The End of the Republican Party?
(We can only hope.)


What MoveOn.org said: General Petraeus, or General Betray Us?

What MoveOn.org meant: "General Petraeus has allowed himself to become a puppet of the Bush administration, and in doing so, has turned his back on both his country and the troops under his command."

The Right: "OMFG, THIS 1S LYKE T0TALY OUTR4G3US!!!!!!11 I C4NT B3LIEVE THEY WUD DO SUCH A THNG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111 L1BRALS R EV1L AND HAT3 TEH TROOPS AND HAT3 AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111"

Congressional Democrats: "You criticized him? But he's wearing a uniform! That mean's you can't criticize him, doesn't it? But you did it anyway. And that's mean."

(Later that month....)

Rush Limbaugh: "Troops who don't support this war are phony soldiers!"

The Right: .....

The Left: "Hey! You just bashed troops for opposing your opinion, and did so without constructing any logical arguments! And then you bashed the people who criticized Petraeus, even though there actually is a legitimate reason for why they did it! That's not only asinine, it's hypocritical!"

The Right: "STFU!!!!!!!!1111 RUSH LUVS TEH TROOPS!!!!!!!!111  TH3R3 WUZ N0 HYP0CR1SY AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!111111"

Congressional Democrats: .....


I would almost think that Limbaugh said what he said just because he wanted to subtly prove the point that the right can get away with doing anything to and saying anything about the troops. Anyone with any semblance of common sense can see that Rush, who was one of the right-wingers who went ape-shit over the MoveOn.org ad, was being as hypocritical as anything in the history of hypocrisy after then going on to blatantly attack any and all soldiers who opposed his position on the war. This whole MoveOn/Limbaugh debacle is downright laughable in the level of obtuseness displayed by Rush.

You'd think he'd learn. After all, Rush's bashing of Michael J. Fox over the issue of stem cells is essentially what handed Claire McCaskill her victory over her Republican rival for the Missouri Senate seat in 2006. We all know that story; you could easily make the case that Limbaugh's sick and twisted on-air rants handed Democrats the 51st Senate seat.

And yet he's at it again. "Damn MoveOn for their criticism of an American military man! Oh, and by the way, any American military man who disagrees with my opinion on the war is a phony soldier!"

The American people may not be quick to pick up on things.....but Christ, You'd have to be fucking brain dead to not catch (and/or care about) Limbaugh's 180.



It's just the latest in a series of right-wing fuckups so obvious and severe that they couldn't do a better job of handing 2008 to the Democrats if they tried.

And 2008 is the conservative assessment (pardon the pun). One Republican lawmaker remarked, "There's talk about us going the way of the Whigs."

Three articles I've read recently highlight this:

Leading Indicators Point Down for GOP - This one expands on how the left is crushing the right in terms of fundraising. And most of the left's contributions come from grassroots - the people - as opposed to the right, whose contributions come primarily from the rich and from big business.

The Religious Right's Power Ebbs - Fundamentalist Christianity is (finally) losing it's chokehold on American political power (presumably because Atheism, Secularism, and Freethought are rising exponentially each year). I'll expand on this more in my next post, which will be devoted to religion and Atheism.

And my personal favorite:

Is the GOP Committing Suicide?

In a word: Yes. One EXTREMELY noteworthy example is Bush's recent veto of S-CHIP (State's Children's Health Insurance Program). It would give free health insurance to millions of poor children in America (a small step toward Universal Health Care). What's more, it would do so by raising taxes on cigarettes - health insurance for children would be paid for by the people who already have enough money to take up that god awful habit. It's a win-win, right? Right. And the overwhelming majority of Americans support the bill.

So what does Bush do? He vetoes it.

Talk about things that make no fucking sense:
a) It's going to drive his 29% approval rating even lower.
b) It puts the right in the position of defending someone who's taking away health care from children.
c) It's fucking cruel and downright sadistic.

As Jon Stewart remarks, Bush's actions are actually starting to resemble someone else:



.....which is hilarious, until you realize just how true it is, and until you realize the fact that taking away so much from people who have so little is anything but a laughing matter.

