Will the Paris attacks bring back the ‘war on terror’? (The right hopes so!)

Associated Press photo

ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a Paris Starbucks yesterday because the Starbucks’ cups were not sufficiently religious. (Kidding! That’s called political satire. The caption for this news photo is: “Victims lay on the pavement outside a Paris restaurant, Friday, November 13, 2015. Police officials in France on Friday report multiple terror incidents, leaving many dead. It was unclear at this stage if the events are linked.” [It is fairly clear now that they were linked.])

I hate ISIS. Always have, always will, and my general feeling toward the members of ISIS long has been pound them into the sand.

It’s not that the members of ISIS call themselves Muslim; it’s that they oppress and slaughter those who do not share their insane religious beliefs — you know, they do what the “Christo”fascists here at home would do if they could. It’s not the specific religion of the members of ISIS that bothers me; it’s their theofascism, their insane, self-righteous, yes, evil belief that their insane religious beliefs give them the right to treat others any way that they please, in the name of a non-existent “God.”

That said, it’s important not to reduce it to black and white, good vs. evil. It’s important to try to view the entire context.

France, along with Britain and the United States (and Spain and some other European nations), has a long history of colonization and of meddling in the affairs of other nations, including in the Middle East. It’s much more complicated than that the members of ISIS are just “evil” and want to strike out at us “good” (that is, “Christian”) Westerners, because that’s just what “evil” people do: strike out at “good” people. No, it isn’t just that “they hate our freedoms.”

Yes, I bring up the ghost of Gee Dubya because I’ll be frank: The United States of America has been rotting from within for many, many years now. This domestic rot started no later than during the Reagan era. “Democrat” Bill Clinton did little to nothing to reverse this rot and decline, and then we had eight long, ruinous years of another George Bush, and now we’re still in another eight years of the Clintonesque/do-nothing/Democratic-in-name-only Barack Obama era.

Thus far in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the main focus, quite appropriately, has been on domestic issues.

Then ISIS goes and attacks Paris, killing at least 127 people. (ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks of yesterday, anyway.)

The French seem prepared to strike back, which is quite human and is understandable, but which quite possibly will start a back-and-forth blood bath that will drag on.

Which will mean that very quickly, the focus in the United States of America no longer will be trying to reverse our domestic rot, but once again will turn toward “terrorism,” because we Americans, first and foremost, don’t want to be bombed or riddled with bullets when we’re out and about shopping for overpriced shit that we don’t need in our mega-malls, drinking our caffeinated hot beverages from our not-Christmas-enough Starbucks cups, or watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster or Oscar bait at a cineplex.

Our chance of being slaughtered by a fellow “Christian” citizen is much higher than is our chance of ever being cut down by an “Islamofascist” “terrorist” (or by an “illegal”), but no matter; we Americans never have been good at calculating actual risks vs. vastly over-inflated risks. (After all, They hate our freedoms!)

I am sorry that dozens of human beings were slaughtered in Paris yesterday. I don’t believe in killing innocents* in order to try to score political points, whether those innocents are killed by “Islamofascist” “terrorists” or by the U.S. military (funny how when the United States government kills innocent people in order to make political gains, which it does routinely, that’s never called “terrorism” [nor is the mass-murderous Israel even capable of “terrorism,” because, like the United States, Israel is “good”]).

While I understand the stance of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists that France and other Western nations are evil because they long have participated in the colonization of and military attacks upon predominantly Muslim nations in the Middle East, the “Islamofascists” apparently also dislike the Western nations more or less equally because the Western nations aren’t backasswards like the Islamic fundamentalists are, such as with their misogyny, their homophobia, their sexual repression and their religious intolerance (including severe but awfully selective scriptural enforcement) to the point of routine violence against “apostates.”

I mean, in its online statement claiming responsibility for the attacks on Paris yesterday, ISIS referred to Paris as a/the “capital of adultery and vice.”

ISIS further declared, “The stench of death will not leave their noses as long as they remain at the forefront of the Crusaders’ campaign, dare to curse our prophet, boast of a war on Islam in France, and strike Muslims in the lands of the caliphate with warplanes that were of no use to them in the streets and rotten alleys of Paris.”

ISIS also proclaimed that France “will remain at the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State.”

My impression is that France is at “the top of the list” for several reasons: One, it has more Muslim inhabitants (percentage-wise) than does any other Western nation; two, apparently there long has been widespread mistreatment of and discrimination against Muslims in “innocent” France; and, of course, France is much geographically closer to the Middle East than are other Western nations (especially the United States, of course), making France, logistically, an easier target for terrorist attacks.

My hope is that things calm down in France quickly, that tit-for-tat bloodshed doesn’t occur, and that the United States of America continues to focus on its domestic crises instead of returning to the days of the unelected, fascistic George W. Bush regime when the “war on terror” eclipsed everything, while the filthy rich continued to get even richer from stealing even more from us, the distracted-by-the-“war-on-terror” masses, and while things here at home continued to deteriorate while we focused on the “terrorists” abroad (yes, the billions and billions of our dollars that went to the war machine — mostly, to the treasonous war profiteers [a.k.a. “contractors”], such as the folks at Dick Cheney’s Halliburton — were billions and billions of our dollars that never went to our public schools, to our streets and other public infrastructure, to our health-care needs, to food, to shelter, to environmental protection, to job creation, etc.).

The Repugnican Tea Party would love for the national discussion to pivot from its current, rare focus on domestic issues and to return instead to the “war on terror.” Because that’s where the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are most comfortable, are most in their fear-based element: spooking the masses by some “enemy” “threat,” be it the often-brown-skinned “illegals” from south of the border or be it the often-brown-skinned “Islamofascist” “terrorists” from abroad come to kill us because “they hate our freedoms.”

This use of trumped-up/Trumped-up fear allows the home-grown, right-wing traitors (and yes, terrorists) right here among us at home to, even literally, get away with murder, to run rampant with their treasonous, right-wing crimes in a nation whose masses are distracted from wildly overblown concerns of harm from without, when the real harm, as almost always, actually is from within.

We truly patriotic Americans allow our nation to return to the right-wing mindset of a “war on terror” at our own peril.

We can stop it.

We simply do what we did not do last time: We stand up and we say: Oh, hell no!

—

*Yes, I get it that there are gradations of innocence.

One could argue, as the “Islamofascists” do argue, that merely to be a citizen of a Western nation that militarily attacks in the Middle East is to be guilty by complacency (if not merely by association), that is, the citizens of the Western nations, this line of thought goes, allow their nation’s military forces to strike the Middle East, and therefore, they aren’t innocent, but do have blood on their hands.

However, when it comes to revenge, I don’t believe in group revenge. If an individual grievously harms another individual, I can see revenge being taken upon the individual who actually perpetrated the harm him- or herself. But to hold an entire group of people accountable for harm done to other people whom they’ve never even encountered — harm that was perpetrated by other people whom they’ve never even encountered — is bullshit. It’s not justice. At best, it’s very, very sloppy revenge.

Sanders and Trump represent hope and fear as responses to the nation’s crises

Both are older white men who have interesting hair and who appeal to disenfranchised voters, but that’s where the similarities between democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and fascist Donald Trump end. Presidential aspirants Trump and Sanders appear to be the natural result of the United States’ increasing political polarization and long slide into fascism, with the right trying to strengthen fascism and the left (the true left, not the center-right bullshit exemplified by the Clinton Dynasty and the hopey-changey Barack Obama) trying to destroy it and bring about an equitable system that benefits the highest possible number of people instead of only the plutocratic few at the expense of the masses.

The United States of America is in crisis, as it has been for some time now — arguably, it has been in crisis since its founding (ask the Native Americans, among many others) — and the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump represent the two main responses to crises: hope and fear, the higher response and the lower response, respectively.

Hope and fear as responses to crises come from correctly identifying the sources of the crises and from incorrectly identifying the sources.

Donald Trump & Co. quite incorrectly have identified the main source of the United States’ ills as “criminal” Mexicans who come to the United States to rape our pristine young white women and to drop their “anchor babies” — the brown-skinned hordes whom we must fear and against whom We Must Build a Great Wall.

Bernie Sanders correctly has identified the main source of the United States’ ills as the billionaires who (in no certain order) don’t want to pay workers living wages, who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes, who don’t care about workers’ conditions, who want to wipe out what’s left of our labor unions, and who don’t give a fuck about the environment that they devastate for their personal profiteering.

