Gay activists were understandably angered by this announcement, and they made that anger felt. Joe Solomonese, head of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s most prominent gay rights organization, issued a public letter to Obama calling his decision a "genuine blow to LGBT Americans." The denizens of the Huffington Post have been expressing their rage, and the popular gay blog Queerty went so far as to claim that Obama "spat on the gays." Adorable lesbian Rachel Maddow called it "the first big mistake of his post-election politicking."

Color me not outraged. In part because amidst all the righteous indignation (something that professional gay activists never seem to lack) over Obama’s selection of Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation was his simultaneous choice of Joseph Lowery, a black pastor, civil rights leader and, important for the purposes of the controversy du jour, gay civil union supporter, to deliver the benediction, or news that Tammy Baldwin, the only openly-gay Congresswoman, was named an honorary co-chairman of Obama’s Inauguration Committee. "I’ll leave those who are upset to their calling," Lowery remarked when asked for his views on l’affaire Warren, suggesting that the perpetually-outraged gay Left might want to reconsider their behavior with what they claim their life’s work to be. Did the dons of the gay lobby ever stop to question whether Lowery and Baldwin’s presence on the dais would similarly upset the Bible-thumpers? Not for nothing did John Gallagher and Chris Bull call the gay movement and the religious right, "Perfect Enemies." More than one person has seriously suggested to me that the Reverend Fred Phelps, he of "God Hates Fags" fame, might actually be a plant on the gay rights lobby’s payroll.  

Invocation, benediction, what’s the difference? Apparently, a lot. "The person selected to deliver the invocation has the honor of serving as the spiritual representative for the entire nation," writes Leah McElrath Renna. Perhaps I missed it, but there is no "spiritual representative" of our constitutional republic, and Renna does her cause no bit of good by ascribing such official significance upon a private citizen like Warren, a man whom most Americans did not know about until gay rights activists raised such a stink, and upon further investigation sounds like a pretty nice guy not deserving of all the insults heaped upon him. The uproar over Warren has the detriment of confirming one of the worst stereotypes of homosexuals: hysteria. That’s because Warren is the lowest common denominator of the socially conservative evangelicals. Up until the Proposition 8 fight, his political involvement extended to such hot-button, "culture war" issues as fighting African AIDS and poverty. Aside from the incest/bestiality slip (which was an effort, however clumsily executed, to make a slippery slope argument rather than a serious attempt at morally equating daughter/dog love to homosexuality) Warren has never really used his high public profile or pulpit to preach hatred of gay people, something that can hardly be said of the long list of Elmer Gantryesque charlatans the GOP has surrounded itself with over the past 30 years. Asked what was a "greater threat to the American family – divorce or gay marriage," Warren answered, "That’s a no brainer. Divorce. There’s no doubt about it," which makes him far more honest than most politically involved conservative evangelical preachers. Count me as being a member of the pragmatist gay camp (not to be confused with theater, dance or other camps), encapsulated by my friend Chris Crain, who writes, "It is a stroke of political brilliance to recruit a conservative megapastor in support of a president-elect who is arguably the most pro-gay, pro-choice and progressive in our history."

The problem for gay activists is that many Americans agree with Rick Warren when it comes to same-sex love. And these people, numbering in the over 100 million range, are not going to be budged in their views by hectoring activists who call them bigots (even though that’s what many of them are). Now, I’m of the firm belief that these debates will be moot in 20 years, when the older generation kicks the bucket and the near-universally gay-accepting Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers take the reins of government. Whatever political victories they feel that they’ve won from Proposition 8 and the other marriage amendments across the country, the anti-gay forces of reaction in this country are gasping their last breath. The honest ones among them acknowledge this, if not publicly. We will hasten the day of gay equality by engaging respectfully with them and winning over the persuadable ones (many of whom, I bet, are followers of Warren), rather than calling them names.  

