Hatred is on the November 6 ballot

The right-wing nutjob (from Florida, of course) who sent at least a dozen pipe bombs or pipe-bomb replicas to several prominent members of the Democratic community (not one of which actually reached its addressee in person, to my knowledge [mail to prominent individuals is screened — duh!]) is, of course, a big supporter of “President” Pussygrabber. He is shown above at a Pussygrabber KKK rally in Florida.

CNN has rounded up all three recent hate crimes in the United States into one article, titled “72 Hours in America: Three Hate-Filled Crimes. Three Hate-Filled Suspects.”

It begins:

Consider the past week in America.

Wednesday, a white man with a history of violence shot and killed two African-Americans, seemingly at random [it wasn’t really random, since he was hunting black people, very apparently], at a Kentucky Kroger store following a failed attempt to barge into a black church.

After mail bombs were being sent to people who’d been criticized by the president, a suspect was arrested Friday — a man who had railed against Democrats and minorities with hate-filled messages online.

And [yesterday] morning, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 people attending Jewish services.

Those three incidents in 72 hours shared one thing: hate.

The pipe-bomb douche — a body-builder who apparently shaves his armpits and reportedly once was a male stripper (not your usual MAGA-cap wearer) — of course is a well-documented supporter of the “president.”

What I’d like to know is whether he never intended a pipe bomb to go off or if he wanted one or more to go off but is too fucking stupid to have been able make one that actually works.

And I knew that it was a wingnut who had sent the pipe bombs or pipe-bomb replicas — that is wasn’t a “false-flag” operation — when I saw the image of the package that he sent to former CIA Director John Brennan, supposedly from former Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, on which he misspelled Brennan’s surname as “Brenan” and misspelled Schultz as “Shultz.” (Gee, that wouldn’t be a tip-off, the sender misspelling his or her own name!)

Wingnuts, including our “president,” are known for being unable to spell and for making typos.

On that note, the pipe-bomb douche put “Florids” instead of “Florida” in the return address on at least two of the packages, and he used a ridiculously large font and unnecessarily put the word “to” in front of the address and “from” in front of the return address, which only a fucktard who doesn’t know how to properly address a package (that is, a Pussygrabber voter) would do.

The pipe-bomb douche is a mixed-race man (Italian and Filipino), apparently, who is 56 years old and apparently was living in that van covered with anti-Democratic and pro-Pussygrabber signs and stickers.

In the less-publicized Kentucky incident, a 51-year-old white man targeted and shot to death two black people, a man and a woman, very apparently because he wanted to kill black people. Here is a lovely news photo of him, apparently escorted, ironically, by black law enforcement officers:

Associated Press photo

After this white-supremacist genius couldn’t get inside of a black church in order to shoot it up Dylann Storm Roof style (those inside wisely had locked the doors) — he opted instead for the nearby grocery store, where he very apparently went hunting for black people.

Yesterday’s massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, was the deadliest hate crime of this past week, with 11 shot dead and six more injured.

The synagogue shooter is a 46-year-old white man —

AFP photo

— who reportedly isn’t actually a fan of “President” Pussygrabber because he deems Pussygrabber to be too cozy with Jews.

(I don’t get anti-Semitism. I am an atheist and so I reject Christianity, Judaism and Islam, not just for their hocus-pocus, Santa-Claus-like bullshit, but also for their long history of patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, but as long as someone doesn’t try to oppress me with his or her bullshit religious beliefs, I believe in live and let live, and if we’re going to judge someone, we should judge him or her upon the content of his or her character, paramount, probably, in regards to how he or she treats others.)

Still, this anti-Semite who acted upon his hatred in Pittsburgh isn’t a “man” who would vote for a Democrat, and Slate.com points out correctly that Pussygrabber for years now has stoked the current toxic environment in which for resentful, stupid, mostly middle-aged white males (and the stupid white women who support them), there are plenty of scapegoats to blame for the fact that they are losers: there are the “illegals” (Pussygrabber’s favorite scapegoats), Jews, blacks, Democrats, socialists, gays, feminists, transgender individuals, Muslims, et. al., et. al.

