Daily Kos Week in Review: The Hangover
It's hard to say what caused it (spiked eggnog? Panama Red? a few too many bowl games?) but Kossacks hit unusually high peaks of wackiness during the holidays. One actually mounted a defense of the indefensible North Korean government, while another argued that some of the most bloodthirsty left-wing dictators of the 20th century would be at home in today's GOP.
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym. Happy New Year!
Niccolo Caldararo: North Korea's just another flawed nation, like the U.S.
...While North Korea may behave in a strange fashion at times, its political history is no less responsible toward its own citizens than the history of [South Korea], especially the recent history that was dominated in the 1960s to 1980s by dictatorial regimes that practiced torture and mass arrest. While we hear of starvation and torture in North Korea, these are far less well documented than the recent history of the South. As for the nuclear weapons issue, we should also recall that the USA has been the only country to use nuclear weapons, and we used them on civilians. If the world is to be afraid of the use of these weapons by a renegade nation, one should look at the definition of the word in the context of the Bush Administration waging war in violation of international law and by the use of evidence it knew was tainted. We cannot expect a world of law and respect after such behavior...
politicjock: The rich want a medieval society, or maybe a banana republic
...[I]n America there are people, the 1%, who would have no qualms to return this country to the middle-ages or even earlier, more brutal forms of slavery...
...[M]any Americans still seem unable to accept that given the chance, the 1% will gladly turn this country into a Honduran style republic where a tiny oligarchy which controls most of the wealth uses the government and death squads as a tool to repress a population of mostly peasants. Yet, the signs of this coming reality are all around us if one only cares to look...
chaunceydevega: Obama inspires Confederate dreams
...[T]he literal white washing of the history of a traitorous Confederacy...loom[s] large in the Conservative political imagination. Those dreams are amplified and made more imminent when a black man is President of the United States, because for the populist conservative, neo-Confederate crowd, nothing could be more of an abomination...
...Adults who dress up in Colonial era period clothing, believe that the Constitution is divinely inspired, and take the metaphor of "a shining city on the hill" as a get out of jail pass for America's shortcomings both at home and abroad, have little use for such facts. Selection bias, Fox News, and an embrace of a fantastical view of political and social reality, protects the Tea Party GOP faithful from any experience of cognitive dissonance...
Jon Stafford: American exceptionalism is a stupid religion
...[I]t's no surprise that a broad swath of Americans believe in the myth of American exceptionalism. Who doesn't want to feel special? And let's face it, a large majority of Americans believe in the existence of a magical being who created the universe, so a MENSA meeting they ain't...
I imagine there are a lot of people out there who pity the poor people around the globe who lack American leadership. I bet they picture emaciated African children lying in a hut, reaching out their bony arms and gasping "America" with their dying breath. If only Obama and the Democrats would let us help these poor people!
These are the people that then-candidate Obama described not incorrectly as clinging to guns and religion. Patriotism is a religion. These people believe. They believe in America's right to rule the world, and reshape it in our glorious image. These are people who do not want any immigrants to come here, yet have no problem with US forces occupying their territory there. These are the core constituency of the Republican electorate...
plf515: Hitler, Mao were Republicans in all but name
Recently, there has been lamenting that conservatives do not have their "A-team" in the race for POTUS...
But who would be the conservative A-Team?
...[T]he current meaning [of conservatism] seems to include a few variations: 1) Anti-government 2) Pro-fundamentalist Christianity (and anti all other religions) and 3) Anti-science, anti-urban, pro-"small town" value type of thing...
The anti-intellectualism, anti-urbanism, anti-rights, nativist positions are those that were most loudly professed by Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, etc, but none of these capture the anti-government fervor. However, they were an "a-team" in that they captured whole nations...
Extremist religious views have been common in many times, but Christians who hold these views have been less successful lately. For this A-team, we have to go back a bit in time, to the likes of Torquemada [and] Cotton Mather...For modern successful groups of this ilk, we could do no better than the leaders of Saudi Arabia, who hold with one of the most extreme forms of Islam: Wahhabism...
I am not saying that any of the current crop of Republicans are the people I list above; rather, I am saying that the people I list above are the natural exemplars of Republican attitudes, only more "successful" than the current crop of Republicans are, or, I certainly hope, ever will be.
- Tom Johnson's blog
- Login to post comments
Comments
Thanks for the laugh, Tom!
Submitted by motherbelt on Sun, 01/01/2012 - 8:38am.
and a Happy New Year to you and everyone at NB!
There are none so blind as
Submitted by ant on Sun, 01/01/2012 - 11:08am.
There are none so blind as those...who call themselves liberal.
Jon Stafford is the epitome of libtarded thinking. In his view, all us evil Americans want to export our way of life, which he sees as wrong, but then says we abhor immigration. Besides being lies, does he not ask himself why immigrants want to come here? Is it easier in their minds to keep other countries people living in poverty and despair, and leave them with the hope that if they can just manage to cross the Oceans, they can escape to the freedom and liberty that the left finds so appalling? In their twisted view America sucks and we shouldn't be an example to the world, so what do they think drives immigrants to come here? Besides jihad and entitlement programs, of course.
