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Archive for June 2006
Liar, Liar, Pulpit on Fire
Posted by Clif on 06/30/06 at 2:48 pm
Category: Lying Republicans, Radical Clerics
Porcine preacher Jerry Falwell was on NPR this morning violating the Ninth Commandment:
Falwell: But I don’t think God hurts innocent people because we hurt innocent people.
Inskeep: Correct me if I’m wrong, didn’t you make a statement at one time about September 11
Falwell: What I said was our secularization of America, our attempt to separate from God, could certainly cause the Lord to lift the veil and I usually added the local church, our sleeping church, and then gays and lesbians and so forth and so on, all who have taken us away from the faith of our fathers, they have exposed us to international hurt.*
Hogwash. First, this just doesn’t pass the red-face test. Does anyone believe that Falwell actually talked about gays and the church in the same breath when apportioning blame for 9/11. Of course not.
This “sleeping church” spin is a relatively recent tactic that Falwell has been using to try to slither away from his original statement. Several days after Falwell blamed gays for 9/11, he issued a half-hearted apology, saying this:
I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize.
So in 2001 Falwell was saying he blamed only the terrorists, not gays, not the “sleeping church.”
But three years later, in a 2004 appearance on Meet the Press, Falwell started to sing from a different hymnal. When Russert quoted Falwell’s remarks back to the preacher, Falwell said this:
And I went on to say in a sleeping church, a lethargic church likewise is responsible.
Which was, of course, a triple-chinned, bald-faced, fat-assed lie, as the complete transcript of his original remarks demonstrates.
Two years later in 2006 the lie has morphed a bit, undoubtedly because he was called on the Meet the Press lie. Now Falwell is not saying that he blamed the church right after he blamed gays. Instead, during the NPR interview, he said that he “usually” did that, whatever that means. Whatever it means, it is — as the third story told by Falwell about this — yet another lie.
*Transcript by Outside the Tent starting at 4:24 in the audio of the interview.
Gipper’s Nippers Revisited
Posted by Clif on 06/29/06 at 8:35 am Category: Iraq, Yellow Elephants
Over at Gipper’s Nippers (a/k/a “Reagan’s Children Blog”), occasional home of the loathsome Patrick Bell, America’s Worst Law Student™, Hans “Heil” Zeiger and other yellow elephants, I saw this little piece of nonsense posted by Francisco Gonzalez:
There were 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January. In the fair city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the month of January. That’s just one American city, about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.
If young Francisco were actually fighting the war he loves so much, he’d probably have a better grasp on how many U.S. soldiers died last January and would have realized that his figure of 39 combat-related killings in Iraq in January was bogus. 62 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in January 2005.
And if he read a newspaper or even cared about Iraqi casualties, he would have known that there were between 531 and 606 war-related civilian deaths during last January. But he doesn’t, so he didn’t know that and accepted uncritically the number he read in a chain email that had been sent to him.
Or if Francisco knew how to use Google, he would have quickly realized that something was wrong with his figure of 39 deaths. Here are two news reports of civilian casualties during January, both easily located with a Google search and each of which alone exceeds the alleged total of 39 war-related deaths in Iraq last January. This story reports 50 police recruits killed by insurgents in Ramadi in January. And this one documents 60 Shiite pilgrims killed on January 5 outside a mosque in Karbala by a suicide bomber.
Fortunately for the not-so-gifted Mr. Gonzalez, he’s been spared the embarrassment of enlistment by being the beneficiary of a wingnut welfare grant* funded by the Scaifes and the Olins.
blank line
Mirror, Mirror, Who’s The Whitest of Them All?
Posted by Clif on 06/28/06 at 8:54 am Category: America's Shittiest Website
Byron York, posting at America’s Shittiest Website™, had this to say about the demographics at Kos:
One bit of information that would have been interesting to know is the racial composition of the DailyKos readership, but that was not included in the data comScore made public
So, lacking any figures, Byron decides just to make some up:
Anyone who attended the YearlyKos convention or other events involving “progressive” bloggers, would guess that the blogs’ readership is more than 90 percent white.
I’m sorry but this is just too ludicrous for words coming from the website of a magazine that was founded by a bunch of segregationists. And hasn’t changed that much since. Let’s play a little game. Here’s a list of National Review authors. Find a black person.
Philanthropy — More Liberal Foolishness
Posted by Clif on 06/27/06 at 1:29 pm Category: Wingnuts
So Warren Buffet decides to give away a big chunk of his money to charitable foundations. No one could see that as bad news, right? If you believe that, then you don’t read Human Wingnuts Online where wingnut extraordinaire Mac Johnson condemns Buffet for his donations to charity. This of course puts the nut firmly back in wingnut. Let’s go to the tape.
