Poor Georgie
Poor George. Gone are the days when everything was laid out into two nice distinct categories. Black and white. Good and bad. Dead or alive. You're either with us or against us. When it comes to the issue of immigration, the Bush administration has suddenly found itself navigating the brownish waters of shit creek. Without a paddle.
Problem is, George and Co. ain't used to nuance, and it shows. That's why we find now find ourselves "led" by a man who thinks we should put up a wall on the Mexican border - except not all the way across the border. A man who thinks that the national anthem should only be sung in English, but that pronouncements from the White House should be published in English and Spanish. A man who thinks that immigrants should speak English, but who, er, doesn't think that immigrants should necessarily speak English. A man who proposes deploying 6,000 National Guard troops to the southern border and then insists that "The United States is not going to militarize the southern border." Is any of this making sense to you? Me either.
Let's try to clarify. Last week George W. Bush visited Yuma, Arizona, where he told reporters, "Right here we're at a place where we're using fencing. And it makes sense to use fencing here. It doesn't make sense to use fencing in other parts of the border."
Way to pander! I'm sure all the people who think that we should put up a fence are now as equally satisfied as the people who think that putting up a fence is a stupid idea. Still, at least he got to take a ride in a dune buggy and "grinned while the driver spun it around in two circles in the sand." So the trip wasn't a total waste.
Meanwhile, according to CNN, "The White House voiced support for two provisions that cleared on Thursday. One declared English to be the national language of the United States. The other deemed it the 'common unifying language.'" New White House press secretary Tony Snow announced that, "What the president has said all along is that he wants to make sure that people who become American citizens have a command of the English language. It's as simple as that."
Really? That's not what Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says. Last week he told reporters that "The president has never supported making English the national language. I don't see the need to have legislation or a law that says English is going to be the national language."
I'll tell you what though - at least with all this confusion over immigration, we're not talking about the war in Iraq any more. So I guess we can consider that problem solved. Mission accomplished, if you will.
posted by Name Held by Request | 10:21 AM
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Last week Karl Rove explained why George W. Bush's poll numbers are sailing somewhere just south of Cape Horn. In case you were wondering, it's not Our Great Leader's fault that he's so unpopular. "People like this president," Rove said during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. "They're just sour right now on the war."
See? People like the president, they're just sour on the war. And the war is hardly the president's responsibility now is it?
Our Great Leader obviously took this bit of spin on board because he gave the same answer during an interview with David Gregory last week. Unfortunately for George, Mr. Gregory had a good comeback:
GREGORY: Let me ask you about your leadership. In the most recent survey, your disapproval rating is now one point lower than Richard Nixon's before he resigned the presidency. You are laughing.
BUSH: I'm not laughing –
GREGORY: Why? Why do you think that is?
BUSH: Because we are at war, and war unsettles people. Listen, we got a great economy. We've added 5.2 million jobs in the last two and a half years. People are unsettled.
GREGORY: But they're not just unsettled sir. They disapprove of the job you're doing.
Indeed. And despite what Karl Rove says, it seems that these days the American people aren't that keen on Bush personally either. According to Knight Ridder, "A drop in his personal popularity, as measured by several public polls, has shadowed the decline in Bush's job-approval ratings and weakened his political armor when he and his party need it most." Oh dear.
See, it turns out that when Karl Rove said that "People like this president," he was referring to an internal RNC poll showing Bush's personal approval rating (as opposed to job approval rating) above 60 percent. Public polls, on the other hand, have Bush's personal approval between 29 and 42 percent depending on which one you read. For Karl, it's simple: "The polls I believe are the polls that get run through the RNC," he said.
Unfortunately you're out of luck if you want to see a copy of this very special poll - for some mysterious reason the RNC is refusing to release it. So you'll just have to trust them.
Ha ha!
I think it's time to cast our minds back for a moment to the Great Clinton Cock Hunt of the 1990s. Ah, those were the days - when the most egregious thing a president could do was get a little extra-curricular nookie in the White House. While Bill Clinton never lied the country into an illegal war, outed CIA agents for political gain, or wiretapped millions of American citizens without a warrant, his penis was of course responsible for evil-doing on a grand scale and had to be stopped by any means necessary.
I know what you're thinking: if Republicans put the same amount of time and effort into catching Osama bin Laden that they spent investigating the presidential member, perhaps we might have caught the guy by now. Priorities, people, priorities! That penis was a weapon of mass destruction far more deadly than anything Saddam Hussein possessed. Er, didn't possess. And anyway, we all know that Republicans care so deeply about the "rule of law" that if they had not tied up the government for years with investigations and impeachment proceedings over a private affair between two consenting adults while the 9/11 attacks were being planned, it would have been plain un-American.
But back to the issue at hand: Robert Ray. He was the prosecutor who took over from Ken Starr after Starr finally masturbated himself unconscious in October 1999, and the investigation eventually fizzled out in 2002 after ten long years of crotch-sniffing.
And two weeks ago Ray "turned himself in to police ... on charges of stalking a former girlfriend," according to the Washington Post. It seems that "Ray's former girlfriend, a 40-year-old Manhattan woman, filed a complaint that he persisted in sending e-mail and knocking on her door months after she broke off their relationship." Police charged him with a misdemeanor and he's due in court on June 12.
I guess after years of stalking Bill Clinton, it was just hard to let go.
Let's cross the pond for a moment and stop by the offices of the British National Party (BNP), the UK's top organization for insane right-wing bigots. Many American wingnuts would feel quite at home in the BNP, considering their penchant for wanting to rid the country of anyone who isn't white and doesn't speak English. But let's be fair: the BNP isn't a racist organization. How do I know this? Because they told me so!
We wouldn't want asylum seekers from Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia or wherever, even if they did bring material benefits, because even the greatest such gains would be more than offset by the fact that their very presence in such numbers will inevitably transform our society, changing Britain and the British peoples into something which is not British and not what is politely called 'European', and impolitely called 'white'. Conversely, if the remaining 40,000 whites of overwhelmingly British stock facing brutal persecution in Robert Mugabe's Marxist hell-hole all wanted to come to Britain, we would welcome them with open arms. They are our kith and kin, they share our values and our culture, and they would integrate immediately and earn their own living.
We believe not just that our people are different from others, but that such genuine diversity is worth preserving. It is not a matter of 'superiority' or 'inferiority'. Thus, for example, as racial realists we have no choice but to accept the wealth of scientific data which shows that East Asians – Japanese or Chinese for example – who live in Western societies have lower average crime rates and higher average intelligence levels than us whites, and that these differences are genetically determined, persisting even when factors such as socio-economic status are taken into account. But recognising these facts does not mean that we would welcome the arrival of several million Japanese or Chinese immigrants.
Nor even does it mean that we think that it is a good thing for even a single person of European stock to have so much as one child with a Japanese or Chinese. We do not, because such a union mixes what are not meant to be mixed, destroys two ancient family lines, and undermines two equally great but entirely separate cultures. And we know that most self-respecting Japanese, Chinese and Africans feel exactly the same way.
This does not make us 'racists'.
Uh, if you say so. But of course non-whites aren't the only people that the BNP would like to see the back of. From the same article quoted above, we find this passage:
So what of those who mix? Well, once again, let’s get something straight. We're not going to impose laws against miscegenation, still less persecute anybody, but neither do we subscribe to the convenient fiction that it's a good thing. It is not, it is a bad thing, and we condemn it, as genuine nationalists of all cultures condemn it because it destroys their own people too.
There is a close analogy here with homosexuality. No one knows what causes some individuals to do what the majority of any healthy society places on a scale somewhere between distasteful and abhorrent, but some individuals will behave in that way whatever the bulk of popular opinion. But there is a world of difference between having a very small proportion of the population behave such ways because that is their natural inclination, and the present circumstances where such "alternative lifestyle choices" are presented as valid – even superior – by the most powerful behavioural modification programme in human history.
Surprise! They hate gays too. All of which brings me to the point of this item. It was recently revealed that the BNP's London organizer Richard Barnbrook "has angrily denied that he produced and directed a gay porn film." Yes, Barnbrook apparently has production and direction credits in HMS Discovery: A Love Story - here's a quick synopsis, courtesy of The Age:
The film, shot in a river, includes men undressing and fondling each other, full frontal nudity, naked men "clawing passionately at each other's bodies" and one performing a sex act on another, the paper said. The pictures, including scenes of flagellation, are set to lines of "erotic poetry" said to have been scripted by Mr Barnbrook and another man.
Hmm. Barnbrook's excuse? "It was an art film, end of story. It was not a bloody porn film."
Well that clears that up! So rest assured that senior BNP member Richard Barnbrook is not buying into "the most powerful behavioural modification programme in human history." He just likes to make films about men boinking each other in rivers.
Bad news for Republicans: The Know-Nothing faction of the party base has already forgotten the “war”
on Christmas and other chimerical dangers. As memories of 9 / 11 fade, they may even be losing vigilance
in the “war” on terror. The latest threat to the purity of our precious bodily fluids is brown-skinned Meskins.
If we’re not vigilant, those swarthy fellows mowing your neighbor’s yard are apt to rise up and sing
“The Star-Spangled Banner” in Spanish. But wait. Hasn’t it been reported that Bush campaigned with a
mariachi band doing precisely that ? Yes, although the White House denies that the National Anthem was
performed in Spanish at Bush’s inauguration. That was “America the Beautiful,” they say. Big difference.
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