Our friend DarkSyde, writing at Daily Kos, pulls out his airbrush and his engorged sense of self and paints one of the most delusional and dishonest pieces of aggrandizing twaddle ever to tag the blogosphere—no easy feat in a medium known for posts that pimp themselves in the same way an aging Norma Desmond once moved showily toward the harsh Klieg light of her own ultimate self parody. From “Turning the Tables”:
The modern GOP is a precarious alliance between moderate, sane, conservatives, corporate interests understandably focused on short term profits, and a fundamentalist mob whose social policies poll anywhere between unpopular to repugnant among the majority of Americans.
The moderates are the official face set forth in PR efforts, the corporate interests drive the money, and like in any feudal system, the cultish masses provide the votes and do the grassroots work. But there’s a glaring weakness: Expose that extremist base for what it is, flip that rock over to illuminate the ugly squatting trolls hiding underneath, and it’s game over folks. Here’s one way to go about doing that, and in all fairness we should thank the GOP shills on Cable News and all across the blogosphere for bringing it our attention and warming up the soundbite for us so nicely.
::
Osama bin Laden:
The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws
Osama bin Laden calling for ‘morality’:
We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.
Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton:
Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office?
Osama bin Laden on women in the workplace:
You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins.
Osama bin Laden on AIDS:
[Y]ou have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention
Osama bin Laden on gambling:
You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.
And that’s just from one of Osama’s barking at the moon bat shit crazy religious screeds. I don’t know about you folks, but that doesn’t sound very liberal to me. But it sure sounds like something I might hear on the GOP/fundie talk radio …
So, when the extremist nutcases in our country start comparing patriotic Democrats and Progressives with Osama bin Laden, welcome the opportunity to point out that the present incarnation of the GOP is controlled by the religious right, the Theocons, who bear disturbing parallels to the most wanted man in the world. And you don’t have to be able to whip out a bunch of quotes, all you need to remember is a simple soundbite and they will open the door for you.
The religious right is Osama bin Laden light.
That’s how easy it is to turn the tables.
Indeed! And, as if to drive the point home, DarkSyde resurfaced here this morning to address one of the many commenters who had yesterday gathered together his paper-thin assertions, rolled them up like an old Times op-ed page, then used the to beat him repeatedly about the snout. Sadly—and, I suppose, predictably—DarkSyde failed on every occasion to counter rejoinders to his to his poorly-considered thought experiment and simply declared victory. As he himself explains it:
I didn’t come here to asnswer [sic] questions folks. I came here to test out how good you guys could answer them when the tables were turned on you. And despite a few abortive attempts, you failed miserably, you absolutely suck on the defensive, which tells me this is a pretty dang good tactic to use and one we never would have thought of had you not demo’ed it for us.
Now we know: It’s a real weak spot and it should be, your own party is eerily the best match for bin Laden in our nation. So again, thanks for the traffic the data, and the perspective
Well then!
Writing on Kos and all, DarkSyde is content to repeat his claims in a retrospective post—comfortable not only that his readers will trust in his strange, alternate history of the rhetorical events—but that they will have neither the time nor the inclination (nor, if he can help it, the opportunity even) to decide for themselves. Because, as he reminds one of the commenters here in this morning:
“[…]I’m on the front page. You’re simply my pet freaks being hosed in public for the amusement of a million readers with no link
Thankfully, I myself am not on the lookout for “traffic data” or new rhetorical strategies to “demo” on the Kossacks (I find that it’s enough just to wave shiny objects in front of them and scream, “Look, Teddy Kennedy’s giving away gold pieces again!”)—which saves me the embarrassment of pretending, as DarkSyde must, that he’s some cut-rate Caesar who’s taken it upon himself to dress the part of peasant and wander the cobbled streets of wingnuttia incognito, picking the brains of my intellectual inferiors to find just what it might take to appease the proles.
And further, even if I hadn’t the intellectual honesty to link back to the exchanges in question—if only to let readers decide for themselves how effectively we warmongering rubes fended off the threat of DarkSyde’s curious strawman, stitched together (as best I can tell) from corn husks, moldy hay, and one of Harry Shearer’s old suits—I certainly wouldn’t brag about it. But then again, I’m not DarkSyde—and honestly, what else can one reasonably expect from a pompous twit who, with the gravitas of one recalling his audience with the Pope (or at the very least, a pre-September Cindy Sheehan), mentions no less than four times that he is a “front page” diarist at Daily Kos.
Which, seriously, man—the last person I can remember being so proud of his position on Kos was Terry Mcauliffe, and that’s only because Moulitsas let him drive for the first half hour before rolling over and demanding a box of glazed donuts—as well as a full report on those classified documents Sandy Berger spirited out of the National Archives jammed in his boxers and socks.
Quickly, and for the record, let’s dispense with DarkSyde’s thought exercise by way of a couple comments plucked from yesterday’s thread. That way I can get back to the business of watching pre-game Conference championship analyses and having some guac and corn chips.
First, here’s Dave Price, who helpfully points out how faulty analogies often turn on both kind and degree — each of which DarkSyde manages to muddle in his attempt to marshal an argument from analogy that relies entirely on freighted inference and faulty correspondence of terms:
I’m actually starting to feel sorry for this DarkSyde guy.
OK, buddy, let me give a serious answer to your silly question.
Yes, there are superficial similarities to the Christian Republican right-wing and Osama bin Laden, just as there are superficial similarities between the philosophies of Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kimn Jong Il, etc. and the Left in America. But in both cases, there are also huge differences in philosophy, mostly in that the American versions of both almost universally believe in freedom, democracy, and not deliberately mass murdering people.
