Bonfire of the vanities part II

Frank Schaeffer has been right in the center of the Christian Right. His father, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, is considered to be the godfather of the modern religious right movement, says an exclusive article at Raw Story. So when he says he's worried about the extent the insanity has reached and that it's all too likely that some Christian fanatic will blow up another building or make an attempt on the President's life, I worry too. All over America, the loonies are restless.

The insanity, you might ask? What about a North Carolina church planning to make a bonfire of all "Satan's" books which include, to the amazement of anyone informed about the history of Bibles, all non-King James versions. Out with that silly Hebrew and Greek stuff or whatever Moses brought down the mountain - the real one was written in Robert Cecil's dining room in Hertfordshire, like God intended.

Of course the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C., says there are "scriptural bases" for the book burning, so you know it's OK with God who always defers to the Reverend Marc Grizzard particularly on matters of inerrancy and infallibility.

Here come the Judge - again

Orly Taitz -- always in the news. Perhaps you remember my Sept. 16th post about how Judge Clay Land threw her "Birther" suit out of court with a warning that she would face consequences for any further frivolous suits. Ms. Taitz is not so easily dismissed, it seems and Judge Land not kindly disposed toward a motion she filed asking the Judge to reconsider -- at least not toward the part in which she called him a traitor and claimed that the 11th circuit court was subject to "external control" and political pressure from an illegitimate president.

At this point, even the Army Captain on whose behalf the suit was filed has bailed out and apparently can't wait to get to Afghanistan. Taitz now has 14 days to show the infuriated judge why she shouldn't be fined $10,000 for contempt. It will be interesting to see how deep a hole this rabid pit bull can dig herself into. Ten thousand seems a very small fine considering how much her insane crusade has cost us all and I'm hoping she can parlay it into some serious jail time.

Lefties

"All political violence is committed by the left in this country,"

said Ann Coulter, continuing her livelihood of making preposterous proclamations designed to inflame any reasonable person enough to produce a counter attack. Given a sufficiently absurd, preposterous or outrageous premise, that becomes so difficult that most of us are reduced to tears and she to witch-like cackles.

Of course the fulcrum of that statement, as it so often is, is the definition of "Left." In this case Left would have to include abortion doctor shooters and bombers, schizophrenics trying to impress Jody Foster, people like Byron De La Beckwith and of course how can we forget those Islamic "Liberals" who blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? If John Wilkes Booth can be a liberal, than there are only three conclusions we can make about Ann Coulter: Insane, dishonest or both.

When something like insisting that there is little danger to a president surrounded by angry opponents equipped with rifles and telescopic sights can inspire even Geraldo Rivera to say she's insane, logic again allows only two conclusions, Rivera is a liberal and ipso facto potentially violent, or he's right and she's insane.

Coulter has a long history of calling the police and claiming people are stalking her. She claims she's more likely to be shot than the President although one wonders about her reaction to being surrounded by armed men carrying signs calling for her assassination. She said nothing however, about being more likely to be fed rat poison than the Federal Judges she deemed worthy of such treatment. I wonder if she has a food taster - or if she eats what humans eat.

MarXrays from planet Obama

My doctor was running a bit late yesterday morning and I spent about a half hour sitting in the waiting room staring at the wall. About 10 minutes before my name was called, a tall, gaunt man in his late 70's lowered his newspaper and said to his wife in the loud way those hard of hearing do: "this is just wrong." His wife seemed to slump down in her chair and mumbled something about Obama only urging kids to work hard and stay in school. "Sixth graders aren't the ones dropping out" he replied "and asking them to help him - that's just wrong."

Of course nothing is "just wrong" it's what you say when you don't have a reason you wish to think about, much less discuss. Of course nobody faulted Bush for reading to kids, and I don't remember any such idiocy about keeping kids from listening to the President since radio broadcasting began in the 1920's, but the idea that president Obama should avoid talking about civics or anything else with school children is based on unsavory premises that need to be hidden -- and so "it's just wrong."

It's amazing how the idea that Obama not only would be "indoctrinating" anyone by making a public speech; much less indoctrinating them in some insidious Marxist plot, is to me one of the most fascinating things about American insanity. It may be the most obviously contrived meme ever to infect us, stemming at first from his questioning of the gospel of tax cuts and privatization and then reflecting the demand by a large majority for the kind of system we have in Medicare already. I don't have space to show how foolish this is and I don't need it -- just read the papers.

