And I thought Bush’s lie that he gave up golf in solidarity out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the war was the winner of the dumbassery remark of the year. Boy was I wrong.

PZ Myers at Pharyngula points to an incredible statement by the movie critic, right-wing Clown Hall writer and radio show host. First, I love PZ’s opening.

Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.

Oh yes, Medved did, friends. I guess the best thing we can say about the following statement is that he probably wasn’t emitting the spittle Pat “A Brief for Whitey” Buchanan did yesterday when he was on Hardball. Medved even makes the gutsy move of explaining that the DNA shaped by our borders and risk-taking requires governing by Republican policies:

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

…Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

Wow. Talk about junk science — so now Americans are a “race”? Holy smoke, this is incredible. Actually, Medved’s working from the same playbook as Buchanan — slavery was a good thing for the darkies, after all, those bringing the slaves over as cargo didn’t have genocide on their minds, they needed that cargo alive because good hard money was paid for them.

Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean. By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse.

H/t, Oliver Willis.

(UPDATE: The GOP is in a panic over the legacy of this administration and its effect on November elections. See below the fold.)

We all know Dear Leader has no shame, but here’s yet another example of his terror alert leash jerking and fearmongering, intimating that electing a Democrat will lead to disaster if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq.

President Bush warned in an interview Tuesday that the Democratic presidential candidates’ plans to withdraw abruptly from Iraq could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States” and would “embolden” terrorists.

In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — Bush said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States.”

I hate to break it to his highness, but he f*cked up the whole region with his Big Military Adventure. It’s hard to imagine anyone screwing over both this country and Iraq any more than he has.

In the interview, he also shows how he prays away any guilt at sending young Americans to perish fighting military battles based on his bad judgment and Darth’s dark hand. God’s comfort is all these families need, not an apology from the man sitting in the Oval Office.

His Christian faith has increased in office, since “part of the faith walk is to understand your weaknesses and is to constantly try to embetter yourself and get closer to the Lord, and that’s a daily occurrence.”

“Obviously, there’s been some tough moments in here,” he said. “When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that’s a tough moment. If you’re a faithful person, you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through. On the other hand, there is a knowledge that the good Lord can comfort during these moments of grief. And that’s what I ask for in my prayer.”

And what can only be described as the public ramblings of a sociopath, our president said he shows his solidarity with families who have lost loved ones in his military misadventure by...not going out on the links anymore. I’m not sh*tting you.

See the video below the fold.
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Kudos to Catholics for Choice for putting together a report exposing that Bill Donohue is not who he says he is. He claims to be a defender of Catholics against bigotry, but instead, he’s a right wing shill who mainly focuses on partisan political attacks. Scott Swenson has the story. Here’s a taste.

In a 43-page report released Monday, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights: Neither Religious, Nor Civil, Catholics for Choice documents a pattern of media and political manipulation by Donahue, his organization, and his supporters. His base of support comes from the most politicized leaders of the Catholic hierarchy, including Cardinal Egan, and a board that reads like a Who’s Who of partisan Republican politics (L. Brent Bozell III, Alan Keyes, Kate O’Beirne, Linda Chavez, Kenneth Whitehead, Lawrence Kudlow, Thomas Monaghan, William Simon, Jr.). Far from protecting Catholics from bigotry, Donahue plays the victim card to advance a narrow, socially conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal political view.

Read the whole thing.

However…

While I agree with Brad (and Lauren, as an aside) that the “everyhick” method of reporting on better-than-urban* America is complete bullshit, I think he’s wrong about one thing: The perception of Obama as Muslim is hurting him in West Virginia.

Maybe not as much as the Financial Times implies:

“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist,” said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.

Mr Simpson’s remarks help explain why Mr Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, by 40 percentage points ahead of Tuesday’s primary election in the heavily white and rural state, according to recent opinion polls.

Brad replies:

Well no, dude, they really don’t.

Only 10% of voters think that Obama is a Muslim. And unless they all happen to be West Virginia Democratic primary voters, I don’t think that Mr. Simpson’s remarks explain anything other than his own psychosis.

Not quite.

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On the horrid article itself (instead of just the jaw-dropping quote), which isn’t technically about the casual cruelty that men inflicted on women in the conservative-romanticized utopia of the 50s, well, Lance Mannion has the long takedown that this article deserves. It’s by Michael Wolff and he at least does the nation a favor and shows that yep, The Village is more worried about politician’s sex lives than about what the public cares about, which is policy and leadership.

Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.

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From Echidne, a jaw-dropping tale from the fundie vs. reason battleground in our public schools.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

Read that next to this post by tristero, to really get that he’s not kidding when he says this.

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Annejumps sent me this, and Cristina Page posted on it. Various anti-choice organizations are coming together and protesting the fact that many of you right now are not having to get abortions. You know, because you use contraception.

There’s an entire bit of pseudo-science woo to explain how the birth control pill actually causes abortion, but there’s no actual scientific reason to think it. The only reason they grasp at this is that the anti-choice movement is not, and has never really been, motivated by concern for fetuses, but more concern for women’s ability to control our fertility, and subsequently our lives, control they don’t want us to have. The pill is protested because their magical beliefs would have it “killing babies”, but that doesn’t explain their opposition to condoms, opposition that has led to abstinence-only education and abstinence-only strings attached to HIV relief funds to the rest of the world. Maybe it kills babies when sperm are deprived of the opportunity to swim free?

I can’t decide between this image that was broadcast on Fox News to illustrate a story about Clinton wanting some Lincoln-Douglas debates with Obama:

Or Chris Muir’s idea about where those crazy ladies keep their Glocks so they’ll be easily accessible:

I actually wedge mine between my anti-gravity titties, with holster embedded via a quick outpatient surgery.

Help me, Pandagonians—which is funnier?

So why didn’t my outgoing governor just go ahead and say “faggot“?

ABC News’ Eloise Harper Reports: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton received the endorsement of North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley Tuesday morning in Raleigh, NC. After touring a bio-manufacturing training center, Gov. Easley, First Lady of North Carolina Mary Easley and Clinton held a ceremony at NC State University. The Governor formally expressed his support saying that there was “nothing I love more than a strong powerful woman.” Easley concluded his remarks saying Clinton — “makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy“.

Note that Hillary, who was right there with the NC gov, said nothing about his remark. Of course Easley infamously received the endorsement of Equality NC in his re-election bid, then in a debate said he’d sign a marriage amendment if it hit his desk, so why should we be surprised. And who is Hillary trying to court here — the “traditional Southern conservative.” Take the homo money and run, as it were. (The Politico):

Easley is a meaningful ally in the culture war she’s waging against Senator Barack Obama, as she seeks to cast him as a hopelessly unelectable liberal elitist and to persuade the Democratic Party leaders who will decide the nomination – the “superdelegates” – to choose her instead.

Both of the Dem candidates for governor here have endorsed Barack Obama, btw. I don’t see Easley’s nod to Clinton as significant; what matters are mayors and state reps, and the majority have publicly endorsed Obama as well.

Hillary Clinton was backslapping laughing with the NC governor. The same Hillary Clinton who has sucked millions of dollars out of the LGBT community. The same Hillary Clinton who cannot use the words gay or lesbian in front of general audiences, the same Hillary Clinton who has a web site where there’s no way to find any information on her LGBT positions.

Activist Phil Attey, former Human Rights Campaign staffer and online strategist, had a lot to say. It’s below the fold.

This release landed in my inbox:

Today in his endorsement of Senator Hillary Clinton, Governor Michael Easley of North Carolina ended his speech with an anti-gay epitaph. The hateful and sexist comment was that in his opinion, Senator Clinton makes Rocky Balboa look like a “pansy.” Directly following the word “pansy” the two veteran politicians burst into laughter and then embraced on stage.

When LGBT activists across the country heard this, our jaws literally hit the floor, as did our hearts. Since the Pennsylvania primary, we’ve been concerned that Senator Clinton is now courting and beholden to an anti-gay demographic, but never did we ever expect to be so whimsically made the butt of a joke nor blatantly thrown under the bus by politicians we once revered and some continue to support.

The statement was calculated and hateful. Americans over the age of 50 are fully aware that the word “pansy” is that generation’s polite way of publicly saying the word “faggot.” Both Governor Easley and Senator Clinton are of that generation, and both of them know what he meant by the word. This was not a slip of the tongue. This is part of Senator Clinton’s new “Rocky theme” … a theme that sadly includes now gay bashing.

