Heh.

Condi Rice: We'll have to wait another 100 years to know if we really fucked everything up.

This is really getting old.

Rice said it is still too early to fully judge the success or failure of that war or other foreign policy issues in the administration of George W. Bush.

Seriously, it will be 3003 and some Bushbot will give a speech at the Bush Library at SMU and say, "Verdict's still out. History will be the judge."

They Shall Know We Are Christians...

Professor Mike Adams (adamsm@uncw.edu) thinks gays can learn a thing or two from a handful of Christians who've been martyred criticized for being bigoted dicks and yet, somehow, lived to tell the tale:

These eight cases are all true except for one thing: The Christians who were bullied by gays and gay activists are all still alive. Not a single one has committed suicide. That is because they have centered their lives around Jesus Christ, rather than their sexual identity.

Christ, what a douchebag.

Glenn Reynolds: damn those oppressive gays!

This rather odd post from Putzy (see the update at the bottom) comes just a short while after his equally weird New York Post piece.

To summarize: gays are authoritarian thought police, and colleges that don't approve of the military's homophobia are the real bigots.

Overcompensating?

Hehindeedy!

Putz, yesterday:

CHANGE: Michelle Obama electioneering in polling place? “You kind of have to drop the standard for the first lady, right?”

Election laws, like taxes, are for the little people.

Back on planet Earth, even Fox says Obama did nothing wrong.

Buck up, assholes! The whitey tape should drop any day now.

What's the libertarian answer to wealth inequality?

Haha, just kidding. Of course, there is none.

Blood on their Hands.

NPR:

After years of steady progress, the percentage of 2-year-olds in private health plans getting immunized dropped last year. ...

Insurers attribute the decline to parents' fears that vaccinations could be linked to autism. Though public health experts and government studies have found no evidence that vaccinations cause autism, the subject has been subject of fierce debate on the Internet and outspoken celebrities have fueled the controversy.

According to a report by the National Committee on Quality Assurance, vaccination rates dropped for measles, mumps and rubella (90.6% in 2009 from 93.5% in 2008), diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (85.4% in 2009 from 87.2% in 2008) and chickenpox (90.6% in 2009 from 92% in 2008).

The repercussions of non-vaccination are nasty; a few years ago, 839 people, including three babies, got the measles -- all thanks to one intentionally unvaccinated kid.

Naturally, there's a lot of blame to go around. For brevity's sake, let's limited ourselves to the most respectable, high-profile fear-mongering assholes:

"As everybody on the planet knows, thimerosal is a neurotoxin. Injecting it at the levels they do and used to do, and still do, by the way, into the bloodstreams of infants must do something." --Don Imus

"I can’t prove it, but intuitively, you look at the spike [in autism], you look at thimerosal, there is no doubt in my mind… we’re gonna find out that thimerosal causes, in my opinion, autism." --Joe Scarborough

"It’s time for the CDC to come clean with the American public. Its tactics of deception and obfuscation are jeopardizing the credibility of the entire vaccine program and posing an enormous danger to public health." --Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"Parents still have to be very careful in the application of vaccines to their kids. That’s what I’ve asked my kids to do with my grandkids." --Joe Lieberman

"Many parents have written us over the last couple of days saying that they have put their child in the process of chelation, which removes the mercury poisoning from the system, and they say they've seen vast improvement. Wouldn't that suggest that there may be some relationship between the mercury from thimerosal and the removal from the child?" --Tim Russert

You stay classy, conservatives.

Can you imagine the non-stop Faux News/GOP/wingnut blogger freakout if someone had put up a billboard of Bush as a terrorist?

Mankiw the Magnificent

It's good to know that a Harvard professorship and overwhelming intellectual dishonesty are not mutually exclusive. And I have Greg Mankiw to prove it. Watch how he uses all of the wizardry and sleight-of-hand tricks available to wealthy tax whiners to twist, manipulate, and distort the impact of the expiring top bracket tax cuts.

Looks like Glenn Reynolds might have an Ivy League future after all if this is where the bar is set.

Another Bet.

Jonah Goldberg today:

Jonathan Chait insists that the GOP will impeach Obama if they take back the House. I think he’s nuts. I’ll bet him $500 to the charity of the winner’s choice it doesn’t happen.

