Month: May 2009

Cheerios Follies

by tristero

As predicted, the right is making food issues into an all-out cultural crusade. The latest battlefield: Cheerios:

Disputes over food-label claims are always political. But the current, insane iteration of the American right has walked several steps past the crazy line with its collective reaction to the Food and Drug Administration’s demand that General Mills (GIS) tone down its health claims for Cheerios.

“It’s fairly obvious to me why the Obama administration is going after Cheerios over possible deceptive advertising,” says the Deadenders blog. “Babies love them more then him.”

“This is the kind of irritating, intrusive nonsense that makes people weary of their government and every smarmy bureaucratic microbe in it,” writes David Crocker of the Behind Blue Lines blog.

The FDA wants General Mills to reel back its claim that Cheerios can “lower your cholesterol 4 percent in 6 weeks.” Such a claim is not backed up by science, according to a letter sent to the company by the FDA. The agency says that General Mills is making claims for its cereal that more properly, and according to federal law, should apply only to drugs designed to cure disease. The claims amount to a “serious violation” of laws governing label claims, according to the letter.

That’s true, of course. But it hasn’t stopped critics from characterizing the situation as President Obama yet again attacking a venerable American institution. Never mind that Obama almost certainly had no idea that his FDA was planning to go after Cheerios.

Food seems to be a common theme among crazy conservatives. For them, wholesome, “American” foods are a-OK. Eurocommie foods are right out. “Washington raised ciggie taxes to pay for SCHIP expansion and are [sic] gearing up to raise soda taxes to pay for Obamacare,” writes the reliably nutty Michelle Malkin. “No vice is safe from the health police. Dijon mustard and arugula exempted, of course.”

We can expect more and more of this kind of nonsense. The anti-Cheerios president! The pro-Arugula, Hawaii -vacationing, Dijon-swilling, liberalcommunistsocialistfascistmonarchist-terrorist coddler! The next thing you know, Obama’ll ban AK-47’s from national parks and then where will we be?

As if this is about the character of a president rather than deceptive health claims to a public that is in no position to evaluate them. As if this is about elitism rather than profiting by marketing a mediocre food as if it was a cure-all. FYI, if you want to know what goes into Cheerios, go here. Bottom line: as factory food goes, there are a lot worse choices you can make. The ingredients include corn starch (of course), trisodium phosphate, salt, sugar (not as much as the usual factory junk) and a chemical preservative. In other words, compared to a bowl of real oatmeal… well, whatever floats your boat, far be it from me to pick a fight over the taste of Cheerios. There’s bound to be a zillion commenters who will complain mightily that I’m insulting their very being because they grew up on the stuff and it tastes far better than the oatmeal swill their friend’s evil mother tried to shove down their throat after a sleep over. So rather than argue over exactly how bland and unpleasantly processed Cheerios tastes (sorry, couldn’t resist) let’s talk the language we Americans prize above everything, even childhood memories: Money.

As Michael Pollan pointed out today on The Brian Lehrer Show (the podcast doesn’t seem to be up yet), Cheerios costs some $4.00 a pound. The far more nutritious organic steel cut oats can be bought for $.79 a pound.* At that price, you can whip up vast quantities of Mark Bittman’s awesome coconut oat pilaf, which is flat-out the best cereal for breakfast I’ve ever had in my life and which I eat as often as I can.

*Perhaps. Here, you can get Cheerios for $4.83 a pound, so maybe somewhere they’re available for 4 bucks (you’re welcome to post lower prices!) in large quantities. As for organic steel cut oats, I found them for $.87 a pound here if you buy 50 pounds. But that is a lot of oats! I should know. I bought a 25 pound bag of organic steel cut oats from Bob’s Red Mill ($1.57 a pound) and proudly show off the huge (by NYC apartment standards) tub of oats to my flabbergasted fellow Manhattanites.

Tortured Politics

by digby

Liz Cheney is taking credit for forcing Obama to block the release of the remaining Abu Ghraib photos, which shows that this is a political issue as much as anything else. The administration will succeed in putting off the inevitable, but it’s highly likely that the Supreme Court will not overturn the two lower courts and require release of the photos, thus endangering the troops at a later date. But, it won’t happen in the middle of a contentious and fluid debate over torture that could result in serious investigations. And that is what this is all about.

