I Get Letters: 'Bend over and grab your ankles,piss ant'

This site has gone dormant over the last month due to a dead computer and my inability to do much more than write basic text documents with my makeshift alternatives. I do apologize for the lack of updates here, both links to pieces elsewhere and also new writing from General Ze'evi and other contributors who want to do something fun.

That's a ways off. For now, here's some fun hate mail I got about this piece on Gawker about Mitt Romney and Treason. I've attached an artist's conception of the sender, which I found by Google Image Searching "Crazy Motherfucker."

FROM: Jim Devitt
EMAIL: devitt9@aol.com
SUBJECT: Bend over and grab your ankles,piss ant

While Chicago community socialist revolutionary usurps our constitution,rule of law and attempts to take away our individual freedom quisling "Americans" like you are enabling and helping oblameo destroy America.we Americans are fed up with the pimps and pimpetes in the leftist oblameo radical leftist propaganda mill spewing out their ofal.america is waking up to the fifth-column of euro-socialist in our mist. The description of treason fit perfectly with you quisling socialist.we will never submit to to obameo's socialism or romney's progressive-moderate- liberal agenda.GOT THE MESSAGE PISS ANT

GAWKER: A Salad Bar of American Dread

Sometimes you just can't think of one "big idea" essay. Thankfully, every day, the United States commits so many individual acts of social, judicial and political horror that you can effortlessly pile them all together into a grab bag of nightmares.

I had no choice but to go that route earlier this week. Topics ranged from Arizona's cultural eliminationism, the snobbery of American colleges, the totally fucking insane Allen West, and the Supreme Court's ruling that you have the right to stay still as the police (legally!) finger your creamy white asshole without probable cause or even dinner.

Click the mystery box to go to the Gawker piece:


I'm posting the mystery box here, because I don't want to give away Jim Cooke's awesome art for the piece, which is absolutely hysterical and well worth the click on its own.

Also, this grab-bag format was poached from our own Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo. So if you enjoy the Gawker update, please come back and read some of Idi's work.

Burn in Hell, Christopher Hitchens

Note: For discussion of Middle Eastern affairs, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III: Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream.


Reflections in a Gimlet Eye
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
— Voltaire

Hitchens was human trash, and his corpse should be interred in a grave worthy of his towering legacy, an eternally burning garbage fire, rising as high as a Baghdad sunrise, a smoky immolation of all the worthlessness that could be crammed in his "contrarian" paunch.

Even this dream, of the phoenix never rising from the ashes, preserves that peasant’s megalomania more powerfully than any embalming fluids currently coursing through his veins. Formaldehyde's more potable than his lifeblood's cocktail of lies and booze, a tincture only the diseased imbibe. Hitchens was strictly for suckers, a mouse that roared, a VH1 I Love the 80s panelist with a fancy accent, a rap sheet and cirrhosis. "Rationalist," "skeptic," "contrarian," "public intellectual" — court jester. He plied that ancient trade for the deadliest predators on Earth; his was the reflexive, suck-up, kick-down cruelty of the British madding crowd. That’s all, folks.

To cite an author he hamfistedly emulated (more or less successfully), Hitchens was Squealer the pig, a silver-tongued correspondent to the middlebrow, flattering of power, contemptuous of the weak, the bashful, the foreign — the sincere. He was a kept man to the bitter end, the part-time iconoclast. As Norman Finklestein recalled, "'The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,' Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. 'You always wore it the 'right' way around.'" Hitchens afflicted the weak and comforted the powerful, an abnegation of any public service a gadfly could perform. Though his Oxbridge accent and erudition were crucial in fleecing the provincials he knew the USA was composed of, it was his more American qualities that endeared him to the terminal-stage Republic.

The multiple comparisons to Lord Byron that Hitchens received are so disturbing as to deserve no response. I'll try anyway. Byron — a superhuman defender of the voiceless, an impossibly good-looking sex machine, the noble son of "Mad Jack" Byron and sole voice in excoriating the destruction of Ireland, a Bengal tiger capable of ripping apart any of Wordsworth's reactionaries in verse or in person, a man disgusted by the fatuous, self-satisfied corruption of the Tory elite and the once-radical Lake poets (who should "change their lakes for oceans"), a man contemptuous of an imperial masculinity defined by cruelty and weakness, fled that stinking island — died a hero's death in Greece, fighting empire.

Hitchens died in Houston, Texas, headquarters of Halliburton.

