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Congrats to Mr. and Mr. Chalmers-Linnell

by Mark Gisleson

Let's try starting out with some good news for a change. No, a crazed housewife didn't break through the cordon of 16,000 British bobbies to swat George W. with a rolled up copy of the Sunday London Times, although that would certainly bring a smile to my face. The good news today is that Gary Chalmers and Rich Linnell won.

What did they win, you might ask? They won the right to get married in Massachusetts. By a vote of 4-3, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Legislature must accommodate the needs of all the citizens of the Commonwealth seeking to join together in wedded matrimony.

I'll also be unnecessarily candid, and admit to a shortcoming of my own. For my parents' generation (you know, the "greatest generation"), the linguistic battle was to exorcise the "n-word" from their vocabularies. Like many Baby Boomers, I've struggled for years to rid myself of the classic male bonding locker room "f-word," and no, I don't mean "fuck." Here's hoping this court ruling helps to make that a little easier the next time I take to trading insults with my drinking buddies.

I look forward to lots of new bonding opportunities next year when the GOP makes 2004 the "Year of Gay Marriage Bashing." I think it's time a few Boomers and a lot of Greatest Generationers learn that young people really don't give a rat's ass about these things, and it's time we stopped freaking out over other people's preferences.

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Regular Babelogue contributor Elaine Cassel's byline shows up at FindLaw today, where she weighs in on Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad. Elaine thinks Muhammed may get a new trial due to Virginia's "triggerman rule." Ashcroft screws up yet again. Eager to assign jurisdiction to a death penalty state, Maximum John forgot to check the rulebooks and, as a result, the slimiest jerkwad to parlay a one-man cult into Jim Jones territory may get off scot free.

I admit to a passing interest in the Ed Geins of this world, and I do have an opinion about this case. Allen is scum and should fry, but Malvo should get off with a very, very long sentence and a chance at rehabilitation. Just call me a wishy-washy liberal, and don't forget my standard caveat that, while I believe in capital punishment for some crimes, I don't think our current system passes the laugh test and that every single person currently on death row should have their sentence commuted to life without parole.

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I'd like to think that nobody cares about Bernard Goldberg's newest book, but for those who do, be sure to read Bob Somerby's recent Daily Howler post in which he shreds Bernie's credibility and so-called facts.

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Had to run out and do some quick errands for "she who must be obeyed," and got to hear some of a Minnesota Public Radio call in with NPR's ombudsman. Nothing terribly important was said (gee, does that sum up public radio or what?), but one caller got my goat. He was a "lifelong Democrat" but couldn't stand how "liberal" NPR was. If MPR or NPR had any class or conviction, they'd hang up the second anyone identifies themselves as a lifelong Democrat.

Why? Because 98% of the time, it's a Republican trash talker trying to establish the most holy of all RNC memes: that of the disaffected Democrat who just can't stand the fact that their party has moved so far to the left. Nevermind that the current Democratic caucus in the Senate is visibly to the right of the Republican Senate minority caucus circa 1967, this is the whopper du jour that the RNC keeps seeking to establish. (In all seriousness I'd trade either Kerry for Chuck Percy, Feinstein for Margaret Chase Smith, Daschle for George Aiken, or Joe Lieberman for Edward Brooke.)

I posted a little bit yesterday at Babelogue's front page blog about "Blind Spot — Hitler's Secretary." Listening to Frau Traudl Junge, it was easy to see how Hitler took and kept power. The Germans, quite simply, did not challenge his lies, and they accepted his authority. The secret to Hitler's rise to power is not a secret: it was based on the "big lie" and reinforced with selective and ever increasing violence.

I'd argue any day of the week that George W. Bush rose to power on the strength of Karl Rove's lies, and while the bourgeois riot in Miami was pretty fey compared to Kristallnacht, it was a strategic application of well-timed violence all the same. And that little thing known as the invasion of Iraq makes up for a lot of the violence gap between AH and GW.

Junge has a telling moment towards the end of the interview/film. She talks about walking down a German street after the war and seeing a statue that had been erected to a young German woman who had been killed for resisting the Nazis. At that moment, Junge finally realizes that there were indeed some Germans her age who saw through the lies and resisted. The shame of that moment stayed with her the rest of her life, and it wasn't until she did the interviews that formed this movie that she finally came to some peace with her role as a secretary to Adolf Hitler. Before that moment she had told herself she was just like every other German.

I don't think Republicans are Nazis, but I do think that the Nazis in the RNC work very hard to make cultural conservatives think that their beliefs are the norm, and that everyone else is aberrant in some way. The galling thing, of course, is that the Republican leadership in almost no way reflects the beliefs of their core supporters. For every bastard Dan Burton has running around Indianapolis, there are countless aborted fetuses that could have claimed a Republican member of Congress as their daddy (or mommy).

It's not Bush bashing to pay attention to Larry Flynt's press releases, and it's not Bush hatred to point out that the emperor not only has no pants, but has a very small dick, and I don't mean Cheney.

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Vacation time coming up next week, and I promise to come back with a bit more polish than I've been exhibiting lately. I need a break from my posting, as I suspect all of you do. Here's to the return of Steve Perry on November 24th (that or you'll find my November 22nd post gathering cyberdust all Thanksgiving week — write Steve to let him know you're looking forward to some new posts from him, but don't tell him I sent you).

Posted by at November 18, 2003 12:27 PM

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