Category: Politics

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Even Wingnuts Sing the Bush-Hating Blues

Jon Ponder

I found this interesting bit of doggerel at the Hotline’s Blogometer last week. It was attributed to John Derbyshire who posts to a rightwing blog called “The Corner,” which you can look up via the Google.

To the tune of “Help Me Make It Through the Night”:

HELP ME GET BACK TO THE RIGHT
Take the W from my car.
Peel it off and let it fall.
Leave the bumper clean and bright
For this sticker from Ron Paul.
It’s not me that’s changin’ sides.
It’s more a case of seein’ the light.
I’ve supported Bush too long.
Help me get back to the Right.

This is ironic because just a few years ago, Derbyshire’s rightwing co-factionalists labeled anyone who dared to criticize their Dear Leader as a “Bush hater” — usually adding that criticizing Dear Leader was equivalent to hating America.

Of course, when the wingers do it, it’s okay. They can even make up songs about it, and no one questions their patriotism.

Ain’t America great!

NFL Quarterback Accused of Hanging, Drowning, Electrocuting, Shooting and Beating Dogs

Jon Ponder

A raid on a kennel in Virginia co-owned by Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick on Wednesday uncovered a horrendous animal abuse operation:

The news focus on this story is all about what these allegations will do to Vick’s career and his $100 million-plus NFL contract, not to mention product endorsements.

Vick, 27, and three others are accused of violating federal laws against staging dogfights, gambling and engaging in unlawful activities across state lines. According to the indictment, they ran Bad Newz Kennels out of a property the quarterback owns in Surry, Va., and executed pit bulls – by methods such as hanging, drowning, electrocution, shooting and beating – that didn’t perform well as fighters.

How involved was Vick?

The indictment identifies Vick as a key player in an operation that dated to 2001, just before his rookie season with the Falcons. Listed are at least 30 fights that Vick or other members of the kennel arranged or participated in, including details such as the names of the dogs and the amount of money — often thousands of dollars — awarded to the owners of the winners of matches that were frequently fought to the death.

Peace, Phillips and Vick also allegedly executed “approximately eight” dogs that did not perform well during so-called “testing” sessions in April. Later, authorities seized from the property 60 dogs — most of them pit bulls — along with treadmills, a stick used to pry fighting animals apart, and a “rape stand” device used to hold down aggressive females for breeding.

The news focus on this story is all about what these allegations will do to Vick’s career and his $100 million-plus NFL contract, not to mention product endorsements. But it’s hard to see what football has to do with this — other than providing the revenue that funded this horror.

One interesting side note is that Al Sharpton, along with music producer Russell Simmons, have teamed up with PETA to send a letter of protest to the NFL, which says, “dogfighting is unacceptable. Hurting animals for human pleasure or gain is despicable. Cruelty is just plain wrong.”

Larry Flynt Says He’s Found Five Hookers ‘So Far’ Who Had Sex with Sen. Vitter in New Orleans

Jon Ponder

Vitter is also rumored to have a diaper fetish, and sources say he fathered a child with one of the prostitutes

On Monday, near the end of Sen. David Vitter’s apology for consorting with call girls, he practically dared the media to prove allegations that he had ongoing relations with hookers in New Orleans in the 1990s.

According to sources, the mother and child live in suburban D.C., where they secretly receive support from Sen. Baby-Daddy.

Last night, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt answered the challenge:

FLYNT: [I] want to point something out very important. [Vitter] lied on TV when he apologized to the nation. He…

[LARRY] KING: Lied how?

FLYNT: … well, he’s using his wife and kids as a shield and said what happened. Those rumors out of Louisiana where he had a small brothel of hookers. That was not true. Well, it is true. I’m working with the major Louisiana media down there.

KING: You say he had a brothel of hookers in Louisiana?

FLYNT: There’s been about five we’ve been able to track down so far. So you see what happens when you’re a guy like him and you’re not completely honest, see, he didn’t even have to bring that up. And now that he’s brought it up, everybody is all over it, including us.

