Via (my) parent blog Webloggin, we learn of a clip of Glenn Beck’s show in which he finds a glaring contradiction in the words of that guy I’m trying like the dickens not to think about or talk about. He Who Walks On Water is saying we need to stop spending money putting Iraq back together and need to spend money instead on putting America back together. Then he presents a bill that would commit us to pouring $845 billion into the one-world government.

The “good stuff” is about 3 minutes into the video - solid information on Senator Obama’s Senate Bill 2433 - The Global Poverty Act.

I notice this about the democrat party lately; I wonder what a political junkie from a hundred years ago would think about this, were he frozen back then and thawed out now. The isolationism. It’s so selective. Always a strong and powerful yea-or-nay to isolationism, nothing in between the extremes. When isolationism would benefit our country, they talk about their open borders, and then when isolationism creates a hazard in the form of potentially devastating terrorism operations, all of a sudden they want it.

Anyway, I see this Global Poverty Act is getting some more attention lately. Good thing.

But hey, how can you be opposed to sending money to feed poor people? It’s not like there’s been any abuse of poverty aid programs within human history…certainly not within the glorious U.N.

As you probably already know, Cassy’s going to be out this week. And this isn’t her writing now; she asked if I could come by and do some “guest blogging.” I’ve been asked this before, by others, a few times over the years. I’ll have to confess to having made a hash out of it, for the most part. But I agreed to it this time because I notice Cassy has a lot of people commenting over here, and you guys have a good track record in my book for raising new perspectives on things. To me, that’s what makes blogging worthwhile, is the meeting of people. Also, I have a little bit more time for it now, and I see she’s tossing up a post or two a day…quality over quantity, in her typical style. Keep the fires burning for a week? Seems doable. Hope I don’t disappoint too badly.

My name is Morgan K. Freeberg (LinkedIn profile: here; Blogger profile: here), and I’ll tell you right up front that I’m sick to death of talking about that guy Barack Obama. And that other hardcore left-leaning liberal John McCain. I can’t foresee what’s going to happen this week, but I tend to put a lot of effort into finding things worth talking about, that have nothing whatsoever to do with those guys. Trying to, anyway. Usually failing at it; it is an election year, after all. Events this week will probably force me to talk about those two chuckleheads again a few times. I dunno. We’ll see. Consider your input solicited, anytime. You can reach me with your praise, criticism and suggestions at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.

I started reading Cassy for two reasons. For one, she is a talented writer; I would put her right about on the line where “gifted” starts. It’s one thing to spell things right and get your grammar straight, it’s quite another thing to translate that into a bunch of words that can be read easily. If you’ve not tried to do either one of those, you can take my word for it. I succeed at the spelling-grammar thing, and fail at the easy-fun-reading thing, on a regular basis. Cassy is just about the furthest thing you can find from some comment on DailyKOS or some other left-wing site — you know what I’m talking about — where you have to read what’s been written, over and over again…three times, four times, five times…only to find out the whole point is to recruit you on some “Am I The Only One Who” bandwagon or “Can I Get An Amen Here” bandwagon.

The other reason I read her is far more important, though: Her understanding of what makes sense, and what does not, is exceptionally strong. She thinks for herself but still has a sense of decency, abiding by Isaiah 5:20, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”

This is an important point, one I think is worthy of clarification. Permit me the indulgence of rambling…

I’ll tell you why I think this is important. We have people who are “strong” and we have people who are “weak”; I do not mean, by this, that the “strong” people are people you’d want to have as your allies. I do not mean, by that word “strong,” anything even necessarily good. I’m talking about, in the disorganized, anarchistic hodge-podge of a process we call “life,” these are people whose ideas are likely to prevail. This is what Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt was talking about in the final scenes of that movie, where he says “I am weak.” His character made a critical mistake, confusing the ability to prevail in the trivial matters immediately under discussion, with the ability to survive; to achieve some measure of immortality. This is, I think, a mistake we all make at one time or another. So let me be clear on the meaning of “strong” here. I do not mean long-lived, healthy or robust. I mean, likely to prevail in the trivial matter immediately under discussion. Within an environment that is not dedicated to discerning validity or truth. This cosmetic, skin-deep sense of “strength.”

And then we have good people and evil people. Evil, tough as it may be to recognize at times, is fairly easy to define: It destroys, or preserves other things that destroy. So picture these divisions as quadrants within the human condition:

1. Strong-good people;
2. Weak-good people;
3. Strong-evil people;
4. Weak-evil people.

My point is, when we do not regulate ourselves, as we interact with each other this strong-evil quadrant begins to swell…the folks who are the subject of Isaiah 5:20, and can warp the prevailing sentiment to conform to their evil desires. We saw it with Bill Clinton lying, and all those “strong” people strongly getting in our faces, waggling their strong fingers at us — “It wasn’t a lie because it was indecent to ask him the question!” There are other examples of this, but listing them is pointless. That’s my favorite one. It’s my favorite because it was so ground-shaking and yet it took place in such a narrow frame of time.

In the summer of ‘98 we had one definition of “truth,” and by a year later we had an entirely different one. That’s a terrible thing. Don’t blame Clinton; the fault lies with us.

That is evil. It calls falsehood truth, and vice-versa. In so doing, it seeks to destroy that which creates or preserves, which is human intellect, and preserve that which destroys.

I view it as metaphorical — ancestral, I should say — for the kind of nonsense we’re enduring now. For example…we have to “responsibly redeploy” from Iraq. Deep down we all understand, I think, if the ideas underneath these tangled, complicated words were good for us, the words used to carry them wouldn’t be so tangled and complicated. We would say “just get out.” Well, we don’t say that because it is logically unsustainable to entertain that this might be a good thing to do. This is an example of the evil being strong; that idea, which we know is a bad one, has become a prevailing sentiment. There are pretty sound arguments being made that this will culminate in a disaster…yet the evil is strong…so into the cul de sac we go.

Popularity is on one side of the fence, reason and logic are on the other. That’s how it works, more often than not.

Here’s another one we have now: Saddam Hussein “did not attack us.” The only idea in that vein that could strongly bolster an argument, would be “Saddam Hussein was completely harmless.” Notice, nobody is saying that. Nobody is even debating that anywhere. The outcome of such a debate would be unhelpful to the strong-and-evil, so we leave it alone. But here, again, by being unspoken, that argument has been all-but-lost. The prevailing point-of-view is that taking any action there at all was a bad idea — and yet nobody is willing to sign their name to the idea that the area could have been safely left alone. Nobody except clowns like Michael Moore. (More on him later.)

The earth is getting warmer and we all have to sacrifice! Eh, actually the facts say no, it isn’t; and the proposed sacrifice isn’t connected with any solution, except by means of vague platitudes. The platitude mumblers don’t actually sacrifice much. They sacrifice as much as they have to, not to save the earth, but to stay popular, and become more popular. Which isn’t much. Changing light bulbs in your house is IN. Riding a bike to work is OUT. We pretend to be saving the planet, but we’re really just incorporating a new sense of fashion sense and saving the planet doesn’t have anything to do with it. Yet again, that message has stuck. The evil have become stronger than the good.

Why does this keep happening?

I’ll tell you why right now.

Because an important sub-contingent within the faction of “evil,” is narcissism. Good weighs consequences; evil, caring only about itself, charges on ahead. The advantage of momentum, therefore, goes to those who do not weigh consequences — the evil. The Isaiah 5:20 people. The conflict comes down to something resembling a game of “chicken,” in which only one of the contestants is wearing a blindfold. A force of nature wins out over a force of reason and intellect, every single time. Those who observe, analyze, weigh, discern and evaluate, end up being just like Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt; their arguments do not prevail in the matter immediately under consideration. They must settle for, perhaps, prevailing over the longer term. Losing the battle and winning the war.

There are reasons to think they will succeed at this:

Thing I Know #62. Throughout history, very little of note has been accomplished by people who made a paramount concern out of what others thought.

…but there are reasons to think they will fail. We have a presidential election, and the front-runner hasn’t done anything, hasn’t said what he’s gonna do about anything without flip-flopping later, lacks basic background knowledge about even mundane things like how many states there are, is backed up by a menagerie of America-hating asshole friends, and doesn’t even seem to be that bright. In short, he does everything he does, by showing off. He’s embarrassed himself quite often lately but overall, it still looks like this is his year. And what’s worse, is he’s sort of a vanguard, if you will, for all others who function this way: Sidestepping reasoned argument, and as a substitute, seeking to manipulate the prevailing emotional flavoring. Result — they stand for nothing. But they run everything.

They get their come-uppin’s eventually, more often than not. But in the meantime they do a lot of damage.

And so Cassy is, to me, the kind of “bloggress” we need now. You wad up some sloppy ball of nonsense and toss it at someone like her…even something that finds a smooth pathway from cranium to cranium in these unenlightened times, like, uh…”if you are not actively serving in Iraq, you are not allowed to say anything good about anybody who is.” Or, “one of the big obstacles women face in achieving equal status in our society, is sexual abstinence education in the schools.” Or, “‘real patriotism’ has to do with finding the most anti-American position of any issue, and consistently taking it.” Yeah, something like those. And Cassy is one of the few people around who have the balls to grab the emergency cord, yank it hard, and say out loud in a strong firm voice, “that’s crap.” Even though some supposed “majority” might say otherwise.

I should say a word or two about my own corner on this, because Cassy invited me to do so, several times. And it occurs to me, this would help you to understand where I’m coming from.

My spot is House of Eratosthenes, known colloquially as The Blog That Nobody Reads. We are a contributing blog to Webloggin. Some of the nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, grumble a bit when I call it that. But they seem to like whatever consistency ripples through it, and I like the kind of folks who have been attracted by the themes and stuck around because of the themes.

