Remember, today is the day everyone needs to start e-mailing Michael "Savage" Weiner with fanciful tales of how his new book, The Enemy Within, is being suppressed and hidden from the public by the vast left-wing bookselling conspiracy. Original post on this topic is here, Weiner Nation's specific instructions on becoming a "Bookwatcher" are here.
Make up a bookstore, e-mail Weiner, and tell him that said bookstore has either stashed his book at the back of the store or placed discount stickers over his face on the cover. Some of you might want to say that you haven't had a chance to take a digital picture yet, but you will do that at the next opportunity and mail it to him.
Another tip: Some of you will also want to write your e-mail in all caps and misspell a bunch of words, that way it'll look more like it came from an actual "Savage Nation" fan. Looking for a start? Here's mine:
From : Frank Detz Sent : Tuesday, January 20, 2004 2:43 PM
To : bookwatcher@paulreveresociety.com
Subject : BOOKSTORE HIDING ''ENEMY WITHIN''
DEAR MR SAVAGE:
I LIVE IN BIRMINGHAM ALA AND ON MY WAY HOME FROM WORK YESTERDAY (MONDAY 19TH) I STOPPED AT THE BOOKSAMILLION ON CLARMONT ROAD, A VERY LIBEREL NEIGBORHOOD. I WENT INSIDE TO PURCHASE A COPY OF YOUR BOOK, ''ENEMY WITHIN''. BUT IT WAS NOT OUT FRONT WITH THE REST OF THE BEST SELLER. SO IA SKED ONE OF THE CLERKS ( GIRL HAD VERY SHORT HAIR, NOSE RING, MOST LIKELY LESBEAN ) WHERE THEY WERE KEEPING IT, SHE TOOK ME TO THE '' POLITICS '' SECTION, WHICH WAS ALL THE WAY AT THE BACK OF THE STORE!!! I TOLD HER IT WAS A RECENT BOOK AND ON THE NYTIMES '' BESTSELLER LIST '' AND WHY WASNT IT AT THE FRONT WITH THE OTHER BESTSELLERS? SHE SAID IT WAS NOT STORE POLACY TO PUT POLITICAL BOOK ON THE SHELFS AT THE FRONT! BUT I WENT BACK AND THERE WAS AL FRANKAN'S BOOK '' LIES AND THE LIEING LIERS '' ON THE SHELFS!!!!
I DO NOT HAVE A DIGTAL CAMERA BUT I WILL BORROW ONE, AND WILL TAKE A PHOTO THE NEXT CHANCE I GET TO TAKE ONE. AND WILL SEND IT TO YOU.
KEEP FIGTING AGAINST THE LIBERELS! I LISTEN TO YOUR RADIO SHOW ON WAPI HERE IN BIRMINGHAM, YOUR DOING A GREAT JOB!!!!
THANK YOU, SINCERELY
FRANK DETZ
See? It's easy and fun. As with Project Hate-Mail, we'll keep you updated as soon as there's something to update. Now start e-mailin'!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:20 PM
Just because it's the day after MLK Day...
...doesn't mean we can all go ahead and forget about the man and what he stood for. If you didn't go back and read any of the man's speeches yesterday, why not read one today? I recommend this one, his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
And after a week that included another suicide bombing in Iraq, more rocket attacks in Palestine, and plenty of thuggish behavior right here at home, how 'bout we pay real close attention to this line:
Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:43 AM
I came for the passive, I'm staying for the aggressive
One more brilliant response to the Hate-Mail Project and it looks like we're done:
From : Salvatore J. Mule' Sent : Monday, January 19, 2004 10:01 AM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
Dear Doug,
You are lame. To think that Al Sharpton Is still considered a candidate in
you Mickey Mouse party is reason enough to laugh at you. And by the way Ms.
Cho is still Really Ugly.
Regards,
Umm...I'm taking crap from a party that not so long ago had Pat Buchanan as a presidential candidate? Bzzzzt, try again! (But oooohh, he capitalized "Really Ugly"!)
Anyway, enough of that crap. Evidently the Hate-Mail Project has been discovered by some folks at a Democratic Underground message board, and they gave us props for doing it. Which we greatly appreciate — make sure to tell all your friends about the site! Ten-thousandth visitor wins...well, nothin'. But keep reading us anyway!
Some of the visitors to GWBWYPGN are taking advantage of the e-mail addresses we posted to send their own e-mails to the racist/misogynistic/homophobic/[insert prejudice here] Freepers who blasted away at Margaret Cho. Which you're all welcome to do. But we at GWBWYPGN would caution you to scrupulously avoid name-calling in any of the e-mails you send. It's all about not sinking to their level; fight back, but fight smart. Here's a challenge: Send these people a mass e-mail in which you insult them by being nice. How do I do that, you ask? It's not as hard as it sounds. Like, send them an e-mail saying you're from the American Nazi Party, you thought they showed a lot of courage in standing up to that traitor Cho, and ask them if they'd like to deliver the keynote address at your upcoming spring jamboree at Hayden Lake. Or say you're a first-amendment lawyer, you've read their complaints that their free-speech rights were violated when they received all the retaliatory e-mails from the Cho fans, and you want to represent them in court. (See how they wrap their brains around that one!)
Better yet, dare them to get angry at you: Tell them it looks like they have a lot of hate and anger in their hearts and you'll be praying for them!
Actually, that might not be a bad idea.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:18 AM
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Fear and loathing in Des Moines
Attention Republicans: If you don't want the fringe lefties comparing you guys with Nazis, maybe you shouldn't be pulling stuff like this:
A Democratic rally at Drake's Olmstead Center, urged young Iowans to get out and vote. It was targeted toward high school and college students. A group known for not voting. The rally featured comedian Janene Garafalo and classic rock star Joan Jett, but it got a surprise visit from some unwanted guests.
A group of college republicans at their Midwest caucus leadership conference heard about the rally and stormed in.
"There are seven of us who worked really hard at putting this conference together, said Jason Cole of the college republicans. "so, we met, discussed and majority ruled. We went down there."
What they didn't discuss is what to do if things get out of hand. One of the Bush supporters shoved Jett and she pushed back in anger. Ole said that was the decision of one person, and not at all representative of what the conference was trying to do.
Oh, so "majority rule" wasn't in effect at that point, eh? Convenient, that. But Joan Jett, evidently, can take care of herself. The real point here is that certain groups of Bush supporters see absolutely no need to follow any concept of propriety in getting their "point," to the extent that they have one, across. We saw it verbally with the Margaret Cho flamers below, and now we see it physically with the Iowa college Republicans. Probably won't be the last time we see it, either.
But here's the thing: These people only look tough until they're challenged. The anti-Cho people sounded real angry and tough until they started getting e-mails, and now they're whining about "free speech" and "this is my business you're e-mailing here." The college brownshirts Republicans in Iowa thought they were going to just cruise into the Democratic rally, ruin it and take off, but it didn't quite end that way. Like the anti-Chos, the Repubs started out thinking they'd look tough, but ended up just looking stupid.
Yeah, it's a simple lesson, but one that bears repeating: Don't back down. Gore blinked first in 2000 and now we have Bush in the White House. The Democratic Party was afraid to criticize Bush after 9/11 and got whacked in the '02 off-year elections.
I'm not saying get into physical confrontations -- this should not become Sharks vs. Jets here -- but don't back down. Your asshole brother-in-law is going on and on at the family reunion about how Bush is going to win re-election in a walk? Challenge him, and don't worry about making waves with the family -- he started it. Someone at the mall or at a restaurant gives you static about your Clark or Dean or Kerry button? Tell him precisely how Bush is screwing up the country and why you won't be voting for him. As we've already demonstrated, your average Bush supporter may not have the foggiest idea why he/she's supporting Bush in the first place, he/she's just following the party line. (You'll also note that the Cho-bashers who were the targets of Project Hate-Mail have been too chicken to leave anything in the comments sections of any of the posts on this site, in spite of the fact that they were given the Web address of this blog and some of them actually paid a visit. They're real good at throwing around epithets like "gook" and "fat bitch," but when given actual points to debate or refute, they shrivel up like George Costanza in a cold swimming pool.)
Some of the libs I know are dreading this coming election season because they're afraid of what might happen. All due respect, f$#! that. The Bushies want to act like high-school bullies, well, we all know what happens to the high-school bullies: They're the ones who never leave their hometowns and end up lifting boxes in frozen-food warehouses. It's time to send 'em back there, and that's not gonna happen if we lay down and do our best welcome-mat impressions. As tough as the Bushies try to act, they have a sense of entitlement that simply beggars belief, and anything that gets in the way of how they think the world ought to be really throws 'em off their game. So come on, it ain't that hard. Do it.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 6:52 PM
Bush Supporters Speak Out (Vol. 2)
From : DA H4CK Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 8:19 PM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : THANKS FOR YOUR REPLY
THE HATE SPEECH SPEWED OUT OF HER MOUTH JACKASS AND WE
ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY LONGER...YOU WANNA SPEW?
GO AHEAD AND FACE THE MUSIC...
BTW SHE HAS A SERIOUS PROBLEM THAT POSSIBLY CAN BE
FIXED WITH DRUGS AND/OR COUNCILING OR HAS SHE ALREADY
TRIED THAT AND FAILED? SOMEONE WITH A CHIP ON HER
SHOULDER THAT BIG HAS A SEVERE MENTAL PROBLEM THAT
STEMS FROM HER CHILDHOOD...WAS SHE YELLED AT A LOT OR
IS IT BECAUSE SHE IS AS UGLY AS A FENCE POST?
From : Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 8:26 PM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
DOUG WHY DON'T YOU TAKE A COLD GLASS OF FUCK YOU AND GO TO BED
OK, people, when the little light next to the capital A on your keyboard is lit, the caps lock is on. Repeat, caps lock is on.
From : Sent : Saturday, January 17, 2004 12:45 AM
To : georgemustgo(at)hotmail.com
Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
Just go out and start talking to people, I am pretty sure they would wind up hating you. Hmm. I do like the fact that I sent hate-mail while Ms. Pug Ugly Cho was witty, right. It is so mature to refer to someone as Hitler, please get a sense of perspective. Someday when you move out of your parents basement and have to make do you will learn that conservatives are right, until then quit wasting your mom and dad's electricity.
From : Sent : Saturday, January 17, 2004 10:11 AM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" CC : fuckwits@ajax.org
Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
After carefully considering your offer, I must humbly decline as I have been outdone by those skillful emailers on the left that have responded to my email with exponentially more hate and stupidity. I would recommend one of your own ilk to craft the hate-filled speech... they are so much better at it than me.
ESAD
"Exponentially more hate and stupidity"? Fo' real? More even than "I am hoping you develop breast cancer or contract a flesh-eating disease and pass it on to your whole f'n family... you bitch"? Wow, musta been impressive.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:09 AM
Friday, January 16, 2004
Bush Supporters Speak Out (Vol. 1)
Started getting responses to my call for hate-mail from the Margaret Cho-bashers within minutes of the initial posting.
From : Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 4:14 PM
To : georgemustgo(at)hotmail.com
Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
Dear Doug,
Please do not send me hate mail. I am a comedian like Margaret Cho. We will be
bum rushing some day.
If you need hate mail from low intelligent persons, right now you can find some
on Margaret Cho's homepage. There you will find hate, vulgarities, name-calling,
hate-mongering, and the like. In fact, you should be able to fill your pages
with her racist, hateful commentary.
But, just remember, hers, like mine, is comedy. Don't you get it?
Mmmm...no.
From : Ken Hartley Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 4:16 PM
To : "'George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!'" Subject : STOP YOUR SPAMMING IMMEDIATELY
You will stop this SPAM immediately.
Any further communication to this email address by said user will be
considered harassment, and be followed up by my attorney.
I don't know why you people keep writing me. This is a business.
My stars, Mr. "Take your fat chink ass back to wherever the fuck you came from" is suddenly all protective of his "business." We continue:
From : Jim Marks Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 4:17 PM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : RE: Please send me hate mail too!
APPARENTLY, I AM GETTING A LOT OF HATE MAIL FROM MY POSTING IN MARGARET
CHO'S WEBSITE. APPARENTLY, FREEDOM OF SPEECH HAS BEEN SUSPENDED BY
MARGARET CHO AND HER CO-HORTS INCLUDING MOVEON.ORG WHO FEEL IT IS THEIR G-D
GIVEN RIGHT TO CRITICIZE PRESIDENT BUSH WITH SUCH VILENESS AND
INSENSITIVITY.
THE SAME OF COURTESY TO RECIPROCATE THE VILENESS SHE AND MOVEON.ORG EXPRESS
IS NOT GIVEN TO ANY OTHER U.S. CITIZEN BECAUSE FOR US FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS
NON-EXISTENCE.
FOR MY ACTIONS OF EXPRESSING THIS I HAVE RECEIVE A LOT OF HATE MAIL, WHICH
IS TRASHED, BUT IT IS INTERESTING TO NOTE THE DUPLICITY AND IGNORANCE OF
PEOPLE WHO ARE LIKE CHO WHICH ARE CHARACTERIZED AS FOLLOWS:
* BELIEVE IN ANY CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT IS PRESENTED TO THEM
* LACKS ANY FACTS OR INFORMATION OF WORLD AFFAIRS, ECONOMICS, INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS AND HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
* LACK OF INTELLIGENCE TO CONDUCT BASIC RESEARCH TO FIND OUT THE FACTS DUE
TO HYSTERICAL MENTAL PROCESSES
* SUSPECTIBLE TO BELIEVING WHAT THEY ARE TOLD WITHOUT QUESTIONING
* HIGHLY EMOTIONAL AND LACKING ANY DEGREE OF COMMUNICATION SKILLS
ALL I CAN SAY IS THIS IS A SAD DAY FOR AMERICA WHEN PEOPLE OF IGNORANCE ARE
BEING LED BY THE NOSE.
SAD, SAD DAY.
Whose free speech has been suspended? I didn't see anybody's free speech get suspended.
From : Dave Mauro Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 4:28 PM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
Try this:
4 MORE YEARS!!!
From : FOOD JOB RECRUITER Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 4:44 PM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
Hi Doug,
How are you? Nice to hear from you!
Was just responding to Ms. Cho's remarks at the MOVEON.ORG meeting. I am
sure you familiar with that. Below is just a few quotes of real hate for the
President of the United States that spews from people like Ms. Cho and your
organization.
Have a great weekend and please keep up the great work your all doing. The
Presidents numbers are looking better all the time!
"Food Job Recruiter" (the f...?) proceeds to cut-'n'-paste Drudge's selections from Cho's stand-up set. Yes, Mr./Mrs. Recruiter, we've all read that. Thanks.
From : mike Reply-To : Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 5:27 PM
To : "'George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!'" Subject : RE: Please send me hate mail too!
...I must have been added to the "Angry Bull Dike Web Ring"... She STILL has
a huge, over sized head and I STILL like my 10 commandments...
MSG
Lovely. But the best was yet to come:
From : David T Owens Sent : Friday, January 16, 2004 6:18 PM
To : "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" Subject : Re: Please send me hate mail too!
you numba ten GI! fucky sucky?
