Liberal Dixie

truthiness to power

2006-05-01T12:28:00.000-04:00

http://thankyoustephencolbert.org/wordpress

Thank the man who made the Cowboy-in-Chief squirm Friday night: Stephen Colbert. MASTERFUL!

not ready to make nice

2006-04-20T12:09:00.000-04:00

Everyone should get their hands on the Dixie Chicks' new album. It's so refreshing when liberals actually take a stand. The new song, "Not Ready to Make Nice," is a head-on, scathing indictment of all the wingnuts who flipped out on them for exercising that all-American right to free speech. Good for them!

See, this is the strategy we should take. The wingnuts have been screaming all manner of insanities from the rooftops for years now because they're emboldened by the success of their Crime and Lies Syndicate. We've almost been lulled into a stupor by this, and it's pathetic.

In what universe should they get away with impugning the patriotism of Max Cleland, a Vietnam-vet TRIPLE AMPUTEE? But they did.

How on Earth did the Swift Boat people ever get any kind of credence at all?

How can Michelle Malkin say that because UC-Santa Cruz doesn't want to be REQUIRED to allow military recruiters on its campus that the whole university hates our troops, and have no one fighting back?

These people are fighting for a one-party state. We can't let that happen. It's hard enough getting through the day as it is. Get a spine. Stop making nice. Get out there and FIGHT.

standard-bearing

2006-04-19T12:39:00.000-04:00

Today's fresh hell is this little gem by our old pal Michael Savage. This sort of thing is just too despicable to describe in words. My first instinct is to give him back exactly what he spews, but then I'm just as much the devil as he is. The second thought is to get him kicked off the air, so he can't infect anyone else with his poison. But that doesn't work either.

Far be it for me to take lessons from South Park, but the Cartoon Wars episodes were right. Free speech has to cover everyone, or no one. The sort of trash Savage spews comes dangerously close to inciting riot and threatening bodily harm to people, which is illegal (even though nobody's going after Michelle Malkin, that paragon of integrity, ha ha). But if we boot him off the air, they have ammo against us, not to mention that we become hypocrites. Sigh.

Being a liberal is a lot of work; we're the ones who have to uphold the values that make America great, and all we get is grief for it. But if we didn't do it, we'd have NOTHING left to hold onto. It's the cross we bear, I guess...

the other n-word

2006-04-17T10:55:00.000-04:00

Can we all agree that the Holocaust was so terrible and unthinkably evil that we should basically never bring it up again except when it's really warranted? There's an alarming trend (that sadly we can't claim immunity from; thanks, Harry Reid!!!) to evoke the H-word or the OTHER N-word whenever it's convenient to scare the bejeebies out of people and make them go along with whatever the politician wants to do. There's a fantastic article on Crooks and Liars today about this.

It's extremely infuriating that people feel the need to resurrect evil when it fits a certain political need while ignoring or trivializing the real thing in our time. How many hundreds of thousands of people are dead in Darfur? Most Americans think Darfur is a pop band from the 80s. The North Koreans have the bomb already, and they're run by a crazy Elvis-wannabe movie freak. We have picked a giant scab in the Middle East and we're all surprised that people are angry at us. I'm so sick of this. The Holocaust is not something that should be taken lightly, nor should it be used for furtherance of political ideology. Six million people died. That's no joke.

But who am I kidding? These are the same people who drag 9/11 out and wave it around to scare the country into voting for them. How can I expect them to honor the memory of dead Europeans? They don't even honor the dead of 9/11, or dead soldiers, or certainly not dead Iraqi civilians. Sigh. November 7, 2006 - it's coming, and we'd BETTER TCB that day...

sweet home... DC?

2006-04-13T14:15:00.000-04:00

There's a great diary over at Daily Kos today that almost made me cry. Liberals should DEFINITELY vacation in DC more often! I live here, and so many of the tourists are faux-patriotic right-wing fatheads from Middle America who have no sense. They're EVERYWHERE: blocking up traffic, waddling around downtown with their packs of children, asking silly questions and spouting off nonsense and right-wing agitprop.

If anyone's ever seen the movie "My Fellow Americans," so many of the tourists are like the country family in the middle of the movie, who claim to be these great patriots but don't know jack about the country they live in. You should have a sense of what you're looking at when you get here, and most of them don't. (Plus, they block the doors of the Metro - our subway - during rush hour and won't move when my poor husband's trying to go to work.)

