I [heart] Gavin.

From New York, from I’ll Never Forget the Smell Like Burning Rubber, from The Sky Was Very Blue that Day, from My Memories and My Photos of “Missing” Flyers and Handwritten Memorials and All Kinds of Acts of Human Kindness and Solidarity, from Any Day they Could Bomb the Subway but Oh Well What the Hell, from the Real World (not MTV)… thank you.

Gavin. It’s not an answer, for there is no answer. But if there was, it would sound something like this. Pretending is easy. Living is hard. You do what you must, you cry out in pain, you scream in futility, you shake your head in grieving confusion. Then you saddle up your shit and you put one foot in front of the other. Charley Mike, mi amigo…

mikey

“What is wrong with us that makes you possible?”

A question I’ve been asking myself (though never quite so simply or eloquently) since the Reagan administration.

I was at 22nd Street the morning of 9/11. Meanwhile, seven of my friends and former coworkers were high up in WTC1. No one made it out from up there.

You describe the conflict well, Gavin. I feel the same reluctance to mention them. Yet it is hard to remain silent when these hate and war mongers blithely use their deaths for their own reprehensible ends.

Stop walking into rooms braying your opinions in a talk-radio cadence with your bare face hanging out, when you were sitting in a comfy chair 2,000 miles away on 9/11, cramming your mouth with Cheetos as your penis got guiltily hard.

In contrast to these adolescent outbursts, the reflections of a grown-up:

Even though I live in Manhattan, I live literally as far as you could get from the WTC — I couldn’t smell smoke, I didn’t have ash settling on my windowsills, traffic wasn’t even disrupted. I was on a six-month maternity leave, and didn’t have any reason to go downtown for all of it. And through some fluke, I don’t know anyone who was in the towers, and while I certainly know people who lost people, no one I’m close to lost anyone important. One idiosyncratic reaction I had was a feeling of a personal intrusion in that someone had taken my stuff — the WTC buildings were a useful landmark, I went through that subway station fairly often, they were something that ‘belonged’ to me and had been taken away. But mostly I reacted to the attacks the way you react to a tragedy that happens on the news.

I’m embarrassed confessing this: I feel like I’m not a New Yorker on some level because I wasn’t personally affected.

Lizardbreath, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks.

This makes me think of Linkin Park shouting, “Shut up! Shut up when I’m talking to you!”

9/11 did change everything. It allowed the neo-cons to achieve their ultimate wet dream and prey on the fear of Americans in order to pursue their nefarious (and, not incidentally, unrelently selfish) ends.

How dare they wrap themselves in the flag, when they are the ones who would destroy all the freedoms and ideals that make us Americans.

How come it’s the wingnuts who are in the lowest probability of attacks like 9/11 who get the most self-righteously whiny about the impact of “That Day” and how mortally afraid we all must be?

I always figure it’s because they’ve been cashing that check for five years now, and pull it out whenever they want their goddamn cut of something. When a Rightwinger is crying about 9/11, hold on to your wallet with one hand and your genitals with the other…

[somewhere in Lilekstan]: Neeew Yawrk City? *hock-ptooey*!!!

It’s Lileks syndrome. What happened in 9/11 wasn’t thousands dying or breathing the ashes of our friends or the destruction of a piece of our past. It was a bunch of swarthy people who made a bunch of desperately insecure emotionally retarded solipsists thousands of miles away askeered, and there aren’t enough dead swarthy people to pay for that.

I was standing outside an evacuated terrorist target with literally thousands of other people waiting to give blood while these assholes were under their desks. Fuck ’em.

May G-d bless Wayne Russo. May his memory endure as a blessing, and may his family and friends be comforted among all who mourn.

That would be pretty difficult in the best of circumstances, but having part of a loved one show up in the Fresh Kills landfill MONTHS after he was murdered makes it harder.

Bless Wayne.

A.P. Poll: Villain & Hero of the year…

“Bush won the villain sweepstakes by a landslide, with one in four respondents putting him at the top of that bad-guy list. When people were asked to name the candidate for villain that first came to mind, Bush far outdistanced even Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader in hiding; and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who is scheduled for execution.

The president was picked as hero of the year by a much smaller margin. In the poll, 13 percent named him as their favorite while 6 percent cited the troops in Iraq.”

There you have it. Bush loses a popularity contest to bin Laden and Saddam.