Ahh, yes. Bush/Cheney '04 must be thrilled to have folks like these on board. But I know there have to be better responses out there just waiting to be written. You'll get them as soon as we do.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:09 PM
I had the opportunity to read the hate e-mail you sent to Margaret Cho this past week and was quite intrigued. I was wondering if you might be willing to craft a similar message and send it to me so that I can post it on my weblog, "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!". See, I started the blog hoping I would get all kinds of hate mail, but I really haven't gotten as much as I would like. So if you were to send me something along the lines of what you sent Ms. Cho, it would help me out in that regard, and plus I'd be able to give my regular readers a first-hand account of the maturity and intelligence levels of the typical Bush supporters out there.
Anything you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Doug
George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!
http://georgemustgo.blogspot.com
Updates as events warrant.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:07 PM
Evil wobbles, but it won't fall down
Lookin' for something to read this weekend? Peep Stanley's essay "Perle's of Wisdom," on the new book by Richard Perle and David Frum titled An End to Evil. Let me repeat that: An End to Evil.
These two gentlemen, who hold a great deal of influence with the Bush administration and, more specifically, the people directing our worldwide efforts against terrorism, actually think we can eliminate evil from the earth. To them, it's not even a war on terror we're fighting, it's a war against evil itself. How do we do this? By invading a whole shitload of countries, naturally. With straight faces (we assume), Perle and Frum propose that we invade Syria and Iran, bomb Libya, blockade North Korea, and that's just the beginning. (And Ann Coulter calls Wes Clark "crazy as a March hare"?) It's witheringly ironic that these two gentlemen, like their commander-in-chief, found various ways to avoid serving in the very same military they now want to send all the way around the world to conquer any country that so much as looks at us funny — though, of course, that same unfamiliarity with anything military-related might be the very reason they think all these various global conquests are going to be such a piece of cake.
And don't think that these guys are mere crackpots. I mean, they are crackpots, but they're crackpots with a lot of pull — Perle is a former chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Review Board (and continues to informally advise the Bush administration on national defense), while Frum was a top Bush speechwriter, and not surprisingly the one who came up with the "Axis of Evil" line for the State of the Union a few years ago. It's frightening to think just how casually grandiose these two men have been permitted to be in cooking up plans for something which, when you get right down to it, equals global domination.
Hey, remember the conversation I had a week or so ago with the girl who said she liked George W. Bush because he was "not naive about what he can and can't do"? Ironic, ain't it, because if this administration thinks it can wipe evil off the face of the earth, it's quite naive indeed. We can fight against bad people, we can try and prevent bad things from happening, we can even take action against bad countries if we are directly threatened. But if the Bush administration or anyone in it is trying to turn America into the spearhead of an effort to rid the world of badness itself, we're biting off more than we can chew — and we're going to be in a heap of trouble. The scary thing is, maybe we already are.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:01 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: 24th in a series
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot already has slogged through, and debunked, countless slanders made by Ann Coulter against Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean. Now that Wes Clark is rocketing up the charts in nearly every early-primary state, Ann has sensed another threat and penned an entire column starting in on him as well. This one may be the worst one yet, and we're not just saying that because Clark has received our endorsement for prez: Not only does Ann make numerous pathetic attempts to smear Clark as a weenie, in spite of the fact that he was taking four bullets in 'Nam while George W. Bush was deserting his National Guard duty back home, she also tries to paint the Clark-led operation in Kosovo as less successful than our current Iraq occupation, the one whose leadership triumvirate of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle makes Larry, Moe, and Curly look like Cirque du Soleil.
So take our hand and follow us through the outrageous straw-man statements and moronic logic of "The Democrats' Idea of a General," and try not to laugh out loud as you do so — if Ann's petulant, immature screed is emblematic of how the Republicans would plan to prop up their flight-suit-wearing Nancy-boy against a decorated military hero (who just happens to be a Democrat) in November, the 2004 election is gonna be a whoooole lot of fun:
Democrats are so delirious about finding a general who is a pacifist scaredy-cat that no one seems to have bothered to investigate whether Wesley Clark is sane.
Oh noooo, you did not just go there. Our current president got strings pulled to swing him an Alabama National Guard spot during Vietnam, and didn't even bother to show up for that. Yet Wes Clark comes back from 'Nam with a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, and somehow he's the "scaredy-cat." Now we're wondering whether we should change the title of this feature from Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot to Ann Coulter is Just a Complete Fricking Toolbag.
On "Meet the Press" back in November, Clark described intelligence as "a sort of gray goo as you look at it. You can't see through it, exactly, and if you try to touch it, it gets real sticky and you might actually interfere with the information that you're getting back. So you have to draw inferences from it." No, wait. I'm sorry. I think that was Clark talking about Monica Lewinsky's dress, not national security intelligence.
That's what makes you question whether Clark is "sane"? At least Clark wasn't the one throwing some random, irrelevant, lame-ass Monica Lewinsky reference into a comment that was supposed to be about national security.
Meanwhile, Clark recently said that the "two greatest lies that have been told in the last three years" are: "You couldn't have prevented 9/11 and there's another one that's bound to happen." If he were president, Clark says, there would be no more terrorist attacks.
Ummmm...when did he say that, Ann?
The adversarial watchdog press did not ask Clark to explain how he could guarantee an end to terrorist attacks, but recited Clark's prior statements calling for better intelligence. Apparently, if we could just refine the gray goo of intelligence to a magical terrorist-prediction machine, Clark could put an end to this terrorism nonsense once and for all.
We ask once more: When did he say that, Ann?
Yes, I suppose if our intelligence agencies knew who the terrorists were and when they were going to strike, we could stop them. And if we knew who all the raving lunatics were, we could prevent these infernal Democratic presidential primary debates. Which reminds me, I think I know how we can win the lottery every week, too.
When did he...aw, fuck it. The day Ann figures out "how we can win the lottery every week" is the day somebody, anybody, figures out how to get Ann to actually back up any of her outlandish, made-up statements.
Liberals scoff at a system to shoot down incoming missiles, but believe that all random suicide bombers can be located and stopped before they strike. Hitting a bullet with a bullet just isn't feasible, so let's concentrate on something doable like predicting the future.
When did liberals demand that George W. Bush predict the future? We simply ask that he act on the intelligence he's given, like when the antiterrorism czar of the Clinton administration gives Condoleezza Rice an exhaustive briefing that al-Qaeda might be mounting a disastrous attack against the United States. Evidently Bush had other things on his mind.
Democrats are utterly unfazed by the fact that Clark is crazier than a March hare. They are so happy to have a pacifist in uniform, they ignore his Norman Bates moments. When this peacenik criticizes the war in Iraq, he can puff up his puny chest and cite his own glorious experience with blood, sweat and tears in the Balkans.
When it comes to pathetic chest-puffing, we've pretty much set the gold standard at Bush's ridiculous flight-suit stunt on the USS Abraham Lincoln back in May. But evidently Ann didn't see the way Clark filled out his black turtleneck in the "Rock the Vote" debate, or she wouldn't be calling his chest "puny." Before this turns into a particularly gushy episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," however, let's take note of the fact that Ann Coulter — who has said many times over she just hates how the Democrats resort to name-calling — just called Wes Clark "crazier than a March hare." What's her evidence, exactly? Uh...nothin'. He's just crazy! I said so, so he is! Shut up and do not question The Coultinator!
Asked on "Meet the Press" what advice he would give Bush, Clark said: "I'd say, 'Mr. President, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to surrender' -- stop right there and the Kucinich crowd is yours -- 'exclusive U.S. control over this mission. ... Build an international organization like we did in the Balkans.'" Because, as everyone knows, Wesley Clark "built" NATO. This guy sounds more like Al Gore every day.
At least Ann has gotten around to admitting that Dennis Kucinich is the only one taking the stance that we need to give up and pull out of Iraq immediately, which previously she had tried to attribute to all Democrats. But is Ann still just going to concoct every single quote in this column out of whole cloth? Clark didn't say he "built NATO," he said "we" — the U.S. and NATO — built an international alliance in the Balkans. Which they did. (And for Christ's fricking sake, get off the "Al Gore invented the Internet" tip already. He never said that, and your insistence that he did only demonstrates your willful ignorance and dishonesty.)
Asked what countries he proposed to bring into Iraq that weren't there already, Clark said, "I think you ask NATO ... just as I did in Kosovo, because this brings NATO into the problem." NATO is the logical choice for this job because of Iraq's extremely close proximity to the North Atlantic.
What the hell does that have to do with anything? NATO member Turkey is barely any closer to the North Atlantic than Iraq is — the two countries border each other, in fact. But we don't see anyone in the Bush administration suggesting that maybe Ankara should go find some other more appropriate treaty organization to be a part of.
Evidently, Clark is sublimely confident that no one remembers anything about his misadventures in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia posed absolutely no threat to the United States -- not imminent, not latent, not burgeoning, not now, not then, not ever. (Unless you count all the U.S. highway deaths caused by Yugos.)
Oh, this is about to get good. Ann, who rails against the moral relativism of American liberalism like it was going out of style, is now about to play a particularly idiotic game of "The $25,000 Dictatorial Relativism Pyramid" right before your very eyes. Here we go...
The president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, never tried to assassinate a U.S. president. He never shook his fist at the Great Satan. He didn't shelter and fund Muslim terrorists -- though the people we were fighting for did.
So that makes Milosevic an OK guy, then?
In humanitarian terms, Milosevic didn't hold a candle to Saddam Hussein. Milosevic killed a few thousand Albanians in a ground war.
Yeah, who needs a few thousand Albanians, anyway?
Hussein killed well over a million Iranians, Kurds, Kuwaitis and Shias, among others.
How dare Ann get her culottes in a wad now over all those Iranians getting killed. The Reagan administration could've tried to put a stop to that back in the '80s, but they didn't, because Iran had been taken over by fundamentalists and Saddam was seen as the lesser of two evils! Hell, we sent Iraq weapons to kill those very same Iranians whose deaths Ann's crocodile tears are now mourning! This is beyond poorly written or intellectually dishonest, it's downright disgusting.
Milosevic had no rape rooms, no torture rooms, no Odai or Qusai. He didn't even use a wood chipper to dispose of his enemies, the piker.
So now Ann is reduced to quibbling over torture methods and offspring as the criteria for whether someone is an evil, maniacal dictator or merely a naughty little Serb. In an oeuvre filled to capacity with stupidity, this is just about as shamelessly bad as it's ever gotten.
And yet NATO, led by Gen. Wesley Clark, staged a pre-emptive attack on Yugoslavia.
How about we go over the definition of "pre-emptive," since Ann evidently needs a refresher: When we attack a nation like Serbia, which is murdering people by the thousands and causing the death and destruction to spill over into neighboring countries (like Albania and Croatia), that attack has been instigated. When we attack a nation like Iraq, which hadn't so much as flicked a booger at us and whose only offense we could come up with was maybe thinking about having nuclear weapons that we might have completely pulled out of our asses, that's un-instigated, and therefore pre-emptive. Clear on that now?
Under Clark's command, the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy by mistake, killing three Chinese journalists. Other NATO air strikes under Clark mistakenly damaged the Swiss, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian and Hungarian ambassadors' residences.
Oh, so all through Gulf War, The Sequel, Ann kept her mouth shut about collateral damage — but all of a sudden now she's wetting herself with outrage.
Despite the absence of ground troops, Yugoslavia took three American POWs, whose release was eventually brokered by Jesse Jackson. America was standing tall.
Yeah, three American POWs who were later released is much more serious than close to 600 American soldiers coming home in pine boxes. (And hey, did you ever send Jesse a thank-you note?)
Clark's forces bombed a civilian convoy by mistake, killing more than 70 ethnic Albanians, and then Clark openly lied about it to the press.
Go back to the paragraph where Ann dismissively snorts that Slobodan Milosevic only "killed a few thousand Albanians." Somehow, though, when forces under Wes Clark accidentally kill 70, it's a major outrage. And that's not to say it wasn't a tragedy — it was — but this should give you some clue as to how politically motivated and out-of-whack Ann's Sliding Scale of Human Misery really is.
First he denied NATO had done it, and when forced to retract that, Clark pinned the blame on an innocent U.S. pilot. As New York Newsday reported on April 18, 1999: "American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the staff of Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO commander, pointed to an innocent F-16 Falcon pilot who was castigated by the media for blasting a refugee convoy."
Read that last paragraph and then compare it to this propaganda report from the Serbian government. Boy, they're a lot alike. Is Ann getting her information from Belgrade? Her recounting of events also sounds like the versions given by all those socialist, America-hating, anti-military groups who opposed action in Kosovo. Is Ann warming up to them after all?
Not that any of that gets Clark off the hook for the big mistake he made very early after the bombing was reported, which was buying too quickly into sketchy evidence that Serbian forces had been the ones that attacked the convoy. And when NATO released what they thought was a tape of the offending F-16 pilot as he commenced the attack, it turned out to be the wrong tape (of a different pilot, who was actually attacking a military convoy). But Ann seems to want you to believe that Clark himself yanked a random F-16 pilot out of a crowd, yelled, "Here, it was this guy!" and let him be torn to shreds by the media. Which simply didn't happen.
What's the bigger outrage here: That a tragic accident happened under Clark's purview in the Balkans, or that Ann "bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" Coulter has all of a sudden decided that the deaths of innocent civilians is something to be outraged about after all — and is exploiting the disaster at Djakovica to try and paint Wes Clark as Hitler? Wes Clark, at least, apologized for the mistakes that he made during the Kosovo intervention. We have yet to hear an apology for any of the mistakes Ann has made in her repeated attempts to slander, profane, and otherwise tear down anyone she has the slightest disagreement with.
Eventually, even a model of probity like Bill Clinton was shocked by Clark's mendacity and fired him.
That's one way to phrase it, if you'd rather spin things to your best advantage than come within 1,000 miles of the truth. A more accurate description would be that William Cohen, at the time Secretary of Defense, relieved Clark of his position as Supreme Allied Comander-Europe. (More on that here, and here.) And it had nothing to do with the tragedy at Djakovica, since the two events happened more than a year apart.
At the end of major combat operations led by NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, arch-villain Slobodan Milosevic was still in power. (At least Clark won't have to worry about any embarrassing "mission accomplished" photo-ops coming back to haunt him.)
Ooooh, isn't that a sneaky little statement. Just four months after Wes Clark left the Balkans for the last time, Serbia held — wait for it — a democratic election, in which Slobodan Milosevic was voted out of power and Vojislav Kostunica put in his place. (Milosevic is now, of course, rotting in a Dutch prison.) Meanwhile, nobody in the Bush administration seems to have the first clue about when the Iraqis will be fortunate enough to have democratic elections of their own, but we doubt Ann is losing sleep over that, since they'd probably just pick some nutcase fundamentalist towelhead anyway.
Today, almost a decade and $15 billion later, U.S. troops are still bogged down in the Balkans. No quagmire there!
What the f..."bogged down"? In a region where the war has ended and democratic elections regularly take place? Christ, by that rationale our troops are "bogged down" at Ramstein Air Base!
So we spent $15 billion in the Balkans, lost zero soldiers in battle, and currently have 4,000 troops safely stationed there. According to Ann, this is a quagmire. But Iraq, which cost $150 billion (and counting) and more than 500 lives, and requires the services of about 140,000 troops, none of which have any idea when they're coming home, that's not a quagmire. If this is the kind of military expertise we can expect from Ann Coulter, perhaps she should find better things to do than second-guess Wes Clark.
That's the Democrats' idea of a general.
You're goddamn right it is, Ann, and if you think we're gonna let you smear him while simultaneously hero-worshipping your draft-dodging silver-spoon pansy of a so-called commander-in-chief — OK, that was name-calling, and we're sorry.
But you know what? No, we're not sorry. For years the Republicans have tried to puff themselves up as the only party that cares about the military, but it's all B.S. Their idea of gratitude for the sacrifices made by our soldiers is slashing military benefits as much as they think they can get away with. Their idea of respect for the military is to character-assassinate people like John McCain (five and a half years as a POW) and Max Cleland (left three limbs in Vietnam) so that draft-dodging mama's boys like Bush and Saxby Chambliss, respectively, can snatch the brass ring. And now, even as the Bush administration ham-fists the Iraq occupation like Gerald Ford at the NBA Slam-Dunk Contest, we have Ann Coulter hacking at a Purple-Heart-wearing four-star general for being a "pacifist scaredy-cat" just because he doesn't want to exploit hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to avenge the president's daddy. Allow us to be the first (but hopefully not the last) to say Respect for the military, my ass, and to pine for the day when the first presidential debate rolls around and we get to snicker as George W. Bush withers in the blinding glare of Wes Clark's medal collection. Ann Coulter still will not have learned anything by then, and is certain to continue embarrassing herself with more character-assassinating columns...but Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will be there to compound her humiliation! Later!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:31 AM
Thursday, January 15, 2004
American Airlines Pilot F@#*s With Touro, Gets Chifres
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, this is your captain, Dale Robin Hirsch, speaking. We're now on final approach to Rio de Janeiro, where local time is about 4:57 p.m. and the temperature is a balmy 79 degrees. For your own safety and convenience, please have your immigration cards ready for the Brazilian agents who will be photographing and fingerprinting you in customs. Oh, and don't make any obscene gestures at the camera when they're doing that — just trust me on that one. I enjoyed flying with you today, and on behalf of the rest of the crew, we hope that the next time you decide to fly to some pissant South American backwater with a bug up their collective ass about national security, we hope you'll choose American.
So, basically, the attitude of our friend Cap'n Dale (pictured) is that while it's OK for the U.S. to photograph and fingerprint furriners when they come to America, any other country that feels a need to do the same can go piss up a rope. And evidently that opinion is so strongly held that he felt the need to spark an international incident over it.
Kids, this is why the rest of the world is turning into the America Sucks Club. It isn't the fact that we have a high standard of living, or the fact that we "love freedom." It's the fact that certain elements of our society absolutely refuse to be held to the same standards to which they hold the rest of the world. Yeah, you Third-World nations really need to cut down on that carbon-monoxide-emissions crap, but us? Hey, this isn't about us, Pedro. Yes, we're going to invade a country because we're pretty sure they're trying to build nukes and nukes are bad...but not so bad that we won't try to come up with a few more of our own. And now we have Cap'n Dale — who really looks like he used to be a cast member on "The Love Boat," maybe it's just the white uniform — giving the one-finger salute to a country that had the audacity to implement pretty much the very same security measures we've set up here in the U.S. (By the way, does anyone doubt that if it'd been an IranAir pilot giving the bird to the cameras at JFK, he'd be shipped off to Guantanamo before the customs guy could even finish saying "Do you have anything to declare?")
I'm sure the minute a right-wing Bushie stumbles across this post, he's going to try and slag this off as the rantings of one of those nasty America-hating, blame-the-U.S.-first lefties. Guess again, Betsy. I love my country and there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that it's the greatest country on earth. But I don't think that automatically grants us the right to act like complete and total asshats toward everyone else anytime we feel like it. There's such a thing as being a good global neighbor, and you'd think we'd be placing more importance on that now than ever — but some people aren't. And a lot of them, unfortunately, are sitting up in Washington.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:19 AM
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Everybody move toward the middle of the blogroll and make some room for...
Zemek's blog, in particular, is one I want to talk up. I got introduced to Zemek's writing not through politics but through pigskin — he is a regular and frequent contributor to College Football News, which nutcase college football fans like myself have been known to peruse religiously. In a feature that went up today on CFN asking "With the college football season over, what are you going to do with your life for eight months?", Zemek mentioned he was going to be spending a lot of time on his blog, so I went over and checked it out.
Zemek is like me in a lot of ways, rabid college football fan being just one of them: He's also a Catholic, and evidently leans to the left on quite a lot of issues. But Zemek's blog is more than just lefty anti-Bush rabble-rousing (not that there's a thing wrong with that), it's a very careful, incredibly well-thought-out running discussion of politics as they pertain to issues of faith and vice versa. One of his missions seems to be advancing the notion that the right wing, and the Christian conservative section in particular, don't have nearly the monopoly on Christian morality that they'd like you to believe they have. If you're looking for comebacks to the shrill, self-righteous blowhards who are ready to brand you a Satanist for so much as not voting for George W. Bush, "Matt Zemek's Wellstone Cornerstone" is a fantastic place to start.
So anyway. Just wanted to demonstrate that football nuts can occasionally have deep insights into politics and religion, too. And not unlike Zemek, I'll probably be using this blog as a way of distracting myself from the sad fact that the Georgia Bulldogs will not be taking the field again for another 227 days. But here's hoping that the thrilling possibility of getting a Democrat back in the White House proves to be enough of a distraction all on its own.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:20 PM
More trenchant, incisive commentary from the pro-Bush camp
OK, what's going on here?
a) This man is a resident of Virginia's 10th Congressional District and a highly dissatisfied constituent of Rep. James Moran (and his entire family)
b) "Moran" is, in fact, a Scrabble-acceptable word that I have handcuffed my game by not knowing all this time, dammit c) This is his call-back audition for keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention
d) He's just a f*$@ing assbag
Feel free to bust your own theories in the comments section below.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:23 AM
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
In their defense, the Supreme Court did sort of say in Lawrence v. Texas that strange bedfellows are protected under the Constitution
Earlier today we had George W. Bush, and inevitably a whole bunch of his neoconservative followers, indirectly trying to justify their way-early planning of the Iraq invasion (as in the-minute-their-asses-hit-the-Oval-Office early) by saying they were only continuing a policy started under Bill Clinton. Now we have yet another loving couple you never thought you'd see: Rush Limbaugh and the ACLU.
Yesterday, the ACLU filed a friend-of-the court brief supporting Mr. Limbaugh’s argument that the seizure of his private medical records was illegal, and Limbaugh gratefully accepted the ACLU’s help. His attorney Roy Black said he and Limbaugh quote “are pleased that the ACLU has filed a motion” and added the seizure was, “also a threat to everyone’s fundamental right to privacy."
We're gonna have to disagree with you there, Roy, since according to your client, there is no right to privacy. Ewps.
There's tons more good stuff in Atrios' comments thread on this little nugget, including a lovely Whitman's Sampler of stuff Rush has said to disaparage and demonize the ACLU in the past. Our favorite, naturally, being the bumper sticker sold at Rush Online that reads "The ACLU: Assholes, Communists, Liberals Union." Hope Rush at least sends them a thank-you card or an I'm-sorry card, if not both.
Anyway, take a quiet moment to ponder the irony here for just a minute, and if you're really at peace and there's not too much background noise, you'll swear you can hear the voice of Phil Hartman from when he played Bill McNeal on "NewsRadio," and he stumbled upon a piece of information that would give him some kind of blackmail-type leverage over his boss, played by Dave Foley: "Deliiiicious."
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:40 PM
The truth comes out...and yes, it is a big deal
So Bush has finally admitted he had his eye on Iraq from the very moment he settled into the White House. As you'll note from some of the comments on a few of the posts below, not everyone thinks this is a huge deal; they say Bush was merely continuing to advocate, as the previous administration had, the policy of "regime change." But leaving aside for a moment the utterly absurd irony of a Republican administration expecting to justify something because "that's what Clinton did," let's examine George's statements a little more closely.
"The stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear — like the previous administration, we were for regime change." Maybe so, but another of your "stated policies" was that the U.S. military should not be used for nation-building. At what point did that one go completely out the window?
"September the 11th made me realize that America was no longer protected by oceans and we had to take threats very seriously no matter where they may be materializing." Well, you know, George, if you'd listened for half a second to that Clinton administration whose policies you say you were so intent on continuing, you might've known threats were materializing. But even that doesn't answer the question, Where was the threat presented by Iraq? They weren't behind 9/11, they didn't have weapons capable of reaching the United States...why was it so vitally necessary to invade?
(Scott McClellan:) "[Bush] exhausted all possible means to resolve the situation in Iraq peacefully." The hell he did! What about letting the UN inspectors do their jobs before demanding that they summarily be yanked out of the country, because the bombs are about to start falling and you don't want anyone to get hurt? Better yet, how about just not invading in the first place? I mean, what was the "situation" Bush was so intent on "resolving"? Did Iraq have a nuke pointed at the United States? Did they have some guy named Akbar standing in the Bleecker Street subway station with a vial of nerve gas waiting for a phone call? Anybody? Hello?...
In a Slate.com forum that began today titled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War," Jacob Weisberg sums it up thusly: "...[A]s a supporter of the war, I can't get myself off the hook by saying Bush has screwed things up, because he has screwed things up in ways that were evident in advance of the invasion. This was elective surgery, and we had a pretty good idea what the surgeon's limitations were." The "elective surgery" comparison is spot-on: This war did not have to happen. And Bush inarguably, undeniably stretched the truth to make us all think that it did.
Say what you will about Saddam being a bad person — and he was — but up until recently it was not the policy of the United States to just overthrow a dictator and take over that country unless said country was directly involved in an act that harmed America. George W. Bush, however, has evidently taken it upon himself to completely change that policy, and that matters. If you think it doesn't, all I can say is that our visions of America must not be all that much alike.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:59 PM
I got your military intelligence right here
If you won't believe Wes Clark or Howard Dean when they tell you the war in Iraq was a bad idea, would you perhaps believe, oh, I don't know...maybe the Army War College?! (On a not-really-related-but-yeah-kinda note, how is it that the so-called liberal media have taken a pass on this story so far, to the point where it's left to The Scotsman to pick it up? Do Ewan MacGregor and Sean Connery have that much more of a pressing need for this sort of information than I do?)
Here's another question, posited by Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" last night. Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill is being investigated for supposedly possessing secret documents outlining a plan for an invasion and occupation of Iraq that was drawn up the minute George W. Bush took office, i.e. months before September 11. So if they had these exhaustively researched plans drawn up so far in advance, how come when it came time to actually occupy Iraq, they still looked like they couldn't find their asses with both hands?!
But really, love the job you're doing up there. Mind if Gert Clark stops by sometime today to measure the windows for her curtains?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:46 AM
Monday, January 12, 2004
Former Treasury Secretary F@#*s With Bull, Gets Horns
That might as well be the headline for this story, from CNNmoney via MyDad:
WASHINGTON (CNN) - The Treasury Department said Monday it is looking into how a government document from the very early days of the Bush administration — marked "secret" and outlining plans for a post-Saddam Iraq — became part of a CBS "60 Minutes" broadcast Sunday night.
"Based on the '60 Minutes' segment aired Sunday evening, there was a document that was shown that appeared to be classified," said Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols. "It was for that reason that it was referred to the U.S. inspector general's office."
Ousted Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, now an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, was a guest on the program, along with the author of a book for which O'Neill was the primary source. O'Neill said on the program that the administration was preparing plans to move against Iraq "from the very beginning."
Ahhhh so. The plot thickens. Well, no it doesn't, because anyone who's been conscious at any point in the last year knows that the neocon Kool-Aid drinkers in the Bush administration had their eyes on Iraq from the moment Bush moved into 1600 Pennsylvania. But isn't it interesting nonetheless: The FBI opens a non-independent probe into how Robert Novak got the classified name of a CIA agent whose husband had criticized Bush, and Bush only has to say "Idunno" for the matter to be dropped for all practical purposes — but a former Cabinet head ends up with some documents that may or may not have been classified, and now we've got a full-fledged investigation on our hands.
The decision to refer the matter to the inspector general was made at a Monday morning Treasury Department meeting involving senior staff and department attorneys, Nichols said, and was made without the initiation or consultation of the White House, the story says. Right, mmm-hmmm, tell me another one:
In the book, "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind, O'Neill describes a disengaged President Bush who appeared determined to bring the United States into a conflict with Iraq for the purpose of ousting Saddam Hussein. ...
In the upcoming book, O'Neill compares Bush's presence at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."
O'Neill also maintains that his advice to Vice President Dick Cheney about steel tariffs and tax cuts was ignored, largely due to political considerations, according to excerpts from the book printed in Monday's Wall Street Journal.
Yep, sounds like political revenge to me. And political revenge is a dish best served in yo' face by a government investigator, beeyatch! Do like the "blind man in a room full of deaf people," though. Expect that one to pop up on bumper stickers and T-shirts within the month. As always, Atrios has more right chyah.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:23 PM
The truth is stranger (and hilariouser) than fiction
Michael "Savage" Weiner needs your help! He exhorts his followers thusly:
Please go to your local book stores, especially the large chains, as well as Costco and Sam's Club. Ask to see copies of 'The Enemy Within,' Michael Savage's latest Best-Seller. It should be placed prominently in the store. If it is not placed prominently, or, discount stickers have been put over the picture of Michael's face and you can verify this, either through a digital photo or e-mail, please contact us at: bookwatcher@paulreveresociety.com Become A Book Watcher for The Savage Nation and help us make sure that the Liberals are not hiding 'THE ENEMY WITHIN.'
Oh, the humanity! Liberals will attempt to hide the truth of The Enemy Within from America if we do not stop them! They know Michael Savage is the greatest threat to their attempts to destroy America and its culture and...uh...hello? This thing on? Anybody?...Bueller? Bueller? Nah, just kiddin' — methinks Weiner is only pre-emptively setting himself to be able to blame liberals when his book dies like a stale fart on the bestseller list, which it inevitably will.
Oh, Mikey. You're so cute when you try to act as if anybody still gives one tenth of a shit about what you have to say. Nevertheless, this is a great opportunity for trouble-causing.
Readers, if you're bored and looking for something fun to do starting next Monday, January 19, do this: Make up a bookstore (you can even make up a Barnes & Noble or something at a nonexistent address), e-mail Weiner Nation at the address linked above, and tell them that bookstore has failed to put The Enemy Within in a prominent place. Tell them you haven't had a chance to take a digital picture yet but you are going to go right out and do that on your way home from work sometime this week. Trust us, hilarity will ensue! And it will be great. We'll post another reminder in a week, so 'till then, come up with some fake bookstores and get your e-mails ready.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:18 PM
Bush supporters: Pansies?
Stop criticizing the president, it's just not nice! So says whiny Iowa retiree Dale Ungerer:
He suggested Dean and the other Democratic candidates stop "tearing down your neighbor" and cut their "slam, bam and bash Bush" rhetoric. "Please tone down the garbage, the mean-mouthing of tearing down your neighbor and being so pompous," Ungerer, a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, said to scattered hisses and boos from the overwhelmingly pro-Dean audience at the Oelwein Community Center.
Awww, poor baby! Did we hurt George W. Bush's feelings? We're so sorry. I guess we just heard so many Bush supporters call us anti-American and unpatriotic for opposing the president that we figured it was OK to criticize. Is that not OK anymore?
Seriously, for crying out loud, dude. It's a presidential campaign. You're supposed to be able to criticize and offer alternatives to the person you're running against — otherwise, we might as well scotch the idea of elections entirely and just keep the same person in office forever — and as much as you Bushies might like to change the rules in the middle of the game, sorry, you can't do it. Sounds like Mr. Ungerer is a little cranky and might need to spend a little time in the Time Out Chair until he can stop pouting.
Incidentally, it's been interesting to see how this story has been covered by different news outlets. AP's version was a very even-handed piece, written by Nedra Pickler of all people, headlined "Republican blasts Dean for knocking President Bush." But when Reuters filed the story, somehow it was all about "Dean's Much-Talked-About Temper" being triggered. On the subject of that temper, sure, it's been "Much-Talked-About," but has it been much-evidenced? I mean, you hear about Dean's temper all the time from the so-called liberal media because it makes for a more interesting story and that's what they've arbitrarily decided they're going to focus on, but think about it. Before the incident with this Ungerer guy, had Dean ever raised his voice at a specific person at a campaign event? (And in his position, come on, wouldn't you have done the same thing?) In spite of the fact that folks like Lieberman and Gephardt look at the words "televised debate" and see "time to bash Dean," has Dean ever "lost his temper" in one of the Democratic debates? Could it be that this whole "Dean's bad temper" thing is just an angle some reporter concocted to juice up his stories from the campaign trail?
Well, we can't spend too much time pondering that question, because we just realized we called Mr. Ungerer a "baby" (and, indirectly, a "pansy"), and now we have to apologize. So we're sorry, Mr. Ungerer. How can we make it up to you? Can we bring you something, like a cup of hot tea, or your pacifier? Oops, we did it again!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:16 AM
Friday, January 09, 2004
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: 23d in a series
Throughout our weeks and months of assembling Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, Ann has taught us quite a bit. We've learned a little about patriotism, a little about love...and a lot about faith. Oh, no, silly, not that faith-in-a-power-greater-than-our-own faith, though this week's title ("The Jesus Thing") would have you believe otherwise; we're talking about the blind faith with which right-wing columnists ask that you swallow their cockamamie assertions and accusations. In the past, articles of faith you'd have to swallow to buy into an Ann Coulter column included "Joe McCarthy is a hero," "Bill Clinton is a rapist," and "Liberals are in league with al-Qaeda." This week we have a new one, and it's just as outrageous and unproven: Democrats don't believe in God! Not a one of 'em!
This is news to Yours Liberally Truly, who has been known to serve as a eucharistic minister at his friendly neighborhood Catholic church. It's probably also new to relatives of John F. Kennedy (Catholic), Jimmy Carter (Baptist), Al Sharpton (Pentecostal) and Joe Lieberman (Jewish), along with a whole bunch of other people. In other words, Coulter's Godless-Democrats thesis is one that can be disproven in approximately five seconds -- and yet she still proceeds to build an entire column around it! If you're already getting the impression that this screed is going to be a poorly-written mishmash of ill-thought-out polemic, then you're in just the right mental place for "The Jesus Thing":
When they were fund-raising, the Democratic candidates for president all claimed to be Jewish. Now that they are headed for Super Tuesday down South, they've become Jesus freaks. Listening to Democrats talk about Jesus is a little like listening to them on national security: They don't seem terribly comfortable with either subject.
Given that Ann Coulter's idea of "national security" is carpet-bombing the bejeezus out of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda, we forgive the Dems for not being as "terribly comfortable" with it as, say, George W. Bush, to whom such things are like mother's milk.
To ease Democrats into the Jesus thing, the Democratic Leadership Council is holding briefings for Democratic candidates teaching them how to talk about religion. The participants were warned that millions of Americans worship a supreme being whose name is not Bill Clinton.
If you're scoring at home, the Bill Clinton Has Not Been President Clock is up to 1,084 days (and still counting). Still not long enough for Coulter to disdain trotting him out whenever she's desperate for a really good insult, or barring that, an eye-rollingly lame one.
As has been widely reported, the DLC gingerly suggests that Democrats start referring to "God's green earth."
Democrats never talk about believing in something; they talk about simulating belief in something. Americans believe in this crazy God crap that we don't, so how do we hoodwink them into believing we believe in God? It's part of the casual contempt Democrats have for the views of normal people.
Time for a brand-new Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot drinking game: Every time she says Democrats don't believe in God, it's time to drink. That means you better bust out your shot glasses right this minute, 'cause she just said it -- and from here on out, her entire column depends on the "fact" that not one single Democrat anywhere believes in God. Good luck with that one, Ann!
What is arresting is the Democrats' fantastic habit of openly talking about how they plan to fake out the American people. The Democrats candidly say: How do we make sure the Americans don't know what we're really thinking? Let's get a Southerner, let's talk about Jesus, let's talk about NASCAR -- white Southern guys seem to like that. Let's see ... If we could get a general on the ticket, Americans will forget how much we hate the military and long to see America humiliated.
Isn't Ann funny when she tries to do her Democrat impression? "We hate the military! We long to see America humiliated!" Oh, Ann, you so crazy! Do it again!
Never has a major political party talked so openly about their plans to fool the voters. It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen. They seem not to realize the people they are talking about are listening and might not be fooled.
Hey, if a draft-dodger like George W. Bush can attempt to fool people into believing he's a Navy fighter jock, why shouldn't we Democrats be able to play make-believe too? But see, again, the opinion that all of this is nothing more than the Democrats' attempt to "fool" voters rests on that asinine "Democrats don't believe in God" canard Ann was pushing at the very beginning of the column.
In the current New Republic magazine, Peter Beinart points out that the capture of Saddam has hurt the anti-war cause and left the Democrats with nothing to say. He proposes that Democrats pretend to support the war on terrorism by calling for a massive campaign to catch Osama. Yeah, let's try that. That'll fool 'em.
It's absolutely incredible how quickly Ann's stance on al-Qaeda has slipped from "bomb their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" to dismissing any calls to capture Osama as, yep, more attempts to "fool" the American public. Yeah, capturing Osama bin Laden, the man who mastermined everything from the bombing of the USS Cole to the 9/11 attacks, is just "pretend" support for the war! I mean, after all, we already got Saddam -- what more do we really need to do?
In the debate this week, John Kerry responded to a question about how he would appeal to Southerners by saying he could put a Southerner on his ticket. As Howard Dean has explained, they're stupid enough: It's just a bunch of white guys in pickup trucks with Confederate flags.
That sure was a slick job of taking Dean's ignorant prejudice and transferring it onto Kerry. But not quite slick enough.
Dean himself has recently made the fascinating discovery that a lot of Americans believe in God. Hold the phones -- the Democrats have a soothsayer in their midst! Next, Dean will be announcing that he's just discovered how important this sex thing is.
Before the poll numbers came out on religious belief in America, Dean said: "We have got to stop having our elections in the South based on race, guns, God and gays." Higher taxes, gay marriage, abortion on demand and surrender in Iraq — that'll do the trick in Mississippi!
So Ann is saying that we Southerners really should stick to elections based on race, guns, God and gays? Soft Bigotry Of Low Expectations Alert! Sounds like she's got more contempt for me and my fellow Southerners than Dean ever did.
Then about a month ago, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a poll showing that people who regularly attend religious services supported Bush 63 percent to 37 percent, and those who never attend religious services opposed him 62 percent to 38 percent. When you exclude blacks (as they do in Vermont), who are overwhelmingly Baptist and overwhelmingly Democratic, and rerun the numbers, basically any white person who believes in God is a Republican.
So many mindless, unproven generalizations we're at a loss to count them all. People in Vermont hate blacks! Only Republicans believe in God! Democrats are Godless scum! (Drink!)
The only Democrats who go to church regularly are the ones who plan to run for president someday and are preparing in advance to fake a belief in God.
Again, as a regular churchgoer, this is news to me. (Drink!)
Though Dean is pursuing the Jesus thing with a vengeance, the results so far have been mixed. In Iowa last week, Dean said, "Let's get into a little religion here," and then began denouncing Christian minister Jerry Falwell. "Don't you think Jerry Falwell reminds you a lot more of the Pharisees than he does of the teachings of Jesus?" I don't even know what Dean means by that. I am sure his audience doesn't.
Once again, Ann -- the champion of the little guy, the hero who defends innocent "red-state" average Joes and Josephines from the snide Manhattan elitism of the liberals -- turns right around and disses those Joes and Josephines without giving it a second thought. Yes, she's so sure those poor dumb Iowans couldn't possibly have understood what Dean was saying. Since you're too lazy to interpret his statement on your own, Ann, let us explain it to you: Jerry Falwell uses religion not as a way of inspiring mankind to be peaceful and compassionate to others, but as a way of advancing his own fortunes and making himself look superior to everyone else. Ergo, Pharisee. I mean, you've read the Bible, right?
Rapping with reporters about God on the campaign plane, Dean said, "(I)f you know much about the Bible, which I do" -- and then proceeded to confuse the Old Testament with the New Testament.
Dean illiterately claimed his favorite book of the New Testament was the Book of Job. (He said his least favorite was the Book of Numbers and then explained how he planned to balance the budget.)
Ann sure seems to have a broad definition of the word "illiterate." In a September column, Ann deemed anyone "illiterate" who asked her to name traitors during her recent book tour, despite the fact that said book was TITLED Treason. Now Howard Dean has been consigned to their "illiterate" ranks, in spite of the fact that he's apparently read the Bible, or at least parts of it. Being unable to read, dear Ann, is what makes one illiterate; getting things out of order only makes one forgetful.
Having already complained to DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe about other Democrats attacking him, Dean recently said: "I'm feeling a little more Job-like recently." That's comforting. A few snippy remarks from the likes of Dick Gephardt and Dean thinks it's the wrath of the God of Abraham. Yeah, that's definitely the guy we want leading the nation in perilous times.
Yes, at the very beginning of the column she implied that Democrats across the nation "worship" Bill Clinton — but when Howard Dean opens his mouth, now all of a sudden she has trouble taking a joke.
Dean's epiphanic religious awakening occurred over a bike path — and that's his version of what happened. He was baptized Catholic and raised an Episcopalian, but left the Episcopal Church in a huff when he finally found his true religion: environmentally friendly exercise.
The Episcopals don't demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages — it's much like The New York Times editorial board. They acknowledge the Ten Commandments — or "Moses' talking points" — but hasten to add that they're not exactly "carved in stone."
Would someone like to explain exactly where a prominent Episcopalian actually said that, or is Ann just making that up like everything else?
After Bush said that the most important philosopher to him was Jesus Christ, the Episcopal bishop in Des Moines, Iowa, C. Christopher Epting, pronounced the answer "a turnoff." So there isn't a lot of hair-shirt-wearing and sacrifice for the Episcopalians.
There's that good ol' Ann Coulter Stealth Elitism again. Only in this case, it ain't that stealthy.
But the bike path incident was too much for Dean. A key tenet of the Druidical religion of liberals is non-fossil fuel travel. So Dean left the Church of the Proper Fork because the Episcopal Church in Montpelier hesitated before ceding some of its land for a bike path.
On CNN, Judy Woodruff asked in amazement, "Was it just over a bike path that you left the Episcopal Church?"
Dean: "Yes, as a matter of fact it was."
Dean waxed expansive on the theological implications of bike paths, saying: "I didn't think that was very public-spirited."
Hey, we know people who've left their church over the choir's choice of music. Next to those folks, Dean's stance looks positively principled.
But recently, Dean has leapt even beyond the DLC-recommended "God's green earth" and begun talking about Jesus, saying, "He was a person who set an extraordinary example that has lasted 2,000 years, which is pretty inspiring when you think about it." Gosh, Jesus is giving Oprah a run for her money. Also, Christ died for our sins, but let's not get into the hocus-pocus part of Christianity. The gist of the New Testament is about bike paths.
What, exactly, did Dean say that Ann finds so offensive? He set an extraordinary example, it's lasted 2,000 years, it's very inspiring. Isn't that pretty much the entire basis of Christianity? God sent Jesus down to a world that was straying further and further from His teachings, to serve as an example of how people should act toward their fellow man. Maybe if Ann weren't so busy using Jesus as a weapon to wield against anyone whose opinion she even slightly disagrees with, she would've noticed that — and she wouldn't have to waste so much time and energy getting so worked up over what is, when you get right down to it, a pretty innocuous statement from Howard Dean.
Dean's relationship with Jesus is a little like David Lloyd George's relationship with the Slovaks. At the Treaty of Versailles conference, the British prime minister was heard to whisper: "Who are the Slovaks again? I can never place them."
Oh no you dih-ent. This Southern liberal of Slovak descent, whose mother's maiden name is Bolecek, who has visited the grave of his great-great-grandfather in the tiny village of Ziemansky Sady, Slovakia, from whence his ancestors struck out to forge new lives for themselves in the free world, will be damned if he's gonna let you invoke the proud Slovak people to try and make your asinine point about Dean not knowing who Jesus is, so do not! Go! There! Or as my Slovak brothers would say, Nezacnite! Tam!
So there you have it: one thousand, one hundred forty-one words, every single one predicated on the fatuous belief that not one single Democrat (not any of the white ones, anyway) believes in God. It's a nifty way to corral them into their very own tidy little catch-22: If they keep quiet about their religious faith, they're evil, pernicious atheists; if they open their mouths, they're only trying to "fool" the American people. Not like George W. Bush, who never met an interviewer to whom he wouldn't pimp out his oh-so-fervent religious faith in the interest of squeezing a few more votes from the evangelical Right. Good show, Ann, you've once again allowed your stupidity to be laid bare for everyone to see! Everyone who reads Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, at least — so from us to you, thanks for reading, so long...and God Bless!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:54 PM
Thursday, January 08, 2004
The longest pause
After our weekly board meeting last night, a bunch of us Clark supporters went to Hooters to get something to eat (no, I don't even want to hear it, thanks for asking), and as we were headed to our table a young woman stopped us and asked us about our Clark buttons. She wasn't a waitress, but she identified herself as a College Republican and said she was "for re-election." As she and her group were leaving later on that night, Yours Truly took it upon himself to pose a question he's been dying to ask for some time.
DOUG: Hey. I don't mean to bug you or anything, but can I ask you a question?...Why do you like George W. Bush?
GIRL: Well...
GIRL'S FRIEND:(laughs) Don't get her started.
One, two, three...
GIRL: Ummmm...
...twelve, thirteen, fourteen...
GIRL: Well, uh...I mean, I think he's not naive about what he can and can't do...and not that Clark is, I think he's a good person, but umm...
