UT's author don'r rub the GOPS back at the annual Salon Spring planting picnic. Glenn seems to say the truth more clear than pro-war folk. The warmongers may read here today, and say with a raspy lisp : "Greenwald, go stub a toe." or,

`O Holy yellow corn, and green beans Succotash!"

from the read ~;

.... "if only we had a `gutsy` political 'leadership` gad zeus.

I want Henry Kissingers & the neocon/neoconservaties to do this :

`Take the Bill Kystal's politico's to Iraq, and tuck human guts into belly cavities.

...." brought the [North Vietnamese] nation to it's knees." No. YOU disemboweled babies!

`What would Krystal's gang of thugs do? Oh ah, go to a 5-star diner to slurp beet juice?

.... "constructive national debate." No joke, Sophia Loren. huh. So~shuffle some hired crazies?

`

Oh, ah, So now-The Main Supportive Murderous rhetoric can be aired in the citizen's public arena? Hire The Goons! Oy! The secret psychopaths & sociopaths club-gang can wield all the bloody shenanigans again? What gobble gunk.

Are we/me comatose yet?

"hoary"... . harpy whores.

'Um are all bloody. Yes. drips.

'Um are not ex-spurts, but 'um are neo-blood-drips.

http://harpers.org/StabbedInTheBack.html

Harper's Magazine, June 2006
Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth
by Kevin Baker

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

[...]

What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics.

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace's “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing's belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation's history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq—and the “war on terrorism”—seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be. Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners—a subject we shall return to. It has used the cover of the war to push through enormous tax cuts, attempt to dismantle the Social Security system, and alter the very social covenant of the nation. Incidents from the Terri Schiavo case to the teaching of “intelligent design” are periodically exploited to start new cultural battles.

[...]

The right was looking for a target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared them to those run by “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings . . . ”

The right's response was predictably swift and savage. The Power Line blogger Paul Mirengoff commented that the senator “slanders his own country. Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the violent overthrow of the government.” Rush Limbaugh harrumphed that “Dick Durbin has just identified who the Democrats are in the year 2005, particularly when it comes to American national security and when it comes to the U.S. military. These are the same people that say they support the troops. This is how they do it, huh? They give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Yet for once, Rush was outdone. John Carlson, host of a Seattle talk show and Washington State's unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in 2000, said of Durbin,

“This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated.”

Bill O'Reilly of Fox News launched a preemptive attack on his few liberal counterparts, urging that the staff of Air America be jailed:

“Dissent, fine; undermining, you're a traitor. Got it? So, all you clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send them over to the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they're undermining everything.”

Once the Republican media had secured the ground and set the terms of debate, the party's representatives in Washington jumped into the fray. When Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi called the war “a grotesque mistake” that was “not making America safer,” the as-yet-unindicted Tom DeLay retorted that Pelosi “owes our military and their families an apology for her reckless comments,” and House Majority Whip Roy Blunt claimed that Pelosi's words had “emboldened” the enemy.

All of the crucial elements of the stab-in-the-back charge were now in place. Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were traitors and “revolutionaries,” individuals who were “conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops,” and “excrement” who could now be safely incarcerated “immediately” or even “eliminated.”

[...]

- - Kevin Baker, Harper's Magzine, June 2006

from Thom Hartmann's new book:

"In politics we tell each other stories all the time. If you think about it, politics is really nothing more than a set of stories."

- - Thom Hartmann