Showing posts with label bill kristol. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bill kristol. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Conservative Heads Explode Over #ConfederateTakeDown

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Previous Related Posts:
Confederate Flags: Hate Gets Harder to Buy
Pressure Builds for South Carolina to Take Down the Confederate Flag
The Charleston AME Church Massacre
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Lovers of the Confederate Flag are losing their minds over the recent push to rid our country of the symbol of hate.

In a conversation with black pundit Juan Williams, Bill O'Reilly insisted the flag represents "bravery" not hate.
Transcript Via Media Matters

O'REILLY: That's a positive and I just -- got to go. You say the Confederate flag is a symbol of hate and you believe that.

JUAN WILLIAMS: That's the way I feel when I see it.

O'REILLY: Okay, okay. And absolutely 100 percent legitimate. For some other people who see it in a historical context --

WILLIAMS: What's the historical context?

O'REILLY: It represents bravery.

WILLIAMS: Oh get out of town.

O'REILLY: In war.

WILLIAMS: They put it up in anger when they were trying to mass resist the Civil Rights Movement in the 60's.

O'REILLY: You know as well as I do that it represents, to some, bravery in the Civil War because the Confederates fought hard.
But that's what it represents. You're right historically, but in their minds, that's what it represents. And in your mind it represents hate. So, and everybody should know what the two sides are believing.

O'Reilly also went nuts on a guest over Racism:

Bill O'Reilly argued that racism is not an "epidemic" in America.

"I’m saying that the world is being told by anti-American haters that we are a rank, racist society, and that is a lie," O'Reilly told Powers during the segment.

After O'Reilly turned to another guest on his show, he accused Powers of "snorting" while the guest was making a point. Powers balked at the accusation, and the two quickly began debating racism again.

While arguing over whether everyone in the U.S. acknowledges the legacy of slavery in the U.S., Powers told O’Reilly, "There are actually a lot of people in this country who are racist."

The debate then took a turn for the worse.

"I have to wonder about why you can’t see what’s happening, because most Americans are not racist," O'Reilly said. "They’re not!"

"Really? So how many black friends do you have?" Powers asked. "How many black friends do you have?"

O'Reilly did not appear to be pleased with Powers' question and said, "If you think most Americans are racist, I’m ashamed of you."



Fox News Hatemonger Todd Starnes wrings his hands and worries if the politically correct flag-haters will become Confederate grave robbers.









Conspiracy-Monger, Alex Jones says because some Democrats turned into "Dixiecrats" after the Civil Rights Movement, then we ought to ban the Democratic Party. Um, but the Dixiecrats turned into the Republicans who turned into the Tea Party, so . . . But he was echoed by Fox News Derp-Mistress Andrea Tantaros.







Not really, Andrea, because History.





Breitbart decided to attack The Gay Rainbow Flag, which as we know flies over every statehouse in the south. Oh wait ...





Then there's Ann Coulter who sounds more and more like Dylann Roof's wicked stepmother in her push to "white up" 'Merica.





Even the The Blaze pointed out Coulter's mistake:



Conservative pundit Bill Kristol became so hyperbolic on Twitter that people wondered if his account was a parody. In a series of nearly hysterical tweets, he compared taking down the Confederate Flag to the French Revolution, as if the guillotines were being set up outside the SC Statehouse. And probably, he should be glad this isn't really a Revolution.






















But Kristol is hardly alone. The hysteria was building yesterday as retailers dropped Confederate Flags from their merchandising.






Wednesday, March 11, 2015

GOP Infamy ~ #47Traitors Twitter Hashtag Trending Worldwide - Updated


Previous Related Posts:
Traitors in U.S. Senate Write Letter to Iran

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The Hashtag #47Traitors Trending Worldwide and in the USA Tuesday night, March 10, 2015. There is also a petition to charge the GOP Senators who signed the letter to Iran with treason posted on WhiteHouse.gov that has garnered over 123,000 signatures. I signed it yesterday when there were only about 6,555. Over 100,000 signatures in 24 hours!

Update: From President Obama:



Update: As of noon on 3-11-2015, #47Traitors is still trending!





























If these Senators really think they can dodge this mess or play "Blame Obama" with it, they really are delusional. Some are already blaming Netanyahu for rabble rousing and pointing at Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) as a scapegoat for writing the letter.

Far-right wingnuts have come out of the woodwork to support Tom Cotton and the rest, while Tom Cotton tries to 'splain what they were doing.
























