His name was NOT Steve.

 "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross"

I wish I could say that was Sinclair Lewis, and perhaps he does too, but it seems he never did. Perhaps someone needs to say it however, because there is something coming; something already here dressed in red, white and blue, blowing hard about Christian values and lying, slandering, maligning, dripping with hate and evil and blood and grasping for power enough to make the devil blush.

You can't talk to some people about Allen West if you are objective about him.  To many ex-military people, it seems as though he is some sort of a hero or, perhaps it's more about some sad kind of solidarity than about sympathy.  I saw a lot of that during the Vietnam war:  the way people looked at me when I talked about the My Lai 4 massacre or when others suggested that indeed Lt. Cally was a war criminal who disgraced his country as much as anyone ever had. Perhaps you've read accounts of how he ordered a small boy who had just escaped the bullets, running screaming from the pit of murdered women and children to be shot. The order was carried out. It was outrageous that he was held accountable said my war supporting, true American coworkers -- just outrageous.

We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.

 I never did quite understand the attitude, but as I wanted to keep my job, I just kept quiet.  By the time  Allan West 'retired' from the US Army to avoid a Court Marshal for abusing an Iraqi prisoner, I no longer was a working man and loudly protested his attempt to become my Congressman.  For many here, the attitude was strangely the same.  He ran as a hero and of course we can't criticize anyone who was "fighting for our freedom" as such things are so grotesquely described.  In fact such people who thought differently then he or John Wayne or the people from Muskogee did, said West, should be deported.

But West's campaign failed and he promptly pulled up his tent stakes and went somewhere else to live and to prosper as the head of something called the National Center for Policy Analysis.  Of course as another failed far-right politician and criminal, he followed in the footsteps of Oliver North and became a Fox News contributor. 

West's current Bogeyman, as is that of his owners at Newscorp seems to be the alleged emergence of Sharia Law under the Muslim alien Obama.  Sadly people listen to him and because there never is a hint of rational cognitive function supporting the claims of the Far Right and the Fox Right you hear it discussed all the time.  Sharia law is taking over, even though it isn't -- not at all, not in Muskogee, not at Wal-Mart.

It's a strange proposition for people who strive with flapping tongues and logic all curled up like a pig's tail to push Christian Values as a substitute for the body of laws we've had since the beginning.  They want Christian law, even though there is no such thing, and they fear Muslim Religious courts that don't exist.  Hell, they think Wal-mart is part of the legal system and they get rich from this stupidity.  But Allen West has announced "Proof" that even without any courts or any mechanism to impose it, even such all-American importers of  foreign goods as Wal-Mart is trying to impose it on its customers.  Yes, that's right and as he observes with ungrammatical and folksy charm:

There was a young man doing the checkout and another Walmart employee came over and put up a sign, “No alcohol products in this lane.” So being the inquisitive fella I am, I used my additional set of eyes – glasses – to see the young checkout man’s name. Let me just say it was NOT “Steve.”

I pointed the sign out to Aubrey and her response was a simple question, how is it that this Muslim employee could refuse service to customers based on his religious beliefs, but Christians are being forced to participate in specific events contrary to their religious beliefs? Boy howdy, that is one astute young lady.

Imagine that, this employee at Walmart refused to just scan a bottle or container of an alcoholic beverage – and that is acceptable. A Christian business owner declines to participate or provide service to a specific event – a gay wedding – which contradicts their faith, and the State crushes them.

Seems the nonSteve checkout boy was a minor.  There was a law, an American, Christian Values law forbidding  a minor to serve or sell alcohol.  As usual the devil is in the details and as the devil speaks through Allen West and his Tea Party hooligans, liars, traitors, schemers, thieves, torturers and war criminals are lying about those details.  His screed was titled, Sharia law comes to Walmart? but he later changed it to More ominous signs of Christian persecution. (Did he mean to say persecution of Christians ?) What does it matter?  Lies have their own grammar, it seems and to the people who are looking to put a rational face on their bigotry, racism and hatred West's face will do fine.   See, we're not racists.

