Bush supporters' aftermath thread II

Coretta Scott King devoted her life to the ideals of equality, fair treatment and human dignity. Naturally this was political as Coretta devoted her life to fighting the republican party.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Amazing how upset you people get when people have the temerity to tell the truth.

Cycloptichorn

Regardless of the truth of the message, are you saying you think a funeral is the time and place for political speech?

The "Reverend" Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church clan like to picket the funerals of soldiers (or anyone else for that matter) claiming as their central message: "God Hates Fags." It's a completely legal activity, but shows very little class.

Do you think using the occasion of a funeral to take political pot shots at your "opponent" shows a lot of class? Or a complete lack of it?

Quote:

"She extended Martin's message against poverty, racism and war. She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar. We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there," Lowery said.

The mostly black crowd applauded, then rose to its feet and cheered in a two-minute-long standing ovation.

Well, let's see. It certainly seems the audience approved. Who are you to tell them what is appropriate and what isn't?

Cycloptichorn

A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: February 8, 2006
George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness (Feb. 4, 2006) Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.

The little man

History will remember Bush as an incompetent and incurious man overwhelmed by a world too big for him.
By Garrison Keillor

Feb. 08, 2006 | The headline of the AP story was "Bush Urges Confidence in His Leadership" -- which is like "Author Says Memoir Is True" or "FEMA Offers Contingency Plan" -- and I didn't bother to read further. The Old Brush Cutter never got the knack of urging, and whenever he tries, he looks small and petulant, like a cartoon of himself. He photographs well in formal situations, and he is good at keeping a low profile when necessary, which is a key to survival in politics, as in boxing, but when it comes to the hortatory, he gets all hissy and squinty.

As a preacher, he is not in the top 50 percentile, and if his name were J. Ralph Cooter he would be hard put to find work in any of the persuasive professions. But there he is, giving the State of the Union, more or less in charge of the shop, or on a first-name basis with those who are, and so long as he refrains from perjury and tax increases and doesn't wear a dress to the Easter Egg Roll, he will probably slide along OK.

Of greater interest than the president's remarks to Congress was the report of the Office of Personnel Management showing that the federal government continues to grow under Republican rule. The executive branch now employs 1.85 million at an average salary of $63,125. In our nation's capital, the average is a handsome $80,425. Of course, the hiring of screeners at airports raised the total, but screeners' average salary is around $27,000 a year, which pulls down the average, which means there must be many happy folks in the higher ranges, assistant pooh-bahs and panjandrums and dukes of earl who are adept at taking a small acorn and weaving a seven-hour day around it, for which they enjoy job security, 13 paid holidays and 21 vacation days, and retirement at up to 80 percent of salary.

Not a bad gig, considering. There are mature gifted musicians scuffling for less than screeners earn, and farm families scraping along despite prayer and hard labor, and genius comedians scrapping for spare change. So a young Republican lady or gent could be tickled pink to land a job as assistant secretary for compliance assurance and get an 18-by-24 office with a window looking out on the Washington Monument and spend the day in meetings after which you will write memos of ingenious persiflage and obfuscation, like a cat smoothing the litter box.

Republicans believe in smaller government and deregulation, but it takes more and more of their friends and loved ones to not regulate us, and who can blame them? Washington is the perfect place for the slacker child who flubbed his way through college and flopped in business and whom friends and family kept having to prop up -- find him a government job. Government service is a broadening experience. It certainly has been for Mr. Bush. He has traveled to China and Europe and other places that never interested him before. He has come into contact with the poor people of New Orleans in a way that never would have occurred to him in his earlier years. He has met opera singers and jazz musicians and journalists. This is all good.

And he has met the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and visited with young people horribly wounded in the war, which would be a soul-searing experience for any commander. To see a beautiful young woman who must now live without an arm as a direct result of decisions you made -- who could see this and not scour the depths of your conscience?

And to suffer pangs of conscience even as you exhort the public to have confidence in you -- this has to be an interesting experience. Your mistakes are responsible for terrible suffering, but you stand among your victims and urge public support for your policies as a sign of support for the people those policies have injured. This is a plot worthy of Shakespeare.