When the first dewy-eyed freshman in Athens, Georgia told a reporter that “I feel like we’re all New Yorkers today, like this happened to all of us,” I had to physically restrain myself from clocking her. This did not happen to all of us; this happened to some of us, and the rest of us have a responsibility to jump off the fucking grief train and start looking to someone else’s needs every once in a goddamn while. I’m so sorry, Gavin; my best to you and to Wayne’s family.

I was extremely fortunate in that I didn’t lose anyone I knew well enough to care deeply for that day – just a couple of people I knew through work. Living where I did in New Jersey, I’m especially lucky in that regard. We had some real worries about my ex’s father for a short while – all of which turned out (thankfully) to be groundless.

These yahoos forget that the “victims of 9/11” are people, and not ciphers for anti-Muslim sentiment or anything else. We can mythologize safely enough about people like Nat Turner or Guy Fawkes or (insert your favorite historical figure here) because they all died long enough ago that there’s no one left living to be hurt personally by our mythologizing.

I’m a history teacher by trade – I earn my bread by spinning tales about people as ciphers for Grand Historical Narratives. But I consider it my duty to try to always remind my students that the people in the past were also, once upon a time, people, not just mythologized characters – and I’d never be heartless enough to forget that people who only died a few years ago are still people, too.

I’m sorry people do that to your loved ones, Gavin. I hope you find something to occupy yourself with tonight – you don’t deserve to be sleepless and alone.

*They* do.

they ALSO forget that, because of the internatinoal nature of the businesses at the WTC, that people from something like one hundred different countries died.

So maybe an America-only pity party is not so appropriate here.

Exposing and skewering the voices of deception and exploitation, people who would use his death for their own vicious ends would make your friend proud. You are entitled to mourn your loss and to express your anger and grief publicly.

Some voices need to speak louder. Yours is one of them.

Gavin, first I think you need to take your medication before you babble incoherently.

And, no, I won’t “shut up”. That’s the problem with this country.. Out of sight out of mind.

The more we “shut up” the more we forget about the Islamofascists that perpetrated the deed, and who would perpetrate many more 9/11s if they stand unopposed.

I was around 1200 miles away from New York City when 9/11 happened, to be a little more exact. My ex-wife was around 2 miles from the Pentagon. Nonetheless, the vast majority of those who perished at the hands of the savages were my fellow American citizens. Was I saddened? Hell yes. Does it still bother me? Damned right. Will I forget? Never–until the bloodthirsty ideology that hatched that heinous act and which continues to murder innocents to this day is brought to its knees and is rendered unable to perpetrate any more mayhem.

I am sorry for your grief, Gavin. My intention was not to open wounds, but to ensure that similar wounds never happen again.

julia said
December 29, 2006 at 1:28

You said it. You’re reminding me of a friend of mine from Iran who lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and went down to ground zero to volunteer for weeks afterwards. I’ll never forget 9/11, and I’m sick to death of the biggest idiots and assholes trying to claim it and use it to justify their base inadequacies, such as their tendency to shit themselves anytime anyone with a darker complexion than they walks into the room.

Gavin, if anything, you were restrained. The full post you quote from is one of the most bigoted things I’ve read – umm, in the past month – but then, I don’t sewer-dive through the rightwing blogosphere too often if I can help it. Pustule Pusateri’s attitude is “you don’t look like me and act like me therefore you’re not American and you deserve to suffer and die.” Some of the comments are as bad or worse, and this is the mentality that is driving our foreign policy and the current attack on our civil liberties. Not that, as Julia points out, any number of bodies will soothe them.

For that matter, nothing can knock sense into someone like Pusateri, not that I would advocate violence anyway, but I am reminded of an exchange from the film Manhattan:

Isaac Davis (Woody Allen): Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y’know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y’know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

Look, its easy to understand. The more you retreat into a fictional world of what you should do and away from the reality of what you actually do (or can do), the more fearful and insecure you become. The more your identity become bound up with that fiction, the harder you have to shovel to cover the insecurity. It is this vicious self-reinforcing spiral of increasing fear and increasingly genocidal tough-guy bluster that makes the modern Warblogger.

Sad, terrified little creatures.

Gavin:

You are absolutely right of course.

But, remember that the wingnuts have many levels of stupid, coarse, narcissistic, childish, evil. Don’t allow yourself to start feeling, really feeling near them or about them.

