Schrodinger's Mo’s Redux

No, you get in the fucking box.

In furtherance of the Glorious Cause and in honor of its flag,

"Ol' Fabulous"
(image boosted from Tengrain while he slept)
this reprise
("Seriously, dude, recycling past glory on new media? Again?
I mean, what are you, The Beatles' back catalog?"
"Shut up!Shut up!Shut up!")
of "Schrodinger's Mo’s" from 2006.

Now fortified with

22% more Tom Waits!

Schrodinger's Mo’s

Let’s lead off with this bit of Constitutional Horseshit hacky-sack from the Dear Leader via the NYT:

June 5, 2006
Gay Marriage Ban Is Short of Votes in Senate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush rallied support Monday for a ban on gay marriage as the Senate opened a volatile, election-year debate on a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex weddings.

''Changing the definition of marriage would undermine the structure of the family,'' said Bush, who raised the issue's profile with an event at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Bush criticized judges who have overturned state laws similar in intent to the proposed legislation. ''Marriage is the most fundamental institution of civilization, and it should not be redefined by activist judges,'' he said.

Traditional marriage, Bush said, is the cornerstone of a healthy society and the issue should be put ''back where it belongs: in the hands of the American people.''

There was little chance of that in the near future. Neither chamber is likely to pass the amendment by the two-thirds majority required to send it to the states -- three quarters of which would then have to approve it.
...

''A vote for this amendment is a vote for bigotry pure and simple,'' said Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, where the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriages in 2003.
...

''The reason for this debate is to divide our society, to pit one against another,'' [Senate Democratic Leader Harry] Reid said in remarks prepared for delivery on the Senate floor. ''This is another one of the presidents efforts to frighten, to distort, to distract, and to confuse America. It is this administration's way of avoiding the tough, real problems that American citizens are confronted with each and every day.''

Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, which in 2004 began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, on Monday denounced Bush's move as predictable and ''stale rhetoric'' aimed at rallying conservatives for this year's midterm elections.
''It's politics. It's pandering and it's placating a core constituency, the evangelicals,'' Newsom said on ABC's ''Good Morning America.''
...

I have neighbors I do not know and who in no way affect me except if their garbage piles up too high, or they play that devil’s music too loud on a Sunday morning when I’m trying to listen to “Lords of Acid” at 120 decibels in peace.

They do not disturb some invisible, trembling pellucid neighborhood ether with their peccadilloes.

They probably self-selected themselves into the area based on some combination of criteria that probably includes a degree of tolerance for people who are not like them, but frankly if they compulsively vacuum in nothing but pearls and heels, or nickname their pet potbelly pig “Mor-ton” and re-enact old episodes of the McLaughlin Group for kicks, what the fuck do I care?

I also have family I see once every few years at reunions.

They are a boisterous bunch, shot through with a lot of hardcore Rightwing Evangelicals. For a couple of days we tell marvelous, funny, poignant stories about relatives long gone, visit the old cemetery, and auction off family knick-knacks and heirlooms to defray the cost of meals and soda. Their bizarre cult beliefs roll off of me like water off a heathen duck’s ass, and I’m sure my vile humanist ravings never so much as raise a welt on their dense, Blood-O’-Christ ablative shielding.

I also have friends and family a few miles away and a half a continent away I can visit or call and talk to when I’m broken and sad: Those are my intimacies of choice.

And while I disagree with Rick Blaine [Casablanca] when he say's “The problems of the world are not in my department”, (yes, he eventually comes around) I profoundly agree with the idea that the personal choices and habits of the rest of the world are absolutely none of my god damned business so long as they keep their garbage off my lawn and don’t frighten the horses in the street.

Which is comical, because I am apparently soooo old that I actually remember sepia-toned days of $0.40/gallon gasoline, commercial-free public teevee and when keeping one’s snout the fuck out of other people’s business used to be touted as a granite pillar of the Conservative movement.

But that was before they sold their souls to Jerry Falwell in exchange for millions of obedient Christopath voters.

So this one is for my new physics pals from the Shakespeare’s Sister meet-up, wherein the estimable Mrs. Shakes consented to rope-and-ride a buncha Liberals to a movie (“An Inconvenient Truth” -- massively recommended) and dinner.

(“Trying to herd cats,” she opined.

Nah.

Herding fireflies with a firehose is more like it. I should know; I’m one of the worst of the bunch.)

So let us imagine there’s a box in, oh, say, Massachusetts or Oregon or Iowa.

