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You are here: Home / Shameless nutpicking

Shameless nutpicking

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In the Detroit Free Press piece about Hoekstra’s reaction to yesterday’s airplane incident, Hoekstra was identified as a “Holland Republican” since he is from the town of Holland, Michigan.

The first comment from the Colonel Mustard post John wrote about:

What is a “Holland” Republican? Did they mean to say “Dutch”? Are they implying that he is a tool for Holland? Fearing that readers might miss the Dutch-Holland connection if they used “Dutch”, did they also fear that they would miss the subliminal implication?

Reader Interactions

74Comments

  7. 7.

    kid bitzer

    meanwhile, the actual guy on the plane who jumped into action and tackled umar crotch-rocket was himself, whadyaknow, a european from holland.
    a.k.a. the netherlands.

    damned foreigners.

  12. 12.

    Brachiator

    Ronald Reagan was known as “Dutch” as a kid. Perhaps he was a sleeper agent. Did anyone ever see his birth certificate?

  17. 17.

    John O

    LOL, DougJ, that IS shameless nutpicking.

    But I tend to believe we’re too stupid to govern ourselves, and this is just example #239227.

  20. 20.

    Anya

    You know that same commenter would have mentioned the religion or the ethnic origin of the congressman if he happened to be an Arab, Muslim or even a middle eastern or African.

  23. 23.

    mcd410x

    I think the Freep was referring to the Pennsylvania Dutch and their on-going hatred of technology, the technology that makes America go. Therefore, they hate America.

  24. 24.

    Annie

    “Authorities say the suspected bomber was traveling on a visa issued by the State Department on June 16, 2008 and valid until June 12, 2010.”

    Let’s see how Lynn Cheney and the Republicans spin this. He was issued a visa during the Bush administion. But somehow the State Department knew in advance that Obama would win the election, so they were just trying in advance to please him. Or maybe it was Clinton’s felt after all for not taking terrorism seriously.

  29. 29.

    wasabi gasp

    Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. That is the sound of my head systematically thumping against my desk.

    Coincidentally, that’s also the sound of Hoekstra’s wooden shoes.

  30. 30.

    Violet

    @Annie:
    But if it’s true that his dad warned the US officials at the embassy in Nigeria and they didn’t put him on the Do Not Fly List, then that’s kind of dropping the ball.

    Apparently he was added to some other list:

    At that time, Abdulmutallab was added to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a database maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center and which contains about 550,000 names of people who could have terror ties.

    But that’s not the kind of list that keeps you off a plane. In that same article it says his dad only warned the embassy in November, so I guess maybe they were looking into him. But it sure doesn’t seem like a good thing that they were allowing him to keep his visa and travel to the US.

  34. 34.

    Mr Furious

    @Violet: Just when I was wondering how you could be on a Terror Watch List and NOT be on the No-Fly List also…

    Is there a point to having over a half-million people on a watch list? Because they sure as shit ain’t watching ’em all.

  36. 36.

    neff

    These people are so stupid I don’t know what it is that keeps me keeping going and not committing suicide, seriously.

  39. 39.

    Violet

    @Mr Furious:
    It seems like being on that other list should at least mean you are taken out of the line for extra screening.

    I recently came back from a trip to the UK was was selected for additional random screening after going down the jetway, but before boarding the plane. They were incredibly thorough in checking in every section of my carry on bags and patting me down so thoroughly it was almost invasive. I guarantee that if I’ve been wearing explosive underwear, they’d have found it. The pat down was that invasive.

    Based on that recent experience, I don’t see why it would be that hard to pull people on the list out of the line, make it seem random, and do additional, thorough screening.

  41. 41.

    neff

    I mean they are so stupid

    they are so freaking stupid

    and they will be part of the electorate that decides on national standards for drivers licenses that completely screw up the transgender people I know

  43. 43.

    John O

    @mcd410x:

    Precisely. Reducing our chances of dying in a commercial airline attack from .-01% all the way to .001%!

    I’d rather take the odds and have an on-time, relatively hassle free flight.

    But that’s just me.

  44. 44.

    Pope Bandar bin Turtle

    Which is perfect because I’m cracking my fool head off!

    ok, you made me do it …

    What goes “Ho, ho, ho, kerplunk?”

    …
    …
    …

    Santa laughing his head off!

  46. 46.

    neff

    This is bugging me because I have a couple of friends who are male-to-female transsexuals even though I am not trans or gay (I’m a boring straight guy).

    Here in Maryland, which has been relatively open about allowing people to change their gender marker on driver’s licenses, there have been proposals to make it much more complicated, owing to the desire to fit in with national driver’s license standards after 9/11.

    This is a big deal because transgender people face a lot of discrimination in jobs and housing and so on, as well as beatings in public, and police discriminating against them… for example, many male-to-female transsexuals will find the police automatically assuming that they are “tranny hookers” and tossing them in the holding cell with men, where they will be beaten and raped and so forth, so it is a big imperative for transsexuals to change the M or F on their driver’s license to the other symbol, but it is getting harder to do so even in liberal states because of post-9/11 identification issues.

    Basically I don’t understand why the M or F and weight and so on even belongs on driver’s licenses now that licenses carry photographs everywhere… decades ago driver’s licenses were a simple card with no photo, so in those days it made sense to include some descriptive info, but not nowadays when everybody has photos. So this whole gender thing is bugging me. I don’t know where else to bring it up among liberal bloggers.

  49. 49.

    mcd410x

    Hope everyone had a great Christmas. Christmas Eve always seems so hopeful; the day itself, rather hollow. (Plus, working on Christmas is a great excuse not to travel to see family that I don’t really care for in the first place!).

