I was behind a pickup truck this morning with a bumper sticker that floored me:

If you must burn our flag,
please wrap yourself in it first.

What is wrong with you people?

This was a brand new bumper sticker, not an old, faded tatty one. The W04 sticker was old and tatty, and I noticed a decided absence of any McCain/Palin stickers, but the brave stand the person in the truck was taking against the damned commie hippies was fresh on his mind, and apparently, fresh from someone’s emporium.

Much has been made of the resurgence of this mindset amongst the right since the election of President Obama, who is naturally going to take our guns away as well as, presumably, our white women, but to actually encounter it first thing in the morning was a bit much.

Since the teabaggers have scheduled tomorrow’s tea party for noon, and I have to work, I submit herewith my poster for the event:

What are you sniggering at? I bet I got it right.

I am pleased to report that at least one part of the Ginormous Liberal Conspiracy has succeeded, apparently. I am referring to the National Organization for Marriage’s recent announcement of “an ambitious new nationwide ‘2 Million for Marriage’ initiative” to combat the horrors of Iowa and Vermont’s approval of gay marriage.

What NOM failed to realize was that our mole was luring them into a trap. Their new initiative is shortened, of course, to… wait for it… 2M4M.

Merciful heavens, people, anyone who has spent any amount of time on AOL or other chat areas knows that M4M is chatroom shorthand for “male for male,” i.e., gay sex chat. The only explanation I can think of for NOM’s epic fail is that there must in fact be a gay mole in the organization who set them up.

Which does not displease me in the least, of course.

update

In a further round of NOMian ineptitudiness, the domain name 2M4M.org has already been snapped up and, um, repurposed. It seems as if the hilarity will not stop any time soon.

further update

This has appeared on YouTube. Why, oh why, are liberal parodists so mean? Oh, that’s right, their subjects are so stupid:

from Kung Fu Monkey:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Har. (This is in reference to the recent spate of rightwing chickengalts, of course.)

Let’s check the Times-Herald‘s Sound Off and see what we find, shall we? Oh look, conservative wingnuts!

What exactly has President Obama done that he said he was going to do? Nothing. Then again, we Republicans new [sic] that before the election.

Hm. Direct military leaders to end war in Iraq? Check. Expand SCHIP eligibility? Check. Increase funding for the NEA? Check. Lift stem cell research restrictions? Check. Close Guantanamo? Check. Overturn Ledbetter vs. Goodyear? Check. Etc. etc. Not bad for six weeks, actually.

Why do you say the people need government right now? The problem is that we have had too much government for the past eight years. Government jobs need to be cut and government spending stopped.

Yet this person would have called me a communist if I had suggested cutting government spending in Iraq over the last six years.

I own a successful business, pay taxes, pay my mortgage and pay all my other bills. I try to save as much money as possible. I bought a new automobile to help the auto companies. Don’t try to tell me I am to blame for the sorry state of affairs.

No one’s blaming you for the sorry state of affairs. Unless, of course, you’re the inventor of complex derivatives.

I, too, hope Obama fails in strangling our republic with socialism.

“Socialism” is not we call what Obama is doing. Nor would actual socialism strangle a republic. You can check with Sweden on that one.

What a furor there was over Richard Nixon’s enemies list. Now we have President Obama and his enemies list headed by Rush Limbaugh. I’d better not hold my breath waiting for the furor over Obama’s list.

Probably you shouldn’t, because it doesn’t exist. Nixon’s list was an actual on-paper list, and those enemies were spied on by the FBI, careers checked at any possible opportunity. Obama of course has no such list. No one’s even suggested that Limbaugh is an “enemy,” except of course for the Republican spokesman himself. But then that’s just good for business.

To Lynn Westmoreland: Thank you for voting no and being a good steward of our money.

Vid. sup., re: Iraq War. Also, I hope Mr. Westmoreland has publicly refused any of the stimulus money for our district. On principle, of course.

One’s jaw just has to drop when these things show up in our public discourse. They’re so disconnected from the reality-based community that there’s no way to approach them. All you can do is wave at them as their little parade passes by.

Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher is a dancing monkey.

That is all.

All right, people, screw bipartisanship. Working with your ideological opposites is not a Good. It’s just a nice idea. And since I cannot say it better than Jamison Foser over at Media Matters, I will simply quote him:

Sure, people want the politicians to stop bickering and get things done. But, more specifically, most people want the politicians to stop bickering and do things they want done. A single mother working two minimum-wage jobs to feed her kids might want politicians to come together in a spirit of bipartisanship — but she doesn’t want them to pass bipartisan legislation lowering the minimum wage; she wants a bipartisan bill raising the minimum wage. If she can’t have that, I suspect she’d take a party-line minimum-wage increase, even if it means a decrease in the bonhomie at Washington cocktail parties she’ll never attend.

