Tales From The Best Health Care System In The World…(continued)
Funny how the same people pushing "free market" solutions to the health care crisis in the U.S. are also the same ones pushing these Religious Exemption laws that allow individuals to refuse to give health care regardless of what their employer’s policies are…
A federal judge’s ruling this week upholds the right of Illinois pharmacists to refuse to dispense emergency contraception.
…
Several pharmacists employed by Wal-Mart and Walgreen Co. have been disciplined for either refusing to dispense Plan B or for refusing to promise that they would dispense emergency contraception if asked.
U.S. District Judge Jeanne Scott denied a request Tuesday by Wal-Mart to throw out a lawsuit filed by pharmacist Ethan Vandersand. Scott sided with Vandersand, who had claimed he was legally protected from discipline by the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act when he declined to dispense Plan B.
Vandersand, who lives in Bluffs, formerly worked at the pharmacy in Beardstown’s Wal-Mart. He was put on unpaid leave after he refused to fill a Plan B prescription requested by a nurse practitioner at Springfield’s Planned Parenthood on behalf of a female patient in February 2006.
Wal-Mart had contended the state’s right-of-conscience law doesn’t cover pharmacists. Walgreen Co. has made the same argument in other Illinois lawsuits filed by fired pharmacists.
But Scott wrote in her ruling, "The statute prohibits discrimination against any person for refusing to provide health care because of his conscience."
Emphasis mine. Note that the law doesn’t limit a person’s right to refuse to give health care to contraception. It can be health care for Anything, according to this judge. Picture someone who has AIDS and needs their medication to keep their viral count low. Picture some religious right bigot behind the counter turning them away because those medications enable homosexuals to escape the consequences of their sin.
Picture that happening to…hell…just about anyone who isn’t living their lives according to the god of the fundamentalists: who isn’t one of their tribe.
You need to keep something in focus here. Take a look back on the history of the rise of the religious right. Abortion was one of their hooks to get votes and money, when school desegregation wasn’t cutting it anymore. Then Anita Bryant showed them how much more effective the homosexual boogyman was, and they’ve been running with it ever since. But this fight has been going on for decades now, and the religious right got involved in politics along with the secular right over school desegregation…and more specifically, loosing their tax exemptions for their segregated private schools. That’s the mindset here. You have to keep that in focus. Abortion…The Homosexual Menace…these are just tools to keep the voters angry. The real agenda, is dividing America into haves, and have-nots. Guess which side of that fence you’re on.
These conscientious objector laws are ultimately about building that fence of have, verses have-not. It isn’t just contraception, and it isn’t just health care. It’s about building that fence. Everything is about building that fence.
Because we don’t deserve the American Dream. This is not our country. It’s theirs. We just work here.
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
Regarding This Post I did a little while ago, on the Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon media bullshit circus….it gets even better…or the stench much worse depending on whether you feel more like laughing or crying. Glenn Greenwald has the goods …
But the far greater deceit involves the trip itself and the way it was represented — both by Pollack/O’Hanlon as well as the excited media figures who touted its significance and meaning. From beginning to end, this trip was planned, shaped and controlled by the U.S. military — a fact inexcusably concealed in both the Op-Ed itself and virtually every interview the two of them gave. With very few exceptions, what they saw was choreographed by the U.S. military and carefully selected for them.
…
The entire trip — including where they went, what they saw, and with whom they spoke — consisted almost entirely of them faithfully following what O’Hanlon described as "the itinerary the D.O.D. developed."
But to establish their credibility as first-hand witnesses, O’Hanlon and Pollack began their Op-Ed by claiming, in the very first sentence: "VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel. . . . " Yet the overwhelming majority of these "Iraqi military and civilian personnel" were ones hand-picked for them by the U.S. military:
Dig it. Two war supporters go over to Iraq on a trip planned, shaped and controlled by the Pentagon, and when they come back to the U.S. to present their pre-packaged findings they’re lauded by our feckless corporate news media as former war critics who went to Iraq to see for themselves what the conditions there were and then became believers in Bush’s policies. It isn’t just that not a word of it was true…it’s that everyone writing those editorals about how Bush’s policies were winning over the war critics knew goddamned well that none of it was true.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.
For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.
Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.
Jordan. Guam. And…the Cayman Islands.
– A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.
Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.
Next time you hear a republican yap, yap, yapping about Roe v. Wade and how abortion is murder, ask them how they feel about universal heath care for children.
I’ve been meaning to post about this since I saw it last week, but I was on the road and I just don’t blog well when I’m flitting down the highway from one motel room to another. But I figured last week that when I got around to it, I’d begin the post with something along the lines of…
I hate these motherfuckers! We have goddamned freedom of the press in this country, and our newspapers resemble something out of the cold war Soviet Union…
On the July 30 edition of the CBS Evening News, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin falsely described Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon as "a critic" of the Iraq war "who used to think the surge was too little too late, [but] now believes it should be continued." In fact, while O’Hanlon has been critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, he supported the invasion and argued in a January 2007 column that President Bush’s troop increase was "the right thing to try."
Additionally, during the July 30 broadcast of Fox News’ Special Report, while introducing a report on a July 30 New York Timesop-ed by O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, director of research at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy — in which they asserted: "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms" — host and Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume suggested that O’Hanlon and Pollack were longtime Iraq war critics. Hume described the two as "[a] pair of longtime opponents of President Bush’s policies in Iraq." The same night, ABC’s World News anchor Charles Gibson began his show’s report on O’Hanlon and Pollack’s op-ed by describing the authors as "long and persistent critics of the Bush administration’s handling of the war." But in focusing only on O’Hanlon and Pollack’s criticisms of the "handling" of the war, the news broadcasts failed to note that O’Hanlon and Pollack were influential proponents of the Iraq war before the invasion, leaving viewers with the impression that the two were war opponents who have now become more supportive of the war.
