Jesus H. Christ: Unbelievable!

So I’m staring at my blank LCD screen, desperately hoping that some topic for today’s blog will magically manifest itself.  I do my usual morning exercise of scanning the CNN page and Huffington Post, clicking on articles of potential interest, reading the appropriate content, and bookmarking sites for possible inclusion in a later essay.  Nothing is piquing my interest and I’m not finding any connections or conclusions that anyone else may have missed.  And then the lightbulb appeared over my head…

I noted a piece about five stories down on the HuffPo page:

Syria Airstrikes Kill 553, Including 32 Civilians, During Monthlong Offensive Against ISIS: Monitor

Pretty much business as usual.  A couple of possible blog themes occur to me.: 1- Just as has been the case for almost a decade and half, we’re at war halfway around the world, and it’s something that barely even enters our daily consciousness.  2-The fact that US and “coalition” bombs incidentally took the lives of 32 civilians, including women and children, is treated as nothing more than an incidental finding, like a little arthritis at the knee in an x-ray of a broken leg.  Those civilians died in a variety of ghastly and painful ways, including dismemberment and disembowelment,  but are just collateral damage.  We’ll save our outrage for the next video of ISIS beheading a hostage.

Then I happened upon this one, referencing a story that’s actually about a week old:

Bill Maher 1, Ben Affleck 0

Affleck got into a heated debate with Maher on his weekly HBO show.  Basically, Maher contends that we need to stop being so politically correct about Islam and recognize it for what it truly is, a religion that encourages and applauds violence, debases women, ignores basic human rights, and whose most basic tenet is the killing of all non-believers.  Affleck, a liberal just like Maher (and me, for that matter) argues that condemning a whole religion for the actions of a relatively small fringe fanatic minority constitutes racism, intolerance and Islamophobia.

While we’re considering that fanatical fringe, let’s look at this:

Video Appears To Show Islamic State Militants Stoning A Woman To Death

If those charming fellows in ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Taliban had their way, stories like this wouldn’t even warrant two paragraphs on page 3. They’d be as common as the half page-chronicles of the DUI arrests that appear as regularly as clockwork every Monday morning after a college weekend in our local newspaper.  We’d have stonings for adultery, stonings for rape (mainly stonings of the victim), executions for homosexuality, even executions for sodomy (that’s right, kids…suck a dick and the next thing you may be sucking is cyanide gas).  That’s the way Sharia law is, and I’d wager that Bill Maher would argue that Sharia law is the rule, rather than the exception in Muslim theology.

Meanwhile, back here in the good old USA:

Conservatives Want America to be a “Christian Nation”

Whether it’s Rick Perry or John McCain or Rick Santorum or one of their talking heads, like Dinesh D’Souza, the GOP is pretty much unanimous in its contention that everything here at home, from education to drugs to wages to immigration, would be just fine if we acknowledged our status as a “Christian Nation”, made our laws based on New Testament gospel, and in general, got ourselves “right with Jesus”.

Then, like a breath of fresh air after being locked in a windowless basement, I just happened upon a little link way at the bottom of a page of something completely unrelated:

No Meek Messiah: Michael Paulkovich 

Paulkovich wrote an extensively researched treatise after reviewing the writings of 126 prominent historians in the first few centuries of the first millennium, and noted that not one of them made even a passing reference to Jesus or Jesus Christ or a messiah of any kind…which would be akin to a modern historian writing a summary of the twentieth century and never mentioning Adolph Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, or JFK.  Paulkovich’s conclusion is that Jesus Christ not only was not the son of god or the messiah, but that he never even existed at all, that he is a complete fiction comprised of whole cloth.  It’s as reasonable a theory as any you’ll hear from the roughly ten trillion words expended on the life and times and significance of JC in the last two thousand years and change.

I have a point here.  In the course of recorded history, there have been untold wars and war crimes and pogroms and inquisitions and tortures and deprivations and burnings at the stake and stonings and rapes and beheadings…all in the name of one god or another…all fought and justified over the seemingly universal contention that “my god is bigger than your god”…and all of it is complete utter undiluted nonsense.  No god has ever written a single word or sentence on a single page.  Every utterance in the Bible and the Koran and every other sacred religious tome is actually no different than any given passage in “50 Shades of Grey”…they were all written by a human being and the highest purpose to which they aspired was to…SELL MORE BOOKS.

