The following editorial excerpts come from an excessively long-winded, blathering editorial piece from an overly verbose, smug, and arrogant-sounding Jonah Goldberg (probably the only things we have in common).. it pretty much sums up the self-righteous air that several culture war chowderheads on the right have recently adopted, weaving in a whole slew of broad, erronious overgeneralizations and patently false assumptions about the electorate in general, and the recent election in particular. I have included my responses.
I have also included some images from werenotsorry.com.. If you get a chance, check it out. You will never find a more wretched hive of, well, mullet-headed rednecks holding big assault weapons.
Anyway, if you get a chance...
They're trying to conserve bandwidth, so be sure to GO TO THE SITE...
and download the pictures from there...
...as often as possible.
JG: The most hysterical part about Dowd's column Sunday (as in hysterically funny, not hysterical in the sense of Krugman explaining why the latest employment numbers are so high) was when she defended William Jennings Bryan's defense of creationism in the Scopes trial, on the basis that Bryan believed Darwinian theory bolstered capitalism. She might have a fraction of a sliver of a historical point (Herbert Spencer: Ptooey!). But to make this argument, she's basically conceding that her problem isn't with creationism per se - normally considered a codeword for the sort of "right-wing ignorance" the Smiley crowd despises - but rather that her problem is with creationism when creationism helps the Right. Now that's a principled position!
But that brings us back to this whole "ignorance" thing. What Smiley, Dowd, & Co. object to is not ignorance qua ignorance, but what the Marxists called false consciousness (indeed, Smiley even talks like a character out of a Tom Wolfe novel with her glib references to "big capitalists" and right-wing "greed"). Gary Wills's question sums up the attitude nicely: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?"
Ummmm...Honestly?
Fuck No.
Okay, well, I can't prentend to speak for Mo Dowd, I certainly can't do a convincing imitation of her tight-skinned, weird, Jackie Kennedy under sedation meets Fran Drescher whine.. Nevertheless, speaking for my own secular humanist blue state self, I object to ignorance, period. I don't care what it's used as a "justification" for. Now, whether or not Creationism is equivalent to ignorance, I'm not going to say.. However, I firmly believe that it does not belong in my kids' public school science class without any evidence backing it up. Neither do "theories" that life came from UFOs, or from the great song of Illuvitar, or that, after all, this is all a dream we dreamed, one afternoon long ago. Not that people aren't more than welcome to believe in any or all of the above- but if they are going to be taught in science class, they need to be backed up via the scientific method, as evolution is-- i.e. with actual physical evidence.
JG: Hating the "Haters"
For example, Saturday night, my wife forced me to watch Bill Maher's HBO show because we'd heard that Andrew Sullivan tore Noam Chomsky apart. That's not actually what happened. Maher actually did a one-on-one interview with Chomsky. It was more like Maher was granted an audience with Chomsky. Maher's style was only slightly less deferential than our own Kathryn Lopez's would be with the pope. Which only makes sense, since Chomsky is something akin to the Black Pope of America-Hatred. Sullivan did a fine job ridiculing Maher about all that, but ultimately the show wasn't worth its price in agita. I had to listen to Susan Sarandon - Hollywood's Patron Saint of Sore Losers - explain that maybe Kerry really did win and that some grassy-knoll Republicans absconded with the election.
But even worse was Maher's mindless righteousness about his own atheism. For years Maher has been auditioning for his Profile in Courage award by saying "brave" things about the unreality of Jesus and the silliness of religion. Every mention of religion causes a dirty smile and joyful sneer to spawn across his face. The other night he was pounding the table with great satisfaction for having the courage to be a "rational" person and hence an unbeliever - and of course the audience was applauding like so many toy monkeys.
Oh, god forbid someone on the left should be guilty of "condescension", much less "mindless righteousness". Has this shitwit ever listened to Ann Coulter? Bill O'Reilly? Cal Thomas? Michael Savage? Rush Limbaugh? Laura Ingraham? Joe Fucking Scarborough?
Nope, no "joyful sneers" coming out of that crowd.
For some reason though, to Mr. Goldberg, the google-eyed dittoheaded fans of the above are, presumably, free thinking rational beings.
And yes, we still live in a country where it takes balls- yes, balls- for a public figure to come out and say they don't believe in some version of the Judeo-Christian diety. Now, it takes less to do so on HBO, of course, but it still takes a bit of nerve. It doesn't take any cojones to be an ego-intoxicated flatulating pundit on the right, in fact it's pretty damn lucrative these days. So why are the fans of Bill Maher so many "toy monkeys", and not the folks who listen attentively to the Catholic Church's dictums on birth control while ignoring all the molestations of young boys that they institutionally covered up?
JG: There's no time here to dismantle fully the edifice of condescension and ignorance constructed by Maher and Smiley (I put Dowd in a different category).
But what offends them so much about religion is that it is a source of authority outside - and prior to - politics. What has offended the Left since Marx, and American liberalism since Dewey, is the notion that moral authority should be derived from anyplace other than the state or "the people" (conveniently defined as citizens who vote liberal).
Voting on values not sanctified by secular priests is how they define "ignorance." This was the real goal of Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" - to replace traditional religion with a secular one that derived its authority not from ancient texts and "superstitions" but from the good intentions of an activist state and its anointed priests.
Shortly before the election, Howell Raines fretted that the worst outcome of a Bush victory would be the resurgence of "theologically based cultural norms" - without even acknowledging the fact that "theologically based cultural norms" gave us everything from the printing press and the newspaper to the First Amendment he claims to be such a defender of.
So Bill Maher- the guy who got kicked off of Network Television for expressing an unpopular opinion during wartime- and who had the White House Press Secretary address him specifically when uttering that lovely little Orwellian line about how "We need to watch what we say"-- only "claims to be" a defender of the first amendment? And I suppose Jonah Goldberg, by publishing smarmy-ass neocon apologia on Nationalreview.com, is really putting his ass on the line for freedom of speech?
Right.
Give it a fucking rest, bub. But, the most offensive part of this paragraph is that, again, Goldberg is trying to tell those of us on "the left" why we have a problem with religion. See, we're just rebelling against god. If we would shut up and surrender to the divine authority of big daddy in the sky (who, conveniently enough, evidently shares Goldberg's neo-con, right-wing, supply side values) then everything would be fine.
I'll tell you what there isn't time for, there isn't time to deconstruct the thirty or so asinine assertions this pencil-dicked ninny crams into that one paragraph. Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" (Jonah Goldberg being the only person who even remembers that phrase) was trying to "replace traditional religion"? Yes, and by placing crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree she was trying to symbolically emasculate white male American paycheck-earners in a replication of a thousand-year-old Santeria ritual.
