Focusing on racism, real and contrived, will ensure that ‘shitholes’ remain so

Image from trumphole.tumblr.com

“President” Pussygrabber on Thursday told a group of U.S. senators and representatives that he doesn’t want people from “shithole countries” immigrating to the United States. I always thought of a “shithole” as that hole in the “president’s” face that continuously spews out shit, but whatever…

The definition of a “shithole” is “an extremely dirty, shabby or otherwise unpleasant place.”

In comparison to standard (that is, at-least-middle-class) U.S. living conditions, there are many “shitholes” outside of the United States and, of course, within the U.S.

Haiti, for instance, would be a “shithole” as defined above. There’s no calling Haiti a fucking paradise, methinks. And most of the world’s most impoverished nations indeed are in Africa.

However, there is a difference between you or I using the term “shithole” and the “president” using the term, and there is a difference between (fairly objectively, once we have defined the term) calling a place a “shithole” — and then thereby deeming its inhabitants to be inherently inferior (which pretty much is the definition of “racism”).

“President” Pussygrabber’s mere use of the term “shithole” obviously is not presidential (but nothing about him is presidential), but it’s not necessarily racist in and of itself. Again, if an impoverished region or nation accurately can be called a “shithole,” then, indeed, “shitholes” abound.

That said, Pussygrabber’s professed preferences among the world’s nations from which he believes we should accept immigrants absolutely reeks of racism.

The Washington Post yesterday indicated that during a meeting with lawmakers in the Oval Office on Thursday, Pussygrabber referred to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shitholes” from which he wants no immigrants and proclaimed that he prefers immigrants from nations like Norway.*

I don’t know how else to translate that except that Pussygrabber, like his supporters and most of the members of the Repugnican Party, prefers white immigrants (especially those with money**) to non-white immigrants, especially brown-skinned immigrants (and especially those without money).

The United States is supposed to be a welcoming nation. At the Statue of Liberty is this plaque of Emma Lazarus’ poem “The New Colossus”:

The poem goes:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The second stanza is the most-quoted, but the first stanza is important, too: “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land” is an anti-imperialist and anti-militarist sentiment, a sentiment that has been largely to mostly lost; for many if not even most American citizens, the U.S. is and always should remain the conquering colossus, not the “mother of exiles.”

And “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” sounds pretty fucking anti-aristocratic to me. Yet “President” Pussygrabber blatantly proclaims that he much prefers “your storied pomp” to “your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Don’t send these! he repeatedly proclaims.

But ironically, the standard of living that most Americans enjoy largely to even mostly comes at the expense of those from poorer, exploited nations whose inhabitants Pussygrabber and his supporters want to keep out.

Indeed, the United States is not the “mother of exiles,” but is that conquering colossus that helps to create exiles. Many if not most — probably most — of us U.S. citizens, in order to deny our role in poverty here and abroad, tell ourselves and each other that poverty primarily is caused by individual laziness and stupidity (and perhaps also by racial inferiority).

To further exculpate ourselves, we callously ignore major factors in global poverty, including the brutal effects of European colonialism that still grip billions of people today, including brutal global capitalism and the insane income inequality that it creates, climate change (caused, of course, by capitalism) and other environmental devastation (caused, of course, by capitalism) and otherwise harsh environments that make it difficult to impossible for human beings to thrive.

Indeed, many to most (probably most) U.S. citizens are perfectly fine with insane income inequality from capitalist exploitation and with environmental devastation from capitalist exploitation — as long as they are not among the worst victims of these wrongs.

Our moral duty as U.S. citizens is to try to help those around the globe — by living more sustainably and more responsibly and less selfishly ourselves, if nothing else — not to shut out those who aren’t as materially successful as we are and who aren’t as materially successful as we are in no tiny part because of us.

In our current environment of toxic identity politics, though — which is aided and abetted by many if not most who call themselves “Democrats” — all that we want to see is racism (and/or sexism/misogyny), real and even fabricated, because focusing only on identity politics, which keeps capitalist exploitation perfectly intact, allows us to continue to blithely ignore the socioeconomic devastation that plagues billions of human beings around the globe for our own selfish benefit.

We’ll say that we oppose racism, that you shouldn’t be judged based upon the color of your skin, but we’ll still gladly allow you to die en masse because of the excessive lifestyle that we refuse to relinquish.

