Snarky the Rabid Marmoset reminds you …

Yeah, I’m just angry at these morons, these eliminationists, these couch-potato secessionists and their unending war of hate, aided and abetted by the “public” airwaves, sold long ago to weasels and lampreys. But when everything I want to say today was written nearly a year ago, by me, about these same parasites, and nothing has changed, and the news has only changed in the specifics but not the essential facts, then the only thing I can do is reprint it, because, babies, it ain’t aged a dadburned day.

Alas.

23 MARCH 2009…1:44 PM

The Legion of Flying Turds

1. The Legion of Flying Turds Origin Issue!

Because the Legion of Doom was already taken. Same idea, but with significantly more malice and significantly less chutzpah. And yet, the Legion of Flying Turds share with various fictional super-villain confabulations that Prime Directive: they want to take over the world.

Think about it. Because it’s nothing less than that. They want the USA to be NUMBER ONE for all of history (forgetting that it wasn’t until the Spanish American War, or, some would argue, the First World War that the United States were seen as a world power of any sort). And they want to rule the USA. Their cockamamie ideas — ideologies never actually field-tested in the real world of human experience — are supposed to be the guiding principles, or they’ll “go Galt” and hold historically dyslexic “Tea Parties.” Ooo0h.

We’re going to bankrupt this country! they screech, most recently, Judd Gregg, (Asshat, New Hampshire), whom I’m beginning to believe was a plant, frankly, a bluff that Gregg wouldn’t ACTUALLY be considered, to “prove” that Obama couldn’t REALLY be bipartisan, because, you know, the malevolent, the malign and the just plain garden variety selfish greedy bastards (whose evil proceeds inadvertently from their credo of “always look out for #1″) — those types can NEVER understand a motivation that transcends simple toddler-style self-interest.

Mohammed wrote in the Koran (I’m paraphrasing here) a very wise observation of human nature: More evil is done by fools in the name of foolishness than is done by the malevolent in the name of evil.

The banality of “evil” lies in that simple, oh, so simple assumption about life: I am the star of this movie, and the rest of you are just bit players. You can see it most purely expressed by the toddler, to whom everything is MINE! MINE!

I’ve heard it from a thousand three-year-olds (the “terrible twos” ought to be followed with the equally descriptive term, the “tyrannical threes.”)

The Legion of Flying Turds doesn’t see you as being “real” — you’re just a bit player in the grand drama of their glorious and all-important lives. Their manners are merely the means to an end. They aren’t necessarily stupid in the purely academic sense.

They are only stupid in the cosmic sense: The Legion of Flying Turds is so intent on grabbing the tiller of the Ship of State that they would rather wreck it on the shoals of depression, recession, war, famine (see Katrina and Iowa), pestilence (witness the Reagan Administration’s long ignoring of the AIDS epidemic that was clearly rising by alarming degrees) and the rest.

You don’t freeze and starve to death because the Legion of Flying Turds wants you to: it’s because you were never a person to them. You were never REAL to them.

That’s what happens, and increasingly, through the “virtual” world of internet and media (which are merging) that’s what’s easier and easier for the Legionnaires. Y0u aren’t real to them. Therefore your problems, no matter how terrible, are YOUR problem and YOUR fault.

“YOUR MORTGAGE IS NOT MY PROBLEM.”

Why should I have to pay for health care for some fatass welfare bum who’s living off of MY TAX DOLLARS and living the Life of Riley while I WORK MY FINGERS TO THE BONE??!?

they grouse.

Right.

You are not real to them. Your contribution to the amazing ant hill that provides them with flat screen TVs, home theaters, internet hookups, high-speed wireless laptops, blackberries, iPhones, iPods and hybrid cars with GPS and surround sound … well, that shit all shows up magically doesn’t it?

It’s so self-centered that enlightened self-interest is as far from it ethically as a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa is.

Or it shows up because Super Genius Bill Gates OR Steve Jobs (this is a religious quarrel in which I have steadfastly refused to participate, the “virtuous” Mac versus the “evil” PC, or, the “snobby” Mac versus the “humble” PC — I’d much rather argue over the best and noblest astrological sign — after Sagittarius, of course, which is indisputably the smartest, funniest, bravest and best, obviously), the “goodies” show up because some Ayn Rand superman MADE them.

To suck from the teat of a society that one does not acknowledge is quite a feat. Even better is to piss on that same society while holding up the noble purpose of “the good of society” as the reason for the pissing.

