise not to embarrass the American people or my President by trying to govern America. That’s what Presidents and Congress are for. I vow not to come up with any “bright ideas” that throw a monkey wrench into the President’s plans.

Any President who hires me to be his VP also gains another vital edge: assassination insurance. Even the most crazed assassin would take pause before firing the bullet that would put the likes of me in the White House! This way the President can concentrate on the hardest job on earth with out having to worry about either being shot down or having a thorn-in-his-side type of clueless VP always putting his 2¢ in or making stupid public statements.

No worries on that score with Vice President Bob Crespo. Between fact-finding missions to Scandinavia and the French Riviera, swimming in the Vice Presidential pool with my attractive young interns and showing minor visiting dignitaries a whale of a good time, I’ll have plenty enough to do without worrying about politics, or worse, actually formulating workable policies.

I will restore the office of the Vice President to the margins of American political life, a do-nothing job held down by a guy who looks good in a suit and is quick with a joke or a ringing endorsement of whatever cockamamie thing the president is up to at the moment. I’m practicing these catch phrases now: “What he said,” “It’s the best thing for the nation right now,” “I agree wholeheartedly with the president” and “Is this a great country, or what?”

I’ll smile and wink at the cameras, maybe flash the occasional “V For Victory”  finger sign, but only rarely speak out, and then only if the president asks me to. If he needs me to threaten someone, I’d do that too, Brooklyn style, so his hands will be clean when Senator so-and-so shows up at a session with a couple of black eyes and a broken thumb to cast his vote in favor of the President.

How many mob enforcers does Joe Biden know? Hah! And fugghetabout corporate lobbyists, I’d have them kneecapped and beaten within an inch of their lives (maybe even have a few whacked to send a message) and clean up D.C in no time!  Coming from Brooklyn has its advantages, and a “suggestion” to lobbyists that they “maybe you oughtta pick a healthier career” and leave Washington for good can only help lubricate the wheels of government.

So there we have it; quiet, non-interfering, fun loving and affable, yet willing to do the “little extras” to help my country (and keep my cushy job!). The choice is clear:

BOB CRESPO FOR VICE PRESIDENT IN 2012.

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND!

Fortunately for President Obama, these GOP and Tea Party Wannabe Presidents are scary crazy and thick as a fence post, every one. What the Republicans seem to have forgotten since their success with the pinheaded Bush The Younger, is that you put the wacky person as the #2 person on the ballot, the office of the Vice Presidency, where they are harmlessly out of the way, running minor state errands and shaking hands with Boy Scouts.

Which is where I come in, to address President Obama’s one weakness at the polls, the #2 man. Joe Biden has been showing signs of taking his job seriously, never a good thing in the annals of the Vice Presidency. Hell, that crazy Cheney guy took  over the country! Now Joe all of a sudden has opinions on things? That just won’t do. Mr. President, dump that croaking frog and share your ticket with me!  I’ll be so anonymous you’ll wonder if I’m even there, the way a proper Vice President behaves!

As Vice President, I will be accorded the use of the Vice Presidential Mansion (with pool!), Air Force 2 (just as cool as AF1), an extensive staff and no shortage of attractive young interns of my own choosing. I will be expected to show up in the Senate every blue moon to break a tie, fly around the world checking beach erosion in Rio and the Riviera, attend minor state functions and basically look good in a suit or tuxedo. Plus a nice salary and a chubby phat expense account! You think I’m going to screw up a sweet gig like that by getting involved in politics? No chance.

I, Bob Crespo, solemnly swear to return the Vice Presidency of the United States of America to its hallowed and time honored position; anonymous, smiling and affable! I am even willing to grow mutton chop whiskers and wear a top hat just like all those other Vice Presidents whose names you don’t know but seemed like jolly enough fellows, but not quite up to being President.  If they were baseball players, they’d have what is called “warning track power.”

But that’s just fine with me, that is all we really want from our Vice Presidents, the appearance of  normality. As long as you can master that, it doesn’t matter how loony you are, just as long as you keep it out of the papers! The real President has enough to do without worrying about a loose cannon like Biden mouthing off about something he doesn’t know a thing about because he’s out of the loop! I will stay out of the loop and make it my business not to get involved in  the business of governing!

See, that’s the problem with modern Vice Presidents: they are all picked from the bunch of candidates that the nominee just defeated, people who spent over a year trashing his policies and selling their own, so they all think they they can do a better job than their boss. I suffer no such illusions. My answer to all political questions will be: “What the President said!”

