LiveJournal: Tough on “Pedophiles”; Soft on Bigots?!?!?!

You will not believe this shit that I just found out from Trinity (via The Strangest Alchemy).

It seems that LiveJournal is currently in a big stink for doing a mass purge of accounts due to a thinly-veiled campaign accusing them of allowing pedophiles and sexual predators to use their sites.  To that end, they went and "struck through" (i.e., shut down) dozens if not hundreds of LJ accounts and pages which basically were associated with themes of rape or incest or pedophilia.  Problem is, a great deal of the groups targeted for censorship were mostly innocent sites which merely either discussed those taboo subjects WITHOUT ever advocating them…or happened to be merely fan sites of slash fiction or GLBT or erotic fiction .  One site which was nuked only dealt with discussion of the novel Lolita…and still got axed.

The chief spokesperson for LJ, who calls himself SixApart, defended the purge against critics by saying that they were just following procedure and enforcing the Terms of Service that all their accounts are subjected to. (Yeah….and perhaps a visit from Abu Gonzales’ henchmen may have been a factor too…naaaaah.)

But here’s the fun part: turns out that the primary group responsible for most of the complaints leading to the purge just so happens to have a few skeletons in their own closets.

And a few hoods and robes.

And plenty of Stars and Bars flags.

And lots and lots of guns, too.

I’ll just let Dark Christian (through Trinity) take the story from here:

Here is the personal blog of the woman who sent in all those complaints to LJ (the Warriors for Innocence woman).

CHECK OUT ALL THE CONFEDERATE FLAGS SHE’S DISPLAYING!!!!! SHE’S ALSO ANTI UNITED NATIONS!!!!!

Nice Confederate battle flags, lady…one of which is a banner for a group known as the REDNECK MAFIA??? She’s a total right wing NUT JOB!!!

Her blog: http://suesviews2.blogspot.com/

I can’t believe Six Apart got railroaded by an ultra-conservative xenophobe! What a bunch of dumb fucks!

Here’s where she got her ‘Redneck Mafia’ banner: http://redneckmafia.blogspot.com/

One banner she has on her blog reads: "America, Saving Europe’s Ass Since 1917" and another banner on her blog proudly bears the words: "United States of America Deportation Squad". It’s reassuring to know that Six Apart and Live Journal listen and take heed to the rantings of an individual who carries such negative feelings toward non-Americans and immigrants…huh.

Good job, Six Apart! *shakes head*

Here’s her Blogger profile: http://www2.blogger.com/profile/03449943067796255822

And here’s her email: warriorsforinnocence@gmail.com

Here’s where I located this information: http://digg.com/tech_news/Livejournal_suspends_hundreds_of_accounts

Pass this info around, please. I’ll be damned if I give my money to a company who bends to the will of a person like this woman…

First off, she links to a write-in campaign for Cary Cartter for the 2008 presidential race; a bit of digging around shows Cartter is explicitly dominionist and may in fact be linked with the "Christian Patriot" militia movement. At the very least, he is definitely part of the "Joel’s Army" movement; his blog includes links to a plethora of fellow "Joel’s Army" bloggers (including one named "Third Wave Dave"; "Third Wave" is a codeword for Joel’s Army theology in the Assemblies and other neopente churches) and a number of dominionist correspondence-school bloggers (as well as at least one explicitly Christian Reconstructionist journal called "Sovereign Joy").

The "Redneck Mafia" seems to be a collection of neo-Confederates and neo-Confederate sympathisers; the Blogspot site not only hosts essentially a webring of neo-Confederate sympathisers, but also a Texas-secessionist webring and an anti-UN webring; the Texas secessionist webring in turn also hosts a neoconservative webring and a secondary neo-Confederate sympathiser webring ("Children of the Confederacy"). Pretty much all of the members are almost identical between these Blogspot webrings.

In fact, almost *all* the blogs cross-link to each other (acting as essentially a web-ring of "Joel’s Army" folks connected to the owner of TexasFred, which is registered via DomainsByProxy (a service used to anonymise whois registration, and commonly abused by spammers). The main "Texas Fred" site includes a Java game entitled "Shoot The Wetback" and is a major promoter of the Minutemen militia group (which itself has extensive ties to "Christian Patriot" dominionist militia groups, racists, and in particular the Constitution Party (itself a de jure Christian Reconstructionist party and a de facto "Militia Party" to boot)). Other fun blogs in the same general "network" include "Beast Media" (which is a particularly obnoxious neocon site that actually makes "Mallard Fillmore" look humorous in comparison, a guy calling himself "Minuteman1776" (whose website links in turn to other parts of the "TexasFred" network including a site called "Radioactive Liberty"–which literally calls for war for oil–as well as a group calling itself "Marine Mom Militia". Almost all of these sites seem to be out to out-Ann Coulter Ann Coulter.

The same site also confirms something that a lot of folks have suspected–they are, in fact, simply searching Google for specific keywords (no matter the actual content) and sending complaints directly to Six Apart based on what they are finding on Google without any attempt to verify the actual content of sites. (As an aside, this could put Dark Christianity in danger–we actually have a "child abuse" tagline in our community, and have posts (searchable on Google) in regards to religiously motivated child abuse as well as sexual scandals (including paedophile pastors in dominionist denominations and the almost complete lack of policing in these denominations) that do come up on Google searches.)

