Jul
31
Playing Spot The Straw Man
Filed Under American Politics
In a post on this disgusting and obviously racist e-mail by a Boston police officer, Sullivan doesn’t feel contented to criticise the officer involved for the content of the e-mail as any sane and normal person would do. No, for Sullivan this is an opportunity to attack all his favourite targets. Cheney, Palin, Christianists, Bush and FoxNews all feature in a post about one racist cop. Talk about projection. Here are the offending pieces:
Here it is, a fascinating glimpse into the actual attitudes and beliefs of a segment of American society, the part that strongly disapproves of Obama, the Palin base, the Fox News core.
Notice the Cheney view: that a suspect has no rights; and is always a suspect, always at the mercy of the state and government, with a duty to obey police and military power or face brutal consequences.
And the more you read, the more you realize how deep the Bush-Cheney legacy runs and how the torture and ‘enemy combatant’ state, celebrated nightly on Fox, easily seeps into domestic law enforcement.
And notice in the email how all of this is bound up with a defense of God. Notice the classic Christianist line
Andrew Sullivan is a very intelligent blogger. When he’s writing on the nature of conservatism from an intellectual standpoint, he’s an addictive read (although I don’t always agree with him). But posts like this are just idiotic. From one policeman referring to Gates as a “banana throwing jungle-monkey”, Sullivan has morphed this into a universally conservative sentiment. He makes no case to back this up, he doesn’t even attempt to. Andrew Sullivan is a hateful man. It is sad to see such intelligence go to waste.
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27 Responses to “Playing Spot The Straw Man”
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I thought it was interesting what Dick Morris had to say on Greta’s show last night about the ‘Beer Summit’. He said that Obama brought the policeman and the professor together to say to the world…that this was their problem to work out…that he had nothing to do with fanning racial discord.
I had been thinking the same thing. Obama is and probably has always been the kind of child and man that used everyone around him as scapegoats to get out of jams he created himself.
This fellow has a character flaw as deep as the Grand Canyon.
An American:
“I had been thinking the same thing. Obama is and probably has always been the kind of child and man that used everyone around him as scapegoats to get out of jams he created himself.”
I can see why you think my part should be played by an angry young black man It’s in part to when you blithely post stuff like that ignoring the record of the 43rd president who had all of his jams dealt with by daddy and daddy’s friends.
Israel,
So…you don’t agree with my assessment of Obama? Why is that? He has used or thrown everyone away that has gotten in his way..his fellow state senators, his grandmother, his minister, his professor friend, the Cambridge policeman…on and on.
Bush, although not perfect by a long shot…was faithful to his family, friends, the American people and his country.
Obama will step on millions of bodies if it helps elevate him to the top.
And you ARE angry…aren’t you. What’s wrong with being angry. Is that now not politically correct…has mind control already arrived.
I am angry too AND I will admit it…I am angry that my life, my children’s lives, my grandchildrens live’s, and my country are being destroyed by Obama and his socialist cronies…I am very, very angry.
Who do you want to portray you in C. Cabbie’s movie?
Israel,
I can’t wait to hear who you think should portray me…perhaps the Wicked Witch of the North from the Wizard of Oz or Nurse Ratchett from One Few over the Cuckoo’s Nest?
Opps! forgot my smiley signs
Obama’s revealing body language (updated and expanded))
July 31, 2009
This picture truly is worth at least a thousand words. More
Check out Obama’s and other’s body language on American Thinker…it says it all.
An American please anybody but Hugh Grant.
Israel should be played by the cool Brit Actor Idris Elba from Hackney East London
aka Stringer Bell from The Wire
http://www.hbo.com/thewire/cast/characters/stringer_bell.shtml
As for Verity
Louise Fletcher aka Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5NyyC-UjBM&feature=related
Kinda scarily like us lot.
An American:
Okay, now i’m pissed off.
We normally have a good to and fro but now l want you to give me examples of where President Obama “threw his grandmother, or his fellow state senators, or Professor Gates, or the lying offer Crowley (read the police report and see how it differs from the police 911 tape and the person who made the calls account) away” after they got in his way. Jerimiah Wright did’nt get in his way he said things that were inapropriate, and later disgraced himself with other comments. I would have walked away from him, why should the president be any different?
