Month: May 2005

Prescient Heckler

Back in the day, before talk radio became a stroke inducing wingnut nightmare (and before Air America) I used to listen to KABC in Los Angeles, which has always been an all talk station. In the mornings it had Michael Jackson (not that one) a very erudite, well informed personality who had the world’s most impressive rolodex. He could get Nelson Mandela or Margaret Thatcher on the phone and callers, before everybody became a right wing asshole, were invariably polite and well informed. It was the kind of talk radio that people like me — the snoozers who watch the History Channel and Lehrer — love. No yelling, no controversy, just a bunch of smart people palavering endlessly. Needless to say, this is so far out of fashion it might as well be a Nehru jacket.

Jackson was on from 9 to 1 and then that sanctimonious prick, Dennis Prager, would come on and blow the whole mood. Guys like him are a dime a dozen today, but he was my first modern wingnut gasbag, so he holds a special place in my … digestive system.

Today, on the Huffington Post, he says that the guy who heckled Ann Coulter is a Hitler youth. But the universities are also like Weimar Germany and Phd’s led the way to the death camps and the gulags.

None of that is factual or makes any sense. Weimar “decadence” was the target of Nazism, not the cause — unless you want to adopt the abuser excuse “she made me do it because she was bad.” And Nazism may have ostensibly been “secular, but it sure as hell used Christian nationalism when it suited them:

In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

But whatever. That’s just typical Dennis Prager dribbling confusedly about barbarians and brown shirts because somebody was rude to Ann Coulter. Rude to Ann Coulter — something one would think he’d be embarrassed to bring up considering what a nasty piece of work she is.

Does everyone remember what the student’s outrageous question in that Q&A was?

“You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage,” said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?”

Think about that for a minute. When I first heard about it I thought he was saying something for the pure purpose of being (as he admits) a jackass and trying to put Coulter off balance. But considering the revelations of this week, in which it was revealed that a prominent religious leader enjoyed forcing sodomy on his wife against her will, it’s actually a serious question.

I agree with Prager that there are barbarians in our midst, but I think he needs to look a little bit closer to his own social circle.

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Who Loves Ya baby?

Roy Edroso says:

Sometimes I wonder if I’m not being too harsh, and sometimes maybe I am, but I can safely say that I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is utterly delusional

Word.

Although I agree that these are fine words to live by, and I do, in this case he is specifically referring to her latest illustration of right wing paranoid victimology:

When was the last time you thanked a cop? And wouldn’t it be nice if, for just a brief moment, the mainstream media would hold a ceasefire in its incessant cop-bashing crusades?

There are good cops, and there are bad cops. But national press outlets, predisposed to harp on law enforcement as an inherently racist and reckless institution, hype the hellions at the expense of the heroes.

Yes, and the MSM hates puppies and kitties and baby rhesus monkeys too. Goddamn evil bastards.

Roy swats down her absurdities like the pesky little nits they are and goes on to discuss the veritable deification of cops in our popular culture noting the somewhat disturbing CSI trend in which:

…cops are not only immaculate honest and zealous in pursuit of the truth, they are also scientifically predestined to find it. (Someday Minority Report will be done as a cop series, and young people will be shocked to learn that it was originally a dystopian vision.)

This may be working against the police, actually, since now prosecutors such as those in the Robert Blake case find their TV addled juries unimpressed with any evidence that isn’t scientifically incontrovertible. They even call it the CSI effect. (I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess. Looking very hot, of course.)

Meanwhile, here in California, cops and firefighters are on TV every five minutes taking issue with the powdered and pampered Republican Governor saying of them, “These are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt.” Seems these unionized public employees didn’t care too much for that. Go figure.

As Roy says and I concur:

I don’t begrudge the police this heroic treatment — though I would prefer, as I suspect they would, that they got the love in their pay-envelopes rather than from mass media. But to say that the MSM is out to make cops look bad is just nuts.

