The First Church of Free Speech

As usual, Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head with regard to the massacre currently in progress in Gaza. The reason Palestinians can be slaughtered in droves in revenge killings is because so many Americans believe Muslims in general, Arabs in particular and even more so the Palestinians are sub-human Untermenschen.

Supposedly the IDF and IAF are retaliating for rocket attacks from Gaza that have killed four Israelis. As of this morning, over four hundred Palestinians have been killed in response -many of them civilians for a ratio of over 100:1. Can anyone imagine another country (even countries on friendly terms with the U.S.) doing such a thing and being cheered on by public officials and the media in this country?

For example on April 10 1992, the IRA set off a bomb in London that killed three people. Did the British send the army into the Republic of Ireland? Did the RAF bomb Dublin? Did John Major (a right-wing politician) send his tanks and artillery into Ireland? Why not? Well first of all, the United Kingdom fancies itself as a civilized country and civilized people don’t do that sort of thing. But what if John Major (or some other PM) had been a complete psychopath and didn’t care if people thought he was a brute? Hell, what if he -like the kinds of war whores Greenwald describes- got off on the idea of blasting a large number of civilians and the presence of a few “terrorists” was a handy excuse to do so? Even in such a case it would have been unlikely. The reason is simple. The Irish are considered to be human beings, and killing them in triple-digit numbers or higher would provoke others to take action -including from allied states like the U.S.*

This also explains why even Nazi dictator Francisco Franco didn’t use large-scale bombings of Basque regions in response to the bombings, shootings and kidnappings carried out by ETA. In fact, when Franco did order attacks on the Basques during the Spanish Civil War, he was condemned for such a fiendish war crime -and rightly so. There’s a reason a small town like Guernica became world famous and it wasn’t because of Picasso (in fact, Picasso’s painting of the massacre was made famous because Hitler and Franco had done to the city what the Israelis are doing to Gaza).

But then, Spaniards -unlike Palestinians- are considered human beings.

*A number of Irish-Americans have in fact supported the IRA with money, weapons and providing safe houses for IRA members on the run. This without the British carrying out aerial massacres like Israel is doing.

I see the voters in California have decided to emulate the Racial Hygiene laws passed in Nazi Germany, which nullified marriages between Jews and Gentiles, just as Prop Hate nullifies gay marriages. The fact that the same voters approved a ballot initiative for more humane treatment for livestock shows just how much pus courses through the veins of California voters. They value pigs and chickens more than human beings.

But the fundies insist that they aren’t motivated by hatred for queers. Here’s a press release from the Mormons, a church that waited until Carter was President to finally acknowledge that black people are not apes:

“Allegations of bigotry or persecution made against the Church were and are simply wrong. The Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage neither constitutes nor condones any kind of hostility toward gays and lesbians.”

No, you just find homosexuals so repulsive that if they are allowed to take part in an activity, then you can no longer bring yourself to do it. The idea that a faggot is doing something that you want to do fills you with disgust, and you want to use ignorant mobs and the power of the state to stop them in a homophobic Krystallnacht.

And you have the gall to say you aren’t hostile.

At least racist crackers during Jim Crow were honest about their hatred for blacks. Their paranoia towards the people they hated was more limited in scale, too. Rednecks were concerned that blacks would ruin the dining experience in their preferred eateries, but not every restaurant in the state. They were at least generous enough to allow that blacks could eat in black restaurants. The same was true for schools and other institutions. Now the schools, stores, restaurants and other institutions that blacks were allowed to enter during segregation were almost always grossly inferior, but at least they could still have them. The voters in California won’t even allow “ghetto” marriages, so hysterical is their bigotry.

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.

If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”

— Thomas Jefferson

We are all Ewoks now.

Michael Goldfarb, You Are A Pussy!

Sully links to a feeble effort by the Weekly Standard’s resident liar-in-chief to tu quoque his way around the fact that McCain/Palin rallies have been orgies of hate and have been inciting violence against Barack Obama, as well as others. These rallies have been remarkably vile and racist -like Klan rallies, only without the quaint rustic charm. Sully notes Hayes’ dishonesty and stupidity thusly:

This morning at a McCain rally here, a bearded young man in the crowd responded to a McCain critique of Barack Obama by shouting: “You’re a liar John!” He then hoisted a young woman with an antiwar poster onto his shoulders and began yelling antiwar gibberish as McCain tried to continue his speech. When McCain supporters ripped up the woman’s sign, she unfolded another one and the spectacle continued.