As long as human beings keep looking to invisible myths in the sky for guidance, those headlines about bombings and wars and atrocities of all kinds are unlikely to change.  Amen.

BW

New Day, Same Worries

I’m not sure if I should be concerned.  All I wrote yesterday was a couple of sentences that didn’t even begin to describe my gastrointestinal distress, and I had more page views than on Friday, when I spent a couple of hours trying to somehow wring some meaning or at least entertainment value out of the week’s celebrity gossip.  Maybe I should hint at colonic catastrophe more often.  Perhaps that’s my niche market.  I could do worse.  Hell, Eve Ensler made a name for herself with talking vaginas (which would be the best ventriloquism act in Vegas if someone hasn’t already done it) and Jeanie Linders made it to Broadway singing and dancing through the joys of menopause.  So I could just as well score big with the “Diarrhea Digest”…maybe corner the whole Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis market.  Just thinking out loud here.

I often find myself writing columns in my head as I’m doing something else, pretty much my only version of multi-tasking.  I was doing that this morning as I was sitting on the recumbent bike at the Y, listening to my “Caribbean Queen” channel on Pandora and watching Ben Affleck being interviewed on the CBS Morning News.  That column kept hitting a roadblock in my head.  Maybe it’s just that I can’t make myself care about why Ben Affleck should or shouldn’t be Batman…since Affleck is an actor and Batman doesn’t exist…and if he did, he’d be Adam West (same bat-time, same bat-channel).  Meanwhile, there were half a dozen issues in the morning news that seemed like reasonable column-fodder, but none stand out enough to get their own 600-800 word treatment.  Let’s just hit the high (or mostly “low”) points:

Does someone in the Secret Service want the president dead?:

It sure seems like a good conspiracy theory, and the evidence is piling up.  Back when I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was “The Wild Wild West”.  Robert Conrad played James West, a secret service agent with the 1870’s version of James Bond’s array of gadgets and the same Bondian inability to die even when the bad guy held a gun to his head while suspended over a pool of hungry piranhas.  I’m guessing James West could single-handedly have stopped one lunatic with a knife from jumping the White House fence, dashing across 168 feet of clear, perfectly manicured Kentucky blue grass, and getting all the way to the East Room, all while a couple dozen guys with M-16’s, sniper rifles, tasers, motion detectors, heat detectors, radar, attack dogs, and Stinger missiles uniformly stood motionless with their collective thumbs firmly inserted in their collective butts.  These were the same guys who, in 2011, apparently mistook seven shots from an assault rifle fired at the White House for backfires from a truck, figuring that the shards of plaster raining down on the Truman Balcony were just pigeon poop or a structural issue.  Look, if these maroons were working for Kim Jong Un, they’d right now be roasting over a slow fire in the palace garden, soon to be served with a little kimchee.  American exceptionalism?  Really?

While you were worried about ISIS coming to kill you, the stuff really coming to kill you came:

This is the column I started yesterday and abandoned when it was clear to me that pain and weakness was making me incoherent (or at least more incoherent than usual).  Look, we’re currently bombing the living shit out of Syria.  Yesterday there was a headline on AOL that trumpeted: US-Led Airstrikes Hit Syria’s Largest Gas Plant, as if that was something we were supposed to feel proud about over our morning coffee.  If not your morning coffee, maybe it should be the Kool-Aid, since that’s the crap we’ve been fed about ISIS plotting to bring down the homeland…as if they, or whichever other group we pick out to target on a particular bombing run, is just moments away from launching their bombers, ICBM’s, navy, cruise missiles, or six armored divisions, none of which they have…which is why they spend all their time and money on developing ever more sinister versions of exploding jockey shorts.  This while we extract our revenge for a couple of staged video murders, all the while failing to appreciate that smart bombs, cluster bombs, Hellfire missiles, and fuel-air explosives behead ten times more human beings, including women, children, and passersby, than any single balaclava-clad son of a bitch in the whole Middle East.

Meanwhile, in a real crisis we can’t solve with high explosives, over 3,000 souls have perished in Africa from Ebola, with no signs of a slow-down and no indication from anyone that there is a light at the end of this very dark and deadly tunnel.  Already, any number of the doctors and nurses caring for these patients have themselves succumbed to the disease, showing with great clarity that the most stringent precautions sometimes fail to prevent a ten micron murderer from finding a way through double gloves and eye shields and rings of duct tape.  Which brings us to Dallas, where a patient is currently quarantined and being tested for Ebola.  No matter what Sanjay Gupta tells you, there is no reason to believe that Ebola won’t eventually find a foothold in the US and Western Europe, and while US patients seem to currently have a better chance of survival than African patients, that’s only because there’s so few of them.  This thing isn’t even near to being over.