….In other words, with the "Warriors for Innocence" scandal, we may actually be dealing with part of a fairly extensive network of neo-Confederate, militia-sympathiser (if not flat out militia-member) "Christian Patriot" God-warriors-with-guns "Joel’s Army" nutcases on our hand…one that potentially makes Focus on the Family or even the American Family Association look like the friggin’ Society of Friends in comparison.

WOW.  Just plain f’n WOW.

So now LJ allows racists and Dominionists not only to roam free and harrass other users, but censors their victims??

Dark Christian’s LJ has much more info on both the controversy and the group here.

Just scroll down Trinity’s LJ home page for the latest articles and links.

[Update: It seems that LJ is trying to right itself now: see this latest post from Trin for details.]

Wingnuttery Plus Manifest Destiny = Whiskey? Tonto? Foxtrot???

The following is a classic result of what happens when you consume a little too much of the right-wing Kool-Aid.

The New York Sun, who obviously must see the New York Post as a bastion of evil liberalism in comparison, decided to bring forth an editorial on the “sellout” of Dimocrats in Iraq. (For them, though, the sellout is not in backing Dubya’s war, but in having the gall to criticize Dubya’s noble mission in the first place.)

And to that end, they envoke the earlier period of “Manifest Destiny”; the acquisition (or, as real honest historians would call it, the outright theft) of half of Mexico to justify the present campaign.

Nezua does such a good job of dissecting this pile of horse dung over at his place..but this deserves a special can of SmackDog Whupass(TM) on its own.  So, if you will pardon my indulgence, on with the fisking.

Iraq and Mexico

New York Sun Editorial
May 29, 2007

News that Senators Clinton and Obama, acting on the eve of Memorial Day weekend, cast their votes against funding our GIs in Iraq put us in a mind to read about Abraham Lincoln and the Mexican War. This had been suggested by Governor Cuomo, in his spirited letter to the editor in response to our editorial about how President Lincoln turned away the editor of Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, and a delegation that had gone to see him, late in the Civil War, in hopes of getting him to back off a draft call from Cook County.

Of course, we all know the reality of that vote (and how Hilary and Barack really maneuvered themselves to act like they were in opposition…but why let facts get in the way of a good McCarthyite smear??

Lincoln had listened to the Illinois pleaders in the cavern of maps that was the office of his war secretary, Edwin Stanton. As Stanton recited the sanguinary statistics that illuminated the need for yet more men for the battle, Lincoln bowed his head. Then he turned on Medill, long a supporter, reminded him of how the Tribune had supported the war and called for Emancipation and told him to go back to Chicago and get the men. Medill retreated, saying that it was the first time he’d ever been whipped and that he didn’t have an answer.

The better analogy, Mr. Cuomo argued in his letter to the Sun (http://www.nysun.com/article/54464) , is the war that President Polk started with Mexico. “As a Congressman in the late 1840s,” Mr. Cuomo wrote, Lincoln, “objected passionately to America’s war with Mexico.” The former governor quotes the man who would become the 16th president as warning, on the floor of the House on January 12, 1848, of the “exceeding brightness of military glory that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.”

The more we read about Lincoln and the Mexican War, however, the less it strikes us as offering a historical harbor for Democrats seeking to legitimize their appeasement line in Iraq. It is certainly true that Lincoln objected to the war, demanding that Polk show him the spot where the first firefight took place, Lincoln believing that it was not in America at all but in Mexican territory. Then a Whig congressman, Lincoln reckoned that the war would lead to an expansion of slave territories. Much of his term in the House was consumed to his opposition to the war.

OK…so tell me how giving the President a virtual blank check with timetables that he can basically ignore like so much chaffe in the wind amounts to legitimizing “appeasment”??  I guess that according to the Sun editorialist, only outright boosting for the war and unswerving allegiance to the President will count as anything other than “surrender”.

But what does this illuminate that could possibly help the Democrats in their current predicament? In contrast to Lincoln, Mrs. Clinton did not object to our entry into either the global war on terror or the battle of Iraq. On the contrary, she voted for it. Mr. Obama, who was not yet in the Senate, opposed Iraq expedition. In any event, there is another difference; once our military was engaged in battle in Mexico, Lincoln always voted to supply our soldiers, a point underlined for us by one of the city’s notable Lincoln scholars, Harold Holzer, co-author of part of Mr. Cuomo’s ” Why Lincoln Matters, Now More Than Ever.”

Lincoln’s support for our soldiers in the Mexican war is something that the Illinoisan boasted about in his debates with Judge Douglas. After all, his opposition to the war with Mexico, however high-minded, was costing him votes. This was particularly true because, even if Polk’s motives were ignoble and the fight seemed unjust at the beginning, the Mexican war had a favorable outcome for America. The Mexican Cession, made under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war on February 2, 1848, established our border at the Rio Grande, ended any dispute over Texas, and gained us not only California, Nevada, and Utah but also parts of Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

Translation: Hey, who cares about moral considerations….WE WON!! And who cares about principles if it costs us votes??

