The Top 10 Conservative Idiots, No. 281March 5, 2007
Ann On Fire EditionWelcome to the 281st edition of the Top 10 Conservative Idiots. It's been quite a week, with Ann Coulter (1) putting the icing on CPAC's cake, Dinesh D'Souza (2) revealing who's really to blame for Abu Ghraib (you'll never guess!), and The Bush Administration (3) secretly funding Al Qaeda-linked terrorists. Yes, you read that right. Elsewhere, Michael Savage (6) gets hired and fired, Glenn Beck (9) shows off his best pick-up line, and Conservapedia (10) puts the "facts" at your fingertips. Enjoy... and don't forget the
key!
Ann Coulter 
Last week Washington DC played host to the 34th annual gathering of CPAC, which stands for "Clinton's Penis! Aaaah! Clinton!" - no, wait, I'm sorry - it stands for "Conservative Political Action Conference." Same thing.
Anyway,
according to the organization's website, the event was set to feature:
Vice President Dick Cheney - Sean Hannity - Senator Mitch McConnell - Ann Coulter - Tom Delay - Michelle Malkin - David Horowitz - Congressman Mike Pence - Newt Gingrich - Phyllis Schlafly - Wayne LaPierre - and many more!
CPAC also featured presidential candiates Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, and Mitt Romney. Doesn't that sound like a good time? And how come Tom DeLay isn't in prison yet?
Of course, one of the stars of the show was Ann Coulter. Coulter was introduced by Mitt Romney who
said, "I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!" She went on to draw riotous laughter from the audience with
this remark:
I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot."
Mmm, bigotry.
According to the
New York Times, Coulter's remarks were "sharply denounced" by three GOP presidential candidates: John McCain (who wasn't at CPAC) said through his spokesman that, "The comments were wildly inappropriate." Giuliani said, "The comments were completely inappropriate and there should be no place for such name-calling in political debate." And Romney's spokesman announced that, "It was an offensive remark. Governor Romney believes all people should be treated with dignity and respect." Hmm. I guess Romney didn't mean, "That is a good thing. Oh yeah!" after all.
It's really quite strange that after agreeing to appear at a conference which featured Coulter (and in Romney's case giving her a glowing introduction) these people would suddenly be shocked - shocked I tell ya! - that she would make such "inappropriate" comments. I mean, it's not like she's never
done anything like this before.
But you almost have to feel sorry for the wingnuts, really. Their bold new majority was supposed to last for a generation, and now the top dogs of the conservative movement have been reduced to sitting around giggling at faggot jokes. Pathetic.
Dinesh D'Souza 
Dinesh D'Souza is a columnist, author, and a former senior policy analyst under Ronald Reagan. He's also a complete dick.
Last week D'Souza decided to rethink Abu Ghraib in an article called, er, "Rethinking Abu Ghraib." His thesis? That the Abu Ghraib scandal was, in fact, the fault of liberals.
Here's his reasoning:
In one crucial respect, however, the Muslim critics were wrong. Contrary to their assertions, Abu Ghraib did not reflect the shared values of America, it reflected the sexual immodesty of liberal America. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched individuals from Red America who were trying to act out the fantasies of Blue America. Casting aside all traditional notions of decency, propriety and morality, they simply lived by the code of self-fulfillment. If it feels good, it must be right. This was bohemianism, West Virginia-style.
At some level, the cultural left recognized this, which is why most of its comments about Abu Ghraib assiduously avoided the issue of sexual deviancy. The left's embarrassment on this matter seems to have drawn on class prejudice. For some liberals, soldiers like Graner and England were poor white trash getting into trouble again. Of course if Graner and England were professors at an elite liberal arts college, their videotaped orgies might easily have become the envy of academia. If they were artists staging these pictures in a loft in Soho they could have been hailed as pioneers and encouraged by leftist admirers to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Let's break this down shall we?
1. Getting a job as a prison guard in Iraq and then sexually humiliating the prisoners in your care is a commonly-shared fantasy of those living in "Blue America."
2. Everyone in "Blue America" has cast aside "all traditional notions of decency, propriety and morality."
3. Torturing prisoners is exactly the same thing as sex between consenting adults.
Where does Mr. D'Souza get off making these wild statements? I'll tell you where he gets off. He gets off in his basement with a copy of
Professors Gone Wild: Liberal Arts Orgies III.