I hate to say “I told you so”, but I told you so.  Riots are coming to a community near to you:

The grand jury hearing the evidence in the Darren Wilson shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri is on the verge of making a decision.  All the signs point to Wilson not being indicted for murder, manslaughter, or at even reckless endangerment.  Nope, Wilson, like so many cops before him (see under: Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by four cops…who walked away free men) will in all likelihood be declared innocent of any crime…just doing his job.  The police in Ferguson are already gearing up for the inevitable backlash from this injustice.  The concentration isn’t on the business of making things right, but of keeping people who want to make things right from having a voice to do so.  Ferguson’s finest have been busy busting protesters for violating the “five second rule”, which give’s demonstrators just that long to move when ordered to so so by anyone with a badge or face time behind bars.  Once the grand jury decision is announced, I have a feeling they’re going to need a much bigger jail.

It just keeps getting more insane.

BW

 

The Insanity Of Bombing Syria

We’re at war again.  Truth be told, we never weren’t at war.  I admit it.  I had high hopes for President Obama when I first cast a ballot for him in 2008, but since then, he’s failed me and our nation again and again.  It’s sad.  He promised to get us out of Iraq, but getting out was never really getting out.  If we had really gotten out, the only Americans left in Iraq would be those foolish enough to be employed there, by Shell or Exxon or Halliburton.  None of them would be employed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that was never the case.  Even when we withdrew, we left behind a few hundred “advisors” and “trainers” and “logistical personnel”.  Now we have a couple thousand boots on the ground, who surprisingly, in what has become an ever increasingly Orwellian version of reality, are not actually boots on the ground, apparently just boots floating inches off the desert sand, without leaving so much as a footprint.  We’ve got thousands of guys over there, mostly in Army BDU’s, but god knows how many in whatever Blackwater wears these days.  Their boots are not on the ground of Camp Lejeune or Fort Bragg or Fort Benning…they’re on the fucking sands of Kirkuk and Takrit…so unless you have some different concept of gravity and geography than I do, we have boots on the ground.   Anyone who seriously believes that those troops won’t be joined by others, perhaps many others, perhaps as many or more as were trapped in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam for a long painful deadly exercise in futility, are deluding themselves.  Just yesterday, Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno announced that an “Army Division Headquarters” would be moved to Iraq…which is at least 100 GI’s and perhaps as many as 500.  And just what do you suppose a division headquarters is going to be directing…ummm…perhaps a division?

And on Monday, the powers that be just had to interrupt “Dancing With The Stars” for an ABC “special announcement”: We were bombing inside Syria!  The military had thoughtfully provided some of that footage of spookily lighted and slightly grainy buildings somewhere in the desert,  lined up in the reticle and crosshairs of an overhead targeting camera, then being pierced by a missile and promptly exploding in a huge gout of flame and smoke.  The elucidative graphic, also presumably supplied by the Pentagon’s Public Information department, showed 138 little bursts of flame on a map of Iraq and Syria, each colorful icon representing the impact point of a bomber’s load of warheads or one of the 47 cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea.  Lest we fail to appreciate the visceral power of our mighty American hand, the final twenty seconds showed one of these  $1.41 million Tomahawks (anyone else want to speculate how much good we might do in NYC or Chicago or Indianapolis with $66.27 million?  I’m guessing that would pay a lot of teachers and buy quite a few school lunches), with a huge cloud of smoke and steam, blasting out of the launch tube on a US destroyer at night, in a scene worthy of Michael Bay and James Cameron. “We now return you to your regular programming, with Michael Waltrip and Emma Slater doing a samba to ‘Girls In Bikinis’.”  (I did not make this up.)

The president himself makes two national addresses on the topic of bombing Syria and going after ISIS or ISIL and he’s semi-apologetic and reluctant about the whole thing, but with the clear subtext of “You sons of bitches were all lined up with pitchforks and garden weasels to crawl up my ass a year ago because I wouldn’t get all up in Syria’s grille, and now I’ve gone full shock and awe on these mothers, so who’s the man now?  Huh?  You happy yet?”

