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.

As a severe asthmatic with various severe allergies causing anaphylaxis, I’ve got one major thing to add to the discussion - something that has yet to come from anyone who has undergone simulated water torture, and rightly so, because the simulation leaves the boundaries of safety if lung conditions are involved. It is the experience of air hunger.

Just like most allergies take a second encounter to fully kick in - and just like most moral depravities (whether universal (e.g. murder) or cultural (e.g. porcophagy) seem only to produce memorable sensation the second time around, it takes us a few goes with air hunger to understand it well. The set of sensations surrounding air hunger are difficult to describe regardless - because they operate at a level well beneath human consciousness. Air hunger produces a sensation of morbidity, the feeling from something beneath your brain, your nerves, and even your organs that you are going to die.

The basic problem behind air hunger precedes sapience, precedes sentience, precedes sex, precedes organs and tissues and even eukaryota. It is the closest anything about the human experience ever gets to primal - and, I can say from experience, rages on all the worse after fine motor control, touch, hearing, taste, and the sensation of temperature - even consciousness - have evaporated.

The reason water torture is so uniquely terrifying is that it involves showing the very cells of the body their own mortality, and responding to it takes such a high priority that the conscious mind labors against its aftershocks in futility. This is something that someone who has been through a single water torture, or a fairly brief series of them, does not have necessarily to deal with.

In psychological and psychiatric terms, the water torture is a barbaric, violent, and permanent abuse - worse than beatings, dismemberment, or rape. Even watching - to say nothing of making - a man drown is grotesque enough; that people anywhere close to power would bless in clean conscience the repeated infliction of air hunger for some horrific parody of interrogation is one of the more demoralizing revelations of my lifetime.

-

*While ‘waterboarding’ is now well-understood enough that its euphemistic power is fleeing, and ‘the water cure’ has been used in a purely pejorative sense for the last half century, it seems glib to the point of blasphemy to use either.

Today, we offer the following brief dialogue as a gentle clarification of what could possibly have motivated Bill O’Reilly to declare, in response to this commercial, “I just want mayonnaise. I don’t want two guys kissing.”

The scene is the happening, if obscure, ‘Chockfull O’Meat’, an Irish delicatessen in historic Greenwich Village. A balding, splotchy man - PAPA BEAR - enters, affecting a sneer at the soft buzzing of a compact fluorescent bulb.

He makes his unpleasant way through a fairly short line of twenty-somethings, and finally arrives at the counter, where a CLERK with a strong Hibernian brogue colored with an affected lisp waits for his order.

PAPA BEAR. Some clientele you got here. This is the place with the two-dollar sandwiches, right?
CLERK. That offer ends at 6 PM, sunshine. It’s 1.75 for a 6-inch and 2.50 for twelve.
PAPA BEAR, grumbling. Of course. I guess I’ll have a foot-long.
CLERK. Sure. What’ll it be?
PAPA BEAR. Hmm. I’m thinking meatball and hot sausage.
CLERK, cocking eyebrow. O-kay. Is the sandwich all you want, sugar?
PAPA BEAR. What do you got in the way of condiments?
CLERK. All kinds. What do you want?
PAPA BEAR. How’s about a nice fat sweet pickle?
CLERK, coldly. What is this? You gonna ask for some beef on the side, maybe hot rolls?
PAPA BEAR. What? This is outrageous.
CLERK, in a cold whisper. You couldn’t care less that this is the best deli in the village. You’re just here to ogle the pretty young things. I got a reputation to uphold, buddy.
PAPA BEAR. No! They said this was - they said you couldn’t go to the Village and not eat here!
CLERK. Yeah, and they were right. Now, are you going to be buying a sandwich or what?
PAPA BEAR. OK, OK, fine. Large pickle, meatball and hot sausage twelve-inch.
CLERK. That’ll be 3.75.
PAPA BEAR. And slather it with mayo.
CLERK. What?
PAPA BEAR. Up one side of the sausage, down the other. Flopped out a little.
CLERK. What?
PAPA BEAR. You know, so I can lick it off. You’re some kind of liberal, aren’t you? You know how these things work.
CLERK. I warned ye once there’ll be no hawkin’ here! Out with you!
PAPA BEAR. But - but!
CLERK. Out! And get out of my shop!
The CLERK angrily gestures to the door. PAPA BEAR, muttering ‘I just wanted mayonnaise, I don’t want two guys kissing,’ makes his miserable way home, leather pants creaking under his overcoat.

What the fuck are you thinking?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we agree on a number of crucial points - which might well not be true at all, but I feel like being charitable. You agree that the craven effort to slash public services and progressive taxation to the bone are horrific and irresponsible; you agree that the mainstream policy establishment within both parties are essentially an interchangeable set of imperial apologists, and you agree that both the ‘culture war’ and for the most part the war on terror has been a protracted excuse for rolling back the 20th century. (To say nothing of, say, the war on drugs - which seems to be aiming for the 17th.)

Why in the fuck are you expecting this out of Hillary Clinton? Clinton was a life-long conservative until she got into the Oval Office and, as part of the notional role of the First Lady, became a political cipher. The one assignment she was given to fulfill the least ambitious of the fairly few progressive promises her husband made was a miserable failure. (And, for the record, she left the race with a more insurance-oriented healthcare plan than Obama’s.) Her career can be summed up as ‘typical corporate lawyer’ until the point at which she became a Democratic politico out of tribal alignment.

If you’re new to Democratic electoral politics, this is kind of how it happens - unlike the Republicans, open pandering to the hard left is treated mercilessly by the national media and as a result Democrats are pretty reasonably expected to run to the right of how they govern. If you’re not, and you supported Clinton for the same reason I did Obama - that is, looking for a charismatic and effective President to repair the unprecedented damage done to the American government, reputation, and very national psyche by Bush (and avert the possibility of further such damage by McCain) - well, it’s exactly why most of us are voting for him, and I really can’t imagine you falling permanently away from the man over a simple electoral defeat.

And if you supported Clinton in spite of all of that, if you supported a woman whose campaign was run by reactionary FUD-mongers - the same horrible, race-baiting bunch who ran Clinton’s stable in ‘92 - and Mark fucking Penn, don’t lecture us about Zbignew Brzezinski. I’m not prepared to say that Obama accepting the man’s support makes me comfortable, but if you actually read Obama’s (admittedly slim, but fairly consistent) policy output, in focusing pretty heavily on promotion of the general welfare of man rather than the narrow interests of American capital, it alienates him completely from the people you’ve been insisting he’s gonna put in power.

Clinton was a mediocre candidate, she ran a horrible race (contrast Edwards, who was a generally middling candidate whose excellent race forced the campaign, however briefly, to focus on crucial issues rather than idiot scandals and probably saved the entire primary from complete political irrelevance), and now she’s finished. If you really wanted what you’re freaking out on Obama for lacking, you’d have backed Kucinich. The very fact that people out there have somehow decided that it’s useful to have opinions farther to the right during the primary than during the general election is fucking infuriating. If you ever believed in any of this, and I really doubt you do, you’d have done better to, you know, fucking put it out there while everyone else in your campaign was speculating on whether Obama was an inexperienced, unelectable secret Muslim.

Jesus Christ.

(Via MMFA.)

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.