A big box, and in that box are the following items:

1. A Bible.
2. A preacher.
3. A gay couple.
4. A straight friend.
5. Enough consumables and comforts to last a lifetime.

Sort of a Biosphere II, but with vastly better feng shui.

And you’re living la vida no-neck in some high-toned, melanin-poor gated exurb, or in some scruffier digs where the “gate” is a gaunt, three-legged pit-bull named Bobby Lee tied the rusted hulk of an El Camino up on ancient blocks.

Now at some point over the course of years, the gay couple may ask the preacher to pick up the bible and, with their straight friend standing witness, get hitched.

Or they may not.

In fact, they exist only in a cloud of quantum connubial possibilities until you bust the box open and demand to know just what in the fuck they’re doing in there. And how can they have amassed such a formidable stockpile of really spiffy antiques without ever having left the box!

It is only when you kick the door down and intrude on their private business that the haze of potential outcomes collapses into a single, nuptial certainty.

So the question is, when exactly -- over the course of, say, forty years of leaving the box intact and letting them be -- did their status inside the box destroy your marriage outside the box?

When was it -- precisely -- during those four decades that this single detail of the lives of strangers who live so immensely far away from you in every meaningful way managed to intrude into your life so violently that it ruined your relationship with your spouse and debased the value of the love and mutual commitment you share?

So much so that the only possible solution is to amend the foundational documents of our democracy?

Because if you cannot identify the specific, quantifiable harm that such a union would have on you and yours, then shut your fucking hole.

And if the only rationale you can conjure is the oldest and most despicable of the “pellucid ether” arguments -- that it would be an affront to God [or his Divine Beard, “Traditional Values”] by asserting, as the Dear Leader just did, that “Marriage is the most fundamental institution of civilization, and it should not be redefined by activist judges” -- then I commend to your attention the opening lines of the June 12, 1967, Loving v. Virginia decision, which gets referred to a lot in Left Bloggylvania, but not cited verbatim nearly often enough for my tastes, because here is how it begins (Emphasis added):

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The law in Virginia as it read provided...

"Punishment for marriage. -- If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."

And the penalty for leaving the State to evade the law was...

...If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage."

What more needs be said?

When the cultural Gladys Kravitzes on the Right stomp into the public square dragging Gay Marriage along behind them, this is what’s really on the menu: Their insatiable appetite to impose their witchbag of hate, squeamishness and childish idiocy on everyone else in the Universe for no reason other than they are hateful, squeamish, childish idiots.

And since there is absolutely no quantifiable harm they can point to (In Loving, the “harm” cited was found in the language of Naim v. Naim which “concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride”…), time and again -- from slavery, through Jim Crow, through “Loving” and now with Gay Marriage -- you see the same democracy-loathing Red Statists thumping the same Bible, from the same pulpit, to the same squealing mob of culturally malnourished knuckleheads.

Generation after debased generation the disease is passed on, because regardless of where this moral cancer has geographically metastasized over the years, the continuous line of divinely-sanctioned White Male Christian Supremacy that runs from “God, Nooses and Negroes” to “God, Guns and Gays” comes straight out of the spiritual heart of the old Confederacy.

And because there are no tangible, measurable negative consequences, when you take it upon yourself to tell two consenting adults who and how they may marry you will always end up playing the “Almighty God”-card. Either explicitly, or by cowering behind such hollow, bigot-coded and patently ridiculous threats as, "Changing the definition of marriage would undermine the structure of the family."

On this issue -- however icky you might personally find the whole idea of boys kissing boys or girls canoodling with girls -- you can either be a Good Republican or a Good American, but you cannot be both.

Because when you insist that your perverse view of the Bible gives you the right to smash open Schrodinger's box and dictate who and how two consenting adults may marry, you will always end up standing on the gibbet, slipping the “Loving” rope around Liberty’s throat.

Always.

And that is no place that any decent American would ever want to be.

When They Were Kings

In celebration of the mighty Blog Against Theocracy this weekend --

Image via the crafty Tengrain

-- this encore presentation ("Oh, is that what the kids are calling it now?" "Shut up!") of the "Ten Plagues of Dumbses II".

(Recently translated from the First and Second Books of Texodus.)

The First Plague:

And so it was the days when the Wingnut Boot was heavy on the throat of the Nation, Reality went unto Dumbses, asking that the mortal remains of Terri Schiavo be respectfully committed unto the ground.

And Dumbses called his pundits and frists; and they by Christopathic enchantments and certain secrets, defiled her mortal remains most egregiously for partisan gain.