But here’s where the cesspool really meets the Cat 3 hurricane (and this is exactly the money paragraph that Nez grabs):

Can it be that Mr. Cuomo and his fellow Democrats want to go into the 2008 election questioning the bona fides of the states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico? That’s a lot of electoral votes. The fact is the fate of those states illustrates one of the great truths about America — that those who either threw in with us or were won by us prospered and lived more freely than any of them would have under the ancien regimes. This is something that has been learned by other peoples, in Europe and in Asia, even into the late 20th century.

Oh, yeah….like the brown folk down there really do appreciate everything that the gringos have done to “liberate” them..just as the Iraqis really do, despite popular protests to the contrary, appreciate all the freedom that “we” have brought to them through the democratic means of torture chambers, carpet bombs, and pilfering their assests. Why, there really are flowers underneath those suicide bombs.

I wonder what these asshats would say about Black folks benefitting from slavery and Jim Crow. Or…maybe I shouldn’t.

 

***

As for Lincoln, his comprehension of the responsibilities of leadership changed radically when he acceded as president. He prosecuted the Civil War relentlessly, and his generals knew who was in command or suffered the consequences. Lincoln’s officers arrested the most troublesome of the Copperhead Democrats. In the case of Clement Vallandigham, who was discouraging enlistees in Ohio, Lincoln himself sent that particular Copperhead down through Confederate lines and into exile. Lincoln tested the Constitution as it had never been tested before. He fought his war to win.

 

Now…not that I as a Black man don’t appreciate the fact that the North won the Civil War and slavery was vanquished…but what the hell does that have to do with Iraq??  That because Honest Abe was the Commander-In-Chief who did manage to run the war and outgun his critics, that justifies his running roughshod over the Constitution??  And how does that justifies Dubya’s war games during a war in which 3/4ths of Americans do not support, that the supposed “benefactors” of such war (read, the citizens of Iraq) do not support, and was justified on base lies about Saddam’s invisible WMD and ties to al Queda and September 11th???

Oh, but I didn’t know…to the editorialists of the NY Sun, Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden making nukes with Iran’s mullahs with the full connivance of those “cut-n-run” Democrat appeasers….which more than justifies making Dubya our supreme Emperor and protector against Islamofascists, illegal aliens, and evil socialists/liberals/radical feminists/whatever the particular right-wing panic button is.

It’s hard to imagine what Lincoln would have made of Mrs. Clinton, who started out in Illinois, when she claims to “fully support our troops” but votes against funding for the war in which they are risking everything. Or what he would have made of another Illinoisan, Mr. Obama, when he declares, as he did last week, that “enough is enough” and that the president should not get a “blank check,” or even, at least on these terms, any check. The more one reads about it, the more one gets the sense that Lincoln might have wondered why Mr. Bush has been so punctilious about the legal niceties. It’s hard to imagine Lincoln would not have understood Mr. Bush on the larger issues, particuarly his understanding of, and his willingness to shoulder, the responsibilities of the president in a time of war.

 

 

How nice that these editorialists have such wonderous powers of mindreading, that they can extrapolate the motives of a President who passed from this earthly coil nearly 150 years ago, and read him exactly to fit the mindset of our current occupant of the White House…and be so perfect to say that Lincoln would be smiling at Bush today, cheering him on to do more shredding of the “goddam piece of paper” that the former took to heart to defend the unity of the nation against the Confederates.

Ahhh…the mind of a right-wing wingnut….so simple in its complexity, so brutal in its subtlety….and so genocidal and arrogant in its equnamity.

 

 

Forget Al Gore….Cynthia McKinney Goes Online

Everybody in the liberal blogosphere seems to think that Al Gore will be the savior of the Dimocrats, which is why they are all pimping for him to run for President, I guess.

Me…I prefer someone a bit more progressive.

Probably that’s why I’ve been fantasizing about former Georgia Congresswoman/progressive headbussa Cynthia McKinney running in the ‘08 campaign as an Independent (possibly on a Green Party slate).

But, since she got Shanghied out of her congressional seat, we haven’t really heard of her whereabouts. 

That is…until now.  Seems like CMcK’s gotten the online blog bug, and has opened up her own blog, which she is using to both vent her spleen at all the current events, raise money to retire her campaign debt, and hopefully plan her third comeback.

I would appreciate it a great deal if you would check her out…and for an appetizer, go over to CounterPunch and browse through her latest essay, too.

As a bonus, go ahead and check out this site in tribute to CMcK that debunks everything about her alleged anti-Semitism and her supposed bad hair, to the pushing incident that helped cost her her seat. It’ll open your eyes quite a bit.

The “Janet Parshall” Doctrine (APRF Update)

When the facts don’t jibe with your particular faith, attack the messenger as unpatriotic/patriarchial/radical.whatever.

Case in point: This shorthand of an online rumble:

Anti-Porn Radfem (aka Faith of Feminist Nation): Oh, rats….look at all those nasty Google search terms loading up my other blog about what men surf for in porn; just proves why we oughta wipe it out!!!