Where the fuck do these people get some of this stuff?
And I'm sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but while you might wish to ascribe the invention of the printing press to divine intervention, the fact remains that what constitutes Judeo-Christian "thought" and it's theological mind police had a significant chunk of time- about 1500 years, to be exact- during which they and they alone were completely behind the driving wheel of Western Civilization.. (And, during which, the height of progress could be summed up as "Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here!")
What they did manage to do was effectively quash the spirit of learning and inquiry which was started by those liberal sodomites, the Greeks.
It was only when some little things known as free thought, rationality, and the scientific method-- the same forces which brought about understanding with regards to evolution, relativity, and quantum mechanincs- were revived that modern western civilization really began to advance beyond dirt farming and into the form we see it in today.
And as much as Mr. Goldberg may wish to ignore this fact in his bloviations about the First Amendment, the Constitution is a 100% Secular Document, and a good chunk of the intellectual steam behind it came from men who were Deists- a religion which bears about as much resemblance to Fundamentalist Christianity as a 747 looks like a steam shovel.
JG: This is, in part, because the crowd he plays to likes the idea of love while it dislikes the idea of God; and in part because these people feel love, so they think it exists. But such is the extent of their solipsism and narcissism that they not only reject the existence of God but go so far as to mock those who do not, simply because they don't feel Him themselves. And, alas, in elite America, feelings are the only recognized foundation of metaphysics.
I didn't intend to get off on the tangent of religion. I'm not particularly religious myself, after all. Nevertheless, I think the great irony of this election is that for all the talk of how the bigoted Right won, the Left's loss has sparked far more bigotry. Their clever trick is to defend their hatred of the religious by calling it a hatred of bigotry itself - a rationalization no liberal would tolerate from any other kind of bigot.
Right. While you're at it, blame the rape victim for the rape. In the upside-down world of the Republican Party, they are the poor, misunderstood victims, discriminated against at every turn.. victims of a "liberal media" (owned by an ever dwindling pool of conservative corporations) endlessly plagued by "big government" (that they now control all three branches of) and victimized mercilessly by "elites" (when a good portion of their base consists of the wealthiest, most powerful members of society)... And subjected to the "bigotry" of liberals who dare to suggest that women should control their own reproductive systems, government shouldn't be playing favorites among the religions, and gay people should be able to commit to lifelong relationships just like straight people can.
I will say one thing for them, they sure have mastered the propagation of the "big lie".
We on the left apparently should hang our heads in shame, because we supposedly "not only reject God" (certainly some of us do, at least.. although I happen to know plenty of people who are not only believers, but Christians, and take that as a mandate to work for things like environmental protection and social justice) but we also "mock the believers". Well, I'm sorry, but if standing up for science classes that teach actual science constitutes mocking people's belief systems, I fully intend to continue with my mockery. I've said it before, I don't care WHAT people choose to believe in or not believe in.. but what they can't do, in what I consider to be the United States of America, is foist those beliefs onto the rest of us- even if they are in the majority. Never in my life have I heard a "liberal" say that people shouldn't be able to worship as they choose- but when that belief seems to necessitate forcing other people's children, for example, to worship as well, that's when- for myself as well as millions of others- it crosses the line.
No, the real issue is, it is the cultural right that can't abide any questioning at all on certain subjects- and religion, particularly belief therein, is one of them. The mere presence of dissent is considered a threat, or "mockery". The right's attitude towards atheists is strikingly similar to their attitude towards gays. They grudgingly accept that we exist, however we are most certainly expected to keep our mouths good and shut about who we are. If I had ten bucks for every glassy-eyed Jesus freak who has, over the years, tried to tell me the "good news", well, I would be a rich blogger. However, non-existent god forbid that some atheist should mention the fact that, yes, well, some of us happen to consider the belief that there really is an invisible man in the sky worried specifically about your sex life to be equally fucking absurd as belief in the tooth fairy.
JG: Anyway, I should wrap this up.
Nooooo! Please, Mr. Jonah, sir, we were just getting started!
Anyway, some of us prattle on endlessly, for free-- just be glad there's a paycheck in it for you.
JG: Look, I understand that the entire Popular Front of the Left lost - and big - last week. I understand they thought they were going to win. I understand that many of them believed all of the nonsense about Bush's being a fascist crusader and I understand that some actually believed P. Diddy's axiom that you should vote (Democratic) or die. (Although it should be self-evident that a man who chooses the name P. Diddy is not a man to take very seriously. Last time I checked, Henry Kissinger never contemplated calling himself "Special K."
P. Diddy was for Kerry. Ted Nugent was for Bush. I say, we call it a draw.
JG: But for those of you who think your grief and disappointment justify your pious nastiness and blame-shifting for your own failures: Do keep in mind that it is precisely such self-indulgence and arrogance that costs you elections.
Erm... Why should the left have to justify its "pious nastiness"? The right sure as fuck doesn't.
Not since Macbeth was allegedly performed in a sewage treatment plant has there been, I think, anyone cackling over such a cauldron of bubbling shit... Excuse me, Mr. Jonah G. Cock-Knocker, but no one "Lost- and Big-" in that election. John Kerry received more votes than any Democratic candidate in the history of the United States. Even if you accept that Diebold's central tabulating machines could, and would, count 30% of the votes fairly and accurately (I don't- and if that makes me a "grassy knoll conspiracy nut", so be it. I don't believe that Arlen Specter's magic bullet was able to do all those insane acrobatics back in 1963, either)
....anyway, even if you believe that, the fact remains that this was a very close election, and we are a very evenly divided country. 51% is not a mandate, and while the helpful pundits on the right are full of good advice about how us severely beaten Democrats should crawl back into our holes and contemplate how wrong we are about everything, the fact remains that now, more than ever, George W. Bush and the Republican party have no one- at all- to blame for their failures and the continuing decline of this nation's prospects except themselves. If they are right about everything they claim to be, then Iraq will quickly and cleanly evolve into a happy, prosperous democracy, the tax cuts will stimulate the economy and the record deficit will magically vanish, the 45 Million Americans (and growing) with No Health Insurance whatsoever will find solace in the GOP's thanks-for-nothin' "Health Savings Accounts", and the pushing of an extreme right social agenda will obviously fly over swimmingly with the majority of Americans... because- as this author claims- the religious right is exactly in tune with the "values" of most Americans..
The environment? The economy? Foreign Policy? There are no problems- there can't be!- since the Republicans are uneqivocally in charge.. Right?
Yeah.