As Greg Sargent writes:

So Liz Cheney is claiming victory, and clearly, this will only embolden the Cheneys to keep up the assaults. By saying that he has now concluded that releasing the photos would endanger the troops, Obama is reinforcing the idea that he was originally prepared to do something that would endanger the troops, and only reversed himself after conservatives called him out on it. Whatever the merits of Obama’s decision, its political impact is that it lets the Cheneys continue to frame the ongoing debate, and to continue casting a full torture accounting as a threat to our national security.

It seems to me that by this logic, the impending release of the CIA Inspector General’s Report is going to endanger national security as well. Certainly one could argue that the release of the OLC memos made the country less safe and that’s what Cheney and the boys have argued from the minute they were released. Once you capitulate to the idea that transparency about what our government did in the GWOT is dangerous to our troops and our national security, you have lost the argument.

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Still All About Iraq

by dday

Among the many inanities from Huckleberry Graham yesterday was his claim that “one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.” You know what has survived for longer than that? Syphillis. Should we incubate that for use on prisoners?

But I’ll agree with Huckleberry to an extent. Torture does work in its primary function: to extract false confessions. That’s why Dark Sith Cheney was so keen on using torture prior to the run-up to war in Iraq.

*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

*Much of the information in the report of the 9/11 Commission was provided through more than 30 sessions of torture of detainees.

Lawrence Wilkerson essentially confirmed this today.

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

Pity that al-Libi just up and committed suicide like that, ay?

Over and over again, we have seen Iraq as the white whale to the Bush Administration, as their sole focus through much of the first term appeared to be laying down the basis for invasion and occupation. Everything flows from this original sin. And we can now say with a good degree of surety that the torture programs rose from a desire to link Iraq with 9/11 and Al Qaeda. if you want to know why Dick Cheney has been on the teevee more than American Idol lately, throwing up roadblocks and confusion and assorted nonsense, it’s because he doesn’t want this fact, which apparently came from his office, revealed.

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“Gee whiz, I wasn’t supposed to do it, I saw the world blow up, but I did follow the rulebook”

by digby

Poor Joan Walsh. Sometimes it just pains me to see her trying to make sense among the babblers that are featured on Chris Matthews’ show every day — including the host. Today, we saw Donnie Deutch claiming that he’s a screaming liberal but he nonetheless believes that torture is acceptable if someone is trying to kill his family. Therefore, torture of “terrorists” is necessary, and he thinks a lot of Americans agree with him. (How we determine whether these are, in fact, terrorists who have such information is not discussed and neither is whether or not he would agree to torture American criminal suspects if the authorities said they were withholding valuable information. )

Joan gallantly made all the right arguments about torture being immoral, useless, illegal etc but it didn’t penetrate. Instead we see Chris Matthews, who up until now has taken a fairly hard line against torture, saying some things that are totally ridiculous about the efficacy of torture based on a bunch of nonsense he made up in his head about the jihadi supermen. And then he comes up with his latest “middle ground” argument when Walsh points out that regardless, it’s all illegal and until the politicians have the courage to legalize it, it can’t be done:

Matthews: I’d rather it be outlawed and force the president to justify breaking the law. I’d rather have that situation because that puts higher pressure on him or her not to break the law. But if they have to do something in the national interest you don’t come afterward and say, “gee whiz, I wasn’t supposed to do it, I saw the world blow up, but I did follow the rulebook.”

We expect president to protect us in extremis, but you’ve got to have judgment at the top. And I don’t want to remove any tool from them in judgment at the top. Generally it may not work. but you’re not going to tell me that in a ticking time situation that you might not be moved to try it.

We’ve got to stop lying about not calling torture torture and stop saying denial of oxygen isn’t torture and stop playing with the rule book. the rule book can say no torture. But presidents have to do things like shoot down airplanes with 200 people on them. They’;ve got to do things that aren’t in the rule book Imagine that. cheney might have had to shoot down that plane that landed in Pennsylvania with the passengers,. he might have shot down that plane if it got through. And he might have done that and I’m sure it’s against the law to shoot down airplanes, but he would have done it because that would have been the right thing to do.

Joan then pointed out that making a bunch of enemies in this “reign of torture” might just be the biggest mistake we make to which Donnie Deutch balefully shook his head and said:

Joan. (sigh) Joan you know what? Unfortunately sometimes we’ve got to go back and watch the Nicholson speech in A Few Good Men. Sometimes we need these guys on the wall that we don’t want to talk about at parties.

Just shoot me now.

