Suffer the children?

Want to know what ticks me off?  Of course you do -- it's that so many of us who think we're out of the woods because the Republicans lost the last two presidential elections   have resumed the idiotic posturing and bickering, hyperbolizing, fear mongering and in-fighting about our often worn out  liberal issues.  Does anyone really think that right wing extremism has slunk away like the loser in a dog fight?

Is the Democratic party going back to being the ban-it party, the baby-on-board ' can't trust anybody party that can't agree with each other enough to get anything done? Are we back to 'ban-the-bomb' naïveté while real evil marches on? Of course, that's what we do, but guess what bucky, Limbaugh still draws ratings and the Fox is still alive -- or at least undead.

Remember when Obama's little talk about patriotism to schoolchildren was "just like Pol Pot?"  Well when Obama cancelled some White House tours, it was only so that he could "maximize the pain" for children says grimacing Gretchen the witch of Fox News.  "Can we be adults about this?" she asked while meanwhile back at the fortress of evil, a Republican (Texas of course) Rep was proposing that Obama can't play golf again until the Republicans say so. Is Louie Gohmert old enough to remember when Eisenhower was accused of playing golf while the Russkies missle-gapped us?

Meanwhile, while Carlson and the Doocebag are trying to Fox Block Obama, inquiring minds are asking whether the Evil Empire will discuss the effect the sequestration gambit will have on American Children.  That's right, children.  They're such useful tools and they're great for breakfast too.  Just ask the Fox.

Vote the Bible!

I can hear the wailing and tooth gnashing all the way at the other end of the country from Texas.  Some woman is asked to cover up the "vote the Bible" T-shirt and it's like a wake up call to every stupid, seditious and  secessionist pervert in the Babble Belt to start howling that the request was because the Bible is "offensive."    Um, I guess that down in the dark heart A Texas, the illegality of campaigning or telling people how to vote in a polling place or its environs is neutralized if the deed is wrapped up in the Bible like a Burrito.  Wrapped up in the Christian version of course and served with a spicy ignorance sauce.  Show up at the polls in Bunghole, Texas with an Obama T-shirt and see how different the reaction is and who takes offense.

Look Tex, the Bible is all about obedience to an unelected, unaccountable and unquestionable authority that threatens to kill you and eat your children for the most ludicrously minor infraction like refusing to rape your sister in law. (Genesis 38: 8-10)  The Bible tells you to forgive debts after 7 years and forbids you to charge interest (which would make Capitalism illegal) if you "vote the Bible"  but that's OK I guess.  You have no idea how it works anyway, do you?  Or you can specify the Christian Bible wherein Saul of Tarsus tells you all those gruesome threats about eating your children (Leviticus 26:27-9) or those 613 Commandments mean nothing -- which makes the whole idea of voting the Bible meaningless. That should be a relief of course, thinking about the 42 children God murdered in hideous fashion for mocking a bald man. (2 Kings 2:23-24)

 Yeah, right, that's not what Pastor Pervy taught in Sunday School, or your idiot Attorney General  raves about and it's not what the Constitution allows if you want to get down to some basic literacy. The Bible is full of atrocities nearly all of us wouldn't want to exist in the world any more and besides, the Christian version says that following Jesus with love in your heart absolves you of those laws and threats of violence (Romans 8:2)  Why the hell can't you be content with that and stop trying to take over a secular democracy that allows the freedom of religion you take for granted.  Why the hell can't you practice the religion you claim to believe in?

Killing him slowly

There simply aren't words adequate to describe Rush Limbaugh unless we quote his own. I'm tired anyway, to tell the truth, of trying to match polemics with him, tired of denouncing him and of course the ears of his acolytes are deaf to such things anyway.

I admit that I don't actually listen to him any more and that's been true for many, many years. I simply can't trust myself in the presence of so much evil, so much hatred of the kind of America I hope for, but at the bottom of it, I can't stand to hear some sinister thing that the law requires us to treat as a human being and citizen, so incapable of reason, so bereft of any human feelings and so unable to feel any kind of shame, so full of hate.

But as I say, his followers can listen to him demanding harsh treatment - even death - for drug users while knowing he's a long time abuser of opiates who has had his employees risk their freedom by buying drugs for him. His hangers on can quote his self contradictions without pause and will smile and nod when he wishes disaster on our country if disaster is what it takes to promote Republicans and destroy any Democratic president. Who but Rush, after all, can call Obama an ineffectual "empty suit" and a tyrannical demagogue at the same time; tell us he was born in Kenya and Indonesia simultaneously and not instantly be dismissed as casually as one flushes a toilet.

