Immoral scumbag Scalia lectures the rest of us on the topic of ‘morality’

Atlantic Wire/Yahoo! News image

U.S. Supreme Court “Justice” Antonin Scalia yesterday publicly compared homosexuality to murder and then claimed that he didn’t do what he just did.

How in the fuck did Antonin Scalia get into law school? Didn’t he have to pass an exam on logic and reason? How did he pass the bar exam? How in the hell did he end up on the U.S. Supreme Court?

Of his opposition to homosexuality and same-sex marriage, Scalia yesterday asked his Princeton University audience, “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

So having sexual relations that others (theofascists, usually) consider to be “immoral” is in the same ballpark as taking a human life. (Scalia reportedly said that he wasn’t equating homosexuality and murder, oh, but wasn’t he?)

To answer Scalia’s deeply philosophical question – the kind of question that stoned, C-average college freshmen might ask each other — yes, one may have “moral feelings” for or against anyfuckingthing he or she chooses. That is his or her right, as sane or insane as he or she may be.

However, when it comes to imposing one’s own “moral feelings” upon others, that’s another fucking story altogether.

The long-standing general idea of FREEDOM in the United States of America — and the U.S. Constitution, which Scalia is supposed to be upholding, is supposed to guarantee us FREEDOM — is that one may do as he or she pleases as long as it does not cause actual harm anyone else.

And no, someone whose irrational (often religion-based) sensibilities are offended (gasp!) has not been harmed. Nor does the U.S. Constitution guarantee that the precious wingnuts shall never be offended (gasp!) in the course of civic life, although the wingnuts apparently believe that they possess that constitutional right.

This view of FREEDOM, indeed, is the libertarian view, and the libertarians tend to bend to the right, like Scalia, not to the left.

So, is it enough that some find homosexuality to be immoral — that is, icky, if not “sinful” – to deprive adults of the right to associate with whomever they please, including having consensual relations, sexual and/or affectional and/or matrimonial, with other adults of either sex?

Our nation is governed by the U.S. Constitution, not by the Old Testament, no matter what “Christo”fascists like Scalia assert.

I find “Christo”fascists to be immoral — they don’t even know the teachings of Jesus Christ, much more follow them — and I find the damage that these evil hypocrites do to society to be much, much closer to murder than is homosexuality, but would it be constitutional to outlaw the practice of their religion?

No, that would be a blatant violation of their freedom, right?

What about the rest of us who disagree with the “Christo”fascists? What about our freedoms?

Scalia and his ilk are doing their best to murder them.

Before we restrict another’s freedoms, we need to demonstrate that such a restriction is necessary to prevent actual harm.

Murder is illegal because the actual harm that it causes is amply desmonstrable. Those who oppose same-sex marriage and who support other forms of legalized discrimination against non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, however, have failed miserably to make such a demonstration of actual harm. They only can fall back upon their backasswards religious beliefs and/or their personal sensibilities and predilections – not upon logic and reason, certainly not upon science (which is why they detest science so much).

In the meantime, there is plenty that is demonstrably harmful that remains perfectly legal in the United States.

Despite human-caused climate change, pollution, poverty and overcrowding and overpopulation in the United States, it is held in the United States that heterosexuals have the right to reproduce irresponsibly, and that to limit the number of children that heterosexuals may bring into the world is a violation of their rights.

Corporations cause untold damage to the planet and to human beings — perfectly legal, because to the right wing, obscene profits are lord and savior, certainly not Jesus Christ. Indeed, the right wing tells us, corporations are people with the same constitutional rights of people (even though the right wing hates the fact that anyone outside of the right wing should have any constitutional rights).

Speaking of corporations, cigarettes and alcohol quite demonstrably are quite harmful. Many even find them to be immoral. Is Antonin Scalia willing to add the sales of harmful, addictive substances to his little list of what’s immoral — and what thus can be deemed illegal?

Of course not.

He just wants to bash the gays.

It has nothing to do with logic and reason, and nothing to do with constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, and the wingnutty scumbag Antonin Scalia does not belong on the U.S. Supreme Court.

He is an ugly, oily stain on the nation, a stain that should be removed.

Four more years (of [largely] the same old shit)!

Reuters photos

I expect little actual progress from the pseudo-progressive President Hopey-Changey over the next four years, but at least during that time I’ll be spared of having to see the Ann-Cunter-like, bleach-blonde harpy Ann Romney trying to fuck us all repeatedly with her strap-on. (Yes, that’s an actual news photo, and so is that one, too.)

Oh, yeah, there was an election on Tuesday.

As I have noted, I voted by mail for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president — yes, practically speaking, as a protest vote – but I knew that President Barack Obama would win my state of California by an overwhelming margin, and he did: thus far in California’s vote counting, Obama has 59.3 percent to Mittens Romney’s paltry 38.4 percent. (Stein, in case you were wondering, is at No. 4, with a whopping 0.6 percent of the state’s vote.)

What I didn’t expect, however, was that as a result of Tuesday’s election — elections, as they say, have consequences – the California Legislature would be on the verge of having a two-thirds “super-majority” in both houses, the state Senate and the state Assembly.

Wow.

This “super-majority” — if utilized – makes the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the Legislature even more irrelevant than they already were before Tuesday.

Not that the Democrats will use their power, of course. Although “super-majority” power, if used to its full extent, would make even the centristy Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown fairly irrelevant, since the Legislature could override his vetoes, there are plenty of center-right “Democratic” California legislators who could threaten any two-thirds threshold.

And, of course, already Jerry Brown has assured spooked California Repugnicans — whose registrants don’t comprise even a full 30 percent of registered Californian voters (the Dems, on the other hand, have almost 44 percent of the state’s registered voters) and whose party doesn’t hold a single statewide office – that his party won’t do too much to upset them, even though, of course, were the state’s parties’ positions of political power reversed, the Repugnicans would ram their right-wing agenda through ruthlessly.

When George W. Bush was “re”-elected in 2004 with a measly 50.7 percent of the popular vote, he called the election results a “mandate.” A “mandate.”

That’s how the Repugnican Tea Party traitors roll: They don’t care even if they don’t even win the popular vote (recall the 2000 presidential election) — they just want to be in power no matter fucking what. They want to shove their Randian, theofascist, neo-Nazi agenda down our throats whether we, the people, give them our permission, via our votes, to do so or not. (So of course if you’re perfectly willing to steal power even when you lost the election, 50.7 percent would be, I suppose, relatively speaking, a “mandate.”)

Votes remain to be counted, but right now Obama is sitting at 50.6 percent of the national popular vote to Mittens’ 47.9 percent. Obama on Tuesday sewed up 332 electoral votes to Mittens’ 206. Including the all-important Ohio and Florida, Obama on Tuesday won all of the states that he won in 2008 (when he garnered 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes), except for two of them, Indiana and North Carolina, which aren’t exactly solid-blue states anyway.

(Indeed, in eight of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, North Carolina went for the Repugnican, and in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, Indiana went for the Repugnican, so Obama’s win in those two states in 2008 was the exception, not the rule, and his loss in those two backasswards states on Tuesday was the rule, not the exception, even though the pathetically straw-grasping Repugnican Tea Party traitors have tried to make some hay out of the fact that Obama didn’t win those two states again on Tuesday. [Indeed, the bar, when it is set by whites, is always set higher for blacks than it is for whites.])

Cheer up, though, white-supremacist wingtards! Mittens did better than John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin did in 2008. They garnered only 45.7 of the popular vote and 173 electoral votes against the guy with the Kenyan ancestry.

Of course, while George W. Bush in 2004 declared 50.7 percent of the popular vote to be a “mandate” and the fascist traitors who comprise his party talked of a “permanent [Repugnican] majority,” only two years later, in 2006, the Repugnicans lost the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic California U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to become speaker of the House in U.S. history, and then two years after that, in 2008, Barack Obama, the nation’s first non-white president, won a higher percentage of the popular vote than either George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton ever had.

So some caution needs to be exercised before declaring a “permanent [insert party name here] majority,” or even a “mandate” based on not even a full 51 percent of the popular vote, but at the same time, to the victor goes the spoils, and the so-called “leaders” of the Democratic Party need to stop acting like losers even after they’ve fucking won.

(Yes, on the heels of his second electoral victory, Obama still is talking about cooperation with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, even though the past four years have demonstrated amply that you cannot negotiate with such terrorists, because the assumption that they are rational creatures capable of compromise is patently incorrect.) 

The Repugnican Tea Party traitor-fascists act like winners even after they’ve lost, and if the damage that they’ve wreaked upon the nation is to be reversed (if that’s even possible at this point [it very most likely isn't, perhaps especially in regards to global warming]), the Democrats really need to stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m not holding my breath, however.

I expect the next four years to look and feel much like the past four, although I expect things here in California to improve more quickly than they improve – if they ever improve — nationally, since here in California we have demonstrated how to edge the Repugnican Tea Party traitors more and more closely to the endangered species status that they oppose so much.

As California goes, so goes the nation, it has been said.

I hope that that is correct.

P.S. Of course I’m happy that on Tuesday the voters of three states — Maine, Maryland and Washington — voted for same-sex marriage, being the first states to adopt same-sex marriage upon a popular vote, and pushing the number of states that have same-sex marriage from six (before Tuesday) to now nine. (The other six states are Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The District of Columbia also has same-sex marriage, as do two U.S. Native American tribes, apparently.)

The 2008 election results were a bittersweet pill here in California, because although Barack Obama had become the nation’s first black president based upon his ubiquitous campaign promises of hope and change (and to a large degree they were just that – promises — we know now), Proposition Hate had shot down same-sex marriage, which the California Supreme Court had ruled earlier in the year was every Californian’s constitutional right.

If same-sex marriage were put up to a vote again in California today, of course it would pass this time — even though, let me be clear, no one’s constitutional guarantee of equality ever should have to be put up to a fucking vote — and it’s gratifying to see that the Mittens Romney-Pretty Boy Paul Ryan ticket, representing the Mormon cult and the Catholick church respectively, were rejected by the majority of the nation’s voters, since the Mormon cult and the Catholick church were the biggest sponsors of Proposition Hate, in their attempt to shove their brand of theocracy and theofascism down our throats, Taliban-style.

Karma is a bitch.

(Just like Ann Romney is. I am sooooo happy not to have to see her fucking face as first lady for the next four years, by the way. Ann Romney reminds me of an Ann Cunter who actually ate something. Why are so many Repugican Tea Party women bleach-blonde harpies who act like sorority chicks who are getting revenge upon all of us for the ponies that they never got as spoiled little girls?)

P.P.S. For all of their post-election sore-loserism crying and whining, the white-supremacist Repugnican Tea Party traitors are fucking lucky that we are seeing a for-the-very-most-part bloodless, demographic revolution in the United States, and not (thus far, anyway…) the actual bloody revolution that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors deserve to have launched against them, a la the French Revolution.

After all, the “47 percent” that Mittens “Let Them Eat Cake” Romney talked about in May when he didn’t know that he was being video-recorded actually is a bit more than 50 percent, we see from Tuesday’s presidential election results.

Mittens insults Poles by telling Polak joke

Reuters photo

Mittens Romney, flanked by wife Ann, tells a Polish woman a Polak joke today in Gdansk, Poland, swiftly bringing the wrath of the Polish press upon him during his visit to Poland. Undeterred by the negative press, Mittens publicly guffawed, “How many Polaks does it take to bring down my presidential campaign?” Ann steadfastly defended her husband, telling the Poles, “You people don’t know a great leader when you see one!”

OK, so I made all of that up*, but fuck, it’s what you’d expect on the last leg of Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney’s Rainbow Tour (Poland), which has been as disastrous for him as Eva Peron’s was for her.

First, Mittens insulted the Brits by proclaiming that their preparations for the Olympics were insufficient.

Then, in Israel, his second stop on his world tour, Mittens yesterday first declared that Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, is the true capital of Israel, which apparently comes from Mittens’ own “Christo”fascism and/or his wanting to please the Armageddon-minded “Christo”fascists — from the theocratic mindset, and not from political reality or from sanity or from fairness.

What the fuck?

As president, would Mittens proclaim that the capital of the United States actually is Salt Lake City?

Then, also in Israel, according to The Associated Press,

Romney’s latest trouble stemmed from a speech he gave to Jewish donors in which he suggested that their culture was part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians.

Kind words for Israel are standard for many American politicians, but Palestinian leaders suggested his specific comments were racist and out of touch with the realities of the Middle East.

Mittens’ pronouncement of the Israelis’ supposed cultural superiority understandably pissed off the Palestinians, whom Romney apparently was calling lazy or untalented or unmotivated or some combination of these things, but shouldn’t it have pissed off Israelis and other Jews, too? I mean, isn’t the economically successful Jew a fairly offensive stereotype?

But if we’re to discuss it seriously, well, it certainly helps Israel that Israel long has been a big recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Notes Wikipedia: “Since 1985, [the U.S. government] has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel, with Israel being the largest annual recipient of American aid from 1976 to 2004 and the largest cumulative recipient of aid since World War II.” (Emphasis mine.)

So it’s not that Israel has received more $$$ from the U.S. taxpayers than has any other nation since World War II.

No.

It’s the Israelis’ culture, you see, that has made them so much more successful than are the Palestinians, whose lands the Israelis occupy, and whom the Israelis treat like the white South Africans treated the natives under apartheid.

Silly Adolf Hitler had it upside down, you see. It’s the Israelis who are the master race.

Politicians from both the corporately owned and controlled Coke Party and the Pepsi Party (a.k.a. the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Party and the Republican Party — I can’t tell the difference between the two) routinely kiss the asses of the Israel-firsters, who have the powerful Israel-first lobbying organization AIPAC to do their bidding, whereas the typical American has no lobbyists working for him or her.

The Israel-firsters are those who proclaim that the U.S. government should continue to staunchly lopsidedly support Israel, regardless of the costs to the people of the United States (such as blowback for such lopsided support for Israel, such as 9/11, and such as how a lot of our own fucking tax dollars sent to Israel sure the fuck could be used here at home).

The craven politicians of the partisan duopoly want the campaign contributions from the Israel-firsters and they don’t want to be accused by the Israel-firsters of being anti-semitic for suggesting that it’s probably actually not in the best interests of the average American for the U.S. government to so blatantly show so much fucking favoritism to Israel over the other nations of the Middle East, and that do so does not make the average American safer, but makes the average American much less safe by further destabilizing the region and by increasing the likelihood of retaliatory anti-American terrorist attacks.

However, there is an awful fucking lot of money for oneself to be made by maintaining the status quo. Not only do the corrupt politicians continue to get their campaign contributions from the Israel-firsters, but these bought-and-paid-for politicians then rubber-stamp the U.S.-taxpayer-funded military invasions, like the Vietraq War, that benefit Big Oil (and other corporations, like Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton), and the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex get to keep stealing trillions of our tax dollars by making sure that we keep making more enemies in the Middle East and elsewhere, which then become “national security threats.”

It’s a sweet gig, if you can get it, to create a problem and then to take money for “solving” the problem that you created, to perpetually perpetrate the problem, and then to perpetually claim that you need perpetual funding to ”solve” the perpetual problem that wouldn’t be perpetual if you weren’t perpetually perpetrating it.

I digress, but this is what Mittens Romney clearly promises us: More of the same. He now talks about war with Iran.