While we were there anyway, we not only bombed ISIS, who we’ve been assured are basically knocking on the front gate of the White House (much like the guy who made it all the way to the front door without a single shot being fired, let alone a cruise missile), but we saved a couple of tons of high explosive for Khorasan.  Excuse me?  Come again?  Yep, there’s a whole new group of bloodthirsty terrorists who needed a good bombing, and we’d never even heard of them before now.  The reason these guys were allegedly on the very cusp of bringing down the American way of life is because they had at long last perfected the underwear bomb…and apparently all our American technology isn’t capable of just detecting boxer and brief bombs at the TSA checkpoint, so the only possible alternative was blowing somebody up before they blew their own balls off.

All of this is being played out before our very eyes, like a hallucinogenic flashback of George W. Bush in 2003.  I’d wonder if everyone in Washington, along with every average Joe on Main Street has gone completely mad, but there’s at least one ex-politician who’s seen this movie before and knows how it ends: Dennis Kucinich: Why Are We Bombing Syria?  It’s almost enough to give me a shred of hope, except that Kucinich has only a thousand times more chance of stopping this madness that I do…and a thousand times zero is still zero.

BW

After The Inquisition, The Crusades, And The Holy Roman Empire, A Pope Finally Makes Some Sense

I’m no fan of religion, not any religion, and Catholicism is among the worst, if one can assign degrees of wrongness to a concept that is wrong at its core.  As per the title above, the outrages and horrors instigated by the Catholic Church over the last two millenia are staggering in their number, perfidity, and devastating consequences.  But I’ve said it before.  The current Pope seems to be trying to make amends. On Saturday, the Pope spoke in Redipuglia, Italy at a war memorial housing the remains of 100,000 fallen Italian soldiers from WWI.  He issued a warning to the whole world, presciently noting,  “even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.”

He’s not far off.  We may not call it a World War, but there’s war all over the world.  The US has been at war since 9/11/01.  It’s called a war on terror…as if you can ever successfully wage war on a concept.  But once we lost 3,000 souls and two skyscrapers, someone by god was going to pay, and pay they have. We’ve thrust the largest, most complex, most deadly war machine the planet has ever seen into Iraq and Afghanistan.  The body count by this point is beyond horrific.  We’ve got our planes and drones aloft over a dozen other countries.  We routinely assassinate designated enemies in places like Somalia and Yemen.  The old Soviet Union also had way too many tanks and missiles sitting around gathering dust as well, so Putin decided he just had to help out in the Ukraine.  The Israelis and the Palestinians have called a truce after turning several hundred square miles into rubble and leaving about 1500 dead and perhaps twice or three times as many injured…and by the way, anyone who thinks this truce will rival the pyramids in terms of permannency hasn’t been paying very close attention.

Now all of a sudden, the same old bad guys have gotten new uniforms and a new name and a new PR director with a real flair for the dramatic, and we’re off and running yet again.  Obama, who gets an enormous amount of grief from the right for being soft on terror, has been anything but soft, raining death from the skies at a pace never before witnessed, failing to close Guantanamo after six years in office, and staying “enhanced interrogation” with one hand while give pats on the back with his other hand to agents and contractors and black ops that give a whole new meaning to the term “enhanced”.

Still, none of it is enough for the bottomless bloodlust of guys like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  Graham indicated on yesterday’s Sunday talkfests that if Obama didn’t “put boots on the ground”, ISIS would “open the gates of hell”.  (Graham is not one for nuanced understatement.)  People here are actually buying this insanity.  Again, the argument that “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here” has won the day without a shred of supporting evidence.  The last time we had to fight them over here was when 11 Saudis hijacked four jets while we weren’t paying attention.  We’ve been paying attention since then, and you’d think that just being vigilant would be enough.  Apparently not.

So heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to war we go.  Pope Francis may have said more than even he understood.  When we drop the first smart bomb on Syria, it might just be the opening shot of WWIII…or maybe the shot has already been fired.

BW

 

Shitstorm In Progress: We’re Downwind Of The Fan

First off, a short programing note: Mrs. Left is undergoing foot surgery tomorrow, which will be followed by 6-8 weeks of recovery, including a week of bedrest.  If you take a moment to do the math, you’ll understand how my schedule will be a bit constrained at least for a week.  I’ll try to find some time at the keyboard, and I’ll do my level best to keep content coming, but I’m not making any guarantees, especially tomorrow, which will almost certainly be a day without Kibbitz Corner (I know, that’s like a cereal without milk, but try to make it through anyway).