As for your deification of Bush, it’s complete bullshit. He was loyal to the people who voted for him, who gave him money, or his daddy’s friends like Salim Bin Laden who got him out of a jam. He was the President on watch when the worst terrorist attack on the US happened, and the President in charge during the diaster in New Orleans, and before you, cabbie, liberty, or OT try to say anything about that l bet you all the money in my bank account against all the money in your combined accounts that if there had been aq democratic president at that time there is NO FRICKING WAY you would not have left the blame for Katrina squarely on his doorstep.
Also it’s not the fact that Political Correctness stops me being the “Angry Black Man”, it’s the stupid sterotyping that stops people regarding what l say or taking it seriously because their first thought is “Oh, here we go again, black man gets angry”. It’s been a long used excuse to deflect crappy things said and done to black men in the past and shows no real sign of stopping.
Who would play you in a movie?
Well it wouldn’t be the woman who was upset because the house fell on her sister THX1138 has the perfect person for that role, and it sure as hell won’t be Ms Daisy!!!
Nah for you l have to say Betty White’s character Mrs Dolores Bickerman from the film Lake Placid:
http://uk.imdb.com/character/ch0014541/quotes
Or Kelly Bishop who played Emily Gilmore in the Gilmore Girls (my one guily pleasure):
http://uk.imdb.com/character/ch0016769/quotes
Two tough outspoken women who don’t take sas from anyone.
Israel,
It’s true that I am a strong woman with strong opinions. Why else would I ‘try’ to hold my own with all of C. Cabbie’s esteemed male bloggers.
That’s an interesting mix of women…I’m a heck of lot better looking and younger than Betty White and rarely use profanity unless it will help make a point. And I’ve never watched the Gilmore Girls…so I have no idea who Emily is…
Check out my Iowahawk site…there is profanity… it is hilarious…this Iowahawk fellow is a great satirist. And he shows an entirely different take on the Professor Gates episode…
You and I will never agree on anything political…but I do enjoy reading your take on things…and yes, I do read them…
I thought your Ms. Daisy quote was hilarious, thanks for my chuckle for the day.
You still didn’t say what actor you wanted to play you in C. Cabbies movie…you do want to be in it, don’t you?
Israel…you miss one point in the Katrina disaster under Bush. The worst area hit was New Orleans and it was Governor Kathleen Blanco, a DEMOCRAT who on Aug27th boasted that she had enough resources to cope with the problems faced by the hurricane. She later recanted and asked for federal help. She also refused to let Bush take over powers of the Home Guard, to stop the looting.
Ray Nagin the DEMOCRATIC mayor of New Orleans was equally tardy in requesting help and is more to blame for the chaos in that city than Bush.
He left the evacuation of the city until a mere 24 hours before Katrina landed, while waiting for an opinion about evacuation from the city’s attorney.
Something else Nagin and Blanco forgot in the heat of the moment is that state governors have to ASK for federal help before it’s provided. I quote:
“Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, explained on September 4 that “the way that emergency operations act under the law is, the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials. The federal government comes in and supports those officials.”[13]
On September 4, President Bush responded to Nagin’s criticism by focusing on the failings of state and local authorities…”
It was the bloody democrats running Louisiana and New Orleans that stuffed up Katrina my biased buddy!!!!!!
I see that Obama is being his usual ‘liberal’ self.
Ah yes…Welcome to Obama’s White House.
Obama has been charging white, rich CEO’s for the priviledge of lunching with him at his White House. That will show those greedy s.o.b.s and of course….it leaves Obama more of the US taxpayer’s money where he believes it belongs…with him.
Did you catch the picture of the Cambridge policeman helping the Harvard professor down those tricky White House steps…where was Obama? Well…good host that he was, he was 10 steps ahead. He just couldn’t wait to get rid of those suckers.
AnAm…give me a link to that picture of the cop helping gates will you?
O. Tony,
Here it is and it tell it all.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/07/obamas_revealing_body_language.html
O. Tony,
James Lewis scores a bullseye on his Birther’s article. Thanks, I missed it orignally.
OT:
Thank you but l don’t really require a reminder of what happened with Katrina thank you, l still remember the events vividly and l have also watched the Spike Lee HBO documentary:
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/
Have you seen that one?
