November 2006

Here’s the latest from Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson:

I join in with Rick Moran’s message to the civil liberty scaremongers like Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU that have been crying about our loss of freedoms, NSA paranoia, and comparing Bush to Hitler.

Well, Jay, your already shredded credibility is still safely demolished. Greenwald has never compared Bush to Hitler. But there’s nothing like a convenient lie to start out a blog post with, is there? And it isn’t like you haven’t been caught lying your ass off in the past, is it?

Greenwald, in fact, wrote a column earlier this year exposing the sorry truth: it is the Bushite neoconservatives who use the Hitler meme:

To pro-Bush war supporters, the world is forever stuck in the 1930s. Every leader we don’t like is Adolf Hitler, a crazed and irrational lunatic who wants to dominate the world. Every country opposed to our interests is Nazi Germany.

From this it follows that every warmonger is the glorious reincarnation of the brave and resolute Winston Churchill. And one who opposes or even questions any proposed war becomes the lowly and cowardly appeaser, Neville Chamberlain. For any and every conflict that arises, the U.S. is in the identical position of France and England in 1937 – faced with an aggressive and militaristic Nazi Germany, will we shrink from our grand fighting duties in appeasement and fear, or will we stand tall and strong and wage glorious war?

With that cartoonish framework in place, war is always the best option. It is the only option for those who are noble, strong, and fearless. Conversely, the sole reason for opposing a war is that one is a weak-minded and weak-willed appeaser who harbors dangerous fantasies of negotiating with madmen. Diplomacy and containment are simply elevated, PC terms for “appeasement.” War is the only option that works.

“Cartoonish” is the best adjective I’ve seen yet that describes you, Jay. Serious, real world, rational and complex arguments have no place in your brightly-colored, childlike world. Neither, obviously, do the facts.

Give up, Jay. You’re a sad little liar with a sad little website posting the sad little lies of yourself and your fellow sad little liars — and everyone knows now that lying is just about the only talent you and your buddies have.

UPDATE 12/02/06 8:50 AM EST: Comments on this post have been re-opened.

John Bambenek claims to be “an academic professional for the University of Illinois”. Does the University of Illinois encourage their “academic professionals” to fabricate quotes out of whole cloth?

City of Chicago: “Christianity is a Cancer on the Soul of the City and We Will Have it Out!”

John, who exactly in the administration of the City of Chicago has said that “Christianity is a Cancer on the Soul of the City and We Will Have it Out!”?

What’s that, John? Read the rest of this entry »

Seth Godin provides anecdotal evidence that the brainiacs at the TSA are spending waaaaay too much time thinking up new ways to be total asshats:

Just on the other side of the line are the bureaucrats at the TSA. They tell a story too, but it couldn’t be intentional.

“No Cake!” the screener yells. “No pie either!” and they make the person traveling to her family throw out her home-baked cake.

We got up to the line. I had an ounce of gel left in a five ounce bottle. They made me throw it out because the label said 5 ounces though it was clearly more than half empty.

The story?

• We don’t care. We don’t have to.
• We don’t make judgment calls. We’re not allowed to and we don’t care that management treats us this way.
• Don’t you dare say anything.
• Be afraid.
• Bothering everyone is smarter than hiring talented people to find the .0001% of the population that’s harmful.

No Cake!

Is this the sort of government we want? We deserve? We should pay for?

Well… no. We deserve a competent government. We deserve a government that actually protects us, rather than spending our tax dollars on security theater.

I learned a lesson in corporate America a long time ago: The fish rots from the head down. Whatever an organization does, it does only because the people at the top issue certain directives and create a certain culture. The culture of the Bush administration is one that cares about appearances, not results — about theater, not security.

We will suffer another terrorist attack someday. If it happens during the last years of the Bush administration, there will be much finger-pointing from the wingnuts on the right about how the Terrible Awful America-Hating Leftists™ are to blame. This will be nothing but more theater, designed to obscure the simple truth: The people in charge, meaning Bush and his syncophants, will have failed to discharge their most fundamental duty of protecting America.

At Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer proves that he doesn’t let the twin handicaps of ignorance and racism stop him from blogging:

It seems as if the “suspicious behavior” on the Minneapolis flight from which six Muslims, who turn out to be imams, were removed consisted of the imams evening prayers. So Shahin says “he was humiliated and never felt so bad in his life. He said its terrible to put six scholars in handcuffs.”

Indeed. It is terrible. It is terrible to have to do so. It is terrible that these and other scholars have allowed those who commit violence in the name of their religion to do so unimpeded and unchallenged. It is terrible that these and other Islamic scholars have responded only with vilification when asked about the teachings of their faith that promote violence, instead of with honest dialogue and attempts to reform those teachings.

In point of fact, Robert Spencer is lying when he claims to know what these imams have said about terrorism. He does not know who these men were does not even know the names of five of the six, nor what they’ve said in the past — yet he blithely claims that they “have responded only with vilification when asked about the teachings of their faith that promote violence”. There is only one basis on which Spencer makes this claim: his racist attitudes toward Muslims.

America has, alas, always been plagued with its share of mouth-breathing bigots like Robert Spencer. The great thing about the rise of blogging in the last few years is that now it’s very easy to spot them. Robert Spencer, like so many of his kind, can’t resist the opportunity to advertise what kind of mindless racism he espouses.

UPDATE 11/21/06 2:32 PM EST: Another thought has occurred to me: The actions of the passengers on this flight serve as stark proof that they allowed the terrorists to win: They demanded that the Muslims be removed because they were terrified.

UPDATE 11/22/06 9:59 AM EST: Jack Cluth has come to the same conclusion:

OK, everyone…if I could have your attention for just a moment, I need y’all to stand up. Now repeat after me:

THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON!!!