The bottom line is that the GOP has gone too far this time, and history will remember!

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Neocons Begging for Another War in Iraq - Updated with Morning Joe

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Previous Related Posts:
Berghazi: Flip-Flopping Wingnuts Trash Bergdahl
Armchair Chickenhawks say Obama is "Weak" and "Feckless" on Russia
Obama Wins on Syria, With Media Derp
Donald Rumsfeld: Blood-Gargling Psychopath

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As Iraq crumbles into chaos, the Neocons are losing their minds again. They don't want Obama to get credit for ending the wars, and they hate him for the Benghazi flop, so they are blaming him for the new chaos in the Middle East. And they seem to want our country to get dragged into ALL the conflicts there, no matter what the consequences. Why exactly? Perhaps they love death and destruction? Senility? Brain Damage? They want another war so they can blame Hillary when she runs for President? The possibilities are endless.

And for some reason the media is dragging up the whole W. Bush administration to talk about it as if anyone cares what they think! Plus Mitt Romneyshambles, the Horses and Bayonets Guy.

Our peace-loving President is trying to be the voice of reason. Here is what he said last Friday:

We will not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq, but I have asked my national security team to prepare a range of other options that could help support Iraqi security forces, and I’ll be reviewing those options in the days ahead.
. . . We’re also going to pursue intensive diplomacy throughout this period both inside of Iraq and across the region, because there’s never going to be stability in Iraq or the broader region unless there are political outcomes that allow people to resolve their differences peacefully without resorting to war or relying on the United States military.

Another peace-lover is Shepard Smith of Fox News, who had this reaction to his colleagues sounding the alarm for yet another war:

Are we about to be drawn back into a conflict in Iraq?" Smith asked. "The same people who 12 years ago told us this will be quick, this will be easy, this will be inexpensive, they will see us as liberators, it's the right thing to do, are now telling us, 'It's the right thing to do.' What's the endgame? Who's thought this through?




Who has thought this through? Apparently no one, but that won't keep them from speaking their minds. And in fact the media is inviting them to do it. Rachel Maddow had this to say:

It is very frustrating to see that this is the way we handle debates about foreign policy in this country. We take people who were so provably, terribly wrong and bring them back and treat them like experts on the very subject they have been so wrong about. It is maddening. It is frustrating.
If you have been frustrated by seeing all these Iraq War architects and cheerleaders back out there doing it again with no accountability you are not alone in your frustration.
. . . Hey Sunday shows! Hey op-ed pages! Hey cable news! Hey everybody! We know you are tempted to keep booking these yahoos on these subjects, but if you keep turning to the people who were famously wrong about Iraq to ask them about what to do about Iraq, you at least will be laughed at. And you will be embarrassed that you did this. And you will eventually have to apologize or at least explain yourself for why you thought Bill Kristol should be explaining what to do now. We can see what you’re doing, and it’s funny, but not in a good way.


John McCain

Everybody in his national security team, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ought to be replaced. It's a colossal failure of American security policy.
. . . Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right. Our failure to leave forces on Iraq is why Sen. Graham and I predicted this would happen.
~ Senator John McCain R-AZ, so excited he is talking in third person about himself

The John McCain military plan for America is the same as the John McCain media strategy. Be everywhere — forever.
~ Jon Stewart on The Daily Show




John McCain has made some really bad Predictions on Iraq
 ~ Via Chris Hayes on MSNBC
  • They Sent Us The Anthrax
  • The Iraqi People will treat us as Liberators
  • Iraqis will pay for post-Saddam Era
  • There's No history of violence between Sunnis and Shias
  • War will be Brief
  • There will be Evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction
  • President Bush will be Justified

















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Lindsey Graham:

We’ve got another Benghazi in the making here. What I heard in there scared the hell out of me.
~ Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC










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Tony Blair

The reality is that the whole of the Middle East and beyond is going through a huge, agonising and protracted transition. We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that ‘we’ have caused this. We haven't. We can argue as to whether our policies at points have helped or not; and whether action or inaction is the best policy and there is a lot to be said on both sides. But the fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.
~ Tony Blair, Former British Prime Minister

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad. He wrote an essay published last week that struck me as unhinged in its refusal to face facts. In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.
. . . Somebody needs to get on to Tony Blair and tell him to put a sock in it - or at least to accept the reality of the disaster he helped to engender. Then he might be worth hearing. The truth shall set you free, Tony.
~ Boris Johnson, Mayor of London

