politics: Oh, great, here we go.

Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts and keep all arms and hands inside the vehicle while it's in motion.

Is this how it begins?
Bush Wants Answers on Iranian Leader's Past.

Does it really matter that much 25 years later? And when you have a country run by clerics, who took power in an Islamic revolution during which the Americans were taken hostage, do you really expect that someone high up in the power structure of that country's theocracy wouldn't have gotten his hands dirty back then?

Good gawd, George, quit ratcheting up the rhetoric so transparently.

Twit.

social issues: Spain ... again

Y'know, that former fascist dictatorship in southwestern Europe is now the fourth country in the world to legalize gay marriage (though it would seem like the 3rd to me, since as far as I know the Canadian law still technically has to go through the senate ... someone correct me if I'm wrong, or if the senate vote is just a formality)?

Get that?

Fascist.

Dictatorship.

Now one of the most socially progressive countries in the world.

And our country? Once perceived as the light of liberty in the world, the laissez-faire city on the hill, the most prosperous, admired, envied nation on earth?

At war with Islam, with science, with civil liberties, with the poor, with all manner of minorities (racial, social, political, etc.). Falling drastically behind in scientific, economic, political and social progress. Being eaten alive from the inside by cancerous greed, corporatism and lust for power.

Is there a point at which we'll have to give it up for dead and let the neofascists gnaw on the bones until they, too perish from their selfish shortsightedness?

It sickens me that they've even pushed things so far that I might even consider that my beloved country may eventually be beyond saving.

politics: Hurrah for Ken Mehlman!

Ken Mehlman's my hero. No, really. He provides me regularly with fodder for rants, dissatisfaction and general blood pressure elevation.

True to form came his e-mail this weekend containing the latest RNC Newspeak. Well, OK, it's not so new (Republicans have been parroting this crap for months). But still.

"Yesterday's era of Democrats like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy brought real ideas and solutions to the table in an attempt to make a better life for the American people," he says.

"Unfortunately, today's Democrat Party is not the one your parents knew. Instead, today's Democrats are singularly focused on obstruction and over-the-top rhetoric, adding nothing to raise the level of discourse and address the concerns of Americans."

All-righty. Democrats have plenty of ideas. Just because you don't like them, or because the SCLM doesn't cover them, or you don't let them come up for votes, doesn't mean they're not there.

Regardless, if you're on a train that's hell-bent on running off the edge of collapsed bridge up ahead over the canyon, you don't sit there and yell at the guy trying to pull on the emergency brake because he's trying to stop the train instead of coming up with another idea about where to drive it.

Idiots.

politics: Amusing statistic

Here's something I read in Ode this morning, a CNN, USA Today and Gallup poll from January asking if President Bush brings people together or drives them apart.

49 percent said he brings them together. 49 percent said he drives them apart.

I laughed out loud.

politics: This makes me happy ...

This makes me happy, but sort of in the same way you'd be happy if someone were in the process of chopping off your hand and instead chopped off four of your fingers:

House votes to limit Patriot Act search powers

politics/social issues: What color is the sky in Newsmax's world?

This is seriously perplexing, even for Newsmax. From their story headlined Facts Show Schiavo Was Not Blind:

In a press conference that raised more questions than it answered, Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin claimed that the "vision centers of her brain were dead," and as a result she could not see.

Seriously.

Not only does every other story out their contradict their headline; their own story contradicts the headline.

The story interestingly casts unfounded aspersions while quoting information from the press conference that directly refutes their every vile untruth.

So rather than honorably backing off their earlier venom, they continue to spew it while the ship of their disgusting politics sinks under their feet. It's sort of fascinating.

politics: Poor choice of gestures

Hi, George!

politics: The first step toward seceding: Make yer own flag

Oh. My. Gawd.

These people have seriously launched themselves with great gusto, speed and general verve off the edge of reason, shouting loud hallelujahs as they plunge through space.

From the Baltimore Sun: Creating a Christian flag for God and country

Fun facts and quotes from the article, if you don't feel like clicking over there:

• "Eldreth is untroubled by the notion of combining American and Christian symbols this way, as she quickly answers yes when asked whether the American purpose in the world is a specifically Christian project."
  
• "'I believe this country can only be great if God is behind us, and he is,' said Gary Folk, who displays his national Christian flag on a pole in front of his home in Cloverdale, Calif. 'That's why we are a superpower.'" Gott mit Uns, anyone?
  
• "Bobby Ables ... said, 'I don't get in politics too much,' but as he sees it, the flag suitably mixes God and country: 'That's what we are, a patriotic, Christian country.'"
  
• And then the one hyper-Christian phrase I've never understood: "It's time for America to bless God." Isn't it God who does the blessing? What ever happened to praising God for blessings received?
  

I've always thought that Christians, especially literalist Christians, ought to be more uncomfortable than they seem to be with America's near-worship of our flag, not that it's my business to tell them how to feel about things. But looking at the Word of God and all, it does seem inconsistent.

This seems worse, to me.

Seriously, you guys want your own theocracy, take Texas or something and go do your own thing. The rest of us have a country to save.

politics: Audacious mendacity

Wow, I've been quiet for awhile. We'll chalk it up principally to the fact that I was rather ill for over a week. Then there's the fact that though there's been such depressing news lately, it's been covered to death by everyone else and I just didn't see the point of going 'Me, too!' over and over again.

