Monday, October 23, 2006

Desperate Republicans Try Sex. They've got to know they're in trouble when they're scraping the bottom of barrel this hard to come up with muck to throw at Democrats. Trying to tip the scales in a tight New York House race, the Republican National Committee has been running an ad declaring that the Democratic candidate called a phone-sex line and left taxpayers with the bill. Strictly speaking, it's true: there was a phone call placed from the hotel room of candidate Michael Arcuri, a county district attorney, to a 1-800 fantasy line. Billing records show it lasted all of one minute, cost $1.25 - and was followed immediately by a call to the state Department of Criminal Justice Services, which has nearly the identical number. It was so obviously a misdial that Arcuri is threatening a libel suit, and seven television stations have refused to run the ad. But that's minor-league mud-slinging compared to the efforts of several GOP candidates to link their opponents to pedophilia! Yep, you read that right: since Nancy Pelosi marched in a gay pride parade that included the icky North American Man/Boy Love Association, and California candidate Charlie Brown (no kidding) supports the ACLU who sometime, somewhere filed a suit on behalf of the same NAMBLA, they are ipso facto advocates of sodomizing teenage boys. I could have sworn that was some other politician... [MotherJones.com | MoJo Blog - Social Issues and Political Commentary] 1:01:50 PM    comment []

"We've never been stay the course," claims the President, even though those were his words on various occasions, as he appears to propose the kind of timetable for the Iraqi government that he forcefully opposed on numerous previous occasions. Plus: 'The end of Maliki?' [Cursor.org] 11:38:43 AM    comment []

Frank Rich | Obama Is Not a Miracle Elixir. "Enter Barack Obama. To understand the hysteria about a Democratic senator who has not yet served two years and is mainly known for a single speech at the 2004 convention, you have to appreciate just how desperate the Democrats are for a panacea for all their ills. In the many glossy cover articles about Obamamania, the only real suspense is whether a Jack or Bobby Kennedy analogy will be made in the second paragraph or the fifth. Men's Vogue (cover by Annie Leibovitz) went so far as to say that the Illinois senator 'alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath' as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Why not throw in Mark Twain and Sammy Davis Jr.?," asks Frank Rich. [t r u t h o u t] 9:54:47 AM    comment []

Justin Frank: Born Again - Again. On Sunday, October 22, 2006 George W. Bush was born again - again. His re-birth was pre-recorded, but the television audience saw it happen before their very eyes between 9 and 10 AM Eastern Standard Time on ABC. He told the interviewer, also called George, that "we've never been 'stay-the-course'" in Iraq. Had the interviewer been a psychiatrist (or a real reporter), he would have had Bush's record at hand, and would have found that Bush has regularly said we would "stay the course" in Iraq. What does this disclaimer mean? It means at least two things: Bush's words are meaningless to him, and that he utters them in interviews and press conferences solely because it is required of presidents and campaigners; second, it again reveals Bush's pattern of dismissing his past when events prove too uncomfortable for him. Normally he indignantly denies the past -"Kenny who?" or "I never met with that lobbyist, Mr. Abramoff." At other times he's sullenly indifferent, as when he said "What's the difference?" when Diane Sawyer's probed him about not the finding the WMDs he had insisted were in Iraq. To a psychiatrist - and to everyone else, for that matter - who takes words seriously, Bush's statement that "we've never been 'stay-the-course'" means that he is delusional about himself and therefore able to split off his own past completely from memory. It also means that he truly believes that the American people will also forget what he said in the past - an even more profound case for his being unfit to remain President. We have heard his delusions before, but they have always been about external events such as global warming, how the war is going in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how our economy is faring. We have never heard him flatly dismiss, in such a clear and carefree way, his own exact words. At this rate, he might suddenly wake up one day to say that he was never even elected President in the first place. But that's unlikely, since in fact, it may actually be true. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 9:52:56 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.