Certainly not Limbaugh's ignorant army. They surely applauded his latest verbal atrocity; telling us how that evil Obama sent troops to Africa to help kill Christians: The Lord’s Resistance Army. They certainly aren't going to notice or care or believe that the LRA are a genocidal terrorist group who has murdered, raped, kidnapped and terrorized tens of thousands over many years. They've killed some Muslims, you see and that makes them Christian Soldiers, marching as to war.

They aren't going to be shocked at the way Limbaugh assembles scraps of misunderstood or non-existent or invented stories without any concern for truth or decency or patriotism or anything but the potential to destroy Barack Obama. No, not as long as he keeps up the endless supply of nasty little lies they can tell their friends over a beer and at the barber shop where Fox plays on the TV, where the stupid go to get their wisdom confirmed and hate is in the air.

"Hey didja hear how Rush called Oh-BAH-ma an empty suit? He sure got that right!"

Koching up some trouble

"Good Lord. These are truly evil people"

says The Impolitic and it's hard to disagree. Of course the people that thought it would be a "conservative" thing to do; giving struggling Detroit homeowners fake foreclosure notices, don't think they're being vandals trying to destabilize civilization and built a "conservative" Utopia on the ruins. In fact the Koch brothers who seem to be behind this prank have a vision for the future that more resembles an Orwellian horror with the part of Big Brother played by corporate robber barons like them and the sinister, black menace portrayed by Barack H. Obama. Their lackeys see it otherwise, I'm sure. A step in the final solution of the "colored problem" that the Liberals and do-gooders brought upon Detroit and a reaction to the stunning affront of ACORN having forced a black president on us -- a man nobody voted for, of course. The new North. It's the old South without the sheets.

It's truly hard to describe this sort of thing in the way we describe rational human conduct, because it isn't any more rational than drunken football hooliganism or beer hall riot -- and a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's all the more dangerous for the lack of attention given. CNN.com today provides a bright colorful farrago of sex scandal, new Facebook features, the exploits of rappers and little else. Indeed what else concerns us?

Stoning the Orca

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

-Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

It was inevitable, since after all, this incomprehensibly huge and ancient universe exists only to provide a place in which God can test the mindless obedience to a farrago of meaningless and often contradictory rules of the sentient apes whose existence spans an infinitesimal part of the space time continuum -- anything that happens must be seen in the context of peremptory power and abject submission to the words of ancient men who went their whole, ignorant, bug-infested lives without soap. Or so saith the AFA.

A captive 6 ton top predator, by following its possibly God given instincts to grab and kill any smaller animal at water's edge was God's way of testing his demand that an Ox who gores a man must be stoned. That's right, the sad death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau was God's punishment to "the west" for the very concept of animal rights and her death a test to see if we'd follow the commands of ancient, flea bitten, psychotics. By not "stoning" the Orca, it's only going to get worse. God will have his Oxen (and Orcas) stoned even if the hirsute brutes he chose to write down his words never heard of such an animal.

Have I been listening to too many paranoid schizophrenics at Nurse Ratched's cuckoo's nest? No, just the perennial font of psychotic idiocy called the American Family Association.

"Chalk another death up to animal rights insanity and to the ongoing failure of the West to take counsel on practical matters from the Scripture," wrote Bryan Fischer, at the AFA's official blog. “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.”

Do you think that if I stampeded some Oxen through their offices and gored the living shit out of Fischer and his batshit crew of straight-jacket candidates, the AFA would find me liable and sue me? I think so too but I would truly love to try it. After all, I could easily cite the 613 Biblical Commandments, 600 of which they routinely ignore, such as the "abominations" of the cheeseburger or using cotton thread to sew your linen clothes or turning on the lights on Friday night. A good goring and stoning would only be God's work, dontcha think? The work of that smelly, sociopathic little God who lives in some dank invisible basement in some invisible world and tortures animals for fun.

There is no place in a sane and decent society for these sick bastards and the curious selection of perverted bronze age superstitions they'd like to replace our laws with. The Bible, or whatever dubiously assembled antique political documents they'd like to tell us is the backbone of existence and the source of all goodness, is simply not compatible with decency, truth, freedom and the safety of humans beings or their families. Freedom from being ruled by its self appointed priesthood has been the long struggle of our kind and I will not have it snatched from us after two centuries of secular Democracy by these evil men.

"for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man," said Jefferson.

Yes, me too.

Yoo's a viper

John Yoo called it a "Witch hunt" but he's lucky it wasn't. I have a feeling he'd have fared far worse had he been tried by a cross section of the American public who would have been more disgusted by his maintaining the legality of crushing an innocent child's testicles or murdering an unlimited of innocent bystanders by Presidential fiat in order to "keep America safe" than the actual jury of his peers -- other lawyers.

