ricketyclick

If you are voting, or have already voted for, Obama, take a look at the comments on this post at Wonkette directed at Sarah Palin’s baby, Trig, dressed in an elephant costume for Halloween.

Such brave, kind, caring, tolerant, loving people you have joined yourself with. I’m so proud of you. Well, no. Not exactly…proud.

You’re proud of yourselves, though, you feel good about yourselves, with plenty of positive self-esteem, so it’s all good, right?

Right?

Here’s the actual lead post:

Little baby Trig must be so glad he wasn’t aborted for this, his first Halloween, because his parents dressed him up like a political party symbol to be carried around at snarling political events. Aww. Isn’t life just grand?

Here’s some selected comments. No, really. Cut’n'pasted right from the site:

A moose costume wasn’t available?
===
I wonder—if given the option—if Sarah Palin would hunt elephants from a helicopter.
===
Such a cute picture of the proud mom…sister…whatever.
===
Ugh. I hate that look people get on their face when they are happy to be holding a baby. It is all domestic and other disturbing things.
===
How mean to dress the down syndrome kid as Dumbo.
===
Initially they were going to have trig dress up as an aborted fetus.
===
I thought her religion was against Halloween.
===
I’d like to abort myself if McCain/Palin wins this election. kthx.

To that last: Please do, you donkey-turd.

No, this was not picking the occasional cherry. This is more like every other one of the first sixteen. Not a single decent human being on the two or three screens I scanned through. They’re proud of themselves for this; they think they’re the intelligent, well-educated, decent, peace-loving ones.

They think they’re better than those gun-clingin’ hillbilly ignorant redneck Repugs.

They think they deserve to rule.

Like I said in the post below: It’s not just Obama himself I’m scared of. It’s the people he’s surrounded himself, and the people he’s getting to vote for him.

Via Mike at Cold Fury, who comments, “evil…bat-scat crazy.”

I’m in an agony of haste at the moment, but I want to put something on the record:

In tonight’s VP debate, if Sarah Palin cannot hold her own even against a somewhat biased moderator, she’s not fit for the Presidency.

I’m pleased to see this post by Todd Zywicki:

Just a quick personal word on Gwen Ifill as debate moderator and her possible bias on the debate. I appeared on The Newshour one night with her to discuss bankruptcy reform. I found her to be eminently fair and well-prepared. She understood the key issues and asked pointed questions for both myself and the other guest. Based solely on the broadcast I would not have been able to discern what her position was. But of all the interviews I’ve done with the media, I founder her to be one of the smartest and most even-handed interviewers that I’ve dealt with.

I’m guessing that she will bend over backwards to be fair, now that her planned book about Obama is public knowledge. If she does not, if her bias becomes evident, there will be mass sympathy for Palin.
I don’t want that. I want Palin to face off against Biden, not the moderator.

I won’t be at all surprised if Ifill acknowledges her book at the start of the show.

Palin’s a big girl. I expect a bit of playground taunting will roll off her back.

But who cares?

Seriously, I’ve seen maybe three or four folks asking what Palin really stands for.

Billy Beck, of course, is one of them:

Nothing in the ground up there belonged — or belongs — to “Alaska” except by arbitrary claim of the sort that kings would have asserted before the rise of rational politics that eventually instituted America as the first nation consciously and deliberately attendant to principles of individualism, in which free people could thumb their noses at such a claim and then go to work at production on their own powers.

I’m warning you people: if you’re interested in freedom, Sarah Palin is not your friend. Get this through your head: no matter how awful an Obama presidency could be, you need to be looking at this Palin thing a lot more carefully than people like Bennett would like you to.

In a sane world, McCain and Palin would be laughed off the national stage as socialist radicals. We’ve gone so far off track, they look like stodgy conservatives, and otherwise intelligent, informed folk of good will are allowing themselves to be distracted by lipstick smears.

Beck calls it The Endarkenment.

Understand, I’m still not to the point where I’m going to stand outside my polling place on Election Day, holding a sign telling people not to agree to tyranny, while handing out pro-gun and pro-jury-annulment flyers. I still think that McCain-Palin, bad as they are, represent a much slower slide into the pit, with fewer razor blades along the way, and maybe even some escape hatches, than Obama does.

But damn, Beck gets harder to argue with every day.

Edwin Leap says the most important thing you will read today:

…The modern emergency department is a kind of social sciences laboratory.  In fact, about 30 years into the existence of the specialty of emergency medicine, I feel comfortable saying that we have shown.with remarkable precision that the more radical social revolutions of the 20th century were shameful, stunning failures.  And the reason I can say it is not based on carefully designed studies, or because I’ve observed it from the comfort of the ivory tower of academia, but because I, and many others like me, treat the casualties of those social revolutions day, after day, after day.  Some examples, you ask?

• Drug use is normal, good, relaxing and enlightening.
• Sex is natural and anyone who tries to limit sex is an old fashioned prude
• The way to fix poverty is to give services, food and money to them, so that they will feel compelled to improve themselves
• Families can be defined in any way, family integrity is over-rated and men are entirely unnecessary for a proper home!
• Religion is an impedance to modern thought, and we need to be liberated from it by the clear, crystal light of pure science.

The mantra of ‘free love’ that began in the 60’s wasn’t about liberation; it was about enslavement to the desires of those who started it and who wanted no restraint on their behavior.
…
Do you know why I see children who are anxious and afraid? Do you know why children seek each other out for sex, and have children of their own at such young ages? Because they are terrified. Why is that? They lack the peace of safe and stable families. They lack the boundaries and discipline, born of love, that proper families give. They want the protection, wisdom, affection of a man and woman, together for the long haul. Without those things, we see what we do in the ER; teen mothers, teen fathers, irresponsible parents shifting sexual alliances from week to week, month to month, moving in with lovers and moving away from them.

Read the whole thing. I excerpt here only the barest whiff of the rotting corpse he wants taken off life support.

As noted in comments there, ERs have a huge selection bias. Also, I believe there’s a big difference between condemning bad behavior socially, and punishing it with the law. Sure, drugs are bad, but the War on Drugs is even worse, because it deprives even the sober of their freedom.

Nevertheless, the attitudes Leap describes are real. My generation, the hippie generation, the peace and love and grooviness generation, is to blame, and we will go down in history as social traitors who destroyed, in only one or two generations, the richest, freest, most powerful nation that has ever been.

===

I cannot resist adding: Obama and his party whole-heartedly embrace the attitudes and policies Leap excoriates. The eyes of Palin, her running mate, and their party leaders, are clouded by decades of socialist, feel-good pap, but they dimly perceive the truth (McCain, of course, survived years of the tender, loving instruction of Obama’s idols), and they are struggling, however weakly, to campaign on the twin pillars of liberty and duty.