Ketchup Is A Vegetable

Thanks to Fake Science.

We would be remiss here at Ketchup Is A Vegetable if we did not mention that the stupidest war ever is finally, officially, over sort of.

It’s funny. As we went through the Iraq War and the Preznit what oversawl it, I thought I was living through the entirely stupidest period in American history ever. At this point, I’m not sure if that’s true or not. These are pretty god-dammed stupid times. But, the fact is that the Iraq War was a very very very very stupid thing.

Let me get something straight here. I am not a pacifist. I don’t oppose war for its own sake. I understand that sometimes a nation has to flex its muscles geopolitically in order to preserve its own interests. For instance, I don’t think George I was entirely wrong for Gulf I, though I do think there was some shenanigans behind our involvement there. And I certainly think Colin Powell showed us how to do such a thing correctly. And I can tell you, as a guy who had to walk home to Arlington from downtown D.C. on September the Eleventh amid reports of car bombs going off everywhere and whatnot, that I would have LOVED to see some fucking justice go down for that shit.

But that’s not what we got. We got a bullshit stupid war that dethroned a guy who—as a secular dictator—was intuitively our most likely natural ally in the Middle East, and, not to mention, a guy who had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks. There were no WMD. There was no reason to invade this sovereign country preventively. And even though the premise was wholely stupid, its execution was mind-blowingly idiotic. I would refer here to a post of mine from years ago, “Freedom’s Untidy.” This is one of the favorite things of mine that I have ever written. And I have written some pretty good shit in my day.

And the question comes, inevitably, as I watched Richard Engle on his embedded reporting from Iraq and junk, and as I was surprised at how uninterested I was in the reporting, the question comes and it can’t help but come: Who won? And what the hell did they win?

The Federal Communications Commission was founded in 1934 with the express purpose of making sure that people could reasonably listen to the radio. Soon thereafter, the agency decided that it could also police the airways for naughty language, which many American seem to feel is physically harmful to them.

As pointed out comically by the late great George Carlin, the FCC had at one point ruled that there were seven words that you were not allowed to say on the air. The agency has also ruled that you cannot reveal a lady’s nipple during the Super Bowl, although a court later reversed that finding. They have also ruled that you cannot refer on the radio to a man playing a piano with his penis, and that nor can you use the phrase “big black lesbian filled with lust” (see Stern, Howard). Bafflingly, the FCC has said that it’s okay to say “fucking” on the air in some instances, so long as you say something like “That’s fucking great” and so long as you don’t say “Hey, Bob and Rita are over in the corner fucking.” Although, if I were a broadcaster, I probably wouldn’t try it.

So the FCC is a fickle bitch when it comes to naughty words (“I don’t mind ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ but P AND C ARE OUT! P AND C ARE OUT!”). They can’t get off their asses and keep the Internet in the commons, but boy, if you say naughty words on the radio or on the TV, they’ll come out with all guns blazing!

But there is one word that is so egregious, so explosive, so utterly awful, that even the FCC doesn’t have to enforce it. And that word was recently uttered 11 times by “Doctor” Laura Kightlinger…I’m sorry, I mean Schlessinger (I bet that happens to Laura Kightlinger all the damned time)…on the radio. This is a word that starts with an “n” and that purports to refer to a certain segment of the American population due to the hue of their epidermis. Epidermii. Whatever.

No, the FCC doesn’t have to do anything about a broadcaster that uses a racial epithet. That person will either have to call it quits or he will have to publicly beg and plead with the Rev. Al Sharpton and will have to hire a minimum of two black people as sidekicks (see Imus, Don). And there is a REASON for this.

You see, “Doctor” Laura, once upon a time in American history, when a person was using the word that you so boldly pronounced ELEVEN TIMES on your air, that person was often MULTI-TASKING. For instance, the person would be saying that word while, oh, I dunno, while he was tying a noose around a person’s neck. Or, while he was saying that word, he might have been beating a person’s skull in with a billy club. Or whipping a guy’s back until it looks like ground chuck. Or chasing a guy with a pack of hounds.

This is why our marketplace of ideas abhors the word. We are a culture that believes that words are powerful, so powerful that we’ve asked our government to protect us from some of the finest among them. So don’t get all shocked when your utterance of the most brutal, most violent word in our culture causes an avalanche on your bony ass.

So when “Doctor” Laura whines that her First Amendment rights have somehow been violated, she takes whatever credibility she might have had, which was rather little—considering that her “Doctor” title comes from a master’s in physiology—and she poops it out and flushes it down the toidey. Her First Amendment rights were not violated in any way. In fact what really happened is that the marketplace—which as you recall is an abstract concept that conservatives enjoy performing oral sex upon—drove her to the edge of town with a bucket and a pistol before Uncle Sam even had the opportunity.

All of this, and, believe it or not, uttering that word is not even the most racist thing the good “doctor” said! No, she intimated that, since we have a black Preznit now, all this racist stuff should just go away! And she told her caller not to “NAACP” her?

What. A pig. Good riddance.

Unbelievable.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger announced Tuesday night that she would end her radio show following her N-word rant last week.

“My contract is up for my radio show at the end of the year and I’ve made the decision not to do radio anymore,” she told Larry King. “The reason is I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.”

Dr. Laura emphasized that she is “not retiring” but rather just ending her radio show.

“I’m not retiring, I’m not quitting, I feel energized actually,” she said. “Stronger and freer to say the things that I believe need to be said for people in this country.”

So, she’s quitting radio so she can say “n*****?”

Hmmmmmmm?

Will it be tax exempt?

How about if you tea-bagging morons stop making idiotic Reductio ad Hitlerum analogies and find that out so you can make an actually rational argument, would you do that for us, please?

Because, my tea-bagging friends, if this frackin’ thing is tax-exempt, then you might very well have a couple of allies over here at the Serious Poo-Poo Institute of Technology. Last thing we need is more damned real estate in NYC that’s tax-exempt because some a-holes talk to their imaginary sky-friends there.

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with a friend who asked me, quite seriously, if I was one of those people who are abandoning the President. She was, I guess, anticipating Robert Gibbs, who recently told the people who worked hardest to get Obama elected what he really thought of them. I told my friend that I will certainly vote for Obama and that I am still likely to work for him in 2012 (although I am more likely to spend my time working for progressive House and Senate candidates).

Am I disappointed with Obama? You betcha. Obama was elected with a mandate for change and with a Congress predisposed to do his bidding (admittedly, poorly led by Nan and Hairy). He has, none the less, failed to anticipate the opposition, unnecessarily surrendered positions of principle and demonstrated an unhappy tendency to compromise before the battle is engaged.

He made a major mistake a few weeks into office when he got between Officer Crowley and Henry Lewis Gates, and he has since caved on every racial challenge. For example, abandoning the highly qualified and talented Van Jones to the vicious attacks of Fox News and the right wing lie machine. Likewise Shirley Sherrod.

Within months of the election, still popular with the voters, The President did not take his substantial clout to the streets to fight the GOOP and get the stimulus package he needed. Instead he accepted a compromise that was known at the time to be too little to do the job and he is now paying for that. I actually don’t think jobs is a “progressive” as opposed to “centrist” issue, but I think the President has dropped the ball on jobs and he has failed focus on infrastructure projects that could help build a stronger future AND provide jobs.

The President surrendered before the fight for single payer health care started, even though he had campaigned on that issue and promised to deliver.

We may always have known that The President never intended to pursue the personal crimes of Busch and Chainy, but we expected at the least some final action against the people who made a mockery of the Constitution in approving torture and used the Justice Department as a political tool. Guantanamo is still functioning and the detainees who should have been tried in civil courts are being tried by military tribunals. This later spectacle is directly attributable to the President’s inability to buck public paranoia stirred up by the GOOP and its media allies.

Likewise, he has turned Don’t Ask Don’t Tell over to the Pentagon bureaucracy, which has shown no signs of actually eliminating the practice. The Fierce Advocate for GLBT Rights has taken a vacation.

Wall Street is still running the Treasury, financial reform failed to encircle many derivities abuses, the reaction to BP’s Oil Spill was slow. It has taken too much time to root out the Busch appointees burrowed into and still running some key agencies.

Would I be happier with Dennis Kucinich? Only if he did a better job than Obama has been doing. The measure is not in the perception, it is in the performance. (BTW I do not want to get rid of the Pentagon. I want to root out the religious fanatics who control too much of it and I want to cut its budget 20 percent.)

Do I think the Obama Administration is a complete bust? No. First and foremost it is not a GOOP administration. The Supreme Court appointments have been disappointing. Too centrist, too corporate, too Ivy League. But they are not facists. We got a health care bill. Even weakened by unnecessary compromises, it is better than nothing. We are once again a respected leader in the international community.

