I Knew It!

Scientific proof that Republicans are delusional: Republicans Report Much Better Mental Health Than Others.

I guess this explains how they can sleep at night.

Gay Flap Flop

Who cares about this flap over the "gay question" asked at last night's debate—allegedly by a member of Clinton's campaign apparatus?

It is as if people think that candidates should not be subjected to challenging or hostile questions during a debate. Well, they should. We're electing a president, here, not a beauty queen (as was all too clear from the pallid and dour faces on display last night in Florida).

Retired Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr has some 40-odd years of experience in the U.S. military and is gay. He has as much of a right to ask questions as the next guy. Do the Republicans getting all bent out of shape over this really think that the debate questions should be nothing but softballs? ("Mr. Burns, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?")

All this hyperventilating (I'm looking at you, Drudge) looks suspiciously like an attempt to change the subject from the abysmally poor answers the candidates gave to Kerr's question.

If Kerr really isn't a military veteran, then you've got a scandal. Otherwise, quit yer whining!

Getting Away With Murder

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides in 2007—the lowest number in over 40 years.

How do you know I don't have a dirty bomb in one of my fists?

Something is obviously wrong, here. How could this be possible? Everybody knows that Mayor Giuliani was entirely responsible for the drop in NYC crime during his reign, thanks mostly to his manliness and his "I don't give a crap what you think" moxie. (Can you simultaneously have both manliness and moxie?) But America's Mayor left office in 2001 (not long after 9/11^TM, as he might have mentioned once or twice), back when there were 661 murders in the city—the lowest figure for his years in office.

If NYC murders continue at the same pace for the last month of the year, there will be 487 murders in 2007. That means Rudy's lowest total would be 35.7% higher than this year's figure.

This raises some troubling questions. Does this mean that Mayor Bloomberg is a better mayor than Rudy (the greatest mayor of anywhere for all time), or, gasp!, 35.7% more of a man? Or could it be that Rudy was a beneficiary of serving as mayor during a time of drastic crime reductions across the entire country and his tough-on-crime tactics were only a part of a much bigger puzzle?

If you take away his anti-crime superhero cape and couple that with his serial exaggeration of the super-big role he played in keeping America safe from Islamofascists (and their $10,000 donations), all of a sudden Rudy doesn't appear to be even slightly qualified to run for president.

And that just can't be.

Birds of a Feather?

See, the Bush White House does have something in common with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after all.

An Inside Job

The people who did this to a harmless Japanese tourist on the Amtrak from New York to Boston—these people, and the unaccountable bureaucrats and politicians to whom they answer, who live only by fear and fiat—are the true threat to America and its way of life.

Terrorists can blow up buildings and bomb trains. They can kill people, but they can't kill America. That can only be done by people with the power to shred the Constitution and plunge our government into a state of paranoid vigilance.

The "Truthers" have it all wrong about 9/11. The real inside job's right here.

Strange Bedfellows

And they say irony died on 9/11.

Today Rudy Giuliani accepted the endorsement of charlatan/preacher Pat Robertson. This is a little odd, since Pat Robertson believes that America "deserved" to be attacked on 9/11 because God had withdrawn his protection from our once-beatific nation on account of Internet pornography, secularism and, of course, abortion.

Rudy "9/11" Giuliani, as we all know, has built his entire national political reputation on the fact that unlike President Bush, he didn't instantly crap his pants when we got attacked. (Suffice it to say our standards for leadership have slipped a bit.)

During a GOP debate not long ago, Rudy lashed out at Ron Paul for having the temerity to suggest that certain US policies toward the Middle East may have played some part in the radicalization of the 9/11 terrorists. From TPM:

"I don't think I've ever heard that before...I would ask the Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that."

Actually, Rudy has heard something similar to that before. And far from asking the fellow who said it to withdraw his comment, today Rudy cheerfully accepted his endorsement. Go figure.

But, as they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. Especially when the politician in question is a shallow and cynical opportunist who (perhaps rightly) has no respect for the intelligence of the American voter and who regularly exploits the true victims and heroes of 9/11 for his own political gain.

Still, I never thought I'd see Giuliani get in bed with one of those Blame America First characters.

Especially not one who probably thinks that Giuliani is going to hell for being a Catholic. And a cross-dresser.

Moratorium

Drawing comparisons between liberals and fascists is a time-honored tradition on the right. It's not just lunatic exhibitionists like Ann Coulter, either. Even slightly less lunatic figures like Jonah Goldberg have gotten in on the act.

Maybe it's time to place a strict moratorium on this kind of rhetoric. It all rings a little false when the Republicans and their mouthpieces are simultaneously in full embrace of detention and interrogation techniques actually used by Stalin, Hitler and the Khmer Rouge.

Don't you think?

Vote For Me!

I'm happy to announce that I have inexplicably been named as a finalist for a 2007 Weblog Award. I am competing in the "you get as many hits in a year as Andrew Sullivan gets in 10 minutes" category. You may vote for me here. Chicago-style ballot box stuffing is strongly encouraged.

Here are a few "greatest" "hits" from the past year that I invite you to peruse. Please wait until after you cast your ballot, though; I don't want to lose any votes.

• A Moment of Stupidity, in which the author opines on school prayer. He's against it.
• Lost in Translation, in which the author meditates on the strange phenomenon of a Turkish politician named Ufuk Uras.
• Separated at Birth?, in which the author notes some striking and disturbing similarities between Kathy Griffin and Brian Eno circa 1973.
• 'What's Wrong With Being Sexy?', in which the author uses the words "sexy" and "Don Imus" in the same post without causing a rip in the space/time continuum.
• A Whiff of Bigotry, in which the author notices that Andrew Sullivan loses control of his critical think faculties when writing about Islam.
• The Myth of Global Warming in which the author glumly notes that global warming naysayers are trying to run out the clock on our lives for their own personal gain.
• Atheism Is Not a Religion, in which the author pops an evangelical bubble and chides some militant atheists just for good measure.

Curveball in the Dirt

Turns out that "Curveball", the secret intelligence source used by the US to bolster the WMD case against Iraq, wasn't a "prominent chemical engineer" after all. His name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan and he is a failed chemical engineering student who spun his tales of pure fiction to help gain asylum in Germany.

A presidential intelligence commission found that Curveball, who mostly told his stories to German intelligence officials who passed them on to the U.S., was a fabricator and an alcoholic.

It just goes to show: put your trust in a liar and an alcoholic and you'll end up in a horrible, pointless war.

We're still talking about Curveball, right?

The Worst Among Us

I despise Fred Phelps and his pathetic Westboro Baptist Church. If fact, I once referred to them as the worst people in America.

But doesn't this verdict set a dangerous precedent?

Free speech laws that fail to protect dissenting opinions—even horrible ones—are meaningless and ultimately protect no one.