You just had to go and die on the Fourth of July.

After all that time you spent making America a shittier place, it’s only fitting you’d go and ruin its founding holiday; to clog our papers with obituaries - like the arteries the tobacco lobby (which, hand firmly in ass, darkened North Carolina with your rotting frame for generations) helps to clog all over this green Earth; that you would find some way to make your death as disgusting as your life. That anyone ever mistook you for a human being is a damning indictment on our species; that you were white makes me wish the Irish weren’t these days, or at least that black-face were socially acceptable. I would that Hell existed if only to place you in it, and would more strongly than I do now that Heaven did not just to keep you out of it.

You shat up my country for just shy of eighty-seven years, and if there is any justice in this universe your corpse will just keep on expanding until it bursts, and no coffin ever made will keep the smell of rancid shit from the human waste who come to mourn you.

I’d call you a son of a bitch, Jesse Helms, but Josef Mengele wouldn’t have deserved to give birth to you and Pol Pot wouldn’t deserve to have called you a son. If your mother had the dignity evolution bequeathed to the scarab, she’d have spent every year from 1921 to her all-too-late death suppressing the urge to tear out her own ovaries. God willing, some day we’ll figure out what we can excise to atone ourselves of you.

Via Sadly, No - and, inexplicably, the fucking White House.

Either of us can pretty much blanket vouch anything Sadly, No! does (in my case, the only exceptions have mostly to do with China), but this is a particularly magnificent study in presidential shitheadedry and worth reading and savoring, like a fine wine - woody, with a faint savor of maize.

If the Pope wants to keep up his entire European Christian conservative routine, a good start would be excommunicating Clarence Thomas for blessing the death penalty in the face of its cruelty. His understanding of the law might require him to do so, but that does not abrogate his higher moral responsibility.

The sad truth, unfortunately, is that holding your breath waiting for large churches to get noisy about prominent conservatives like they do, and less appropriately, about prominent liberals (it’s not Kerry’s job to rule on the justice of abortion, for instance) is a pretty reliable way to choke to death. But it doesn’t mean we can’t ask why it isn’t happening.

:.

On the other hand, it’s much more difficult to call Bill Kristol’s surreal take on one of his ostensible religion’s more important holidays sacrilege. After all, it might strike a Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, or For-Jesus Jew as inappropriate, maybe even insane, to associate the Biblical narrative of God’s deliverance from persecution with a military campaign against international terrorism. In fact, were Kristol any of those, that point would be easy to make; but the statement is much more consistent for his personal creed, in which the role of protector and jealous shepherd of the Chosen People - traditionally associated with the all-knowing, all-present one who is called I Am - is actually an official function of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Other traditions of Neoconservative Judaism you might be unfamiliar with: acting out blood libels out of sheer cussedness and contempt for their coreligionists; insisting the prophet Elijah was actually a time-travelling Barry Goldwater; quietly worshipping Jesus, our Lord who is Christ; greedily devouring bacon cheeseburgers every Saturday, then hectoring Liberal children for being atheist queers on their way home from temple.

1. Isolate uses of ‘freedom’ or any form of it (’free’, ‘freed’) and any cognate of it (’liberated’, ‘liberty’, ‘liberal’ if and only if as part of ‘liberal democracy’ or maybe in the economic sense, ‘franchise’ for voting but not for beef (nor ‘frank’ or ‘France’), use your head here) in any right-wing, neoliberal, or drink-soaked former Trotskyist opinion writing or speech.

2. Replace it as grammatically and elocutionally appropriate with ‘free Willy’.

From the recent attempt by the miserable failure George W. Bush to Google-bomb Ozzie b.L, MoveOn, and Code Pink:

BEFORE:
I appreciate all you’ve done and I really want to thank Heritage. One of the interesting things about the Heritage legacy is that the folks here have been tireless advocates, tireless champions of liberty, and free enterprise, and democracy and religious freedom.

AFTER:

I appreciate all you’ve done and I really want to thank Heritage. One of the interesting things about the Heritage legacy is that the folks here have been tireless advocates, tireless champions of liberal Willy, and free-Willy- enterprise, and democracy and religious freedom of Willy.

Try it for yourself!