And Speaking Of Closet Cases That Shouldn’t Be Allowed Anywhere Near Kids…
Via Firedoglake…the unsurprises just keep on coming. Here’s another republican operative and closet case, Matt Drudge, on the despicable predatory sexual behavior of…wait for it…teenage boys …
And if anything, these kids are less innocent — these 16 and 17 year-old beasts…and I’ve seen what they’re doing on YouTube and I’ve seen what they’re doing all over the Internet — oh yeah — you just have to tune into any part of their pop culture. You’re not going to tell me these are innocent babies. Have you read the transcripts that ABC posted going into the weekend of these instant messages, back and forth? The kids are egging the Congressman on! The kids are trying to get this out of him. We haven’t got the whole story on this.
Well we’ve got the whole story on you Matt, now don’t we?
You could say "well Drudge, it’s abuse of power, a congressman abusing these impressionable, young 17 year-old beasts, talking about their sex lives with a grown man, on the internet." Because you have to remember, those of us who have seen some of the transcripts of these nasty instant messages. This was two ways, ladies and gentlemen. These kids were playing Foley for everything he was worth. Oh yeah. Oh, I haven’t…they were talking about how many times they’d masturbated, how many times they’d done it with their girlfriends this weekend…all these things and these "innocent children." And this "poor" congressman sitting there typing, "oh am I going to get any," you know?
Well those shameless young hussies. Strutting their stuff in front of that poor closet case of a wack job republican congresscritter. Maybe next congress they’ll put them all in burkas just in case there are any grown adults on capital hill who can’t fucking control their libidos, let alone can’t remember that part of being an adult is Fucking Setting A Goddamn Example!
Obviously the difference between an adolescent and a child is that the teenager is becoming sexually mature. But the operative word there is becoming. At Minimum it is not the prerogative of grown adults to indulge that sexual inexperience and immaturity, to push a kid’s buttons when the kid is only just discovering that the buttons are even there to begin with, for the sake of their own greedy selfish urges…I won’t even dignify it with that beautiful word desire. Jesus Christ Almighty! Adults are supposed to be teaching and encouraging kids at that stage in their lives how to Fucking Manage Their Sexual Nature Responsibly And Honorably not exploiting their inexperience, their naivety, their adolescence, for pleasure, like they’re some kind of sexual junk food.At long last, at long fucking last, is there Anyone left in the republican party that knows how to be an adult?
I can see where a kid would be positively creeped out by what Foley was doing. But I’m 53 years old now, and I can see something else perfectly well: how deliberately, how calculatedly Foley was pushing that kid’s buttons. There is no mistaking it for what it is. Foley was taking sexual advantage of that kid…even if at that point he hadn’t laid a fucking hand on him. I can see how a kid would be creeped out. But as an adult I can see something more. At our age (Foley is a year younger then me it seems) even a guy who has very little life experience knows perfectly well where those buttons are, and just how to push them. That’s what’s so disturbing. Foley is sexually manipulating that kid and the kid sort-of seems to realize it, but he’s still too young to really grasp what’s going on the way a mature adult can.
And the profound embarrassment lurking just behind that kid’s words are palpable to me. Drudge it seems, can only see the surface bravado…but not the heart…of a kid. Why is that not surprising? Are they fucking all a bunch of sociopaths in the republican establishment?
A Republican staff member warned congressional pages five years ago to watch out for Congressman Mark Foley, according to a former page.
Matthew Loraditch, a page in the 2001-2002 class, told ABC News he and other pages were warned about Foley by a supervisor in the House Clerk’s office.
Loraditch, the president of the Page Alumni Association, said the pages were told "don’t get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff."
…
Pages report to either Republican or Democratic supervisors, depending on the political party of the member of Congress who nominate them for the page program.
Several Democratic pages tell ABC News they received no such warnings about Foley.
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image…(Continued)
Via Atrios… The True Blue Patriotic Christian Americans responsible for covering up Mark Foley’s behavior with teenagers (that would be House Majority Leader John Boehner and House Speaker Dennis Hastert) are planning a fundraiser for U.S. Rep. Don Sherwood, who by the way, recently settled a multimillion dollar lawsuit with a young mistress who accused him of abuse. Pam’s House Blend had the details…
Rep. Don Sherwood reached a settlement Tuesday with a former mistress who accused him of abuse in a $5.5 million lawsuit, according to his lawyer.
Terms of the settlement between Sherwood, R-Pa., and Cynthia Ore, with whom he acknowledged a five-year affair, will remain confidential, said Paul Clark, a spokesman for Sherwood’s attorney, Bobby Burchfield.
"Attorneys for Cynthia Ore and Congressman Don Sherwood announced today that their clients have resolved their differences, and the lawsuit will be dismissed," Clark said, reading from a statement.
…Sherwood, a fourth-term congressman, is married with three daughters. He issued a statement this summer apologizing for the affair but denying he physically hurt Ore. He also said she never lived with him, which she had claimed in her lawsuit.
The Open Sewer That Wants To Remake America In Its Image
Pam’s House Blend has a poll up, from the right wing World Net Daily, which asks the question…
What does the Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation mean for the Republican Party?
The highest affirmative response, at 37.66 percent, is…
What Foley did is inexcusable, but if the U.S. is to win the war on terror, republicans must win in November.
Well what a coincidence. As it turns out, 37 percent seems to be about the floor beyond which Bush’s approval ratings never seem to drop any lower, no matter what jackass thing he says or does. Iraq. Katrina. A mountain of debt amid corruption and cronyism that would make Grant blush. None of it seems to matter. Bush never gets below the mid thirties in the polls no matter what.
