Author: phronesis

Confronted with increasing recognition in MSM of what we always knew, namely that Bush and his fellow idiots are incompetent, and confronted with a book that exposes what Bush and his fellow idiots really thought about their lunatic religious right base, the Republicans will resort to one of their best election tactics……go after gay people.

This time, however, they will sacrifice on the altar of their own greed for power gay Republican staffers who they will claim are the real culprits in the cover up of Foley’s sexual predation.  And they will find lots of willing wing nuts like the Reverend Wildmon to do their bidding.

http://www.alternet.org/story/42972/

This is how the party of family values will speak to their base: by destroying careers and lives all in the name of keeping the actual criminals in power.  What is so horrendously ironic is that the very idiots the Republican power brokers call idiots will buy into this buy-off. (Can something be horrendous and ironic? Well, this crap can.)

I’m working on a diary with a working title of “People of the Book” which is a term Muslims have used to describe Christians and Jews as people with a common bond to a bible.  The problem in all three desert religions is that The Book has become the god.  The Koran the The Bible are worshipped more than the god they supposedly reveal.  When people create a god in their own image and then worship that image, it’s called idolatry.  That’s what all fundamentalism is; and this self-idolatry is then supported by mis-reading The Book.  

All the passages quoted by our current stock of “good” “religious” hate-filled right wingers (Christian, Jew or Muslim) are cultural artifacts of people who wandered around in the desert some centuries ago whose ruminations gave us the Tanakh and the Koran and then The Bible.  Their culture bound admonitions about everything have absolutely nothing to do with us or with how God wants us to act in the world.  But they can be used to support any current political whim like gay-bashing, women-hating, or end-of-the-world-yearning.  Because fundamentalists of all stripes fixate on “literal” words and worship passages rather than the spiritual truth God was trying to impart.

So hate-filled people can destroy fellow human beings and delude themselves that they are doing it for good and honest reasons.  I really fucking hate Republicans, and but for the grace of God I will go to fucking hell because of this hate, where I will meet all those fucking piece of shit right wing little bastard so-called Christian fuckers again and have to listen to their fucking crap for eternity.  Now that is really damnation.  My only thanks to God for this will be that they will have to listen to me.

This local television news show called Eight on Your Side reveals the slimy Santorum at his truest.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/#42727

Santorum has run an ad that makes several claims about Casey campaign donors, every single one of which is false.  Sweet.  In fact, one of the people Santorum claims gave money to Casey is actually a Santorum contributor.

Santorum truly is the face and soul of the Republican Party: a hypocritical toxic mix of ignorance and arrogance infected with a garnish of prevarication.  

Oh, this piece actually resembles journalism.

Bush, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. etc. etc.

Al Franken’s book title about right wing lies and the “Lying Liars Who Tell Them” turned out to be true not only of the talking heads of the right wing propaganda machine at Fox News and on right wing radio but of the Bush Administration as well.  It’s so sweet to finally see the MSM pull their heads out of their asses and see what has been right in front of their faces for six years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000282.html?sub=AR

Booman had a diary about Rice being either stupid or a liar.  I commented that she wasn’t stupid.  Apparently I was wrong.  She is both a fucking liar and a fucking dumbwad (I finally get to use my daughter’s favorite word to describe her older brother when she was 5 and he 8…….In my daughter’s defense, I added the adjective.)

Republicans, as all of us who read and write here already know, are shamelss, hypocritical human beings.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061001/ap_on_go_co/foley_reynolds

Here’s the headline for this link:

GOP leaders knew of Foley e-mail in ’05

Now it’s clear that the family Republicans value is one that allows that special kind of love between a man and ………..shit, I just can’t bring myself to list everything that gives Rick Santorum wood.  

I’ve asked God to forgive me for the joy I’m feeling right now.

Keith Olbermann did a pretty good imitation of Edward R Murrow the other day on his MSNBC Countdown.  His take down of Rumsfeld was exquisite.  Here’s more evidence that mainstream media types  are getting the picture.

http://www.startribune.com/561/story/648793.html

This Minneapolis Star Tribune article makes excellent points and is much more civil than I could ever be when discussing the pieces of shit running our governemnt.  (See what I mean).  Two of those points deserve a highlight.  If Rumsfeld is honest about the World War II level threat of the terrorists , then he should call for a universal military draft and a real war against terrorists instead of carrying the Bush family’s water in Iraq.  Since he won’t do that, he’s just carrying more Bush family water in engaging in Rovian politics.  

