Prop8 Upheld in California! Hey, why stop there!

 

Great news!  Prop 8 was upheld in California!  That means I will finally be safe from homosexual men and woman getting married!  My kids will never be subjected to their evil lifestyle!  California has succeeded in protecting the gays from polluting the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, the way g-d intended it to be! Phew!  Now that that is taken care of let’s take care of a few more things.

1.       Let’s repeal a woman’s right to vote.  They’re woman after all!  They are way too emotional to make important decisions like who to vote for. Their little lady brains just can’t handle that.

2.      Woman in the military, let’s put an end to that too.  Do you really want an emotional woman holding a gun?  G-d knows what could happen when her little friend comes to visit once a month!

3.      Repeal the Civil Rights act!  Bring back the Jim Crow Laws! Let’s go back to full separation of the races!  I’m talking separate drinking fountains, blacks to the back of the bus, separate schools, and while we are at it lets take away their right to vote also!  We were all much better off then.  Of course President Obama will have to step down.  You can’t possibly have a black man as president if he doesn’t have civil rights!?

4.      Internment camps for Japanese people!  They attacked us once, you never know when they could snap again!

5.      Remove all Jews from Kenilworth IL!  I can’t believe they let us in, in the first place!

6.      Stone all witches!

7.     Bring back slavery!  After all it’s a cheap source of labor.  GM and Chrysler could save billions in labor costs and avoid bankruptcy!

8.      Equal pay for men and women, come on!  Men are clearly worth more! Get rid of that as well!

 

But seriously, if two men, or two women who love each other, in a country that has come so far to legally eliminate so many injustices and forms of discrimination, can’t simply get married, then where have we truly advanced to?  To make this perfectly clear to any idiots out there who think I might be serious about any of the suggestions made above, I am not.  It’s called sarcasm.  But since in a recent poll many Republicans thought Stephen Colbert was on their side, I felt I had to make myself clear here.  So you don’t need to write me angry letters and stone me while I walk down the street.  I am a bleeding heart liberal.  (actually you may want to stone me for that) There is absolutely no reason why two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives together should not be able to marry, no matter what gender they may prefer.  In what document does it state that same sex marriage is wrong?  Ohhhhhh, the bible.  I’m sorry I meant a legal document.  You see in this country we have something called the separation of church and state.  Our laws are not created by a religious entity or governed by a church.  They are made by people who represent all of the individuals of this county including people of all races, genders, religions, and sexual orientations.  But all of the arguments against same sex marriage are based on religious reasons.  The bible says this or the bible says that.  We are not ruled by the bible.  We can’t be because in a country that celebrates the freedom of religion, what bible would we be ruled by, the Torah, the Koran, the New Testement, and which version of the New Testament?  The religious arguments simply don’t apply in a country that is not ruled by religion.  And anyone who claims that we are a Christian nation, you are wrong.  President Obama recently pointed out in a speech he made in Turkey, “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."  And this is a truth that many religious people just do not want to accept.  We are a country of freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from discrimination.  And whether it is discrimination based on race, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, it is wrong.  Gay couples live together, raise children together, build lives together and they should have the same rights that my wife and I have.  They should have to right to legally marry each other.  If a person’s religious beliefs don’t support same sex marriage, then that is a personal thing between that person and there church, and it has no place in our legal system.  I would just hope that we would all love and support our children unconditionally and only want them to be happy, no matter what choices they make.  Shame on California.  They seem to have forgotten that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

When I grow up, I want to invade Iraq... just like Dad did!

 

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."

    -- Nietzsche

"I hope one day I can clone another Dick Cheney. Then I won't have to do anything."

   -- George W. Bush 
 

 

In 1999, candidate George W. Bush spoke to biographer Mickey Herskowitz.  He told him that as president, given the opportunity he would invade Iraq.   At the time Herskowitz was helping Bush write his biography. Candidate Bush went on to say “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief… My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of [Kuwait] and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”  When the Bush camp saw what Herskowitz was going to write, we was fired.

Then 9/11 came along and bingo…justification.  And we did have justification, to invade Afghanistan, to knock out the Taliban, to destroy al-Qaeda, to capture Osama bin laden, except besides invading Afghanistan, we accomplished nothing.  The Taliban still exists and is getting stronger.  Al-Qaeda still exists, and the mastermind of 9\11, Osama bin laden, has not been captured. We diverted our attentions to Iraq without finishing the job we should have.  On March 13, 2002, in a press conference Bush was quoted as saying  "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."  Of course not, because our real priority was to get rid of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that was being built up by Saddam Hussein.  But as we all know now, WMDs never existed.  It was never the real reason we went into Iraq. We were lied to, we were deceived and to date we have 4299 dead U.S. soldiers, 31,156 wounded, and over 92,000 civilian Iraqi deaths, not terrorist Iraqi deaths, civilian men, woman and children Iraqi deaths. 