It’s the treasonous plutocrats, not impoverished immigrants, who have been destroying the nation since at least the days of the fascist Repugnican President Ronald Reagan. The vast majority of the wealth of the American working class and what’s left of the middle class has been going upward, to the plutocrats like Donald Trump and his treasonous ilk, not downward to the impoverished, including immigrants from Latin America. (Indeed, if it were, they wouldn’t still be impoverished. The wealth is going to those who are only getting richer and richer, obviously.)

But the “tea party” fucktards, like chickens idolizing Colonel Sanders, refuse to recognize this obvious fact, and, because one day they’d like to be like Colonel Sanders themselves, they worship Colonel Sanders. This is the dynamic that we’re seeing with Donald Trump: He’s Colonel Sanders (no relation whatsoever to Bernie Sanders) and his supporters are the chickens.

Donald Trump appeals to the base ignorance, fear and hatred, the bigotry and xenophobia, of the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging fucktards — most of them white supremacists and jingoistic nationalists, most of whom would say that they are members of the “tea party” (or at least sympathize with it) — who are his followers and who are the psychospiritual (if not in some cases the actual) descendants of the Nazi Germans.

Even though most of Trump’s followers experience financial distress because of him and his fellow treasonous millionaires and billionaires, their lottery mentality leads them to believe that they, too, might become filthy rich one day (um, they will not), and because their juvenile jingoism is so easy to appeal to, all that Trump has to do is pose with a bald eagle and they orgasm.

The rise of Trump can’t be a huge surprise in a nation that has been sliding toward fascism for some time now. Lest you think that I’m tossing around the hippie term “fascism” lightly, know that one scholar defined “fascism” as “the government of the financial capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary slice of peasantry and intelligentsia. Fascism in its foreign policy is the most brutal kind of chauvinism, which cultivates zoological hatred against other peoples.”

Yeah, that would describe a President Trump to a “T.” (Not that he’s the only fascist running for the White House; Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, et. al., are fascists all, and even Billary Clinton is at least Fascist Lite [doing little to nothing to counter fascism is pretty fascist in itself].)

I expect Trump to implode eventually — that is, I at least moderately doubt that he’ll ever sit in the Oval Office — but his current campaign, with anti-Latino-immigrant sentiment as its centerpiece, is chillingly reminiscent of the Nazi Germans’ scapegoating use of anti-Jewish sentiment to gain political power for themselves, no matter the brutal cost to their victims.

I, for one, would not idly stand by while a President Trump and his Schutzstaffel rounded up Latinos for persecution.

Trump leads the fascist, treasonous Repugnican Tea Party presidential pack by double digits in most recent polls, so it’s too early to dismiss him entirely. It seems to me that he could emerge as the party’s presidential nominee, but what I’m hoping is that the party’s panicked establishmentarians push him out of the primary race, piss him off by doing so, and so he runs as an independent presidential candidate, siphoning off votes from the Repugnican Tea Party establishment’s candidate.

Which would be a path to the White House for Bernie Sanders, should he emerge as the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee, as even the Millennial snobs at fivethirtyeight.com recently finally have acknowledged might actually happen. (Interestingly, one of them, in their online debate/discussion, even makes the point that I made last month: since John Kerry came back from the dead after having won Iowa and then New Hampshire in early 2004, winning him the vast majority of the rest of the states in toppling-dominoes fashion, why wouldn’t the same happen for Bernie Sanders?)

Speaking of Bernie, while fear, represented by the face (and that hair) of Donald Trump, is doing well on the right, hope, represented by the progressive agenda of Bernie Sanders, is doing well on the left.

Two recent nationwide polls of Democrats and Democratic leaners have Billary Clinton down by about 10 percent and Bernie Sanders up by about 10 percent in just a one-month period, from last month to this month.

A CNN/ORC nationwide poll taken August 13-16 puts Billary at 47 percent, down from the 56 percent she’d received in a CNN/ORC nationwide poll taken July 22-25. The August 13-16 poll puts Bernie at 29 percent, up from the 19 percent he’d received in the July 22-25 poll.

An August 11-13 Fox News nationwide poll puts Billary at 49 percent, down from the 59 percent she’d received in a Fox News nationwide poll taken July 13-15. The August 11-13 poll puts Bernie at 30 percent, up from the 19 percent he’d received in the July 13-15 poll.

The two independent nationwide polls average 9.5 percent down for Billary in just one month, and 10.5 percent up for Bernie in just one month.

That’s a lot of movement in just one month.

As I’ve noted, I welcome Veep Joe Biden to become a Johnny-come-lately in the race; his support would only further erode the support for Billary, I surmise, and that’s because while he and Billary are closely associated with the disappointing Barack Obama — the answer to Sarah Palin’s infamous, snarky question, “How’s that hopey-changey stuff working out?” is “Not very well, but that’s because the crypto-center-right Obama never actually even tried to actually deliver on his promises of hope and change” — Bernie Sanders, who his entire career in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate has been an independent, the lone democratic socialist, truthfully can say that he’s been outside of the Democratic Party establishment.

Sanders and Trump are only superficially alike in that both of them are surging because a huge chunk of the electorate have had it with establishmentarian, duopolistic partisan politics. They correctly recognize that the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party stopped representing the best interests of the vast majority of Americans long ago.

But, again, the Trump side, in order to stoke up ungrounded fear for political gain, blames the wrong people for our crises — those on the Trump side, as all bullies do, pick on the weaker, on those who can’t much fight back — whereas the Sanders side blames the right people for our crises.

And that fight, which is the right fight, the good fight, is the much harder fight to fight, because our opponents — the treasonous plutocrats (like Trump), who of course would rather have us wrongly persecute immigrants than correctly come after them with our torches and pitchforks — aren’t weak, not financially, not politically.

But they are incredibly morally weak, and they are vastly outnumbered, which makes them defeatable.

We of the left could use the Colonel-Sanders-worshipping chickens on our side instead of on Colonel Sanders’ side, but we continue to fight even for them without them.

Because Barack Obama, Billary Clinton and the rest of the establishmentarian Democrats in name only, despite their betrayals and their failures, haven’t completely destroyed our hope.

P.S. I should note that Donald Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric is, of course, not harmless. And it certainly isn’t amusing. It’s chilling.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, in a piece titled “Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny” (again, to me Trump never has been funny — fascism isn’t funny), writes (links are Taibbi’s):

So two yahoos from … my hometown of Boston severely beat up a [Latino] homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that “Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.”

When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn’t yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, “That would be a shame.” But right after, he went on:

“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”

This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

The thing is, even as Donald Trump said and did horrible things during this year’s incredible run at the White House, most sane people took solace in the fact that he could never win. (Although new polls are showing that Hillary’s recent spiral puts this reassuring thought into jeopardy.) …

That made Trump’s run funny, campy even, like a naughty piece of pornographic performance art. After all, what’s more obscene than pissing on the presidency? It seemed even more like camp because the whole shtick was fronted by a veteran reality TV star who might even be in on the joke, although of course the concept was funnier if he wasn’t. …

So already Trump has demonstrated that he’s a sociopath who should be nowhere near the White House. Of course his hateful rhetoric spurred a hate crime — gee, what a shock that the hate speech of a powerful billionaire running for president actually resulted in a hate crime — but of this hate crime Trump will only say that “the people that [sic] are following me are very passionate.”

This is a man (and I use the term lightly) who shamelessly freely used the freak shooting of a young woman in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico as “proof” that his xenophobic, cruel anti-Latino-immigrant platform is sound, but whose evil won’t allow him to take responsibility for the simple, obvious fact that his anti-Latino-immigrant hate speech — as was entirely predictable — resulted in a hate crime.

This is a “man” who wouldn’t flinch at building concentration camps for the nation’s new scapegoats for the approval of his “passionate” followers who only “love this country” (just as the Nazi Germans were “passionate” lovers of their country).

All of the signs are there. Trump refused to condemn a race-based hate crime that resulted from the fucking centerpiece of his presidential campaign, which is hate speech against Latino immigrants. Instead, he merely called the perpetrators of the race-based hate crime “passionate.”

We ignore the blatant signs of fascism that Trump is displaying for all of us to see at our own peril.

It strikes me that it’s quite possible that should this “man” ever actually make it to the White House, those of us who are true patriots are going to have to get “passionate” and deal with him, as Adolf Hitler needed to be dealt with.

The only good fascist is a dead fascist.

And after Americans just allowed the fascist George W. Bush & Co. to steal the presidency in 2000, we true American patriots cannot just assume that Donald Trump absolutely cannot make it to the White House. The precedent more or less is there.

P.P.S. Here is a frightening news photo of Führer Donald greeting his nearly-all-white adoring supporters in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday:

It looks quite surreal, but it’s quite real.

