Outside in the Distance a Wildcat Did Growl
I'm still dealing with my grief over the absurd concept that the once-revered U.S. Senate would actually choose to explicitly condemn a newspaper ad drawing attention to the unquestionable betrayal of our heritage by some combination of bush and petraeus. Suddenly we have a kinder-Senate. I wonder if they're getting graham-crackers and milk and enforced rest times?
Pathetic is putting it far too kindly. Maybe I said that before. Regardless, it's worth repeating. The world of real news and ferment, i.e., the Internet, is full of opinions quite different from what you'd get if you settled for Today, Russert, Katie, and the like.
Exhibit A here is from Scarecrow via Firedoglake:
Today’s WaPo has an article about MoveOn, but it’s really about the pitfalls of being a truth teller in a Beltway Establishment drowning in its own duplicity and lack of accountability.
The 22 Democrats who voted to condemn the truth tellers and provide the most dishonest Administration in my lifetime with a political distraction need a verbal flogging, but before that, they need a few reminders:
MoveOn did not lie to get the country into a needless, bloody war; Bush/Cheney did.
MoveOn did not fabricate a phony link between Saddam and 9/11; Bush/Cheney did.
MoveOn did not fail to plan for an extended occupation; did not fail to protect Iraq’s national treasures, did not fail to secure Saddam’s conventional arms caches or prevent them from falling into the hands of those likely to resist the invasion; did not disband the Iraq Army, putting thousands of trained/armed soldiers on the streets with no jobs — Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld did.
MoveOn did not install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad and then profess shock that Iran was gaining too much influence; Bush/Cheney did.
MoveOn did not inflame Iraqis by authorizing torture and failing to set humane rules for Iraq detentions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo — Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld did.
MoveOn did not authorize the presence of 20,000 to 30,000 armed mercenaries and did not force the Iraqis to accept their presence without any legal accountability to Iraq and did not fail to follow up with any legal accountability in the US — Bush/Cheney and the current acting Attorney General did.
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And Helen Thomas is not to be missed - I sure wish there was more from her. I've not found a way to be sure I get to enjoy all of her product. But this as always is appreciated:
As if there were any doubt, a new book titled “Dead Certain” asserts that President Bush is deeply convinced that he did the right thing by invading Iraq.The book, by Robert Draper, national correspondent for GQ magazine, is important, as the president — who does not like to “navel gaze” — uses his interviews with the author to explain himself and some of the public perceptions of his presidency.
Most of them seem right on.
Draper said Bush is revered by his staffers, who are pained that not everyone shares their admiration for their boss.
Yet Draper writes that some of Bush’s qualities could also be viewed “less glowingly: the quickness as brusque impatience, the plain speech as intellectual laziness, the strategic vision as disrespect for the process, the boldness as recklessness, the strength as unreflective certainty.”
Woven in the book is the fact that Bush is not afraid to say he has “cried without shame” after meeting with families who have suffered losses in the war. But does he cry also for the Iraqis whose thousands of dead are not officially counted by the Pentagon?
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And then there is this one, entitled "The Fall of the Godmongers." And that's not the half of the title, frankly. But I delighted in the epic swings of this writer's work, only a sample of which I am including here. In essence, he's here to tell us that because the appetite of the fundamentalist right is effectively inquenchable, their failure is inevitable. That is a theory I'd love to have proven. I'm not sure I am fully convinced yet, but I sure enjoyed the terrific word-storm in the meantime. As with all of the links here, I encourage you to follow up. I'm at best giving excerpts.
Oh yes, by all means please take a moment to look around, ye who might be feeling a bit hopeful and optimistic right now.
Because indeed, you’ve got your wonderful and ever-accelerating green movement, your lovely mixed-blessing organic food movement and your rejuvenated attention to solar power and sustainable buildings and organic cotton and free-trade coffee and clean energy and CFLs and urban recycling and sleek gorgeous modern vibrator design to make hip women of the world swoon.
We’ve got urban smoking bans and Smart cars and women finally rising to the most powerful positions in the land. We’ve even got an increasing awareness (BushCo, the Middle East, and China gruesomely excepted) of industrial pollution and global warming, all maybe indicating a subtle but still profound shift away from traditional modes of waste and war and our everlasting thirst for death and all possibly pointing to a happy delicious karmic sea change toward light and health and love for all beings everywhere for all time, as the butterflies and bunnies and birds all hum and smile and sing. Mmm, utopian.
But wait, why stop there? While we’re wearing these swell rose-colored glasses of momentary progressive bliss, let us go one big step further.