The reasoning l have for putting the final blame on President Bush is a simple one. The president of the United States is the titular head of the country, whatever tin-foil hatwearing nutters think, so by that reasoning just as George H W Bush was deemed responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Andrew, and Bill Clinton was deemed reposible for the World Trade Centre attack 3 months into his presidency and people are already saying that it’s “Obama’s economy” and it’s “Obama’s war” then it’s safe to say that Katrina was George W Bush’s disaster.
I’ve already had to go through all this with see who will not be named by me on the Spectator blog so i’m really not interested in going through that again, thank you very much!!!
An American:
Been doing some thinking on the movie with all of us. THX1138 had a great idea with Idris Elba, but thinking on this l remember what an ex-girlfriend once said about me one of the few times she saw me sharply dressed:
‘You look like Wesley Snipes did in “Jungle Fever”!!’
Yep. That circa Wesley will do me, not the Blade 3 version!!
An American:
Went to Iowahawk.
Not impressed.
Reminded me of Fox News’s attempt at humour “The Half Hour News Hour”.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do that much better.
Israel,
You didn’t read it…or you wouldn’t say that…it is wonderful satire.
Stewart is a bright fellow and funny… Colbert on the other hand is not funny…I find him kind of pathetic, actually.
Israel,
I believe that THX suggested Idris Elba to play you…what do you think?
Israel
Wesley Snipes it is…BTW is he still in jail for tax evasion?
Israel,
I don’t think you understand…the US Constitution was written to have a balance of power to keep people with ambitions like Obama from usurping all of the power. Which he is in the process of doing as I write this.
In emergencies like Katrina…it is the state Governor that makes the main decisions to protect the state’s citizens, then a Mayor of a city. The US intervenes only when asked…requested in writing… by the Governor. The Louisiana Govenor did everything wrong including putting off requesting federal help and aid…until things got really bad. 90% of the New Orleans fiasco belongs to her (and she lost her Govenorship because of it) and the Mayor. Mississippi was much hit much worse…but their Republican Governor did everything right and although the damage was 100 times worse than Louisiana over a much larger area, no one died in Mississippi. The difference from competence and incompetence, which seems the the only thing that liberals are good at.
AnAm…well said! Israel didn’t want to expand on the Katrina topic because he had “discussed it at length on The Spectator”, a pretty lame excuse for squirming out of that fact that he is wrong about Bush on that score!
An Amrican & OT,
You are wrong and the reports give credence to the fact that the Bush Administration was both slack and slow in response. Newt Gingrich thought so, see the last para in the piece I have put up from CM&D
I still cringe when I recall the stunned mullet* look that Bush evinced when being given that video conference briefing concerning Hurricane Katrina.
An expression use Down Under when a person looks like a fish, in this case a mullet, that has been landed and whacked on the side of the head, hence looking somewhat dazed and confused!
Here is a major extract from Source Watch at the Center for Media and Democracy cocerning Katrina see entire @
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George_W._Bush:_Hurricane_Katrina
Chain of Events
Hurricane Katrina: Weather Warnings
Louisiana and Mississippi Requested DoD Assistance
In a special Department of Defense (DoD) briefing via satellite telephone September 1, 2005, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, said that on Friday, August 26, 2005, as the hurricane was approaching, the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi requested “additional assistance.” The DoD established “coordinating offices” in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana over Friday and Saturday, August 26 and 27. JTF headquarters was established in Mississippi, “with a forward cell of the 5th United States Army in Louisiana.” JTF-Katrina itself was established on Sunday, August 28, with Lt. Gen. Honoré as task force commander.
When Bush Knew
At 4:00 PM on Sunday, August 28th, “National Hurricane Center Meteorologist Chris Lauer said Katrina was still on track to hit the New Orleans area as a devastating Category 5 hurricane as its eye comes ashore” on Monday morning, August 29th, Gordon Russell wrote in The Times-Picayune.
Also, on Sunday, August 28th, Max Mayfield, still “worried about Hurricane Katrina … even talked about the force of Katrina during a video conference call to President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.”
“In his first extensive interview since resigning as FEMA director” on September 12th, Michael D. Brown “declined to blame President Bush or the White House for his removal or for the flawed response,” New York Times’ David D. Kirkpatrick and Scott Shane wrote September 15, 2005.
“But Mr. Brown’s account, in which he described making ‘a blur of calls’ all week to Mr. Chertoff, Mr. Card and Mr. Hagin, suggested that Mr. Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly,” they wrote.
