Updated: Republicans Hate the Troops

Republicans, The Military

Or else why would they have voted against Jim Webb’s “proposed amendment forcing the Pentagon to give troops more time off between deployments”? Webb comes from a military family; he’s a Vietnam veteran, a father to a son fighting in Iraq and son to a World War II warrior.

Chief among the objectors was “Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has made winning in Iraq the focus of his bid for the presidency.”

Not that he’s any less hypocritical than the Republicans, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is quite right to say that “most of my Republican colleagues are much more concerned about protecting their president than protecting our troops.”

Update: As I understand it, the idea is a simple one: to allow soldiers worn-out by lengthy deployments sufficient time to recover—allow them at least to rest up. That’s why I say Republican puling about loving the troops is nothing but posturing. They won’t even allow the poor sods to get a break from the Iraqi inferno.

Quotations

IlanaMercer.com, Political Philosophy, The Zeitgeist

The quotations on IlanaMercer.com are now organized under topics. If you find a quote you like (in my work), which hasn’t been included in the hundreds of quotations, let me know. I am updating them as we speak, and am including some fun quips on the Vagina Monologues, under “Feminism & Feminization,” and others under “Homosexuality & Sexuality.”

Rudy’s Repulsiveness

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Politics, Republicans

About Giuliani, Clyde Haberman of the New York Times writes this:

“Non-New Yorkers got a taste of it the other day when Mr. Giuliani interrupted his speech — a very important speech — to the National Rifle Association in Washington. His cellphone rang. It was his wife, Judith. Smack in the middle of his talk, he whipped out the phone.

‘Hello, dear,’ he said in a syrupy voice. ‘I’m talking to the members of the N.R.A. right now. Would you like to say hello?’ He listened, and laughed. ‘I love you, and I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m finished, O.K.?’ he said. He listened a bit more. ‘O.K., have a safe trip. Bye-bye. Talk to you later, dear. I love you.’

Campaign aides said it was a spontaneous moment, with Mrs. Giuliani calling just before she boarded a plane.

Granted, lots of people call loved ones before a flight. But a presidential candidate doesn’t shut off his phone, and instead takes a call, in the middle of a major speech? The episode was so bizarrely cutesy-poo that more than a few people in the audience went, Eeeww! Nor was it an isolated incident; the same thing happened in Florida three months ago.

The cellphone routine was not Mr. Giuliani’s sole icky moment last week.

While rattling the cup in London, he told reporters that he was ‘probably one of the four or five best-known Americans in the world.’ Oh? And who, someone asked, also makes that rarefied list? ‘Bill Clinton, Hillary,’ he replied before aides hustled him away.

Offhand, we can think of any number of Americans who might be more famous worldwide. President Bush, anyone? How about Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey?

The real revelation was Mr. Giuliani’s sense of his own importance. It was on display again in his N.R.A. speech. Freshly returned from London, he told the audience, ‘It’s nice to be here in England.’ Then, seeing an American flag, he said, ‘Ah, America.’
He meant it as a joke about the mental scrambling that the rigors of campaigning can cause. But the underlying assumption was that people were so focused on him that they knew his travel schedule by heart. Many in the audience didn’t get it…

It kicked in hard several times with the mayor’s cross-dressing skits, including one time when he squealed in delight as Donald Trump nuzzled his fake breasts. It turned up in 1999 when he joked to a black audience, of all groups, about the hard time he had getting a New York taxi to stop for him.
It emerged when he told reporters that he was leaving his wife — his second wife — before he bothered to tell her. It resurfaced a few months ago when wife No. 3 allowed that this was her third marriage and not her second, as she had let everyone believe for years.”

Don’t forget how Giuliani Nifonged great business men like Michael Milken.

Update #V: Beware the Police

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Rights, The State

Evidence is mounting for the increasing brutality of the police, especially your local “friendly” state troopers.

Read and watch how this journalism student is carted away and tasered for the offense of questioning John Kerry persistently. Kerry the coward didn’t intervene. Were a Republican present, I suspect the outcome would have been the same. Worse: the students sat there like golems as Meyer was assaulted. What obedient little lap dogs. Whatever one thinks of the 1960s, that generation would have started a riot, then and there. Here’s the account:

“Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President George W. Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.
… Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting. As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student’s ‘very important question,’ Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, ‘Don’t Tase me, bro,’ just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, ‘What did I do?’”

There have been many other incidents, the last of a young man, Brett Darrow, who had the good sense to mount a dashboard camera in his car and film an officer, Sgt. Kuehnlein, threatening to fabricate charges against him. The poor lad was terrorized, but showed remarkable composure.

