Douchebag of the Day

Yes, we want to see Dick Cheney shrieking his last sieg heils from the guillotine after he is convicted of crimes against humanity and his head falling with into the mud to be used as a soccer ball by the laughing, free children of America. Die, die you fucking monster!

Stubbier Broeder: Justice is bad because it’s impolite.

As a lawyer, and a former criminal practitioner at that, this depresses me. These people either don’t understand the legal system or simply hate the Constitution and the rule of law on which our country was founded.
Fucking assholes.

Most of the same idiots were against the Church Committee, and after the results came out we knew why. COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, covert ops against “dissidents”, etc.

We need something similar to roll up the issues of torture, extrajudicial rendition, secret prisons and illegal domestic wiretaps. The only disappointing thing about the first committee was that nobody ended up in jail, despite clearly illegal activities.

If accountability is the standard …

That tells you all you need to know about Mr. Broder.

Is there a category for Douchey City of the Day?
Obama’s plan to speak to schoolchildren ignites furor in Dallas-Fort Worth

A friend of mine just told me the following was said at a Nita Loewy townhall:
“My great great grandfather fought for the negroes in the Civil War, so I don’t owe anybody anything.”

He’s a lawyer.

I’m confused. Isn’t this what the Nuremberg Trials were about? Following orders was not a defense?

@texrednface: I’m going back under the table to hide. And I only just came out.

@Benedick:

There you go with that pre- 9/11 mentality again. NEVAR FORGET!

@texrednface: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or Democrat. We have a problem with the government intruding on our lives,” said Hogsett, who has a 5-year-old son in kindergarten.

So it’s true. Everything Bill fuckin Hogsett intends his son to learn he’ll learn in kindergarten. DFW can go take a flying leap off the friggin moon, nobody will be the worse. And take Dubya with you, moran.

@The Nabisco Quiver: I’m sitting in the Oakland airport listening to some of these morons being interviewed on CNN Headline News. I think that pervasive racism has driven hundreds of thousands of people nuts. Is there any other explanation?

@Tommmcatt Floats: One of my most vivid memories of that day was standing on 42st, while waiting to go back to rehearsal to see if the terrorists were going to be able to stop musical theatre (answer: hell NO!!), watching the jumbotron opposite Mme Tussaud’s with a whole great crowd of people. The screen clearly showed the gaping chasm where the buildings had been. They had only just collapsed and the air was thick with the smoke and dust that lasted for days. A man in front of me kept pointing at the screen telling anyone who’d listen that the buildings were still there they were only hidden. He simply could not believe that they were gone despite the evidence of his own eyes. It was deeply creepy.

@Dodgerblue: I think that pervasive racism has driven hundreds of thousands of people nuts. Is there any other explanation?

That’s Prommie’s specialty, but you’ll recall the anti-Clinton virulence (starting from at least Hillary’s cookie reference), and the JFK hatred apparently included a full-page ad in the Dallas paper the day he and Jackie arrived for a little parade.

I’d call it Liberal Derangement Syndrome, except for the unfortunate acronym. Racism just adds special spice.

@Benedick: I was taking Son of RML to school when I thought to myself “shouldn’t the buildings be collapsing about now? ” And then . . .

@Benedick:

I left New York about a year previous to that. One of my day jobs, though, was actually as a fill-in waiter at the Deuchebank executive restaurant, located, of course, right across the street from the towers.

I remember my ex called (I was living in SF at the time), having gotten off a stopped downtown 9 train and wandering over to the west side highway, where he walked the 50 back up to his apartment. He was devastated.

And I just sat on the couch with my San Francisco boyfriend, watching the footage over and over, while he cried on my shoulder. I had gotten up earlier than he that morning to get to work, and I remember thinking that I this was a movie, some disaster movie. It literally took three-or-four minutes before I changed the channel and accepted that it was real. That was the kind of denial I was experiencing.

Never forget, indeed.

@Benedick: I saw the second tower go down from the 43rd floor of 919 Third. Very eerie seeing just one standing for a while.

@blogenfreude: Since I typically sleep in, a friend had to call me that morning — “Turn on the TV!” So I did, and after a moment I said, “Both of them?”

And then I estimated how close I lived to the Transamerica Pyramid.

I always thought they were such beautiful buildings. When one got inside, nothing seemed to be holding them up. There were no pillars. When I was drafted and fled the country reluctantly accepted a job offer in London, I sailed on the SS New Amsterdam (don’t ask me why I sailed. I was very young and had a trunkload of books I wouldn’t leave behind). But as we sailed out of NY harbor a fire was raging in one of the incomplete buildings. As I remember they were built with no light switches. The lights were always on. Could that be true? Seems dubious but I do remember reading that they were designed to be two pillars of light at the entrance to NY.

@blogenfreude: I didn’t see them collapse. I was on the train and then walking up 8th from Penn Station. But we were sent home that day and it was quite a trip to get to Long Island. Then of course we rehearsed the next two weeks on 42 st and the city was very very extraordinary. The walls of missing people’s pictures, huge piles of flowers blocking the sidewalks outside fire houses, and people behaving with much grace. On the 12th we began with trying to work out how we could possibly go on with rehearsals: and yes, someone (I suspect a musician) did say we must go on or else the terrorists had won.

And scum like that Palin person dares to talk about ‘Real Americans’.

@nojo: You’re right, its not so much racism per se, its just that this time, the racism adds to the virulence. Its really just a stupid, uncivilzed, violent, hatred that does not allow them to accept the legitimacy of anyone being in charge other than themselves.

Uncivilized, focus on this word, uncivilized, in every sense of the word, this is what they are.

They cannot accept the orderly working of democracy, they cannnot accept the peaceful transfer of power, they cannot accept democracy when they are not in the majority, they cannot accept LOSING.

They are barbarians. The thing that keeps every shithole country on earth a shithole is in most cases the simple fact that most people don’t play well with others and have never learned to share; or to put it in other words, their cultures don’t have traditions which inculcate the values necessary for a peaceful democracy. In shithole countries, bannana republics and such, the losers of elections simply refuse to accept the loss, and these countries are kept in a perpetual state of civil war, constant back and forth, retaliation for retaliation for retaliation ad nauseum, and every time they hold an election, both sides cheat, the losers rise up in arms, and the winners fight back with arms.

Our only civil war happened because Southerners refused to accept the election of a president they didn’t like.

These are those same people. Barbarians who refuse to accept democracy, who do not possess the values necessary for democracy to work in a society, tolerance, patience, sportsmanship, decency. They are thugs and bullies and they want power and they are right and everyone who opposes them is evil and does not deserve to live.

Barbarians. Savages. Uncivilized people, not civilized.

And its no accident that they come from the sticks, and not from the civis.

I remember the night the Supreme Court decision installing Bush was released, in 2000, as far more painful and traumatic to me. The towers were a tragedy, yes, but the knowledge of ultimate corruption, that there was no real justice, that the system was rotten from the top, that was worse for me, as I was still making my living in the courts then and laboring under the delusion that courts strive to do justice. Not even do it, mind you, just try. But the conservatives on the supreme court, no, they don’t even try.

@Prommie: 2000 also made clear (if the impeachment hadn’t already done so spectacularly) the intellectual hypocrisy of the Party of Ideas.

They had spent years arguing that Bubba didn’t have a “mandate” because he won with pluralities. So Al wins the popular vote, and the argument immediately shifts to compensate. Fast-forward to last year and one of the most decisive elections of our lifetime, and you get more of the same. They don’t even pretend to be honest these days.

Now if the Demrats would just learn how to deal with winning…

@Prommie: For me, I can still feel the sensation of the air being taken out of the room at a hotel ballroom in Santa Fe when FLA got stole with the cancellation of Gore’s lead. Our Nation has never recovered. I think that’s when I embraced sports talk radio as my escape.

The true irony of our situation is that BHO seems to value “bipartisanship” above all else, even his own agenda which he clearly stated during the campaign. He wins the election, and then he immediately gives up, all in the name of “bipartisanship.” He tosses aside all potentially real solutions to our nation’s problems because they’re not “bipartisan.”

And how has he been rewarded for his extraordinary efforts to work with his political opponents and shun the people who actually supported him? With a tidal wave of insane, psychotic, raving hatred that’s unparalled in contemporary Western countries. If another country acted this way–illegal wars, torture, open kleptocracy, a large, mentally unstable population–the State Department would warn us away from visiting it.

@Original Andrew: “I am the President of all Americans,” I believe was the don’t-be-skeered quote he used at the time.

He won by squatting on the Middle — the ten-percent swing vote — and he’s shown no intention of budging from it. We’ve been seeing the Demrat version of how the Repugs used to play the Religious Right, until the fundies decided to take matters into their own hands.

