To the Flag. . .

Adam Crapser is an American, but like John McCain or Ted Cruze, he wasn't born within our borders. But he's had a rough life, unlike those men who consider themselves legal and potential Presidents.  An abandoned child, he was adopted from Korea by American parents who apparently were abusive and neglectful and failed to fill out the citizenship papers.

I pledge allegiance to the flag. . .

The reason I can't force myself to regurgitate that fulsome and illegal oath of allegiance I'm prompted to do at every turn these days isn't just the "God" bit but the Liberty and Justice for All. Today may be April Fools day, but we're a nation of fools all year. 

The damn government wants to send him back after 36 years of living here, marrying and trying to support a family -- to deport him  to a country he doesn't know or belong to or speak the language thereof because he's "illegal."  Because he's "illegal" he's found it very hard to find employment in the land of Freedom and Justice and when they send him back to an alien country, his wife and children will find out the hard way, what a sham American Liberty is.

Small minded, bigoted, petty, afraid -- perhaps. All too willing to hide behind walls and punish people who say a word in some language other than English or Starbucks. The free and brave have no compunctions about tossing anyone on the trash heap because of some paperwork he was too young to fill out.

And it's likely to stay this way because of the mean-spirited bastards who call themselves a political party, call themselves "Christian" and demand protection for morality and decency and humanity because of their "faith" and "family values."  By mean-spirited bastards I mean, for the most part, the Republican Party, but their opposition has to share some blame for the bickering, parochial, short-sighted behavior. We're against this or that, but only after you agree it's only our subset, our group who is the victim of this or that, that our particular problem is the one and only and most important, or that our most dire and pressing issue is this or that or the other thing to the exclusion of all else and we won't support candidates who don't agree, who aren't obsessed with our obsessions.

When someone comes here involuntarily as an infant, is educated here, speaks English as a first or only language and is part of our culture, what does it cost us to treat him better than a dog - to allow him to work, pay taxes, start a business, educate his kids and contribute to our society?  What do we gain by sending an American to Mexico or Korea to perish there?  Nothing at all is the answer and God might as well damn any country that acts this way, for we've damned ourselves.

Impeach Obama, Court Martial Bergdahl

Damn the troops, Damn everything.  We're the Republicans

Didn't you see it coming?  The release -- let's call it a rescue -- of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from the clutches of the Taliban after 5 years should have been a feel-good story for all of us as well as his friends and family in these days of supporting the heroic troops, but a country pleased with anything,  even for an afternoon,  just can't be allowed by the party that has long made it it's business to tell us just how awful things are  and just how it's Obama's fault.  As you know, some Guantanamo "detainees" yet to be tried for anything, were taken custody of by agents of Qatar in exchange for Bergdahl's release.  Even an old cynic like me went looking for a flag to fly.

Before the rest of us had finished saying "welcome home,"  Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sternly warned America that this would have dire but unidentified consequences for all of us and of course "the troops."  Let the Inquisition, the disgusting denunciations and fear mongering begin. What did you expect? 

That Obama, said Oklahoma Jim, “clearly violated laws” that require him to notify Congress 30  days before any transfer of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.  He betrayed us all, as is his wont, by failing to explain to Congress how the threat of releasing the satanic horde had been substantially mitigated before uncorking the Guantanamo bottle and thus denied the Grand Old Bastards the opportunity to filibuster, stall, vilify and ultimately prevent the recovery of Bergdahl, who, up until now, had been an illustration of Obama's uncaring negligence.

So stop your anti-American celebrating, Jodi and Bob Bergdahl and the town of Hailey, Idaho.  This is an impeachable offense, and your favorite son be damned.  And don't you dare bring up the sale of arms to our enemy Iran to bargain for the release of hostages because that's entirely different. Reagan was a Republican and it's OK when we do it.  Besides Obama has deprived the depraved party of their ability to denounce him for neglecting Americans in captivity and that's unforgivable.

And of course, say some of  the True American Patriots: sometimes our sainted troops aren't worth supporting.

"Bergdahl is a stank-ass hippie who accidentally joined the Army and decided to smell some Afghan flowers one night"

So he wasn't worth the time and effort even searching for him and it was, as when that Communist Clinton tried to punish al Qaeda with his "Monica Missiles,"  all a cover up for the Benghazi scandal, or the VA scandal or whatever scandal we are selling this week.

