I would really like to know where people like Soderberg get the idea that the U.S. President has the power to “order” private citizens to do anything, let alone to break the law, as even she admits happened here. I’m asking this literally: how did this warped and distinctly un-American mentality get implanted into our public discourse — that the President can give “orders” to private citizens that must be complied with? Soderberg views the President as a monarch — someone who can issue “orders” that must be obeyed, even when, as she acknowledges, the “orders” are illegal.

– Glenn Greenwald

One of the reasons I have a hard time following Glenn Greenwald is that he has a habit of devoting looooong pieces to topics that require two or three paragraphs, tops. But I do find it interesting that Glenn, along with what is in my estimation a sizable majority of the liberal blogosphere, treats the status of being “American” as an immutable value. The idea of an all powerful, imperial executive is hardly “un-American” in today’s political culture. In our current power-worshiping, hero-lionizing milieu, it’s as American as a gas-guzzling hummer that you don’t need. In all honesty we should simply admit that the republic, to the extent that it ever truly existed post-Spanish American war, is dead and buried. All that’s left is for America as it currently is, i.e. the USEmpire, to burn away in all it’s self-destructive, violent glory.

Should be interesting.

Our masterpiece. I gotta talk Janie into filing a joint patent application for this.

From the IHT:

“I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states,” wrote Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

But his campaign said that Obama’s opposition to the initiative, which will appear on the state’s November ballot, did not signal a change in position. He remains opposed to same-sex marriage, but supports civil unions and domestic partnerships.

I’m sure that the queers will greatly appreciate Barack Obama’s milquetoast support of second class citizenship for those of a different sexual orientation. However, I regret to inform him and the rest of the self-congratulatory “moderates” that such a proposal is simply a craven means of supporting vicious discrimination while claiming to oppose it, and that they can all therefore eat shit and die.

I might have called it a bit too late when I predicted a date of January 20, 2009 for when progressive bloggers would begin tying to rationalize Obama’s failures. In fact, it looks like at least one of the big ones is looking for a head start:

“We chose serious symbolic change that has deep cultural meaning over serious ideological change that has deep political meaning. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that — the effects of such things are far reaching and incredibly important for the advancement of our society. You can’t forget that Barack himself was born at a time when Jim Crow was still enshrined in the south. This is huge. But nothing comes free and having a politically moderate president at a time when a more explicit progressivism might have gotten a boost is the price we pay. The Village will only tolerate so much change at one time. If we want real political change, it’s time to change the Village.”

So, you see, Obama’s rapidly solidifying embrace of status-quo national-security state politics is the price we pay for being able to vote for a hollow-man savior who happens to be black.

To read the comments and see a mass of Digby’s readers shower praise upon her for such nonsense makes the pwog community look more like a support group than a serious group of activists…blogging at its most typical.

Yes, there are some changes going on around here. I’ve already screwed up on one part, which is what I get for starting it at 3:00AM. Fortunately, that was a relatively small thing.

Digby, again:

“As I’ve written before, that slogan was the antiwar chant, “no blood for oil.” It was true and yet it was considered “all wrong.” It’s a testament to the conservative rhetorical dominance of our culture that it was relegated to the fringe.”

And yet, many liberals seem to be convinced that the only reason “conservatives” so thoroughly dominated the rhetoric in the choreographed run up to the Iraq aggression was because of their keen ability to package and shrink-wrap their message in a way that made it attractive to an impressionable American political market. The Busheviks, however, didn’t have to do very much to sell a mid-east war to a nation in the mood for carpet bombing just about anything that looked like an Aye-rab. Indeed, the events of 9/11 were only a particularly strong additive to an inherently violent national mindset. From white settlers carving out lebensraum by wiping-out and expropriating indigenous peoples to “humanitarian” interventions in the former Yugoslavia, American culture has been defined by a sadistic pride in its ability to compel obedience through violence. No amount of industrial prefabricated rhetoric, via think-tanks or whatever, is going to change that essential fact.

What does it take to turn Americans against a war? Certainly not sympathy for the plight bestowed upon brown people in the form of warlordism, ethno-sectarian cleansing and, of course, a foreign occupation that includes virtually lawless mercenaries. What it took, in the end, was this. Even before that, Americans viewed their own 4000 or so uniformed and armed military personnel who lost their lives in Iraq as the greatest tragedy, while the few hundred thousand (bare-minimum) Iraqi civilians who have died, not to mention the innumerable others that have had their lives and families destroyed by such death and destruction, barely even registers on the radar. We’re a colonialist culture, we care not for those living under out thumb but rather those whose thumbs are getting tired maintaining a foreign occupation. And, barring that, we care for our wallet and our ability to drive around in gas-guzzling Hummers.

I really don’t mean to pick on Digby and other progressive bloggers so much. Their hearts are in the right place, but they stubbornly remain under the delusion that they can somehow (through electing more-n-better Democrats!) reverse the irreversible. America is destined to do what all empires do: collapse under the weight of its own excesses.