So why does he still seem so small, our president? In his presidential library, he'll be portrayed as Abraham Lincoln after Chancellorsville and FDR after Corregidor, but to most of us, the crisis in Washington today stems from a man intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to rise to the challenge. Most of us sense that when, decades from now, the story of this administration comes out, it will be one of ordinary incompetence, of rigid and incurious people overwhelmed by events in a world they don't dare look around and see.

State Department sees exodus of weapons experts
By Warren P. StrobelKnight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - State Department officials appointed by President Bush have sidelined key career weapons experts and replaced them with less experienced political operatives who share the White House and Pentagon's distrust of international negotiations and treaties.
The reorganization of the department's arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it's thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder.
The reorganization was conducted largely in secret by a panel of four political appointees. A career expert was allowed to join the group only after most decisions had been made. Its work was overseen by Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer who was detailed to the State Department as senior adviser to former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of arms agreements and international organizations.
Bolton's nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was nearly derailed last year by allegations that he'd harassed and bullied his staff. Some State Department weapons experts from offices that had clashed with Bolton were denied senior positions in the reorganization, even though they had superior qualifications, the officials and documents alleged...

And clearly (and oh so refreshingly) they are also not frightened to speak loudly their hearts and minds on the matter of the decrepit and rotted morality of this administration.

BOORISH, IGNORANT BEHAVIOR

Was it a funeral? Or was it a political rally? Sadly, both. No .. I didn't watch it. It's hard to watch television when you're under general anesthesia. But I did manage to listen to some sound clips and watch a bit of video [view Lowery and presidents] yesterday evening. It looks like there were some old leftist warhorses at the Coretta Scott King funeral yesterday who were determined to use the occasion to get in some shots against President Bush. In today's politics, that wasn't surprising. You do remember the Paul Wellstone funeral in Minnesota, don't you? The 2002 memorial service turned into a full-fledged campaign rally for Walter Mondale who was running against Republican Norm Colman for Wellstone's seat. Republicans at this memorial service, Trent Lott, for instance, were booed by the crowd. Some pundits believe that this memorial-service-turned-political-rally had much to do with the Democrats miserable performance in the 2002 mid-term elections.

This repugnant behavior was to be expected out of Joseph Lowery. He chose the occasion of the funeral of the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. to announce that we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Never mind that Lowery is wrong. He's often wrong. For Lowery, the race baiting and liberal dogma always comes before fact and logic. He didn't measure up as President of King's SCLC, and he didn't measure up to the task of being a gentleman and honoring Coretta Scott King yesterday.

Then there was Jimmy Carter. Some people refer to Carter as "America's best ex-president." Well, if you want to consider his empowerment of people like Kim Jong Ill and Hugo Chavez as good for America, then you may have a point. If measuring the worth of a former president consists of measuring his affection for the world's dictators, then Carter is indeed one of the best. Carter used the occasion of this funeral to take a jab at bush over the NSA wiretaps. Carter has declared them to be illegal. Now he's a judge and a legal scholar. Carter brought up the fact that the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King. He didn't mention that this happened under Democratic administrations. He also failed to mention that it was under a Democratic institution that tapes of those wiretaps, tapes purportedly showing instances of MLK's infidelities, were surreptitiously sent to his wife.

President Bush knew that this would happen when he went to the funeral. He knew that Democrats and liberals would use an overwhelmingly friendly audience to take their shots. He showed great dignity in sitting there and taking it all in stride. Bush stood tall, Lowery and Carter stooped low.

This, then, seems to be the new standard for funerals and memorial services for liberal icons. The TV cameras will be there. Millions will be watching, and emotions will be raw. What a great time to get in some political digs! Both Joseph Lowery and Jimmy Carter should be ashamed. Sadly, they don't have the class to understand that.

So Tico, you think Coretta baked yummy cookies?

From Cyclops' link re: Katrina and equality in America:

Quote:

And as Greenspan himself points out, by many measures the economy is doing well. Unemployment is down, GDP is up. Inflation still slumbers. Current standards of living are unmatched.

"So you can look at the system and say it's got a lot of problems to it, and sure it does. It always has," Greenspan told the JEC last week. "But you can't get around the fact that this is the most extraordinarily successful economy in history."