At last year’s White House Correspondent’s dinner, you’ll remember that when the president joshed and giggled about not finding the weapons of mass destruction, the press laughed and laughed. They just love it when the president makes fun of himself. It reminds them of why they love him — and why they are better than he is.
I sorry to report that this year, in an alarming lack of decorum, Stephen Colbert went way over the line — he lampooned the press corps itself in such a way as to make it seem as if they might be partly responsible for why 70% of the nation feels the country is on the wrong track. Making fun of politicians is one thing. They are a slightly lower life form. But the press itself? Implying they are complicit in all this unpleasantness with war and what not? Well, that simply isn’t done.
I’m sure Joe Klein was appalled. Colbert, with his horrible little parody was no better than a left wing blogger from the fever swamp who doesn’t respect his betters. He even had the temerity to ask the question that dare not be asked in polite circles:
Why did we invade Iraq?
That will not do. Why if anyone asks that question the public might notice that the White House press corps behaved like bunch of lovelorn eunuchs until about 20 minutes ago — at which point their hilarious, down-home moron of a president began to threaten to throw them in jail.
All hail Stephen Colbert — the man who coined the word for what the Washington press have been feeding us for the last decade. The truthiness hurts, doesn’t it kids?
Crooks and Liars has the video. I think it may be one of the most revealing moments I’ve ever seen in American politics.
Peter Daou has some thoughts and recommends Eric Boehlert’s book “Lapdogs” which I’m sure is as popular as Stephen Colbert’s video with Helen Thomas — the only person with guts in a whole room filled with pearl clutching little old ladies.
Update: Atrios checks into the “Why did we invade Iraq?” question and finds that Bill Kristol’s answer to Colbert last week was truthiness. I’m stunned.
Please tell us again why the Spanish translation of the National Anthem is making wingnut heads explode when they all but genuflect at the waving of the Confederate Rebel flag?
Tell me please, which of these was meant to turn hearts to America, and which is meant to tear the country apart?
I don’t know the answer to that. Apparently honoring the confederate flag is ok because it’s a tribute to the heritage and culture of some Americans’ forebears.
But that’s the only culture and heritage to which Americans are allowed to pay such tribute. The one that seceded from the United States and created its own country.
Those whose forebears didn’t secede from the US to form their own country but rather came to America to become Americans should not be allowed to honor their culture in any way shape or form. That would be un-American.
If anyone has fantasies of what it would be like to see George W. Bush on the witness stand in his own trial, check out his good friend Kenny Boy’s performance:
Enron Corp. founder Kenneth L. Lay — Kenny Boy to his friend President Bush — is renowned for his courtliness, his philanthropy, his rise from a dirt-poor boyhood in the Missouri Ozarks to a nine-digit fortune.
Codefendant Jeffrey K. Skilling, who invented Enron’s most profitable business and ran the company during most of its heyday, also is known for getting in a bar fight while under indictment and for publicly calling an investment analyst by another name for a sphincter.
At the start of their federal fraud and conspiracy trial three months ago, the betting was that the volatile Skilling’s performance on the witness stand might drag Lay down, not the other way around.
Former Chief Executive Skilling, 52, shares some of the obsessiveness of Queeg, the Navy skipper of “The Caine Mutiny.” But unlike Queeg, Skilling didn’t unravel on the stand. Where mastery of Enron’s finances was at issue, he overpowered co-lead prosecutor Sean M. Berkowitz. When the nimble Berkowitz pushed certain buttons, Skilling showed flashes of anger and arrogance, but he generally kept his head.
For Lay, however, it’s been a rockier ride. Although nobody knows what the 12 Texans in the jury box are thinking, during his first four days on the stand, Lay, 64, has shown some attributes that clash with his reputation as affable, openhanded and shrewd.
His worst moment came Wednesday, when prosecutor John C. Hueston jolted Lay with questions about his attempts to reach actual or potential witnesses in the case — efforts that persisted even after Lay’s lawyers told him to stop.
“You’ve got to question the judgment of the person,” said Mark C. Zauderer of New York law firm Flemming Zulack Williamson Zauderer. “No lawyer would have his client in the dock calling potential witnesses. It could be very suspect in the minds of the jury.”