If a graduated income tax is Marxist, then as I've said several times, Adam Smith and Teddy Roosevelt were socialists FDR was the anti-Christ and Dwight Eisenhower was Lenin. Still the meme has cascaded down from the RNC through Fox and the ignorant backwoods bastards who hate black people and want to launder their bigotry at Murdoch's laundromat. "Work hard and stay in school?" "Think about ways to improve our nation?" COMMUNISM! FASCISM!

It's not just that miserable old hypocrite in the waiting room, doubtless having his bill payed by "socialist" medicare, it's the ignorant, stupid, miserable bastards of America pushing school boards to let their kids stay home and not be exposed to the communising Obamanite which emits MarXrays causing them to speak French and visit a dentist regularly.

Michelle Malkin is squealing like a stuck pig. World Net Daily is calling for a national "stay home from school day." Glenn Beck is being -- Glenn Beck and the rest of the Republican blogswamp is croaking like bullfrogs after a rainstorm: "Obama wants to create his own Hitler Youth!" School boards all over the country are being besieged by howling rednecks and districts in 6 states so far are refusing to tune in. It's crawling through the nation's school system like a flesh eating virus.

In a way, it's encouraging that after nearly 8 months, giving a speech to America's students is the worst thing they can pin on Obama, but that this pathetic collection of misbegotten miscreants will buy into it as enthusiastically as monster hunting peasants surrounding castle Frankenstein makes me continue to be ashamed at any country with such people in it.

Hateful twits, hateful tweets

". . . and forgetting long passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not on their ashes."

-Thomas Browne-

Unless of course the vitriol of human meanness courses through your veins, in which case you don your rabid Pit Bull apparel and gnaw on what bones can be found. I've rarely seen such hate, even at a time like this where hate is the entire foundation of American Conservative politics. As fast as the greasy fingers can type, the Internet begins to fill with accusations of murder, treason and more formless forms of evil known as "liberalism." There is no restraint in Mudville now that Ted Kennedy has struck out.

Too many blogs, too many twits, too many accusations to dignify with a reply, but one thing is held in common: the tribe that represents the worst traits of our remote ancestors feels victimized and therefore free from any obligation to decency. They lost an election, their worship of Feudal Corporatism, equal rights and civic responsibility is being challenged - at last - and their true values finally revealed. It's as ugly as it's ever been.

I recently and reluctantly signed up for Twitter. I should have stayed at home. the necessity to keep it all idiotically short as brought out more unadorned ugliness than one finds on blogs.

"Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement,”

rages the ridiculous Breitbart

“IF a GOP possesses 1/100 of human failings of T. Kennedy he/she is TOAST,”

is another one of his staggering lies with endless examples to prove it false. Malkin laughs that he didn't go to France for his treatment as though it were funny or actually meant something, others follow suite and Chappaquiddick references spurt like pus from the septic boil of Republic sentiment; from those who would and do accept any act of Presidential treason, dishonesty and manslaughter -- and yes drunken driving. How many people died because George W. Bush was President? No, Kennedy was a “villain,” “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”

Pissing on Kennedy's ashes is just a small part of the psychotic rage that fills the void once filled by Conservatives. A conservative by nature does not respond to disagreement by using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, that's what a madman does, that's what Mr. Breitbart is, that's what Ms. Malkin is and this is what the end of everything sounds like.

Burn baby burn

Teddy Roosevelt was a Socialist; so was Adam Smith, Adolph Hitler and FDR. Anyone in fact who thinks there ought to be a government is a Socialist unless there's " a war on." At that point everything changes and anyone who thinks there's too much government, too intrusive and abusive in it's powers becomes the Socialist villain. That's the simple version. Of course people who wonder why, when half the e-mail screeds one gets from Republican sources begin with a picture of the World Trade Center in flames and exhortations never to forget, we can also call an official day of Remembrance and Service "Socialist." Is it the service that sours the remembrance? Perhaps a national day of insulting France would have been less Socialist. Perhaps burning the UN would have been more "conservative."

“The plan is to turn a ‘day of fear’ that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left,”

writes Matthew Vadum in The Spectator. What could be more Socialist that interfering with the fear level Republicans promote in concert with international terrorists to keep authoritarianism alive in America.

"Nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.”

Or at least the meaning that can be interpreted to demand bigger, more militaristic government and an attack on Constitutional Government. That's "desecration" howls Vadum. I'm sure that all the police, fire, public safety, paramedics and others who died on that day were Socialists as well - and desecrators as well. And what about all the Socialists who volunteered afterwards? You can see the danger!

So when you see the inevitable burning towers picture, remember to preserve the fear, promote the panic and for heaven's sake don't do anything to get in the way of ever increasing government power and defense contractor profit. That would be nothing but Nihilism and Socialism (if your doublethink capacity is great enough to tie those two together.)