With the last Repugnican president, we were told that war with Iraq was necessary. Now, here is Mittens telling us that war with Iran is necessary.

Look how much the average American benefitted from the Vietraq War! Yes, indeed, the spoils of war trickle down, don’t they?

Except that they don’t. Since the unelected, treasonous Bush regime launched the illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War in 2003, the average American has gotten poorer and the filthy rich have gotten filthier.

The average American sure the fuck foots the bill for the wars for our plutocratic overlords’ profiteering, but the average American’s own economic situation only worsens — not to mention the number of lives lost to the plutocrats’ treasonous wars for their own personal fortunes.

I, for one, don’t feel like dying in a wholly preventable nuclear World War III because of Mittens Romney’s own lunatic “Christo”fascist beliefs and/or because of his desire to appeal to the “Christo”fascists lunatics’ belief that Israel is critical to bringing about “the end times,” which they want to do.

(This interesting paper on this topic notes:

Pentecostalists have inherited and modernized the fundamentalist end-time system that believes the end of the world will come with the establishment of Israel as a geographical entity, with borders very similar to what was outlined in the Bible, the turn of the Jews from exile, and Armageddon – a final war between Israel and all its enemies.)

By far, Mittens’ visit to Israel has been the scariest stop of his Rainbow Tour. When he rattles the saber against Iran, I believe that he’ll use it.

After all, treasonous plutocrats like Mittens Romney never pay the costs of the wars that they begin.

We do.

P.S. Speaking of King Mittens and Queen Ann, I saw this Photoshop job on Joe. My. God. today and busted up. (You need to know the story of poor Seamus Romney to understand the joke, though.)

–

*Well, the news photo actually was taken in Gdansk today. That part is true.

Only Prick Santorum thinks that he should continue his quest

Associated Press photo

No, wait — his wife (pictured with him above in Wisconsin on Friday) also thinks that he should keep going because it would be so cool to be first lady! So that’s two people.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum won’t stop wailing and whining that it’s a great fucking idea for him to continue his impossible quest for his party’s 2012 presidential nomination, even all the way to the party’s convention in August.

In Wisconsin, where Prick will lose to Mittens Romney tomorrow, Prick proclaimed today: “I think it would be a fascinating display of open democracy, and I think it would be an energizing thing for our party to have a candidate emerge who’s a — who isn’t the blessed candidate of the Republican establishment. I think that’s a good thing; it’s a good narrative for us. It makes this election a short election; the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are, not the worse.”

I’m not sure exactly what Prick means by “the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are.” Does he mean that if Mittens is declared the party’s 2012 candidate sooner rather than later, all of the additional time and attention focused exclusively upon Mittens will induce Mittens to lose in November? Does Prick even mean that the least amount of time and attention focused exclusively upon him, the better?

In any event, the Repugnican Tea Party candidate, whoever it is (but who very most likely will be Mittens), most likely will lose to incumbent Barack Obama anyway. While I suppose that it’s not absolutely impossible for the wooden, milquetoast multi-millionaire Mittens to somehow pull off a victory in November, I certainly can’t see Americans chosing Prick Santorum over Barack Obama.

(Indeed, recent nationwide polls* have shown Obama with a 2 percent to even an 11 percent lead over Mittens in a hypothetical matchup, but with a 5 percent to 14 percent lead over Prick.)

It was Prick Santorum’s having led the charge against women’s access not only to abortion (a right guaranteed to them in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade), but also to birth control, for fuck’s sake, that no doubt has decimated women’s support of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential ticket in the crucial swing states.

Reports Yahoo! News today:

Female voters in battleground states are rallying around President [Barack] Obama in droves, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll released [today], suggesting a gender gap could pose one of the Republicans’ biggest challenges in this fall’s general election race.

Obama led Mitt Romney by 18 percentage points among female registered voters in the nation’s top 12 swing states. The gender gap between Obama and Rick Santorum was 15 points. USA Today reports that this is the “first significant lead” the president has held in these key voting states.

Those leads represent big gains for the president, compared to previous swing state polls conducted by USA Today/Gallup, according to USA Today:

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30 percent. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

Recent Quinnipiac University polls conducted in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania bore out similar results. Female voters supported the president over Romney or Santorum by 6 to 19 percentage points in these three states.

Democrats are likely to use these poll numbers to fuel their argument that the Republicans are alienating female voters this cycle by focusing on women’s issues, something which is also likely to shape Democratic voter outreach efforts.

Democrats have branded congressional Republicans’ coordinated opposition to free birth control this year as well as Romney’s stated pledge to end Planned Parenthood as key actions in the Republican party’s “war on women.” (The party also lumps in conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s verbal attacks on Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke.) …

Attacking women’s right to use contraception was a huge fucking blunder that the incredibly fucktarded Prick Santorum primarily pushed. Mittens, who probably never would have broached the topic of contraception on his own, apparently didn’t want to be out-wingnutted by Prick and so he jumped onto the anti-birth-control bandwagon, and then when Grand Dragon Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for having promoted women’s right to access to birth control, the branding of the Repugnican Tea Party as the party against women’s right to access to birth control, for fuck’s sake, became cemented.

Prick Santorum, with his backasswards, “Christo”fascist, papal proclamations — with his far-right-wing worldview in which only staunchly conservative, white, (presumedly) heterosexual, “Christian” males have any rights and have the lion’s share of all of the power – already has damaged his party for the November 2012 presidential election, probably irrevocably so, yet Prick argues that the best thing for his party is for him to remain in the race for as long as possible.

Prick-friendly or potentially Prick-friendly states (Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia) aren’t on the primary election calendar until next month, however, while Mittens should win Wisconsin tomorrow and five Northeastern states (including New York) plus the District of Columbia tomorrow and later this month, and if Prick loses his home state of Pennsylvania to Mittens on April 24, I don’t expect Prick to fight on even into next month.

There’s all of that and the fact that according to the latest Gallup daily tracking poll, Mittens now leads Prick 43 percent to 25 percent among the members of their party nationwide. That 43 percent is Mittens’ highest showing ever in the daily tracking poll in this election cycle, and Prick peaked in the daily tracking poll way back in mid-February, when the highest that he polled was 36 percent.

Prick has said that he’d be happy to be Mittens’ running mate — indeed, after having lost his last election (his 2006 re-election bid to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania) by a whopping 18 percentage points, being even vice president would be a big step up for Prick — but after the damage that Prick has caused Mittens, not only with the women’s vote but with his “Etch-A-Sketch” bullshit, I don’t expect Mittens to pick Prick, who pretty much is the male Sarah Palin. (I expect Mittens to try to appeal to the Latino vote and to the youth vote by picking the obnoxious Marco Rubio, U.S. Senator for Florida, who, like many if not most of his fellow Cuban Americans, has sold out to right-wing whites.)

The chance of an incredibly stupid, “Christo”fascist, Pope-Palpatine-ass-licker like Prick Santorum being only a heartbeat away from the presidency, however, probably would be enough to induce me to hold my nose and to give President Hopey-Changey some money and maybe even my vote.

–

*By “recent” I refer to the five nationwide polls posted on pollingreport.com that were taken between March 10 and March 26. Anything older than this, in my book, isn’t recent. The average of these five polls shows Obama 6.2 percent ahead of Mittens and 10.4 percent ahead of Prick. November is, at least today, looking pretty good for Obama.

Desperate Mittens finally jumps on ‘war on religion’ bandwagon

Associated Press photo

Mitt Romney obviously is running scared, with Prick Santorum running ahead of him as much as 10 percentage points in recent nationwide Repugnican Tea Party presidential preference polls.

Mittens hasn’t spoken much about religion thus far, I surmise, because he doesn’t want to draw attention to his Mormonism* and because he knows that many if not most of the so-called “swing voters,” who decide presidential elections these days, are turned off by hard-right “Christo”fascist rantings and ravings.

