GOP Delenda Est

Kevin Drum:

Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.

Like it or not, this is the modern Republican Party. It no longer serves any legitimate purpose. It needs to be crushed and the earth salted behind it, while a new conservative party rises to take its place. This new party should be conservative; brash; ruthless when it needs to be; as simpleminded as any major party usually is; and absolutely dedicated to making Democrats look like idiots. There should be no holds barred except for one: no appeals to racism. None. Not loud ones, not subtle ones. Whatever else it is, it should be a conservative party genuinely open to any person of any color.

When that happens, I will change my mind about how we should fight the Republican Party. Until then, no, I don’t think Brett Kavanaugh deserves any help from Democrats and I don’t think liberals should waste any time tut-tutting over Twitter mockery from 2013 that all of us know perfectly well doesn’t represent any genuine anti-white sentiment.

GOPus delendus est. That’s it. Whatever works best, I’m in.

Tuesday, November 6.  Vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.

Respect for Religion

Divine Irony:

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion’. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and yes, our fearless disrespect.

Salman Rushdie. (via veganoanarchosatano)

Harsh Truth for White Liberals

Just read it.  Then get the fuck out there and work.

The Same Sorry Reason

Via Political Animal:

 

I met her twice, and got her to sign all six of her books for me - every one of them worn from constant re-reading. I stopped dog-earing the pages to mark the best stuff when I realized I was dog-earing all the pages.

 

I think she would tell us two things today: First, that we've been here before, and we'll be here again, and we just have to keep fighting and laughing.  And second, to stop saying we need her back, because everything she knows is in her books.

 

You're right as always, Molly, which is why we miss you so much.

QOTD: What Makes Us Sick

Zandar:

The fear and hatred from "Christians" in this country just makes me physically ill.

Hysteria in Frankfort: Gun Nuts Shitting Themselves in Fear and Excitement

UPDATED

Sheesh. Some holiday-enraged idiot with a gun tries to get past the extremely heavy security at the Health and Family Services building on Main Street, and would-be good-guys-with-guns are locked and loaded all over town.

Rumors flying, people racing for home, but not a peep out of emergency management about anything but approaching tornadoes.

If anybody gets shot, it's going to be the unlucky coworkers of the idiot concealed carriers who have been breaking state law by bringing weapons onto state property.

UPDATE:  Yeah, it;'s bullshit. But that won't stop the hysterical ammosexuals from demanding open carry in state office buildings.  

The Real Threats No Repug Will Ever Acknowledge, Much Less Address

Because real threats take hard work and tax money to deal with. Fake threats just take demagoguery.

Rude Pundit:

In fact, most of the things that are actual threats to the vast majority of Americans were either ignored or barely mentioned (Tuesday) night. Here's a short list of Things That Are Way More Likely to Kill You Than Muslim Terrorists or Hispanic Immigrants. These are the real threats to national security:

a. Christian white men with guns. Hell, you could probably just say, "All the fucking guns," and leave it at that. Not once did domestic terrorism from white people get mentioned, and that's probably because we still have a bizarre inability to label shit like Sandy Hook or the Planned Parenthood shooting "terrorism." And gun deaths in general are the security threat that Republicans dare not speak of.

b. Climate change is going to murder the fuck out of millions of people, barring drastic action. And it is going to propel the citizens of poor nations to ever-increasing acts of desperation, which will lead to more terrorism, which we'll probably deal with by bombing the famine-fucked or drowning nations.

c. Infrastructure collapsing around us. The Department of Transportation estimates that 14,000 people are killed annually due to shitty roads and bridges. By the Rude Pundit's mystical mathematical abilities, that adds up to...carry the three...a fuckload more people dying from the failure to invest in infrastructure than from every terrorist attack on the U.S. in the last, hell, let's say 100 years.

SNIP

So, really, you could say that the entire debate was theatre. It was like a bunch of high schoolers telling each other their favorite creepypastas while sharing some cheap wine they stole from their moms. Ooh, who's gonna scare us worse? Even though, at the end of the night, Slender Man is fuckin' fake and drunk driving is real, but guess which one they're afraid of?

Why Are We Declaring War on a Bunch of Punks?

Because the repugs can't get it up unless we're massacring brown folks. And they can't win elections unless they've got everybody terrified of a boogeyman under the bed.

Digby:

Maybe some of these right wing panic artists will listen to Daniel Larison at the American Conservative. (I doubt it, but it's worth a try.)