THAT is “trickle down” economics, after all. You give the mouse a lot of cheese and base your economic policy on the sure knowledge that he’ll distribute it to all the other mice as a natural consequence of his ennobled and enlightened mousiness.

And you’ll note that the Legion of Flying Turds has never repudiated that Trickle Down snake oil cure-all that old Colonel RayGun’s Travelling Minstrel and Medicine Show sold with such great success.

Success, that is, for the Medicine Show, but not for those partaking of the magical elixir.

Perhaps you noticed that every time they look for job losses or bad economic figures it’s “the worst since 1985″ or “the worst since 1983.”

(Funny how nobody ever seems to mention who was in the White House during those terrible times that we haven’t seen since — until now.)

The idea that we are all in this enterprise together, or, as Ben Franklin put it: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” and in our first Political Cartoon: Join or Die.

The very people holding “Tea Parties” are those who have no comprehension of what Franklin’s message was and is.

The very greedheads who have looted our treasury since Reagan, and unleashed at least five wars of choice (Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, The Afghan War and Occupation, The Iraq War and Occupation), who have run up the largest deficits in the history of civilization, and overseen not just ONE banking collapse brought on by deregulating all those Depression Era banking reforms and oversights, but TWO such collapses, the worst of which we’re in … those very greedheads are suddenly worried about “fiscal responsibility” and “bankrupting” our country?

Uh, but they are the least sympathetic to the insane, overwhelming and staggering number of foreclosures happening each and every day? And three more banks collapsed this weekend, bringing the grand total for this year to an even twenty. Who did they think that this country WAS that was going to be bankrupted?

The country of the Legion of Flying Turds?

“Flying Turds” because, you know, they don’t actually set down on terra firma,but float (their shit don’t stink, you know) above it all, their delicate roseate scent efflorescing throughout the region that they have deigned to grace with their magisterial presence.

And “Turds” because that’s the politest term available for what they actually are.

In the body, they would be a cancer: cells that wildly grab every nutrient that they can, growing wildly without providing any service to the body itself, finally either cut or burned out with knives, chemicals and radiation, or else they kill the host, because, while they are OF the body, cancer cells are, finally, alien to the body. “Malignant” they call clots of them. Tumors.

In the body politic, I choose to call them the Legion of Flying Turds.

2. The Legion Flies to the Aid of Their Fellow Turds

“It’s MY money! It’s MINE! It’s MINE!” Legionnaire Bill O’Reilly screamed over Molly Ivins and Pat Schroeder at Al Franken at the Los Angeles Book Expo in 2003.

Anyone who’s ever been around a particularly vicious three year old knows that cry. If they’ve been around a “mother’s little precious” (the kind that can do NO wrong), it chills the blood, inflected properly.

We are not real to them: that is the reason that families are being thrown out on the streets. That is the reason that their abandoned pets roam the deserted neighborhoods of American cities. That is the reason that they scream their pique at “Tea Parties” frantically and fervently pushed by The Legionnaires themselves.

That is the tragedy and your doom if you are unlucky: you are not REAL to them. They care about you only for your utility to their arguments, just as the six million Jews of the Holocaust only matter to those who invoke them rhetorically to make points, without once considering the six million non-Jews killed in the selfsame death camps, by the selfsame butchers.

And, to those butchers, those twelve million weren’t real, either.

That was the “banality of evil” in Eichmann that Hannah Arendt coined, reporting on Eichmann’s trial:

… Arendt concluded that, aside from a desire for improving his career, Eichmann showed no trace of an antisemitic personality or of any psychological damage to his character. She called him the embodiment of the “Banality of Evil“, as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi criminals were manifestly psychopathic and different from ordinary people.

And it was that same coinage that Ward Churchill invoked, talking about how many CIA front and Defense Department offices, how many firms acting in concert with them overseas were IN the Twin Towers in New York City on 9-11, which came out, when rephrased through the megaphone of The Legion of Flying Turds as “that libberul leftist fancypants college perfesser Ward Churchill called them patriotic Americans what died on Nahn-Uh-Lebbin NAZIS!”

Because, as those Eichmann was charged with exterminating were never real to him, so, too, Churchill and Churchill’s right to free speech, and the observation that we MIGHT JUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO PISS OFF the 9-11 bombers, well, that was never real. Just a thought and a thinker and speech and the speaker that needed to be exterminated, as well.

