Our Leader's base

Sources:

CBS News Poll 1/4/07
AP/AOL Poll 12/31/06

Jon Tester's powerful mojo

Representative Sen. Ed Butcher
Montana House of Representatives

Dear Rep. Sen. Butcher,

The last few years ain't been easy for you. It must have hurt bad when you lost your state senate seat to Jon Tester after redistricting, so bad, you still wear a name badge that says "Representative Sen. Ed Butcher." Most people would have probably chosen to move on after four years, but not you. Have you ever wondered why that is? I mean it's more than a little obsessive, don't you think? Heck, it's down right unnatural.

As you know, Tester is an organic farmer, and that basically translates into hippy--that crew cut doesn't fool anybody. Have you considered the possibility that Jon Tester might have cursed you with some of his organic farmer hippy mojo. It'd explain all of the problems you've had Indians. Hippies love Indians.

Think about it. Don't you think people overreacted a bit on Thursday when you referred to Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy as "Chief Windy Boy" and asked him if his gavel was a war club? I can't figure out why people got so upset about it. It was just a bit of your basic Republican humor. Obviously, Tester's mojo was to blame.

The same holds true for that time a couple of years ago when you said that Indians are "unwilling or incapable of working like normal outside people" and that they just want to collect welfare. Again, there's nothing in those statements that should anger anyone. People cheer when they hear that kind of stuff at GOP conventions.

I don't think there's anything you can do to break Tester's spell--that organic farmer hippy mojo is way too strong. Your best bet is to do something to work up a little sympathy for yourself. I'd suggest pounding your face with Rep. Windy Boy's gavel until you knock yourself out. I bet the people of Montana would love you for it.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

A foreigner gets it right

I'm not a big fan of foreigners or Radio France, but some guy named Sasha Baron Cohen gets a couple of things right in a Fresh Air interview: swarthy looking people who drive ice cream trucks in front of the White House are terrorists and deserve to be detained by the Secret Service; and it's dangerous to be a homosexual in Alabama.

He is wrong however when he says that you might not be 110% committed to the heterosexual lifestyle if you've ever had a set of testicles sitting on your chin. As Sen. Larry Craig can attest, it happens to heterosexuals all the time.

Bring back the head of Jamil Hussein

Michelle Malkin
Our Lady of the Concentration Camps

Officer Floppy
Flopping Aces Security Services

Dear Mrs. Malkin and Officer Floppy,

It looks like the francosphere is in full bore celebration mode now that Jamil Hussein's arrest has made you look like fools. I hope you don't let their laughter get to you. It doesn't matter that you wrote dozens and dozens of posts claiming that Hussein was a fictional AP source. It's the reason you did it that's important. Hussein's quotes to the AP were losing the war for us. You stopped him. I think that makes you heroes.

Think about it. Nobody gave a damn about Hussein until you started raising hell about him. Obviously, someone in DC heard about it, and decided to get the goods on AP's treachery. They asked the Iraqi Interior Ministry (can we end this fiction and call it what it is, the Mahdi Army, now that we've all seen the hanging video?) to look into it, and, now he's sitting in their jail being interrogated with one of those old Sears arc welders.

I hope his capture doesn't affect your plans to go to Iraq. That'd be a shame, especially now that you've made it possible to win this war. Heck, you ought to go there to at least pick up his head if for no other reason. I'm sure the Interior Ministry Mahdi Army will have prepared it for you by the time you arrive. Wouldn't it be great to have it to show off at the next Pajamas Media Christmas party? While you're in Iraq, you could also spend an afternoon taunting Hussein's now-fatherless children by poking them with sticks. I bet you'd enjoy that.

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

The Courage of his Convictions

Back in the Straddle

Healing a nation

Gerald Ford's FBI:

"After I got there," Hamilton said years later, "Dave Price and Bill Wood and Gary Adams showed up. They were about the worst of the FBI agents on the reservation, though they did sort of keep their distance from me that morning. I had always sworn no matter what they did, they were never gonna see me cry, but I’d already gotten started before they got there. I heard one of them say, 'Well, she’s crying.' It hasn’t a sympathetic tone. They were making jokes and laughing and all that over there."

Special Agent Wood eventually introduced himself to Hamilton.

She said she knew who he was.

He asked if she had information about how Aquash had died.

She told him to go to hell.

[...]

A clutch of Aquash's friends, women chiefly, marked time outside the autopsy room.

"I thought, 'Oh shoot, these agents are having it much too easy today because we’re all so upset,'" Candy Hamilton recalled.

"So I started quarreling with Wood. I said, 'Her family's coming and we want her jewelry and personal items to give to them.'

“He said, ‘Well, that’s all evidence now, you can’t have any of that.’

"I said, 'That's not evidence--you couldn’t even identify her by 'em. We want it.'"

"He just sneered and walked out."

[...]

"Well, Wood came back in and was way across the room from me, and he said, 'Candy, you want something of Annie Mae's? Here'--and he threw a box across the room at me--'take her hands.' I caught it, and all the women turned and looked and said, 'What’s that?' And I said, 'He says it's her hands.' You could hear them rattling in there. Everybody was horrified. They hadn’t started the autopsy yet, so I went in the room where Peterson was. They still had her all covered up. I told him, 'It's really important for her to have all her body together. Could you put these in with her or put them back on her or something?' And he did, he sewed them back on at the end of the autopsy."

