This vicious attack from the left on President Barack Obama had me laughing. Whereas it’s fairly common that I find myself agreeing with liberals about the facts of a situation, but reaching different conclusions, this time I disagreed with the facts but…reached all the same conclusions. Well, mostly. Anyway, it’s worth reading.
Monthly Archives: January 2010
No Stone Left Unturned
It is good to know that no stone will be left unturned in the quest to exorcise racist language from public discourse, especially with super word codebreakers like Zennie62 on the job. He tells us that Erick Erickson, writing at RedState has “used a word that’s has a totally racist connection to describe President Obama’s delivery: ‘cocky.'”
Totally racist. It conjurs up images of white sheets and burning crosses every time I hear it. What was Erick thinking?
Yes, Zennie62 claims that “cocky” is a racial code word. Why? Because it was once used by a racist.
“In a rather wild thread called “Politically Correct Racism” [in the StormFront.org forum], Valhalladream let loose with the “C” word on Valentines Day, 2009 (there must be something wrong because Valhalladream should have been out with his girlfriend, right?) Valhalladream writes:
‘And the problem is – is that we are just so used to it. We laugh about it – shrug it off. Time has come to get just as “touchy” as them. Oh, and you know the election which was supposed to bring the country together in one big kum-by-ya love in and it will be like mixing coffee and cream and we will all “get along” and live happily ever after? NOT! I have been so much more openly antagonistic towards blacks – especially the ones who think they own the freakin’ world now because of that black sob in MY white house. They are getting really cocky. [I believe emphasis added by Zennie63] One crackhead in his pimp-mobile blocked an intersection and I opened my window and said “You better move that car you black ba_ _ _ _ _d!” He looked at me I think in shock and didn’t know how to react. I would have never done that a year ago. I don’t care. They need to be slammed back'”
Valhalladream’s rant is vile but that doesn’t mean that any of the words he chose to use are inherently racist; they are racist because his intent is racist. It’s difficult to know if Zennie62 really believes his ludicrous assertion, although I believe it’s much more likely that he just wants anyone who feels inclined to criticize President Obama to, you know, shut up.
This is intended to be paralyzing. Using this logic, every English word with a negative meaning is no longer valid for use in discussing African-Americans because it’s surely been used at one time or another with racist intent.
The claims of racism coming out of the left are becoming increasingly absurd and obviously baseless but that’s okay with me. The sillier they get, the more harmless their claims become.
Filed under Insanity
The Horror! The Horror!
Scroll to the bottom to view the ad.
If you’re planning on watching the Super Bowl with your family, take care to guard your children’s hearts and minds, as CBS is inviting a dangerous intruder into your living room.
Subject: Focus on the Family in your living room
Dear Ms. Words,
CBS has cleared the way to subject nearly 100 million people to Focus on the Family’s extreme agenda by agreeing to air its new pro-life ad during the Super Bowl.
Focus on the Family has an unmistakable anti-choice, anti-birth-control, anti-sex-education, anti-gay agenda. If that isn’t bad enough, its views on women are just plain insulting and dangerous. For example, its web site urges women facing an unintended pregnancy to seek “wise advice” because “the hormones and extreme emotions of pregnancy make reasonable decisions more difficult.”
We can’t just sit by while CBS lets Focus on the Family place a political ad during the Super Bowl, when millions of people are watching ads.
It’s unprecedented for CBS to approve an ad of this nature during the Super Bowl.
All major networks hosting the Super Bowl have denied ad space to political candidates2 and organizations including PETA*, MoveOn.org, and the United Church of Christ. Now CBS is trying to justify its decision by changing the rules in the middle of the game.
It’s absurd that CBS would give Focus on the Family a platform to spread its message to tens of millions of people – especially when it has blocked other advocacy groups from having the same opportunity.
Thanks for holding CBS accountable and not letting the network make exceptions for Focus on the Family.
My best,
Nancy Keenan
President, NARAL Pro-Choice America
What is it that has them so worked up?
The 30-second ad’s theme is “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life” and a Focus on the Family press release said the Tebows agreed to the ad because “the issue of life is one they feel strongly about.” As a result, the ad is widely expected to focus on Mrs. Tebow’s pregnancy with Tim, when she was encouraged by doctors to abort him.
