In Mary Shelley’s classic sci-fi horror novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818), her protagonist, the brilliant Dr. Viktor Frankenstein, allows his hubris to get the better of him by assuming the powers of the Creator. His monstrous faux human creation, without name or number in the original—let’s call him “Donald” for now– refers to himself initially as “the Adam of …
The entire idea of the “ransom of the atonement” places salvation upon a plane of unreality.
Another fine mess they’ve gotten into Well, Duh: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, threatening to end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if he becomes the majority leader. “There not a doubt in my mind that if the majority breaks the …
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Jon Stewart reviews another thrilling episode of the action-adventure series, “McCain”
Obie Grump Kanobi, as Stewart calls our favorite galavanting action star and former POW, Senator John McCain (Warmonger-Az), has never seen an international conflict where US military forces shouldn’t just stay the fuck home.
As pointed out here about McCain in Tales From The Benghazi Crypt Keeper:
Just as he has never gotten over being tortured by the North Vietnamese, manifest in his ‘bomb the hell out of ‘em’ knee-jerk response to nearly every foreign policy crisis, he will never get over losing to The Black Man in The White House.
Early in President Obama’s first term, McCain beat the war drums on Iran. During the Arab Spring, he demanded that our default response be to arm every opposition group in sight, despite the fact that many of them are Islamic fundamentalists with Al Qaeda sympathies. The strategy of “leading from behind” that operated so effectively in overthrowing Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi, costing not a single American life, makes McCain’s wrinkled and liver spotted skin crawl right off his malformed skeleton. (That skeletal malformation was the result of a crash landing he endured after being shot down over heavily populated Hanoi by the Vietnamese during one of his 23 bombing sorties.) This is a guy who really, really enjoys the smell of napalm in the morning.
The political point being that arming anyone and everyone who mouths the word “democracy” is not necessarily a trusted ally; that weapons provided to today’s “freedom fighters” won’t be used by anti-US forces tomorrow, a point that Stewart drives home. (See, e.g. the Muhajadeen in Afghanistan, who we armed to fight the Soviets but who later morphed into today’s Al Qaeda and Taliban.)
In the clip above, one of the vaunted Syrian rebel commanders photographed with McCain during his secret trip to Syria (designed to undermine President Obama’s cautious foreign policy?) appears to be the same guy who kidnapped 11 Shiite religious pilgrims in Lebanon. That would, of course, make him a terrorist, assuming he uses the ransom money to buy weapons.
During the 2008 presidential election, McCain’s hand chosen VP candidate, Sarah Palin, accused Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists.” This was an apparent reference to Obama’s acquaintance with former Weather Underground co-founder, Bill Ayers, who happened to be a professor at the University of Illinois at the same time Obama was teaching law there.
McCain seems to be as oblivious to irony as he is to critical judgment. A dangerous combination for someone who seems to have an open invitation from the Sunday morning talk show “public affairs” programmers, who regularly offer him a platform from which he can inflict his warmongering bias upon their considerable audience.
To be fair, McCain seems to be somewhat saner on domestic matters. However, when his carefully self-cultivated image as a political Maverick is seriously challenged by the extreme right wing of the GOP, as it was on the issue of immigration when it could have determined his most recent re-election to the Senate, he will default to doing whatever it takes to maintain his political survival.
For someone who has so much invested in the legend of his own mind, the image of him as the Crypt Keeper is, well, a keeper.
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Like progressive bloggers blessed with a satirical warp everywhere, we at US are deeply saddened by the departure from the Beltway Bubble of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Wingnuttia). A search of our site contains more “here” “here” “here” Bachmann links than we have the time, desire, or patience to document.
The many comments from the blogosphere over this momentous political and comedic event spans the political spectrum. From Reality Challenged Wingnuttia, we have The Beckster who called it “sad and tragic”, the result of the “Chernobyl” that is Washington, D.C. with her “honor and integrity” intact. (Gag me with a ladle.)
On the left, we enjoy FDL’s TBogg, who writes:
I, for one, am sad to see her go and, in fact, I was previously unhappy to hear that she might actually lose in the upcoming 2014 election. While there are many profoundly stupid conservatives in the House (I’m looking at you guys: Louie Gohmert, Patrick McHenry, and Jason Chaffetz) to hang around the Republican neck, Michele Bachmann brought a special bright-eyed ingenue lunacy to the party. Although she lacked the 12-hour meth-binge feral viciousness of a Sarah Palin, she was no less a virtual Pez dispenser of “Hunh? Whut?….” quotes, but always served with a “Bless their hearts” chaser and a squirrels in the attic stare.
I shall miss her star turn panache and amphetamine eyes; she gave good face to the Loonier Than Thou wing of the party. Now we are left with Peter King and the aforementioned Gohmert who are nothing more than stock villains sent over from central casting when the call went out for red meat slabs of resentment, ignorance, and opportunistic yahooism. I expect that Michele will probably move on to something a bit more on the evangelical side, since she lacks the dirty stripper-past-her-prime hardness that Fox prefers from its lady talkers,
Of course the big loser in all of this is delightful hubby Marcus Bachmann who stands to lose more “Me Time!” with Michelle always about the house and constantly under his marabou bedroom slippers with the four-inch heels.
What he said.
(With a nod to Liberace, for his implied, fabulous influence on Marcus.)
Impatience is a spirit poison; anger is like a stone hurled into a hornet’s nest.
–The Urantia Book
Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore writes :
Even as “investigators” seek without much success so far to find evidence that the IRS scrutiny of applications for 501(c)(4) status represents a vast political conspiracy—one that might have changed the outcome of the 2012 election, no less—the aggrieved Tea Party Movement is taking action…
I would have hoped everybody has figured out by now that the Tea Party Movement is not some news-from-nowhere citizens uprising that’s recruiting previously apolitical Americans in a battle against Washington, but a large, radicalized segment of the conservative “base” of the GOP (none the less Republican for the self-identified independent status of many Tea Folk, who vote Republican very loyally but don’t want to identify with it because they don’t trust it is or will remain sufficiently conservative). As such, it is much less a threat to the Democratic Party than to the GOP—insofar as Republicans have political objectives that don’t always coincide with the truculant and ideologically extreme attitudes of the activist “base.”
Precisely. The recent hyperventialtions by the Rethug Scandophiles are less a threat to the Obama Administration than it is to the Rovian wing of the Grand Obstructionist Party. A point we have been trying to make here repeatedly.
Or as Willie might have said: Go for it:
“Lay on, McDuff, and be damned he who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!”
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth
