Uniformly Funny

You've probably figured out by now that I don't like getting blindly-forwarded, guilt-trip inducing, "support our troops the way I say you should, or you're un-American" email messages.

A friend sent me one a few days ago that starts like this:

Half Man - Half Boy

If you read this, you WILL forward it on.

You just won't be able to stop yourself.

The average age of the military man is 19 years. He is a short haired, tight-muscled kid who, under normal circumstances is considered by society as half man, half boy. Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer, but old enough to die for his country.

...and I unloaded on him with this reply:

I find it neither patriotic nor worthwhile to forward an email message designed to perpetuate national priorities favoring the privileged few over the less well-off many by taking advantage of the idealism of those very "Half Man - Half Boy" troops it disingenuously pretends to champion.

I'll continue to support our troops by working to show folks who forward such messages the difference between jingoism and patriotism and to elect leaders who espouse policies which see war as a last resort rather than as the centerpiece of foreign policy.

Today, I have reason to believe that my friend is discovering that sappy emails and yellow "ribbons" made in China and stuck on the bumper of a gas-guzzling SUV do not constitute support for our troops. Like wakes and memorial services for the dead, they exist primarily to make those left behind feel good, and they do absolutely nothing for those who have undergone the experience which is being commemorated.

Just a few minutes ago I received the following from him:

OK! OK! Try this.

THANK GOD THEY CAN STILL MAINTAIN THEIR SENSE OF HUMOR OVER THERE!!!

God Bless Our Troops!

God Bless America

Indeed!

Our troops are very good at making lemonade out of the lemons which life and the inept Bush administration has thrown at them.

They're also quite capable of taking care of themselves without sappy, self-serving acts of faux-patriotism from us.

She's a Witch

It looks as if the GOP has been watching old Monty Python films for ideas as it prepares to oppose President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as the replacement for David Souter on the Supreme Court.

The attacks on Sotomayor's character currently streaming from the hate and fear-mongers of the rabid right make about as much sense and use the same logic as this video clip in which a woman is captured, dressed as a witch, tried, and condemned by a group of ignorant and frightened men who aren't the least bit interested in the truth.

Click on the image and see if you don't agree.

Supreme Irony

Funny in its absurdity, yet sad in its spot-on accuracy, this video "newscast" illustrates the abject stupidity of the strategy the GOP has embraced in response President Obama's efforts at finding bipartisan solutions to the economic, health care, energy, global-warming, and other problems facing America.

The clip presents how the Party of No might respond if President Obama were to name Jesus Christ as his nominee to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court.

Click here or on the image below to watch this supremely clever lampoon.

Here's a sample of the fun: GOP concerned about Savior's "troubling Middle Eastern ties."

Washing Away Their Sins?

On May 22, conservative radio hosts Erich "Mancow" Muller got waterboarded, and after lasting just six or seven seconds, he admitted it is "absolutely torture."

Click the image to watch the video.

Now that one of their own has been baptized in the truth, it's time for fear-mongers like Dick Cheney and the frightened, juvenile sheep who follow them to shut up and let the adults who were elected last November get on with the job of cleaning up the mess they left us in.

Rebranding the Right

For more than thirty years, the radical right has hoodwinked Americans into voting against their own best interests through a coordinated and well-financed strategy which used hate and fear mongering ads to make wedge issues dominate elections.

This tactic has been quite effective in eliminating both reasoned discourse and logical thinking from political debate, replacing them with vacuous, emotional appeals and outright lies carefully wrapped in the flag or couched in the guise of religious "truth" - often both.

It was the method chosen by "born-again" George W. Bush to lie us into war by claiming simultaneously that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and that God had put him in office to protect America.

Now, Roger Simon of POLITICO reports that, despite the written objection of their Chairman Michael Steele, the RNC is mounting a campaign to rebrand the Democratic Party as the Democrat Socialist Party.

In light of this initiative and the fact that the GOP is rapidly turning into a southern regional party, I offer the Democrats a fair and balanced rejoinder to the RNC's stratagem in the form of an updated logo and motto for the once-proud Party of Lincoln.

Sen. Inhofe's 700 Club

Q: When is a scientist not a scientist (or one with no expertise in climate science)?

A: When you find his or her name on the list of 700 "prominent scientists" used by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) to reject bona fide scientific evidence of global warming.

File this one under: "You may be entitled to your opinion, Sen. Inhofe, but you are not entitled to make up your own facts or to use a bogus list of "experts" to force your religious beliefs on others."

Click either the link or the image below to read INHOFE'S 'EXPERTS' by Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

In a related story, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will not attend tonight's White House Correspondents Dinner. "First Dude" Todd Palin will take her place at the event so that the governor, who also denies the existence of global warming, can "visit parts of Alaska that have been struggling with the most serious flooding in decades."

