A particularly unacceptable Palin myth

I have an awful lot to say about Sarah Palin. (In fact, I had started to say an awful lot of it before my ridiculously buggy home computer crashed. Thanks, Windows.) It'll get out here sometime. But here's an opinion I can no longer hold in: TINA FEY IS HOTTER THAN SARAH PALIN. STOP MAKING THE ANALOGY.

There, I feel much better.

On Jesse Helms

I know that I'm several days late to jump on the conservatives-are-stupid-for-lionizing-Jesse-Helms train, but I didn't think I had much to say until I saw this on Ta-Nehisi and couldn't could, but didn't quite want to believe it. According to the Heritage Foundation, Jesse Helms was a "champion of freedom" and "a powerful voice for free markets and free people." Similarly, Billy Graham called him a "patriot who fought for free markets and free people." Members of North Carolina's Republican congressional delegation felt similarly: Robin Hayes said that Helms "will be remembered for his work to spread freedom around the world," and Virginia Foxx praised his "strong legacy of fighting for the freedoms that make America great."

Perhaps because I usually embrace the good old-fashioned Midwestern desire that we all just try to get along, perhaps because there are people much better-placed than me to call out racism persuasively, I usually give conservatives the benefit of the doubt, assuming that the modern Republican Party's lack of useful ideas about how to address the astounding inequalities between black and white Americans is a function of oblivion, incompetence, or neglect - the kind of thing that happens, I would argue, among people who isolate themselves in the suburbs and fetishize the "inner city" as an impassable danger zone - rather than active racism. But it's really difficult for me to maintain my understanding that the Republicans have moved from race-bashing to gay-bashing when prominent members of the conservative "movement," if you can use that term to describe a group of people who want to go nowhere at best and backwards at worst, continue to maintain Jesse Helms' understanding that the only freedom that counts is the freedom of white people.

Two things that pissed me off today

First, more comically: Predictably, the Federal Marriage Amendment is back, and David Vitter and Larry Craig are among the ten original sponsors in the Senate. Family values, kids! Hat tip to Ta-Nehisi Coates - and yeah, follow that link, because the Chris Rock clip is sweet.

Second, more angering: the brouhaha over something Wes Clark said yesterday. First, watch the actual video:

Or, if you're really pressed for time:

Clark: "Because in the matters of national security policy making, it's a matter of understanding risk. It's a matter of gauging your opponents and it's a matter of being held accountable.

"John McCain's never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world.

"But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded -- that wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle this publicly? He hasn't made that calls, Bob."

Bob Schieffer: "Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down."

Clark: "I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

Immediately, McCain and friends flipped a shit about how Clark was smearing McCain and disrespecting his military service and probably hates baseball and apple pies and motherhood. (Oh wait - that last one would be the GOP.) This in itself is ridiculous. For starters, the idea that Wes Clark, a decorated veteran with thirty-five years of military service, would in any way devalue military experience - John McCain's or anyone else's - is simply incredible. Add that to the fact that one of the loudest critics has been Colonel Bud Day, who was active in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and you have a thoroughly bogus accusation. But most tellingly, Clark went out of his way to acknowledge McCain's service to the military, both in active duty and in his position in the Senate. Unless I've suddenly forgotten how to read, I'm pretty sure Clark said nothing that could be reasonably construed as an insult to McCain's military service.

But what frustrates me the most is that Clark is getting in trouble for something that is absolutely true. Factually, riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is not a qualification to be president, and I doubt that you can find a single person who's been through the experience who will make that claim. Maybe I've missed something, but John McCain doesn't make that claim; neither do the people who have jumped to his (imaginary) defense. Moreover, what Clark said was a response not to anything McCain has argued, but to what Bob Schieffer said might be an argument on McCain's behalf. In essence, the Republicans are grasping at straws, trying to find something that they can get offended about, and I'd say it's not working except that the media sure is all over this non-story. Diversions from actual issues, anyone?

And now for some "research" from "experts"

I have long admired my friend David Schraub's intrepid use of his excellent blog to cover the exploits of the Family Research Council, a "Christian organization promoting the traditional family unit and the Judeo-Christian value system on which it is built." Hoping to latch onto David's coattails, I subscribed to the FRC's newsletter. Most of it is predictable drivel, and I pass it up, operating on the principle that if I wanted high blood pressure, eating fried food would be a much more enjoyable way to get it.

But today an excellent gem passed through my inbox. The FRC is all excited about the First Circuit's decision Monday to dismiss a case that challenged the constitutionality of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. They're wrong to get all excited, for the obvious reason that they're wrong on the policy as well as the gloat-inducing one that the Ninth Circuit more or less upheld a similar challenge last month. The FRC acknowledges this and tries to put it in a better light:

You might not have heard about the latest decision--a Ninth Circuit ruling last month that kept another such challenge alive received about three times as much media coverage. However, both decisions acknowledged the broad discretion Congress has in regulating the military (despite the 2003 Supreme Court decision legalizing homosexual sodomy), and both rejected the basic argument of homosexuals that for the military to "discriminate" based on "sexual orientation" violates the "equal protection of the laws."

You know, as A Gay, I am by now used to highly influential wackos putting me in scare quotes in the ongoing attempt to deny that homosexuality exists (la, la, la, la, I can't hear you!). And since this bulletin comes from a group of those people who believe that homosexuality is a choice, and who accept the implication that millions of Americans are so stupid and masochistic as to have woken up one day and said, "Gee, I think I'll actively choose to be gay, since losing hundreds of federal rights and privileges would be just fabulous!" - if you're one of those, I guess I can understand why you might put those quotes around "discrimination" as well. But "equal protection under the law"? Honestly? As much as I'd like to take credit, on behalf of the "homosexual activists," for having invented equal protection for the sake of advancing our sinister agenda, I'm pretty sure that language is in the Constitution. I suppose that makes the Constitution another piece of radical liberal heresy, but if so, I'm proud to have it.

