Trickle down hate

The new Strib: it’s not the stories so much as it is the comments.

American newspapers have run story after story about how “evil” Russia invaded a sovereign neighboring state. Many accounts made it seem as though the conflict was started by an aggressive Russia invading the Georgian territory of South Ossetia. Some said that South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was destroyed by the Russian army. Little attention was paid to the chronology of events, the facts underlying the conflict.

Last week, Georgia’s president invaded South Ossetia during the night, much as Adolf Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Within hours, Georgian troops destroyed Tskhinvali, a city of 100,000, and they killed more than 2,000 civilians. Almost all of the people who died that night were Russian citizens. They chose to become citizens of Russia years ago, when Georgia refused to recognize South Ossetia as a non-Georgian territory.

The truth is that, in this case, Russian aggression actually made some sense. Russia defended its citizens.

Olga Ivanova

A partisan account, no doubt, but it’s the letters that are fascinating.

Baltic

Yes, Olga, feel free to fly back to Russia. Just remember (or get acquainted with) Putin’s policy toward journalists who try to report what’s actually happening in Russia–the list of those murdered duing his regime is growing quite large!

posted by kiesel on Aug 16, 08 at 8:57 am

 

Humanitarian Aid

I suggest the next several plane loads be rich in TOW anti-tank missiles and Stinger ground to air missiles. All those Russian trucks and tanks are sitting ducks!

posted by Vietor on Aug 16, 08 at 1:47 pm

 

Putin’s press fools another Russian

Unfortunately, the Russian press has mislead their own citizens on this. Russia started by sending in a truckload of Russian Passports to S. Ossetia 10 years ago with KGB. Russia has been rebuilding the rail tracks into BOTH Abkhazia and S. Ossetia preparing for this invasion all spring and summer and had some 2000 tanks ready to go (see Russia’s own website: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080531/108953337.html ) See also: ( http://www.reuters.com/article/asiaCrisis/idUSL025279 ). Then two weeks before the actual invasion Russia launched cyber attacks and shut down Georgia’s sites see: ( http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24183730-5006003,00.html ). Then KGB launched mortar attacks against Georgian troops to illicit violent response. Then it takes 25 hours for Russian Navy ships to reach Georgian coasts and Russia was there within 24 hours all ready to go already with sailors and supplies ready to go. Does this sound like Russia was taken by some surprise Georgian incurrsion?? The Russian people are suckers to Putin’s KGB media blitz and the author of this article is one of them.

posted by skimthood on Aug. 15, 08 at 7:29 PM | 

 

Godwin’s Law

Seriously, three paragraphs and then a comparison to Hitler? Another “useful idiot”. Keep drinking the Pravda Kool-Aid, comrade.

posted by ebrandel on Aug. 15, 08 at 11:40 PM

Godwin’s Law. How I rue the day when that one took hold in the blogosphere. The perfect meme for an imperfect time. The more the Bushies acted like dime store Goerings, the more often Godwin’s Law was invoked. 

God bless the Crawford Queen and his fascist regime.

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Work the press hard enough and sometimes you get a break. From a long and (for Minnesotans not at all newsworthy) article on campaign ads:

Victor Coffman, a 74-year-old former school principal from Blaine, doesn’t mind the ads.

“Those ads are funny … not only funny, but very novel and creative,” said Coffman, a Republican who supports Coleman. He especially liked Coleman’s ads featuring bowlers.

Coleman has twice used men in a bowling alley to make his points — and Franken has responded with a bowling-related Web ad.

In one of Coleman’s ads, the bowlers discuss what the former St. Paul mayor has accomplished for the city and the country.

In another, the bowlers go after Franken more directly and conclude: “We’ve decided we’re running for U.S. Senate. Why not? We’re just as qualified as Al Franken, and we’re better bowlers.”

Franken’s actually a pretty talented bowler, his staff said. His campaign provided a video of Franken enthusiastically bowling a strike at Texa Tonka Lanes in St. Louis Park and scoring on average in the high 150s. 

Rachel Stassen-Berger and Jake Grovum

Franken’s folk are certainly diligent. I think I got the same bowling email they sent the PiPress.

Maybe after the RNC they’ll start to get serious.

Or maybe Norm will accept Al’s challenge to go bowling. And thank god they’re both New Yorkers and not from Jersey or we’d have to watch one of those notoriously funky 9-pin matches they love so much in the bocce-er parts of the Garden State.

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Human interest stories are going over like red kryptonite lately. Rubén Rosario wrote about a young mom whose gas was cut off for the best part of a week and the PiPress’s readership went nuts projecting themselves onto her story. Rosario says 800 comments and 60 voice mails.

