So sad... So pathetic... So hate-filled... So disgusting...

i'm speechless...

hate in orange county (courtesy of glenn greenwald)...



ya know what particularly disgusts me...? i met with congressman ed royce in his office in d.c. a year and a half ago in the company of a friend and colleague, an afghan muslim and here he is, participating in this horror show... god help us all...

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The really sad thing about Ted Nugent

ordinarily, i just dismiss this certifiable moron with a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders... i don't believe in giving his kind of idiocy any more bandwidth than it deserves, which is zero, zip, nada...

i'm breaking my own rule with this one, however, because as i was reading it, i had the sad, if somewhat obvious, realization that nugent is merely saying out loud what a lot of people in the united states say on a routine basis... the only difference between those people and ted nugent is that ted nugent has a megaphone to broadcast his hate... and, make no mistake... nugent's hate is of the same variety as that of rush limbaugh, just less prettified... in fact, you can find the same thing coming from the likes of bill kristol, lou dobbs, and congressmen such as steve king and eric cantor... being congressmen, of course, they would NEVER resort to such crudities as nugent, but the mindset is the same...

On President Obama, the southern rocker said he believes "Mao Tse Tung" had arrived, "and his name is Barack Hussein Obama."

"I wanna throw up," Nugent said.

He started off the interview by jabbing supporters of animal rights, claiming he wants to kill 100 more of something every time he hears the two words together in a paragraph.

"I'm not just killing them I’m fucking slaughtering them and I’m going to gut them and skin them, quarter them and butcher them and feed them to the soup kitchen and homeless shelters of America," Nugent said. "Not because I need to, because it will cause Bill Maher to shit blood. That’s my goal in life."

Oddly, while he boasts about wanting to feed the poor and hungry masses, Nugent's words for his fellow Americans who depend on food assistance are quite vulgar and surprising.

"Welfare isn’t supposed to be used for hairdos," he said. "If you need food stamps, eat the fucking pet!"

what i'd like to do with this guy and others of his ilk is to put them on a plane to afghanistan, not to fight or be killed, but to have to live and work on a daily basis with afghans in an organization like the international rescue committee or the aga khan foundation... yes, he'd have to be dragged there, kicking and screaming, but getting exposed to some of the brutal realities of extreme poverty and despair and having to live with it in your face every day might give assholes like this a different perspective... otoh, maybe not... assholes of nugent's age are pretty impermeable to letting go of their bullshit...

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You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father . . . could never have imagined

i've posted this before but somehow, today, reading it again at information clearing house, it seems pertinent once again...

"What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures'. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

You don't want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined." :

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

i'm not posting this because it's how i see the whole of our current reality... i think the direction mayer describes is very much the world our handlers are trying very hard to create, but i also think there's a countervailing trend that, bit by bit, is banishing such darkness, and it's that trend that i choose to spend my active energy on... that doesn't mean, however, that we should adopt a pollyanna viewpoint or put our heads in the sand, but it does mean that, in continuing to be aware of the dark, we don't spend our time reinforcing it by succumbing to fear and hate...

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THIS is what tolerance for bigotry, violence, and hate produces

maybe, just maybe, america is beginning to extricate itself from the fetid morass of hate, prejudice, and advocacy for violence that such devout christians as james dobson and tony perkins have, tellingly, never explicitly renounced, and that such extremist, far-right mouthpieces as malkin and coulter have all but openly endorsed... tragically, for some, like matthew shephard and david ritcheson, it comes too late...

two and one-half months ago, david ritcheson testified before a house of representatives committee considering hate crimes legislation...

It was shortly after arriving at this private residence that a minor disagreement between me and the attackers turned into the pretext for what I believe was a premeditated hate crime. This was a moment that would change my life forever. After I was surprisingly sucker punched and knocked out, I was dragged into the back yard for an attack that would last for over an hour. Two individuals, one an admitted racist skinhead, attempted to carve a swastika on my chest. Today I still bear that scar on my chest like a scarlet letter. After they stripped me naked, I was burned with cigarettes and savagely kicked by this skinhead’s steel toed army boots. After burning me in the center of the forehead, the skinhead attacker was heard saying that now I looked like an Indian with the red dot on my forehead. Moreover, the witnesses to the attack recalled the two attackers calling me a "wetback" and a ‘spic" as they continued to beat me as I lay unconscious. Once the attack came to an end, I was dragged to the rear of the back yard and left for dead. Reportedly, I lay unconscious in the back yard of this private residence for the next 8-9 hours.

yesterday, he took his own life...

A Spring teen who survived a brutal beating with a pipe last year apparently jumped to his death from a Cozumel-bound cruise ship on Sunday.

we are all human beings, living on the same planet, trying to find our way... can we please stop this...? NOW...?

(thanks to mariachi mama at daily kos...)

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Totally beyond unbelievable

i thought i knew insanity... i thought i knew fear-mongering... i thought i knew bigotry... i thought i knew hate... surprise, surprise... i didn't know this...

