A joke was recently presented to me in the form of an opinion piece by the Wall Street Journal.  In it, the author hilariously attempts to equate Batman as he is portrayed in the new movie with...  lol... sorry one sec...   lolololol... with George W. Bush.  Hold on. hahahahahahah.  Ok, I haven’t seen the movie, so I gotta know, does Batman let the main villain escape into the mountains then turn all of his effort, all of his technology, and all of his attention to a common street thug and fail even in that by the end of the movie?  

My first diary on DKos, published in December 2004, started with this paragraph:

In the fall of 2002 I started asking myself the question, "Knowing what I know now, when would I have left Germany before WWII?"  Would it have been with the rise of the military-worshipping culture?  Would it have followed the putsch?  Would the anti-semitism have driven me away? All of those would have been fine reasons, but I think I would have left Germany as soon as I understood that I was personally in danger because of my oppostion to the government, non-violent though it may be.

I left the US in 2006... and I won't be back soon. After the jump I explain why.

After today's disgrace of the Senate's vote to pass the FISA Act unamended, Martin Niemoeller's poem comes to mind. If you will allow me a slight variation (Original Poem):

The latest Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker is frightening, even as I try to convince myself that dday is right at Hullabaloo, that it's less a fait accompli than a media shot across the bow, a warning designed to make an attack on Iran less likely.

I'm agnostic on the subject of Iranian weapons - I'd rather no one had weapons of mass destruction but I'm no more afraid of the Iranians than I am, say, the Pakistanis or, for that matter, the Bush regime. What I don't understand is how Americans can let themselves be known, the world over, as cowards.

How many children should we kill to reduce the already minuscule chance of of our own death by terror? Seriously - help me out here.

Remember the day after the 2006 election, that exhilirating feeling that something was going to change...the direction of the war might shift, maybe even end, that the Patriot Act would not be renewed, or at the very least the most egregious violations of our civil rights would be removed.

How about that sensation that the administration would finally be held accountable for their blatant and I mean PUBLICALLY blatant criminal, morally bankrupt and constitution ignoring behaviour.

What has happened since then? ABSOLUTELY nothing. FISA has been held up, anything else?

While progressive blogging communities were congratulating themselves for the FISA stalemate, Indiana passed a law forcing citizens to consent to warrantless searches and monitoring of their computers.

While liberal bloggers were polishing their Indiana primary predictions, Indiana passed a law denying their citizens full access to the Internet.

While liberal pundits were extolling the courage and conviction of Martin Luther King, the Missouri Senate approved a Constitutional amendment denying citizens the protection of ex post facto.

While liberal leaders were condemning China for human rights violations, the Missouri Senate approved a bill forcing house arrest on citizens--who had not been arrested.

And where was the media?  Where was your candidate?  Where the f**k were the so called liberals?

For years, I have considered this question.  And the answer always comes out the same. Of course, the obvious answer is the typical misogynist.  The men who see women as only sex objects and the women who seek those men.  Weak men are always frightened by strong women.  So the women they seek are the young and frightened girls and women who see themselves as only sex objects, and accept almost any behavior from these men, who usually think of themselves as he-men rather than the scared little boys they actually are.  Men like this have no problem beating small children, or their wives and girl friends.  I have seen these cowed women and children for many years.  More beneath the fold:

America fought Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and won.  America faced down Stalin and Krushnev and their nukes and won.  Empires with millions of soldiers, sailors, pilots, factory workers and scientists, empires with tanks and submarines and missiles, empires that spanned time zones and dominated entire continents have challenged us and failed.  Now, we face a pitiful handful of religious kooks, and, encouraged by craven leaders, we tremble in fear.

According to President Bush, America's greatest enemy has no state, no navy, no air force, a tiny and pathetic "army" good for nothing but guerrilla warfare. It is funded and supplied exclusively through underground channels and openly supported by almost no one.  Yet, despite the pathetic state of our "opposition," the Republicans continue to insist that defending us from them should be the primary goal of government, that everything else should be pushed aside in the name of security.  They want us to give up our rule of law, to relinquish our rights, to ignore the very Constitution that makes this country the great place it is--all to protect us from the weak, pathetic spectre of Islamic terrorism.