Here Radley Balko exposes more of the ubiquitous violations perpetrated by our protectors—and worse: the laws that help police conceal crimes against those they swore to protect.

Update # I: The fascists on cable all, left and right, with no exception, agreed with glee that for the police to assault this manifestly non-violent protestor, sans provocation, was A-Okay. It would be poetic justice if the son or daughter of one of the cable capos was tasered and thrown in jail overnight for speaking loudly and waving his or her arms in the air during a debate. You’re a slave if you rationalize this incident. Even if, as one reader claimed, this was a set up (whatever that means), isn’t it obvious that a non-aggressor, who has hurt nobody should never be assaulted, hurt, and incarcerated, not in a free country. Even if he was being provocative.

Balko makes the same point with respect to Brett Darrow: “I’ve heard people make the argument that this kid’s habit of baiting cops into abuse somehow diminishes the excesses he’s captured on tape. I don’t agree at all. His ‘baiting’ thus far has consisted of asserting his rights. Perhaps not as politely as he should, but being impolite isn’t and shouldn’t be a crime. Neither is parking in a commuter lot, or asking why you’ve been pulled over when you haven’t broken any laws.”
America isn’t free.
I do want to give Dick Morris, of all people, credit for showing the utmost revulsion at the brutality of the cops. I have never seen the smarmy smooth Morris grow as livid as he did earlier today on Hannity and Colmes, who both giggled about the incident. Morris called it fascism. A Taser, moreover, is not without its dangers. It can cause permanent heart-muscle damage and even kill. Tasering Meyer was so clearly sadistic, unnecessary, and reckless. It’s obvious that the cops use the Taser very flippantly.

Update # II: Tasers do kill. Here, the cowards are incapable of controlling a wheelchair-bound woman, so they kill her. Ann Coulter once wrote a fine column about the increased deaths associated with women in the police force. Women, being weaker and generally more fearful than men, tend to use lethal force more frequently. The sadist cop who used her Taser for 160 seconds on the victim was female.

Update # III: Some of the responses to the Comments Section, unpublished, alarmed me, in their inability to grasp that this is not about an annoying kid, who might have been playing to the cameras. Rather, this concerns the proper role of law enforcement in a free society. Free people grasp that assaulting a person who has not aggressed against a soul is unconscionable and authoritarian. As I say, if you can’t recognize that, you are a slave—or perhaps you haven’t internalized the fact that you could just as well be on the receiving side of such brutality.

To those who accused me of generalizing from a few isolated incidents, I suggest you bring yourselves up to speed, fast. Under the auspices of the Drug War, our militarized feds conduct daily “no-knock” raids, barge into homes, confiscate property, and rob people of their liberty—sometimes of their lives.

The Tyranny of Good Intentions by Paul Craig Roberts is highly recommended as well. As I wrote in “Remember Reno”:

“Back in the day, the law was intended as a bulwark against government abuses. It has now become an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the ‘greater good’—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law has been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights.
Add the aggravating circumstances of a highly militarized federal law enforcement that shares the judiciary’s contempt for the Rights of Englishmen, and is abetted by a public dimmed by statist schools and media—and one has a recipe for disaster.”
I’ll leave you with another startling visual from rural America of a man being violated by police for no reason other than that THEY CAN.

Update # IV: More evidence that “‘To Protect and Serve’ often translates into harass and control”:
• Salty Burger Lands McDonald’s Employee in Jail
• The Case of Monica Montoya

Update # V: I confess that I’ve become quite fearful of the liberties these government goons seem to take—the brazen “I’m your boss, you serf, free to do with your body as I please” attitude. When I venture down the road to the gym, for example, I always make sure I don’t forget my driver’s license. It’s hard not to speed in this torqued-up devil, but I do my best.
It’s quite uncanny how, no matter how hard free men and women have illustrated what the issue here is, slaves of the state on this blog have demonstrated an inability to grasp what liberty means. Freedom is the unassailable right to raise your voice, flail your arms—even make a harmless nuisance of yourself during a debate; fascism is when those acts could get you assaulted, injured, even killed. That’s all there is to it! The cops who’ve written in supporting the vile conduct of their colleagues enforce my fears.
Incidentally, when Sean and I went down to our local police station to get our carry-concealed licenses, the cop spat bitterly: “Yes, you ex-South Africans like your guns.” I was naïve then, imagining, somehow, that he’d be happy we were proponents and practitioners of the magnificent 2nd Amendment.