Wingnut Navel-Gazing Wankery

Somehow, we inspired a wingnut to gaze into the abyss and write ALL of this...and I am only showing you a snippet of it--the whole thing is really long and turgid. You get my meaning...

If you believe that humanity should band together to defeat evil, bandits, enemies of humanity, pirates, criminals, and the other riff raff trash, then you would see it as the good when your side is recruiting allies in the heart of enemy territory. If you believe you have right on your side, why wouldn’t you also believe that your enemies are only resisting you because they are ignorant and misguided? Why wouldn’t you believe that fighting them, and thus communicating the reality of your beliefs and cause in a way that diplomacy cannot, would not be beneficial to your long term goals in this war through convincing your former enemies that they should not be your current allies?

The Vet for Peace believes that Iraq is a waste of resources or at least whatever gains developed there, wouldn’t translate to the greater war on terror, as he sees and terms it.

That, however, is an arbitrary conclusion based upon arbitrary philosophical assumptions. For one thing, there are many individuals fighting this war and there will be many more individuals fighting this war in the future, both immediate and long term. The Vet for Peace talks about war prospects as if America doesn’t need allies in Iraq nor does America need governing and fighting experience in the heart of the Persian and Arabian historic empires. The people that will be fighting this war, present and future, and the families that will suffer on the front lines, both American and allied Iraqi or allied forces, deserve more from this Vet for Peace than to be discarded for some individual’s notion of armchair micromanagement and strategizing.

You should not discard your allies simply because you think a different front of the war deserves more attention and resources. You can discard them, like Israel discarded many Palestinians that worked with the Jews, Zionists, and Israeli intel agencies, but in the long term, however, whatever short term resources you may have saved by selling the Arabs out to their Arab enemies, will be more than used up on combating a unified enemy that you have not been able to divide because you have sacrificed all the allies amongst your enemies that could have divided those enemies. All the Arabs, all the Kurds, and all the Shia: sacrificed for one Peace advocate’s notion of streamlined warfare.

Declare victory and bring the troops home. As if you either have the power or the right to decide the fates of millions of Arabs and Americans based upon a whim, with no consideration of what the enemy has done or will do to kill the people that you should have been planning to protect but didn’t because you declared victory. Victory is earned and paid in blood, not in whims and boastful proclamations.

There is no compromise between people that don’t see how Iraq is necessary for America’s long term war prospects and those that believe Iraq must be won for America’s war efforts to be improved greatly.

The only “qualitative” difference between the US being involved in European and Asian matters as opposed to nation building in Iraq is that Iraq requires will, resources, sacrifices, and political deals to be made from the current and future generation of Americans. Whereas the US involvement in Europe and Japan was already paid for by a previous generation of Americans. This makes it very easy to support the involvement in Germany and Japan, when you don’t have to pay the butcher’s cost for it, than supporting Iraq, where resources are being re-directed to Iraq from your own little pet projects.

People love having things that they didn’t pay for. Something more expensive, like Iraq, now that is a different matter. It has different “qualitative” aspects, you see.

The rather interesting bit about the argument “Iraq was pre-emptive” while WWII was “reactive” is that the first forces Americans encountered and fought with when they landed on Africa were the French. Not the Japanese, interestingly enough. Not only that, but America, meaning Roosevelt and Churchill, decided to focus most of the resources on the European theater. Europe, which coincidentally, had not attacked America at Pearl Harbor.

American went to Africa, then Italy, then France after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. America went to Iraq after 9/11 was attacked by Al Qaeda using Saudi operatives, while based in Afghanistan. Japan launched a carrier strike at Pearl from Japan. Roosevelt then went to Africa.

Either these people think they can lie to us and have us swallow their lies, or they are truly as ignorant of history as is required of a person to believe in such fallacious strategies and tactics as “declare victory when you want to and then leave”.

To Jimbo, you have to remember that the Kurds don’t mean a damn to the Vet for Peace so he doesn’t really give a Foxtrot Fauk about the Kurds being wiped out by Saddam’s weapons. Whereas your example of the “neighbor” is about neighbors. People you care about because they live near you and which you know personally. He don’t care about the Kurds. You expect him to think of the Kurds and Iraqis as “neighbors”? People have too parochial of an outlook for that kind of cosmopolitan thinking.

Does your brain hurt after that? Mine does.

Here's my response:

I thought we invaded Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. They didn't. Why are we still there?

Wanker of the Week

Douglas Hanson of American Thinker.

Sometimes they just fall into your lap. Like this one.

Take this little nugget from Douglas Hanson, the blogger who erroneously posts as American Thinker (who, like most conservatards does not allow comments lest he have to ask questions of his not-thought-out beliefs.)

Those pesky chemical agents that the left says that Saddam never had just keep turning up all over Iraq. The latest occurrence is noted in a CENTCOM press release concerning operations near Mahmudiyah, Iraq. Coalition Forces conducted multiple raids in the area with one operation uncovering a cache of seven tanks of chlorine in a building. The deadly gas was later destroyed.

What. A. Dolt. Dunce. Useless Idiot Wanker.

