I protest.

Thomas Cole, idiot.

I don't really expect very much from most Republicans, particularly if they're from the South, but Cole has really gone out of his way to show himself to be not only a fool but a malicious fool. Josh Marshall calls Cole's comments "outrageous," but I think that falls a bit short. Cole claims that he does not

believe that a vote against President Bush is equivalent to a vote for Adolf Hitler.

But Cole did say,

"I promise you this, if George Bush loses the election, Osama bin Laden wins the election, it's that simple. It will be interpreted that way by enemies of the United States around the world."

"What do you think Hitler would have thought if Roosevelt would've lost the election in 1944? He would have thought American resolve was [weakening]."

"What would the confederacy have thought if Lincoln would have lost the election of 186[4]?"

"I stand by these statements and do believe that this November is again another important time in history, just like Lincoln's victory in 1864 and Roosevelt's victory in 1944. President Bush has proved that he will stand up to our enemies and I believe that is his most important job as Commander in Chief,"

If Bush loses, bin Laden wins? I Don't Think So. Just what has Bush been doing for the last year? He certainly has not been pursuing bin Laden. He has been fucking around in Iraq getting thousands of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of American soldiers killed, with more dying every day, but bin Laden, or at least al Qaeda, has been having a field day. The American invasion of Iraq was the best thing bin Laden could have hoped for; it took the heat off him and distracted the United States with an morass that will remain chaotic (and therefore easy pickings for al Qaeda) for the foreseeable future.

To think that Bush has proven "that he will stand up to our enemies" requires one to conveniently forget or ignore his incompetent reaction to 9/11, his failure to follow up on the Clinton administrations efforts to capture or kill bin Laden before 9/11 and his blind rush into a tar-baby of a war. A war that he had planned from his first day in office.

Cole compares Bush to Roosevelt and Lincoln. Cole is a fucking idiot. By 1944, Roosevelt had already led the United States out of the worst economic disaster of its history and through the biggest war in the history of the world. Roosevelt had established his credentials as a great President, and had done it in spite of the polio and polio-related problems that eventually killed him. As for Lincoln, by his reelection in 1864 the South had essentially lost the Civil War. Sherman's March to the Sea had been completed and the heart had been cut out of the Confederacy. There was more of the war to go, but again, Lincoln had by this time established his credentials during one of the bloodiest, nastiest periods in the country's history.

Both Roosevelt and Lincoln were intelligent, well-spoken, well-read and great orators. Bush doesn't read, he stumbles over words and can't deliver an unrehearsed speech to save his life. Roosevelt and Lincoln dealt with facts as they truly were. Bush can't see past the wish-fulfillment fantasies of an ignorant, spoiled rich kid. Success is built upon accepting reality as it is and then dealing with it on its terms. Only failure can come from denying reality, which might explain why every venture in which Bush was involved failed. Including his Presidency, as it happens. Thousands dead, millions out of work. On his watch. His only reaction is to continue to build his fantasies.

Bush is no Lincoln. Bush isn't even an Andrew Johnson. I suspect that history will paint Bush as at least as bad a President as Grant. Perhaps worse.

Where does that leave Cole and his claims that "a vote against Bush is a vote for bin Laden?" (No, that's not what he said, but it is quite certainly what he meant.) If he really believes this, Cole is a fool; if he doesn't, he's not only a fool but a liar as well. Whether he believes it or not, though, he is trying to ensure Bush's reelection in the most malicious way possible, by trying to tie voting for John Kerry (that is, voting against Bush) to "the threat of terrorism" in the minds of the ignorant and gullible.

Which probably describes most of his constituents. What but an ignorant and gullible electorate would choose such a malicious fool as their representative?

"Too much freedom?"

The Murky News reports "Same-sex marriage foes in Bay Area share ideas." Ordinarily I like the reporting at the Mercury News, but this article just seems to pander to the bigots. It is one thing to simply report the existence and statements of these people, but it is quite another to slant the article to be sympathetic to their bigotry and to provide them a platform from which to preach their beliefs. I think that is what Michelle Quinn, the reporter, intended. At least, the article certainly reads sympathetically.

Unfortunately, the views expressed by those interviewed range from simple ignorant intolerance to outright hatred. For example,

"I have no problem with the union of same-sex couples," said Ilya Vinogradsky, 28, a San Carlos software engineer. "I don't like the word 'marriage' and how it's applied to such a union. Historically, marriage is a union of a man and woman and implies conceiving children."

Not true. "Historically," marriage of homosexuals has been fairly widely accepted. It is only in the last couple of centuries that homosexuality in general and homosexual marriage in particular has become taboo. So this guy isn't necessarily a bigot, he's just ignorant. He should have done a bit of research before demonstrating his ignorance before the world.

Here's another one:

James Staehs, 71, a retired engineer in San Jose, said he and his family oppose gay marriage because of their Christian faith, which he said is at the very foundation of the country. According to the Bible, he said, marriage was instituted by God as a union between one man and one woman created for the purpose of reproduction.

"The gay community is trying to redefine marriage to satisfy their own personal desires, and thereby making a mockery of God's plan," he said.

Well, first, the "Christian faith" is quite certainly not "at the very foundation of the country." While the "founding fathers" may have been deists, i.e. they believed in a God, they were emphatically not Christians, at least not in the way Staehs defines the term. They were the people, after all, who made damned certainly that the separation of religion and government, the "separation of Church and State," was made an integral part of the Constitution. And secondly, it is far too late for gay people to "redefine marriage to satisfy their own personal desires." The heterosexual majority has already made "a mockery of God's plan" with the embrace of divorce in particular, as well as adultery and a number of other activities against which the Chrixtian holy book speaks much more vehemently and repeatedly than it does regarding homosexuality (rarely) or homosexual marriage (not at all). In "defending" heterosexual marriage, Staehs simply ignores his own belief system. He's a hypocrite. And a bigot.

Then there's this one, which gave me the title for this entry:

For Emma Papa, 45, a marketing professional who works from her Alameda home, gay marriage is too much too fast. An immigrant from the Philippines, Papa said she has gay friends but can't support gay marriage, because of her strong Catholic beliefs.

"I try to teach children not to be prejudiced about gay people," said Papa, who has a 14-year-old son and a 25-year-old daughter. "It's not our business. It's good enough they are accepted in our time but to go as far as legalizing, what moral lesson is that giving our children? We already have too much freedom in this country."

I repeat: She said, "We already have too much freedom in this country." Um, just how fucking much is "too much?" As I see it, these days we don't have enough freedom, although Emma here certainly has enough to spew her idiocy in public. One wonders how Emma manages to "teach children not to be prejudiced about gay people" when she has so much obvious prejudice of her own. What moral lesson is legalizing gay marriage giving our children? How about the moral lesson that tolerance is a good thing? How about the moral lesson that everyone is equal and liberty is for all, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. As a Filipina, I would expect Emma to have some clue about this kind of thing, but it's pretty obvious that she has at least two sets of standards, one for herself and one for those of whom she disapproves.

If Emma truly believes that we have "too much freedom," I respectfully suggest that she move back to the Philippines for a few years. If she manages to return to the States at the end of that time, I would then like to know just how much freedom is "too much" in her view.

Then there's "Juliet Stanton, 40, a homemaker and lifelong resident of the South Bay." She says,

… she also tries to put herself in a gay person's shoes. What would she do? "I would not want to go out and upset the norm, whatever that may be. I would want to keep my lifestyle personal."

I suppose that Juliet thinks that interracial marriage should still be against the law then? After all, forty years ago it was the "norm" and it certainly was "upset." Juliet is also an ignorant fool:

Stanton says she doesn't understand the point of legalizing gay marriages. "It's not only upsetting tradition, but many children and families as well. I can understand making a ruckus over getting certain rights, but I don't understand doing this over a piece of paper."

See my comments above regarding "history" and "tradition." As for this only being about "a piece of paper," I'm sure that she knows as well as I do that marriage carries with it a large number of legal rights over and above the important social recognition of the relationship. Things like being able to make life-or-death decisions on behalf of the spouse. Being able to inherit. Being able to truly share legal custody of children. The three listed in the article, "hospital visits, sharing property, health benefits." Many, many others. "Juliet Stanton, 40, a homemaker and lifelong resident of the South Bay," is a bigot.