Well now we now where that 37 percent is coming from don’t we? This is the Bush power base talking. They are the 37 percent of True Blue American Patriots who will vote republican, even if it means putting a grown man who hits on vulnerable teenage boys back into office…for the sake of…what was it again? Oh yes…to bring America back to decent Christian Moral Values.
Remember this the next time some republican starts yapping at you about liberal moral relativism.
TPMmuckraker September 12, 2006 02:46 PM: WPost Taps White House War Salesman for Op-Ed Spot: The big story in the New York Times’ Sept. 8, 2002 edition was headlined, "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That infamous article, by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, told the now-debunked tales of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, through the voices of lying Iraqi defectors and anonymous quotes by Bush administration officials. Most folks who read it probably can’t recall the details of the article. But few have forgotten one comment from an unnamed "hard-liner" administration official, paraphrased by the reporters:
The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.
It was memorable then for being such a clever and powerful turn of phrase. It’s memorable now because we know it was baseless — yet oft-repeated. And it’s important to remember at this moment because the man who wrote it, Michael Gerson, just got himself a regular column in the Washington Post.
With no apparent sense of irony, the Post announced on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that Gerson — one of the men who worked hardest to dishonestly connect al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in the public mind, and launch an invasion of Iraq based on the horrible events of that day — will join its op-ed team.
In the release publicizing its selection, Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt calls Gerson "an eloquent writer and provocative thinker." Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Take, for example, this eloquent and provocative line from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own." (We know now, of course, that’s not the case.)
Yep, that was Gerson’s. He was, in fact, the only speechwriter in the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), created to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the U.S. public. He was responsible for nearly every misleading statement that came out of the administration — at least the ones that sounded good…
What is more despicable…a totalitarian state that shuts down the free press, or a free press that sells its country out to totalitarians?
Wait…you just gotta love this. A Pennsylvania pro-family group… Later in the article you discover that it’s the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Family Association. Agape Press is owned and operated by the American Family Association. So it isn’t merely "A Pennsylvania pro-family group", but themselves that they are are talking about here. They can’t even get the first sentence of their "news article" out without being deceptive. Not one single sentence into it and they’re already being deceitful. If there is an answer to all the wickedness in this world, a way out of sinfulness and toward redemption and hope, their religion sure isn’t it, is it.
But…anyway…
…suggests that the recent arrest of a University of Pennsylvania professor on child sex charges should cause the school to consider banning homosexual professors, just as the Boy Scouts ban homosexual troop leaders.
Considering how often heterosexual teachers have been caught recently in bed with their students, your reflex might be to just toss this off as yet another fart from the kook pews. But what’s interesting about this piece is that, for a change, they seem not to be relying on Paul Cameron’s junk science to back them up, but another guy who I hadn’t heard of before. His name is Gene Abel.
The AFA of Pennsylvania leader cites a study of non-incarcerated child-sex offenders by research scientist Gene Abel that found homosexuals "sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls." Abel’s research reports that, on average, 150.2 boys are molested per homosexual offender, whereas 19.8 girls are molested per heterosexual offender.
Well that sounds pretty bad. Bad in the same way mind you, as Paul Cameron’s factoid that the average lifespan of a homosexual is 46 years sounds pretty bad. Right away, even before you look into it deeper, you just know that there is something a tad…er…queer, about it. If homosexuals are molesting kids at a rate several orders of magnitude greater then heterosexuals are, then even if we’re just a tiny fragment of the population as a whole you’d expect to see something like nearly every kid in America having been molested at least once in their lives. And since kids eventually grow up to become adults, nearly all adults alive today must have been molested when they were kids. And yet, that is just not the case. So you know something’s wrong here right away, and that something is either Abel, or Agape is distorting the work of another honest scientist.
But Abel, though he seems credentialed in a way Paul Cameron is not, is a crank. Maybe even a bigger uglier crank then Paul Cameron, because Abel actually thinks that most child molesters are other children, not adults. Paul Cameron is something of a pathetic figure. Abel, at least to the degree I’ve been able to find out anything about him so far, is horrifying.
You can tell that something’s not quite right about this man immediately, simply by doing a Google search on him. What you get, page after page of it, are cites by the right wing kook press and nobody else, until you’re very, very deep in the rankings. So that’s the first tip off right there. A little casual digging further, and you start running across his books, like Stop Child Molestation, and that’s where it starts getting interesting.
Abel thinks the average age of a child molestor is 13, which means that most child molesters, according to Abel, are children themselves. According to one reviewer at Amazon.Com, Abel blames that on…testosterone, accidental pairings of orgasm with thoughts of younger children, sexual victimization, or "biology that is deviant." Don’t bother looking up "deviant biology" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because you won’t find it.
Deviant biology. Deviant biology. If you’ve ever entertained the thought that finally convincing the homophobes that our sexual orientation isn’t chosen, isn’t an artifact of poor parenting or ungodliness, but that it is something hard wired into us either at or before birth, if you’ve ever thought for a second that convincing them of this fact would make them hate us a little less, you can disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Repeat after me: Deviant biology. Deviant biology.
There is much in that review of Abel’s book that is worth noting. The emphasis in the following is my own…
The first sign that something is amiss is his claim that one out of every twenty boys develops pedophilia, usually in childhood or puberty. He never explains how he arrives at this figure, one which cannot be found anywhere else in the literature. This 5% prevalence rate would mean that pedophilia is one of the most common serious childhood diseases in America, similar in prevalence to asthma.