Those themes within House of Eratosthenes are multi-fold, and I’ll try to give each one of them it’s due without boring you to tears in the paragraphs below. The primary one is simply this: We point out things that “everybody knows,” that everybody knows for no better reason than that “everybody” already knows them. Nonsensical stupid things, things people bully others into believing but can’t state word-for-word, fastened on to any reputation worth defending. Things people “believe,” only because they’re worried about their continuing survival if they’re caught believing something different. Things like single mothers can raise children as well as married couples; if women run the world, war will become a thing of the past; God is fiction, we’ve evolved, there is no master design to our inner workings, and yet somehow we weren’t designed to eat meat. Things like, President Clinton told something that was virtually true because it wasn’t any of our business to ask him the question in the first place. Or that Saddam Hussein was a harmless teddy bear. Or that global warming makes it important for us to “come together” and “sacrifice” so we can “do this” — but it’s everlastingly trivial and unimportant and meaningless, somehow, to contemplate what exactly “this” is. Or womens’ equality has something to do with girls indiscriminately screwing a whole bunch of sub-standard guys.

Those things and more. I said, above, that this is Barack Obama’s year. As any thinking person knows, this is not a pinnacle of civilization or “progress,” but rather a low nadir of chaos. In our society, the intellectual “house” is a pigsty. It’s what you’d expect to find if you loaned out your house to a dozen frat boys for a month There are messes everywhere.

House of Eratosthenes is not here to clean up the messes.

It is here to point them out. Clean-up is an individual responsibility. We’re each responsible for keeping our “houses” in order, and clean the cobwebs, pizza boxes and dust bunnies out of them. There is no way for us to do this, short of respecting ourselves. We own the decisions we make, as individuals, whether we realize it or not. When we decide things in groups, we make a fustercluck out of it because the entity making the decision, the group, is distinctly different from the entity that owns it, which is the individual. Quoting Ayn Rand, in one of her snippets providing the greatest ease of understanding for strangers to the topic:

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

And so what we do, is to champion the decision-making power of the individual; and, just to keep our sense of humor about such a grave and complex matter of human relations — make fun of the decisions made in committee.

Because you know what? That’s exactly what history does.

All who would argue that point, might find it educational to review the story of why we use a funny name like “Eratosthenes.” We’re named after a guy who figured out the size of the earth about two centuries B.C.; the experiment is discussed in detail here. That’s because, when you ponder big questions like the size of the earth, and you don’t have any technology available to find the answer by conventional means, you have to arrive at some unconventional means. Therefore, you must think for yourself. Really think for yourself. We honor this experiment, because it is logically impossible in a whole fistful of ways for it to have been conceived in committee. The premise upon which it was based, alone — the earth might be round — would’ve been shot down in a heartbeat. Bah! Who are you to say? Scientific consensus, it’s flat! And so, what one guy managed to do a long time ago, seems to be something we can’t do anymore. It represents a style of thinking that is slowly asphyxiating.

Even the good decisions we make, nowadays — how did we make them? We got twenty or thirty highly-paid professionals in a room, wasted an hour or two, and then did what the “smartest guy” said we should do. Without inspecting it. So at it’s best, group-think really is just individual-think, without anyone taking responsibility for it.

There’s something else busted, too: The people who are best at doing that…the sitting in a meeting, pretending to pay attention, and then simply mimicking the “smartest guy”…are our “educated” types. And those are the ones who make the decisions about what viewpoints should prevail and what ones should not. Over the course of a lot of years keeping my mouth shut and paying attention, I’ve learned something funny about those people: Most of them aren’t really educated. Not functionally. They don’t have an education good enough to repeat Eratosthenes’ experiment. They’ll brag all day long how they went to graduate school and learned all about climatology; and yet, they can’t do trig. They can’t even carry a conversation too far, about how angles relate to distance. By the time you’ve finished the ninth grade, you should be able to explain the Earth-measuring experiment down to the smallest detail, and answer Q&A about it. That requires a commanding knowledge of geometry, powerful enough to enable you to figure out how things work. To come up with an experiment of your own — that requires the ability to produce a list of procedures, not simply follow one.

And if you’re running around spewing nonsense about Saddam Hussein being harmless just because that’s what the other guy said, this goes well beyond what you’re doing.

Among the secondary themes, one of the most popular ones is the girls in skimpy outfits. That started out being just for fun, but then we realized quickly that this secondary theme had a lot to do with our primary theme. We’d put up a picture of Erica Chevilar in her red bikini, the Google hits would spike, our traffic would zip upward for a little while, and then someone somewhere would start sounding off about all the things that are bad about nice-lookin’ girls in red bikinis, without being able to explain what’s bad about ‘em. And that’s our central purpose. The bullying. The “That’s Just Bad, Can I Get An Amen Here?” stuff. The nonsense. We’re going to make rules about girls wearing more clothes, and department store mannequins being thicker, so our girls don’t develop eating disorders. Sports bars are oppressive to women. Women who work in banks should be fired if they wear swimsuits for calendar shoots on their personal time…in the name of “womens’ choice.”

