And then we will go back to ignoring her, becuase despite the fact that I think she got hosed in this Edwards deal, she is, at the end of the day, batshit crazy and stupid. Doug Feith stupid, if you ask me.
A Contest
Partially inspired by Dahlia Lithwick’s “Turn Me Into A Wingnut” competition, and partially inspired by yesterday’s Frank Gaffney manufactured Lincoln quote, Balloon Juice is proud to present you with our own competition.
The rules:
Take an actual famous or well-known quote from the past, and modify it slightly so that it either attacks liberals, shows gushing support for Bush and his policies, or both. Or make up a quote that sounds plausible, yet is completely fabricated. Some examples from the comments section yesterday:
1.) “Liberals are traitors that compromise the moral integrity of our Republic and deserve to be hanged; especially Hillary Clinton.”—Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, 1795
2.) “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be the fault of the Democrats for not supporting the troops.”—James Madison, 4th President of the United States
3.) “Those would not give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve to be shipped to Gitmo and waterboarded like the traitors they are.” – Benjamin Franklin, An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, 1759
The winner gets a free subscription to Balloon Juice. Have fun.
*** Update ***
Here is my entry:
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him. Which is why you send them to Guantanamo, waterboard them, and keep them imprisoned indefinitely. – Winston Churchill
No, Ace. You Were Right The First Time
Ace hammers the new half-cour conservative comedy show and then has second thoughts:
Second Thoughts: Watching it again, it’s not as bad as I first thought. It’s bad — but John Steward pretty much sucks too, I think, and the average Leno or Letterman monlogue is not exactly bursting with comedic brilliance. SNL’s Weekend Update has about three decent jokes per ten minute installment.
So maybe I was too hard on the show. Maybe it is jealousy and all that, and knowing I, along with about one tenth of the American population, could do better. It’s not a show I’d watch, ever, but then, there are a lot of shows I won’t watch, ever.
Go with your first instincts on this, Ace. It is terrible.
High Comedy on the Right Flank
So Frank Gaffney pens a piece calling for treason charges against those in Congress who disagree with the decider, using a fabricated quote from Abraham Lincoln as the cornerstone of his argument:
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — President Abraham Lincoln
The usual suspects, and read their daily Washington Times while drinking their morning coffee, and a flurry of posting about the merits of this idea begins:
Of course, the left would howl and scream if a modern person said this. They would whine that we were questioning their patriotism.
You’re damn right we are!
This is a wonderful quote from “honest Abe Lincoln” that should be on every conservative website as a reminder to America why the Dems are not to be trusted with our national security:
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — President Abraham Lincoln
Now who is going to argue with Abraham Lincoln? If you oppose the Democrat plans to surrender Iraq, post this quote someplace.
The joy is palpable, as their noble cause of smearing anyone who disagrees with them now has the apparent backing of the man most like the decider- good old Honest Abe, himself. Except, of course, the quote is fabricated:\
But this quote is completely invented. Lincoln never said it. This “quote” was first attributed to Lincoln by J. Michael Waller in Insight Magazine, in a 2003 article revealingly entitled: Democrats Usher in an Age of Treason. But as Waller himself now admits, the quote attributed to Lincoln is completely fraudulent. Waller wrote in an e-mail to FactCheck.org (h/t William Wolfrum):
The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.
It was Waller, in The Washington Times’ Insight Magazine, urging that anti-war Congressmen be hanged — not Abraham Lincoln. But to justify their plainly un-American assault on our most basic constitutional liberties, neoconservatives like Gaffney simply invent quotes, attribute them to Abraham Lincoln, and continue to use them long after they have been debunked.
So the Washington Times features a story from a columnist that features a bogus quote that found its origin in another Washington Times publication. How delicious. But that isn’t the real punchline. The real joke is who the conservatives who ran with this story are blaming. I will give you three guesses.
If you guessed Frank Gaffney, you would be wrong.
If you guess J. Michael Waller, you would be wrong.
If you guessed the Washington Times, you would be wrong.
Nope, our intrepid conservative stalwarts are blaming… the media.
