Sunday, August 29, 2004

God bless this convention, and God bless America! (Only not the faggots.)

Just got word that Jerry Falwell will not in fact be given the honor (if one can call it that) of giving the opening invocation at the RNC tomorrow. Instead, the responsibility will fall to Sheri Dew, who had this to say in a recent speech:

At first it may seem a bit extreme to imply a comparison between the atrocities of Hitler and what is happening in terms of contemporary threats against the family -— but maybe not. I just turned 50 years old, and I have never married. That was not my intention, and it has not been my choice. When someone asks me why I have never married, the simple and truthful answer is that nobody has ever asked me. Nonetheless, when I speak about the family, I have a deep, profound and abiding belief that the family is absolutely ordained of God, that it is part of His plan for His children, that marriage is supposed to be between a male and a female, and that children deserve to be born to and raised by two parents, father and mother. That is the ideal.

Is this the Republican Party's official position? Support for legal gay marriage = support for Hitler? (Why didn't they just ask Rick Santorum to do it, or did they think "support for legal gay marriage = support for Osama bin Laden" just wasn't quite extreme enough?)

All through the Democratic convention, the Repubs were pissing and moaning about how the Dems were just putting on a big show and what people saw "wasn't the real Democratic Party." But I, for one, can't wait to see just how the Republicans are going to try to snow people into believing that they don't hate gay people, they don't actually want to take away women's right to choose, and oh yeah, black people love us! What a marvelous bit of political theatre that should turn out to be.


Thursday, August 26, 2004

If I was John Kerry's campaign manager

. . . This would be Kerry's next campaign ad: "George W. Bush . . . too much of a pussy to face the Cong; too much of a pussy to face a one-armed guy in a wheelchair."

Got to hear from one of Kerry's actual Swift-Boat crewmates, Skip Barker, at a fundraiser here in Mobile last night. And I wish I could introduce Skip to each and every one of these Bush Kool-Aid drinkers who are perfectly happy to just swallow every single thing the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" tell them. Skip spoke with such fire and sincerity about his time with Kerry in Vietnam and what kind of person he thinks John Kerry is that I found it downright laughable that anyone could willingly accept the SBVT's word(s) over his.

Someone asked Skip why he thought folks like George Elliott have been shifting their stories around so much, and Skip actually related a phone conversation he'd had with Elliott in the spring. Skip asked him point-blank why he was changing his story, and according to him, Elliott's response was that he had a reason, but he couldn't tell it to Skip right then. When Skip asked him why, Elliott replied that he didn't know.

Why wasn't he willing to say? "Because he's weak," Skip told us. Fightin' words if ever I heard them.

Look, it all comes down to this: You can trust folks like Skip or Jim Rassman, who have witnessed with their own two eyes what others have only heard about through multiple other people, Telephone-style. Or you can trust people like John O'Neill, who lied about Kerry's time in Cambodia (not to mention his own); George Elliott, who seems to be changing his story every five seconds; Adrian Lonsdale, who's doing the same thing; Louis Letson, who claims one of Kerry's Purple Heart wounds was bogus even though there's no record that Letson ever even treated him; and Larry Thurlow, who claims there was no enemy fire in the incident for which Kerry won a Bronze Star despite the fact that he won a Bronze Star for the very same incident.

Hey, I can understand why the Bushies want to believe these guys. If they succeed in tearing down Kerry's service, then the fact that Bush stayed home and played pool in Texas while others died doesn't seem quite so bad by comparison. But how stupid does one have to be to turn that want into actual belief? Surely even the Bushies are smarter than that, aren't they?

Aren't they? . . .