August 2006

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Wingers going nuts over fiction

August 31, 2006 in Political Animals | 6 comments

Well, it’s the silly season again. Of course, with the radical right, when isn’t it the silly season?

AJ Strata is having hysterics over a BBC television movie that will air next year, which portrays the fictional aftermath of the fictional assassination of President George W. Bush. (Did everyone understand that this a fictional story? Good!) AJ breathlessly informs us that:

This will kill the democrats who will have to come out strongly against this and alienate the radical far left. If not they will lose the center. Either way they lose. It is only a question of whether they lose with honor or the jump into the fevered swamps.

Everyone get that? Every time anyone anywhere imagines anything about Our Sainted President that AJ doesn’t like, the Democrats must must MUST immediately respond! The fate of nations hangs on a fictional TV movie!

What, I have to ask myself, is AJ smoking these days? Whatever it is, it’s strong stuff.

Of course, Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson at StopTheACLU.com has to chime in:

But I’m sure there is a market for such a movie. The fringe moonbats will be flocking to see this.

Jay seems to conveniently forget that he’s already been caught advocating the use of murder as an instrument of political will. Pot, kettle, black.

Michelle Malkin, bless her shriveled, bigoted soul, chimes in as well. After posting a few examples of threatening images depicting violence against George W. Bush, she piously intones:

They all need serious help.

Of course, as David Neiwert has amply documented, Michelle does not see the seemingly endless deluge of violent rhetoric coming from her side of the blogosphere to be a problem. In fact, it is doubtful that she sees it at all — another example of what I have dubbed “Invincible Ignorance”.

Once one leaves the Reality Distortion Field that AJ, Jay, Michelle, et al live within, some facts become clear:

  1. It’s a BBC TV movie, folks. Such productions are not notable for their effect on US politics.
  2. There is no indication it will be shown in US any time soon.
  3. There is no indication of the political leanings of the writers and producers. (The wingers imagine that anyone who could fictionalize the assassination of the Fratboy-In-Chief just has to be a liberal, but experience tells us that right-wing imagination has a very tenuous connection to reality, at best.)
  1. It is, in fact, the radical right that is a source of an endless cesspool of eliminationist rhetoric.

    Of all the things to get exercised about in this world, the wingers sure do know how to home in on the most trivial.

    UPDATE 09/02/06 02:21 PM: Kevin Beck posts an extended response to the comments of ‘Dan L’ (see below).

Cao falls for more ignorant bullshit

August 30, 2006 in Political Animals | 1 comment

Poor Cao. She swallows whatever looney Right Wing Meme of the Moment happens to come along. This time, it’s the idea that Hitler believed in evolution:

Stalin, Marx, Carnegie, Hitler–those are just a bunch of dead guys (who all believed in Evolution).

The subtext, of course, is that Evolution Is A Bad Bad Thing. The problem, of course, is that Cao is wrong — again. There is ample historical evidence that Hitler, in fact, believed in ‘special creation’. Ed Brayton points out that all one has to do to confirm this is to read “Mein Kampf”: Read the rest of this entry »

My small contribution to the Katrina Blogswarm

August 28, 2006 in Political Animals | No comments

I learned of the Katrina Blogswarm from Shakespeare’s Sister. Apparently the idea originated with King Cranky of Royally Kranked.

The idea is that since today can be considered the first anniversary of the onslaught of Katrina, those of us in the blogosphere who pay attention to such things should devote at least one post to Katrina’s aftermath. The press is paying attention to this as well, of course, but we can count on them to make minimal mention of the near-criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in dealing with the massive human cost of that disaster.

I am not certain what I can add in the way of analysis. Shakespeare’s Sister says it most succinctly, I think, when she states that “Katrina was the inevitable failure in the wake of Bush Conservatism’s success“. Perhaps the best I can do is to point out a few items that illustrate the extent of this administration’s failure: Read the rest of this entry »

Widow tells Bush: Time to end the war

August 25, 2006 in Political Animals | No comments

Greg Sargent interviews Hildi Halley, who lost her husband Patrick in the Iraq War:

“We literally sat knee to knee…I looked deep into his eyes and talked to him about love and losing people and that he was responsible for this. I said, ‘I didn’t vote for you, but you are my President. And you’re not serving me.’”

“I said I believed it was time to put an end to this. His job is to find solutions. I said, ‘You yourself have said you had erroneous information going into this.’”

She continued: “I said, ‘As a Christian man, you realize that when you’ve made a mistake it’s your responsiblity to end this. And it’s time to end the bleeding and it’s time to end the war.’”

