If you don't get the joke, you might be a Republican

Well no wonder they don't think The Daily Show is funny and don't notice when Colbert rips them to pieces.

Some scientific folks at UC San Francisco have completed a study indicating that people in the early stages of dementia have lost the snark detection system most of us were born with and can't tell when you're lying or being facetious. It explains a lot of things, actually, from why people send their life savings to Nigeria to why they can support a candidate who changes his entire philosophy from hour to hour to negate whatever his opponent says.

"Divergent Neuroanatomic Correlates of Sarcasm and Lie Comprehension in Neurodegenerative Disease," a paper presented Thursday at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Hawaii, suggests that dementia can be detected earlier by noting this telltale disability. Fans of Blade Runner will smile and those of us baffled by the thought processes of Sarah Palin disciples will say "AHAH!" Perhaps we can now begin to understand why there are no really funny conservative comedians and how John McCain can flip and flop faster than a Cray supercomputer without fostering the slightest cynicism from the right.

After all, what has been eroded by disease in some people may simply not exist in others.

The Angle of reflection

A significant part of the Republican "message" has been that our secular laws derive from a largely mythical "Judeo-Christian" system of values. Yes, the adage about strange bedfellows is true, but politics and religion, being in bed together, tend to spawn strange offspring and to dress them up as reason and decency.

Of course it's true that a great number of our laws do reflect religious prohibitions, biases and attitudes and those laws often criminalize behavior that involves no harm to people or property and interferes with personal liberty, but those taboos seem to be shared by a great number of cultures which adhere to religions from Animism to Confucianism. There's little that's unique about our alleged Christian values and from the start, many of those values were at odds with our independence and our freedom. Yes, it's hard to think of a religion of any kind that has no rules of behavior but we're talking about Americans -- the people at the center of the universe who don't really think much about thinking or the necessity of reason.

So when we pass laws forbidding dancing on Friday, the observation or rejection of Christmas, the reading of certain books: when we make laws concerning who may live together, have sex together and in what way, we have illustrations of religious law intruding into secular life in America. Such things are slowly eroding and always changing, of course, but the prospect of a group that has always composed a small minority in the US: The Muslims, supporting certain religious rules within their own congregations and amongst their adherents seems to have all the bells in the national belfry ringing in discord.

Islamic religious law, says Sharon Angle, is "taking hold" in some American cities and that's a "militant terrorist situation." No, really. I suppose it's wildly different in a terrorist sort of way for Jews to forbid Pork and Lobster or cheeseburgers or to require prayer at certain times and even to mandate beards or distinctive clothing. I suppose it's not the same thing for Catholics to forbid divorce and require celibacy of certain people and distinctive clothing for the clergy. The special Mormon underwear? Prohibitions against alcohol and coffee? Is the Church of Latter Day Saints "taking over" Utah and the constitution taken to the shredder? No, there's no militant terrorist situation there. Is there really a chance that the constitution will be supplanted by the Amish Ordnung even if an area has a majority of that peaceful faith? So why are we afraid and what are we really afraid of? Why does Sharon Angle say:

"It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States?"

Well, of course we wouldn't pay any attention to such a person as she if she weren't outrageous, but if we were a nation that could notice that these religious rules are in no respect taking hold of municipal governments and in fact are optional personal choices in a nation that allows us to make such choices freely, perhaps Sharon Angle would be all alone in some little room raving at the walls and not on national TV farting out her fallacies, misrepresentations and hysterical lies -- and God help us, running for the US Senate. Sure there would be something fundamentally wrong, but more certainly: it isn't happening here. Religion, say the courts, gives no license to break the law whether that faith demands we strangle a wayward daughter or drag a gay man behind a pickup truck or poison our congregation with cyanide.

The key word here is "Foreign." Although virtually all our religions are imported and many religious groups immigrated simply so that they could have communities with their own religious rules, Angle wants to reinforce the chauvinism of a certain kind of self-styled Christian who would be quite happy with a massively powerful government intent on substituting their own 'Christian' restrictions for our secular constitution. She is, most ironically, the best example of what she wants us to fear. Muslims and certain other people will always be "foreign" and most of us will never pause to reflect upon the horrible consequences that xenophobic, nationalistic bit of European bigotry had in the last century.

But we're not a nation of critical thinkers; at least not enough of us to give reason or even common decency a fighting chance. Bigotry, our real national religion, forbids it after all and we make demons out of people who don't want to participate or worst of all, don't want any religion forced on them.

Angle would like to pass on her contagious nightmare and indeed I know too many people who share it and who will refuse to be persuaded that even if we someday have an Ayatollah of Texas, he's not going to be able to use force to punish reprobates and infidels or have any more secular authority than an Archbishop or TV evangelist. They refuse to remember when Roman Catholics were a "foreign" religion to be feared for inquisitions and foreign rule over Americans. Somehow that "hopey-changey" thing did work our fairly well for them and for the many others who have had to contend with the Know-Nothing nativists and the Sharon Angles of their day.