Still, Focus on the Family is keeping the specific content of the ad under wraps until its Feb. 7 debut, in an effort to build anticipation.
“The Tebows, they have a lot of really inspiring stories. And [Mrs. Tebow] and Tim are going to share one of those stories on February the 7th,” said Gary Schneeberger, Focus on the Family spokesman.
Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, said in a statement, “Tim and Pam share our respect for life and our passion for helping families thrive.”
The Tebows are evangelical Christians who have served as missionaries in the Philippines on numerous occasions and founded the Bob Tebow Evangelistic Association, which continues to evangelize in the Philippines, where Tim was born.
During one of the mission trips, Mrs. Tebow came down with amoebic dysentery and slipped into a coma, requiring a treatment regimen that included strong antibiotics that can damage or kill an unborn child. When Mrs. Tebow learned she was pregnant, doctors advised her to abort the baby, whom she and her husband had prayed for and already named Timothy, she told the Gainesville, Fla., Sun in 2007.
“Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life.” Hot damn! That is extreme! I’m so glad that NARAL is watching out for me and millions of other people like me who might be irreversibly scarred by this extreme horror story of a mother’s love.
It’s hard to know where to begin.
NARAL is making these over-dramatic, disingenuous assertions about a commercial they haven’t even seen. Not to get bogged down in details, Keenan proceeds directly to the fear-mongering. Focus on the Family is going to be “in your living room,” where you’ll be “subjected” to their “extreme agenda.” She carries on as though homophobia is something you can catch just by hearing Tim and Pam Tebow celebrating life.
Although the e-mail claimed to have gleaned the information on the “extreme agenda” from the Focus on the Family website on January 25th, it didn’t include links. Searching their site for “birth control” or “sex education” returns no results. I’m not saying there’s nothing there, just that I couldn’t find anything to ascertain what, exactly the extreme views are. I find it highly unlikely that Focus on the Family opposes the concept of birth control and surmise that NARAL classifies Focus on the Family’s opposition to abortion and the morning after pill as “being against” birth control. As I said, disingenuous.
Keenan takes exception to it when Focus on the Family advises a woman facing an unexpected pregnancy to seek “wise advice” because making a rational decision might be hard during such a difficult time. Yes. Clearly it’s better to seek bad advice. Or possibly make one of the most important decisions of your life alone and scared.
One needn’t really wonder why NARAL is in such an uproar. They claim to be pro-choice, but their tolerance for choice only reaches as far as the choices they would make. They’re offended by women who make the choice for life under difficult circumstances. Remember, this is the organization that found it repugnant that people in the State of Virginia might be able to choose to purchase license plates that supported pro-life causes. It’s not hard to see why they’re offended by Sarah and Bristol Palin and Pam Tebow.
Update 2: The Other McCain has some thoughts on this issue
I’ll likely need counseling to recover from the trauma I suffered viewing this terror-inducing ad. Heh.
Filed under Washington
“Creep” Is A Synonym For “Adulterer,” Actually
People who cheat on their cancer-stricken spouses are all creeps, even if said spouse isn’t a particularly nice person. Thus, the revelation that John Edwards is a creep shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Aside from that, this is not the way normal people act! This man wanted to be President of the United States, for crying out loud! Frankly, it scares the pants off me that someone who appears to be quite unstable was ever considered a viable candidate. Worse…people were willing to vote for him!
Andrew Young, the man who falsely claimed to be the child of Edwards’ daughter, Frances, has penned a book revealing all the sordid details. In fact, if this were a work of fiction, I’d call it a trashy novel. Young claims to have gone along with Edward’s paternity scheme, among other things, due to misguided loyalty. Or, possibly, the chance to pen a tell-all.
H/T Dan Collins
Filed under Washington
A Tale Of Two Governors
Virginia’s new governor, Bob McDonnell, sounds like my kind of guy. Barely sworn in and already he’s advocating for a change that’s proven to save states money – privatizing the sale of liquor, wine and beer.
Here in Washington, we’re not so lucky. Even though some State legislators are calling for such a change in light of our current budget difficulties, Governor Gregoire opposes the idea, partly on the grounds that the State won’t realize any immediate savings.
