“Where the hell were you in the Vietnam War? If you had gone to Vietnam like the rest of us, maybe you would have learned something about war. You can’t keep troops on the ground forever. You gotta have a mission. You gotta have a purpose.”
If this is the only way to get a message to the VP, so be it, I guess. The only way it would have been better is if he could have said it to Cheney’s face. But I doubt that will ever happen. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I long for the day when those who still wholeheartedly support the war will actually explain themselves face-to-face with someone who disagrees.
I have a nagging questions about a quote from “conservative comedian” Evan Sayet at CNS News, which I found on Cruel.com:
Liberals are wrong about everything and have the mentality of kindergarteners, in the view of conservative comedian and commentator Evan Sayet.
“The Democrats are wrong on quite literally every issue,” Sayet said at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on Monday. “They are not just wrong. They are as wrong as wrong can be.
“It’s not just domestic policy. It’s foreign policy. It’s every policy,” he said, adding that liberals are “diametrically opposed to that which is good, right and successful.”
“The modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success,” Sayet said.
“How could you possibly live in the freest nation in the history of the world and only see oppression? How could you live in the least imperialist power in human history and see us as the ultimate in imperialism? How can you live in the least bigoted nation in human history … and see racism lurking in every dark shadow?” he asked.
The comedian attributed the trend to a “rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency.”
Sayet also argued that liberals “have the mentality of five-year-olds.”
He said the 1986 Robert Fulghum book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” “reads like the bible of modern liberalism and the playbook of Democratic Party policy.”
“‘Don’t hit’ has just become ‘War is not the answer,'” Sayet said.
“If we’re going to save America, we must take back the schools, the universities, the media, [and] the entertainment industry,” he said.
Maybe it’s selective quoting by CNS News, but I don’t get, from this at least, why he gets to be called a “comedian.” The article continues:
The Democratic National Committee did not respond to invitations to comment for this article, but Toby Chaudhuri, communications director for the liberal Campaign for America’s Future, told Cybercast News Service that “Sayet is a comedian with a cross to bear.”
“He hasn’t been able to think of any new jokes for over 30 years. Maybe that’s why he gets laughs even before he opens his mouth,” Chaudhuri said.
“Even a kindergartner knows that the right is wrong,” he said.
“Conservatives have had their way, and they failed,” Chaudhuri added. “The catastrophic conservatism of George Bush and the DeLay Congress has collapsed, [and] the GOP coalition is splintering.”
Maybe I’ve been watching The Daily Show too much, but the humor is lost on me. It just sounds like a set of observations. I may not agree with Dennis Miller on everything, but at least he’s witty.
In fact, the vast majority of Christians don’t scare, bother, annoy, or irk me. In fact, they’re generally great people. If this sounds strangely backhanded, I honestly don’t mean for it to be. Perhaps it is unfair that I pick on an entire belief system because a small handful of nutbars keep getting a national stage–I could also blame that on a market-driven infotainment system that generally finds putting nutjobs on screen to spew crap gets better ratings than an actual reasoned discussion of faith (sad but true, and I’d rather be watching the Sci Fi Channel, anyway). Perhaps it is my own rather unpleasant history with the faith that makes me get a bit of a thrill from being mildly provocative (not sure who I’m provoking, but a guy can dream).
Anyway, my point is that this guy scares the crap out of me. And he works out of my hometown. And I sure hope he does not represent the mainstream of Christian (or any) thought.
A Tennessee lawmaker is demanding answers about the creation of the universe from the state education commissioner.
State Sen. Raymond Finney sponsored a resolution to ask Education Commissioner Lana Seivers whether the universe “has been created or has merely happened by random, unplanned and purposeless occurrences.”
Mr. Finney, a Republican, said he wants the department to say there’s no scientific proof for the theory of evolution and to let schools teach creationism or intelligent design.
“Is there a creator? If yes, why are we afraid to teach creationism?” Mr. Finney said Tuesday. “And if the answer is ‘well, we can’t tell,’ then why are we prohibiting an alternative theory?”
Excellent, excellent point. Let us teach our children the alternative theories of how life has come to be. There are, after all, quite a few conceptions of the Demiurge. Now, explain to me why all of the following theories shouldn’t be given equal weight:
Intelligentdesign: Life has aspects that possess irreducible complexity. Therefore, they cannot have originated naturally. Therefore there must have been a Creator, but let’s not actually call said creator God. Now, what’s on TV?
Creationism (also here): God created the world in seven days. Genesis says so, in two different chapters with quite a few differences between them. They’re both true. If you disagree, you will go to hell. (Yes, I know I’m paraphrasing with liberal bias.)
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (or Pastafarianism, also here): The world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Honestly, it’s not any more inherently ridiculous than most other creation stories.
According to the Scandinavians, the beginning of life starts out with only fire and ice. It began with the existence of only two worlds: Muspellheim and Niflheim. When the warm air of Muspellheim hit the cold ice of Niflheim, the outline of the Thurses Ymir and the icy cow Audhumbla were created. Ymir’s foot bred a son with the other and a man and a woman emerged from his armpits. Thus he would be the father of an entire host of the cruel creatures known as giants. As Ymir slept, the continuing heat from Muspellheim made him sweat. He sweat out Surt, a flaming giant who went to Muspellheim, whose fire made him feel welcome. Later Ymir woke and drank Audhumla’s milk. And while he drank the cow licked on a salt stone. The first day a mans hair appeared, on the second day the head and on the third day the entire man emerged from the stone. His name was Bure and with an unknown giant he fathered the three gods Odin, Vili and Ve.
Anyway, they went on to somehow create Yggdrasill, the giant tree where we all live.
The most widely accepted account of beginning of things as reported by Hesiod’s Theogony, starts with Chaos, a yawning nothingness. Out of the void emerged Ge or Gaia (the Earth) and some other primary divine beings: Eros (Love), the Abyss (the Tartarus), and the Erebus. Without male assistance Gaia gave birth to Uranus (the Sky) who then fertilised her. From that union were born, first, the Titans: six males and six females (Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys, and Cronus); then the one-eyed Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires or Hundred-Handers. Cronus (“the wily, youngest and most terrible of [Gaia’s] children”)castrated his father and became the ruler of the gods with his sister-wife Rhea as his consort and the other Titans became his court. This motif of father/son conflict was repeated when Cronus was confronted by his son, Zeus. Zeus challenged him to war for the kingship of the gods. At last, with the help of the Cyclopes,(whom Zeus freed from Tarturus), Zeus and his siblings were victorious, while Cronus and the Titans were hurled down to imprisonment in Tartarus.
I think Tartarus was also home to the God of Fried Seafood, but I may be mixing my theologies.
Anyway, if we don’t know who the “creator” in intelligent design is, how do we know we don’t actually live on Yggdrasill and may wind up spending eternity hanging with Sisyphus?
See Max Blumenthal‘s adventures at CPAC here–they include confronting Michelle Malkin with a picture of a Japanese internment camp and asking Tom Tancredo supporters about white power. I guess that’s the best we can hope for in political dialogue from now on.
“For ’tis sport to have the engineer/ Hoist with his own petar….” Hamlet, act III, scene 4, lines 206 and 207
The NYT editorial page has a “must-do list” of tasks to reverse some of the more troubling trends of the current administration:
Restore Habeas Corpus
Stop Illegal Spying
Ban Torture, Really
Close the C.I.A. Prisons
Account for ‘Ghost Prisoners’
Ban Extraordinary Rendition
Tighten the Definition of Combatant
Screen Prisoners Fairly and Effectively
Ban Tainted Evidence
Ban Secret Evidence
Better Define ‘Classified’ Evidence
Respect the Right to Counsel
The editorial expounds on each of these, and they are all worth looking at. I strongly believe, in keeping with the notion that we are a “nation of laws, not men,” that a grant of executive power should consider the extent to which such power could be abused by an executive, rather than trusting the currently-serving executive to not abuse it. After all, the American Revolution was at least in part inspired by an overbearing, unaccountable government.
I wasn’t born a Republican. I chose to be one because I believed in the things the party stood for. But when the party changed from the New World Order to preemptive strikes against countries that did not attack us, and when it changed from being the party of law and order to the party of ignoring the rule of law, I was able to see that they weren’t right for the country anymore.
This is not the Republican Party I grew up in. This is not a conservative philosophy that treasures our constitution and our form of government. This administration has become an embarrassment. They never believed in the greatness of this country and the strength of its principles.
I considered myself a Republican until the evening of January 16, 1991. I was a 16-year old peacenik at the time, but I still stand by my decision. I talked about this in depth in an earlier post.
