Month: January 2008

Six years too late, George W. Bush has finally acknowledged that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were citizens of the U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia:

From 2003 to 2007, the number of people who believed Bush’s lie dropped from 70 percent to 33 percent. Bush will never recover from the anger felt by the 37 percent of Americans who came to the realization that they had been lied to by their president.

“There’s a lot of really good people here [in Saudi Arabia]. Look, you can’t deny the fact that some, a majority, of the terrorists came from Saudi, but you should not condemn an entire society based upon the actions of a handful of killers.”

It would have been nice if the interviewer, ABC’s Terry Moran, had gotten Bush on the record about the Middle Eastern nation whose citizens were not represented among these 19 mass murderers.

The breakdown was 15 Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese and two from the Union of Arab Emirates (UAE).

None were from Iraq.

Despite this fact — and the fact that Saddam Hussein was a secular despot who was despised by Osama bin Laden, a right-wing religious fanatic — a poll two years after the attacks, and six months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The fact that a solid majority of the public was misinformed was not an accident. It was a result of a propaganda campaign deployed from the Bush White House:

[…]

More evidence that approximately one-third of Americans are either feeble-minded, delusional or both:

Just 32 percent of Americans now approve of the way Bush is handling his job, while 66 percent disapprove. Bush’s work on the economy has likewise reached a new low. And he shows no gain on Iraq; despite reduced violence there, 64 percent say the war was not worth fighting, 2 points from its high.

If you need proof that the evangelical agenda is to impose theocracy on the United States, listen to what their standard-bearer, Rev. Mike Huckabee said yesterday:

“I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards.”
–Huckabee

“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Huckabee often refers to the need to amend the Constitution on these grounds, but he has never so specifically called for the Constitution to be brought within “God’s standards,” which are themselves debated amongst religious scholars.

If we’re going to start basing our civil laws on biblical edicts — the way they do in, say, Moslem countries — then we need to do it across the board. Let’s take adultery, for example. Unlike the biblical prohibitions against gay sex, which are buried in lists of abominations in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the warning against adultery is in the Ten Commandments, right up there with murder and lying.

[…]

Clinton Leads Obama By 31 Points in Bay Area, the State’s Democratic Stronghold — And By 21 Points in Vote-Rich L.A.

The Clintons have always been popular in California and, according to a new poll from the Los Angeles Times, Politico.com and CNN, that is as true now, with three weeks to go before the Feb. 5 primary, as it has ever been:

Clinton led Obama 47 percent-31 percent among voters judged likely to cast ballots in California. As she did in New Hampshire, where she eked out a win over Obama last Tuesday, Clinton held onto a sturdy margin among Democrats, 47 percent-32 percent. But the New York senator also opened a strong lead — 52 percent-29 percent — among independents, who will be allowed to vote in the Democratic primary … Women supported her over Illinois Sen. Obama by 50 percent-30 percent; men by a slightly smaller 46 percent-32 percent.

In the Bay Area, the most concentrated Democratic area in the state, Clinton led by a 31-point margin, which narrowed to 22 points in the state’s second Democratic bulwark, the Los Angeles area.

On the GOP side, Rudolph Giuliani, the most liberal of the Republican candidates, appears to have lost the comfortable lead he enjoyed for most of the past year:

The Republican race is, at this stage, far more uncertain. Among likely voters, Arizona Sen. McCain was ahead at 20 percent, with Mitt Romney at 16 percent, Rudolph W. Giuliani at 14 percent and Mike Huckabee at 13 percent. The results for all four were within the poll’s margin of error.

Republican voters remain a bit squishy: Six in ten said they might change their mind over the next few weeks. Among Democrats, the number was four in ten.

Daytona, Fla. is known for several things: spring break, bike week, and NASCAR, to name a few. But no world-championship spelling bees have ever taken place there among the topless and the leather-clad. It should therefore come as no surprise that the supervisor of elections of Volusia County can’t spell “Barack.”

The office sent out more than 2,000 Volusia County absentee ballots with a presidential candidate’s name misspelled. Their ballots read “Barak Obama.”

…Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall announced the discovery of the misspelled name last week and said all future ballots will spell the name correctly. She also said that voting equipment will still be able to read the ballots, and that votes for “Barak Obama” will count toward Barack Obama.

Oh well. At least they didn’t pull a Mitt Romney, who stopped a hair shy of calling the senator “Obama bin Laden.”

Mike Huckabee campaigns as an ardent upholder of traditional marriage. On his website he says he led the move in Arkansas to adopt the practice of "covenant" marriage, and that he supports amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit gay people from marrying. He and Mrs. Huckabee say they believe in the New Testament edict that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

But if you can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps then it appears that Huckabee’s moralizing about the sanctity of marriage is mainly just for show. For example, he takes advice on political strategy from Dick Morris, the sleazy Fox News Clinton-hater who was outed in a tabloid magazine over a decade ago by his paid mistress — and who was one our nominees last year to the GOP Adulterers Hall of Fame.

Huckabee has tried to keep his relationship with Morris on the q.t. (He even lied about it to George Stephanopoulos.) On the other hand, he was brazenly unashamed to have former Sen. Tim Hutchinson, one of Arkansas’ most notorious adulterers, serve as his surrogate in television interviews in Iowa and New Hampshire.

What makes Hutchinson’s betrayal of his wife particularly scandalous is the fact that, like Huckabee, he is an ordained minister as well as a Republican politician who won elections by presenting himself as an adherent of moral values, including, of course, the sanctity of marriage.

But what makes Hutchinson notorious is the timing of his of his affair with a much-younger member of his Senate staff:

Scant weeks after voting to remove Bill Clinton from office, the one-time Baptist preacher made a fortuitously timed announcement of his impending divorce from his wife of 29 years. Having cast a stone at Clinton, he called his own divorce “intensely personal” and refuses to answer questions. Also unavailable for comment was the much younger member of Hutchinson’s staff with whom he’d been “romantically linked,” as people said in a politer era. Reporters couldn’t find Randi Fredholm anywhere. She’d flat disappeared. A suspicious person might wonder if she’d gone into hiding.

After Hutchinson spent a relatively brief interval as a Washington bachelor, Randi reappeared as the new Mrs. Tim Hutchinson.

(Tim’s even more holier-than-thou brother, then-Rep. Asa Hutchinson, was one of the Impeachment Managers in the House.)

Hutchinson was defeated for reelection in 2002 by David Pryor, a Democrat. Pryor did not make Hutchinson’s adultery — or hypocrisy — a campaign issue, at least in part because he didn’t have to. Both were common knowledge. Hutchinson was the only Republican to lose a Senate seat that year.