And that is why I join Roy in saying I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is delusional. And nuts.

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Doomsday Machine

Everybody go sign up for PFAW’s “Nuclear Option” Mass Immediate Response:

By giving us your cell phone number, we will text message you as soon as Senate Republicans trigger the “nuclear option.” Embedded in that text message will be a link to the Senate switchboard. With the push of a couple buttons, your call – along with thousands of others – goes right through to the corridors of power demanding preservation of the filibuster.

This the first time flash mob technology’s been used for political purposes. Which means it’s just cute enough to get some press.

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Revival Hype

Both Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum believe, based upon findings in the recent Pew poll, that we would be better off if we liberals lightened up and accepted the 10 Commandments on public buildings and certain other somewhat trivial religious issues. I’m not sure how we do this, considering that this has been the interpretation of the courts rather than a legislative battle, but I’m sure that if we just give in on Pricilla Owen et al, we’ll see some change on this and other issues of importance to the Religious Right. I’m also sure we can then cherry pick those issues that are really important to us, but I’m not certain at all if the principle on which we make our argument will still be operative once we’ve tossed it aside for these trivial reasons.

As it happens, I couldn’t care less whether the 10 Commandments are displayed on public buildings as long as all religions are treated equally. I certainly hope that when a Hindu requests that his religion be equally represented that we liberals will also uphold his rights. Otherwise, we will have established a state religion, which I think is a really bad idea considering the millenium’s worth of blood that was spilled by our forebears in Europe over these issues.

Unfortunately, it seems we are on course to do just that. Or at least establish a “Judeo-Christian umbrella” state religion.

A federal appeals court has ruled that a Virginia county can exclude a member of a minority religion from offering prayers at county board meetings — even though adherents of “Judeo-Christian” religions are allowed to lead invocations.

In a unanimous ruling April 14, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against county resident Cynthia Simpson, whom officials denied the opportunity to offer prayers at meetings of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors.

Simpson is a practitioner of Wicca, a neo-pagan religion that she has described as interchangeable with witchcraft. She is a leader in a Wiccan congregation in the suburban county near Richmond. When she asked to be put on a list of those who could lead invocations at board meetings, the county attorney told her she would not be allowed, claiming that “Chesterfield’s non-sectarian invocations are traditionally made to a divinity that is consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Simpson, working with attorneys from a pair of civil-liberties groups, sued the county. A federal district judge in Richmond sided with her, ruling in 2003 that the practice unconstitutionally discriminated against religions that do not stem from the dominant Western monotheistic traditions.

But the latest ruling reverses that decision, citing the Supreme Court’s 1985 Marsh vs. Chambers decision allowing “non-sectarian” legislative prayers before the Nebraska legislature. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, authoring the 4th Circuit’s opinion, said the content of the prayers Chesterfield County officials allowed was broad enough, and the fact that Simpson was barred from offering one was immaterial to the case.

“The Judeo-Christian tradition is, after all, not a single faith but an umbrella covering many faiths,” Wilkinson wrote. “We need not resolve the parties’ dispute as to its precise extent, as Chesterfield County has spread it wide enough in this case to include Islam. For these efforts, the County should not be made the object of constitutional condemnation.”

Wilkinson has been widely rumored to be among the candidates for a Supreme Court appointment, should any slots on that body come open before the end of President Bush’s term.

Apparently, all religions that fall under the Judeo-Christian “umbrella” are non-sectarian, which I suppose is a form of progress. But you can’t just let any old religion be officially recognized in public functions. Ones that aren’t drawn from the old testament, anyway.

Clearly, just like guns and the death penalty and dozens of other things, the Democrats are going to cave on this issue. And in and of itself, it will not make much difference. Ever since the entire congress stood on the steps of the congress and sang “God Bless America” I knew that any pretense toward religious neutrality was over.

