No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Putting the "ass" in assassination

Dick Cheney, the President of Vice, just loves lurking in the bushes - he's at it again. He reminds me more and more of a dirty old man getting ready to pounce on some passing children. "Hey, wanna see my branch of government? Heh heh heh! Subpoena this, suckers! Go fuck yourselves!" Then of course he would shoot someone in the face.

Have you ever wondered what the last few years of nightmare would have been like if the Dems had half a backbone between them? Read this and weep for what might have been.

Meanwhile the rethugs, undeterred by their loss of subpoena power, are plotting to subpoena Valerie Plame. I suppose they're still jumping up and down and screaming about Joe Wilson going on a "junket" to Niger, one of the poorest countries on earth. Jesus H. Christ on a goddam pennyfarthing bicycle! Those mouth-foaming neanderthals are so extreme, so far removed from reality, they inhabit an alternate dimension beyond space and time, in the foul Stygian depths of Cthulhu Cheney's lair.

Speaking of which, just when you think Ann Cthulhu has hit absolute rock bottom in shear loathsomeness, the hideous harridan of hatred plunges to new, jaw-dropping depths of utter vileness and bestiality. The grotesque gorgon of gall says that we should invade oil-rich countries, kill their leaders, forcibly convert their populations to christianity, blow up the UN and the New York Times building, execute liberals, "talk" to them with a baseball bat, and assassinate John Edwards. And the liberal media continues to treat this vicious virago of venom as a font of wisdom and humor, rather than the sickening freakshow she/he/it (henceforth to be abbreviated as "shit") is. I'm sure even Paris Hilton is sick and tired of seeing her transsexual father's incredibly ugly face saturating the airwaves.

I'd better stop blogging before I throw up on my keyboard. Later...

All in all, it's just another brick from the wall

There's a definite theme to my blog posts tonight - the stunning, jaw-dropping arrogance and unaccountability of the George Bush Junior regime. This time Junior is aided and abetted by his black-robed lapdogs, the SCROTUS, who have ruled that nobody has standing to file lawsuits against Junior's "faith-based initiatives." The rationale was almost as weak and convoluted as the ruling that installed him in the White House in the first place.

And so another brick is torn out of the wall of church-state separation, and we are one step closer to a christofascist theocracy.

Cheney to US Constitution: "Go fuck yourself"

By now you've heard the latest outrageous example of the Junior Junta's incredible arrogance and criminality: Darth Cheney is refusing to obey the law regarding classified documents his office handles. Just when you think you've seen everything...

Cthulhu Cheney's insultingly lame and mendacious excuse is that he is not part of the executive branch. Oh, really? Then hand over the minutes and attendance records from those secret meetings where Enron wrote your energy policy, or where the betrayal of a covert CIA agent was planned and coordinated. After all, you falsely claimed executive privilege then, but now you've admitted that you weren't entitled to invoke it. Oh, and stop drawing money from the public treasury to fund your office. You aren't entitled to a penny. Best of all, resign before you are impeached.

Lady Liberty just got shot in the face once again... how long more will we continue to tolerate this crime wave in the White House?

Toxic schlock

What a shameless bitch.

WASHINGTON -- Ex-EPA chief Christie Whitman denounced as "downright falsehoods" the criticism of her assurances that it was safe to breathe the air around the fallen World Trade Center.

"There are people to blame. They are the terrorists that attacked the United States, not the men and women of all levels of government," Whitman said Monday at a hearing where she faced some of her toughest congressional critics.

I don't think it was Osama bin Laden who ordered lower Manhattan workers back to work and assured them the air was safe to breath when it was loaded with carcinogens... (See also this cartoon.)

This is the George Bush Junior regime all over - arrogance, hubris, lies, total lack of accountability, demonizing anyone who points out your crimes, corruption and incompetence, and banging the 9/11 drum to drown out any criticism. Also, total contempt for the law and the "little people" who have to follow it.

The Junta has left a toxic residue that will take centuries to clean up, if and when we take this country back from them. We ought to round up every last one of those corrupt criminal traitors and bury them in a lead-line chamber in a salt bed one mile below the surface of the earth. Then wait for their evil and sleaziness to decay over the next few million years...

The infinite dumbfuckery of the extreme lunatic right

IN THE MAIL: Col. Buzz Patterson's War Crimes: The Left's Campaign to Destroy Our Military and Lose the War on Terror.

I don't think that the left wants to lose the war on terror, exactly -- they just want Bush to lose the war on terror. I suspect, however, that Patterson's theme is one that we'll hear more in the future, especially if things go badly in Iraq.