That is all.

There remains to be decided where to put George W. Bush.

If I were a powerful liberal blogger, I would feel compelled to link to news stories which documented my decisions here, but I’m not, so I won’t. You will just have to accept this as the last ravings on eight years of hell.

And so, on to hell, specifically Dante’s Inferno, where he has generously categorized all the places one can end up if one is a) non-Christian, and b) unrepentant. For my purposes here, which is chiefly anticipatory schadenfreude, we’ll just plop George W. Bush down in one of the Circles rather than somewhere in Purgatory, where I’m sure a just and loving God would allow him entrance. But I’m not, so I won’t.

Unlike Dante Alighieri, we’ll start at the bottom and work our way up.

Circle 9: Traitors

Well, of course. W would easily gain entrance to Round 2, traitors to homeland. Yes, his apologists will whine that he thought he was doing the right thing, but you know what? So did Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, and they’re down at the bottom in Round 3. W has betrayed everything this country has stood for to the rest of the world, and he could easily find himself up to his neck in ice.

Circle 8: The Fraudulent

Where to begin? Bolgia 10: The Falsifiers? Easy, what with the whole WMD fiasco. No, I do not think for a minute he believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He lied to us. Bolgia 9: Sowers of discord? Heavens, the number of wedge issues used by this man and his cronies to capture the White House in 2001 and especially 2004 have filled several books. Bolgia 8: Fraudulent advisors: maybe more for Cheney and Rove, but I don’t mind letting W keep them company. Bolgia 6: Hypocrites: in case you had any doubts, W has given interviews recently that completely blow his cover on evolution and other key wedge issues. Now that he doesn’t have to pretend the Bible is literally true, he’s pretty open about it. But for the past eight years? You’d think he’d attended Oral Roberts U., which for all the good we’ve gotten out of his Ivy League education, he might as well have. Perhaps it’s simplest to put him Bolgia 5: Corrupt Politicians, and leave it at that.

Circle 7: The Violent

In the inner part of this circle, the Violent against God are bound to burning sands, with a rain of fire making their eternities particularly unpleasant. I’m not sure W qualifies for blasphemy specifically, but I’m pretty sure God cannot be pleased with W’s claim that He was giving W complete instructions on his policies. However, to be submerged in the river of boiling blood with all the other Violent against Neighbors, there can be no doubt. Throw him in!

We can mercifully skip Circle 6: The Heretical, although if you have any thoughts about this, I’d be glad to entertain them.

Circle 5: The Wrathful

Well, yes. Has any man positioned our country as a force of anger in the world as much as George W. Bush? Has any man incited as much hatred for our fellow humans, whether gay or liberal or Muslim? Put him in the swamp with the others.

Circle 4: The Avaricious

Again, no contest. The entire thrust of W’s two terms has been to reward his rich friends, the upper 1% of our population and to abandon the less fortunate to their well-deserved fate. And as for his incredibly immoral spending, taking us from a budget surplus to a record level of debt, he deserves far worse than rolling rocks around.

Again, we can skip Circle 3: The Gluttonous and Circle 2: The Lustful. Whatever else we can lay to his charge, being an overeater or, Pan help us, a satyr were not issues for him. As far as we know. Poor Laura. (If this were a high-powered liberal blog, then the wingnuts would recognize their cue to begin screaming, “But Bill Clinton! Got a blowjob! In the WHITE HOUSE!!~!!@!!!” So you see, it all balances out, doesn’t it?)

Circle 1: Limbo

At last, here, and only here, is where I want to put George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States. Like this blogger over at DailyKos, I am wary of attempting actually to punish him for his many, many, many crimes against this country. As much as I would love to see him standing in the dock at The Hague, I think a far greater punishment is to consign him to anonymity. Don’t interview him a month from now for 60 Minutes. Don’t give him the microphone the first time an international crisis erupts. Don’t refer to him (sort of like the Republicans at their convention last summer) and don’t mention him.

Instead, refer constantly to our efforts to “reform” and “fix” and “bring back” and “salvage” and “redeem” all the horrible things he did to our country. Let him see the joy in our nation at his departure and in the radical shifts of government and governance we embrace. Let the ideas he based his entire regime upon be reviled and ridiculed, publicly and without rebuttal. Let his name rank with Benedict Arnold and with Herbert Hoover in our nation’s mythos.

And let him live to see it.