The unbearable luxury of truth

"and how much more falsity is still necessary to me that I may therewith always reassure myself regarding the luxury of my truth."

-Friedrich Nietzsche-
________________

Quick, hurry, watch this video right away before "they" pull it. Watch it before "they zap it off the internet" because it's a video of Obama admitting that he grew up with Muslims and is "one of them." Watch carefully and you can see where it was edited. It's the third one in my in-box this week and the week's not over. Videos about impaling Christian babies on the "Scimitar of Muslim justice." Obama in a Ukrainian porn video -- hurry, before it gets pulled as part of his obvious Marxist agenda! Even a dog knows better than to swallow anything from Obama, but we swallow the slander with infinite glee. In YouTube we trust and ain't it fun to hate Obama?

How many thousands of years ago was it that merely saying President Bush was embarrassing was enough to ruin your career and get you excoriated on Fox News, and reading the names of the fallen in Iraq was an outrageous attempt to criticize the president that bordered on treason? Go back and look -- quickly -- before history is rewritten.

UnitedHealth, the largest US health insurer by market capitalization, posted earnings of $944 million in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from $726 million in 2008, it was announced this morning. That's a 30% increase -- what recession?

Last week I got a bill for over $700 for some routine blood work. Good thing I can afford Blue Cross at $1500 a month with a $2500 deductible, but still, I pay in far more than I get out of it seeing as that's how private insurance works and how they need to make 30 or 40 percent to keep the stockholders fat. Good thing for UnitedHealth if the Sleaze Lords defeat "Obama's" Marxist agenda!

America hates the President, America hates the courts, hates the Congress, hates the Government. America doesn't trust science, doesn't trust educated people, doesn't trust Liberals. Americans believe they're smart, that their opinions are valid; their superstitions, their fears, their prejudices and that they're being oppressed by everyone but those who get rich from their suffering. America trusts anonymous e-mails, Rush Limbaugh and YouTube. Americans love comfort, security and luxury, especially if they have more of it than their neighbors. Of course paying for it with cash is Communism, but what's a little falsity? It's free and abundant -- and it's fun!

Sometimes an opinion is just a lie

It's going to get harder for Fox News to hide behind the giggles, the puffed up pretense to being offended and accusations of insanity if more of the other networks begin to fight back against Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes's lie machine. Brad Blog covers CNN’s Rick Sanchez's, slapdown of Fox. Sanchez, who seems of late to be more willing to speak up against injustice went after Fox's Washington Post ad claiming they were the only network to cover the 9/12 "tea party" in Washington.

It's good to see someone get mad at the ever increasing torrent of lies, distortions and false claims emanating from Fox. It's going, as I said, to get harder to call the few vocal opponents like Olbermann and even Jon Stewart crazy or inconsequential if CNN is willing to run ads as they did yesterday evening, accusing Fox of "Distorting Not Reporting."

The people who send me wingnut e-mails about things that are designed to outrage the ignorant, often preface them with "why isn't the MSM covering this?" although usually, they are and have been. Fox's WaPo ad seems to have been the "enough is enough" trigger and even ABC declared it “demonstrably false.” The claim that no other networks were there was deemed by the Post to be an expression of an opinion not a lie, which of course doesn't help their credibility, regardless of what they claim the meaning of the word "is" is. Sanchez, concluding his diatribe said this:

“Let me address the Fox News Network now, perhaps the most current way that I can — by quoting somebody who recently used a very pithy phrase. Two words, that’s all I need. ‘You lie.’”

Lets hope it becomes a movement. Let's hope the Glennbeckery, the outrageous liberties taken with the news have finally pushed the timid competition into speaking out for the truth - they way they're supposed to.

Bye Bye Norma Rae

You remember Norma Rae, although her name was Crystal Lee. Sally Field played the Union Organizer from Burlington North Carolina in 1979 and won an academy award for the performance. Ms. Field who presumably is financially secure, is still with us but Crystal Lee, who wasn't, isn't. She got brain cancer she couldn't afford to treat, she had to battle her insurance company to live up to its contractual obligation, they stalled and she died Last Friday.

Sarah Palin is right, Death Panels are real and the Health Insurance companies all have them, practicing 'delay and deny' tactics that resulted -- intentionally -- in the death of the 68 year old Crystal Lee Sutton. Her insurance company interfered between her and her doctor, she couldn't afford Chemo on her own and some employee likely got a bonus for saving the company money.

Like Most Republican arguments, the Death Panel idea illustrates the principle of projective accusation. if your president was guilty of more lies than any other in history, you start accusing the opposition of lying and if you're lucky you can find a mote in his eye and gleefully use it to deny the giant sequoia in your own. Thus to protect the insurance companies that profit by interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, dictate and deny treatment and let people die unnecessarily they accuse a system designed to stop it of doing the same thing. Americans are stupid enough to buy it.