Another theme is lamentation and alarm over the various subtle and veiled attacks on plain old-fashioned manhood. This, too, dovetails in strongly with the primary theme of people not thinking for themselves. We’re a little bit chicken to harp on it often because some may misconstrue the message — but boys and girls are different, and men and women are different. Women are better at establishing and preserving protocol. Men are better at stepping outside of it, should the need arise. Part of thinking for yourself is keeping track of what’s moderate and what’s extreme, and part of the damage we’re doing to ourselves nowadays is creating established protocols for everything; as if, any human activity that isn’t cloaked in a rigid agreed-upon social convention, is some kind of unfinished task. One trope you’ll find in our pages on a recurring basis is (roughly paraphrasing here), “if you can’t state the idea without using the word ‘every,’ ‘never,’ ‘always,’ ‘all’ or ‘none’ — it isn’t a moderate idea.” In 2008, our standard of living is very high compared with the years past, and we have a tendency to identify toxins, strip them away, measure the residue, strip it away some more, and when we’ve gotten rid of it all call ourselves “moderates.” Carbon dioxide is a great example of this. The residue-toxin can also be something intangible, like probability. The likelihood your kid might scrape his knee on the playground; extremists are trying to get rid of that, and calling themselves moderates as they do so. There are other phony toxins. They all have to do with getting rid of the exigencies associated with life — therefore, they have to do with getting rid of life itself.

Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

Another theme is just a big ol’ hodge-podge of things that are “red state,” that we happen to like; anything that ends up being under attack by these evil-strong prevailing-viewpoint bullying-not-explaining people. Guns. Meat. Barbeque sauce recipes. Really big powerful internal combustion engines with multiple turbochargers. Beer, wine, practical jokes, James Bond movies and robots.

The list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the one really deadly thing we’re REALLY supposed to hate, without understanding why we hate it: The woman who loves her man and does nice things for him. We obsess over the seemingly meaningless gesture of bringing her man a cold beer — simply because that ticks off the feminists faster than anything, and they themselves can’t seem to coherently explain exactly why. But here in Northern California, the strong-and-evil feminists have emerged triumphant in molding the prevailing sentiment. We’re supposed to look with disdain down upon women who bring their men beer, and show some kind of fawning respect to women who do not. Even the fellas are supposed to do this. Therefore — men are supposed to be nice to women who are mean to them, and mean to women who are nice to them.

You know, prevailing sentiment that may be, but I don’t think that dog’s gonna hunt.

So who am I, to dare to point this out?

I’m just a middle-aged guy who writes long, windy, bloated essays like the one you’re reading now. I’m concerned about the “Strong Good” quadrant. It is anemic, and it should not be. As Edmund Burke said,

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The primary concern there, is the primary concern here. When the good remain silent, everybody else slowly departs from the kind of thinking that energized Eratosthenes’ experiment two thousand years ago, the kind of thinking that powers “The Blog That Nobody Reads”; and they start to babble away with all their foolish nonsense.

Things you say for the purpose of getting attention. How quickly we are seduced when we say things to get attention. And that is the key reason why we call ourselves The Blog That Nobody Reads; as a reminder. If you’re still unclear on how that works, you could review the List of Things People Say To Get Attention, which is a little compendium I’ve been putting together of self-inflicted injuries, of the public relations variety, perpetuated by celebrities, politicians, authors of letters-to-Editors, and other folks drunk on their own glamor. It is not meant to be exhaustive; the point isn’t how long I can make such a list, the point is that there is always a fresh supply of such incidents rolling in.

People don’t think when they’re showing off. It’s a simple fact of human nature.

What else can I say by way of introduction. I’m often told a sign of a civilized society is one that gets rid of the death penalty. To me, a death penalty is one of the fundamental things a civilized society keeps in place.

What are my less popular views…

I think the word “totally” should be banned.

The best movie swordfight of the twentieth century was at the end of The Phantom Menace.

I’m in Dr. Savage’s corner on this whole autism business…mostly. Not completely. I think he committed a sin for being both a doctor and a shock-jock, demanding credibility for one of those roles, and then speaking in the capacity of the other. He was tactless; to date, I don’t think he’s suffered any punishment that he hasn’t deserved. But in my book, his point was a valid one and it’s overdue for some critical inspection. We are not thinking like Eratosthenes on our Four A’s (autism, aspie, AD(H)D and allergies). This is group-think at it’s most damaging and millions of children are suffering for our mistake. Some of them, perhaps permanently.

And I don’t smile for photographs. Ever.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. My resume is full of Information Technology stuff, twenty years’ worth. Most of my positions held, especially back in the younger years, had to do with software development. I’m afraid that’s why my treatises are a bit bloated — in software development, of course, if anything is left undefined, the whole damn thing ain’t gonna work. People ask if I’ll start a writing career; I like the idea of being able to do something for money, late in life, with one foot in the grave and writing is just about the only thing that would fit that. But I harbor no delusions about becoming a great one. Ever. You have to have empathy to do that. You have to anticipate what the audience already knows, and leave it out. Like lots of nerds, and children falsely diagnosed with the 4 A’s, I’m empathically-challenged. Hey, maybe someday some one will come up with some disorder label for that. Then nobody will ever expect a damn thing out of me. We could call it P.E.D.D. for Persistent Empathy Deficit Disorder.