Of course, with American fascism (like with Nazi German fascism), we have to throw theocracy and toxic “Christianity” in there, too (along with the white supremacism, the jingoistic nationalism and the blind, self-defeating obedience to the titans of capitalism). “Lord Jesus” wants Donald Trump to be president! Of course! How can you argue with that?

We’ll have to pry away the gun nuts’ ignorance and fear

Um, yeah, this is for illustrative purposes and is not anyone whom I know…

I recently was tempted to write a post, in jest, that Colorado’s recent fairly devastating flooding obviously is God’s punishment for Coloradans recently having recalled two state legislators over their support of gun control, but, alas, I let that idea go.

Wingnuts routinely claim that this or that is “God’s punishment” for this or that — as a gay man, apparently, not only do I and my kind “deserve” “God’s punishment” of AIDS, but we also are the cause of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, etc., etc. — but whatever. I don’t believe in God, and so I don’t believe in “punishments” from “God,” and even if there were such a thing as a “punishment” from “God,” no mere human being truthfully could claim to be “God’s” spokesperson who truthfully can pronounce such “punishments.”

That said, the concept of karma makes sense to me, but again, who among us can be an arbiter of karma with any actual knowledge of its workings?

Guns, though, are, in a word, bad. For the very most part.

Those who love guns overwhelmingly are ignorant and thus fearful individuals. Therefore, as President Hopey Changey once put it (accurately), they cling to their guns. Their guns give them a false sense of safety and security, when, ironically, they cannot see that it’s their own ignorance and fear that contributes to the violent environment of which they’re terrified.

While I don’t advocate that the guvmint attempt to take everyone’s guns — a position that most of us on the left are accused of holding by the wingnuts — and while I generally support the Second Amendment, it’s incredibly bad public policy for fearful, ignorant people to have such easy access to guns.

When you are drunk and/or drugged and angry and/or frightened, or even sober but angry and/or frightened, maybe having easy access to a gun isn’t such a great idea.

Fucktards like wannabe cop George Zimmerman should not be allowed anywhere near firearms. Frankly, I suspect that he carried a gun while he played cop in that gated community in Florida because he wanted to shoot someone, and that Trayvon Martin was just the poor individual who was the victim of Zimmerman’s quest for a “reason” to shoot someone.

While I can’t see that Zimmerman, as the aggressor, was acting in actual self-defense, guns can be used for actual self-defense, but it troubles me than in the year 2013, when we have so many other technological achievements, cops and others deem a lethal firearm as the best or even the only way to practice actual self-defense in many if not most if not even all cases.

How many times do we read news stories about someone who was unarmed but who nonetheless was shot to death by cops, such as the unarmed 24-year-old black man Jonathon Ferrell, whom a young white cop shot 10 times in North Carolina this past weekend? From what I can surmise, Ferrell, who had just been in a car wreck, was in shock, and so he came in the direction of the cop, probably for help, but did the cop really have to shoot at him — 12 times (hitting him 10 times)?

How can any of us, with a straight face, claim that Trayvon Martin and Jonathon Ferrell were not the victims of racial profiling?

This isn’t all abstract to me; gun violence recently hit close to home.

My 25-year-old nephew sits in a jail cell in Phoenix after he shot and killed another man earlier this month. Details of the incident, as they have reached me through relatives and as I have been able to find them on the Internet, still are sketchy; my nephew claims that he was ambushed or about to be ambushed, that two or more other males had set him up and were about to perpetrate physical violence upon him (to “jump” him, in the parlance).

My understanding is that thus far, there is no witness who is disputing my nephew’s account, as the others who were present at the shooting have evaded the Phoenix police, who would love to question them.

From what details I’ve heard, if they are factually correct, my best guess is that my nephew at worst ultimately will be convicted of manslaughter, but conceivably could be acquitted for the reason of self-defense if he and his defense team can demonstrate that he used the gun in self-defense, which, I understand, Arizona law, like Florida law, allows.

My understanding is that my nephew owned and carried the gun entirely within Arizona law, and that before the shooting incident he had no violent criminal record.

I consider my nephew to be innocent of any crime until and unless he is found otherwise by a jury of his peers (and exhausts any and all appeals, should that happen), but would I choose to carry a gun in public like we’re still living in the wild, wild West?

No.

Do I want to even see people — those of the non-law-enforcement variety, I mean — carrying guns on their persons while I’m out and about in public?

No, absofuckinglutely not, and I’m thankful that I live in California, which is a “non-permissive open carry” state, and not in one of the “permissive open carry” (or otherwise more gun-permissive) states, such as Arizona and most of the red states.

Do you really fucking need to bring a gun into, say, a Starbucks?

It’s in the news today that Starbucks’ CEO has asked that Starbucks’ patrons don’t bring guns into Starbucks locations, but that in those states where it is not illegal to openly carry firearms, Starbucks won’t ask those who are packing pistols to leave.

Where it comes to our rights, our rights end where others’ rights begin.

We sane Americans — we non-gun nuts — have the right, when we’re out and about in public, not to have to see fucktards who shouldn’t be even allowed to own a gun openly carrying a gun as though we’re still living in the wild West. We have the right not to have to fear for our own safety because some fearful idiot is carrying a gun in the name of his or her own “safety.”

Americans have the right to protect ourselves, but, it seems to me, most shooting deaths in the United States of America are not the results of cases of actual self-defense, but are cases of murder, suicide and accidental shootings (and, I suppose I should add, cases of trigger-happy, jumpy cops, many if not most of whom are white cops who are racial profilers and who probably are too young and immature to be cops anyway).

When guns for the most part cease to be about actual self-defense, it seems to me, they have become a public menace, and no one has the right to pose a menace to the public.

At this point, I think it’s fairly safe to say, the widespread ownership of and easy access to guns in the United States causes more harm than good. (I don’t even need to mention the latest gun massacre on Monday that left 12 people dead at the Washington Navy Yard, because these gun massacres are so common in the U.S. these days.)

But gun control, as Colorado voters have just demonstrated, is an incredibly sticky political subject.

The ignorant and the fearful will cling to their guns, which, the late gun nut Charlton Heston famously declared, we’ll have to pry from their “cold, dead hands.”  That’s their way.

Trying to pry the fucktards’ guns from their still-living hands, though, perhaps is the wrong approach.

It’s the ignorance and the fear, I think, that we have to tackle first, because it’s their ignorance and their fear that makes the gun nuts cling so steadfastly to their guns.

After all, ultimately, it’s not guns that kill people. It’s ignorant and fearful people who, using guns, kill people…

Bibi/Mittens 2012!

Reuters photo

The unelected, treasonous Bush regime, in order to sell its Vietraq War, lied about the specter of the “smoking gun” manifesting itself as a “mushroom cloud.” Wingutty war monger Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu today before the United Nations General Assembly, in lying about a casus belli to launch a war on Iran, couldn’t even be that sophisticated, and chose instead the bomb from the board game Stratego. (Yeah, very unfortunately, that’s not a Photoshop job…)

I was going to title this “Romney/Netanyahu 2012,” but let’s face it: Shadow U.S. President Mittens Romney is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s little bitch, not vice-versa, so we’ll put Netanyahu at the top of the ticket, and to call these two right-wing, war-mongering, Islamophobic, walking and talking fucking jokes by their actual surnames is to give them respect that neither deserves.

Today at the United Nations, Netanyahu embarrassed himself and his nation by lying that Iran is close to attaining nukes and poses a threat not only to Israel but also to the entire Middle East, Europe and the United States. (See the sad and pathetic news photo illustration above.)

Netanyahu clearly is trying to influence the November U.S. presidential election by fear-mongering, and Netanyahu and Mittens Romney very apparently are working together — which whiffs of treason to me, since the American people in 2008 elected Barack Obama as their president and commander in chief, not Mittens Romney (not that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors ever worry about actually being elected).

It can’t be a coinky-dink that the same day that Netanyahu was lying to the United Nations about Iran (which reminds me of how Colin Powell held up that vial of white powder and lied to the UN about the threat that Iraq posed), Mittens declared on the campaign trail: “It is still a troubled and dangerous world. And the idea of cutting our military commitment by a trillion dollars over this decade is unthinkable and devastating. And when I become president of the United States, we will stop it. I will not cut our commitment to the military.”

Mittens does not for a fucking nanosecond care about the welfare of the average American. He already declared that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about at least 47 percent of Americans.

Mittens’ only interest is in pleasing his (would-be) plutocratic cronies of the military-corporate complex, who want to continue to suck, treasonously, billions and billions and billions of our Americans’ tax dollars for their bogus warfare and their bogus “defense” against bogus “threats” while the majority of us Americans are told that the nation just can’t afford us.

I can see where the wingnut Bibi would be so fucking clueless as to the mood of the American people, since he lives in Israel, but Mittens has no such fucking excuse.

After we, the American people, were royally punk’d on Iraq, we have no fucking appetite to now launch a bogus war on Iran.

We are the United States of Amnesia, that is true, but nonetheless it’s still way too fucking soon for the (aspiring) war criminals to start lying to the American people again about why we must invade another nation and to expect the American people to buy the fucking lie again this time. (Indeed, it was only 9/11 that allowed the Bush regime’s lies about Iraq to go so unchallenged in the first place. Indeed, 9/11, which the Bush regime just allowed to happen, was the unelected, treasonous regime’s Reichstag fire.)

Mittens is losing* the presidential race, so expect his war-mongering to continue. Fear is all that he has left to peddle, since the multi-millionaire’s claims of compassion for the American people are so fucking ludicrous, even without that hidden video of his fundraising dinner for his fellow plutocrats/aristocrats in May, but so out of touch is Mittens from the common American that he apparently has no idea that what worked in 2004 to get “President” George W. Bush “re”-elected won’t work in 2012.

—

*The polls are looking increasingly worse for Mittens these days, with Gallup’s daily tracking poll putting Obama at 50 percent and Mittens at 44 percent, and other nationwide polls taken within the past two weeks also putting Obama at 49 percent or 50 percent and leading Mittens by 3 percent to 7 percent.

That doesn’t sound all that awful for Mittens, but the U.S. president isn’t chosen based upon the popular vote, but is chosen based upon the Electoral College, and it’s Obama who has the easiest path to the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the election.

The New York Times’ presidential prognosticator Nate Silver, whose blog I read religiously, as I type this sentence projects that while Obama on November 6 will win 51.3 percent of the popular vote to Mittens’ 47.6 percent, Obama, who is leading Mittens considerably in the critical battleground states, will win more than 315 electoral votes while Mittens won’t garner even a full 225. Silver thus right this moment puts Obama’s chance of being re-elected at more than 80 percent.

(I’m such a fan of Silver, that sexy geek, that I’ll probably buy the new book that he has out.)

So it will be awkward, methinks, for Mittens to campaign over the next several weeks. I mean, he essentially has lost the election already, but he has to pretend that he hasn’t, has to continue to go through the motions of campaigning.

Again, since he has nothing to lose, expect him to continue the fear- and war-mongering. Again, it’s all that the pathetic gold-plated piece of shit has left.

You DON’T get to vote on my rights

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no [legitimate] interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

— Federal Judge Vaughn Walker in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

— The U.S. Declaration of Independence

Associated Press photos

San Franciscans Spencer Jones and Tyler Barrick, who were married when California honored same-sex marriage in 2008 and who are featured prominently in the worthwhile documentary “8: The Mormon Proposition,” celebrate a federal judge’s decision today that November 2008’s anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition 8 is invalid because it violates the protections afforded to Californians by the U.S. Constitution. I expect the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately uphold the ruling.

I should have been a fucking lawyer.

When I predicted several hours before he did so that federal Judge Vaughn Walker would rule that Proposition H8 is unconstitutional — which he did, of course — I noted the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, the case that found that no state has a legitimate reason to meddle in what consenting adults do sexually in private, that religious sexual prohibitions aren’t enough to make a sex act illegal if the state cannot demonstrate that the state has an interest (such as a public-safety interest) in making that act illegal. 

In his ruling invalidating Prop H8, Walker wisely and correctly notes, on page 8, that “The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas…”

Yup.

Again, I don’t wish to compare same-sex marriage and sodomy (the subject of Lawrence vs. Texas), but again: What Judge Walker said!

The pro-Prop H8 fascists have actually claimed that same-sex couples getting married actually violates their (the fascists’) religious freedom because they find same-sex marriage to be offensive to their religious beliefs and sensibilities.

This line of “argument” is down-the-rabbit-hole-level insanity.

To live in a free nation is to be offended sometimes. If you can’t fucking handle that, then you need to get the fuck out of the fucking nation. (I hear that the Taliban is recruiting, and they’re quite homophobic.)

But seriously, I find Mormon motherfuckers, “tea-party” dipshits and other “Christo”fascists to be incredibly offensive. I find them to represent quite the opposite of what Jesus Christ and the founding fathers stood for. Thus, in all seriousness, I find them to be anti-Christian and anti-American.

However, because their very existence offends me — and my sense of religious and civic propriety — does that mean that I have the right to violate their constitutional rights in the name of preserving or defending my own rights or my personal cognitive comfort or my peace of mind?

Fuck no.

Then there is the “argument” that whatever a majority of the voters decides never, ever should be overturned, that that majority vote is sacrosanct.

OK, what if we Californians took a vote, and a solid majority of us decided to drive every last Mormon motherfucker out of the state of California? Would that be constitutionally permissible?

Um, yeah.

Only you know what? Such a ballot measure wouldn’t even fucking make it to the ballot. It would be stricken down as blatantly unconstitutional before a single voter could weigh in on it.

Yet my equal human and civil rights were put up for a vote in November 2008, and that is some fucked-up shit. It’s why they call being non-heterosexual “the new black”: because even black people, who should know how wrong oppression is, shit and piss upon us non-heterosexuals.

Then there is perhaps the lamest argument against same-sex marriage that I’ve heard: that same-sex couples can’t produce children, and procreation is in the state’s interest.

Oh, puhfuckinglease. Procreation is in the Mormon cult’s best interests, because the Mormon cult wants to take over the entire fucking world, and the Catholicks are big on procreation, too, because they also want to take over the world, even though to prohibit birth control is incredibly irresponsible and cruel, especially in the Third-World nations where there is starvation and disease and overpopulation, but the United States of America is not underpopulated (indeed, in Arizona they’re trying to drive all of the brown-skinned people out) and Homo sapiens is, um, the last time that I checked, not on the endangered species list (the omnipresent risk of nuclear annihilation aside, of course…).

And let’s carry the procreation “argument” out: So what if two old people, say a widow and a widower in their 70s, want to marry? We don’t let them because the only valid purpose of marriage is procreation? What about heterosexual couples of reproductive age who aren’t able to have children for medical reasons? Must we give fertility tests before we allow heterosexual couples to marry, since procreation is the only valid reason for marriage?

What about fertile heterosexual couples that never have a child? Should we annul their marriages in, say, a year or two if the woman doesn’t get knocked up? What if she manages to get knocked up but just can’t carry a baby to term, but keeps miscarrying? How many chances should we give her?

Um, yeah, one by one, all of the “Christo”fascists’ and other assorted wingnuts’ “arguments” against same-sex marriage all come down to their own backasswards, bigoted religious or personal beliefs.

The pro-Prop H8 wingnuts lost their case before Walker because they have no fucking case.

The wingnuts no doubt will crow that because Walker himself is gay, he handed down a personally biased ruling.

However, when the case goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, the court will be required to look at U.S. Supreme Court precedent, and Lawrence vs. Texas is precedent — fairly recent precedent — that isn’t friendly to keeping same-sex couples from marrying.

I put the chances of the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing with Walker that to prohibit same-sex marriage violates the U.S. Constitution at about two in three.

The battle for same-sex marriage is pretty much all over except for the wingnuts’ crying.

It’s too bad that the Mormon cult and its allies spent more than $40 million pushing Prop H8 down Californians’ throats. Probably the best anti-Prop H8 sign that I’ve seen reads: “Jesus said: ‘Feed the poor.’ They said: ‘Sorry, Jesus, we spent $40 million on hate and fear!'”

I suggest that the members of the Mormon cult and the other “Christo”fascists, instead of trying to make their miserable, hypocritical, self-righteous selves feel better and superior by shitting and pissing upon others, actually fucking read what Jesus Christ actually fucking taught. And then fucking follow it. And then tell the rest of us what great fucking Christians they are.

God bless America, land of the free.

Amen.

‘8: The Mormon Proposition’

DVD review

Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones, both raised in Mormon families, were married in San Francisco’s city hall during the window period in 2008 in which same-sex marriage was legal in California. Their marriage remains legally valid, but Proposition 8 put an end to further same-sex marriages. Barrick and Jones are featured in the documentary “8: The Mormon Proposition.”

I’m glad that they made a documentary — a pretty good one, too — about the Mormon cult’s behind-the-scenes push for Proposition 8, the ballot initiative in California that in November 2008 wrote discrimination into the state’s constitution, invalidating the state’s Supreme Court’s May 2008 ruling that to prohibit same-sex marriage violates the rights guaranteed to Californians by their state’s constitutution.

Let me state right off that I fucking hate the fucking Mormon cult.

I could, but I won’t, go into detail about the Mormons’ fucktarded, backasswards beliefs, such as that non-whites aren’t white because they were punished by God (yes, the Mormons are huge old fucking white supremacists); that their “prophet” (a stupid old evil white guy named Thomas Monson, who even has his own website) literally receives communiques from God (Monson “is the only person alive who can receive revelation for the entire [Mormon cult],” his website proclaims); that their polygamous founder, Joseph Smith Sr., in the late 1820s transcribed golden plates given to him by an angel fucktardedly but appropriately named Moroni (these golden plates, which contained the Book of Mormon, reportedly were taken back by the angel, conveniently); and that when good Mormons die they get to be gods of their own planets (which is even better, I’m guessing, than the bevy of virgins that good Muslim men are promised in the afterlife).

Frankly, the Mormon cult is lucky to be able to get away with what it gets away with, most notably and probably most destructively, its routine brainwashing of its youth, who have no fucking choice. Those born into Mormon families, if they reject the toxic, bullshit belief system that is crammed down their throats from birth, risk being ejected from their own families.

When belief is tied to life’s necessities, such as food and shelter, that’s not spirituality; that’s the pyschological enslavement of other human beings (a.k.a., too often, as “religion”). And that is evil, and that is nothing that Jesus Christ taught, and there is nothing to fucking debate about it.

And this evil perpetrated by the Mormon cult on a daily business is perfectly legal. In fact, even non-Mormons support the Mormons’ right to brainwash and thoroughly pyschospiritually destroy their offspring for life. This is called “religious freedom.”

Speaking of which, I remember when a co-worker of mine and I happened to be walking around the state Capitol here in Sacramento on our lunch break in late October 2008 and we quite unexpectedly happened upon a large group of wingnuts demonstrating in support of Prop H8 in front of the Capitol.

On their blue-and-yellow “Yes on 8″ signs were the Orwellian slogans “Restore Marriage,” “Protect Marriage,” “Prop 8 = Free Speech,” ”Prop 8 = Religious Freedom” and “Prop 8 = Less Government.”

As I noted of these slogans/“arguments” just after Prop H8 narrowly passed in November 2008:

“Restore[/protect] marriage”: How do same-sex couples harm heterosexual couples’ marriages? If heterosexual marriages are in trouble, don’t the heterosexual couples need to do something about it? The divorce rate was sky high long before gay men and lesbians ever got the legal right to marry in any state.

“Less government”: Wait a fucking minute. “Less government”? The government telling two consenting adults that they may not get married is less government? How?

“Free speech”: Yes, you have free speech. You may hold the most hateful beliefs that you want and you are pretty free to say whatever hateful things you want. But what right do you have to infringe on someone else’s rights?

[“Religious freedom”:] These motherfucking haters, if it is their religious belief that same-sex marriage is wrong, are perfectly free not to marry someone of the same sex. Their religious freedom is in no way infringed upon by two other consenting adults marrying each other.

If we actually are to buy this argument that to offend someone’s religious beliefs is to infringe upon his or her religious freedom, then we must make interracial marriage illegal too if it should — gasp! — offend someone’s religious beliefs. (What about the eating of certain foods? Should pork be banned by constitutional amendment because its consumption offends some people’s religious beliefs? Where would it end?)

The bottom line is that the homo-haters have no actual legal, moral or ethical arguments against same-sex marriage. They have only blind hatred, and they fabricate “arguments” to try to legitimize and sanitize their hatred.

The overarching “argument” by the homo-haters that their civil rights — religious freedom, freedom of speech, parental rights, etc. – are actually being violated by gay men and lesbians being granted equal civil rights is beyond insane.

“8: The Mormon Proposition” — narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the gay (ex-?)Mormon who, ironically, won an Oscar for his screenplay for the film “Milk” — makes it clear that the stupid evil white men who run the Mormon cult are not satisfied with having control only over the hearts, minds and genitalia of their Mormon mindslaves. They want control over the entire nation, if not also the entire planet.

And it is at that point, when the Mormon cult no longer is content to mind its own fucking business, but wants to convert all of us to Mormonism, that the Mormon cult deserves to be brought down. (And no, I don’t rule out violence if necessary. An unprovoked, direct strike at our equal human and civil rights deserves a strong response, and if violence ever is called for, then so be it.)

“8: The Mormon Proposition” masterfully exposes how the Mormon cult has tried to hide behind its anti-non-heterosexual crusade by creating front organizations (most notably, the National Organization for Marriage* [which, ironically, actually is for fewer marriages]) made to look as though it’s a grassroots effort rather than what it actually is: a crusade of the Mormon cult. “The Mormon Proposition” also details the history of the Mormon cult’s involvement in denying equal human and civil rights to non-heterosexuals, starting with the battle over same-sex marriage in Hawaii in the 1990s.

“The Mormon Proposition” showcases two young gay (ex-?)Mormon men who wed when same-sex marriage was legal in California and follows their story, which includes ostracization from their family members (although the mother of one of the two young men is very supportive of him and the cause of equal human and civil rights for all Americans; she rocks).

I’m not decided whether the two young men are given too much attention in the documentary or whether it’s a strength of the documentary that their case is a thread that runs throughout it. In either case, though, they are an adorable couple, and if you are sane you can’t help but feel happy for them and you can’t imagine that anyone could be so miserable and hateful as to try to take their happiness away from them.

Also featured in “The Mormon Proposition” is Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate (now known as a national group called Rights Equal Rights), whose advocacy for equal human and civil rights and whose counter-crusade against and exposition of the “Christo”fascist Mormon cult I admire greatly (but I’m not big on his bid to run for president in 2012 on the Repunignican ticket; there’s no way in hell I’d vote for a Repugnican, but especially not for a gay Repugnican).

Karger’s Californians Against Hate website sums up the Mormon cult’s support of Prop H8 rather succinctly in a post on July 8:

During the summer of 2008, we discovered the active involvement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) in Prop 8. The Mormon Church had taken over virtually every aspect of the Yes on 8 campaign.

Mormon families contributed approximately $30 million of the $40 million raised, the Church produced 27 slick commercials, put up an expensive website, bused in thousands of volunteers from Utah [and] had massive phone banks, yet only reported a mere $2,078 in non-monetary contributions three days before the election.

Two weeks later I filed a sworn complaint with the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) against the Mormon Church for not reporting its vast financial involvement in the campaign.

The commission prosecuted the case, and conducted an unprecedented 19-month investigation of the Salt Lake City-based church’s finances. Three weeks ago the FPPC found the Mormon Church guilty of 13 counts of late reporting and they were fined $5,539. That was the first time a religion was found guilty of election irregularities in the 36-year history of the FPPC.

How the Mormon cult retains its tax-exempt status regardless of its well-documented illegal involvement in politics eludes me. The Mormon cult should have been fined millions of dollars and lost its tax-exempt status. That it did not shows how scared the powers that be are of the “Christo”fascists of the Mormon cult.

One thing in “The Mormon Proposition” that I’m not thrilled about is to watch people cry over the passage of Prop H8 when the Mormon cult had to lie and cheat in order to “win.” When you have to lie and cheat to “win,” your “cause” is fucking weak. It’s actually good news that the Mormon “Christo”fascists had to resort to their anti-Christian deception and lies to “win.” It proves that unless they wear sheep’s clothing, the majority of the voters will recognize them as the wolves that they are. The Mormon “Christo”facists don’t have the power of the truth behind them.

And despite the tens of millions of dollars and the manpower that the Mormon cult pumped into Prop H8, it didn’t win by a huge margin. It won by only 4 fucking percent. That’s not what I’d call a fucking landslide.

The latest Field Poll on the issue, taken in late June and early July, indicates that if same-sex marriage were put on the Californian ballot today, Prop 8 would be reversed, with 51 percent supporting same-sex marriage, 42 percent opposed and 7 percent undecided. (It seems to me that most of the undecideds would end up in the pro-same-sex marriage camp, since the hardcore homo-haters already know who they are.)

My fellow non-heterosexuals need to stop crying and start fighting, which includes educating themselves and others on how and why Prop H8 passed in the first place. While I’m happy to see that the 52 percent support for Prop H8 in November 2008 appears to have dropped 10 points to 42 percent today, 51 percent of Californians in favor of same-sex marriage is still too close for comfort.

“8: The Mormon Proposition” is a great teaching tool, and I recommend it for everyone who gives a shit about equal human and civil rights for all Americans.

