tommyclogges & zer ozzer space brozzers

What I Won -- and Lost -- at the Obama Fair

2011-07-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

by Robin Morrison on Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Electoral politics are strangely accounted transactions. Because they happen over long arcs peaking on a one-day-only jam auction in which you can spend your one vote only on that day, and because what we try to purchase with that vote is a complex range of hopes and fears contained in a box labeled Candidate X, our assessment of what we've actually bought is strangely construed.

First, we only get something if our candidate wins.

Second, candidates historically deliver little of what they promised to do.

Thirdly, candidates rarely even try to deliver on their promises.

I campaigned for (not much, bad health), contributed to (not much, poverty) and voted for Barack Obama in '08. I was an 'early adapter' true believer, plugging him as The One back when Hillary was seen as the only viable decent candidate.

He won! Oh, the shower of unicorn puppies that floated down from the sky on nobly biracial wings! They looked so good, him and his family, on that Chicago stage. Yes we can! I cried.

2 & 1/2 years later I got a bit of health care reform, wrist slap financial reform, some kind of support for the repeal of DADT, and a few other things I forget. That's the good stuff that my vote bought for me. I won’t list the bad stuff; it's way too much to plop down under our nose here, but I suggest you google terms like 'Obama Department of Justice erode civil liberties'. Stuff like that. Stuff whose execution and responsibility lie solely on Obama's desk. No obstructionist Republican Congress or spineless blue dawg Democrats required. Just Obama, an executive order or legal decision, and a pen.

It's funny. We're arguing, these days, whether we should buy Obama again. I am firmly against spending my vote on him. (The Republicans only get my consideration for a moment of shits 'n' giggles imagining Michele Bachmann, the current star, wearing a clown nose and clown feet. I have grown literally incapable of seeing a Republican candidate sans red round nose and giant patent leather clown shoes. This is perhaps a flaw on my part, but if so, many are similarly flawed.)

Obama loyalists trot out Obama's accomplishments, and I appreciate them, and will return to them down the page, but the main argument they offer for Obama's reelection is that Obama is all we've got against an invasion of clown feet and rosy red honkers.

I want to put that second argument aside, since that is about candidate promises and that strange box of possible outcomes that is the hope and faith we place in a candidate. Instead, I want to focus on what I actually got for giving Obama my vote in '08.

For me, it's far from insignificant. Major health problems have hammered my darling daughter, who is over 21. She'd moved out of home and forged her own way in the world despite a chronic pain condition that would put most of us on our back. She is tough.

But it took her down after a year on her own, took away her job, that job's health insurance, and put her back home with Mom and Dad and Medicaid since she could no longer be on our insurance after she obtained her own through hard work and a decent employer. Insurance limits on dependent coverage disallowed us from reenrolling her on our plan.

Before Obamacare, we would not be able to reenroll her on our insurance, but Obamacare raised the age for dependents on parental insurance at home, and so she now qualifies with our insurance plan. The other factor is the removal of preexisting conditions limitations that Obamacare also gave us.

So, twice, Obama's presidency has been a great blessing to us. A GREAT blessing. I have many times seen her in a fetal curl, emotionally disemboweled with pain, not able even to howl, before she was able to be on a doctor-supervised pain management regime.

But it's not enough for me. Just because electing a candidate is a crap shoot doesn't mean I should be grateful to win any old thing. I voted for a lot more. The man promised a lot more, and again, I am not talking about things that an obstructionist Congress of hop-head clown feet can be blamed for. I'm talking about (among other things) the deliberate further erosion of habeus corpus following -- quite loyally, it feels to me -- in the footsteps of that other worst.preznint.ever: Dubya. (Remember him?)

As another early Obama adapter-supporter put it: "When we elected a prestigious Constitutional scholar into the White House, we had this crazy notion that the guy would, you know, uphold the Constitution. What were we thinking?"

So: I paid my vote, pulled the switch in my precinct's slot machine voter booth, and won! Obama won! And I even got some coins in the payout tray below. What Obamacare did for my daughter is immeasurable, especially since Medicaid worked hard to kick her off every month she was on it and finally succeeded. Our insurance came up for renewal just in time with Obamacare's improved regulations in place. (The condition she has does not tolerate even a day without her necessary meds.)

But I ain't bought off, see? Because I could also be one of millions of Americans screwed by an economy that Obama didn't bust but whose rebuilding he sold down the river to Wall Street. I could just as easily not have a daughter with chronic severe pain via nerve damage, and my wife could easily not have a better-than-average job for superbly considerate employers in a fairly recession-proof job. (I am recovering from physical disability myself.)

I could be well and truly screwed, like so many of you are, without a decent job, my home lost to foreclosure, living in a crappy rental paid for by the temp work my wife and I might barely find to scrape through yet another blind and dead-end month, under a President who is screwing the very Consititution of our land.
Did I win? Yes. My candidate won. Did I yield at least some significant return on my investment? Yes, probably better than most of y'all. Will I vote for the arrogant lying little fuck again?

NO. Not unless he performs a major turnaround, something tantamount to the hero who sold out Hollywood cliché, pulling off the sellout mask at the 11th hour and rounds up the bad guys and delivers the real goods. In short: a miracle replete with awesome special effects. And if the best argument folks can offer, to convince me to invest my voter franchise in a Constitutional desecrator and corporate crony, is to parade a bunch of loser wacko Republicans in clown drag, then perhaps they might should reconsider their position. Lesser of two evils? Perhaps. One never knows until the labeled box takes office. If Obama could prove to be so different than what he promised, it's possible that Republicans can be equally duplicitous (and prove to be less destructively insane as they present themselves to be).

