To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

—Tomas Young
 

 
The Crucifixion of Tomas Young (TruthDig)

Who wouldn’t want to punch this stupid face?

Hahahahahaha. I guess getting punched in the face by a “union thug” wasn’t quite the career break that Fox News dickweed and self-styled “comedian” Steven Crowder thought it would be. A Michigan prosecutor has declined to pursue assault charges against the man who punched him. On video.

Via Raw Story:

The Lansing State Journal reported on Tuesday that Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III decided not to pursue a case after watching unedited video of Crowder’s appearance at a protest against right-to-work legislation, which culminated in Crowder getting punched in the face.

Crowder filed a police report and claimed he was assaulted, saying in interviews that he was “beat down” and that protesters “literally would have killed me where I stood if I defended myself.” He also published an edited version of the confrontation online.

But after watching both that video and a longer, unedited account of the incident as aired on Current TV, Dunnings said, “It’s pretty clear the person that they wanted to charge was acting in self-defense.” In the longer video, the man who punched Crowder was pushed by an unseen person before striking him, giving the encounter a different context.

“I’m not holding that against him, but why would they provide the edited video?” Dunnings said. “The longer video clearly shows the guy got pushed down and came up swinging.”

Why would Steven Crowder have provided an edited video, I wonder?

Anyone care to hazard a guess?

Another fun fact about Crowder: He’s an abstinence advocate…

Roger Ailes really knows how to pick credible people for Fox News, doesn’t he?

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Fox News dickhead punched at labor protests in Michigan

Fox News chucklehead under scrutiny for creative editing of ‘union thug’ video

Fox News bastard who got cold-clocked at labor protest tells his own idiotic side of the story

 
This ridiculous footage was shot over the weekend at the conservative Republican convention, CPAC, during a seminar titled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” led by a black conservative by the name of K. Carl Smith. (As Bill Maher pointed out Friday on his HBO show Real Time, if you’re “sick and tired” of being called a racist, chances are that you ARE a racist, but nevermind that rather obvious logic for a moment).

TPM’s Benjy Sarlin was present at the seminar and wrote that Smith “mostly urged attendees to deflect racism charges by calling themselves ‘Frederick Douglass Republicans.’” (Now THAT’S rebranding for ya, ain’t it?)

Watch what happens when CPAC attendee, Scott Terry of North Carolina, speaks. It’s mind-boggling. This asshole—who was with a buddy in a Confederate flag tee-shirt—shocked even his fellow CPAC attendees with his “food and shelter” remark about slavery. I don’t think that was easy to do in a place like CPAC—in particular to offend the kinds of clowns who’d sign up for something called “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”—but somehow Scott Terry managed it.

Scott Terry is “proud” of “his people”! So proud that he felt the need to go to a meeting about perceived racism in the conservative movement and explain how as a white, Southern male, HE’S BEING DISENFRANCHISED by all this talk of minority outreach!

Genius!
 

What do you think Perez Hilton would draw on this photo?

When Lauren Drain, 27, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church hate group sat down with The Advocate to discuss her new book recently she revealed her belief that “something” had happened—something, let’s face it, that is TOTALLY EASY TO BELIEVE—in his past that inspired “church” founder Fred Phelps’ vicious anti-gay crusade:

I never understood why, when [the media asked him], “Why are you so against the homosexuals? Did you have a homosexual experience? Do you have homosexual tendencies?” And he would get so mad, he would shut down. And he’d be like, “I can’t talk to this person anymore, they’re stupid.” His reaction to that was stronger than any other question you can ask him. So I always wondered that — why does he get so mad? If I’m not gay, I’ll just say I’m not gay. And I’m not going to freak out, like, “Why are you calling me gay?” I always thought that was super strange. … I don’t know what happened there, so [speculation] is all that I can leave it at. But something happened, and something made him change his mind about the military, and in turn have kind of a crusade against sexual immorality and homosexuals.