No, dumbfuck. Here's a cluebat: George Bush Junior has already lost the war on terror. We just want him held accountable for it. And we're really sick and tired of chickenshit little dumbfucks like you placing the blame for your beloved Junior's fucktardery everywhere except where it belongs. Now run away and play with yourself.

Gun! Kill! Dead! Piss!

So I submitted my humble blog to the blog ratings classification board, and got NC-17. "This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words: * gun (9x) * kill (6x) * dead (2x) * piss (1x)" Oookay... I guess that's what I get for blogging for gun reform and against the mindless extremism and gun fetishism of the NRA. And I'm sure some of those "kills" and "deads" were in reference to the neonazi-con's monstrously obscene and immoral war against Iraq.

I know the "rating" was generated by some simplistic algorithm which triggers on relatively innocuous words (it reminds me of "murder-death-kill" from "Demolition Man"), but I can't help seeing a parallel with the extreme lunatic right that continues to support 28% Boy. They get synchronized screaming fits of the vapors when some liberal says "fuck" or "shit", but they are wilfully blind to incredible evil of the warmongering policy they support (though not by enlisting), and the infinite suffering it causes.

Oh well, if you're under 17, you probably aren't reading this blog anyway. And if your IQ is under 17, you're a George Bush Junior supporter and you certainly aren't reading this blog.

Arizona Conservative Idiot of the Week: the Arizona state legislature

Or at least those powerful Republican members who shot down a bill to create "International Baccalaureate" schools in Arizona, a program which has been highly successful in other states - until sabotaged by local fundy extremists.

The program, which would have been heavily subsidized by businesses and universities at a relatively minimal cost to the state, would allow children to learn a second language in kindergarten and would have focused on teaching about other countries and cultures in order to graduate students who can compete with their far better-educated counterparts from abroad. University and corporate leaders agree there is a crying need for such programs if the United States is to stay competitive in the global economy.

But the rethugs don't care; such programs are evil and Satanic, and "part of a slippery slope to a U.N. takeover and the end of U.S. sovereignty." Why? Because they expose children to the existence of a big wide world out there, instead of mindlessly inculcating "Americanism" and "United States heroes", and teaching children that America is the only country in the world with the One True System of Government (TM), and the only one where they are free to bear arms and worship Jeezus - two activities that go hand in hand, apparently.

I'm constantly astounded, not only by the ignorance of the religious lunatic extreme right, but their pride in their ignorance. They wallow in nativism, know-nothingism, and self-imposed blindness and backwardness. Gawd forbid that our kids should know anything about the world in which they will have to compete for a living! If it ain't in the Holey Buybull or the Book of Mor(m)on, you don't need to know it, so shut up and keep flipping burgers.

Of course, this anti-knowledge force field with which fundies surround themselves is part of the arsenal of defenses that makes American-style hard-right fundyism such a pernicious and virulent meme. By encasing its victims in an impenetrable cocoon of self-righteous ignorance, it guarantees that they are never exposed to any facts that might disturb their blinkered, rigid, unthinking world view and cause them to question their assumptions. Thus the meme ensures its continued survival and propagation.

If ignorance is bliss, those 'thugs in the state capital are in friggin' Nirvana.

That's mormonic!

A story in the Arizona Repulsive describes how Mormon tourists are swarming around pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico and Central America, "strengthening their faith" by walking in what they believe are the footsteps of the lost tribes of Israel who sailed to America and founded the Mayan culture.

Needless to say, mainstream archaeologists state categorically that there is no connection between the Mayans and any putative lost tribes of Israel, whatever Joseph Smith may have claimed. But that doesn't deter the Mormon tourists who smugly "nod knowingly" and "chime in with scripture references" as they are herded around the sacred sites of a civilization they know nothing about and have no intention of learning anything about - they just want to shoehorn it into their narrow religious world view.

Mormonism is such a Mickey Mouse, self-evidently false religion, that only in America could it thrive and become a multi-billion-dollar industry. I visited the temple in Salt Lake City several years ago, and the experience could be summed up as "Jesus in Disneyland." What I remember most vividly amidst all the kitsch and schmaltz is a huge spiral ramp that you walk up while viewing murals showing scenes from Mormon mythology. As you get to the top, you ascend into Heaven and see JHC and God standing on a cloud, joined by the hordes of people who were baptized posthumously. And don't get me started on the magic underpants thing.

