Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, October 18, 2008

MundiMuster! Censure Michelle Bachmann

No, Michelle, proving you hate democracy actually isn't the same thing as showing you "love America."

Wingnut zealots who call for witch-hunts in the name of a death-dealing money-grubbing so-called "Pro-America" theocratic police-state agenda rejected by an overwhelming majority of actual Americans should pay the price of getting their asses handed to them in a hat when they decide to bark and bray their blank-eyed moralizing hate in the light of day.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh god, I saw a clip of this person on Pharyngula yesterday ‐ how wretched. At least, as PZ pointed out, her opponent's campaign has received a financial boost since the proliferation of that interview.

Anonymous said...

The tenor of this election is really, really ugly. It's obvious that Republicans hate losing much more than Democrats, and they're willing to say and do anything to stay in power, not least of which is framing the debate so that you are either an American (Republican) or a socialist terrorist.

I think when this is all said and done, and John McCain has time to reflect on his loss, he will be ashamed of his behavior. Perhaps this, rather than the Keating 5 scandal, will be the worst moment of his life.

Dale Carrico said...

I am hearing stories now of tires getting slashed on cars with Obama stickers, and early voters getting heckled as "cheaters" in polling places. I don't think this is a matter of one side hating to lose more than the other, I think it is a question of one side actually disapproving the very notion of democracy. This sort of comment is all too apt to be dismissed as simply an ad hominem smear -- but it really is true that there are any number of ways of organizing a polity and one senses that the anger of McCain's base comes from such a place. It seems to me that to accuse fellow citizens of "cheating" in exercising their legal right to vote implies a disapproval that this is a legal right, rather than competitiveness trumping principle. This extends as well to the arrant double standard of perpetuating voter fraud through a trumped up scandal about voter registration fraud in the case of Acorn, and the flabbergasting sanctimony with which Republican operatives are spreading unbelievably scurrilous claims about Obama, whomping up the worst kinds of racism and rabble-rousing while accusing Obama and Democrats of "playing the race card" in recognizing what the Republicans are doing! I am expressing these views in a tone of no small amount of perplexity and even fearfulness, I should add. I'm not sure what exactly is going on here. As for McCain's shame, I was never one of his big boosters back in the day (I always found him to be worrisomely militarist and anti-choice), but I'll admit I never once imagined he was the sort of person who would stoop to this sort of thing or countenance it. I don't know what to think of all this anymore, I find myself contemplating dark fantasies of a Rovian cabal shepherding another Bush-lite cipher (Palin) through the sausage machine of a dying Republic to maintain their corporate-militarist hegemony. When all is said and done I simply can't believe that is true -- and if it were, I am pleased to say I do believe that these killer clowns are going down in an epic defeat. Still, this ugly consummation of Nixon/Reagan/Bush Movement Republicanism (nested within the larger Hayek/Friedman/Reagan/Thatcher/Pinochet/Deng neoliberal epoch) is a fittingly dumb small shitty end to a constellation of catastrophically idiotic ideas. Here's hoping a progressive sustainable technodevelopmental epoch of p2p democratization has more to offer for the next thirty.