You know what Bob Inglis is? A socialist. A Republican socialist.
The veteran South Carolina congressman is a conservative-hating, Bilderburger-coddling, quisling traitor who's trying to kiss that crook Bill Clinton's ass while he runs interference for the communist "organizer" Barack Hussein Obama -- the Kenyan witch doctor now occupying (in the Nazi sense of the word) the White House.
Inglis is a hoity-toity little snot who thinks he's better than the people he's selling out up there in Washington, D.C., and now he's bitter because patriots saw through his "conservative" act and handed him his pinko-commie ass in the Republican runoff.
AND NOW the little traitor is showing his true colors, what with all his sour-grapes trash talking about God-fearing tea-party patriots to that godless commie rag Mother Jones:
During his primary campaign, Inglis repeatedly encountered enraged conservatives whom he couldn't—or wouldn't—satisfy. Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:
I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.
Later, Inglis mentioned this meeting to another House member: "He said, 'You mean you sat there for more than 10 minutes?' I said, 'Well, I had to. We were between primary and runoff.' I had a two-week runoff. Oh my goodness. How do you..." Inglis trails off, shaking his head.
(snip) Why not give these voters what they wanted? Inglis says he wasn't willing to lie:
I refused to use the word because I have this view that the Ninth Commandment must mean something. I remember one year Bill Clinton—the guy I was out to get [when serving on the House judiciary committee in the 1990s]—at the National Prayer Breakfast said something that was one of the most profound things I've ever heard from anybody at a gathering like that. He said, "The most violated commandment in Washington, DC"—everybody leaned in; do tell, Mr. President—"is, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.'" I thought, "He's right. That is the most violated commandment in Washington." For me to go around saying that Barack Obama is a socialist is a violation of the Ninth Commandment. He is a liberal fellow. I'm conservative. We disagree...But I don't need to call him a socialist, and I hurt the country by doing so. The country has to come together to find a solution to these challenges or else we go over the cliff.
Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.
Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild. That was what I was dealing with."
OOOOOOH. Tea-party patriots are scawy, scawy people. Ooooooh, the mean tea-pawty peoples aw gowing to huwt powah, powah Biwul Ingwiss!
The RINO sounds like Barney . . . Barney Frank! HAAAAAA!
And I'll bet some Jew put him up to saying tea-party people are anti-Semitic.
OH . . . get this! He says the Republicans will regret following the common-sense, freedom-loving patriots instead of the commie-libs and Bilderburgers!
Inglis is a casualty of the tea party-ization of the Republican Party. Given the decisive vote against him in June, it's clear he was wiped out by a political wave that he could do little to thwart. "Emotionally, I should be all right with this," he says. And when he thinks about what lies ahead for his party and GOP House leaders, he can't help but chuckle. With Boehner and others chasing after the tea party, he says, "that's going to be the dog that catches the car." He quickly adds: "And the Democrats, if they go into the minority, are going to have an enjoyable couple of years watching that dog deal with the car it's caught."
AND WE'RE GONNA enjoy watching you burn in hell with your communiss friends, you America-hating pansy!
You just don't get that sometimes you have to destroy the village to save it. Destroy it all!Destroy it so that the green shoots of freedom will emerge from the rubble of the socialist state, fertilized by the corpses of all the pinkos and the parasites.
When a multinational corporation cuts corners on a deepwater oil rig, blows the son of a bitch to high heaven, kills 11 crewmen and unleashes an oily apocalypse that consumes everything in its filthy path -- fish, turtles, birds, plankton, oysters, shrimp, marshes, jobs, health, cultures, lives -- you can count on Right-Wing America to put on a long face and tell us "Well, those things happen."
When government apprises this apocalypse wrought by the multinational corporation and decides the responsible party needs to pay up -- now -- suddenly the long faces of Right-Wing America contort into scowls, and pundits' voices rise as one unholy chorus from the depths of hell to wail "This shall not stand! Communists! Hugo Chavez tactics! Shakedown! Help! Help! Daddy Warbucks is being repressed!"
And the thing is . . . lots of people buy this stuff. They buy into a societal anti-morality that turns social Darwinism into holy writ.
The devil, he's a real pro.
Blessed are the powerful! Alms for the rich! Kill the poor! Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Judge Andrew Napolitano and 1,000,000 others like this.
While "right-to-life" groups keep busy demonizing health-care reform and slandering those who support it. . . . And while Nebraska Right to Life is busy endorsing Republicans who make abortion really, really attractive to poor women. . . .
It takes a disposable-diaper maker to get with the program of making a people actually rethink the whole enterprise.
ALL BECAUSE Pampers wants to sell some product, and this iPad app is a hell of a way to do it. Think of it this way: You're taking your standard pro-lifer's plastic fetus combined with all the pamphlets filled with gestational information, and then throw in a 4-D ultrasound for good measure.