The truth is that ISIS and its affiliates don’t pose an “existential threat” to Western societies, and it is laughable to think that they ever could. They arguably don’t pose an “existential threat” to anyone except the people that have unfortunately fallen under their control and possibly their immediate neighbors. At the very least, the threat they pose to us and to other Western nations remains a relatively small and manageable one. The only real “existential threat” that Western nations have faced since WWII was the Soviet Union and their satellites, and in the end the threat from them proved to be a manageable one that the U.S. and its allies successfully faced down and outlasted. ISIS poses a much smaller threat to the U.S. and its allies than the Soviets ever did, and we should not inflate that threat into something that it clearly isn’t. The problem isn’t just that threat inflation is bad analysis (though it is), but that it often leads to reckless and irresponsible policies that aren’t even required to address the danger. Threat inflation prompts us to favor unnecessary and excessive measures here and overseas, and it causes us to obsess over combating certain adversaries to the detriment of other more important interests. Describing something as an “existential threat” is the worst and most irresponsible kind of threat inflation. It is a phrase that ought to be reserved to describe only the most dire threats to our very survival. That doesn’t apply to ISIS or indeed to any terrorist group.

Thank you. But I suspect this is just spitting into the wind. These people deeply desire an "existential" threat so they can justify their free-floating fear of everything and their deep desire for violence to be the silver bullet that will fix it for them. It's primitive human species stuff which civilized leadership from institutions like the church and the government are supposed to mediate. Instead they're stoking it for their own ends.

More rational thought from the Rude Pundit.

Repug Night Terrors

They're looking at the shadow cast on the wall and exaggerating the danger. Every danger.

Political Animal:

I think that Peter Beinart has done a good job of describing the difference between how Republican presidential candidates and President Obama assess the threat from ISIS.

Because the GOP candidates see violent jihadism as a powerful, seductive ideology, they think that many American Muslims are at risk of becoming terrorists, and thus that the United States must monitor them more aggressively. Because Obama sees violent jihadism as ideologically weak and unattractive, he thinks that few American Muslims will embrace it unless the United States makes them feel like enemies in their own country—which is exactly what Donald Trump risks doing.

Obama…believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad. His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).

All the chest-thumping coming from Republicans is based on an elevated assumption of the real threat posed by ISIS. But that’s what happens when the only card you have to play is fear. Behind all the bravado, their message makes America look weak and easily intimidated. President Obama isn’t buying into that for a minute.

Cowards Who Think America is Weak

The Rude Pundit:

This is simple: If you say that the United States or your state or your city or your little shithole by the ditch should ban refugees from Syria because ISIS fighters or Islamic terrorists or Sharia-packin' mules might get into the nation. you are a pussy. Because what you are saying is that you are so afraid of a couple of goatfuckers getting through and blowing themselves up that you would rather cringe in the dark and hide. And you think the nation is so pathetic and weak that those goatfuckers could actually have a shot at destroying Our Way of Life (spoiler: they don't).

The Un-American-ness of "Constitutional Conservatism"

No, you can't argue with people who think letting people marry whom they love is cause for the violent overthrow of the government

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

This isn’t, by the way, just about incitement to violence. All this talk about liberal “tyranny” also illustrates the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of “constitutional conservatism.” Most liberals, even if they really, really hate conservatives, would concede that everybody has the right to contend for their point of view in the arena of elective politics. The central conceit of constitutional conservatism is to deny the equivalence of policy preferences, and to assert that favored conservative policies are permanently enshrined by the Founders—who in turn were inspired by divine and natural law—immune from popular majorities, no matter how large. It helps to understand that when someone like Ted Cruz talks about “liberties,” he’s not just talking about freedom of expression or even of religion, but the right to use your private property however you damn well please free from taxation or regulation or unions.

If you feel your own POV is the only legitimate set of ideas consistent with the Constitution or even the structure of the universe and the Will of God, then you are not going to be interested in compromise or limits on your exercise of power or civility towards the opposition, are you? I’m afraid that is more responsible for what Tom Mann calls “our current distemper” than is usually recognized.

In any event, in the short term progressives, responsible conservatives, and most of all the MSM need to challenge Second Amendment ultras either to repudiate the right to armed insurrection or stop using rhetoric that suggests one of our two major parties is promoting “tyranny” or trying to “destroy the country.”

Choose: Dystopian Hellscape or Powerful National Facing Real Problems

Conservatives have always played the politics of fear and hatred.   

 

Even Especially Ronald Reagan, who announced his candidacy for the presidency and promised to restore "states' rights" while standing not 3 miles from the spot where "defenders of states' rights" murdered three civil rights workers not 15 years earlier.  Reagan, who rode the lies of "welfare queen" and "buying vodka with food stamps" to victory.

 

Which side are you on? 

Digby: 

Republican America is a dystopian hellscape in which evil, violent foreigners are trying to kill us in our beds while rapacious jackbooted government thugs try to wrestle our guns from our cold, dead fingers and Planned Parenthood sociopaths are committing mayhem on children and selling the body parts. And that’s just for starters.