“Mother of exiles”? Hell, no! We’re the motherfucking U. S. of A., the conquering colossus!

P.S. Race and class are indeed closely intertwined. There very apparently is a close correlation between race and income level in the United States, for example. Per Wikipedia, in 2015 the median household income for Asians in the U.S. was $74,245; for whites, $59,698; and for blacks, $36,544, the lowest median household income for all races.

As I have noted many times before, it rankles me that while we American commoners are too busy discussing race, often fighting among ourselves over it, our plutocratic overlords continue to increase income inequality, which harms people of all races.

That said, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time; we have to fight both racism and income inequality at the same time. Thing is, you can’t legislate a racist becoming a non-racist.*** You can, however, pass legislation (eliminate tax loopholes for corporations, raise taxes on the super-rich, keep raising the minimum wage, etc.) to reduce income inequality.

Finally, because race and class are so closely intertwined, in the case of “President” Pussygrabber, who was born into wealth (apparently he inherited his family’s real-estate business), to me it’s difficult to tell how classist he is vs. how racist he is.

For example, is his main problem with Haitans that most of them are black — or that most of them are poor?

Despite the fact that he was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth, Pussygrabber apparently equates being poor with being a loser, and, perhaps because of his German background, he sees the poor as being weak and thus undesirable, and he always has shown a Nazi Germanic obsession with strength as he defines it.

After all, Pussygrabber advocates that immigrants to the U.S. already be rich, very apparently missing the fact that for many if not most of these already-rich immigrants, coming to the U.S. would be a step down.

—

*Pussygrabber is OK with some Asian immigrants, WaPo quotes the White House, since Asians tend to have and to make money. Pussygrabber apparently really has it out for the Haitians, probably because they’re the most impoverished nation that’s closest to the United States (as well as because of their race, of course), but, to be fair, U.S. immigration policy long has been rough on Haitians, including the historical preference for Cuban immigrants over Haitian immigrants, even though the island nations are neighbors.

**Why the fuck would white immigrants who live in nations whose governments actually believe in taking care of their inhabitants and their environment want to come to the United States, only to be thrown, like chum, to the corporations for their shark-like, treasonous profiteering? (Western nations whose per-capita wealth is higher than that of the United States include Norway, Ireland and Switzerland.)

***That said, anti-discrimination laws and hate-crime laws are critically important; perhaps you cannot change a racist’s mind, but you have to punish a racist’s crimes against others.

With Ireland, yet another pink domino topples; next up, the United States

EFE/EPA/Aidan Crawley photo

People in Dublin celebrate the passage of same-sex marriage in the widely-considered conservative nation of Ireland yesterday by more than 60 percent of the vote. Of course, this isn’t all about the Catholick church; it’s about human rights and freedom.

The news story headline from today “Church reels after Ireland’s huge ‘Yes’ to gay marriage” made me giddily happy, but the news story misses so much. It begins:

Dublin (AFP) — The once-dominant Catholic Church in Ireland was trying to come to terms [today] with an overwhelming vote in favour of gay marriage, saying it needed a “new language” with which to speak to people.

As jubilant “Yes” supporters nursed their hangovers after partying late into the night following [yesterday’s] referendum result, the faithful attended mass to hear their priests reflect on the new social landscape in Ireland.

“The Church has to find a new language which will be understood and heard by people,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, one of the Church’s most senior figures, told reporters after mass at the city’s St. Mary’s Pro Cathedral.

“We have to see how is it that the Church’s teaching on marriage and family is not being received even within its own flock.”

He added: “There’s a growing gap between Irish young people and the Church and there’s a growing gap between the culture of Ireland that’s developing and the Church.”

The majority of Irish people still identify themselves as Catholic but the Church’s influence has waned in recent years amid growing secularisation [gotta love the British spelling] and after a wave of clerical child sex abuse scandals.

During the campaign, bishops spoke against changing the law, while older and rural voters were thought to have accounted for much of the “No” vote.

Final results showed 62 percent in favour and 38 percent against introducing gay marriage in a country where being homosexual was a crime until 1993. …

Many things strike me. Where to begin?