Apparently even our vaunted journalists can be taken in by an internet fraud. Turns out this quote is not from Lincoln. Great. Now we can’t even trust the media to get quotes right.
You are right, MEDIA LIES. The “Media” can’t get quotes that DO NOT FUCKING EXIST right. The “Media” can not correct every wingnut idea pubvlished by some wingnut columnist in the Washington Times. Clearly, this is David fucking Broder’s fault. Damned liberal media.
Then there is my favorite:
I was linked by some foul mouthed childish liberal nut, who had a good point – this Lincoln quote I saw in a Washington Times article is an internet fake. Of course I cannot fact check the news media, and if the emotionally stunted blogger would have simply emailed me with the fact this was one of those urban legends I would do what I am doing now, alertiing folks that the quote is a fraud.
Damn liberal media.
Torture Justifications From Fantasy Land
Via Sullivan, this Hugh Hewitt interview with retired Army Colonel Stuart Herrington, which featured this tidbit:
HH: Now an e-mail. Mr. Hewitt, can you ask the Colonel if we would authorize torture regarding someone who knows of a nuke about to go off in minutes or hours.
SH: Yeah, that’s the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. The difficulty with that is that that question poses a hypothetical which in my experience, I never ran into a hypothetical like that. If you pose the rectitude, or lack thereof, of torture based upon that hypothetical, you’re not really dealing in the real world. That’s my answer to that.
HH: In an era when we’ve had attempted dirty bomb importation into the United States, and we’ve had WMD used here, in anthrax, at least, are there some circumstances where at least at a classified lever, people ought to walk through those scenarios, to have the rules laid down in stone, Colonel?
SH: I’m sorry, but I didn’t get the thrust of that.
HH: The thrust is, should…I don’t know whether you want to do it publicly, but shouldn’t the military be walking through those scenarios, and establishing the guidelines right now, so that they’re not improvised when and if such hypotheticals occur?
SH: You mean the interrogation guidelines?
HH: Yeah.
SH: Yeah, well I think the answer to that is that you know, the type of information you’re trying to get is obviously situation dependent, and sometimes the situation is more critical than others, but there’s got to be, and that’s what’s going on now, a healthy deliberation, and a laying down of here are the procedures…and this has been done already, here are the procedures that are authorized, here are some more aggressive procedures that are not authorized without the approval of so and so, and here are procedures that you will never do, and so that everyone knows basically what the ground rules are, so there’s no room for hot doggery, you know?
I particularly enjoyed how, even after being told the scenario is not in the real world, Hugh pressed on and thought that guidelines should be created for the fantasy ticking time bomb scenario anyway. That would go a long way to explain our policy decisions the past 5-6 years, and I suggest the administration already has a guy who would be perfect for creating guidelines and policies in fantasy situations- Doug Feith.
Herrington did have some suggestions as to what does work:
HH: Is it effective? Is water boarding effective?
SH: Boy, you know what? I can’t tell you that. I’ve never practiced it. I consider it to be abhorrent, a practice that shouldn’t be practiced by any professional interrogator, and you’re going to have to ask someone other than me. But I, generally speaking, know from experience that when you levy brutality against a person in order to get that person to talk, even if the person hasn’t got anything to say, or doesn’t know what it is that you want, they’ll come up with something to say just to get you to quit doing it.
HH: Do you play on fears of family and their safety, not reprisal, but you know, going back to be with them? Is that effective?
SH: You know, the developmental approach involves engaging someone in conversation and evaluating them. And certainly, I’ve had cases where family played a big part. I once had a prisoner in Panama, for example, who was on his second day of captivity, was in tears, and was depressed, and the guards told me they were worried about him. When I went to see him, it turned out that you know, he’d been captured for three days, his wife didn’t know if he was dead or alive. He had an 18 month old child at home, and he was just totally depressed and in a deep funk over it. I got a cell phone, and we called his wife. I was his friend for life after that.