In a way, it's liberating to be old and not to have to give a shit about what the tinhorn patriots and liars for God have to say or what they threaten to do, and there's no reason to refrain from saying that the My Lai murderers and the unnamed perpetrators of similar massacres are no better than the Nazi Criminals we executed years ago, and that Allen West is their brother in dishonor.   They dishonor our country, they dishonor all things honest and true and decent, they dishonor our species .

Wild Wild West

You know, it's odd. I apparently have a love/hate relationship with Rep. Allen West.

It's weird. Before this month, I would have said it was entirely hate. I mean, West is exactly the worst type of human being in America. He is a miserable, unlikable, lying sack of smegma, with the morals and integrity of a pustulent, diseased maggot. And many people think that he's just being a sore loser, refusing to accept the election results two weeks after Election Day.

But as it turns out, he's doing, for once in his life, exactly the right thing. Admittedly, for all the wrong reasons. But, like Hermann Göring saving a kitten from drowning, Allen West is doing a good thing.

See, here's the problem. For Allen West, losing the race for reelection would be evidence the the world is not falling into chaos. He has had one of the most evil, dishonest and hate-filled political careers of any political operative since Joseph McCarthy, and if anyone deserves to lose, die in ridicule and be crushed in the trash compactor of history, it would be Allen West.

He is, after all, the man who claimed, with nothing more than his own paranoid feelings as "proof," that all of the Democrats in the House of Representatives were Communists and essentially slaveowners. (Not to mention his history of torturing prisoners and endorsements by the worst figures of recent Republican history: Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent, among others.)

But West has every right to ask for a recount, especially on a razor-thin margin of loss: the last recounts, late though they were, show West's campaign trailing by a margin of 0.58 percent; any spread of less than 0.50 percent would have triggered an automatic recount. That's pretty damned close, though - well within the margin of error.

And here's the thing: we just finished a campaign season full of voter suppression by the GOP, and outright fraud, incompetence and election theft for the last decade or more, and so any attempt to ensure a fair and complete election has to be taken seriously.

More than that needs to be done: laws need to be passed to punish the criminals who try to subvert the democratic process, and laws need to be repealed (I'm looking at you, Citizens United) to ensure that people can't just buy an election.

And, admittedly, Allen West's fight to continue the recounts, much like the rest of his political career, are based in fear-mongering and conspiracy theories. But there is enough actual evidence of impropriety, or at least mismanagement, that the Allen West fight must be allowed to occur.

It would be a tragedy of Biblical proportions, but Allen West might not have lost his seat in Florida. And the only way to be sure is to get a full and fair accounting of the votes in every county affected by this election. (You know, the thing that the Supreme Court wouldn't allow in Florida back in 2000?)

Few people in America deserve to lose as much as Allen West. But his fight must be allowed to continue.

It's called "democracy." And we have to support it.

Talkin' To The Man III

Dear Congressman West,

Just to recap, over the weekend you made the following statement:

This is a battlefield that we must stand upon. And we need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table...

Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

Of course, when confronted by a reporter asking you to clarify your statement, instead of standing behind your openly moronic quote, you chose to deny having said it. Which kind of makes you a pussy, doesn’t it?

The other thing is that I did not refer to any person leaving. If you go back and read the transcript of the message that I gave, it was about equality of achievement, it was about economic dependence, it was about enslaving the American entrepreneur’s will and spirit. That message needs to leave this country.

That's crap, Allen. You don’t get to say idiotic things to pander to the paste-eating lunatics and inbred mouthbreathers hiding in the swamps of Florida, and then back away from it. You said it, and only a coward lies about his own past.

Of course, you have a lot to be ashamed of in your past, don't you? Strangely, you and I have a lot in common. Both of us entered and left the military in the same years: of course, having said that, only one of us wasn't forced to retire instead of going to jail for torturing Iraqi policemen.

