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.

(An addendum to Der Ewige Türke.) Read more »

The following, to believe Wikipedia, is an ‘oft-quoted excerpt’ illustrating the ‘rhetorical strength’ of its source: Read more »

When the sun rises again today, it’s certain to shine a little bit less brightly - for we have lost not just its worthiest follower but a man who pierced the darkness of vanity and self-righteousness like no other. A world without him to balance out the evil, self-important assholes - the ones who took ‘politically incorrect’ from him, back when it meant something noble, and twisted it into a badge to crown their shameful, petty tribal hate - is going to be just a little bit darker for it.

Parker and Stone and every other dour fascist who TV execs who still don’t get you signed to ride on your coattails are still around, metastasizing, bound for the Medal of Freedom and old-age home that eluded you, punishing us all for our horrible taste while you rot. I like to think you’d find it funny. You always were a motherfucker.

Rest in peace - and here’s to hoping if there’s anything after this life you’ll figure out how to freak ‘em out there, too.

Burma? Nah. China? What are you talking about?

No: the worst human rights abuses ever are those taking place under Mugabe, in which a more or less normal African dictator has expropriated land from white people.

If it was ever necessary to prove how deeply indebted the Anglosphere’s right wing is to their childhood fetishes, here is the final word - nothing freaks them out quite like the colonials revolting, and they have endless stories of this or that Siege (always, curiously, in land that the natives used to have sole rights to twenty years ago) and this or that Rebellion and this or that tragedy. When darkies start oppressing whitey in any fashion, an injustice for the ages has taken place.

Zimbabwe’s regime is autocratic and the expropriation of land is unfair. But the consistent treatment of Mugabe as the worst human being alive is patently ridiculous. Just like the continuous efforts to make any oppressed minority in the Islamic world into Christians (e.g. the (90%+ Sunni) Kurds or Fur), it’s a clear example of people refusing to exercise an ounce of critical thought, moving into the world with nursery-school lies as firm and fixed as laws of nature.

And if there’s no better reason to be found to avoid an American empire per the British one, it’s more than worth the price of forbearance to avoid some honky complaining at our tanned grandchildren that ‘they kicked us out of Iraq, you know’.

I respectfully disagree. While I can’t vouch for the original author, I do feel that two things are both very true and very alarming:

a) The new mode of political discourse involves a replacement of class and race struggle with ‘culture struggle’, and
b) Taking their cues from every other group to consider themselves locked in a culture struggle, the Enemy of the right is a hodgepodge of accusations of elitism, defeatism, and radicalism which smells an awful lot like the ones that used to dominate the negative stereotyping of the Jews.

While the Clintonites’ ‘creative class’ nonsense is more or less innocent of first-hand anti-Semitism, the same cannot be said of the wider conservative culture they take a page from - in which ‘latte-sipping intellectuals’ are closely affiliated with Hollywood and high finance, George Soros is a liberal mastermind instead of a normal philanthropist, and almost every debased coin of the anti-Semitic realm has ‘degenerate/Aryan’ overstruck with ‘elitist/Patriot’.

The ‘creative class’ is a way for a movement that’s always been deeply affiliated with the Little People to avoid alienating the people that keep them little - that is, to pretend that the ‘average American’ matters not because she is poor, but because she is a boor. And it is much easier for the high-powered lawyers and corporate professionals who form the political base of the Clintonites (especially the Clintonites-cum-McCainiacs) to aim for the interests of the boor than the interests of the poor. All they have to do to sastify the boor is to call black people nasty names - and hell, they were doing that anyway.

‘Latte-sipping elitist intellectual’ is a couple of notes away from ‘radical elitist degenerate’, and whether you like it or not someone who believes in the former is usually willing to accept most of the premises of the latter. The only reason that widening ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so repugnant lately is because the main agitators for that widening are jackasses who believe setting fire to Palestinian orphans is an integral part of Jewish identity. Der Ewige Entartete has gone hand-in-hand with der other Ewige for a century now, and denying that is disingenuous.