Because right now, there is perhaps no greater item we as a struggling human ant farm can be grateful for, no single social emetic we can look to for inspiration or hope or a happy tingly sensation in our collective groinal region indicating a possible move away from our long-standing Dick-Cheney-in-hell attitude of shrill bleakness, alarmism and religious righteousness than the simply wonderful implosion of the evangelical Christian right that’s happening right now in America.
Do you know this clenched and panicky group? Of course you do. They’re the throngs of megachurch lemmings Karl Rove masterfully manipulated and rallied and whored to Bush’s very narrow advantage in two elections.
They’re the ones who’ve made all the headlines and influenced all sorts of laws and national policy changes lo, this past half-decade concerning everything from stem cell research to gay marriage to evolution, sanitized school textbooks to failed abstinence programs to RU-486 restrictions to silly anti-science rhetoric, the ones who gasped in horror at a woman’s bare nipple and made a disgusting mockery of Terri Schiavo and actually applauded when John Ashcroft spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to throw some heavy drapery over the shamefully exposed breasts of the bronze (female) Spirit of Justice statue in the Hall of Justice. And so on.
They are, in short, responsible for a great many of the most notable social and intellectual embarrassments in America since the new millennium took hold, and rest assured, we and the rest of the civilized world shall recall their bleak accomplishments for much of our natural born lives, and shudder.
Now then, your evidence of a new hope? Your reason for rejoicing? Right here: It seems the remaining core of politicized evangelicals, far from realizing its diminished influence and far from realizing the GOP has largely imploded and far from sensing, therefore, that it might perhaps be time to dial down some of its more unpopular, virulent agenda items, this group is actually aiming to step up its dogmatic demands from various GOP candidates this next election.
That’s right. They want more. Or rather, less.
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But then again, the cheerful upside is tough to resist. Jerry Falwell is dead. Pat Robertson is so politically dead he’s become nothing more than a sad punch line, a guy who makes the devil himself smile every time he opens his “gays-caused-9/11″ mouth. Then there’s the truly spectacular list of scandals and meltdowns and moral collapses that have befallen the “family values” party. Indeed, while cultural conservatives have certainly won a few nasty battles (and they’ll doubtlessly win a few more), they’re very much losing the war.
But when you come right down to it, the Great Truism has been validated once again: Righteous fundamentalism, be it Christian, Islamic, or otherwise, has the seeds of its own destruction built right into its very framework, a priori and de facto and by default. Powered by the deeply joyless engines of fear and shame, it can never quench its own impotent desires.
And for that, we can all praise Jesus indeed.
Pathetic is putting it far too kindly. Maybe I said that before. Regardless, it's worth repeating. The world of real news and ferment, i.e., the Internet, is full of opinions quite different from what you'd get if you settled for Today, Russert, Katie, and the like.
Exhibit A here is from Scarecrow via Firedoglake:
Today’s WaPo has an article about MoveOn, but it’s really about the pitfalls of being a truth teller in a Beltway Establishment drowning in its own duplicity and lack of accountability.
The 22 Democrats who voted to condemn the truth tellers and provide the most dishonest Administration in my lifetime with a political distraction need a verbal flogging, but before that, they need a few reminders:
MoveOn did not lie to get the country into a needless, bloody war; Bush/Cheney did.
MoveOn did not fabricate a phony link between Saddam and 9/11; Bush/Cheney did.
MoveOn did not fail to plan for an extended occupation; did not fail to protect Iraq’s national treasures, did not fail to secure Saddam’s conventional arms caches or prevent them from falling into the hands of those likely to resist the invasion; did not disband the Iraq Army, putting thousands of trained/armed soldiers on the streets with no jobs — Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld did.
MoveOn did not install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad and then profess shock that Iran was gaining too much influence; Bush/Cheney did.
MoveOn did not inflame Iraqis by authorizing torture and failing to set humane rules for Iraq detentions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo — Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld did.
MoveOn did not authorize the presence of 20,000 to 30,000 armed mercenaries and did not force the Iraqis to accept their presence without any legal accountability to Iraq and did not fail to follow up with any legal accountability in the US — Bush/Cheney and the current acting Attorney General did.
-clip-
And Helen Thomas is not to be missed - I sure wish there was more from her. I've not found a way to be sure I get to enjoy all of her product. But this as always is appreciated:
As if there were any doubt, a new book titled “Dead Certain” asserts that President Bush is deeply convinced that he did the right thing by invading Iraq.The book, by Robert Draper, national correspondent for GQ magazine, is important, as the president — who does not like to “navel gaze” — uses his interviews with the author to explain himself and some of the public perceptions of his presidency.
Most of them seem right on.
Draper said Bush is revered by his staffers, who are pained that not everyone shares their admiration for their boss.
