Uh...¿Ésta no es la línea para el restroom de los hombres?
Two fun links from Atrios today. The first concerns the cheering crowds that witnessed Bush's campaign stop at U.S.A. Industries on Long Island — all that enthusiasm must mean they truly believe in Bush's message of peace and prosperity for America, right? Well, let's see:
Security people kept reporters from interviewing the workers at U.S.A. until the president was on the way to his next stop.
But when workers were finally interviewed -- these people who made up the bulk of the president's cheering audience in New York -- Bush's performance turned out to be, if anything, even more impressive.
"No speak English," said the first worker, smiling apologetically.
"No speak English," said the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth workers way-laid in the crowd.
But you think the tax cuts should be made permanent, as he says?
"Sorry, no English," said another.
So Bush travels to New York City, site of the World Trade Center tragedy, site of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the spot from whence he bravely vowed to avenge the deaths of the thousands of WTC victims, and he can't even find anybody to go to his campaign appearance who actually understands what he's saying? (This does explain a little better why you don't see the GOP pushing that official-language idea anymore.)
Of course, if Kerry tries to explain this to the cheering crowds who greeted Bush on Long Island, they won't have a frickin' clue what he's saying. Ahhh...now it's all starting to make sense.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:16 AM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, Version 30.0: With introduction presented in BibleVision™
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, Chapter 30, verses 1-24:
1 And though her lies were many, the Coulter didst continue to speak them;
2 She didst transform William Safire into a liberal, and the people trembled with fear, for they knew the end-times were upon them.
3 The Coulter condemned the liberals, saying they knew not of GOD,
4 And the liberals did protesteth, but the right wing branded them as traitors and bid them to be silent.
5 And in her mendacity, the Coulter didst proceed to trick them with a false idol:
6 She held aloft the film that had been forg'd by Gibson of Babylon, and said, "Look you upon me, true patriots and Christians!
7 "Here is the film that hath been created by Gibson of Babylon, that he hath offer'd up to the LORD;
8 "It speaketh of the Passion of our Savior, JESUS CHRIST, and lo, though many shall say it cast much aspersion on the Semites, thou shalt not criticize it;
9 "For it is the work of the LORD, and any who speak against it, speak against the LORD.
10 "The liberals are sure to protest it, and by their GOD-hatred you shall know them;
11 "I decree that they shalt spend eternity in the fires of Gehenna, where there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth."
12 It was after this condemnation by the Coulter that the skies did open, and a dazzling light shone through the clouds;
13 And the people didst tremble anew, for they knew the LORD was upon them. And thus He spake:
14 "Ann, thou hast displeased Me with thy falsehoods;
15 "With thy voice hast thou slander'd the brave Max Cleland, and tarnish'd the land with thy hypocrisy;
16 "Thou hast taken my commandment to love thy neighbor, and thou made'st an incidental tenet of it.
17 "Now thou stand'st before Me with a false idol, and thou hast encourag'd the masses to worship it;
18 "Thou hast said all those who love the film of Gibson of Babylon love GOD, and all those who do not enjoy the film are not of GOD.
19 "Thou hast equated the work of Gibson of Babylon with the work of the LORD thy GOD, and thou hast broken My first commandment.
20 "Begone, Coulter! For it is written, 'You shall worship the LORD your GOD, and Him alone shall you serve.' "
21 And the LORD didst transform the Coulter into an Afghan hound,
22 But not before the Coulter penned yet another scroll of lies and excrescence, and she didst again blaspheme the LORD by titling it "W.W.J.K.: Who Would Jesus Kill?";
23 But the scribes of Alabama didst tear the scroll to pieces, and bade the crowd to laugh,
24 And the crowd didst laugh, and it was good.
The William Safire, The New York Times' in-house "conservative" — who endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992, like so many conservatives — was sure Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" would incite anti-Semitic violence. Thus far, the pogroms have failed to materialize.
Holy shit. Is Coulter basing her entire column on the idea that William Safire is a liberal? Ladies and gentlemen, the complete psychotic break we've long feared from Ann may finally have happened. Shut your doors and windows and don't come outside until you get the all-clear from the local authorities.
With all the subtlety of a Mack truck, Safire called Gibson's movie a version of "the medieval 'passion play,' preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as 'Christ killers.'" (Certainly every Aryan Nation skinhead murderer I've ever met was also a devoted theater buff and "passion play" aficionado.)
We're trying real hard, real freaking hard, not to make a joke about Coulter having met vast numbers of Aryan Nation skinhead murderers. It would be so easy to do — oh, God, so very, very easy. Why don't you use this pause to make your own joke, chuckle softly at it, and then move on.
The "passion play" has been put on in Germany since at least 1633. I guess 1633 would be "pre-Hitler." In addition, Moses walked the Earth "pre-Hitler." The wheel was invented "pre-Hitler." People ate soup "pre-Hitler." Referring to the passion play as "pre-Hitler" is a slightly fancier version of every adolescent's favorite argument: You're like Hitler!
Is it just us, or is Ann making entirely too much out of Safire's "pre-Hitler" modifier? She acts like she's earned some international medal for investigative journalism for running Safire's comment through her Demagog-O-Matic decoder ring and deducing that he's comparing the anti-Semitism of the early Passion plays with that of Hitler, as if it was some big secret, but...actually, Ann, that's precisely what Safire was doing, and it doesn't look like he was hedging in any way. What's your next news flash, the fact that Andrew Sullivan is gay?
Despite repeated suggestions from liberals -- including the in-house "conservative" and Clinton-supporter at the Times -- Hitler is not what happens when you gin up Christians.
Who said "Hitler is what happens when you gin up Christians"? Wasn't us. Wasn't that nasty liberal Safire. (Jeez, you can't imagine how stupid we felt just typing those words. Safire, a stealth liberal? Surely somewhere on the Town Hall editing food chain, there had to be an editor willing to say, "Ann, sweetie, we love you and everything, but...that's pretty f$#!ing retarded, even for you.")
Like Timothy McVeigh, the Columbine killers and the editorial board of The New York Times, Hitler detested Christians.
Ah, yes. Liberals hate Christians, we're back to that old line again. We've scoffed at it before, but at this point its utter stupidity doesn't even merit the scoffing. We will, however, point out that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian, and as a right-wing militia member detested all manner of non-Christian people. Jews, f'rinstance.
Indeed, Hitler denounced Christianity as an "invention of the Jew" and vowed that the "organized lie (of Christianity) must be smashed" so that the state would "remain the absolute master." Interestingly, this was the approach of all the great mass murderers of the last century -- all of whom were atheists: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
Boy, Ann spends the better part of a year calling down the wrath of God upon Saddam Hussein (Muslim), and now that he's getting lice-checked in Gitmo, he doesn't even make her list of great mass murderers. Some gratitude, Ann! What is he, chopped liver?
In the United States, more than 30 million babies have been killed by abortion since Roe v. Wade, vs. seven abortion providers killed. Yeah -- keep your eye on those Christians!
But according to liberals, it's Christianity that causes murder. (And don't get them started on Zionism.)
Nobody can throw together a straw man like our dear Ann. With all the words she crams into the mouths of us liberals week after week, it's a wonder we get a word in edgewise.
Like their Muslim friends still harping about the Crusades, liberals won't "move on" from the Spanish Inquisition. In the entire 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, about 30,000 people were killed. That's an average of less than 100 a year. Stalin knocked off that many kulaks before breakfast.
Maybe, but Stalin didn't single out a specific religious group for killing — he pretty much purged anyone who got in his way. By the way, does anyone see the agonizing irony in the fact that Ann claims to have such respect for life, getting on her soap box about abortion, but when it comes to 30,000 dead in the Inquisition, she's all, "Ehhh, that ain't that many?" Especially when you consider that Ann has lowballed the Inquisition body count by, oh, a little over 90 percent. Is this another one of those things she just assumes nobody's going to check up on?
But Safire argues that viewers of "The Passion" will see the Jewish mob and think: "Who was responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain deserves to be punished?"
Let's see: It was a Roman who ordered Christ's execution, and Romans who did all the flaying, taunting and crucifying.
Anyone who has seen this movie, or even read anything about it, knows that Ann is telling a flat-out lie here. Romans did all the flaying, taunting and crucifying? Ohhh nooo...the card says Moops.
Perhaps Safire is indulging in his own negative stereotyping about Jews by assuming they simply viewed Romans as "the help."
But again I ask: Does anyone at the Times have the vaguest notion what Christianity is?
Oh, for Christ's sake, Ann, quit being such a f$#!in' retard.
(Besides people who go around putting up nativity scenes that have to be taken down by court order?) The religion that toppled the Roman Empire -- anyone?
Actually, as a commenter to World O'Crap's take on this column pointed out, the Roman Empire was Christian when it fell — at the hands of pagan barbarian hordes.
Jesus' suffering and death is not a Hatfields-and-McCoys story demanding retaliation.
No news to us, Ann, but you might want to forward that memo to your pal Mel.
The gist of the religion that transformed the world is: God's only son came to Earth to take the punishment we deserved.
If the Jews had somehow managed to block Jesus' crucifixion and He had died in old age of natural causes, there would be no salvation through Christ and no Christianity. Whatever possible responses there may be to that story, this is not one of them: Damn those Jews for being a part of God's plan to save my eternal soul!
Congratulations, Ann, you've apparently mastered the vagaries of the Chewbacca Defense. "If the Jews hadn't killed Christ, there would be no Christianity, so there's no reason for anyone to get mad at the Jews! It just doesn't make any sense!" No, it doesn't, but you know what? People do it anyway. And your unilateral declaration that it's just plain ridiculous evidently hasn't stopped hate groups from whacking Jews in the name of God. No, it's not right, and no, it's not something Christianity encourages, but it happens. So put on a pot of coffee and wake the f$#! up.
Gibson didn't insert Jews into the story for some Machiavellian, racist reason. Christ was a Jew crucified by Romans at the request of other Jews in Jerusalem. I suppose if Gibson had moved the story to suburban Cleveland and portrayed Republican logging executives crucifying Christ, the left would calm down. But it simply didn't happen that way.
Stop treating Mel Gibson like such a freakin' Boy Scout, Ann. Yes, your historical account of the Jews' role in Christ's death is accurate, which means Mel didn't just throw them in there arbitrarily. But the way Gibson portrays their role in the event is enough to make people wonder what his motivation is. So are the numerous stories about Mel, his very bizarre father and their opinions on those who follow the Jewish faith.
Of course, the original text is no excuse in Hollywood. The villains of Tom Clancy's book "The Sum of All Fears" were recently transformed from Muslim terrorists to neo-Nazis for the movie version. You wouldn't want to upset the little darlings. They might do something rash like slaughter 3,000 innocent American civilians in a single day. The only religion that can be constantly defamed and insulted is the one liberals pretend to be terrified of.
Waah, waah, waah. One minute Ann raises holy hell about anyone who would use the Crusades or the Inquisition to tar the entire Christian religion as bloodthirsty, the next minute she writes off the whole of Islam as a bunch of murderous terrorists. Nope, no double standard there. Then, exhausted, she curls up into her little All Liberals Hate Christians bed and falls asleep like a little angel. Lovely.
You don't need a college — or even high-school — education to understand how deeply idiotic this is. Ann writes column after column about how liberals don't believe in God and they hate Christians, and what's her supporting evidence? Umm...the fact that liberals don't believe in God, and they hate Christians! I said it, it's true, so there! Only this time she supported her "thesis" with the fact that...William Safire is actually a liberal. Yup, that's what she said. William Safire is a liberal, William Safire didn't like Mel Gibson's movie, ergo liberals hate Christ. Now's the part where you picture Jon Stewart making the "squeak-a, squeak-a" noise as he furiously rubs his eyes, then pulls his hands away and asks plaintively, "Whaaaa...?"
All due respect, Coulter fans, y'all have to be some incredibly stupid motherf$#!ers not to see through this crap. But just in case the message still hasn't penetrated those thick Kevlar skulls of yours, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will be back next week to pound it in some more! Until then, go forth, be fruitful, and multiply!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:17 AM
Thursday, March 11, 2004
You have got to be f$#!ing kidding me...
When Bush makes his big trip to New York today for his fundraisers and his little side trip to the groundbreaking of the 9/11™ memorial, park workers from all over the city will be dispatched to make sure he doesn't get any dirt on his shoes.
Nope, didn't make that up. To make sure he doesn't get any dirt on his shoes. At a fricking groundbreaking. For real. Are they sure there'll be enough workers left over to clear the brush away so that Bush doesn't get a run in his tights? Will they also be charged with making sure nobody yanks on his pigtails, or is that still the Secret Service's job?
