Sometimes you just gotta have a good hard cleansing cry

Have you ever had a day where everything just comes to a head and you lose it over something that normally would only irritate you or cause you to shake your head in disgust? Well, that was me last night. I was sitting at my computer when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I just lost it. I was just so pissed, so disgusted, and so overwhelmed with a sense of defeat and hopelessness that I just could not stop myself from having a good cry (with a little bit of temper tantrum thrown in for good measure).

Now it wasn’t any one thing in particular that caused it. It was more of a gradual build up of things. It has gotten to the point where there’s just not a day that goes by in which I don’t read at least one mind-bogglingly ludicrous or infuriating or depressing thing that painfully reminds me of what a pathetic state our country is in.

Well last night I was getting my final dose of blog-reading in before shutting off the computer and getting ready for bed when I popped on over to John’s place for a bedtime story and read this:

US military kicks out 3 more Arabic linguists for being gay

Sure, we won't be able to stop the next September 11 from killing perhaps tens of thousands of people because we don't have enough linguists to translate the terrorist chatter, but at least they stopped the gay linguists. And they wonder why we're losing in Iraq? Because we have complete bozos running our military. This is criminal.

Now normally this would not have been enough to send me over the edge. I’ve certainly known for quite some time that our military has become a joke when it comes to its wildly over-the-top homophobic Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. And I am not talking about our brave men and women (many of them gay) over in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am talking about the 5-star wussies over in the Pentagon who enforce this ludicrous policy. By acting like a bunch of weak-kneed frightened pansies who look under their beds for those scaouwy scaouwy homos every night before they go to bed, they have reduced our supposedly “Greatest Military in the World” into a laughing stock. They may never rid this world of terrorists, but rest assured people, they’ll have the “straightest” military ever.

Sheesh.

But as I said, that bit of news on any other day would just make me shake my head in disgust, embarrassment, and anger, it wouldn’t normally make me have a minor breakdown.

No, it was definitely a slow culmination of highly disturbing articles like this one from WorldNetDaily, a major whacked out religious site no less:

Bush grants presidency extraordinary powers, directive for emergencies apparently gives authority without congressional oversight:

President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight.

...The directive establishes under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator whose job is to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

"Catastrophic emergency" is loosely defined as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."

And this article in which extremely sloppy reporting gives legitimacy to a known hate mongering homophobe and damages a whole class of people in the process:

SF Chronicle quotes known hate group as legitimate expert claiming gays molest kids

Ilene Lelchuk, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, quoted the leader of a known hate group (without identifying him as such) as a scientific expert on gay issues (he claimed that gays molest kids) in a story just published Monday. The "expert" in question is none of than Paul Cameron. You may recall that I've been writing a lot about Cameron in the past few weeks (as has Pam Spaulding), as the lead religious right groups keep pushing his hate "science."

What's the problem with Cameron? He's a man who has suggested that the extermination of gays might be necessary. Per the Southern Poverty Law Center:

He told the 1985 Conservative Political Action Committee conference that "extermination of homosexuals" might be needed in the next three to four years. He has advocated tattooing AIDS patients in the face, and banishment to a former leper colony for any patient who resisted. He has called for gay bars to be closed and gays to be registered with the government.

Or this:

Greg Palast has something to say about Monica Goodling.

From a press release on Daily Kos.

BBC Television’s Newsnight has 500 "missing" Rove office emails including a series of self-incriminating notes which provide "the keys to the kingdom" behind the prosecutor firings.

In the opening to today’s testimony before Congress, Monica Goodling, former Department of Justice White House Liaison, testified that Deputy Attorney General Kyle Sampson lied. At issue was, says Goodling, Sampson’s denial "that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote ‘caging’ during the work on the President’s 2004 campaign."

(snip)

The BBC reporter explained that ‘vote caging’ is a crime; Tim Griffin directed it; Karl Rove, Goodling and Sampson knew it, yet Rove demanded the appointment of Griffin as the US Attorney for Arkansas.

‘Caging’ was a 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign scheme to challenge, on false evidence, the right to vote of tens of thousand of Black voters.

Which in turn led me to this and made me realize how criminally negligent and pathetically inept our major news organizations in this country are:

GregPalast's diary

[…]

In several emails obtained by subpoena by Congressional investigators, Goodling and Griffin complain about ‘that British reporter Palast’ (an American working with BBC London). In a February 5, 2006 email, Griffin gloats to Goodling that "no [US] national media" has picked up Palast’s discovery of the ‘caging’ operation.

[…]

Which led me to this:

Depressing Video Clip and the realization that maybe we didn’t need to be going through this agony these past 6 ½ years with this worst President ever if we had just had a clean election system that we could trust.

And there’s oh so much more, but I think you get the picture and this post is already depressingly long. I know I am not the only one who has scary mood swings that vacillate between a catatonic depression and seething rage so let me close with this piece of advice, which certainly has helped me:

Have a good old fashion temper tantrum and cry once in a while, it doesn’t solve the problems that sent you over the edge in the first place, but you sure feel better afterwards.