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Sleep is hard to find
when, looking back, you see you've
never been awake.
No
Utopia...W H A T ' S . A . S W E E T H E A R T . L I K E . Y O U .
....D O I N ' . I N . A . D U M P . L I K E . T H I S ?
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Monday September 15, 2008...........................................................................................................
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STEVE KIRSCH
comcast
Hockey mom gets pucked by Anchoragians!
7:25 am |
Many Alaskans do have their heads on straight after all. Sarah Palin may be their governor but, by the look and sound of this demonstration, she is not universally loved up there. May their wise sentiments inspire certain credulous folks in the lower 48.
Mudflats reports on anti-Palin rally in Anchorage:
Saturday September 13, 2008.
Cheney²
8:01 am |
Remember a few years ago when Dick Cheney shot his hunting partner, Harry Whittington, in the face? He'd been spending a day drinking beer and shooting quail at the Armstrong Ranch quail shooting-gallery.
A quail-shooting ranch is a place they let testosterone- challenged big men like Cheney and Antonine Scalia out with guns to shoot quail that are nurtured to be picked off by "sportsmen". They call it hunting. It's a live shooting gallery for effete elitists. It's great fun for everyone except the quail.
Well, with aspirations to follow Cheney into the White House and history, Sarah Palin has a similar blood-lust bent. She promotes shooting wolves from planes. Besides the obvious technological advantage (wolves don't know much about anti-aircraft guns or surface-to-air missiles) this is done in areas of deep snow. Have you ever tried walking in deep snow without snowshoes? Have you ever even seen a wolf in snowshoes?
See, the idea is, you fly around for a while in the domain of hawks enjoying the inspirational Alaskan scenery until you catch a wolf minding his own business slogging across some open range. Then you swoop down in your Cessna with a high-powered rifle with a big scope, and shoot the sucker (who can't even make a run for it because his legs keep sinking elbow-deep into the powder). Sometime you miss or wound the animal and it spends the time between bullet and death in pain.
This is the kind of environmental policy the Republican nominee for VP promotes. This and Drill-Drill-Drill and drill now. Palin's a well-dressed and well-coiffed lady of the Middle Ages and is apparently a good Bible-thumping woman to boot --one who must believe quite literally in that line from Genesis:
Ok, ok, that last line is mine. Poetic license, but it's not far from the truth.
Here's a little video to enlighten you on one of God's gift to women, Sarah Palin.
Friday September 12, 2008.
Lying like an oval office rug
8:01 am |
You don't have to be a carpet installer to know that what we're seeing from the McCain campaign is pretty much a trailer --a preview of the feature, i.e. what we can expect if he comes to occupy the oval office. He will lie like a rug from day one. This is what a responsible president must do (he'll think). Sometimes a president must lie to the people for their own good. We have eight years of precedent (he'll muse). Worked well for our side at least.
And his Vice Liar will do the same or worse should the aged McCain keel over during an angry tirade at displeasure with an aide. Theoretically, this could happen on January 21st 2009. We could very well have a president Palin on that day. I get goosebumps and hives just thinking about it.Paul Krugman has something to say about all of this here.
...how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
Empty-Suitism
7:26 am |
After eight years of Empty-Suitism gimme someone who thinks! Gimme a president with a plan. Don't give me a chip off the old hack. Don't try to sell me a guy who's single most compelling credential was that he survived 5 years as a captive. That may be proof of a stout heart and great resolve, but sometime great resolve is a filter for good sense. And coming off of eight years of ruinous government by his party, senseless resolve is no basis for voting for him.
A man who wants to govern with the same policies as the current empty suit is not an agent for change no matter how loud and frequently he tries to bull-horn it into our ears, and remind us he was a POW hero (which he really doesn't like to talk about, except when he's talking about it, which is almost every time he's interviewed).
Wednesday September 11, 2008....
Apology Cards
4:54 pm |
More apology cards
Wednesday September 10, 2008...
Call it that
4:54 pm |
The go-for-broke gutter politics of right-wing Republicans is reaching wretched levels in this presidential campaign. The John McCain bull-shit machine is hurling product faster than an honorable man can dodge it. Whatever character John McCain once had he’s spent in spades during the past few years, most furiously since choosing the sugar-coated, serpent-tongued Sarah Palin as his co-liar. They aspire together to be our Liar-in-Chief and Vice Liar.
And this is not left-wing hyperbole. It’s gotten so bad even the corporate media, though still clinging to euphemisms, is getting close to coming right out an saying it –saying that John McCain and his new soccer-mom consort, are liars.
