Presidential candidate Mitt Romney enthusiastically accepted the endorsement of Dr. Bob Jones III, Chancellor of Bob Jones University, during the last election.
“We’re proud to have Dr. Jones’ support and look forward to working with him to communicate Governor Romney’s message of conservative change to voters,” Romney spokesman William Holley said in a statement in October 2007.
The endorsement of Bob Jones was once a much-sought-after prize in South Carolina’s early primary. In 2000, George W. Bush’s speech before the BJU crowd brought controversy to his campaign because of the university’s rule forbidding interracial marriage and dating. One month later, BJU reversed its long-standing policy on CNN’s Larry King Show. All serious Republican candidates, including Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H.W. Bush made the pilgrimage to America’s “Fortress of Faith” in the upstate town of Greenville.
Back in those days, the following statement by Dr. Bob Jones III, then president and now-chancellor of BJU, barely raised an eyebrow:
I’m sure this will be greatly misquoted but it would not be a bad idea to bring the swift justice today that was brought in Israel’s day against murder and rape and homosexuality. I guarantee it would solve the problem post-haste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.
Go to any bar in the Dupont Circle area and you’re liable to find a few stoned gays (trans folks too probably.)
But I digress….
If the corporatist media did its job the way that it tried to do a job on candidate Barack Obama in 2008, then – forget the North Carolina nutjob – the entirety of the Mormon religion would be Multiple Choice Mitt’s “Jeremiah Wright problem.”
Our questions for Governor Romney are:
(1) Were you aware in 2008 that Dr. Jones and BJU had advocated the stoning to death of homosexuals?
(2) If yes, why did you accept his endorsement? If you weren’t aware, why not?
(3) This time, will you accept his endorsement? Or will you join our petition drive calling on Dr. Jones to apologize for his rampant, blatant homophobic statements?
Will the corporatist media even go for the low-hanging fruit of Bob Jones?
A newly-unearthed photograph showing Mitt Romney demonstrating in favour of the Vietnam War draft might leave the presidential candidate feeling somewhat embarrassed.
The veteran Republican, then 19, can be seen picketing an anti-war sit-in at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1966.
…
George Romney headed American Motors before becoming Michigan governor in 1963, a position he held for six years before being appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development by Richard Nixon.
Ironically, he later had a change of heart and turned against the Vietnam War.
His pro-war son, meanwhile, never served in south-east Asia because his status as a Mormon missionary exempted him from the draft.
The GOP hopeful spent just one year at Stanford before heading to France for 30 months of missionary work.
He had already met his future wife Ann in 1965 when he was 18 and she was 15. The couple married in 1969 and have five sons and 16 grandchildren.
Millionaire son of a millionaire – who knows he’ll never have to face the draft (much less the VC) because of the special rights afforded to religionists – campaigning to ensure that poor kids can be legally enslaved against their will to fight battles that will benefit corporatists such as his father and future corporatists such as himself.
What does that make him?
The 0.00000001%?
Hell, even Dubya had to make some effort at pretending to be in the National Guard to avoid going to Viet Nam.
Yes, I guess this is indeed the ultimate reason to disqualify Mr, ‘Corporations Are People Too’ from contention for the presidency: By comparison to Mitt, George W. Bush is actually a patriot.
It recently emerged that Mr Romney has plans to quadruple the size of his $12 million California home.
How many of the people who weren’t able to dodge the draft with not just money but religion would like to spend $12 million to quadruple the size of their graves?
Inquiring war dead want to know.
I hope that the emergence of this causes Mitt the Flip to shit in his magic underwear.
“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret. ”
Sadly, I can’t agree with that last sentence.
I might have been able to 30 years ago, but now? An American public dumbed down by MTV, right-wing talk radio and the fake dichotomies of an artificial two-party system even before Fox ‘News’ was allowed to work its way into the American greymatter? Most of them actually believe that Dubya won in 2000 and 2004, no?
Seen today exiting the parking lot of a grocery store somewhere in the American Midwest:
Obama‘s a big awful mistake, eh?
Tell ya what Ms. ‘Marriage – One Man One Woman’ Born Again 2010 Iowa Voter, you think Obama’s such a big mistake? Then get thee to an Abbottabadery.
Oh, wait…
What you’ve declared to be America’s ‘big mistake’ beat you to that, didn’t he?
And, um….
Why was Osama still around for Obama to catch in 2011?
Oh, Ms. ‘Marriage – One Man One Woman’ Born Again 2010 Iowa Voter……..
I’m waiting for an answer.
Either worrying about who can get married and who can’t was (and is) more important than finding a mass murderer who wouldn’t have given a shit on 9/11 if he had had intel informing him that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were full of nothing but people who share your view on marriage limitation (and, lets get real, the Pentagon probably was) or someone who, at best, had questionable occupancy rights to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from 2001-09 really wasn’t playing for the team that you’ve convinced yourself that he (not to mention the person Obama beat in 2008) was, or….
maybe you’re just a worthless, braindead homophobic racist.
