Photos and Quotes That Only Confirm That Atheism Equals Sanity:


No, that bunch of Muslims is not finally worshiping one of their own. It's actually from the Friday, September 25 "Day of Islamic Unity," where somewhere between 1000 and 8000 Muslims gathered on Capitol Hill to pray and hear speakers on America and Islam. Let's let Fox "news" describe the event: "The crowd in attendance on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building was comprised predominantly of people of color and men, with females seated separately." After the prayers, one speaker "urged all Muslims to 'God bless America' and avoid the 'trap' of hating anyone, particularly Christians and Jews."

Of course, there were conservative Christian protesters, some handing out pamphlets that yelled, "Abortion is Murder!! Homosexuality is Sin! Islam is a Lie!" If the pamphlet shovers took a second to ask anyone there, they'd discover that many of the praying, scary brown people agreed with them on two out of three of the expressed sentiments.

The Rude Pundit's Super-Duper Prayer Team got into the mix of things, too. The Rude Pundit joined the Family Research Council's Super-Duper Prayer Team a few years ago under a nom de rude, and each week he receives his prayerphyxiation orders from the Prayer Team's captain of, well, prayer. Last Wednesday, he was informed of the SDPT's activities in DC: "Perhaps a thousand Christian evangelists and prayer warriors were on site and posted at Metro stops around the city hoping to reach thousands of Muslim visitors with Bibles, gospel tracts, and DVDs." You got that? A thousand Jesus-fluffers were trying to convert a couple of thousand Mohammed-fellatilists. It's like King Kong versus Godzilla.

Oh, and then there's the actual prayer the SDPT was supposed to fall on its knees and intone: "Praise God! May widespread Christian prayer continue to restrain militant Islam and the radicalization of peaceful practitioners. May vital Christianity preempt the spread of Islam by the sharing of the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with those who have been blinded by the 'god of this age.'"

This is followed by suggested bible verses that are supposed to send us scurrying to our handy New American editions to read what God hisself had to say about our extreme action prayers. In this case, it's shit like Psalm 96 or Isaiah 44, the "only one God" or "no god above our God" stuff, the kind of thing where, if you replaced "God" with "Packers," you'd have a perfectly good football chant.

You look at this nonsense, this derangement masked as rational thought or behavior: one group praying to their invisible sky wizard while another group is proclaiming that their invisible sky wizard is sooo much cooler than the first group's invisible sky wizard. If they were talking about centaurs or fairies, we'd lock all of them the hell up. And, as Barack Obama tries to figure out what the fuck to do about the Taliban mowing down Americans in Afghanistan, you gotta think, "We're just fucked."

If It's Monday, It's Stephanie Miller Time:
Listen in on yer radio dials, yer internets o' love, or yer casting pod players: The Rude Pundit does Stephanie Miller live on the radio this morning at 9:30 ET/ 6:30 PT. You should all be so lucky.

Regarding Polanski and the Rule of Law:
The Rude Pundit wasn't going to comment on Roman Polanski case because it's a ridiculously simple thing: fugitive rapists should be brought to justice. That would seem to be an absolute. As for the high profile people defending Polanski, well, shit, just because your friends like you, it doesn't mean you're not a criminal. Hell, you could probably find insane religious zealots saying that Elizabeth Smart's rapist should go free because God wanted him to rape Smart. Mostly, though, it's a waste of time, even a few people you would normally think have better sense have said dumb things along the way.

However, there's a bizarre moral equation going on among some (not all) on the right that because a petition calling for Polanski's release has been signed by a bunch of well-known movie people, it means liberals as a hegemonic whole want to just let Polanski go. For instance, because of what Whoopi Goldberg ("it's not rape-rape") and Feminist Majority founder Peg Yorkin (especially surprising) said about Polanski, Rush Limbaugh belched, "That's where the feminazis are today...Just like there was no compassion for Paula Jones, where's the compassion for that 13-year-old girl? Juanita Broaddrick, alleged rape by Bill Clinton, who said he said, 'Put some ice on your lip.' They went after Juanita Broaddrick, not Bill Clinton." Now that's a fucking leap in moral equivalency, but it's really the only exercise Limbaugh gets.

And Limbaugh might be on to something if he wasn't utterly and completely wrong. Outside of show business, virtually every feminist writer and pundit has been squarely on the side of the victim. Kate Harding in Salon, Katha Pollitt in The Nation, you get the idea. When you're dealing with Limbaugh, though, facts never get in the way of some random point you think you're making. (And Limbaugh condemning someone for evading the law is a little like John Wayne Gacy saying clowns are scary.)

There's also attempts to tie the Polanski case to other supposed liberal excesses. On Morning Starbucks on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski, dominatrix sneer in full swing, compared Polanski to David Letterman confessing to having sex with employees under some general "Hollywood" banner. Over at the Heritage Foundation, the blog is using Polanski as a way to condemn Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary of education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools and the latest victim of the right's witch hunt in the Obama administration. Gary Bauer somehow shoehorns ACORN and abortion into his discussion of Polanski.

What's fucking funny is that all of these people who write the lie about how squishy liberals want to set Polanski free get into a righteous froth when liberals say that people who committed torture during interrogations should be investigated and brought to justice. This is not some vague analogy. See, some of us believe in principles, not just politics. One of those is that criminals should pay for their crimes, no matter if they're famous movie directors, CIA agents, or Vice Presidents. We can argue about what the punishment should be. But no one should be excused from answering to the law. It's the right that's always too ready to excuse criminals when it suits their ideological purposes.

Rep. Alan Grayson May Just Fuck Your Shit Up:
It's too soon to tell, but there's a good chance that Representative Alan Grayson, he of the "Die Quickly" Republican health care plan, will end up fucking your shit up. Too rich to be bought off, Grayson's been fucking with the powerful for a few years now. As an attorney, he represented whistleblowers, going after the hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud committed by contractors and others in Iraq. He told CNN in April 2006, "The development fund of Iraq was looted by war profiteers and war whores." Check out the huge ass article on him in Vanity Fair from 2007 (and check out that goatee). He went after Halliburton and KBR; he fucked with Dick Cheney. You think a man whose name is a homophone with "boner" is gonna trouble him?

Look, let's be clear: Grayson of Orlando, Florida, is something of a drama queen. Defeating an incumbent Republican in a previously solidly Republican district as part of the Obama wave in 2008, he's an attack dog straight out of old school progressive politics. Here he is in January on President Obama's stimulus plan: "It shelters the homeless, and it heals the sick. It helps us to look forward to a day when we beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks, and when a nation does not lift up a sword against nation anymore." It's a bit over the top, like his Holocaust remark yesterday and his demand that AIG's CEO "name names" of those who received bonuses.

But sometimes those kinds of dramatics can be absolutely energizing, like the second shot of cheap tequila, as when Grayson said, "Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we'd all need pain killers."

And this dude knows how to apologize to right-wingers. Pushed by Michael Steele to beg forgiveness from Limbaugh like so many Republicans did, Grayson offered, "I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being."

Grayson was the member of Congress who authored the grandly symbolic bill attacking executive compensation in the financial firms now owned by all of us, also known as the "Pay for Performance Act," currently somewhere on hold in the Senate after passing the House in April. This would be back when "populist anger" was actually about people against corporations, which, of course, meant conservatives thought it was wrong. Grayson said, "You should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure...This bill will show which Republicans are so much on the take from the financial services industry that they're willing to actually bless compensation that has no bearing on performance and is excessive and unreasonable. We'll find out who are the people who understand that the public's money needs to be protected, and who are the people who simply want to suck up to their patrons on Wall Street."

The bill caused Fox "news" host Neil Cavuto to lose his shit on the air with Grayson, to the point where Grayson said that Cavuto was conjuring a "paranoid fantasy" about the implications of the bill. Cavuto cursed and spat while Grayson looked like he was wondering if he was going to have to grab Cavuto's jaws to keep him from biting.

Since Grayson said that the Republican plan for health care is "Don't get sick" and "Die quickly," Grayson has become this week's punching bag for conservative wads of fuck who want to equate his words with Rep. Joe "Insert Banjo Music" Wilson's loud "Don't lie" fart during the President's health care speech. Beyond the hypocrisy of the death panel people saying someone's being too mean, it should also be pointed out that Grayson didn't just bray out of nowhere like he was getting fucked by a donkey. He was recognized and speaking in turn. Robert's Rules of Order don't say anything about whether or not a speaker can drip with savage sarcasm.

Yesterday, on The Situation Room with Wolf "Bow Down Before the Sartorial Magnificence of My Beard" Blitzer, the gathered CNN superfriends couldn't comprehend Grayson, as if anger and honesty coming from a Democrat is some unknown species of rhetoric. "They should apologize to America," Grayson said of Republicans calling for him to beg forgiveness. He may as well have said, "Suck my balls."

The best part was when designated Republican Alex "Douche 'Stache" Castellanos asked Grayson which people does the Congressman think he wants to die. Grayson went right back at him, calling Republican ideas "amorphous nonsense," and "Do you really think that tort reform is going to take care of 47 million people?" By the point that Grayson said Republicans were just using the "usual cliches," Castellanos had the look of a straight man who was just shown the cock that was going to fuck him.

It was truly something beautiful because Grayson walked into Wolf Blitzer's house, drank his whiskey, and took a giant shit on CNN's floor. The pundits from Carville to Castellanos to Borger didn't know what the fuck to do with this guy who wasn't going to play by the usual rules of suck up and pander and call for bipartisanship like other Democrats. The closest they've gotten is the occasional Barney Frank appearance, but Grayson is something different, a Democrat who not only has his own balls, but is ripping the nuts off others. "They've been dragging their feet. These -- these are foot dragging, knuckle dragging Neanderthals who think they can dictate policy to America by being stubborn. And I think it's -- the time is over. We had an election. That's it. Now we have to move ahead in just the way the president wants us to," Grayson said, and, oh, the sputtering that happened.

