Dawkins writes:

Look for the Bush administration's strategy in its attacks on its critics and its attempts to defend itself against criticism: everything is taken (and given) personally, never substantively.

We all know quite well by now how honorable and decent and humble a man George W. Bush is. (How do we know this? Because he's an honorable and decent and humble man, that's why.)

Any criticism of his policies is a personal attack on him because how could an honorable and decent and humble man create policies that merited attack? The answer is that such a man couldn't have done so, so why are you engaging in gutter politics and attacking him personally?

Did you try to suggest that President Bush did not serve his country honorably in the National Guard? Do you not realize that this President is an honorable and decent and humble man? Are you trying to subvert fact and say he did something that was not honorable and decent and humble?

Also, why are you trying to impugn the integrity of the National Guard, and collectively, the integrity of all the honorable and decent and humble men and women who serve in the National Guard? Why do you attack them personally?

Today's New York Times features a story in which "more than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statementÂ… asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad."

In short, many of the nation's leading scientists criticize the policy practices of the Bush administration.

So how does "Dr." John H. Marburger III, "science adviser" to President Bush and director of the "Office of Science and Technology 'Policy'" at the White House cast the issue?

What's at stake is the personal pique felt by a handful of prideful prima donna eggheads:

"I think there are incidents where people have got their feathers ruffled," Dr. Marburger said. "But I don't think they add up to a big pattern of disrespect."

Scientists accuse the administration of distorting fact and subverting sound science.

But really, say the Bushies, these guys have a personal axe to grind, because, of course, scientists only point out discrepancies in fact and method when they've been personally disrespected!

And, of course, it's also political. Personal and political: the only motivations that ever exist for criticizing this administration.

Says, "Dr." D. Allan Bromley, the "science adviser" to Mr. Bush's father: "You know perfectly well that it is very clearly a politically motivated statement," said "Dr." Bromley, a physicist at Yale. "The statements that are there are broad sweeping generalizations for which there is very little detailed backup."

The Bushies hate it when you criticize their policies (in their minds, when you launch attacks against the integrity of a certain honorable and decent and humble President).

So you think in the general election they'll play the same game and refrain from launching personal attacks against a certain French-looking, pussy-whipped, unpatriotic presumptive Democratic nominee?

The nation needs to remain focused and "win the war on terror, support our troops, find the terrorists wherever we can and either put them in a cell or put them in the cemetery," DeLay said.

All of that is part of a focus on "security, prosperity and family," he said.

"But security and prosperity are not worth anything if you don't maintain and protect the American family from the onslaught that is attacking the family, starting with gay marriages," he said. "We believe the American family is headed by a man and woman, and that is marriage, and that is the foundation of this country."

More filth.

Meanwhile:

California Judge Denies Immediate Stay of Gay Marriages

SAN FRANCISCO -- Gay and lesbian couples won another reprieve Friday when a judge declined to immediately stop San Francisco from granting them marriage licenses, saying conservative groups failed to prove the weddings would cause irreparable harm.

Full story.

'NY Times' Fails to Acknowledge Its Role in WMD Hype

The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.

However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat.

Full story.

A footnote to that last post. A reader at 9/11 Citizens Watch leaves the following comment:

Sadly, James Hatfield, the author of this last story, was found dead in a hotel room o­n July 18, 2001, an apparent 'suicide'. Hatfield was also the author of 'Fortunate Son', in which he accused Bush of hiding a three-decade-old cocaine arrest. As a side note, reporter Helen Thomas and others are starting to question whether the community service Bush performed in Houston in the early1970s was somehow related to this, which would also explain why Bush failed to report for his Texas Air National Guard medical exam/drug test. A positive test for cocaine would have done more than grounded Bush - it might have sent him to prison.

Two things occur to me.

1.) I must have totally forgotten that Hatfield "was found dead in a hotel room o­n July 18, 2001, an apparent 'suicide'." What a weird end (or not?) to a weird story.

2.) Has it been obvious to everyone else all along that the reason Bush "failed to report for his Texas Air National Guard medical exam/drug test" was that he was snorting coke at the time and would obviously have been caught by a blood test? Is anyone raising this issue, or is the cocaine thing still beyond-the-pale illegal-abortion-caliber taboo?