No gasps from the peanut gallery? Nope, none at all.

Drain’s book, Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church, describes her childhood growing up with Westboro nutters after her father became obsessed with the group and moved his family to Kansas to be nearer to the Phelps family.
 

 

 
Professional silly person Glenn Beck discusses the death of America in one of his most over the top performances in quite a while.

YouTube commenter Greg Rowe succinctly describes Beck’s shtick:

He gets a little blackboard and draws out a pathetic syllogism

Hitler was a vegetarian

Many liberals are vegetarians

Hitler killed Jews

Ergo: Liberals killed 6 000 000 Jews

And suddenly all of his pea-brained followers are running out to buy guns and ammo over the realization that liberals and Nazis are really the same.

Glenn Beck—the guy’s fuckin’ nuts and his audience are drooling idiots—but he’s still quite the showman, I’ll give him that. Notice how well his show is directed (a big improvement over the production values of his Fox News show). His camera operator must be the best in the business.
 

 
Via Right Wing Watch

 
On her Facebook page, apparently the only outlet open to her since Fox News showed her the door, Sarah Palin stepped into a steaming pile of rhetorical dogshit on the topic of the so-called “sequester.”

On Tuesday, in a post, non-ironically titled: “D.C.: Cut the Drama. Do Your Job,” the reality TV drama queen who quit halfway through her own job as Alaska governor had this to say:

If we are going to wet our proverbial pants over 0.3% in annual spending cuts when we’re running up trillion dollar annual deficits, then we’re done. Put a fork in us. We’re finished. We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest.

Oh boy. Nice way to “wee-wee” up the low IQ rubes who still care about the opinions of a certain snowbilly grifter. It’s so hard to tell if she’s just plain stupid, or in fact really crafty, like Glenn Beck is. The thing is, in Palin’s case, I’m not sure that there is a discernible difference. I don’t look at Beck and think “dumb” (“Asshole” is a word that comes more readily to mind. “Crazy,” too, but never dumb). Glenn Beck is just cynical but Sarah Palin’s stupidity, her obvious idiocy, is THE ACTUAL REASON that Tea party-types (still) find her so “refreshing.”

“She’s just like us…” (yeah, that’s right, she is, she’s a fucking idiot). You can’t fake it!

Politico had this to say about Palin’s outlandish claim:

Palin - who wrote on her Facebook page on Tuesday, “We’re going to default eventually and that’s why the feds are stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest” - joins conservatives Alex Jones of InfoWars.com, who wrote about the ammo buy last year, and radio host Mark Levin, who said on his radio program earlier this month that the government is “arming up” because society is “unraveling.”

“Law enforcement and national security agencies — they play out multiple scenarios. They simulate multiple scenarios. I’ll tell you what I think they’re simulating: the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society and the potential for widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, because that’s what happens when an economy collapses,” Levin said on his radio program.

You’d think that after five years of being a walking, talking, Facebooking definition of a fucking idiot that Sarah Palin might, you know, be slightly more circumspect about her information sources, especially when they’re coming straight from anonymous ALL CAPS forwarded emails, WorldNut Daily, originated with Alex Jones or have already been debunked on Snopes.com, but no…

That’s why she’s Sarah Palin. She dares to be dumb. It works for her!

Below, “One of us! One of us! One of us…”
 

 
Comic “Brick Stone” (aka Dave Sirus) winds them up tighter and tighter as this goes on. Brilliant.

“Have you ever wondered how good gay sex must be if people are willing to go to Hell for it?”

And the line that saw my coffee go from my mouth to my keyboard:

“How do you respond to rumors that you’re 26?”

More fun at God Hates Brick Stone.
 

Field marshal Rove?

The leader of the Tea Party Patriots organization issued an apology on Tuesday to Karl Rove after the group sent out a fundraising email with a doctored photo depicting the GOP adviser in a Nazi uniform.