If you are truly feeling about it, my advice is don’t, because it can break you down.

you don’t look like me and act like me therefore you’re not American and you deserve to suffer and die.�

Oh give it a rest, Julia. It wasn’t a band of boy scouts led by Lutheran church ladies that flew those planes into the towers.

Do all Muslims want Americans dead? No. Is it a critical mass of Muslim extremists who want Americans dead? Is it Muslim extremists who are perpetrating 90 percent of the world’s terror? Hell yes.

When the Pope goes around issuing a nuclear fatwah, then we’ll talk cultural sensitivity. Until then, I’m a bit more interested in keeping America safe, thank you.

You can be a good dhimmi, if you want to be. But count me out, thank you. Should we continue to shake down 93 year old grandmas in the name of “cultural sensitivity”?

Did Leo just say that because Gavin never talks about his dead friend here on this blog, therefore Gavin never thinks about his dead friend?

Why, yes, I think he just did.

I will not engage with sub human shit like Leo, who don’t recognize that all the killing and occupying and enslaving and oppressing CREATED the people who flew those planes, and his hatred, blood lust and belief that killing people and destroying cities is a good solution, unless of course it is our cities and our people, who are not SYMPTOMS of the problem, they are the problem. Nope, I won’t engage, because they are too stupid to recognize the very behaviors they advocate only serve to make the problem worse, and if you really want peace, you make peace, and if you really want war, you make war.

But if I was to engage I would ask him what actions we have taken that have made us safer, I would ask him if he’s ever personally policed up a blown up person, if he’s ever taken a life, if he’s ever done one goddam honorable thing. I would tell him he doesn’t have to join up, you can get on a plane and go to any number of war zones on the planet, gore-tourist, y’know? He could go see firsthand what these kinds of policies result in, the disease, the poverty, the exploitation, the HATRED. I would ask him if he ever got outside of his little “islamofascist” fantasy and considered the human beings at the other end of the policies, just like the human beings at this end on 9/11. But of course, he doesn’t really care about people, or peace, or solutions. He gets off on killing people who are not like him, breaking their stuff, consigning generations to a hellish life as refugees. He’s nothing but a chickenshit war junkie with only one excuse – 9/11…

mikey

Is it Muslim extremists who are perpetrating 90 percent of the world’s terror? Hell yes.

You can be a good dhimmi, if you want to be. But count me out, thank you. Should we continue to shake down 93 year old grandmas in the name of “cultural sensitivity�?

What the fuck are you talking about moron?

Actually, sunshine, Julia didn’t say that.

Julia said that she stepped up while you wet your pants.

I can see why you wouldn’t want to address that. You can’t.

Leo, let me explain something very slowly to you: If I were an Islamic Terrorist and I wanted to kill as many Yankee infidels as I wanted, would I dress in a Ghurtra and pray loudly in Arabic? Or would I try and look as harmless as possible, perhaps recruiting radicals who looked and dressed and sounded western? Also, since the terrorists wish to hide as a school of fish amongst a sea of peasants, it plays into their hands if idiots like you get their way and every Muslim is treated as if she or he is a terrorist. You seem to want to treat all Muslims like crap, yet expect them to do exactly what you want. Sorry, people, be they Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Atheist or whatever don’t behave in that fashion.

What mikey said.

You can be a good dhimmi, if you want to be. But count me out, thank you. Should we continue to shake down 93 year old grandmas in the name of “cultural sensitivity�?

Quite seriously, what are you trying to say with that?

Pusatari’s beneath contempt in all kinds of ways. But it makes me laugh that his justification for his garbage is “out of sight, out of mind.”

Yeah, just like Bin Laden and your boy Bush, eh? Fuck you. I’m still waiting for justice but that fucking chimp got distracted blowing up innocent people in Iraq instead.

What a fool you’ve made of yourself. Shame on you for coming to this house. Gavin was absolutely right to fret and absolutely right to say his piece anyway. Voices do need to be heard, because of pricks like you, who make it your business to speak against the dead.

Leo.

We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them

You do not get to decide who learns what from 9/11

We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them

You should sit down now.

What in the world kind of sense does this man have? Is he capable of understanding the emotional content of a piece of writing, and recognize that he might be a symptom of pain?