Romney for the most part has avoided going there, but with Santorum having gone there and surging as a consequence, what’s a poor multi-millionaire Mitt to do?

This:

Today Mittens proclaimed on the campaign trail in Michigan: “Unfortunately, possibly because of the people the president hangs around with, and their agenda, their secular agenda — they have fought against religion.”

Um, so President Obama is palling around with the wrong crowd? He can’t think for himself?

Here is the breakdown of religious belief in the United States of America (according to Wikipedia):

Protestant: 51 percent of Americans

Catholic: 25 percent of Americans

No religious affiliation: 15 percent

Non-Christian religions (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.): around 4 percent to 6 percent

My Internet research shows that there are about 6 million Mormons in the United States of America, which has a total population of about 313 million, which calculates to only about 1.9 percent of Americans being Mormon.

(The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says that 51 percent of Americans are Protestant, 24 percent are Catholic, 16 percent are unaffiliated with any major religious group [4 percent identifying as atheist or agnostic], and 5 percent are Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim or Hindu. And the Pew Forum puts the number of Americans who are Mormon at only 1.7 percent.)

So we have Catholick Prick Santorum, whose religious beliefs are shared by no more than a quarter of the nation’s population, and Mitt Romney, whose religious beliefs are shared by no more than 2 percent of the nation’s population, wanting to shove their particular brands of religious belief down all of our throats.

Is that fair? Is that right? Is that moral? Is that democratic? Is that American? Is that even Christian? (Whom would Jesus religiously oppress?)

Fact is, in such a religiously pluralistic* nation as ours, the only fair and just and sane way to handle such religious diversity — which includes, of course, atheists and agnostics – indeed is to govern secularly.

To do otherwise is not to be a government for everyone, but to be a government for only some.

Frankly, whenever I hear Barack Obama bring up God, I cringe. I would prefer that if my president actually believed in a non-existent, Zeus-like deity, he or she wouldn’t talk about it publicly. Because when I hear my president bring up God or Jesus, I don’t feel like my president is my president.

(For the record, I gravitate toward Buddhism and other Eastern belief systems, and while I agree with the majority of Jesus Christ’s actual teachings [but I don't buy that he was more than a human being, so no, he was not conceived asexually, and no, he did not rise from the dead, and nor did he perform the other assorted "miracles"], I am not into the deity/Super-Sized Santa Claus in the Sky thing, and my opinion of the Western patriarchal religious belief system [Christianity, Judaism and Islam] is that it is so toxic as to bring about World War III any day now.)

However, the times that Barack Obama does mention God, I more or less bite my tongue. I know that I’m in the minority, and that for political reasons, Obama is going to make an occasional mention of God whether he would do so naturally or not. He is nothing if not shrewdly but shamelessly politically calculating.

The “Christo”fascists have a pretty good stronghold on the nation, it seems to me. But Mitt Romney, who is losing to Prick Santorum — which absolutely never was supposed to happen — at long last has jumped upon the “Christians are being persecuted!” bandwagon.

Bullshit. When we are tossing Christians to the lions again I’ll believe that they’re being persecuted.

As I noted recently:

The “Christo”fascists in the United States of America have the freedom to live their lives as they wish. If they believe that contraception and/or abortion are evil, then they do not ever have to use contraception or ever get an abortion. Neither contraception nor abortion is forced upon them by the government. If they believe that same-sex marriage is evil, then they don’t have to marry a member of their own sex. The government doesn’t force them to marry members of their own sex, either.

The “Christo”fascists are free to believe whatever insanity they wish to believe, a right that they exercise to the fullest. The government does not force them to believe in evolution or global warming, and if they want to shield their offspring from facts and science and sanity, then they may school their little spawn at home. (That’s child abuse, in my book, but they have that right.)

What really rankles the “Christo”fascists is not that they cannot live their own lives as they see fit, despite their ludicrous claims of victimhood, their ridiculous propaganda about a supposed “war on religion” when, in fact, Americans are free to pray at home and in their places of worship of their non-existent, Zeus-like deity, and are free to express and to disseminate their ideas about this non-existent deity, and U.S. churches remain untaxed, may with impunity blatantly discriminate against individuals based upon their sex and race and sexual orientation and gender conformity (and, of course, based upon their religious beliefs), and, despite their untaxed status, still the churches blatantly insert themselves in the political process (like the Mormon cult’s and the Catholick church’s involvement in Proposition H8).

U.S. churches long have had special rights and privileges and immunties that we non-“Christo”fascists do not possess (try not paying your taxes, or blatantly discriminating against women or non-whites or those whose religious views differ from your own in your workplace, for example), yet they cry “victimhood.”

No, what really rankles the “Christo”fascist minority is that there are tens and tens of millions of us Americans who reject their Bible-based bullshit, and, because the “Christo”fascists’ backasswards worldview doesn’t survive the scrutiny of reality and logic and reason, they need as many converts as they can get in order to be comfortable in their bullshit, backasswards beliefs.

If I were president of the United States of America, I never would make public mention of God. Not only because there is no God — certainly not as Christianity, Judaism and Islam describe God (again, as a Zeus-like figure, male, all-powerful and perpetually angry and ready to smite you at any moment) – but because as president I would want to be all-inclusive, not exclusive.

The 15 percent to 16 percent of Americans who consider themselves atheist or agnostic or otherwise unaffiliated with the major religions is a huge (and growing) chunk of the population.

As president I wouldn’t want to alienate even the 4 percent of Americans who call themselves atheists or agnostics.

I mean, there are more than twice as many of them as there are Mormons, yet Mitt Romney wants to shove his teeny-tiny minority religion down the entire nation’s throat.

With a President Romney, we might as well move the nation’s capital to Salt Lake City. (Romney isn’t beholden to the cabal of stupid old white men in Salt Lake City? Well, they get 10 percent of his income of millions and millions of dollars! Sounds like they pull some strings to me!)

And with a President Santorum, we’d have to move the Oval Office to the Vatican, because it would be Pope Palpatine controlling Prick Santorum like he controlled Darth Vader.

Under the “leadership” of a President Romney or a President Santorum, we would see in the United States of America the actual religious persecution that they falsely claim that they suffer.

One of the few good things that I can say about Barack Obama is that for the very most part, he has governed secularly, and that’s the only way to govern the very diverse United States of America.

– 

*An October 2011 nationwide CNN/ORC poll found that 17 percent said they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is Mormon, and 36 percent of the respondents said that Mormonism is not a Christian religion.

**Lest you wish to argue that the 51 percent of Protestants make a majority, and thus we don’t have a plurality where religious groups in the United States are concerned, well, the many, many Protestant denominations hardly are monolithic. As the Pew Forum notes:

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51 percent.

Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions: evangelical Protestant churches (26.3 percent of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1 percent) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9 percent).

Is Prick Santorum the biggest dipshit on the planet?

AFP photo

“Christo”fascist Prick Santorum, trying to distance himself from his strong insinuation of yesterday that President Barack Obama isn’t a Christian and he is, today essentially stated that he believes that humankind should do as it pleases to planet Earth. (It’s in the Bible, after all!) Another great “save” there, prick!

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum, embattled because of his strong insinuation of yesterday that President Barack Obama isn’t a Christian, today “clarified” that he believes that Obama is a Christian, but that it’s Obama’s “worldview” that he takes issue with. The Associated Press reports that Santorum said of Obama today:

“I am talking about his worldview, and the way he approaches problems in this country. I think they’re different than how most people do in America.” …

The former Pennsylvania senator said Obama’s environmental policies promote ideas of “radical environmentalists,” who, Santorum argues, oppose greater use of the country’s natural resources because they believe “man is here to serve the Earth.” He said that was the reference he was making [yesterday] in his Ohio campaign appearance when he denounced a “phony theology.”

