What's All The Fuss About?!

HERE I WAS, EAGERLY ANTICIPATING A WILD AND CRAZY ride, looking forward to reading every salacious detail of 22-year old Barack Obama's romantic dalliance with his Aussie girlfriend from her journal's "juicy" (?) recollections in Vanity Fair as the goofy Tamron Hall intimated she couldn't talk about some of the "sexual" content in girlfriend's hot journal entries. (Incidentally, I think I figured out what accounts for Tamron's terrific curves: It's her daily Burger diet.)

So, based on Tamron's tittilated reaction (she's not the only one; the women went a little nuts with, let's face it, their romance novel syndrome) I began scanning the article for accounts of wild parties at Studio 54, round-the-clock sex explicitly detailed, drugs, and rock 'n roll ... Instead, what do I find?

A young Barack spending nights at the University library, open 24 hours, where it's warm; hooking up with an Aussie chick, diplomat's daughter, getting laid but not as a one night stand (what a romantic prude, Barack!); discussing postmodern literature and quoting T.S. Eliot; on Sundays lounging around barechested doing the New York Times crossword puzzle while wearing a blue and white sarong (pitter-patter goes Tamron's heart — FYI provincial Beltway denizens, Texans etc., back in the day reading the Sunday Times was a program, along with brunch; how very bourgeois of His Barackness); writing long, poetic, political, beautifully literate letters (I've written epistolaries in my day, how 'bout you?); going on theater dates, to museums (who can resist the Met?), Italian restaurants of the type still extant in Little Italy; racing girlfriend in the park, letting her win (how romantically gallant ... 'pass the barf bag'); being cool, aloof, guarded, veiled (OH MY), so girlfriend says (a test) "I love you" and Barack replies politely, "thank you."

Tamron and her girlfriends are mystified and incensed: Why didn't he say, "I love you too"? But guys totally get it; she's making her commitment move, so pull back and don't up the emotional ante, best to let her down easy, politely but noncommitally; inevitably living together brings tension, Barack has flare-up over doing the dishes (how quotidian!); they push each other away. One of ten million stories in the big city. Next chapter ... Any questions?

Hmm ... Twenty-something President Obama was an incurable romantic, an introspective intellectual, who wrote beautifully. Fits right into the mainstream lives of great American presidents, like Jefferson and Lincoln. Who'd a thunk it?

P.P.S. Of Heroes And Villains

 NORM ORNSTEIN AND THOMAS MANN explain why it is necessary for we, the voters, to fumigate the Republican Party as we would a cockroach infestation. Meanwhile, Villain Ratigan can't seem to fit them into his schedule — OOPS, not after Villain threw a hissy fit at a former Medicare administrator who found fraud in the system but failed to blame President Obama; instead, he credited oversight provisions in the President's Affordable Care Act for unearthing the fraud, and added it will be a "tragedy" if the Supreme Court overturns it.

Paul Krugman who Lawrence accurately noted "is right about everything," won't be on Villain's show either; Villain hates him almost as much as he hates the President, because Krugman makes Villain look like a bigger fool than usual ... without breaking a sweat. But the stealth Republicans, Americans Elect, are Villain's kind of political support group ... "so gobsmackingly wrongheaded. To be fair, Americans Elect only has a few things wrong with it: They can't win, they can't govern, and the way they're going about their business is making our problems worse." Peas in a pod: Villain likes them.

 

P.S. Our Favorite Hollywood Socialist Mocks Ayn Rand Disciple Paul Ryan

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE, Paulie. Dear objectivists, watch as Lawrence deconstructs your cult Goddess, Ayn Rand and fawning  disciple, apple-of-the-Beltway's-eye, Paulie the Munster, who ran for the hills pretending to be a Jesus Freak and pious God-fearing Catholic. Jeez ... Can Paulie the toast of D.C. get more fifth-rate than that?!

 

HAIL TO THE CHIEF! President Obama Spikes The Ball In The Endzone

IN A BRILLIANT political maneuver President Obama outflanked his political opposition, consigning the hammerlock Republicans have held over the Democratic Party's head, false though it has always been, of "weakness" on national security to the dustbin of political history. Shorn of Republican spin, History shows Democrats have been plenty tough enough prosecuting our post-LBJ wars/military interventions, the wise grown-ups who internalized the lessons of Vietnam, whose trauma happened on the Party's watch with tragic consequences at home and abroad.

The more Republicans protested with faux outrage the "politicization" of the killing of Osama bin Laden the more Americans were reminded of it, and the more the President's stock rose. It was almost palpable. Oingo-boingo Mitts-flops reversed himself so often it was hard keeping up with the latest pirouette. Some years ago in response to then-Senator Obama's promise to hunt down and kill bin Laden given actionable intelligence, no matter where he may be, Romney harrumphed that it wasn't worth "moving heaven and earth" to find one individual, cautioning that we musn't offend Pakistan by "bombing our ally" without their permission. "Bomb-bomb-bomb bombbomb McCain" must still wake up in a cold sweat over this one.

Then, during the insanity reality show known as the GOP presidential debates, Romney joined the chorus for war with Iran (and the Soviet Union, too, to protect Czechoslovakia, I guess) over their nuclear program — no diplomacy there; straight to war — but couldn't decide whether he was for troop withdrawals and an end to our wars in the region with a Bushwhack punt about listening "to our commanders on the ground." Wrong answer. When you're the Commander-in-Chief, they listen to you. He also refused to commit to any troop withdrawal timetable.

