ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES is one of the blogs on my roll that I always make sure to read everyday, even when I can't find the time to read all of them. And this post is the perfect example of why. Echidne's writing is impassioned, witty, intelligent, and inspired, all at the same time, and that's why I love it. And in fact, I enjoyed this particular post so much that I'm going to quote it here in its entirety.

Here we go: A place to scream, to kick holes in the wall, to tear out any hair you might have left and to spit at pictures of the powers-at-be. In other words: Echidne's Rant Room.

These are some of my hatefullest things:

That this country is run by a man who was selected, then possibly elected; who doesn't read, who doesn't know history, who cannot speak English or any other language, come to that; who takes pride in his intellectual laziness and his lack of diplomacy, who pads his crotch as much as he pads his lies; who thinks pleadings of mercy from someone to be executed are funny, who seems to completely lack the empathy button in that square box on his back, who thinks the square box might be a hot line to god, who doesn't think much at all; who reads the Pet Goat with glazed-over eyes when the country is attacked and who then bravely goes to the site of the attack several days later, who is not even informed when the country might have been attacked again because he was biking in an area where biking is forbidden and who wants the Commander of the Armed Troups to be informed about any fucking thing?

That this man made up a reason to go to war, that thousands of people then died, that this man might even now be plotting to invade yet more countries, and all the time bin Laden is free as a bird.

That a minority, a small group of fundamentalist wingnuts, have grabbed the power in this country and are telling me to live according to their inane interpretation of morals and ethics, that they are allowed to get away with this by others who are supposed to be saner, that we all are supposed to respect the fact that these wingnuts are religious, respect it, even when they plot to lock me up in a kitchen all silent and submissive, respect it, even when they urge for the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution, just keep on respecting, yessir, to accept that this earth was created a few thousand years ago, to accept that Adam and Eve were chased out of paradise by dinosaurs, that they then had children who busily had enough incest to create all of us though of course women were created to be permanently guilty for the snake thing and gays should not exist and so on. But fucking respect!

And the Islamic fanatics, those stalwart thinkers of the ninth century, who want what their Christian fundamentalist brethren do, only in much more extreme and painful forms, including the killing of women who are no longer viewed as stainless flags of family honor. And the fact that I and so many others are stranded between these two armies: the Bush one and the one of the bin Laden types, and nobody has asked us if we like to be in the middle, because neither of these armies fucking cares.

That the corporate powers to be are funding the Bush administration in exchange for getting the best picks of all the lucrative projects that can be made up, picking the bones clean in places of suffering, that the corporate powers are in bed with the extreme clerics, that the corporate powers are using this government to guarantee that the American workers will be poorer, will work longer hours and will have less protection against illness and old age. That to even say this causes accusations of fucking communism.

That this is the end of an era, the era of enlightenment, that we are sliding into the new dark ages where reality is whatever the government tells us, where everything is relative (and this from the party who tells us that our values are relative!), where facts are no weightier than opinions and where wingnut opinions are facts even if they fucking aren't.

That this is an era where the press is meek as lambs and much of the clergy ravenous as hyenas, an era where the uneducated and ignorant decide what is education and knowledge, an era where the only choice we seem to have is between bread and circus on the one hand and bread and church on the other. And not much fucking bread either way.

Any writer who would choose to use language like "These are some of my hatefullest things" instead of "These are some of the things I hate most" is a must-read, in my book.