He hardly even seems grateful for having avoided the tar and feathers and the pillory, considering that he's upbraiding President Obama for not recognizing his efforts to allow a president to "keep America Safe" by exercising unlimited executive power under the aegis of a war he has the power to start for no other reason than to give him that power. Did any of our fabled founding fathers really envision such a thing except as the perfect opposite of an American President?

Yoo's image of an American president as unlimited by law, treaty or moral scruple to a degree not unfamiliar to Attila or Tamarlane or Ghengis Khan should be producing more widespread disgust than it is, but that no doubt shows the immense power of the massive, corporate sponsored, Republican organized eruption of noxious gas and poisonous accusations: a smokescreen the likes of which hasn't been seen since the close of the Permian.

No, Professor Yoo is claiming that even though the proceedings against him were initiated under the Republicans and he was let go by Democrats, he's a victim -- Obama's victim. That ungrateful man of sorrows who apparently is all things contemptible because with the power to do evil, we would surely be overwhelmed and conquered by a few dozen guys with explosive jockey shorts. He's a victim and it's because he loves keeping America "safe."

"an entirely false narrative of his own victimization." says Joe Mathis at the Philadephia Weekly. "Get this straight, the so-called 'smear job' came under the Republican president. The so-called 'vindication' came under the Democratic president."

Preposterous by the strictest definition of the word; the same problem with cause and effect that makes Obama guilty of Bush's economic train wreck.

Guilty of professional misconduct and poor judgment is a slap on the wrist considering that his support of giving the President the power to break constitutional law ad libidem as long as "there's a war on" might at one time have been punished quite severely. You'd think he'd just thank his luck and the corruption of justice that's become institutionalized in the US, but no, he has to be a victim, he has to vilify the administration that let him go free and he gets to keep his tenured job, his law license and most likely will have a great number of books bought up by CPAC and distributed for free to contributors so that he can be on the NewYork Times best-seller list and gloat about Democratic "Royalists."

There's a lot of money, there's a lot of safety in evil.

Dana Perino and Junkyard Wars

So Dana Perino still isn't bowing out of her mission to defame the President who employs her. It's too breathlessly important to talk down America who pays her salary; pays her excellent medical and dental plan that she would deny us, to bother to be consistent with what she just finished saying or with objective reality. Why should she, after all? She's preaching to her own demented and dishonest choir, none of whom is any smarter or more honest than she is.

A few days ago, it was wrong for President Obama to play golf because "there's a war on." Yesterday it was just fine to call him to task for not calling a shooting "terrorism" even though "there's a war on." Criticizing the President in time of "war" is only treason when the President is of their tribe, you know and it's never treason when Fox does it. Anything goes, you see, when you're blond and perky. Anything -- even forgetting that the 9/11 attacks were not only on George W. Bush's watch, but that George W. Bush wasn't actually watching and had effectively shot down those who were. But hey, that was history and history is a junkyard from which you take parts and assemble your own truth.

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during president Bush's term,"

Perino said to Sean 'Insanity' Hannity on Fox last night. The old Fox with the botox face didn't even flinch. She went on to politicize the shootings at Fort Hood by accusing Barack Obama of "politicizing" the shootings at Fort Hood by not calling the act of an American officer "terrorism" in advance of any evidence to back that up other than the man's religion.

So why is it so important, other than for reasons of creating a religious war, to label the Fort Hood murders terrorism? So that she can pretend Bush was a protector and Obama is not. She needs a "terrorist" attack to create a false equivalence and never mind the lack of equivalence. In her little mind, your little mind will accept that the billions of dollars of destruction and the 3000 or so lives is equivalent to an American officer going wacko and shooting up his fellow soldiers and therefore Barack Obama is a failure.

What's in a name? Everything, it seems. The difference between death by friendly fire and terrorism is all in the politics of the beholder, whether or not the fire is friendly. If someone "fragged" his commanding officer, it's not terrorism and if Pat Tillman was shot by his own men, that's not terrorism either. Charles Manson isn't a terrorist, even though his mission was to strike terror into the hearts of white people and start a war. David Berkowitz wasn't a terrorist although he terrorized New York -- and why? A political football is not a football until someone kicks it and the Grand Old Fox has no interest in doing so unless it serves their need of supporting Republicans and toppling Democrats.

I've seen famous comedians booed off the stage for making mild jokes about George Bush, I've had death threats for saying Reagan had serious flaws. Where is the outrage now? Where is the response to such amateurish, clumsy and wildly dishonest propaganda coming, like foul breath, out of the mouths of Fox?