Death Panels are real and death panels are inevitable because corporations are beholden to their stockholders, not to their insured clients. Actual panels of actual people get salaries and bonuses for obfuscating and delaying claims until it's too late, or for scouring your life for some unreported case of acne or the flu to justify denying your cancer claim. A large part of your premiums go, in fact, to pay for these Death Panels and to keep the stockholders happy.

Perhaps someone will chime in here and deny it. I hope so because I'm dying to say You Lie! I can't wait to tell the inevitable troll who will insist that just like Public Schools, Public Libraries, National parks and the National Guard, Government claims administration is Socialism! You lie!

Same old, same old Party

What's more disgusting than CNN giving copious air time to Florida Representative Connie Mack this morning so that he can continue to demand the firing or resignation of Tim Geithner for reasons of complicity in a no strings attached, unsupervised AIG bailout under Hank Paulson and the Bush administration? Why, it was natty, nasty and nefarious young Connie Mack himself. Representative Mack, in trying to pin the tail on the donkey, seems to have overlooked the fact that it's an elephant's tail and wants us to buy the notion that the AIG bonuses were not only Geithner's fault, but proof of the incompetance of President Obama in fixing the Republican train wreck. The spectacular smugfest of Republicans acting as though oversight of Wall Street was their idea is just that -- spectacular.

Asked pointedly and repeatedly on CNN this morning however, Mack refused to comment on whether Geithner or the Obama administration should attempt to recover the funds, repeating again and again that they never should have been given and asking what Geithner knew and when he knew it.

"Quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster."

said Mack last Wednesday. Once again, CNN missed the opportunity to ask whether the huge disaster of the last 8 years was anyone outside the current administration's responsibility and whether the 8 years of mismanagement could reasonably be expected to have been rectified in a matter of weeks without the waste of a hundredth of a percent. Are we to have forgotten that the kind of oversight that would have prevented the mess was the devil himself to every Republican of the last several decades?

I have to recall however that the Republicans waited two months longer to declare the Obama Administration a failure and disaster than they did when Bill Clinton was elected. Some couldn't wait for him to actually take office to begin the disinformation, investigation and sabotage and what can we call this but sabotage as they offer no practical alternative other than to attack, attack and attack?

One can never hope for contrition from any Republican it seems, nor can anyone expect their cooperation in any attempt to deal with their failures and misdeeds. It's just hte Same Old Party and the Same Old Excuses.

Say it ain't so, Bobby

We can see that Bobby Jindal likes to talk as though his audience were all preschoolers and wear ties he borrowed from Bozo the Clown, but did Bobby Jindal make up a story? Seems like it.

Tuesday night's speech to congress had the man who would be president calling himself a hero, insisting that boats be allowed to rescue people of New Orleans stranded on rooftops; standing firm when some nasty ol' gummint bureaucrat was telling the sheriff that boats without proof of insurance would have to stay home. Only problem is, says Talking Points Memo -- he wasn't in the sheriff's office -- he may not even have been in New Orleans and the sheriff didn't know about the policy until weeks later.

Seems his only course of action may be to insist, like Sarah Palin, that she really did say "thanks but no thanks" and really did sell the state jet on eBay when she didn't and blame it all on the Liberal Media. Good luck to the both of them.

I don't know anything

Nobody knows anything. I've heard the quote attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, but I don't know. I don't know anything.

I don't know how the economy can go straight to hell in a supersonic hand basket and yet the dollar can gain strength against stronger currencies.

I don't know how John McCain can bellow about Obama's lack of leadership when he can't rally his own party to fix his own party's disaster and I don't know how he can mock Obama for being aloof regarding the deliberations when McCain continued his campaign after his "putting it on hold" play to the grandstand, and he and Lieberman went out to dinner at an expensive restaurant while it was going on.

I don't know why it's a good thing to be a maverick who can't get along with his party or the other one when leadership is required and I don't know why it isn't a bad thing when a senator or congressman votes against the wishes of over 80% of his constituents.

I don't even know why McCain, who despite his hyperbloviations has reversed 26 years of experience in backing this bailout can blame Obama for being more fiscally conservative and a big spender at the same time. I don't know why McCain bellows about lowering taxes when the Democrats' tax plan lowers them for more people and I don't know why his party doesn't simply fall down and die of shame after telling us we need an immediate, no questions asked bailout only days after insisting that the economy was sound and debt didn't matter and in fact we needed more of it. I don't know how leadership consists only of blaming others while weaseling out of responsibility for having been part of the collapse that I and many others predicted would come of borrow and spend economics. I don't know how leadership involves lying repeatedly, consistently and thoroughly and I don't know how one gets points for snickering and grimacing in a debate.

I don't know why this flyblown, disease ridden, dishonest old crank has more than a dozen supporters, but he does. I don't know anything and that's an understatement.

