According to Mr. Bush's new line of dung regarding the Iraq war, we have to fight the terrorists over there or they will follow us here. Right. Obviously the follow us here rule doesn't apply to Londoners, whose subway system somehow still got bombed last July despite their government's efforts to fight them there so they don't follow us here. I think a better way of fighting terrorists is to fight them where they are, rather than starting a war in a country you really, really wanted to invade anyway and creating more terrorists there and everywhere else.
Former Republican House Rep/current MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough discusses the reaction to his criticism of Mr. Bush , including an 8.15 segment called "Is Bush an Idiot?" I note that on two occasions, Scarborough first attempts to describe a "conservative" reaction to his criticisms, but quickly corrects himself by describing said reaction as "Republican loyalist." This disconnect is a fairly constant theme here at "Thieves in the Temple," and in conversations I still have to correct myself, just as Mr. Scarborough did. Anyway, I wish Joe (who's a "little O'Reilly" in good ways as well as bad) the best in his effort to get the difference between conservatives and Bush Mobbers straight in his own mind.
Speaking of what could have been Joe Scarborough's next job: Katherine Harris can't stop screwing up before the Lord. Not too long after her infamous "widow's mite" comment, Ms. Harris has now unloaded thusly: "(i)f you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin...Whenever we legislate sin, and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don't know better, we are leading them astray and it's wrong..." Also, by the way, "God is the one who chooses our rulers," meaning, I suppose, that in 2000 God was Katherine Harris. Her campaign, shifting to the damage-control mode to which it's grown accustomed, repeatedly asserted that she did not mean to offend. How many times must I tell these pimps! What you do matters, not what you intend. Besides, what other intent can we divine from her comments? That she intended to pander to right-wing knuckle-draggers?
Rick Santorum unbound? Don't believe the hype. The August 22 Rasmussen Reports poll has Casey the Younger up 48-40, with Carl Romanelli getting the same number of percentage points (five) as "some other candidate" got last time; if the 7 undecided points all go for Santorum, then it's still Casey by a point. Even Rasmussen's own analysis seems like it's trying to prop up Santorum a bit: paragraph one points out that Senator Encyclopedia Brown went from 23 points down in May to 8 points down now, when it's fairly obvious now (never mind how much I gloated about it then) that the 23-point deficit was an aberration, while paragraph two inaccurately states that this is Senator Man-on-Dog's first single-deficit showing when Rasmussen's own chart shows Senator Altered Human Embryos (I'll stop soon) with a single-deficit showing in March. I think it's far more significant that, though Mr. Santorum (told you I'd stop) spent a lot of money, produced at least one genius ad and several merely misleading ones, and assisted Mr. Romanelli's petitioning effort, the two-term Senator has gained exactly one point over the last month -- and, as Rasmussen helpfully notes, still hasn't matched his high for the year. I never said the race wouldn't finish close; I just said Rick Santorum would lose it. Why? Read over those three nicknames I gave him again.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen gives Republicans another reason to officially Be Worried: John Ensign only leads Jack Carter by seven points in the most recent Rasmussen poll, and doesn't break 50%. You can explain the problems all those other beleaguered incumbents are having, but John Ensign? He should be safe: he won two House terms in a relatively liberal district, then came within 400-odd votes of beating Harry Reid in 1998, and then pounded Ed Bernstine by 15 points to win Richard Bryan's open seat in 2000, all in a state that ain't that red and ain't as red as he is. In addition, Ensign and Reid seem to work well together, and Reid hasn't shown that much enthusiasm for the prospect of unseating him. So if Carter the Son is this close three months before Election Day, then the Republicans ought to be on red alert. (For the record, the safest Republican seat up in 2006 belongs to the honorable Richard Lugar of Indiana. No Democrat filed to oppose him.)
I planned to bash Joe Lieberman's head in a little more for pretending that "partisanship," in this era, isn't mostly a creation of far-right knuckle-draggers, but I've trod that grass into dirt already, and I'd rather use this occasion to correct something I said a while back. I really, really, really wish I hadn't said, in describing our relationship with those who call us traitors and terrorist-symps, "(t)here is a time for war and a time for peace." That's just flat-out false; we're not at war with any of our fellow-Americans. Ecclesiastes also says "there is a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing," and that quotation explains my feelings a lot better. I'm going to leave the original post as it is, but if I ever collect these little rants of mine into a book, I'll probably change it then.
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