Category Archives: Politics

The Friesian Correspondence: Letter 2: The Left Believes Science is Euro-Centric Oppression

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Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and State of Fear

The second email, which I sent Kelley Ross in December 2009, was shorter and goes unanswered, perhaps because it came from the same email I used with the first one. What really set me off was reading his home page on how the Left, in their “post-modern” worldview have drifted into a “post-Copernican” ideology. His anger may have to do with him not being published since he says: “The peer-review system of publication, while helping to maintain scholarly standards, also serves to screen out innovation and dissent and to promote doctrinal uniformity and a self-referential scholasticism — the stigmata of academia becoming a rent-seeking bureaucracy.”

When I first read his introduction, I assumed that he had meant that most Liberals had adopted the post-modern concept of cultural relativism to the point where they didn’t even believe the world being round to be a scientific fact. As crazy as that sounds, Richard Dawkins had attacked similiarly irrational beliefs in The Selfish Gene. Re-reading this now, I think he might have been writing metaphorically, insinuating that post-modernism as philosophically “post-Copernican,” but on the other hand, he continues on by claiming that the Left sees science as “an instrument of Euro-centric oppression.” The only euro-centrism I’m aware of his the fact that he believes one snowy winter in Britain disproves global warming, but taking obscure post-modern academic eccentricies and attributing them to the entire Democratic voting bloc is pretty much his bread and butter.

Letter 2: Western Academics Take Up Totalitarianism

Western academics and intellectuals have truly and heartily taken up the cause of totalitarianism, fallen from the dead hands of fascism and communism, with the same goals, through the same methods, namely, laws about speech, thought crimes, disarmament of civilians, political control of private property and private relationships, denigration of religion, political propaganda through state schools, the militarization of police, the destruction of the rule of law through discretionary powers given to executive officials and bureaucrats, the subversion of trial by jury, etc. etc. There are also new twists, like the distortion of civil rights law into a means of abolishing civil rights.

Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself.The “post-modern” move may even be called the “post-Copernican”move, where the “de-centering” of meaning and objectivity (giving new meaning to the word “obscurantism”), returns the “marginalized” literary critic or theorist to the Ptolemaic center of the universe, whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. Where the arrogance has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life.

How many people on the Left do you know really believe this? Lefties believing in a “post-Copernican” world where science is a “Euro-centric” invention of oppression is not an idea that has received any amount of traction by any stretch of the imagination. This has got to be the ultimate straw-man argument, especially since you don’t even believe the science of global warming.

Question: what is science? What makes evolution science and climatology pseudo-science? Do you think every individual, whether holding a degree in science or not, gets to choose what the word means? Because if you talked to, you know, a real scientist, instead of trying to pretend you’re an expert in all fields, you would learn that global warming is accepted throughout the entire scientific community, not just a few liberal tree-hugging environmentalists. Yet your global warming web page tries to blame most of it on Al Gore. In fact, there is no credited scientific organization on the entire planet that challenges the science, not even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which not too long ago gave Michael Chricton their yearly award in “Journalism”!

You don’t even attempt to hide the fact that you start with the politics and work backwards from there. Your anger towards the Left is evident in the way you accuse *them*, not the scientific community(!), of “inventing something else” if it wasn’t global warming. What a totally outrageous and unethical accusation to make without any amount of proof. The financial pressure to maintain the status quo hardly needs an explanation, but do you really believe that people on the Left hate their country or the rich or whatever so much they just somehow convinced everyone except a few “true science-followers” like yourself into this Green conspiracy? The money trail from oil companies to anti-climate change astroturf organizations is clear enough for anyone with a computer to see yet there is not one financial link that can be found connecting clean energy to climate scientists. A conspiracy like this would have to be over 100 times larger than the “9/11 Truther” conspiracy with billions if not trillions of dollars needed in bribes, and yet not a single connection between the liberal politics and the climate science can be found.

Your webpage on climate change is especially lame, and this is coming from someone who thinks you have the best website ever created (in terms of sheer volume and display, not correct answers, although I applaud your work on the so-called “Fall of Rome” and the Eastern Roman Empire). Some 10 or 15 loose, incomprehensible, and extremely unscientific pages worth of content on “Unstoppable Global Warming” (one-third of which concentrates on a *science fiction author*) does not compare to the thousands upon thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research from actual scientists in countries throughout the world working on many independent lines of evidence. You might as well try to disprove evolution by writing about the volcano theories of L. Ron Hubbard on a cocktail napkin, which, come to think of it, isn’t far from how supply-side economics was invented.

