Armageddon Out of Here
(h/t to the phonetically eponymous Salon commenter for the title…)
Glenn Greenwald has a great piece up today about how religious nut Mike Huckabee met up with some other religious nuts in Israel, to, well, be nuts and religious together. As my mother used to say, sweetly and surreptitiously, about especially striking unattractive couples, “It’s nice they found each other.”
Each day I’m astonished at the unnatural, eyeball-searing couplings occurring with nauseating frequency on the right; health care billionaires and Medicare-dependent retirees, preachers and whoremongers, and eliminationist Christians and “unperfected” Jews. Nobody has suffered from beer goggles more astonishingly than these Republicans, where if lions didn’t routinely lay down with lambs, the lambs would pretty much never get laid, and not just because of their obesity, advanced age, and disturbing personality traits.
Cloaked in the usual deceptive and focused-grouped talking points that are whispered like pillow talk to the victims, er, dates, by charlatans like Huckabee, suddenly Israel’s decision to move more crazy people in yarmulkes and beards into Palestinian land to push out the Palestinians has become nothing more than a matter of not “telling Israelis where they should live”. (Nice hook… works into the property rights angle of which the Right is so enamored, except for the inconvenient fact that it’s not their property, a fact which remains unchanged despite that even though they’re authoritarian, religious, crazy, and as such quite appealing to loons like Mike Huckabee, the Israeli religious right’s claim to a divine right to things that aren’t theirs is laughable on its face, according to the UN and almost all normal nations.
Along comes that uppity Schvartze, Obama, and the next thing you know some quiet peeps are being gingerly made made about, well, illegal colonization and subjugation of native populations, and Huckabee’s running around committing what would have been considered irredeemable treason back in the Bush Era… bashing “America” on “foreign soil.” Who among us could ever have predicted this? That’s a trick question, of course.
Now, experience has shown me that Jews, like the rest of us, have their flaws, but stupidity is not among them, and allying themselves with the “Left Behind” crowd, seems uncharacteristically retarded, or just deeply cynical: religious crazies of whatever stripe the world over have more in common with each other than they do with normal people, and Heck, lots of money is to be made while everybody fights, bloodily, expensively and interminably, for their own personal spaghetti monster. Ridiculous arguments are, inexplicably, so much more winnable when one simply says, “God Said so.” Cut to commercial.
The fact that Obama seems to be so deserving of “off soil” of criticism from nuts like Huckabee and the Israeli Right is of course overblown and manufactured, but it is one of the few bright spots in an ostensibly liberal Presidency that so far has offered thinking Americans precious few of them. When crazy Israelis are calling Obama both a schvartze and an Arab, proudly and simutaneously, while Huckabee feels the overwhelming need to head on over and buck them up, it’s not the worst thing; however mildly, Obama is finally pissing off the right people. For a Change.
You’re so right about the religious crazies having a lot in common with one another, even when their theologies are at odds, all the way to the state of war. The arguments at UT today over Revelation are amusing. They are also a bit dispiriting, because my post quoting Revelation at The Seminal got only four comments. If the Hag and RMP hadn’t shown up, it would only have gotten off-track comments. I suppose I should have gone a little farther to show that I was just using the Revelation bit as hyperbole, but I thought that by giving an extra “6″ I’d tip it off.
I usually stay away from commenting at UT on Israel threads because they degenerate into outrageous stuff so quickly. I felt like I had to join in today at least to help welcome Glenn back.
I missed the post about the international traffic. That’s great that the hits here are so high. Too bad none of the Latvians showed up to share their WD-40 or whatever it is they drink.
I think sysprog likened it to 10/40 weight, which is slightly more viscous than WD-40, but would probably taste better with the right mixer. As for the Seminal piece, I do think that the toobz are a field of tumbleweeds at the moment, because a lot of people out there have lives. (I’m not speaking for myself, of course…) I have heard that that phenomenon is widespread.
Dirigo talked about the crazies in Texas in an earlier thread. This judge should be put in charge of the crazies as long as it is inside a maximum confinement facility.
Texas judge on trial for mishandling execution: Republican judge Sharon Keller told lawyers for convicted killer ‘we close at five’ as they scrambled to delay execution
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/17/sharon-keller-lethal-injection
More on Keller and her fellow travelers …
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/08/hbc-90005554
OT This is long overdue.
Mental Stress Training Is Planned for U.S. Soldiers (the dealing honestly with emotions part should be required of all congress critters)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/health/18psych.html?_r=1&hp
Nothing Huckabee does surprises me in the least. The man’s a complete and utter scumbag. Google “Huckabee and DeMond” for details if you’re not already familiar with Huck’s despicable attempt to blame Bill Clinton (who else?) for his own actions.
Oops – make that “Huckabee and DuMond” – haven’t had my coffee yet.
I guess it’s Clinton’s fate to be followed in office by righty halfwits willing to lie and their even dumber followers, who’ll believe anything.
In the category of ‘unnatural couplings’ just this morning I was remembering Barbara Boxer standing by and for Joe Lieberman during the Lieberman vs Lamont contest. I’ll never see Boxer in the same light. She wears ‘teh stupid’ now right along with her pal Lieberman and right along with everyone who voted for the snake. Of course, I’m still more than befuddled about where Gore’s head was at in 2000.
Ah, would that Connecticut had a “sore loser” law, and Holy Joe would have been all through when Lamont beat him in the primary. Boxer wasn’t the only Democrat to kiss Lieberman’s wrinkly ass, either.
Re: Boxer wasn’t the only Democrat . . .
http://nytimes.com/2006/04/02/nyregion/02lieberman.html
HARTFORD, March 31 — Three times on Thursday night, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman asked the crowd of 1,700 for quiet during his remarks at the state Democrats’ annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey fund-raising dinner.
“Shhh,” he told the guests. But rather than interrupting him with applause, many were ignoring him, having struck up conversations after finishing their chicken.
[...]
A few minutes later, however, the audience was riveted as Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the guest speaker at the $175-a-plate dinner, stood on the podium and began the customary round of recognition of candidates and incumbents in the room. When he got to Mr. Lieberman, who is his mentor in the Senate and who helped recruit him to speak at the event, the applause again was muted.
“I know that some in the party have differences with Joe,” Senator Obama said, all but silencing the crowd. “I’m going to go ahead and say it. It’s the elephant in the room. And Joe and I don’t agree on everything. But what I know is, Joe Lieberman’s a man with a good heart, with a keen intellect, who cares about the working families of America.”
Then, with applause beginning to build, he finished the thought: “I am absolutely certain that Connecticut’s going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the United States Senate.”
- – NYTimes
Good sense? Expect the Nutmeg State to lose its senses next time around, leaving Joe to get a crony capitalist “job’ like the rest of the vermin.
I wrote a bunch of support emails to variuos companies that have taken their ads off Glenn Beck’s show and here’s the boilerplate response from GEICO. I guess they sent the same response to supporters of their decision and opposers:
Dear Sir/Madam,
If you are a policyholder we thank you for being with GEICO and we want to tell you more about this matter. If you are not, we also want you to learn more.
This week we took action to move our marketing messages from the Glenn Beck show and you are wondering why.
Well, you deserve an answer.
If the inflammatory nature of the comments on a program overshadows our message and causes GEICO to be drawn into a national debate, we are likely to reconsider where we place our marketing messages, which is what we did.
GEICO delivers very important messages through its major marketing campaigns: we’re saving customers’ dollars … we’re easy to do business with … we’re looking out for our policyholders. That’s what we hope the public hears and sees and focuses on.
As a company, we do not take positions on controversial issues.
As an advertiser, while a national debate on issues can be healthy and appropriate, we don’t see ourselves in the role of taking part in those debates.
Our business is auto insurance. We want to bring people value and we attempt to reach large audiences with that message.
It is of little benefit to us if a controversy on the program gets so much attention that our message is drowned out.
GEICO Corporate Communications
Nice letter, Retzilian, and thanks for providing it.