The First Church of Free Speech

According to Sean Hannity, John Edwards and Bill Clinton are beneath contempt for violating their wedding vows. When Hannity’s co-host, Alan Colmes, showed uncharacteristic spine and pointed out that Dungeon Master McCain broke those same vows, Hannity squealing like a stuck pig that McCain should be given a pass because he was locked up in a Vietnamese prison.

Crooks And Liars has the video here.

If Hannity thinks being locked up under wretched conditions should give a person license to mistreat others, then maybe he should ask for a pardon for Roman Polanski, who suffered far worse* than anything McCain and his fluffers describe in their numerous tall tales.

*Polanski spent his youth as an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp, and his pregnant wife was murdered in the most ghastly manner by the Charles Manson cult. For the record, I don’t think any of the horrors Polanksi suffered can justify his repulsive behavior, either.

Oh dear, once again the Dungeon Master has given us another tall tale of what went on a long time ago in a prison far, far away.

This isn’t the first time. First he claimed to have duped his jailers by giving them the names of players from the Green Bay Packers. Then, in order to suck up voters and media in Pennsylvania, he claims that he had given them names from the 1967 Pittsburgh Steelers. Then he claimed to have become an ABBA fan in 1967, which was five years before the group had released any music. Now, in order to appeal to fundies, the Dungeon Master claimed just last night that a Vietnamese prison guard drew a cross in the dirt to show sympathy for him. I caught a whiff of bullshit, and apparently, I’m not the only one.

From Daily Kos:

by rickrocket Sun Aug 17, 2008 at 09:32:42 AM PDT

I was watching the forum last night and decided that since I hadn’t eaten yet, I would try to listen to John McCain speak. I was doing OK with the “my friends” and the evil chuckle when I heard him talk about his POW story of the cross in the dirt. That was when I couldn’t take it anymore.

* rickrocket’s diary :: :: *

It just sounded so fake and so contrived, so I did a little research about it. Someone on here said it sounded like a scene from Ben-Hur, so I did a google search about Ben-Hur and cross in the sand and such. No dice. But I searched around a little bit more and here is what I found. A story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his times in the Soviet Gulags.

Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

[From Luke Veronis, “The Sign of the Cross”; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

So, it is very interesting that Mr. Solzhenitsyn and Mr. McCain had the same Christian guard/prisoner experience. Or maybe it is all just a made up story. Somehow I doubt that Alexander Solzhenitsyn heard John McCain’s story and copied it.

UPDATE: This story was actually excerpted from “The Gulag Archipelago” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which was released in the US in 1973.

Of course the media aren’t about to hound Dungeon Master McCain about any of this, since only Democrats’ war records are subject to scrutiny.

How else can one explain her post where she calls out Dungeon Master McCain for lying about his “service” in Vietnam? Doesn’t the proprietor of Hullabaloo realize that right-wingers always tell the truth about war and that Democrats always lie because they hate America and want sinister dark-skinned people to rule the world?

I mean, so what if McCain claims he became an ABBA fan when he crashed in Vietnam in 1967, even though ABBA didn’t release any music before 1972? First of all, they were Swedish and the Swedes opposed the Vietnam War, so they probably faked their discology just to discredit Uncle Sam. I just got an e-mail from Andy Martin telling me that Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad are Swedish code names for Jane Fonda, and that Bjorn & Benny have links to George Soros.

Shorter Jerome Corsi:

2004: John Kerry is a crypto-Jew who faked his wounds in Vietnam.

2005: Iran is going to nuke America.

2006: The Mexicans are invading and want to take over the country.

2007: But not before the country is merged with Canada and Mexico and we’re all using “Ameros” as currency.

2008: Obama is not just an angry, uppity Negro -but an angry, uppity sand Negro who prays to Allah!

A post from Brainy Bombshell Rachel Sklar about Dungeonmaster McCain asks:

Where Noonan Leads, McCain Follows?

The article makes the point that the Dungeonmaster is following the lead of deranged right-wing crackpot Peggy Noonan. For example, Noonan insinuates that Obama isn’t a “real” American (you know, the kind that napalms Vietnamese civilians). For reasons I can’t explain, Sklar takes Noonan seriously.

She shouldn’t. Were it not for George “Triumph of the” Will, Peggy Noonan would be known as the most pretentious twit in opinion journalism. Like the late William Buckley, she affects a kind of Thurston Howell-meets-Olivia deHavilland posh accent last heard in movie studios fifty years ago. But that accent, like her hifalutin prose is about as phony as one of Sean Hannity’s so-called “freedom concerts”.