Update. Puto Estupido comments:

A pair of filmmakers made a documentary that follows the whole Hatfield saga from beginning to end that is reportedly really good -- I haven't seen it, but you can watch the trailer here:

http://www.hornsandhalos.com/

From 9/11 Citizens Watch:

9/11 Family Steering Committee: Questions for Bush

The Family Steering Committee Statement and Questions Regarding the 9/11 Commission Interview with President Bush

February 16, 2004

The Family Steering Committee believes that President Bush should provide sworn public testimony to the full ten-member panel of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Collectively, the Commissioners are responsible for fulfilling the Congressional mandate. Therefore, each Commissioner must have full access to the testimony of all individuals and the critical information that will enable informed decisions and recommendations. Before an audience of the American people, the Commission must ask President Bush in sworn testimony, the following questions:

1. As Commander-in-Chief on the morning of 9/11, why didn't you return immediately to Washington, D.C. or the National Military Command Center once you became aware that America was under attack? At specifically what time did you become aware that America was under attack? Who informed you of this fact?

2. On the morning of 9/11, who was in charge of our country while you were away from the National Military Command Center? Were you informed or consulted about all decisions made in your absence?

3. What defensive action did you personally order to protect our nation during the crisis on September 11th? What time were these orders given, and to whom? What orders were carried out? What was the result of such orders? Were any such orders not carried out?

Read all 23 questions.

USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll results

2. If Massachusetts Senator John Kerry were the Democratic Party's candidate and George W. Bush were the Republican Party's candidate, who would you be more likely to vote for?

Likely Voters
2004 Feb 16-17

55 Kerry
43 Bush

3. If North Carolina Senator John Edwards were the Democratic Party's candidate and George W. Bush were the Republican Party's candidate, who would you be more likely to vote for?

Likely Voters
2004 Feb 16-17

54 Edwards
44 Bush

"For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all..." (I Timothy 2:5-6)

No: another mediator has come and gone, leaving a cleansed earth in his wake. It has been washed in His blood.

The New Testament was itself only a prefiguration of the current dispensation, inaugurated today by the withdrawal of Howard Dean, the true Christ, from the American presidential campaign.

The cruel Father of the Old Testament was only partially placated by Jesus' suffering.

The Father lived on in the Media-Industrial complex, which had demanded more blood from the righteous.

But the Second Christ has come and given his blood. We are now free.

The now impotent media feeds on its accursed and dead beloved. We survive, and demand victory.

The media has been placated and rendered impotent. The field has been cleared. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Mortal men will make it of their own free will.

John Kerry and John Edwards will now exercise their prerogatives as free men. They need no longer suffer. We need no longer suffer. For He has come and bled for us.

Dean is Dead. The filthy God has absconded with his bloody bones. Long live Howard Dean.

The first Gallup poll conducted on the issue of interracial marriage was in 1958 and showed that 94% of whites opposed such unions - and while disapproval has lessened in recent decades, it's hardly been a 180-degree shift.

Do they still poll people about their opinions on interracial marriage? I'm guessing not, but I'd be interested to know what percentage of those people "troubled" by same-sex marriage are (or at least used to be, say, in the last 20 years) "troubled" by different-race marriage. In any case, the point should be clear: it has always been a band of hateful Bible-thumping cretins who need another class of people to kill instead of themselves, and a whole lot more well-meaning but ignorant people swallowing their poison.

If the Dem candidate doesn't support full, across-the-board same-sex marriage rights (at least after the election is over), he is shameful to the extent of being unsupportable. Santorum's "man on dog" quip is very instructive: disallowing marriage rights is basically saying that some people are animals. True, there are some laws protecting animals, but in general they can be beaten, starved, or killed (or neutered) at the pleasure of their owners. I really think it's that simple.

More fun from the good old days:

In the years after the Civil War, it was an eagerness to "preserve the integrity of the white race" by preventing the birth of mixed-race children that in great part motivated states to pass miscegenation laws. Some states, like California, chose to specifically prohibit "intermarriage of white persons with Chinese, Negroes, mulattos, or persons of mixed blood descended from a Chinaman or Negro from the third generation inclusive." In 1869, a Georgia judge blocked the marriage of a white Frenchman and a black woman by saying, "The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural but is always productive of deplorable results. Our daily observations show us that the offspring of these unnatural connections are generally sick and effeminate." And a Missouri judge in 1883 prevented an intermarriage, because, "It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the [children] of a black man and white woman, and a white man and a black woman intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites."

