Quotes That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Shove a Mint Julep Up a Man's Ass:
"That's offensive to me that they would take my heritage and make it into a Holocaust era type description." - South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, back in November 1999, when he was still a state senator, regarding African Americans being upset that the Confederate flag was being flown over the statehouse.

"[W]e have a dictator, Saddam Hussein, who has chemical and biological weapons, who is developing nuclear capabilities." - Wilson, now a U.S. Congressman, on CNN, September 28, 2002.

"Sean, as usual, you're absolutely correct. In fact my wife also wants to tell you how cute you are." - Wilson to Sean Hannity on Fox "news," May 7, 2002.

"With the death of Strom Thurmond, South Carolina has lost its greatest statesman of the 20th Century." - Wilson on June 27, 2003.

At least if you're wrong and an asshole, Joe Wilson, you've been wrong and an asshole your whole life.

Live Whiskey-Blogging the President's Health Care Speech:
So here we are, once again, the Evan Williams on the coffee table, the tumbler with two fingers in it to start (oh, it'll be a fist of whiskey by the end), the CSPAN on the TV since the Rude Pundit can't stomach any of the news networks pulling out quotes to keep below the President on screen like comic strip bubbles for the ignorant. What's the over/under on standing o's? And what about Republican boos? (Please let there be Republican boos.)

And away we go (all quotes pretty much guaranteed to be wrong in wording, but correct in spirit):

8:11: Obama enters, Mitch McConnell behind him looking as happy as a leather queen at a prison rodeo, Harry Reid looking...like a diminutive fucking Golem. Do they each know something the rest of us don't?

8:14: It's probably too soon to say this, but Ted Kennedy's widow is a total hottie.

8:16: He's starting by establishing his street cred: "Hey, motherfuckers, I've gotten shit done."

8:17: A standing ovation for the unemployed. The last time that'll happen in the Congress for a long ass time.

8:18: It's be awesome if he used the word "cockmongers" tonight. "Twatmongers" would be nice, too.

8:19: He's there to talk about health care, he says. And Republicans are not applauding. Who's the designated yelling guy on the Democratic side? Christ, that dude sounds like he's in pain.

8:20: "Everyone understands" the hardships of the uninsured, which is a bit optimistic on his part. Saying that Republicans understand hardships is like saying that a rattlesnake understands how shitty the desert actually is.

8:22: He's personalizing it with stories about how insurance companies are cockmongers. (See how useful that would be? Such instantaneous shorthand.)

8:24: By invoking auto companies and trade, he's making a specifically capitalist argument. "Our health care problem is our deficit problem."

8:25: "These are the facts." Facts? What country does he think he's talking to? Facts are to Americans as salads are to Americans.

8:27: Is he gonna take some people to the woodshed? "The time for games has passed," he says.

8:28: "The plan I'm announcing tonight..." Death panels and meat grinders?

8:29: Here's the plan: nothing in this plan "will require you to change the doctor that you have." Ahh, but the cockmongers outside the plan will.

8:30: Against the law to have coverage denied for pre-existing conditions. Fat bastards on both sides heave themselves up to wheezily applaud. Against the law for insurance companies to drop your coverage. No caps. A limit on out of pocket expenses. "In America, no one should go broke because they get sick." Insurance must cover asshole and boob stuff.

8:32: For those without insurance, you can get coverage - how? How? Insurance exchange...yeah? And? And?

8:33: Okay, sure, same coverage as Congress? For those unable to afford it, there will be tax credits. Immediately offer catastrophic care - a McCain idea. He's reaching out to Republicans, who will no doubt respond by trying to fuck his face.

8:36: Gets laughed at for saying there's details to work out. Yeah, he kind of deserved that.

8:37: Takes on death panels directly. "It is a lie, plain and simple." Did the President of the United States just call Chuck Grassley and John McCain liars?

8:38: Someone just yelled "lie" at him about covering illegals. From Obama, a fucking death stare. No dollars to fund abortion and federal "conscience" laws stay in place. None of this shit will appease the evangelical and/or nutzoid right. They don't care. A black Democrat is proposing this. That's all that matters.

8:41: "I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business...I just want to hold them accountable." Says we need to make a "not for profit" option. Okay, good. Keep going. What do you mean, man? Fucking say it.

8:43: Nice analogy to private colleges versus public ones. And now he's hedging on it. But now he's not. More whiskey. More goddamned whiskey needed.

8:44: He's asking Republicans to behave rationally. "I will not back down" on providing Americans "with a choice" if they can't afford coverage.

8:46: Is he coming out strongly for the public option? He's promising to not raise the deficit. And he just sucker-punched Bush supporters, some of whom stood to applaud him saying that there were too many deficit-funded initiatives.

8:47: Says he's talking to seniors, yet he doesn't raise his voice, so he doesn't really care if they hear him.

8:52: Brings up tort reform and a whole group of white men in dark suits just stood up in the room, which ought to make any black man nervous.

8:53: Compares the cost to the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and the Bush tax cuts. Republicans sit down and cry. (Gotta say: $90 billion a year ain't a whole fuck of a lot in the scheme of the American budget.)

8:54: He just cut off a bunch of Republicans at the knees, like Jim DeMint, by saying he won't deal with people who want to kill the bill.

