Kristia Cavere, the teabagger running in New York’s 19th Congressional district, has a subtle revisionist take on WWII:
“The Republicans are the ones who liberated Europe in World War II.”
According to her bio,
In May 2009, Kristia received a Masters in Science degree in “Defense and Strategic Studies” from Missouri State University, which is located in Fairfax, Virginia right outside our nation’s Capitol. She graduated summa cum laude and with a 4.0 grade point average.
I’d like to know what else she learned at MSU. Unfortunately, even though she claimed to be raising $300K, she hasn’t filed a FEC report, so we probably won’t be hearing much more from Ms. Cavere.
dmsilev
What the Hell does that even mean? She does know that both Roosevelt and Truman were Democrats, right? Only thing I can think of is that Eisenhower became a Republican after the war, though in today’s GOP he’d be tarred, feathered, drawn, quartered, and run out of town on a rail.
And the war in Europe was primarily won by the Soviets anyway.
Edit: And the Republican party of the day was largely comprised of isolationists who didn’t want us getting involved in the war at all.
dms
The Grand Panjandrum
It appears that the Karl Rove edition of the GOP is alive and well in Yankee territory. What is it with these teabaggers and their inability to grasp even the simplest of facts. They think we are either too lazy, or too stupid, to know the truth? Quite frankly she sounds like an opportunist who is just out to con the dumbasses carrying signs to keep the government of Medicare. Make a quick buck then disappear. Hey look at this cool new Mercedes I just bought!
Mike E
I think she means Franco, but got the sequence all wrong.
ETA: Breaking news–the Generalissimo is still dead!
Jeff
Subtle as a brick through a window.
dricey
Missouri State University is located in Springfield, Missouri, not Fairfax, Virginia.
This woman is a Palin-class delusional.
Mike
Of course Missouri State University is located right outside our nation’s capitol.
salacious crumb
Look like MSU’s Defense Studies faculty consists mostly of right wingers like Ilan Berman and others who served under Republican Administration’s. But then again you cant blame Republicans for everything. After Kristia needs a brain first before she can even be eligible to be called an idiot.
El Cid
Did the Republicans stop when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
MikeJ
@dricey: Actually, part of the school is, oddly enough, in Virginia:
http://dss.missouristate.edu/
Ash Can
@dricey: Actually, MSU’s Defense and Strategic Studies graduate program is in Fairfax. However, for her to make a public claim like this about WWII reflects terribly upon the school and its program, especially if she did so well academically there. For MSU’s sake, I hope she’s just trying to get away with something she knows is a lie.
SGEW
It’s the Jonah Goldberg formula:
Liberating Europe = Fighting Fascism
Fascism = Liberalism
Liberalism = Democrats
Fighting Democrats = Republicans
Q. E. Duh.
[Either that, or she’s claiming that Stalin was a Republican.]
dricey
@Ash Can: I stand corrected on the location of the Missouri State graduate program.
I stand by my take on the level of Cavere’s delusion.
stuckinred
Republicans probably did the intel on Peleliu.
MattF
@SGEW
I like that– In reality, though, Ms. Cavere’s claim makes no sense at all. I expect that it’ll be picked up by Drudge and NRO any moment now– three,… two,… one,…
stevie314159
If we had promised the Germans a capital gains tax cut, the war would have been over in 1942.
John Cole
It depends on whether she is attractive or not. If she is ugly, we will probably not hear from her again. But if she gives a bunch of old men at the NRO wood, she’ll be their next spokesperson until the next new thing comes along.
Fern
And here I was thinking that the Brits and Canadians and Australians (among others) had small roles in WWII. Oh well.
bkny
This is the oldest and most prestigious masters program of its kind in the country and focuses on the three areas used to defend ourselves as a nation: the military, economics, and diplomacy.
oh really? has anyone else ever heard of this — the oldest and most prestigious Masters program in the country..
but, then, when you’re a graduate of the renowned Washington Adventist University in Takoma Park, Maryland, i guess you can write your own ticket…
TR
@John Cole:
That guy at Newscopy (the second link) sure did seem to be having some starbursts of his own. According to the comments, he sat next to Cavere at a dinner, right before writing the piece.
MattF
@bkny
The weird thing is that Takoma Park (a.k.a. “Takoma-with-a-k”) is the DFH capital of the DC metropolitan area. Just goes to show that they’ll tolerate anyone.
fucen tarmal
that would be the northeast southwest missouri state campus in fairfax va.
yeah schools have branch campuses, still sounds funny, and should be mocked…
stuckinred
Her brother was KIA Iraq
Medic, looks like 10th Mountain but who can tell these days?
Mudge
Talk about epistemic closure..here’s her favorite columnist list:
Columnists Kristia Enjoys
Ann Coulter
Cliff May
David Horowitz
David Limbaugh
Dennis Prager
Dinesh D’Souza
Jed Babbin
John Hawkins
Kathryn Jean Lopez
Mark Steyn
Michael Medved
Michael Reagan
Michelle Malkin
Mona Charen
Phyllis Schafly
Thomas Sowell
Victor David Hanson
cleek
was the GOP opposition to the war the key factor in securing Europe’s freedom ?
@Mudge:
looks like the cast of NRO and TownHall. idiots, every one.
this doesn’t speak well of Missouri U’s program…
debit
@Mudge: She alphabetized by the first name? That was some college education she got there.
toujoursdan
Actually, it was the Soviet Army and the nasty Russian winter that allowed Europe to be liberated.
geg6
@SGEW:
Considering what the Republican Party is like in this day and age, that may well be true.
stuckinred
I taught at SE Missouri State one summer. Home of Bass Pro Shops and gateway to Branson!
El Cid
Obama’s approval rating is at an average of 54%, and even in the South it has swung waaaaaaay up from a norm of 27% or so up to 40%.
What’s funny is that this movement appears to come entirely from the “No Opinion” column.
Oh, and every where else he’s 57 – 67% approval.
Tee. Hee.
BOO HOO HOO HOO HOO WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK!
Sir Nose'D
While I am aware of all internet traditions, I am unaware of any graduate programs that bestow the title of summa cum laude upon their graduates. In the sciences, students need to maintain a 3.0 GPA or they are dismissed. You don’t graduate cum laude–you get kicked out if you don’t meet that minimum standard.
dmsilev
@debit: Glad to see I wasn’t the only one who noticed that. She probably had a list and hit the ‘sort’ button in Excel or whatever, but didn’t realize that the computer wouldn’t magically do what she meant it to do, but instead would go ahead and do what she told it to do.
dms
Ash Can
@dricey:
I stand by it too.
debit
@El Cid: Look at the Latino numbers. Wow. I wonder how many Republican strategists are gnashing their teeth over that. They lost the African American vote, probably forever. But they really wanted the Latino vote. Well, except in Arizona. They really are the party of old white guys.
Winston Smith
@stuckinred:
Don’t forget Springfield Cashew Chicken. That and Brad Pitt are Springfield’s gift to the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/dining/11cashew.html
Chris
Two words for this dipshit – Wendell Wilke.
I don’t believe his 1940 campaign revolved around liberating Europe. Republicans were riding some isolationist fever at the time.
Honus
@Ash Can: The MSU that’s in Fairfax is right-wing propaganda training center. I remember researching it when it popped up a few years ago over at SadlyNo when some wingnut was listed as a grduate. It exists to produce just this kind of stupidity.
http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Missouri_State_Universitys_Department_of_Defense_and_Strategic_Studies
Omnes Omnibus
@Sir Nose’D: Law schools do, but she didn’t go to law school.
grandpajohn
But, but, but what does Rasmussen say? After all, he is the only one who counts, well that is when his numbers support the wingnut view
Honus
After reading her bio, I realize, the wingnut was her. She was saying something about how she had sacrificed and dedicated herself to working for a large financial company to honor her brother’s death in Iraq in 2007.
Bill E Pilgrim
Most of the rest of the world thinks the Russians actually liberated Europe, at least as much as the US did (Russia lost a million men in Europe).
Maybe she got all confused by Rube Goldberg’s logic contraptions in which “facism” and “so cialism” and “left wing” and “right wing” are all scrambled, so that somehow by the end of reading his book she decided that the Soviets were right wing Republicans.
Pasquinade
Missouri State slogan:
http://www.missouristate.edu/
@cleek, MU is the University of Missouri, not Missouri State, which, I believe, is the school that Limbaugh flunked out of.
Bill E Pilgrim
Most of the rest of the world thinks the Russians actually liberated Europe, at least as much as the US did (Russia lost a million men in Europe).
Maybe she got all confused by Rube Goldberg’s logic contraptions in which “facism” and “so c ialism” and “left wing” and “right wing” are all scrambled, so that somehow by the end of reading his book she decided that the Soviets were right-wing Republicans.
(Damn, forgot which part of the word was verboten, sorry if you see this twice)
El Cid
@dmsilev:
Uh oh! There’s someone who shouldn’t be making a gazillion dollars at Goldman Sachs!
stuckinred
@Winston Smith: Cool, I missed that!