I flew home last night from a business trip, and we came in over the Potomac. I happened to be on the side of the plane that faced DC, and I'll tell you, it's majestic when you look at how beautiful our capital is from the air. You can see all the monuments all lit up, and it's really a testament to the great thinkers the diarist mentioned in the Kos post. It made me remember why I'm a liberal in the first place - pride in our wonderful country and its high ideals. So please come to DC and see this stuff for yourself; we're always glad to have you!

grief for something larger than ourselves

2006-04-10T11:23:00.000-04:00

Today on Daily Kos, I read this diary entry. Seems to me, sadly, that he's right. We are coming perilously close to the complete death of the American dream, and what a tragic loss that would be. Remember when we were kids? For me, that wasn't really that long ago. I was in elementary school during the thick of the Reagan-Bush 41 years, the "ketchup is a vegetable" time, and even then, there was still a sense of possibility for everyone in my second-grade classroom. Today, I think it's dishonest and cruel to set kids up with the "You can be anything you want to be!" line.

There's precious little middle class left. Jobs that people could do with little formal training are pretty much gone, replaced by technology or shipped off to Bangalore. The minimum wage hasn't gone up since the first days of Clinton. There seems to be a concerted effort, between outsourcing and this asinine "guest workers" program, to create two Americas: the rich, and the underclass. How antithetical to everything we stand for as a country!

My husband and I are in our 20s, and we've followed every rule: work hard, go to school, be kind and conscientious. But that just doesn't cut it in BushCorp America, so we have to reconsider our options. I've decided to become a lawyer, not only for the interest in the field, but because I need to find a career that pays large amounts of money to be able to afford housing and guarantee my future. There's no telling where outsourcing could take the white-collar field, now that the blue-collar occupations have pretty much been dismantled in America. It's a grand tragedy writ large all over this country. The Republican Crime & Lies Syndicate is killing our nation's spirit, one tax cut for the wealthy at a time. I grieve for the nation I was raised in, the one I pledged allegiance to every morning of my childhood. Where I live doesn't resemble that place at all.

oh, jesse

2006-04-08T11:47:00.000-04:00

We are sitting around with our new cable box, playing with the digital video recorder, and we found Jesse Jackson buried on channel, like, 3,658 talking about God only knows what. Maybe this is heresy, but I'm to the point with Rev. Jackson where I'd like him to fade into history. He's done a lot for our side over the years, and his work with the civil rights movement is truly inspiring. But I'm just not sure how he fits into the modern discussion. When I heard his quotes on the whole Barry Bonds and the syringe thing in San Diego this week, it made me sad, and here's why.

Barry Bonds' treatment at his hated rivals' ball park is not an issue that warrants the ire of people fighting for civil rights. There are so many real injustices in this world, like people who want to build a wall around our country, that it's pointless to waste our energy on stuff like this. This is the central failing of the Jesse Jackson of the 21st century. He still has flashes of brilliance, too, like when he was on the Colbert Report speaking so eloquently about the destruction of my beloved New Orleans and the apathy shown to its plight. But so often, he's just wasting good energy. That's a really sad postscript on a great career, too.

sadly, yes...

2006-04-07T13:05:00.000-04:00

If there's one thing I hate more than anything else on this earth, it's a sanctimonious scold. You know the type:

Tom DeLay

Sam Brownback

Jerry Falwell...

...and then there's this craziness on Sadly, No from a couple of days ago, with a continuation here.

It always pains me to take on one of my own, but this sort of crap just isn't going to cut it. For God's sake, this is something out of Ann Coulter's fantasies. If you're going to be against the right wing repression machine telling you what to think and say, you can't scream at us for a harmless joke that didn't even mean what you thought it meant. This woman has way too much anger and time on her hands, as I pointed out in the INSANELY long comment list. If something this small would set her off, I can't imagine how she gets through a day.

Racism sucks. Sexism is a horrific thing. But the phrase "D-Ho's Crack Den" isn't hurting anyone. It's a waste of rage to go off on something like this. Channel that furor into something CONSTRUCTIVE, like the immigration circus, the South Dakota abortion ban, or some other cause you love. If we keep cutting each other down for supposed transgressions, we will NEVER GET ANYWHERE AS A MOVEMENT. Progressives need a sense of humor. Period.

update...

