Crandolph’s Barbaric Yawp

Bend over and take it , America.  Vote tally.

What do you do when you’ve control of the purse strings when you know the American ‘intelligence community’ has been lying, conniving, cooking the books and pulling the wool?  Perhaps you cut their funding or demand accountability.  Perhaps you withhold funding until heads roll, or until the ‘intelligence community’ reaffrirms its allegiance to this nation and its human inhabitants Kent Brockman-style.  If you’re the US House of Representatives, you vote better than 20:1 to give ‘em a raise.

Keep in mind this money, which is a sort of black bag budget that Congress gets few details of, is for "intelligence and intelligence-related activities."  Intelligence-related activities?  The horror, the horror…

So that’s 409 yeas to further skullduggery and official lies, with 16 votes in dissent.  The usual anemic liberal crew, frequently AWOL of late, bothered voting the right way on this one (Kucinich, Rangel, Waters, McDermott…) with the always-reliable Ron Paul (R-TX) doing his thing as the best legislator in America.  Bernie Sanders (I-VT) let us down on this one for the second time in as many months, voting with the Empire against the Rebel Alliance.  You know better, Bernie!  Paul was joined by fellow Republican John Duncan of Tennessee, of whom I know nothing other than to assume he will soon be shipped to Guantanamo on a fact-finding mission and might come home reeducated.

Of the 8 non-voters 3 were Dems and 5 Reps, an unusual reversal of the usual slacking pattern.  Is there a person out there who still views the Dems as an opposition party?  In case you were wondering, Bob Brady (D-PA) as usual voted with Bush on this one.  Thanks, Bob!

From an undated interview in his Rotten.com library profile:

"When I see blacks and women wanting to gain their freedom so they can become corporation executives, I realize that the situation is hopeless. What’s the good of having freedom if you then willingly go off and become a slave to an amoral institution? It’s especially depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and now they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them."

Frightening new federal internet guidelines have just kicked in, causing a wave of justifiably fear-induced self-censorship.  The new federal laws provide up to 5 years’ prison time for pornography (or "pornography" such as Rotten.com’s Gaping Maw feature) whose production isn’t documented six ways from Tuesday.

One of the few bills ever submitted by our own US Representative Bob Brady is an expansion of a similar catch-all law which could result in tens of thousands of dollars in fines and/or federal prison for people using meta tags or domain names which whack jobs like Alberto Gonzales or John Ashcroft don’t think are obviously ‘porny’ enough.  The claim is that the law is for "misleading" meta tagging and domain naming, but an examination of the actual text of the law leaves what that means open to very wide interpretation which effectively rests the burden of proving innocence on the defendant.  All of this back door censorship under the rubric of protecting the children, one thing the laws do not do in any conceivable fashion, even as the same legislators fail to provide millions of American children with health or dental coverage and give the Pentagon millions to create a database of new underaged cannon fodder.

You thought they were the Jews!  Wrong, so wrong.  They’re Texas oil millionaires with a passing knowledge of evangelical Christianity.  So I’ve learned from the evil Presidential Prayer Team, with my free subscription to their mailing list and free ‘adoption’ of an anonymous Iraqupying soldier under the name Mars, God of War.  Some onwarding Christian soldier is theoretically being prayed for by Mars, who appears in their membership list.  (Don’t thank me for the witticism, thank the brilliant Mark Twain.)

The PPT, when not selling propaganda prints which desecrate the memory of Deist President George Washington, sends out moneygrubbing emails to their credulous email list which reference Psalm 33:12, which I had to look up:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he  hath chosen for his own inheritance.

Take that, Israel!  Have at you, Saudi Arabia!  Get bent, Bhutan!

The less haughty, less nationalistic Christian might prefer Psalm 33:16:

There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man is  not delivered by much strength.

 

As long as we’re picking quotes out of the frequently contradictory and sometimes just plain loopy Bible, why not go with Psalm 33:2?

  Praise the LORD with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an  instrument of ten strings.

The image to the right suggests what part of that might look like.  "Damn Middle Eastern pentatonic scale!"  And don’t forget your psaltery.

GQ, of all magazines, has published the account of 5 Pennsylvania National Guard members who had been assigned to guard Saddam Hussein.

Best of the many winning quotes:

Saddam was friendly toward his young guards and sometimes offered fatherly advice. When O’Shea told him he was not married, Saddam "started telling me what to do," recalled the soldier. "He was like, `You gotta find a good woman. Not too smart, not too dumb. Not too old, not too young. One that can cook and clean.’"

Then he smiled, made what O’Shea interpreted as a "spanking" gesture, laughed and went back to doing his laundry in the sink.

More detail.

Crank up the audio and watch these videos (large files, fast connection suggested):

Zladko "Zlad!" Vladcik, parody artist from the imaginary nation of Molvania

Actual Croatian artist Belinda Bedekovic

Croatia is a real country (I’ve been); Molvania is not.

If anyone could write a better description of Congressional Democrats in 2005 than Ambrose Bierce did in The Devil’s Dictionary over a century ago I’m hard-pressed to find it:

OPPOSITION, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

The King of Ghargaroo, who had been abroad to study the science of
government, appointed one hundred of his fattest subjects as members of
a parliament to make laws for the collection of revenue. Forty of these
he named the Party of Opposition and had his Prime Minister carefully
instruct them in their duty of opposing every royal measure.
Nevertheless, the first one that was submitted passed unanimously.
Greatly displeased, the King vetoed it, informing the Opposition that
if they did that again they would pay for their obstinacy with their
heads. The entire forty promptly disemboweled themselves.

"What shall we do now?" the King asked. "Liberal institutions cannot be maintained without a party of Opposition."

"Splendor of the universe," replied the Prime Minister, "it is true
these dogs of darkness have no longer their credentials, but all is not
lost. Leave the matter to this worm of the dust."

So the Minister had the bodies of his Majesty’s Opposition embalmed and
stuffed with straw, put back into the seats of power and nailed there.
Forty votes were recorded against every bill and the nation prospered.
But one day a bill imposing a tax on warts was defeated — the members
of the Government party had not been nailed to their seats! This so
enraged the King that the Prime Minister was put to death, the
parliament was dissolved with a battery of artillery, and government of
the people, by the people, for the people perished from Ghargaroo.

Good job, guys.

And it’s much more important to do some partisan bickering than organize against an increasingly unpopular war to begin with, eh..?