"Republicans are monitoring South Dakota, Arkansas and Missouri, where they see potential [voting] problems that could spark legal challenges. 'Post-election disputes are more likely than they would otherwise be' because Senate contests are so tight, Vogel [Alex Vogel, general counsel to the National Republican Senatorial Committee] says." —Jill Lawrence in this morning's USA Today

Dems in the affected states: If this happens, by all means wave a few of these at the GOP whiners.

The Detroit News reported last week that Ted Nugent is considering a run for governor of Michigan in 2006.

Please do it, Ted. Please. Make my day.

My fantasy is that he gets the GOP nomination while the Democrats play possum. Only then do they point out some of the Nuge's verbal nail bombs to the public at large:

"... Yeah they love me (in Japan)—they're still assholes. These people they don't know what life is....Foreigners are assholes; foreigners are scum; I don't like 'em; I don't want 'em in this country; I don't want 'em selling me doughnuts; I don't want 'em pumping my gas; I don't want 'em downwind of my life—OK?" —Nugent as guest D.J., WRIF-FM, Detroit, November 19, 1992

About national health care: "The government must stay out of my life. If there are weenies who are in the liability column of our nation, tough shit." —Westword, Denver, Colorado, July 27, 1994

About Hillary Clinton: "You probably can't use the term 'toxic cunt' in your magazine, but that's what she is." —ibid.

(Source)

"Oh, it's pretty simple -- I say if you can't speak English, get the hell out of America. In case anybody needs an interpreter -- get one! The American dream is not available for anybody who can't speak English." —in concert, 2000

(Source: fifth article here)

I left out some pearls of wisdom about Haitian refugees and gay people. Also about South African blacks and Muslims (Michigan's population includes a large number of Muslims and, of course, African Americans).

Wouldn't it be nice if, for once, a right-winger who said things like this were actually held to account for them?

Oh, and did you notice where the Nuge sent up his trial balloon, according to the DetNews story? In Naples, Florida, where he'd gone "to speak to middle and high school students about the dangers of drugs and alcohol."

But ... but ... but I thought we lived in a politically correct police state, where people were made societal pariahs for calling animal companions "pets"! Surely the thought police wouldn't have allowed someone who called Hillary Clinton a bad name to appear before impressionable youth! Ann Coulter says so, so it must be true!

"Analysis: Partisan memorial aids GOP" is the headline of a story in this morning's Minneapolis Star-Tribune.  

This is bad. Why did it happen? Why didn't the Democrats understand the standard they'd be held to?

Day in, day out, Republicans are clinically precise: the nice version of their message goes out to exactly the people who want it nice, and the red-meat version -- not merely partisan, like the Wellstone service, but often utterly vile -- is limited to venues where it will reach the zealots but be utterly ignored by everyone else (apart from a few disgruntled lefty eavesdroppers like me).  

The Democrats have to find a way to turn this one around, or this Senate seat will be a Republican pick-up. For now, they've given the GOP a wide-open opportunity to whine, and nobody does that better than Republicans.

OK, you want religious bigotry? This is religious bigotry.

Boy Scouts to atheist Eagle Scout: convert or quit.

Last week, Lambert was given roughly a week by the Boy Scouts' regional executive to declare belief in a supreme being and comply with Boy Scout policy, or quit the Scouts. The official and Lambert were to talk again this week regarding Lambert's answer, although a definite date hadn't been set by Tuesday.

"We've asked him to search his heart, to confer with family members, to give this great thought," Brad Farmer, the Scout executive of the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts, told The Sun of Bremerton. "If he says he's an avowed atheist, he does not meet the standards of membership."

Remember this story the next time someone tries to suggest that opposing the anti-gay policies of the Scouts is like opposing Mom and apple pie.

In his most recent Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen says a questioner should tear up her contract with a real-estate agent who is an Orthodox Jew and refuses to shake a her hand because she's a woman.

I may be a lapsed-Catholic atheist, but I find this embarrassing and annoying.

Both Cohen and the questioner agree that the agent is guilty of sexism. Well, if so, it’s sexism only on a symbolic level. The questioner calls the agent "courteous and competent" and never suggests that in this business transaction he has treated her with insufficient respect because she’s a woman. And she never hints at any other problem with the agent -- in theory, a religious conservative might refuse to rent to a gay person or someone else a property owner would be happy to have as a renter, but there’s no suggestion of that.

