The Bombs Bursting In Air

If there are no local fireworks shows in your area, you can always watch the self-immolation of Sarah Palin.

Personally, I hope this is not the last we see of Wailin’ Palin. I want her in the next GOP primary, preferably with Newt Gingrich running alongside.

The Iraq Memorial War Wall

All Guns Blazing

Dan Froomkin, whose career with the Washington Post has ended under circumstances that bring considerable disgrace to the newspaper, has filed his final WaPo column. He is not, I’m happy to see, going gently into that good night:

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn’t as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it’s now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don’t know.

Froomkin says he’ll take some time off before unveiling his next project. Best of luck to him.

The Winger Mindset

Okay, people, somebody walk me through this.

Bill O’Reilly can spend hours of television time denouncing Kansas physician George Tiller as a Nazi, a moral equal to NAMBLA and Al Qaida, and call him “Tiller the Baby Killer” because he performed legal late-term abortions, but nobody can suggest that his words played any part in Tiller’s assassination by an anti-abortion psycho . . .   

. . . but mere words in a novel about a teenaged boy’s coming out are so dangerous to the public that a group of Wisconsin wingnuts not only want it banned from the local library, they want it burned in public.

I mean, the ranks of Wingnuttia are swollen with culture warriors who have built whole careers on the notion that mere video games, movies and TV shows have the power to warp minds and turn innocents into bloodthirsty criminals. The mere existence of Michael Moore was enough to cause the 9/11 disaster, to hear Dinesh D’Souza tell it. But a FreaksNews cable troll can howl against George Tiller night after night and that’s not supposed to have any effect on his viewers? The less stable ones, I mean, assuming that’s a distinction one can make among O’Reilly’s followers. 

While we ponder that question, let’s relax with some highly entertaining video built on O’Reilly’s latest froth-fest against Salon editor Joan Walsh. Good times!

From Batty to Bughouse

I know, I know . . . it’s been way too long since my last post. Here’s the problem: the two biggest issues of the moment are the ongoing financial meltdown caused by the Bush Bust-Out, and the increasingly insane and violent temper of conservative rhetoric. The first I have to avoid commenting on for professional, day-job reasons. The second gets a little monotonous — how many times can somebody write, “Haw haw, lookit the wacky wingers”? So lately I have the feeling that I just don’t have that much to add to the national political conversation.

On the other hand, I read this rant from the reliably zany Andrew Breitbart – proprietor of Big Hollywood, that online wingnut salt lick where washouts like Dirk Benedict go to whine about how Hollywood liberals wrecked their showbiz careers — and it seemed the least I could do would be to highlight the flakiest flake in any given week of flakery. And so, join me in calling on Andrew Breibart to put down his sippy cup, arrange the arms straps on his straitjacket and rise to take a bow as we salute Andrew Breitbart, Flake of the Week.

God Squawk

The argument about same-sex marriage has been going on long enough now that we can sort the anti-SSM rationales into three, you must excuse the term, positions: (1) EEEEEYEEWWW!; (2) defining marriage as anything other than a union of man and woman undermines the foundations of civilization; (3) the Big Guy in the Sky says it’s forbidden, and we have to do like he says or he will withdraw his blessing from America and all kinds of bad things will happen.

Since (1) is self-refuting and (2) usually leads to (3), let’s focus on the religious argument — specifically the Christianist view. As it turns out, Damon Linker in The New Republic has a pretty cool rejoinder to the Big Guy in the Sky contingent:

Among many other things, Christian scripture and tradition affirm the legitimacy of slavery, claim that the Jews are cursed for killing Jesus, and assert that one must give away all of one’s belongings and even learn to hate one’s own family before following Christ. These are just a few of the matters on which contemporary Christians, including orthodox Christians like Rod (Dreher), feel quite comfortable breaking with, or explaining away, scripture and tradition. And it’s a good thing, too, because it shows that they’re willing to think for themselves about important moral issues and to use their minds to separate out what is enduringly true in scripture and tradition from the unexamined prejudices that shape and distort everything touched by human hands, very much including received religious norms, practices, and beliefs. The issue, then, is to determine why so many contemporary Christians have decided that the teaching on homosexuality — but not the teachings on slavery, Jews, and the most stringent requirements of becoming a disciple of Christ — deserves to be preserved.