I saw a post on Facebook yesterday from Steve M, a friend from dancing, and a guy who I never quite realized was so enlightened until I started perusing his posts.  He was just enumerating the various trigger points around the globe at the moment, including Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine, North Korea, and Somalia.  We’ve got ISIS, beheadings, bombings, drone attacks, rocket attacks, incursions, invasions, and oh yeah…there’s that small matter of Ebola spreading through Africa like a wildfire in dry brush and high winds.  Every time the CDC reassures us that there is no immediate danger to the US, I’m tempted to buy another case of MRE’s and another box of ammo.  I’d really like the CDC to explain to me why they’re convinced that a highly contagious virus that is easily and rapidly spread from human to human and has so far ignored a dozen national borders is going to somehow be deterred by an ocean or two.  Delta may divert flights when someone starts bitching about the reclining seats, but I doubt they’ll turn the plane around if someone looks a little feverish.

So if you’re of an evangelical Christian mindset, I can see why you might be concerned that we’re on the verge of the rapture, or if you’re more metaphysical, of pole shifts or other apocalyptic earth changes, or if you’re just a pessimist, like me, of a total shitstorm of woe and war and plague for the next couple of decades.  Look, you’d have to be deaf to not hear the percussive beat of war drums in the not so far distance.  These ISIS assholes are good at messaging in the twenty-first century.  Now they’ve done their second video beheading in a little more than a few weeks, and the outrage engendered is exactly what they expect and even demand.  (I wonder how much outrage would result if someone ever videoed the immediate physical result and aftermath of a US drone strike.  Is dismemberment by explosion less terrifying than dismemberment by blade?)  Obama doesn’t instantly respond, then responds in a calm and measured manner after confirming the authenticity of the latest shock video,  and the predictable hyperbole, bellicosity and bloviating vomits from a host of right-wing mouths.  If John McCain or Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan had been president, we’d already have the 101st Airborne dropping into Damascus, and there’ be a hundred cruise missiles in the air…no particular targets, but someone by god needs to die.  In fact, had one of those statesmen been at the helm, we’d already be marching all over Syria, Iraq, Iran, and probably Libya for good measure.  These guys are more eager to pull the trigger than a nine year-old with an Uzi, and so far as I can tell, the Republican response to the unemployment problem is to give everyone an M-16, desert camo, and an insufficient monthly paycheck from the Department of the Treasury.

At this point, I don’t see how President Obama can possibly keep us out of a new war.  Given the depressing predictions for the makeup of the Senate after the next midterm elections, it may be all he can do to keep his job until January 20, 2017.  Get on your raincoats and goggles, boys and girls…the shit is really gonna fly.

BW

So Many Assholes, So Little Time

There are days when I can’t think of anything to write about, and there are days when I can’t think of anything not to write about.  I’ve always said that as long as “they” continue to commit outrages, I’ll never lack for topics.  The world at this moment is such a complete utter total shitstorm of outrageous clusterfucks, I hardly know where to begin.  Let’s just take it one by one:

Social Studies is a good course for fourth graders.  Assault weapon usage is not.

What in the name of all that is holy were they thinking?  Who the fuck in their right mind puts an Uzi submachine gun capable of firing 600 rounds/minute in the hands of a nine year-old girl?  But that’s exactly what happened this Monday in White Hills, Arizona, and it ended in a way that was both tragic and entirely predictable.  Charles Vacca, the 39 year-old range supervisor/instructor got shot in the head when he allowed the child to fire the weapon on full automatic, when it promptly kicked up and back so powerfully that she ended up shooting him over her own shoulder.  It’s not like they couldn’t have predicted it.  The exact same thing happened in 2008 at a gun show in Massachusetts, with the only notable difference being that the victim in this case was the shooter himself, an eight year-old boy.  It’s utter madness, and whether you choose to blame the operators of these gun ranges or the parents who now have to live with the results of their own folly, at the heart of it, it’s the insane religion of gun worship that is second only to Christianity in American culture.  I’ve read all the posts and comments from “good guys with guns”, who herald the family traditions of giving their kids shotguns and .22 “varmint” rifles at ages just beyond kindergarten, and the warm fuzzy family bonding rituals of target shooting and hunting and roasting rabbits over an open camp fire.  Bullshit.  Complete undiluted Ted Nugent psychobabble horse crap.  Perhaps if we stopped teaching our children about how much fun it is to kill other creatures, we’d start making the world a much safer and saner place to live in for all of us.  But don’t hold your breath.  Two days after the incident in Arizona, the NRA, in yet another instance of complete tone deafness, arrogance, and cynical contempt, tweeted from its NRA Women branch…and I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP: “7 Ways Children Can Have Fun At The Gun Range”.  They didn’t include way number eight…blowing someone’s brains out.  Astonishing.