“I think that is a phony ideal. I don’t believe that is what we’re here to do,” Santorum said. “We’re not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.” …

Um, when did Barack Obama ever state that we are “here to serve the Earth”?

Um, when did even any “radical environmentalist” state that we are “here to serve the Earth”?

Is Prick Santorum talking about the “Christo”fascist idea of what Paganism is? Is he, in code, calling Obama an Earth-serving Pagan? Is he calling “radical environmentalists” and Obama supporters Pagans? (Not that there is anything wrong with being a Pagan — the majority of them are a lot more fun to be around than are those evil pricks like Santorum who call themselves “Christians.”)

I ask these questions because environmentalism isn’t about “serving” the Earth. It’s about saving it. Not “serving” it, but conserving, preserving it.

Environmentalism isn’t about whether we should put humankind or the planet above one or the other. That’s a false choice fabricated by the science- and planet-hating wingnuts. Environmentalism is about how humankind and the planet (and the rest of the planet’s lifeforms) are so intertwined.

But, if we have to put one above the other, let’s fucking face it: We humankind need the planet, but the planet sure the fuck doesn’t need us. It can do just fine without us, as it did for the billions of years before we human beings arrived on the scene, and if we carry out the insane irresponsibility of Prick Santorum and his ilk far enough, that’s exactly what will happen: The planet will be free of human beings once again, because we human beings will have wiped ourselves out.

The Bible that Santorum — who, while we’re on the topic of serving, clearly serves the Vatican – thumps indeed puts mankind above the Earth and its natural resources, including, of course, all other of its lifeforms. But that Bible was written centuries and centuries ago, and its ignorant authors knew nothing about science. They knew only superstition. Also at that time, the planet’s human population was small enough that indeed it seemed to the human beings of that time that the Earth could take all of the abuse that mankind could dish out.

But now we’re at more than 7 billion human beings, and the planet is showing obvious signs that it can’t take more abuse. The melting North Pole alone demonstrates that fact, and as I’ve found myself having to pop antihistamines significantly early this year because of all of the trees that already are blossoming in Sacramento even though the start of spring is more than a month away, global warming appears to be quite real to me.

Yes, I suppose that it is about “worldview.”

And Prick Santorum’s worldview — in which mankind is the master of the planet and therefore may do to the planet and its resources whatsoever he pleases – is defunct. Worse, it’s a recipe for the extinction of the human race (not to mention the other species that humankind is wiping out right now).

I suppose that Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascist ilk want their “Armageddon,” and therefore they’ll do everything in their power to bring it about. (“Armageddon” is not pre-ordained, of course, and any such mass extinction of mankind most likely would be caused by mankind’s own stupid actions, not by some divine intervention.)

Those of us who are sane and who therefore are not bound to the scribblings made by ignorant men centuries and centuries ago, but who value facts and science and logic and reason over ignorance and fear and superstition, indeed have a different worldview than does the Neanderthal Prick Santorum (wait — that’s probably an uncalled-for slam against the Neanderthals).

And those of us who do not share Prick Santorum’s Bible-and-Vatican-based worldview do not wish to go down the dark path that he would drag us, kicking and screaming. As the planet gets hotter and hotter, it would be, indeed, an awful lot like hell on Earth.

The two Pricks vie to be the top fascist

Associated Press photo

“Christian” presidential aspirants Prick Perry and Prick Santorum falsely greet each other at an apparent all-white-male “prayer breakfast” in South Carolina today. With “Christians” like these, who needs demons?

Presidential wannabes Prick Perry and Prick Santorum, with the presidential primary election in South Carolina upon us on Saturday, apparently are vying to be the biggest “Christo”fascist in the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary race.

Thank Goddess that neither one of them has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever sitting in the Oval Office.

Texas Gov. Prick Perry, who wants to represent the third and maybe even the fourth term of George W. Bush, has proclaimed that to denounce the recently revealed incident of U.S. Marines having urinated on the bodies of their kill in Afghanistan is to have “disdain for the [U.S.] military.”

That exactly is what the criminal members of the unelected, treasonous, fascistic Bush regime did: They equated any criticism of their profoundly bungled military policy or of any of their military failures (such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) to wholesale attacks on our troops by America-hating traitors. And that is the same tack that Perry is trying to take now: Barack Hussein Obama, you see, according to Prick Perry, actually hates our troops. (Well, Obama does send them off to their pointless deaths as nonchalantly as George W. Bush did, but that’s another blog post.)

“Obviously, 18-, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that’s what’s occurred here,” Perry dismissively said today of Goldenshowergate, adding, “What’s really disturbing to me is the kind of over-the-top rhetoric from this [the Obama] administration and their disdain for the military.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta should not have condemned the desecration of the dead, which the Geneva Conventions forbid, you see. The Associated Press reports that Perry today “said the Marines involved should be reprimanded but not prosecuted on criminal charges” — even though they violated the Geneva Conventions, for fuck’s sake.

Prick Perry’s knee-jerk right-wing, jingoistic “defense” of Goldenshowergate unintentionally raises more questions than it puts anything to rest.

Why do we have “kids” in the U.S. military when, as Perry correctly states, “kids make stupid mistakes all too often”?

Why do we entrust such highly sensitive matters to “kids”?

Is it because older and wiser individuals will know that they are being exploited? Is it that it easier to send kids — with their false sense of immortality and their naive trust of authority – to their pointless maimings and deaths in the bogus wars for the profiteering of the stupid old rich men who so casually send our kids off to be maimed and traumatized and to die for their personal fortunes?

I can assure Prick Perry that President Barack Obama hates our troops just as much as “President” George W. Bush did. If Obama did not, he would never put them in harm’s way only for the benefit of the war profiteers of the military-industrial complex and the corporateers, such as Big Oil.

Obama promised “hope” and “change,” but there still is plenty of death and destruction in the Middle East that benefits only the war profiteers and the corporateers. But apparently for Prick Perry, there isn’t enough death and destruction for the obscene profits of the 1 percent.

Not to be outdone in hateful jingoism by Prick Perry, former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Prick Santorum – the evil stooge for the pedophilic Catholick church led by Pope Palpatine who fancies himself a “Christian” and is who is so hated by his own state that he lost re-election by a record margin there in 2006 – has declared that no one should condemn the assassination of a 32-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist last week.

This is (was…) 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who, according to the Iranian government, was murdered in a car bombing in Tehran on Wednesday:

Associated Press image

Whoever killed Roshan is guilty of the murder of a young father. There is no getting around that, whether Roshan’s murderers turn out to be the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (as the Iranian government reportedly alleges); Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, Mossad; or even – who knows? — fellow Iranians who for whatever reason or reasons wanted Roshan dead. While I suspect the CIA or Mossad (or both), it’s not impossible, I suppose, that even the Iranian government killed Roshan.

But to hear “Christo”fascistic assbites like Prick Santorum make such pronouncements as “Our country condemned it [Roshan's murder]; my feeling is we should have kept our mouth shut,” is nauseating.

Of whose assassination would Jesus approve?

Further, both the United States and Israel apparently have nukes.* What if the Iranians assassinated an American or an Israeli nuclear scientist on American or Israeli soil? That would be an outrage that might even be cause for all-out war, no? Why, then, is it perfectly OK for the United States or Israel to assassinate others on foreign soil?

And why is it that the United States and Israel may have nukes, but that any other nation may not? Why do the United States and its partner in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Middle East, Israel, get to determine who may and may not possess nukes in the Middle East?

This blatant hypocrisy and double standard and self-righteousness is why the United States and Israel are so hated in the Middle East, and why we have seen perpetual warfare there (and blowback here at home, such as on September 11, 20o1).