From The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks.

Hendricks' radio interviews.

Have friends or family in Iraqistan?

I'd really like to hear tales of heroic deeds performed by Floppy and Our Lady of the Concentration Camps. Feel free to forward my email address, patriotboy@charter.net, to anyone you know over there and ask them to pass it on.

Ruining it for everybody

Why couldn't this guy celebrate the birth of our lord the traditional mercenary way: wasting random brown people while driving down Route Irish? Now he's gone and ruined it for everybody.

"On [Christmas] eve (2006) here in the Green Zone a Blackwater employee got into a scuffle with an Iraqi personal guard that was guarding a judge and shot him ten times and killed him. The Blackwater employee was drunk. Why did he have his weapon on him? He has been whisked out of Iraq as fast as possible so the local authorities could not get a hold of him.

Blackwater is trying to keep it all hush-hush so the media doesn't find out about it and dirty their already dirty reputation. Now all the Blackwater employees are pissed off cause they have installed a no alcohol ban on all Blackwater employees."

Just like NASCAR

And Fallujah's just like Daytona.



Let's not overlook potential recruits from the Left Coast



or any Smokey and the Bandit fans out there.



Elsewhere: Remembering DD.

Crossposted to Operation Yellow Elephant.

The General ♥ Seattle Dan and Tammy and Rev. Jerry

I've been rather out of it because of my illness and I neglected to thank everyone for their nice Christmas books.

Thanks. I love them.

Update: Mississippi has nothing over South Dakota

I just finished The Unquiet Grave : The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country by Steve Hendricks. Wow. If you're unfamiliar with the history of Indian civil rights, you have to read this book. If your familiar with the history of Indian civil rights, you have to read this book. If you've read Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, you absolutely have to read this book.

What the US Government and the State of South Dakota did to the Lakotas in the seventies was unconscionable. It's disheartening that so few people know about the FBI and BIA's support of open warfare on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A political militia no less evil than Sadr's Mahdi Army operated openly and with the support of federal agencies and the military. In one case, the BIA police watched for hours as the Guardians of the Ogalala Nation--a name they chose for it acronym, "GOON"--partied while shooting up and firebombing a town known for harboring dissenters.

Pine Ridge had the highest murder rates in the country during this period, higher even that of Detroit, and many, if not most, of those murders were political in nature. Murders are handled by federal agencies when they occur on reservations, but when the FBI or the Department of Justice investigated these murders, more often than not their intention seemed to be to cover up rather than to solve the cases.

It was COINTELPRO applied to Indian dissenters.

Hendricks doesn't let AIM off the hook either. He tells the story of how Anna Mae Aquash's murderers were brought to justice. They weren't GOONs as Matthiessen suspected, but were AIM members probably acting on the orders of Dennis Banks and/or Clyde Bellecourt who were convinced in an FBI COINTELPRO operation that she was an informant. He also informs us that AIM executed a Black civil rights activist (and possible FBI agent provocateur) during the occupation of Wounded Knee.

Wild Bill Janklow, former SD Governor and AG, former Congressman, convicted vehicular manslaughter perp, and rapist gets treated with all the respect he deserves. Of all of the villains in this slice of history, he might be the worst, or at least a close second to Oglala Chair Big Dick Wilson and a half dozen FBI agents and GOONs.

Buy this book through the Amazon link on my side bar, or if you'd rather support an independent bookseller, call or email SeattleDan and SeattleTammy at Jackson Street Books, (206) 324-7000. You won't regret it.

Olbermann

He haughtily continues to refuse to accept Our Leader as his lord and savior.

Muqtada's man in Washington

Muqtada al-Sadr
Shi'i Warlord
c/o Embassy of the Republic of Iraq

Dear Mr. Sadr,

You may recall that I wrote you awhile back about my grandmother's problems with Medicare. I'd hoped that you would command Our Leader to pay for her medication when the "doughnut hole" potion of her Part D coverage kicked in. I figured that if you could command Our Leader to abandon a military operation to find a missing American soldier, it would be no problem for you to tell him to cop a few meds for Grandma.

Unfortunately, you didn't respond, and now Grandma wants to move in with us so she can use her rent money to buy prescriptions. I had hoped it wouldn't come to that. We really don't like her all that much--she's always praising FDR and leaving the toilet seat up--but what would the neighbors think if we turned her away?

I see you still have a lot of influence at the White House. After all, you were able to convince Our Leader to release Saddam to your flunky, Maliki, so you could execute him to chants of "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada" on the eve of the Shi'i Eid (the Sunni Eid had already begun). It was the kind of press event people would kill for (and you did), but it couldn't have happened if Our Leader had the guts to tell you, "no."

So I'm asking you again. Could you please tell President Bush to take care of Grandma's Medicare problems?