I don’t see the big deal about Noonan’s attempt to paint Obama as someone who doesn’t love the country enough to sent another 4000 troops to their deaths. Accusing their opponents of being disloyal to the country, or of not being war whores is what Republitards have done for the last sixty years. Why should this time be any different?

Besides, patriotism is like sexual prowess: Show me someone who brags about having more than others and I’ll show you a guy who’s hung like a lightswitch.

I see Songbird John McCain is crying in his beer because the New York Times ran a pair of editorials denouncing his sleazy TV ads against Barack Obama.

Here’s the fun part from Devlin Barrett’s story from AP [via Huffington Post]:

Goldfarb compared the editors to a blogger “sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of Dungeons & Dragons.”

If I worked for a candidate with a track record of making up fanciful stories that supposedly took place long ago and far away in dungeons (stories that improve with each retelling), the last thing in the world I would want to bring up is Dungeons & Dragons. McCain’s story about memorizing the names of the players from the Pittsburgh Steelers of 1968 and using those names to dupe his Vietnamese jailers is about as plausible as the adventures of Mordenkainen the Wizard in the realm of Blackmoor. At least when the late Gary Gygax invented fantasy tales about dungeons, he was entertaining.

Not to worry: Barack Obama gives this country a bonus of +2 to its saving throw versus wankers.

It’s a sad day when a dead Jesse Helms does more to delay the FISA bill than a live Harry Reid or Barack Obama.

I wasn’t going to do anything special for July 4th since I’m not exactly proud of this country anymore and see nothing worth celebrating. Then I heard Jesse the Hutt had kicked the bucket…

…and I broke out the charcoal and ran to the fireworks stand. It was time to celebrate!

Normally I find it tasteless to gloat when even the more loathsome people keel over, but Jesse the Hutt was truly one of the most repulsive individuals to ever hold public office in the history of the country, along with Pitchfork Tillman.

It’s nice to know that the flames of hell will burn just a little brighter now that a big pile of rancid fatback named Jesse Helms has been tossed on the fire down below.

Back when Helms won the 1990 senate race by running paranoid racist ads, I came up with this joke:

Q: Do you know what the difference is between David Duke and Jesse Helms?

A: Neither do I.

When Duke lost another race in Louisiana, I updated the punchline:

A: about 400,000 votes

Now that he’s roasting in hell, I can update it again:

A: six feet of dirt

Apparently it’s front page newsworthy that a maniacal Palestinian ran over three Israelis with a Caterpillar bulldozer, the kind preferred by Israeli ethnic cleansers when they crush Palestinian homes, sometimes with the Palestinians inside. It’s also the kind of vehicle that was used to murder Rachel Corrie.

At first it might appear that the story made the papers and newscasts for the same reason that a “Man Bites Dog” story would. Such is not the case when it comes to the Middle East, however. The simple fact is, the media are deeply racist -especially toward Palestinians, who are regarded as sub-human- and very much pro-Israeli (preferably right-wing Israeli). It’s “newsworthy” because most journalists place value on Israeli lives and don’t value the lives of Arabs, least of all Palestinians.

Ever since Christopher Hitchens made his much-advertised stagger from the Left to the Right (the same stagger he accused another boozing English gasbag -crank “historian” Paul Johnson- of making) he has been a shameless war whore, accusing those who opposed the rape of Iraq of being cowards and traitors -going so far as to use a forged e-mail to slander the mother of one of the soldiers killed in Iraq. He even tried to downplay the number of Iraqis who met untimely deaths thanks to his pet war (No wonder he’s such a David Irving fanboy!).

Now that the War Party is on the way out and many a war whore has been lawyering up to avoid being held responsible, Hitchens’ horseshit isn’t much in demand and Hitchens is trying to mask his buyer’s remorse with self-flagellation -much as Henry II had himself whipped after bumping off Thomas Beckett. It was a farce over 800 years ago and it’s a farce in 2008 when Hitchens had water forced down his gullet to prove something everyone already knew: water torture is (brace yourselves)…

…TORTURE!

Were it not for Hitchens’ shameless pimping for this war, which has led to the water torture and other atrocities he helped incite, one might think he was trying to win some sort of No Shit, Sherlock Award. It’s obvious that what he’s really doing is groping for an excuse to turn against the War Party, and his condemnation of water torture is six years late and countless billions of dollars short. The simple fact is, Hitchens didn’t have the time of day for the victims of Dubya’s war crimes when it mattered.

Besides, if the folks at Vanity Fair wanted to torture Hitchens, they could have told him he was about to be dunked in whiskey, only to use water instead.

“Where’s my chaser?”