James Carville asked Grayson at the end if he was ready for how his life was going to change. What ought to be happening is that Democrats should be using Grayson as their point person, sending him out to take a wrecking ball to the stick houses of arguments Republicans keep constructing. Republicans have never known how to deal with it when someone fights back with the same brutality they use. Grayson just pointed out that motherfuckers fuck their mothers. It's that simple.

Note to Mainstream News Media: You're Not Blogs and Everything Is Not Legitimate News:
Think back for a moment to 2004. That was the last chance we had to wrestle with whether or not President George W. Bush, up for reelection, had completed his minimal duties as a member of the Air National Guard in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a story with a paper trail, credible people involved, and a presidency in the balance. The right dismissed the whole thing as a made-up controversy, a conspiracy theory by liberal losers, and, hey, what about John Kerry and those Swift Boat vets? Until the strange and mysterious forged documents showed up at CBS (the existence of which neither proved nor disproved anything about Bush, but it did discredit the story), the news media was actually discussing whether or not it was true. Republicans were apoplectic at this questioning of the President's military street cred.

The point here is not to revisit that issue. But can you think of another time in the reign of the Bush the Lesser that any other story that debased Bush got any traction in the media? The National Guard story was legitimate news. What if, though, CNN spent days examining Bush's cocaine use? Or the allegations that he forced a lover to get an abortion? Or that Laura Bush, as a teenager, intentionally killed an ex-boyfriend? We're talking about a media that, for the most part, wouldn't even look into whether or not Bush was legitimately elected in the first place or wouldn't investigate the administration's claims on Iraqi weapons prior to going into a war.

The Rude Pundit's not saying that the fringe stories, about coke, abortion, and murder, should have made Wolf Blitzer's radar. They shouldn't have. He's not commenting on whether or not those are true or false. However, to report them as more than an interesting blip is to legitimize them and to legitimize those making the allegations.

Let's push this further. What if CNN or MSNBC interviewed 9/11 truthers on a daily basis during the Bush administration? Even if the hosts scoffed at them, what if, on a semi-regular basis, someone who thought 9/11 was an inside job or that Flight 93 was shot down was allowed to comment on issues related to that day and allowed to say that the Bush administration destroyed the Twin Towers to bring down the nation in order to maintain power? You know what would have happened? Shit would have burned. Conservatives would have exploded with rage, Democratic politicians would have had to condemn the people who said it, and the news networks that gave the truthers time and investigated what they said would have faced boycotts and threats.

Which all leads to what we deal with today: why the fuck are we even hearing about things like whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States? It's not a real story. Why the fuck are there serious discussions on the news networks over whether or not the Obama administration's ultimate plan is to turn America into some kind of socialist dystopia? Or about whether or not Obama is like Hitler (a report that CNN actually did)? Or whether Obama wants to set up "death panels" to kill old people? Why are guests allowed on who believe these things? It ain't censorship to not give a platform to maniacs. This ain't just a complaint about Fox "news," although Fox is certainly Public Enemy Number 1 (and "public enemy" here means "enemy of the public") or your Limbaughs and Becks. It's that nothing is beyond the pale at this point. No longer is anything, on its face, too absurd or baseless to discuss. Stupid people believe stupid things, and there will always be opportunists there to exploit stupidity - politicians, pundits, news people.

As the right seeks to delegitimize the Obama presidency, as the media is willing to be complicit, as few brave Republicans are willing to call "bullshit," we are, as Thomas Friedman points out today, heading into truly dangerous territory. Sure, people have always called for the heads of their leaders, but they used to have to stand on street corners with cheap microphones and amps. Now, when they write that the military might have to overthrow Obama, it sits in a browser tab right next to the Washington Post, and most people can't tell the difference. We need arbiters with spines. The media were spineless arbiters during the Bush administration. Now they are spineless and filterless, political relativists, if you will, not willing to ignore what needs ignoring, not willing to condemn what needs condemning.

Someone's gonna get hurt. Hell, someone may already have over in Kentucky.

(Just to be clear: the Rude Pundit's no conspiracy theorist - he doesn't believe in ghosts, gods, or grassy knolls, and he thinks that 19 dudes with box cutters lucked out on September 11, 2001. Yeah, yeah, send your emails.)

Health Care, the Public, Abortion, and Money:
Here's a sickening number for the day: the budget for one year of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that'll probably be passed by the Senate today, is $128.2 billion. The cost of the most generous, most public optiony of the health care bills currently under consideration in the Congress is roughly $110 billion a year. That's deduced through simple math: $1.1 trillion divided by 10 years. It is, by the way, a lot less scary of a number than the ten-year one, and you gotta wonder why supporters don't use it. But, still, we're not going to blink at spending more on wars that are, at best, the indulgences of a fallen empire left over from its days of bloated arrogance.

Seriously, at this point, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become that gym membership you signed up for but never use, yet you can't get out of the contract, so you just keep paying the hundred bucks a month, waiting for it to go away. Except for that goddamn automatic renewal clause you didn't see.

This is not about the wars (although, you know, fuck the generals). And it's not totally about cost comparison (although the seeming difference in cost between the House bills and the Baucus bill is about $15 billion a year, the cost of a little over a month of the wars - again, division makes a difference in perspective). No, instead this is about the appalling way in which we're still debating aspects of health care reform.