You're distributing this around the world, at zero cost after production, and you're distributing it to millions at a time -- not just to abortion-prone women or from an information table at a county fair or somebody's church.
What do you think will do more to make the world safe for unborn children, what Pampers is doing or what the "pro-life" movement is doing now . . . under the covers with politicians whispering sweet nothing in its ear.
Mark Lilla, in the latest New York Review of Books, looks at the tea-party movement and -- by Jove! -- absolutely figures it out. If I may be so bold as to summarize this amazing piece of commentary (and do go here and read the whole thing), it goes something like this: We Americans, bastard offspring of the coupling of the sexual revolution and Gordon Gekko, think John Donne was full of beans.
We also aren't too sure about the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Fall. Except when it comes to "big government" -- we think gummint types got their share of original sin . . . and ours, too.
A little over a decade ago I published an article in these pages titled “A Tale of Two Reactions” (May 14, 1998). It struck me then that American society was changing in ways conservative and liberal commentators just hadn’t noticed. Conservatives were too busy harping on the cultural revolution of the Sixties, liberals on the Reagan revolution’s “culture of greed,” and all they could agree on was that America was beyond repair.
The American public, meanwhile, was having no trouble accepting both revolutions and reconciling them in everyday life. This made sense, given that they were inspired by the same political principle: radical individualism. During the Clinton years the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation). As I wrote then, Americans saw “no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace…and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now.
What happened? People who remember the article sometimes ask me this, and I understand why. George W. Bush, who ran on a platform of “compassionate conservatism,” seemed attuned to the recent social changes. The President Bush who emerged after September 11 took his party and the country back to the divisive politics of earlier decades, giving us seven years of ideological recrimination. By the time of the last presidential campaign, millions were transfixed not by the wisdom or folly of Barack Obama’s policy agenda, but by absurd rumors about his birth certificate and his “socialism.” Now he has been elected president by a healthy majority and is grappling with a wounded economy and two foreign wars he inherited—and what are we talking about? A makeshift Tea Party movement whose activists rage against “government” and “the media,” while the hotheads of talk radio and cable news declare that the conservative counterrevolution has begun.
It hasn’t. We know that the country is divided today, because people say it is divided. In politics, thinking makes it so. Just as obviously, though, the angry demonstrations and organizing campaigns have nothing to do with the archaic right–left battles that dragged on from the Sixties to the Nineties. The populist insurgency is being choreographed as an upsurge from below against just about anyone thought to be above, Democrats and Republicans alike. It was galvanized by three things: a financial collapse that robbed millions of their homes, jobs, and savings; the Obama administration’s decision to pursue health care reform despite the crisis; and personal animosity toward the President himself (racially tinged in some regions) stoked by the right-wing media.1 But the populist mood has been brewing for decades for reasons unrelated to all this.
Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.
Historically, populist movements use the rhetoric of class solidarity to seize political power so that “the people” can exercise it for their common benefit. American populist rhetoric does something altogether different today. It fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied, but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.
A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.
LIBERTARIAN MOB. That's about it.
We can't agree on anything in this country, except that we're God. Well, I'm God . . . or at least a god, if not the God. You, you're the spawn of Satan.
Today’s conservatives prefer the company of anti-intellectuals who know how to exploit nonintellectuals, as Sarah Palin does so masterfully.16 The dumbing-down they have long lamented in our schools they are now bringing to our politics, and they will drag everyone and everything along with them. As David Frum, one of the remaining lucid conservatives, has written to his wayward comrades, “When you argue stupid, you campaign stupid. When you campaign stupid, you win stupid. And when you win stupid, you govern stupid.” (Unsurprisingly, Frum was recently eased out of his position at the American Enterprise Institute after expressing criticism of Republican tactics in the health care debate.)
Over the next six months, as midterm elections approach, we’ll be hearing a lot from and about the Tea Party movement. Right-wing Republicans hope to lead the movement by following it. Establishment Republicans will make fools of themselves trying to master a populist rhetoric they don’t know and don’t believe in. Democrats will take cover, hoping that their losses won’t be too great and that they’ll pick up seats in places where Republicans are slitting each other’s throats. In the end we will likely find ourselves with a divided and irresponsible Congress even less capable of gaining public trust by governing well. Confidence in government will drop further and the libertarian commedia of American politics will extend its run.
But the blame does not fall on Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the Republican Party alone. We are experiencing just one more aftershock from the libertarian eruption that we all, whatever our partisan leanings, have willed into being. For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing—though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have—and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.
Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”
Can we agree it's not a good idea to engage in a culture war when you're completely outgunned and your ranks are full of Benedict Arnolds? Can we agree that "conservative" Christians engaged in this "war" with all the forethought and all the tactical aplomb of George W. Bush, circa 2003?
And finally, can we just agree the culture war is over, and the "moral majority" lost? Actually, it wasn't even a contest.
MAYBE WE could call it "Dobson's Last Stand," considering this story in Miami New Timesabout one of the men who co-founded the Family Research Council with him:
The pictures on the Rentboy.com profile show a shirtless young man with delicate features, guileless eyes, and sun-kissed, hairless skin. The profile touts his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch c*** (uncut)" and explains he is "sensual," "wild," and "up for anything" — as long you ask first. And as long as you pay.
On April 13, the "rent boy" (whom we'll call Lucien) arrived at Miami International Airport on Iberian Airlines Flight 6123, after a ten-day, fully subsidized trip to Europe. He was soon followed out of customs by an old man with an atavistic mustache and a desperate blond comb-over, pushing an overburdened baggage cart.
That man was George Alan Rekers, of North Miami — the callboy's client and, as it happens, one of America's most prominent anti-gay activists. Rekers, a Baptist minister who is a leading scholar for the Christian right, left the terminal with his gay escort, looking a bit discomfited when a picture of the two was snapped with a hot-pink digital camera.
Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. "I had surgery," Rekers said, "and I can't lift luggage. That's why I hired him." (Medical problems didn't stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.)
Yet Rekers wouldn't deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it.
At the small western Miami townhome he shares with a roommate, a nervous Lucien expressed surprise when we told him that Rekers denied knowing about his line of work from the beginning. "He should've been able to tell you that," he said, fidgeting and fixing his eyes on his knees. "But that's up to him."
For decades, George Alan Rekers has been a general in the culture wars, though his work has often been behind the scenes. In 1983, he and James Dobson, America's best-known homophobe, formed the Family Research Council, a D.C.-based, rabidly Christian, and vehemently anti-gay lobbying group that has become a standard-bearer of the nation's extreme right wing. Its annual Values Summit is considered a litmus test for Republican presidential hopefuls, and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have spoken there. (The Family Research Council would not comment about Rekers's Euro-trip.)
THE FRC will be unable to hide from this one, so it just as well address the issue. Then again, what in the world could its officials say? "Holy crap! This may have just discredited us?"
As for Rekers' part, it seems there's no explaining this one away. His pathetic attempt to do just that was his best possible shot. Read on:
In his interview with New Times, Lucien didn't want to impugn his client, but he made it clear they met through Rentboy.com, which is the only website on which he advertises his services. Neither Google nor any other search engine picks up individual Rentboy.com profiles, any more than they pick up individual profiles on eHarmony or Match.com. You cannot just happen upon one.
To arrive at Lucien's site, Rekers must have accepted Rentboy.com's terms of use, thereby acknowledging he was not offended by graphic sexual material. He then would have been transported to a front page covered with images of naked, tumescent men busily sodomizing each other.
OH, MY! And then it gets really disturbing if you apply just a little imagination.
Not to mention Rekers' blog, TeenSexToday.com. Again, from New Times:
Indeed, much of Rekers's activism over the past three decades — beginning with his 1983 book, Shaping Your Child's Sexual Identity — has been devoted to improving children's lives by educating them, protecting them from their own budding sexualities, and keeping them safe from gay adoptions — as he did by testifying as an expert witness in favor of gay adoption bans in both Arkansas and Florida.
Well, it's a good thing Rekers isn't gay himself. Lucien tells us that Rekers frequently takes in foster children and that four years ago he adopted a 16-year-old boy. We found the boy, who is now Lucien's age, on Facebook. He declined to be interviewed.
IN THE ARENA of culture and morals -- in the quest to redeem a fallen culture and dysfunctional society -- it just doesn't work to look at this and say "Well, he's a son of a bitch, but he's OUR son of a bitch."
You can't preach the gospel and promote good morals with a gay "rent boy" by your side. Well, you can, but the cynics will laugh and everybody else will be scandalized. You can't win a "war" by giving your "enemies" ammunition.
Assuming, of course, that what Christians are called to is war. Which we aren't.
We're called to love our neighbor and proclaim the truth -- in love. This is not achieved by entrusting a pearl of great price to culture-war hypocrites who lust after "rent boys" as they troll the halls of power, flattering Caesar and living a lie.
LBJ killed JFK! Elvis faked his death and last was seen at a Burger King in Chattanooga!
The North Koreans blew up the Deepwater Horizon!
We "know" all this because right-wingers hated the Great Society, beehived middle-aged ladies and assorted weirdos couldn't believe the King could ever die, and Republicans find it more plausible that Kim Jong-il launched a minisub on a suicide mission from a freighter steaming from Havana to blow up an oil rig that . . . oh, for pity's sake!