    Happy Boxing Day!

    (Up the Arse!! Giant game tomorrow with the Chelsea draw!!).

  50. 50.

    rob!

    There’s a part of me that really admires Obama for even wanting to try and lead a country full of people so stupid and venal as Hoekstra and the people who comment on that blog. If it were me, I’d just throw up my hands in disgust and move far, far, away…

  51. 51.

    The Republic of Stupidity

    Wanna good laugh?

    Follow the link to Col Mustard’s blog and scroll thru the comments.

    ‘Marxo-Muslim Messiah’ this and ‘Lib-tard’ that…

  53. 53.

    MattR

    @New Yorker: I don’t really see the incompetence. There was no actual evidence beforehand that would have led anyone to put him on the No Fly list. How could American officials know that this was anything other than a family dispute? They might have suspicions but not anything that is enough to justify putting someone on the No Fly list. All they could do is make sure he was on the lessor list and pass it on to someone else to follow up on. If anything this just shows that we need to be taking money away from Iraq and Afghanistan and use it to investigate claims like the one made by this guy’s father.

    As for the fact that the UK rejected him, that seems pretty irrelevant since the reason was that he said he was going to a nonexistent college. It was not because they deemed him a threat.

  54. 54.

    asiangrrlMN

    @neff: Have you ever been to Pam’s House Blend?

    She is a black lesbian blogger, and there are several transgendered people who blog on her site.

    Yeah, it’s a very tough issue, one of many facing LGBT folk. It’s easy to get down when thinking about this kind of discrimination.

    I do what I can, my friend. I am bi myself, so these issues are close to my heart.

  55. 55.

    mcd410x

    @John O: It’s just amazing how bad humans are at risk assessment. 35-40,000 deaths by automobile every year, and we worry about 3-4 attempted airliner incidents in 8+ years.

    Egads.

  56. 56.

    Jon H

    @arguingwithsignposts: “Wait, I thought there were only 72 virgins? Is this like the 6-8 black men? I’m feeling robbed her”

    It’s actually a transcription error in the Koran.

    It should be “a 7’2″ virgin”.

  58. 58.

    Liberty60

    I can’t believe no one has connected the dots, and recognizes this as the latest salvo in THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS!!

  59. 59.

    gnomedad

    If people can’t even READ on the goddam plane, I wonder if this won’t be the last straw for a lot of folks.

  61. 61.

    Mr Furious

    @New Yorker:

    The son of a prominent Nigerian banker, who allegedly attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight over America, was barred from returning to Britain earlier this year…

    Is everyone missing the obvious, here? That this guy was simply pissed off no one was responding to his emails about the $23 million dollars he wanted to deposit?

  64. 64.

    Joey Maloney

    What do you call a “terror” list with over half a million names on it? Useless. That’s part of the problem right there. Of course there’s no way to know how names get added or removed from such a list since the goverment won’t tell us, but how much use can it be when it casts a net that catches Edward Fucking Kennedy? No, just like nearly every other measure put in place since 9/11, it’s most likely a pants-wetting overreaction and ultimately counterproductive.

  65. 65.

    rachel

    Sounds like a spoof thinking of this:

    Nigel Powers: All right Goldmember. Don’t play the laughing boy. There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.

  66. 66.

    bob h

    Had the attempt succeeded and the plane spiraled aflame into Detroit, Obama would have loosed the Air Force and Special Forces on Yemen, and his approval ratings would go to 70% overnight.

  67. 67.

    Homeland Insecurity

    It was my understanding that this flight originiated in Nigeria and had a stopover in Amsterdam. They talk about how we need to upgrade our outdated scanning systems. What good will this do for inbound international flights? Also, considering how many billions have been spent since 9/11 for Homeland Security why is it this has not been done? Maybe we shouldn’t have been shipping pallets of money to Afganistan & Iraq for Halliburton and company.

    Officials now say tragedy was only averted on Northwest flight 253 because a makeshift detonator failed to work properly. Bomb experts say there was more than enough explosive to bring down the Northwest jet, which had nearly 300 people aboard, had the detonator not failed, and the nation’s outdated airport screening machines may need to be upgraded.

    “We’ve known for a long time that this is possible,” said Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar and ABC News consultant, “and that we really have to replace our scanning devices with more modern systems.”

  68. 68.

    calipgyian

    @neff: I don’t know why a drivers license should convey any more information than that the possessor can drive a car.

    That it has become the thing that you show the Man when he walks up to you and hisses “Papahz, please” is bad.

  72. 72.

    Dan Robinson

    I grew up in Holland, Michigan. It was a nice little town known as a “city of churches”. They still have a lot of churches. I looked it up recently, and there are over 130 churches in the city, more in the suburban areas out side of the city limits. The town has a population of around 35,000. Some of those churches draw from the suburban area, but it is still a lot of churches. The Christian Reformed Church started here.

    Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, is from Holland.

    Hope College and Western Theological Seminary are in Holland.

    Steelcase and Haworth are in Holland.

    So if you are cube dweller who hates everything about Blackwater, Holland is your ground zero.

  73. 73.

    burnspbesq

    @LABiker:

    Am I going to be allowed to wear pants on my flight home tomorrow?

    Wear your coolest boxers, just in case.

    The thought of 200 people lined up in a jetway waiting to get their pants from the baggage handlers … too funny.

  74. 74.

    Bruce Webb

    @Mr Furious: “That this guy was simply pissed off no one was responding to his emails about the $23 million dollars he wanted to deposit?”

    No wonder he paid cash for his ticket. This guy had money burning in his pocket. Also.

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