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Sunday, December 26, 2010
Stephen Colbert applauds Bill O'Reilly's brilliant borderline-heresy.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Crib From This Contra Glenn Beck
Now, the fact is that this dude ain't worth it, because unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh -- who, despite having a lot of dumb people in his audience, cannot himself truthfully be said to be dumb, on the basis of his considerable moneymaking acumen alone (and who also isn't worth it) -- Glenn Beck's dumb as a rock. And that's an understatement. I mean, the guy is really, really dumb. Not George-W.-Bush/good-ol'-boy/lacking-intellectual-curiosity dumb. We're talking glaring/conspicuous-cognitive-deficiencies-having dumb. That's how dumb Glenn The Dumb Guy Beck is dumb.
And anyway, I tire of expressing pure outrage (because making normal, intelligent people angry is precisely what Glen Beck is designed to do…to what end is beyond the scope of my comprehension), but what the hell is this guy talking about?
All he does is tell bizarre lies and attack both individuals and large communities in a way that is at once deeply vicious and confoundingly non-specific.
The latter is especially troubling, because when he demonizes others by using insinuations and weird neo-McCarthyist rhetoric — be it cries of “communists” or “fascists” or whatever — he is himself by definition engaging in precisely the rhetorical strategies that are the hallmark of propaganda in radical totalitarian regimes. Surely, even someone as willfully ignorant as Beck realizes this, and that’s part of what makes it so outrageous and mendacious as a provocation.
But what offends me even more than his lies, his slander and even his vulgar and continual celebration of his own ignorance, is the fact that he clearly does not have anyone’s best interests at heart. There is no trace of passion for any human cause — however misguided or illusory — to be found in either his persona or rhetoric.
He does not wish to change the minds of his ill-defined ‘political enemies’: He merely wants to silence them or to destroy them. His attitude toward his own audience (and even, at its core, toward himself) consists of nothing more than contempt.
According to the Weltanschauung he espouses (if I may call it that) the world is a dark, dark place where communication, understanding, consensus and even compromise among people is not only impossible but undesirable, whatever the specific circumstances, period.
In short, he's anti-democratic.
If Thomas Jefferson came back today and saw the things that Glenn Beck says in the name of ‘American patriotism’, he’d never stop throwing up.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
You have to see it to believe it.
First, the blog PhuckPolitics shares with us a video clip taken from Fox News that depicts talking heads engaging in what appears at first glance to be their run-of-the-mill, neo-corporightist and/or crypto-racist rhetoric. Whereupon, the viewer realizes that that decrepit Aussie Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour gift to this here land has transcended itself as regards its capacity to produce reckless and shameful innuendo.
The matter-of-fact nonchalance in this instance becomes all the creepier as the viewer ascertains that the correspondent posing as a putative "healthcare expert" -- naturally, a role delegated to a journalist on staff at the National Review -- is claiming that large-scale reforms to the present US healthcare system (which system is that, exactly?) will increase the threat to the Homeland of terrorist attacks.
And, of course, the anchorman interviewing this National Socialist Review stooge apparently sees no need to challenge -- however cursorily -- his colleague's 'hypothesis'. It's as though this bald-faced tidbit of demagogy were -- well, sir -- just plain old everyday common sense. The footage is about as offensive, twisted, wrong and evil as anything we've heretofore seen from these cynical manipulators of secessionist South fake-populism. I strongly encourage you to watch it.
Second, courtesy of an item posted by the blog DownWithTyranny, I learned a couple of new things. Apparently, the Deranged Right has become cyber-savvy. Who knew? Not many Republicans that I know are particularly skilled in the ways of the Internets, although that's probably because almost all of them are sexagenarians.
"Over the weekend," states the blogger (who I infer is an opponent of Tyranny and not Tyranny's homeboy),
a friend sent me a link for a Facebook polling [sic] asking whether President Obama should be killed. I called a friend of mine who works at the Secret Service. They were already on the case.Whew. That's pretty damn shocking. Can you remember anybody sending around Internet surveys asking this question about the previous occupant of the Oval Office? I certainly can't. And neither I nor those who were/are inclined to circulate lame Internet surveys were exactly huge fans of that administration.
