I Hate What You Just Said

From Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld:

Back in 2002, [John] Podesta formed a group called the Coalition for Freedom of Information, which demanded access to secret government records on UFOs.

So right after 9/11, the worst attack on American soil ever, thank God there was someone in D.C. who had their priorities in order. I mean, maybe Martians did bomb the World Trade Center.

Look, I don’t dispute that aliens exist, but there are more urgent matters to deal with, other than wrinkly creatures with a knack for anal probing.

But enough about Barney Frank.

From JimLarkinsGhost (quoting the APA):

Researchers at the University of Georgia conducted an experiment involving 35 homophobic men and 29 nonhomophobic men as measured by the Index of Homophobia scale. All the participants selected for the study described themselves as exclusively heterosexual both in terms of sexual arousal and experience.

Each participant was exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian videotapes (but not necessarily in that order). Their degree of sexual arousal was measured by penile plethysmography, which precisely measures and records male tumescence.

Men in both groups were aroused by about the same degree by the video depicting heterosexual sexual behavior and by the video showing two women engaged in sexual behavior. The only significant difference in degree of arousal between the two groups occurred when they viewed the video depicting male homosexual sex: ‘The homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference to the male homosexual video, but the control [nonhomophobic] men did not.’

Just sayin’.

This interview clip is heartening.  President-elect Obama has put himself on record - he will “close Guantanamo” and he will “make sure that we don’t torture.”

The contrast between Obama’s remarks and the moral decay of the Bush administration is striking, and it is just one of the many reasons that November 4 marked a new era of hope for America.

In January, we can all celebrate our new President’s inauguration. And then we must do our job - we must hold him to his words.

Thanks to my good friend Larry Tate for tipping us off to another SJOYA contender.

It appears that Representative Paul Broun (R - GA) is caught up in the excitement of Barack Obama’s election victory. However, his particular type of excitement manifests itself in the form of fear-mongering paranoid right-wing fantasy.  According to Broun, Obama will govern like Stalin.  Or Hitler.  Or something.  Whatever - he just knows it’s going to be really bad!

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

…

The Obama transition team declined to comment on Broun’s remarks. But spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama was referring in the speech to a proposal for a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction efforts such as rebuilding infrastructure — an idea endorsed by the Bush administration.

Well, I agree with you on one point, Congressman - you do sound “crazy and off-base.” And you are now our third nominee for the Shameful Jackass of the Year Award. Good luck, and keep an eye out for the Obama storm troopers! You Jackass.

Paul Krugman with a statement on “The Monster Years.”

Ezra Klein has a fantastic essay up over at The American Prospect. He writes,

Barack Hussein Obama was, arguably, the country’s most unlikely candidate for highest office. He embodied, or at least invoked, much of what America feared. His color recalled our racist past. His name was a reminder of our anxious present. His spiritual mentor displayed a streak of radical Afro-nationalism. He knew domestic terrorists and had lived in predominantly Muslim countries. There was hardly a specter lurking in the American subconscious that he did not call forth.

And that was his great strength. He robbed fear of its ability to work through quiet insinuation. He forced America to confront its own subconscious. Obama actually is black. His middle name actually is “Hussein.” He actually does know William Ayers. He actually was married by Jeremiah Wright. He actually had lived in Indonesia. These were not smears, though they were often used as such. They were facts. And this election was fundamentally about what happened when fear collided with fact.

For the first time, America had to articulate what exactly it feared. Did it truly believe that the middle name “Hussein” suggested a terrorist threat to the country? Well, no. Did it genuinely think Obama a radical Afro-nationalist who had dedicated his life to serving a country he loathed? Probably not. Did it actually seem plausible that Obama wanted to become president so he could finish the job the Weathermen started? Unlikely. The shadowy terrors that animated American politics in the dark aftermath of 9-11 receded. Time had passed. To borrow a line, it was morning in America, and our country looked different in the clean light of the dawn. And so too did its problems.

The entire essay is worth a look.

Wheeeeee! I’m popping open a cold EuroBud in celebration of a really big number.  Ahhh, freedom never tasted so good.

This actually explains a lot about Dick Cheney and the administration’s response to 9/11. Seems like he lives in a state of constant, pathological fear:

In the days after 9/11, when fears of another terrorist strike were at their peak, Vice President Dick Cheney was convinced that he had been subjected to a lethal dose of anthrax, according to a new book.

White House insiders from that white-knuckle time told author Jane Mayer, who authored “The Dark Side, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” that the scare contributed to Cheney’s insistence on hard-line tactics for fighting terror.

Mayer, a writer for the New Yorker, claims that the vice president became the driving force in pushing for tougher interrogation tactics that critics charge went over the legal line and constitute torture.

In the days after the horror of 9/11, the country seemed to be under assault from many sides, with anthrax letters showing up in Congress and newsrooms.

On Oct. 18, 2001, a White House alarm went off indicating that sensors had detected dangerous levels of radioactive, chemical or biological agents. According to Mayer, anyone who had entered the White House situation room, including Cheney, had been exposed.

“They thought Cheney was already lethally infected,” said a former administration officer who had kept the White House secret until now, according to the book.[. . .]

Miraculously, he survived.

But in the days after the incident, Cheney was taking no chances. Eleven days later, Cheney insisted on leaving the White House and retreating to one of his “secure, undisclosed locations,” the book claims.

Cheney and other Cabinet members took turns hunkering down in one of several cold war era bunkers built to survive a nuclear attack. The bunkers, deep underground, were crammed with communications gear and Cheney would stay in what was dubbed the “The Commander in Chief’s Suite,” Mayer writes.

When vice president wasn’t in the bunker, Mayer claims that “a sense of constant danger followed Cheney everywhere.” The route was altered daily during the veep’s commute to his above-ground office. On the back seat next to him would be a duffel bag stuffed with a gas mask and biochemical survival suit. And a doctor nearly always traveled with him, “The Dark Side” claims.

Of course, Cheney and Rumsfeld share a deep history of delusion, paranoid ideation, persecution complexes, and a variety of unreasonable fears.

Update:

Andrew Sullivan is out today with a chilling piece on Cheney: “Vice President For Torture.”

In the situation room

There was a toy world

And a flight costume

and a picture of–

It’s Goodnight Bush!  Sweet Dreams…

From J.K. Rowling’s graduation address to Harvard University:

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

Michael Ledeen–arch neocon douchebag–has penned an editorial at the Washington Street Journal. It’s entitled –I’m not kidding– “Iran and the Problem of Evil.”

The folks over at Sadly No! gave it a very kind review:

Ledeen has squeezed nearly every moronic analogy, utterly batshit conviction, shopworn trope, and demagogic twistification that neocons have had about foreign policy in the last eleventy years into this column. Pretty much the only thing missing is a claim that one or all of the many Hitlers of the Muslim world possess WMDs. But then Ledeen already used that one to great effect, didn’t he?

Keep in mind that this is the same Michael Ledeen who facilitated the sale of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra scandal.