These are for you.
For everything you’ve done to my country.
Category: Liberal Rants
Thoughtful posts on why the neopaleolithic viewpoint, while perhaps valid for its adherents, is yet not the way I want my country run.
A lovely bit of snark
I just had to share this, and I will share it on my Facebook page just to broaden its distribution:
from one of my favorite Evil Liberal Blogs™, Eschaton:
I’m so old I can remember when spending $8 billion to give more health care to kids would spook the bond markets so badly that it just couldn’t be done.
Stuff like this reminds me of why I hate Republican governance.
Gay marriage
Open letter to religious opponents of gay marriage:
First of all, when you say that “God ordained that marriage is between one man and one woman,” do us all a favor and say, “I believe God ordained that marriage is between one man and one woman.”
This keeps the debate over the topic a little clearer, because then others who might still be thinking about which way to think about it have the opportunity to reflect that you might also believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, or that God hates shrimp.
And I know you’re not given to thinking about ambiguities, but you really need to mull over this idea: with California’s Proposition 8, you restricted the right to marry to heterosexuals. The problem is that when a right is given only to part of the population, it is no longer a right, it is a privilege. And you remember what your parents told you about privileges. That’s right, you have to earn them. And they can be taken away by the Authority Figure who grants them. “It’s not a right, it’s a privilege,” remember? So by converting the right to marry into a privilege reserved for only a portion of the population, you have just stripped all of us of our right to marry.
Hope this doesn’t make your brain hurt too much, but remember: no pain, no gain.
The audacity of hopelessness
Here’s a news story for you. Go read it. I’ll wait for you.
Rick Davis is breathtaking in his Orwellian manipulation of the language. Here’s my brief analysis of what he’s doing to the public:
“John McCain held the Bush administrations feet to the fire more than anyone else for the first four years of the administration.”
Okay, that’s an easy one. Surely even the most brain-damaged nutjob realizes straight out that there’s been another three and a half years of Bushdom, during which McCain voted with the Current Occupant’s desires 90% of the time. These votes include voting to authorize the administration’s torture policies; kill the new GI Bill; authorize unwarranted surveillance; kill expansion of SCHIP; you name it, he’s voted with the White House position. (If I were a real blogger, I’d link to all those votes.)
“…he has attacked Sarah Palin and thrown the George Bush card back on the table.”
“The George Bush card”? Really?? The sitting President, the leader of McCain’s party, is now equivalent to Willie Horton?? It’s an amazing admission on Davis’s part that the past eight years of Republican governance have been an appalling disaster. He cannot possibly have meant that.
“If you bring up his association with William Ayers or Rashid Khalidi it’s, ‘Oh boy, that’s off limits; you can’t do that,’ but they can prosecute a campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars with no accountability.”
William Ayers? ::sigh:: A mischaracterized relationship with no discernible influence on Obama’s thinking or policies. A bogeyman. Rashid Khalidi? A completely falsified characterization, outright lies as to who Khalidi is and what he stands for. A racial bogeyman.
And notice the asymmetry of the sentence: two scary people = …? The natural end of that equation should be the aforementioned George W. Bush, but Davis can’t go there, can he? So he just tapdances. And notice too the awful awfulness: “prosecute… millions of dollars… no accountability.” Just what accountability does U.S. law, and here I’m thinking of the 1st Amendment, provide for campaigns, Rick? What accountability is Obama evading that McCain is adhering to? (vid. sup., re: Ayers, Khalidi)
“You have to wonder what his version of America is going to look like when people who disagree with him get attacked over and over again,” Davis said.
This is a stunning statement, absolutely gobsmacking. It’s a direct dogwhistle to the people who sincerely believe that Obama intends to establish a police state and round up all “right-thinking” people after his election. Crazy? Absolutely, but I’ve read their blog posts and the unhinged comments thereunto. These people are completely panic-stricken about the coming black power/Islamic/socialist destruction of our country. One is reminded of the recent research on the conservative brain being motivated by fear.
The statement is also a damnable hypocrisy, given the hell-for-leather tar and feathering the Republican party has been engaging in since Newt Gingrich passed out his little pamplet of labels to use against liberals. In this campaign alone, remember flag pins? Saying the Pledge? “Hate America”?
Not only all of the above, but Obama just aired a 30-minute infomercial in which he didn’t mention John McCain, or even the opposing side, even once. Can you imagine a 30-minute McCain production doing that? I didn’t think so.
In short, Rick Davis’s got nothing but LOLPreznents: “Hugely successful campaneing: ur doin it wrong.” Only four more days, my friends.
An open letter
Dear Republicans:
When you ask me why I’m voting for the socialist, and I reply that the nation cannot afford more Republican governance, your next line is not, “Well, they were all part of it.”
Your next line is, “I like where our country is after eight years of Republican governance, and I’m voting for McCain so we can keep going down this road.” Try saying it out loud.
Just try.
Sincerely,
Dale
Esprit d’escalier
Things Joe Biden might have said after Sarah Palin asked him, “Can I call you Joe?”
- “That would be fine, Governor Palin.”
- “Whatever you like, sweetcheeks.”
