By Hanlon, on August 20th, 2008 at 10:32 PM
 Let met start this one out by saying I like Joe Biden. There’s talk that he’s the one that may be Obama’s running mate, and to a great extent that sounds good to me. He’s a good talker (if he does go too far sometimes), and he’d be more than happy to go after McCain in all the ways we’ve been waiting for. After all, he’s the one who said all of Giuliani’s sentences are “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”
That said, Glenn Greenwald hits on a great point, as he so often does. Responding to an exchange in which Biden touted his “strength” by pointing out that he pushed for war in the Balkans, Greenwald says:
Apparently, that’s the way many Democrats believe they can and should answer the accusations that they’re “weak” on national security — not by contesting the underlying premises that starting wars is a sign of “strength,’ but instead, by proving that they, too, want to prosecute wars — just perhaps in different places or with different tactics. As Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, Biden also voted to authorize the attack on Iraq.
That seems to be where the line of weakness and strength is. Whether you’re willing to wage war.
There’s one pretty big problem with this assumption: the people who make that decision aren’t actually fighting the war. If Congress had to vote on sending Congress to war, then yes, the guys who voted “yes” would absolutely be the stronger in character. It takes a lot to send yourself to battle, and not much to stay behind and just hope for the best.
However, that’s exactly what the GOP politicians are doing. In response to a perceived threat, they’re sending other people to fight. That changes the field entirely. Where I come from, when you’re scared and send someone else to fight the bad men for you, there’s a word for it: cowardice.
It is not evidence of cowardice to say the terrorist threat is overblown. We are, in fact, not afraid of Al Qaeda, we are not afraid of Iran, and we were not afraid that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of nuclear weapons he was ready to hand over to Osama bin Laden. The Republicans were terrified of terrorists, extremists, Saddam Hussein, nukes and biological warfare, so they sent our military to fight a war in a country the vast majority of them won’t even travel to in order to visit the men who are dying to make those same goddamn Congressmen feel “safe”.
Cowards jump at shadows and send someone else downstairs to see what the noise was. We, on the other hand, have kept our cool and responded to real situations in a rational manner. Conservatives are the cowards. They’re craven, blubbering, trembling cowards, pissing their pants every time someone in the Middle East holds up a poorly made “death to America” picket sign, and it’d be damn nice if someone in the media would finally call these yellow-bellies out.
Instead, we have Democrats arguing that they’re “strong”, citing times they were “brave” enough to sign a bill to send someone else’s kid to get his balls blown off in another country. I still like Biden, though.
By Hanlon, on August 20th, 2008 at 02:04 PM
 There’s one big reason the right-wing media drives me nuts. It’s not a conservative take on current issues, a focus on anti-liberal stories, or fawning over Republican politicians. It’s that pieces like this show up and are so mindblowingly asinine it’s hard to believe someone got paid to write it. Jeffrey Lord, writing for the Wall Street Journal, apparently thinks he’s hit upon something by bringing up the Democratic Party’s history of racism.
The article reads like what happens when a D-grade history student finds out that there were racist Democrats while he’s flipping through his book during study hall and suddenly thinks he discovered the Ark of the Covenant. Lord, who I’m ashamed to say is a PA resident like myself, assails the Democrats for not outlining their pro-slavery past in their promotional material. I guess the Republican pamphlets are all full of all the awful things the GOP has done since its inception.
It doesn’t help that he’s a little off on his history, citing the slave owning Democrats between 1800 and when slavery was abolished. Between 1800 and 1824, there were no “Democrats”, but “Democratic-Republicans”. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were “Democratic-Republican” presidents. Not Democrats. They called themselves either Democrats or Republicans, and they owned slaves. The D-R party paved the way for both of the current parties that bear half of its name, so pinning their sins on either side is just stupid. But that’s not what really chaps my ass on this column.