Basically D'Souza's theory comes down to this: nobody in "Red America" is ever to blame for any of their own actions. If a conservative gets caught blowing a male prostitute for meth (Ted Haggard), or in possession of child porn (Parker J. Bena), or having a child out of wedlock (Dan Burton), or handing divorce papers to their second wife while she's in hospital recovering from cancer (Newt Gingrich), or trying to choke their mistress (Don Sherwood), well - it's all because they couldn't resist the temptations of "Blue America." And who cares if "Red America" has
higher divorce rates than "Blue America?" The liberals are to blame! Now that's what I call personal responsibility.
Come on, conservatives. If liberals told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?
No, seriously, would you? Just wondering.
But wait, there's more...
But being low-life Appalachians, Graner and England inspired none of these elevated thoughts. Instead, liberals moved opportunistically to attack the military and discredit its prisoner interrogation policies - even though these policies had nothing to do with what actually happened.
Moving past the boring "liberals attack the military" slur, let's take a look at those Bush administration interrogation policies which, according to D'Souza, "had nothing to do with what actually happened."
"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A." -
New Yorker,
May 2004"Accounts of US soldiers, Iraqi detainees and human rights groups show that forced nudity of prisoners in Abu Ghraib reflected aggressive, pervasive pattern of humiliation, so commonplace that soldiers did not view it as abusive or out of the ordinary; practice apparently started last July, three months before arrival of seven soldiers now charged arrived, and bred culture in which other abuses occurred." --
New York Times,
June 2004"To this day, the Bush administration has failed to repudiate many of these decisions. ... it still refuses to disavow all forms of coercive interrogation or to adopt a clear policy forbidding it. Indeed, it reportedly continued as late as June 2004 - long after the Abu Ghraib mistreatment became public - to subject Guantánamo detainees to beatings, prolonged isolation, sexual humiliation, extreme temperatures, and painful stress positioning - practices the International Committee of the Red Cross reportedly called 'tantamount to torture.'" Human Rights Watch,
January 2005But don't blame Dinesh D'Souza for pulling all this nonsense out of his ass. Blue America made him do it!
The Bush Administration 
Seymour Hersh, the man who wrote the piece in the
New Yorker exposing Abu Ghraib, which I excerpted above, dropped another huge bombshell last week. He
revealed that the Bush administration has been "pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight" into the hands of "three Sunni jihadist groups." Why? Because these groups are aligning themselves against Hezbollah and are opposed to the spread of Shiite influence in the Middle East.
Just one problem: these Sunni groups are also connected to Al Qaeda. That's right - according to Hersh, "We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11."
It seems that the Bush administration believes that these Sunni extremists will cause significant damage to the Iranian regime, and to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Makes sense - if we just fund the
right terrorists then everything will work out fine. After all, it worked really well when we funded the Afghan
mujahideen against the Soviets, right? That didn't cause any problems later on.
So, yeah, the Bush administration is bypassing Congress in order to hand American tax dollars to radical Sunni groups that are connected to Al Qaeda.
But never mind that.
Haven't you heard? "Anna Nicole Smith once urinated in a pet litter tray, her friend has revealed."
The Tennessee Center For Policy Research 
Soon after Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" won Best Documentary at last week's Academy Awards, shocking news broke.
According to a press release by the non-partisan Tennessee Center For Policy Research, "Gore's mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES)."
Within hours of their press release, the story was being hurled across the conservative blogosphere, from Instapundit, to WorldNutDaily, to Drudge, and eventually into the mainstream media at ABC News. But of course, the Gore-smearers were hiding some "inconvenient truths" of their own.
According to the
Tennessean:
Gore purchased 108 blocks of "green power" for each of the past three months, according to a summary of the bills.
That's a total of $432 a month Gore paid extra for solar or other renewable energy sources.
The green power Gore purchased in those three months is equivalent to recycling 2.48 million aluminum cans or 286,092 pounds of newspaper, according to comparison figures on NES' Web site.
(snip)
"Every family has a different carbon footprint," said Kalee Krider, a spokeswoman for Gore. The Gores' 10,000-square-foot house on Lynnwood Boulevard has a large one.