Evenson engendered empathy as well as scorn. She was praised and ridiculed for speaking out. She was criticized for having two kids so young and taking on too high a mortgage. Heck, people wondered whether she had cable TV, cars, cell phones and money to fix her hair but not pay her gas bill.

As my wife says, when you point a finger at someone, three point back at you.

A substantial number of readers felt exactly like Evenson. They provided intimate personal details of similar economic struggles. Yet a good number of readers felt she and her husband have no one to blame but themselves for their financial predicament.

Many agreed with her big-picture take of a country increasingly divided by class and money and that neither major party speaks for people like her anymore. Others took issue with those assessments.

A few spun the story to fit their political ideology or agenda, missing the key element, which is that she finds fault with BOTH major political parties. 

 

I do want to rap those on the online discussion board — the bully pulpit for the gutless, I call it some days — who took mean-spirited shots at Evenson because she struggles with depression. They blamed her plight and views on her mental affliction, as if people dealing with depression don’t have the right to voice their opinions, or are maligned for it when they do. Those folks, who of course vented anonymously, went beyond gutless. 

“Dear Mr. Rosario,” Jeanne Cunniff, of St. Paul, wrote Thursday. “After reading your article this morning, I wished I felt more compassionate, but was instead frustrated and dumbfounded by the debt that family took on, which was well beyond their means.

“The size of the mortgage ($190,000) was astronomical relative to their income,” Cunniff added. “Borrowers need to be realistic about their earning ability and be conservative in their estimation of what they can afford, a skill which seems to be sorely missing in this mortgage debacle.” 

 

[T]he nation’s working middle-class is being affected by significant increases in unemployment, foreclosure, inflation, outsourcing and stagnant wages, while the gaps between the haves and the have-nots have widened like never before.

If you contest that, I suggest you take your head out of the sand or somewhere else.

Perhaps Allison’s underlying message, the one she really wanted to express above all, is one that Franklin Delano Roosevelt touched upon in a State of the Union speech more than 64 years ago in his call for a second Bill of Rights addressing economic issues. I credit Barb Sarapas, of St. Paul, whose entire e-mail is available online, for sending me this:

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” FDR noted. ” ‘Necessitous men are not free men,’ ” he said, quoting an English judge, a Lord Chancellor, from 1762. Then he went on: “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

He listed these American rights:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
• The right of every family to a decent home.
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
• The right to a good education.

“America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens,” FDR concluded. 

The problem is that Americans aren’t hungry. I’ve said this countless times but the only reason we haven’t had more riots since the Days of Rage is because of our cheap food policy. If food prices ever went up like gas prices have, people would be hunting down members of Congress like they were dogs and cyber detectives would be pooling resources to find out where in the world W was hiding.

Obama is inheriting a powder keg. Thank God he isn’t a hothead like me. Even I can appreciate the wisdom of isolating and distancing independents and moderate Republicans from the assbiting hard right. Come 2009 we’re going to have to start moving forward again or this country will go under. Right now we’re sinking but instead of a brass band playing Nearer My God to Thee, we’ve got assbites thuggishly attacking poor moms, immigrants, and any “others” they can find.

And it’s my generation that’s the worst. Young conservatives aren’t writing the PiPress to mock young mothers because they’re all too aware of what that’s about. No, the worst most vitriolic crap comes from the usual middle-aged to older losers and more than a few of life’s winners. 

I recall during the early days of the newspaper crisis commenting at the Strib that they should be willing to settle for a 20% profit margin. Two well heeled jerks immediately opined that 20% profit margins weren’t all that high and that they preferred even high returns on their investments. They didn’t say but I think they both had significant positions in the blood diamond market with options to buy shares in some SE Asian gold recovery startup that was busily buying up graveyards.

Despite all the idiot talk about unlimited profits and creating profit out of nothing, the truth is that wealth is always finite, and at some point those amassing riches are literally plucking it from the pockets of the poor. When you don’t pay living wages, you are worst than the old slave masters who at least fed, clothed and housed their slaves, unlike modern corporations.

Under FDR we had hope and a vision of where we were going. No we have no hope and an all too good view of how far we got before the pitons started coming out and the long climb turned into a breakneck descent.

And yes, I saw too much of the true believers last night: society’s winners lapping up John McCain’s hoary anecdotal gruel (heavily frosted with folksy goodness). Christians compelled to applaud Obama’s goodness, but still eager to cheer on McCain’s good wars.

And I do. blame. Fox News.

Propaganda makes a huge difference. This isn’t tens of thousands of pointy headed pricks reading Krauthammer while thinking about which of their neighbors they’d like to butcher and keep in the basement freezer. Fox News is about millions of dupes eagerly lapping up hate speech while ogling streetwalkers in short skirts flirting with their knuckledragging co-hosts. 

We took away their n*ggers, then we took away their abused spouses. We told them they couldn’t beat their kids unconscious, and then we made them put away the snakes and told them to see real doctors. And each time the American right was forced to inch away from their 13th century code of values, the resentment built until now they’re savaging young moms and telling lies faster than could-care-less press could ever begin to debunk.

This is a few months old, but I’d like to close with Michelle Malkin because I think we forget just how bad the real stuff is among the folks who think of Rush Limbaugh as a semi-deity.

Snob-ama is not alone

Michelle Malkin
Copyright Creators Syndicate 2008

The odor of elitism is like onion breath: It’s quick to acquire, hard to mask. Try as he might, Barack Obama cannot camouflage the political stink he exhaled when he dissed small-town Americans as “bitter” Neanderthals “clinging” to their guns, faith and belief in strict immigration enforcement. It wasn’t the first time the effete Snob-ama revealed himself.

In Philadelphia, he passed up the hometown cheesesteak—gloppy, artery clogging and blue-collar (yum!)—for a nibble of Spanish-imported, $100/pound ham. In Iowa, he moaned to voters about the price of arugula at Whole Foods market. (Fun fact: There aren’t any Whole Foods markets in Iowa.) And at an Altoona bowling alley, he couldn’t even score his age. Superficial but telling glimpses of a condescending core.

Obama is reportedly flummoxed that his remarks have been interpreted as arrogant. After all, he was a “community organizer” who came from a single-parent home! He is The Everyman. The Uniter. The Soul-Fixer. The Vessel of All Hopes and Dreams. How could he possibly be perceived as out of touch?

Well, Beltway elitism isn’t about biography. It’s a corrupted state of mind. Obama can at least console himself with the knowledge that he has plenty of out-of-touch company in both parties in Washington.

Let’s face it. Hundred-million-dollar Hillary “I’m not Tammy Wynette” Clinton, John “$400 Haircut” Edwards, John “French” Kerry and Al “$30,000 utility bill” Gore make Obama look like a peon of pretension. And it’s hard to top the imperiousness of Reps. Cynthia McKinney, Patrick Kennedy and Sheila Jackson-Lee, who all abused vlaw enforcement or service workers while demanding special privileges as “public servants.”

They eat up shit like this from high profile celebrity hatemongers every day. Malkin’s audience ranges from the mid to the high six figures and for a political writer that’s a huge audience. The lies in this snippet of screed are astonishing, but as always it’s the arugula that gripes me most. It’s a story that proves that not even Jesus Christ could run for the Democratic nomination and emerged unscathed by the mouthbreathing right.

Yes, Obama talked about arugula prices once. Not at a Whole Foods (that’s new to me, I’m not keeping up well with the latest in made-up bullshit). No, Obama was standing next to an Iowa farmer and they were looking at the farmer’s field of arugula which he was growing as a new cash crop. Changes the story a bit, now doesn’t it?

I read for news and when I see something that illuminates the nature of today’s right, I publish it. That’s usually something pretty negative. Rightwing blogs do the same but they don’t pull their stories from newspapers quite as often. For them any story told anywhere is fair game, and so they reinforce the lies they’ve packed their heads with with still more lies. Fuck Godwin’s Law, if Michelle Malkin hated Jews there would be ovens running in Pennsylvania even now. She points her finger, and death threats follow.

This isn’t about issues, this isn’t about what’s going on in the world today. This is about people who hate, and the lengths they go to to keep their mad on. 

This is no country for young women, children, gays, or the infirm.

So yes, let’s hope that Obama can chip away at the evangelicals, further isolating the worst haters into their little letter writing and blog reading cells.

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Cabaret for the new century.

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More reprints from the PiPress, but I’m sure you can guess why I’m reprinting the beginning of this one:

The Democrats are ready to nominate a presidential candidate with Hussein as his middle name, and some Barack Obama backers are even adopting Hussein as a middle name to show support. Here are a few more fair-to-middling facts:

• Middle names are a somewhat recent tradition in Western civilization. No person aboard the Mayflower had a middle name. Only three of the first 17 U.S. presidents had one. 

Probably because the Republic couldn’t have survived under George Delano Washington, John H.W. Adams, Thomas Fitzgerald Jefferson, James Milhouse Madison, James Wilson Monroe, or John W. Adams.

Suddenly Hussein doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

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