Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate

Receives Standing Ovation at Missouri Rally

 

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Then this follows in the post:

Conservatives’ vision for this country is dark, dystopian, and deeply pessimistic.

Sounds about right.

Late on a windy May night in Manhattan, Kathrine Gutierrez Hinds, a 24-year-old psychology student, rambled around her apartment, unable to sleep. Firemen had rousted her from slumber earlier in the evening, bursting into the building to fight a basement fire. At least she didn’t have to evacuate in her pajamas, she told herself, as she logged on to her laptop. That’s when she discovered an astonishing drama unfolding on the Internet—in real time.

A guy who occasionally blogged on one of her favorite sites, MetaFilter, had posted a call for help: “A Russian friend of mine may be in a dangerous situation in Washington, D.C.”

He explained that two young Russian women, ages 18 and 21, had just landed in D.C. He knew one of them from teaching English in Russia a few years back. The women had come to the U.S. for summer jobs arranged by a Russian travel company. The problem: The jobs—lifeguarding at Virginia Beach—had fallen through. So the women had been told to call a man named George upon landing for instructions on new jobs.

George told them to do something that sounded sketchy: Hop on a bus to New York and go to a nightclub on Coney Island in Brooklyn, at midnight. Jobs as “hostesses” awaited them.

Daniel Reetz, the 28-year-old North Dakota blogger who issued the online alarm, didn’t like the sound of that. He told the women not to meet George. After all, who conducts job interviews of jet-lagged 18-year-olds in a bar, at midnight, on Coney Island? And who hasn’t seen those Law & Order episodes about foreign women tricked into prostitution?

Read the whole thing.

I think I need to visit metafilter more often.

This story makes me wish that the people who are so gung-ho about delivering death to the people they think of as our enemies were really on the front lines.

The bomb was hidden in the bike’s gas tank. Its blast threw Pereira onto the highway. As he hit the asphalt, he thought he’d stepped on an IED, wondered if he’d lost his legs. He hadn’t. He stood, got his bearings. The motorcycle had vaporized in a cloud of gray dust and black smoke. Three men from Pereira’s squad—Sgt. Ryan “Lou” Louviere, Spc. Jonathan M. Curtis, and Pvt. 1^st Class Andrew N. Meari—lay helpless on the hill below. Pereira ran for them.

Then the ambush began in earnest, as insurgents opened up with AK-47s from a half-dozen positions inside the town of Senjaray. “You hear the big mosquitoes going by,” Pereira said of the bullets. Pereira reached Curtis, who had been standing next to the motorcycle. Curtis wasn’t moving, but Pereira hoped he might be alive. He tried to pick Curtis up, carry him to safety. But shrapnel had cut through Pereira’s right leg, sapping his strength. He couldn’t move Curtis. With his leg bleeding and numb, Pereira stumbled up the hill, looking for help.

Meanwhile, Pvt. 1^st Class Philip Wysocki sprinted to cover Louviere, who was moaning in agony. Louviere had been standing behind the motorcycle when it blew. The bomb took out chunks of his legs. “Lou said, ‘Wysocki, tell it to me straight, are my legs gone?’ ” Wysocki said. But Louviere’s pants had been blown off, and Wysocki saw that despite the wounds, his legs were intact. And something else too. “I was like, ‘Sgt. Lou, nice cock.’ Everything was hanging out.

I have always valued insouciance in the face of overwhelming odds.  ”Nice cock”.

Curtis and Meari were dead.

“We weren’t leaving until we got Meari’s body,” Wysocki said. “We were taking fire from just about the whole city.” The soldiers shot through nearly all their ammunition before help finally arrived. After bringing Meari’s body to safety, Wysocki and the other soldiers asked if they could rejoin the fight. “They wouldn’t let us go,” Wysocki said. “I think they knew if they let us go back out, we’d raise hell. I was fucking pissed. I was ready to kill everyone in Senjaray.”  Four months later, the squad hadn’t lost its desire for revenge. Wysocki: “There is never one day when we don’t want to take it to the Taliban.” Pereira: “I want to stay and fight for the guys who died.”

Fight for your buddies.  In the tract which opens Philip Caputo’s, “A Rumor of War”, he talks about the bonds that are formed, that unlike marriage  vows, can only be broken by death.

Amen.

Virginia, fresh off the thrilling conservative victory of getting a Republican judge to rule part of Obamacare unconstitutional, is now looking to ban gays from the National Guard in its state,because playing around with secessionary tactics is the second greatest passion in the South. (#1 passion: the South.)

Yes, people in the South talk about the South, how great it is and how it is disrespected.  I haven’t gotten a lot of that from other places I’ve lived in this country.  As I told JMan the other day, “If you want to be respected, be respectable.”  But the last bit of that snark reminded me of this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pardon the advert; it is also available on Netflix.