Other developments include widely reported stories that Vitter has a diaper fetish and would pay the women to dress him up like a baby, as well as a story that he had a child with one of the prostitutes, Wendy Cortez, and that mother and child live in suburban Washington, where they receive financial support from Sen. Baby-Daddy.

I Love Posts Like That, Kenneth

Buck Banks

Kenneth Quinnell of the Florida Progressive Coalition took offense at a post I made on Sunday about Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman and her questionable lobbying practices. Specifically, he resented my using the term “idiots” in my post, though I will note that I never called either one of them idiots, exactly.

He provides a line-by-line deconstruction of my post here. While I’m not going to argue line by line (after all, Quinnell now owns the high road, while I own the low road of the craven personal attack), I do want to make a few points based on 1) listening to the relevant portion of the radio show and 2) doing some research and 3) speculating on the true motives of a certain lobbyist who also serves as the head of a state political party.

‘Does anyone think that when Karen Thurman takes that check, she’s going to turn around and become a Republican?’
— Kenneth Quinnell

Perhaps I was a bit harsh in the words I used and, for the record, neither Quinnell nor his guest used the word “idiot” during the portion of the radio program I listened to, as he points out. However, they did say some things that sounded like maybe if you didn’t agree with their position, then you were simply a pure puzzlement to them, like a geek in a sideshow. While expressing extreme puzzlement about why anyone would care about such a non-issue and dismissing the topic as not worthy of his consideration, Quinnell said:

Obviously, the Republicans aren’t going to do it [lobby for security at the Port of Miami]. So if they’ll pay us to do it, I don’t see a problem with that.

And:

Does anyone think that when Karen Thurman takes that check, she’s going to turn around and become a Republican?

And:

Lobbying against security down there [Miami], that’s what the Republicans are doing.

I leave it to you, dear reader, to assess the substance of those quotes.

Now, the genesis of the “idiot” comment was an e-mail exchange between me and co-editor Trish. She apparently asked Quinnell to address the Thurman topic on his radio show, and while he did address the topic, it was in a sarcastic, derisive, dismissive tone, employing the incisive arguments above as well as that old chestnut: The Republicans are doing worse things, so why should we focus on this? Quinnell takes umbrage because he says I called an “ally” and “idiot,” but I never said I was his “ally.” But I’ll take the high road on that one ….
[…]

Vitter Challenges Media to Prove He Consorted with New Orleans Hooker

Jon Ponder

His number appeared five times in DC Madam’s call lists but now he says reports that he frequented a New Orleans brothel in the 1990s are “not true”

“Unfortunately, my admission has encouraged some longtime political enemies and those hoping to profit from the situation to spread falsehoods too, like those New Orleans stories in recent reporting.”
– Sen. David Vitter

In the spring of 1987, Colorado Sen. Gary Hart held a commanding lead in early polling in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But two questions dogged the candidate: How would he deal with the large debt carried over from his 1984 run for the presidency — and what about the rumors that he was, as they said back then, a “womanizer.”

The debt quickly became a non-issue after Hart made a miscalculation in handling the second question that has become a classic “what not to do” in politics — he challenged the media to prove he was having an affair:

“Follow me around … I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

Reporters from the Miami Herald took Hart up on the challenge and quickly outed his extramarital relationship with an attractive young woman named Donna Rice. After photos surfaced of Hart and Rice looking both intimate and disheveled on the deck of a yacht called Monkey Business, he dropped out of the race.

Yesterday, Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican with a penchant for pompous moralizing, may have made the same mistake Hart did 20 years ago. After waiting a full week to address revelations that he used the services of the DC Madam five years ago, he appeared before the media and dropped the gauntlet, all but challenging reporters to prove he had relationships with other prostitutes:

Unfortunately, my admission has encouraged some longtime political enemies and those hoping to profit from the situation to spread falsehoods too, like those New Orleans stories in recent reporting. Those stories are not true. Now, having said all of this, I’m not going to answer endless questions about it all over again and again and again and again.