As much as I’d love to celebrate the death of the Catholick church, it’s not dead yet. For decades Europeans, Americans, Latin Americans and others throughout the world have been calling themselves Catholicks but have doing what they want to do anyway. They disagree with the church on many issues, such as birth control, abortion and same-sex relationships, but go about living their lives as they wish to live them anyway, but still giving at least lip service to having some fealty to the Catholick church. They have been living compartmentalized lives, and this doesn’t seem to bother them much, if they even think about it much at all.

This phenomenon of compartmentalization (in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, apparently) is quite old, and while of course Ireland being the first nation in the world to establish same-sex marriage at the ballot box (rather via a legislature or court of law) is a milestone in equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals — probably especially because Ireland is considered to be a conservative nation — the Catholick church will continue to sputter on until its eventual demise.

Remember that 10 years ago in the heavily Catholick nation of  Spain, the parliament passed same-sex marriage, which was favored by more than 60 percent of the nation’s people — 10 years ago. (“The ratification of [same-sex marriage in Spain] was not devoid of conflict, despite support from 66 percent of the population,” notes Wikipedia, adding, “Roman Catholic authorities in particular were adamantly opposed, criticizing what they regarded as the weakening of the meaning of marriage.“)

Spain was the third nation to legalize same-sex marriage, after the Netherlands and Belgium, and was quickly followed by Canada, which became the fourth nation to adopt same-sex marriage.

Since Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina and parts of the very heavily Catholic Mexico — Mexico City and the Mexican states of  of Quintana Roo and Coahuila — have followed with same-sex marriage. (And it’s important to note that any same-sex marriage that legally was performed anywhere in Mexico must be recognized throughout the nation’s 31 states.)

And following Mexico with same-sex marriage have been Denmark, Brazil, France, Uruguay, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Finland, England, Scotland and Wales, and now, Ireland.

A lot of Catholicks in the Western world live in jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is legal. Wikipedia, for instance, puts the populations of Ireland, Mexico and Portugal all at more than 80 percent Catholick, Argentina at more than 75 percent, Spain and Luxembourg at around 70 percent, Brazil and France at more than 60 percent, Belgium approaching 60 percent, and Slovenia and Uruguay around 50 percent.

So Ireland’s having joined the same-sex marriage fold yesterday can’t have been a huge shock; it’s not like it was unprecedented.

But I’ll take this latest win for love and for freedom, the freedom to live one’s life the way he or she wishes to, as long as he or she does not harm others — and no, violating some tyrannical, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging theofascist’s backasswards beliefs on how we, the rest of us, may and may not live our lives (whether we even believe in a “God” or not) is not harming anyone else. Quite to the contrary, it’s the theofascists who always have been causing the harm (in the names of “God” and “Jesus” and “love”), to which the masses have been waking up and realizing, and thus the march of same-sex marriage rights continues throughout the globe. (A lot of work remains to be done, especially in the African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Muslim nations, as well as in Russia.)

Speaking of which, I find it interesting that it’s reported that the final tally from the vote in Ireland yesterday is expected to exceed 60 percent, since earlier this month the polling organization Gallup reported that a record number of Americans polled — 60 percent — now support same-sex marriage. That’s fairly fast growth, considering that Americans didn’t reach the 50-percent mark in Gallup’s polling on same-sex marriage until 2011.

True, not even a full quarter of Americans call themselves Catholick (thank God), and of course we can’t blame only the Catholicks for their opposition to same-sex marriage in the United States, since there are plenty of other hateful, ignorant, right-wing “Christian” churches in the United States, such as the Southern Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Methodists, and, of course, the Pentacostalists, who probably are the scariest of the theofascist “Christians” (whom I commonly call “Christofascists,” after “Islamofascists,” as though the fundamentalist Muslims had a monopoly on “God”-based fascism).

And, of course, the Catholicks aren’t monolithic; many if not even most of them personally are OK with same-sex marriage, despite the church’s official stance on the matter. Still, though, I can’t understand how anyone can support such an evil, harmful institution, even peripherally, such as by even still calling oneself a “Catholic,” knowing the damage that the Catholick Church has been wreaking upon humanity for centuries. (Ditto for the Protestant churches, too; even the more liberal Protestant churches still push a belief in “God,” which to me is only a Santa Claus on crack. [He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!] The opiate of the masses, indeed.)

