How Liberals Debate

[Paul Revere]

Yes it is true. I have read his cra... errr.... rambling misspelled rants for years. When busted elsewhere, as on this thread.... he doesn't deny it.

I am new to this forum. I received one or two ( I don't know for sure ) warnings about insulting him. I accumilated some points, I have no idea what they are redeemable for. At least on the Public Opinion people were allowed to comment on his IQ level with comments such as being as smart as gravel, and not since Jethoe Bodine, has anyone been so proud of a six grade education. People also compliment him on being able to function with a single brain cell. I have no idea if they would be considered insulting him here or not so I will try to walk a fine line and be polite.

Look at any three or four of his posts. Now Put a different name on each one. Do you think different names are going to fool any one?

Did you check out hs March 7th letter to the editor in the Chambersburg Public Opinion? I can not yet post URL Links in their pure form, but go to http(Eliniate this space) Eliniate this space) // (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) publicopiniononline (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) com/opinion (Slide that together) and in the block marked "Past Editions" choose a date, choose March 7. Click his letter " Retreating from Iraq would help enemies." Read the Comments by clicking the link below his letter. The most recent comment appears at the top. He hand delivers a letter to the Public Opinion office each month. His topics are - the economy is great, gas companies only make a few cents per gallon, Bush is great, dems and libs are the worst thing on Earth.

 

[glockmail]

Yes it is true. I have read his cra... errr.... [1] rambling [2] misspelled [3] rants for years. [1,3] When busted elsewhere, as on this thread.... he doesn't deny it.

I am new to this forum. [1,3] I received one or two ( I don't know for sure ) warnings about insulting him. I [2] accumilated some points, I have no idea what they are redeemable for. At least on the Public Opinion people were allowed to comment on his IQ level with comments such as being as smart as gravel, and not since [2] Jethoe Bodine, has anyone been so proud of a six grade education. [3] People also compliment him on being able to function with a single brain cell. [1] I have no idea if they would be considered insulting him here or not so I will try to walk a fine line and be polite.

[3] Look at any three or four of his posts. Now Put a different name on each one. Do you think different names are going to fool any one?

[3] Did you check out hs March 7th letter to the editor in the Chambersburg Public Opinion? I can not yet post URL Links in their pure form, but go to http(Eliniate this space) Eliniate this space) // (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) publicopiniononline (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) com/opinion (Slide that together) and in the block marked "Past Editions" choose a date, choose March 7. Click his letter " Retreating from Iraq would help enemies." Read the Comments by clicking the link below his letter. The most recent comment appears at the top. He hand delivers a letter to the Public Opinion office each month. [1,3] His topics are - the economy is great, gas companies only make a few cents per gallon, Bush is great, dems and libs are the worst thing on Earth.

Delicious irony.

 

[red states rule]

I once applied for membership to my local Democrat party. They turned me down

I passed the mental test

 

[red states rule]

Firedoglake Bloggers Fantasize About Killing Rove
Posted by Lance Dutson on March 12, 2007 - 14:33.
The ultra-left echo chamber blog Firedoglake is continuing to excel in its pursuit of the worst in political hysteria. This time, the notorious blog articulates its wish for Karl Rove's demise by describing the hyper-violent murder of the early twentieth century Russian mystic Rasputin. The post is titled 'Rovesputin', and features an image of Rove superimposed on a painting of the unfortunate advisor to Czar Nicholas.

FDL was founded by Jane Hamsher, who made her big name by posting a picture of Joe Liebermann in blackface on The Huffington Post,and then being forced to apologize for it. She is also known for being the producer of the ultra-violent film Natural Born Killers. According to Wikipedia, "Hamsher had an uncredited cameo in the film as a female demon." Hamsher has recruited a fine group of contributors to FDL, and the result is a continuing escalation of conspiracy-theory rhetoric.

The pseudonymous FDL poster TRex, who has described himself as having "a burning crush on retired NBA star John Amaechi",was the author of the Rove post. He begins with the following historical account of Rasputin's murder:

The murder of Rasputin has become legend, some of it invented by the very men who killed him, so that it becomes difficult to discern exactly what happened. However, it is generally agreed that on December 16, 1916, having decided that Rasputin's influence over the tsarina made him too dangerous to the empire, a group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov, and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (one of the few Romanov family members to escape the annihilation of the family) apparently lured Rasputin to the Yusupovs' Moika Palace, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a large amount of cyanide.
Determined to finish the job — and now we are fully in the realm of narrative legend — Yusupov worried that Rasputin would live until morning, so that the conspirators wouldn't have time to conceal his body. He ran upstairs to consult with the others, then came back down and shot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell. The company then left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to grab one. While at the palace he went to check on the body, Rasputin opened his eyes, grabbed Felix by the throat, strangling him. Rasputin ominously whispered "you bad boy" in Yusupov's ear, and then threw him across the room and escaped. As he made his bid for freedom, the rest of the conspirators arrived and fired at him. After being hit three times in the back, he fell. As they neared his body, they found he remarkably was still struggling and trying to get up so they clubbed him into submission; then, after wrapping his body in a sheet, they threw him into the icy Neva River. Three days later the body of Rasputin — poisoned, shot four times, and badly beaten — was recovered from the river and autopsied. The cause of death was drowning. His arms were apparently found in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice. In the autopsy, it was found that he was poisoned, and that the poison alone should have killed him.

