JABbering Stooge

Our Lady of the Internment Camps, Michelle MalKKKin, has done it again. This time, she’s heartily endorsing David Horowitz camp-follower Robert Spencer’s new “Kill All the Muslims!” screed, Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t. This ugly elimination game is not new, and certainly should not be tolerated in 21st Century America. Mainline Christians in this country have learned from the examples of the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust and the Salem Witch Trials that incitements to religicide - the religious version of genocide - have produced some of the darkest chapters in human history. Not to mention that it goes against everything the Founding Fathers fought, bled and died for.

Sadly, conservative Christians seem to think that treating members of differing religions (or even no religion) as fucking human beings is “dhimmitude.” Quite frankly, I’m sick of it. But if MalKKKin wants to write off an entire religion merely because of the actions of its most fundamentalist whackjobs, then it’s only fair that we level the same jaundiced eye towards the twisted notion of Christianity that she and her cohort espouse (and would like to jam down our throats). After all, the Bible is just loaded with hateful passages that suggest that the Christian God gets off on “smiting the infidel.”

And then there’s the effect that all this religious hatred has on conservative Christians. In just the last few weeks, followers of “The Religion of Peace” have:

• Torched an Antioch, California mosque.

• Beat the shit out of a London imam who was minding his own business.

• Disrupted services at gay-friendly churches.

• Called for President Bush to declare himself Dictator-for-Life while nuking Iraqis (and other <Insert ethnic slur for Muslims here> off the face of the Earth.

• Issued a fatwa against Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, calling for followers to engage in “imprecatory prayer” against the religious watchdog organization.

Sidebar: Sadly, No! fans, take note: one of the people disrupting the church services was none other than Coach Dave “Spaghetti Pusher” Daubenmire.

As I’ve said before:

For all the screeching protests of the unhinged right to the contrary, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the theocrats that they lovingly endorse and the theocrats that they want to stuff inside of human-sized microweaves.

Michelle, do you mind if I make one personal observation? STICK IT. Seriously, until you and all the other holier-than-thou asshats stop inciting terrorism against anyone who doesn’t subscribe to your twisted notion of Christianity, you can just forget about Christianity having ANY legitimate claim to being a “Religion of Peace.” Not that you’d listen. I forgot about your orgasmic requirements.

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.

Wonder if it’s gonna be a shotgun wedding…

No, seriously. I shit you not. That’s what was in the paper today. Take a look (emphasis mine):

Sometimes it pays to shop around for the truth

Ben Sargent characterized Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a fibbing Pinocchio in his July 29 editorial cartoon. I thought back to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and could not recall a similar artistic statement made by Sargent. In fact, his acerbic tendencies seemed to be on extended vacation during this protracted news story.

If one’s statements are consistently politically one-sided, and his are, then the message unfortunately is limited to barbs and ridicule targeting the same groups, and that becomes boring and predictable after a while. Instead, let’s see commentary transcending political affiliation and based on principle, such as pointing out the damage caused by lies and abuse of power in all situations where it occurs.

That type of artistic statement has world-changing potential.

Steve <REDACTED>, Austin

As much as I malign the Statesman for its anti-liberal bias, they actually did some decent journalism this time by pointing to a Ben Sargent cartoon that criticized President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal witchhunt.

And in case you’re wondering, here’s the cartoon the letter writer was concern trolling about:

On my way home from Phoenix on Sunday, I decided to plunk down $2.00 for the Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic, when I discovered this gem of wingnuttery:

My answer to those expressing outrage

Has the United States evolved into a country of people who constantly “express outrage” about something?

With that in mind:

• Jarrett Maupin and Al Sharpton, you are miles away from the great Martin Luther King Jr. and his intelligence. Sit down and shut up.

• Cindy Sheehan and especially Rosie O’Donnell, if you cannot help matters, sit down and shut up.

• Those strange few who insist on using the opposite sex restrooms, illegal border crossers who feel mistreated here and Muslim clerics at airports who act suspicious knowingly - hey, sit down and shut up.

• The Sierra Club and other groups that insist on making all of the outdoors off limits except for the 2 percent of the population who are backpackers and hikers (never mind the majority who responsibly use federal lands daily), as well as the environmental study groups and special interest groups that make a stand against anything and everything for the sake of seeing their name in the newspaper or some eco-terrorist newsletter - sit down and shut up.

Many long for the day we finally can tell any group, organization, coalition, cause, study group or ad hoc committee that uses the term “We express outrage” to “Sit down and shut up.”

Richard <REDACTED>, Fort Mohave

Yeah. Great. Anyone who is not a straight, white, male conservative Christian needs to STFU! Just what we need in this country - another advocate of unity at the point of a gun.

And then there was this bit from Captain Obvious:

Here’s a simple solution for bridges

When hundreds of large trucks pound these bridges everyday, after a while small cracks in the concrete begin to appear.

