His Picture Is in the Thesaurus for Class (Antonym of)

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the Man Who Would Have Been President (If Only He Had Won):

George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.

He promised to “restore honor and integrity to the White House.” Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon.

This from a man who served in an administration that solicited campaign funds from Chinese nationals and whose president was impeached for lying under oath and later lost his law license for perjury. Visit the whole remarks at Move On, an organization founded to help America move on from the scandal wherein the former Senator from Tennessee’s former boss was investigated for shady land deals and later for having adulterous sex in the White House.

Jeez, Gore, you don’t hear statesmen talking that way. Did you hear George H.W. Bush or Dan Quayle barking like that after Clinton? Can you imagine George W. Bush, former governor of Texas and presidential candidate, laying into a Gore presidency like that? No?

And I bet you don’t even understand why not. Timidity? Fear of your righteousness?

Just face it, you’re losing that type of class warfare.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

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Emancipations from Proclamations

Thanks to a pinko reader for sending us an enlightening e-mail:

You sure you wanna have a religous nut in the white house?

http://www.snopes.com/religion/jesusday.htm

Follow the link to the Snopes page, and you’ll find that George W. Bush, as governor of the state of Texas, issued a proclamation that made June 10, 2000, Jesus Day in Texas. This, I guess, is supposed to illustrate that George W. Bush is a religious zealot, and that by electing a person who sincerely espouses a religion to elective office, we can expect to get someone who acts according to higher ideals. You know, convictions. So be it.

But tying Bush to this single proclamation is a red herring and not really an argument in that favor. George W. Bush issued numerous proclamations when he was governor; that’s what governors do, at least it’s the least harmful thing governors do. Personally, I’d rather they issue useless proclamations every day instead of politicking and spending tax money. But what do I know? I am just a voter in the minority.

Here’s a running tally of other groups to whom George Bush is beholden, as illuminated by the proclamations he issued:

So you can see that the Governor’s mansion, and probably the White House, have a whole wing of highly-paid professionals who do nothing for 30 hours a week but to turn out these proclamations for someone to stamp the executive’s signature on. To call Bush a religious nut or to think that the proclamation for Jesus Day is out of the ordinary, establishing a state church which will begin pogroms against other faiths or to even indicate that there’s a morality above the Government is Good creed is asininine. (Sorry, that particular word is a little like banana to me.)

If you want to elevate one of these trivialities as a wedge issue, why not start printing the bumper stickers that say:

President Bush:
Weak on French Week, Weak on Terror

To be honest, there’s only one trivial ceremonial issue that could make me vote for someone other than Bush this election. As a meat eater and a proponent of capital punishment, I am greatly bothered that this president, like his predecessors, pardons the damn turkey every Thanksgiving. It sends a bad message to America, that it’s bad to kill something to eat, and that you can pardon animals like you pardon criminals. You want to know who I will vote for instead of Bush?

I will vote for the candidate who promises to whack the turkey, particularly if he (or she) will do it himself (herself) with a hatchet and a tree stump. I will even send money to a candidate who plucks the turkey and eats it himself. That’s an American president. Also, I like turkey.

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Quick Observation

Is it just me, or do a lot of the Democrat presidential nominees all have first names for last names?

There’s Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, Jonathan Edwards….

I am not sure what this means, but our crack staff of paranoid neurotics (not the paranoid schizophrenics, who make things up) here at MfBJN are working on it as we speak.

The prevalent working hypothesis: It will be easier for candidates to completely reinvent themselves in 2008 if each has a completely new name, such as Dean Howard, Clark Wesley, or Clinton Hillary.

We the People will have completely forgotten about that other schmuck losers whose ideas and policies were completely out of touch with the direction in which we want the country to go by then.

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The Very Name a Punchline

Orrin Hatch.

Sounds kinda like a crime of a sexual nature for which you would go to prison for many years in a number of states.

Sorry, Unca Orrin, but I kinda like that part of the Constitution. Makes it one generation harder for the Islamacists to get elected to the presidency.

And by the second generation, the damn kids are peircing things and rebelling against their parents. Or else we wouldn’t see the honor slaughter going on in England, wot?

(Link seen on Fark. They’re the subversive influence, not me.)

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Todd Aiken Responds

El Guapo, an actual card-carrying Libertarian, has recently taken to writing to our shared Congressional representative Todd Akin to express his views as a constituent. El Guapo apparently e-mailed Representative Akin about his views on medicinal marijuana. Rep. Akin replied:

Thank you for contacting me to express your support for legalizing medical uses of marijuana.

