Utopia 2025Fascinating article from The Nation about attempted-right-wing-poster-boy Pat Tillman (hat tip: John Callender at lies.com):
The fact is that Tillman was so much more than a shill for the fever dreams of the New American Century crowd. His family deserved better. He deserved better.
We all deserve better.
This week’s “Top Ten Conservative Idiots” over at Democratic Underground is one of the best ever – each one is a gem. But this passage about Iraq stood out to me:
The truth is that Iraq is on the verge of tearing itself apart, with our soldiers trapped in the middle. In order to “catapult the propaganda,” Bush has been tossing out the fantasy that “Right now there are over 80 army battalions fighting alongside coalition troops,” with “over 30 Iraqi battalions in the lead.”
There are about 500-600 soldiers in a battalion, so that’s a minimum of 15,000 Iraqi soldiers ready to rock n’ roll. Considering that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, that means we only have to train 135,000 more Iraqis (at a cost of $7 billion per month) to finish the job. It took us two years to train 15,000 so it should only take another, oh, 15-20 years or so to train the rest.
There’s just one problem – when Bush says that there are 30-80 Iraqi battalions fighting in Iraq, he’s talking out of his ass. Last week Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there is actually only one self-sufficient Iraqi battalion.
One. It’s taken us two years to train one self-sufficient battalion, comprising 500-600 soldiers, at a cost of $200 billion dollars and counting.
President Bush: job approval at 37%. (yep.)
Tom DeLay: indicted (three times).
Karl Rove: on the cusp of indictment.
Harriet Miers: attacked by both right (Ann Coulter!) and left.
wait for it…
wait for it…
And for those who think I’m just a pinko Commie baby-eating Chomsky-loving liberal conspiracy theorist, remember when Tom Ridge admitted that the administration pressured him into raising the threat level? Yeah.
Dean Esmay, the avowed atheist who never met a hard-line Christian conservative he didn’t like, links to an article by Michael Balter whose premise is neatly contained in the headline: Let ‘intelligent design’ and science rumble.
Hey, what a great idea. I think the next series of debates should be “Physics vs. Magic: Who’s right?” Can physicists explain everything? Hell no. So the obvious alternative is magic. I’m not sure if it should be the magic of “Charmed” or “Bewitched” or even “The Craft” (if we’re reaching), but that can be determined by a public opinion poll, or something.
I personally believe that angels cause “gravity” by pushing us all down away from Heaven until we’re ready to go. Prove me wrong, Stephen Hawking! I dare ya!
If Bush nominated a fax machine for the Supreme Court, right-wing weblogs and pundits would be engaged in endless discussions of what the judicial philosophy of the Xerox 4250 would be.
On Fox News Sunday:
Brit Hume: We still don’t know how the Xerox would rule on Roe v. Wade. But the fax machine has been in the Oval Office for some years, so we have to trust that President Bush knows how it would rule.
Juan Williams (incredulous): It’s a FAX MACHINE!
Brit Hume: What’s your point?
Best deconstruction of Bennett’s remarks I’ve read so far, from a commenter at Daily Kos:
There is no distortion that could make those remarks worse than they were. The idea that any context could make even hypothetically suggesting that total genocide would reduce the crime rate just shows the depth of his bigotry.
And in fact even taking the entire conversation into account makes it worse not better. Even if, as some have claimed, he was only extrapolating from the observation that crime-rate (official) is higher in the black population, the fact that he said he “knew” that removing all black people, even hypothetically, would result in a reduction in crime rate means that at bottom, he believes that blackness must be causal. [Emphasis mine. -TM] If he had been prepared to consider that, say inequality was causal, or poverty, or judicial racism were causal, he could not have said that he “knew” the crime rate would go down. Because there is absolutely no way of knowing. It is perfectly possible the crime rate would stay the same or go up. It depends on what is causing the crime rate. By saying he “knew” what would happen, he was assuming race was causal.
Ergo it was not just disgustingly racist, but simply racist. There is absolutely no defence.
Now Bill Bennett can concentrate on blackjack full-time:
And yes – I feel tremendous pleasure from this. I’m OK with that. Sort of like when Bill O’Reilly was caught leaving unwanted dirty-talk messages on an employee’s phone, just when “The O’Reilly Factor for Kids” was coming out? Yeah, like that.
“In the White House that hero worshipped the president, [Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Harriet] Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.”
-David Frum, National Review Online
“I’m disappointed, depressed and demoralized.”
-Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard
“I am going to assume that this is a classic Bush head-fake gambit. If I’m wrong, I will spend the weekend banging my head against a concrete wall. This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about! It’s not a job for a political functionary!”
-John Podhoretz, The Corner on National Review (before the pick was announced this morning)
Man at a party with friends and his wife:
Man: You know I bet if I punched my wife in the mouth that would get her to shut up. But that would be morally reprehensible to do, and I would never hit my wife.
Wife: I can’t believe that you would say that, I’m offended that you would talk openly about punching me in the face.
Friend: Well, Wife you didn’t listen to his WHOLE statement, he said it would be morally reprehensible. He was just stating a FACT, because he’s a big guy and if he did punch you in the mouth I bet that it would make you shut up. I can’t stand that everyone is so P.C., he was just making a truthful claim and again why can’t he just talk about PUNCHING you in the face, it’s in his right to make thought experiments.
If we killed all the vets returning from duty in Iraq, we would reduce the incidence of mental illness in this country. Of course that would be very hard to do and it would be morally reprehensible but we would have alot less nut jobs.
Both stolen from comments at Balloon Juice, where conservatives are falling all over themselves to figure out ways to support Bennett and his comments. Which says more than Bennett’s quote ever did, if you ask me.
“You know, there’s a lot of filth coming out of Hollywood these days. And if your sole purpose was to clean up Hollywood, you could just abort every Jewish baby in this country. Of course it would be impossible and reprehensible to do such a thing – but Hollywood would be a better place.”
“If all you wanted to do was lower the obesity rate in this country, there’s a simple solution – shoot all the fat people. I mean, just round them up and shoot them in the head and dump their bodies in the ocean. But of course, that would be wrong.”
UPDATE: The White House now calls Bennett’s original remarks “not appropriate.” To which Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) responded, “Not appropriate is wearing white shoes after Labor Day. These comments were reprehensible and racist.” Yay to Sen. Lautenberg!