Later in the post, TRex makes this equivocation, to make sure his delusional fantasy of murdering Rove is not mistaken as literal:


Who on our side is going to have the stomach to take him down? Who's going to wrap Rovesputin in a rug and throw him into the frozen Potomac? (I mean that politically, of course.)

And then this odd testament to the author's imagination:


Karl? Is that you? It smells like Vienna sausages and Astro-Glide in here, so it must be you.

The post ends with an image of a stuffed horse's head lying on a pillow:



This is classic incitement rhetoric, and the folks at FDL seem to be pulling out all the stops to rile up their audience. Or perhaps they are just gunning to be the next bloggers for the Edwards campaign...

http://newsbusters.org/node/11364

 

[wiggles]

Tuesday February 13, 2007 09:35 EST
Extremist Bush supporter calls for murder of scientists

(updated below)

Whenever you think that Bush followers cannot get any more depraved in what they advocate, they always prove you wrong. This is what University of Tennessee Law Professor and right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds said today about claims by the administration that Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents (claims which, needless to say, he blindly believes):

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc.

Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we've done nothing along these lines.

Just think about how extremist and deranged that is. We are not even at war with Iran. Congress has not declared war or authorized military force against that country. Yet Reynolds thinks that the Bush administration, unilaterally, should send people to murder Iranian scientists and religious leaders -- just pick out whichever ones we don't like and slaughter them. No charges. No trial. No accountability. Just roving death squads deployed and commanded by our Leader, slaughtering whomever he wants dead.

To get a sense for how profoundly violative of our political and military traditions such proposals are, one can review this comprehensive report on the history of American law and foreign assassinations, authored by Nathan Canestaro, a member of the Afghanistan Task Force of the CIA (he also, ironically enough, graduated University of Tennessee School of Law). Every U.S. President since Gerald Ford -- including Ronald Reagan -- has either issued or left standing an Executive Order which expressly provides:

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

Every administration, Democratic and Republican, have agreed that creating death squads and engaging in extra-judicial assassinations is so repugnant to our political values and so destructive to our moral credibility around the world that an absolute ban is necessary -- including at the height of the Cold War, as we battled the "evil empire" which had thousands of nuclear-tipped warheads pointed at numerous American cities.

As Canestaro notes, it was the U.S. which was the first country to formulate a legal code of military conduct for use by soldiers in wartime, and the first Order on assassinations was issued by Abraham Lincoln (General Order 100) in the midst of the Civil War. It provided:

The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such international outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

Consistent with American tradition, international treaties, with virtual unanimity, deplore extra-judicial assassinations as the tools of savages and barbarians.

And what is most striking is that these anti-assassination prohibitions apply (a) to wartime and (b) even to foreign leaders of nations who are at war. But here, Reynolds is actually advocating that we murder scientists and religious figures who are "radical," whatever that might happen to mean in the unchecked mind of George Bush.

If we are to be a country that now sends death squads into nations with whom we are not at war to slaughter civilians -- scientists and religious figures -- what don't we do? American credibility in the world has fallen to literally unimaginable depths over the last six years, but it is critical to remember that with a President never to face the electorate again, many Bush supporters -- and certainly the White House itself -- are headed in the direction of increasingly extremist and bloodthirsty measures. And it is hard to overstate what a complete disregard they have -- really an intense contempt -- for the values that have long defined this country.

UPDATE: Evangelical Bush supporter and talk radio host Hugh Hewitt also favors Leader-ordered murders of Iranian civilians, as he chimes in to praise Reynolds' proposal. When it comes to killing in the Middle East and unrestrained power vested in the President, there is literally no limit -- none -- as to what this strain of Bush supporter will advocate. Their sole dissatisfaction with the President, as Reynolds says, is that he has been far too restrained in his approach to Muslim countries and Muslims generally.

-- Glenn Greenwald

 

[red states rule]

Yes it is true. I have read his cra... errr.... rambling misspelled rants for years. When busted elsewhere, as on this thread.... he doesn't deny it.

I am new to this forum. I received one or two ( I don't know for sure ) warnings about insulting him. I accumilated some points, I have no idea what they are redeemable for. At least on the Public Opinion people were allowed to comment on his IQ level with comments such as being as smart as gravel, and not since Jethoe Bodine, has anyone been so proud of a six grade education. People also compliment him on being able to function with a single brain cell. I have no idea if they would be considered insulting him here or not so I will try to walk a fine line and be polite.