I don’t know how prevalent Matthews’ latest “idea” is among the villagers, but it goes back to Alan Dershowitz whose original articles after 9/11 were among those that put torture on the table. He argued, however, that we should legalize torture so the president isn’t put in the position of breaking the law, which at least respects the basic notion that the president is subject to it. Matthews thinks the president needs to have the law stay in place as a sort of guideline that forces the president to think a little bit before he does whatever he needs to do to keep us all safe. He literally believes that the president has no obligation to follow the law, however, but rather use his “judgment.” The founders must be rolling in their graves.

BTW: the idea that the Vice President was doing the right thing by ordering the military to shoot down an airliner is mind-boggling. The president was certainly available to make that “judgment” himself and according to the 9/11 report there were people in the room who were profoundly suspicious that ole Uncle Dick forgot to ask him before he made that decision. That alone should be cause for anyone to doubt whether or not that particular “system” of relying on judgment calls is a good idea.

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Common Sense

by digby

Ari Melber very nicely handled the torture question today in a way I wish more”democratic strategists” would do. On MSNBC earlier with Carlos ‘n Contessa, he and Republican Joe Morton squared off over the FBI Agent’s testimony on the efficacy of torture before the Senate today:

Morton: And yet there are others who would say that the waterboarding helped. It helped provide information…

Melber: But Joe, even if we put that aside and say that might be possible, there are leaders throughout the world who would say that genocide helps security, that cancelling elections helps security, that fascism helps security. At some point here the whole issue is that we have to move beyond the framework of just saying torturing someone or killing someone worked, and be bound by the rule of law.

This is so obvious to me that I can’t understand why people don’t say it more often. If you can excuse breaking the law to use torture to keep the nation safe, you can excuse breaking the law to do anything to keep the nation safe. That nullifies the rule of law — and civilization.

I actually take this argument a step further and say that by refusing to completely repudiate torture and hold those who devised the regime responsible, we are making ourselves substantially less safe. Superpowers which are seen as tyrannical and which believe that the ends justify the means are not considered trustworthy by the rest of the world. It’s possible that it doesn’t matter if the rest of the world finds us threatening and, frankly, evil. But it is going to cost us a huge amount in blood and treasure to maintain our security under those circumstances. (I won’t even mention the potential economic fallout of becoming a pariah nation.)

This gets to the fundamental difference of opinon between liberals and conservatives about America’s role in the world. They think we are a military empire which must constantly prove its toughness and brutally demonstrate its willingness to do whatever it takes to “defend” its interests (which is defined as dominance.) Liberals (would like to) see America as a powerful leader of nations and an example of civilized, cooperative behavior based upon trust and mutual interest. Conservatives believe we must dominate, liberals believe we should engage.

Torture, of course, stands alone as a despicable betrayal of decent human values. But as the argument evolves, we are seeing the foreign policy implications start to emerge as well. I always assumed that the Obama administration understood this better than anyone and it is one of the things about which I was truly optimistic. But it’s looking less likely that we are truly going to see a break with the bipartisan consensus on American military power and substantive change in our approach to world leadership.

People around the world do like Obama and still have great hopes. But it won’t last forever if the only thing they get is lip service and it appears that the administration is driving down America’s hawkish road, just like the ones who came before him. To persuade them that America has truly repudiated the Bush years, he’s going to have to do more than simply assure everyone that “America doesn’t torture” and leave it at that. After all, George W. Bush said exactly the same thing.

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Prizewinning Blogger

by digby

Massive props to Marcy “Izzy” Wheeler for winning the prestigious Hillman Prize. Nobody deserves it more. She’s like a cat — she goes deep into the weeds and sees things that humans just can’t see. And she proves that you don’t actually need to cultivate “sources” or spend your time palling around with politicos and pundits to do real journalism. Indeed, she proves that if journalists spent a little bit more time reading documents and a little less time getting spun they’d get to the truth a lot more easily.

Huzzah to one of our own for finally getting the recognition she deserves.

