So I’m hearing where the Republicans have, in the face of economic depression, offered a budget which includes a five-year spending freeze. That rustling sound you hear is the gathering ectoplasmic storm, in which the shades of Keynes and Friedman will rise from the earth, put aside their differences, and go to town on John Boehner — one ghosty wang in each ear.

(P.S. sorry for the silence recently; work has been hell. Have a post nearly ready to go.)

An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.

On alicublog, which remains one of my favorite blogs, Roy Edroso addressed the potential hate speech prosecution of Dutch kulturkampfer Geert Wilders in the same way he did the earlier legal complaint against Mark Steyn:

Hear, hear. Wilders is a wretched bigot, but here in the states we let them rave.

I didn’t respond before, bu it’s this kind of thing that pisses me off. In the US, we let them rave because we have a legal tradition protecting speech and a broad right to freedom of speech and press encoded in the Constitution. The Netherlands is not the United States. Neither is Canada, for that matter. Different nations have the right to their own legal traditions. If you want to argue that the specific American concept of freedom of speech is an inalienable right, do that; just be honest about what you’re doing.

I live in Oregon. We have an even stronger constitutional protection of free speech than the US Constitution. It’s so broadly interpreted that it’s been repeatedly applied by the state supreme court to regulations banning all-nude stripping. Other states may put their exotic dancers under the unfair yoke of “pasties” or “g-strings,” but in God’s own country, that 18-year-old has a right, enshrined in 150 years of glorious tradition, to display her unobscured genitals to drunk guys for money for as long as she damn well pleases. Other states don’t have that protection, and that’s why there’s so many strip clubs on the Oregon-Idaho border. Is Oregon right, and Idaho wrong? Is the federal interpretation of free speech right, and the Oregonian interpretation wrong?

Israel banned Meir Kahane’s Kach party and prevented him for standing for office for basically the same thing — openly campaigning for the persecution and exclusion of a large minority of his country’s citizens. I can’t remember the last time I heard a free-speechy liberal mourning Kahane’s persecution, and for good reason. The United States is large, and its race-warriors have generally either been marginal or in control of the reins of state. Hate speech has never been as dangerous here.

Have you seen Fitna? In the context of Wilders’ political stances and demands, and the current climate in the Netherlands, it can only be seen as incitatory — an attempt to depict Islam as incompatible with Western laws and ideals, and Muslims as ineligible for protection under those laws and ideals. Ultimately, whether Wilders has broken Dutch law is up to the Dutch people. Hate speech laws would be unconstitutional in the United States, and I oppose them completely. But while freedom of speech is an inalienable right, whether hate speech is as well is another question.

Oh, and Roy? Must you, must you quote someone who uses the word “dhimmitude” unironically?

Hello there, *campers*. I’m Thuryl, II*D*’s Australian correspondent, here to bring you news from the other side of the world (or, if you are on this side of the world, this side of the world).

Before that little election or whatever it was that you Americans held a few months ago, some of you contacted me about the possibility of moving over here in the event that McCain won. To you, dear friends, I say: you’re ignorant fuckwits who know nothing about Australia. At the best of times, we manage to be slightly less horrible than you. My purpose here will mostly be to show you just how bad we are.

The media over here are already getting tired of reporting on Obama’s inauguration and looking for news further afield. Today, they’ve managed to latch onto a misogynistic lecture by Abu Hamza, an “Islamic cleric” who runs a small Muslim social club about 10 minutes’ drive away from my home. (Wonderful term, that, isn’t it? Don’t bother researching whether he’s widely respected or has any kind of recognition outside his own congregation; just call him a “cleric” and be done with it. Do people go around referring to street preachers as “Christian clerics”?)

Now, this lecture was delivered back in 2003, and Abu Hamza hasn’t done anything much in the public eye since then, so the only purpose anyone could have for digging it up and kicking up a fuss about it today is race-baiting. It’s not as if it’s even a slow news day, for heaven’s sake. Yes, the lecture is pretty repulsive: among other things, it argues that a married woman has no right to refuse her husband’s sexual advances. On the other hand, this is still the Catholic Church’s official position on marriage. The Vatican is a damn sight more influential than Abu Hamza, and yet somehow people find it easier to believe that a Catholic can disagree with the Vatican than that a Muslim can disagree with whichever “cleric” has been trotted out and demonised this week. Or, if you happen to be a Protestant, look at, say, your own Phyllis Schlafly. Civil authorities don’t do much better than religious ones on the issue, either: spousal rape was completely legal in Australia until 1985, and many police still don’t take it seriously.