This is because they are cowards.

I know that election ponderings can get a bit...blah, blah, blah...especially right before the "primaries." Sorry. But there's a lot to be said about the damn things. In so many ways, I believe we Dem's are truly shooting at our own damn feet. Are we filled with this much self doubt? Self-loathing? Self-hatred? What the devil are we doing? 'Tis not only a flesh wound at this point. We are hemorrhaging the very democratic ideals we claim to be trumpeting!

From Merriam-Webster -

coward; one who shows disgraceful fear or timidity

Any reasonable person would correctly characterize the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as a horrible, despicable act committed by those that prefer to live in an uncivilized world ruled by fear and violence.

Budget deal would probably give Bush victory on war funding.
Yet again the Democrat Congress gives into Bush and the Republicans.  

Harry Reid and Nancy Peolsi are going to be swear words in American history. Judas Joe Lieberman is nausea incarnate, but we already knew that. However Harry and Nancy blindsided us with their unforgivable betrayals. God may forgive them, but we never will.

It's time to change the meme. All of the gains the terrorists have made in six years, in destroying the pre-9/11 America we all still want to live in, have been handed to them by spineless, lily-livered cowards who wet their pants on 9/11 and have been doing so every day since.

I have known about "the conspiracy" since 1978.
I reported what I knew to the Justice Department.
I received answers from them that stated I was reporting the"crime"
to the wrong department.
This answer, of course was absurd.
This conspiracy is committing crimes that would be considered "heinous"
in any court of law.
When you are certain that your facts are straight and no one in your government will assist you, your government has not only failed you,
it has failed the entire country.
There are people that have been in our government that know the same
facts that I know.  They are just cowards that are afraid to be Americans.

and like many of you, I am concerned how many of you are using the F-WORD a little too liberally. I believe it is necessary to communicate to the collaborator wing of the democratic party that if they ignore the will of the voters (or just us activists), they will do so with emptier pockets and fewer supporters. If we love the Democratic party, don't we owe the cowards and collaborators in the party a life lesson?

It's simple, really.  You didn't control the message.

You let the Republicans frame the debate as whether or not you were voting against the troops, which is fucking stupid.

Let me explain why below the fold.

The craven and cowardly capitulation to the corrupt and treasonous notion of either: a) that George Bush is a "unitary executive" with absolute War Powers, or, b) that handing to George Bush another blank check to further escalate his illegal and immoral Invasion/Occupation, founded only on a bedrock of demonstrable lies, is somehow an acceptable action to be taken by Congress, not only makes both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hopelessly unfit to lead the Democratic Party, but it is a total  affront to the voters that elected them there and our servicemen who continue to be given up as cannon-fodder.


Nancy Pelosi now has refused to listen to the will of the people on both: a) the matters of ending the madness, bloodshed, and utter futility of the Iraq War, and b) also on the matter of holding hearings into the Impeachable crimes of Richard Bruce Cheney, a man who stands at 18% in the polls and steals money from Taxpayers and blood from our servicemen every single day that he remains in office.

I don't understand why everybody is so upset at what the Democrats did!! Did anyone really expect them to follow the advice of the American people, and try to end the war?? I certainly didn't. I always knew the Democratic leaders were a party of cowards, who would cave in when the going got a little tough.

George Bush knew the Dems would cave, so that's why he struck to his gun, and got the victory over the Democrats. You have to hand it to George, no matter how bad things get in Iraq, he could count on the Democrats to hand him another victory, and kill more soldiers, and innocent Iraqi's while our standing in the world gets even lower than a gophers basement.

The jellyfish known as the Democratic leadership are now being put on notice. Moveon.org are now going to target these wimps in order to show that they are just as pissed off as the American people are at the sight of these cowards, and get the candidates needed that actually have a spine.