Defining Terrorism

Regarding this video snippet...

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. I mean, they're only dictators as long as they aren't our dictators, right? Why shouldn't the same rule apply to terrorists?

New rule for the Campaign '08 drinking game! Whenever Palin or McCain mentions Bill Ayers and either "terrorist" or "Obama" in the same sentence, take a drink. If they do so in response to a question not directly related to Bill Ayers, take two drinks. If they manage to fit Bill Ayers, Barack Obama and a reference to terrorism in the same sentence without conjunctions, finish your drink.

Special thanks to BuzzFlash for bringing this to my attention. Read his blog entry on the topic, it's far more eloquent than mine. :)

Chuck Norris, Black Belt Economist

So. It's been a while since I've posted. Things have been pretty hectic for me back in Real Life, and what's been going on in politics lately has been... well... too depressing to even blog about. I wanted to go positive on my next post, but it's been sort of difficult. I think I will veer off of politics in my next post which I will try to get out there tomorrow. I'm not sure if anyone's reading this thing at this point, so meh, maybe no one's really noticed. Heh.

Anyway, this right here is funnier than it is depressing, at least. McCain was going to hire Phil "you buncha whiners!" Gramm to be his Secretary of the Treasury -- but that's only because Chuck Norris was already booked to be Mike Huckabee's Secretary of Treasury!

Did you hear Chuck Norris kicked the national debt so hard, it lost three or four digits!

You know honestly, every time Norris goes on TV to stump for Republicans, it really takes the mystique and -- dare I say it -- the grandeur out of his reputation as a mythic asskicker. I mean seriously, the guy's dumber than a bag of rocks. I think he needs to go back to his roots and defend America by beating up endless swarms of ninjas, not careening through political analysis like a third grader at the wheel of a semi.

Take my advise, Mr. Norris. Take one for the team and just sit this discussion out. We'll call you if a guy with an eyepatch or a facial scar shows up and tries to steal a nuke or whatnot, okay?

In the meantime, let's not talk about "economic terrorism," unless you seriously expect us to believe that you're really willing to ship Lloyd Blankfein to Gitmo as an enemy combatant, or waterboard Hank Paulson in order to stop the "ticking time bomb" that is our economic meltdown. 'Cause I'm guessing... you're not.

How Bad Books Get Good Sales Numbers

Check out Park Here and Political Irony to find out how to get your scurrilous, right-wing propagandist tripe to the top of the bookseller charts!

At this rate, there won't be any room at Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste.

Lipstick on a... oh.

Uh... Senator McCain? Barack Obama wasn't talking about Sarah Palin. :)

(Edit: Whoops, forgot the tags!)

The real American Kulterkampf

Just when I thought that Republicans could jump no more sharks and plumb no more depths... well... check out this post on Crooks & Liars.

I can't believe it. I really can't believe it. Well... I do believe it, I suppose. I just really don't want to. If you had any doubt that the Republicans weren't going to frame the War in Iraq as a Christian crusade against Islam, that they aren't concerned with lumping in millions upon millions of innocent, peaceful Middle-Easterners in the same category as the mythical stereotype of the al-Qaeda super-terrorist... that they're not concerned, ultimately, about how many innocent people die, both American and Middle Eastern lives, so that they can provoke this so-called culture clash between the East and the West that they've manufactured... here is your proof.

If you're not already familiar with the concept, I suggest you refer to Wikipedia's entry on Kulterkampf. I come from an ethnic background of Roman Catholic German and Polish heritage... while the specific reasons my ancestors departed Europe remain unstated in my family, I can check the emigration dates on my family's geneology, and I can do the math.

Granted, the original application of Kulterkampf reflected an extremist form of secularism that was targetted against a specific religion. That religion (Roman Catholicism) was viewed as an external threat to the "national integrity" of the German Empire. I dare say it isn't a stretch to substitute another extremist ideology as the driving force (say, evangelical Christianity) and target a totally different religion which can be demonized as a foreign threat to our existence as a nation (say, Islam).

If I need to point out just where this subverted, nationalistic form of uber-patriotism ultimately carried Germany, then you apparently slept through a very important history lesson in school.

If the founding fathers of this country could witness this year's RNC, they'd be bursting out of their graves in desperation to stop this. More than ever now, I fear for the future of the United States of America.

The Avatar of Replicanism...

...is Sarah Palin, it would seem. Jane Smiley at HuffPo has put it in terms more eloquent than I can muster, so I recommend you check out her post first.

Have you read it? And you came back here and you're still reading my blog entry? Oh thank God(s). :)

I'm just staggered by McCain's VP choice. Not so much with her being neo-conservative and ultra-Christian -- McCain needs to make some strange bedfellows if he wants campaign donations from anyone other than telecoms, oil companies and defense contractors. I'm not even surprised that her first major presentation to the world at large contained bald-face lies about her own record as well as her rivals'. I mean, hypocrisy is the bread and butter of the Republican party.

Case and point, this tired refrain: "Oh, John McCain was a POW! You can't challenge the consistency of his positions when he served his country with honor!" Well, John Kerry is a war hero, and that didn't protect him from being labelled a flip-flopper and things much, much worse. It didn't stop the Republicans from attacking John Murtha and Wesley Clark did it? Oh, no, but suddenly McCain is sacrosanct because he was fought for his country and that magically makes him, and him alone, immune from criticism.

I'm not awestruck that McCain chose Palin. I'm awestruck that he and his campaign botched it so very badly. The cat's out of the bag about her daughter's teen pregnancy, the religious fervor of her associating the War in Iraq (who are we at war with again, exactly?) with "God's work," and her ties to an Alaskan secessionist movement. How long did these guys have to do their homework on Palin so as to spin it somewhere useful (or at least, somewhere obfusciated and harmless)? Or, God(s) forbid, pick someone else with the same qualifications (womanly bits, belligerent partisanship, ultra-Christian) who hadn't descended into sheer crackpottery? Instead, they equated "a long and thorough vetting process" with "late night cram session" and Sarah Palin was the result.

Fortunately, for us perhaps more than for Republicans, she is the perfect icon of the Republican Party.