Sex-PosFem (aka Trinity of The Strangest Alchemy): Oh, really?? You do know that most of those "searches" could have been generated through spam bots, right??  And that that says nothing about the overwhelming majority of porn surfers who go towards legal adult consensual porn, right??  Try being a bit less emotional, OK??

Faith: Emotional???  I’m being emotional???  Why, you no good pro-porn sellout, I have PROOF of how porn destroys women and distorts men; get the fingers out of your damn ears and listen, you Janet Parshall wannabe!!

Trinity: Oh, please….that’s your proof??  And, OMG….thery’re all from right-wing antifeminist Christian fundamentalist right groups and right-wing think tanks!!! You know, the ones who want to destroy feminists like you???  For shame!!

Faith: What???  You calling me a right-wing fundamentalist?? Look, now…you just don’t want to admit that in your heart, I’m right and that porn really is evil and should be banned. And stop lumping us radfems with the Christian Right; we are fundamentally different!!

Pro-Porn Supporting Men (played by Iamcuriousblue and moi): Ahhh, Faith…is the shoe fitting a bit too comfortably here?? the complicit alliance between APRF’s and the Christian Right isn’t a figment of the imagination; it’s proven FACT and HISTORY.  Who’s doing the denial now??

Faith: Oh, there you pornified liberal men go again! Of course you’d defend porn….what would you say about defending Larry Flynt’s racist, misogynist ass?? Don’t blame us radfems….ahhh, I mean, feminists if we want to protect women and children from you men!!

Moi:  Ahhhh…Flynt has not a damn thing to do with this…unless you have proof that other than some nasty book covers and  a few satirical cartoons, Flynt and HUSTLER represents the heart of "trafficking of women". And what about those women who fight against everything you say you are against, but stop short of endorsing your brand of sex-shaming and male-baiting…I guess that they aren’t feminists now?? But the likes of Judith Reisman and Alberto Gonzales are, their antifeminism on other matters aside??

Faith: OK, OK…I changed the links to a less homophobic and more neutral source.  Happy now??

Moi: You call that "neutral"?? You do know that the founder of that group was the very one who prosecuted Mapplethorpe and Flynt on obscenity charges, right?? And that he once said that even softcore simulated sex scenes in cable and satellite TV should be prosecuted and banished under his interpretation of obscenty law?? Hell..James Dobson would be merely "conservative" in your mind??

Goodness. With "feminists" like Faith, who needs Pat Robertson???

 

 

 

 

For Those Of You Just Joining Us….

I see that Dr. James at Left End of the Dial has added this humble blog to his own blogroll, and appropriated my….errrrrrr…Earthside’s "Dimocrats" gloss (that’s OK, Doc….fair use and Creative Commons License and all).

Considering that I may be getting a few of his browsers who might tour this blog and wind up saying things like: "What the hell is this??", I figure that a reset for who I am and what this blog means might be in order.

So, for those of you who are just browsing in; here’s the abbreviated version of The SmackDog Chronicles Primer 101.

1) The title is inspired by the fact that I happen to be a Black man (hence, the popular hip-hop derivative "dog", who happens to run a lot of smack about my feelings about this world and my place in it.

2) My politics are basically more inclined towards the independent Libertarian Left — that is, I tend to distrust a lot of what passes for government leadership from most sides; but I generally support the aggressive use of government as a tool to equalize and level the economic playing field and to offer fundamental protections for the most expansive envelope of free speech and free expression humanly possible. I’d rather censure and call out haters and jackasses and bigots and other asshats than censor them.

3) I am more of a plain populist democratic socialist, in that I tend to believe that the means and ends of production should be better distrubuted amongst those who actually do most of the work (hence the term "working class") rather than merely hoarded by a few super-rich corporations and their owners.

4) As you can plainly see, I have quite a low opinion of the Democratic Party (now transformed into the "Dimocrats"); this was well earned through my experiences with the Louisiana variant (hint: ex guv Edwin Edwards, ex US Senator John Breaux, current guv Kathleen "Kitty Blanks" Blanco) which caused me to leave the party about 20 years ago and register as an Independent. In my not really much humble view, the Dims have basically been using and milking progressives and "liberals" to gain electoral majorities, only to consistently and constantly ignore their basic needs in favor of sucking up to the corporate-military war establishment, not to mention their consistent pandering to the most reactionary groups in the hope of winning back the mythical "center". I tend to favor the "build a REAL Left that stands for egalitarian values and stands strong against privilege (both economic and social), and let the Center come to you" approach.

5) Of course, my opinion of the current occupying Republican party in the White House, not to mention the current occupant George W. Bush and his gang of merry fascist thieves, is that much lower even than that of the Dims….but then again, any party led by the likes of Dubya, Dick Cheney, and Alberto "Abu" Gonzales, who has the likes of Tom "Bug Spray" DeLay, Dennis Hastert and Ricky Santorum as its chief spokesmen in Congress, and who claims as their chief boosters in the media people of the quality of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, and Bill O’Reilly, would probably not rank too high with reality-based people, either. (And the local variant matches the national in terms of going off the cliff, too; just think "David Duke".)