There's plain facts in this nation. One of those is that abortion remains legal, despite the efforts of some states to regulate it to near-elimination, despite the efforts of individuals to intimidate or kill those involved in the procedure, despite the mewls of the religious that an invisible sky wizard is offended by it. It is still legal.

Yet, in this health care debate, it's not enough for anti-choice nutzoids that the federal government is banned from directly funding abortions. It's not enough that if any public option happens, abortions cannot be paid for by it. No, now anti-choicers want any insurance plan that is part of an "exchange" from which people can choose cannot have abortion coverage because people buying into those plans may be getting subsidies from the government to do so. Follow the bouncing ball to madness here: pro-choicers have already done financial contortions to please the anti-choicers, making it so any subsidies would not actually be used for abortions. But, see, that ain't good enough because, in the even more contorted logic of the conservative crazeratti, any money that's paid to insurers from the government frees up funds to pay for abortion.

Again, this is over a legal medical procedure that simply displeases a segment of the population. It's merely a back door way to outlaw abortions through a thousand cuts, it's another conservative assault on women, it's another hypocrisy in that the only time a business is regulated is to conform to some outdated notions of morality because it gets the yahoos out to vote. It is, ultimately, an argument over a pittance, and it's also another bullshit way to possibly derail reform.

How about this: ask how many people would rather that Iraq/Afghanistan budget go for health insurance for Americans. Then we're talking real money.

Today the fight in the Senate is over the public option. The abortion debate is coming. The landscape is strewn with mines set by the right. The only question is if Democrats are going to try to tiptoe around them or just bulldoze the shit out of them.

The Rude Pundit on Today's Stephanie Miller Show:
Yes, Stephanie Miller did ask the Rude Pundit to describe "scrotal infusion" on live radio. And, yes, of course he did, as well as talk about terrorism, ACORN, and more, with copious use of the phrase "Fort Dix."

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You can always subscribe to the Rude Pundit's podcast, if you want to hear about artificially inflated nutsacks while you're at the gym.

Also, for DC rude readers, the Rude Pundit's pal, Jeff Kreisler, is doing a show based on his kick-ass funny book Get Rich Cheating at the DC Arts Center in the ol' Adams-Morgan. Tickets available.

Updated With Ironic Info: For Conservatives, Being America Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry:
Oh, their stars and garters. Reading some of the reaction from right-wing pundits to President Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations last week is like reading the diary of an adderall-popping high school cheerleader who delusionally thinks that her jock boyfriend is cheating on her. They're upset at what they see as the nearly traitorous act of Obama acknowledging that the United States fucked up in its relationship with the world during the previous, let's say, eight years or so. They see it as arrogantly associating the world's perception of America with the world's perception of him.

Here's Michael Gerson, wringing his hands with worry like a panic-attack-driven mental patient waiting for soup: "The thesis: pre-Obama America is a nation of many flaws and failures. The antithesis: The world responds with understandable but misguided prejudice. The synthesis: Me. Me, at all costs; me, in spite of all terrors; me, however long and hard the road may be. How great a world we all should see, if only all were more like...me." Obama is driven by narcissism, you see: "At the United Nations, Obama set out to denigrate American goodness so he can become our rescuer."

Over in the National Review (motto: "Thank God Buckley's dead so we can go bugnuts like the rest of the movement"), Jonah Goldberg moves from stupidly snide to snidely stupid in a few short sentences: "'For those who question the character and cause of my nation,' the president pronounced Wednesday, 'I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.' America is 233 years old. Some think that there are ample accomplishments speaking to our character and cause that predate Obama’s ascension to the presidency. Feh, Obama seems to be saying. Look instead to our new greatness, for we have elected a man like him!
Having anointed himself America’s vindicator and redeemer, Obama’s real purpose seems to be to become the leader not of the free world but, simply, the world."

Beyond the strange desire to have America of today judged by actions two centuries ago (did he judge French character in 2002 based on that country's revolution 200 years before?), Goldberg, a man who really should be forced to bathe his own vile mother, then veers into the most paranoid of conspiracy theorist fantasies. How dare Obama want the world to see things his way, how dare he ask the world to join his "cult of unity," as Goldberg puts it. Yeah, unity is for pussies. Build that completely unnecessary and worthless missile shield because we said we were gonna.

Exactly why was Obama doing some measure of saying, "Look, the last guy fucked it all up. Let's make it better, but you gotta get on board, too"? Fuck, who knows?

Maybe it was this speech by George W. Bush on September 20, 2001, where the man who was our president said to the world, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Maybe Bush still angry then, except that this is what he said on November 6, 2001: "Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror." Maybe it was that 2002 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, where he told the nations of the world that they would make the U.N. irrelevant if they didn't believe him on Iraq and agree to a resolution leading to war. The United States, through its face to the world, the President, told the world, "You will now only be judged by a simply choice." If you were, say, Austrian or Bolivian or Cambodian, you might think, "Umm, fuck you?"

