Author: Thomas More

Hey Karl Rove:

Are you sure you want to talk about the conservative response to 9/11, compared to the liberal response? You sure? OK. Let’s go, baby.

It was a conservative President who sat in a classroom reading to children about a pet goat while the country was suffering its worst attack ever.

It was a conservative administration whose first response to the savagery of 9/11 was to hustle the family members of the attack’s ringleader out of the country by any means necessary.

It was a conservative administration whose advice to the shell-shocked and grieving populace was simply: go shopping.

It was a conservative administration that thought the best way to find perpetrators was to announce, weeks before it happened, that they were going to bomb the country where they thought the terrorists might be.

It was a conservative Secretary 0f Defense who told the administration’s top terror analyst, “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. Let’s bomb Iraq.”

It was a conservative administration that tried everything possible to block an investigation into what happened on 9/11.

It was a conservative administration that assembled a firestorm of ginned-up “intelligence” to justify a pre-emptive war against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

It was a conservative administration that both praised and promoted those most closely responsible for the greatest intelligence failures in the history of the United States. Go team!

It was a conservative government that decided they could wage war on the cheap, denying soldiers the equipment they need in the field, and denying veterans the health care they deserve when they come home.

It was a conservative administration who blacked out passages from the (eventual) 9/11 report dealing with the country where most of the 9/11 attackers came from: Saudi Arabia.

It is a conservative President who can’t catch the perpetrator of 9/11 after nearly four years, and in fact “doesn’t spend that much time on him” at this point.

It’s a conservative Congress that wants to renege on $125 million in aid to injured and sick Ground Zero workers.

It is conservatives who use the dead bodies of those who perished on 9/11 as a cudgel with which to beat their political enemies.

So Karl, in the immortal words of Vice President Dick Cheney: Go fuck yourself.

“The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.”

-U.S. Flag Code

In the spirit of all the overheated hyperbolic rhetoric being slung around these days*, I thought I would indulge in a little of it myself.

George W. Bush is like that serial killer that’s just daring the movie detective to catch him. He leaves clues about his crimes everywhere, in places he knows the detective will find them. He calls the detective from easily-traced phone lines, and writes notes in his own blood reading “Catch me…IF YOU CAN!” He clearly has a subconscious need to be caught.

But in this particular case, the detective is distracted by Katie Holmes’ engagement and some missing girl in Aruba, and can’t exactly be bothered with a serial killer trying to get his attention. It’s just not all that important.

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* My current favorite outrageous hyperbole comes from, big surprise, that crapweasel right-wing torture apologist Dean Esmay, who has decided on absolutely no evidence that Michael Schiavo killed his wife, calling him both “O.J.” and “a lowlife piece of human excrement.” Look in the mirror, dude.

Rudepundit.

Bracing and fantastic.

Downing Street Memo:
“The sky is blue. Everyone knows the sky is blue, and we talked about it.”

Bush and Blair:
“The sky is absolutely not blue. That’s just a patently false statement.”

American media and public:
“Eh. Who really cares what color the sky is, anyway?”

For right-wing crapweasels, the Newsweek story must have presented an excruciating Sophie’s Choice:

Which do I hate more: those evil Muslims, or the American media?

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Fox-News-drunk crapweasels chose the media. Newsweek was “Traitor of the Week,” and its staff should be fired and then shot, and the building dynamited, burned down and then razed. Dan Rather’s face hovered before them, like the Emperor’s hologram in “Star Wars.” The bloodlust was so thick that they didn’t take the time to fantasize about what should happen to the towelheaded rioters, who made such a fuss over a book.

Now that Terri Schiavo is gone, I can only hope that all the people who kept this bloody fight going will one day have the entire country passing judgment on their private medical and family matters. I can only hope that talk radio, TV psychics and thousands of weblog writers will make pronouncements about what’s best for their family. I can only hope that Congress will step in, so it can control the outcome. I can only hope that people like Dean Esmay – 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag – who willingly spread falsehoods about this case will have an endless litany of protestors screaming in his ear that he is a murdering sadist Christian-hater, and that Tom DeLay will take to the floor of Congress to declare that he is “a man of questionable morals.” I can only hope that all the people who used this family’s grief as a bludgeon will be personally lectured over the public airwaves by Rush Limbaugh.

I can only hope that as they sit at the bedside of someone they love, they will have Randall Terry in the hallway, conducting a live interview on CNN.

I can hope, can’t I?

The Terri Schiavo case has proven to me, without a shadow of a doubt, that the rule of law means nothing to the crapweasel right wing in this country. All that matters is their agenda. A dozen courts have already ruled in Michael Schiavo’s favor, but that means nothing to these people, who are lining up to use Terri Schiavo’s body as a human shield against their blood enemies.

More: And go he should, if he were the devil himself, until he broke the law.
Roper: So now you’d give the devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get to the devil?
Roper: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the devil benefit of law – for my own safety’s sake.

-Man for All Seasons

I have some questions for those who think the government should step in and require that Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube be re-inserted.

• If you were in a persistent vegetative state, would you want to live 15, 20, 30 more years?
• If your spouse told you unequivocally that they would not want to be kept alive under such circumstances, how would you feel about spending 10 years in court to carry out their wishes?
• Do you really want the state to have that much control over your family’s medical decisions?
• Did you know that when he was governor of Texas, George W. Bush signed a law that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes?

How many billions of pixels have been wasted on mindless, irrelevant drivel about Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert? How many stars are in the sky? Here’s some common sense.

-Guckert used an alias to conceal his gay escort past/present, not because it was “easier to pronounce.”
-Guckert got a day pass to the White House press room for *two years.*
-He got a day pass rather than the permanent “hard pass” because he didn’t want to submit to the background check.
-He was in the White House before “Talon News” even existed. Someone vouched for him. Who?
-Guckert’s escort ads were up on the internet throughout the time he was a “reporter.” His “personal life” was not “violated.”

Furthermore, crossing into pundit territory, he was a gay male prostitute in Washington (imagine the client list!) while spreading the administration’s anti-gay rhetoric through a fake news organization mostly in the business of transcribing White House press releases. As far as I’m concerned, he richly deserves everything he gets.