Rumsfeld has no integrity towards his office as Sec’y of Defense and he must go.  Of course he won’t because he, as Olbermann so eloquently put it, is the Harold McMillan clone, the one whose arrogance and imcompetence, along with Bush and Cheney and their cronies, have put our country in moral and physical danger.

Several days ago I wrote a comment to an excellent Steven D diary titled “FBI Ginning Up A Terror Threat?”  The point of the post was the believeability of the Bush Administration’s posturing about the “terror” cell in Florida.  Here’s part of my comment.

…….the latest FBI discovery of an al Qaeda cell in Florida is not a real discovery but a Karl Rove inspired discovery.  I know this is true because Rove did this in 2000, 2002 and 2004.  This is as true as the election thefts of 2000 and 2004 are true.  Indisputable.

………There will be more of these “discoveries” over the course of the summer and into the fall with more and more right wing bleating about how only the Republicans following our Fearless Leader can keep us safe.  They’ll also be playing musical potential terror targets to make sure that the right voters get the message.  “Oh my God, honey, they found terrorists right in our neighborhood.  Let’s pray for Saint George to save us.” I don’t know what pisses me off more: that these fuckers do this over and over and over, or that Americans keep falling for it.  

Back in the late ’30s FDR said to Americans that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.  When things were bleak and threatening he called on Americans to buck up and suck up and not to let fearmongering Chicken Littles prevail.  Now those Chicken Little chickenhawks are in the White House and the VP mansion and their idea of governing is fear mongering.  They’ve replaced a democratic model of leadership with a fascistic one.

Over the weekend we heard about another such terror threat, this time against the Holland Tunnel in NYC.  With the Bush Administration there are always two ,and only two, questions to ask about any release of information: 1) Is it true? 2) What are the political gains sought by the Rove-inator?  Regardless of whether or not there was an actual threat against the Holland Tunnel, this pattern fits the musical chair terror target discoveries that we can expect this political season.   Republicans are so cynical that they will play politics with our safety and their cynicism is only equalled by their ineptitude.  What a toxic combination.  

This threat may very well be an actual threat.  But the Bush Administration’s history of serial lying is so well established that one must ask the two questions: is it true? what’s the politcal benefit for Bush?  Bush and Cheney have lied about when threats existed, and have in the past warned us about threats that existed three or more years ago.  So, when was this threat actually discovered.   Unless we assume that al Qaeda only wants to do us harm in even numbered years rather than carrying out their war against us all the time with all the means they have, then we can only know that the timing of the “news” about threats is suspect at best.  With all the illegal surveillance going on, shouldn’t we continually be hearing about these threats being uncovered?  (Oh yeah, I forgot, unless they hear it from the New York Times, al Qaeda doesn’t know that we’re looking for them.)  

About a week ago, I responded to a great diary about the FBI’s “discovery” of an “al Qaeda” cell in Florida.  Here’s that comment.

I’m working on a diary that I’m sure would be banned at the orange place because it will state that the latest FBI discovery of an al Qaeda cell in Florida is not a real discovery but a Karl Rove inspired discovery.  I know this is true because Rove did this in 2000, 2002 and 2004.  This is as true as the election thefts of 2000 and 2004 are true.  Indisputable
How many times will we let the Republicans use their Fear and Smear tactic to undermine elections?  There will be more of these “discoveries” over the course of the summer and into the fall with more and more right wing bleating about how only the Republicans following our Fearless Leader can keep us safe.  They’ll also be playing musical potential terror targets to make sure that the right voters get the message.  “Oh my God, honey, they found terrorists right in our neighborhood.  Let’s pray for Saint George to save us.” I don’t know what pisses me off more: that these fuckers do this over and over and over, or that Americans keep falling for it.

Back in the late ’30s FDR said to Americans that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.  When things were bleak and threatening he called on Americans to buck up and suck up and not to let fearmongering Chicken Littles prevail.  Now those Chicken Little chickenhawks are in the White House and the VP mansion and their idea of governing is fear mongering.  They’ve replaced a democratic model of leadership with a fascistic one.