How many social evenings in New York end with a leavetaking between two male-female couples in which the women air-kiss each other, the men and women air-kiss … and the men shake hands? I fail to see an effective difference between this air-kiss double standard and an Orthodox Jew’s refusal to shake hands across gender lines.

The Senate could go Republican in a week and become a hiring hall for anti-abortion judges. Can we please do a better job of picking our battles, people?

I’ve been away from non-print media for a few days. Are the right-wingers still cackling about the fact that those durn libruls were wrong about the sniper being an angry white male?

Well, no matter. The profilers (liberals? think these folks are sitting around debating the departure of Christopher Hitchens from The Nation?) weren’t just wrong about race -- they were wrong six ways from Sunday. Remember, we were supposed to be dealing with a couple of teenagers or a firefighter or a 26-year-old with a buzz cut. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

What fools we’ve been for paying attention to profilers.

Recall the profile of the Unabomber: He was supposed to be in his thirties or forties (Kaczynski was a decade or two older); he was supposed to be a guy who hadn’t managed get through college but hung out on campuses (rather than an ex-professor living deliberately distancing himself from academe).

And recall, from last May, this profile of the mailbox bomber -- someone “older” (“This guy didn't just fall off of a turnip truck”), “one person or a small, small group of participants, people who have known each other for a long time or shared distrust of the government, tax issues, health issues, land use, grazing rights.” The bomber turned out to be a 21-year-old kid who believed in astral projection ("He didn't think people really died; they just moved on to other places. We were like, 'Whatever'") and was trying to use bombs to make a happy face.

Profiling is a scam. Maybe now it can be plopped on top of phrenology on the ash heap of pseudo-science.

Let's review:

It now appears that John Allen Muhammad, despite being prevented by law from possessing a firearm, obtained a Bushmaster XM15 rifle with features that mimic those of banned guns ("It complies with the letter of the law, but it is still an assault rifle"), possibly at a gun show or from a private seller, or possibly at a gun shop that failed an ATF audit two years ago by being unable to produce sales records for 150 weapons, as required by law -- a shop owned by a man who told one story about Muhammad's weapon to investigators and a different story to reporters.

* * * * * * *

"A Justice Department study last January estimated that there were two million restraining orders around the nation, but that only 590,000 had been entered in the system," Fox Butterfield writes in today's New York Times.

"A bill that would give the states $375 million a year for the next three years to catch up on the backlog passed the House of Representatives but has been stalled in the Senate by opposition from Republicans."

I knew Paul Wellstone put his Senate seat at risk this month when he voted against the Iraq blank check for Bush; I'm embarrassed to admit that I had to be reminded that he did something similar in '96, voting against welfare "reform" just before the election. Two gutsy votes by a Democratic senator -- I'm 43 years old, and I wonder if I'll see even that many the rest of my life.

"Whatever evidence convinced two juries to convict the five animals, it was not DNA evidence."

--Ann Coulter, "New York Times Goes Wilding on Central Park Jogger," 10/17/02

*****

"Contrary to arguments made by a prosecutor at two trials in 1990, four strands of hair were never 'matched' to any of the Harlem teenagers accused of beating and raping a jogger in Central Park, a former police scientist said this week....

"Nicholas Petraco, a detective who examined the hairs when he worked in the Police Department's criminalistics division and testified at the trials, said the technique for hair examination in 1990 was not powerful enough to tie anyone to the crime with certainty....

At most, Mr. Petraco said, the hairs could be described as 'consistent with and similar to' those of the defendants and the victim....

"While Mr. Petraco avoided making an absolute link between the hairs and any person during his testimony, the lead prosecutor, Elizabeth Lederer, showed no such reticence. In her closing arguments, she used emphatic language to assert that hair found on a defendant, Kevin Richardson, had been "matched" and vouched for the reliability of the vigorously contested confessions.

"' He found on Kevin Richardson's underpants a hair that matched the head hair of' the victim, Ms. Lederer told the jurors. 'And there was a second hair on the T-shirt that matched' the victim's pubic hair...."

--Jim Dwyer with Susan Saulny, "Hair Evidence in Jogger Case Is Discredited," New York Times, 10/25/02

Yes, in context Coulter is referring to DNA evidence taken from semen that now conclusively links Matias Reyes to the rape, rather than hair evidence. Nevertheless, she doesn't make that distinction. She makes a blanket statement about the value of DNA evidence to the case.

And that blanket statement is not supported by the facts.

Doug Forrester, the New Jersey GOP's candidate for the U.S. Senate, and a number of his supporters have recently questioned whether Democratic candidate Frank Lautenberg is too old for the Senate at age 78.