That chlorine was imported by coalition forces and *contractors* for water purification plants. (Then it was not properly secured, making it easily pilferable by insurgent fighters.)

But the failure to secure the stuff doesn't obviate it's necessity, since we shocked and awed the infrastructure into rubble.

Wanker of the Week: Phill Kline

There were lots of wankers this week, so many it was quite a winnowing process selecting just one. Thank God for Phill can't-even- spell-Phil Kline.

Kline is the former Kansas state legislator and Attorney General who was thumped by Paul Morrison in the AG race in November. Paul Morrison switched parties just too tromp his ass and send him packing.

Kline just doesn't give a good-god-damn about minutiae such as "due process" or professional ethics. He was born 40 years too late and in the wrong super-power. He woulda been one hell of a Soviet aparatchik. Unfortunately, he's a pretty fuckin' lousy American.

He spent his four years as Attorney General obsessing about abortions performed on minors. He tried to obtain confidential medical records, and some confidential information made it to the air on Bill O'Lieleys show.

Now he has a new obsession.

Kline out of bounds with blood-test plan

Prosecutor seeks evidence of a crime at the expense of a medical patient’s privacy. Health professionals object. Prosecutor says he’ll arrest them if they stand in his way.

The sequence has a familiar ring to anyone who followed Phill Kline’s turbulent term as Kansas attorney general. It’s perturbing, but not surprising, to see him continue the pattern as Johnson County’s district attorney.

As attorney general, Kline sought records of some patients who had received abortions. He waged an unsuccessful and widely ridiculed legal battle to require counselors, doctors and others to notify authorities if they suspected that some teenagers were sexually active.

Now Kline wants hospital staffers to obtain blood tests from certain unwilling patients to determine whether they are intoxicated. He says he’ll arrest the medical personnel for “obstruction of justice” if they don’t comply, even though they are bound by federal regulations and accreditation guidelines to respect patient privacy and a patient’s right to refuse medical treatment.

No responsible person wants to let intoxicated drivers off the hook. But the proper procedure is to obtain a warrant from a judge if a motorist balks at providing a blood sample.

In a small number of cases, a warrant won’t be available. Reasonable prosecutors have still found ways to hold drunken drivers accountable without forcing health care workers to violate professional codes.

Kline, however, lacks finesse and experience in criminal prosecution, not to mention respect for health professionals. After just three months in his new post, he is drawing the once-respected Johnson County district attorney’s office into unnecessary, but predictable, controversy.

This health professional is not going to play along. I have informed the healthcare staffing agencies that I take shifts for every summer when I'm off from school, that I will not take any shifts on the Kansas side. An invasive procedure committed upon an objecting lucid patient is assault, and I am not going to commit that crime.

Fuck Phill Kline. He may not have any professional ethics, but I do. And I am not going to put myself in a position where I have to chose between whether to live up to the professional code of ethics that I have operated under for two decades, or going to jail. I have no desire to be a martyr or a test case. Kansas trauma teams will just have to operate without me until that wanker is out of office.

Wanker of the Week: E. Thomas McClanahan

Mr. MBG, this ones for you...

The cloying fly in the editorial ointment at the Kansas City Star struck again last Sunday. But then, at our house, we say “If it’s Sunday it must be McClanahan!” Then we start making fun of him. (He just makes it so easy!)

The Democratic Party is full of defeatists, you see, because we have the ability to perceive reality.

When the WMD’s became histories first proven negative, victory in Iraq became unachievable. When the lies that launched the war became obvious to all save McClanahan, reasonable people realized that as objectives had ever been clearly defined, they couldn’t be realized.

He is quite chuffed at the lack of enthusiasm for the fight among those with something to lose – like life, limb or loved one. Hell, he’s still pissed off that we didn’t sacrifice a few thousand more in southeast Asia.

He simply refuses to get it. Iraq is embroiled in a multi-faceted sectarian civil war, and we don’t get to win it.

I opted not to reproduce a snippet of last Sunday’s column, but really, every McClanahan column of late is a variation on the same theme. He is quite obsessed, to the point of pathology, it would seem, with the notion that all Democrats are quite simply traitors and cowards. If he isn't yammering about that, he's pissed off because he dislikes the architecture in the midtown revitalization that has made my property values soar. He's frankly a pedantic fuck no matter the topic.

I am not going to waste bandwidth to repeat his idiotic ramblings, but feel free to click here if you want to wade into the festering swamp for a sample of McClanahan’s fevered "mind" at “work.”

I will, however, give you some background on E. Thomas.

He is a chickenhawk of the first order. He went to Viet Nam – but he never saw the brush except when he flew over it. His pasty white ass was sitting in an air-conditioned office sending missives about “defeatocrats” back home even then. He is perhaps the original keyboard commando; and frankly a pathetic, contemptible and sad little man.

McClanahan is so ginned up for the fight, and thinks the troops can get by just fine without a year off between year-long deployments, he should find out first hand, and not from an air conditioned office this war. McClatchy should send him to Anbar to embed with some Marines immediately.

For a year. Then send his ass back in seven months to do it again.

Until he puts his own skin in the game to report from the front, I simply can not take a single word he writes about war seriously, including “and” “the” and “of”.