As I’ve noted before (and implied many times as well), I tend not to be impressed by arguments that involve waving around the nearest handy copy of the local holy book. If the Almighty wants to part the clouds, shine down a beam of light and inform the world in thunderous tones that he doesn’t want to see SSM accorded equal status with opposites-attract wedlock, then he’s got my attention. Until then, Jesus whoopers and Christianists can put away their witch doctor paraphernalia and frame their arguments in a rational fashion.

I realize that I have failed to take into account the Rick Santorum if-we-allow-gay-marriages-then-we’ll-end-up-letting-people-marry-house-pets-and-livestock point of view, but since most of us would need nine-tenths of our brains surgically removed before we could address that argument on its proper intellectual level, I figured I’d save us a lot of trouble.

Stupid Prosecutor Tricks

Cases like this are just one more reason to be glad for the ACLU. As a breed, prosecutors are vulnerable to the Witchfinder General Syndrome, and this guy sounds like a classic example of what happens when a prosecutor gets drunk on his authority and power.

Atlas Frugged

After the Hieronymous-Bosch-Meets-The-Island-of-Dr. Moreau spectacle that was CPAC, followed by the entirely predictable news that RNC chairman Michael Steele has leased a long-term parking spot for his lips on Rush Limbaugh’s butt cheeks, I thought the conservatives had topped up their crazy tank and would spend the rest of the week chilling out in their padded cells.

Silly me. Now the flappers are talking about “going Gault.” Let’s trek into the fever swamp and listen as these strange creatures gather around their favorite salt lick:

• I shut down my online businesses in early November, I don’t remember why. I’m now a net user of Obama Cheese. I may even apply for food stamps.

• Small businesses will lay off employees, and I hope the first to go are the ones that voted for bho. They wanted ‘hope and change’, well you got it. These bho voters have NO idea how much more taxes they are going to be paying. I just hope those bho voters have their IRA, 401k and stocks cratered as much as those who DID not vote for bho. Such(sic) it up kids!

• I’m starting my victory garden this spring. My sister is expanding hers and in exchange for my helping with that I will be able to claim some of the produce. I’ve been couponing for over a year now and have a nice stockpile of food for when things get really, really bad. I can’t believe that my country is on this path. From Ronald Reagan to this Marxist in the span of one generation. Unbelievable.

I trust the Ayn Rand reference is already clear.

Debate of the Living Dead

I think it’s safe to say that if a geologist decided it would not be worth his  time to engage in a staged discussion with a hollow-earth cultist, you would not hear people of average education accusing him of being pissy or trying to stifle scientific debate. That’s because people of average education and intellect understand that the interior of the earth is not a vast cavern with its own sun, and that the Pellucidar novels are pulp fantasy, not scientific speculation. They also understand that for a scientist, getting into a “debate” with a scientifically illiterate crank has no upside — it is simply a time-suck that will keep him away from career-advancing research, while giving the crank a spurious air of authority.

So why is it that somebody who is demonstrably well-educated in many areas fails to grasp that evolutionary biologist Nick Gotelli has better things to do with his time than engage in yet another “debate” about creationism and evolutionary theory with somebody from the Discovery Institute, that wellspring of bad-faith argument and impenetrable ignorance? And that Gotelli’s elegantly phrased and utterly scathing rejection of the offer of debate is not “posturing” or pissiness, but simply streetwwise recognition of the fact that the Discovery Institute is interested only in grubbing for publicity.

“Debate” implies an exchange of arguments that leads to a conclusion and an adjustment of opinions in the face of the stronger argument. Gotelli knows that he can spend hours demolishing creationist arguments, like other scientists before him, without changing a single mind on the other side. When a creationist’s points are refuted, he simply reshuffles and restates them. If George Romero makes another zombie movie, I humbly suggest he clothe the undead in t-shirts with terms like “Irreducible Complexity” and “Intelligent Design” across the chests. No matter how many times you shoot them down, they get back up and keep coming.

There is plenty of debate taking place every day about the nature of evolution. Creationism — or intelligent design or whatever new bottle is fashioned to hold the old whine — is not a part of that debate. The staffers at the Discovery Institute are either half-smart religious cranks, or fully sleazy operators who know better but keep pushing discredited nonsense because they want to keep cashing their wingnut welfare checks.

Got Biblical?

Do you have morals worthy of the Bible? Take the quiz and see.