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/tony-blair-is-mad-to-deny-iraq-was-a-tragic-error-20140616-zs97h.html#ixzz34tlUalWm












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Mitt Romney

Tragically, all we’ve fought for in Iraq, all that 4,500 American lives were shed to gain, is on the cusp, potentially, of vanishing.
. . . I lost the election. We lost the election. But I and we will continue to fight.”
~ Mittster Romney at his Mormon "Summit" in Park City, Utah







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Bill Kristol:

It's a disaster made possibly by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.
. . . President Obama said two days before election day, in 2012, Iraq is on the path of defeat, the war in Iraq is over. That was enough to get him re-elected. Iraq is on the path of defeat. Neither is true. It's a disaster for our country.
~ Conservative Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard

Kristol has been wrong about literally everything — most of all, Iraq.
I’d give him credit for tenacity if he wasn’t so tenaciously clinging to an idea that led to one of the most horrifying foreign policy blunders in modern history.
~ Bob Cesca on The Daily Banter

Update: Kristol vs. Heileman on Morning Joe

If [Obama] goes on TV and says, ‘This is a strategic crisis for the reasons I’m going to lay out here. We have to do something no one wants to do, which is to go back in with a lot of air power and special forces and maybe a few conventional troops to help stabilize the situation. We cannot allow an al Qaeda-backed group to dominate one part of the Middle East and Iran and Iranian-backed groups to dominate another part of the Middle East. It’s an unacceptable threat to us.’ He would have support.
~ Bill Kristol on Morning Joe, 6-17-2014

Bill’s notion, with all due respect, is fantastical. As in, absurd.
I think it's ridiculous. This is American blood you're talking about! You want to send people into another intervention in which most people in the country believe that this is a centuries-old sectarian violence that we have no place and no ability to solve!
. . . There is war weariness in this country, whether you like it or not. I know you don’t have the weariness for war, but the country does.
~ John Heileman on Morning Joe









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Paul Wolfowitz

This is more than just the obscure Shia/Sunni conflict. This is al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda is not on the road of defeat, al-Qaeda is on the march. Not just in Iraq and Syria and we have real enemies in the US and what we should be looking for friends. I think when we stick with our friends and those friends are not always perfect, but we stuck with the Kurds for twenty years. Northern Iraq, Kurdistan is a success story. We stuck with them South Korea for sixty years. South Korea is a miracle story if we walked away from that country in 1953, that country was a basket case.
~ Paul Wolfowitz on Meet the Press

(HUH?)

The “obscure Shia/Sunni conflict”? There is no hell hot enough for these people.
~ Scholars and Rogues Blog

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason." – Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, during a "Vanity Fair" interview, May 28, 2003
~ Via IBTimes




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Ari Fleischer:





(Ahem, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.)








Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Bergdahl Swap Causes GOP Brain Meltdown - Updated with More Hate

head explode photo:  imagesqtbnANd9GcSvhCkal5JFEwmNQLTUW.jpg

Because the GOP hates the President so much, they will seize on anything to try and sully his actions, even if they once agreed with him. And right now their heads are exploding because soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who has been held by the Taliban for five years, was traded for some Gitmo prisoners. Even though the deal was in the works for years and many Senators, such as John McCain, knew about it, they are now expressing outrage that Obama dared to do something as Commander in Chief during time of war. How dare he? Uppity! No President has EVER done that before! Except George Washington. And Nixon. And Reagan. Oops . . .

And to make things worse, soldiers who served with Bergdahl have come out accusing him of cowardice and desertion, as if that changes the fact that he was held as a prisoner of war until his health began to fail. The soldiers in his unit, who obviously did not like him anyway, are saying they resent that lives were lost while searching for him in the desert, and accused him of doing horrible things such as sympathizing with the plight of the Afghanis. Not very patriotic since if they had been captured first Bergdahl would have had to risk his life searching for them, since that's what soldiers do. But all of that has fed into the GOP frenzy to slam the prisoner swap as "President Trades Terrorists for a Deserter."

The GOP have even attacked Bowe Bergdahl's father for having a beard and saying "Allah" in front of the President. And Obama smiled at him, therefore MUSLIN!!! Beards and the entire Muslim religion are somehow anti-American now, except for Duck Dynasty, of course, who are true Patriots for hating The Gay. How about some respect for the family of a young man who served his country but may have been conflicted by war, like thousands of other young soldiers throughout history?

