perfidy

The homunculi down in the Department for Endogenous Perfidy Tracking (known internally as the DEPT Dept.) have clipped this little piece of stink and sent it upstairs for my review.

Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee (news - web sites) warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.

The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn't aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. "It wouldn't surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage," Gillespie said.

The flier says Republicans have passed laws protecting life, support defining marriage as between a man and a woman and will nominate conservative judges who will "interpret the law and not legislate from the bench."

"The liberal agenda includes removing `under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance," it says. . . .

Gillespie said same-sex marriage is a legitimate issue in the election. President Bush (news - web sites) has proposed amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Democratic Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) also opposes gay marriage but said a constitutional amendment is going too far.

The RNC also is running radio ads in several states urging people to register to vote.

"There is a line drawn in America today," one ad says. "On one side are the radicals trying to uproot our traditional values and our culture. They're fighting to hijack the institution of marriage, plotting to legalize partial birth abortion, and working to take God out of the pledge of allegiance and force the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America."

"Are you on their side of the line?" the ad asks before making the plea to "support conservative Republican candidates."

Shit, Phyllis! They're onto us. You conservative toads have literally no idea what you're in for if the Liberal Party wins in the Fall. And I do mean Fall for those of you of a pentecostal bent. Our hate for this nation will go unchecked like a drunken slavering invert bound for perversion on a Saturday night in lower Manhattan. Nothing but wall to wall gay sex (and bondage!) on TV 24/7. Public schools will teach nothing that has not been thoroughly cleansed (some would say purged, but that's such an ugly word, don't you think?) of all racial, ethnic, religious, or non-New-York regional overtones. Private schools will be banned-- in fact, isn't private property as a concept just a bit louche these days? Abortions on demand for everyone! Little plastic flags for the rest! Congress will become a rump for the International Homosexual Caucus (get it... rump?). Your guns will all be rounded up and melted down to make prisons for fundamentalists. With bondage.

It's not you we hate. It's your freedom.

Within ten years, every city from Biloxi to Boise will become a haven for the expensive-coffee-and-cardigan-over-the-shoulders-oooh!-oooh!-are-those-John-Fluevog-shoes crowd. In fact, you will all be that crowd. The national language will be French. The national sport will be volleyball. Men's volleyball. Your precious "700 Club" will be yanked from the air and replaced with a daily "666 Club" hosted jointly by Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand (with musical guest Michael Jackson). We plan to introduce legislation outlawing heterosexuality forever and mandating the more esoteric sides of BDSM. The national currency will feature an engraved depiction of the "dirty Sanchez." We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. Your kids will meditate in school. Your kids will meditate in school. Your kids will meditate in school. Your kids will meditate in school.

[wik] ... or maybe the mouthbreathers who circulate this tripe are the right's equivalent of the Larouche Democrats, and nobody takes it seriously. Is it too much to hope that absolutely nobody will take this stuff seriously?

[alsø wik] Why oh why do I hate freedom so dang much?!?

[alsø alsø wik] Not that I'm all that much of a flaming liberal anyway. Indeed, I'm a self-described economic centrist and social libertine (... I mean libertarian), but if some part o' the GOP designed the foregoing noxiousness to be exactly on message for some portion of the country, then I should probably revise my notion of where exactly the center is.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] In fact, does it make anyone else a little ill that Ed Gillespie, the administrative head of one of our two major political parties purporting to represent half of all of us and what we all think in a normal non-hallucinatory state, did not run screaming from this dose of poison, but rather shrugged complaisently and said "sure. maybe. It sounds like something we'd do."? As Patton said in the comments, "May a pox descend on all their houses, the fuckers."

[see the løveli lakes...] Then again, the GOP let Sheri Dew open their national convention. Sheri "At first it may seem a bit extreme to imply a comparison between the atrocities of Hitler and what is happening in terms of contemporary threats against the family—but maybe not" Dew. That's some big-ass tent the GOP have got if they can make room for the terminally insane. Yay, America!

[the wøndërful telephøne system...] Buckethead has since posted on the possibility that "memogate" may be linked to the Kerry campaign. Query: would that be worse, or just different, than telling the voters in West Virginia that the Liberals, who are apparently the true backers of John Kerry, are dead set on banning the Bible?

[and mäni interesting furry animals...] I should have mentioned before that Norbizness is the fount of this outrage. Thanks, Texas, for giving us a President, a Norbizness, and Kelly Willis!

An old friend of mine from Ohio who for some reason up and moved to Florida after she got married just sent me an image of a brand new postcard honoring that beleagured, storm-battered state.

Heh. Indeed.

(I very nearly posted this under "Crazy Foreigners" since my experiences within the Sunshine state have uniformly been of the queer, unsettling, accidental-touristy kind. No offense.)

Everyone knows that the new DVD version of the original Star Wars Trilogy will be released this coming Tuesday. Like all the other hapless suckers, I have already reserved a copy. However, there has been some impressive investigative reporting digging into the changes that Lucas has made to the films for the new edition. Here are some screenshots of a few of those changes:

We all figured that Lucas would take advantage of advances in CGI to clan up some of the special effects from the original films. Some of the shots of monsters and creatures were especially bothersome. Here are a couple impressive updates:

Some of the more controversial changes involve beloved characters. Lucas shows some questionable judgment in replacing them with CGI "improvements":

The change that convinced me that Lucas is smoking the crack, though, is this alteration to the battle scene on the ice moon of Hoth:

If you haven't already ordered your copy, better start planning to stake out a place in line at Best Buy. These babies are gonna go fast.

From Silflay Hraka, a post short and pithy enough that I will excerpt the whole damn thing:

Why John Kerry Is Doomed: An Exercise in Metaphor

Jimmy Carter in 1980: "America needs to take its cod liver oil."

Walter Mondale in 1984: "America needs to take its cod liver oil."

Mike Dukakis in 1988: "America needs to take its cod liver oil."

Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996: "Ya'll want a beer? I'm buying, and you have got to see the jugs on this waitress."

Al Gore in 2000: "America needs to take its cod liver oil."

John Kerry in 2004: "America needs to take its cod liver oil."

Over at the Smallest Minority, I found an interesting discussion about possibilities for a second American civil war. Sadly, the comment thingy there would not let me post my comment, and so you are perforce subjected to my thinking here. I try to lighten the burden, but it doesn't always work.

We discussed this not long ago on this very blog, in the comments somewhere, and I'm too lazy to dig it up. There's some interesting thinking in the post I linked, and it gives context to what I say below.

Despite the deep divisions in our soceity, over abortion and many other issues there really isn't much cause for civil war.

The reason is economic. In the first civil war, issues of states' rights and slavery were claimed as the motivating causes for the two sides to start slaughtering each other. However, for those causes to reach the point of bloodshed, they had to be supported by deep economic divisions as well. The proto industrial north v. the agrarian/slaveholding south. The West by and large joined the north, although not uniformly, witness bleeding Kansas. That economic division gave substance to the philosophical and religious differences.

Our divisions today are more geographically dispersed, and also there is no major economic divide that lines up along ideological divides. People on both sides of most ideological divides are living the same lifestyle as each other - or at least the same spread of lifestyles. Rich, poor, worker, industrialist whatever.

Not to say that this can't change, but unless it does, I'm pretty sure we'll muddle through. The wingnuts on both sides are largely (largely) isolated from the power centers of either party, and government is still from the center. No one except the wingnuts is even remotely pissed enough to think about armed rebellion.

I would think that we would need at least two of these three things for a real civil war: an opening economic divide that happened to line up along an existing or new serious ideological divide; or a new movement that powerfully motivates and gains followers while simultaneously scaring the bejeebus out of everyone else; or an honest to god coup, which leaves many with divided loyalties.

Economics, ideology, and wars of succession are the big three historical causes of civil war.

Barring a world wide depression and a spectacularly poor response to it, I don't thing we'll see the economy tanking dramatically enough, or changing enough to support the first probability. Communism might (barely) have been a force like that here a most of a century ago, but now, no chance. Islam has never really spread except by the sword, and I don't think that will happen here. It would have to be something new. It can always happen, and has often in the past - the thirty years' war in Germany, countless third world civil wars in the last century, and our own civil war. Our system, for all its flaws, is pretty good at preventing the last one, even when its poked real hard like four years ago. Not to say it couldn't, but it isn't necessarily enough.

And, as a side note, bleeding Kansas situations only happen when there is a general breakdown in civil order, like when there's a civil war going on. I don't think most grabastic leftist groups, tempted into terrorism, would last very long against our pretty formidible law enforcement agencies.

Aside from the obvious truth that any parent that allows a child within a mile radius of clearly strange Michael Jackson should be immediately be prosecuted for child endangerment; the scene outside the courtroom made it clear that many, many people are really screwed in the head.

Watching the throng of congenital morons and paint chip eaters chant, "We love you Michael!" was frankly horrifying. We can set to the side the fact that the King of Pop has not had a decent record in almost a quarter century, and has not looked human for almost as long. We will allow the subhuman chanters their musical taste.

But you are outside a courtroom chanting approval of a 'man' who is for the umpteenth time facing serious charges of child molestation. He has not been convicted, sure. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. But shouldn't your no doubt sincere admiration for the man's musical genius and the glories contained in his catalog be outweighed by at least mild moral repugnance and a wish not to be associated with someone who at a guess is at least as guilty of pederasty as OJ Simpson is of murder?

I know this has been circulating in the blog world for a while, but for the benefit of my dear 'ol dad, here is lgf's magic blink comparison of the CBS memo and the version he created in five minutes in Microsoft Word using the default settings:

There is no way that a typewritten document from 1973 would match a computer generated document from 2004 so perfectly. Different technologies, different methods, same result. My bullshitometer pegged instantly.

[wik] The original image link is long succumbed to bit-rot. It has been replaced by a wikimedia image linked from the Killian documents controversy article

By way of Tim Blair, this gem of a Kerry interview on the Imus in the Morning program:

KERRY: I mean, what you ought to be doing and what everybody in America ought to be doing today is not asking me; they ought to be asking the president, What is your plan? What's your plan, Mr. President, to stop these kids from being killed? What's your plan, Mr. President, to get the other countries in there? What's your plan to have 90 percent of the casualties and 90 percent of the cost being carried by America?

IMUS: We're asking you because you want to be president.

At least someone gets it.

Imus later said,

"I was just back in my office banging my head on the jukebox," Mr. Imus said. "This is my candidate, and ... I don't know what he's talking about."

Mr. Blair also regales us with this story:

Emerson College professor Jeffrey Seglin is frightened by blogger exposure of Memogate:

"The mainstream press is having to follow them," said Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston. "The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?"

Beats me. Read them? Would that work?

Dr. Rusty Shackleford is forming a blog pimp alliance. We've been here before, but for the alliance, we are:

Master Pimp Minor Perfidy Slim

I'm Dan Rather, Bitch! Saying it that way just tickles our soft spot for the sadly passed on superfreak. And in the comments, See-Dubya channels Happy Gilmore:

Dan: "I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast!" Blogosphere: "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?"

Heh.