FACE IT, right-wing ideologues have gone around the bend, tinfoil hats are in vogue, and now is the time to buy, buy, buy those aluminum stocks.
With tensions increasing in the region throughout 2009 and into early 2010, the news suddenly reached the world that a SKorean naval patrol ship, the Cheonan, sank off Baengnyeong island in the Yellow Sea, near the border with NKorea on Friday, the 27th of March. A close range explosion had rocked the ship. More than forty sailors were missing and later presumed dead.
Earlier that same morning, the North's military leaders threatened SKorea and the United States with "unpredictable strikes."
At first, South Korea played down any involvement with its totalitarian neighbor to the north, but gradually incontrovertible evidence emerged that the North had deployed an armed, sophisticated mini-sub into the Yellow Sea. It launched a torpedo at the Cheonan and sunk it in an unprovoked attack.
Twenty-four days later, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig owned by the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor Transocean, and operated by British Petroleum, suddenly exploded and caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico. More than a dozen were injured and 11 assumed dead.
(snip)
Now as SKorea vows retaliation for NKorea's act of war, evidence has surfaced that NKorea may have deployed the same type of armed military submersible against Deepwater Horizon.
Facts have also emerged that Hyandai Heavy Industries of Seoul, South Korea built the rig at a cost of $1 billion and despite insurance may have to write off significant losses. The oil rig explosion also has repercussions for the SKorean economy.
So with one attack, NKorea could have dealt a serious blow to two of its greatest enemies.
According to some reports, suspicion has fallen on a NKorean merchant vessel, the Dai Hong Dan, that left a port in Cuba the night of April 18th. The merchant vessel is the class of ship that intelligence agencies have long known can be fitted for—and has carried in the past—NKorea's two-man mini-submarines.
The mini-sub, an SSC Sang-o Class submersible, can carry two torpedoes. They have been known to be transported by several classes of their warships, disguised as merchant vessels or by their older submarines.
The older NKorean subs have been determined By the SKorean navy to be based on a former Yugoslavian design that the NKorean military adopted. Those 1990 versions were retrofitted to carry the two-man submersible and capable of sea launch.
The newest generation of the NKorean mini-sub has stealth abilities, a longer range and can stay submerged much longer than its previous versions.
According to Russian intelligence which released a report in Moscow on May 30, 2010, the NKorean vessel carried a force from the 17th Sniper Corps and departed the Cuban port of Empresa Terminales Mambisas de La Habana April the night of April 18, 2010. Although it's destination was Caracas, Venezuela, it changed course and steamed to within 113 nautical miles of the Deepwater Horizon rig. The mini-sub is estimated to have an effective range of 175 nautical miles.
Then, according to the Russians, the NKoreans launched one of its SSC Sang-o mini-subs (the same kind it used in the attack on the SKorean warship in the Yellow Sea). When the stealth sub reached the offshore oil platform it fired two incendiary torpedoes at the rig's superstructure.
BECAUSE ALL of this is soooooooooo much more plausible to conservatives than an oil company and its drilling partner getting greedy, lobbying against regulations requiring state-of-the-art blowout prevention, then cutting corners and screwing up . . . and blowing themselves up in a catastrophic fashion.
Next thing you know, the right-wing echo chamber will be arguing that destruction of the wetlands, and much of the Gulf fishing industry, actually is a good thing. That those shrimpers and oystermen ought to thank their lucky stars that multinational capitalists applied a little black-gold tough love to their blue-collar, loser asses and gave them such a golden opportunity to retrain for much more lucrative -- and much less smelly -- careers as derivatives traders and financial analysts.
Remember, no freedom-loving American capitalist patriot is worth the label if he can't believe at least a half-dozen impossible things before Rush comes on at 11.
My old high school pal (Deleted), for the sake of democracy, really needs to lose his bid for legislature in that upper-Midwest state of his.
There isn't a whack job out there today in the fever swamps of American paranoiac politics to whom he can't pander.
And now, on Facebook, he "likes" the group page for "ReFounders."ReFounders says it's the "unified voice of Constitutional, Conservative Americans. We are a united movement of pro-Constitution, Conservative women and men of various faiths and traditions, race, ethnicity, age and political affiliation."
SOMEHOW, I don't think Jews or African-Americans need apply. Probably not anyone named Garcia or Gonzales, either.
OF COURSE, among the "fan" photos is the tea-party's anti-"ObamaCare" staple, the poster of President Obama as an African witch doctor. That, of course, is not racist, because the tea partiers say it isn't.
Just like the following "fan" photo isn't highly anti-Semitic.
LOOK at Hillary Clinton's earring, as well as Joe Biden's and Rahm Emanuel's lapel pins. Each is the Israeli flag.