The Green Power Switch program isn't all that Gore and his wife, Tipper, are doing, Krider said.
They use compact fluorescent light bulbs and are in the midst of a renovation project that includes having solar panels installed on their home to reduce fossil fuel consumption, she said.
Their car? A Lexis hybrid SUV.
"They, of course, also do the carbon emissions offset," she said.
That means figuring out how much carbon is emitted from home power use, and vehicle and plane travel, then paying for projects that will offset that with use of renewable energy, such as solar power.
But never mind all that. Al Gore is a hypocrite! Did you know he once said he invented the Internet? And co-wrote "Love Story" with James Lee Witt of FEMA?
Meanwhile, Drew Johnson, the president of the Tenessee Center For Policy Research, told the
Tennessean that he "doesn't differ much from Al Gore on his environmental concerns." He said, "We went into this just asking the question, 'Is the leader of the environmental movement basically living up to his word?' Given that he's a Tennessean, I thought it's a question we should ask."
Sounds innocent enough... although the bloggers at
Seeing The Forest noted last week that the Tennesse Center For Policy Research is a mysterious organ indeed. A
review of their IRS forms indicate that they have no officers, directors or trustees, and are run out of a P.O. Box. Their "non-partisan" website gets no traffic and
only links to conservative organizations.
But hey, I'm sure the folks at the so-called Tennessee Center For Policy Research are a trustworthy bunch who have real environmental concerns and no ulterior motives whatsoever.
The Pentagon 
Last week the general in charge of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, George W. Weightman, was "relieved of command following disclosures about inadequate treatment of wounded soldiers,"
according to the Associated Press. Good. The firing comes after
revelations in the
Washington Post that Walter Reed's Building 18, where many American soldiers are recuperating after being wounded in the Middle East, is moldy, rodent-infested, cockroach-ridden, and "smells like greasy carry-out."
And shortly after Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey gave Weightman the boot, Harvey himself
resigned abruptly. Even better. However, according to the AP:
Hours earlier, President Bush ordered a comprehensive review of conditions at the nation's network of military and veteran hospitals, which has been overwhelmed by injured troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A "comprehensive review," eh? Is this going to be anything like the Bush administration's comprehensive reviews of
9/11, or the
wiretapping scandal, or
Hurricane Katrina?
In a word, yes. Last week the Pentagon attempted to
prevent George Weightman from testifying before Congress. Why? They wouldn't say. But surely it couldn't have anything to do with this...
(Henry) Waxman charged that the Army used an unusual process to award a five-year, $120 million contract to manage the center to a company owned by a former executive of Halliburton, the scandal-prone government contractor once operated by Vice President Dick Cheney.
In 2004, the Army determined that Walter Reed's federal employees could operate the medical center more efficiently than IAP Worldwide Services, which is operated by the former Halliburton executive, Al Neffgen, Waxman wrote. After IAP protested, the Army "unilaterally" increased the employees' estimated costs by $7 million, making IAP appear cheaper, Waxman said. Rules barred Walter Reed employees from appealing the decision, Waxman wrote, and in January 2006 the Army gave the contract to IAP.
According to an internal memo written by a senior Walter Reed administrator and obtained by Waxman, the decision to outsource to IAP led the center's skilled personnel to leave Walter Reed "in droves," fearing they would be laid off when the contractor took over. In the last year, Waxman found, over 250 of 300 government employees left the center. The lack of staffing put patient care "at risk of mission failure," warned an internal Army memo obtained by the congressman.
...could it?
Michael Savage Last week, prominent Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA) inked a deal with right-wing radio host Michael Savage. And then, two days later, they un-inked it.
After signing with CAA, Savage went on a tear against Melissa Etheridge (and gay people in general),
saying, "Turn it off. Get her off my show. I don't care what her name is. I don't like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke. ... I want to puke when I hear about a woman married to a woman raising children because, frankly, I think that it's child abuse to do that to children without their permission. What does a child know? Ask them when they're 16 whether they want to be raised by two lesbians or two men. What are the two men doing behind the other wall? You think the children don't hear it?"
Unfortunately Melissa Etheridge is also a client of CAA, and CAA's co-chairman, Bryan Lourd, is gay. So Savage's dumb bigotry didn't go down too well at the talent agency, and he was dropped like a hot potato.
