Month: November 2006

2006 Terry Dolan Award Seeks to Name Biggest Gay Republican Hypocrite

Jon Ponder

History will remember 2006 as the Year of the Gay Republican.From Mark Foley to Ken Mehlman, from Pastor Ted Haggard to over 200 gay Capitol Hill staffers on “The List,” the sheer volume of queers in Republican corridors of power has surprised even the most cynical observers of the Gay Old Party.

Of course, self-hating gays are not new to Republican politics. During the McCarthy era, homo-miscreant Roy Cohn helped persecute gays working for the government. Even the eponymous Sen. Joe McCarthy was allegedly gay.

But the most extravagant example of a Republican self-hating homo may well have been the Reagan era “New Republican” operative, Terry Dolan. A rabid homophobe by day, at night, Mr. Dolan allegedly prowled D.C. leather bars for what was then known as “rough trade.” (See bio in sidebar.)

In the craven spirit of the late Mr. Dolan, we propose the awarding of the 2006 Terry Dolan Award to (dis)honor the gay Republican who has done the most to harm to the cause of gay civil rights in the past few years.

To wit, a partial list of nominees:

[…]

Rosie O’Donnell on Radical Christianity and Islam: Irreverent Yet Irrelevant

Buck Banks

Rosie’s thorny: On Sept. 12, on the TV show “The View” that she co-hosts with Barbara Walters and a couple other female talking heads, Rosie O’Donnell, blathering on about religion, dropped this little off-the-cuffer: “Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like the United States.”

‘Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like the United States.’
— Rosie O’Donnell

Somehow I missed the ensuing ruckus raised by the Christian Right, the calls for ABC to fire O’Donnell, etc. Maybe that’s because “The View” is just not on my radar — or apparently many other folks’ radar, either.

So why bring this up two months later? Well, to fill the post-election vacuum, of course. But more importantly because our old pal George Barna has just released the results of another one of his Jesus surveys that sought to measure the depth of cultural penetration and height of dudgeon achieved by O’Donnell’s comment (which I agree wholeheartedly with, by the way). Here’s some of the results from the Barna Group survey:

Despite the media hailstorm stirred by her controversial remark, only one out of every six American adults (17 percent) was aware of her words. The group most likely to know of her verbal assault was evangelical Christians, who were twice as likely as other Americans (36 percent) to have heard about her statement. Even within the Christian community, other segments remained largely ignorant of the slur. For instance, only 17 percent of all other adults who consider themselves to be Christian but are not evangelicals knew of her words, similar to the statistics among Catholics (18 percent) and Protestants (20 percent). The episode failed to generate much buzz among non-Christian adults: only 10 percent of those who associate with a non-Christian faith, and 14 percent of atheists and agnostics were aware of her remarks. The outburst was no better known within the gay and lesbian community, of which Ms. O’Donnell is an outspoken champion: only 14 percent of adults who associate with that lifestyle were aware of her comments.

Most Americans disagreed with Ms. O’Donnell’s point of view. In total, just 10 percent strongly agreed with her statement and 18 percent agreed somewhat, while 15 percent disagreed somewhat and 48 percent disagreed strongly. In total, then, about one out of every four Americans (28 percent) agreed to some extent, while more than twice as many — two out of every three (63 percent) — disagreed.

Levels of disagreement varied substantially across faith groups. For instance, eight out of 10 evangelicals strongly disagreed compared to only one out of three non-Christians. Strong disagreement was measured among half of all Catholics (47 percent), nearly six out of 10 Protestants (57 percent), and eight out of 10 Revolutionary Christians (79 percent).

The question is, however, not whether one agrees with Rosie, but whether her assessment was correct. Of course evangelicals and “Revolutionary Christians” (whatever those are) came out 8-to-1 against, but that’s to be expected — because they are the problem. There are indeed parallels between what the Imams and the Christian Right are each trying to accomplish:

1) Creation of a theocracy where there is no distinction between church and state — a basic tenet of Islam and a goal of the Bible-thumpers.
2) Creation of a homogenous congregation that shares a monolithic belief system — for example, today Muslims who convert to Christianity can be jailed and executed in Afghanistan, and Lord only knows what Revolutionary Christians would do if they took over the government, but I give you the Protestant Reformation, for starters.
3) Conquest and conversion — both the radical Islamists and the radical Christists want to convert the whole world to their peculiar tenets, indeed, they believe that it is an essential facet of their faith to do so.
4) Eradication of homosexuality (except for preachers and pashas).

So, in a way, Rosie actually was right. Like some kind of idiot savant she managed to piece together a coherent sentence that made a very large point in a very small soundbite. Problem is, nobody much heard it or cared beyond the few heads of Christian groups who saw an opportunity to get their names in the media by condemning O’Donnell’s statement and calling for her to be fired (at the stake, perhaps?).

It’s clear that not that many people watch “The View,” and virtually nobody really cares about what Rosie O’Donnell thinks as a culture commentator. Unfortunately, the truth behind her words received as little consideration as their source, and that might turn out to be a very dangerous thing down the road, when the Christian equivalent of the Taliban takes over the United States.