Now, if you remember, the “table†you “turned†was the fact that Osama is repeating tendentious, oft-discredited Leftist talking points in order to attack Bush. Pointing out that similarity is not the same, however, as claiming Republican = Taliban. We’re decrying your tactics, not your philosophy.
The fact Al Qaeda is gleefully recycling some of those attacks should make you think about how dishonest you’ve been in your partisan zealotry. Not that you will.
And secondly, here’s Alex, who effectively hammers home the sheer stupidity of the rhetorical exercise itself, particulary as DarkSyde has tried so hamfistedly to frame it:
Bin Laden is not referencing evangelical Christian screeds against homosexuality/abortion/social conservative item of choice in his various screeds, nor is he using typically evangelical Christian rhetoric in his speeches. At no time has he ever suggested to a Western audience that it familiarize itself with the collected works of Pat Robertson—because bin Laden simply did not learn social conservatism from Christian sources; he learned it from Muslim religious laws and the interpretation thereof.
If you could plausibly suggest that the religious right in America had so manipulated the media narrative about social conservative issues that Bin Laden’s ‘gays should be stoned to death’ arguments could now be presented as the opinions of a perfectly reasonable man; if social conservatives in the U.S. had somehow created an atmosphere in which this kind of ‘opinion’ was considered as within the bounds of rational discourse, then you would have a point. But because this is not the case, Bin Laden has never attempted to appeal to the West as a champion of ‘family values’ (Don’t send your gay son Charlie to religious sexual re-education camp–just crush him with a stone wall! Problem solved!).
He has, however, made use of the language of cultural relativism, so-called ‘anti-racism’, and Western cultural guilt over the legacy of colonialism. Because he knows that this kind of argument is one to which the average educated Western listerner is intensely and fundamentally susceptible. He clearly does not think that he can get the same pull from portraying himself as the man who will save your children (except for Cindy who was stoned as a harlot for wearing lipstick) from the evils of late-night Cinemax and 6th grade science class. Because even Bin Laden knows that there is a gigantic goddamn difference between murdering sinners and pestering them with irritating pamphlets and waving Bibles at them.
Finally, here’s Pete Jackson, putting the entire episode in a bit of perspective:
[Writes DarkSyde] You guys still haven’t figured it out yet have you? [...] Why is fundamentalist Islamic ideology virtually identical to that of the modern incarnation of the GOP?
See, you’ve put a question mark at the end, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is your conclusion. When you put your conclusion in your question it’s called “begging the question,†a very famous logical fallacy. You were called on this instantly last night yet you keep right on pretending that you’re smart or something. This is what you get when you learn your logic in a Womyn’s Studies class instead of a Logic class. You want a valid answer? Ask a valid question.
The fact is, Bin Laden isn’t on TV parroting Jimmy Swaggart, he’s stating common cause with YOU, making YOUR arguments, recommending YOUR books. We’re not simply asserting that he’s on your side, HE is stating that he’s on your side. So given this, if we’re to take your question seriously, then YOU are claiming to be “the modern incarnation of the GOP.†Weird.
And of course, my favorite is this little bit:
I didn’t come here to asnswer questions folks. I came here to test out how good you guys could answer them when the tables were turned on you. And despite a few abortive attempts, you failed miserably, you absolutely suck on the defensive, which tells me this is a pretty dang good tactic to use and one we never would have thought of had you not demo’ed it for us.
Ahh, another leftist revealed by his own obiter dicta. See Darksyde, you guys’ problem is that you’re more concerned with “winning†than you are about knowledge itself. And this is why you never win. The satisfying part is knowing that you are going to live to see the word “progressive†taken from you by others whose actual political goal is to seek to use knowledge to further society.
But read both threads and decide for yourself. Of course, if you’re a Kossack, you’ll have to arrange your own transportation over here. Because DarkSyde, bless him, has unilaterally declared the road to protein wisdom closed—just like Chimpler might do were the Kossacks not around to save us from our otherwise inexorable descent into a fascist theocracy run by redneck gaybashers who, between eating starchy foods and fingerbanging brittlehaired trailerpark Lolitas, spend their Sundays with their cocks pressed firmly between the buttocks of King James—at least, right up until kickoff time.
Speaking of which…
****
For recent additional thoughts on the poltico-religious tendencies of the left and right, see Cathy Young (with my further thoughts here).
****
Mark Coffey has more on Moore, taken directly from Fatty Starbuckles’s own website in 2004.
(h/t Leon)
– Yea verily… ‘tis true indeed that the best defense is a good offense. Unfortunately when you have no real offense, when your team keeps dropping the political ball, “all thats left” is simply being offish, evasive, and offensive.
TW: The volume of the howling protestations haved reached a state of incoherence.
I see that we have a proponent of the time tested “I know you are, but what am I?” school of argumentation. How dastardly! We should have seen it coming. If we hurry, we might still successfully employ the rubber barricades and Darksyde’s inherent stickiness.
– In the mean time ….”Reports from Palastine continue to detail the preperations in all political camps for the upcoming Parliamentary elections. Hamas is considered the lead opponent for the Abbas interum government. A large contingent of election observers will be on hand to oversee the balloting, led by former President Jimmy Carter. Security has been markedly beefed up coming on the heels of apparent kidnapping threats against the Carter group…..”
– Wonder if Carter will be on the ticket?
I did learn something from DS (besides BS). You don’t really need to marshall any facts when argueing – you just need to stake out a position and create some facts to support it. Then blindly ignore (haughtily…haughty works better when dealing with your “lessers”)any counter arguements or facts and just keep repeating your position.
When the heat starts to get to you, pick up your marbles, give ‘em the finger and go home.
Come to think of it, I’ve seen that same thing over at John Cole’s place.
Hey, remember how successful the Dems were when Terry MacAuliffe called conservative Christians the American Taliban?
We need to encourage Darksyde and his little minions to spread this “religious right = “Osama light” meme as far and as loudly as they can.
I’m in awe of TopSiders’s imagination and insight. Now all he needs is a snappy name for us – maybe he can invent “Taliban Republicans”.
Or maybe he could spend more time reading The Daily Kos, since his argument was offered there a year ago (presumably not for the first time), by Kos himself.
Well, I hate to interfere with his sense of self-discovery.
It’s interesting that the comparisons between bin Laden’s speech and that of the Democrats has been done by, you know, comparing actual portions of his speech with actual portions of those coming from the leading Democrats in Congress.
DarkSyde’s comparison involves bin Laden’s speech, and the assertion that someone, somewhere in America might have said something like it. Or at least thought something like it. And that person might have been religious. Might even have been conservative. Heck, could even have been a Republican. And in the outer realm of possibility, may even have been a politician!
So on the one hand, we have a comparison that relies on direct quotations from speeches by bin Laden and the Democrats that are indistinguishable from each other in their content. And on the other hand, we have DarkSyde’s comparison that relies on a bin Laden speech and… the unsubstantiated assertion that these views are shared by a subset of his political opponents.
Wow, I’m convinced!
The more time these puerile shit-disturbers waste hounding the so-called religious right, the better it is for conservatives generally.
I’ve never seen anything like it—the “religious right” is the Left’s white whale. They’re freaking obsessed with the whole concept. They have no idea that the version of the religious right that haunts them day and night exists primarily in their own fevered imaginations … It’s a bogey man concocted by the more ruthless puppeteers in their party, primarily to help drive recruitment and fundraising.
Actually, I take it back—I have seen this sort of thing before. The spectre of the imagined looming enemy is a classic propaganda tool.
Bin Laden: Leave Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arabs alone. Stop stealing our oil. America is a rogue state.
The Left: Support our troops, bring them home. No war for oil. America is a rogue state.
Completely different, I see. Not like the Taliban/Republican plank of stoning gays, full sharia, and brutal repression of women.
One-to-one correspondance there.
Seems to me that bin Laden’s bit on exploitation of women could just as easily have been lifted from a feminist/Marxoid tract, a la Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed.”
check this comment quickly, it will not persist.
sorry, comment 189 or 190 on that thread.
ugh! i despise Kos’ scoop software!
The inmates of Kossistan have violated one of the principle rules of propaganda; “Don’t get high on your own supply.”
They have spouted the “Republicans are controlled by sinister Theocon masses” lie so often, they have started to believe it themselves.
Who gets more shit from his “own party” when he says something politically outrageous, Pat Robertson or Michael Moore/ Jimmy Carter/ Harry Belafonte/ Ray Nagin/ etc. ?
Oh. My. Osama.
Wait, as I recall, anyone who logically disagrees with any writer from DailyKossacks is banned?
Remember your act of chivalry a few years ago, Jeff?
ha! this comment
Whoa there Phinn, if you let these Theocon Taliban Rethuglicans get their way, they will take us back centuries, even to the horrors of colonial times. The horror!!!
Conservatives want to pull us back two centuries, unlike the liberals who want to usher in a glorious future promised to them two centuries ago by Rousseau, but who also don’t want to appear religo-racist to their constituents that want to set the clock back 1300 years.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Goy Girl, the scoop software degrades dissenting comments down to deletion and then the commenter gets troll-ranked and banned.
Wonder if anyone over there will relent and post the link back to the threads here. Or will the Kossack commenters simply continue to congratulate DarkSyde on his “excellent analysis” without bothering to read the exchange or consider the answers we offered him is so gracious an abundance.
I don’t think it is possible for Michael Moore/ Jimmy Carter/ Harry Belafonte/ Ray Nagin/ etc. to say anything outrageous. There seems to me to be no concept of hyperbole where they live.
I can post it, if you like.
Kos delets nics, not IP addrs.
but you can’t comment for 24 hours.
one tip, enter separate comments–if you comments are nested, the whole shebang goes when the top comment is deleted.
Oh, a new gem, someone on the thread used the term Christofacist… Absoposilutely charming.
Jeff, your wish is my command.
– Au contre’ Shinji… I deny them any link traffic, even at the expense of a few howls, reading the bowel movement mouth verbage of the Kosanians of Delusionville….
– The one 800 lb Dennis Miller Gorilla the Kostenettes can’t get over, under, or around, is that going into the last quarter, the welfare whimps are still down 0 and 15 to the BushChimpy Roving Bears, and no attacks since 9/11 on American soil. Damn tough to figure any way to deal with that, even using every revisonist lexiconal trick…
Christofacist…
Wow, if that one catches on I might have to start believing in the Rovian Mind Beam.
– Hmmmm…. Maybe this calls for some nice added nouns to the political gene pool…
– LadinLiberals – AmerJiheads – Anarc-kist-libbys – UsamaKosettes – ACLibewes – Al Qeada-bats
– this is fun…..
rls, I think this is called “assuming the moral high ground”. In my experience, this tactic is usually applied when the assumer is neck deep in a cesspool, and can’t/won’t admit failure.
TW: you can’t make this shit up.
Oh dear, banned already.
that didn’t take long.
So much for honesty.
I also want to amend one of Darksyde’s comments:
Guts is not synonymous with a strong stomache.
Banned, Nishizono? Heaven forfend! Twas just this morning that dear DarkSyde proclaimed:
BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY!
tw: Bring it, bitch.
Rubber? Glue?
– And that would then mean immediate banning of counter comments = “No honesty over ‘there’”.
– Well hell…. they can’t just sit there while Usama dismantles all their carefully crafted bullshit screeds….
TW: I’m for a congressional bill to look for a remedy for BDS, and a fascination for bright shiny objects….
I don’t have the stomach to look for myself, but tell me the “Who do you hate more…Bush or Osama” Poll, is not sitting next to TopSyder’s post in the side bar. Because that would be funny!
I think DarkSyde is from France.
Poor Soul…he was just too high-strung. He’s no daisy, though.
There are two people who are very proud of DarkSyde right now. Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove. Rove becuase he makes Rove’s job this November so much easier. Hillary because he makes certain that John Kerry won’t be bothering her come Democratic convention time in 08. Of course, whether there will actually be a Democratic party in 08 should people like DarkSyde hold sway at the DNC remains to be seen. But that would just make Karl Rove doubly happy.
Hmmm.
I’d include something witty here but really just reading that DarkSyde bullshit just makes me all tired. It seems that every single time anybody has to debate a liberal on just about everything it always has to include a massive educational effort to teach the fucking liberal just the basics of whatever the issue is.
And really. “DarkSyde”? What a utterly idiotic name.
tw: analysis
DarkSyde wants to know how I feel. I feel like DarkSyde hates me because of my religion. Ya think?
corvan as usual has a good point, but it’s worthwhile to back off a bit and look at what might be termed the meta-issue.
The policies and proposals of DarkSyde and the Kos Kidz are nothing but farts in a whirlwind unless they can get their people elected. Moulitsas himself is, what, 0 for 15 in that respect?
So: which is the more effective as a political approach to getting elected:
1) We disagree, but understand your concerns. Perhaps we can relieve your anxiety in a way different from what you’ve suggested.
2) You’re dirty, rotten, vile, and reprehensible, and too stupid to understand anything, so you have to vote for meeeeeee to get what you ought to have instead of the vileness you propose.
Kos & Co., with DarkSyde in the lead, are not only plumping 100% for door no. 2, they have so insulated themselves from anything resembling criticism—it hurts their feelings, don’t’cha know—that they clearly believe that simple flat assertion is entirely sufficient. So Lofty, so Clever, so Exalted are they, that their mere say-so is sufficient not only to convince (say, rather, browbeat) but to establish that having DISPOSED, their pronouncement is TRVTH that simply cannot be challenged in any way.
Meanwhile, behind door no. 1, Republicans listen attentively to people who have concerns that may or may not be rational, and try to relieve them of those concerns in ways that the rest of us can live with, too. It’s called “compromise”. You know, diversity. Nuance, even.
Time will tell, but I really don’t think that insulting potential voters is a really effective way of getting check marks on ballots. That’s gratifying from my POV—I don’t want any more of those idiots in office than is unavoidable, i.e. the ideal number is zero—but it’s also a bit sad, isn’t it?
Regards,
Ric
Ric,
It’s beyond sad. It’s freaking dangerous. Darksyde and his merry ilk have taken a one way trip into their own dementia. Becuase of it they cannot be relied upon to make a reasonable decision on anything…not Iraq…not Iran…not anything.
Yet the rest of the country, a large number of them red staters and religious folks, (i.e. people DarkSyde and the rest hate passionately) are forced to defend them from Islamists and make decisions for them.
As conditoons in Iran worsen, and I fear they’re going to worsen, we’re going to need each other, all of us.
But alomst half of us are too deluded even to be trusted wiht brushing their onw teeth, much less with making reasonable decisions in important matters during dagerous times.
The left has gone from being a laughably strange relative that’s always in the way to being a dangerous drunk groping for the keys to the family car. We vote for them at considerable risk to the Republic.
That’s what you call substantive counter-argument?
Because the Religious-Wrongâ„¢ is not yet committing mass-murder, or that Usama’s particular written dogma about the </b>same</b> Abrahamic god is a not the New Testament, then it makes the valid point that they are indeed cut from the same cloth invalid?
Bwahaha.
That is like saying that some new mass murderer is different than Charles Manson because he got his message form listening to Hard Days Night instead of Helter Skelter. Preaching hate and discrimination because your dog spoke to you through a Beatles record, but pointing out the difference in track that your dog told you to hate other human beings is laughable. But if that’s your defense, welcome to it.
Lestatdelc –
In the first part your comment you say the religious right/wrong/whatever aren’t mass murderers, then it the second part of your comment you’re using mass murderers as your example?
Your comment is seriously flawed.
– Apparently Mass Murder = Mass spirituality in the Disneyland revisionist world of the Al Qeada-bats. *snort*
I learned all that at Cornell, not from the dread Christofascistsâ€â€who, despite their many ideological affinities to Afrocentric and Native Peoples’ conspiracism and the econo-pruderies of feminism, don’t think those specific things.
(God damn, the ‘90s sucked.)
If you search Kos or DU for “AmTaliban” or “Christofascist” or similiar, you’ll find that Osama/Bush conflations had been a standard shibboleth ‘round them parts for years, until they realized they kinda liked Osama, right around last election. Then it died down a bit. And now it’s new. Again.
The thoughtless repetitiveness of those two places is hypnotizing. Or symptomatic of hypnosis. I can’t tell the difference.
Kirfz1 – I’d agree, but after reading through DarkSyde’s series of comments, it’s clear to me that neither he nor many of the other posters have even the most rudimentary understanding of what your religion is. Neither he nor they can distinguish, apparently, between fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity, nor do they seem to understand the often-wide gulf separating televangelists from the Protestant mainstream.
The caricature presented there is so far at odds with my own experience of half-a-century in the “Bible Belt” South that it leaves me astonished. Have DarkSyde or any of the Kossacks ever ventured outside their carefully-cocooned reality, even for a moment?
Oh hell. I guess if I’d been low-bridged by the king of Islamic murderers, and garnered the mantle of “Jihadist sympathizer”, forever joined at the hip with Usama, I’d be looking for anything I could to change the subject too. Problem is, whichever way they go with it, they’ll just look more amoral relativistic, and class rascist, not to mention anti-religious.
– That should bode well at the ballot box when you’re desperately seeking parity….. Yeh. Thats the ticket. Just blow off flyoverland, and we’ll make it up in the Liberal halls of SF, NY, or Boston. Wonder if they ever miss all those aborted babies that could have grown up to be good left voting Komrades….
TW: Its just downright amazing, watching the left use BDS mindlessly, as they progress toward oblivion.
wow.
i’m unbanned.
Darksyde must have kosclout–that has never happened before.
coolio.
truly, i am so astonished.
the argument continues.
For the benefit of Lestatdelc – the reason that these folks you call “Fundamentalists” in any way merit that term is because they – wait for it – believe the Bible (both Tanakh and New Covenant, if you like) to be inerrant, literal truth, and hence feel themselves bound to obey its teachings.
So, when they read a passage in the New Testament that urges a believer to “forgive one’s enemies” or “do unto others as ye would have them do unto you” – that is the behavior such “fundies” believe themselves enjoined to follow. Literally. Mass murder, forcing one’s beliefs upon others, and power-seeking of the sort you describe are completely incompatible with such a world-view.
A concrete example for you – in the Protestant faith in which I was reared, I never met a minister who was a veteran – they all, to a man, registered as conscientious objectors because it was incompatible with their understanding of Scripture.
Honestly, guy, this sort of willful misunderstanding on your part and that of others like you is getting worrisome. Try getting out a little more – 24/7 denial of reality is not exactly healthy.
Oh, I see–not yet. The ‘Religious-Wrong’ (catchy and clever!) is but a matter of hours/days/weeks/months/years/decades/who the hell knows or cares away from rounding up all the homosexuals, adulterers, unwed mothers, the entire membership of the ACLU, and every biology professor in the country and ferrying the lot of them off to Gitmo to be gassed. Shortly before nuking San Francisco from orbit.
How do we know? Um, well. . .there’s Eric Rudolph and those abortion clinic bombers and the Weather Underground–no, no sorry!–the Black Panthers–gosh DARN it, sorry again!. . .and, and uh. . .
Sweetheart, every ideology up to and including pacifism has produced a few whackos interested in killing for it. But if you honestly believe that, outside the evidence of these few marginal figures who were universally and immediately condemned by the mainstream evangelical preachers (and no, Virginia, Fred Phelps is *not* mainstream) there is some sort of rising groundswell of broad-based support among American evangelicals for mass-murder of any sort (which has no, I repeat, NO ideological support in Christian doctrine or in the creed of ANY denomination) then you are either a complete and utter jackass, or. . .
Indeed, if you can on such flimsy evidence assume that the evangelical Christians are just a hop, skip, and jump away from going ‘Children of the Corn’ on the rest of the country–because, what, both they AND the clinic bombers didn’t believe abortion was morally right?–wouldn’t we on the right be equally justified in presuming that the far more prevalent and persistent inflammatory rhetoric on the left calling for the murder of the president and/or other members of his staff is for real, then–and. . .
And you guys really are just days away from violent revolution?
Bwahahahahahahaha!
Sayeth alex: And you guys really are just days away from violent revolution?
We have all the guns. Although, I must admit, they’re good with improvising bombs. Oh, but we have tanks and planes and missiles and nukes and…
incredible.
my comments are still up at dKos.
i’ve had dozens of comments deleted there and burned least a half a dozen nics to troll status.
i don’t know what to say!
Kos is now possessed by the demon of tolerance?
RS
I’m pretty sure all I have to do is explain that I think abortion is the killing of human beings for DarkSyde to assign me as one of the religious right whom he hates. I’m so extreme, I think the DNA evidence is conclusive.
tw: national
– More like the demon of embarrassment, coupled with the confusion of what to do about the unwelcome affections of their new lover Usama…..
– Double BWAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
….(sound of champaign bottle being decorked)
RATS!
They found us out. Of course the way we hide our intentions is by speaking in code. Just this morning my Southern Baptist minister said something about God loving everyone and that He wants us to succeed in life.
I’m pretty sure that was really code for “go round up some people that don’t look/act/believe like us and prepare the iron maidens we keep down in the church basement.
Wow! This has gotta be good enough to warrant his nibs’s making a change in his tagline–
Jeff Goldstein: the man who brought glasnost to the Daily Kos.
Yeh alex…. except they should change the blog name to “Daily Shari’ia”, now that Usama has announced the engagement…..
i think this is so cool.
i’m dialogging with kossacks.
and they left Allah’s post up that i replayed for them–how can anyone argue with what he said?
Allah is the most brilliant.
But what can one expect from the Creator of Worlds but ingenious, convincing, brilliance?
My ex-boyfriend Jack is a liberal atheist, me a Xtn con. We drove up to my sister’s house, where my parents were also visiting. He knew my dad had been a preacher at one time.
Waiting for dinner, my sister’s friend calls with an SOS.. her car had broken down. We got the car and her friend to the house OK, and during dinner, Jack made a funny… “Why don’t you guys just lay your hands on the car and say a prayer?”
He said all his friends thought it was funny as hell too. I never managed to get it across to him just how fucking STUPID that remark was. We weren’t even offended, just… stunned.. and confused. HUH?
– Does this mean we’ll finally get some “beautification” when Code Pink has to start covering up in Berka’s?
I followed the link to Kos. Wow! Now DarkSyde is arguing that we shouldn’t worry about terrorism since it kills far fewer Americans than cancer or heart disease. Of course, even at its peak, far fewer black Americans died of lynching than of cancer, heart disease, accidents, or old age, but who would dare argue that it was no big deal and was never worth fighting against? Only a heartless moron, I think. I’d post this argument over there, but why bother? It would just be deleted.
Even more amusing, Weevil, is that most of them over there would contend that it’s the government’s job to save you from all the health hazards mentioned, were that a Kos thread on healthcare or prescription drug policy.
Good going, Nishizono! I have a feeling the Kossacks are going to learn the meaning of ojigi quite soon.
– Like I said. This whole WOT thing is really short-circuiting their give-away agenda, and as they see it, siphoning off tax dollars that would be better spent funding grass for aids sick dickwads in SF, and more “touchy/feely” identity politics courses in the Liberal halls of academia….. Oh and walk-up abortion counters at WalMart…
– If the left was 1/10 as good at the ballot box as they are in working their base up in a deranged frenzy against political boogymen they wouldn’t keep losing elections. Personally I hop they keep right on going with this act…..
Not cool, BBH. At all.
Seriously, let’s compare:
Name the last utterance from Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell that anyone with two gray cells to rub together took seriously. Yes, those two move (NOT) public opinion because of their high official positions in the government or the American political parties.
Last I checked, the White Press press briefing on the subject included the polite-for-the-table terms for calling Robertson “crazy as a shithouse rat.”
The political landscape for the evangelical revolution is a bit uneven for any comparison to OBL and his boys. Just ask the former members of the Dover, Pennsylvania school board. Or Roy Moore who faces a steep uphill struggle to secure the Republican nomination for governor…IN ALABAMA. For a parallel, if the Kossacks are to be believed, picture a Sunni having political trouble in Anbar. Or a Kennedy in Massachusetts.
On the other hand, there’s the opposition party’s main OFFICIAL voices denouncing the President in a time of war for his conduct of the war. Now there is a parallel with OBL.
Opposing gay marriage (I don’t.) does not equal summary executions for homosexuality.
Opposing abortion does not equal black sacks and arranged marriages for 11-year old girls with 50 year-old men.
As for the rest of the argument, I’m at a loss to even understand WHERE the Kossacks believe they currently reside. Vegas is not going anywhere, folks. Neither is the Spice Channel. Ditto Title IX.
Yeah, some of us have a hard time letting go of the whole Bubba thing. After all, we’re just not comfortable with the President getting hummers from his interns. I’ll happily raise my hand in favor of prudishness on that score. If that’s all you’ve got on the road to the giant C-O-N-S-P-I-R-A-C-Y, then you’ll just have to try harder for a strategy that will lead a majority to take you seriously.
This. Is. Not. It.
– I’m not pulling any punches in that area anymore alex. I can feel human sorrow for people when they suffer, but condemn the actions that got them in that pickle in the first place. Nothing inconsistant with that. Especially when it endangers everyone. I can also feel “wronged” when I get to finance the results of behavior I don’t rile against, but I also don’t condone. So yes. Not cool indeed.
No, sweetie, that isn’t me being hosed. That’s me watching you masturbate.
But I do have a question. As a DKos front pager, do you get a cool orange belt like a school safety? A badge? An id card to flash around? Cause that would be like, so hot.
They get a hat and a badge.
hmmm…domo arigato gozaimasen, RS-san, but there was no ojigi yet.
I hope i made my points.
I was surprised to find that Darksyde, like Greenewald, believes the WoT is basically a scam to get votes run by GW.
I pointed out that i don’t think the democrats can win without believing the WoT is real.
Because that is what most americans believe.
Oh, well, i most likely convinced no one.
We all have our crazy eddie moments.
NS –
The thing that is quite difficult to understand about the GWoT is that while as they assert, the terrorism itself, isn’t that big a deal, it’s the precursor signal that’s a great deal scarier. This is like getting wrapped around the axle over German reoccupation of the Rhineland. No, the turf itself isn’t that big a deal, but the costs of not nipping it in the bud are virtually unimaignable. And I don’t think these people are capable of letting their common sense actually see the potential threat for what it can lead to.
Oh well, and it was ever the same.
BRD
BBH, I love you and all, but . . .
You might consider the fact that there are a lot of ways to get AIDS other than via gay sex. Yes–the bathhouses should have been closed down in the 1980s once the gay community knew the dangers, but there are a lot of AIDS patients who got that way via blood transfusions. Some patients were born infected, via mothers who themselves had the disease. And of course it’s very easy for a woman to become infected if her partner hides his HIV status from her: anyone can get taken in by a con man.
As for those who did get the disease via sex, there is a lot to be said for “judge not lest ye be judged.”
Atilla Girl,
To add to your point, there seems to be a tipping point on AIDS at which point it becomes a predominantly heterosexual disease. And that’s a bad thing. So yeah, I’m quite happy to toss money at fighting the disease where it is, rather than where it can get to.
BRD
– Of course Attila sweets. My comment was focused with the bathhouse thing in mind, but I was not all that clear, and definately insensitive to all the innocent ways that a person can get in harms way. For me its never been about sexual choices….I really could care less if people found ways to have sex with their ceiling fans, or cusin-arts. It was always the health risk factor, and the thought of, god forbid, innocent children becoming victims of what seemed, back when we knew nothing about the threat, was a simple matter of selfish, wreckless disregard, for anyone or anything. I apologize if it seemed I was condmning out of hand.
Never send a theocon to fight a theocracy. Send in liberals and feminists.
Actus, if wars were won by namecalling, you’d be a military genius.
However, they are not.
– And of course when theres no theocracy available, well hell then just invent one. The cause must march on……
Hell, send in Code Pink! That ought to scare the crap out of the Mad Mullahs, all that pallid skin and lust inspiring radiating hair. We should see an immediate and unconditional surrender.
TW: man. Oops!
actus!!!! that is so genius!!!
Let’s send feminists and liberals to fight the theocracy in Iran!
hmmm…Murtha can be the field commander, and send Hillary, the grrls from feministe, echidnae and marcotte…..oh, i can just see it now!
the kossacks can be the main invasion force, and, of course, actus, you will lead them to glory!
oh, i can’t wait!
All I can say is that if we’re going to do the “Boobs not Bombs” bit again, can we at least do it with good looking boobs? Where are all the firm, nubile naked protesters?
Sadly, “Boobs Not Bombs” does not actually refer to mammalian appendages.
. . .to fight the noble ‘other’ and his brave attempt at resisting the western colonial monopoly on ‘meaning-making’?
Better not send in *both* the ‘liberals’ and the feminists, at any rate, is what I say; the moment she turns her back for half a second, the first will have wrapped the second in a burqa and donated her to the first persuasive, sad-eyed fellow to shed a couple crocodile tears on his shoulder over the evils of Israeli occupation and the lost olive groves of Palestine.
Women and children first, leftist style. LMFAO!
Pretty sure sending Marcotte after them would be a war crime.
“Hell, send in Code Pink!”
In a word, yes. Fund secular womens rights groups in the muslim world.
Actus, do you honestly think doing that without having troops there to protect them will work?
And if we’re lucky–taking as a rough marker the years which passed between Mary Wollstonecraft’s publication of the ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ in 1792 and the passing of the 19th amendment in the U.S.–the eventual ‘indigenous’, uncoerced, ‘culturally authentic’, Prime-Directive kosher Enlightenment in the M.E. can’t possibly hit more than 100 years after Iran develops nuclear weapons.
Seriously, you wingnuts. So impatient.
P.S. ‘Secular’ women’s rights groups? Not going to happen–any reformation which happens will have to come from within the religion itself.
Isn’t it rich?
Aren’t they a pair?
Medea Benjamin leading ground troops,
Actus in mid-air.
Send in…the clowns.
Well…
At least it’s only the idiots at Kos vice mainstream Democratic politicians comparing radical Muslims to Christians :
Umm…nevermind.
– He forgot the last part….”…and extreme secular groups, like the left in my own party…”
Works better than funding the terrorists that run the palestinean authority.
This is what US feminists think about Iranian women activists. Something to be manipulated, and not taken seriously. I think that you are likely in the same camp.
Not to mention that Code Pink is not any sort of model for women’s rights (note preceeding link).
Oh, and this is what the Iranian government thinks about liberals and feminists.
Ever wonder why some people don’t take you seriously? Probably not. Sheesh!
Berkah? Now there’s a nifty oxymoron. Certainly appropriate to cover up the Code Pink berks with something, tho.
– That would be called a “Bark-a” – woof woof
A few thoughts.
One, I knew Kos personally back in the early 90s and he was passionate and intense but not crazy then. Sad.
Two, as one raised in a very conservative Protestant area who is a-religious, I find it incredibly amusing that the ‘Party of Nuance’ (if I remember the claims of Kerry backers) can’t distinguish between various types of Protestant religiosity. Fundamentalist, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Primitive and so on. You gotta have a scorecard if you don’t know the players. The ignorance over there is just mindboggling. They apparently know next to nothing at all about either ‘the Religious Right’ (so-called by opponents) or Islam.
Three, I have a student who is mostly LIHOP (he thinks a remote-controlled military plane hit the Pentagon and that the WTC towers were brought down by internally planted explosives), and HE is getting off the Democratic bandwagon. The moonbattiness may be driving him sane. It’s weird. **THEY’RE TOO CRAZY FOR HIM!!**
God, I wish the Repubs would remember where they came from. It would be soooo easy about now to do things right. Ah, well. There’s no real reason to believe Repubs are inherently smarter than Dems, although they do appear to be, on average, saner.
Actus, I agree with you about the Palestinian authority. Do the folks over at KOS agree with you about that? Do they think the Palestinain authority is run by terrorists?
Why only secular women’s rights groups? Why not Christian groups as well? It is best to counter false spirituality with real sprituality, not with the empty prosises of secularism.
Jesus, I find this gratifying
You know what he means, don’t you?
What he means is this: there are a large number of voters and potential voters who are religious. The Republican Party pays some attention to them and listens to their concerns. And there is no, zero, nada, difference between that and imposition of a “theocracy”.
Why gratifying, you ask? Well, there used to be this notion that the national parties were umbrellas or “big tents”. In that view, America didn’t have a Parliamentary democracy, it had two of them—the log-rolling and coalition building happened before the election, and the best coalition won.
Republicans still do that. There are a lot of other Republicans that I don’t agree with on some quite substantive issues, but we still have enough in common to vote for at least some of the same candidates.
The Democrats are trying to build an ideologically pure, European (or, rather, Parliamentary)-style political party, and see everything through that lens. Because Republicans allow the religious to be part of their coalition, they must of necessity be equally pure, and therefore a fundamentally religious party.
The problem is that we also have winner-takes-all, also known as “first past the post”, in elections. WTA naturally gravitates to a two-party system when it doesn’t devolve into a single-party one, and there are many mechanisms to discourage or prevent single-party rule. And in a two-party system, if one’s a coalition and allows coalition politics within it, and the other is ideologically pure, the coalition is almost guaranteed a win. There just aren’t enough of any given flavor of ideologue around to get a big enough majority to gain office under WTA.
So have a happy, Democrats. Been nice to know you. Wonder what the new, opposition coalition party will be called? I suggest “Liberty”. Most of the other non-Conservative words (note the uppercase) have already been either taken or debased by the Left.
Oh, and somebody could do me a favor. I don’t go over there, so would one of you tell Kos to tell his mother that Bobbe Moss says “Hi!” for me?
Regards,
Ric
Wait, is it time to name-drop our credentials here? Because I was a Senior Developer on a site which, at its’ peak, had far higher traffic than Kos; also, I was (am) a technical resource/consultant on the book of an NYT columnist who is taken far more seriously as an opinion leader than any Kos front-pager. So does pimping my creds mean I get to self-aggrandize and wave my digital dick around?
I’m surprised the netroots-left are apoplectic over drawing this comparison now, after all the “American Taliban” comments, after all the “we’re installing democracy over there while destroying it over here” comments, after all the comparisons to Hitler and after all the similar, related BS that is at the heart of most of the “boo louder” Dem blogs–not to mention the blaring and direct parallels in OBL’s election tape to familiar anti-American talking points and Moore’s self-confessed unbalanced, unfair agendamentary, F911. The outrage being ginned-up now is uninteresting; it’s a defensive reaction to cognitive dissonance. What *is* interesting, and what should have been the discussion since that election-time tape, is the transformation of AQ rhetoric from a fundy/islamist focus, to a familiar (to Western-educated folks), co-opted, pseudo-Marxist “critique” of America As Hegemon, and what that means in terms of the reshaping of the conflict between AQ, affiliated organizations, the current conflict, and the future of the Middle East as a whole. If this is, at its’ core, a battle for hearts and minds, then what does it mean when the figurehead of the enemy starts talking like one of us?
Jorg, also Wahhabism is NOT a fundamentalist strain of Islam. Fundamentalism in Christianity refers to believing in, more or less, the Nicene Creed, that Jesus is the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary. Wahhabists are more Unitarian in their creed.
Just not a whole lot of scare factor to Islamic Unitarians, but I digress.
– Ric – That idea may not be as far-fetched as it may sound to some. Some of my closest friends, Democrats, have expressed a great deal of discomfort with their own leadership, not so much in terms of issues, but in the tactics the far left seem so ready to employ.
– I asked one of my buds how he feels when he sees Dean, or Schumer, or Kennedy do one of their partisan public displays and he replied….”I won’t say we’re angels ,and I wouldn’t be happy if it payed off, but the left has had it pretty much their way now for years, and to what good end. In my opinion, we’re worse off now than we were 6 years ago. so whats the point.”
– When I asked Him about Kerry, He laughed sort of ruefully and said….”Kerry… well what can I say… Kerry was a absolute disaster, the easiest way to put it is a fair number of moderates were for him before they switched and voted against him. Kerry was the best weapon Bush had.”
– Problem is third parties, by nature, tend to be pretty much purist as well, so the options for a moderate or Independent are pretty limited. Bottom line is, its not all good that the core of whats left of the Dems has taken on the hue of a cult, and is slipping fast. Single party politics almost never works well for the electorate in the long run.
I have had the same experience. A liberal friend told me yesterday that at this point, he trouble distinguishing between the rhetoric of bin Laden and that of Howard Dean. He admitted that while he doesn’t love Bush, he almost prefers him to the Democrats because at least Bush has a plan for fighting the terrorists.
And, of course, the inveterate actus. Why do we have police actus? Why, oh why, oh why, oh why dear actus? Because you need order in a society, especially a liberal one, so that you don‘t get murdered for, say, declaring for atheism instead of Allah, evolution instead of the Pope. Now if the order is completely antithetical to a liberal society, i.e. a police state or a theocracy, if you can’t say a word outside of orthodoxy, the entire damn country could be packed with liberal, MoveOn, NOW types who’ve each gotten $100K grants. It won’t matter because it only takes one Tianamen Square to grind them underfoot.
That’s why you need the military there to knock over regimes that won’t liberalize and threaten the hell out of those that are try to crack down.
Ignore that at your own stupidity.