Read Every Third Word Backwards And You'll See It, Man

by dday

Here's the text of the big speech that will indoctrinate our kids and turn them into a socialist Army of children crusaders. Sure, the message to the kids appears to be to stay in school and work hard and reach their potential. But everyone knows that it's not the text, it's the subtext. For example, I heard that the camera was going to show Obama from the waist down, and his smooth pelvic thrusts and hip twists would turn the kids into violent, sex-starved maniacs. I think he learned it all from this book.



Sadly, America's great hero in fighting back against messages to children about the value of hard work, Florida GOP chair Jim Greer, is now cravenly capitulating by approving of the Obama speech. How could he? Doesn't he know that Obama's eyes have the power to hypnotize the pre-teen set into becoming unthinking, rabid, spittle-flecked followers of the grisly philosophy of moderate technocratic fixes that fall short of sweeping changes and keep in place the dominant corporate power structure? Now is not the time to give up! Just because we got rid of one communist (green jobs? Try red jobs!) doesn't mean that others aren't lurking.

Yours in the resistance,

A crazy person

P.S. As I was saying.

Truthers, Birthers, And Their Proper Side Of The Fence

I've seen Van Jones speak and had the opportunity to talk to him at the DNC last year. I'm going to rerun a bit of that discussion and have you tell me if these are the words of a Communist:

On green jobs, which is Jones' real focus area, he stressed that we need to move the environmental conversation from a cultural one to a political one. The green-collar economy "can be a place for people to earn money, not spend money. We need collective action for green citizenship, to create the jobs of the future in a Green New Deal. As long as carbon is free we're never going to move forward." He was pleased by the recent efforts by municipalities and states (green jobs bills have been passed in Massachusetts and Washington state, and the US Conference of Mayors is on board as well), but recognizes that the federal government must be involved as well. "This is about laws, not gizmos. Technology cannot be the savior. This has to be a bottom-up, inside-outside AND a top-down strategy. If the Feds are MIA, human life will be MIA in the future."

We talked about the offshore drilling debate, where Jones clearly stated that the Republicans won the day by lying to the American people. He had three major points:

• There is no such thing as American oil. There is oil drilled by multinationals that is sent overseas to China and India. American offshore driling will do nothing to solve any American oil problems.

• We banned drilling in offshore areas not to save birds and fish, but because of coastal families and coastal communities, because kids were walking into the water and coming out with oil on them, because property values were plunging. Democrats should not be willing to throw away America's beauty for a 2-cent solution in 10 years.

• We've seen the new phenomenon of the "dirty greens," who want to have an "all of the above strategy" on energy, with solar and wind, but also clean coal and drilling offshore and shale and all these dirty polluters. "All of the above" is not a strategy. It's not a wise choice, but a stupid swipe at a persistent problem.

That sounds like pretty mainstream liberal conceptions on energy and the environment. Jones was an activist who went into the government because he saw the need for a federal strategy to deal with green jobs.

But because he was previously involved with Color of Change, who has engineered a successful boycott of Glenn Beck, the Foc News crew has wanted to collect Jones' scalp. So they point to comments and replay them over and over. Not really anything he did, but things he said (ooh, he called Republicans assholes! What delicate sensibilities these chaps have), things he's signed. Although, I have to agree, this was certainly a mistake.

President Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones has been targeted again and again by conservatives for his controversial views and now they’ll have another item to use as fodder.

Mr. Jones signed a statement for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into what the Bush Administration may have done that “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

Jones has thus far apologized for prior statements and said he didn't agree "now or ever" with the 911 Truth letter. But if he has to leave his job at the White House, that will be the reason. And he absolutely made a mistake

But it brings up something interesting. There are now around a dozen Republican members of Congress who have co-sponsored legislation, essentially asking the President to reveal his birth certificate. The Birther phenomenon is at least as crazy and irresponsible as the Truther phenomenon. Why would it be OK to have 12 members of Congress who are conspiracy theorists, and not one in the White House? Now, the members of Congress would tell you they're not conspiracy theorists. So would Van Jones.

The range of debate that's acceptable and unacceptable keeps changing, somebody send me a scorecard.

More Pejoratives, Please!

Republicans, lacking perspective on anything anymore, have now resorted to calling the BCS Communist.

Texas Rep. Joe Barton likened college football's Bowl Championship Series to "communism" Friday, even as he made the case that the system is what it is because of money.

In his opening remarks during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's commerce, trade and consumer protection subcommittee, Barton — the panel's ranking Republican — recalled the hearing he held on the same matter several years ago.

"That time, I had hoped through a spirit of volunteerism, the BCS would decide to go to a playoff system," he said. "That hasn't happened yet. It is interesting that people of good will — I think everybody on whatever side of the issue is a person of good will — keeps trying to tinker with the current system."

"It's like communism, you can't fix it."