This is the sociopolitical (and sociopathic) background in which the nation will go to the polls in only nine days.

Those who might one day find themselves to be one of the victims of these hate-filled, white-male losers — and those who care about these hate crimes — might want to be sure to vote, because, no matter what “President” Pussygrabber’s treasonous, insane-by-definition supporters might claim, hatred indeed is on the November 6 ballot, and it’s up to each and every one of us to vote for it or to vote against it.

Attacks on Elizabeth Warren demonstrate her strength

Reuters news photo

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has the stuff of which U.S. presidents are made, which is why she has plenty of detractors. (And she really rocks purple. Just sayin’: I want eight years of a purple-wearing president.)

Reading Yahoo! political commentator Matt Bai’s recent column on why he believes Vice President Joe Biden should run for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination, I was stopped cold by Bai’s casual, cavalier remark that besides Biden, “There’s [Vermont U.S. Sen.] Bernie Sanders, who’s an avowed socialist [as though there were something wrong with that], and Elizabeth Warren, who sounds more like a Jacobin.”

I recalled that the Jacobins were associated with the French Revolution, but I couldn’t recall exactly what they were about, and so I looked them up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia notes of the Jacobins, in part: “At their height in 1793-94, the [Jacobin Club] leaders were the most radical and egalitarian group in the [French] Revolution. Led by Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794), they controlled the government from June 1793 to July 1794, passed a great deal of radical legislation, and hunted down and executed their opponents in the Reign of Terror.”

Wow.

For all of the right wing’s bullshit about “class warfare” — which, conveniently, according to the right wing’s playbook always is waged by the poor against the rich and never vice-versa — Elizabeth Warren actually has not called for a violent revolution.* She has called for a return to socioeconomic fairness and justice, which is more than reasonable, especially given what has happened to the American middle class since at least the 1980s, during the reign of Reagan (another reign of terror from history, not entirely metaphorically speaking). But if you can’t win an argument these days, you just accuse your opponent of being a terrorist (not entirely unlike Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recent comparison of Wisconsinites standing up for their livelihoods to the terrorists who comprise ISIS).

Matt Bai makes only one other brief reference to Warren in his screed about why, in his estimation, Biden should run for president for 2016: “Biden’s a middle-class champion who makes the case for economic fairness with more conviction than [Billary] Clinton and less vitriol than Warren .”

I agree that Billary has little to zero credibility on the issue of socioeconomic justice, but if you Google “vitriol” you will see that it means “cruel and bitter criticism.”

Wow. Warren is passionate, absolutely. She’s one of the relatively few passionate and progressive elected officials in D.C., and passion is a normal response to socioeconomic injustice that is deep and widespread. But when has Warren ever been bitter and/or cruel? WTF, Matt Bai?

I’m not the only one who has recognized this. I was pleased to see soon later that Salon.com writer Elias Isquith wrote a column on Bai’s drive-by bashing of Warren and on the establishment’s fear of Warren — fear of Warren because she actually threatens to upend the status quo in Washington, D.C., the status quo that is toxic for the majority of Americans (and much if not most of the rest of the world) but that is working out just fine for the denizens of the halls of power in D.C. (which would include Bai, whom Isquith refers to as “the star pundit-reporter and longtime communicator of whatever the conventional wisdom of the political elite happens to be at any given time”; I would add that Bai is a mansplainer par excellence as well).

Isquith, too, takes issue with calling Warren a “Jacobin,” and Isquith compares a quotation of an actual Jacobin (the philosophy of whom is that “[the] policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror. … Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs”) to a quotation of Warren (one of my favorites):

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

This statement (from August 2011, when Warren was running for the U.S. Senate) is eminently fair and reasonable — I’d call it “common sense” if the wingnutty fascists hadn’t already bastardized that term for all of their harmful ideas and opinions.