The announcement was hailed as a surprise in some reports, but Buffet’s generous actions follow a well-worn script written by Andrew Carnegie over a century ago. . . . Doubtless the Carnegie Foundation, the 2,500 libraries he built, and his legion of other public works have brought great benefit to our society. But I do not believe that they benefited us nearly as much as U.S. Steel did.
“Sire, the rabble is at the gates demanding something to read.” “Let them read steel,” replied his majesty.
If your goal is to help the poor, then why not make them less poor while doing what you do best. What job training program could a charity provide that would be better than … a job? Especially a real, meaningful job from which the holder could be fired, or receive a merit bonus, or be exposed to dozens of successful people actually engaged in the act of being successful?
What a brilliant idea! The way to deal with AIDS and malaria in the third world is to give these folks jobs. Then they can be fired for taking too much sick leave.
Mac probably figures that everyone is laughing at him now so he clinches his arguments by giving not one, but two, count ‘em, two better ideas as to what really rich people can do with their money rather than wasting it on hospitals and things:
Paul Allen, who like Bill Gates is one of the founders of Microsoft, could have given his entire fortune to the Paul G. Allen Foundation or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation . . . . He could have sponsored “Masterpiece Theatre” until Jesus came back. . . .But he used part of his fortune on something much more creative. He decided to fund a private attempt to send an affordable and reusable craft of novel design into space.
That way we can just rocket off into space if the global effects of poverty and disease begin to interfere with our ability to summer in the Hamptons.
And idea number two is equally, er, rich:
Imagine that you had $100 in 1967 and wanted to help the world. You could have donated it to a charity and it would have done real good for a few people for a few days. Or you could have invested it in Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway company and today it would be worth nearly $500,000. Which $100 would have done more good? I think the invested money would have, and not because you could then donate the huge profits to charity, but because the profits help make charity unneeded.
Of course two can play the “what if” game. What if the money spent on building a university provided an education to the person who found a cure for cancer? What if you invested that money in Enron? What if Mac Johnson had been born with a brain?
Musclehead of Mass Distortion
Posted by Clif on 06/25/06 at 3:26 pm Category: Wingnuts, Iraq, Town Hall Watch
Radio wingnut and Clown Hall regular Kevin McCullough likes to call himself, without a trace of irony, a “musclehead.” Poor fellow thinks it means smart.
To see how smart Kevin is, let’s look at his latest column over at Clown Hall:
By now much of the nation has finally heard the truth; George Bush never lied about weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday of this last week, Senator Rick Santorum and Congressman Peter Hoekstra revealed . . . that [the] U.S. military had uncovered a minimum of 500 weaponized munitions that could in fact be used to deliver mustard and saran [sic] gas.
Umm, Kevin, the answer to that would be no. Shortly after Santorum’s “discovery,” the DoD told Fox News that these were unusable, degraded pre-1991 shells. (Note: saran gas is the less deadly version of glad gas, both of which are made by burning plastic wrap and capturing the fumes in two-liter Mountain Dew bottles. The bottles can then be hurled from moving vehicles with devastating effects.)
But Kevin is too worked up to stop there:
These weapons were the kind used to kill 5000 [sic] Kurds by Saddam. Saddam only needed 3 of these missiles to accomplish that feat - we’ve uncovered 500. That’s enough nerve agents to kill more than 8.3 million people - or the Island of Manhattan, or the city of Chicago.
Um, no, Kevin, wrong again. Leaving aside that its hard to kill people with shells that don’t work, Kevin’s claim that only three shells were used to kill 5,000 Kurds during the Halabja massacre is just a made-up little factoid that Kevin pulled out of his butt musclehead. Eyewitness accounts related that the Iraqi Air Force spent more than three hours shelling the village with chemical weapons. I think its safe to assume that this rules out the idea that only three were used.
Anyway, back to the musclehead:
The lying leftists who will get all of us killed if we don’t remain vigilant were very slow to respond. . . . For a season or two the left has had what they thought was the smoking gun for the President and his party - to say he lied to the American people . . . . That smoking gun has now been turned on themselves.
I think Kevin needs to go back to metaphor school. It’s really not such a big deal to have a “smoking” gun turned on you. But, hey, Kevin thinks that degraded shells can kill a megabazillion people, so no doubt he is also quite convinced that the smoke from a gun is equally deadly.
In his next column at Clown Hall, Kevin will further bolster his claim that there are WMDs in Iraq by providing evidence of a stash of diet cokes and mentos found in a convenience store in Tikrit.
Swift Snowing
Posted by Clif on 06/24/06 at 4:57 pm Category: The American StreetMy post for today is over at The American Street. Go over there and read all about Tony Snow’s preposterous claim that Al-Qaeda had never heard of the SWIFT system for international wire transfers until the New York Times told them about it.
