Sometimes a baby's gotta do what a baby's gotta do.

This last weekend upwards of 50,000-60,000 teabagging douchebags descended on the streets of Washington D.C. to loudly voice their anger at the results of the last election.

We're all aware that a good portion of the clowns that were marching were there in response to Glenn Beck's "9-12 Project" of which the goal, according to Beck, is to return the country to that unified spirit of purpose we displayed immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center.

I'm always amused by the generally accepted view that those on the right are generally more prone to logic while those on the left are easier swayed by their emotions. This paradigm seems so superficially wrong, so upside down as to be laughable.

Conservatives aren't logical. They're simply lacking in emotional maturity and any sense of empathy. They're stuck in adolescence, unable to see past the end of their own nose.

Some conservatives like William F. Buckley or George Will are better able to hide that emotional immaturity than their ideological soul mates. They bury their childishness in their writings under a blizzard of vocabulary or statistics. At their hearts they're nothing but five-year old boys angry because they were picked last for dodge ball.

In the days following the September the 11th attacks all Americans regardless of political stripe were frightened, confused and angry. I recall myself wanting the U.S. to lash out violently at whomever was responsible for the attacks. Eventually we sobered up and realized the complexity of the situation demanded better of us (the Bush administration and it's supporters never did.)

At it's heart the 9-12 Project is a pining for the days when the conservatives weren't the only illogical, angry, frightened or immature group of people in the country. It's a plea for angry truthiness, a longing for shared stupidity.

Beck and his supporters don't like being the only kids in the playpen.

Figure a man's only good for one oath at a time; I took mine to the Confederate States of America.

On the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and after some personal reflection here are a couple of lessons I take from the attacks in the wake of the last six years.

Osama Bin Laden is a strategic genius. He was forward-thinking enough to realize that it was the perfect time to attack the United States. Our boy-president had just come into office surrounding himself with fellow deep-thinkers who could easily be counted on to go off the deep end and overreact accordingly. With Bush in office Bin Laden was assured that the United States was weak. He couldn't have been more correct in that assumption.

We will always be at war. One thing that leaps out and depresses the hell out of me is that there's a significant enough portion of powerful people who are so vastly intellectually immature that they simply can't define themselves outside of their violent opposition to some other ideology on the world stage, even if that ideology is in reality impotent. How else could one explain the almost effortless Neocon segue from "Oh my God the Ruskies are going to get us!" to "Oh my God the Islamofascists are going to get us!"

If pisses me off that these people continue to set an agenda in terms of resources and focus towards conflict when the vast majority of the world's population simply wants to go along to get along.

There is no longer an objective reality. Demonstrated most recently by the Petraeus testimony yesterday. All of those things that humans survive on a micro scale; the ability to learn from one's mistakes, objective reasoning, etc. are also a necessity on the macro scale that the entire society may survive. These things are missing and we are all suffering for it. Not to mention it drives the most rational of us absolutely bonkers.

Politicians don't really love this country. Their collective inability to defend our constitution in the wake of the attacks breaks my heart. I had always assumed that, regardless of our political leaders use of their elective office for personal aggrandizement, they had at least originally decided to serve and run for office based on a deep sense of patriotism. When push came to shove they would remember that original reason for service and act accordingly.

I was wrong.

There will be no bargain, young Jedi. I shall enjoy watching you die.

In response to Keith Olbermann's excellent 911 speech Rush writes:

All right, folks. I think that is revisionist history. This idea that we were all unified on 9/11 is just bunk, and I am going to say it. I don't believe it for a moment. I think that when 9/11 happened, a lot of kooks on the left said, "A-ha! This is how we're going to get Bush. He's incompetent," or they were either saying, "Oh, no! The country is going to come together." You can't tell me that the people who hated Bush ten months earlier over the Florida aftermath, the Florida recount, all of a sudden came together and it was all kumbaya time. I do not believe it."

I'd make the observation that anyone who cannot imagine that those whose politics they disagree with would put country before party in a time of national crisis must themself be someone who consistently puts party before country and sees everything through this same lens.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy. The United States Of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.

Rather than mark the 911 attacks by laying a wreath at ground zero, President Bush would be better served by repeating his actions on the day of the attack: listening to a children's story and then hiding under the bed on Air Force One as it flew him to Nebraska.

Since this date has become an odd sort of holiday with the expectation that everybody take a moment and remember what they were doing on that horrible day here's mine: I spent the day wishing Bill Clinton was still the President rather than a fucking incompetent frat-boy.

Strangely enough I've had no problem remembering that feeling in the years that've followed.

My least favorite part was when you spit poison in the obnoxious fat guy's face!

Now this is a decent review of "The Path to 911."

An appalling secondary concern is the tone makes almost every pre-9/11 American look like a fool.

Look, there's a security guard yawning while terrorists plant the 1993 bomb at the World Trade Center. How dare a security guard work while tired.

Oh, hey, there's an airline agent checking in a 9/11 terrorist even though he has a carry-on bag. Stupid airline agents.

Excuse us all, writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham, for not acting like Hitler Youth in the glory days before ordinary Americans knew commercial planes could be turned into missiles.

Idiots.

Cheap emotions are on orange alert. Of all the people who died in the 1993 attack, who does the camera focus on? Ding-ding-ding, you are a winner if you said "a pregnant woman rubbing her belly."