Honus
@El Cid:
Maybe not Goldman Sachs, but she was an integral cog in the greatest health care system in the world at the age of 22:
“After college, Kristia worked as a Senior Financial Analyst for the largest healthcare corporation in Maryland for five years until September 2007, when she began graduate school full-time. “
Ash Can
@debit:
I’m sure there are GOP leaders and strategists who would sincerely love to see that voting bloc in the R column, but they’re certainly neither powerful nor numerous enough to convince the party as a whole to do anything about it. The unholy alliances of the Southern Strategy and the Reagan Administration are coming home to roost. What the party strategists want doesn’t matter anymore; the monster that they created to serve them has wrested control from them itself. As John would say to them, what now, Einsteins?
GregB
She has a diverse taste in punditry. Veering from the hard-right to the very hard-right.
Ash Can
@grandpajohn: Rasmussen is the one true poll. All the others are outliers.
/wingnut logic
Shalimar
@John Cole:
Judge for yourself: http://www.rightwingnews.com/graphics/rushheritage2.jpg
henrythefifth
Isn’t she on The Hills?
;)
Funkhauser
@debit: @dmsilev: @El Cid: Today’s piece of trivia: here in Brazil, all lists are alphabetized by first name. It’s necessary because of the uncertainty as to where each person’s last name begins.
For example, the President is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his hopeful successor is Dilma Vana Rousseff Linhares. Their last names, respectively, are da Silva and Rousseff Linhares.
debit
@Ash Can:
They chase the Teabaggers to the North Pole?
Perry Como
SMSU was the biggest party school in MO, at least back when I was in the state.
Omnes Omnibus
@debit: Mary Shelley. Well done.
El Cid
@Ash Can: Well, the other factor is that the most reliable consistently Republican voting Latino population, Cuban exiles and their communities in Southern Florida and New Jersey, have been succeeded by later generations who don’t feel that every time a sparrow falls it did so at the hand of Fidel Castro and that an imminent recapture of the island for their grandparents’ property grievances were at hand.
chopper
@MattF:
i lived in takoma park for years. i wonder if the nutjob saw the irony in living in a ‘nuclear free zone’.
JSpencer
Just another surfacing of the clueless twit component that runs rampant among the teabaggers.
Meanwhile, how about this scenario from Tim Wise:
http://ephphatha-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/04/imagine-if-tea-party-was-black-tim-wise.html
georgia pig
Maybe you’re misunderstanding. She’s talking about the German liberation of Europe, before those nasty socialists enslaved it.
georgia pig
Maybe you’re misunderstanding. She’s talking about the German liberation of Europe, before those nasty socia1ists enslaved it.
V.O.R.
If we do hear from her again she might tell us how Republicans won the Punic wars.
My thought exactly. A lot of people get Reagan and Stalin confused, after all. (The key to telling them apart is the purges.)
Linda Featheringill
@Bill E Pilgrim: I think that the moderator getting excited over the word soshulism has probably done more to advance the cause of Chuck and Fred than anything I’ve seen recently!
Good work, Brownie!
Ash Can
@V.O.R.:
Good point. Stalin’s victims went to Siberia, while Reagan’s just headed for unemployment lines, welfare, and food stamps.
Woodrowfan
@Chris:
Actually, Willkie was from the Internationalist wing of the Republicans, which helped isolate the isolationists somewhat politically. He advocated aiding Britain, although opposing entering the war directly. After the election he supported Lend Lease and became an Ambassador for FDR.
ericblair
@El Cid:
I’m thinking this is that block of undecideds that the pundits wank over. You know, the ones that aren’t actually the detached logical observers of the political process that wisely choose how to vote at the eleventh hour after carefully digesting all the pap the Washington press puts out, but in actuality have no idea what a political issue actually is or what political parties can do about them. All they know is that Obama won healthcare, and we all want to hang out with winners so we’re winners too, so now we support him.
New Yorker
So when will we begin the hearings to revoke Daniel Inouye’s Medal of Honor? He’s a Democrat, so obviously he lost his right arm in a deliberate attempt to avoid the draft, the dirty hippie.
Cacti
@Pasquinade:
Limbaugh went to Southeast Missouri State (SEMO) in his hometown of Cape Girardeau, MO.
Missouri State was formerly known as Southwest Missouri State and is located in Springfield.
AkaDad
@dmsilev:
How could he run out of town if he’s been quartered?
stuckinred
@New Yorker:Niesi’s were RA!
mellowjohn
“A lot of people get Reagan and Stalin confused…”
i think that’s because a lot of those people would like to see st. ronnie’s pickled corpse on display, just as stalin’s used to be.
mellowjohn
@ akaDad:
very slowly.