Game Over: Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

For a certain segment of the Ron Paul fanbase, no evidence of his disseminating hateful, paranoid material will ever be enough. Citing James Kirchick's piece in The New Republic wasn't sufficient, because Kirchick could have just been "making everything up." Then, when I and others posted copies of "The Ron Paul Political Report Special Issue on Race Terrorism," that too wasn't convincing.

"Proof that he said/endorsed racist things? Hardly. Doing it repeatedly in one document isn't enough to prove that he did it. Now, if there were many documents..."

Well, now there are many documents. Over fifty. Right here.

As I said in my rundown on the Paul platform over at Vice, reasonable fans of Dr. Paul now must accept that

there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

Further, you can't dismiss this in the name of higher political or socioeconomic aspirations. Since Paul has no chance of winning — seriously, no chance at all — his only value is as a voice, a conduit for principles. And if your only hope is to change the discourse by amplifying ideas, you can do that via many voices and avenues. As I said in my Vice follow-up, acknowledging some of Paul's good ideas,

when you opt to support anti-imperialist and civil liberties ideals by supporting Paul the Candidate, you end up supporting everything else about him. That includes those newsletters and the unambiguous message to those who enjoy them: You can write these things and succeed; this works. The other good ideas to which he's signatory can't erase the fact that he put his name to those words printed above. The moral weight of those newsletters drags down even the most high-minded aspirations he has about civil liberties, and everything crashes down on all of us.

It's fine to have convictions about things he believes in. But when you voluntarily whitewash his record or choose to ignore it and champion him anyway, you are complicit in supporting the idea that racism and homophobia are morally inconsequential to the process of running for President of the United States. And, while many Paul supporters consider racism a social injury subordinate to extra-legal military conflict, there are just as many who disgustingly handwave at racism because it's an inconsequential burp on the way to more tax cuts, Free Markets, Free Money, Free Black Peop — stuff for me!

And still, for the faithful, this will not be enough.

Below, I've tried to give helpful general (bold) titles to each excerpt of the various Ron Paul newsletters available. These come courtesy of a zipfile of scans sent to me by reader Heresiarch, who, along with others, compiled it from various sources — although the lion's share, if not all, come from James Kirchick, who wrote the original, big Ron Paul story in The New Republic, in 2008. (You can see many of his highlights on the scans.) I have omitted the over 65 pages of scanned federal earmarks Ron Paul requested for his district, in a fit of States' Wants pique. I have also omitted the scans of Von Mises Institute brochures about a Secession Conference at which Paul spoke.

No attempt has been made to organize these via topic, since pages of each newsletter are apt to feature mini-articles on multiple topics, making organization futile. (My summaries don't indicate all that go on in the scans, so please click away.) Finally, below some of the scans, I've offered some comments in plain text. Those within quotation marks are direct quotes from the text appearing in the newsletter scans. Those without quotation marks are my own observations.

VICE: Ron Paul—Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

This week, the good people at Vice.com asked me to write about Ron Paul, because we both thought Newt was just too tiresome, and, "Please, God [we're] sick of Herman Cain. No more Herman Cain."

A lot of this Paul information isn't new. That's because Ron doesn't change. Time lumbers on, indifferently, into a bigger future, and he remains, hiding behind his 18th century battlements, picking lice off himself, rubbing coins fervidly and wearing a special kind of hat that says, "You can't force me to be a bowman if we fight France."

Unfortunately, Paul fans don't change much either. They see "no more War on Drugs" and "let's stop fighting in the Middle East," and everything else about the man goes unresearched or becomes a kind of meaningless hum. Which is why every now and again, you need to slap them. Hopefully this helps. Click the smilin' Ron Paul below to be taken to Vice:


By the way, the nice fella in the picture with him is Don Black, founder of Stormfront.org, America's #1 white supremacist site, which endorsed Ron Paul in 2008. (Even now you can find great information about him there, like, "All Republican candidates are Jew tools except for Ron Paul," which, perversely, is a fair reading of the GOP establishment's Israel policy.) The Paul campaign spent weeks pretending the endorsement and Stormfront's donation weren't an issue. That might have had something to do with not wanting to alienate supporters, like campaign coordinators who are Klansmen and neo-Nazis, or campaign volunteers like neo-Nazi Holocaust Museum shooter James van Brunn.

The GOP Welcomes You to the New Jim Crow

Depending on which nation or state you live in, you might have missed the Republican party's commitment over this last year to returning the U.S. to Jim Crow levels of voter disenfranchisement. Rolling Stone had an excellent article on the subject this week (and you should read it as soon as possible). In it, and in every right-wing pundit's gloss on the strategy, it's clear that the GOP believes it must rely on voter suppression and restriction to win elections.