Kiddin’.

I have no college education, and my high school GPA is medium-to-dismal. I’m one-time married, divorced for sixteen years and almost seventeen; I have a live-in girlfriend who loves doing things for me. And yes, I do things for her. I have one son who is eleven years old. He’s weird in all the ways I’m weird, and then some. The schools tell me he’s off-the-charts intelligent but they don’t know how to relate to him. That’s what a lot of people say about his Dad. I’ve pretty much figured out why they call the boy intelligent. Why people call me that, sometimes I have to seriously wonder.

I’m a South Park Republican, I think. I don’t like seeing religion used to inflict guilt, and I tend to part company with my more fundamentalist right-wing brethren on this point; becoming more horrified every single living year with the decisions that are made in groups, and how they are made, I just can’t bring myself to go to church anymore. Haven’t gone in quite some time. But the liberal hierarchy of “values” is really offensive and odious to me. I think that fits the definition, or overlaps with it anyway…

I hate conservatives, but I really f—–g hate liberals. — Matt Stone

I believe in God. I wasn’t too sure about Him until my son was getting ready to get born. I was encouraged, in those oh so civilized, sensitive, enlightened Clinton years, to take an active role in all tasks that had to do with the pregnancy. Darwin just left waaaaaay too much unexplained. So when the know-it-all atheists can get condescending and snooty, I can be condescending right back, and I can rattle off exactly what is left unexplained by the gnostic atheist viewpoint. No, I’m not talking about that silly creationist-banana thing. Better stuff than that. YES, there’s a God. It isn’t open to question, except for patently absurd, silly questions. The kind of surreal strange questions socially desperate and strong-but-evil people ask, not to learn about anything, but to show off and get attention.

I don’t imagine this leaves you hungering for more by way of introduction. But there’s always the possibility that I may have been guilty, again, of clarifying one thing, when the curiosity of some may have been focused on something else. So consider the following as reference material — take what you like, leave the rest:

Things I Know
Things I Doubt
Things I Don’t Get
What’s Wrong With the World?
The Oath of Eratosthenes
House of Eratosthenes Glossary
Yin and Yang
What Is a Liberal?
Seven Steps to Insanity

Anyway. Plum pleased to be here. Cassy says she’ll be back inside the week. In the meantime, I’m going to do my darndest to make sure, in the week ahead, this is the longest single thing you ever have to read outta me…

Apparently, a bunch of unnamed people want to silence him, and that these mysterious people will control the media. They want to keep him quiet, he says, so that his message about poverty (at $55k a message) and universal healthcare cannot be heard. He says people who make $100 million a year (who are these people??) don’t want this stuff to be heard. But he’s a WARRIOR, and he will NEVER be silenced!! NEVER!

Just out of curiosity, can anyone remind me who supports silencing voices in media due to “fairness” and who doesn’t?

Um… isn’t it… the Democrats?

Come on — how much more biased to the left does the media need to be before the Breck Girl considers it “fair”?

And really, how much more hypocritical can the multi-millionaire Breck Girl be? He bashes the rich, when he was an ambulance-chasing trial lawyer who picked cases with the highest possible rewards, while charging astronomically huge fees to his clients. Now, he has an income of over $400k a year, probably a large portion of which comes from his poverty speeches, which he charges $55k for. He’s worth approximately $70 million. He has a 28,000 square foot mansion which has an estimated worth of about $6 million. It is a 102-acre estate with a private gym, pool, a basketball court and racquetball court.

HuffPo, of course, claims that the Breck Girl is not a hypocrite at all:

It is not hypocritical for rich people to help the poor. It is kind and generous.

John Edwards is constantly attacked by the right-wing for fighting poverty while at the same time … wait for it … being rich! How dare he?!

So, what is he supposed to do? Hide his money and keep it from everyone else like a good greedy, conservative? It wouldn’t be hypocritical to be greedy with your money if you’re rich, but it would be hypocritical if you tried to help others? How dumb do you have to be to think that Republican talking point makes any sense

Uh, no. It’s not hypocritical for the Breck Girl to be rich and to donate to charity or “fight for poverty”. It is hypocritical, however, for him to bash rich people and capitalism, claim he looks out for the “little people” while charging ridiculously high fees in his trials (supposedly anywhere between 30-40%) and freakishly high fees to speak about poverty. It’s hypocritical to be railing on about “Two Americas” while spending $400 on haircuts, or $225 in “services” from a salon called the Pink Sapphire.

Then there’s also the private jets. There’s the Wal-Mart bashing, even though he made sure to be one of the first to get a PS3 there, and apparently, even owned stock there at one time. His son makes fun of kids whose parents aren’t rich and therefore have to buy shoes from Wal-Mart, a story Edwards himself told to participants of a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union-sponsored call. Yet he lectures us about the great divide in classes, leading to his famous “Two Americas”. He rails against hedge funds, but simultaneously invests in them.