We are often told by our leaders that “9/11 changed everything.” This quickly became a rationale for changing all the rules. These, however, are the rules that have made America as great as it is. We are, to the best of my knowledge, the second-oldest functioning democracy in the world (behind San Marino, which was founded in AD 301), and may very well have inspired democracy elsewhere. We have endured through any number of crises and several secession attempts (of various degrees of seriousness and success). We only rank 17th on The Economist’s Democracy Index of 2007, but that’s still top 11% (17 out of 167–North Korea ranked last, Sweden first, in case you’re curious).
If I had enough time and bandwidth to summarize de Tocqueville and add in a few million words of my own thoughts, I could fully lay out my thoughts on this matter, but my overall point can be summarized as this: 9/11 did not change enough to make it worth throwing away 220 years of such a successful constitutional track record. America has been around for almost 231 years, 220 with our current constitution. We may not have the longevity of the Byzantine Empire (approx. 1100 years)–at least, not yet. International terrorism has been around for decades, if not centuries or millenia. 9/11 wasn’t even the first time it directlyaffectedtheUnitedStates. What made 9/11 different from all terrorist attacks before it was its brazenness and the extent of damage it caused. Again, to the best of my knowledge, no one had set out to cause such a huge amount of damage before, although there had been mass hijackings and plans to use planes as missiles before. This is not to diminish the severity, tragedy, or reprehensibility of the 9/11 attacks–the 9/11 attacks were incomprehensible, unjustifiable, and unforgivable–in that the perpetrators (who are still at large, I might add) deserve all the FUBAR-ing we can give them. But I still don’t see how a large-scale revamping of our system of constitutional checks and balances is necessary (again, see how the 9/11 perpetrators are still at large). What actual benefit have we received from, say, warrantless wiretapping that couldn’t have been derived from tapping the same phone lines with FISA court approval? What actual benefit has the shadowy treatment of Jose Padilla achieved? I don’t doubt that there have been shady goings-on within our government since at least the start of the Cold War (although I stop short of X-Files-style conspiracy theories.) What exactly about our system that has worked so well for so long is no longer applicable now that a terrorist attack that has been envisioned and attempted before, but never before succeeded, has succeeded on American soil? Which laws, to draw from John Adams’ phrase, are no longer as important as the men who run the country?
We have often been told that 9/11 occurred because there are people out there who “hate our freedoms.” Yet now we see a concerted effort to chip away at those very freedoms, an observation I have made before.
Let’s face it: al Qaeda is probably not an imminent existential threat to America. They can cause damage, and lots of it, but they cannot conquer and hold territory on our soil. They can, however, sow fear. After the Oklahoma City bombing, I remember a conversation with a friend where we discussed how, if there is a threat to the continued viability of the United States, it would be a threat from within. I’m not necessarily talking about homegrown terrorists or militias–we may just change our system enough, and slowly enough, that America ceases to be America anymore, and no one notices until it is too late.
America is too awesome to let that happen.
As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
He also said: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Wise man, indeed.
I can’t sleep, and this was too strange not to mention. Apparently Phyllis Schlafly and those of her ilk have decided the liberal bias of Wikipedia is too much to bear, so they have launched their own site, Conservapedia. There are some amusing comments on the site’s content and lack thereof.
Is it too much to hope for that this marks the beginning of a trend; that Ms. Schlafly and her followers will simply abandon other modes of contemporary communication to start their own? Eventually, they will disappear into self-imposed segregation (yeah, I said it), secure in the knowledge that they will never have to hear a dissenting opinion, have their Christian faith questioned, or hear the word “evolution” again. They will breed prodigiously for a while, what with the total lack of condoms or sex education, but without any knowledge of evolution, flu epidemics will probably be common (since there would be no need to ever update their vaccine supply, since viruses couldn’t possibly mutate or evolve without God’s help.) Large-scale flu epidemics would be tragic, please understand. I’m just the messenger.
I’m not going to bother to reprint any of her argument from Fox News yesterday. My opinion of those who try to compare the current war situation to World War II should be clear by now (ignorant, indefensible, and akin to slime mold).
Secretary Rice may have hit a new low by essentially reversing history and suggesting that we should not have used force…wiat, we should have used force but not rebuilt…uhh…shit, I can’t make heads or tails of anything she said. You owe it to yourself to watch what Keith Olbermann had to say.
OK, hopefully you’ve watched it by now. I’m too pissed off to write much more. Let me just ask a (presumably rhetorical) question: if Iraq is so comparable to WWII, why are we throwing so few resources at it, where are all the calls for sacrifice, and so forth? We kicked Hitler’s ass after throwing everything we had into the fight, and then we threw even more into rebuilding the place. You can’t save the world on the cheap.