UMMMMMMMMMMMMM

some crazy at dailykos (a liberal blog for crazies) thinks barack obama is a mythic hero, hillary clinton is medusa, and barack is destined to save the planet by severing hillary clinton's head, etc etc etc. read the whole thing for a big dose of crazy, etc etc etc.

i really hope am really glad that this is satire. because if it wasn't, this post would just demonstrate that the far left, in its quest to manufacture a soothsaying wunderkind, will stop at nothing to destroy pragmatic politics and its purveyors. hillary clinton, for reasons left unclear, is medusa simply because she is, kind of like samantha power once said, "a monster that turns people into stone if they gaze upon her." and if that isn't enough, it's sooooo well-known (especially in the circle of prophesy-wielding crazies) that "Algol, Medussa's eye, has long been seen as one of the most malifec and evil stars in the heavens."

well, to quote an oft-used and tacky phrase, if loving medusa is wrong, i don't want to be right. i'd rather have a tested woman impervious to attacks than a man guided by perseus.

really, i like barack obama. but why do some of his supporters have to be so farcical?

UPDATE: duly noted, eva. samantha power did NOT say that hillary clinton was a "monster that turns people into stone if they gaze upon her"--that's from the dailykos entry, tenuously attributed by the comma that separates "is" and "like." i've added "kind of" to  emphasize the difference.

Clinton office hostage situation

If you haven't heard yet, there was a hostage situation at Hillary Clinton's campaign offices in Rochester, NH (not New York, which someone told me today) today. Two hostages were released earlier; police aren't saying whether there are additional hostages in the building. Keep them in your thoughts.

More celebration!

One more item: Tom Tancredo is resigning from his House seat at the end of his current term. My favorite part: now maybe he'll shut the hell up. My second favorite part is the timing:

Tancredo said he made the decision several weeks ago, but he held off until the end of the World Series in hopes of starting a Colorado decision. His congressional predecessor, the late Rep. Dan Schaefer, announced his retirement decision almost immediately after a Denver Broncos Super Bowl win.

That Denver Broncos Super Bowl win was against my team; I think I was in the third grade and may have cried about it. Given that Tom Tancredo would succeed Schaefer, sports probably predicted news there. Now, it appears that good news in sports is a harbinger of really fantastic news in politics.

(For the record: his seat is in a very Republican district and will presumably not go over to the good side in 2008. My glee isn't a function of partisan advantage - it's a function of Tom Tancredo driving me insane.)

Well, Gag Me With a Spoon

Via my friend David Schraub, whose blog The Debate Link is well worth a read:

A county judge in Maryland last week ruled that he couldn't convict a man seen hitting his girlfriend in a gas station parking lot - by a police officer, no less - of domestic abuse on the grounds that the woman did not appear to testify, and therefore he couldn't determine that the abuse wasn't consensual. (Coverage at The Nation and The Baltimore Sun.) He delivered this enlightening tidbit: "Sadomasochists sometimes like to get beat up," and argued that the court would be "stepping into the shoes of the victim when she obviously doesn't care," exhibiting a "big brother mentality," if he were to assume that the abuse was non-consensual.

Prize for the best response goes to Byron Warnken of the University of Baltimore Law School: "What would we do in a murder case?"

There you have it: It's not that people ignore domestic abuse because they're oblivious to crimes perpetrated primarily against women, or poor women, or minority women, or anything like that. It's that they're really sensitive toward sadomasochism.

Happy Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week!

Sorry to be so late on this one, but I just now noticed that nobody had picked this up on Dem Apples yet.  So: we are in the final hours of Hump Day of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.  (Its official website can be found here.) The campaign is billed as "the biggest conservative campus protest ever," a "wake-up call," and an effort to "rally American students to defend their country." The "campaign" (and having been involved in campaigns that actually, you know, do something, I hesitate to call it that) is the brainchild of David Horowitz, who does... well, I'm not altogether sure. Once he was on the left, but now he's on the right; he makes a lot of noise about universities being bastions of the radical left; he runs a couple of websites (FrontPage Magazine, which probably only has one page (the front one!), and Discover the Networks, "a guide to the political left"); and he directs an institution called the David Horowitz Freedom Center. I thought you didn't name things after yourself until after you were dead, but evidently David Horowitz is so amazing that he can do that.

Anyway, IFAW (as I'm going to call it because typing "Islamo-Fascism" is a bit awkward, no doubt because the QWERTY keyboard was designed by radical leftist academics) features such illustrious speakers as Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum on campuses across the country. I'm not entirely sure what they do when they can't get speakers, since they claim that 200 campuses are participating and they certainly don't have that many events listed. Perhaps those enterprising Islamo-Fascism Awareness Clubs will spend IFAW putting up posters featuring such tasteful images as this:

As far as I can tell, no enterprising conservatives at Harvard have gotten it together and extended an invitation to the campaign, so we'll be bereft of David Horowitz's shining fountain of truth once again. But in case - despite the fact that George Bush remains the president, despite the fact that we have 25,000 troops in Afghanistan and 168,000 troops in Iraq, despite the fact that Rudy "9/11" Giuliani is running for the presidency - in case despite all of that you'd forgotten somehow that somewhere out there, there are terrorists, and a number of them claim to be practicing Islam... well, now you know: happy Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week!