What Obama, our new face to the world, also said was "After all, it is easy to walk up to this podium and point fingers and stoke divisions. Nothing is easier than blaming others for our troubles, and absolving ourselves of responsibility for our choices and our actions. Anybody can do that." Like Gerson and Goldberg, anybodies if there ever were some.

Update: By the way, you know who was one of the people responsible for that September 20, 2001 speech? Who may have written the words that divided the world solely on the United States's terms, setting the attitude the Obama has had to overcome? Michael Gerson, once one of Bush's speechwriters, now just a douchebag pundit.

Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising (Last Day):
An accurate measure of the number of rude readers who got in the Marxist spirit would be in the neighborhood of an assload. In donations from a couple of bucks to c-notes, the love came in. Big damn thanks. If you wanna get in on that special feeling you can get when you buy the Rude Pundit a drink (and help him buy that new laptop), click on that button down there or the one on the side. After this, we shall not speak of the uprising again (until next year).

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Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising (Day 6):
Oh, fuck, anyone got something that'll wash out a brain? The Rude Pundit just sat in Barnes and Noble for a while, reading Glenn Beck's latest "book." Sweet Jesus, what a $30 pile of crap with a rancid cherry on top. Incoherent, random, and pointless (no, really, the book just ends - with no final summary or point), just like Beck's show. The worst part? When the Rude Pundit picked up the book, a fat white guy walking by saw him, nodded, smiled, and waved the copy he was holding in his meaty paw, as if we were Beck butt buddies. Oh, and Beck justifies the 3/5 Compromise on counting slaves in the Constitution as a good thing.

Help the Rude Pundit get the whiskey he needs to wipe his memory clean (and buy a new laptop). The Rude Pundit's annual fundraiser is on. Click on that button down there or the one on the side, like dozens of people coast-to-coast and around the world have already done. Click like you're pretending to boil a frog to make some stupid point.

If you hate the PayPal, here's the Rude Pundit's snail mail address where you can send all manner of mailable material:
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A Note on an Absence of Hysteria Regarding a Possible Terrorism Plot:
So there's this thing that you don't want to google called "scrotal infusion." (No, really, don't google it.) There's a couple of reasons why men will use a needle, a tube, and saline solution to inflate their nutsacks to cantaloupe-sized proportions. For some, it is a sexual thing, in the same way that a gerbil tickling one's prostate is. For others, it's a temporary way of making one look like one has huge-ass balls. (You googled it, didn't you? Told you.) Think about it: for a good couple of hours, a man with a tiny scrotum can look like he's sportin' grapefruits in his pants.

The Bush administration was, in many ways, one prolonged scrotal infusion. Those motherfuckers would do anything to make them look like they had the biggest balls in the room, no matter how much it was just cosmetic. How many times did we have to deal with Ashcroft, Ridge, or Chertoff making a statement to the press about whatever group of psychotics or losers or loudmouths they had rounded up in order to flog the latest "terror plot"? The Homeland Security website under Chertoff was overflowing with this fearmongering kind of shit. Shove the needle in and let the saline flow. Holy shit, what elephantine nuts. People with stones that gargantuan must be able to protect us, just by throwing their balls in the way.

So let's end this week on a semi-positive note amid the chaos of Iran, the clusterfuck of Afghanistan, and the petulance of Senate Finance Committee Republicans: When arrests were made in the seemingly way-closer-to-real terrorist plot involving Najibullah Zazi and others, there was no press conference involving Janet Napolitano or Eric Holder. (Holder did express his concerns for a 60 Minutes interview.) There was no federal trumpeting of some great and mighty effort to smash the terrorists who wanna kill us all. There were simply press releases about actions taken by the FBI and the Department of Justice. No "let's all go batshit paranoid" dramatics. The media takes care of that part, anyways.

To put it simply, if you're confident in the balls you have, you don't need to disguise them.

Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising (Day 5):
The Rude Pundit's annual fundraiser is on. Click on that button down there or the one on the side. Give to defray the costs of the Rude Pundit's new laptop, his travel, and his liquor, man, his sweet, sweet liquor.

If you hate the PayPal, here's the Rude Pundit's snail mail address where you can send all manner of mailable material:
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Conservatives: You Can Break the Law If It Accomplishes Our Goals (Part 1):
Last night, the Rude Pundit tuned into Fox "news" host Bill O'Reilly's nightly round of self-fellatio, The O'Reilly Factor, and there was Representative Barney Frank, talking to O'Reilly about the banning of federal funding for ACORN programs. (ACORN, as you know, is the vilest, most evilest organization on the face of the earth ever to register voters, deadlier than al-Qaeda and more pimpalicious than Lil Wayne.) They got around to discussing the merry pimp and prostitute-disguised pranksters who secretly filmed and audiotaped ACORN employees. Seems that by doing so in Baltimore without consent or warrant, they violated state law. Frank, who supported halting ACORN funding, also supported an investigation into the other broken laws, even if he passed on commenting ACORN's civil suit against the filmmakers. O'Reilly, as is the way of a man concentrating on sucking his own dick, wouldn't let Frank make his point, and he constantly interrupted Frank to try to get the congressman to call the conservative activists "heroes" or some such shit.

