Save The Billionaires!

Hey friend. Again with the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meme? That's getting to be a habit with you. I know I asked once, and you said you just don't like her. I'd rather have more to go on than that, but okay, fine, you don't like her. I think maybe the only things you think you know about her are on these little propaganda hit pieces you keep posting, brought to you by the same folks who said Obama is a foreign-born Muslim terrorist. I don't know if you bought that too, but if you did, I'd say you're ripe for the picking.

This meme at least has a bit of substance to it, and isn't just trying to make AOC out to be a daffy uneducated bimbo. She's about as far from that as you can get, but evidently all you have to do is mock someone like that and people will gleefully spread it far and wide as though it were true. Just like you did! But this one cites a complaint about her involvement with a political action committee. The Federal Election Commission is looking into it, and I'd wait to see what they find out, myself--but hey, you go ahead on, and post the meme.

It's rich though. Really rich. The PAC she's involved with deliberately courts small donors. It's harder to come up with the millions it apparently takes to run a campaign when you're doing it that way, instead of tapping the billionaires, but it's the principle of the thing, and a fine principle it is for a working democracy, in my opinion. And the people ultimately responsible for ginning up the propaganda you lap up aren't bothering with the small donors.

They're probably starting with DonorsTrust,  through which they can make unlimited philanthropical (wink-wink) donations anonymously. And those untraceable billions, a.k.a. Dark Money, go to little grassroots (wink-wink) organizations like Americans For Job Security and All Votes Matter and Right To Work and other blatantly political outfits, many of which the original donors designed themselves. It's by far the biggest slush fund the world has ever seen, and look what it has accomplished! The defeat of universal health care in favor of the for-profit insurance industry, the rollback of taxes on the super-wealthy, and--most impressive of all--they were able to turn the tide on any effort to curb global warming, by paying off a few scientists, submitting a new script to their propaganda arms, planting irate citizen-actors in town halls, conducting focus groups to learn what particular line of bullshit would appeal to Mr. and Mrs. America, and good old-fashioned threats to pull funding from legislators--that sort of thing. Thus they were able to secure enormous private fortunes for another twenty years or so while threatening the future of every man, woman, child, fetus, and wombat on the planet. Bless their stony hearts, they may well have killed us all.

So. This is the group infiltrating your social media feed. This is the group working so hard to bring down this young freshman Ocasio-Cortez. And it's easy to see why the billionaire boys' club doesn't like her. They hate everything she stands for: Democratic Socialism, through which they might be relieved of the grossest excesses of their wealth in order to make life substantially better and more secure for people like you and me. And support for unions and a livable wage, both of which cut into their profits but which produce the actual job-providers. (You didn't buy that bit about the billionaires being the job providers, did you? Oh honey. It's normal people with enough security to live modestly with dignity, and pay each other to paint their houses or their nails. We keep each other afloat. And unions used to make sure we could, even those of us who weren't in one.) And, most urgent of all, she stands for getting us the hell off of fossil fuels and into the economy of the future before we have no future at all. Fast. Too fast, too extreme? As someone recently said, we're not in charge of the deadline: physics is. Ocasio-Cortez knows how imperative this work is, and how disruptive, and is working to make sure the poor and the shrunken middle class don't bear the brunt of it. She is not extreme. She is absolutely right.

So that's who's behind all this nastiness and mockery you like to spread around. I know exactly why the billionaires want to destroy this young woman. What I don't get is why you want to carry their water.

The State Of Our Union Is Wrong

Like everybody else, except Native Americans who might otherwise like to vote, the State of the Union has an address. Which means you can get a pretty good fix on it. With a good enough address, you can find out if the fellow in charge is able to correctly identify actual problems and then not really do anything about them; or, conversely, he has no idea what's at stake, attacks fictitious problems, and doesn't really do anything about those either. The first gives you that tiny pop in your sails for a few minutes, and the second makes you want to go straight to bed with Cheez-its, a bottle of hooch, and a catheter.

This one was a doozy. Both teams were in uniform: white on the side of Faint Hope, blue suits and red ties on the side of the Co-Conspirators. The co-conspirators got the most exercise. If you were able to thread them properly and hook them up to a machine, you could have stitched a nice long seam. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. With the white team, you'd end up with the same basket of unfinished mending you started with. That's what makes them relatable.

All those ovations took a toll on the co-conspirators, though. Next year they're hoping to power their pants with coal, if they can't farm out the standing applause to ragged children in Bangladesh for a nickel.

Ovations there must be, however, in order to keep the Dear Leader from sagging like an inflatable tube-man at a used car lot. He was thus encouraged to tout all his accomplishments, most of them, amazingly enough, having been achieved like never before. This is the kind of thing you say if your history book starts the moment you get your breakfast cheeseburger and concludes with The Sean Hannity Show. Highlights included the smooth segue from defending sacred fetal life to having the biggest, baddest-ass military ever, like the world has never, ever seen.

It was a little disappointing, though, from a reality standpoint. Our commander-in-chief, as well as the rest of us, is standing under a monster Death Star and his plan is to shade his eyes, send the Death Star supplementary fuel and supplies, and send in the Marines to deal with a little hatch of imaginary terrorist mice on the southern border. It does make one wonder if he and the co-conspirator team even know where the true threat lies, but not to worry--it turns out they do.

It's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ordinarily someone this fresh to Congress would not be the subject of so many mocking memes and hysterical right-wing attacks, so you have to give the suckers credit for knowing who's about to eat their lunch. Even just since the State of the Union address, where she sat resplendent in white with all her congress-sisters, she has been attacked for being too wide-eyed and wild AND being too sullen. She needs to find that middle ground.

Specifically, the middle ground wherein she pushes inconsequential legislation, protects the interests of billionaires, comes out strong against childhood diseases and the plague, and paves in a few wetlands on weekends.

While being blonde.