8:55: "If you misrepresent this plan, we will call you out."

8:56: Big ending - a letter from Ted Kennedy. (Okay, yeah, that earlier thing about his widow was totally inappropriate, but still...)

9:00: This is the fucking President, man, that the Rude Pundit voted for, this one, here at the end, laying it out plainly, with history and smarts, and empathy, "when only timidity passes for wisdom," that's some great shit.

9:02: He says, "We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it." Republicans don't stand. This is for Americans now. He is shaming Republicans and they are gonna be mightily pissed. Look forward to right wingers saying, "He's a masterful speaker, but" on an endless loop.

But what the fuck did he believe? No, really. There was no bottom line beyond the shit he says they all agree on. Otherwise, the public option is what he wants, but he's open for other ideas. What's the bottom fucking line? What's the endgame?

Oh, wait...9:06: Charles Boustany of Louisiana? The Rude Pundit has met that backwards ass fucker and his racist family. What's he saying? Ah, fuck him.

The Rude Pundit on the BBC (No, Really):
The Rude Pundit was interviewed about Barack Obama's stay-in-school speech for today's episode of the BBC World Service's World Today. The beginning of worldwide rudeness? Who can predict the future. Check it out:

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An Observation or Two Before the Big Speech:
(The Rude Pundit will be live whiskey-blogging the President's mostest stupendously momentous thing ever said ever in the last couple of months [also known as his health care speech to Congress and, you know, the rest of us] tonight.)

So enough, enough, enough already. The children have thrown themselves on the scuzzy floors of the local Wal-Mart to wail and bray that they want their Super-Soakers now. They've gotten it out of their system, even if they'll piss and moan all the way home. Summer's over, you little shits. It's time for the grown-ups to get to work. And just because you don't understand what Mommy and Daddy do at their jobs doesn't mean you won't be grateful that they do it.

1. The Rude Pundit is remaining agnostic about the whole speech. He needs to hear that some things are worth fighting for, he needs to know from the dude whose balls he cupped through an entire campaign that there's gonna be a fight, he needs the assholes and maniacs taken to the woodshed and spanked with a switch until their bare cheeks bleed, and he needs to know that there are some goddamned principles at work here. He wants to continue believing in this President, but he's gotta be shown why. Or, to put it another way, no matter what white bag of douche Saxby Chambliss says, Obama better show no "humility" tonight.

2. In "her" Wall Street Journal editorial today on "health care reform," insignificant attention whore Sarah Palin offers a nugget of wisdom: "Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats' proposals 'will provide more stability and security to every American.'" She doesn't say why common sense tells "us" such things, but she doesn't really need to, one supposes, because it's common sense and you either have it or you don't. Alaskans love a good tautological argument.

Sarah Palin's role in the world right now is to have her face photoshopped onto pictures of spread-eagled, nude MILFs, with the images emailed around the dorms of Dartmouth or Pepperdine so that she provides fresh spanking material for young conservatives who just want to jack their spunk onto her glasses. It puts her in the pecking order of usefulness somewhere between tribute bands and moon shoes.

3. Here's a few quotes from a few different people from the last month:
Sen. Richard "My Forehead Is Too Big For My Face" Shelby: "I think rationing is underlying all of this. There's a lot of denial out there, but you look at the other plans -- you look at the Canadian plan, the British plan and so forth, and you have long lines. People decide who's going to get treatment and when. That's rationing health care. If you don't get health care when you need it, you know, ultimately it's going to affect your life."

Sean Hannity on government-run health insurance: "There's rationing, there's long lines."

Neil Cavuto on the same: "It is going to be spread between a lot of folks and there will be long lines and rationed care."

The threat of "long lines" is invoked by other members of Congress, like Representative John Fleming (R-LA) and the hilariously named Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Starb...VA).

You get the idea. You've heard it all a million times over. Here's the problem: if you're afraid of "long lines" for health care, then you advocate rationing that care. Because what you're saying is that you don't want more people to be able to go to the doctor. In other words, you want to deny people medical treatment because you (mostly irrationally) fear there's a possibility you may not be next in line, that some impoverished woman on a public option might go before you.

In even other words, if you're afraid of "long lines," you are part of a de facto death panel. Your convenience comes at the cost of other people's misery and demise.

Now, why can't we win this argument?

The Rude Pundit on Today's Stephanie Miller Show:
The Rude Pundit and Stephanie Miller indoctrinate each other into the ways of socialist lust, but George Bush, Sr., Gerald Ford, Phyllis Schlafly and Michelle Malkin get in the way.

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One can always, as ever, subscribe to the Rude Pundit's podcast.

The End of the School Speech "Controversy" (For Now):
When Barack Obama makes his mundane speech on studying hard in school in a little while, it'll be the end of one chapter of one of the most idiotic right wing uproars in a while. With all the dignity, wisdom, and precision of a room filled with diapered toddlers and sharp knives, some conservatives have manipulated people's simple-minded, uninformed idiocy for their own gain. And it ain't like the people have responded gracefully. Like iguanas at breeding season, fucking in scaly madness, parents and politicians alike have given us a mountain of lies and crazed conspiracy theories. Fox "news" has been, as usual, Nutzoid Central, caressing this completely manufactured controversy like a swollen clitoris sore from so much rubbing.