But a good enough choice? No. We are in deep trouble, people, and a little bit of this or that in our favor isn't going to help any if we don't force our elected leaders, one way or another, to do what we need (I use that word quite literally -- NEED) them to do lest we find ourselves in the deepest dogshit possible without using a steam-shovel to dig even further.

One way or another, as they say. First, I will vote for whatever decent 3rd party dares show its head in these crazily polarized, two-parties-take-turns-taking-all times, or, miracle of miracles, if a solid Democratic primary challenger appears. Elizabeth Warren, Russ Feingold, Howard Dean -- my hope springeth eternal because it is currently all I have. Before and after, I will organize with them. Third... the third time's the charm. We don't want to know what I -- or you or him or her or them or us -- will do if things get much worse. But just in case, has anyone got some rope?

[ed note: I put this here w/o Robin's permission, just so's I could "publish" it to a wider audience. Because it deserves it. The original is at his FB wall, ~ Tom/LT]

still smells fishy to me

2009-10-25T10:14:00.001-07:00

The new and improved Tesla Vagina...

ze ztupid blog...

2009-10-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

...doesn't post my comments. I wanted to say this about Lady Ta-ta:

Zhe haz ze ringz around her nipplez. Duzzat mean zhe iz married?

Barsoom Bazooms

2009-10-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

Tommy was de go-to guy for ze bazoom conniseureations. Once zere was a fabulous dutchylady he allatime repeated to send.

Zis girl hung around Ed's bar alot, waitin' for the Clogges-clump to sound on deck.

She is gonna be in his biomovie.

when last we didn't get to see...

2009-09-28T17:41:00.001-07:00

...KK's tatas, Clogge's decanter was standing at full attention!

z'elder space brozzers

2009-09-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

One is still alive. At this time they both were alive together, for the last time, on stage.

sleepwalkers

2009-09-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

I think he'd have dug this.

I do. I'd love to have heard this guy still be alive (he died 20-some years ago) riffing like the 1st dude.

MARY

2009-09-17T02:18:00.000-07:00

She jus' left onna jetplane. We are not zat far behind

Ze cloggers will surely be sitting her down next ta him in ze bar, and tellin' her how often she was on his playlist.

"ED! .... More drinks!!! ... wid more o' dem li'l paro-salls!"

Martians wanna...

2009-08-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

...go home.

he would have worn these with extraordinary...

2009-08-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

...panache.

pres...

2009-08-12T17:25:00.001-07:00

...Lester Young

for me, the Lester Young...

2009-08-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

...of rock guitar.

Just skip to 3:00 to get to the point.

one of my kids'll get...

2009-08-12T16:41:00.001-07:00

...married afore long. Wish I could beam him in to play for the wedding.

through a...

2009-08-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

glass eye ... your throne ... is the one danger zone ...

Take me to the pilot of your soul.

Just like a cat named Hercules ...

His la Petomane tribute act...

2009-08-08T11:55:00.000-07:00

...performed with Mr. Ed as MC, was a gas.

He put up with and palled around with...

2009-08-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

...guys like this.

'scuse the cornball vid; such was the 80s. But, while I'm not the world's biggest Rod the Mod fan, this is a tune he did exceptionally well and it showcases the range and nuance his voice could achieve in the right setting.

He was casually comfortable...

2009-08-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

...with his manhood.

pyracy

2009-08-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Tommyguns was the only of the original Martian pyrates who wore a real eye patch because he'd really lost his eye. He began collecting glass eyes before the thing what killed his eye killed him. Some kinda cancer.

He played a decent sea chantey, he did.

he was known for his charity work...

2009-08-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

for the love of a floozy

Ze Pyrate Radio's Transition to Galactic Wavelengths

2009-08-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

Tommy be De Munck to alla pyrate fans inna world who stole them radios. Since he moved on to broadcasting to the galaxy, the reception is as problematical as wid Radio Caroline in the typhoon days. O' course ye can read allabouttit in the original momma tongue. Clogges prolly never played this next song, nor even the best cover of it in the universe, ever, but alltagether now space brozzers ... Sweeeeete Keroliiiiyyyyynnnn!!

down in the valet where...

2009-08-04T18:49:00.000-07:00

...nobody goes:

Clogges clearing out the high-pressure bathroom at Bar Soom. He liked a bit of elbow room when he whipped it out.

Bar Soom...

2009-08-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

...is a real imaginary deep-sea drinking and diving establishment. The sea is not so drunk as it is deep, the diving ain't so deep as it is cold.

Not to be confused with The Mars Bar nor this, although the latter is closer than not after one allows for gravity and atmospheric pressure differences. The bar maid deserves honorable mention although Ed, Bar Soom's proprietor wouldn't employ women unless they would work under the table.

This image, incongruously from the drag queen Mars Bar, captures just a slightest wisp of Bar Soom's interior sense.

But really, you had to have been there. Woodstock required 100s of 1000s of people and a million doses of illicit drugs to create its personal sense of unreality. At Bar Soom, half a gin&tonic will suffice.

meanwhile, back on...

2009-08-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

...Mars...

he was riding...

2009-08-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

this but cloak tech barred us from seeing his Wonder Horse,

Brigitte, whose streamlined curves are made of pure reflatable Martian love doll alumiskin .

when last we saw tommy...

2009-08-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

He was in Muriana, aka Atlantis...