6) Finally….don’t be scared off by a lot of the sex and porn talk here; this is mostly a PG-13 rated blog.  I am interested in sex positivism and pro-sex radicalism mostly because I’ve seen for far too long how sexually reactive and sexually conservative politics has basically destroyed progressive politics by throwing certain sexual dissidents and sexual outlaw groups under the train to feed the dominant cultural consensus. I tend to defend free sexual expression and free sexual media mostly because challenging the dominant social conservatism should be part of any thinking Left radical’s mission, and because scapegoating innocent people merely because their form of private consensual sex play doesn’t meet certain people’s conceptions of political theory really does suck (and not in the good way, either).

I think that that’ll be a nice intro for starters.  Please feel free — and it is all free, of course — to browse through the blog and read up some more on my methods and my madness…and if you still feel up to staying here (or not), thanks for stopping by anyway.

Just remember the SmackChron Prime Directive:

Have a take that does not suck….and don’t be an asshat.

Welcome in, y’all.

 

Dimocrat Cave-In Smothers Cindy Sheehan

Well, well, well…guess who became the  first announced public victim of the Great Dimocratic Iraqi Cave-In???  None other than the patron saint of war mom protesters herself, Cindy Sheehan.

From her blog entry at AfterDowningStreet.org:

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

[...]

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

[...]

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye, America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

And Mrs. Sheehan didn’t stop there, either….in a special open letter resignation to the Dimocrat leadership, posted in CounterPunch today, she tore new ones into them:

[....]

Naively, I set off on my tireless campaign calling on Congress to rescind George’s authority to wage his war of terror while asking him "for what noble cause" did Casey and thousands of other have to die. Now, with Democrats in control of Congress, I have lost my optimistic naiveté and have become cynically pessimistic as I see you all caving into "Mr. 28%"

There is absolutely no sane or defensible reason for you to hand Bloody King George more money to condemn more of our brave, tired, and damaged soldiers and the people of Iraq to more death and carnage. You think giving him more money is politically expedient, but it is a moral abomination and every second the occupation of Iraq endures, you all have more blood on your hands.

Ms. Pelosi, Speaker of the House, said after George signed the new weak as a newborn baby funding authorization bill: "Now, I think the president’s policy will begin to unravel." Begin to unravel? How many more of our children will have to be killed and how much more of Iraq will have to be demolished before you all think enough unraveling has occurred? How many more crimes will BushCo be allowed to commit while their poll numbers are crumbling before you all gain the political "courage" to hold them accountable. If Iraq hasn’t unraveled in Ms. Pelosi’s mind, what will it take? With almost 700,000 Iraqis dead and four million refugees (which the US refuses to admit) how could it get worse? Well, it is getting worse and it can get much worse thanks to your complicity.

[....]

So, Democratic Congress, with the current daily death toll of 3.72 troops per day, you have condemned 473 more to these early graves. 473 more lives wasted for your political greed: Thousands of broken hearts because of your cowardice and avarice. How can you even go to sleep at night or look at yourselves in a mirror? How do you put behind you the screaming mothers on both sides of the conflict? How does the agony you have created escape you? It will never escape me…I can’t run far enough or hide well enough to get away from it.

By the end of September, we will be about 80 troops short of another bloody milestone: 4000, and MoveOn.org will hold nationwide candlelight vigils and you all will be busy passing legislation that will snuff the lights out of thousands more human beings.

Congratulations Congress, you have bought yourself a few more months of an illegal and immoral bloodbath. And you know you mean to continue it indefinitely so "other presidents" can solve the horrid problem BushCo forced our world into.

It used to be George Bush’s war. You could have ended it honorably. Now it is yours and you all will descend into calumnious history with BushCo.

Pretty sad to see, I’d say, and quite painful to watch…..but more than necessary to break through the psychological chains and see the truth.

I’m sure that we will be seeing the "attention whore traitor" smack from the "lesser evil" Dimocrat loyalists any time now….as if Cindy Sheehan would be held personally responsible for allowing Dubya to get his blank check.

Only message that I’d send to Mrs. Sheehan would be this: Welcome to the club….and there is an alternative.

 

Welcome to the Fighting 101st, Earthside…

In the midst of my anger over the Dimocrats craveness, I may have discovered a new soldier for the Fighting 101st Progressive Headbussa Brigade(TM).

Say hello to the blog Earthside, who has been excellent in revealing the truth about the Dimocrats and their latest spinelessness, and the real agenda behind the Bush "surges". To with, this nugget:

Okay … this isn’t hard to figure out.

The propaganda ‘leak’ is that the Iranians and al Qaida and the Sunnis and the Shias and CHAOS and Smersh and all the forces of the Illuminati are going to join together to force the U.S. military out of Iraq this summer.

So, Bush is planning to send even more troops into Iraq, to double-up on the ’surge’. Naturally, this means that any kind of judgement about the effectiveness of the ’surge’ in September is going to be way too premature. Maybe by December, okay?