Meanwhile, The New York Times is reporting that President Bush plans to name William Webster, former head of the FBI and CIA, to head a new accounting regulatory agency.

Guess how old Webster is.

Ann Coulter's new column is up. Like last week's, it's about the Central Park Jogger case. For now, I'll limit my disgust to Coulter's language: In the two columns, Coulter calls the black men convicted (perhaps erroneously) of the park attack "savages" four times, "animals" three times, and "feral beasts" and "primitives" once each. And Andrew Sullivan can't see a difference between Coulter and Maureen Dowd?

It's obvious that Coulter, like a very young, very bratty child, is testing limits. She wants to find out how long we'll let her get away with the Bob Grant imitation.

So far the answer seems to be: as long as she wants.

The next sound you hear will be Ann Coulter libeling liberals by saying we want this guy acquitted -- even if (or perhaps especially if) it's proved that he's the D.C. sniper -- because he's black and a Muslim.

"Liberals so long to claim that every criminal is innocent." --A. Coulter, "New York Times Goes Wilding on Central Park Jogger," 10/17/02

Andrew Sullivan recently asked in his blog how Maureen Dowd and Ann Coulter differ, if in fact they differ at all. In what follows I examine Dowd’s and Coulter’s four most recent columns -- from Dowd, "From Vertical to Horizontal" (October 23), "The Soufflé Doctrine" (October 20), "Black Heart, White Van" (October 16), and "Texas on the Tigris" (October 13); from Coulter, "New York Times Goes Wilding on Central Park Jogger" (October 17), "New Global Warming Threat: Hot Air on Iraq" (October 10), "Dems to Torch: Only Crooks Who Can Win" (October 3), and "Why We Hate Them" (September 26).

I’ll ignore for the moment the most basic difference between the two -- that Maureen Dowd, a critic of President Bush and other Republicans, won fame (and a Pulitzer, the "liberal" Establishment’s highest journalistic accolade) writing nasty columns about Bill and Hillary Clinton, and denigrates the Clintons, Al Gore, Tom Daschle, John Edwards, and other moderate and liberal Democrats to this day, while Ann Coulter scrupulously avoids criticism of Bush, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, and other members of the GOP’s right wing.

The main difference between the two columnists is this: Dowd ridicules the subjects of her columns -- sometimes. Coulter goes much further: She denounces the objects of her contempt with words intended to define them as pariahs, people who should be shunned by a decent society. Dowd, when she’s in attack mode, describes her targets as clumsy, foolish, and cunningly nasty; Coulter -- who is always in attack mode -- paints hers as brutal, criminal, treasonous, or otherwise beyond the pale.

In Coulter’s column "Why We Hate Them," it’s not merely that Islamic terrorists are "primitives" -- Democrats are "traitorous" ("I've been too busy fretting about ‘why they hate us’ to follow the Democrats' latest objections to the war on terrorism. So it was nice to have Al Gore lay out their full traitorous case this week"); critics of President Bush, apparently including Maureen Dowd and Al Gore, are "anti-American" ("The ‘empire’ argument is wildly popular among the anti-American set"); and, if I read this correctly, Germans and Koreans are "barbarians" who are morally equivalent to advocates of female genital mutilation:

Stewing over the "profound and troubling change in the attitude of the German electorate toward the United States," Gore ruefully noted that the German-American relationship is in "a dire crisis." Alas, the Germans hate us.

That's not all. According to Gore, the British hate us, too. Gore said Prime Minister Tony Blair is getting into "what they describe as serious trouble with the British electorate" because of his alliance with the U.S. ("Serious trouble" is British for "serious trouble.")

That same night, James Carville -- the heart and soul of the Democratic Party -- read from the identical talking points on "Crossfire": "The Koreans hate us. Now the Germans -- you know that's one against Germany. You know what? You know what? If we had a foreign policy that tried to get people to like us, as opposed to irritating everybody in the damn world, it would be a lot better thing." (Hillary Clinton on James Carville: "Great human being.")

Perhaps we could get Djibouti to like us if we legalized clitorectomies for little girls. America is fighting for its survival and the Democrats are obsessing over why barbarians hate us.

In "Dems to Torch: Only Crooks Who Can Win," Coulter accuses Democrats of standing for "treason" and "the fundamental right to suck the brains out of little babies," and she says that "honest elections and a million unborn babies" are on "the Democrats’ death list." (Additionally, she suggests that New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey -- "the Democratic governor" -- could appoint to the Senate Amiri Baraka, recently the author of an anti-Semitic poem about September 11, despite the fact that McGreevey’s response to the poem was a call for Baraka’s resignation as New Jersey's poet laureate.)

