KUCINICH (corrected) is getting on my nerves. There he is on Faux giving aid and comfort to Fauxers

[ljm2002]

66. I don't like the evolution of his views on reproductive rights either...

...although at least they evolved in the right direction.

I don't care who he marries. I have nothing but scorn for someone like Newt Gingrich, not because his wife is half his age, but because he presumes to lecture others on morality while himself having the morals of a tomcat. Do you see the difference?

I don't care that Dennis saw a UFO. A UFO is just that: an unidentified flying object. I've never heard of him making any claim as to what the object was. I have never heard of him claiming, for example, that it was an alien spacecraft. Now if Shirley MacLaine has made such a claim, well big whoop.

Dennis had his first political defeat due to a very progressive move that he made as the mayor of Cleveland. He refused to sell the city's electric utility to private investors. He was ousted in the next mayoral race, largely due to scaremongering by the private interests. Years later the people of Cleveland realized he had done right by them, when their rates continued to be low compared to the rates that people in other cities were paying.

He also cosponsored the Medicare for All in the House -- HR 676 I believe. It's still knocking around Congress but with little hope of passage. That must be his fault.

I remember the first Presidential campaign debate in the 2008 race, when there were 9 candidates on stage. His first question came at 45 minutes in, when he was asked if he believed in God. His answer was the best line of all the debates IMO: "Well I've been standing here for the last 45 minutes, praying that someone would call on me". TPTB made damned sure that his campaign was not "ready for primetime" -- they made damned sure that his voice was not heard on primetime. They didn't want him anywhere near the levers of power. Similar to Howard Dean, who I will readily acknowledge was a far more credible candidate, but not for the reasons you cite. It's just that Dean is much more of a politico who knows how to work within the system, while Dennis is much more of a gadfly. And even so, Dean was too much of a gadfly for TPTB, who destroyed him with the manufactured "Dean Scream" (TM).

I wish we could have a gadfly or two get some real power. But it is true, gadflies may be less good at governing. So there are tradeoffs. But what we have now is always, whoever gets into the Presidency soon becomes such a part of the well-oiled machine of state, that they seem to forget some of the reasons they got there in the first place, and they become reluctant to make much-needed changes, for fear of breaking the machine.

Like Mario Savio during the Free Speech Movement, I believe we need to throw our bodies on the machine and make it stop. It is a destructive machine. The machine may not need to be utterly destroyed -- certainly history shows us that is a very hazardous proposition, and may only give us something worse. But the machine we have needs retooling in a big way, and the party politicians we have right now are not equipped to do it.

In the meantime, poverty grows, the war machine grows, tensions rise and the world continues to heat up, both literally and figuratively. And our politicians continue to present us with two big choices: Awful, or Less Worse.