Of course, of what the Catholick Church and other “Christian” churches are most terrified is continuing to lose their grip on the masses’ minds, genitalia and wallets and pocketbooks. Virtually all organized religions, small or huge, are all about those in the upper echelons of the hierarchy, be they the petty pastors of puny Pentecostal churches or Il Papa himself.

These theofascist tyrants never have cared about anyone’s true freedom — only about their own power and wealth, the sustenance of which requires that others be enthralled to them through ignorance and fear, via “God,” “Jesus,” “heaven,” “hell,” “sin,” “eternal damnation,” etc.

The gaining of equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals is only one front in the continuing throwing off of the theofascists’ centuries-long tyranny. Science, technology (including, of course, the communications revolution that the Internet has been), logic, reason, true democracy (which necessitates secularism) — in a word, modernity — is what poses the largest threat to the continued existence of the infantilezed organized religions that refuse to let go of their desire to infantilize and enthrall all of us.

Next up, I expect the U.S. Supreme Court to rule next month that no state in the U.S. may prohibit same-sex marriage, as such a prohibition violates the equal human and civil rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

The about-40 percent of Americans who still oppose same-sex marriage will, of course, quite predictably whine that a pro-same-sex marriage ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court is an anti-democratic fiat by “activists” judges (of course, if the U.S. Supreme Court actually were to rule against same-sex marriage [which I find unlikely], to the wingnuts this would be wholly democratic and the judges would not be “activist” at all, but simply would have done their job to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, you see).

Of course, in the United States we never have had any national referenda, such as Ireland just did on the topic of same-sex marriage. In the U.S. there is no mechanism in place for the entire nation to vote on any matter other than who will be U.S. president and U.S. vice president, and given that the members of the U.S. Supreme Court are appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, we Americans, who elect the president and our U.S. senators, of course have some voice in the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court, so to call the court’s rulings (the ones that we disagree with, mostly) entirely anti-democratic is, of course, largely if not mostly bullshit.

And I’m quite confident that were same-sex marriage put to a national referendum in the U.S., it would pass.

Gallup polling this month found 60 percent support for same-sex marriage in the U.S., but a CBS News/New York Times poll taken just before the Gallup poll found 57 percent support, and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken right before that one found 58 percent support. A Quinnipiac University poll taken right before that one also found 58 percent support, and an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken at the same time as the Quinnipiac University poll found 61 percent support.

So Gallup’s finding of 60 percent seems to be no more than within a percentage point of two of the actual level of support for same-sex marriage within the United States. (The average of the five nationwide polls cited above, which were taken this month and last month, is 58.8 percent.)

Again, were same-sex marriage put to a national referendum in the United States of America, it would pass. It’s safe for the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging haters to argue otherwise, since we never have national referenda here in the U.S., but the timid, behind-the-curve, right-of-center U.S. Supreme Court (which did, after all, decide the 2000 presidential election even though Al Gore had won more than a half-million more votes than did George W. Bush and decide that bazillionaires may have unlimited spending in elections) would not rule in favor of same-sex marriage if it weren’t confident that a solid majority of Americans are on board with it.

Because a solid majority of Americans are on board with same-sex marriage, the U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps further emboldened by the latest example of Ireland, most likely will rule in favor of same-sex marriage throughout the land.

And the land will not erupt in chaos and violent upheaval, as the theofascist terrorists warn us will happen (it’s just yet another terrorist threat meant to get them their way over the majority, even though they are in the solid minority), because where same-sex marriage is concerned, the U.S. democracy, such as it is, and as slow as it always has been to bring about equal human and civil rights for all, at least in the area of the constitutional right to same-sex marriage, is working.

Not quickly enough, but it is working, and next month we truly freedom-loving and love-loving Americans most likely will be celebrating in the streets like they have been celebrating in the streets of Ireland this weekend.

Our national Rorschach test results

Updated below

NorthJersey.com image

We didn’t have just a bombing in Boston yesterday, did we? We had a national Rorschach test, didn’t we? We have seen what we have been predisposed to see, haven’t we?

The folks at Westboro Baptist Church say that yesterday’s terrorist attack in Boston was God’s punishment for Massachusetts’ having instituted same-sex marriage. I guess that would be God’s very delayed reaction, since Massachusetts instituted same-sex marriage way back in 2004.

