The Power Of Nightmares

This is a blast from the past, and I'm putting it up again because (1st) it's a good look at how the perceptions and opinions of whole populations can be cynically manipulated, and (2nd) because as time passes, we need to stay aware of the extreme dangers that arise from the merger of Religion and Politics.



You can watch the 2nd and 3rd episodes at the archive site.

Today's Christianist

Ya can't be "a true Christian" if you don't vote Republican.



hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors

Just Chill A Minute, Dammit

Thanks to (and a big ol' hat tip for) Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.  It's good to take a step back and try to remember where we were trying to go before all this weird shit happened and we started feeling so lost.

Shower The People --James Taylor

Today's Wingnut

hat tip = Addicting Info

I guess Lil Donny is off his meds again - railing against the docs who contracted Ebola Fever while trying to be professionals who actually give a fuck:

"People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences"

That would certainly help explain why Trump and his fellow-traveler "conservatives" are so dead-set against trying to make the VA a better place.  Soldiers who go to far away places to help us out are great, but they knew the risks when they signed up, so if they don't have sense enough to die over there, fuck 'em(?)

How is it that these guys are always making stoopid general pronouncements, and nobody "on their side" ever seems to get wise to it?

And then there's RushBo:



Be afraid.  C'mon guys - if I'm wrong about y'all being a buncha whiny-butt pussies who're frightened by every shadow and every fleeting glimpse of anything you can't either immediately identify as friendly (aka "exactly like you") - or anything you're not allowed to shoot 47 times with your 50-calibre manly inadequacy compensator - then ya gotta be able to recognize that you're being played for suckers.

And now I'll trot out the old standby (Groaner Alert):  These "Thought Leaders" on the far right must think you're all mushrooms - why else do they keep you in the dark and feed you a steady diet of shit?

Huh?

As if anybody needed another indication that DumFux News is a bad place to get anything but dumber.

Cuz everybody knows Murica has to be 110% against that sub-human mongrel in the White House.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Connections

I wonder if this:




...might hook into this:



Big O has been really really careful never to say the word 'torture' in any public setting - not that I can recall anyway (update*).  So I have to wonder why he's saying it now, and I don't think it's solely because it's come up and he's trying to do the damage control thing by blaming Bush or whatever.  That said, tho', the guy can be crazy stupid good at political judo, and keeping in mind that it's never just about what they tell us it's about, here's a few possibilities stumbling thru my brain clutter today:

• he's floating the torture thing to counteract the impeachment thing.  "you fuck with me on impeachment, and I'll fuck you back even harder by arresting Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and a hundred others and I'll personally deliver 'em all the The Hague to face charges for their war crimes". (you'll notice Liz Cheney popped up on DumFux News almost immediately to slag the Prez for a good 4 minutes - talking about torture and making no mention of her dear ol' dad - of course)

Anyway - back to stumbly thingies:

• he's angling for better support from his own wingers.  The guy does an awful lot of Hippie-Punching, and so he's throwing a bone to the Left Wing to get 'em all out to the polls this fall.
• he's finally getting around to addressing the post 9-11 madness.  And so this is all about trying to signal an attempt to make up for doing nothing about it; or he needs to move a little closer to traditional foreign allies in order to get something from them(?) - maybe shore up support for sanctions on Russia and Iran and/or slapping Israel(?)

Dunno, but things happen for a reason, and maybe this happened late on a Friday so it wouldn't get much coverage, which means it'll generate very little heat, which means  everybody's expecting the Press Poodles to keep it on the down low because there's a coupla dozen trainloads of politicians and operatives and bureaucrats and Press Poodles who should rightly be in prison because they took an active part in the shittiness or they actively avoided doing anything to prevent it, or they made sure we didn't notice or whatever.

As long as you can make it look like everybody's responsible, then nobody can hold anybody accountable for anything - ever.  Welcome to America's Imperial Era.

*Update = From Little Green Footballs:

Obama’s statement on torture wasn’t really news; in May 2013 he said pretty much the same thing: Remarks by the President at the National Defense University | the White House.

Meanwhile, we strengthened our defenses — hardening targets, tightening transportation security, giving law enforcement new tools to prevent terror.  Most of these changes were sound.  Some caused inconvenience.  But some, like expanded surveillance, raised difficult questions about the balance that we strike between our interests in security and our values of privacy.  And in some cases, I believe we compromised our basic values — by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.

Still seems kinda odd to me tho'.

The Challenge

On the The Professional Left podcast this week, Bluegal referenced the video below (Samuel L Jackson saying motherfucker - 171 times)...



...and then issued a challenge:  Somebody should do something similar with Chuck Todd and Cokie Roberts and any other Press Poodle who draws a paycheck for being adept at Pimping The Horserace - ie: making sure that whenever Ted Cruz walks across the rotunda and publicly skull fucks John Boehner, what we hear at the end of the TV segment is, "Yeah, but the Democrats..." and "Both sides..." and "There's plenty of blame to go around..."

Once you know what to look for, it's easier to find.

Today's Eternal Sadness

International Edition:

Not Equal: Gaza in Over 1000 Frames from MarkFiore on Vimeo.

Today's Rude-ness

The Rude Pundit starts it all off:

7/31/2014
In Brief: Quotes That Mean as Much Now as When They Were First Said (With a Photo for Context)

The quote is from a just-released recording of former President Bill Clinton speaking to a group of business people in Melbourne, Australia, on September 10, 2001 (or "One day before everything changed forever and we lost our country"). Clinton was talking about how he might have been able to get to Osama bin Laden: "I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it."

You can tease that out and say that killing those 300 people would have created even more terrorists. Or you can say that those people were accessories to bin Laden by their proximity and that Clinton was a hypocrite because of other missile strikes he ordered or that Bill Clinton was a pussy whose inaction helped cause 9/11 (and then you can merrily go fuck yourself).

The photo is from the Gaza Strip in the last few days. The context is how intractably screwed people are when they don't give a shit about those innocent men, women, and children:

And I'll just add this - I don't pretend to know what exactly we should do, or even how we're supposed to figure out what "the right thing" is, but I think I know this much: The process for making the decision on "doing the right thing" never starts with "Step 1 - Fuck those kids - they don't matter as much as this other thing".

Some Toons