Yet Draper writes that some of Bush’s qualities could also be viewed “less glowingly: the quickness as brusque impatience, the plain speech as intellectual laziness, the strategic vision as disrespect for the process, the boldness as recklessness, the strength as unreflective certainty.”
Woven in the book is the fact that Bush is not afraid to say he has “cried without shame” after meeting with families who have suffered losses in the war. But does he cry also for the Iraqis whose thousands of dead are not officially counted by the Pentagon?
-clip-
And then there is this one, entitled "The Fall of the Godmongers." And that's not the half of the title, frankly. But I delighted in the epic swings of this writer's work, only a sample of which I am including here. In essence, he's here to tell us that because the appetite of the fundamentalist right is effectively inquenchable, their failure is inevitable. That is a theory I'd love to have proven. I'm not sure I am fully convinced yet, but I sure enjoyed the terrific word-storm in the meantime. As with all of the links here, I encourage you to follow up. I'm at best giving excerpts.
Oh yes, by all means please take a moment to look around, ye who might be feeling a bit hopeful and optimistic right now.
Because indeed, you’ve got your wonderful and ever-accelerating green movement, your lovely mixed-blessing organic food movement and your rejuvenated attention to solar power and sustainable buildings and organic cotton and free-trade coffee and clean energy and CFLs and urban recycling and sleek gorgeous modern vibrator design to make hip women of the world swoon.
We’ve got urban smoking bans and Smart cars and women finally rising to the most powerful positions in the land. We’ve even got an increasing awareness (BushCo, the Middle East, and China gruesomely excepted) of industrial pollution and global warming, all maybe indicating a subtle but still profound shift away from traditional modes of waste and war and our everlasting thirst for death and all possibly pointing to a happy delicious karmic sea change toward light and health and love for all beings everywhere for all time, as the butterflies and bunnies and birds all hum and smile and sing. Mmm, utopian.
But wait, why stop there? While we’re wearing these swell rose-colored glasses of momentary progressive bliss, let us go one big step further.
Because right now, there is perhaps no greater item we as a struggling human ant farm can be grateful for, no single social emetic we can look to for inspiration or hope or a happy tingly sensation in our collective groinal region indicating a possible move away from our long-standing Dick-Cheney-in-hell attitude of shrill bleakness, alarmism and religious righteousness than the simply wonderful implosion of the evangelical Christian right that’s happening right now in America.
Do you know this clenched and panicky group? Of course you do. They’re the throngs of megachurch lemmings Karl Rove masterfully manipulated and rallied and whored to Bush’s very narrow advantage in two elections.
They’re the ones who’ve made all the headlines and influenced all sorts of laws and national policy changes lo, this past half-decade concerning everything from stem cell research to gay marriage to evolution, sanitized school textbooks to failed abstinence programs to RU-486 restrictions to silly anti-science rhetoric, the ones who gasped in horror at a woman’s bare nipple and made a disgusting mockery of Terri Schiavo and actually applauded when John Ashcroft spent $8,000 of taxpayer money to throw some heavy drapery over the shamefully exposed breasts of the bronze (female) Spirit of Justice statue in the Hall of Justice. And so on.
They are, in short, responsible for a great many of the most notable social and intellectual embarrassments in America since the new millennium took hold, and rest assured, we and the rest of the civilized world shall recall their bleak accomplishments for much of our natural born lives, and shudder.
Now then, your evidence of a new hope? Your reason for rejoicing? Right here: It seems the remaining core of politicized evangelicals, far from realizing its diminished influence and far from realizing the GOP has largely imploded and far from sensing, therefore, that it might perhaps be time to dial down some of its more unpopular, virulent agenda items, this group is actually aiming to step up its dogmatic demands from various GOP candidates this next election.
That’s right. They want more. Or rather, less.
-clip-
But then again, the cheerful upside is tough to resist. Jerry Falwell is dead. Pat Robertson is so politically dead he’s become nothing more than a sad punch line, a guy who makes the devil himself smile every time he opens his “gays-caused-9/11″ mouth. Then there’s the truly spectacular list of scandals and meltdowns and moral collapses that have befallen the “family values” party. Indeed, while cultural conservatives have certainly won a few nasty battles (and they’ll doubtlessly win a few more), they’re very much losing the war.
But when you come right down to it, the Great Truism has been validated once again: Righteous fundamentalism, be it Christian, Islamic, or otherwise, has the seeds of its own destruction built right into its very framework, a priori and de facto and by default. Powered by the deeply joyless engines of fear and shame, it can never quench its own impotent desires.
And for that, we can all praise Jesus indeed.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 11:13 PM
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