Apparently, the Minneapolis Joint Task Force on Terrorism recruited people last spring to go underground at vegan potlucks.
No one could make this stuff up.
And the inevitable result of this sort of bat-shit craziness becomes ugly pretty quickly.
The Republicans can't have it both ways: They are either using the weapons of war against a group of political opponents, or they actually believe a hippie peace group poses a serious terrorist threat.
On an individual level, that kind of thinking would be labeled as paranoid-schizophrenic.
And if we understood the entire neo-con power structure to be engaged in a collective paranoid-psychotic break, it would help explain a lot.
Vegan Terrorists
Hostages for Choice
Carly Fiorina has is backwards when she claims that the Democratic party has held women "hostage" over the issue of choice.
It's the other way around. It's the Republicans -- who have made the assault on a woman's right to choose a central mission for the last 20 years, and who have brought themselves very close to victory with recent Supreme Court appointments -- that have forced any self-respecting woman who wants to maintain control over her own body to vote Democratic.
A Thrill Junkie in Charge?
I spent much of my morning surveying both the MSM, designated “pundits”, and the on-line community vis-à-vis the selection of Palin by McCain. Dems and progressives are generally delighted and having fun expressing outrage (feigned and otherwise,) intellectually honest conservatives are aghast, and –as might be expected – the designated members of the echo chamber (Gingrich and his ilk) are all in false congratulation mode over the “boldness” of his choice.
My thoughts move quickly from the obvious (clearly a political choice from a man who has put the perceived needs of his campaign ahead of governance issues for our country) to the less obvious: what this says about a man who has, indeed, faced death, and who should know better than to taunt the reaper.
As at least one conservative writer commented, the ultimate hubris behind this decision shows that John McCain clearly believes that he doesn’t need a qualified vice-president to serve in any meaningful way the day after the election. He has no intention of making room for even an Al Gore, much less a Dick Cheney. Those advisory roles will no doubt be played by the neo-conservative Feiths and Liebermans in his circle.
But even beyond that, McCain has either never for one moment considered the possibility that he might die in office – or he truly doesn’t give a shit about the future of this country. Those are the only options available for a man who has argued that the U.S. faces some of the gravest threats in its history.
So if we assume that the latter is not true, then we must examine the former: that he has failed to achieve the central benefit available to anyone who has brushed up against their own mortality: the knowledge that life is fragile and can be stolen in a heartbeat; the understanding that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
This fits well with other things we know about McCain: That in addition to his time as a POW, he has crashed at least two airplanes in circumstances that were also life-threatening, and that he likes to “roll the dice” so recklessly that his campaign has barred him from casinos for the duration. What we have hear folks is a thrill-junkie, someone who delights in flipping the bird to the so-called fickle finger of fate.
That may make for a great personal narrative. It might even be amusing and novel on the political stage. But is it really the temperament Americans want in their President? The high-roller may be fun to watch at the table, because none of us has to go home with him at the end of the night when he loses.
But the thought of this man – and that attitude – at the helm of US foreign policy should send shivers up the spine of any thinking citizen.
Best so far
As he did last night on CNN, Paul Begala takes the sharpest knife so far to the McCain campaign over their selection of Palin.
But that's just from the Democratic perspective. Sullivan picks up one of the more intellectually honest Republican reactions.
But I think I like this one best. It's from one of Sullivan's conservative readers, who puts it on a broader landscape. He sees it as the final demise of the whole nasty mess that is movement conservatism.
Deconstructing Stupid
This kind of shit really pisses me off. Enough that I went searching through the archives there, looking back over David Ignatius’ constant bemoaning of partisan politics when they were being played most effectively by Republicans. I couldn’t find anything! Imagine that!
All of this began when the Republicans decided to impeach a President for lying about a blow-job “because we can” as Newt Gingrich explained at the time. That began the era of truly ugly, partisan power politics that Ignatius so bemoans. Nixon may have started it with the racial coding of his campaign and the dirty tricks of his administration, but it has reached its gross and ugly fruition in this Bush Administration. Never in the history of this country has one party so abused the power under its control to achieve its agenda, both at the Executive level through power-corrupted cabinet officials and through its legislative leadership and behavior. And when the American people finally woke up and elected a Democratic majority in 2002, suddenly a supermajority of 60 became necessary to get anything done, because issues from small to large became subject to filibuster. This was a breathtaking change in how our government had ever functioned up until that time and we accept it now as a given standard.
This is what the Republicans have done to our government.
But in the face of the continuing Rovian bile that substitutes for reason in Republican campaigns, Democrats shouldn’t fight back?
The “Get Even” bunch?! You’ve got to be kidding me! The Democratic leadership of this last Congress could easily have drawn up Articles of Impeachment against this President, and even the least informed citizen could have helped to write the list of crimes. Yet stupidly, IMHO, they believed themselves faced with the choice of actually pushing forward some legislation that would benefit real people, or spend their two years trying to hold the Bush administration accountable.
So spare me the post-partisan lullabye. The Republicans continue to demonstrate every day that the only ball they know how to play is hardball.
Game on.
h/t to Glenzilla, who picks it up as part of a larger theme.
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