[ADDENDUM – 5/5/2011, 5:24 PM CDT]
I’d forgotten to include this photo, taken at the same parking lot – roughly a minute before the ‘BAM’ shot.
No optical illusion. The Americross is planted in the bed of the pickup, which – now here’s the money shot (in light of the ‘god is able’ communique) – was parked in a handicap space.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t see anything expressly anti-Obama on this, um…., vehicle. But, I am left with a question: If god is able, why is he not willing?
Its as if Dubya and Obama were two pitchers who combined for a legendary pitching performance: Dubya the starter, and Obama the reliever.
The lives and legacies of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden have been inextricably intertwined since Sept. 11, 2001.
Two days after bin Laden’s terrorist operation killed more than 3,000 Americans, Bush declared, “We will not rest until we find him.” It was Bush who authorized the CIA to use the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history. Then came Tora Bora, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, rendition, terrorist strikes in London and Madrid, and more than 6,000 U.S. military casualties in twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now that bin Laden has been killed by U.S. forces on a mission first assigned by President Bush, aided by evidence gained from “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized by the former president, Bush’s frustrating “mission impossible” has, in the dead of night, turned into “mission accomplished.”
And in an instant, Bush’s fruitless search for bin Laden was hailed across the political spectrum as a determined effort that paved the way for his successor’s success.
The Houston Chronk says it, so it must be true, eh?
“He never wavered in that mission” to capture or kill bin Laden, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday at a news conference near Ground Zero.
Fox & Friends had wall-to-wall coverage of the celebrations inspired by news of Osama bin Laden’s death this morning, and had on lots of analysts to discuss the Obama administration’s big victory in the so-called “war on terror”.
To do that, strangely enough, they had on all sorts of commentators, including various politicians, such as Karl Rove, and featured statements from the likes of Dick Cheney. Oddly enough, not a single segment managed to include a Democratic politician or even one person from the Obama administration.
Instead, what we heard all morning was how George W. Bush deserves credit too! They even ran a segment featuring Bush vowing in 2001 he would eventually get Bin Laden, with the longest time frame being a year from then.
There’s a fair amount of this rhetoric bouncing around this morning, and it’s not especially surprising — Republicans aren’t going to credit President Obama, regardless of merit, so it stands to reason they’ll try to bring George W. Bush into the picture.
If this is going to be a new GOP talking point, we might as well set the record straight.
In March 2002, just six months after 9/11, Bush said of bin Laden, “I truly am not that concerned about him…. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.”
In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.
Barack Obama is not Randy Johnson to Dubya’s Curt Schilling.
Rather, the year is 1986 and Barack Obama is the New York Mets to Dubya’s Bill Buckner – not to imply that Obama was lucky but, rather, that the Bush family is on one team and the rest of us are on another.
But reality has never gotten in the way of a conservative Texas ‘news’ outlet fluffing the Bush family.
If history is any guide, the successful U.S. military operation is likely to boost the sagging popularity of President Barack Obama. But for Bush, the terrorist leader’s death also could alter public perceptions of his presidency.
Well…
Hopefully it will remove all doubt that Dubya didn’t give a damn about finding bin Laden and, instead, was only concerned about ejaculating on Iraq.
“It’s certainly a validation of the policies that President Bush put in place following the attacks of 9/11,” said Midland businessman Donald Evans, a close Bush friend and former commerce secretary. “President Obama has looked back at how President Bush led the war on terrorism and I think he drew many lessons from that.”
Bush left office in January 2009 as the least popular president in three decades. But lawmakers from both parties said Monday that his aggressive efforts to combat al-Qaida will burnish his legacy. A small group of Texans gathered outside Bush’s Dallas home Monday, leaving behind American flags and patriotic, red, white and blue balloons.
“President Bush has been proven correct,” said Rep. Al Green, D-Houston. “He indicated that he would bring bin Laden to justice or we would bring justice to bin Laden. While President Bush isn’t president, I do believe President Obama finished what President Bush started.”
Some elected officials said the interrogation tactics approved by Bush may have played a key role in locating bin Laden.
U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, an Austin Republican, told the Houston Chronicle that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided U.S. interrogators the name of a courier trusted by bin Laden, enabling U.S. officials to eventually track the courier to the compound where bin Laden was found and killed on Sunday by a helicopter-borne team of Navy SEALs.
McCaul, a former federal prosecutor who handled counterterrorism duties in Texas for the Justice Department, said Mohammed had surrendered the crucial information some time after being subjected to the “aggressive interrogation techniques for which the Bush administration was criticized.”
The practices used on detainees at Guantanamo have fueled deep divisions over the value and ethics of harsh interrogation techniques, but supporters now point to the intelligence gathering as one way in which critical information was collected over a period of years.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said intelligence obtained at Guantanamo prison that led to bin Laden’s death was “a direct result of President Bush’s orders.”
