Via Molly I over at Eschaton…  The Kenosha Kid says it’s not that Rudy had an extramarital affair that will cost him the wingnut vote.  It isn’t even that he billed it to the tax payers.  It’s that he conducted his affair in the Hamptons, that hated den of filthy Jews Liberals.  They’ll never forgive him for it.

I think he’s on to something there.  The moral posturing of the hard right, especially the southern contingent, has always been a nothing more then a thin veneer over the bedrock of their prejudices. 

I’m headed for bed, and not even going to bother watching the republican debate.  But scanning the blogs that are following it live, I’m seeing that a gay (former) general asked a question concerning gays in the military and he was apparently roundly booed by the audience…

…so I just want to re-emphasize something I put up on my Twitter bar a few hours ago, for the sake of a few certain someones I no longer speak to, and one who I’m still very much holding at arm’s length:  If you can still vote republican after all the gay bashing they’ve been doing, then we are not friends.  It really is that simple.

Someone put a fork in the party of Lincoln, it’s done.  And…I’m going to bed now…

Rudy Giuliani stands tall for the heterosexual prerogative…

Giuliani continues his conservative shift

Favors fewer rights for same-sex unions

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to discard the moderate and liberal positions of his past. The latest is civil unions for same-sex couples, which the Republican presidential candidate has been backing away from in recent months.

A campaign aide told the Globe this weekend that Giuliani favors a much more modest set of rights for gay partners than civil union laws in effect in four states offer.

Giuliani has described himself as a backer of civil unions and is frequently described that way in news reports. But he began distancing himself from civil unions in late April, when his campaign told The New York Sun that New Hampshire’s new law goes too far because it is "the equivalent of marriage," which he has always opposed for gays.

Giuliani’s aides offered little explanation of what specific rights he would support for same-sex couples.

Perhaps…a city expense account…?

‘Taxes funded Rudy Giuliani love trysts’

Rudy Giuliani faced fresh questions about his judgment last night amid claims that trysts with his mistress while he was New York’s Mayor cost taxpayers thousands of dollars.

The Republican presidential frontrunner’s record as New York mayor is already facing closer scrutiny after the indictment this month of his close friend Bernard Kerik, whom Mr Giuliani appointed as the city’s police chief.

According to records obtained by a respected US political website, Mr Giuliani billed New York City for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for his security detail, who accompanied him on trips to Long Island while he visited his mistress.

Many of the security expenses were billed to obscure city agencies, such as the New York City Loft Board, giving the impression somebody did not want the expense claims to be linked to Mr Giuliani. The expense receipts tally the cost of hotel and petrol bills for police detectives who travelled everywhere with Mr Giuliani, according to the website, Politico.com.

More fun and games, from the folks morally qualified to tell gay people that our unions aren’t fit to be called marriages.  Tune in next week as Mike Huckabee explains how having a divorce rate three times that of Massachusetts means Arkansas covenant marriage laws are working to protect and preserve the sacred institution of marriage whilst same sex marriage in Massachusetts has been greatly weakening it…

Via Atrios… 

From CNBC: "Citigroup will not be bringing its SIV assets onto their balance sheet."

SIV = Structured Investment Vehicle.  The Wiki article isn’t bad…go read it for some insight into why big capital is getting anxious about what’s happening now due to the sub-prime mortgage collapse.  Basically what Citigroup is trying to do here is a little creative Enron style shell company book keeping in the hope of propping up their market value.  Oh no…those aren’t Our worthless assets…they belong to that company over there…er, the one we created to hold those worthless assets… What’s…astonishing…is how brazen they’re apparently being about it.

And you thought the stock market was the only form of gambling Wall Street did.  Oh goodness no…

Via Atrios…  In case you haven’t heard of it, Conservapedia is Wikipedia for culture warriors who want their reality filtered through the lens of their own bar stool prejudices.  Or as Wikipedia puts it…

English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project with the stated purpose of creating an encyclopedia written from a socially- and economically-conservative viewpoint supportive of Conservative Christianity.^[1][2][3] Many of its articles^[2][3] support the Young Earth creationism point of view.^[4] Andrew Schlafly, the site’s creator and son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, stated that he founded the project because he felt Wikipedia had a liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American bias.^[5][6]

And what do these socially and economically conservative one-hundred percent all American Christians want to read about most on Conservapedia …?