According to the article, 37 percent of the residents of the Bay Area oppose gay marriage according to "a recent Field Poll." Of course, I don't care if the number is 97 percent. This is a cut-and-dried civil rights issue. Those who are opposed need to give some serious thought (as opposed to knee-jerk reaction) to their opposition with regard to how it compares to the opposition in the fifties and sixties to interracial marriage. Those opposed at that time look simply ignorant and bigoted. History will judge those opposed now in just the same way.

Attorneys general and bad laws.

Again according the Murky News, State AGs come down against gay marriages. I don't have a lot to say about these attorneys general, except that they are cowards almost to a person.

Take New Mexico AG Patricia Madrid, for example, who "wrestled with it for about an hour" and then decided that same-sex marriage was against the law. She wrestled for a whole hour? My, that was a struggle, wasn't it? It took a whole hour for her to fail to find a backbone!

Eliot Spitzer in New York, on the other hand, "personally would like to see the law changed, but must respect the law as it now stands." Of course, that's not true. Sure, these people take an oath to not only serve the people of their states but to uphold the law as well. Somehow, though, I have the feeling that "serving the people" should trump "upholding the law" when the law is clearly unfair, unequal and discriminatory. No, we mustn't "respect the law as it now stands." We have a moral obligation to oppose that law. As attorneys general, these people should at the very least fail to act, turn a blind eye or, as Lockyer has done, just take the issue to a higher authority and in the meantime do nothing.

While I don't particularly care for Lockyer, I have to admit that his action was clever and probably as moral as someone in his position could be.

Then there are the ignorant bigots, who, like Kelly Clark, the lawyer for a group of bigoted "pastors and conservative lawmakers," claim that "you don't change 4,000 years of tradition." Perhaps Clark and his fellow bigots should read a bit more history, since current marriage traditions are only perhaps a few hundred years old and are certainly nowhere near four thousand. When you go that far back, you find homosexual marriage in virtually every culture on the planet.

And ultimately there are the people like "South Carolina's Republican Attorney General Henry McMasters." This person, and I use the term in its most general sense, "questioned how any public official could knowingly break the law they swore to uphold, even if they disagreed with it."

"You can't have every elected official … in this country saying this law or that law violates the Constitution, therefore they're not going to pay attention to it. That'd be anarchy," he said.

This assertion is so mind-bogglingly stupid as to be almost impossible to address. It seems to me that there are a plethora of ways in which we could avoid "anarchy," even if every elected official in the country did start ignoring laws they didn't like. (Impeachment springs to mind. There are lots and lots of others.) In this case, however, it isn't just the elected officials saying that laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts very clearly brought the Constitutionality of such laws into question in the minds of every informed person in the United States. This, of course, is why the raving bigots want so much to insert their marriage ban into said document. It's the only way to make such laws Constitutional.

The real point I want to make, though, is that these Attorneys General have the same obligation that any jury has when forced to decide the guilt or innocence of someone accused of the violation of an unjust law. In such a case, when the jury truly feels that the law is unjust, they have an obligation to find the accused not guilty even if they clearly did violate that law. (It's called "jury nullification" and despite the claims of judges and prosecutors, it's one of our fundamental rights.) Similarly, when dealing with a truly unjust law, officials have the right and obligation to refuse to enforce that law.

This is a right and an obligation that, so far and with respect to same-sex marriage, no Attorney General has had the courage to exercise.

It worked.

In a small way, at least. In "Petard hoisting time" I pointed out Billmon's suggestion that we turn the tools of the opposition to our own ends. I did so, in fact. I sent (via email) letters to the editors of the LA Times, the Orange County Register and a few more local papers, Torrance's Daily Breeze and a couple of beach papers.

Well, one of those beach papers printed my letter. In full, as far as I can tell (like an idiot, I forgot to keep a copy). I don't often read this particular paper, the Easy Reader, just because I don't usually see copies of it and it's not worth going out of my way to get one. So the first I heard of my letter being published was when I found a message on my answering machine praising me for having written it! I finally saw it when my landlord, who also liked the letter, gave me a copy of the paper.

