The Rude Pundit

Why Bill Kristol Ought to Be Sodomized with a Rolled-Up Issue of The Nation (Part 327):
In today's New York Times, the Clarence Thomas of the paper's regular columnists, William Kristol, tries to give hope to John McCain supporters that they shall overcome the Barack Obama juggernaut. And it's such a pathetic little half-whimper of a rallying cry that it's more or less the rhetorical equivalent of a would-be prison bitch being punched in the face repeatedly by the yard's biggest man-rapist who wants his ass. Yeah, you feel sorry for the bitch as he desperately swings his fists at the air, but you know that in the end, how ever much his nose is busted up and he's tasting blood, that poor fucker's gettin' reamed out.

Kristol, who, it must be pointed out as often as possible, was Alan Keyes' campaign manager in the insane bastard's way unsuccessful Senate race, says there's three things that happened last week that bode ill for Obama: Obama's huge-ass loss in West Virginia, the California Supreme Court's mucho logical decision allowing gays to marry, and President Bush's simpering attack on anyone who would talk to "radicals," like the leaders of Iran. For Kristol, these all add up to possible trouble for Obama, coupled with Kristol's deep research into voting trends, that, believe it or not, Republicans can win the presidency when Democrats make congressional gains.

Yep, the best Kristol can muster is that bad shit for Obama is good for McCain (although some of us think that two out of three of Kristol's demerits are actually pluses for Obama and/or the nation). Or, in other words, according to Bill Kristol, really, truly, the only way McCain wins is by Obama fucking up. How well did that work out for Hillary Clinton?

It's truly, sadly hilarious, how little energy Kristol can muster in attempting to support McCain. You look around at the neocons and the evangelicals, and you realize that they are just lost, bereft, depressed. If the Rude Pundit gave a shit about them, he'd say they need to be on suicide watch. However, indeed, these fuckin' lemmings need to follow George Bush over the goddamn cliff so that we can clear the land of rodent droppings.

So as much as Kristol needs that "This year’s election could see a return to this cold-war model — a strong-on-national-security and supporter-of-middle-American-values Republican presidential candidate prevailing, while at the same time voters choose a Democratic Congress," what he's gonna get is an election that doesn't follow the same script.

And that'll be mostly thanks to Bill Kristol and his fellow future wrist cutters.

End the Week with Good News: V-Gay Day, California:
Goddamn, the Rude Pundit wishes he had been in the Castro in San Francisco last night. The most color-coordinated neighborhood in America must have been an explosion of festive, orgasmic jouissance the likes of which haven't been seen since the U.S. Supreme Court declared that it was totally legal to get blow and rim jobs all over the nation. The streets must have run with man chowder, the lights must have dimmed from all the vibrators being charged up, the convenience stores and pharmacies must have run out of chapstick and condoms, the air must have been filled with beautiful cries and joyous curses, and, this morning, there must be many sore knees, tongues, assholes, cocks, and twats. Yes, yes, to have been there last night, after the kind of V-Gay Day the queer community experienced, would be to have experienced ecstasy in all its fulfilling forms.

Of course, here are battles to come in California and the nation in our ongoing, stupid war over the right of marriage for gays, lesbians, et al. There's the very real possibility of a referendum changing Cali's constitution to outlaw gay marriage. There's the gut-churning likelihood that, like in 2004, idiots will be manipulated by conservatives to think that the potential of icky homosexuals gettin' hitched is a more important issue than the war or the economy. But, for now, for a day or two, let's just celebrate a sane ruling by the California Supreme Court saying, in essence, "What the fuck is wrong with you people? Ain't it obvious? 'Equality' means 'equality,' motherfuckers. Let the gays get married."

Actually, the text of the ruling itself is, for a non-Scalia-scribed judicial decision, quite the little bitch slapping. Check this out:
"[T]he constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage."

You got that, family values-humpin' tool? No? How about here then: the Court said, "Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights."

In other words, this is family values in the real world, not in some backwards ass context where, oodles of evidence to the contrary, only straight couples can somehow raise kids who don't want to, say, shoot up schools or rape dogs or whatever shit taint-licking fundamentalists believe.