 "And, oh, yeah, Bergdahl will be treated as a hero instead of the little coward deserter that he is. If he makes it to a court martial, he’ll get slapped on the wrist, get an honorable discharge and go on his merry way to co-write a book." 

He's a traitor and deserter for sure say the patriots in and out of the military, proving, if proof is needed that there is no God who punishes those who need so badly to be punished.  Of course the punishment of living in a country that doesn't punish the Republicans is punishment for the rest of us.

Liberal Nazis don't want you to know this!

Lots of things are happening in the world that Cable News disciples don't seem to notice or know about.  Lots of crazy stuff is swept under the racist team owner, missing airplane, sunken ferry rug every day.  It's a revelation.

I read today about another one of those wonderful preachers who seem to have a handle on our real problems -- the kind of stuff we need to read more of.  I'm talking about Brother Dean Samuel who showed up a a screening of  a film about 1998 Miss World Pageant winner and rape survivor Linor Abargil last month, wearing a T-shirt saying "You Whore."  It's her fault for being raped, he says, she should have stayed home.

He's right.  That neighbor across the street who leaves his garage door open is just inviting me to steal his Ferrari  and it's his own damned fault if I do. Don't you just love Christianity?  Do what thou wilt is the law - for men of course.  Hey, don't argue, God's a man, or two men and a bird, but don't ask.  The answer gets kind of weird.

And then there's that moral and righteous Newt Gingrich who got all Puritan on us when Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down, cheating on his wife while Newt was doing the same thing?  I'm glad I didn't get distracted by the Missing Plane and got to read how "Liberal Nazis" forced Condoleeza to cancel her commencement speech at Rutgers. He blamed an "elite Media" for this horror:  "an elite media that would have been screaming if right-wing groups had done this to a Somali woman and an African-American woman."  'This' meaning calling her to task for helping to falsify information about Iraq,  ignore information about al Qaeda and justify a war that killed hundreds of thousands, helped punish critics, destroyed a country that had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 and bankrupted our economy.   Thanks Newt, you're a real piece of Patriot.  Who else could conflate opposites and accuse others of your own sins with a straight face?

There's so much going on with those damned Liberal Nazis elsewhere we need to know about.  Take the outrage perpetrated on a California school district superintendent, Mohammad Z. Islam who wanted 8th graders to research the Holocaust to see it if ever happened or the Jews actually made the whole thing up for money.  Those Liberals didn't want us to know about this so we couldn't offer Mr. Islam our support for his freedom of speech!

If you only watched commercial, for-profit news (other than Fox) you'd probably never know that the people of Oklahoma have no blood on their hands for the grizzly execution that took 43 minutes to kill Clayton Lockett, bound to a table and zapped with a cattle prod so they could continue to pump agonizing chemicals into his groin. It's true - he didn't bleed.  Damn bleeding heart liberals anyway -- too busy telling us we're not a Christian Nation to help hold the guy down.

And again, are the Liberals trying to keep you from hearing Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court tell us we need a new constitution to protect us from "gays and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg?"  The same judge who bravely asserted that "Buddha didn't create us so the first amendment only applies to Christians?"  Liberals don't want you to know the truth.  Not like Fox News who aren't afraid to tell you that people who want to take prayer out of state supported schools are like Hitler.

No all this stuff that makes me proud to be an American and I had to find it on the web because the liberals don't want us to know!

Wisconsin hates workers

Thanks to Sheria for calling my attention to this one.  I've long been amused at conservatives who insist we should all get our health insurance from employers so that we lose it when we need it most, but the laugh is that these folks are the descendants of the head bashers who fought the labor movement of the last century to protect employers from having to provide any benefits at all, such as paid vacations, sick days and of course a 5 or 6 day work week.  The reason they'd prefer employer based insurance only is that it's the gateway to no insurance at all.

Of course I use the word "amusement" cynically. It seems that not only should employees not be allowed to ask "please sir may I have some more" without being thrown out in the snow, Wisconsin Republicans, Bibles in hand, think there should be no rest on the seventh day, except for Congressmen, of course.

You see, Wisconsin workers really want to work more days to make more money say Sen. Glenn Grothman of West Bend and Mark Born of Beaver Dam.  I mean, this is the land of opportunity, right?   And what's more productive of opportunity than to reduce the men, women and children of  the Dairy State to abject serfdom so these useless parasitic slugs may receive knighthoods from the lords of industry?  I mean when you're at the bottom, any direction is up. We're putting Americans on an upward path!