And though Reality did consume every wingnut trickery and win that argument most decisively, Dumbses’ heart was hardened, and he did not hearken to the will of the Nation, as Reality had commanded.

The Second Plague:

And unto the Media a Memo from the Street of Downing was delivered, proving the perfidy of Dumbses in the matter of the Great War. And it was shewn to the Nation that Dumbses did turn the nation of Iraq red with blood for lies and profit.

Thus therefore saith Reality: "In this thou shalt know that I am not to be fucked with: behold I expose the lies that led to the Debacle in the Desert."

And among the the soldiers that are in the War, many shall perish for criminal want of Armor and Medical Care. And the Press shall become corrupted, and the Nation shall be afflicted with ignorance and cognitive diarrhea when they try to gain knowledge from the Media.

And Reality landed smack on fat heads Dumbses and his servants and bloggers and water-carriers: and Iraq was turned into blood.

The Third Plague:

And the Pundits and Chickenhawks who throve in the shallow, smelly end of the bullshit tide pools of Conservative mendacity began to go mad; and the information flow became corrupted and completely detached from the real world. Runaway Blondes and Sharks Attacks displaced vital debate on and analysis of the Iraq War, and the Press refused to tell the Nation what in the fuck was really going on in Dumbses’ Excellent Iraqi Adventure.

And the limbaughs, hewitts and kristols worked their enchantments in like manner, tattooing the killword "Traitor!" upon the brow of any who dared to question the infinite wisdom of Dumbses; and Dumbses’s heart was hardened, neither did he hear the Nation, and he turned himself away, and went to Crawford the clear brush and play blindfolded "Find the WMD" with his Office Wife Secretary of State, neither did he set his heart to it this time also.

And Reality said, quit lying to the people you despicable, dry-drunk idiot. Quit slandering honorable me and quit shitting on the Constitution.

But if thou wilt not, Reality shall multiply the number of enemies and terrorists who will afflict you and the next two generations.

The Fourth Plague:

And Black Prisons and Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the bloody occupation of a foreign land for years in a war that was supposed to take a fortnight did rend the Coalition of the Willing, did drive Moderates into the arms of the Enemy, and did greatly enflame passion against a Nation that would be so fucking addle-pated as to have allowed a feebleminded frat-rat to rule over it in the first place.

While Osama bin Laden sat in safety in a different country altogether and laughed and laughed and reaped the rewards of the propaganda victories Dumbses kept handing him, year after year after year.

And the o’reillys and the coulters and the malkins did conjurate their majyks and process fact though their Orwellizers and cast enchantments to “prove” that this plague of failure showed how very, very right Dumbses had been all along, and how very, very wrong and disloyal the followers of Reality had been.

And Dumbses was reassured that he was right in all that he had done, and again hardened his heart against Reality.

The Fifth Plague:

And Reality stretched forth its hand upon the waters, and struck sky and ocean, and there came a Great Storm. So large was it that it could be seen from Space striding towards the Nation fangs and claws bared like a lion nearing the sheepcote.

And yet the Beast Katrina bore down on the Nation, Dumbses did nothing.

And as the Gulf Coast of the Nation was consumed and a great city lost, and as the brownies and chertoffs were commended for the heckuva job they were doing, even members of Dumbses own Party now began to wonder where they were being led.

And who the detached, oblivious shit-kicker was who was leading them into disaster after disaster.

The Sixth Plague:

And then didst Dumbses attempt to privatize the Nation’s Social Security.

As deftly and smoothly as a bear with DTs wearing oven mitts trying to thread a beading needle with sticky silk fresh from the spinneret of an Araneus diadematus.

And although he was beaten by Reality like a rented dromedary, he still didn’t fucking get it and his heart stayed as hard as Ted Haggard on a meth bender with a pre-paid rent boi.

The Seventh Plague:

And then there came a very grievous swarm of Leaks into the demesnes and principalities of Dumbses and of his servants, and all the Nation learned of the “Dubai Port Deal”, “Valerie Plame”, “Vote Caging”, “Energy Task Force”, “Jeff Gannon” and a host of others. They fell upon the Nation like a cloud of stinging flies, and the Nation rose up and said very clearly, “We wanted these incompetent, lying fucknozzles gone!”

And the friedmans and the broders and the rest of the pundit priesthood did sift the air and cast spell after spell, incanting “Bill Clinton’s Penis Was Woooooorse”.

And another layer of concrete was poured over Dumbses’ wretched heart.