All you Republicans and Bush sycophants out there who see this man as the first and foremost symbol of America's might, the brave, fearless individual who doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks and who is the only one remotely capable of protecting our nation from the evils of terrorism, before you go to sleep tonight, remember: Your hero mobilized park workers from all over New York to make sure he wouldn't get dirt on his shoes. Just when you think the girlification of the Republican Party can't get any worse...it does.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:58 PM
On a more positive note, at least now we know which time of the month is that time of the month for Marc Racicot
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called Wednesday for deeper tax cuts for the middle class than proposed by President Bush and described his Republican critics as "the most crooked ... lying group I've ever seen." The chairman of Bush's re-election campaign called on Kerry to apologize "for this negative attack."
Snip...
"Senator Kerry's statement today in Illinois was unbecoming of a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, and tonight we call on Senator Kerry to apologize to the American people for this negative attack," Racicot said in a statement.
Let me make sure I'm crystal-clear on this one, Marcia: You're running point for a campaign that, in 2000, administered push polls implying that John McCain fathered a Vietnamese child out of wedlock, and just days ago tried to claim a connection between John Kerry and North Korea. And you're getting your tampon string in a knot over "the most crooked lying group I've ever seen"? (Compounding the irony is the fact that Racicot himself recently lied through his teeth on NPR about Bush "volunteering" to go to Vietnam back in the '70s.)
If Kerry or anyone else on the Democratic side does apologize for this, I'm gonna lose some respect for them. He's got absolutely nothing to be sorry for, and I think a lot of Democrats are going to be (and should be) pumped that the party standard-bearer is exhibiting the ol' fire-in-the-belly that just wasn't there in 2000. Meanwhile, don't be surprised to see the Republicans' testicles popping up on the sides of milk cartons. For a party that regularly accuses liberals of trying to turn America into a nation of oversensitive, politically correct whiners, they've done a bang-up job of shrieking like an infant with a steaming load in his Huggies each and every time something in this campaign hasn't gone their way. Methinks a certain party has gotten fat and happy from not being questioned for the better part of three years, but now that someone's actually challenging them on a daily basis, they just don't know how to deal. For their sake, it's something they might want to figure out before November.
Though it was a pretty ridiculous movie for the most part, there was one good exchange from the movie "Days of Thunder" where Tom Cruise is participating in his first NASCAR race and is stunned to find that other cars are banging into him right and left. But when Cruise radios in to his pit crew to report that "the sonofabitch just slammed into me," his mentor, the world-wise stock-car lifer played by Robert Duvall, responds: "No, no, he didn't slam into you, he didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you — he rubbed you. And rubbin', son, is racin'."
Welcome to racin', bitches.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:22 AM
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Do it! Do it! Do it!
Close your eyes and wrap your brain around this one: Kerry/McCain '04.
"John Kerry is a close friend of mine. We have been friends for years," McCain said Wednesday when pressed to squelch speculation about a Kerry-McCain ticket. "Obviously I would entertain it."
McCain cautioned that it was unlikely the Democrats would go for "a pro-life, free-trading, non-protectionist, deficit hawk" on the ticket. But is it completely outside the realm of comprehension? The abortion issue might seem like a sticking point, but McCain and Kerry do seem to agree on one thing — that simply banning all abortions out of hand isn't a good idea — so maybe it's not the 900-pound gorilla it sounds like (the issue doesn't even show up on the issues section of McCain's Web site). Certainly the fact that McCain is tough on the deficit would present no problem, especially if the Democrats want to try their hand at becoming the party of fiscal responsibility in the wake of Bush's $500 billion budget deficits. And while the knee-jerk response is to describe the free-trade/protectionism issue as Republicans think good, Democrats think bad, the smart money knows that's way too complicated an issue to be broken along strictly partisan lines.
Imagine Kerry standing up there with McCain at his side in Boston this summer, saying, "Four years ago, George W. Bush promised us he'd be a uniter, not a divider — a promise that was never kept. But John McCain and I are standing before you today asking you to give us the chance to succeed where he failed. We're asking Democrats, Republicans, and independents to join us in the quest to return fiscal responsibility to Washington; to make real progress in the international war on terror; to ensure that every American has a chance at economic success; and to stand together as one to face the road ahead. These are not Republican values, these are not Democratic values, these are American values, and we're standing before you today to prove that. We're putting aside partisan politics to see those values flourish across this great land, and we're putting our faith in you, the American people, to do the same."
Would this ever happen? Nah, probably not. But there are worse ideas in the world.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:37 PM
As Erma Bombeck would say, "In theory, it should've worked"
Via Wonkette, our attention was drawn to a nifty little feature of the official Bush/Cheney re-election Web site: a custom poster-maker! Yes, click on that link and you'll get a poster with the official Bush/Cheney '04 logo that you can customize with your own city and state, your specific organization, even your own slogan. What a great idea!...
...Or at least it probably seemed like one at the time. At Wonkette's prodding, hundreds if not thousands of naughty anti-Bushies have headed over there to make mischief and create slogans the Bush campaign probably would rather not have associated with their official logo and the legend "Paid for by BUSH-CHENEY 'O4, Inc." Yes, you, too, can create a poster reading "Gay Muslim Socialists fo BUSH/CHENEY '04" that appears to be officially endorsed (and paid for) by the campaign — and all through the magic of the Internet (and Adobe PDF, sold separately)!
Before you get too excited, there are certain words the poster-maker won't let you use — obscenities being one example, but "Nazi" being another. Which begs the question, if the gimcrack Webmasters who thought this thing up were prescient enough to realize that interlopers would be attempting to throw the word "Nazi" on a sign, why didn't they take similar steps to prevent the use of, oh, "Gay Muslim Socialists" or "Jesus Hates Gays Too"?
Oh, well, 'tis not for us to speculate — 'tis only for us to make mischief, and merriment! Do mosey on over there and take advantage before the campaign bigwigs get wise. It's fun, it's easy, and best of all it's paid for by BUSH-CHENEY '04, Inc.!!!!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:04 PM
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Scratch that
Well, it looks like we (and the New York Times) may have jumped the gun when we announced just now that Bush wouldn't be limiting his time before the 9/11 Commission to an hour after all. Joshua Marshall has a transcript of today's White House Press Briefing, during which Scott "Sucka MC" McClellan was asked (by my count) 17 times whether Bush would be willing to talk to the commission for longer than an hour and not once gave a straight answer. A sampling of his typical responses follows:
And as far as the President, the President looks forward to meeting with the chairman and vice chairman and answering all the questions that they want to raise.
But, look, he’s going to answer all the questions they want to raise.
I just said that the President will answer all the questions that they want to raise.
The President looks forward to answering all the questions that they want to bring up.
Look, he looks forward to the meeting. Let’s let the meeting take place.
And now they’ll have an opportunity to come to the President, and ask any question that they want to. The President is glad to answer their questions.
The President is going to make sure, as we have, that they have all the information that they need to do their job.
I said he's going to answer all their questions.
But I'm just stating a fact -- the President will answer all the questions they want to raise.
But I'm saying the President, of course, is going to answer all the questions they want to raise. I think that you all should make that distinction.
Again, from this podium I'm telling you that the President, of course, will answer all the questions that they want to raise.
Congratulations, McClellan, you've achieved the rare distinction of actually being more annoying than Ari Fleischer. What do you think about all this, Comic Book Guy?
Worst. White House press secretary. Ever.
Yeah, that's what I thought too.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:36 PM
"Bring it on," indeed
Well, it looks like Bush is backing down on his insistence that he'll only meet with the 9/11 Commission for one hour. Scott McClellan's tendency to repeat the same answers over and over again regardless of the question means that we'll reserve final judgment on (and relief over) this development until we actually get to read the transcript of the press briefing, but at least it's a start.
Now that you've made that concession, George, howsabout you drop this nonsense about John Kerry's 1995 proposal to cut the intelligence budget by $1.5 billion. As Atrios points out, Kerry's proposal would have been stretched over five years, and centered on pork-barrel projects that were obsolete once the Cold War ended anyway.
Besides, Georgie, you keep harping on this spending-cut thing and someone's gonna find out what John Ashcroft did right before 9/11: Not only did he deny an FBI request for $58 million in new antiterrorism funding, he slashed — by nearly 60 percent — a program that issued grants to state and local law-enforcement agencies to fund their own counterterrorism efforts.
And then there was Donald Rumsfeld, who threatened to veto a plan that would've shifted $600 million from missile defense to counterterrorism.
Rumsfeld made the threat on September 9, 2001. Ashcroft announced his cuts the very next day.
We like Atrios' title for his post on this subject: "Bring it on." Yes, let's please have a discussion about "irresponsible" treatment of the intelligence budget. Why don't we have that discussion right now. Maybe then we can dismiss this silly notion that Bush is stronger on national security than Kerry would be (a notion which, by the way, nobody has stepped forward to defend, despite our challenge to do just that). And then maybe we can put somebody competent in the White House.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:29 AM
The natives are getting desperate
Ignore our last post in which we said that the GOP's next attack theme against John Kerry would be that he's soft on national security. No, they found a couple things that are even better! And by "even better," we mean completely fricking ridiculous!
(1) John Kerry has a potty mouth! Matt "No, I'm Not a Real Journalist, But I Did Stay at a Holiday Inn Last Night" Drudge reports that Kerry's Web site is "riddled with obscenities"! He even goes so far as to link to the search results for words like "f$#!" and "shit" so you can see the extent of Kerry's foulness! Oh, the profanity!
If you don't feel like clicking on those links, we'll sum them up for you: The f-word pops up all of four times; in two of the instances, it was spoken by Kerry, while the other two times it was used by various magazine writers in articles written about Kerry that the campaign site links to. The word "shit" pops up five times, twice attributable to a direct quote by Kerry (though, oddly enough, they're the same article, quoting from a journal entry Kerry wrote during the Vietnam War). The other three times, again, it was used by magazine writers the Kerry campaign has no control over.
This is "riddled with obscenities" in Drudge's book? OK, Matty, we're gonna lay out a situation for you, and you stop us whenever it starts to ring a bell: You're still steamed that you jumped on board that bogus-ass Kerry-infidelity story and got royally humiliated as a result, and now you're trying to save face. You've got to do something that makes Kerry look bad. Anything. And the issue by which you choose to do that is...Web profanity? Why don't you go play outside, Matty, it's a beautiful day...
(2) John Kerry is in league with the North Koreans! No, sadly, we're not making that up — it really says so on the Republican National Committee's official freaking Web site. So now Fox News isn't "fair and balanced" enough for the GOP? They're turning to the "official mouthpiece of Mr. Kim’s communist regime" for their daily news?
But, uh, look at all the dirty furriners who've come right out and endorsed Kerry! He has a French cousin! And he's also been endorsed by, uh, the lead singer of Coldplay! And, uh...
If this is the best the Republican campaign machine can come up with, we're starting to wonder if Karl Rove might have lost his Midas touch. Be on the lookout for upcoming accusations that Kerry is responsible for everything from Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl to the heartbreak of psoriasis.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:34 AM
Monday, March 08, 2004
Monday, Monday, MONDAY! It's a Bush-Kerry flip-flop SMACKDOWN! (And the GWBWYPGN?! Challenge o' the Week)
The GOP campaign machine has already tried two lines of attack on John Kerry — the first was that he was a loathsome Godless commie sympathizer after the Vietnam War, which kind of lost steam because the Repubs risked setting off the where-was-Dubya-in-'72 booby-trap every time they came near it; the second was that he gobbled up special-interest dollars like there was no tomorrow, which lost steam because Kerry hasn't even come close to racking up the kind of special-interest cash that Republicans treat like mother's milk. You can call someone an elitist for driving a Mercedes, but when you're hurling such epithets from the back seat of your chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, you kind of look like a douchebag.
Undaunted, the Bushies have a new theme against Kerry: He's a flip-flopper! A tried-and-true strategy, yes, since "flip-flopper" has only been used against every single political candidate since the beginning of time. Once again, however, the stones are being launched from one very fragile glass house. The Daily Kos (or, more accurately, one of their readers) has done us all the service of writing down Bush's substantial laundry list of flip-flops, and if the Kerry people are smart, they'll be taking notes.
Once this theme fails just like the previous two did, the Bushies are sure to whip out the "weak on national security" accusation against Kerry, the one that's so far been advanced primarily by conservative bloggers and GOP congressmen who literally think that a vote for anyone but George Bush is a vote in favor of Osama bin Laden. As far as I can discern, these accusations of national-security weakness are based entirely on the fact that Kerry wouldn't go off half-cocked by invading, and subsequently occupying, countries that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11™, and goodness, wouldn't that just be terrible. But maybe I'm missing something. So in the spirit of Why Do You Like George W. Bush? and Why Do You Think George W. Bush is Strong on National Security?, we'd like to propose the following question to the Bush supporters and non-liberals who occasionally stumble onto this site: What makes you think Bush has been any stronger on the national-security issue than Kerry would be? Get your response on in the comments thread below. No points for whipping out the old "'Cuz he kicked Saddam's ass, beeyatch!" canard, since it should be obvious by now that the Iraq invasion was little more than a distracting sideshow to the larger war against terrorism. But if anyone can come up with a substantive bit of evidence that Bush is the only one who can keep this country safe, while a vote for Kerry would lead America down the road to ruin, I'm all ears.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:49 AM
Friday, March 05, 2004
Now's the part of the show where we like to ask, And how are you doing?