I gotta say, after seven years of hearing pwoggies chide Bush supporters for being a lot of brainless zealots in a cult of personality, it’s kind of funny to see so many of them emulating that behavior with regard to Obama. That is why my irony meter turned to ash as I read about the insufferably sanctimonious Keith Olbermann rushing to Obama’s defense as the latter threw his support behind the FISA capitulation, and then reading him respond like the low-rent apparatchik he indisputably is when Glenn Greenwald called him on it. To drive the point further down the alley, I should note that he did so to the same chorus of insipid idolatry he usually receives from to Kos crew. This is the future, folks: one cult of personality goes out of power, one from the other faction of the empire goes in. But alas I remain certain that Obama’s magical incantations invoking the twin avatars of “hope” and “change” will somehow help to some degree. Look for the pwoggies to tie themselves in knots trying to justify Obama’s failure to alter our national-security state in any meaningful way starting on January 20, 2009.

EDIT: And while I’m on the topic, one of the fall-back positions on why Obama is still preferable to a McCain presidency has thus far been his potential judicial nominations, but when you actually examine this it would seem to stem from a faith on the part of pwog-Dems that mercenary justices can only come from the opposite side of the aisle. There is nothing stopping Obama from appointing sympathetic and deferential justices with liberal credentials in the same manner that Bush has done with long-time conservatives. On the other hand, the fact that Bush has packed the court with a lot of mercenary justices could have a somewhat positive effect, as their lack of loyalty to Obama could inspire them to engage in the kind of obstructionism I desire when Obama inevitably continues the now decades-long and still running consolidation of executive power.

John West over at Disco’s propaganda clearing-house is gloating about how the ACLU of Louisiana has admitted that the LSEA, that state’s version of the DI’s bullshit “academic freedom” legislation, has admitted that the bill itself would probably pass constitutional muster as written. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve always suspected this to be the case: the law seems to be sufficiently vague in it’s language to avoid any establishment clause challenge. West, of course, continues beating away at the fig-leaf section:

[T]he LSEA explicitly states that it “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or promote discrimination against religion or non-religion.” Incredibly, Ms. Esman suggests that this wording doesn’t mean what it says, insisting that “It does not say it prohibits the introduction of religion, and there’s a difference.” Actually, the language is even broader than that, prohibiting anything that might be used to promote a religious doctrine or religious discrimination.

The Discoverup Institute has been devoted, since their inception, to hiding the clear religious nature of their particular brand of creationism in order to get it past the courts. The reason they are behind these laws is because they want to inject their misinformation about evolutionary biology into the science classes to create FUD. They’re various attempts at crafting a successful application of the Wedge Strategy have been met with abject failure, but it now appears that they’ve developed a strategy where the law enabling creationism is vague enough to get by a court challenge, even if an individual application of said law could succumb to such. The probable goal behind these laws is to keep the target moving, the laws can stay in place while science education activists have to constantly put out fires in the places they’re enacted.

We’ll see what happens.

Okay, there is the teaser I’ve been waiting for. I have now had some time to develop and collect my thoughts, they appear below with “+” and “-” characters indicating positive and negative reactions, respectively:

+.) Ray Stevenson looks pretty fucking badass. He’s big, and he’s got the voice to be Frank Castle. That’s the biggest plus in comparison to 2004 Punisher, IMO.

-.) Frank hanging from the chandelier with guns blazing is pure fucking bullshit. The Punisher is tactically intelligent, not showy. If there’s lots of bad guys that need to be eliminated at once, he would use C4, white phosphorous grenades, incapacitate them with flashbangs and proceed to pick them off, or something like that. I’m thinking of stuff like that scene in the beginning of the first Punisher Max storyline where he draws a bunch of “wiseguys” out of a party and wipes them out with an M249. Stuff like this hanging bullshit totally detracts from the Punisher’s image.

+.) The neo-noir-ish lighting and contrast, reminiscent of The Crow and Dark City, is exactly what I wanted for the atmosphere, in addition to it obviously being a colder environment. You need that kind of dark milieu to replicate the feel on Punisher MAX, which is apparently what they are going for.

-.) Save the flashing near the beginning, you can barely see the fucking skull on Frank’s vest. ‘Nuff said.

+.) The scene of Jigsaw standing outside of “Brad Street Hotel”. Once again, ’nuff said.

-.) “Sometimes I’d like to get my hands on God.” It’s in the right spirit, but poorly executed. Maybe it’s just me, but hey, these are just my reactions.

All in all, my reaction to the trailer is a positive one, primarily because it’s such an improvement over the last effort to create a Punisher flick. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it’s probably unfair to expect perfection. Let’s hope that it turns out good when it hits theaters.

The Schlafly-Lenski Briefwechsel