Are we at the point where Republican Freedom is indistinguishable from Feudalism, where Freedom is indistinguishable from Slavery?  Are we listening to people who don't believe in human rights, decency or civic responsibility -- to people who think do as you're told should be the law?

Why is America so clueless?

Mirandize this!

Why are we supposed to be "terrorized" by the one in a hundred million chance of being blown up by cookware in the streets when we have black-booted, goose-stepping Republican goons insisting that the rights and liberties guaranteed by the US Constitution don't apply any time they don't think they should? What terrifies me is not the bang in Boston but the whimper of  cowards demanding that people can arbitrarily be deprived of their innate and inalienable rights by semantic chicanery and that we justify it by fear.  Why is the serial killer, the arsonist, the murderous Christian leader not a terrorist and so exempt from the protection of the law we fraudulently flaunt as our American birthright?  Because we don't like their religion? Because they have 'foreign' names? Ask the Republicans. Ask them why they're again demonstrating that the Constitution is a quaint anachronism and an impediment to the lustful needs of absolute power -- or 'Homeland Security' as they like to call it. Ask them why a massacre in Boston justifies the dismemberment of  the Constitution that grew out of  a previous one.

There is no chance in hell that whether or not young Mr. Tsarnaev talks to the FBI truthfully or not at all, has anything to do with whether or not he is ritually told he has the right to keep quiet, is responsible for what he says and has the right to legal counsel. He has those rights and we all have the guarantee of those rights. He already knows it and he's already demonstrated the personal qualities that prove he doesn't have a hell of a lot of respect for the USA or its laws and restraints anyway. If he can be forced to incriminate himself, if he can be stripped of all the rights we used to guarantee, we thereby incriminate ourselves as liars, hypocrites and barbarians unworthy of being called a free nation.

We have no idea whether he was in any condition to answer questions when apprehended or whether or not any were asked. We know that the request to surrender was first answered with a fusillade which is prima facie evidence of a mood of non-compliance.  Police weren't required to "Mirandize" him before asking him to give up or asking him if  he had explosives or if the boat was booby trapped or if he had accomplices at large or anything similar and at present he's sedated and intubated and the question of further questioning is moot.  Nothing he might say or might have said, is needed to convict him.

When the Senators from the Great State of Chickenshit insist that they have or someone has the power to ignore the US Constitution with some peremptory declaration that a criminal is an "enemy combatant" when there is no declared state of war and no entity at war with us that the criminal belongs to or acted in concert with, it's possible they are so stupid -- Republican Stupid -- that they haven't thought it out, but far more likely that they're still their old anti-American, Democracy hating, liberty fearing bastard selves -- and cowards, of course.  Are they really afraid that he will be released for lack of evidence, exonerated by some court just because he has a public defender?  Of course not.  It's not about bombs, it's about Obama. It's about accusing Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer and crypto-jihadist for the benefit of the fearful, the bigoted, the ignorant, the racist, the demented, delusional and dimwitted: the Republican Base, or as one says in Arabic -- Al Qaeda.

The stain remains on the American escutcheon from having sent American citizens to the gallows using a secret military tribunal in 1865, but I guess there's plenty more room for bloody fingerprints in the opinions of Senators McCain and Graham, who by fighting against the foundations of our nation are in my opinion true Enemy Combatants, subject to indefinite imprisonment without charge or access to due process and of course torture for the crime of having declared war on our country and the laws they have sworn to uphold.

If we lose the protection of the law simply because some political demagogue can strip you of it then we have lost the moral basis of the American revolution and the country should declare it's mistake and pledge its allegiance to the Crown of England which may long since have surpassed us in its concept and guarantee of justice anyway.

9/11 didn't change a goddamn thing.  9/11 was an excuse our internal enemies have been waiting for since the beginning.  

Tales of the Bizarro World

Remember Bizarro World, where everything is its opposite?  As Superman said, "If I win this crazy game, these Super-Creatures will say I lose"  Hit the ball over the fence and they'll call you out.

Somehow this has been the tactic behind Republican campaigns since that great Victim, elder statesman and non-crook Richard Nixon was forced to resign rather than be convicted of burglary and obstruction. Everything is its opposite, the loonies run the asylum. Democrats want to oppress women by allowing them to use birth control, or get innoculated against HPV and by not forcing them to give birth to two-headed, hydrocephalic offspring of rapists. Democrats (according to radio ads for Allen West) want to take away our Social Security, while the Army Colonel who had to resign rather than face 11 years in Leavenworth for war crimes is a "war hero."

Of course it's not just Republicans, it's the Christian Right some of whom insist that "you can't be a Christian if you don't own a gun"  Just like Jesus would if Jesus were his own opposite.

Dr. Gary Cass, with heavy-hitter credentials in the Republican Party and the Bizarro World of forcing militant, heavily armed Christianity upon America and the World -- Dr. Gary who now heads the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission,  perhaps another exercise in contradictory rhetorical gymnastics, insists that Christians need guns because those Satanic, non-cult members want to kill babies and allow people to marry in contradiction of Dr. Gary Cass's 'moral' compass.  Bizarre enough for ya?  Is he saying that these "Christians" need to kill doctors and blow up women's health clinics in the name of morality?  Sounds like it to me, but then it could mean the opposite, couldn't it?

Could it be that the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is the Bizarro way of being the Defamation-of-everyone-else-Commission?  Certainly, or of course not, depending on whether you're a Bizarre Super Creature or a rational human being. If you are a Bizarro creature, you see, Victims are victimizing the persecutors and the ancient institution that's been persecuting others for millennia, is the Victim here:  the victim of the victims and if you shoot someone for not obeying you, why you're the victim. Just like Jesus.

When arguing with the Right, you can't win because they'll declare you the loser, just Like Superman said -- so should I declare that you can't be a Liberal, or even that you can't be moral if you don't own a gun?  Sounds Bizarro right to me -- make mine a Kalshnikov.

Ablow the man down

So, another Monday morning in this best of all possible countries; this greatest there ever was since the Big Bang and greatest there will ever be until Jesus comes back. And what do I read in the news this proud American morning?

Mark Sanford, as though he hadn't disgraced himself enough as Governor of South Carolina, calls President Obama a spear chucker.  Don't tempt me, Mark.

The American Family Association, that Far Right group of  Freaky Fundies masquerading as an American Family Association tells it's cult members to keep their kids out of school for an Oct 30
anti-bullying event, “Mix It Up For Lunch Day,” they insist, is 

"just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda."  

Imagine trying to tell kids it isn't the Christian thing to do to beat up gay kids or torment them to the point of suicide.  What would Jesus do, after all?

And on Fox & Friends some alleged psychiatrist aptly named Ablow declared that Vice President Biden was probably demented based on what he saw in the 'debate' with Lyin' Ryan.

“I did not evaluate Joe Biden, but if someone said to me, we want you to do what’s really required. You have to put dementia on the differential diagnosis. You have to say bizarre laughter, interrupting. If this were your dad or your grandfather, wouldn’t you say if you brought him to me, Keith, tell me, is he suffering with dementia? Because he can’t seem to listen, he’s laughing inappropriately.”

I did not evaluate, so I know the problem. How very Fox.  Is this what they call an Ablow job?    to tell the truth, Ryan makes me laugh at him  too and I just can't listen to the goddamn lies and sedition from the foreign owned Fascist propaganda organization any more, nor do I think laughter is what is really needed here as a national response to the Idiot's Crusade. Bring back the laughing stock!

I read this morning at Raw Story that

"A Florida judge has ruled that a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who believes he is the “Prince of God” and is convinced that he will be resurrected to sit for eternity at God’s right hand is sane and can put to death next week."

Good to know that such people are considered sane in Florida and perhaps that explains why according to my local paper 81% of this county's inmates plan to vote for Mitt the Shit and Lyin' Ryan. So the hell with the Supreme Court ruling against killing the insane, We don't need no damn government and we're gonna do the Christian thing anyway.  Jesus is going to need a man like Prince John Ferguson when it comes time to shove the Jews into the lake of fire after the Rapture.

My current issue of Newsweek has a lurid cover story proving that heaven is real because some guy who went into a coma from meningitis says he went to heaven and met beautiful women there.  Another straight to the recycling bin issue.