Heterosexually yours,

Gen. JC Christian, patriot

Our secret weapon

There are many in the Francosphere who insist on renaming the sustained surge option for Bush/McCain/Lieberman War Against Withdrawal by calling it "escalation." These defeatunists fail to understand what we, or at least 25% of us according to an AP/AOL poll, understand: a sustained surge will be only temporary, because Jesus will return in 2007. He is our secret weapon.

Prophecy tells us that he'll appear above Jerusalem at the site of Solomon's Temple. He'll grow to a height of 1000 cubits and destroy our enemies by stomping his terrible feet on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. Then he will turn his terrible gaze toward Iraq and destroy every major city with lasers he will shoot from his eyes. Finally, he will turn the clouds above Iran into a giant anvil which he will drop on mullahs and their followers.

And there will be much rejoicing.

On the radio

I'll be on Goldie's show on KIRO at 9 PM PST talking about my design for Our Leader's library and my plan to use giant robots to invade Iran. It's 710 on the AM dial if you're in the Puget Sound area (I'm not sure, but I think they broadcast at 50,000 watts at night so you might be able to hear it throughout the West). You can also catch the streaming broadcast here.

Bringing in the New Year

I wonder what Jenna and Not-Jenna are doing tonight.

Crossposted to Operation Yellow Elephant.

Freedom is Conformity: Restricting Liberty in the Name of Liberty

_{Image © Austin Cline
Original Poster: National Archives
Click for full-sized Image}

There has been a growing hostility on the part of some conservatives towards basic civil liberties. Some might argue that this hostility has always existed, especially given the prevalence of authoritarians among conservative; yet I think a case can be made for the idea that such people are becoming far more willing to be open and public with their animosity. In the past it was treated as something that needed to be uttered in hushed tones among the faithful, but recently more and more have been willing to proclaim their hostility towards liberty in a public and unashamed manner.

Newt Gingrich is a prominent member of this club, having recently claimed in more than one context that Americans will have to give up basic liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. He has claimed that free speech should be restricted, which isn't a surprise, but more curious is his claim that religious liberties should be restricted. Conservative Christians complain that secularists are denying them the right to pray in schools, but Gingrich would take Muslims and throw them in jail as terrorists for praying on a plane. I haven't seen a peep of complaint from conservative Christians — do they only care about religious liberty when it's their religion involved?

Even more prominent right now may be Dinesh D'Souza who has been arguing that Muslim extremists don't hate America because of its foreign policies, but because Americans at home abuse their freedoms. It must be admitted that he has a point because these extremists have, for as long as they have existed, been very critical of Americans taking liberties with their liberties. Even if America were 100% isolationist and never did anything abroad that bothered them, they would still object to American culture. Where D'Souza goes wrong is in suggesting that their terrorism against America is based on this. Muslim terrorists don't fly planes into buildings because American women wear short skirts, because American couples dance too close together, or because Americans use their freedom of speech in ways that are insufficiently respectful of religion or Islam.

Why do people like D'Souza get it so wrong? I doubt it's an accident because the liberties they suggest need restricting in order to appease the extremists are exactly — and only — the liberties which they have been arguing against for so long. They don't recommend appeasement in any other context, but if it gets them the sorts of restrictions they have been longing for over the past decades, they will gladly don the cap of Chamberlain and fly to Munich to negotiate the elimination of people’s freedom to say unpopular and critical things.

What is it with authoritarian conservatives — whether Christian or Muslim — and their complaints about people "abusing" freedom by doing things they want to do? It's difficult to understand what abuse of freedom really is because I don't think that any of those who complain about it have ever specifically defined what it is, when "use" of freedom crosses some line to become "abuse" of freedom, and why it shouldn't be protected. This vagueness raises the suspicion that "abuse of freedom" is a catch-all label for anything which authoritarians don't like, but can't pretend isn't protected as part of basic civil liberties. If they can't deny that something is a protected liberty, and know that they can't successfully argue that the liberty should be ended, maybe they hope they can turn the tables and get people to believe that freedom can be abused.

I do think it would be a mistake to think that freedom is something that couldn't possibly be abused. We all have freedom of speech, but if enough of us use it to shout nasty things at a person then perhaps we are abusing our freedom to create a threatening environment for that person. If it is legitimate to use the concept of "abusing freedom" here, though, it must be narrowly limited to situations where others are put in danger or have a legitimate reason to fear that they are in danger. They can't simply say that they don't like what's going on — seeing women in short skirts isn't the same as being concerned for your physical safety.

I'm not sure that people who tout the "abuse of freedom" rhetoric would be willing to accept such distinctions, however, so perhaps another tactic is necessary. Could we accuse them of abusing their freedoms because they are arguing for restricting other people's liberties? That's at least as plausible as the arguments they are making, and it carries the advantage of putting them in a position where they have to explain how and why their writings are not abuse. That, in turn, requires that they explain what abuse of freedom really is, which will give the rest of us a chance to demonstrate that their concept is nonsense, or perhaps even that it applies much more broadly than they have been willing to let on.

I fear, though, that rhetoric like that used by Gingrich and D'Souza will fall on fertile ground in America. Although such ideas are contrary to the basic principles upon which America was supposed to be founded, the fact remains that conformity is generally easier — socially, psychologically, politically — than freethought and independent dissent.