My attitude? Okay, you folks have the ball. Run with it. Knock yourselves out.
We'll still be here, sucking on our lattes and enjoying our sinful, godless, secular humanist coastal elite lives.... when you're all finished.
And Mr. Goldberg, if I were you, I wouldn't run around bitching about "condescension", "bigotry", and certainly not an "edifice of ignorance"... until you've spent a couple hours poking around werenotsorry.com.
FUN EXTRA CREDIT GAME!
Match the Picture, Above, of the Right-Wing Poultry-Fucker From the Scary Jingoistic Redneck Website, With The Appropriate Name Below:
* "Speed Kills"
* "...But So Do Donuts"
* "Burn Victim"
* "Acne Statin"
* "Learn To Spell Before You Call People 'Dumb'... Oh, and Nice Fuckin' Hat."
* "...You Talkin' to me?"
* "The Brave Soldiers of the Playstation 2 Squadron"
By now, most of you have heard about sorryeverybody.com-- the site where well meaning Americans offer their heartfelt apologies to the rest of the world for re-electing President Dumbfuck. I have not, as of yet, participated. First off, this blog is more than enough of an expression of how I feel, and secondly, I don't think I personally have that much to apologize for. I worked my ass off for this election, and I don't believe that doing more could have made a difference. Because first and foremost, I did not have access to the Diebold tabulating machines that, I suspect, fudged the numbers in Bush's favor... I ran around saying I didn't trust Mr. "We will deliver Ohio" Diebold to run a fair election while no one was looking, but of course such speculation is dismissed as idle conspiracy chatter by the same integrity-laden mainstream media that thinks Scott Fucking Peterson is the most important story on the god-damn planet... Secondly, the stone cold dipshits who actually were going to vote for Bush weren't going to be dissuaded by the likes of me.. Or by Bruce Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Danny Glover or anyone else. Shit, those people weren't going to be dissuaded by the facts or by reality, so what would the combined weight of the so-called "liberal establishment" be able to do? Past a certain point, I think throwing more paid ACT UP volunteers at doorsteps in Ohio became counter-productive. So, while I sympathize with the pain and distress of the rest of the world (just be glad he's not picking your supreme court), I'm not about to apologize, because I did what I could. It's the fuckers who voted for Bush who owe the apology-- to all the rest of us.
Not that they're going to understand that, at least until things get far worse due to Bush's incompetence. No, they're cackling, drooling, and yukking it up in paroxysm of low-IQ glee, as evidenced by the right-wing response to sorryeverybody.com: a pathetic, truly frightening site called werenotsorry.com.. Of course, this name immediately calls to mind Pee Wee Herman's immortal "Hamburger Man" in Cheech & Chong's cinematic masterpiece "Nice Dreams". Unfortunately, whereas the Hamburger Dude apparently had chronic cocaine abuse and a stint in a mental institution to blame for his babbling incoherence, these retarded right wingers have, as far as we know, no such excuse. But the images on this site... well, they sure would have made for some nice Thanksgiving eye candy to accompany today's rant, and particularly would have helped remind us that we truly do have much to be thankful for... Specifically, that we were not born as dumb, and ugly, as these fuckers.
Unfortunately, the 21st Century challenge of actually maintaining a website was obviously too monumental a task for the cro-magnons over at werenotsorry.com, and whatever bandwidth they had available to handle photo transfer has obviously gone the way of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd lineup... ergo I have decided to substitute their pictures with photos of happy, frolicking chimps and other apes. Trust me, you're much better off with the monkeys, particularly if you haven't eaten yet today. We're eagerly waiting to see if werenotsorry.com will come back online, because some of these shots need to be seen to be believed (never were bad hair and assault weapons blended together in such a surreal montage).. but in the meantime, you can amuse yourselves with reasonable facsimile site weisnotsorry.com.
The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush
in the 2004 Florida Elections
Summary:
Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.
Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.
In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.
Of course no one is paying attention... even if they wanted to, you would barely even know we just had an election, from watching our illustrious media sources. No, again, the most pressing issue facing the future of our planet, apparently, is whether or not Scott Peterson will get the death penalty. When they announced that verdict a week or so ago, (and yes, gentle readers, I realize I have been derelict in my blogging duties. The strain of the failed/lost/stolen election was simply too much, and for the past week I have been holed up in the crawlspace under the impeach dubya compound, sucking warm Early Times Whiskey through a straw and muttering to myself in Portuguese while gnawing on bits of particle board and old leather straps. But I'm much better now.) ...Anyway, when they announced the Scott Peterson verdict, there were pictures in the paper of about a hundred well-dressed, middle class professional white people, all standing around outside the courthouse, cheering. My thinking was, if these folks aren't related, materially, familially or otherwise personally to this case, what the fuck are they cheering about? Why are they standing around outside the courthouse? What the fuck happened to their heads that they think this is any of their business?
Now let me state, once and again, that what happened to Laci Peterson was awful. A heinous crime, and certainly the perpetrator deserves punishment, although whether or not someone ought to get put to death on the basis of what seems to be mostly circumstantial evidence-- I find debatable, since the notion of putting someone to death for something they didn't do makes me a little, erm, squeamish.. (Yes, I know, more evidence that I am not a Real American)... Yes. Heinous terrible crime. But. Really. Was the heinous terrible crime really worth eighteen months of non-stop wall to wall fucking news coverage? Is whether or not this guy gets the death penalty worth even more? Some tens of thousands of Iraqis have summarily received the death penalty since we invaded their country, and most of them didn't commit any crimes other than living over a whole shitload of oil... Where's the news coverage on them? Maybe if we sent Scott Peterson to Iraq, we could get the fucking media to tell us what is going on over there.
But Iraq ties in to the subject of today's rant, which is (like last week's rant, and many of the ones from last month, and two months ago, and three months ago, etc. etc. etc.) the fact that-- in case no one has noticed-- up really is down, black is white, and Bass is ucking Fackward in our great land today.