Follow the link on the bottom of the "artwork" and you'll find your explanation for that.
In brief, the explanation is that the "artwork" is the product of a stone-cold, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-Semitic Holocaust denier named David Dees. Dees says he's not anti-Semitic -- that he actually is "PRO-Jewish, but extremely ANTI-Zionist."
Because, of course, all "PRO-Jewish" people are Holocaust deniers.
Here's some more of his handiwork:
THE DAVID DEES "artwork" appearing on the ReFounders page did not go unnoticed by the page administrator, whose only possible line of defense would be to claim an extreme lack of attention to the picture's detail, as well as a total lack of curiosity about the "artist."
No, to the admin, Dees' whack-job foray into anti-Semitic paranoia instead "speaks volumes, and serves to inspire us."
Click on screenshot to enlarge.
THIS IS WHAT conservatism has come to -- such blind hatred of a sitting American president that it's oblivious to the sorts of demons with which it has hopped into bed. Then again, that first demon, blind hatred, was the killer.
The kooks and the racists and the anti-Semites and the conspiracy nuts are all just icing on the cake.
Therefore, it's really, really important that folks like my old high-school chum never, ever "take back" this country. To the extent that the United States claims moral high ground over Hitler's Germany, Botha's South Africa and Davis' Confederate States of America, this never was the hatemongers' country to begin with.
Sigh. And when this is a tea party, the onlyoffical lanoguage is"teabonics" -- at least according to the New York Daily News.
PRESS "1" FOR ENGLISH:
Indisputably, these are the pictures of the day, but that doesn't mean the News doesn't have a bunch more just as funny on display for your giggly pleasure. Get thee there now, and let the hilarity commence!
PRESS "2" FOR TEABONICS:
In desputeaIndispotIndesputobley, thees our the picsures of the day, but that dos'nt mean the News dos'nt have a bunch more just as funny on dispay for you're giggly pleshure. Get the they're now, and let thee hilary comense!
It looks like I picked the wrong day to quit snorting Drāno(TM). Unless, of course, this story really wasn't in Tuesday's New York Times and, in fact, was just the kind of hallucination you get when drain cleaner meets brain cell.
YOU DECIDE, as they say on Everybody's Favorite Cable Network:
When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.
Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.
In the last year, he has organized a local group and a statewide coalition, and even started a “bus czar” Web site to marshal protesters to Washington on short notice. This month, he mobilized 200 other Tea Party activists to go to the local office of the same congressman to protest what he sees as the government’s takeover of health care.
Mr. Grimes is one of many Tea Party members jolted into action by economic distress. At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.
The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.
Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”
“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said.
The fact that many of them joined the Tea Party after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an improvement in the economy, with people trading protest signs for paychecks.
But for now, some are even putting their savings into work that they argue is more important than a job — planning candidate forums and get-out-the-vote operations, researching arguments about the constitutional limits on Congress and using Facebook to attract recruits. (snip)
Jeff McQueen, 50, began organizing Tea Party groups in Michigan and Ohio after losing his job in auto parts sales. “Being unemployed and having some time, I realized I just couldn’t sit on the couch anymore,” he said. “I had the time to get involved.”
He began producing what he calls the flag of the Second American Revolution, and drove 700 miles to campaign for Mr. Brown under its banner. Flag sales, so far, are not making him much. But he sees a bigger cause.
“The founding fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor,” he said. “They believed in it so much that they would sacrifice. That’s the kind of loyalty to this country that we stand for.”
He blames the government for his unemployment. “Government is absolutely responsible, not because of what they did recently with the car companies, but what they’ve done since the 1980s,” he said. “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”
He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.
“If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.
ME, I THINK this demonstrates what I've thought all along about the tea party movement -- that it's blind rage, abject fear and talking-head-fueled paranoia in search of the Other.
That "Other" might be black folk on welfare, or white folk on Wall Street, or brown folk roofing your house, or black folk in the White House, or pinko commie-lib Democrats in Congress . . . or just some poor jerk in the coffee shop (or on Facebook) who disagrees with you. The tea party "patriots" represent free-floating rage with nowhere to go -- because that kind of rage can't go anywhere constructive.
It only can destroy . . . consume. It can't build.
Creating requires a clear head; it requires transforming anger into something that transcends itself. Building a better future for this country requires knowing what you believe and where you want to go.
UNFORTUNATELY, it's becoming clearer and clearer that America's angry tea partiers don't even know their ass from a hole in the ground. Doubly unfortunately, that hole is where their blind rage and complete confusion threatens to bury us all if we don't watch out.
