Blog Box

June 17, 2005
Compiled by Delilah Boyd, A Scrivener's Lament

Back in the day, TV shows were chock-full o' family values. Hidden among the all-white casts, the picket-fenced yards, and the picture-perfect holiday specials was a moral for every episode.

What if the TV shows of yesteryear were updated for today's typical American audience? Would our children learn anything of value? Would the moral of each episode stand up to scrutiny?

Leave It To Freepers

In tonight's episode...

Libertythink explains why McCain will never be elected president:

McCain openly attacked the (POW/MIA) activists telling the press, "The people who have done these things are not zealots in a good cause. They are the most craven, most cynical and most despicable human beings to ever run a scam." The Justice Department did investigate the POW/MIA activists and their organizations and found no reason to charge any POW/MIA activist.

The moral of this episode: No semi-sane Republican has a general election chance in hell... with his own party.

Let's Make A Deal

Joe Biden, come on down!

David Sirota, at sirotablog, wants to make a deal with Senator Joe Biden. If Biden will stop attacking Howard Dean, he can have his choice of Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3, where Carol Merrill is standing!

All good Democrats and progressives should make a deal with Biden: he can continue stabbing his own party in the back with impunity for his own self-promotion, and say his party doesn't speak for him. In exchange, Biden should agree to never, ever claim to speak for Democrats. (snip) Is it a deal, Joe? We won't speak for you, as long as you never, ever try to claim your record is representative of us. Sounds pretty fair - and believe me, in the long run, the Democratic Party would be getting the better end of the bargain.

DuPage County (IL) Dem candidate and blogger Rob Freedman nails the Dean issue succinctly by blaming the person who started it all... Tricky Dick Cheney.

Dragging one's mother into a national debate to avoid facing the issues is pretty low. Between this and telling Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to "F@&k Off" I'd say Vermonters in general get to the Vice-President.

The moral of this episode: Screw your enemies, and screw your friends, too. In fact, screw everybody, kids!

Gilligan's Gulag

Just sit right back, and I'll tell a tale...

Church For Sanctuary clarifies Amnesty International's "Gitmo Gulag" allusion and utterly destroys the warmongers' straw argument:

The critics of Amnesty International (hereafter AI) report that it is unfair to associate what the current administration is doing with its detainees as a "gulag." The Russian government of that era had imprisoned more than fifteen million people. It is estimated that the imprisonment of people by the current American administration as it wages war on terrorism according to AI is around 70,000. While a match in numbers is not comparable, it does not mean that the world does not have another "gulag." For instance, Stalin's "gulag" of harsh and inhumane conditions did not occur overnight. The American "gulag" is only in its infancy. Only time will determine if the numbers between the two gulags are comparable in harshness and being inhumane.

The moral of this episode: It's okay to rape and torture people, as long as you don't call a fledgling gulag a full-blow gulag. Got that, kids?

My Three (And Counting) Memos

In tonight's episode...

As more and more minutes and memos fight their way to the U.S. media surface, The Heretik explains why Tony Blair's days are numbered and why George W. should be preparing to answer the $200 billion question:

A great disquiet now haunts the seeming silent, stiff lipped British political soul. That disquiet will not stay silent much longer. An honest British soul has whispered of his disquiet. That quiet rage will now be heard here across the Atlantic

Etherealfire, at An Etherealgirl's Adventures In Cyberland, links us to Shakespeare's Sister, who links us back to The Heretik's rendition of George W.'s famous "Fuck Saddam! We're taking him out!" incident (in front of Condi Rice and three senators). Add Raw Story's excellent Iraq Timeline, and I do believe we have a story with legs.

Now, if only our media - who are bobbing and weaving to avoid a head-on collision with this story - would do its job, the U.S.A. might be able to regain its own lost soul and collective conscience. Oh, yeah. I forgot - you can't spell conscience without "science." Maybe that's the problem.

The moral of this episode: By the time the general public finally hears about an issue, the Republican noise machine has already (pun intended) flushed it.

The Blastocyst Bunch

Till the one day, when this lady met this fellow...

Jenna Bush News, the unofficial weblog of Jenna Bush news, links us to a fascinating story about embryo twinning, which appears to refute BushCo's belief that life begins at conception.

The strange thing is that the president, as the father of twins, might be expected to understand how hard it is to draw a bright line defining when life begins. No one can say when Barbara and Jenna Bush got their individual start in utero; twinning can take place as long as seven to 10 days after fertilization. This is why even some Catholic theologians suggest that "ensoulment" occurs at some time after conception.

So, it appears that not only are Jenna and Barbara seriously late entering the workforce (or the military) after college, they were also late (by their father's own definition) for the Fascist Fundie Soul Train.

