Here’s an interesting lesson for Republican leaders. If you’re gonna stab somebody in the back, make sure they can’t pull out the knife and get their revenge :

When Sen. Trent Lott decides which GOP presidential candidate to support in 2008, it apparently will not be Sen. Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican who Lott says betrayed him at a low moment in his political career.

Asked Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether Frist, who challenged and succeeded Lott as Senate majority leader in 2002, has the character to be president, Lott paused before answering.

“I think I’d have to think about that,” said Lott, R-Miss.
. . .
In a new book, “Herding Cats, A Lifetime in Politics,” Lott fingers Frist as one of the “main manipulators” in the events the led to Lott’s fall from power.
. . .
Lott wrote that Frist’s actions amounted to a “personal betrayal.”

But Frist’s Machiavellian maneuvering isn’t Lott’s only target. In his book, he also has this to say (clip at Crooks & Liars) :

In the summer of 2002…the president began lobbying for an open-ended resolution empowering him to wage war in Iraq…Bush had made clear his intentions to wage war on Iraq in several of our private meetings.

And Lott isn’t helping the President with his Cindy Sheehan problem either :

Even those defending Bush tempered their support with expressions of concern about what they described as a disconnect between the administration and the public over the U.S. role in Iraq.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), the former majority leader, said that his constituents, despite their “very pro-military” feelings, were beginning to question whether the United States was doing enough to help establish an independent Iraqi government and make enough progress to allow troop withdrawals anytime soon.

“They still believe very strongly in President Bush,” Lott said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” citing recent conversations with frustrated constituents. “But they have a right to ask their elected officials, you know, ‘What is the plan?’”

Trent Lott is seriously off-message and with good reason. Why should he bend over backwards to defend the men who destroyed his career? With so many sour grapes, I can’t help but think of another Latin saying : In Vino Veritas.

One of the latest talking points from the “Bush can do no wrong” brigade is to point out the difficulty our founding fathers had putting together a constitution when defending the problems plaguing Iraq’s. This terrific article from Slate pretty much destroys that comparison :

The real inference to be drawn is that the American colonies were as well-fit for a democratic union as any society in human history—and they took more than a decade to get their act together. Today’s Iraq enjoys almost none of their advantages, so how long will it take to move down the same path—and how long will we have to stay there to help?

Let us count just a few of the obstacles.

A major dispute at both constitutional conventions was how to divide power between the central government and the regional provinces. But in the American case, the provinces—i.e., states—were well-established political units, with governors, statutes, and citizens who identified themselves as, say, New Yorkers or Virginians. There are no comparable authorities, structures, or—in any meaningful sense—constituents in Iraq’s regions (except, to some degree, in the Kurdish territories, and many people there want simply to secede).

America’s Founding Fathers shared the crucible of having fought in the Revolutionary War for the common cause of independence from England. This bond helped overcome their many differences. Iraq’s new leaders did not fight in their war of liberation from Saddam Hussein. It would be as if France had not merely assisted the American colonists but also fought all the battles on the ground, occupied our territory afterward, installed our first leaders, composed the Articles of Confederation, and organized the Constitutional Convention. The atmosphere in Philadelphia, as well as the resulting document and the resulting country, would have been very different.
. . .
Sectarianism did not exist in early America. Yes, there were sharp regional differences between mercantile New England and the agrarian South, as well as moral splits over slavery. But no groups exacerbated these tensions by asserting an exclusive claim on God.

Early America saw armed revolts, notably Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. But they were protests led by debt-ridden farmers against rising taxes—not pervasive or murderous insurgencies against the entire established order. They were also put down fairly promptly—Shays’ by a state militia, the Whiskey Rebellion by a mere show of government force.

Or as Bill Maher put it, Jefferson’s people weren’t gassing Hamilton’s people.

It’s worth pointing out that the argument during our constitutional convention 220 years ago (or so) was about whether or not the relatively new and ill-defined “United States of America” needed a strong central government. The main question in Iraq isn’t whether or not to have a strong central government, but the degree to which that government will protect minority rights (among other issues). Yeah, our founding fathers punted the issue of slavery, but not having any slaves participating in the process probably made that one a little easier too.

If the Bush Administration is serious about these comparisons to the American revolution, then the best thing they could possibly do to help Iraq remain stable and independent is to relax the tariffs on imported tea. It worked so well for us.

Okay, Greg. Let’s try to get through this post without saying something offensive…

According to a survey by The Princeton Review that asked 110,000 students at 361 top colleges to rate their schools and report on their campus experiences, Reed College (Portland OR) has the best academics. It also has the least religious students.

