Monday, December 20, 2010

One Hundred Fifty Years Ago This Week...

170 vile traitors in South Carolina declared that their state was leaving the Union, the start of the most monstrous and devastating act of treason in American history, one which eventually left over 620,000 military dead and tens of thousands of civilian dead. This treason left an additional 400,000 Americans wounded, many permanently disabled. And on what grounds were the vile traitors acting? The suspicion that the conciliatory Abraham Lincoln, who was bending over backward to compromise with the vicious slave owning class of the South, would act to crush the South's "peculiar institution" as it was once known.

And this was the "noble cause" the South Carolina traitors were defending:




And the outcome of the mass treason they started?





And the political party that celebrates the Confederate treason and honors the Confederate traitors?

Take one guess:

Friday, December 10, 2010

Hitchens Hits a Home Run

I have often bitterly disagreed with Christopher Hitchens, but here he and I are in complete agreement--and he says it better than I could. Hitchens' target is the Tea Party and the vile people who have inspired it. A sample:

Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread [John Birch Society founder] Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.


**********

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …


Wow. Read the whole thing, and then be reminded of just what we're really up against in the Radical Right.

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Hear Hear!

Illinois State Senator Ricky Hendon on the Illinois Civil Unions law:



My only objection to the law is that it didn't go far enough. Illinois--and every other state--should have laws guaranteeing full marriage rights for all adults, regardles of sexual orientation.

RIP Elizabeth Edwards

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards, and an accomplishd woman in her own right, has died of cancer.

My condolences go out to her family, her friends, and her many, many admirers.

Saturday, December 04, 2010

No, We CAN'T Work With the Republicans

Steve Benen explains why not in detail here. It's simple: the Republicans want total victory 100% of the time on 100% of all issues. They will not cooperate, they will not compromise, and their counter-proposals are right-wing lunatic garbage, from  which they will not budge one inch. I am in total despair because our President doesn't seem to grasp this.

Oh, and one other thing:

THE CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS  DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT AMERICA AND THEY WANT CONDITIONS IN THE COUNTRY TO GET WORSE SO THEY CAN SEIZE POWER AGAIN. THEY WANT TO SEIZE POWER SO THEY CAN LINE THEIR OWN POCKETS AND THE POCKETS OF THEIR FRIENDS, AND IMPOSE THEIR SO-CALLED, FRAUDULENT  "VALUES" ON EVERYONE ELSE.

Is that clear enough?

Thursday, December 02, 2010

Radical REPUBLICAN Right Winger Steve King: VILE RACIST BASTARD

I know the accusation of racist gets thrown around too often, but in this case, it's justified. Check out the details here. The controversy surrounds the USDA compensating black farmers for discrimination against them by the government in previous years. King calls these payments "slavery reparations". Reparations is one of the radical Right's favorite buzzwords, one of their racist dogwhistles. Limbaugh uses it all the time in his streams of non-stop lies against President Obama and the Democrats. It's all part of the tired, sickening Right-wing mindset: The lazy ni**ers are taking my money. It never, never, never lets up with these people. Never.

King speaks for the millions of hate-filled, often elderly whites who feel 24/7 resentment against anyone who doesn't look like they do. You would think in this day and age this bilge would no longer be acceptable.

You'd be wrong.

Welcome to the Republicans, the Party of Jefferson Davis.

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

Birther Idiots STILL at Work

The racist Birthers are still at work, as noted here. It really is no different than a bigoted white cop stopping a black driver for no reason at all and saying, "Show me your license, boy." As Angry Black Lady says:

At some point, somebody’s going to Joe Wilson on everybody’s asses; somebody is going to call Obama a nigger before these next two years are over. Count on it. That’s what they’re calling him in their Stupid Ass White People meetings. It’s only a matter of time before someone forgets that they’re only supposed to talk that talky talk in their smoke-filled backroom.


This country is full of idiots, and it’s reaching critical mass.

Man, she's got that right.