I know it’s hard for an ideologue like yourself to change your mind, but I implore you to go to the library and read up on Climate Change again, only take out random books instead of starting with Ann Coulter. If it wasn’t for your politics, would you really be accusing the Left of inventing what your side calls “the greatest hoax in the history of mankind”? Can you really be on the side that says scientists, not fossil fuel industries, are deluding the entire world and at the same time say the same colluding body of scientists/climate alarmists are in epistemological disagreement with one another? Don’t you find it just a little disconcerting that the top guys fighting Climate Change science today is an English Lord with a Classics degree and a Creationist Senator who belongs to a Fundamentalist Christian mafia organization linked to the C-Street sex scandals? If you really think science can be bought so easily, then you should at least admit to being somewhat “anti-science” yourself, at least as far as the current official stance is in relation to the truth, but you should also ask why the Right can’t just buy their own climate scientists. Was it a mistake of history that the entire world body of climate science ended up on the Left despite the Left’s “post-Copernician” hatred towards their profession?

The theory that massive amounts of carbon inserted into theatmosphere causes global warming is over 100 years old. Congress waswarned about this from James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute forSpace Studies over 20 years ago. They have been proven by the hottest decade on record, the melting icecaps, the forest fires in California,the desertification of Australia, etc., etc., etc., all of which either follows or surpasses the worse-case scenerios predicted by the much-despised IPCC. Stephen Hawking, who some consider to be the smartest physicist in the world, ranks climate change along side the proliferation of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats to the future of the world. And once again, every accredited science organization on the planet says you are wrong and we are right. If you are going to present yourself as unbiased, you have to admit to some kind of even-handed criteria to which you would take the other side. What exactly would our side need to present to you for you to consider other alternatives to this world-wide conspiracy theory?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics/

The Friesian Correspondence: Letter 1: Hippie Stalinists and the Pro-Saddam Left

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Kelley Ross
Kelley Ross, retired philosophy professor

One site I’ve mention before is Friesian.com. In terms of content, it’s one of the best websites created: tons of great stuff for history and philosophy lovers. Unfortunately, as mention in a previous post, the site’s creator, Kelley Ross, is also deeply emeshed in Republican politics. He considers himself to be a Libertarian, but has become more and more of a Neo-Con as time has passed.

The following is the first of several emails I wrote him, starting back in 2007. My main complaints were with his page on Ayn Rand, which said: “With exquisite irony, just as the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Empire fell in the years 1989-1991, American 60’s radicals, who were essentially Communist sympathizers, were completing their takeover of American higher education and other “circles,” as the Soviets used to say, of the American intelligentsia,” and “Early in 2003, the Left, with their useful idiot supporters in Hollywood and anti-American (i.e. anti-capitalist) forces around the world, committed themselves to protecting the neo-Nazi dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.” On another webpage about climate change, he claimed that: “There are many who may sincerely believe this scenario, but with far too many activists it is a smoke-screen for an “agenda” (as they like to say) for something very different: for a virtuous eco-poverty (as in Cuba) and a government that will make the “hard choices” of forcing people into that poverty (as in Cuba).”

I’ve added his reply and my reply to it in the comments section below. I’m not particularly happy with the letter now since the arguments come off as stale and sloppy, not to mention the fact that the way I move from appeasingly polite to aggressively accusatory and back again makes me come off as a tad bipolar. I also no longer consider myself to be a “left-leaning Libertarian.” But I wanted to post the other emails I sent so I figured I should go ahead and start with the first one:

Letter 1: Climate scientists are “whores” and “We will be their peons”

I wanted to write you to let you know that I think your website is my absolute favorite in terms in history and philosophy, but my least favorite in the realm of politics. I especially loved Decadence, Rome and Romania, the Emperors Who Weren’t and Other Reflections. It has greatly helped in putting to rest with certain people the often-heard fantasy that Rome “fell” for ethical reasons. I was especially impressed by the level of professionalism you used in the piece in criticizing Christianity on your website without ever attacking it, something I have found lacking in books such as God Against the Gods by Jonathan Kirshe.

