What The World Needs Now Is a Lot Less Spite….

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

No, not just for some but for everyone

I love the song lyrics above. They give me hope that someday, probably in the very distant future the world will turn to love but we got a long ways to go before that can even remotely become reality. In the interim I am just praying that the world has a little less spite tomorrow than it does today. Spite is such a destructive thing to humanity. It is hateful rhetoric that we need a lot less of.

I want to make sure that we are on the same page so I will give you an official definition of that word here:

spite         noun

feeling a need to see others suffer ⤻
syn: malice, maliciousness, spitefulness, venom
malevolence by virtue of being malicious orspiteful or nasty ⤻
syn: cattiness, bitchiness, spitefulness, nastiness
verb 1

hurt the feelings of ⤻
syn: hurt, wound, injure, bruise, offend

The picture here is from a display panel at the Brown vs Board of Education historic site. The look on the young girls face behind the African-American entering a once segregated school is the ultimate spite in my mind. There is nothing in the world productive about spite. It only has a totally malicious, often hateful, purpose.

I ran across an invisible face of spite recently when I accepted a friend request from someone I remotely knew from my high school days. When his Facebook postings came up the next day he was passing on a cartoon with the final frame calling President Obama a “shit head”.  When I commented that I wonder if calling the first dark-skinned president a shit head was intentional or just Freudian. He said he just thought it was funny and did not hate the president.

But this brought out one of his other “friends” screaming spite in a diatribe about how the president was evil and the worst person in the history of the world. I enjoy debating people who have different political or philosophical outlooks on life but I have learned from experience that is not possible to do that with people who scream so loud. They are not about to hear anything but their own rants or maybe reinforcement of their prejudices.  Sadly I am discovering too many of my previous high school classmates in this mode. I wonder what happened to them in the intervening years to cause such anger toward anyone? I wonder if that young girl in the picture who is now in her 60s or 70s ever mellowed out? I pray that she did…

What the world needs now is a lot less spite, then maybe we can move on to a little love….

What were you thinking, America?…

Brunt’s message, essentially, was “What is wrong with you people?”

“Many of us Canadians are confused by the US midterm elections,” he began, before running down a list of accomplishments he credited to the president, including falling unemployment, gas prices, and interest rates, along with a record high dollar, stock market, and corporate profits.

He lists similar triumphs on the foreign-policy front.

“America is leading the world once again and respected internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.”

“So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason,” Brunt writes. “When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?”

The letter has brought some on the liberal left – many of whom have long been disillusioned with Obama, and many of whom seem to have disappeared during the midterm election and its aftermath – out of the woodwork….

“We love him,” writes Macleans in an article headed “Canada’s love affair with Barack Obama.” “The broad-band smile, the Lincolnesque bearing, the sense of the man as an avatar of multiculturalism—it all makes Barack Obama the perfect US president in the eyes of Canadians.”

Heck, there’s even a Facebook page for “Canadians for Obama.”

SOURCE:   After midterm sweep, Canadian asks: ‘What were you thinking, America?’ – Yahoo News.

I love the perspective that our Canadian friends give us about our politics and for that matter most other areas of our life. They just see past all the games to the core of any topic.  We Americans just never seem to be satisfied with our current circumstances. There is always something to complain about. Our politics drastically shifts from one extreme to another.

It also amazes me that after just six years we have forgotten what this young black president has accomplished during his time in office. We could be in very different circumstances if things had worked out differently.  We could be like we were in the 1930s with our financial institutions in shambles and the average guy struggling to just put food on the table. How quickly we forget how differently things were just six short years ago.

Yeah many of us haven’t seen a raise in decades while the 1% continue to rake in bigger and bigger increases in their wealth. Yeah we are still mired down in the mud with our approach to foreign policy. Too many of our kids have died as a result of very narrow thinking. But things could have been much worse if the likes of Mr. Cheney were still in power.

We Americans are just never satisfied with our current circumstances no matter what they are. Whereas our Canadian friends seem to be the very definition of stability. They have their political problems too but they just seem to keep them in a more normal perspective than we ever have. For most of us our glass may be just half full but it is a lot better than is was just six short years ago. Even though it it too late to do anything about it, thank you guys for helping us understand how good we have it even when we don’t realize it ourselves…..

Three Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law

Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about “Obama spending” and “Obama deficits” and how the “stimulus” just made things worse….

 

SOURCE: Three Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law Updated | Dave Johnson.

In the old days, that is the time before I gave up on all the cable news channels I used to get a weekly dose of Fox News.  As they say keep your friends close and your enemies closer. It was anything but news……

That’s all I want, or need, to say about this topic. It is too toxic to go any further into the idiocy of it….

Whitewashing of torture….

