Year: 2011
CNN’s Punching Bag
In Egypt, the opposition’s feeling super,
As they watch Mubarak circling the pooper.
But you’ve got to applaud his supporters
For whupping up on reporters
And beating the crap out of Anderson Cooper.
Fox’s Latest Revision of History: Iraq Is the Only Democracy Ever Born from Revolution
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Hosni Mubarak Will Not Run Again | ||||
|
||||
The GOP’s propagandists at Fox have been busy rewriting history as fast and as hard as they can lately. Most notably, Glenn Beck has convinced his mostly elderly, feeble-minded and/or historically challenged viewers that the Nazis were liberals and that America’s Founding Fathers, many if not most of whom were slaveowners, inserted the three-fifths clause into the Constitution because “the Founders wanted to end slavery.”
Now Fox host Sean Hannity has proclaimed that in the entire history of the world, only one democracy has ever arisen out of an uprising — Iraq.
See minute 2:29:
STEPHEN COLBERT: Sure, sure. It’s easy to say the dictator’s out. That’s great. But Sean Hannity and I know that this won’t necessarily end in democracy.
SEAN HANNITY (in video clip): The only democracy that has emerged when you see uprising like this is in Iraq. Name me one other example. I can’t think of one in history. Can you?
COLBERT: No. I mean, besides the Czech Republic, India, France, Poland, East Germany and — I feel like I’m forgetting one. Oh yeah, the United States. But that’s six and he said “name one.” I’d say Sean wins this round.
And, for the feeble-minded or history-challenged who may be reading this: Iraq did not undergo an uprising. We invaded it for spurious reasons in what amounts to a gigantic, immensely expensive blunder and a horrendous war crime in which tens of thousands of people died for no good reason. Also, the democracy in Iraq is barely functioning and is unlikely to survive a year after the U.S. military leaves — if it ever does.
Egyptian Authorities Use ‘Emergency Law’ to Strip Human Rights
emergency law A nifty term used by Egyptian leaders that gives the police and military the right to strip a citizen of their human rights at any time the government sees fit. That includes unlawful arrest and imprisonment, as well as silencing opposition.
Ayn Rand Was a Good Ol’ American Socialist – Just Like You, Me and 226 GOP House Members
According to a new book “100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand,” by Scott McConnell, late in her life, Ayn Rand, the tea partyists’ anti-government patron saint, went on the government dole. That’s right, when the going got tough, Rand, the “every man, woman and child for him or herself” objectivist, author of “Atlas Shrugged,” the cartoonish libertarian bible that is the second-best selling book in the world, availed herself of good ol’ red, white and blue American socialism.
Any time the citizenry bands together to pool its resources to cover the costs of a community benefit — whether it is fire and police protection or other emergency services; public institutions like schools, hospitals and libraries; or infrastructure like streets and highways, bridges and tunnels, airports and harbors — that is, by definition, socialism.
According to McConnell, who is the founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute, a social worker he interviewed had helped Rand, who was known to the government as Mrs. Frank (Ann) O’Connor, and her husband sign up for government benefits in 1974, when Rand, a lifelong, two-packs-a-day smoker, was 69 years old and going broke from the costs of treating her lung cancer.
A freedom of information request confirmed that Ayn Rand, or Ann O’Connor, received thousands in benefits before she died eight years later. Efforts to confirm that Rand received Medicare payments were inconclusive, but, technically, Medicare is a part of the Social Security system so it is more likely than not that she did.
Here, according to the oral history, is how Rand justified her late-life conversion to socialism:
The Tooth Suit
You’ve got to feel sorry for poor Dennis Kucinich.
All he wanted was a chicken wrap sandwich.
But when he took a bite, forsooth!
He hit an olive pit, cracked a tooth!
So he’s suing the cafeteria, ain’t that a bitch?