The moral of this episode: The Bush twins have no souls. No big surprise there, kids.

I Love Lynching

Dang me!

Sepia Mutiny asks the burning question: But why now?

Why after all this time is the Senate finally acknowledging this dark chapter in U.S. History? (snip) Do you all see the Machiavellian plot being hatched here? George Allen is just as ambitious as Bill Frist in seeking the Presidency in '08. Seasoned pundits even see him as a frontrunner, and the campaigning has long since begun. In order to get the support of the religious right (which is an absolute imperative for Republicans in this country) he needs to help get rid of the Senate filibuster and get right-wing judges on the bench. By sponsoring this anti-lynching legislation he is really just trying to build the case against the filibuster AND trying to shore up black votes for his 2008 run. Believe it.

Meanwhile, AmericaBlog is keeping score.

It's high time we demanded to know why 27% of the Republicans in the US Senate refuse to come out in opposition to lynching. All the Democrats now support the resolution. So why not the Republicans? Or was Howard Dean right? The GOP is the party of far-right Christian WHITE people? The irony is, Frist tried to lynch the resolution.

The moral of this episode: Republicans hate black people, brown people, women, and all foreign-looking people. Period. And they're not really fond of "regular" or "poor" white people, either.

Regime Knows Best

In tonight's episode...

According to (gagging on the title here) Blogs For Bush, Father BushCo knows best how to protect us from those evil Gitmo detainees:

In all of the discussions of Gitmo, the thing least mentioned is what sort of people are being held there. Right now, there are about 550 detainees - the real hard-core of captured terrorists; people who, if released, would likely immediately go back to killing others. For most of them, we probably lack "stand up in court" evidence to convict them of a specific crime - so they cannot under any circumstances be turned over to our courts, because we'd just have to release them. Those who are calling for the closure of Gitmo are, in the end, calling for more deaths of innocents, because that would be the net result of a closure of the detention center.

Oddly enough, the comments posted after that blog entry are even scarier than the crapfest post itself.

The moral of this episode: Freeper logic is piss poor. Prisoners don't deserve due process because they'd just be released? Shades of Scalia - you can execute an innocent person even if he's proven not guilty after being convicted. (You're so totally screwed, kids!)

Make Room For Bloggers!

Fighting the good fight, lefty bloggers are today's Revolutionary War pamphleteers, who are determined to defend the truth and expose injustice. Some of them have even agreed to share their insights with us.

DUer "DA" who posts from Portland, Oregon, and his guest author "cs" who posts from Central Ohio, are better known as BloggerRadio. Both prefer to blog anonymously, in order to minimize the impact on their families and workplaces. DA was prompted to begin blogging by a friend who was frustrated by the sheer number of political emails that DA had been forwarding. DA adds, "There is too little information being supplied by MSM [mainstream media] these days, as well as misinformation coming from dark-side sources for us to remain idle/silent."

Most of the posts at BloggerRadio are whipped-out using things as simple as Notepad and then copied into TypePad on-the-fly. DA and cs would like to venture into the realm of portable/wireless posts someday, and they also want to incorporate audio/podcasts, etc. into BloggerRadio.com in the future.

DA believes that affordability is one of blogging's major strengths and driving forces behind its explosive popularity. According to DA, the time and energy expended to maintain a viable blog is a much greater investment than the dollars. BloggerRadio focuses on politics and consumerism, and the blogging duo consider their perspectives to mirror those of Joe & Jane Sixpack.

DA's advice to new bloggers: "Have multiple authors, in separate time zones. And, where possible, pick your co-authors from those who already have some familiarity for the platform (in our case TypePad) that hosts the blog. Authors in various locales makes for more interesting inputs & perspectives, and the multiple time zones make it easier to keep something current/fresh coming to the blog."

This week, BloggerRadio takes on Fristquackery:

Be sure to visit BloggerRadio.com and watch for DA's powerful DU posts.

In other DU news, congratulations to DU Blogger wicket at BlueBus.Org for the Ron Reagan (MSNBC) mention!

Way to go, wicket!

And so, before you sit down with the family to discuss the moral depravity of Republicans, give this some thought: once upon a time, real family values, like good citizenship, were standard TV fare. Sure, the shows were lame, and the characters were corny. But telling the truth and doing the right thing were, and are, important lessons for America's children. We've come too far since those "White & Straight Make Right" days to stand idly by and watch Republicans erect more white picket fences around their secure, undisclosed family-values compounds.

The moral of this Blog Box: How pathetic that no one ever cared enough about today's Republicans to teach them how to behave or how important it is to be considerate of the needs of ALL people!

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