"I think we are all going to need a self-esteem course or two after that litany and we can't blame anyone for feeling despondent in the midst of all that," Bachmann quipped. [...]
"We are looking at serious long-term damage to the economy and the well being of our people. We really need to sober up…the only people with the power to change this very bad diagnosis is President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Harry Reid"...
Even her attempted smack downs are one big epic fail.
For more Bachmann inspiration, read the rest of her diatribe here.
Tom DeLay was on Hardball yesterday, as you can see here, and told a very strange story about protesters at a health care town hall in the '80s who "brought in quadriplegics on gurneys and dumped them on the floor in front of my podium."
Two journalists who've covered Tom DeLay extensively over the years tell TPMmuckraker they've never heard of his story [...]
"Jan Reid and I (and a researcher) spent a full year, reading clips and running down sources. Nowhere did I see any mention of quadriplegics brought in on gurneys," Lou Dubose, co-author of The Hammer: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress, tells TPMmuckraker in an e-mail. "We would have used if we had it." [...]
Susan DuQuesnay Bankston, who worked for the Fort Bend Star from the mid-1980s until last year, including as a political columnist, followed DeLay closely over the years and attended many of his town halls. [...] Of DeLay's story about quadriplegics being "dumped" in front of his podium at a town hall, Bankston says: "No incident like this ever occurred." If it had happened, "the chances of us hearing about it were one hundred percent."
It might be really helpful to his image [sic] if Tommy Boy didn't hit the bottle before appearing on national TeeVee shows, hold up his shiny new dancing shoes, and tell whoppers.
Who's up for a new reality show, "Dancing with the Liars"?
This is one heck of an enticement to enlist. Actually, it's more about how the military is scrounging for people willing to put their lives at risk after five years of a fraudulent, deadly, quagmirey occupation:
Thanks to desperate recruiting methods required to staff those wars, the U.S. Marines may be turning military service into a male sexual fantasy land, where recruits are paid actual money to cohabitate with drunk, stoned, horny teenage girls.
UCSF scientists tested and surveyed 2,157 female U.S. Marine recruits -- out of 2,288 possible respondents -- with an average age of 19. Researchers found that the young women were more than twice as likely as non-military young women to be infected with venereal diseases. And the recruits were prone to engage in behaviors likely to get them sick again.
The sexually-precocious female recruits "perceived that sex is more likely and enjoyable under the influence of alcohol, and were heavy alcohol and drug users before recruit training entry," according to a November 2008 UCSF study titled "Relationships amongSociodemographic Markers, Behavioral Risk, and sexually transmitted infections in U.S. Female Marine Corps Recruits."
[...] The Marines seemed to find their most sexually adventurous female recruits in rural areas, where a disproportionate number of them whiled away their high school years having drunken, stoned, unprotected sex, according to the UCSF report.
"Young women enter recruit training for the military with high levels of STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and increased risk for acquisition of STIs including sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs, sex with a risky partner, and infrequent condom use," the UCSF study said.
This is great news for randy young men weighing a career in the Marines -- as long as they're fastidious about wearing rubbers.
So, is this for real? And did they really just say "randy"?
We can't let that little nugget just lie there, now can we? Let's see what the original post says:
I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:
A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."
And then this:
"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."
Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.
Gee, I can't imagine why his reputation is in tatters. Allegedly.
In one of President-elect Barack Obama’s first Presidential decisions since Election Day he selected Representative Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff. We all know that Emanuel has“has a proven commitment to Israel’s security and served as civilian volunteer on an Israeli military base during the Persian Gulf War of 1991.” We also know that Emanuel’s “aggressive, pragmatic style of politics” makes him the perfect selection to be Obama’s Chief of Staff.
But could have Emanuel’s selection had something to do with his first name - Rahm?
*Point of clarification: Ra’am- spelled reish, ayin, mem - means thunder, but it depends on how he spells his name. If he spells his name reish, mem, then it may mean something different (like “high, lofty, or loud") - and it looks like he may. (Thanks for the heads up Nava!)
Wait... now Rahm means "high"? Oh no, Obama hired a druggy! A Jewish druggy! A loud, lofty, high guy!
In the cockpit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.
"I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying," McCain writes. "I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties." McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn't.
In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight.
Here's what happened after one of his many plane crashes:
When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.
My hero.
With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the "Key Fess Yacht Club," which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers' quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from "vice commodore" to "commodore" of the club.
Then he married his first wife. We all know how that ended.
More excerpts from Make-Believe Maverick, re: his time at Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia:
There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames "Punk" and "McNasty." Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean little fucker." McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father's taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge. [...]
Before meeting a girlfriend's parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman's uniform.
And then there was Annapolis:
When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. [...] McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.
"He was a huge screw-off," recalls Butler. "He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather — they couldn't exactly get rid of him."
McCain's self-described "four-year course of insubordination" ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.
A Republican councilman in Columbia, SC was arrested for drunken driving in July, the third DUI arrest for Paul Lindemann, who is currently running for reelection. [...]
In the video, Lindemann agrees to take a sobriety test but repeatedly fails to get through the alphabet, attempting instead to segue from "W" back to "H." He has even more trouble counting backwards from 32 to 18, stammering, "32-31-32-30 -- 31-32-31-32-33-33 -- 31-32-30-29 -- 19-18-17-16-18 -- 20-21-22."
He is then arrested.
Now, in his own defense, he's invoking the name of "In What Respect, Charlie?" Palin. No, I'm not kidding:
"I'm going to get everything resolved with the charge, and we're going to win in November as well," Lindemann insisted after the video was released. He also suggested that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's current problems may help him, because "people have started to recognize that everybody who's running for political office is as human as those sitting back home."
Please feel free to provide any appropriate snark in Comments. I'll be waiting...
It would be appropriate to ban all video of George W. Bush, but that won't happen. Instead, he's everywhere, including here:
How appropriate that he's talking about Wall Street "getting drunk":
An ABC-TV outlet in Houston, and now the Houston Chronicle, have posted a video taken at a political fundraiser for Pete Olson, featuring George W. Bush last week -- capturing some embarrassing/revealing moments after, he noted, he had asked cameras to be turned off.
The first moments form the July 18 event find him speaking almost incoherently in admitting, for once, that his friends in big business had screwed up: "There's no question about it. Wall Street got drunk ---that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras -- it got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments."
Is he referring to Wall Street or himself?
Then, making light of the foreclosure crisis, he said: "And then we got a housing issue... not in Houston, and evidently not in Dallas, because Laura's over there trying to buy a house. [great laughter] I like Crawford but unfortunately after eight years of sacrifice, I am apparently no longer the decision maker."
From your mush mouth to any deity's ears.
No one is saying how ABC's Miya Shay got the video or how it emerged.
Most likely because no one wants to be waterboarded.
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