[Bush loyalists] are increasingly angry at criticism leveled at him. Karen Hughes, the communications adviser who famously went back to Texas when her teenage son grew homesick but has since returned as an under secretary of state, says she is tired of seeing Mr. Bush treated as a “caricature.”
We’ll stop treating him like one when he stops being one.
If you know the name Israel Hernandez, you probably know him as “Altoids Boy,” the young man in charge of George W. Bush’s breath mints. (He says his real Dubya-assigned nickname is Izzy.)
Hernandez was 23 when he signed on as the Charlie Young to Bush’s Jed Bartlet 14 years ago, and is like a member of Bush’s family.
Israel Hernandez was a fresh-faced college graduate from the Texas border town of Eagle Pass in the summer of 1993 when he landed a job in Dallas as the personal aide to the part-owner of the Texas Rangers George W. Bush.
Together, they spent months driving the dusty back roads of the Lone Star State to promote the team, Mr. Hernandez behind the wheel of Mr. Bush’s Lincoln Town Car.
“He would speak to a rotary or chamber and say, ‘You need to come to the ballpark and we’ll make it Athens, Texas, Day. We’ll put you in your own special section; we can say ‘Welcome Athens, Texas,’ on the big screen; you can come to batting practice, ‘’ Mr. Hernandez recalled…
Mr. Hernandez, who is so close to the Bushes that he moved in with them in Dallas after his apartment was burglarized,
Do the homo-haters in Bush’s conservative Christian base know that he used to travel all over hell and half of Texas with a hot young gay dude, and that same young homo also lived with the Bushes in Texas?
Despite evidence to the contary, George Bush is not gay. He is a hyporcrite. He attacks gay people in order to gain poltical advantage — leaving millions of his unsmart-American base with the impression that he hates queers as much as they do.
How do Republicans do it? How do they send their political goons out to whack gay people in the afternoon and then sit down to dinner with their Izzy Hernandezes, Mary Cheneys, Ken Mehlmans and, who knows, Josh Boltens and Condi Rices?
Worse still, how do these self-loathing gay people square the circle in their own minds that they are lap dogs to the masters of the same people who spend their days ensuring their continued oppression and disenfranchisement?
For his loyal years of service, Izzy, now 37, travels the world on the government dime as an assistant secretary of commerce, which, frankly, is the sort of job a pol would give a crony’s ex-mistress.
Good for him. I’m sure he deserves a reward after years of service to such an unpleasant, aristorcratic boor.
Obviously, Izzy has reconciled himself to the fact that this man to whom he devoted his youthful time and energy has done more to hobble the cause of gay civil rights than anyone else in our time — but I, for one, can’t imagine how.
Update: Corrected name of West Wiing character. Thanks, West Wing Fan!
David Geffen deserves applause, not contempt, for his comments to MoDo about why he supports Obama over Clinton.
“Not since the Vietnam War has there been this level of disappointment in the behavior of America throughout the world, and I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?” Geffen told the Times’ Maureen Dowd…
“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family,” Geffen told Dowd.
Geffen also alluded to possible campaign distractions caused by Bill Clinton’s personal life should his wife secure the Democratic nomination, saying, “Everybody in politics lies, but [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
The founder of Geffen Records continued, “I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” calling the former president “a reckless guy” who “gave his enemies a lot of ammunition to hurt him and to distract the country.”
Whether or not Bill has changed, and I suspect he has — kind of — I for one, am already sick of Jay Leno ending every reference to Hillary with the fact that Bill cheated. I was sick of the dirty yucks when he was president and they haven’t gotten any funnier in the time since.
But the reaction of the Clinton folks actually disappoints me. It’s as if they begrudge Geffen the right to have an opinion or support someone else.
This morning, Clinton aide Howard Wolfson demanded that Obama remove Geffen from his campaign and return the money he had helped raise…
“If Sen. Obama is indeed sincere about his repeated claims to change the tone of our politics, he should immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign, and return his money,” the Clinton backer said.
Why? What did Geffen say that disqualifies him from polite company? That he prefers Barak to Hillary? And…?
Although Clinton herself is not associated with Wolfson’s remarks, you can bet she favors them. Get over it, Hil. There will be plenty of other people who agree with Geffen, or support John Edwards, or who just cannot get past your inability — so like the Current Occupant’s — to admit when you’re wrong.
A little follow-up by the hometown paper on the bellicose voice behind the “Nancy Pelosi’s plane is bigger” brouhaha shows why the public is over Republicans.
U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Bartow, Fla.) was out in front on the story, supplying quotes and moral high ground by claiming Pelosi wanted a more luxurious plane than her predecessor, Big Denny Hastert. But the 32-year-old wonderGOoP blames the media for starting it and says he was only exploiting the opening they gave him.
Ick.
Putnam now acknowledges he had no personal knowledge of any Pelosi request. He said he was commenting on an anonymously-sourced story in The Washington Times and additional coverage from CNN.
“This was a classic case where the media got out in front of us,” Putnam said. “Did we jump on it? Yes.”
And he is unapologetic about that. He calls the Pelosi plane story, whatever its legitimacy, “the first break [Republicans] have had from the media in driving our message since before the Mark Foley story broke.”
Let’s get this straight. Putnam sees Pelosi needing a plane that will fly nonstop to California instead of Illinois equivalent to former Rep. Mark Foley spending years pressuring teenage male pages for sex while the Republican leadership at best turned a blind eye and at worse, covered it up?
Ick.
But Putnam is just getting warmed up — he’s been appointed chairman of the House Republican conference committee.