Credit where it's due: this wager is slightly more tasteful than the last one, in February 2005:

Since [Juan Cole] doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now).

Needless to say, Goldberg was wrong about everything and the parenthetical was probably a lie.

Duly noted, K-Lo. Duly noted.

Huh.

There’s an odd piece over on Politico today. It’s the collaborative effort of three of its leading writers, about Newt Gingrich. It mentions from the get-go his recent comment about Barack Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. The comment was made to our Bob Costa. And Newt was explicitly flagging — and endorsing — Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis about what makes Obama tick, the point of D’Souza’s recent Forbes article and new book. But the Politico piece never mentions the D’Souza book, making Newt sound randomly kooky at best.

This just in from Politico: "CORRECTION: Yesterday we incorrectly implied that Newt Gingrich is fucking bonkers. He was actually quoting and endorsing the views of Dinesh D'Souza, who is fucking bonkers. POLITICO regrets the error."

It's obvious day!

Rich Iott points out that historical re-enactments are a way to teach history. Yep, and people who dress up in SS uniforms are fucking creepy.

I'm glad we had this talk.

The Sound You Hear is Kay Graham Weeping.

The latest offering from On Faith, the unholy lovechild of The Washington Post's perennial embarrassment Sally Quinn and Newsweek's Jon Meacham, suggests that the plucky vanity site seeks to occupy a space in the discourse just to the right of The American Spectator.

Yesterday (which, not for nothing, was National Coming Out Day) Quinn and Meachan saw fit to publish the work of Tony Perkins. The views of Perkins, who has some pretty ugly ties to David Duke, are well known: he's warned that same-sex parenting is a danger; criticized Judge Vaughn Walker for being "openly homosexual"; and claimed that gay men disproportionately abuse children.

It's not unreasonable to assume that Quinn and Meacham -- or whoever actually oversees the page -- contracted Perkins specifically to deliver this unusually rank bigotry.

Amid a spate of suicides and bullying  -- and a mere week and a half after one of the uglier anti-gay hate crimes in New York history -- Perkins points the finger:

...homosexual activist groups like GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) are exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda of demanding not only tolerance of homosexual individuals, but active affirmation of homosexual conduct and their efforts to redefine the family.

Also, says Perkins, gay activists and the media are the guilty parties:

Some homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex attractions are abnormal--yet they have been told by the homosexual movement, and their allies in the media and the educational establishment, that they are "born gay" and can never change. This--and not society's disapproval--may create a sense of despair that can lead to suicide.

Thank you, Washington Post Company, for bankrolling Tony Perkins' plea against tolerance.Oh, and here's how GLSEN "exploited" the beatings:

Many in the LGBT and ally community are asking what we can do in the wake of multiple tragedies across the country. What can you do to make a positive difference?
Ask for help:

If you or someone you know is in crisis and has mentioned or is considering suicide take it seriously and get help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or the Trevor Lifeline at 1-866-488-7386. View the resource list below for how to recognize if someone is in crisis.

Shameless, I know.

The Right Swiftly Denounces Homophobic Remarks.

Totally kidding.

But why would they? Paladino,  who said that gays are dysfunctional, simply echoed the party line.

Well, that settles that.

Salena Zito enlightens us all with a made up election narrative that is conveniently similar to her preferred outcome and worldview her excellent understanding of partisanship and the American voter in a lovely piece called "Americans Will Vote Their Interests, Not Their Party."

Despite the contradictory evidence offered by the last 50 years of political science research, I think I'll go with Selena's explanation here. She seems more credible given the amount of research she did (i.e., talking to two people in Independence, MO).

Media Matters Just Doubled Its Staff.

Rich Lowry:

Just a short notice: Comments are finally coming to the Corner, tomorrow if all goes as planned.

I look forward to learning some very creative, asterisk-filled words for black people and homosexuals. NRO will kill this new, certain-to-be-hilarious feature no later than Friday.

Liberal media update.

The New York Times has new, fawning feature stories on Pam Gellar and Ann Coulter.

Discuss.

A little dodgy? How about creepy or bizarre?

Not even NRO is trying to defend the Ohio Republican who likes to dress up like a Waffen-SS trooper.

Now, I’m all for two evil totalitarian superpowers killing each other, but Americans romanticizing it by reenacting it? That’s a little dodgy.