Sweet, eh? When you can’t find a critic of the war who supports the surge, you simply recast a couple old supporters of the war as opponants and…Voila! Proof that the policies of president I’m The Decider are winning over even his toughest critics.
It is difficult to remember a media spectacle to match yesterday’s [July 30, 2007 -Bruce] grand pageant where Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon were paraded across virtually every network and cable news show and radio program and heralded as "war opponents" and "Bush critics" who nonetheless returned from Iraq and were forced by The Truth to admit that we are Winning. For sheer deceit and propaganda, it is difficult to remember something quite this audacious and transparently false.
As was demonstrated yesterday, O’Hanlon and Pollack were among the most voracious cheerleaders for Bush’s invasion and, as the war began to collapse, among its most deceitful defenders. But it goes so far beyond that.
Even through this year, they have remained loyal Bush supporters. They were not only advocates of the war, but cheerleaders for the Surge. They were, and continue to be, on the fringe of pro-war sentiment in this country. And yet all day yesterday, this country’s media loudly hailed them as being exactly the opposite of what they really are. It was 24 hours of unadulterated, amazingly coordinated war propaganda that could not have been any further removed from the truth.
…
I spent yesterday and today reading through virtually all of the writings and interviews of these two Brookings geniuses over the past four years concerning Iraq. There is no coherence or consistency to anything they say. It shifts constantly. They say whatever they need to say at the moment to justify the war for which they bear responsibility. It is exactly like reading through the writings of Bill Kristol, Tom Friedman and every other individual who flamboyantly supported this disaster and — motivated solely by salvaging their own reputations — are desperate to find some method to argue that they were right.
Even though I write frequently about how broken and corrupt our establishment media is, witnessing these two war lovers — supporters of the invasion, advocates of the Surge, comrades of Fred Kagan — mindlessly depicted all day yesterday by media mouthpieces as the opposite of what they are was really quite startling. After all, there is a record as long as it is clear demonstrating what they really are.
But in order to maximize the potency of their propagandistic Op-Ed, they proclaimed themselves to be "analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq" and — just like that — Americans hear all day about the magical and dramatic conversion of these deeply skeptical war opponents who were forced by the Grand Success they witnessed first-hand in Iraq, as much as they hate to do it, to admit oh-so-reluctantly that the Surge really is working! Well, if even these Howard-Dean-like War Opponents say it, it must be true. That was the leading "news" story all day yesterday.
Nice. This is the kind of crap I was used to seeing in the state controlled press of totalitarian states like the Soviet Union. But they all bought into the war…hell, they all bought into George Bush…early on, and now they don’t dare admit that they’ve brought an unmitigated catastrophe down on their country. In an editorial titled, Iraq Hasn’t Even Begun, contributing editor to the Los Angles Times Timothy Ash writes…
So Iraq is over. But Iraq has not yet begun. Not yet begun in terms of the consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the United States’ own foreign policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath, with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country. Already, about 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders, and more than 2 million are internally displaced.
Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call "soft partition" — the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 million to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions, under close U.S. military supervision — would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that Americans are prepared to allow their troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job — two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.
In an article for the Web magazine Open Democracy, Middle East specialist Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Besides the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalizing of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the Al Qaeda brand; the eruption, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shiite, "a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition"; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the West and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.
For the United States, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged "Al Qaeda Central" in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed, and there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq. In 2007, there is an Al Qaeda in Iraq, parts of the old Al Qaeda are creeping back into Afghanistan and there are Al Qaeda emulators spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe.
Osama bin Laden’s plan was to get the U.S. to overreact and overreach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The U.S. government’s own latest National Intelligence Estimate, released this week, suggests that Al Qaeda in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.
The U.S. has probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of its military was "no more Vietnams," it faces another Vietnam. There are many important differences, but the basic result is similar: The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary.
Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be some totemic photographic image of national humiliation as the U.S. struggles to extract its troops.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have done terrible damage to the U.S. reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the West.
In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer-term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But as far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic.
Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.
This is the basic point, but it’s also something that has not penetrated the brains of the Very Serious People who rule our elite discourse. They fucked up. Lots of people died. Lots of people continue to die. Each of them, in their own little way, contributed to this "comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster," and most of them are unwilling and unable to face up to that fact. This is truly the era of Bush, where accountability is for suckers, and I’ve come to conclude that’s pretty much the dominant cultural fact of elite Washington.
Our corporate news media served the voters up this disaster on a silver platter of dollar store bullshit, jingoism, and their drunken bar stool conceits. They hated Bill Clinton, they hated the democrats, they hated the liberals, and most of all they hated the Dirty Fucking Hippies Who Made Us Loose In Vietnam. Bush was their hero, their knight in shining armor, their exoneration. Pusillanimous, pampered, petulant, with a abundant sense of his own entitlement to match his grotesque self righteousness. He was their hero, the hero they all knew they were deep down inside. And when terrorists killed over three-thousand Americans on 9-11, they figured their moment of glory had arrived at last. Along with their hero, they were going to remake the nation…and the world…in their own image.
We gay folk have friends among the heterosexuals. Never doubt that. Never, never, never. And because they are beautiful people…decent…good hearted…good people…they don’t really understand what it is we’re all facing. They just don’t…
When I saw Angels in America, I thought the closeted gay Mormon character was a little too heavy handed, but in retrospect I’ve come to realize that Tony Kushner understood something about the world that I did not.
Yeah. He does. Yeah…it looks a tad heavy-handed… But no…it isn’t…
Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.
Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.
Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh’s death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.
“I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard,” Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.
Oh you did, did you? Well I was just in Laramie lady, and I can tell you for a fact that they are busy trying to forget it ever happened. Learn something? Oh my goodness. How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.
The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore. I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects. But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up. So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened. Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere. Maybe a little plaque. Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects. I found exactly nothing.
Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand. So I did a small amount of poking around and found the spot where Shepard’s dying body was found and looked it up on a map. Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road. I’d already read that the property owner had torn down the deer fence that Shepard had been tied too, out of pique that so many people were leaving flowers and tributes there. But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.
It was not to be…
The road leading to the site is now marked with signs warning you that it is a private drive, not a public road, and that everyone should keep out. That entire area is now off limits to the public. You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.
I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened. Or maybe a nice tennis court.
Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X. He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…
If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.
Progress is healing the wound… Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things. But real progress toward gay equality, toward that day when gay people can live side-by side with our heterosexual neighbors in peace and good will, won’t happen, won’t even begin to happen, until straight America is willing to begin healing the wound. And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.
And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay. Too many people hate us enough to kill us, to think of killing us as some kind of sport, or a rite of passage into manhood. And too many other people don’t give a shit. Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.
That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake. ABC News can get away with helping the religious right whitewash that basic fact of the killing, because few people outside of the gay community will bother making the trip to Laramie to see the place where it all happened for themselves. But last night I drove from about where Shepard was kidnapped to the place where his killers tied him to a fence, put their cigarettes out on his skin, and beat his skull open with the butt of a pistol.
You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond. Into the rolling sage. Into the darkness. I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now. Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate. They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive back toward town or drive for miles to Happy Jack Road. So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could. Into the darkness. Where no one would see. Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.
You take that drive…out of town…far away from the town lights…into the night…and you start thinking to yourself…This was a robbery? No way. Just. No. Way. There were two of them against one small, 112 pound boy and they passed plenty of nice, quiet, dark places where they could have taken Shepard, robbed him, dumped him, and driven off. Hell…they passed plenty of places where they could have just shot him dead and driven off without being seen. You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid. You drive him there because you intend to spend a while enjoying yourself beating a faggot to death while he begs for his life and nobody can hear him scream for help, and you don’t want the body discovered before you’ve had a chance to clean up and get rid of the evidence.
That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck. If you doubt that, take the drive yourself some night, from downtown Laramie to Snowy View Road, and try to convince yourself that they only intended to rob him.
Lessons? Lessons? There is no memorial to Matthew Shepard anywhere in Laramie that I could find, the site of this beating is off limits to the public now, and thanks to ABC News, people are calling Matthew Shepard a Meth addict who knew his killers, and maybe even had sex with them once or twice. And the killing goes on. They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning. Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.
[Edited a tad…]
[Update…] The Good People of Laramie eventually did decide to erect a memorial after all. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby present you with the Matthew Shepard Memorial…bench.
Via Box Turtle Bulletin. The man who went to a Houston Texas gay bar looking for a homosexual to kill, and killed 46-year-old Kenneth Cummings Jr., believes with all his heart that he did the right thing. Well of course he does…
A Cypress man charged in the death of a Southwest Airlines flight attendant said Saturday that he was doing God’s work when he went to a Montrose-area bar last month, hunting for a gay man to kill.
"I believe I’m Elijah, called by God to be a prophet," said 26-year-old Terry Mark Mangum, charged with murder June 11. " … I believe with all my heart that I was doing the right thing."
Interviewed in the Brazoria County Jail Saturday morning, Mangum said he feels no remorse for killing 46-year-old Kenneth Cummings Jr., whom relatives described as a "loving" son who never forgot a holiday and a devoted uncle who had set up college funds for his niece and nephew. He worked at Southwest for 24 years.
Mangum, who described himself as "definitely not a homosexual," said God called on him to "carry out a code of retribution" by killing a gay man because "sexual perversion" is the "worst sin."
Mangum believed Cummings to be gay.
"I planned on sending him to hell," he said.
Cummings disappeared June 4. His charred remains were found June 16, buried on a 50-acre ranch near San Antonio owned by Mangum’s 90-year-old grandfather.
Hey, John Smid…I got your considerate and transparent dialogue right here…
Via Pam’s House Blend… You could just about predict the reaction from the kook pews when several democratic candidates for president announced they’d participate in a debate on Logo about gay issues…
After all who could argue with the intellectual, philosophical, economic, national security, and social conscience expertise of a network that prides itself on the number of different ways a human being can have engage in sexual behavior while at the same time avoiding good old fashioned marital sexual intercourse?
…
What will happen is that each of these candidates will have to also later face the same "faith-based" audiences that they have been attempting to woo in recent weeks. Heaven forbid, but Obama might even have to make a follow up appearance in Rick Warren’s pulpit to announce the results of his most recent AIDS test. And what will they have to say then?
See here is the unrelenting truth, put as plainly as humanly possible:
Homosexual behavior and Christianity do not mix. From the standpoint of theory, theology, doctrine, and practice the two are totally and completely incompatible; as are adultery, pornography, bestiality, pedophilia, pre-marital sex, incest, cross dressing, multiple partner orgies and the list goes on. So the candidates can not have it both ways.
The truth is Democrats are not now nor have they ever been interested in seriously committed faith based voters.
So says Kevin McCullough over at TownHall.Com. Meanwhile…back on the side of all that is Godly and Righteous, the republicans are showing the rest of the nation just what it means to be morally upright…
NEW ORLEANS — New allegations tie Sen. David Vitter to a high-priced brothel in his hometown, days after he publicly apologized for his connection to an alleged prostitution ring in Washington, D.C.
Vitter (R-La.) acknowledged being involved with a D.C. escort service that federal prosecutors say was a prostitution ring.
On Tuesday, former madam Jeanette Maier said Vitter was once a client of her Canal Street brothel. She pleaded guilty to running the operation in 2002. Vitter won his seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004.
Maier described Vitter as a "decent guy" who appeared to be in need of company when he visited the brothel.
