To all the koch brothers and bob perrys and trumps and frieses and newty's casino mogul and their ilk who think they can just buy these elections and these politicians and all they have to do is send enough checks: "YOUR CASH AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT TRASH!!!!"

Because he feels some sort of pseudo-messianic mission is at work here to ensure that the Supreme Court remains horridly CONservative. AND because he's just that arrogant. This guy wrote the book on arrogant! But make no mistake - he won't go willingly til there's a republi-CON in the White House. He won't risk his replacement being named by a Dem. He's THAT partisan. It'd have to be some illness or family crisis or some such thing over which he has no control, that forces him to resign before he damn well feels like it. He won't go voluntarily, just because he might be WAY old enough.

Don't misunderstand - I DO NOT wish him ill. But I sure wish he'd step down. Get that really disgraceful and utterly Troglodyte mentality and agenda OFF the high bench. And wouldn't he love to go on the mashed potato circuit and cash in with speaking engagements and book deals galore?

Hey fat tony, ALLLLLL THAAAAAATTTTT AWAAAAAAAAAAITS YOOOOOOOOO... All you have to do is step down and pony up. All your rich little friends on the wrong-wing extremist "think tank" and "foundation" scene would welcome you with lucrative fellowships and elder-statesmen positions and seats on all their boards of directors. They'd practically canonize you at Liberty "University"! They'd appoint you president of the whole works by acclamation! Regent "University" too! You'll be richer than trump! You won't have to waste another minute of your precious time suffering all those annoying nuisance arguments put forth by attorneys and Solicitors General from the enemy camp while you sit on the bench and sneak your game of Angry Birds or text somebody you're not supposed to, or jerk off under your robes every day. AND you can hide in the shadows of the "private sector" instead of being in a public-works crucible that all the newspeople keep track of, and you can have all the privacy and wheeling/dealing you can eat. Which, as we know from the size of your ego and the history of your appetite, is quite substantial.

C'mon, tony. DO IT. DO IT NOW while you're still pretty healthy and have a lotta livin' yet to do! Go! The world's yer oyster! Think of how fat the fat tony retirement fund will engorge and all the ways you can go out and have fun spending it, and there'll always be more! That CONservative fan base just won't quit and Pox Noise will be riiiiight (LOL, get it?) there beside you, just stokin' those fires! You'll be richer than the kochs! And you'll be out of range of all those idiotic critics and stupid do-gooders - they won't care about you anymore and they'll forget all about you. Outta sight, outta mind, dontchaknow.

C'mon, tony. DO IT. You know you want to...

Here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002738067#post5

This is one of the main spear-headers of the present-day mean-spirited, hate-mongering, racist, selfish, greedy, Dark-Side mentality. grover norquist - who would love to see government shrunk so small you could drown it in a bathtub (OR, I suppose, force it up inside every vagina in the country). But note the first one - about the main goal being to inflict pain.

Nice, 'eh? And our country is suffocating under the toxic smog of that mentality. And chances are, they all loudly call themselves Christian, too.

Having come from that time, myself, many of us just didn't understand.

Yes, there were many among us (coming of age in the '70s) who protested the war and followed the carnage, and tried to understand the horrors of that reality that we were all so insulated and sheltered away from. I don't know of anyone in those ranks who responded to returning Vietnam Veterans with as much cruelty and ignorance as there was. But we saw it. And yeah, there were people who cursed and denounced. Not sure about the stories of spitting on returning troops and if it happened I completely condemn it! I would have, then, too. It was such a horrible morass that sucked some people down into a darkness where they would otherwise never have chosen to go.

And there was so little understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and what war does to you. Easy to misunderstand when all one does is watch it on the evening news and never sees or feels or smells or touches the bloodshed or wreckage or dismemberment or death. The human mind processes simplistically, it seems. Many of us when you and your brothers came home just did not understand. And there was precious little attempt to make sense of it, or to educate about it - mainly because there was so little public or official recognition of it. In some places it was just not even spoken. And people ACTIVELY sought NOT to recognize this as a fact, to acknowledge PTSD as something very real requiring proper classification and treatment and response. Easier to ignore it and sweep it away - and in true willful defiance of any 12-step program - to deny you even have a problem.

