Thanks to Think/Progress for the tip and the audio.
“‘Perhaps, Captain, we should avoid the iceberg.'” So said the second captain of the Titanic. ‘No. I think we can cut right through it. This ship’s unsinkable.’ Except we’re at the stage with the Republican party where the ship’s already going down. And they’re circling back around to hit the iceberg again.” — MSNBC “Morning Joe” show host Joe Scarborough on the Republican strategy for sinking the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination.
“And remember, one of al Qaeda’s goals — it’s not just to attack the United States. It’s to prove that we’re hypocrites, that we don’t live up to American principles. So when we use torture and abuse, we’re playing into one of their stated goals.”
If you thought Bush was only using the born-again shtick to rally his base, you might be wrong. It’s possible that George W. Bush not only truly believed the most horseshit aspects of fundamental Christianism, but according to Clive Hamilton on Counterpunch, he used them as the basis for the invasion of Iraq.
In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped.
Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac: “This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.
Hamilton: “Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog.”The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.
The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.
In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.
On the one hand, you can see why any comparison on the Republican National Committee’s part between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and James Bond character Pussy Galore would be just…yucky.
After viewing an RNC video that juxtaposed the speaker with the James Bond
villainess, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told POLITICO Saturday:“I thought it was reprehensible, irresponsible and unpersuasive. If we’re going to regain the credibility of the American people, we’re going to have to stop with silly antics like that. It may get a snide chuckle inside the Beltway, but it offends most people. We have to get away from the politics of personal destruction,” he said of the video.
The RNC declined repeatedly to explain the Pelosi/Galore connection, saying only that the video was about the speaker’s “lack of leadership.”
On the other hand, the video itself is so lame that it’s hard to get too worked up. Showing Robert Gibbs looking good? O.K. Showing Leon Panetta giving a blanket defense of the CIA without any clue what happened six years before he came on board? O.K. Showing Nancy Pelosi getting lost in her notes? Whoo. Now I get it! She’s just like Pussy Galore.
I suggest whoever came up with this video take it down and try again. This time, show some evidence the CIA briefed Pelosi specifically on waterboarding. Then we’ll pay attention.
That the Republicans are a party of old white men could be a headline from “Duh” magazine.* But when you see how that plays out in real life, as the Miami Herald showed with the 2010 Florida races, it’s pretty surprising stuff.
The Republican front-runners for statewide office include Gov. Charlie Crist for Senate, Attorney General Bill McCollum for governor, Senate President Jeff Atwater for chief financial officer and U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam for agriculture commissioner. Putnam is the only one of the GOP candidates under 50 years old…
In contrast, the Democratic front-runners for the top of the ticket are U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a 42-year-old African American running for the U.S. Senate, and Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink for governor, who would be the state’s first female chief executive. A handful of Hispanic and Jewish Democrats are potentially in the mix for attorney general and chief financial officer.
This might be a bit of a simplification, since Crist’s rival in the Senate primary is former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American. And Crist himself falls into a couple of minority demographic groups. First, he’s widely believed to be in the closet but gay. Second, he’s not really white but more whatever that color that U.S. Rep. John Boehner is.
Still, you can stand around saying that you just don’t get it all day long. In Florida, the Republican party is putting its slate where its mouth is. We believe them, and commend their steadfast determination to cling to an outdated leadership model, no matter what. You go, moldy white guys! Really. Go.
* Thanks, Andy Borowitz
A recent Gallup poll found that the Republican Party is losing members from nearly every demographic group, including a 10 percent drop in college graduates. The only group that didn’t lose membership is the demo that attends church frequently. Meanwhile, national Chairman Michael Steele is threatening to quit if he doesn’t get to hold the party’s purse strings.
Nationally, the GOP is slouching toward irrelevance. But in Florida, the GOP is still a nasty, scrappy group of old white guys.
You know, I used to kick Florida Democratic Party Chair Karen Thurman pretty hard for being a dingbat. But since I’ve signed up to receive the RPOF (Republican Party of Florida) newsletter, I’ve got to say that Chairman Jim Greer makes Thurman look like a freaking Einstein.