Consider the source

The Army Times can't easily be dismissed as part of the Liberal Elitist press, but guess who is questioning the honesty of John McCain? Flip Flop or Fib? asks staff writer Bradley Penniston today.

Obama promised, according to a McCain statement on Sept 8th, to "slow our development of Future Combat Systems."

Future Combat Systems is a program that is seen as the core of the program to modernize our military in keeping with future requirements.

“This is not a time to slow our development of Future Combat Systems"

said McCain -- the very same McCain who back in July of this year declared to the Washington Post about the Army's FCS program:

" that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed."

So what is this -- a flip flop or a fib? To answer the question, the article quotes the Lexington Institute, a Libertarian think tank, as calling McCain "deceitful."

“McCain’s interpretation of Obama’s position is typical of the way in which the Republicans have twisted Democratic views in order to undercut their opponents and at the same time obscure the past positions of the Republicans,”

Considering the source, this is amazing material. Could it be that the troops have figured out who really supports them? Could it be that John who has never been on the web doesn't realize how easy it is for people to relate his words of today with his words of yesterday? Anyway, to see such no-nonsense criticism in a publication that seems unlikely to support a Democratic candidate against a military "hero" might be seen as a glimmer of hope. If McCain loses the military vote, he may lose the election. If so the question "is there a God" may still remain, but "is there a Democracy" will be answered.

My dinner with Fox

O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain

-Hamlet-


I had dinner with some boating friends Thursday evening. All retired engineers with advanced degrees who have had important careers. It's probably safe to guess that they are intelligent. All couldn't resist telling me how terrible it was the way the media were treating Poor Little Sarah and wasn't it unforgivable that the Liberals were sending planeloads of people to Alaska to dig up "dirt" on Poor Little Sarah. Wasn't the courage and poise of Poor Little Sarah, just remarkable? Didn't she tell the Liberals off?

I managed to mumble something about the dozen papers I read every day gushing nearly as much as the stadium full of drunken delegates did and that the only thing she really told was a pack of lies. Isn't a convincing liar more dangerous than a bumbler? I don't know how much more I can take. Of course to cite any source, verifiable or otherwise other than Fox is to provoke the hands over the ears Liberaliberaliberal chant. It reminds me very much of the films I used to watch as a psychology student before I decided dealing with the insane wasn't for me.

Of Course, FactCheck.org and AP have shown in detail that virtually every word from this campaign has been a lie, whether it's been to praise their own wonderfulness or to decry the perfidy of the Democrats. FactCheck.org has a summary of what John has been slinging, and I earlier referenced an AP summary of Poor Little Sarah's flim-flam, but at this point perhaps there's no point in bothering. If it's coming from the Republicans, it's a lie and besides, all the proof in the world will not affect the programming of the possessed and the demented voters. It might as well be true anyway.

It's not so much the whoppers I worry about, it's the little things, the little embellishments and half truths that cement the whole into one huge concrete crock. Take McCain's swooning praise for the governor who put the executive jet up for sale on eBay and made a profit. Yes, that's the same Poor Little Sarah who left Wasilla with a $3000 per capita debt when she slithered into the governorship. But you have to admit it sounds great even though it isn't true. It failed to sell on eBay and was sold through a broker at a loss.

There is a difference between a profit and loss. A president should know what the difference is.

Of course there's a difference between the truth and "truthiness" as Colbert would call the plausible but untrue little statements. The would-be president probably knows it and apparently doesn't care.

Watch that smile!

No lie too lame

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out


All of what most of us say and do and believe has nothing to do with reason or even with facts. That anyone can, as many obviously do, blame the 2001 attack on Democrats as part of a belief system under which our country is divided by phallic metaphor between tough and wimpy, hard and soft, unbending and flaccid, is evident. The cornerstone, the unquestioned first principle is that Democrats are Liberals and liberals are defenseless and advocate defenselessness -- history and dictionary be damned.

Of course the attack was aided and the attackers abetted by the refusal of the Republican government to pay attention to warnings and the effective shutdown of anti-terrorism planning. Why it was the Democrats' fault that the airlines weren't forced to incorporate reinforced cabin doors, I don't know and why the myth persists that Democrats resisted counterattack I don't know either, other than to say this is a nation of insane people.

So why is it surprising that yet another insane billboard has cropped up in Florida, with yet another picture of those tired towers burning and the fully expected and indeed inevitable plea not to vote for Democrats. It wouldn't be surprising even had Bush admitted responsibility, admitted incompetence or even complicity. Democrats advocate defenselessness, unilateral disarmament, appeasement and general flaccidity and they would in the minds of the mindless even if they were all Goosestepping down Pennsylvania Avenue in black, shiny boots and even though the party supported Bush's programs in near unanimity. Belief is truth and truth is belief.