Lay probably didn’t help matters by responding to Hueston’s blitz with sarcasm. The jury of eight women and four men has hardly been immune to humor during the trial — even Skilling’s mordant wit sometimes connected — but nobody cracked a smile at Lay’s comebacks Wednesday.
Noting Lay’s $120,000 investment in a company whose main customer was Enron, Hueston asked whether he had made conflict-of-interest filings required by Enron’s code of conduct.
“I don’t know,” Lay shot back. “Have you checked it? I imagine you have. You guys are pretty thorough.”
After describing himself in early testimony as “more of a delegator” than a micromanager, Lay quickly proved himself adept at delegating blame. If something worked out, it was his idea. If it blew up, it was somebody else’s.
Asked to name his biggest mistakes at Enron, Lay unhesitatingly listed “hiring Andy Fastow” and promoting him to chief financial officer.
Andrew S. Fastow turned out to be a crook who secretly stole millions from Enron and allegedly helped cook the books. Lay didn’t mention it, but he had to know the jury would recall that hiring and promoting Fastow was entirely Skilling’s doing.
It wasn’t the only time Lay subtly undercut his codefendant. He cited Skilling’s surprise resignation in August 2001 as a source of uncertainty in the financial markets that set the stage for the investor and creditor panic that Lay said ultimately brought Enron down.
Moreover, by praising Skilling as an executive who “really gets into the details, the guts of how things work,” Lay may have signaled that Skilling, far more than Lay, would have grasped the intricacies of Enron’s accounting and financial reporting — the things at the heart of the criminal case.
Lay blamed two aides for what turned out to be one of the biggest PR gaffes of the century: rebuffing the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2001 when the paper had questions about Fastow and his mysterious LJM partnerships — complex financial structures that the government says let Enron hide problem assets and falsely pump up profit.
With Enron offering only a brief statement written by its lawyers, the company lost any control over the debate and was powerless when the resulting stories eviscerated its stock. A livid Skilling even called from retirement to ask why Enron wasn’t defending itself.
In Lay’s view, his own instincts had been right all along. Stonewalling the Journal, he testified, went “against every bone in my body.”
One of the witnesses whom Lay admitted trying to reach was a former Enron risk manager named Wincenty “Vince” Kaminski. Jurors would remember him as a professor type with a Polish accent and a healthy ego who testified that he tried vainly to warn higher-ups that Fastow’s LJM partnerships were a stupid idea and that Enron shouldn’t be involved with them.
In testimony Tuesday, Lay seemed to impugn his former colleague’s courage. He acknowledged that Kaminski had been an early skeptic of the LJM deals, but added that it was only after the Journal stories hit and the partnerships blew up in scandal that “his level of dislike intensified.”
Can’t you just see Bush stabbing Cheney and Rove in the back and blaming them for all his troubles? Being snotty to the prosecutor? The whole thing sounds like a typical Bush press conference to me.
Just as a reminder, Kenny Boy Lay was Bush’s biggest contributor in 2000. His presidential campaign received $1.14 million from Enron. And Enron got its money’s worth until the whole thing imploded:
Shortly after taking office, President Bush waged a battle against the imposition of federal price controls in California that allowed Enron to price-gouge consumers by extending the energy crisis in California, costing the state billions of dollars. Enron reported increased revenues of almost $70 billion from the previous year.
Two peas in a pod, Lay and Bush. Arrogant losers who drove their organizations into the ground.
Prosecutors won’t immediately seek hate-crime charges against two white teens accused of brutally beating and sodomizing a 16-year-old Hispanic boy, who was clinging to life after being left for dead, authorities said.
The two attacked the boy after he tried to kiss a 12-year-old girl at an unsupervised house party Saturday night in suburban Spring, authorities said.
The attackers apparently were offended at the age difference between the victim and the girl, who is also Hispanic, and shouted racial slurs at him during the 10- to 15-minute attack, investigators said.
Authorities said the two dragged the boy from the party and into the yard, where they sodomized him with a plastic pipe from a patio table umbrella and poured bleach on him.
“After they got him down on the ground, they stomped his head with (steel-toed) boots,” Harris County Sheriff’s Lt. John Denholm said. “They actually kicked the pipe further into him with the boots.”
County prosecutor Mike Trent described the pipe as being sharpened at one end. At one point, the teens tried to carve something on the boy’s chest with a knife, he told CNN Friday.