Hypnos
@Bill E Pilgrim: actually it’s 23 million. 10 million soldiers and 13 million civilians.
In other words, 14% of the pre-war population.
But I’d make a distinction: the Soviets defeated Nazi Germany; they did not liberate Europe. They conquered it for themselves.
Scutch
Sadly, No! has been all over Kristi Cavere from day one:
The Mascara Massacre: How Drag Queens Are Killing Our Troops
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/21606.html
John
Huh, I always thought World War II was one of those “Democrat wars” Bob Dole was so annoyed by.
At any rate, what puzzles me is the fact that a public state university has a school located outside the state that chartered it. Are there any other examples of this?
Soprano2
If the school were located here in Springfield you’d have the same result. The school was founded by William VanCleave, who is a hard-right wingnut – bio here http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Cleave_William_Van Another SMSU – MSU claim to fame is helping John Ashcroft avoid the Vietnam War by giving him an “absolutely essential” teaching position to keep him out of the draft. Oh, and besides being the headquarters of Cashew Chicken (no where else makes it right, you have to come here to get the real thing, which you will then become addicted to) it’s also the international headquarters of the Assemblies of God church. It’s a fun, fun place to live if you’re a liberal, as you can imagine.
Comrade E.B. Misfit
My recollection of history was that when FDR began supplying escorts to convoys in the Western Atlantic (the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet was in a de facto shooting war with the Germans months before Pearl Harbor was attacked), the Republicans decried it as “Mr. Roosevelt’s War”.
Die-hard Republicans referred to WW2 as “Mr. Roosevelt’s War” right up to the point where WW2 became lionized as a “good war.”
(Heck, the wingnut Pearl Harbor conspiracy freakazoids still do, on occasion.)
Davis X. Machina
In Latin, cavēre means ‘to beware’.
nomen est, just sayin’, omen
Bill E Pilgrim
@Hypnos: I just meant soldiers, which is why I mentioned “in Europe”.
This is really hard to justify. I mean yes, they kept control of East Germany, and the occupation was real. However the idea that the war fought between Germany and the Soviet Union was a matter of the Soviets looking to conquer anyone is pretty twisted, they were invaded by Germany who sought to conquer them.
SiubhanDuinne
Actually, MSU operates its School of Defense and Strategic Studies in Fairfax, VA, but the DSS signifier is usually shown (in part, I suppose, to avoid exactly this kind of confusion). MSU-DSS has always had a pretty solid reputation, I thought, but if they’ve been teaching that the GOP won WWII, I guess I’ll have to revise that belief.
ETA: I see about a gasquillion other people got there first and better. For some insane (caffiene-deprived) reason I thought I was one of the first commenters instead of #75 or so.
Mjaum
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I think you are misinformed. While the Soviet Union did fight fascism, they also conquered Europe. Apart from certain parts of Norway, no land taken by the Soviets during ww2 was ever returned.
NobodySpecial
For a minute there, I thought this was the place Stan Dai went to, but then I realized that there’s more than one place training wingnuts how to scream bloody murder about A-Rabs.
2th&nayle
@V.O.R.: You’ve obviously never heard of the Air Traffic Controller Purge of 1981.
Quackosaur
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Tell that to every country between East Germany and Russia that had declared independence following World War I. I’m sure they decided that freedom from imperial powers (read: Russia, Germany, and Austria) wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.
Comrade E.B. Misfit
@Mjaum:
Have you forgotten about Austria? The Soviets occupied the eastern third or so of that country until 1955.
Gozer
@John:
Only other one I can think of off the top of my head is the UC Washington Center: http://www.ucdc.edu/
Jon H
IIRC, One of the guys who tried to molest Landrieu’s phone line also had connections to the same shoddy diploma mill operation.
phoebes-in-santa fe
@John: Well, my son is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins SAIS School of International Affairs, which is located in DC, instead of Baltimore.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mjaum:
I’m not denying that they conquered Germany.
I’m saying that to simply categorize the war between the Soviets and Germany as the Soviets “conquering” Germany, as the commenter did, is to miss a great deal, since another way of putting it is that Hitler had dreamed of invading and conquering the Soviets for years. And then invaded to do just that.
Bender
I wish the Republicans were all Genius Scienticians, like the Democrats.
Now, can anybody tell me if Guam capsized over the weekend? Because there was a marching band contest there on Saturday, and you know how that can tip over a small island!