DOUG: Well, that's great, but I'm not even talking about why you think he'd be better than Clark or anything like that. Why do you like George W. Bush specifically?
GIRL: Ummmm...
...twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five...
GIRL: Well, I think he's a good man — a good Christian man [emphasis hers]...
DOUG: Uh-huh. And you think this because?
GIRL: Well...
...thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight...
GIRL: See, my family is all very strong Republicans — they've donated a lot of money to his campaign.
DOUG: I'm not concerned with what your parents did. Why do you like him?
GIRL: Well, I just think he's a strong leader — a strong Southern leader [emphasis hers again].
DOUG: He was born in Connecticut.
GIRL: No he wasn't, he's from Texas!
DOUG: But he was born in Connecticut.
PETER:(chiming in) And his dad's from Maine.
JIM:(likewise) And his granddad was a senator from...where?
DOUG: I think Connecticut also.
JIM: Yeah.
DOUG: Well, thanks for taking the time to answer my question, I appreciate it...
GIRL leaves with the rest of her group.
DOUG: ...and my work here is done.
DOUG proceeds to hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner over the bar, and then goes to work on a nearby waitress as to why Bill Clinton's moral failings have nothing to do with the policies he enacted as president.
As you can see, a very edifying conversation, for more than one reason. Now I know the only three qualities you need to have to get Republican votes in this country — you have to be Christian, Southern, and aware of your limitations. Buoyed by this epiphany, I'm making a bold announcement today, and I think you know what it is: I, Doug Gillett, am hereby running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2004.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:19 AM
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
It is an oil rig in my pocket and I'm happy to see you
Today's shining example of government by the people, of the people, and for the people, at least the way the Republicans see it:
A dozen or more congressional Republicans will gather at a resort in balmy Phoenix this week to hear the legislative wish lists of Western coal, power and mining companies - and raise money from them.
The four-day conference begins today with a $1,500-per-person round of golf and private dinner, dubbed "Mulligans and Margaritas." The money raised from industry officials will be divided among the re-election campaigns of the lawmakers, most of whom serve on committees that oversee the mining and energy industries. ...
[G]uidelines issued by the House ethics committee warn the chamber's members "to avoid even the appearance that solicitations of campaign contributions are connected in any way with an action taken or to be taken in their official capacity."
Bit late for that, like! "Mulligans and Margaritas," puh-leeeeze. And to think, I'd gone the entire day without wanting to stab myself in the neck with a letter opener. Oh well!
The worst part of this, though, is that it doesn't come as anything close to a surprise (or shouldn't, at least). We still haven't gotten a look at the minutes from those secret meetings the White House had with the energy industry back when the administration first took power, the meetings Dick Cheney is moving heaven and earth to conceal from the American public; if they're not being made to feel any heat from that, why would the GOP feel any shame whatsoever about this little shindig?
What would be surprising is if scores of congressmen jetted off to Sun Valley or Big Sur or someplace to hear the "legislative wish lists" of folks like the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Trust. Mmmhmm. Yeah. That'll happen about the same time pigs come flying out of my anus, or about the same time Joe Gibbs comes out of retirement to coach the Redskins again.
(Oh but wait...he did! So there is hope. Not for the pigs-flying-out-of-my-anus thing, I mean, but for a federal government that gives a rat's ass about the environment. So how about let's elect a brand-new president and get right on that, k thanks.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:24 PM
Hello, kettle? Pot here. You're looking awfully black today (Or, Are you frickin' kidding me?!)
"Clark - well, I have a visceral aversion to his megalomania and to the cynicism with which the Clintonites have rallied around him. A campaign based entirely on regaining power, by using a candidate as a cipher, is a dangerous thing. Besides, I think Clark is a crackpot."
Wait, so you don't like the idea of a cipher-candidate being used solely to regain power? What do you call Bush in 2000? Think about it: Bush had no record you could point to as governor of Texas, other than 152 dead prison inmates. When you took a closer look, none of that "no child left behind" stuff he campaigned on was nearly as impressive as his campaign tried to make people believe. The Republicans desperately wanted someone who could wipe the Clinton legacy out of Washington, and Bush had relative youth, charisma, and a family pedigree; if there wasn't much substance to him, so much the better, because that made him a blank slate onto which the right wing could project all the ideals and desires that had gone unfulfilled under eight years of Clinton. They were just desperate to hand the nomination to somebody who could erase those eight years; hell, they didn't even bother to find someone with a different last name from the guy Clinton had displaced to begin with.
Got a deal for you, Sully: Come down here to Alabama, find 50 people who voted for Bush in 2000, and ask them why they voted the way they did. If any of them give you an answer more substantive than "Because I hate that rat-bastard Clinton," dinner at the Veranda is on us.
But Sullivan's blissful ignorance of history is just one of the many ways in which the Bush Double-Standard has manifested itself over the past few years, and especially this election season:
Is it OK to nominate a candidate who's only a pawn being used to regain power? Re Clark: "He's a cipher and a crackpot!"
Re Bush: "Hey, we had to erase the Clinton legacy somehow!"
Is it OK to have moral failings in one's past? Re Clinton: "This man is Satan. No, really. He's Satan."
Re Bush: "He hasn't done blow in 25 years. Well, maybe 20 years. But 15 years, yeah, definitely 15 years."
Is it OK to have a draft-dodger in the White House? Re Clinton or Dean: "No! They should be strung up for treason!"
Re Bush: "Put him in a flight suit on an aircraft carrier and people will forget all about it."
Is it OK to have a candidate who comes from an incredibly wealthy background? Re Kerry: "He's completely out of touch with regular people. And he looks French!"
Re Bush: "Sure, he has that huge ranch in Crawford, but he chops all the wood himself!"
Is it OK to lie your ass off? Re Clinton: "He got a blowjob from an intern? All of Western civilization is doomed if we don't impeach him right now!" Re Bush: "So what if Saddam didn't have any nukes? He was an asshole."
Obviously, you know where we stand on Wes Clark, and we're still waiting to hear where Sully gets that "megalomania" charge from. Clearly he's made it his mission to find something to nitpick in every Democratic candidate, and if he can't find something, well, he'll just make it up. Given the president whom he holds up as his hero, his shining example of morality and patriotism, this should come as no surprise.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:15 AM
Monday, January 05, 2004
Liberal Media, My Ass, Vol. 1
After watching LSU deliver a beat-down on the once-invincible Oklahoma Sooners to win a piece of the national title (go SEC!), moseyed over to my homey Peter's house to watch the Wes Clark appearance on "Meet the Press" he'd TiVo'd that morning. Clark kicked ass, as he seems to be doing in more and more interviews lately, even when Tim Russert tried to nail him with stupid-ass questions like this one:
MR. RUSSERT: General, you also said something else. And this is how the Baton Rouge Advocate captured it: "Clark said the president `didn't do his duty' to protect American from attack on September 11, 2001. `I think the record's going to show he could have done a lot more to have prevented 9/11 than he did.'" What else could George Bush possibly have done, and why didn't anyone else in Congress or in the military suggest things that could have protected us on 9/11?
Wait a second..."What else could George Bush possibly have done?" Tim, if you don't know the answer to that question, it's because of the nap you and your colleagues have been taking on the job ever since 9/11.
The Bush Kool-Aid drinkers of the right wing have tried to state point-blank that disasters like 9/11 were the fault of intelligence lapses, if not sheer laziness, during the Clinton administration. But as this excerpt from Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (courtesy The Poor Man) shows, the Clinton administration in fact had cooked up a comprehensive plan to deal with the alarming threat from al-Qaeda in the last few weeks and months before Bush took office. They handed it over to Bush with the faith that Bush would act on it — faith that was quickly shattered:
[Outgoing National Security Advisor Sandy Berger] told Dr. [Condoleezza] Rice, "I believe that the Bush administration will spend more time on terrorism in general, and on al Qaeda specifically, than any other subject. '' ...
After Berger left, Rice stayed around to listen to counterterrorism bulldog Richard Clarke, who laid out the whole anti-al Qaeda plan. Rice was so impressed with Clarke that she immediately asked him to stay on as head of counterterrorism. In early February, Clarke repeated the briefing for Vice President Dick Cheney. But, according to Time, there was some question about how seriously the Bush team took Clarke's warnings. Outgoing Clinton officials felt that "the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism."
The passage goes on to describe how Bush, Cheney, and even warhawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz responded to numerous terrorism-focused briefings and committee reports by doing absolutely squat. Clarke tried to re-introduce a revised and updated version of his terrorism plan to deputies of the Bush administration's security principals on April 30, 2001, but they didn't even get around to looking at it and approving it until the middle of July. Then they passed it on to the principals themselves — Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld among them — who wanted to schedule a meeting for August, but they couldn't. Why? Everyone was out of town vacationing — you'll recall that George W. Bush has more or less designated August as "ranch month" — which of course is so much more important than protecting the U.S. homeland. Clarke and George Tenet — the two holdovers from the Clinton administration — were frantically trying to convince the administration that a major attack might be in the cards, and by mid-July Tenet had even convinced Condoleezza Rice that such an attack was imminent. But the administration did nothing, and in fact even turned down several requests for more counterterrorism funding.
One of the refusals actually was issued on September 10, 2001.
So you see, Mr. Russert, when you incredulously ask Gen. Clark "What else could George Bush possibly have done," as if Bush was some tireless hero who moved heaven and earth to protect America and yet still could only watch helplessly as two jumbo jets were augered into the World Trade Center, you don't succeed in making Clark look like a heartless creep — you only prove your own ignorance, laziness, or both. Maybe Bush didn't know 19 Arabs were about to hijack two Boeing 767s and Boeing 757s and attempt to crash them into major American landmarks in Washington and New York, but he knew something was very likely going to happen, something that steps needed to be taken to prevent. Or would've known, had he (or anyone else) been paying attention. But they weren't.
But according to Tim Russert and his colleagues in the so-called "liberal media," that isn't the real story here. The real story is that un-American bastards like Wes Clark have actually had the gonads to call our Dear President on it. Our Dear President, who just risked his own life the lives of thousands of American soldiers to protect America from al-Qaeda Iraq and its stockpiles of WMDs nuclear-weapons program they were sort of thinking about maybe starting at some indefinite point in the future! Wes Clark, have you no decency?!?
Actually, yes, he's got quite a bit of decency. More than Russert has, at any rate. And as someone who got a journalism degree partly because of this silly idealistic notion that journalists expose, you know, the truth, it makes me sick to my stomach.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:19 AM
Sunday, January 04, 2004
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: 22d in a series
Happy New Year, traitors, and welcome to a brand-new year of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, where we expose right-wing hypocrisy in 30 minutes or less or it's free. This week's is a doozy, and probably not the way Ann really wanted to close out her 2003. See, conservatives always paint liberals as whiners, people who make a big petulant stink and claim "racism" or "sexism" or whatever else they can anytime something doesn't go their way -- but as as we've already pointed out, conservative whiners put liberals to shame, and there's no more obvious proof of that than this week's dose of Coulter. Every time a right-winger wants to do something perfectly reasonable like put a two-and-a-half-ton Ten Commandments monument in their state judicial building or pass a law dictating what consenting adults can do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, the court system steps in and puts a stop to it. And in Ann Coulter's world, this just isn't faiiiir!
Which is weird, because our definition of "fairness" always involved stuff like making sure all religious beliefs are respected equally, with none being raised higher in the government's eyes than another, or not arbitrarily sticking one's nose in what is quite clearly none of their business. But Ann doesn't see it this way, and she's pissed that her side is losing. But rather than take a hard, objective look at why the right wing has repeatedly failed in jamming its square-peg agenda into the round hole of American law, she does what any football team does when they just can't believe a group of guys as big and as talented as they are lost to an inferior squad: They blame the refs. Thus it becomes a commie-pinko judiciary who's really to blame for "creating a universal ban on God" -- which, like this week's column title, "Place Your Right Hand On The Quran And Repeat After Me," is something that's never actually happened:
The American Civil Liberties Union began its onslaught against Alabama Judge Roy Moore in 1995, when an ACLU lawyer, depressed that he was not chosen to play Mrs. Claus in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade that year, wrote a letter to all the state judges in Alabama protesting their practice of having a prayer in the courtroom every few weeks. (Obviously you can't have prayer in court: It might distract all the people holding their hand over a Bible and swearing before God almighty to tell the truth.)
Well, we hoped we'd never have to say it here, but Ann's got us in a corner. We have to admit there is a weird irony in the fact that prayer isn't allowed but witnesses still swear on a Bible. We can only hope that non-Christians who don't want to swear on a Bible are not forced to do so; no telling whether such folks were coerced into joining in with the courtroom prayers, or if they merely kept their mouths shut because they didn't want to make a scene (which, we can tell you, here in Alabama would not have gone over well at all).
Everything had been going just fine in Alabama – no defendant had ever complained about the practice – but upon receiving a testy letter from the ACLU, all the other Alabama judges immediately ceased and desisted from the foul practice of allowing prayer in court. Judge Moore did not.
For resisting the ACLU's bullying, Moore became High Value Target No. 1. Soon the ACLU and its ilk were filing lawsuits and anonymous ethics complaints against Moore. The ACLU along with the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Moore for having a Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom. (Poverty had been nearly eliminated in the South until a poor person happened to gaze upon Moore's Ten Commandments – and then it was back to square one.)
Ann, the problem with non sequiturs like this one is that they cut both ways. OK, so having the Ten Commandments in the courtroom didn't make things substantially worse in Alabama. But did they make things substantially better? Did the ongoing poverty problem in Alabama improve as a result of Moore's display? For that matter, did the plaque result in any fewer murders, thefts, or other crimes?
An affirmative action, Carter-appointed judge (oh sorry, I forgot – we're only allowed to say that about Clarence Thomas) found that the Ten Commandments plaque violated the First Amendment.
We're as confused as you are -- does Ann really think Jimmy Carter appointed Clarence Thomas? Or was her fact-checker distracted that afternoon? Does she have a fact-checker?
Apparently, in a little-noticed development, Judge Moore had become "Congress," his Ten Commandments plaque was a "law," and the plaque established a national religion. The Taliban had better legal justification to blow up centuries-old Buddha statues in Afghanistan.
You know, if anyone else had written that last sentence, Ann would've yanked it out of context and used it to brand them as an al-Qaeda-loving traitor before the ink had even dried.
The then-governor of Alabama, "Fob" James, responded to the inane ruling by saying he'd send in the Alabama National Guard if anyone tried to take down Moore's Ten Commandments.
Oh, sure, upholding the non-establishment clause of the Constitution is "inane," but vowing to sic the National Guard on anyone who tries to remove the Commandments is a perfectly rational, reasonable way of dealing with the situation.
That's all it took. The Alabama Supreme Court backed off from a confrontation with the governor by dismissing the ACLU's suit on technical grounds.
Both Moore and James were soon re-elected in landslides, Moore to chief justice. Liberals reacted to the overwhelming popularity of the state officials who resisted the ACLU by accusing them of stirring up the Ten Commandments dispute as a publicity stunt. The president of the Alabama ACLU said "the whole thing is political," and that Moore and James were using it as an election issue. The ACLU sues, and for not surrendering immediately, state officials are media whores.
