Nutjobs Ranting About Politics.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
In a sense, the more contact you have with media, consumer markets, and modern life, the more likely you are to develop the "skill" (if that's the right term) to accomodate these things. Modernity gives fundamentalism something to reject.

My god. It's like you grew up down the same dirt road from me.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

David Brooks in tomorrow's NYT:

• He has unified the party through sheer force of prolixity. Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.
  
  Over the last few days I have spoken to Democrats who are firmly convinced he is a hawkish free-trading fiscal conservative who believes that life begins at conception, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that the U.S. should bulk up its forces in Iraq. I've also spoken to other Democrats just as convinced the Kerry is really a protectionist, socially liberal dove who actually opposes the war and supports gay marriage and nationalized health care.
  
  Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.

[SlaveNoMore]

Michelle Malkin calls out Washingtonienne and Wonkette for the golddiggers they really are.

[SlaveNoMore]

I just watched a good portion of the Convention rebroadcast on PBS (with Lehrer, fuck me). Anyway:

- Hillary is still as a flat as ever, but god do they love her.

- Milkulski has to be one of the worst speakers I've ever seen. Boxer and Feinstein must have been laughing behind her back.

- Even after throwing out his initial speech and being told to start from scratch, Gore still had to repeatedly go back to Florida.

- Bill is still far and away the best politician we got.

- Who was that old Yoda-looking man who kept describing this administration inept in foreign affairs? (It was suggested to me it could be Carter, but no way would he have the hubris to fault anyone in that sphere.)

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Michelle Malkin calls out Washingtonienne and Wonkette for the golddiggers they really are.

Slave -- get this -- the Earth isn't flat anymore, either! It's shaped like a tennis ball!

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
I just watched a good portion of the Convention rebroadcast on PBS (with Lehrer, fuck me). Anyway:

- Hillary is still as a flat as ever, but god do they love her.

- Milkulski has to be one of the worst speakers I've ever seen. Boxer and Feinstein must have been laughing behind her back.

- Even after throwing out his initial speech and being told to start from scratch, Gore still had to repeatedly go back to Florida.

- Bill is still far and away the best politician we got.

- Who was that old Yoda-looking man who kept describing this administration inept in foreign affairs? (It was suggested to me it could be Carter, but no way would he have the hubris to fault anyone in that sphere.)

Funny. I caught Hill and Bill's speech during dinner hour tonight at the firm. I thought Hill was better than usual, though when she tries to project here voice she still seems shrill. I thought Clinton, while good, gave a speech that was too academic for the audience (in fact, I've seen him give that same speech two or three times now).

I didn't catch Gore. Did he lose it? Did he make anybody wish he had won in 2000?

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
Slave -- get this -- the Earth isn't flat anymore, either! It's shaped like a tennis ball!

"There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them."

--- Jean Cocteau

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
"There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them."

--- Jean Cocteau

Still talking about Cosby, I see.

S_A_M

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Unclear who we're supposed to be killing in the meantime.

I wish I could find a link to someone who said this better than me, but fundamentalism is -- counterintuitively -- a reaction to modern times, not a symptom of people living in the past. Look at what Osama does -- they know modern technology and have no problem using it against us.

I know that you mean better than what you seemed to be implying.

You imply that efforts to understand radical Islamsist and killing radical Islamists are mutually exclusive activities. Wrong. You need to understand the enemy to overcome him. If you think I'm suggesting we bury our heads in the sand and refuse to recognize the part our own poor foreign policy played in making us "the great satan", you've misread me. We need to uderstand why we're being targeted and modify our own behavior. Unfortunately, that alone will not stop the radicals, so in the interim, with our other free hand, we have to crush their jihad to the best of our abilities. Your soft intellectual solutions are fine fodder for these academic debates, but in reality, you and I both know, you don't fight people like Al Queda by "winning hearts and minds" or through mere political moves. You've got to kill a whole lot of them, and some of the kills must be spectacular, to reinforce the notion that the US cannot be defeated or brushed back. Its a terrible analogy, but think Hiroshima. Some enemeies don't learn until you bring out the huge guns. The other angle we are properly engaging is beefed up intelligence with assassinations of radical leaders, but its still not enough. We should start "disappearing" people in the AQ network. We should put all rivals to radical islamists on the payroll to "hit" the imams who advocate Islamic theocracy and violence against the US.