"As far as the girls coming out after seeing David, all they had was nice things to say. It wasn’t all about sex. In fact, he just wanted to have somebody listen to him, you know," Maier said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Tonight I got confirmation from a solid inside source who has no ideological ax to grind. The source said [Sen.] Vitter was a client at Canal Street, and provided some additional details that shed light on Maier’s comment that there was “more to the business than sex”. [Update: Based on her comments about Vitter not having “unusual predilections”, I would interpret this comment to mean something like companionship and social interaction rather than fetishes… etc.] These details are not for the faint of heart, either.
We’re talking about, among other things, Diaper Fetishism. That’s right folks, according to a trusted inside source, Vitter was well known among other Canal Street Brothel patrons to like diapers as well as other bizarre “fetishes”. I don’t have much more info than that from my source, except that some of the other patrons at the brothel included a well known business-minded New Orleans Republican and a well known Democratic ex-governor. There are many other well known patrons who never held public office, too. You’ve probably heard various names floated about.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love that New Orleans has more than its share of sex fetishists and preeverts who can’t come missionary. This ain’t a vanilla town, kids.
But the thought of Vitter prancing around in a dipey is a bit jarring, especially since I’m changing those nasty things every day.
During the Clinton impeachment scandal, Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt placed an article in his magazine offering up to $1,000,000 for information on sexual indiscretions by Republican officials. Flynt received evidence that Livingston had strayed outside of his marriage and he was preparing to publish this information. Livingston got word that the article was pending. During debate over the impeachment resolution on December 19, 1998, Livingston surprised everyone by stepping down as Speaker-elect and announced he would resign from the House in May1999. He was succeeded by David Vitter…
The writings of the Founding Fathers are very instructive on this issue. They are not cast in terms of political effectiveness at all but in terms of right and wrong — moral fitness. Hamilton writes in the Federalists Papers (No. 65) that impeachable offenses are those that "proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust."
In considering impeachment, Vitter asserted, Congress had to judge Clinton on moral terms. Decrying the law professors’ failure to see this, Vitter observed, "Is that the level of moral relatively [sic] and vacuousness we have come to?" If no "meaningful action" were to be taken against Clinton, Vitter wrote, "his leadership will only further drain any sense of values left to our political culture."
You don’t say, David. Gosh…three cheers for moral leadership. And…prostitutes who are worth every penny they charge. Especially the ones who know how to dress a man in diapers.
Today, looking back, Jeanette is not the least bit ashamed of the business she built. "There is a need for prostitutes," she says. "We balance everything out. We let a guy live out his fantasies."
Some of the fantasies at the Canal Street Brothel got a little rough. For those who liked that kind of stuff, there were whips, chains and a lot of leather. Jeanette says that most of the clients who wanted to be dominated were Republicans. She cracks a smile, then adds, "They wanted to be spanked and tortured and wear stockings–Republicans have impeccable taste in silk stockings–and these are the people who run our country."
"We’ve got 20-some investigations that all look good," Flynt said during a news conference at his Beverly Hills office.
"We have got some high-ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and the House," he told reporters. "If I get just a couple of those phonies out of there, maybe it will be a step forward."
I’m laughing in your face Kevin McCullough, and all the rest of you pusillanimous sexual perverts over at Town Hall. Sex is a beautiful, thrilling, wonderful part of being alive and being human, and it isn’t Godlessness that’s writing all these sordid headlines now, and it isn’t moral relativism and wasn’t the dirty hippies and all their free love. This is what you get when you drag this vital part of the human identity into the gutter like it was dirty laundry, not one of this life’s pure and perfect joys. When you teach people that sex is a sordid, squalid, dirty thing, don’t be surprised when they act it out in sordid, squalid, dirty ways.
The author Mary Renault once said that politics, like sex, is an expression of the person within. If you’re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you’re not the sort of person who will behave like that. So what have we here? The party of Greed Is Good, and Sex is 90 Percent Evil, Except When It’s Between A Married Man And Women For Making Babies. And the brothel owners are saying they like to be dominated and spanked and tortured. And…wear silk stockings. And…diapers. And I’ll not endure lectures on how unnatural my sex life is from the likes of your kind Kevin.
In the wake of three Surgeon Generals testifying on Capital Hill about Bush administration political interference in medical science, raising once again the issue of how the Bush administration has been relentlessly attacking any science that doesn’t agree with their agenda, Andrew Sullivan thinks Virginia Postrel is making sense…
"Scientists have gotten way too fond of invoking their authority to claim that "science" dictates their preferred policy solutions and claiming that any disagreement constitutes an attack on science. But, even assuming that scientists agree on the facts, science can only tell us something about the state of the world. It cannot tell us what policy is the best to adopt. Scientists’ preferences are not "science." You cannot go from an "is" (science) to an "ought" (policy). Social science, particularly economics, can tell you something about the likely tradeoffs (hence some of my frustrations at Aspen). But it can’t tell you which tradeoffs to make,"
– Virginia Postrel, making sense as usual.
Postrel is referring to an op-ed defending Governor Girly Man’s sacking of Robert Sawyer, chair of California’s chair Air Resources Board. Schwarzenegger had appointed him in December of 2005, calling him "an exceptionally accomplished scientist, teacher and environmental policy expert who has devoted his career to using science and technology to improve air quality not only in California, but across our country and the world."
The grim irony in Postrel’s blog post is that what the Schwarzenegger camp would have you believe is that Sawyer was fired for doing exactly what Postrel said needs to be done: weighing the science against the public interest. Against the wishes of environmentalists, the state air board led by Sawyer voted by a 7-1 margin to let San Joaquin Valley polluters have until 2024 to come into compliance with the Federal Clean Air Act. The San Joaquin Valley is California’s, and by extension much of this nation’s, food basket. But it wasn’t this decision, so much as Sawyer’s insistence that the State Air Board remain politically independent, that got Sawyer his pink slip. That is what Postrel is defending here; not the idea that public policy often has to be a compromise between various necessities, but that science must serve politics.
