A suspect has been arrested in the Wisconsin terrorism case involving a bomb set off in a Planned Parenthood case. Francis Grady is facing federal charges. A couple of things that are important to keep in mind about this case and this suspect.
1) Profiles in terrorism. Because there's an allergy in the mainstream media to labeling terrorist acts committed by anyone other than Muslim men as what it is---terrorism---important information about the profile of a terrorist tends to go unlearned. Grady is a middle-aged white man. To those who observe anti-choice terrorism closely, this is roughly the least surprising news ever, and not just because of prior incidents of anti-choice terrorism. It's also because the bulk of the men having public conniption fits about women being sexually active are middle-aged white men. There's a sprinkling of women in there, but by and large, the people who are on the radio screeching about how women who use contraception are "sluts", who convene and sit on congressional panels about how contraception is the end of "religious liberty", who pass laws restricting abortion while making speeches comparing women to farm animals, who melt down on Fox News at the very idea that family planning clinics continue to exist, who try to eliminate all funding for contraception on the state and federal level, and who run for President while talking about the evils of contraception or why we need to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood? Middle-aged white men. For some reason, middle-aged white men in our culture are encouraged to take their generalized frustrations in life and dump all that anger on women who dare have sex with someone else without paying an enormous and unnecessary penalty for it. But because of the tendency to only label Muslim terrrorism as "terrorism", this phenomenon gets under-analyzed. There's been a lot of ink spilled about young men and terrorism, because of Muslim terrorism, but the profile of an American terrorist is one where he's just as, if not more, likely to be middle-aged.
2) Grady is proud of himself. Getting the suspect to confess was no problem at all, it seems, since he's gloating about how awesome he is.
Francis Grady, 50, spoke to reporters who were covering his first appearance in federal court since the Sunday night attack. The Green Bay Press-Gazette posted video of him walking through the courthouse followed by a short clip of him speaking to reporters outside.
"There was no bomb," Grady said. "It was gasoline."
A reporter asked why Grady attacked the clinic.
"Because they're killing babies there," he responded.
The newspaper also got more from inside the federal courtroom, where Grady reportedly interrupted the judge to ask, "“Do you even care at all about the 1,000 babies that died screaming?"
Obviously, this is classic anti-choice delusion. They've convinced themselves embryos are "babies", and so it's not much of a leap to suggest that they therefore "scream", even though they have no mouths, lungs, or throats to scream, or brains that would compel this action. But we all know this isn't about "babies", so much as abortion and reproductive rights generally being a scapegoat for anger at declining male privilege and women's expanding opportunities.
Because of the aforementioned angry, middle-aged white men denouncing women's rights from TV and radio, from the halls of Congress to the presidential campaign, are we surprised that an anti-choice terrorist would get it in his head that he's a hero with widespread social support? Are we surprised that he's bragging about his crime instead of recoiling in shame? He probably thinks the Republican presidential candidates who were in the state campaigning when Grady set this bomb off are watching this on TV and approving of him.
The mealy-mouthed unwillingness to take anti-choice terrorism seriously is a large part of the problem. It's not called "terrorism". Conservatives offer half-hearted denunciations, but then immediately turn around and continue to offer support for the narratives that create terrorism, such as claiming that nearly every woman in America is out of line for using her access points to health care---whether it's private insurance or government programs to fill the gaps---to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Or claiming that the 1 in 3 American women who have abortions are murderers. As long as it's socially acceptable for men to be angry about women's bid for equality, and as long as that anger continues to be channeled into hatred for reproductive rights, some of the angry dudes are going to turn violent. Mild denunciations of crossing the line aren't enough. Anyone who continues to support the narrative that forced child-bearing is an appropriate social control placed on women is responsible for this.
Back online, and stoked about it! I’ve been interested in this story for a couple of days, but haven’t been able to blog about it: a man was arrested in Dearborn, Michigan for attempting to blow up a mosque, and this time there is no wriggling out of the fact that the would-be terrorist is a classic teabagger. Nor is there wriggling out of the fact that Dearborn has long been a town that wingnuts use for propaganda purposes. During the campaign, Sharron Angle claimed Dearborn was ruled by sharia law. In reality, it just has a lot of Muslim residents.
