fayfreethinkers.com

"Geraldine Ferraro turned out to be David Duke in drag.
She's such a fucking whore! Hillary is a big fucking whore, too.
Oh, fuck you, Hillary."
-- Randi Rhodes, suspended, Air America radio talking head, proud to be neutral until we have a nominee

What Real Straight Talk From McCain Would Sound Like on The Fifth
Anniversary of the Iraq War (By Calvin Trillin)

It's going very well, my friends.
Our triumphs now are bound to grow.
The worst five years are over, friends.
That leaves just ninety-five to go.

“What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!

“This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God,” Davis said. “Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.”

--Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupting atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield

LINK

The REAGAN DIARIES, edited by historian Douglas Brinkley and published in 2007 by Harper Collins, contains this actual quote that Ronald Reagan wrote about George “W” in his diary on May 17, 1986:

“A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida; the one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.”

Here.

Doug wrote:The REAGAN DIARIES, edited by historian Douglas Brinkley and published in 2007 by Harper Collins, contains this actual quote...

DAR
It's bogus. I knew it was bogus because if it was true we would all be very familiar with it. Reagan's diaries came out some time ago. Snopes has the debunk here.

DOUG
My bad. I would have been suspicious had I thought that part of the diary had been out for a while.

"Referring to voters who America has left behind economically as “bitter” isn’t an insult. In fact, it’s a compliment, acknowledging that they’re smart enough to understand what’s happening to them. The hopeful, now those are some idiots. So let’s separate the bitter – my people – from the idiots. If you think the Democrats are going to take away your Bible, you’re an idiot. If you think they’re going to take away your gun, you’re an armed idiot. And if you think they’re going to take away your gun and give it to a Mexican to kill your God, you’re Bill O’Reilly."
--Bill Maher

"Thank you, your Holiness. Awesome speech."
--America's Monkey, to the Pope



"They went off the rails. That's it. They took a majority
that took 16 years to build and they destroyed it."
--Gingrich, on how Bush and the GOP destroyed themselves

From C & R:

"When Lt. Col. Billy Hall lost his life in Iraq, his grieving family gave permission for the media to cover his funeral at Arlington Cemetary. But the Pentagon had other ideas and cordoned off the media so that they could get no usable audio and only a few, distant photos with yellow ropes blocking the face of his loved ones." The family responds:

Whatever this war does and does not mean to the history of this country nothing could have more greatly impacted the family of Lt. Col. Billy Hall. And if his story, and the story of other American heroes are kept from the American public, it is not the doing of the American media that somehow dishonors the troops. The blame lies clearly and completely at the foot of the Bush administration. IT does not want our heroes honored. It wants itself honored. And all else — Lt. Col. Hall, his family and their wishes – they can all, Mr. Bush is saying, go to hell. Wash. Post

Did you know that ALL recessions since the 1930’s, save one, have taken place under Republican presidents? True fact. The single exception occurred at the conclusion of World War II during the administration of Harry S. Truman and it was one predictable consequence of ending a war. It was also the shortest, as well as the shallowest. Contrast that with the fact that we are now enduring our SECOND recession due to the gross mismanagement of that congenital idiot and the band of thugs in his administration.

The irrepressible BartCop, whom I quite enjoy, is fond of saying “It’s the Republicans’ job to crash the economy so the super-rich can swoop in and buy companies and assets for pennies on the dollar.” (Vol. 2139, in “Quotes” near the top of his page) Now, this is a bit on the simplistic side, but in essence, it’s EXACTLY what they do! And another for good measure: “Never trust a Republican. It’s their job to crash the economy so their billionaire friends can buy once-healthy companies for pennies on the dollar, fire the employees and sell the assets for profit.”

See here.

"I would like to know why the word "liberal" is so often used as a put down, when it is actually a compliment. The word means open-minded, broad-minded, moderate, freethinking, and tolerant... while the opposite of that is narrow-minded, unadventurous, conventional, conformist, and old-fashioned. I would much rather be a liberal, especially in this day and age when conventional thinking has gotten our country into so much turmoil... it is time for a change !!" --Cincinnati Kid

“My friends, I will have an energy policy which will eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.” --McCain, today Link

Chris Matthews opines:

“You know, if somebody else were to say that, they would be accused of being a communist, or radical, or a leftist…for John McCain, a war hero, to say that we’re fighting in the Middle East to protect our oil sources is an astounding development.” --ibid

In American politics, it is an astounding development when someone says the truth. Isn't that something.