I'm not going to say that makes me a better person than you: it would be the sum total of your life that proves that. And I'm not going to tell you to get out of my country, because unlike you, I have some concept of the ideals that this country was founded on, and I support them.

I will say that you are a shallow, deluded, lying gasbag who is not fit for public service; please resign in disgrace from a second government job. Get the hell out of my Congress.

With all due respect,*



Bill Minnich
Albuquerque, NM



* None
_______________

Snail-mailed this afternoon (without links or video) to:

Representative Allen West
3111 South Dixie Highway, Suite 308
West Palm Beach, Florida 33405

West world

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, many of the ugliest Republicans told us that Democrats were "playing the race card" a mawkish cliché which means, I think, falsely accusing them of the racism they do really espouse. In other words, talking anal cysts like Limbaugh were having their pearls of wisdom denounced by the "politically correct" because you can't criticize a black man these days without being called a racist. It's a cheap dishonorable gambit, but like counterfeit money, it can be passed off on an uncritical populace.

An uncritical, astigmatic, angry and greedy American public seems to have had another bit of counterfeit money passed off it. Allen West, the Republican Congressman from the 22nd Congressional District right here in Florida, land of snakes, lizards, Teaturds, pollution and poisonous toads -- Allen West, one chromosome short of a tape-worm, says in his blog:

"I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

Well isn't that special? Indeed it's the one feature of that pretentious Club of Fools that keeps it in business: it allows the mentally under-endowed, cognitively incontinent circus clowns to challenge their betters and to assault us with ideas that don't hold water nearly as well as a worn out douche bag. The giggle gallery in the back of the class, mocking the teacher.

Indeed West, speaking from his teabag-buttressed platform of arrogated biological superiority seems to be of an intellect too limited to have noticed the irony of a black man appealing to the snobbery of the uneducated, ill-informed, probably stupid and definitely angry whites, and offering soothing delusions of genetic superiority in a grotesque parody of white supremacists from Montgomery to Munich. But then, when has any American been too stupid and dishonest to be someone's hero?

There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men and there is an armada of those now afloat on that full sea of hate, not only using it for their own purposes but seeking to make it rise further until it drowns the land. Allen West is such a man, a man whom under ordinary circumstances would be a nobody, a flyblown bit of flotsam in a stagnant pool; but because of this tidal wave of fury, he can pretend to be a battleship and his flatus a volley of cannon. He can twist, misuse, misquote and invent, he can put on the white-face and wear a red tie, He can grin like Uncle Tom and mock like a monkey, but while honesty is within reach of all, what he pretends to is not.

Women from Planned Parenthood and the activist group Code Pink "have been neutering American men" he says and making them weak. West tells us this with his genetically based intellect still unaware of Dr. Strangelove and bodily fluids. Perhaps he himself is having problems with his manhood and this talk of virility and gene pools tells a cover story. Perhaps his politics serve as verbal Viagra for the intellectually impotent Representative. But I don't need to postulate such questions, the doctored Obama bumper sticker with the hammer and sickle tell us the whole, sick, sad, disgusting tale. Allan West is a whore. Allen West is Count Dracula's rat-eating Renfield, Allan West is a liar. Allen West, and for reasons probably too disgusting to contemplate, is trying to ruin everything good about the United States of America. So what do I do when I see that sticker? You don't want to find out.

The president, despite all appearances and lack of opposition to corporate abuse and capitalist excess is a "low-level socialist agitator" reciting "Marxist demagogic rhetoric." Is West describing himself again, or is he just grabbing bits from the instruction manual like a tent-meeting preacher with his mouth full of Jesus and a mind full of money? Obama is a Communist to the extent that John D. Rockefeller was a Communist and Bernie Madoff was a capitalist.

No, this high water mark of anti-government anger that produces foul and foetid things like Allen West and the Tea Party has little to do with genetics and everything to do with our national ignorance and our manufactured delusions; both fed and cultivated by the people who reap benefits in their billions and trillions by subverting the values of civilization and setting the dogs on the ever expanding masses. It's an old story, but in our new version, not all the dogs have four legs.