All I can say is that while the circulation of this particular paper is tiny, the people around here have a lot of economic clout and do tend to vote. So maybe it will make a difference, even if that difference is miniscule.

Hey, at least I can show it to my Mom!

For the letter itself, read on ...

As it was printed:

Dear ER:

I am appalled that the president is pushing for a discriminatory amendment to the Constitution. Such an amendment is in opposition to everything the Constitution and our country stand for.

And frankly I don't understand why so many are so afraid of gay people being able to marry. It is in fact important that they be able to marry; these people have longstanding relationships that amount to marriage in every way but the legal one, yet they have none of the rights that those of us who happen to be hetererosexual and married take for granted. This is enormously unfair.

It is absurd to think that "gay marriage" would somehow cheapen marriage in general. This argument was used when interracial marriage was being depated and has certainly not proven true in that case.

My marriage can withstand any number of other marriages, gay or straight. The only thing I find that that might "cheapen" marriage is the idea that it should be an exclusive club limited to only those of whom some group or groups approve. What's next, will these groups not allow me to marry my wife because neither of us is Christian?

Opposition to gay marriage is simply discriminatory. It is as wrong as was opposition to interracial marriage in the 1960s. Sadly, though, the same arguments used then are being used now.

Lesbian and gay couples should have the same freedoms the rest of us enjoy, including the freedom to marry. Only civil marriage can provide such vital protections and security to lesbian and gay families as granting the right to visit a hospitalized partner, custody and visitation rights for families, social security benefits to a surviving partner, immigration rights for international same-sex couples, and hundreds of other legal protections and responsibilities. It is only fair.

Immigration rights in particular are important to me, since my wife is Chinese. Were I gay, though, my partner could not immigrate; either I would be forced to move to China or we would be forced to be apart. I can't imagine such a fate.

A couple of observations.

I'm incredibly busy preparing for a demo to no fewer than four DARPA project managers next week, dead tired and my back hurts so I must keep this short. I haven't written in a while, though, and there are a couple of observations I've been wanting to make.

First, it seems that while Bush can quite cheerfully pose for pictures with babies, he has somewhat more difficulty attending funerals. He as attended not one of the funerals for the men and women whom he sent to die in Iraq. Not one. And people are still dying, every single god-damned day, because Bush was obsessed with "getting Saddam." Worse yet, the dead are probably the lucky ones. The wounded are coming home with missing legs and arms, wounds in their bodies and in their minds. When they arrive, though, rather than receiving the lifelong care they expect from the country for which they sacrificed so much, they find that Bush and his buddies have cut their benefits and left them without resources or choices.

Of course, to Bush, their suffering, or, really, any suffering, is simply not real. It is not part of his experience and he can't imagine it. He was born to privilege and as a man of below-average intelligence he cannot conceive of a life that is different from his. It's not that he doesn't care, it's that it would never even occur to him that he should care, because the poor and the suffering simply don't exist for him. And as for the mess that he has made of Iraq, of Afghanistan and of the United States, I'm sure that he's completely confident that someone will come along and magically bail him out, as has happened with every other mess he has made.

Finally, though, I have the distinct impression that the days of the Bush administration are numbered. While there is still a long time until November and much can happen in those few months, I have the feeling that the messes have simply grown out of control. Even conservatives are abandoning Bush. I'm beginning to think that the Mayberry Machiavellis, as Billmon terms them, have lied for so long about so much that the lies are beginning to catch up with them. These people are just not smart enough to stay consistent and they aren't competent enough to do the things that need to be done. (Like, say, capture bin Laden. For example.) The shakey edifice of lies they have built over the last three years is beginning to fall apart. It is crumbling on all sides.

It is possible that the bastards in the White House might pull it together by November, that they might manage to once more hoodwink enough of the American people to gain reelection. It's possible. But I'm beginning to doubt that they will be able to manage it. I'm beginning to suspect that even another terrorist attack would have more the effect of turning people against Bush than it would have of increasing his support.

So while it's certainly not time to stop fighting, at least we can feel that we might actually win this fight. And it is about time. Those bastards have rigged the game for too long. It's time, and past time, to turn them out and bring someone more competent and more honest in.

You certainly can't get less honest than the Bush bunch.