Then we can hail Rosie as a prophet, a martyred lesbian prophet no doubt, but a true seer nonetheless.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the cardinal virtues.

— Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English philosopher

Elections Are Over — Now Where Is Mark Foley?

Jon Ponder

On Oct. 1, Republican former Rep. Mark Foley checked into the Sierra Tucson Treatment Center in Arizona, purportedly to deal with the alcohol abuse that he cited as a contributing factor to his sexual pursuit of teenage boys.

Rehab at the center usually lasts 30 days (at a cost of $30,000) but on Nov. 1 we learned that Foley was going to stay at the center for at least another week — thereby conveniently keeping his name out of the press in the final days of campaigning for the midterm elections.

Well, the elections are over and the damage done by his scandalous behavior has taken its first toll. His party lost both houses of Congress, in no small measure due to the revelation of his salacious emails to young House pages.

The elections may be over but the Foley scandal is not. We are still waiting on findings from the House Ethics Committee. We need to know when the House leadership, including Speaker Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner and others, knew about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward the pages. We need to know whether there was a cover-up by GOP House leaders and, if so, who else may have been involved.

So many questions but let’s start at the top: Where is Mark Foley?

Meanwhile Morgues in Iraq Are Filled to Capacity and Bodies Are Piling Up

Jon Ponder

And the band played on:

In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.

Baghdad’s morgues are full. With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.

Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.

The city’s network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says…

Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.

“We can’t remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again,” al-Obaidi said. “We simply don’t have the staff.”

Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.

“Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They’re all looking for their dead sons and I don’t know how the computer or we will bear up,” he said.

While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.

The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. The Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 — close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000 to 50,000.

In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.

GOP Wakes Up to Fact That Bush is Worst President Ever

Jon Ponder

As a coda to Republicans’ losing Congress this year, the firing of Donald Rumsfeld may serve as the tipping-point moment when the GOP could no longer ignore the fact that their former Dear Leader, George Bush, is indeed the Worst President Ever in the history of the United States.

History may well show that the forced resignation of the secretary of defense on the day after the election is the equivalent in the political realm of Pres. Bush’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with that assessment.

Bush should have removed Rumsfeld “as soon as he had made up his mind. And that’s a hard thing to calculate. But it’s highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out.”

“And if Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference,” Specter said. “I’d still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”

The same thought occurred to veteran Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who was on the verge of becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. After the election, Shaw said that if Rumsfeld had stepped down before last Tuesday, Shaw and other Republicans might have won.

“It could have made a difference in who is running the Congress,” said Shaw.

Let’s stipulate that lying — often gussied up as “misleading” or “shading the truth” — is part and parcel of politics. But George W. Bush came into politics with a record and a reputation as someone who lies compulsively.

In this instance, whether he lied to the press before the election when he said that Rummy and Cheney were doing “fantastic” jobs and would stay on through the end of his term, or whether, as my colleague Trish has suggested, he lied after the election in order to cover his tracks, the fact is, he lied one time too many — and he may have contributed to the undoing of his presidency, and his party, in the process.

Hat tip to JR

Norquist: Sherwood Lost Because His Mistress ‘Whined’ about Being Strangled

Jon Ponder
Sherwood’s seat would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn’t whined about being throttled.”
— Grover Norquist

Grover Norqist, the GOP operative who has been best pals with Jack Abramoff since college, is in denial about the message sent by voters in the midterm elections last week.

Norquist believes the heavy Republican losses were not caused by discontent with the Iraq war but rather by voters’ fits of pique over the foibles of various members of Congress. For example, Rep. Sherwood’s loss in Pennsylvania, Norquist says, was a result of Sherwood’s mistress whining about his abusive behavior:

“Bob Sherwood’s seat would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn’t whined about being throttled,” said Mr Norquist.

This is wrong on so many levels, the least of which is the fact that Sherwood’s name is Don, not Bob.

Despite running a campaign ad in which he apologized for committing adultery but denied the allegations of abuse, Sherwood lost to Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak, his Democratic opponent.

Poll: Bush Drops to 31% in Newsweek Survey

Jon Ponder

A four percentage point drop since last week:

President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to just 31 percent, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Bill Clinton’s lowest rating during his presidency was 36 percent; Bush’s father’s was 29 percent, and Ronald Reagan’s was 35 percent. Jimmy Carter’s and Richard Nixon’s lows were 28 and 23 percent, respectively. (Just 24 approve of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s job performance; and 31 percent approve of Vice President Dick Cheney’s.)

But He Meant It In a Good Way

Trish

I don’t even know anybody in Mississippi, and I’m insulted by what U.S. Charles Rangel (D-NY) said.

Rangel, a Democrat, was quoted in The New York Times on Thursday saying: “Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?”

Rangel said he didn’t intend to insult the state…

Obviously.

Maybe Rangel needs to get out more. He could come south and listen to some live blues and maybe even eat a fried catfish. But let us know when you’re coming, Charlie, so we can all peel our “We don’t care how you do it in New York” bumper stickers off our cars.