Oh, did I mention the sweet pension and the lifetime Secret Service bodyguard detail? Great seats at Yankee Stadium forever! But I digress. Today I announce my candidacy for the office of Vice President of The United States. I humbly offer my lack of services to President Obama and the nation.

BOB CRESPO FOR VICE PRESIDENT IN 2012!

OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND!

The Jersey Shore: When the runaway entertainment sensation of the year is a celebration of vulgarity, casual cruelty and blissful ignorance, we have reached a crossroads: do we pursue the crass and talent-free, or try to get back on the high road? When we started down this road of lowest common denominator television, so-called Reality Programming (created only so producers wouldn’t have to “waste” money on expensive acting talent and gifted writers and directors), it was only a matter of time before our children assumed that crude stupidity is a viable, desirable option.

The Tea Party: When 10 second sound bites replaced reading, thinking, paying attention to informed debates on important issues and forming our political opinions accordingly, did it not follow that the dumbest and most mentally lazy among us would consider themselves modern Thomas Jeffersons? Get used to inarticulate anger masquerading as policy. Lewis Carroll would be proud of the these Mad Hatters and their schizoid tea party.

Extreme Christianity: Taking a cue from unschooled Muslim rabble rousers, America’s fastest growing religion is not a religion at all, but a political movement that completely refutes the message of Jesus Christ, putting words in his mouth that he never said and fusing them with half baked jingoist political ideas, thus creating a hybrid creed called Hatriotism. (See “Tea Party,” above.)

The Financial Meltdown if 2008: Once CEOs discarded the old rule of thumb that they earn 20 to 30 times what their average workers earned and decided they were worth 400 times their average employees’ salaries while demanding huge bonuses and Golden Parachute clauses paying them a kings ransom whether they ran their companies well or straight into the ground, as sure as day follows night the focus came off producing high-quality products and services and on to stealing as much money as humanly possible by any means at their disposal. When their crimes dragged the entire world’s economy into the toilet, their wealth increased as everyone else’s decreased.

High Fructose Corn Syrup: That super sweet concoction knows as “sugar’s sugar” has found its way into thousands and thousands of processed food products, even salad dressings, sending medical science searching for a stronger term than “obese” to describe the phenomenon of the fattening up of America. Hence the term “morbidly obese.” Thanks, Giant Agribusiness! You have succeeded where mere farmers have failed, what with their antiquated obsession with producing nutritious, wholesome food.

Hessians: With America’s descent from a Republic to a world-straddling Empire, our all-volunteer army had proved inadequate to the task of conquering the entire world, prompting the Pentagon to hire high-priced mercenaries to flesh out the ranks of our military might. Professional soldiers from many different nations whose only loyalty is to the highest bidder, they are cynically called “contractors” and are subject to no law; domestic, military, foreign or international. They have proved themselves invaluable for spreading terror among occupied nations with wanton murder sprees and routine violations of the Geneva Convention. There are some jobs deemed too low for even the CIA (hard as that is to comprehend given their track record). Enter the private contractors, who come in very handy for performing their “super-dirty work,” ensuring the CIA’s inclusion in the critical striking-numb-helpless-fear-into-hearts department and cementing their place in history alongside the legendary Gestapo, KGB and NKVD. Thank you, Hessians!

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed. You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed. You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.

You didn’t get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.

You didn’t get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.

You didn’t get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.

You didn’t get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.

You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick.

Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick…Oh, No Way!!!!

Which is not to say that these 2010 midterm elections are not important, far from it. All elections are vitally important and everyone eligible to vote should do so every time, if only because you can. Not every nation gets to do that. In 2008, the country not only voted for a black president, but for his plans to take the country in a different direction, sort of like Ronald Reagan, only not really old and dopey.

And as always when a president gets swept in with a new broom, the midterm elections are filled with voices of those getting cold feet about the new direction they voted for 2 years ago. These things happen, and the political party that finds itself on the outside looking in after one of these sea changes always works overtime to undermine the party in power.

That’s adversarial democracy at work, and the greater the president, the more vociferous the opposition. No president had more volatile critics than Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln, two men who took this nation in new directions in a very big way. Those comfortable with the status quo, no matter how awful, are terrified by new directions and the talented people who want to lead us there.