There is a lot about Iran not to like, such as its oppression of women and non-heterosexuals and those who don’t submit to the nation’s theocratic rule, but this patriarchal (and misogynist and homophobic) theocratic rule is exactly what the war-mongering, patriarchal theofascists here at home — such as Prick Santorum and Prick Perry — would love to establish for themselves right here.

And not to let Mitt Romney off the hook; a Mormon president would be a huge mistake. Although Romney’s Mormonism instructs him to pretend to be more civil than are his political opponents and to be falsely nice while in actuality he supports a great deal of evil, if we are going to elect Mitt Romney as president we might as well just move the nation’s capital from D.C. to Salt Lake City and put the control of the nation entirely in the claws of the cabal of stupid old evil white men who rule the Mormon cult, who are no different in (malevolent) spirit from the patriarchal, totalitarian clerics who control Iran and other “Islamofascist” states.

It speaks volumes of the evil of the Repugnican Tea Party that its presidential aspirants claim to be such great “Christians” but are supportive or dismissive of such evils as assassination — murder – and desecration of the dead (although, as I have noted, it’s a much, much larger crime to murder someone in the first place than it is to then disrespectfully treat his or her corpse).

How about we assassinate Prick Perry and Prick Santorum and then piss on their corpses, since such acts, according to them, are perfectly acceptable?

You know, I don’t call myself a Christian – in large part because evil people like Prick Perry and Prick Santorum and Mitt Romney call themselves “Christians” – but it seems to me that Jesus Christ’s core teaching that anything that you would not want done to yourself you should not do to anyone else is pretty fucking sound.

If “Christians” actually followed Jesus’ teachings, then we wouldn’t witness things like bogus warfare and mass murder and war crimes and crimes against humanity and assassinations and torture and desecration of the dead.

I can guarantee you that if an actual Christian — someone who actually followed Jesus Christ’s teachings as contained in black and white in the New Testament – ever ran for president, I would vote for him or her enthusiastically, but no actual Christian will win the presidency in November 2012 because no actual Christian is running.

And nor could I see a majority of the people of the United States of America ever actually electing an actual Christian president, since the majority of Americans are not only comfortable with, but very apparently want, a certain amount of evil in their leaders. After all, the vast majority of people want their leaders to be just like themselves.

–

*Wikipedia notes that Israel refuses to confirm or deny whether or not it possesses a nuclear weapon. I assume that Israel does. Indeed, with the billions of our U.S. tax dollars that go to the parasitic, war-mongering Israel, I’d be surprised if Israel doesn’t have nukes.

‘Bomb-throwing’ Ron Paul wins wingnuts’ New Hampshire debate

Associated Press photo

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, left, gestures at front-runner former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during tonight’s Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Romney was polished and toed the party line, while Paul kept it real and wasn’t afraid to buck the party consensus.

I live-blogged tonight’s Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, the first 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary debate that I’ve watched in its entirety. The live-blogging is below.

I conclude that Ron Paul won the debate, hands down.

–

5:59 p.m. (Pacific time): The debate should begin within minutes… I’ve yet to force myself to sit through an entire 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential debate, but tonight I am going to, come hell or high water.

6:03 p.m.: It’s telling that all six candidates are middle-aged or old white men. These are the faces of the Repugnican Tea Party, no doubt. Anyway, with Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos and some other guy moderating, this apparently is a pretty high-level debate…

6:07 p.m.: All of these fascists more or less look alike to me, but thus far Mitt Romney seems to be doing pretty well, with the exception of his fakey-fake “friendly” voice, which is whisper-like and condescending. Rick Santorum seems to be uncomfortable in his own skin, not entirely unlike how he is parodied by Adam Samberg on “Saturday Night Live”…

6:11 p.m.: The candidates are now singing the praises of capitalism, which they aren’t calling “capitalism,” but are calling “free enterprise,” since that polls better and since capitalism isn’t as popular as it used to be with the 99 percent these days. There was a mention of how dangerous Iran is, which I’m sure we’ll get back to. This “free enterprise” crap sounds just like the portion of a debate I listened to a long time ago, when Michele Bachmann was still in the race…

6:14 p.m.: Ron Paul has called Santorum “corrupt.” Santorum has taken issue with this charge, of course. Santorum also states that he isn’t a libertarian, but that he believes in some government. (Government when it helps the plutocracy, right?)

6:17 p.m.: Ron Paul brags that he has signed only a handful of appropriations bills in the U.S. House of Representatives, that he opposes most government spending. “I am not a libertarian, Ron,” Santorum has repeated.

6:19 p.m.: Rick Perry is on now. He has bashed “corrupt spending” in Washington, D.C., and touts that he’s a D.C. outsider. His claim that he has been the “commander in chief” of Texas’ National Guard, apparently, is risible.

6:21 p.m.: Ah, we’re back to Iran. What’s the U.S. without a bogeyman? Jon Huntsman is rambling now. Sawyer asked about Iran, but Huntsman, perhaps fearing he won’t be able to answer another question, hasn’t answered the question, but has given a little stump speech. Huntsman is as white-bread as Romney is, but maybe that’s a product of their Mormonism.

6:25 p.m.: So Romney has called Barack Obama’s a “failed presidency,” stating that Obama has no leadership experience (I guess that the past three years don’t count), and alleging that Obama hasn’t been tougher on Iran, even though elective war in the Middle East has brought the American empire to the brink of collapse already.

6:27 p.m.: “Iran’s a big problem, without a doubt,” Rick Perry has proclaimed, further claiming that Iran (somehow) threatens our freedom. (It would be the plutocrats here at home who threaten our freedom, but that’s another blog post.) We heard the same thing about Iraq, did we not? That it was a threat to our freedom and our security? Again, it’s apparent that the Repugnican Tea Party fascists intend to use the specter of Iran to scare the populace into voting for them. Will it work again?

6:30 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about chickenhawks, though who gladly send our young off to war when they avoided military service themselves. Paul and Newt Gingrich went back and forth about whether or not Gingrich evaded military service, which would make him a chickenhawk. It’s rare for a Repugnican Tea Party candidate to bash chickenhawks.

6:33 p.m.: Ron Paul passionately has talked about how blacks and other “poor minorities” disproportionately are punished by our “criminal” “justice” system (as opposed to whites), including the fact that blacks and other poor minorities are more likely to be executed than are whites. Paul’s rant was a diversion from the question about the reportedly racist overtones of his old newsletter, but it’s rare to hear a Repugnican Tea Party candidate admit that the “criminal” “justice” system is patently unfair and racially biased.

6:35 p.m.: So there’s a break now. Some fucktarded ABC News pundit has called Ron Paul a “bomb-thrower,” but Paul seems sincere in his positions to me. Thus far, Ron Paul is doing the best in the debate, in my book, but as his views are closest to mine, maybe that’s why. I find front-runners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to be yawn-inducing and utterly uninspiring.

6:41 p.m.: Mitt Romney states that he personally opposes any attempt to ban contraception, although he states that he has no idea as to whether or not it would be constitutional for a state to attempt to ban contraception. Romney states that he supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define a marriage as being only between a man and a woman. This makes him utterly unelectable to me, to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution.

6:42 p.m.: Romney states that he believes that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned, which also makes him utterly unelectable to me.

6:43 p.m.: Rick Santorum, not to be outdone by Mitt Romney, also states that he also would overturn Roe vs. Wade. These men sure hate women.

6:45 p.m.: The topic now is same-sex marriage. Ron Paul has talked about privacy rights, but I’m not sure of his stance on same-sex marriage. Thus far no one supports same-sex marriage, unsurprisingly, with the possible exception of Paul. Jon Huntsman says he supports civil unions but does not believe that same-sex marriage should be allowed. That’s the coward’s way out, and separate is not equal.