The BCS, of course, is an oligarchic plutocracy, so Barton didn't even get the political science right.

I think we have to take up a collection for the wingnuts so they can come up with a new set of epithets to hurl at their enemies. Clearly these ones aren't working. In fact, they're only making people appreciate Communism and socialism more. I hope they don't start calling Democrats mass murderers - wouldn't want that to become popular.

Who's The Cult Leader, Now?

This "Obama is a cult" thing is starting to fly around in the media, and yet things like this go virtually unnoticed:

Few visitors will venture far from the usual sites to see a spectacular exhibit -- just a short walk from the Mall -- that so very much captures the spirit, the essence, the greatness of this shining city on a hill.

Yes, it's the beautifully designed photo homage to one of our nation's leaders, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson. The photo exhibit is boldly and proudly displayed in the lobby of HUD's headquarters building, itself a dreadful gray relic of Great Society architecture.

Tour groups need not even go through the inviting metal detectors to admire 20 large, color photographs of the secretary, each about 2 feet by 3 feet. No fewer than five of them feature Jackson with President Bush-- in the Rose Garden, in the Oval Office, chatting together, coming down the steps at the Capitol.

The photographs cover an entire wall of the lobby as you enter, passing two other photos, the smaller official ones, of Bush and his old buddy from Texas days, side by side to greet you.

I mean, we have a White House Chief of Staff who has a wall collection of pictures of Bush's HANDS at key moments in his life.

And we're talking about some OTHER politician leading a cult?

This, of course, is an example of the attacks we're going to start seeing with regularity if Obama, as presumed, becomes the nominee. We'll see more baseless insanity masquerading as analysis like this:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.

Shorter National Review writer - I knew someone who knew someone who was part black and part Jewish, therefore Obama is a Communist!!!1! Almost as good as there was a poet from Hawaii named Frank who joined the Communist Party at some point, therefore...

These stories aren't meant to convince anybody, they serve as a backdrop. It manifests itself when the right finds a bill or some policy paper that they can elevate into a full-fledged hissy fit, as they are now doing in a very off-the-radar-screen kind of way:

It isn't a high-profile bill, but the Global Poverty Act has lit up the conservative blogosphere, and even Rush Limbaugh has gotten into the act.

Quietly approved by the House of Representatives last fall with bipartisan support, the bill, sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., would require the president to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to help reduce extreme global poverty.

Conservative critics, including Limbaugh, Tony Perkins — who heads the Family Research Council — and others, claim that the measure would cost U.S. taxpayers $845 billion over the next dozen or so years. They also charge that it would tie the United States to the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which, among others things, calls for banning "small arms and light weapons" and ratifying the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty and the Convention on Biological Diversity [...]

Smith says there's no link and points out that there's no additional spending mandated in his bill.

He said the attacks weren't aimed at him but at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he recruited last year to be the bill's chief Senate sponsor. Smith is the chairman of the Obama campaign in Washington state.

Limbaugh, according to a transcript of his radio show, last week called the bill an effort to "soak U.S. taxpayers again to fund global, liberal feel-good garbage."

So it's not enough that (insert liberal here) will steal our hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving poor in this country, it's now that (insert liberal here) will steal our hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving poor all over the world. And with the background of "Obama is a Communist" from the far right, and probably worse from various email forwards and other sludge, the pieces fit together. Obama wants to realize Che's vision and install one world government to destroy the American way of life and make us all wear burqas, even the men, while the lucky duckies in Benin live it up with our cash.

(By the way, isn't Bush spending a week in Africa, the last place where he can show his face, to tout these kind of "handouts" like investment in decent medical care to stop the spread of AIDS and malaria?)

The progenitor of this "Obama is the Communist Robin Hood" attack that ties it up all in a bow is the same guy who's been pushing many of the far-right attacks on Obama, including the one that he knew some Communist named Frank in Hawaii.

The dustup began last week when Cliff Kincaid, a columnist for Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org), a conservative news-media watchdog organization, dismissed the bill and linked it to an effort by Democrats to burnish Obama's legislative credentials. His original column was widely distributed on Web sites ranging from www.fishingbuddy.com to www.capitolhillcoffeehouse.com.

On Wednesday, Kincaid ratcheted up his criticism.

"This is how the Washington game of spending more of your money works," he wrote. "This is a budget buster that siphons your hard-earned tax dollars to the U.N. and the rest of the world."

This guy is paid, and probably very well, by the wingnut noise machine to put these things out there into the ether and then find something to make the ridiculous sound plausible.

In fact, if there's any group that characterizes the behavior of a cult - moving in lockstep, making up wild fantasy stories that they will themselves and others into believing, ignoring mountains of evidence to arrive at their conclusions - it's the wingnut welfare crowd. Of course, that's the cult of the "I-Know-Where-My-Bread-Is-Buttered."