The bitch! How dare she be resourceful when right-wing thugs (a) grab her sign and (b) tear it up! If Hayes wasn’t so mindnumbingly stupid and so shamelessly dishonest, he would know that it is the anti-McCain protester who was wronged, and the fact that the McCain/Palin campaign has been ginning up an assassination attempt against Obama is not disproved by this kind of hoodlum behavior on the part of McCain supporters, but confirmed by it.

Earlier, at a rally in Philadelphia, Obama praised John McCain’s service to America and called for a civil debate over the final days of the campaign. He was lustily booed by his angry supporters. And yesterday, at a McCain rally in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, another angry heckler shouted “Liar” and other insults at McCain from the crowd.

I’ll believe McCain’s “can’t we all just get along” shtick when he swipes the microphone from his running mate who slanders Obama as “palling around with” terrorists, and when he stops running ads that falsely accuse Obama of being in league with Bill Ayers. Until then, it’s nothing more than McCain trying to distance himself from responsibility from what could happen if one of his supporters should follow in Amir’s footsteps or if one of his cretinous mobs should say, physically attack a journalist or supporter of the opposition.

I for one am not terribly amused by Tina Fey’s dead-on impersonation of Sarah Palin. To mock in such a tame manner an openly fascist politician who revels in cruelty to animals, quotes Jew-baiters and white supremacists in her acceptance speech, lies constantly and hysterically, supports (and is supported by) violent fanatics at home and abroad is like cracking bald jokes about Mussolini or jesting about Timothy McVeigh’s crew cut. It’s lame and muddies the waters. Sarah Palin’s stupidity is the weakest reason to vote against her, no matter how amusing it might be to watch her read through her lines with such an obvious sense of discovery.

1) Palin supports the sort of cruelty to animals that even Michael Vick would find appalling. Shooting wolves and leaving them to die agonizing deaths, then chopping off the animals’ paw is sick.

2) She quoted Westbrook Pegler, a racist, anti-Semitic crackpot who called for the assassinations of Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy and supported lynching, in her convention acceptance speech.

3) She used (and continues to use) the powers of the office she holds to carry out personal vendettas and flouts the law to cover it up.

4) She has a lunatic preacher administer some kind of exorcism on her. This same fanatic is best known for leading a village mob to chase an elderly woman out of her home with threats of violence against her. The reason? Witchcraft!

5) She makes promotional videos for the Alaska Independence Party, a seditious group that wants to break up the United States of America. A group her husband was a member of.

6) She thinks people and dinosaurs inhabited the earth at the same time.

On top of all this is her behavior at a rally in Florida, described by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:

It was time to revive the allegation, made over the weekend, that Obama “pals around” with terrorists, in this case Bill Ayers, late of the Weather Underground. Many independent observers say Palin’s allegations are a stretch; Obama served on a Chicago charitable board with Ayers, now an education professor, and has condemned his past activities.

“Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” Palin said.

“Boooo!” said the crowd.

“And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’” she continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

Palin went on to say that “Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers’s living room, and they’ve worked together on various projects in Chicago.” Here, Palin began to connect the dots. “These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes — remember that’s what Joe Biden had said. “And” — she paused and sighed — “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America, as the greatest force for good in the world. I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as ‘imperfect enough’ to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”

“Boooo!” said the audience.

Rachel Maddow played the video to this scene on her show, and Palin just grinned and continued her bush league Nuremberg rally as though nothing happened. McCain also grinned when one of his supporters answered McCain’s rhetorical question “What does that make Obama?” with “A TERRORIST!”.

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, we actually have one presidential campaign trying to incite the assassination of an opposing candidate. The other case I can think of where a political campaign laid the groundwork for the assassination of the opposing candidate was over a decade ago in Israel, when Likkud likened Yitzhak Rabin to a Nazi death camp guard and hinted that he was a traitor who was in bed with “terrorists”. It didn’t win the election for Likkud, but it wasn’t really meant to. It did bear fruit later, when Zionist fanatic Ygal Amir assassinated him.

I get the impression that McCain and the other Republitards know they’re more than likely going to lose, so inciting the murder of the candidate who beat them is the next best thing.

I thought Dungeon Master McCain had scraped the bottom of the sewer yesterday when he ran an ad that tried to make Obama look like a pedophile. With the nursery music and the voice-over that was as sinister as it was dishonest, the ad claims that Obama (the ad tries desperately to depict him as shifty-eyed, like Peter Lorre in M) wants to teach small children about sex before they learn to read. As it turns out, the bill Obama was for was designed to help prevent child molestation. But then, the Republitards are the ones who covered up for Mark Foley when they knew he was cyberstalking teenage boys, and they indulge in more projection than Panavision, so this kind of filth and garbage is to be expected.