6:47 p.m.: Santorum says that marriage is a federal issue. (I agree. Same-sex marriage should be allowed in all 50 states.) Santorum sounds like he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman only.

6:49 p.m.: Romney has used the bullshit “argument” that same-sex marriage should not be allowed because children should be raised only by heterosexual couples. Studies refute this assertion, and of course many people marry with no intent to raise children. Newt Gingrich essentially has tried to make the argument that “Christo”fascist haters are being oppressed by not being allowed to hate and to discriminate against others based upon their hateful religious beliefs. Oh, well. Gingrich has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it to the White House anyway.

6:54 p.m.: Rick Perry couldn’t resist adding that he also supports an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning same-sex marriage, and he is echoing Gingrich’s “argument” that the poor “Christo”fascists are experiencing a “war on religion.” Really? How about we start throwing them to the lions so that at least they aren’t lying through their fucking teeth when they claim that they are so fucking oppressed because they can’t cram their bullshit beliefs down our throats?

6:59 p.m.: Sounds like Jon Huntsman supports our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Newt Gingrich has used the topic of Afghanistan to bring up the specter of Iran, but, surprisingly, indicated that the problems in the Middle East don’t call for military solutions. Rick Santorum speaks again. He still seems ill at ease. He opposes withdrawing from Afghanistan any day soon, very apparently, because, he says, “radical Islam” is a “threat.” (Funny — I see radical “Christianity” as a much bigger and much more immediate threat to my own freedoms and security than I see Islam ever being.)

7:01 p.m.: Rick Perry says that he disagrees with the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, because Iran will overtake Iraq — “literally” “at the speed of light,” he said. (Really? Literally at the speed of light?) Like the last governor from Texas knew what to do in Iraq… Anyway, Rick Perry isn’t getting much air time, and I predict that his campaign won’t make it to next month.

7:04 p.m.: Ron Paul correctly points out that so many of the members of his party can’t wait to, as John McCainosaurus once put it, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, but that he thinks it’s a bad idea, as the U.S. military already is woefully overextended. (Paul did make an awkward comment about how although the Chinese government killed scores of its own citizens, it was a ping-pong game that “broke the ice.” Again: Awkward…)

7:06 p.m.: Rick Santorum seems like he’s so nervous that he might barf. We’re on another break now.

7:11 p.m.: Still on break. In my book, Ron Paul is winning this debate. However, he’s not mimicking all of the others on key stands (Iran evil, same-sex marriage evil, etc.), so I can’t see him getting even the vice-presidential spot on the 2012 ticket (presuming he’d even want it).

7:20 p.m.: We’re talking about the nation’s infrastructure now, apparently having finished with social issues and foreign policy. Mitt Romney is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead he’s singing yet another insipid paean to capitalism, as opposed to Barack Obama’s “social welfare state.” Newt Gingrich is actually answering the question. Newt says that we have to maintain our infrastructure in order to keep pace with China and India (not because it’s good for us commoners, but because it’s good for business, apparently). Rick Santorum is supposed to be talking about infrastructure, but instead is claiming that corporations are overtaxed and over-regulated. Apparently the Repugs don’t really want to talk about the infrastructure, which the unelected Bush regime allowed to crumble for almost a decade.

7:25 p.m.: So little of substance was said on the topic of our crumbling infrastructure. Apparently all of our resources should go into even more warfare in the Middle East for the war profiteers and for Big Oil. Ron Paul is rambling on about cutting spending. Who is going to pay for our infrastructure? Oh, no one, since it’s not important, apparently. Rick Perry is now pontificating about lowering taxes (although without taxes, we can’t have a commons) and is advocating an energy policy of “drill, baby, drill,” essentially, and claims that Texas’ being a “right-to-work” state has resulted in job growth there. The plutocrats love it when the worker bees cannot unionize for better working conditions and better pay and benefits and rights. Rick Perry is evil, and his state’s jobs are low-paying jobs with bad or no benefits, which is why he focuses on the number of jobs, not the quality of those jobs, in Texas. Bad, low-paying jobs in which the deck is insanely stacked in the favor of the plutocrats are great for the plutocrats, but are catastrophic for the working class.

7:26 p.m.: Mitt Romney says that the November 2012 presidential election is about “the soul of the nation.” Indeed. If any of these fascists win, the soul of the nation will wither even further than it has over at least the past decade.

7:28 p.m.: Newt Gingrich has brought up Ronald Reagan. I’m shocked that it has taken this long for the name of St. Ronald to be brought up. (No mention of George W. Bush yet. Not one… Hee hee hee…) Rick Santorum, who still appears to be nauseous, just essentially stated that we don’t have socioeconomic classes here in the United States of America, and that Barack Obama has been trying to stoke “class warfare.” Wow. We are a classless society? When is the last time that Rick Santorum hosted a homeless person in his home, I wonder? And given that Obama took more money from the Wall Street weasels than John McCainosaurus did in 2008, how has Obama been stoking “class warfare” (as Santorum means it)?

7:32 p.m.: Now the topic is China. Apparently China is The Enemy, too, although I’m sure that Iran remains Public Enemy No. 1. Hmmm. Isn’t it the capitalists who sell us out here at home for their own enrichment, rather than anyone in China, who are responsible for our nation’s economic collapse? All of these bogeymen, when the enemies are right here among us…

7:40 p.m.: Another break. Overall, this is a sorry batch of candidates, a bunch of circus clowns, for the most part; Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman seem to be the least insane of the six all-white, all-male candidates. Rick Perry wants to be George W. Bush’s third term, apparently, and again, I can’t see that happening for him; I predict that he’ll be the next to drop out. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum seem to be too similar on the issues for it to matter much which one might ever be president, Mitt the Mormon “Christo”fascist or Rick the Catholick “Christo”fascist.

7:42 p.m.: Damn, this shit is over already!

The winner of the debate, in my book, was Ron Paul. The pundits, not shockingly, are calling Mitt Romney the winner. Gee, if being as insipid as a glass of warm milk makes you the winner, then perhaps Romney won, but Paul showed more spunk and passion and sincerity — and, dare I say it, some wisdom – than any of the other five candidates.

I think the pundits are calling Romney the winner only because they’re fucktards who are going to side only with establishmentarian, orthodox candidates. To them, Ron Paul essentially is a ghost, an invisible man, because he doesn’t say what they think he should say. They don’t really listen to him, but only compare what he’s saying against what his cohorts/“cohorts” are saying, and because he isn’t mimicking his cohorts, and because his views don’t fit neatly into the pundits’ oversimplified worldview, they simply ignore him or dismiss him.

I hope that Paul sticks it out and keeps sticking it to them. He’s the only thing remotely interesting about this crop of backasswards white men who would be president who seem to be stuck in the ethos of the 19fucking50s.

Hitchens was an overrated gasbag

Reuters photo

And only Donald Trump has worse hair than he did.

On Slate.com’s home page right now I count no fewer than twentyfuckingfive pieces about the now-dead pundit Christopher Hitchens.

You know, when Hitchens made himself a prominent cheerleader for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War, which unnecessarily has cost thousands and thousands of Iraqi and American lives and (at least) hundreds of billions of dollars, he totally lost me. He was dead to me then, already having lost all respectability.

In his later years, the overrated Hitchens tackled the topic of atheism. Oh, big fucking whoop! Doesn’t just about every pseudointellectual college freshman pontificate about atheism?

The fact that there is no God is self-fucking-evident. Why the need to expound upon it when many others already have done so over the past many decades?

It’s necessary to prevent the theofascists (be they “Christian,” Muslim, Jewish or whatever) from trying to shove their bullshit beliefs down our throats and from otherwise trying to infringe upon our freedoms and liberties (such as the freedom and liberty to marry whomever we please), but other than that, what’s to talk about? God doesn’t exist and neither do dragons, but we don’t write entire books about and otherwise discuss at incredible length the nonexistence of dragons, do we?