Because as we all know, denying poor children the right to medical care simply because equality despite wealth is a Socialist principle instead of a Capitalist one is EXACTLY what Jesus would have done.

But this S-CHIP veto is just the latest in a ridiculously long line of right-wing fuckups so severe that the country is not only turning left now, it may be turning left long term.

Allowing 9/11 to happen, taking away our freedoms and privacy with the Patriot Act, focusing on banning gay marriage and abortion when they should be focusing on real issues, lying about WMDs, entering a war of choice Iraq, saying we'll only be there 6 months and that it will only cost us $10 billion, failing to plan for the post-war, denying troops body armor and vacation time, extending troop deployments, failing to react to Hurricane Katrina, embracing crony Capitalism, putting us into a debt that will take us at least half a century to get out of, authorizing torture, ignoring global warming, failing to capture bin Laden, failing to secure the borders because of squabbling over how to best punish the people trying to provide a better life for their families, letting Walter Reed go to shit, pushing America ever close to a theocracy......

And that's not even including the sex scandals. Mark Foley, Jeff Gannon, Ted Haggard, Bob Allen, David Vitter, Larry Craig.....party of "family values", indeed......

Right-wing sleazebag commentators are only hastening the separation between conservatism and the future of America. Rush calls troops who disagree with him "phony soldiers". Bill O'Reilly is shocked to find out that African-Americans actually have table manners. Neil Boortz, aside from his asinine idea of the "Fair" Tax, has said this about immigrants: "When we yank out the welcome mat, and they all start going back to Mexico, as a going away gift let's all give them a box of nuclear waste....Tell 'em it'll heat tortillas". It's hard for any rational person not to cringe in the face of such blatant racism.

And to top it all of, the king (pun intended) of all the right-wing nutjob screwballs is coming out with another book. Ann Coulter's latest book is called "Democrats Would Be Republicans If They Had Any Brains". Now, for a commentator who wants herself to be taken seriously, she's a hair off of sounding like Lil the Toddler on the old Rugrats cartoons: "If Brains Were Gasoline, Democrats Wouldn't Have Enough To Power An Ant's Car Around The Outside Of A Penny". Well I hate to break it to you Ann, but most of us have graduated elementary school. We have real jobs now, so we won't have any time to meet you on the playground after school to play a game of Throw Rocks At Poor Kids.

But even Ann Coulter knows that the right-wing could very well be facing the end of it's days. Here's something I noticed while watching Faux News a couple days ago, so I decided to track down a couple pictures for comparison to make sure I wasn't imagining things:


"I AM SMILING, SEE? THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS GOING TO LAST FOREVER! AND JESUS WILL RETURN BEFORE ANYONE PUTS ANOTHER DEMOCRAT BACK INTO THE PRESIDENCY! SEE MY SMILE? HOW COULD ANYONE BE NERVOUS WHEN THEY'RE SMILING AS WIDE AS I AM!"

That's what I noticed when I saw her on TV. Looking much more ragged, and obviously faking a smile that's trying to mask the fact that she knows 2008 and a good chunk of America's political future lies with the left. The exact same kind of forced optimism that Karl Rove showed while he was proclaiming that Republicans would win even more seats in the Congress just days before the 2006 election.

But she was part of what contributed to that. Sane, rational people are repulsed by the things that Coulter, Limbaugh, and Hannity proclaim on a regular basis. The best thing that could ever happen to America would be if political discussions shifted from "right vs. left" (or "right vs. middle", given the wimpy Dems currently controlling Congress) to "middle vs. left". This is Coulter/Limbaugh/Hannity's worst nightmare, but by steadily spewing blatant hatespeech through TV, books, and radio, people have begun to see just how asinine the radical right's "principles" and "values" really are.

It's the combination of that hatespeech with the maliciousness and incompetence of the Bush Regime that has essentially cemented the left's influence over American politics in the near future (and quite possibly for a very long time to come).

--Kryss864 (My personal blog)
--Why I Am the Way I Am (An essay about why I am an agnostic atheist.)
--Little-known statistics about religion (A reason to hope)
--The Day the Democrats took back Congress
--Save Roe v. Wade!
--Atheists in Foxholes
--Beautiful stories of deconversion from Christianity