The Best of the Best, Eh? Riiight.

jacob5 Comments
I’ve been reading mostly novels and non-fiction lately. One o’ these days, I’ll even get around to some reviews. But right now, I just want to bitch.

The other night, after finishing Crooked Little Vein and getting my mind thoroughly fucked, I surveyed my shelf of unread books and decided that I’d better start in on the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections that have been gathering dust. I haven’t read short-form fiction in many moons. Gotta catch up on the state-of-the-art, figure out how the short story is done these days, seeing as how my current fiction projects are short stories.

My darlings, if these collections are any indication, I should either stop worrying about how my stories measure up, or I should just shoot myself.

I’m two stories in. I’m wondering simultaneously a) how this shit got published and b) if it’s the best, how much worse could the mediocre be?

The stories were okay. They had a few unique turns-of-phrase, some good imagery, and a spirited attempt at beginnings, middles, and ends (sometimes even within the same story). But for fuck’s sake, could we just please maybe be a little less fucking predictable?

Story One: a house mysteriously appears overnight. Could it be – gasp – magic? Oh, wow, imagine that – witches.

Story Two: an evil dutchess controls her daughter-in-law with mushrooms. Gee, I wonder if the daughter-in-law is going to figure out and turn the tables. Quelle surprise.

Throw me a bone here, people. Either make the prose or the characters so compelling that I don’t give a rat’s arse that I can tell exactly where this is going, or shock me. Knock the conventions of the genre completely askew.

I know I haven’t lost my patience for fantasy due to my immersion in science and reason. I know this because I’ve read several books lately that left me gasping for air. The mythology is so rich, the characters so compelling, and the elements of the plot so twisty that it doesn’t matter it’s total woo. The fantastic works in these books because the author is masterful at making it work. It seems utterly real, and it reveals the humanity of the characters in a way that reality-based fiction never could.

Not so Story One, in which the appearance of a house overnight leads the suburban neighbors to shrug and pretend it’s not happening, because hey, these things just don’t. The author was trying to make a point that we ignore things that are too out of the ordinary for us to cope with. Not when they suddenly appear in plain sight right in front of our fucking faces, we don’t. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief – I was too busy disbelieving that anything would happen the way the author said it would. And then, to throw in a character who’s working on artificial intelligence and then explain away the sudden appearance of the house by saying it’s witchcraft – that was just so fucking lame. Leave the AI out of it if you’re going to reach for something so pedestrian as witchcraft, people, please.

I’m so fucking afraid to peruse the rest of the stories in that book. I’m terrified I’m going to end up stabbing my eyes out with one of my beloved Uni-Ball Signos, and the only question is whether I would do this before or after lobotomizing myself with a mechanical pencil.

I should be happy. The bar seems awfully low: I could probably hop it with my toes tied together. But I don’t want it to be that way. I want to struggle to measure up. I want the water-mark to be so high I don’t have much hope of reaching it. That way, if I fail, I can be proud of failure – look who I was up against! The literary equivalent of Newton, Einstein and Hawking – even coming within shouting distance of them is a triumph! Whereas right now, failure would give me a sensation akin to that you experience after having been beaten out for a promotion by a stinking, festering, half-brained, syphillitic schizo with a family history of inbreeding that stretches back to the Roman empire.
All right, so the stories aren’t quite that bad, but still. I demand more, damn it.

Guess I’d best get to delivering it, then.

The Best of the Best, Eh? Riiight.
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Election Fraud Is Their Specialty

jacob

For a horrifying preview of what this fall’s election is likely to entail, go peruse this saga.

With the sudden realization of what was probably happening,I had to make a decision. Glancing around the room, I realized that I had seen all of these election judges at past elections. What was the likelihood of them all being untrained, or them all having forgotten what the rules were in the prior election. I calculated the odds were long.

I turned back to Leroy and replied, “Leroy, my son and I want to vote. We brought what was required of us. I am holding the SoS’s web page n my left hand. If you will not look at it, or read it, please call Charlene Davis at the Eastern Jackson County Election Board, or call the SoS’s office to find out what you are supposed to do. Because we want to vote.”