Southwestern Iowa, can we talk? Surely you've noticed lately that your guy in the U.S. House, Steve King, has been a little out of control . . . even by his own loose standards. Frankly, guys, the rest of the country is starting to think he's a little nuts.
OK, a lot nuts.
He's going around throwing rhetorical bombs. He's acts like he's trying to start something bad, trying to get people all riled up.
Frankly, if the tea partiers actually got their way and got national governance just the way the Founding Fathers served it up . . . your representative might be writing manifestos on toilet paper for his lawyer to smuggle out of jail and hand over to Glenn Beck. The Alien and Sedition Acts, as applied by President John Adams, surely would not have been kind to Steve King. LET'S TAKE a look at Steve King's latest, greatest hits, shall we? Starting with this story today in the Omaha World-Herald:
Midlands Republicans on Capitol Hill strongly opposed health care legislation, but most showed little interest this week in repealing it now that it is the law of the land.
One man who is ready for a repeal push is Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
“Today the work begins to repeal Obamacare and restore the principles of liberty that made America a great nation,” King said within hours of the bill's passage. “The American people must take their country back by methodically eliminating every vestige of creeping socialism, including socialized medicine.”
Of course, repeal would be a steep climb. Republicans probably would need to capture the White House, a majority in the House and 60 seats in the Senate, where they currently hold 41.
AND THIS, an account of King's Sunday night antics, courtesy of The New York Times:
“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”
OF COURSE, let us not forget this, as recounted by CBS News:
Conservative lawmakers and pundits already have many grievances against the Democratic health care reform plan, but Rep. Steve King of Iowa and Fox News personality Glenn Beck are adding one more to the list -- the vote scheduled for Sunday.
Democrats are scrambling to get the bill to the president before leaving for Easter recess, prompting the House to schedule a vote for the bill this Sunday.
"They intend to vote on the Sabbath, during Lent, to take away the liberty that we have right from God," King said on Beck's radio program Thursday, the Hill reports.
Beck chimed in, "Here is a group of people that have so perverted our faith and our hope and our charity, that is a -- this is an affront to God."
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) urged a smaller-than-expected crowd of Tea Party protesters on Tuesday to launch a Velvet Revolution-style uprising against the federal government, saying the parallels are striking between America's current government and Eastern European communist rule.
Speaking to the Huffington Post shortly after his speech, King declared that a peaceful uprising, a la the successful overthrowing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on the streets of Prague in 1989 "would be fine with me."
"Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can't get in, they can't get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people," he said.
"So this is just like Prague under communist rule?" the Huffington Post asked.
"Oh yeah, it is very, very close," King replied. "It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there."
Earlier, King implored the crowd to bring the nation's capital to a sort of paralysis. Warning, erroneously, that the health care bill would fund abortion and fund care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, he demanded that concerned citizens "continue to rise up."
AND, OF COURSE, we can't overlook this "Osama bin King" moment after Joe Stack flew his plane into Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin, Texas, last month:
SOUTHWEST IOWA, let me be direct. You have a problem -- you elected a lunatic. Furthermore, considering you elected a lunatic to Congress, he's our problem, too.
And we expect you to fix our problem at your earliest possible convenience.
But if he were to take a nap, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are more than up to the job of filling the teabaggers' hard little hearts to the brim with hatred of their fellow man.
The last time I saw (Deleted), it was 1978, and we were on the staff of Campus Currents, the student newspaper at Baton Rouge High.
Nowadays, (Deleted) is running for legislature in an upper-Midwestern state -- and he was a tea partier on Capitol Hill this weekend protesting against the health-care bill. This is what he put on his Facebook profile today:
“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism and the goal of socialism is communism.” - Lenin 'Nuff said?
WHERE DOES one start in confronting such as this? When people can believe this of their fellow Americans -- when a debate over health-care reform turns into a referendum on Americanism vs. the Red Menace, it seems to me someone has created an atmosphere conducive to somebody ending up dead.
Or to lots of somebodies ending up dead.Remember Oklahoma City? I think the toxic politics leading to that 1995 act of domestic terrorism was nothing compared to today. For one thing, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy.
For another thing, Glenn Beck was still a shock jock in New Haven, Conn., making fun of Asian callers to his radio show.
BUT BACK to medicine being the keystone of socialism, yadda, yadda, yadda. . . . Here is what I wrote in the comments for my old schoolmate's Facebook post:
Too much said.
(Deleted), people can disagree profoundly, but that doesn't mean what you disagree with is some kind of bolshevik putsch.
Do you really think countries with far more ambitious health-care plans than the one passed last night are REALLY commie? Do you REALLY think Canada is a communist country? France? Great Britain? Switzerland? Taiwan, for God's sake?
You think they're REALLY all red enclaves?
You REALLY think the president of the United States is a communist? That Bart Stupak is, like the congressman from Texas yelled, a "baby killer"?