But I must re-emerge to present the June 'Disassembler of the Month' award to Ken 'No, I'm not gay! Seriously. I'm not! Shut up! SHUT UP! Lalalalala I can't hear you!' Mehlman, esteemed chairman of the Republican National Committee. Howard Dean may get all sorts of ire for bluntly stating the truth, but apparently Ken Mehlman gets none at all in the SCLM for lying.

You've probably all seen/heard/read about it in the alternative media outlet of your choice, but from MSNBC.com's transcript of June 5's Meet the Press (and if you get the time, do read the whole thing -- what a hoot he is!):

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to the now-famous Downing Street memo. This was a memo, July 23, 2002, from the head of British intelligence to Prime Minister Blair; in effect, notes taken from a briefing that was given to Prime Minister Blair after the head of British intelligence came back from a trip to Washington. It says this: "[The head of British Intelligence] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

This is July of 2002. We didn't invade until March of 2003. And the prime minister of Great Britain is being told by the head of his intelligence that he went to Washington and believes that a decision had already been made and that the administration was fixing or manipulating the intelligence to support the policy.

MR. MEHLMAN: Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then. Whether it's the 911 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all. The fact is that the intelligence of this country, the intelligence of Britain, the intelligence of the United Nations, the intelligence all over the world said that there were weapons of mass destruction present in Iraq. We knew that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction before. We still know that there was a weapons of mass destruction program. He was evading the sanctions, and he had plans to reconstitute the program. We also knew that Saddam Hussein had uniquely invaded his neighbors, had uniquely supported terrorists and we all know today that we are safer because he's been removed from power.

So I believe that that individual report not only has been discredited but that the overall reasons for removing Saddam Hussein were broader than that, they were correct, and we're now safer and certainly the people of Iraq are safer now that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power.

MR. RUSSERT: (vewwy quietly -- Chris) I don't believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited.


So not only does he outright lie, in that not only has no one disputed the authenticity of the memo but the 9/11 Commission and the Senate didn't even know of the memo until we did, but he also falls back on the old saw of 'we're safer, Iraq's safer, everybody's dancing a jig in a field of flowers since we overthrew Saddam.'

I mean, seriously, even if I were to grant that that's true (which I don't, for the record), it would be a bit like, oh, say, someone dropping a few bombs on the Northwest Valley here in the Phoenix area, after which half the population rushes to the person's defense saying, "Look how much smoother the traffic is from Surprise into downtown now! If he hadn't bombed that part of town into oblivion we'd still have nonstop traffic jams at rush hour. Do you want that?'

The benefit isn't the point (though it's certainly cause for debate in itself), you morons. It's the cost. How many dead people is enough? How many is too many? Is there such a thing as too many dead Iraqis? I earnestly hope there's a special place in Hell for Christians who crow endlessly about the 'Culture of Life(tm)' but turn a blind eye to the mass-murder of thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of innocents because they live in another part of the world and (mostly) practice a different faith.

I know I repeatedly go off on this whole death tangent, but it sickens me that no one seems to care. I mean, even a lot of the anti-war crowd only mentions this as an afterthought. A lie is horrible. Profiteering and stealing are horrible. Blithely ignoring the Constitution is reprehensible. And all of these things are important, and I can yell about them with the best of y'all.

But dead is dead folks. Each person has a story, the way you have a story. Each person has plans, dreams, hopes, family, friends, love, hate, creativity, work, play, fun, happiness, anguish, fear, courage, lust and all the other things that make a human life what it is. When it goes, it goes away for good, and no one, and I mean no one has the right to decide for them when it does so.

So all the young Americans who've died as a result of this Big Lie, who will never see their new wives or husbands, or children or parents again are victims of murder. And all of the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives intertwined theirs are, by extension, also victims. And all of the thousands, tens of thousands, of Iraqis, who've died as a result of this Big Lie, are victims of murder. And the millions of people whose lives intertwined with theirs are also victims by extension. These are unfathomable numbers. The human brian cannot, perhaps by design, understand the magnitude of such loss and such sorrow.

That the Iraqis now rise in anger doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that, with some notable exceptions, the Americans touched by this mass murder sit quietly, after expressing their grief in quiet and socially acceptable ways, slap the magnetic 'Support the Troops' ribbons on the back of their SUVs and find meaning in the suffering by standing fully upright behind the War Criminal in chief and parroting his poisonous lies.

They shoud be channeling their anger into the immediate, lawful and unequivocal overthrow of the murderous war profiteers who've hijacked what used to be, and could again one day be, the greatest country on earth.

Since my radical college days, I've gradually tempered my total opposition to armed conflict because invariably nearly everyone I know, no matter how sympathetic in principle, would search for examples of a justified war just to see me squirm intellectually and try to argue my way out of their straw box. I got tired of it.

But you know what? I'm done with appeasement. Organized murder, whether you call it war or genocide, is a monstrous evil that has no place in humanity if we're ever to develop beyond savages with a god complex. And these unevolved creatures with the blackness of death and the heavy pain of amoral greed in their hearts need to be locked away in cages for the good of the human family.

*phew*

Catharsis! And before anyone makes any comments on this post, understand that any arguments about my anti-war stance, or exceptions you can find to the rule, or criticisms about how it's 'utopian' or 'unrealistic' will either be ignored or deleted. I have good points to make in support of my position, but I'm tired of offering them up to people who seriously have no interest in listening and just feel like taking my stuff apart.