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TruePunk delivers the worst curse I have ever heard:

If your name is Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Rangel, Durbin, Frank, Leahy, Kennedy, Hoyer, Harkin, Dodd, Kucinich, Biden, Jefferson, Feingold, Hastings, Dingel, Murtha, McDermott, McCaskill, Byrd, or Waters, I very much want you to wake up in the middle of the night in a severe existential crisis and confront your faces and eyes in the mirror.

Before I tell you how bad I hope that experience is, let me add some other names to my hate list: Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Katie Couric, Punch Sulzberger, Andrew Sullivan, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, Larry King, Glenn Greenwald, Dan Rather, Charles Gibson, Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, David Gergen, Jan Wenner, Bill Maher, David Letterman, Craig Ferguson (deport him!), and all the editors of Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The New Republic, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, all the hosts of Air America, and all the vicious, foul-mouthed left-wing bloggers and commenters who commit mental crimes of violence against their enemies.

Now. Here’s what I hope happens when you confront yourselves in the mirror. Annihilation. I want you to see yourselves as you are — intellectually and morally corrupt, dishonest, selfish, narcissistic, shallow, more devoted to pornography than philosophy, contemptuous of your betters, servile to superiors, alienated from all worthwhile pursuits, poisonous to the happiness of your own children, and dead-ended on a down-the-drain pursuit of wealth and fame.

Then he gets ugly.

By the way, B. Hussein Obama is exempt:

I’m fairly sure that in his heart of hearts he’s a radical left-wing Marxist racist, but that’s not a crime in and of itself. In the ordinary course of things, he would be a splinter party of one, self-righteous and (inevitably) rich by virtue of the rewards his adoring constituents would lavish on him.

Yup. Moreover, I don’t hate robots or puppets — I understand the difference between the tool and the hand that wields it.

Earlier, I referred to Irena Sendler, hero of the Holocaust, getting elbowed out of the Nobel Peace Prize by the Goreacle.

I missed this cartoon attached to the story at Flopping Aces:

For a long time now, the Associated Press has been working hard to lose your trust by acting as a mouth piece for terrorists, publishing staged and altered photos, and pandering to the lowest sort of anti-American Americans.

Now, in a classic move to lose readership, AP has started suing people who link to and quote their stories.

Fine.

They haven’t been an important source for this blog, but it’s my plan to not give them any more links or quotes, at all.

Drink ink and die, AP.

“Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform, don’t kid yourself.”
– Frank Zappa, Burnt Weenie Sandwich

Now read this, over at Overcoming The Bias:

Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black.  It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Damn straight, Skippy.

I know people who simply refuse to like anything they hear on Top 40 radio, simply because it’s popular, and they can’t tolerate along with the crowd.

Shakespeare’s bad, because, you know, he’s a cultural icon.

Most of them are against the war in Iraq, because, you know, they’re questioning authority. They’re speaking truth to power. They’re out on the edge.

‘Scuse, please, but they’re credulous starry-eyed sheep. Avowed skeptics and inclusive multi-culturists, they’re bowing down before the most racist, sexist, close-minded, anti-progressive religious cult to come along in the past thousand years, a cult that openly promises to enslave or kill them. They’re trying to elect a presidential candidate from the Chicago Machine they’re treating like the Messiah. Meanwhile, if I can keep from vomiting on the voting machine, I’ll vote for this guy.

I know, vaguely, what wearing the clown suit feels like, because I’ve come out to “liberal” friends and family as a gun owner. My advocacy of possessing a tool that would allow me to actually resist tyranny made me a pariah to folks who are very strident in their rebelliousness. (I probably also wore the clown suit a lot in school, but wasn’t aware of it. I don’t think that counts. Hm, I did almost start a fad for carrying Slinkies around, but the teachers put a stop to that, because they’re so damn noisy. Does that count?)

And mind, by the standards of the linked article, I’m still not a true rebel, because I didn’t figure out, on my own, how crucial the right to keep and bear arms really is; I picked it up from a chance conversation back in ‘76, and had it reinforced by Gharlane of Eddore, a nut job science fiction fan posting in the Babylon Five usenet forums.

I’m giving up on trying to be a rebel. I swear, from here on out, not to care how popular or unpopular my positions are, but only whether or not I feel they’re right. If I conform, too damn bad.

Now me, you know, I really am an iconoclast.  Everyone thinks they are, but with me it’s true, you see.  I would totally have worn a clown suit to school.  My serious conversations were with books, not with other children.

But if you think you would totally wear that clown suit, then don’t be too proud of that either!  It just means that you need to make an effort in the opposite direction to avoid dissenting too easily.  That’s what I have to do, to correct for my own nature.  Other people do have reasons for thinking what they do, and ignoring that completely is as bad as being afraid to contradict them.  You wouldn’t want to end up as a free thinker.  It’s not a virtue, you see - just a bias either way.

So I liked Madonna’s “Material Girl” video. So sue me.

[update]

Holy. Crap.

Overcoming Bias is a serious trip, particularly if you’ve let yourself get intellectually lazy. It’s a bigger, and far more productive, time sink than Wikipedia or even TV Tropes. Very, very strongly recommended.

Via Grouchy Old Cripple:

Followed by this:

Just think. If the ecotards and the Dimocrat Party had not kept us from drilling in ANWR, off our coasts, and on federal lands and if they hadn’t blocked the building of new refineries and nuclear power plants, we would be energy independent and this would be the peace we would be raining on Iran and Saudi Arabia. These are the two countries who are our worst enemies on this planet and the countries we will eventually be at war with. They sponsor most of the Islamic terrorism in the world. The sooner we realize this and take steps to destroy them, by first becoming energy independent, the better off we’ll be.

