Puck

Please check out 15-year-old media-activist Ava Lowery’s site, peacetakescourage.com. She’s visually articulate and very couragous. She’s also received some truly hateful responses to her work. One hate-monger wrote to her, threatening, “It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun…. Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.” A story about Ava, her work, and the respone to it (both positive and negative) can be found at The Progressive.

In response to my letter asking her to support Rep. John Conyers’ H. Resolution 635, which calls for an investigation into the crimes committed by President Bush with an eye toward impeachment, McMorris replied that Conyers’ Resolution was “one of a series of politically motivated attacks” on the President. I suppose that’s true, in the same way a group of sane people defend themselves against the paranoid-schizophrenic rampages of a serial killer. McMorris claims that Bush “has been admirable in defending freedom throughout the world.” I guess it depends upon your definition of “freedom”: illegal incarcerations, extraordinary renditions, torture, illegal spying upon U.S. citizens, and the wholesale slaughter of innocents in Iraq are not, however, within any sane person’s definition of freedom. “President Bush should be praised for his bold leadership and dedicated service to this country,” McMorris continues and again, I have to agree, as long as were defining “bold leadership” and “dedicated service” as including inspiring thousands of Muslims to join the various jihadist movements around the world. The President is dedicated to a “clash of civilizations,” to use Samuel Huntington’s misguided phrase, and to boldly lead the U.S. into a morally and economically draining perpetual war. Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden roams free–a fact McMorris doesn’t mention (ever) but one that must surely constitute a key component of her definition of “freedom” and of her continued hardline support of the President.

Richard Kim blogs in The Notion that the gay mainstream press has hit a new low: “If you want to see the pathologies plaguing the gay marriage movement in action, you need look no farther than this article penned by Jasmyne Cannick. Titled ‘Gays First, Then Illegals,’ Cannick’s editorial spews the kind of xenophobic rhetoric now rarely heard outside of right-wing radio and white nativist circles — unless, of course, it’s coming from the mainstream gay press.” Continue Reading »