With no timetables in the Iraq funding legislation that the Democrats are reportedly working on, well, Bush will have achieved a political triumph, he will crow that his plan has been ‘approved’ for all intents and purposes — and U.S. troops will be in Iraq indefinitely.

In other words, the ’surge’ plan of January this year was a lie … and the Democrats are preparing to cave-in because Bush and Cheney and Rush Limbaugh will call them nasty names and they don’t want that!

What a country, eh?

Other than forgetting Unka Karl Rove, and the mendacity of "liberals" like MoveOn and Kos, I’d say that he’s exactly on target.

Duly racked, and I will place in the Blogroll when I get back from work.

…And While Dimocrats Retreat; Dubya Surges…Again

And. right on the cue, this is how Dubya rewards the Dimocrats for giving him basically all he wants: by grabbing more and more.

Say hello to the "second surge" plan…thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle:

 

Bush could double force by Christmas

Stewart M. Powell, Hearst Newspapers

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

(05-22) 04:00 PDT Washington — The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.

The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.

The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.

Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 — a record-high number — by the end of the year.

The numbers were arrived at by an analysis of deployment orders by Hearst Newspapers.

"It doesn’t surprise me that they’re not talking about it," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, a former U.S. commander of NATO troops in Bosnia, referring to the Bush administration. "I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this."

The first surge was prominently announced by President Bush in a nationally televised address on Jan. 10, when he ordered five more combat brigades to join 15 brigades already in Iraq.

The buildup was designed to give commanders the 20 combat brigades Pentagon planners said were needed to provide security in Baghdad and western Anbar province.

Since then, the Pentagon has extended combat tours for units in Iraq from 12 months to 15 months and announced the deployment of additional brigades.

Taken together, the steps could put elements of as many as 28 combat brigades in Iraq by Christmas, according the deployment orders examined by Hearst Newspapers.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Carl S. Ey said there was no effort by the Army to carry out "a secret surge" beyond the 20 combat brigades ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"There isn’t a second surge going on; we’ve got what we’ve got," Ey said. "The idea that there are ever going to be more combat brigades in theater in the future than the secretary of defense has authorized is pure speculation."

Ey attributed the increase in troops to "temporary increases that typically occur during the crossover period" as arriving combat brigades move into position to replace departing combat brigades.

He said that only elements of the eight additional combat brigades beyond the 20 already authorized would actually be in Iraq in December.

The U.S. Joint Forces Command, based in Norfolk, Va., that tracks combat forces heading to and returning from Iraq, declined to discuss unit-by-unit deployments.

"Due to operational security, we cannot confirm or discuss military unit movements or schedules," Navy Lt. Jereal Dorsey said in an e-mail.

The Pentagon has repeatedly extended unit tours in Iraq during the past four years to achieve temporary increases in combat power. For example, three combat brigades were extended up to three months in November 2004 to boost the number of U.S. troops from 138,000 to 150,000 before, during and after the Jan. 30, 2005, Iraqi national elections.

Lawrence Korb, an assistant defense secretary for manpower during the Reagan administration, said the Pentagon deployment schedule enables the Bush administration to achieve quick increases in combat forces in the future by delaying units’ scheduled departures from Iraq and overlapping them with arriving replacement forces.

"The administration is giving itself the capability to increase the number of troops in Iraq," Korb said. "It remains to be seen whether they actually choose to do that."

Nash said the capability could reflect an effort by the Bush administration to "get the number of troops into Iraq that we’ve needed there all along."

I’m sure if this strategy works as well as the first "surge" did (like, not at all), then the next step will be formal reinstatement of the military draft.  I wonder how many Dimocrats will cave in on that??

Two-party system, my ass. Maybe time for an alternative.

 

More Excellent Democrat Dimocrat Betrayal And CYA

As if it wasn’t enough for the \”Dimocrats\” (thank you, Earthside, for that timely gloss) to sell their voters out on Iraq, get a load of how they plan to mask their craven vote today through the magic of parlimentary rule making.  Seems like they’ve been learning big time from the mechanisms of Tom DeLay when the Repubs were in charge..probably the only thing that they got from watching \”Bug Spray\” roll them over for so long.

David Sirorta of Working for Change gives the game away today at his blog (emphasis added by moi):

Today is the day House Democrats are expected to vote on Iraq – except, news out of Washington this morning says the leadership has come up with a nifty little trick to try to prevent the public from seeing who voted for giving Bush a blank check, and who voted against it. If you thought Democrats were behaving like cowards by caving into a President at a three-decade low in presidential polling and giving him the very blank check they explicitly promised not to give him during the 2006 election, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are watching the rise of the Dick Cheney Democrats – that is, the rise of Democrats who endorse governing in secret and hiding the public’s business from the public itself.

Here’s how it is expected to work today in a process only Dick Cheney could love (though you never know – it could change at the last minute). Every bill comes to the House floor with what is known as a “rule” that sets the terms of the debate over the legislation in question. House members first vote to approve this parliamentary rule, and then vote on the legislation. Today, however, Democrats are planning to essentially include the Iraq blank check bill IN the rule itself, by making sure the underlying bill the rule brings to the floor includes no timelines for withdrawal, and that the rule only allows amendments that fund the war with no restrictions – blank check amendments that House Democratic leaders know Republicans will have the votes to pass.