A handful of influential therapists began promoting the belief in an epidemic of childhood sexual deviance about 20 years ago-at the same time that some of the same therapists convinced the public that satanic ritual sexual abuse was occurring at nursery schools across the nation, and that large numbers of women had been sexually abused by their parents in childhood but had repressed their memories of it. Both of these beliefs were eventually disproved by investigators and researchers, but only after thousands of children were traumatized and adults’ lives were destroyed. However, the myth of rampant childhood sexual deviance has survived, most likely because its believers-juvenile sex offender therapists-comprise an industry mostly hidden from public view and exempt from oversight by the mainstream mental health community. Sexuality researchers have noted that these therapists commonly label children as "sex offenders" for mutually desired sexual contact with each other, then imply that they are dangerous to other children.
Abel recommends that all parents question their sons at around 6th grade about their sexual fantasies. Any boy who is suspected of having sexual thoughts involving younger children, or who has been sexually touched by an older child or adult, is to be referred to a "sex-specific therapist" who will test him for pedophilic symptoms. The test should be either a sexual interest test (developed by Abel himself, in which the boy examines photographs of children and adults in swimwear while a computer measures visual reaction time), a lie detector test, or a plethysmograph connected to his genitals while he looks at or listens to sexually stimulating material.
The problem with such tests (aside from their intensely humiliating and stigmatizing effects) is that they have never been validated, a process which would require testing a representative sample of American children to establish norms. In fact, all researchers are agreed that very little is known about normal sexual feelings during childhood and adolescence. To make matters worse, Abel refuses to release data necessary for independent researchers to evaluate his test.
I’m still digging for a reliable link to this, but I see out there what looks like a news article noting that Dr. Paul Fedoroff (who is a staff psychiatrist with the Law and Mental Health program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and co-director of the sexual behaviors clinic at the Royal Ottawa Hospital in Canada), said that at least some of Abel’s studies might not be reliable because…
…they were conducted on sex offenders who were given certificates of confidentiality, meaning that they would not be turned over to the police, no matter what they admitted. To get the certificate of confidentiality, the offender had to admit something. The more they divulged, the better they looked in front of their therapists.
So Abel was apparently interviewing subjects who had a vested interest in telling him what he wanted to know. And since he doesn’t divulge his data, we cannot even know whether even this self serving source of information was enough to justify his conclusions.
But never mind. It isn’t science, if you’re not willing to publish your data along with your results. That one fact alone tells us all we need to know about Abel. He is not a man of science. This is why you see him being cited approvingly in the kook pews. And just like all his other neighbors there, while posturing as a defender of children, Abel shows a stunningly depraved indifference toward them.
However, the most chilling part of Abel’s book comes when he outlines treatment methods to cure "pedophilia" among boys: separation from other children (possibly removal from the family), monitoring of sexual feelings and behavior by family members and friends who report to the therapist (and sometimes by plethysmograph), high doses of sex drive reducing drugs, covert sensitization, and aversion therapy with ammonia. The last two methods are intended to eliminate particular sexual thoughts by pairing them with pain, fear, or humiliation. Any of these methods may be imposed on the boy for life by the therapist, regardless of his or his parents’ wishes.
Although Abel refers to them as "breakthroughs in testing, medicine, and therapies," students of history will recognize plethysmographs, sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, and covert sensitization as the methods used decades ago to "cure" homosexuality. Mainstream health professionals and the public (even those who disapprove of homosexual behavior) now consider them ineffective, dangerous, and unethical. Numerous accounts show they lead to nightmares, depression, chronic anxiety, self-hatred, and suicidal thoughts among both gay men and children labeled as "deviant." And no wonder: Considering the fact that we know almost nothing about the development of sexual feelings, it is clear that such efforts amount to messing with something we don’t understand.
Like the "expert" doctors and therapists who justified their use on homosexuals, Abel shows no concern for emotional trauma and intense stigma these methods inflict on boys, instead rationalizing such abuse by writing that the protection of normal children takes precedence over the welfare of deviant children.
Especially disturbing is the apparent endorsement of this approach by some other leaders in the juvenile sex offender industry-an approach that would create a new class of lepers consisting, presumably, of 5% of all boys.
So with utterly no actual science grounding his notions of the developing sexuality of children, Abel proposes to subject any of them, as young as sixth graders, to having their genitals hooked up to a machine while they’re shown provocative images of scantily clad children and adults, and then perhaps a nice regimen of sex drive reducing drugs, aversion therapy, covert sensitization and the occasional lungful of ammonia. Sixth graders mind you. And he figures some of them may have a "deviant biology" which makes them dangerous to the other kids. That…and testosterone. This is the man being cited by ersatz Christian publications as an authority on child molestation. Well…I guess so. Picture him shoving ammonia in a sixth grader’s face while the kid has his genitals hooked up to a machine and he’s being shown a picture of another kid in a bikini.
So by that logic, and accepting the premise (which I do not) that men who molest boys are by definition homosexuals, then we should not only keep gay professors out of colleges, we should keep gay students out of colleges too. And grade school. And you’d better believe that this is also on the agenda of the AFA too. Just…one step at a time please.
Eventually, it’ll be only Christian Nationalists who are allowed to go to school. Well…the straight boys anyway. The ones who pass the plethysmograph test. Because a women’s place is in the house, being gracefully submissive to her husband and bearing him as many children as he wants her to, so girls don’t need much of an education really. And the boys will only be taught by male professors, since women shouldn’t have authority over men. Remind me again…why did we bomb the Taliban?
What will it say about President Clinton? Here’s Rush Limbaugh with a preview:
A friend of mine [Cyrus Nowrasteh] out in California has produced and filmed — I think it’s a two-part mini-series on 9/11 that ABC is going to run in prime-time over two nights, close to or on 9/11. It’s sort of surprising that ABC’s picked it up, to me. I’ve had a lot of people tell me about it, my friends told me about it…And from what I have been told, the film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration in doing anything about militant Islamofascism or terrorism during its administration. It cites failures of Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Sandy Burglar.
