I used to like Inouye

Hell, I went to high school with his son, who was one of my few fellow punks in suburban MD at that time. But there's not a personal connection strong enough to excuse this. Inouye joined two other Dems in a vote to approve the "let's destroy our national treasures" amendment to the budget. The vote was 51 to 49 to leave the desecration of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge amendment in the budget, so pretty much as long as they can pass a budget it will include provisions to destroy an ecosystem so that we can keep driving Lincoln Navigators.



You know I'm not even someone who considers "The Environment" one of my top issues. What I mean is--economic and social justice, civil liberties, anti-imperialism, these all rank higher for me in terms of things I'd go march for or things that, in fact, keep me up at night sometimes. But this delight to extract oil from one of the world's remaining wild places upsets me as much as anything in the news. It is symbolic to me of just how base and venal our culture and administration is.

It's such a junky mentality. We'll throw anything overboard for the sake of a lousy tank of gas. I mean, fuck our children's inheritance, fuck those Iraqis that are under dirt now, fuck those young Americans who joined the military so they could go to college and now consider themselves fortunate to be alive with no legs. In fact, pretty much everybody who's not a rich, greedy robber baron with their snout up to the oil trough can just go fuck themselves. We want our SUVs.



I hate them passionately today.