While your doublethink module is engaged, please remember that it wasn't Socialism to support a national day of service when George Bush promoted the idea or when it got Bipartisan support this Spring. It's Socialism because Barack Obama is President.

Damn, these socialist/nihilist Liberals are insidious! Promoting positive outcomes and reducing fear is the first step down the slippery slope toward Socialism and if that is difficult for you to understand, Raw Story has all the reasons all the Republican opinion shouters give us to support "conservative" fear mongering, xenophobia, divisiveness, totalitarianism, Chauvinism and military aggression instead of that goddamn e pluribus unum constructivism those nihilist homosexual, far-left Socialists, want to sell us.

Rounding up the righteous.

Glenn Beck, that bottomless sack of snake shit, is trying to make you forget that the last administration set new highs in illegal surveillance of private citizens by referencing a small item at the Whitehouse.gov web page which asks that the endless stream of e-mail lies be forwarded. The site, if you care to look, has information and videos that attempt to disprove the mostly baseless claims. The professional liars are alarmed and so they want you to be alarmed -- and so they break out the swastikas again and try to pin them on the Democrats. "They're rounding up the conservatives, they cry, while trying not to snicker. "they've created a new 'Information Czar'" says the bullshit Czar, Glenn Beck.

People who invent psychotic scenarios and dress them up as dire warnings are "conservatives" you see and only trying to help you see that Obama is a fascistcomministmuslim and illegal alien -- conservatively speaking.

If you're like me, you've had enough of the Palin "death panel" fraud and a great many others and forwarding them to Snopes or Factcheck simply doesn't help much. Returning them with comment to the people who sent them to you doesn't help either. Depending on the Media to refute the obvious and childish fabrications is a lost hope, but it seems that Mr. Beck and Senator Cornyn and the other professional traitors and haters of honesty are afraid someone will get to the bottom of it all and trace the sabotage, the lies and the psychotic ravings back to the RNC and into their own hard drives from whence it originates.

Behold, we're now all being asked to "squeal on our neighbors" say the folks who wanted to have postal letter carriers peek in our basement windows a few years ago and encouraged librarians to spy on those of us who read. Obama is making up a list, just like Santa and he's going to put all those people who tried to warn you that Obama is Hitler into camps.

Did I mention that Poland invaded Germany? The Liberals don't want you to know.

Birthers, believers and bananas

There are those -- a lot of those, for whom any hint of apology for or embarrassment about the United States of its actions is treason and unforgivable. That's unforgivable and perhaps sometimes treasonous since it tends not only to reward, but promote our bad behavior.

Of course there is no way that I can apologize to the world for the "Birther" phenomenon, its psychotic proponents and demented followers, but it's surely embarrassing to contemplate the way the world sees us, which must be very much how we would see some naked savages from Papua New Guinea who happened to have nuclear weapons they were constantly threatening us with. Pardon my unforgivable frankness, but I'm embarrassed to be an American -- once again.

Of course it's worse in the South, the former Slave States where segregation, lynching and Jim Crow policies were only stopped with great effort and physical force in my youth and where even NASCAR and college football take a back seat to believing as a popular sport. Believing without evidence generates disbelieving despite the evidence and so early poll data in Virginia seems to show that almost half of Virginians believe Barak Obama was born in Kenya and that the official State data showing he wasn't, was planted over 40 years earlier in the hopes that he could one day run for president.

". . . a result making me want to bang my head against the table, the first round of calls for our Virginia poll this afternoon founds voters in the state almost evenly split on whether they thought the President was born in the US"

said PPP communications director Tom Jensen. I can well imagine.

Whether Public Policy Polling, who is conducting this poll is or is not a good prognosticator or data gatherer, responses to their announcement at their web site were centered around personal attacks and obscene comments about the snottiness of elite liberals rather than the data or the apparent insanity and delusional condition of the Birthers. Not one of them gives a damn about facts. Not one is capable of self doubt.

Of course believers rarely if ever choose what to believe without assistance and an examination of the obviously mental inventors of the libel such as Orly Taitz can make you want to put a noose around your neck -- or hers depending on your proclivities. If this woman gave you a used Rolls, would you even sit in it without a hazmat suit? None of the "birthers" would be imaginative enough to cook up this story, they got it the way Germany got Fascism: from a band of brownshirt organizers and disruptors and hooligans.

No problem for the bigots, for the believers, for the people who equate fact and reason, law and decency with fascism: Southern Whites, who for over 150 years have stood on their beliefs, on what they have been told by hatemongers to use against freedom for anyone but white males. No problem at all. If it feels good, believe it. If challenged by facts, slime the challengers, but never give up, never surrender, never stop hating.