“I don’t know that the very beginning of the attack was racial,” Trent said, “but there’s no question that they were venting quite a bit of hatred in their hearts.”
Oh really. He must have gotten the story from the young sadists themselves and bought their assertion that they were trying to protect this girl rather than the obvious fact that they are violent racists. And that is likely why they aren’t charging these predators with a hate crime. They actually feel some sympathy for these guys. “They have quite a bit of hatred in their hearts” they say. Do they have hearts?
Of course “the beginning of the attack” was racial. Did they just become racists half way through their brutal rape and beating? They are racist psychopaths who poured bleach on the victim and called him racial epithets, for crying out loud. I somehow doubt that they would have done the same thing to a white kid.
And once again, I have to ask about the forced sodomy. Is it that men were always raping other men with objects and nobody talked about it, or is this becoming more common? This particular form of violence is showing up everywhere from Abu Ghraib to the less physically brutal but equally terrifying “hazing” of grade school kids. And the common denominator in all of this is that it’s being excused by the rightwing moralists. What in the hell is up with this?
And don’t be surprised if we start seeing more of this racial violence toward Latinos. The wingnuts are getting their hate on and reviving some of their favorite propaganda techniques:
AN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The creators of a video game called “Border Patrol” won’t win any awards for graphics or creativity, but could take home a prize for bad taste.
(on camera): This isn’t some expensive game for the Xbox. It’s simple, free and on the Internet and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, dangerous.
JONATHAN BERNSTEIN, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: It puts in the mind of the player that they should be resorting to violence.
SIMON (voice-over): The objective? To shoot and kill Mexicans crossing into the U.S. The game’s targets? Mexican nationalists, drug smugglers and most outrageous, breeders, pregnant women running with children. The more you kill, the higher your score.
CRIS FRANCO, COMEDIAN/SATIRIST: You’re killing a pregnant woman, and if you can feel good about that, well, have at it.
SIMON: Sarcasm comes naturally to Latino comedian Cris Franco. All joking aside, though, Franco was concerned when we showed him the game.
FRANCO: What sort of makes it innocuous is sort of the thing that makes it so very dangerous, is that you might have kids getting up there and they’re killing Mexicans. You know? And now that’s a fun thing to do I gather, in our world. I think most people of conscience would not think this was a good way to spend your time.
You can see this “game” here on a CBS News affiliate web site. The blood spattering the pregnant woman with kids when the bullet hits is especially “fun.”
These video games and other violent racist paraphernalia are sure to be part of our culture forever, whether we like it or not. (In this post about rightwing “humor”, Maha provides some fine examples of the kind of “jokes” that used to be prevalent during Jim Crow.) But when you have major politicians race baiting you normalize this stuff — and that leads bigoted psychopaths to lose their inhibitions and feel that they have the support of the mainstream.
Neil Young’s Living With War. What a great album! And you can listen to the thing for free here. It’s everything rocknroll should be: angry, beautiful, dirty, dangerous, lyrical, sloppy, emotional, coldly-calculated, and indispensable for sanity in a world gone mad.
It’s on my must-buy list. Speaking of which, My Smart Spouse got me The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, a collection of genuine rarities from the 20’s and 30’s wrapped up in some great R. Crumb artwork. Perhaps the rare Son House tracks will convince you. Perhaps the reputation of the Georgia Potlickers. But as flat-out great as the individual cuts are, it’s the cumulative effect that’s so overwhelming. I’m more of a very knowledgeable amateur than a professional when it comes to folk music, but I’m certain that this is the finest compilation of real American folk music since The Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology, in case you don’t know it, is essential, and I mean that the way water and air are essential.
Getting back to Neil for a moment, be sure to see Jonathan Demme’s documentary about the old coot. It’s a great film. But best of all, it sets up Living With War perfectly because of the contrast with it. The concert is reflective, personal, country music (sort of). The album is uncompromisingly social, rocknroll (definitely).
Oooh. This is too good. Could Porter Goss be caught up in the developing Duke Cunningham hooker scandal? Justin Rood at The Muckraker thinks it’s possible.
Yowzah.
Actually, make that a double-yowzah: Remember that Goss is the one who plucked one of Wilkes’ old San Diego friends, the unusual and colorful Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, out of CIA middle-management obscurity to be his #3 at the agency. At the time of Foggo’s appointment, no one could figure out where he came from, or how Goss knew him.