That, my friend, is hypocrisy.

So, with all of this against him, no wonder the Breck Girl is terrified about being silenced. Although, you know… it might only be beneficial to him, when you think about it…

Hat Tip: Iowa Voice

I’d like to introduce you to someone today, in case you aren’t yet acquainted.

His name is Ted Rall. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: he’s one of the most well-known cartoonists (and op-ed writers) alive today. He’s also one of the most vile, despicable, hateful, bigoted, unhinged people alive. However, don’t consider him on the fringe; the bio from his website shows just how celebrated he is (emphasis mine):

… Rall’s cartoons were signed for national syndication. He moved to Universal Press Syndicate in 1996.

His cartoons now appear in more than 140 publications, including the Philadelphia Daily News, Aspen Times, Hartford Advocate, Newark Star-Ledger, Los Angeles Times, Wilmington News-Journal, San Diego Reader, Village Voice, Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News, Las Vegas Review Journal, Washington City Paper, Tucson Weekly, Sacramento News & Review, San Jose Mercury-News, Lexington Herald-Leader and New York Times.

In 1996, he was one of three Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He was one of the New York Times’ most reprinted cartoonists in 1997, 1999 and 2001. He also did color strips for both Time Magazine and Fortune Magazine from 1998 to 2001. He was awarded the 1998 Deadline Club Award by the Society of Professional Journalists for his cartoons. Rall received first place in both the 1995 and 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Cartoons. The award, founded in 1968, recognizes distinguished work on behalf of disadvantaged Americans.

Ted Rall has shown appalling hatred towards our troops and America time and time again.

He’s accused our troops of being murderers for Halliburton (emphasis again mine):

There was a time when service in U.S. military was honorable and professionally rewarding. But because of politicians who use the military to pump up corporate profits instead of defending us, that was a long time ago. Americans with personal integrity should boycott the volunteer military and discourage everyone they care about to do the same. “They come from parts of the country where jobs are hard to find,” an acquaintance condescendingly excuses the enlistees. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? I’d rather sleep under a bridge, eating trash out of a Dumpster, than murder human beings for Halliburton.

If we’re attacked by a foreign power, as we last were in 1941 at Pearl Harbor, Americans will line up to volunteer. World War II, won six decades ago by a storied generation of draftees and volunteers, was fought to defend American freedom. But we haven’t fought an honorable war since.

He likened terrorists such as Osama bin Laden to our Founding Fathers:

Whether or not I am a patriot is for others to judge. I do love this country, however, and I’m fighting my damnedest to remind my fellow Americans of our core values, those we all learned as children, and to stop the Hard Right from revolutionizing us into a neofascist nightmare. (By the way, I don’t recall labeling myself. And another by the way: since when are socialists anti-patriotic?)

…

And I might think better of you when you stopped using loaded rhetoric like refering to resistance fighters (a clearer and more neutral term) as “terrorists.” Unless, of course, you also consider George Washington to have been a terrorist, in which case we’ll let it go.

He’s most known for mocking fallen hero Pat Tillman as an idiot and a sap. Pat Tillman was the man who gave up a multi-million dollar NFL contract to enlist in the Army and fight for his country. Rall drew the following cartoon (click for larger image):

And now, Ted Rall is at it again: slandering our troops in the worst way, mocking everything that makes them honorable.

As Michelle Malkin put it,

Now, all in one cartoon, he shows his naked contempt for the very traits of the American soldier that helped give birth to this country and secured it for 231 years: willingness to sacrifice, faith, courage, respect for the commander-in-chief, and determination to complete their mission.

Here is the newest, and possibly worst, cartoon (click for larger image):

How many times can Ted Rall slander our military and our country without getting called out on it? Well, I take that back — conservatives call him out. But liberals, with their “moral authority” stay silent. What a double standard, huh? If Ann Coulter does so much as mock what Bill Maher says on HBO, she’s called out on it and castigated in the media for weeks. It’s front page news. Ted Rall does it on a weekly basis, and nothing. Nada. Not a peep.

And not only is he not called out on it, but he’s given awards. Liberal publications heap respectability on him and embrace him as an outspoken, prolific “neo-traditionalist” who is launching a “vehicle for change”.

But still — all politics aside — how dare he slander and smear the very people who give him the right to slander and smear them? He has the right to think and say whatever he pleases — thanks to those he so gleefully attacks — but decent Americans everywhere should be outraged. And just because he can think it, and say it, and draw it, and write it, does not mean that he should, or that Universal Press Syndicate has to continue to syndicate him, or that supposedly respectable institutions, such as the New York Times, have to publish his vile cartoons.

If liberals had any decency in them whatsoever, they would shun this despicable excuse for an American. But instead, he is welcomed, lauded, praised, rewarded — for slandering the very people who give him the freedom he loves to take advantage of.

So what can we do? We can contact the Universal Press Syndicate and demand that he is dropped from syndication:

Universal Press Syndicate
4520 Main Street
Kansas City, MO 64111-7701
(816) 932-6600

If the paper you read carries his cartoons and/or op-ed columns, contact them and demand that they remove his material as well.