Like O'Reilly, other conservatives have said that whatever "crime" might have been committed, it's nothing compared to what the tapes revealed (although it's unclear that any actual crime was being committed by ACORN's employees). This isn't about ACORN, though, which has more to do with how an organization might have lost its way. It's about how "conservative" used to stand for, you know, "conservative," which one might think means "people who break laws ought to answer for that." But apparently, it now stands for "the ends justify the means."

Take another example: the alleged "scandal" over whether or not Obama administration officials are using the National Endowment of the Arts to get artists to create things that promote the goals of the White House. (Read the transcript - only conspiracy-minded nutzoids and Obama haters could see it as anything but using art for public engagement, not for a specific point of view.) Problem is, again, that the jerk-off doing the recording of the conference call never got anyone's consent to do so, and that included a number of private individuals. See, that violates laws in several states involved in the call. Again, conservatives don't give a fuck that laws may have been broken. That's merely the disposable peel for the sweet pulp underneath that they can devour.

The problem, as Frank repeatedly tried to tell a condescendingly smirking O'Reilly, is that, whatever you think about the results of the law-breaking, laws were broken. And some may admire the man who kills the neighbor who molested the man's kids, the dude's still a murderer. You either enforce the laws of the land, change them, or just say, "Fuck it," and let's go back to street justice.

Let's remember that when civil rights protesters violated the law, they expected to be arrested and jailed. Their goal, though, was to end unfair laws. That ain't the case here. For O'Reilly, it's pick and choose. One imagines that if Andrea Mackris had released recordings of her boss's falafel-sporting harassment, he'd've countersued her "big boobs" off. But apparently, for many on the right, laws on things like privacy exist merely as impediments, a wall of bullshit, when they have an agenda to accomplish.

Tomorrow: Yes, this is also about CIA interrogators.

Updated with Shiny New Address: Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising (Day 4):
Today is Bruce Springsteen's birthday. The Rude Pundit's celebrating by listening to Nebraska and thinking, "Goddamnit, that's all horribly relevant now."

Oh, and, hey, the Rude Pundit's yearly fundraiser is on. Look at that archive list: six motherfuckin' years, and the stomach lining and liver are still working. Show the right-wing bastards that you know rude when you see it. Click on that button down there or the one on the side. Give to defray the costs of the Rude Pundit's new laptop, his travel, and his liquor, man, his sweet, sweet liquor.

Spectacular Update: If you hate the PayPal, here's the Rude Pundit's snail mail address where you can send checks, money orders, and all manner of mailable material:
Lee Papa
P.O. Box 20071
New York, NY 10014

What the Fuck Does Glenn Beck Believe, Why He's Dangerous to the Right, and 14 Ways for Him to Flame Out:
The Rude Pundit has to admit to being mildly obsessed with the destruction of Glenn Beck. It's not that Beck's some kind of right-wing demagogue. No, that's run-of-the-mill shit. It's not that he's so fully, incoherently wrong about everything he says. Anyone who would, as Beck did, put Che Guevara, Saul Alinsky and Woodrow Wilson together as roots of the end of America has no understanding of anything. Not even how to fucking breathe. No, what pisses the Rude Pundit off is a simple question: "What the fuck does he believe?" (It's the same question that plagues Glenn Greenwald.) The corollary questions are "What's his fucking goal?" and "What's the fucking goal of the tea bag movement?" Anyone got an answer?

Read the shit that's all over his 9-12 Project site, like the "9 Principles, 12 Values." It's like having a dwarf tap dance on your forehead without the momentary charm of the act. There's nothing in it except some vaguely nihilistic version of a kind of populism that he thinks springs from the elitist landowners who started this nation. The only conclusion is that he doesn't actually believe in anything except his own rightness. And that means he's either insane, a con man, or both. The Rude Pundit knows greedy frauds. And, crazy or not, Beck's one of 'em.

The reason Beck is, as Greenwald says, "a histrionic intellectual mess" is that there is a fundamental flaw at the center of the whole movement, the whole faux ideology that Beck has concocted around this conspiratorial mythos about Barack Obama and the government that is equal parts Dan Brown, Brigham Young, and Lyndon LaRouche: the natural end point of Beck's anti-(some)corporations, anti-Wall Street, anti-tax, sort-of-libertarian, sort-of-anarchist weepy ranting is real and genuine progressive populism. Yes, Beck is tapping into some sweeping discontent in this country, what the Rude Pundit has previously described as pent-up, misdirected rage at the Bush administration, and what he's harnessed and ridden like Slim Pickens on the bomb is the energy that comes with anger. And the fact that Democrats have ceded this fury, often expressed by the least articulate and stupidest among the mob, has led us to where we are with health care and taxation and myriad other issues.

But they have nowhere to go. The problem with the Beck followers is that all Beck offers them is some weirdo ideas about returning to some sort of state of nature, except with Jesus hanging out there, like Utah, one supposes. What they should be directed to do, like the poor back in the 1930s, is to demand more from their government, to demand a truly progressive tax system, to demand safety nets that function, to demand trust-busting and corporate oversight, to demand strong unions and programs that strengthen communities. If this was a century ago, the tea party protesters would be marching to let Andrew Carnegie treat his employees as he saw fit and to give more money to Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.