But if Goss was at the “parties,” I wonder, was Foggo there too? Did they see each other? Is this where Goss had an opportunity to gauge Foggo’s abilities, and determine he was qualified for the CIA executive director post
Ken Silverstein at Harper’s blog describes the parties:
As to the festivities themselves, I hear that party nights began early with poker games and degenerated into what the source described as a “frat party” scene—real bacchanals. Apparently photographs were taken, and investigators are anxiously procuring copies.
My, my, my.
But there’s more to it than that. Remember what we have all heard about old Duke:
What you won’t read about in these mainstream press accounts is the other double life led by the closet case, Duke, the anti-gay conservative.
Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.
Birch never mentioned Cunningham’s name, but she talked about a rabidly anti-gay congressman who asked to meet privately with her in the midst of a controversy over his use in a speech on the floor of the House the term “homos” to describe gays who have served in the military.
Alone with Birch and an HRC staffer, the unnamed congressman shared that he had loved men during his life. In telling the story, Birch offered up a few too many details about the closeted congressman.
A few Google searches later, the Blade reported that it had to be Cunningham, whose career was pockmarked with bizarre gay pronouncements, including a reference to the rectal treatment he received for prostate cancer, something he told an audience “was just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.”
There’s every reason to believe Birch’s inadvertent outing, even as Cunningham denied it through a spokesperson.
This is, after all, a man without principles, who could “love men” in private, all the while condemning gays in speeches and in congressional votes. Little surprise that he could live a second double life, in which he sold those unprincipled votes to the highest bidder
The Dukestir and Porter Goss can hire Jimmy Jeff Gannon and perform a country version of “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair” in the House gym for all I care. But the massive fraud and corruption involved are unacceptable. If the Dukestir takes Goss down it would be a beautiful bit of poetic justice. I have a feeling that there are plenty of people at the CIA who will be happy to help the FBI with anything they might need to prove that case.
Jane is righteously taking on the wingnut liars today (as she does every day) but this time on the subject of this dumb pissing match about liberal book sales. Just read it. it’s so ridiculous it makes you want to laugh.
As she points out, the right has subsidized these lousy writers and thinkers for decades. They buy their crappy books for their crappy book clubs (whining all the way about totalitarian leftists bookstore owners who refuse to sell their crappy crap) and give the impresion that they are successfully indoctrinating the country with their crappy propaganda. From the numbers of rightwing propagandists who are allegedly great authors and thinkers, you would think that the Republicans would rule with an 80% majority. The truth is they have always rigged the numbers.
As Jane points out, what has them upset is that we managed to push Greenwald’s book to number one on Amazon in a day. It drove them into such a tizzy that they are now outright lying about Kos and Jerome’s book sales in an attempt to discredit it. (Sigh. Why do I feel like I am dealing with kids all the time?)
“Crashing the Gate” is the most discussed book about Democratic strategy in decades. The review on the NYRB is almost ecstatic. Very influential people are reading and discussing it. Its sales are great and they are only half way through their book tour. It is, by all possible measures, a success. And it’s a success on its own merits. I don’t think George Soros and Barbra Streisand bought the book in bulk so that it will be selling for a dollar in remainder bins by the middle of summer. Real humans are reading the book.
If you haven’t yet bought CTG, do it. It’s an easy read, humble and insightful. Supporting liberal writers and thinkers like Kos and Jerome and Greenwald are one great way to make sure that our ideas penetrate the media industrial complex. And, if nothing else, it really seems to freak out the wingnuts. Consider it part of your entertainment budget.
Update: Patrick Neilsen Hayden has more on this. So does Greenwald.
Kos suggests a new marketing slogan and I think it’s brilliant: “Buy ‘Crashing the Gate.’ Make a conservative cry.”
So now they want to dismantle FEMA. Isn’t that just perfect? It worked great not five years ago but since the republicans got their hands on it, it’s completely gone to shit.
We can still get the story if we dig deep enough in the papers, but you won’t see the front page telling us that the purpose of this administration is to eliminate any competence in government to serve the public. No, let’s just make sure the EPA doesn’t do it’s job so Republicans can say, “See? Government can’t do anything! You pay taxes for this and you don’t get it!” After which they can safely eliminate the programs without lowering your taxes. Eventually, the programs will be gone and you won’t be hearing all that anti-tax rhetoric anymore – it will be patriotic to pay taxes, again.