This means that when the public goes to look for the real vote on the Iraq supplemental bill, the public won’t find that. All we will find is a complex parliamentary procedure vote, which was the real vote. Democratic lawmakers, of course, will use the Memorial Day recess to tell their angry constituents they really are using all of their power to end the war, that they voted against the Republican blank check amendment which the rule deliberately propels, and that the vote on the rule – which was the real vote for war – wasn’t really the important vote, when, in fact, they know very well it is the biggest vote on the war since original 2002 authorization for the invasion. It is a devious, deliberately confusing cherry on top of the manure sundae being served up to the American public, which voted Democrats into office on the premise that they would use their congressional majority to end the war. To read more on these deliberately complex machinations, see Congressional Quarterly’s piece just out on the web.

All of this is happening at the time top Republican leaders are making ever more sociopathic statements at odds with mainstream public opinion. Today, as just one example, House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-FL) cheered on the blank check, telling Roll Call that “You drop Murtha [troop readiness standards], you drop withdrawal, the troops win.” He doesn’t explain how popular proposals to better equip and train American soldiers for combat and force the Bush administration to come up with a plan for redeploying troops out of harms way means “troops win.”

– Excerpted from Sirota Blog: Vote Alert: Dick Cheney Dems Plan To Hide Votes On Iraq TODAY

Oh, and just so you think that this sort of behavior by the Dims only applies to Iraq (and soon to come, Iran), well Sirota bursts that bubble real quick.

If this secretive behavior seems familiar, it should. You may recall that in the past two weeks, the same Dimocratic leadership that is now trying to hide its votes on Iraq negotiated a secret free trade deal with the White House, steamrolling its other key Election 2006 pledge to stop lobbyist-written trade policy. The legislative texts of the trade pacts in question remain concealed from the public, though K Street lobbyists have told reporters they have received “assurances” that any of the much-touted provisions that purport to protect labor and the environment will be written to be unenforceable.

Oh, and did I forget to mention the betrayal on oil company price gouging, too??  See this CounterPunch article on that.

But, anyways…the Dim leadership already has a plan ready to face up to their pissed off constituents.  Mostly, lie through their teeth and rant about \”it’s all Dubya’s fault\”:

Not surprisingly, Democrats are reacting to questions about why they are trying to secretly defy the will of the public and disrespecting their Election 2006 campaign in the same way they always do: Like wailing infants. Last week, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) took to PBS to lace into critics of the secret trade deal he negotiated, saying he should have “ignored” his own Democratic colleagues raising questions because they are “wasting my time.”

On the war, same thing. Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL), for instance, today criticized Moveon.org in Roll Call newspaper for asking Democrats to vote down the blank check proposal, saying “I would urge MoveOn and others to recognize that the person who is extending this war is George Bush.” This is the same Artur Davis who whined to reporters that it was “unfortunate” he was exposed for taking thousands of dollars of credit card industry cash in exchange for his support for the credit card-industry written Bankruptcy Bill in 2005.

Oh, how really touching for MoveOn.org to finally rise up in opposition.  Now, if they hadn’t been so damn busy pimping the Dim establishment and torpedoing the likes of Woolsey, Waters and real progressive Democrats in offering a genuine antiwar bill that would have REAL:LY cut off funds to Dubya’s war, maybe it wouldn’t sound so farcical and hypocritial today…

But, then, Davis is trying to pull the same kind of rhetorical trick that so many other Democrats pull: Attempting to make us believe they are merely innocent bystanders, and that there isn’t that document known as the “Constitution” that gives Congress the power of the purse over George Bush. We’re all just supposed to be totally psyched that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) says she is unhappy that this is all happening, even though Pelosi is simultaneously using her power to schedule this vote, and set it up in a way so as to hide it from the public. She would have us believe that September will be “really the moment of truth for this war,” as Congressional Quarterly quotes her saying – as if it’s no big deal that more troops will die because she and her colleagues are willing to drag their feet from the comfortable guarded confines of the U.S. Capitol. We’re all just supposed to wildly applaud when Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) goes on national television to say that the bill they are pushing is “the beginning of the end of the president’s policy in Iraq” – we’re not supposed to know that he and his colleagues stripped out the timelines for withdrawal and even stripped out waivable troop readiness standards.

Sirota later goes on to pin his hopes on either 20 Dems voting with the Repubs — who would rather an open debate rule for baiting the \”cut-and-run party\” for \”abandoning our troops\” and for cutting out all the \”pork barrel\” spending (including the increase in the minimum wage — to kill this rule and start fresh (yeah, right); or, failing that, a filibuster in the Senate by the likes of Sanders, Feingold, Dodd, and Kerry. Boy, is he the eternal optimist, considering the record of the Senate Dims on holding on to principle (as displayed so explicitly in the Supreme Court nomination \”fights\” against Alito and Roberts).  And besides, doesn’t he know that Joe Lieberman can still switch parties and give the GOP Senate control anyway??