In that vein, gays would do well to store their gunpowder for the truly significant legislative battles that will no doubt be fought in the years ahead. Getting rid of the odious and national security-weakening "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" regulation, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act, passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and Matthew Shepard hate crimes law will all be possible over the next four years now that we have a Democratic president and Congress committed – at least on paper – to effecting these positive changes. If gays had given Obama some much-needed slack on Rick Warren, perhaps he’d feel a political debt to us when these truly significant issues come up for debate. But how sincere – or politically threatening – will gay complaints about administration foot-dragging on issues that actually affect millions of gay and lesbian people sound in light of the unwarranted outrage that’s been generated over the guy who’s going to deliver a two-minute reading that no one will remember? Attacking the President-Elect who campaigned as the most pro-gay candidate in American history over an issue as irrelevant as this one, I fear, makes us look like we’re crying wolf. And we all know how that fable ended.

The post The Gay Community Needs to Calm Down About Rick Warren appeared first on Jewcy.

Mr. Curry had lunch with Mr. Lieberman in December 2005 and warned about the antiwar sentiment sweeping Connecticut. “This is not an argument over the capital gains tax,” Mr. Curry recalled telling him. “This is the biggest foreign policy mistake in the history of the country.” Mr. Lieberman, who often praised the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, shrugged off this advice. He saw the war as an epic struggle against Islamic terrorism; bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either.

Actually, in October of 2003–a mere six months after the successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein–Lieberman called for Rumsfeld's resignation, long before it was fashionable. Here's what he said rather plainly on CBS News:

The uniform military feel deeply that he doesn't respect them, doesn't listen to them. The judgment about whether he stays or not is up to President Bush, but if I were president, I'd get a new Secretary of Defense.

Then there's the snarky, throw-away line stating that Lieberman came around to the belief, circa 2005, that "bombing Iran might not be a bad idea, either." Never mind the sneering tone: does Michael Powell have Lieberman on record (or even off) uttering anything along lines indicating support for "bombing Iran?" Lieberman has never called for the bombing of Iran. In fact, he delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week in which he called for tougher sanctions so as to prevent military action. The assertion that Joe Lieberman thinks attacking Iran is "not a bad idea" is an outright lie. And it raises a question: why is establishment media now so keen on attacking anyone with views on military intervention to the right of Barack Obama's?

Related: The whole premise of this article is a factual error.

The post New York Times Fact-Checkers Drop the Ball on Lieberman appeared first on Jewcy.

This is all wonderful news…I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

In addition to accusing Gary Kasparov of being a former KGB agent and a "crook," Fischer also had these delightful observations about Jews:

The Jews are a "filthy, lying bastard people" bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust ("a money-making invention"), the mass murder of Christian children ("their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies"), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin' Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).

Fischer died last week at the age of 64, and he'll probably be remembered for his radical views as much as his prowess as a chess champion. His ravings about Jews came to mind as I had just published excerpts from Ron Paul's newsletters on The New Republic website in which Fischer was praised as an "American hero." A cursory investigation reveals who might have been responsible for such passages.

The historian Ronald Radosh sent me the following email last week, recounting his experiences with Murray Rothbard, one of the leading lights of American libertarianism and an intellectual guru to Ron Paul:

You probably know that at one point I co-authored a book with Murray Rothbard that the Von Mises institute has now scanned and put on the web. I had been good friends with him and used to see him a lot during the so-called "left-right" alliance he forged in the 60's. At that point the concentration was on the Vietnam war. I broke with him and indeed never saw him again a few years later. He started to publish a mimeographed newsletter (oh those days before xerox copiers, blogs and the web) that had a very limited circulation. He would give me copies. I wished I had saved them. They were viciously anti-Semitic (even though he was born Jewish he converted and became a Baptist) and anti-Israel. That had never come through when I was associated with him, and I was stunned. He had some crazy analogy that I can't quite remember that put Cambodia and the slaughter there with Israel. I think he took a Chomsky like attitude towards Pol Pot and argued in print that those attacking Pol Pot and the Cambodian slaughter were doing so in order to gain sympathy with Israel through the back door.

