Rolling Stone Rolls Right Over McCain

Here it is. This is the exposé that destroys McCain utterly.

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

After reading this, only a true-believer, reality-blind frothing fuckwit could possibly retain any respect for this disaster of a man, or one iota of belief in his myth. And the most incredible thing? A lot of the most devastating quotes are taken verbatim from McCain’s own book.

You need to read the entire Rolling Stone piece. We need to print copies and hand them out liberally to anyone who’s on the fence. This article explains, in stark and plain language, exactly why this man should never be allowed to govern this nation.

Here’s some excerpts to whet your appetites:

There’s a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met.”

On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.

“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”

“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.

“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.

“Why? Where are you going to, John?”

“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”

“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”

McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.

“I got a better chance of getting laid.”

[snip]

McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His father — himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex — had secured a political post as the Navy’s chief liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington cocktail circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames “Punk” and “McNasty.” Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as “a mean little fucker.”

[snip]

In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.

“I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying,” McCain writes. “I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties.” McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn’t.

In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.

[snip]

These are the moments that test men’s mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain’s. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then “gallantly took command of a firefighting team” that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.

McCain displayed little of Hope’s valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who “stayed to help the pilots fight the fire,” McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the “ready room,” where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room’s closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”

There’s more. There’s far more. Things you knew, and things you’ll learn here for the first time, relentless and appalling, building a mosaic of a man who would be catastrophic as our President.

I fear for my country. I fear for my world.

(Tip o’ the shot glass to Firedoglake.)

Rolling Stone Rolls Right Over McCain
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McCain: Aspiring Dictator

McCain tells the Des Moines Register what he thinks of the failed economic bailout bill and gives his game away:

“This is just, uh, an unacceptable situation. I’m not saying this is the perfect answer. If I were a dictator, which I always aspire to be, I would write it very differently…”

He surely didn’t look like a man who’s joking. If you have any friends, family, colleagues, etc. who are leaning McCain’s way, you might want to ask them how they feel about living in a dictatorship. And considering how old McCain is, and who’s been picked to succeed him, we’d soon be living in a Dominionist theocracy.

Be warned.

McCain: Aspiring Dictator

Dear al Qaeda, Here's $13 Billion. Best Wishes! Uncle Sam

And here you thought it was just Cheney and Bush’s corporate buddies drinking from the firehose of cash they’ve aimed at Iraq.


The Democratic Policy Committee continued its series of oversight hearings on Monday.

The testimony was shocking: more than $13 billion in American funds for reconstruction projects which were never built combined with deaths of 32 Iraqi officials charged with oversight. Allegations of widespread corruption, with an accusation that “Iraqi government officials worked with al-Qaeda terrorists at the Baiji refinery to steal oil to sell on the black market.”

So… we’re funding terrorism now. Does that mean America has to declare war on itself?

Dear al Qaeda, Here's $13 Billion. Best Wishes! Uncle Sam

They're Not Even Pretending Anymore

The Bush regime has absolutely no fucking respect for the American people. It doesn’t even have fake respect.

So they come asking us for $700 billion dollars, no strings, and you know how they came up with this almost trillion dollar figure? They pulled it out of thin fucking air:

Forbes writes on part of the reason that the American public is so skeptical of the Bush administration’s bailout proposal:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.

Translation: How much do you think we can take these suckers for?

Fuck Guantanamo. These fuckers need to be shoved into uniform and sent to Afghanistan to fight in the wars they started. They wanted glory – they can fucking have their glory.

Good luck, dickheads.

They're Not Even Pretending Anymore

We're About to Cough Up $700 Billion – and it May Not be Necessary

File this under “Oh my fucking god:”

Let’s dispel the Henny Penny idea that if we don’t act in the next 10 minutes, the sky will fall. The argument for a government bailout goes something like this. If the finance sector crashes, the credit market could lock up and businesses won’t be able to get the short-term credit they need to stay afloat. A large chunk of our businesses depend on short term loans and would fail in a matter of weeks or months after such a lockup. Its really not the financial industry per se, then that’s the problem, its the many businesses which rely on short term loans that would dry up if the investment banks fail. There’s one problem with this line of argument. The connection may not be there.

Both conservatives and liberals are beginning to have doubts. For instance, Alan Reynolds of the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the far right Cato Institute writes:

The financial storms over the past year have — before last week — been largely confined to securities markets and to interbank loans among commercial and investment banks. Bank loans to commercial and industrial business, real estate and consumers continued to expand nearly every month. Commercial and industrial loans exceeded $1.5 trillion this August, up from less than $1.2 trillion a year earlier. Real-estate loans exceeded $3.6 trillion, up from less than $3.4 trillion a year ago. Consumer loans were $845 billion, up from $737 billion. Credit standards are tougher, which is surely a good thing, but interest rates for creditworthy borrowers remain low.