"Liberals get abjectly hysterical whenever the truth about them is pointed out,"

reads a comment at Republican website Lucienne.com. Hysteria of course is a familiar condition at such places; obsessively so, albeit mostly unnoticed except when projected onto others. The calm, dispassionate commentary by Republican agitators and polemicists, it's implied, should be an example to abjectly hysterical Liberal hotheads like -- well, like me. Of course the hysteria is theirs, the truth is not, and so it will remain until the inevitable collapse of the United States into an authoritarian, aggressive, nationalistic, xenophobic cauldron of irrational right wing idiot rage; flags flying, neon crosses ablaze and the twin towers forever smoking on billboards in the hot Florida night.

Burning

Outrage!

The latest crock of fake, puffed-up anti-Obama outrage now arriving at in-boxes all over the Internet is purportedly from a disabled Marine who allegedly spoke to the Senator from Illinois at some rally at a local college.

"Senator Obama; I work with disabled veterans throughout the VA Hospital system, what is your plan for our veterans, especially our disabled veterans who use the VA Hospitals for their care. I stated we need mandatory funding for our VA system to ensure the care is available when needed, especially in light of the current situation in Iraq and the numbers of troops who are coming home with severe disabilities."

"He told one of his aide's [sic] to get my name, blew me off, did not answer my question and I never heard from him or the aide again."

I'm shocked, SHOCKED that he or his "aide's" didn't answer every comment from every one of the thousands of people he addresses every day! After all, John McCain and George Bush and "go fuck yourself" Cheney are very responsive to every individual veteran's request, aren't they?

"Is this who we want as our "Commander in Chief"? [sic]

"He wouldn't even answer a "veterans" [sic] question, regarding other veterans. Take it for what it's worth.. just thought I'd pass on my experience with Mr. Obama."

Well Mr. Veteran, if you really exist as other than the figment of the Republican hate machine, you have a hell of an ego to go with your piss poor and very selective memory as to the Republican Party's treatment of veterans. I will take it as worth less than nothing and if this is the honesty level of McCain supporters, I would vote for anyone you oppose.

If this is the best you can do in the manufactured outrage department you might as well confess that you have some other interest in promoting the guy with a pretty lousy record of promoting better conditions and care for our military because the country's experience with the Republicans has united it as never before against these pirates -- and apparently against you.

I'm getting pretty tired of your jingo jive about "commanders in Chief" as well. The President needs to be and do vastly more than to send people to war and command a warrior nation. In fact when he does, it's usually the mark of his failure as a leader and sometimes the mark of his using the military as a pawn in some perfidious and profitable game. Yes, our administration and the Republicans for whom they stand have sold you out, and whether or not Barak Obama had time to address your far from unique concerns in person, John McCain, the man the Senate Ethics Committee found guilty of "poor judgement" will continue to sell you out and sell us all out if he's allowed to.

Perhaps you've received the same viral e-mail. Perhaps you just deleted it -- certainly you're smart enough to see it for the pathetic nonsense it is, but perhaps, like me, you told the sender to take his puerile propaganda and stick it, whether it cost you a friend or not. I care too much about America's future to keep friends like that.

Childe Barak

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

-- Robert Browning

**********

When does enough become too damned much? Immediately, when we're talking about any US election and this one is exceptional only in that it went over the top before it even started. The latest bit of fake outrage at the Republican "he said, she said" buffet is that Barack Obama told a whopper when he said an uncle of his helped liberate Auschwitz. The man actually participated in the liberation of Buchenwald.

No straw lacks enough buoyancy to be grasped at by the party drowning in its own deceit.

"Obama's frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief,"

said RNC spokesman and ethical cripple Alex Conant. No, they don't, but he wishes they did. He wishes they would raise the kind of doubts that should have prevented the coke and booze-addled serial failure, cynical liar and duty shirker George Walker Bush from being elected to public office. George, the guy who promised to keep us out of foreign conflicts and nation building and to restore honor and dignity to the Presidency.

Obama's grandmother's brother, was a member of the US 89th infantry division that went into Buchenwald and that's a fact. It has no more or less significance than if it had been another camp, although of course Auschwitz is in Poland and was liberated by the Russians. No honest man could identify this as a lie, but then we're talking about Republicans.

No candidate's programs, promises, plans or platforms ever survive first contact with reality anyway, It's all for show, but if Obama is being dishonest by naming the wrong concentration camp and George Bush was honest by claiming he had never been arrested for drunk driving, then it's time to stop talking about honesty and begin talking about gross, offensive hyperbole and ruthless hypocrisy. It's time to get real about who's exaggerating and how it reflects on the GOP and its candidates.

Cross posted from The Reaction

More flags, fewer facts

I've been wondering when the swift boats would put to sea, but perhaps we will have to wait until the Democrats have chosen a candidate so that it doesn't become apparent that anyone and everyone opposing God's Own Party will be attacked. Until then we'll likely have an endless supply of cheap shots lobbed over the fence, like the viral picture of Obama in front of an obscenely large flag without his hand on his heart and the cynical outrage at Hillary Clinton's failure to leave a tip at a Toledo, Iowa diner that inspired a cartoon in today's New York Times. Meanwhile very few of us will have any idea of exactly what their health care proposals contain or what their economic policies would be like.