Case in point? I spent the past couple days slightly outside the political comfort zone of my nice, liberal, blue coastal enclave. Not exactly in Texas, but in a part of my state that has a few more pickup trucks and yahoos (although where I live certainly has a fair share of those too) than I'm used to. Wouldn't you know it, I'm not parked at the fucking grocery store the other night for more than 10 minutes, and some shit-fur-brains has left a little piece of folded paper, printed on someone's computer (Lookee hyar, Eunice, I can change the font-- an' everything!) that says "SAY NO TO WAR! ...Unless the president is a Democrat". Now my car is not as plastered with left-wing bumper stickers as you might imagine, but there's not a whole lot of question as to where I stand. Interestingly enough, however, nothing on my car says anything about war, in Iraq or anywhere else. But apparently some retarded inbred fuck thinks these ten words are some kind of brilliant, all-purpose comeback to us "Librullls"... Now, leaving aside for the moment that some pathetic sack of shit had nothing better to do than apparently print up a whole stack of these nonsensical, stupid fucking things, so he could drive around leaving them on people's windshields... What got my goat was that not only did he think this was some kind of intelligent response or argument, he was too chicken-shit to say any of this.. well, anything at all... to my face. Which is a shame, because I wrote the following on his piece of paper, and then tacked it up on a bulletin board in town, so hopefully one day he, or one of his waterhead friends will be able to read and understand my response:
"SAY NO TO WAR!... unless the president is a Democrat.. Well, no, actually Bubba, I would phrase it this way- Say No To War- unless you've got a damn good reason for it. How about Say No To War based on a pack of lies, and ever-shifting rationalizations.
Because, Scooter, taking a country to war is the most serious decision a President, or any leader, can make. And if you're going to do it, you had better be damn sure you're doing it for reasons that can stand the light of scrutiny. You had better not be fucking flippant-- you know, like, "bring 'em on"-- when you're sending other people's children onto the battlefield to die and be maimed. Now, if the person who had left this non sequitur piece of shit on my windshield was anything resembling a real man... i.e. if he (or she) had had the BALLS to actually talk to me face to face, the individual in question would have discovered that, unlike the asinine assertion on his second grade attempt at political commentary, my support or opposition to any given war has absolutely nothing to do with the party of the Commander-in-Chief. In fact, I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, after 9-11, and the President was not only a Republican, he was the same inept, incompetent, and dangerously stupid Republican that went ahead and invaded Iraq based on a series of patently false rationales. Of course, silly me, I did actually believe the shithead back when he told us the purpose of the Afghan invasion was to "smoke out" Osama Bin Laden, because clearly capturing or killing the madman who brutally murdered 3,000 innocent Americans had to be priority number one for the post Sept. 11 United States. Well, three years later, Osama is still free and able to release the occasional music video, but we have installed dapper Fez-wearin' ex-UNOCAL employee Hamid Karzai as "President" of Afghanistan, and while women and gays are still regularly put to death there for their sexual practices, at the very least the Kazahkstan Natural Gas Pipeline is back on track. But I supported that action. I did not support the war in Iraq because the reasons seemed like bullshit before the invasion, and they've been proven to be so since. Beyond that, the Iraqi people clearly don't want us there, so the first step in granting 'self-determination' to them, logically, to me sounds like letting them determine themselves that we should pack up and go home.
So, genius, whether or not the President is a "Democrat" has nothing to do with whether or not I support a war.
Apparently, I should have been thankful that this guy only left a note, and didn't try to slash my tires- the next day, some crazy shitwit in an SUV (of course) tried to run me- and my wife- off the road like we're Karen fucking Silkwood....
Screw Texas, at this rate I'm not even going to Sacramento anymore. Y'all can fuck yourselves, you stupid, buck-teethed, inbred assholes.
Yeah. So, speaking of which, in the SF Chronicle the other day, there was one of these inevitable cluck-clucking pieces by another in the seemingly endless line of self-appointed culture war nabobs and uptight church lady moralists about the decline of common decency in our society.. This particular person started off with the premise that there is ground for political compromise because Americans are really "moderate", then launched into the standard diatribe about how the fact that we can't seem to come to any accord on the issues is the fault of the godless pagan latte-sucking elites on the coasts, since we're way too busy fornicating and eating babies and flying around on our broomsticks. The assertion that really galls me, however, is not that we are suffering a moral decline in our country- on that, I agree with her- but that the moral decline is indicated by things like a flash of titty during football hour. It never fails to amaze me that people can get so hung up on things like the word "Fuck" in a rap song-- because, god forbid, your kid might have his delicate ears soiled with the F-word as you're grooming him for his shit minimum wage job, or, even better, a brutal death in some stupid, meaningless oil war. Fuck yes we have a moral crisis in our country, but one of the biggest symptoms of the sickness itself is the fact that anyone- with a straight face- can seriously try to assert that the moral problem is related to short skirts and too much implied fucking on television. Um, people? You just had a president lie his way into a war which has led to the deaths of over a thousand members of your brave armed forces. That has led to the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis. That was based on reasons which have proved to be patently false, and, even worse, that the people in power knew were false going into the thing-- and no one cares! No one can be bothered to care-- This president took the country to war pre-emptively- something we've never done before in two and a quarter centuries- and his reasons for doing so turned out to be utter and complete bullshit... And what did we, as a people, do in response?
We re-elected the fucker.
Shit, yes, there's a moral crisis in our country. It manifests in an attitude of "I got mine, so screw you"... and "Why should I worry about anyone else on the road, (much less the fact that I'm a pathetic little man with obvious, shall we say, size issues) I'm just going to make sure I have the biggest, meanest SUV on the freeway?"... And these nattering dipshits have the nerve- the nerve, I tell you- to act like the problem is that you can rent Rocco Ravages Prague at the local video store on DVD.
Oh, and the new one I read about today? The problem with marriage isn't (just) that the gays are insidiously destroying it with their incomprehensible Liza Minnelli worship, it's apparently that divorces are too easy to get. It boggles my mind that the same people who want to make assault weapons available in vending machines have nothing better to do than worry about "access" to dangerous things like No-Fault Divorce and Gonzo Porn. (Pop Quiz, Kids!- when right wingers like this guy say that we need to "address" things like "co-habitation", what do they really mean? First one to post the correct answer in the comments gets a free picture of a monkey.)
The moral crisis is, first and foremost, that the people who talk the most about "morals" in our society wouldn't know genuine morality if it bit them on their collective, sanctimonious ass. Meanwhile, here in Liberal la-la land, I see people with right-wing or Bush bumper stickers on their cars all the time. Obnoxious ones, even. Generally I will smile sympathetically at these folks, although if I'm in a really shitty mood I do plead guilty to giving 'em the occasional finger.
But Kerry sticker-bearers, beware: apparently a segement of your heartland "morals voters" have no compunction about running those they disagree with right off the gul-durn road. Yeee Haw!
The first thing I would like to do, as part of my official post-election wrap-up, is offer my sincere and heartfelt congratulations to Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Satan, and everyone else who had a hand in the events of last Tuesday. I will say one thing, you won this time, fair and square...