Why the establishmentarian attacks on Warren, whose actual words and actual record have nothing whatsofuckingever to do with what her detractors and critics claim about her? Isquith offers a plausible explanation (links are Isquith’s):

… The first and most obvious reason is that Washington is, to put it gently, a swamp of corruption where many influential people live comfortably — thanks to Wall Street. Maybe they’re lobbyists; maybe they work in free-market think tanks; maybe they’re employed by the defense industry, which benefits greatly from Wall Street’s largesse. Or maybe they’re government bureaucrats who find Warren’s opposition to the “revolving door” to be in profound conflict with their future plans.

My second theory is less political and more prosaic. Another reason Bai and his ilk find Warren discomfiting may be her glaring lack of false modesty and her disinterest in keeping her head down and paying her dues. Because despite being the capital of what is nominally the greatest liberal democracy on Earth, Washington is in truth a deeply conformist and hierarchical milieu, one where new arrivals are expected to be neither seen nor heard until they’ve been deemed to have earned their place. And while Warren may want to be seen as a team player, what she cares most about is reining in Wall Street. If she deems it necessary to accomplish her primary goal, she’s willing to step on some toes and lose a few fair-weather friends. …

I would add that patriarchy, sexism and misogyny certainly play a role, too. It might not be conscious in all cases, but I surmise that because every single one of our 44 U.S. presidents thus far have been men, there is an ingrained cultural, even visceral, belief among many, many Americans — even women — that the U.S. president should be a man. Thus, the likes of Matt Bai is rooting for Joe Biden; Bai’s support of Biden apparently stems, in no tiny part, from the fact that Biden is yet another older white man.

The U.S. president should be, in my book, the candidate who both is the most progressive and the most electable, and right now that candidate is Elizabeth Warren. That she happens to be a woman is great, as we are woefully overdue for our first female president.

Presidential preference polls consistently show both Warren and Biden to be Democrats’ second and third choices after Billary Clinton (who, after E-mailgate, might slide in the polls of Democrats and Democratic-leaners; we’ll see).

Joe Biden probably would be an acceptable-enough president – I’d certainly take him over a President Billary – but given his age (he’s 72 years old today and would be 74 were he to be inaugurated as president in January 2017, making him the oldest president at the time of inauguration in U.S. history [even Ronald Reagan was a spry 69-going-on-70 years old when he took office in early 1981]) and given his reputation as a hothead, I don’t know how electable Biden would be.

And while in fairness the vice president doesn’t get to do very much, what has Biden done over the past six years?

Biden’s age doesn’t bother me — if you can be the job, I don’t much care how old you are — but it would become a campaign “issue.” And while perhaps it’s not fair to Biden as an individual, it’s pathetic and sad and deeply disappointing that in our so-called “representative democracy,” our 45th president would be yet another white man, for a string of 44 out of 45 U.S. presidents being white men.

Elizabeth Warren is a twofer: an actually progressive Democrat who is electable as U.S. president, and thus also potentially our first U.S. president who is a woman.

Attacks on Warren by the shameless, worthless, self-serving defenders of the status quo are to be expected; when the voters hear and read what Warren has to say, versus the bullshit that the establishmentarians spew** about her, they will, I believe, put Warren in the White House, where she belongs.

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*For the record, I don’t rule out the use of violence in a revolution. Our plutocratic overlords never rule out the use of violence (state violence, usually) against us commoners. Unilateral disarmament is bullshit.

I’d much prefer a bloodless revolution, of course, but again, when the enemy doesn’t rule out violence, you shouldn’t either.

**Similarly, were most Americans actually informed about what democratic socialism actually is all about, they probably would embrace it, which is why it has been so important to the establishmentarians and the wingnuts (really, “wingnut” is too-cuddly a word for right-wing fascists) to lie about what socialism is all about.