God is great - Bill O'Reilly? Not so much.

Blurry words and fuzzy logic are the tools of the deceiver. Take the word "terrorist." We're still trying to fit it into the Procrustean bed, or should we call it the Republican Bunk? In fact we can no longer distinguish between terror, the emotion or terrorism; the acts designed to produce terror. We're always arguing about who is a criminal and who is a terrorist but, always willing to help us find our balance, Fox news and Sean O'Reilly are on the job.

In order to keep the terror, angst and anger flowing and the ratings high, it's important to keep the supply of terrorists visible and to keep them ethnic -- and here comes Sean Hannity to tell us that what makes a terrorist a terrorist is that he praises God before he terrorizes. It's not all that simple though, he has to do that in Arabic otherwise every foxhole would be full of terrorists of many faiths.

It's simple enough however to say that because Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly said Allahu Akhbar before shooting up Fort Hood. On the other hand, attacks from the bombing of Guernica to the Rape of Nanjing to the shocking and awing of Baghdad are not. Simple haters like simple rules for hating. They like simple things that can be used to create convenient groups: tropes like "political correctness" of which O'Reilly accused The Washington Post's Sally Quinn Wednesday night. It's much easier to condemn a group fabricated for the purpose than to address her reluctance to call the man a "Muslim Terrorist."

"You have a hard time saying the words 'Muslim terrorist. I don't know why."

I do know why. If the only difference between Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, David, Son of Sam, Berkowitz and Major Hasan is religion, it becomes awfully hard to launch the Fox Crusade against Muslims alone. So one hates along with Bill, or one is politically correct which means unwilling to hate along with Bill. One jumps to convenient conclusions with him or one refuses in that politically correct way, thus defining PC as smart and honest and responsible for people more logically adept than the Fox Fools.

One must be a hater of Muslims or a terrorist supporter and without that assertion O'Reilly melts on the floor like the Wicked Witch. A nice binary, Good V. Evil choice to replace the kind of reasoning stupid people hate and fear and are incapable of: the kind of choice Lyin' Bill peddles like crack in the high school parking lot.

A right wing bigot owns our media

Well there you have it. With Fox News, it starts right at the top. He's not sure if it's valid to compare President Obama with Stalin, he says, but he certainly is a racist and Glenn Beck was right in saying it, says Rupert Murdoch.

"But he did make a very racist comment. Ahhh…about, you know, blacks and whites and so on, and which he said in his campaign he would be completely above. And um, that was something which perhaps shouldn’t have been said about the President, but if you actually assess what he was talking about, he was right,"

he said on Australian TV. Well ahhh and um, anybody who can look at Barak Obama in the context of early 21st century America; stand him against Murdoch's race-baiting bogus journalism and call him a racist is either deranged, dishonest or stupid. I don't rule out that Rupert has hit the Trifecta here.

Of course Murdoch denied being aware that Beck had compared our President with Joseph Stalin even though, of course, he did just that and of course Fox in general is engaged in an often self-contradictory orgy of slanderous invention deceptive video editing and stealing rumors from disreputable blogs without investigation. If Murdoch isn't aware or doesn't understand, it argues strongly for the deranged and dishonest. If we're looking for the reason behind Fox's loyalty to someone who is loosing advertisers and making our country and much of its media a laughing stock, here you have it: Rupert Murdoch thinks Glenn Beck is right and I don't mean far Right.

Obama may not hate white people, admitted Beck, but he has a problem with "white culture" and I suppose that might be true if you define white culture as Glenn Beck's kind of loathing for anything smelling of decency. Indeed lumping together the "white" people of the world into one culture is in itself an act of idiotic, deceptive and ugly racism, but do we need to need to explain Glenn Beck or do we need to boycott every and any Rupert Murdoch enterprise until he feels it in his swollen bank accounts?

In the corner

". . . whether or not these techniques are immoral, or how immoral they are, surely depends on whether they worked”

said George F. Will regarding the use of torture. How sad that anyone considers this man "conservative" or in fact listens to him at all. Although he supported a commission to study (obfuscate) the matter on ABC's This Week yesterday, Will seems to consider an extreme utilitarianism a valid moral measure. If it works to reduce crime, why not human sacrifice? Perhaps Will would like to be on the commission to "study" that.

Although the idea that a practical end justifies any means or makes crime legal or worse, is the basis of moral judgment, is frankly horrifying and although such thinking may long have been with us, it hasn't, to my knowledge been so clearly championed. The idea that such things still need to be re-examined is sickening, considering that we used opposition to this kind of Spencerian social Darwinism as a rallying cry in WW II and it's more sickening still that Will can call opposition to it "liberal" and Dick Cheney can call it "far left."