You REALLY think that?
And do you REALLY think a bunch of tea partiers going on and on like that in the Internet Age -- and a few real whack jobs perhaps acting on their paranoia -- wouldn't have the potential to blow this country apart in a way that wasn't possible in 1968?
(Deleted), we're armed to the teeth -- regular folk have automatic weapons and regular idiots can figure out out to build Oklahoma City-style bombs. Do you REALLY think all the inflammatory, and patently irresponsible, rhetoric won't lead, with just the smallest amount of bad luck, to a frickin' bloodbath in this angry and divided country?
There is madness afoot. Avoid it at all costs.
OH . . . and on another post, he had linked to that Phyllis Schlafly press release -- the one saying it was impossible to be pro-life and a Democrat.
Me and Bart Stupak, congressman from Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We've been written right out of the ranks of pro-life Americans by Republicans, members of a party that stood strong by a president who thought it perfectly fine to honor the human dignity of "enemy combatants" through life-affirming torture sessions.
We've been condemned to pro-abortion hell by none other than Phyllis Schlafly, who said the House's final passage of health-care reform "clarified that you cannot be pro-life and be a Democrat."
One GOP congressman put an exclamation point on Stupak's pro-life excommunication by yelling "Baby killer!" at the Democrat on the House floor. It's a pity the marathon House session didn't run just a little longer, so that anonymous Republican could have gone for the tea-party hat trick by calling Barney Frank the F-word and John Lewis the N-word.
Again.
Because that's the patriotic, all-American and pro-life thing to do, apparently.
IT DOESN'T matter to the tea partiers, or to the Republican caucus, or to the nation's Catholic bishops that virtually every expert out there (except for their own) said the Senate health-care bill -- which the House was voting to ratify and send to President Obama for his signature -- was no pro-abortion document.
An interview with a law professor -- Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee -- by NPR's Robert Siegel on All Things Considered last week was particularly informative:
SIEGEL: And first, is the Senate bill more tolerant of abortion and federal spending on abortion than the House bill is?
Prof. JOST: No, it is not.
SIEGEL: In the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' statement against the Senate bill, Cardinal Francis George wrote this: The Senate bill deliberately excludes the language of the Hyde Amendment. It expands federal funding and the role of the federal government in the provision of abortion procedures.
You would say that's not true?
Prof. JOST: That is not true. The bill explicitly cross-references the Hyde Amendment at a couple of different places. One is, it provides that no federal funding for the new premium subsidies or cost-sharing reduction subsidies - the money that's going to go help people buy health insurance - that none of that money can be used to pay for abortions.
And secondly, it provides that the conscience protections, and the protections against discrimination against providers who are unwilling to provide or pay for abortion - is also preserved under the Senate bill.
(snip)
SIEGEL:You've studied both the House and the Senate bill.
Prof. JOST:Mm-hmm.
SIEGEL:How would you characterize both of them - on a crude spectrum, from pro-choice to pro-life? How do these bills look to you?
Prof. JOST:I think they are both basically pro-life bills. I think they are bills that - the Senate bill has some provisions that are stronger than the House. Senate bill, for example, provides $250 million to provide support for pregnant and parenting women who want to bear and keep a child. That's not in the House bill. So there are some provisions in the Senate bill that are stronger than the House.
The bishops prefer the approach that the House bill uses to the provisions of the Senate bill. But they're basically equivalent. Both bills prohibit federal funding for abortions through the premium subsidies. And as a practical matter, both of them are going to make it more difficult to get abortion coverage through an insurance policy. That is true under the status quo.
SIEGEL:Professor Jost, you've been studying health law for quite a while. Is there something about these bills that is especially confusing or opaque that would lead to these very different interpretations, whether one is much more pro-life than the other? Or are people just being tendentious in their readings of these two bills?
Prof. JOST:I think people are being distrustful in their reading. I think that there's a tendency to sort of assume the devious motives on the parts of others, you know - which may, in part, be justified. This has been a pretty intense debate in our country.
But I think in this case, it is just not justified, that - I think that the senators who drafted these amendments are pro-life senators who intended to make sure that federal funding doesn't go for abortion. And so I think that there's sort of an unwarranted belief that people are proceeding in bad faith when in fact, they're proceeding in the best of good faith and trying to achieve the same goals.
AND THUS Stupak and his tiny band of pro-life (er . . . baby killing?) House Democrats sought refuge in the cover of a presidential executive order reaffirming what already was plain in the Senate language. That Obama even would compromise that much infuriated pro-choice advocacy groups.
Unfortunately for Democrat pro-lifers, it seems there is no cover from zealots eager to excommunicate from the pro-life movement anyone deemed less pure -- or less right-wing -- than themselves. Pity poor Bart Stupak, for there most certainly is no cover from wild-eyed Republicans' verbal brickbats in the "people's house."