Such a dog-whistle word has “socialist” become, indeed, that Matt Bai simply dismisses Bernie Sanders’ entire being in one fell swoop in just one phrase (“an avowed socialist” — gasp!).

Thank you, Matt Bai, for so courageously doing your part to discourage all actual thought in the United States of America!

Was the London murder a murder or a ‘terrorist attack’?

Updated below

Michael Adebolajo: Murderer or “terrorist”? Is he a “terrorist” because he’s Muslim? And of Nigerian descent?

First off, let me be clear: I am not at all OK with the grisly murder of 25-year-old British soldier and Afghan war veteran Lee Rigby just outside of his barracks in London yesterday. And I reject the idea of killing one person in retaliation for killings that other people committed. In my book, revenge, if it is going to be exacted, should be exact, not approximate.

One of Lee Rigby’s two very apparent murderers, 28-year-old Michael Adebolajo of London, “a British-born convert to radical Islam,” according to Reuters, notoriously calmly explained to someone with a video camera — while he still held a knife and a meat cleaver in his bloodied hands (see the video still above) — why he and his companion, also of Nigerian descent, according to Reuters, attacked and killed Rigby, whom they reportedly first ran down in a car and then started hacking with a meat cleaver and knives: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

In Greenwich Village this past weekend, 32-year-old gay man Mark Carson was shot to death in an apparent hate crime; reportedly, Carson’s accused murderer, Elliot Morales, 33, who was apprehended by police, had used anti-gay hate speech before he shot Carson to death.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said of the murder: “It’s clear that victim here was killed only because, and just because, he was thought to be gay. There’s no question about that. There were derogatory remarks. This victim did nothing to antagonize or instigate the shooter. It was only because the shooter believed him to be gay.”

Reuters reports that many posit that recent advances in same-sex marriage rights in the U.S. — including three states having gone for same-sex marriage earlier this month — might have been behind the murder of Carson.

Yet the murder of Carson is called a “murder” and the murder of Rigby is called, automatically, a “terrorist attack” or “act of terrorism.”

What’s the difference between an act of murder and an act of terrorism/“terrorism”?

The murder of Carson, I surmise, was meant to send this message to all gay men or even to all non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals: You are not safe walking the streets. You might be the next one to be shot (or stabbed or beaten up or whatever).

That’s not a form of terrorism — an act of violence (a murder, no less) apparently committed with the intent to strike fear within a whole class of people?

Michael Adebolajo very apparently was using Lee Rigby as an example — he killed him in effigy of all British soldiers, in effect — just as Elliot Morales very apparently was using Mark Carson as an example — he killed him in effigy of all gay men, in effect.

So if Adebolajo and his cohort are “terrorists,” why isn’t Morales a “terrorist”?

My answer to my own question is that when a member of a historically oppressed minority group (like gay men) is murdered, it’s not considered to be a big deal. We can call it just a “murder,” as though it didn’t extend beyond just the murdered victim at all, but was just one of those random things — an act of God, Wolf Blitzer might say.

But when even one soldier is murdered — even on a public/civilian street, and while not on duty, which very apparently is how Rigby was murdered — that’s considered an attack on the plutocrats, the elites, of whom the commoner-funded military (Britain’s as well as the United States’) is just an arm.

The plutocrats, the elites, can’t maintain their overprivileged status without whole armies at their command, and the plutocratic elites are far, far more important than any of the rest of us ever could be, so the murder of just one of their soldiers — even in a non-combat situation — automatically is branded as “terrorism,” a more serious crime than plain-old murder.

I disagree that Rigby’s murder was an act of “terrorism.” Rigby’s murder was much closer to a murder than to an act of “terrorism.”

If we’re going to call Rigby’s murderers “terrorists” instead of just plain-old “murderers,” then we’re going to need to call Elliot Morales a terrorist, too — because his crime very apparently was motivated by his religious and political beliefs, just as Adebolajo’s and his partner’s crime was motivated by theirs.