It's not clear whether a tip was actually left; the Clinton staff said there was a $100 tip left and the Picture of Obama was of course taken out of context from a a video that shows the Pledge of Allegiance was not being regurgitated when it was taken, but little by little, the sleaze brokers are going to chip away at the candidates images, misinterpreting remarks, photoshopping images, rearranging stories so as to make Democratic candidates seem unpatriotic, disdainful of the common man and just plain un-American.

Of course, the attempt to remake Barak Obama as a closet Islamic radical didn't work for most of us and his failure to wear the requisite flag pin at every moment didn't really convert anyone to support of the Republican pandaemon and the stories about Hillary hiring hit men to go after an opponents cat are less that credible, but each new piece of dung flung from their cage does work a slow erosion, a slow character assassination and an insidious diversion away from what America needs to save itself.

I care little where a president puts his hands unless it's into my pocket or onto the red button and I quite frankly don't give a damn about the illegal coercion in pledging allegiance to someone else's God or about flags or cheap jewelry or people who worship them while treating the constitution and our laws and our property with snickering disdain.

Freedom's just another word

It's to the point where every time I see another picture of those damned smoking towers I know somebody's going to lie to me and last night was no exception.

"They attacked us!"

says the legless man in camouflage; The ad run during NBC Nightly News showed that same old video as though he wasn't talking about two disparate and essentially unrelated "they's." A shadowy organization calling themselves Freedoms Watch is shamelessly promoting the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein attacked New York and with the smug, condescending attitude of a second grade school teacher talking to small children about keeping order in the lunchroom.

If we pull out now, the sacrifice will have been in vain, says the pathetic victim of the Bush family vendetta. Well here's the only point on which I agree since it was all in vain from the start. If I don't keep trying to turn lead into gold, I will never turn lead into gold. That's logically true, of course, but a misleading tautology. I won't turn lead into gold no matter what I do.

So what the hell is he really selling with the crude sophistry and fatuous fallacies? Nobody goes to the trouble of creating false equivalences and forging them into truth by relentless hammering on the anvil of American ear drums unless there's something to be gained by it. Freedom's Watch doesn't hide their mission, although they keep their identity and funding out of sight. Their web site is festooned with flags and eagles and tawdry tokens of cheap souvenir patriotism and its mission statement is as gaudy and cliché as one would expect from any carnival barker:

Our mission is to ensure a strong national defense and a powerful fight against terror, especially in Iraq.

National defense being deceitfully defined, of course, as committing all your assets in an attack on and occupation of a non-threatening nation. National defense is using those troops as hostages in an imperial endeavor. But terror is fear, not a country and sorry to say, I'm not afraid much less terrified, so for my part the question is moot.

Our group will give a voice to those who believe that victory is America's only choice.

Which begs the question the answer to which has been accepted by most rational people including the Generals. The question is "what is victory for us in someone else's civil war" and the answer is that military victory is not a concept that applies here. Dealing with the fact that hating America to death is growing like an epidemic that grows faster every time we kill someone in a country that did not threaten us or attack us does not include the prolonged military occupation of Iraq. Those who believe, in this case, are most likely to be those who profit.

Those who want to quit while victory is possible have dominated the public debate about terror and Iraq since the 2004 election.

But that's not too surprising because Victory is undefinable, occupation unsustainable and what seems to be the largest possible majority in America wants out of it -- and they want out because they believe "victory" is not possible. There is in fact no debate about Iraq and terrorism. Iraq was never a supporter of international terrorism. Those countries who supported al Qaeda are being called allies.

For those who believe in peace through strength, the cavalry is coming.

Yes, this is a John Wayne movie and will end nicely as the credits roll on the silver screen. Don't worry about it. Strength means constant war, doesn't it? Strong people are always picking fights.

Our goal, as we await General Petraeus' report, is to make sure our elected leaders do not abandon our nation's mission in Iraq and that they do not cave in to the demands of those who want to cut and run.

After all, it's not their job to execute the will of their constituents, is it? It's what the nameless and wealthy warmongers and plutocrat profiteers want that should matter to them. It's also rather suspicious that they seem to know what General Petraeus' report contains, but of course we know the source of all this, don't we?

There's no fallacy or misstatement there that hasn't been beaten to death, but human nature being what it is, repetition wipes away refutation and lies become history. Click on the about us link at Freedoms watch and you won't find anything about them other than an assertion that they are legal and are asking for money, as though the people who fund it haven't made so much money from this war that they don't need your contributions. What they really want is your freedom, and your future and the blood of your children.