Here's Rick Santorum on Fox "news" last Friday: "[T]o many parents in particular, it's a little threatening to have someone come in who's so polished, who's so cool and come in front of their kids. And then when you see the curriculum, you see some of the things that have been said that he might be -- might be talking about, which are all about him, it's just -- it's a little creepy. It just -- it's a little unsettling for parents." Remember: the guy calling something "creepy" is the same dude who was "kissing and cuddling" the fetus his wife miscarried, having his kids do the same. He even sang it a lullaby.

But the parents are the best. Between the weeping tools (watch the video and see if you can pinpoint the moment the husband realizes what a horrible mistake he's made) and the almost-open racists (like the woman on Fox "news" who admitted that she just "trusted" Ronald Reagan more and would have let her daughter hear him speak), it was a parade of ignorance expressed as reasonable discourse, like listening to a particularly talented chimp try to jabber a manifesto of shit throwing. Most parents, though, probably just don't give a fuck, as mom Hilary Valente demonstrated: "First of all, I think a lot of people are very confused. When I mentioned these issues to other parents, a lot of them didn't even know really what was going on. It seemed like you had to be on top of it to figure out what exactly -- what's going to happen on Tuesday."

What's going to happen today is that a lot of schools aren't going to show the speech, a lot are, most students will be bored and restless, a few will be inspired, a few will try to get on the news by pretending to be outraged. And the school year will go on.

By the way, free, public schools? That's right out of The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx listed it as one of the major steps to socialist revolution. Uh-oh. When Obama says, "Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country," it's gotta be a call to proletariat uprising.

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No, This Is What a Socialist Says: Eugene Debs Would Kick Your Ass:
For Labor Day, as people who don't actually understand a thing about socialism keep spouting that vaguely moderate Barack Obama is some unholy descendant of Cesar Chavez or Emma Goldman (did she ever go to Kenya?), the Rude Pundit is offering some quotes from a real socialist, Eugene Debs, who ran for president as, you know, a Socialist Party candidate five times between 1900 and 1920, getting nearly a million votes in 1908. See, real socialists aren't exactly known for subtlety in their rhetoric. They don't want to trick workers into uniting. They want to show workers the failure of the capitalist system, which will make them willingly join. And, as you can see below, Debs will kick your ass (and he'll take your name, since organizing was the foundation of the socialist movement):

From an August 27, 1912 campaign speech in Fergus Falls, Minnesota:
"[Capitalism is] a confidence game the professional politicians have been playing with the workers of all nations all these years. To keep them in subjection by playing upon their ignorance is the rule that governs their campaigns for votes among the workers. The 'issues' upon which they keep the workers divided into hostile camps are of their own making."

From a June 16, 1912 campaign speech in Chicago:
"The baseness, hypocrisy and corruption of these twin political agencies of Wall Street and the ruling class cannot be expressed in words. The imagination is taxed in contemplating their crimes. There is no depth of dishonor to which they have not descended - no depth of depravity they have not sounded.

"To the extent that they control elections the franchise is corrupted and the electorate debauched, and when they succeed in power it is but to execute the will of the Wall Street interests which finance and control them. The police, the militia, the regular army, the courts and all the powers lodged in class government are all freely at the service of the ruling class, especially in suppressing discontent among the slaves of the factories, mills and mines, and keeping them safely in subjugation to their masters.

"How can any intelligent, self-respecting wageworker give his support to either of these corrupt capitalist parties? The emblem of a capitalist party on a working man is the badge of his ignorance, his servility and shame."

From a February 21, 1925 speech in Chicago:
"The class now in power cannot rule honestly. They must rule corruptly. They are in the minority. They have not the votes of their own to put them in power, but they have the money with which to corrupt the electorate. They have the money with which to corrupt the courts and to buy the legislators, and to debauch all our institutions. They have the power to do this because they have the money, and they have the money because they own the means of production and distribution. The great mass of the workers depend upon them for employment. In this system no working man - we boast of every man having the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and yet in this system that has been alternately supported by both of the capitalist parties, no man has a right to work. He can only work on conditions that the master who owns the tools he works with grants him permission to work, and the man who works by permission lives by permission, and is in no sense a free man."

Yeah, Debs had his dreams, man, and most of them failed. The point is that because Debs and so many others were there, much got transformed for workers because of the fear of those in power that there might actually be a socialist uprising. Now, the loudest "movement" is a group of people who may as well be an army of scabs and Pinkertons, so slaveringly do they do the bidding of the powerful. They have been completely co-opted by those who despise them. They are lambs willingly announcing that the wolves are their friends. God, how Debs would wonder when a real leader will rise to the occasion. God, how he would wonder if we could rise to it.

(By the way, this is as good a time as any to say that a fine Labor Day gift would be the book Staged Action: Six Plays from the American Workers' Theatre, edited and with introductions by the Rude Pundit, and filled with rabble-rousing goodness from the 1920s and 1930s.)