"Fair"? Not so fast. After all, some of us-- who have not yet had our pre-Nov 2. memory cartridges scrubbed by the combine's mind-droids-- still recall the voter registration destruction drive of Nathan Sproul, of Sproul & Associates, Arizona.. (Wanna bet he ends up doing exactly the same amount of time as Ken Lay, or the individuals who outed Valerie Plame?) We wonder what happened with the 60,000 Absentee Ballots in Broward County. We wonder what happened with the voter registrations that another Jeb Bush appointee threw out because a totally redundant box affirming US citizenship (hidden on the form, above and beyond a signature line attesting to the same) was not checked. We still remember that a massive disinformation and disenfranchisement campaign was waged to intimidate, confuse, cajole, harass, and otherwise prevent minority, young, and first-time voters from making it into the voting booth. We have hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots, presumably to mitigate the disenfranchisement concerns left over from the last stolen election, that now- I guess- are never going to be counted. Well, shit.. I hope at least someone is planning on recycling all that paper.
And to top it all off, what's this crap about Bush calling Kerry a "worthy adversary" and saying it was a "spirited battle?". That makes it sound like they're pulling out of the cricket match for tea and fucking crumpets. Let's not forget the levels at which Bush and his teams of goons stooped to slime a war hero and patriotic American. Let's not forget that Dick Cheney essentially told American parents that their children would be incinerated via Nuclear terror if Kerry was to occupy the White House. Let's not forget that while Bush's shock troopers were silencing dissent and forcing rally participants to sign loyalty oaths, his media goons were forcing television stations to air anti-Kerry propaganda, for free, over the public airwaves. "Fair"? Uhhh... huh.
"Square"? Yeah, that's a little iffy too, isn't it? I mean, do the right angles add up? I guess that one depends on whether or not you're living in a non-euclidian universe. Because Bush's victory, if you crunch some very weird numbers, starts to look a little oblong. A little obtuse. Strange patterns emerge when you analyze the data.. And, thanks to the helpful efforts of Diebold Systems and other heavily-Republican donating corporations who were all too eager to "fix" the nation's voting systems in the last four years, data is all we've got for many areas of the country. As I mentioned before, lots of people- myself included- ran for the tin foil to start fashioning headgear when we heard the Cable News Bobbleheads on Election Night begin dissing "Exit Polling" on cue, particularly lamenting the weird fact that it seemed to be under-counting Bush's results. Well, a couple possibilities exist, with regards to that. One, the exit polling was way off. Some have speculated that Karl Rove told people to lie, because... uh... well, we're really not sure why he would do something like that. But it gives one possible explanation. And lordy knows, if anything doesn't gibe with the official results, that 'anything' has to be wrong.. right? I mean, uh.. the results- travelling to Diebold-manufactured central tabulating machines over phone lines with proven security flaws, using software that has demonstratable weaknesses with regards to hacking... The sacrosanct results can't be questioned, of course... Then you have these odd reports of machines unaccountably giving Bush (but no one else) votes. You have the weird situation in Texas and elsewhere where voters hitting the straight Democratic Ticket ended up voting for Bush.. You have machines in Broward County that apparently were programmed to "count backwards" after 32,000 votes.. ...Machines "losing" votes.. (and anyone who says it's just "unavoidable errors" is fucking high- if ATMs started losing money, what sane individual doesn't think people would go fucking ape-shit? Why are we so blase about these fuckups with the electronic voting machines?) ....uh... yeah, there couldn't be anything questionable about the results, right? No- far better to just trust the media and the government- i.e. the people who lied to you about Iraq- to give you 100% unfettered truth with regards to these mysterious magic numbers appearing on the nation's television screens, all magically impervious to calls for "recount" because, hey, there's nothing to recount.. The numbers are what the machines say they are, and that should be good enough for you-because you don't have a choice, at this point.
Which brings me to word number three, here: "Won".. Well, presumably Bush "won". After all, Kerry conceded, and unlike Al Gore, he's not going to sit here for three weeks while right-wing pundits bitch about him and call him names and clever Republicans make up bumperstickers with his and Edwards' names, like they turned out those witty "Sore Loserman" stickers in 2000... No, and unlike some of my friends over there at Democratic Underground, I'm not holding out hope that Kerry is actually hiding in some secret underground lab, watching and waiting to spring out of the batcave at the last minute with a manila folder full of evidence that the election was stolen... even if it was. And the idea that Ralph Nader is going to redeem himself by busting out of a phone booth, challenging election results and saving the day like Superman... Sorry, kids. I hate to break it to you, but I fear this baby is over. We need to, if not move on, at least deal with reality.
And one thing is more than certain. Whatever happens with these legitimate questions about the election, disenfranchisement, and the weird results, the mainstream media, particularly television, is extremely unlikely to touch ANY of it. In fact, you could smell their palpable relief on Wednesday when they could start moving back to what God created cable news networks for- 24/7 detailed analysis of the Laci Peterson case.
Which isn't to say I don't support vigorous investigations into what really went down. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, as far as I'm concerned. I think the turnout, the exit polls, the widespread voter motivation on the part of Democrats across the board-- makes these results seem, well, questionable. And I'm not the only one.
Will Pitt, over at Truthout, has covered Blackbox Voting Previously, and has an excellent run-down on just how fucked up this situation with the Diebold GEMS tabulation software (which, by some accounts, was responsible for tabulating some 30% of the nation's votes this time around).. Here is one particularly pertinent paragraph. (Thanks, Will:)
For both optical scans and touch screens operating using Diebold election systems, the voting system works like this:
Voters vote at the precinct, running their ballot through an optical scan, or entering their vote on a touch screen.
After the polls close, poll workers transmit the votes that have been accumulated to the county office. They do this by modem.
At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS.
GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time, it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy.
The Elections Supervisor never sees these three sets of books. All she sees is the reports she can run: Election summary (totals, county wide) or a detail report (totals for each precinct). She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden.
And here is what is quite odd: On the programs we tested, the Election summary (totals, county wide) come from the vote ledger 2 instead of vote ledger 1.
Now, think of it like this: You want the report to add up ONLY the ACTUAL votes. But, unbeknownst to the election supervisor, votes can be added and subtracted from vote ledger 2, so that it may or may not match vote ledger 1. Her official report comes from vote ledger 2, which has been disengaged from vote ledger 1.
If she asks for a detailed report for some precincts, though, her report comes from vote ledger 1. Therefore, if you keep the correct votes in vote ledger 1, a spot check of detailed precincts (even if you compare voter-verified paper ballots) will always be correct.
And what is vote ledger 3 for? For now, we are calling it the "Lord Only Knows" vote ledger.