The same is not true for your politics. Your accusations in this department rate up there with Ann Coulter. American 60’s radicals were essentially Communist sympathizers? You know, I didn’t live back then (I’m 29), but I’m pretty sure Woodstock wasn’t about overthrowing the government and replacing it with a worker’s Utopia. The real objective in environemntalism is not to protect the future generations from man-made disasters but to curb economic growth and ensure people are living in poverty? What, no super death ray? You know, I could try to make a similar argument that the Right actually wants the world to end so that all non-Christians can hurry up and burn in fiery hell forever and point to the Left Behind series as proof, but that would be pejorative. Then there’s the accusation that the Left committed themselves to protect the “neo-Nazi” Saddam Hussein. This is a truly ironic accusation from the Right considering the shameful support Saddam got for 20 years previous to the Gulf War in order to shift trade away from the Soviet Union. Even after the Gulf War, the rebellions against Saddam received no support from the U.S. because everyone knew the choas that would result in a Post-Saddam Iraq, and sure enough it did. But its funny that those who now accuse the Peace Movement of being Saddam sympathisizers had no complaints when the atrocities were actually happening.

But that’s indicative of the Right, who still blame the Islamic Revolution on Carter for not maintaining relations with the tyrannical Shaw without even considering that part of the Iranian resentment may have come from Eisenhower and the British deposing a democratically-elected Prime Minister in order to reverse the nationalization of the Iranian Oil company now known as BP. Yes, and why shouldn’t the Iranians come up and hug us after we helped associate our Western values with corruption and Soviet-style secret police? At least Eisenhower figured out at the end how the military industrial complex were parasitically fermenting this kind of ideology and gave a speech warning us to that effect before he left office. This same war profiteering can be seen today with Halliburton and Lockheed Martin, the latter of whom pays for commercials on CNN assuring us “We never forget who we’re working for.” (My question is, if the company has no private consumers and only sells weapons to to the government, who are they advertising to?) And, although I do consider myself a left-leaning Libertarian, I would also like to point out that it was the Libertarians who were against fighting the original Nazis in WW2, since (just as today) they are against all non-defensive wars, especially wars of aggression, which includes this adventure into Iraq that the far Right still indignantly defends despite being wrong on every prediction that was made.

I was especially dismayed about your page on Unstoppable Global Warming. True, Albert Einstein isn’t going to be called a bastard because of his skepticism of quantum mechanics, but then again, nothing is at stake in that argument. When you set aside the verdict of the majority of climate scientists and are willing to risk disasterous reprecussions on the earth because global warming skepticism better fits your economic philosophy, you are taking on a huge responsibility, one that a single web page on the subject doesn’t remedy. And if you’re going to take offense to that, you may want to rethink calling Noam Chomsky a lunatic since he is well-read and whether you agree or disagree with him, his arguments do make more sense than Ann Coulter’s suggestion that we invade all Islamic countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity (I noticed her book is on your bibliography). And I would like to see proof that “unlimited government and command economics” means more “money and power” for Gore and his friends, especially since you seem skeptical that Bush, Cheney, and Rice would have any invested interest in the subject despite the fact that they came to the election directly off the rig.

You site three studies that do not agree very well saying that carbon dioxide is unrelated to temperature, but the graph at RealClimate.org shows a 90% correlation, and I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take the word of a climate scientist over that of a philosopher.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/22/231145/76

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6096084.stm

My question is, shouldn’t a “conservative” take the safest route? Risking mass extinctions and global famine for the sake of oil expansion doesn’t seem like the “conservative” approach to me. Even if the chances for this happening were at 10% instead of 90%, are nuclear power and alternative fuels really so poor a substitute that we shouldn’t even bother investing in them for the future? Are we really going to try and pretend that the oil companies work in some free market economy completely independent of the government and foreign policy? As seen in the second article I have linked there, Tony Blair backs a study done that global warming will cause 40% of earth’s species to become extinct, cause the global economy to shrink 20%, and will cause water shortages for 1 in 6 people. Shouldn’t that mean something to someone interested in “conserving” the way things are now? Even Bush has left his previous stance of “needing more research” and has made the “liberal talking point” that we are addicted to oil and need to get off it, something much akin to a drug dealer telling a customer to cut down. So who exactly can you say is “on your side” now other than Micheal Chriton? You also say that the ones who would most be hurt by any due changes are the non-Industrialized countries, yet the fact that they are the ones getting a free ride are exactly what has helped drum up so much support against Kyoto.

Cutting oil dependence would also ensure that no American money is used in terrorist plots against us, but even that doesn’t phase the morally indignant Right. Instead, scare tactics are used to associate the Drug War with the War on Terrorism. The Right was horrified that border guards who illegally shot a Mexian marijuana smuggler then tried to cover up their crime by filing false reports would actually be punished as if what they did was a crime, but they could care less that the government, still expounding a “Zero Tolerance” policy, is actively protecting the explosion of poppy growth in Afghanistan that would never have been allowed under the Taliban. By continuing the War on Drugs, they ensure the crop will yield maximum profit for our allies, which goes to show that if anything, buying smack helps the War on Terrorism.

