Sadly, No!

LindaSOG, a right-wing blogger who recently posted the IP and email address of one of our commenters out of sheer bwahaha pettiness (and is now forging emails — don’t leave a comment at her site; this crazy person can’t be trusted with any personal data) brings up an interesting point apropos the Code Pink thing and our own Photoshopping of images, specifically this picture of Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House robbing a convenience store:

Above: Moran didn’t actually rob a convenience store, as far as we know

Not cool for school! You complain about the photoshop of code pink’s banner and then post that vileness using someone else’s name.

well, it certainly makes a mockery of the entire thread and shows you to be the hypocrites that you are.

We think she’s talking about the Moran pic; we’re not totally sure what the ‘vileness’ is.* So okay. The first thing we have to do is get this out of the way:

Above: LingaSOG, Internet boor

So there’s that. Now, Confederate Yankee stopped by a couple days ago (in a rare visit) and said something similar, so let’s clear this up forthwith: Photoshopping a Code Pink banner so that it says something about murdering troops, or molesting sheep, or whatever anyone might want to Photoshop onto a Code Pink banner? Eh. The image is clearly watermarked, but even if it weren’t clearly watermarked, it wouldn’t occur to us to ‘complain’ about it. There’s nothing to ‘complain’ about. It’s art; it’s an image. It’s satire.

The obvious and oft-stated problem (and by Jesus, I’ll say this very plainly so that even LindaSOG can’t find a way to misunderstand it) is that people have been posting that image as if it were real, arguing that it proves something about Code Pink — specifically that it proves that Code Pink are, in real life, murderous communists treasonously sabotaging America with their treasonous, shrill calls to murder US troops, as is clearly seen from their banner.

Above: Actual Code Pink banner (Hanx! Mo’s Bike Shop)

Above: Photoshopped Code Pink banner

Now what’s interesting here isn’t just that people are trying to claim, against all evidence, that the fake banner is real. There’s also sort of a metastory in that these are the same people who were invited to the White House and met President Bush, Laura Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Condi Rice last week, three days after they attacked protesters at an anti-war demonstration in DC.

Above: Gathering of Eagles assaults Gold Star father Carlos Arredondo, 9/15/07
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Everyone knows that 9/11 was really the dastardly plot to get the NFL to fix the Super Bowl for the New England Patriots. After all, what could bring the country together more than watching an underdog team dressed in red, white and blue conquer a vastly superior opponent with the help of a strapping young quarterback named Thomas Brady… who “coincidentally” appeared at President Bush’s State of the Union address as a “special guest of Laura Bush!” Only neo-creationist Gregg Easterbrook can bring us the Truth!

And what the heck, I can’t ever resist an opportunity to annoy Pats haters with this video:

9/11 conspiracy theorists aren’t too bright.

That is all.

DoughBob Loadpants is unhappy with Katie Couric for saying this:

“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’”

DoughBob comments:

What a fascinating little slip! How deeply disturbing it is when Americans refer to the United States in a time of war as “we”!

Well yes, Dr. Loadpants. Her point was that, in a terrifying rush of patriotic groupthink, we Americans (Look! I said “we!”) got ourselves sucked into one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in our history. And regardless of all the super-happy-sexytime-go-U-S-and-A press releases you get from the White House, Iraq is (in the immortal words of the grumpy old man from the Woodstock documentary) “a damn shitty mess.” The major reason that we (that word again!) are in this mess right now is because of the lumpheaded jingoism encouraged and fueled by wingnut hacks such as Dr. Loadpants and the Ole Perfesser.

Yet despite all this, folks like DoughBob are nostalgic for the days when a majority of their fellow Americans were completely freaked out by 9/11 and would acquiesce to any war plan, no matter how stupid it sounded. For them, our desire to keep our country out of a costly and bloody quagmire that has ruined our country’s reputation is the deepest form of traitorous thinking. Memo to DoughBob: most of us oppose the Iraq war because it is against our (oop! There I go again!) national interests. If you can’t get that through your thick, Twinkee-padded skull by this point, then there really is no hope for you.

‘Fred Thompson Statement on Ahmadinejad at Columbia University’

Above: Republican presidential candidate and actor Fred Thompson (left) and Larry The Cable Guy

• Columbia University was wrong to extend freedom of speech to a dictator whose country locks up its own students for saying things he disagrees with. If that Amma-doodad feller’s not careful, why, we’ll take over his country and start locking up people for saying the things we disagree with.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Shorter Michelle Malkin: “Waaaaah-haaaa-haaaaahhh! That mean Rick Perlstein called us bed wetters!! It’s not faaaaaaay-yer!”

