President Gas 2008

a contemporary twist on a classic by the Psychedelic Furs;

I found it on Crooks and Liars

Huckabee is a fucking freak

 

I am not paying much attention to the campaigning in the presidential primaries in The Amerika. With the exception of Ron Paul, I think that all of the candidates, whether Republican or Democrat, are simply unacceptable. Therefore I don’t really care what they have to say or what their religious beliefs are or whether they used to smoke crack or engage in bestiality. The idea that one of those loathsome people is going to end up as leader of the free world fills me with horror.

But today I am going to nominate my candidate for freakiest of the freaks – Michael Dale Huckabee, Southern Baptist minister, former governor of Arkansas, covenant marriager, and advocate of concentration camps for AIDS patients.

My disdain for Huckabee started back in August when I was reading Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming and came across the 2005 public spectacle of the Huckabees’ covenant marriage ceremony:

The highlight of the night was the Huckabees’ conversion of their marriage and restatement of their vows, including Janet’s pledge to “submit” to Mike. When they were done, they invited the audience to repeat their promises. Thousands of wives, some in evening gowns or wedding veils, vowed to submit to thousands of husbands…

More recently Huckabee’s 1992 remarks about AIDS sufferers were brought to light. “We need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague…” Nice one, Dickhead.

And within the last few days – the fact that he had advocated parole for the rapist of a 17-year old girl. The released rapist went on to rape and murder two more women.

A beauty of a quote came out just yesterday. Claiming that he believed Mormonism was a religion, but admitting that he didn’t know much about it, Huckabee asked, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Not really an appropriate question for a clergyman or a statesman to ask about a religion.

And of course Huckabee doesn’t believe in evolution.

For more on what a fucking freak Mike Huckabee is, read Larry Womack’s column here. There are some good links as well.

On today’s injustice

 

Early Christmas for Scooter – the pяez gives him a “get out of jail free” card.

Bush’s decision is beyond disgraceful. It reeks of cronyism – once again the old boys protecting each other without a thought for justice or political responsibility. But it is in no way surprising – anyone could have predicted that Bush would not allow one of his own to go to jail. And he obviously could not care less what the rest of us think about it.

Overload

 

Just after I had returned from France, two different friends sent me emails with links to political news stories – both of which have enraged me. I have not been able to write about them because I have had no idea where to start. But here goes.

Darth Cheney

I hope that many of you have already seen the 4-part story that was in the Washington Post. It starts here. I have not yet read the whole thing – it’s very long. What I have read thus far is basically confirmation that Cheney has acted way beyond his powers as vice-president, and has even tricked the “president” into signing orders by allowing him to think that they have already been through all the proper channels and that other advisers have seen them. Several other people are implicated, and others are portrayed as being innocently outside the Cheney cabal. I am not going to attempt to summarise. As I said, I haven’t even read the whole thing yet. It has been difficult because I already loathe Cheney.

I checked the Constitution to see if a vice-president is impeachable on his own. He is.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

– Article 2, Section 4

And apparently the whole process can be very simple and quick, as shown here. It really is time to impeach Cheney.

** Update ** Crooks & Liars is also calling for Cheney’s impeachment.

Inform on your neighbour

This story seems to be less known. I therefore assume that it has not been published in the mainstream media.

The FBI have gone into academia to cow students, researchers and professors into reporting on their colleagues and peers. It seems to be a pilot project focusing on well-known research universities such as MIT. The FBI has provided Defense Department guidelines on what behaviours may be signs that one of your colleagues has been, or is preparing to, pass on classified or sensitive information. The guidelines will assure you that by reporting on your colleagues to the authorities, you will actually be doing your colleagues a favour. Saving them from themselves, as it were.

Again, I am not going to summarise the articles I read; they are here and here.

This attitude of ‘suspect everyone and narc on your peers’ reminds me of two things: McCarthyism in the US, and communism over here. We could soon all be questioned about why we have foreign friends, why we speak other languages, why we are working late, why we are curious about other people’s research, or, in fact, anything at all.

Hello, totalitarianism.

* Thanks to Moscow Mike and Monkey for the initial links. And an extra thanks to Monkey for you-know-what.