Bill E Pilgrim
@Quackosaur: Tell what to those countries? That the Soviets were invaded by Germany before they conquered Germany?
I can’t imagine that those countries would disagree, since it’s what happened. That’s the only point I was making.
Bender
By the way, there’s still no corroboration on this quote from anybody but a lefty blogger who said he saw it in a small-town newspaper a few months ago.
Good enough for dKos (and Ball-Juice, of course) to run with it, though.
JOURNALISM!
Donald G
@NobodySpecial:
While Stan Dai apparently didn’t go to the Missouri State University in Fairfax, Virginia’s Defense and Strategic Studies Program, Robert Flanagan, who was Dai and James O’Keefe’s alleged partner in the crime of allegedly attempting to bug Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, did.
Catfish N. Cod
Well, I suppose if the Republicans liberated Europe, then they must also have won the war in the Pacific.
And heck, what other things have Republicans done that we haven’t been told about?
* I heard that they actually won the Mexican-American War, too. Reports that the Republican Party would not even be founded for another six years are clearly due to liberal revisionism.
* The 1856 Republican Party slogan was “free labor, free land, free men”, and the Republicans can be proud of their strong record in support of labor in all the years since. Suggestions that Republican supporters often unleashed private troops in bloody labor suppression riots are mere propaganda.
* And, of course, Republicans have always been staunch defenders of the small businessman. The Sherman Anti-trust Act was written by a Republican, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Republican President (note: actually true!), and it was a Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt, who was its biggest champion. Clearly, then, Republicans have always been the biggest champions of preventing monopolies and destructive accumulations of capital, notwithstanding numerous history textbooks to the contrary.
Catfish N. Cod
Ever heard of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, sometimes also called the “Fourth Partition of Poland”? I assure you the Poles remember it very well: it was the assassination of Poles as part of that partition that the Poles and Russians were going to memorialize the day that plane crash killed the Polish President.
Not even the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact made mention of the Baltic states. But since there was no one left who could stop it, the Soviets took the opportunity to grab them too.
Now there were things the Soviets did as a result of Germany’s decision to gratutiously backstab them in ’41 — the expansion of Poland to the west, the Russification of Koenigsberg into Kaliningrad, et cetera. But the idea that Stalin wasn’t in a conquering mood just ain’t fitten wit de facts.
apocalipstick
@Pasquinade:
Limbaugh flunked out of Southeast Missouri State in Cape Giradeau, his hometown. Missouri State, formerly Southwest Missouri State University, is located in Springfield.
apocalipstick
@Soprano2:
The Defense Policy Institute portion of MSU was founded by VanCleave. The rest of the school predates him considerably.
Stefan
This is really hard to justify. I mean yes, they kept control of East Germany, and the occupation was real. However the idea that the war fought between Germany and the Soviet Union was a matter of the Soviets looking to conquer anyone is pretty twisted, they were invaded by Germany who sought to conquer them.
Not that twisted. Remember that in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union invaded it from the East. The Soviet Union also then invaded Latvia, Lithunia and Estonia (which they conquered until driven out by the Germans, who held it until again driven out by the Soviets) and Finland. They did not exactly enter the war as an entirely innocent victim — they were themselves an aggressor.
And once they drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union, they pushed on into Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, all of which were under de facto if not de jure Soviet military occupation for the next 45 years.
Soprano2
@apocalipstick:
Thanks, I didn’t know that. He used to write letters to our local paper – that’s how I knew about him.
justme
LOL, I thought this was just beautiful
coming from the party-unity-is-everything crowd.
Seriously. She can say that in the same interview where, moments before, she had reduced WWII to party politics? Ffffffffffuuuuuuuuu…. That’s some fine politikling, Lou. Wow.
The Populist
I wish reasonable righties would call out morons and their revisionism.
They call Obama the N-a-z-i yet when I look back on history THIS is how those assholes took control of Germany. They made things up and let the public run with it.
asiangrrlMN
Is are children learning? Apparently not. I don’t think she’s attractive, but stupid and venal does nada for me so YMMV.
Cliff Weathers
I checked a little further into Kristia Cavere and she gave a speech in front of a teabagging group where she said one of her two favorite people is Jack Bauer.
A fictional TV character? You’ve got to be kidding me!
Anne Laurie
@ericblair:
Bingo. Our team America, fvck yeah!
Davis X. Machina said, “America’s tombstone will read ‘killed by a story arc’,” but I think “Politics is just another sporting event” would be a strong contender.
matt conway
in springfield, many refer to gen. ashcroft’s denomination as the “ass of god”. i’m just sayin’