Busy day ahead, so there won't be too many more posts today — so it's time to bring you, the reader, into this debacle Web site. We had that mini-poll a few weeks ago about whom the Democratic vice-presidential nominee should be, but that's only interactive up to a point; I want you guys to use the comments below to give your answers to the following two questions:
1. Whom do you think John Kerry should pick to be his running mate?
2. Leaving aside considerations like who actually ran for president (and even who's actually in politics), what's your ideal presidential ticket in 2004? The only guideline is that you want someone who can actually pick up some votes — beyond that, go nuts.
My choice for Kerry's running mate: Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (runner-up: Bob Graham). '04 dream ticket: Wesley Clark and...Vermont Sen. James Jeffords. (Although if Paul Wellstone were still alive, what a great choice that would be. Sigh.)
So basically it's part fantasy baseball, part "McLaughlin Group." Leave your answers in the comments below, fill that sucker up. Be funny and/or creative if you're so inclined.
...Morton Kondracke!!...
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:56 AM
Sorbet
Here's something to cleanse your pallet after you've swallowed the bitter pill of Ann Coulter, below: a slate column by Will Saletan making the case against George W. Bush about as well as anyone has so far. Some call it "Steady leadership in a time of change," we call it "Stubborn leadership completely oblivious to change." Here, let Will tell it.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:02 AM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, Part XXIX: The Gospel According to Ann
Hey, anybody in the audience today ever read George Orwell's 1984? Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot has — and we seem to recall this part called the Two Minutes Hate, in which the government basically riles the subjugated populace into a hate-filled frenzy against whomever they're opposing at that moment. If America ever does, in fact, turn into that kind of 1984-ian dystopia — and in some ways we ain't that far off — somebody needs to sign Ann Coulter as the director of the Two Minutes Hate. In just one column this week, she calls the wrath of the Almighty upon everyone from Godless liberals and bloodthirsty Muslims to lying film critics and allegedly pansy Volvo drivers. Nope, we're not kidding.
But the worst part is, she cloaks all of this hatred and bile in the guise of righteous indignation that God and Christianity are being criticized. Actually, you'll note that neither God nor Christianity are being criticized — Mel Gibson and his movie "The Passion" are. But the thought processes of Ann and her right-wing sycophants are primitive enough that Gibson makes an easy surrogate for Christ, and that lets them start right in with their liberal-flaying. "Just a movie," you say? Then clearly you hate our Lord Jesus, you filthy Satanic scum! Now that we've got you in the mood and your bile duct is primed, let's begin with the Two Minutes Hate, as Ann gets us started with "The Passion of the Liberal":
In the dozens and dozens of panic-stricken articles the New York Times has run on Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ," the unavoidable conclusion is that liberals haven't the vaguest idea what Christianity is.
For Chri...um, I mean, for crying out loud, is this going to be another column about how not a single Democrat believes in God? Is there no argument so moronically fatuous that Coulter won't spend a thousand words trying to advance it?
The Times may have loopy ideas about a lot of things, but at least when they write about gay bathhouses and abortion clinics, you get the sense they know what they're talking about.
But Christianity just doesn't ring a bell. The religion that has transformed Western civilization for two millennia is a blank slate for liberals. Their closest reference point is "conservative Christians," meaning people you're not supposed to hire. And these are the people who carp about George Bush's alleged lack of "intellectual curiosity."
Snore. Somebody wake us up when Ann either presents some evidence in support of her Democrats-don't-believe-in-God "hypothesis," or when she appears to have some kind of a point with all this.
The most amazing complaint, championed by the Times and repeated by all the know-nothing secularists on television, is that Gibson insisted on "rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus' death." The Times was irked that Gibson "relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours" – at the expense of showing us the Happy Jesus. Yes, Gibson's movie is crying out for a car chase, a sex scene or maybe a wise-cracking orangutan.
As always, Coulter has applied as snide and selective an interpretation to a Times story as she possibly can, so here's the actual review from which she quotes if you want to make your own judgment. You'll notice that the review's points are largely cinematic in nature, as opposed to theologic — and far from "crying out for a car chase, sex scene or maybe a wise-cracking orangutan," the reviewer, A.O. Scott, seems to imply that Gibson has already treated Jesus' death with too much gore, sensationalism, and Hollywood shallowness as it is. But acknowledging that would force Ann to admit that the Times does have something valuable to say every once in a while, and we all know that ain't gonna happen.
The Times ought to send one of its crack investigative reporters to St. Patrick's Cathedral at 3 p.m. on Good Friday before leaping to the conclusion that "The Passion" is Gibson's idiosyncratic take on Christianity.
The Passion of Jesus Christ isn't "Gibson's idiosyncratic take." Gibson's movie, however, is. I've been to numerous Good Friday services (wonder if Ann can say the same?), and at none of them was I treated to a blood-soaked 45-minute beating of the priest who was playing Jesus, nor did a crow ever come down to peck the eyes out of the parishioner playing one of the thieves crucified next to him.
In a standard ritual, Christians routinely eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, aka "the Lamb of God." The really serious Catholics do that blood- and flesh-eating thing every day, the sickos. The Times has just discovered the tip of a 2,000-year-old iceberg.
Wow, so Ann knows about Communion. Whoop-dee-doo, I started doing that since I was 7, and I'm not crazy about Ann exploiting that ritual simply to politically bludgeon the New York Times. As a raised-then-lapsed-then-reformed-again Catholic, I'd be really, really interested to know how much time Ann Coulter has spent, total, in a Catholic church. Anybody have any guesses?
But the loony-left is testy with Gibson for spending so much time on Jesus' suffering and death while giving "short shrift to Jesus' ministry and ideas" – as another Times reviewer put it. According to liberals, the message of Jesus, which somehow Gibson missed, is something along the lines of "be nice to people" (which to them means "raise taxes on the productive").
Yeah, "blessed are the merciful," what a crock of shit! "Love thy neighbor," gross! What if my neighbor is a liberal or a Muslim? Do I still have to?
You don't need a religion like Christianity, which is a rather large and complex endeavor, in order to flag that message. All you need is a moron driving around in a Volvo with a bumper sticker that says "be nice to people." Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity...
Hear that, Christians and Coulterheads? "Being nice to people" has been reduced to the status of "incidental tenet" of Christianity as far as Coulter's concerned. If that's only an "incidental tenet," what does she think the really important stuff is? "Kill liberals"? "Smear the homos"? "Don't eat shellfish"?
...(as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed").
So Christianity isn't all that concerned with being nice to people, and Islam is only concerned with smelling bad and killing people! Boy, Ann, you're just batting a thousand with your interpretations of the world's belief systems! How on earth did you find the time to fit in all those comparative-religion courses between your Klan meetings?
But to call it the "message" of Jesus requires ... well, the brain of Maureen Dowd.
It may not have been the message, but it was a message, was it not? Have I been getting Christianity wrong all this time?
In fact, Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it. That is the reason He is called "Christ the Redeemer" rather than "Christ the Moron Driving Around in a Volvo With a 'Be Nice to People' Bumper Sticker on It."
But isn't "being nice to people" kinda the opposite of "sinful"...aaah, screw it.
The other complaint from the know-nothing crowd is that "The Passion" will inspire anti-Semitic violence. If nothing else comes out of this movie, at least we finally have liberals on record opposing anti-Semitic violence. Perhaps they should broach that topic with their Muslim friends.
We now have another slanderous lie to add to our Coulter On Liberals collection: Liberals love seeing violence done to Jews! We'll put that one right next to "Liberals don't believe in God," in between "Liberals are sad that Saddam got captured" and "Liberals want to help al-Qaeda."
One Times review of "The Passion" said: "To be a Christian is to face the responsibility for one's own most treasured sacred texts being used to justify the deaths of innocents." At best, this is like blaming Jodie Foster for the shooting of Ronald Reagan.
Here we go again...and here's the article in case anyone would like to actually read it instead of trust a hack like Coulter to accurately sum it up for you.
But the reviewer somberly warned that a Christian should "not take the risk that one's life or work might contribute to the continuation of a horror." So the only thing Christians can do is shut up about their religion. (And no more Jodie Foster movies!)
Who said Christians should "shut up about their religion"? The writer was merely cautioning Christian filmmakers like Gibson — quite calmly and eloquently, we thought — to be very careful in how they portray other religions, and consider how those portrayals might be interpreted by the public at large. Hell, that's sage advice for any filmmaker, no matter what their movies are about. But that didn't jibe with what Ann was trying to say, so once again, she twists the writer's words to her whims.
By contrast, in the weeks after 9-11, the Times was rushing to assure its readers that "prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions."
Exactly what comparison is Ann trying to make here? After 9/11, the Times went out of its way to explain that Islam doesn't promote violence against non-believers, even though some people may use 9/11 as evidence of the opposite. In her article on "The Passion," Mary Gordon points out that Christianity doesn't promote violence against non-believers, even though some people may use "The Passion" as evidence of the opposite. Gosh, it sounds like everyone's actually being pretty loving and understanding here! — except for Ann, of course.
(That's if you set aside Muhammad's many specific instructions to kill non-believers whenever possible.)
Ann proceeds to make exactly one citation of such a "specific instruction" (below), and she even manages to cock that up. Sure, the Quran contains a lot of violent imagery, though it's juxtaposed with a number of exhortations for peace; it's kind of inconsistent that way, open to an awful lot of interpretation. Kind of like another holy book you might have heard of...oh, what is it called again? It's the one that says "Thou shalt not kill" but also "an eye for an eye"...it's right on the tip of my tongue...oh, what is it? Wait, wait, don't tell me...
Times columnists repeatedly extolled "the great majority of peaceful Muslims." Only a religion with millions of practitioners trying to kill Americans and Jews is axiomatically described as "peaceful" by liberals.
Are you freaking kidding me? The woman who said "bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" suddenly has a bug up her bony ass about violence in the name of God?!
Even Coulter's diehard fans should be able to grasp the hypocrisy here. When Mel Gibson makes a movie that blames bloodthirsty Jews for the death of his Savior, Coulter rails away at those who would paint all Christians with the same broad, bigoted brush. (Longtime readers will also note she flies into a frothing rage anytime someone brings up the Crusades or the Inquisition.) But when 19 Muslims out of 1.48 billion crash Boeing 767s into the World Trade Center, it's perfectly acceptable to slag off the entire religion as a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, and to scoff at any idea that some of them, any of them, might be "peaceful." (Despite the fact that the standard Muslim greeting, Assalamu Alaikum, means "peace be upon you." Oh, those lying Muslims, they're probably just being snarky!)
As I understand it, the dangerous religion is the one whose messiah instructs: "[I]f one strikes thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" and "Love your enemies ... do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you." The peaceful religion instructs: "Slay the enemy where you find him." (Surah 9:92).
Please note that the cited Quran passage says nothing of the kind. Read this additional information from World O' Crap if you're interested in finding out just how Ann might've gotten confused; it turns out she's cribbing her notes on the Quran from noted Islam expert Jerry Falwell.
Imitating the ostrich-like posture of certain German Jews who ignored the growing danger during Hitler's rise to power, today's liberals are deliberately blind to the real threats of violence that surround us. Their narcissistic self-image requires absolute solicitude toward angry savages plotting acts of terrorism. The only people who scare them are the ones who worship a Jew.
Coulterites, I hope your souls feel just a little dirty just from having read this crap. In the span of just a few hundred words, Coulter basically dismisses the idea of "loving one's neighbor" as an important tenet of Christianity; slags off the entire Muslim religion as a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, and deliberately misquotes their holy book to support that view; and continues to reiterate her opinion that no liberal anywhere believes in God, as if that was some intelligent insight worthy of being repeated. We can only surmise that Ann's knowledge of Christian theology isn't nearly as deep as she'd like you to think it is, because this certainly doesn't sound very Christian to us. (Maybe she's going to try and defend herself with the Homer Simpson excuse — "Marrrge, I'm just trying to get into heaven! It's not like I'm running for Jesus or anything!") Throughout her claims that liberals don't know squat about the teachings of Christianity, the one who appears to have missed the Christian message most completely is, ironically enough, Coulter herself.
Nobody who's been following this feature for any length of time should have the idea that Ann is a kindhearted person, but lately she's been outdoing herself week after week. It's not even that she's intellectually dishonest (though she is), that she insults her readers' intelligence (though she does), or that she's got bizarre ideas on how this country should be run (though she has) — she's just a mean, nasty, vindictive bitch who gets off on the very sort of anger and hate of which this post-9/11 world needs absolutely no more. In other words, she's the polar opposite of the example Jesus was sent down to earth to be. Oh, well...as the one liberal in North America who still believes in God, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will pray for her anyway! Ta-ta, heathens!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:43 AM
Thursday, March 04, 2004
We missed the big one-oh-oh-oh-oh, so...
