I have a dream:
Customer: "Hi, I'd like to buy these three adult DVDs, please."
Retailer: "Sure, I can ring you up right away; just need to see your voter registration card."
(Slightly puzzled, the customer hands it over.)
Retailer: "Oh, I'm sorry; I can't serve you."
Customer: "Why not?"
Retailer: "Well, you're a registered Republican."
Customer: "What's wrong with that?"
Retailer: "Wow; where to begin? Well, first of all, I see you have in your hand one of our more popular all-girl titles, and yet your party's platform opposes the right of any of those lesbians—or the gay men that perform in several other disks I have for sale—to get married to each other, to adopt kids, to serve in the military, to not be discriminated against in applying for a job or renting a room at a boarding house or filing tax returns, to make life-or-death decisions for their partners if they need to, to get the same Social Security and other government benefits as hetero couples—do I really need to go on?"
"In fact, Republicans are literally insane on the subject of sex. Leaving aside the sexual hypocrites currently serving in Congress—David Vitter, Larry Craig and John Ensign—and those are just the ones we know about—the Republican Party line is that the less people know about sex, the better it is for them. So Republicans oppose comprehensive sex education, oppose making condoms and other birth control available to high school and public university students, oppose abortion, which they say is "too easy" to get, even though some states have no providers at all—and in fact, the latest crop opposes it even to save the life of the mother, or in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest—and at least one particular nutbar, Christine O'Donnell, even opposes people masturbating, while some Party hack at the last Conservative Political Action Conference claimed that jacking off makes adolescent boys gay."
Customer: "Hey, hey, hey; wait a minute. O'Donnell's not Republican, she's Tea Party."
Retailer: "Oh, yeah, like there's really a difference! To the extent Tea Partiers aren't just confused about taxes, the national debt and the size of government—their three main issues—they're incredibly ignorant about a whole host of social and political issues, as Matt Taibbi chronicled in his recent Rolling Stone article. For instance, most of them are against 'socialized medicine' but many get either Medicare or Medicaid. They're in favor of 'privatizing Social Security' but are too stupid to realize that if they'd invested the Social Security taxes they paid with Wall Street in, say, the summer of 2008, they'd be broke now, eating catfood and living off whatever charity they could get... even 'government welfare.' And ask Gene Cranick what he thinks of lower taxes and privatization: A bunch of local firefighters just stood by and watched his house burn to the ground because he hadn't paid a $75 'fee' to the local fire department—a 'fee' that should have been included in his and his neighbors' taxes! (Of course, Glenn Beck, the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer and a bunch of other 'free-marketers' thought Cranick just got what he deserved.) And to the extent these idiots care about porn, they're all in favor of local prosecutors and state attorneys cracking down on it. That's probably because a survey by the conservative Public Religion Research Institute found that 47 percent of them are part of the religious right, and Allahpundit on the right-whackadoodle site hotair.com deduced that 'the tea party has in part simply been a way for conservative Republicans to rebrand themselves after souring on the GOP.' And guess what: In that voting booth, they all vote Republican!"
"Beyond that, why do you think this store is located a block from the city dump? It's because Republicans decided that nobody downtown or in residential neighborhoods should be able to rent an adult DVD on their way home, so they zoned every adult business—video stores, strip clubs, even boutiques with lingerie and sex toys—out to the boondocks, and guess what? Even that wasn't enough for them. They also want to make me and the other businesspeople close down between 11 p.m. and 9 a.m. and all day Sunday for no good reason, to prevent strippers from taking off all their clothes or coming within six feet of a customer—and you'll be lucky if the local church group doesn't take down your license plate number, get one of the law enforcement buddies to illegally search DMV records, and post your name on the internet as a 'godless heathen' just for walking in here!"
"And guess what? None of that's likely to change anytime soon because those fucking Republican presidents have stacked the Supreme Court with conservative ideologues like Scalia—that cocksucker actually said a convicted defendant's execution shouldn't be stopped just because he was later proved to be innocent—Roberts, Alito and (apparently former porn hound) Thomas (whose wife Ginni runs her own conservative Political Action Committee 'Liberty Central'—which like many Republi-PACs doesn't disclose its donors, but which should disqualify Thomas from ruling on any cases involving conservative organizations or policies), and plenty of appeals court and district court judges who are just aching to tap-dance on the heads of some liberals."