In "New Global Warming Threat: Hot Air on Iraq," Coulter describes Senator Robert Byrd as "D-KKK," a "kleptocrat," "an ex-Klanner" with "his white sheet in a knot," and, in case we weren’t paying attention, "a kleptocrat ex-Klanner." She refers to those who have questioned George W. Bush’s moves toward war in Iraq as "liberals pretending to be Americans." And, of course, she calls Bill Clinton a "felon."

The terms of opprobrium Coulter uses in "New York Times Goes Wilding on Central Park Jogger" would be understandable, given the brutality of the crime under discussion, if a confession by a man who was never convicted in the case, who claims to have acted alone, and whose DNA matches evidence taken at the crime scene had not raised doubts about what exactly the five young convicted in the attacks did on the night in question, and if the possibility of false confessions in the case could be readily dismissed. Coulter -- not merely unwilling to entertain the possibility that the young men are innocent, but unwilling even to accept that they might have committed other crimes without ever attacking the jogger -- calls them "the five animals," "the five primitives," "the savages," and "a mob of feral beasts."

This is not Dowd’s method.

In Dowd’s "Texas on the Tigris," George W. Bush is "the failed Harken oil executive" and Dick Cheney is "the inept Halliburton chairman." "Failed" and "inept" are insults, but of the sort used for managers of last-place baseball teams, not for threats to civilization as we know it. And CIA director George Tenet is described as so "desperate to please Mr. Bush" that he is said to brief the resident "while polishing Mr. Bush's shoes" -- an object of ridicule, yes, but not a menace to society.

In "Black Heart, White Van," Dowd calls Police Chief Charles Moose of Montgomery County, Maryland, "Fussy Charlie"; she says "Ari Fleischer leaped from abstruse to absurd" in calling D.C.-area snipings a question of "values"; and she calls the gubernatorial bid of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (a Democrat) "limp." These are not words of demonization. (Yes, Dowd calls the sniper a "suburban maniac," a "fiend," and a "freak." These epithets would be analogous to Coulter’s harsh words in "New York Times Goes Wilding" if Coulter’s words were directed at the actual attackers of the Central Park jogger rather than those who were convicted, perhaps erroneously, of the attack. It should also be noted that Coulter words are racially coded, while Dowd’s are general.)

It’s simply unimaginable that Ann Coulter could write anything as mild as Dowd’s most recent column, "From Vertical to Horizontal," about newly appointed L.A. police chief William Bratton. The harshest phrase in it is a reference to William Simon, the GOP candidate for governor in California, as "the disaster area" -- an assessment with which some Republicans might agree.

The recent Dowd column that most appalled conservatives, "The Soufflé Doctrine," depicts President Bush as a callow, whiny simpleton and strongly suggests that he is unfit to hold office. It does not, however, suggest that Bush or anyone who advises him is unfit to walk among decent men and women. Richard Perle is depicted as coldbloodedly and cynically -- but not criminally or insanely -- bellicose. If you think Perle sounds like a lunatic in the column, it’s because Dowd’s allusion is obscure: In a profile in the October 15 Los Angeles Times, Perle spoke of his dreams of running a restaurant in which soufflés are cooked without human intervention at diners’ tables; Dowd’s central conceit -- which she certainly overworks -- is that this dream is a metaphor for Perle’s bloodless approach (in Dowd’s view) to geopolitics. Suggesting that a defense strategist is coldblooded is not the same as suggesting that he is a (war) criminal or a madman.

"The Soufflé Doctrine" is by far the nastiest of the four Dowd columns under discussion. In the others, Dowd’s outrage is muted to nonexistent: "From Vertical to Horizontal" focuses on inside skinny (soft-news trivia about William Bratton and Rudy Giuliani), while "Texas on the Tigris" is primarily constructed of examples of Dowd’s favorite rhetorical device, the ironic mirrored pair ("The Democrats were desperate to put the war behind them, so they put the war in front of them"; I’m sure I used to know the Latin or Greek name for this device, and I’m certain Andrew Sullivan still knows it). Dowd clearly enjoys gossip and ironic mirrored pairs for their own sake; by contrast, if Coulter has ever written a piece in which she disconnects from her rage long enough to luxuriate in gossip, in wordplay for its own sake, or in any other silly pleasure -- well, I haven’t read it, and I’d welcome a link.