I’ve been watching this happen for several years now. It’s scary as hell, and perhaps the scariest thing about it is, it forbids you to talk about it.

It’s the Jihad on Free Speech.

If you read that, grimaced, and moved to click the Back button to get away from this racist screed, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step to Submission!

If you want to find out how your right to free speech is being eroded by religious fanatics who happen not to be Christians, read Bruce Bawer’s Anatomy of Surrender over at City Journal.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys.

Oh, yes. Read the whole, ugly, sordid, thing. You need to know.

It’s long and detailed, but here’s the nut:

Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even [the phrase "War on Terror"] offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”

Oh, that’s lovely. Brilliant. Note how that makes it impossible to fix responsibility for jihadist terrorism where it belongs. Anyone committing such an act is automatically considered separate from Islam–which therefor cannot be blamed for incitement.

In Britain, “Asian” is the accepted codeword for “Muslim”. In Europe, Muslim rioters are “disaffected youths”. Thus is the language debased, and made to hide the truth rather than reveal it.

Can’t be said often enough:

There is no God, especially not Allah; and Mohammed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-molesting mass murderer. Islam is no “Religion of Peace”, but a violent warrior cult specially designed to enforce ignorance and hatred of everything other than itself.

Steve at Hog on Ice, commenting on Israel Prime Minister Olmert’s traitorous decision to return the Golan Heights to Syria:

Liberals believe battered wives aren’t fit to be trusted with handguns, but they think savages are fit to handle huge armies and nuclear weapons. Someone explain the logic.

===

As TC says in comments: “Ehud Olmert : Israel :: Jimmy Carter : United States”

Yes, Carter is also a traitor.

===

On the other hand, as Sigivald notes, “that’s if we can believe a Syrian cabinet minister. Olmert and the Israeli Government have not, it appears, said it themselves.”

However that may be, Steve’s comment on what those who call themselves Liberals believe is still accurate.

Today is St. George’s Day.

This flag has long been a symbol of England. It’s also associated with the Crusades, and is therefore reviled by jihadists. Today, the dhimmi forces of appeasement are working to ban its public display. In the latest outrage, a St. George’s Day parade has been canceled, because the planned participation of 1,500 children made it too attractive a target for the Religion of Peace.

Can’t be said enough:
There is no God, certainly not Allah; and Mohamed, may piss be upon him, was no prophet, but a child-raper and mass-murderer who invented a sociopathic warrior cult that advocates more of the same.

Also via the Anchoress, an excellent article explaining why the majority of American soldiers believe that what they are doing is right and necessary.

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
- Carl Jung

Last weekend, I was profoundly privileged to be in the VFW Post in Nashville, Tennessee with a roomful of the some of the most intelligent, reasonable and sane human beings I have ever encountered. These men seemed to shun the term “hero.”

Yet, what other word could possibly suffice?

From Hollywood’s anti-war movies to the New York Times’ pitiful anti-vet screeds, to the major networks’ portrayals of whacked-out homeless vets to the Winter Soldiers , the American public is bombarded on a daily basis with the notion that suffering for a just cause is not only a needless expenditure of treasure, but a disgraceful evil that should never be borne by good people.

But anyone with a decent upbringing and a grain of common sense, who listens to representatives from Vets for Freedom and Vets for Victory, as I did last weekend, clearly knows that Carl Jung had it right. These hero vets of VFF and V4V know intimately and soundly, the difference between legitimate and illegitimate suffering.

These men, these genuine heroes, are the personification of sanity walking tall.

And having listened to these heroes explain with poise, eloquence and clarity the cause of our war against the forces of terror, I have never been more proud to call myself an American.

Nor have I ever felt such shame for the mainstream media’s insane and childish portrayal of America to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has the big megaphone and theirs is the voice the world hears.

The author, Kyle-Ann Shiver, then presents summaries of two of the speakers. Read the whole thing.

From the Gates of Vienna:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference denounced yesterday the reprinting of a blasphemous Danish cartoon, warning it could lead to confrontations between Muslims and Christians. “By reprinting these cartoons we are heading toward a bigger conflict and that shows that both sides will be hostages of their radicals,” OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told AFP in Istanbul.

“It is not a way of improving your rights and exercising your freedoms when you use these rights for insulting the most sacred values and symbols of others and inciting hatred,” he said. “This is a very wrong, provocative way — unacceptable.”

Several Danish newspapers on Wednesday republished one of 12 drawings, which had already caused bloody riots in the Muslim world in 2006, after police uncovered an alleged plot in the Scandinavian country to kill the cartoonist.

“The people who are doing this put themselves with the radicals, the fanatics and extremists who are using their beliefs as justification to hurt others,” Ihsanoglu said. “This is not the way to improve relations between East and West, between Islam and Christianity.” The drawing has triggered fresh uproar in Muslim countries.

GoV notes that what’s on offer here is your basic protection racket: “Nice little civilization you got here; It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Bring it, assholes. Our civilization has pounded yours into the sand every time you pissed us off badly enough to bother to try.

Trite and obvious, yes, but this must be said, over and over, until it is heard:

It is not a way of proving the sanctity of your values and symbols when you riot, burn, kill, and, yes, incite hatred against those who mock you for rioting, burning, killing, and inciting hatred.

It’s the ones who do that who are in fact the radicals, fanatics and extremists who are using their beliefs as justification to hurt others.

I am a skeptic; I regard all religions as the groping attempts of pre-scientific societies to make sense of their world and their place in it.

Instead, I hold such constructs as the U.S. Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, as sacred. I most highly esteem the First and Second Amendments, which acknowledge (but does not grant) my right to express to my conscience, whoever it may offend, including my exercise of the power of life and death to defend myself and resist tyranny.

Again: there is no god, not even Allah, and Mohammed was a deranged mass-murderer.