So then why did we go into Iraq if there were no WMD’s?  Was it to finish the job that Bush senior could not finish?  Was it for Oil?  Was it to liberate the people of Iraq from a ruthless dictator? Was it to protect Israel from Iraq? Was it to make money for U.S. firms that would benefit financially from the reconstruction of Iraq such as Blackwater and Halliburton (whose former CEO was Dick Cheney)?  Was it for President Bush to be seen as a great leader, a commander-in-chief?  Was it to break the ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?  Well those never existed either.  In fact Osama bin laden hated Saddam Hussein.  The truth is we don’t know the truth behind why we invaded Iraq because we were lied to.  And the reason we tortured was not to protect American lives.  It was so that the Bush Administration could create a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda that simply did not exist.  Bush and Cheney messed up.  They blamed the CIA for providing false information to justify their unjustified invasion of Iraq and then scrambled to find a smoking gun that the American public and the world would swallow.  Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush authorized the torture at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and the recent reports of waterboarding and now Cheney is all over the media defending his actions.  If torture is justifiable then why don’t we use it on drug dealers, and murderers, rapists and child molesters?  Aren’t there crimes often as terrible as the acts of some of these terrorists?  We don’t because it’s Illegal in this country.  We don’t because it’s immoral.  We don’t because the information that torture gives us is unreliable.  In addition it has also been shown that when a person who is high up in a terrorist organization is captured, the organization changes their plans.  So even if the torture reveals factual information, it is often outdated information. 

Charles Guthrie writes in the British newspaper “The Times,” “Torture is illegal. It is a crime in both peace and war that no exceptional circumstances can permit. The Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, firewalls for our collective humanity, expressly forbid it. It is prohibited without qualification in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - a document signed by people from every corner and culture of the Earth who had survived the suffering of both world wars, the horrors of fascism, and the evil of the Holocaust. They understood well that global humanitarian norms and a rules-based world order are in all our interests…

 

There can be no exceptions to our laws, and no attempts to bend them … President Obama has consigned to the past a shameful period in his nation's proud history. The previous Administration sought to justify the unjustifiable. It narrowed its definition of torture to the infliction of “excruciating” pain to legitimize simulated drowning. It coined the euphemistic doublespeak of “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition”. But its dissimulation did nothing to diminish the barbarity of its practice. Torture does violence to the defenseless, using their bodies against their souls. There must be no going back. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “necessity does not admit of cruelty"… I applaud (the) new Commander-in-Chief for honoring his promise and ordering an end to (the) use of torture. This symbolic act re-establishes an American legitimacy that had been forsaken in the eyes of the world.”

Dick Thou Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks!

Recently I wrote an article on the torture controversy(See article here). I wrote it because it bothered me that many leaders in this country were justifying our actions as OK.   Lindsey Graham recently tried to justify it by saying “one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.”  The problem is that it doesn’t work.  Just because torture makes someone talk, it does not mean that the information is worth anything.  We also keep forgetting…it’s illegal.

Today I want to share portions of an article that I just read on the Washington Note.  It was written by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff of the Department of State during the term of Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Col. Wilkerson served under Bush/Cheney.  Col. Wilkerson has firsthand knowledge of what was going on under Vice President Cheney’s watch.  Col. Wilkerson, who is a Republican, felt compelled to write this article after appearing on Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC.  While waiting to go on, Col. Wilkerson heard in his earpiece, “videotape from the last few days of former Vice President Dick Cheney extolling the virtues of harsh interrogation, torture, and his leadership.”  As Col. Wilderson writes in his article:

“Let's just say, that five minutes of (Cheney) was stunningly inaccurate… So, when I got home last night, I thought long and hard about what I knew at this point in my investigations with respect to the former VP's office. Here it is.

First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney's watch than on any other leader's watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the "seven and a half years" after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.

Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11--much touted by Cheney--is due almost entirely to the nation's having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to "the Cheney method of interrogation."

I have learned that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee "was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.  There in fact were no such contacts.

Less important but still busting my chops as a Republican, is the damage that the Sith Lord Cheney is doing to my political party.

He and Rush Limbaugh seem to be its leaders now. Lindsay Graham, John McCain, John Boehner, and all other Republicans of note seem to be either so enamored of Cheney-Limbaugh (or fearful of them?) or, on the other hand, so appalled by them, that the cat has their tongues. And meanwhile fewer Americans identify as Republicans than at any time since WWII. We're at 21% and falling--right in line with the number of cranks, reprobates, and loonies in the country.

When will we hear from those in my party who give a damn about their country and about the party of Lincoln? When will someone of stature tell Dick Cheney that enough is enough? Go home. Spend your 70 million. Luxuriate in your Eastern Shore mansion. Shoot quail with your friends--and your friends.