The ongoing slow but steady availability of bank credit helps explain the much-remarked contrast between Wall Street and Main Street — the shaky condition of exotic financial markets compared with relatively benign statistics for industrial production, retail sales, employment and the rest of the nonhousing economy. Most people go about their business without depending on investment banks or exotic varieties of commercial paper.

From the left, NYT Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston writes:

Ask this question — are the credit markets really about to seize up?

If they are then lots of business owners should be eager to tell how their bank is calling their 90-day revolving loans, rejecting new loans and demanding more cash on deposit. I called businessmen I know yesterday and not one of them reported such problems. Indeed, Citibank offered yesterday to lend me tens of thousands of dollars on my signature at 2.99 percent, well below the nearly 5 percent inflation rate. That offer came after I said no last week to a 4.99 percent loan.

If the problem is toxic mortgages then how come they are still being offered all over the Internet? On the main page AOL generates for me there is an ad for a 1.9% loan (which means you pay that interest rate and the rest of the interest is added to your balance due.) Why oh why or why would taxpayers be bailing out banks that are continuing to sell these toxic loans?

Good question, Rocko! If we the taxpayers are supposed to cough up endless cash, putting our chance at affordable healthcare, clean energy, and a better life out of reach, then the fucking assholes we’re bailing out had better fucking need it desperately, and they’d better stop the fuckery that got us into this mess to begin with.

If we find out after the fact that these ratfucking greedy sons of bitches never needed a bailout in the first fucking place, I think we’ll be within our rights to demand they be thrown into Guantanamo Bay as enemy combatants and subjected to some of that “enhanced interrogation” John McCain cleared the way for.

I hope to fuck that Congress doesn’t lose its spine today. I know a huge number of Republicons and nearly all the Dems are smelling a rat and digging in their heels. If they smell smoke, they’d better realize that the only fire they’re dealing with is the rat Bush just set on fire to try to scare them into letting him and his cronies raid the Treasury on the way out the door.

(I’ve added links to the referenced articles. Read them both. Your energy costs will go down – you’ll be steamed enough to boil water on your scalp, thus negating the need for a stove. Feel free to eviscerate Alan Reynolds’ right-wing deregulation bullshit in the comments – the paragraphs quoted above are the only ones that remotely make sense, and the rest is just a lot of nonsensical bleating about how deregulation didn’t get us into this mess. Funny, but none of the non-partisan economists seem to agree. Gee, I wonder why that is?)

We're About to Cough Up $700 Billion – and it May Not be Necessary

Campaign of the Absurd

Are you sitting down? Are your drinks fully swallowed?

Good.

I know the McCain campaign jumped the shark a long time ago, but somehow, they keep finding more sharks to jump. They’ve lied so much there’s now a website dedicated to tracking their lies (as of this moment, the count stands at 63). They held a conference call with the press to cry over the New York Times calling them out on their lies, and lied continuously throughout. They’ve lied so much that even McCain’s biggest fans in the media have stopped bringing him donuts and started reporting the lies.

And now we learn that even their “grassroots” efforts are nothing more than factories for lies:

“You can be whoever you want to be,” says an inviting Phil Tuchman. “You can be a beggar or a millionaire. A mom or a husband. Whatever. You decide!”

I volunteer in political campaigns now and then. After a series of outings for Obama and a first mission as a phone banker for John McCain, I returned to McCain’s headquarters in Arlington, Va. The offer was too alluring to delay — they wanted to put me into action as a ghostwriter. Next to commercials and phone banking, writing letters to the editor is the most important method of the McCain campaign to attract voters. At least that is what’s written in the guidelines that McCain campaign worker Phil Tuchman presents to me.

[snip]

The assignment is simple: We are going to write letters to the editor and we are allowed to make up whatever we want — as long as it adds to the campaign. After today we are supposed to use our free moments at home to create a flow of fictional fan mail for McCain.

Un-fucking-believable.

The “talking points” the ghostwriters work from include some screamers, including Palin’s former 80% approval rating (which was true – up until Alaskans got a good look at her and didn’t like what they saw). Let’s remember that when Bush first took office, his numbers were high, too. Now he’s Mr. 19%.

They also repeat that bloody Bridge to Nowhere lie that’s been debunked endlessly. In fact, if we had a dollar for every time that howler’s been disproved, we could very nearly pay for Paulson’s bailout plan.