On behalf of the LGBT community, I demand the following three things:

1. Governor Easley immediately issue a public apology for his use of hate speech and commit to launch a new state-wide campaign in North Carolina to educate the public on the issue of anti-LGBT hate speech and hate crimes.
2. Senator Clinton make good on a previous campaign ascertain that that she would strongly “reject and denounce” any endorsement from someone who engages in hate speech by immediately rejecting and denouncing Governor Easley’s endorsement.
3. Governor Easley face me in a public boxing ring in Raleigh, NC this weekend, so I can show him and the those who make such hateful comments, that if you go up against a real “pansy,” you’re going to end up pushing daisies. And, yes, I double yellow dog dare him.

Well, I did take notice of the Karl Rove article in Newsweek, but I didn’t, until today, see the fucking cover of the magazine.

Yes, the cover is about how much Obama is an “elitist” because there’s a vegetable called arugula and a beverage called beer, and while there’s not a whole lot of evidence that either substance is consumed to the exclusion of the other by Obama or that either imparts magical elitist or non-elitist properties, you’re supposed to believe this makes Obama unelectable. No word yet on the elitist properties of mustard, turnip, or collard greens. And if you’re holding your breath waiting to hear if John McCain has ever fouled his lips with the fancier foods, you can keep waiting. I’m sure his family’s private chef only makes them food that Bubba would eat. I find these food wars to be amusing as hell, since I’m like half redneck, because I guarantee you that some of the food I ate growing up would make the “journalists” who trumpet these kinds of non-controversies spin with confusion. Chicken and dumplings? I’m so electable. Quail, venison and elk? Elitist! What if I told you that my stepdad shot it all himself, though? Er, people do that? I’d also venture to mention that Mexican food has been 50% of my diet since I was able to chew, but that kind of information could cause a short-circuit. How do you read the tea leaves? Are you an elitist if you drink Miller but not Bud? I suppose it’s a gracious favor to the press corps that I’m never going to run for President with this sort of confusing background. Are all candidates supposed to submit a typical week’s diet for examination, or are only the Democrats?

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Karl Rove, who we know is just parroting the official Republican party line:

[Obama’s] stump speech is sounding old and out of touch. You made a mistake by not giving the bored press (and voters) something new last Tuesday when you lost Pennsylvania. Come up with something fresh that’s focused on the general election. Recapture the optimistic tone of your start and discard the weary, prickly and distracted tone you’ve taken on.

Dowd:

Hillary is not getting much sleep or exercise, and doesn’t, like the ascetic Obama, abstain from junk food and coffee and get up at dawn to work out on the road. She’s still a long shot and she’s 14 years older than her rival.

Yet she’s the one who is more energetic and focused and beaming, and he’s the one who seems uneven and gauzy, often fatigued and unable to disguise being fed up with the slog. Even his speeches don’t have the same pizazz.

She said it with more pizazz, but it’s clearly the same talking point that was probably on the fax machine the morning she wrote it: Obama is tired and boring. She’s getting her talking points from Karl Rove, y’all. Isn’t she supposed to be the “liberal”?

From Jake, it looks like Newsweek is looking for a new low in standards, publishing a concern troll piece by Karl Rove that’s probably best taken as a list of things for Barack Obama not to do in proper concern troll style. It’s sickening the way Rove is treated by the mainstream media—he should be received by decent people as if Jeffrey Dahmer walked into a room, but instead, he’s treated like a prince. All for his “brilliant” ability to be meaner and more soulless than even most Republicans. (At least in terms of political operatives. Surely those who run death squads and mercenary firms are even worse, though it might just be that Rove is incompetent at that kind of evil instead of unwilling.) But I suppose for the mainstream media, he’s a godsend, since he represents this sort of formal permission to replace legitimate analysis with shit-flinging and bullying. The country thanks this patriot for making all of us collectively stupider. In Rove’s America, there’s no more room for talking about issues that matter, and everything is potshots, innuendo, fear-mongering, and the favorite tactic of the right—”where there’s smoke, there’s fire”. (I was interviewed in the Austin-American Statesman, where I talk some about this in light of the Catholic League assault on myself and Melissa McEwan.) Mainstream media’s got to love him for making room for simple-minded bullying to become the prominent form of discourse. Maureen Dowd probably sleeps with a picture of him under her pillow.

This piece is a really shining example of how Rove’s moronic impulses are why he’s loved. Even the dumbest internet denizens would realize that this is very silly concern trolling. Right off the bat, he pushes the “elitist” slur, which sadly is so stupid it will probably take in the media, because black is white and up is down and the people who are fighting for greater justice and equality are more elitist than those who try to lift up the rich and stomp down everyone else.

But the real weak sauce, the demonstration that he’s just throwing shit against the wall to see what will stick, is in the list:

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As Richard at All Spin Zone notes, shouldn’t there be an investigation by officials into this? Inciting a riot is a felony. Here’s Rushbo:

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country…

…Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“We do, hopefully, the right thing for the sake of this country. We’re the only one in charge of our affairs. We don’t farm out our defense if we elect Democrats … and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don’t elect Democrats. And that’s the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think,” Limbaugh said…

Richard:

Someone needs to tell me the difference between Rush Limbaugh and Moqtada al-Sadr (above and beyond the fact that al-Sadr is an ordained cleric, and Limbaugh is just an ordained asswipe). And I want to know how Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, etc. etc. can continue getting away with inspiring their listeners to violence, yet are never called on it by either the Republican Party leadership or law enforcement authorities.

If you feel so moved, you can contact the Colorado Attorney General’s office and express your concerns. At a minimum, inciting to riot is a serious offense. When the call goes out from someone of Limbaugh’s stature, who has legions of loyal dittoheads hanging on his every word, it’s very, very likely that his “call to arms” could motivate some right wing crackpots to action.

Note this is not an exaggeration — Mr. Hillbilly Heroin could be in a heap of trouble. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper realizes that a line has been crossed, saying “Anyone who would call for riots in an American city has clearly lost their bearings.”

Why does Rush Limbaugh hate America?
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When I first heard about the Open Source Boob Project, I was sort of overwhelmed by the dipshittery and couldn’t really begin to tackle the multi-layered asshole levels required to be a part of this thing. (Summary: A bunch of dudes at some comic con decided that it would be awesome to trade on a handful of women’s serious insecurities and get some fondling. Gack, it’s complicated—just read the link.) Now that it’s been thoroughly dismantled by the rest of the feminist blogosphere, I feel like I can safely make fun of the whole thing without feeling like I’m missing something.

You have to give the assholes credit. Most men who have a strong need to have women flail around doing humiliating things (like being likened to open source software—aka, those other bitches you got to pay for, but you guys give it away for free) have to go the long, hard road and get a woman financially or socially dependent on them. You need to either go the Hugh Hefner route and just pay women openly for the favor or you go the route of any abusive fuckwit Joe Blow U.S.A. and charm her first with talk of love until you get her into a committed relationship and then start humiliating her, secure in the knowledge that it’s going to take her a lot, emotionally and financially, to break the commitment. In other words, you got to work for it most of the time. But these guys just waltzed in, declared themselves the judges of female beauty, and next thing you know, women are making absolute asses of themselves seeking the approval of these self-appointed judges. Nice racket if you can work it.

Not that I’m blaming the she-geeks that were sucked into this. As a she-geek of sorts, I fully understand that when you are old enough to vote but probably not old enough to drink, you are still getting over the fact that everyone who told you that you were too ugly and unsexy for admission in the human race in high school was probably exaggerating the case. And thus, you might be vulnerable to the flattery of some asshole who says, “Your tits are just good enough to be groped by random dudes who think showering every day is for peons.” But I promise you, young ladies, you don’t need the affections of men who hate you in order to get your grope on. Time passes and even those of us with the most unfortunate nicknames in high school can often go on to be considered full members of the human race, and attractive even to decent people.

Shorter Rod Dreher: Rape and child abuse should be legal long before we allow consenting adults of the same sex to marry. (Hat tip.)

What a massive, stinking asshole.

First, he tries to show his bona fides before he suggests that selling your daughters to your friends as rape toys should be legal.

Regular readers know that very little upsets me as much as child abuse. My default position is that the authorities must not hesitate to go in to protect children who may be being abused.

But then he immediately backs off this and gives people an exception if they say that god told them to rape girls that are barely past puberty. And he notes that raping young teenage girls has been considered a perfectly fine way to past the time throughout history, so we should take that into consideration when we decide to tolerate the practice of men raising daughters to give to their friends as sex toys, what you might call an FDLS compound, but I call a rape farm. By Rod’s argument, we should also be lenient on slavery (though it’s worth noting that the FDLS definition of wifehood is close to indistinguishable from slavery), infanticide, rule by kings, torture chambers for heretics, witch-burning—ah shit, what am I saying? All these injustices tend to fall on the shoulders of those who are not in his privileged shoes, so he’s probably see all of them as tolerable as long as you hid behind the “people of faith” label.