So perhaps we have to put dementia in the differential diagnosis of our national psyche and definitely we have to be grateful there isn't a YHWH to blow America to kingdom come or to wherever Sodom wound up, because if this is the best of all possible countries, no god worth his apocalypse would stand for our sad, demented, ugly and hate filled planet. Or perhaps I'm wrong about that and perhaps that's what the newly discovered comet 2012 S1 (ISON) due to fill the sky in about a year is all about. If it doesn't blow us all to hell, perhaps the fundies and righties and all the other dimwitted, demented friends of the Fox will dress in purple robes and tennis shoes and take the Cyanide Express to the Mother Ship.  Even in the worst of times, there's always hope.

The Legitimate Rape of Freedom

I went to bed ruminating about the predicted course of Tropical Storm Isaac which had it ravaging the West coast of Florida from fort Meyers to Tampa next week.  Am I a bad person for dreaming that a random raging force of  nature might do what our miserable excuse for a righteous God never seems to do and tear the Tampa Convention Center to pieces, rending flesh from barbarian bone and yet somehow leave the Tampa General Hospital just across the channel intact to tend to any decent folk who got caught out in the storm?  Perhaps I am, but the teeth and claws of the GOP are as visible to anyone with eyes to see as if they were painted red with gore -- as indeed they are -- and who will be there to rescue us when the wolf has eaten Grandma (and blamed it on Obama?) Sadly today's National Hurricane Center prediction shows Hurricane Isaac passing to the west of Tampa, leaving only some wind and rain to drown out the demented cries of a dying country.

It won't be quite loud enough of course, to obscure the lies and libels, the slanders, the fabrications or the calls for armed insurrection against the decent, the humane or the lovers of freedom  -- nor wet enough to wash away the Tea. But don't bring your guns to Tampa.  It was OK for the toothless Tea Whores to bring firearms to Democratic meetings and threaten to use them, but the GOP has banned guns at their sabbath.


There will be and there already are howls about spending and taxes and budgets, but put in the form of a passion play that has more to do with reversing the guilt for having started a war on invented information -- the most expensive war in our history -- and proposed that it would cost nothing if only we relieved the richest of us of a few more percent in taxes. They'll go on pretending that a middle class tax cut was a tax hike, that no additional gun control was somehow a "gun Grab" and that restoring Ronald Reagan's tax relief for the richest Americans, many of whom like Mitt Romney paid paid nothing and are still paying almost nothing was "the largest tax hike in history" and a flirtation with Marxism.  They'll continue the tradition of posing pornography, legal birth control, the "personhood" of fertilized eggs and abortion as the great issues of the day and the same people who claim that the universe is only a few years older than the pyramids will howl like idiots about how 14 year old girls won't get pregnant if the rape wasn't forceful enough and how women with hydrocephalic babies can't actually die in childbirth. They'll stand on the bloodstained platform or their vampire religion and call for the subjugation of women, the abandonment of the old and sick and weak and claim we simply can't survive if we do what everyone else in the free, modern world does.  They'll suggest a country with a double standard of morality, where the government sleeps in your bed but not in theirs and where they pay nothing and obey no rules. 



No, sorry Messrs. Romney and Ryan, I'd like you and your numbered accounts in Bermuda and Luxembourg and Liechtenstein washed out into the Gulf, never to be seen again and soon to be forgotten by the madmen, the congenitally stupid, the misogynists, the sexual perverts who support all the silly, stupid, racist rhetoric. I'd like to drown the contempt for facts, for science, for mathematics, for history and of course  your contempt for anyone who didn't lie cheat and steal their way to wealth and power, but of course I can't.


I can't because this is a stupid country, a petty, angry, prejudiced, bigoted, selfish and deluded country who thinks it would be better off and safer with no government at all. We're the country that elected George Bush twice and Richard Nixon twice and Spiro Agnew and savaged everyone that spoke up. This is the party that was outraged at anyone who said the economy was unsustainable and now sneers and snarks about how the economy is unsustainable.  This is the country that cheered at the biggest borrow and spend spree and now looks at the spendthrift culprits as saviors. Perhaps we deserve our fate. Perhaps we deserve even worse.  Perhaps a better nation might some day emerge from the stinking wreckage, but probably not and probably some other power will come to dominate the world -- a power who cares less for the kind of country we pretended to be and insisted we were while we danced around a bonfire chanting as America died.