Christian men don’t start wars based on deliberately cooked intelligence. Christian men don’t keep sending soldiers to die in a war that admittedly has nothing to do with the terrorists that said war was supposedly going to combat. Ms. Halley, I am afraid, has badly misjudged George W. Bush in this regard. Read the rest of this entry »

Schneier: Refuse to be Terrorized

August 24, 2006 in Political Animals | 2 comments

Bruce Schneier makes the point again: if we are going to beat the terrorists, we have to Refuse to be Terrorized:

We’re all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.

In truth, it’s doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn’t even have passports.

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.

…


[O]ur job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

Every time a right-wing pundit or far-right blogger screeches about the terrorists being harbingers of The End Of Civilization As We Know It, they are helping the terrorists achieve their goals. It’s time to call these people out for the accomplices that they are.

Wednesday Hodgepodge

August 23, 2006 in Life, the Universe, and Everything | No comments

  • Chris Hallquist explains what he believes in One humanist’s manifesto:

    The following is in response to a couple of comments to the effect that I do nothing but attack religion. It is a simple statement of what I am for. Every one of these things, I should point out, is threatened by religious fundamentalism. That’s why I spend so much time talking about the things I do.

    • I believe in reason.
    • I believe in being honest with oneself.
    • I believe in improving on accepted beliefs.
    • I believe in having the freedom to seek the truth without worrying that the evidence will point to the “wrong” conclusion.
    • I believe in having the determination to make a careful investigation and not accept the first answer that is presented.
    • I believe in having the courage to face unpleasant realities.

    There is more, and a lively discussion in the comments.

  • Why are Iraqi civilians dying at the hands of US soldiers? Because at least some commanders don’t see anything out of the ordinary when such deaths occur:

    The Marine officer who commanded the battalion involved in the Haditha killings last November did not consider the deaths of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, unusual and did not initiate an inquiry, according to a sworn statement he gave to military investigators in March.

    “I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines,” Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, said in the statement.

    “I did not have any reason to believe that this was anything other than combat action,” he added.

    Chessani’s statement, provided to The Washington Post by a person sympathetic to the enlisted Marines involved in the case, helps explain why there was no investigation of the incident at the time, despite the large number of civilian deaths, and why it took several months for the U.S. military chain of command to react to the event.

    It also provides a glimpse of the mind-set of a commander on the scene who, despite the carnage, did not stop to consider whether Marines had crossed a line and killed defenseless civilians.

    It suggests that top U.S. commanders have been unsuccessful in urging subordinate leaders to focus less on killing insurgents and more on winning the support of the Iraqi people, especially by providing them security.

  • Anyone who has watched even a few minutes of the nauseating product of the cable news channels this past week now knows just how fond those outlets are of dead girls. Dead girls make for dynamite ratings… but only if they are dead, blonde, and American:

    But although I mind this pollution of the air waves with something that is not, whatever it is, news, the main thing I mind is the racism.

    The case of Abeer al-Janabi, the little fourteen-year old Iraqi girl who was allegedly raped and killed after being stalked by a US serviceman would never be given the wall to wall coverage treatment.

    That is frankly because the victim was not a blonde, blue-eyed American, but a black-eyed, brunette Iraqi.

  • And it’s news only if those beautiful dead girls did not die while serving with the American military in Iraq. Wouldn’t want to remind the unwashed masses of the meatgrinder that Bushco lied us into:

    We hear a lot about beautiful dead girls in the US media. Here are some that we haven’t heard about much. Their smiles haven’t been plastered over the supermarket tabloid press, and they’re not likely to be. One of the reasons is that they don’t fit the popular stereotype of beautiful-woman-as-helpless-victim. Another reason is that many people still haven’t focused on the reality of women in the military. Even here on DKos, I see comments about “sons and fathers” who have been killed and maimed. Almost NO MENTION of women in the military.

  • You gotta love in-your-face science:

    Science: It works, bitches
    A more sublime T-shirt cannot be imagined.

John Bambenek vs. the facts

August 18, 2006 in Political Animals | 5 comments

Yesterday, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor found the National Security Agency’s ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program’ to be unconstitutional. Ed Brayton correctly predicted that the right-wing terror monkeys would make all kinds of ignorant noise about the ruling, and John Bambenek at StopTheACLU has obliged by doing just that.

Let’s start with the title of John’s screed:

“Federal Court Rules Protecting America is Unconstitutional”

Utterly false, of course. Judge Taylor made no such ruling. What she ruled was that the warrantless wiretaps undertaken by the NSA were unconstitutional. There is a mechanism in place for performing wiretaps: it’s called FISA, and it requires that a warrant be signed by a judge. John might want to consider why the Bush administration is unwilling to abide by the law of the land.

“The ACLU has convinced a federal judge that monitoring overseas communications of terrorists is against the constitution.”

False, and also disingenuous. John Bambenek knows full well that the communications in question are those that occur between someone in the US and an overseas location. He is being very careful not to mention this fact — probably because he is well aware that to do so would sink instantly his argument. Doggone those inconvenient facts, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday Hodgepodge

August 16, 2006 in Life, the Universe, and Everything | No comments

  • David Byrne reviews the film Jesus Camp:

    There were some perfect sound bites — at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them” — but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.”

    …

    They want to turn the U.S. into the “Christian” version of Iran or Saudi Arabia. A theocracy. The separation between church and state, already shaky with Bush in charge, is under full frontal assault by this bunch — and they are well organized, too. The megachurches tell their parishioners who to vote for, what judges to support, letters to write, and where they should stand on the issues. Well, we all do this to some extent — even in casual chats with friends we attempt to deduce and arrive at a consensus of opinion; a sloppy democratic give-and-take on any number of subjects often gives way to agreement. But this is top-down messaging — no discussion allowed. There’s a scene in the Colorado Springs megachurch run by the Preacher who talks with Bush once a week — same deal as with the kids, only most of the attendees are pliant adults.

  • Juan Cole on the Israel-Lebanon mess:

    Hizbullah is a poor people’s movement. It could have been moderated over time, and its adherents could have been pulled into more moderate, mainstream politics if the world had devoted itself to seeing that the Lebanese economy flourished and its government was gradually strengthened. That was the achievement of the Lebanese and regional political elite in the 1990s. If the Israelis had not aggressively occupied the Lebanese South, there would have been no Hizbullah. If the Israelis had left ten years earlier, Hizbullah would have disarmed when all the other militias did. Hizbullah could have been nurtured out of existence if Lebanon had been helped.

    Now, extremism has been strengthened. Lebanon is abject, on its knees, stricken with a plague inflicted on it by Bush and Olmert. The abject, the humiliated, the impoverished do not, as Bush and Olmert fondly imagine to themselves, lie down and let the mighty walk over them. They blow up skyscrapers.

    The idea that the whole Eastern Mediterranean had to be polluted, that the Christian Lebanese economy had to be destroyed for the next decade or two, that 900,000 persons had to be rendered homeless, that a whole country had to be pounded into rubble because some Lebanese Shiites voted for Hizbullah in the last election, putting 12 in parliament, is obscene. Bush’s glib ignorance is destroying our world. Our children will suffer for it, and perhaps our grandchildren after them.

  • After reading this exhaustively researched (and probably incomplete) list of factual errors and outright lies in Ann Coulter’s Godless, the natural reaction is: “Holy crap — is there any doubt now that Ann Coulter is nothing but a lying hack?”
  • Al Gore is training volunteers to give his presentation of An Inconvenient Truth around the country.
  • PBS has a guide to videos shot by soldiers serving in Iraq.

Some perspective on terrorism

August 14, 2006 in Political Animals | 4 comments

I don’t know if this is a meme taking hold in the blogosphere, or just a sudden downpour of serendipity, but it seems that about every third link I come across takes me to a discussion of the crying need for perspective in the public discussion of terrorism.

First comes a short article in Reason, reviewing the threat of terrorism in comparison to other threats we face every day: Read the rest of this entry »

The sober and the side-splitting

August 13, 2006 in Political Animals | No comments

Bruce Schneier’s sober take on last week’s foiled terror plot is so obvious. That must be why the Bush administration, and the terror junkies of the right, don’t get it…

Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won’t make us safer, either. It’s not just that there are ways around the rules, it’s that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets—stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security—and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don’t work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It’s not security, it’s security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

King Fu Monkey’s “Wait, Arent You Scared?” is at once gut-busting funny and absolutely spot-on:

I am absolutely buffaloed by the people who insist I man up and take it in the teeth for the great Clash of Civilizations—“Come ON, people, this is the EPIC LAST WAR!! You just don’t have the stones to face that fact head-on!”—who at the whiff of an actual terror plot will, with no apparent sense of irony, transform and run around shrieking, eyes rolling and Hello Kitty panties flashing like Japanese schoolgirls who have just realized that the call is coming from inside the house!

…

Maybe it’s just, I cast my eyes back on the last century …

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

… and I’m just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

Go, and read the full versions of both.

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