The whole mess is about Obama Derangement Syndrome and Self-Righteous Vigilante Justice. For the past few days the GOP has been going around like General Patton when he slapped a man for having post-traumatic stress disorder, and for which he was demoted during WWII. What he did to that poor man wasn't right, and Americans instinctively know this, unless you have the instincts of the GOP, which aren't very sharp. Therefore, Twitter is awash with calls for firing squads and executions from the same people who were whining about cow-abuse at Bundy Ranch a few weeks ago. It's astonishing.

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BBC: Video of Bergdahl Release:



This is what happens at the end of wars. Regardless of the circumstances, whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. We don’t condition that.
~ President Obama speaking in Warsaw on the prisoner trade and release of Bowe Bergdahl, via Time

Our first priority is assuring his well-being and his health and getting him reunited with his family. Other circumstances that may develop and questions, those will be dealt with later.
~ Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel





"We really don't know why he left the base and under what circumstances," Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said Monday. Details of that will come out, he said, adding that the Army has never classified Bergdahl as a deserter and has scheduled the soldier for a promotion next month. But the details around a soldier being taken captive "don't matter," he said, when it comes to the military's response.
~ CNN

He walked off. He left his guard post. Nobody knows if he defected or he's a traitor or he was kidnapped. What I do know is, he was there to protect us, and instead he decided to defer from America and go and do his own thing. I don't know why he decided to do that, but we spent so much of our resources, and some of those resources were soldiers' lives.
~ Former Pfc. Jose Baggett, 27, a member of Bergdahl's company

It’s true that Bergdahl was never officially categorized as a “prisoner of war,” since the Pentagon apparently stopped using that designation years ago. But he was defined as “missing/captured,” which is essentially the same thing. And while the Taliban fighters who were released were likewise not formally designated prisoners of war, either, because of the odd, formally undeclared status of the war with Afghanistan, that’s what they were.
. . . It’s shocking to see conservatives argue that the Taliban should have the final word on an American soldier’s fate, even if he’s accused of desertion.
~ Joan Walsh on Salon

We Lost Soldiers in the Hunt for Bergdahl, a Guy Who Walked Off in the Dead of Night
For the veterans of the units that lost these men, Bergdahl’s capture and the subsequent hunt for him will forever tie to their memories, and to a time in their lives that will define them as people. He has finally returned. Those men will never have the opportunity.
~ Soldier Nathan Bradley Bethea on Daily Beast

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Bergdahl Responsible for How Many Deaths?
Is This Turning Into "Berghdazi"?














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Let's Attack Bergdahl's Family

















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The GOP Deranged Clown Circus

How many soldiers lost their lives to capture those five Taliban terrorists that we just released? Ambassador [Susan] Rice basically said to you, yes, U.S. policy has changed. Now we make deals with terrorists. And the question going forward is, have we just put a price on other U.S. soldiers? What does this tell terrorists, that if you capture a U.S. soldier, you can trade that soldier for five terrorists we’ve gone after?
~ Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas

I don’t think he [Obama] should have made that deal. He may well pay a price.
. . . I know everyone’s happy to see him back and all that. The fact is, Susan Rice said on TV yesterday he was taken on the battlefield and that he served the United States with honor and distinction. There’s a lot of reporting that he wasn’t taken in battle, he seems to have deserted or at least gone AWOL, he may have cooperated with the enemy after they captured him, soldiers died trying to find him.
~ Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard on Morning Joe, via Politico














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The Grand Hypocrites of All Time

No, Mr. President, a soldier expressing horrid anti-American beliefs – even boldly putting them in writing and unabashedly firing off his messages while in uniform, just three days before he left his unit on foot – is not "honorable service." Unless that is your standard.
. . . You blew it again, Barack Obama, by negotiating away any leverage against the bad guys as these bad guys – Osama Bin Laden's partners in evil crime – joyfully celebrate their "win" in the deal you sealed.
~ Sarah Palin, ex-politician, on Facebook







I am eager to learn what precise steps are being taken to ensure that these vicious and violent Taliban extremists never return to the fight against the United States and our partners or engage in any activities that can threaten the prospects for peace and security in Afghanistan.
~ Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, who is also an Ex-Prisoner-of-War exchanged in a deal under President Nixon










I strongly believe that we should have been consulted, that the law should have been followed. And I very much regret that that was not the case.
~ Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California