Okay, if Campaign 2008 is what stiffens your nipples, shoot up some more

Oh I used to be disgusted
and now I try to be amused.
But since their wings have got rusted,
you know, the angels wanna wear my red shoes.

But when they told me 'bout their side of the bargain,
that's when I knew that I could not refuse.
And I won't get any older, now the angels wanna wear my red shoes.

-- Elvis Costello

* * *

I am REALLY TRULY AUTHENTICALLY disgusted.

And I am not in the least amused.

American politics and government have collapsed into the most useless, corrupt and sordid cesspool I can remember. (I began remembering sometime around 1955.)

If you think I'm just shaking my Geezer Finger at Bush -- forget it. I'm sending money to Cindy Sheehan's campaign to unseat Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats whom America voted in to cleanse Washington and Stop This Fucking War Now are more useless and pathetic than the Psycho Fundie Republicans who designed this catastrophe. And they're just as corrupt and devoid of vision.

Vleeptron was SUPPOSED to be about Better Things, Higher Things, More Beautiful Things, or at least Funnier things. Vleeptron was supposed to be about the BEST that human beings can be. Paul Klee. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Game Theory and the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Did someone just mention Hannah Arendt? Ramanujan. Mozart. The Melkweg and the Dwingeloo Galaxies. Spinoza, Newton, Descartes. Vleeptron was supposed to be about the most amazing, fantastic and beautiful things that human beings have ever imagined and dreamt of.

Not about this endless and endlessly sordid Hillary Obama McCain Romney Giuliani Fred Dalton Thompson klown karnival klusterfuck.

I would scream WHO CARES??? except that my neighbors' children are dying and being maimed, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, and this dumb presidential campaign circus is the only process the USA has that could possibly put an end to

Vietnam --
the Sequel
with iPods and Cell Phones

I did indeed have aspirations and ambitions that Vleeptron would have a political dimension, and that it might even have substance and significance. That's the Hot Now Way Cool Awesome Stuff about Blogs, right? The national politics, the independent challenge to the old media monopoly stranglehold, that's why Blogs are crawling all over your screen, Blog Blog Blog.

But this war is disgusting and this campaign is disgusting, and it's dragging me and Vleeptron down into its cesspool, and forcing me to pretend I acknowledge and validate this campaign, and its cartoon haircuts and its amazing dental work and Hillary's softer, friendlier hairstyle, as significant or important.

The last post was my reply to a mass-e-mail, from a very bright and highly courageous and accomplished fellow who pissed me off by dismissing Ron Paul as a "right-wing nutcase."

Unintentionally and much to my surprise, the whole subject has touched a nerve and pressed some buttons. Even on me.

So here we are, exactly where Vleeptron never wanted to be -- a Political Blog.

Well, if this is the drek that gives the Blogosphere its biggest stiffy and moistest Nether Regions, if this is what makes your nipples stiff, here's some more. Everybody eat it up with a spoon. Everybody mainline it into your eyeballs with a syringe. Everybody squirt it up with an ænema.

===============

e-mail from the Sincerely Excellent and Brainy Young Fellow who sent me the mass-spam that called Ron Paul a "right-wing nutcase":

=========

More than forgiven, and I appreciate the smackdown on calling Paul a nutcase. Even as I typed it in with semi-sarcasm intended, I had nagging doubts in my mind that I should be resorting to language that dismisses the guy out of hand. My understanding of him is that he's a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian sort, and I often find libertarian arguments attractive, but then feel repulsed by other aspects, being more left-libertarian myself, more of a Kucinich type. Yes, it's all such silly parsing, and I should know better. I shouldn't be respecting with the one hand and dissing with the other. Anyhow, thanks for your letter and for replying all cuz it's a little bit of good added to the world.

J**

===========

and another:

===========

As an aside, you say Kucinich is the only Dem to say he'll definitively pull us out of Iraq, but isn't Richardson pretty definitive? And same with Mike Gravel?