It is the conference chairman’s responsibility to coordinate message and manage media relations for House Republicans. That means developing themes that counter and discredit an agenda set by the new Democratic majority. It’s a role Putnam has embraced in the new Congress.
…After Democrats swept to a congressional majority in November’s elections, Putnam moved up in the Republican leadership to conference chairman, the third-ranking House Republican position. Only Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and the whip, Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, outrank Putnam.
And if you’re expecting him to play fair, forget it. Facts just get in the way of whatever makes the best story.
…a set of talking points titled “Air Force 3 – A symbol of Democrat Excess” remained prominently displayed on the regularly updated Web site of the House conference committee days after the story was discredited. It mentioned Pelosi by name and said she was pursuing “an unprecedented perk.”
Asked about the talking points Friday, Putnam responded: “You must check the Web site more often than I do.”
…Putnam blamed any unfairness in how the Pelosi plane issue was portrayed on the media that covered it, and he said he found it “curious” that reporters would question how the story spread.
I guess reporters should just accept these stories on their face and make his life that much easier.
Ick.
Too bad nothing will come of it:
In his closing argument, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chief prosecutor, said that disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity was used by the White House to discredit her husband’s assertions that the Bush administration had distorted intelligence to justify invading Iraq. He said the disclosure of her name cast a cloud over the Bush White House in general and over Mr. Cheney in particular.
But Mr. Wells argued for the defense that when Ms. Wilson’s name was first disclosed in the summer of 2003, Mr. Libby had been so preoccupied with growing questions about the inability of United States forces in Iraq to find any unconventional weapons, a principal justification for going to war, that he did not have time to pay attention to the issue of Ms. Wilson.
“The wheels are falling off the Bush administration,” Mr. Wells said. “Thousands of young kids are on the ground there. It’s a crazy period.”
And:
Mr. Fitzgerald seemed for the first time to lend his weight publicly to the assertion by critics that Ms. Wilson’s identity was disclosed to punish Mr. Wilson and undermine his credibility.
Mr. Fitzgerald said the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s identity had left “a cloud over the White House over what happened” as well as a cloud over Mr. Cheney because he had been behind the effort to counter Mr. Wilson’s charges.
Neither Mr. Libby nor anyone else was charged with unlawfully disclosing Ms. Wilson’s identity. But Mr. Libby was charged with misleading the grand jury and investigators.
“Don’t you think the American people are entitled to a straight answer?” Mr. Fitzgerald asked of the jury. He said that “a critic points fingers at the White House and as a result his wife gets dragged into the newspapers.”
He said Mr. Libby “made a gamble, he threw sand in the eyes of the grand jury” rather than tell the truth and risk being prosecuted for leaking her name.
The Brits are leaving Basra:
[U.K. Prime Minister] Tony Blair today declared that “the next chapter in Basra’s history will be written by the Iraqis,” as he announced that 1,600 British troops would be withdrawn in the coming months.
The current total of 7,100 would be reduced first to 5,500 and then to 5,000 by the end of the summer, the prime minister told parliament in a special statement on Iraq.
But he did not specify a time in 2008 when all UK troops would be withdrawn
The British withdrawal could escalate beyond these numbers after Blair leaves office at the end of the summer.
This is sourced to Ariel Sharon, a Bush ally:
Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon’s delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: “I will screw him in the ass!”
Sounds like our guy — likes towel snaps and fart jokes, and was caught on tape speaking with his mouth full in an expletive-laden conversation with Tony Blair.
But is it a Freudian slip?
Earlier this month, Rev. Tim Ralph, one of the ministers charged with degayifying self-hating homo evangelist Ted Haggard announced that Haggard had been completely cured, and anyway, he only had sex with the gay prostitute and no one else:
In investigating Haggard’s assertion that his extramarital sexual contact was limited to former male escort Mike Jones, the board talked to people close to Haggard and found no evidence contradicting him, Ralph said.
“If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. “We’re into this thing over 90 days, and it hasn’t happened.”
Well, Rev. Tim, it has now. The people in charge at Haggard’s former mega-church have done what they say is a “reality verification” on their former leader, and it appears Ted may need further degayification:
“[We] have done extensive fact-finding into his lifelong battle with a ‘dark side’ which he said in his confession letter has been a struggle for years,” Pastor Larry Stockstill, part of the church’s board of overseers, told the 14,000-member congregation Sunday.
“We have verified the reality of that struggle through numerous individuals who reported to us firsthand knowledge of everything from sordid conversation to overt suggestions to improper activities to improper relationships. These findings established a pattern of behavior that culminated in the final relationship in which Ted was, as a matter of grace, caught,” he said.
Stockstill did not elaborate…
None needed. Ted was perving on men in his church, and even leading some of them astray. Looks like Pastor Ted has a lot more gay to pray away.
Tony Snow was awfully casual about the fact that Pres. Bush knew about the horrid conditions at Walter Reed hospital’s Building 18:
In today’s press briefing, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow about the Washington Post’s two-part series over the weekend, highlighting the Walter Reed hospital’s dilapidated conditions. Snow stated that “the president certainly has been aware of the conditions in the wards where he has visited, and visited regularly.†Snow also affirmed that the administration was aware of Walter Reed’s conditions “before the articles appeared in the paper.â€
So Bush knew wounded soldiers were living in rat- and cockroach-infested squalor at the military’s flagship hospital and yet he did nothing about it. In fact, no one did anything about it until the Washington Post ran an expose.
Trump and the Iranians seem to be in different realities,
Though they share a callousness toward the war’s casualties.
Is Trump insane
Or just insanely vain?
And how can we extract ourselves from his “Quagmire of the Vanities?”
