Sadly, No!

Representative Ted Poe (R – Hixas) quotes Nathan Bedford Forrest on the floor of the House.

Lefties are appalled.

Special Ed of Crap N’ Quaaludes blog says it’s much ado about nothing and implies that Lefties are faking their outrage. In his capacity as master of Cartesian logic, he makes his case with the following rationale:

The quote may not have even been Bedford’s, Rep. Poe was just trying to convey a military principle, and what the hell does the quote have to do with the Klan anyway? Also, there’s this:

For instance, do lawyers who reference Hugo Black support the Klan as well? If not, why not? Poe referenced Forrest’s military strategy, not his views on race. Referencing Black’s viewpoint on law should also then connect to his activities in the Klan … right? That’s the Carpetbagger standard.

Special Ed, above: “These’n heauh vittles is from an ol’ Confederate recipe!”

Predictably, Perfesser Corncob of the Tennessee Recovering Alcoholic Confederate Jugband notices Special Ed’s post, approvingly links, offers the requisite Robert Byrd reference, then opines that all this Lefty pseudo-outrage is a conspiracy to excuse that negro Al Sharpton’s bigotry. Because, see, Al Sharpton is a slave trader and a terrorist who founded a society dedicated to destroying the rights of a certain race of citizens and.. wait, he didn’t?

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…but your state sucks:

Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday said he won’t veto a bill that would block state officials from following his order that all sixth-grade girls be vaccinated against a virus that causes cervical cancer.

The Republican governor accused the state legislators of politicizing the debate over his February executive order that required vaccinations against the human papillomavirus vaccine for girls starting in September 2008.

However, he acknowledged the Legislature’s overwhelming disdain for his program and said he will allow the bill to become law without his signature.

“It is time to move this issue from the political arena to the court of public opinion where real lives are at stake,” Perry said. […]

The vaccine protects girls and women against strains of the sexually transmitted virus that cause most cases of cervical cancer and genital warts. Merck & Co.’s Gardasil is the only HPV vaccine on the market.

Republican Rep. Dennis Bonnen bristled at the governor’s criticism of his bill.

“We should not and are now not going to offer the 165,000 11-year-olds in Texas up to be the study group for Merck to find out what the implications of this vaccine would be for these girls,” he said.

Uh, yeah right. It’s about the boinking, guys. You think giving girls the vaccine will encourage boinking. Just admit it. Creeps.

Dear American Soldier in Iraq:

Why, Dennis Prager! As I live and breathe! I haven’t heard from you since the divorce. How’s everything going? Is your son still hanging around with that black kid?

There are a few things you should know about how tens of millions of us back home feel about you and the fight you are waging.

Tens of millions of you? Like, how may tens of millions? Say, 84 million? Because that would be, I believe, 28% of the population.

These things need to be said, especially now, given the fact that the head of one of America’s two major political parties has announced that the war in Iraq is lost.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Politicians are always saying dumb shit like that.

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Oh, shit:

When you’ve just made it sound like the Queen is more than 200 years old, there may be a few ways of recovering from the gaffe.

But turning to her and giving her a sly wink is probably not included in any book of royal etiquette.

That’s what happened yesterday after George Bush mangled his greeting to the Queen on her state visit to the U.S.

Stumbling over his words, he came perilously close to suggesting that the monarch had toured the States in 1776.

And although the President’s following wink was initially rewarded with a regal glare, the Queen did at least seem to see the funny side of the blunder.

God, what a moron. But as per my last post, also in its own way evidence of his inheritance from Richard Nixon:

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I have a theory that the Republican Party is like Cobra Command, Karl Rove is Dr. Mindbender and George W. Bush is their Serpentor, created from the harvested political DNA of two wingnut saints: Barry Goldwater & Richard Nixon. And not just any DNA from these two hosts. No, that would be too easy. Instead, Dr. Mindbender has carefully harvested the worst of material from both sources.

But then of course by ‘worst’ I mean ‘most wingnutty’. So from Dr. Mindbender’s point of view, the operation has been a success.

