Last week’s almost completely ignored Assclowns of the Week had a theme: Republicans who provided aid and comfort to al-Qaida. This week, in wake of the annual CPAC conference in which arch neocon George W. Bush (4, 10) was roundly slammed by Phyllis Schlafly to the great delight of the unsatisfied maniacs in the crowd, we’re seeing clearer signs than ever of the spousal abuse syndrome that characterizes the party of conservative compassion.
We’d heard Condoleezza Rice (5) say on ABC a week ago that Congress should abdicate its role as a co-equal branch of government and not get in the way of George Bush’s “enormous successes” in Iraq; The US Army (2) assign blame for the Walter Reed scandal squarely where it belonged: On the wounded troops they victimize; The Bush administration and American Enterprise Institute (1) for fervently applauding a Lebanese psychopath who fervently applauds the killing of US troops and Ann Coulter (8) who was likewise fervently applauded by the very crowd that she’d insulted.
So, obviously, spousal abuse works both ways in the Republican party. So, before we go on, let’s bow our heads in gratitude that Dick Cheney escaped the bomb blast in Bagram early this week because you-know-who is one heartbeat away from the Presidency.
Sometimes it’s hard to see progress when you’re living close to the scene. I guess the New Orleans Saints football team represents to me what’s happening in this part of the state — a resurgence, there’s a renewal. Even though there’s a lot of work to do, the spirit of the people down here is strong.
Thank God the Saints didn’t win the Super Bowl. He would’ve construed that as “Mission Accomplished” and taken his ball and gone home.
But, really, would that be such a bad thing?
“Do who I say, not who I do.”
In a nation of neocon hypocrites, Lonnie Latham, a former member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, stands head and shoulders above the rest. Or he would be if he wasn’t on his knees so often. And it’s not enough that a year ago this clown did essentially the same thing as Ted Haggard in soliciting for gay sex while foaming at the mouth from behind his pulpit every Sunday about how “sinful and destructive” homosexuality is.
No, it was virtually mandated (no pun intended, no really) that Lonnie’s defense would be that he didn’t do anything illegal, which may be true enough, and that any God-fearing Republican hypocrite ought to be free to solicit for gay sex. And to add that extra little ironic twist, the Oklahoma chapter of the ACLU, those wicked liberal shysters, are taking up his cause, filing a brief that claims his right to free speech was impinged upon.
All of which, I’m sure, will subsequently be profusely appreciated. That is, after Pastor Ted gets his online Masters in psychology and passes on the miracle of his three week-long therapeutic regimen.
And while we’re in the subject of “faggots…”
Some of the most intriguing mysteries of our time:
How come the 23rd century Captain Kirk’s communicator can’t take pictures or videos like our 21st century cell phones?
Why does Brazil play hockey but not baseball like the rest of South America?
And why does CPAC, year after year, keep inviting long-legged bile duct Ann Coulter when she’s guaranteed to embarrass the Republican party and insult the guests, appearances that inevitably result in chagrined silences to calls to Republicans’ offices?
Yep, leave it to good old Adam’s Apple Annie to stick to the salient political issues. At this week’s annual CPAC conference in which every Republican presidential candidate save for Mad Jack McCain sucked up to the Dark Side to prove how properly evil they were to be President, Ann Coulter closed her remarks by saying on CSPAN, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I -- so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”
This was at least as offensive as her remarks at last year’s CPAC in which Coulter referred to Muslims as “ragheads.” This time, as with last year, the mainstream media almost completely ignored her homophobic rant. The New York Times and the Washington Post did eventually get around to covering Coulter’s anti-gay remarks but only after the initial shock value was wasted.
And, as last year, the titillated audience appeared shocked then fervently applauded her bile retching because, well, it was aimed at a pretty boy Democrat so who cares? This doesn’t surprise me, that the Dark Side would support and cheer on such a hateful wouldbe standup comedian in much the same manner that the MSM pitches woo over neocon nutjob bloggers who plainly despise them while heaping scorn on liberal bloggers to prove their conservative chops to the right wingers. Because the neocon movement is merely a segment of a national population and a media that pulls a full blown nutty whenever Kanye West speaks the truth by saying that George Bush doesn’t like black people, two feminists attached to the Edwards campaign speak the truth about the sexist and misogynistic RCC and John Kerry says uneducated kids get sent to Iraq.
But if Ann Coulter wants to dive into the mud wrestling pit to call John Edwards a faggot and to complain that using the word faggot is unjustly politically incorrect, it’s entertainment or harmless fun.
Except this time even noted conservative bloggers like Captain Ed and Michelle Malkin have no stomach for this kind of “political discourse,” even though Coulter wrote Adam Nagourney, “C’mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean.”
Because, after all, the word “faggot is just a naughty name.” So I guess you won’t be offended, Annie, if I call you a “tranny cunt with Tourette’s.”
"Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, uh, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone."
I’d like to propose right here and now that we get the Parsons Group back in Basra so they can finish building that childrens’ cancer hospital so we can get Pickles off the talking head circuit and get her to shut her cigarette hole on grownup matters.