It's no wonder that others on the right are turning on Beck. He is their Frankenstein monster, created by Murdoch to conquer death, but with the brain of a maniac. He must be destroyed now before he kills again.

And the Rude Pundit wants to see Beck fall, hard, back to alcohol, coke. Found with a pile of kiddie porn while fucking a stump whore. Whatever. Cruel? Sure, but these are vicious times. In fact, for real fun, the Rude Pundit asked the Facebook rude friends for their ideas of how Beck will implode and collapse into himself, creating a black hole in Nutzoidland. Here's some of their responses:
-Sheep
-A web clip of him rehearsing his "crying" that ends with him saying "that oughta impress those white trash bastards"
-Video of him snorting amphetamine off of Pat Robertson’s genitals.
-Maybe O'Reilly will falafel him to death for not giving him the common courtesy of a reach-around
-Booze and a freakin' ripped hot dude that's hung like a donkey... just for the added irony
-Hemorrhoid rage
-His other wives come out of the dungeon, more pale and in need of more magic underwear
-Booze and Gannon
-Being discovered masturbating to a copy of Hellcats of the Navy while dressed in full nurse drag
-My guess is that he's a poorly, or untreated, bipolar. His undoing will be something like another suicide attempt or a naked climb up the side of a building.
-Glenn Beck is black?
-Obviously he kills himself and the right blame it on the left hate-machine
-My guess is a combination of gorilla tranquilizers, Japanese manga porn, necrophilia and beastiality
-oh, and possibly cannibalism

Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising (Day 3):
Damn, it's just day three, and people across these United States, Canada, and the UK have contributed to the rudeness (with special love to California). And you can, too. Toss some money into the new computer and too-much whiskey fund by clicking below. Or over on the side, if you're a rebel. Click that fucker like you're voting for Tom DeLay on Dancing With the Stars ('cause the Rude Pundit wants that fucker dancing until he has a stroke).

Note to those waiting for the P.O. Box: another charming effect of 9/11 - the need for two i.d.'s at the post office. Live and learn, man, live and learn.

Values Voter Summit or Joyful Conservative Fuck-Fest?:
By now you've seen this:


It's the ought-to-be-famous "Jesus loves cock rings" poster from the Abstinence Clearinghouse, angling for attention through doubletakes at the Family Research Council's (et al) Value Voters Summit this past weekend.

Of course, the abstinent people weren't the only ones bringing the sexy to repression of natural human urges. Between the cute little minx next to the table and the picture with Britney Spears practically ordering you to face fuck her, the Rude Pundit's penis was confused about the message here:



The most hilarious thing about a group of nutzoid right-wingers coming together to talk about "values" or some such shit is how the bubbling-below-the-surface desire to ball madly spews forth in the most unexpected ways. God, how the cell phones of the local manwhore pimps must have been vibrating all night this weekend with demands for gay booty calls from the Omni Shoreham. God, how tired housekeeping must have been cleaning up jizz-crispy pages of the Gideon Bible, the only proper way to wipe an evangelical dick after nailing the ass of an abstinence advocate.

The surging libidinal need made its way to the dais, too. In his speech, Representative Mike Pence of Indiana was more or less describing how much he wanted to blow Christ: "[N]othing can compare to the inexpressible joy I felt on a night in April in 1978 when I gave my life to Jesus Christ." And that Jesus is a demanding Master to his little submissives: "Well, like millions of Americans, I've been spending some time on my knees lately."

Most creepy was Pence's fetishization of America's youth, a masturbatory need so great that he had to rush back home to indulge it: "I got on the plane and flew home to Indiana, went out to the Henry Country Fairgrounds for a Boy Scout Jamboree on a cold Saturday morning just about a year ago, and I'll never forget it. You know the Boy Scout Jamboree situation. A bunch of little boys with their hair tousled, ties pulled to the side, one shirt tail out, standing in a row." The Rude Pundit doesn't know about you, but he probably couldn't describe a row of scouts in such...loving detail.

And the Congressman even admitted that Mrs. Pence knows the score: "[B]ehind every great man there is a woman rolling her eyes." She'd be rolling them nonstop if Mr. Pence bumped into this guy in way-deep denial:



But maybe she'd get lucky and her hubby would stop by this table first to talk to its lonely attendant:


One imagines that guy is texting an IM to the Congressional page dorm. Or the local scoutmaster.

(Photos from TPM.)

Updated to Include Today's Stephanie Miller Show: Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising (Day 2):
Yeah, it's been six years of ripe old bloggery, and the Rude Pundit's hosting his yearly send-me-money-bitches-a-thon. Why? Because you're all commies, and that's what you do. (Oh, and the Rude Pundit'll buy a new laptop and whiskey with the leftovers.)

Click on that damn button down there or on the side like it's a throbbing clit:

Tomorrow: a magical P.O. Box address for those who fear the PayPal.