From a programming standpoint, there might be reasons to have a special vote ledger that disengages from the real one. From an accounting standpoint, using multiple sets of books is NOT OKAY. From an accounting standpoint, the ONLY thing the totals report should add up is the original votes in vote ledger 1. Proper bookkeeping NEVER allows an extra ledger that can be used to just erase the original information and add your own. And certainly, it is improper to have the official reports come from the second ledger, the one which may or may not have information erased or added.
Again, this mirrors much of the work that has been done by Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.org.
Democratic Underground Poster and All Around Stand-Up Dude "Truthisall" has made a detailed, and very interesting, analysis of the glaring discrepancy between the exit polling results with regard to the actuals in states with paper trail voting, vs. EV states with no paper trail.
Again, the numbers smell bad..
But, of course, the media will tell you that the exit polling "must be flawed", although how it managed to be selectively flawed in Kerry's favor only in states with paper-trail free Electronic Voting, I guess I'm too much of a technophobe to truly understand. Likewise, I'm a little befuddled as to why CNN abruptly altered their exit polling results, removing Kerry's obvious lead, in the wee hours of Nov. 3... well after any and all exit polling was long finished.
That being the case, the brutal and bitter reality is that we're stuck with Bush and Cheney and at least most of the clowns from the circus for the time being. And what, dear reader and patriotic student of democracy, does that mean for you and I? Fuck if I know. I fear, yes I fear my friends, it aint good. No, obviously we're going to see more fundamentalist wackjobs and right-wing goons thrown at the federal judiciary to see if they will stick, and some of them are probably going to end up soiling the SCOTUS for the next twenty or forty years, that's for sure.
Yeah, we're in for a weird and bumpy ride, people. I don't think there's any point in beating around that particular Bush, as it were.. I don't think it's unreasonable hyperbole to ponder the fact that we may be- for real and for honest- witnessing the takeover of America by folks who truly and honestly want this to be a Theocracy. Who desire nothing short of religious rule, and live as if the "end times" are upon us.
These are people who have spent a very, very long time getting their ducks in a row, and have some extremely unsettling things in mind for the United States, the Constitution, and the rule of law...
Yeah, there are some scary folks out there, in the highest corridors of power... and they're all set to pounce on our Judiciary like a drunken frat boy on a passed-out coed.
And the media's new meme of how "Values" voters left us in the dust and gave Shrubya his whopping 51% MAN-DATE (not that the GOP approves of that sort of thing) is just the icing on the cake, isn't it? Oh, the airwaves are positively brimming with helpful Republicans bending over backwards to chastise us libruls and offer constructive advice about how we can, we must, re-connect with the heartland and the evangelical voter. All we need to do, apparently, is jettison such useless trappings as our commitment to reproductive rights, our belief in the equality of our gay and lesbian citizens, and our funny insistence on wacky notions like the Separation of Church and State. It seems that we effete libruls, living on the coasts in population centers of no consequence, like Los Angeles and New York City, are in deep need of moral correction from our betters in Alabama and Oklahoma... and now we're going to get it. Oh, goody. See, they don't have much use for our secular, sinful ways, apparently, but we are now supposed to fall all over ourselves and apologize for being pro-choice heathens who find cluster bombs more offensive than cluster fucks. Michael Kinsley just wrote an excellent take on this phenomenon, albeit without the salty, foul-mouthed swearing your humble blogger likes to indulge in.
No, I say the Democratic Party came very near- despite disenfranchisement, smear campaigns, possible election fraud, terror hysteria and the timely appearance of Osama- to kicking the ass of the GOP in a resounding and inescapable fashion. Yes, it's disturbing as fuck that nearly sixty million people (allegedly) voted for that incompetent, bumbling ninny.. But as Michael Moore recently noted, we did garner more votes for our guy than a Democrat has ever received, and "mandate" talk to the contrary, Bush limped through with the weakest re-election margin since Woodrow Wilson.
So, I call "bullshit" on the talking heads who demand change from the Democratic Party. Should the Dems change? Hell, yes. But not in the sense of selling out commitments to core issues, like reproductive freedom. What we should do, and what John Edwards started to do, is reframe economics issues in values terms. I've said it before- 45 Million Americans with no Health Coverage is a Moral Travesty. We should keep at that, but we also should do a better job of clearly and vocally standing up for social libertarian values, so that we can catch the urban independent voters with a libertarian bend as they increasingly flee from the Theocratic Republican Party. There are millions of educated, secular voters in this country who hang on a thread between the GOP and the Democrats, because they can't figure out which party is LESS interested in interfering in their personal lives. I suspect that the GOP will soon prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is not them. Therefore, I would like my democratic party to be ready and open, when the time comes, to stand up clearly for principles like the right of consenting adults (note I have not said consenting corporations) to do what they damn well please, so long as it's in the privacy of their own homes, it doesn't keep the neighbors up, and it doesn't hurt anyone else. With this, I mean- among other things- ending the stupid, pointless drug war. We don't need to blow $400 Billion a year to make sure Tommy Chong isn't selling bongs over the internet. That's a fucking waste of my tax dollars. I also mean that if some poor duffer with bone cancer, in crippling pain, wants physician assistance and a dignified, pain-free exit, the humane thing to do is allow it. A new Democratic party will stand up for these things, and pick up urban libertarians. Meanwhile, a new Democratic Party will also frame values issues to rural religious folk like Martin Luther King did. Social Justice. Fair Play. These are "family values".. not obsessing over what your neighbors are doing with their naughty bits. And, finally, what is the ONE thing I think the Democratic party needs, above all else?
...Waiter? A PAIR OF FUCKING BALLS, PLEASE.
You want to know why we lost, if indeed we did? It's because we've played the game too carefully, for too long. If careful mattered, George Bush would be working in a car wash. The guy fucks up. He says stupid shit, he pisses people off, and he doesn't care. He laughs about the fact that there were no WMDs, for Christ Fucking Sake! And then turns around and nails John Kerry for using a word like "nuance". Sure, the folks who weren't going to vote for him, like me, point to it, wave our arms, and go "Jesus- how can any sentient life form still support this chucklemonkey?!?" But guess what. He still gets votes. People respect the dickhead, because he wanders through his fuckups like Mr. God-Damn Magoo, and not only doesn't care, he can't even be bothered to acknowledge them. Say one thing for him, he's not afraid to do the wrong thing. He positively revels in it. So, we as a party need to stand up. Take unpopular positions. The WORST thing we could do right now would be to run away from every principled stand we've ever taken, whining "We have to change the message and appeal to the evangelicals! We have to stop being so pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-freedom!" Yeah, and the minute we did that, the evangelicals would laugh about how we "flip-flopped"... Fuck that. We need to stand up for things that piss them off MORE, and this time not apologize for it. Legalized Prostitution. Porno movies at the drive-ins. More boobs flappin' around loose at the super bowl. Government subsidized medical marijuana from Canada. They want to teach creationism in Public Schools? Fuck that- we want to bust in on Sunday and teach evolution--- in their CHURCHES.