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This perv has a rap sheet with 30 arrests for sex abuse, 13 for jostling and two for grand larceny, according to the NYPD, and his behavior is so compulsive that he was barely out of the clink before he started up with the sexual abuse again.

About two weeks after he was released from prison, Freddie Johnson boarded a crowded subway train in Manhattan and illegally rubbed up against a woman, authorities said.

It is a fairly common crime on subways in New York. But this was no common criminal. Johnson has been arrested a staggering 53 times — the majority for groping women on the subway, police and prosecutors said.

In his latest arrest, Johnson was being followed by plainclothes officers who recognized him from police photos, authorities said. He was charged with persistent sexual abuse, and if convicted this time, he could be sent away for life. The district attorney’s office branded him a “recidivist transit grinder” at a court hearing earlier this week.

But the fact that Johnson was roaming the subways in the first place has raised questions about how the state deals with the problem of repeat sex offenders. His case even drew the scorn of a newspaper editorial this week that labeled Johnson the “Subway Rat.”

I’m surprised this dick still has his wing-wang; surely if he rubbed up against my cousin, it would be swiss cheese by now.

My story of pervy subway behavior is below the fold.
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Thanks to Roy for paying attention to Lileks’ continuing mental degradation. Roy wisely realizes that Lileks really is the true representation of the asshole who leans conservative, kind of hates himself for it because even he can tells he’s something of an asshole, and then doubles up the grumping in an effort to drown out the voices inside telling him that it doesn’t have to be this way. Or that’s what I’m telling myself is his disfunction this week.

Anyway, there are few things worse than when Lileks thinks he’s being clever, except of course that it’s also slightly awesome because it gives you a glimpse into the mind of someone who devotes 75% of his waking hours to rationalization. This review of “There Will Be Blood” tells us much about the mindset of a conservative who has replaced grumping with actual thought.

It kept my attention, and I enjoyed watching it, even though I felt myself disengaging from it by degrees in the last hour. Let’s just not tell ourselves that it’s a mark of great artistic insight to have the character get more insular and nasty as he gets richer, shall we?

Oooooh, insightful. Next he’ll be complaining that lovers in movies look starry-eyed, or that death causes the characters grief. Perhaps the rich in movies are portrayed as nasty and insular for a good reason? Hell, Lileks isn’t even rich, but being comfortably middle class has turned him into a person that hunkers down in his home, fearful that post-modernists and hippies are going to kick in his door for an interracial love-in. There are a few rich people who are good and kind, of course, but movies talk either in characters or symbols, and since “There Will Be Blood” was a film heavy with symbolism, it would have been, what’s the word?—moronic for the character that symbolized wealthy capitalists to be anything but power-hungry and crazy.

Look, mega-wealth is irrational, and yet it’s the source of 95% of the political problems we have nowadays. It doesn’t make sense that people who have enough money to live in the lap of luxury should want more all the time, and should do everything to cut taxes and cut corners and tweak the market to get rich quick and cut corners to the tune of something like the Enron scandal. And that’s what they do. The logic of mega-wealth is the sort of thing that only springs from nastiness and insularity, a total lack of perspective.

It’s kind of fun to be treated like a marauding threat to civilization itself.

Via Sadly, No, Michael Medved wrote a rather revealing column. I mean, it’s stupid, but as this quote that Travis plucks out shows, it’s revealing.

Now that we’ve broken barriers with history’s first viable female and African-American candidates, opponents of organized religion hope for a new campaign in which a brave politician makes a credible run for the highest office even while proclaiming his non-belief.

Considering that this entire article is bashing atheists, you can piece together what he’s saying, which is that the country is going to hell now that black people and women can run for President, and now that he’s been deprived of an opportunity to bash either group, he’s going after atheists.

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I’m beginning to think that, as irritating as it is, this drawn out primary is going to have one good side to it. At least the nominee, whoever he or she may be, will have had a chance to get some coverage before the full-blown onslaught of fanboy enthusiasm for McCain from our ridiculous mainstream press kicks in. I’m entirely unsure how the hell a Democrat is supposed to have a fighting chance with the ridiculous, deceitful McCain worship from the press.

Exhibit #1 in how bad this is going to get: CNN reporter Jim Acosta characterized this question as “heckling”.

STUDENT: We can see that this isn’t completely absent, uh, political motivation isn’t completely absent, yet we were told this isn’t a political event. So, what exactly is your purpose in being here, not that I don’t appreciate the opportunity, but I’d just like some clarification.