In the meantime, they’ll demand that we fork over huge amounts of money in the name of national security (or “fighting terror”, she laughed bitterly), while making sure that any measure that would actually protect our security is round-filed. I mean, it’s not like we should worry about nuclear materials being illegally imported into our country, undetected, by people whose purposes are not friendly to our citizens.
So first you wreck the program, then you claim its failures are the result of the fact that “government programs don’t work” – relying on amnesia about the fact that it worked just fine before they started “fixing” it – and then they decide we need to abolish it rather than putting it back the way it was when it used to work.
Oh, and just to make it seem like it’s coming from sensible people, we have some specially-labelled “moderates” – one from each party – to make a proposal to abolish, oh, say, FEMA. Like Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Leiberman (R-DLC). And the start of hurricane season just a month away, too!
I fear that she has hit the nail on the head. We are going to be dealing with the fallout of these horrible eight years for a long time to come. As each failure reaches critical mass, they will say that it proves their point — government doesn’t work. They have spent more than a quarter century pounding that mantra and it’s going to sound very “true” when people hear it.
It’s quite a scam. Run on government being incompetent and stealing your hard earned money. Take power. Make government incompetent while lining your pockets with as much taxpayer money as possible. Lose office. Make Democrats clean up your mess. Rinse repeat.
Ezra points to this fascinating profile of George Allen in the New Republic by Ryan Lizza. You really have to read it to believe it.
I know little about Allen except that he sounds even dumber than George W. Bush every time I see him speak on television. Yesterday he was blathering on about something and I was struck by how his rosy cheeks and strange purplish hair made him look a little like Reagan. So he has Reagan’s looks and Bush’s brains. Oh Jesus.
What I didn’t know was that he was a racist, sadistic prick. I now understand why he is such a Republican favorite. I had heard that he kept a confederate flag around and that he had a cute little “noose” hanging from a ficus tree. I didn’t know that he had been a neoconfederate since he went to Palos Verdes High, right here in LA. (He didn’t live in the south until he was a sophomore in college.)
George saw himself as disconnected from the culture in which he lived. He hated California and, while there, became obsessed with the supposed authenticity of rural life–or at least what he imagined it to be from episodes of “Hee Haw,” his favorite TV show, or family vacations in Mexico, where he rode horses. Perhaps because of his peripatetic childhood, the South’s deeply rooted culture attracted him. Or perhaps it was a romance with the masculinity and violence of that culture; his father, who was not one to spare the rod, once broke his son Gregory’s nose in a fight. Whatever it was, Allen got his first pair of those now-iconic cowboy boots from one of his father’s players on the Rams who received them as a promotional freebie. He also learned to dip from his dad’s players. At school, he started to wear an Australian bush hat, complete with a dangling chin strap and the left brim snapped up. He wore the hat for a yearbook photo of the falconry club. His favorite record was Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. Writing of her brother’s love for the “big, slow-witted Junior” on “Hee Haw,” Jennifer reports, “[t]here was also something mildly country-thuggish about Junior that I think George felt akin to.”
In high school, Allen’s “Hee Haw” persona made him a polarizing figure. “He rode a little red Mustang around with a Confederate flag plate on the front,” says Patrick Campbell, an old classmate, who now works for the Public Works Department in Manhattan Beach, California. “I mean, it was absurd-looking in our neighborhood.” Hurt Germany, who now lives in Paso Robles, California, explodes with anger at the mention of Allen’s name. “The guy is horrible,” she complains. “He drove around with a Confederate flag on his Mustang. I can’t believe he’s going to run for president.” Another classmate, who asks that I not use her name, also remembers Allen’s obsession with Dixie: “My impression is that he was a rebel. He plastered the school with Confederate flags.”
Politically, Allen’s years in Palos Verdes were dominated by the lingering racial tensions from the riots in nearby Watts in 1965–when that neighborhood was practically burned to the ground–and the nationwide riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, which left other parts of Southern California in flames. It is with that context in mind that four former classmates and one former administrator at Allen’s high school described to me an event for which Allen is most remembered–and the first glimpse that the château-raised Californian might grow up to become a defender of the South’s heritage.