Gavin, I am sorry for the loss you suffered, more than you will ever know or I can say. I am sorry,also, that this idiotic moron saw fit to come and make a bad situation worse. There is no respect here. No respect at all, for the dead, for the living who carry the dead with them always, or for the way our honored dead have been dishonored by one not fit to sit in the office of the Presidency, and his one-handed keyboardists. Whether you believe in God or not, Gavin, God’s blessings to you, to your friend’s family, and please know that he will not be forgotten, because you have remembered him here today.

Oh give it a rest, Julia. It wasn’t a band of boy scouts led by Lutheran church ladies that flew those planes into the towers.

Yes, as we all know, it was a squad of elite Iraqi commandos.

I lost two friends in the towers that day, Leo, and every day Bush spends not hunting down Bin Laden is a day he spends pissing on their memories.

Fuck him and fuck you too.

Leo’s idea of empathy…

Gavin, first I think you need to take your medication before you babble incoherently.

Yes, like Ann Coulter knifing the wives and relatives of the 9/11 victims for questioning the Bush administration, Leo reveals the man he truly is.

He claims to be all sad and shit about what happened on 9/11, but his sympathy only extends to the victims who agree with Bush (ironically, Leo, there are very few Bush-supporters in New York City).

You can’t say you hate what happened on 9/11 and be for the Iraq war. Being for the Iraq war makes you one with the Taliban – who, like you, think it’s ok to slaughter innocent people. Anything to exact revenge.

You KNOW innocents are dying by the hundreds in Iraq every week. You fucking know it. At least admit that. If you can’t, then shut your lying piehole.

Leo’s tough-guy act didn’t work like he planned.

I know, next time he can start his screed by talking about skinning cats, drinking the blood of his neighbor’s newborn baby and pissing on the graves kind old men. Then we’ll be really scared. Then we’ll respect him and fear him and woman will flash their boobies at him because he’s a living He-Man.

What a fucker.

Leo sed: “Is it a critical mass of Muslim extremists who want Americans dead?”

Leo, the only thing their extremists have on ours is that our extremists rarely have to use their guns against an occupying army, and their extremists don’t have high speed internet and new SUVs.

Stirring the shitpot of Iraq only justifies your delusions, as more and more Muslims come to truly hate us. So you just keep supporting it. Go ahead, invade iran, destabilize syria and pakistan… we may just reach that “critical mass” yet. Killing them only makes their children angry and fatherless.

but the hell we would pay is what we deserve IF we keep this B.S. militarism up

“…on the graves of kind old men.”
“…women will flash their boobies.”

And the preview button was right there!

Leo’s actual surname=Pustule. A booger-encrusted pustule. Are there any other kind of Bush supporters?

As a New Yorker who lost friends in the attack, let me join the others here in inviting Leo and the rest of the pants-pissing conservatives to shut the fuck up.

You people keep invoking NYC and 9/11 as justification for your bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy, but all you’re doing is making another attack on our city even more likely. It must be easy to rattle the sabers stupidly from the suburbs of St. Paul, knowing that if retribution comes, it’ll never strike close to you. So very, very brave of you.

Please, please shut the fuck up.

See? You never really loved me, steve_e.

*tiny sob*

Leo is certainly a cretin – seriously now, 19 people commit a crime and he’s apparently ready to seek revenge on a billion innocents based simply on their following the same religion as the criminals? That’s stunningly unhinged. Or more precisely stunningly bigoted, since he doesn’t seem to have the same emotional reaction to the murders committed by Tim McVeigh.

But Timmy was a Christian, and white, and English speaking and so is Leo but of course Leo isn’t a terrorist and shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush simply based on these unrelated factors. That wouldn’t make sense now would it?

Leo is just a garden variety tiny brain, that’s all. Making patterns and connecting the dots in his head because that’s what humans do. But he really can’t make any sense of them so the only option is to lash out irrationally. He’s nothing but silly and harmless really.

Shorter Leo: WHITES MAD!!!! WHITES SMASH!!!

Oh, stuff Leo. He’s honestly not worth it.

If I still lived somewhere in the same tri-state area as Gavin, I’d offer to bring him over some of my homemade potato-leek soup tonight.

I could pack some in dry ice and Fedex it to you, if you like.

I just hate seeing people I’ve come to like and admire feeling crummy. Maybe we all could come up with some idea here for something thoughtful we could do? Charitable donations of some kind? Something?

I don’t want to be presumptuous or anything. Just feeling like I wish I had something to offer.

