Now's the part of the show where we like to ask, And how are you doing?
Busy day ahead, so there won't be too many more posts today — so it's time to bring you, the reader, into this debacle Web site. We had that mini-poll a few weeks ago about whom the Democratic vice-presidential nominee should be, but that's only interactive up to a point; I want you guys to use the comments below to give your answers to the following two questions:
1. Whom do you think John Kerry should pick to be his running mate?
2. Leaving aside considerations like who actually ran for president (and even who's actually in politics), what's your ideal presidential ticket in 2004? The only guideline is that you want someone who can actually pick up some votes — beyond that, go nuts.
My choice for Kerry's running mate: Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen (runner-up: Bob Graham). '04 dream ticket: Wesley Clark and...Vermont Sen. James Jeffords. (Although if Paul Wellstone were still alive, what a great choice that would be. Sigh.)
So basically it's part fantasy baseball, part "McLaughlin Group." Leave your answers in the comments below, fill that sucker up. Be funny and/or creative if you're so inclined.
...Morton Kondracke!!...
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:56 AM
Sorbet
Here's something to cleanse your pallet after you've swallowed the bitter pill of Ann Coulter, below: a slate column by Will Saletan making the case against George W. Bush about as well as anyone has so far. Some call it "Steady leadership in a time of change," we call it "Stubborn leadership completely oblivious to change." Here, let Will tell it.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:02 AM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, Part XXIX: The Gospel According to Ann
Hey, anybody in the audience today ever read George Orwell's 1984? Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot has — and we seem to recall this part called the Two Minutes Hate, in which the government basically riles the subjugated populace into a hate-filled frenzy against whomever they're opposing at that moment. If America ever does, in fact, turn into that kind of 1984-ian dystopia — and in some ways we ain't that far off — somebody needs to sign Ann Coulter as the director of the Two Minutes Hate. In just one column this week, she calls the wrath of the Almighty upon everyone from Godless liberals and bloodthirsty Muslims to lying film critics and allegedly pansy Volvo drivers. Nope, we're not kidding.
But the worst part is, she cloaks all of this hatred and bile in the guise of righteous indignation that God and Christianity are being criticized. Actually, you'll note that neither God nor Christianity are being criticized — Mel Gibson and his movie "The Passion" are. But the thought processes of Ann and her right-wing sycophants are primitive enough that Gibson makes an easy surrogate for Christ, and that lets them start right in with their liberal-flaying. "Just a movie," you say? Then clearly you hate our Lord Jesus, you filthy Satanic scum! Now that we've got you in the mood and your bile duct is primed, let's begin with the Two Minutes Hate, as Ann gets us started with "The Passion of the Liberal":
In the dozens and dozens of panic-stricken articles the New York Times has run on Mel Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ," the unavoidable conclusion is that liberals haven't the vaguest idea what Christianity is.
For Chri...um, I mean, for crying out loud, is this going to be another column about how not a single Democrat believes in God? Is there no argument so moronically fatuous that Coulter won't spend a thousand words trying to advance it?
The Times may have loopy ideas about a lot of things, but at least when they write about gay bathhouses and abortion clinics, you get the sense they know what they're talking about.
But Christianity just doesn't ring a bell. The religion that has transformed Western civilization for two millennia is a blank slate for liberals. Their closest reference point is "conservative Christians," meaning people you're not supposed to hire. And these are the people who carp about George Bush's alleged lack of "intellectual curiosity."
Snore. Somebody wake us up when Ann either presents some evidence in support of her Democrats-don't-believe-in-God "hypothesis," or when she appears to have some kind of a point with all this.
The most amazing complaint, championed by the Times and repeated by all the know-nothing secularists on television, is that Gibson insisted on "rubbing our faces in the grisly reality of Jesus' death." The Times was irked that Gibson "relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours" – at the expense of showing us the Happy Jesus. Yes, Gibson's movie is crying out for a car chase, a sex scene or maybe a wise-cracking orangutan.
As always, Coulter has applied as snide and selective an interpretation to a Times story as she possibly can, so here's the actual review from which she quotes if you want to make your own judgment. You'll notice that the review's points are largely cinematic in nature, as opposed to theologic — and far from "crying out for a car chase, sex scene or maybe a wise-cracking orangutan," the reviewer, A.O. Scott, seems to imply that Gibson has already treated Jesus' death with too much gore, sensationalism, and Hollywood shallowness as it is. But acknowledging that would force Ann to admit that the Times does have something valuable to say every once in a while, and we all know that ain't gonna happen.
The Times ought to send one of its crack investigative reporters to St. Patrick's Cathedral at 3 p.m. on Good Friday before leaping to the conclusion that "The Passion" is Gibson's idiosyncratic take on Christianity.
The Passion of Jesus Christ isn't "Gibson's idiosyncratic take." Gibson's movie, however, is. I've been to numerous Good Friday services (wonder if Ann can say the same?), and at none of them was I treated to a blood-soaked 45-minute beating of the priest who was playing Jesus, nor did a crow ever come down to peck the eyes out of the parishioner playing one of the thieves crucified next to him.
In a standard ritual, Christians routinely eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ, aka "the Lamb of God." The really serious Catholics do that blood- and flesh-eating thing every day, the sickos. The Times has just discovered the tip of a 2,000-year-old iceberg.
Wow, so Ann knows about Communion. Whoop-dee-doo, I started doing that since I was 7, and I'm not crazy about Ann exploiting that ritual simply to politically bludgeon the New York Times. As a raised-then-lapsed-then-reformed-again Catholic, I'd be really, really interested to know how much time Ann Coulter has spent, total, in a Catholic church. Anybody have any guesses?
But the loony-left is testy with Gibson for spending so much time on Jesus' suffering and death while giving "short shrift to Jesus' ministry and ideas" – as another Times reviewer put it. According to liberals, the message of Jesus, which somehow Gibson missed, is something along the lines of "be nice to people" (which to them means "raise taxes on the productive").
Yeah, "blessed are the merciful," what a crock of shit! "Love thy neighbor," gross! What if my neighbor is a liberal or a Muslim? Do I still have to?
You don't need a religion like Christianity, which is a rather large and complex endeavor, in order to flag that message. All you need is a moron driving around in a Volvo with a bumper sticker that says "be nice to people." Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity...
Hear that, Christians and Coulterheads? "Being nice to people" has been reduced to the status of "incidental tenet" of Christianity as far as Coulter's concerned. If that's only an "incidental tenet," what does she think the really important stuff is? "Kill liberals"? "Smear the homos"? "Don't eat shellfish"?
...(as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of "kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed").
So Christianity isn't all that concerned with being nice to people, and Islam is only concerned with smelling bad and killing people! Boy, Ann, you're just batting a thousand with your interpretations of the world's belief systems! How on earth did you find the time to fit in all those comparative-religion courses between your Klan meetings?
But to call it the "message" of Jesus requires ... well, the brain of Maureen Dowd.
It may not have been the message, but it was a message, was it not? Have I been getting Christianity wrong all this time?
In fact, Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it. That is the reason He is called "Christ the Redeemer" rather than "Christ the Moron Driving Around in a Volvo With a 'Be Nice to People' Bumper Sticker on It."
But isn't "being nice to people" kinda the opposite of "sinful"...aaah, screw it.
The other complaint from the know-nothing crowd is that "The Passion" will inspire anti-Semitic violence. If nothing else comes out of this movie, at least we finally have liberals on record opposing anti-Semitic violence. Perhaps they should broach that topic with their Muslim friends.
We now have another slanderous lie to add to our Coulter On Liberals collection: Liberals love seeing violence done to Jews! We'll put that one right next to "Liberals don't believe in God," in between "Liberals are sad that Saddam got captured" and "Liberals want to help al-Qaeda."
One Times review of "The Passion" said: "To be a Christian is to face the responsibility for one's own most treasured sacred texts being used to justify the deaths of innocents." At best, this is like blaming Jodie Foster for the shooting of Ronald Reagan.
Here we go again...and here's the article in case anyone would like to actually read it instead of trust a hack like Coulter to accurately sum it up for you.
But the reviewer somberly warned that a Christian should "not take the risk that one's life or work might contribute to the continuation of a horror." So the only thing Christians can do is shut up about their religion. (And no more Jodie Foster movies!)
Who said Christians should "shut up about their religion"? The writer was merely cautioning Christian filmmakers like Gibson — quite calmly and eloquently, we thought — to be very careful in how they portray other religions, and consider how those portrayals might be interpreted by the public at large. Hell, that's sage advice for any filmmaker, no matter what their movies are about. But that didn't jibe with what Ann was trying to say, so once again, she twists the writer's words to her whims.
By contrast, in the weeks after 9-11, the Times was rushing to assure its readers that "prominent Islamic scholars and theologians in the West say unequivocally that nothing in Islam countenances the Sept. 11 actions."
Exactly what comparison is Ann trying to make here? After 9/11, the Times went out of its way to explain that Islam doesn't promote violence against non-believers, even though some people may use 9/11 as evidence of the opposite. In her article on "The Passion," Mary Gordon points out that Christianity doesn't promote violence against non-believers, even though some people may use "The Passion" as evidence of the opposite. Gosh, it sounds like everyone's actually being pretty loving and understanding here! — except for Ann, of course.
(That's if you set aside Muhammad's many specific instructions to kill non-believers whenever possible.)
Ann proceeds to make exactly one citation of such a "specific instruction" (below), and she even manages to cock that up. Sure, the Quran contains a lot of violent imagery, though it's juxtaposed with a number of exhortations for peace; it's kind of inconsistent that way, open to an awful lot of interpretation. Kind of like another holy book you might have heard of...oh, what is it called again? It's the one that says "Thou shalt not kill" but also "an eye for an eye"...it's right on the tip of my tongue...oh, what is it? Wait, wait, don't tell me...
Times columnists repeatedly extolled "the great majority of peaceful Muslims." Only a religion with millions of practitioners trying to kill Americans and Jews is axiomatically described as "peaceful" by liberals.
Are you freaking kidding me? The woman who said "bomb their cities, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" suddenly has a bug up her bony ass about violence in the name of God?!
Even Coulter's diehard fans should be able to grasp the hypocrisy here. When Mel Gibson makes a movie that blames bloodthirsty Jews for the death of his Savior, Coulter rails away at those who would paint all Christians with the same broad, bigoted brush. (Longtime readers will also note she flies into a frothing rage anytime someone brings up the Crusades or the Inquisition.) But when 19 Muslims out of 1.48 billion crash Boeing 767s into the World Trade Center, it's perfectly acceptable to slag off the entire religion as a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, and to scoff at any idea that some of them, any of them, might be "peaceful." (Despite the fact that the standard Muslim greeting, Assalamu Alaikum, means "peace be upon you." Oh, those lying Muslims, they're probably just being snarky!)
As I understand it, the dangerous religion is the one whose messiah instructs: "[I]f one strikes thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also" and "Love your enemies ... do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you." The peaceful religion instructs: "Slay the enemy where you find him." (Surah 9:92).
Please note that the cited Quran passage says nothing of the kind. Read this additional information from World O' Crap if you're interested in finding out just how Ann might've gotten confused; it turns out she's cribbing her notes on the Quran from noted Islam expert Jerry Falwell.
Imitating the ostrich-like posture of certain German Jews who ignored the growing danger during Hitler's rise to power, today's liberals are deliberately blind to the real threats of violence that surround us. Their narcissistic self-image requires absolute solicitude toward angry savages plotting acts of terrorism. The only people who scare them are the ones who worship a Jew.
Coulterites, I hope your souls feel just a little dirty just from having read this crap. In the span of just a few hundred words, Coulter basically dismisses the idea of "loving one's neighbor" as an important tenet of Christianity; slags off the entire Muslim religion as a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, and deliberately misquotes their holy book to support that view; and continues to reiterate her opinion that no liberal anywhere believes in God, as if that was some intelligent insight worthy of being repeated. We can only surmise that Ann's knowledge of Christian theology isn't nearly as deep as she'd like you to think it is, because this certainly doesn't sound very Christian to us. (Maybe she's going to try and defend herself with the Homer Simpson excuse — "Marrrge, I'm just trying to get into heaven! It's not like I'm running for Jesus or anything!") Throughout her claims that liberals don't know squat about the teachings of Christianity, the one who appears to have missed the Christian message most completely is, ironically enough, Coulter herself.
Nobody who's been following this feature for any length of time should have the idea that Ann is a kindhearted person, but lately she's been outdoing herself week after week. It's not even that she's intellectually dishonest (though she is), that she insults her readers' intelligence (though she does), or that she's got bizarre ideas on how this country should be run (though she has) — she's just a mean, nasty, vindictive bitch who gets off on the very sort of anger and hate of which this post-9/11 world needs absolutely no more. In other words, she's the polar opposite of the example Jesus was sent down to earth to be. Oh, well...as the one liberal in North America who still believes in God, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will pray for her anyway! Ta-ta, heathens!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:43 AM
Thursday, March 04, 2004
We missed the big one-oh-oh-oh-oh, so...
...if you fire up this Web site and the number in the counter on the right says "20,000," howsabout you shoot us an e-mail.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:05 PM
Hi. It's Dubya. Mind if I exploit your national tragedy for a little while? It'll only take a second.
Demonstrating the sensitivity and eye for good taste for which his administration has become world-renowned, George W. Bush will be using images from the World Trade Center disaster in a round of TV ads unveiled yesterday on behalf of his re-election campaign.
Not surprisingly, some folks are upset:
"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people," Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the twin towers, told the New York Daily News for its Thursday editions. "It is unconscionable." ...
"It's as sick as people who stole things out of the place," said Firefighter Tommy Fee of Queens Rescue Squad 270. "The image of firefighters at ground zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics." ...
"I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty," said Tom Roger, whose daughter perished on American Airlines Flight 11. "But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat."
And these are friends and family members of people who died, for crying out loud. But if you're a Republican who's trying to find a way to ignore how repugnant and exploitative this all is, just do what Karen Hughes does and assume they're all Democrats anyway:
"I can understand why some Democrats might not want the American people to remember the great leadership and strength the president and first lady Laura Bush brought to our country in the aftermath of that," she said.
Mmmm, yeah, great leadership and strength. The kind of leadership and strength that allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda operative who's been implicated in this week's bombing in Baghdad that killed 271 people (not to mention additional incidents that resulted in hundreds of other deaths), to get away clean. If the Republicans can fume about how Clinton supposedly "let Osama bin Laden get away," why aren't they more pissed off about this:
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
Snippety snip...
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
Yup, mm-hmm. But we're supposed to believe that the war in Iraq was integral to the fight against terrorism, and that it wouldn't distract from the ongoing battle against al-Qaeda. And we're supposed to believe that Bush is soooo strong on national security, the only guy who is qualified to protect America in this uncertain new world. Well, so far nobody's convinced me. In fact, he might just be the least-qualified one out there.