But, what makes anyone think that this will be enough to sway any votes or stop the rest of the theocratic agenda? Are people voting on the single issue of the 10 Commandments and if we give in on that we can start talking about the minimum wage? Just as people like Kevin and Matt and I don’t care deeply about whether the 10 commandments are displayed or a creche is put in front of city hall at Christmas, I doubt whether the full 70%+ of Americans who thinks the 10 Commandments should be allowed on public buyildings actually vote on the issue. Most people agree, just like us, that it isn’t a big deal — all except those who are fighting for the principle of it. Those people aren’t changing sides politically — and the rest just don’t give enough of a damn to change their voting behavior over it.

The danger is that the ones who are fighting on the principle that Christianity should be part of civic life are also the ones who are not giving any ground. And they won’t. They are thinking long term — patiently chipping away at the principle of separation of church and state, while the rest of us say “lighten up” to the ACLU, who is taking a principled stance on trivial issues so that we can make a consistent argument when it comes to fighting for the important ones. Like teaching creationism in the public schools.

As Matt points out, the other interesting finding in the PEW poll is that a majority believe that creationism should be taught along side evolution in the schools. (I suspect that most people do not realize that the goal of the Christian Right is to replace the teaching of evolution, and think instead that creationism is a worthy subject for a class on comparative religions, not science. But that’s just a hunch.) Kevin says we shouldn’t give in on that, but really, what’s to stop it?

I realize that we liberals believe that this is a matter of teaching fact based science as opposed to faith based religious belief, but the truth is that schools that aren’t funded by public money can teach creationism till the cows come home already. The state cannot compel anyone not to teach religion in place of science in the public schools unless we believe there is a constitutional prohibition against the schools promoting one religion over another.

So, on what will we hang our hat on once we’ve decided that religion — or more specifically the “judeo-christian umbrella” — is sanctioned by the state in regards to prayer in schools, the 10 commandments on public buildings and public displays of religion on community ground. These things are all trivial in themselves (although for some people, putting little kids in the position of having to pray or abstain is unconcionable.) But regardless of whether each little instance of religious tradition in the public square is in itself pernicious, taken together, if sanctified by the courts, it erodes one of the basic tenets of our system, which is the prohibition against the establishment of state religion. And that adds up to a greenlight to teach creationism or promote any other Christian dogma — with my tax dollars.

On a pracical political level, I might point out that electorally, getting religion may not be the bonanza everyone thinks it will be long term. The largest growing religious cohort in the United States is “non-religious”, doubling in the past decade and growing stronger. And it’s particularly true in the western states where there is a growing preference for “spirituality” over formal religion.

Contrast this with the studies that show Protestants losing ground for decades, perhaps stabilizing now, but certainly not growing, while Catholics remain fairly stable, but divided politically. The Barna group, which does the most in-depth polling on religion in America recently wrote:

“There does not seem to be revival taking place in America. Whether that is measured by church attendance, born again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions.

If we are to look at the electoral landscape, we will see that the hard core religious cohort is most influential in the south, which is no surprise. But if you take a look at this interesting map, created by USA today, you’ will see that “non-religious” is a rather large minority in the west and midwest swing states; when you combine it with liberal mainline protestant churches and liberal catholics you will see that the Christian Right is not the electoral powerhouse it’s cracked up to be. We should not fear them like this.

And needless to say, as our ethnic make-up continues to change, in which Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians and others continue to immigrate and pass their belief systems to their children, we are going to see a continuance of the explosive growth in those religions and philosophies as we’ve seen in the last thirty years. There is a huge potential for strife in our future if we continue down this road of establishing the “Judeo-Christian” umbrella as a quasi official religion.

There is good evidence that we are the victims of Republican hype on this religious issue, which perpetuates itself in the servile media, creating a faddish obsession with religiousity at a time when more people are actually leaving religion than coming into it. Like the phony campaign against Christmas, they are tying us up in knots with this theocratic correctness. For both practical and principled reasons, we shouldn’t let them do it.