But what really gets me is the contempt you have for the people who take up the cause, with these green and “watermelon” rats that say “Global Warming Scaremongering,” as if the answer to the question is doesn’t even deserve contemplation. *Of course* climate scientists from many different countries and backgrounds are all participating in a global conspiracy to limit America’s economic growth. Everyone knows they’re really just neo-Communists working to put everyone back on the farm. We shouldn’t even “fear” that it might happen since it goes against the economics of Thomas Jefferson. I want to let you know that Jefferson is one of my personal heroes, but I think if he was alive today, he would say worrying about the planetary catastrophe takes precedence over worrying about the American economy. For that matter, he’d probably say that gun nuts should just chill out because he included the freedom to bear arms so that the U.S. government wouldn’t get too uppity, not because he thought gun collectors deserved the right to shoot machine guns with armor piercing bullets. And his statements would probably make him as hated by the Religious Right now as he was in his own time.

I’m sorry so much of this e-mail is negative, but its always easier to talk about what you disagree with than what you agree with. Once again, I’d like to point out that no one has put up another site that even comes close to rivaling yours in impeccable content. I also included a link below to my web site on the historical Jesus, which I thought you might find interesting.

Jeff Querner

http://www.lost-history.com

Sex, Lies and Twitter Pics

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A lot of crazy sex stories lately:

1. Last January, it came out that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, had gotten the female dental hygenist who fixed his teeth (after they were chipped by a man punching him through his car window at a rally) to throw him a sex party. The girls, who were dressed as cops and nurses, gave him a lesbian show, and the 74-year-old managed to convince the dental hygenist to join the party. But that’s just par for the course for Berlusconi.

2. Ted Haggard came back to the spotlight last January to say: “I think that probably, if I were 21 in this society, I would identify myself as a bisexual.” Good to know. He also wanted to clear up that he didn’t have “sex sex” with the male prostitute he bought drugs for; he just got a hand job. He also says he would have come out with all of this earlier but was afraid of becoming konwn as the “masturbation guy.”

3. Around the same time it came out that a Vatican department advised Ireland’s Catholic bishops in 1997 not to report priests suspected of child abuse to the police

4. An Indonesian Member of Parliament who helped pass a tough anti-pornography law has resigned after being caught watching sexually explicit videos on his computer during a parliamentary debate.

5. Wisconsin state Republican Senator Randy Hopper, while claiming to still live with his wife, was actually living outside the district he represents with a much younger 25-year-old mistress since May 2010. Hopper claimed to maintain an “apartment” in the district but the address he gave turned out to be $600,000 home owned by a high-ranking employee of his media company. She was then given a job with Governor Scott Walker’s administration with a 35% wage increase, despite the fact the administration was cutting wages and that she never actually turned in a job application. He filed for divorce last August.

6. Republican House Representative Christopher Lee resigned last April after a report emerged that he had tried to pick up a woman on Craigslist. He sent a bare-chested photo of himself to the woman, lying about his age, his marriage status, and his occupation (claiming he was a lobbyist), but for some strange reason used his real name.

7. New information also came out regarding the Ensign sex scandal. In November 2007, the Hamptons, old high school friends of Republican Senator John Ensign who worked for him and lived in the same gated community, had their house robbed. The robbery greatly shook up Cynthia Hampton, so Ensign convinced them both to move in with him, and soon afterwards began an affair with Cynthia. According to her, she at first asked if he had lost his mind, to which he said he had, then after being “very persistent and relentless,” and continuously calling, and never taking no for an answer, she gave in to him. Hampton, says the report, “was in a vulnerable emotional state and a mess at the time Senator Ensign was pursuing her, as her home had been burglarized, a family member was undergoing medical treatment, and Mr. Hampton’s travel schedule back and forth to Washington gave them little time to be together.”

Doug Hampton found out about it next month when he saw a message from Ensign come to his wife’s cell phone saying “How wonderful it is. … Scared, but excited,” just as Ensign was coming to the airport where they were to pick up the Hampton’s son. When Ensign got there, Hampton jumped out of the chased him. Cynthia stayed in the airport for hours and took a taxi home. The two families had a discussion on Christmas Eve, Ensign wept and promised to end the affair, and the two celebrated Christmas together.