Kicking it

"We're kicking ass" said the ever-eloquent George W. Bush to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile. That's not to say, of course that we're making Iraq safe for American occupation and oil exploitation, much less making it safe for Iraqis and it's certainly not to say that we're winning. We have however, kicked a lot of people out of their country and they may be the lucky ones. "Kicking Ass" to my way of thinking is one of the exhausted idioms George Orwell refers to as a token of insincerity. It allows Bush to seem sanguine without actually lying.

Bush, of course, is in Australia seeking to aid the re-election of Prime Minister John Howard over the Australian Labor Party's Kevin Rudd and of course to sell his war. Somehow the full scale riots expected in protest of his presence and his policies would make the effort questionable, but questionable efforts, questionable ethics, and questionable deeds have never really seemed to matter to Bush who listens to higher sources than the people he's hired to serve. I'm sure he will kick ass in Australia too.

Why we lost the war.

George Will writes today, in anticipation of the September progress report:

"After the First World War, politics in Germany's new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power."

Of course we know that this fanciful analysis led to extremism, scapegoating and persecution of the innocent, but what Will does not discuss is the fanciful analysis that has fed the still unbridged divide in the US that followed upon the Viet Nam war. We would have won that one of course, if only or if it hadn't been for Fonda, Hippies, flag burners, the Liberal Press, unpatriotic dissenters, etc. We would have "won" but for the lack of resolve and the "emboldenment" of the "enemy" by those who didn't swallow the false reports and fanciful predictions. We were so close to winning.

The fact that containing the spread of Communism by military involvement in civil wars has been largely unsuccessful since the end of WW II doesn't seem to enter the equation or dilute the argument that what every citizen of the world wants is American inspired and all they need is to have is elections for western liberal democracy to flourish. It was never that we jumped into untenable struggles with inchoate strategies without the slightest doubt of our heroism, it is always the fault of some convenient group who never believed the lies.

Nixon's plan to win was of course, to appear resolute, to escalate in secret and to give false progress reports while predicting that the Vietnamese army would soon stand up so that we could stand down and declare victory with honor. That's the same basic strategy of our Decider, Commander Guy, Warpresident: we win through resolve alone and lose through realism - and he still gets applause for it.


Will goes on to speculate that Petraeus' report will convince no one in the two opposing camps, but in typical Will fashion, he avoids having to admit that there is accessible reality outside of political scenarios. It's as though the deluded and the perspicacious are somehow equivalent and so objectivity is illusory. Perhaps George has been studying Zen or perhaps he's designed an interesting way to avoid taking responsibility for his support of the Neocon crusade.

Viet Nam ended badly because we had no plan for orderly withdrawal short of unconditional surrender of all opponents civilian and military and so it will be with Iraq. Of course it's interesting to note that Bush has finally made notice of the lessons of Viet Nam, the conflict he and his cronies avoided, by warning us of the bloodshed that will ensue if we leave, without taking responsibility for the blood already shed in our arriving and remaining. The precipitous end of our involvement in Viet Nam allowed chaos to ensue because we bombed countries into the stone age and destabilized every government in the area and created more enemies than we could count and didn't have time or the means or the plan to get our friends out. Sounds like a familiar story, doesn't it?

No one will be able to perpetuate this war long enough or be able to deploy enough force to change the indigenous religions and tribal affiliations and the ancient animosities they carry. Iraq will not be standing up for the Maliki Government or anything like it. This war will end badly and is likely to spread and of course to the next, remember-nothing generation, it will have gone badly because of the Liberals and their lack of resolve.

The Ministry of Logic

And snarling Dick Cheney continues to channel Joseph Goebbels; furnishing a gathering of Marines with enough bullshit, steaming, bubbling and reeking, to fertilize all the poppy fields in Afghanistan forever.

We're fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, not local insurgents, not the Iranian trained operatives we were blaming last week, not the sectarian militias who are united only in their desire to have us long gone. We're facing an organized army led from a central headquarters, and we have to fight them in Iraq because they're fighting us in Iraq. Never mind that it isn't true that Iraq wants us there. Never mind that it doesn't make sense to fight "them" in Iraq, if the leaders are in Afghanistan. Never mind that there would be no al Qaeda in Iraq, if indeed there really are more than a few, if we hadn't invaded and allowed the complete collapse of law and order because of an arrogant preference for political theory over sound military advice.

"If you support the war on terror, then you ought to support it where the terrorists are fighting us,"

Or in other words, if you support A then you should support B where B is, even though the relationship between A and B cannot be shown. These arguments should be preserved in logic textbooks for students to study forever. One hopes that the marines forced to listen to this infantile babble have had enough training to wonder why, if we're not fighting Iraqis in the streets of Iraq, we would have to concentrate on foot soldiers and ignore the possibility of going after the alleged leaders in their headquarters; have enough military know-how to ask why we have to let "the enemy" choose the battleground. But I can only hope they are tired enough of the slaughter, the flag waving, the lying and the dying to see through it all.

