first as tragedy, second as farce

From The New York Times:

In the Israeli parliamentary elections, to be held Tuesday, he is running on a vow to require Arab citizens to sign a loyalty oath. As his campaign slogan asserts with a sly wink at Jewish voters, Avigdor Lieberman “knows how to speak Arabic.”

Mr. Lieberman does not know Arabic and will not, by all polls and predictions, become the next prime minister. But his popularity has been climbing so steeply that his party is now expected to come in third, making him a likely power broker with an explosive and apparently resonant political message: Israel is at risk not only from outside but also from its own Arab population.

“It no longer matters whether Lieberman will get 19 seats, as some polls indicate, or merely 15,” noted the political commentator Sima Kadmon in Friday’s Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “He is the story of this election campaign.”

This guy made his Yisrael Beitenu party because Israel's far right, militarist Likud party wasn't right wing enough for him. He made a dehumanizing threat of violence against Arab Israeli citizens his campaign slogan. A central part of his "peace" plan is revoking their citizenship. And he may soon become one of the most powerful men in Israel.

Just what kind of high government official would he make? Here's a nugget of Lieberman's diplomatic wisdom for ya, in response to a volley of suicide bomb attacks:

"if it were up to me I would notify the Palestinian Authority that tomorrow at ten in the morning we would bomb all their places of business in Ramallah, for example."

Speaking of more right than right, if his party proves as successful in the election as polls indicate, Israel will have elected as its 3 main choices a right wing party, a centrist party, and an uber-right wing party. And we are committed to defending them no matter what.

What could possibly go wrong?

Sarah Palin quoted man who called for Bobby Kennedy's assassination

And she did so in her big RNC speech. No kidding. From Frank Rich's NYT column today:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

And thus the McCain campaign's use of projection as a rhetorical tactic descends into farce as Sarah Palin favorably quotes an advocate of domestic terrorism.

not just jokes to everybody

I'm sure you've all heard about the shooting in Knoxville by now, in which a crazed ultraconservative neoconfederate nutball took a shotgun and 76 rounds into a Unitarian Universalist chapel and started mowing people down during a children's musical. Turns out he had a couple of choice authors on his bookshelf: Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Neiwert reminds us that Chad Castagana, the crazy bastard who mailed fake anthrax letters to various famous liberals, was a Free Republic commenter who loved to read him some Michelle Malkin.

But hey, that joke about the liberal hunting license is a real knee slapper, am I right?

Orcinus

I've added a new blog to my blogroll there on the right side of the screen: Orcinus. It's maintained mainly by a freelance journalist named David Neiwert, and it's very content-heavy and thematically oriented.

That theme is authoritarianism.

There's a lot of great material there on not only authoritarianism per se, but also things like eliminationist rhetoric, institutional (and individual) discrimination, rightwing quasi-fascism, and anti-immigrationism. And, of course, Michelle Malkin.

There's also, interestingly, a lot of discussion there of futurism, which from what I gather is the directing of science and systems theory to figure out what scenarios are most likely to happen in the relatively near future, especially considering potential crises like climate change, overpopulation, and peak oil.

I try to keep the blogroll short, limited to what I see are the couple very best blog out there. This one definitely belongs on the list.