We try to avoid concocting hypothetical situations here -- that's one of Ann's strategies, usually because she can't come up with any real situations that support her views -- but close your eyes for a second and imagine a somewhat reversed situation. A Muslim judge in Manhattan -- one with a history of liberal-leaning rulings -- has a plaque of the Koran in his courtroom. The Christian Coalition begins exerting enormous pressure for him to take it down; even members of the New York judiciary, city council, etc., quietly ask him to remove it just to keep from making any waves. But the judge refuses (after all, if Moore can have the Ten Commandments, why should he have to deny his own faith?). Now imagine the column Coulter would inevitably write about this situation. "Media whore" would be the least of her accusations.
But that's not really the point. The actual point -- and it's clear enough for everyone in Alabama to see, assuming they've remained rational enough to keep from standing on the steps of the state Supreme Court building and screaming "Get your hands off our God, God-haters!" -- is that Roy Moore is, indeed, as big a media whore as they come. Sorry, Ann, but take it from an actual Alabamian -- that's what he is. It's only a matter of time before Moore declares he's running for some sort of public office, and we're guessing it's senator, because the Mobile Register already has taken a poll indicating that Moore would defeat Richard Shelby if he was to run. Think Moore would've clinched that poll without the benefit of the controversy he'd ignited over the silly-ass monument he snuck into the Supreme Court building under cover of darkness two years ago?
Thus, according to Time magazine, Judge Moore has been on a "crusade" since – in Time's own words – "he defended his right to display" the Ten Commandments. It "should have surprised no one" the magazine continued, when Moore installed the Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse lobby and "forced a showdown by refusing to remove it."
In other words, Moore defended himself from one ACLU lawsuit and then – as if that weren't enough! – he did not instantly surrender when the ACLU filed a second lawsuit. That guy sure knows how to get publicity.
It's easy for Coulter to portray Moore as the innocent, mild-mannered, passive judge who was simply the victim of all this, because she hasn't gotten around to the Ten Commandments monument yet -- and barely pays it passing mention when she finally does.
Indeed, Moore maintained his disagreement with the ACLU's interpretation of the Constitution as creating a universal ban on God right up until he was out of a job.
Beg pardon? The ACLU wants a "universal ban on God"? What an imagination you have, Ann! The ACLU has never sued anyone for displaying religious icons or documents in their homes or offices, and had Moore kept his Ten Commandments plaque or monument in his private chambers, nobody would've been able to touch him. But because he's one of those what-good-is-Christianity-if-you-can't-force-it-on-others types who insists on making the rest of us look bad, he had to go putting it where it would be seen by as many people -- and cause as much controversy -- as possible. Ergo, media whore. (Oops, we may have just called him a name! Anja, we apologize!)
A lot of conservatives said Moore was wrong to refuse to comply with the court's idiotic ruling. The conservative argument for enforcing manifestly absurd court rulings is that the only other option is anarchy.
But we are already living in anarchy. It's a one-sided, "Alice in Wonderland" anarchy in which liberals always win and conservatives always lose – and then cheerfully enforce their own defeats. Oh, you see an abortion clause in there? OK, I don't see it, but we'll enforce it. Sodomy, too, you say? OK, it's legal. Gay marriage? Just give us a minute to change the law. No prayer in schools? It's out. Go-go dancing is speech, but protest at abortion clinics isn't? Okey-dokey. No Ten Commandments in the courthouse? Somebody get the number of a monument removal service.
You can almost hear the nasal, preadolescent whine from here: "You always win! And it's no fayyyyerrrr!" She practically says it outright a couple paragraphs down.
What passes for "constitutional law" can be fairly summarized as: Heads we win, tails you lose. The only limit on liberal insanity in this country is how many issues liberals can get before a court.
Apparently the only thing standing between a government of laws and total anarchy is the fact that conservatives are good losers. If we don't give liberals everything they want, when they want it, anarchy will result. We must obey manifestly absurd court rulings, so that liberals obey court rulings when they lose.
Yeah, that's why conservatives are "good losers." Not because liberals might be, you know, constitutionally correct or something when they say judges don't have the right to impose their religious beliefs on every single person who comes into their courtroom. What Ann almost seems to be saying here is "OK, we'll let you win," but she might as well be saying that Oakland "let" Tampa Bay win last year's Super Bowl. There's letting someone win, Ann, and then there's winning fair and square.
When ranting on subjects like liberalism's influence on college campuses, Ann likes to trot out the phrase "marketplace of ideas" -- to wit, when people are given complete, unbiased exposure to a full range of opinions and/or political leanings, they will choose which ones they like. And in Ann's world, the most popular ones, since they are able to garner approval from the widest range of people, are best; sort of an ideological capitalist Darwinism, if you will. Well, Ann, under that survival-of-the-fittest line of thinking, the right wing's consistent inability to convince courts of the correctness of their theocratic, homophobic, reactionary views might be an indication that there's actually something to this whole liberal thing, but Ann of course doesn't see it that way.
Point one: They almost never lose.
Whine, whine, whine. What do you want us to say? "Sorry for being right"?
Point two: They already refuse to accept laws they don't like. They do it all the time – race discrimination bans, bilingual education bans, marijuana bans. They refuse to accept the Electoral College when their candidate wins the popular vote, and they refuse to accept sexual harassment laws when their president is the accused. If you don't let them win every game, they walk off with the football.
Christ, this is getting pathetic. "You always win! It's no fair!" When did we ignore bans on bilingual education? And if you want to chide us for "refusing to accept marijuana bans," shouldn't you also lay into George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for "refusing to accept" bans on driving while intoxicated? Just for the record, Ann, we'll be happy to accept the Electoral College when we're confident that the voting wasn't tampered with and everyone who was eligible to vote had equal access to the polls. But you guys didn't seem to think that was important, and -- irony of ironies! -- needed a Supreme Court ruling to rig things your way. (And for the past three years, we liberals have been obeying a "manifestly absurd court ruling," so when are we gonna get credit for that?) And we're also perfectly willing to "accept sexual harrassment laws" when the president is accused, we just don't think they rise to the level of an impeachable offense.
I'm not sure what horror is supposed to befall the nation if the liberals started ignoring the law more than they already do, but apparently it would be even worse than a country in which the Ten Commandments have been stripped from every public space, prayer in schools is outlawed, sodomy is a constitutional right, and more than 1 million unborn children are aborted every year.
The Ten Commandments can be displayed in a public space as long as other religions aren't kept from displaying their own monuments. Any student is welcome to pray quietly to themselves anywhere, anytime they want to, as long as it doesn't interfere with the education of their classmates. And sodomy is a "constitutional right" only because the Supreme Court took the pernicious, meddling opinion that the government shouldn't have the right to dictate what goes on in the bedrooms of consenting adults. See, when Ann rants about how the country is being completely wiped clean of religion (and Christianity in particular), what she's really upset at is that people like her are being stripped of their ability to throw their righteously indignant weight around and impose their specific brand of Christianity as the law of the land. And it's just not fayyyy-yerrrr!
The handwriting's on the wall, and it's not our fault Ann Coulter can't see it: Maybe the reason her side's agenda is failing in the courts is because it runs counter to the Constitution and the very ideals of freedom and democracy upon which this country was founded. Oh, sure, Ann may try to spin this as the judicial system infringing upon Roy Moore's so-called "freedom" to display the Ten Commandments in a public place and foist his religious views on anyone who comes into his courtroom, but one man's "freedom" is another man's sneaking suspicion that if he's not Christian, he won't get a fair shake from the judge before whom he's about to stand. Oh, sure, none of that would be an issue if people like Moore would be satisfied with merely worshipping God in private and keeping the Ten Commandments in their hearts (as opposed to their courtroom walls), but that just wouldn't garner enough media hysteria, would it? So thanks, Ann, thanks ever so much for buying into Roy Moore's martyrdom act hook, line, and sinker. Now, in addition to saying that you're a fascist, a homophobe, and a witheringly bad writer (and not even that hot), we at Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot can say you're also completely dense and have the gullibility of a five-year-old! Hope you're as pleased as we are about the start Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot has gotten off to in 2004...see you later on this week!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:50 PM
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Hate mail (well, strong-dislike mail) No. 3: Ladies and gentlemen, we have a point!
Not even three full days into the new year, and what did we find in our in-box this morning but our first hate-mail of 2004...but unlike the last couple, this one actually has a valid point to make:
To Whom it May Concern~
Being that I am personally a proud Conservative, Army Brat, and Roman Catholic I will not being to tell you how you are wrong on many of your views. But I do have a word of advice. When your presenting your veiws you may find it better to not resort to such low and vulgar vocabulary, such as when you call our PRESIDENT and Ann Coulter "Douches"....... Come on.....thats just a stupid insult to being with! But few Educated people will take a website like yours seriously if you use such foul and low language.
Just a thought....
Anja Stick
We used Blogger's search function to track down the instance in which we had used the word "douche," and there was one: In an October 17 post proclaiming to the world that we'd been linked by Mary over at Naked Furniture, we described Mary thusly: "She goes to Notre Dame (sic 'em, Catholics!), skews toward the liberal side, and thinks both George W. Bush and Ann Coulter are complete douches." So technically, Anja, we didn't technically call either Bush or Coulter a "douche." (Although we did say that we shared Mary's sentiment, so maybe indirectly we did call them that. Oh, semantics.)
Nevertheless, we do care what Anja has to say. This site isn't meant to just preach to the liberal choir; in explaining very clearly, and with factual basis, why we think Bush's presidential antics are destructive and dishonest, rather than merely finding a thousand different ways to say "Bush is a dick," we hope that maybe, just maybe, we can pick up some more conservative converts along the way. But we're shooting ourselves in the foot if all we do is a bunch of name-calling, and Anja's comments prove that.
In truth, as hard as this is to believe, we make every effort to refrain from abject name-calling on this site. No, really! But are we failing to practice what we preach? I decided to go back to the Blogger search window, type in a few of my most treasured insults, and see if I'd actually been bandying them about more than I realized. After finding the one instance of the word "douche" -- which, I'm sorry, Anja, I really think that's a hilarious thing to call someone, so sue me -- I hunted down the following:
"asshole": Used in direct reference to the Rev. Fred Phelps, all three of the Husseins, and hypothetical people who complain about their placement in the blogroll (so far nobody has); also used in indirect reference to George W. Bush ("...if he's using [this UN speech] as an opportunity to be an asshole").
"assface": The guy who broke into my car three days before Christmas.
"ass clowns": Used as a general description of certain unnamed people at Fox News.
"ass monkey":Bill O'Reilly. A blustering, egomaniacal ass monkey, to be exact!
"idiot": OK, Stanley did once refer to George W. Bush as "Idiot-in-Chief." And I did use the word in reference to Bush once too, but only conditionally: "If he thinks these European countries will want to give us a hand with [Iraq debt restructuring] when we've summarily denied them [reconstruction contracts], he's an idiot." Also used to describe Judge Roy Moore and Lt. Gen. William Boykin, and I absolutely stand by those.
So really, when you get right down to it, this site doesn't call George W. Bush all that many names. Pretty few, in fact, especially when you consider that this site's entire purpose is to expose his dishonesty and general incompetence. No, no, Anja, no apologies necessary; our vindication is enough. But before we go, let's take a closer look at that last insult, "idiot," for a moment. Here's Ann Coulter decrying the way liberals supposedly wield that word against conservatives to no end:
"After years of defending Clinton, liberals love the piquant irony of calling Bush a liar. For 50 years liberals have called Republicans idiots, fascists, anti-Semites, racists, crooks, shredders of the Constitution and masterminds of Salvadoran death squads. "
Wow, Ann, we had no idea we were doing that. We feel just terrible about it. But wait! No sooner has she whined about being called an idiot than she turns right around and tries to use it back:
"With a great deal of charity – and suspension of disbelief – I was willing to concede that many liberals were merely fatuous idiots."
So you see, Anja, we'll take our lumps for descending into name-calling when we're guilty of it. But if you want to be truly "fair and balanced," make sure you save some of your tsk-tsking for conservative hypocrites like Coulter.
Who is, we maintain, a complete douche.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 6:24 PM
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Last post of 2003: A modest proposal
Got an e-mail from my friend Mark in Atlanta a couple days ago. It included the following:
I was thinking about politics and such, and I'm concerned about the winnability of the election for the Democrats. I mean, attacks on Bush are all well and good, but I don't think it appeals to enough of the electorate to win the presidency with. It would be better, perhaps, to draw a line between September 10th and September 11th Americans. There's nothing wrong with either, I don't think, but the real philosophical issue dividing the nation is over whether we have something to fear, and how that affects our rights. Personally, I like to consider myself a September 10th American. But the September 11th Americans tend to fall in the Republican camp.
Later on.
I like Mark's line of thinking here. We have, post-9/11 in this country, two groups of people: Those who approve of the thigs Bush has done in the wake of that tragedy, and those who do not. Obviously, you know where this site falls on that one. But believe it or not, we understand the thought process of the other side: They're afraid -- and Bush has tapped into that.
Think about it. How could anyone support the pre-emptive, unprovoked invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11? Because Bush made people think we had to be afraid of Iraq. How could anyone support the outrageous restrictions on our constitutional rights contained in the USA PATRIOT Act? Because Bush (and Ashcroft) scared us into thinking they were necessary for our security. How could anyone feel comfortable with the way the Bush administration has tried to censor or impugn the patriotism of anyone who criticizes them? Because they're too afraid to speak out against their Dear Leader in a time of war.
I can remember a time when life wasn't like this. When the World Trade Center was bombed back in 1993, it didn't suddenly turn us into this frightened, reactionary nation. Even when we went to war in Iraq the first time back in 1991, we didn't do it because we were afraid of what we thought Iraq might do; we went to war because we could not abide the injustice of what Iraq had done. And we went into the Middle East, settled the score, won that war in a walk, and came home.
I love my country very much. I'm proud of the things we've accomplished and the way the world at least used to admire us as the planet's greatest example of free democracy. And I'm angry at the way Bush has weakened my country. See, when people talk about what a strong leader Bush is, they don't realize that he's only made himself look strong by comparison by making the rest of us, this country, look weak. If we're scared and intimidated, of course he's going to look strong compared to us. But how did we let ourselves get into that position to begin with.
I'm not saying we have nothing to fear in this bizarre post-9/11 world. But we have two choices: Face our fears, or let them control us. Bush and the Republican Party haven't faced our fears -- in case you haven't noticed, we haven't devoted substantial resources to fighting Osama bin Laden in a long, long time -- they've allowed us all to be controlled by them. PATRIOT acts, mysterious, unexplained "orange alerts," pre-emptive wars: This is not how a strong country, confident in its righteousness and the will of its people, acts. If you have to make big shows of force, then clearly you weren't confident enough that people would believe in your forcefulness on their own.
America wasn't like this before George W. Bush used September 11 to turn us into this scared, erratic nation. But we don't have to be like this forever. I'm going way, way deep on my motivational depth chart and taking a page from Ronald Reagan's playbook: Remember how the Gipper said he wanted to make it "morning in America" again? Well, I want to make it September 10 in America.