- “Say, that’s pretty cute. Isn’t she cute, ladies and gentlemen?”
- “Really??”
- “Did John put you up to that? It sounds like his lame sense of humor.”
- “Sure, Sarah. Cute shoes.”
- “No.”
And winked at her.
Hey, wait a minute…
As I continue to figure out ways to nudge friends and relations away from their deep-seated impulses to vote for John McCain, I realized in full the tidy little scam being pulled on the Amurkan people.
- Cut taxes for the richest 1% of the populace (let’s call them “George’s Friends”) on the grounds that they invest that money and keep the economy going. The rest of us (let’s call them “the Rest of Us”) get basically nothing.
- George’s Friends invest said moneys (when they’re not buying another home or car) in Bear Stearns.
- Bear Stearns makes risky decisions in order to increase profits for George’s Friends.
- Bear Stearns goes belly up, so the government bails it out.
- The Rest of Us pay for the failure through our continued tax payments.
- Profit! (Well, for George’s Friends, anyway.)
When you’re George’s Friends, who needs Underwear Gnomes?
Disbelief
I am extremely disturbed by the reaction of the paleocon crowd to John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. They have gone from apathetic about his candidacy, if not outright antipathetic, to joyful. Finally, a real conservative on the ticket, change they can believe in!
And why? She’s one of them: a rightwing, conservative Christian, anti-abortion hardliner. And I’m thinking: is this all you got? Abortion? Is this the single, overwhelming problem you think we need to solve in our nation, so much that all other positions, policies, and qualifications of a candidate can be disregarded? Should be disregarded? Now you can be excited about electing the man who will continue almost all of George W. Bush’s disastrous policies?
There’s also something ghoulish about their glee. I read one supporter’s comment who actually said that it wasn’t reasonable to expect McCain to live through his first term, and then we’d have our first woman President. Heavens.
I am not too torqued about her “lack of experience.” Some of us on this planet are just preternaturally competent, and she may be one of us. It does mean that the McCain campaign have to drop their attack on Obama as unprepared.
It’s more her religious extremist background that concerns me. Creationism? No place in our educational system or in our government. Anti-abortion? Dangerous. That’s on top of her usual Republican issues. Anti-environmentalist? Can’t afford it, people. Big Oil buddy? Been there, done that, and look how that’s worked out.
She’s anti-corruption? Where was she when the Republican party needed her for the past eight years? And does that include her own Troopergate, which is scheduled to hit the news cycle right before the election?
The base of my extreme unease over her selection, and the joy with which it’s being celebrated out on the fringes, is that the American people are just so damned dumb. There are a host of issues and policies that they need to be looking at before selecting a candidate, but they go with gut feelings and personality traits. I actually had a teacher ask me the other day if I thought Obama was secretly Muslim. WTFF?
Don’t do this, people. For once in your Fox-News-blighted lives, find out what the candidates would do if elected, and vote for the one who would make the America you want your children to live in, even if he is black or can’t remember how many homes he owns. Then maybe I could sleep at night.
Why is this?
In Indiana — stop me if you’ve heard this one — a congressional candidate recently attended a meeting of the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), where he made a speech. The occasion was the 119th birthday of Adolf Hitler. There was a large portrait of the man, a Nazi flag, and everyone in photos of the event was wearing a swastika armband.
The candidate later defended himself on his website by describing the speech as:
my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews.
Well.
I’ll link to the site where I read this in a moment, but first a thought experiment: with which of the two major political parties in this nation is Mr. Zirkle affiliated?
That didn’t take long, did it? My thesis today is: why the hell didn’t it take you long? Yes, there are loonies on both sides of the spectrum, we all know that, but why is it that this particularly nasty kind of loony gravitates to this one party?
To be fair, the state party is horrified and trying desperately to disconnect themselves from Mr. Zirkle, but I think the question still stands, and I think the party needs to do some soul searching: why is it that racist, anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-women, anti-gay candidates automatically affiliate themselves with this party, and not with their rivals?
Perhaps more germane to the party bigwigs is the question: why would most citizens assume that this is the case?
I think this question needs to be asked particularly by those whose first reaction would be, well, now, that’s not necessarily the case.
Go read about it here.
55 days
No, I didn’t get anything done on the symphony all weekend. Leave me alone.
However, I was struck by an ad on the TV. You may have seen it. In it we are told that “we [the U.S.] didn’t wait…” to be told or shown how to do a string of wonderful things, and now we’re not going to wait before solving the global warming problem.
Okay, I just googled it and have discovered that this is an ad from Al Gore. The mind boggles. How this got out of the brainstorming phase is beyond me, because…
We didn’t wait…
- …to storm the beaches at Normandy. Actually, yes, we did. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. We didn’t bother getting involved until everyone else was waist-deep in that particular Big Muddy.
- …on civil rights. Hello? What??? Then where exactly did all those images of thousands of people clogging the Mall come from?
- …to put a man on the moon. Well, after Sputnik captured our attention, certainly, we worked our ass off, but until then we had no such ambition.
Sorry, Al, baby, you lost me on this one. Admirable sentiment, but historically illiterate. Abysmally.