The Intervention of the Reasonable Men:

Reality was by this time starting to notice that Dumbses stayed constantly and imperviously drunk on a cocktail of Hubris and Delusion, and that his Party's big plan was to just let him get away with it and blame Jimmy Carter or somebody whenever someone shoved a camera at them. And so Reality did summon The Baker and The Hamilton from their homes high atop Mount Whiteguy, and lo a Commission was formed so that Dumbses might be given a face-saving exit from his Iraqi Debacle and in that way the Nation might be saved.

And the Baker Hamilton Commission did produce a very mild, very moderate, very Centrist Report, and presented it as tribute to the mighty Dumbses.

And Dumbses used this Report as ass-paper,

and his heart stayed harden as neutronium.

And the Nation wept.

The Eighth Plague:

Ironically, in the case of Immigration, Dumbses actually tried to let some people go.

They were, in the main, the People of the Mexican Lands, who were sorely afflicted and heavy laden with the toil of picking the Nation’s fruit and swabbing the Nation’s bedpans while dwelling in a twilight economy. And Dumbses did stretch out his hand and try to find a middle course wherein the suffering of the People of the Mexican Lands might be balanced with the legitimate legal and security needs of the Nation.

But in this, Dumbses’ own magicians, pundits, spear-carriers and shouty-crackers rose up on Dumbses skin like boils. And they bit Dumbses upon his ankles and his throat, crying that he “Wanted Amnesty” and was perhaps even “Secretly Liberal”.

For Dumbses while had girded himself in a powerful armor of pinhead fanatics to protect him from Reality, he never understood that those reprogrammable sock-puppets would turn on him in a hard-heartbeat if he ever showed signs of not irrationally scapegoating the right groups of people.

The Ninth Plague:

And Reality brought a burning wind out of Texas called Alberto Gonzalez to set fire to what the other plagues had left in tinder-dry rubble. And day and night Dumbses loyal foot-servant stood before Congress under oath and lied and lied and lied and lied.

Badly.

He perjured himself publicly and repeatedly, and when he was not lying he was stumbling and “forgetting” frighteningly important details, until all the Nation could conclude was that Gonzalez was either deeply and criminally complicit in a cover-up of illegal activities perpetrated by the White House to subvert the Constitution and violate the civil rights of the people of the Nation...

...or that day-in-day-out he was proving to be possibly the stupidest creature on two legs, all while Dumbses kept insisting that he was, in fact, fucking brilliant, honorable, and was running the Nation's Department of Justice like an EZ-Bake Oven with a fresh light bulb.

And a great Darkness enveloped the GOP, as even the most loyal vizier and conjurer realized that the failings of the Dumbses Regime had exceeded even their considerable talent for propagandistic legerdemain.

And they keenly remembered what had happened when Dumbses had waited far, far too long to eliminate Rummy.

“Pleeeeeease,” they begged of him in private. “You must fire this baby-faced ebola virus or he’ll take the whole Party down with him. Didn't your spectacular failure to excise Rummy until he had doomed us all teach you a God Damned thing?!”

But again Dumbses’ heart was hardened and he said “Fuck you all; the Higher Father sez Gonzo’s stayin’!”

The Tenth Plague: The Loss of The Firstborn.

And finally Reality had had it with Dumbses and the filthy little fascists who eagerly followed him into despotism and ruin like baby ducks.

And Reality said, “OK, that’s it. I’m tired of playing. I’m making your kids into Liberals. The firstborn in the land of the Wingnut shall become Dirty Hippies, from the firstborn of Dumbses’ ministers, even to the firstborn of the trailer-dwelling mouth breather who thinks we can nuke all of our problems away.

"Might even make ‘em gay too, but for now we’ll just see how this goes."

And there shall be a great cry in all GOP, such as neither hath been before, nor shall be hereafter.

And you know what?

That’s exactly what’s happening…

From The Political Wire

July 27, 2007

Republican Support Collapses Among Youth

A new Democracy Corps/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey finds young people "profoundly alienated from the Republican party and its perceived values."

Key finding: "Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day."

In the presidential race, "both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lead Rudy Giuliani -- the most acceptable of the Republican offerings among youth -- by significant margins. The President’s standing is substantially worse, to the degree that is possible, than we find in the broader electorate. Moreover, the disconnect we see between the Republicans and our nation’s youth runs so deep, that it likely will not only outlive the Bush administration, but potentially haunt the Republicans for many years to come."

So let it be written.

So let it be done.