2008

Shorter Ogre:

• I got mine. Fuck everybody else.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.

John Cole makes it crystal clear where the priorities of the Republican senators who killed the auto industry bailout bill really lie:

Just in case you are confused – Republicans object to a car czar overseeing the bailout because it is too much government interference, but a few Republican Senators dictating from Washington how much companies pay their workers is just the invisible hand of the free market bitch-slapping you while you are down. Those Senators, btw, make $160k a year and have full medical and just decided that an autoworker making 50k a year is just too damned much money. $700 billion for the millionaires and billionaires who helped create this mess, not a dime for the guys who make $50-60k a year and whose chief sin is showing up for work every day.

Like most of the wingnutsphere, the hapless fumblenuts over at Flopping Aces are busy spinning fact-free horseshit about a supposed complicity of President-elect Barack Obama in the attempts by Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to sell Obama’s now-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder — despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that Obama had any part in the scheme. Hilariously, the ever-dimwitted Scott nearly dislocates his shoulder patting himself and his fellow wackaloons on the back…

[T]his story is being driven by the blogosphere and local news-not the msm. One would think that newspaper and network power players would recognize that their BDS has led them down the wrong financial path, but apparently not yet.

One would think that the marching morons of the far right would recognize that the miserable failure of their orgies of shit-flinging to have the slightest effect on the outcome of the recent Presidential election might be an indication that baseless smears aren’t an effective means of political expression — but apparently not yet.

As I’ve pointed now more times that I can count, the most common tactic the wingnuts employ is the bare-faced lie. Here’s an example of blatant mendacity from a blithering idiot that styles itself “Van Helsing”:

The farce Washington governor Christine Gregoire initiated by allowing militant atheists to put up a sign denouncing Christianity next to the Christmas display in the state capitol has reached a new extreme of tastelessness.

Well, let’s just compare this hooey with the reality, shall we? Here’s the sign in question:

The message in full reads:

At this season of the WINTER SOLSTICE may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

Read it once or twice.

See any ‘denouncing’ of Christianity? Any mention of Christianity at all?

Nope.

Any ‘denouncing’ is an invention of the feeble minds of fuzzy thinkers like ‘Van Helsing’. Unless, of course, you think that a sign suggesting that we might want to engage in the dread sin of reason is itself a denunciation of religion.

And what does that say about religion?

“Robert”, the whackaloon blogger who spews his bile over at American and Proud, no doubt pretends in his daily life that he is a fine, upstanding, highly moral Christian gentleman.

This, of course, is purest horsecrap.

“Robert” and others like him are moral zeroes. They lack any understanding of the difference between right and wrong. This can be easily observed in Robert’s latest dropping, in which he gets his rocks off dreaming of murdering other human beings…

Bunch of fucking queers, They should be banished to a damn Island somewhere and used for target practice…

When the morally impaired try to pretend that they know what’s best, be certain to laugh square in their faces. “Robert”, you are truly a pissant travesty of a man.

The “War on Christmas” is one of the unhinged right’s favorite chest-pounding memes, and a great fundraising tool for the wingnut fringe, as well. Who actually started this nonsense? Unsurprisingly, white supremacists and anti-Semites unleashed this crap — and the wingnuts are only too happy to lap it up.

…Brimelow founded what would become the internet’s leading anti-immigration web journal, VDare.com, named for the first British child born in the Americas. Brimelow’s new venture provided a forum to allies like Jared Taylor, a white supremacist publisher, and Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychology professor who has argued that Jews are genetically equipped to out-compete Gentiles for resources and power. In 2003, four years after VDare’s founding, the Southern Poverty Law Center classified the journal as a “hate group.”

VDare became the staging ground for the War on the War on Christmas. Unlike their more respectable counterparts, Brimelow’s writers dared to name the true anti-Christian Grinch: Jews. The winner of Brimelow’s 2001 War on Christmas competition, a “paleoconservative” writer named Tom Piatak, insisted that those behind the assault on Christmas “evidently prefer” Hanukkah, which he called the “Jewish Kwanzaa,” a “faux-Christmas.” “Teaching children about Hanukkah, rather than the beliefs that actually sustained Jews on their sometimes tragic and tumultuous historical journey,” Piatak fumed, “inculcates negative lessons about Christianity, not positive ones about Judaism.”

