Utopia 2025

Jon Stewart showed again last night that he can take apart any conservative pundit, if he wants to. Finally that pompous gasbag Bill Bennett gets the kind of media attention he deserves: scorn, wrapped up in equal parts humor and common sense.

Bennett: Look, it’s a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.

Stewart: I disagree, I think it’s a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Of course, people like La Shawn Barber believe being gay *is* a random (and destructive) fetish, so there you go. Some people are unreachable. But I think there are a lot of people out there who would respond if the debate were put in Stewart’s terms, instead of Bennett’s.

Turns out that Sgt. Peter Damon, suing Michael Moore for $85 million dollars for including his image in “Fahrenheit 9/11” because he says it makes him look anti-war, appeared in 2004 on the stage with Sen. Ted Kennedy as Kennedy gave a fiercely anti-war speech.

Hmmmm.

But wait. It gets better – much better. Damon now lives in a house built by the charity Homes for Our Troops. Homes for Our Troops is one of the charities to which Michael Moore donated profits from – wait for it – “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

I have lots of thoughts about the whole “Bush endorses anti-gay-marriage amendment” crap. So let’s just get them out of the way.

First, and perhaps most important, this has absolutely no chance of getting out of the Senate, much less passing the House and making it out to the state legislatures. So spending any time or emotion on it is stupid. I know that. That doesn’t stop it from, as Grandpa Simpson would say, “angrying up my blood.”

Next: Everyone, including the far-right religious fanatics this is being aimed at, know that this is a political stunt by a President whose approval ratings are hovering just this side of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Bush’s statement is also meaningless, except in that it represents a craven flipflop from his earlier position to let the states handle it.

Next. Memo to hard-right religious fanatics: Did you by any chance notice that you’re not getting squat from this President? Women are still getting abortions, even strippers and unwed teens. Sodomy is still legal. Revival meetings still cannot be held on public school football fields. Fags continue to flaunt their evil deviances in your face. You’re getting nothing! Are a few meaningless words in support of your cause really enough? Where are the results? Think about it.

Next. I can’t stand these Democratic operatives going on every national media outlet and using this as their debate tactic against the anti-gay amendment: Hey, the American people don’t care about this; they care about jobs, and Iraq, and gas prices. To this I say, get a spine, will you, Dems? How about, “This amendment would enshrine discrimination into the Constitution”? Something like that. Something real and true. Can’t manage it? No, I didn’t think you could, you spineless, scum-sucking political operatives. Go fuck yourselves.

Next. As Atrios pointed out, why isn’t every fucktard who screams about “activist judges redefining marriage against the will of the American people” asked a simple question: “When Loving v. Virginia made mixed marriages legal in 1967, 73 percent of the American public disapproved of interracial marriage. Was that an ‘activist court’? Was that a bad legal decision, since it went against the will of the majority?” But of course that question will never be asked. The press knows where its bread is buttered.

Next. A fascinating factoid I came across when researching this entry: In February 2004, Massachusetts residents disapproved of same-sex marriage 53 percent to 35 percent. In May 2004, the state began marrying gay couples. When the same poll was taken in March 2005, less than a year later, the numbers had done a complete reversal: 56 percent in favor, 35 percent opposed. I guess letting those gays get married isn’t so bad, after all.

Finally. My opinion, and I’m serious about this, is that the government should get out of the marriage business entirely. If people want to get married in a church, or on a beach, or in prison, or while naked or underwater, they are welcome to do so. But it should be a religious and/or cultural institution, not a legal one. Why should the state be sanctioning anyone’s relationship in the first place? You want property rights, or child custody, or whatever – go to a lawyer. That means you, breeders. Yeah, you. I’m sure the lawyers will be behind this plan. You don’t want the state to sanction icky gay sex? Fine. But it’s not going to sanction your lifesize-sex-doll, Internet-porn, getting-it-on-with-the -babysitter hetero marriage either.

CODA: You think I have a potty mouth? Try the always-bracing Rude Pundit.

MSNBC’s Olbermann has always been entertaining in his disdain for pompous sexual-harrassing gasbag Bill O’Reilly. But tonight Keith was on fire, ripping O’Reilly apart for claiming that American troops massacred surrendering Nazis at Malmedy in World War II – seems it was the other way around.