Don't take this the wrong way. I don't want airport security guards to go slack and start letting people carry box cutters onto airplanes again, and I don't want us to start looking the other way as al-Qaeda sleeper cells build dirty bombs in their apartments. But neither do I want this country to be ruled by fear. We're better than that. We don't need to restrict our foreign policy to sheer intimidation, and we don't need to curtail the very freedoms that made this country the greatest on earth -- we can find better solutions to our problems than that. But we need a president brave enough to try them. We need a president who will stand up to terror and say, "We will fight you, but in that fight you will not be permitted to force us to cater to our worst instincts. We will be vigilant, we will be strong, but we will not be afraid. The principles America was founded on sustained it for more than 200 years before the World Trade Center fell, and I trust those same principles to sustain it now. We're going to turn our backs on fear and return to those principles, and we're going to make it September 10 in America again."
Instead of a president who cynically makes decisions based on how easily he can scare the public into trusting them, I want a president who exudes a strength and confidence that can be reflected in the people. Instead of an administration that operates in such secrecy that a confused, uninformed public has no choice but to live in a vague state of worry, I want an administration that trusts the American public enough to be open and honest with what it knows. Instead of a country that tries to cure its own fear by projecting that fear onto other nations and bullying them, I want a country that's confident enough in America's goodness and rightness that it can deal with other countries using friendship and negotiation rather than taunts and threats.
If we haven't bought too completely into the idea of a world where George W. Bush and George W. Bush alone isn't too afraid to know what to do, we can have a president, an administration, a country like that. And we can make it September 10 in America again.
Let's do that in 2004, people.
Happy New Year...holler at you again soon.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:35 PM
Chris, why do you hate America? We've had two, count 'em, two New Year's celebrations since 9/11, both of which went off more or less without a hitch. Do you still have such little faith in what New York Mayor Richard Bloomberg calls "the world's greatest police force"?
When can we expect Bush supporters to lay into this traitor for making those comments? I mean, if this isn't undermining America's resolve and giving aid and comfort to terrorists, what is?
If nobody's going to slam Shays, does that mean he's right? And does that mean we finally need to admit that when Howard Dean said the capture of Saddam Hussein hadn't made America safer, he may not have been completely nuts?
(On an unrelated topic, please welcome new blogroll passenger Nitpicker, and make him feel at home.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 7:37 AM
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Why is George W. Bush looking longingly at Homer Simpson?
Because he likes ogling Homer's exquisitely manly physique? No, you filthy sodomite, our president is as pure as the driven snow and would never be turned on by such a thing! If George looks a little envious as he gazes upon Homer's rippling body, it's probably because of a recent poll indicating that more British people would trust Homer than Dubya if given the choice of skydiving with either of the two. (Twenty percent said they'd want to go with Homer; only 8 percent chose Bush.)
We'll readily concede that Limey pollsters evidently have a whole freakin' lot of free time on their hands these days. But still...damn. Homer, you'll recall, is the man who once lit a Q-tip on fire so he could see better inside his head; as far as we can remember, however, he has never choked on a pretzel.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:07 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: 21st in a series
Yup, this is the big number 21 for Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, which is finally of legal drinking age. If you've followed this feature from the start, you've probably gathered two things about Ann Coulter: She's a lousy writer, and she isn't that hot. It's too bad that title is already kind of long and unwieldy, because we'd like to point out one other integral part of Ann's existence — she's a raging hypocrite. (Sure, we could add that onto the title if we really wanted to, but we're worried that the floodgates would open and pretty soon you'd be reading Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and a Hypocrite and She Isn't Even That Hot and Plus, She Has an Adam's Apple. And you don't really want that, do you?
But anyway, back to the whole hypocrite thing. Ann loves to do stuff like fume about the way Democrats make fun of Republicans for their physical appearances — and then point out a half-dozen or so Democrats she thinks are ugly. Or chastise the left for resorting to name-calling in political discussions — and then calling them names so immature your average third-grader would snicker at them. Ann's hypocrisy-o-matic was churning at full bore last week; she started out criticizing the way liberals in "blue states" (urban, heavily industrialized states on either coast) have this really snotty contempt for people in the "red states" (more rural, conservative states in the southern and central parts of the U.S.), but in making those criticisms of the blue states, her attitude takes on the very snobbishness and contempt she aims to decry. You'd think that a decent editor would gently tap her on the shoulder and ask for some mild revisions when Ann commits the very same offenses she just got finished condemning, but after reading "When Blue States Attack," you may wonder if an editor ever came within ten miles of this column:
Uttering the standard liberal cliche a few years ago, Richard Reeves described "representatives of the new South" as "Republicans of old puritan definition, righteous folk afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun." (I'll skip the context of Reeves' insight, except to note that apparently aging liberals view sodomy with a chubby intern in the back office as "having fun.")
Well, Clinton was probably having fun, wasn't he? You know Ann's argument has to be getting off on the wrong foot when she can't even wait past the first paragraph to whip out another jab at a president who, at the time this column was written, had not been president for 1,069 days (and counting). Do note, however, that Ann at least admitted she had chosen to "skip the context" of Reeves' column. She's still taking quotes out of context and twisting their meanings past the breaking point, but at least she's admitting it now, which for Ann is quite a step.
Like all beliefs universally held by liberals, Reeves' aphorism is the precise opposite of the truth.
Oh, Ann, let's trim the fat off those fancy ten-dollar words and cut this sentence down to what you're really trying to say: Everything liberals believe is a lie. But hey, thanks for not making sweeping generalizations or anything like that.
It's the blue states that are constantly sending lawyers to the red states to bother everyone. Americans in the red states look at a place like New York City – where, this year, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade featured a gay transvestite as Mrs. Claus – and say, Well, I guess some people like it, but it's not for me.
Boy, that's rich. Evidently Ann missed the Supreme Court decision earlier this very year in which an anti-sodomy law in Texas — that's a red state if ever there was one, kids — was struck down because the Court just could not figure out why a government has any business regulating what consenting adults do in their bedrooms. Going so far as to pass laws against stuff like that sort of goes beyond simply shrugging and saying "it's not for me," don'tcha think?
Meanwhile, liberals in New York and Washington are consumed with what people are doing in Alabama and Nebraska. Nadine Strossen and Barry Lynn cannot sleep at night knowing that someone, somewhere, is gazing upon something that could be construed as a religious symbol.
As crazy as this sounds, Ann, some liberals in Alabama and Nebraska are even concerned with what people are doing in Alabama and Nebraska. This Alabama liberal, for instance, had to watch as millions of his tax dollars went down the pooper just so that Roy Moore could mount a pointless crusade to have his two-and-a-half-ton Ten Commandments monument displayed in the middle of the state judicial building instead of in his private office where it belonged — and then break the law by refusing to obey the court order for its removal. The chief justice of the state supreme court! Breaking the laws he's supposed to uphold! But yeah, you're right, we liberal Alabamians should probably just butt out.
It's never Jerry Falwell flying to Manhattan to review high-school graduation speeches, or James Dobson making sure New York City schools give as much time to God as to Mother Earth, or Pat Robertson demanding a creche next to the schools' Kwanzaa displays. (Is it just me, or is Kwanzaa becoming way too commercialized?)
You're right, Ann, Falwell and Dobson and Robertson never do any of those things. They don't have to: They have access to entire television and radio networks through which they can exhort their willing followers to do all that dirty work for 'em.
But when four schools in southern Ohio have displays of the Ten Commandments, sirens go off in Nadine Strossen's Upper West Side apartment. It will surprise no one to learn that the American Civil Liberties Union promptly sued and the schools are now Ten Commandments-free. (At least students in the Ten Commandments schools, as opposed to schools in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, might reasonably be expected to know how to count up to 10.)
In case you just haven't gotten your fill of Ms. Coulter's Homestyle Deep-Dish Irony™ yet, here's another helping: Coulter decries the effete anti-"red state" snobbery allegedly practiced by blue-state liberals, and then proceeds to slag off blue-state urban centers as filthy cesspools where the kids can't even count. If Manhattan is such a lost cause, Ann, why do you still live there?
From the Chelsea section of Manhattan, the gay, Bronx-born Puerto Rican executive director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, tossed and turned all night thinking about the Ten Commandments display on the Elkhart, Ind., municipal building, which had been there, without incident, since 1958. The ACLU sued and the monument was hauled off.
Aren't any of Ann's fans concerned that in addition to being a caustic reverse-geographic snob, she's also a vicious homophobe and a racist? Or maybe you can explain to us why she felt it was necessary to point out the fact that Romero is gay and Puerto Rican.
In Ohio, Richland County Common Pleas Judge James DeWeese had a framed poster of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. The ACLU sued and the Ten Commandments came down. Compare that to the late New York judge Elliott Wilk, who famously displayed a portrait of communist revolutionary Che Guevara on his office wall. (Che, Castro, Hussein – evidently the only bearded revolutionary these people don't like is Jesus Christ.) And yet, no one from Ohio ever sued Wilk.
In between Ann's fatuous claims that liberals love Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein — the first time she's tried to advance that asinine accusation since, well, the last hundred thousand times — we hope you found the two critical phrases in this paragraph: "in his courtroom" and "on his office wall." See, how you decorate your own office is your own business. But a courtroom, where justice is administered on behalf of the people, belongs to the people, be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Baha'i, Scientologist, or Jedi knight. And as such, judges don't have the right to impose their own religious beliefs on any Tom, Dick or Harry who finds himself standing before the bench. Is Ann really so dense she doesn't understand the subtle difference here? Oh, that's right, she thinks "nuance" is for sissies.
The ACLU got word of a Ten Commandments monument in a public park in Plattsmouth, Neb. (pop. 7,000), and immediately swooped in to demand that the offensive symbol be removed. Not being from New York, Plattsmouth didn't want to litigate. Soon cranes were in the park ripping out a monument that had sat there, not bothering anyone, for 40 years.
ACLU busybodies sued Johnson County, Iowa, demanding that it remove a Ten Commandments monument that had been in a public courtyard a since 1964. Within a year, the 2,500-pound granite monument was gone.
Mail-order minister Barry Lynn's Americans United for Separation of Church and State – a group curiously devoid of both Americans and churchgoers – sued little Chester County, Pa., demanding that it remove a Ten Commandments plaque that has hung on the courthouse wall since 1920.
"The Upper West Side and Malibu United" also sued the city of Everett, Wash., demanding the removal of a Ten Commandments monument in front of the police station. AU legal director Ayesha Khan explained they had nothing like that back in Pakistan and look how well things turned out there.
Sure, this sounds like the work of naughty Satanist liberals out to wipe any mention of religion off the face of the earth. But did it ever occur to Ann that if religious monuments like those are allowed to stand, the communities in question leave themselves open to demands by any random group of nutcases that a monument of their own be allowed to go up beside the Christian ones?
In an earlier column on a similar topic, Ann bemoaned the case of the Columbine High School students who painted individual tiles as a way of mourning the shooting rampage back in the spring of 1999. Tiles that certain students had decorated with religious themes were ordered by a court to be taken down, and Ann, not surprisingly, railed against this — while conveniently failing to mention that had they been left up, other tiles featuring pentagrams and the slogan "God is Hate" would've had to remain as well. Also, in Laramie, Wyoming, earlier this year, legendary homophobe and asshole extraordinaire Fred Phelps demanded that he be allowed to erect a monument in the city park commemorating the day that murdered college student Matthew Shepard "entered hell." Phelps said that if the city could keep a monument to the Ten Commandments on the park's grounds, it had to display his as well. Lovely!
Of course, this could all be solved if people would stop trying to use public property as canvases upon which to display their righteousness and instead leave the Ten Commandments-recognizing to their homes — and their hearts. Why is that such a hard pill to swallow?
(Perhaps in addition to the usual processing requirements for new immigrants, there should be a form that says: Welcome to America! You will no longer have to live in a mud hut, earn 32 cents a year, and have members of your family periodically dragged off and shot. However, you may, on occasion, have to see people praying.)
Nothin' wrong with that. Just as long as they're not being forced to join in.
The alleged legal basis for removing all of these Ten Commandments monuments is the establishment clause of the First Amendment. That clause provides: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The vigilant observer will note instantly that none of the monuments cases involves Congress, a law or an establishment of religion.
They do involve a legislative body, a direct action taken by said legislative body, and an endorsement of religion.
Monuments are not "laws," the Plattsmouth, Neb., public park is not "Congress," and the Ten Commandments are not a religion. To the contrary, all three major religions believe in Moses and the Ten Commandments.
Wow, Ann actually lowered herself to acknowledging Islam as a "major religion" (even if she didn't mention it by name) and admitting that they do, in fact, adhere to the Ten Commandments. Wow, maybe she got a little bit of the Christmas spirit after all!
Liberals might as well say the establishment clause prohibits Republicans from breathing, as that it prohibits a Ten Commandments display. But over the past few years, courts have ordered the removal of dozens and dozens of Ten Commandments displays.
How a local judge acknowledging a higher power with a symbol used by all three major religions is the same as Congress establishing a national religion remains a legal mystery – like, how the University of Michigan can use one admissions standard for blacks and another for whites and yet it's not race discrimination.
Blah blah blah, again with the "admissions standard" whining. What Ann calls an "admissions standard" is in actuality a points system that adds a certain number of points for being a minority — just as it adds a certain number of points for a prospective student being a legacy or the offspring of a major donor. But has she ever railed against any of that?
How about a truce? The intolerant religious fanatics in the red states will continue not complaining about high taxes, secular education and gay-rights parades in the blue states, and the proponents of tolerance in the blue states will stop bothering everyone in the red states.
At the risk of sounding rude...ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? The "intolerant religious fanatics in the red states" do nothing but complain about high taxes, secular education and gay-rights parades! And that's where Ann's righteous indignation about ACLU "meddling" in individual communities' actions really flies off the rails. The only reason Christian right-wingers don't make nuisances of themselves filing lawsuits in far-flung cities and states is because that's not their strategy; their M.O. is to impose their narrow beliefs on an entire country by supporting constitutional amendments for stuff like school prayer and bans on gay marriage. So far it hasn't worked (praise the Lord), but that doesn't mean they're not still trying it.
If you don't like the concept of certain people meddling in the affairs of others, go ahead and diss the ACLU all you want. But in the interest of fairness, save some invective for the radical right-wingers who want the government to stick its nose into your bedroom (and your uterus, should you have one) and who seem to insist that it's the government's responsibility, as opposed to that of the citizens, to promote religion far and wide. And whatever you do, don't buy into Ann's fairytale of the "red-state" conservatives placidly, contentedly sitting back and not allowing themselves to be concerned with anything that goes on in any other part of the country. We know what you're thinking: Has Ann Coulter actually described something that has no basis whatsoever in actual fact? As hard as it is to believe, yes, she has! If that shocks you, don't miss the next installment of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, 'cause she's sure to do it again! Peace out, and here's to a brighter, happier, regime-changed 2004!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:12 PM
Monday, December 29, 2003
Brain Dump Part Trois: What GWBWYPGN Did on Its Christmas Vacation edition
We heard the anguished cries, the clamor for new posts, the...OK, we can't back that up. In the end, we estimate that exactly four people noticed GWBWYPGN took a 10-day hiatus over the Christmas holiday, and of those four, maybe two gave a rat's ass (and we're probably related by blood to both of them). Nevertheless, the blog is back, and it's ready for some action. Maybe not quite as much action as before, at least for a while, since a certain blogger's laptop was helpfully removed from his car in Atlanta last week (more on that later). But as long as Bush sucks — and yes, Virginia, he still does — we'll be here to call him on it.