I seem to recall something in a book I read once about removing the log from your own eye before pointing out the speck in your neighbour’s.

Any one of the millions of men with sufficiently non-nasal alto voices and severe delusions about the American class system burst into a kindergarten, set a succession of children down on their knees, and told them one of two stories.

1) “Well, we spent years training and outfitting the Georgian army, to the point that they yelled and cheered like Americans as their troops poured into a breakaway area with a long history of ethnic conflict with Georgians and bound by treaty to remain demilitarized. They got as far as the capital, and held it for two days, before foul interloper Putin – completely without warning and cause – invaded, slaughtering armed Georgian innocents en masse and driving thousands of military refugees behind the Ossetian border. But they had done work we could be proud of – in those two days in the capital they left no stone unturned in the Jewish quarter, and it seems that the Caucasian state would have exercised its precious sovereignty to purge Georgia of the last Russophile Semites befouling their territory with Marxism.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Putin, the swarthy traitor, opposes America in its quest to free Earth of Jewish tyranny.”

2) “Well, after the twin humiliations of the long-demonized Hamas winning Palestinian elections insisted on by Bush and a failed neocon-backed invasion of Lebanon, Israel decided it had had enough of failing and invaded the Gaza Strip in an effort to make the politics of Israel’s Palestinian wards more Israel-friendly. The completely spontaneous combined-arms assault surgically neutralized hundreds of deviously unarmed Hamas militants and eliminated what little infrastructure Hamas, in its perfidy, had built up to circumvent Israel’s democratic, self-determining decision as a free nation-state to completely blockade Gaza to any and all traffic, including “food”, “water”, “humanitarian aid”, and other vital Islamofascist instruments. To this day, Gaza remains under heavy occupation by Israeli forces, a historical first that will surely disarm the nationalist radicals dominating their local politics.”
“What’s the moral of this story, strange man?”
“Don’t fuck with the Jews.”

(BONUS FUN STORIES to come when a cartoon defaming symbols of Israel warrantlessly attacks the Jews for the Israeli state’s behavior; when long-term US ally Uzbekistan makes rootless Bolshevist radicals wear yellow badges to ensure the continued freedom of world markets; and when Israeli dissidents treasonously abandon the quest to destroy Islamofascist children wherever they be born.)