Now I could say something mean about religion that uses the words “myth” or “superstition”, but I think there’s probably something else going on here. For one, college is the last place where I’d expect people to be religious. When you’re young and breaking out on your own for the first time, why the hell would you want to go to the place your parents dragged you every Sunday morning. Then again, I’m the one making the leap that the study’s definition of “religious” includes going to church. Perhaps the study missed a lot of people who believe in god and occasionally pray, but don’t feel comfortable being lumped in with zealots who have hijacked religion. (Do I even need to bother naming names?) Maybe asking students isn’t the best way to determine which school has the “best academics”. Or maybe the study is evidence that a religious lifestyle and academic pursuits are incompatible. Who knows?

I probably should be surprised by this fucking insane remark by Pat Robertson, but it seems like par for the course for a political operative who’s been disguising himself as a religious man for more than forty years now. (via Atrios) :

There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he’s going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United … This is in our sphere of influence, so we can’t let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Now think about this for a second…Pat Robertson – the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Christian Coalition – is calling for the murder of another human being. I cannot imagine how any honest Christian can look at this man and not come to the conclusion that he’s, at the very least, a complete fraud. The fact that the more devout members of the WWJD? crowd would follow Robertson rather than decry him as the anti-Christ tell you all you need to know about the personality-driven nature of “mainstream” (read : overbearing, xenophobic, paranoid, mass-media based subset of) Christianity in America.

This sort of thing makes my blood boil. I hate Christian sects that insist that their interpretation of the Bible is the only “true” Christianity, but I feel rather justified in saying that anyone who actively supports Pat Robertson’s ministries at this point is a “bad” Christian. There is no way you can reconcile Pat Robertson’s apparent bloodlust with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Period. Even attempting to justify a remark like this is tantamount to putting “thou shalt not kill” and “love thy neighbor” behind less important teachings like “thou shalt cover they televangelist’s ass”.

As far as the political aspects of a remark like this, I think it’s high time that the Democratic party borrow a page from the Republican playbook and insist that high-profile conservatives like George Bush, James Dobson, Bill Frist, John McCain, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay and the like go on record about whether or not they agree with Pat Robertson’s call for the killing of Hugo Chavez. Do you agree that Chavez should be assassinated or not? Since you’ve been so willing to speak for Jesus in the past, do you think he’d support sending someone to murder the democratically elected leader of a foreign country?

File this one under “H” for “Heh, Indeed” :

The state of Connecticut filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging President Bush’s No Child Left Behind school reform law, arguing it is illegal because it requires expensive testing and programs it doesn’t pay for.

The lawsuit, which officials said was the first of its kind to be brought by a state government, asks a federal judge to declare that the federal government cannot require state and local money be used to meet federal testing goals.

Those jerks in Connecticut are sooo greedy. They want better schools and the funds to make that goal possible??? Somebody needs to explain to these people that there are a few things more important than paying for federally mandated testing for our children, like no-bid contracts to corporations who donate to the Republican party, tax cuts for the wealthy, homeland security funds for states that aren’t targets for terrorism, investigating ways to fix the Space Shuttle again, congressional pet projects like a tobacco museum or bridges to places nobody wants to go, Medicare overhaul that partially subsidizes the pharmaceutical industry, a new yacht for President Bush, armor for our troops that are dying in Iraq….okay, I was kidding about that last one, but you get the idea.

Today George Bush is going on a bike ride with seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. It’s a win-win situation for both since it will give Armstrong, who’s been rumored to be considering a career in politics, some face time with the President and it will give Bush an excuse to piss away the entire day without doing any work. Like Colin Powell ten years ago, Armstrong is poised to be an enormously popular political figure without the public knowing anything about where he stands. As an early indicator, here’s a picture of Armstrong’s girlfriend :

I’m sure he and the President will have a lot to talk about. Maybe they’ll even ride by Camp Casey.

Pope Ratzo’s looking for a “get out of jail free” card (via DailyKos) :

Lawyers for Pope Benedict XVI have asked President Bush to declare the pontiff immune from liability in a lawsuit that accuses him of conspiring to cover up the molestation of three boys by a seminarian in Texas, court records show.

The Vatican’s embassy in Washington sent a diplomatic memo to the State Department on May 20 requesting the U.S. government grant the pope immunity because he is a head of state, according to a May 26 motion submitted by the pope’s lawyers in U.S. District Court for the Southern Division of Texas in Houston.

Joseph Ratzinger is named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit. Now Benedict XVI, he’s accused of conspiring with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to cover up the abuse during the mid-1990s.

I guess it’s considered “anti-Catholic” to point out that a man of god (ha!) has been helping sexual predators rape little boys, but it does raise the question of whether or not god is responsible for the loophole that Ratzo is exploiting. Just imagine how much less junk food news we would have had to endure if Michael Jackson had simply declared himself the “head of state” at Neverland ranch.

