JABbering Stooge

Via the fine folks at Sadly, No!, Our Lady of the Internment Camps whines about the sudden dearth of maturity on the Internets:

Longtime readers are familiar with the brilliant work of Diana West. She has been a guest-blogger here and I frequently link her trenchant Washington Times columns. Today, her first book debuts: “The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” I was delighted to read the manuscript and provide an endorsement. The book is a brilliant diagnosis of our backward baseball cap culture and its intellectual and moral deficiencies, which have profound consequences for a nation at war.

S, N! commenter Mikey quickly takes her to task:

Hey, Michelle, come over here and sit down. Give me an hour or so to tell you how I “grew up”.

Because you are an insulated, insular, priviledged american bigot, you are quite comfortable cheering for war and demanding we as a nation grow up. Sadly, hypocritically perhaps, or perhaps just ignorantly not understanding the role war plays in growing up.

Frankly, I could have used a little less growing up, and a little more childhood. At 18 years old, I didn’t need to see the things I saw. I didn’t need to learn the things I learned about the world.

And because you are addicted to hatred, you want to inflict that caliber of horror on kids all over the world. Our kids, and “theirs”. To what end? To what bloody, selfish, pathetic end, dammit?

When we are all veterans, having killed, having lost friends and loved ones in horrific ways, having cradled a young strangers head while he bleeds out, shivering in the hot afternoon sun, having fired the rounds that helped a child to “grow up” more quickly by killing his mother, what will we have accomplished? Will that somehow be a better society? Will we be better people? Will you have learned that hatred only breeds death?

No, Michelle, it is you and your arrogant, bigoted friends safely ensconced in your suburban paradise, where the worst that can happen is a splinter in your finger from that darn garden gate, that need to grow up. You need to understand that in war, everybody loses, and that fighting in a war is not honorable, does not fill you with glory, does not protect you from the people who hate YOU.

When you have grown up a little, you will have learned that it is a proud, honorable human who lives at peace with his neighbors, who finds a little discussion, a bit of negotiation, perhaps a smidgen of commerce to be a better solution to disagreements than killing and destruction.

As a grown up, you will find that lifting up your fellow human brothers and sisters, helping them be more, and better, and healthier, is infinitely more rewarding than killing them and wrecking their stuff.

A genuine adult understands that they are making a choice. They can choose a path that leads to eternal conflict, hatred, destruction, fear and back to more hatred, or they can find path to peace and prosperity. It doesn’t need to be surrender - but it doesn’t need to be war either…

Amen, man.

Sidebar: I’ll have a comment or two on MalKKKin’s latest endorsement of yet another “Kill all the Muslims!” book-length screed when I get back from Drinking Liberally.

As Comedy Central’s “fake” news show sends its correspondants to do the reporting the “real” news won’t do in an effort labelled “Operation Silent Thunder,” the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, especially as it gears up to ghostwrite Gen. Petraeus’ September report on the progress (or lack thereof) of the clusterfuck in Iraq, more closely resembles “Operation Silent, But Deadly.”

Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats are still deploying their stale, 14-year-old strategy, “Operation Where The Fuck Are My Balls?” Even as the conservative punitocracy launches “Operation Nuke The Darkies” and “Operation Gilead.”

I’ll be in the corner, curled up in a fetal position. That is, if I haven’t drunk myself into oblivion at DL tonight. (Which would be a first - I’m a total teetotaler when it comes to alcohol - never really found a drink I particularly like.)

Sadly, I will be at Drinking Liberally tonight when Christiane Amanpour’s three-part series, “God’s Warriors,” begins on CNN. Tonight’s edition should be especially interesting, since it focuses on the Jewish equivalents of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bill Donohue, Osama bin Laden Forgotten and Ayatollah Khomeini - a subject that doesn’t get a lot of attention in mainstream press they way the above-mentioned nutjobs do.

Hopefully, the entire series will expose people to the reality that this shit has gone on for far too long.

Wiley Miller made the point far more eloquently than I ever could in a recent Non Sequitur comic:

Leona Helmsley is dead. Sadly, her ugly tax-evading legacy lives on in this “Fair Tax” nonsense. The most famous line attributed to the late , “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes,” is already virtually a plank in the GOP platform. We see it in their sneering harangues about the “lucky duckies” living at or below the poverty line. These “lucky duckies” are people who are just one medical emergency away from bone-crushing debt which, thanks to the draconian new bankruptcy laws, they can no longer escape. Hardly what any rational observer would call “lucky.”

We see it in the glowering diatribes equating wealth with moral superiority - that somehow the poor are inherently morally defective because they are poor. For instance, Neal Boortz frequently rails against the minimum wage as the federal government “[using] its police power to force an employer to pay an employee more that that employee’s labor is worth to the employer” - by which he means forcing employers to pay their employees anything at all. Conservatives would have you believe that the poor choose to be poor because “we’ve created an endemic unwillingness to make the choices one needs to be even mildly more successful.” (Translation: The poor are poor because they’re lazy.) Never mind that many of these poor families consist of multiple income earners, each with multiple jobs that barely even pay peanuts (the most salient example of this was the woman with three jobs that The Most Holy George W. Christ, being the insensitive jerk that he is, made the butt of a joke). After all, according to conservatives, only “incompetent, ignorant, worthless adults” make minimum wage.

In other words, the poor are moral degenerates because they don’t pull in twenty-figure salaries, and they’re not absurdly rich because they’re moral degenerates. It’s a neat trick of circular logic used to justify the calcification of socioeconomic strata that’s been going on for the last twenty-seven years.

Sidebar: In case you’re wondering why I’m ragging particularly hard on the Rarin’ Aryan Boortz, he’s been one of the biggest proponents of this “Fair Tax” idiocy - even going so far as to co-author a book-length screed on the subject.

And now the hatred of the poor is cropping up in the form of tax policy. It’s suddenly not enough that Ken Lay and Leona Helmsley got to hire the best accountants and tax lawyers to suss out as many legal loopholes as possible for them to squeeze through and the “little people” didn’t. Oh, no. You see, on paper at least, the upper 1% has to pay a larger percentage in income tax than those “lucky duckies” conservatives are constantly sneering at. “It’s not fair!” they whine.

And so, by coopting progressive rhetoric about fairness, they’ve advocated the ultimate in class warfare: a national sales tax. And given that the working poor spend a much higher percentage of their meager incomes on basic necessities like food and clothes - the very things that would be subject to sales taxes - than the Donald Trumps of the world, the poor get hit the hardest by a national sales tax. It’s the best of both worlds, really. By coopting progressive rhetoric, they get to claim that they, not the evil “libruls,” are the One True Defenders™ of the “Little Guy” while at the same time enacting policies that hang increasingly heavy millstones around the necks of the people they secretly look down their noses at. Never mind that such a system is unsustainable. Never mind the system’s inherent instability produces a major drag on our economy. So long as they get to reap all the benefits and treat labor as a market externality that they can ignore, marginalize, and, if need be, crush, then “Ford’s in his Flivver, and all’s well with the world.”

Perhaps the best way we can nip this insanity in the bud is to apply the appropriate framing label in much the same way that progressives applied the label “Paris Hilton Tax” to the Estate Tax to signify that that was pretty much the only person being affected by the Estate Tax. I’d like to suggest “The Leona Helmsley Tax” for the National Sales Tax, since that appropriately represents the utter contempt conservatives have for anyone who makes less than a bajillion dollars per second.