...if you fire up this Web site and the number in the counter on the right says "20,000," howsabout you shoot us an e-mail.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:05 PM
Hi. It's Dubya. Mind if I exploit your national tragedy for a little while? It'll only take a second.
Demonstrating the sensitivity and eye for good taste for which his administration has become world-renowned, George W. Bush will be using images from the World Trade Center disaster in a round of TV ads unveiled yesterday on behalf of his re-election campaign.
Not surprisingly, some folks are upset:
"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people," Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the twin towers, told the New York Daily News for its Thursday editions. "It is unconscionable." ...
"It's as sick as people who stole things out of the place," said Firefighter Tommy Fee of Queens Rescue Squad 270. "The image of firefighters at ground zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics." ...
"I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty," said Tom Roger, whose daughter perished on American Airlines Flight 11. "But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat."
And these are friends and family members of people who died, for crying out loud. But if you're a Republican who's trying to find a way to ignore how repugnant and exploitative this all is, just do what Karen Hughes does and assume they're all Democrats anyway:
"I can understand why some Democrats might not want the American people to remember the great leadership and strength the president and first lady Laura Bush brought to our country in the aftermath of that," she said.
Mmmm, yeah, great leadership and strength. The kind of leadership and strength that allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda operative who's been implicated in this week's bombing in Baghdad that killed 271 people (not to mention additional incidents that resulted in hundreds of other deaths), to get away clean. If the Republicans can fume about how Clinton supposedly "let Osama bin Laden get away," why aren't they more pissed off about this:
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
Snippety snip...
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
Yup, mm-hmm. But we're supposed to believe that the war in Iraq was integral to the fight against terrorism, and that it wouldn't distract from the ongoing battle against al-Qaeda. And we're supposed to believe that Bush is soooo strong on national security, the only guy who is qualified to protect America in this uncertain new world. Well, so far nobody's convinced me. In fact, he might just be the least-qualified one out there.
ETA: ...And it might be even worse than I thought. Josh Marshall explains.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:05 PM
Silence, bitches, and do not bore the great Scott McClellan!
Maybe you think that joke about one hundred women with black eyes is really funny but you're worried that you can't tell it in mixed company. Well, just replace "one hundred women with black eyes" with "one hundred members of the White House press corps" and you're golden, because evidently the press corps just doesn't f$#!ing listen!
Herewith are utterances made by White House Press Secretary Scott "Sucka MC" McClellan at Tuesday's press briefing. What a pain in the ass these reporters must be, because Sucka said all of this in a briefing that spanned a mere 28 minutes:
No, I think we've addressed this matter. I think we addressed it yesterday very clearly.
Well, again, I just mentioned where our focus is.
Terry, I think that the matter has been addressed. Secretary Powell yesterday fully addressed it, too, and outlined exactly how events occurred.
I think I've described the President's views from this podium, and I would leave it at that.
The President has talked about that.
He talked about it in his State of the Union address.
Les, I think that's a matter that you need to address to the state of California.
Les, I think that California issues you can address to California.
The President's views are very well-known.
Well, I think you know the way the legislative process works.
His views are very well-known on the other issues, as well.
His views are very well-known, David. I just said that.
Our views are very well-known on those issues.
I think, Goyal, that we've addressed this issue.
And I would refer you back to those remarks.
Russell, I think I've addressed this matter. I think I said, as recently as yesterday, that in terms of the issue, if you're asking about recusals or things like that, those are issues to address to Justice Scalia. And I think Justice Scalia has addressed that matter.
All right, thank you.
Why are we even paying Sucka a salary? Why can't we just replace him with a voice-activated mp3 device that simply repeats the phrase "I've already gone over that" whenever someone asks it a question? Or if "Go back and look it up yourself" is the only answer the press corps is ever going to get, why don't we just replace him with any librarian from any high school in the United States? Or InstaPundit?
Enough! Scott McClellan is tired of answering questions he has already answered, even if he hasn't already answered them! Scott McClellan tires of your foolishness! Begone, and if you come up with a decent question the great Scott McClellan hasn't already addressed, you may address it to the great Scott McClellan!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:26 AM
OK, sure, but he was probably preoccupied with all the F-102s he was flying at the time
Well, somebody has finally come forward to say they remember seeing George W. Bush 30 years ago...but it wasn't anybody who served in the Alabama National Guard.
Rather, it's one of Bush's old economics professors from Harvard, and he's got a few insights about Bush that go a little deeper than "Best Friends 4-eva! C U next year!!!!" scrawled in the back of the Harvard Business School yearbook:
I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism."
Yeah, I definitely want this guy to be president for another four years. (Link via Atrios.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:25 AM
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
No honor among good ol' boys
This right here is the new Georgia flag. Like it? Not only is it purty, but peep that arch in the middle of the blue field. That's the University of Georgia arch, beeyatch, not some sissy yellow jacket. Say word, son!
Anyway, the good people of my home state voted yesterday to keep this flag instead of the previous flag that Roy Barnes proposed while he was governor to make the Confederate battle emblem smaller. So why are some people still pissed off?
Well, you see, the current governor, Sonny Perdue, defeated the incumbent Barnes in 2002 after promising to give Georgia voters the chance to reinstate the old stars-and-bars flag over the Barnes flag. The votes of the Confederate-flag-crazy fergit-hell crowd helped Perdue sail into the governor's mansion, but when it came time for Perdue to pony up with the promised referendum, he OK'd a referendum plan that offered only two choices — the Barnes flag, and the lovely emblem you see above. Not appearing on your ballot: the stars and bars. D'oh!
And now the hard-core "flaggers" are pissed. Awwww...poor y'all. On the one hand, as a distant relative of Robert E. Lee, I want to feel sorry for you. On the other hand, when you put your faith in a good ol' boy like Sonny and base your entire vote on something as picayune as a frickin' flag, you're kind of leaving yourselves open for some embarrassing shit like this.
So anyway...no soup for you. But love you guys. Hey, I hear they're still flyin' the stars and bars in South Carolina! Like, whenever you're ready...
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:37 PM
Good for the 9/11 Commission. If Clinton and Gore, the two guys who were responsible for 9/11 in the first place (everybody says so), can handle questions from the entire Commission panel, what do Bush and Cheney have to hide, and why do they only want to sit for an hour? Hmmmm?
If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had.
What, negative job growth? Whew, yeah, thank goodness we didn't let the Democrats mess with that. Really dodged a bullet there! I mean, who wants something like jobs? Ew! Yuck!
But we shouldn't be surprised to hear this kind of nonsense from a guy who characterizes the "Democratic policies" as "tax increases," even though, as Josh Marshall points out, the Democratic candidates never campaigned for a tax increase — they merely campaigned against the thoroughly ill-advised tax cuts Bush rammed through. So not quite the same thing.
Oh, and if you peep that Yahoo! story, you'll also note that Cheney is officially supporting the gay-marriage amendment that Bush threw his weight behind last week. Despite the fact that his daughter is, you know, an open lesbian. "Father of the Year" trophies may be sent to The White House, c/o Vice President Dick Cheney, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 7:44 AM
Monday, March 01, 2004
Congratulations on your brand-new testicles!
It took him long enough, but now that Bush has let his homophobe flag fly and vocalized his desire to keep gay people second-class citizens, Andrew Sullivan has all of a sudden grown a pair and learned that criticizing the president is OK. He's even written a whole column about how Bush's relative success in wartime could prove to be a disadvantage this election season.
Sully even goes so far as to offer some sage advice for you LINOs who claim to be Libertarian but then vote straight-ticket Republican every time you actually have to put your ballots where your mouths are. Well, he's actually just the conduit for said advice from a libertarian e-mailer, but hey, we'll take what we can get:
You claim in your blog that 'It looks increasingly as if anyone who cares about fiscal sanity is going to have to sit this election out.' However, isn't it obvious that the only way to impose some sort of fiscal sanity is to vote Kerry — resulting in a split government that can't reach any sort of agreement as to how to spend money?
Additionally, if we are going to spend money like drunken sailors wouldn't we rather have Kerry, who will at least tax the baby-boomer generation that is benefitting from all this spending, instead of Bush who wants to run up huge deficits and force these problems on future generations... people like ME?
As an uncatered to libertarian in my twenties, I think the answers to both of these questions are 'yes' and 'yes'. I intend to vote Republican except for President, where I intend to vote a big fat 'D'. Then I'll sit back and pray for government gridlock.
Sully agrees with this sentiment, even going so far as to admit that "Kerry seems to have a better grip on fiscal reality than Bush does." Democrats, the party of fiscal responsibility. Who woulda thunk it? Look, I'm not trying to say that the Democratic Party as a whole has all of a sudden had its fiscal come-to-Jesus moment and is now a bunch of budgetary tightwads. But at least we understand that if the government is going to spend an assload of money, it behooves said government to take in enough money to compensate, rather than just slash revenues like crazy and pray for the best — in other words, a tax-and-spend liberal is still better than a don't-tax-but-spend-anyway "conservative." It's time to end this fantasy that Republicans spend less and manage the country's money better, because three years of Bush have proven that to be emphatically false.
(Oh, and props to Sully for bringing our attention to this.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:03 PM
We're number one runners-up! We're number one runners-up!
GWBWYPGN?!'s influence continues to spread, like wildfire, cream cheese, or SARS — TBOGG named us a runner-up in his competition for best Bush/Cheney re-election slogan. Might we be patting ourselves a little too hard on the back for what basically amounts to an honorable mention? Possibly, but I don't see you winning any recognition for your Bush/Cheney re-election slogans, so until you do, suck it!
Man, now that I think about it, "Suck it" makes a perfect Bush/Cheney re-election slogan. Ah, well. Spilled milk, in any case. If you like GWBWYPGN?!'s sort-of-award-winning slogan idea, or any of the other ones we came up with, by all means feel free to put them on a bumper sticker. Don't steal any of the other slogans TBOGG published, because those were other people's ideas and they may not like you stealing them. But us, hey, we'd love for you to steal them. Anything to get our insolent and disrespectful crap work seen by a greater audience, we're whores! Just make sure when anyone asks you about your witty and hilarious bumper sticker, you say, "GWBWYPGN?!, baby — I steal from the best! Or if not the best, certainly the most desperate for public acclaim and recognition!" But really, we're doing it for the kids.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:52 AM
So long, Perle, and don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya
Richard Perle, the controversial member of the Defense Policy Board who called Seymour Hersh "the closest thing American Journalism has to a terrorist" because Hersh exposed Perle's connection to security/defense venture-capital company Trireme Partners in this article, resigned from the DPB a couple weeks ago, but his resignation letter became public over the weekend. The whole letter can be found here, but this is my favorite paragraph:
We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated. I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign. This is particularly true now since I have just published a book that calls for far reaching reform of government departments responsible for combating terrorism. Many of the ideas in that book are controversial and I wish to be free to argue them without those views or my arguments getting caught up in the campaign.
Shorter Richard Perle*: "I just wrote a book that says we should invade Syria, Iran, and Libya, and given that the unadulterated 100-percent bat-shit-craziness of these ideas may hurt the President's re-election campaign by association, it's probably best if I hang back for a while."
Richard Perle, stepping into the strike zone and taking one for the team. A prince among men.
There's lots of ways to get them the information they need to do their job. And I would point out to you that it is extraordinary for a sitting President of the United States to meet with the 9/11 Commission, a legislative body.
I don't know about you, but the way McClellan sounds, it seems a lot like Bush's attitude is basically, "Look, bitch, I'm the president, so you peons should be kissing my feet for wasting even an hour of my precious time with you, OK?"
Well, maybe that was too harsh. Let's let McClellan explain himself:
Well, I just talked to you about how this is an extraordinary move by a sitting President of the United States to do this, and how we are confident that the chairman and vice chairman will be able to share all this information with the rest of the commissioners.
No, we were right the first time -- Bush is too cool to spend more than an hour with these dorkwads, and he only wants to talk to the important people.
'Scuse me for sounding like a grudge-holder, but if Bill Clinton has to spend days at a time getting questioned and deposed about a blowjob, then maybe Bush should man the f$#! up and submit to some extended questioning about the worst terrorist attack in the history of the freakin' United States.
We try as hard as we can on this blog not to come off as nutcase tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists, but it's awful hard when the Bush people act like such complete asshats.
That's right, ladies — the NYT boosts their headlines from none other than Yours Truly. Send your phone numbers and risqué jpegs to this address — the line forms to the right.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:16 PM
Rush, you ignorant slut
Merciful God in heaven above, Rush "The OxyCutioner" Limbaugh is defending Howard Stern! Let's listen:
Limbaugh made the comments after his parent company Clear Channel dropped Viacom's Howard Stern from its stations.
"Smut on TV gets praised. Smut on TV wins Emmys. On radio, there seems [sic] to be different standards," Limbaugh explained.
"I've never heard Howard Stern. But when the federal government gets involved in this, I get a little frightened."