Wait a minute? Republicans calling other Republicans Nazis??? Whoa! This means the Tea party blockheads are beginning to hate Rove with the same sort of bile these characters normally reserve for Obama? How very, very fascinating!

The solicitation was titled, “Wipe the Smirk Off Karl Rove’s Face” and read:

“Karl Rove believes he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars, crush the Tea Party movement and protect the big-government status quo in Washington from millions of freedom loving Americans.”

Hilarious, but all too predictable. There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that gives me more joy than to see the country’s DUMBEST voting block splintering into angry, impotent… hate cults. To watch the disciplined Republican Party devolve into fractious groups that utterly despise each other—in real time, yet—is such a deeply pleasurable thing.

From all appearances, the GOP still cannot fathom the demographic tidal wave that hit them in the ass on Election day. Forget about all this talk of “rebranding.” I mean, these guys are fucked—fuckity fuck fuck fucked—and the smartest ones in their ranks have figured this out. They’ve got an insurmountable problem on their hands called their own voters!

How can you cater to the lowest IQ buffoons, racists, gun nuts, women haters, Creationist lunatics and cranky old people for decades and then try to turn that barge of fools around on a dime, all the while losing elections and presenting your biggest donors with NOTHING for the return on their (huge) investments? It can’t be done and I think the younger Republicans realize the brand is now so badly tainted and beyond repair that they’re starting to think “Why bother with these dipshits?”

The savvy old hands like Newt Gingrich know this. When he waged his notoriously vicious scorched earth campaign against Mitt Romney in the GOP primaries last year, it quite obviously got to the point where Gingrich just didn’t give a fuck anymore. He wasn’t in it for the good of his party (if he was he never would have considered running in the first place), he was only in it for himself. Even longtime Gingrich watchers were shocked by the hardcore nature of his attacks. Republicans aren’t supposed to speak ill of their fellow Republicans. Haven’t they heard of Reagan’s 11th Commandment? Newt pissed on Romney with gleeful abandon.

Turns out that might’ve been Newt just clearing his throat for his latest scheme…

Gingrich was left badly in debt by his ill-fated Presidential candidacy. One of his think tanks was forced into bankruptcy last Spring and he was reportedly nearly $6 million in debt by June. Say what you want about Newt, he’s got a pretty astute sense of what the most numbnuts conservative punter really cares about. If “Newt Inc.” (as Gingrich calls his various enterprises) is faltering, what’s (newly) poor Newt gonna do? It’s reinvention time.

If the party’s fucked anyway, I predict that Gingrich is going to make a new career out of what he previewed last year, and that is vilifying “the Republican establishment” for fun and profit. I’m pretty sure he looks at the carcass of the GOP like a vulture would, as something to be picked clean. I can’t say I blame him.

Even if the Republican Party moving forward from 2013 is relegated to a mere shadow of its former self, a diminishing and rapidly dying-off fiefdom of free market/Fox News/Christianist idiocy, what’s left of the GOP will still be an awful lot of people. Newt can be the leader of that club. He’ll never, ever get near the White House, but there are tens of millions of dollars in it for him to wrest a good portion of the GOP and divert it into his own personal cash cow. Newt can do that demonizing Karl Rove as the personification of the establishment and setting himself up as the “anti-Rove.”

I think it could happen. If there is one thing the Tea partiers love, it’s a mean cuss. Who’s meaner than Newt Gingrich? I can’t see their allegiance going readily to other GOP figures. And look how visible he’s been lately. Newt has adroitly sniffed the fart of populist rage that the GOP’s rank and file feel towards the party’s establishment. There’s a cheap and cheerful way for him to capitalize on it and that is to pile on Karl Rove.

What’s hilarious to me, though, is how Gingrich manages to keep a straight face while saying shit like this, as he wrote in Human Affairs:

I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism.

So wrote the man whose entire run at the nomination was funded by ONE billionaire, Sheldon Adelson!