You’d think there’d be some embarrassment, shame, and plausible denials put forth by the campaign after such a revelation. A normal campaign would say, “We had no idea this was going on. This was not authorized by the campaign, and the person responsible for it has been tossed out on his ear. We stand for truth, justice, etc. etc.”

But we all know the McCain campaign is anything but normal. Caught blatantly manipulating public opinion by getting hacks to write fake letters to the editor (in the best tradition of the National Enquirer, most of whose stories are made up on the spot), they didn’t express faux outrage. No, they went with their old standby: yell at the journalist who exposed their lies and then lie some more:

Gail Gitcho, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, said that Oostveen did not properly identify herself to campaign workers in Arlington. “She did not represent herself as a journalist to the people who work in the mid-Atlantic office.” Ostveen, who also wrote a column about an earlier stint phone-banking for the McCain campaign, says she twice explained to different workers in the Arlington campaign office that she might be using her experiences as a volunteer in her columns for the NRC Handelsblad.

Can you believe these fuckwits? They’re beyond pathological – I’ve known compulsive liars, clinically mentally ill pathological liars, no less – who have more respect for the truth than these assclowns.

There’s no way America can elect these buffoons and keep its self-respect.

Campaign of the Absurd

Email Your Congresscritter

The American Freedom Campaign has made it easy to tell your representative just what you think about this insane bailout that Bush and his fat cat friends swear we must give him.

Everything I’m reading today makes it abundantly clear that this bailout as it stands is noxious on a variety of levels. It’s going to cost us far more than $700 billion in the end. It’s going to ensure our national debt is so insanely high that we won’t have anything left over for the social programs that could have made our lives better. Once again, the Republicons bring us to the brink of bankruptcy and walk away with their sacks full of cash, laughing while the Dems tighten the nation’s belt, count its pennies, and tell us that in order to balance the checkbook, we’re going to have to make sacrifices.

It’s not even clear this is necessary in the first place.

And now the fuckers are talking about how they can demand we do this, and then vote against it so they can use it against the Dems in the election (h/t Digby):

Every Democrat should read Patrick Ruffini’s post from yesterday at NextRight. He is, I strongly suspect, perfectly reflecting the game that Republicans, including Team McCain, want to play with the Paulson Plan:

Republican incumbents in close races have the easiest vote of their lives coming up this week: No on the Bush-Pelosi Wall Street bailout.

God Himself couldn’t have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the Administration. That’s why I want to see 40 Republican No votes in the Senate, and 150+ in the House. If a bailout is to pass, let it be with Democratic votes. Let this be the political establishment (Bush Republicans in the White House + Democrats in Congress) saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt (more than the Iraq War, conjured up in a single weekend, and enabled by Pelosi, btw), while principled Republicans say “No” and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress….

In an ideal world, McCain opposes this because of all the Democratic add-ons and shows up to vote Nay while Obama punts.

History has shown us that “inevitable” “emergency” legislation like the Patriot Act or Sarbanes-Oxley is never more popular than on the day it is passed — and this isn’t all that popular to begin with. All the upside comes with voting against it.

Ruffini is exactly right about the politics of this issue, especially for Republicans. Think of this as like one of those periodic votes on raising the public debt limit. It has to pass, of course, but there’s zero percentage in supporting it for any one individual. The speculative costs of the legislation actually failing are completely intangible and ultimately irrelevant, while the costs it will impose are tangible and controversial from almost every point of view. For McCain and other Republicans, voting “no” on Paulson without accepting the consequences of that vote is the political equivalent of a bottomless crack pipe: it will please the conservative “base,” distance them from both Bush and “Washington,” and let them indulge in both anti-government and anti-corporate demagoguery, even as Democrats bail out their Wall Street friends and big investors generally. You simply can’t imagine a better way for McCain to decisively reinforce his simultaneous efforts to pander to the “base” while posing as a “maverick.”

Democrats are right to demand significant substantive concessions before offering their support for the Paulson Plan. But just as importantly, they need to demand Republican votes in Congress, including the vote of John McCain. If this is going to be a “bipartisan” relief plan, it has to be fully bipartisan, not an opportunity for McCain to count on Obama and other Democrats to save the economy while exploiting their sense of responsibility to win the election for the party that let this crisis occur in the first place.

I cannot express to you my outrage that these goatfuckers are planning to use the crisis they encouraged in order to score politically. They’ve proven that they’re nothing more than common fucking criminals. This is what criminals do: blame the victim for their own lawbreaking. We need to do everything in our power to ensure they don’t get away with this.