P.S. I'd like to ask Jon if giving 100 million taxpayer $ to Hamas and now, an additional $40 million to the Palestinians counts as unduly influencing the global 'community'. All approved by Congress, BTW, throw the bums out, the R's included. Obama is not satisfied with the paltry $120 million alotted for the terrorists, however, and is asking for an additional $530 million in 2012 for the Palestinians alone. Do they love us yet?
Kos kooks!
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Sun, 01/01/2012 - 9:44am.
Wow! They claim Obama inspires racism in the conservative world, but I know the left would go hog wild if Herman Cain (or any other black conservative) had been the pick for 2012. I don't care that Obama is black, I care that his policies are hurting all Americans.
I love the one about Hitler & Mao.
Submitted by drsamherman on Sun, 01/01/2012 - 12:52pm.
Hitler was a socialist megalomaniac and Mao was a communist megalomaniac. Neither would have held to conservative, Republican ideals of free enterprise, strict constructionism for the constitution and limited government. Of course, such facts never cloud the mind of a Kossack. It still amazes me as a physician that Kossacks manage to function with such critical anencephaly.
The amoral equivocation between North Korea and the United States is fully delusional. North Korea has a documented history of placing those of its citizens who displease its government into labor camps, often destroying entire families. They have also kidnapped Japanese citizens and thrown them into slavery in North Korea in an effort to provide some genetic diversity and population growth. You will note there are a few good studies published on the epidemiology of the North Korean population being shorter and having multiple health problems due to hunger and lack of nutrients. A similar study was made of various European nations following World War II, the most famous being the babies and children who survived the great starvation in the Netherlands being the shortest generation on record for that country. To engage in such morally bankrupt equivocation makes it clear to me that if the poster finds the US to be so offensive, he should be sent to live in the communist worker's paradise of North Korea. I would give him two days before he is crawling under his bed and crying "mommy!" in the fetal position.
Chauncey, as usual, hauls out the term cognitive dissonance. Of course, Chauncey probably picked up the term while his therapist used it to describe his problems and he transferred it to Republicans and conservatives. Chauncey also seems more than obsessed with the Civil War and those who participate in re-enactments of battles. Perhaps he was denied a set of Lincoln Logs when he was a kid and he never got over it. Or perhaps his Zoloft and Seroquel need some upward dosing adjustments.
Jon-Jon's polemic stands on its own lack of merit. He must be a fun guy at parties, more than likely the kind that won't stop obsessing over politics and compelled to spew out the latest DNC/DKos/DU/Media Matters sewage like a human voice recorder. Of course, it never enters his small brain to question any of what he is told and his tiny brain has been wiped of any initiative to actually read anything other than the current leftist manifestos.
Good selection this week. The Kossacks' observations read like the interviews for some of my more deluded patients.
So nice to see that there's a
Submitted by rbosque on Sun, 01/01/2012 - 3:50pm.
So nice to see that there's a website for morons to go to and spew their stupidity. See? There's a website for everybody!
Funny to see anti-Capitalists use the fruits of Capitalism to demonstrate to everyone how "Capitalism doesn't work".
Just my two cents...
Submitted by LinTaylor on Mon, 01/02/2012 - 6:03am.
I just wanted to remark on the twaddle put out by Chauncey. You see, my parents are big Civil War buffs, as well as history and genealogy buffs. For years they were members of groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, hanging out with like-minded people, just having fun. They never denied that the South did some terrible things back then (though they would often counter by pointing out all the things the North did that tend not to get reported, like Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus), but they weren't about to spend their meeting wringing their hands over how horrid their forebears were for holding slaves and the like.
That's the problem - you aren't allowed to look back at the past with any degree of pride or nostalgia anymore. You can't admire the Founding Fathers without some liberal apologist whinging about how Jefferson raped his slaves, or how Franklin was a horny old goat. Try to honor the Greatest Generation for their service to the country and the world, and inevitably someone will chime in and rub our faces in things like internment camps for Japanese-Americans or the ongoing racial strife.
In the end, I think that's the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are all about pride - being proud of your heritage, your country, your religion, and so forth. We aren't so proud that we don't recognize our mistakes, but try to learn from them and grow as people. Liberals, however, are all about shame. To them, everything that ever happened is so horrible that we might as well kill ourselves right now, but in the meantime they can try to relieve the pain by lashing out at those Re-Smug-Lican S.O.B.s who have the AUDACITY to not be ashamed. That's why they're so eager to give their money to a common pool and to abandon their sense of self in favor of a faceless, heartless Big Brother: they hate themselves for existing and want to fade into a collective identity so maybe they won't feel quite so bad all the time.