While I can’t support him for president, I wholeheartedly agree with Fred Karger’s proclamation that:

Younger people who begin to realize that they might be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer will soon be afforded all the same rights as their brothers, sisters, friends and neighbors.

That is what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We will settle for nothing less.

Amen.

–

*Speaking of NOM, headed by the grotesque wingnut Maggie Gallagher, who really needs a dildo, a wingnut recently showed up at a NOM event holding this sign:

Yes, many if not most of the “Christo”fascists believe that non-heterosexuals should be executed — just like it is the case in theofascist nation of Iran. (Thus, I think of the “Christo”fascists as the “American Taliban.”) 

This is why I never rule out violence against the “Christo”fascists.

Sexual orientation is quite relevant to the victims of closet cases

California state Sen. Roy Ashburn, a Repugnican, top, and U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York, a Democrat, are the latest prominent politicians embroiled in political same-sex sex scandals. Ashburn has maintained that his sexual orientation is irrelevant, even though he consistently has voted against equal human and civil rights for his fellow non-heterosexuals.

Political scandals of any type come as no surprise to me.

“Politics,” to me, broadly means “the use of power.”

Many if not even most people don’t know how to handle responsibly any significant power that they come into. To me, there are two major ways that a significant amount of personal political power can be used: (1) to help as many other people as possible in ways that are transparent and legal and ethical, or (2) to help oneself and one’s cronies (this would include one’s political friends, one’s campaign contributors and one’s friends and family members), usually in ways that are kept hidden in the dark and are at least unethical if not also illegal.

Unfortunately, most people who come into power see the purpose of politics not as the first, but as the second. They might pay plenty of lip service to the first, but their deeds demonstrate their allegiance to the second.

In power plays, we usually see two things involved: sex or money (or both). This is because personal power so often is exchanged in money or in sex (or both).

Monetary scandals rather bore most of us. It’s the sexual scandals that we really pay attention to.

And of the sex scandals, it’s the gay sex scandals that really capture our attention.

Recently, first there was Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York, who resigned yesterday. He more or less used cancer as his official reason for resigning, but the word is that he sexually harassed a male staffer. Details of the alleged sexual harassment, which Massa at first apparently denied but then apparently admitted, are sketchy, but it appears as though the sexual harassment was verbal, not physical.

Adding to the scandal is that Massa, 50, was in the U.S. Navy for more than two decades, which probably helped him win his seat in his Repugnican-dominated district, and that he has a wife, two sons and a daughter.

Gay political sex scandals are bipartisan, of course.

The Sacramento Bee today reports:

A prominent Republican [California] state senator arrested on suspicion of drunken driving this week in Sacramento has taken a personal leave through Sunday from the upper house.

State Sen. Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield, a 14-year veteran of the Legislature, was arrested at about 2 a.m. Wednesday while driving his state-issued car near the state Capitol.

Ashburn later issued a written apology, but the arrest catapulted his personal life into a very public spotlight.

A Sacramento TV station reported that unnamed sources saw Ashburn at a gay bar the night before the arrest, setting off a media frenzy that stretched from the blogosphere to late-night television talk shows.

Ashburn’s hometown paper, the Bakersfield Californian, printed excerpts from an unpublished interview he did last year in which the divorced father declined to address rumors he was gay.

“Why would that be anyone’s business?” he told a columnist. “I think there are certain subjects that are simply not relevant, and this is one of them.”

But in a world where activists have the ability to instantly hold politicians accountable for any inconsistency between their public actions and personal behavior, some say sexual orientation is entirely relevant.

West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon, an openly gay Democrat, told The Bee and other media he had spotted Ashburn at other gay bars in Sacramento in recent months.

“I don’t think it’s a scandal for an elected official to be gay,” Cabaldon said. “But if you’re going to vote against every piece of hate-crimes legislation (to protect gays), that’s hypocritical.”

In the interview, Ashburn said he didn’t believe he had been a staunch anti-gay activist, insisting the way he had voted on social issues reflected his constituents’ views.

Ashburn, who is in his last year representing a bedrock conservative region, organized a Traditional Values Coalition rally in Bakersfield in 2005 to support a proposed constitutional amendment that year to prohibit gay marriage.

Ashburn also touted his support for Proposition 22, [an anti-]gay-marriage ballot initiative, calling himself a co-sponsor at the 2000 measure.

Equality California, a gay rights group, gave Ashburn a “zero percent” for his 2009 voting record.

Ashburn voted against bills that included expanding California’s mental health services for gay youths and measures to protect gay prisoners from violence – which won some GOP votes – and creating a day to honor slain gay activist Harvey Milk.

An Ashburn aide said Friday the senator had no response to questions about his sexual orientation, adding that aides didn’t know if Ashburn would appear Monday for a Senate floor session….

Ashburn is a textbook case right out of the excellent documentary “Outrage”: A closeted, usually Repugnican politician who works against equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals. A despicable fucking hypocrite and a fucking traitor to his tribe.

Yes, Assburn, if you are a non-heterosexual legislator who votes against equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals, then your sexual orientation is quite relevant, quite relevant to those whose equal human and civil rights you are obstructing because you are ashamed of your own sexual orientation.

And if you are a non-heterosexual man posing as heterosexual but you sexually harass your male co-workers or your male underlings (as has happened to me at the workplace, so I know something about this), then your sexual orientation is relevant; you have made it quite relevant to the victims of your sexual harassment.

And if you are a non-heterosexual male but you have heterosexually married and have had children, guess what? Your sexual orientation is quite relevant to your wife and kids.

If you are a closet case who actually manages to keep your sexual orientation entirely to yourself — which is damn near impossible, unless you live alone in a remote cave, as we are a social species — then perhaps we can say that your sexual orientation is “irrelevant.” (After all, if one actually is asexual or nearly so, then one’s sexual orientation indeed would be fairly irrelevant, at least to other people.)

Those who maintain that one’s sexual orientation is “private” or “irrelevant” or the like — especially when one has made his or her sexual orientation other people’s business — are homophobes.

The only reason that you would maintain that something as basic to oneself as one’s sexual orientation is “private” or “no one’s business” or “irrelevant” or the like is that your core belief about non-heterosexuality is that it is wrong and shameful.

You only enshroud in darkness that which you believe does not belong in the light.

There is nothing wrong with or shameful about non-heterosexuality.

There is something wrong with lying, such as lying about one’s sexual orientation, and there is something wrong with misusing one’s sexual power, such as in the case of sexual harassment.

That is the lesson that we need to take away from the gay political sex scandals.

As long as non-heterosexuality itself remains stigmatized, closet cases will continue to do their damage to others.

Dumbfuck Nation

The recent “National Tea Party Convention” has inspired me to pick up again Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason, which is about the threat that rampant intentional ignorance and anti-intellectualism poses to the continued existence of our democracy and our nation. I started to read Jacoby’s book when it came out in 2008 but then I put it down. I’ve picked it up again, as now it seems timelier than ever.

I liken our national situation to this: A horribly incompetent surgeon seriously botched our surgery. So we pick a new surgeon. However, the damage that the first surgeon caused is so serious that the second surgeon can’t fix it overnight. Impatient and frustrated, we think that it’s a swell idea to return to the first surgeon. After all, a whole year has passed since we last saw him!

That is how bright it is for us to turn the reins of power back to the Repugnican Party, which “Tea Party” Queen Sarah Palin-Quayle tells us we should do. (It’s funny how she states that the “tea party” isn’t about any one person, when clearly she would love to be their leader.)

I understand that people are frustrated, angry and confused. But it is precisely when we are frustrated, angry and confused that we need to think, and to not act stupidly — because acting stupidly in a time of crisis will only worsen our crisis.

This excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article on the recent “tea party” convention in Nashville, Tenn., sums up the “tea party” crowd pretty well, I think:

Ask Gail Hathaway, a warm 61-year-old retired nurse from Vonore, Tenn., what she wants out of the “tea party” movement, and she returns the quizzical look of someone worried she’s been asked a trick question.

“What do I want? Well, I want it all to stop,” she said late Thursday night from the floor of the National Tea Party Convention, an event billed as the first major conference for the conservative movement currently reshaping America’s political landscape. “Our way of life is under attack. I truly believe they are trying to destroy this country. It’s just hard to say who ‘they’ is.”

That is it, in a nutshell: The world is changing rapidly, and the “tea party” crowd wants it to stop. The United States as a whole no longer resembles the cozy little lily-white town of Mayberry, N.C. (if it ever really did), and the “tea party” crowd wants to bring Mayberry back.

Only you can’t bring Mayberry back, even if doing so were a good idea (which it isn’t), and no one is “trying to destroy this country.” Not even the “Islamofascists,” who just want the United States to get the fuck out of the Middle East and who want to be left the fuck alone, which sounds fairly reasonable to me, as we wouldn’t want a Middle Eastern military presence in our nation, would we?