Postrel’s post is dishonest claptrap of the sort that homophobes use when they bellyache that they’re being called bigots merely for "disagreeing with the gay agenda". It isn’t disagreement the scientists are calling attacks, it’s when politicians censor them, and then rewrite their science outright to fit a specific political agenda, that’s the attack on science. It’s one thing for politicians to say that they have to weigh the science against what they see as the public interest, and another for them to force science to tell the public things that are not true. But this has been Bush administration policy from day one, and republican party policy now for decades. Intelligent Design anyone?
I keep turning to Jacob Bronowski on this, but he said it absolutely right…
Picture the state of German thought when Wener Heisenberg was criticized by the S.S., and had to ask Himmler to support his scientific standing. Heisenberg had won the Nobel prize at the age of thirty; his principle of uncertainty is one of the two or three deep concepts which science has found in this century; and he was trying to warn Germans that they must not dismiss such discoveries as Relativity because they disliked the author. Yet Himmler, who had been a schoolmaster, took months of petty inquiery (someone in his family knew Heisenberg) before he authorized of all people, Heydrich to protect Heisenberg. His letter to Heydrich is a paper monument to what happens to the creative mind in a society without truth. For Himmler writes that he has heard that Heisenberg is good enough to be earmarked later for his own Academy for Welteislehre. This was an Academy which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice.
-Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values.
For years after reading that I wondered why the hell anyone would want to force scientists to say that stars are made of ice. Then I came across this web site run by a group of people who still believe in the Ptolemaic earth centric model of the universe and then it made sense. There are still some nutty fundamentalists out there who insist that the earth must be the center of the universe, because they bible says so. But in that case the stars simply cannot be suns like our own, and light years away from us, because then the outer edges of the universe would be whipping around the earth once each day at speeds even a fundamentalist could not accept. So the stars must be a lot closer to the earth and the universe must be a lot smaller. But if the stars are a lot closer to the earth then they can’t be objects like our sun. So they must be made of ice instead, and are merely reflecting the light from our own sun back at us.
It’s crazy. But that’s apparently what Himmler believed, because his screwball religion told him it had to be so. And never mind what the evidence says. Contrary opinions are not merely wrong, they’re heresy, and even worse, they’re rebellion against authority. This is why theocrats and totalitarians hate the practice of science. The only authority science accepts is the evidence. At the end of the day nature speaks for itself. This is why science is always going to have a tense relationship with politics. But it’s not a hopeless one, so long as everyone is willing to tell the truth.
It’s one thing to say that we have to weigh the costs and benefits, and make hard decisions sometimes that maybe nobody really likes, and another to try to make scientists say things that aren’t so. No, science can’t tell us what policy is the best to adopt. But it can sure as hell narrow it down. You can’t even begin to guess what the best policy is, if you don’t know what the goddamned facts are.
You have to think that there are people in Washington, almost certainly among the punditboro, now thinking to themselves that Nixon should have just pardoned the Watergate Burglars immediately…then he wouldn’t have needed to worry about burning his secret White House tape recordings because the investigations would have ground to a halt.
But back then Nixon would have still had to worry about impeachment in a way Bush never will. The republican party hadn’t yet sunk into the depths it has today. Today, if Bush was caught stuffing money he’d just stolen from a bank into the g-string of a 12 year old pole dancer (of either sex) on the White House lawn the republicans wouldn’t impeach him. If Bush walked out of the White House and shot a random tourist in the head the republicans wouldn’t impeach him. There’s no way they’re going to let him be impeached over the Scooter Libby affair.
Many others will note this but I feel obliged to do so for the record. The real offense here is not so much or not simply that the president has spared Scooter Libby the punishment that anyone else would have gotten for this crime (for what it’s worth, I actually find the commutation more outrageous than a full pardon). The deeper offense is that the president has used his pardon power to shortcircuit the investigation of a crime to which he himself was quite likely a party, and to which, his vice president, who controls him, certainly was.
The president’s power to pardon is full and unchecked, one of the few such powers given the president in the constitution. Yet here the president has used it to further obstruct justice. In a sense, perhaps we should thank the president for bringing the matter full circle. Began with criminality, ends with it.
Here on the Times Oped page you’ll see David Brooks column claiming that the information Joe Wilson brought before the public four years ago turned out to all be a crock, a bunch of lies. And we’ll let Brooks’ scribble be a stand-in for what you will hear universally today from the right — namely, that just as Scooter Libby was charged with perjury and not the underlying crime of burning an American spy, the deeper underlying offense, the lie about uranium from Africa, didn’t even exist — that at the end of the day it was revealed that Wilson’s claims, which started the whole train down the tracks, were discredited as lies.
You’ll even hear softer versions of this claim from mainstream media outlets not normally considered part of the rump of American conservatism.
There aren’t many subjects on which I claim expertise. But this is one of them. I think I know the details of this one — both the underlying story of the forgeries and their provenance and the epi-story of Wilson and Plame — as well as any journalist who’s written about the story. The Fitzgerald investigation is probably the part of it I know the least about, comparatively. (It is also incumbent on me to say that in the course of reporting on this story over these years I’ve gotten to know Joe Wilson fairly well. And I consider him a friend.)
And with that knowledge, I have to say that the claim that Wilson’s charges have been discredited, disproved or even meaningfully challenged is simply false. What he said on day one is all true. It’s really as simple as that.
Really. The entire Wilson/Plame affair is a textbook example of how the republican party Mighty Wurlitzer operates, hand in glove with the Washington press and the Washington punditboro. Never mind talk radio. This was an inside job. The beltway cool kids have been as unanimous in calling for Scooter’s pardon for obstructing justice in the case of outing a CIA agent as political retribution, as they were in calling for Clinton’s head for obstructing justice over a blow job.