You see, according to the First Lady of cluelessness, while there are several bombs that go off a day in Iraq, there’s only one a day that really bothers people.
So, who would these people be: Americans who have loved ones that are all too often in the blast radius or the Iraqis who are victimized by such attacks 240 times a day? What’s there to get upset about if your child or mother was torn to shreds in a blast that may’ve only killed a couple of more when al-Qaida-aided Sunni insurgents can kill 40, 50, 60 or more once a day? And I guess we should blame the liberal MSM for paying attention to that one attack and one attack a day that upsets everyone so much?
And far be it for Pickles to ask Hubby in between Heimlichs whose fault it is for catalyzing these attacks that kill over 100 Iraqis a day and for being unable to stop them (especially since he and the Saudis are directly and indirectly funding al-Qaida).
It was interesting that Larry King would’ve said, “This war has not asked people to sacrifice very much” just after asking about the twins.
“Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see… visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities.” - George W. Bush, January 10, 2007
Well, George, they’d have an easier time doing that if they fucking had light to see by.
After $4,200,000,000 and four years, you’d think the Iraqi people would have at least as much electricity now as they did in the Saddam era. But they don’t. While megawatt generation is comparable to pre-invasion figures (3,958 megawatts per month before US occupation as opposed to 3,640 megawatts as of last month), the average amount of electricity “enjoyed” by the average Baghdad resident was 4.4 hours per day last January. According to this USAID report, they’d reached a peak of 4584 megawatts by July of 2004.
And despite the backslide due to terrorist and insurgent attacks and corrupt, lazy and inefficient American contractors like Bechtel, we hope to reach those glorious heights again, comrades!
But that’s just the beginning of the good news, comrades! For Baghdad and all of gloriously free and democratic Iraq will have power ’round the clock… a decade after the glorious invasion.
That’s right, according to “Army Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, the senior U.S. military officer overseeing reconstruction efforts… the Iraq government plans to increase power generation ‘to catch up with demand’ for electric power by 2013, ‘somewhere in around that area.’”
Shades of Rumsfeld! With exact prognostications like that, what could go wrong? The good news, comrades, is that four of those years have passed already and there’s just six short years to go!
And yet more good news, comrades! Consumption of electrical doodads has increased by 70% even if consumption of electricity has plummeted! We bet you’re dying, literally dying, to start using those blenders, pasta makers and espresso machines, aren’t you, comrades? Huzzah!
Condi Rice had this to say to Congress on ABC last Sunday: “Fuck off. Who said you had a say in the matter?”
Or rather, that was the gist of what she said to George Stephanopolous: "Then you're going to have the worst of micromanagement of military affairs. And it's always served us badly in the past." More and more, we’re seeing various senior administration officials coming out of the woodwork in what can only be described as batterer’s syndrome.
It doesn’t matter how compliant and accommodating Congress has been in the past in voting in massive tax cuts in a time of war that they’d also authorized, not to mention hundreds of billions to fund those wars, a PATRIOT Act, several renewals, military tribunal bills, assclown neocon judicial appointments, you name it.
But the minute wifey starts whispering a protest, the Bush White House slips on the wife beater shirt and goes into brass knuckle mode, screaming, “Fuck you and shut up! Now where’s the money you’ve been hiding in the sugar bowl? The guys are outside waiting!”
Of course, Condi never mentioned how Cheney huffed and puffed his way into Langley five years ago and pimpsticking the analysts to tell him what he wanted to hear: flawed intelligence that was part of a massive failure that, praised be God, still turned into enormous successes!
Likewise hubby’s micromanaging of Congress and his meddlesome and wearying insistence that they hurry up and rubber-stamp his every Jim Beam-influenced idea.
527 Things I Hate About You.
Bush has placed enough foxes to mind the henhouse, so why not send a Fox to Belgium?
If you put together enough assholes who have been nominated by George W. Bush, it paints a pretty compelling picture of back-scratching cronyism and slimy thank you’s for a job well done. This was memorably exemplified in the Senate confirmation hearings of Sam Fox, Bush’s nominee for ambassador to Belgium.
To give it that fillip that seems peculiar to politics of late, one of the senators on the Foreign Relations Committee was none other than my homie John Kerry, who asked Fox a series of rapid fire questions regarding his $50,000 contribution to the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth that helped derail his 2004 presidential campaign.
After the usual niceties, Kerry then threw Fox one curveball after another, asking him about the politics of personal destruction and his $50,000 contribution to the dirtiest 527 group ever assembled. What followed was a true testament to and an enduring profile of Republican courage.
After changing his pants and slipping into his kneepads, Fox sounded positively liberal in his vilification of 527 groups and somehow was heard, over the rising chorus of choked-back guffaws, telling Kerry that he was “a hero.”
Fox must’ve really wanted that job in Brussels or wants to get the fuck out of St. Louis bad.
How about we give these right wing rednecks a carbon footprint up their fat asses?