Conservapedia statistics

There are 45,009 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Conservapedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don’t qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 19,565 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.

5,901 files have been uploaded.

There have been a total of 36,693,438 page views, and 334,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 7.43 average edits per page, and 109.78 views per edit.

User statistics

There are 15,474 registered users, of which 27 (or 0.17%) are Administrators.

Most viewed pages

1. Main Page‎ [1,900,647]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,534,983]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [516,478]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [418,644]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [387,730]
6. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence‎ [348,594]
7. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [339,321]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [329,695]
9. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [273,149]
10. Homosexuality and Syphilis‎ [263,645]

Well it ain’t economics.  Geeze…I don’t think about homosexuality as much as these people and I’m a gay male.

Back when I was a teenager, this list would probably have been all about the International Communist Conspiracy.  The top link would have been to an article on Communism, followed by a bunch of Communism and This, and Communism and Thats.  Communism and Atheism…Communism and Jews…Communism and Liberalism…Communism and Democrats…Communism and Hollywood…Communism and Hippies…Communism and Feminism…Communism and Negroes…  In my lifetime the American far right has gone from looking for communists under the bed to sniffing the underwear of gay men.  That’s degeneracy for you. 

So I see Rex Wockner, and Andrew Sullivan are in agreement with John Aravosis that transgendered people have basically hijacked the gay rights movement.  Dan Savage is at least on board with the transgender free Barney Frank/HRC bill that just passed the house.  Somehow, it’s…unsurprising…to see the "No Fems" contingent bellyaching that they just don’t get the transgendered.  Here’s Wockner giving it his best attempt…

I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?

Any deeper then this and Wockner is in danger of getting his own reality TV series.   Wille.  Wille.  You know, not all transgendered persons go the sex reassignment surgery route, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the "No Fems" crowd to have picked up on that.  Geeze…and I used to think I had a problem with things female, my libido and my emotions being so relentlessly polarized toward the male sex.  But the worst I ever was, was indifferent.  I didn’t dislike girls and I don’t now, they just don’t register on my radar like guys do.  I like guys.  I like being a guy.  I like being around guys.  I like being made sweet sweet love to by guys.  But there really are males, heterosexual ones too amazingly enough, who just get deeply anxious when confronted with anything even vaguely suggestive of femininity, and never more so then when it’s within another guy.  I guess they’re afraid of their own dicks falling off or something if they get too close.  Notice Wockner’s problem is with "a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts" and "become a woman".  Notice further that he’s saying this right after talking up Shannon Minter, born female, now living as a man.  

I do, in fact, count myself among those Americans who still don’t fully understand and "get" the whole concept of being born in completely the wrong body. I’ve asked Shannon for a personal, one-on-one crash-course the very next time we’re within range of each other on the national map.

Probably because Shannon is butching it up and Wockner can deal with that better then with a person born male but who considers themselves female.  Well let me say I don’t "get" what the goddamned problem is here.  Has Wockner, after all this time, never pondered what makes some people gay and others straight?  There is a mountain of evidence building now, that sexual orientation is innate, something in our biology, that draws us to mate to our own sex.  It’s not in our willies, but in our heads.  Is it really that hard to look at this, and consider then that gender expression may also work in some similar way?   And for Christ’s sake it’s not like issues of gender haven’t been animating American politics ever since…oh…the feminist movement.  I know that serious questioning of whether gender expression is more nature or nurture, biological or sociological, have been tracking alongside the same questions regarding sexual orientation since at least my own teen years and I’m older then any of these three deep thinkers (Aravosis doesn’t seem to be thinking about any of this at all so much as machine gun jerking his knee…)

I think my eureka moment came some decades ago while reading an article on boys who had been born with deformed or missing genitals and were, shortly after birth, surgically assigned a female gender and raised as girls.  Tragically, horribly, it didn’t work.  There was one boy in particular, who said he’d kept on reflexively trying to pee standing up all through his childhood.  That opened my eyes.  As it turns out, it’s not what we have between our legs that makes us masculine or feminine, it’s what we have between our ears. 