The modern Republican Party combines Goldwater’s foriegn policy extremism and domestic glibertarian batshit rhetoric with Richard Nixon’s penchant for shitheaded dirty-tricks and skill at cultivating bigotry. What a political cocktail! Anyway, Rick Perlstein thinks so, too — though without the corny 80s pop culture references:

I pointed out that the modern conservative movement that first massed in 1960 behind Barry Goldwater defined themselves against Republican standard-bearer Richard Nixon’s ideological expedience – but that at the very same time the same people who “pioneered this anti-Nixonian movement of principle showed up in the dankest recesses of the Nixon administration. People like Douglas Caddy, of course, the co-founder of the effort to draft Goldwater for vice-president in 1960 and YAF’s first president, who was the man the White House called on to represent the Watergate burglars in 1972,” and former Young Americans for Freedom president Tom Charles Huston–“who, as the author of the first extra-legal espionage and sabotage plan in the Nixon White House, can fairly be called an architect of Watergate.”

I interviewed many of the original organizers of Young Americans for Freedom for my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Here’s what I said at [not] “Princeton” [University but at the right-wing “Madison Institute”]:

How did my subjects from the youth conservative movement of the 1960s, the ones that later came to inherit the world, present themselves to the researcher who came calling for stories about how their triumph began? On the one hand, beaming, telling me stories of principle. On the other, sometimes in the same breath, winkingly defining political deviancy down, telling Hustonian tales of antinomial subterfuge. Peeling off opposition bumper stickers with razor blades, jamming Rockefeller phone banks, working to subvert the 1961 National Student Association convention by setting up a dummy “Middle of the Road Caucus.”

I explained that this was why Richard Nixon’s White House speciically recruited dedicated conservatives to do his dirty work – “good, healthy right-eing exuberants,” as he described the likes of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. And what do conservatives think of convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy, who cheerfully worked overtime specifically to break the law on the White House’s behalf? They made him one of their most popular speakers and radio hosts. The party of law and order indeed….

How did this roomful of “conservative intellectuals,” including those beside me on the dais, respond to my agument that Richard Nixon loved conservatives specifically for their willingness to break the law in the service of something they call “freedom”? One of them, another YAF founder, M. Stanton Evans… quipped, “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”

That sounds about right.

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Amazing:

Congressional leaders from both political parties are giving President Bush a matter of months to prove that the Iraq war effort has turned a corner…

…which it won’t…

with September looking increasingly like a decisive deadline.

…which it won’t be…

In that month, political pressures in Washington will dovetail with the military timeline in Baghdad. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, has said that by then he will have a handle on whether the current troop increase is having any impact on political reconciliation between Iraq’s warring factions.

Translation: he’ll go before Congress and make some shit up about schools being painted, thus necessitating our stay in Iraq for another kajillion Friedmans. We’ve seen this tired act before, peeps. How long can you keep falling for it?

And fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1, will almost certainly begin with Congress placing tough new strings on war funding.

Which they won’t. Because, for reasons that elude any sane person, they’re scared of defying a president whose approval ratings are 28%.

“Many of my Republican colleagues have been promised they will get a straight story on the surge by September,” said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.).

Ooop. I’ve just soiled myself laughing. Excuse me while I go clean up.

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I have a question, and I ask it in good faith: Is there any theoretical amount of immigration that could be seen as ‘too much’ by my fellow lefties?

The whole immigration argument bothers me. First, there are the givens, which I also accept:

1. Racism can and does inform anti-immigration macro-sentiment to some degree.

2. The law of supply and demand as applied to the avaliable labor pool and, mitigated, thank god, by minimum wages rules, dictates wage values.

And here’s the trickiest one:

3. Citizenship matters.

I’m looking for the intellectual underpinings of the pro-immigration argument. So far, there are a few admirable principles that I can discern: Reaction against the real and perceived racism of anti-immigration forces, the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, the historical tendency of anti-immigration groups to be pointless and destructive.

But I’ve also noticed some pathetic components of ‘our side’ of the argument: That all anti-immigration sentiment is prima facie evidence of the holder’s racism, that nations have an equal responsibility to citizens and (resident or non-resident) aliens, that the same historical forces (boom & room) which allowed for near-unlimited immigration in the past equally hold true today.

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