UPDATE
McCain has a gotten a little flack over this but not nearly enough. His response? To blatantly lie about it! He now says he was referring to the first Gulf War:

[quote]
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) clarified his comments Friday after suggesting the Iraq war was motivated by U.S. reliance on foreign oil.

His explanation: He was talking about the 1991 Persian Gulf War, not the current conflict.

He sought to clarify his comments after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said.

“But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said.

“I want us to remove our dependency on foreign oil for national security reasons, and that’s all I mean,” McCain said.

Regarding the current conflict, he said, “The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction.”

DAR
Here is the transcript. Does it sound like he’s talking about the first Gulf War?

"Senator Obama and Senator Clinton want to set a date for withdraw. That’s what they want to do is get everybody out. I believe that would lead to catastrophe and chaos and that we would have the whole region including the whole region and the country in such turmoil that we would be required to come back to the region. And I just want to promise you this. My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will - that will then prevent us - that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East."

LINK

D.

"A president saying that he has the right to overturn George Washington’s 200-plus year prohibition
against torture and torture anyone he wants, with his assistants gathering to personally review the
kinds of torture techniques being used prisoner by prisoner, its obscene."
-- Al Gore, LINK

How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words

"So the Pentagon would maintain a team of “military analysts” who reliably “carry their water” — yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access — even before responding to the press — only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the “less reliably friendly” ones — frozen out by the Pentagon — would be “weeded out” by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was “their bread and butter.” These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters — and to do so almost always unchallenged — but also even to shape and mold the networks’ coverage choices."

Glen Greenwald: The road to Serfdom

DAR
Hilarious video clip of Bill O'Lielly losing it. Two minutes.

PREVIOUS POSTER SAID:

"A president saying that he has the right to overturn George Washington’s 200-plus year prohibition
against torture and torture anyone he wants, with his assistants gathering to personally review the
kinds of torture techniques being used prisoner by prisoner, its obscene."
-- Al Gore, LINK

BUT CONSIDER:

While legal rendition has been used by the United States increasingly since the 1980s as a method for dealing with foreign defendants, extraordinary rendition is a wholly extra-legal process that differs in its nature and usage as a tool in the US-led "war on terror". Modern methods of rendition include a form where suspects are taken into US custody but delivered to a third-party state, often without ever being on American soil, and without involving the rendering country's judiciary; they have been termed "extraordinary rendition". The CIA was granted permission to use rendition in a presidential directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995, and the practice has grown sharply since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

According to Clinton administration official Richard Clarke:"'extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government…. The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'”

(from Wikipedia on "extraordinary rendition")

SO, although I realize the Bush Administration has abused the torture allowance considerably, Gore is being a little too self-righteous in his criticism.

Anonymous wrote:GUEST
SO, although I realize the Bush Administration has abused the torture allowance considerably, Gore is being a little too self-righteous in his criticism.

DAR
I did some reading about this (for instance here ) and I checked your source. I think you make a good point. At best we might say for Gore (seeing how Bush has so bastardized what may have been intended to be isolated, covert and rare), is that he has evolved. Interesting how when a person is in a position of power over other people their perspective changes. Perhaps especially with regard to torture.

D.

DAR
Bush has so screwed the pooch and things are such a mess on the planet he can't even play golf anymore. Isn't that something?

***
From an interview with Politico and Yahoo News:
"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization's high commissioner for human rights.

"I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life," he said. "I was playing golf -- I think I was in central Texas -- and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, 'It's just not worth it anymore to do."

LINK

***
UPDATE: Uh oh. Telling the truth is hard apparently:

Warren Street at Blue Girl, Red State says that Bush is lying about why (and when) he quit golf:

"Actually, it is far more likely that Bush quit playing golf because he was suffering from knee problems throughout the latter half of 2003."

Street then links to a CBS News article published in December 2003[..]

"Bush actually played his last round of golf on October 13, 2003. This means that the reason he gave for quitting after the August 2003 U.N. bombing is dubious at best. More likely, he made the story up in a clumsy ploy to gain sympathy. In many regions and cultures around the world, this is called “lying.”

LINK