Wow, Rush, that was actually a stirring, cogent defense of free-speech rights. Or it was until you started being your usual douchebag self:
"If we are going to sit by and let the federal government get involved in this, if the government is going to 'censor' what they think is right and wrong...what happens if a whole bunch of John Kerrys or Terry McAuliffes start running this country, and decide conservative views are leading to violence?"
What the f...how did Rush just suddenly switch this whole thing over to being the Democrats' fault? Hey, Rush, you know who controls all three brances of government right now? The Republicans! Know who controls the FCC right now? The Republicans! Know who received two-thirds of Clear Channel's total campaign contributions in 2002? The Republicans! Yet somehow Rush whips out an absurd hypothetical, and all of a sudden John Kerry and Terry McAuliffe are on a crusade to crush the voice of the opposition! We can only guess he's back on the drugs again and his perception of reality has once again been fundamentally altered.
How stupid do you have to be to actually listen to this buffoon? How stupid do you have to be to enjoy his program?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:30 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot (2.0): 28th in a series
Welcome to the new and improved Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot — it includes all the snarky goodness you love in a revamped, easier-to-navigate package. In other words, we're now running Ann's words in italics and our own witheringly sarcastic running commentary in plain text. Not only is it more in keeping with the style we usually use for quoting or citing other people, but according to a Poynter Institute study, it makes Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot 73 percent easier to read!
Know what the best part is? We pulled that "73 percent" number right out of our ass! But we're only using a technique cribbed from Coulter herself, whose typical modus operandi (yeah, that's Latin, bitch!) is to make random, arbitrary non-sequitur statements with little basis in fact or logic to distract people from the fact that the people or things she's defending don't have a leg to stand on. It's kind of like, "OK, so we haven't found any WMDs in Iraq and millions of people are still unemployed, but — ooh, look, a pony!" It makes her a perfect match for our current administration, and it's a tactic she uses repeatedly in this week's column, "AFL-CIO Motto: Kick Me Again." So while Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot may be 124 percent easier to read (see how we just switched that number when you weren't looking? Another time-honored Coulter Classic!), it won't make it any easier to understand the twisted rhetoric and bizarre logic of the Coultinator:
In the past decade, the AFL-CIO has lobbied Congress on three major issues of any importance to union members:
(1) Oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement;
(2) Oppose permanent normal trade relations with China;
(3) Support drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The unions lost every vote.
Give Ann this much credit, she's definitely a shrewd, no-nonsense framer of issues. She rattles off these three issues right off the bat, and then proceeds to act as if these are the only causes that the AFL-CIO has seen fit to put its weight behind, ever — ignoring other more germane labor issues like, oh, equal pay, workers' rights, safe workplaces, that sort of thing. In other words, all the stuff that conservative Republicans like Bush oppose out of hand — and all the reasons labor unions generally don't touch right-wing candidates with a ten-foot pole.
Demonstrating his savvy political skills, the head of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, repeatedly throws the federation's support to political candidates who opposed labor on all three issues. So if you ever find yourself negotiating with Sweeney, make sure your opening bid is "nothing."
Sweeney's curious lose-at-any-price strategy has cost the unions everything. The only two Democratic presidential candidates to vote with the unions on any of these issues -- not all, but any -- were Representatives Dick Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich. Gephardt was out of the race after the first primary, and Kucinich can't break beyond the Aliens-Kidnapped-My-Mother crowd. (Dennis Kucinich did his tax return this week, and under "occupation" he wrote "Jay Leno punch line.")
From what we can gather, this is going to be Ann's column about how those horrible, evil Democrats sold the labor unions down the river. So when she brings up two Democrats who haven't committed that offense, what does she do? Slags them off as carrying the banner for "the Aliens-Kidnapped-My-Mother crowd." It doesn't matter what you do if you're a Democrat — Ann's still going to make fun of you.
There is only one candidate for president who didn't vote for NAFTA, didn't vote for trade with China and supported drilling in ANWR. That candidate is George Bush.
Of course he didn't vote for any of those things, he was a governor who had no voting power in Congress! How stupid does Ann think we are? And does this mean that when I run for president in 2028, I can use "didn't vote to send American troops to Vietnam" as one of my talking points?
He got into office by beating Al Gore -- the guy who was the head cheerleader for NAFTA. And unlike Dick Gephardt, Bush spends more time on the phone with Jimmy Hoffa than with Barbra Streisand.
Yeah, Gep and Barbra are best buds. Ann's willingness to whip out random names like "Barbra Streisand" for no other purpose than to initiate a Pavlovian right-wing response in her readers should give you some indication as to the level of intellectual contempt Coulter has for her own fans.
As president, Bush enraged free traders -- and our precious European "allies" -- by imposing tariffs on steel imports.
Which he dropped just this past September, because the tariffs were actually hurting American industries by encouraging international corporations to go elsewhere for cheaper steel.
Sweeney has rewarded Bush by calling him a "horror" for organized labor. Apparently what "organized labor" really wants isn't good jobs at good wages, but ... abortion on demand!
Wait, so all of a sudden this is a column about abortion? Ann knows just as well as we do, of course, that labor unions have no incentive whatsoever to support the big-corporation-fellating Bush policies that aim to keep workers' rights and benefits at the barest of bare minimums while looking the other way as thousands of jobs get shipped overseas. But mentioning this would make Bush look bad, so she has to throw the critical workers'-rights argument out the window and spin the issue into irrelevance: Unions oppose Bush not because he doesn't give a rat's ass about their working conditions...but rather, because they're in league with the nasty evil abortionists! Jeez, Coulterheads, isn't your intelligence insulted by this?
The AFL-CIO has vowed to devote massive union resources against Bush in the crucial swing states of Missouri, Ohio and Florida in the coming election.
Strictly following his strategy of selling union votes for nothing, the AFL-CIO has endorsed Sen. John Kerry -- who voted for NAFTA, voted for trade with China and voted against drilling for oil in Alaska. Skilled laborers will have to wait another day for "fair trade" and high-paying jobs in Alaska, but at least Sweeney's candidate supports the issues that really matter to the average blue-collar worker: gay marriage, global warming treaties and hybrid cars.
Ann, you're doing it again...not only that, but you're blaming Kerry for making this gay-marriage thing a huge issue, when in fact that was all GOP, baby. And she's still repeating NAFTA/China/ANWR as her mantra.
Kerry denounces "Benedict Arnold" CEOs who ship "American jobs overseas." (Experts are still trying to figure out why Kerry didn't mention his service in Vietnam in that statement.)
And there we have the hat trick. Ann doesn't want to deal with the fact that Bush and his economic team are utterly unconcerned with the steady flow of jobs overseas, so she diverts the reader's attention with this rhetorical tennis ball: "John Kerry talks about his Vietnam service too much!" (Except you'll notice that he didn't mention it! That means Ann Coulter just used a statement by Kerry in which he does not mention his Vietnam service to...bitch about how he talks too much about his Vietnam service! Oh, the stupidity!)
Sweeney seems to be satisfied with Kerry's explanation that -- like his vote for war with Iraq -- he voted for free trade, but then was shocked when free trade resulted.
Sen. John Edwards calls protection of U.S. jobs "a moral issue." Reminding audiences that he is the son of a mill worker almost as often as Kerry mentions that he served in Vietnam,
And as if it wasn't stupid enough the first time, Ann does it again! This time talking about John freaking Edwards!!!!
Edwards says that "when we talk about trade, we are talking about values." As the son of a mill worker, he has seen with his "own eyes" what bad trade agreements "do to people." Of the evil trade agreements (supported by AFL-CIO's candidate) Edwards says: "Those trade deals were wrong. They cost us too many jobs and lowered our standards."
Except -- like Kerry -- Edwards also voted for those trade agreements every chance he got. In 2000, Edwards voted for trade with China. Having seen with his "own eyes" what happens "when the mill shuts down," Edwards voted to shut down a few more mills.
Yeah, that's why he did it. Not because being able to sell more goods to China might result in more prosperity for American manufacturers...he did it because he wanted to screw those poor slobs back in North Carolina! Suckers!
Edwards also voted his conscience to oppose drilling in Alaska. Whenever Edwards' conscience speaks to him, it sounds remarkably like Barbra Streisand.
And there she whips out Barbra again. I can hear the anguished cries of my brain cells dying just from having to read this.
Edwards' only fig leaf for claiming he backs labor is a hypothetical vote he never actually cast. He bravely claims he would have voted against NAFTA -- if only he had been in the Senate when it came up for a vote.
That's an interesting moral calculus. Edwards didn't mind forcing American workers to compete with a billion Chinese -- famously including child workers and slave laborers. But trade with Canada and Mexico he says would have offended his delicate moral sensibilities.
Oh, this is just too f$#!ing rich. Ann lauds George W. Bush for not casting NAFTA or ANWR votes he had no authority to make, but when Edwards says he wouldn't have supported NAFTA, she affords him no such luxury.
In his stump speech, Edwards implies he ran against Jesse Helms by saying he beat "the Jesse Helms machine" to win his Senate seat. It was a real David and Goliath match-up -- pitting a poor, beleaguered multimillionaire trial lawyer against an elderly senator of humble means.
For Christ's sake. Edwards was a political newcomer, Helms was a 30-year Senate veteran who unofficially ran the entire Republican Party in North Carolina. And nobody who's served five Senate terms gets to say they're from "humble means" anymore. So howsabout we bring the Jesse Helms Pity Party to a halt right here.
But the mere mention of Helms' name invariably elicits sneers from the party of the little guy.
Helms voted with the AFL-CIO on all three big labor issues -- against NAFTA, against trade with China and for half a million good jobs in Alaska. Indeed, Helms was one of the main lobbyists against trade with China. The guy Edwards actually beat, Lauch Faircloth, was in the Senate for only one of these votes. The AFL-CIO didn't have to take Faircloth's word on how he might have voted on NAFTA: He voted against it. The AFL-CIO endorsed Edwards and opposed Faircloth and Helms.
Well, the AFL-CIO does have millions of African-American members, that may be one reason why they weren't lining up to support Lauch and Jesse.
It's not particularly surprising that the party of trial lawyers, environmentalists and Hollywood actresses keeps voting against blue collar workers. What's strange is that the AFL-CIO keeps voting against blue-collar workers, too.
But that, of course, is what this column is really about. Ann's primary concern isn't really with the poor benighted blue-collar workers of America; if it was, she wouldn't be encouraging them to support Bush in a million years. No, Ann's primary concern is George W. Bush, and if the AFL-CIO won't bite the bullet and support him, well, they must be punished! Since it doesn't look like the AFL-CIO is going to support Bush anytime soon, there's potential here for Ann to write a column about how all blue-collar union members are traitors...if she writes it, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will be there to deconstruct it! See you then!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:40 AM
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Big Bully strikes again
Yesterday I chided all those right-wingers who fatuously claim that gay marriage would tear the very fabric of our American society, challenging them to explain exactly how this was going to happen. Well, a letter writer in today's edition of the Birmingham News surprised me by stepping up to the plate. The Rev. Christopher Crain declares that gay marriage will destroy American society because it will...irrevocably alter the wedding industry!:
If same-sex marriages were mainstreamed, everything from the content of sociology classes in our public high schools to the covers of family and parenting magazines would reflect this radical change. Residential phone listings in the telephone book would look different. Jewelry stores would market a new genre of wedding rings. Wedding caterers would offer cake toppers that would initially turn heads.
Yes, wedding caterers would have to introduce entire new lines of cake decorations. Clearly, this is an issue requiring action at the Constitutional level.
Look, I don't want to go on at length about the gay-marriage amendment — for one thing, it stands about as much chance of passage as the anti-flag-burning amendment did, and for another thing, it's a stupid argument. I don't think wedded matrimony is a stupid goal for gay couples to have, mind you, I just think it's stupid that we're discussing this at all, for reasons that the good Reverend above inadvertantly made clear. I mean, our soldiers are dying in Iraq, there's still the matter of those 2 million lost jobs, the national debt has passed $7 trillion, and our President Nero is fiddling with...gay marriage?
Of course he is, because he had to find something to distract his conservative base from the fact that, in pretty much every relevant area of public policy, he's really kind of letting things go to shit. The ultra-cons were getting nervous about the rampant spending coming out of the White House and Bush's relative inaction on their pet social issues, so Bush had to make some grand gesture to make them think he was cool again. And how did he do it? By picking on the weakest kid in the schoolyard.
We've already described at length how the invasion of Iraq was nothing more than a distraction from the rigors of the real War on Terror, how it was merely picking on the weak kid because he'd be the easiest to beat. Well, Bush's support of the Federal Marriage Amendment is no different. Gays are an easy minority to stigmatize, you can get a pretty big organization built up against them in the religious right, and they're not enough of a concern within your own party that you'll have to take much crap from fellow Repubs for smacking them down. Yeah, sure, why not discriminate against a minority that's easy to discriminate against, especially if it'll make you look like Big Man in front of the Christian Coalition?