Bleeding This Country Dry

by digby

I thought I had seen Lindsay Graham at his most revolting when he gave one of the most inane speeches in history before the US Senate in Clinton’s impeachment trial. Here’s a little reminder:

Is that what you want to do in this case? Just to save this man, to ignore the facts, to have a different legal standard, to make excuses that are bleeding this country dry? The effect of this case is hurting us more than we will ever know. Do not dismiss this case. Find out who our President is. Come to the conclusion, not that it was just bad behavior, it was illegal behavior. Tell us what is right. Tell us what is wrong. Give us some guidance. Under our Constitution, you don’t impeach people at the ballot box, you trust the U.S. Senate. And I am willing to do that. Rise to the occasion for the good of the Nation

Yes, he really said “rise to the occasion.” Read the whole thing is you can stand it just so that you can ask yourself how Huckleberry came to become a senator after that embarrassing performance.He’s much meaner now. Of course, here he’s defending the use of torture techniques, which he obviously thinks are not just useful, but downright entertaining. (But then, like so many Republicans with issues, he’s always been into the dirty stuff with a touch of menace.)Here he is treating a law professor like a lackey in today’s hearings:

He just gets creepier and creepier as time goes on. Unfortunately, he isn’t getting any smarter. From Greg Sargent:

While directing hostile questioning at a witness during the Senate torture hearing, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham cited an infamous ABC News report from 2007 that said a terror suspect broke under minimal waterboarding, and suggested it undercut the claim that torture didn’t work. But Graham didn’t appear to be aware that the report has since been debunked, and that ABC itself has since corrected the record.[…]
Graham didn’t seem to be aware of this during the hearing, however. When the witness pointed out that the story had been debunked, he stared into the distance without saying anything and moved right on to a new round of questioning.

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The Sensible, Party-Saving Brother

by tristero

While skimming Maureen Dowd’s latest waste of newsprint, a ho-hum column about Dick Cheney’s evilosity, I came across this:

“Bush 41 cares about decorum and protocol,” said an official in Bush I. “I’m sure he doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out. He is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.” [All emphases added.]

And this:

W.’s dark surrogate father is trying to pull the G.O.P. into a black hole of zealotry, just as the sensible brother who lost his future to the scamp brother is trying to get his career back on track.

They, MoDo and her source, are talking about Jeb Bush. They are saying he is sensible and in a position to save his party. That is the same Jeb Bush who, well, let The Miami Herald explain what happened:

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted – but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Miami Herald has learned.

Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.

For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called “a showdown.”

In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.

“We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,” said a source with the local police.

“The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,” said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. “When the sheriff’s department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.”

The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday’s events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge’s order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge’s order whenever an agency appeals it.

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

Participants in the high-stakes test of wills, who spoke with The Herald on the condition of anonymity, said they believed the standoff could ultimately have led to a constitutional crisis and a confrontation between dueling lawmen.

“There were two sets of law enforcement officers facing off, waiting for the other to blink,” said one official with knowledge of Thursday morning’s activities.

In jest, one official said local police discussed “whether we had enough officers to hold off the National Guard.”

The sensible brother, the moderate. Of course, he publicly denies this showdown ever happened – but it did. And it’s not as if the rest of his behavior during Schiavo, and so much more, is, by any standard sensible, let alone party-saving. For example:

Bush’s history of politically unfortunate rhetoric goes back to 1994, when he famously answered a question on the campaign trail by saying he would do ‘probably nothing’ for blacks if elected governor. He lost the race against incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles by a hair — and many analysts believe his dismal showing among black voters (he got just 4 percent) was largely to blame…

Bush’s record on social issues isn’t exactly stellar: His nominee to head the state’s troubled child welfare agency signed onto a treatise calling for more corporal punishment of children and the consignment of women to the home.

Or this, from a WaPo article that tries to be sympathetic:

Yet, while his tenure coincided with a sizzling economy and an overflowing treasury, Bush’s back-to-back terms were marred by frequent ethics scandals, official bungling and the inability of the government he downsized to meet growing demands for state services, including education and aid for the infirm and the elderly…

[Jeb Bush’s] administration — the Department of Children and Families, in particular — was vilified for losing track of 500 youngsters under state care and for failing to prevent the deaths of several others. A smiling Rilya Wilson became the poster child for all that was wrong with the agency and, by extension, the Bush administration’s failure to serve Floridians in need. Although her body was never found, it is believed the 5-year-old Miami girl was killed in December 2000, 15 months before the state realized she was missing.

Despite the controversy that swirled around the botched 2000 presidential election, which saw his brother win Florida and thus the White House by 537 votes, Bush failed to fully restore confidence in an electoral system that is still mired in controversy and lawsuits. He did little to counteract soaring property insurance rates or shorten waiting lists for citizens needing services.

“He led the enactment of tax cuts that will drain the state of needed revenue for health care and children and senior citizens — and we already rank at the bottom of the nation in those services,” said Karen Woodall, a lobbyist for migrant workers and the poor.