Sadly and pathetically, police have questioned a 20-year-old man from Saudi Arabia attending school in Boston apparently primarily because he was At the Boston Marathon While Arab. Reportedly a bystander who had appointed himself a modern-day Paul Revere tackled the Arab man, who apparently looked suspicious! because he was an Arab-looking man running away from the blasts — go figure! I mean, the normal human response would be to run toward the blasts, into harm’s way, right? And what was an Arab man doing at the Boston Marathon anyway?

(The young Arab man’s roommate says that he’s very most likely innocent. I have to agree. This very most likely is a case of racial profiling, it seems to me. I hope that the Paul Revere who tackled the Arab man is brought to justice — that he at least is sued by the Arab man, if not also criminally prosecuted for the apparent assault and battery.)

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (another paranoid, right-leaning white man) has posited that the U.S. government perpetrated the bombings in order to discredit and oppress the members of the so-called “tea party” and like-minded individuals.

Never mind that such a so-called “false-flag” operation would be incredibly difficult to pull off. Who would be willing to perpetrate it, knowing that he (or she) might be caught and prosecuted one day? And who would order it to be done, knowing that he or she also might be caught and prosecuted one day? Think of the number of people who would have to cooperate in such an operation. How would you ensure that none of them ever talked?

And never mind that the “tea party” peaked a long time ago and today is a but a shadow of its former self. You would go that far to try to weaken or destroy the “tea party” or any other political group only if it actually had a lot of power and influence.

That the wingnuts pre-emptively claim that yesterday’s terrorist attack is only being blamed on the wingnuts in order to discredit the wingnuts does not mean, of course, that homegrown wingnuts did not perpetrate the crime.

Taken all together, it sure looks like homegrown wingnutty terrorism to me.

Besides being Tax Day, yesterday also was Patriots’ Day, a day that is obscure here in California but that is big in Massachusetts and in Maine. (Indeed, the Boston Marathon is held in conjunction with Patriots’ Day.)

Patriots’ Day is celebrated on the third Monday in April. It was on Patriots’ Day in 1995 that homegrown wingnutty terrorist Timothy McVeigh, a disaffected young white man (if we want to do any racial profiling…), bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City.

So: Tax Day. Patriots’ Day (Timothy McVeigh’s chosen day for his act of domestic terrorism, in which 168 people were killed). The city of Boston’s symbolism of revolution against oppressive taxation and an oppressive government (McVeigh believed that he was crusading against an oppressive federal government). Massachusetts being a dark-blue state, a bastion of liberalism. (My guess is that a homegrown wingnutty terrorist most likely would attack a real or perceived liberal population rather than a conservative one or even a mixed one.)

Again, I can’t see the “Islamofascists” having perpetrated yesterday’s terrorist attack in Boston. This looks like an inside job to me, and by “inside job” I don’t mean by the Obama administration or by any part of the U.S. government (as much as a fan of the center-right Obama administration and the center-right U.S. government that I am not).

A professional “Islamofascist” terrorist organization would have killed more than just three people, it seems to me. This seems like a much more amateurish terrorist job.

The only real question that remains in my mind is how many people perpetrated yesterday’s terrorist attack.

My guess is that at least two or three people were involved, but I suppose that we can’t rule out a “lone wolf” like then-32-year-old Norweigan right-wing nutjob Anders Behring Breivik, who in July 2011 slaughtered 77 people whom he considered the enemy because he perceived them (correctly or not) as liberal.

Ironically, Breivik hates Muslims, as do his Islamophobic cohorts here at home, yet it seems to me that as a gay man and a left-winger, I’m more likely to be killed by one of these domestic “Christo”fascists that I’m ever likely to be snuffed out by an “Islamofascist.” I am much more concerned about our wonderful homegrown terrorists than I am about terrorists from abroad.

These are the results of my own Rorschach test, but my test results, I wager, are much more likely to be shown to be the actual case than are the other results that I’ve been reading about.

Update: My bad: Apparently Timothy McVeigh picked the date of April 19, 1995, to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building because that date marked the second anniversary of the siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993. April 17, not April 19, was Patriots’ Day in 1995. (Patriots’ Day was on April 19 in 1993, however.)

McVeigh may not even have been aware of Patriots’ Day, it seems to me.

WHO is demonic and mob-like?

