Did you ever actually try to read The Gulag Archipelago? It’s like being trapped down at the end of the bar, two hours before closing time, buttonholed by a blabbering drunk who keeps clutching your lapel or your sleeve. He can’t keep track of what he’s already told you, so he just keeps repeating himself, urgently, leaning in too close, breathing whiskey fumes in your face. You can’t get a word in edgeways, and you can’t get away because he’s physically blocking you. You can’t even go to the bathroom, even though your bladder’s bulging and you’re desperate to micturate. The hands clutch and tug insistently at your sleeve: No, but listen… You don’t understand… It was like this… Listen… It was like this…

It’s probably best if we honor the memory of Solzhenitsyn the man, not (unfortunately) Solzhenitsyn the writer.

Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, and President Bush carried the state twice, by nine and eight points. But the campaigns of Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, agree that it has become one of the nation’s new swing states, joining the likes of Ohio, Florida and other battlegrounds in determining who will win the White House. The result in the Old Dominion has been a burst of political activity unlike any in modern times.

This is very good news, readers, but I’m still not very confident. McCain still has a very good chance of becoming our next president. Every presidential election since Campaign 2000 has been a referendum on “character issues,” and the Dems get their clocks cleaned every time. They simply don’t know how to fight back.

The GOP has nothing at all to offer this year. McCain is promising nothing but four (or even, God help us, eight) more years of the same bumbling, tone-deaf ineptitude and swaggering international truculence that have been the hallmarks of the Bush administration. Their only hope is to keep trying to smear Barack Obama personally, and that’s all you’ll hear out of them.

Already, that’s all you hear on wingnut AM radio, and it’s all you read on wingnut blogs: scary stories about Scary Obama Hussein X, the Corrupt Black Muslim African Terrorist-Lover who Hates America and wants to Destroy Our Great Nation From Within. That’s all they’ve got, readers.

The scary part is that I think it might work…

If Obama could go to Germany and give a speech in English and be not only understood but well-received, why does he say we all need to learn another language?

My guess is that K-Lo would rather not have learned any language at all, but her parents wouldn’t stop talking to her when she was a baby.

(via Sadly, No!)

McCain may not rally a crowd, but there’s there there that could plausibly be commander-in-chief of a nation at war (really, we are, remember? It’s not just over there.).

Has anyone ever produced a worse sentence while attempting to write English?

They go on to say that 90% of the world’s glaciers are shrinking - which sounds like a made-up stat simply because most glaciers are in pretty inaccessible areas and thus can’t be measured

[Note: actually, one scientist is quoted as saying that "as many as 90% of the world's mountain glaciers are getting smaller." I'll leave it up to your judgement whether Noonan's paraphrase ("they go on to say that 90%...") is accurate.]

Yeah, the only way to observe the size of a mountain glacier is to observe it with your own eyes, in situ. GLIMS is obviously a liberal hoax. How fishy does this sound to you, readers?

GLIMS (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space) is a project designed to monitor the world’s glaciers primarily using data from optical satellite instruments, such as ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and reflection Radiometer).

Some of this “worldwide database” stuff sounds suspiciously like the fever dreams of a One-World Government:

The GLIMS team uses high-resolution satellite images from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument and the Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), archived at the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), to track the size and movement of glaciers. For the first time, scientists will be able to assess and track glacial change on a global scale through a worldwide database of glacier information.

But never mind all that: it doesn’t matter, since Mark Noonan will not accept any observations as “definitive” unless there are measurements dating back to some unspecified length of time:

[continuing directly] and, more importantly, haven’t really been measured for any length of time which would permit us to say, definitively, that Glacier A is getting smaller overall than it used to be.

So, Shorter Mark Noonan: You can’t observe glaciers without being there, and even if you could, you can’t observe them forever. Ergo, global climate change is a big liberal lie.

Just last week the onetime Republican presidential hopeful said Obama “looks toward Europe for a lot of his inspiration” after the Illinois senator suggested Americans would benefit from knowing more languages.

“I think John McCain is going to make sure that America stays America,” Romney said in an interview on Fox News.

Foreign languages? There’s no benefit in those. Better to ignore them and let “America stay America.” But what’s this, readers?

Updated 2008/07/21: It seems that the owner of this video has recently disabled embedding. If you want to see the video, you’ll have to go to YouTube and watch it there.

That’s right, readers: Mitt Romney speaks French, and he speaks it really well. His French is excellent, much better than John Kerry’s, as a matter of fact. (Romney spent two and a half years in France in the late 1960s, on his Mormon mission.) Does that mean Romney also “looks to Europe for inspiration”?

Mitt Romney is playing the American people for fools here, readers. He’s willing to say things that are stupid and wrong, knowing full well they’re stupid and wrong. What a tool.

(CNN link via Sadly, No!)

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting [at the G8 Summit in Toyako, Japan] with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Yes, readers, the President of the United States thought the G8 Summit was an appropriate place to crack a “joke” about being “the world’s biggest polluter,” then ham it up with some broad physical comedy.

Seriously, I half-suspect this story has got to be some kind of hoax. President Bush is famously tone-deaf (cf. his “joke” in 2004 about not being able to find Saddam’s WMDs — I’m sure the wounded soldiers at Walter Reed were “ROTFL” over that one), and also has a history of making an ass of himself at G8 summits (remember when he groped German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the 2006 G8 Summit), but this is a remarkable level of smug assholery, even by Bush’s standards. It’s like Bush has become a caricature of himself.

Yes, readers, we elected this man President. Twice.

(via appletree)

“Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week,” Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his “doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice” and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

[...]

In a string of e-mail messages with his superiors, Eason was told he could either lower the flags or retire effective immediately.

Though he’s only 51, Eason chose to retire, although he pleaded several times to be allowed to stay at the lab. Eason, who had worked for the Agriculture Department since graduating from college, was paid $65,235 a year as the laboratory manager.

Jesse Helms was a reprehensible person, a sorry excuse for a human being. The world is a better place without him.

Bravo to Mr Eason for refusing to pretend otherwise.

(via Obscure Store and Reading Room)

The fact that many of these people have turned out to be wanted in the US for various crimes gives one pause about claims of innocent people winding up in Gitmo - once again, how would an MSMer really be able to find out that the “innocent detainee” he’s interviewing is really someone innocent? Obviously, if someone is wanted in the US but is out and about in, say Somalia, then he’s already tangled with the law and got out of it by one means or another. Unless one wants to subscribe to the theory that our soldiers and intelligence agents are stupid thugs, one must give the benefit of the doubt to our side and discount media stories about allegedly innocent detainees. Not that an innocent person cannot have been picked up, but that the chances of a completely innocent person winding up in Gitmo are very small and would be the exception proving the rule.

You see, readers, it is an article of wingnut faith that the federal government is capable of doing some things perfectly — absolutely infallibly — and one of those things is determining Who’s A Terrorist. It’s very unpleasant to contemplate the idea of innocent people being locked in cages forever by the US government without ever having charges brought against them, so the wingnut’s way of dealing with it is simply to refuse to contemplate the idea.

Everyone being held at Gitmo is a Terrorist, “the worst of the worst,” full stop. How do we know they’re terrorists? Because they’re at Gitmo. Why are they at Gitmo? Because they’re terrorists. The logic has the symmetry of a snake swallowing its own tail.

You see, readers, the same wingnuts who sat down at their keyboards with golf-ball-sized crocodile tears sliding down their faces to sanctimoniously invoke Patrick Henry just a few days ago, on the anniversary of our nation’s birth, are perfectly comfortable with giving the Executive Branch of their federal government the power to unilaterally designate anyone in the world an “enemy combatant,” and the power to hold those “enemy combatants” in jail, forever, without ever having to show evidence against them, without ever even having to bring charges against them, and even the power to torture them.

That’s a lot of power to give your federal government, especially if you call yourself a “conservative.”

In order to avoid cognitive dissonance, wingnuts therefore have to avoid considering the possibility that they’ve made a dreadful, terrible mistake in cheerleading for the profoundly un-American activities their government is performing in the name of the American people.

Look at Noonan’s straw man above: “Unless one wants to subscribe to the theory that our soldiers and intelligence agents are stupid thugs, one must give the benefit of the doubt to our side.”

No one says “our soldiers and intelligence agents are stupid thugs.” But you know what, readers? Our soldiers and intelligence professionals are human beings. And sometimes, human beings make mistakes. We fuck up.

That’s what we have a court system for — just because you’ve been accused of something doesn’t mean you’re guilty. Your accuser has to present proof of your guilt, and you get a chance to defend yourself. That’s how it works in America. Does the fact that accused criminals get to have their cases heard in court mean that police officers are “stupid thugs”? Of course not. A reasonably bright six-year-old would know better than that.

And look at what Noonan has unwittingly revealed in his choice of words: “one must give the benefit of the doubt to our side and discount media stories about supposedly innocent detainees.”

“Our side” is put in opposition to “media stories.” If you’re presented with evidence that your government has fucked up, made a bad mistake, and held an innocent person captive for something they didn’t do, what should you do? Ignore it. Decide it just couldn’t be true. Never mind the evidence, just “give the benefit of the doubt to our side.” Readers, that’s not the mindset of a freedom-loving person, that’s the mindset of a Communist Party apparatchik in the depths of Stalin’s reign of terror. That’s a blood-chilling glimpse into the mindset of someone who has welcomed and embraced authoritarianism (albeit in the name of “freedom,” to be sure).

Mistakes have been made at Gitmo:

You might think you would have to do something pretty obvious to wind up in Guantanamo. Apparently not. The U.S. government does not claim [Huzaifa] Parhat was a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. He was not captured on a battlefield. The government’s own military commission admitted it found no evidence that he “committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition partners.”

So why did the Pentagon insist on holding him as an enemy combatant? Because he was affiliated with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a separatist Muslim group fighting for independence from Beijing. It had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks but reputedly got help from al-Qaida.

But the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after reviewing secret documents submitted by the government, found that there was no real evidence. It said the flimsy case mounted against Parhat “comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.” And it ruled that, based on the information available, he was not an enemy combatant even under the Pentagon’s own definition of the term.

Readers, there’s no reason your government should have the ability to lock people up, forever, on the suspicion of being involved with “terrorism.” Nothing could be more un-American. Let the government prove its case against all terror suspects, and let’s have an end to this extralegal shadow government of overseas holding cells, no-warrant wiretaps, “enemy combatants,” and “extraordinary rendition.”

Our troops and our intelligence professionals are brave, smart, and capable. We don’t need an authoritarian Executive Branch to “keep us safe” from anybody.

It’s not too late for us to start acting like Americans again, goddamn it.

And there’s this conspiracy theory is that Mrs. Clinton, through Mr. McAuliffe, is gonna massage things out in Denver so that [Obama] doesn’t get the nomination. You couple this with Obama’s plane, Fort Marcy Airlines, having to take a detour to St. Louis for a mechanical problem. You get the left-wing kooks out there, who are just convinced as they can be that the Clintons are not out of the picture, that they’re still mobilizing behind the scenes to take down Obama.

Way to go, Rushbo! Stay classy, baby!