Free Republic

Why Don't Americans Care? Do you know who Halliburton is? Dick Cheney? How about Karl Rove? Alas, most Americans don't Let's be honest. Percentage-wise, few people in America really give much of a crap about what's going on in the hallowed halls of politics and power. This is what we in the media and maybe you in the media-consuming audience tend to forget far too easily: This country is simply jam-packed with millions of people who have no time for, or interest in, politics, or media, or environmental policy, or education, or global issues, or which presidential candidate lied his...

Polls are the genital warts of election year. They are the swarming gnats in your Jell-O salad, the dead escalator in your shopping mall, the sour milk in your coffee. Because clearly, if you attempt to follow any of them, the AP polls or the American Research Group polls or the Newsweek polls or the ABC News polls or the CBS News/NYT polls or the Zogby polls, you can only conclude one thing: These polls are designed solely to mangle your head and confound your synapses and elate you and titillate you and then plunge you into instant despair and...

This is the great thing about rabid fundamentalism. You really just don't have to give a damn. Take the environment. I mean, isn't it just a little pointless to care so damn deeply about the air and the soil and the water and the stupid little disposable animals on this silly spinning ball of expendable rock when the Second Coming is imminent and a blood-soaked fire-breathin' Jesus who looks remarkably like Mel Gibson will return very soon to smite the heathens and the gays and the vegetarians and the Francophiles, and who will rescue all those who worship patriarchy and...

I am searching for a few good things. Things to counteract, to dissolve the simmering dread, to deflect the waves of nausea and karmic pain induced by the incessantly depressing media maelstrom and the appallingly hateful gloat of the GOP convention and by the most tyrannical administration and least articulate American president in 100 years. You know how it is. And you say to yourself, these things, these radiant gems that live outside the mass-media miasma, I need them because they provide some balm, soften the fact that the nation feels massively off track and blinded and war torn and...

No one in his/her right mind truly believed that San Francisco's landmark same-sex marriages would stand the test of the scowling California Supreme Court or the white-hot glare of the rabid homophobic war-drunk BushCo Right. It was almost no contest, a leather-clad dove versus an archaic, oily tank from the word go -- or, rather, from the words "I do."

"Hanoi John!!" (To be sung to Neil Young's "Farmer John") Hanoi John, I'm opposed to yer Power!! Ohahhohh... Ashamed of you...an yer goddamned LIES!! Ohahhohh... I loathe the way you flop, I loathe Left's sissy-talk!! I loathe the way RATS wriggle...Left snickers and it mocks!! Hanoi John...ohahhohh...I think you are a Coward!! Yeah, yer scum... damn yer VietNam LIES!! Ooahhohh... (Little guitar jammin') Ohhahhhhohhhhh!! Hanoi John, what makes yer heart sooo purple?! Ohahhohh... Yer "injuries"...were just gutless LIES!! I loathe the way Left mocks...and all their sissy-talk!! I want the righteous Truth...RAT-fools, you are losing...LOSING!! Hanoi John, I'm opposed to...

<p>Friendly sex shops. Peet's. Dog parks. Stellar restaurants. Superlative tattoo artists. Fabulous weather. Unparalleled natural beauty. Organic foods. Fewer SUVs, more Priuses. Mission burritos. An overwhelming anti-Schwarzenegger sentiment. Sushi. Bush never visits.</p> <p>There are things that make you happy to live in San Francisco, truly grateful, along with plenty of things that make you hyper-aware that you live in the country's most progressive open-minded convoluted messed-up liberal bubble, for both good and ill.</p>

<p>Let us imagine the discussion: "Boys, the nation's in massive reeling record-breaking debt and morale's at an all-time low and disposable American soldiers are dying brutal horrific deaths every day over nothing at all except our greed and flagrant cronyism and corporate petrochemical profiteering.</p>

<p>Exile Mohammad Vakilifar runs down a Paris street yesterday after setting himself afire to protest the roundup by French authorities of Iranian dissidents opposed to the Islamic regime. He survived.</p>