Joe Klien of Time, for instance, says “... (McCain) is responsible for one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won’t abet its spread by linking to it, but here’s the McClatchy fact check (regarding it).
Or the Washington Post: “From the moment ... Sarah Palin declared that she had opposed the ... ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ critics, the news media, and nonpartisan fact checkers have called it a fabrication or, at best, a half-truth. But yesterday in Lebanon, Ohio, and again in Lancaster, Pa., she crossed that bridge again.”
MSNBC: ”McCain and Palin together have told a broader story about the bridge that is misleading … ‘I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere,’ (Palin) said in her convention speech last week.
“(But) that's not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.”
But euphemisms or not, everybody knows what half-truths, un-truths, less-than-truths, misleading remarks, or fabrications are. They’re lies. We wouldn’t put up with them from friends, family, or our children (imagine scolding pre-teen Alicia with the less-than-effective, “Now honey, stop telling half truths and fabrications, and please don’t mislead or obfuscate.” No, we cut to the chase. We say, “Don’t lie!”).
Therefore: my first paragraph above (anything else would be less then the truth :).
McCain/Palin’s latest lie is their pretense of offense about Obama’s “pig-in-lipstick” remark. The Democratic nominee delivered it to characterize McCain’s policies. It had nothing to do with Palin, although the Republicans took pains to say it did, and called it “sexist”. But it was all fakery, McCain used the very same colloquialism at least three times before, in criticizing Obama.
What’s going on? They lie and repeat the lie. They’re called on the lie, yet they repeat the lie again (Washington Post cited above) and again. There’s only one explanation. They have no character so they don’t care. They will lie to a voter’s face and not blink. They will slander an opponent’s patriotism without a blush. Palin might be as religious as the Pope, but she lies like a rug. If that’s what her religion teaches her, I'd rather vote for an out-of-the-closet atheist. At least they’re honest about who they are.
But lies work. That's how we got where we are. As Digby, one of my favorite commentators, put it,
“The GOP manufactures a juicy tidbit designed to get the sophomoric kewl kidz (talking heads) excited --- something sexy or silly and always stupid and distracting --- and they don't have to think about all that icky, boring wonky crap that actually affects people's lives. But it works on several levels.
“Today, people like Chuck Todd (of MSNBC) and Mark Halperin (Time) are "calling out" the McCain campaign for manufacturing the scandal. Indeed, they are calling them out and calling them out and calling them out, showing the footage, discussing the ‘controversy’ all day and basically doing exactly what the GOP wants them to do --- get it out there.”
This is how swift-boating works. At least half of the American public is so cranked on fear and left-loathing they suck “Rovian” sleaze with the same gusto that WWF fans take in a “wrestling” match. They know it’s all showbiz, contrived, and false to its core, but there they are nevertheless, screaming “Kill! Kill!” like the Roman masses at a Christian massacre.”
And so you see otherwise normal, god-fearing people, abandoning their own integrity, surrounding the “charismatic” Sarah and the not-so McCain, waving and cheering them on as they deliver yet another raw “fabrication” …’scuze me, lie.But the problem is not just the lies themselves, the problem is that the McCain campaign is building an American house of cards on lies. They're not addressing the issues that will make or break working families and the nation during the next four years. They offer nothing but more of the same in the way of policy energy policy, education, healthcare reform, national debt, budget deficit, ecology, job loss, etc. They deliver their lies only to distract us, hoping we will not notice how empty of solutions their "program" is.
If for no other reason than to say, “We are Americans, we are not chumps!” the Republican ticket should be overwhelmingly repudiated in November.As for the niceties of public discourse, Gertrude Stein wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” If that’s so, then what is a lie?
Call it that.
Enough is enough.
4:48 pm |
Having to respond to another McCain waste-of-time remark Barack Obama says, "Enough is enough." But in unprincipled power grabs enough is never enough for the right.
As ifnuriating as it may be to have to endure the propagandist bullshit of the Republican do-nothing-except-wreck-the country platform, you will not see the bullshit abate because John McCain has abandoned even the appearance of having any character left.
Here's Obama responding:
Sunday September 8, 2008.
Sunday September 7, 2008
McCain McSame McBush BuCain CaBush
McMore McDitto
12:58 pm |
Here's John Stewart doing what he does best ...doing what mainstream news should do but doesn't.
Check out especially the segment that starts at 5:00 min. in. It's a brilliant little set of juxtapositions.
Sunday August 31, 2008...