But if you think that's shocking/disgusting, DownWithTyranny follows it up with something even worse. Initially showcased by a Web site called Right Wing Watch, DWT presents an outcry
more disturbing than Joe Wilson's "You lie" screech at the Joint Session of Congress. This outbreak was from another extreme right wing Republican congressional backbencher looking for some attention, Trent Franks, whose Arizona district stretches from the suburbs west of Phoenix through Glendale and Sun City and up to the northwest corner of the state. [...]Take a look at the short video and transcript of Congressman Franks's remarks, which DWT points out was likely to have encouraged fanatics to advocate proceeding with the ouster of the current administration through the staging of a military coup:
Franks is an angry and driven man who feels he was dealt a bad hand in life. He's filled with irrational paranoia, bigotry and hatred. And, of course, he's a birther. Normally the Republican leadership keeps him away from the cameras and microphones but this week he escaped from the reservation and found an opportunity to declare President Obama "an enemy of humanity." [Emphasis mine - cft]
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic... Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?There are some scary people out there. Shouldn't more people be lambasting the Republican Party for encouraging this kind of extremism? There are probably people out there who have never quite gotten over the Civil War. Sure, in important ways, they're marginalizing themselves into their destiny of political irrelevance. But even so, don't these people have guns?
Now you'll have to excuse me as I proceed to retreat into my multi-racial, multi-ethnic Democratic-voting Chicago neighborhood and hope that, if I ignore them, these problems will go away....
Friday, November 7, 2008
CNN.com: "Moderates to blame for GOP losses, conservative leader says"
This is exactly the kind of dream-world nonsense Brooks is referring to. It's going to be very entertaining to watch from the sidelines as the GOP keeps this up! And as it continues to lose election after election after election....Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told CNN that conservatives need to take back control of the GOP if the party is to return to its winning ways.
"Moderates never beat conservatives. We've seen that in past elections," he said.
Rejecting suggestions that the conservative movement was viewed as being out of touch with the electorate, Perkins says the Republican Party needs to go back to basics.
"It's a return to fundamental conservative principles that Ronald Reagan showed work and that people can be attracted to," Perkins said. (Full article on CNN.com)
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Sarah Palin: a lip-smacking summary & dismissal.
Palin, McCain roasted on a rotisserie built from their own lies!
"Put Lipstick on Sarah Palin...," by Rosa Brooks
Keep the faith, comrades! We'll win this thing yet. (I think I should go to bed.)
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Polemic of the day, from Downbeaten Wife
Contributed by Jenny Ludwig
Palin responds to several successive interview question as if there were no--and indeed is not ever any--gray areain sexual politics, as if being "pro-life" were equivalent to what she calls "choosing life" (and this video dates from long before McCain picked her for duck-duck-grey duck). As she flatly refuses to even acknowledge the differences between the situations that the interviewer offers, repeating "I would choose life" with the complacency and saccharine kindness that only the self-righteous can muster, it occurred to me that, unlike other conservative thinkers that I have known--indeed, unlike even the zealots and near-Nazis that I've known--Palin actually thinks that her deeply warped ideas describe the world, that you don't need anything more than an adage and a strong will to make the world as you think it should be, and, most importantly, that if you govern the world as you would govern the world you want, that the world will come to match the government you offer. Palin has forgotten that it's the dealer's game, and the odds are with the callous world, which invariably overpowers the insufficient and brittle structures we invent. The repeated lesson of history is that reality's great gambit is to overpower and undermine attempts to contain it through description; it wins every time against the theorized, the dreamed, the written, the desired, the proclaimed, the denied, the imagined and the depicted.
What has this to do with gender politics? you ask. Amber made a great quip last night, which she meant as a kind-of serious throwaway: When I said "pro-life," she responded, "Or, as I like to say, anti-choice." This reversal of the key terms of the abortion debate reveals the degree to which (as per far too often) it is the "anti-choice" lobby that has established the terms of the debate. Who, after all, wouldn’t "choose life"? It is primarily Sarah Palin's complacency--the complacency of the chosen-—that makes me so fucking angry about her nomination, but also the way that central questions about gender politics and government are obscured by the tepid debate about Palin's gender, womanhood recast as the glory of motherhood, which makes a woman stronger rather than weaker. Palin trumps Clinton through her ever-productive womb and her mobilization of the sexual appeal of that fertility through the production of an ahistorical femininity. In this arena, a world whose changes are immaterial to the highly motivated, women’s rights (rather than her own nomination) are a kind of affirmative action; if women had been strong enough, they would never have been kept down by unchecked fecundity.