Attacking World War II troops for atrocities that were actually committed by Nazis? Bill O’Reilly is a traitor.

UPDATE: O’Reilly also peddled this same outrageous falsehood last year, so it’s not exactly a slip of the tongue. And for the cherry on top of the sundae, Fox scrubbed O’Reilly’s transcript, replacing “Malmedy” with “Normandy.”

My jaw is on the floor. Last night on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Billy called Iraq “an optional war.” Wow. And the comments on NewsBusters show that right-wingers are adding him to the chorus of voices they used to revere, but now are all too willing to throw under the bus of their hard-right worldview.

Will wonders never cease?

The Republican nominee for President in 2008 is going to make George W. Bush look like a combination of Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky and Dennis Kucinich. And when that whackjob wins, after a very short time we will all be nostalgic for the measured, intelligent, middle-of-the-road presidency of George W. Bush.

Dean Esmay, on Hitler’s Germany:

There are serious academic scholars who say the German people, or at least vast swaths of them, were bullied and terrified into following Hitler’s gang of criminals. A gang of criminals who were never legitimately elected. I can point you to academic sources that debunk the “Hitler was elected” nonsense any time you like. He and his group of thugs seized power, through terror duplicity and coercion. They then constructed an image of German national unity that had nothing to do with what everyday Germans actually thought.

Hmmmm.

Why don’t those dead reporters file more *positive* stories about Iraq?

George W. Bush, call your office.

(stolen from August Pollak’s xoverboard site.)

Well, surprise: World Net Daily took the passage about Hitler and the Nazis out of the piece I wrote about last week. George Orwell, call your office. Meanwhile, a commenter on Crooks and Liars named Slippytoad pretty much summed up my feelings about the whole immigration “debate”:

If you bothered to ask me what my position was, I would tell you very simply that we need to do three things: #1, we need to prosecute companies who wink and nod and hire illegals. This would stop the incentive for people to come in the country. If they don’t have jobs to come to, they will stay home. #2, we need to make a serious and abiding effort to improve economic and trading relations with Mexico so that their economy is not an open cesspool of corruption and misery. We contributed to that mightily with the ill-conceived NAFTA giveaway to large corporations. We need leadership to come up with a trade program that actually improves economic conditions for everyone, instead of just for large companies. #3, we CANNOT deport 12 million people, and more importantly we should not. What we should do is make a sane and rational process for becoming naturalized that isn’t up to the whims of paper-pushing assholes, and not insist on horrific punitive measures that are only there to make racist pricks feel good about “administerin’ justice.” The people are here, and they have families here, and some of them believe it or not are refugees from oppresive regimes who came to America because they thought it was the land of the free. We owe it to them to give them the opportunity to do it right, instead of wasting tremendous amounts of taxpayer money, blood, effort, and time doing a purely spiteful thing like yanking them out of the lives they have established here and putting them in tremendous peril, just because we’ve suddenly decided to enforce the rules that we’ve been winking and nodding at for 30 years. Large corporations enabled this situation by nudge nudging and selectively enforcing immigration laws. Nobody, especially the Republican Congress, deserves any political capital for suddenly creating a crisis out of whole cloth and capitalizing on it.

And that’s what I’m really fucking sick of. The hysterical bullshit assertion that this is suddenly a crisis. Jesus Fuck, I grew up in Denver, Co, and know goddamn well what’s going on. DO NOT presume to tell ME what I do or do not understand about immigration. You have no idea who I am or what I do or who I know, so you can climb off your fuckin’ high horse of knowledge and come down here where your assertions stand or fall based on their truth. And the truth of it is, we are engaged in this discussion because Republicans are scared shitless of losing their base. And the reason they are using this issue is to scare their base with the image of a bunch of “filthy brown people” scumming up their alabaster fucking communities. And any impulse in that direction I encounter from anyone will be met with unremitting, withering scorn. Deal with the REAL ISSUE. Do not make up fake issues to scream about. I will mock you, I will get the facts, I will jam them right up your ass, and I will shut you down. Bank on it.