When you’re in a tough time like this people put that idea out there, like that will save us,” Gregoire said. “(Auditor) Brian Sonntag’s report doesn’t show one penny for this biennium. Not one.”
I think almost everyone can see that if you never make the change, you’ll never realize any savings, but it’s a concept that appears to be just beyond the reach of Governor Gregoire. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time she’s had difficulty recognizing whether or not something helps or hurts the State financially. As I outlined here, Gregoire once claimed that a $1.5 million settlement was a “good deal” for the State when compared to the $500,000 it would have cost to try the case.
Not to mention that this kind of short-sighted thinking surely has contributed to the State’s current fiscal woes. Just look at the way the budget gap was closed last year, with accounting tricks and one-time stimulus grants, with no apparent thought given to trying to address the root causes of the budget crisis. Hey, slap a Band-Aid on it and call it good!
Or it could be that she doesn’t dare risk any more lawsuits (and here) from the State employee’s unions. Quite understandably, the unions are reluctant to renegotiate, but persuading people to work together as a team is part of being a good leader, something about which Gregoire appears to be quite ignorant.
Stefan Sharkansky discusses the Governor’s claims in depth at Sound Politics.
Filed under Washington
Ellie Light Responds
Ellie Light responds but she might have been better off if she’d just kept her mouth shut. On the very off chance that you haven’t already seen Ellie’s letter,* here it is.
A YEAR AGO, if we’d read that employers were hiring again, that health-care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly was a nice place to take kids, we’d have known we were being lied to. We knew the problems President Obama inherited wouldn’t go away overnight.
During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn’t be fixed in a year, that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires, and wouldn’t be an easy venture.
Candidate Obama didn’t feed us happy talk, which is why we elected him. He never said America could solve our health-care, economic and security problems without raising the deficit. He talked of hard choices, of government taking painful and contentious first steps toward fixing problems that can’t be left for another day.
Right after the election, we seemed to grasp this. We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees, and would be slow to hire.
We understood that the banks were lying when they said they’d share their recovery. That a national consensus on health care wouldn’t come easily. Candidate Obama never claimed that his proposed solutions would work flawlessly right out of the box, and we respected him for that.
Today, the president is being attacked as if he’d promised that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never did. It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything.
Ellie Light
Despite the letter having appeared, apparently, in dozens of newspapers across the country, “Light said she didnt [sic] submit her letter to all the outlets that published it, and said many carried it after it was cited several weeks ago by Politico’s Ben Smith. She says she prefers submitting her letters to smaller papers, ‘specifically because I think rationality needs a broader audience.'”
Rationality needs a broader audience? Right. Not to mention less competition for publication.
But what does that even mean? If I wanted a broader audience, I’d submit to larger papers, but I’m obviously not as clever as Ellie, so maybe I just don’t get it.
Ellie doesn’t know when to quit. She goes on:
If my letter were boilerplate [White House senior adviser David] Axelrod dribble, as has been suggested by your new fan club, it would not have been published. Many of my friends have written letters to the editor and bemoan the fact that they never get published. I reply that everything they wrote in their letters has been said before by others. I think, however, this one letter that I wrote, is unique enough, that it was worth widespread attention, simple as that.
I don’t know about you, but when I first read Ellie’s letter, I thought it sounded as though it had been written by a high school student (and, indeed, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level is 9.4). Ellie, however, is of the opinion that her letter – far from being “boilerplate Axelrod dribble” (and I assure you, I almost dribbled my drink down my front when I read that bit of drivel) – was “unique enough” (don’t get me started on adding a qualifer to a superlative) that editors across the country scrambled to print it. Yeah. And she’s smarter and more original than her friends. They’re lucky to know her, really.
(Note to Ben Smith: If Obama’s supporters are having a hard time crystallizing the rather simple thoughts Ellie included in her letter, maybe liberals really aren’t the smart ones after all. Just sayin’.)
*If you aren’t familiar with this story, click through on this link, read the article, and follow the links.
Update 1: Ellie still ♥ her letter, or so she told Michael Smerconish, a talk show host based in Atlanta.
“My letter was pretty darn good. It took a long time to write. I took more interest in honing it than most people take today.”