This is one of the rare instances in which the Republican party has evinced even the slightest interest in math. They're playing percentages. Their ideal voter model is 2010 or any low-interest midterm contest; their nightmare is more of 2008. The fewer black, brown, filthy or foreign "Them" who can vote — not to mention college kids who are obliged to keep reading actual books about economics and American history — the greater force with which old, white, privileged evangelicals can shove this country back to the 19th century. They're not even particularly subtle about it. Just a few days ago, Salon's Alex Pareene ran an excellent breakdown of an odious piece of GOP opinion by Matthew Vadum. Pareene describes it as "positively Swiftian, if Jonathan Swift had been an actual cannibal." Let's look at what Vadum has to say:

Riot Tweetup: 'Mohammed Was a Bacon-Eating Homosexual'

There will always be people who claim that Twitter is useful. They'll mention monetizing your blog, winning free iPhones, crowdsourcing or promoting natural dick growth. They're mistaken. Twitter's most powerful value lies in baiting people — whether it's Hoobastank sending two million people to "goatse" during the Iranian election crisis, or a man named "Fart" goading Smash Mouth's front man, Mr. Mouth, into eating two dozen eggs.

Also, evidently, all it takes is a handful of tweets to turn Britons on Twitter into Oswald Mosely, Nick Griffin of the BNP, or that hooligan bozo Stephen Yaxley-Lennon of the English Defence League. Or, at least that's what happened when a Twitter poster named Solaar used the #LondonRiot hashtag to drop a couple of fake lines about a Sharia revolution straight out of a right-wing fantasist's cheapest nightmare scenario. Here, take a look:

Understanding 'The Sharia Threat'

Despite their 2010 mid-term success, the Republican National Committee will probably not spend 2012 banging the socialism drum again to the same degree. Sure, their mid-term victories supposedly "stopped Obama," but the administration's policy juggernaut also raced forth with all the horsepower of a kid riding a big-wheel with one of those plastic handbrakes jammed in the "on" position.

Scaring people with socialism again will be a tougher sell because it's a retread and because the specter of taxing wealthy people to create government jobs for a stagnant economy isn't so spooky in states that have suffered over 10% unemployment and staggering underemployment. A safety net won't so easily represent doom to those still falling. Thankfully, based on the rousing success of "THEY'RE COMING TO THE GROUND ZERO MOSK," the latest lurking horror to send you screaming for the Party of Reagan is "Sharia." Don't take my word for it. Take theirs.

INFOGRAPHIC: 'IS THE SHARIA THREAT REAL?'

(This INFOGRAPHIC is an addendum to "Understanding 'The Shariah Threat.'")

Those looking for a fuller explanation of Sharia can turn to the normally terrible Wikipedia — home of facts like this one — for a surprisingly decent rundown of what it means. Cynics will note that, politically, Sharia is Michelle Bachmann's favorite new argument, one that ignores history and the terms of the Bill of Rights to paint a unique existential threat that is to be categorically feared. That she is willing to demonize Sharia as fundamentalist Islam's lurking, hateful agenda, crafted by a bunch of men to tell women what they can't do and seeking to criminalize private behavior on the basis of abstract morality — and, further, that no manner of violence is prohibited to defend this morality — should at no point remind you of her fundamentalist Christianity, which is something totally different.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Liberal Extremism

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


You Can Keep the 'Climate Change'; I'll Cling to My Fracking and Logs
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Due to budget cuts, the government will shut down or significantly scale back several web projects which increase government transparency. One of those projects involves showing which private companies were awarded stimulus contracts. Surely this move won't benefit companies owing millions in back taxes, for a total of almost $25 billion given to companies that hate the government so much that they want to ensure it won't be able to afford to give them contracts in the future.

• Blue Dog fuckhead Steny Hoyer insists on ruining the well-being of Federal employees, by asking as a part of budget negotiations to bring down their employee benefits to the nonexistent level of the private sector. Give Hoyer credit for mastering the art of Democratic negotiation: abandoning all major demands as a prerequisite for getting to the bargaining table and converting all those golden concessions into the lead of GOP demands rubber-stamped by "liberal" policymakers.

• State Park Obituaries:

California — Democratic (questionable) Governor Jerry Brown has proposed closing a quarter of the state's parks, with 70 scheduled to shutter as a result of budget cuts. Thankfully, closing 16 of those parks may violate federal law, meaning a mere 56 would be closed. Besides, the ones remaining open are already in such bad shape, it's like, who cares?