Here’s Sullivan trying to make heads or tails of the implications of that after a reader reminds him…

What T’s have in common with LGB’s is that primary opposition to all of you comes from your subversion of proper, binary, complementary gender roles.  You may be quite different from the inside, but from the outside you look similar.  I heard my southern baptist grandfather give a sermon in which one of the ills of the modern world was "men not wanting to be men."  I’m pretty sure he had gays in mind.

Surely you know this.

To which Sullivan reliably babbles… 

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don’t conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

Not to worry Andrew, a lot of gay folk don’t regard you as being part of our community either.  Not after you swooned over the man who vowed to veto any attempt to repeal the Texas sodomy laws because he thought they were a valid expression of the morality of the majority of Texans.   But, no you drooling moron, the entire point of anti-discrimination laws Is how other people view us, not how we view ourselves. 

Yes, yes…we’re all different from one another in so many little ways.  Men and women from other men and women.  Whites and blacks and Asians from other whites and blacks and Asians.  Gays from other gays.  How many different sub groups within that vast rainbow of humanity that are homosexual?  Bigotry on the other hand, ignorantly lumps people together.  Since when did prejudice ever make sense?  No, the color of your skin doesn’t say anything about the content of your character.  Neither does your sexual orientation.  Neither does your gender.  Neither does your gender expression.  And as for why ‘T’s are part of this movement too, well let’s let Jack Chick explain something you need very much to understand:

Now, look at that.  No…Really Look At It.  Anti-discrimination laws aren’t about how minorities see themselves.  What they address is how popular prejudices view and treat minorities.  Look At That Image.  This is what the bigots see, when they look at us.  They don’t see difference one between the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s you idiot.  They don’t even admit there is such a thing as sexual orientation. let alone something called transgender.  To them, it’s all sex perversion.  You’re a man and you’re having sex with other men and that means as far as they’re concerned, that you’re acting like a woman.  Never mind you don’t think you are.  It’s not about what you think.  Butch it up until you’re growing hair on your palms and it still won’t matter to them. They see a man making himself into a woman.  They see gender non-conformity.  In my 8th grade sex ed class back in 1969, I was taught that as a literal truth: that homosexual men think they’re really women.  You’ll always be a fairy to the bigots Sullivan. 

None of us, the ‘GL’s, the ‘B’s and the ‘T’s behave according to the gender expectations of the majority.  That’s why we’re discriminated against.  That’s the stinking rotten core of it, along with a healthy dose of misogyny.  Men rule, women serve men, wives gracefully submit to their husbands who are the head of the household and all is right with the world.  Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgendered people all throw that nice neat little "natural order" into question and they can’t deal with it.   But you need to understand that the problem from their perspective isn’t that you’re homosexual.  Many of them insist there is no such thing as a homosexual to begin with, merely damaged heterosexuality. Their problem is that you’re a man who, by having sex with other men, makes himself into a woman.  That’s the thinking going on here.  They see no distinction, zero, zilch, nada, between a transgendered individual and a homosexual.  None.

And this is why any anti-discrimination law that does not include gender expression in it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.  Incrementalism is fine I suppose, when it actually gets you somewhere.  Civil Unions before marriage.  Okay…I can dig that.  I don’t like it but I can dig it.  At least Civil Unions are a step forward; at least they’re something.  The EDNA passed last week is nothing but hot air and a bunch of preening politicans and HRC lobbyists patting themselves on the back for appearing to be doing something when all along they were too goddamned timid to actually fight for something honestly worthwhile because that might be risky.  You know…behaving like democrats always do these days.  Any bigot with half a brain can simply say they fired you because you weren’t conforming to their company gender norms, not because of your homosexuality.  And Barney Frank has given them the green light to do that, by insisting that the law Specifically omits gender expression as a protected catagory.  Lambda Legal has been all over this big honking loophole, and Frank and HRC (say…I thought you didn’t like them Andrew) went ahead and did it anyway.

