Here's a website which deserves more attention: 2

Here's a website which deserves more attention.

No More Mister Nice Blog is a great read on American politics. Written by liberal New Yorker Steve M. (and he seems to have hidden his surname well) it's a wry take with occasional verges into a bite on liberal shibboleths and general faffing about, specifically Democrat waffling.

His sometimes hilarious writing reminds me of another discovery of mine from the last election campaign, the comical stylings of Charles P. Pierce at Esquire magazine.

On a simple blogger template, his 20 (?) posts per page is mainly text, so an easy load and a ripping long read, if you're at all interested in what the cousins across the water are up to.

Just to pick a couple of recent posts at random, he analysed a cover story from the National Rifle Association (NRA)'s magazine titled 'How and When Obama Will Come for Your Guns'. He does this quite often, fisks something from 'wingnuttia', poking fun but usually with a serious edge.

The story reads like something from the 'Left Behind' best-selling series of 'rapture' novels, or as he calls it apocalypse porn.

It imagines a future where Obama wins the Presidency again, a pretext arrives and through executive orders he manages to 'come furyer guns'. Insane then and even more insane looked at now, when the slaughter of twenty small kids looks like producing no change on gun policy.

This is as crazy as birtherism or 9/11 trutherism. It should be the sort of thing that gets published and read only on the fringes of society. And yet the organization that publishes this is the organization that determines America's gun agenda.

Imagine if no election law could be passed in this country without the imprimatur of a powerful lobbying organization led by Orly Taitz [birther leader]. Imagine if the Centers for Disease Control were powerless to respond to any epidemic in a way that ran afoul of [anti-vaccine former Playboy model] Jenny McCarthy.

That's where we are on guns.

In another post ('Testing whether barrel has a bottom') he discusses the rather remarkable news that Tony Perkins is being floated as a Republican candidate for the Senate from Louisiana.

Perkins runs a Christianist outfit called the Family Research Council, designated a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. He has a history of associating with white supremacists and defended the former Republican Missouri Senate candidate Todd "legitimate rape" Akins.

Perkins regularly appears on TV opposing gay rights, something which various groups have protested given that his more outrageous statements off camera are never brought up so he's allowed to appear vaguely normal.

Steve wants Perkins to get the nomination:

I hope the 2014 Senate field for the GOP is literally 100% nutjobs. I hope they're all as far right as Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. I hope it's Steve King and Paul Broun and Joe Miller and this guy. I hope some teabagger beats Mitch McConnell in the primary by dubbing him a liberal. I hope this happens coast to coast.

I know that even this probably won't work, but if anything could get the Beltway establishment, and thus the general public, to grasp that maybe, possibly, the Republican Party as currently configured is a menace to American society, it would be the systematic replacement of all of its arguably within-the-pale politicians with the most batshit-crazy extremists.

And yeah, I know that some of these clowns could win in their states, including Perkins. But the only way it might become clear to the establishment and public that the GOP is crazy is if there's no one left in the party's front ranks to provide a veneer of respectability, because they've all been replaced by lunatics.

More here.