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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
- mazel tov to @bluenatic and @grandstreet on the birth of their baby girl 2 weeks ago
- RT @JTownCrier: Tropper? Kolko? Margulies? Balkany? Dwek? Rubashkin? NO. Moetzes Gedolei Torah condemn AVI WEISS as more offensive. 2 weeks ago
- Rorschach from Watchmen is the new Freddy Krueger http://bit.ly/7s61Cj 2 weeks ago
- More updates...
NY Post's Unabashed Unamericanism Masquerading as Patriotism
Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post says that the laws restricting federal wiretapping are now responsible for the death of an American serviceman in Iraq.
You hear that America? The Constitution is killing our soldiers!
In order to protect the freedoms granted by our Constitution, we must eviscerate the Constitution!
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the American Der Stürmer.
[Update] Fine. I overreacted.
I was upset.
Today I watched Rudy Giuliani speak at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention in DC and I seriously think I burst a blood vessel in my head.
Giuliani was decrying how Obama had said that he would meet with dictators like Ahmadinejad without any preconditions. Giuliani said that after Obama caught flack for those remarks, Obama said that Reagan had done the same with the Soviet Union. Giuliani retorted, ‘I hate to break it to ya, but you’re not Reagan.’ (As if that were a bad thing.) To which the audience roared with laughter, of course. Giuliani then said, ‘You know how Reagan negotiated? He put missiles in every major European city pointed at the USSR, with a town’s name on every missile. Then he said to the Communists, Let’s talk.’ The crowd erupted with thunderous applause and howls of approval.
I wanted to throw up.
A room filled with rich, Republican Jews. Jews who buy recess appointment ambassadorships. Jews who have dumped millions into projects like Freedom’s Watch and Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. Jews that bankrolled Bush’s presidential bids.
Jews that daven the same tefillah as me. Jews that share the same heritage as me. Jews that inherit the same values as me. Jews that share a covenant with me–
Smugly cheering the idea of stuffing missiles in people’s faces.
And coming from the mouth of the man who turned NYC into the world’s largest stripmall.
Uch–just thinking about it makes me want to retch all over again.
…And then The Post.
What can I say about a newspaper that’s conspiring to steal my rights? Or about yellow journalism in the age of media transparency? I saw three people reading The Post within a single eyeshot on the train this afternoon and wanted to call them out all at once and ask them why they hate America.
I’m boycotting MySpace and all Newscorp properties. After this post, I’m deleting my profiles. And I’m not going to watch The Simpsons anymore. It sucks now anyway.
It’s a sad age when conservative pundits can call liberals Nazis from their bully pulpits day-in-day-out, but if I draw an apt comparison between the fragility of American democracy and that of Germany’s democracy on the brink of its transformation into Nazihood, I purportedly lose all credibility.
But I suppose that’s all right. I’m just stooping to their level, you know, mentioning Nazis and all.
You gotta understand though — as a grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, I grew up in a house where the lingua franca was the Holocaust. This one’s a Nazi. That one’s a Nazi. Everyone’s a Nazi. Drive a Mercedes? Nazi. Wear Abercrombie & Fitch? Nazi. Threaten Israel? Nazi. Use the threat of terrorism as a pretext to curtail my civil liberties and launch an endless war that stuffs full the pockets of your benefactors? Nazi.
You can say it cheapens the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, but frankly I think that’s a bunch of bullshit. There’s a Holocaust-scale genocide in Congo nearly every five years. 3,800,000 died in 1998 alone. There’s nothing unique to the way we were demonized and destroyed. One day we’re friendly neighbors, the next we’re soap. Welcome to Africa. Yugoslavia. America, from Plymouth Rock to Wounded Knee. Enough.
Militant Zionists will tell you that the lesson of the Holocaust is that when a politician says he intends to kill Jews, you should believe him. And perhaps that’s so. So they stand outside Columbia, protesting the notion of open discourse, academic freedom, and the essence of freedom of speech its very self, carrying placards bearing an image of Ahmadinejad contorted into a swastika.
(Image by Eli Valley)
But perhaps there is a greater lesson to be learned from the Holocaust:
Never give your government the rope to hang you with.
And that is not just the lesson of the Holocaust. It is the credo of the founding fathers of these United States.
And these RJC motherfuckers, and their ilk at Newscorp, and in the friggin’ Congress? They either don’t get it… Or they get it and they willingly ignore it.