And here's all the hot, wet sarcasm from today's Stephanie Miller Show:

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Okay, Now It's McCarthyism:
Much spittle has been spread about how Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, and the advance guard of the new Red Scare are leading us down the road to a new round of McCarthyism. Beck's specious little rant a week or so ago comparing himself to Edward R. Murrow exposing McCarthy, but let's remember that Murrow may have brought down McCarthy, but McCarthy and those he drove to spasmodic paranoia about Communists were out to destroy as many careers as possible. That meant not only politicians and Hollywood lefty types, oh, no. Blacklisting and fear of possible blacklists were used against librarians, schoolteachers, and university professors.

And now, in this retro-era of the new communist witch hunt (based some fantasy version of communism that has little to do with real and actual communism), everything old is new again. The difference this time has to do with so many activities the government used to do on its own: the cause has been privatized. This is different than random cranky whores desperate for attention, like David Horowitz and his little book of fucktardery, The Professors, where he identifies the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America," which is not unlike uncovering the deadliest prairie dogs on the plains.

No, now we have an honest-to-god, well-funded effort from a conservative organization, the Leadership Institute, a kind of school for assholes that claims to have trained Mitch McConnell, Grover Norquist, and other various and sundry right-wing spoogebuckets. The new effort of the Institute is CampusReform.org, which started this week. The Rude Pundit received a letter of invitation to join up from LI's founder, Morton Blackwell, which explained the goals of this "massive new website I have created at LI to combat leftist abuses and bias at our colleges and universities."

Mr. Blackwell wants the Rude Pundit to spread word of CampusReform.org to conservative students on college campuses: "CampusReform.org will dramatically increase the number of battles fought against leftist abuses on college campuses this year. And based on my long experience, I confidently predict conservative students will win most of those new battles as they identify, expose, and combat leftist abuses and bias." And how?

Why, through CRorg's easy-to-use narcing system. Sort of like RateMyProfessor for even bigger cunts and dickwads, a conservative student can go and whine about the mean old meanie leftist professor who gave poor little Sean or Ann a bad grade because they don't want to lick the waxy folds of Barack Obama's nutsack. It's big fun. Want some examples?

Here's what some little shithead named "wareagle01" said about Auburn University PoliSci Prof Jim Seroka: "Obvious leftist. Denigrates Republicans and conservatives in class. Cuts off criticism of Democrat politicians. Seems to be especially fond of any foreign TV shows that denigrate the US. Uses terms such as 'gun nuts' to describe 2nd amendment supporters and 'fascists' to describe conservatives." Oh, Mary, pull the panties out of your ass and move on.

Or here's what someone said about University of Tennessee Psych Prof Eric Sundstrom: "While Professor Sundstrom does a great job with teaching this class, he unfortunately allows his liberal biases to creep into dicussions. I took this class in the fall of 2003 and he regularly attacked President Bush and his foreign policy during discussions of organizational theory." You know, teaching by using examples is not a bad thing.

What's fascinating is that the site doesn't even realize the total fucking hypocrisy built into its effort. If you praise people for being conservative and denigrate them for being liberal, how is that, in any objective way, qualitatively better than the reverse? Oh, fuck, wait. That was an application of logic. Sorry.

But, hey, thanks for proving why tenure exists with this entry on Lehigh University's David Amidon: "Having gotten tenure when he was a young liberal, the administration could not remove him when he changed his positions and became an old conservative."

The "Holy-Crap-It's-Been-Six-Years" Rude Pundit Fundraiser:
Well over a million words, most of them his own, including coverage of two presidential elections, interviews with homeless people and famous ones, on-the-spot bloggery from Minneapolis during the Republican Convention and DC during the inauguration, a couple of stage shows, a regular weekly national radio appearance, podcasts, a growing Facebook community where commenters can go nuts, goddamn Twitter, and more: the Rude Pundit's just gettin' revved up, motherfuckers. And there's even bigger rude stuff coming in the not-so-distant future.

We're at the end of six years of being rude before it was cool, and every year at this auspicious time, the Rude Pundit celebrates the birthday of this not-so-humble blog by upending the cowboy hat and asking for you to fill it with your hard-earned spare change, yer Georges, Abes, Alexes, Andrews, Benjamins, etc. You get the idea. Money, you know? Donations.

Call this the Sixth Anniversary Rude Reader Socialist Uprising. Your donations will provide precious funds for a new laptop and enough whiskey to make it through the next year of Obama press conferences and major speeches. It'll make you feel like your Marxist overlords have redistributed your wealth. You can strike a blow for solidarity, comrades, by clicking on that PayPal button on the side there. Or right here:

(Tomorrow, the Rude Pundit will post a snail-mail address for PayPal haters.)

And, as has been the tradition here, let's open it up for reader questions. What do ya wanna know? What do you need advice on? What do you want a rude opinion about? The Rude Pundit will answer the best, weirdest, or most interesting ones over the next week. You know the address: rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com.

And, yes, your regular-scheduled bloggery will continue.

As will tomorrow morning's weekly breakfast in bed with Stephanie Miller at 9:30 ET/6:30 PT. There's room enough between the sheets for all of us.