FYI

Dakinikat brought this to my attention in the comments but I think it deserves front page attention:

“I suppose that I should take a moment to congratulate the consummate professionals at the Daily Konfluence for invoking me once again, attributing rabid falsehoods and mischaracterizations about myself and my compatriots, and for once again hosting the most historically inaccurate and obtuse conversation on Israel that can be found outside of rense.com. They’ve been making a variety of attempts to engage us in a blog war since there isn’t anything going on more pressing, like the end of our Constitutional Republic as we know it. If y’all would just use a little Boudreaux’s Butt Paste that rash would clear up and you might act less petty and pathetic. Personally I think Riverdaughter may have the cyberhots for me. Why else would she keep mentioning my name? Honey, please contain your pining to the fjords. Your overtures, while flattering, are not appreciated, and are just plain creepy.

[…]

The United States, in its typical ignorance of the functionings of the Middle East, seems to think that it can blackmail Israel by sending the message that there will be no help on the Iran nukes front until Israel consents to a Palestinian state with a divided Jerusalem. [the folks at the Konfluence don’t seem to realize that utilizing this kind of blackmail to dictate the policy of a sovereign nation is the same neocon tactics used by George W. Shrub, but they don’t care as long as they get the results they want; a Palestinian State led by its current terror kleptocracy which means a fucked Israel. So let us now refer to the Daily Konfluence as a neokon blog as no self- respecting liberal would ever endorse neocon strategy…unless they were a bunch of fucking hypocrites. Well, you know what they say, if the shoe fits jam it.]

There’s more – a lot more.  I strongly urge you to go read all of it and verify that I did not misquote, mischaracterize or attribute any falsehoods about the essay or its author, a former front-pager here at The Confluence named Shtuey.  And while you’re there please take note of this comment by MadamaB, another former TC front-pager:

madamab said…

This post is a clear demonstration of your total ignorance of the most basic facts of the Israel-Palestine situation. As we all know, the Holocaust had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel. And all Jews are racists. F*ck them. You are nothing but an AIPAC mouthpiece, Shtuey Van Shtuey!! Holocaust, Holocaust Holocaust!

😉 😉

I sure hope there’s some chocolate in my goody bag. That was emotionally draining! Seriously, great, great post.

April 22, 2009 1:54 PM

Some of you may not you may not know but neoconservatism is strongly pro-Israel and many neocon leaders are Jewish.  Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism” is Jewish, as is his neocon son William Kristol.  Norman Podhoretz, another leader of the neoconservative movement, is Jewish too.  Former Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz is another Jewish neoconservative.  While not all neoconservatives are Jewish, the movement is consistently pro-Israel.  In fact, critics of neoconservatism have been accused of (wait for it) antisemitism.

A lot of things have been said about those of us remaining here at The Confluence.  I’ll let you form your own judgments about the statements quoted above and their authors.  Please consider their words and actions as well as ours, then make up your own minds.  If our former associates turned critics are correct and the most ardently pro-Israel political movement in the United States is antisemitic, what’s that make the rest of us?
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UPDATE:

An edited version of Shtuey’s post appears here

Yesterday I Was Thinking of Queen Elizabeth, And I am Letting You Know Today

Hi! Mark your Calenders. Today is Little Isis Day at The Confluence. Riverdaughter has invited me to start Posting Regularly here. Okay, well… technically I emailed her and told her I would start posting here, but that is a moot Point. The Point is, I am here now. I have succesfully seduced the rest of the Authors here into letting me post myself silly, and I am here to charm the pants off of all of you. (You know you can’t resist)

I was inspired last night by Afrocity. Sort of. So I started me a WordPress blog, wrote a post that some of you have all ready seen, and paraded it on a thread, as is my style and fashion. I suppose that since this is my Debut, and everyone seemed to like that post (which I shamelessly paraded), I will use it as my Debut Post.

Here is the Debut Post (which you can also find at http://mysticgirl.wordpress.com) that is debuting my Little Isisness.

It’s Raining, and I’m Thinking of Queen Elizabeth Today

As of late, I know we’ve been talking about the Way Forward for PUMAs. Well, here I am, my only day off this week, save for Wednesday, with a Case of the Mondays.

When I have a Case of the Mondays, I usually don’t feel like doing anything. I mean, it doesn’t help that it’s raining up here- I’m in Northeast  Ohio. I vote at a Nature Reserve. Rain is Lake Effect. It’s like this really annoying guy that keeps asking for your phone number and you keep trying to pretend you have something else to do, but he doesn’t leave, so you tell him you had a sex change (even though you didn’t) to get him away from you and he STILL doesn’t get the message.

Well, that is what rain is like in Northeast Ohio in April. Like a bothersome boyfriend.

But April Showers and bothersome boyfriends get me thinking about things.  Like… what was I doing during the April Showers of 2008?

I don’t know if any of you remember… I doubt it. But in April of 2008, I wrote an email to Donna Brazille. It was during the primary, and her response to me was less than pleasant. So I posted it on my blog, and… something of a firestorm erupted, I guess. I had Greg Sargent from TPM email me, asking for Brazille’s letter, which I gave him, but nothing ever came out of it. Not that I expected it to.

Tears of a Clown

What's the matter? Don't ya like clowns?

I don’t blog to be liked.

I didn’t come here because I was lonely and wanted to make new friends.  I started blogging because I have strong opinions and a compulsive need to inflict them on other people.

I intentionally cultivated an obnoxious online persona and chose an ugly homicidal clown as my avatar because I want my arguments to stand on their own.  I don’t want people to agree with me because they like me, I want them to agree with me because they think I’m right.

If Person A says 2 + 2 = 4 and Person B says 2 + 2 = 3 then I will say that Person A is right and Person B is wrong, even if Person A is a jerk and Person B is a saint and a friend.  And I’m not going to change my position even if all my other friends side with Person B.  It’s not about how I feel about Person A or Person B, it’s about what I think is true.

Last year we saw people we liked and respected fall victim to Kool-aid logic.  They liked Obama and wanted to be part of the “in” crowd so suddenly they had no problem believing that Hillary was a racist bitch and that it was okay to call Sarah Palin a stupid c*nt.  They turned on Hillary supporters like rabid chihuahuas and attacked us as Republican ratf*ckers despite the years we spent advocating liberal causes and beliefs.

I’m not claiming to be infallible but if I have to choose between being right and being liked then I will never be popular, and I’ll never get to sit with the kewl kidz.

I can live with that.

Wednesday: Foxhole Liberals

My mom called me the other day.  She was visiting my brother in AZ over Easter and as the conversation wrapped up, she told me cheerily, “I’m going to one of those tea party thingies!”  Knowing my mom’s susceptibility to Republican messaging, I warned her, “You know, those thingies are mostly about anti-tax stuff.  You have to be really careful.”  I’m relieved to discover that there is quite a bit of anger directed at the financial industry at them as well but, still, I worry.

My mom bought into the whole uber pro-life, pro-war, anti-liberal message of the Bush era.  For eight long years, we could barely be in one another’s presence without wanting to kill each other.  In the past couple years, she kind of came out of the trance.  Last year, I got her to vote for Hillary.

Now, the reason I mention this is because my mom is a Democrat who has traditionally voted for Republicans over social issues.  It’s her religious background that lures her into their camp every single time.  And she mostly goes along with their program except that when I made her do her political compass a couple of years ago, it turned out that she was more liberal than I was.  She didn’t believe it at first until I pointed out to her but she likes a lot of liberal ideas, social justice and social security and medicare and all that.  She’d claw your eyes out before she’d let you take her VA benefits away.

I suspect that there are a lot more people out there who in the next couple of years are going to discover their inner liberal.  After all, it’s one thing to rail about deadbeats on unemployment when times are good.  It’s quite another thing to be ON the unemployment line, realizing you haven’t done anything wrong but that the wealthy shareholders of your company preferred a juicier dividend to your wage slavery.  And SCHIP shouldn’t be given to people who have jobs, except when those jobs suddenly no longer cover the costs of living.  And social security privatization can probably be postponed until the next century or at least until after my generation dies.

There is nothing that will concentrate the mind so keenly as poverty.  The Great Depression featured many such conversion stories.  The farmers of the dust bowl who were sometimes reduced to eating nettles and saw their children melt away due to malutrition didn’t all start out as fans of FDR.  But they started to see the sense of his WPA programs and his soil conservation projects.  The perpetually poor of the Tennessee Valley weren’t all pinko commies, but after the TVA brought power and light to Appalachia, Democrats were able to capture their hearts.  We might not all like the byzantine rules and restrictions of a union shop, but really, how many of us want to go back to the days when we were paid third world wages, had our children working with us and had no benefits?  That wasn’t so long ago.  My own grandfather, who was born in 1912, was forced to leave school in eighth grade so he could earn his keep.  12 years old and he was already doing a man’s work. Do we really want to chuck all of that because a few unions have overreached?

The powers that be have spent close to a generation spreading a message of begrudgery.  They’ve directed our attention down onto the person below us.  If we weren’t getting a bigger piece of the pie, it’s because of the welfare queen or the quota system or the uneducated lazy poor.  But now there are two classes in America, the wealthy, well connected who control the money, and everyone else.  Now, the rich are looking down at that everyone else and complaining that they have to share their hard earned wealth with us in the form of taxes.  WE are the new welfare queens to them.  The ‘everyone else’ category contain a lot of people, both educated and uneducated, union and professional, Democrat and Republican.  That everyone else is the new working class and it contains all of the people who do not pull down million dollar bonuses each year or have their wealth socked away in offshore bank accounts.  That everyone else are all equally vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and we are starting to figure it out and cast our attention up instead of down in the food chain.

That social safety net doesn’t look so bad now that we’re all sitting in the same foxhole, does it?  There’s nothing wrong with getting rich with your own efforts but gambling away someone else’s money suddenly isn’t so virtuous anymore, is it?  Maybe we should have elected more women because countries that have more women in office tend to have fewer social problems.  And really, are the proscriptions against gay marriage that important when we’re all struggling to keep our heads above water?

Keep it in mind as you watch the tea party phenomenon develop.  There is an opportunity out there to turn this country on its head for the persons who seize it.  And it won’t be long before Americans all over the country demand more of their government to do something.  Liberalism may become the next new religion for Republicans too.

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