The act-of-murder-vs.-act-of-terrorism problem largely can be solved if  the usage of the “t” terms — “terrorist,” “terrorists,” “terrorism” — returns to the terms’ status before 9/11. Cases of murder committed by an individual or two people apparently acting on their own and not as part of a known terrorist/“terrorist” group — such as the apparent case with the Boston Marathon bombings (I refer to the two Tsarnaev brothers, of course) and the apparent case with the British soldier who was murdered yesterday — are probably much closer to murder cases than they are to terrorism/“terrorism” cases.

We don’t refer to the two Columbine High School killers as “terrorists,” for example, even though they slaughtered many more people than did the Tsarnaev brothers or Michael Adebolajo.

That’s at least in part, of course, because the two Columbine killers were two white “Christian” kids, and you’re much more likely to be branded as a “terrorist” if you are Muslim — and even more so if you are a non-white Muslim.

That shit needs to stop. We can’t have a two-tiered system of “justice” in which it’s only “terrorism” if the (accused) perpetrator is Muslim or non-white or both. If we must go hog wild with the “terrorism” thing, then it must apply to so-called “Christians” and to other non-Muslims and to whites and to other non-blacks as well.

Update (Sunday, May 26, 2013): Columnist Glenn Greenwald, who once wrote for Salon.com but now works for The Guardian of the United Kingdom, on Thursday also tackled the question of “Was the London Killing of a British Soldier ‘Terrorism’?”

In his column, Greenwald notes that

An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being “terrorism”: indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as “terrorism.”

Yup. Here, I think, is the money shot of Greenwald’s analysis:

The reason it’s so crucial to ask this question [of whether or not an act of violence constitutes “terrorism”] is that there are few terms — if there are any — that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that “terrorism” provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do.

It’s a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world.

It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal.

There is ample scholarship proving that the term has no such clear or consistently applied meaning. … It is very hard to escape the conclusion that, operationally, the term has no real definition at this point beyond “violence engaged in by Muslims in retaliation against Western violence toward Muslims.” …

Actually, it seems to me, in the Western world, especially in the U.S. and the UK, “terrorism” has come pretty much to mean just “violence engaged in by Muslims.” Even the acknowledgment that such violence might be “in retaliation against Western violence toward Muslims” usually never is made in Westerners’ discussions of “terrorism,” since that obviously would be to bring Westerners’ guilt into the discussion, and most Westerners, it seems to me, will have none of that.

Greenwald also notes that “earlier this month, an elderly British Muslim was stabbed to death in an apparent anti-Muslim hate crime and nobody called that ‘terrorism,'” and adds that the term “terrorism” “at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.”

Yup.

There are news reports, such as this one, of actions perpetrated against Muslims in Britain by non-Muslims in “retaliation” for the slaughter of the British solider in London. This report (from Slate.com) states that “The incidents [so far have ranged] from name calling and abuse on social media, to the painting of graffiti, attacks against mosques, and pulling off women’s headscarves in the street.” (“Attacks against mosques” is so vague as to be almost meaningless. I wish that the writer had given us the details there, or if he didn’t have the details, to have stated that fact.)

Of course, such low-level, “harmless” terrorism is what the Jews in Nazi Germany experienced before the Nazis ratcheted things waaay up.

This leads to yet another question: Is an act in which someone is not injured or killed “terrorism”? Is it only “terrorism” if someone is injured or killed? These thugs pulling Muslim women’s headscarves off — that is not done with the intent of terrorizing these women?

Is such terrorizing OK if it’s considered in “retaliation” of, or just in reaction to, another incident? Would this be “counter-terrorism”? Or would this be something like just plain-old “justice,” since we non-Muslims never use the “t-” word to refer to any of our own actions?

Anyway, as I wrote in my first paragraph of this post, “In my book, revenge, if it is going to be exacted, should be exact, not approximate.”