And fair is fair, everyone gets to speak their mind around here, and no president is infallible, or immune from vigorous criticism. Only trouble is, this time around, too many of the people opposing President Obama’s agenda are idiots who are also completely out of their fucking minds.

Having purged the Republican Party of the sane and the reasonable, the right wing went so crazy after being voted out of power in 2008 that not even daft old Ronald Reagan could be a Republican today. Even he wasn’t that crazy. Now, we’ve got people running for office either because they’re angry or because God himself told them to. Beyond their rage or zealotry, they’ve got nothing, no plan, not even a clue.

Hell, plenty of people are angry, or religious nut jobs. Or both. No reason to elect them to anything either. There’s something awful fishy about bellowing dunces all of a sudden amassing millions of dollars in campaign funds. From who? Jerry Lewis fans? Did somebody somewhere decide that government needs to be a source of entertainment?

Is this the idea: Democracy would be really great if only we could get a bunch spiteful lunatics elected to high office? Hardly seems reasonable. Especially in a nation where there’s an amazingly broad variety of entertainment available at our fingertips every minute of every day.

Or maybe these dimwits are fronts for someone else with lots of money who wants to buy political power, like Bush The Younger was for Shotgun Dick Cheney. That would have been as funny as our comedians seemed to think it was if it wasn’t for all the catastrophic policies of the Cheney Administration.

Entertainers have their place, and so do dopey people. That place just doesn’t happen to be in the halls of power. We already tried the elect-the-buffoon strategy, and his “handlers and advisers” screwed up the richest, smoothest-running country the world has even seen in their 8 years in power.  Generally, only dancing bears, prisoners and mental patients require handlers. Having a stammering dunce for a president wasn’t all that funny after all.

The joke was on us, and now these assholes want us to fall for it again. Get out and vote this November. Whatever the race, whatever the state, whatever the office at stake, the choice is clear: vote for the sane person. There’s serious work to be done in America. Send the ridiculous people back to wherever it is they came from, and let the grownups get to work.

The original “evil immigrants” that so upset the Know Nothings were Irish and Germans, who came to America in droves between 1830 and 1860, bringing their Catholic religion with them, which many American Protestants feared even though they lived in a nation that kept religion a private affair by law, so private that more than a few of our early presidents were not affiliated with any church at all, something that would be unthinkable in today’s God-charged political climate.

These days we have all sorts of Christian Fascists gravitating to the Tea Party and claiming all sorts of divine rights to make rules for everybody else, not different at all from the sort of people America is fighting in wars both hot and cold all over the world, the Muslim extremists who would spread Islam and Sharia law globally. Like their Christian Fascist brethren, their calling cards are fear and hate. These mullahs and Imams are your basic garden variety would-be tyrants who don’t let their own intellectual shortcomings get in the way of their grand ambitions.

They simply play to the dumb ones in the audience, those with no skills or much of a work ethic, an easy crew to rile up, then make a lot whole lot of noise, figuring that louder means better. So far they are still searching for a second act after blowing up the World Trade Center and starting a global war on extremism. Apparently that was the extent of their planning, noise and death on a grand scale for their own sake.

Not exactly a coherent political philosophy, but one that has the attention of the entire world. To the bin Ladens of this world, knocking down the two biggest towers in the capital of the world automatically makes you a political genius leading a popular movement, even though that act brought hellfire and destruction on the Medieval nation of Afghanistan that gave him sanctuary and a base of operations. Since that day, bin Laden’s “operations” have consisted of hiding in the barren mountain wastes of South Asia and moving quite frequently, occasionally making video tapes outlining his “plans” to conquer America.

Our own religious extremists are also a set of jackasses, priding themselves on not knowing a damned thing about the American political process, the Bill of Rights or the United States Constitution. They only know that they want what they want and they want it now, never mind how things actually get done in America. Oh, and they also think paying taxes is evil and say so quite loudly as they crisscross the nation on taxpayer-built roads under the protection of taxpayer-paid law enforcement agencies.

And, bless their hearts, just like the original Know Nothings, they seek to demonize other people’s religions while acting like demons themselves. Just like the mullahs and the bin Ladens, they play to the dumbest of Americans, those too stupid to realize that the party they supported for 8 years under Shotgun Dick Cheney is the party responsible for most of the misery in America today, people so stupid that they support every measure designed to keep this nation a nation of haves and have-nots.