The affair started again a month later and when Hampton found out again by seeing a call going to Cynthia on Ensign’s cell phone labelled “Aunt Judy,” he asked Ensign’s long-time spiritual adviser Tim Coe to help end the affair. Coe brought in his brother, as well as Marty Sherman (the founder of the secretive Fellowship Foundation) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). The group confronted Ensign about the affair at the infamous C Street house on Valentine’s Day, and Coburn convinced Hampton to forgive his wife again, but the affair continued. At one point, Coe saw both cars pakred at a hotel near their community and called Ensign saying, “I know exactly where you are. I know exactly what you are doing. Put your pants on and go home.” But Ensign replied, “I can’t. I love her.” The Hamptons went to Ensign to talk about the affair the next day, but he told them he was in love with Cynthia and wanted to marry her and that Doug couldn’t work for him anymore, after which Ensign called his wife to tell her about his feelings and moved out of the family home to live with his parents.

Mrs. Hampton and Ensign continued their affair, with the senator buying two new cell phones to allow them to talk without being detected, but Ensign’s wife found out about the phones and they were disconnected. Cynthia asked him to stop contacing her and other congressmen confronted Ensign, but the affair continued until Mrs. Hampton sent him an email in August 2008 imploring him to stop contacting her because her life and family is in shambles.

Ensign also had his parents pay the Hamptons $96,000, which Hampton admits was “severance,” even though severance pay is illegal. Ensign tried to claim his parents paid them this money “out of concern of the well-being of the longtime family friends during a difficult time,” but once the Ethics Committee started investigating, Ensign’s parents turned on their son and denied giving it.

At this point I should probably mention that Ensign is a Pentacostal and a member of the Promise Keepers. This is what Ensign had to say in one of his own speeches against gay marriage:

Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation.

So does homosexuality…. and divorce and remarriage, which is what Ensign was planning.

Ensign is also a member of the Christian evangelical group, “The Family,” located at the tax-payer-funded C Street House. The same C Street House where Governor Mark Sanford brought his mistress to have sex with so that his “Christan friends” there could help cover it up. The same C Street House where Mississippi Represntative Chip Pickering had sex with his mistress according to the “Alienation of Affection” lawsuit brought on by Pickering’s now x-wife and mother of his five sons against his girlfriend. The same C Street House connected to Laurent Gbagbo, the Christian African president who planned to enact Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law (reportedly, the death penalty has been removed in subsequent negotiations). Senator Inhofe was so upset that Gbagdo lost in the last UN-sanctioned election against his Muslim opponent, he actually called on Hillary Clinton to demand a new election!

Hampton, now bitter at the Evangelical group, said that the people at C Street “think the consequences don’t apply. Those need to be dealt with differently. Because of the responsibility. Because of pressure. Because of the work that needs to be done… This is about preserving John, preserving the Republican party, this is about preserving C Street. These men care about themselves and their own political careers, period.”

8. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Director of the IMF and member of the French Socialist Party was arrested while boarding a New York flight back to Paris on charges he had forced the African American maid at his hotel to perform oral sex on him and then attempted to rape her. His lawyer has indicated he is going to allege the sex was consensual, but he apparently has a history of sexual aggression since in February 2007, a French journalist alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in 2002 during the course of an interview for a book, saying: “It ended really badly. We ended up fighting. It finished really violently … I said the word ‘rape’ to scare him but it didn’t seem to scare him much … “ Two weeks after the arrest, two female staff members brought charges against a junior minister, one of whom said the case encouraged her to come forward. Prosecutors also opened an inquiry after former education Minister Luc Ferry accused another unnamed ex-minister of being engaged in acts of pedophilia in Morocco. Following the Strauss-Kahn affair, Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche published an outpouring of allegations by female members of parliament about crude remarks by male legislators to their women colleagues and staff under the headline: “Routine sexism in parliament.” Ben Stein defended Strauss-Kahn by saying he never heard of an economist committing rape. Jon Stewart listed a litany of economists who had been charged with sexual assault and concluded that by Stein’s logic, economists are the “rape-ist profession going.”

9. There’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose father-of-the-year award for hiding a now 13-year-old son makes John Edwards’ disowning his newborn daughter look almost whimsically slimy.