Read More ->
There’s one big reason the right-wing media drives me nuts. It’s not a conservative take on current issues, a focus on anti-liberal stories, or fawning over Republican politicians. It’s that pieces like this show up and are so mindblowingly asinine it’s hard to believe someone got paid to write it. Jeffrey Lord, writing for the Wall Street Journal, apparently thinks he’s hit upon something by bringing up the Democratic Party’s history of racism.
The article reads like what happens when a D-grade history student finds out that there were racist Democrats while he’s flipping through his book during study hall and suddenly thinks he discovered the Ark of the Covenant. Lord, who I’m ashamed to say is a PA resident like myself, assails the Democrats for not outlining their pro-slavery past in their promotional material. I guess the Republican pamphlets are all full of all the awful things the GOP has done since its inception.
It doesn’t help that he’s a little off on his history, citing the slave owning Democrats between 1800 and when slavery was abolished. Between 1800 and 1824, there were no “Democrats”, but “Democratic-Republicans”. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were “Democratic-Republican” presidents. Not Democrats. They called themselves either Democrats or Republicans, and they owned slaves. The D-R party paved the way for both of the current parties that bear half of its name, so pinning their sins on either side is just stupid. But that’s not what really chaps my ass on this column.
Read More ->
By Hanlon, on August 20th, 2008 at 07:48 AM
 A big honkin’ Pew Research study of the media and American awareness of current events came out recently, and all of the blogs are abuzz. Most of the study is separating news viewers into various categories, seeing where they got their news, how dubious they are of what they see, and who watches what. In the middle, though, is an interesting little piece on general knowledge.
About half of Americans (53%) can correctly identify the Democrats as the party that has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 2007, shortly after the Democrats gained control of the House after a dozen years of GOP rule, many more people (76%) knew the Democrats held the majority.
The public is less familiar with the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown). About four-in-ten (42%) can name Rice as the current secretary of state. The public’s ability to identify Rice has not changed much over recent years: In April 2006 and December 2004, shortly before she was sworn in, 43% could correctly identify her.
For reasons that completely escape me, the “political knowledge” test consisted entirely of identifying the Secretary of State, the British PM, and who has the majority in Congress. That still tells us some interesting stuff (did people actually forget who holds the majority between February 2007 and now??), but there’s a whole slew of other stuff worth asking:
- Who are the presidential nominees and what are their current positions in the government?
- What Senator was recently indicted?
- Any foreign leader: Germany, France, Israel, Iran, Russia, Pakistan. Pick three. Bonus if you give their proper title.
- True or false: Iran has nuclear weapons.
- True or false: Barack Obama is a Muslim.
- Name the House and Senate majority leaders.
I could go all day. I point this out because the results show a lot of educated viewers in areas I wouldn’t expect (yes, I mean FOX viewers). This isn’t just because of bias, it’s because in 2003 a PIPA study showed that FOX and right-wing talk radio audiences were hilariously misinformed on everything around the “war on terror”, believing that Iraq had WMDs, Saddam was connected to 9/11, and world opinion supported the war. Not matters of subjectivity, they were just flat wrong.
So this poll, being generally soft (why Gordon Brown? Honestly, why not Musharraf or Ahmadinejad or Putin?) and asking few controversial questions is a bit misrepresentative of how much people who rely on various sources actually know, but it does show just how ignorant people are generally.
By Will, on August 20th, 2008 at 07:33 AM
 Yes, Toby “We’ll put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way” Keith has endorsed Barack Obama.
“So I thought it was beautiful the other day when Obama went to Afghanistan and got educated about Afghanistan and Iraq. He came back and said some really nice things.
“So as far as leadership and patriotism goes, I think it’s really important that those things have to take place. And I think he’s the best Democratic candidate we’ve had since Bill Clinton. And that’s coming from a Democrat.”
I know Keith said before that he was a Democrat, but still… it is just too damn early in the morning for this confusing shit. Wow.
By Hanlon, on August 20th, 2008 at 07:33 AM
The Carpetbagger Report has a massive list of McCain’s flip-flops, 74 and counting to be precise. If ever you needed a handy-dandy list when someone claims he’s a straight talker, there you go.
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