RNC Clown College

Have you ever been to the circus? Do you remember how you laughed when all those clowns got out of that itty-bitty car?

Well, once you view this slideshow, you won't be able to think of anything else the next time you see the GOP congressional delegation troop down the Capitol steps en masse toward the waiting microphones in order to demonstrate their 100% solidarity against a bill passed by the Democratically controlled Congress or to unanimously denounce, out of hand, President Obama's latest attempt to address one of the problems facing America.

The only difference is that instead of a tiny car these clowns come out of a very small and constantly shrinking tent.

Click on the image and enjoy the RNC Clown College!

Specter of Change

With Arlen Specter switching parties, it has become quite clear that Karl Rove's dream of a permanent GOP majority is disappearing faster than the polar ice caps. Claims that Specter was a turncoat who was purged from the GOP for the sake of party purity suggest a debacle-in-the-making for the Republican party.

Comparing the meltdown of the GOP's electoral prowess, built up over three decades, with the visible effects of global warming on eons-old polar ice seems apropos. Both threaten turmoil; yet both continue apace to the accompaniment of a steady stream of denials of their very existence emanating from the The Party of No.

If the GOPs tack to the rabid-right fringe of the political spectrum (AKA its "base") continues, it won't be long before the remnant of Rove's aspirations will most closely resemble a lone, recalcitrant, soot-covered snowball in Hell.

Let the carping begin.

She Gets It!

John Demjanjuk is an alleged Nazi death camp guard who has lived in Ohio for fifty-eight years. He currently faces deportation to Germany to face 29,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Marian Woodson is a seventy-three year old woman from Columbus, Ohio who, as a child, spent time in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines at about the same time Demjanjuk is alleged to have conducted mass murder for the Nazis.

Her letter to the editor appeared in the May 4 Columbus Dispatch:

John Demjanjuk likely will be prosecuted under the Nuremberg war-crimes protocols. That group established unequivocally that "I was only following orders" is not a viable defense.

The individual Nazis who made the decisions and gave the orders were tried for crimes against humanity and hanged. Members of the Bush administration made the decisions and gave the orders to engage in torture. President Barack Obama is on the horns of a dilemma: whether or not to prosecute. Should he risk the enormously divisive social and political costs of doing so?

I'm a 73-year-old retiree. I spent my childhood in Camp Holmes, a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines. This issue has had powerful resonance with me ever since I saw the first reports of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Could we, as a country, do the equivalent of "shunning"? Could our allies join us? Could the United Nations issue a statement? Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are too blinded by their arrogance to recognize that they were an American "axis of evil."

There are too many critical issues that the president has to deal with to waste the time and energy on this.

Obama already made a powerful statement repudiating the actions of the previous administration by ordering the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

MARIAN J. WOODSON

Columbus

Clearly, Ms. Woodson is someone who gets it.

As serious as the allegations may be that members of the previous administration committed war crimes, she understands the importance of maintaining focus on the issues of the economy, climate change, health care, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Middle East Peace, and Social Security.

Starting a "Who knew what and when?" sideshow would undoubtedly derail the opportunity to implement the changes Americans voted for when they elected Barack Obama to be their president last November.

A Study in Irony

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has switched to the Democratic party after twenty-nine years as a Republican lawmaker. This is but the latest in a series of events which underscore the truth of the oft quoted axiom attributed to the American editor and author, Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), "Politics makes strange bedfellows."

The Democratic party is and always has been a rag-tag coalition of diverse factions within the populace. Will Rogers described it best when he said, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." He also observed, "Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans."

Until they switched sides, lawmakers from the "Solid South" were Democrats. Known as Dixiecrats, they were but one faction within the Democratic coalition, and their power was necessarily tempered and checked by the need to compromise in order to achieve any of their objectives.

Then in 1964 President Lyndon Johnon signed the Civil Rights Act into law; and, in one of the great ironies in American political history, the champions of Jim Crow Laws defected and were welcomed with open arms into the Party of Lincoln.

Once that had occurred, it was but a matter of time until the other shoe dropped, and drop it most certainly did.

Because of its adherence to conservative principles, the Republican party is ideologically opposed to change. In the past this was its great strength, serving as a check against the hasty passage of irresponsible legislation. But with the addition of the Dixiecrats, it became the GOP's achilles heel.

It didn't take long for the newly minted Republicans to realize that they could dominate the party using the "traditional" tactics of intimidation and fear-mongering which had allowed them to maintain segregation in the South for nearly a century after the end of the Civil War.

Thus, in 2009 America is a country where a black man from the party which coddled the Dixiecrats for so many years serves as President while conversely, and perversely, the once-proud Party of Lincoln has rejected the ideals of the Great Emancipator in favor of those of the Old Confederacy.

Go figure!