Ohio - A bill to allow Oil and natural gas drilling in state parks has passed the state house, and famous asshole governor John Kasich supports the measure. Nevermind that fracking for natural gas is like sticking nitroglycerine in your air-popper before the start of movie night, and that it's worse for the environment than just straight-up using coal. The big problem is that otherwise there's just not enough of a chance that Ohio will experience earthquakes, and this is something fracking can finally correct.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: O, Minnesota!

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


Land of 10,000 Corpses
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Perhaps to invigorate old people on death's door with a sense of empowerment, nursing homes want to ensure that employees receive less care than residents. To this end, they've sought exemptions from obligations to provide care to workers, who are already so terribly compensated that one in three don't have any health insurance at all. The ironic occupation of uncared-for caregiver gibes neatly with an existing program pioneered by Representative Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), in which congressional cafeteria busboys and servers were replaced by people who are starving to death and paid in useless 20-lb lead ingots they are too weak to lift.

• Speaking of Minnesota: Republicans proposed cutting the rolls of MinnesotaCare, which provides poor and indigent state residents with health care. Instead of leaving them sick and dying like people with normal private health insurance, they thoughtfully gave them vouchers to purchase private health insurance, whereupon they could be denied care just like a successful person who's going to die of a treatable illness in his own home. A Democrat brought forth an amendment to test the effectiveness of this method of money-saving by also putting members of the state senate on that same voucher program. It was a failure, just like other attempts to replace public health care programs with private insurance vouchers.

Teaparties, Race and a Union Rally in a Tiny Tampa Park

Over the last few years, I've accrued pageloads for mocking mean-spirited teapartiers and their misspelled signs, slovenliness and ideological self-contradiction, going back to that well again and again and again and again. It's a cheap and easy recipe for attention-getting stuff. Take one (1) group of nasty people, add lots (lots) of photographic evidence of their being nasty, then add one (1) comment per photo about how they suck.

I've never posted any sort of counterpoint. The most obvious explanation is that reasonable people aren't very funny. You can't run dozens of photos of civil human beings and gin up a laugh. Less obviously: most liberal activists stayed home these last two years. Vindicated by winning an election, they stupidly abandoned the physical realm of protest to the teaparty. While teaparty goons shouted down town hall discussions on healthcare, liberals enjoyed the warm-crotch sensation of watching them on Youtube, from their laptops. They relied on a few people to attend these events and upload teaparty protest photos and fussy personal diaries on Daily Kos. Liberal public agitation has been token, intermittent, ethereal and impotent.

Thanks in part to union demonstrations and outrage in Wisconsin, as well as Florida Governor Rick Scott's criminal and imperial dismissal of the obligations of office, bizarre disdain for even bipartisan legislation and ruthless de-funding of public services, even Floridians have evinced anger strong enough to drag them out in public. Last Tuesday, thousands of citizens organized in dozens of cities across the state for simultaneous protests against Scott's fiscal war against the Florida school system and his ideological war against unions and collective bargaining.

Florida, like the rest of the south, has historically declined most unionization, never approaching the north's membership. Despite the AFL and CIO engaging in expensive unionization campaigns in the middle of the 20th century, the south didn't bite. Historians and anthropologists have furnished a host of reasons, from racism (northern unions were integrated) to an atavistic quasi-Scots-Irish tribalism, to "Cavalier" individuality. (Readers of Malcom Gladwell's non-science and non-history might remember his bastardization of David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed in the last example.) Economic context also played a part. Union proselytizing in the south, funded by unions' ascendency, was bound to be less persuasive because of that ascendency: when the worker was doing well in America, unions just didn't seem as necessary. That attitude worked doubly well in Florida, a state without an income tax, where lower wages were offset by lower tax obligations and where the bill for today's state services could be tied to tomorrow's home purchases or tourist taxes and fobbed off on the next influx of suckers.

Given the above, the protest turnout was stunning. A group called Awake the State — which was created via a partnership amongst Progress Florida, Florida Watch Action and America Votes — managed to get pro-labor Floridians outside and in front of government buildings even after work and during the dinner hour. In the public imagination, and frequently in reality as well, only teachers seem to march or gather in Florida union protests. But this time manual laborers and public-service workers showed up in force.