These dunderheads regularly vote against their own interests and support treasonous laws like the Patriot Act, forgetting that taking away the sacred protections of the Bill of Rights from “them” also takes it away from “us.” They insist that rich people shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of taxes to the nation that made them rich, the same sort of rich people who sold their jobs overseas and sold them a scam mortgage, and wouldn’t be caught dead rubbing elbows with them after they are finished issuing their marching orders from the podium.

This “People’s Movement” is a lot like another people’s movement in the 1960’s, with irritating and childish assholes like the Yippy Party spouting all sorts of gibberish that made a serious movement against an unnecessary war in Vietnam somehow appear ridiculous. Reasonable voices were drowned out by ignorant clowns with more slogans than solutions. The fact that the Yippies coupled sane political questions with a call to get stoned on drugs sort of put a crimp in any plans they might have had to get anything done.

Martin Luther King was correct to distance his Civil Rights Movement from these hippy clowns and the equally ridiculous and militant Black Panther Party. His cause was just and the task was huge. Dr. King and his his fellow civil rights workers were serious men and carried themselves as such. He was a lucid man with stirring ideals and solid ideas, the stuff that political movements are made of. King had a lot more than just a dream, he had a plan. Knowing you are right and changing the world are two different things. King succeeded where the buffoons failed, and peace eludes us still.

So far the Tea Party has gone the Yippy route, offering completely ridiculous people as their leaders, many of them even more off-the-wall than Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman combined. At least those guys had LSD to blame for all the silliness. What’s the Teas Party’s excuse? With all the problems facing America these days, these dopes have elected to rail against rich people paying their taxes! “Power the people” used to be the Yippy’s motto. What’s these people’s motto: “Even more power to the greedy pricks that stole all our fucking money in 2008?”

Right off the bat you’re thinking that maybe they dropped the ball here. Here they have an America pissed off at going broke, sick and tired of two more unnecessary wars, 40 million Americans living in poverty and reeling from 8 years of corporate treasury looting under the Cheney Administration, and all these assholes could do to stir up a restless population was to champion the wealthy? That’s where you waste this wellspring of passion? As the kids say, WTF!

They choose instead to be angry that President Obama hasn’t been able to fix the monumental damage to our economy wrought by Shotgun Dick and The Hole In The Head Gang. Cheney and his uber-wealthy contemporaries launched an era of greed, acquisition and theft on such a monumental scale that less than 1% of Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 95% of us. That  dough had to come out of somebody else’s (your name here) pockets. That doesn’t bother anyone in the Tea Party?

Their chosen people also lied us into a war in Iraq where grand fortunes were made by American corporations at the expense of over 4,000 American lives and 100,00 Iraqis. Now American corporations are selling Iraq $113 billion worth of modern weaponry, a nation we are supposedly leaving but will maintain an occupying army of 50,000 soldiers. Does that make sense to anyone? Just in case that doesn’t make the Middle East a big enough tinderbox, Saudi Arabia is buying $60 billion worth of American fighter jets too.

There’s some stuff for a political movement to question from this Democratic president who voted against the Iraq war as a Congressman. Instead, they attack Obama’s health care reforms, again not winning a lot of hearts and minds by equating healing the sick with the Third Reich. But then again, reality is not really their strong suit (see Glen Beck). When seeing Russia from your front porch is enough to be a statesman to your supporters, the bar is set pretty low in the Qualifications Department.

The idea of a new political party and a movement to shake up Washington to make some changes for the better in America is exciting. America has always been a work in progress, striving to live up to the immortal words and sacred ideas upon which this nation was founded. From time to time a leader emerges and a movement arises that stirs us to action and we move closer to our ideal America.

This is not one of those times, at least not yet, and the Tea Partiers are simply whack jobs too nuts to be regular Republicans, just like the Yippies were too crazy for the Democrats back in the day. They both hurt their respective causes with their willful ignorance and buffoonery, drowning out the voices of reason with empty noise. America could sure use another Martin Luther King right about now. Reasonable geniuses are hard to come by.

1911 was the year that galvanized the labor movement, because that was the year that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 women and girls working in a sweatshop with all the doors locked so the very little girls would remain at their machines for 60¢ for an 80 hour week.

The labor wars had been raging for decades in America. In 1894 President Grover Cleveland created the national holiday Labor Day as a sort of my bad for Federal troops and U.S. Marshals killing 13 workers and wounding another 57 during the course of the nationwide Pullman Railroad strike in 1893.

There were hundreds of similar stories during the Labor Wars, with wealthy and influential companies hiring gangs of violent thugs and, when that failed, calling out State Militias to bully and attack workers seeking to organize against hellish work conditions and poverty wages.

The Robber Barons, who paid 1% or less income tax, lived baronial lifestyles of unparalleled luxury while those who made them rich as Midas lived in overcrowded tenements or company-owned hovels and choked the black dust of their industries until they couldn’t work anymore, at which point they were discarded and replaced like worn out tools.

The corporate barons were so wealthy that they built hundreds of gigantic mansions in New Port, Rhode Island just for the hell of it, to use as summer cottages for a couple of dozen days per year.

Which makes yesterday’s corporate barons not at all different from today’s bunch of corporate thugs, the ones who stole all the money in 2008 and continue to get away with the same crimes over and over and live like kings while the country writhes in economic pain.

The bonuses, the private jets, the multiple palatial homes, the art collections, the million dollar cars, all “earned” on the sale of fraudulent financial products and the failure to pay their fair share of taxes, is unchanged in this class of beings that brought the nation and the world to the brink of financial ruin. They gave up Bernie Madoff, took a trillion or so from U.S. Treasury, and kept on keeping on.

Does anyone think that these rats would behave any differently towards labor than those came before them?  What has their post-2008 behavior indicate? Remorse? No. Reform? No. Adopting honest business strategies and reality-based asset evaluation? No. A rededication to the law and business ethics?

Any of these these responses would have been welcome, accompanied by a thorough house cleaning at the top in corporate offices.

If anything, this recession that they created has them lashing out to blame everyone else, anyone but the person they see in the mirror every morning. Unions are always an easy target during bad times, a reminder to the world that workers can gain fair treatment, competitive wages and a safe work environment.

Robber Barons see well paid employees as an impediment to attaining their next Picasso, a Rolls Royce in all 5 driveways or an upgrade of the company jet. Every large corporation is top heavy with such useless leeches. In 1965, 3 people at American Airlines earned more than jumbo jet pilots, the highest skilled workers in the company.

Today, there are thousands of empty suits at American Airlines who make a lot more than the pilots, the only absolutely essential employees in an airline. These Vice Presidents and Managers have nothing to do with actual aviation, and could just as soon be taking up space in the office tower some other company that sold spaghetti sauce or light bulbs for all they know or care.

Those with a passion for aviation, spaghetti sauce or light bulbs actually do the flying, the cooking and the assembling, while the empty suits earn the lion’s share of the profits. These non-innovators are the ones who start eliminating production jobs and lowering pay scales when their multimillion dollar bonuses are threatened.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to see how they would treat their employees without the laws written in workers’ blood that guarantees Americans a safe work place and the small social safety net currently enjoyed by every worker. Anyone care to volunteer their 7 year-old to work in filthy mines or factories 6 and a half days a week?

Men have not changed since 1911, neither the rich ones, the poor ones or that big bunch in the middle, the ones that got to the middle thanks to unions. It is only our toys that have grown more complex, not us.

To think that the unions’ work is done and their time is past is to ignore human nature. They are as relevant now as they were in 1911. Just look to many other nations, where the majority live in extreme poverty. It is always 1911 for workers without representation.

Only around 15 million American workers are members of unions. The history of unions in America is the history of the betterment of American workers and the founding of a broad middle class. To paraphrase Churchill: “Never have so many owed so much to so few.”

Doctor King’s speech was a watershed moment in American history, while Beck’s was more of an irritating sweat stain on our collective armpits. Glen even claimed to be King’s “brother.” If so, then he has to be the Fredo of the King brothers

Beck and the Tea Party were never people with ideas, instead content to be angry all the time and attack other people and their ideas. Now Beck and his Tea Party fans finally come up with an idea, this rally, called “A Rededication of America,” a golden opportunity to showcase whatever policies they were able to come up with, and guess what, the only thing they could think of was a violation of the United States Constitution and the laws of the land.

Normally, the prudent course of events would be to formulate some serious ideas and policies, and then hold your rally. Even if it’s only one big idea, something to stir things up socially and politically, that would be fine too.

Their big idea? Turning America into Iran, Christian Fascist style. Beck put it like this: “America today turns back to God.” Oh, really? If he’s talking about the same country the rest of us live in, The United States of America, he was calling for a return to a special time in American history that… never happened! From its very beginnings in the late 1700s, America put religion in its proper place, far from the halls of government.

Dr. King, who was an ordained Baptist minister, never tied the Civil Rights Movement to his or anybody else’s church, and borrowed his non-violent tactics from a Hindu, one Mohandes K. Gandhi, to achieve his goals. He instead relied on the words of our Founding Fathers and challenged America to be America for every citizen. It cost him his life, but it worked.

Our Founding Fathers, none of them particularly religious people, had seen first-hand the bloody results of state-sponsored religion, and were having none of it for their brand new nation. They stated simply that Congress shall pass no laws concerning religion, rendering it a private matter for citizens to deal with, or not deal with, as they saw fit. Any and all faiths were welcome to flourish in the United States, but none of them were allowed to have a say in governing the nation.

Which didn’t stop certain Americans far too insecure in their own faith from trying to persecute other religions, most notably the waves of Catholic immigrants who came to America in the late 1800s and early 1900’s, bringing with them the “Papist Scourge.” Jewish immigrants were also treated to this lapse of hospitality.

Both groups petty much ignored the bigots and went about their business, confident that the Constitution protected their right to pray and worship as they saw fit. Of course they were correct and the bigots are forgotten by history, while these immigrants have all left their indelible marks on America. They built and ran this place as we now know it and their descendants continue to flourish, having produced war and peace heroes, Nobel laureates, poets and titans of both politics and industry.

America itself flourished with this infusion of new blood, offering an unprecedented quality of life for the working classes unmatched before or since in history. Not having a useless and demanding monarchy or a rapacious official religion to support removed a huge social barrier from humanity. Outstanding individuals and hard workers could and did climb the social ladder, something almost impossible in the monarchies and theocracies that dominated the earth in the not-so-distant past.

There are still plenty of such nations around, staining the landscape of their regions and oppressing their own people, and now Glen Beck and the Tea Party want America to join these backwards assholes and “turn to God.” Turning away from God, or at least rendering Him a private citizen, is what enabled America to build the best hope for humanity the world has ever had, and to build history’s biggest economy.

While the Tea Party has never been renowned for its ideas, what with most of them being Sarah Palin addicts and complete morons, at least they attracted the attention of a lot of people who liked the notion of a new political party, any party, just to wake up the Democrats and Republicans who figured they had a monopoly on politics in this country.

The whole idea was exciting, at least for about 5 minutes.Then one of the Tea Partiers opened their mouth and all that came out was horseshit. Dang! Then came the revelation that the Tea Party isn’t a separate political party at all, but a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, Inc.

Apparently one of those notorious closet-queen Republican operatives came up with this ruse in response to having their party unceremoniously dumped from power in 2008, figuring Americans are really, really stupid. Stupid people have long been the bread and butter of the Republicans, people who can be regularly fooled into voting against their own interests.

In years past, the Republicans employed really smart people to sell others on the notion that what is right for the super-wealthy and the giant corporations is right for America. They’ve elected some terrible presidents with that idea, but the last time around they got too cocky and installed a semi-literate bumbler as a figurehead president and just had Dick Cheney run the show.

The fact that they did this so openly and led the nation into one disaster after another is what got them ousted in 2008. Americans don’t like dictators, and were doubly insulted that our first-ever dictator was Shotgun Dick Cheney, as unlikable a human being as has ever breathed with the aid of replacement parts, like some bald and dumpy Darth Vader without the cool swagger.

So naturally you’d think that the rank-and-file Republicans would protest and go off to form their own party. Too bad for America that the only serious recent attempt at forming a 3d political party turned out to be another phony sideshow from the Republican Dirty Tricks Department. The only “leaders” it attracted were Glen Beck and Sarah Palin, two seriously unhinged individuals who are also both as dumb as your average Cocker Spaniel.

Imagine being a follower of someone like that? Wow! The mind boggles at having as your leader someone who has never made a lick of sense and never sustained an ideology they did not contradict time and again whenever convenient. On Saturday in Washington, no agenda was proposed, no famous speeches made or memorable phrases etched into American political lore.

What was it all about? Who the hell knows with these pinheads? Let’s just hope that this whole “return to God” crap doesn’t become what so many other public petitions to God have become, a bloodbath for some poor saps practicing the “wrong religion.” For now, Beck and Palin resume their lucrative careers of trashing other people’s ideas, figuring that ideas are things they never have, so it must be wrong to have one. Ask Fredo what it all means.