Just because he has the right to draw and write whatever he pleases thanks to the Frist Amendment does not mean he can escape accountability.

accountability:
noun
responsibility to someone or for some activity

I’m not asking for him to be censored. I am asking for him to no longer be embraced and revered, for he has crossed the line too many times. For the sake of decency, and for our heroes fighting overseas whom he so easily mocks and bashes, we must stand up against him in protest. Contact Universal Press Syndicate. You can even contact Ted Rall himself. However you choose to do it, speak out against him.

This kind of hatred should not be embraced any longer.

Oh, and to close, some lovely hypocrisy from Ted Rall, in a Universal Press Syndicate interview, in which he proclaims he doesn’t like hateful responses or vitriol (imagine that — someone who spouts hate so often doesn’t like hate!):

Hateful responses get under my skin, death threats obviously more so. But there are other jobs for people who are afraid of extreme reactions to their political or other points of view: Dog catcher. Computer programmer. Centrist Democratic Senator. As someone else said, it’s not about not being afraid; it’s about what you do when you are afraid. I worry about the vitriol but I can’t let it stop me. Besides, for every reader who hates my stuff are many more who like it!

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin

As the Edwards campaign wallows in hypocrisy, the MSM has decided to completely ignore it and has jumped on board enthusiastically. The Edwards-Coulter match has been almost tabloid fodder for the media, as it is yet another excuse for them to portray a successful conservative woman as “hateful”, and the liberal woman as a kindly, compassionate person who simply wants to “rise above” hate speech and keep the political dialogue higher than that.

Yet, when Ann Coulter engaged in “hate speech” at CPAC earlier this year, John Edwards celebrated as he found another way to make money by using “Coulter Cash”:

Friday afternoon, Republican mouthpiece Ann Coulter brought hate-speech politics to a new low.
This video shows Coulter addressing the American Conservative Union’s Political Action Conference, March, 2, 2007 in Washington, D.C.

We must show that inflaming prejudice to attack progressive leaders will only backfire.

Can you help us raise $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” this week to keep this campaign charging ahead and fight back against the politics of bigotry?

With such a genius fundraising opportunity, I don’t know why the Edwards campaign is complaining, as it obviously gives them the chance to raise so much money. But I digress. The point here is the Edwards’ campaign’s blatant hypocrisy.

Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center has fired back at Elizabeth Edwards over the hiring and firing of controversial, bigoted, hate-filled bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan in a new press release:

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, has called on Americans to stop conservative Ann Coulter’s “hate words.” But when that campaign hired two hateful, anti-Christian bigots as “official” bloggers, Mrs. Edwards did not object and the campaign decided to give them a “fair shake,” as John Edwards said. The bloggers resigned in February only after their bigoted writings were exposed by other bloggers and conservative talk radio, causing a huge embarrassment.

ABC, CBS, and NBC interviewed Elizabeth Edwards this morning to allow her to further complain about Coulter’s “hate words,” but none mentioned the Edwards campaign’s bigoted bloggers. Concerning Elizabeth Edwards’ silence about the “hate-mongers” in her husband’s own presidential campaign, MRC President Brent Bozell issued the following statement:

“Elizabeth Edwards, who apparently is now acting as spokesperson for the Edwards campaign and who is very familiar with and active in the blog world, never said a word about the campaign’s hiring and defending of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan. Mrs. Edwards is a hypocrite. These two bloggers are notorious for writing such repulsive things as,

“What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.” (Marcotte)

In the Duke Lacrosse case, “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?” (Marcotte)

Sen. Rick Santorum talks about sex “lest his lack of self-control be manifested by f***ing his desk on the Senate floor.” (Marcotte)

God is “a sadistic bastard.” (Marcotte)

Pope Benedict, “he’s just a dictator … the Pope’s gotta’ tell women who give birth to stillborns that their babies are cast into Satan’s maw.” (Marcotte)

President Bush has a “wingnut Christofascist base.” (McEwan)

“When CNN invited Ann Coulter to comment on the 2004 presidential debates, I sniffed, ‘I didn’t realize they had officially transformed into the C*** News Network.” (McEwan)

“Elizabeth Edwards and the liberal media have a double standard when it comes to ‘hate words.’ If it’s hate towards conservatives, it’s okay with them. But if it’s criticism of the Edwards campaign by a conservative, it’s ‘ugliness’ that ‘debases political dialogue.’ The liberal media need to ask, Will Elizabeth Edwards rebuke those hateful bloggers and, by the way, did she have a hand in hiring them?

I still want to know why Elizabeth Edwards is defending her husband, anyways. Isn’t he the one running for President? Shouldn’t he have the, uh, cojones to handle this himself? Oh, silly me. Why would I think that a man who gets $400 haircuts and then an additional $225 at a spa and salon called the “Pink Sapphire” in “services”, and charge exorbitant speaking fees to a poverty group, be able to defend himself? Of course he’s hiding behind his wife’s skirts.