There’s a tendency, even among too many people of good faith and good politics, to shy away from asserting and admitting this simple fact because Wilson has either gone on too many TV shows or preened too much in some photo shoot. But that is disreputable and shameful. The entire record of this story has been under a systematic, unfettered and, sadly, largely unresisted attack from the right for four years. Key facts have been buried under an avalanche of misinformation. The then-chairman of the senate intelligence committee made his committee an appendage of the White House and himself the president’s bawd and issued a report built on intentional falsehood and misdirection.
No one is perfect. The key dividing line is who’s telling the truth and who’s lying. Wilson is on the former side, his critics the latter. Everything else is triviality.
Garrison Keller was right: they’re republicans first and Americans second. Not just the men in power, but their courtiers in the news media and the punditboro. When they tell you that the break president Junior gave Scooter Libby is no big deal they are looking you right in the eye and lying through their teeth. It is exactly as Joshua Marshall says it is: "…the president has used his pardon power to shortcircuit the investigation of a crime to which he himself was quite likely a party, and to which, his vice president, who controls him, certainly was." And that crime wasn’t a blow job in the White House, it was damage to our intelligence gathering abilities, done for the sake of silencing a critic, sending a warning to others, and bringing the intelligence community to heel. When you see one of these gutter crawling thugs solemnly saluting the flag this Forth Of July, and speaking of the patriotism, and their love for America, remember it.
The prosecutor in the Plame case, Fitzgerald, issued the following statement regarding Bush’s commutation of Libby’s sentance…
We fully recognize that the Constitution provides that commutation decisions are a matter of presidential prerogative and we do not comment on the exercise of that prerogative.
We comment only on the statement in which the President termed the sentence imposed by the judge as “excessive.” The sentence in this case was imposed pursuant to the laws governing sentencings which occur every day throughout this country. In this case, an experienced federal judge considered extensive argument from the parties and then imposed a sentence consistent with the applicable laws. It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals. That principle guided the judge during both the trial and the sentencing.
Although the President’s decision eliminates Mr. Libby’s sentence of imprisonment, Mr. Libby remains convicted by a jury of serious felonies, and we will continue to seek to preserve those convictions through the appeals process.
Bush, through his press secretary, has indicated he may pardon Libby outright. Look for that to happen if Libby keeps loosing his appeals. Expect the Washington press to rejoice if he does.
Broder seems to have at long last recognized that something is very rotten in Dick Cheney’s office. Huzzah. But it is curious that he mentions Scooter Libby’s name without addressing whether he still thinks it’s such a great idea to shield one of these lying, power-mad zealots from the consequences of his actions. (Maybe Sally Quinn ought to crank up the phone tree and find out.)
With all the Claud Rainsing about Dick Cheney’s power grab, you have to wonder when Broder will finally break to the surface of his beltway wet dream long enough to recognize that a federal prosecutor dealing with one of Dick Cheney’s minions repeatedly lying to his face might have justifiably been suspicious that something more than "just politics" was going on. After all, he was seeing this operation close up, in all its glory, years ago. Cops and prosecutors tend to get curious about why people are lying and covering things up. It’s just the way they think. And when people continue to do it, even when they are caught red handed and everyone knows it, prosecutors have no choice but to charge them. The stench coming from Cheney’s office had to have been extremely pungent.
Broder admits that he was wrong to think that Cheney would be a good second in command and that’s a big admission for him, I’m sure. But he also makes the flat claim that what Cheney has done was constitutional and legal. Again with the knee-jerk defense of the Bushies. Just because they say it doesn’t make it true and there are so many secrets still unrevealed that it’s impossible to properly assess that fact. It’s long past time for these insiders to stop automatically giving the administration the benefit of the doubt.
And it is also long past time they offered an apology to Patrick Fitzgerald who was just doing his job, quietly and deliberately, while Cheney and Scooter’s compatriots both in and out of the administration shrieked like wounded harpies at the prospect of any of the Vice President’s good and honest men being held to account for anything. These courtiers were so caught up in defending one of their own that they didn’t even realize that the bastard in all this was the guy who sent Scooter out to lie and cover up — their great pal, Dick Cheney, the man who learned everything he ever needed to learn about politics by watching Dick Nixon and then doing it better. These people look more and more foolish every day.
The decline of undercover reporting — and of investigative reporting in general — also reflects, in part, the increasing conservatism and cautiousness of the media, especially the smug, high-end Washington press corps. As reporters have grown more socially prominent during the last several decades, they’ve become part of the very power structure that they’re supposed to be tracking and scrutinizing.
Chuck Lewis, a former "60 Minutes" producer and founder of the Center for Public Integrity, once told me: "The values of the news media are the same as those of the elite, and they badly want to be viewed by the elites as acceptable."
Ever wonder why mainstream news has had that rancid aroma ever since Bush was elected? For a good alternative you might try the McClatchy Bureau home page. It’s motto is the heartening Truth To Power. Also, you should give Raw Story and HinesSight a look.
It’s Good To Be King. It’s Even Better To Be Vice President…
A politician’s candor always increases in direct proportion to proximity to retirement. That must be why Dick Armey, the departing house majority leader, so openly discussed his party’s version of pork-barrel politics with the A.P. "There is an old adage. To the victor goes the spoils," he said, explaining why Republican districts have received an average of $600 million more annually than Democratic districts since the Republican takeover. (By the way, that is nearly 18 times the partisan disparity that existed — in the opposite direction — when Democrats last ran the House.) It was good of Professor Armey to share his governing philosophy with us now, even if he and his pals Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay forgot to mention their partisan budgetary objectives when they were promoting the Contract With America in 1994. But their libertarian admirers may be disappointed to learn that these great statesmen were more focused on redistributing wealth upward than in reducing the size of government.
To the victor belong the spoils. Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had. What they wanted, simply, were the spoils. Nothing more. I’m sure historians will debate for generations how the train wreak that was the Bush presidency happened, and why it seemed that they always governed more like a gang of thugs then like the ideologues they presented themselves as being. But it’s simple. They’re governing like a gang of thugs, because that’s what they are.