Not even the home-grown wingnuts — with the exception of the rapturous “end-timers,” I suppose, who want World War III to occur because they are “saved” — are “trying to destroy this country.” It is true that the wingnuts’ fucktardation, unchecked, would result in the destruction of the nation — already the wingnuts’ fucktardation has brought the United States to the brink of extinction, when their usurper “war” “president” ran the show for eight endless years — but do I think that they want to destroy the nation?

Probably not, although it seems clear that Sarah Palin-Quayle wants WW III to happen. She suggested today that President Barack Obama could win re-election in 2012 if he were to declare war on Iran. (Hey, she was the running mate of John “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCainosaurus, after all.)

Now, never mind that just yesterday at the Wingnut Super Bowl in Nashville, Palin-Quayle accused the Obama administration of “generational theft” by running the federal budget deficit up even more than the BushCheneyCorp did; today, Palin-Quayle suggests that we launch a war on Iran.

Because that would not be “generational theft,” to launch another major war in the Middle East when you are still reeling from the record federal budget deficit that the previous Repugnican “president” left you and when things have been crumbling here at home for some years now.

As I’ve said before, the wingnuts are fine with running up a deficit as long as we are using that money to kill innocent people in the Middle East in their “Christian” crusade against Islam; but if we want to spend any money on Americans here at home, that is “socialist” “generational theft.”

How would Jesus budget? Would he prioritize things like health care? Education? Food? Shelter? Environmental protection? 

No! He would launch a war on Iran!

“Our way of life is under attack. I truly believe they are trying to destroy this country,” the “tea bagger” told the L.A. Times, admitting that she couldn’t even identify “they.”

No, it’s that things are changing. Rapidly. Science and the Internet, the free flow of information, haven’t been very kind to the ignorant and fear-based “Christianity,” the brand of “Christianity” that the wingnuts follow.

Because the wingnuts feel like they are under attack doesn’t mean that anyone is actually attacking them. It’s what you call “paranoia.”

Millions and millions of other Americans don’t look, believe and act just like the wingnuts do. In their insecurity, if everyone is not on the same page with them, the wingnuts become unhinged and unglued. Rather than examine their own ignorance and their own misguided beliefs, the wingnuts lash out at those others who aren’t carbon copies of themselves. And rather than change with the times, the wingnuts would rather destroy those whose differ from them, and that is a long hit list: non-whites, feminists, non-“Christians,” non-heterosexuals, non-right-wingers, foreigners, et. al., et. al.

If I want to marry my boyfriend of two-plus years here in Northern California, it’s because I want to marry my boyfriend. (I take the American principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “liberty and justice for all” seriously, you see, and unlike the wingnuts believe, I don’t believe that these things are for only those who look like me and who agree with me.)

If I want to marry my boyfriend, it’s not because I am “attacking” the “way of life” of some “tea-bagging” “Christo”fascist wingnut in Idaho who opposes same-sex marriage. If I want to marry my boyfriend, it has nothing to do with the wingnuts, whom history is leaving behind. (Funny that they should rally around a wingnutty book series called Left Behind when they are the ones who are being left behind, like the dinosaurs that they don’t believe in were left behind.)

The root of fear is ignorance, but the wingnuts embrace their ignorance.

In her rant at the Wingnut Super Bowl yesterday, “Tea Party” Queen Sarah Palin-Quayle said that “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

That “clever” line is to meant to glorify stupidity and brute force and to denigrate intelligence. George W. “Mission Accomplished” Bush was a great commander in chief? Yeah, I want a dumbfuck in charge of the nuclear codes. I want my nation’s leader to be as dumb as humanly possible.

Palin-Quayle panders to the dumbfucks. She assures them that their dumbfuckery is not only OK, but that their dumbfuckery is a sign that they’re great Christians and that they’re great patriots. She has the “tea party” set worshipping a fucktarded golden calf.

We sane Americans underestimate, I believe, how dangerous individuals like Sarah Palin-Quayle and her “tea-partying” ilk are. In the last decade alone, they stole at least one presidential election, oversaw the largest terrorist attack ever on our nation’s soil, launched at least one bogus war, just allowed one of the nation’s worst natural disasters ever to kill thousands of Americans, and in all of this created a record federal budget deficit — but they blame the current state of the nation on Barack Hussein Obama.

The “tea party” “movement’s” Cult of Dumbfuckery appeals to the millions of Americans who never read books (except perhaps for Glenn Beck’s) and who get their “news” from FOX. The “tea party” “movement” tells people that it’s not only OK to be ignorant, but that it’s good to be ignorant.

This is some pretty fucking scary shit, folks.

If anyone bothered to read books anymore, they might recall the ruling totalitarian party’s credo in George Orwell’s chilling novel 1984:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

That is Sarah Palin-Quayle’s and the “tea party” “movement’s” “vision” statement in a nutshell.

If we allow their “vision” to rule the nation again, we won’t have a nation any longer.

Yet another dream deferred

A little history lesson:

On July 26, 1948, [President Harry Truman, against the threat of a filibuster by racist white Southern U.S. senators] issued an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces and ordering full integration of all the services.

Executive Order 9981 stated that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

The order also established an advisory committee to examine the rules, practices and procedures of the armed services and recommend ways to make desegregation a reality. There was considerable resistance to the executive order from the military, but by the end of the Korean conflict, almost all the military was integrated.

[Source: usnews.com]

Now, I’m no lawyer, although I probably should have become one, but it seems to me that President Barack “Where Are My Balls? Has Anyone Seen My Balls?” Obama could, if he so desired, issue an executive order to stop discrimination against non-heterosexuals in the U.S. armed forces.

I don’t buy the Repugnican “argument” that the homophobes in the U.S. armed forces need “time” to get used to the idea that it’s not OK to discriminate against someone because of his or her sexual orientation.

What the fuck does it say about the character and integrity of those in the armed forces that they need “time” to stop fearing and hating a whole class of people whom they have no rational reason to fear and hate?

This is from The Associated Press today:

Washington – The United States should not rush into a change as large as repealing the ban on gays serving openly in the military without making sure the people it affects are on board, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said [today].

Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said an 11-month study into the effects of lifting the ban will examine practical questions such as how the change would affect the numbers of people who decide to remain in the service when their terms expire.

“There is very little objective data on this. It is filled as you know with emotion and strongly held opinions and beliefs,” Mullen said a day after announcing his own opposition to the ban as unfair to gay troops.

“That’s the work we have to do over the course of this year. We need to understand that in terms of what the senior military leadership’s principal concern is, which is the readiness and military effectiveness of the force,” he said.

The study is seen by advocates of a quick repeal as an unnecessary delay, or a political convenience designed to stretch any real action to lift the ban until after congressional elections this fall….

Gates told the House Armed Services Committee … [that] he learned that imposing change from on high does not work….

“Stupid was trying to impose a policy from the top without any regard for the views of the people who were going to be affected or the people who would have to effect the policy change,” Gates said.

Gates has commissioned two reviews, one by the outside consultant Rand Corp. and one to be led by a four-star Army general and the Pentagon’s top lawyer. The reviews will look at attitudes about openly gay service among the armed forces, with particular emphasis on those in combat.

The reviews are supposed to look at the effect that lifting the ban could have on soldiers’ trust and reliance on one another, as well as practical and legal issues, military officials said.

Mullen is the president’s senior military adviser, but he said he does not speak for all the Pentagon top brass. Several of the top uniformed leaders in the military services have deep reservations about repealing the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Mullen was unable to unite them behind his view before [yesterday], when he became the first sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to say the policy should be changed.

The attitudes of troops under fire, the ramifications for recruiting, family benefits and other considerations are likely to get a fuller examination later this month, when leaders of the Army, Marine Corps and other services testify separately on Capitol Hill….

President Barack Obama pledged to work this year to repeal the 17-year-old policy that says gays may serve in the armed forces only if they keep their sexuality private. In the decades before that, the Pentagon expelled gay troops but the policy was not written into law.

Congress enacted the ban in 1993 as a compromise short of fully allowing openly gay military service, as then-President Bill Clinton had said he wanted.

What the fuck?

First off, Obama never should have kept on Gates, who was defense secretary under George W. Bush. Obama probably did that to look “bipartisan” and/or not “soft on terror” or the like, but it was a mistake.

Secondly, they’re going to issue a survey to the members of the U.S. military?

Maybe the survey questions will look something like this:

Do you want your male comrades to try to fuck you up the ass when you drop your soap in the shower?