That is the banality of evil, and The Flying Legion of Turds has it in abundance.

3. Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts

Which brings us, by commodius vicus of recirculation to the focus of this essay written on the bathroom wall of American history:

They are simply attacking mindlessly, and their method is clear: create an utter shitstorm of endless and mindless snark that silences all rational debate, a wall of “brown noise” if you will.

The last week has been wearying, just trying to keep up with the endless whining, puling, simpering, “gotcha!” “told ya so!” snarking, sniping, and schnooking aimed at stopping all meaningful government action, period.

Worse, every day it turns out to have been based on an outright lie. I don’t even bother reading it anymore, because I already know it’s a lie, and I’m not wasting my time debating facts with them that don’t believe in no steeenking facts.

Because not only aren’t WE real to The Legion of Flying Turds, REALITY ITSELF isn’t real to the brave Legionnaires.

Oh, sure, we used to joke about “fact based reality” and the like, but it was never quite serious criticism. They lied a lot, but like any successful con artist, there was always a little nugget of truth, no matter how buried in the byzantine arabesques of Turdlike Thought and Rationalization. It was never quite serious criticism; now the criticism needs to be quite serious.

This is the intellectual equivalent of jamming the radar defenses of an opponent’s ship or plane.

But[t] soft: this was written in the wee hours of the morning on the West Coast. Over one a sleep cycle, the Legionnaires have thoughtlessly provided ample exemplars of their handiwork.

This weekend, the Legion of Flying Turds dressed in formal flying monkey regalia to shriek this story through the blogosphere (keeping in tune with the latest GOP strategem: paint Obama as ineloquent, boring, stupid, and “just an entertainer”) 10AM EST Today (click here for the links):

Gateway Pundit: Obama Upsets Sarkozy With Letter to Jacques Chirac  —  In his latest faux pas Obama managed to pi$$ off France…  President Obama wrote Jacques Chirac saying he was looking forward to working with the former French president in the coming four years(?)  —  Monsters and Critics reported:

Discussion:
Ed Morrissey / Hot Air:   Winning friends internationally again
Right Wing News: Obama’s Failed Diplomacy
Erick Erickson / RedState: Morning Briefing for March 23, 2009
Don Surber: 63rd day, 66th mistake
Jim Lindgren / The Volokh Conspiracy: Obama Snubs Sarkozy By Writing to Chirac.  According to the …
But As For Me: Obama Hacks Off France In Latest Foreign Policy Blunder
Jules Crittenden: So We Finally Get A French President Who’s More Or Less Onside*
neo-neocon: Obama can see Chirac from his house!
Jimmie / The Sundries Shack: Diplomacy With A Blunt Object
Confederate Yankee: Bestest President Evah**

[* This guy's a newspaper reporter and editor! Must've gone to the Andrew Malcolm GOP School of Journalism]

[** a/k/a "Butt Plug Bob"]

But, as usual, as ALWAYS it was a fraud and a misrepresentation. (I don’t even bother reading most of this stuff anymore, and I never believe it when I do. So far I’m batting 1.000.) From the Christian Science Monitor also today [emphasis added]:

Obama writes letter to Chirac – blogosphere goes crazy
By Jimmy Orr | 03.23.09

Want to know how quickly rumors get spread on the Internet? Here’s a prime example.

The right side of the web is apoplectic this morning claiming that President Obama doesn’t know who the French president is.

They point to an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro reporting that President Obama last week wrote a letter to former French President Jacques Chirac.

“I am certain that we will be able to work together, in the coming four years, in a spirit of peace and friendship to build a safer world,” Obama is purported to have written.

Wrong guy

This has electrified the Internet. Why would President Obama initiate correspondence with Mr. Chirac instead of President Nicolas Sarkozy?

One excited blogger writes, “Doesn’t Obama ever consult his staff before acting? Sarkozy is the President there! It’s like Sarko writing to George Bush and saying he looks forward to working with him. Chirac is the FORMER president.”

That’s a good heads up. But let’s dig a little deeper.

French-speaking pal

Our handy colleague, Laurent Belsie, who writes the New Economy blog here at the Monitor, speaks French.  (We don’t hold that against him.)

With his help we found out that another French newspaper, the New Observer, explained that Obama was merely replying to a Chirac letter who was writing him as the head of his foundation — the Jacques Chirac Foundation for sustainable development and cultural dialogue.