I promise not to do this too often (and the source’s willingness to jump aboard the Natural Birth bandwagon seems like a matter almost as damnedable), but this NYT article, via Broadsheet, is breathtaking.

Some of you might have known women growing up that had to live through the pre-Roe period. It’s worth bearing in mind that for us (born in 1987 and 1986, respectively), even our grandparents were pretty young when Roe was decided.

Good on the NYT for publishing this. We’re much too blasé about what the Republicans want to take away from us; allowing them to remain as coy as they are about the kind of world they want to see is despicable, and our peers’ children (2002-) need to have something to remind them the consequences of reactionary excess.

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.

[nota bene: This is a series of personal recollections. My memory is horrible and I vouch for no specific facts or dates; any event I describe occurring I do vouch for, although the specifics of it and when it happened are up in the air.]

Picture the sort of person who will make a weekly habit of beating off to clips of Winston Churchill saying famous things, demonstrating what his admirers mistake for resolve. Put a khaki shirt on him - a paramilitary affiliation, appropriate enough for this Little League fascist. Keep this image in mind. You’ll need it later.

The Boy Scouts were set up out of a megachurch, called - simply enough - Central Christian Church. The Boy Scouts have various classist and authoritarian instincts built into their organizational structure; they are centralized under a single leader, the Scoutmaster, answerable to nobody, and surrounded by lackeys with positions of responsibility unaccompanied by authority. It is the perfect way to teach boys - and their fathers, for that matter - that life, and especially adulthood, is a succession of increasingly burdensome obligations to authority without any personal autonomy; the only possible reward is a larger number of bulliable subordinates. And like good evangelicals, their contempt for women was boundless. The Promise Keepers were in vogue at the time, and their vague, self-congratulatory vows not to beat women for being filthy, stupid animals seemed to stop well short of letting women do anything constructive.

My mother was a cub scout leader, see. My father got involved when he could, but he completely lacked the time - had a busy schedule. And my mother wanted us to have something like the Cub Scouts - complete with camping, useful skills, and opportunity to socialize - in our lives. She ran the den out of our house most of the time, and all concerned were very pleased with themselves.

A succession of moves lead us to a number of boy scout troops. The megachurch one lasted us the longest; it was the one that, as the homophobia rocked the organization (and my parents, who respected Gore a great deal, were bombarded continuously with Bushie urban legends, shitty jokes, and other bullshit spam), drove first me and later the rest of my family out of the Amerikaner Hitlerjugend. (That and I was never particularly good at the bondage stuff.) Read more »

Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee sweep the Iowa caucuses. Exit polls cite the primary motivator as a desire for “change,” further cementing the nation’s awful stereotype of Iowans as easily-led hayseeds. Next up is New Hampshire, a state so blessedly deranged that John fucking McCain is the man to beat. Dodd and Biden have both apparently dropped out, feeling the change in the wind — no more is it the day of the merely bland honky with suspicious hair.

There’s going to be some entertainment in watching the bloody fight within the Republican party over “conservative” priorities. Obviously, they’d prefer a candidate who slashes taxes as readily as he kills Haji and praises Jesus, but what can be sacrificed? Will the squat little psychopath Giuliani’s white-hot desire to exterminate the Saracen be enough to make up for his crippling association with Jew York? Can a Smithite queer-lover like Romney adequately defend America from the looming threat of dhimmitude, even if his economic record in fell Taxachusetts is admirable? Could Thompson perhaps fit every Arab in the entire world into his baggy, Aqua Velva-scented jowls?

At this point, I’m just half-heartedly pulling for anyone who won’t bomb Iran, which in this post-NIE environment appears to be anyone but Clinton and the Republican war party. A federal subsidy for Oregon hops growers would probably buy my vote, or else I’ll have to switch to Budweiser.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I’ve been alternately busy, drunk, and unwell, and Alec has been fucking bears. I hope to get back to a more normal schedule shortly.