Have even the most articulate supporters of Republican policy run so far out of arguments that they have to resort to these mindless dichotomies? A cornered rat does not think of right and wrong and neither, apparently does a cornered Republican. It's just me against you and anything I do to you is justified.

Queen Michelle

Almost within hours after Sarah Palin became the Republican VP candidate, Fox news began a preemptive assault on critics, falsely alleging ( it had appeared in the Washington Post as a joke) that planeloads of lawyers had already arrived in Wasilla to "dig up dirt" about her family and that the widespread and stunned reaction to selecting a person of such mediocre and unhinged mind was some kind of smokescreen covering up the true objective of defaming her daughter.

So why am I bringing up such old news? It's possible that I may attract more viral e-mails than anyone else, but I doubt it and in fact you may also have seen the one titled Queen Michelle in your own mailbox recently.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the theatrical display of shock and offense certainly is a one way thing, because I'm hearing none of it on the subject of Republicans openly calling for the murder of Mrs. Obama and her "Stupid children." I am hearing crap about how Democrats are playing some kind of "race card" to defend against valid criticism, but incitement to riot, incitement to murder and deadly threats against a President are a felony, not a playing card. Where's the protest from Republicans?

Our former First Lady was treated with a great deal of respect and bipartisan praise. Very little was made of her history or background or of having been the first and only First Lady to have killed someone. Nothing whatever was made of her large staff and payroll.

It's true that Michelle's is not an elected office but there are traditional duties that have long required the services of people from hairdressers to personal secretaries and assistants. Nobody worries much about it since in a great many instances she has to represent the United States here and abroad.

So deep is the desperation of the lunatic fringe that now makes up most of the Republican party that all prior restraints have evaporated in the lust to defame, smear, degrade, insult, intimidate, threaten and humiliate president Obama's family, and the giggling cowards can't turn out the propaganda fast enough.

Queen Michelle is the title, and it begins:

"First Lady Requires More Than Twenty Attendants

July 7, 2009 - Dr. Paul L. Williams"

There is of course, a real Dr. Williams, who writes books about how Islam is plotting to kill us all and about the need for another Crusade and who, like Joe McCarthy uses accusations of harboring Islamic terrorists and nuclear attack plots to throw his weight and his books around.

I don't know that Dr. Paul L. Williams wrote this, but I doubt that the perpetrator of this would ever identify himself or the PAC that employs him. The e-mail goes on to list 22 ( 20 or 26 in some versions) White House staff that Mrs. Obama "employs" at our expense while others of us poor Liberal dominated serfs have to stock shelves at Wal-Mart. Nothing is said about the people who own Wal-Mart or their lifestlye or whether we elected them. Indeed nothing is said of the dodgy Doctor either.

It portrays her as someone much like Marie Antoinette, haughty and disdainful of lesser people, which of course is a confection more airy than the cake Marie legendarily Suggested the French poor should eat.

She has no official duties, it's misleadingly stressed, although it seems that every First Lady since and including Martha Washington has indeed served in many capacities as a diplomat at large, good will ambassador and hostess. Laura Bush was widely praised in that role.

What's not pointed out is that her budget and number of "attendants" is just about the same as Laura Bush had. Nobody called her Queen Laura or threatened to kill her and her children. Only the mind of a Republican could dream up such such ugliness and dare to disseminate it -- and don't expect them to take responsibility or apologize. The best we can hope for is some rhetoric about "Liberals" "whining" about Bush and some foul, rancid, reeking attempt to equate and justify their disgusting behavior because after all "Liberals criticized Bush."

Don't believe it? I politely refuted the claims and replied. My answer from the person who sent my my copy was exactly that - seething fury about how I will

"just have to get used to it and suck it up because you damn communist bastards have been preaching hate for years."

These are your "conservative" values, your family values. This is your party of morality and personal responsibility. Good, Christian folk from small towns in the heartland where all the good Christian values come from. What costume will they put on after someone finally acts out their Satanic passion play? I don't want to think about it. God damn them one and all.

Hail Satan!

look, folks!
Right here in River City.
Trouble with a capital "T"
And that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool!

Yes sir, Crooks and Liars has the story behind all our troubles. Barak Obama is the anti-Christ and "the Bible" proves it, at least it does if you're a demented, ignorant and dishonest idiot. Proof of course, to people who deny reason itself and prefer to believe what they're told by professional liars like World Net Daily, isn't what proof is to the fully rational -- but I digress.