10. Anthony Weiner, Democratic Representative of New York, has been doing a lot of sexting and phone sex over the years, but he screwed up when he sent a picture of his hardon on Twitter. Someone who hated Weiner was able to download the pic before Weiner deleted it, and it eventually got sent to Brietbart. At first he tried to claim he was hacked and the pic was meant as a slight against his name. Jon Stewart, who happens to be an old college buddy of his, waxed conflicted over bashing an old friend and taking advantage of a golden comedic moment, but jokingly concluded that the boner was way too large to be his. When Weiner tried to dodge answering whether the pic was of him, he tried to claim that it didn’t look familiar but he didn’t want to say outright that it wasn’t him because…. Someone might have altered another Weiner pic. This obviously made it worse because it insinuated there are so many boner pics of him, he couldn’t even recognize it. Weiner even went on Rachael Maddow, saying: “Stuff gets manipulated. Maybe it started out as being a photograph of mine” that had been “taken out of context.” Cue laugh track. He even tried to cite Jon Stewart’s “that bulge is too large to be his dick” joke for support, as if Jon Stewart had a better idea of what his penis looked like than he did!

Republicans like Ann Coulter mocked him for getting a lawyer without involving the police. Bill O’Reilly tried to claim the possibility that the boner pic came from terrorists was too great to chance and that it was Weiner’s patriotic duty to involve the police. Brietbart and liberal bloggers began to tangle over the validity of the pics until finally, after Brietbart was able to get his hands on some other – far more embarrassing – pics, as well as some steamy sex-chat sessions, Weiner came out and admitted he was the one who sent the pic. Brietbart promised not to publish the new photos, saying “it’s better for him and his family.” Naturally, that lasted a day. He showed them to the radio jocks Opie and Anthony using his cell phone; the radio hosts took a pic of the unrestrained boner and posted it online.

If Weiner had just been honest in the first place, then the general populace would never have been able to see his dick and read these hilarious chats with Las Vegas blackjack dealer, Lisa Weiss:

Lisa Weiss: “To get us in the mood, first we watch back-to-back episodes of ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert Report’, Or if this is not your thing, we can just get drunk and have mad, passionate sex!”

Anthony Weiner: “Why choose? With me behind you can’t we both watch ‘Daily Show’?”

Lisa Weiss: “..couldn’t love you more than when you were on Bill Maher…”

Anthony Weiner: “Maybe Maher will let me do you on his desk…”

This turned out to be great schadenfreude for Matt Taibbi since Weiner led a media campaign against him, calling on everyone to trash their copy of the New York Press because Taibbi had written a tragically unfunny article making fun of the death of Pope John Paul. At the time, Taibbi thought it was an “odd take on the First Amendment, coming from an ostensibly left-leaning New York liberal Democrat,” but then Weiner called the police on a WCBS reporter just for asking him questions! “I love how all of these ACLU all-stars turn into little Pinochets the instant the heat on their beloved careers moves up past room temperature,” he writes. Taibbi was also “fascinated by the editorials blaming the media for their unjust treatment of Weiner – like it’s none of our business whether or not this guy is sending pictures of his boner to young women around the country.”

In contrast, Glenn Greenwald claimed just that journalists condemning Weiner like Megan McArdle, have “absolutely no idea what vows Weiner and his wife have made to each other, and she shouldn’t know, because it’s none of her business, despite her eagerness to learn about it and publicly condemn it.” Unlike other sex scandals, which typically have some pretense on politics, either because of illegal activity or gross hypocrisy, there is nothing to tie it to news other than pure muckraking. And although Greenwald has a point, it seems to me if only sex scandals based on hypocrisy were reported, it would generally be perceived as bias against Republicans. But as Greenwald points out, he’s not a fan of Weiner since the congressman is rabidly pro-Israel (even criticizing Obama stance), despite the fact that his pregnant wife is an Arab Muslim.

Jon Stewart was actually tougher on Weiner than Greenwald, saying that if Weiner was picking up women with boner pics, he had to go, but if he was just afraid to admit that he had pictures of his weiner on the computer, then, “welcome to the club.” Taibbi was even tougher, saying , “The truth is, if you’re worth the congressional office at all, your automatic answer to any question about pictures like that has to be, “No, that can’t be me in that picture, because I’m a United States Congressman and I don’t take digital pictures of my hard-ons.” Bill Maher went even further, treating the practice like a taboo, saying it was even creepier to have pictures like that on his hard drive than it was to actually send them, before lamenting that Weiner got all of the scandal with none of the sex. My own feelings can best be described by the line given by Bryan Lambert at YouAreDumb.org: “I don’t give a shit that he lied. I don’t give a shit that he Tweeted cock pictures to ladies on the Internet… But I cannot forgive him for letting Andrew Breitbart get something right for the first time in his life.”