I mean, they already think we're degenerate heathens, but maybe if we stopped being such fucking wusses about the whole thing, they might develop some long-overdue respect for us.
Which brings me to my final point... I think it's time to point out, gently but firmly, to our friends in the so-called Heartland, just how essential us "out of touch, coastal secular elites" really ARE to this nation. You have a bizarre situation now whereby the podunk residents of places like Nebraska and Oklahoma are dictating the cultural terms to the people in New York and California. Which may sound fine, but who brings home the proverbial bacon for the country? Who gets most of the work done? Who keeps the engine of the economy chugging? That's right, a big fat nasty chunk of it is taken care of by the people in the Blue States. The East Coast. The West Coast. Illinois, namely the Chicago area. Places that the "Red State" folks want to give the big, honkin' finger to. Well, before they do that, they should keep in mind just how much we're keeping them afloat. California only gets back something like 70 cents on each dollar it sends to the Federal Gov't. Why are we giving welfare to red states... that despise us? So, with that in mind, many people have begun to propose, in various fashions, targeted boycotts to leverage some economic weight against people who have shut us out from the legislative process in Government. I plan on contributing to these developing efforts as much as possible. And yes, I am more than aware that there are good, hard-working Democrats in the most Red Areas in America. What I would personally like to see is boycotts of businesses that supported Bush as well as generalized boycotts of the areas where he pulls the strongest support, potentially combined with lists of Democrat-Friendly "blue" enterprises for people to support in those regions. Keep in mind... this is all a work in progress.
Must be getting early...
clocks are running late
paint-by-number morning sky
looks so phony.
Dawn is breaking everywhere,
light a candle, curse the glare.
Draw the curtains, I don't care, 'cuz..
It's all right.
I will get by.
I will get by.
I will get by,
I will survive.
I see you've got your list out,
Say your piece, and get out.
Yes, I get the gist of it, but
It's all right.
Sorry that you feel that way,
the only thing there is to say
Every Silver Lining's Got A
Touch of Grey
I Will Get By... I Will Get By... I Will Get By... I Will Survive...
It's a lesson, to me
The Ables and The Bakers and The C's
The ABCs, We all must face
Try to keep a little grace.
It's a lesson, To me...
The Deltas and the East, and the Freeze
...The ABC's
We All Think Of...
Try to Win A Little Love
I Know the rent is in Arrears,
The Dog Has Not Been Fed In Years...
It's even worse
Than it appears...
But it's all right...
Cow is giving Kerosene-
Kid Can't Read,
At Seventeen
The Words He Knows
Are All Obscene
...But It's All Right.
I Will Get By,
I Will Get By,
I Will Get By,
I Will Survive.
The shoe is on the hand it fits
There's really nothing much to it.
Whistle Through Your Teeth, and Spit..
'cause...
...it's all right.
Oh, Well, a Touch of Grey..
Kind of Suits You, Anyway.
That Was All I Had to Say, and...
It's all right.
I Will Get By,
I Will Get By,
I Will Get By,
I Will Survive.
WE WILL GET BY.
WE WILL GET BY.
WE WILL GET BY....
WE WILL SURVIVE.
Note to my readers, etc: Obviously, this was a shitty-ass week. We're still collecting ourselves, fighting off a nasty cold, and reading up on New Zealand immigration law over here... but I do plan to have my own detailed election analysis/bitch & rant session up by the end of the weekend.
Two pertinent pieces of information can't wait, however:
One, If you thought that the results of the election smelled fishy, particularly when compared to the early Zogby Exit Polling data, you're not alone. Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org has filed massive FOIA requests pertaining to the results in districts where paper-trail free Electronic Voting took place. She needs support-- and legal help if available.
Two, We're not going away. We're not giving up. We're not throwing in the towel and we're not going to curl up in a ball and die. I was hoping to retire this blog this week, or, at the latest, Next January. It is not to be, so I intend to be here, plugging away, until that Korsakoff's-addled cock-knocker goes back to Crawford-- be it in Jan. 2009, or when the Senate Bangs down the gavel and pronounces the Worst President in the History of the United States Impeached AND Removed From Office...
The following editorial excerpts come from an excessively long-winded, blathering editorial piece from an overly verbose, smug, and arrogant-sounding Jonah Goldberg (probably the only things we have in common).. it pretty much sums up the self-righteous air that several culture war chowderheads on the right have recently adopted, weaving in a whole slew of broad, erronious overgeneralizations and patently false assumptions about the electorate in general, and the recent election in particular. I have included my responses.
What they did manage to do was effectively quash the spirit of learning and inquiry which was started by those liberal sodomites, the Greeks.
Right. While you're at it, blame the rape victim for the rape. In the upside-down world of the Republican Party, they are the poor, misunderstood victims, discriminated against at every turn.. victims of a "liberal media" (owned by an ever dwindling pool of conservative corporations) endlessly plagued by "big government" (that they now control all three branches of) and victimized mercilessly by "elites" (when a good portion of their base consists of the wealthiest, most powerful members of society)... And subjected to the "bigotry" of liberals who dare to suggest that women should control their own reproductive systems, government shouldn't be playing favorites among the religions, and gay people should be able to commit to lifelong relationships just like straight people can.
We on the left apparently should hang our heads in shame, because we supposedly "not only reject God" (certainly some of us do, at least.. although I happen to know plenty of people who are not only believers, but Christians, and take that as a mandate to work for things like environmental protection and social justice) but we also "mock the believers". Well, I'm sorry, but if standing up for science classes that teach actual science constitutes mocking people's belief systems, I fully intend to continue with my mockery. I've said it before, I don't care WHAT people choose to believe in or not believe in.. but what they can't do, in what I consider to be the United States of America, is foist those beliefs onto the rest of us- even if they are in the majority. Never in my life have I heard a "liberal" say that people shouldn't be able to worship as they choose- but when that belief seems to necessitate forcing other people's children, for example, to worship as well, that's when- for myself as well as millions of others- it crosses the line.
My attitude? Okay, you folks have the ball. Run with it. Knock yourselves out.