I’ve been too busy to read much these past couple of days, so maybe you can tell me how right wingers are trying to wriggle out of this. Mostly, it seems they don’t have to, since the mainstream media has decided to pretend there is no such thing as domestic terrorism, because every time you actually pay attention to instances of it, the whining and crying and lamentations of victimhood from the people who say the sorts of things that make would-be terrorists feel self-assured is so shrill. I did find Conor Friedersdorf—-who I occasionally find cause to respect only to have something like this happen, which makes me lose it all—-trotting out what appears to be the standard minimization line. He’s noting that the explosives weren’t that explosive-y—-they were fireworks, basically—-and that the guy was, sigh, “crazy”.
Both of these excuses are full-blown bullshit. It’s super duper great the guy didn’t have the wherewithal to get better explosives, but the next guy—-or the last guy that attempted to attack the MLK Day parade—-just has to get in touch with his local militia to get whatever he wants. Or he could skip the explosives and just buy a bunch of powerful guns and open fire on a crowd. To point to the fireworks is to imply there’s controls on what kind of access people in this mindset have to dangerous weapons, that’s just a lie, if only by implication. The “crazy” gambit is bullshit for a couple of reasons. The big one is the “So?” reason. So what if he’s crazy? That just makes it worse—-people like Sharron Angle are out there, talking up paranoid fantasies, and they know there are crazy people out there who are going to take them seriously. The fact of “crazy” just means you have more, not less responsibility not to spout paranoid lies.
Also, I’m really concerned that “crazy” is getting defined down rapidly, from potential schizophrenia to a situation where someone who does something terrorism-related will get called “crazy” for pretty much anything, letting the right off the hook for their constant stream of paranoia. The problem with that is that mental illness is like the common cold—-almost everyone has a touch of it—-so they’ve created a neat little loophole where there is no such thing as a terrorist action, no matter how neatly it ties into paranoid wingnuttery, that will actually “count”. Hey, the guy felt blue after his divorce. That’s a history of depression, so ignore what he actually did and shake your head in rue that there’s nothing that can be done.
I read the article that Conor used to minimize right wing responsibility here, and it does nothing of the sort. While Roger Stockham had a long history of mental health problems, his history of acting out is mostly to completely related to being a patriarchal-minded, entitled wingnutty guy. He’s done it all: kidnapped his own child (which is the outer limit of the “fathers rights” assholery), harassed a woman that was at the VFW with him for having a black boyfriend (there’s probably more to that story, though who knows?), and tried to kill a bunch of people so he could blame it on Muslims. The man had a lifelong obsession with racist beliefs. Yet, he chose to act within a few months of anti-Muslim sentiment—-especially by a politician in his area (his previous violence was all in the Nevada/California area) targeting Dearborn specifically—-had reached a fever pitch in the run-up to the election. Coincidence? I’m skeptical.
I’m also fully expecting this one to go right down the memory hole.
I made fun of RedState’s anti-choice post from this weekend this morning, and started a hashtag with Jesse for those who want to continue to do so on Twitter. The pomposity RedState brings to their brazen misogyny and their attempts to rewrite history to justify their reactionary tendencies are funny.
But there’s something more troubling about all this, and it’s that they were so blatant in their willingness to threaten violence if they don’t get their way on abortion. I hate to say it, but I think the aftermath of the Tucson shooting is that there’s even more fear of speaking out against right wing hate speech, incendiary language, and paranoia. I wrote about this for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free today. A sample:
Despite the facts on the ground, the right was able to quell discussion about the role that their paranoia and violent rhetoric likely played in this event, particularly with regard to the political figure whom, among others, Loughner chose to shoot. Sarah Palin started shouting “blood libel”, and it was all so unpleasant that many in the mainstream media decided it was better to let important questions lie than to provoke her into worse assaults on decency and good taste.
Unfortunately, the effect of the successful rightwing freakout has been to scare most of the mainstream media from talking about domestic terrorism honestly at all.
Please read the whole thing, which includes analysis of RedState blatantly using inciting language on the anniversary of Roe, and the threats against an elderly college professor that have been inspired by Glenn Beck’s rantings.
One of the reasons that the talking heads can continue to play the “both sides” card and pretend that political violence isn’t (yet) a problem in our culture is through carefully ignoring the unpleasant evidence that the atmosphere of conspiratorial thinking and old-fashioned misogyny—both issues in terms of partisan politics, as only one side really goes out of its way to cater to these kinds of thinking—-played a role in Jared Loughner’s choice to shoot up a Democratic congressperson’s constituent meeting. But the other reason they can play ignorant is even more sobering, because they’re exploiting an otherwise good situation. And that reason is that law enforcement is doing a really good job of preventing right wing nuts from attacking large numbers of people.
A lot of the time, it’s because they’re working off good information, even though nasty pieces of work like Michelle Malkin overtly tried to pressure the FBI away from devoting resources to monitoring domestic terrorists. A lot of the time, it’s because they’ve put a lot of resources into rapid response, which involves doing what the Villagers are trying to make taboo, which is admitting right wing cranks who turn violent are out there, and using that willingness to believe to deal with them when they’re right in front of you. If you look at this list Digby put together of recent right wing violence, you’ll see how much credit for prevention goes to law enforcement. Unfortunately, some officers have lost their lives doing the valuable work of fighting back against extremists that the talking heads are blithely trying to pretend don’t exist.
And sometimes, law enforcement just gets lucky, which is why, thankfully, many lives were potentially saved on Monday, when three parade workers for an MLK Day parade in Spokane, Washington spotted a pipe bomb in a backpack, and law enforcement was able to disable it without anyone getting killed.
There’s an interesting double standard in play. When international terrorists try and fail, due to bad luck or skilled law enforcement, to attack and kill large numbers of people, it gets breathless minute by minute coverage on the cable news. I remember when there was some poison being smuggled in by Al Qaeda from Yemen in some office equipment, and it was thankfully and swiftly intercepted by law enforcement. It’s a great story, and I think it should be covered, but I also recall being at the gym and spending the entire 40 minutes of my run watching footage of some trucks moving around a parking lot, interlaced with breathless news anchors trying to wring more coverage out of a story that was important but not especially lengthy in its narrative arc. This act of potential domestic terrorism is similar in most ways, and yet it went straight into the memory hole immediately. You know, even though the networks were already using MLK Day as a news hook.
What’s especially frustrating is that the viewer at home is probably more empowered to do something about domestic terrorism. The FBI, for instance, is offering a reward, and if the news doesn’t give this thorough coverage, that incentive might not get out to the right ears.
Being uncomfortable with admitting that terrorists aren’t easy to spot is part of this, but the other part, I believe, is that admitting that shit like this happens leads you down a path of talking about things that we as a society pretend aren’t going on. In this case, ongoing racism is the issue that is being strenuously ignored. In order to perpetuate the myth that civil rights and anti-racism are universally accepted in our culture and that MLK Day is uncontroversial, we have to put all the disingenuous opposition to it in an SEP field. Everyone who opposed the creation of the holiday was handily given the chance to stuff that right down the memory hole. Every year, a cadre of conservatives who go out of their way to destroy King’s legacy by lying about who he was and what he stood for, but there’s a veneer of pretending that they do this to honor him, and so we all just pretend not to grasp the ugly implications. “Jokes” That Are Kept In The Company Of White People are something hidden behind the social fiction that they aren’t happening or that people don’t mean it, as if it were pot smoking instead of, you know, hating entire groups of people based on race. And then someone puts a pipe bomb on a parade route for MLK Day and admitting that it happened means that you might have to admit that all this other stuff is happening, and so let’s just not go there. It makes D.C. cocktail parties so uncomfortable, when you’ve considered how many people at them have pandered to racists to get votes.
The news did break late yesterday, and so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there will be wall-to-wall coverage of this pipe bomb that could have been really dangerous. I hope that my cynicism in this is proven wrong.
I just want to note that the picture above features a T-shirt that was stuck inside the backpack. I want to highlight that it appears the T-shirt is an anti-abortion T-shirt.