So send your emails. Make your phone calls. And be sure to tell absolutely every right-leaning friend, acquaintence, and stranger on the street just how stupid the cons think they are.

***

In case you’re interested, this is the email I sent my Congressman, attached to the pre-made one from the American Freedom Campaign:

The more I read about the consequences of this bailout package, the more it terrifies me. The lack-of-oversight concerns attached at the bottom of this email are only the most obvious.
1. There’s a lot of crowing in right-wing circles about how this can be used to destroy Democrats. The basic premise is that Republicans will vote no while you vote yes, and then they’ll put on their fiscal conservative hats and run against you.
2. Every credible economist – right, left and center – despises this bill. And all of them are saying that $700 billion is only the beginning.
3. Paulson demands you pass a “clean” bill, and yet spent this weekend stuffing it with extras for his Wall Street pals.
4. And the saddest part: by simply bailing out the rich kids who got burned, we’re doing nothing to ensure that the rest of America has anything left over. If we don’t attach requirements that ensure the American people get something out of this deal, how are we going to pay for health care, for science, for social programs? How are we going to afford a better future if all we buy are toxic, worthless assets?
Congressman Inslee, as I sit here, I’m watching our future die. And I am bitterly, bitterly angry that the greedy bastards who murdered it are about to walk away scot-free, not a penny poorer.
Please, please fight this. Please fight for us. Make sure that there is oversight, make sure America gets a chance to earn back some of that $700 billion, and make sure that the irresponsible idiots who brought us to this pass are responsible for helping set things right.
I know I can count on you. You have never let me down. Thank you for all you’ve done, and all I know you will do.

Feel free to steal any/all verbiage for your own efforts.

Email Your Congresscritter

Throw These Fuckers Out. Never Give Them Power Again.

I don’t have enough profanity for these motherfuckers who are killing my country and quibbling over the carcass. I just don’t.

You need to read the entirety of Devilstower’s “Three Times is Enemy Action.” It lays out the whole history of the Republicon rape of this country’s economy, from Keating to the present day. I’m just going to share the paragraphs that left me incandescent with rage.

One:

Following the S&L crisis, the Resolution Trust Company was formed to swallow up the debt of Lincoln and 746 other S&Ls gone wild, and taxpayers were left with the $125 billion bill. The resulting budget deficit forced cutbacks in other programs. The artificial real estate boom collapsed and housing starts fell to their lowest levels in decades. Finally, the whole nation settled in for a period nasty enough that three years later someone could still campaign around the idea “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Two:

Thanks to this fortunate trifecta of Gramm-crafted legislation, Enron was able to create “EnronOnline” and trade electricity in California with absolutely no oversight or transparency. They quickly worked out how to game the system. Previously, there had been only one Stage 3 rolling blackout in the history of California. Within months, the system had been manipulated by traders to generate 38 such blackouts and wholesale electrical prices had gone up more than 3000%. Despite production capacity equal to four times the demand during winter, energy traders even engineered a blackout in mid-January.

During the confusion of these deliberate “shortages” and “price spikes,” the California administration of Gray Davis — blind to speculator manipulations because of the walls erected by Gramm’s legislation — was forced to sign energy contracts at enormous rates. There was little choice, because most of California’s public utilities were on the brink of bankruptcy from the rising wholesale prices.

Three:

Credit default swaps did allow the banks to share risks. So much so, that banks raced each other in an effort to find more risks. They made it possible for the down payment on homes to become 3%, 1%, 0%. Skip the credit check, avoid the employment requirements, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! We’ve got a credit default swap, we can do anything!

[snip]

How big did this market become? Here’s business correspondent Bob Moon and host Kai Ryssdal on American Public Media’s Marketplace from back in the spring.

BOB MOON: OK, I’m about to unload some numbers on you here, so I’ll speak slowly so you can follow this.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion.

The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion.

The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion.

OK, you ready?

The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion.

KAI RYSSDAL: That’s a lot of money, Bob.

As in three times the whole US gross domestic product, Bob. And the truth is that Moon probably underestimated. The unregulated and poorly reported credit default swaps may have actually passed $70 trillion last year, or about $5 trillion more than the GDP of the entire world.

So, are you starting to get an idea of just how big a genie Phil Gramm and his pals unleashed?

Bang.

This is enemy action. This is a bullet deliberately fired into the economy by men willing to exercise their ideology regardless of the cost to taxpayers. Men who have every expectation that they can plunder the system again and again, while the public picks up the tab. John McCain may not have had his finger directly on the trigger, but he was there. He assisted. These were his personal friends and philosophical comrades. He may not be the high priest, but he has been a loyal acolyte in the cult of deregulation.

