Our political reporter, Josh Muggins, filed this report after a John McSame rally in Prescott, Arizona on Sunday, June 8th, 2008.

Following another tepid, uninspiring speech by the Senator, the McSames, honored guests, and members of the press attended a God Bless America Rally at the Talking Rock Golf Club, hosted by Rev. John Hagee, Rod Parseley, and Kenneth Copeland.

The following is an account of the startling conclusion to the night's events:

Who says you have to wait 24 hours to say how you really feel? Who made up that rule?
I am a stand-up comedian, very little if anything is too sacred to talk about or blog about.  Are we not supposed to be real when we write a blog?  
When I tell a joke, what I am really saying is, "Here’s a topic we all know or should know, I thought of some new shit about that topic and I made it funny."

I usually choose not to do jokes about the recently deceased because;

"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens 20 years after it happens anywhere else."

...The rest of us soon drifted into matters near and dear to the hearts of our sort -- business and wages, of course. At a first glance, things appeared to be exceeding prosperous in this little tributary kingdom - whose lord was King MacCain - as compared with the state of things in my own region. They had the "holiday" system in full force here, whereas we were working along down toward green energy, by stages, and were now about half way. Before long, Dowley and I were doing all the talking, the others hungrily listening. Dowley warmed to his work, snuffed an advantage in the air, and began to put questions which he considered pretty awkward ones for me, and they did have something of that look:

    Yesterday, I was looking for a quote that I remembered as coming from Mark Twain:

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it" Mark Twain

Strangely enough, this quote is not listed on twainquotes.com
I did find some other quotes, listed below the fold, but my search for this quote and the things I found got me thinking:

What is Patriotism?

The typical patriotisms: to party, to religion, to authority, to politics, to country.  I am no patriot, for I reject these patriotisms.  They are but fleeting prejudices - created by Man to control men and women for their own dark purposes.

I am my own patriot.  I believe that all who participate are patriots - not based on their choices, but on their participation.

No party holds the privilege of dictating to me how I shall vote. If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot. If there is any valuable difference between a monarchist and an American, it lies in the theory that the American can decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn't. I claim that difference. I am the only person in the sixty millions that is privileged to dictate my patriotism.

- Mark Twain

That is a question that I have been pondering for some time now.

The Republicans have developed and honed a strategy for fighting Democrats in political races - particularly presidential races.  I will simply call this strategy: attack at all costs.

The definition of this strategy is to always attack.  Truth, facts, and reality do not matter.  Attacking is what matters.  Whittle down your opponent in any way possible.  Bring up the past.  Bring up any tiny little potential "problem".  Attack with inneundo and outright fabrications, if possible.  Make people afraid.  Scare them into voting Republican.

The "Rove method" of this strategy is only the most recent version.  This basic strategy of attacking one's opponent at all costs has been the Republican method since Nixon.

My 5-year old son (I'll refer to him as Huck) voted today - voted with me, that is.  The conversation in the car began this way:

MT:  We're going to vote today.

Huck:  Daddy, what does voting mean?

MT:  Well, it means that we get to pick who we want to try to be president.  We get to choose every 4 years - kind of like the olympics.

Huck:  What is the president?

MT:  He or she is the person who is in charge of the country.  They choose some of the things that happen in the country and around the world, and which kinds of people they want to help.

This will be quick. And not pretty.

It seems that Mark Twain, among his many other gifts, may have been something of a seer.

While perusing a collection titled The Bible According To Mark Twain (a tome primarily devoted to excoriating the god of Abraham), I came across an unpublished piece of Twain's, written in 1901, that seems, at least from a certain bleak perspective, to perfectly encapsulate the state of the nation, as we prepare to ease from the reigns of George I, Clinton I, and George II, into that of Clinton II.

Twain's text below the fold:

I was sitting in my room and sketching out the plot for a short story, while listening to music. And suddenly, the song that came on (it's from System of a Down's "Steal This Album") made me want to pick up Mark Twain's The War Prayer. So I did.

And I read it again, for the nth time, and this time - I don't know why - it gripped my heart, and tears came. I thought, "How little we have changed, and how appropriate this still is."

The book is small, yet packs a punch, more so at this time.

Mark Twain dictated his little known War Prayer around 1904-05.  It was rejected by his publisher, and was found in manuscript form after his death.  The War Prayer was first published in 1923 in Albert Bigelow Paine's anthology, Europe and Elsewhere.