Look at any three or four of his posts. Now Put a different name on each one. Do you think different names are going to fool any one?

Did you check out hs March 7th letter to the editor in the Chambersburg Public Opinion? I can not yet post URL Links in their pure form, but go to http(Eliniate this space) Eliniate this space) // (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) publicopiniononline (Eliniate this space) . (Eliniate this space) com/opinion (Slide that together) and in the block marked "Past Editions" choose a date, choose March 7. Click his letter " Retreating from Iraq would help enemies." Read the Comments by clicking the link below his letter. The most recent comment appears at the top. He hand delivers a letter to the Public Opinion office each month. His topics are - the economy is great, gas companies only make a few cents per gallon, Bush is great, dems and libs are the worst thing on Earth.

PR is the US Message boards version of Inspector Clouseau

 

[red states rule]

Tuesday February 13, 2007 09:35 EST
Extremist Bush supporter calls for murder of scientists

(updated below)

Whenever you think that Bush followers cannot get any more depraved in what they advocate, they always prove you wrong. This is what University of Tennessee Law Professor and right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds said today about claims by the administration that Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents (claims which, needless to say, he blindly believes):

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc.

Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we've done nothing along these lines.

Just think about how extremist and deranged that is. We are not even at war with Iran. Congress has not declared war or authorized military force against that country. Yet Reynolds thinks that the Bush administration, unilaterally, should send people to murder Iranian scientists and religious leaders -- just pick out whichever ones we don't like and slaughter them. No charges. No trial. No accountability. Just roving death squads deployed and commanded by our Leader, slaughtering whomever he wants dead.

To get a sense for how profoundly violative of our political and military traditions such proposals are, one can review this comprehensive report on the history of American law and foreign assassinations, authored by Nathan Canestaro, a member of the Afghanistan Task Force of the CIA (he also, ironically enough, graduated University of Tennessee School of Law). Every U.S. President since Gerald Ford -- including Ronald Reagan -- has either issued or left standing an Executive Order which expressly provides:

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

Every administration, Democratic and Republican, have agreed that creating death squads and engaging in extra-judicial assassinations is so repugnant to our political values and so destructive to our moral credibility around the world that an absolute ban is necessary -- including at the height of the Cold War, as we battled the "evil empire" which had thousands of nuclear-tipped warheads pointed at numerous American cities.

As Canestaro notes, it was the U.S. which was the first country to formulate a legal code of military conduct for use by soldiers in wartime, and the first Order on assassinations was issued by Abraham Lincoln (General Order 100) in the midst of the Civil War. It provided:

The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such international outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.

Consistent with American tradition, international treaties, with virtual unanimity, deplore extra-judicial assassinations as the tools of savages and barbarians.

And what is most striking is that these anti-assassination prohibitions apply (a) to wartime and (b) even to foreign leaders of nations who are at war. But here, Reynolds is actually advocating that we murder scientists and religious figures who are "radical," whatever that might happen to mean in the unchecked mind of George Bush.

If we are to be a country that now sends death squads into nations with whom we are not at war to slaughter civilians -- scientists and religious figures -- what don't we do? American credibility in the world has fallen to literally unimaginable depths over the last six years, but it is critical to remember that with a President never to face the electorate again, many Bush supporters -- and certainly the White House itself -- are headed in the direction of increasingly extremist and bloodthirsty measures. And it is hard to overstate what a complete disregard they have -- really an intense contempt -- for the values that have long defined this country.

UPDATE: Evangelical Bush supporter and talk radio host Hugh Hewitt also favors Leader-ordered murders of Iranian civilians, as he chimes in to praise Reynolds' proposal. When it comes to killing in the Middle East and unrestrained power vested in the President, there is literally no limit -- none -- as to what this strain of Bush supporter will advocate. Their sole dissatisfaction with the President, as Reynolds says, is that he has been far too restrained in his approach to Muslim countries and Muslims generally.

-- Glenn Greenwald

More from the oh so tolerant left

Usually when we do an edition of A.C.P.O.T.I., we're embarassing some bunch of racist hooligans, poking fun at conspiracy theorists, or bringing the comments of some bunch of Bin Laden loving Islamo-Fascists to light. But today, I ran across some posts that were so repulsive and sickening that they merited being dragged into the public view. Political discussions often get pretty heated and rhetoric gets tossed around freely but rarely do you hear a group of people talking about how much they'd like to rape somebody because they disagree with their views. Well the degenerates at Dumbrella forums apparently have no such inhibitions. They didn't care for the Ann Coulter quotes I put up yesterday which prompted them to go on and on about how they'd love to rape Ann Coulter. You just have to see the conversation of this group of sexual predators in the making to believe it. So get ready for one of our most twisted episodes of A.C.P.O.T.I....

===

Some weirdo who sounds like he just got of an asylum for the criminally insane started things off...