Bush and his supporters love to trumpet his courage, even though he sure does spend an awful lot of time picking on political weaklings. But his expressed support for the FMA is only courage on paper — or even less than that, since he's never going to actually have to put his so-called "courage" on the line by signing a ready-to-be-ratified amendment. At some point before November, Bush is actually going to have to tackle a tough issue or a formidable opponent, or he'll be supporting the gay-marriage amendment from Crawford, Texas, next year. We can only hope.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:28 AM
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Bad gay people! Bad, naughty gay people! No marriage for you!
OK, it's long past time for GWBWYPGN?! to weigh in on this whole gay-marriage-amendment thing, and it's just a shame that we waited until after we'd offered up the F-word for Lent, but here are five thoughts anyway:
1. Has anyone actually read the wording of the Federal Marriage Amendment? Evidently not, or else people across the country would be up in arms about how f...uh, how freakin' retarded it is:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
This amendment says no state or federal law can require marital status to be "conferred upon unmarried couples." So, um, doesn't that kind of BAN ALL MARRIAGES?! I mean, on the one hand, this amendment would be a perfect out for me whenever my parents ask why I haven't settled down with a nice girl yet and started a family, but beyond that, I was kind of hoping I would get married someday, y'know? Hello? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?...
2. It's time for conservatives everywhere to formally disabuse themselves of the notion that George W. Bush is one of them. There was a time when someone who described himself as a "conservative" would've called gay marriage the kind of thing that should be left up to individual states to decide. No longer, evidently.
But the odd thing is, Bush himself used to be one of them. Here's Dubya in a 2000 interview with Larry King, courtesy of Atrios:
KING: So if a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it?
BUSH: The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's issue like you're trying to get me into.
Yup, you heard it straight from the horse's ass mouth: The state can do what they [sic] want to do. Apparently that's been changed to "The state can do what they want to do, as long as they want to ban gay marriage."
3. It's a desperation move. Not so very long ago, Bush wouldn't have had to declare his support so openly for this amendment. Lord knows he tried to dance around the issue for as long as he could, but his verbal contortions on the issue didn't matter, because he trusted the Christian-conservative wing of his party to know what was really in his heart — "I don't like the gays any more than y'all do." So how is it that his hand was forced this time — why did he feel the need to come out and unequivocally declare his support for an amendment that, even if it was ratified, wouldn't achieve full Constitutional status until months (but more likely years) after the 2004 election?
Simple: Because he's getting nervous. He'd been waffling on the gay-marriage issue for so long that the Christian conservatives started to wonder whether he was really serious about this amendment; for a while, that was safe, because who else are they gonna vote for, John Kerry? But now the rumblings of dissatisfaction are coming at a time when Bush isn't doing so hot in the polls, and not only that, but there may be an ominous new challenger to court the votes of the Christian right if they sense that Bush isn't doing enough for them. (And we're not the only ones who see this as a real threat to Bush, either.)
Basically, Bush never would've had to step up and spell it all out for his Christian supporters before. Now he does. And that's odd.
4. It says a lot about this amendment that some very prominent Republicans sound like they'd rather not deal with it. Andrew Sullivan pointed out these quotes from the AP story on Bush's announcement: Tom DeLay, whom you might expect to be chomping at the bit to pass some anti-gay legislation, said, "This is so important we're not going to take a knee-jerk reaction to this. We are going to look at our options and we are going to be deliberative about what solutions we may suggest." Rep. David Dreier, co-chair of Bush's California campaign in 2000: "I will say that I'm not supportive of amending the Constitution on this issue. I believe that this should go through the courts, and I think that we're at a point where it's not necessary." Rep. Jerry Lewis, also from California: "At this moment I feel changing the Constitution should be a last resort on almost any issue." Evidently a lot of Republicans are squeamish about using the Constitution of the United States as the weapon of choice for blocking the progress of gay rights. Which brings us to our last point...
5. Wake up, people — it's the f$#!ing Constitution. Once upon a time, we amended the Constitution to end discrimination — we ratified the 15th Amendment to give African-Americans equal rights, the 19th Amendment to give women the right to vote. Now we're using the Constitution to uphold discrimination. And if you don't understand how very, very sad that is, I just don't know what to tell you.
Look, the anti-gay-marriage forces have used all kinds of specious and irrelevant arguments to convince people that this amendment is necessary — gay marriage will bring about the destruction of the American family (never quite heard that one adequately explained), legalized gay marriage will lead to people marrying their children or their pets (right, mm-hmm, sure, you betcha). But the desperate clamor for an anti-gay-marriage amendment boils down to one core belief: the idea that a gay couple can't possibly be as moral, as committed, or as loving as any straight couple.
And this straight guy would like to step forward and say that's complete and utter bullshit. It's just too bad our president can't figure that out.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:14 AM
No, but I kiss your momma with this mouth
As alluded to last week, GWBWYPGN?! is giving up the F-word for Lent. Each time GWBWYPGN?! uses the F-word, GWBWYPGN?! will put a dollar in a jar, and at the end of Lent the collected funds will be donated to some kind of charity, to, I don't know, buy soap for the millions of impoverished families in Africa who can't afford to put their own soap in their kids' mouths when they say the F-word.
Anyhoo, for the next 40 days, Rudepundit will be doing the swearing in GWBWYPGN?!'s stead. In terms of humor, Rudepundit is a little like an even more gutter-mouthed version of Dennis Miller before Miller applied for that $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study just how far he could bend over for George W. Bush.
So anyway, enjoy.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 7:47 AM
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Welcome to GWBWYPGN?!, ladies drink free!
Forgive GWBWYPGN?! for indulging in a little sexism here, not to mention going on at length about superficial stuff like appearances, but we've decided it's time to inject a little sex appeal into this campaign season.
Somehow, over the past decade or two, the Republicans have been able to bogart the mantle of Fun, Glamorous Party from the Democrats. Once upon a time, the liberals were the people you wanted to hang out with and the conservatives were the stuffed-shirt dorks, but somehow that's gotten switched around; now the Republicans have co-opted hipness — I guess if you've got as much money as they do, you can do that — and the Democrats and liberals have been left with the image of the people you avoid at a party because they're going to try and engage you in some lengthy discussion on the dangers of a capital-gains tax cut. Look at poor Al Gore — watching him debate George W. Bush was like watching E.J. Dionne debate Jessica Simpson, but Gore still lost because he had little more charisma than Ferris Bueller's American-history teacher.
And the Republicans think they've also wrestled away the title of Party of Hot Chicks now that they've got people like Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and the McBlondes of Fox News on their side, whereas the Democrats are being painted as pasty Birkenstock-wearing feminists now busily scraping Dean stickers off their Volvo station wagons. This is a damn shame, first of all because Ann Coulter isn't even that hot (as those of you who've been following this blog may have inferred), but second of all because the Democratic Party is loaded with hot women — particularly if the Tennessee Democratic Party celebration I went to right before the TN primary is any indication, but I've also had the good fortune to meet a couple of smokin'-hot ex-Deaniacs just in the last couple weeks (and, yeah, I happen to like Volvo station wagons). In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess to a crush on Juliet Huddy, who puts the "fox" in Fox News, but only with the caveat that the typical level of discourse on "Fox & Friends" makes Carrot Top look like Walter fuckin' Cronkite.
So as distasteful as this may sound to some of you, if we want to win in November, we've got to put our best foot forward in the hot-women department. Fortunately, the Democratic Party in its current state is eminently capable of doing that. As you'll see below, our hot women can go toe-to-toe with theirs any day of the week:
Sleeper VP pick ....... Theirs: National-security........Ours: Sen. Mary Landrieu adviser Condoleezza.............(D-LA)
Rice
Presumptive First Lady Theirs: Laura Bush.....................Ours: Teresa .............................................Heinz Kerry
Up-and-coming House member ...... Theirs: Rep. Katherine...............Ours: Stephanie Herseth Harris (R-FL)............................(D-SD), candidate to
............................................replace Bill Janklow
Fire-breathing columnist Theirs: Ann Coulter..............Ours: Maureen Dowd (Full horror of Adam's
apple viewable here)
Presidential offspring ....... Theirs: Jenna Bush............Ours: Karenna Gore Schiff (OK, so she's hot.)
Governor ....... Theirs: Rick Perry..........Ours: Jennifer Granholm (D-MI)
(R-TX)
So you see, kids, this is one battle we're ready to fight. They're tanned, they're rested, they're ready — it's time to make the Democratic Party hot again.
ETA: Want to see more of the lovely Stephanie Herseth? Then help her get elected. Her Republican opponent is already loading up the big-money guns, so it's time to give her some ammo of her own — donate to Herseth for Congress right here.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:07 PM
Monday, February 23, 2004
Special interests for special people
If you've been paying any attention to the Kerry-Bush campaign repartée lately, you've probably inferred that special interests aren't just the interests that ride the short bus to school. They're becoming a central campaign theme — and Bush, amazingly enough, is using this as an issue to bash Kerry with, despite the fact that Bush lecturing anyone on special interests is sort of like Jesse Helms telling someone to cool it with the racial humor. Not only that, but he's lying about it, says The Daily Howler. Bush's latest Internet attack ad accuses Kerry of taking “more special interest money than any other senator,” but howsabout we deal with the truth instead:
According to Peter Beinart, Kerry ranks ninety-second among U.S. senators when it comes to special interest money. Meanwhile, at his Annenberg “FactCheck” site, Brooks Jackson shot down this ad’s bogus claim too. (He shot it down ten days ago!) Is Kerry first among senators in special interest dough, raising $640,000 in the last fifteen years? Please. “So far, for example, Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist reported $1,022,063 in PAC donations for his 2004 campaign alone,” Jackson notes.
And that's not even counting the money Frist made from his witheringly self-satisfied eugenics primer Good People Beget Good People, which has rocketed up to #70,009 on Amazon's sales chart.
Still, the GOP thinks that by taking $640K in special-interest money, Kerry has rendered himself "unprincipled." By that standard, then, Frist must be "unscrupulous," according to my computer's built-in thesaurus, even "wanton." And Bush? Downright "whorish," if you ask me.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:06 PM
The Alabama solution: Run, Roy, Run!
It's official: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader (anagram: "Crap! Ravenous, coldhearted man") is running for president. Thanks, Ralph, but don't you think you've done enough already?
I'm not convinced that Nader's decision to run is really the huge disaster for the Democrats that it was in 2000. For one thing, after three years of Emperor Dubya, most of the Naderites of 2000 have learned their lesson. Even the Green Party knows better than to have anything to do with him this time around. Still, there's even less margin for error in 2004 than there was in 2000, and Nader's monstrous ego might just be the difference again.
But what if there was a way to counter Nader's independent campaign on the left with an equivalent, if not stronger, campaign on the right? Those of us in Alabama have the solution: Chief Justice Roy S. Moore (anagram: "Joyous, I emcee for Christ") needs to throw his hat into the ring. With Reverend Roy siphoning the hard-core fundamentalist-Christian votes away from the Republican Party, Bush will be out of the White House before you can say "I, John Forbes Kerry, do solemnly swear..." But how do we get him to do this?
The other day, as I was messing around on Dave Leip's excellent Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, I discovered that a little party called the Constitution Party won 98,022 votes in the 2000 presidential election. I'd never heard of the Constitution Party before, so I paid a visit to their Web site, where I discovered that they "work to restore our government to its Constitutional limits and our law to its Biblical foundation." Not only that, but Roy Moore his ownself has been speaking at their state party meetings.
Roy Moore. The Constitution Party. A match made, if you'll pardon the pun, in heaven.
The idea isn't that preposterous. This past weekend, you'll recall, Bush used another recess appointment to install Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Ironically, though he is a devout Catholic and about as right-wing as lawyers get, Pryor is now persona non grata with Alabama's substantial Bible-thumping demographic. As the attorney general, you see, Pryor was tasked with prosecuting Moore for the ethics violations that stemmed from the big-ass Ten Commandments monument that Moore moved into the state judicial building; because Pryor actually acknowledged the rule of law (heavens, no!) and agreed (if grudgingly) to prosecute Reverend Roy, Pryor has been lumped in with all those atheists and God-haters who wanted to see Moore removed from the state bench. And now that Bush has given a recess appointment to Pryor, the real hard-core fundies on the right wing are wondering if they've been betrayed.
There's got to be a way to get Reverend Roy to run. If Nader's ego is big enough to convince him to run for president a second time, surely Roy's is just as big, or bigger. He just has to be convinced there's enough people behind him.
So let's try this: Go to the Foundation for Moral Law, Inc., the legal-defense fund for Reverend Roy. And e-mail info@morallaw.org with your own personal encouragement for Roy to seek the Constitution Party's nomination for president. Cite Bush's recess appointment of Bill Pryor as evidence that Bush and the Republican Party have abandoned Moore, and God, in the name of political expediency. As with Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter, don't let on that you're a leftie, but at the same time, don't ham it up in your attempts to sound like a dedicated Roy Moore fan.