Democratic America is a very powerful nation struggling with a declining middle class and economic insecurity at the hands of the ultra-rich, requiring some energetic government intervention to mitigate income inequality, solve the looming crisis of climate change and manage global crises without plunging the nation into more wars. They also must hold off that anarchistic opposition which sees the world as a dystopian hellscape and that may be the greatest challenge of all.

Homage of Reason

Divine Irony:



↵ Reblogged from sagansense

How Repug Fear Infantalizes Us

I am continually stunned by how people who lived through World War II and the Cold War - genuine existential threats to our democracy let alone existence - can with a straight face demand hysterical overreaction to a bunch of antediluvian goat-fuckers in the desert.

Digby:

"Nothing matter is we aren't safe..." There you go. That excuses any breach of human decency, law and norm. Because I hate to break the news to people, you will never be perfectly safe. We used to be a mature enough society to understand that. But now that we have the Daddy Party infantilizing us, a whole lot of Americans are so easily frightened they just want to suck their thumbs and hear a nice bedtime story about what good girls and boys they are.

Charlie Pierce:

The fact is that a lot of things "matter" even if we're not "safe." Climate change matters. Income inequality matters. Poverty matters. They "mattered" before September 11, 2001 and they "mattered" afterwards and they "matter" now. (They "mattered" before and after the Oklahoma City bombing, for all that. And Lincoln expanded higher education and built the intercontinental railroad with the goddamn Army Of Northern Virginia a few days' march down the road from Washington. They "mattered," too. So did the war. America used to be like that.) If "nothing matters if we aren't safe," then everything is up for grabs if and when some lunatic decides to demonstrate that we're not. Marco Rubio wants to lead a fearful nation. Fine. Let him go find one.

Being White Does Not Make You A Special Snowflake

Oh, just fucking stop it, whites.  This is pathetic.  And it's destroying the fucking country.

Aurin Squire at TPM:

Recently released records show that Cleveland Police charged 12-year-old Tamir Rice with inducing panic and being an “aggravated menace.” He was shot and killed by an officer in less than two seconds while sitting in the park with a toy gun. This development is juxtaposed with the news that a violent biker gang in Waco, Texas shot up a restaurant parking lot and killed nine people. Police arrested 170 armed gang members. Apparently they weren’t an aggravated menace worthy of immediate death. Tamir Rice was an African American, while the biker gangs were not.

This scenario has repeated itself too many times to be coincidence. An 8-year-old child shot and killed by officers while she slept, a 17-year-old killed in the by police in his own home, a 22-year-old immediately shot and killed in a Wal-Mart, and many more cases of unarmed African Americans immediately getting shot down as and labeled as a menace. While on the other side of reality, the Aurora shooter, Timothy McVeigh, and many other armed mass killers are arrested without a scratch on them.

The most dangerous uprising that's threatening America's stability isn't black protests in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. It's taking place among an aging white majority that is losing its bearing on reality and destroying the gears of government, media and public welfare. At its center is an inexplicable, illogical and dangerous fear that some sociologists are now defining as white fragility.

SNIP

White fragility is a termed coined by Robin DiAngelo, an associate professor of education at Westville State University in Massachusetts. In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility. Professor DiAngelo said she came up with the term when she was a diversity trainer for the state of Washington.

“The participants were mostly white, working [in] offices that were 98 percent white, living lives of never having to see people of color, and they were incredibly hostile and mean when discussing anything about race,” said DiAngelo, who’s white. “Some guys would pound their fists on the table in fury at being in a room where this discussion was taking place, many sulked silently.”

SNIP

The strangest thing about white fragility politics is that the detrimental policy results are spread out across race and class. Yet, the political results for the conservative movement priming the pump of white fragility and rage is election victories. And why should they change when they can get large sections of an aging white population to consistently vote for policies proven to statistically hurt their economic chances, personal health, their children’s education, and their very safety?

What do you say to a state like Indiana that rolls back Planned Parenthood for political points based in white fragility and then watches as HIV infection rates explode in the community? What can be said of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and the legislators who knowingly bankrupt the state’s treasury to promote an economic philosophy of tax cuts to the wealthy that result in fewer services, broken infrastructure, suffering in schools, and—in the long run—more deaths? These are not rational decisions. These are fear-based politics that create avoidable disasters in which all suffer. This new wave of segregation fear is surging across the country. In response to the continued white fragility panic of 2008, conservative political movements are set to capitalize on the cycles of manufactured hysteria.

“We are watching the repeal of the 20th century,” Wise said.

