Friday morning at the water cooler...

Some reading for all of you avid readers.

First, Driftglass takes off the gloves, grabs a scalpel and slices New York Times columnist David Brooks to absolute pieces.

Yes, 30% or so of the citizens of this country are a cultural dead-loss. A morally atrophied slumgullion of wasted carbon, bad ideas and straight-grain-stoopid that cannot be reasoned with and should never be indulged.

And they have been feeding off of that steady diet of psychotic rage that their religious, media and political leaders have pumped into our national groundwater. For every ache and pain in their pathetic lives they have been offered the same, simple sacrificial scapegoats over and over and over again:
Queers, Feminists, Activist Judges and Dirty Hippies.

But that 30% is unelectable without a thick undercoating of respectability and a heavy carapace of “Reasonableness” welded to their hides. Without some nice, clean, articulate barker to work the Midway and wheedle the Moderates into Jerry Falwell’s political freak show.

Without a suit, a pair of glasses, soft hands, a moon face, a pink tie and some valuable real estate on the editorial page of the NYT they’re just another mob of racists and Dominionists begging for tyranny and screaming for blood.

So this is what it comes down to:

The Center does not exist anymore because the Right murdered it. Methodically strangled it in full view of the public and the press over the course of thirty years.

The men that killed the Center still rule the Modern GOP.

These are the Modern GOP’s only legacies:
A New Orleans in rubble.
A Constitution in tatters.
A carefully cultivated international reputation in ruins.
A debased media.
A proud legacy of science and inquiry kneecapped by roving bands of Conservative theocrats.
A debt that will hag-ride us for a generation,
And an Iraq ablaze for the next 20 years.

Next, from Chris Clarke who rails on the religious ones who seem unable to restrain themselves from issuing their faith against his wishes after a personal loss.

Here are a few basic ground rules for religious tolerance. Not everybody believes what you believe. This includes the existence of an afterlife, the existence of a soul, the existence of any gods at all much less one all-encompassing one. A person’s failure to believe what you believe does not constitute disrespect for your beliefs. Failure to be obsequious in the face of your religion’s central story does not constitute disrespect for believers in your religion. One can respect Christians as human beings and still opine aloud that the New Testament is a bunch of nonsense, just as one can respect traditional Hopi culture without writing in your Pleistocene paleontology paper that the ancestors of the Hopi emerged into this world from a sipapu in the Grand Canyon.

Both posts are long, but well worth the read. Bookmark them if you have to. Print them and read them later. Make copies and pass them around. Wave printed copies under the noses of wankers and religious freaks then twist them into a cone and, staple first, shove them...

Ah well, you get the picture.

Apologies: After excerpting from Chris Clarke I didn't make sure the link worked. It's now fixed and also here. Sorry about that.