But then…why someone who doesn’t believe in anti-discrimination laws in the first place is bellyaching about including ‘T’s, when he thinks ‘G’s and ‘L’s and ‘B’s shouldn’t be protected classes either is beyond me.  I guess you just have to jerk your knee at every fucking thing that liberals are for, or that you imagine they’re for.  The guy who once said that liberals might mount a fifth column against the war on terror is certainly no stranger to how bigots think is he?   And I see that the candidacy of Hillary Clinton has you back to nearly full time snarling at the Clintons again hasn’t it?  Jesus Christ you are one big fucking bundle of surly knee jerk reflexes aren’t you?

Instead of writing the transgendered out of EDNA, maybe Barney should have just written "No Fems…" into it.  That would have made you guys happy, wouldn’t it?

No fems please…we’re all manly cocksuckers here.  Hey…don’t get me wrong…I’m a big fan of Y chromosomes myself.  Just not the big stupid ones. 

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Ben Franklin 

Bye Ernie.  Don’t let the diversity hit you on the way out.   And…good riddance…

Kentucky Governor Loses to Democrat

Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.

Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time.  Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places.  I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections.  The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear.  The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal. 

And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility.  Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night.  When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty.  The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close.  The national debt has skyrocketed.  So have foreclosure rates.  People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum.  And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes.  I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.

"Greed is good", they said.  People should have paid more attention.  No, greed is not good.  Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year.  Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year.  Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow.  There is only now.  Right now.  I want it Right Now.  "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.

Paul Krugman had a good riff on the excuses we’re hearing now from the party faithful, that Bush and his cronies don’t so much perfectly represent modern movement conservative values in practice, as they are a betrayal of them.  Bullshit…

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

Bush is not incompetent.  He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power.  Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.  They don’t matter.  Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow.  Greed is good.  Or to put it succinctly:

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror, who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:

"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery's parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."

Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?

You got what you voted for.  The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print.  You didn’t read the bold print.

Don’t ask if I’m still pissed off at you…

Kentucky GOP Pushing Anti-Gay Message In Final Days Of Gov Race

Going into the home stretch in in the Kentucky gubernatorial election, the Republicans appear to have brought out one last card: Paranoia against gays.

The state GOP is now sending a robo-call throughout the state featuring none other than Pat Boone, warning that as a Christian he is concerned that Democratic nominee Steve Beshear, who has been way ahead in the polls, will work for "every homosexual cause."

"Now do you want a governor who’d like Kentucky to be another San Francisco?" Boone asks. "Please re-elect Ernie Fletcher."

And at a campaign stop last night, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Republican nominee for Lt. Governor made a direct attack upon the Democratic ticket: "Do you want a couple of San Francisco treats or do you want a governor?"

(Emphasis mine) So the republican candidate gets way behind in the polls and he starts waving the Gay Menace.  This is what republicans do to win elections, and never mind how many gay Americans it gets killed.  Talking Points Memo has a recording of Fletcher’s robo call.  You may recall that on April 11 of last year Fletcher, declared Diversity Day in Kentucky, and on the same day eliminated anti-discrimination protections for gay state and local government workers.

I wrote a post a few days back about wanting a door I could walk through from time to time.  Don’t assume that means I’m not just as pissed off at all of you as I was.  In fact, I might even be More pissed off now then I was.  Because it just never stops with the republicans.  It just never stops. 

I don’t expect everyone who knows me to agree with me on every political issue.  But if you can vote republican while they’re doing this to gay people to win elections then you are not my friend.  It really is that simple.  I’ve got a bullseye on my back, along with ever other gay American citizen, and it’s not gutter crawling maggots like Ernie Fletcher who put it there, it’s all of you who told the republicans they can incite passions toward gay people as often and as crudely as they like and you’ll still vote for them.

So don’t ask.  Just…don’t. 

When the roll call of the gay bashed for this election cycle is read and I’m lucky enough not to be on it that’ll be no thanks to the likes of any of you.