The foundation is promoting access to water and medicines in west Africa, combating deforestation in the Congo Basin, and trying to save dying languages in Polynesia, according to a spokesman who helped set up the foundation….

They don’t really believe that you are real, because they’d probably never try to pull a sleazy lie this transparent on anyone they actually know. No: I take that back. No one is real to The Legion of Flying Turds except themselves INDIVIDUALLY. Selfishness made manifest, an endless need to triumph in the ideological battle coupled with a seemingly instantaneous amnesia that they had just been supporting the sins they now accuse others of. What was this lie? A “George Dubya” moment of saying or doing something stoopid.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the leitmotif of stealing EVERY lampooning (rightful, to be fair) of Dubya: , from Mad Magazine, to idiotic gaffes, and almost randomly ascribing them to Obama, not because they’re politically germane as satire, but because they HAVE to get even, an eye for an eye.

Which perhaps explains why the patron saint of The Legion of Flying Turds is Mr. Magoo.

Or take this thrilling moment as the Fox News stalks the henhouse:

This weekend, while on vacation, I was ambushed by O’Reilly’s top hit man, producer Jesse Watters, who accosted me on the street and told me that because I highlighted O’Reilly’s comments, I was causing “pain and suffering” to rape victims and their families. He of course offered no proof to back up this claim, instead choosing to shout questions at me.

I expect O’Reilly to air this “interview” at some point this week, possibly as early as tonight. I have no expectation that he will show the entire altercation or give the entire story about what happened, so here is the full account, offering a glimpse inside the O’Reilly harassment machine:

– The Stalking: Watters and his camera man accosted me at approximately 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, in Winchester, VA, which is a two-hour drive from Washington, DC. My friend and I were in this small town for a short weekend vacation and had told no one about where we were going. I can only infer that the two men staked out my apartment and then followed me for two hours. Looking back, my friend and I remember seeing their tan SUV following us for much of the trip.

– The Ambush: Shortly after checking into our lodgings, we emerged and immediately saw two men walking toward us calling out my name. Watters said he was from Fox News, but never said his or his companion’s name, nor did he say he was with The O’Reilly Factor.

– The Surprise Attack: Watters immediately began asking me why I was causing “pain and suffering” to the Alexa Foundation. He never gave me the context for his questions. Confused, I repeatedly asked him what he was talking about and whether he could refresh my memory, but he just continued shouting his question.

– The Evasion: I said that it was inappropriate for O’Reilly to imply that just because a woman may be drunk and/or dressed in a certain way, she should expect to be raped. Watters asked me whether I had listened to the interview (which I had) and claimed that O’Reilly had made the comments in the context of a commentary on Mel Gibson/drunkenness. When I tried to ascertain why he was attacking ThinkProgress in particular — even though other sites had also covered the story — he said that we were part of the “smear pipeline,” which also included the “Soros-funded” Media Matters. He ignored my comments when I asked if Fox News also smears people….

That’s from Amanda Terkel, of ThinkProgress, who says “I’m a 5 ft, 100 pound woman” being chased by Fox Goons with a heavy camera and bludgeon-like microphones on behalf of “It’s MINE! It’s MINE!” Bill O’Reilly (of whose life, we are all merely bit players in):

I Was Followed, Harassed, And Ambushed By Bill O’Reilly’s Producer
By Amanda Terkel at 10:35 am | 23 MAR 2009

And it’s every single solitary day like this.

Here’s a photo of Terkel:

Here’s Fox Nooz’s Watters (minus cameraman):

I don’t know about you, but if I were a very petite woman in a strange town being followed by a couple of aggressive thugs with a camera and microphones, who’d tailed me for miles, I’d probably be intimidated as hell.

It borders on domestic violence, without any hint of domesticity.

Because Amanda Terkel isn’t real to Bill O’Reilly. None of us are, and that’s what’s so dangerous about these jerks. They need to be bitch-slapped (or maybe waterboarded) back into a recognition of the body itself. As it stands, they are, quite literally, a cancer on our nation and a tumor in the Republic for which they claim hypocritically to stand, even as they strangle it in a Norquistian bathtub of selfish, self-centered intolerance and greed.

And I don’t know what we must do about The Legion of Flying Turds, but I know that something MUST be done.

And, uh, aren’t these the same people who were saying that disagreement with the Presidunce in Time Of War was Tantamount to Treason?

Oh.

Courage.