This entire situation makes much more sense if you remember that Donohue is an old political ally to Rudy Giuliani. Donahue’s behavior follows a fairly straightforward formula—he pretends to be a representative of the Catholic Church and sounds the “alarm” in one of two cases 1) He hasn’t been in the news awhile and needs to inject some energy into the culture wars by pretending Christianity is under attack and 2) He’s shilling for some candidate. His attacks on me and Melissa McEwan were basically assaults on John Edwards, who is, out of all the major Democratic candidates, the one who is most likely to show some backbone against Republicans if he wins. Also, I still think he’s the one most likely to do well in a general election, though Obama has some promising advantages (mainly his Midwest ties). Now Huckabee is gaining in the polls, which doesn’t mean he’ll win, but because of the elaborate voting processes in Iowa, it does mean that he could throw the primaries to Mitt Romney, fucking over Donahue’s gay-snuggling, pro-abortion best buddy Rudy Giuliani. So, time to go on the attack against Huckabee.
Why do I think Donahue and Giuliani are so tight? Well, they go way back. In retrospect, Donahue faking some outrage over the “Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art was a big fat kiss to Rudy Giuliani, an opportunity for Giuliani to act all pious and self-righteous when his reputation was suffering. I expect that unless Giuliani gets knocked out of the primaries fairly soon, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of his comrade-in-assholery Bill Donohue.
31 Responses to “Bill Donohue makes up bizarre excuse to attack Huckabee”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Donohue is a poor excuse of a human being. I wish someone would shut him up permanently.
Since The Golden Compass bombed Donohue ash to do something!
Is it just me, or is this fracturing and infighting among Republicans just fucking beautiful? I’m usually pretty cynical, but I interpret the usually tight coalition of fundagelicals on one side and militarists and plutocrats on the other falling apart as a damn good omen.
Hunh??
Huckabee is a Baptist. Donohue is a Catholic. The two groups, um (be polite) don’t like each other very much. And as to either Baptists or Catholics voting for a Morman, fuggetaboudit.
(And cries of “heresy!” are heard in the land, from all sides. Pass the popcorn!)
The “Sensation” business is what launched Donohue and started getting him on Fox, IIRC. They ate that shit up.
Giuliani did a lot of manufactured-outrage, and he lost every single free-speech case that was brought as a result of his obsessions. He denied parade permits impermissibly, he tried to get the Brooklyn Museum’s funding cut over Sensation (which only worked to the benefit of the BMA), ordered the MTA to pull bus ads for New York Magazine because they said the magazine was “the only good thing that Rudy hasn’t taken credit for.”
He *did* succeed at shutting down a lot of nightclubs and bars at which people spontaneously danced because they didn’t have cabaret licenses.
Overall, kind of a matched pair of jackboots, those two.
I suppose it would have been too much if Donohue had finally woken up and realized that Huckabee and a lot of the religious right that make for nice convenient allies on certain issues think that Catholics aren’t really Christians.
It’s funny how Donohue is willing to throw his self-righteousness out the window for someone like Giuliani, who while on paper is Catholic, is probably the most “immoral” candidate in the field for either party (BOTH in the faux-moral sense and in terms of legitimate morality…not much explanation needed in either case.)
I don’t know. Whatever happen to “the enemy of my enemy is my friend“? It’s all about making damn certain that your ideological side wins, remember? As nomination-time draws near I definitely foresee the wingnuts and powerful/influential godbags putting aside their quibbling over their superstitions-of-choice, and just going with whichever Repub candidate that possesses some chance of defeating the Dem candidate. And perish the thought, if this country goes fuckin’ stupid yet again–and it probably will, cue the “how can 50+ Million people be so stupid” British headline– and a Republican wins, then they’ll go back to sputtering about “OMFG!!! THEIR religion believes [insert some theological thing here]! They are so NOT real Christians!”
The gourd! The shoe!
Not only did Rudy manage to lose every free-speech case and most of the other civil-liberties cases resulting from his policies, but in doing so, he managed to cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.
I think the Giuliani-Donohue thing is not just that they’re both posturing pharisee-catholic assholes, but that they both in particular love the decadent authoritarian aspect of the Catholic church hierarchy. In a previous century they would both have aspired to become ostensibly-celibate cardinals.
Regarding comment #4 - In 2004, Donahue attacked a Catholic politician (Kerry) in support of an Evangelical politician (Bush). Donahue’s Catholic loyalism is not sufficient to explain his attack on Huckabee.
Huckabee is a Baptist. Donohue is a Catholic. The two groups, um (be polite) don’t like each other very much.
You know why they like each other? Same reason the Nazis and Stalinists didn’t–because they are both oh so close to each other in their outlook, and therefore are competing for the allegiance of the same type of person.
Anyway, Donahue is a loud-mouthed statist tool, and I feel sorry that you had to deal with him.
I had forgotten about Giuliani’s “Sensation” dustup. That was sort of his Entartete Kunst moment - but he wasn’t quite as successful at exploiting the faux outrage as I’m sure he wanted to be (Americans, grateful for his courageous moral stand, spontaneously rise up, carry him bodily to Washington DC, physically throw Clinton out of the White House, and make Giuliani president, while birds sing and god smiles down on us in heavenly joy…).
Oh well, not everybody reads from the same script, apparently…
Eh, it’s the same reason Ann Coulter came out against Huckabee. Donohue and Coulter are there to stir up the fundie base, not to actually get one of their clowns into office. Huckabee is off-script, which is why the party establishment is suddenly so confused that they’re attacking a bona fide fundie for being too liberal.
Actually, the conservative backlash against Huckabee is one of the funniest political phenomena I’ve seen in the forty some years I’ve been paying serious attention to the news. They can’t stand him because he’s too tolerant, because he isn’t a slavish tool of the wealthy, and because they don’t think a former Baptist minister could be elected president.