What is or is not in the Bible of course has always been at issue, wars being fought and people being exterminated over such questions and for my part, although I know it's no more an accurate account of real history than the Gilgamesh Epic, I count the Gospel of Luke as a twisted derivative of some other book written by someone who was nowhere near Jesus of Nazareth in time or place or theology.

None the less, there are people who insist that God wrote it although which of the three it might be I don't know. Worse yet; there are people who insist that the book written long after Jesus' life on earth and in a foreign language in a foreign place and selected for the canon by a Roman high priest, predicts that US President, Barak H. Obama is in that nauseatingly idiotic Aristotelian tradition where things create their opposites: the Anti-Christ.

Of course if one doesn't believe there ever was a Christ, whether it be King David or Jesus H. it's a hard sell, but it's a hard pile to peddle if one simply knows a thing or two about certain languages and isn't situationally psychotic ( or a Fundamantalist if you prefer.) There is a word in Hebrew: (בָּרָק‎) usually transliterated as Barak and meaning Lightening. There is a word in Hebrew usually transliterated into English as Bimmah meaning amongst other things a platform from which scripture is read. It's sometimes translated as a High Place or ritual platform or altar.

Now comes the "proof" part. "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." (Luke 10:18) Put Barak and Bimmah together and you guessed it. QED. Our president is lightening from a high place ( if you leave out his middle name) and the antithesis of the man, whatever that means, who somehow, in some illogical way, was the heir to the throne of Judea.

Of course Luke isn't written in Hebrew or Aramaic but in Greek and the man who wrote Luke was a Greek ( the traditional names weren't assigned to these books until many years later) and so one has to wonder why he was speaking about our President and if somehow he was thinking in a language he didn't understand can we be sure he wasn't writing in code about the Commander of the prophetess Deborah's Biblical army, the late blues man Lightnin' Hopkins or a character from Amos and Andy? There is no way to get from the Greek Astrape to the Swahili/Arabic Barak or even a flash of light from the altar to the kind of Satan that crept into Christianity in the late first century. It's enough like logical progression for the legions of the unwashed however and a great reminder that half of Americans have double digit IQ's and little education.

Mr. Obama was, of course, named for his Kenyan father and in Swahili, a language filled with Arabic borrow words, the word means "blessed" as it indeed does in pure Arabic. Its cognate in Hebrew is Baruch, also a common name amongst the Jews. We see it in both languages used that way: baarak Allaah fiik or baruch ata hashem -- ( Borchu et Adonai in Aramaic as every Bar Mitzvah boy knows) God bless you or blessed is God, respectively.

There is no logical or honest progression through which we can pass Barak Hussein Obama,"blessed and beautiful Obama" as it means, and transform it into the metaphorical source of all evil with his origins in Babylonian and Persian mythology. Indeed one would have to pass it through that source of evil itself and that's just what has been done. What else in the phenomenal world can transform beautiful and blessed into ugliness and evil but the Republican hate machine?

There is no Devil but the devil in Man and no more devilish men than the men of the Republican Party, WorldNetDaily and the Religious right. Think about this when you listen to them crying about "Character assassination" of Sarah Palin. Look upon them and despair. If you're a Christian, think about the people that have made Jesus into a dirty joke and say something about it. If you don't think our government should be based on lies and the product of hate and stupidity wake up and never vote for a Republican again.

No lie too big, no mind too small

Get ready for it: another surge in the Anti-Obama Wars will be arriving in about a week with a new and more specious attack from the Derangement Rangers, or as these vampires call themselves the Our Country Deserves Better PAC. Twisting facts and flinging fallacy, they intend to pump up the rage junkies for some purpose we can only imagine and we can be sure that if someone stupid enough to buy their product acts on that rage, they will wash their hands of it and blame the liberals. In fact they're already doing it.

I can say that because the ad will apparently reference the recent intelligence report warning of increased right wing terrorist activity -- which of course proved true: blood, bullets, bodies and all -- as an example amongst many, of how Barak Obama is just like Adolph Hitler.

"As the regime spun out of control, they labeled political opponents domestic terrorists, and warned of confrontations between such groups and government authorities."

Is their view of an all too correct observation. Too damned bad more attention wasn't payed over the howls of offended wingnuts and too damned amazing that they're still howling after the warning was proved accurate.

Of course it takes a special person to see this alleged spin-out of the administration, but the accusation is quite predictable. Indeed every accusation made against Bush, no matter how true, is going to be re-labelled and returned in the same fashion as Watergate was reprised in every word and action and relaunched against Bill Clinton.