1. Hit him in the neck with a brick.
2. Take his space helmet away at the last minute.
3. Set him on fire.
4. Wait about a century.
5. Nail him to a tree.
6. Shoot him often enough.
7. Shoot him too often.
8. Keep his hospital from treating his cancer.
9. Hit him near the neck with a brick.
10. Break him with a wheel.
11. Put him in a gas chamber for being a Jew.
12. Let him eat nothing but brass.
13. Delegate it to a mob het up by his honoring his Iraq-casualty sibling’s lack of faith.
14. Bombard him with a fatal level of radiation after his grip on the screwdriver holding you away from the other plutonium hemisphere slips.
15. Keelhaul him.
16. Break him without a wheel.
17. Put him in a gas chamber for having a shitty lawyer.
18. Find a way to give him kwashiorkor.
19. Hit a brick with his neck.
20. Pulp up a McSweeneys and feed it to him with arsenic.
21. Put him in Lyndon Johnson’s way.
22. Carve out his heart and eat it with chili to make sure the sun will rise next year.
23. With kindness and a dirk.
24. With just the dirk.
25. Get him and his idiot friend drunk and have them reenact that pencil thing the Joker did.
26. Wait until he’s black and about to use the phone and then shove him in front of a NYPD officer.
27. Put him in between fundamentalist oil warlords and wait.
28. Give him a blood transfusion before the vector for HIV is fully understood.
29. The same way that one guy did in that urban legend.
30. Use the brick again.
31. With a laser.
32. Provoke a nuclear war with needlessly aggressive military maneuvers just inside of Warsaw Pact radar.
33. Rob him of his manhood in the worst war in modern history and wait for machismo to take its course.
34. Refuse to heed warnings about the cold weather on Cape Canaveral.
35. Rend him asunder with a series of dogs.
36. Fill his uterus with air.
37. Botch any surgery you like.
38. Sandblast him.
39. Tell the Don about his wire.
40. Convince him to punch the President.
41. Leave him to the mercy of savage explorers with foreign germs.
42. With a .22, but don’t kill a mockingbird – they bring nothing but joy to the world.
43. Charge the stage and gut him with a katana.
44. Encourage him with likeable teen-oriented characters to regard a dangerous, addictive, and expensive habit as cool and desirable.
45. Grenade up the ass.
46. Get your running mate to convince a bunch of terrified wingnut cowards he’s a Muslim.
47. Too much or too little water.
48. Rip out his gonads and his head.
49. Treat his clearly suicidal behavior as part and parcel with his avant-garde literature.
50. Just keep shitting on him until he stops moving.
51. Bury him face-down in the sun.
52. Anthropomorphize large predators, render him retarded, and put him in the zoo.
53. Fire him from a cannon.
54. Just shoot him with the cannon.
55. Work him to death.
56. Literally throw him under the bus.
57. Pay him so much money to engage in highly competitive ceremonialized bloodsport that he is essentially forced to use performance-enhancing drugs, and wait for him to die of either injury or cirrhosis.
58. Go for the soft spot.
59. Use him as a pinata.
60. Manhandle him until he winds up in front of the third rail and pisses himself.
61. Paint him a completely unrealistic picture of ‘natural’ childbirth and let him exsanguinate a fifth of the time.
62. Fuck his brains out in a slasher pic.
63. Fuck his brains out anywhere else.
64. Drop a sledgehammer on him from a great height.
65. Really, anything that gets his brains out will do.
66. Throw a brick at his face.
67. Miss and hit him in the neck with a brick.
68. Have him help sign up and protect black voters in the 60s.
69. Convince him you need to practice your chainsawing.
70. Throw a series of switches after he has bade his heartwarming cinematic farewell.
71. Make sure he’s an Anne Rice character.
72. Punch a bunch of holes in his scuba gear.
73. Shoot him with a neurotoxin-tipped dart for invading your isolated clan’s territory.
74. Tell an important Russian he’s a communist / kulak.
75. Wait until September 9, 1976, assuming he’s Mao Zedong.
76. Tell your friends specific details about his ship’s route and cargo for no real reason.
77. Hook him on drugs and keep them illegal.
78. Get one of the other Minutemen to find the water they leave out for him and salt it.
79. Drive a wooden stake into his heart with a stout hammer.
80. Paint him with gold paint all the way and shiv him repeatedly.
81. Syphilis.
82. Marry an even older one and you won’t have to.
83. Keep on pistolwhipping him – it’s not as easy as the movies make it look.
84. Order the opposing gladiator to kill him.
85. Make him pretty and leave him in prison or the Eastern Front.
86. Keep air away from his brain.
87. Deliberately ignore him as you bulldoze Palestinian homes.
88. Piss on him, assuming you piss hydrofluoric acid.
89. Leave him unsupervised in his crib.
90. Participate in a culture of perfection which encourages him to out-pretty the other girls by starving himself.
91. Teach him the Method and film a Howard Hughes biopic with him.
92. Leave him to fend for himself in the cold ruins of American industry.
93. Get him to catch your darts.
94. Convince him that communism poses a grave threat to his homeland that can only be averted by surrendering his civilian life and killing things in a South Asian jungle, then wait until he falls onto a bunch of sticks with shit on them.
95. Cut him up and leave him in the refrigerator purely to screw with his husband, your superpowered nemesis.
96. Beat him to death with a plastic explosive.
97. Put him in Thunderdome until the law of averages wins out.
98. See to it he has incriminating information on the Clintons, then, with a solid axe, break open his ribs from behind and pull out his lungs.
99. Have a blacksmith forge him by mistake.
100. Tee him up to kick the football, and then – in an oft-repeated and soon-iconic moment symbolizing to a generation of Americans the caprice of luck, expectations, society, and the opposite sex, hit him in the neck with a brick.

With apologies to Scott -

“In 2008, we ran an angry geezer and a crazy moose-hunter, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2012, we ran the crazy moose-hunter and a plumber/country singer/professional bald man, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2016, we ran a doughy giggler who touched himself and made high-pitched gawping noises whenever he saw a woman, and a street preacher who screamed “HOMONUPS NEVER!” over and over during his speeches, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2020, we ran a clone of Adolf Hitler and a bucket of frozen embryos, but we didn’t go far enough right. In 2024…”

First they elected a moderate paleocon,
And I said nothing, because fuck atheists.
Then they elected an angry old man,
And I said nothing, because fuck Clinton.
Then they elected a spic-loving nepotist,
And I said nothing, because fuck the poor.
Then they elected a hardline right-wing race-baiter,
And I said nothing, because fuck the blacks.
Then they elected a shrieking empty suit to whip up angry crowds,
And I said nothing, because fuck most of America.
And when the time came for me to say something,
There was no one left to elect.
I blame the liberal media.
Fags.

