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How We're Fucked by Family Values

Assholes like Joe Lieberman reveal their essential perversity and stupidity when they talk about how uncivil the discourse has gotten. Just so, various pukes in the commercial media decry the vituperation they find in the blogosphere -- almost invariably depicting bloggers on both the left and the right as equally excessive. They seem to assume that the proper response to stolen elections, criminal incompetence, rampant and unrepentant corruption, nauseating hypocrisy, murderous adventurism, the suspension of the Bill of Rights, the endorsement of torture and an unprovoked $6,300-per-second war, which is predicated in innumerable lies, was prosecuted merely for temporary advantage in domestic politics and proving to be the greatest disaster in American history -- the proper response to all this, is something like "With all due respect, you might want to reconsider your course."

The powers that be are essentially shitting on the flag (not to mention the New Testament) and we're supposed to be polite about it. Yet another illustration of Goethe's wisdom: 'The journalists do not speak the language, and in journalese you cannot tell them so.'

Indeed, the "family newspaper" aesthetic of the Times, the Post, et cetera, which prevents them from printing a "fuck" or "shit" yet allows them to megaphone every toxic obscenity, every lie, every mealymouthed fatwah death warrant the punishment freaks can come up with, is an essential part of the problem. They literally cannot print the hideously obscene truth, but can only approximate it in terms so understated as to entirely misrepresent. It is like the stewards of the Titanic telling those in steerage, 'Having a spot of trouble. Worry not -- we'll keep you posted.'

By the way, I love this image, a pneumatic moonslide in the shape of the dying Titanic. From those wacky Danes, of course, the same lovely people who brought us Kierkegaard.

posted by Kalkaino @ 9:19 AM