The following story about our imperial vice president may seem trivial compared to Cheney’s unilaterally engineering the withdrawal of the Unites States of America from the Geneva Convention, but it’s everything that is cheap and squalid about the Bush Administration, and by extension the modern republican party, in a nutshell.
Sue Ellen Wooldridge, the 19th-ranking Interior Department official, arrived at her desk in Room 6140 a few months after Inauguration Day 2001. A phone message awaited her.
"This is Dick Cheney," said the man on her voice mail, Wooldridge recalled in an interview. "I understand you are the person handling this Klamath situation. Please call me at — hmm, I guess I don’t know my own number. I’m over at the White House."
Wooldridge wrote off the message as a prank. It was not. Cheney had reached far down the chain of command, on so unexpected a point of vice presidential concern, because he had spotted a political threat arriving on Wooldridge’s desk.
In Oregon, a battleground state that the Bush-Cheney ticket had lost by less than half of 1 percent, drought-stricken farmers and ranchers were about to be cut off from the irrigation water that kept their cropland and pastures green. Federal biologists said the Endangered Species Act left the government no choice: The survival of two imperiled species of fish was at stake.
Law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.
With predictable results…
First Cheney looked for a way around the law, aides said. Next he set in motion a process to challenge the science protecting the fish, according to a former Oregon congressman who lobbied for the farmers.
Because of Cheney’s intervention, the government reversed itself and let the water flow in time to save the 2002 growing season, declaring that there was no threat to the fish. What followed was the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Characteristically, Cheney left no tracks.
Other then the wreckage you mean. Those of you who seriously thought that the republicans were fighting for smaller, less intrusive government, more personal freedom from the nanny state, and for fiscal responsibility, are now feel free to feel like they’ve been had. Except you were warned. Over and over again you were warned. And the warning sign was this: instead of appealing to American’s hopes and dreams, they kept appealing to our fears, to our resentments, to our hatreds…
That should have told you everything. These thugs, who live in a gutter of fears and resentments and cheap bar stool hatreds, if they know nothing else they know the language of fear, and resentment, and hate. It’s their point of repose, their magnetic north, their absolute bedrock. Fear, and resentment, and hate. And you let them manipulate yours. And you got what you voted for. What do tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, liberated now from life itself, hundreds of dead Americans, mostly poor and black, floating in the waters of New Orleans, and the largest fish kill the American west has ever seen have in common?
Next time, vote your hopes instead of your fears, or it’s your fears you’ll be living with after the election.
People don’t always appreciate how the fascist right often cloaks its war against political opponents in terms of fighting indecency. The Bush Administration crack down a couple years ago on broadcast indecency was usually taken to be a bone tossed at it’s fundamentalist base. But it was of a piece with the right’s long war on dissent…
You might react by saying that the FCC fines only for exposure of certain portions of skin or particular diction, and it would never punish anyone for expressing a political view. I would respond with three facts.
First, in the 1950s FCC Chairman Doerfer started investigations against TV stations for showing reports done by Edward R. Murrow that were allegedly not sympathetic to famous republican anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy.
Doerfer was a McCarthy man. McCarthy was such an important figure in the Republican party, similar to Representative Tom Delay today, that his behavior was tolerated by the Republican White House. Indeed, President Eisenhower put two McCarthy people on the commission, among one the Chairman.
Second, while the Washington Post was starting in on the Watergate story, President Nixon’s staff, perhaps at his request, apparently caused his appointed Chairman at the FCC to begin investigations into the Washington Post’s television stations in Florida. The idea, according to then Post publisher Katherine Graham, was to have the investigations cast a cloud on the Post’s continued ownership of the stations, so as to undercut the business model that was supposed to further her initial public offering. Of course, the Post saw this as punishment for its pursuit of the story of the Watergate break-ins.
The political cartoonist Herblock used to draw Nixon’s FCC chairman and cronies with a big sign behind them that said "Fairness Doctrine: If It’s Not Pro-Administration, It’s Not Fair" Even back then attacks on the media by the right wing were fierce and unrelenting. Anytime a story that was critical of Nixon appeared in the press or on TV there were howls from the right about bias. But back then the news outlets had a little backbone. It wasn’t until the right managed to rewrite FCC rules on radio and TV station ownership, rules which once had bipartisan support on the theory that neither party should be allowed to dominate the public airwaves, that the right was able finally to shut progressive viewpoints out of the public debate.
The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.
The new report — entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” — raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.
While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America’s airwaves. Some key findings:
– In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.
– Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk — 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.
– 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.
Note that those top ten markets are either in solidly blue states, or in blue areas of blue states. The exception being Texas.
Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:
Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]
Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.
Along with other ideas, the report recommends that national radio ownership not be allowed to exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations, and local ownership should not exceed more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market.
I bought a satellite radio receiver for my car mostly so I didn’t have to listen to hate radio whenever I took my yearly road trips out west. Anyone who really thought back when the rules were being changed that letting big business rule the airwaves would result in a more consumer choice and more responsiveness to what consumers want to hear either knows now that they were sadly mistaken, or they never listed to radio in the first place and aren’t now. Of course, anyone who’s paid a utility bill recently in a deregulated market knows exactly how much consumer choice big business wants to let us have.
(Albany, New York) The Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation Tuesday night, but the state’s highest ranking Republican vowed not to allow it to come to a vote in the Senate.
And what’s hilarious about all this is that a lot of these so-called gay conservatives think all the sexual hedonism of the liberal "gay lifestyle" is wicked and we should all be about settling down and getting married and moving to the suburbs and getting rich. The way they tell it, it’s the socialist-communist urban liberal left that’s anti same-sex marriage. So you’d think it would be democrats who are adamantly against it. But no…
Just remember folks, while you’re busy kissing up to the republican establishment, that Truman Capote once said a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.
Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that — literally in almost every case — the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.