Out of the horror of World War II came one of the great achievements in all of human history: the Geneva Convention of 1949. It was a statement from humanity to itself that, in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in history, some decency might still be rescued. Despite the millions of senseless dead, despite all the mass murder and genocide and terror bombing, despite all the filth and hypocrisy and witless incompetence, the Convention states these things shall be held inviolate in war:

Wounded and sick soldiers shall be treated humanely, and medical facilities shall be off-limits to attack.

The same shall be true of wounded, sick, or shipwrecked sailors, and humanitarian ships.

Prisoners of war shall be treated humanely.

Non-combatants shall be treated humanely.

In 1988, President Reagan signed into law a treaty adding another stipulation to the list:

Torture shall be absolutely forbidden.

Reagan was no saint. His foreign policy caused tens of thousands of pointless deaths in Nicaragua alone. But he worked hard to get this treaty passed, and it is to my mind his greatest achievement. It added a bright star to the narrative of human progress….

Let’s compare that to the text of the Convention Against Torture:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of President Obama (aside from his unflappable, even cadence) is the way he instinctively tries to understand and legitimize both sides of every debate. When well-applied, as it was during his famous speech on race during the 2008 campaign, it adds needed nuance and complexity to difficult subjects.

Torture, on the other hand, is a simple subject that has little nuance or complexity. It is an absolute evil that has no place or function in a civilized, decent society. It is illegal under United States law. Only a complete idiot would try to use it to gather intelligence. Its only effective uses are thoroughly totalitarian: to intimidate, punish, and extract false confessions.

SOURE: President Obama’s despicable whitewashing of torture – The Week.

For the most part I am going to let the words above speak for me. Torture and anyone condoning it is simply idiocy. Yes, I kind of agree that one of President Obama’s most distinctive characteristics is trying to legitimize both sided of a debate.  Many times he is just too intellectual for his own, or the country’s good.

I also agree that Reagan was no saint but he came through with his abject hatred of torture.  I wonder how that affects his image for many of the current crop of conservatives who condone that tactic? Torture simply has no place in humanity.  Enough said…..

Driving Me Nuts…..

“Republicans are mad at me for taking these actions. They’re not doing anything and then they’re mad at me for doing something. I’m not sure which of the things I’ve done they find most offensive, but they’ve decided they’re going to sue me for doing my job,” Obama said in his speech at picturesque Lake Harriet….

Obama likes to joke that he is like a bear breaking out of his cage. On Friday, he said Republican inaction “drives you nuts … and it drives me nuts.”

“Sometimes I’m supposed to be, you know, politic about how I say things, but I’m finding lately that I just want to say what’s on my mind,” he said.

Other presidents have actively invoked executive actions. During his first four years in office, Obama signed 147 such orders. In comparison, George W. Bush signed 173, Bill Clinton enacted 200 and Ronald Reagan ordered 213 in their first terms.

SOURCE: Obama blasts House Republicans over lawsuit threat – Yahoo News.

After my recent vacation I am feeling more stress free than I have for a while so I thought I would do a more political post here. Yeah, I am aware that President Obama’s ratings are below 50% and in fact I am one of those who are just not impressed with his actions.  To me he just seems to be too timid, or maybe a better word is intellectual, when it come to his actions. We need a ball-buster like LBJ in the Oval Office instead of an intellectual to do battle with all those Republicans who are totally frozen by their various fears.

Congress won’t do anything to help us attack our 21st century problems and now they want to also prevent the president from doing anything. I certainly can relate to his comment in that it drives me nuts.  As he said, he just needs to say what is on his mind and maybe more importantly act upon it. I think Mr. Obama is a good guy who has a compassionate heart for all of us who are struggling but…

I can’t understand how those GOP in Congress can say things that are so easily disproven by the facts.  I guess they don’t think that anyone bothers to research what they say. I am sure that is true for many of the Fox News viewers but I hope the other 90% of us who don’t watch that vitriol news channel take the time to know what is real and what is pure hype. Of the four previous presidents Mr. Obama has used his executive authority less than all of them. The problem is not too much but too little action.  To me the problem is that the president needs to grow a pair and get on with the business of the country. Unfortunately he just seems unable to do that….

Obama Teaches Us All A Lesson About Cliven Bundy

President Barack Obama taught everyone a little lesson about racist Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy during the 2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Obama was touting the success of Olympic snowboarder Jamie Anderson, who was in attendance at the dinner, saying he hadn’t “seen someone pull a 180 that fast until Rand Paul disinvited that Nevada rancher from this dinner.”

“As a general rule, things don’t end well if the sentence starts with, ‘Let me tell you something about the Negro,'” Obama said. “You don’t really need to know the rest of it, just a tip for you.”

SOURCE:  Obama Teaches Us All A Lesson About Cliven Bundy.

LOL……