OK. First of all: It's time to come clean on whom we're supporting for president. A lot of anti-Bush blogs have already done this; we chose not to for a while, because we were afraid that if we endorsed Candidate A, the supporters of Candidates B, C, D, and E might stop coming here. But after a lovely weekend in Columbia, South Carolina, spent getting signatures on a certain candidate's petition to be added to the Democratic primary ballot, there's no point in being coy or beating around the bush. So here it is.
This blog [heart]s Wesley Clark.
Here's the deal: A lot of the candidates — actually, all the candidates — are angry at Bush. Which is good, the guy's a lousy president even on his best day. But the problem is, anger ain't enough. If any of the Dems are fortunate enough to boot Bush out of the White House in November, he/she's going to be presented with tons of problems, including (but not exclusive to) an ongoing occupation in Iraq, a massive national debt, rampant unemployment, and former allies around the world who now wouldn't pee on us if we were on fire. And if the new Democratic president still doesn't have anything except Angry At Bush to solve these problems, we're going to be in a heap of trouble.
Wes Clark, Gorblessim, has more than anger. He's got the military experience to handle the Iraq occupation better than any of the neocons currently screwing it up; he's got a plan to turn the deficit around and take us back to the surpluses that rat-bastard Clinton cursed us with; he's got a job-creating plan that will stop encouraging American corporations to ship jobs overseas; and his experience as supreme allied commander of NATO will enable him to mend fences with the countries Bush has pissed off like it was his job.
Yes, the first priority here is getting Bush out of office. But you'll remember that a candidate running on nothing but I'm Not That Guy is what got us into this mess to begin with. Remember 1999 and 2000? Bush had no plan, no vision, no record of substance that anyone could point to. The only plank in his platform was I'm Not Clinton, and millions of people were dumb enough to fall for it. If the candidate we nominate in 2004 has nothing but I'm Not Bush in his arsenal, we're no better than those people are. Wes Clark has way more than that, plus he's got arguably the broadest appeal of any of the candidates running and hence the best chance at beating Bush. And he's our man.
That said: Just because we've come out of the closet doesn't mean this is going to become an all-Clark-all-the-time blog, nor does it mean we're going to start laying into the other Democratic candidates (unless they do something monumentally stupid and detrimental to the chances of the Democratic Party as a whole). We really want people to continue wasting their valuable time at this site no matter whom they support, be it Clark, Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, Sharpton or anyone else — so in the interest of fairness, as a gesture of good faith, we're adding links to all of the Democratic candidates' campaign sites over on the right side of this page. If you haven't checked out any of them yet, do it. The election is closer than people think, and it isn't getting any further away. Funny how that whole linear time thing works.
Sooo...anyway. What else. To the Virginia Cavaliers, congrats on winning the Continental Tire Bowl; to Wes Clark, thanks for signing the book; to Al Franken, I devoured "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" in the span of a few hours on Christmas Day, and if someone doesn't give you a Pulitzer for it, you should go to a trophy store and just have one made for yourself; and to Howard Dean, if Osama bin Laden has already taken responsibility for 9/11, you don't have to get your boxers in a twist over "pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found." (OK, we're sorry about that...but do refer to the "unless they do something monumentally stupid" clause in previous paragraph.)
Oh, and to the "alternative shopper" who busted out the window of my Jetta a week ago and made off with my laptop computer AND my best Georgia hat: Nice one, assface! The fuck is your problem? Didn't think I needed that stuff? Or is shattering only ONE window your idea of "peace on Earth and goodwill toward men"? Son! Of! A! Bitch!
But OK, funny story. The Atlanta police officer who came to take my report was writing down the description of my car, and as he was doing so he noticed the "I don't have to like Bush to love America" sticker on the bumper. He asked me (jokingly) if maybe the guy who boosted my stuff was a Bush supporter and I said who knows, wouldn't put it past 'em. And the cop says, "Well, then I guess I better hide my car too, 'cause I don't like Bush either." Brownie points for the APD.
Last item: You might've thought even Ann Coulter would use the Christmas holiday to look a little deeper into her soul and vow to devote more of her energies to making the world a better, more compassionate place...but you'd be wrong, you bleeding-heart goody-twoshoes pantywaist hippie, you. Her Coulterness did release a column last week, on Christmas Day no less, which means Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will have to grind its rusty gears into motion once again (probably tomorrow). Keep your eyes peeled...and your bullshit detectors on "stun."
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:45 AM
Thursday, December 25, 2003
Frequently Lodged Accusations: The George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?! FAQ
1. Who are you and why should anyone give a rat’s ass what you have to say? My name is Doug Gillett; I was born in Roanoke, Virginia, but grew up in Georgia and graduated from the University of Georgia (w00t!) in 1999. I currently live in Birmingham, Alabama, and work in the publications department at one of the universities in town, which does not sanction or in any way associate itself with the views expressed on this blog.
As for why anyone should give a rat’s ass what I have to say, hell, I don’t know. Nobody put a gun to your head and made your ass come here.
2. How did you get started blogging? Back in the fall of 2002, right after I moved to Birmingham, my friend Larry said he was starting a blog and asked me if I wanted to participate. I’d never blogged before, but I’m kind of opinionated and love spouting off to anyone and everyone who’ll listen, so I said sure. We did that for a while, blogging about just whatever popped into our heads, and round about the middle of 2003 I realized that a lot of the stuff I was putting up on there was pretty political (and pretty anti-Bush). I didn’t want to just unilaterally turn our blog into a political site, so I "went solo" and started my own blog that I could devote specifically to politics.
It was called "Flowers for Dubya," and it was basically a blog diary for George W. Bush to take down as he underwent a brain operation and got progressively smarter and smarter (as in Flowers for Algernon). The point was that as he got smarter and smarter, he realized how horrible his policies were and how dishonest some of the people in his administration were; that worked for a couple of months or so, and then I realized that the conceit had played itself out and just wasn’t funny anymore (if in fact it ever had been). So I ditched that and started GWBWYPGN?! as a straight-up mostly non-ironic critique of Bush and his administration. Which seems to be working better.
3. Where does the name "George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!" come from? The book Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now! by Dr. Seuss, who will always be one of my favorite writers ever.
4. Why do you hate George W. Bush so much? Sigh. I don’t hate George W. Bush. But I don’t agree with his policies and I don’t think he or his administration can be trusted. That’s what this blog is about.
5. But not everything on here is specifically about George W. Bush. No, there’s stuff here about his administration, Republicans in general, the Christian right, Ann Coulter, etc., but it all sort of basically revolves around how conservatives (George W. Bush being the most prominent) are screwing up the country.
6. Now that you mention her name — what the hell’s up with that Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn’t Even That Hot feature? Why did you single her out specifically for ridicule? Because she’s a lousy writer, and she isn’t even that hot. I won’t hold her non-hotness against her personally (though I just don’t understand why so many right-wingers act so smug about having this supposedly hot blonde on their side when she isn’t even that hot), but I will hold her personally responsible for being a terrible writer. The kinds of arguments she makes can be picked apart by most folks with a junior-high-level education, and yet so many right-wingers think she’s God’s gift to political commentary, in spite of the fact that every one of her arguments basically boils down to "Liberals are traitors." She’s a lowest-common-denominator writer no many how many books she sells, and she deserves to get taken apart week after week. Dissecting her columns was something I decided I wanted to do on this site the minute I started blogging.
7. Why is her name always hyperlinked to a kids’ site about the Adam’s apple? Heh. My lame little attempt at a Google-bomb. But come on, the woman is mannish.
8. What’s the most popular post you’ve ever put on this site? It’s hard to tell, because visitors to this site are only tracked by what day or time they’re visiting; there’s really no good way to tell exactly which post they’re looking at. The most number of hits I’ve ever gotten in a single day was February 13, 2004, which I’m pretty sure was in response to Project F$#! You, Ann Coulter; I’d put that up in response to a particularly dishonest and egregious column Coulter had written smearing former Sen. Max Cleland, and a lot of other bloggers linked to that one, for which I was very appreciative (and very flattered). But maybe the most popular post ever, which random people still link to and visit from time to time, is "Oval Office Space" from March 26, 2004.
9. Yeah, I remember that one. It was long. Again, nobody put a gun to your head . . .
10. You can be kind of an asshole sometimes, you know that? Damn right. I didn’t start this blog to be nice, I did it because I was angry and I wanted people to open their eyes to the bad policy and dishonesty coming out of this administration. Sometimes I get my point across with a straightforward essay-type post; other times I tell jokes or make fun of people. But I do make an effort to keep people entertained.
11. Do you really expect Bush fans to change their minds after reading the blog? Would I like it? Of course. Do I expect it? Not really. I like to think that I’ve made people think, maybe ask a few more questions than they otherwise would have, but so many of the Bush fans out there are so blindly, unquestioningly faithful to Dear Leader that I can’t count on converting too many of them. But hey, even one or two would be nice.
12. Do you do any work with the Kerry campaign? Funny you should ask — as a matter of fact right now I’m the communications chair for Alabama for Kerry.
13. Do they know you’re doing this? Yeah, but this blog is not an official part of our campaign efforts, and it is not endorsed by John Kerry or his campaign.
14. Wow, if even they won’t endorse you, you must really suck. Hey, now who’s being the asshole?
15. Sorry. But seriously, this blog is pretty simple — aside from the occasional photo and the stuff like comments or site tracking that you can get pretty much anywhere, there aren’t a lot of interesting features, it’s just pretty much plain text. Well, aside from hyperlinking and making stuff bold or italicized, I pretty much don’t know jack squat about designing Web sites or writing code. But this pretty well serves my purposes. And if I got into anything substantially more complex or involved than this, I’d probably get to the point where I was doing it 24 hours a day.
16. How many hours a day do you mess with this blog? Ummm . . . let’s say "more than I probably should," and leave it at that.
18. Those are all liberal blogs, pretty much, aren’t they? Yeah. But I also visit some right-wing blogs on a fairly regular basis, just for the sheer train-wreck fascination of it all — Adam Yoshida is one that’s borderline insane, but I also read Andrew Sullivan, who can be pretty thoughtful and perceptive when he’s not cooing like a schoolgirl over how macho and heroic Dubya is. In the middle are sites like Moxie, which can be intelligent from time to time, and Freedom of Thought, which rarely is, but I read it anyway (again, just for curiosity’s sake). I used to go to The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, but that one’s so brainless it’s hard to read it even just for the sake of ridicule.
19. So how do I get linked? If you want to get linked in a post, it’s pretty much a crapshoot — I just link to whatever I’ve run across that day that’s particularly noteworthy or outrageous. Same thing kind of goes for the blogroll (I just put sites on there that I’ve run across and think are particularly good), though if you let me know that you’ve already linked me and you ask really nicely, that’s a good way to get on the blogroll too.
21. Sike! I don’t really want you to link me. I’m just planning on sending you some hate mail, you traitorous Commie scum. Yay! I love hate mail. Rest assured that if you send me hate mail, I will post it on the site so everyone can read it.
22. Oh. Well, maybe I’ll just put a snide remark in one of the comments threads. You’re welcome to do that too. I’ve never deleted a comment or banned a commenter, and I don’t plan to. If you have an opinion you want to post on one of the threads, put it up there and have at it along with all the other commenters. Some of them may like you; some of them may not.
23. Hey, did you know there are conservatives posting in the comments threads? Yup. They’re welcome just like everyone else. Some of them are even friends and/or relatives of mine.
24. So let me ask you this: What are you going to do if George W. Bush gets re-elected in 2004? I guess I’ll be blogging here for another four years, then.
25. What about if he loses and John Kerry gets elected? Then I’m going to kick back, change the name of the blog to "Mission Accomplished" and devote the entire thing to Georgia football, pop culture and pictures of Elisha Cuthbert Keira Knightley. No, seriously, I’m sure the right wing will be completely unable to take the fact that the voters of the United States sent their beloved Georgie home, and like any typical 4-year-old who throws a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way, they’ll be spending every waking minute to try and bring down John Kerry just like they did (unsuccessfully) with Bill Clinton — so I’ll probably keep the blog going just to counter all that.
26. Speaking of Elisha Cuthbert Keira Knightley . . . why do you keep mentioning her? Because we're dating, remember? Duh!
27. Liar. OK, not really. I just put that up there to make fun of the fact that Bush always says he supports stuff like a patients’ bill of rights or more equipment for the troops even though he’s never actually done anything in favor of those things, so by that rationale, I’m dating this actress even though I’ve never actually met her before in my life.
28. But in the back of your mind you’re kind of secretly hoping that somehow she’ll stumble across this site, and it’ll turn out she’s this hard-core bleeding-heart liberal and she’s so impressed with the blog that she’ll shoot you an e-mail telling you how awesome you are, right? Ummm . . . why, no. That's, uh, absurd. Don't be silly. Let's, um, move on to the next question . . .
29. You’re pathetic. By the way, whatever happened to Elisha Cuthbert? We drifted apart. There’s really nothing else I can say about that.
30. What’s with the quotes that always appear at the top of the page, right below the title? Those are from "The Simpsons." I don’t know why, I just like that show a lot. (In the interest of full disclosure, that concept is actually stolen from Sadly, No!, which puts up a different quote from "Seinfeld," also a historically awesome show, every week or so.)
31. What kind of car do you drive, what’s your favorite music group, what was your major in college, what’s your favorite color, did you get to see Georgia’s historic 41-14 thrashing of Tennessee in person in 2003, do you have any pets, what’s your favorite board game, and do you really think Jenna Bush is hot? A 2000 Jetta, the Pet Shop Boys, print journalism, blue, hell yes, a Brittany spaniel named Penny, Scrabble, and, sadly, yes.
32. The Pet Shop Boys? You’re not gay, are you? Not last I checked, no.
33. I thought they stopped putting out records, like, years ago. No, they’ve been releasing records consistently ever since "West End Girls" in 1985. In fact, they just released a greatest-hits collection that has two brand-new songs.
34. That’s kind of messed up that you know all that. Well, you’re entitled to your opinion.
35. I MUST SOLICIT YOUR CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION. THIS IS VIRTURE OF IT’S NATURE AS BEING UTTERLY CONFIDENTIAL AND TOP SECRET. WE ARE TOP OFFICIALS OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF NIGERIA CONTRACT REVIEW PANEL WHO ARE INTERESTED IN IMPORTATION OF GOODS INTO OUR COUNTRY… OK, I think we’re done here.
Further questions can be submitted, if you're really that desperate for something to do, to georgemustgo(at)hotmail.com.
Edited 6/22/04 to account for new pseudo-relationship with Keira Knightley and other extraneous bullshit.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:01 AM