Lox: "Dude...

I would fully break in her teeth with a ball peen hammer and f*** the bleeding wreckage of her mouth.

Which, since it is not actual intercourse, would be ok between unmarried Christians such as ourselves... right, Wrongth ???"

===

Nato appears to be the lone voice of reason on the forums....

Nato: "...So, just because she's a woman and you disagree with her (and she is indeed out of her freakin' mind), you feel entitled to smash her face in, and then rape her?

Somehow I doubt you'd say the same thing about, say, Rush Limbaugh."

===

Wetzil doesn't think raping Coulter is OK! She's not attractive enough for that in his opinion and besides he has different perverse fantasies he wants to indulge in...

Wetzil: "Dude, Lox, look at her arm. She's obviously bulemic. You'd bash her teeth in and f*** her foul-smelling, vomit-stained mouth?

Me, I'd just keep her around as a whipping boy for my brother. "Dammit, Charlie, you left the lights on in the basement again? Ann Coulter gets ten lashes!"

===

Erol explains that EVERYONE who disagrees with him deserves to be raped...

Erol: "But don't get me wrong, I'm not liberal, and don't dislike her on principle. Nor am I conservative. I dislike her because she's an idiot and I feel that people on the extremes of either side deserve to get a hammer-f*** by Lox."

===

joeybagadonits thinks Coulter blames liberals too much which of course justifies his little rape fantasy...

joeybagadonits: Ann bugs me because she defends conservatives fiercely, but turns a blind eye to her fellow uptighty-whities mistakes by saying 'it's the liberals fault' as a neat little blanket statement about anything. it's that or 'the liberal conspiracy spun it this way...'

I bet this lady blames the liberals when she spills her coffee.

in other news, i'd still like to gag her and get it on. no hammer neccessary, just a ball gag or something.

===

Serial rapist in the making Lox responds to Nato's condemnation of his original statement and adds Charlotte Church to the list of women he'd like to rape...

Lox: I never said I disagreed with her.

I don't feel entitled to anything.

She's just in that elite group of ladies who deserve a ballpeen hammer to the pearlies... don't worry, Charlotte Church needs the company.

===

Self-admitted liberal Filler Bunny is up next. Thank goodness we have someone who respects the rights of women and will make it clear that these long, casual, & creepy discussions of rape would be more appropriate for a "rapists anonymous" meeting than an internet forum...well actually he doesn't and there's an incredible pot calling the kettle black vibe going on in this post that you'll immediately pick up on...

Filler Bunny: "I'm going to poop my dirty-hippie liberal feces into her mouth. Christ almighty, that woman has problems."

===

Well Filler Bunny blew it but luckily we have another hyper-sensitive Liberal who's concerned about offending people coming up next. You know, someone who probably spends half his life offended by us "meanspirited" Conservatives...

And: "I'm a liberal, because I think the president has all the wisdom of a chimp, because I think that a woman gang-raped by a bunch of drunken rednecks would want to abort the future wife-beater she could end up bearing, and because I can't say "I am proud to be an American! America is the best country in the world, and we are always right, never unjust, and perpetually without any blame!"

I don't bash her because she's a conservative. My girlfriend is conservative. I bash her because she's a highly opinionated, closed-minded, hatemongering b***h who would prefer adding to a disunionizing conflict to boost her f***in' book sales rather than taking things calmly, rationally, and cooperatively. She doesn't want America. She wants dollars.

I'd almost say go ahead and hammer-f*** her, Lox, except I would rather not give her another reason to write another f***in' book"

===

Schabe, undoubtably typing with one hand, comes up with the title for Coulter's next book...

Schabe: "Dude, you know "Gang-Raped by Liberals" would sell like hot cakes!"

===

What do you think the Liberal reaction would be to a bunch of Conservatives sitting around "joking" about how much they'd like to rape Hillary Clinton? All I can say is that I hope there aren't any "highly opinionated" women who get stuck alone with a group of these guys somewhere....

http://www.rightwingnews.com/crackpots/liberalrape.php

 

[red states rule]

or this act of liberal compassion - libs can say whatever they want and when busted - they say how sorry they are and that makes everything OK



Official Apologizes For Saying Bush Should Be Shot Between Eyes

POSTED: 2:27 pm EDT June 1, 2006
UPDATED: 10:25 am EDT June 2, 2006

Email This Story | Print This Story

NEW YORK -- State Comptroller Alan Hevesi publicly apologized Thursday for a "beyond dumb" remark about a fellow Democrat putting "a bullet between the president's eyes."

Hevesi called a mea culpa press conference hours after putting his foot in his mouth at the Queens College commencement.

"I apologize to the president of the United States" and to the fellow state politician, Sen. Charles Schumer, Hevesi said. "I am not a person of violence.

"I am apologizing as abjectly as I can. There is no excuse for it. It was beyond dumb."