No, Really, They've Lost Their Fucking Minds: More Incidents of Conservative Brain Damage:
1. Former Marine spokesman Josh Rushing is now a reporter for the English language Al-Jazeera (motto: "Relax; the name doesn't mean anything evil"). He's interviewed Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice. His network had press credentials for the Republican National Convention. But when he was granted access to the Harris County jail in Houston, Texas by Sheriff Adrian Garcia in order to do a report on the "treatment of the mentally ill by U.S. law enforcement," the local Republican Party chair, Jared Woodfill, lost his fucking mind. Woodfill sent out an email for people to call the sheriff's office to "voice concerns" about allowing an American reporter to visit an American jail. Unfortunately, he "accidentally" gave out the emergency number instead of just the random cranky idiot number, flooding the line with calls.

2. As barking mad Michelle Malkin discusses in her column this week, titled something like "Liberal Dingos Will Eat Your Babies," a school principal in Farmington, Utah, apologized this week for showing the "I Pledge" video produced for the inauguration by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. It's sort of like a bunch of celebrities making New Year's resolutions, with them saying shit like, "I pledge to be a better father." Oh, and to do something to help the environment (which these days qualifies automatically as socialism). What creeped them out was Moore pledging to be a servant to Barack Obama. Not artfully worded, sure. But the context was for each person to make some little pledge on their own to work to make the country a better place. We used to call that "citizenship."

Sure, this we can argue about being shown in school, although, you know, if it had been some post-9/11 let's-hold-hands-and-shop thing, there wouldn't be a peep from the right. But in one of those "says everything you need to know" moments, someone from the Utah Eagle Forum (that state's chapter of Phyllis Schlafly's organization [holy fuck, is she still alive?]) lost her fucking mind and said, "We do not pledge to be a servant of the United States."

Motherfucker, you got that right.

3. Regarding Glenn Beck's foray into art criticism of Rockefeller Center, could someone tell him that the whole concept of beating swords into plowshares comes from Isaiah 2:4 in the, you know, bible?

That Was Quick: The Rude Pundit and Hal Sparks on The Stephanie Miller Show from Monday:
Thanks to rude Miller fan KB, we now have bootleg audio from Monday's Stephanie Miller Show, where the Rude Pundit and guest host Hal Sparks talked about the L.A. fires ready to kill Sparks, Obama's strategy on health care, and how Sparks is way more sincere than Miller. The joke the Rude Pundit didn't get to tell: how he was waiting for a zombie Ted Kennedy to rise up and eat conservative brains. Ah, well. At least we laughed like awkward frat buddies wondering whether we should kiss.

As ever, you can subscribe to the Rude Pundit's podcast.

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In the Realm of "You Have to Be Fucking Kidding": Obama's School Speech Makes Conservatives Cry:
Twenty years ago, in his first year as President, George Bush the Smarter gave a speech broadcast live to schools around the nation. The September 12, 1989, talk was done with less than a day's advanced warning, but a good many schools stopped everything to put televisions into classrooms and hold assemblies to watch. In the speech, Bush sought to scare the living fuck out of kids about drugs. After telling the story of a cop who was blown away at point blank range, killed on the orders of a drug kingpin, cold and calculated," Bush offered, "[O]ut on the street a nightmare for America is happening, every day, every night. Somewhere a teenaged girl who ought to be in school is giving birth to a baby already addicted to cocaine, and that baby is coming into this world shaking and twitching from withdrawal, so sensitive to the touch that it can't be held or fed properly." He informed the now-terrified students that "Saying no won't make you a nerd," asked them to narc on friends, quoted Michael Jordan, and concluded with "Have a good year."

The backdrop of the speech was that Bush was trying to get Congress to pass a tough and useless anti-drug program that included lots more prisons, prosecutors and other things that don't really work. Democrats wanted to add more drug treatment and prevention measures to the bill. Bush had already spoken to the nation on September 5 about drugs, even getting the DEA to set up a crack sting near the White House just for a visual and a story in that address.

So, in other words, in 1989, President Bush spoke to students with the blatantly political goal of getting his harsh new drug laws passed in order to demonstrate, again, how tough he was. And the outrage from the left? Well, some of the kids thought the whole thing was worthless and/or bullshit. Some liked it. Otherwise, not a damn peep from anyone, not even on the good liberal McNeil/Lehrer Newshour.

And why was there no outcry of indoctrination to conservative causes, no uproar about inflicting such unpleasant thoughts on the precious children, no kerfuffle over whether or not the students were forced to watch it? Because there wasn't. Because he was the President. And if the President of the United States wants to make some little statement to students, then he gets to fucking do it. And, really, unless he's got spinning hyno-eyes telling them to kill their hippie grandparents, who the fuck cares? There was more important shit to do then, like debating whether or not there should be a flag-burning amendment. (God, the 80s sucked.)

Nutzoids on the right are upset not only that President Barack Obama is going to make some innocuous "study hard" speech next week. They've especially got wedgies over the teaching materials accompanying the speech, which ask students to do an assignment in response to the speech about how they can be good students. The post-speech suggestions used to ask students to write about "how they can help the President" by achieving the education goals he talks about. That's been changed to eliminate reference to the President because of the inability of conservatives to make logical connections between thoughts. These are supplements to the speech. Students are not commanded to do them by the White House. The Rude Pundit remembers often being asked to write letters to various presidents about various issues as school assignments based on materials sent to the school by various departments. It's pretty much the way it goes when you want your nation's kids to be an engaged, thinking group of citizens who think that their participation in government matters.