"They proposed a civilian security force, and a Congressman warned it was exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany. Opposition heightened after voter fraud by the president's allies, including thousands of bogus voter registration [sic]"

Since I'm personally involved with civilian security (Radio Amateur Emergency Services) I would have to laugh at a bunch of retired engineers volunteering to do emergency communications in a disaster being compared to Storm Troopers, but it's hard to understand why a thousand or two bad registrations, which don't seem to have produced any actual votes could account for the 9 million vote Obama victory. Hard, unless you're up to no good yourself and of course the OCDB PAC isn't. It's the illegitimate child of Howard Kaloogian, the fellow who during his losing campaign to replace disgraced Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham told us that Iraq was safe and almost free of violence and that the fact was being hidden by -- you guessed it -- the Liberal Press who of course support terrorism. Is there any doubt?

"And now the Obama Administration is warning law enforcement to focus their attention on the dangers of conservatives."

says their website. They're not, unless you describe murderers as conservatives, but I am and I can't help but mention that this kind of rhetoric and this kind of campaign was pioneered by Adolph Hitler himself.

These people are deranged, malignant well financed and well armed. Oh yes and dishonest, did I mention dishonest?

Man was made for the law.

At least while the remnants of Republican barbarism still control the court, the law is the law is the law; right or wrong .

Is anyone still so idealistic as to think that our justice system is about justice and not about upholding the authority of. . .well, authority? Well, maybe the latest ruling from the Old Bastard's Club we sometimes call the Supreme Court and the Republicans sometimes accuse of giving a damn, will change your mind. In a ruling today one might have expected from a Texas court or perhaps the Spanish Inquisition, it ruled that once you're convicted, you have no right to obtain evidence that might exonerate you at least in Alaska, one of the six states in which innocence is no defense once the infallible courts have ruled.

"Science alone cannot prove a prisoner innocent,"

read the decision and of course not, but it can prove him not guilty and it often has done just that. But I guess this is a good way to keep from the inevitable embarrassment of killing a few innocent people now and then.

So isn't it nice that at least one branch of Government retains it's contempt for the value of human life once it's had the chance to be baptized?

What we have here is a failure

Sarah Palin says Obama is driving the country toward Socialism, although she's not exactly sure what that is or how he's doing it.

"We’re borrowing more to spend more ... it defies any sensible economic policy that any of us ever learned through college"

said she to Insanity Hannity although that's been the main thrust of GOP economic policy since Reagan. Never mind that she didn't actually study economics in her long, picaresque romp through a series of fourth rate community colleges and hasn't any real idea of who owns what part of American industry. If she did, perhaps the failed VP candidate, failed beauty queen and desultory student would have to blush about Alaska's state ownership of oil and gas resources and her failure to bring capitalism to her state.

But that's OK. Former Speaker of the House and thoroughly dispicable human being Newt Gingrich says that whatever Obama may be driving us toward, President Barack Obama’s plan to fix the economy has “already failed” and “bowing to the Saudi King is not an energy policy.” Of course not, and Obama would agree. Playing basketball after hours isn't either, but neither is it supposed to be, any more than being a serial adulterer like Newt is a guarantee he means what he says. Of course none of us will get the chance to ask him whether Cheney's collusion with oil magnates about raising the price of oil is an energy policy either, but it helps that whatever Obama has been falsely accused of doing, he's failed to do it.

Rush Limbaugh isn't ready to call Sonia Sotomayor a failure yet, but he hopes she will be. Racist and hack yes, he's ready to say that, but as he does with our president and our nation, he hopes for a good, solid failure. And besides, of course, as with Michael J. Fox's Parkenson's disease, Ms. Sotomayor's recent broken ankle is certainly evidence of lack of character.

“Now, the question is, would a white, male judge have fractured his ankle in the same circumstances?”

No, actually the question is whether Rush can say anything at all without his racism and misogyny creeping through, but we won't embarrass him by asking it, not while he's back on the Vikes and babbling.

Drug addicted, draft dodging Limbaugh however, hardly compares with Gordon Liddy, the convicted felon/conservative radio host who thought it important to speculate as to whether the judge's menstrual cycle will interfere with her judgment.

"Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate,"

Liddy said in a conservative fashion.

"That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

Yes, Mr. Liddy, and the Lord knows that would be bad regardless of which Lord you mean, just like conspiring to overthrow democracy in the US and bragging about it -- which seems to be your main "conservative" credential.

Yes, 4 months is soon enough to talk about failure and face it -- who is more qualified to talk about failure than the Republicans?

Holiday of Hate

Michelle Malkin is talking about Christmas cheer. Yes, it's like Kim Jong Il talking about threats to civil liberties, only worse, because we don't have Fox News bleating his demented ravings or calling them "conservative comment."