ETA: ...And it might be even worse than I thought. Josh Marshall explains.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:05 PM
Silence, bitches, and do not bore the great Scott McClellan!
Maybe you think that joke about one hundred women with black eyes is really funny but you're worried that you can't tell it in mixed company. Well, just replace "one hundred women with black eyes" with "one hundred members of the White House press corps" and you're golden, because evidently the press corps just doesn't f$#!ing listen!
Herewith are utterances made by White House Press Secretary Scott "Sucka MC" McClellan at Tuesday's press briefing. What a pain in the ass these reporters must be, because Sucka said all of this in a briefing that spanned a mere 28 minutes:
No, I think we've addressed this matter. I think we addressed it yesterday very clearly.
Well, again, I just mentioned where our focus is.
Terry, I think that the matter has been addressed. Secretary Powell yesterday fully addressed it, too, and outlined exactly how events occurred.
I think I've described the President's views from this podium, and I would leave it at that.
The President has talked about that.
He talked about it in his State of the Union address.
Les, I think that's a matter that you need to address to the state of California.
Les, I think that California issues you can address to California.
The President's views are very well-known.
Well, I think you know the way the legislative process works.
His views are very well-known on the other issues, as well.
His views are very well-known, David. I just said that.
Our views are very well-known on those issues.
I think, Goyal, that we've addressed this issue.
And I would refer you back to those remarks.
Russell, I think I've addressed this matter. I think I said, as recently as yesterday, that in terms of the issue, if you're asking about recusals or things like that, those are issues to address to Justice Scalia. And I think Justice Scalia has addressed that matter.
All right, thank you.
Why are we even paying Sucka a salary? Why can't we just replace him with a voice-activated mp3 device that simply repeats the phrase "I've already gone over that" whenever someone asks it a question? Or if "Go back and look it up yourself" is the only answer the press corps is ever going to get, why don't we just replace him with any librarian from any high school in the United States? Or InstaPundit?
Enough! Scott McClellan is tired of answering questions he has already answered, even if he hasn't already answered them! Scott McClellan tires of your foolishness! Begone, and if you come up with a decent question the great Scott McClellan hasn't already addressed, you may address it to the great Scott McClellan!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:26 AM
OK, sure, but he was probably preoccupied with all the F-102s he was flying at the time
Well, somebody has finally come forward to say they remember seeing George W. Bush 30 years ago...but it wasn't anybody who served in the Alabama National Guard.
Rather, it's one of Bush's old economics professors from Harvard, and he's got a few insights about Bush that go a little deeper than "Best Friends 4-eva! C U next year!!!!" scrawled in the back of the Harvard Business School yearbook:
I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism."
Yeah, I definitely want this guy to be president for another four years. (Link via Atrios.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:25 AM
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
No honor among good ol' boys
This right here is the new Georgia flag. Like it? Not only is it purty, but peep that arch in the middle of the blue field. That's the University of Georgia arch, beeyatch, not some sissy yellow jacket. Say word, son!
Anyway, the good people of my home state voted yesterday to keep this flag instead of the previous flag that Roy Barnes proposed while he was governor to make the Confederate battle emblem smaller. So why are some people still pissed off?
Well, you see, the current governor, Sonny Perdue, defeated the incumbent Barnes in 2002 after promising to give Georgia voters the chance to reinstate the old stars-and-bars flag over the Barnes flag. The votes of the Confederate-flag-crazy fergit-hell crowd helped Perdue sail into the governor's mansion, but when it came time for Perdue to pony up with the promised referendum, he OK'd a referendum plan that offered only two choices — the Barnes flag, and the lovely emblem you see above. Not appearing on your ballot: the stars and bars. D'oh!
And now the hard-core "flaggers" are pissed. Awwww...poor y'all. On the one hand, as a distant relative of Robert E. Lee, I want to feel sorry for you. On the other hand, when you put your faith in a good ol' boy like Sonny and base your entire vote on something as picayune as a frickin' flag, you're kind of leaving yourselves open for some embarrassing shit like this.
So anyway...no soup for you. But love you guys. Hey, I hear they're still flyin' the stars and bars in South Carolina! Like, whenever you're ready...
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:37 PM
Good for the 9/11 Commission. If Clinton and Gore, the two guys who were responsible for 9/11 in the first place (everybody says so), can handle questions from the entire Commission panel, what do Bush and Cheney have to hide, and why do they only want to sit for an hour? Hmmmm?
If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had.
What, negative job growth? Whew, yeah, thank goodness we didn't let the Democrats mess with that. Really dodged a bullet there! I mean, who wants something like jobs? Ew! Yuck!
But we shouldn't be surprised to hear this kind of nonsense from a guy who characterizes the "Democratic policies" as "tax increases," even though, as Josh Marshall points out, the Democratic candidates never campaigned for a tax increase — they merely campaigned against the thoroughly ill-advised tax cuts Bush rammed through. So not quite the same thing.
Oh, and if you peep that Yahoo! story, you'll also note that Cheney is officially supporting the gay-marriage amendment that Bush threw his weight behind last week. Despite the fact that his daughter is, you know, an open lesbian. "Father of the Year" trophies may be sent to The White House, c/o Vice President Dick Cheney, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 7:44 AM
Monday, March 01, 2004
Congratulations on your brand-new testicles!
It took him long enough, but now that Bush has let his homophobe flag fly and vocalized his desire to keep gay people second-class citizens, Andrew Sullivan has all of a sudden grown a pair and learned that criticizing the president is OK. He's even written a whole column about how Bush's relative success in wartime could prove to be a disadvantage this election season.
Sully even goes so far as to offer some sage advice for you LINOs who claim to be Libertarian but then vote straight-ticket Republican every time you actually have to put your ballots where your mouths are. Well, he's actually just the conduit for said advice from a libertarian e-mailer, but hey, we'll take what we can get:
You claim in your blog that 'It looks increasingly as if anyone who cares about fiscal sanity is going to have to sit this election out.' However, isn't it obvious that the only way to impose some sort of fiscal sanity is to vote Kerry — resulting in a split government that can't reach any sort of agreement as to how to spend money?
Additionally, if we are going to spend money like drunken sailors wouldn't we rather have Kerry, who will at least tax the baby-boomer generation that is benefitting from all this spending, instead of Bush who wants to run up huge deficits and force these problems on future generations... people like ME?
As an uncatered to libertarian in my twenties, I think the answers to both of these questions are 'yes' and 'yes'. I intend to vote Republican except for President, where I intend to vote a big fat 'D'. Then I'll sit back and pray for government gridlock.
Sully agrees with this sentiment, even going so far as to admit that "Kerry seems to have a better grip on fiscal reality than Bush does." Democrats, the party of fiscal responsibility. Who woulda thunk it? Look, I'm not trying to say that the Democratic Party as a whole has all of a sudden had its fiscal come-to-Jesus moment and is now a bunch of budgetary tightwads. But at least we understand that if the government is going to spend an assload of money, it behooves said government to take in enough money to compensate, rather than just slash revenues like crazy and pray for the best — in other words, a tax-and-spend liberal is still better than a don't-tax-but-spend-anyway "conservative." It's time to end this fantasy that Republicans spend less and manage the country's money better, because three years of Bush have proven that to be emphatically false.
(Oh, and props to Sully for bringing our attention to this.)
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:03 PM
We're number one runners-up! We're number one runners-up!
GWBWYPGN?!'s influence continues to spread, like wildfire, cream cheese, or SARS — TBOGG named us a runner-up in his competition for best Bush/Cheney re-election slogan. Might we be patting ourselves a little too hard on the back for what basically amounts to an honorable mention? Possibly, but I don't see you winning any recognition for your Bush/Cheney re-election slogans, so until you do, suck it!
Man, now that I think about it, "Suck it" makes a perfect Bush/Cheney re-election slogan. Ah, well. Spilled milk, in any case. If you like GWBWYPGN?!'s sort-of-award-winning slogan idea, or any of the other ones we came up with, by all means feel free to put them on a bumper sticker. Don't steal any of the other slogans TBOGG published, because those were other people's ideas and they may not like you stealing them. But us, hey, we'd love for you to steal them. Anything to get our insolent and disrespectful crap work seen by a greater audience, we're whores! Just make sure when anyone asks you about your witty and hilarious bumper sticker, you say, "GWBWYPGN?!, baby — I steal from the best! Or if not the best, certainly the most desperate for public acclaim and recognition!" But really, we're doing it for the kids.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:52 AM
So long, Perle, and don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya
Richard Perle, the controversial member of the Defense Policy Board who called Seymour Hersh "the closest thing American Journalism has to a terrorist" because Hersh exposed Perle's connection to security/defense venture-capital company Trireme Partners in this article, resigned from the DPB a couple weeks ago, but his resignation letter became public over the weekend. The whole letter can be found here, but this is my favorite paragraph:
We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated. I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the President at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign. This is particularly true now since I have just published a book that calls for far reaching reform of government departments responsible for combating terrorism. Many of the ideas in that book are controversial and I wish to be free to argue them without those views or my arguments getting caught up in the campaign.
Shorter Richard Perle*: "I just wrote a book that says we should invade Syria, Iran, and Libya, and given that the unadulterated 100-percent bat-shit-craziness of these ideas may hurt the President's re-election campaign by association, it's probably best if I hang back for a while."
Richard Perle, stepping into the strike zone and taking one for the team. A prince among men.
There's lots of ways to get them the information they need to do their job. And I would point out to you that it is extraordinary for a sitting President of the United States to meet with the 9/11 Commission, a legislative body.
I don't know about you, but the way McClellan sounds, it seems a lot like Bush's attitude is basically, "Look, bitch, I'm the president, so you peons should be kissing my feet for wasting even an hour of my precious time with you, OK?"
Well, maybe that was too harsh. Let's let McClellan explain himself:
Well, I just talked to you about how this is an extraordinary move by a sitting President of the United States to do this, and how we are confident that the chairman and vice chairman will be able to share all this information with the rest of the commissioners.
No, we were right the first time -- Bush is too cool to spend more than an hour with these dorkwads, and he only wants to talk to the important people.
'Scuse me for sounding like a grudge-holder, but if Bill Clinton has to spend days at a time getting questioned and deposed about a blowjob, then maybe Bush should man the f$#! up and submit to some extended questioning about the worst terrorist attack in the history of the freakin' United States.
We try as hard as we can on this blog not to come off as nutcase tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists, but it's awful hard when the Bush people act like such complete asshats.
That's right, ladies — the NYT boosts their headlines from none other than Yours Truly. Send your phone numbers and risqué jpegs to this address — the line forms to the right.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:16 PM
Rush, you ignorant slut
Merciful God in heaven above, Rush "The OxyCutioner" Limbaugh is defending Howard Stern! Let's listen:
Limbaugh made the comments after his parent company Clear Channel dropped Viacom's Howard Stern from its stations.
"Smut on TV gets praised. Smut on TV wins Emmys. On radio, there seems [sic] to be different standards," Limbaugh explained.
"I've never heard Howard Stern. But when the federal government gets involved in this, I get a little frightened."
Wow, Rush, that was actually a stirring, cogent defense of free-speech rights. Or it was until you started being your usual douchebag self:
"If we are going to sit by and let the federal government get involved in this, if the government is going to 'censor' what they think is right and wrong...what happens if a whole bunch of John Kerrys or Terry McAuliffes start running this country, and decide conservative views are leading to violence?"
What the f...how did Rush just suddenly switch this whole thing over to being the Democrats' fault? Hey, Rush, you know who controls all three brances of government right now? The Republicans! Know who controls the FCC right now? The Republicans! Know who received two-thirds of Clear Channel's total campaign contributions in 2002? The Republicans! Yet somehow Rush whips out an absurd hypothetical, and all of a sudden John Kerry and Terry McAuliffe are on a crusade to crush the voice of the opposition! We can only guess he's back on the drugs again and his perception of reality has once again been fundamentally altered.
How stupid do you have to be to actually listen to this buffoon? How stupid do you have to be to enjoy his program?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:30 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot (2.0): 28th in a series
Welcome to the new and improved Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot — it includes all the snarky goodness you love in a revamped, easier-to-navigate package. In other words, we're now running Ann's words in italics and our own witheringly sarcastic running commentary in plain text. Not only is it more in keeping with the style we usually use for quoting or citing other people, but according to a Poynter Institute study, it makes Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot 73 percent easier to read!
Know what the best part is? We pulled that "73 percent" number right out of our ass! But we're only using a technique cribbed from Coulter herself, whose typical modus operandi (yeah, that's Latin, bitch!) is to make random, arbitrary non-sequitur statements with little basis in fact or logic to distract people from the fact that the people or things she's defending don't have a leg to stand on. It's kind of like, "OK, so we haven't found any WMDs in Iraq and millions of people are still unemployed, but — ooh, look, a pony!" It makes her a perfect match for our current administration, and it's a tactic she uses repeatedly in this week's column, "AFL-CIO Motto: Kick Me Again." So while Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot may be 124 percent easier to read (see how we just switched that number when you weren't looking? Another time-honored Coulter Classic!), it won't make it any easier to understand the twisted rhetoric and bizarre logic of the Coultinator:
In the past decade, the AFL-CIO has lobbied Congress on three major issues of any importance to union members:
(1) Oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement;
(2) Oppose permanent normal trade relations with China;
(3) Support drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The unions lost every vote.
Give Ann this much credit, she's definitely a shrewd, no-nonsense framer of issues. She rattles off these three issues right off the bat, and then proceeds to act as if these are the only causes that the AFL-CIO has seen fit to put its weight behind, ever — ignoring other more germane labor issues like, oh, equal pay, workers' rights, safe workplaces, that sort of thing. In other words, all the stuff that conservative Republicans like Bush oppose out of hand — and all the reasons labor unions generally don't touch right-wing candidates with a ten-foot pole.
Demonstrating his savvy political skills, the head of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, repeatedly throws the federation's support to political candidates who opposed labor on all three issues. So if you ever find yourself negotiating with Sweeney, make sure your opening bid is "nothing."
Sweeney's curious lose-at-any-price strategy has cost the unions everything. The only two Democratic presidential candidates to vote with the unions on any of these issues -- not all, but any -- were Representatives Dick Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich. Gephardt was out of the race after the first primary, and Kucinich can't break beyond the Aliens-Kidnapped-My-Mother crowd. (Dennis Kucinich did his tax return this week, and under "occupation" he wrote "Jay Leno punch line.")
From what we can gather, this is going to be Ann's column about how those horrible, evil Democrats sold the labor unions down the river. So when she brings up two Democrats who haven't committed that offense, what does she do? Slags them off as carrying the banner for "the Aliens-Kidnapped-My-Mother crowd." It doesn't matter what you do if you're a Democrat — Ann's still going to make fun of you.
There is only one candidate for president who didn't vote for NAFTA, didn't vote for trade with China and supported drilling in ANWR. That candidate is George Bush.