At the news conference, a contrite Hevesi repeated what he recalled saying in the speech. The comptroller said he was merely trying to convey that Schumer has strength and courage to stand up to the president on major policy issues.

According to a videotape of the speech, Hevesi said:

"The man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president's eyes if he could get away with it. The toughest senator, the best representative. A great, great member of the Congress of the United States."

Hevesi said he hadn't been in touch with the White House but he hoped his apology reached President Bush.

Hevesi, a longtime professor of government and politics at Queens College before becoming comptroller, also referred to his comments as "remarkably stupid" and "incredibly moronic."

"I do speak extemporaneously," he said. "And I've never said anything like this."

Schumer spokeswoman Risa Heller said the senator was satisfied with Hevesi's apology.

"Comptroller Hevesi was trying to make a point," Heller said. "He went way too far, and it was inappropriate and wrong. He has apologized to both the senator and the president, and we believe that ends the matter."

A White House spokesman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment Thursday. But at least one Republican seized on Hevesi's words.

"Threats against the president are no joke, and this incident raises real concerns about Alan Hevesi's fitness to hold public office," GOP Comptroller nominee J. Christopher Callaghan said during his acceptance speech at the Republican state convention in Hempstead, N.Y.

http://www.wnbc.com/politics/9306297/detail.html

 

[wiggles]

Where's the Compassion?

Joe Conason

"I am a fiscal conservative and a family conservative. And I am a compassionate conservative, because I know my philosophy is optimistic and full of hope for every American." So George W. Bush described himself and his beliefs on the eve of his first campaign for President. With that speech, the Texas governor hoped to finesse a paradox of national politics. To win the nomination of the Republican Party, he had to be acceptable to every kind of conservative, from the libertarian to the fundamentalist; to win the presidency itself, he also had to embody an alternative to the angry conservatism that Americans had found increasingly repellent during the Clinton years.

Moderate, suburban voters were alienated by the partisanship, self-righteous hypocrisy and antigovernment extremism of Newt Gingrich's Republican "revolutionaries." By 1999 the House Speaker's colleagues had immolated him, but his brief tenure and the impeachment fiasco he sponsored left behind a cloud of acrid smoke.

Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove knew that he could ill afford his father's mistake of alienating the far right. At the same time, they knew he had to avoid being isolated politically on the right. "Compassionate conservatism" was their answer. So deft was this gambit that it left journalists gawking and scratching their heads, as if they had witnessed the candidate literally running in two directions at once.

During the election year to come, Bush and Rove will renew the "compassionate conservatism" theme to draw independent, female and minority voters, balancing the appeal of a "wartime presidency" that is already beginning to lose its luster. The President recently returned to emphasizing buzzwords like "inclusive, positive and hopeful" in a June speech to the Urban League.

Indeed, "compassion" is a featured topic on the new website put up by Bush-Cheney '04 (www.georgewbush.com), where "news" about the President's agenda of compassion includes highlights like "President stresses importance of health and fitness." The need for such filler reflects how thin the Administration's portfolio for the poor remains. The site's most noticeable feature is a "compassion photo album" consisting almost entirely of photos of the smiling Bush with smiling black children. This is almost identical to the public-relations material Bush and his advisers rolled out during the 2000 campaign (and the minstrel-show GOP convention in Philadelphia), repackaged to remind voters that he is, or purports to be, a "different kind of Republican."

Distinguishing son from father was a process that began during George W.'s second gubernatorial campaign in 1998, with a massive wave of television advertising created by Mark McKinnon, formerly a top Democratic consultant in Austin. McKinnon honestly believed that George W. Bush was a "different kind of Republican," a bipartisan leader who cared about the poor, and that belief showed in his advertising. Later, McKinnon, Rove and other advisers developed the same themes into a more sophisticated strategy that drew from the two most successful politicians of the postwar era, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

From Reagan, the Bush advisers borrowed the friendly optimism, the down-home cowboy boots and the lavishly produced Morning in America style of advertising, which they retitled "Fresh Start." (If that sounded like a breakfast cereal or deodorant, it was entirely appropriate.) From Clinton, they adopted the supple tactics of repositioning their rhetoric toward the center and rephrasing issues to neutralize any partisan disadvantage.

This wasn't the first time, of course, that attractive branding had sold the nation a phony product. After two years of skewed tax cuts, destructive deregulation and social regression, nobody doubts Bush's conservatism. But where's the compassion?

To paraphrase a famous man, it depends on what the meaning of that word is.

Americans normally understand compassion to mean caring for the ill, homeless, hungry, unemployed, destitute and defenseless. "Compassionate" softens "conservative," a word that tends to be associated with smug stinginess rather than benevolence or mercy. "Compassionate conservative" acknowledges that unfortunate stereotype, indicating a person of right-wing inclination who nevertheless feels an obligation to lift up the downtrodden. In the modern context, the term also suggests acceptance of government responsibility--since private charity has never been sufficient to relieve social distress.