As a gay man, I’m never happy to read about the slaughter of a gay man because he’s gay. To use an example that hit close to home, in July 2007, 26-year-old Satender Singh, a Fijian of Indian descent, was killed in my area (Sacramento) because he was suspected of being gay.

Whether he was gay or not I don’t know, but the two men from Eastern Europe who were charged with his murder very apparently thought that he was, because, witnesses said, the Slavic thugs who attacked Singh expressly targeted him because he was, they said, a “faggot” and a “sodomite,” among other things.

According to the hate-group watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center, witnesses also reported that these Slavic thugs “bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a ‘good church’ like theirs.” This was right before one of the thugs delivered a blow to Singh’s head, a blow that later caused his death. (Great “Christians,” eh? Well, even the Nazis considered themselves to be great “Christians.”)

While I truly wish that the homophobic Eastern European immigrants here in California would fucking respect and honor how things are done and are not done here in California (and not act here as it’s OK to act in their backasswards countries in Eastern Europe) — and if they don’t like our freedoms here, including our freedom from their brand of theofascism, they are free to return to Eastern Europe — never would it have occurred to me that it would have been OK to randomly attack (apparent) Eastern European immigrants on the street in “retaliation” for the murder of Satender Singh.

Ken Mehlman is NOT one of us

AFP photo

Repugnican Ken Mehlman, pictured in 2005, now finally publicly acknowledges that he’s gay. All non-heterosexuals of good conscience should shun him for having sold his community out for political gain. Ken Mehlman is a fucking piece of shit who should donate his organs now.

I’ve heard way too many gay men (and some others) defend Ken Mehlman, who was George W. Bush’s campaign manager for Bush’s 2004 “re”-election campaign and then served as head of the Repugnican National Committee before finally publicly acknowledging this week that he’s gay.

We (those of us gay men who were paying attention) all knew for years that Kenny Boy is gay. Way back in November 2004 I wrote about Mehlman’s closeted homosexuality.

The most common “defense” of Mehlman that I’ve been hearing as of late is that coming out can be a process, that it can take time, blah blah blah blah blah.*

Bullshit.

Mehlman was 37 years old when I blogged about him in November 2004. A 37-year-old man knows fully well whether or not he is primarily or exclusively sexually attracted to other men.

So the issue wasn’t that Mehlman wasn’t sure of his sexual orientation. The issue was that he was too much of a fucking coward and a fucking liar to be truthful with others about his sexual orientation.

And fine if we want to let pathetic closet cases pathetically drag their feet for years, knowing fully well that they are homosexual, perhaps even having sex with other men on the side while lying to everyone about their sexual orientation (a phenomenon that I refer to as “having one’s cock and eat it too”).

But not everyone who has his cock and eats it too is the fucking campaign manager for the BushCheneyCorp, which used whipped-up anti-gay sentiment as its centerpiece for the 2004 elections, just as the Repugnican Tea Party today is using the hatred of “illegals” and their “anchor babies” and Muslims as its centerpiece for the 2010 elections. And not every closet case then goes on to be the head of the RNC.

Ken Mehlman should be embraced by the non-heterosexual community to the same degree that a Jew who had helped the Nazis persecute the Jews should be embraced by the Jewish community.

That’s not hyperbole — that’s exactly how I feel about Ken Mehlman.

He’s a fucking traitor. He caused immeasurable harm to the non-heterosexual community and now he says that he’s one of us.

No, he isn’t one of us — and anyone who associates with him is, quite literally, palling around with a terrorist.**

—

*Mehlman himself is trying to use this defense. “It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” he is quoted as having said. “Everybody has [his or her] own path to travel, [his or her] own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.”

Mehlman conveniently leaves out the part, the little detail, where he supported the party that sold out non-heterosexuals for political gain, and he talks about his own happiness with apparent total disregard for what he did to others — who also wish that he’d come out of the closet years ago.