(This also goes for Brit pundit Richard Dawkins, who also has made atheism his bread and butter, although he’s much more likeable than Hitchens was.)

It is the fact that he was British-born that gave Hitchens (who became a U.S. citizen in 2007) the air of the intellectual here in the United States, from what I can tell.

Pundit Andrew Sullivan, who like Hitchens did writes in and about the United States, also apparently benefits from having been born in Britain, but he’s just as frequently clueless as was Hitchens. Like Hitchens did, Sullivan supported the obviously woefully misguided (to put it mildly) Vietraq War. (Maybe the British-born Sullivan and Hitchens primarily desperately wanted to demonstrate their Americanness by supporting whatever fucking war the treasonous members of the unelected Bush regime wanted to pull from their treasonous asses using 9/11 as a pretext?)

Sullivan’s latest cluelessness is having endorsed Texas U.S. Rep Ron Paul – another favorite of the pseudointellectual college freshmen — for president of the United States of America, even though Sullivan is gay and Ron Paul is a homophobe as well as a nutjob.

The real story in the death of Christopher Hitchens, it seems to me, is that Americans apparently don’t have faith that there are any homegrown American intellectuals, and that if you’re British-born or use an affected British accent (like the American-born late wingnut William F. Buckley did), a huge number of Americans are going to regard you as fucking brilliant, no matter what stream of fucking stupidity comes out of your mouth.

Desperate Rick Perry takes last refuge of the scoundrel: ‘Christianity’

As is the case with Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, we probably safely can ignore Repugnican Tea Party Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who, like Bachmann, can’t break even 10 percent in recent presidential polls of the members of his own fucking fascistic party. Like Bachmann, Perry would be lucky even to be considered for the Repugnican Tea Party’s vice presidential spot on the 2012 ticket.

Still, Rick Perry’s “Brokeback Mountain”-like anti-gay spot (apparently primarily meant for Iowans, who will caucus early next month) has gone viral to the point that I feel compelled to chime in.

Many have pointed out (correctly) that the jacket that Perry wears in the spot is fairly identical to the jacket worn by the late Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain” –

– and spoofs of the spot abound, including PhotoShop spoofs –

– and video spoofs such as this one, which is Perry’s spot “gay-dubbed”:

Perry deserves to be lampooned. Actually, he deserves worse. He apparently believes that the way to make up for his own glaring deficiencies is to attack an historically oppressed minority group, as though this were the 2004 presidential election (hey, gay-bashing worked pretty well for the last governor from Texas!). Yet the name of Perry’s Brokeback spot is “Strong.” Because yeah, it takes a big, strong, manly man to beat up on gays.

I’ve long suspected that Rick Perry in fact is a closet case, and the video of him giving an apparently drunken speech in New Hampshire in October pretty much confirms my suspicions — in the clip, it appears that Perry is drunk, and that alcohol, the great disinhibitor, brings out what’s deep inside Perry, as he displays much-less-than-macho verbalizations and gesticulations. (As I noted at the time, he acted like a giddy schoolgirl.)

Not that I want Rick Perry on my team — I do not — but if it looks like a queer duck, waddles like a queer duck, and quacks like a queer duck…

But let’s go beyond the image stuff and go ahead and tackle the “substance” of what Perry actually says in his spot. He says: “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian, but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

Wow. This is wrong on so many levels. Where to begin?

OK, first, I suppose, we need to define the word “Christian.” To me, the word means “one who is familiar with and who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

By my definition, of course, Rick Perry and his ilk are not Christians. They are ignorant, fearful, violent (at least violent at heart and violent in spirit if not also physically violent) haters who are bound together not by anything remotely like love, but by their ignorance, their fearfulness and their hatred of the same “out” groups, such as non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians,” non-whites, non-Americans, non-wingnuts, et. al.

Also fundamentally, we need to ask why Perry is conflating non-discrimination within the U.S. military and our children’s ability to “celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” Perry’s “logic” here is as clear as is the “logic” of the “Christo”fascist fucktards who protest at U.S. military funerals, claiming that God kills U.S. soldiers abroad because the United States is too permissive on homosexuality. (What? You don’t see the clear link?)

We also need to look at Rick Perry’s utterly bogus claims of victimhood. “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” he whines, although anywhere from around 60 percent to 75 percent of Americans call themselves “Christians.” This is a persecuted minority? Yeah, you know, I, for one, haven’t seen a so-called “Christian” tossed to any lions recently.

Speaking of which, there is no fucking “war on Christmas.” I am so not a Christian (well, I agree with Jesus’ teachings that no one follows, but I certainly don’t identify with the fascistic hypocrites who call themselves “Christians”), but I give Christmas cards and Christmas gifts every year. Christmas is pretty deeply ingrained within the American culture, and affects you whether you identify yourself as a Christian or not.

If anyone has been destroying Christmas, it is those who have commercialized it, who have sucked every drop of spirituality from it in order to make a buck, and they enjoy the full support of the “Christo”fascist Repugnican Tea Partiers, so if anyone is destroying Christmas, it’s the wingnutty fascists who hypocritically blame others when, as usual, it is they who are to blame.

Anyone who wishes to celebrate Christmas in the United States of America may do so — but not with public funds (at least in the blue states, which for the most part honor the separation of church and state). That’s fair and that’s just. The same “Christo”facists who want to use our public funds to shove their own religious beliefs down everyone’s throats would go ballistic if those same public funds were used to promote another religion, such as Islam. And how would the “Christo”fascists feel about Muslim prayers in our public schools?

Yeah, fuck the “Christo”fascists.

Perry also remarks in his spot, “You don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday” — is this Perry’s admission that he just calls himself a “Christian” since it’s good politics in the backasswards “Christo”fascist state of Texas? Is this Perry’s admission that he knows about as much about his own claimed religion as he knows about the U.S. Supreme Court, which he believes has eight justices, and not nine?

Speaking of Christianity, anyone who actually has read and comprehended the words of Jesus Christ as contained in the four gospels would oppose the very existence of the U.S. military, since Jesus taught love and peace and turning the other cheek – not bombing and gunning down and torturing and otherwise maiming and killing and inflicting pain and suffering upon others.

Jesus also said not one fucking word on homosexuality, at least not as recorded in the four gospels.

Obviously the holiday of Christmas was invented after Jesus’ death, so we can’t say that Jesus was pro-Christmas and still claim sanity, and this is what Jesus had to say about the public prayer that Rick “The U.S. Supreme Court Has Eight Justices” Perry claims is so central to Christianity:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” [Matthew 6:5 and Matthew 6:6]

Jesus clearly repudiated public prayer as being something that only hypocrites practice and instructed that his followers should pray in private.

We have all of these so-called “Christians” here in the United States of America, and I don’t believe that in my almost 44 years I’ve actually met any more than a handful of them, not by my reasonable definition of a Christian.

Rick Perry certainly isn’t a Christian. He’s just an apparent alcoholic closet case, a self-loather who has wanted the presidency of the United States of America to fill the endless black void that is his soul, and he has demonstrated that he is perfectly willing to persecute the already persecuted in order to get there. Just like Jesus would do, right? And just like Adolf Hitler and his henchmen did.*

–

*No, the Hitler comparison is not out there. The right-wing, fascistic/pro-corporate, “Christian” Nazis killed thousands of gay men, just as the American Taliban – the “Christo”fascists here at home, the majority of whom are aligned with the Repugnican Tea Party – would do if they could. Hitler’s political tactic was to whip up hatred of minorities (Jews, gays, gypsies, Communists, et. al.), and that’s what the politicians within the Repugnican Tea Party do also (with hatred of Muslims, gays, “illegals,” “socialists,” et. al.).