But the ideological authors of Bush's "philosophy" have devised their own definition of compassionate conservatism. The phrase itself usually refers to the policy prescriptions of Marvin Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas who also publishes World, an ultraconservative, fundamentalist-Christian newsweekly. With the assistance of the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks on the right, Olasky has written three books extolling religious charity as a moral alternative to the sinful welfare state.

In early 1996, Newt Gingrich wrote a gushing introduction to Olasky's book Renewing American Compassion. Four years later, Bush contributed the foreword to Olasky's next volume, Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America. Christian Century's reviewer called it "less a book than an advertisement for Bush's presidential campaign." Although Bush used rhetoric about compassion to distance himself publicly from Gingrich, their overlapping relationships with Olasky showed how little ideological space really existed between them. Both had endorsed the rebranding of conservatism with a human face. Both had done favors for this idea's "godfather" and accepted favors from him. Both were determined to dismantle the programs of the New Deal and the Great Society, from Social Security to Medicare.

But Gingrich couldn't redecorate his threatening image in comforting pastels. He wasn't sufficiently nimble to move in two directions at once. Bush, having entered the national consciousness as an unknown figure marked only by his father's famous name, had no need to remake a damaged image. He rolled himself out as the "conservative with a heart," and profited by contrasting himself with the disgraced former Speaker. And if Bush's differences with Gingrich were a pretense--as they surely were--that easy deception only reflected the more profound dishonesty of the "compassion" strategy.

Now, after observing Bush's first few years in the Oval Office, we have a clearer understanding of what his words meant on that auspicious day in New Hampshire. Being a "fiscal conservative" meant passing lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy few and leaving the federal budget in deficit for the foreseeable future. Being a "family conservative" meant looking after certain families, particularly if their annual incomes are higher than $200,000 and their estates are valued at more than $2 million. And so far, being a "compassionate conservative" appears to mean nothing very different from being a hardhearted, stingy, old-fashioned conservative.

Bush's budgets prove that he still emphatically prefers cutting the taxes of wealthy individuals and corporations to maintaining living standards for poor and working-class families. States and localities, their economies soured and their budgets overstrained, are unable to maintain services for their neediest citizens. Food deliveries to many of the helpless elderly will end. Nearly a million Americans are losing their Medicaid benefits in what the National Governors Association describes as "the worst fiscal crisis since World War II." For the first time in a decade, the rate of poverty is rising again, with 1.3 million Americans falling below the poverty line in 2001.

The most vigorous response of the Bush White House to these grim prospects is to propose abolishing "double taxation" of stock dividends. "That is very much pro-poor," according to R. Glenn Hubbard, the former chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, even though the poor won't get any of the benefits.

While he is fighting to allow the highest income class to pay nothing on investment earnings, he is tightening the requirements for those who seek the earned-income tax credit--meaning the working poor. Essentially a refund of a portion of regressive payroll taxes paid by low-income workers, the EITC is one of the most successful government initiatives directed toward Americans who work full-time but cannot earn enough to keep their families above the poverty line. In 1999, at the zenith of his compassionate phase, Bush stood up as a defender of the EITC against Congressional Republicans who were trying to reduce it. He quite rightly denounced the scheme pushed by his fellow Texan Tom DeLay, a professing Christian, as an attempt to balance the federal budget "on the backs of the poor." But having since legislated mammoth tax cuts for the wealthy and run up a record deficit, Bush won't defend EITC from conservatives in the White House and Congress who are seeking to cut it, eliminate the funds that help workers apply for it, impose harsher audits on families that claim it--or even eliminate it.

Originally, the twin centerpieces of Bush's compassionate conservatism were his education plan, "No Child Left Behind," and his "faith-based initiative" to direct federal funds toward private charities, including religious institutions. Owing to the deficits caused by the recession and his tax cuts, however, the education bill he negotiated with Senator Edward Kennedy fell far short of the funding he had originally promised. Although his budget proposal increased education spending, the proposed rise was the lowest in several years. He cut a billion dollars from programs specified in his own bill. One statistic summed up Bush's priorities: His tax cuts for the rich amounted to more than fifty times the total amount he requested for new education spending.

Bush's vaunted "faith-based initiative" met an even more disgraceful fate. In the winter of 2002, Bush got a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking from John DiIulio, the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The University of Pennsylvania professor is probably the leading neoconservative exponent of compassionate conservatism. As a devout Catholic and lifelong Democrat, he didn't share Marvin Olasky's religious or social views, but he joined the Republican Administration because he hoped to create innovative programs to assist the poor.

In a devastating, emotional seven-page letter quoted by journalist Ron Suskind in Esquire magazine, DiIulio depicted a White House dominated by partisan cynicism and devoid of competent policy-makers. Karl Rove and his aides dominated every discussion of domestic issues, always emphasizing media and political strategy at the expense of substance and analysis. DiIulio told Suskind that when he objected to a proposal to kill the earned-income tax credit, he suddenly realized that he was arguing with libertarians who understood little about the workings of government and had no interest in learning.

