A Certain Sameness

Addicting Info ran a piece about how the Wingnut Militia Goons who were supposed to gather en masse along the US-Mexico border have come up just a tad bit short.

As it turns out, patrolling the border isn’t exactly the adventurous and glamorous life that right-wing militia members thought it would be.
In fact, the militias are all talk and no walk with internal disputes and just plain boredom leading to many armed vigilantes taking their weapons and going home.

Last month, a Minuteman militia member named Chris Davis announced via video a plan for stopping undocumented immigrant children from crossing the border. They’re idea? Aim guns at them and shoot if they don’t turn around and go back to the hell they’re escaping from. After catching much flak for it, the man who issued the call in the first place backed away from his words and removed the video. His plan failed and his hope for a groundswell of volunteers to militarize the border fizzled as well. Currently, Davis and a tiny band of militiamen are spread out along a wide swath of the border along three states.

So the effect here is pretty interesting.  These guys (prob'ly) got all het up about patrolling the border cuz they spend way too much time surfing the wingnut website whirlpool where every link they click on takes 'em to another page that says almost exactly the same thing as all the other pages, and so they end up believing not only the bullshit story, but that everybody buys the bullshit story, and it's driving millions of good decent Muricans - just like their-own-bad-selves - to take up arms and defend our sovereign purity from the hordes of filthy vermin blah blah blah.

The Right Wing Echo Chamber's a real thing, but it's actually intended just to make you think you'll be joined by a gigundous mob of like-minded cheese fritters just itchin' to go for a little target practice while playing Rambo Junior in the desert southwest.  The Panic Pushers are hoping to manufacture a critical mass when there really isn't the slightest potential for such a thing to happen organically.  That kind of self-delusion is what got you that Romney Landslide in 2012, remember?

Do ya just never get tired of chasing the tin cans they're tyin' on your tail?

As a simple exercise, every once in a while take whatever nonsense du jour pops up and google the main point; something like "immigrants infected".  No matter what it is, an awful lot of the time, you'll get several pages of hits that say practically the same thing - including a bunch where it's an obviously copy-n-paste-verbatim kinda deal.  And it's not just DumFux News and Breitbart and Wingnut Daily either.

It's good to refresh your memory about just how In The Tank these chuckleheads really are, and how way too many Press Poodles are doing anything they need to do to cater to some people's willing ignorance in order to sell 'em some extra camo shirts or dippin' snuff or gold-leaf-plated pot metal "coins".  Business is the first order of business after all; and the "News Bidness" is no exception - not any more.

But it's just as important to remember that rubes are always willing to buy into the belief that no matter what they get talked into doing, as long as they're convinced they're acting in the name of some greater calling or higher power, nothing is out of the question, so everything is acceptable.

'Twas ever thus, and ever thus 'twill be I suppose.  Society carries the seeds of its own destruction just as our own individual bodies carry a host of harmful bacteria and viruses that can kill us whenever the balance of "good germs vs bad germs" goes a little wacky.

The body politic seems in dire need of a powerful high colonic right about now.

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

Meet Ryan Anderson

Ryan Anderson is the young gun occupying the William E Simon chair at The Rich Boy Vanity Project Heritage Foundation - the guy's a piece of work.

Quick Recap: The point here is supposed to be about pushing the Phobes at Heritage to defend their stoopid - ie: Marriage Inequality within the IRS Code.  So the questioner asks why he shouldn't be allowed to file a joint tax return with his husband just like all the straight couples get to do - and behold the awesomeness beginning at about 1:00:



Anderson uses Slippery Slope to build a Straw Man made of Special Pleading, and finishes it off with a near-brilliant Tu Quoque flourish, just before he deploys Begging The Question as a lead-up to blaming the victim (it's your own fault because you wanna marry the wrong person).

Once you know what you're looking for, it gets easier to find.

hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors

Irony-Challenged

Whenever I hear "Frivolous Lawsuit" or "Litigation Crazy" or "Litigious", it's pretty automatic that I'm going to think "GOP" because they're the ones who're always carping about how everybody just wants to sue everybody whenever they don't get their way, or they're just looking for a nice fat payday for doin' nuthin' blah blah blah.

Is there anything more frivolous than the crazily litigious House Republicans voting to sue Obama - at the end of the least productive legislative session since Hammurabi and right before these douche nozzles leave town for 5 weeks of vacation?

Don't Believe

"What's it like to lie to children for a living?"

Logical Fallacy #20 - Begging The Question

Begging the question means "assuming the conclusion (of an argument)", a type of circular reasoning. This is an informal fallacy where the conclusion that one is attempting to prove is included in the initial premises of an argument, often in an indirect way that conceals this fact.[1]

The term "begging the question" originated in the 16th century as a mistranslation of Latin petitio principii "assuming the initial point".[2] In modern vernacular usage, "to beg the question" is sometimes used to mean "to raise the question" (as in "This begs the question of whether...") or "to dodge the question".[2]

Today's Rational Thinking

Some of the discussions in the comments sections are trying to address the "economics" of this thing, and it occurs to me that we'll need somebody to look into the potential economic ripple effect of people feeling less comfortable in public places, and so deciding to stay home rather than accept the increased risk (real or imagined) that they'll be the victims of random gunfire while simply attempting to order out at the local deli.

PQED.org

hat tip = Crooks and Liars

About That Flag

Some knuckleheads down in Richmond decided a while back to put up the CSA Battle Flag because they tho't it was a good way to show their...uhm...American Pride(?)  Yeah, that one still eludes most of us graced with the sense the good lord gave the average okra pod.

Anyway, they've put up another one, but there seems to be some real push-back goin' on (or at least a little wishful Photoshoppin'):

And BTW:

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Pix

Modern GOP Arithmetic

Teacher: Johnny, if you have 12 cupcakes and you give 3 to Jamal, how many cupcakes do you have left?

Johnny: I have 12 cuz I ain't givin' nuthin' to nobody.

Teacher: Well, if you have 12 cupcakes and I take 3 from you and give them to Jamal, then how many do you have?

Johnny:  Then I have 12 cupcakes and 2 dead bodies to dispose of.


(Ed Note: I'm not clever enough to have come up with it on my own - I saw this not too long ago on the discussion thread of a "conservative" website.)

(2nd) Coming Soon

Prob'ly not gonna be what most of us were taught to expect.




And we can always count on the Right Reverend Fishsticks to step in it with a lack of self-awareness that'd make a Sea Sponge blush:



big hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors

He all but says it straight out - torches and pitchforks for everybody - let's go fuck up somebody's embassy!

And as an extra added attraction (after about the 10:30 mark), we get the Denialist Bullshit du Jour, citing Calvin Beisner.  But that's another story.

Classic - and BTW, Black Jesus looks to be more than just taking shots at Xianity.  Aaron MacGruder's critiques of "Black Urban Culture" are often relentless and unblinking to the point of being uncomfortable for me to watch; partly (I suppose) because of the kernels of White Guilt I wish I didn't have to lug around with me, and partly because I just really don't get some of it.

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