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.

A swarm of rants in the blogosphere...

So. I finally got around to starting my own blog. :) This little corner of the internet will serve as a place to post about what's on my mind. Mostly, these will be political commentaries, I imagine. For the record, I am a raging anti-imperialist liberal who believes that, if government is going to exist at all, it should damn well take care each and every single person in its jurisdiction, no matter who they are or what they do. Government should not be a tool for domination of any class of human beings over any another and it should isolate itself from institutions that do (organized religion, the "free" market, gambling, first person shooters, whatever).

Now and then I will post some things related to my other interests, those being art (drawing, digital and 3D, maybe occasionally video or music), games of various types including board games (we're talking hardcore, like Arkham Horror not Chutes and Ladders, people!), computer games, and roleplaying games. I have a few (some say a few too many...) projects of my own that I am working on, and I will probably foist them upon my readership from time to time. :)

Anyway, please read the rules before leaving any comments on my little blip in the blogometric field. They're to the right. No, your other right. A little farther... little farther... too far! Back a bit. There you go.

Enjoy!