Updated below

Associated Press photo

The new face of terrorism? The latest political-ideologically motivated murderous rampage was committed not by some “demonic” liberal, but by yet another paranoid, bigoted, stupid white man who, among many other wingnutty things, opposes the immigration of people who aren’t just like he is, including those who aren’t “Christian.”

When is the last time that some liberal went on a political-ideologically motivated murderous rampage here in the United States of America?

According to the American right wing, acts of violence committed by left-wingers are commonplace. In her introduction* to her subtly titled book Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America, wingnutty whackjob Ann Cunter proclaims that “The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic”; “A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group”; and “The Democratic Party is the party of the mob…. Democrats … are the mob.”

She goes on:

The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes — as yet — but uses a more insidious means to incite the mob. The twisting of truth, stirring of passions, demonizing of opponents, the relying on propagandistic images in lieu of ideas — these are the earmarks of a mob leader.

Gee, I don’t know. It seems to me that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are much more like the mob than are the Democrats, and that Cunter’s definition of mob-like behavior describes the behavior of her and her fellow Repugnican Tea Party traitors to a “T” (that’s “T” for treason).

The Democrats just let George W. Bush treasonously steal the White House in late 2000 — meanwhile, there were actual mobs of Repugnican operatives in Florida who did their best to disrupt the ballot counting at ballot-counting sites, which to me sure the fuck amounts to treason — and then the Democrats just let Bush treasonously launch his illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War in March 2003. (Thousands of our troops have died for the unelected Bush regime’s repeated lies about its reasons for having launched the Vietraq War. If that isn’t treason — to launch a war that is good for the profiteering of a relative handful of corporate war profiteers but that is disastrous for the nation as a whole — then I don’t know what the fuck is.)

There were some protests against the blatant theft of the White House and the launching of the bogus Vietraq War — I attended them — but they were nonviolent and thus they were non-threatening to the powers that be. (I’d have written “the powers that were,” but these powers essentially still are, so I’ll leave it at “the powers that be.”) Thus, the protests were ineffective. (Nonviolence, as the right-wingers know, often if not usually is ineffective, which is why they often embrace the use of violence for achieving their political aims.) 

And indeed, the unelected Bush regime was able to get its bogus Vietraq War for the war profiteering of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other oily subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp in large part because of the mob-like, toxic national political atmosphere that the Repugnicans had created in the wake of 9/11, in which to disagree with the unelected Bush regime on just about anything supposedly amounted to treason and supposedly aided and abetted the “terrorists.”**

Democrats dangerous? Democrats ready to put wingnuts’ heads on pikes?

Fuck, I only wish! (Just as I only wish that corporate-ass-licking capitulator in chief Barack “Hope and Change” Obama actually were a socialist.)

Speaking of mobs, it was the “tea party” traitors who disrupted the congressional town halls to discuss the Obama administration’s (pseudo) health-care reform. It was a nationwide coordinated attempt by the right wing to disrupt the town halls that was reminiscent of the coordinated attempt by the right wing to disrupt the ballot counting in Florida in late 2000. The right-wingers hate democracy except when democracy goes their way. (And even when democracy doesn’t go their way, they’ll treasonously steal an election if they can get away with it.)

Now that’s mob activity. I only wish that the waaay-too-easily-cowed Democrats would engage in actual mob activity when it comes to things like stolen presidential elections, the launching of bogus wars for corporate war profiteering, and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ current plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and to eliminate, as much as is possible, taxes for the rich and the super-fucking-rich — because surely the remedy for our nation’s economic woes is to make the poor even poorer and the filthy rich even richer.

Another quote from Ann Cunter before I move on: In her intro to her latest collection of venom, bile and blatant lies, she also notes, “It is official Democratic policy to appeal to the least-informed, weakest-minded members of the public.” Um, isn’t that Faux “News'” mission statement? And isn’t that Cunter’s bread and fucking butter, appealing to the least-informed, weakest-minded members of the public? If millions of so-called Americans weren’t paranoid, abjectly ignorant, bigoted, self-righteous and hypocritical mouth-breathing fucktards, Cunter couldn’t keep selling her demonic books. 