In contrast to the ignorance that muddied such racist rulings, the clearer prejudice of Virginia's Judge Leon Bazile in the famous 1959 Loving case (in which a black man and white woman were sentenced to prison for trying to circumvent Virginia law by marrying in Washington DC) is almost refreshing. "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Maylay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," he said. "And but for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages." The 1967 federal law superceded state statutes, but it took decades for all states to officially remove these laws from their books; Alabama did so just this year.

Dear Urban Outfitters,

I have purchased many items of clothing from UO over the years. Today, a friend brought to my attention that your product line includes a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Voting Is For Old People." Your website's photograph features a "young person" wearing this Tee.

My question is: When did UO adopt a policy of promoting subjection, oppression, bondage, and eventual death and annihilation? (You do realize that those are almost certainly the conditions which would obtain in the United States if everyone who was not an "old person" followed the advice of your shirt and chose not to vote.)

You may reply that the shirt's message is meant to be "ironic" and thus "hip." Well, that shirt is not ironic, it is not funny, and only the biggest assholes in the universe would consider it "hip." Do "the biggest assholes in the universe" represent your target clientele?

In any case, I will certainly never buy anything from OU ever again, and I will urge everyone I know to do the same (that includes quite a few "hip" "young people" here in New York City--all of us voters, by the way).

Be sure to NOT ADD ME TO ANY EMAIL LIST.

Thanks for your attention.

Sincerely,

Blicero

Progress Media Names Progressive Talk Network “Air America Radio”

Progress Media announced today that it has chosen Air America Radio as the name for its new progressive talk radio network.

“Air America Radio will provide a counterbalance to right wing voices,” said Mark Walsh, Chief Executive Officer of Air America Radio network. “The top talent in the country is coming together to ensure Air America Radio provides the most compelling and entertaining programming on radio.”

Air America Radio recently announced the signing of comedian and best-selling author Al Franken and Robert Kennedy Jr. as well as a radio network distribution deal with Multicultural Radio’s WNTD 950AM in Chicago.

In addition, Air America Radio expects to announce additional distribution deals and acquisitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major media markets across the country.

Is this

Partisan Denunciations Fly Over Secret Strategy Memos

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 — Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have been matching each other with nasty accusations for well over two years in the debate over the treatment of Bush administration judicial candidates.

really the appropriate way to title and begin a story, the point of which is

The Senate sergeant-at-arms, who is nearing the end of an investigation into the tampering, told senators last week that the Republican staff members' activities went on much longer and were far more extensive than previously believed.

They spanned more than two years and involved conscious computer hacking as some 3,000 Democratic documents were secretly downloaded, read and distributed by some number of Republican aides, said people who attended the briefings.

?

At least the cherry atop this massive shit sundae is rightfully saved for last:

The most unrepentant of Republicans was Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership. According to the newspaper Roll Call, Mr. Santorum told reporters that he still believed that "the real potential criminal behavior" was with the Democrats because the content showed their unwholesome ways of colluding with outside interest groups to oppose Mr. Bush's judicial nominees.

Everyone remember what santorum is?



Google search: "Rick Santorum"

Santorum
Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes
the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum .
Description: Satirical attempt to name the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct...
Category: Society > Politics > Humor
www.spreadingsantorum.com/ - 1k - Cached -Similar pages

Goodies from the Daily News:

Now the incorrigible Larry Flynt says he plans to market a Bush abortion story as genuine - in a book to be published this summer by Kensington Press.

"This story has got to come out," the wheelchair-bound Hustler magazine honcho told the Daily News' Corky Siemaszko . "There's a lot of hypocrisy in the White House about this whole abortion issue."

Flynt claimed that Bush arranged for the procedure in the early '70s.

"I've talked to the woman's friends," Flynt said. "I've tracked down the doctor who did the abortion, I tracked down the Bush people who arranged for the abortion," Flynt said. "I got the story nailed."

Flynt wouldn't disclose whether he plans to name the woman.

speakingcorpse writes:

There's nothing else to say about this fool who thinks he's the only person in the world who cares about the sex trade; who portrays himself as the heroic savior of foreign brown girls; who refuses to acknowledge that brown people might themselves have some interest in stopping the sex trade; who ignores the pleas of numerous American feminist organizations to publicize their work on the sex trade, because such publicity would interfere with his own efforts to cast himself as an iconoclast who stands above all traditional forms of political "partisanship," and would interfere also with his efforts to pander to maniacal Christ-lickers who, according to Kristof, care more about women than American feminists (those self-indulgent and amoral advocates of sex, birth-control, abortion, and lesbianism).

If only liberals and feminists could get over themselves and their self-righteous efforts to impose their hedonistic moral bankruptcy on the rest of our pious and good-hearted nation! Does Kristof really believe this garbage? No. But at least he isn't one of those benighted LIBERALS, who started off wanting to save the world and have now gotten bogged down in the depravity let loose by the "anything-goes" 1960's! (How different Kristof is from Katha Pollitt, who, I think, is now my favorite political writer.)

Kristof to the Rescue?
by Katha Pollitt

You'd think he'd learn. But no. Now Kristof is complaining that American women's groups such as NOW and Feminist Majority don't care about sexual slavery and the trafficking of women and children for commercial sex. In a series of columns, he describes his efforts to "buy the freedom" of two Cambodian teenage prostitutes living in a sleazy brothel in Poipet and to get them home to their families. Evangelical Christians, he argues, care about girls like these; feminists are too busy "saving Title IX and electing more women to the Senate," he observed in a Times online forum.

Full story.

This from Scat-Man Carothers:

Vain, glory-loving, restless, agitated, but at the same time incapable either of perseverance or of action, [Bush] was simply an epicurean, a hard drinker, a romantic, and a petty tyrant on the throne. As a man incapable of actually doing anything, he doubted nothing. It seemed to him that royal power, in the mystical, divine mission of which he sincerely believed, gave him the right and the strength to do absolutely anything he took it into his head to do: to accomplish the impossible, to unite the categorically incompatible, in defiance of logic and all the laws of nature and society.

...But there was nothing serious in any of this. He accomplished only one thing: by his constant efforts, which kept supplementing and contradicting each other, he turned the whole of the old order upside down and thoroughly shook up his subjects from top to bottom. Everyone began to anticipate something.

That "something" was the revolution...

-Mikhail Bakunin, "Statism and Anarchy", 1873, Ch.VI

speakingcorpse writes (to the Secretary of State):

Dear Mr. Powell,

I recently your read of your despicable conduct in testimony before members of the House of Representatives. I hope you know that you are big worthless asshole. Fuck you. Listening to you talk is like listening to a broken record. It's like hearing the digestive tract expel its waste products into a clogged toilet. No one who ever thought you were respectable thinks so anymore. Everyone knows that you're a pathetic slave to power. You think you have power because of the office you occupy. You don't. Only people who can DO something have power. You can't DO anything. You're as pliable as toilet paper. Your mouth is a hole through which other people spit and shit. You're nothing. If your masters could appoint a plastic "Secretary of State" figure through which to broadcast their absurd lies, they would so in a second. Would such a bit of plastic have power? You're also guilty of spawning the fat piece of shit Michael Powell. You owe me a personal apology for that. His birth was the true obscenity (unlike the revelation of Janet Jackson's nipple shield--which, I admit, was unpleasant). I don't believe for a second that you were angry at Sherrod Brown. It's the shit you were told to pull. But you probably don't even know the difference anymore between real anger (or real thoughts and feelings of any kind) and the fake shit you spew. You probably never knew the difference. Only a mindless hack could allow himself to be used the way you're used.

speakingcorpse

And "a friend of" speakingcorpse writes (to the object of Powell's "explosion"):

Dear Congressman Brown:

Thank you for your excellent questioning of Colin Powell last week. Your conduct was exemplary. You should know that nothing you did surprised Powell or made him actually angry. He was simply practicing a tired but nonetheless effective Republican tactic: when Democrats pose serious questions, Republicans whip themselves into frenzies of phony outrage, so as to prevent the discussion from even occurring. You can be sure Powell had his much-reported sudden "explosion" of anger planned out in advance, for use in case someone like you had the guts to bring up Bush's embarrassing record in yet another public forum. But you've got to keep at it! Maybe the next time some Republican tries to cut off legitimate discourse with phony outrage, you could allow yourself to get REALLY outraged. Tell the Republican hacks--and make absolutely no mistake, Powell is nothing but a mindless hack--that their behavior is dangerous, insulting, un-American, craven, and disgraceful. Their behavior is no better than that of infantile brats who try to sweep the pieces off the board-game when they begin to fear losing.

SO SCREW THEM!

Well, you can't say that, but I can. I know how hard it must be to try to carry on speaking to these bastards as if a real conversation were even possible. But you keep up the front, for the good of the country and the institutions on which it depends. I admire your struggles greatly.

Sincerely,

A friend of speakingcorpse