While Ann Coulter was captured on CSPAN calling John Edwards a faggot to the disinterest of the mainstream media, said fourth estate was going wild over the revelation that Al Gore has a huge carbon footprint, courtesy of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. Who’s the Tennessee Center for Policy Research? Well, they’re a nonpartisan organization that’s interested only finding out the truth about…
Oh, who the fuck are they kidding? They’re the next Swiftboat Veterans for Truth who went into spin mode the minute Al Gore & Co. won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for An Inconvenient Truth. You see, by “proving” that Al Gore uses more electricity in a day than most homes do in a month, that somehow proves that global warming is a myth, after all, an irony whose bones were jumped by every right-thinking neocon out there. Bloggers, incidentally, who couldn’t be concerned with trifling matters like the Walter Reed outpatient scandal, the Bush administration’s bungled case for Iran’s complicity in Iraq and Bush’s secretly funneling money to at least three al-Qaida-backed Sunni insurgent groups.
Thank Dave Johnson and James Boyce at the Huff Po for keeping track of the verminous horde of liars and for exposing the TCPR’s real agenda. It won’t be any surprise to find out who funds them. (Hint: Their president Drew Johnson oozed out of the Exxon-subsidized American Enterprise Institute, which set up mosh pits earlier this week in Walid Jumblatt’s honor.).
General Weightman’s former mansion, which is right across the street from Building 18. Opulence and decrepitude juxtaposed.
In a followup article, Dana Priest and Anne Hull found out that Walter Reed senior staff “heard a stream of complaints about outpatient treatment over the past several years.” This, after CO For a Day Kiley claiming that the problems of Building 18 were few and minor and “were not emblematic” of any neglect of their patients.
Kiley, incidentally, lives literally across the street from Building 18, so he’s either the biggest fucking liar or the stupidest and least observant man on earth, even after “sensing sessions“ in 2005 that are town hall meetings to address problems to senior Walter Reed staff. To give yourself an idea of how closely the Army closes ranks to any kind of questioning or criticism, check out these three paragraphs:
Last October, Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was taken to Walter Reed by a friend concerned about outpatient treatment. She attended a weekly meeting, called Girls Time Out, at which wives, girlfriends and mothers of soldiers exchange stories and offer support.
According to three people who attended the gathering, Rumsfeld listened quietly. Some of the women did not know who she was. At the end of the meeting, Rumsfeld asked one of the staff members whether she thought that the soldiers her husband was meeting on his visits had been handpicked to paint a rosy picture of their time there. The answer was yes.
When Walter Reed officials found out that Rumsfeld had visited, they told the friend who brought her -- a woman who had volunteered there many times -- that she was no longer welcome on the grounds.
This kind of defensive reprisal has survived to this day since the Army Times reports that soldiers are being punished, being made to wake up at six and to muster for daily inspections at seven. I guess these are the people whom Robert Gates wants to “hold accountable.”
George Bush has promised to start up a bipartisan panel investigating the debacle that happened right under his gin-blossomed nose, a debacle that’s a deadly combination of outsourcing, apathy and self-serving defensiveness. Let’s hope that this bipartisan panel is more interested in getting to the truth than the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and the ISG.
Now, if you still have any doubts as to how committed Bush and the far right wing is to the troops…
Politics makes strange bedfellows. Or, in this case, diseased fuck buddies.
Can somebody please tell me how an anti-semitic maniac who’d gotten his diplomatic visa revoked over three years ago for wishing out loud that Paul Wolfowitz had been killed in a rocket attack and that the killing of US troops in Iraq was “legitimate and obligatory” would wind up meeting with George W. Bush on the 26th and speaking to fervent applause at the American Enterprise Institute?
Incredible as it sounds, Walid Jumblatt, an anti-American, anti-Zionist, anti-Iran and anti-Syria radical member of the Lebanese parliament who’s calling for regime change in Syria just as loudly as the Far Right is for regime change in Iran, which Jumblatt is also throwing in for good measure, has the politically tin ear of the Bush administration.
Questions:
Gee, that couldn’t be why he was speaking at the neocon AEI think tank, because they have a common perceived enemy in Iran, could it? The Druze leader wouldn’t be using the new anti-Iranian sentiment to achieve his own nefarious aims, would he?
And how could Bush, whose meeting with Jumblatt was kept on the QT with no comment, maintain with a straight face that he still supports the troops after the Walter Reed mess and meeting with this nut job while refusing to see Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was one of the soldiers whose death Jumblatt celebrated as “legitimate and obligatory”?
I wonder if Jumblatt also considers “legitimate and obligatory” the slaughter of his own people last July at the hands of the Israelis while allies Bush and Rice twiddled their thumbs and refused to call for a cease-fire?
And how come CPAC didn’t hold a companion panel discussion entitled, "The Right's Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier"?
And hasn’t Jumblatt ever once come across the irony that his name sounds suspiciously Jewish?
(Crossposted at Welcome to Pottersville.)