For more on Rothbard's extreme anti-statism — so extreme that it is indistinguishable from far-left anti-Americanism — check out the CATO Institute's Tom Palmer, who has been tracking the "fever swamps" of the libertarian movement for years.

Repulsive comments such as the ones above, according to Rothbard — in an essay published in a collection entitled, "The Irrepressible Rothbard" — are at worst, "not Politically Correct." Rothbard had immense admiration for Fischer, a strange person to admire. But the two men had one thing in common; they were both Jews who had tried to erase any sense of their heritage, a severing that manifested itself in the form of self-hating anti-Semitism.

The post Bobby Fischer “a Hero,” Ron Paul’s Newsletter Once Said appeared first on Jewcy.

McAfee makes only passing mention of the man who founded Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Karenga, né Ronald Everett. In her family-focused narrative, the man who created the holiday and his reasons for doing so are of negligible importance. She suspects, however, that readers are at least somewhat familiar with the radical origins of Kwanzaa, but dispatches this criticism with mockery, criticizing those "the naysayers who mock Kwanzaa as a pseudo holiday, created to annoy white people and kept alive to peddle cards and kente cloth." In a serious discussion of Kwanzaa, however, the holiday's founder–and his ideology–deserve a little more than mere passing mention. Karenga came to prominence in the 1960's when he founded the United Slaves Organization (US), a group more radical than the Black Panthers, on the UCLA campus. The outfit was little more than a political cult and Karenga possessed all the traits of a political cult leader: megalomania, paranoia, and an inclination to lash out violently against his opponents, a black nationalist Joseph Smith if you will. All these traits were on display during a May 9, 1970 incident in which Karenga ordered the torture of two women he believed to have been an informant (Karenga himself allegedly beat the woman with an electrical cord). Here is a newspaper account:

According to a Los Angeles Times account of testimony published at the time of the trial, Karenga and the other men forced the women to remove their clothes, and beat them with an electrical cord and a karate baton. The men put a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and against her face, and they squeezed one woman's big toe in a vise, the Times reported. Karenga's former wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified he sat on one woman's stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose, according to the Times.

"Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know," Karenga allegedly told the women, the Times reported Oct. 7, 1970, shortly after Karenga's arrest.

Jones said during the trial that Karenga initiated the attacks because he suspected her and Davis of trying to poison him with "crystals."

But it's not just the violence which renders Kwanzaa a dubious "holiday;" many traditional Judeo-Christian celebrations are rooted in acts of violence, Chanukkah being an example (though that violence was arguably righteous, as opposed to Karenga's attempt to re-enact Hostel). It is Kwanzaa's separatist, Marxist ideology which ought to give African-Americans pause before embracing it. Here are the 7 principles celebrated during Kwanzaa:umoja, or unity; kujichagulia, or self-determination; ujima, or collective work and responsibility; ujamaa, or cooperative economics; kuumba, or creativity; and imani, or faith. "Creativity" and "faith" are wonderful things to celebrate, "cooperative economics" not so much. They haven't worked so well in Africa, to be sure.

Rick Rosendall explains how Kwanzaa opposes the American creed here, working in arguments by one of the greatest, yet under-appreciated, 20th century figures, Bayard Rustin:

Our destinies are inextricably intertwined by our shared history. Whether they like it or not, the heritage of white Americans contains African threads; and whether they like it or not, the heritage of black Americans contains European ones. You do not shed the European portion of your heritage merely because you take an Afrocentric name, nor do you give up your stake in the greater society of which you remain a part. In addition to colonialism (which existed in Africa before the white man came), Western heritage includes free markets and individual liberties, as well as the idea that all men are created equal.