Painful as it is, we are no longer trying to hide the cost of our little wars, and know the total cost of government.

Obama’s EPA has, more than any other agency, unwound Busch era programs designed to cripple it and is now reregulating to beat the band. Stem cell research is safe from religious nut jobs, and science has been restored to an honored place in government. There are only 50,000 troops left in Iraq and Afghanistan is supposed to wind up in a year. It could be worse.

One of the most interesting aspects of our national politics in the last month has been what appears to be an effort to rebrand the war in Afghanistan as “The War for Women.” Time just published the cover girl for the movement, a once beautiful young woman grotesquely mutilated by her family.

If you havn’t seen it go look. It will make you want to get out the shotgun and go shoot down a couple of those vicious fuckers yourself. It seems her crime was she was forced into a marriage at 13 and was getting tired of being beaten and abused daily by the family of her “husband,” and was getting old enough (19) to worry that they might decide to burn her (a divorce substitute widely used in the region in which inconvenient wives accidentally catch fire and burn to death).   So she ran away from home and with the help of the Taliban was tracked down. They cut off her ears and her nose and left her to bleed to death. Charming people.

Now comes Media Matters, which claims there is evidence that the article and other similar propaganda is the work of the CIA, which is working to drum up new enthusiasm for the war. I have to say, CIA propaganda or not, this problem has always been in the back of my mind. How do we abandon Afghanistan without turning over the women to the vicious mercies of Taliban misogyny?

This is admittedly a problem all over the Middle East, where, for example, the Saudi government claims to have made radical strides in women’s equality by granting them the right to drive.

Still there is the notion, clear and well reasoned, that the war in Afghanistan is not winnable. No foreign conquerer has won a war there ever. It was the downfall of Alexander the Great, the bane of the British Empire. Why should we expect to win now? Regardless of how much we put into it, and how much we want to save the women, in the end we will not succeed. Certainly not with the current plan.

Which of course brings me to a new strategy. Let the women save themselves. Arm them with handguns and teach them how to shoot. They are perfrcctly positioned to knock off the worst of the Taliiban with hardly a notice. Their culture gives them a natural cover. The burka covers everything, including handguns. The men think women are stupid and defenseless. I bet armed women could knock off a couple hundred of the SOBs before they even figured out who was doing the shooting.

There is a good project for trhe CIA. Arm the women.

I have long predicted that this whole “gay marriage” brouhaha would someday end up in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. It has to, it just has to.

From what I’m reading, SCOTUS won’t have much to go on to flip this decision. This Vaughn Walker fellow really did his homework and created a decision that seems to fairly insurmountable. (No pun intended). Eugene Robinson breaks it down nicely in today’s The Washington Post.

What a banner day.

And, by the way. You’re going to hear a lot from conservagoats about how this is an example of the tyrannical court system going against the will of the people. Blah, blah, blah, it’s horseshit. Let’s recall what ACTUALLY happened, shall we? In sunny California, a court said, okay, you guys can get married. And so they DID. They showed up in droves in Sam Framcisco to wed. Then the Mormons came to town and funded a petition drive and got this Prop 8 thing on the ballot. It passed with a slim majority. So what happened was that the state extended a right to all of its citizens via the courts, then an election swapped that right away. That is not justice, folks. It’s disgusting. Kudos to this judge for setting that right.

Nine years ago today, a CIA agent handed the President of the United States his Daily Brief,  titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”

I am not a big fan of making Elena Kagan one of the Supremes. She is, after all, just another Ivy League lawyer. None the less, it is disappointing to see that the vote was only 63 in favor. And it shocking that one of the 37 in opposition was, at least officially, a member of the Democratic Party.

That scumbag Ben Nelson became the first Democrat not to vote on a Supreme Court nomination of a sitting Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson nominated Thoroughgood Marshall (nine Southern Democrats voted against him). Now I am trying to think of one significant vote in this Congress where Nelson voted with his party. Not Healthcare. Not the unemployment extension. Not the Jobs Bill. Not Financial Reform.

So why is this guy still caucusing with the Democrats? Nelson is not a committee chair, but chairs subcommittees in Agriculture, Armed Forces and Appropriations… all plumb positions, and all very important to Nebraska. Why does he still have them?

Don’t we have party discipline, or is that just something the GOOP does?