Condoleezza Rice gets that fated memo about planes flying into buildings, and makes it very clear to anyone who’ll listen just how concerned President Bush is about these terrorist threats — despite the fact that we’re given little concrete evidence of the president’s concern or interest in taking action. Maybe my memory fails me, but the only person I remember talking about Osama bin Laden back in 1998 was President Clinton, while the current anti-terrorist stalwarts worked the country into a frenzy over what? Blow jobs. In the end, “The Path to 9/11″ feels like an excruciatingly long, winding and deceptive path, indeed.
ABC’s drama will purportedly conflate separate incidents into a single fictional account that gives the impression that U.S. operatives were literally standing outside Bin Ladin’s compound ready to go and Clinton refused to give the order. Allegedly, the television program will even depict a make-believe phone call in which Sandy Berger tells field agents that if they go after Bin Ladin, they’ll have to do it without the support of the U.S. Government.
This warped account is pure wing-nut fantasy. It’s both fictional and irresponsibly untrue. But is it even truthy?
Richard Clarke, a terrorism expert who served under Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. Bush, refutes this claim utterly. Clarke does describe an incident in which Clinton hesitates on a question of international law until Al Gore persuades him to be more aggressive. But Clarke maintains that at no time was Clinton ever given an opportunity to capture Osama Bin Ladin that he failed to give the go order.
And if Richard Clarke’s testimony isn’t good enough for you, the 9/11 Commission itself discredits the claim that Clinton ever refused an offer of Osama bin Ladin on a silver platter.
So much for being based on the 9-11 commission report…
What we do know is that after Osama Bin Ladin bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Bill Clinton personally ordered simultaneous military strike camps in Afghanistan, and was roundly criticized by Republicans for "Wagging the Dog" to distract from his Monica Lewinsky scandal.
We also know that President Clinton sent strong Memoranda to the CIA reiterating that they were authorized to use tribal assets or other means to hunt down Osama Bin Ladin, and kill him if necessary. And we know that President Clinton personally negotiated with the leader of Pakistan and secured a joint plan to capture Bin Ladin – plans that evaporated when Mr. Sharif was violently overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf.
We also know that President Clinton demanded daily intelligence reports about Bin Ladin after 1998 and that his administration successfully thwarted a Millenium Attack – with connections to what we would eventually understand to be Al Qaeda – by arresting an Algerian Jihadist smuggling a load of explosives into the U.S.
And finally, we also know that when the Bush Administration transitioned into power, they did not agree with Clinton officials that terrorism should be the major priority of their administration until after September 11, 2001.
Bear in mind, ABC is the same network that tried its level best to whitewash the murder of Matthew Shepard back in November of 2004. it deliberately and despicably planted in the national discourse on gay bashing, calculated anti-gay propaganda that Shepard was a meth addict and his murder was the result of a drug deal gone bad. The religious right had been yapping since before the poor kid’s body was cold that he must have brought it on himself somehow, in some way, because after all he was a homosexual. Whenever anyone made the obvious link between religious right hate mongering and Shepard’s murder, they fell over themselves trying to smear that poor kid even more. He was a sexual predator they said. He was a prostitute they said. He was a drug addict who liked dangerous sex they said. Until ABC News gave their smears the respectability of a mainstream news network, nobody beyond the kook pews took them seriously.
But ABC News knew that calling Matthew Shepard a meth addict who may even have had a sexual relationship with one of his killers wasn’t merely a right wing obscenity. It was…controversial. And that meant ratings. So they did it. Less then four months later, in Santa Fe New Mexico, a young gay man, James Maestas was beaten so badly by his three attackers, his lungs were burned by his own stomach acid.
Now ABC News will, in a few days, give another bitter America hating right wing fantasy wings. And its of a piece with little they care anymore about the lives of common average everyday Americans. Instead of holding the Bush gang accountable for how badly they’ve damaged America’s ability to defend itself, they’re going to help it pass the buck, and never mind that isn’t going to make Americans one whit safer from terrorism. They didn’t smear a dead gay college student to draw attention to anti-gay violence. They did it for the money. And that’s where the fascist right, and the network executives shake hands.
Tales From George Bush’s America…Special Katrina Remembrance Edition
One year ago today the United States lost a city. And if you’re still wondering why reconstruction has been taking so long to even get really started, then you’ve been missing the point of the past five years. Digby has a post up, linking to a Frank Rich column that pretty much nails it, but I wouldn’t go reading it if you’re still not ready to see that open sewer that is the republican party today for what it is…
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
The inaction is the action… People who are thinking that the devistation of New Orleans, and the Bush gang’s shockingly callow response to it are going to hurt the republicans politically still aren’t getting it. New Orleans is dead, but Louisiana is red. The GOP is counting it as a plus, never doubt it.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students frm Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!
This is why George Bush could strum a guitar while New Orleans died. Last year, as the appalling scope of the disaster just kept getting more and more worse, and Brad DeLong was saying, astonished, "I really am naive. I did not expect this degree of unpreparedness and incompetence. I did not expect this even though I knew that the Bush administration is worse than you can imagine, even after having taken account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine"…I wrote this:
For generations the Republicans have played Americans against one another. As government in the late 20th century began to acknowledge and protect the rights of minorities and women, the republicans began a concerted effort to deliberately weaken government, so it could no longer do that. An America that extends the promise of liberty and justice to all is anathema to them. For decades they poured billions of right wing dollars into a relentless campaign to convince Americans that greed is good, and that their worst prejudices were righteous. American self reliance became self interest. American independence became insularity. In pulpits all across America, the Jesus who taught us to love our neighbor was crucified as a communist and a pervert, and a new one who taught that might makes right was put in his place. The payoff came with the election of George Bush. The punch line came this week in New Orleans.