The Right Kind of Terrorism

Last weekend you might have seen two links posted on your Facebook or sent to your inbox repeatedly. The first, by the brilliant Tim Wise, asks us to, "Imagine the Tea Party Was Black." The second, a slickly produced video from the Republican Governor's Association, asks us to "Remember November," a cynical distortion borrowing from the movie V for Vendetta. While there have been several thoughtful pieces about both, no one has mentioned that the impulses driving both pieces of theater are the same.

Wise's piece speaks for itself, and you should read it if you have the time. Assuming you're swamped: it recalls conservative actions and rhetoric from the past two years and asks if we'd countenance the same actions from non-whites. His best example is the recent teaparty gathering in Washington in which whites armed with assault rifles announced that they were willing to start another revolution if they didn't get their way in government. This is little more than a threat of coming bloodshed — their common "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants" signs say as much — a gunpoint extortion of the body politic. If black citizens armed themselves under a Republican administration and issued a list of demands, FOX News would howl and run a 24/7 graphic of Flavor Flav wearing a dynamite-laden clock above a chyron: "AMERICA'S BLACKS: A TICKING TIME BOMB?"

'NIGGER FAGGOT': All You'll Ever Need to Know About Those in the Front Ranks of the Teaparty Movement

The outrage demonstrated by teapartiers over the last year has always been incommensurate with the issues ostensibly causing it. The media were happy to chalk the intensity up to passion for some abstraction of limited government, but their cowardice thankfully didn't extend to the internet, where liberal bloggers noticed and condemned the dog-whistle rhetoric of racism, homophobia and islamophobia.

Even bored amateurs effortlessly exposed this. One got a sitting Republican congressman to follow his Twitter feed after demonizing the president as a muslim terrorist. A contributor to this site sometimes tweets quotes from Mein Kampf where the word "Liberal" has replaced the word "Jew," and dozens of acknowledged teaparty and 9/12 Project members re-tweet and follow him after every one. This happens because the movement has never been about limited government; it's been about hate.

GOP 2010: Mindless Terror, Now with Collectibles!!!

Yesterday, Politico published a piece of investigative journalism whose ramifications could be sharply negative for the Republican National Committee. Good for them! You knew they'd have it in them — eventually... reluctantly. You can almost picture beads of sweat erupting on the tech guy's face as he queued the update, each keystroke resounding in his ears like a hammer striking an anvil.

In the piece, Politico excerpted details from a leaked 72-page RNC document explaining how to better raise funds for 2010 GOP campaigns. Politico summarized the RNC strategy thus:

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives...

[The] RNC has shifted toward a reliance on small donors, but the document reveals extensive, confidential details of the strategy for luring wealthy checkwriters, which range from luxury retreats in California wine country to tickets to a professional fight in Las Vegas...

One page, headed “The Evil Empire,” pictures Obama as the Joker from Batman, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and Scooby Doo, respectively.

Update: Robert Byrd Must Die

As I explained here yesterday, a C-SPAN caller asked Senator John Barrossa (R-WY) if insufficient or misdirected prayer had caused God to not only omit smiting the foul Democrat Robert Byrd but also to cause James Inhofe (R-OK) to be absent from the vote.

Since then, Talking Points Memo printed their suspicion that the call was a prank:

Back in April, a man with a very similar voice, and also from Georgia, called in and asked David Brooks if he, as a sophisticated New Yorker, would help to bring down the black man in the White House. Brooks was laughing in disbelief at what he was hearing.

I disagree with their reasons, even if their conclusion turns out to be correct, because it didn't seem that over-the-top. Now, cynically speaking, it's in my best interests for this to be real; I look silly to have written all that ire about the un-Christian and uncharitable sentiments of wishing Byrd dead if it turned out to be a gag. But, at the risk of seeming like I'm trying to walk back my comments to avoid embarrassment, there are three reasons why this should be a non-starter:

Give Patrick McHenry (R-NC) Islamophobic Birther Tweets or Give Him More Just Like Them

Do you use Twitter? Why not try an experiment? Take an apolitical Twitter account. Make a racist or verbally violent comment on muslims or Obama's supposed conspiracy to destroy white, conservative Christian America. Append the hashtag #tcot to the comment so it gets filtered into a feed read by people interested in the "Top Conservatives on Twitter." Then ask yourself a question:

Q: How long will it take for someone to follow your feed or RT (re-tweet) your comments in approval?

A: Not long at all. But what may surprise you is that your new fan may be Republican United States Representative for North Carolina's 10th District, Patrick McHenry.

