Outside the Spectrum

   It’s important to not look back. Looking back means actually analyzing yourself and your behavior, and that’s bad when you’re a blackout drunk leading a nation with lies through a bloody, bungled war. It’s also important to, rhetorically speaking, fellate your interviewee as a “tough” journalist in the “no-spin” zone.

   Speaking of blackout drunks, how’s the JAR doing, Drinky? Not so good.

    Iraqi and U.S. doctors conduct a study that indicates that 650,000 civilians in Iraq have died (who otherwise wouldn’t have died) following the “allied” invasion in 2003.That’s even more than that bullshit 400,000 number Tony Blair blurted out about how many people had been found in a mass grave attributable to Saddam Hussein. That’s even more than the 290,000 Iraqis Hussein killed in his reign.

   And, like the Lancet/New England Journal of Medicine report before it, it will certainly be slandered vigorously by the right.

   As Cenk Uygur has said, this president “will live in infamy.”

   You deserve him.

   Although I have said it before, sometimes it deserves repeating. Recently perusing the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune (that filthy rag is ubiquitous here) I noticed the usual stuff: an editorial by Charles Krauthammer, that malignant cripple, using some of the most painfully clumsy logic to justify threatening North Korea and Iran. Dennis Byrne writing his throwaway garbage--I can’t even remember what his article was about. Timothy McNulty, the public editor, writing a piece whining that an article in the last Sunday Tribune was too critical of some rich people’s houses and that rich people deserve respect, too, as well as enormous amounts of money.  Not a progressive voice to be seen: in short, the reason why I usually reserve the Chicago Tribune for cleaning up after my dog and little else.

   I couldn’t help but notice the letters to the editor from some people who had clearly been listening to Lush Limbaugh and Orifice for years. They were responding to a piece a while ago in which some law professor defined what a “liberal” was and advocated the general precepts: tolerance for dissent, progressive social values, blah blah blah. This prompted quite a few moral cockroaches to come crawling into the public eye after the article had left and begin gnawing away at the thesis of the story with high-school jokes about liberals and mischaracterizations the likes of which usually come spilling out of Mark Levin’s mouth at 3 am when he’s a bottle of whiskey into his night:

A liberal is someone who wants to salve his guilt with your money.
                         -John Knoerle
                         Chicago

A liberal is someone who believes government is responsible for his well-being from birth to grave. A liberal believes he has no personal responsibility for his own welfare or actions.                     
-Michael Sheridan
                         Mokena

The left does not tolerate any dissent whatsoever…The left regards the United States as evil and hence unworthy of defense, which is why the left opposes the War on Terror…The defining characteristic of the left these days is intellectual dishonesty…
                         -Mark G. Arnold
                         St. Louis

A liberal is a person who is open minded but only to his way of thinking, and he thinks that anything goes as long as it benefits him.
                             -Rita Rucin
                         Oak Lawn

And so on. The intellectual equivalent of watching four people shit their pants and then crow about how sophisticated they are. Note John Knoerle’s 11th grade, nasty little sarcasm. Note Michael Sheridan’s ridiculous, Limbaugh-like mischaracterization of those liberals. Note Mark G. Arnold’s hysterical projection of the vices of the right onto the left. Note Rita’s inadvertent sarcasm (trust me, it was inadvertent. The rest of her letter is written at the level of an 8th grader).

   These are the remaining 36% who still, after six years, give a thumbs up to Drinky, the worst president in history. These are the kind of voters who, no matter what the outcome of the mid-term elections this November, will end up sending most incumbents (and most republicans) back to office.

   They deserve the worst president in history and the worst Congress in history. They deserve to live in a country where wealthy individuals shift the tax burden onto them, where their poor friends and relatives get ground into meat to serve Thurston Howell III’s dogs, where their sons and daughters are kept fighting foreign wars against their will, where the conservative religious leaders they love are dismissed as “nuts” by their leader’s chief advisor and then cynically used for the votes they can deliver, in short, they deserve to live in a country in which there is no law but the law of the jungle--a country that is despised.

   Driftglass echoes my writing (or perhaps I echo his). As I excoriate these Sean Hannity fans, Drfitglass urges his readers to remember that America is worth fighting for. 58 percent of people in this country officially believe Preznit Drinky “purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war.”  A similar majority believe that terror suspects should be given due process rights. Public opinion polls usually show, to the never-ending surprise of a pessimist like me, that the majority of the American public is very frequently right in its opinions on a host of issues from the Israeli-Palestinian problem to priorities for government spending.

   Indeed Driftglass, there is hope. The GOP has written off Mike DeWine’s seat in Ohio. Bwahahahaha! Lights OUT, Mike!

   Occasionally, David Brooks says something that reveals what a great love of democracy the Bush Administration really has…

   Glenn Greenwald, brilliant as he is, finally realizes that GOP Congresspeople are all part of the same machine. God bless, Glenn.

   These are just drops in the ocean, though. A lot of progress needs to be made in this United States. I think optimists should be cautious speaking of a nation that has just officially legalized torture. I think Driftglass should be realistic hoping for a nation that, even if the election this November goes the democrats’ way, will still be run by a criminal president and a cowed and bought democrat caucus in the Congress.
  

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Hat tip to Driftglass for finding this gem.

   Hastert goes “on the offensive,” because God knows you can’t be on the defensive in politics in this country (even if you should be defending yourself), and claims that the Foley scandal is being used as a tool by democrats to swing an election. Hannity jumped on board the bandwagon and painted the scandal’s timing as part of a democratic conspiracy to affect the election. These moral inbreds just can’t criticize one of their own members and then let the situation lie. It, in some way, has to be partly the democrat’s fault. I’m sure some editorials will follow blaming the scandal on Bill Clinton or the liberal culture of accepting homosexuality. Oh, wait. That’s already happened. I am not kidding. I just discovered this commentary on Thinkprogress. Unbelievable. See? When a Republican turns out to be a gay sexual predator, it’s liberals’ fault.

   Meanwhile, conservatives respond to the scandal by smearing homosexuals. I have written about this before. Smearing gays as de facto pedophiles is written into the DNA of religious conservative groups, people, and the politicians they send to Washington. It’s par for the course for them. Even relatively mild conservative commentators like Jonah Goldberg just can’t resist.

   You see, almost everything is liberals’ fault. Columbine? The result of teaching evolution in schools and allowing abortion, of course. This man isn’t some random lunatic, either. As I have previously written on this blog, Tom DeLay echoed his opinion at the time of the shootings.

  This as the scandal worsens, and ABC uncovers evidence that Foley had internet sex with a page while awaiting a vote. Reynolds, the republican who was originally informed of the situation, literally surrounded himself with a human shield of children at a recent press conference and refused to ask the children to leave so a frank discussion of the sexually-charged issue could take place. Wow. He was literally hiding behind children. That is one of the lowest political stunts I have ever seen.



  

  

“The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.” –Senator Palpatine



“There are methods of coercion … rougher than the Miranda standards of criminal and military justice systems…that have already saved thousands of American lives.” --William F. Buckley, NR October 9