Rejecting that idea four decades ago as a sham, Karenga and other radicals adopted a revolutionary posture and an Afrocentric program. In doing so they repudiated integrationists like civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, who pointed out that Black Studies "will hardly improve [black students'] intellectual competence or their economic power." In the campaigns by Karenga and his comrades to "Buy Black" and create autonomous communities, the language of liberation was a poor substitute for development capital. As Rustin wrote in his 1970 essay "The Failure of Black Separatism," "The call for community control in fact represents an adjustment to inequality rather than a protest against it."

Karenga is your garden variety racial-nationalist thug, a mix between Louis Farrakhan and Amiri Baraka. But this doesn't matter to McAfee, who simply wants people to understand that Kwanzaa was "a way to bring our ragtag family together and nudge us away from the false idols and commercial trickery of the holiday season." Yes, the principle of "cooperative economics" may disavow the obsession with merchandise that have come to mark the holiday season, but Kwanzaa is not lacking in the "false idols" department, black nationalism and Marxism being two pretty major gods that failed. McAfee should at least have the honesty to reconcile the actual reasons the holiday was created — and, I imagine, the reasons why whatever few actual adherents it has celebrate it today — with whatever beneficent characteristics she imputes to it and lay off implying that its critics are somehow crypto-racists.

Last, and least, is the faux-holiday's obvious ripoff of Chanukah that makes Kwanzaa just plane lame: 7 days instead of 8, but the candelabra is still there.

The post A Short History of Kwanzaa appeared first on Jewcy.

Desmond Tutu is indeed a man of great stature; his criticism of the African National Congress for its unforgivable policies in support of Robert Mugabe and its AIDS denialism, as well as his calls for African Christians to be more accepting of homosexuality, have been exemplary and courageous. But he's not perfect, and happens to have rather odious views about the Middle East. I feel no amount of intellectual inconsistency embracing him for his honesty on Zimbabwe, AIDS and gays, while simultaneoulsy finding his words about Israel and Jews outrageous.

Lest my interlocutors at the time felt this avowal was a cop-out, I'll take this moment to praise Tutu for his latest moral declaration: lashing out at the Anglican Church for its "obsession" with gays. The years-long rift and coming split in the Church between its liberal, Western wings and the culturally conservative global south has not been lost on Tutu:

"Our world is facing problems — poverty, HIV and Aids — a devastating pandemic, and conflict," Tutu said. "God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another. "In the face of all of that, our church, especially the Anglican church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality."

"If God as they say is homophobic I wouldn't worship that God."

Dem's fighting words. Contrast Tutu with Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, who has to compete with Muslims for African converts (which is not to suggest that he doesn't believe the homophobic hatred he regularly spews) and has called homosexuality a "chronic aberration." No word yet on whether African Anglicans plan on matching the head of the Ugandan Muslim community's plan for a gay island.

The post The Good Tutu appeared first on Jewcy.

First read the post, which is thankfully brief. Yglesias's premise is that the Clinton administration was doing a fine job tackling international terrorism until the Bush administration came into power. This contention — while debatable — is significant only insofar as Yglesias wishes to cast doubts on his own sanguine assumptions about the competency of the Clinton administration (perhaps this will this merit him an "Yglesias Award" nomination, inexplicably doled out by Andrew Sullivan for those writers daring to express views at odds with their own political constituencies). Yglesias links to a 6-year-old news story about Clinton's then-outgoing United Nations Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who, in final statements to the world body before the inauguration of George W. Bush stated that containment of Hussein, "while it is far from satisfactory," was nonetheless necessary, expressed frustration with Hussein's refusal to allow weapons inspectors into the country, and promised that the administration of George W. Bush, like that of his father, would also have to deal with the lingering problem of the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad. There's really nothing here that's in the least controversial or was ever disputed by knowledgeable observers, except, perhaps, by the likes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, and, it now seems, Matthew Yglesias.