We were then told, “You can either give me what I told you to, or you can just get out that door and find someplace else to vote!” (as he stood towering above my son and I). I looked him in the eye and said, “Leroy, Nope! We will not leave until you give us our rights. We’ve a right to vote!”
Leroy leaned over the table and shouted, “Not unless you follow our rules here!” To which I replied, “Your rules do not trump the laws of this state! Please read them!This ID card (the precinct-issued card) is all I need. And slapped the card down on the table in front of him. “this is all that is required.”

Galloglas had the proper ID, the state requirements for voter ID in hand, and every right in the world to vote. So what happened? He got arrested.

This is how the Republicons plan to win this election: first hurl lies, insults and ignorance at their opponent, then commit as much election fraud as possible. They’ll even have citizens who won’t play by their illegal rules chucked into jail. It’s the only way they can win.

Be ready.

Election Fraud Is Their Specialty

Happy Hour Discurso

jacob2 Comments
Today’s opining on the public discourse.

(Yes, Blogger ate another Happy Hour. If this keeps up, WordPress and I are going to have an affair, damn it.)

This just could be the jump-the-couch moment for the Republicon National Committee:

In any party or political movement, there’s bound to be a mainstream and a fringe. As a rule, the fringe looks to the mainstream for validation, and the mainstream looks at the fringe as kind of icky.

Things get interesting, of course, when the line between the mainstream and the fringe blurs. Take the Republican National Committee, for example.

The RNC is a fairly predictable, far-right animal. It’s run by lobbyists and business interests who divide their time between raising money and lying about Democrats. The RNC likes to exploit the ignorance of its base, and stoke the culture-war fires from time to time, but generally steer clear of the kind of insanity one might find in, say, a thread at the Free Republic. It’s the whole mainstream/fringe dynamic in practice.

At least, that’s usually the case. This morning, RNC Chairman Mike Duncan sent out this email to Republican donors.

During his recent speech in Berlin, Barack Obama tried to ingratiate himself to the foreign crowd by claiming loudly that he was “a citizen of the world.”

The problem is Obama’s self-proclaimed global “citizenship” appears to go well beyond just a rhetorical device to gain favor with a European throng full of pie-in-the-sky utopians.

[snip]

And now he’s putting your money where his mouth is.

A bill he has sponsored in the U.S. Senate, the so-called Global Poverty Act(S. 433), would raise the amount of American tax dollars allocated to United Nations’ redistribution efforts to $845 billion.

[snip]

You can check Google and find literally thousands of right-wing activists who are just livid about Obama’s “plan” to give the United Nations $845 billion of our money. And they can’t imagine why the media refuses to tell the public about this nefarious scheme, but they’re
pretty sure news outlets are in on some kind of conspiracy to keep this dastardly plan under wraps.

The problem, of course, is that there is no such plan. It’s a right-wing myth that has been making the rounds for months, and to which the Republican National Committee has finally given its imprimatur.

At issue here is a U.N. initiative to implement its Millennium Goals on global poverty, which would, in fact, total $845 billion over 13 years — from industrialized nations across the globe.

The Congressional Budget Office did a cost-estimate analysis of Obama’s legislation, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, and found that U.S. responsibilities “would cost less than $1 million per year.”

First, the leadership of the RNC is falling for pure myths. Secondly, the leadership of the RNC is apparently worse at math than Dr. Evil. Thirdy – but no, we already knew these stupid fucks have no concept of reality whatsoever. At least this shows us just how empty their bucket of ideas is – they have to fill it with imagination.

It’s getting so bad for them that they’re viciously turning on their hero, Captain Codpiece:

A House Republican leader is lambasting President Bush on his decision not to call Congress back into session to deal with the energy crisis.

In a legislative update sent to GOP members and staff on Tuesday, Republican House Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) accused “Beijing George” Bush of throwing House Republicans “under the bone-dry bus” on his way to the Olympics in China.
House GOP leaders last week called on Bush to convene an emergency session ofCongress, but the White House said such a move would not make a difference because Democrats would not call for an up-or-down vote on offshore drilling legislation.

McCotter, known for his frank and sometimes unusual political opinions, was not pleased with that decision. His memo stated, “Today, in his final term, the wildly unpopular President George W. Bush boarded Air Force One bound for the Beijing Olympics and a meeting with his chum Hu Jintao, the dapper ruler of a nuclear armed, communist dictatorship. … Perhaps our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief will bring our absent Democrat Congress some ‘Made in (communist) China’ souvenir t-shirts: ‘Bush went to Beijing and all I got was this lousy five week, paid vacation.’ “
The memo ends, “Bon Voyage, Mr. Bush! House Republicans will fight on for America!”