Of course he didn't vote for any of those things, he was a governor who had no voting power in Congress! How stupid does Ann think we are? And does this mean that when I run for president in 2028, I can use "didn't vote to send American troops to Vietnam" as one of my talking points?
He got into office by beating Al Gore -- the guy who was the head cheerleader for NAFTA. And unlike Dick Gephardt, Bush spends more time on the phone with Jimmy Hoffa than with Barbra Streisand.
Yeah, Gep and Barbra are best buds. Ann's willingness to whip out random names like "Barbra Streisand" for no other purpose than to initiate a Pavlovian right-wing response in her readers should give you some indication as to the level of intellectual contempt Coulter has for her own fans.
As president, Bush enraged free traders -- and our precious European "allies" -- by imposing tariffs on steel imports.
Which he dropped just this past September, because the tariffs were actually hurting American industries by encouraging international corporations to go elsewhere for cheaper steel.
Sweeney has rewarded Bush by calling him a "horror" for organized labor. Apparently what "organized labor" really wants isn't good jobs at good wages, but ... abortion on demand!
Wait, so all of a sudden this is a column about abortion? Ann knows just as well as we do, of course, that labor unions have no incentive whatsoever to support the big-corporation-fellating Bush policies that aim to keep workers' rights and benefits at the barest of bare minimums while looking the other way as thousands of jobs get shipped overseas. But mentioning this would make Bush look bad, so she has to throw the critical workers'-rights argument out the window and spin the issue into irrelevance: Unions oppose Bush not because he doesn't give a rat's ass about their working conditions...but rather, because they're in league with the nasty evil abortionists! Jeez, Coulterheads, isn't your intelligence insulted by this?
The AFL-CIO has vowed to devote massive union resources against Bush in the crucial swing states of Missouri, Ohio and Florida in the coming election.
Strictly following his strategy of selling union votes for nothing, the AFL-CIO has endorsed Sen. John Kerry -- who voted for NAFTA, voted for trade with China and voted against drilling for oil in Alaska. Skilled laborers will have to wait another day for "fair trade" and high-paying jobs in Alaska, but at least Sweeney's candidate supports the issues that really matter to the average blue-collar worker: gay marriage, global warming treaties and hybrid cars.
Ann, you're doing it again...not only that, but you're blaming Kerry for making this gay-marriage thing a huge issue, when in fact that was all GOP, baby. And she's still repeating NAFTA/China/ANWR as her mantra.
Kerry denounces "Benedict Arnold" CEOs who ship "American jobs overseas." (Experts are still trying to figure out why Kerry didn't mention his service in Vietnam in that statement.)
And there we have the hat trick. Ann doesn't want to deal with the fact that Bush and his economic team are utterly unconcerned with the steady flow of jobs overseas, so she diverts the reader's attention with this rhetorical tennis ball: "John Kerry talks about his Vietnam service too much!" (Except you'll notice that he didn't mention it! That means Ann Coulter just used a statement by Kerry in which he does not mention his Vietnam service to...bitch about how he talks too much about his Vietnam service! Oh, the stupidity!)
Sweeney seems to be satisfied with Kerry's explanation that -- like his vote for war with Iraq -- he voted for free trade, but then was shocked when free trade resulted.
Sen. John Edwards calls protection of U.S. jobs "a moral issue." Reminding audiences that he is the son of a mill worker almost as often as Kerry mentions that he served in Vietnam,
And as if it wasn't stupid enough the first time, Ann does it again! This time talking about John freaking Edwards!!!!
Edwards says that "when we talk about trade, we are talking about values." As the son of a mill worker, he has seen with his "own eyes" what bad trade agreements "do to people." Of the evil trade agreements (supported by AFL-CIO's candidate) Edwards says: "Those trade deals were wrong. They cost us too many jobs and lowered our standards."
Except -- like Kerry -- Edwards also voted for those trade agreements every chance he got. In 2000, Edwards voted for trade with China. Having seen with his "own eyes" what happens "when the mill shuts down," Edwards voted to shut down a few more mills.
Yeah, that's why he did it. Not because being able to sell more goods to China might result in more prosperity for American manufacturers...he did it because he wanted to screw those poor slobs back in North Carolina! Suckers!
Edwards also voted his conscience to oppose drilling in Alaska. Whenever Edwards' conscience speaks to him, it sounds remarkably like Barbra Streisand.
And there she whips out Barbra again. I can hear the anguished cries of my brain cells dying just from having to read this.
Edwards' only fig leaf for claiming he backs labor is a hypothetical vote he never actually cast. He bravely claims he would have voted against NAFTA -- if only he had been in the Senate when it came up for a vote.
That's an interesting moral calculus. Edwards didn't mind forcing American workers to compete with a billion Chinese -- famously including child workers and slave laborers. But trade with Canada and Mexico he says would have offended his delicate moral sensibilities.
Oh, this is just too f$#!ing rich. Ann lauds George W. Bush for not casting NAFTA or ANWR votes he had no authority to make, but when Edwards says he wouldn't have supported NAFTA, she affords him no such luxury.
In his stump speech, Edwards implies he ran against Jesse Helms by saying he beat "the Jesse Helms machine" to win his Senate seat. It was a real David and Goliath match-up -- pitting a poor, beleaguered multimillionaire trial lawyer against an elderly senator of humble means.
For Christ's sake. Edwards was a political newcomer, Helms was a 30-year Senate veteran who unofficially ran the entire Republican Party in North Carolina. And nobody who's served five Senate terms gets to say they're from "humble means" anymore. So howsabout we bring the Jesse Helms Pity Party to a halt right here.
But the mere mention of Helms' name invariably elicits sneers from the party of the little guy.
Helms voted with the AFL-CIO on all three big labor issues -- against NAFTA, against trade with China and for half a million good jobs in Alaska. Indeed, Helms was one of the main lobbyists against trade with China. The guy Edwards actually beat, Lauch Faircloth, was in the Senate for only one of these votes. The AFL-CIO didn't have to take Faircloth's word on how he might have voted on NAFTA: He voted against it. The AFL-CIO endorsed Edwards and opposed Faircloth and Helms.
Well, the AFL-CIO does have millions of African-American members, that may be one reason why they weren't lining up to support Lauch and Jesse.
It's not particularly surprising that the party of trial lawyers, environmentalists and Hollywood actresses keeps voting against blue collar workers. What's strange is that the AFL-CIO keeps voting against blue-collar workers, too.
But that, of course, is what this column is really about. Ann's primary concern isn't really with the poor benighted blue-collar workers of America; if it was, she wouldn't be encouraging them to support Bush in a million years. No, Ann's primary concern is George W. Bush, and if the AFL-CIO won't bite the bullet and support him, well, they must be punished! Since it doesn't look like the AFL-CIO is going to support Bush anytime soon, there's potential here for Ann to write a column about how all blue-collar union members are traitors...if she writes it, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot will be there to deconstruct it! See you then!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:40 AM
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Big Bully strikes again
Yesterday I chided all those right-wingers who fatuously claim that gay marriage would tear the very fabric of our American society, challenging them to explain exactly how this was going to happen. Well, a letter writer in today's edition of the Birmingham News surprised me by stepping up to the plate. The Rev. Christopher Crain declares that gay marriage will destroy American society because it will...irrevocably alter the wedding industry!:
If same-sex marriages were mainstreamed, everything from the content of sociology classes in our public high schools to the covers of family and parenting magazines would reflect this radical change. Residential phone listings in the telephone book would look different. Jewelry stores would market a new genre of wedding rings. Wedding caterers would offer cake toppers that would initially turn heads.
Yes, wedding caterers would have to introduce entire new lines of cake decorations. Clearly, this is an issue requiring action at the Constitutional level.
Look, I don't want to go on at length about the gay-marriage amendment — for one thing, it stands about as much chance of passage as the anti-flag-burning amendment did, and for another thing, it's a stupid argument. I don't think wedded matrimony is a stupid goal for gay couples to have, mind you, I just think it's stupid that we're discussing this at all, for reasons that the good Reverend above inadvertantly made clear. I mean, our soldiers are dying in Iraq, there's still the matter of those 2 million lost jobs, the national debt has passed $7 trillion, and our President Nero is fiddling with...gay marriage?
Of course he is, because he had to find something to distract his conservative base from the fact that, in pretty much every relevant area of public policy, he's really kind of letting things go to shit. The ultra-cons were getting nervous about the rampant spending coming out of the White House and Bush's relative inaction on their pet social issues, so Bush had to make some grand gesture to make them think he was cool again. And how did he do it? By picking on the weakest kid in the schoolyard.
We've already described at length how the invasion of Iraq was nothing more than a distraction from the rigors of the real War on Terror, how it was merely picking on the weak kid because he'd be the easiest to beat. Well, Bush's support of the Federal Marriage Amendment is no different. Gays are an easy minority to stigmatize, you can get a pretty big organization built up against them in the religious right, and they're not enough of a concern within your own party that you'll have to take much crap from fellow Repubs for smacking them down. Yeah, sure, why not discriminate against a minority that's easy to discriminate against, especially if it'll make you look like Big Man in front of the Christian Coalition?
Bush and his supporters love to trumpet his courage, even though he sure does spend an awful lot of time picking on political weaklings. But his expressed support for the FMA is only courage on paper — or even less than that, since he's never going to actually have to put his so-called "courage" on the line by signing a ready-to-be-ratified amendment. At some point before November, Bush is actually going to have to tackle a tough issue or a formidable opponent, or he'll be supporting the gay-marriage amendment from Crawford, Texas, next year. We can only hope.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:28 AM
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Bad gay people! Bad, naughty gay people! No marriage for you!
OK, it's long past time for GWBWYPGN?! to weigh in on this whole gay-marriage-amendment thing, and it's just a shame that we waited until after we'd offered up the F-word for Lent, but here are five thoughts anyway:
1. Has anyone actually read the wording of the Federal Marriage Amendment? Evidently not, or else people across the country would be up in arms about how f...uh, how freakin' retarded it is:
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
This amendment says no state or federal law can require marital status to be "conferred upon unmarried couples." So, um, doesn't that kind of BAN ALL MARRIAGES?! I mean, on the one hand, this amendment would be a perfect out for me whenever my parents ask why I haven't settled down with a nice girl yet and started a family, but beyond that, I was kind of hoping I would get married someday, y'know? Hello? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?...
2. It's time for conservatives everywhere to formally disabuse themselves of the notion that George W. Bush is one of them. There was a time when someone who described himself as a "conservative" would've called gay marriage the kind of thing that should be left up to individual states to decide. No longer, evidently.
But the odd thing is, Bush himself used to be one of them. Here's Dubya in a 2000 interview with Larry King, courtesy of Atrios:
KING: So if a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it?
BUSH: The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's issue like you're trying to get me into.
Yup, you heard it straight from the horse's ass mouth: The state can do what they [sic] want to do. Apparently that's been changed to "The state can do what they want to do, as long as they want to ban gay marriage."
3. It's a desperation move. Not so very long ago, Bush wouldn't have had to declare his support so openly for this amendment. Lord knows he tried to dance around the issue for as long as he could, but his verbal contortions on the issue didn't matter, because he trusted the Christian-conservative wing of his party to know what was really in his heart — "I don't like the gays any more than y'all do." So how is it that his hand was forced this time — why did he feel the need to come out and unequivocally declare his support for an amendment that, even if it was ratified, wouldn't achieve full Constitutional status until months (but more likely years) after the 2004 election?
Simple: Because he's getting nervous. He'd been waffling on the gay-marriage issue for so long that the Christian conservatives started to wonder whether he was really serious about this amendment; for a while, that was safe, because who else are they gonna vote for, John Kerry? But now the rumblings of dissatisfaction are coming at a time when Bush isn't doing so hot in the polls, and not only that, but there may be an ominous new challenger to court the votes of the Christian right if they sense that Bush isn't doing enough for them. (And we're not the only ones who see this as a real threat to Bush, either.)
Basically, Bush never would've had to step up and spell it all out for his Christian supporters before. Now he does. And that's odd.
4. It says a lot about this amendment that some very prominent Republicans sound like they'd rather not deal with it. Andrew Sullivan pointed out these quotes from the AP story on Bush's announcement: Tom DeLay, whom you might expect to be chomping at the bit to pass some anti-gay legislation, said, "This is so important we're not going to take a knee-jerk reaction to this. We are going to look at our options and we are going to be deliberative about what solutions we may suggest." Rep. David Dreier, co-chair of Bush's California campaign in 2000: "I will say that I'm not supportive of amending the Constitution on this issue. I believe that this should go through the courts, and I think that we're at a point where it's not necessary." Rep. Jerry Lewis, also from California: "At this moment I feel changing the Constitution should be a last resort on almost any issue." Evidently a lot of Republicans are squeamish about using the Constitution of the United States as the weapon of choice for blocking the progress of gay rights. Which brings us to our last point...
5. Wake up, people — it's the f$#!ing Constitution. Once upon a time, we amended the Constitution to end discrimination — we ratified the 15th Amendment to give African-Americans equal rights, the 19th Amendment to give women the right to vote. Now we're using the Constitution to uphold discrimination. And if you don't understand how very, very sad that is, I just don't know what to tell you.
Look, the anti-gay-marriage forces have used all kinds of specious and irrelevant arguments to convince people that this amendment is necessary — gay marriage will bring about the destruction of the American family (never quite heard that one adequately explained), legalized gay marriage will lead to people marrying their children or their pets (right, mm-hmm, sure, you betcha). But the desperate clamor for an anti-gay-marriage amendment boils down to one core belief: the idea that a gay couple can't possibly be as moral, as committed, or as loving as any straight couple.
And this straight guy would like to step forward and say that's complete and utter bullshit. It's just too bad our president can't figure that out.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:14 AM
No, but I kiss your momma with this mouth
As alluded to last week, GWBWYPGN?! is giving up the F-word for Lent. Each time GWBWYPGN?! uses the F-word, GWBWYPGN?! will put a dollar in a jar, and at the end of Lent the collected funds will be donated to some kind of charity, to, I don't know, buy soap for the millions of impoverished families in Africa who can't afford to put their own soap in their kids' mouths when they say the F-word.
Anyhoo, for the next 40 days, Rudepundit will be doing the swearing in GWBWYPGN?!'s stead. In terms of humor, Rudepundit is a little like an even more gutter-mouthed version of Dennis Miller before Miller applied for that $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study just how far he could bend over for George W. Bush.
So anyway, enjoy.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 7:47 AM
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Welcome to GWBWYPGN?!, ladies drink free!
Forgive GWBWYPGN?! for indulging in a little sexism here, not to mention going on at length about superficial stuff like appearances, but we've decided it's time to inject a little sex appeal into this campaign season.