Once Savage learned that he'd been given the boot, he went off on a
curious rant in which he announced that, "Those of you who think I'm your enemy ... who are spending all your days and nights attacking Michael Savage ... You're mentally ill, and you need help. You need more help than you can imagine. ... I know you're mentally ill. I know that, and you can't help yourself. The mentally ill cannot heal themselves."
I mean, sure, Mr. Savage appears to suffer from exteme paranoia. But clearly it's
everyone else who is mentally ill.
He continued, "How (liberals) could have such hatred in their hearts for people like myself ... how they will take the side of the Islamic extremists over the president and over the troops, how they will take the side of the enemy in virtually every interchange could only be answered with one statement: liberalism is a mental disorder, and I don't have the cure for it."
By the way Michael, did you hear that President Bush is funding Al Qaeda-linked terrorists using your hard-earned taxpayer dollars? What's that? You don't care, because you're too busy searching for the hidden code in the
San Francisco Chronicle that spells out a secret gay plot to take over the world? Sorry. Carry on.
The Bush Administration In August of 2006, I noted that George W. Bush's National Drug Control Strategy didn't seem to be working too well. (See Idiots
256.)
Here's what Our Great Leader had to say in 2002:
Just think about the Taliban in Afghanistan - 70 percent of the world's opium trade came from Afghanistan, resulting in significant income to the Taliban, significant amount of money to the people that were harboring and feeding and hiding those who attacked and killed thousands of innocent Americans on September the 11th. When we fight drugs, we fight the war on terror.
I noted in Idiots 256 that in 2001 Afghanistan produced 185 tons of opium, and in 2005 Afghanistan produced 4,500 tons of opium, which was a new record and "constitutes almost 90 percent of the world supply."
So has any progress been made since then? Well, no. According to the BBC:
Opium production in Afghanistan reached record levels last year, the United States has said.
The US State Department's annual report on narcotics also said the flourishing drugs trade was undermining the fight against the Taleban.
It warned of a possible increase in heroin overdoses in Europe and the Middle East as a result.
Poppy production rose 25% in 2006, a figure US Assistant Secretary of State Ann Patterson described as alarming
So... the Bush administration has spent five years fighting the war on drugs (which is also apparently the same as fighting the war on terror), and Afghanistan has gone from producing 185 tons of opium in 2001 to producing more than 5,600 tons in 2006.
Color me unsurprised.
The Bush Administration 
While we're on the subject of the Bush administration's awesome successes, let's take a quick look at the state of the military under George W. Bush. You may recall that in the summer of 2000, one of the Bush campaign's tactics was to claim that the military had languished under Bill Clinton. Here's what George
had to say when he accepted the GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2000:
We have seen a steady erosion of American power and an unsteady exercise of American influence. Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, "Not ready for duty, sir."
This administration had its moment, they had their chance, they have not led. We will.
And just how well has the Commander-in-Chief led the military over the past six years? Well, the
Washington Post reported last week that:
Nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated "not ready" -- largely as a result of shortfalls in billions of dollars' worth of equipment -- jeopardizing their capability to respond to crises at home and abroad, according to a congressional commission that released a preliminary report yesterday on the state of U.S. military reserve forces.
The report found that heavy deployments of the National Guard and reserves since 2001 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other anti-terrorism missions have deepened shortages, forced the cobbling together of units and hurt recruiting.
"We can't sustain the (National Guard and reserves) on the course we're on," said Arnold L. Punaro, chairman of the 13-member Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, established by Congress in 2005. The independent commission, made up mainly of former senior military and civilian officials appointed by both parties, is tasked to study the mission, readiness and compensation of the reserve forces.
"The Department of Defense is not adequately equipping the National Guard for its domestic missions," the commission's report found. It faulted the Pentagon for a lack of budgeting for "civil support" in domestic emergencies, criticizing the "flawed assumption" that as long as the military is prepared to fight a major war, it is ready to respond to a disaster or emergency at home.
Wow, that George is a real leader, ain't he?
Incidentally, here are some other choice quotes from that acceptance speech:
"I am proud to have Dick Cheney by my side. He is a man -- he is a man of integrity and sound judgment..."
"Social Security has been called the third rail of American politics, the one you're not supposed to touch because it might shock you. But if you don't touch it, you cannot fix it. And I intend to fix it."