Appallin' Palin
8:22 pm |
John McCain's brilliant VP pick is just one more Republican with a viscious streak. Listen to Sarah Palin here, laughing, as a local Alaskan shock jock, Bob Lester, villifies another Alaskan pol, Lyda Green, with typical right-wing vitriol.
Nico Pitney of HuffPo says this:
Early this year, an op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News ripped into Gov. Sarah Palin's appearance on a morning "shock jock" radio show as "plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I've ever seen from a politician."
So what happened? Palin has repeatedly feuded with the state's Senate president, Lyda Green, over a wide range of legislation. Last January, Palin appeared on "The Bob and Mark Show," whose host Bob Lester despises Green. That's when the trouble started:
Early on in the conversation before Palin started to crack up, Lester referred to Sen. Green as a jealous woman and a cancer. Palin, who knows full well Lyda Green is a cancer survivor, didn't do what any decent person would do, say, "Bob, that's going too far."
But as the conversation moved on, Lester intensified his attack on Green.Lester questioned Green's motherhood, asking Palin if the senator cares about her own kids. Palin laughs.
These people are pretty much nothing but white trash with money.John McCain questions Barack Obamas judgement?
John McCain wants to put an air-headed, creationist under investigation for abuse of power, and with essentially no experience, next in line for the presidency when, at his age, with his health, McCain could keel over in the next minute?
Country first? I don't think so.
Oops!
8:37 am |
In the god-works-in-mysterious-ways dept. TPM posted a link to the GOP website.
This screen-shot image is not great, but what it says in the circle is "McCain Chooses Sarah Palin", followed by the intended Obama-trashing: "Check out Notready08.com".
The truth is an insidious interloper. It can even breach Republican bulwarks.
Minneapolice: Just more police-state news
7:05 am |
The police in Minneapolis have taken a page from the Bush administration's now pro forma idea of how to govern. It looks a lot like its idea for war. The Minneapolice has been conducting preemptive raids on private households, intimidating residents by busting through doors in swat regalia and big guns, handcuffing them, and generally trying to scare the shit out of them to avoid the sight of protests surrounding the RNC.
Is this what our troops are fighting for? To protect a police state instead of a consitutional one?
Other residents up and down the street said that the houses targeted were occupied by groups of student-age men and women who had caused no trouble in the neighborhood. They were apparently guilty of nothing more than planning perfectly legal (consitutionally speaking) protests of Republican governance --the "constitution" part is probably what irks the powers that be most.
This from Glen Greenwald's site:
...
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.
You might want to check out how many "fire code violations" you have in your house, especially if you or your children are planning any un-pro-government demonstrations on the town commons.
With abuse of power like this will a red-white-and-blue KrystallNacht be far behind?
McPander panders with Palin
6:58 am |
John McCain said Barack Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election ...that he'd sell the country down the river to win. Then McCain picks as his VP running mate a right-wing, creationist with virtually no experience (especially foreign policy experience) to replace him in the (eminently possible) event that, while he's president, his age catches up with himof him. He does this to gain advantage with women and his conservative base.
You could say McCain would rather jeapordize the nation rather than lose an election.
Karl Rove got it right -bless his Machiavellian heart-, except for the canidate. Just change "Obama" to "McCain" and "Tim Kaine" to "Sarah Palin" in his following quote and you've got the picture.
"I think [Obama's] going to make an intensely political choice, not a governing choice," Rove said. "He's going to view this through the prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to say, he's going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He's not going to be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president."
Rove singled out Virginia governor Tim Kaine, also a Face The Nation guest, as an example of such a pick."With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he's been a governor for three years, he's been able but undistinguished," Rove said. "I don't think people could really name a big, important thing that he's done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America."
From the Anchorage Daily News -gotta be a joke:
State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.
"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"
Saturday August 16, 2008.
.Required Listening
9:08 am |
I listened last night to Bill Moyer's Journal. Moyers interviewed Andrew Bacevich about his new book, the Limits of Power. This should be required viewing and/or reading for all Americans who would like to find our way out of the morass we've followed the leaders into, and which we helped along the way during the previous decades with our rush to consumption (which one time was the name of a disease).
This is definitely worth 53 minutes of your time.
The Moyer's site lede:
America's in a pickle. Our friends, the Russians, with whom we were about to conduct joint military exercises, decided instead to attack some of our other friends, the Georgians, who not only aspire to democracy but control access to lots of oil and pipelines in which American energy companies have huge investments. But when President Bush demands Russia go home and leave Georgia alone, his pal Vladimir Putin - the modern Russian czar - gets that sardonic smile on his face.