Caught on Tape
The Associated Press reported March 1, 2006, that film footage it had obtained, “along with seven days of transcripts of briefings … show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.
“Linked by secure video, Bush expressed a confidence on Aug. 28 that starkly contrasted with the dire warnings his disaster chief and numerous federal, state and local officials provided during the four days before the storm.”
“In dramatic and agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief that Hurricane Katrina could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans’ Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to video footage,” AP reported. “Bush didn’t ask any questions during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: ‘We are fully prepared’.” Video tape link on page. Also see more media coverage
Flooding in New Orleans
On Monday, August 29, 2005, “New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said on NBC’s Today Show there was already ’significant flooding’ in the city, most of which lies below sea level. … ‘I’ve gotten reports this morning that there’s already water coming over some of the levee systems,’ he said.”
Late on Monday morning, a “large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new ‘hurricane proof’ Old Hammond Highway bridge,” gave way “in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north,” Doug MacCash and James O.Byrne reported in The Times-Picayune. “The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east.”
Inexplicable is the fact that President Bush incorrectly told reporters in his September 2, 2005, press conference in Biloxi, Mississippi, that the “levees broke on Tuesday in New Orleans.”
When White House Actually Knew About Flooding
“Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding” from FEMA official Marty Bahamonde “reached the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight,” Eric Lipton wrote in the February 10, 2006, New York Times.
Michael Brown said in a February 9, 2006, telephone interview that “he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to,” Lipton wrote.
Vacation as Usual
“On the day after Hurricane Katrina was declared to be not as bad as originally feared, it became clear that the effects of the storm had been, after all, beyond devastation,” a New York Times Op-Ed announced August 31, 2005. “But this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation.”
“George Bush stayed on vacation. He didn’t get back to work. When the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history attacked us, George Bush STAYED ON VACATION. Why did the federal government stumble so badly on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday? Because on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, George Bush stayed on vacation in Crawford, Texas. On Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, vice president Dick Cheney STAYED ON VACATION in Jackson, Wyoming. On Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, Sec. of State Condi Rice WENT ON VACATION in New York City and went to a splashy Broadway musical and bought obscenely expensive shoes. She went shopping,” Michael Giltz of AMERICAblog wrote September 5, 2005.
“No need to explain why the President was golfing on Tuesday, playing guitar with country singers on a Tuesday while New Orleans died. Which would be fine if not for the inconvenient fact that the levees were breached on Monday, discovered on Monday, and confirmed on Monday. Monday was the day the levees broke,” Izzy wrote September 3, 2005, in the blog Unbossed.
Moreover, “there were no calls for national unity, no experts explaining the state of things, no marshaling of buses and boats and helicopters. Our national leaders were absent. Our national pastimes went on. The experts who were on the news did not speak of the levee, the pumps, the flood, the emergency. They spoke of the revenue, the casinos, the oil, the markets,” Izzy added.
Cheney Came Back “Early”
When Cheney was asked by reporter Roger Simon “why he did not return from his vacation earlier than [Thursday, September 1, 2005,] three days after the hurricane hit, the vice president replied: ‘I came back four days early.’
“And you can see why Cheney is so testy,” Simon wrote in the September 12, 2005, US News & World Report, “He had to miss four days of his vacation to help a bunch of people who probably had never voted Republican in their lives.”
Bush Emerged and Made His Worst Speech Ever
On Tuesday, August 30, 2005, while delivering his third speech “in just over a week defending his Iraq policies,” while “standing against a backdrop of the imposing USS Ronald Reagan, the newest aircraft carrier in the Navy’s fleet,” President Bush answered “growing anti-war protests with a fresh reason for American troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country’s vast oil fields that he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.”
It was also announced during the speech that, due to the “devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina” in the Gulf Coast, he “was cutting his August vacation short to return to Washington to personally oversee the federal response effort.”
However, it was not until the following day, on Wednesday, August 31, 2005, long past the time when Katrina had arrived, struck New Orleans, and moved inland away from the Gulf Coast, that President Bush actually made even a cursory 35-minute flyover in Air Force One to view the devastation in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Note: Newsweek incorrectly reported that President Bush made his flyover on Tuesday, August 30th.
This was “the perfect metaphor for his entire presidency,” Arianna Huffington wrote August 31, 2005: “detached, disconnected, and disengaged. Preferring to take in America’s suffering — whether caused by the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina — from a distance. In this case, 2,500 feet.”