Somehow, over the past decade or two, the Republicans have been able to bogart the mantle of Fun, Glamorous Party from the Democrats. Once upon a time, the liberals were the people you wanted to hang out with and the conservatives were the stuffed-shirt dorks, but somehow that's gotten switched around; now the Republicans have co-opted hipness — I guess if you've got as much money as they do, you can do that — and the Democrats and liberals have been left with the image of the people you avoid at a party because they're going to try and engage you in some lengthy discussion on the dangers of a capital-gains tax cut. Look at poor Al Gore — watching him debate George W. Bush was like watching E.J. Dionne debate Jessica Simpson, but Gore still lost because he had little more charisma than Ferris Bueller's American-history teacher.
And the Republicans think they've also wrestled away the title of Party of Hot Chicks now that they've got people like Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and the McBlondes of Fox News on their side, whereas the Democrats are being painted as pasty Birkenstock-wearing feminists now busily scraping Dean stickers off their Volvo station wagons. This is a damn shame, first of all because Ann Coulter isn't even that hot (as those of you who've been following this blog may have inferred), but second of all because the Democratic Party is loaded with hot women — particularly if the Tennessee Democratic Party celebration I went to right before the TN primary is any indication, but I've also had the good fortune to meet a couple of smokin'-hot ex-Deaniacs just in the last couple weeks (and, yeah, I happen to like Volvo station wagons). In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess to a crush on Juliet Huddy, who puts the "fox" in Fox News, but only with the caveat that the typical level of discourse on "Fox & Friends" makes Carrot Top look like Walter fuckin' Cronkite.
So as distasteful as this may sound to some of you, if we want to win in November, we've got to put our best foot forward in the hot-women department. Fortunately, the Democratic Party in its current state is eminently capable of doing that. As you'll see below, our hot women can go toe-to-toe with theirs any day of the week:
Sleeper VP pick ....... Theirs: National-security........Ours: Sen. Mary Landrieu adviser Condoleezza.............(D-LA)
Rice
Presumptive First Lady Theirs: Laura Bush.....................Ours: Teresa .............................................Heinz Kerry
Up-and-coming House member ...... Theirs: Rep. Katherine...............Ours: Stephanie Herseth Harris (R-FL)............................(D-SD), candidate to
............................................replace Bill Janklow
Fire-breathing columnist Theirs: Ann Coulter..............Ours: Maureen Dowd (Full horror of Adam's
apple viewable here)
Presidential offspring ....... Theirs: Jenna Bush............Ours: Karenna Gore Schiff (OK, so she's hot.)
Governor ....... Theirs: Rick Perry..........Ours: Jennifer Granholm (D-MI)
(R-TX)
So you see, kids, this is one battle we're ready to fight. They're tanned, they're rested, they're ready — it's time to make the Democratic Party hot again.
ETA: Want to see more of the lovely Stephanie Herseth? Then help her get elected. Her Republican opponent is already loading up the big-money guns, so it's time to give her some ammo of her own — donate to Herseth for Congress right here.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:07 PM
Monday, February 23, 2004
Special interests for special people
If you've been paying any attention to the Kerry-Bush campaign repartée lately, you've probably inferred that special interests aren't just the interests that ride the short bus to school. They're becoming a central campaign theme — and Bush, amazingly enough, is using this as an issue to bash Kerry with, despite the fact that Bush lecturing anyone on special interests is sort of like Jesse Helms telling someone to cool it with the racial humor. Not only that, but he's lying about it, says The Daily Howler. Bush's latest Internet attack ad accuses Kerry of taking “more special interest money than any other senator,” but howsabout we deal with the truth instead:
According to Peter Beinart, Kerry ranks ninety-second among U.S. senators when it comes to special interest money. Meanwhile, at his Annenberg “FactCheck” site, Brooks Jackson shot down this ad’s bogus claim too. (He shot it down ten days ago!) Is Kerry first among senators in special interest dough, raising $640,000 in the last fifteen years? Please. “So far, for example, Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist reported $1,022,063 in PAC donations for his 2004 campaign alone,” Jackson notes.
And that's not even counting the money Frist made from his witheringly self-satisfied eugenics primer Good People Beget Good People, which has rocketed up to #70,009 on Amazon's sales chart.
Still, the GOP thinks that by taking $640K in special-interest money, Kerry has rendered himself "unprincipled." By that standard, then, Frist must be "unscrupulous," according to my computer's built-in thesaurus, even "wanton." And Bush? Downright "whorish," if you ask me.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:06 PM
The Alabama solution: Run, Roy, Run!
It's official: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader (anagram: "Crap! Ravenous, coldhearted man") is running for president. Thanks, Ralph, but don't you think you've done enough already?
I'm not convinced that Nader's decision to run is really the huge disaster for the Democrats that it was in 2000. For one thing, after three years of Emperor Dubya, most of the Naderites of 2000 have learned their lesson. Even the Green Party knows better than to have anything to do with him this time around. Still, there's even less margin for error in 2004 than there was in 2000, and Nader's monstrous ego might just be the difference again.
But what if there was a way to counter Nader's independent campaign on the left with an equivalent, if not stronger, campaign on the right? Those of us in Alabama have the solution: Chief Justice Roy S. Moore (anagram: "Joyous, I emcee for Christ") needs to throw his hat into the ring. With Reverend Roy siphoning the hard-core fundamentalist-Christian votes away from the Republican Party, Bush will be out of the White House before you can say "I, John Forbes Kerry, do solemnly swear..." But how do we get him to do this?
The other day, as I was messing around on Dave Leip's excellent Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, I discovered that a little party called the Constitution Party won 98,022 votes in the 2000 presidential election. I'd never heard of the Constitution Party before, so I paid a visit to their Web site, where I discovered that they "work to restore our government to its Constitutional limits and our law to its Biblical foundation." Not only that, but Roy Moore his ownself has been speaking at their state party meetings.
Roy Moore. The Constitution Party. A match made, if you'll pardon the pun, in heaven.
The idea isn't that preposterous. This past weekend, you'll recall, Bush used another recess appointment to install Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Ironically, though he is a devout Catholic and about as right-wing as lawyers get, Pryor is now persona non grata with Alabama's substantial Bible-thumping demographic. As the attorney general, you see, Pryor was tasked with prosecuting Moore for the ethics violations that stemmed from the big-ass Ten Commandments monument that Moore moved into the state judicial building; because Pryor actually acknowledged the rule of law (heavens, no!) and agreed (if grudgingly) to prosecute Reverend Roy, Pryor has been lumped in with all those atheists and God-haters who wanted to see Moore removed from the state bench. And now that Bush has given a recess appointment to Pryor, the real hard-core fundies on the right wing are wondering if they've been betrayed.
There's got to be a way to get Reverend Roy to run. If Nader's ego is big enough to convince him to run for president a second time, surely Roy's is just as big, or bigger. He just has to be convinced there's enough people behind him.
So let's try this: Go to the Foundation for Moral Law, Inc., the legal-defense fund for Reverend Roy. And e-mail info@morallaw.org with your own personal encouragement for Roy to seek the Constitution Party's nomination for president. Cite Bush's recess appointment of Bill Pryor as evidence that Bush and the Republican Party have abandoned Moore, and God, in the name of political expediency. As with Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter, don't let on that you're a leftie, but at the same time, don't ham it up in your attempts to sound like a dedicated Roy Moore fan.
Keep in mind that I'm taking a bullet for you bastards here — if Roy runs, he's going to win the state of Alabama in a walk, which means I'm going to have to move back to Georgia to restore my dignity, and that's going to cost money. (To find out how you can contribute to the Help Doug Move Back to Georgia Foundation, e-mail georgemustgo(at)hotmail.com.) But I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get Bush out of the White House. And if that includes being a sneaky, devious son of a bitch...so much the better.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 10:06 AM
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Woodward Ho!
So one of us lefties will be all, "It looks an awful lot like Bush is trying to cover up what he did before 9/11," and the right wing will be all, "Quit being such a paranoid nutbag," and then I read something like this that makes me all, "Yeah, eat me":
Feb. 18 - Faced with presidential resistance to turning over highly sensitive intelligence briefs, the commission investigating the September 11 terror attacks tried to learn the details in the documents by obtaining access to White House transcripts of interviews that senior officials gave to a prominent journalist, NEWSWEEK has learned.
The extraordinary access that top Bush administration officials gave Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward more than two years ago for his book, “Bush at War,” became a principal issue in the contentious battle between the September 11 panel and the White House over access to the President’s Daily Briefs or PDBs—the intelligence briefing report that is given to the president every morning.
Like, what the crap is going on here? The administration will let Woodward have unprecedented access to their files so he can write a blowjob book about Bush, but when the freaking 9/11 commission wants access to the same stuff, they get all David Spade on them, like, "And you are...?" Priorities, people! What the administration is doing right now is sort of like if I were to take my deathly ill daughter to the hospital, and when the doctor asks what she's allergic to and what medication she's taking, I get all huffy and reply, "Well, just because I told my cleaning lady all that last week doesn't make it any of your business, Mr. Nosypants."
Don't believe that this is some serious shiznit? Here's another paragraph from the Newsweek article:
But there is little doubt that Woodward got details of documents that are central to the commission’s investigation—and more than a little sensitive for the Bush White House. One intelligence document that Woodward described in a May, 2002 Washington Post story , although not in his book, is the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB given to Bush while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford. This is the day that intelligence officials briefed Bush on the prospect of an upcoming Al Qaeda attack and the prospect that terrorists might seek to hijack commercial airliners—a warning that critics have long charged should have triggered a more vigorous response from the White House. The title of the PDB, according to Woodward’s story, was more prophetic than the White House has ever acknowledged: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
Tick, tick, tick...
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 12:03 PM
Friday, February 20, 2004
Tonight I have a message for the readers of GWBWYPGN?!...
...Go home and die. But first, watch the State of the Union Address, take one.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:18 AM
Thursday, February 19, 2004
"Son, you were spending pretty fast back there. You have any idea what the debt ceiling is around here?"
If I had a dollar for every girl who'd ever rejected me in my life...I'd need to be rejected by seven trillion girls to pay off the national debt. (Hey, I'm pretty close!)
Record-setting national debt, rampant job losses, highest gas prices in four years, and oh yeah, those 140,000-some troops in Iraq...once upon a time, this all would have been enough to get a sitting president ridden out of Washington on a rail, wouldn't it?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:10 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: 27th in a series
Well, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot fans, it would appear that Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter has achieved some level of success — and even if it hasn't, we're going to take credit anyway: Ann's disgusting denigration of war hero Max Cleland last week made waves all over the country, and all sorts of folks are coming forward to condemn Ann for the disrespectful witch asshat that she is. So many, in fact, that Ann evidently felt compelled to use her entire column this week to explain herself — though her "explanations" are, as you might expect, witless, self-serving, and dishonest.
In fact, the woman who said last week that Cleland "dropped a grenade on himself" barely has a chance to catch her breath before she calls us liars! Yes, she says we're lying when we claim she lied about how Cleland lost his limbs. But you'll notice that Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot never claimed Max got hurt in an actual combat situation; we simply called shenanigans on the "dropped a grenade on himself" lie, as well as her insolent assertion that Cleland exhibited "no bravery" in Vietnam. No, this latest "I know you are but what am I?" from the Coultinator is just more of her typical goalpost-moving, and it makes the title of her screed this week ("File Under: 'Omission Accomplished' ") even more ironic:
Liberals are hopping mad about last week's column. Amid angry insinuations that I "lied" about Sen. Max Cleland, I was attacked on the Senate floor by Sen. Jack Reed, Molly Ivins called my column "error-ridden," and Al Hunt called it a "lie." Joe Klein said I was the reason liberals were being hysterical about George Bush's National Guard service.
All sounds like pretty fair criticism to us, Ann.
I would have left it at one column, but apparently Democrats want to go another round. With their Clintonesque formulations, my detractors make it a little difficult to know what "lie" I'm supposed to be contesting, but they are clearly implying -- without stating -- that Cleland lost his limbs in combat.
You'll note that in our previous edition of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, not once did we say or even imply that Cleland had lost his limbs in a combat situation, and that issue didn't figure among the many lies and omissions we were pointing out in her column. Ann will only name two "detractors" who are "implying" that Cleland lost his limbs in combat; as for the rest, she's just putting words in their mouths like she always does with us nasty libruls. Anyway, the point here is not to fall for the issue-skirting Coulter will try to engage in for the remainder of her column.
It is simply a fact that Max Cleland was not injured by enemy fire in Vietnam. He was not in combat, he was not -- as Al Hunt claimed -- on a reconnaissance mission, and he was not in the battle of Khe Sanh, as many others have implied. He picked up an American grenade on a routine noncombat mission and the grenade exploded.
Ann, you ignorant slut.
In your first column on Cleland, you claimed on multiple occasions that Cleland "dropped a grenade on himself" (which you just now changed, hoping that nobody was looking, to "picked up an American grenade"). That's what got us hopping mad about your mendacity, the fact that you would deliberately tell a falsehood about what happened just to make Cleland look like a clumsy oaf responsible for his own injury. But you gloss right over the lie — yes, the outright lie — you told last week just so you can get to a made-up charge that's easier to defend yourself against.
In Cleland's own words: "I didn't see any heroism in all that. It wasn't an act of heroism. I didn't know the grenade was live. It was an act of fate." That is why Cleland didn't win a Purple Heart, which is given to those wounded in combat. Liberals are not angry because I "lied"; they're angry because I told the truth.
No, Ann, we're still angry that you lied. (And have yet to admit it.)
I wouldn't press the point except that Democrats have deliberately "sexed up" the circumstances of Cleland's accident in the service of slandering the people of Georgia, the National Guard and George Bush.
Umm, when exactly where "the people of Georgia" slandered by Cleland's defenders, Ann? Boy, does she have a warped idea of what that word really means.
Cleland has questioned Bush's fitness for office because he served in the National Guard but did not go to Vietnam.
Cleland didn't question Bush's fitness for office — he questioned Bush's courage and honesty, considering that Bush likes to brag about what a hot-shit fighter jock he was in the National Guard. And as far as we're concerned, sic 'em, Max.
And yet the poignant truth of Cleland's own accident demonstrates the commitment and bravery of all members of the military who come into contact with ordnance.
Ahhh, now we start with the backtracking. Just last week, Coulter said there was "no bravery" in Cleland's sacrifice. But now she's waxing damn near poetic about its "poignant truth," saying it "demonstrates...commitment and bravery." Call Cleland a coward, call him brave, but at least have enough courage of your convictions to pick one and stick with it, you opportunistic, bandwagon-hopping douchebag.
Cleland's injury was of the routine variety that occurs whenever young men and weapons are put in close proximity -- including in the National Guard.
Yeah, we're sure George W. Bush was just surrounded by grenades and live ammo as he bravely read safety manuals at his inactive National Guard post in Montgomery in '72.
But it is a vastly more glorious story to claim that Cleland was injured by enemy fire rather than in a freak accident. So after Saxby Chambliss beat Cleland in the 2002 Georgia Senate race, liberals set to work developing a carefully crafted myth about Cleland's accident.
Why would we nasty libruls wait until after the election to "develop a carefully crafted myth" about Cleland's service? Everyone in the state of Georgia knew about Cleland's heroism during Vietnam, as well as his injury, so there was no need to "craft a myth." What we did after the '02 senatorial election was simply express outrage that a man who had given as much for his country as Cleland had was allowed to be slandered as unpatriotic by the insolent Saxby Chambliss. And despite Coulter's fatuous "Who, us?" claims last week that the Chambliss campaign never implied that Cleland was unpatriotic, we stand by that outrage still.
Among many other examples, last November, Eric Boehlert wrote in Salon: "(D)uring the siege of Khe Sanh, Cleland lost both his legs and his right hand to a Viet Cong grenade."
So Boehlert got some circumstances and some facts wrong. Embarrassing, yes, but is Ann Coulter really the one who should be pointing fingers at him? (Insert your own "glass houses" quote here.)
Sadly for them, dozens and dozens of newspapers have already printed the truth. Liberals simply can't grasp the problem Lexis-Nexis poses to their incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty -- hysterical overreaction. The truth is not their forte.
Oh, fuck you, Ann, you hypocrite, and fuck you again. (Sorry, we were really hoping we'd be able to keep the profanity down after last week's tirade, but sometimes we just can't help it. Don't worry, we're giving up the F-word for Lent. No, really.)
One of the most detailed accounts of Cleland's life was written by Jill Zuckman in a lengthy piece for The Boston Globe Sunday magazine on Aug. 3, 1997:
"Finally, the battle at Khe Sanh was over.
(That would be the battle in which Cleland exposed himself to enemy mortars and rocket fire to move his wounded fellow soldiers to safety. Is anyone surprised that Ann didn't feel the need to include that part?)
"Cleland, 25 years old, and two members of his team were now ordered to set up a radio relay station at the division assembly area, 15 miles away. The three gathered antennas, radios and a generator and made the 15-minute helicopter trip east. After unloading the equipment, Cleland climbed back into the helicopter for the ride back. But at the last minute, he decided to stay and have a beer with some friends. As the helicopter was lifting off, he shouted to the pilot that he was staying behind and jumped several feet to the ground.
"Cleland hunched over to avoid the whirring blades and ran. Turning to face the helicopter, he caught sight of a grenade on the ground where the chopper had perched. It must be mine, he thought, moving toward it. He reached for it with his right arm just as it exploded, slamming him back and irreparably altering his plans for a bright, shining future."
My, my! Wouldn't that information have been helpful last week! But Coulter didn't include it because it wouldn't have served her hatchet job quite as well.
The first time around, Coulter summed up the incident with the following sentence: "Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends." The impression your average reader gets from this description is that Cleland hadn't been fighting at all, he simply found an unclaimed grenade on his way to the canteen where he was going to pound some PBRs with Hawkeye and Corporal Klinger. (Yes, we know we're mixing wars here, we're just trying to paint a picture — and who are you all of a sudden, Norman freakin' Schwarzkopf?) And that particular description made it a lot easier for Coulter to paint Cleland as a loafer and an incompetent.
Now we find out that Cleland was just 15 miles from the battle zone where he'd risked his life for his fellow soldiers just days before — and if he was, in fact, going to be "drinking beers with friends," it was after a hard day's work of setting up a radio relay station on orders from his superiors. Sounds perfectly reasonable for a soldier who'd displayed so much bravery and selflessness over the previous four days, doesn't it? Apparently not, according to Ann, for "there was no bravery involved in dropping a grenade on himself with no enemy in sight."
Interestingly, all news accounts told the exact same story for 30 years -- including that Cleland had stopped to have beer with friends when the accident occurred (a fact that particularly irked Al Hunt).
"He told the pilot he was going to stay awhile. Maybe have a few beers with friends. ... Then Cleland looked down and saw a grenade. Where'd that come from? He walked toward it, bent down, and crossed the line between before and after." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec. 5, 1999)
Wait, so now he was "maybe" going to have a few beers with friends. Which is it? (By the way, we searched the Journal Sentinel's own archives separately using the phrases "Max Cleland," "a few beers" and "the line between before and after," and were never able to locate an article on the date cited by Coulter. If anyone has a copy of the full article, we'd love to read it, because based on our prior experiences with Ann's work, we find it very hard to trust her characteristically selective, misleading use of quoted sources.)
"(Cleland) didn't step on a land mine. He wasn't wounded in a firefight. He couldn't blame the Viet Cong or friendly fire. The Silver Star and Bronze Star medals he received only embarrassed him. He was no hero. He blew himself up." (The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 24, 1999)
We tried to pay the $2.95 to get this article out of the Baltimore Sun's archives, but their server wouldn't cough it up. We can only hope that the writer was being facetious or trying to recreate Cleland's thoughts from the many years in which he mistakenly thought it was his own grenade, because "He blew himself up," beyond being an inaccurate statement, is just a shitty, shitty thing to say.
"Cleland was no war hero, but his sacrifice was great. ... Democratic Senate candidate Max Cleland is a victim of war, not a casualty of combat. He lost three limbs on a long-forgotten hill near Khe Sanh because of some American's mistake ..." (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 29, 1996)
OK, this is really starting to piss us off. Coulter, and evidently whoever wrote this AJC article, apparently think that just because Cleland's horrible injury didn't happen in a combat situation, that disqualifies him from being a "war hero." Which completely ignores the indisputable heroism Cleland exhibited at Khe Sahn, linked above — for which he was awarded that Silver Star that Coulter hasn't seen fit to mention once, except in the above citation of a Baltimore Sun article she didn't even write.
The story started to change only last year when the Democrats began citing Cleland's lost Senate seat as proof that Republicans hate war heroes. Indeed, until the myth of Republicans attacking Cleland for his lack of "patriotism" became central to the Democrats' narrative against George Bush, Cleland spoke only honorably and humbly about his accident.
Don't you just love how the Republicans' attacks on Cleland's patriotism — which included ads seen by millions of Georgians, myself included, juxtaposing Cleland's picture right next to Osama bin Laden's — have now become a "myth" in Ann's eyes? Republicans may not "hate" war heroes, but they sure don't have a lot of respect for any of the ones who decline to toe the Grand Ole Party line. Look at what they did to John McCain. Hell, look at what Coulter herself did to John McCain.
"How did I become a war hero?" he said to The Boston Globe reporter in 1997. "Simple. The grenade went off."
Notice he didn't add "...after I dropped it on myself." Again, that's the part that Coulter just concocted out of thin air.
Cleland even admitted that, but for his accident, he would have "probably been some frustrated history teacher, teaching American government at some junior college." (OK, I got that wrong: I said he'd probably be a pharmacist.)
Cleland's true heroism came after the war, when he went on to build a productive life for himself. That is a story of inspiration and courage.
"...True heroism came after the war"...there she goes again, acting like his pre-grenade bravery at Khe Sahn never happened.
He shouldn't let the Democrats tarnish an admirable life by "sexing up" his record in order to better attack George Bush.
Bitch, Max's record doesn't need any "sexing up." What it does need is for lying, no-account ass clowns like yourself to stop sexing it down just so that your boy Bush doesn't look quite so shiftless by comparison. Yes, Coulter somehow did find it in her heart to throw lip service to Cleland's "commitment and bravery" and the "productive life" he built for himself, but she still hasn't apologized for the abject lies and omissions she made a week ago, nor has she admitted on her own that Cleland did exhibit "true heroism" during the war (even if the grenade accident was not where it was specifically exhibited). "Omission Accomplished," indeed.
So nice try, Ann, but you're still dishonest, still disrespectful, and still a nasty, nasty bitch. And if you're still clinging to the hope that sitting behind a desk in Montgomery makes George W. Bush half the hero Cleland was, make that a pathetic, nasty, nasty bitch. Thanks to all the Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot readers and OFYAC participants who came forward to defend Max and, in their own small way, forced Coulter to 'splain herself (after a fashion) in this week's column; based on early projections, we predict that her column next week will be a blistering condemnation of a) homemade apple pie, b) Abraham Lincoln, or c) cute, cuddly newborn puppies. Which one will it be, which one will it be? You'll just have to tune in to Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot to find out!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:10 PM
Down goes Frazier
Still more fallout from OFYAC, in this instance regarding Kent State U. columnist Andrew Wallace. This morning, the Kent Stater's editor writes:
The Daily Kent Stater ran a guest column Monday by Andrew Wallace titled “Democrats’ attacks against Bush unfounded.” Soon after running the column, another staff member sent me evidence indicating Wallace had lifted some of his information from columnist Ann Coulter. One paragraph in particular was hardly altered.
(GWBWYPGN?!'s note: A million thanks for using "titled" as opposed to "entitled.") Later on:
Wallace has since fully admitted to the accusations. Plagiarism is absoultely unacceptable, and he will no longer be permitted to write for the Stater. He will, however, be allowed one more column in which he has asked to apologize to the readers.
I commend Wallace for his apology in a time when people would rather justify their mistakes than take responsibility.
Yeah, no shit, as you'll find out from Ann Coulter herself later today.
One final note — this is simply an update on an ongoing issue this blog has sort of taken up as its very own, and I don't want anyone to construe it as gloating. Sure, we revel in the misfortune of schmucks like Coulter, but that schadenfreude does not spread to a kid who simply cut corners on a column in his college newspaper. When I was at The Red & Black oh so many years ago, I was in the position of having to make the kinds of decisions that Wallace's editor just made, so I know how humiliated Wallace must be feeling right now; for that reason, I don't take any pleasure in what happened to him. And neither, I hope, do any of you.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:20 AM
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
The plot thickens (and sickens)
Don't want this to turn into an All Max Cleland, All The Time blog, but it looks like GWBWYPGN?! wasn't the only one to get really frickin' pissed about Ann Coulter's lies concerning Sen. Cleland.
Many more have taken the time to expose Coulter's statements about Cleland for the lies that they are, including the always-excellent Truthout.com and Matt Bivens, whose "Daily Outrage" appears in The Nation. On a not-really-related-but-sorta note, reader texoma forwarded us this post from Unfair Witness saying that one newspaper, the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., has given KKKoulter's kkkolumn the heave-ho (also reported on by OFYAC Platinum-Level Supporter TBOGG). Not for lying about Cleland specifically, but hey, anyone wise enough to rid their pages of Ann Coulter's B.S. deserves to be commended. "We took a chance on a firebrand writer, and it didn't work," writes the P-E's Gale Hammons. "We're not afraid to admit our mistake, and fix it."
Which is more than you can say for Bushista blogger Claudia at Freedom of Thought, which might as well be "Freedom to Lie." Claudia, too, dutifully parrots Coulter's libel of Sen. Cleland, and concludes that she is "vindicated" for not thinking Cleland was an actual war hero. (For someone whose blog trumpets its military connections as loud as hers does, that's an awfully strange view to take, but whatever.) Certainly Claudia isn't the only right-winger who got hook-line-and-sinkered by Coulter's dishonesty, but what's really funny is that in the post directly before the one about Coulter's column, Claudia gets taken in by the doctored photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda that's been making the rounds lately. Oopsie! That's two posts in a row where you got burned for just swallowing whatever the right wing feeds you, Claud! In her defense, she does apologize for the Kerry photo (though without taking said photo down, strangely enough), but so far no apologies for Cleland. Guess that feeling of "vindication" absolves you of such responsibility.
Interestingly, Claudia doesn't have the stones to list an e-mail address where you can contact her, so it looks like you'll just have to leave a bunch of comments on the Cleland post. Remember, be polite.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:37 PM
Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but Republicans are a bunch of culotte-wearing, herbal-tea-sipping Nancy-boys.
First it was George W. Bush requesting massive structural reinforcements to Buckingham Palace, an edifice that had ably protected elderly members of the British royal family for centuries. Then it was RNC chairman Ed "Edith" Gillespie sulking over the "dirty campaign" he feels sure the Democrats are planning. Now we have government officials mulling the possibility of sending federal troops into New York to guard the Republican National Convention this year. Yes, the NYPD was strong and capable enough to protect about a million partygoers in Times Square on New Year's Eve, but a few thousand drunk Republicans in the middle of September, now those people need some real firepower!
Forgive me for indulging in some gratuitously sexist stereotyping, but if the Republican Party wants to continue projecting a global image of power and strong leadership — not to mention the image here at home of themselves as the only party fearless and gung-ho enough to adequately protect the American homeland — perhaps they should quit acting like such girls. I mean, I've slept with known Auburn sorority girls with more guts than these people.
Look, Betsy, we're not gonna send in thousands of federal troops to guard you guys' friggin' purses, OK? So man up and make do with the NYPD. They're heroes, remember? From 9/11? Remember, that day that you rescheduled your convention specifically to exploit?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:13 AM
What is unknown to most is that Sen. Cleland didn’t lose his limbs in any combat situation. He was going to have a few beers with his buddies and picked up a live grenade that had dropped. While abysmal, this could have happened anywhere, even in the Texas Air National Guard. When Terry McAuliffe starts vouching for your military record, Sen. Cleland, it’s time to throw up the white flag and step back.
Compare the two columns and see if you don't think our boy Andy is treading awfully close to plagiarism with this crap. At least he doesn't parrot Coulter's lie about Cleland "dropping a grenade on himself," but he does repeat practically verbatim Coulter's inexplicable assertion that Cleland was "going to have a few beers with his buddies," which is a lie by itself.
So Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter is officially expanding to include Bad Andy. E-mail your (non-profane) sentiments to him at acwalla1@kent.edu, and cc it to the Kent Stater's editors at stater@kent.edu while you're at it. Especially for my fellow current or ex-journos out there, be sure to point out that Andy's lazy ass basically lifted all the "facts" in his column strait from Kommandant Koulter, and that as journalists they should have higher standards than that.
Holler back if you hear anything from either of 'em. Peace.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:42 AM
Monday, February 16, 2004
Slogan's run
Corrente, a top-notch blog and Gold Level supporter of OFYAC, ran the Bush re-election campaign's new slogan ("Steady Leadership in a Time of Change," vomit) through an anagram generator and came up with some choice alternatives. (Best one, to our way of thinking, is "I'm a Hypertense, Death-Dealing Fiasco.") We were hoping to goof on the campaign slogan in some fashion, too, but we would never steal from another blogger; instead, we're just going to steal from David Letterman. Herewith, our Top 10 Suggestions for the Bush/Cheney '04 Campaign Slogan:
10. Maintaining a Steady Level of Mediocrity in a Time of Change
9. I'm Not a Complete Babbling Idiot, I Just Play One on "Meet the Press"
8. Better Living Through Demagoguery
7. You Call It Two Million Lost Jobs, I Call It Two Million People With More Time to Party!
6. Please Give Me Four More Years...I'm Still Trying to Make Up My National Guard Duty
5. Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Y...I Mean, Than You Were Two...Uh, Make That Six Mon...I Mean, You're Doing OK, Right?