It’s hard to tell whether Cunter is someone who hypocritically projects her own evil onto others like she’s on crack or if she’s an outright liar for pay (very good pay, apparently). What she at least appears to desire, however, is an Ayn-Randian “utopia” in which everyone whom she disagrees with has been eliminated. And because she apparently fears that the left wing might one day purge the nation of the right wing, that the left wing might beat the right wing to it — even though the modern American left wing has shown itself to be pathetically unable to accomplish anything big and routinely lays down and plays doormat to the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (Sure, Gee Dubya, we’ll just give you the White House; sure, Gee Dubya, we’ll just give you your Vietraq War; sure, John “Cry Me a River” Boehner, we’ll just give you your cuts to Social Security and Medicare and your tax breaks for the rich and the super-rich) — she has written a book telling her fellow wingnuts that the liberals are gearing up to put their heads on pikes. (Or, again, she’s lying and she knows it. Hard to say which…)

While I can’t think of a single instance of an actual liberal actually having gone on a murderous rampage over his or her political ideology, Norway this past week was rocked by a white-male wingnut who went on a murderous rampage over his right-wing political ideology.

Reports Reuters today:

Sundvollen, Norway — Norway mourned [today] 93 people killed in a shooting spree and car bombing by a Norwegian who saw his attacks as “atrocious, but necessary” to defeat liberal immigration policies and the spread of Islam.

In his first comment via a lawyer since his arrest, Anders Behring Breivik, 32, said he wanted to explain himself at a court hearing [tomorrow] about extending his custody.

“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” [lawyer] Geir Lippestad said.

The lawyer said Breivik had admitted to Friday’s shootings at a Labour party youth camp and the bombing that killed seven people in Oslo’s government district a few hours earlier.

However, “he feels that what he has done does not deserve punishment,” Lippestad told NRK public television.

“What he has said is that he wants a change in society, and in his understanding, in his head, there must be a revolution.” …

More information about terrorist Anders Behring Breivik will come out, I’m sure, but it’s interesting that Ann Cunter very apparently shares his core right-wing beliefs on such issues as “liberal immigration policies” and “the spread of Islam.” I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Breivik is familiar with Cunter’s work.

The picture of Breivik above shows him to be a young white guy. Murderous thugs or terrorists aren’t supposed to be squeaky-clean-looking conservative blond white guys. Nope. They’re supposed to be black or Arab or Muslim (or some combination thereof).

I have to wonder if Breivik’s brand of terrorism — and, because he’s a right-wing white guy, are the wingnuts here at home even going to acknowledge that Breivik is indeed a terrorist? — is the new (white male) face of (domestic) terrorism. (I specify “domestic terrorism” because the white male face long has been the face of global military terrorism, although, of course, here in the United States it’s never considered to be terrorism if the U.S. military [or one of its wingnutty allies, such as Israel] commits state-sanctioned terrorism.)

Reuters notes that Friday’s “violence, Norway’s worst since World War II, has profoundly shocked the usually peaceful nation of 4.8 million.”

If a white male wingnut can slaughter 93 innocent people in the name of his political ideology in a nation that (until now, anyway…) has enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most peaceful nations on the planet, what might we expect here at home?

While Ann Cunter blathers on about Democrats seeking to put the heads of American wingnuts on pikes, it was a white-male wingnut who apparently agrees with her on the core issues who in cold blood slaughtered dozens of mostly teen-aged members of his nation’s Labour party, which is roughly equivalent to the United States’ Democratic Party. (I can only say “roughly equivalent” because the establishmentarian Democratic Party, since Bill Clinton, has been drifting further and further to the right to the point that it really can no longer be called “liberal.” Even calling it “centrist” is a stretch, since it’s more center-right than it is center-left.)

While Cunter blathers on about Democrats being violent, it was an apparently right-leaning young white man, Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head (and shot six others dead) in Tucson in January.*** Oh, and this was after Repugnican Tea Party (then-)queen Sarah Palin had posted this image on the Internet, in which Giffords had been indicated on a map with a gun-sight crosshairs:

Yes, it’s the Democrats who are mob-like, certainly not the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, whose presidential aspirants actually think it’s perfectly OK to post mob-like hit lists of political opponents on the Internet. 

I’m not advocating that we actual liberals seek out the white male wingnuts and pre-emptively put their heads on pikes because they are ticking time bombs ready to start shooting into gatherings of people whose ideology they oppose (I could list several examples of their potential targets, but I don’t want to give them any ideas) and to start bombing government buildings a la Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was yet another right-leaning white male terrorist (and who might have inspired Breivik; I suppose that we’ll find out).