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," he said. "What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." That was DiIulio's nickname for Karl Rove and his aides, "who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."

The result is that the President's "faith-based initiative" has been transformed into a patronage operation. During the 2002 midterm-election campaign, Administration officials suddenly showed up at inner-city churches, seeking to entice African-American ministers with federal funding. A half-million-dollar grant was quickly slated for Pat Robertson's quasi-charitable Operation Blessing International Relief and Development Corporation, which the Christian Coalition founder has in the past used to advance his diamond-mining ventures in the Congo region.

The White House staff, he said, "winked at the most far-right House Republicans, who, in turn, drafted a so-called faith bill that...satisfied certain fundamentalist leaders and Beltway libertarians but bore few marks of compassionate conservatism.... Not only that, but it reflected neither the president's own previous rhetoric on the idea nor any of the actual empirical evidence." He declared, "There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism."

"So-called compassionate conservatism." That phrase, written by a man who said he still loved and admired George W. Bush, resounded with disillusion. Still, DiIulio held out hope that someday in the years to come, his ideal of a spirited movement to uplift the poor might be realized. There was no domestic policy, but in two years, or six years, something might happen.

The saddened professor couldn't quite admit that this President is unlikely ever to fulfill the expectations he raised--because in a White House ruled so thoroughly and ruthlessly by pious conservatives, there is so little room for compassion.

 

[red states rule]

so the liberals answer to Pres Bush is to murder him

there is liberal compassion

Joe Conason is a card carrying member of the far left

BTW, since such a small minority of taxpayers pay a huge majority of the taxes - they do the majority of tax cuts

So why do libs have a problem with that?

 

[wiggles]

The Compassionate Conservative's Bait-and-Switch Budget

Reagan pioneered the Bush tactic: Cut taxes, generate deficits, express shock, compel off-setting cuts in social spending

By Robert Kuttner

Most of the debate about President George W. Bush's proposed budget has focused on fiscal and tax issues: Are the tax breaks excessive? Would they go to the right people? Will they really promote long-term growth? Is the resulting deficit sustainable? Does the economy really need this kind of stimulus? These are important questions. And the skepticism expressed by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, as well as the recent critique by 10 Nobel laureates in economics, should give Congress plenty of pause. However, a whole other issue has been obscured by the tax-and-deficit debate: the devastating effect of the Administration's budget priorities on domestic social spending.


The Bush budget claims that federal outlays will rise, on average, by about 4% in fiscal year 2004. But beware of averages. This is the same Administration, after all, that insisted that the "average" working family would get an income tax break of $1,083. In both cases, of course, the average conceals extreme differences: Bill Gates and I have an average net worth of about $15 billion, but that doesn't make me any richer. In truth, the typical, or median, household will receive less than $300 in tax cuts.

On the spending side of the equation, unrealistically low projected increases in defense and homeland security outlays are averaged with real cuts in other spending. The Administration's proposed military budget hike of just $15.3 billion doesn't count the likely costs of an Iraq war. (The Turks alone are holding us up for an unbudgeted $15 billion in collateral outlays.) A budget-busting supplemental defense appropriation of at least $100 billion is likely later this year. And the proposed jump of just $1.3 billion for homeland security is pitifully inadequate and will have to be increased, too. If we include the higher interest on the debt, the real 10-year costs of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and the proposed cut of 2003 are more than $3.5 trillion, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

The common casualty of these huge tax breaks and unacknowledged defense hikes is, not surprisingly, domestic outlays. This means not just social spending but everything from science and technology to public health, highways, and government statistics. In domestic program after domestic program, appropriations have fallen far short of the budget authority--so a nominal hike is often really a cut. As hidden costs of the tax reductions and defense needs mount, other outlays will only be cut further.

Discretionary domestic spending has been on a downward slide for two decades, from 4.8% of gross domestic product in 1978 to just 3% by 2000. According to a Brookings Institution study, the Bush budgetary priorities will require roughly a 40% real cut in discretionary spending over the next decade. Ronald Reagan pioneered the maneuver that Bush is trying to emulate: slash taxes, generate big deficits, express surprise, compel offsetting cuts in social programs. Rinse. Repeat.

But Bush, let's recall, advertised himself as a compassionate conservative. Supposedly, he opposed not social investment per se but merely its bureaucratic form and its handouts to the undeserving. Social services were to be rechanneled through religious institutions. Federal aid to education was supposed to be increased and coupled with greater school accountability. Welfare outlays were going to be redirected to supporting work and families. Bush even talked about adding a new prescription benefit to Medicare. But as the fine print of Bush's budget makes clear, his compassionate conservatism turns out to be a grand case of bait and switch.