Upon further investigation, I believe it’s actually a cancer foundation relay. Which, if the bomber was smart, probably means he (or, though unlikely, she) just grabbed a bunch of shirts from the dollar bin at Goodwill, because using your own is really dumb.
I know I probably sound like a broken record on this, but it’s important to cover the growing problem of right wing domestic terrorism. Media Matters has put together a report on the beliefs of Byron Williams, who got into a shootout with California Highway Patrol officers on July 18th. Luckily, he didn’t kill anyone, but it came out that his intention was to commit acts of terrorism against the Tides Foundation and the ACLU. Working for Media Matters, journalist John Hamilton interviewed Williams, and surprise surprise, found out that he’s a huge devotee of Glenn Beck.
I have no doubt that Beck will immediately deny any responsibility for filling people’s heads with paranoid lies until someone cracks and decides to do something violent. But there’s a clear line here:
Observers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams’ reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations.
Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting.
Here’s some more reporting on Beck’s obsession with Tides and particularly with George Soros. There are many other billionaires who spend money on lefty causes, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, but Soros gets the lion’s share of the attention from the freaked-out right. And frankly, after seeing the tenor that the freak-out over Journolist took, I’m definitely of the mind that this is anti-Semitic. With Beck, the unspoken but ever-present anti-Semitic themes of his fear-mongering are probably a result of expedience. Beck has never been one to reinvent the wheel. If he wants to paint a picture of an international conspiracy to rule the world, of course he’s going to finger Jews as the people behind it. The sentiment already exists in his audience. It’s much easier to fan the flames if the embers are already there. Check out some of the Facebook replies Michael Roston got off Mark Levin’s Facebook page when Levin was feeding his audience bullshit stories about Journolist and the liberal conspiracy to run the media, one listserv where we talk about “The Wire” at a time:
I want to take a moment to point out that Williams was targeting both Tides (which he concluded was the org from which Soros will do all his dirty, world-conquering work) and, yep, the ACLU.
Yeah, this last one is a head-scratcher.
Obviously, most people who eat Glenn Beck’s shit all the time aren’t going to commit acts of violence. Most of them are, luckily, too cowardly and comfortable to do something like Williams did, even if they fantasize about it. But some oddballs here and there are going to do this, because they really do believe what Beck is saying about some grand conspiracy of evil liberals.
Richard Scott McLeod of Brighton was arrested Monday in Webberville on weapons charges and is under suspicion for potential threats against President Barack Obama.
On the outside of the 48-year-old’s vehicle were bumper stickers quoting Adolf Hitler. On the inside, police say there was a picture of Obama, a loaded gun, a bullet-proof vest and tips on how to build bombs.
A lot of the time, these extremists consider folks like talk radio show hosts to be weak sauce, not extreme enough. (Though interestingly, this seems to be less so when it comes to Glenn Beck. Scary.) But it’s worth remembering that the bar on radical, over-the-top fear-mongering is set by what the more mainstream wingnut pundits will say. People who want to be more extreme in their conservatism take their cues from what is permissible to be said on Fox News and add 15 points of nutbar. Beck is impeding on the hardcore types’ “Jewish conspiracy to rule the world” fantasies, and I imagine their reaction will just be to turn the heat on even higher.
A group of self-appointed moral guardians decides that there’s a cancer on society that only they really understand. People are “killing babies”! Obviously, killing “babies” is so wrong that extreme methods are justifiable, right? Such as showing up at clinics and harassing the customers and employees, and playing innocent when one of yours is emboldened to commit an act of terrorism. But society basically tolerates this horrible behavior, while laying down a few lines that legally can’t be crossed (though often are), because the harassers are so sincere. They love babies. And let’s face it: who wants to stand up for abortion? Everyone will think you’re a witchslut
morally insufficient person or something like that. Let’s just all pretend the antis are a little dim and that makes them think there’s wee little babies in there, and not that this is some kind of terrorist-style assault on women’s liberation and sexual freedom.