But for the some on the right, this is just like Maoist indoctrination camps except with less rice. Biled Michelle Malkin on Sean Hannity's Fox "news" show, "[T]his is not a merely a morale-boosting speech that he's giving. He's giving it in the context of his Obamacare plan completely under siege. We know the left has always used kids in public schools as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda." Which, of course, gave the cuntish she-beast a chance to say "Bill Ayers" again. Hannity actually sodomized himself with a Saul Alinsky dildo at the mention.

Some abusive parents have decided that their blind ideology is more important than exposing their children to ideas not approved by Rush Limbaugh and are actually preventing them from watching the speech. Because why? They're afraid Obama will seem like a nice guy when he doesn't have a Hitler mustache?

Oh, sweet, stupid motherfuckers who shouldn't have been allowed to breed, like it or not, when someone is the President, that person is the President of all of us. So, sorry, conservatives madly craning your necks to lick your own taints over Obama's speech, he's your President, too. The only way he's not your President is if you leave the country. On the left, we lived with that knowledge for 8 years. You're not even up to ten months. A little advice here: let this one go.

Or maybe we should put a positive spin on the ignorance on display here. Maybe this actually accomplishes Bill Ayers' goals in education moreso than sitting and watching the speech. Indeed, maybe what the parents are teaching their kids is to question authority. So, in that context, dear, dumb assholes, good luck with that when your kids become teenagers.

No Rude Podcast This Week:
Because the good people at The Stephanie Miller Show are on vacation this week, the Rude Pundit's appearance with guest host Hal Sparks is not available for him to download and give to you gratis. So unless someone out there is an obsessive fan who recorded Monday's show, you won't get to hear, as one rude listener described it, "the nervous giggling between you and Hal like two lovebirds just meeting."

Northern Racism Alive and Well and Stupid:
Here's a fun little story from about ten years ago: the Rude Pundit was once sitting around with a group of professors, and the subject got around to how one defines "white trash." It's one of those charming theoretical discussions you get to have when you're overeducated and proud of it. He sat there for a moment while this circle of Northerners trotted out every trailer-living, tobacco-chewing, hick-talking stereotype (which, to be clear, exists in numbers far too large). And, of course, there was the defining element of these awful people from the South - their racism. Finally, the Rude Pundit spoke up and said, "As the only person here who has actually lived in a trailer in the South, I've gotta say that there's neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Boston where you'll find white trash racists who make the residents of Backwards Ass, Alabama, look like hippies." This was met with blinking and agreement and a change of subject.

It hardly needs to be said, but every once in a while, as all the redneck townhall protesters from the south, the midwest, and the west are paraded out on the airwaves like a barn beauty pageant, we need to be reminded that violent, stupid white people exist all over this devolving nation of ours.

Suffolk County, New York, out on Long Island, is the place where the wealthiest of the wealthy have homes (like, you know, Steven Spielberg), where the Hamptons are, as well as a bunch of towns whose name ends with "gue." Wherever there's a clusterfuck of rich people, there's gonna need to be people who serve them, who build their pools, who make their food, who wipe the sweat off their balls. And in contemporary America, that's gonna be Latinos, many of whom will be illegals, who will live as close to their jobs as they can afford, generally gathering in a few towns. And in contemporary America, whenever there's an influx of cheap labor in that particular demographic group, there will be asshole white people who will do what asshole white people have always done.

So it is that a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center singles out the white people of Suffolk County for a decade's worth of harassment, violence, and, in at least one case, murder, all against the county's Latino population. This includes recent charming seaside village incidents such as notes left at a church in Patchogue that said, "White people rule the church" and a beating and robbery of a Latino man by three white kids who, of course, used racial epithets during the incident. (By the way, in a look-how-far-we've-come incident this year, three black guys also beat a Latino while insulting his race.)

Where there's motherfucking going on, there will always be motherfuckers. In this case, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who has mocked the racially-motivated murder of Marcelo Lucero in November 2008 and wanted the police to be able to detain Latinos simply on suspicion on being illegal immigrants. The police union refused. By the way, Levy's a Democrat. The county is also rife with stupid fucking white people joining stupid fucking white people gangs and groups that exist solely to demonstrate how fucking stupid stupid fucking white people can be.

The point here is not to say anything new. We know there's northern racism. We know there's racial profiling. The Latinos of Suffolk County say that you can't tell by looking who is illegal and who is not, thus they all fear attack. And in the area of enclaves where rich liberals gather, now heading into the last weekends of their summers before they close up their homes except for the occasional trip the rest of the year, one is always left to wonder who is the white trash and who is not.

In Brief: Failed Attempts to Humanize a Drooling Bog Monster (Fox "news" Version):
So it was during Chris Wallace's gleeful blumpkin for a shitting Dick Cheney in his Wyoming bathroom on Fox "news" Sunday this week that Wallace made a vain attempt to remove his semen-slicked lips from the former Vice President's pustulent hard-on long enough to offer this:

"At one point the Vice President showed us the view of majestic mountains from his back yard. I asked about the Democrats running battle with the CIA including Nancy Pelosi's charge the agency once lied to her."

One can almost imagine Wallace, lifting his head from Cheney's lap for a sec and seeing mountains through the window above the sneering, sweating man, with Cheney saying, "Yeah, they're fuckin' purple mountains majesty. Now get back to the purple veins of my majestic cock and ask me about that cunt Pelosi."

Bear in mind that this pathetic moment took place after Cheney had said that he supported CIA interrogators breaking the law. Wallace had asked, "So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?" Cheney answered, "I am."

When Wallace finished his serving of Dick chowder, he said, "Well, we want to thank you for talking with us and including in your private life putting up with an interview from the likes of me." Yeah, a good little bitch knows his place.

Fucked New Orleans, Four Years On in Purgatory:
If you knew New Orleans before Katrina and then go visit since the storm, you know the feeling. No matter where you are in the city, it doesn't feel quite right. You don't have to be in the Lower 9th Ward, the poorest area of the city where rubble and moldy, abandoned houses still dominate the neighborhood, dotted as it is with the occasional home that's been restored. No, you can be in the untouched Garden District or the French Quarter, and there's a weight in the air, beyond the stifling humidity and the stale stench of being between a big ass lake and a big ass river. You've felt it if you're a visitor. Imagine if you're a resident. The people the Rude Pundit knows in New Orleans are unanimous in their assessment of their hometown in 2009: "It's better, but..."

And that's what the Rude Pundit thought when he was in New Orleans back in July. The brutal heat of this goddamned summer had inflicted a gray haze over the city like a sheet made of an old man's pubic hair. Everywhere he went, there was a pervasive sense of rot, of the aching entropy of unfulfilled promises, of the imminence of collapse, and of the tenuous, halting steps forward. It is a space of overwhelming insecurity, like being in a ward of people with severe germophobia and only one sink. And the Rude Pundit stayed in the "good areas" this time, since his time was short and his visit was packed.

People still talk about doing things as if they are existing in opposition to some unnamed entity. Going out to dinner is treated as a kind of triumph, a "fuck you" to forces that want to stop you from doing so. Moving back to the city after leaving is like winning a marathon. Rebuilding a home that was wrecked? Fireworks and blow jobs, man, fireworks and blow jobs. The Rude Pundit felt like he was staying with people who had been abandoned as children.

And why not, huh? 36% of the city's housing is unoccupied. Only one new school has been built. Rents have gone up 40% since Katrina. Sure, unemployment is low compared to the rest of the country, but the jobs are shit temporary and low-paid positions, Louisiana being one of those charming "right-to-work" states. And the unemployment rate has jumped nearly 3% in a year. Crime is still high, murders too frequent. The sewer system is still held together by duct tape and hope.

The new administration has only on this anniversary begun to take notice of New Orleans (or the entire Gulf Coast). President Obama has promised to visit New Orleans, which he should have done before he went to any of the other health care town halls around the country, considering the still fucked up state of the city's hospital system. He has promised to streamline the bureaucracy that has slowed recovery. And now that a report has demonstrated that the Army Corps of Engineers wasted $430 million on worthless flood control pumps (another little fuck-you from the Bush administration's bungling of everything to do with Katrina), Obama has knocked the Corps down a peg by putting in an oversight panel that'll coordinate recovery efforts. "It's about time" doesn't even scratch the surface of the rage that ought to be there.

Remember: to acknowledge the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is not to remember the damage done by a storm. It is to remember the damage done by us to ourselves. It was decades of incompetence, fraud, and cruelty of governments and contractors that have left New Orleans, truly, no better off than it was four years ago. The place feels different because to be there is to realize that all the things you hoped would protect you and the city have failed, and that to be there, especially during hurricane season, is to understand that it could so easily happen again when it shouldn't and when it shouldn't have in the first place.

Of course it's better. Anything is better than flood and abandonment and chaos. And of course the city feels different than before. Purgatory's always better than Hell.

On Monday...Whoa, Wait, Who the Hell Is in the Bed?:
Hello, handsome stranger. The Rude Pundit will be on The Stephanie Miller Show tomorrow with guest host Hal Sparks. Different time just for this week because guys fool around later in the morning: 10:30 ET/7:30 PT. Listen on yer radios or over the web machine.

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Ban "Hurricane" as a Drink Name (Part of the "Fucked New Orleans" Series):


As the fourth anniversary of the destruction of large swaths of the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina approaches, it'd be easy to post pictures of the rubble and rot that still remain in places like the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. Instead, that's a picture of the trailer that houses the firefighters of the Lower 9th. The firehouse has not been rebuilt since the storm.

There's been promises, made a year ago, with the outside hope that something might be there sometime in 2010, with Engine 22 and Engine 39 combined into a single station. Katrina wrecked 22 out of 33 firehouses in the city. About half of those have been rebuilt, including Engine 38, which serves the wealthy area of uptown New Orleans.

Although that's unfair to say because even those have been rebuilt primarily due to the efforts of volunteers and private donations. As the head of the NO firefighters said this week, "Federal, state and local government failed us." Government officials say FEMA dollars are part of the equation, although that's a pathetic statement. A great deal of credit, though, goes to actor Denis Leary's foundation, which has done more to assist the firehouses of New Orleans than any government entity.

And while that's a credit to Leary and to all the volunteers, it is another of the utter disgraces in this fucked city's too-long battle to return to normalcy. And it begs the question of what could happen if there were government entities that could take care of this, not just with subcontracting the work out to profiteering bloodsuckers who would slice their mother's throats if it let them have the winning bid, but with actually hiring the people to do it. In other words, unlike those who scream that government is the problem, the lack of it is not the answer.

Ted Kennedy: There Went a Man:
Finally, we must take a measure of the man. Not the person, or the legislator, or the family member. No, the man. Ted Kennedy was more of a man's man than any of the brush-clearing, hick-talking, pick-up driving politicians who overcompensate again and again by faking it. No, Kennedy demonstrated, through all the ups and downs, again and again what a real man is. It is a type of masculinity that we rarely see anymore because it is a fearlessness that few are allowed to embrace.

Put aside the money for a moment. Wealth makes life easier but it does not make one happy and it is not a measure of character. Don't you think that Kennedy would have given away his whole fortune to have his brothers back?

For a man does not shy away from the tragedies of his life. When John was assassinated, Kennedy took up the cause of the civil rights movement as his first major action in the Senate. When Bobby was killed, he began to push even harder against the Vietnam War. When his 12 year-old son, Ted, Jr., had to have a leg amputated to prevent the cancer there from spreading in 1973, Kennedy threw himself into the cause of rights for people with disabilities as much as his sister, Eunice, had, a crusade that would last the rest of his life.

A man fucks up again and again, but he owns his mistakes and learns from them. Ted Kennedy wore his flaws openly in his personal life. Some of it was the price of juvenile overindulgence (even as an adult) and some of it was just stupidity. The question is less about fucking up, but how a man reacts to it. He was kicked out of Harvard for cheating on an exam, so he joined the military (although he would achieve none of the glory of John and Joe, Jr.). When the Chappaquiddick incident happened, he nutted up and told the voters to decide on his fate. He was a hard-drinking son of a bitch who screwed around on his first wife, a Dean Martin-like punchline to jokes about alcoholism and a tabloid laughingstock. During that period, among other things, he was getting funding cut off to Chile because of Pinochet's barbarism, pushing legislation to help political refugees, getting sanctions imposed on apartheid-era South Africa, negotiating with Gorbachev on nuclear missiles, stopping Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination, and strengthening the Civil Rights Act. What did you do on your years-long bender? He paid, too, with his presidential ambitions dashed. And when he was slugging 'em back like a frat boy with his nephews on a night that ended with William Kennedy Smith arrested on an accusation of rape, Kennedy made another public reckoning about who he was as a man in a speech in October 1991. And despite all he had accomplished before, he grew up, finally, understanding that to be a man one must become a man.

A man works to help those who need help. A real man is a liberal because a real man is unafraid of change and progress and difference. Let us come back to the money. The Kennedy family has always seen wealth as a privilege, a burden, and an opportunity to do good for others. Yes, it is easier to support charities and to have the time to work for various causes. But Kennedy made it his role in government to level the playing field. Where do you wanna go with this? Other than his work that climaxed with the Americans With Disabilities Act, other than his support for civil rights legislation going back to the 1964 act, we could talk about the Ryan White CARE Act, which gave funds to cities hardest hit by the AIDS crisis; we could talk about his intense support for the rights of workers through raising the minimum wage and supporting union goals; we could talk about his work for housing, for education, for women and children, for the Family and Medical Leave Act. We could talk about how he opposed the Iraq War, how he was working to provide educational opportunities to kids in Muslim countries, how he helped end the war in Northern Ireland. We could talk about how he believed, his entire career, that health care for everyone was a right, not a privilege, with COBRA and S-CHIP having been accomplished because of him. He was an unabashed, proud liberal whose full-throated speeches roared in defense of the whole ideology against the ignorance of those who would keep progress from being achieved.

A man is willing to embrace his enemies. Yesterday, Ron Reagan, Jr. had his mother on his radio show to talk about how much the Reagans loved Ted Kennedy. Kennedy and Nancy Reagan were allies on stem cell research funding, but the former first lady talked about how she and her husband were dear friends with Kennedy. Kennedy worked with Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, both George Bushes, and anyone he could to accomplish his goals. That's called politics. Compromise was a willingness for both sides to move. When George W. Bush dicked him over on No Child Left Behind funding, Kennedy had to know that a tide had shifted in a way that was going to make the entire process of legislating more rancorous and difficult. The political nature of the nation was moving into entrenchment, which was not how Ted Kennedy functioned.

A man knows how to die. A man understands that the end comes and doesn't desperately cling to every millisecond of life that medical science can squeeze out of him. No, a man dies with his family, in a place he loves, having done much, knowing that there was much still to be done, but accepting that there's only so much one can live.

A Message on Ted Kennedy to Conservatives Who Hated Him (Mostly Profanity-Free for the Kiddies):
Let's just get this right:

Do you like your state and not the federal government controlling the curriculum of your kids' schools? Thank Ted Kennedy.

Do you like being able to vote starting at age 18? Thank Ted Kennedy.

Do you think low-income people should get help with heating their homes in the winter? Thank the man.

Do you think the federal government should fund cancer research? Yep.

Do you believe that Meals on Wheels is a good thing? Ditto.

Does your daughter (or you, if you're female) like playing soccer or basketball or softball at school? That'd be because of Ted Kennedy.

Do you think that disabled people should be able to go to school? Have access to buildings? Not be discriminated against for housing and loads of other things? Kennedy, big time.