He also hasn’t shown much interest in “leading” — another word for bipartisanship is “consensus”, and Barry would prefer for everyone else in the room to come to agreement before he weighs in.

Like I said long ago, he’s a transcendent triangulator: You usually don’t hear the gears whirring, like you did with Hillary. His calculations are well-oiled.

And all that said: Yes, you’re right. Since he’s abdicating leadership, someone else has to step in and do it for him. I forget who said it the other day (Rachel?), but if progressives stop acting like a doormat, they’re less likely to get stepped on.

@nojo: I was checking email in Tokyo at 10 pmish when I saw a cryptic message from my aunt “the first tower just collapsed”. WTF? I thought, “turn on the television” I said to Ma Nabisco who was nursing junior. We spent the next hours flipping back and forth between CNN and BBC, CNN actually showed the second tower collapse the Beeb missed it live. I spent the next four hours trying to get a message through to my brother, who worked for the State dept which had been rumored to have bombs in the parking garage.

I met Angelina Jolie the next day, and we rode an elevator in silence together. Very romantic. ADD: who could forget?

That day and for some time, everyone was my friend overseas. Two years later that had changed dramatically.

Ducks on blue turf tonight.

@nojo:

Ed Shultz said that he’s acting like a Senator, not a President. Seemed pretty apt.

@Tommmcatt Floats: Did Ed Shultz also say he’s acting like a pussy?

@Tommmcatt Floats: Actually, what’s happening is that you’ve got the extreme Right saying he’s acting like a tyrant, and the progressive Left saying they wish he would.

@redmanlaw: Hunh? Stillers v. Jagoffs, and Iggles v. somebody. Dogkiller Vick may play an entire half.

@The Nabisco Quiver: Well, I’ll be at “mini-schedule” tonight, in which parents run through a truncated version of their kid’s school schedule, meet the teachers, etc. Looks like punch and cookies for dinner and SportsCenter and NFL Network for recaps unless something is on past 9 pm MDT.

@nojo:

If he could do that and not get fined, he would have.

@texrednface: It’s not just DFW unfortunately. The same thing is happening in Arizona and the statewide Superintendent of Public Instruction is getting in on teh krazee.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/09/03/20090903obama-edu0903.html

broder should be inglouriously basterdized. Then pissed on.

@Jamie Sommers: The very idea that US American citizens are rising up in rage and anger at the idea that their children will be exposed, in school, to their president, and are organizing movements for a mass skip-day, its ugly, strange, weird, it presages something deeply wrong.

For those who say Obama is being cowardly, and not leading, I simply have to suggest, that he knows very well he is sitting on a powderkeg. He knows well that he is president during a time when our political discourse, through years of republicans dragging it down to the depths, is at the most contentious, and just short of open violence, in maybe a century.

And on top of that, the Bush years gave him an economy that was spiralling into total collapse, and it could yet be, this could be just a blip of hope, this recent period of mild and weak and fragile hope, it could be just a blip in a continuing disastrous decline, I am so very afraid it is, myself.

I do not think it exxageration to say that Obama finds himself president at a time when the country is on the brink of both insurrection, reactionary, right wing violence, and economic implosion, and so far, both have been avoided, so far.

I would tread lightly in his shoes, I would.

@redmanlaw: “Ducks on blue turf tonight.”

Yeah, Mr. SFL is screaming as loudly as Nojo is, methinks.

@Promnight: “I would tread lightly in his shoes, I would.”
Yep, yep, yep. I am worried about what the fuck is going to happen this fall.

And why are we all telling 9/11 stories today? Mine is sad but not as visceral as Bloggie and Benedick.

Next week I’m going to see the “American Idiot” opera at the Berkeley Rep on 9/11 – does that mean I hate US ‘Merika?

A: well, yeah, duh

@SanFranLefty: Oh, my Ducks?

Hold on…

Yes, the ticket insert I designed is for September 3. No wonder the office didn’t send me chores today.

@nojo: Uh, yeah. I pointed out to Mr. SFL that The Farm is now above The Ducks in Pac-10 rankings. He gave me a cold shoulder and turned on Snakes on a Plane. Methinks that SFL will not be getting much loving tonight for ragging on U of O.

@SanFranLefty: Double-reference bonus! One of Silent Creative Partner’s tees is featured on the Snakes DVD.

And by “featured,” I mean barely visible for a few frames. But they made us sign a release, so it’s official.

@texrednface: Do you think the Dallas mob would put away their pitchforks if Obama just sat down to read to the childrun, say from a book called The Pet Goat?