And I just can’t stomach it no more.
Tags: 4th amendment, civil liberties, jingoism, Media, politics, propaganda
Dan, as much as I can understand your concern, please don’t get yourself into trouble with comparisons like the above…
yes, i will get myself into trouble by making accurate comparisons that the jewish right has denounced as off-limits, except when applied to democrats, palestinians, and mahmoud ahmadinejad
I understand your point, but, as my bf used to ask me, “Must you be so blunt all the time?”
If your wife or child were taken and a wiretap might aid in recovering them, would you say no if asked permission? Is a wiretap the same as torture?
Josef, suppose your question compares to the on-going debate over here in Central Europe whether death penalty should be re-installed for child molestors; as a colleague of mine put it, “I detest death penalty by any means based on my political and philosophical views, yet I know that if anybody laid hands on my son, I’d kill that person, but I would never want any state to kill anybody on behalf of me”.
fisa oversight insures a) that the government is provided the ability to wiretap in order to investigate crimes or to conduct intelligence gathering for the sake of national security, b) that the government doesn’t abuse its surveillance powers in order to violate the rights of citizens or to conduct espionage against political opponents.
while it’s alleged that, in this case, it took 10 hours to get authorization to wiretap, the fisa provisions already allow the government to begin a tap and retroactively get approval for that tap. in fact, the legislation recently passed by congress — legislation that was supposed to reign in the actions of an overzealous administration — ended up providing even more powers to the president than he had already abused. it was a major letdown for many who voted democratic in the last cycle expecting follow through from a party that campaigned on eliminating the so-called “rubber stamp” congress.
and yet as though that weren’t enough, the post’s article promotes the elimination of fisa oversight entirely. which means that this isn’t about stopping criminals and terrorists. this is about giving the government the power to tap whoever they want, whenever they want, without any oversight or accountability.
and it’s fascist bullshit.
Pretty much what “fasces” means in Latin…
BTW, Dan, I’m glad you did some editing.
I hate to be a jerk, but it’s Reagan.
Other than that, Dan, a-friggin’-men. To paraphrase Vince Vaughn on this one, you’re so right and you don’t even know it.
Sorry, to tired to reply in detail (went here http://www.konstantin-ausstellung.de today), but maybe it’s growing up in Germany that makes me feel there needs to be drawn at least a semantic line between Nazis and fascism / political arbitrariness from other sources.
oyy,, this world is nasty out there, … the only sanctuary is either WAY out there (desert style) or way in here, (place of heart and soul)…
I’m glad I got taken out of the political system to which I was attached and so retchedly disgusted by long ago, to join a system perhaps as corrupted (or more so) but somehow— I don’t have the 20 year build up of bile waiting to billow out each time I hear about the next best shanda… though I better pray those days don’t come any sooner….
i think the most important lesson, was taught to us at the end of zeitgeist– ultimately, we need to be empowered to live our life, and feel the power we are each endowed with- live for the very real reality of those people directly around us and support each other as the people behind the dollar bills run their asinine policies through our consciosnesses..
thanks for listening.. it’s gonna be another partly cloudy day tomorrow– (lightning storm in jerusalem tonight— awesome
Mobius reads the Pooooost, Mobius reads the Pooooost.
thanks for calling spades, spades. The first tool of silencing opposition is the declaiming of legitamacy.
May Hashem save us from ourselves.
“Or about yellow journalism in the age of media transparency?”
Media transparency? You’ve got to be kidding. Define that for me please.
the age of media transparency — an age where, a) due to the public’s access to the means of creating mass-media (blogs, podcasts, viral video), the public is more informed and aware of the manner in which news is created, packaged, and distributed, and the processes underlying that work; b) due to the constant “fisking” by bloggers of mainstream media sources, readers are more aware of the manner in which stories are shaped in order to promote a specific viewpoint or agenda.
[...] anarchist silliness I’m not big on, usually puts out good writing, and his latest (right here) raises several points from his own personal perspective, as a balanced commentator and as a [...]
Update: You didn’t overreact, other than your blatant flouting of Godwin’s Law.
Disgusting how they’re exploiting the young grunt’s situation and disgracing the very basis of his service – as per his oath.
uhhh……OK
[...] I felt a little scared reading this. Whatever the impact, this is yet another reason to hate the Post, I [...]