In the winter after a rain or melting snow, there may be a hard freeze. Water gets in the cracks and freezes. Freezing water expands with great force, making the cracks larger, and larger, each time the rain-freeze cycle repeats. After enough winters and enough trucks the bridge will fail.

How can this be prevented?

Inspect the concrete for cracks. When a crack is found, blow the moisture out and fill the crack with epoxy crack filler.

This may be too simple for our government engineers, or maybe not expensive enough. But in case no one believes this cycle of destruction, it didn’t cost me much to write this letter.

John <REDACTED>, Phoenix

Note the open admission of the wingnut article of faith that every single government position is filled with incompetent boobs whose only purpose in life is to pick his pocket. Seems to describe the kind of governance we’ve gotten out of Rethuglican administrations of late…

But as the title implies, Arizona wasn’t the sole source of wingnut LTTEs that pissed me off. Here are a couple from the local fishwrap, both from the Monday edition.

First up is David from Lakeway, who writes:

The liberals’ plan

While it would be hard to defend many of President Bush’s actions as president, he has done nothing impeachable. Insofar as I can determine, he hasn’t even lied to the American people, and lying is not an impeachable offense.

Yeah, sure. Lying is not an impeachable offense, unless it’s a Democratic president lying about a matter that has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH HIS JOB AS PRESIDENT!!!

Oh, and another thing. The Most Holy George W. Christ did lie about Iraqi WMDs. But, please. Continue.

The favorite line of the liberal Bush haters is that he claimed, in his prewar State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain nuclear material in Africa. Not true. He stated that British intelligence had reported this, which Tony Blair confirmed.

Your assertion is flat out false. I don’t care if God Himself corroborated it in one of President Bush’s drunken “visions,” all reliable evidence points to the fact that Iraq did not posess WMDs at the time of the 2003 invasion.

Bush’s predecessor, and most of Congress, believed that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction and was trying to build more.

Yeah, Congress believed it because The Most Holy George W. Christ wouldn’t show them the CIA’s doubts and the evidence against it. And of course, you just had to resort to “Bu-bu-but Clinton!” Please. That dog won’t hunt no more.

Bush was reelected because of the liberals, who chose to run a miserable slate of Kerry/Edwards. They should think about that before they run a lightweight like Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., or a silly character like John Edwards in 2008.

Umm. Yeah. Bush was “reelected” because of Rethuglican voter suppression tactics like caging lists in Ohio and Florida and voter registration companies that promptly shredded the registration forms of Democrats in Nevada and Oregon. Granted, it didn’t help that our side nominated a shitty campaigner like Kerry, but that’s another story.

Oh, and by the way, getting campaign advice from a wingnut concern troll is like a chicken getting health advice from a fox. That’s how we wound up with Kerry as the nominee last time.

Finally, there’s this nutter:

Liberals and health care

Liberals are always saying that the government has totally botched the war in Iraq, and the response to Katrina was just awful, a real mess.

So, after the bridge collapse in Minnesota, we hear them bray that our nation’s infrastructere is a mess and all because of the government’s lack of attention. These same liberals now want this government, the one that can’t seem to get anything right, to take over the nation’s health care. The liberal mind is truly a wonder to behold.

Jim <REDACTED>, Austin

Umm. Yeah. It’s the cronyism and corruption, stupid! There’s a reason why the joke among liberals is “Conservatives complain that government doesn’t work. Then they get elected and prove it.” As a fellow blogger put it, “Don’t expect good government from a party that believes government is bad.” As if somehow Halliburton, Enron or Wal-Mart could do a better job of maintaining our infrastructure.

Philly Daily News‘ Stu Bykofsky bleats:

One month from The Anniversary, I’m thinking another 9/11 would help America.

Worse, he “justifies” this shit by taking a Joe Lieberman-esque “there’s too much partisanship” tack.

Strangely, even this is not enough to keep Our Lady of the Internment Camps from shrieking at him. Quoth the MalKKKin:

We don’t need healing. We need the half of the country that doesn’t believe we are under threat from global jihad to wake up and smell the suicide bomb smoke.

And just how do you propose to accomplish that, eh, Michelle? Extraordinarily render the membership of MoveOn.org? Hook up electrodes to Howard Dean’s testicles? Send the Senate Democrats to Room 101?

Ahh, yes. Unity at the point of a gun. Always a favorite tool of totalitarian dictators.

* With apologies to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

M. C. Rove has left the building. At least for now. And who knows what the future holds for “Bush’s Brain?” The way I see it, with Congress set to start breathing down his neck now that he can no longer plausibly hide behind executive privilege (not that he should’ve been able to hide behind it before, mind you), he will make like Lt. General Philip Kensinger (the general in the Pat Tillman cover-up case) and skip the country. We’ll see.