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Gandhi And His Rabble

And the “revisionist historians” proceed apace. Via Ted at Crooked Timber I see that the Highpockets and the boys at Powerline have endorsed the idea that the British should have held out against “Ghandi and his rabble” — to prevent violence, of course, which is why all good white men have to keep the wogs in line, don’t you know. Didn’t the Raj have any purple ink to pacify the little bastards? Dear me.

“It’s great to see someone standing up for colonialism, especially British colonialism. I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, for example:

Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided.” (quoting Roger Kimball.)

But really dear boy, while we’re praising British colonialism, let’s not stop there. One can’t help but observe that if they had just held out against Washington and his rabble a few years longer the tragedy of the civil war might have been prevented. Failure of nerve, I’m afraid. Yes, yes, it would have been bloody, but what isn’t, I say? Best to keep the swinish multitudes under one’s thumbs. (Of course, except for the slaves, the Americans were white, weren’t they? Makes a difference; indeed it does.)

Hilzoy at Obsidion Wings offers the substantive response for trolls who require one.

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Oil For Fools

I think the thing I love most about the right wingers is their commitment to principle and intellectual consistency. For instance, on the Un Foundation’s blog UN Dispatch, Peter Daou took issue with Roger Simon’s obsessing over the Oil For Food program, while never having a kind word to say about the good things the United Nations does around the world. The right blogosphere is incensed that he would dare to tell a blogger what he should blog about, and besides the oil for food scandal is, like, really really bad.

Now call me crazy, but I seem to remember some wingnuts bleating every five minutes or so about how the news media is obsessing about all the “bad news” in Iraq to exclusion of the “good.” It’s been their mantra for the last two years as a matter of fact. John Tierney of the NY Times even said just the other day that we shouldn’t talk about the suicide bombers because it gives the wrong impression — that suicide bombers are everywhere and people’s lives are threatened. Even though the Iraqi people’s lives actually are threatened and there actually are suicide bombers everywhere. Best not to harp on the bad news.

Here we have an institution, the UN, that is enmeshed in a corruption scandal — and not one that appears to be unprecedented or shocking by corruption scandal standards. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the serious everyday violence that is taking place in Iraq. And yet we have right wingers obsessing about it to the exclusion of all its substantial and important good works around the world — while they constantly complain that the news media focuses too much on wanton violence and social chaos in a country we occupy, to the exclusion of insubstantial and meaningless happy talk about schools being painted (for 2 million dollars a piece.)

The sad fact is that the UN Oil for Food scandal is becoming another one of these right wing masturbatory obsessions — like Christmas in Cambodia and Vince Foster. There are always a few of these hobby horses out there, nobody knows why.

Meanwhile the UN actually does a lot of really important work, unlike the Pottery Barn debacle in Iraq, where we are supposed to get credit for fixing what we broke. Here are just a handful of the issues the UN has been working on while the wingnuts blather on:

Tackling the threat of transnational organized crime

Shipping supplies to millions of Iraqi schoolchildren

Controlling the Marburg virus

Building thousands of homes for tsunami victims

Partnering with the private sector to meet humanitarian needs

Reducing child mortality rates

Rehabilitating Iraq’s marshlands

Eradicating polio

Rebuilding lives in Afghanistan

Fighting the global malaria epidemic

Curbing the world’s most hazardous pollutants

Improving global disaster and emergency response

Building a sustainable future

This right wing UN fixation is another one of those issues that goes all the way back to the Truman era. I’ll say it again; anybody who thinks the Republicans are the party of new ideas are sadly mistaken. They haven’t even joined the last half of the 20th century yet.

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Blasphemous Perverts

Everybody’s talking about the article in The Nation about Dr. David Hager, the Bush appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration. His wife Linda says he forcibly sodomized her. Often while she was unconcious due to her narcolepsy.