He knows that American troops are spread so thin in Iraq and Afghanistan that Uncle Sam more resembles Gulliver, tied down by too many commitments, too much hubris, and too many mistakes, than he does to Superman. It's a pickle and a predicament, and it's serious.
The limits of American power have never been more vividly on display. That's the subject of my conversation this week with Andrew J. Bacevich. Here is a public thinker who has been able to find an audience across the political spectrum, from The Nation or The American Conservative magazines, lecturing to college classes or testifying before Congress.
To those of us who stood with jaws agape as the Bush administration led us, distracted by anger, fear, and jingoism, into a preemptive and totally unnecessary war, this stuff is (and was) obvious, but coming so clearly out of the mouth of a conservative (with solid conviction), it may help others think about who we are and where we're going.
We are not going to survive as a free nation without a transformation in our sense of values --which, emphatically, does not mean the "values" hyped by the right wing for too long.
No Comment
8:47 am |
Head of the State of Inebriation
7:48 am |
Maybe this is how we got into the freaking war.
What would Jesus do?
McClone, or the evil twin
7:25 am |
One night a drunk was on his knees under a lamp post searching for his lost keys when a passerby says, “What are you doing?”“Looking for my keys,” says the drunk.
“Where’d you lose them,” the stranger asks?
“Across the street,” the drunk replies.
“Well, how come you’re looking for them here?”
“There’s more light here, Silly.”
So a dumb joke becomes the logic for war and the general problem-solving strategy of an entire political party: “How come you persecuted a war against 9/11 terrorists in Iraq when they were trained and head-quartered in Afghanistan and most of them came from Saudi Arabia,” asks the world?
“Because it was easier pickin’s over here, that's where the oil is, and we couldn’t attack Saudi Arabia because they sell us a lot of the stuff, Silly”
As Paul Krugman said,”…the core of Republican policy and political strategy (and its) de facto slogan has become: ‘Real men don’t think things through.’”
Somehow the party of the very smart and able Abe Lincoln has become the party of dumb and dumber. And it’s become so without shame and with brutish pride.For example, in a move to bond with anti-intellectuals McCain launched his speech at the big Sturgis, SD bike rally by offering his wife as a piece of meat in the often topless/sometimes bottomless Buffalo Chip beauty pageant, "I was looking at the Sturgis schedule, and noticed that you have a beauty pageant, so I encouraged Cindy to compete. I told her, with a little luck, she could be the only woman only to serve as both the First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip!" HaHa.
Conservative politics meets wet T-shirt competition.
But the exploitation of Cindy was not the only exploitation the ol' oil panderer had on his mind. He was also intent upon exploiting the frustration and financial woes of average Americans on behalf of his partners in Big Oil.Yelling at congress for taking a vacation McCain squawked, “When I’m president of the United States, I’m not going to let them go on vacation. They’re going to become energy independent and we’re not going to pay $4 a gallon for gas because we’re going to drill offshore, and we’re going to drill now.”
Drill, drill, drill —the American man's-man's answer for everything.No matter that all the experts tell us that off-shore oil drilling will not affect the price of oil for at least ten years; no matter that oil corporations have 68 million acres of federally leased land upon which they're already not drilling, he presumed nominee was just being a Republican. He was just applying the stupid, but successful, all-purpose reasoning of his party (and of the drunk under the lamppost):
Why does McCain want to look for the key to the door of our energy independence on an oil rig off Miami Beach rather than in the Province of Renewables where we’re more likely to find it, “Because it’s more convenient to run an oil-con from an (especially) American oil rig, Silly.”
Republicans have raised the aspiration to dumbness to stratospheric levels. The national Republican Party embraces stupidity for the sake of power. They rely on an uninformed electorate to win elections –or to accept the stealing of elections. They love secrecy. Republicans believe that operating in the dark across the street (a la the furtive Dick Cheney) while they pander from a soapbox under a lamppost is how to get things done.
This open embrace of ignorance is nowhere made clearer than in the McCain campaign’s castigation of Barack Obama for his successes. They portray him as being somehow unworthy of the presidency. They say he is presumptuous. They suggest he is uppity. Any white Republican candidate coming from Obama’s humble beginnings to graduate from Harvard law School and go on to the United States Senate would be lauded by them as a fulfillment of the American dream. Instead they call him an empty-suited elitist. Using their well-honed pretzel-logic, they twist truth inside out and offer it up for us to bite. Why should they expect otherwise, we’re still chewing their last crumbs?