Oh! The Outrage!

I wonder if the wingnuts have to take time out from raving about how they are insulted by intelligence reports warning ( correctly it seems) of increased militancy amongst hate groups, in order to find ever wilder ways to portray mainstream liberals and moderates as Bolshevik extremists -- or whether they can do both at the same time.

The party that told us it was ridiculous to find anything questionable about the Palin family involvement with an Alaskan Independence Extremist group and witch murdering religious cult, finds it absolutely outrageous that Sonia Sotomayor once, many years ago sat on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund which concerned itself with such outrages as Affirmative Action and voting rights, but far, far worse, opposed Saint Reagan's appointment of Judge Bork. Ridiculous and hypocritical you might say? Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) agrees, saying that the Republican Senate minority would find something to object to “even if the president had nominated Moses.” You remember, Moses; that bearded radical Israelite separatist, Zionist, baby killing, Jew-extremist Commie?

Anyway, despite the rash of wingnut murders and plots, they appear still ready to insist that anyone who is not a fanatic Obama Supporter is being and will be targeted by the government and not just slandered as a member of a hate group, but put in concentration camps. A far easier fate awaits a local gentleman and felon arrested today for having a garage full of explosives, guns and money. I don't know what his private gunpowder plot was about, but I'm willing to bet that he's not a liberal and like 2/3 of the residents of my red county, hates Mr. Obama.

Yes, yes, of course -- I'm just like Hitler for mentioning it, although to continue the metaphor to the point where the wingnuts start comparing themselves to the Jews may be beyond even their level of dementia and malice.

Well, at least we have our American Circus to entertain us while the "liberal" media crams that neurotic reject from Frankenstein labs up our noses 24 hours a day as though piling up teddy bears in the street is more important than blood and corpses in the roadways and Korean missiles falling from the sky and the continuing slide of our economic prospects. That's just how Hitler and the International Jewish Conspiracy took over Germany, I'm sure.

Asses of Evil

"They understand I’m not like no politician they have looked at, ever."

I'm not so sure, but I am sure that if Neal Horsley were running as a Democrat, the blowhards would be in ecstasy and the blogs would be brimming over with hilarity enough to last for years and years of giggling.

Horsley, after all, admits to having had sex with a mule.

“You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually”

says the Georgia Creator's Rights Party gubernatorial candidate. That's the TCRP or T-Crap for short. Of course Neal is all grown up now and that's why his family hates him and he's almost killed his son and he publishes the names of doctors who perform abortions and crosses them off as they are murdered and is willing to start another civil war so that Georgia can secede and overturn Roe Vs. Wade even if it costs the life of his child - or yours.

Is this what's left at the bottom of the barrel the GOP has drank from all these years or is this just a Georgia thang?

“I contend this is really about people’s ability to believe in God. When it comes to that place, when your’re talking about God’s plan to protect himself, then the lives of people become, really, almost irrelevant… in the degree that they result in Him being glorified. That’s the nature of the truth”

says the very Christian Horsley. That's the nature of a scared, vulnerable and weak God who needs to protect himself no matter who gets killed in the process. Glory is important, people are irrelevant and if you don't believe in Horsley's God, then you're irrelevant.

I suspect Neal isn't the sole bat in the Religious Right's belfry. I suspect Sarah Palin is just as bonkers but more reluctant to open her personal can of batshit gumbo to a public viewing.

To be sure Horsely is a long-shot candidate even in the Bible Belt, but with careful handling and sufficient rabble-rousing, there is no reason he can't go far. Just how far he does go will be interesting to observe as a measure of the post-Obama fundamentalist world that continues to lower the bar in their desperate game of Limbo.

It's a Doocy, all right

I think we'd all feel better if we stopped fretting about things and realized that the world we live in is no more than a huge, slowly revolving madhouse with no walls. It's the notion that things and people ought to make sense that drives us crazy -- because they don't. You only have to tune in the news for all the evidence you might need. Take Fox, for instance: any one of those shows with giggling night of the living dead zombies batting fallacies, conjectures, hypertrophied hyperbole and lies back and forth like a game of three-way badminton.

