Author: Roberta

Click here to help the victims of the flooding in New Orleans. If we all do what we can, however modest, it will add up.

I received the following email today:

By the way, none of my business, but as a suggestion, I would not “tie” your blog into your musical activities. (Not all of your fans are going to share your politics and may be putt off by some of your comments.)

If all my readers (all two of you as far as I know) shared my politics what would be the point of the blog?

In case some of us haven’t noticed, there’s a war going on. Seems to me a couple of lost CD sales pales in comparison with the carnage taking place every week that we remain in Iraq. When/if this war ends, I will consider moving my political blog to a separate location. For now it stays here.

See here: https://robertajazz.com/blog/?p=8

Under mounting pressure to justify the disaster he created in Iraq, Bush says we should stay in Iraq in order to honor the 1800 soldiers who have been killed in Iraq. Let’s put aside for the moment the obvious fact that this criterion for continuing to send our sons and daughters to slaughter has nothing to do with whether we can actually accomplish anything useful by being there, and ponder the following: if the logic of this dangerous statement were followed consistantly throughout history, no war would ever end!

Yet the president who is responsible for the deaths of these servicemen and women makes this hypocritical and perverse utterance almost daily.

Recently, in a piece on the Roberts Supreme Court nomination, I heard an NPR reporter refer to prochoice and antichoice (my words, and a most objective description, surely both sides would have to acknowledge) advocates as “left wing and right wing groups”. I recognize that NPR must be terrified of being attacked against by the fascists in Congress who are not content to control merely the private corporate airwaves, but is it really balanced reporting to refer to those trying to preserve 30 years of case law as “left wing?” Especially when the other side bases their position on their vision of a religious fundamentalist theocracy, how is it possible to justify this “left wing/right wing” paradigm?

It is unfortunate that NPR and the rest of the media cannot or will not be intellectually honest enough to admit that, for all intents and purposes, there is no “left wing” left in America. There is a liberal or progressive wing; there is a moderately liberal (and in the current crisis quite useless) wing; there is a conservative wing (although their voice in the GOP has been shut down because they can’t raise as much cash as the rlght wing); and then there are those whose goal is to destroy the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution, an extreme right wing position if ever there was one.

There’s a great bit by Lenny Bruce explaining separation of church and state. Everyone should hear it. I’ll try to find out the name of the bit. I probably cannot post it here due to copyright considerations.

During the time leading up to the Second Stolen Electlon of the 21st Century (I mean the one stolen in Ohio not the one stolen in Florida) I started forwarding some emails on occasion to my gig mailing list. Looking back, I can see how some could consider this an inappropriate use of this list, but I felt that speaking out against a fascist leaning regime embroiling us in a pointless war based on lies, which controls the majority of the airwaves, warranted it. (Pause for air.)

Most people responded positively. A few asked me to refrain from sending political email. A couple, however, became downright vitriolic. One man informed me he was going to burn all my CDs that he owned.

Disturbingly, this is one more example of the ugly fascistic thug mentality that Rove, Rumsfeld, and overgrown fratboy/puppet- president Bush have been advancing. I acknowledge that, technically speaking, the Nazis did not burn CD’s, only books. (For those of us too young to remember, CDs did not yet exist back then.) The idea, however, that by expressing a political opinion I had done something to warrant this sort of sick vitriolic response is disturbing.

More on this later.