Seriously, watch the video. The student’s tone is even more measured and respectful than you would imagine reading the already bland transcript. I swear to god, if trends continue, before long, it’s going to be called a “terrorist act” to ask McCain any question other than, “May I fluff your pillow, Senator? Would you like another chocolate, Your Eminence?”

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And the problem with being a lesbian is…? I am so sick of these Cro-Magnons pontificating on the air. (Media Matters):

SULLIVAN: Two things. One, it’s important to clear up that he [Wright] did not say “The Jews are going to get you” in some conspiratorial, classic anti-Semitic fashion. I think that’s just —
HITCHENS: He [Wright] thinks only Jews are going to object to [Rev. Louis] Farrakhan and [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi. Excuse me?
SULLIVAN: No, he didn’t say “only.”
HITCHENS: No, but —
SULLIVAN: Again, you keep playing with that quote. We’re happy to have it on the record. And now you’ve made me forget my second point, which is —
HITCHENS: Oh, well, don’t be such a lesbian. Get on with it.
SULLIVAN: I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten my second point. But I do think that’s important. And I don’t think Wright is Farrakhan. And I don’t think Obama, in any conceivable way, represents anything but racial inclusion and integration. And anybody that looks at any part of his career and can be in any doubt about that is beyond me.
The reason he went to that church, clearly, if you read his biography, is he wanted to understand what it was to be black in America. He didn’t understand. He’s a very polyglot person. He grew up in Hawaii, he had some time in Indonesia.

I’m serious — I don’t know what the f*ck Hitchens is talking about here. Are lesbians slow to make a point? Foot-draggers? Jesus. It’s nice to know he can combine misogyny and homophobia in one fell swoop. Admirable multitasking.

Perhaps Hitchens knows how many lesbians it takes to screw in a light bulb, or where the stock of conversion toasters are stashed. Inquiring minds want to know. Andrew Sullivan didn’t even bother to counter this crap. Sigh.

I don’t listen to WDCG’s G-105 morning drive time bigot Bob Dumas of “Bob and the Showgram,” I did years ago, but it’s easy to tire of juvenile, offensive frat boy humor that gets him in hot water all the time, and he’s an equal opportunity offender. (N&O):

In the radio segment, Dumas and co-hosts kidded an intern about her upcoming marriage to a Lumbee Indian. Dumas joked that Indians are “lazy” and that “a lot of Indians live on the reservation.” He also asked whether the groom’s grandfather would stand on the side of the road “with a single tear.”

Co-host Mike Morse asked: “After you guys get married, are you going to have a tepee-warming party?”

After that BS, complaints to the FCC and Clear Channel Communications quickly rolled in. WDCG General Manager Dick Harlow released this statement on the station’s web site:

“WDCG apologizes to any listener that may have found remarks or recordings played Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 during Bob and the Showgram to be offensive, derogatory or insensitive. WDCG does not condone inappropriate behavior, language or insensitive remarks.”

…Paul Brooks, chairman of the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs, released a statement lambasting “Bob and the Showgram” for the Tuesday remarks, as well as a history of “derogatory and insultuous comments against American Indians, African Americans, Asians and Hispanics.”

This is the same station, by the way, that sponsored a Straight Pride Parade in Chapel Hill, NC.

More below the fold.
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Right wingers ask:

Huh? Who thinks of babies as “punishment”?

Better yet, what kind of father would describe babies as “punishment”?

Well, Sean Hannity, for one, describes unplanned pregnancies that result in babies as a punishment for sex he doesn’t approve of. From his anti-freedom tome Let Freedom Ring:

We live in an age characterized by the maxim “If it feels good do it, regardless of the consequences.” It’s a sex-drenched culture–from movies, music, and magazines to TV, radio and the Internet–that glorifies premarital sex, promiscuous sex, extramarital sex, kinky sex, rough sex, and gay sex. You name it, you can find it, and without looking too hard.

So there’s the point of disagreement. Right wingers who wish to deprive women of the right to choose abortion, of contraception access, and of sex education believe babies are a punishment for sex. Obama said they shouldn’t be a punishment for sex, meaning he believes they are not a punishment for sex, but that right wing policies make them that way.

If you are against babies being treated as a punishment for sex, you agree with Obama.

So why are these wingnuts freaking out? Could it be that they’re lying sons of bitches? Sources say yes.