I need a thesaurus. The usual words expressing how lame, insane, and outrageously histrionic the Republicons are just fail here. The snide, sniping, lying, full-of-bullshit-and-belligerence party is now reduced to eating their own. And their attacks on their own former Glorious Leader don’t scan any better than the ones they launch against Dems.

And while the Republicons bray for the Dems to return to Washington and debate energy policy, where are the leaders crying most loudly? Oh, you know. Not fucking there:

Since last Friday, House Republicans have been engaged in a political stunt on Capitol Hill, staging fake sessions on gas prices while Congress adjourned for recess. Over the weekend, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) urged Members to return to the Capitol, “although they themselves didn’t show up“:

“It’s not a request we make lightly. But the American people are suffering,” Boehner and Blunt said. “We’ve called on the Speaker to call Congress back into an emergency session this month and schedule a vote on the American Energy Act. We must continue to make a stand until the Speaker complies.”

Riiight. Where are you while the American people suffer, John? Ah:

But what has Boehner been doing while his comrades are fighting the good fight? Golfing.

Republicons: because the crazy, evil fuckwits need a political party, too.

Happy Hour Discurso

The Wrong Psychology

jacob

Fine. McCain & Co. wanna talk psychology, let’s talk psychology.

Let’s talk about the massive psychological manipulation the right wing engages in, and why it’s crippled this nation’s ability to believe in charting a new course.

Take a trip back in time with me to 2002, when the Iraq War was just a sadistic twinkle in Bush’s eye and his long parade of breaking the law in the name of national security was just beginning:

THESE ARE scary times. Al Qaeda terrorists prepare to attack American civilians. A desperate and paranoid North Korea builds an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

And how does our government respond? The Bush administration declares an urgent need to invade Iraq.

[snip]

The domestic scene is just as surreal. Rank opportunism rules. In the name of preventing terrorism, the Bush administration has employed a politics of fear to create the most extensive national security apparatus in our nation’s history.

Military tribunals. Mandatory registration. Mass detentions. Electronic surveillance. Government secrecy. Executive privilege. Office of Total Awareness. Perpetual war.

Folks, this is the stuff of such dystopian novels as Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or George Orwell’s “1984.” As a historian, I hear echoes of voices from the past — survivors of Nazi-occupied nations, dissidents who disappeared in Soviet prisons, Japanese Americans ordered to internment camps, political activists persecuted under McCarthyism.

No, none of these historical analogies is appropriate — yet. But we civilians have just as much responsibility to protect our liberties as do combat soldiers. And right now, we are governed by an administration that wields far too much power — simply because it can.

Fifteen months ago, we discovered that two immense oceans can’t protect us from attacks on our own soil. Afterward, a traumatized people wanted to trust their president. But our leaders have taken advantage of our fear. The Bush administration has planted the seeds of a security state that can, without judicial oversight, congressional opposition, and popular resistance, grow into a repressive government.

And what’s happened since? Every time we move in the direction of sanity, the drums of fear are beaten, the voices of reason get drowned in the frenzy, and insanity continues apace. You saw what happened with FISA.

It’s all about fear and the exploiting of it. Fear of terrorism. Fear of blacks. Fear of gays. The list could go on for hours. What it really comes down to is this: the neocons are terrified of losing power. We’re kept in perpetual fear because it’s the only way the power they’ve grabbed won’t be taken from them.

Look what happened last summer when reason tried to rear its head:

It had to happen. President Bush’s bungling of the war in Iraq has been the talk of the summer. On Capitol Hill, some of the more reliable Republicans are writing proposals to force Mr. Bush to change course. A showdown vote is looming in the Senate.

Enter, stage right, the fear of terrorism.

Yesterday, the director of national intelligence released a report with the politically helpful title of “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” and Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, held a news conference to trumpet its findings. The message, as always: Be very afraid. And don’t question the president.

