I Used to be a Republican...

I Used to be a Republican t-shirt

Hell, we all make mistakes sometimes, but the best thing about mistakes is when you learn enough to correct them. And the great thing about reading is that you can learn stuff-- like what's in the Bill of Rights, for example.

Reagan: Not Dead Enough.

Ronald Reagan: Not Dead Enough Yet t-shirt

Offensive? Sure it is. It's totally about one one-hundred-thousanth as offensive as, say, supporting the overthrow of democratically-elected governments in Latin America, or trading arms for hostages and selling guns to America's enemies to fund illegal wars, or cutting the funding to asylums so the nation's streets filled up with homeless people with mental illnesses, or stoking America's poverty crisis in a thousand other ways while giving billions of dollars in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy, dismantling the systems that protected American citizens from corporate monopolies, and generally turning this into a country by the rich, for the rich, at the expense of the poor. So long as he read his lines properly and reminded us once again to "win one for the Gipper," we could all forget that he was slashing America to pieces. Reagan's dead, but his scumbag policies live on. Wear this shirt to tell people it isn't over yet.

Dick Cheney: Still just "Dick" to me.

Richard "Dick" Cheney t-shirt.

Isn't amazing how Dick Cheney came designed to be called precisely what you want to call him? Maybe there were a few good things about the Bush administration after all!

G. Gordon Liddy: Felon.

G. Gordon Liddy: Felon t-shirt

This is the shirt that gave me the idea of making all these shirts in the first place. I was working around the house the other day and my mind wanders, the way it does when you're doing little chores. For some reason, the subject it wandered to the subject of G. Gordon Liddy and the fact that he has a talk show in this country that people listen to.

Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but the man didn't just break the law-- he broke the law trying to subvert the very fabric of the American democratic system itself. He was involved in committing crimes to attempt to assist in dismantling the two-party system in this country in order to help Nixon and his gang achieve a level of power they didn't deserve (he also admits having planned to kill investigative journalist Jack Anderson because, you know, he exercised the first amendment to criticize the crimes of the Nixon administration-- that unpatriotic jerk!). As far as I'm concerned, this isn't just a simple crime-- it's treason, and the man is a traitor. Yet you can hear G. Gordon Liddy on Radio America, six hours a day, Monday through Friday, acting as though he's not a man who hates America and everything the constitution of this country stands for (except for the guns part-- that part's okay). G. Gordon Liddy is a 100% unamerican traitor and we owe it to people around us to remind them that he's a felon. When someone asks, as they no doubt will, what it was he did again, you can remind them that he tried to unravel the system that underpins this free society.

Hell, call his radio show! He could use a bit of the truth. Just remember to sound like a right wing nut when they screen the call so you can get on the air-- they won't let you on if you sound like you don't answer the door with your gun in your hand.

Hey there (a greeting-slash-junior-manifesto).

I hear it's a new dawn and everything since Obama got elected. Some day soon the Republicans might even stop pretending he's not an American citizen (though likely to start campaigning to give non-Americans the right to the presidency and running Schwarzenegger for the office). The fact of the matter is, even though the USA might seem on the surface to have become somewhat more liberal, we're still the victims of the most poisonous conservative ideology in the Western world.

Every day we endure the array of subhuman opinions that pass for "mainstream" in this country-- whether it's the American Taliban extremists posing as Christian Evangelists, the robber barons whose gluttonous greed we'll be paying the cost of for the rest of our lives, the hard-core bigots who have besmirched the name of "the American family" in the pursuit of their gay-baiting, or the heavily armed libertarians who believe that every American should be free to be exploited and shit on (by them). Most of us, being liberals, figure, hey-- we're the nice guys. We stand on the side of decency; we believe in fairness, in decency, in recognizing the evils of greed, bigotry, and inequality in this country and trying to set them straight. Even if we're outraged by the rape of this nation by the subliterate venom of these scumbags, we can't let anybody know except in our usual passive-aggressive little ways.

Fuck that. There's good reason for liberals to be angry, and there's good reason to make it plain. We know who our enemies are-- it's easy to see them, since their bosses own the majority of the media in this country and make sure to prop them up in every newspaper, on every TV station, and on every notch of the radio dial, retching up their bilious lies (and always claiming it's the LIBERAL MEDIA, folks, who are really the problem).

But just because they own the media doesn't mean they outnumber us. We're a decent people and many among us are fed up with this bullshit. And just because the Republican party is reeling from getting its ass handed to it in the 2008 election doesn't mean that they're going to go away, even for a second. It doesn't mean we're going to stop hearing ten of their opinions for every one of ours, and it doesn't mean that the most extreme reactionary opinions will stop being presented as "the political center."

So I've started this little t-shirt thing as a means for one person, plus a few more (that's you), to try and shift that political center a little bit back to the left by giving the option of expressing liberal opinions as loudly and angrily as we believe them. I'm in no mood for pulling punches from the crooks, liars, bigots, creeps, and scumbags who dominate the national discourse, and I wager that neither are you. So I'm doing it in a simple, American way-- stop by this site, check the shirts out, have a laugh if you like them, buy them if you REALLY like them.

Wearing a t-shirt won't change the world or the country or your life. But it does let off a little bit of steam while you're out trying to do all that other stuff, or even if you're in line at the supermarket behind a guy still wearing his Dubya'04 t-shirt like it'll bring that simian excuse for a national leader back. So here you are. Hope you like them.