What we're protecting in Afghanistan

Hamid Karzai, whose illegitimate election last year should have been the last straw for NATO, has thrown a major hissy fit over the very modest pressures that we've been putting on him to behave himself:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatened over the weekend to quit the political process and join the Taliban if he continued to come under outside pressure to reform, several members of parliament said Monday.

Mr. Karzai made the unusual statement at a closed-door meeting on Saturday with selected lawmakers – just days after kicking up a diplomatic controversy with remarks alleging foreigners were behind fraud in last year's disputed elections.

From the Globe. So let's get this straight. We're propping up an illegitimate leader, risking our own troops' lives, killing civilians, and turning over prisoners to authorities who torture them, and now this arsehole threatens to join the Taliban?? And we're doing this for what exactly? To uphold democracy? See Karzai's election above. To protect the rights of women? A laudable goal, but maybe we should be working on this at home first. The pipeline? Probably a major reason. To save face? Probably another major reason. But even if we accept these last two goals as legitimate, we can only save face, or build the pipeline, if we can win the war. My opinion? We can't. The USSR was a huge country, with a lot fewer supply line problems than NATO (thanks to being right next door to them), and yet they lost. We will too, mark my words.

ETA: The coup in Kyrgyzstan (h/t Blaque) may help to speed things along, by depriving NATO of the use of a crucial air base.

Still more right wing madness

It's escalated:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A Nashville man says he and his 10-year-old daughter were victims of road rage Thursday afternoon, all because of a political bumper sticker on his car.

Mark Duren told News 2 the incident happened around 4:30p.m., while he was driving on Blair Boulevard, not far from Belmont University.

He said Harry Weisiger gave him the bird and rammed into his vehicle, after noticing an Obama-Biden sticker on his car bumper.

Source. No information on whether the alleged assailant has any direct connection to teabaggers, but I bet he's a fan of the same media that they are, at the very least.

Incidentally, there's an update in the story of the bullet that broke a window at the office of a Republican member of Congress:

Police said a first floor window was struck by a bullet at around 1 a.m. on Tuesday. The building was not occupied, police said. A preliminary investigation determined that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window at a downward direction, landing about a foot from the window. The bullet had enough force to break the windowpane but not penetrate the window blinds, according to a news release.

From here, via bluicebank in this DailyKos thread. As someone else points out further down that thread, it's really difficult to target a bullet that's fired into the air like that, which makes it much less likely that Cantor's office was targetted. Then, still further down, we find this:

As you say, that's one hell of a shot -- if done with a firearm. I'd like to know if there is powder residue or rifling on the bullet, because this is not so difficult to do with a direct shot from a wrist-rocket.

Actually, the presence of powder residue or rifling might not prove anything either, because it's not too hard to fire a bullet and then pick it up and fire it with a slingshot... and that could conceivably have been done by someone on either side (Dems wanting to send a message, or Repubs wanting to make it look like the Dems were in on the bad behaviour too). More likely than either of those, though, is a stray bullet; that happens a lot in many American cities.

One thing that some people have pointed out is that an awful lot of the teabaggers you see at those rallies are quite old, which reduces the likelyhood of them being at serious risk of becoming violent (James Wenneker von Brunn notwithstanding). However, they're making an active effort to recruit folks who carry guns professionally. The Oath Keepers are soldiers and police officers who have vowed to resist orders that they consider to be unconstitutional, and that could be really dangerous. Think of all the shell-shocked veterans who are coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq; a lot of them are going to be very disgruntled with the government, and they know how to shoot. While a military coup and/or civil war is far from certain, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility...

The teabaggers show their true colours

I've often used Blaque's Blog of Horrors as a source for this stuff, since being an American he's much more attuned to this stuff than I am (indeed, by the look of things it would be difficult to avoid seeing it). This weekend he (and his regular commenters) have found some dandy examples as the vote on the health care package approaches.

Exhibit A:

This is actually relatively benign as these things go, since the protesters are relatively civil there, but have a look at what happens when they try to answer simple questions about why they're there. It would be amusing if that were all there was. Unfortunately, it gets worse. Exhibit B:

The way they treated that guy is horrible. And this isn't the only example of their true colours coming to the surface, as this HuffPo story shows:

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protesters shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

"It was absolutely shocking to me," Clyburn said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post. "Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday... I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit-ins... And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus."

Just in case you didn't already know that. And check out some of the pics in that story too (particularly the "If Brown can't stop it, Browning can" placard). These people are potentially very dangerous. A commenter on one of the YouTube videos above suggested that if Fox News told them to start killing everyone except white conservatives, a Rwanda-like massacre could result, and I don't think that's so implausible anymore. Especially considering who else is getting involved:

It’s no secret that conservatives have a hard time keeping racism out of their ranks (airwaves), and now it seems it has surfaced in even their grassroots (astro turf) movements. The whole tea party thing (except with representation and a high income bracket this time) is being organized by conservative corporate lobbyists, Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity, who are no doubt milking this all the way to their billion dollar bank accounts.

If that wasn’t hard enough for real [sic] conservative activists to swallow, they are really going to hate showing up at rallies only to rub elbows with white nationalists. Kris Kobach got the party started in Kansas on April 4th when he hosted a joint tea party/anti-immigrant rally with Billy Gilchrist, Topeka chapter leader for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. In 2004 Kansas Republican leader Timothy Burger wrote in response to Kobach’s failed congressional run, “It doesn’t help matters that Kobach was hired by FAIR, widely perceived as a racist anti-immigrant group during the campaign.” But that stinging accusation hasn’t stopped Kobach from working for the John Tanton network ever since, or from dipping his tainted toes into anything that smells ripe for manipulation and publicity.

Blaque has suggested in an earlier post on his blog that lefties (at least in the US) should start buying guns, because the righties already have them. I hate to advocate that, given how arms races generally end up, but if any First World country is headed for civil war, America is probably the prime candidate.