It’s a clear pattern with these people. Just check out what they were up to in 2006, when they realized Americans were losing their fear, might actually elect Democrats, and – gasp – could even start fussing about unchecked government intrusion into our private lives:

It is the sheerest luck, I know, that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales looks (to me) a bit like Jerry Mahoney, because he fulfills the same function for the Bush administration that the dummy did for the ventriloquist Paul Winchell. At risk to his reputation and the mocking he must get when he comes home at night, Gonzales will call virtually anyone an al-Qaeda-type terrorist. He did that last week in announcing the arrest of seven inferred (it’s the strongest word I can use) terrorists. I thought I saw Dick Cheney moving his lips.

The seven were indicted on charges that they wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI bureau in Miami. The arrests came in the nick of time, since all that prevented mass murder, mayhem and an incessant crawl at the bottom of our TV screens was the lack of explosives, weapons or vehicles. The alleged conspirators did have boots, which were supplied by an FBI informant. Maybe the devil does wear Prada.

[snip]

Does it matter? Yes, it does. It matters because the Bush administration has already lost almost all credibility when it comes to terrorism. It said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there were none. It said al-Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots and that was not the case. It has so exaggerated its domestic success in arresting or convicting terrorists that it simply cannot be believed on that score. About a year ago, for instance, President Bush (with Gonzales at his side) asserted that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted.” The Post looked into that and found that the total number of (broadly defined) “terrorism” convictions was 39.

This compulsion to exaggerate and lie is so much a part of the Bush administration’s DNA that it persists even though it has become counterproductive. For instance, the arrest of the seven suspects in Miami essentially coincided with the revelation by the New York Times that the government has “gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans.” Almost instantly, the administration did two things: It confirmed the story and complained about it. The Times account only helped terrorists, Cheney said.

Extraordinary timing, was it not? This is how they operate. This is all they have to offer America: fear and placebos. The “cures” they offer for our fears and our economic woes (pre-emptive wars and a gas tax holiday) do nothing but psych Americans into thinking they’re being taken care of. Meanwhile, the country rots away from untreated disease.

The only thing wrong with this country is that we fall for this shit. That’s why one of McCain’s buddies had the poor taste to say that a terroris
t attack would be good for McCain’s campaign – they know Americans run to Daddy when that happens, because Daddy talks tough and tells us everything will be just fine if we only do everything he says.

You know who else says that to people? Rapists. Murderers. Criminals who want to control the behavior of their victims. Terrified people don’t try to change their situation. They’re too busy trying to survive.

Time we remember that. Time we cured ourselves of this pathological fear the cons have instilled in us. Hope is also a frightening thing – hope may not work out – but hope is what we need. Change is what we need.

Don’t let Republicon fearmongering scare you into submission this time.

The Wrong Psychology

It's Not Too Late to Jump Into Bed

jacob1 Comment

We’ve settled the difficulties with Jane Hamsher’s elbows, Cujo359’s stopped shedding, and I’ve gotten help with my snoring. There’s no better time than now to join us in bed.

There’s 3,240 of us right at the moment. That means your donation doesn’t have to be big to talk big.

Why donate, you ask me? Why should I bomb Washington with my hard-earned dough? So glad you asked:

The force and power of a moneybomb is simple and straightforward. We all donate on the SAME DAY, and working together we send our political leaders (Democrat and Republican) a freedom message they will never forget. So help us make it work. Pledge today; then come back and donate on the 8th. Let’s show our leaders once and for all that there is a POWERFUL movement here that will settle for nothing less than constitutional governance in America.

That’s right. It’s for that poor, abused bit o’ parchment otherwise known as the Constitution of the United States of America. It’s for that document that has stood between us and tyranny for over 200 years. It’s for that hope, and promise, and the rule of law.

Some politicians have gotten the idea that once elected, they don’t have a mandate to protect the freedoms and rights enshrined in that document. We beg to differ. Money talks, and we plan to force them to listen.

We’re doing it on August 8th for the symbolism:

That is the day in 1974 when Richard Nixon was forced to resign from office for his lawbreaking and surveillance abuses. That day illustrates how far we have fallen in this country in less than 35 years, as we now not only permit rampant presidential lawbreaking and a limitless surveillance state, but have a bipartisan political class that endorses it and even retroactively protects the lawbreakers.

And if you want to know how your cash will be used, Glenn Greenwald can ‘splain. He doesn’t just sum up.

