Rally Round, Mushheads!

Maxspeak is taking umbrage at a Ted Rall cartoon attacking the glorification of Pat Tillman, the football player turned Special Forces op turned dead hero in Afghanistan.

Ted Rall is anti-war from way back. When the Bush administration starts a new spin campaign to sell the war on terror as a quality product endorsed by the noble corpse of Pat Tillman, Ted attacks.

Some people find this offensive. They are, unfortunately, wrong.

The Bush Administration is currently creating new Pat Tillmans at a rate of two or three per day with the enthusiastic help of the Iraq and Afghan insurgencies.

If we allow ourselves to step back and “support our troops” and “respect their sacrifice” and assume postures of solemn mourning as the transfer tubes roll by, we’ll never get around to stopping this war.

We don’t know if Pat Tillman’s service was a non-stop cavalcade of red, white, and blue heroics that dealt terrorism a telling blow, or if he spent his days futilely kicking down doors chasing al-Qaeda will ‘o wisps by day and disconsolately masturbating at night in babe-free Afghanistan while dreaming of the NFL career he discarded. Maybe it was something in between. We’ll probably never get the full story.

Whatever it is, I feel sorry for him.

There’s only two things we know for sure:

Pat Tillman is dead.

And the war is still going on.

And we also know that the current Administration’s response to the current disaster in U.S. foreign policy it has created in the Middle East will only be defiance, denial and deception. The moral and political travesty can only be ended by removing the Bush administration from office.

Moaning about how a cartoon gave a dead hero a urinal for a headstone foolishly contrasts the bruised feelings of the commentator with the futility of the war, the urgency of ending it — and the stern, cold, and eternal indifference of Pat Tillman.

Which brings me to the true subject of this essay:

Mushheads.

A.K.A Independents.

People who might be ready to turn their backs on a war now that its political, strategic, and moral bankruptcy are beyond dispute to anybody with a functioning brain stem…

…but get all wound up about a cartoon disparaging the circumstances of Pat Tillman’s service.

The people who supposedly hold the key to the election in their pockets.

People who could only vote for that anti-war flip-flopper Kerry only if they held their noses.

Let me tell you:

The only reason independents have to hold their noses is because their heads are way up their own asses to begin with.

Mushheads are really what’s wrong with this country.

For years they have benefited from the political perception that America is an electoral sandwich: one slice of true-blue Democratic rye, once slice of bloody red GOP pumpernickel, and that thin slice of 10% swing voters in between:

The independents.

The mushheads.

That stinking, yellow piece of cheese that each party’s candidate is supposed to slobber over, pander to, and shower with tax breaks and political concessions until it oozes over into the winning camp with its rancid load of doubts, fears, and complaints.

Our politics, our society — and our country — have suffered as a result of the special pleading of this passive, vacillating group.

Independents thrive on a feeling of victimhood. It’s all about them. Their high taxes, their employment anxieties, their fear of an unfamiliar, threatening world, their media-abetted sense of confusion combine to endow them with a privileged political passivity.

When Ted Rall delivers an unpalatable idea — something that calls into question the comforting myth that the Iraq war is a noble crusade at least in its conception, aspirations, and sacrifices if not in results or execution — independents want to shoot the messenger.

The Bush administration panders to them relentlessly, with irresponsible tax cuts and the sound and fury of useless wars that provide a transitory feeling of power and security.

Now it looks like John Kerry is expected to assume that wretched burden.

Ever since Dean’s candidacy imploded, there has been a sense that Dean was too angry, too threatening, too upsetting to assume the role of Father of His Country.

In McLuhanesque terms, it seems it is time to be cool, not hot on the war.

We’re warned that the precious independents will regard anti-war stridency as extremism and scurry fearfully into the welcoming arms of Rove and Bush.

So Kerry begins his awkward sidle to the middle with a muddled pranti-war stance.

Fortunately, Kerry’s public and less-than-inspiring search for a resonating message has been overshadowed by Bush’s current floundering.

So far Bush has done a pretty good job of self-destructing.

But as long Bush controls the national agenda through his powers as President and commander-in-chief, benefits from the instinctive feeling of loyalty and protectiveness many Americans feel for their chief executive regardless of his qualifications, and enjoys the unquestioning financial and opinion-shaping support of a well-heeled, ruthless conservative cabal, we can’t rely on Kerry to coast to victory simply as an alternative to Bush’s lethal incompetence.

Especially since Kerry seems to display the campaigning agility of Robbie the Robot on Quaaludes. Exactly what fucking cars are in your garage today, John?

Kerry can’t do it running left toward Dean.

And I don’t think he can — or should — do it by running toward the mushheads.

The Democratic Party alone doesn’t have the answers to the current problems.

Not even a combination of the real JFK and the mighty Clenis could create a mushhead-pleasing and compelling Democrat message of hope, change, and progress amid the current national debacle, even if he didn’t have to deal with a Republican majority in Congress and an imbecile plurality in the country.

But Kerry doesn’t have to it alone.

He’s got help from a large, important electoral group that has been ignored up til now.

We the People.

The citizens of the United States who care about this country and its future.

The majority of Americans who believe that the country is on the wrong track.

I think these people recognize that the politics of polarization — the struggle for the mushheads that has enriched so many politicians, consultants, corporations, and media parasites just as it has impoverished our country and bankrupted our public morals — is a dead end.

Mushhead politics offers no solution to the national impasse: that we are trapped in Iraq — and deadlocked in America — by an administration and a political culture that have reduced war, government finance, and public policy to easily misused and abused, discardable tools in a neverending electoral struggle.

We have to move beyond party politics to the politics of national unity.

There’s enough dissatisfaction with Bush on the right — as well as on the left — that Kerry can win big on a fusion platform — a government of national unity composed of GOP and Democrat patriots.

Of course, be careful what you wish for. We might just get new and improved gridlock.

Buit if Kerry joins Republicans disgusted by the Bush/neocon wing of the GOP in a defacto coalition government, at least policy debates will involve discussions between people who recognize the crisis this country is in, and are looking for a way out…

…instead of groveling before a privileged, inward-looking group obsessed with its own advantages and attitudes in return for a short term license to plunder and pillage.

Then we can finally send a welcome message to the mushheads — that catering to their moral timidity, selective and self-serving outrage, and delicate sensibilities are no longer the defining fact of political life in this country.

Don’t think of Ted Rall as this year’s Sistah Souljah — an expendable left-wing sacrifice to the indifferent mushhead gods.

Think of him as somebody who took a stand opposing our wars in the Middle East when it was considered unpatriotic, unrealistic, and contemptible.

Somebody who decided to make a difference instead of tagging along, and whose views and actions demand to be put into a proper context…

…instead of being reduced to a simpleminded cliché palatable to the self-congratulating mushhead herd...

…like what happened to Pat Tillman!

Hey!

Max Sawicky sucks!

That is all.