Should the white male wingnuts start mimicking Anders Behring Breivik (and Timothy McVeigh and Jared Lee Loughner and…) here at home, however, I wouldn’t rule that out.

My general feeling is that if the treasonous wingnuts want another civil war, then we should give them one — and annihilate them this time, instead of actually help them with reconstruction, only so that they could continue to drag the nation down to this day.

In the meantime, however, it’s quite easy to lay waste to the claim that it’s the liberals who actually are “demonic” or “mob-like” when it’s the wingnuts who always actually have committed the lion’s share of the killing of innocents and other mob-like behavior.

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*No, I have not and I will not read Cunter’s entire book. I’d never contribute a single fucking penny toward her poisonous and treasonous right-wing propaganda. The intro to her book, if you want to read it, is available at amazon.com.

**I use quotation marks because it’s only others who kill for political gain who are “terrorists,” even though the United States slaughters far more innocent civilians in its pursuit of its own political (well, corporate) objectives than does any other nation, hands down.

***Loughner appears to be insane and his political ideology (what we know of it, anyway) therefore is muddled, but he inarguably meets the profile of the alienated, angry, dangerous young white man whom we have come to know and love. And certainly his target, a female Democratic lawmaker, sure looks like, symbolically, at least, an assualt on the liberal and the feminine by the conservative and the masculine. With a gun, of course, because the alienated, angry, dangerous young white men sure love their guns. And aren’t they exactly the ones who should possess their own home arsenals?

Update (Sunday, July 24, 2011): I’ve done a lot of reading on Anders Behring Breivik. It’s quite interesting. Apparently we know that he was inspired by at least one American white male wingnut — Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” portions of whose manifesto Breivik reportedly simply lifted for his own lengthy manifesto.

Breivik reportedly signed his wingnutty manifesto as “Andrew Berwick,” which suggests that he identifies with the Anglo(-American) brand of winguttery, even though he is a Norwegian nationalist who apparently wants to see Norway (and indeed, all of “white” Europe) purged of people who don’t look and believe like he looks and believes, much like the Nazis of Nazi Germany wanted to purge Nazi Germany of its “undesirables” and the anti-immigrant, xenophobic, misogynist, patriarchal, homophobic, capitalist/anti-socialist, Islamophobic “Christo”fascists (and some right-wing Jews) of the United States (who, with rare exceptions, such as Repugnican Tea Party presidential aspirant Herman Cain, also are white supremacists) would love to purge the United States of its “undesirables.”

The world — its demographic make-up and its balances of power – is rapidly changing, and the stupid white men who always have been in charge of the show (at least in Europe and in the United States) — and their supporters – are coming unglued. Suddenly they are the “victims” — even though no one is victimizing them and they continue to victimize others.

Finally, you should read Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the definition of the word “terrorism.”

As Greenwald points out amply, to hypocritical Americans (and, I suppose, to some hypocritical Europeans and Israelis as well), it’s only “terrorism” when a Muslim does it. And I mean literally — to many, the very definition of “terrorism” necessitates that it is an act committed by a Muslim, because, very apparently, “Christians” (and Jews) are, by definition, incapable of committing terrorism. (When you are God’s chosen, you can do no wrong, apparently. Especially if your skin is white.)

This discussion of the definition of “terrorism” reminds me of how George W. Bush used to toss around the word “civilized.” According to Bush, the Muslim “terrorists” (oops — that’s redundant!) are not “civilized,” while the “Christian” (and Jewish) residents of the United States of America (and the United States’ partner in crime, Israel), by definition are “civilized” – even though in my lifetime the “civilized” “Christians” and Jews of the United States and Israel have slaughtered far more innocent Muslims than vice-versa.

(The tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis whom the United States of America has slaughtered since March 2003 in the Vietraq War in retaliation for the roughly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11, 2001 — even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11 — is in line with the insane disproportionate amount of killing that we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the Israelis whine that they are “victims” when, in fact, every time there is an Israeli-Palestinian flare-up, only a handful of Israelis die in comparison to the large number of Palestinians who die as a result of the military aid that the United States gives Israel.

Yeah, the United States and Israel — God’s chosen nations, dontchya know — are “civilized.” Right. Just like Anders Behring Breivik is civilized.)