As to Wright himself, well, I have my own thoughts. First and foremost, I guess I am no longer the delicate fainting flower that most other bloggers and media commenters are these days. I spent several years in the early days of this blog being all sorts of outraged about petty bullshit. I spent days calling Ted Rall an asshole (he still is, I think), days opining about what an asshole Michael Moore is, and so on. I got my panties all in a bunch about Ward Churchhill (also a dick), and stupid things Bill Maher may or may not have said, and so on.
And you know what? They may be assholes, or jerks, or whatever term you want to use, but they sure as hell didn’t run this economy into the ground. They aren’t responsible for turning a huge surplus into a several hundred billion dollar deficit. I have yet to read any memos from Barbra Streisand detailing how we should spy on American citizens.
And so it is with Jeremiah Wright. Is he a jerk? I don’t think there is any argument to be made that lately he hasn’t in fact been one big, giant, puckered asshole. His ego tour the past few days was all about him, but so what? I blame the media as much as I blame him. Is it an offensive notion that the government created aids? Absolutely, but I refuse to get all bent out of shape about it, because the government that tortures people and ran the Tuskegee experiment and wiretapped MLK for years opens itself up to crazy accusations like that.
Read it all. And if you happen to be in close proximity to Joe Scarborough or Larry Johnson, please rub their fucking noses in it.
One thing that may shock a few people who have only started visiting Rumproast in the last few months is that one of the most heavily-trafficked posts I’ve written was one supporting Hillary Clinton against what I saw as unfair attacks by Chris Matthews. I thought the media and Matthews in particular were willfully trying to dictate the outcome of the primaries and I found the piling on unseemly after Clinton suffered just one, albeit shocking, primary loss (Iowa). You couldn’t find one cable news channel that wasn’t declaring that Hillary was toast pre-New Hampshire and trying to yank the will of the people away from the electorate.
We’re now seeing the media pull the same stunt with Obama and their incessant and self-serving obsession with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Once again, they’re manufacturing a controversy and flicking the auto-repeat switch to keep it wedged into as many news cycles as possible. That beady-eyed butthead Joe Scarborough can’t got three seconds without barking out Wright’s name like a Tourette’s tic and, unfortunately, a majority of MSNBC’s hosts and anchors who follow him are nearly as bad. Many pro-Hillary bloggers have become even worse, cheering about how Wright is “the gift that keeps on giving” and plopping YouTube embed code for anti-Wright videos into every other of their posts. There used to be a time when liberal blogs defended Democrats against repugnant and relentless intellectually dishonest media attacks, now it seems to be all the rage to not only endorse those attacks but to outdo them. The political blogosphere has become, in many ways, no better than mainstream media, if not worse.
So I’m giving a tip of the hat to pro-Hillary blogger Riverdaughter from The Confluence, who I’ve taken issue with before, for trying to inject a little sanity into the debate. While she writes a few things in her “Whoa! The wheels are coming off Obama’s campaign” post and her follow-up comments I disagree with, overall she makes some very thoughtful and intelligent points regarding Wright and the media’s manipulation of what she refers to as a “manufactured scandal” that several pro-Hillary bloggers and supporters should take to heart. And if you’re an Obama supporter it may do you well to read her post and her comments and realize that there may be enough wood to build a bridge across the Great Divide regardless of how this fucking mess turns out.
“We had two very good men, and men of faith, run for president in 2000 and 2004,” [Hillary Clinton] said. “Large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand, or relate to, or respect their ways of life.”
Granted, you could argue that “large segments of the electorate” didn’t respect Kerry’s “way of life,” but I don’t think for a second you could say that about Gore. If anything, they didn’t respect the “way of life” of the President he served under and you could make the argument that hurt him in 2000. What a gaffe.
Besides that, her performance was pretty awful overall. She looked spiteful at the beginning slinging her new desperate “elitist” charges at Obama (and Kerry and Gore) and when answering the other questions she looked, for the most part, like a high schooler who didn’t study for an oral exam, padding out her answers with rambling, ill-conceived bullshit.
Obama flubbed the initial “bitter” question. His answer should have been much stronger (he had to know it was coming), but he pretty much sailed from there, sounding far more presidential, thoughtful and knowledgeable than Rodham From Day One. The crowd responded to his answers much better as well.
Big advantage to Obama, especially if his team works that Gore gaffe to their advantage.
The word “squeeb” is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and admirable animal. In the ocean there’s almost nothing you’d rather be than a squid, one of nature’s most perfect predators — fast, resilient, ruthless, more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a squid, I tell you.
But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It’s a spineless, squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn’t stand a chance in a cage match with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter during a presidential election season.
That’s especially true now, during a “controversy” like this latest flap over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst — panicky, gutless, acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s also a great example of how the presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders. Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom, through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest — survival of the Squeebiest.
I don’t think Clinton brining [sic] up the issue of Wright was a matter of keeping the story alive. The polls show that nearly 90% of Americans already know and have an opinion about it, that’s a done deal. Rather, Clinton was belatedly putting some needed distance between herself and Wright. [emphasis added—ed.]
Jeffrey Goldberg is a self-described “erstwhile optimist” regarding the future of the Middle East and he’s penned a well-laid-out and even-keeled nutsheller for The Atlantic about the many different ways that region can head after we threw a stink bomb into the middle of it. It’s highly recommended if you need to get your head around that mess and amidst all of that good learnin’, he’s managed to tuck in a few gems like this:
Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurdistan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.
Neowrong, time and time again. I don’t think history will ever forgive us for turning our foreign policy over to those wrong-headed fucktards.
I’m sure by now most of you have seen the video of Tom Cruise’s mindfuckerrific ode to Scientology that’s leaked onto the web (part 2 of 6 in the YouTube player below), but there’s a lot more footage from the award ceremony and accompanying crazy available. It’s the longest blowjob Tom Cruise ever got in his life and it all ends with lusty “hip hip hoorays” directed at an oversized portrait of L. Ron Hubbard. Watch it all before the litigious Scientologists get it yanked off of YouTube.
UPDATE: Oh well, that didn’t last long. All of the videos but the well known one have been pulled and this message has been added to the censored pages: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Church of Scientology International.” See below the fold for options on downloading AVI files of the full awards ceremony.
PROBLEM CORRECTED: All six pieces available for viewing again below.
Too funny. I love it when “good” Christians talk dirty. And I love it even more when they mix up their disgust for homosexuals and Muslims into one gooey stew of stupidity.