Enemy within

J. Thomas Duffy at the Reaction calls it the night of the jackal. I hope someday if we're not forbidden by BB to discuss it, we don't look back and call it the night when freedom died. It's hard to get my mind off of the Congressional sellout that allows Bush unlimited power whenever he decides he needs it. It's hard not to associate it with the directives that allow him to seize your assets if you get in the way of his Iraq agenda and that allow him to declare himself supreme ruler for as long as he deems necessary. It's hard not to see liberty and justice slipping silently and invisibly away like water over polished marble slabs.

Remember when Bush told us he didn't trust government - he trusted the people? Perhaps as Duffy says, the lion sleeps tonight, but the lyin' never stops.

Still, it's important to remember that even if President Bush is the greatest enemy of our constitution since King George III of England, there are other enemies demented and domestic that pursue a relentless process of undermining what is left of the promise of liberty. They send me e-mail almost every day. Saturday evening brought me a very impassioned note showing a picture of the face of the Washington one dollar coin with the huge headline displayed in red letters:

YOU GUESSED IT 'IN GOD WE TRUST' IS GONE

After a fabricated story about having picked up some of these gold tone coins at the bank and the shock, the horror at discovering the omission of that Ten Commandment defying motto, I'm asked again in huge letters: "

"Who originally put In God We Trust onto our currency? My guess is that it was one of the presidents on these coins. All our US government has done is dishonor them, and disgust me!!! Together we can force them out of circulation. Please send to all on you [sic] e-mail list. I am personally offended and fed up with the denigration of God and Christianity in my country. I am certain George Washington would never have agreed to his picture on the coin if it any way diminished faith in God. "

Of course the guess is wrong and he may be certain but he's certainly wrong about Washington. He would have done no such thing, being a Deist and not a Christian believing in a personal or monetary God and having exhibited no particular urge to establish a religion in defiance of the Constitution during his lifetime and there not having been any religious message on any of our coinage prior to 1864. We can be sure he's not rolling in his grave at the moment. It's also a bit odd to say that faith is promoted (albeit in rampant defiance of the Bill of Rights and the stated intentions of those who wrote it) by slogans on money. But of course the whole thing is rendered hilariously moot by the fact that the motto does indeed appear around the edge of the coin. The perpetrator is of course lying for the Lord and at full throttle.

Perhaps the outraged author is ignorant enough not to know that the initial appearance of 'In God we Trust' was on the two cent coin in 1864 and was part of the attempt to assign a religious mission to the Northern side in the Civil War. It was added at the behest of the Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Most people would probably fall for the fabrication:

"The new George Washington $1.00 coin is the first money ever issued by the USA in modern history without the words "In God We Trust". By omitting these words, our politically correct, secularist leaders made a conscientious decision that either; 1) God does not exist, or 2) that God exists, but can no longer be trusted. "

but fabrication it is. It was only from 1938 on that all coins bore the motto and the first paper money to bear it was issued in 1957.

Since it's nearly impossible for anyone to be quite as stupid as the writer of this e-mail appears to be, I can only conclude that it's another attempt by the Christianist Jihad to undermine truth, justice, the monetary system and the American Way. So perhaps by pointing to the correct history and by reading the overtly secularist constitution, I've become a politically correct secularist leader. I'm not actually sure what that means, but I do think it's better to be correct than incorrect with respect to the facts and better to tell the truth than to be a liar, even if it's a liar for the advancement of Christian supremacy.

New lamps for old

Remember the queasy feeling you used to get when you saw Lyndon Johnson's flabby face saying "mah felluh Amuricuns" knowing he was going to announce another escalation of the war in Viet Nam? For those as old as I am, the reports of 20,000 troops scheduled to be "rotated" into Iraq this December brought a flashback today. It's hard to avoid the feeling of history repeating itself, even if the details are different.

It's hard to avoid the creep of rising despair and disgust when reading about how more than half of Ohio's 2004 ballots have been destroyed in defiance of law. Future historians may see the Bush era as a sort of dark ages, with little in the way of records or documentation to tell them what happened. It's hard enough for us to tell what happened while the Administration refuses to release records or to testify. Even former officials like Don Rumsfeld seem to feel that they have a perpetual right to be exempt from inquiry. Rummy seems to simply have ignored the request to testify in the Pat Tillman inquiry and the White House won't respond to a request for information about the death and perhaps the murder of an American soldier who they used as a poster boy for the war. Will they remember to forget this episode when next they chastise us for demoralizing the troops who are going to spend yet another Christmas in Iraq wondering if anyone will ask questions or get answers if they get shot three times between the eyes because they saw something or had the wrong beliefs?

Will I live long enough to see another generation of disillusioned troops return from a military disaster to be neglected by the government and lied to about why their sacrifice came to nothing? Will my grandchildren witness the scraggly gray haired veterans of Bush's wars sleeping in vacant lots next to the VFW hall grumbling about how Michael Moore lost the war for them? That's one of the curses of growing old. You can't see the present as anything new.