And really, anyone who uses the mawkish term “journey” to talk about his or her life should be shot immediately.

**My broad definition of “terrorism” is the use of fear for political gain, and Mehlman was instrumental in the Repugnican Tea Party’s use of the fear of and the hatred of non-heterosexuals for political gain.

There is no doubt that Mehlman’s support of the party that historically has persecuted non-heterosexuals has contributed to the national homophobic sociopolitical atmosphere that has caused the deaths of many non-heterosexuals.

There is no doubt in my mind that Mehlman is indirectly responsible for deaths of members of the community that he now claims for himself. I hope that his karma hits him sooner rather than later.

It’s time to play ‘Who’s a Terrorist?’

I read an Associated Press news article that begins like this — 

DALLAS – A Muslim charity and five of its former leaders were convicted [today] of funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, finally handing the government a signature victory in its fight against terrorism funding.

U.S. District Judge Jorge A. Solis announced the guilty verdicts on all 108 counts on the eighth day of deliberations in the retrial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once the nation’s largest Muslim charity. It was the biggest terrorism financing case since the attacks of Sept. 11.

“Money is the lifeblood of terrorists, plain and simple,” U.S. Attorney Richard Roper said. “The jury’s decision attacks terrorism at its core.”

— and the thought struck me: Who gets to decide what is and what is not “terrorism” and who is and who is not a “terrorist”?

Whoever is the more militarily mighty gets to decide that, apparently; the AP notes that “The U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995 and again in 1997, making contributions to the group illegal.”

According to BBC News, from the end of September 2000 to mid-January 2005, more than three times as many Palestinians were killed by Israelis than vice-versa. And this body count was done by an Israeli human rights group.

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

Yet Americans who give money to Israel aren’t charged with supporting terrorism — although, it seems to me, they are doing just that, if you use my dictionary’s rather broad definition of terrorism, which is “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” My own personal definition of “terrorism” has always been something along the lines of “the use of fear and intimidation for political gain.”

You know, under the/my broad definition of terrorism, certainly those who give any money to Israel that is used in Israel’s terrorist campaign against the Palestinians can be said to be supporting terrorists. But we Americans don’t prosecute those terrorist sponsors. No, we Americans love to kiss Zionist ass, and it’s Israel that dictates our policy in the Middle East. And although the Israelis slaughter far more Muslims than vice-versa, we never call the Israelis “terrorists.” They’re our allies, for Christ’s sake!

Shit, since the intention of Proposition 8 was to intimidate gay men and lesbians for political gain, and since Proposition 8 was funded mostly by the Mormon cult and the Catholic church, I might just consider them to be terrorist organizations, which means, of course, that anyone who has given money to the Mormon cult or the Catholic church has given money to a terrorist organization, and anyone who gave to the pro-Prop 8 campaign is a sponsor of terrorism, of course.

After all: “Money is the lifeblood of terrorists, plain and simple.”

Gee, getting to define who is and who isn’t a “terrorist” or a “sponsor of terrorism” sure is fun!

Bad-ass Ayers?

OK, I will admit that until just very recently I had no idea of what “terrorist” William Ayers looks like. (I’ve been meaning to catch the 2002 documentary “The Weather Underground,” but I’ve yet to do so.)

I had figured, since President-elect Barack Obama had been accused by Repugnican Sarah Palin-Quayle of having “palled around” with “terrorist” Ayers, Ayers must be some bad-ass. Not too much of a bad-ass “terrorist,” because the man is not in prison but is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and because the “terrorist” group “Weather Underground” never actually, um, hurt anyone, but still somewhat of a bad-ass.

But shit, I just very recently have seen what Ayers looks like, and the man sets off my gaydar:

Associated Press photos

This is a bad-ass terrorist? What did he do? Did he set off some gay bombs?

Ya know, I feel pretty safe now that Barack Obama does not, in fact, have a history of cavorting with bad-ass terrorists…