She also admitted to faking her address (which would appear to be at odds with her earlier statement about not having submitted her letter to the many outlets that published it).
“I need to own up – I did misrepresent my home town in some places,” Light told Smerconish. Her logic in faking the addresses is one familiar to advocacy groups: “If I thought it was written by a neighbor of mine, I would give it more credence.”
I don’t know about you, but I never put much credence in the words of known liars. But maybe that’s just me.
Filed under Journalism, Media
The New Puritan Seal of Approval
This swimwear has received the New Puritan Seal of Approval for use by Republican women. If only Scott Brown had know before allowing this scandalous family photo to be snapped.
If anyone with mad Photoshop skillz can come up with a better seal, I’d be much obliged.
Filed under Hypocrisy, Journalism
Going Fishing
As outlined by the Purple Avenger at Ace of Spades HQ, it’s been a rough few months for environmental extremism.
Despite public protestations to the contrary, even the most fanatical disciples of the Church of Global Warming realize they’re losing the battle for public opinion in regards to climate change. What’s a zealot to do?
Hot chicks in bikinis are casting around, too.
If Al Gore and the other snake oil salesmen had actually based their belief in climate change apocalypse on now-questionable data, you might expect them to be at least a bit relieved that perhaps Earth was to be spared, rather than doubling down on the stupid. If, on the other hand, they were more concerned with wielding near total control over every aspect of your daily life than in the possibility that Denver might become a major seaport, they might start casting around for a new crisis that could be attributed to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Thank Gaia for a new cudgel, ocean acidification, which will be brandished to subdue the unruly automobile-driving, electricity-consuming, breathing mobs.
During a December 2nd, 2009, Climate “Science” Hearing, Washington’s very own Jay Inslee recounts a heart-warming encounter he had at the University of Washington with a young man global warming denier, of whom he asks , “Look, if you’re right and there’s no global warming, if you’re so right, what are you gonna do about ocean acidification? What do you say about that?” (If you’re allergic to insufferable, condescending jerks, fast forward to 2:32; living in Inslee’s district, I can attest that the rash is quite bothersome.)
I find it absolutely astonishing that Inslee would treat a tax-paying citizen of the United States with such disdain, while treating John Holdren – a man who, during the 70s, proposed forced abortions; mass, involuntary sterilization; and even compulsory marriage or adoption for unwed mothers as a way to avert another imminent crisis threating to destroy the Earth – as a respected expert. I may be overly critical, but I think Holdren’s creds are in question.
The oceans may be becoming more acid but, just as with global warming, the snake oil salesmen need to show first, that human activity has significantly contributed to the problem and, second, that human efforts can significantly improve it. Until then, keep casting, guys.
Bonus hot chicks. (Maybe NSFW and, yes, I’m angling for blog hits.)
Update 1: Stacy McCain explains how, She Puts the Fin in Fine.
Update 2: Jimmie Bise opines that he doesn’t get out fishing nearly often enough.
Filed under Environmentalism
Puritanical Hypocrites
The New Puritans at the Huffington Post are all offended because Gail Huff, wife of newly elected Senator Scott Brown (R-MA, baby!) appeared in a racy music video back in the ’80s.
This video hardly qualifies as racy, but when compared to what the HuffPo’s readers probably view on a regular basis – for instance, this not-safe-for-work gem from Paula Cole – it’s kiddie fare. In sort of the same way the Beatles started to look all cute ‘n’ cuddly to my parents when my sister started listening to Steppenwolf.
Breathless, the HuffPo goes on to tell us:
Of course, the Browns are no strangers to skin: Senator-elect Scott famously posed nude for Cosmopolitan in 1982, and more recently with his bikini-clad daughters.
Oh! The scandal! Scott Brown’s daughters…wear bikinis! Honestly, you’d think it was kiddie porn the way they’re going on about it. All right…the photo may prove they have really bad taste in swim wear but it’s a family vacation photo, apparently in Hawaii. How many of you have something similar tucked away?
Personally, I don’t find any of this shocking. Not the video, the Cosmo spread or the bikini-clad daughters. But if this is the standard to which the left would like to be held, hey, I’m all for that.
Filed under Hypocrisy
it's only words 