Rachael Maddow of Air America and MSNBC recently summed this all up succinctly on her radio show. She said, “I think that it is wrong, and weird, and Orwellian, and stupid, and counter- productive that American politics have come to the point where the facts don’t matter; where everybody acknowledges that the facts don’t matter.” And that’s a fact that probably also doesn’t matter.
To illustrate the Republican party’s descent into dumbness Krugman cites this quote by GOP wag, Peggy Noonan, who once wrote in the Washington Post, “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”
See, intellect is the problem with the world. A simple man like George Bush is the route to well-being. Uh,huh –you see where that got us. Rejecting reason, todays polls say about half of us still consider another four years of Bush, under John McCain, to be wise.
I don’t think we’re gonna find our keys under that lamp post.
McClone, or the evil twin
7:15 am |
Sunday July 27, 2008.
One-trick pony
8:21 am |
He's a one-trick pony
one trick is all that horse can do
He does one trick only
it's the pricipal source of his revenue
And when he steps into the spotlight
you can feel the heat of his heart
come rising through
.............--Paul Simon
I know I’m not the only one who thinks that, as a presidential candidate, John McCain is a one-trick pony. His trick is war. His fundamental credential is that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. His one-note campaign theme is the Iraq war and specifically, the Surge. And yet this one trick pony still is toe to toe with Senator O. Why?
Maybe it’s because George Bush was a no-trick pony. Maybe those presently considering McCain as Bush’s successor see one trick as a huge improvement. But when a one-trick pony is up against a multi-trick pony with a brain, it becomes clear a single trick is the nearest thing to zip that you can get, not counting fractions.
While Barack Obama is in Berlin addressing a crowd of 200,000 Europeans (many waving American flags), John McCain is holding forth with10 patrons at a German Sausage Haus in Ohio having knockwurst and brot while beating a war drum.
While Barack Obama delivers an intelligent, nuanced, and reasoned foreign policy speech, John McCain sings, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” with a twinkle in his eye. Or he answers questions pertaining to the violation of trade sanctions during the Bush administration with a quip —when asked about the sale of $158 million of cigarettes to Iran he says, “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.”
We’ve been here before. We had glimpses of the meanness-of-spirit of the current president during his first presidential campaign. These impulses pop up unbidden because they’re honestly part and parcel of who a person is. Think of them as god’s warning lights.
“Here’s the straight scoop on this guy,” flashes the Lord: And George-The-Lesser, Governor of Texas, launches into a heartfelt ridicule of the Carla Faye Tucker who had recently been executed by the state.
Referring to an interview Carla Faye had given to Larry King just prior to her execution, journalist Tucker Carlson asked then Texas Governor Bush if he’d seen the show. Bush said he had, and mentioned that King had asked the death-row inmate what she might say to him if she could.
“What was her answer?" Carlson wondered. "'Please,'" Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "'don't kill me.'"
“I must look shocked,” said Carlson, “—ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.”
Even Gary Bauer, another Republican candidate for president, said "I think it is nothing short of unbelievable that the governor of a major state running for president thought it was acceptable to mock a woman he decided to put to death."
But unfortunately, enough U.S. voters ignored the hints of the Lord, so that soon The United States had an institutionalized torture program, and a president with the authority to lock up any American citizen who displeased him –with no recourse to the courts.
Fast-forward to 2008:
If George Bush was a mean-spirited sub-par candidate who did what he could to avoid military action, John McCain is cut from the same cloth, except he volunteered to fight. But practically speaking, their potential for driving America further into the ground is about equal. In fact, it looks like McCain will do whatever he can to finish bungling the job Bush started, and with even more venom.
Let’s take a look at a fuller list of god’s hot flashes:
Flash 1. “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”
Flash 2. Quip regarding trade-sanction violations in sale of cigarettes to Iran: “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.”
Flash 3. McCain angrily calling his wife the “C” world in front of reporters. According to writer Cliff Schecter McCain said, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you C-Word!" (McCain excused himself saying it had been a long day. But Don’t presidents often have long days?)
Flash 4. McCain was known as “McNasty” in high school –Schecter againFlash 5. McCain’s publically-uttered gorilla rape joke –punch line by beaten victim awaking from a coma: Where is that Marvelous gorilla?