“Charitable donations of some kind? Something?”

Well, I’m about to send a check to the ACLU. I’ll just write “fuck Leo Pusateri” in the memo line.

I’m proofing an herb focacia. Gonna grille a steak, mash some yukon golds with cream and butter and fresh herbs, saute up some wild mushrooms with onions and peppers, and chop a green salad with these awesome columbian tomatos I scored today. Food is likely the answer…

mikey

Gavin, thank you, it needed to be said.

Someday maybe the wingnuts will figure out the difference between fighting terrorism, and attacking anyone who speaks the same language or prays in the same direction as the terrorists. Or rather, one particular group of terrorists – Abe’s point about McVeigh is well taken. The notion of “group guilt” for a crime always stops with one’s own demographic group.

Leo Pusateri said, December 29, 2006 at 2:01
Is it Muslim extremists who are perpetrating 90 percent of the world’s terror? Hell yes.

Factually incorrect.

Therefore all conclusions derived from factually incorrect data are incorrect themselves.

But when you live your life with blinders of hate, it’s easier to be ignorant of facts and reality.

I smell…I smell…Pusateri!

this leo person seems like a real cockface.

Is he too old to fight in Iraq? Is there any way to Shanghai him into th military?

That lizardbreath quote J posted sums up my experience all too well. I lived on the upper west side then, and was spared losing any of those I depend on. I knew a few a who died, but in the sense of having gone to school with them and maybe knowing their faces. The foul smoke of the fires only even reached my area for a single afternoon. I was spared so much I feel mild guilt just saying I lived here then. As for Leo, in the spirit of your intellectual equal Gary, let’s just remember the fact is NYC voted something like 4-5 to 1 against Bush in 04.
We’ve made clear where we stand.

And the people of DC and northern Virginia, who saw the other 9-11 attack, also voted overwhelmingly against the Boy-Blunder and his administration. Funny how those who are really in danger from terrorism reject this administration as bozos incapable of defending a cookie jar while the good folks of MiddleofNowehreshicktown, who are about 100,000 places down on the terrorist hit list are all atwitter over how “strong’ he is and how he is protecting their 1 stop light town.

Not entirely off-topic, and somewhat amusing:
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2006/12/02/

Sleep well, Gavin. Life is too short not to. At least for the deserving.

It takes a peculiar sickness to want deaths of the innocent to result in more deaths. If I didn’t hate them, I would pity them.

Never–until the bloodthirsty ideology that hatched that heinous act and which continues to murder innocents to this day is brought to its knees and is rendered unable to perpetrate any more mayhem.

Brought to its knees by the actions of a bloodthirstier heinous ideology that murders even _more_ innocents! You know, to teach them a lesson about who’s _truly_ capable of mayhem. Preferably described in language that would embarrass Conan the Barbarian. U-S-A! U-S-A!

And, no, I won’t “shut up�. That’s the problem with this country.. Out of sight out of mind.

Shut up, cockface.

They continually claim they believe America is under the GREATEST THREAT it has ever known and the react to that THREAT by calling people names and writing snuff porn of what they would like to do if only given a chance, excuse me, snuff porn of what they would like OTHERS to do…

Shorter Leo: Leans over on left buttock. Squeezes out loud, wet fart. Bends head to crotch. Breathes deeply. Smiles and is content.

Fuckin’ amen to that, is all I have to say.

Except that, you know, McVeigh’s terrorism in all likelyhood WAS intimately connected with his race, religion, and political ideology.

McVeigh had ties with the racist “Christian Identity” movement, as well as right-wing militia groups, the vast majority of whom are simply more radical versions of mainstream Republicans.

One might argue that the vast majority of right-wing white Christians are not terrorists, but then, the same is true of right-wing brown Muslims.

And hey, here’s a question, how about some fucking cultural sensitivity for the tens of thousands of fucking Muslims who lost their loved ones because of our Iraq adventure, which may I remind you, WAS COMPLETELY FUCKING UNNECESSARY? Where the fuck is the sympathy or them, asshole?

And you know what else? SOME MUSLIMS ARE AMERICAN. What, they don’t count as part of American civilisation, even if they were born here? Even if they lived in fucking New York city?

Fuck, the idea that only whitey is American is so incredibly fucking pervasive that even liberals like myself often implicitly buy into it.