This is your \”lesser evil\” party, folks.  What ‘cha gonna do about it??

I know what I’ve done.

 

Tweedledum And Tweedledumber: Just Another Democrat Dimocrat Cave-In

Gee…you just gotta love the Democrat Dimocrat Party, do you??

All that bluster about standing up to Dubya and his war games…

All that promise of changing the policy on Iraq…

All that smack about real changes occuring….

And in the end, they do as they always will do….they run crying into the night and surrender.

 

– From MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann (via YouTube/Susie Madrak @ Suburban Guerilla)

Did I or did I not predict this to happen??

Anyone who knows the history of the Democrat Dimocrat party (and yes, I use that term deliberately) in talking up a good game and then punting at the last minute; knew that they would give Dubya his war funding with little or no restrictions (at least, not restrictions that could actually be binding or effective).

\”But..but…but, SmackDog,\” you say, \”we did get a badly needed increase in the minimum wage for our efforts!! So what if the war continues, at least we got something out of it!!\”

Yeah, right.  Odds are that the Repubs are already planning on gutting that in the final conference..or Dubya can just do one of his famous signing statements relieving his business friends from enforcing the increased pay.

In the meantime, the war will continue, the killing of Americans (let alone Iraqis) will continue unabetted, and worse yet, thanks to the Democrats from AIPAC (and Boeing and the rest of the Scoop Jackson/Zell Miller wing), there will be no resistance whatsoever to any invasion of Iran, either.

Congratulations, Rahn Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman: you’ve managed to basically trash a mandate straight to hell, and crack your party clean to pieces.  And more than likely, Karl Rove will still play you like a violin come next year’s election, anyway.

And a special \”Fuck you\” goes to all those \”lesser evil\” liberal luminaries like MoveOn.org, Kos, and all the rest of the cheerleaders for the Democrats Dimocrats who kept on telling us that throwing money at conservative Dimss would make a real difference.  Turns out it did….it made the sellout that much more painful to watch.

And you really think that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Edwards will really make a difference?? Really??

(And no, Kucinich and Gravel don’t count, even if they are more progressive….they have simply no chance in the rigged money machine that passes for our democratic primary system; and they still are held back by the fantasy that the Democrat party can ever be anything more than the smiling face wing of the ruling class.)

Well, at least I gave them half a chance this time.  No more. It’s either a legitimate Left Independent or NOTA for me in ‘08.

When and if the Dimocrats ever grow a spine, a brain, and a heart, and move beyond being a party of scarecrows,  tin men (and tin women), and  cowardly lions, I may reconsider.  Probably not.

[UPDATE: Leave it to Keith Olbermann to drop the proverbial hammer on the Democrats:

[...]

• The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
• The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans;
• The Democratic leadership has given Mr. Bush all that he wanted, with the only caveat being, not merely meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government, but optional meaningless symbolism about benchmarks for the Iraqi government.
• The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.

You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions—Stop The War—have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.

You may trot out every political cliché from the soft-soap, inside-the-beltway dictionary of boilerplate sound bites, about how this is the “beginning of the end” of Mr. Bush’s “carte blanche” in Iraq, about how this is a “first step.”

Well, Senator Reid, the only end at its beginning… is our collective hope that you and your colleagues would do what is right, what is essential, what you were each elected and re-elected to do.

Because this “first step”… is a step right off a cliff.

And in typical Olbermann fashion, he spares Dubya no quarter either:

And this President!

How shameful it would be to watch an adult… hold his breath, and threaten to continue to do so, until he turned blue.

But how horrifying it is… to watch a President hold his breath and threaten to continue to do so, until innocent and patriotic Americans in harm’s way, are bled white.

You lead this country, sir?

You claim to defend it?

And yet when faced with the prospect of someone calling you on your stubbornness—your stubbornness which has cost 3,431 Americans their lives and thousands more their limbs—you, Mr. Bush, imply that if the Democrats don’t give you the money and give it to you entirely on your terms, the troops in Iraq will be stranded, or forced to serve longer, or have to throw bullets at the enemy with their bare hands.

How transcendentally, how historically, pathetic.

Any other president from any other moment in the panorama of our history would have, at the outset of this tawdry game of political chicken, declared that no matter what the other political side did, he would insure personally—first, last and always—that the troops would not suffer.

A President, Mr. Bush, uses the carte blanche he has already, not to manipulate an overlap of arriving and departing Brigades into a ‘second surge,’ but to say in unequivocal terms that if it takes every last dime of the monies already allocated, if it takes reneging on government contracts with Halliburton, he will make sure the troops are safe—even if the only safety to be found, is in getting them the hell out of there.

Well, any true President would have done that, Sir.

You instead, used our troops as political pawns, then blamed the Democrats when you did so.

You can either read the rest of Olbermann’s well-aimed nuke here…or view the \”Special Comment\” in its full rage and glory (and download it, too) here. (via Crooks and Liars)

 [UPDATE #2: Found the YouTube vid of KO's Special Comment:]

 

 

 – from Countdown with Keith Olbermann: Special Comment (5-23-07: \”Entire Government Has Failed You\” via YouTube