Much of the rest of the decision deals with the separate-but-equal designations foisted on gay couples by frightened kitten governments. In another beautiful "shut the fuck up, you 'tards" statement, the Court writes, "[T]he limitation clearly is not necessary to preserve the rights and benefits of marriage currently enjoyed by opposite-sex couples. Extending access to the designation of marriage to same sex couples will not deprive any opposite-sex couple or their children of any of the rights and benefits conferred by the marriage statutes, but simply will make the benefit of the marriage designation available to same-sex couples and their children."

Or, in the real world, stop being such assholes. A cocksucker marrying another cocksucker ain't gonna stop your wife from sucking your cock. And if your daughters want to suck cock, gay marriage won't halt them and they can even marry the guy attached to the sucked cock. And if your sons want to suck cock, well, now, in California, they can even marry the guy attached to the sucked cock. Everyone wins.

And the Rude Pundit is thinking fondly of a pair of lesbians who are friends of his up in Eureka, who were planning their trip to San Francisco when that city briefly allowed gays to marry. The same court put the kibosh on that because, really, rationally, each city in a state making marriage laws would be utter chaos. But now, he knows, this couple, together for almost a decade, will be able to tie the knot in their own backyard. Ahh, paradise for a pair of dykes. Hey, Karen and Stace, the Rude Pundit's already dusting off his suede vest for the occasion.

Drugged Immigrants and Lying to the Public? So?:
At this point in our history, America is like a victim of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, held captive in a pit, softened up, and then murdered for our supple skin so that the batshit killer can prance around and imagine he's the belle of the ball. If you're living the end of your days in a chamber of horrors, then, really, nothing awful is surprising anymore. The gruel you're fed has maggots in it? Yeah, okay. You're blasted with cold water every now and then? Sure, sure, whatever. You're in a goddamn dirt pit, a pseudo-grave, fer fuck's sake. Waiting to be skinned. What the fuck else is gonna be worse?

So it is with the endless streams of revelations of how nightmarish and cynical the Bush administration actually is. The Pentagon was manipulating the media through the placement of ex-military members as "analysts" on the news networks and programs in order to hype the war? Fine, fine. What else ya got? Homeland Security is doping up immigrants for deportation? Really, what would have been shocking is if the Bush administration hadn't been shooting drugs into detainees.

That's how low we've finally sunk. America has reached the point where some reporter for the Times could discover that George W. Bush has personally authorized and encouraged a program where illegal immigrant children have been rounded up from schools and hospitals and work camps, slaughtered by Blackwater mercenaries who were given free rein to kill them in whatever way they thought necessary - knife, gun, machete, spiked-glove beating - and then told to make sure they're dead by fucking the corpses, their bodies brought to rendering factories, where, in front of their parents, the children were boiled until there was nothing left but bones, and their families, under threat of their own murder, corpse rape, and rendering, were forced to grind their children's bones into a powder, which was then mixed with other materials and poured into a mold in order to make spiky dildos that were shipped to military prisons in Iraq where CIA agents would use them to sodomize the asses of bound up "suspected terrorists" with electrodes attached to their nipples, whose screams and weeping were recorded and edited into a several-hour long loop, put on an iPod and sent to Dick Cheney, who would play it when he was alone in his office so he could get an erection to masturbate and cry over pictures of the illegal immigrant children who were killed in the first place, and the news media and most of the country would just shrug and say, "Yeah, like Dick Cheney wouldn't do that."

Of the legion of harms done to this nation by this presidency, one of the worst has been the elimination of our capacity to be appalled. The administration has just raised the bar too high. And that is a loss of innocence, in a sense, like post-Watergate or post-Kent State. When a government demonstrates what depravities it is capable of, and the people are willing to blithely accept them, then we have indeed fallen; we have been traumatized into apathy.

One of the greatest goods an Obama administration could do would be to lead us back to a place where we can feel again, where we can rightly and righteously be angered into action.

The Creepiest and Saddest Things Said Yesterday:
Sure, it's easy to knock President Bush for his "If I play golf, soldiers' families will cry" remark to Politico. That foolishness is easily disposed of with this from a year ago:


Seriously, dude, just fuckin' golf. And don't use the war as an excuse for your weak-ass follow-through.

No, instead, let's look at this truly creepy answer to a question about what he was thinking at Jenna's wedding: "I was thinking this is one beautiful bride, and Henry is a lucky man." The groom's lucky 'cause he gets to bang the beautiful bride? It's awesome that a man can sound envious over the fact that, later that night, another man is gonna place his penis inside the first man's daughter's vagina.