11. John Edwards has been charged with using campaign money to pay for the concealment and generous lifestyle of his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and unborn child. Edwards now admits that he financed her with generous funds given by banker heir, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, an elderly philanthropist who agreed to pay for all of John Edwards’ haircuts personally when the media started hammering him on his $400 haircuts, but denies this was improper because the money was used for personal reasons, not political ones. Money was also provided for Andrew Young, the married staffer who originally took the bullet for Edwards and claimed he had knocked up Hunter. Edwards’ campaign finance chairman, Fred Baron, claimed that he had been providing financial assistance to both Hunter and Young “without Edwards’ knowledge.”

Bonus: If you need an inspiring story to wash the sex out, here’s a story about two long lost siblings that found each other through an internet dating service after 30 years. They say they figured it out before they…

Although Wiener’s sex scandal is by far the least offensive, it has gotten the most press, which goes to show that if you’re a politician involved in a sex scandal, and your name is synonymous with a sexual organ, do not allow Twitter to be involved with your sex life in any way.

Obama the Moderate Republican

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Here’s an exchange that Donald Trump had with Anderson Cooper:

TRUMP: Well I’ve been told very recently Anderson that the birth certificate is missing. I’ve been told that it’s not there and it doesn’t exist. And if that’s the case, that’s a big problem.

COOPER: Who told you that?

TRUMP: I just heard that two days ago from somebody.

COOPER: From your investigators?

TRUMP: I don’t want to say who. But I’ve been told that the birth certificate is not there, it’s missing.[…]

COOPER: Can you name even one person who your investigators have talked to?

TRUMP: I don’t want to do that right now. It’s not appropriate right now.

You got to love how this facade gets lamer and lamer. For all the talk about “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”, it turns out no one was looking too hard for it. Anyone can actually find proof at the Hawaii Vital Records Office, which lists all the children born in the state, including Obama, yet only the Associated Press and one other person have bothered to look at the binder according to the sign-in sheet.

But don’t think that means Republicans are racist. Why, more than half of Republicans in Mississippi think interracial marriage should be legal, and that’s got to count for something. I mean, it’s only been 43 years since the Supreme Court decided ant-cegenation laws are unconstitutional. Give them a little time.

Ann Coulter came on Hannity’s show not too long ago and claimed that “every responsible conservative organization to look at [the Birther issue] has shot it down, which is why you normally hear it being talked about exclusively on the liberal cable stations.” Obviously, an intellectually honest Birther would have told her, “Actually, I myself have doubts about Obama’s birth certificate.” Instead, Hannity responded with, “Well, it’s an interesting point,” since it’s more important to put up the facade of unity than to actually distinguish his political philosophy from other Conservatives. If a liberal show host had tried that, they would be instantly discredited, but in the Conservative world of Doublethink, you can be a Birther and still blame Birtherism on the Liberal media. (Of course, Ann Coulter was full of shit: WorldNetDaily, which runs her column, promotes Bither conspiracies, and Greta Van Sustren had Trump on the very next hour to trumpet his birther credentials.)

Ezra Klein recently wrote an interesting article about how if you look at Obama’s policies, he’s really a moderate Republican from the 90’s:

America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

He goes on to point out that Obama’s individual mandate plan and Cap and Trade first came to life as Republican ideas meant to counter the single-payer and direct taxes Democrats had planned, and that Obama’s budget has far fewer tax increases than George H. W. Bush’s budget.

Ramesh Ponnuru responded by joking that you can make the argument that George W. Bush was a moderate Democrat since he sponsored No Child Left Behind, “he favored the war Iraq–like John Kerry,” and he cut taxes with Max Baucus’ support.

Obviously, the last two of those hardly prove anything “favoring” the Iraq War merely meant voting to give Bush the power to go to war, which the Administration claimed was only going to be used as a threat, and one Democrat supporting his tax cuts does not mean most of the Democrats in office supported it. But Klein responded that he was right that No Child Left Behind, as well as Medicare Part D, were originally Democratic ideas.

Another point Klein failed to mention is Obama’s Republican acceptance of basically every Bush-era attack on civil rights, from Obama dropping his plan to close Guantamino on the very first day of his re-election campaign, to his War on Whistleblowers, to the unconstitutional imprisonment of Bradley Manning without a trial.

The Daily Show played a clip of liberal “protesters” singing a terrible, off-key song to Obama about Manning’s imprisonment, but even before the song was over, they promised to vote for him again and even called out their love for him after the song. Oh yeah, and they paid $76,000 to Obama to sing it to him. And really, this more than anything shows what absolute pussies Democrats are.