The whole Mormon religion is such a crock, I don't know how anyone takes it seriously. I mean, come on! Some uneducated peasant crawls out of the woodwork and announces that he has discovered a set of golden plates carved in a strange language which only he can read, and the plates say he is God's prophet and can have as many women as he wants. Oh, and you'll just have to take his word that the plates even exist. Anyone with the IQ of a sea cucumber would reply, "Nice try, Joe. Still no luck getting laid, huh?"

Instead, Smith finds himself the head of a new religion, with thousands of people willing to give up everything and follow him into some gawd-forsaken desert. Smith's successors continue to lord it over their flock as divinely-appointed messengers with a hotline to the almighty. So when Utah wants to join the Union and is told it has to stop practicing polygamy, the celestial prophet gets a celestial message saying, ix-nay on the celestial marriage. How convenient! But sometimes God is a little tardy getting the celestial message across - like when he revealed to the faithful that black people do have souls after all, years after everyone else figured out that African-Americans should be treated as equals. Good friggin' grief, could it be any more blatantly obvious that Mormonism is a gigantic con?

But of course Mormons don't have a monopoly on stupidity by any means. Those tourists gallivanting around Meso-American ruins in search of some Disneyfied rewriting of history remind me of the silly fundies who go to Turkey in search of Noah's ark, or the cretinist tour groups who go into Science museums and loudly and obnoxiously proclaim that the exhibits are just evil Satanic propaganda, and the real science is that goddidit. (Hmmm, I wonder how the cretins would respond if some scientists turned up at the Creation Museum and started pointing out the lies, distortions, ignorance, stupidity and abysmal intellectual dishonesty that underpin this bloated boondoggle of dumbassery. I'm sure we'd never hear an end to all the whining about religious persecution and what nasty, impolite people those reality-based types are.)

Anyway, I know that as an uppity atheist I'm not the best authority on the subject, but it seems to me that religion shouldn't be about believing in some foolish just-so stories - it should be about trying to be a better person. If you "strengthen" your faith by cherry-picking isolated facts, ripping them out of context and shoving them willy-nilly into some childish fairy tale, while ignoring huge masses of countervailing facts, then your faith is shallow and stunted, both morally and intellectually.

I've always believed that it's not which ancient scroll you believe in that determines whether you are a virtuous person, it's how you act towards your fellow creatures - a point that seems utterly lost on holy-roller tourists of all stripes.

How we cope

I've fallen way behind in my blogging - I've been working insane hours lately, and then coming home and working on another project which will hopefully, at some stage, liberate me from my cubicle-slave existence - so I am just going to catch up with some philosophical ruminations, inspired by a discussion on the Mike Malloy show that I was listening to while driving home.

Malloy and his callers were discussing how they cope with the rage and frustration that builds up in them as they contemplate life under the Bush regime. People have various strategies: going for a walk, hugging a tree or making music. How do I cope? You're looking at it - my blog.

Anyone who only knows me from this blog may think I'm this really high-strung guy who goes around in a constant rolling boil, overflowing with rage and anger. But anyone who knows me personally, realizes that nothing could be further from the truth. I'm really a pretty laid-back guy, and (dare I say it) a nice one, in the real world. This blog is my place for cutting loose and enjoying a temporary different persona. I deliberately try to be outrageous and over the top in how I express myself, but hopefully always leavened with humor and snark. Because if you just want pure unadulterated knee-jerk anger, with no coherent thought behind it, any right-wing pundit will give you an infinite supply.

This is not to say that I am insincere. I do get pretty pissed off sometimes. In fact I experience a complex mix of emotions which can not simply be summarized (and trivialized) as "rage." Yeah, I feel anger and outrage, as well as nausea and disgust, at the incredibly arrogance, corruption, criminality, treason and incompetence of the extreme-right ruling junta. I feel contempt for the ignorance, stupidity, backwardness and bigotry of their useful idiots, the mouth-breathing, gay-bashing, brown-bashing, science-hating "base" (or as one says in Arabic, al Qaeda). And I feel despair at the cowardly, craven, quisling Democrats in Congress who refuse to stand up and grow a backbone when we are crying out to them to oppose the never-ending destruction by the extreme right of our most important institutions.

Anyway, most of the time I try to let all the sleaze and stupidity wash over me, and to maintain an amused cynical detachment. But every so often it gets too much, and I just have to vent and let off steam. The result is a blog post. If someone else enjoys the post and finds it worth reading, that's gravy. And if someone gets their knickers in a knot over it, that's even better.

I guess what I'm saying is that a sense of humor is essential for surviving these dark days.