Burger King Workers Charged In Gay Couple’s Beating

(Union City, New Jersey) Two workers at a Burger King in Union City have been charged with assault and a hate crime in connection with the beating of a gay couple outside the restaurant.

Christopher Soto and Angel Carbaballo, who have since been fired by the chain, are scheduled to appear in court this week.

The victims, both in their 40s, have not been named.

When the couple asked for a refund for a menu item that the counter person discovered was not available, another counter person then asked who wanted the refund – “The faggots over there?”

The couple left the restaurant, but a group of Burger King employees allegedly followed them to a side street and beat them mercilessly, though not fatally. 

The employees made repeated anti-gay slurs during the beating according to the indictment.

Someone calling themselves Mrs du Toit responds to my post yesterday on the Nazification Of The Western Male.  I’ve no way of establishing the authenticity of the commenter, but I reply back in the comments.

Atrios points to this post on Lawyers, Guns and Money with the comment, Tiny Penis Syndrome…sadly, it does explain a lot.  Yes, but not everything…

I just finished teaching an upper-division US history course in which my students read — and I swear I’m not making this up — Kim Du Toit’s repellant 2003 essay on "The Pussification of the Western Male". The class had just finished Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization (1995), a marvelous examination of the cultural transformations of gender between the 1880s and World War I. We used du Toit as a companion piece to the chapters on Teddy Roosevelt and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall — each of whom were, in their own ways, as anxious as du Toit about what they perceived to be the devaluation of masculinity.

…

Hall, for his part, was preoccupied not with adult masculinity but rather with the incipient manhood of youth. Believing that developing children rehearsed the cultural evolution of the human race, he insisted that young boys should not be deterred from expressing "the instinct of the savage."

Boys are naturally robbers; they are bandits and fighters by nature. A scientific study has been made of boys’ societies . . . . In every instance these societies have been predatory. All of the members thirsted for blood, and all of their plans were for thievery and murder

Allow the young boy to beat the shit out of his companions, Hall suggested, and his mental and physical development will proceed in a smooth and healthy fashion. Divert him from his natural course Hall warned, and you will produce "a milk-sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak." Such a child "lacks virility, [and] his masculinity does not ring true." Perhaps he will — as Hall himself did — grow up to be a chronic masturbator, a helpless slave to "the lonely vice."

That passage of Hall’s rang familiar in my ear.  Not so much for the words, as the sensibility that male youth is by its nature savage and brutal and that cultivating that savage, brutal nature is the task of every great civilization.  I’d heard all that somewhere before.  So I did a little digging and it wasn’t long before I found it…

"My teaching is hard. Weakness has to be knocked out of them. In my [elite schools] a youth will grow up before which the world will shrink back. A violently active dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after". Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. Strong and handsome must my young men be. I will have them fully trained in all physical exercises. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and the chief thing. In this way I shall eradicate the thousands of years of human domestication. Then I shall have in front of me the pure and noble natural material. With that I can create the new order.

"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. I would have them learn only what takes their fancy. But one thing they must learn – self-command! They shall learn to overcome the fear of death, under the severest tests. That is the intrepid and heroic stage of youth. Out of it comes the stage of the free man, the man who is the substance and essence of the world, the creative man, the god-man. In my [elite schools] there will stand as a statue for worship the figure of the magnificent, self-ordaining god-man; it will prepare the young men for their coming period of ripe manhood."

-Herman Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (1939)
 

Emphasis mine.  I’d heard these words of Hitler’s first in my own youth, sitting in a junior high school history class watching a documentary produced in 1956 titled, The Twisted Cross.  I was a bookish little kid even back then, and when the scenes of Nazi mobs burning books came on screen I was completely horrified.  When the scenes of the concentraton camps came on screen later I felt that, yes, the one led right to the other.  Where books are burned, people are soon after.  But the scenes of Htiler and Himmler inspecting the ranks of young soldiers, while the narrator intoned those words from Hitler Speaks, chilled me to the bone.  My junior high school years were when I experienced the worst bullying of my life, and I didn’t have to think hard about what living in Hitler’s Third Reich was like when I heard that.  Great if you were part of the ruling thug caste…not so much if you were everyone else.  I remembered that documentary so vividly that decades later when I saw a videotape of the if for sale and took it home to watch, I was amazed at how detailed my memory of it actually was after all those years.