If you don't have the time to read the full commission report then I recommend this graphic novel adaption. For some reason the graphic novel format provides a much easier way to get one's head around all the convergent timelines and personalities behind the scenes in the 911 attack.

Will you tell me where you think the accident will take place and I'll make sure I'm there.

Just a little reminder as we find ourselves knee-deep in conservative 911 revisionism over the next couple of days. It may come as a shock to the Rush Limbaughs of the world but the country actually formed a commission and held *gasp* hearings in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. The commission's final report was itself a summary of much of the testimony and investigative work that it implemented.

Some highlights from just that one day of public testimony covered in the March, 2004 Washington Post article I cite above:

President Bush's top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday.

Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging "policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book.

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The CIA now says that a controversial August 2001 briefing summarizing potential attacks on the United States by al Qaeda was not requested by President Bush, as Rice and others had long claimed.

(In fact Rice held a news conference JUST to claim that the PDB was requested by Bush. Liar, liar...)

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Commission investigators disclosed that during the Clinton administration, the president and other White House officials signed a series of secret orders for covert action that, according to the top Clinton aides, authorized the killing of bin Laden by CIA proxies.

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In the summer of 2001, veteran counterterrorism officers privy to reports on al Qaeda threats "were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns," according to one of two staff reports issued by the commission yesterday. Senior CIA officials were also frustrated by some Bush appointees who were not familiar with surges in terrorist threat information and questioned their veracity, the report said.

And it goes on and on. Point is the producers of the ABC movie seem to want to pretend there was no 911 Commission while claiming, at the same time, that the work of the Commission supports the "truthiness" of their film.

La-hoo-sa-her.

Should there be any doubt as to the mental makeup of the typical right-of-center blogger I'd encourage you to run over to firedoglake and read Kevin K's awesome guest post on the subject. The whole thing had me alternating between bits of hysterical laughter and shaking my head at the inanity of the bedwetting little losers. Just a taste:

I didn’t really follow the explosion of bedwetting blogs post-9/11 because I was too busy languishing in my pre-9/11 NYC liberal mindset, but apparently the blogosphere was flush with dorks in crouched-down, defensive positions who pecked away at something they called "warblogs." These, ahem, "warbloggers" (must … stop … tittering) thought they were at war and no amount of fear of Blogger’s registration process and/or HTML interface was going to get in their way to fight the good fight. They were G.I. Jonesin’ for some seriously manly cutting ‘n’ pasting as they bravely stormed the frontlines of HyperText Transfer Protocol. And some of them, primarily "9/11 Republicans" and alleged libertarians, were so addicted to the notion that "everything changed after 9/11" that they discarded large, important chunks of their belief systems because they figured the "everything changed" doctrine applied to their very beings as well. A few of them have circled back to reality and well-earned rounds of raspberries, but a substantial number still cling to what are becoming increasingly razor-thin threads of dignity, and generally when you take it that far, you never come back because, let’s face it, it’s really, really embarrassing to do so. The Roger L. Simons and Charles Johnsons of today are the ex-lefty David Horowitzes and Michael Savages of tomorrow, except, as Pantload Media has proved, we don’t ever have to worry about Rog and Chucky being anywhere near as popular, successful or influential. Or handsome.

It’s been funny watching nutter bloggers cheer on Iraqis for standing up to terrorists when it’s quite evident that guys like John Hinderaker and Hugh Hewitt clearly wouldn’t have the balls to do the same in a similar situation. If you put Hinderaker in a scenario where white supremacists had taken over his perfectly-named hometown of Apple Valley, Minnesota and were setting up IEDs around town and blowing up shit at random, a teary-eyed John would be the first one out of his house waving a white dress shirt and bellowing in desperation, "I’m on your team!" before collapsing on his well-manicured lawn in a puddle of urine. Hewitt, for cripes sake, has to be heavily sedated and diapered before he enters the Empire State Building, which he seems to believe is a bullet-strewn frontline in the war on terror (like Sadr City, but taller!), with its spine-tingling Skyride and elevators stuffed with fanny-packed tourists in ESPN Zone t-shirts. I mean, for all of the chest-thumping-and-puffery these proud patriots do you can’t help but notice through their squeals of store-bought muscular bravado that a majority of them are pinched-up, picked-last-in-dodgeball mega-dweebs. We’re talking central casting material for the remake of Revenge of the Nerds, except in this version they just read Drudge and Instapundit all day and curl into a ball every time they get within 20 yards of an Arab or one of the Satellite Sisters.

Herman! Herman, please! How many times do I have to tell you not to pound stakes while I'm around? You know it gives me heartburn!

A tip of the hat to Al Lewis who was Grandpa Munster from "The Munsters." I was surfing political blogs today and stumbled across this quote from just after the 9/11 attacks when his radio show was run off the air by the threats of someone who may or may not have been a federal agent. (It's confusing but the story is here: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001/10/16/ebrief.htm )

To quote the article: Al Lewis decries censorship, but at 91, he says, he has seen it before. "I lived through the McCarthy period. It will get worse."

Lewis, who just passed away in February, said this before spying on peace groups, "free speech" zones and warrantless domestic spying. Must have been his uncanny vampire senses that let him see into the future...