I am not sympathetic with the movement to legalize marijuana for medical use. The active intoxicant in marijuana, THC, is already available by prescription in pill form. I am not aware of any convincing evidence that raw marijuana provides any notable advantage over this legal pill. On the other hand, I am certain that marijuana is a gateway drug for millions of teenagers. While not every marijuana smoker moves on to harder drugs, virtually everyone who abuses cocaine and heroine begins by smoking pot. I am hesitant to support any legislative initiative which might jeopardize the lives of youths, and undermine the efforts of conscientious parents, by legitimizing marijuana use in the eyes of the public. No one doubts that the legalization of medical marijuana use is the first step toward legalizing its “recreational” use; advocates of drug legalization openly admit this. To me, this first step constitutes an unwise gamble: risking the lives and health of teenagers to achieve a small-scale and dubious medical benefit.

Please do not hesitate to contact me again with any thoughts or concerns.

A principled response, apparently to El Guapo’s e-mail.

I wonder, though, if the answer was canned. After all, someone I know once wrote, with pen and paper and stamp, to Def Dicky Gep, her congressional representative, to protest that the government had made AVSCOM, a military command and her place of employment, into a smoke-free environment. She smokes. So she wrote her Congressman.

Someone in the Congressman’s office scanned her letter, found the word AVSCOM, stamped the canned response letter with the Congressman’s signature, and stuffed it into an envelope. The constituent received a nice letter addressing her concerns about the impending closure of the command to save the federal budget. Def Dicky Gep was against it, believe him.

So that, too, was a principled, well-reasoned response.

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Poor Form, Peter

Slate today featured a round-up of previous stories about Strom Thurmond, who died last night.

The link that led to this index page off of the Slate home page read Good Riddance to Strom:

Poor form, fellows. I would say “I hope the writers of your obituary show greater respect whether they agree with your principles and politics.” I would say that, but I am not that high-minded. I hope someone urinates on your grave, or worse, that no one notices you’re not around anymore.

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Il Dick

So Representative Gephardt, in his Look at me! campaign for the Democrat nomination for president, briefly made his voice heard above the dim din of the other candidates by saying:

“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” Gephardt said.

Rachel Lucas was the first to go off on him, followed later by Professor Volokh, Andrew Sullivan, Professor Reynolds, and even ScrappleFace, leading to the normal blogomockratic firestorm.

Okay, so Il Dick would knock out at least one competing branch of government if he were elected president. I have good news, though, he won’t! He’s such a longshot candidate that he’s firing all of his guns at once and imploding in his space, or something along those lines.

Unlike Ms. Lucas, Prof. Volokh, Mr. Sullivan, Prof. Reynolds, and Mr. Face, I have had the privilege of voting against Dick Gephardt. When I lived in Attempted Casinoport, Missouri, that unincorporated area known colloquially as “Lemay,” I was in his district. Every two years, I got to vote for whatever Don QuiGOP candidate tilted at the Speaker of the House. The best protest votes I ever cast.

But I digress. When prompted to explain the statement by ABC’s The Note, Gephardt’s office said:

We asked the Gephardt campaign for a response.

“The fact that this question comes from libertarian law professors should speak for itself,” spokesman Erik Smith wrote in an e-mail. “Dick Gephardt knows the law. The president can not overturn a Supreme Court decision. That’s not what he said. He was simply expressing his commitment to diversity and his willingness to use the tools of his office to promote affirmative action programs to the fullest extent possible. It’s important to remember that Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the military.” [Emphasis mine]

So the response is that libertarians are whack jobs! Ad homenim! Of course, they’d hate to practice the politics of personal destruction, but since some people have begun taking the representative at his word, there will be hell to pay!

Fortunately, Dick Gephardt will return to citizen life soon, and by “citizen life” I mean “highly paid lobbyist life.”

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Kerry’s Boolean Criteria for a Fillibuster?

Oh, and check out the Boolean construction in his criteria for a fillibuster. It’s not really clear. He’ll fillibuster a candidate who

((would turn back the clock on a woman’s right to choose OR would turn back the clock the constitutional right to privacy OR (would turn back the clock on civil rights AND individual liberties)) AND would turn back the clock on the laws protecting workers) AND would turn back the clock on the environment

That’s a pretty convoluted criteria, and a pretty tough one to meet. I reckon no candidate would, which means Kerry’s algorithmic condition will never be met. No fillibuster(String supremeCourtNominee) method call at all!

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Senator Kerry Threatens to Deploy Evil Kerrybot

Drudge has pointed to a story in which Senator John Kerry, in which the Vietnam veteran claims:

“I am prepared to filibuster, if necessary, any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on a woman’s right to choose or the constitutional right to privacy, on civil rights and individual liberties and on the laws protecting workers and the environment,” Kerry said in remarks via satellite at a meeting of Democratic party officials in St. Paul, Minn.

As you know, Senator Kerry’s full-time job these days is running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. This requires nationwide, or at lease extra-DC, schmoozing, gladhanding, speechifying, and fundraising–all things you cannot do while not yielding the Senate floor.

Hence, I can only infer that he is planning to unleash an android replica of himself to do one or the other since he cannot be in all those places at the same time.

I just threw in the evil part because it makes the copy snappier. We all know Senator Kerry is not truly evil, just misguided.

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