To Yglesias, Holbrooke — now a senior foreign policy advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton and a sure bet for Secretary of State should she become president — is damaged goods because, like nearly everyone else at the time (including, one should note, Yglesias himself), he believed that Saddam's "willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times." This statement does not at all indicate support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent occupation of Iraq (again, which Yglesias supported). It's merely a boilerplate expression of the policy of the Clinton administration (under whose watch the Iraq Liberation Act, making "regime change" United States policy, passed overwhelmingly in the House, unanimously in the Senate, and was enacted into law).

Though he doesn't come out and say it, this is a not-so-subtle attempt on Yglesias's part to retroactively group Holbrooke in with the evil-doers, the neo-cons, admission into whose fold today requires little more than "frequently call[ing] attention to the unprovoked aggression of despotic regimes (e.g. Iran and Syria), the violation of human rights in other countries, and advocates the moral superiority of democratic countries in international affairs." (Holbrooke, at least in the excerpts cited by Yglesias, is only guilty of the first two offenses). The word "neo-con" is now used by the net-left to describe anyone to their immediate right who doesn't agree with them. Yglesias's entire schtick is that the entire Beltway "foreign policy community" is a corrupt lot whose supposedly consensus opinions have proven a disaster for the country; his simplistic, uninformed, and self-aggrandizing view of how American foreign policy is formed groups people like Richard Holbrooke and Frank Gaffney into the same boat and assumes that nothing less than a Jacobin, intellectual purge and the subsequent elevation of Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, LaRouchite Robert Dreyfuss and their ilk to prominent positions in the liberal punditocracy and the return of Zbigniew Brzezniski into the State Department will cure Washington's poisoned think-tank and diplomatic cultures and bring American foreign policy back on track.

For too long, journalists (myself included) have taken Yglesias seriously; we've treated him as someone whose writings actually merit measured and contemplative responses. Perhaps this due consideration is given to the fact that Yglesias has a perch at The Atlantic. But even bloggers (as opposed to actual journalists, who, you know, actually do things like travel abroad or pick up the phone before opining about international affairs) ought to have an elementary understanding of history and logic. The proper way to treat Yglesias is demonstrated by the indefatigable New York Sun national security reporter Eli Lake, who does not suffer fools lightly, in a comment to said post:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he's a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to[o].

Eli

By Yglesias's reasoning, anyone who expressed views similar to those of Richard Holbrooke in 2001 (meaning almost the entire Democratic Party foreign policy establishment and many liberal journalists, including Yglesias), is not "prescient" and their views on foreign policy ought be discounted. This is obvious nonsense, and I'm not sure if Yglesias is even aware that he's writing himself out of the bounds of respectable debate with such ruthlessly unforgiving historical revisionism. But this is what the vaunted "Reality Based Community" has become; a band of useful idiots better known as what Lake calls "The Credulosphere," whose collected writings, if they were a film, would be anthologized as "Say Anything."

Whatever his intent, Yglesias's logic demands that we stop listening to him. Maybe he'll just follow his own advice, make our lives easier, and stop pontificating.

The post Stop Making Sense appeared first on Jewcy.

I was reminded of this astute (if, admittedly, distasteful) comparison upon reading about the solution Uganda's Sheikh Ramathan Shaban Mubajje suggests for his country's homosexual problem:

He told journalists at a press conference on Friday that he had recommended to the country's President at a meeting last week that all gay people should be sent into exile on an island in Lake Victoria.

"If they die there then we shall have no more homosexuals in the country," he added.