I took this screenshot of the first page I pulled up with the search term “young women facebook” because I think the real moral of this story is going to get lost as right wingers sink their teeth into it and go nuts. (Via.)

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I need my President to be the kind of manly man who really knows how to handle some balls.

This is not helpful. A fan of winger Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, Instapunk, used Barack Obama’s invitation to discuss race to unload this bile:

However much they may scream and protest, black people will know what I mean when I demand they concede that the following people are niggers:

- Jeremiah Wright
- O.J. Simpson
- Marion Barry
- Alan Iverson
- William Jefferson
- Louis Farrakhan
- Mike Tyson . . .

You see, you’ve just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column — unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We’re teetering at the edge of believing that you’re a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You’ve made it possible for us to believe that. Because you’re never outraged by what the worst black people do. Because you continue to make excuses for what should be inexcusable to everyone.

Sigh. A Fifth Column. Does this mean I’m missing my copy of the Uppity Negro Manifesto? Once I get my copy, do I cross reference it with my copy of The Homosexual Agenda?
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Now that the Rev. Wright thing has provided an even better excuse for racists to start saying in public what they usually keep in private, I knew it was just a matter of time before the “blacks should be grateful” argument came out. Being a white person from an especially racist part of the country means you can index some of these nonsense arguments, since you hear white people speak them behind closed doors so often. Not that I’ve actualized any value from being able to predict all the favorite nonsensical tropes that racists trot out, but if I can wrestle one benefit away, it’s this: I can safely say that it’s a lot like the anti-choice nonsense. The assholes making the arguments are irredeemable and should be written off. But it’s still somewhat of a benefit to engage their nonsense and show why it’s nonsense for the benefit of people listening who may be naive and can be rescued before they turn into irredeemable assholes.

I mention this, because I read the most audacious version of “they should be grateful” at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where they link this guy who says:

Far as I am concerned, many Blacks in the US ought to be thankful that no matter how their ancestors got here they are better off in the US than in some shiitehole in Africa, eating scarps of bread, swatting flies and living in mud huts using arrows and clubs to hunt their food.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this, and in a saner world, such a blatant racist should be dismissed. It’s easy to say, “The fuck?” and “You know, Africa is an extremely diverse and complex continent that can’t be characterized so simply.” But if you look beyond the surface of this ignorant fuckwittery, you realize this is another version of “The poor aren’t poor because they have color TVs.”

Grass huts and other racist tropes aside, it’s undeniable that large parts of Africa are desperately poor and war-torn. What I think is useful to remind people, though, is that the poverty and warfare in Africa is not inevitable, because the continent is rich in natural resources that should, in a fair world, leave many nations in Africa quite wealthy with a high standard of living for everyone. That this is not true for a lot of people has everything to do with, you guessed it, the history of Western colonization of the continent. Hell, that’s not even a distant memory—South African apartheid ended within most our memories, and in a sense, it didn’t really end, because the whites that controlled the economy managed to sneak out with their economic interests intact instead of doing what was right and letting the wealth of South Africa be for South Africans. The last scene in There Will Be Blood—you know, with the milkshake?—really tells you the whole story of the West’s attitude towards Africa, an attitude that has been held back some, but not enough. The U.S.’s willingness to instigate warfare and subvert elections when the people elect leaders who will take measures to reclaim the nation’s wealth for the people (socialists!) doesn’t limit itself to Central and South America, you know. We’ve propped up our share of murderous, graft-happy African dictators in the past, with the paper thin justifications of “oh noes, communism!”

Clearly, it’s nonsense to suggest that black individual Americans are sort of faced with this existential choice—here or Africa?—which makes little real world sense, like suggesting that I would somehow individually exist if various ancestors hadn’t migrated from various European countries to mingle their genetic material in the Western Hemisphere. But I bring up the point that the same colonizing forces that brought slavery to the U.S. brought economic destruction to Africa to make the larger point that the word “gratitude” should get nowhere near this discussion.

The NYT’s Deborah Solomon interviewed anti-gay, Catholic-bashing, Armegeddon-worshipping, John McCain-endorsing megachurch pastor John Hagee. He was asked about his rant about gays bringing hellfire to New Orleans via Katrina.

All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are - were recipients of the judgment of God for that. The newspaper carried the story in our local area that was not carried nationally that there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades. So I believe that the judgment of God is a very real thing.“

This is what he said about the above in the interview.