Now, this would noramlly be just a run of the mill GOP hypocrite story that doesn’t deserve any more than a little laugh over beers. But it should be emphasized that many of of us knew Dr Hager was a scumbag when he was appointed back in 2002. And he has subsequently proven to be the extremist we knew he was by personally blocking, in unprecedented fashion, the FDA’s decision to make Plan B, the morning after pill, a quasi OTC drug.

But, he was a very religious man so everyone had to shut up and let him have a job he was abjectly unqualified for because to do otherwise would be theocratically incorrect.

Dr Hager was primarily known at the time as the writer of scriptural cures for women’s reproductive problems. But his cure for infidelity was just plain creepy:

Picture Jesus coming into the room. He walks over to you and folds you gently into his arms. He tousles your hair and kisses you gently on the cheek. . . . Let this love begin to heal you from the inside out.”

I’m no Christian, but that sounds damned close to blasphemy to me.

Between the mule fucking, the narcophelia and the sexual fantasies about Jesus, I’m beginning to feel like a provincial schoolkid. To think that we impeached a president over a couple of half baked blowjobs in a hallway — and listened to years and years of non-stop moralizing from these Republican perverts. I’m a pretty sophisticated person and I don’t usually pass judgements on people’s fantasy lives or their sexuality. But the Christian Right with their wild shedding of the most shocking of sexual taboos are starting to freak me out. And I’m from California.

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It’s Still On?

I knew it was over when Bush’s fawning sycophant, Dennis Miller, tried to pass himself off as a libertarian on Jon Stewart’s show a couple of weeks ago. In fact, I found that little moment quite uplifting. There is nobody more trendy, more “finger in the wind,” more faddish than the Rant man himself. If he’s climbing off the conservative bun-boy train, then the zeitgeist has definitely shifted.

And his show’s finally been put out of its misery, too.

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Glory, Glory, Jalapeno

In honor of this great post by James Wolcott called “Godless Heathens Get No Respect”, I am hereby no longer going to be polite or even mildly respectful to the morons of the Christian Right.

As Christian fundamentalism becomes more intrusive and oppressive, Pat Robertson’s odious discharge being just the latest example, it is up to us adherents to reason, law, and unchained thought to revive and sustain the reputations of America’s great individualists and nonconformists. It’s understandable that Democratic candidates, sincere and insincere, feel they have no choice but to drag faith around with them like a little red wagon, but the we non-office-seeking nonbelievers are under no such obligation, and have been accomodating for too long.

He is right. There is a long tradition of religious irreverance in this country and I’m tired of holding back out of some misplaced sense that I’ll offend some religious person somewhere. I’ll cast my lot with this guy:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is – in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree – it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.”

Mark Twain

Back in the late 70’s the fundamentalist bozos were wandering around church parking lots like a bunch of blind salmon, sending money to perverts like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert and handling snakes around children. Paul Weyrich and Morton Blackwell knew just what to do. Make them into Republicans. And now they are the very backbone of the Party.

Morons.

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Getting Antsy

Kevin Drum wonders what Bush’s bizarre Yalta blathering was code for. We all know that when Junior dredges up some obscure historical reference (like his strange interjection of “Dred Scott” into the debates) you can be sure he’s speaking in tongues to somebody. The question is who and why.

I think it’s just possible that the neos are getting ready to turn up the heat on their old nemesis, Russia. They will not rest until some commie blood is spilled by the forces of good. And terrorism just isn’t a grand enough enemy for these guys. It’s messy, it’s hard to define, we can’t defeat it with bombs and military invasion. I think it’s been much too hard for these guys to get their nut with this sneaky, asymetrical 21st century enemy, and the Iraqis just aren’t cooperating enough with their “liberation” to be truly satisfying. Time to get back to basics.

If we’re lucky, maybe before he checked in at his new job, Wolfowitz dusted off his 1992 plan to invade Russia. (Oh, excuse me, “defend our vital interests in Lithuania.”) Now that was a war plan, goddamit.