“President Bush set into motion the mission to bring down bin Laden,” she said, “and President Obama carried it through to completion.”
How’d that campaign for Texas governer go, eh Kay?
Still, said Mark P. Jones, chairman of the political science department at Rice University, the killing of bin Laden is “bittersweet for President Bush.”
“On one level, he’s happy to see him receive the justice that he deserved,” Jones said. “On another level, he has to be disappointed it didn’t happen on his watch. It reminds people that he failed in the capture or death of bin Laden.”
You know…
Maybe I’m being too harsh with Bill Buckner. After all, he was a good player who made a bad play – just at the worst possible time.
The fate of bin Laden was one of several unsettled matters that academics say will influence Bush’s ultimate place in history. These include the nation’s economic situation, the fragile stability of Iraq, the future of war-torn Afghanistan and the fate of democracy movements in undemocratic nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Certainly, President Bush handed off two unresolved wars and an economic collapse to his successor,” said Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson. “Anything that takes the edge off those problems – bin Laden’s death, economic recovery, and easing out of Iraq and Afghanistan – will help President Bush’s legacy, at least at the margins.”
So, to stick with the baseball comparisons, I guess that would make the ‘journalists’ who can’t be bothered to mention:
Remember the run-up to the 2000 presidential election?
When gay conservatives were falling all over themselves to support George W. Bush, justifying that support with the delusion that there was no proof whatsoever that he was actually anti-gay?
Well, what if – all other things being equal – he actually had turned out to be the stealth pro-gay candidate that those gay conservatives were asserting/implying that he was?
What if he had supported – and achieved – DOMA repeal? DADT repeal? An inclusive ENDA?
While that would all have been nice, it wouldn’t alter one nagging piece of reality: George W. Bush actually lost the 2000 presidential election. The process that put him into the White House in 2001 was illegitimate and everyone – including Justices Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, O’Connor and Kennedy – knows it. Ditto for 2004.
In turn, even if 2001-2009 resulted in occurrences which could allow a sane person to honestly claim that President George W. Bush was a friend to the LGBT community, the same sane person could not honestly say that George W. Bush legitimately earned the right to be in the position where he was able to demonstrate that friendship via DOMA repeal, DADT repeal, inclusive ENDA passage, et. al.
Moreover, take a guess as to how little of this will ever make it into any Texas-approved textbook:
All of us knew it but couldn’t prove it. Now we can prove it. Newly declassified documents published at the National Security Archive prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the Bush administration planned to topple Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq as early as January, 2001, and were making strategic plans and resource allocations as early as November, 2001.
America has now reached the equilibrium of class insanity that England was wallowing in during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: only the poor, politically-unconnected and without titles of nobility ever had to answer for their actions. Theft of property valued at 12 pence (1/20 of a British Pound) was punishable by hanging – and almost always was so punished (the only other alternative besides a pardon resulted in Australia.)
Today in America?
Steal a loaf of bread to eat or make off with a gallon of gas so you can drive to an interview for a job (that you’re not going to get because the position you applied for was shipped to India even before the want-ad you answered was placed in the newspaper) or lie to an insurance company to get a life-saving medical procedure that the insurance company had lied to you in telling you that policy was going to cover and, while you can be assured that you won’t have to catch the next tumbrel cart to Tyburn, you can be assured that that the American Corporatist Criminal Justice(?) System will ensure that, for the rest of your life – even if it somehow manages not to include any actual time behind prison walls – you will be caste buddies with mother-rapers, father-stabbers, father-rapers and child-pimpers.
Meanwhile…
Arrange to steal an election, then lie to start not one but two wars, then subvert every statute and constitutional provision that you swore to uphold when you took the oath that you illegally put yourself in the place to take….?
If only Hitler had had Karl Rove, even if Germany had still lost the war Hitler could have spent the 1950s travelling throughout the U.S. giving speeches to local meetings of the John Birch Society proudly proclaiming that, “Hey, we had our differences back in the 1940s, but at least I’m not a Commie! And I’m damn sure not Kenyan!”
Mehlman says he only recently realized he’s gay — an absurd claim — and insists that he worked behind the scenes to beat back efforts to attack same-sex marriage during the Bush years. That’s a staggering claim from someone who presided over a campaign that exploited homophobia to advance constitutional amendments in 11 states banning same-sex marriage.
…
Mehlman is the Roy Cohn of his generation, quietly enabling some of the most damaging attacks on LGBT people and our families.
Actually, this gives me a chance to nevertheless take a shot at QCM.
I think that that passage is an insult to Roy Cohn.
Seriously.
Cohn never came out, but there is verifiable evidence that, at least once, he worked on behalf of at least one member of the LGBT community: Renee Richards.
Posted by Katrina Rose 
ENDAblog 