After the “discovery” of the Florida “terrorists” and their “threat” to blow up the Sears Tower, CNN interviewed a woman in Chicago.  She said she worked just a few buildings away from the Sears Tower.  She said she was just getting over the fear that had eaten away at her ever since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.  She said that now, once again, she was afraid to go to work and was worrying all over again about an attack in her city of Chicago.  All I can say to this is Well fucking done, Karl.  Mission Accomplished.  Not only have you turned real political leadership on its head, you and your bitch George have succeeded in creating fear in your fellow citizens.  Who are the fucking terrorists here?

In his Laws Plato has this conversation between a couple of guys, a stranger and a Cretan.  Crete was a society that, like Sparta, operated on the principle that “all are invloved ceaselessly in a lifelong war against all” and that peace is really nothing more than “that every society is, by a law of nature, engaged perpetually in an informal war with every other society.”  The reason for this perspective is obvious, at least to the Cretan, that a society must be focused “both public and private, with an eye to war, …… in the conviction that without victory in war nothing else, whether possession or institution, is of the least value, but all the goods of the vanquished fall into the hands of the victors.”

This leads to the following conversation, led by the Stranger, and this is one that needs to happen in our own country.

by the definition you have given of the well-constituted society you appear to me to imply that it ought to be organized in such a way as to be victorious in war over all other societies.  Is that so? (To which both the Cretan and the Spartan respond of course, how could it be any other way.)
ATH. If this, then, is the right attitutde for a society to adopt towards another society, is the right attitude for village towards village different?
CLIN. By no means.
ATH. It is the same, you say?
CLIN. Yes.
ATH. Well then, is the same attitude right also for one house in the village towards another, and for each man towards every other?
CLIN. It is.
ATH. And must each individual man regard himself as his own enemy? Or what do we say when we come to this point?

We know the answer to this question.  We end up with the current America that the radical right has created.  The Bush foreign and domestic policies are all of one cloth.  They are meant to divide into Us and Them and to be focused on making war against Them.  “Them” can be defined as Iraq, the “axis of evil,” liberals, Democrats, states like Louisiana with a Democratic governor when deciding whom to help in the aftermath of Katrina, and even fellow Republicans who don’t tow the party line and do so with the right cheerful attitude of submission and ass-kissage.

Once this division is made, it is the foremost intent of the Bush administration to use fear as a way to intimidate those who aren’t Us.  They use this tactic to steal elections and to govern after the theft.  (Of course, I have left out the other important tactic in the Right’s trinity, namely LIES, but hey, there’s only so much one can stuff into a diary, and there are many many better things written about Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.)

Fear.  Good stuff if you have no respect for your fellow citizens….Oh wait a minute, Bush and his fascistas don’t think of us as fellow citizens.  Remember the ad in the 2004 campaign that featured glimpses of wolves looking ferocious, ravenous, dangerous, spooky, lurking in shadows just waiting to get us, and then a voice over that said

In an increasingly dangerous world…..

and went on to falsely accuse Kerry and liberals for voting to cut “intelligence  operations” at which time in the ad the wolves got up and menacingly advance toward the camera.  And this bullshit all ends with Bush’s voice.  

I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message

Here’s Bush on October 30, 2004.  Remember the Cretans.

All progress on every other issue depends on the safety of our citizens.  Americans will go to the polls Tuesday in a time of war and ongoing threats. (My emphasis) The terrorists who killed thousands of innocent people are still dangerous and they’re determined to strike.  The most solemn duty of the American President is to protect the American people.  If America shows uncertainty or weakness in these troubling times, the world will drift toward tragedy.  This is not going to happen on my watch.

Regardless of the fact that the world has in fact drifted into tragedy precisely because of George’s watch, the point Bush is trying to make can’t be any clearer.  Be afraid for your security and well being and I’ll keep you safe.  Actually, the most solemn duty of the President is to “faithfully execute” the laws of the United States and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.  Bush has done neither.  But as long as he can keep Americans afraid and then lie about who will protect them he will succeed in his aims.

Remember all the multi colored terror alerts.  What was their purpose, other than to announce to terrorists when we were not being all that vigilant? Their purpose was to keep Americans afraid.  I wonder if they’ll be back in 2006 and 2008?

