Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!

I just now saw this.  I must be in an especially irresponsible mood -- more so than usual, even -- and I find I must pass it along.  Via James Bovard, here's Tom Blanton's "Holly Gonna Whup Paula's Ass."

OK, I'll straighten up now.

Today's Scripture Lesson

This is America, where we're all very big on the Ten Commandments, right?  (Especially when they're posted in the government schools or the post office or some such place ... not so much, I think, when engraved on the heart.  But never mind that for now.)  Let's look at two consecutive verses: Exodus 20:13 and 14:

You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.

I'm thinking right now of our just-resigned CIA director, General David Petraeus, the man with the exquisitely Roman-sounding name.  (Why couldn't his parents have chosen "Caesar" as his first name?)  Transgressing Exodus 20:13 made him a household name, a great military hero.  Transgressing Exodus 20:14, on the other hand, is a scandal that makes him unfit for refined company.

Hmmmmm.

Is this a great country, or what?

Hey, Winners ...

... please give a little thought to a powerful post from Chris Floyd.  An excerpt:

To all those now hailing the re-election of Barack Obama as a triumph of decent, humane, liberal values over the oozing-postule perfidy of the Republicans, a simple question:

Is this child dead enough for you?



This little boy was named Naeemullah. He was in his house -- maybe playing, maybe sleeping, maybe having a meal -- when an American drone missile was fired into the residential area where he lived and blew up the house next door.

As we all know, these drone missiles are, like the president who wields them, super-smart, a triumph of technology and technocratic expertise. We know, for the president and his aides have repeatedly told us, that these weapons -- launched only after careful consultation of the just-war strictures of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas -- strike nothing but their intended targets and kill no one but "bad guys." Indeed, the president's top aides have testified under oath that not a single innocent person has been among the thousands of Pakistani civilians -- that is, civilians of a sovereign nation that is not at war with the United States -- who have been killed by the drone missile campaign of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Yet somehow, by some miracle, the missile that roared into the residential area where Naeemullah lived did not confine itself neatly to the house it struck. Somehow, inexplicably, the hunk of metal and wire and computer processors failed -- in this one instance -- to look into the souls of all the people in the village and ascertain, by magic, which ones were "bad guys" and then kill only them. Somehow -- perhaps the missile had been infected with Romney cooties? -- this supercharged hunk of high explosives simply, well, exploded with tremendous destructive power when it struck the residential area, blowing the neighborhood to smithereens.

As Wired reports, shrapnel and debris went flying through the walls of Naeemullah's house and ripped through his small body. When the attack was over -- when the buzzing drone sent with Augustinian wisdom by the Peace Laureate was no longer lurking over the village, shadowing the lives of every defenseless inhabitant with the terrorist threat of imminent death, Naeemullah was taken to the hospital in a nearby town.

This is where the picture of above was taken by Noor Behram, a resident of North Waziristan who has been chronicling the effects of the Peace Laureate's drone war.  When the picture was taken, Naeemullah was dying. He died an hour later.

He died.

Is he dead enough for you?

Dead enough not to disturb your victory dance in any way? Dead enough not to trouble the inauguration parties yet to come? Dead enough not to diminish, even a little bit, your exultant glee at the fact that this great man, a figure of integrity, decency, honor and compassion, will be able to continue his noble leadership of the best nation in the history of the world?

A long excerpt, I know, but it's not a short post.  And quite difficult to find a place to "cut off" when excerpting.  Please read the whole thing.

Not Every Post Needs a Title

And this post won't get one, either.

Just wanted to pass along a nice image, and acknowledge Jeff Berwick, who published it at LewRockwell.com.

The Big, Colorful Show

We all have our guilty pastimes, I suppose.  I certainly have mine.  One of them is the Schadenfreude I get from viewing train wrecks like this one ... purely for the comment threads (I wouldn't characterize the blogmistress's work product as a "train wreck" by any means -- she's quite a good writer).  But those comment threads!  Unlike me, she has a large audience, and it's composed almost exclusively of -- well, I was going to write "doctrinaire lefties," but that's not really true.  These folks are partisans of the Democratic Party, which certainly doesn't qualify as "the left."  When the Barackster practices the drone warfare and the extrajudicial assassinations, that's jake with them.  When he demonstrates his servant status relative to our corporate masters, well, that just isn't noticed.  Nor is it just the current president; they'll issue the same free pass to any halfway presentable and successful Donk.

So, I looked in there today, figuring (after yesterday's orgy of voting) that I'd be treated to some crude triumphalism.  I was not disappointed.  Man, is everything wonderful today!  It's an all-blue country, for sure.  Fortunately for the commenters, the House of Representatives remains nominally in evil GOP hands.  As the Empire continues its slow-motion collapse, then, it won't be difficult to lay the blame on those red-tinged miscreants.

Certainly, the same thing happens in the scarlet wing of the War Party; if I'm not mistaken, there was a short period during the Dubya regime in which both White House and Congress were nominally red.  And I'm sure there was plenty of elephant hubris to be seen online.  Probably because I used to self-describe as a "conservative," I seem to get more pleasure from viewing blue excess.  As I say, a guilty pastime.

I just wish it were possible to do the following simple experiment.  Get some volunteer political partisans, red and blue: a statistically-significant sample of each sort.  Get them to agree to live in an isolation dome for, let's say, a decade.  No newspapers, no broadcasting, no internet goes into the dome, except through the busy hands of the experimenters.  The experimenters would provide to the subjects a daily Dome Newspaper, which would contain all the news, complete and truthful, but with the names and formal political affiliations redacted:  replaced with "person A" and "person B," affiliated with ... what shall we call the parties?  Maybe the Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples?  (I started to write "Crips and Bloods," but I believe those two already have blue and red associations.  An interesting thought, that!)  Anyway, after the ten years' experimental period was up, ask each volunteer to say who was who, and what party was in power when.  Unless I'm greatly mistaken, they would be correct at no better a rate than would result from random guessing.

Folks, there's only one party.  And it keeps you fascinated and diverted by this sock-puppet show it puts on, continually: a blue sock on one hand, a red one on the other.  And that's the way it's a-gonna stay.

You Attend Your Church, and ...

... I'll attend mine.

A couple of days ago, I spent the morning with a congregation of the like-minded in order to worship, together, the Lord Jesus.

Today, I've already been asked several times whether I've attended the High Holy Day of the Cult of Democracy.  No, I say, I don't do that, emailing my link to a couple of folks.  Diversity's a good thing, isn't it?  Isn't that what we're so often told?  I think, in many cases, the tellers don't really believe it.  That, or their idea of "diversity" differs pretty sharply from mine.

Still, I'm sure I'll turn on the Magic Talking Satan Box tonight and entertain myself with the results.  Just because I don't vote doesn't mean I can't root.  And, I tell you, I'm really rooting for Obamney.  Man, if that chowderhead Rombama wins, we're in a whole lotta trouble, fer sure!  And if you're not sure which one's Obamney, and which is Rombama, well ... welcome to the club.