The joke was excused by McCainiacs as “John just being John.” This is what god’s trying to tell us, people! If we don't listen when the Lord speaks we might as well roll up our prayer shawls and have some fun before the axe falls.We’ve got some things to consider:
A boy who, in high school, was already called "McNasty" puts this character trait to use, joins the Navy, and drops bombs. He’s shot down, captured, and held in cruel conditions wherein his stubborn nastiness helps him survive.
After being abused and tortured for almost six years it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine his irascibility would not be diminished.
So now, with a well established propensity to anger, he joins a political party which is congenial to his personality; hits the political trail telling bad, ugly jokes; calls opponents profane names (Schecter again); jokes about bombing Iranians or killing them with lung cancer; and suggests rape victims enjoy their abuse, especially if the perp is a gorilla.So many undertones to god's crystal clear note.
It’s a country with a death wish in which a John McCain is running neck and neck with a Barack Obama.
John Stewart on Obama's excellent European adventure
8:05 am |
Sunday July 6, 2008
.
Sad irony
8:19 am |
I recently received an email that sums up, in an almost tragic-comic way, the confusion and cluelessness of Americans about the war in Iraq.
The message tells the sad tale of a mother who's lost her son in a war trumped up by oil men. A mother who, in her deep desire to pay tribute to him and his fallen comrads, drives around in a vehicle covered with air-brushed images of the stars and stripes, flag-draped coffins filling C-10s, soaring jets, tanks, and helicopters. These scenes completely cover the body of a gas-hog SUV —a Hummer.
The poignancy of her situation is clear and understandable. The death of a child is heart-wrenching for most parents. And her desire to give her son's death a meaningful context is also obvious. But the irony of her memorial being rendered on the sides of a vehicle which is a symbol for the war's real rational should be equally as clear. That it's not is another indication of how out of whack some people still are about the reasons for this woman's son's death and the deaths of over 3000 other young Americans.
Finally SUV sails are way off, and it might be karma that American car manufacturers are getting creamed by foreign competitors for their stupidity. Sometimes it takes a hard blow to the wallet to see reality starkly. The launching if a pre-emptive war of choice didn't seem to do the trick, the adoption of torture techniques to interrogate the possibly-not-guilty meant little, the mounting death toll of American service personnel seemed to have little effect, the growing animosity of the rest of the world toward the USA failed to make a dent, but now that gas has topped $4.00 + a galllon, we're all upset. But unfortunately, even with all of that, some of us still don't get it. It's a sad commentary on who we are.
Ironies may be both sad a cruel. And maybe I'm being nit-picky, but images plastered on the skin of a gas-guzzling SUV to memorialize men who've died in a war fought because we're a nation addicted to oil (which, until now, has been unwilling to change its ways) somehow seems an unfitting monument —even if it's one created by a devastated mother.
Pod person
7:50 am |
Where's the fire in the belly? Where's the heart of the mantra for change? Oh, the mantra may still be there, but where's its heart? Where's its soul? Obama has disappeared down the chute of ambition and been replaced by a pod person.
Caving on the FISA bill has so far been the worst of it, but the general drift to samedom is definitely there. Though the differences between Obama and McCain remain huge, you can't help but have the feeling that the drift of the US further into politics of ditto will not abate with an Obama presidency.
Several years ago the fear crept up my spine that, having studied the presidency of the anti-democratic George Bush, its aggression and arrogance and the impunity with which it's been carried off, the amazing ease with which he's gotten away with it, all future presidents would simply embrace its notions of power and carry them forward. I continued to hope otherwise, but I have the stinking suspicion that Barak Obama, in his position on the FISA bill, is doing just that: heading off down the trail blazed by his corrupt predecessor.
If we were hoping for a return to American democracy after Bush, it may not happen. The truth may be, Yes we can't. It may take another revolution.
Maybe I'm wrong. God, I hope I'm wrong.
Saturday June 28, 2008.
Smearsville and Manchurian Candidates
12:25 pm |
In a WaPo article today Matthew Mosk examines the anatomy of a smear; specifically the one that portrays Barak Obama as a closet Muslim. Or, as someone suggested, a Muslim Manchurian Candidate.
But, if we're talking about Manchurian Candidates (that is, sleeper enemies nefariously slipped into the democratic process by ruthless self-interested entities to take it over and run it into the ground), George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove fit that profile pretty well.
They may not be radical Islamists, but they sure know how to implode a Republic.
Anyway, the article by Mosk traces the origins of a lie-ladened email; specifically, the one about how Obama is not really a Christian, but is a Muslim.
Bullshit is what was found.
What Are We, Romericans?