Yes, it’s true…despite the best efforts of Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader and the Mainstream Media, we as a people are now so thoroughly scared s—tless that the very sight of…

…wait for it…

MUSLIMS PRAYING IN PUBLIC (oh, the humanity)…

…is enough to send normally reasonable, rational, albeit distubingly sheep-like Americans into paroxysms of abject, bowel-evacuating terror.

How else do could you possibly explain six, law-abiding Muslims- who, by the way, just happen to also be American citizens- being put off a US Airways flight for the high crime and misdemeanor of- you guessed- praying in public while Muslim? The only honest and reasonable answer is that there IS no explanation for this travesty. We have officially become the Republic of Fear, a place where the mere fact of looking and acting Muslim is enough to terrorize the poor, cowering sheeple. The mere sight of a devout Muslim is enough to cause Americans to lose control of their bowels and soil themselves in abject terror.

Get a grip, willya??

CORRECTION 11/22/06 6:06 PM EST: It appears that Spencer knows the name of one of the Muslims removed from the plane: Omar Shahin. There is, of course, no sign that he bothered to check the backgrounds of any of the six men, nor did he know anything about their views on terrorism before he posted.

Yes, Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson has again proven what a festering boil on the ass of the wingnutosphere he has become. He has posted video of a UCLA student who was tasered — repeatedly — by the UCLA campus police for the heinous crime of Using The Library While Brown:

I also don’t understand why people make such a big deal out of tasers. They are non-lethal.

The ACLU have made it clear that they are against the use of tasers and are usually first to the scene in an incident like this. They may not get involved on this one, as CAIR is the first to arrive.

Let’s deal first with Jay’s incredible ignorance: “tasers… are non-lethal”?

• Pathologist says Taser used by Chicago police killed man
• Teen Shot by Police Stun Gun Dies
• N.C. man killed after being shot with Taser gun
• Taser shocks ruled cause of death
• Autopsy links Taser to death in Mesa
• Suspect dies after shock from Taser

Never let it be said that Jay Stephenson has ever once bothered to research the facts before opening his big mouth. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Firedoglake, TRex points out just how toxic the far right has made political discourse in this country — toxic enough that Malkin-worshippers are now emailing phony anthrax threats to perceived liberal ‘enemies’:

These people are ultimately exactly the same as the radical Islamic clerics and jihadis they claim to oppose, and it’s time we called them out as such. The Right Blogosphere is a cesspool of boiling hate and howling insanity and we need to stop pretending that these are people who can be engaged rationally, appeased, or tolerated. They stand in direct opposition to everything that America is about, freedom of speech, plurality of ideas, and equality before the law regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological or spiritual affiliation. To Malkinites, ALL MUSLIMS ARE KILLERS, ALL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE DANGEROUS, and ALL LIBERALS ARE “UNHINGED”.

“Unhinged” is a favorite word of Mrs. Malkin’s. It was the title of one of her illegible screeds about the dangers of allowing liberals to exist in our society, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone more unhinged than a man who sends death threats and phony anthrax to media figures in an effort to silence and intimidate them. Enough is enough. Perhaps this incident and the FBI’s scrutiny of hate sites like LGF and Free Republic will mean a safer, less threatening world for us all.

One can only hope…

UPDATE 11/16/06 11:59 AM EST: And the evidence just keep mounting. Pamela Geller Oshry at Atlas Shrugs has called for the murder of American diplomats. Glenn Greenwald has the whole story.

It’s funny how selective some folks’ outrage can be. Over at Gateway Pundit, good ol’ ‘Midwest Jim’ makes a big stink about how U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore hired her son, who was charged with slashing the tires on vans rented by Republican campaign workers, as a staffer for her own re-election campaign. Goodness! Tire slashing Democrats! Somebody get the smelling salts!

Of course, ol’ Jimbo does not dare devote a post to the arrest of Chad Castagana — a conservative blogger who has been charged with "mailing more than a dozen threatening letters containing white powder to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Jon Stewart" and other media figures. As David Neiwert points out, Castagana was a regular on the far-right wingnut hate site Free Republic.

There has been scant media coverage of the arrest of Castagana. It seems that Jimbo is just following the popular trend: when someone with far-right-wing political leanings starts doing terroristic things, just ignore it. Pretend it didn’t happen. In other words: it’s not terrorism if one of the wingnuts’ own does it.

Nothing like a little moral relativity to illuminate what the wingnuts are really about, is there?

UPDATE 11/15/06 10:58 AM EST: Jamie at Intoxination points out the “very eerie silence coming from the right-wing blogs”:

Isn’t it amazing how these are the same wingnuts that always use the argument “the Democrats want to let the terrorists win”. Well here you have a case of one of their own tying up hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of manpower from our vital counter-terrorism task forces, and they can not show outrage towards this. Think of what these professionals could have been doing if they didn’t have to chase down the product of right-wing reading.

I have already documented the multiple lies of Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson. Now he’s lying again

The ACLU warns that the 109th Congress may vote on some “key” issues between its return and adjournment. One particular issue of concern for the ACLU is that Bush has made it clear his intentions to push through legislation that would legalize his illegal program of spying on ordinary Americans. Don’t believe the hype about it only being foreign telephone calls to suspected terrorists. Bush is intent on invading ordinary citizens privacy in order to set up his internment camps for those that oppose him and ultimately a Christian Theocracy stripped of all Constitutional Rights.

O.K. They didn’t say all that. I’m exaggerating.

No, Jay. You were lying outright. You’ve lied before, and now it has become so ingrained a part of your modus operandi that you don’t even bother to hide your dishonesty.

It’s sad, actually. Jay seems to be an intelligent person. But so long as he insists upon employing lies and distortions as his chief tactics, he will find that he has no credibility whatsoever.