But the great power of Obama's promise is that he can roll with the punches, that he is going to look around before he decides what to do, that--in contradistinction to my vision of Palin--not just government but ethical behavior and responsible relationships with other people overall depend on the capacity to look at what is actually outside of you before you decide what to do or say. To be certain, Palin's gender has no relation to her politics whatever and it's more laughable than insulting to imagine a Hillary Clinton supporter voting for this Stalinist bitch, but she is being presented as someone who is able to cope with the modern world without giving up her value system. [NB: Palin doesn't, of course, describe herself as a feminist and as this quite elegant discussion on Slate points out, this is not what our mothers fought for--for our right to choose; to return to work the day after giving birth and to be so fucking awesome we neither want nor need any physical, household, bodily, familial or emotional help]. But, aside from the fact that--and I paraphrase from The View--you can't exchange a vagina for a vagina, even one whose fertility is unchecked, the larger point is that Sarah--and Bristol--Palin''s rights and abilities to have the children they want, to keep the babies that may not have been foreseen, to decide that motherhood is what they want, that they don't want to use birth-control or wouldn't ever terminate a pregnancy, are never and have never been in jeopardy. Pro-choice is not (as my Dad is unfortunately though occasionally wont to say) "pro-abortion"; rather, it supports the right to choose either way.
This occurs to me partly because I--like most of my peers--spent decades understanding Roe v. Wade as central to my own life. I never lived in a time or a place when I didn't know that free, safe and private advice, support, and--did I so want--an abortion were available to me. When I was seventeen (or twenty-seven), if I had gotten pregnant, I would have gotten an abortion, as most of my friends who got pregnant did. Now, however, at the grand old age of 33, when I am much less likely to make such grand mistakes than at 17, I know that I would never have an abortion. My relationship with Roe v. Wade has shifted; the rights it endows are for mychildren and grandchildren, not for me. And, of course, for Sarah Palin's three daughters.
The idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is related to Sarah Palin's parenting is absurd; the Christian Right finally got one thing right when they admitted that seventeen-year-old girls get pregnant all the time, in every country in the world, every state in the Union (even those that might want to secede), and even in the most evangelical of evangelical households. And, frankly, most seventeen-year olds get pregnant because they don't use birth control even when they do have sex-ed classes, curfews, moms who don't work or regale their children with stories of when they marched on Washington and piles of condoms for the taking in guidance offices and clinics.
But, Palin's "I am pro-life" goes far beyond the question of an unplanned pregnancy, elaborating a policy stance into a lifestyle choice. Her daughter, therefore,--her seventeen-year old high-school senior of a daughter--is not just having this child, she is getting married and raising that child. I'm going to show my age, but, in my day, if you didn't want to get an abortion (and in my parents, when you couldn't), you went to stay with Aunt Susy for a year, to attend a different school and get some "rest". Then you came back and finished high-school. If Bristol Palin was sacrificed for this campaign, it is not only in that her personal life was made public for her mother's benefit, nor even that she "chose" to bear this child—and I don’t think any of us believe she had any real "choice"—to ratify her mother’s ethical stance, but because she "chose" to marry and keep the child, to extend the Palin clan to a third generation. Her entire life was sacrificed for Palin’s ideals. And that, perhaps, is my point. I think Sarah Palin was lucky as hell that Bristol was the one who got knocked up. She seems like a sweet kid, but very much sculpted by her mother and bearing the brunt of the intense parental scrutiny, protectiveness and pressure that only the oldest girl in a family can feel. So, she said she'd keep the kid and marry the boy, and, frankly, she probably wasn't going to leave Wasilla anyway.
But Sarah Palin has three & daughters, and one of those daughters is going to show her, in the worst and most painful way possible, how much her ideologically-restrictive, Stalinist, depressingly provincial tight-fist rule costs. If Bristol were a slightly different child, was given a bit more or a bit less freedom, went to better or even worse schools, spent her childhood in Anchorage or Washington, was a year or too older or younger, she wouldn't have agreed to bear that child; she would have run away, or aborted it by herself or drank and smoked herself and it into oblivion; and one of Sarah Palin's daughter is going to be that child. Piper Palin may spend the next ten years of her life in Washington; it will be 2015 or so before she's thinking about sex, and we don't even know what the world will look like. But Sarah Palin, who will not let herself or is not able to imagine any kind of world that she can't control if she is given a chance, will still be laying out the same rules and the same reasons and expecting them to resound as they did before.