Fear.  The political use of Fear is to intimidate.  To intimidate other countries.  To initimidate one’s own citizens.  It is a fascist tool, not a democratic one.

After reading this diary, one possible response is this.  “This is old news.  We all know Rove and his hand puppet Bush are all about Fear and Lies.”  This is the wrong take.  These tactics are as old as every single Rove campaign.  These tactics are the only tactics that Bush and the radical religious right use to govern.  Because they are “tried and true” means that we can’t allow them to be used with impunity.  Kerry showed himself to be weak (which was the whole Rovian point)because he didn’t fight back ferociously at those who attacked him using Fear and Lies.   (However Kerry lost because the election was stolen.  But he still appeared weak because he wouldn’t stand up to thuggism).

When Jesus sent people out to talk about the “kingdom of God” he told them to have the innocence of the dove, but the wisdom of the serpent.  He meant have hope in our cause, but fight those who would intimidate you with every tool of the devil.  In the movie Mississippi Burning one of the FBI agents in Mississippi investigating the deaths of three campaign workers says, when arguing with his boss about tactics, “these people came out of the gutter,” and that in order to beat them we have to get right in the gutter with them.  Seems to me these are good tactics to replicate.  Democrats have to outline principles, not “triangulate,” and then jump in the gutter created by Bush’s fascist tactics and fight back with hope.  Hope is a democratic tool, it is anti-fascist.  So is righteous indignation at what has been done to our country.  

This piece in AlterNet is why Greg Palast should be on every frog ponders reading list.  Palast has also documented the election thefts of 2000 and 2004.  

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/37948/

This documents that the story that Dan Rather told about Bush’s AWOL from the Guard was not only true, but on the record in other places.  This passage is a gem about the Republican propaganda machine and gullible voters.

You aren’t stupid, they just talk to you that way. It’s 2004. Falluja’s on fire, your pension’s burning away, the last General Motors worker is turning out the lights in Detroit — and the biggest issue of the election, aside from Christians who don’t want homosexuals to have families, was whether some elderly news celebrity, Dan Rather, had besmirched the reputation of our President, a former Naval Aviator. They can’t get you to ignore that man behind the curtain, Dorothy, unless there’s a fascinating show on stage to distract you. And, for the final days of the presidential campaign, they gave us the lynching of Dan Rather.

Palast illuminates, for me,  a couple things.  First, that Rather was too much of a wuss to act like a real journalist.  Second, that the corrupt cronyism of the Bush clan is almost congenital.  The Bush family are the Borgias of our country.

This is an editorial from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  It’s not The New York Times or The Washington Post, it’s not even The Minneapolis Star Tribune.  That may be the reason for the rationality of the piece, and the absence of ass-kissing to power.

Editorial: King George, the eavesdropper

Figure this one out: The U.S. government can’t be asked to justify its secret eavesdropping on American citizens, it says, because the reason for such spying is a secret itself. That’s more or less what a Bush administration attorney told a federal judge last Monday in urging dismissal of a challenge to the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping scheme. Given what’s already known about its skulking wiretapping program, hiding behind the “state secrets” shield may be the Bush administration’s best bet.

Best, but not good enough. The whole point of the American Civil Liberties Union’s case against NSA eavesdropping is that no government may operate by secret presidential decree. Filed in Detroit on behalf of journalists, scholars, lawyers and nonprofits who say the prospect of official eavesdropping has harmed them, the suit assails this warrantless surveillance as the legal outrage it is. For starters, says the ACLU, the program flouts the Fourth Amendment’s command that government may not spy on Americans without court permission. And as the suit notes, it also ignores a federal law barring U.S. officials from domestic spying even to obtain foreign intelligence — unless they first secure a warrant from a special court.

The administration is only too willing to acknowledge such legal sidestepping — but insists it’s no big deal. Why not? In wartime, the White House argues, the president is constitutionally entitled to do whatever he deems necessary to defend the country — including shrugging off the law — without submitting to any sort of oversight.

What will King George think of next? Today he’s invoking the theory — and the endless, ubiquitous “war on terrorism” — to justify warrantless spying on innocent Americans. And tomorrow? Why not an executive edict for house-to-house searches, or a suspension of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, or the tidy establishment of a virtuous and upright state religion?