"And believe me, they've already fucked us pretty royally. Even though the Constitution doesn't exempt sexual speech from First Amendment protection, those black-robe types keep approving obscenity prosecutions and 'time, place and manner' restrictions on adult businesses, even though Scalia said that Lawrence v. Texas—which he voted against, of course—'decrees the end of all morals legislation,' and even more recently absurdly declared the idea of a constitutional right to privacy to be 'total absurdity.' Apparently, this great constitutional scholar has never read the Ninth Amendment."
"The evidence that Republicans don't give a shit about actual 'law and order' is clear from the fact that even after President W admitted that he approved of torturing the prisoners—actually, 'kidnap victims'—at Guantanamo Bay, neither Attorney General Mukasey nor Gonzales had him, Cheney or their subordinates indicted for war crimes, in effect giving him free rein to trounce everyone's rights, read their emails, listen in on their telephone calls and in general treat them like the pieces of shit he obviously believes them to be. And the most recent example of how his Supreme Court judges agree with that is their refusal to hear the case of Weise v. Casper, where Bush's Secret Service admitted that they forcibly ejected two citizens from a public speech Bush gave in Denver in 2005 because their car had a bumper sticker that read, 'No Blood For Oil'!"
"Another example of the Supremes handing your asshole party the 'keys to the kingdom' was this year's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which overturned nearly a century of law that prevented corporations from donating money directly for the election or defeat of political candidates. So what do we have now? Billionaires like the Koch brothers (oil magnates who also paid for a pro-global warming exhibit at the Smithsonian—and the subject of Jane Mayer's excellent article in The New Yorker), Carl Lindner (American Financial Group) and Trevor Rees-Jones (Chief Oil & Gas) have literally given millions to winger groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Karl Rove's American Crossroads—together, nine winger 'super-PACs' had bought, between August 1 and mid-October, over 60,000 TV ads at a cost of over $52 million—the vast majority of it anonymously donated, thanks to Citizens United—attacking Dems and/or supporting Republicans—while NewsCorp's Rupert Murdoch (Fox News Channel) has donated a million bucks each to the Republican Governors Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has recently come under fire for taking foreign countries' donations to fund its Republican-friendly political advertising—and which supports sending American jobs overseas and allowing American companies to bribe foreign officials to get their way."
"And of course, one of the things all that money buys along with the ads is good press. Ninety-two percent of all talk radio and TV is unwaveringly conservative, often parroting exactly what the winger lobbyists say in their advertising, and it's impossible to listen to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Levin, O'Reilly, Ingraham, Prager, Boortz, Medved, Gallagher and their ilk for more than 10 minutes without hearing at least one major lie and several intentionally-misleading statements about current affairs. And after all, it isn't MSNBC that employs every single potential Republican presidential candidate (except Mitt Romney) who isn't currently in Congress; that's Fox News Channel."
"And all of that is without even considering the religious nutbars that infest this power-grab. You know them: They're the ones who insist that this country was founded on 'Christian principles' even though several of the Founders made it clear that that wasn't the case, even signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797—just eight years after the Constitution was ratified—which said exactly that. They're the ones who think all forms of birth control should be outlawed, that an embryo smaller than the period at the end of a sentence is a 'human being' and should have exactly the same rights as a born infant—check out Colorado's Amendment 62, the 'personhood' amendment. They're the ones taking the lead in promoting 'abstinence education' which has been proven ineffective in preventing underage kids from having sex—but incredibly effective in shaming them into not using condoms and other birth control devices when they do! They're the ones who are trying to repeal the section of the Arizona Constitution that says, 'No tax shall be laid or appropriation of public money made in aid of any church, or private or sectarian school, or any public service corporation' so they can get state money to send their kids to religious schools. They're the ones who think gays—especially the HIV+ ones—should be put in concentration camps, forcibly 'reeducated' or if religious nutbar David 'Wallbuilders' Barton has his way, 'regulated as a health hazard.' They're the ones who made a federal case out of Janet Jackson's tit being shown on TV for half a second and Charlotte Ross's ass for seven seconds on 'NYPD Blue' in 2003. They're the ones who are giving CBS shit over the title of its new comedy show, '$#*! My Dad Says.' And don't get me started on what they want to do to public school textbooks in Texas!"