What got Greer’s nose out of joint this time was a recent New York Times article in which freshman Democrat Florida Representative Alan Grayson was quoted voicing his opposition to the $98 billion military-spending bill before Congress:
“There is no need in the 21st century to do this, to make us safe. This is a 19th-century strategy being played out at great expense in both money and blood in the 21st century, in the wrong time at the wrong place.”
“It’s wrong,” Mr. Grayson added. “That’s why I am going to vote against it.”
So Greer released a rant-filled “press release” attacking Grayson, whom he calls “the representative from ACORN.”
ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is a favorite whipping target of the GOP, and last year during its voter-registration drive caught an extra load of crap when it appeared that Mickey Mouse had filled out an ACORN registration card, which was rejected. Greer cites the following video as evidence that Grayson is “the representative from ACORN”:
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In a dramatic move just hours after author/activist Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out (TWO), posted a round-up of growing dissent among gay writers and activist arising from Pres. Obama’s lack of progress and even backtracking on gay issues, a decorated Air Force pilot came out of the closet on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and announced that he was being fired from the military today because of the Obama administration’s failure to act to rescind the ant-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Here’s an overview of the pilot’s career from Aubrey Sarvis, executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, writing for the Huffington Post:
Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach, a fighter weapons systems officer, has been flying the F-15E Strike Eagle since 1998. He has flown numerous missions against Taliban and al-Qaida targets, including the longest combat mission in his squadron’s history. On that infamous September 11, 2001, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach was handpicked to fly sorties above the nation’s capital. Later he flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has received at least 30 awards and decorations including nine air medals, one of them for heroism, as well as campaign medals for Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is now a flight instructor in Idaho, where he has passed on his skills to more than 300 future Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force weapons systems officers.
Since 1987, when Fehrenbach entered Notre Dame on a full Air Force ROTC scholarship, the government has invested $25 million in training and equipping him to serve his country, which he has done with what anyone would agree was great distinction. He comes from a military family. His father was a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, his mother an Air Force nurse and captain. Lt. Col. Fehrenbach has honored that tradition.
And the Air Force is about to discharge this guy, a virtual poster boy for Air Force recruiting, because he is gay? Someone has to be kidding. This is sheer madness.
In his interview with Rachel Maddow, Lt. Col. Fehrenbach said that, until his appearance on her show last night, no one in the Air Force knew he was gay, except for superior officers and military lawyers working on his discharge.
In an email to supporters before Fahrenbach’s surprise announcement yesterday, TWO’s Besen offered a round-up of growing discontent among influential gay writers:
Believe it or not, those clips being shown on the news channels are not from a Saturday Night Live sketch of a comedian imitating RNC Chairman Michael Steele — that is, as we say in LA, the real Michael Steele.
It couldn’t be SNL, of course, because Steele’s speech was funny, albeit unintentionally laughable.
Trish wrote yesterday about Steele’s jaw-dropping assertion that the era of Republicans apologizing for their mistakes was over. As she said, “Was I out of the room when the Republicans apologized for the Bush years?”
But the biggest unintentional laugh from the speech may have been Steele’s
rallying cry toward the end of the speech in which he asserted that the hope for the GOP lies in the teabagging movement:
Those of you who live outside of Washington know what I’m talking about. Those of you who actually attend Lincoln Day dinners, and county party events, those of you who toil in the vineyards, spending time in communities, in diners, in barber shops, and in coffee shops where real, every day people can be found. You know it is real. You can see it and feel it.
This change comes in a tea bag! And that’s a wonderful thing.
It’s doubtful Steele thought it was such a wonderful thing when organizers of the Chicago teabagging rally in April rejected his offer to speak at the event.
And in the same way adults bow to a kindergartner’s stubborn determination to wear her princess gown to the mall, Steele and the GOP deserve credit for forging ahead with teabagging, despite having been relentlessly mocked this spring for choosing branding that is a famous frat-boy double entendre.
But if it’s true that the GOP is betting its future on an astroturf “movement” that is orchestrated by party fatcats, paid for by Republican lobbyists and promoted on hate radio and Fox News — and that uses crypto-racist messaging to rally mostly uneducated whites to protest tax increases on people with incomes over $200,000 — then Democrats, and the country at large, can rest easy.
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