And most of all, we should use the best chemotherapy we have on radical Islam - American culture. We should FLOOD their media with American programming more than we do already and dump more of our products into their markets. Our culture is like crack. You feed these bastards enough decadent western junk and they'll forget Islam.

Hell, I'd go as far as to flood their societies with Western drugs like crack and meth. Get them addicted to something that makes them hurt themselves instead of others. Thats insane, but I guarantee, somewhere, there's a classified document discussing how that might work. Hell, drugs keep the cultural stasis in our country. The sort of minds who gravitate to fundamentalism have about the same education as those on meth and crack. Imagine how screwed we'd be if the meth heads had found fundamentalism instead of drugs. Fuck, we'd be saying Hail Marys before the All Star game and jailing people for adultery.

Kill them while converting them. A little carrot and stick action. Levis, a discman, a membership to BMG music club, a little internet porn, subscriptions to People and US Weekly, a little fantasy football, some electric shavers and chicks on the street dressing like Britney... OR, join the jihad - have the air sucked out of your lungs by a Daisy Cutter.

They'll all forget Allah like the fiction he is... you'd have shit for brains to bargian for 72 afterlife virgins when you had live hotties right in front of you. I've seen some of those Iraqi women in western dress. Some are damn fine... they have a sort of Latina-hottie thing going...

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I know that you mean better than what you seemed to be implying.

Are you saying that I actually mean "all muslims", rather than merely "radical Islamists" or are you saying that you understand that I merely hate radicals?

If you're saying the former, you're wrong, and I'm a bit shocked at such a ridiculous assertion from you, particularly because it runs contrary to just about everything I've ever written here. And you know it.

[sgtclub]

Teresa Heinz Kerry, years before becoming a Democrat, railed against the party's ``putrid'' politics, said she didn't trust Sen. Edward M. Kennedy [related, bio] and angrily called the liberal lion a ``perfect bastard.''

In comments published in a little-known 1975 book about political wives called ``The Power Lovers: An Intimate Look at Politicians and Their Marriages,'' Heinz Kerry lashed out at the senator she'll share the primetime convention stage with tonight.

``I know some couples who stay together only for politics,'' Heinz Kerry said at the time. ``If Ted Kennedy holds on to that marriage (to ex-wife Joan) just for the Catholic vote, as some people say he does, then I think he's a perfect bastard.''

http://news.bostonherald.com/dncConv...rticleid=37308

[notcasesensitive]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Kill them while converting them. A little carrot and stick action. Levis, a discman, a membership to BMG music club, a little internet porn, subscriptions to People and US Weekly, a little fantasy football, some electric shavers and chicks on the street dressing like Britney... OR, join the jihad - have the air sucked out of your lungs by a Daisy Cutter.

Death by BMG Music Club? You can't possibly be suggesting that a membership in the BMG Music Club will make them give up Islam? More likely it will divert the focus of their jihad away from America as a whole and towards the executives at BMG. Or maybe towards you, sebby, if you're the asshole who signed them up for it.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Are you saying that I actually mean "all muslims", rather than merely "radical Islamists" or are you saying that you understand that I merely hate radicals?

I think your rhetoric was a little extreme. Calling any group of people animals and suggested that we bomb them back to the Stone Age is a little extreme. Did you grow up reading Curtis LeMay's Bedtime Stories For Kids or something?

[sgtclub]

Berger has acknowledged removing his handwritten notes taken during a review of classified documents. That's a violation of National Archives policy. And he says he mistakenly took the copies of the aforementioned memo, different drafts written by Bush-bashing anti-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke. Some of those copies remain missing.

But a new scenario has Berger, who only took notes on an initial visit last fall, placing material -- again, related to the millennium terrorists threats -- into the files on his second and third visits.


And adding an entirely new layer of intrigue to the story is word that telephone calls made by Berger during those latter two visits may have been monitored by an "unauthorized agency."

source? -- t.s.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by notcasesensitive
Death by BMG Music Club? You can't possibly be suggesting that a membership in the BMG Music Club will make them give up Islam? More likely it will divert the focus of their jihad away from America as a whole and towards the executives at BMG. Or maybe towards you, sebby, if you're the asshole who signed them up for it.

Diabolical, huh?

I'm actually snickering because I'm looking at a BMG solicitation I received this morning and thinking "God, how did junk mail get through my brain's filter staright into a post?" I don't recall even reading the solicitation. Creepy... they got me subconsciously. Like the fucking White Album.