The Real Way to Confront Repug Insanity

This deals specifically with the Jade Helm stupidity, but it works for pretty much everything.

Via Juanita Jean, Stonekettle nails the racist, freakazoid crazies.

Read the whole thing, but he concludes:

You all should have grown out of this silly horseshit around about the time you stopped having your daddy check under your bed for monsters.

Stop it. Stop it right now.

If you can’t, then find an adult: have them slap you across the face, HARD, hard enough to knock out what few rotten teeth you have remaining in your pointy head. Have them slap the drool out of you. Have them keep smacking you up side your goddamned head until they knock some fucking sense into you.

This entire thing is a spook story manufactured whole cloth by people who make money, gobs and gobs of money, by preying on the simpletons and the fearful.

If you believe in any of this crap, then you are either mentally ill OR you are so goddamned stupid you shouldn't be allowed any social interaction of any kind without a court appointed keeper.

Stop it. Stop it right now.

"Just because you're paranoid," said Ted Cruz, "doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

Dude, they’re out to get you because you’re paranoid.

Paranoia is a mental illness, not a super power.

And only a raving lunatic would think otherwise. 

Who's Afraid of a Lone Wolf?

Digby:

Terrorism carries a special brand of fear due to its political motivation.

But the "lone wolf" threat in the US? Considering the threat we live with from our fellow "lone wolf" citizens every day, even from political violence, it ridiculously hysterical. Nobody bats an eye at abortion clinics being targeted for years on end. A couple of right wing lunatics gunned down police officers in Las Vegas with a political beef a few months back and we didn't launch a national crusade against it. We can't even sustain any alarm at kids shooting up kids in schools for longer than a couple of days. We hardly even report it anymore it's so old hat. If there's one nation on earth that knows how to keep calm and carry on in the face of random armed misfits gunning down strangers it's us.

SNIP

From what I gather from the comments of various law enforcement officials and terrorism experts, the threat that concerns them is the Lone Wolf scenario. I'm sure it's very scary. But again, what makes it so much scarier than Adam Lanza or James Holmes or Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold? I don't think anyone wants those kinds of killings but we haven't decided to turn ourselves into a full-blown police state to stop them. In fact, we have pretty much done nothing to stop them, even the smallest common sense measures like trying to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill kids. So all this handwringing over Muslim lone wolves seems just a bit over the top.

But it is very convenient and lucrative for certain politicians, news networks and military contractors, so there's that ...

There's a Reason Almost All Suicide Attackers Are Freakazoids

They think they're going to heaven, of course. 

Robert Farley at LGM:

... the question that Krauthammer poses is whether godless communists, who anticipate no reward in heaven, can nevertheless be motivated by nationalistic and ideological commitments to undertake suicide attacks.  The answer is yes.  The answer is also “yes” for Vietnamese Communists, who were sufficiently motivated by nationalistic and ideological commitments to undertake suicide attacks in several instances.

Both Farley and Krauthammer grossly misrepresent the motivations of the godless.  Yes, atheists can be motivated by nationalistic and ideological commitments to undertake suicide attacks, but we rarely do so.

It's not because we anticipate no reward in a heaven we know doesn't exist.  It's because we know this is the only life we get, and do not risk it lightly.

Freakazoids of every flavor live only for an afterlife that doesn't exist. They have no respect for this life. Instead of living this one life to its fullest, they constantly rejected and sacrifice any and all present joy in the moment in the futile home that an invisible sky wizard will be propitiated and save them from eternal torment.

It makes them enormously susceptible to the blandishments of terrorists.  "You're not having any fun in this life, anyway - why not go out with a bang?  There's a spot on a cloud next to your invisible friend waiting for you."

Try that with an atheist and she's likely to die laughing - a far better way to go than by blowing yourself up.

Theists die in fear, terrified that even the most sacrificial, buy-bull following life is not enough to save them from a lake of fire.

Atheists may die wishing we had more time with those we love, but we do not fear death because we know it is a mere end: one last breath, then nothing.

Atheists are the true "pro-lifers." We cherish every precious moment of this life and make the most of it.  Atheists live to ensure that on our deathbeds, we do not regret that we failed to live life to its fullest.

QOTD: Terrorism Fear-Mongering

Charlie Pierce:

We are back in the hands of the spooks again. In all of our institutions, secrecy and the magical thinking of the intelligence priesthood inflitrates itself like foul water after a storm, bringing rot we cannot see until it brings everything down. Then the members of the priesthood put on their most glittering robes and blame the heretics out there who did not believe, the infrastructure of disbelief that the priesthood's own mendacity constructed within the incense-clouded cathedral it has made of our fears.

Formalized Panic

Divine Irony:



atheistjack:
via We Fucking Love Atheism