CNN is a communist organization says Steve Doocy on Fox and friends. Like "Liberal" It's a term without fixed meaning, used often enough on Fox that it really means little else than that the victim doesn't have rabies and doesn't preach abject obedience to Fox approved authority and doesn't exhibit a Pavlovian rage response on cue. That certainly describes CNN, who sometimes actually does indulge in honest reportage rather than to derive stories from the Ouija board used by Fox and Friends. But anyway they are all Commies - perhaps some of the few left in the real world and they don't need to tell you why or how. All the proof you need is that a former CNN employee, Mauricio Funes, has been elected President of El Salvador. Elected, not installed by a military insurgency or people's revolution or quasi legal action by the courts. Elected by popular vote. Elected as in Democracy.

So anyway, by the law of sympathetic magic, or perhaps something even more arcane; because he isn't Augusto Pinochet or any of the other murderous, fascistic, peasant slaughtering, protester torturing, nun raping, drug money laundering anti-communist Generalissimos the US traditionally supports and supplies, he's a communist and CNN is the "Communist News Network." What's more, the liberal party he belongs to has, according to Mr. Doocy "allegedly ties to Caesar Chavez," a man that those without heads spinning from Fox Poisoning will remember is long dead. Of course Doocy's duezy was not only to confuse Hugo with Caesar, but to confuse a baseless, irresponsible, malicious and speculative accusation with fact. That's Fox. That's what Fox is about: the voices from Neptune for a mad, mad, mad world.

I happened to be perusing an auction catalog over coffee, early this afternoon; thinking about the things I might have been bidding on if George Bush's irregulars hadn't stolen everyone's money and there were a couple of lots of antique Chinese opium pipes and accessories. That's right, drug paraphernalia and legitimately so because you really can't smoke anything legal in an opium pipe.

Of course the water pipes Tommy Chong once manufactured worked quite well with tobacco, that highly addictive, highly toxic and legal drug, yet Tommy went to prison and lost nearly everything he had. What's the difference between selling legal drug paraphernalia and illegal drug paraphernalia? Nothing beyond the personality involved. We have all sorts of laws enforced only to advance the careers of law enforcement, because, just like the traditional, criminally repressive generalissimos we traditionally support in Latin America, our Justice Department Buccaneers can make an honest man into a criminal as easily as Fox News can make Thomas Jefferson into a Communist and Jesus into Attila the Hun.

If you care about this insanity, you can't expect to survive intact and so I try very hard not to. Sure, I lost almost 80% of my net worth and the people who made that possible are fighting against any attempt to restore order; screaming like demons about Commies and Liberals and Witches and welfare queens but although I can still pay my bills, I can't afford to care. I've still got my house and my boat and a big ocean to float it in and as of today, I can even blog while afloat, hiding in my escape capsule from the madness of the world.

Military intelligence

The twenty first century. The military might want to shut it all down; in the name of freedom, of course.

"GPS cell phone service could be used by our adversaries for travel plans, surveillance and targeting,"

said a draft report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). No more maps at gas stations folks, and I had better go back to using a sextant on my boat lest somebody hijacks it and uses it to terrorize the Florida coast.

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,"

Damn those vegetarian devils!

"Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,"

and aren't those Republicans good at it?

"Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool,"

and the same thing goes for postcards and telephones and semaphore signals! Who knows what those boy scouts are talking about? Don't they have training camps or something like that?

"Terrorists may or may not be using voice-changing software but it should be of open source interest that online terrorist and/or terrorist enthusiasts are discussing it,"

said the Generals, and if the price of goats is being discussed in Pakistan, we need to get the flock out of there.

Cross posted from Human Voices

Fight or flight?

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This may be an existential moment for America, a "to be or not to be" dilemma. Still, not all of us are concerned with questions about whether to bail out the banks and brokers or to suffer the slings and arrows of market forces: some of us are more concerned about why God is allowing his chosen country to suffer.

The answer most satisfying to the Evangelistic ego of course is that, like most events tectonic and atmospheric, the credit crisis can be blamed on sex; gay sex.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies posted on the National Review's web site that he is sure that Washington Mutual's collapse is to be blamed on open minded hiring practices and not predatory lending and the risky loans it produced. Hiring Blacks, Gays and Hispanics with no regard to their dirty minority private lives or unacceptable ethnicity pisses God off.

No, this whole debacle is about sex and tolerance, not money, not debt. God likes money far more than tolerance after all, and as the late Jerry Falwell told us, you have to give money to God if you want to succeed. But you have to stop giving money to people who believe in abominations like birth control, says Christian leader Mike Heath. The credit crisis is about our

"sinful sexual culture, and the acceptance of gay unions"

So perhaps if I were Hamlet and had to choose between opposing our troubles and ending them: or to die, to sleep no more, to end the heartache. If I had to choose between caring what happens to this country and walking away, taking leave of the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, I would simply sail away, another orphan.