Yes, it's the atheists, as though they were a group: it's the atheists, the non-believers who are getting in the way of her cheerful enjoyment of Christmas and the atheists who should be treated like "Internet trolls." That, I presume, means to ignore them. Of course, in Fox speak, that means to continue their mythical battle between retail Christianity and the nefarious forces of religious freedom.

Gretchen Carlson, who apparently has a good shot at surpassing Malkin for sheer vituperative viciousness disagrees, saying that religious freedom will be the death of Christianity.

"If you don't stand up and fight for it, it might just disappear! I'm talking about Christianity!"

No, you're not, you're talking about forced unanimity and mandatory expressions of official faith. Christianity thrived actual persecution for enough time to make me doubt that it's future is in jeopardy, at least from other religions, and it has thrived through persecutions of it's own, but it's having a tougher time in some places that leave everyone alone to celebrate if and when and how they like and restrain them from forcing their practices and rituals on others.

Back before Christianity was coopted by those who play to the stupid and ignorant and hateful; back before Fox News and the Aryan Nation, it was an inclusive holiday. As a non-Christian and an atheist and someone who knows all too much about Christian history, about early Christian, Greco-Persian, Roman and Norse practices that form the basis of Christmas: as someone who knows how the holiday (and yes, it's a goddamn holiday) owes more to Coca-Cola, Hallmark and Charles Dickens than to some Jewish baby born to a teenage mother in April of an indeterminate year about 2000 years ago, I've always celebrated it anyway. After all Christmas as we know it is an American holiday and one that used to bring about a spirit of tolerance, brotherhood and generosity to a unique degree. It was a holiday that brought out the liberal in most of us.

Now that it's become a bloody piece of meat in the claws of harpies like Malkin and Carlson, now that we've become as stupid and superstitious and as ready to rend our neighbors as any of our subhuman cousins at the behest of Fox and its stable of demons, I'm no longer interested. Its just another hot poker in the dungeons of the Fox inquisition.

Of course if their were any real Christians in this country they might propose at least to ignore this attempt to make it a holiday of hate, but perhaps that, like liberty and the pursuit of happiness just another lost hope of the secular humanists who first dreamed of it.

The McCarthy Code

"The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater,"

says Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times, but was Goldwater really anything like Sarah Palin or George Bush or indeed any Republican president or candidate since his disastrous run?

Gabler thinks the true story bears no resemblance to the heroic epic of Goldwater, Reagan, and the Bush's, but rather that the blood line descends from Joe McCarthy to Dick Nixon to the Commander Guy. Wisconsin Senator McCarthy with his witch hunts, fake lists of Commies in the State Department, Hollywood, the schools and under your bed was the prototype; set the stage for the aggressive use of bogeymen to divide, antagonize and conquer.

"McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don't exist."

Even a man like John McCain couldn't resist the temptation to demonize, to invent doubt and suspicion, to enlist people like Sarah Palin -- and perhaps without the vertiginous descent of our economy, so reminiscent of the Biblical plagues upon Egypt, he would have succeeded.

All the pundits are pretending to ask themselves "whither the GOP?" Now that McCain has sold his withered soul and slithering Sarah is in the spotlight, supporting unscrupulous candidates and hunting witches. Gabler thinks he knows and I think I agree.

"There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes."

Let's hope we acquire some immunity.

The Devil loves Obama

It seems everyone running against a Republican candidate is supported by the bogey man of the day and that's held true throughout my lifetime. Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Min, Nikita Kruschev, the Anti-Christ: they all fully endorsed Democrats, if we're to believe the cannot-tell-a-lie Republicans. So of course it's no surprise to learn that Kim Jong Il would just love to see Barak Obama elected; at least that's what Lyin' Laura Ingraham was jibbering about Monday on Fox News.

Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and all the boys over at Hamas are all wearing the Big O T-Shirt these days. Of course one might speculate that any of these evildoing action figures would be smart enough to know that their actual support would harm a candidate and thus would express a fondness for those they would least like to win, but Laura and her limp-brained fans aren't big on logical processes when it's so much fun to hate.

Anyway, now that Kim's axis may no longer be quite as evil, we may suspect that his support will swing over to the Republican side. Will Laura have to decide that he's not so bad after all?

Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation announced on his blog, The Washington Note, last night that George may overcome Dick's objections and take Mr. Kim off the "terror watch list" by tomorrow. Whether or not he will be moved to some lesser list, like the Nexus of Nasty remains to be seen but I have to wonder if Bush is really trying to engage in some statecraft these days -- just for the hell of it -- or whether he's just trying to slide North Korea to the sidlines so he can concentrate on the remaining axial, Iran. You know, the one with oil.