But doesn't that seem unlikely? Maybe Piper won't want to give up her scholarship to college or just because mom says so. Maybe one of Palin's daughters will be raped in the big city, or some older boy or relative will use her and leave her. For whatever reason, if Sarah Palin makes her two younger daughters live in a world
where sex-ed is unnecessary and abortion is illegal, one of them won't want to have the child that will inevitably be conceived. And Sarah will watch her world--the one she has constructed so painstakingly and bolstered with the center of her arrogant little soul--, along with any other worlds she could even imagine, come smashing down around her head as she watches one of her daughters bleed out on her pale-pink bathroom floor, with a hanger sticking out of her cootch, because there wasn't a single goddamn doctor or nurse in Alaska who would give her an abortion.
__________________
* A good friend of the author and of the author's husband, too. -- Ed.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
I think that the GOP has thrown in the towel: Palin is a nightmare who appeals only to a narrow base of inbred racist mean people.
Let's face it, people: the Republicans are sitting this one out. Just as when George H.W. failed to get his second turn, the GOP knows that it's not going to win this election, and so instead, it's concentrating on galvanizing the solidarity of its base. It's leaving a huge deficit that will be sure to cripple Obama's ability to push through his domestic agenda, and the Sarah Palinites will remain true to the cause, and they're have abortion, guns and "the liberal media" on their mind.
By the way: WHO ACTUALLY STILL USES THE PHRASE "THE LIBERAL MEDIA??" Answer: nobody. Not anybody who knows what they're talking about. But the GOP is playing the game it's played in one way or another since Nixon. It's going to feed on the weepy, self-centered "victimization" and "marginalization" of white, unsophisticated, lower- and lower-middle-class white people. Particularly born-again Christians. That is the only group of people in the world who think the media are "liberal" after the Iraq War. And that's because they're basically fascists: uneducated and confused about the world. And they are precisely the people for whom the low-rent spectacle of this year's Republican Convention has been staged.
They're not trying to win this thing. They're setting their sights on future elections.
Further bric-a-brac upon which I rest my thesis:
Sarah Palin has chosen to exploit her own daughter's pregnancy: and when "family values" types do this kind of thing, we have the right, my friends, to point and to laugh our little Left-liberal-blogosphere-asses off. So take that, Rudy "Looks, Sounds and Thinks Like A Dumber and Meaner Benito Mussolini" Giuliani. But beyond that, whatever bullshit sympathy accrues to the Stupid Alaskan Bitch from an understanding, partner-in-white-born-again-Christian-victimization Christian Right, it's simply not going to be durable enough to carry her and much less to carry McCain to a general election victory. I mean, could you actually picture this freak show in the White House/VP mansion? I just don't fucking think so.
Also, thanks to Gypsy Sun & Rainbows for first bringing my attention to this tasty little morsel, which I think gives us a pretty good idea of what Republicans across the country are saying behind closed doors, even as they churn out bullshit lies in their columns about how very earthy Sarah "I BURN BOOKS, WHICH IS ALSO WHAT ADOLF HITLER (A NAZI) DID" Palin is.
This really is a new low for politics in my lifetime. I mean like, for real. It's just so cynical and full of hate. And we have the Republicans to thank for wasting our time with it.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Sarah Palin: not just dumb, but evil. And the embodiment of a lunatic fringe fringier & more lunatic than known previously to exist.
- When she was mayor of Alaska, Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, Time, "Mayor Palin: A Rough Record":
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.
- Did you hear that? I said that Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual":
Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.
Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.
The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.
- And, in addition to attempting to BAN BOOKS -- you know, like what they did in NAZI FUCKING GERMANY? -- Sarah Palin is a mean-spirited, vindictive, ideologically rapacious nightmarish RNC-funded opportunist who refuses to accept the idea of Christians assuming public office if they are not born-again Christians (New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual"):
The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people — Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? — seemed all but obsolete the year Ms. Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent, John C. Stein.Dear Reader: I beg of you: don't let the Republicans pull this country back into a never-ending fascistic culture-war hell.
Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf.....Ms. Palin and her passion for Republican ideology and religious faith overtook a town known for a wide libertarian streak and for helping start the Iditarod dog sled race.
“Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”
“I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’ ” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”
VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA TO PUT AN END TO ALL OF THIS NONSENSE. AND CONVINCE YOUR FRIENDS TO DO SO TOO. If we don't win this one for the Constitution, the rule of law, a respect for reason, the sciences and the humanities, an understanding of the primacy of quality education as a moral and economic necessity, we are going to endure decades of listening to idiots like Sarah Palin. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY! DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOUR AND MY CHILDREN. VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
McCain campaign, in bid to more closely resemble reality TV show, chooses airline stewardess as would-be VP.
Are you fucking
kidding me?
Reasons why McCain's selection of a quasi-Canook cocktail waitress as his running mate is either an act of desperation or cry for help:- She's a cocktail waitress.
- Or a airline stewardess, or whatever.
- She's dumb.
- Her political career -- such as it is (and it isn't!) -- consists of mayoral offices in towns with populations equal to the number of people currently standing at the Belmont El stop, and having done so at the behest of oil companies that use her as their little doe-eyed puppet to screw the American people out of their own natural resources.
- Her husband looks like a child molester:
- Not only that, but he works for BP.
- She has no qualifications and in fact has never set foot outside the United States. Check out this -- sorry, it's difficult to type because I'm laughing so hard -- time line in the The New York Times, which documents her lifetime of formidable achievements -- which include graduating from journalism school at the University of Idaho, playing Division 3 basketball at some piece of shit Alaskan college, and apparently (winning I'm not kidding about this) some kind of local beauty contest. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
- The number of disgruntled Hilary-supporters who would actually vote for this woman, who's rabidly "pro-life" (and even though she's not hypocritical about it -- what with the five babies or whatever, and the baby recently born with Down's syndrome -- she's still pro-life which is hella-NOT what Hilary supporters are). Plus any women with even a vague feminist impulse can't support this biatch. Why? Because she's obviously dumb as a goddamn brick!
- They look terrible together. As if McCain's fucking Botoxy socialite bitch of a wife didn't make him look bad enough, now he looks even more like some creepy old man, collecting young girls to stand next to him (and make him look old, which doesn't help him). Observe:
Say NO to this, America! It's so fucking creepy!
- She's .... uh ... not qualified to be president. And as Rahm Emanuel pointed out, it's not like ol' Johnny's not #1 in the most likely to die while in office category.
- I mean, seriously, could you imagine if this bimbo became president? And no, I'm not equating "looks" (which she supposedly has? says somebody, not sure who) with stupidity. I'm equating stupidity with stupidity.
- And I'm not equating inexperience with unsuitability for office. I'm equating the combination of inexperience and stupidity with unsuitability for office.
- And, you see, Barack Obama -- to the extent he's "inexperienced" -- is also smart, inspiring, on-the-ball, the galvanizer of a nationwide movement....I mean, he's Barack Fucking Obama, and this chick is just some dumb cheerleader from butt-fuck nowhere, with a dumbass husband who looks like he's inbred or something. I don't want that motherfucker anywhere near the White House. He would stain the furniture just by looking at it.
- Isn't America sick of all of this fucking Conservative Christian bullshit? Can't all of the Fascists-For-Jesus people just go away?
- She's into hunting and NASCAR and all that other redneck bullshit. Isn't America sick of all the redneck shit yet? I mean, come on.
- And also the fucking oil people? Aren't we sick of having motherfuckers who work for oil companies setting our fucking foreign policy? Examples in the current Administration of people who RECENTLY WORKED for oil companies (off the top of my head): Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush. AREN'T PEOPLE SICK OF THESE FUCKING ASSHOLES? You want more of this shit, Conservative Christian America? Need more oil CEOs setting your policy for you?? We are a country of dumbass masochistic assholes, and we seem to get what we deserve.
- Apparently John and Sarah hadn't spoken to one another until like a couple of days ago, and then, only briefly. No surprise.
- Just no.
- Were the two of them to win the presidency, satire as a form of humor and communication would cease entirely to be distinguishable from reality. It's already close enough now, with Bush and his cowboy hats and his "Mission Accomplished" airplane stunt.
- She's Dan Quayle in drag.*
* Not my joke. I can't remember where it came from. But it's good, no?