Upon his arrival in Washington the same day, President Bush “bounced off the helicopter on the White House lawn carrying his dog under his arm (where was that little inner voice saying, ‘ditch the dog’?), and came across as an idiot in his address to the nation’s television cameras. Partly, this is the trivial matter of the presidential smirk; he often looks as if he is smiling even when he isn’t. But it was also his jarringly upbeat tenor. With every word contradicted by the television news pictures of hopeless squalor, he said: ‘I’m confident that, with time, you can get your life back in order, new communities will flourish, the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it.’ The next day he made things worse by pleading with Americans: ‘Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it’,” John Rentoul wrote in the September 4, 2005, Independent (UK).
A September 1, 2005, editorial in the New York Times commented:
“George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.”
National Emergency
The degree of frustration on the ground with unfolding events was expressed the following day, September 2, 2005, by Terry Ebbert, the head of emergency operations for New Orleans:
“‘This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace,’ said Ebbert. He said it had taken too long to evacuate the Superdome, a sports complex that quickly became a squalid shelter for tens of thousands of storm victims.
“‘FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control,’ he said, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ‘We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.’”
“Even Republicans were criticizing Bush and his administration for the sluggish relief effort. ‘I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?’ said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich” on September 2, 2005.
An American and OT:
I’m NOT squirming out of anything, i’m just not going to go through it all again about Katrina. It is one of the few times when posting comments where l was actually upset by some of the callous responses by so called “christians” and “compassionate, big tent” conservatives. I swore to myself then that l would not allow myself to get in such an emotional state over any other subject (but failed with the torture debate) and l was un willing to do what Hayward has done, ie repost all the links and reports on what happened, who was told when, and what their response was. Kanye West summed up a lot of the feeling of the black community when he went off script at the Katrina benefit and the reposne from the media commentators on the right was interesting. No calls for boycotting his music, no four people panels discussing why he hates america (meaning why he was against Bush) just like the Dixie Chicks faced. It seemed to me that the right wing media, expecially the boys and girls at Fox agreed with Kanye.
I have to thank Hayward for his efforts and l keep forgetting one thing. as much as Michael Brown was an unqualified crony, l remember a video shown about the hours before Katrina WHERE BROWN TELLS THE WHITE HOUSE HOW BAD THINGS WERE GOING TO BE AND THAT PEOPLE SHOULD GET READY TO RESPOND. I don’t know why he himself didn’t remember to do his job or demand to speak to the President while on his vaction but his and Bush’s cupability in the disaster is probably the best example of the hypocrisy of right wingers who claim that people see Obama as some sort of religious figure but geneflunct everytime they think of Bush’s “Great Work”.
But onto something else. The always great Bill Maher on the increase of teh stoopid:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/node/30105
Israel
Bill Maher having a go at “birthers”. Oh the irony:
Strange how you never felt so strongly about the liberal birthers over Palin (Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Bill Maher) at last count. You are very selective in your condemnation.
Not really. I just didn’t think it was a subject that had much merit.
The thing that you are ignoring in your claims of irony is that on the left, this subject IS DEAD. The only person who makes any reference to it (and that was when challenged about a statement he made on the “birthers”) was the right winger Sullivan who said that if he was asking questions about Palin and Trig he had to ask questions about the “birther” claims. A stoopid reasoning but then he IS one of your lot, no matter how much you guys try to deny it.
But riddle me this , Cabman (i’m sorry l cannot call you the great detective’s name. The Dark Knight stands alone):
Who in congress on the left or right would go on record and deny or question Trig’s birth today?
As you haver acknowledged Factcheck.org and Snopes have gone through this thing with a fine tooth comb and found that there is no merit or substance to the story yet 53% of surveyed republicans refuse to believe or answered “don’t know” when asked if President Obama was born in the US. This is a problem festering TODAY.
Just as you like to try to equate this “birther” crap to “truthers” and the Sullivan/Trig thing the fact is that this nonsense will damage the party if it continues, and while those of the base in the region continue to believe:
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2009/08/01/poll-most-birthers-are-neo-confederate-republicans/
they make it harder for the rest to be seen as rational as they struggle to keep them happy and not ailenate the sane people in the US.
Israel
I wondered how long it was before you were going to mention the Daily Kos poll. That should tell you all you need to know about how much value I place in that!!!