Or not. I’ve made it clear that I agree with what Ellen Willis wrote in 1980 about the anti-choice movement:
I believe—-and in saying this I intend no hyperbole whatsoever—-that it is the cutting edge of neo-fascism, a threat not only to women’s rights and to everyone’s sexual freedom and privacy but to freedom of religion and civil liberties in general.
Turns out she was right. Because this group that’s terrorizing Amarillo, TX is using anti-choice tactics, but they aren’t even pretending that this is about “life” or any other cover story anti-choicers engage in. They’re the sex police, and they’re going to make your life a living hell if you don’t obey the sex rules they made for you. Which are, as you can imagine, very strict.
The group is Repent Amarillo, and they are very evocative of the Taliban—-mostly young men who sport military drag to shore up their masculinity (though obviously they’re too busy screaming at fornicators to do things like actually join the military). I have racked my brain and I cannot understand why it is that this sort of thing happens, that young men can get so thwarted and hateful towards any and all expressions of freedom and sensual pleasure. This group focuses on sex, but if they were given power, I have no doubt they’d expand like the Taliban did into stomping out music, kite-flying, anything that could give human beings a moment of joy. In this case, an older man who is a leader’s motivations are easy enough to understand:
“I was a sexual sinner before I got saved. I got saved seven years ago. Prior to that–yeah, I’ve been to strip joints and porn shops. I’ve done all kinds of things,” he says. “We understand the destructive power of sin firsthand. We’ve lived it. We’ve walked in those shoes.”
I’ve stood by our radical black socialist magician President through thick and thin. I was with him when he threatened to kill Granny with bureaucracy, I was with him when the stimulus bill reserved $212 million to promote teenage pregnancy, I was even with him when he appointed Alger Hiss’ ghost to oversee Cash for Clunkers. And you know why I was with him? Everything he did was to advance the greater good.
However, when Barack Obama dares to tread upon the sacred American ground of September 11th by proposing a National Day of Service, that goes too fucking far. There is perhaps nothing more offensive than the idea of people gathering together in their communities in an organized fashion to help others - in fact, it may be precisely what the terrorists wanted, given bin Laden’s stated intention to plant trees and donate canned food in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Atlas Shrugs is worried that this will be the launch of Obama’s private civilian army, because it makes sense that the man in charge of the most advanced military force on the planet would build up a subsidiary army of college students and stay-at-home parents whose main training will be in phonebanking and pamphlet-stuffing.
Robert Stacy McCain pimps the 2,996 Project, because Americans are dumb and cannot both help people and remember why they’re helping them. Personally, I was helping an old lady across the street yesterday and halfway across left her there because I forgot I wasn’t supposed to get paid for it.
Michelle Malkin smartly points out that Obama believes that 9/11 happened because of “a fundamental absence of empathy” on the part of the attackers, which is a ridiculous statement, because I suppose they actually cared about the people they brutally murdered? Anyway, volunteering is for jobless libtards, so there.
This is my break with the statist authoritarian ideology of Barack Obama. By asking Americans to voluntarily pay tribute to the people whose lives were lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 through aiding their communities and making the country we all love a better place, he is effectively Joseph Stalin. Also, Cash for Clunkers is over, and Ghost Alger Hiss is currently haunting my refrigerator. Thanks, Barry.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asks what happens if Ahmed Ghaliani is found not guilty and…wait, let me clear this up a bit. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asks what happens if evil terrorist and guilty-as-sin because he’s obviously a terrorist (and, oh, evil) Ahmed Ghaliani is found not guilty and is told by the federal government to rent out your garage apartment from the Twitter or Craigslist.
Today Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, asked, “if we’re going to treat this terrorist detainee as a common civilian criminal, what will happen to Ghailani if he’s found not guilty? And what will happen to other detainees the administration wants to try in civilian courts if they are found not guilty? Will they be released? If so, where? In New York? In American communities? Or will they be released overseas, where they could return to terror and target American soldiers or innocent civilians?”
McConnell continued: “If Ghailani isn’t allowed to go free, will he be detained by the government? If so, where will he be detained? Would the administration detain him on U.S. soil, despite the objections of Congress and the American people?”