Over to you. How do you cope with this crap? Do you blog? Make music? Hug trees? Comment, dammit!

Nil carborundum illegitimati!

It's not a football game!

I don't want to jump too hard on Dirk, he is a good liberal who does sterling work pissing off the conservatards, but he pushed my button with this comment.

The 'sectarian' violence in Iraq is so idiotic. They are all Muslims. I can't remember the exact differences between Sunni and Shia, but it's something about the way they pray and dress. The Iraq religious violence is not just a Middle East thing, it's similar to what was happening in Ireland where Catholics and Protestants had to kill each other for control.

People always bring up Ireland (or, if they have a little knowledge, Northern Ireland specifically) as the prime example of a place where people hate each other and are killing each other just because they are different religions. When I first crossed the pond to attend grad school in Boston, I quickly got tired of people asking me if I had emigrated to escape the violence. (Especially considering that Boston's crime rate is orders of magnitude higher than Dublin's.) One guy had an interesting variation; as soon as he heard I was from Ireland, he asked me if I was from the green side or the orange side. (Because there's only two choices, apparently.) Unfortunately I didn't think of the correct response at the time: "It's not a football game."

I'm sure you've heard the joke whose punchline is, "Yes, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?" Anyway, the Northern Ireland situation is much more complex than "holy war". For a start I would point out that Catholics and Protestants manage to live together perfectly peacefully in the Republic of Ireland, and although Protestants are 5% of the population there, 25% of Irish presidents have been Protestant. And to further mess with your mind, the IRA is a Marxist organization that has a profound contempt for Catholicism.

In Northern Ireland, it's not just about religious differences, there is also a long history of Catholics being treated as second-class subjects and considered inherently "disloyal" by virtue of their religion - rather like Shiites under Saddam, I suspect. In Northern Ireland, religion happens to be a useful proxy for all sorts of divisions - primarily, the indigenous Irish population are mostly Catholic and the descendants of the colonial settlers (what Merkins call the "Scotch-Irish", though many are of English descent) are mostly Protestant. For the Catholics, the conflict is mainly a struggle for freedom from British colonialism, and religion really has nothing to do with it, any more than the US civil war was a conflict between the colors blue and grey. For some Protestants, like Ian Paisley, it is in fact a religious struggle against heathen Catholic hordes, with the British monarchy standing in for Jesus Christ, and the pope for the Antichrist - I told you this was complex.

Anyway, religious differences in themselves don't necessarily trigger violence - but when one religion has an imbalance of political power, watch out! That is why separation of church and state is such a vital principle, one worth fighting to the death to protect. If the religious-right lunatics here in the US had half a brain between them, they would realize that church-state separation benefits them just as much as it benefits other religions and people of no religion.

Let's close with some words of wisdom on this subject from that raving liberal loonie (compared to today's conservatoids), Barry Goldwater:

• "When you say 'radical right' today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye."
• "By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars."
• And my personal favorite: "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."

Yay Stacy!

This was posted several days ago and I just came across it, but I felt like cheering as I read it.

We buried Jerry Falwell. Can we please bury superstition, now, too? Every last bit of it?

No blaming homosexuals and feminists for "angering God". No blaming the ACLU and secularists for keeping prayer out of public schools, thus losing the Creator's protection. No belief that AIDS came from God to punish tolerance of gays. And no correlations between natural disasters and the holiness of the people whose lives were destroyed by them.

Read the whole thing. There are some pretty good comments too.

Bush pardons Paris Hilton by mistake

See also Bush pardons Libby Dole by mistake. I guess the message got garbled in the White House today - someone told Junior that some rich white bitch was heading for prison and needed to be sprung, and he didn't realize they meant Scooter Libby.

Anyway, the Baltimore Chronicle has a useful summary of Traitorgate and its many links to the criminals who are still roving around the White House. ("They turn my stomach in clusters, because their roots connect them.") And the Albuquerque Tribune spells out exactly why Libby shouldn't be pardoned. Remember when rethugs were for the rule of law before they were against it?

Of course the wingnuts are still frantically spewing their talking points, distortions and outright lies. In fact a rural Virginia newspaper even hints that Valerie Plame, not Libby, should go to jail. However, the readers commenting on the editorial unanimously say that the editor is full of it. I guess there's still hope for America.

Arizona Conservate Idiot of the Week: the Arizona Republic

For years, the vast right-wing noise machine has been pouring out a never-ending torrent of hatred and bile against Democrats and liberals. "They don't want to do what's right for America" is far, far milder than anything the extreme-right hatemongers ever said about the Dems. The words "sick", "evil", "traitor" and worse, were constantly rolling off their forked tongues. And the Arizona Repulsive and its partisan hack columnists were forever cheering them on and joining in the fun.

Now the rethugs are turning their venom on each other, and the Grey Lady of Van Buren Street is suddenly wringing its hands about the "bitter, divisive" and "unforgivable" language that is poisoning the political atmosphere.

Well, boo friggin' hoo! You reap what you sow, 'thugs. Pardon me while I pour myself a tall, cool glass of schadenfreude.

If it wasn't for double standards, the Arizona Republic and its namesake party wouldn't have any standards at all.

In Xanadu did Kubla Bush a stately pleasure dome decree...

A quick follow-up to my previous post. Read this article about the gargantuan US "embassy" planned for Baghdad and tell me I'm wrong about the neonazi-cons plotting world domination.

Also, I note that in the post about Ford's Pardon of Nixon that I cited, I wrote:

Unless the Democrats take control of Congress and promptly commit mass seppuku (always a possibility)...

Am I prescient or what?!

Everything's just peachy

Gary Kamiya explains why Junior hasn't been impeached yet, despite his never-ending cavalcade of crime, treason, corruption and stunning ineptitude. The sad fact is that after 9/11, many Merkins don't want the rule of law, they don't want a president with a functioning neuron or two in his skull, they don't want stable, competent government (even when natural disaster strikes, as in Katrina) - all they want is revenge. They want blood, they don't care whose, and Junior promises it to them... and delivers.

Junior clings on to power because he appeals to - even embodies - all that is base and brutal in America. The blind, unthinking blood lust, the immature swaggering, the naked anti-intellectualism, the racist and bigoted disdain for anyone who is an "other" - Monkeynuts has it all in spades.

Meanwhile the craven, cowardly Dems in Congress are doing their instinctive political calculus and trigonometry, and calculating that they personally have more to lose by fulfilling their constitutional duty and impeaching the bastard than by letting him continue to go down in flames and take his party with him. Never mind the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that will be thrown into the Iraqi black hole between now and January 2009. But they forget that the neonazi-cons have been around before - since Reagan's time, and even Nixon's - injecting their foul venom into our political process, and they will continue with their evil schemes of endless war and global domination unless a stake is driven through their black hearts once and for all.

Impeachment - it's not just for sex any more!

Emerge from the emergency: CHIMPEACH!!!

I blogged recently in a somewhat throwaway manner about NSPD-51, but it really is an appalling power grab by the Boy Blunder. It's an executive ordure which gives the feces-flinging chimperor virtually unlimited power. If he, at his sole discretion, determines that a national catastrophe has occurred (like a Democrat winning in '08?), he can:

take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government."

This is very scary stuff. Junior proposes to rule by decree in a way that goes infinitely beyond what Hugo Chavez, legally and transparently, did in Venezuela. (Remember how much screeching and wailing that provoked among the rightwads?)

Leaving aside the irony that the Constitution died the day the Supreme Court crowned George Bush Junior monarch of the United States in defiance of the national vote - let alone when he took office and began a long sustained shredding of that document - the US already has a plan for dealing with disasters, but it has checks and balances intended to prevent the president's emergency powers from being abused, and emergencies declared for trivial or partisan reasons. But NSPD-51 - most of which is classified - sweeps away the last few tattered shreds of the US Constitution and provides for a secret government that is totally unaccountable and out of control.

Whenever one complains about the endless abuses of power by the Junior Junta, extreme-right Bush-worshippers mindlessly chant in unison: "We're at war, we mustn't tie the president's hands, we mustn't stop him from getting good candid advice." But when you ask if they would be comfortable with anyone other than Junior - say, Hillary or Obama - holding such extraordinary powers, here's the response. I guess the regime takes the same view - there is no way they would let any Democrat or any moderate Republican (assuming such a creature ever regains control of the party ) use the unlimited dictatorial power they are currently arrogating to themselves, which means there is no way they will simply hand over the administration in January 2009. Another Reichstag fire, anyone?

This raving psychopath is so far out of control, it's unreal. I've lost count of the number of grounds we have for impeaching his ass. What are we waiting for? Tomorrow may be too late!

Chimpeach NOW!

The gayest blog I've ever seen

Check out Iraq Prayer Surge Now! - it's just bursting at the seems with unintentionally (?) homoerotic imagery. I'm surprised they didn't throw in a few Abu Ghraib pics. (Trust the Rude Pundit to find it.)