The good Sheikh's views on the existence of homosexuals is actually quite intriguing: he seems to think that if society gets rid of the current crop of fags, then homosexuality itself as a feature of the human condition will suddenly disappear. This reading on the origins of homosexuality seems to posit that homosexuality is akin to a disease like leprosy — something one cannot choose to have, but once isolated from the larger community, will disappear. But how does homosexuality afflict a community in the first place? If it's like a disease, it must have a root? Is not, therefore, a corollary to this contention the condition that homosexuality is a feature of human nature, and will continue to exist despite the Ugandan government's best efforts to exile whatever gays they can lay their hands on? The Sheikh's solution appears paradoxical. Unless, of course, he believes that homosexuality is a "choice" (the product of dreaded Western influences), in which case the gay island will need to be constantly replenished with those "choosing the gay lifestyle." But this would seem to negate his stated belief that the death of present-day homosexuals would end the problem of gay existence itself.

Anyways, his idea is not as novel as it may seem. After all, Fire Island and Ibiza are pretty much gay islands, though they're seasonal tourist destinations, not latter-day Birobidjans.

In Uganda, homosexuality is "against the order of nature" and the country's Muslims (at 12%) rival their pious Christian fellow-travelers in their support for state-sanctioned oppression of gay people.

In response to the gay rights press conference Muslim youth belonging to the Tabliq movement announced they plan to set up 'Anti-Gay Squads' to fight homosexuality.

Wonderful: Youth gangs to wander the streets looking for gays to bash. Just what a dirt-poor, culturally backwards African country needs its young people doing.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan rants on about the supposed "Christianists," explicitly equating American evangelicals to Islamists. Please point me to the major, recognized American Christian leader (Mujabbe is the leader of Uganda's Muslims) calling for the literal extinction by force of homosexuals. And show me the gangs of Christian thugs organized by church leaders to locate gays and maim them. The worst we have in the States are the "ex-gay" summer camps, which awful as they are (and which should probably be shut down by the government as a form of organized child abuse), are a night at SBNY compared to what the Islamists want to do to me. Muslim clerics of this sort are a dime a dozen and constantly try to one-up each other in their fanatical calls for the genocide of gay people.

The post Escape from Gay Island appeared first on Jewcy.

A few quick things of which to dispense:

• As for Charles Barron, the most Boyd can muster is that he's "rather unpleasant." He then chides me for linking to a piece I wrote about Barron as my "source on Barron's faults." Sam should do some reading on New York City politics before commenting so impetuously about Charles Barron, but here's some other stories about his endorsing the assassination of one of his Council colleagues and his hosting Robert Mugabe in Council chambers.
• Boyd writes that my "casual dismissal of Jesse Jackson as a 'racial huckster' is extra special classy." Not sure what he's getting at here, but if it's an attempt to say that Jesse Jackson deserves anything more than "casual dismissal" from serious people and that he isn't a "racial huckster," then Boyd's just beyond the reach of rational discussion. Charles Barron, by the way, makes Jesse Jackson seem like Bayard Rustin.

Matthew Yglesias joins the pile-on, and while the post is more grammatically coherent than his usual, fobbed off prose, it still makes no sense so there's nothing I can really offer in reply.

While we're on the subject of presidential endorsements, I already see that liberals at Tapped and elsewhere are making hay over Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. They should. It's slimy. And you can argue all you want that Obama's association with Barron and McClurkin mean nothing (I'd actually contend that the views of Barron and McClurkin are far more reprehensible than those of Robertson), but don't simultaneously criticize the Robertson endorsement as spelling Giuliani's conversion to the religious social agenda. You can't have it both ways.

Finally, neither Boyd, Yglesias, or anyone at the Prospect has responded to my queries about Robert Dreyfuss, the magazine's "Senior Correspondent" on national security and foreign policy, who is a disciple of Lyndon LaRouche, or about their magazine's hawking his LaRouche-published book on its website. This reticence is understandable, considering how embarrassing it must be to have such an individual as a colleague at your place of employment. But that won't stop me from bringing it up.

The post Hollow Criticism from Boyd and Yglesias appeared first on Jewcy.

