A priest, a rabbi and a Lenny Bruce walk into a bar.

Use a "cocksucker", go to jail.


On being deliberately crude or insulting.

I want to win, just so we’re clear.

To win.

To wrestle one corner of our democracy back from the bestial creatures that have taken the place over and use that real estate like the Allies used the beaches of Normandy. I want them on the run.

I want them furious.

I want them bugfuck with the kind of rage that brings down IQs and makes people stupid and linear and easy to pick off.

With reasonable men and women, I believe in sitting-and-reasoning together. For someone who believes in the idea of the common good, and can correct their mistakes when shown that they’re wrong, I believe in extending respect and every kindness.

But for the others, I want their sensibilities lacerated morning-noon-and-night for the same reason that the picadors lance the neck muscles of bulls in the ring: I want them goaded and head-down charging straight into their own doom.

I want them pissed as hell. I want their “they volunteered”, sending-other-people’s-children off to fight their Faith-Based Crusades cowardice mocked, and their Death God religion ridiculed.

I want their dangerous imbecility laughed at. I want future generations of Americans to look back on the Modern GOP as the swine that they are, and shake their heads with the same kind of what-the-fuck-were-they-thinking incredulity we have for George Wallace and Bull Connor.

I want them foaming-at-every-orifice furious, so that the nation and the world can continue to get a clear, unvarnished look at these horrid cocksuckers in a bright light.

Why? First, because they deserve it. They deserve to be shamed in the public square both for their rancid ideology and their reeking hypocrisy. Big on my bill of particulars: Anyone who militated for the Impeachment of Bill Clinton and yet has yawned though the last five years and chose to re-elect George Bush needs to be put in the stocks and made to recite, “I am a shit-eating fraud whose existence shames my Nation and my God.”

Second, because he who angers you, controls you. I want them angry, at our hands.

I want to see them kicked where it hurts, Garo-Yepremian-hard, until they stop trying to feed the Constitution into the woodchipper and ram their cancerous mockery of “Christianity” up everyone’s ass.

I want to see us do what we Liberals have such a fucking hard time doing – bitch-slapping them around the block and back again until they geek.

What put me in mind of this?

A family fight over at Steve Gilliard’s house.

Harsh language, and hard feelings. Either poorly worded or just-plain-wrong opinions were lobbed around like cranky scorpions. There was some nearly hysterical over-reaction. Bad Joss and, as Cosmo D’Medici famously said, “You shall read that we are commanded to forgive our enemies; but you never read, that we are commanded to forgive our friends.”

Which put me in mind of targets and intentions.

One of the worst things I ever did in high school was I once picked on one of the few kids that were actually slower and weaker than I was. It was a thoroughly shameful thing to do, and I did it for no other reason than in made me feel good.

I spent a good number of years getting tossed down stairs, wet-towel flogged in the locker-room shower, stabbed in the leg with the pointy-end of a compass and assorted other public-education-sponsored horrors. School was where I learned that while Authority talks a helluva good game in civics class, when it came time to actually pulling the trigger on the jock zombie army to maybe stop them from beating the everloving shit out of my friends and I, “Authority” were just so many empty suits who gladly turned a blind-eye to what some, favored students did.

We had targets publicly painted on our asses and learned very fast and very early the valuable lesson that without strong, principled leadership, out-groups can expect little help from “the government”. We also learned that fighting fair doesn’t work. Whenever one of us threatened to actually win one of the many fights we were shoved in to, two or three or more of our tormentors would just pile on and pound us into a finer grade of hamburger.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t win: it was that we were not going to be allowed to win.

So like geeks since before the dawn of time, whenever possible, we moved onto the battlefields where we could win, formed out own alternate culture and waited for our liberation.

And during a particularly bad time, I bullied a young man until he cried. I knew better – I fucking well knew better – but on a particularly awful day I just wanted to feel bigger and more powerful than somebody, so with a minimum of provocation I lit into him. Verbally bracketed him and blew him apart...and it felt dark and sick and drunkenly wonderful.

So I really do understand a little of what it is to be the weakling bully who makes himself feel better about his weakness by kicking on someone even more powerless than he is.

Amp that impulse up a hundred times, and you have the College Republican Yellow Elephants. Increase it by a thousand, and you get the gleeful thugs of Hate Radio. You get Dobson and DeLay. You get Falwell and Frist.

Another few notches, you get Jim Crow and lynching in the name of God. Weak white men fearful that Blacks weren’t just their equals, but their betters. Knowing in their ugly hearts that they could not survive a typical week in the life of a typical Black American in the Segregated South. Knowing that they were pussies compared to the people they oppressed, and this sickness drove them madder still.

A few more notches, you find yourself in the antebellum South.

A few hundred more and you find yourself in the company of Nazis.

By avocation, I’m a writer. So are you. So is everybody, to some varying degree or another. You and I, we were bequeathed 300,000 words from a hundreds tongues and cultures, and some large fraction of them are pretty hard-edged.

I don’t give a shit what words someone uses as long as they use them well. I don’t give a shitif a man or woman says “cunt”...or “ditch-delivering drab”. Or “gadzooks”. Or contracts “God’s wounds” into “zounds”...as long as they deliver the rhetorical goods, and as long as they’re going after a deserving objective.

When Rush used his megawattage and decibels to flog the poor and the sick and the weak, he’s being, oh, let’s say an arrant knave. A ghoul who uses his position of power to donkey-punch people who are frail and relatively powerless.

OTOH, by dint of his long years getting rich picnicking on the fragile and helpless, Rush deserves no mercy, and if calling him a junkie or a douchebag or a cunt gets the job done...sign me the fuck up for that detail.

Being gay is not a sin or a crime or any-damned-thing other that the business of the consenting adults involved. Is it my cuppa tea? No, but going after someone who is gay for being gay is just despicable. Profoundly un-American and un-Christian.

OTOH, in case you hadn’t noticed, our Adversaries seem positively obsessed with sex, especially gay sex. A shockingly high percentage of Republicans seem to be self-hating gay men, and a vast number of others are so paranoid about their manhood that they’re willing to go to war to prop up their limp dicks. Cruel, brittle, bitter egos barely papering over deep fears of impotence and inadequacy.

These people are bigots with public manners and private codes. It makes them schizophrenic, which gives us an opening. Remember how freaked out the Cheney’s were during the campaign when Kerry referred to their openly lesbian daughter as...a lesbian?

These people think being gay, for example, is shameful and an abomination, but the dictates of the political world demands they pretend otherwise. To these people – to the people in power -- I think we are frankly obligated to occasionally be as offensive and insulting as we can be without wandering over into libel and physical threats. To highlight the contradictions.

All 300,000 words in the language belong to us. All of them. If a writer uses language recklessly or as hammer to beat a bunny rabbit, they should be called on it. I took down a post for just that reason: I’d gone too far and the person who called me on it was right, and I was wrong. There are no rules to it that I know of other than to be kind to people who can’t defend themselves and foreswear the use of nukes when conventional weapons are all you need to make your point.

That being said, when my opponent offers up his ass in public in a way that screams Big Fat Target, damned betcha I’m down for that. If going right after their fears over their manliness with a meat-axe helps get the job done, I say Let’s Party! And if winning means throwing some pitiless fucking haymakers with language that’d make my mother blush and run out of the room, well, whoever said politics was beanbag?