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Christopher Hitchens gets to the heart of it with these words from a Slate column titled “White Fright:”

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Mr. Fish doesn’t need words.

And take a look at this video that was embedded in the Hitchens column. 

This guy looks like he’s trying to be Benjamin Franklin, but he’s no Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was enlightend.  This guy is not.  Neither are most of the other people interviewed in this video.

Thank you Mr. Fish for searing images into my brain of a camouflaged genitals and American GI’s traversing a hairy ass.

I’ve always thought war was way more disgusting than romantic, and now… even more so.

The U.S. Military invaded Afghanistan 9-1/2 years ago to topple the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden.  Our number one reason for being there vacated the caves of Tora Bora just months after we arrived and, since then, the mission has been one of keeping the Taliban at bay and instituting some form of modern democracy in a country populated by people that aren’t to keen about change. 

Obama’s strategy has been to stabilize the country, get the Afghan military trained well enough to do the job themselves, and then get out. 

But today we learned that there’s gold in them there hills!  Well not so much gold, but a lot of other minerals that we need to keep our high-tech, battery powered economy going.  Today’s NYT reports:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

…

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

Finally a reason to get greedy extraction-industry corporations interested enough in this war to wanna fight harder.   Maybe they’ll even be willing to help pay for it.

Mr. Fish delivers the news perfectly with this comic about the importance of what we’ve discovered that “was hidden beneath the feet of the worthless population” of Afghanistan.

Fans of Mr. Fish (self-proclaimed upholder of Truth and Horseshit) can now find his comics and animations on his new blog, Clowncrack.com.

Check it out today.  I spent several minutes on the animations page and highly recommend you do the same.  Watch “Piece,” “Jesus Time,” “BushPresidencyCondensed,” and:

Oh just watch them all.

And visit Clowncrack often.

On the blogroll now too…

I’ll remind you once and a while.

For a summary of arguments from both sides of the debate on The Bailout, you can read this post by Paul Krugman (whom we love) or you can watch this segment of “A Formidable Opponent” from the October 2nd airing of The Colbert Report:

and laugh your ass off.

You are free to choose.

… and you really should read Mr. Fish’s latest comic.

Mr. Fish illustrated the unnatural combination of politics and religion perfectly in this week’s comic featuring a caricature of Barack Obama.  Go read it now and then come back here.

Mr. Fish could make the same point with any of the candidates running for president.  All he’d have to do is replace Obama with McCain and add statements made by James Agee, or replace him with Clinton and mention her former pastor who was recently convicted of molesting a seven-year-old girl or her membership in The Fellowship.

All the candidates would be well advised to lay off each others’ ties to religious figures and religious organizations.  Counter attacks are too easy and, no matter how much the media chooses to focus on it, religion isn’t supposed to have anything to do with who we choose to be our president.  What’s supposed to matter is what the candidates themselves say and do.

The real story isn’t that these candidates are Christians and attend churches.  The real story is about how the media’s coverage is driven by race.

Read E. J. Dionne, Jr. today.

You really, really, really, really need to go read Mr. Fish right now.

How did we get from here…

That’s Barack Obama delivering the Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic Convention.  I remember it well and I also remembering quite a few people telling me how they’d love to be able to vote for him for president instead of John Kerry. 

To here?

That’s today’s weekly comic from Mr. Fish on the Harper’s website.

I guess Mr. Fish isn’t cutting Obama any slack for being “so fresh and so clean clean.”

from Harper’s.

Cartoon by Mr. Fish.

Words by Pierre Tristam.

When an American soldier dies his story is written up in his hometown paper, powerfully enough usually, but the story’s effect is limited to that newspaper’s readership zone. There is no totality in the reporting of war casualties, no sense that one soldier s death, no matter where from, affects the whole nation. A town in Montana will ache for a lost son by itself, as if it alone is experiencing loss. What mourning and suffering does take place is solitary because inherently isolated. Existentialism at its bitterest, though don’t expect our information society ever to touch on the subject more than gingerly. It’s an aspect of that sickness of compulsive “localism” in American journalism: if it’s not local, it’s not relevant. If twelve Americans from other states are killed in a single day, your state, should it have been spared, will not care. Newsy attention will rather be focused on Nancy Grace and Larry King, who’ll be busy exploring the depths and breadth of the latest mystery disappearance of the white model with 38-C tits and a million-dollar estate. So news of the dead is forcibly diffused, its impact lessened to the point of irrelevance beyond that daily listing printed in a few newspapers.

And when it comes to civilian deaths…

When they are counted, they’re scabrously discounted, as has been the case since that study was published, showing possibly 650,000 Iraqi deaths since 2003. The debate over the study shows up the disconnect of the American public and media over the devastation of the war better than anything to date. No matter how much you downgrade the number, even if it’s cut in half, it still amounts to more deaths in three years, as a result of the American intervention, than all the killings of the Saddam Hussein regime in a quarter century-and all the killings at Hiroshima, Hamburg, Tokyo and Dresden combined. It’s still more than all the American dead of World War I and II combined. It’s still more than all the American dead, northerner or southerner, of the Civil War, and by far more than all the American dead, soldier and civilian, in all wars involving Americans since World War II, combined. (See for yourself.)