Obviously Gingrich believes Republicans have the memory of goldfish, but you can see how he’s positioning himself and it’s clever. If you have Rove leading the establishment Republican charge and the Newtster setting himself up to profit from the appearance of combating Rovers influence, well, grab some popcorn, this is going to get good.

 
Christian radio host Janet Mefferd cuts to the heart of the gay rights matter and says out loud what many will not: Many conservative Christians simply do no want to be forced to look at gay people.

Whether the homosexual activists like it or not, and I know this isn’t politically correct to say this, but not everybody wants to see that. I know that that’s offensive to the activist crowd, they want us all to see it, they want us all to approve of it, they want us all to call it blessed and okay and rejoice and have parties and throw confetti in the air over this whole thing. But the fact of the matter is it’s a moral issue. You will always have Christians who will disagree with this and why should the rights of the activists trump the rights of Christians?

By this same logic why should the rights of the black people have trumped the rights of Southern slave owners?

Got an answer for that one, Janet?

I’m sure you do. I’m equally sure that it’s fucking stupid and decidedly unscientific.

(And what about people who are offended by low IQ idiots like Janet Mefford, don’t we have any rights?)

Advice to Janet Mefferd from the Holy Book itself:

If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.

That’s right, Janet, gouge your own eyes out if you’re offended by gay people. The Bible IS the inerrant word of God, isn’t it? Out they go!

Barring that, stay at home and keep the door locked and the TV off. The 21st century is gonna really suck for you otherwise, doll.

Send a message to Janet Mefferd on Twitter.

Via Right Wing Watch/Joe.My.God.

 
Never underestimate the stupidity of… stupid people.

Take anti-union activist and Tea party tool, “interim” AZ FreedomWorks coordinator Stephen Viramontes, for instance. Yesterday on Twitter, Viramontes bragged about how he planned to give out Valentines to AZ ‘s Republican lawmakers with drawings of Hitler, Fidel Castro, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong as well as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Apparently, for it’s unclear, his bright idea was to somehow associate these figures with union-busting legislation SB1182—strongly favored by Viramontes’ fellow dimwits in the Tea party movement—and “humorously” put some pressure on several GOP lawmakers believed to be wavering in their support of the draconian anti-union bill.

Presumably someone close to him convinced Stevie Blunder that this was a total clownjob move that would just make him look like a dickhead and cause him professional embarrassment, as Viramontes deleted his lamebrained boasting.
 

 
Maybe it was all in fun, but since The Arizona Capitol Times got a nice screenshot before he deleted his tweet, the joke’s on Stephen Viramontes.

Proving yourself too stupid for a career in AZ Tea party politics is a real accomplishment:

Viramontes’ planned use of cards featuring Hitler, Stalin and other leaders who are estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 65 million people comes on the same day that nonprofit liberal news magazine Mother Jones posted a story on its website about an internal investigation that was sparked after FreedomWorks’ executives made a video of a woman wearing a Hillary Clinton mask having sex with a woman in a panda suit.

The video was intended to be shown at FreePac, a July 2012 conference in Dallas, but was scrapped after FreedomWorks employees complained.

Although he sent out a series of tweets about the cards, some of which showed pictures of them, Viramontes said after an initial version of this story was published that he never planned to give the cards to lawmakers and said he doesn’t support the actions or beliefs of any of the dictators on the cards.

“It was never something I was really, seriously going to do,” he said. “It was probably bad judgment on my part to even joke about it.

“Those that know me get the humor.”

Like this guy?
 

 
The Valentine cards are actually the work of artist Ben Kling, who has created other, similar cards with philosophers, authors, celebrities and historical figures. Kling had nothing to do with Viramontes’ feeble attempt at a “joke” and no association with FreedomWorks. He told TPM that he thought the media flap caused by Viramontes’ lame attempt at some Hitler humor was hilarious.