It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the school library and other places. All five people who described the incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually put there by Allen and some of his friends. “It was something like die whitey,” says Campbell. The school administrator, who says he is a Republican and would “seriously consider” voting for Allen for president, says the graffiti said, “burn, baby, burn,” a reference to the race riots.
Karl Rove and Lee Atwater would no doubt high five such smart thinking. What a fine preparation for southern GOP politics. But then, Allen always played hardball:
…when his father was on the road, young George often acted as a surrogate dad to his siblings. According to his sister Jennifer, he was particularly strict about bedtimes. One night, his brother Bruce stayed up past his bedtime. George threw him through a sliding glass door. For the same offense, on a different occasion, George tackled his brother Gregory and broke his collarbone. When Jennifer broke her bedtime curfew, George dragged her upstairs by her hair.
George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense, the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled, is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend’s head. “George hoped someday to become a dentist,” she writes. “George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession–getting paid to make people suffer.”
According to Lizza, Allen explains “It’s the perspective of the youngest child, who is a girl.”
I am tempted to make a big deal out of Allen’s phoniness, as Lizza does. After all, from the non-Virginian cowboy boots to the tobacco spitting, he has self-consciously adopted these neo-confederate affectations. He’s not a real son of the south. But as a good friend explained to me some time ago, it would do no good to attack him on that basis. Despite Joe Klein’s fantasy about “authenticity” being the lodestar of winning politics, George W. Bush has proven that being a phony southerner is better than not being a southerner at all. Indeed, a phony southerner can be better than a real one as long as they put their whole heart and soul into it as George W. Bush and George Allen do. It shows respect.
In Mudcat Saunders’ new book about how the Democrats can win the south, he and his co-author go to great lengths to explain that politicians must have southern cultural tastes in order to win the presidency. Presumably a guy like Allen (who during his teen-age years in Southern California had a confederate flag on his mustang and wore a rebel flag pin in his graduation picture) is a man who has lived his bona fides even better than the the Yale fratboy, Junior Bush. Nobody can assail his good ole boy pretentions. Allen truly loves southern culture even if he has no blood ties to the south and his mother is (gasp!) French.
If winning the presidency in the country really rests on relative good ole boy-ness, then it’s hard to see how anyone can beat Allen. Aside from his total immersion in southern culture, the article is full of examples of his youthful (and not so youthful) racism and I can only assume that this will help him when he goes up against John McCain in the south. The racist voters of the GOP will catch all his winks and nods with no problem.
The only question is whether the big money boys will get behind him. He is, after all, even dumber than George W. Bush and they may be having some second thoughts about running another empty suit:
…although Allen is undoubtedly the hot new thing within the Beltway’s conservative establishment, some denizens of K Street and right-wing newsrooms have begun doubting whether he represents their best hope to snuff out the burgeoning campaign of their enemy, McCain. “If my choice is, ‘Who do I want to go out with to a fun dinner to drink our brains out,'” says one of the party’s top fund-raisers who has met with Allen many times, “there’s no question, it’d be Allen. He’s a guy’s guy, but he didn’t blow me away in terms of substance.”
It’s hard to believe that they can’t find a southern Republican who isn’t a sadistic idiot to run for president, but I’m beginning to think that’s the real problem. Guys like Bush and Allen are the best they can do. Clearly, all the smart southerners are Democrats.
Lucy’s Love Shop employee Wanda Gillespie said she was flabbergasted that South Carolina’s Legislature is considering outlawing sex toys.
But banning the sale of sex toys is actually quite common in some Southern states.
The South Carolina bill, proposed by Republican Rep. Ralph Davenport, would make it a felony to sell devices used primarily for sexual stimulation and allow law enforcement to seize sex toys from raided businesses.
“That would be the most terrible thing in the world,” said Ms. Gillespie, an employee the Anderson shop. “That is just flabbergasting to me. We are supposed to be in a free country, and we’re supposed to be adults who can decide what want to do and don’t want to do in the privacy of our own homes.”
Not according to RepresentativeRalph who doesn’t want the women of South Carolina to have unapproved orgasms.
Perhaps he feels that if he takes away women’s sex toys they might want to have sex with him instead. Here is his picture.