These guys want to run around playing their little keyboard warrior games, but rest assured, the very last thing they want is the public to feel the pinch of war. Because when they do, little Steve’s war games would end right quick. Does anyone think we would have been in Afghanistan for the last decade if our taxes had been increased to actually pay for that war?

The mantra of entrepreneurialism is: other people’s time, other people’s money, other people’s ideas.  The Bush war crowd are two for three, but perhaps it should be modified to include “other people’s blood.”

In recent days, several elected officials in Southern states have been pricks about slavery and the Civil War.  Eugene Robinson has a better response than me.

It was bad enough when Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell proclaimed “Confederate History Month” without mentioning slavery, but at least he came to his senses and apologized. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s contention that the whole controversy “doesn’t amount to diddly” is much worse.

“I don’t know what you would say about slavery,” Barbour told CNN, “but anybody that thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing, I think that goes without saying.”

And that’s the problem — Barbour thinks it “goes without saying.” The governor of the state whose population includes the nation’s highest percentage of African Americans believes it is appropriate to “honor” those who fought for the Confederacy. Clearly, he has no problem revisiting the distant past. Yet he sees no reason to mention the vile, unthinkable practices — state-sanctioned kidnapping, torture and rape — that those Confederate soldiers were fighting to protect.

It amounts to much more than “diddly” that so many Americans try hard to avoid coming to terms with the reality of slavery. It wasn’t just “a bad thing.” Littering is a bad thing. Slavery was this nation’s Original Sin, and yet many people will not look at it except through a gauze of Spanish moss.

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the last millennium’s greatest horrors. An estimated 17 million Africans, most of them teenagers, were snatched from their families, stuffed into the holds of ships and brought to the New World. As many as 7 million of them died en route, either on the high seas or at “seasoning” camps in the Caribbean where they were “broken” to the will of their masters.

If he has never done so, Barbour should hold in his hands some of the leg irons, manacles and other restraints that were used to subdue the Africans. He should visit some of the plantations where slave cabins still stand — there are plenty in his state — to get a sense of how the Africans lived. He should spend a long, hot day picking cotton. He should read the accounts of plantation life written by former slaves, and then he should explain why there is any reason to “honor” soldiers who fought to perpetuate a system that could never have functioned without constant, deliberate, unflinching cruelty.

The Tea Party movement has a lot of racist dog whistlers in it.  These are people who use words and images that will appeal to other racists, but somehow not be heard by people who are not racists, much like only a dog can hear a dog whistle.  I’m tired of it.

As most readers have probably heard, Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell got himself into hot water by declaring April “Confederate History Month,” in a proclamation that did not mention the rather pertinent fact that the Confederacy was a revolutionary (and by definition, treasonous) effort to maintain slavery against even the possibility of abolition.

After the predictable firestorm of criticism, McDonnell allowed that it must have been a mistake not to mention slavery in his proclamation. And then he repeated his rationale for the whole idea, which was, he claimed, simply a matter of promoting tourism in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s outbreak. Tourism!

I’m sure most conservatives will consider McDonnell’s act of contrition sufficient, while many liberals will cynically conclude the whole thing was a dog whistle to the far Right, much like his earlier and less notorious commemoration of March 7-13 as Christian Heritage Week, in honor of the Christian Right’s revisionist theory that the Founders were theocrats at heart.

But as a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.

It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.

A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.

Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when “Dixie” was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.

Bob McDonnell should be particularly responsible, as a former Attorney General of his state, for reminding us all of the “massive resistance” doctrine preached by Virginia Senator Harry Byrd in response to federal judicial rulings and pending civil rights laws, and of the “interposition” theory of nullification spread most notably by Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick.

Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.

Having flirted with such theories himself, Bob McDonnell probably wouldn’t be interested in discussing them in the context of Civil War history. But that’s okay: A greater public understanding of the exceptionally unsavory tradition that conservative Republicans are following in claiming that states can refuse to accept health care reform would be valuable without an explicit discussion of current politics.

So give it up, governor: If you are going to have a Confederate History Month, at least be honest enough to acknowledge that the legacy of the Confederacy didn’t die at Appomattox.

Update #2: At 5:00pm, Fox’s Greta van Susteren tells us that the vote is still “too close to call.” I’m expecting next to hear from Baghdad Bob.

He fancied himself one of the big thinkers, and most of his ideas were not only bad but appalling; for he lived largely for the body’s pleasures, actual and vicarious, and adopted ideas that serviced those pleasures. T.S. -Eliot remarked that a great writer creates the taste by which he is appreciated; Mailer helped create the moral confusion amid which he was glorified—not quite what Eliot had in mind.

Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom.

Yeah, what he said.  Although this ran a close second:

By this point, Mailer had jettisoned his first wife, college sweetheart Beatrice Silverman, and clearly traded up in the sexual-allure department by marrying the painter Adele Morales in 1954. With Adele’s all-too-willing complicity, he cultivated the ugliest part of his nature and called it high moral adventure.

High moral adventure.  That’s what you call it when you live a life that is without basis or constraint.  Just ask any sociopath.