Maureen Dowd got up Rush's nose, apparently. In responding, Mr. Feminazi takes the high road, as always:

"All she's got now is bourbon for mouthwash, and it's showing on her columns."

The key riff in Maureen Dowd's latest column went way over a lot of people's heads, including mine, but once you know what she's talking about, it's perfectly comprehensible.

Here's the setup, in which Richard Perle addresses "Boy Emperor" Bush:

"I am the chairman of your Defense Policy Board," an amused Richard Perle replied. "I am an adviser to Rumsfeld, a friend of Wolfowitz's and a thorn in Powell's medals. Je suis un gourmand, Monsieur le President. I have always dreamed of opening a chain of fast-food soufflé shops based on a machine that would automatically separate eggs, beat the yolks and combine them with hot milk and sugar, add the desired flavorings, whip the whites until stiff, fold them into the mixture and bake in individual pots without human intervention. Then conveyor belts would bring the glass-enclosed ovens to the table and patrons would get to see their meals rise. I've never found investors smart enough to realize the dazzling ingenuity of the Perle Soufflé Doctrine. Meanwhile, I'm killing time trying to get your foreign policy to rise. I'm known as the Prince of Darkness."

What this alludes to is an October 15 Los Angeles Times piece by Johanna Neuman entitled "Perle's Passion Is Served." In it, Neumann writes:

Beyond the policy debate, Perle is an original — a conservative agitator with a passion for the good life, a member of the Washington establishment who defies the town's workaholic habits, a weapon strategist who at the height of the Cold War fantasized about opening a souffle restaurant.

Neuman goes on to describe Perle's unsettlingly antiseptic culinary dream:

When Perle seeks brief refuge from the public policy battles, he can be found at home, in a kitchen any great chef would envy. Unlike the wars over arms control or Middle East policy, the gratification from a meal beautifully prepared is instantaneous. So attracted is Perle to the mechanics of cooking that he obsessed for years about opening a souffle restaurant in which a conveyor belt would bring a glass-enclosed oven to the table and patrons could watch their meals rise.

"I still think it's a good idea," he said, between bites of raw fish.

Snot that I am, I've already e-mailed this guy and this guy to explain.

(The L.A. Times piece, by the way, is here; use "clipjoint" at both prompts if, like many people, you have trouble persuading the Times server to let you read it.)

In my last post, I said that the Pepsi/Ludacris story was old news. Apparently I was wrong: Pompous ass Bill O'Reilly, on a roll after his successful browbeating of the soft-drink maker, now wants to impose his right-wing-nanny-state values on VH1 because it intends to air "Music Behind Bars," a documentary about imprisoned musicians.

O'Reilly didn't initiate the campaign against VH1, but he did turn it from a protest into a fatwa, devoting two episodes of his O'Reilly Factor to the upcoming documentary and calling for the resignation of Christina Norman, the president of VH1. (It's not clear whether he truly considers her resignation to be an adequate abasement or whether the right-wing reeducation camps just haven't been set up yet.)

A while back, professional pompous ass Bill O’Reilly browbeat Pepsi for planning to put the rapper Ludacris in some ads. O’Reilly claimed that Ludacris was "peddling antisocial behavior"; he objected to such Ludacris lyrics as "I been drankin' and bustin' too, and I been thankin' of bustin' you upside your fuckin' forehead." Pepsi went on to dump the rapper.

This is old news, and it was dissected hilariously last month by G. Beato. I bring it up because Fox’s high-priced crank apparently doesn’t know much about the star of a previous wildly successful Pepsi ad campaign -- Ray "You got the right one, bay-bay" Charles.

For the moment, let’s ignore the 1965 arrest for heroin possession, after which Charles admitted (according to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia) that he’d been using smack for nearly two decades; Charles cleaned himself shortly afterward. And let’s overlook the fact that a year after his arrest Charles released a song called "Let’s Go Get Stoned"; at the time, "stoned" meant "drunk" as often as it meant "wasted on illegal drugs." I want to talk about his cheery 1968 tune "Understanding."

"Understanding," a meditation on love, features two spoken interludes by Brother Ray. In the second one, he says this about his "old lady":

….What I mean is, if she must play around, don’t let me catch her, because what I don’t see can’t hurt me, you understand? But on the other hand, if I should ever catch her, I’m not gon’ talk about her and call her a bunch of bad names like you-all might. No! Mmm-mmm. What I’m gonna do, I’m gonna go downtown to the hardware store and buy myself a double-blade axe handle, come back, square off, and believe me, her soul’s gonna belong to the good Lord, because her head gonna belong to me.