Liberals like Klein aren’t the only ones comparing Obama to Republicans, but on the right, any comparison made is a negative one to Bush. While this is true when it comes to foreign policy, some of the attempts to show similarities are ridiculous. For example, one person who calls Obama “Bush Black” sent me a list of suppossed traits of which Bush and Obama are identical, such as “Czar Appointees” and “Federally Funded Faith Based Groups.” Here was my response:

BAILOUTS & STIMULUS PACKAGES: Yeah, another similarity is Bush and Obama both have two eyes. And they both have a nose. And they both wear clothes. Everyone in congress voted on the bailouts and stimulus packages. But who are the people that are mad at Wall Street and who are the people making excuses for them and complaining about Obama being antagonistic to them after he just let them all off the hook like that?

CZAR APPOINTEES: I have to give the guy who wrote this credit for acknowledging that Bush created czars too when that was clearly left out of the Republican Talking Points, but he’s still an idiot. EVERY PRESIDENT SINCE ROOSEVELT HAS CREATED CZARS AND NO ONE CARED!! The “czar controversy” was just like every other Republican controversy: it was ginned up as a cynical attack on Obama for no reason but to make people think he’s doing something radically different. Find me the guy who was actually complaining about czars BEFORE OBAMA: He doesn’t exist!!!

CITIZEN SURVEILLANCE: Yeah, liberals used to complain about this one until Obama was elected. Now both sides have accepted this. Only liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald criticizes Obama for this.

FEDERALLY FUNDED FAITH BASED GROUPS: Again, liberals are the only ones who ever complained about this.

A CALLING FROM GOD : The website says: “Once again, Bush was often criticized by various groups for claiming to ‘do God’s will’ in his politics…. Obama: ‘This is the source of our confidence. The knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.'” Uh, yeah. BIG DIFFERENCE. Bush was talking about WAR WITH IRAQ being “God’s will.” He told this to a Palestinian official and to the President of France. Obama was talking about “honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.”

MEETINGS WITH RELIGIOUS LEADERS: Just like every other president….. Also, most religious leaders are right-wingers…..

MIDDLE EAST ISSUES: The website says: “This segment may be an eye opener for some. The general stereotype is that Bush was a loyal Zionist supporter and blindly supported Israel in every endeavor while Obama will take America away from Israeli support into either a moderate position or even a pro-Palestine position.” Yes, that is the Republican talking point that you embraced. […]

LOBBYIST APPOINTEES: Again, nothing new. Again, liberals are the ones protesting Washington lobbyists.

THE TREATMENT OF DISSENTERS UNDER EACH ADMINISTRATION: The comparisons made are not equa[l] at all. The first source says the Bush protestors were on a public street, while the second source says, “According to Minerd, the police told them the stadium had been rented by the Obama campaign.” The third source says a guy [was] ARRESTED and FINGERPRINTED for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt on the Capitol steps during a presidential appearance. The fourth example is a pathetic attempt to find equivalence by picking some random car that got pulled over in Louisiana which had NOTHING TO DO with the president.

Marginalizing Citizen Protest Efforts by the Media: “Under Bush: Example: Cindy Sheehan, Antiwar Protester”, “Under Obama:
Example: Tea Party Protesters” Say what?? The media gave both Cindy Sheehan and the Tea Party free advertisement!

NATIONALIZATION OF AMERICAN INDUSTRY: There’s a difference between a “bailout” and “nationalization.” Bailout means the taxpayer assumes all the risk while Wall Street keeps all the profit. “Nationalization” means the taxpayer gets to keep a rightful amount of profit. The only people who wanted nationalization are left-leaning writers like Paul Krugman and Matt Taibbi.

AGREEMENT ON VARIOUS SOCIAL ISSUES: I don’t what this guy was on when he wrote this. Obama eliminated abstinenace-only sex education. Bush wasn’t for same sex marriage. We just had a huge fight over health care and we’re still fighting over economics.

CONCLUSION: The guy goes on to say Obama is the 5th term of the ClintonBush White House. Do you really believe that too? I guess he’s trying to say Bush was always a liberal, but if you look at the actual ISSUES, it’s obvious it’s Obama who has accepted all the Bush Fallacies (War on Terror, PATRIOT Act, Survellance State, unconditional support of Israel, Tax Cuts for the Rich, Lobbyists, etc. etc. etc.).