Shock and Awe is plenty shocking, but not at all awesome.

We’re bombing in Iraq again, and scouting in Syria, where in another day or week or month, we’ll start bombing.  We’ve got maybe a thousand or more troops back in Iraq, and no matter what anyone tells you, they’re at war.  They may be called advisers or security or any other damned pseudonym these fuck-weasels can invent, but we’re going back to war again.  Has no one in Washington watched the news in the last decade?  Haven’t they read the fucking book?  Have they never heard the wise aphorism about insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over but each time expecting a different result?  The briefers at the White House and the Pentagon are talking about the danger of ISIS, and even re-using the old saw about if we don’t fight them over there we’ll have to fight them over here…as if these backwater camel fuckers have their own air force or ICBM’s or blue sea navy…which they don’t.  No one even mentions our old reliable nemesis Al Qaeda anymore, completely failing to appreciate that ISIS is the same fucking lunatics in new scary black uniforms with a snappy new title.  So our leaders, who can’t even agree on what to do about a million little Central American kids trying to escape torture and violence and starvation, are snapping at the bit to spend another trillion dollars and expend another river of blood on the same failed policies that nearly broke the will, the bank, and the conscience of this country in the two longest and most ill-advised wars in our history.  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  We’re doomed.  Oh, and by the way, while we’re setting off explosives and pissing off the natives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria, right next door in Pakistan, they’ve got their own problems with new fanatics with new uniforms and new names…and they also DO have ICBM’s and thermonuclear weapons, and a very volatile and unstable relationship with India.  Maybe we ought to get involved there too, while we’re at it.  In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Only assholes become terrorists.

Some of the biggest stories this week include the beheading of Richard Foley by terrorists, the death of a terrorist who turned out to be an American, the possibility of other Americans being in ISIS, and more Americans being held hostage by ISIS.  Give the terrorists credit.  They’ve checked the dictionary and they know that they qualify as terrorists if they create terror, and they’re doing one hell of a job.  I’m as sickened by murders on video as anyone, but don’t be fooled.  Our response is exactly what these guys want it to be.  Nothing would make ISIS happier than drawing us into another full scale land war.  WWIII would make them cream their fashionable black jammies.  And as for Americans signing up to be warriors for Allah, fuck ’em.  They’re assholes to begin with.  No one with half a brain is ever going to buy into this kind of nonsense.  Every one of these people is a religious fanatic to begin with.  Most get disillusioned with whatever god has failed to bring them the happiness that was promised, so they go shopping for another bigger better more badass god.  Just check to see how many atheists have enrolled with ISIS or Al Qaeda.  I’d bet the farm that the answer is NONE.

The Michael Brown murder was about racism.  All rationalizations to the contrary are bull.

How many stories about cops arresting, harassing, and killing young black and Hispanic men do we need to see before we accept the problem and start doing something about it?  How about 22 year-old John Crawford, who was shot dead in a Walmart in Beaver Creek, Ohio on Wednesday?  His crime?  He picked up pellet gun from the shelf in the toy aisle and still had it in his hand in the next aisle…oh, and one other thing…he was black.  Or how about the charming K-9 officer in Ferguson who allowed his police dog to pee on the Michael Brown memorial?  Or the head of the St. Louis County Police, who defends the use of tear gas, armored personnel carriers and other battlefield military hardware “because we patrol very urban areas.”  Get it?  Urban areas?  Like urban music?  That roughly translates into, “We need to armored up like troops in Kandahar because we’re dealing with all these…negroes.”

The Right is filled with racist assholes.

On FOX NEWS, Bill O’Reilly has been spending his week up on his soapbox, denying the existence of “White Privilege”.  Bill didn’t mention when he’d last been stopped and frisked while shopping for Ralph Lauren suits on Rodeo Drive.  And over there on “The 700 Club”, the ever reliable Pat Robertson had to weigh in on the cause of the Robin Williams suicide.  His take? Robin was pursuing “idols, the god of the heathens” instead of the one true god, Jesus.  Shit.  If only he’d known.  And if that didn’t work out for him, he could have tried ISIS.

BW