Islam is not the other; a person can be muslim AND American. So if this is all about treating American civilisation as worthy of respect, how about WE START FUCKING TREATING AMERICANS WITH RESPECT?

I think I swore too much up there. But it’s true; We’ve killed more people in Iraq then the terrorists killed in the World Trade Center.

No, the events are not comparable, but Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Assuming, for the sake of this excercise, that our stated goals for the Iraq war were the actual goals for invading, we could’ve accomplished them without an invasion, and thus, without killing any of the many Americans and Iraqis we’ve killed.

It just seems… bad to me to say that a dead American is inherently more tragic then a dead Iraqi. That somehow, when guys who look like them fuck us up, ALL guys who look like them should happily bend over for mandatory cavity checks, but when guys who look like us fuck them up, they can only blame the specific individuals who fucked them up, and if they show the least amount of disrespect towards ALL the guys who look like us it proves their disgusting lack of morals and manners.

I guess I’m being redundant, but this is an issue which is bothering me quite a bit lately, I wanted to state it a little more calmly.

In condemning Islamic extremists for 9/11 and the rest, poor little Leo is as right and as wrong as someone who observes that you can scoop up a gallon size bucket of sand from the Sahara Desert. It’s perfectly true, but there’s a lot more to be said.

Especially, since this is our principal religious heritage here in the US, about Christianity. Remember the 15th, 16th century? Christianity 1.0 went to bloody war against Christianity 3.0, with 3.0 splintering into 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, Lutherans, Calvinists, and so forth, all merrily slaughtering each other.

(BTW, Christianity 2.0 was when Orthodoxy in Constantinople split off from Rome in the 12th century, but they had no armies close enough to each other to make fighting worth while.)

Christianity has no right to lord itself over any other faith on the basis of nonviolence. Especially Islam. I’m no expert, but I don’t believe that Muhammed ever advocated a policy of nonviolence. Jesus did, and forbade violence even to protect his own life. And with that for a model, look what followed.

I paraphrase Sam Harris: When’s the last time you heard of hordes of atheists rioting, killing nuns, burning embassies, or cutting peoples’ heads off because somebody said something or drew a cartoon they didn’t like?

Or for that matter, blowing up abortion clinics or shooting doctors through the head as they’re talking in the kitchen with their teenage sons. Fanatical Muslims are mostly responsible for the atrocities in the last paragraph of my previous post, fanatical Christians for these. I should be more ecumenical.

Shorter Leo Pustule: America, FUCK YEAH!

I think his mommy should take his keyboard away now…

(Gavin – hugs and best wishes to you. So sorry about your loss and fuckwits like this that keep scratching open that wound.)

That’s the problem with this country..

After what must be thousands of examples, I have never, NEVER heard anything intelligent follow this statement, and the streak is still intact. Perhaps I have finally found an absolute I can accept – anyone who seriously says this is too stupid for belief, too stupid to be allowed out without a handler, and so fucking stupid I’m surprised they don’t forget to breathe.

I wish these scum could just experience a moment of pure, undiluted self-awareness, one direct, unobstructed stare into a mirror. I can’t imagine a worse punishment.

Shorter Leo:

If I knew someone who died on 9/11, I’d totally be milking their memory for every dead Muslim I could get.

Gavin–from someone who was 2,000 miles away on 9/11/01–thank you. There were a lot worse things to bear that day than scary images on the teevee. Thanks for reminding us of that.

And I don’t think you’re hijacking your friend’s family’s grief–you aren’t telling us that we need to invade Turkmenistan for your friend, or stop the war for your friend, or do anything for your friend other than to remember that he, and everyone else who died that day, was an actual human being with friends and family and that he meant more than just an abstract reason to go kill brown people.

He was and he does, and you honor his memory by reminding the rest of us.

Okay, I gotta go to work, so I don’t have time to do the research I really want to do to support my post.

But as to Leo’s sanctimonious crap about the victims being “my fellow American citizens” — as I recall the months following 9/11, reading every single day the NYTimes profiles of the victims, what struck me most vividly was the incredible diversity of the people who worked and died in the towers, and how many of them were…..brown people who were not American citizens.

Well, and white people who were not American citizens. And brown people who WERE American citizens. And people who were not like Leo.

So as Leo clutches these “”victims” to his bosom as if they all went to high school with him, he’s simply full of shit. He would have despised half of them. He would have deported some of them, willlingly. He would have killed and imprisoned many of them, simply for being brown non-Christian non-citizens.