Such notions may sound absurd, but are they? If it’s agreed that executive authority really does trump law and judicial review, there’s really nothing the president can’t do. That theory — sauced by the claim that any public assessment of government conduct jeopardizes the keeping of “state secrets” — is a recipe for dictatorship.

This very danger is reason to halt NSA’s warrantless spying straightaway, as the ACLU has asked. But U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who has charge of the case, has opted against an immediate order, and against a Justice Department petition for dismissal of the lawsuit. Another hearing is scheduled for July 12. The likelihood is great that the White House will claim then what it has maintained all along: The case must be dismissed because the president can spy however he likes, because revealing the details of such spying would compromise its essential secrecy — and because the ACLU’s clients can’t prove they’ve been spying targets anyway.

Welcome to the world beyond the looking glass — where the president is king, a war prevails eternally and the rule of law applies only to some. How long until the beheadings start?

The bold passages are my highlight, not the Star Tribune’s, but the passages adds credibility that progressive bloggers are truly in front of the MSM and that, hopefully, at least some parts of the media are catching up with reality.

Simon Malthus has a great diary on censoring discussions of election theft and conspirarcy theories of 9/11 at DKos.  

I quit participating on DailyKos because of this censorship, and because I believe journalists like Greg Palast and how they have documented Republican election thievery.  I’m also weird enough to have the thought flit through my mind that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the American version of the Reichstag fire.  Take that for what it’s worth.  The experience of the last six years has simply confirmed for me that the Bush Administration was capable of it.  On the other hand, the incompetence of the Bush Administration puts a big hole in any conspiracy theory.  So wouldn’t it be better to have arguments about this rather than throw people off.  

I made a comment to Simon Malthus’s diary which might be a good beginning point for a discussion of how the blogosphere’s obvious power gets translated into “political power.”  I think that what’s happening at the orange place is a misguided attempt to do something with the “netroots” that may not be possible without destroying thosse very roots.  Here’s my comment to Simon Malthus’s excellent diary.

Re: Censorship and Dkos (none / 0)
I want to do two things in this comment.  Suck up to Booman and offer an idea about the “censorship” on DKos.  
First: sucking up.  I started out in the blogosphere as someone making comments and writing pretty much unread diaries on Dkos.  It was fun to read the few comments about my diaries, and to make comments on other diaries.  I discovered the frog pond through DKos and so I started doing the same thing here: writing and reading diaries and comments.  And then something wonderful happened, I started to see and feel an actual sense of community in the frog pond.  People could still be obtuse or off-putting or out in left field (and so could I) but there was and is a sense on Booman that whatever it is that keeps us participating here is more important that the opinions we express.  Booman has helped to create something precious.

Second, Dkos never had this feeling of community for me.  I think it’s because while Dkos started out as a great forum, as Markos and his blog became more “famous” he came to be seen and perhaps came to see himself as some sort of broker with a base.  And he needs to have his base have a more coherent “message” or he can’t deliver.  This is a complete misunderstanding of the blogosphere, or at least the progressive manifestation of it.  I commented somewhere else about DKos and censorship with regards to the theft of our elections and said something to the effect that Kos and Armando and perhaps others who may feel like they are herding cats over there trying to make sure the right opinions are advanced feel that way not due to “the independence of the cats but to the mistaken self-identity of the herders.”  

There is a less polite way to put this: Markos has been co-opted by the glitter and glamour of politics and the notion that he might be a player in it.  As a political operative on a state level several years ago, I can tell you it’s fucking addictive,  especially when you win, and even if you don’t, because people see you as important, someone who must be reckoned with.  Don’t get me wrong, we have to have people in the game, so to speak, that will express our views forcefully, and Markos and DKos can certainly do that.  But he shouldn’t think that he has to somehow shape the opinion expressed on his site to do this.

On Booman I feel that there are at least a few people who are interested in what I think, and there are people here whose diaries and comments I look for to find out what they think.  What’s so impressive here is that none of us have to be an “elite.”  Booman, while he has “front pagers,” doesn’t make any of us feel that our ideas are not welcome, or that we are simply the raw material for his rise ot media or political celebrityhood.

What do you think?