They could be right, but the message it sends to his supporters is that the conservative establishment really doesn’t care about people like them, which is exactly what we’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been keeping track.
I know it’s been mentioned elsewhere, but I agree that much of the attack on Huckabee is about class. The Villagers still whine their outrage over that Clinton riff-raft that spoiled their cocktail parties during the 90s. And Donohue, while currently not part of DC’s glitterati, wants to get into the game.
I would really like to think that we’re witnessing the splintering of the Republican coalition, what with the various religious nut-jobs realizing that they don’t actually like each other and with the fiscal conservatives realizing that the religious nutjobs don’t care about balanced budgets. But maybe that’s too optimistic. They’ll probably pull it together and get all their people to vote for anybody but Hillary/Obama/Edwards.
Incidentally, there seems to be another Sally lurking around the comments these days. I’m the old-school Sally, with the capital S.
the fiscal conservatives realizing that the religious nutjobs don’t care about balanced budgets.
This fiscal conservative realized this a long time ago. The Republican Party hasn’t been fiscally conservative since Newt Gingrich. Tom DeLay and George W. Bush changed the party from one of disciplined spending and balanced budgets into a free-spending political machine to buy votes.
The Republican Party hasn’t been fiscally conservative since Newt Gingrich. Tom DeLay and George W. Bush changed the party from one of disciplined spending and balanced budgets into a free-spending political machine to buy votes.
Is somebody forgetting about Ronald Reagan? You know, the guy who wanted to bankrupt the federal government by cutting taxes and increasing spending. The Reagan admin wasn’t one for disciplined spending. Unless, of course, you mean that they had a goal and stuck to it by wildly overspending on the imaginary arms race with the USSR & on the war on drugs boondoggle.
Yeah, but I think that a lot of old-line, fiscally conservative Republicans thought it was a blip or that they could win back the party. My sense is that a lot of them are finally thinking about jumping ship.
Your timeline is off. The GOP stopped caring about balanced budgets the second Ronald Reagan came to power. Newt and Delay did better when Clinton was in office, but Delay fell off the cliff when Bush took power in 2001.
Your timeline is off. The GOP stopped caring about balanced budgets the second Ronald Reagan came to power.
There was a Democratic Congress at the time though. Congress tends to control fiscal policy, so it can be excused more easily than when they had all three branches of government.
Once Gingrich went away they really seemed to go off the rails. There are a few exceptions of course, such as Jeff Flake. But they were steamrolled by the Delay machine. The massive spending for the war–which we were all told would be paid for by oil revenues (ha!)– followed by the prescription drug boondoggle did it for me.
I’ll vote for just about anyone that will restrain spending and balance the budget.
I have a mixed view of Reagan. I don’t think he was the second coming of Christ, but I don’t think hes George W. Bush.
His upside was his willingness to work across the aisle. Think of the Social Security reform in the early ’80s, or the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He knew a quagmire when he saw one, and knew to cut our losses. Think Lebanon in 1982. Despite neoconservative revisionism, he also was more than willing to negotiate with the adversaries of the United States. Cutting taxes did in fact raise revenues, the problem was the government just spent faster.
The downside is, of course, the deficit, the merging of the Republican Party with social reactionaries, and the escalation of the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs to “nuclear”.
Don’t for one minute confuse a little primary season squabble as a true rift in the right-wing machine. The pairing of fundies and plutocrats has always been a loveless marriage of convenience. As soon as general election time comes rolling around they’ll be throwing out voter registrations and absentee ballots, push polling, and working any number of other dirty tricks in the name of the lord/free-market.
“I’ll vote for just about anyone that will restrain spending and balance the budget.”
Geez. Who would that be?
You have a good point in that when congress and the presidency are controlled by opposite parties that we tend to spend less. Clinton/Gingrich and now Pelosi/Bush are pretty clear examples.
It’s hard to see how Tom Delay isn’t a villian to pretty much anyone on the left or right.
There was a Democratic Congress at the time though. Congress tends to control fiscal policy, so it can be excused more easily than when they had all three branches of government.
Funny. During Reagan’s 8 years in office, he asked Congress for over $16 billion more in spending than it actually signed into law. So really, Congress was restraining him. But anyway…
The scary thing is that now we’re dealing with ’starve the beast’ fanatics like Grover Norquist who want to create such a fiscal train wreck that our government collapses in on itself under the weight of massive debt, and don’t care about the consequences to our nation.
“I’ll vote for just about anyone that will restrain spending and balance the budget.”
Geez. Who would that be?
That would be Michael Cullen, the NZ Finance Minister.
The right-wing whines that he’s too conservative in taxing in order to maintain a budget surplus, and then whines when he spends or has tax cuts because he’s bribing the voters.
Essentially, they whine on economics because Labour is doing a steady, competent job. And you just know that if the buggers get in, cut taxes, and stuff up the budget, they’ll be whining that it’s somehow Labour’s fault…
Mike Huckabee being favored by voters actually makes me kind of happy that our presidential elections are rigged.
I named Bill Donohue the second biggest asshole of the year, along with everyone who is part of the Catholic League.
Why did Edwards work for a hedgefund in 2006? Why wasn’t Edwards leading the fight against subprime mortgages or against the occupation of Iraq?
Because he is a Republican.
Edwards’ backbone has terminal cancer, and when she is gone he becomes a jelly fish.
That would be Michael Cullen, the NZ Finance Minister.
The right-wing whines that he’s too conservative in taxing in order to maintain a budget surplus, and then whines when he spends or has tax cuts because he’s bribing the voters.
A budget balancer and a tax cutter? Someone should give him a green card.
…the election. Because as sure is eggs are eggs that gutless wonder won’t actually show any backbone before or during the election.