Taking AIM at Gays
Posted by Clif on 06/23/06 at 8:38 am Category: Gay Issues, Wingnuts
Over at the comically misnamed Accuracy in Media (AIM), resident crackpot Cliff Kincaid, desperate for something crazy to say, argues that Fox News is within the thrall of the gay rights movement:
Bill O’Reilly featured a discussion recently about whether President Bush would make a campaign issue out of gay marriage. O’Reilly doubted that Bush would actively support a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage between a man and a woman. . . . Reticence may stem, at least in part, from the anticipated media hostility. O’Reilly should turn the attention on the media, including Fox News, one of many media backers of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (see list of media sponsors of NLGJA conferences posted here on page 9). Does this give you some idea of how deep the media hostility runs against the conservative agenda on pro-family issues?
Now that, I submit, is some prize-winning wingnuttery when Fox-Fucking-News and Bill-Falafel-O’Reilly are alleged to be under the control of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. If Fox is that far gone, I probably should expect to see a segment on 60 Minutes on how to build a gay S&M leather dungeon in my garage.
But Cliff is just getting wound up and has even crazier shit to say:
When not celebrating homosexuals as heroes and martyrs, the media are busy characterizing them as ‘pretty typical’ people, ‘not so different’ from their straight neighbors.
Once again, the MSM is passing off the lie that the gays just want to live a normal life, watch American Idol, and cook hamburgers in the back yard when in fact they want to marry snakes and horses, have sex with dogs, and convert small children into their nefarious chardonnay-sipping, chevre-munching, designer-fashion-wearing, Darwin-worshipping lifestyle.
You’re probably thinking that Kincaid can’t sink any lower. But you would be wrong:
Too many in the media are allowing their story content to be dictated by GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and other vocal homosexual groups.
GLAAD is the same group that honored Charlize Theron for her portrayal of a lesbian serial killer in the movie “Monster.” Her “boyfriends” ended up dead.
So not only are teh gays bestialists and pedophiles, but they are murderers too. In fact, of course, the GLAAD award to Charlize Theron cited her support for gay marriage, including her commitment not marry her boyfriend until gays and lesbians have full marriage rights.
Kincaid’s over-the-top rhetoric makes me think that the idea of gay sex gets him all tingly in the shorts and makes him start wondering about how he would look in a pair of leather chaps.
The FEMA-ization of CPB
Posted by Clif on 06/22/06 at 1:27 am Category: White House, Wingnuts, America's Shittiest Website
Following the White House’s tradition of appointing unqualified partisan hacks, Bush has announced the appointment of Warren Bell to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Bell, a sitcom writer, producer and co-perpetrator of Coach and According to Jim, is also a frequent poster at America’s Shittiest Website™ (a/k/a The Corner) and a regular contributor to the right-wing segregationist rag National Review.
Some of Warren’s most notable contributions to National Review and America’s Shittiest Website™ are — surprise, surprise — racist and sexist which makes him, of course, the perfect Bush appointee.
First, consider Warren’s defense of why there aren’t any black people on his juvenile yawnfest According to Jim:
Yesterday the head of Disney’s Touchstone Television and the head of casting for ABC/Disney called me to, er, suggest that According to Jim might do a little better this year in terms of casting minorities in significant roles. Our admittedly dismal track record was recited to me — two Asian-Americans, one Latino (oh, dear, is that the right term?) in roles of “guest star” billing during the 26-episode course of last season.
With you guys I can whine a little. It’s really hard! Half of our guest stars end up in fistfights with one of the regulars. So am I supposed to cast the first African-American neighbor in the history of the show, only to have Jim punch him out for being a loudmouth?
Leaving aside the implication that all African-Americans are “loudmouths,” this is rather like saying that the reason for not hiring black baseball players is to relieve them the embarrassment of striking out.
Just as bad is Warren’s National Review Online column where he posts a giant “No Girls Allowed” sign on his comedy treehouse:
Are women as innately funny as men? The answer, I can tell you without fear of contradiction, is…(gets up, goes to door, checks both ways in hall) …er…(checks again, closes door)…ummm…(remembers that almost every TV comedy development executive in town is a woman)…well, it’s a damn good question, isn’t it?
Wait a second. This is National Review Online. What are the odds of a woman in the notoriously liberal television industry seeing this?
Okay, men are funnier. Way funnier. Not even close. Male writers, male actors, male stand-up comedians. All funnier.
No, that’s not parody. Bell is dead serious. Of course you can only believe this shit if you believe that Bell’s episodes of Coach kick I Love Lucy’s butt and will still be in syndication fifty years from now.
Bell has announced that his first act at CPB will be to promote a dramatic adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved cast entirely with white guys.
Cross-posted at The American Street.