Let me go on record as saying this this isn’t funny. In fact, I think it’s pretty fucked up :

MichelleMaglalang.com

Should I bother pointing out that Ms. Malkin’s next book, Unhinged : Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, is all about “the utter hypocrisy of Democrats who fashion themselves as role models of tolernace and civility”? Thanks for giving her more ammo for her book tour.

But that’s not why having a fake URL leading to a Google search for the terms “Michelle Malkin” and “whore” is a bad idea. The real reason is because people who are serious about politics shouldn’t be acting like fucking children. If you really wanna hit her where it hurts, I’d suggest redirecting that URL to something like this.

A few additional points to make :

I’m almost positive that MichelleMaglalang.com wasn’t registered by somebody on the right to embarrass liberals. I’m not going to give out the person’s info, but a little research showed that this is the product of someone on our side.

What’s the deal with throwing around her former surname (Maglalang) anyways? Did she change it to seem less “ethnic” or did she just marry some nutcase named Albert? Either way, it doesn’t seem like that big a dis.

Yes, I know a few on the right have used the word “whore” to describe Cindy Sheehan, but the examples I’ve seen have actually been as part of the term “media whore”. I still strongly disagree with that, but there’s a big difference between a media whore and the “sucking dick for crack money” variety.

Finally, before any conservatives want to use this little incident to defame the left, let me remind you that there’s much worse stuff to be found on any given day in the comments sections of the Free Republic or Little Green Footballs. I suppose you could even write a book about it, but what kind of hack would do something like that?

UPDATE : Kudos to the domain owner for updating the redirect to something more appropriate. I think the new destination will be far more effective criticism than simple name-calling.

You could devote an entire blog to some of the dumbass campaigns by PETA, but I like this article about their latest campaign for the quote at the end from a spokesman for the NAACP. He gives it the amount of attention and seriousness that it deserves :

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is reconsidering a campaign comparing images of animal abuse with those of slavery after complaints from civil rights groups and others.

The animal rights group’s “Animal Liberation” campaign included 12 panels juxtaposing pictures of black people in chains with shackled elephants and other provocative images.
. . .
One panel showed a black civil rights protester being beaten at a lunch counter beside a photo of a seal being bludgeoned. Another panel, titled “Hanging,” showed a graphic photo of a white mob surrounding two lynched black people, their bodies hanging from tree limbs, while a nearby picture showed a cow hanging in a slaughterhouse.
. . .
However, officials with the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People aren’t buying it.

“PETA operates by getting publicity any way they can,” said John White, an NAACP spokesman. “They’re comparing chickens to black people?”

By the way, for future reference, if you’re going to have a protest that evokes slavery and civil rights, you could probably choose a more sensitive title than “We Are All Animals“. Jeez, I know PETA’s hearts are usually in the right place, but every time I read about one of their campaigns, I get the mental image of a bunch of college students so filled with righteous outrage that they have absolutely no idea how the things they say will be received in the real world.

Good grief. Ms. Malkin, to her eternal shame, couldn’t do a post about the cross-destroying dickhead on her side without turning it into an attack on the left :

Nice to see the far Left finally outraged about the desecration of crosses.

Don’t seem to recall their outrage about this or this or this, though. Or, of course, this.

I’ll spare you the hyperlinks, but suffice to say, they’re as contradictory as the rest of her oeuvre. The first three links are to news stories of desecrations of pro-life protests that used white crosses and the fourth is, hilariously, a link to the infamous art piece “Piss Christ”. Perhaps Michelle and Michelle will need to have a second debate on whether or not they support the first amendment’s freedom of expression?

And since we’re playing the childish “you didn’t denounce it on your site, therefore you support it” game, I don’t seem to remember Michelle making an effort to denounce the cross burnings in North Carolina, not that I’d expect any less from the writer of a racist book. (via Atrios)

That book, of course, was In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror. Think about the title alone for a minute or two. Turn it over in your mind. Then focus on this: what Malkin defended for the length of an entire book was internment based on one characteristic alone: a person’s ancestry. This is the most blatant and repellent form of racism. Due to Malkin’s efforts, the “acceptability” and “defensibility” of racism achieved great prominence in our society. It was, and still is, a “respectable” topic of conversation. Racism as the basis of government policy was an “acceptable” subject on which to offer an opinion—and a range of opinions was encouraged. Perhaps it was bad policy, perhaps it wasn’t. Who can know for sure? The historical record is complex. Certainty on this question is impossible of achievement.

Add these further facts to your consideration of this matter. As Eric Muller and Greg Robinson examined and proved in great detail, Malkin plays fast and loose with the actual historical record. Her research methods were contemptibly shoddy. The arguments she offers cannot withstand even casual scrutiny. Her book and her subsequent arguments defending it are filled with dishonesties. In short: there are no facts or arguments to sustain Malkin’s position. The policy of internment was irrational at its foundation, and it destroyed many lives. It stigmatized a large group of people for no legitimate reason, and changed many lives forever. For nothing.