Gosh! There were songs that mentioned interpersonal violence before rap music was invented? Uh-huh.

As you follow the story of the Bali car bombings, remember that this is what Ann Coulter wished on reporters, editors, clerical workers, truck drivers, janitors, visitors, and passersby in and around the New York Times building in her vile New York Observer interview.

And this. And this. And this. And this. And this.

"Is your tape recorder running? Turn it on! I got something to say. My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

“THINKABLE”

The cover story in the October issue of Popular Mechanics cheerily describes tiny, allegedly high-precision first-strike “bunker-buster” nuclear weapons that are currently being developed by U.S. scientists.

Don’t you find that reassuring?

I mean, surely you’re not troubled by the fact that a Princeton physicist quoted in the article believes such devices would “release rather than contain radioactive fallout” -- that is, while most of the material “would remain within the blast area, a radioactive cloud seeping from the crater would release a plume of gases that would irradiate anyone in its path” -- and if such a device “were used to root out terrorists near a major Third World city such as Baghdad, the casualties could be in the hundreds of thousands” (the vast majority of them no doubt civilians). Are you?

And I assume you’re not thinking about the fact that the last wonder weapon we used in the Middle East, the supposedly pinpoint-precise Patriot missile, was not exactly what it was cracked up to be in 1991, right?

And certainly you wouldn’t suggest that our enemies might claim that our development of first-strike theater nukes justifies, in their eyes, more 9/11s, more Balis, and maybe even a secret WMD program or two.

Would you, Mr. Sandal-Wearing, America-Hating Neville Chamberlain?

Mad Dog Michael Kelly gets a well-deserved thrashing.

IS IT ANN COULTER -- OR IS IT DAVID DUKE?

Maybe people wouldn’t be so quick to call Ann Coulter a hatemonger if she didn’t write so much like...well, an ex-Klansman. Here are twenty-five statements, some from Coulter’s best-selling book Slander, others from writings posted by David Duke at his Web site, David Duke Online (including excerpts from his book, My Awakening). Duke is thought of as a man with, well, issues about black people, and while that’s true, a visit to his site shows that the real bee in his bonnet is Jews. So I’ve chosen Duke passages in which he talks about Jews, while the Slander passages, needless to say, concern liberals.

Can you tell which is which?

Answers below.


1. ...[liberals/Jews] are bitter. The one impulse that consistently unites them is hate.

2. You will never appreciate the full savagery of [the left/Jews] until you get in their way.

3. Powerful [liberals/Jews] in media and government around the world frequently act to exert control over the peoples among whom they live.

4. [Liberals/The Jewish people] hate America, they hate “flag-wavers,” they hate abortion opponents....Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like [liberals/Jews] do.

5. Through the efforts of [liberal/Jewish] and other traitors to the United States, the American government has embarked on a foreign policy that has repeatedly betrayed America’s true interests.

6. Predators are great fun for [liberals/Jews]. Criminals and poor people allow them to swell with a sense of their own incredible self-worth.

7. [Liberals/Jews] hate society and want to bring it down to reinforce their sense of invincibility. Secure in the knowledge that their beachfront haciendas will still be standing when the smoke clears, they giddily fiddle with the little people’s rules and morals.

8. The same media that prohibits even the slightest criticism of [liberals/Jews] has no reluctance to demean other groups....The portrayal of the slack-jawed, green-toothed, ignorant, racist, hateful, murderous, rural White Southerner has become a stereotype in Hollywood films....In stark contrast, whenever [liberals/Jews] are mentioned as a group, it is always with a sort of a hushed reverence.

9. Like all propagandists, [liberals/Jews] create mythical enemies to justify their own viciousness and advance their agenda.

10. Each year, tens of thousands of stories about intelligent, compassionate, unselfish, creative, moral and courageous [liberals/Jews] fill two-foot TV screens and 30-foot movie screens; our newspapers, magazines, and books; our playhouses, pulpits and podiums; our radio waves and satellite transmissions. There are thousands of portrayals of persecuted [liberals/Jews] as innocent, noble and heroic; while their opponents are portrayed as the embodiment of evil. No group on Earth has better public relations than do [liberals/the Jewish people].

11. The wildly disproportionate percentage of [liberals/Jews] in the media is not an insignificant point. The media determine how the news will be served up, how the players are characterized, what news to report, and what news not to report. The same clichés, biases, and outright lies are constantly reinforced through the media sound chamber.

