Best. Blog. Entry. Ever.

Driftglass smacks down Tom Friedman:

But yes, Tom, we are at war with Islamic terrorists.

And since we are at war, we should be taking every measure to fight them intelligently, using every tool at our disposal. And, conversely, every time someone gives aid and comfort to our Enemies -- every time someone makes it easier for them to recruit new blood and harder for us fight them – that person deserves public censure, prison and, if necessary, a firing squad.

But on the face of your Flat Earth, Tom, our enemies are Small and we are Gargantuan.

Like the Titan that we are, we have to be very careful where we put our feet. We can roll over while watching a ball game and crush entire economies. One especially zippy ad campaign for Coke can obliterate a local deity.

Now some of our more thuggish and brick-stupid citizens think this is cool. They are moral and theological weaklings and pussies and like all those of their ilk, they can only overcome their mental and emotional impotence and feel the flush of what they mistake for courage by beating the shit out of other, weaker people.

We call these types “Republicans”.

Others of us very much like all of the amenities afforded to us by the luck of the birth-lottery that landed us in the United States. We love our country. We love what it is supposed to stand for, and against. We love the liberty of it. The freedom of motion and belief and the Constitutionally-burned-on-fucking-the-motherboard ideal of tolerance that makes the whole thing go.

And boy-howdy do we hate it when so-called-Christian Americans work day and night to eviscerate that ONE thing that sets us apart from fascist and theocratic states.

It is unarguably true that, time and again, we have failed and we have fallen and we have come up short when we measure ourselves against our own high-flow rhetoric.

So what? The key is to keep trying. The solution to the problems of Democracy is More Democracy.

OTOH, the eternal Enemy of Democracy is Theocracy.

Everything in which we take a measure of justifiable pride is made possible by having a Tolerant and Explicitly Secular Nation, and every time an enemy rises up to harm us, they march under the banner of God’s Mandate. Or the Divine Power of the Dear Leader, or the Chairman, or the Fuhrer...but it all comes to the same thing.

On the face of your Flat Earth, Tom, we cast by-far the longest, deepest shadow. There really isn't even a close second. And in spite whatever megakill-the-brown-people fantasies Limbaugh and Cheney and DeLay jerk off to at night, we really can’t just slaughter everyone who pisses us off.

Or, to very aptly paraphrase Victor Lazlo from “Casablanca”, “What if you murdered all of them? From every corner of your Empire, thousands would rise to take their places.”

“Even Rumsfeld can't kill that fast.”

[snip]

So I’m sure you will agree that presenting a Fanatical Fundamentalist face to the world, and openly using the word “secular” and “tolerant” as partisan pejoratives would be an insanely stupid way to fight this war...and yet that is exactly what we have done and continue to do.

And as long as Republicans run this country, and they are run by scum like Frist and Cheney, Dobson and Falwell, this will be our fate.

As long as the owners of the GOP insist publicly that we are a Christian Nation first and foremost, we will continue to drive away potential friends and give aid and comfort to our enemies.

As long as the leaders of this country openly make war on the very idea of a Free Press and state that judges should bend a knee to the whims of Tom DeLay and his Christian Sharia and kick the shit out of gays in the name of Jesus every time they need a few votes...as long as this is the case, the Republican Party acts as nothing less that a traitorous Fifth Column for our terrorist enemies.

You wrote: "Whenever they are exposed, they react the next day," Mr. Carmon said. "No one wants to be exposed in the West as a preacher of hate."

But what about in the West, Tom? Why is it that not a single Christopath with a megaphone in our country fears being exposed as a, “preacher of hate.”

Shit, why are they actually proud of it? And why does every, single Republican of note cower like beaten, temple eunuchs every time douchbags like Ken Mehlman or Mary Matlin or Pat Robertson shows the nakedly hateful face of the GOP on nation television?

More here. Do go read the whole thing. It's worth it.