Vitter was referring to stories that surfaced in New Orleans last week that he had been in a relationship with a working girl in the 1990s:

[…]

Bill Kristol Predicts Bush Presidency Will Succeed in the End – But He Hasn’t Been Right Yet

Jon Ponder

The Washington Post gave William Kristol space in its Sunday editorial pages to send a sweet summer bouquet to his BFF in the White House:

“I suppose I’ll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush’s presidency will probably be a successful one.”

Kristol offers three reasons for this magical thinking: 1) We haven’t been attacked since 9/11, 2) the economy is doing great and 3) the war in Iraq is going to turnaround any day now.

In reality, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center came eight years after the February 1993 attack in which terrorists set off a bomb in the garage under Tower One. We’re not quite six years out from the 2001 attacks.

The economy may be doing well for the top income earners like Kristol and his buddies, but I don’t know anyone who thinks the economy is as “strong” as Kristol described it.

On the war, it’s hard to imagine how the United States, or any third party, could “win” an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war.

Maybe Kristol is privy to a new Bushite marketing campaign in the works for a September roll-out in which the president declares victory and gets out. Otherwise this is just more bad, delusional thinking from Kristol, whose track record is among the most abysmal of the Beltway pundits — a group that is beyond disgrace and would be tarred and feathered were it not for the fact that they are accountable to no one.

Kristol closes with this:

[What] happens when voters realize in November 2008 that, if they choose a Democrat for president, they’ll also get a Democratic Congress and therefore liberal Supreme Court justices? Many Americans will recoil from the prospect of being governed by an unchecked triumvirate of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. So the chances of a Republican winning the presidency in 2008 aren’t bad.

What it comes down to is this: If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president.

I like the odds.

A brief scour of Bill Kristol’s writing and TV punditry produces very few instances when his prognostications have been correct. On the other hand, in January, Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory composed a list of instances when Kristol has been flat-out wrong :

[…]

Novak: It Gives GOP Hope That Dem Nominee Might Be Female or Black

Jon Ponder

Le Douche on an all-male, all-white panel on Meet the Press today:

[ROBERT NOVAK]: Republicans are very pessimistic about 2008. When you talk to them off the record, they don’t see how they can win this thing. And then they think for a minute, and only the Democratic Party, with everything in their favor, would say that, “OK, this is the year either to have a woman or an African-American to break precedent, to do things the country has never done before.” And it gives the Republicans hope.

Karen Thurman is Screwing Up the Florida Democratic Party and Florida ‘Progressives’ Say ‘Who Cares?’

Buck Banks

Co-editor Trish tried to get the Florida Progressive Coalition in their weekly radio blog to address the problem of Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman taking money from Republican lobbyist Al Cardenas. You know what they said? It’s a non-issue and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.

Well, you know who the idiots are? Florida Democrats, that’s who. (Full disclosure: I am registered Independent, but I still don’t want to see the FDP screw up — again).

Karen Thurman, whose intellect and capabilities I have questioned before, is paid $100,000 per year by the Florida Democratic Party to lobby for the Florida Democratic Party. That she takes $3,500 per month from Cardenas to lobby for Republican issues is an issue, and if these numbnuts don’t think it’s an issue, then they are as useless as the FDP.

Look, Florida stands the first chance in a long time in the coming presidential election of turning from red to blue, and the “brightest lights” of the “Florida progressive movement” don’t think it’s an issue that the chair of the Florida Democratic Party is in bed with a Republican operative?

Anyone who thinks that is really an idiot.

Why Fred Thompson’s Really Waiting to Announce

Trish

It’s all about bucks, baby.

Under the equal-time rule, if a network gives time to one political candidate, it is required to provide the same amount of airtime to his or her opponents. In other words, if Thompson appeared on a “Law & Order” episode for 10 minutes during prime time, NBC would have to give Thompson’s rivals for the Republican nomination 10 minutes of prime time each.

“The equal-time requirement applies when the person has legally qualified as an official candidate in a relevant state — for example, having his or her name formally approved to be on a state’s primary ballot — not merely when he/she declares his or her intent to run,” an NBC spokeswoman said. “If Fred Thompson formally announces his intention to run for president, NBC will not schedule any further repeats of ‘Law & Order’ featuring Mr. Thompson beyond those already scheduled, which conclude on Saturday, September 1st.”