Oh happy days!

The Tea Party movement is launching a UK branch.  Apparently you can go teabagging with Daniel Hannan in Brighton (I wish to Eris I were making this up).

Well, this is unexpectedly hilarious.  On every possible level.

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Sure, you can use my identity when travelling to kill a terrorist

Douglas Murray asks “Who cares who killed the Hamas commander?”

At the risk of stating the obvious, I am forced to reply “the people whose passports were cloned in order to do the deed”?  I mean, its bad enough when people steal your identity and buy bad porn films in your name.  At least you don’t run the risk of Hamas assassinating your dog or blowing up your car as well.

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Sometimes, failure is the only viable option

Via TPM

The Massachusetts man charged this week with stockpiling weapons after saying he feared an imminent “Armageddon” appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, and saw Sarah Palin, who he said is on a “righteous ‘Mission from God,’” as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of society.

You know, if Sarah Palin really is the only person capable of averting the destruction of society, I’d rather have the destruction take place.

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The perfect setting for a dystopian, alternate history novel

I like to imagine the novel (and indeed the island) would be called “Thatchergrad“:

Margaret Thatcher initially refused to give 10,000 Vietnamese boat people refuge in Britain, privately warning her ministers that there would be riots on the streets if they were given council housing, Downing Street papers reveal.

The papers also show how Thatcher told her foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, and her home secretary, Willie Whitelaw, that it was “quite wrong that immigrants should be given council housing whereas white citizens were not”.

The Downing Street files provide shocking evidence that a personal element of racism, not evident in her public statements as prime minister, lay behind her reluctance to agree to a private and informal request from the United Nations high commissioner for refugees for Britain to take in 10,000 refugees who had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The papers, released at the National Archives today, show that her reluctance to take in any of the Vietnamese boat people led to her making a proposal to the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, that they jointly buy an Indonesian or Philippine island “not only as a staging post but as a place of settlement” for them all. This proposal was blocked by Lee Kuan Yu of Singapore, who feared it might become a “rival entrepreneurial city”.

Oh yeah, and if you hadn’t already figured it out, Maggie Thatcher was quite comfortable with racism (hey, you don’t think it was just coincidence the far-right collapsed after her election victory, did you?).

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Yes, but…

Al Schumann makes a good point when he says:

There’s no mystery to the tin foil hat hysterics of the wingnuts. They live in a society in which the Sunsteins have limitless opportunity to indulge their passive aggression and misanthropic control freaking. The wingnuts’ opportunities to vent are highly circumscribed, by their own vicious collectivism, and by a society arranged for the comfort of banksters and double-domed, extravagantly credentialed concern trolls. Things like the teabagging and birth certificate tantrums are all they’ve got. If the big shot pwogs were really worried, they could try addressing some of the material concerns and insecurities that drive and attract people to the cretinous outbursts. The hard core is probably implacable but the impact of their behavior would fade into a minor freak show in a country less dedicated to violent managerialism, stupid authoritarian mind games and kleptocracy.

However, that misses out the vital role wingnuts play in US politics, especially within the Democratic Party and its progressive supporters.  To put it bluntly, if wingnuts didn’t exist, then the Democrats wouldn’t have anyone scary to use to discipline their own members and those on the liberal-left end of the spectrum to vote for them.  They don’t care what the root causes of wingnuttery are, because they rely on it, to show how they are the only real alternative for any serious and intelligent person.  Without it, people might vote for the Greens, or even liberal Republicans (the few that haven’t been purged).  It’s a nice little, self-sustaining loop of stupidity and arch-cynicism.

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This politics thing is easier than it looks

So apparently, the party formerly known as Bush’s Cheerleaders has come out with a new statement of principles, since they’re evidently not yet bored of purging the ranks.

However, they have convinced me to throw my hat into the ring, and form my own political party, with my own, superior statement of principles.  Because naturally, anything they can do, I can do better:

1.  We support smaller government through mandated Russian Roulette games for all political seats and, if killed, the politician replaced by a blow-up sexdoll.  All lobbyists will also be thrown down a cliff, then laughed at.

2.  We support abusing Canada’s government-run health care, and will bus American citizens over the border to be treated.

3.  We support market based energy reform, such as hiring Blackwater to slash the tires of every energy company who doesn’t do as we say.

4.  We support the worker’s right to go crazy and whack their supervisor, if they feel like it.

5.  We support the expulsion of all illegal immigrants to America, their children, their children’s children, their children’s children children etc etc ad infinitum.  Zero tolerance.

6.  We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by declaring we have won, then withdrawing sneakily so the terrorists cannot follow us home.

7.  We support the containment of Iran and North Korea via the construction of a giant, space-based weapons platform, which we call a “Death Star”.  Dick Cheney will be the commanding officer.

8.  We support the Defense of Marriage even more, by restricting marriage to white, hetrosexual twenty-somethings, and making divorce punishable by being hung until you are sorry dead.

9.  We support death panels so long as it makes Sarah Palin do more hilarious freakouts.

10.  We support the right of every child in America to own one depleted uranium shell.

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