VDare’s 2005 War on Christmas winner, Steve Sailer, a Eugenics enthusiast and author of the new biography of Barack Obama, America’s Half-Blood Prince, picked up where Piatak left off. “American Jews,” Sailer wrote, “those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.” Sailer went on to quote at length from a column by the purportedly Jewish writer, Bert Prelutsky, called “The Jewish Grinch Who Stole Christmas.”

(hat tip: News Hounds)

Also, Lawrence Lessig has a short but pithy comment on the proposed automaker bailouts.

(hat tip: BoingBoing)

The terror weenies of the wingnut right still haven’t gotten over their Saddam Hussein fetish. What they never mention, of course, is that Saddam was a darling of the Republicans back in the day:

Declassified U.S. government documents show that while Saddam Hussein was gassing Iraqi Kurds, the U.S. opposed punishing Iraq with a trade embargo because it was cultivating Iraq as an ally against Iran and as a market for U.S. farm exports.

According to Peter Galbraith, then an idealistic Senate staffer determined to stop Hussein from committing genocide, the Reagan administration "got carried away with their own propaganda. They began to believe that Saddam Hussein could be a reliable partner.

(hat tip: Firedoglake)

At Obsidian Wings, Publius points out the obvious:

…[O]ne of the goals of modern terrorism (particularly radical Islamic terrorism) is to trigger an overreaction by the victim country. In this respect, al Qaeda was wildly successful. One goal of 9/11 was to trigger a massive invasion of Afghanistan and create a new quagmire. Fortunately, bin Laden underestimated the world’s outrage, along with the success of the initial military operations. Luckily for him though, we fulfilled his wildest dreams by invading and occupying Iraq, a country with far more sacred sites. And we’ll be dealing with the blowback from this war for decades to come.

The wingnuts, as I have said before, have already handed a victory to the terrorists by allowing themselves to be terrorized. And naturally, in their mindless panic, they want to give the terrorists exactly what the terrorists want: an overreaction. Duncan at And Rightly So provides a perfect example:

I say we take a book from the Roman Republic and declare an all out war, without quarter, against these muthas. The time for hand-wringing and navel gazing is over. The time for moral equivocation is over. The Romans realized the hard fact that there comes a time to just eradicate your problem, especially if it continues to raise its ugly head. Lets kill these bastards, lets destroy their sanctuaries, and then lets salt the earth so they never return…

And everyone’s favorite whackaloon deathlover, “Emperor” Misha, chimes in with his own paean to genocide:

Nuke them. Nuke them till they glow. Then nuke them some more, just for the sheer fucking Hell of it.

Death to pisslam, death to the followers of it and everlasting death and torture to anybody who as much as thinks about coming up with excuses for it.

For terror weenies like Duncan and Misha, the terrorists have already won — they and their fellow wingnuts are terrified, and are demanding mass slayings in retribution. That’s the very definition of overreaction, a key goal of the terrorists.

Why are the wingnuts so eager to give the terrorists what they want? It’s called cowardice, and it is fueled by a complete abdication of any moral standards whatsoever. As Publius observes: ”[Y]ou want to get mad, but getting mad is exactly what they want. Indeed, it’s part of the plan.”

Any sane reaction to the Mumbai attacks, by any nation or combination of nations, has to take into account the fact that overreacting will play directly into the terrorists’ hands. But you certainly won’t find signs of sanity in Greater Wingnuttia, a world driven entirely by unreasoning fear.

Dave Neiwert:

[T]here’s a certain symmetry about [Alaska Governor Sarah] Palin gallivanting off to campaign for [Georgia incumbent Saxby] Chambliss. It makes clear she really doesn’t give a rat’s hindquarters about her actual constituents.