Johnny, we hardly knew ye

So much for the Straight Talk Express:

Stephanopoulos (reading the text of the Classified Information NonDisclosure Agreenent that White House employees are required to sign):"I have been advised that any breach of this Agreement may result in the termination of any security clearance I hold; removal from any position of special confidence and trust requiring such clearances; or the termination of my employment..."

Stephanopoulos: Do you believe that this agreement should be abided by?

McCain: I do, but that also implies that someone knowingly revealed...

Stephanopoulos: This covers negligent disclosures

McCain: Again I don't know what the definition of "negligent" is.

It's sad, really, to see someone who wasn't cowed by the Viet Cong be so completely emasculated by a White House operative who spread filthy rumors about his wife and child five years ago.

(hat tip: Americablog)

Another pretty young woman missing; this one warrants no coverage

Jazz informs us that a pretty young woman from South Philadelphia has been missing since Monday -- and the story has received ZERO coverage from the MSM, save for one article from the local CBS affiliate.

Go check out Jazz' entry, and note the appearance of the woman. She's pretty, she's pregnant, this story OUGHT to be all over the cable news networks hungry for programming, right? Yet it isn't.

Gee, do you think her pigmentation has something to do with it?

Have you no decency, sir?

WaPo:

"THIS IS HIGHLY usual," declared a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when asked this week whether the request by committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) for information from three climate scientists was out of the ordinary. He and his boss are alone in that view. Many scientists and some of Mr. Barton's Republican colleagues say they were stunned by the manner in which the committee, whose chairman rejects the existence of climate change, demanded personal and private information last month from researchers whose work supports a contrary conclusion. The scientists, co-authors of an influential 1999 study showing a dramatic increase in global warming over the past millennium, were told to hand over not only raw data but personal financial information, information on grants received and distributed, and computer codes.

This is your new Republican Party -- it rules by intimidation, harassment, and threats.

A reliable toaster

Following the 10th anniversary of the television series M*A*S*H, I recall a critic saying that this excellent series just chugs along, year after year, like a good, reliable toaster.

The same could be said for Frank Rich, whose journey from the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, to the op-ed page, back to A&L, now has him back on the op-ed page where he belongs:

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

Only 36 hours after the John Roberts unveiling, The Washington Post nudged him aside to second position on its front page. Leading the paper instead was a scoop concerning a State Department memo circulated the week before the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame, in literally the loftiest reaches of the Bush administration - on Air Force One. The memo, The Post reported, marked the paragraph containing information about Ms. Plame with an S for secret. So much for the cover story that no one knew that her identity was covert.

But the scandal has metastasized so much at this point that the forgotten man Mr. Bush did not nominate to the Supreme Court is as much a window into the White House's panic and stonewalling as its haste to put forward the man he did. When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear.

As White House counsel, he was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation. This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap. "Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing. Mr. Gonzales was in the thick of the Plame investigation, all told, for 16 months.

Thus is Mr. Gonzales's Supreme Court aspiration the first White House casualty of this affair. It won't be the last. When you look at the early timeline of this case, rather than the latest investigatory scraps, two damning story lines emerge and both have legs.

[snip]

The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

Northside Produce Market, July 2005

We sniffed, poked and taste-tested our way around Northside Produce Market last weekend. Once again the sun was shining, wicker baskets and canvas carry bags were in abundance, and it seemed like anyone who was anyone was sporting a pampered pooch as well.L-R: Coriander and chilli pesto; pistachio and green olive pesto; and rocket and almond pesto from Pastabilities.Their chilli jam is dee-lish

Northside Produce Market, July 2005

We sniffed, poked and taste-tested our way around Northside Produce Market last weekend. Once again the sun was shining, wicker baskets and canvas carry bags were in abundance, and it seemed like anyone who was anyone was sporting a pampered pooch as well.L-R: Coriander and chilli pesto; pistachio and green olive pesto; and rocket and almond pesto from Pastabilities.Their chilli jam is dee-lish