4. If You Don't Vote For Me, Dick Cheney Will Fucking Kill You
3. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength
2. I'm Not a Dictator, I'm Just Engaging in Dictatorship-Related Program Activities
1. You Owe Me This...I'm a Bush, Dammit!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:09 PM
Sunday, February 15, 2004
I thank you, Max Cleland thanks you, and the truth thanks you
You guys. No, really, you guys!
In the 24-hour period starting around 2 p.m. Friday, this site experienced about 20 times the number of hits it ordinarily gets in a day. And it was all due to people coming by to check out Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter. In case you need an update, Ann Coulter's selected libel target last week was, inexplicably, former Sen. Max Cleland, whose Vietnam sacrifice of both legs and one arm evidently wasn't enough to satisfy the Coultinator. No, Coulter fabricated a story about Cleland dropping a grenade on himself, all the better to conclude that Silver Star winner Cleland is no more heroic than George W. Bush. (The factual story can be found here.)
GWBWYPGN?! started Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter as a way of standing up for Max and making Ann's publishers, editors, and other enablers confront just how disgusting she is -- obviously, a Web site like Town Hall isn't going to get too hot and bothered about Coulter insinuating that Democrats kiss pictures of Saddam Hussein before they go to bed each night, but even they should be squeamish about allowing a columnist to lie in order to ridicule someone's war injury. We knew people would get good and pissed off about what Coulter did; what we didn't know was how quickly the news would spread, and how many bloggers would take the time and the Web space to bring others in on the project. And we wanted to say thanks.
Mad props must go to TBOGG, who sent nearly six hundredeight hundred well over a thousand new visitors (and counting) over here all by his lonesome, and runs a wicked funny Web site besides. Props also to Daily Kos and another one of Ann Coulter's personal Satans, Scoobie Davis, for sending plenty of traffic this way, as well as the visitors to the comments section at Eschaton.
Plenty of other blogs got in on the Operation, some old friends, some brand-new. Some of the first to get on board were Mary at Naked Furniture and Lisa at Kamikaze Kumquat, Official GWBWYPGN?! Homegirls; Dr. Damfa at Damfacrats 2004; and Georgia resident Steve (w00t!) at I Like to Write. We're also pleased to make the acquaintance of Corrente, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Department of Louise, and The Sesquipedalian. You'll note that you all have been rewarded for your service with links in the blogroll, which have a cash value of $0 and cannot be returned or traded, but, like, it's the thought that counts.
Not directly affiliated with Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter but still standing up for Max in their own way are Doxagora, Demagogue, and the Center for American Progress. Go check out their sites, and please also pay some visits to the Operation supporters who were kind enough to leave comments beneath these various posts. We appreciate every Websurfer who sent letters and e-mails on behalf of Sen. Cleland, and if you were one of those letter-writers, leave a comment here (even if it's just a "wert erp") so you can get at least something approaching your due. (And if we've left anyone out who gave the Operation a link assist, get your e-mail on and we'll correct that post haste.)
We'll keep y'all updated on whatever results from this little project. Sadly, we can't promise that anyone else will be firing Coulter like National Review did, but at the very least, some people have been forced to answer the question, "What are you doing still hanging out with that bitch?" When/if we do get those answers, you'll hear 'em.
So thanks again, guys. Y'all's hearts are as big as the 2005 projected federal budget deficit, and GWBWYPGN?! loves everything about you.
As for Ann Coulter, should she somehow stumble across this: F$#! you.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:10 PM
Friday, February 13, 2004
It's Open Line Friday on GWBWYPGN?!(!)
It's Friday the 13th, so here's a not-quite-coherent Lightning Round of all the things that need to be dumped out of the ol' Inbox before the weekend...
Run along, Mildred, the men are trying to have a conversation here. Get this — Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, is already complaining that the Democrats are running a dirty campaign. (And doing so, as Counterspin points out, the very day Drudge is shouting to anyone who'll listen about John Kerry supposedly nailing an AP reporter.) It looks like we're going to have to suspend our unofficial GWBWYPGN bylaw against name-calling for one more post, 'cause there's only one thing we can say about this — Jesus, Ed, quit being such a pussy. I mean, you're coming from the party of Karl Rove and G. Gordon Liddy, and you're calling us dirty? Go home, soak in a hot bath for a while, drink yourself a Cosmo or two and man the fuck up. Are you crying? Please don't tell me you're crying. No, really, look at the picture in the USA Today story — he's got that hangdog look and the puffy eyes that indicate to me he just had himself a good cry over this dirty campaigning thing. Christ. Go clean yourself up, Tiffany, wash your face and come back when you think you can really handle this politics thing.
I'm Dick Cheney, yes the real Dick Cheney, and all you other Dick Cheneys are just imitating, so won't the real Dick Cheney please stand up, please stand up, please stand up... *BEEP* "George? You there? This is Dick...nothing important, really, just wanted to let you know that order of Bush/Cheney '04 chastity belts we talked about yesterday is gonna make it in time for the convention, so we're good to go on that...oh, and by the way, the whole thing in Iraq really was about oil after all. All right? Gotta go, talk to you Monday."
That sound you hear is Ed Gillespie clutching his plush Hello Kitty and whimpering into a lace pillow. Drudge has Kerry with an AP reporter...National Enquirer has George W. Bush with a Texas stripper. Verdict: Push.
If you love Iraq's WMDs, set them free. If they show up, they will always be yours. If they don't show up, they were never yours to begin with. The Bush administration's continued belief that Iraq had WMDs, despite all indications to the contrary, has gotten so pathetic that even David Kay is like, Let it go, man, let it go. "But maybe they were in the — " No, George. This is getting fricking ridiculous. You're focusing way too much time and energy on this — don't you have a hobby or something? Maybe you can go collect Malibu Stacy dolls with Ed Gillespie, that'd give you something to do.
Now go participate in Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter right now if you haven't already. Me, I've already written my letters and e-mails, so I'll be spending this weekend schmoozing folks at the Birmingham AIDS Outreach Valentine's Day gala, particularly those of the female persuasion, and working on my latest side project, a coffee-table book of men's-restroom-wall graffiti from around America. Look for it in bookstores by Christmas.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:10 PM
Stand up for Max — join Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter
Hopefully you've just finished reading the latest edition of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot below, and you're pissed. Good; you should be. It's bad enough when Ann tries to insinuate that Democrats are in league with Saddam Hussein, but when she tries to have her fun at the expense of someone like Max Cleland and his catastrophic war injury — going so far as to tell lies in order to make him look like a buffoon — she's crossed the line. And it's time to ruin her day.
We're going to send letters, e-mails, whatever we can to the media outlets and other companies that allow Ann to spew her hateful, dishonest crap about people like Cleland. Basically, the point of these correspondences should be this: This woman ridiculed not just a brave man but the sacrifice he made in Vietnam, and your company's stature is lowered simply by doing any business with her. If you consciously decide to maintain that association even after knowing what she did, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Some right-winger may try to spin this as a free-speech issue, which is baloney; Coulter does indeed have a first-amendment right to unload whatever garbage she wants, but we also have a right to disagree with it, and to express that disagreement with the people who enable her.
1. First, send a hand-written letter to the following address:
Random House, Inc. 1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
Remind them of Ann's lies about Max Cleland "dropping a grenade on himself," express your displeasure, and inform them that you won't be purchasing any more Random House-published books until she's no longer on their list of authors.
And, if you're so inclined, send one to Ann herself.
Ann Coulter
c/o Crown Forum Publicity
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
2. Next contact Premiere Speakers, the group that sets up Ann's speaking engagements. Remind them, too, of Ann's dishonesty and disrespect, and point out how ironic it is that they have numerous soldiers and former POWs on their speakers list alongside Ann Coulter, someone who appears to be all too willing to ridicule and disparage their sacrifices.
Go ahead and send it to every single person who works there, just to be a nuisance. (If that "mailto:" link doesn't work for you, I'll throw the full list of addresses in the comments section below in just a second.)
3. E-mail her Webmaster (tom@anncoulter.org), the editors at Front Page Magazine (jglazov@rogers.com, ben@cspc.org) and Human Events (editors@humaneventsonline.com), and Crown Forum (crownpublicity@randomhouse.com) just for good measure. Also use Town Hall's e-mail submission form at www.townhall.com/about/contact.html. Concede that you have no problem with any political disagreements they might have with Sen. Cleland, but add that if they're willing to let Ann Coulter ridicule and spread lies about Cleland's war injury, not only should their journalistic integrity be called into question, but so should their respect for America's military.
4. If you run across a Coulter column in any newspaper or magazine you happen to pick up, write or e-mail them about Coulter's comments concerning Sen. Cleland, and inform them that you won't be purchasing or reading any future issues until you receive assurance that Coulter won't be published there again.
Here are the ground rules:Do not use profanity or call names in any of these messages — even the ones you write to Coulter personally. (Yeah, I know I kind of went off in Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot, but I've had time to cool off a little, and so have you. Let's not sink to Ann's level.) Do not let on to any of these folks that you're a Democrat or a liberal. (That's the quickest way for your letter to end up in the trash, and besides, this isn't a liberal/conservative issue, it's a respect-for-the-military issue.) Do not use words like "silence" or "censor," or imply that Ann doesn't have a right to say what she did. (She does have that right, but nobody has the obligation to give her a sounding board.) Above all, do make it clear that Ann lied about what happened to Cleland. (Look to the post below, or to this post from TBOGG, for reference.)
If someone does, in fact, have Ann's home address or telephone number, I remain all ears. But in terms of a verbal beatdown, this is the next best thing.
Thanks for the help. Holla or leave a comment if you have any questions.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:36 AM
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Max Cleland: What really happened
Not even two hours after the latest Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot went up, got this e-mail from a gentleman by the name of Barry Ingram:
I tried to post this in the comments, but it wouldn't let me.
This is from http://www.the-hamster.com, here is what Senator Cleland did (and I am forever in his debt for his service)
So what did Cleland do during the war?
"Awarded: Silver Star; Date Action: 4 April 1968; Theater: Republic of Vietnam
"Action: For gallantry in action while engaged in military operations involving conflict with an armed hostile force in the Republic of Vietnam. Captain Cleland distinguished himself by exceptionally valorous action on 4 April 1968, while serving as communications officer of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Calvary during an enemy attack near Khe Sanh, Republic of Vietnam.
"When the battalion command post came under a heavy enemy rocket and mortar attack, Capt. Cleland, disregarding his own safety, exposed himself to the rocket barrage as he left his covered position to administer first aid to his wounded comrades. He then assisted in moving the injured personnel to covered positions. Continuing to expose himself, Capt. Cleland organized his men into a work party to repair the battalion communications equipment which had been damaged by enemy fire. His gallant action is in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service, and reflects great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army ... While disembarking from a transport helicopter, Capt. Cleland reached for a grenade he believed had become dislodged from his web gear. Later it was discovered that the grenade belonged to a young soldier new to the theater. That soldier had improperly prepared the grenade pin for easy detonation and had dropped it while coming off the helicopter. The grenade exploded and severely injured Capt. Cleland.
The Silver Star is the third-highest valor decoration of the United States. Sen. Cleland also was awarded a Soldier's Medal, Bronze Star, Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal with Device (1960), Vietnam Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal and Parachutist Badge.
Thanks for the Coulter smackdowns - and reiterating what a heartless b*tch she is.
BI
Thank you, Mr. Ingram, for that additional information. It's going to come in handy tomorrow, because we're going to embark on a little project to get Ann Coulter back. Keep your eyes peeled for the details first thing tomorrow morning.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 3:23 PM
Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot: Bottom of the barrel
Despite our abiding contempt, some would even say loathing, for Ann Coulter, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot has managed to refrain from getting down in the gutter with her while refuting her idiotic columns. This time, though, we're forced to issue a parental advisory: This edition of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot makes frequent use of graphic language, and discretion is advised. You see, Ann is now going after former Sen. Max Cleland for criticizing George W. Bush's National Guard record — and the lengths, or should we say depths, she goes to in order to smear Cleland pretty much throw any chance at decorum right out the window.
Maybe it's because we grew up in Georgia. Maybe it's because we had the opportunity to meet Sen. Cleland and shake his one remaining hand at a Democratic Party function. Maybe it's because we'll be goddamned if anyone's going to impugn the competence, much less the patriotism, of anyone who lost three fucking limbs in Vietnam while Bush was desperately hunting for ways not to have to fly fighter jets in Texas and Alabama. But this latest effort by Ann Coulter made us downright sick to our stomachs, and if we toss a few F-bombs as a result, sorry, you're just gonna have to deal with it. If Cleland's catastrophic injury is just some big joke to Coulter, we wonder how anybody (even Republicans) can have the slightest shred of respect for her — and after choking down the bile and outright lies of "Cleland Drops a Political Grenade," you'll be wondering the same thing:
Former Sen. Max Cleland is the Democrats' designated hysteric about George Bush's National Guard service. A triple amputee and Vietnam veteran, Cleland is making the rounds on talk TV, basking in the affection of liberals who have suddenly become jock-sniffers for war veterans, and working himself into a lather about President Bush's military service. Citing such renowned military experts as Molly Ivins, Cleland indignantly demands further investigation into Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard.
There's at least one of these in every column, so we've experienced so many of them that we shouldn't even have to point them out anymore. But hell, here we go anyway. Ann Coulter on the "Today" show in 2002: "Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments." Ann Coulter just now: "Jock-sniffers!"
Bush's National Guard service is the most thoroughly investigated event since the Kennedy assassination.
More thoroughly investigated than 9/11, Ann? Well, since the Bush administration has resolutely refused to cooperate fully with the 9/11 Commission ever since it was founded, maybe his National Guard record wins that title by default.
But the Democrats will accept only two possible conclusions to their baseless accusations: (1) Bush was "AWOL," or (2) the matter needs further investigation.
Thirty years ago, Bush was granted an honorable discharge from the National Guard –– which would seem to put the matter to rest. But liberals want proof that Bush actually deserved his honorable discharge.
John Kerry saved people's lives and won numerous Purple Hearts in Vietnam, yet protested the war when he got back, so Coulter sees fit to tarnish him as a traitor. But Bush gets an honorable discharge, and it's "Good enough for me! Stop asking questions!"
When a guy disappears from his Guard duty for five months at a stretch, yet gets an honorable discharge anyway, hells yes we want to know what's up. Look, Bush got the lowest possible score on his pilot-aptitude test and still managed to get scooted in front of more than five hundred people ahead of him on the waiting list to get into the National Guard. If Dubya's political connections can swing that little sleight-of-hand, how difficult would it be for them to finagle him an honorable discharge he didn't earn?