What we’re doing here is no more and no less than changing the way politicians calculate the cost/benefit ratio of their actions. If they realize there’s a steep political price to be paid for shitting upon our constitutional rights and freedoms, they’ll likely choose to shit elsewhere. Those who don’t will rightfully get their arses kicked.

The politicians who have enabled Bush to break our laws with impunity, who have extended vast warrantless wiretapping powers without so much as a thought for the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee that we shall be secure from unreasonable search and seizure, who have allowed America to slip-slide down the slope toward a totalitarian surveillance state, need to be made very aware that there are consequences for their actions.

Money talks. Our money can make them listen.

It's Not Too Late to Jump Into Bed

Happy Hour Discurso

jacob2 Comments
Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Blogger ate Happy Hour. Of course it did it right at the end of my lunch break, when I didn’t have any chance at pulling it from Blogger’s stinking maw and getting it posted on time. So we’re late. So sue Blogger.

Right. Onward.

Here’s another for the annals of “How Many Lies the Bush Regime Told To Get Us To War:”

Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winning author/journalist, has been a thorn in the side of the Bush White House for a few years now, but this might be the most damning revelation yet: Suskind reports in his new book that White House officials ordered the CIA to forge a “back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.” The goal of the letter, apparently, was to “portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Over the next few days, the Habbush letter continued to be featured prominently in the United States and across the globe,” Suskind writes. “Fox’s Bill O’Reilly trumpeted the story Sunday night on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ talking breathlessly about details of the story and exhorting, ‘Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam.’”

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Back in the real world, forgery is a crime. Tampering with or falsifying evidence is a crime. Murder is a crime. These fuckers forged us into a war, fabricated all of the evidence that plead the case, and ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people. Think they’re going to pay for it? Not with the wussies we’ve got in Congress.

Thanks so much for taking impeachment off the table, Nancy Pelosi, you shit.

Bush seems to have a severe problem understanding right, wrong, and common decency. Consider this example from a recent interview:

Abramowitz also asked Bush about the recent charges of politicization at the U.S. Justice Department: “In a report last week, the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that senior department officials broke the law and improperly took political considerations into account in screening applicants for civil service jobs.

“Bush described the report as a ‘very thorough and well-researched analysis’ but declined to say much more. He also refused to get drawn into a discussion of whether there was ‘too much politics’ in administration hiring, as Democrats and others have charged.

“‘I had a lot of hires in this administration, a lot of parts of it,’ Bush said. ‘I’ve read the critique. I’ve listened very seriously to what they said. And other than that, I have no comment.'”

Translated into layman’s terms, that was Bush saying, “Fuck off and die! I got away with it, and you can’t touch me! Neener neener nee-ner!”

And speaking of the terminally reality-challenged:

During today’s Pentagon daily briefing, spokesman Geoff Morrell disputed a reporter’s characterization of Afghanistan as “desperate.” Mocking the question, Morrell insisted there was nothing “urgent or precarious about the situation” there:

MORRELL: You characterize it as Afghanistan desperately needing more troops. I would take issue with the characterization that there’s anything desperate about the situation in Afghanistan, anything urgent or precarious about the situation in Afghanistan. What we have is a situation where the commanders would like additional forces, and we are working to provide them with the additional forces they would like.

Morrell didn’t just “take issue” with the reporter’s description; he was also disputing the view of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen. Just two weeks ago, in an interview with Jim Lehrer, Mullen declared that the situation in Afghanistan “is urgent“:

JIM LEHRER: With no — now, Afghanistan. Senator Obama has used the term that Afghanistan — the situation there is “precarious and urgent.” Do you share that?

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: I think it is. It is urgent. It is one where the violence is growing.

Whom to believe? Oh, what a difficult decision: the two-bit lackey blowing off pleas for more troops as if they were no more than unimportant preferences, sort of like “They’d really like steak for dinner, but the whiny bitches may have to put up with hamburger.” Or should I believe the fucking admiral? Gee, it’s tough, but I think I’ll have to plump for the fucker who knows his shit.

How long are we supposed to endure these hack losers again?

Happy Hour Discurso

The Religious Right, the Republicon Party, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

jacob2 Comments

Heh heh. Could it be that the evangelicals, in lusting for political power, could end up burning their own house down (h/t Dispatches)?

Evangelical Christians in Iowa, dominant in the state’s Republican Party, have denied Sen. Charles E. Grassley his request for a place on the state’s delegation to this summer’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Mr. Grassley may attend the party’s Sept. 1-4 nominating convention in St. Paul, but not as a voting delegate.