12. The [liberal/Jewish] domination of American media is long-standing. Even as far back as the 1920s, [liberals/Jews] had influence far disproportionate to their percentage of the population. And even though media operations frequently change hands and the CEOs, chairmen, administrators, and top editors change, [liberal/Jewish] domination is stronger than ever—and the power brokers continue to increase and consolidate their power.

13. Once I discovered the [liberal/Jewish] power over the American media, I resolved never to surrender my freedom of speech in deference to it, no matter what it would cost me. I became determined to oppose the media masters who seek to destroy our way of life and our very life form.

14. During my hundreds of interviews over the years, whenever I mentioned [liberal/Jewish] media domination, my interrogators first would deny the [liberal/Jewish] preponderance of power. Then, when that defense sank beneath a sea of facts, they acted shocked that anyone could even suggest that [liberals/Jews] might use their media power for their own advantage.

15. [Liberals/Jews] don’t try to win arguments, they seek to destroy their opponents and silence dissident opinions.

16. If you live in a major city, the daily newspaper you read will more than likely be [liberal/Jewish]-owned or -edited. So will the national newsmagazine you buy at the news counter. More than likely, the national cable or regular TV network you watch will be [liberal/Jewish]-owned, and if not, [liberals/Jews] will be preponderant in the executive and decision-making departments. The movie you see in the theater or watch on television will very likely have been produced, directed, or written by [liberals/Jews]—and often all three. The publishers of the hardbacks or paperbacks you read, even the record companies that produce the music you buy, will probably be [liberal/Jewish]-owned, and if not, they will very likely have [liberals/Jews] in key executive positions. Bookstores and libraries often select their new book purchases based on reviews by [liberal/Jewish] critics and publications such as The New York Times Book Review, another part of the [liberal/Jewish]-run New York Times.

17. Vast agglomerations of money are deployed to publish and promote [liberal/Jewish] authors. National magazines and newspapers give hallucinatory reviews of books by their fellow [liberals/Jews] and snub books by [conservatives/Christians]. Ludicrous uncompensated advances are made to support [liberal/Jewish] authors, and [liberal/Jewish] jeremiads make it to print without the most cursory fact-checking.
Meanwhile, the entire information industry works overtime to suppress [conservative/Christian] books.

18. Book publishing is perhaps the part of American media least controlled by [liberals/Jews]. Yet they still dominate the most important parts of that industry. All one needs is a printer and some cash to publish a book, and tens of thousands of printers do business in America along with hundreds of small book publishers. Yet here too the [liberal/Jewish] influence is powerful, for writing a book, no matter how intelligent and provocative, offers no guarantee of it being published, and being published offers no guarantee of being professionally promoted, distributed, or even reviewed. The half dozen or so of the largest publishers and distributors handle 95 percent of the biggest-selling books in America. And in those areas of book publishing and distribution, [liberal/Jewish] appraisal is inevitable and [liberal/Jewish] approval is crucial.

19. The spirit of the First Amendment has been effectively repealed for [conservative/Christian] speech by a censorious, accusatory mob. Truth cannot prevail because whole categories of thought are deemed thought crimes.

20. If there were a modern Spanish Inquisition in America today, it wouldn’t be Bob Jones rounding up Catholics. It would be [liberals/Jews] rounding up [right-wingers/Christians] and putting them on trial for hate crimes.

21. As they have gone from outsiders to now thoroughly dominating the Western governmental and media establishment, many [liberals/Jews] have shifted from strong defenders of free speech to some of its most willful suppressors.

22. The [liberal/Jewish] students who dominated the "free-speech" movement at Berkeley in the mid-’60s sang the praises of free speech for the purpose of inviting to campus the likes of the filthy-mouthed and repugnant Allen Ginsberg and the violent, openly Communist, black revolutionary Angela Davis. Today they attempt to silence anyone who dares to speak before a student audience on the issues raised in this book.

23. [Liberals/Jews] need not bother with logical persuasion as long as they can prey on people’s sense of weakness.

24. My assertion that there exists a powerful, cohesive, world-wide [liberal/Jewish] supremacism finds confirmation in evidence mostly provided by the [liberal/Jewish] supremacists themselves.