You like your cheap airfares? You know the answer.

You think people on welfare oughta get jobs? So did Kennedy.

You think mental institutions should treat people humanely? Yeah, so did your new friend, Ted Kennedy.

You believe that the Defense Department should provide child care for the kids of soldiers? Kennedy did.

You think a woman shouldn't lose her job if she gets pregnant? You think 100,000 more cops on the street's a good idea? You think poor kids should have health care? You think soldiers in Iraq should have the proper armor? Just tick those things off the list. Some of them would have been accomplished without him; many would not have been.

You agreed with Ted Kennedy far, far more than you want to think you did, dear conservatives. Still, go ahead and dance your mad jigs on his still-warm corpse. Why not? We on the left certainly did when Jerry Falwell, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms kicked. Hell, one asshole blogger even celebrated the death of Ann Coulter's father. But know that you dance in ignorance. Ask Orrin Hatch.

But, of course, you want to address the far more pressing issue of whether or not Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kopechne back at Chappaquiddick all those decades ago, no matter what the investigations said. There's only a couple of things to say about that: The glib response is, "Yeah, and Thomas Jefferson nailed his slaves. What's your point?" More directly, Kennedy asked the people of Massachusetts if they wanted him to quit. They did not. The rest of the nation may have not wanted him as president, but for Massachusetts, Chappaquiddick quickly became a settled issue and distant history. That's all that mattered to keep him in the Senate, just like Louisiana will have to judge whether or not a prostitute-lovin' David Vitter should go back. That's democracy, gang, like it or not.

And Ted Kennedy did more for real, actual democracy than almost anyone else in our entire history as a nation.

More on that tomorrow in a real tribute.

(By the way, perhaps we now know why Barack Obama was trying to get health care reform done quickly.)

A Few Random Observations Regarding the Newest Torture Report:
1. It didn't work. That's what needs to be hammered home again and again. No matter how much Dick Cheney wants to insist it did, it didn't fucking work. How does the Rude Pundit know this? Two reasons:

A. If there was a single, demonstrable instance of a correlation between threatening to power drill the nutsack of Abu al-Fuckingbadguywithamoustache and the prevention of a terrorist attack, that shit would be a new book in the right-wing Bible. It'd be the trump card for every conservative bag of fuck on every news show, in every Bush administration self-justification memoir; it'd be tattooed on John Woo's sneering lip and on Alberto Gonzales's dick. Instead, all we get is the assertion that torture worked by the people whose asses' freedom depends on it.

i. It ought to be noted that even if torture "worked," it's still illegal.

B. Even the CIA reports that Cheney wanted declassified show jackshit about the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

2. If you threaten to kill a man's kids or to rape his mother in front of him and you believe that he believes you'll do it, you have ceased to represent any ideas that are better or stronger or more moral than the man you are threatening. In other words, is this how things work in a shining city on a hill?

3. Considering your country has bombed the living fuck out of villages in a man's country, killing children, there's no reason for him to doubt that you'd kill his kids and rape his mother. Which means he'll tell you anything to prevent that from happening, especially if what he's telling you is what you want to hear.

4. Truly, really, and, c'mon, can we finally, at last, all just call this "torture"? When is pressing a prisoner's carotid artery until they almost passed out and then doing it again not torture? What about scrubbing someone with an abrasive brush? Is it only torture if it rises to the level of WWSD (What Would Saddam Do)?

5. What the fuck's in the huge redacted sections? Compared to what we know, what are those other shoes and when will they drop? (We know some of it from Jane Mayer and Ron Suskind, but there's always more, there's always more.)

6. The Rude Pundit really has to stop watching the smugfest that is Morning Joe. Today, he heard Joe "A Dead Staffer Is an Office Accessory" Scarborough and the rest of the Joe Tools talking endlessly about the political ramifications of Attorney General Eric Holder pursuing prosecutions against the CIA operatives involved. They were worried about the morale at the CIA. They were confused as to why Holder wouldn't hold off until after the health care reform debate was ended. They couldn't understand why Obama wouldn't step in to slow down or stop the investigation. They were surprised that Holder would use the same report dismissed by Michael Mukasey's Justice Department. It was unreal, like being at a party where the entertainment is some ball-gagged dude getting his anus licked by a German shepherd and you say to another guest, "Oh, hey, that reminds me, I brought a 7 layer dip and nacho chips. How did you like it?"

In other words, there was no mention at all that, in our American name, someone took out a power drill and threatened to use it on a restrained prisoner. Sorry, motherfuckers on the right, but however evil that prisoner was, what was done was evil, too. Evil may have gradations, but it's still fucking evil. And, because it needs to be said as often as possible, the kick in the ass is it didn't make us any safer at all. The kick in the nuts is that no one has been punished or charged with any crime for doing it. Also not mentioned: prosecuting people with actual authority, like the aforementioned Vice President.

But to the Morning Joe pissants, that's not nearly as important as whether or not they should have rolled this out in August or waited until January.

7. Galileo recanted his scientific work when he was shown the implements of torture by the Catholic inquisitors. One imagines there was something like a drill there, too.

8. The Rude Pundit knows that many of those interrogated enhancedly are probably awful fuckers who would gut him the second they had a chance. So?