It isn’t that America can’t respond to the need of New Orleans as well as it can the need of those places destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami…it’s that it isn’t supposed to. That’s what all the vitriolic rhetoric about "nanny government" means. A government that can wage a successful fight against civil chaos after a devastating natural disaster, can also prevent lynchings, wife beatings, and gay bashings. Government isn’t supposed to take care of the powerless, whether they’ve been rendered helpless by a hurricane, or by a lynch mob. Rights are for the powerful. To be able to just get on with your life is a privilege, not a right. That is George Bush’s America.
Somewhere in a corner of the putrid stench the Superdome has become, are the rotting corpses of two elderly New Orleans women, laying where their bodies were dragged to get them out of the way of the still living. Take your mental camera into the Superdome. Pan it across the trash littered bleachers, move down the aisles, through the suffocating stench of hundreds of backed up toilets and cardboard boxes full of human excrement. There…there they are…in that dark corner over there. Two pitiful little bodies you could almost mistake for just another random pile of trash. But they were people once. Your fellow Americans. Slowly zoom your mental camera in on that image. There is the America the republicans have been doggedly leading us to for decades now. There is what is inside the shining city on the hill.
NEW ORLEANS – Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far frm the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.
Officials had hoped to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut down the area where the vehicles were being loaded.
"We were rolling," Capt. Jean Clark said. "If the buses had kept coming, we would have this whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it."
…
Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Force National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when evacuation efforts began. That number swelled as people poured into the Superdome because they believed it was the best place to get a ride out of town.
He estimated Saturday morning that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were left at the Superdome. But it remained a mystery why the buses stopped coming to pick up refugees and shuttle them away.
Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she left the Superdome and walked toward a bus. "I never thought I’d make it. Oh, God, I thought I’d die in there. I’ve never been through anything this awful."
The arena’s second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.
Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench frm backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.
"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That’s all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.
Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.
…
At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees frm the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.
"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.
The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome…
One military official said that as of Friday morning, 4,200 people had been evacuated, including 1,000 frm the convention center, where many times that number spent days without any aid and where several corpses lay on the street Thursday. Another military official said that commanders had not been aware of the large and desperate concentration of people at the convention center until Wednesday, that the focus had been on evacuating the Superdome and conducting other emergency operations in the city.
"It had not perhaps been raised to our consciousness by the reports we had received," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, the chief operations officer of the U.S. Northern Command, said in a phone interview.
…
By Friday night, the number of National Guard troops was expected to reach 11,700 in Louisiana and 8,000 in Mississippi, with more than 5,000 troops still to come over the weekend. Add to that more than 2,500 Coast Guard personnel on the scene with more than 50 aircraft. Four Coast Guard cutters are stationed in the Mississippi River to offer communications and logistics support, said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Sharon Richey. Even so, one frustrated state senator announced that he has lined up barges to float aid down the Mississippi River to stranded individuals…
…
As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them — as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.
Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request frm FEMA.
"We know very well how to do this, and it’s just incomprehensible that we’re not," Wattenburg said.
…
Canaan Spriggs, 31, and his extended family, including three infants, again prepared to sleep on the floor of a nearby parking garage. He said he was pleased by the sight of the military convoys but that the city was far frm tame.
"It’s quiet now, but the night-time is wild," he said. "They’re sugarcoating it on the news. Come out here at night, but only if you have the National Guard with you. There are gunshots, and you hear people screaming for help.
WASHINGTON – Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help frm his state’s National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come frm Washington until late Thursday.
The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views frm the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.
But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:
Conditions in the Convention Center
# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. — 2:11)
# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)
# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.
# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.
Uncollected corpses
# Brown: That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report frm my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I’m just not going to speculate.
# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, ‘People are dying in front of us’ — 4:36 )
# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.
Hospital evacuations
# Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.
# CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells — 4:45 )
# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.(Mayor’s video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix — 1:03)
Violence and civil unrest
# Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.
# CNN’s Chris Lawrence: Frm here and frm talking to the police officers, they’re losing control of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire — 2:12)
The federal response:
# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.
# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.
# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.
# Nagin: They don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.
# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.
Security
# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There’s some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there’s somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty’s rant on the government’s ‘bungled’ response — 0:57)
# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.
# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.
# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They’re literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N’Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen." Out of the cameras’ range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
…
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
No matter how nervously Kanye West said what he did, it wasn’t some revealed truth, but a long assumed feeling. Bush doesn’t care about black people. No fucking kidding.
The problem is that he doesn’t care about anybody.
The fact that the citizens of New Orleans are now Aligator MRE’s is of concern to Bush, because it may make him look bad. But the world of George Bush is a narrow one, not much beyond his nose. Everything is about him.
Which is why he can praise Brown. Even the French fired Nivelle once he failed and replaced him with Petain. Bush only sees what affects him.
COUSHATTA — Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children.
The situation has outraged relatives of the black children who have filed a complaint with school officials.
Superintendent Kay Easley will meet with the family members in her office this morning.
…
Easley would not comment much on the allegations Wednesday, saying it is a personnel issue. She acknowledged that she has investigated the claim. And she confirmed that the bus driver did not run her route Wednesday, nor would she today.
Asked if the driver would work for the rest of the year, Easley said, "I’m not going to answer the questions. "You’re getting all that you’re going to get from me. I’m sorry."
…
After Richmond and Williams [the parents of the children] filed complaints with the School Board, Transportation Supervisor Jerry Carlisle asked Davis to make seat assignments for her passengers, Sessoms [a relative] said.