Let’s talk about your much-quoted comment that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for a gay rights parade in New Orleans . We’re not going down there. That’s so far off-base it would take us 33 pages to go through that, and it’s not worth going through.

I am not eager to rehash it either, although I wish that evangelicals were not so hard on gays. Our church is not hard against the gay people. Our church teaches what the Bible teaches, that it is not a righteous lifestyle. But of course we must love even sinners.

Do you have any gay friends? I don’t want to say that I have any friends, because when you say, “Who are they?” I don’t want them jumping off the balcony.

He must have those same imaginary self-loathing, potentially balcony jumping gay buds these bigots always refer to whenever they are asked that question. You all have any ideas of about a few closet cases that might be buds with Hagee?

Listen to McCain’s pathetic defense of Hagee to moral gambling man Bill Bennett after the jump.
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You know, I had a weary response semi-scripted in my head to those people making a fuss over Obama’s old minister’s belief in conspiracy theories about where HIV came from, a response that would both be understanding of why people fall for conspiracy theories while still maintaining that the truth is the most important thing, and conspiracy theories need to be pushed back against. With a soupcon of explaining why the underlying themes of conspiracy theories about the medical profession that proliferate in the black community are understandable, considering the circumstances. But luckily, wiser heads than me have tackled this problem, so I recommend reading them instead on this issue.

But what is interesting to me is how disingenuous some of the attacks against Rev. Wright are when it comes to actual concern for stopping the spread of HIV.* While not downplaying the role that HIV crankery plays in the spread of the disease (as Kevin notes, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has dismantled the infrastructure to respond to the disease in the wake of believing said crankery, but for racists eager to embrace this, it’s worth noting that Mbeki did so over backed by white advisors and over the objections of black officials), I’m going to say the larger problem here and everywhere around the world is lack of access to protection and lack of education about how to protect yourself from contracting or passing HIV.

As a demonstration of what utter, irresponsible bullshit is going on, I present you the figure of Michael Gerson. Gerson is very concerned about HIV conspiracy theories.

This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.

But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

And Gerson should know about crankery and battiness on the issue of sexual health, because he’s one of the nation’s leading cranks who is eagerly spreading wack-a-doodle theories that are getting people killed unnecessarily. Gerson has been a huge player in trying to make sure that AIDS relief money sent to Africa is not used to do anything crazy like prevent the transmission of HIV. He pushes abstinence-only here and abroad. After Democrats managed to push through a much weaker PEPFAR bill than they should have, he ran to the WaPo to whine some more about how all the world needs is to start yelling louder at people to keep it in their pants, as if millenia of pushing that message has worked (or as if it were fair to deprive people of sexual expression when there’s a way to do so that’s relatively safe).

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Sorry to keep bringing up this saga of No-Show Sally, but I really thought this Kern thing was going to blow over. After all, wouldn’t you want to take a little media holiday after a YouTube of your homophobic rants hit a million views, and you received tens of thousands of emails calling you out for making an ass out of yourself?

Peter LaBarbera, in his lame defense of Sally Kern’s bigotry, is trying to claim there is no transcript of her hateful speech that was recorded.

No complete tape or transcript of the speech has been produced; why has the Oklahoma media relied on an edited video brought forth by a homosexual group out to destroy Sally Kern? Yesterday (March 19), a reporter told Kern that he received a transcribed copy of the full speech, but she still has not seen it.

Ooops. Why you can simply read the entire rant is here — nothing is out of context, btw.

And I love her pitch for creationism - it’s after the jump.
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Man, I thought that Marc Rudov character was just a really stupid comedian. Apparently, he’s a stalwart defender of wife beaters, especially the kind that buy their victims from overseas, or at least that’s the impression I got from a shitstorm that erupted when it was pointed out that he’s not funny. Because I got these emails overnight from one of the usual MRA types, Louis Ferrante from Boca Raton, Florida:

Normally I would email a carefulluy composed retort to your ignorance, but frankly you are an asshole underserving of even minimal effort.
Have a cancer and die soon, please

And:

Actually, I wouldn’t wish a cancer even on the likes of you — I do suspect however, that you are one very desperate, confused, and tragically unhappy woman

The smiley face makes it okay!

After the fold is what the special moderation queue looked like this morning. They’re apparently going wild down there, so if there’s anyone that needs to be banned, please email and let me know. I see no reason to let the fans of mail order brides or wife-beating to be let loose here. They have Mens News Daily to spread their weird hate.

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