(Since when did the party of Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd get so obsessed with honor?)
Dunno, probably around the same time the party of Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and Tom DeLay declared they were the only honorable party.
On "Hardball" Monday night, Cleland demanded to see Bush's pay stubs for the disputed period of time, May 1972 to May 1973. "If he was getting paid for his weekend warrior work," Cleland said, "he should have some pay stubs to show it."
The next day, the White House produced the pay stubs. This confirmed what has been confirmed 1 million times before: After taking the summer off, Bush reported for duty nine times between Nov. 29, 1972, and May 24, 1973 -- more than enough times to fulfill his Guard duties.
Not so fast, Ann — the stubs only confirmed he got paid for his duty, and as Richard Cohen indicates, showing up wasn't even a prerequisite for getting paid. Those pay stubs, incidentally, don't indicate what "duty" was performed to earn them, nor do they even say where Bush was stationed at the time they were issued. So...what, precisely, are they supposed to prove again?
(And nine times more than Bill Clinton, Barney Frank or Chuck Schumer did during the same period.)
Or Dick Cheney, or Tom DeLay, or Saxby Chambliss, for that matter. Ann, you so do not want to drag the Republicans into a who-didn't-serve pissing match over this — trust us, it's a baaaad idea.
All this has been reported -- with documentation -- many times by many news organizations. George magazine had Bush's National Guard records 3 1/2 years ago.
All available evidence keeps confirming Bush's honorable service with the Guard, which leads liberals to conclude ... further investigation is needed! No evidence will ever be enough evidence. That Bush skipped out on his National Guard service is one of liberals' many nondisprovable beliefs, like global warming.
Replace "Bush" with "Hillary" and "National Guard" with "Whitewater"...and see how interesting that statement reads coming from Ann Coulter?
Here are the facts, Ann, with which you seem so unconcerned: Bush has bragged repeatedly about wanting to become a fighter jock during the Vietnam War. When he joined the Air National Guard, roughly one million dollars were spent to train him as such. But after just a couple years of the duty he swore himself to, George evidently decided he was bored and wanted to work on a family friend's Senate campaign instead. So this wannabe fighter jock wasted all those training dollars by working his way into a unit that did nothing more than handle mail — and worked his way in without the Guard's permission. Never mind the fact that nobody can remember having seen Bush even at the posts where he will admit to having shown up. There are all sorts of questions surrounding Bush's alleged "honorable service," Ann, and they are not rendered invalid simply because you're too lazy to ask them.
Cleland also expressed outrage that Bush left the National Guard nine months early in 1973 to go to Harvard Business School. On "Hardball," Cleland testily remarked: "I just know a whole lot of veterans who would have loved to have worked things out with the military and adjusted their tour of duty." (Cleland already knows one -- Al Gore!)
Well, Gore did actually experience bullets whizzing over his head in Vietnam, Ann. Maybe it just can't compare to the life-or-death rigors of schmoozing Alabama politicians on a golf course, but who knows, perhaps the military thought Gore deserved a little extra leeway just the same.
When Bush left the National Guard in 1973 to go to business school, the war was over. It might as well have been 1986. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had already lost the war, and President Nixon had ended it with the Paris peace accords in January. If Bush had demanded active combat, there was no war to send him to.
This is hysterical. Coulter says Kennedy and Johnson "lost the war," and she also has accused the Democratic presidential candidates — falsely, except in Dennis Kucinich's case — of wanting to "lose" the Iraq war by summarily yanking our troops out ASAP. But Nixon, who actually yanked the troops out of Vietnam and effectively ended any chance that South Vietnam would stay a free country? Gets a pass. Hey, he gets credit for "ending" the whole bloody conflict. If you've kept up with Ann's columns in the past, you'll note this is just one of the many bizarre instances in which she has wielded Vietnam as a partisan cudgel with which to selectively bash Democrats. Her view is that Vietnam had to be fought, but the Democrats like JFK and LBJ who shared that view "lost the war" and hence they suck. But Nixon, who pulled the troops out and "ended it"? Hero! Of course, any claims supporting Ann's logical consistency should have been well and truly debunked years ago.
To put this in perspective, by 1973, John Kerry had already accused American soldiers of committing war crimes in Vietnam, thrown someone else's medals to the ground in an anti-war demonstration, and married his first heiress. Bill Clinton had just finished three years of law school and was about to embark upon a political career -- which would include campaign events with Max Cleland.
Evidently the fact that, "by 1973," Kerry had actually served in Vietnam, or that Clinton got the same student deferment that dozens of current GOP bigwigs got, is not the least bit relevant here.
Moreover, if we're going to start delving into exactly who did what back then, maybe Max Cleland should stop allowing Democrats to portray him as a war hero who lost his limbs taking enemy fire on the battlefields of Vietnam.
If you're a Cleland admirer, a Georgia resident, or, hell, anyone with even a shred of human decency, you might want to quit reading here.
Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman –- or what Cleland sneeringly calls "weekend warriors." Luckily for Cleland's political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.
How in the world does Ann know Cleland was "about to drink beer with friends"? How in the world can she describe George W. Bush's National Guard paper-shuffling as "honorable," yet denigrate Cleland's sacrifice half a world away? And how in God's name can she even look at herself in the mirror on the morning after saying this was a "lucky" occurrence in Cleland's life?
We've tried to keep it reasoned and professional on this site, even when hammering away at Coulter, but sorry, we can't do that this time around.
Fuck you, Ann. Fuck you, Ann, you lying, disrespectful, nasty bitch.
There is more than a whiff of dishonesty in how Cleland is presented to the American people. Terry McAuliffe goes around saying, "Max Cleland, a triple amputee who left three limbs on the battlefield of Vietnam," was thrown out of office because Republicans "had the audacity to call Max Cleland unpatriotic."
How is that "dishonest"? Cleland left three limbs in Vietnam, and he lost after a bunch of punk bitches in Saxby Chambliss' campaign office decided to compare him to Osama bin Laden. Sounds pretty fucking unpatriotic to us.
Mr. Cleland, a word of advice: When a slimy weasel like Terry McAuliffe is vouching for your combat record, it's time to sound "retreat" on that subject.
Ahhhh, now we see why Ann thinks McAuliffe's characterization of Cleland is "dishonest" — because McAuliffe was the one doing it. By the way, chalk up another immature third-grade insult ("slimy weasel") to the woman who just won't stand for crass name-calling from the Democratic Party.
Needless to say, no one ever challenged Cleland's "patriotism."
Yeah, they put his picture next to Osama bin Laden's because they thought he was a nice guy.
His performance in the Senate was the issue, which should not have come as a bolt out of the blue inasmuch as he was running for re-election to the Senate. Sen. Cleland had refused to vote for the Homeland Security bill unless it was chock-full of pro-union perks that would have jeopardized national security. ("OH MY GOD! A HIJACKED PLANE IS HEADED FOR THE WHITE HOUSE!" "Sorry, I'm on my break. Please call back in two hours.")
Want to know something crazy? Cleland supported the Department of Homeland Security idea before Bush did! George "I'm not going to change because of polls" Bush only jumped on board when it became clear how popular the idea was, and Bush was the one who tried to alter Cleland's vision by throwing in a bunch of anti-union provisions whose benefit to national security nobody could ever quite articulate. In other words, those "pro-union perks" were merely efforts to ensure that Homeland Security workers had the same workplace rights enjoyed by virtually everyone else in the employ of the federal government. But to Ann, this means Cleland was fighting for the rights of security officers to pound Krispy Kremes while 747s get flown into the White House — despite the fact that he championed Homeland Security before anyone in the White House did! Do you ever wonder how in the world Coulter's fans aren't more pissed off that she's willing to so blatantly insult their intelligence like this? (Since they're not, does it make you wonder if they have any intelligence to insult to begin with?)
The good people of Georgia -- who do not need lectures on admiring military service –- gave Cleland one pass for being a Vietnam veteran. He didn't get a lifetime pass.
Indeed, if Cleland had dropped a grenade on himself at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. senator in the first place. Maybe he'd be the best pharmacist in Atlanta, but not a U.S. senator.
If anyone knows Ann's home address in Manhattan, send it to us, because we're going to go to her residence and kick her ass our goddamn selves.
Not content to pooh-pooh Cleland's unimaginably horrible war injury, Ann now has stooped to telling outright lies about how it happened — notice that she went from "found a grenade on the ground" a few paragraphs ago to "dropped a grenade on himself" just now. Which is an out-and-out, bald-faced lie. Cleland didn't "drop a grenade on himself" — Ann only said that so you'd think Cleland was a bumbling, incompetent fool. And for that, she deserves...well, we can't say in polite company what she deserves.
He got into office on the basis of serving in Vietnam and was thrown out for his performance as a senator.
Cleland wore the uniform, he was in Vietnam, and he has shown courage by going on to lead a productive life. But he didn't "give his limbs for his country," or leave them "on the battlefield." There was no bravery involved in dropping a grenade on himself with no enemy troops in sight.
Fuck you, Ann. Fuck you.
That could have happened in the Texas National Guard -- which Cleland denigrates while demanding his own sanctification.
But it didn't happen in the Texas National Guard. It happened in Viet-fucking-Nam, in the midst of a bloody and horrible conflict that George W. Bush, "honorable service" or no, felt no need to come within 10,000 miles of. Yet George W. Bush's service as a glorified postal worker on an inactive Guard base was "honorable," while Cleland exhibited "no bravery" in making about the biggest sacrifice a solider can make short of his own life. Wait, here it comes again...Fuck you, Ann. Fuck you.
Given the hysterical, abject hypocrisy Coulter repeatedly exhibits on the subject of name-calling, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot has tried as hard as it can not to stoop to her level. But we just can't muster the energy this time. So Ann, you know what? You're scum. You're a repulsive, lowlife bitch who, if she got nailed in a Manhattan crosswalk tomorrow by a speeding taxi and had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, would have her work cut out for her explaining how she didn't deserve every last karmic bit of it. And anyone who would willingly admire her and hold her up as the standard-bearer of their party or ideology, after the way she just dragged the name of a good, honorable man through the mud, is tarnishing the name of whatever they stand for merely by associating themselves with her.
Ahhhh, that felt good. Not as good as if Coulter had just kept her Y-chromoso...er, mouth shut, but hey, that's why Ann Coulter is an Obnoxious Cun...er, Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot is here — to deliver the verbal beatdown she so richly deserves every time she takes pen to paper. Hope you weren't too offended by the colorful language this week, stop by a week from now when (with any luck) we'll find it within ourselves to keep it clean! Of course, if Ann dares to stoop this low again...who knows!
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 1:38 PM
Parental advisory — explicit lyrics
Just wanted to let y'all know we'll be back with a poppin'-fresh edition of Ann Coulter is a Lousy Writer and She Isn't Even That Hot tomorrow...but don't let any of your kids in the room while you're reading it, because quite frankly, the language is going to get pretty raw. Not Coulter's, ours — her column this week is about Max Cleland, Vietnam veteran, triple-amputee, and former U.S. senator from Georgia. Naturally, she has almost nothing kind to say about him, but her denigration of hs war injury (yes, you heard right, denigration of his war injury) goes absolutely beyond the pale.
"You mean you're going to be calling her a bitch or something?" Most assuredly. But "bitch" doesn't even begin to cover it.
ETA: You know what, fuck it. The column's going up this afternoon, 'cause I have a project in mind.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:18 AM
Put-up-or-shut-up time
The 9/11 commission has announced it's going to "invite" Bush, Clinton, and a whole bunch of other people within their respective administrations to testify about pre-9/11 intel warnings.
It's time for all these people to put their money where their mouths are. And I'm sorry, but anyone who doesn't cooperate automatically takes on a new level of shadiness as far as I'm concerned. Yes, even if it's Bill Clinton or somebody who worked under him. The American people have a right to know who was actually working to combat al-Qaeda and who was asleep at the switch.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:06 AM
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Why does George W. Bush hate America?
If you've been keeping up with the Bush/AWOL story — you know, the one the press should've gotten around to covering four years ago — you may be scratching your head as to why Bush won't just go ahead and release all his military records, already. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things Bush doesn't want people to see.
[Federal 9/11] Commission sources tell NEWSWEEK that panel members are fed up with what one calls "maddening" restrictions by White House lawyers on their access to key documents. Unless the panel gets to see the docs, the report "will not withstand the laugh test," a commission official says. The panel is threatening to force a showdown soon—by voting to subpoena the White House.
The documents at the heart of the dispute are the so-called presidential daily briefs, or PDBs—the daily intelligence brief given to Bush by a senior intelligence official, usually the CIA director or his deputy. White House lawyers have guarded the documents as the "crown jewels" of executive privilege. But last year Kean and other commissioners complained they couldn't write their report without seeing exactly what Bush, and Bill Clinton before him, had been told about the threat of Al Qaeda. The White House then agreed to a complex deal that would allow four panel officials to review the PDBs and then brief the full 10-member panel. But the arrangement hasn't stopped the wrangling. The four-member team asked to look at 360 PDBs dating back to 1998; White House counsel Alberto Gonzales permitted them to see just 24, arguing that only those that specifically mentioned possible domestic attacks or airplane hijackings were relevant. (One panel member was allowed to read all 360—but couldn't share the contents with colleagues.) The team was permitted to write brief summaries of the PDBs they did read. But White House lawyers objected to some of the wording. The bickering has meant the full panel has yet to be told anything about the PDBs—even while it was conducting interviews with top officials, like last Saturday's with national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Ummm...something you'd like to share with the rest of the class, Mr. Bush? Why don't you want us to get to the bottom of the intelligence failures that led to 9/11?
We've tried to ask only the legitimate questions on this blog, only reverting to tinfoil-hat Kool-Aid-drinking conspiracymongering in jest. But when the administration tries to pull this blatant sort of stonewalling, it's hard not to start asking questions that, under any other circumstances, would sound pretty paranoid. Like, OK, you all heard about the 23-minute phone call from flight attendant Betty Ong aboard flight 11 the day it was steered into the World Trade Center. How is it that in the span of twenty-three minutes,not one single fighter jet was able to intercept the plane? (If you're going to respond with the argument "Nobody had ever even conceived that this could happen before 9/11," stuff it — as the Cooperative Research piece indicates, plenty of people had conceived of it before 9/11.)
I'm not one of those nutbags who believes that the Bush administration planned 9/11, or even that they knew it was about to happen and let it happen anyway. But at the very least it appears there was some gross incompetence on the part of people in the administration that allowed things to happen the way they did. And when Bush pulls these kinds of ridiculous stonewalling tactics, it just makes them look worse.
So what's up, George? Is there really something you'd rather not let us know?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 4:10 PM
Over? Nothing's over 'til we say it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! And it's not — well, no, yeah, it's over.
Soon as I get done writing this post I'll be sending an e-mail out to all of our Alabama volunteers, informing them (if they don't know already) that Wes Clark has dropped out and thanking them for everything they've done for us over the past five months. Sigh.