"But she still assigned the black children to the back of the bus," she added.
And the nine children had to share only two seats, meaning the older children had to hold the younger ones in their laps.
A new solution reached Monday by School Board officials has a black bus driver driving across town to pick up the nine black children.
Dig it. The new solution was to kick the black kids off the white lady’s bus altogether.
It’s Louisiana and I’m not surprised. I’ve driven from one end of this country to the other and Louisiana has always stood out in my remembrance for the level of openly in-your-face white racism I saw while I was there. It’s a problem everywhere, but in Louisiana it was like stepping into a time warp, not just in terms of how often you saw it, but how they all seemed to accept it as a fact of life. New Orleans was the exception to that. Drive across the causeway into Covington and north and there might as well have never been a civil rights movement. But in New Orleans itself, at least the parts I explored, you didn’t see that. And that’s almost certainly why New Orleans is still a devastated ruin. I’m convinced the rest of Louisiana was glad to see it go.
USNews.com: Washington Whispers: Animal House in the West Wing: He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.
"He came in here and he trashed the place and it’s not his place." -D.C. pundit David Broder, bloviating on the unacceptable personal behavior of…Bill Clinton.
A ceremony to honor the achievements of six high profile gay Californians erupted into a political fight at the State Capitol Monday with some Republicans storming off the Assembly Floor.
The Legislature’s Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender Caucus (LGBT) sponsored the first Pride Recognition Awards, a program they say is designed to recognize the accomplishments of people who happen to be gay in their respective fields.
Conservative Assemblymembers boycotted the program.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise," said Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia, R-San Diego. "We’re wasting a lot of time we have a lot of bills on the floor."
The honorees included several celebrities, including former NFL tackle Esera Tuaolo and Reichen Lehmkuhl, the million dollar prize winner of the "The Amazing Race 4" reality television show. Watching quietly from the back of the room was Lehmkuhl’s partner, Lance Bass, a singer with the former boy band ‘N Sync. Bass recently went public with the fact he is gay.
Assemblymember Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said he hoped the event would benefit Republicans by showing them the "strength of our diversity and the many accomplishments in a variety of disciplines." But about 10 Republicans either walked out or boycotted the event altogether.
"So it’s a great disappointment that they’re acting like such children," Leno said.
MEADE – Two Meade boys have confessed to cutting down a rainbow flag outside a hotel here, the proprietors said Monday.
The Lakeway Hotel became a focus of controversy last month after owners J.R. and Robin Knight hung the colorful banner, a gift from their 12-year-old son, in front of the place. Locals uncomfortable with such a symbol – it also stands for gay pride – decried the flag’s presence and then, in the early-morning hours of July 31, someone cut it down.
The disappearance had remained a mystery, but the father of two local boys brought them to the Lakeway on Friday and they owned up to their involvement.
"They apologized and said they’d replace it," J.R. Knight said. He didn’t name the boys, and Meade County Sheriff Michael Cox said only that officials are investigating.
Meanwhile, Knight said replacing a 5-foot-by-5-foot plate glass window smashed in at the hotel’s restaurant – also apparently due to the flag flap – probably would cost about $500. Two neon beer signs destroyed in the same incident probably will cost another $1,000.
Someone tossed a brick through the window early Friday morning, according to the Knights and local authorities, who are investigating. Scrawled on the brick was the word "fag."
An 18-year-old gay man who was badly beaten in Edgewood on July 30 might have been assaulted because a man at the party believed the gay man had touched his butt, a statement of probable cause filed in state District Court says.
William York, 21, of Edgewood, and Leroy Segura, 19, of Moriarty have been charged with aggravated battery, kidnapping, false imprisonment and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Bond for each man was set at $100,000 cash only by District Judge Michael Vigil on Monday. Two juveniles, a boy and girl, are also being held in connection to the case.
York believed the victim tried to grab his butt while they were at a party in Edgewood on July 30, the statement says. He said Segura, who is known by the nickname “Half Pint,” told him the victim tried to grab York’s butt, the statement says.
In an interview, York told state police the comment upset him and made him want to fight the 18-year-old man, the statement says. York said everyone at the party made fun of the 18-year-old man because he was gay, the statement says. York said he wanted to “scare” the victim to “make him straight and to get him to stop acting the way he was,” the statement says.
The juvenile male arrested in the case said he, York and Segura tied the gay man’s hands, placed a torn black T-shirt over his head, walked him into a deserted field, pushed him onto a downed fence and beat him, the statement says. The juvenile, the statement says, said he egged on York by calling the gay man joto, a derogatory Spanish word meaning gay.
The documents did not contain statements from Segura, who wore a rosary around his neck in court Monday.
The gay man suffered bleeding on the brain, a concussion, facial lacerations and bruising from the beating, which lasted for hours, state police have said. York, Segura and the juvenile male have been charged under New Mexico’s hate-crimes law.
The 18-year-old victim went to the party with a girl, who was also beaten and held inside the trailer house where the party took place, the statement says. She told police “the male subjects would knock (the gay man) down and if he did not get up off the ground within a certain count or if he did not make any noise, they would jump on him, hitting and kicking him,” the statement says.
The female victim said the beating stopped as “the sun was coming up,” the statement says.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I rise to point out the ridiculousness of the exercise…"
Remember this name if you haven’t already heard it: George Allen. Son of legendary Redskins coach George Allen, one time governor of the state of Virgina, now senator, and all around racist prick. This is from his Wikipedia entry:
Allen has a long history of interest in the Confederacy although he never lived in the South until he transferred from UCLA to the University of Virginia as a sophomore in college.
