harikari.com

This Staturday, the mayor of Mount Vernon is going to give Glenn Beck the key to the city.  If it was closer, I would go up there and let everyone in Mount Vernon know what I think of Glenn Beck…

From the AP:

Mount Vernon Mayor Bud Norris came up with the idea to honor Beck, proclaiming Sept. 26 as “Glenn Beck Day” as a way to honor his success as a nationally known broadcaster. The event at which Beck is scheduled to speak sold out.

But, I just found out that I don’t have to drive for over an hour to flip him off in person.  All that I need to do is go down to Safeco field.

From the Seattle PI:

The Emerald City is hosting a man who calls Barack Obama a “racist,” sees a back-to-school presidential speech as “indoctrinating” children and defends an obscure 18th Century constitutional provision that set in place the slave trade and capped taxes at $10 a slave.

While paying good money to see such a lunatic is hard to fathom, the Seattle PI continues:

Still, there are plenty of “wing nuts” to give Beck a warm welcome. The private reception-with photos ($500) is sold out as well as the private reception-without-photos ($250) and the on-field seats with lunch ($100).

I will most likely walk down there just to gawk at the folks that look to him as a hero (and laugh at them).

Last night a man in his 60’s punched a healthcare reform advocate in the nose and promptly had his finger bitten off.  The AP reports that “his treatment was covered by Medicare.”

…a man on MoveOn.org’s side of the street crossed over and shouted “Why don’t you like the public option?” Several of the counter-protesters said that they don’t want the government to run everything. The MoveOn.org man got nose to nose with a short, gray-haired counter-protester, and sneered, “You’re an idiot.”

At that point, I’m told the victim either swung at or pushed his assailant’s face away with an open hand, and his finger entered his mouth. Update (3:09 PM PT): The victim, Bill Rice, admitted he threw the first two blows; his finger was bitten off on the second blow.

So, a person who “doesn’t want the government to run everything” gets his finger bit off and then uses a government insurance plan to pay for his medical bill?  WTF?

Speaking of the Lunatic Fringe, here’s a recent quote from the Queen Mother of the wingnuts, Former Governor (read “Quitter”) Sarah Palin:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.  Such a system is downright evil.”

Laura Harrison McBride wrote the following about Palin’s crazy talk:

• An end-of-life decision is not the same thing as an “ending life” decision.  The former refers to a decision  made by an individual at the end of that individual’s life, and commonly includes such matters as which grandchild gets the gold-rimmed teacups and where one wants to be buried.
• An “ending life” decision (death panel), on the other hand, would be a decision made about the individual by another party…a relative, a government, a jury of one’s peers and so on.

It isn’t awfully surprising that Palin would mix up the meanings of these two terms.  She joins a long list of other ignorant conservatives who willfully and purposely misuse language to pull the wool over the eyes of others, most notably their own followers since the rest of humanity seems able to see through it.

That’s an excellent response, but I kind of like throwing Palin’s own words right back at her, like this quote from her resignation speech:

“So how about in honor of the American solider you quit making things up?”

Yes, why don’t you Sarah?  Don’t you know you are letting our soldiers down with your batshit crazy talk?

A frame from the June 16th edition of This Modern World:

Ha that’s funny!  Because like even though some crazy conservatives might actually think that, they wouldn’t actually say it out loud, would they?

Michael Scheuer on Glenn Beck’s show last night:

Transcript:

Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it’s going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It’s an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.

Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.

Why do conservatives hate America so much? Why do they think it must be destroyed before they can save it?

For a whole lot more of Michael Scheuer’s batshit crazy analysis, read this column he wrote for the Washington Post that ends with:

…The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party’s left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America’s defense and — like Obama — naively believe that the West’s Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden’s shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin.

Michael Scheuer is an ex CIA man and he worked again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004.   He now works as a news analyst for CBS News.  I wonder how much longer he’ll have that job…

UPDATE:  Daily Show coverage of this story here.