I think most of us who were assembled at the Blue Monkey last night to watch the primary returns kind of knew the fix might be in, though that didn't make it hurt much less when the announcement popped up on the CNN crawl around 9:30. But I don't regret a single second I spent being involved in this campaign. This is the first time I'd ever worked directly with a specific political candidate, and I dare say it was the rookie outing for a whole bunch of our volunteers, too; but more importantly, even though Wes Clark isn't going to get the nomination, we met and interacted with a whole bunch of people in Alabama and other states who may never have voted before in their lives, but may be voting this fall, just because someone from our campaign reached out to them. People like that, who figured politics was a lost cause but now maybe don't anymore, and who are going to get involved as a result, are the reason Bush is going to lose in November. This whole thing was worth it for those people if nothing else.
This all may sound very maudlin and sentimental, but fuck it. Thanks, Wes, for being a great candidate and someone I could get excited about — thanks to you, we somehow have assembled a massive grass-roots organization in Birmingham and all over northern Alabama, and you've helped assure them that it's OK to demand better from Washington. It won't be easy keeping everyone organized and unified from now through November, but we're going to give it our best shot.
In other words, Wes, you're my dawg, dawg. I put on my "All Patriot, No Act" button before I left for work this morning and I'll be wearing it all day, and if Bush wants it he can pry it from my cold, dead sweater vest.
P.S. If I talk to Colin Powell anytime soon, I'll make sure to get the dimensions and square-footage of the Secretary of State's office for you.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 8:17 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Some of George W. Bush's conservative political supporters are increasingly restive and anxious about the president's economic policies as well as his attempts to justify the war against Iraq.
Popular conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly, usually an outspoken Bush loyalist, said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."
WASHINGTON -- The White House stepped back from a high-profile assertion by President Bush, in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, that U.S. forces had uncovered evidence of a potential attack against an American nuclear facility.
In the speech, Mr. Bush warned of a terrorist threat to the nation, saying that the U.S. had found "diagrams of American nuclear power plants" in Afghanistan.
Coming just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and as U.S. forces were on the hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan — the statement was offered as evidence of the depth of antipathy among Islamic extremists, and of "the madness of the destruction they design."
"Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears," Mr. Bush told Congress and the nation in the televised speech. He said "we have found" diagrams of public water facilities, instructions on how to make chemical arms, maps of U.S. cities and descriptions of U.S. landmarks, in addition to the nuclear-plant plans.
Monday night, the White House defended the warnings about Islamic extremist intentions, but said the concerns highlighted by Mr. Bush were based on intelligence developed before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, and that no plant diagrams were actually found in Afghanistan. "There's no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found," a senior administration official said.
I concur with Atrios — this is worse in some ways than even the Iraq deception was. At least that had a goal; this was just to scare us, pure and simple.
Connect this with "I'm not sure we have any real option but Bush" statements from people like Andy Sullivan, and you start to wonder: Why don't Bush and Cheney just bite the bullet and make "YOU'RE NOT SAFE UNLESS WE'RE RE-ELECTED" the official slogan of their re-election campaign?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 2:26 PM
Have your war and eat it too
Not to flog a dead horse or anything, but there's one other quote that really bothered me from Bush's "Meet the Press" interview on Sunday...
I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign-policy matters with war on my mind.
...and I couldn't quite figure out how to express why it unnerved me so much, but this morning, Calpundit (riffing on a post by Mark A.R. Kleiman) was nice enough to do it for me:
Who the hell does George Bush think he is, anyway? We haven't had a "wartime president" since FDR, and there's a good reason for that: you're only a wartime president if you act like you're at war. That means placing the country on a wartime footing, putting aside petty politics to forge a bipartisan wartime consensus, and telling the nation in no uncertain terms that sacrifices need to be made. George Bush has done none of those things. In fact, he's done exactly the opposite, sending the message loud and clear that this war is as trivial and inconsequential as it's possible to be, all the time treating it as little more than a partisan club with which to beat his enemies.
I was thinking I might save my rant on this topic for March, like the one-year anniversary of the invasion or something, but I might as well give a preview of said rant right now, because Drum hits the nail right on the head. Whether you agreed with this war or not, you have to admit that certain elements of this administration have approached the idea of "war" way too casually.
I remember walking home from church the night the invasion started, my stomach still churning from hearing the priest's words during the intentions ("For the innocent people in Iraq, who are preparing to be bombed, let us pray..."), and noticing how ordinary everything looked in a city located in a country that was supposedly at war. People were sitting outside at the Ruby Tuesday near my house, drinking their drinks and laughing; a couple folks were walking their dogs down Highland Avenue; a car drove by with its windows down, rap music blaring. It was just like any other day. Nobody outside of the church seemed to be expressing any particular concern for the innocent people of Iraq, there weren't big groups of people crowded around the TV sets at bars or restaurants. Nobody even seemed particularly afraid that some retaliatory attack by Iraq against the American homeland might be in the offing (which really says something about the supposed "threat" Iraq presented at the time).
Two and a half years after the event that was supposed to have irrevocably changed all our lives, not much has changed at all. Two and a half years after we were shown in brutal Technicolor just how willing the rest of the world is to bring its hatred and frustration to our doorstep, we're still so isolated from the rest of the world that we can start a war and yet not be forced to live our lives one bit differently (other than the fact that the wall-to-wall news coverage might pre-empt "American Idol"). And I think this cavalier attitude is a reflection of the administration: We don't act any differently because Bush has never indicated that doing so is necessary. If this were really as serious as Bush claimed, we'd be making the kinds of sacrifices Drum talked about — for instance, Bush might have asked America to give back part of its tax cut, since this war and the subsequent occupation is going to cost us around a quarter of a trillion dollars, if not more, and nobody wants to be running a $500 billion deficit. But he didn't even do that. The world is a completely different place from what we thought it was as recently as three years ago, but the Bush administration has taken every effort to make sure our lives don't have to reflect that in the slightest.
Maybe the free-'n'-easy convenience of his approach appeals to some people, but not to me. War isn't convenient — it's horrible. And we should all be reminded of that, lest we begin to see war as an easy solution. If you've been following the ongoing was-it-worth-it debate in the comment threads, you may have inferred that my threshold for war is a lot higher than some people's might be; when I ask why we couldn't give the inspections more time, a common response is, "We'd been doing that for years, how much more time do you want?" You know how much time I wanted? As much time as it took. The whole purpose of those inspections, the whole purpose of diplomacy, is to avoid a war, and you'll notice that nobody died in all those years we had weapons inspectors poking around. Call me crazy, call me a wuss, but if we'd had to keep a rotating team of weapons inspectors continuously in Iraq until Saddam Hussein was in his grave in order to avoid a war, I would've been fine with that. War is that bad, in my opinion.
But Bush couldn't wait, and that's what makes me think he has no clue as to how horrible war is. Which would be bad enough, but because of the example he's set, the rest of the country doesn't either. When Andrew Sullivan or some other conservative blogger denigrates the ability of the Democratic presidential candidates to fight terrorism, their attitude is always, Ahem, don't they realize we're at war here? But look around you: Does this look like a country at war? I don't think you guys have the slightest clue what "at war" means. And I'm almost positive George W. Bush doesn't.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:19 AM
Monday, February 09, 2004
Cannibals of the right
Evidently Bush's performance on "Meet the Press" was so uninspiring that not even the august personages of The Corner could bring themselves to defend it with much enthusiasm. One of the most damning criticisms came from John Derbyshire:
Just got through watching the President on Meet the Press. I thought it was a pretty dismal performance. I'll be voting for GWB in November, but let's face it, the Great Communicator he ain't. The tongue-tied blather was coming thick and fast. At times, he looked like Al Sharpton on the Federal Reserve.
Russert: "Why didn't you establish the intelligence commission earlier?"
GWB: "Blather blather blather. No answer."
Russert: "Will you yourself testify before the commission?"
GWB: "Blather blather blather. No answer."
Russert: "Why was Saddam Hussein a threat to the US?"
GWB: "He had the capacity to make weapons... a madman..."
Russert: "There is a sense in the country that the intelligence was ambiguous, that in presenting it to the country, you sexed it up."
GWB: "He had the capacity to make weapons... a madman..."
This stuff isn't going to convince anyone, and will probably turn off some supporters. The best defense of the Iraq war I have yet seen was given by Alan Keyes on FNC last week. Crisp, clear, and convincing. POTUS should hire Keyes as a speechwriter, at any salary he asks for.
It got a bit better. National Guard? Stop denigrating it. (Darn right.) GWB got honorable discharge--what's to argue with? But then we hit the economy.
Russert: "Our current fiscal policy is unsustainable, according to the GAO. Why, as a fiscal conservative, would you allow this deficit disaster?"
GWB: "The budget I have just proposed will cut the deficit... If Congress is wise with the people's money..." If Congress is ****W*H*A*T****???? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
There were all sorts of presentational problems that GWB really should not be suffering from at this stage in his career. He dropped the acronym "PDB"; Russert had to interrupt to explain to us peons that it means "President's Daily Briefing." Too reminiscent of Bob Dole in '96 mumbling
about "cloture" (which, as P.J. O'Rourke said at the time, most Americans probably believe to be a surgical procedure).
Russert: "What will be the main issue in this campaign?"
GWB: "Who can most properly use US power..."
To place national security up front like this, on its own, has all sorts of perils. What if there's another big terrorist attack in October? I myself believe that GWB **IS** the right man in a dangerous time, but he's not going to convince the unconvinced with feeble performances like this.
Seven "ha"s for Bush's answer on the deficit? Oh, Derb, you bitch! Evidently some Bush partisans were not too happy to read his criticisms, because not quite 10 hours later, Derb posts...
Yes, I got a lot of e-mail about my postings too, some of it angry. Who the heck do I think I am, criticizing Bush's performance? Etc., etc. Well, I'm a citizen, and this is not North Korea...
No fucking shit, Derb. Getting censored and branded as un-American doesn't feel so fricking great, now, does it? So thank you for finally realizing what we on the left have known for years: We are well within our God-given rights to criticize the president, and if anyone thinks otherwise, maybe they're the real threat to the principles upon which this country was founded. Now that you've had this revelation, John, would you mind sharing it with Ann Coulter, Michael "Savage" Weiner, Adam Yoshida, and the rest of those folks who read 1984 less for entertainment than for pointers? (Might want to cc the Bush administration on that memo, too, because Ashcroft still thinks I'm giving aid and comfort to the enemy.)
Derb's parting shot — "As for the lese majeste accusation: Shove it. This is a republic." Exactly. Not a kingdom, not a sultanate, and not an empire where people believe the ruler governs by divine providence. Something tells me this may not be The Corner's first experience with this kind of attempted censorship, but as many times as they need to get the picture, that's fine with me.
...based on the last 24 hrs of e-mails: GWB has the serious-Christian votes wrapped up, tied, stamped and mailed.
Following my remarks about the Russert interview I got a biggish e-mail bag (50-60 items) running around 2-1 for-against my position. Of the most angrily against, a striking number were from readers who declared themselves, or advertised the fact by other means (e.g. mottoes at the bottom of e-mails) to be born-again or otherwise deeply-committed Christians. Nobody quite warned me that I would go to Hell for criticizing the President, but a couple came close.
Wonder if any of those came from Bryan Uhl?
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 11:04 AM
Beat the Pres
Watched as much of Bush's "Meet the Press" interview as I could from my hotel room in Nashville on Sunday, and what I saw was bad enough — but it wasn't until I peeped the full transcript this morning that I began to see what a thoroughly lousy interview it was.
First question, right outta the box:
Tim Russert: On Friday, you announced a committee, commission to look into intelligence failures regarding the Iraq war and our entire intelligence community. You have been reluctant to do that for some time. Why?
All right, legitimate question. Let's see how Bush responds.
President Bush: Well, first let me kind of step back and talk about intelligence in general, if I might.
A primer on intelligence...well, OK, that's fine.
Intelligence is a vital part of fighting and winning the war against the terrorists.
Yes, certainly.
It is because the war against terrorists is a war against individuals who hide in caves in remote parts of the world, individuals who have these kind of shadowy networks, individuals who deal with rogue nations.
Right, but Saddam Hussein wasn't hiding in a remote cave when we invaded, was he?
So, we need a good intelligence system. We need really good intelligence.
Ummm...that's it? That's your trenchant insight into the nature of intelligence? We need it to be "really good"?
So, the commission I set up is to obviously analyze what went right or what went wrong with the Iraqi intelligence. It was kind of lessons learned. But it's really set up to make sure the intelligence services provide as good a product as possible for future presidents as well. This is just a part of analyzing where we are on the war against terror.
Well, OK, you're doing a service for future presidents. That's admirable.
There is a lot of investigations going on about the intelligence service, particularly in the Congress, and that's good as well. The Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks.
You "look forward to all the investigations and looks"?
Again, I repeat to you, the capacity to have good intelligence means that a president can make good calls about fighting this war on terror.
This is something that's bugged me about Bush from the jump: He makes these bland, completely obvious statements, but does so with these inflections that sound like he thinks he's imparting this grave, important wisdom to you. "Again, I repeat to you" is the kind of make-no-mistake intro that should be followed by something forceful like "We will not allow our way of life to be dictated by terrorists" or even, if you believe it, "This war was a just cause"; instead, Bush followed it with his pat answer about how we need "good intelligence," which is about as obvious and/or striking as "Again, I repeat to you, I love cuddly bunny rabbits." (Try the frequent use of that sort of inflection around your workplace or classroom today — when Steve in the cubicle next door to yours asks what you feel like doing for lunch, get this real serious look and say, "Again, I repeat to you, I could really go for some Chinese.")
But that's kind of how the whole interview went. I don't think you could point to one single piece of information Bush gave us that we didn't already know, or one single "explanation" that made anything more understandable or transparent. Basically it was just a rehash of all the talking points Bush has been pumping out since we invaded Iraq, and it didn't help that Russert rarely saw fit to press for anything deeper or more substantial. This sort of lengthy one-on-one interview is something Bush rarely does, to the point where it's a major nationwide event when it does happen, and yet the most trenchant insight he could come up with was: We need a good intelligence system. We need really good intelligence.
But hey, at least we can all breathe easier knowing that Bush "look[s] forward to all the investigations and looks."
Here's a short list of things that didn't suck in Nashville this past weekend: Wes Clark's speech at the Presidential Primary Celebration on Sunday night; the porkchop sandwich at Robert's Western World on Broadway; and the complete stranger who, without any provocation, walked up and slipped me her phone number at the Hilton during Clark's speech. In all honesty, it was just like every other time that's happened to me before, except for the fact that that's never happened to me before. As Dave Attell might say, Thanks, Nashville, we had a hell of a time. Now get some sleep.
# Once again back is the incredible Doug at 9:43 AM
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