George W. Bush, Will You Please Go Now?!

Things to do in Denver now that GWBWYPGN?! is dead

2005-03-01T19:57:00.000-08:00

While GWBWYPGN?! decomposes beneath the rich earth of the blogosphere, waiting to emerge reborn, Phoenix-like, as something mercifully and completely different, here are some suggestions as to other blogs you could check out, ones that I read (more or less) every single day. I've already mentioned Atrios and Pandagon, and here are some more -- think of these as the blogs you should've been reading while you were wasting your time with this one, and now that you're not wasting your time with this one, you've got no excuse not to read them instead and atone:

First, TBOGG, a Platinum-Level Supporter of Operation F$#! You, Ann Coulter (remember that?) and maybe the funniest political blog on the Web. GWBWYPGN?!, on its best day, was never as funny as TBOGG is when he's not even trying, and GWBWYPGN?!'s replacement (whatever it ends up being) probably won't be either. Just to give you fair warning.

I also have to give props to Mary at Naked Furniture, who was maybe the very first blogger to link to GWBWYPGN?!; I remember looking in my referral log way back in the fall of '03 or whenever it was, finding Naked Furniture in there and thinking, "Holy shit, some totally random person I've never even met thought this blog was worth linking to! Poor girl, she must be stuck in northern Saskatchewan or someplace where her only choices for entertainment are intramural curling or using an Internet connection on a computer that has frozen up on this blog and cannot be directed anyplace else!" As it turns out, that guess was wrong; at the time, Mary was a student at Notre Dame with a life and everything, and even though her Internet browser did go to other sites besides this one, she chose to come here on her own. She is now a law student at Indiana, and still does, in addition to still being very funny, very angry, and very potty-mouthed. All of which are, as Paris Hilton would say, hot.

I think it was also Mary who was responsible for cluing me in to Basket Full of Puppies, another milestone in my blogging "career." (Did everyone make finger quotes around that last word even as I said it? If you didn't I'll give you some time to catch up . . . ready? OK, good.) If you want to get a glimpse of what I'm kind of hoping my next blog will be more like, pay a visit to Matt Lavine; he comments on all kinds of stuff from politics to TV shows to chess and manages to make it funny without using epithets like "f$#!bag" or "ass gopher" every other word, a talent which, at the time of its passing, GWBWYPGN?! had still clearly not mastered. In other words, he's way smarter than me, and the fact that there is a blog anywhere in the world that doesn't link to his is a travesty. Know how every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings? Well, every time a blogger doesn't link to BFoP, an angel gets a cold sore. One of the highest compliments I can pay Matt is that he sounds like the kind of guy I wish my sister would end up with, instead of the ass gophers she currently gravitates toward. OK, see, dammit, I did it again!

Speaking of baby sis, if you haven't gone over and checked out her blog, Practically Harmless, you are not only missing out on (yet another) person who's smarter than me, you're also committing what I consider a personal affront against a member of my immediate family. And nobody f$#!s with the Gilletts, OK? Ann's politics are almost as liberal as mine, only she talks about it gooder than me does. And maybe if more people go over there on a regular basis the Catholic guilt will kick in and she'll be forced to post more.

Finally we have another frequent GWBWYPGN?! linkee, Sadly, No!. Sadly wades through more brain-dead right-wing commentary than any thinking human being should have to in order to cull from it the very best in (mostly unintentional) entertainment -- S,N! was the one who first turned me on to the wanting-so-badly-to-be-hip-but-falling-so-humiliatingly-short-of-the-mark fundie Christian musings of Doug Giles, for instance, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. S,N! is so funny that even its commenters could usually wipe the floor with this blog, humor-wise.

So go check those out, add them to your Favorites even, and I'll be back before you know it with a new blog, a new angle, and a new attitude . . . the last of which will last probably all of five minutes before I regress back into the same bilious, antisocial dillwad I've always been.

No no, I'll show myself out.

But, see, he was writing about the al-Qida network. He didn't say anything about the al-Qaeda network!

2005-02-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

Don't call our new secretary of state a liar. Because she's African-American, that automatically makes you a racist. Instead, just say she's somewhat truth-impaired:

EIGHT months before the September 11 attacks the White House's then counterterrorism adviser urged then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold a high-level meeting on the al-Qaeda network, according to a memo made public today.

"We urgently need such a principals-level review on the al-Qaeda network," ... Richard Clarke wrote in the January 25, 2001 memo.

Mr Clarke, who left the White House in 2003, made headlines in the heat of the US presidential campaign ... when he accused the Bush White House of having ignored al-Qaeda's threats before September 11.

Mr Clarke testified before inquiry panels and in a book that Rice ... had been warned of the threat.

So, just to review:

> Condoleezza Rice believed a briefing titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike In U.S." wasn't actually a warning that a terrorist strike was soon to happen.

> Condoleezza Rice believed a memo containing the words "We urgently need such a Principals-level review on the al Qida network" did not count as "turn[ing] over to the new administration" the al-Qaeda threat.

But we've got her as our top diplomat anyway. Aren't we lucky!

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

2004-08-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

If I was John Kerry's campaign manager

2004-08-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aren't they? . . .

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! (No, really!)

2003-12-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

Do a favor for your pals at GWBWYPGN:

1. Open up a new window and go to Google.
2. Type the words miserable failure (without quotes) in the search field.
3. Hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

And bickety-bam, you're at the miserable failure home page! That's right, the effort begun weeks ago by Old Fashioned Patriot has succeeded — George W. Bush's bio page on whitehouse.gov is now the top response to the search phrase "miserable failure" on Google. Back on Nov. 25, we'd set Christmas Day as the unofficial goal for the Bush bio to become the number-one return, and we've hit it weeks in advance. Congrats to everyone who put a miserable failure hyperlink on their page and helped make this happen!

But unlike George W. Bush, we're not declaring everything hunky-dory and wiping our hands clean just because the primary mission has been accomplished. We're going to have to continue throwing this hyperlink into our pages now and then to keep the Bush bio at #1, so don't forget to do it again every once in a while. And you'll notice that if you enter "miserable failure" (in quotes) in the Google search window, the Bush bio only come up as the #2 response, and that ain't good enough. So if you're part of the strategic hyperlinking project that Old Fashioned Patriot started, start adding the quotes to your hyperlink from time to time.

There's no telling how far we can go with this. As long as we're planting seeds here, why not make a hyperlink every time you reference the name Ann Coulter? You could link it to...oh, I don't know...this page.

Let's get crackin', kids! Link away!