Malkin’s failures were both predictable and unavoidable. An irrational policy cannot be defended with rational arguments. Facts cannot be marshalled to support delusions. And note one additionally ugly aspect of the history of internment in World War II, pointed out in the Muller-Robinson discussion: nothing similar happened to those of German or Italian ancestry, although those countries were also our enemies. It was only those slant-eyed yellow people—those people who are not “really like us”—who were singled out. This is the lowest, most primitive, and subhuman version of racism. Racism in any form is immoral, irrational and always to be condemned. In that sense, degrees of immorality do not apply. But in another sense, this may be the worst kind of racism of all.

By the way, does anyone know how internment camps and an APB on any “swarthy” looking Arab men would have helped aid in the capture of Richard Reid , Jose Padilla, or John Walker Lindh? It seems to me that the (suspected) terrorists have already found a loophole in the “arrest any brown people with funny names” plan.

There’s an additional, and somewhat amusing, disagreement between the two Michelles over the term “grief pimps” :

The Los Angeles Times graciously admits it was wrong when it said I disdainfully called activists supporting Cindy Sheehan “grief pimps”. . .The Times has appended the correction to its original article. I’ll be looking for corrections from all the other papers that repeated the Times’ false allegation.

Where could the Times have gotten the bizarre idea that Michelle Malkin thinks the activists supporting Cindy Sheehan are “grief pimps”? Could it be the letter she reprinted without comment a letter from a reader that expounds on the term “grief pimps” or the fact that the post in question is actually called “grief pimps”? Perhaps the title of the post was referring to something else entirely? Since she didn’t technically use the term “grief pimps” on her own to explicitly reference the supporters of Cindy Sheehan, I guess she’s right in saying that the Times use of the words “disdainfully called” represents a “false allegation”. Perhaps they should have said “callously suggested” instead. There was a time when this sort of hyper-parsing was called “Clintonian”, but these days I prefer the term “Malkinized”.

Over the weekend, my mom went down to Crawford to see Casey Sheehan’s mom. Since they’ve been destroyed by some maniac supporter of the President’s, here are a few of pictures that she and my step-father took of the cross memorial :

How anyone could look at these crosses and want to destroy them is beyond me…

WTF?! John Bolton met with Judy Miller in jail? Tom DeLay crony Jack Abramoff has information on a gangland-style murder? If somebody can figure out a way to tie this all to a plot by Jeff Gannon to steal the election in Ohio, then we might have a grand unifying theory of the liberal blogosphere.

Okay, I got this one from TBogg too, but the last line of this quote needs to be seen to be believed.

A man fired a shotgun into the air as about 60 anti-war protesters held a religious service on the road to President Bush’s ranch.

Sheriff’s deputies and Secret Service agents in the area of the demonstration site Sunday rushed to the home of Larry Mattlage after the shots were fired but did not arrest him.

“I ain’t threatening nobody, and I ain’t pointing a gun at nobody,” Mattlage said. “This is Texas.”

Ahhh….I forgot about the “This is Texas” loophole that allows gun owners to do anything they want. Pretty sad that the same Secret Service that investigates rappers, cartoonists, and Senators for rhetorical threats against the President does nothing when some idiot with a shotgun starts shooting into the air next door to the President’s ranch. If only Lee Harvey Oswald had a better understanding of Texas law…

Not that you need a reminder, but there’s something really sick about the fact that many Bush loyalists will go out of their way to disrespect our troops in order to support lil’ G (via TBogg) :

When Sheehan arrived in Crawford on Aug. 6, her small group started marching to Bush’s ranch, then was moved by authorities to a plot of land a few miles away.

Late Monday, a pickup truck tore through rows of white crosses that stretched about two-tenths of a mile along the side of the road at the Crawford camp. The crosses bore the names of fallen U.S. soldiers. No one was hurt.

I wonder if any Bush supporters are dancing on the graves in Arlington cemetery as well. After all, if it would piss off Cindy Sheehan, it must be the right thing to do.

Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh. Perhaps this is just an isolated incident of disrespect towards our armed forces…

“I’ve got a purple heart too, HAW HAW!”

Assholes.

I understand that the President likes to spend as much time as possible away from the majority black and Democratic Washington D.C. and spend time in “real” America, but doesn’t this setup for his press conferences seem a bit odd?

It’s weird enough for the President of the United States to be holding press conferences on the side of the road, but if you’re gonna go for faux-whateveryoucallit, ensuring that Georgie still has a podium with the Presidential seal to stand behind pretty much cancels out any improptu cred you’re trying to garner. Does this bullshit really work on people? Are there still people who look at the President in his tailored jeans doing camera-friendly busywork and think “he’s just a regular guy like me?”