Hell, too many people TO VERY THIS DAY still scoff and sneer at the very idea of PTSD. "Just something those stupid naive lib'ruls made up to force me to pay higher taxes..." "when 'Real Men' know their job is to just shut up and get over it." But it's VERY real. You don't emerge from that kind of horror without being affected, without being changed, without being scarred. And it takes a LOT of work to heal that - not just within your own self as one who went to war, but also within all those around you who love you and live with you and/or see you or work with you or otherwise interact with you every day.

We've become a nation where empathy is laughed at. Laughed at!!!!! Sneered at. Scoffed at. Viewed as dehumanizing, somehow. As some sort of terrible un-American unpatriotic negative. Empathy somehow means you're weak and not a "real" American. Well, NOBODY quite understands what a "real" American is, anymore, and it sure as hell is NOT some John Wayne-meets-Steven Seagal-on-"24" hybrid. And it seems to me that's the biggest dishonor we show to our troops and our veterans.

Welcome back, SGMRTDARMY. Thank you for your service, and your struggle, and your sacrifice. It is very real to us here. I'm sure as hell not going to belittle it or roll my eyeballs at it or tell our Vietnam veterans (or ANY veterans) in their pain just to get over it. And you sure as HELL don't boo them as they cope with their own issues and struggles. Patriotism isn't just some slogan you slap on your back bumper. It's how you live your life and how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who cared enough to put THEIR lives on the line for this country.

their families a high personal priority. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden have done more for veterans and their families than ANY other administration I can think of. Made it their personal cause. And Joe Biden's son is an Iraq War veteran. Seems to me NO ONE supports veterans quite as profoundly as a family that has one in its own midst.

I hope this poll is not correct. I can't believe veterans would turn their backs like this - in favor of a guy who doesn't even know who our "#1 enemy" is, and still sounds like he wants to ramp up war and a policy of international aggression again.

and walked the whole length of that monument. I started at one end, dry-eyed. By the time I reached the other end, I was nearly sobbing. You walk on a downward-sloping path, leading down below ground-level, til it's almost as though you're submerged - by these tall, slick stone panels carved with all these names. At either end, it starts with one line of names. Then, as you start the walk downward toward the center, there are two or three lines of names. And then more lines. And then more. And then STILL more lines of names. And it just keeps going til you're drowning in names - on slick stone panels that stand higher than your head. And by then you feel like you're drowning in your own tears. And then you start walking back up from the center, which is the lowest point, along the panels sloping upwards toward ground-level. By the end of the journey, you're emotionally spent, and you feel like it's a huge and incredibly profound life/war metaphor. You've climbed back up above ground-level (where the living dwell) from the below-ground-level monument (the realm of the dead), and you emerge into the light and to the day-to-day life that continues around you, fairly oblivious of everything else. And you carry with you the memories of being submerged with all those names. The names of the dead. You emerge, alright. But you emerge quite changed. Affected deeply by what you walked past, down there below-ground-level, and VERY sobered.

It's the heaviest, most profound, most viscerally powerful monument I've EVER seen. Especially close up. It compels you very quietly and in the most subtle fashion to experience the whole concept of war and loss - in a very personal way. It's utter genius on so many levels. Almost ridiculously simple. And more powerful and personally moving than ANY other monuments I've ever seen. Designed by a young woman, too. How 'bout that.

Delicate as can be in Paris, taking cover in that "champagne-missionary-division" during Vietnam, when others went to fight and die. Guess he couldn't afford to get his nice, clean, white, fingernail-polished hands dirty or that nice hair too mussed up.

Evidently his time slot got moved and it conflicted with what was on there. I think it was Randi Rhodes - who should NOT be sacrificed and should be kept on the air in high-profile drive-time. But they somehow still had to move Thom Hartmann. He's so smart and his knowledge is so vast. It's a real loss. DAMMIT. I tuned in there every mid-morning and always learned something. It was like watching Rachel Maddow. Listening to Thom Hartmann makes you smarter. And we don't have that in L.A. anymore.