LIFE IN THE closet can be hellish. It contorts one’s true self. Some go so far as to blame being the closet for ethical misbehavior (see Jim McGreevey, who likewise did a grave disservice to gays by conflating his criminality with his homosexuality), and there is no question that living in the closet is a psychologically unhealthy lifestyle. But what are the many housewives, (who know few —?if any — gay people in their personal lives), watching “The View” supposed to think when they see the famous lesbian Rosie O’Donnell claim that 9-11 was an inside job? What are they to think of the Rosie who, before she came out of the closet, was a rational human being?

Of course Rosie should have come out of the closet. But she did not simultaneously have to become a Truther.

Now we learn that MSNBC, high off the fumes provided by Keith Olbermann's relative success as an evening talk-show host (despite his regular pounding by Bill O'Reilly in the ratings), is in talks with the Countess of Crazy about her hosting a political gabfest. The most that can be said about this move is that at least the show will feature only one obnoxious yenta as opposed to several. The Times completely glosses over why her hire would be so controversial:

During the nine months she spent on “The View” before departing abruptly last spring, Ms. O’Donnell raised viewership notably. She did so while lamenting the unabated casualties of the Iraq war and advocating the right to gay marriage, among other positions.

O'Donnell's views on the Iraq war and gay marriage are hardly on the fringe of political opinion, rather, its some of her "other positions," to which the Times does not even allude, that are so off-the-charts nutty: that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Bush administration was behind the Iranian capture of British soldiers last spring and that American soldiers are terrorists.

Popular Mechanics responded to her allegations, which is kinda like Albert Einstein explaining particle physics to a grape.

The post Rosie O’Donell: Bad For The Gays (And Everyone Else, Too) appeared first on Jewcy.

Bombing Iran, says Chuck Schumer, would be a big political loser for Republican candidates in 2008.

“It would change the landscape against them, big time,” Mr. Schumer, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said about a scenario in which the Bush administration launches a military attack on Iran before leaving office. “I don’t think they are likely to do it, because they are so weak—not because they are chastened—but I also think it is very likely to be a negative political for them.”

Now, far be it from me to offer sound political advice to the man who engineered a remarkable victory for Democrats in the Senate in last year, picking up six seats (his aid in ending the political career of George Allen is reason alone to consider his tenure as DSCC chair a success), but is Schumer here indicating a belief that presidential administrations should determine grave foreign policy decisions based upon whether or they will be net "negative" or "positive political" for them? Or is he just blaming the Bush administration for this sort of cynical calculation? If short-term political viability was the utmost concern of the Bush administration (and Congressional Republicans), would not the president have removed all American forces out of Iraq a long time ago? The crass, score-keeper way in which Schumer discusses matters of war and peace is unsettling.

But since Schumer brought it up and fashions himself such a keen strategist, let's take a look at the actual numbers, shall we? According to a Zogby poll published last week, 52% of Americans said they would support a military strike against Iran in order to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons. Lest one think that the poll somehow indicates a right-wing preference, 41% of Democrats would support one a strike and 21% of all those polled believe that Hillary Clinton is the candidate best equipped to deal with the Iranian threat, more than any other candidate.

I offer this poll not by way of saying that Schumer should emulate the cynicism he seems to accuse the Bush administration of exhibing by rallying Democrats in support of a strike, but to point out that his vaunted knowledge of the electorate and how to win is a bit over-hyped (that 52% number will only increase, by the way, as the Iranians progress in their nuclear program and as Iraq's political situation continues to stabilize). Americans want to hear how the Democrats propose to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, not the score-keeping of a campaign strategist whose ultimate interest is picking up Senate seats. Casting aspersions on the administration by insinuating that — were it to seek authorization for strikes against Iran — such a move would be predicated entirely upon a desire to boost GOP poll numbers hardly instills confidence in the political party that has long lacked voter trust when it comes to issues of national security. Indeed, the fact that Schumer brings up such crude motivations at all suggests that he is the one willing to play politics with national security. 

The post Schumer’s Strategy appeared first on Jewcy.