Keep in mind that I'm taking a bullet for you bastards here — if Roy runs, he's going to win the state of Alabama in a walk, which means I'm going to have to move back to Georgia to restore my dignity, and that's going to cost money. (To find out how you can contribute to the Help Doug Move Back to Georgia Foundation, e-mail georgemustgo(at)hotmail.com.) But I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get Bush out of the White House. And if that includes being a sneaky, devious son of a bitch...so much the better.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:06 AM
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Woodward Ho!
So one of us lefties will be all, "It looks an awful lot like Bush is trying to cover up what he did before 9/11," and the right wing will be all, "Quit being such a paranoid nutbag," and then I read something like this that makes me all, "Yeah, eat me":
Feb. 18 - Faced with presidential resistance to turning over highly sensitive intelligence briefs, the commission investigating the September 11 terror attacks tried to learn the details in the documents by obtaining access to White House transcripts of interviews that senior officials gave to a prominent journalist, NEWSWEEK has learned.
The extraordinary access that top Bush administration officials gave Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward more than two years ago for his book, “Bush at War,” became a principal issue in the contentious battle between the September 11 panel and the White House over access to the President’s Daily Briefs or PDBs—the intelligence briefing report that is given to the president every morning.
Like, what the crap is going on here? The administration will let Woodward have unprecedented access to their files so he can write a blowjob book about Bush, but when the freaking 9/11 commission wants access to the same stuff, they get all David Spade on them, like, "And you are...?" Priorities, people! What the administration is doing right now is sort of like if I were to take my deathly ill daughter to the hospital, and when the doctor asks what she's allergic to and what medication she's taking, I get all huffy and reply, "Well, just because I told my cleaning lady all that last week doesn't make it any of your business, Mr. Nosypants."
Don't believe that this is some serious shiznit? Here's another paragraph from the Newsweek article:
But there is little doubt that Woodward got details of documents that are central to the commission’s investigation—and more than a little sensitive for the Bush White House. One intelligence document that Woodward described in a May, 2002 Washington Post story , although not in his book, is the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB given to Bush while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford. This is the day that intelligence officials briefed Bush on the prospect of an upcoming Al Qaeda attack and the prospect that terrorists might seek to hijack commercial airliners—a warning that critics have long charged should have triggered a more vigorous response from the White House. The title of the PDB, according to Woodward’s story, was more prophetic than the White House has ever acknowledged: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Tick, tick, tick...
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:03 PM
Friday, February 20, 2004
Tonight I have a message for the readers of GWBWYPGN?!...
...Go home and die. But first, watch the State of the Union Address, take one.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:18 AM
Thursday, February 19, 2004
"Son, you were spending pretty fast back there. You have any idea what the debt ceiling is around here?"
If I had a dollar for every girl who'd ever rejected me in my life...I'd need to be rejected by seven trillion girls to pay off the national debt. (Hey, I'm pretty close!)
Record-setting national debt, rampant job losses, highest gas prices in four years, and oh yeah, those 140,000-some troops in Iraq...once upon a time, this all would have been enough to get a sitting president ridden out of Washington on a rail, wouldn't it?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:10 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: 27th in a series
Well, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot fans, it would appear that Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter has achieved some level of success — and even if it hasn't, we're going to take credit anyway: Ann's disgusting denigration of war hero Max Cleland last week made waves all over the country, and all sorts of folks are coming forward to condemn Ann for the disrespectful witch asshat that she is. So many, in fact, that Ann evidently felt compelled to use her entire column this week to explain herself — though her "explanations" are, as you might expect, witless, self-serving, and dishonest.
In fact, the woman who said last week that Cleland "dropped a grenade on himself" barely has a chance to catch her breath before she calls us liars! Yes, she says we're lying when we claim she lied about how Cleland lost his limbs. But you'll notice that Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot never claimed Max got hurt in an actual combat situation; we simply called shenanigans on the "dropped a grenade on himself" lie, as well as her insolent assertion that Cleland exhibited "no bravery" in Vietnam. No, this latest "I know you are but what am I?" from the Coultinator is just more of her typical goalpost-moving, and it makes the title of her screed this week ("File Under: 'Omission Accomplished' ") even more ironic:
Liberals are hopping mad about last week's column. Amid angry insinuations that I "lied" about Sen. Max Cleland, I was attacked on the Senate floor by Sen. Jack Reed, Molly Ivins called my column "error-ridden," and Al Hunt called it a "lie." Joe Klein said I was the reason liberals were being hysterical about George Bush's National Guard service.
All sounds like pretty fair criticism to us, Ann.
I would have left it at one column, but apparently Democrats want to go another round. With their Clintonesque formulations, my detractors make it a little difficult to know what "lie" I'm supposed to be contesting, but they are clearly implying -- without stating -- that Cleland lost his limbs in combat.
You'll note that in our previous edition of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, not once did we say or even imply that Cleland had lost his limbs in a combat situation, and that issue didn't figure among the many lies and omissions we were pointing out in her column. Ann will only name two "detractors" who are "implying" that Cleland lost his limbs in combat; as for the rest, she's just putting words in their mouths like she always does with us nasty libruls. Anyway, the point here is not to fall for the issue-skirting Coulter will try to engage in for the remainder of her column.
It is simply a fact that Max Cleland was not injured by enemy fire in Vietnam. He was not in combat, he was not -- as Al Hunt claimed -- on a reconnaissance mission, and he was not in the battle of Khe Sanh, as many others have implied. He picked up an American grenade on a routine noncombat mission and the grenade exploded.
Ann, you ignorant slut.
In your first column on Cleland, you claimed on multiple occasions that Cleland "dropped a grenade on himself" (which you just now changed, hoping that nobody was looking, to "picked up an American grenade"). That's what got us hopping mad about your mendacity, the fact that you would deliberately tell a falsehood about what happened just to make Cleland look like a clumsy oaf responsible for his own injury. But you gloss right over the lie — yes, the outright lie — you told last week just so you can get to a made-up charge that's easier to defend yourself against.
In Cleland's own words: "I didn't see any heroism in all that. It wasn't an act of heroism. I didn't know the grenade was live. It was an act of fate." That is why Cleland didn't win a Purple Heart, which is given to those wounded in combat. Liberals are not angry because I "lied"; they're angry because I told the truth.
No, Ann, we're still angry that you lied. (And have yet to admit it.)
I wouldn't press the point except that Democrats have deliberately "sexed up" the circumstances of Cleland's accident in the service of slandering the people of Georgia, the National Guard and George Bush.
Umm, when exactly where "the people of Georgia" slandered by Cleland's defenders, Ann? Boy, does she have a warped idea of what that word really means.
Cleland has questioned Bush's fitness for office because he served in the National Guard but did not go to Vietnam.
Cleland didn't question Bush's fitness for office — he questioned Bush's courage and honesty, considering that Bush likes to brag about what a hot-shit fighter jock he was in the National Guard. And as far as we're concerned, sic 'em, Max.
And yet the poignant truth of Cleland's own accident demonstrates the commitment and bravery of all members of the military who come into contact with ordnance.
Ahhh, now we start with the backtracking. Just last week, Coulter said there was "no bravery" in Cleland's sacrifice. But now she's waxing damn near poetic about its "poignant truth," saying it "demonstrates...commitment and bravery." Call Cleland a coward, call him brave, but at least have enough courage of your convictions to pick one and stick with it, you opportunistic, bandwagon-hopping douchebag.
Cleland's injury was of the routine variety that occurs whenever young men and weapons are put in close proximity -- including in the National Guard.
Yeah, we're sure George W. Bush was just surrounded by grenades and live ammo as he bravely read safety manuals at his inactive National Guard post in Montgomery in '72.
But it is a vastly more glorious story to claim that Cleland was injured by enemy fire rather than in a freak accident. So after Saxby Chambliss beat Cleland in the 2002 Georgia Senate race, liberals set to work developing a carefully crafted myth about Cleland's accident.
Why would we nasty libruls wait until after the election to "develop a carefully crafted myth" about Cleland's service? Everyone in the state of Georgia knew about Cleland's heroism during Vietnam, as well as his injury, so there was no need to "craft a myth." What we did after the '02 senatorial election was simply express outrage that a man who had given as much for his country as Cleland had was allowed to be slandered as unpatriotic by the insolent Saxby Chambliss. And despite Coulter's fatuous "Who, us?" claims last week that the Chambliss campaign never implied that Cleland was unpatriotic, we stand by that outrage still.
Among many other examples, last November, Eric Boehlert wrote in Salon: "(D)uring the siege of Khe Sanh, Cleland lost both his legs and his right hand to a Viet Cong grenade."
So Boehlert got some circumstances and some facts wrong. Embarrassing, yes, but is Ann Coulter really the one who should be pointing fingers at him? (Insert your own "glass houses" quote here.)
Sadly for them, dozens and dozens of newspapers have already printed the truth. Liberals simply can't grasp the problem Lexis-Nexis poses to their incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty -- hysterical overreaction. The truth is not their forte.
Oh, fuck you, Ann, you hypocrite, and fuck you again. (Sorry, we were really hoping we'd be able to keep the profanity down after last week's tirade, but sometimes we just can't help it. Don't worry, we're giving up the F-word for Lent. No, really.)
One of the most detailed accounts of Cleland's life was written by Jill Zuckman in a lengthy piece for The Boston Globe Sunday magazine on Aug. 3, 1997:
"Finally, the battle at Khe Sanh was over.
(That would be the battle in which Cleland exposed himself to enemy mortars and rocket fire to move his wounded fellow soldiers to safety. Is anyone surprised that Ann didn't feel the need to include that part?)
"Cleland, 25 years old, and two members of his team were now ordered to set up a radio relay station at the division assembly area, 15 miles away. The three gathered antennas, radios and a generator and made the 15-minute helicopter trip east. After unloading the equipment, Cleland climbed back into the helicopter for the ride back. But at the last minute, he decided to stay and have a beer with some friends. As the helicopter was lifting off, he shouted to the pilot that he was staying behind and jumped several feet to the ground.
"Cleland hunched over to avoid the whirring blades and ran. Turning to face the helicopter, he caught sight of a grenade on the ground where the chopper had perched. It must be mine, he thought, moving toward it. He reached for it with his right arm just as it exploded, slamming him back and irreparably altering his plans for a bright, shining future."
My, my! Wouldn't that information have been helpful last week! But Coulter didn't include it because it wouldn't have served her hatchet job quite as well.
The first time around, Coulter summed up the incident with the following sentence: "Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends." The impression your average reader gets from this description is that Cleland hadn't been fighting at all, he simply found an unclaimed grenade on his way to the canteen where he was going to pound some PBRs with Hawkeye and Corporal Klinger. (Yes, we know we're mixing wars here, we're just trying to paint a picture — and who are you all of a sudden, Norman freakin' Schwarzkopf?) And that particular description made it a lot easier for Coulter to paint Cleland as a loafer and an incompetent.
Now we find out that Cleland was just 15 miles from the battle zone where he'd risked his life for his fellow soldiers just days before — and if he was, in fact, going to be "drinking beers with friends," it was after a hard day's work of setting up a radio relay station on orders from his superiors. Sounds perfectly reasonable for a soldier who'd displayed so much bravery and selflessness over the previous four days, doesn't it? Apparently not, according to Ann, for "there was no bravery involved in dropping a grenade on himself with no enemy in sight."
Interestingly, all news accounts told the exact same story for 30 years -- including that Cleland had stopped to have beer with friends when the accident occurred (a fact that particularly irked Al Hunt).
"He told the pilot he was going to stay awhile. Maybe have a few beers with friends. ... Then Cleland looked down and saw a grenade. Where'd that come from? He walked toward it, bent down, and crossed the line between before and after." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec. 5, 1999)
Wait, so now he was "maybe" going to have a few beers with friends. Which is it? (By the way, we searched the Journal Sentinel's own archives separately using the phrases "Max Cleland," "a few beers" and "the line between before and after," and were never able to locate an article on the date cited by Coulter. If anyone has a copy of the full article, we'd love to read it, because based on our prior experiences with Ann's work, we find it very hard to trust her characteristically selective, misleading use of quoted sources.)
"(Cleland) didn't step on a land mine. He wasn't wounded in a firefight. He couldn't blame the Viet Cong or friendly fire. The Silver Star and Bronze Star medals he received only embarrassed him. He was no hero. He blew himself up." (The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 24, 1999)
We tried to pay the $2.95 to get this article out of the Baltimore Sun's archives, but their server wouldn't cough it up. We can only hope that the writer was being facetious or trying to recreate Cleland's thoughts from the many years in which he mistakenly thought it was his own grenade, because "He blew himself up," beyond being an inaccurate statement, is just a shitty, shitty thing to say.
"Cleland was no war hero, but his sacrifice was great. ... Democratic Senate candidate Max Cleland is a victim of war, not a casualty of combat. He lost three limbs on a long-forgotten hill near Khe Sanh because of some American's mistake ..." (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 29, 1996)
OK, this is really starting to piss us off. Coulter, and evidently whoever wrote this AJC article, apparently think that just because Cleland's horrible injury didn't happen in a combat situation, that disqualifies him from being a "war hero." Which completely ignores the indisputable heroism Cleland exhibited at Khe Sahn, linked above — for which he was awarded that Silver Star that Coulter hasn't seen fit to mention once, except in the above citation of a Baltimore Sun article she didn't even write.