If that happened today, the pro-torture Republican party and her blogospheric nitwit enablers would advocate having the man stripped down naked, have menstrual blood smeared on him while chained him to the floor in either an exceptionally hot or exceptionally cold room with blaring music. When that didn’t work, they would waterboard him. If the press found out, Donald Rumsfeld would have clucked that he stands all day long at work, so how bad could that really be?
The reason Hugh and others are so desperate to validate the necessity of torture through the ticking time bomb scenario is that it is the only way to justify it, because torture just isn’t effective for information gaining purposes. There are other practices that are better, and that do not debase yourself, your country, and terrorize the victim. In essence, the ticking time bomb scenario is not unlike the old joke (some are claiming it was Churchill and not Shaw, I don’t know- I just googled parts of the joke and this is what I came up with. Wikipedia credits both of them, FYI.):
Some years ago, George Bernard Shaw and a middle-aged London socialite engaged in one of the most famous encounters in the battle of the sexes. Shaw asked the woman if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. She responded with an enthusiastic “yes!” Then Shaw playfully lowered the offer to one pound and sixpence. “Certainly not!” the woman huffed, “what do you think I am?” Shaw smiled and said, “We’ve already established that . . . now we’re haggling about the price.”
The only way they can justify torture is through the worst-case scenario, and then, once it is validated in their own minds, they can apply the torture procedures downward. In short, the ticking time bomb advocates are just haggling for a price.
*** Update ***
I have to comment on this, btw:
HH: You’re not a Steelers fan, are you, Colonel?
SH: Oh, I have to say I am.
HH: You know, that’s…it’s a very sad thing when I find otherwise upright Americans who lack football sense.
SH: But my credibility would be zero if I said no.
HH: No, that’s true, but it’s sort of like an accident of birth.
Browns won a Super Bowl, yet, Hugh?
That is what I thought.
Torture Justifications From Fantasy LandPost + Comments (230)
Hubris Watch
Blogger #2 from the Edwards campaign resigns:
I regret to say that I have also resigned from the Edwards campaign. In spite of what was widely reported, I was not hired as a blogger, but a part-time technical advisor, which is the role I am vacating.
I would like to make very clear that the campaign did not push me out, nor was my resignation the back-end of some arrangement made last week. This was a decision I made, with the campaign’s reluctant support, because my remaining the focus of sustained ideological attacks was inevitably making me a liability to the campaign, and making me increasingly uncomfortable with my and my family’s level of exposure.
My favorite reaction by the blogosphere headhunters is some variation of this:
I don’t think I’ve read enough of her blog to know much about McEwan, but I can say this: she exhibited more class and dignity than Marcotte, even as I find it somewhat ironic that someone who calls my fellow Christians “christofascists” accuses others of unleashing “frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation.”
In other words: “Hey- I hate her and she is an ugly bigot who deserved every vicious thing I said about her, but she was classy when she left the job she wanted to take to support her candidate. Aren’t I noble for noting her class. How big of me.”
/vomit.
Meanwhile, the disgusting Catholic asshole Bill Donohue still retains the wide support of these folks, apparently, because they have done nothing to beat him down. And that is how the game is played, these days, I guess. Bill Donohue, who is more disgusting and has a bigger audience than either of these two women, will face no scrutiny, will not be held to task for the disgusting and truly stupid things he says, because he is on the “right” side. I mean, after all, the man attended Just Us Sunday and worked to keep Schiavo on life support and hates gays and Jews and Democrats and Hollywood- this is our kind of guy!
Color me unimpressed.
Dear Republicans- it is ok to despise nuts like Donohue and nuts like Marcotte. I do it every day. There is no contradiction. In fact, the party will be better off if you would throw aside our nuts- but you won’t, if for no other reason that the Republican party is now so insane itself that it can not recognize that Donohue is, in fact, nuts.
*** Update ***
Bob at the Confederate Yankee thinks I have been unfair to him, and he is right.
Budgetary Bullshit
This has me so god damned mad I can’t even write a restrained and reasonable post.
I am sure all the people furious about Obama’s remarks will be spear-heading a movement for restoring funding to the VA and expanded services. Although probably not- that doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.