I’m sure all you’re seeing here is power. Scary, religious frother power. But let’s dig deeper, shall we?

“The Republican Party of Iowa is moving significantly to the right on social issues,” the just-ousted Iowa Republican National Committee member Steve Roberts told The Washington Times. “It hurts John McCain’s chances to win this state.”

Does it now? Evangelicals of Iowa, unite! By all means, accrue all the power you can lay your grubby hands upon.

Other party officials said money for the party is drying up because of past mismanagement and current religious dominance, which has turned traditional Republican politics upside down.

Ooo, this just gets better and better.

Party officials in the state say the takeover is alienating major Republican donors and driving them out of the party.

The takeover by members and leaders of the Iowa Christian Alliance, successor to the Iowa Christian Coalition, was extensive.

Indeed it was. If the Republicon Party of Iowa were a tree, it’d be shot through with rot and ready to fall down in the next high wind.

I think this could be great good news for the Republicons, at least in Iowa. In the short term, they’re facing disaster. In the long term, however, I think it’s going to end up a gorgeous demonstration of the need for separation of church and state. The fundie frothers are already alienating the elements that keep the Republicon party going. They’re turning the whole thing into a theocratic farce. The fundies are bumbling idiots with too much god-rot in the brain: at some point, they’re going to fuck up so spectacularly, destroy things so thoroughly, that the old-school conservatives might just be able to stage a comeback. Can anyone say “backlash”?

That would make me happy. I get tired of wielding the Smack-o-Matic against such easy targets. I’d love to have opponents I can actually respect.

But even if respectable, sane conservatives can’t rescue their party from the clutches of these god-ridden maniacs, it’s still good news – for Democrats. I don’t think this country, fucked up as it is, is going to take well to the excesses of a theocracy. When their power gets too great, when the intrusion into personal lives and the fuckery and the sheer delusional disaster of it all finally becomes so egregious that it interferes with the latest edition of American Idol, the masses shall rise up and boot the batbrains out. And to do that, they’ll turn to the only party left standing.

Not to mention, exiled conservatives with the political sagacity and deep pockets to make it work might just decide to start their own party. One that will provide a genuine alternative to the two-party hegemony we have now. I am not now and never will be again conservative, but I’m all for conservative folks having a happy home that doesn’t reek of the overwhelming stupidity of the current one.

I’m sure this isn’t what the evangelical movement had in mind when they started playing politics. That’s what they get for mixing God with Government. They should’ve stuck with rendering unto Caesar and so forth.

Times a’ comin’ when they’re going to find that out the hard way.

The Religious Right, the Republicon Party, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Religion Is Dangerous In So Many Ways

jacob1 Comment
I don’t think anyone aside from fundamentalist Christians and people who are afraid of “universe is a friendly place my child” overdoses think Wicca’s dangerous, but all religion is dangerous. It’s not just the fuzzy thinking, the human tendency to go all “my god/dess is better than your god/dess,” and the very real risk of dying of boredom during interminable religious ceremonies – the sharp objects aren’t safe, either:

LEBANON, Ind. – A woman accidentally stabbed herself in the foot with a 3-foot-long sword while performing a Wiccan good luck ritual at a cemetery in central Indiana.

Take a moment to fully savor this. She stabbed herself in the foot during a good luck ceremony.

If that’s not irony, my darlings, I have no idea what is.
Religion Is Dangerous In So Many Ways

Who Needs Comedy When You've Got Worldnut Daily?

jacob1 Comment

These aren’t tears of sadness glistening on my cheeks, my darlings. Not by half.

Make sure you’re securely seated with drinks fully swallowed. Ready? Go:

When Barack Obama looked Americans in the metaphoric eye and told them he was not and was never a Muslim, he had, admittedly, been worshipping at the Trinity United Church of Christ for 20-odd years. So we know for certain that he is not a Christian.

Pause.

Longer pause.

Bwah-ha ha ha ha ha! Hee hee whadafuckinmoron heh ha ha *snort* ohjeez. Heh.

I think I strained a muscle…. Ed Brayton’s got more where that came from, if you’re up to it. I need to go have a lie-down.

Who Needs Comedy When You've Got Worldnut Daily?