The John Doe Manifesto
By Michelle Malkin

i pay as little attention to hate-filled pundits as i can... oh, yes, i'm aware that they're out there and i read references to their screeds in blogs i regularly visit, but i have so little interest in their venomous spoutings that i see no point in wasting precious blog space and bandwidth giving them any more of a forum than they already have... this, however, was more than i could stomach... the link above takes you to this, as vicious a piece of totalitarian, repressive, pus-oozing, maggot-filled trash as i have ever read... i thought ann coulter was bad, but this puts her to shame... read it... read it carefully... let the full impact wash over you... see for yourself what kind of mind it must take to write something like this... the only way i can describe my own reaction is that it must be similar to watching the snake charmer play his flute and seeing the cobra rise out of the basket, looking into its poisonous eyes, and feeling paralyzed... i'm stunned... literally...

Dear Muslim Terrorist Plotter/Planner/Funder/Enabler/Apologist,

You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.

I am John Doe.

I am traveling on your plane. I am riding on your train. I am at your bus stop. I am on your street. I am in your subway car. I am on your lift.

I am your neighbor. I am your customer. I am your classmate. I am your boss.

I am John Doe.

I will never forget the example of the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who refused to sit back on 9/11 and let themselves be murdered in the name of Islam without a fight.

I will never forget the passengers and crew members who tackled al Qaeda shoe-bomber Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63 before he had a chance to blow up the plane over the Atlantic Ocean.

I will never forget the alertness of actor James Woods, who notified a stewardess that several Arab men sitting in his first-class cabin on an August 2001 flight were behaving strangely. The men turned out to be 9/11 hijackers on a test run.

I will act when homeland security officials ask me to “report suspicious activity.”

I will embrace my local police department’s admonition: “If you see something, say something.”

I am John Doe.

I will protest your Jew-hating, America-bashing “scholars.”

I will petition against your hate-mongering mosque leaders.

I will raise my voice against your subjugation of women and religious minorities.

I will challenge your attempts to indoctrinate my children in our schools.

I will combat your violent propaganda on the Internet.

I am John Doe.

I will support law enforcement initiatives to spy on your operatives, cut off your funding, and disrupt your murderous conspiracies.

I will oppose all attempts to undermine our borders and immigration laws.

I will resist the imposition of sharia principles and sharia law in my taxi cab, my restaurant, my community pool, the halls of Congress, our national monuments, the radio and television airwaves, and all public spaces.

I will not be censored in the name of tolerance.

I will not be cowed by your Beltway lobbying groups in moderate clothing. I will not cringe when you shriek about “profiling” or “Islamophobia.”

I will put my family’s safety above sensitivity. I will put my country above multiculturalism.

I will not submit to your will. I will not be intimidated.

I am John Doe.

Pass it on.

Reader Frank e-mails that he has created "I am John Doe" buttons. Buy 'em here.

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Reasons to not ignore Ann Coulter

last week i begged for a respite from the ceaseless barrage of posts on the evil, extremist, bigoted cyborg, ann coulter...

no more about ann coulter... the amount of bandwidth that woman has sucked up in the last 24 hours is unconscionable... we complain over the media's obsession with anna nicole and then we go and do the same thing with someone who, in her own twisted way, is equally unworthy of any attention, much less the time spent blogging...

jamison foser at media matters smacks me down, and quite rightly...

All of which brings us to the first of two reasons why it is actually important that we don't ignore Ann Coulter.

If Coulter's seething hatred was hers alone, she might best be ignored. But that ugly and unthinking hatred isn't unique to Coulter.

Instead, Coulter's anger and venom are illustrative of the modern conservative movement. Her vitriol is embraced and rewarded by right-wing audiences far and wide. Her intellectual and rhetorical peers -- Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, among others -- are, like Coulter, anything but "marginalized." They unleash vicious tirades against gays, women, minorities, and liberals -- and are paid handsomely for it. And they are paid not only in cash, but in respect: Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, sometimes seems to be auditioning to be Limbaugh's co-host, while President Bush opens the Oval Office to the likes of Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity.

[...]

But the most interesting -- and important -- thing about Coulter's hate speech isn't that it is representative the of attitudes of her ideological fellow travelers.

It is the similarity between what Ann Coulter was trying to do by calling John Edwards a "faggot" and what countless "respectable" members of the "MSM" do every day.

Coulter's comments, of course, weren't about convincing people that John Edwards is gay. They were about trying to strip him of his masculinity, to feminize him -- and in doing so take advantage of the cultural stereotypes that equate strength with men and weakness with women to portray Edwards as "wussy" (her word).

[...]

But the most interesting -- and important -- thing about Coulter's hate speech isn't that it is representative the of attitudes of her ideological fellow travelers.

It is the similarity between what Ann Coulter was trying to do by calling John Edwards a "faggot" and what countless "respectable" members of the "MSM" do every day.

Coulter's comments, of course, weren't about convincing people that John Edwards is gay. They were about trying to strip him of his masculinity, to feminize him -- and in doing so take advantage of the cultural stereotypes that equate strength with men and weakness with women to portray Edwards as "wussy" (her word).

excellent points, all... even so, i refuse to devote my limited resources of time and energy to paying attention to such bile... i may chuckle and shake my head from time to time... i may occasionally have to supress a gag reflex, but those creatures of the underworld will just have to figure out how to go on without me...

(thanks to atrios...)

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