Not that they're going to understand that, at least until things get far worse due to Bush's incompetence. No, they're cackling, drooling, and yukking it up in paroxysm of low-IQ glee, as evidenced by the right-wing response to sorryeverybody.com: a pathetic, truly frightening site called 
...Anyway, when they announced the Scott Peterson verdict, there were pictures in the paper of about a hundred well-dressed, middle class professional white people, all standing around outside the courthouse, cheering. My thinking was, if these folks aren't related, materially, familially or otherwise personally to this case, what the fuck are they cheering about? Why are they standing around outside the courthouse? What the fuck happened to their heads that they think this is any of their business? 
Now let me state, once and again, that what happened to Laci Peterson was awful. A heinous crime, and certainly the perpetrator deserves punishment, although whether or not someone ought to get put to death on the basis of what seems to be mostly circumstantial evidence-- I find debatable, since the notion of putting someone to death for something they didn't do makes me a little, erm, squeamish.. (Yes, I know, more evidence that I am not a Real American)... Yes. Heinous terrible crime. But. Really. Was the heinous terrible crime really worth eighteen months of non-stop wall to wall fucking news coverage? Is whether or not this guy gets the death penalty worth even more? 
Some tens of thousands of Iraqis have summarily received the death penalty since we invaded their country, and most of them didn't commit any crimes other than living over a whole shitload of oil... Where's the news coverage on them? Maybe if we sent Scott Peterson to Iraq, we could get the fucking media to tell us what is going on over there.
Now my car is not as plastered with left-wing bumper stickers as you might imagine, but there's not a whole lot of question as to where I stand. Interestingly enough, however, nothing on my car says anything about war, in Iraq or anywhere else. But apparently some retarded inbred fuck thinks these ten words are some kind of brilliant, all-purpose comeback to us "Librullls"... Now, leaving aside for the moment that some pathetic sack of shit had nothing better to do than apparently print up a whole stack of these nonsensical, stupid fucking things, so he could drive around leaving them on people's windshields... What got my goat was that not only did he think this was some kind of intelligent response or argument, he was too chicken-shit to say any of this.. well, anything at all... to my face. Which is a shame, because I wrote the following on his piece of paper, and then tacked it up on a bulletin board in town, so hopefully one day he, or one of his waterhead friends will be able to read and understand my response:
"SAY NO TO WAR!... unless the president is a Democrat.. Well, no, actually Bubba, I would phrase it this way- Say No To War- unless you've got a damn good reason for it.
In fact, I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, after 9-11, and the President was not only a Republican, he was the same inept, incompetent, and dangerously stupid Republican that went ahead and invaded Iraq based on a series of patently false rationales. Of course, silly me, I did actually believe the shithead back when he told us the purpose of the Afghan invasion was to "smoke out" Osama Bin Laden, because clearly capturing or killing the madman who brutally murdered 3,000 innocent Americans had to be priority number one for the post Sept. 11 United States. Well, three years later, Osama is still free and able to release the occasional music video, but we have installed dapper Fez-wearin' ex-UNOCAL employee Hamid Karzai as "President" of Afghanistan, and while women and gays are still regularly put to death there for their sexual practices, at the very least the Kazahkstan Natural Gas Pipeline is back on track. But I supported that action. I did not support the war in Iraq because the reasons seemed like bullshit before the invasion, and they've been proven to be so since. Beyond that, the Iraqi people clearly don't want us there, so the first step in granting 'self-determination' to them, logically, to me sounds like letting them determine themselves that we should pack up and go home.
Apparently, I should have been thankful that this guy only left a note, and didn't try to slash my tires- the next day, some crazy shitwit in an SUV (of course) tried to run me- and my wife- off the road like we're Karen fucking Silkwood.... 
The assertion that really galls me, however, is not that we are suffering a moral decline in our country- on that, I agree with her- but that the moral decline is indicated by things like a flash of titty during football hour. It never fails to amaze me that people can get so hung up on things like the word "Fuck" in a rap song-- because, god forbid, your kid might have his delicate ears soiled with the F-word as you're grooming him for his shit minimum wage job, or, even better, a brutal death in some stupid, meaningless oil war. Fuck yes we have a moral crisis in our country, but one of the biggest symptoms of the sickness itself is the fact that anyone- with a straight face- can seriously try to assert that the moral problem is related to short skirts and too much implied fucking on television. Um, people? You just had a president lie his way into a war which has led to the deaths of over a thousand members of your brave armed forces. That has led to the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis. That was based on reasons which have proved to be patently false, and, even worse, that the people in power knew were false going into the thing-- and no one cares! No one can be bothered to care-- This president took the country to war pre-emptively- something we've never done before in two and a quarter centuries- and his reasons for doing so turned out to be utter and complete bullshit... And what did we, as a people, do in response?
We re-elected the fucker.
And to top it all off, what's this crap about Bush calling Kerry a "worthy adversary" and saying it was a "spirited battle?". That makes it sound like they're pulling out of the cricket match for tea and fucking crumpets. Let's not forget the levels at which Bush and his teams of goons stooped to slime a war hero and patriotic American. Let's not forget that Dick Cheney essentially told American parents that their children would be incinerated via Nuclear terror if Kerry was to occupy the White House. Let's not forget that while Bush's shock troopers were silencing dissent and forcing rally participants to sign loyalty oaths, his media goons were forcing television stations to air anti-Kerry propaganda, for free, over the public airwaves. "Fair"? Uhhh... huh.
Yeah, we're in for a weird and bumpy ride, people. I don't think there's any point in beating around that particular Bush, as it were.. I don't think it's unreasonable hyperbole to ponder the fact that we may be- for real and for honest- witnessing the takeover of America by folks who truly and honestly want this to be a Theocracy. Who desire nothing short of religious rule, and live as if the "end times" are upon us.
And the media's new meme of how "Values" voters left us in the dust and gave Shrubya his whopping 51% MAN-DATE (not that the GOP approves of that sort of thing) is just the icing on the cake, isn't it? Oh, the airwaves are positively brimming with helpful Republicans bending over backwards to chastise us libruls and offer constructive advice about how we can, we must, re-connect with the heartland and the evangelical voter. All we need to do, apparently, is jettison such useless trappings as our commitment to reproductive rights, our belief in the equality of our gay and lesbian citizens, and our funny insistence on wacky notions like the Separation of Church and State. It seems that we effete libruls, living on the coasts in population centers of no consequence, like Los Angeles and New York City, are in deep need of moral correction from our betters in Alabama and Oklahoma... and now we're going to get it. Oh, goody. See, they don't have much use for our secular, sinful ways, apparently, but we are now supposed to fall all over ourselves and apologize for being pro-choice heathens who find cluster bombs more offensive than cluster fucks. 