PENTAGON WAR SCENARIO SPOTLIGHTS RUSSIA

STUDY OF POTENTIAL THREATS PRESUMES U.S. WOULD DEFEND LITHUANIA

Barton Gellman Washington Post Staff Writer
February 20, 1992; Page a1

A classified study prepared as the basis for the Pentagon’s budgetary planning through the end of the century casts Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests and presumes the United States would spearhead a NATO counterattack if Russia launched an invasion of Lithuania U.S. intervention in Lithuania, which would reverse decades of American restraint in the former Soviet Union’s Baltic sphere of influence, is one of seven hypothetical roads to war that the Pentagon studied to help the military services size and justify their forces through 1999. In the study, the Pentagon neither advocates nor predicts any specific conflict.

The Lithuanian scenario contemplates a major war by land, sea and air in which 24 NATO divisions, 70 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carrier battle groups would keep the Russian navy “bottled up in the eastern Baltic,” bomb supply lines in Russia and use armored formations to expel Russian forces from Lithuania. The authors state that Russia is unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but they provide no basis for that assessment.

[…]

National security officials outside the Pentagon sharply disputed the scenario’s premise, noting that the United States never recognized the Soviet Union’s World War II conquest of the Baltic states but steered clear of interference there for fear of nuclear war. One State Department official said the Pentagon scenario “strikes me like being more of a Tom Clancy novel.” Another official with responsibility for European security policy said flatly, “We have no vital interest in Lithuania.”

[…]

Wolfowitz, who requested the scenarios in an Aug. 10 memorandum, wrote that they would “guide program formulation and evaluation.” Wolfowitz asked for two scenarios centering on Russia: a smaller, more rapidly developing threat based on the consolidation of existing Russian forces, and a much larger, more slowly developing threat premised on “reconstitution” of a Russian-based hostile superpower.

The reconstitution scenario names no adversary, citing only a “resurgent/emergent global threat,” or REGT. It describes a five-year U.S. buildup that would come in response to a Russian buildup, could exceed peak Cold War levels and could lead to a major global war.

The Lithuania Scenario

The Lithuania scenario is a potential diplomatic embarrassment, emerging as it has in the aftermath of a joint declaration Feb. 1 by President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin that “Russia and the United States do not regard each other as potential adversaries.”

It is also the only European contingency in the Pentagon document. Congressional advocates of drawing U.S. forces in Europe below the 150,000 troop level set by the Pentagon for the mid-1990s can be expected to challenge the realism of the scenario and assert that no plausible mission remains for large-scale NATO forces.

Finally, the Lithuania scenario is the most demanding single military contingency in the Pentagon document and, therefore, a potentially controversial yardstick for the military force required in the late 1990s. A working group from the Joint Staff’s planning directorate, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the office of program analysis and evaluation estimated it would take 7 1/3 divisions, 45 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carriers to fight the Russians.

[…]

REGT Scenario

A “resurgent/emergent global threat,” or REGT, becomes capable of threatening U.S. interests worldwide. According to national security sources, the scenario refers to Russia, with or without other former Soviet republics.

The REGT develops into an “authoritarian and strongly anti-democratic” government over about three years, beginning in 1994. After four or five years of military expansion, the REGT is ready to begin “a second Cold War” by the year 2001, or launch a major global war that could last for years. Pentagon planners assume that the United States would spend years of political debate before beginning a buildup in response to the REGT. “Reconstitution” of U.S. forces, as the Pentagon calls the buildup, would include expanded recruitment, weapons modernization and greatly increased production, and, if necessary, the draft.

No outcome is projected for a global war.

As you may have begun to notice, the right wing doesn’t adapt well to change. They are still talking about McCarthyism and hippies and any number of other anachronistic topics. They are obsessed with being right, not only today, but fifty years ago. They still call liberals commies. It would not surprise me in the least if they are going to turn their attention back to their mortal enemy. Once a commie, always a commie. Hasn’t that always been their motto?

And if Bush’s pal Vladimir doesn’t co-operate, we can always start asking “who lost China?” That one never gets old.

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