That's what happened to a Twitter user named MagicHDetective, after posting the following tweets satirizing far-right paranoia over Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan:

And here is the email notification he received from Twitter just a minute after that last tweet, showing him that Representative McHenry was now following his tweets:

Glenn Beck Compares Calling People 'Racist' to Taliban's Use of Suicide Bombers

I can't believe he didn't say "homicide bombers." Can we afford to go off-message like this? These people are not suicides; they're not depressed from Seasonal Affective Disorder, maundering through another lonely Christmas. They're murderers. Their purpose is to kill people.

Here's his video, with which I obviously disagree...


but if you want to skip to the relevant part about how those who would use the term racist to demonize their opposition are morally equivalent to Taliban suicide bombers, click here to get right to it.

All I can say is that I fervently hope Mr. Beck does not go off-message like this in the future.


Or the past.

You know, whenever.

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part IV: The 9/12 Project—Building a Bridge to Nowhere with Fractions of Sense

Forgive my not watching Glenn Beck on Saturday, when he and his Freep-mustachioed army crossed the Potomac, entered the city, cast the congressmen out of the Temple of America and ratified the new Bible of Rights with blood taken from the incorruptible corpse of Ayn Rand, all to finally defeat 9/11. His 9/12 Project came off exactly as expected. By that, I mean nothing happened, but it was really loud, obnoxious and ignorant in the service of nothing.

I can barely handle the man in the best circumstances, and I wasn't going to try while hungover. I needn't have bothered anyway. Beck repeats himself ad nauseam, and there's really no reason to devote new effort to record his mass-distributed hysteria. The purpose of Beck's 9/12 Project is to bring America back to the way we all felt on the day after 9/11, but Beck is mistaken about almost every detail.

At the time, the United States reeled from violent dislocation, banded together to save even the least of our own from the direst straits and in the process cast off political labels for a temporary unity of purpose. Beck's crusade, however, demonizes taxes as slavery, lawful representation as criminal usurpation, Democrats as complicit with terrorists, the president as alternately Stalin or Hitler and pretty much everything he doesn't approve of as apocalyptically dire.

Because I've written about the teaparties of April 15, Beck's live broadcast on the same day and the July 4 teaparties, it's a waste of my time and yours to go into their particular ills with the same level of detail again. What you need to know about what happened on 9/12 are the following three things:

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part III: A Pictorial Roundup of the Obese Shuffle of the Ignorant and Damned

Yesterday, while any reasonable person in America was busy spending time with friends, drinking cold beer and eating large amounts of animal parts, a subset of this great nation apparently began the day with posterboard, magic marker and loyalty oaths. While others entertained themselves, these patriots were busy making sure everyone else would be entertained by them throughout the week. Because it would require the intervention of a bored and capricious greek god to make the July 4th tea party protests any more of a sublimely humorous collision of ironies than they already are.

First of all, you have hundreds of people holding up images of Barack Obama as a leader of a cult of personality, implying that he thinks himself a godhead and that liberals worship him. Meanwhile, they're wearing Sarah Palin t-shirts, other Sarah Palin t-shirts, holding Sarah Palin bumper stickers, holding up Sarah Palin lipstick references, wearing Sarah Palin campaign signs, and waving countless handwritten signs sending her messages like "Run, Sarah, Run!" despite Palin's not being affiliated with the tea parties in any official capacity whatsoever.

And as if that irony weren't enough, there's the fact that her recent resignation from Alaska's governorship so dominated the holiday news cycle that it pushed their largely meaningless demonstration from the News in Brief sections of virtually every mainstream outlet and off their pages entirely. Their hero not only quit on them; she obliterated almost all traces of their relevance to the media. Nevermind the further irony that said heroes' state relies on government pork handouts for its own existence and practices a socialistic redistribution of wealth from energy profits.

Then, just when you think there can't possibly be any more ironies, there's the fact that a group of people who claim to "surround them" (whoever they are) managed to mobilize perhaps a tenth of the 3 million people they commanded on April 15th. Of course, on April 15th, their powerful grassroots movement had been promoted for three consecutive days on FOX news, with over $500,000 of free advertising time on that network, with that network setting up staging areas and on-location shows with live cameras. That, and the whole thing was funded and organized by an astroturf group created by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. But once you strip away niggling facts like no longer having millions in organizing and advertising capacity or the inducement of being able to get on live TV with news celebrities, these groups really do speak with the Voice of the People. About 1/1,000th of them, if we're generous.

There is just so much irony to work with, even at a glance. For instance, you have: