Shorter SOTU:
"Terror, terror freedom, freedom, 9/11. Freedom terror, 9/11, freedom, terror. 9/11, freedom freedom. Terror. Terror 9/11. Creating human-animal hybrids. 9/11, freedom terror terdom free 9 ror 11. (Oh, shit, the teleprompter is borked.)"
The fuck did he say? Human-animal hybrids? I didn't think I'd see the day the President would mention werewolves and centaurs in the State of the Union speech and I don't know if I should blame science, science fiction or the hydroencephalic superstars that voted for Bush.
"Sheehan, who was invited to attend the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D- Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. The charge was later changed to unlawful conduct, Schneider said. Both charges are misdemeanors."
Somebody hates freedom and I don't know who it is.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
State of the Union
7 comments:
Of course, Josh, a teacher from Pennsylvania was escorted out of the SOTU in 1999 for wearing a shirt that said "He didn't inhale, he just sucks." The teacher was a guest of Santorum and he was held in the Capitol basement for a few hours and released. So, you could argue that Bush is against freedom with the Sheehan thing, or you could just think Sheehan is a nutjob and probably did something rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.
Also, I'm kinda shocked that you continually no-sell the war on terror. Everyone one of your anti-Bush posts talk about "ter-rists." So are you saying that there is no terror threat, just as liberals in the 1945-1950 period said that there was no need to fear Soviet aggression and that the U.S. caused the Cold War?
And then, we have this story: http://www.local6.com/news/6647094/detail.html
Apparently the wife of a GOP representative was removed from the gallery for wearing a T-shirt that supported the troops. So, they had a standard "no t-shirts with slogans" policy and got everyone.
Yep. Ol' W sure restricts freedom.
I didn't say anything about Bush restricting any freedoms, so I think somebody's got what my Grandpa referred to as a guilty conscience (and what with the stories of booting people out of Bush rallies for anti-war/anti-Bush t-shirts and all the arrests at the 2004 GOP convention, maybe rightly so). Removing the teacher from the Impeachment hearings in 98 (not the SOTU in 99 unless Drudge's story has changed since earlier today) and the wife of the GOP rep being removed as well as Sheehan was stupid, high school dress code bullshit. I think our civil liberties have been on the decline for some years at a slow pace and this is just more of the same. It's a sad, sad state of affairs when someone is arrested over a t-shirt. Period.
And I'll continue to no-sell the War on Terra as well. I have a better chance of being run over by a green bus driven by a midget than I do of being killed in a terra attack. Yes, terrists are the new bogeyman, just like the Comm'nists in the Cold War, and I laugh heartily at all the pants-pissingly scared conservatives so afraid of these bogeymen they they're more than happy to further and further expand the police powers of the government just so they can sleep safe at night. Just don't try and raise their taxes to pay for it (or something that might benefit society). The government can't be trusted with money, but they can be trusted with your rights.
And I'd also like to point out once again that the sedated howler monkey you voted for twice for President referred to the dangers of "human-animal hybrids" in his SOTU address last night. Terrists, Comm'nists, Werewolves and Centaurs.
Even in the fevered dreams of tuberculosis, Orwell couldn't have imagined.
Ok, first off it was the impeachment hearings and not the SOTU. Regardless, it looks like the policy was uniformly applied in this most current case. I don't know if you can call it part of a general decline of civil liberties or not. They probably would have thrown a guy out for trying to get in without a shirt or without shoes. I don't know if lack of appropriate attire is a civil right.
Now, on to the more important stuff. Yes, those dangerous midget-driven green buses are probably more of a realistic threat to people in Johnson City, Tennessee or Gainesville, Florida (even though our buses are blue and not green), but the United States hasn't been attacked by bus-driving midgets. We have, however, been attacked by Islamic fundamentalists who flew some planes into some big buildings. We have also broken up (according the news reports) a number of terrorist cells who were in some stage of planning more attacks. So, if you want to make the case that we should defend against bus-driving midgets instead of terrorists, I don't think it will get very far.
Dropping the silly metaphors, I think that terrorism is a legitimate threat. Can you argue that we are devoting a disproportionate amount of resources to a war on terror? You might could make that claim. Can you say that we may be making too many sacrifices in the name of safety? Possibly. Those would be more plausible than saying there is no threat and we are using "ter-rists" as some sort of monolithic threat in order to revamp the scale and scope of government powers.
Historically, the opposition party has questioned the allocation of resources and the restriction of civil liberties in wartime. That isn't new. However, in most of those cases, people acknowledged that there was a legit threat. In the 1950s, the GOP said that Korea should have never gotten to the conflict stage because the U.S. should have kept the South Koreans heavily-armed after WWII. They never said that there was no threat from the North Koreans. Only the nuttiest of nuts said that FDR purposely drew us into WWII and most of those, except for the Elizabeth Dilling's and the more anti-semitic of the far-Right, thought we should fight once we were attacked at Pearl Harbor.
Claiming that the War on Terror is a made-up war so the Republicans have political cover to do what they want borders on lunacy and ignores the facts. Opposition is one thing, outright distrust and a myopic view of things is another.
You know what? I had a bunch of shit written and said fuck it. There's so much asinine bullshit to respond to that I don't know where to start or how to organize this so I'll just bring out the shotgun.
First off, I don't give a shit about Sheehan one way or the other, but I'll paraphrase Letterman from when he kicked the shit out of O'Reilly: to not have any sympathy for a mother who lost a child in this war, or enough respect to not call her a
nutjob for protesting this fucking miserable mess we're in makes you a soulless dick. And that you think a t-shirt bearing the number of American deaths in Iraq is rude, crude and socially unacceptable is beyond fucking belief.
Second, terrorism has existed in other parts of the world for years and it wasn't a fucking secret (see the IRA, Beirut, Israel, etc.), but it hits here and suddenly the fucking sky has fallen.
So what we'll do is declare war on a fucking idea. I don't know how, exactly, you fight a fucking idea, but it was so successful when we tried it with Drugs and Poverty that we'll do it again. Because if whatever it is that we did before pissed them off enough to attack us once, starting fucking wars in their homelands will make them fucking love the shit out of us.
Clinton goes after Bin Laden in Sudan in 98 and your GOP dicksuckers like Tom DeLay accuse him of wagging the dog to take the heat off of the Lewinsky scandal you fuckholes ginned up. Clinton leaves a memo on Bush's desk telling him Bin Laden WILL be a threat and to keep an eye on him. A month before 9/11 the NSA, at the BUSH ADMINISTRATIONS REQUEST, says yes, we do have credible information about Al Queida wanting to hijack planes and fly them into landmarks and, according to Condoleeza Rice's own fucking testimony, they shrug their fucking shoulders at it. Then 9/11 happens and oh now Bin Laden and terrorism is an issue?
19 Saudis hijack four planes, fly them in the WTC and we attack...Afghanistan. We haven't finished Afghanistan yet and we attack...Iraq with "weapons of mass destruction" that they don't have. Now Iran says "hey, we're getting the nukes and oh, yeah, fuck Israel" and what the fuck are we gonna do about that? Not to mention North Korea saying "hey, we've already got
the nukes and oh, yeah, fuck you" and what the fuck are we supposed to do about that?
Two credible threats from soverign states with nuclear capabilities and we're wasting lives and resources playing in the fucking sandbox with a military stretched to the breaking point, no end in sight, and a President in the middle of a "war"
pushing for PERMANENT TAX CUTS and warning of the dangers of "human-animal hybrids" in the State of the Union address.
So far there's one country we've left in shambles and forgotten about with likely better reasons to have went elsewhere like, say, Saudi Arabia where the hijackers fucking came from, and another country we can't get the fuck out of and have no goddamned reason for being there.
The idiots that came up with the foreign policy that led us to this point were reelected by you and your mouth breathing brethren AFTER IT BECAME CLEAR THEY HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE DOING and you think you've got any credibility to
point out lunacy and ignoring facts?
You, sir, can go fuck yourself.
You probably should have stuck with your original post. But, since you want to devlove the rhetoric to an obscene insult, I think you are wrong and completely off base, but other than the last nine words before the last comma, I'll let you have the last word on it.
"Wrong and off base"? Are you saying 19 Saudis didn't attack us? That we didn't attack Afghanistan in retaliation for that? That we didn't leave Afghanistan in the lurch to attack Iraq over WMDs they don't have? That we don't have a military stretched precariously thin? That we're not in a situation Bush's father wouldn't get into a decade earlier because he knew we couldn't get out of it?
That Clinton wasn't accused of wagging the dog for going after bin Laden by right-wing assholes three years before 9/11? That Clinton didn't warn Bush as he was leaving office? That the NSA didn't warn Bush? That the Administration didn't shrug their shoulders at the warnings?
Iran isn't pursuing nukes again? North Korea doesn't have nukes? We're in a position to do anything about it?
That Bush's idea of "sacrifice" during "wartime" is permanent tax cuts for the richest of the rich? "Human-animal hybrids?"
Yeah, I wouldn't want the task of finding the inaccuracies of those claims, either.
I was writing my original, unposted response while doing laundry and missed the comment about my laughing condescention toward the War on Terra bordering on lunacy and ignoring facts until I was revising the comments. Then I noticed it and I just lost all sense of decorum. Because you absolutely, positively refuse to even begin to contemplate the idea that your party leaders have been feeding you anything but total bullshit for the last four years. And that's on you, so, you know, whatever.
You continually come at this with parallels to the Cold War, which was another beast entirely, with the airs of a learned history professor (and rightly so, since you are). And don't get me wrong, I'm not one to ignore history, but I outlined the two and a half years of foreign policy and national security that directly preceded the last Presidential election, which, if the War on Terra is so important, would heavily impact upon and influence your vote for President and you cast your lot with the same group of fuckups without flinching. Yet *my* view of the War on Terra is what is bordering on lunacy and ignoring facts? We can agree, we can disagree, we can even agree to disagree, but that is beyond the pale.
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