Monday, July 13, 2009

Winguts: latina wings Edition

Some Steve Benen quickies:

* Audra Shay, the new chair of the Young Republicans, has drawn considerable criticism for racially-charged comments online, but the matter did not stop her from getting the job.

* Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade continues to draw fire for last week's comments on racial "purity" and Americans' habit of "marrying other species and other ethnicities."

* I'm starting to get the sense that Joe Klein isn't impressed with Bill Kristol.

* Althouse sure does write some nutty posts.

* Even now, it appears the RNC doesn't know what EFCA is.

* And Al Kamen ponders Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-Okla.) doctor-patient relationship with Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.): "[I]f a guy can't trust his OB-GYN, who can he trust?"

Dougj: Blow job bounty

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that the same people who wanted to investigate Bill Clinton for an affair with an intern don’t want to investigate the Bush administration for torture and illegal surveillance. And I wish that the argument were phrased in these terms more often. So I was glad to see this from Marcy Wheeler (via):

“Your idea is that after investigating Bill Clinton for a blow job for like five years, we shouldn’t investigate the huge, grossly illegal things that were done under the past administration, only because Alberto Gonzales was too much in the back pocket of Dick Cheney to do it while he was still in office.”


MSNBC apologized for Wheeler’s choice of words. They didn’t apologize for Pat Buchanan’s comments about killing Levi Johnston.

I decided to give fifty bucks to the Marcy Wheeler Investigative Blogging Fund and from now on I’m going to do the same for anyone with a donation page who says something that blunt and accurate on teevee.

Update. Via JK, Howie Kurtz has his panties in a twist about this:

Hey, I’m not objecting to the Clinton/BJ not-so-bad argument uttered by the MSNBC guest, but the word. Whatever happened to euphemisms?

Digby: Gasbag Denuncia
Rush Limbaugh has his granny panties so twisted up about the DenunciaRush.com ads that he's strangling on them:

Now, the Democrats want to make this all about Sotomayor versus me. We have a spot, a new ad run by a liberal Latina organization called "Presente Action." They have a website called DenunciaRush.com. DenunciaRush.com and they're running these radio ads in Florida against John Mica and Adam Putnam.

RUSH ARCHIVES: She doesn't have any intellectual depth. She's an angry woman. She's a bigot. She's a racist...


RUSH: Must have hit home on that one if they're running ads out there trying to denounce -- they've got a whole website called DenunciaRush.com because I called her a "racista," a "racista and a bigot," and they're taking that... By the way, I sounded pretty good in that sound bite, don't you think? I'm the only one in English in the whole bite, but you get the drift here. The last line of this: "We asked Republican Congressman John Mica if he would denounce Limbaugh's words. His response? Silencio." Silence.

[...]

... we have crashed, ladies and gentlemen, we have crashed DenunciaRush.com. They are at the moment finito. DenunciaRush has been crashed. So Russ Feingold, a couple of words that Sonia Sotomayor said taken out of context. You mean like Macaca? George Allen saying Macaca? We heard about that for weeks and months as the Washington Post and the Democrats sought to destroy Allen. He'd been a congressman, a governor, and a senator. Sotomayor's comments are much worse than Macaca, and they're frequent, and they are long held. You see how this race thing works, folks. If you're a liberal nothing you say can be held against you.


Read the whole thing. He's starting to babble like Sarah Palin. Talk about thin- skinned.

The GOP must think that they are in serious danger of losing the white male, conservative blowhard vote or they wouldn't pay fealty to someone whose every word is designed to ensure that they are the only ones voting for Republicans. They obviously don't want the Hispanic vote.

One word to the wise to the fatuous one: when you're talking about long held racist views, it's probably not a good idea to hold up a guy who had confederate flags and hangman's nooses in his office as being innocent as a lily white lamb. It's not like "macaca" came out of nowhere.



Let's keep those ads going, folks. Every time Rush calls Sotomayor a racist a future wise latina gets her progressive wings.

Donate here. (And kick in a couple of bucks for the bravest man in congress, Alan Grayson, while you're there.)
Benen: NEWT'S GLOBAL REACH...
It's bad enough when disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says nutty things in the U.S. media; it's more embarrassing when he's speaking to an international audience. Faiz Shakir has the latest head-shaking Newt moment:

In an interview with Al Jazeera's Fault Lines program, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich outlined his U.S. policy towards Iran. Gingrich said the U.S. should "sabotage" Iran's oil and gas infrastructure as part of an effort to topple the Iranian government.

Al Jazeera's Avi Lewis told Gingrich, "In the past, you've called for the bombing of Iran's oil refineries." Gingrich clarified, "I called for sabotage, not bombing.... Fundamental difference." Gingrich explained that the U.S. should use "covert operations" against Iran's refineries because they "have only one refinery that produces gasoline in the entire country."

The refinery line happens to be wrong, but never mind that now. Gingrich went on to say that U.S.-backed sabotage would have "strategic meaning" and help lead to a "responsible Iranian government." Al Jazeera's Avi Lewis seemed amused when he noted that Gingrich was suggested a "responsible Iranian government" would be the natural outcome of "a gas crisis with black-ops sabotage."

And while that is amusing, Gingrich's seriousness notwithstanding, I just have to wonder whether Al Jazeera's audience realizes that Gingrich is not part of the American mainstream, has no influence in the American government, and his "sabotage" strategy will not be implemented.

Which is to say, Americans are accustomed to Gingrich being a pseudo-intellectual nut. What about international audiences?


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