The May 8, 2006 [16] and the May 15, 2006 [17]issues of The New Republic reported extensively on Allen’s long association with the Confederate flag. The magazine reported that "[a]ccording to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the [Confederate] flag–on himself, his car, inside his home–or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000." Allen wore a Confederate flag pin for his high school senior class photo. In high school, college, and law school, Allen adorned his vehicle with a Confederate flag. In college he displayed a Confederate flag in his room. He displayed a Confederate flag in his family’s living room until 1992. In 1993, Allen’s first statewide TV campaign ad for governor included a Confederate flag. In 2000, when a voter told Allen, "Long live the Confederate flag!" Allen replied, "You got it!"
Allen has confirmed that the pin in his high school yearbook was a Confederate flag. Allen has said "it is possible" that he had a Confederate flag on his car in high school. He has not responded to the allegations that he displayed the flag on his pickup truck and in his room in college and law school. In 1993, he confirmed that he had long displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. Greg Stevens, the political consultant who made the 1993 TV ad, confirmed that the ad included a Confederate flag.
I say remember this guy’s name, because from the chattering on the Right I’m hearing, this is the guy the Bush power base Really Likes…the one they’re going to anoint as the next republican candidate for president of the United States. And here’s what they’ll be sending to the White House if they succeed:
Democrat James Webb’s Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.
S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like "Macaca."
"This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come."
After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a "bunch of Hollywood movie moguls," Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.
"Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia," said Allen, who then began talking about the "war on terror."
The Webb staffer in question…
Macaca…I hear you asking (assuming you’re as naive about these things as I am)? Well…Atrios was wondering too…
I was thinking that the assumption that George Felix Allen had been invoking a species of monkey was a bit of a stretch and that he was probably just speaking gibberish for "furrin name." But it is actually an established racial/slur, specifically directed at North Africans. If you search the nastier corners of the internet you’ll find it’s in surprisingly common usage.
Here…from the List Of Ethnic Slurs…
Macaque (Belgium & France) a Negro (originally) or a person of North-African origin (more recently); derived from macaque monkeys
What you need to notice about this, more then the slur itself, is the arcane nature of the slur. I’ve heard racist slurs tossed around, sometimes casually and thoughtlessly, and sometimes with bitter venom, probably no more or less then any other average white America male has (and I’m sure a good deal less then the average black American has…). I was a school kid during the worst of the late 20th century race riots, the great civil rights march on Washington, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers. I’ve heard plenty of racist catcalls in my lifetime. This one was new to me. But apparently fairly common among the hard core racist set. That’s what you need to notice.
If you think this will hurt Allen in Virginia, you are sadly mistaken. If you thought Bush was the bottom of the barrel, think again. There is no bottom.
Lay aside, for the purposes of this argument, the destruction this war has delivered to Lebanon. Krauthammer has never in his career expressed a word of sympathy for an Arab, anywhere. He hates them all. For him, the only good part of this war is the damage done to Lebanon.
But here’s the beauty part. Krauthammer doesn’t care about the Jews either. He wants a ground war and if it kills 500 Israeli soldier boys, so be it. Can you imagine. Usually, you can count on Krauthammer to weigh in about Jewish losses at every opportunity. In fact, the mean-spirited Krauthammer only cares about Jews. Or so I thought.
Actually I should have known better. About three years ago, I saw Krauthammer flip out in synagogue on Yom Kippur. The rabbi had offered some timid endorsement of peace — peace essentially on Israel’s terms — but peace anyway. Krauthammer went nuts. He actually started bellowing at the rabbi, from his wheel chair in the aisle. People tried to "shush" him. It was, after all, the holiest day of the year. But Krauthammer kept howling until the rabbi apologized. The man is as arrogant as he is thuggish. Who screams at the rabbi at services? For advocating peace?
So I was wrong about Krauthammer. He doesn’t give a damn about Israel…
I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens…
You know…these people really have no business posing as the protectors of children…
Just remember who bellyaches the loudest whenever schools consider anti-bullying measures to protect gay school kids from abuse. If the day ever comes that we manage to convince these louts that sexual orientation is something determined before birth, you best believe that when a toddler is sexually abused and it turns out the kid has a homosexual biology, every talk radio jackass on the dial will be yapping to the mob that the kid probably bought it on themselves. That was their first reaction to Matthew Shepard’s murder wasn’t it.
The antigay junk science of the religious right often strikes me like a bunch of drunks in a bar trying to see who can out bullshit everyone. I’m telling you guys, homos are all pedophiles. The average homo has sex with a thousand underage kids in his lifetime…did I say a thousand? I meant ten thousand. In a day. During their lunch break. That’s why they’re all school teachers. I’m telling you. Where’s my drink? The whole entire fucking NEA is a bunch of liberal homos. And they’re communists too. Communist Islamic terrorists. They want to teach six year olds how to use dildos. No shit…I did a study that proves it. They should pass an amendment closing all the public schools and making home schooling mandatory for everyone. Last year the NEA passed out a million dildos to elementary school kids. It’s true. And they panted them to look like candy canes. FOX news did a story on it…
One of these days, I figured, they’d start yapping that we’re having sex with infants too. Well…guess what…
An organizer for the conservative Renew America is under fire for linking homosexuality with infant pedophilia.
"The newest thing in Chicago, it’s becoming a trend, and you’re gonna find this hard to believe…sex with infants," Guy Adams told an Internet radio show hosted by fellow conservative Stacy L. Harp.
Adams (pictured) offered no evidence to back up his claims of infant pedophilia.
He appeared on Harp’s program on Wednesday to discuss the recent Gay Games in Chicago and embarked on a nearly 30 minute conversation with Harp to attack gays.