There are few things more disorienting than listening to Rush Limbaugh declare himself the icon of machismo and masculinity and mock others as "wimps." And if you look at those who have this obsession — the Chris Matthews and Glenn Reynolds and Jonah Goldbergs and Victor Davis Hansons — what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
Not that I’m saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one’s duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one’s pain threshold.
The post Yglesias links to also has this little gem…
Is Instapundit A Homo? Well, I think I met him three times or something, and he never tried to pork me. Given the fact I’m 180 pounds of rompin’-stompin’ Clydesdale-clompin’ 180 proof sex, I’d say he successfully passed that test.
Or maybe Reynolds isn’t into drunken horse asses. Three times or something. Good thing he didn’t have to use two hands to count them on or he’d probably still be trying to write that post. There’s an old joke about how God gave men brains and dicks and not enough blood to operate them both at the same time. Somehow I don’t think this guy has that problem.
Have you ever wondered how men who feel such a profound contempt for anyone who would allow themselves to be fucked, treat their women during sex? The Ex-Gay barkers generally link male homosexuality to a broken sense of one’s own masculinity. But isn’t it staringly obvious that a broken sense of masculinity is what’s behind male homophobia, and misogyny?
Oh…and this…
Pam at Pam’s House Blend riffs on a column in the right wing World Net Daily from Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who according to his Wikipedia entry is the founder of a group called The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, a group which is dedicated to promoting responsible fatherhood amongst African Americans. His column is a pathetic diatribe against the opposite sex…
Many women I counsel with and have interviewed on my radio and TV shows are quick to point out everything their man is doing wrong, but it’s rare to find one who will honestly admit that she’s screwed up the kids or that she’s driving her mate crazy.
It’s time that we look at the role women play in driving men out of the home and separating them from their children. That’s not to say that men don’t bear the brunt of the responsibility for their weakness. Men need to learn how to deal with women with strength and patience – this is love.
…
Most women themselves don’t understand why they provoke and agitate their spouse to lash out or run away. They don’t understand the subtle control they have over weak men.
Men typically marry for love and to raise children. The mistake they make is that they’re looking for love from the wrong source. Men shouldn’t look for love from women. Rather they should find God’s love and pass that love down to the wife and children.
WTF?? As a gay man, this contempt for the opposite sex you regularly see from the ersatz "manly man" crowd is really striking. The shibboleth is that they’re thumping their manly chests to prove they’re not homosexuals. I think they’re thumping their chests because it’s the only way they know how to prove they’re somebody. Because they’ve lost the person within. There is no there inside them anymore. That’s probably why they don’t know how to love anyone outside of themselves. Sex is a reflex, and they still understand it when it tugs at them. But love is utterly beyond this kind of guy. You need a heart for that, and all he’s got is his…masculinity.
There’s an order to life: God in Christ, Christ in man, man over woman, and woman over children. When this order is broken or violated you have "hell" on earth.
…
There’s been a deliberate plan to wipe out masculinity in society. When you wipe out the man you wipe out God, because the man represents God on earth. Then there’s no truth – no light – and no hope for the family.
The man represents God on earth… Well there’s a little Christian modesty for you. None of this meek shall inherit the earth claptrap for this guy. No, no. All you need to do to be the very embodiment of God on earth in his good book, is to be born with that there ‘Y’ chromosome and you’re set. And…to attack masculinity is to attack on God.
And I could almost buy that, in the sense that to demean and degrade anything that is a part of this wonderful universe is an attack on its creator, on existence. To attack femininity is to attack God. To attack sexuality is to attack God. To attack any part of our shared humanity is an attack on God. But I don’t think that’s what this creep has in mind. He thinks his ‘Y’ makes him something. But all it makes him is male. Now to this gay boy, and I’m sure most heterosexual women will agree, that is no trivial thing. But you need to be more then simply male to be attractive. You need to be decent. And the ‘Y’ won’t make you that. You have to make yourself that. That’s the part people like Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson miss.
I would ask the Reverend what the difference is, between holding yourself above women simply because you’re a man, and holding yourself above others simply because of the color of your skin. You can make a case for the proposition that the genders view the world around them in their own way, but that’s not to say that one gender is better then another, let alone that being male makes you God on earth. This is the cop out people take, when the struggle for character becomes too much. Instead of reaching beyond themselves, for that better person they could become, they buy the cheap seat to self esteem. Why bother making yourself a better person, when you’re already the embodiment of God on earth?
And the problem with that is that it leaves an empty spot, a barren patch deep down inside, where a conscience is supposed to develop. The Reverend may think he’s preaching a message of strength to his male flock, but he’s just making them weak. "…what one finds in almost every case is that those who want to convert our political process and especially our national policies into a means of proving one’s "traditional masculine virtues" — the physically courageous warriors unbound by effete conventions — themselves could not be further removed from those attributes, and have lives which are entirely devoid of such "virtues."
As Frank Lloyd Wright said, "No stream rises higher then its source" The cult of masculinity, is more of a dildo. A grandiose substitute for something that’s all well and good just for what it is, but that shouldn’t be made into any more then what it is. A masculinity that feels itself threatened by gay men, let alone the opposite sex, is one that’s probably broken to start with. Your own maleness is a good thing to understand if you’re a guy. But it isn’t what matters. It’s what you make of yourself that matters. The higher ground, the exalted status, is possible to all of us, regardless of our gender, or our sexuality. But so is this:
You need a really good set of brakes to avoid finding yourself in this place. The ancient passions of our tribal past, of the long march of life on earth from the sea to our human existence, can sweep us off our feet in an instant, and deliver us into unmitigated evil before we even know where we’re going. The flesh of our existence is an amazing, wonderful, glorious thing. But to see your personal salvation in it is to walk away from everything fine and noble a human being can be, and bellyflop into the jungle of our past. Real men, like real women, have brains, and hearts, and a conscience that knows where the lines are you cannot cross, without renouncing your humanity.
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