"I will work to reduce nuclear weapons and nuclear tension in the world, to turn these years of influence into decades of peace."
"A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming."
Way to go, numbnuts.
Glenn Beck 
Keith Olbermann had a few choice words for conservative TV host Glenn Beck recently:
A wolf in sheep's clothing. The very dangerously bigoted guy who is selling himself as a pragmatic philosopher. I don't think he sees his own bigotry. There's something about him that suggests that, one night, he'll say something that will cost him his career in television.
Beck immediately fired back.
According to Think Progress:
Glenn Beck responded tonight, calling Olbermann an "intolerant ideologue" whose ideas "smack of the same McCarthyism (Edward R.) Murrow fought so valiantly against." Beck added, "Hey, Keith, you're not saving the world's democracy; you're killing it, my friend, by trying to limit the marketplace of ideas to only those that reflect your own."
In case you missed them, Think Progress also helpfully lists some of the ideas that Beck has been selling in the marketplace. Here are a few of the best:
The anti-gay slur "faggot" is nothing more than "a naughty name." (1/23/07)
"I wonder if I'm alone in this - you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families? Took me about a year." (9/9/05)
"And that's all we're hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones we're seeing on television are the scumbags." (9/9/05)
But last week Glenn went off in a different direction altogether. Here's a partial transcript of his interview with Dina Sansing, west coast editor of
US Weekly, on the pressing matter of "American Idol" contestant Antonella Barba's recently-revealed nude photographs.
Beck: I don't think you have to be famous. I think you just work in the average, uh, you know, in the average, uh, environment in America now, somebody would get a picture of you and then it would be posted all around, and you... it'll happen in your office.
Sansing: Yeah, possibly...
Beck: You don't think so?
Sansing: Well, it depends, you know...
Beck: Dina, I've got some time and a camera. Why don't you stop by?
(incredibly awkward five second pause)
Beck: No? Okay.
Don't miss the
video... it's, well, awful.
Conservapedia 
And finally: exciting news! Conservatives who are sick and tired of having to deal with inconvenient things like facts now have a new website where they can find all kinds of "facts" which are much more agreeable to their own point of view.
Introducing
Conservapedia, "a conservative encyclopedia you can trust."
If you're a moron.
At Conservapedia you can enjoy such delightful entries as
this one on dinosaurs, which speculates that "there are a number of lines of evidence that point to dinosaurs and man coexisting." Conservapedia cites such reliable sources as
Answers in Genesis, which notes that "in Papua New Guinea's
The Independent newspaper, a 'dinosaur-like reptile' was seen on two occasions in the Lake Murray area."
If that first source is not good enough for you, then perhaps you prefer
Creation On The Web, which reveals that "in Papua New Guinea's
The Independent newspaper, a 'dinosaur-like reptile' was seen on two occasions in the Lake Murray area."
Wait a minute, that's the exact same article. Let's try a different citation... here's a
better one from Answers in Genesis: "Mrs Edna MacInnes reported on June 24 that she had seen a 15-metre-long creature with a neck like a giraffe in Loch Ness."
There you have it: rock-solid proof that dinosaurs are in fact living among us today. Answers in Genesis goes on to note that, "Despite the hype, Jurassic Park is fiction." Gosh, really?
You'll also enjoy Conservapedia's articles on
gravity ("Some have criticized gravity, reminding us that it is only a theory, and that no scientist has ever seen a graviton or a space curve ... The considerable disagreement between scientists about the theory of gravity suggests that, like evolution, the theory will eventually be replaced with a model which acknowledges God as the source of all things"), and
Fox News ("Fox News was started in 1996 in response to the other cable news channels which all had obvious liberal biases. Because of this, Rupert Murdoch decided to start a real new channel which would tell the truth. The success of Fox news over every other news channel is because it is fair and balanced. It has many people on it who work to spread truth such as Sean Hannity who is a great American.")
Conservapedia is still a young website and therefore has many pages to fill: for example, they don't seem to have a page on
Afghanistan yet, despite the fact that there are currently around 50,000 U.S. and NATO troops there fighting the "war on terror."
Fortunately some good people have found the time to create pages for "
Excretion" and "
Gonad," so it's not all bad.
See you next week!
-- EarlG
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