"It’s not enough that they have…you know when you engage in perversion, and homosexuality is perversion, we don’t hate the gays mind you, we don’t hate them, we hate what they’re doing…pretty soon that perversion is like addiction, it’s not enough, so you need to graduate to something else. You need to move on. So now they’re having sex with animals, a small group that’s getting bigger, sex with infants, sex in the street in Chicago out in the open, it’s just getting more and more perverted."
Adams dismissed the contributions of GLBT people to society by saying, "what contributions, AIDS, pornography?"
He also referred to gay people as "a very angry and violent group when confronted with the truth."
From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To "Joe Brummer" <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Cc <stacyharp@gmail.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 216 AM
Subject Reply From Joe
What’s your point Joe? It sex with babies the truth; it IS happening, so what’s your point?
Let’s just assume that gays are not screwing babies. Okay then, what ARE gays doing? Can you describe it for me and the public???
If you won’t describe it, then I will. Openly and in a national forum.
One thing you will quickly discover about me — I CANNOT be intimidated nor will I retreat. I will stand my ground no matter what.
YOU brought this war to me and I will finish it. And there are many, many more like me too.
We simply don’t care about you petty proclamations, not does Alan.
You woke up the wrong guy.
~Guy
—– Original Message —–
From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Cc <stacyharp@gmail.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 329 AM
Subject Re From Joe
Dear Joe,
You are intentionally deceived.
Whether I reach gays or not is not that important to me. Yes, I hope that God is able to reach them, but at the end of the day, I have been placed at war with your likes, and that was YOUR choice.
In other words, I declare war against you and your kind.
I did not desire this war, but you thrust it upon us. It was your call.
Having said that, I say to you (now more than ever) that I am singularly determined to see your agenda defeated, and it will be.
Not that I am perfect — far from it, but your behavior is explicitly labeled by God as an "abomination". T\here’s no getting around that judgment.
Say what you will and argue as you must, but at the end of the day, God declares your behavior as totally unacceptable to Him.
God will not change His position on that, as He has clearly stated, Jesus is the same today, yesterday and tomorrow.
He will never affirm homosexuality.
Nor will I.
~Guy
On Thu, August 3, 2006 856, joebrummer@joebrummer.com said
> Dear Guy,
> Sorry you feel that way. While your busy trying to get God to call me,
> you are also out in the public eye making outlandish and false claims
> about gays and lesbians. Injustice like that needs to be brought to the
> light of the public eye, or as I commonly say, the sunlight of justice.
> I cannot change your mind about gays and lesbians, although I can
> certainly say I have never had sex with animals or infants. Your claims
> are disgusting and your message is evil. Talk about bearing false
> witness.
> You will never reach gays and lesbians with these immoral acts. Your
> approach is awful. Sadly you discredit anything truthful you could say
> with the utterly outrageous claims like this. Stacy informs me that
> part 2 of the show is worse and that your claims there are eve more
> outrageous.
> Your mentality is nothing more than a call to arms that some sick minds
> will be happy to take. Over the past six weeks there have been some
> violent attacks on gays and lesbians espcially in San Diego. Where do
> you think people get this notion tht they need to "get the homos"? Is it
> perhaps your false messages about gays being after children? Is it your
> false notion we are the biggest danger since the civil war?
> Your message is wrong and it will be paid for in the blood of GLBT people.
> Perhaps you should think before you speak. If you think you are doing
> god’s works, you are sadly mistaken. God would have no part in putting
> his children in danger they way you have done.
> Joe
On Thu Aug 3 1:19 , ‘Guy Adams’ sent
Joe,
Initially, I had a great sense of compassion for you and I hoped that God would be able to reach you.
But after your actions in shutting me down on your blog, and esp after reading your recent pleas to Stacy, I am of the persuasion that you are what God calls a "reprobate", beyond His willingness to save.
Over and out,
~Guy
~Guy Adams
Deputy National Grassroots Director
(Alan Keyes’ RenewAmerica)
Email GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us
—– Original Message —–
From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To "Joe Brummer" <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 257 AM
Subject Re From Joe / you lose.
You and your remarks are inconsequential.
At the end of the day, you lose.
~TGuy
—– Original Message —–
From "Guy Adams" <GuyAdams@RenewAmerica.us>
To "Joe Brummer" <joebrummer@joebrummer.com>
Cc <stacyharp@gmail.com>
Sent Friday, August 04, 2006 222 AM
Subject Re From Joe
Your comments are not even worth me read. I’ll bypass. WHO ARE YOU? WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
In the course of a few short months, no one will want to mention your name out of sheer fear.
You CANNOT tear my words apart because you are speaking from the moral low ground and because my words spoke the truth.
In other words, you have no firm ground on which to stand. You are a coward. I initially had a heart for you but you have proven yourself to be a reprobate.
The war is on. As Reagan said: We win, you lose.
Understand that quite well, because in a true war (unlike Iraq), all means available to me will be used.
You targeted the wrong guy, but I thank God that you did.
There it is. There is the hot burning core of hate not far beneath all that pious rhetoric about loving the sinner, and hating the sin. And that kind of thing, I want to emphasize, is nothing new. Over and over I saw words just like those on Usenet, back as far as 1993. Paranoid…threatening…hysterical…and not just from the usual gutter trash, but from…well…otherwise fine and upstanding pillars of the community. People just like Mr. Guy Adams, who, as it turns out, not only works for Renew America, but also is, or was as of January 2005, a Deputy Sheriff in Cook County Illinois.
(Thanks to Pam’s House Blend for the catch) I’m sure he treats the gay and lesbian citizens of Cook County he encounters during the course of his work with dignity and respect. Well…actually I’m not.
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