Maybe it really is all about penis envy. But I don’t recall any of my childhood bullies feeling their threatened manhood by me.  What I saw in their faces was contempt.  Contempt for anyone they could beat the crap out of, whether by themselves or with the help of their gang.  When you have no brains to speak of, when even a cinderblock could add 2 plus 2 more accurately then you, all you have left is brute force to live by, and for some that is the only standard of value they know for taking their measure, and everyone else’s too.  The contempt for effete intellectuals is no envy.  It really is contempt.  So what if you can grow food.  So what if you can turn dirt into steel.  So what if you can cure disease.  If I can beat the crap out of you, then I’m the better man.  Because then I can simply take everything you have.  That really is the thinking going on there.

And never mind that no amount of force, no advantage in weapons, no military superiority ever gave a single penny’s worth of value to a dollar.  The criminal mindset, unable to distinguish between creating wealth and stealing it, regards all creation as theft, all theft as creation.  All that matters in the end, is can you take it away from someone else.  If you can, then it’s rightfully yours.  If the other guy can’t hold onto it, then it was never his to begin with.  Might makes right.  Any other standard of morality is literally incomprehensible to them.  When you’re too stupid to know how modern civilization really works, you’re also too stupid to know it.

That is the essential fascist mindset.  When you hear some moron babbling on and on about…

• The feminization of males
• Effete Intellectualism
• Military glory

…all rolled together in one tightly packed little ball of bitterness, you can be pretty sure of what you’re dealing with.  What dimwits like Du Toit and all the other right wing kultar kampfers think they’re selling America is this…

…but what what you always get is this:

There’s what not deterring young men from expressing "the instinct of the savage" gets you, right there.  Look at it.  There’s your savage manly man’s promise land.

At least Fox doesn’t own nearly all the TV stations in most places.  But in many parts of the country, a Clear Channel radio station in one format or another is all you get.

When the republicans set out to abolish FCC media monopoly rules, many people warned that it would lead to a stifling of variety on the airwaves.  Sure enough, only those of us who can afford now to have a satellite radio in the car can get something approximating the breadth that was once there to be found on the radio dial.  Clear Channel has single handedly killed radio for most of us.  But it would be a mistake to think that it’s just about peddling junk music to the lowest common denominator for profit.  Oh, no.  Consider the new Bruce Springsteen album, Magic, which has been a hit just about everywhere…except on radio for some strange reason.  Fox News attempts to spin it thusly…

Bruce: Magic Refused Radio Play

Bruce Springsteen should be very happy. He has the No. 1 album, a possible Grammy for Best Album of the Year for "Magic," an album full of singles and a sold-out concert tour.

Alas, there’s a hitch: Radio will not play "Magic." In fact, sources tell me that Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from "Magic." But it’s OK to play old Springsteen tracks such as "Dancing in the Dark," "Born to Run" and "Born in the USA."

Just no new songs by Springsteen, even though it’s likely many radio listeners already own the album and would like to hear it mixed in with the junk offered on radio.

Why? One theory, says a longtime rock insider, "is that the audience knows those songs. Of course, they’ll never know these songs if no one plays them."

"Magic," by the way, has sold more than 500,000 copies since its release on Oct. 2 and likely will hit the million mark. That’s not a small achievement these days, and one that should be embraced by Clear Channel.

But what a situation: The No. 1 album is not being played on any radio stations, according to Radio & Records, which monitors such things. Nothing. The rock songs aren’t on rock radio, and the two standout "mellow" tracks — "Magic" and "Devil’s Arcade" — aren’t even on "lite" stations.

The singles-kinda hits, "Radio Nowhere" and "Living in the Future" — which would have been hits no questions asked in the ’70s, ’80s and maybe even the ’90s, also are absent from Top 40.