2006-04-07T10:56:00.000-04:00

More on the whole insulting a guy's sick kid thing from Crooks and Liars:

Curt Weldon's Messiah
Corrected: Swing State Project has the story.

No wonder he had the nerve to attack Joe Sestak's four-year-old, cancer-stricken daughter.

Chris Bowers: "After repeatedly denying it ever happened, Curt Weldon finally admitted that he attended, spoke and organized an event that declared Sun Myung Moon to be "humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."

AAGH! What is it with righties and the Unification Church? You know, the mass wedding people? First the Washington Times, now this.

my new hero: Harry Taylor

2006-04-07T09:51:00.000-04:00

Rachel Maddow had a GREAT clip for me this morning! This man, Harry Taylor, got up at a Bush rally in North Carolina, which had up until this point been a total love-fest, and told him in no uncertain terms exactly what he thought:

"While I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water," real estate broker Harry Taylor told Bush at a town hall meeting. "I have never felt more ashamed of nor more frightened by my leadership in Washington." [he continued,] "I feel like, despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration," he told Bush. "And I would hope, from time to time, that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself." - Houston Chronicle

[ROARING APPLAUSE FROM ME]

Thank you, Harry Taylor! You had the guts to say what everyone's thinking. And not only did he get that eloquent and spot-on criticism out without getting arrested, he even did it POLITELY!

"I really appreciate the courtesy of allowing me to speak what I'm saying to you right now," Taylor said near the conclusion of his reprimand. "That is part of what this country's about."

That's what I love about Southern liberals: that combination of gentility and intelligence. That was PERFECT! Usually, the face of dissent is something that can easily be written off as treasonous or, in the words of Michelle Malkin, the ranting of moonbats. Here's a grown man with a real job, politely and firmly telling the man who runs the greatest country on earth how America is being driven into the ground with reckless abandon by BushCorp and his cronies. Chew on that, righties!

leave his kids alone, congressman

2006-04-05T22:38:00.000-04:00

You know, just when you think people can't go any lower, Curt Weldon has the UNMITIGATED TEMERITY to question his Democratic opponent's choices when it comes to treating his daughter's malignant brain tumor. Dear God, is political power that important to these people? Even in the all-out War Against Bill Clinton, people got MAD when Limbaugh or whoever called teenage Chelsea "the White House dog." There used to be a certain level beneath which you didn't sink in politics, and people's kids were off-limits. Then came the Bush-Corp Plutocracy, and suddenly all manner of hideous things became not only OK, but necessary.

You know why? They know they can't beat us on IDEAS. They can't hold a candle to us on ideas. We speak the truth, and we actually think about - gasp! - the CONSEQUENCES of our actions. So what do you do when you're a power-hungry Republican desperate to get your grubby little hands on a House seat, but there's a good candidate with rock-solid ideas in your way? You lie, lie, lie. Compare him to Osama bin Laden. Make her look like a screaming radical. Scare the holy tar out of the electorate with threats of terrorist attacks that only you can hold back or assaults on everything they hold dear at the hands of big bad gay people. It's sad, it's weak, it's anti-American in every way...

...and yet somehow, it keeps WORKING. We need to get wise and STOP LETTING THEM BULLY US SO BADLY! Dems, we need a collective spine. FIGHT BACK! The very nation we love is at stake. Stop Curt Weldon from dragging his opponent's sick kid through the mud. DON'T LET THEM WIN!

howdy!

2006-04-05T13:07:00.000-04:00

I don't know about y'all, but I am sick and tired of being told what I believe as a Southerner, or what I should believe as an American. The Republican Crime and Lies Syndicate has bullied us and pushed us around for the last time. I am FIGHTING mad, and I refuse to carry on like an abused wife, afraid to speak up to the fear-mongering sleazeballs dragging the spirit of America through the mud. So here I am on the blogosphere, adding my name to the growing list of people tired of living in a plutocracy. Let's wake up, y'all; the time to strike is now! Let's make 2006 the year we say ENOUGH. Welcome to my little corner of the world. In Liberal Dixie-land I'll take my stand, and we'll all live and die in a free and just America once more. Join me!