I wrote yesterday about what kind of diseased mind it takes to kill and maim wolves from an airplane for “sport”, and the similarities between what Sarah Palin considers recreational, and what Michael Vick considers good clean fun. How sick are the minds of Dungeon Master McCain and the other Republitards?

Shortly after Jesse Helms died, I had the chance to speak to Sam Seder, who was subbing for Mike Malloy. He noted that the paranoid racist excrement being hurled at Barack Obama wasn’t much different from the kind of paranoid racist excrement hurled at Martin Luther King by creeps like Jesse Helms *. I said that there was one low the Republitards had yet to sink to with Obama that the Right had wallowed in with King: fear of miscegenation -which is to say, the fear of Angry Black Men (or “uppity”, as Republitard peckerwood Lynn Westmorland called Obama) attacking white women. This kind of depraved lunacy was the cause of numerous lynchings, as well as the destruction of parts of Tulsa, Oklahoma and almost all of Rosewood, Florida in anti-black pogroms that were euphemistically dubbed “race riots”.

To this poisoned well can be added Palin’s weird obsession with wolves and what do we have as a result?

Oba-Mandingo: The Uppity Negro Werewolf!

Look out! He craves the flesh of white women!

*As Garry Wills pointed out in his review of Taylor Branch’s newest book about Martin Luther King, a great deal of racist slander was aimed at white women who took part in the civil right movement. They were often accused of joining the movement in order to fornicate with black men, who were depicted as wild beasts seeking to violate white womanhood.

Lloyd Alter has a bitterly sarcastic column at The Huffington Post about how Sarah Palin’s fondness for killing wolves from airplanes has endeared to “real” men and other working-class heroes. You know, like the fat sissies with asthma who write for National Review Online.

Here’s a video about the “sport” of shooting animals from the air:

It’s a “sport” Michael Vick would approve of wholeheartedly, just as Sarah Palin does. And the armchair sadists at National Review Online love her for it.

Remember SCHIP, which is aid to families with disabled children who aren’t completely destitute? Remember Congress trying to pass it last year, but failing? Remember the way the Republitards mocked the disabled the 12-year-old boy whose family would have received aid, and cyberstalked the kid and his parents? The Democrats made it clear that they would press for a new vote this fall. This new vote would (a) put pressure on fence-sitters to vote for something that is not only right, but popular as well and (b) embarrass any who voted against it and (c) actually accomplish something, which the Congressional Democrats have yet to do.

Well, Democrats can’t be bothered with that sort of thing right now:

New York Times

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall.

Before the summer recess, Democrats had vowed repeatedly to force another vote on the popular program. But Democrats say they have shifted course, after concluding that President Bush would not sign their legislation and that they could not override his likely veto.

Mr. Bush vetoed two earlier versions of the legislation, which he denounced as a dangerous step toward “government-run health care for every American,” and the House sustained those vetoes.

Congress returns on Monday for a session expected to last three or four weeks. Lawmakers say they will focus on energy legislation, essential spending bills and efforts to revive the economy and to create jobs.

The fight over the children’s insurance program prefigures a larger legislative debate, expected to start next year, over the future of health care and the role of government in providing it.

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said: “We are not going to change any votes on the children’s health insurance bill. We still don’t have enough to override a veto. Those who opposed this bill can face the voters and explain why they believe 10 million kids should not get health coverage.”

The child health program has become an issue in some Congressional races. In almost every speech, Kay Barnes, a Democrat running for Congress in northwest Missouri, criticizes Representative Sam Graves, a Republican, for voting against the bill last year. Mr. Graves said the bill would have allowed illegal immigrants and some high-income people to get “free taxpayer-funded health care.”

House Democrats fell 13 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override Mr. Bush’s first veto last October, and they were 15 votes short when they tried again in January.

Democrats cited several reasons for their second thoughts about the wisdom of another vote on the child health bill. The cost of the bill has increased, according to the Congressional Budget Office, though the revenues expected from higher tobacco taxes are about the same. Under current rules, Congress would need to find a way to defray the extra cost.

In addition, time is short, and the Congressional calendar is packed with other issues.

That’s funny. They had enough time to attend a fancy party the telecom companies threw for them in Denver as a reward for passing the new FISA law, gutting the Bill of Rights -and all for such a measly sum of bribe money.

When the White House wanted retroactive immunity from lawsuits for illegal wiretapping, the Congress gave him MORE than he asked for. When the Democrats have the chance to call a vote on something that would help themselves (even if the vote failed), they can’t be bothered. Can someone explain what the Democratic Congress has done since January of last year that was different from what Congress did when the Republitards were in power? Come to think of it, that’s a misleading question since the Republitards are still in power and almost every bill passed by Congress proves it.