Either way, the Edwards campaign should be slammed for their blatant, foul hypocrisy and lay off of Ann Coulter. Why was it ok for Bill Maher to say it about our vice president, but not ok for Ann Coulter to remark upon that hypocrisy when it comes to John Edwards? Was it that hard to understand what she was saying? I understood exactly what she meant.

But waiting for the mainstream media to call out a liberal for being hateful, hypocritical, treasonous, or any other negative anything, is like waiting for… well, John Edwards to stop being a greedy bastard.

Hat Tip: Newsbusters

I always kind of snicker whenever a Democrat whines about Republicans being mean. First of all, if you’re in politics to begin with, it’s going to happen. I know, I know, as a Democrat you are a superior being and a moral authority and therefore supposed to be immune to such attacks, but they’ll happen. Get over it.

Elizabeth Edwards chastised Ann Coulter for the “personal” attacks on her husband, John “Breck Girl” Edwards, which “lower public discourse”. Every time you hear a Dem talk about public discourse being lowered, you know it has become the time to stop listening. If they won’t acknowledge it in themselves (and they won’t), they have no right to point the finger.

Anyways, here’s what Elizabeth Edwards had to say:

Elizabeth Edwards pleaded Tuesday with Ann Coulter to “stop the personal attacks,” a day after the conservative commentator said she wished Edwards’ husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, had been killed by terrorists.

“The things she has said over the years, not just about John but about other candidates, lowers the political dialogue at precisely the time we need to raise it,” Edwards said by phone on MSNBC’s “Hardball” program, where Coulter was a guest.

Elizabeth Edwards said she did not consult her husband before confronting Coulter on the air, adding that she felt the pundit’s remarks were “a dialogue on hatefulness and ugliness.”

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday, Coulter was asked about a March speech in which she used a gay slur to refer to Edwards.

“If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot,” Coulter said Monday, picking up on remarks made by HBO’s Bill Maher. Maher suggested in March that “people wouldn’t be dying needlessly” if Vice President Dick Cheney had been killed in an insurgent attack in Afghanistan.

I remember John Maher’s remarks. They FLOORED me. I was furious. I understand where Ann was going with what she said completely. But, that is not the point I’m making here.

Let’s look at the oh-so-honorable Elizabeth Edwards’ background with “public discourse”, name-calling, and personal attacks.

Remember when not too long ago, she attacked someone? Not a politician, not a public figure. No, she said she was terrified of her neighbor, because he was (cue scary music and flashes of lightning)… Republican!

Elizabeth Edwards says she is scared of the “rabid, rabid Republican” who owns property across the street from her Orange County home — and she doesn’t want her kids going near the gun-toting neighbor.

Edwards, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, particularly recalls the time neighbor Monty Johnson brought out a gun while chasing workers investigating a right of way off his property. The Edwards family has yet to meet Johnson in person.

“I wouldn’t be nice to him anyway,” Edwards said in an interview. “I don’t want my kids anywhere near some guy who when he doesn’t like somebody, the first thing he does is pull a gun out. It scares the business out of me.”

Edwards views Johnson as a “rabid, rabid Republican” who refuses to clean up his “slummy” property just to spite her family, whose lavish 28,000-square-foot estate is nearby on 102 wooded acres.

Johnson, 55, acknowledges his Republican roots. But he takes offense to the suggestion he has purposefully left his property, including an old garage that he leases for use as a car shop, in dilapidated condition.

“I have to budget. I have to leave within my means,” Johnson said. “I don’t have millions of dollars to fix the place.”

Johnson, who has posted a “Go Rudy Giuliani 2008″ sign on a fence just 100 feet from the entrance to the Edwards’ driveway, has criticized Edwards for the scale of their nearby home. The property and home, which includes an indoor basketball court, an indoor handball court and an indoor pool, is valued at $5.3 million.

The Edwardses are still putting the final touches on the property, which they purchased in 2003.

“I thought he was supposed to be for the poor people,” Johnson said. “But does he ever socialize with any poor people? He doesn’t speak to me.”

Johnson said he has put his property on the market, in part blaming the high property taxes for his decision to leave. He also wants to move for another reason.

“I don’t want to live somewhere where someone’s always complaining about me,” he said.

I can’t believe it!! A Democrat… attacking a Republican?! NO! What Elizabeth did, in my opinion, was much worse however. Ann was attacking John Edwards, a politician and public figure running for President. Elizabeth attacked her neighbor, someone unknown and someone she had no profit to make from attacking, unless you count further elevating your reputation as a snooty Democrat who thinks they belong to an elite class and anyone who doesn’t fit into that elite class needs to go away.

Anyhow, Pot, meet Kettle. Notice how they’re both black?

As John Hawkins said when he published this story on Right Wing News, “Also, isn’t it kind of pathetic that Elizabeth Edwards had to speak up for her husband because what — he’s afraid of Ann Coulter? If the Breck Girl can’t stand up to Ann Coulter, what makes anyone think he can take on Al-Qaeda? Get out from behind your wife’s skirt and start fighting your own battles, pretty boy.”