They destroyed our standing in the world. They eviscerated our civil liberties and our Constitution. They’ve laid our economy to waste.

Three times, Republicons have pulled the trigger, and America bleeds. I’m staring down the barrel of a gun aimed at my country, and it’s held by smiling Republicons getting ready to deliver the coup de grace into America’s head.

If our country survives this assault, we can never again place these criminals in charge of her again.

Never. Again.

Throw These Fuckers Out. Never Give Them Power Again.

Terror In St. Paul

I found this originally through AOL’s comedy video channel, but it’s not comedy – it’s real terror, and it’s a stark reminder of just how out-of-control our police agencies got during the RNC.

These people were being herded. This didn’t seem like crowd control – it seemed like a cruel game, police drunk on their own power letting their inner thug loose, knowing the crowd was too weak to strike back.

This is our country if the Republicons stay in power. This is just a taste of what they consider appropriate.

Bitter, isn’t it?

Terror In St. Paul

It's .50 Caliber, but It's Not a Killing Machine. Honest.


Pop quiz time. This is a photo of:

A. A new U.S. Army Special Forces Unit

B. A mercenary group for hire

C. The Richland County, SC Sheriff’s Department’s shiny new toy

Tell me just what the fuck cops need with armored personnel carriers. Especially after their behavior in Minnesota, which we’ll be exploring in depth here within the next day or so, once the apoplexy’s managable.

This is just insane:

Radley Balko notes another community that has gone ultra-militarized (and, as he says, “Who wants to set an over under on the first time they use this thing to bust a pot dealer?”)

Police Mag (March, 2008)

The Richland County (S.C.) Sheriff’s Department has acquired an armored personnel carrier complete with a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun for its Special Response Team.

Sheriff Leon Lott told the Columbia State newspaper that he hoped the vehicle, named “The Peacemaker,” would let the bad guys know that his officers are serious.

“We don’t look at this as a killing machine,” Lott told the paper. “It’s going to keep the peace. We hope the fact that we have this is going to save lives. When something like this rolls up, it’s time to give up.”

“Letting the bad guys know you’re serious” is not a good answer to “What the fuck do you need with an APC?”

You only use “a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun” for one thing – killing as many people as you can. It’s not meant to keep the peace. It’s meant to destroy enemy soldiers. That’s what enormous fucking machine guns are for.

They are not for police agencies, which are ostensibly tasked with saving lives rather than spraying indiscriminate death down upon the nation’s citizenry. Although, after the last week, I’m not too sure about law enforcement’s role as the thin blue line anymore. “Jack-booted thugs” seems more accurate.

Eight years ago, I loved and trusted this nation’s peace officers. A few bad apples occasionally gave the whole barrel a bad taste, and a few agencies needed their corrupt asses kicked, but on the whole, I knew they were there to serve and protect.

Does that motherfucking tank look like a peace officer’s weapon to you?

Do the mass arrests, the torture, the brutality, the spying, and the thuggery in St. Paul remind you more of America or the Iron Curtain?

How long do you think it’ll be before America has its own Tienanmen Square? How long before a protester gets run down by some macho wanna-be Rambo in a policeman’s uniform and an APC?

But no, this is America.

We always do the world one better.

Fuck running down a single individual. There’s a gargantuan gun mounted on that baby – fire it up. Spray hot lead all over those vegans and those flower-children. Show ’em who’s boss.

This country is on an extremely dangerous trajectory. Just imagine what would have happened if one of these APCs had been present at Kent State. In Denver. In St. Paul.

The restraints of democracy and decency that used to at least somewhat protect this country from excesses of police brutality have been removed. The Constitutional protections that kept us from becoming another Myanmar, Tibet, Russia, El Salvador, a hundred others, aren’t simply being eroded – they’re being blasted away. Bush removed the torture taboo, started playing dictator, and it’s all the signal others needed to start playing right along with him. After all, if the President can do it, why not the local police department? It’s not wrong. It’s not illegal. The White House attorneys said so.

And here we see the real reason for the neocons’ hatred of communist regimes: it wasn’t moral outrage, it was jealousy. Why else leap so quickly to demolish the freedoms they pay lip service to? That kind of power over the mind and body of their citizens was something they could only dream of – before Bush started making their dream a reality.

We’re sliding into totalitarianism. It’s time to stop the slide. Don’t let the people you love vote their own freedoms away.


(Tip o’ the shot glass to Ed Brayton)

It's .50 Caliber, but It's Not a Killing Machine. Honest.