And it goes on. To say Jeb Bush’s record as governor is “mixed” is to be far kinder than Bush would ever be to anyone other than a fellow Bush. To characterize him as “sensible” is simply idiotic.

There is something seriously askew with a political party which seeks its future by looking to a Bush, any Bush, to save them – or to a Gingrich, a Cheney, or a Limbaugh. But that is how far gone the Republicans are, and, dear friends, that is not a good thing.

Furthermore, it is a stark example of how poorly the public’s interest is served by the mainstream press that a major columnist at the New York Times would call the stupid, impulsive, corrupt, and downright awful Governor Jeb Bush “sensible.” No wonder they’re going out of business.

Danger To Our Country

by digby

Come on. The administration is now refusing to release the remaining Abu Ghraib pictures because they have the potential to cause harm to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Really?

It seems to me that we should probably get them out of a war zone, then. Talk about dangerous. Why, last I heard they are getting shot at every day over there.

But this really takes the cake. In fact, I’m sorry to say that it reaches Fleischeresque levels of fatuousness:

Reporter: Was he pressured by the military?

Gibbs: No, in fact his decision was brought up yesterday with general Odierno at the end of the meeting General Odierno and Ambassador Hill had with the president and the president informed General Odierno of his decision. Obviously, there was certianly concern throughout the process. By folks concerned about the harm that could be caused by their release.

Reporter: (gibberish)

Gibbs: I think they have. But I would also say the president believes a couple of other things. Understand that the existence of these investigations are, and I don’t know the exact address, but they on the DOD web site, the president believes that the release of these photos will also provide a disincentive for detainee abuse investigation. The photos don’t denote the existence of the investigations, they are simply part of the potential evidence in the cases that have been finished since 2004. But if in each of these instances, somebody looking into detainee abuse takes evidentiary photos in a case that’s eventually concluded, this could provide a tremendous disincentive to take those photos and investigate abuse.

Apparently, the logic is that the military will refuse to investigate criminal behavior if there is any chance that pictures of such criminal behavior could be made public. So we simply won’t make pictures of it public anymore.

I have to say that between the CIA threatening to let the country be attacked if they are punished for torture and the military threatening not to investigate war crimes if they are made public, I’m beginning to have some doubts about the honor, integrity and commitment to the rule of law by a large swathe of the American government. Perhaps someone should look into that.

Update: Gibbs keeps saying that the president believes that nothing will be added by people seeing the photos of detainee abuse that was previously investigated. I guess we’ll just have to take his word for that.

And I’m sure these pictures couldn’t possibly add to the clamor for new investigations, so there’s no need to go there.

Update II:

Inflammatory Now
“The president strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would
only serve the purpose of inflaming the thea-
ters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces …”
– U.S. official, today

Inflammatory Then
“[Release of photos] could only further inflame
and possibly incite unnecessary violence in
the world and would endanger our
military men and women …”
– U.S. official, February 15, 2006

Update III

Who care about a bunch of DFHs, anyway.

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Socialist Schmocialist

by digby

They’re finally getting serious:

A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”

When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”

Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.

Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”

Awesome. But they’ve missed a huge opportunity here. They could try to “rebrand” the Democrats as the National Socialist American Worker’s Party, which would have been rilly, rilly kewl cuz then they could have merged Obama’s picture with Hitler ‘n stuff. Oh wait:

Or they could just go all the way and call it the Communist Party Of America then they could say, like, Obama was all Mao-like. Ooops they’re ahead of me again:

Simply rebranding the opposition party as the Democrat Socialists of America fails to see the full scope of the possibilities.

I’m joking because it seems so absurd, but it speaks to something much more malignant lurking in the conservative id. Here’s Ed Kilgore:

Here’s how the sponsor of the resolution, Jeff Kent from Washington State, explained its rationale a few weeks ago:

There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.

I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”

The St. Paul of the “Democrat Socialist” rebranding, Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr., sent an encyclical around further explaining its purpose. Here’s a pertinent passage:

The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated. They are proceeding pell mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level, to strap future generations with enormous unsustainable debt, to debase our currency, to destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death, and to weaken our national defense and retreat from the war on terror. Unless stopped, we will not recognize our country in a few short years.

Maybe the Democrats should all be put in coffins with some bugs and then waterboarded for a while. That’s one way we could make sure we still recognize our country.

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