Doom and gloom

Salvador Dali – Premonition of Civil War

Something is coming. I’ve had this feeling for the past 4 or 5 days that I am going to die. But I am not going to die. Aside from being fat and smoking and having high blood pressure and a wonky back, I am perfectly healthy. But I am also intuitive and this feeling is the worst I have ever had. Of course feelings like this can come and go with nothing at all happening, but I know that things are at least being seriously considered. The only question is if action will be taken this time, or if things will calm down again for a while.

It finally came to me tonight that this feeling that I am going to die is not actually about me. It relates instead to the whole world.

I have just been reading the news on Stop the Lie and Information Clearinghouse – all doom and gloom, yes, but it’s some of the only news available that tells you what really might be going on.

The war in Iraq is lost, yet we keep going. The “prezident” just signed that directive last month that gives him absolute power in the case of a vaguely defined “Catastrophic Emergency”. The administration is looking for an excuse to bomb Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons. How convenient if we could kill two birds with one stone: a catastrophic national emergency that gives us a reason to attack Iran.

And it’s not just wack jobs coming up with these ideas.

Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in Washington May 30 that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in the United States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the Bush administration might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, “Could al Qaeda Attack Trigger War With Iran?“

Then there is Paul Craig Robert’s article posted today on Information Clearinghouse: “If You Think Bush Is Evil Now, Wait Until He Nukes Iran”. You can read it here. Paul Craig Roberts is a respected scholar, journalist and academic, and he was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

And there is a lot more of that out there.

Earlier today, I linked from Strike the Root to this article, “An Orwellian answer to all our problems”, by Kerry Tomasi on Online Journal, which says everything I have wanted to say about that directive, Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20.

I know most people don’t click on the links I post, but maybe this time you’ll consider looking at one or two.

Or go away convinced that I’m the nut job, and wait for me to say I told you so yet again.

 

 

Know thine enemy

 

Late last night Jack asked me for a definition of neo-conservatism. Or maybe he asked me for the relationship between conservative and neo-conservative. The question, whatever it was, was clearly some sort of test. Was I using ‘neo-con’ in order to accurately describe the person we were discussing or was I just labelling him with a pejorative epithet?*

We agreed that the relationship neo-conservatism has with conservatism is much like the relationship neo-Nazism has with Nazism. That is to say, the only relationship is an imagined one that the neophytes have conjured into existence.

Today I went looking for a definition of American conservatism. I found what I was after in the American Conservative Union’s Statement of Principles, which outlines the beliefs that we describe as conservative.

Conservatism is belief in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and belief in inherent individual rights and strictly limited government. It is a belief that capitalism is the only economic system that is compatible with liberty, and government must not interfere with it. It is also belief that it is the responsibility of every individual citizen to safeguard his own rights and to join together with other citizens to protect those rights when they are threatened.

Now it’s time to examine what neo-conservatives stand for.

Paul Craig Robert calls the Bush-Cheney administration “America’s first neoconservative regime.” In his latest article, Americans Have Lost Their Country, Roberts points out that, amongst other things, our current government “has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral reputation…” Roberts believes that “neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world.”

Welcome to The New Amerika.

But maybe I am not being fair, and I should let the neo-cons speak for themselves. I found this article that was written by Irving Kristol, “the godfather” of neo-conservatism, in which he purports to define the “persuasion” that is neo-conservatism.

According to Kristol, neo-cons believe in capitalism and economic growth. But neo-cons are happy to put up with budget deficits “as the cost of pursuing economic growth” and they like a strong government as long as it’s not “overly intrusive”. Neo-cons worry about our culture, that it is declining and “sinking to new levels of vulgarity”. Neo-cons “are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention.”

And then Kristol moves to foreign policy, which he boils down to patriotism and an extensive definition of what comprises our “national interest”. I am going to let Project for the New American Century speak for the neo-cons on this concept.

We aim to change this. We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership…

We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;

We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;

We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;

We need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

And why the label “neo-con”? According to Wikipedia:

The prefix neo- refers to two ways in which neoconservatism was new. First, many of the movement’s founders, originally liberals, Democrats or from socialist backgrounds, were new to conservatism. Also, neoconservatism was a comparatively recent strain of conservative socio-political thought. It derived from a variety of intellectual roots in the decades following World War II, including literary criticism and the social sciences.

And there you have it.

 

* in fact, I was doing both.