___ Yes  ___ No

Do you want to have to learn to sleep with one eye open, lest one of your comrades try to get Brokeback with you?

___ Yes  ___ No

I kid, but it does dangerously seem to be the case that the “review” is going to consist of something like a fucking poll.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Equal human and civil rights are not up for a vote. Equal human and civil rights are what our founders called inalienable rights — rights that are inherent and rights that cannot be taken away, not rights that we take a vote on.

Further, isn’t the U.S. military supposed to be a top-down organization? Um, you take orders in the military, don’t you?

Before the unelected Bush regime in March 2003 launched its bogus Vietraq War for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton and for the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, they didn’t ask the troops what the troops thought about that, did they? They didn’t conduct a “review.” They gave marching orders.

This 11-month “review” on whether or not to end discrimination against non-heterosexuals in the U.S. military is what you call BULLFUCKINGSHIT.

It’s foot-dragging.

Whether it’s because of the November 2010 elections or whether it’s just to buy the retrogressive homophobes some more time, there’s no excuse for it.

So after 11 months, then what?

We find out that indeed, the majority of troops are homophobic?

What excuse will we be given then?

“Well, we reviewed it, and now just isn’t the time.”

No — now is the time. There is no other time than right fucking now.

Fuck the stupid old white men like John McCainosaurus. He’s half-dead already. He is history. He represents the old dead hand of the past. This is about the future. This is about what is right.

There was resistance among the racists in the U.S. military when President Truman issued his executive order to desegregate the troops. And it was just too damned fucking bad.

Now, we take a desegregated military for granted.

One day, we will take for granted a military that doesn’t discriminate based upon sexual orientation.

Click here to sign on to the Courage Campaign’s letter to Sen. Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to include a repeal of the unconstitutional, unAmerican “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the defense budget bill.

More assorted shit

If the United States of America is so damned big and bad, then why are we so fucking obsessed with the threat (real or imagined) of terrorism?

When were we ever 100 percent safe? Why don’t we fear our cars, since we’re much more likely to die in an automobile accident than we are to die in a terrorist attack? 

Today The Associated Press has not one, but at least two, news items on security for the Super Bowl: “Protecting Against a ‘Lone Wolf’ at the Super Bowl” and “X-mas Bomb Attempt Prods Super Bowl Security Change.”

You know what I’m hoping for?

I’m hoping that members of Code Pink crash the Super Bowl.

They’re good at getting into events — here is a photo of Code Pink members crashing the lie fest — er, testimony — of former Secretary of State Condoleezza “You Know She’s Lying When Her Lips Are Moving” Rice:

— and they never actually harm anyone.

The Code Pink activists are hated because they stand up to The Man, an act that the brainwashed masses deem to be “crazy.” In a democracy, you see, you’re just supposed to just shut the fuck up and let the stupid white men run the show. They know better than you do. I mean, the current state of the nation after the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration is proof of that. And dissent is uber-unpatriotic, you terrorist-lovin’ pinko. Real patriots march in lockstep with their all-white-male leaders. Every true patriot knows that.

—

I recently wrote:

What the fuck is with the widespread belief that others’ beliefs, no matter how insane and potentially oppressive or even dangerous to others, should be held by all of us as sacrofuckingsanct?

We are allowed to believe whatever we want to believe, but when we believe that others should be oppressed or subjugated, that’s a fucking problem, because our beliefs that others should be oppressed or subjugated often end up in actual oppression or subjugation. Actions often follow beliefs. Hate speech, for instance, often leads to hate crimes. And it’s the hateful beliefs that precede the hate speech.

So just now I read a piece on the murder conviction on Friday of wingnut warrior Scott Roeder, who in May 2009 shot to death — in a church — Dr. George Tiller, who had provided abortions in Kansas.

Here is the money shot of the piece:

During closing arguments Friday, [defense attorney Mark] Rudy urged the jury to reject the murder charge. “No one,” he said, “should be convicted based on his convictions.”

Rudy mentioned leaders who stood up for their beliefs, including Martin Luther King Jr. They were “celebrated individuals (who) stood up and made the world a better place.”

So Scott Roeder was just another Martin Luther King Jr., you see. Except that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in cold blood, just like Dr. George Tiller was. And Scott Roeder gunned down George Tiller. (Don’t try to understand the “logic”; it will just give you a sick headache.)

Tell you what: After Scott Roeder is gunned down like the dog that he is, then maybe, just maybe, we can start comparing him to someone else who was assassinated. Until then, he isn’t a martyr. He’s an assassin, a murderer. And he was convicted of murder, not convicted of having believed something.

You gotta love his “defense,” though.

I suppose that I could have assassinated “President” George W. Bush and been compared to Martin Luther King Jr. for having done so. After all, if Tiller was responsible for taking innocent lives and therefore his killer was a hero like MLK, well, mass murderer George W. Bush is responsible for having taken many more innocent lives, including the lives of more than 4,300 U.S. troops who have died as a result of his bogus Vietraq War for the war profits of Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp — and the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis, whom he permanently “liberated.”

You know, wingnuts, you really don’t want to go down that path, that one’s beliefs justify killing others. You lost the Civil War to us blue-staters, remember.

—

Speaking of abortion, The Associated Press reports today that New Repugnican Hero Scott Brown is pro-choice:

Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts says he opposes federal funding for abortions, but thinks women should have the right to choose whether to have one.

Brown tells ABC’s “This Week” that he disagrees with his party’s position that the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion [Roe v. Wade] should be overturned.

Brown says the abortion question is one that’s best handled by a woman, her family and her doctor. He also says more effort needs to go into reducing the number of abortions in the U.S.

Brown has said the GOP shouldn’t take his vote for granted on every issue. He says he’s fiscally conservative but more moderate on social issues….

I’m not sure how much of Brown’s stance is out of political necessity, given that he’s in the blue state of Massachusetts, and how much of it is out of any actual sanity, but I think it’s funny that the wingnuts — who would prefer Brown to say, like wingnut football hero Tim Tebow has said, that he’s happy that his mama didn’t abort him — don’t have Brown on board with them on the issue of women’s right to have control over their own fucking uteri.

Speaking of fiscal conservatives, I’m totally down with fiscal conservatism — the taxpayers’ dollars should be spent judiciously and responsibly — but I have a real fucking problem with the Repugnicans’ philosophy of spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on the war profiteers via bogus wars but refusing to spend the taxpayers’ dollars on the taxpayers. 

Where in the fuck were the cries of “fiscal conservatism!” when the unelected BushCheneyCorp created a record federal budget deficit, with most of that money funneled to the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex?

Um, yeah.

—

A little more on John Edwards, and then hopefully I’ll never feel compelled to write about the loser again.

While I have no plan to buy former Edwards aide Andrew Young’s tell-all book The Politician, I found this recent reportage from Salon.com’s War Room to be interesting:

Young’s book also elaborates on the now-dominant theme of Edwards as a narcissist on an epic scale. If half of what the book says is true, the candidate’s obsession with his appearance was, if anything, underestimated during the campaign.

Preoccupied with the appearance of his hair and his weight, he scorned state fairgoers as “rednecks” who would try to force feed him. According to Young, Edwards delivered one line that seems a bit too perfect: “I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?”

I never bought Edwards’ supposed populism, which is why I never supported him for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Do I blame Edwards for not being thrilled to be hanging out with rednecks? No. I’m not thrilled to hang out with rednecks, either. They tend to be not very bright, not very curious, and they tend to fear — and to oppress and even to aggress upon — those who don’t look, act and believe just like they do.

But the difference between Edwards and me is that I don’t lie about my feelings about rednecks.

—

Finally, I like this line in an AlterNet piece about why the U.S. Supreme Court fucked up when the five wingnuts on it ruled that corporations have the First Amendment right to spend an unlimited amount of money on political ads: “Simply put: money is not speech [and] corporations are not people.”

Yup. I especially believe the latter part: corporations are not people.

One certainly could argue that money is needed to disseminate one’s message, but the First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Nothing in there about corporations having the same rights as do individual people — nothing about corporations in there at all — and the courts have ruled consistently that what appear (correctly or incorrectly) to be restraints on free speech are constitutional if they are content neutral.

Restraining corporate influence on the national political dialogue is not about suppressing individuals’ free speech; to the contrary, it’s about ensuring that the individual’s voice is not completely drowned out in the national dialogue by Big Money.

To allow that to happen would be to hasten the conversion of our democracy into a complete corporatocracy, which has been going on for some decades now.

No one who understands and cares about our democracy would be OK with its hostile takeover by the corporations, which represent the largest threat to our democracy, by far.