============

Vleeptron -- disgusted and not amused -- replies:

============

grrrrr don't you know by now I'm lazy, sloppy, shoddy and unreliable? Have I no right to be accepted and loved for who I am rather than who I ought to have been?

You're probably right (because you're usually right), and that plunges me into the annoying requirement of researching Gravel's and Richardson's positions on the Iraq War. You COULD make it easier on a feeble, senile old man by supplying me a couple of definitive URLs. (I tried to cover my ass in my original e-mail by asking everybody for precisely that.)

Defending my right to be lazy, evasive and disengenuous, I was just expressing my allergic reaction to your pidgeonhole for Paul.

But this brings up what to me is a disturbing question. Whether you shoot up The NY Times or Washington Post or CNN or big network TV news, I'd characterize the mainstream media's characterizations of Gravel and Richardson as already doomed, hopeless, going-nowhere candidacies. So for my Single Issue (see footnote below), they share Iraq Marginalization candidacies with Paul and Kucinich.

Of the candidates who the mainstream media tells us are the most realistic big-party nominees and thus the most realistic next presidents, Stop The War Immediately seems to be universally regarded as a poison pill, the fast track to oblivion, a third rail.

Giuliani and McCain make far more headway with flat-out More, Longer War platforms. Hillary Rodham Clinton -- well, she's pathetically schizophrenic, simultaneously claiming to be opposed to the Iraq War, blaming her vote to authorize it on lies from Bush, promising voters to travel back in time to 2003 and vote differently, partnering with that psycho loop Lieberman to rattle sabers against Iran now.

I'm sorry to do my own pidgeonholing and slurring here, but Obama and Edwards just seem to be All Hair and Teeth and Ill-Defined Hope for a Better Future (the Bill Clinton Magic Platform). Have any of the Dem's Big Three captivated you with any Authentic Substance about any issue you consider critical?

I note also that this year's lefty moonbeam, Kucinich, seems to be the only Single-Payer Health candidate -- thus running for the presidency wearing a t-shirt that says

MARGINALIZE ME!

I LOVE COMMUNISM & CASTRO!

I Vleeptroned my reply to your e-mail (without mentioning your name), and got a nice pat-on-the-head Comment from this woman in Santa Barbara. I clicked on her blog

http://upstreamdownstairs.blogspot.com/

and Lo! A Ron Paul True Believer! Check out a few of her very eloquent posts.

I think we grudgingly have to acknowledge that we live in a world that has some Republicans -- for a very recent decade, it seemed we lived in a world without Democrats -- and this woman expresses that end of the voter spectrum very interestingly.

Living up here in Happy Valley/The Bubble, I tend to forget that there have always existed Republicans who have authentic visions and beliefs beyond mere rapine and plunder.

The footnote -- she describes something I wasn't clearly aware of, Ron Paul's strident opposition to The War On Drugs. So I just might end up

(a.) voting for Ron Paul after all and

(b.) not being a Single Issue Voter after all.

Perhaps the worst legacy of Bush will be in dramatically lowering the bar for what Americans will be willing to tolerate and put up with in a president. In mechanical practice, most of that's the fault of the mainstream media and its collapse of standards and its unwillingness to exercise critical analysis of the most astonishingly blatant and outrageous bullshit.

But in all honesty, it's all our fault, the fault of voters and citizens, for swallowing all the bullshit so uncritically. My sin here in this Ron Paul business is that he's offering me something -- an immediate end to this wretched war -- that's Not Bullshit, and I'm so startled and mesmerized that I'm selling the truck and boarding up the house and shaving my head and joining the Kult.

Lazy Disengenuous Evasive Unkie Monkey

P.S. The very worst and most useless of the Dems who were supposed to help us end this war is Pelosi. I'm so ripshit and disgusted that I actually have sent money to Cindy Sheehan, who's running to unseat her.