Wanker of the Week: Mort Kondracke

It was a tough call settling on just one Wanker this week, but I managed to separate the chaff from - well - the chaff.

For being an overt tool of the right-wing noise machine, making excuses for administration malfeasance, and casting aspersions toward Democrats for having the audacity to hold the Bush administration to some level of accountability - Mort squeeked it out.

During the "All-Star Panel" segment on the March 28 edition of Fox News' Special Report, Roll Call executive editor Morton M. Kondracke called the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys "a hanging party," explaining that he chose the characterization "because every time there's an inconsistency in somebody's testimony, however minute ... they're ready to pounce and accuse [the witness], basically, of perjury or violating the law or something like that." Additionally, Kondracke accused Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) of "McCarthyism," for questioning the reasons behind Justice Department White House liaison Monica Goodling's statement that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right and refuse to testify if called upon by Congress. Addressing Goodling's announcement, Leahy stated: "The American people are left to wonder what conduct is at the base of Ms. Goodling's concern that she may incriminate herself."

Yep. McCarthyism. That's a pretty thin soup. The McCartyyism charge would be more accurately leveled at the administration for demanding blind fealty to The Cause over serving justice at Justice, don't you think? Or is my education - and common sense - getting in the way of me being led around by the nose again?

Wanker of the Week: Ruben Navarrette Jr. of the San Diego Union Tribune

Look out! Here comes the race card! And this chump thinks it's a trump!

Yep. According to this jackass, we only want Gonzo's head because we are "white liberals who resent Gonzales because they can't claim the credit for his life's accomplishments and because they can't get him to curtsy. Why should he? Gonzales doesn't owe them a damn thing."

Yeah. And those U.S. Attorneys were all fired for performance reasons, too.

What a wanker.

Listen up folks, and I don't care who this pisses off, but I am sick to death of identity politics. You're hispanic, she's black, I'm a Jew and who gives a flying fuck about any of that? I don't give a rats ass what race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed you are. Can you do your fucking job? Are you trustworthy? Are you competent? If pressed, could you locate your moral compass?

I was born during the Civil Rights movement and and grew up with parents who weren't fucking insane. When I don't get earnest enough for the identity politicians, I shake my head in dismay. Hell, isn't this what the struggle was for? That whole content of the character thing? Got it. Think it's a grand idea. Consider that one incorporated into my gestalt.

Another given is that assholes come in all varieties of human. Gonzo happens to be an asshole and Hispanic. Lieberman is an asshole and a Jew. That's my cross to bear.

Gonzo was not appointed to be the Attorney General for Hispanic Americans. Or do we all get one?

It isn't about race, it's about turning Justice into "Just Us" and I don't give a fuck if the offender is the only one of his or her kind - I still want their fuckin' head on a pike.

Just in case the race card fails, Navarrette also offers this totally DOA defense of Gonzo's fecklessness: "Gonzales' persecutors are blind with rage, or maybe just blind. Surely they see that the push to dump the U.S. attorneys came from White House political adviser Karl Rove."

Ummm. That's a defense? Somehow I don't think so. If a member of my ethnic group was so useless and weak as to capitulate the entire fucking Constitution to the likes of Karl Rove...I would be the first one calling for their resignation, not the last loyalist at the battlements. Buy a fucking clue, moron.

And for just flat out not fucking getting it, Ruben Navarrette, Jr. of the San Diego Union Tribune Editorial Board is our Wanker of the Week™.

Wanker of the Week: Missouri State Senator Carl Vogel

Missouri State Senator Carl Vogel is our Wanker of the Week™ and a big 'ole pile of steaming hypocrisy all in one.

This dubious honor we (by "we" I mean me and the cats and a three year old) have bestowed on the Republican from the 6th district turns on a pissing match he is currently engaged in with my State Senator, and we already know I am a huge fan of hers.

My State Senator, the perfectly-named Jolie Justus, introduced an anti war resolution. It was, of course, voted down on a party-line vote, but it put everyone on record.

But here is where the behavior that garners him the honor comes in...Vogel leads the State Senate Ways and Means Committee, and because he opposed Senator Justus' anti-war resolution, he is refusing to hear two of her bills that are before his committee - stating "We were disappointed in the filing of the (Iraq war) resolution." and said that the state lege has no business debating the war. "That forum is not the Missouri Senate. I have no problem leaving that debate in Washington."

I call bullshit.

First, lots of Missouri businesses are being hurt by repeated deoployments of their employees who are in the Guard and Reserves. That makes it a state issue, Mr. pro-business Republican.

Then there is this:

On March 20, 2003, the state Senate, after bruising debate, passed a resolution supporting the invasion of Iraq. Here is some interesting text from that March 20, 2003 resolution: "Iraq's conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons threaten world peace." that resolution went on to tie Saddam to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 - "bringing justice to Osama bin Laden and those responsible for the terrorist attacks on United States soil."

Vogel voted for that resolution, full throated. (And still defends that vote, while denying that he's being a hypocrite! IOKIYAR, I guess.)

So for being a big steaming pile of hypocritical horseshit - Senator Vogel is our Wanker of the Week™.