I’ve never been a big Everclear fan, but Bob Lefsetz just turned me on to their new song, “Jesus Was A Democrat”, which the band is giving away on their website…absolutely no strings attached (no email address, no pop-up ads, no nothin’). Here it is on their website. Grab it, take a listen, and conitnue reading. Why are they making it free? Lefsetz says it best:

…America is pissed.

America is pissed about so much. And feels too often that politicians don’t care about them. And there’s scads of ignorance, purveyed by biased talk show hosts and bloviating, supposedly neutral, TV talking heads. And everybody’s afraid. You get people saying Sarah Palin won the Vice Presidential debate and you wonder if you watched the same show. When I didn’t answer the questions in school, I flunked. And suddenly, by going to school, working damn hard, studying to get good grades to get into a good college, I’m an elitist, my opinion is to be discounted. I shouldn’t have gone to public school, I should have gone to a parochial institution, to be indoctrinated in viewpoints that don’t square with reality. Worse yet, be home schooled. That’s code for “Christian Right Education”.

Hate me all you want. Tell me you can get infections hanging with the underprivileged in regular high schools, that you can teach your kids better than those underpaid teachers. But what about socialization, what about opposing viewpoints? How can there be a dialogue when there’s not another side?

And that’s what we have in America today, only one side. Everybody’s on his own side, only speaking to himself, like-minded people. Who’s going to change the equation? Certainly not politicians, elected officials. Obama’s got to say he’s for drilling to get elected, because the person paying four bucks a gallon doesn’t know that it’ll take eons for said oil to reach the pump. We’ve got the businessmen raping and pillaging, the politicians lying, at best being expedient, and the only people we can count on to speak the truth have abdicated their power, their duty, their role. That’s what the job of the artist is. To question authority, challenge convention, speak the unpopular, if it’s the truth. And that’s what Art Alexakis and Everclear have done in “Jesus Was A Democrat”.

That is a large quote from Lefsetz’s argument but you should also read the rest here, because it’s pretty damn brilliant. He’s right, America is pissed, and I’ve never been more pissed about the ignorant thinking of some of my fellow Americans than right now….after seeing the McCain campaign chose Palin as a running mate (pure bullshit right-wing strategy that even Sarah Palin should be offended by), the lies that McCain’s campaign is spewing about Barack Obama (which Obama’s campaign is brilliantly taking the ’stay positive’ moral high-road on), the bullshit emails from right-wing relatives in the sticks claiming that Bill Clinton is responsible for all the disasters of the past eight years (c’mon!), the scary YouTube videos of folks outside the McCain rallies in Ohio and Pennsylvania yelling that Obama is a terrorist (and somehow believing that), and all the other complete idiocy that bull-headed Republicans have to make themselves believe in order to stick with their party…which has now become more important than the well-being of other fellow Americans who live under different circumstances then they do. Continue Reading