For instance, in his No Child Left Behind Act, Bush struck a bargain with the Democrats to trade high-stakes testing of schoolchildren for more federal aid to needy districts. But as the group OMB Watch points out, Bush's proposed education outlay of $22.7 billion under No Child Left Behind is actually $600 million below the necessary inflation adjustment--and a startling $9.4 billion below the spending that Bush's own legislation authorizes. Under Bush's spending priorities, any new prescription-drug benefit will come out of the hide of Medicare through a new privatized approach that caps the federal contribution and leaves seniors to make up what's not covered--or do without. Child-care spending is at least $5 billion below what is necessary to care for kids whose mothers must work under new welfare reform mandates. School lunch programs are also being cut. In everything from Head Start to Medicaid, the strategy is to convert a federal program to a capped block grant and leave the states holding the bag.

So while the tax cuts are misdirected and the endless deficits are alarming, the budget's other mischief warrants notice. A budget sets national priorities. Bush's budgetary priorities are as warped as his arithmetic. While the looming deficits are alarming, their sources and consequences deserve far more attention and debate than they are now receiving.



Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and author of Everything for Sale.

 

[red states rule]

will tax cuts go to "the right people"? How about tax cuts going to the people who pay taxes?


as far as the rest of your article - try facts

revenues are up and the deficit is down all due to tax cuts



US Treasury Sets New 1-Day Tax Receipt Record Of $85.8 Billion
Tuesday September 19th, 2006 / 0h04


WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The U.S. government recorded record-high overall and corporate tax receipts on Sept. 15, which was a quarterly deadline for tax payments, the Treasury said Monday.
Total tax receipts were $85.8 billion on Friday, compared with the previous one-day record of $71 billion on Sept. 15 of last year, the Treasury said.
Within the overall figure, corporate tax receipts Friday were $71.8 billion, up from $63 billion in September of last year.
Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance Randal Quarles said Friday's numbers provided a "continuing demonstration of the strength of the U.S. economy."
"In fact, Friday's gross receipts were the largest in a single day in the nation's history - 20% higher than receipts on the same quarterly tax payment date last year," Quarles said in a statement.
-By Benton Ives-Halperin, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9255; [email protected]
http://www.easybourse.com/Website/dynamic/News.php?NewsID=58170&lang=fra&NewsRubrique=2



US Tax Revenues Up 9.7% through four months, Deficit Down 57%; US Media Outlets Mostly Ignore the News

http://www.bizzyblog.com/2007/02/13/what-happens-if-a-deficit-falls-and-almost-no-one-reports-it/


The current federal buget is nearly $3 trillion - what the hell is not being funded?

 

[Shattered]

...apparently, Liberals debate by cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff.

 

[wiggles]

...apparently, Liberals debate by cutting and pasting a bunch of stuff.

http://www.usmessageboard.com./showthread.php?t=47644

and...

 

[Annie]

http://www.usmessageboard.com./showthread.php?t=47644

and...

and what?

 

[Dirt McGirt]

and what?

And what, what?

 

[LuvRPgrl]

Yes Tweddledumb, no matter where you you take you BS I'll find you. So, you actually have a female posting support. The last time that happened she was you. I bet you cropped out the infant and printed her photo and keep it near your petrolem jelly jar.

If u r talkin bout me yweedledumb, Im a guy you idiot. Talk about being dumb !

 

[LuvRPgrl]

So try a credible source some time.

Right wing idiot debate tactic #1: If a liberal posts a link to - say - a report on a study on climate change from NASA, respond by posting an op-ed written by an oil lobbyist and proclaim yourself the winner of the conversation.

Problem is, to you narcisist libs, if a source disagrees with you, then its auto matically not credible.

Case in point, al bore. He proclaimed the jury is out, the debate is over, global warming and the consequences are a fact. Yet thousands of credible scientists have said they arent sure global warming is happening, and if it is, is it due to man, and even if it is due to man, is it really going to have the dire consequences predicted.

Dont forget, Mother Jone, one of your pet propaganda protaginists, had on its front cover, a frozen earth is its mag, ohhh, back in about 88 I believe, then the rage was global freezing, hahahhahahah

Oh, and I ONLY site credible sources,

 

[red states rule]

Problem is, to you narcisist libs, if a source disagrees with you, then its auto matically not credible.

Case in point, al bore. He proclaimed the jury is out, the debate is over, global warming and the consequences are a fact. Yet thousands of credible scientists have said they arent sure global warming is happening, and if it is, is it due to man, and even if it is due to man, is it really going to have the dire consequences predicted.

Dont forget, Mother Jone, one of your pet propaganda protaginists, had on its front cover, a frozen earth is its mag, ohhh, back in about 88 I believe, then the rage was global freezing, hahahhahahah

Oh, and I ONLY site credible sources,

or the Nation - a real socialist rag. Good for lining bird cages or wrapping fish. Other then that, a waste of paper and ink

 

[Paul Revere]

Why the dead cat tweddle?