I have a piece up at Alternet today, which. . .well, you know, I’ve had wicked, brick-wall writers’ block for a long time, blog posts excepted, so I’m not actually sure how I finished it. I just started typing, and at a certain point there didn’t seem to be especially much typing left to do.

Warning: Contains Schlussel

While I try to reacquaint myself with how that works, feel free to stop over and take a look.

Is there a civil rights-themed corollary to Godwin’s Law? Because if there’s one thing people on the internet like to do even more than comparing people who disagree with them to the Nazis, it’s comparing themselves to oppressed minorities. Conservatives in particular are especially fond of this; you can’t hit refresh on your browser without running into some lily-white six-figure gomer who is convinced that, due to his inability to smoke cigarettes on a 45-minute flight or call his secretary a Japaheeno, he has known injustice unprecedented since the days of the Holocaust.

Is this all leading up to Cal Thomas? You bet it is!

Above: “I, too, have a dream…that someday, I will not have to watch two chicks make out”

Any conservative who has ever tried, or actually succeeded, in speaking on the campus of predominately liberal academic institutions knows it can resemble to some extent the struggle experienced by African Americans when they attempted to desegregate lunch counters in the South during the Civil Rights Movement.

Boy, it sure can, can’t it? I mean, when a leading conservative speaks on campus, they’re pretty unlikely to be physically beaten or lynched, but sometimes they have to wait upwards of two weeks to collect their five-digit honorarium! And the horror doesn’t stop there, oh no:

In the 1980s, I spoke at universities from Smith College in the East to the University of California, Davis, in the West. At Smith, lesbians sat in the front row kissing each other while the rest of the crowd shouted so loud no one could hear me.

Had Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., J.E. Chaney, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Harry T. Moore, William L. Moore, Lin Newborn, and Lamar Smith not all been brutally murdered, I’m sure they would be appalled at the treatment of this brave white man, and protest in the strongest possible terms his audiences exercising their free speech by booing him and making him watch girls kiss.

Let’s all give it up for this modern-day pioneer for liberty and civil rights. Truly, we have not seen the like since Paul Craig Roberts dared to reveal the truth that the modern-day millionaire and/or billionaire is, in fact, much worse off than a black slave in the antebellum South.

Above: Two victims of terrible injustice and oversized neckties

Slaves in that situation were as free as today’s American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves. In fact, they were freer than today’s American taxpayer.

America’s white millionaires, my friends. How long will their suffering last? When will they be free at last?

You know — and we don’t often say such things — following this Code Pink dealo has been like going down the freaking rabbit hole.

It’s important to note somewhere that right-wing rhetoric has gotten more snarly and bloodthirsty over the past few weeks, especially about the rapturous prospect of a really stupid and destructive attack on Iran, and about the need to repress the treasonous, murdering saboteurs (i.e. people like us) who are sapping America’s strength with their vile and cowardly lies, and so forth. This might be as good a place as any to make that observation in plain words — rather than contextually, as with the earlier posts down the page.

Still, it’s surprising even now how shoddy their crap is, but how tenacious even the flimsiest bit of misinformation can be when people want very badly to believe it. Here’s snooper, the same guy from the Gathering of Eagles comments, using the Code Pink Photoshop on his own site:

The Death Of Our Nation

And, so, true Patriots, the ones that have performed their duties to dig out the truth of these pathetic excuses of “troop supporters”, will expose and confront them all and, we shall overcome.

Are these “patriots” and do they really “support the troops”? I think not. They are the enemies within.

These Code Pink Skanks do NOT support the troops. They support our enemies that are doing just what the banner depicts.

Where is the outrage on Capital Hill over this banner? No, by choice, others are superior over others and others are inferior. Plain and simple. The women in the photo above are inferior to all that is decent by American Standards regardless of the attempts of such cretins trying to redefine those same standards.

Muahaha, and thus we will crush and expose the traitors who are inferior to us, for we are American Standards, bwaha.

When somebody pointed out that the picture wasn’t real, snooper replied:

snooper Says:
September 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm

Dear ass hole…I was there in DC with the Gathering of Eagles and Vets For Freedom. I saw the damn thing myself.

Try again ass hole.

And:

snooper Says:
September 24th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

Prove it wasn’t moron.

I was there and hundreds of us saw it.

No matter how your kind try to spin it, you have showed your true colors…YELLOW.

Have a nice day. Your above post is the last.

Have fun in your slippery slope into the Abyss of Obscurity.

Welp, okay. Here’s a statement (also from yesterday) from the guy at the Two Malcontents blog who Photoshopped the banner, although he also seems to have something of a problem in remembering things that don’t exist:
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Hilarious. And sad:

In The Know: White House Announces ‘Everything Is Great In Iraf’