As someone who agrees with the broad strokes of the argument that Wright was treated as an unacceptable radical for – the sentiment that the vicious inequity that America spent centuries promoting were a shame on us all, evidently only acceptable to believe if that inequity involves people enjoying their sex lives – I’m not that personally attached to America in and of itself. I find its ideals admirable and am often impressed with its people’s basic benevolence; what impresses me about the outcome of this election is the profound spirit of general amity.

As we sometimes have cause to remember – almost sadly, now that we have been made to swallow the bitter harvest sown by the blood-lusting Republicans – the reaction to 9/11 internationally was extremely similar to the reaction to 9/11 internally. While there were certainly some people who reacted with a sort of nasty, unwelcome, and almost always vicarious fury (I have never met among the ‘nuke Mecca’ crowd a man or woman closer than six degrees to a WTC casualty), the predominant reaction to the day’s tragedy was sorrow and support. It’s worthwhile to compare it to the London tube bombings – the right had so fully coopted the basic idea of suffering that to express sympathy for the day’s victims of al Qaeda had been drummed and massaged into an informal referendum on murdering wholly unrelated people in Iraq.

We have, for the last six years, been convinced for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy military-industrial fuckwads surrounding Cheney that the world hates America, that we’re fundamentally incompatible with the people and values of Europe and England, and that there exists a foreign contingent that reflexively sneers at us and wishes us failure. Of course, the latter is only a simple case of misidentification; there is such a foreign continent. The problem is, they are – like Mark “The Human Jizz” Steyn and Christopher “Intefatigable Doughty Socialist Fag” Hitchens – cheerleaders for the current vile administration, eager to provide philosophical or psychological fig-leaves to the American neoconservatives’ comprehensive contempt for the Constitution, international law, and human dignity. Whether you’re a jack-ass whose contribution to socialist theory revolves around how awesome you are and how awful darkies are or a vile, race-baiting neo-Nazi who gleefully mocked the American victims of his intellectual cousins in Oklahoma, the Bush Administration had a warm spot in its heart and a soft spot in its brain for you.

The farthest fringes of the right have been conscripted to project a sort of gleeful, shit-eating hate to foreigners. The cowboy stereotype is a kind one compared to the one presented by Broder, Rice, and all the fuck-the-world gang – our cultural, political, and economic leadership has spent the last six years screaming hate at the world, insisting that we’re ignorant, bellicose monsters whose firepower entitles us to anything we want, consistently presenting the bare basics of humanity as limp-wristed Foreignese gibberish.

And the same people who had spent those six years in a desperate struggle to preserve civilization from our government – who have seen terrorism, global warming, and diplomatic tension spiral out of control as a direct consequence of us – have erupted over the last few days in joy.

Of course, the totalitarian freeper goons – and their beloved America-hating dancing monkeys – have all erupted into passionate hate, wishing death and destruction on Obama and the country and shrieking in impotent rage at a country in the throes of collective triumph, cursing at a people who would not put another of their angry, rotten old men in power.

It’s not sufficient to spoil it, though – the sense, among Democrats and Republicans, the left and right, and the great majority of Americans and people of the world, that we’ve stepped back from the brink. We told a pair of candidates – who shrilly berated us for liking a man who had not only grown up in Chicago but was clearly a ni, who called us Communists for favoring a tax policy common to the entire first world, and whose sole agenda consisted of a long, unbreaking stream of hate-objects up to and including the Earth itself – to fuck right off, and we elected the country’s first black President in the process, an intelligent and genuinely decent man.

After all this time, the world – and we – didn’t know and couldn’t but hope that we still had it in us, that we were even in the loosest sense the same country that destroyed fascism and tamed the atom. The Republicans figured we didn’t – and we weren’t – and in front of the entire world we showed them just how wrong they were.

And that is why the world wept for joy – in the words of Tim Krieder, like a happy 9/11. Not just our allies – but friends throughout humanity, people happy to see us prosper without seething in desperate eagerness to see our enemies destroyed.

There will be a time for cynicism – the inside-baseball stuff, like the high-level appointment of Rahm Emanuel, has been all too disappointing so far – but after eight years of Bush I suspect we’re all happy just to enjoy these high days’ international comity, and rest secure in the knowledge that none of the usual thugs is in a position to exploit it.