No shit sherlock. Here’s the opening lyrics to Radio Nowhere…

I was tryin’ to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin’ the last lone American night

This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

I was spinnin’ ’round a dead dial
Just another lost number in a file
Dancin’ down a dark hole
Just searchin’ for a world with some soul

This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
Is there anybody alive out there?

Sound like the sort of thing your friendly neighborhood republican media monopoly wants played on Their Radio Stations???   Here’s Living In The Future…

Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray
Beneath a dirty sun, I whistled my time away
Then just about sundown
You come walkin’ through town
Your boot heels clickin’
Like the barrel of a pistol spinnin’ ’round

Don’t worry Darlin’, now baby don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet
Don’t worry Darlin’, now baby don’t you fret
We’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet

The earth it gave away, the sea rose toward the sun
I opened up my heart to you it got all damaged and undone
My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run

I’m rollin’ through town, a lost cowboy at sundown
Got my monkey on a leash, got my ear tuned to the ground
My faith’s been torn asunder, tell me is that rollin’ thunder
Or just the sinkin’ sound of somethin’ righteous goin’ under?
 

Clear Channel will play this kind of thing when hell freezes over, or President Nice Job Brownie grows a conscience, whichever comes first.  This sort of thing doesn’t fit very well into their format.  For Bruce to get any airplay on Clear Channel, he needs to be more positive.  Give the audience something like this…

 

 

The phrase "brought to you by Clear Channel" is partly cut off there, but this is what Clear Channel was splashing all over the nation’s highways after president Junior launched his excellent adventure in Iraq.  Says it all, doesn’t it?

What to do? Columbia Records is said to be readying a remixed version of "The Girls in their Summer Clothes," a poppy Beach Boys-type track that has such a catchy hook fans were singing along to it at live shows before they had the album. Bruce insiders are hopeful that with a push from Sony, "Girls" will triumph.

I’m not so sure.

Clear Channel seems to have sent a clear message to other radio outlets that at age 58, Springsteen simply is too old to be played on rock stations. This completely absurd notion is one of many ways Clear Channel has done more to destroy the music business than downloading over the last 10 years. It’s certainly what’s helped create satellite radio, where Springsteen is a staple and even has his own channel on Sirius.

It’s not just Springsteen. There is no sign at major radio stations of new albums by John Fogerty or Annie Lennox, either. The same stations that should be playing Santana’s new singles with Chad Kroeger or Tina Turner are avoiding them, too.

Like Springsteen, these "older" artists have been relegated to something called Triple A format stations — i.e. either college radio or small artsy stations such as WFUV in the Bronx, N.Y., which are immune from the Clear Channel virus of pre-programming and where the number of plays per song is a fraction of what it is on commercial radio.

Republican radio network Clear Channel, a monopoly in many cities and a dominant player in most of the rest, isn’t interested. Is it because Springsteen has been an outspoken campaigner for Democrats and progressives? Clear Channel has taken a political stand with its programming in the past. Just think back to their boycott of the Dixie Chicks. Oh, no… not way back, just back to when they released their most recent album. Despite being one of the top 10 best-selling American albums of the year– across all genres and demographics– radio studiously ignored it. There were maybe half a dozen country stations that even played it at all. What Clear Channel did to the Dixie Chicks is a watertight case for the need to break the media companies up into a thousand pieces. (John Sununu disagrees; he’s pro-censorship.) I spoke with an old friend who heads a record company and preferred to speak off the record.

"When you have artists like the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen who have overtly spoken out against this Administration, they are taken to task in spite the clear and undeniable indications from the marketplace that people want to hear their music. What seems to be happening– if sales are any kind of a barometer of what the marketplace is– is that these politically-connected radio networks like Clear Channel are not looking to succeed as radio stations as much as pushing forward some political agenda.

Another friend of mine distinctly recalls the Senate hearings on radio consolidation in light of the Dixie Chicks boycott where Barbara Boxer and John McCain heard testimony including an internal Clear Channel memo threatening "Just wait and see what happens if Springsteen tries this." I guess we’re seeing that right now.

I guess.