"And then there are the complete whackadoodles that are supported by your party. I mean, you don't hear Democrats talking about getting their state to secede from the union, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry did. You don't hear Democrats questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S., like Sen. Richard Shelby, Reps. Roy Blunt and Jean Schmidt, and Sarah Palin. You don't hear Democrats working to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, which allows voters to choose their senators rather than having them selected by state legislatures, like Joe Miller and Ken Buck are—or the Fourteenth, to prevent people born in this country to foreigners from being considered U.S. citizens, like Rand Paul and Jon Kyl are."
"And it's not Democrats who are planning an invitation-only Palm Springs retreat in January to 'develop strategies to counter the most severe threats facing our free society and outline a vision of how we can foster a renewal of American free enterprise and prosperity' (translation: 'How to defeat Obama and any remaining Democrats in 2012'); that's the billionaire Koch brothers—whose last such retreat was attended by Scalia and Thomas!"
"It's not a Democrat who thinks scientists have cloned mice with 'fully-functioning human brains'; that's Christine O'Donnell. It's not a Democrat who likes to dress in a Nazi SS uniform; that's Rich Iott. It's not a Democrat who thinks prisoners shouldn't be allowed to read anything but the Bible; that's Berkeley County (S.C.) Sheriff Wayne DeWitt. It's not a Democrat who worries that 'by 2042, white Americans will be a minority in this country'; that's the Heritage Foundation's John Hawkins. It's not a Democratic judge who threw a lawyer in jail for contempt because he wouldn't recite the Pledge of Allegiance; that was Mississippi Chancery Court Judge Talmadge Littlejohn. It wasn't a Democrat who decided to get snippy and refuse to share the Porta-Potties on the National Mall with attendees at Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity; that was Marine Corps Marathon director Rick Nealis. It's not a Democrat who's opened yet another investigation into the climate change views of ex-Univ. of Virginia researcher Michael Mann, though he's previously been cleared of any improprieties; it's Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. And speaking of Virginia, it's not a Democrat who wants to sell all the state-owned liquor stores to private interests, thereby losing the state billions of dollars over the next decade; that's Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell, whose Regent University thesis bashed feminists, gays and 'fornicators'.
"It's not a Democrat who supports getting rid of the minimum wage; that's Joe Miller, Sharron Angle and a few other Repubs. It's not a Democrat who thinks privatizing Social Security is the way to 'save' the system; that's Angle and dozens of other Republicans and Tea Partiers. It's not a Democrat who thinks it's okay for a public school to teach creationism; it's Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady. It's not a Democrat who served on the finance council for the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay and sought to cover up priestly sex abuse; that's Wisconsin's Ron Johnson. And it's not Democrats who apparently put up the front money for uneducated, unemployed vet Alvin Greene to run for Senate against conserv-a-hole Jim DeMint in South Carolina. And it's not Democrats who've sworn that after election day, they absolutely will not compromise with Democrats on any substantive issues; that's Rep. Mike Pence, House minority leader John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell—and guess which party they belong to!?! Hell, conservative lobbyists Vision To America is petitioning to 'Permanently Adjourn Congress'!"
"Hey, since you're a Republican, maybe you think 'So what?' if U.S. corporations have earned $609 billion in domestic profits since the beginning of 2009 but in that same period have cut $171 billion from the wages and benefits of their workers. Maybe you think it's okay that the 20 percent of city-dwelling Iraqis who lived in slums in 2003 have now grown to 53 percent, thanks to Bush's war. Maybe you think it's okay that one of your party's front groups tried to by an ad on TV to convince Latinos, many of whom support Democrats, not to vote at all on Nov. 2. Maybe you go along with your party's Dallas County (Tex.) nominee for Congress, Stephen Broden, who said that a violent overthrow of the federal government 'is on the table' even though it is 'not the first option.'"
"I could go on, but why bother? I mean, I'll admit that Democrats haven't done the greatest job they could have, even despite the Republican opposition, but that's mostly because they've become, thanks to all the bad press and pressure groups, the 'Chickenshit Party' in this election. But they're still way better than the Republicans, whom I call the 'Evil Party.'"
"And that's why you can't buy anything in this store. Now get the fuck out!"