See, this sets up the fundamental disconnect between what our system of fighting terrorism is and what it should be. McConnell’s presumption (and tacit admission) is that we have people in custody despite not being able to prove that they’re actually terrorists, connected to terrorism or even able to locate Israel on a map of the world. The worry is that through some clever lawyer pointing this out, the non-terrorist (who actually is a terrorist, because, hey, he was in prison!) will be released onto our city streets, free to wander this alien land and eventually inspire some Neo-Nazis to stop their Eighty-Eight Quilts for Eighty-Eight Aryans craft fair and go try to blow something up.
The end goal of the closing of Gitmo should be that we arrest, try and punish terrorists in a way that ensures they are not only kept from harming others, but are also thoroughly and humanely interrogated for any other information they have. If and when we arrest someone who’s not actually a terrorist, they are again treated in a way that is as human as possible so that they don’t go back to their home countries and start pursuing a radicalized path, which is where a not-insubstantial number of “recidivist” terrorists come from in the first place. The problem with the current system is that it treats anyone who is accused of terrorist activity as if they’ve already been tried and convicted of that activity just by virtue of accusation.
There’s the obvious question of whether McConnell will be asking these questions when any of the right-wing domestic terrorists of the past fortnight or so go on trial, but not only do we know the answer to that, we’ve also all accepted it as an internalized risk of the justice system. At least for white people.
I find it touching that conservatives are willing to apply a deftness of perception and distinction between themselves and James von Brunn that they aren’t willing to apply to the billion Muslims around the world.
With the second such right wing terrorist attack in as many weeks, conservatives are scrambling to figure out how none of this has anything to do with them. The first tack is to declare that conservatism/extreme right-wing politics only come in one flavor - the not-shooting-people flavor. It’s yummy!
This is a bizarro version of the exact conversation Muslims have been having since 2001, which conservatives will never, ever recognize. Those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Allah do not act or speak for the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world. Your average Muslim walking down the street shouldn’t have to explain the acts of murderers half a world away, yet they’re asked to. The words of their holy text are taken grossly out of context - first by terrorists, then by the people assuming that they are themselves terrorists - and then those out of context words are put back into their mouths by critics.
When Bill O’Reilly calls George Tiller a genocidal monster for providing legal services to women in need, or when Glenn Beck theorizes that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, or elected representatives legitimize the belief that the President of the United States is a secret Kenyan Muslim intruder, doesn’t that speak far more directly to a crazy, violent, deadly element in modern society than a shared 1400-year-old text with 1400 years worth of interpretation across a variety of social, cultural and political perspectives? Or does it not, because of this made-up distinction that I just pulled out of my ass?
UPDATE: Did you know that Nazis were a non-violent group before Muslims came along? Does this count as Holocaust denialism? Because I think it does.
Just another one of those oddball weekend posts; I’ll date myself—again. Whether you loved or hated high school, you’ll probably identify with some of it. I happened to enjoy my nerdy years at Stuyvesant High School in NYC (class of ‘81). The Beastie Boys gave a nod to Stuy in the 1986 video “Fight for Your Right (to Party).” BTW, the group has pretty much disowned the song.
Ironically, the song was intended as a parody of party and attitude songs, such as “Smokin’ In the Boys Room” and “I Wanna Rock.” However, the irony was lost on most listeners. Mike D commented that, “The only thing that upsets me is that we might have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different. There were tons of guys singing along to ‘Fight for Your Right’ who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them.”...
Despite probably being the group’s most famous song, the Beastie Boys have expressed distaste for it. In The Sounds of Science liner notes, MCA jokingly says the song “sucks,” though they did not feel the album would be complete without it. The group has not performed the song live since 1987
My fellow Stuyvesant High School alums have been forever traumatized by gym class; each squad leader had to wear this infamous red Stuy T-shirt, so to see the shirt turn up in a video was pretty amusing.
That song isn’t in my collection, but these two are…
Intergalactic: this video is so out there. Definitely captured the Godzilla insanity vibe. My brother and I used to watch those awful dubbed flicks every Saturday.
Sabotage: this song has had a resurgence because of its use in the latest Star Trek film where kiddo Kirk steals his stepdad’s classic car for a joyride in the desert. The Spike Jonze video is another tasty gem for those of us who grew up on those ridiculous cop shows of the 70s.