The story of the prayer was written in response to the Spanish-American War and its tailend "Phillipine Insurection," which Twain opposed.  Another of our wars to make the world safe for Chritianity, Democracy and the American Way Of Life.  

Oddly enough, this was a war fought mostly in the Phillipines, when young brown Muslim "insurgents" for three years flung themselves in suicide attacks against superior American forces.  Like the Vietnam and Second Iraq Wars, it was a war fought on trumped up "facts" about the enemies attacks ("Remember the Maine!" and the Bay of Tonkin.), or planned attacks, against the United States by Saddam with his amazing airforce and ICBMs and... .  Oh, wait, he didn't have any of those things!

I'm 39, and the first time I was ever called "nigger" as an adult was about 6 months ago-- in Germany. I'd been hiking in a place called Potsdam when this guy walked to me called me a "nigger."

My reaction? Well, I ended up being a guest of the German government for five days. Ansd that was only the first time. I was called nigger a lot while I was in Germany. That and a lot of people felt the need to "Seig Heil" me. And I won't even get into the weirdness of being referred to as a "Negro" while I was in the Netherlands.

But it was a strange irony that I had to travel to Europe to reminded of the power of the word "Nigger."

See bottom of diary for updates

A while back while monitoring REDSTATE I noticed a comment that quickly caught my eye concerning Senator Barack Obama's Memoir in which he had admitted trying Cocaine. The individual remarked that even if he were a Democrat he could never vote for an admitted Cocaine user. I thought what a fucking hypocrite this dude is because in all likelihood this little Social Conservative piece of shit had already voted for a Cocaine user twice albeit one that never publicly admitted it although more tellingly President Bush has never denied either. They obviously are in denial about many things over at that mindless Fantasyland known as REDSTATE.

There’s no doubt that a good argument could be made, and often is, that the most famous of American prognosticators is none other than the enigmatic Edgar Cayce, and I certainly would never take anything away from his extraordinary psychic achievements. But, I talk today about another man with the gift of sight, a soothsayer wrapped in the illusory façade of a simple humorist whose intelligence and foresight was both underestimated and underappreciated back in his day. However, today he's proving to be the Nostradamus of American life whose forward vision was leaps and bounds ahead of his own 19th-Century.

Kevin Drum brings us Mark Twain's "The War Prayer", an anti-war prose poem he wrote in the aftermath of the Spanish-American and Phillipine-American wars.

His family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously: "None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth."

Washington Monthly's publisher, Markos Kounalakis, made a video of the story for release this Memorial Day. You can watch the video and read the story here. Here is the War Prayer from Twain's story:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

It's been a while since anyone has posted anything here about this little-known anti-war short written by Twain, and longer still since anyone put up the entire piece.  My understanding is that it is in the public domain, so I am going to post the entire thing (source: Wikisource, though this version matches others freely available).  If you've never read it, take a few moments and do so...it's a fitting piece for the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend while we're still engaged in a brutal war of our own choosing.

Shadan7

Those Ugly Words

By Peter Fredson

April 25, 2007

Russell Simmons of the Hip-Hop Action network last Monday stated that "We recommend that the recording and broadcast industries voluntarily remove/bleep/delete the misogynistic words 'bitch' and 'ho' and the racially offensive word 'n***er.'," because they are derogatory and disrespect people’s suffering, pain, and racial oppression for several hundred years.

This came about as a response to the firing of Don Imus radio and television show in which Imus referred to the Rutgers basketball players as "nappy-headed hos." And this followed the racial insults hurled by Michael "Kramer" Richards at a LA comedy club

We've talked a lot about the press round these parts. From the insidious Judith Miller and the New York Times' flagrant beating of war drums to the berating of the blogosphere by Howie Kurtz and other yeyhoos, the "mainstream media" (MSM) has performed miserably on so many occasions it is impossible to keep track any longer. Let's face it: newspapers suck in this country. Today, they are owned by corporate oligarchs who bend decidedly rightward, who have no respect for the journalistic enterprise or the quest for the truth, and who are willing to sacrifice millions of people to the meat grinder of a profit machine they stoke.

No self respecting fish would be caught dead in today's newspaper. As for us, I think it's now safe to say: the Internet IS our free press.

Join me below the electronic fold for a little more rant, some interesting links, and some news about what Patrick Fitzgerald is busy doing today.