The story started to change only last year when the Democrats began citing Cleland's lost Senate seat as proof that Republicans hate war heroes. Indeed, until the myth of Republicans attacking Cleland for his lack of "patriotism" became central to the Democrats' narrative against George Bush, Cleland spoke only honorably and humbly about his accident.
Don't you just love how the Republicans' attacks on Cleland's patriotism — which included ads seen by millions of Georgians, myself included, juxtaposing Cleland's picture right next to Osama bin Laden's — have now become a "myth" in Ann's eyes? Republicans may not "hate" war heroes, but they sure don't have a lot of respect for any of the ones who decline to toe the Grand Ole Party line. Look at what they did to John McCain. Hell, look at what Coulter herself did to John McCain.
"How did I become a war hero?" he said to The Boston Globe reporter in 1997. "Simple. The grenade went off."
Notice he didn't add "...after I dropped it on myself." Again, that's the part that Coulter just concocted out of thin air.
Cleland even admitted that, but for his accident, he would have "probably been some frustrated history teacher, teaching American government at some junior college." (OK, I got that wrong: I said he'd probably be a pharmacist.)
Cleland's true heroism came after the war, when he went on to build a productive life for himself. That is a story of inspiration and courage.
"...True heroism came after the war"...there she goes again, acting like his pre-grenade bravery at Khe Sahn never happened.
He shouldn't let the Democrats tarnish an admirable life by "sexing up" his record in order to better attack George Bush.
Bitch, Max's record doesn't need any "sexing up." What it does need is for lying, no-account ass clowns like yourself to stop sexing it down just so that your boy Bush doesn't look quite so shiftless by comparison. Yes, Coulter somehow did find it in her heart to throw lip service to Cleland's "commitment and bravery" and the "productive life" he built for himself, but she still hasn't apologized for the abject lies and omissions she made a week ago, nor has she admitted on her own that Cleland did exhibit "true heroism" during the war (even if the grenade accident was not where it was specifically exhibited). "Omission Accomplished," indeed.
So nice try, Ann, but you're still dishonest, still disrespectful, and still a nasty, nasty bitch. And if you're still clinging to the hope that sitting behind a desk in Montgomery makes George W. Bush half the hero Cleland was, make that a pathetic, nasty, nasty bitch. Thanks to all the Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot readers and OFYAC participants who came forward to defend Max and, in their own small way, forced Coulter to 'splain herself (after a fashion) in this week's column; based on early projections, we predict that her column next week will be a blistering condemnation of a) homemade apple pie, b) Abraham Lincoln, or c) cute, cuddly newborn puppies. Which one will it be, which one will it be? You'll just have to tune in to Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot to find out!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:10 PM
Down goes Frazier
Still more fallout from OFYAC, in this instance regarding Kent State U. columnist Andrew Wallace. This morning, the Kent Stater's editor writes:
The Daily Kent Stater ran a guest column Monday by Andrew Wallace titled “Democrats’ attacks against Bush unfounded.” Soon after running the column, another staff member sent me evidence indicating Wallace had lifted some of his information from columnist Ann Coulter. One paragraph in particular was hardly altered.
(GWBWYPGN?!'s note: A million thanks for using "titled" as opposed to "entitled.") Later on:
Wallace has since fully admitted to the accusations. Plagiarism is absoultely unacceptable, and he will no longer be permitted to write for the Stater. He will, however, be allowed one more column in which he has asked to apologize to the readers.
I commend Wallace for his apology in a time when people would rather justify their mistakes than take responsibility.
Yeah, no shit, as you'll find out from Ann Coulter herself later today.
One final note — this is simply an update on an ongoing issue this blog has sort of taken up as its very own, and I don't want anyone to construe it as gloating. Sure, we revel in the misfortune of schmucks like Coulter, but that schadenfreude does not spread to a kid who simply cut corners on a column in his college newspaper. When I was at The Red & Black oh so many years ago, I was in the position of having to make the kinds of decisions that Wallace's editor just made, so I know how humiliated Wallace must be feeling right now; for that reason, I don't take any pleasure in what happened to him. And neither, I hope, do any of you.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:20 AM
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
The plot thickens (and sickens)
Don't want this to turn into an All Max Cleland, All The Time blog, but it looks like GWBWYPGN?! wasn't the only one to get really frickin' pissed about Ann Coulter's lies concerning Sen. Cleland.
Many more have taken the time to expose Coulter's statements about Cleland for the lies that they are, including the always-excellent Truthout.com and Matt Bivens, whose "Daily Outrage" appears in The Nation. On a not-really-related-but-sorta note, reader texoma forwarded us this post from Unfair Witness saying that one newspaper, the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., has given KKKoulter's kkkolumn the heave-ho (also reported on by OFYAC Platinum-Level Supporter TBOGG). Not for lying about Cleland specifically, but hey, anyone wise enough to rid their pages of Ann Coulter's B.S. deserves to be commended. "We took a chance on a firebrand writer, and it didn't work," writes the P-E's Gale Hammons. "We're not afraid to admit our mistake, and fix it."
Which is more than you can say for Bushista blogger Claudia at Freedom of Thought, which might as well be "Freedom to Lie." Claudia, too, dutifully parrots Coulter's libel of Sen. Cleland, and concludes that she is "vindicated" for not thinking Cleland was an actual war hero. (For someone whose blog trumpets its military connections as loud as hers does, that's an awfully strange view to take, but whatever.) Certainly Claudia isn't the only right-winger who got hook-line-and-sinkered by Coulter's dishonesty, but what's really funny is that in the post directly before the one about Coulter's column, Claudia gets taken in by the doctored photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda that's been making the rounds lately. Oopsie! That's two posts in a row where you got burned for just swallowing whatever the right wing feeds you, Claud! In her defense, she does apologize for the Kerry photo (though without taking said photo down, strangely enough), but so far no apologies for Cleland. Guess that feeling of "vindication" absolves you of such responsibility.
Interestingly, Claudia doesn't have the stones to list an e-mail address where you can contact her, so it looks like you'll just have to leave a bunch of comments on the Cleland post. Remember, be polite.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:37 PM
Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but Republicans are a bunch of culotte-wearing, herbal-tea-sipping Nancy-boys.
First it was George W. Bush requesting massive structural reinforcements to Buckingham Palace, an edifice that had ably protected elderly members of the British royal family for centuries. Then it was RNC chairman Ed "Edith" Gillespie sulking over the "dirty campaign" he feels sure the Democrats are planning. Now we have government officials mulling the possibility of sending federal troops into New York to guard the Republican National Convention this year. Yes, the NYPD was strong and capable enough to protect about a million partygoers in Times Square on New Year's Eve, but a few thousand drunk Republicans in the middle of September, now those people need some real firepower!
Forgive me for indulging in some gratuitously sexist stereotyping, but if the Republican Party wants to continue projecting a global image of power and strong leadership — not to mention the image here at home of themselves as the only party fearless and gung-ho enough to adequately protect the American homeland — perhaps they should quit acting like such girls. I mean, I've slept with known Auburn sorority girls with more guts than these people.
Look, Betsy, we're not gonna send in thousands of federal troops to guard you guys' friggin' purses, OK? So man up and make do with the NYPD. They're heroes, remember? From 9/11? Remember, that day that you rescheduled your convention specifically to exploit?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:13 AM
What is unknown to most is that Sen. Cleland didn’t lose his limbs in any combat situation. He was going to have a few beers with his buddies and picked up a live grenade that had dropped. While abysmal, this could have happened anywhere, even in the Texas Air National Guard. When Terry McAuliffe starts vouching for your military record, Sen. Cleland, it’s time to throw up the white flag and step back.
Compare the two columns and see if you don't think our boy Andy is treading awfully close to plagiarism with this crap. At least he doesn't parrot Coulter's lie about Cleland "dropping a grenade on himself," but he does repeat practically verbatim Coulter's inexplicable assertion that Cleland was "going to have a few beers with his buddies," which is a lie by itself.
So Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter is officially expanding to include Bad Andy. E-mail your (non-profane) sentiments to him at acwalla1@kent.edu, and cc it to the Kent Stater's editors at stater@kent.edu while you're at it. Especially for my fellow current or ex-journos out there, be sure to point out that Andy's lazy ass basically lifted all the "facts" in his column strait from Kommandant Koulter, and that as journalists they should have higher standards than that.
Holler back if you hear anything from either of 'em. Peace.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:42 AM
Monday, February 16, 2004
Slogan's run
Corrente, a top-notch blog and Gold Level supporter of OFYAC, ran the Bush re-election campaign's new slogan ("Steady Leadership in a Time of Change," vomit) through an anagram generator and came up with some choice alternatives. (Best one, to our way of thinking, is "I'm a Hypertense, Death-Dealing Fiasco.") We were hoping to goof on the campaign slogan in some fashion, too, but we would never steal from another blogger; instead, we're just going to steal from David Letterman. Herewith, our Top 10 Suggestions for the Bush/Cheney '04 Campaign Slogan:
10. Maintaining a Steady Level of Mediocrity in a Time of Change
9. I'm Not a Complete Babbling Idiot, I Just Play One on "Meet the Press"
8. Better Living Through Demagoguery
7. You Call It Two Million Lost Jobs, I Call It Two Million People With More Time to Party!
6. Please Give Me Four More Years...I'm Still Trying to Make Up My National Guard Duty
5. Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Y...I Mean, Than You Were Two...Uh, Make That Six Mon...I Mean, You're Doing OK, Right?
4. If You Don't Vote For Me, Dick Cheney Will Fucking Kill You
3. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength
2. I'm Not a Dictator, I'm Just Engaging in Dictatorship-Related Program Activities
1. You Owe Me This...I'm a Bush, Dammit!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:09 PM
Sunday, February 15, 2004
I thank you, Max Cleland thanks you, and the truth thanks you
You guys. No, really, you guys!
In the 24-hour period starting around 2 p.m. Friday, this site experienced about 20 times the number of hits it ordinarily gets in a day. And it was all due to people coming by to check out Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter. In case you need an update, Ann Coulter's selected libel target last week was, inexplicably, former Sen. Max Cleland, whose Vietnam sacrifice of both legs and one arm evidently wasn't enough to satisfy the Coultinator. No, Coulter fabricated a story about Cleland dropping a grenade on himself, all the better to conclude that Silver Star winner Cleland is no more heroic than George W. Bush. (The factual story can be found here.)
GWBWYPGN?! started Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter as a way of standing up for Max and making Ann's publishers, editors, and other enablers confront just how disgusting she is -- obviously, a Web site like Town Hall isn't going to get too hot and bothered about Coulter insinuating that Democrats kiss pictures of Saddam Hussein before they go to bed each night, but even they should be squeamish about allowing a columnist to lie in order to ridicule someone's war injury. We knew people would get good and pissed off about what Coulter did; what we didn't know was how quickly the news would spread, and how many bloggers would take the time and the Web space to bring others in on the project. And we wanted to say thanks.
Mad props must go to TBOGG, who sent nearly six hundredeight hundred well over a thousand new visitors (and counting) over here all by his lonesome, and runs a wicked funny Web site besides. Props also to Daily Kos and another one of Ann Coulter's personal Satans, Scoobie Davis, for sending plenty of traffic this way, as well as the visitors to the comments section at Eschaton.
Plenty of other blogs got in on the Operation, some old friends, some brand-new. Some of the first to get on board were Mary at Naked Furniture and Lisa at Kamikaze Kumquat, Official GWBWYPGN?! Homegirls; Dr. Damfa at Damfacrats 2004; and Georgia resident Steve (w00t!) at I Like to Write. We're also pleased to make the acquaintance of Corrente, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Department of Louise, and The Sesquipedalian. You'll note that you all have been rewarded for your service with links in the blogroll, which have a cash value of $0 and cannot be returned or traded, but, like, it's the thought that counts.
Not directly affiliated with Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter but still standing up for Max in their own way are Doxagora, Demagogue, and the Center for American Progress. Go check out their sites, and please also pay some visits to the Operation supporters who were kind enough to leave comments beneath these various posts. We appreciate every Websurfer who sent letters and e-mails on behalf of Sen. Cleland, and if you were one of those letter-writers, leave a comment here (even if it's just a "wert erp") so you can get at least something approaching your due. (And if we've left anyone out who gave the Operation a link assist, get your e-mail on and we'll correct that post haste.)
We'll keep y'all updated on whatever results from this little project. Sadly, we can't promise that anyone else will be firing Coulter like National Review did, but at the very least, some people have been forced to answer the question, "What are you doing still hanging out with that bitch?" When/if we do get those answers, you'll hear 'em.
So thanks again, guys. Y'all's hearts are as big as the 2005 projected federal budget deficit, and GWBWYPGN?! loves everything about you.
As for Ann Coulter, should she somehow stumble across this: F$#! you.
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