***
To complete this weekend nostalgia trip, seasoned with a little personal humiliation, here are some photos from my days at Stuyvesant High School (at its old location at 15th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan).
Left: A serious OMG Big Hair day, taken at graduation outside of Carnegie Hall. This is what my hair looked like when it was processed to within an inch of its life, and humidity still got the best of it. Right: The infamous gym class. I never got to be a squad leader—they got the red leader shirts as I mentioned above. Anyway, NO ONE liked gym. For my classmates out there—remember the gymnastics rotation? I nearly killed myself on the uneven parallel bars. One semester, I convinced one of the teachers to let me bring in a jump rope so that I could teach folks double dutch.
Michael Goldfarb attacks those of us who believe that same-sex marriage is okay, but torture isn’t, because logically, you’d realize that those two things are inextricably joined at the gay terrorist hip.
As to the morality of the methods used, I don’t see anything immoral about smacking around a terrorist or making him sit in the cold or dunking him in the water, but you can argue it either way. Still, I wonder why the same people squealing about the alleged moral indignity to which these monsters were subjected are the same people who want the government to keep morality out of their bedrooms and doctors’ offices. Why should the government be forbidden from making a moral judgment about gay marriage or abortion but compelled to make a moral judgment about the treatment of terrorists plotting to murder Americans citizens?
This is an incredibly clever argument, if by “clever” you mean “using a word in one context and then putting a cloth over its mouth, dragging it to a basement, dumping it in a hole and spraying it with a fire hose until it breaks down crying”. Which you do.
A better (and marginally realistic) way of phrasing this argument would be “why should the government be forbidden from restricting people’s fundamental rights when it comes to gay marriage or abortion but allowed to restrict people’s fundamental rights when it comes to torturing the shit out of them?” And then you realize that when you phrase the question like that, IT’S TORTURE, YOU FUCKING IDIOT.
Someone should probably talk to, at least, certain members of the IDF about their decision-making process:
Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of U.N. human rights experts said Monday.
The Israeli Defense force ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the U.N. secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.
Radhika Coomaraswamy said the incident on Jan. 15, after Israeli tanks had rolled into the neighborhood, was a violation of Israeli and international law.
It was included in a 43-page report published Monday, and was just one of many verified human rights atrocities during the three-week war between Israel and Hamas that ended Jan. 18, she said.
Emphasis mine, because it seemed to need pointing out.
The worst part about this is that I can construct an entire LGF comment thread in my head on how to defend this kind of an action. So since we can assume I’ve considered all the possible justifications and rejected them pre hoc, I hope that we’ll consider keeping them the hell out of comments. (As well as, it goes without saying, any excesses from the opposite bank of crazy. If you know what I’m saying. And I think you do.)
I suppose that there may have been some tiny, naive part of me (the same part that wistfully turns past Saturday morning cartoons wishing that I still had any interest in watching them) that sort of hoped al-Qaeda were equal-opportunity mass murderers, discriminating based solely on infidel status and unwilling to get involved in petty concerns of race and ethnicity.
However, I’m glad in a way that al-Qaeda’s now willing to not just be a group of callous, mass-murdering monsters, but callous, mass-murdering monsters who are actively searching for new and inventive ways to be even bigger fuckfaces. They were running the risk of becoming stale, let’s be real.
I 
I’ve stood by our radical black socialist magician President through thick and thin. I was with him when he threatened to kill Granny with bureaucracy, I was with him when the stimulus bill reserved $212 million to promote teenage pregnancy, I was even with him when he appointed Alger Hiss’ ghost to oversee Cash for Clunkers. And you know why I was with him? Everything he did was to advance the greater good. 
Just another one of those oddball weekend posts; I’ll date myself—again. Whether you loved or hated high school, you’ll probably identify with some of it. I happened to enjoy my nerdy years at Stuyvesant High School in NYC (class of ‘81). The 
To complete this weekend nostalgia trip, seasoned with a little personal humiliation, here are some photos from my days at Stuyvesant High School (at its old location at 15th Street and 1st Avenue in Manhattan).