DAMMIT.

toward their Commander-in-Chief, whose wife and family (AND his Vice President and HIS wife and family - one of whom recently served in Iraq) have laser-focused this entire term on the needs of veterans and their families. Their Commander-in-Chief is more focused on bringing troops home, compared to his chickenhawk/hid-out-in-Paris-in-the-champagne-missionary-division-during-Vietnam opponent who somehow thinks we're back in the Cold War against Russia, and whose foreign policy advisers are all part of the bush/cheney war-criminal lie-us-into-illegal-war machine. And they're for THAT guy? INGRATES.

No need to worry about saying something that somehow dishonors their service. THEY'RE taking care of that just fine, on their own.

My mom even had a bit of this. She'd been terribly wronged when she was very young. And some things about her young adulthood weren't exactly peachy, either. She always seemed to lead with an unspoken compulsion to punish. Someone had to be punished for what she suffered through. Someone had to pay.

The punishing thing, the desire or the compulsion to punish, to rule by tyranny and not just to defeat but to draw blood from an opponent. That goes to the drive to dehumanize, demean, and diminish all those people and ideas and policies in ol' newty's nasty little book of black magic that taught the terminology and verbiage - framing and other psy-ops - for describing your side versus your opponent's side. That's how "liberal" became a dirty word. That's how taxes became so bad. That's how government was suddenly some ridiculous Mother Goose and Brothers Grimm monster to be avoided, defied, wiped out, and the ground salted underneath. I read an essay in and around here whose premise was how the Dems and GOP look at politics and the whole concept of bipartisanship completely differently. Our side values reason, compromise, give-and-take, various kinds of power-sharing in the service of solving problems and dealing with issues for the common good. Their side views compromise as a dirty word, and whose longterm mission is not to find ways to work together but to keep Democrats out of power permanently.

There's also something else that, it seems to me, also feeds into that intrinsic, seemingly instinctive urge to cause pain that I learned about in great depth while I was pregnant. If you just start reading and exploring and learning, you eventually stumble into the little cul-de-sac of the history of pain relief or lack thereof during labor and childbirth. Those utterly merciful epidurals and other professional-grade pain medications are a relatively new thing, only becoming standard operating procedure in the last century or so. How come? Because the prevailing opinion in the (mostly male) medical establishment and, of course, the Church, was that women should not be given or offered any relief from pain during labor and childbirth because women were SUPPOSED TO suffer. It was their birthright stemming from the Sin of Eve. The "Original Sin"! Seriously. Therefore, to compel women to struggle and suffer in labor and childbirth was somehow a God-sanctioned position because that was womankind's lot in life, because of Adam and Eve and the snake and all that, and how women simply were expected to pay for Eve's disobedience as her surrogates, by enduring the full hurricane blasts of agony like you get a LOT of during labor and childbirth.

And when that whole Dark Ages mentality began to evolve and that barbaric philosophy started to change, church officials, meddling moralists, and establishment conservative opposed it and fought it vigorously. I swear to you I saw this stuff while I was learning about my pregnancies! And it was stunning as all-get-out. I just could not fathom it, especially as a pregnant woman myself, back then.

Maybe it's where we get that "authoritarian father," or the "domineering father," or the "tough love" approach, while the mother is purportedly the softer, more malleable, more accomodating nurturer. It just seems to be this general Puritan, Inquisitional, narrow, imperious, authoritarian, punishing ethic that much of the world struggled with during the Dark Ages. Like an overall smog that settles over us that we have to keep breathing for awhile until we can finally get all the air cleared. Seems to me this whole sick, stunted, Troglodyte mindset stems from the "Original Sin" curse and the vigorously insisted-upon penance foisted upon you as an heir of Adam and Eve. It's a whole "you were born into sin until you're rescued in baptism" thing - in which you start out a loser and a sinner the instant you're down out of the chute and breathing on your own, in religious and socio-religious terms.

VERY odd and twisted way to explain and justify extremist shit. It's sociopath and psychopath stuff, seems to me. And it's all the sadder that it may have its roots in religion.