And the saddest thing? This line from Hillary Clinton's "White people love me" speech: "I’m also thinking of Dalton Hatfield, an 11-year-old boy from Kentucky, who sold his bike and sold his video games to raise money to support my campaign."

What would have been charming in, say, January is just pathetically depressing now.

Late Post Today (With a Brief Aside on How the Rude Pundit Was Right About Indiana):
Last week, the Rude Pundit waxed nostalgically about his time in the putrescent herpes sore that is Indiana. Yesterday, the Washington Post backed him up:

"In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, [Danielle] Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into 'a horrible response,' as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.

"'The first person I encountered was like, "I'll never vote for a black person,"' recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20."

(The article also details racist incidents in Pennsylvania. And Muncie's a city of about 70,000, not exactly a "town.")

Back later with more on bugfuckery masking as political discourse.

(Tip o' the hat to rude reader Neil for the link to the Post article.)

Why the U.N. and the U.S. Should Invade Myanmar and Why We Can't (Updated with a consideration for Hurricane Katrina):
What's occurring right now in Myanmar, post-cyclone, is nothing short of the slow-creep beginning of a genocide. When a nation's leaders willfully keep aid provided by humanitarian and relief agencies, governmental and non-governmental, from the desperate, starving, dying people who need it, then that nation's leaders want large numbers of people to die.

Right now, in addition to the complete fucking abomination that is the junta's refusal to allow the wave of aid workers needed for the devastated nation, there are credible allegations that the regime is hoarding high quality food from relief shipments for itself and the military while giving the citizens poor quality or spoiled food. 'Cause, you see, if you run a country with the military, then you better fuckin' feed the military first, or revolution is gonna happen. That's 400,000 members of the military and roughly a couple of million family members. Yeah, the people of the Irrawaddy Delta are fucked.

We're at a likely 100,000 or more dead, at least a million homeless. Bodies are polluting the rivers, bloated corpses bumping into sewage and debris. If there's an uprising by people who are watching their kids starve to death, the well-fed military will take care of that. Otherwise, it's just kick back in the bunkers of Naypyidaw and wait for those bastards who dared to defy the junta to get their fill of cholera. You can goddamn well bet there's gonna be a paucity of monks in Burma come summer.

Over at the Asia Times, Shawn W. Crispin, no rabid interventionist, makes the case for invading Myanmar. Prodding the United Nations to take action beyond a shaking finger and a strongly worded letter, Crispin says, "In the wake of the cyclone, the criminality of the junta's callous policies has taken on new human proportions in full view of the global community. Without a perceived strong UN-led response to the natural disaster, hard new questions will fast arise about the UN's own relevance and ability to manage global calamities."

However, the UN has "limited powers of projection," and Crispin states that the United State would need to lead any armed intervention into Myanmar against the paranoid savages that run the country. And he gives a reacharound to the Bush administration, saying, basically, "You wanna raise the American standing in the world? Kicking the shit out of the junta in Yangon in the name of saving the people would go a long way to rebuilding the broken dam of American foreign policy." What, he asks, as well he should, is the price of doing nothing?

Indeed, if it is possible, this might be a modified use of the shock doctrine to do good - get aid to a population that is being murdered by its own government and getting rid of a thuggish, repressive government in the wake of a massive disaster. Fuckers are already so nutzoid panicked over possible outsider invasion that the leaders are in hiding. Now, we could say, let's make their worst nightmares come true to prevent genocide. (Update: Anne Applebaum at Slate also makes the case for intervention.)

Except...we can't. "We" being the United States. In the wake of Iraq, we have so lost all moral authority that, even in a situation where the murky rivers of fluid morality clarify, we cannot plausibly say that we have the interests of the people of Myanmar at stake (even if one possible outcome is a Myanmar that might open to U.S. interests). Because we used it all up on the Iraq war, all the chits we had. America can no longer make predictions about what might happen after an invasion because we fucked it all up so very badly by even invading Iraq in the first place. We don't know if it'd be a Bosnia or a Somalia. Bush invaded out of trumped-up fear and weakness. Now, when we're at a situation that's potentially an inexorable Sudan-like death march, we are simply floating bereft on that river of morality, hoping someday we can dock.

