Refuting the Idiotic Assertions of K-Lo

It's super-bonus wingnut-debunking time--and why not go with a slam-dunk and take some K-Lo (Kathryn Jean Lopez) out for a good debunking?

Today, she gets some valuable exposure from the folks at CBS News.com:

George Bush may have gone to war for Halliburton and or his daddy but at least he wasn’t getting us attacked in New York and Washington again. During the 2004 campaign, Clark explained that President Bush “was focused single-mindedly on missile defense, the centerpiece of his foreign policy.” And so: “George Bush was sworn in in January 2001- a full nine months before the attacks. That day he took the oath that every commander-in-chief of our nation has taken: to defend our nation and to protect the lives of the American people. But for nine months he did not live up to that oath.”

As always, the facts surface and K-Lo is left holding her plentiful sack of lies...

According to Clark: “They [the administration] disregarded the warnings of the intelligence community and the Clinton administration on what the greatest threat to America was. They marched to their own drumbeat and they got caught out of step and it cost 3,000 people their lives in this country.”

Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S

It does beg the question of what exactly the Democrats who were in the White House before Bush did to prevent 9/11. But that would suggest Clark should be held accountable for his words, something the U.S. media hasn’t bothered to do. If we did, Clark would not be an Obama foreign-policy adviser, he would have never been on "Face the Nation" as an Obama surrogate, he would have never been a Hillary adviser ridiculously arguing that Clinton’s experience exceeds McCain’s.

He did a hell of a lot more than Bush ever did.

Conservatives should not let this Clark moment pass. Barack Obama should distance himself from efforts to dishonor McCain’s military service. Obama should be disappointed and saddened. This is not the Wesley Clark he knew. And he should drop Wesley Clark as an adviser. That would be general progress away from the paranoid style of American politics.

Right after McCain drops all of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth (like Bud Day), the lobbyists who think that if terrorists strike the US that it would be good for McCain (like Charlie Black), and anyone else who is incapable of understanding that Wes Clark isn't the bad guy here--the bad guy is the guy who forgot to hide what was in McCain's military records.

--WS

Congratulations Lee Judge!

You made K-Lo's head explode!



Anything that makes that idiot twit twitter and fume is fine by me! Meet me at the Gates BBQ in Midtown and I'll buy you a beer!

~~BG

Kathryn Jean Lopez Is a Disgrace

Plus, she's a grade "A" moron of the first order. Here, she weighs in on Hillary Clinton by bringing up a book written by the late Barbara Olson.

Throughout the Clinton campaign, I’ve had this pang of anger that Barbara Olson couldn’t weigh in on Hillary’s run for the White House. Barbara could see the “Hillary for President” signs. There were too many signs in Hillary’s life pointing in the direction of the Oval Office for herself. Moreover, Barbara knew the Clintons didn’t have it in their blood to disappear from the national political stage.

Barbara Olson, of course, was murdered in the plane en route to California that hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

In her book, “Hell to Pay”, which chronicled Hillary’s pre-Senate political experience and ideology, Barbara wrote:

At one of her lunches with John Robert Starr at Little Rock’s Café Saint Moritz in 1989, there was a lapse in the conversation about Bill’s ambitions for national office. Starr took the opportunity to ask Hillary what she wanted to do. “She leaned toward me,” he recounted, “eyes ablaze, and said in as an intense voice as I have ever heard, ‘I want to run something!’”

Doesn't Lopez run the online portion of National Review? Women who want to "run something" are suspect, right? Ambition is something to be reviled, apparently. Unless you're a Republican, of course.

Olson's book was merely one of many titles spewed out by conservative publishing house Regnery in the 90s, and was never a serious candidate for being "archived" or respected as a book about Hillary Clinton. It was cheap fodder for quickie buys at the bookstore, part of the wingnut welfare that flowed during that time and allowed a small cottage industry to spring up. Hate the Clintons? Here's ANOTHER Regnery book for YOU! Conservative authors wrote so many that one could hardly blame Olson for contributing hers to the pile. Olson is no longer alive to defend herself. She has become a favorite martyr of pundits like Lopez--and the trick is to simply deflect criticism from herself by citing the work of the late author.

Olson concluded her book:
The Clinton years might seem like a long national nightmare of scandal, sleaze, and ruthless acquisition of power. Hillary herself is the link from the excesses of the Watergate staff, to the Whitewater fiasco, to the abuses of executive power, to the defense of her husband’s perjury and obstruction of justice. But now it is Hillary’s turn. The Clinton era is far from over and Hillary’s ambitions far from satisfied.

The problem with that is, we're living the nightmare of the Bush Administration, which is a thousand times worse than any wingnut could imagine under the Clintons. Ten thousand times worse. One could never imagine a President lying to take us to war. One could also never imagine a Presidential spokesman coming forward, hangdog with shame and guilt, to expose the lies that were told, either. We are looking at $4 bucks for a gallon of gas, a permanent presence in Iraq, almost 4,100 dead soldiers, over thirty thousand wounded, over a trillion dollars pissed away, habeas corpus suspended, signing statements that tell Congress to stuff it, runaway debt, runaway spending, incompetence on a scale never before seen in our government, and our ability to defend ourselves shattered because of a broken military.

Lopez is a disgraceful idiot because she can't stop obsessing about the Clintons well after that ship has sailed; her intellectual dishonesty shines through because what word never appears in her column?

"Bush."

Look for a lot of these wingnuts to run from that word.

--WS

Kathryn Jean Lopez Hates Like No Other

One of the things I need to stop doing is wandering into that horrific freak show of self-deluding wankery called The Corner...

Speaker Pelosi, Step Aside [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

As a sister Catholic, I have a plea to Nancy Pelosi this morning: Don't do it. Don't make the papal Mass about you or a political statement. The Vatican wants bishops to shepherd pro-choice Catholic pols — you can't be a pro-choice Catholic pol — and Pelosi (who was at dinner last night) insists on receiving Communion. If the pope, unknowingly perhaps, gives her Communion, the image will be a damaging one — in one picture, undoing what he's trying to ingrain in Church leaders. She knows this is a big deal. I know it means something to her — but she should have this fight another day.

It's a tough thing. No one wants to judge. No one can know another's soul. But we know voting records and rhetoric and we know what it taught. And I just don't want to see a beautiful Mass become a political statement. We'll see. God bless all who will be at Nationals stadium today, Democrat, Republican, everyone.

This is a beautiful bit of wingnut wankery. On the one hand, a woman who wants communion from her church is vilified and pilloried simply because of a public policy position that is contradictory to that of her faith--separation of church and state much? On the other hand, God Bless all who will be there, even you filthy, disgusting, horrible, no-good Democrats.

The American Wingnut, circa April 2008: I can't get the hate out of my fat fucking mouth fast enough...

K-Lo Gets It Backwards

If I'm reading this right--and I know I am, but I have to say things like that from time to time--then McCain is a leader because he has exactly the wrong strategy for fighting the war in Iraq:

What the “100 years” talk refers to is something McCain rightly said in response to a question during a New Hampshire townhall meeting in January. The question regarded Bush’s statement that we could be in Iraq for 50 more years. McCain sensibly responded: “Make it 100. We’ve . . . been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’s fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.”

When asked to clarify, he would go on to say that it could be 1,000 years, or even a million years. These are the lines that try Democrats’ souls. But McCain was right about the long war. It was a sensible answer. And though it doesn’t sound like the most attractive answer -- who wants 100 years in Iraq? -- it was straight talk from a senator who has a better track record on Iraq than most. And it may not hurt his campaign, either.

Now, that's a bit of a stretch. The only reason we stayed in those places was because of a symbiotic relationship between us and the host country which was based on protecting them while they rebuilt their society, infusing money into their economy, and because there was no popular groundswell of the will of the people in those host countries to throw us out either by violence or by protest. We had a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that was based on law, not something concocted on the way to secretly meet with the prime minister.

Pew reports that Americans are split about whether the war is going well or not. They’re split over bringing the troops home or keeping them there. But they know that 4,000 American lives have been lost valiantly, and Americans don’t like losing something they’ve gone into with their blood.

According to Pew, 53 percent of Americans think we can win this. A CBS poll indicates 42 percent acknowledging the surge has worked -- it’s meant progress. Contrary to the way the Dems talk, a Gallup poll had a minority (18 percent) favoring withdrawing the troops immediately.

Say what you want about McCain, but he’s been right about Iraq. He was right to say “no surrender.” He was right to support the surge. By contrast, Obama has been endorsed by MoveOn.org, which had the nerve to suggest Gen. David Petraeus was betraying us with false information. Clinton refused to condemn the ad, which was no surprise given the disrespect she showed the general in congressional questioning.

Wow--if that isn't cherry picking old polls and trying to shine a turd, I don't know what is. The war has been consistently unpopular. The people support the troops but not the Administration, which has had an approval rating so low for so long it shouldn't even be brought up in polite conversation. The Commander in Chief of this war has been so unpopular for so long, K-Lo has to gloss over it and cherry pick polls from one polling outfit just to try to skate past that whole thing about the war being about as popular as New Coke, pardoning Nixon and Yahoo Serious.

Here are some poll numbers to contemplate:

Nearly half of all Americans - 46 percent - want large numbers of U.S. troops to leave Iraq within the next year. Twenty-two percent are willing to have U.S. troops remain in the country for one to two years, and 28 percent are willing to have troops remain longer than that.

Fewer than one in three Americans approve of the way Mr. Bush is handling the war in Iraq. His 30 percent approval rating on the war is unchanged from last month and closely matches the president’s overall approval rating of 29 percent.

Thirty-six percent of Americans think the U.S. did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, while 59 percent believe the U.S. should have stayed out. In March 2003, nearly seven in 10 Americans said the U.S. did the right thing.

Just 31 percent of Americans think the U.S. should have stayed to rebuild Iraq after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. Twenty-seven percent say the U.S. should have pulled out of Iraq after removing Saddam, while 41 percent say the U.S. should have never gotten involved in the first place.

Twenty-eight percent of Americans believe Saddam was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. That figure is down significantly since the spring of 2003, when more than half of those surveyed said the former Iraqi leader was involved in the attacks.

That's gotta hurt--the only way McCain can take the wingnuttery all the way to the White House is for people to be confused about the reasons for the war. Once people finally wake up, they're going to be pissed.

And, no, he's been wrong about Iraq. He can't even get straight who makes up which side and who they're aligned with without being prompted by Joe Lieberman. He fails every basic test in a Commander in Chief--you know, the test that starts of with "we are fighting (blank) because (blank). When a candidate for President can't even get that much right, we're not talking statesman. We're talking confused and cranky.

He clearly doesn't have the temperment to be President. Just ask him if he sent his staff to talk to John Kerry about running on the Democratic ticket in 2004--you'll get an earful of his leadership, wisdom and judgement.