25. That’s the whole point of being a [liberal/Jew]: to feel superior to people with less money.

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ANSWERS:

1. AC (Slander, p. 201)
2. AC (Slander, p. 8)
3. DD (Preface to “Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question” by David Duke;
http://www.davidduke.com/supremacism/preface.shtml)
4. AC (Slander, pp. 5-6)
5. DD (“How Israeli Terrorism and American Treason Caused the September 11 Attacks”;
http://www.davidduke.com/writings/howisraeliterror.shtml)
6. AC (Slander, p. 29)
7. AC (Slander, p. 27)
8. DD (My Awakening, ch. 15;
http://www.davidduke.org/awakening/chapter15_03.html)
9. AC (Slander, p. 166)
10. DD (My Awakening, ch. 15;
http://www.davidduke.org/awakening/chapter15_02.html)
11. AC (Slander, p. 57)
12. DD (My Awakening, ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_05.html)
13. DD (My Awakening, ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_15.html)
14. DD (My Awakening, ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_14.html)
15. AC (Slander, p. 91)
16. DD (My Awakening, ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_03.html)
17. AC (Slander, p. 97)
18. DD (My Awakening,ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_07.html)
19. AC (Slander,p. 4)
20. AC (Slander, p. 196)
21. DD (My Awakening, ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_10.html)
22. DD (My Awakening, ch. 19;
http://www.davidduke.com/awakening/chapter19_10.html)
23. AC (Slander, p. 33)
24. DD (Preface to “Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question” by David Duke;
http://www.davidduke.com/supremacism/preface.shtml)
25. AC (Slander, p. 29)

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." --White House Chief of Staff Andy Card last month.

So it's been clear for a while why there was a relatively slow rollout of the Saddam war campaign. But once the Bushies had driven everything else off the front page, why did they allow the congressional vote to take place so early? Why didn't they work with GOP leaders in Congress to drag the process out? Why wouldn't they want to keep beating the war drums all through October?

Oh, now I get it.

George Pataki may have insisted on a lousy format for yesterday's New York gubernatorial debate -- the debate included all seven candidates and was by most accounts a mess -- but now no one can accuse the Republican governor of attempting to exclude or censor a third-party candidate who can take votes away from him, the well-heeled, self-financing fiscal conservative Tom Golisano.

I’ve long thought that Al Gore should have done something like this in response to Ralph Nader’s attempts to join the presidential debates. Gore could have said, "I welcome the chance to debate Ralph Nader," while insisting he would only do so if Pat Buchanan, or Buchanan and Libertarian Harry Browne -- both of whom actually qualified for more state ballots than Nader -- were also included. Why should only one major-party candidate have been compelled to compete in the debates with an ideological purist who had no chance of winning and thus no need to tack toward the center?

WE ARE STARDUST, WE ARE GOLDEN. YOU, ON THE OTHER HAND, ARE AN IDIOT.

Stamping his foot, Ron Rosenbaum declares in this week’s New York Observer that he will have nothing more to do with the Left (and its “idiocies”) because some contemporary leftists ill-advisedly compare the United States to murderous totalitarian regimes.

Well, funny thing -- this sort of talk on the part of leftists apparently amused Rosenbaum greatly in 1968, and continued to win his admiration as recently as a few years ago.

Rosenbaum was “in the streets,” as they say, during the 1968 Democratic convention, where he heard Chicago referred to as “Czechago.” Rosenbaum recalls this in a 1996 essay with the wince-inducing title “The Unbearable Sadness of Tear Gas”; in the essay, Rosenbaum, who describes present-day leftists as “people who are unable to make moral distinctions,” expressed no outrage at the fact that leftists of his golden ’60s youth compared merely thuggish Chicago cops to the genuinely totalitarian Soviet repressors of Czechoslovakia. To the contrary: Rosenbaum ’96 admiringly credited the “Czechago” pun to “one of the brilliant Yippie agitprop masters” then abroad in the land.

Apparently Rosenbaum believes that only modern leftists should be judged on the logical rigor of their words. Here he is in 1996, writing about his groovy generational peers: “For better or worse, 1968 was not so much about ideological consistency as it was about the spirit of rebellion -- at its best, anarchic, antinomian, even Blakean in its radical innocence, on the side of dissent in general against oppressive authority in general. At its worst, misguided, sectarian, and willfully ignorant, but certainly no more willfully ignorant than those sending hundreds of thousands to die in a misguided war.”

I guess the fact that we are about to send tens if not hundreds of thousands to possibly die in another misguided war doesn’t give contemporary leftists the right to be innocent in their Blakean anarcho-radical antinomianism. Or whatever.

(“The Unbearable Sadness of Tear Gas” appears in Ron Rosenbaum’s book The Secret Parts of Fortune.)