Also, George Bush has so degraded this nation that we no longer have any leverage with China and Russia, who have gotten the backs of the junta at least in the U.N. and whose approval would be needed for any U.N. effort. In other words, if we piss it off, China fuckin' owns us. And Russia doesn't give a shit about relations with us except in how it can exert more and more power inverse to our degradation. (That's a vast oversimplification of shit, yes, but it's close enough.)

To bottom line it: we can't be trusted. And no one's got our back.

And thank fuckin' god for the China earthquake so we can move on to talking about another country's dead.

How often do we have to stand by and abide madness? In Bush's America, we have reached the point where we have no choice but to smile and wave as parts of the world claw themselves to pieces.

Update: Several people have written to the Rude Pundit with a pithy line like, "Under your logic, someone could have invaded the United States after Katrina." To them, the Rude Pundit would say, "Look at the fuckin' first sentence up there." This is about a potential genocide. The post-Katrina disaster was a horrible clusterfuck of incompetence and neglect, covered in a secret sauce of willful evil. As awful as that was (and is), we're on a different scale here of death and misery, with a government that can't even be shamed by its own people into pretending it's acting.

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Freebase Fondant While Downing a Bottle of Moet and Chandon:


In as much as these things have meaning, the altar for Jenna Bush and Henry Hager's wedding looks an awful lot like a grave. Laura, as ever, looks like the Xanax and scotch have kicked in.

And sister Barbara is the stoned sorority girl trying hard at the Greeks' nymph fest to look fuckable for the Delt that's dressed as Perseus.

Late Post Today (With a Brief Insight Into Possible Outsourcing):
Every once in a while, it's fun to see what Google searches get people to the Rude Pundit. Sometimes, amid the depressing range of kiddie porn people are looking for, you get something that gives a little window on our world.

Hence, this search: how to overcome sounding rude on calls. From Bangalore, India. Once may presume that the googler didn't really get good advice from this blog. Or customer service at AT&T may start sounding a little more piquant.

More soon.

In Brief: Hugh Hewitt to Barack Obama: You Better Shut Your Bitch Up:
Hugh Hewitt, the radio host and writer, and a man who looks like he's got a reservation at the Hostel to slice up Asian chicks with a razor and jack off on the wounds, in his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "an illogical series of brainless beliefs constantly repeated in a different order, a Phillip Glass symphony of fucktardery, if you will"), asserts that Barack Obama's real problem winning the general election won't be Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Oh, no.

He extensively quotes a speech by Michelle Obama, the candidate's wife, that she gave last Friday in North Carolina, prefacing it with: "This is not a speech from the mainstream of American politics. It is a radical critique of the country." And then he offers as evidence of this "radical critique" such Che Guevara-like quotes as:

"[F]olks are struggling like never before, working harder than ever, believing that their hard work will lead to some reward, some payoff. But what they find is that they get there and the bar has changed, things are different, wasn’t enough. So you have to work even harder."

And: "Let me tell you, single parents love their kids, too. But it is almost impossible to raise a family of any size on a single salary. So now you’ve got single parents who have to double and triple shift, taking on two, three jobs, working all the time, and feeling like they’re failing because that bar is moving, because how on Earth are you going to work as hard as you need to to pay the bills and be at parent/teacher conferences, and sit down and do homework when a kid has trouble?"

Yes, because Michelle Obama speaks about working class people, who, yes, are most often poor people, and speaks about them as if they actually contemplate their struggles and says that her husband might just be able to show that the nation gives a shit about them, she is "radical."

Hewitt conveniently posts on his blog the entire speech, which features such Emma Goldman-worthy bomb tosses like, "[T]he beauty of this country is that most Americans are like my father. That’s what traveling around this year has taught me, and I wish every American could do it, going into somebody else’s neighborhood, sit down in somebody else’s kitchen, share your stories and your fears, and cry a little bit, and you realize that we do share the same values. We are hoping for the same things."

That line didn't make the cut into Hewitt's column. If Michelle Obama's desire for people to be treated fairly and equally is what passes for "radical" these days, then our political discourse has shifted so far rightward that it must be "moderate" to believe that the poor shouldn't be rounded up and forced into prison camps to be raped repeatedly and made to pick the crops.