He's not a Catholic lawmaker acting in good faith as he exercises his prudential judgment on legislation that's as pro-life as he has the power to make it -- a bill most "experts" say is pretty pro-life indeed.
No, Bart Stupak is a "baby killer." A traitor. An ex-pro-lifer.
Someone, in the words of Schlafly, who "will be forever remembered as being among the deciding votes which facilitated the largest expansion of abortion services since Roe v. Wade."
IT MATTERS not a whit that any of this is only true in the peculiarly peculiar alternate universe inhabited by the Republican Party and their useful -- and angry -- idiots in professional pro-liferism. Ask Ben Nelson; he got the Stupak treatment before Stupak got the Stupak treatment.
When you so sell your political soul down that particular River of Denial, it's easy to equate "pro-life" with a party willing to see 47 million (and climbing) Americans subsist with no health insurance at all. It's no big whoop to equate saving lives with maintaining the status-quo probability of losing everything if you get sick enough.
In the funhouse-mirror world of professional, political pro-liferism -- or perhaps the better term is "anti-abortionism" -- it's far better to maintain a system where it's a lot cheaper for low-income, uninsured women to get an abortion than it is for them to get prenatal care. See "Nebraska, State of" and "Heineman (R-Neb.), Gov. Dave."
Anti-abortionism is good with all that, just so long as it keeps civil society unsullied by health-care reform legislation that's merely "pretty good, considering" from a pro-life perspective instead of the New Jerusalem come down to earth. Yesterday.
The tyranny of dying for lack of decent health care -- the tyranny of money being, in too many cases, the final arbiter between living and dying if you're sick in America -- is really the preservation of liberty . . . or so we're told by the voices coming from the funhouse. Tyranny is only tyranny if it's the tyranny of "socialized medicine."
Elder care is "death panels," prenatal care is an abortion waiting to happen, fundamentally pro-life legislation is "the largest expansion of abortion services since Roe v. Wade" . . . and Bart Stupak is a "baby killer."
THESE VOICES -- the ones from the funhouse . . . the ones in the heads of those deep inside political pro-liferism -- come up with the damnedest things indeed. Like this:
George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States, will be the featured speaker at the 27th annual Life Centers Celebration of Life fund-raiser in Indianapolis. President Bush will join special musical guest, Grammy Award-winning artist Sandi Patty, and 2009 Miss America Katie Stam at Conseco Fieldhouse on Thursday, April 15 at 7pm.
"We are honored to welcome President George W. Bush, whose strong record on life issues demonstrates his belief that every life matters," Brian Boone, Life Centers president and CEO, said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to celebrate life - with a keynote address from a public servant who made the sanctity of human life a priority."
The proceeds from the event will benefit Life Centers, a nonprofit Christian ministry which helps women in unplanned pregnancies by providing free services including pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, confidential peer counseling, 24-hour help line calls, post-abortion and maternity support at its eight pregnancy resource centers across Central Indiana.
"We are grateful that President George W. Bush will inspire our community to create a culture of life at the crossroads of America and to show compassion to women in unplanned pregnancies," Boone said.
THE GEORGE W. BUSH who approved federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. The George W. Bush of waterboarding fame. The George W. Bush who went to war in Iraq for, as it turns out, no discernible reason other than to "get" Saddam Hussein and to "establish freedom."
The George W. Bush of torture at Abu Ghraib, torture at secret CIA prisons and torture at Guantanamo.
The pro-life movement -- or, more precisely, the political operatives and conservative ideologues who've hijacked the pro-life movement -- say Bart Stupak is a baby killer and that neither of us are real pro-life Catholics.
To be authentically "pro-life" is to take marching orders from one bunch to whom George Bush is a hero?
To be a real pro-life Catholic is to treat as holy writ the political judgments of a "hapless bench of bishops" ostensibly capable of deciphering the pro-life bona fides of health-care policybut decidedly less facile at keeping pervy priests from diddling little boys? I'll declare unyielding fealty to Catholic bishops' take on health-care reform when they take responsibility for their own complicity in perpetuating the moral horror of sexual abuse in the church.
Deal?
GO AHEAD, "pro-life" movement.Excommunicate me, and Bart Stupak, and U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and every other "formerly pro-life Democrat" for thinking that the health-care reform proposal ratified by the House was "good enough for government work."
The veteran South Carolina congressman is a conservative-hating, Bilderburger-coddling, quisling traitor who's trying to kiss that crook Bill Clinton's ass while he runs interference for the communist "organizer" Barack Hussein Obama -- the Kenyan witch doctor now occupying (in the Nazi sense of the word) the White House.