Stay out of our way as we try to repair the extensive damage you've done--to the country and to its Republican Party.”*

Again, this is coming from a Republican, United States Col. who served under Bush and Cheney, under Colin Powell.  What we did was wrong, illegal, it was ordered from as high up the chain as it gets, and the justification that it worked, which is still up for debate, does not make it ok.  In addition, it seems to be that this approved torture was more to justify us invading Iraq then to prevent another terrorist attack.  There is a saying, “Thou doth protest too much.” For 8 years we barely heard a word from Dick Cheney, now he won’t go away.  Mr. Cheney, if you did nothing wrong, why do you keep defending yourself?

* The full article can be found at: http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/05/the_truth_about/.

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My GOP sprung a leak! Anyone know a plumber?

Recently “Joe the Plumber”, aka Samuel Wurzelbacher, told Time magazine, “he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party … he also said he wouldn't support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.” Joe the Plumber also went on to say in a recent article in Christianity Today, on the subject of same sex marriage “I personally still think it's wrong…” He then went on to refer to homosexuals as queer and said that he is actually friends with homosexuals and “they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children.” Then finally, to pour Drano on the wound, Elisabeth Hasselbeck of The View, disowned Joe the Plumber for his recent comments that "queers" aren't welcome around his children. Hasselbeck then went on to say that “Joe the Plumber is not invited anywhere around me.”... Wait…hold on a second…Time Magazine!?... Christianity Today!?...Elisabeth Hasselbeck!? (wasn’t she on Survivor,…and lost? Who f----in’ cares then.) It’s JOE THE “PLUMBER” people, Joe the f----in’ plumber! He’s a plumber, and not even a licensed one! He’s Joe the Plumber, the biggest backfire of campaign tactic that a Republican candidate ever pulled out of his ass since asking an Alaskan white trash governor to be his running mate! Joe the Plumber’s fifteen minutes of fame was over sixteen minutes before it started! Joe, won’t support any cuts in defense, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid? WHAT!? You’re Joe the Plumber, not Joe the Congressman, or Joe the Senator, or Joe the Supreme Court Judge. You’re not even Joe the City Councilman. You’re Joe the out of work, unlicensed plumber! Who gives a crap what you are going to support and not support? And why are the news media and former Survivor losers wasting their time reporting on the continued antics of Joe? Joe the Plumber, was a poorly thought out tactic by John McCain to appeal to the everyman during his debate with President Obama, nothing more. He was meant to be an analogy that people could relate to, to position McCain as someone who could relate to the problems of the average American. The problem was that Joe the Plumber, who is not even Joe, but Samuel, really existed, and was not exactly the everyman that John McCain thought he was. He certainly did not share the same ideology of McCain.

Now I’m not trying to bash John McCain, or even poor, used, misguided, Joe. In fact, I like John McCain. He would be fun to hang around with. I’d love to take him to a Cubs game, have him over for a bar-be-que. He’s like everybody’s cool grandfather. I’d even invite Joe over for beer and brats. Joe and John are not the bad guys here. What I don’t get is the press and the republicans who keep giving Samuel Wurzelbacher (c’mon lets call him by his real name) a forum. He’s not a bad guy. Everyone is entitled to their views, and the things he said really don’t surprise me at all. But he’s not a politician, he’s not running for office, he’s not even a celebrity. He’s just Samuel Wurzelbacher, average guy from Toledo. It’s not like if he uses the word “Queer” he is going to be kicked out of office. He doesn’t have an office. He is a victim of the GOP. He got pulled into this unwillingly, but then for some reason no one told him, the GOP, or the press, it’s over. It seems the GOP is so hard up for a voice and for a direction that there voice is coming from places that would make Ronald Regan roll over in his grave. G-d forbid a republican should say something bad about Rush Limbaugh, they end up apologizing to him the next day. When did Rush, loudmouth radio host, become the voice of the republican party? And is the GOP so lost right now that this is who they have chosen as there defacto leader. The fact that Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a very vocal republican ever held Joe The Plumbers view to such importance that now she feels she has to publicly announce that she disowns him, is the core to what the main problem the GOP now faces, they have no real leaders. I may lean heavily to the left but lets understand something, we need a strong right, to have a strong left, otherwise the left will get cocky, and once you get cocky you lose. If you are on top and have nothing to fight for, the fight sneaks up on you. But Republicans, let’s get real. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Joe the Plumber are not the ones who are going to lead you to rebuild your party. It has to come from within. In my opinion, it’s Sara Palin! Just keep supporting her all the way until the next election and I am sure that up against President Obama, you will be sure to win! I wouldn’t steer you wrong, now would I? Dontcha know?