monchieland: a reality-based community

Welcome to post-democracy America, where "Land of the free with liberty and justice for all" is just a subversive memory in the minds of the Evil Lib-ruls.

Post-democracy America is a dark, forbidding place where our corporate and media overlords tell us who to vote for, and more importantly who to vote against, and if we don't obey, they just go to Plan B: Diebold.

Post-democracy America is not a Shining City on a Hill; it's more like Evil Empire 2 or The Fourth Reich. (Oh, and don't bring up Godwin's Law; it should've been automatically repealed on 12/12/00.)

And in New York Harbor, Lady Liberty is weeping...as well she should, since she's French.

Season's greetings from Idaho!

Just when I thought the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine couldn't possibly sink any lower, it goes ahead and greatly exceeds my expectations.

The Michelle Malkin Division of The Propaganda Machine has now targeted a 12 year old for a smear campaign.

Lemme repeat that: The Michelle Malkin Division of The Propaganda Machine has now targeted a 12 year old for a smear campaign.

The boy's sin? Why, he gave the Democratic rebuttal to the Bush regime's veto of the State Children's Health Insurance bill, explaining how this program had covered him and his sister when they were seriously injured in an auto accident.

And how do they smear him? The usual right-wing bag of dirty tricks: dishonest misrepresentations and gross distortion of facts. For example, they shriek loudly that the kid is attending an expensive private school -- and neglect to mention that a) he has a scholarship, and b) his parents only pay $500 a year in tuition, which incidentally is slightly less than my monthly health insurance premium for one individual.

There's more info about the Right-Wing Smear Machine's despicable dishonesty in this case at the above links. There simply is no depth to which the right wing will not sink, no gutter through which they will not slither.

You know, if there is justice in the afterlife, there's gotta be a special place reserved deep in the bowels of Hell for the likes of Michelle Malkin.

UPDATE: America's No. 1 Lying Liar himself, Rush Limbaugh, has now joined the smear campaign.

After a week of controversy, Iranian president and Designated Top Boogieman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is set to arrive in New York today for the United Nations General Assembly.

Ahmadinejad's request to visit the World Trade Center site while he's in town was denounced and denied last week.

Ahmadinejad currently shares Top Boogieman status with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Under the American system, Boogiemen are only designated by members of the Bush Family and their political associates. Former Top Boogiemen include the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi and jailed Panamanian General Manuel Noriega.

Some Top Boogiemen, such as Hussein and Noriega, were once associates of the Bush Family before achieving Designated Top Boogieman status.

Many of us have long been aware of the Bush regime's Orwellian use of the English language. For example, "Social Security Reform" referred to a privatization scam that would have destroyed Social Security, the "Clear Skies Initiative" allowed power companies to pollute even more, and the "Healthy Forests Initiative" helped logging companies cut down old growth trees.

Well, now the Bush apparatchiks are referring to torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- but it seems that they're not the first government to refer to torture in that manner. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers discovered that back in the good old 1930s and 1940s, the Gestapo's euphemism for torture was "verschaerfte Vernehmung"...which translates into English as, roughly, "enhanced interrogation techniques." (Sullivan checked this out, and I personally googled the phrase as well as ran it through the Alta Vista translator, where it came up as "intesified hearing.")

Given what the Bush regime has been doing the past 6 1/2 years, isn't it long past time for Godwin's Law to be repealed?

And now for something completely...uh, related...:

The always literate and insightful Digby has an interesting take on a thoroughly dishonest but (unfortunately) not disgraced "journalist":

I haven't read the book, so I won't comment on the substance. I have read [Jeff] Gerth's work before, however, and let's just say that after his "investigations" of Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee, he has a teensy tiny credibility problem. Much like his fellow NY Times reporter Judy Miller, he seems to be just a tad gullible when it comes to his wingnut sources. It would appear from early reports about the book that he hasn't learned his lesson.

Yup, that's Gerth's modus operandi: Get a hot tip from a lying, prevaricating right-wingnut, then regurgitate it into print without actually checking it out to see whether it's true or not. Also, be sure to write it up in an opaque, insinuating style that makes your target look guilty as hell without having to go to the trouble of actually providing evidence of that alleged guilt.

In an alternate universe where journalistic ethics still exist, The New York Times fired Gerth for his lack thereof somewhere around the spring or summer of 1992, soon after the first dishonest Whitewater story was written (but never published), and Gerth is now selling tube socks in the Times Square subway station.

Here's a video to commemorate a late friend, Bill B., for whom the highlight of the year in NYC was Fleet Week, which starts on Wednesday:

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on our endless hostage crisis:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

Steven Colbert delivered a really gutsy commentary on those poor, persecuted college students who were forced to watch Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth" for a science course: