My point exactly

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Breitbart the Fox

Only Rachel Maddow got it right. Be afraid, white people, be very afraid.

No one had ever heard of poor Shirley Sherrod until Andrew Breitbart (who has replaced his former mentor Matt Drudge as the prime bottom-feeder for Fox News) got ahold of her. He twisted her story to fit his narrative: ACORN, the NAACP, black people in the Obama administration – they’re all racist, and they’re coming to get you, white people. They’re going to take all the things you’ve pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps to get, and give them away to black people.

And it all starts with Obama, of course, which is why Breitbart’s timing is so calculated. Check it out: ACORN and health care reform. Shirley Sherrod and financial reform. Create a media firestorm; eclipse Obama.

How did the latest storm start? When the NAACP dared criticize the Tea Party for racism. Have you ever seen their signs? “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery.” “Save White America.”

It takes a clever man, doing the Atwater-Rove school one better, to take this criticism and throw it back, using a phony tape and Fox News. And it takes a very clever man to somehow escape criticism of his own role, by turning the whole dirty story into a criticism of the Obama administration, even from the likes of Keith Olbermann.

Be afraid, America, be very afraid, of the Breitbart/Fox/Murdoch media empire.

Marriage is sacred, except for Karl Rove’s

New Year’s resolutions, four days late, but better than never:

I will continue to write this blog every day; at least I’ll try very hard to write every day. It feels good once it’s done, like banging your head against a wall, and sometimes it’s even fun during the writing part.

I won’t write anymore about saints. For one thing, my true-atheist friend, who’s one of my most loyal readers and so I really do have to take her wishes into account, has a hard time with all those dead people she’s never heard of; and for another thing, one of my oldest friends, another loyal reader, who struggled with the Catholic religions along with me and therefore has heard of all those dead people, tells me she skips all the saint entries. And, likewise, no more Catholic feast days, or even Eastern Orthodox feast days, even though they’re a lot more interesting.

I will write more about interesting people’s birthdays because, after all, most people do celebrate the time of their birthday, whereas all the saints’ days celebrate the dates they were (mostly) gruesomely murdered, and so unless they’re up there watching, they themselves certainly never celebrated their saint’s day.

I’ll probably write about holidays here and there. But maybe not.

For my Sam Parnia buffs: yes, I’ll continue to write about him, and spooky stuff about death and dying, and weird scientific experiments.

I will continue my fair and balanced political observations, beginning today with the news that seems to have been conveniently buried under the holidays, not to mention the Christmas bomber: Karl Rove is getting divorced! For the second time!

And if you can’t figure out who that charming guy is up in the left hand corner, you, unlike him, haven’t been following Karl Rove closely enough.

Torture is fine, but forget gay marriage

Power drills and threats of rape and mock executions, not to mention actual (“authorized”) torture. Meanwhile Karl Rove was back here stirring his base with the moral outrage of gay marriage.

A nation of barbaric hypocrites.

Tax Day, Tea Parties, and Lee Atwater

“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.”

I wonder if this is when it all began.

Ronald Reagan said this in 1984, when Lee Atwater was the political director of his reelection campaign. Lee Atwater, who deliberately used political divisiveness as political strategy. Lee Atwater, who trained Karl Rove.

It ranges from extremely petty, as in the small “d” in every reproduction of this quote, to genuinely alarming, as in the rants of Palin/Limbaugh/Beck – so alarming, in fact, that we’ve now been warned by Homeland Security about the dangers of “right-wing extremist activity.”

Ironically, maybe this little triumvirate should listen even more to Lee Atwater. As he was dying, he said, in a letter to the Congressional candidate his campaign had succeeded in defeating (by calling his treatment for depression being “hooked up to jumper cables”):

[M]y illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood. . .