8:04 am |
Michelle Obama said she had never in her adult life been proud
of her country until the 2008 presidential campaign. I knew what she meant.
With just a simple google you can find info about the near-genocide of native Americans (to make room for white Europeans to build a nation), and the reliance upon slavery to grease the wheels of our fledgling economy, to our history of racial discrimination and the non-enfranchisement of women.
With all of that, any patriotic, butmodestly honest American might have similar feelings. We may have things to be proud of, but these are not some of them.
What Michelle Obama was expressing was her pride that the nation had risen above much of our history by the mere fact of her husband's candidacy.
Aren't we all please by that —notwithstanding the attacks of those who are practiced in the high art of smear?
Meanwhile, I've never been as ashamed of my country as I have since it became clear that the idea of torturing humans was something the nation appears to find acceptable.
It's obviously more acceptable that $4.00 gas. There's lots of outrage in the news about the price of crude, but precious little about the crudeness of torture.
Bob Herbert, in his NYT column today is right when he says that torture, for most of us, is very abstract.
When was the last time, for instance, that you saw someone forced to stand naked in a stress position for hours on end. And how long ago did any of us perform our last electrocution?
If these things happened within sight of the checkout counter of the local supermarket maybe they would have more excited our compassion. But with the brutality occuring conveniently out of sight, in remote prisons such as Guantanamo, or others in Afgahnistan and who knows where else(?), it's hard to imagine what torture actually is –and hard to believe how it brutalizes both the tortured and the torturer.
Yet all of us feel the acute, personal pinch and pain of expensive oil. Ouch.
For certain of the religious among us it must be a tough trick to juggle their conscience in one hand and what they're willing to accept as required for "security" in the other.
For them a potent image of torture is central to their faith's iconography. Crucifixion.
Many of them are pained to think of the brutal scourging and killing of Jesus at the hands of the Romans, as if it happened yesterday.
But the same people are silent about the immediate torturing of men (some of them beaten, tortured, and simply released), Tourture probably taking place as we speak –at the hands of Americans.
Bob Herbert:
For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary ...
Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.
The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released ...without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All ...were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick ... and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.
He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”
Officials at Physicians for Human Rights said extensive medical and psychological examinations were conducted — and in two cases prior medical records were consulted — to help corroborate the testimony of the detainees. The organization has a long and credible history of documenting such abuses...
The detainees ... were abused at facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Three said they had been subjected to electric shocks. One said he was stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver and hit in the head and in the jaw with a rifle.
For a nation that testifies to be overwhelmingly "Christian" and which "believes in God" to the tune of 90%, this ok-with-torture attitude seems not just odd but schizophrenic.
They say Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the least of these you do to me."
They didn't say he added, "Unless they're terror detainees."
So what are we now, Romericans?
Saturday June 25, 2008.
Love and hate
10:59 am |
I get a lot of emails that run the gamut from brilliant to banal. I get fuzzy teddy bears saying corny things. And I get a lot that share the wisdom of kids.
Given the national political dialog and our attitudes in the international sphere, this quote from a six-year-old named Nikka is more than apt. As a matter of fact, it's apt even if Nikka didn't really say it.
If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate.
With thoughts like that Nikka may grow up to be crucified.
Pot and Cancer
9:58 am |
Here's another example of the supremacy of ideology over science. It will probably come as no suprise to anyone that the government has been supressing research regarding the beneficial qualities of marijuana.
Yup, it's true. And it's been supressing for a long time.
Life through a micro-mesh Bible strainer
8:15 am |
Now that his rebuke of Sponge Bob Square Pants is part of religious history, James Dobson is after Barak Obama. This is not surprising. It was bound to happen. Dobson's world view is so narrow not much fits within its confines. And Obama, having the temerity to have his own views about what he finds in the Bible, was certain to piss Dobson off.
Here' some of what Obama said in a speech that Dobson doesn't like:
This is a legitimate question, there being more Christian sects in America than there are cereal picks in a grocer's aisle. Whose indeed?
But Dobson thinks, Dobson's, of course.
Should we expect any more from a guy who sifts his thoughts through a micro-mesh Bible stainer even before he has them –a guy who discards a huge portion of god's diverse creation as corrupt based (ultimately) on his own judgement as to what is good and what is bad? I'd sooner expect truthfulness from Dick Cheney.
Via HuffingtonPost
Saturday June 21, 2008.
Old story, new story
2:08 am |
English professor and writer Charles Johnson, in an article at The American Scholar, winds up with this observation about the back-story of black Americans:
At the moment a black American is the Democratic nominee to be President of the United States, Johnson's essay on the "end of the Black American Narrative", has some heft.
Thursday June 18, 2008
.
Free to see the forest and the trees
9:04 pm |
Somewhere along the line John McCain forgot how our system of government is supposed to work. The man's a little confused -and no, it has nothing to do with his age, it's more about being a Republican who's drooling to be president. Drooling to be president is, first, not too attractive; and, second, it makes you say stupid things.
The senator, fretting recently about the Supreme Court's decision to honor the constitution regarding the treatment of alleged perpetrators of terror, complained that judges and courts are not accountable to voters. He said this as if it were some bizarre, anti-democratic conspiracy hatched by liberals. The idea, however, goes back to the founders themselves.
The concept's pretty simple, and logical. If the courts, like the other two branches of government, were as subject to the short-term whims of voters, no one would be safe from the whims of wing-nut politicians who pop into the system at intervals to whip things into a lather. Crack-pots like Tom Delay and Dick Cheney could write all sorts of laws to reflect their self-serving notions of human relations and we'd have no recourse. The courts, being somewhat insulated from the fickleness of voters (who one minute want to be free people in a just society, and the next want a Papa President with fangs to keep them safe no matter what), are free to act rationally -and legally- over time. They can exercise prudence and judgment rather than hop on whatever jingoist band-wagon happens to be picking up steam in any given decade. Courts are designed to take a long view. They're free to see the forest and the trees.
Upon hearing of the Supreme Court's decision, McCain at first said "I don't agree, but let's move on." He should have left it at that. But next day, after a night with his political advisors, we got McCain's second reaction. From the senator's retake we now know that would-be president McCain has a pretty shallow understanding of the role of the courts in a Democracy.
The guy they like to call "maverick" (as if that's what he is), quotes Chief Justice Roberts' dissent to the ruling about Guantanamo prisoners. Like the supreme Supreme, McCain also complained judges are unaccountable to voters. Thank God!
But as writer S.Kadidal says at the Huffington Post, "That is precisely why they are well-situated to … hold the executive branch accountable for its abuses and incompetence. Measures that are popular with voters - including … the notion of detaining foreigners without legal rights or judicial review - often leave us less safe than we would have been without them"
The constitution was not conceived to grant its rights and privileges as if we lived in Utopia. Poet Wislawa Szymborska fills us in on that long dreamed-of place in her poem of the same name. She says that Utopia is an "island where all becomes clear", where "the tree of understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It". In Utopia, the poet says, there is the "Valley of Obviously" over which towers the mount of "Unshakeable Confidence" whose peak "offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things."
But, says Szymborska (big but): "For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, /and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches / turn without exception to the sea. / As if all you can do here is leave and plunge, never to return, into the depths. / Into unfathomable life."
In other words, life ain't so neat and tidy. Utopia might be a wonderful place, but those who were smart and brave enough to set the foundation of our nation never, for an instant, thought we lived there, or ever could. They were too realistic for that. That's why they wrote the Constitution.The constitution was not created for the good times when everything is brimming with justice and very cool. It's not for the times everyone agrees; when strife is distant, and the wolf is not at the door. Who needs a constitution when everything's A-OK? You need a constitution when everything is not A-OK, when people don't agree, when the wolf is not just at the door but in the bedroom eating grandma. That's when you need laws and firm guiding principles to keep the predators in suits from feasting on the riff-raff.
But John McCain, of all people, fails to apprehend this simple idea --McCain the man who spent tortured years in a prison with no recourse. Maybe, in his lust for power, he just forgot. He wouldn't be the first.
If any government, on the authority of just one man -a president even- can imprison people, keep them confined, and torture them(!) without even an opportunity to suggest he got the wrong guy, forget about the price of gas, you and your kids have got a much bigger problem than that to keep yourselves occupied in the immediate future. Not all enemies come from without.
Thursday June13, 2008.
...
Bush McCain McBush BuCain CaBush McCush McBain McSame
12:59 am |
How low are you willing to go in the "war on terror"?
12:16 am |
How low is the average American willing to go to sell their soul? What price is too great for"safety"? How much can one get for a safe soul these days?
Anyway, over at Low Road, Tiger Red, fills us in on our prison ships, and things like that. The home of the brave and the land of the free with –prison ships. Doesn't this seem just a little dissonant?
What's your soul worth on the market today?
I'm voting Republican because the idea of America is old-hat and dangerous
12:05 am | <