So he needs to shut the fuck up.

Fuck it. Gotta go to work.

SteveT, the last time I heard about atheists doing stuff like that might have been back during Stalin’s purges or during the cultural revolution in China. I’ve always thought that ideologies or religions that demand unquestioning obedience tend to lend themselves to commiting atrocities.

But it all comes down to this: Leo Pusatari woke up this morning and he was still Leo Pusatari of Blogs for Bush. The same fate awaits him tomorrow. There’s not much more that can be said or done to lower his position amongst God’s — or anyone’s — creatures.

Happy New Year.

Leo definitely sounds like an impotent pompous ass.

Here’s all you really need to know about Blogs for Bush:

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That’s right. No one, repeat no one, wants to advertise on that site. Leo Pustule is apparently the last person in America who wants to associate himself with the winning brand that is The Decider!

Leo:

“Will I forget? Never–until the bloodthirsty ideology that hatched that heinous act and which continues to murder innocents to this day is brought to its knees and is rendered unable to perpetrate any more mayhem.”

Leo, look in the mirror: you possess that “bloodthirsty ideology”. It drips from every word. You advocate policies which result in the murder of innocents, and perpetrate more mayhem. The only difference between your ideology and that of the Islamofascists is the intended target.

There is no doubt in my mind that, had you been born and raised in their society, you would be one of the people you revile now.

Gavin’s right. Shut up. Take your jingoistic “America – fuck yeahs!” elsewhere. Go back to your comic books, and let the grown-ups deal with the real world.

Leo’s convinced that the brown people will love us if we can only manage to kill enough of them.

Leo Pusateri
A Puerile Sot
Asleep, I tour.

I’ve always thought that ideologies or religions that demand unquestioning obedience tend to lend themselves to commiting atrocities.

Indeed, Simon from Quebec, which means that’s it’s questionable whether you can really call such people atheists. A Stalinist, a Maoist, or, pace Godwin, a Nazi had totally surrendered his intellectual judgment to an all-encompassing ideology, despite there being insufficient evidence to justify it. He may not have believed in God specifically, but he believed, and that belief justified in his mind committing any atrocity demanded of him, and then going out and thinking up a few more on his own.

Sounds like exactly what we see today, and in places a lot closer than Baghdad.

Gavin, thanks for the post.

The more we “shut up� the more we forget about the Islamofascists that perpetrated the deed

–Leo Pusbag, or whatever his name is

I truly am not that concerned about him.

–George W. Bush, referring to Osama bin-Laden

Leo, looks to me like you should address your concerns about “forgetting” to the Dear Leader.

But you won’t, of course.

You stupid fucking twat.

Wow. Gavin does with his words what others do with their fists. I also [heart} Gavin. XOXO

The more we “shut up� the more we forget about the Islamofascists that perpetrated the deed, and who would perpetrate many more 9/11s if they stand unopposed.

So has Bush caught Osama yet?

Oh, right – he pulled troops out of Afghanistan to send them into Iraq…

Well, I’m about to send a check to the ACLU. I’ll just write “fuck Leo Pusateri� in the memo line.

Now that’s constructive. Well done, sniper! I shall follow your lead. Won’t be a big check because I’m poor, but I haven’t sent them anything in a while.

Fuck you, Leo. I’m not just ashamed to be a fellow citizen of yours, I’m ashamed to share the fucking planet with you, you little coward.

I still think “Blogs for Bush” sounds like a porn site…..

Timothy McVeigh, Leo. Timothy McVeigh.

And yeah, I too was on the other side of the country. I didn’t see the bodies falling, didn’t breathe the poisoned air for weeks, didn’t watch while brave people moved toward the danger to help as many other people as they could. I wasn’t one of the dispatchers who stayed on the line with a frightened woman, trapped on the upper floors, until the line went silent forever. I’m not one of the team who’s been working every day for years trying to assemble body parts, bits of bone, fragments of identifying human debris.

I wasn’t personally acquainted with Lauren Grandcolas, who lived with her husband one town over from me, and who died on Flight 93. She was returning from her grandmother’s funeral. She was two months along in her first, very longed-for pregnancy. She managed to leave a telephone message for her husband.

In his grief, her husband Jack has tried to do something to make this world a little better. He’s established a foundation to support a new birthing unit at a local hospital. He worked with others to get Lauren’s nearly completed book to publication.

To my knowledge, he’s never once retreated into Leo Pusateris’ realm of bloody, jingoistic, antagonistic, and ultimately crippling fear. Leo, you are on the wrong side of history, and you know it. You know it.

I wasn’t touched by it.

Other than the fact that an actress I once worked with lost her husband.

Other than the fact that a business acquaintance’s son was late getting to the Windows on the World meeting, and so avoided death, but due to the difficulty of communication, my acquaintance couldn’t concentrate on business that day.

Other than the fact that a co-worker had a houseguest whose sister worked in a nearby building, and was unreachable by phone until Wednesday.

The first person was African American. The second was a first-generation Cambodian-American. The third was Jewish and liberal.

All of whom Pusty probably doesn’t consider American.

I am caught in a bit of a quandary, here. I think Leo should not be told to keep his trap shut, as it reenforces his sense of persecution, and feeds into his “they’re trying to suppress my opinion” fantasy.

But, as someone who has been up close to death, and done some really awful shit for his country, in places lots of people couldn’t find with a map, I think Leo doesn’t have the foggiest fucking clue what he’s advocating. Largely, I think, because he can’t grasp the distinction between finding and killing the terrorists, and engaging in a war on a tactic (all the while antagonizing the people that could HELP us prosecute it). It’s fundamental, really, because he’s never seriously examined the central issue of our approach. How, Leo, do we end radicalism by killing the innocents of a country that had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11?

How do we prevent the resurgence of radicalism in Afghanistan, who we abandoned to the warlords and Taliban in order to invade Iraq? (And who spent the succeeding 3 years sliding backward into the near feudalism that gave birth to the Taliban in the first place.)

It is my opinion that, until you can answer either of those questions with anything more substantive than “at least we’re better than the Taliban” then you should be quiet. Not because I don’t want to hear what you have to say, but because you have nothing of value to say.

You could, of course, continue to make a fool of yourself by spouting off on a subject of which your are profoundly ignorant, and providing fodder for us to ridicule you. That suits me fine, too.

I think I swore too much up there. But it’s true; We’ve killed more people in Iraq then the terrorists killed in the World Trade Center.

No, the events are not comparable

Uh, I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Terrorist attacks on civilian targets are bad, but surely unjustified, bloody wars of aggression are equally as bad, if not worse.

We’ve killed more people in Afghanistan than the terrorists killed in the World Trade Center. The toll in Iraq utterly dwarfs that number. That doesn’t make any single one of the deaths at the WTC less tragic, but neither does the gravity of the 9/11 attack diminish by any amount the tragedy of each innocent Iraqi’s death or maiming.

I’m not saying you’re saying anything different. Just wanted to be clear.

It is my opinion that, until you can answer either of those questions with anything more substantive than “at least we’re better than the Taliban� then you should be quiet. Not because I don’t want to hear what you have to say, but because you have nothing of value to say.

You could, of course, continue to make a fool of yourself by spouting off on a subject of which your are profoundly ignorant, and providing fodder for us to ridicule you. That suits me fine, too.

Four truly excellent sentences – worth repeating.

Goddamn, Leo–you DARE to come here and comment? At long last, have you no shame?

Like the man said: Shut. The. Fuck. UP.

I just read this post for the first time and all I can say is thank you. Thank you so much for this post. This post read like poetry. I am so sick of people who were thousands of miles away on 9/11 telling those of us who were in New York or DC how we should feel. Unless you were there to see the wreckage and smell the burning flesh you have no right to use our names to call for more war, more wreckage, more burning flesh.

I was scared that day, and angry, and I am still angry (although maybe not at the same people now as then). But I have never been able to identity with the great national pants wetting that our country has indulged in since, nor do I understand why the worst of the pants wetters are the people who were not even there.

Hi everyone this is Leo Pusateri the Third, Leo Pusateri’s Son. I do not appreciate the fact that you are bashing people like my dad whose son is in Iraq and is fighting for the Iraqi’s Freedom getting bashed. He is a nice fair man. It is saddening what happened at 9/11, Belive me, My mom was in D.C. I know what is going on but we cannot forget 9/11 and we must punish those responsible and those who helped it happen.

-Leo Pusateri the Third

Iraq had nothing to do with it and the sooner you figure that out, the sooner you’ll, you know, wake the fuck up like everyone else has.