What now Mittens? With the President's speech explaining to Americans that a "responsible" drawdown of our troops and ending the war in Afghanistan requires that we maintain a military presence there until 2024, is Mittens going to try to outflank the President on the right: "I'll take your 12 and raise you 28 for an even half-century presence in theater"? Good luck selling that to the American people. Or will he horrify the neocons by flippin' the dove and announcing we should be out sooner? Team Obama will love pointing out Romney's naïve "cut-and-run" military posture. Can you say "check" ... mate? Or try intoning "I'm so disappointed" like a wild and crazy guy ... ha-ha-ha. Sob.

More than two decades before President Obama's historic post-Cold War reset of American foreign policy, the neocon Republican fantasy that American military virility should remake the world in our own image, whatever that meant, had won the day. And also ensuing decades, with tragic consequences. The neocon Statement of Principles eerily parallels the traditional fascist ideal of a superior race with a mythologized past. Its neocon American version resurrects the 19th century concept of American expansionism known as "Manifest Destiny" (2.0) in which a virtuous America is entitled to realize its destiny as a world power by force of arms if necessary: Such a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today," the "Statement of Principles" concludes, yet "is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next."

By contrast, Democratic foreign policy and our military posture was informed by the small 'd' ideal of American democracy. The same ideal which Romney sneeringly and ignorantly berates as President Obama "apologizing" to the world for America. A lie, of course, along with the myth of Democratic "weakness" on foreign policy. The U.S. Democratic foreign policy was reaffirmed and championed by President Obama on the anniversary of bin Laden's killing, with exceptional skill, real "moral clarity" and a steely focus on our national security interests: First, (a) identify and prioritize the goal —to hunt down bin Laden and exterminate Al Qaeda — then (b) set out systematically to accomplish it. It is the rational counterweight to the inherently racist Manifest Destiny (2.0) as the ideological foundation for heady neocon dreams of empire.

The Republican experience is completely different. No matter the cost, their warmongering is an end in itself rather than a somber but determined concession to the failure of diplomacy as applied in self-defense, or in concert with our allies when all other peaceful means of averting a crisis have been exhausted. To the chicken hawk neocons, most of whom have never tasted battle, their aim is to create empire by force of arms and a 21st century "Pax Americana" through Orwell's perpetual wars feeding the military-industrial complex beast that President Dwight Eisenhower warned of in his farewell speech.

Lest we too quickly dismiss as preposterous the notion of a fascist strain in American politics and foreign policy, consider this: The Nazi Germany version of Manifest Destiny was known as Lebensraum, literally "living space." It was the ideological justification for Nazi Germany's eastward expansionism, seizing lands and raw materials from "inferior" Polish, Russian, and other Slavic populations, while committing unspeakable atrocities. In Manifest Destiny, American expansionism was westward, the populations to be subjugated, enslaved, and largely exterminated, were the "inferior" Native Americans herded into concentration camps called reservations.

Relying on an updated version of Manifest Destiny as their ideological foundation, neocons view the Cold War "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" as actually representing a romantic, conservative Reagan ideal, a return to which neocons fervently crave, but which in reality has never existed. Their misguided, bellicose neo-imperialism is all the more dangerous for its ideological underpinnings and ultimately doomed to self-destruction through the inexorable, unprecedented sapping of American power, prestige, and influence abroad.

The (George W.) "Bush Doctrine" of "preemptive war" was drawn from the neocon Statement of Principles on the "need to increase defense spending significantly ... to carry out our global responsibilities today, modernize our armed forces for the future," and "accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Bush plucked, wholesale, a neocon pre-9/11 letter to President Clinton calling for the peemptive removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In his 2010 memoir, Bush justified his neocon "doctrine" as "taking the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at home" and "confronting threats before they fully materialize."

Tragically, in his zeal to apply the bellicose neocon imperialist policies, Bush attacked the wrong country in Iraq, took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape the mountains of Tora Bora into Pakistan. Saddam was a bad actor but he had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Nor did he harbor designs on attacking the U.S., much less retain the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction, with highly competent UN inspectors breathing down his neck. Choosing war over sanctions to take out one lousy dictator among dozens around the world was not worth the sacrifice in blood, treasure, and heartache to the United States.

Significantly, American military interventions during the Carter and Clinton presidencies were narrowly focused with a humanitarian component; the opposite of the neocon ideological Republican wars. President Carter, subject of the Romney cheap shot — "even Jimmy Carter would have given that order" to take out Osama bin Laden — actually made that fateful and gutsy call of a failed mission to rescue the American embassy hostages held in Iran.

Unlike the Republican neocon bloodlust for deposing anti-American leaders — Manuel Noriega (Panama), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), democratically elected president Salvador Allende (Chile), failed coup attempts in Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega) and Venezuela (Hugo Chavez) — President Carter took the much more effective approach, at least in Latin America, of declaring that human rights would henceforth be a cornerstone of American foreign policy. It restrained Latin military dictators dependent on U.S. aid from their most abusive practices, and paved the way for democracy to take root and flourish in Latin America.

President Clinton's military interventions, in Somalia (unsuccessful), in Haiti (restoring deposed President Aristide to power), and the U.S.-led NATO military action in Bosnia to stop ethnic cleansing and the killing of civilians, without a single American killed in action, were each based on humanitarian grounds. Stopping the genocidal Bosnian war and bringing the criminals to justice in the International Tribunal in the Hague, reinforced that other doctrine of a "just war" consistent with our highest moral values as a civilized democracy.

Ironically, the raison d'etre for the doctrinal neocon notion of "perpetual war" — Orwell's metaphor for the Cold War — was their fantastical idealization of Ronald Reagan, credited with "winning the Cold War" as the accelerated rotting from within collapse of the Soviet Union ended on his watch as well as Pope John Paul II's. Still, Reagan deserves great credit for being a better peacetime diplomat with our biggest foes than a military commander. His military adventurism in Lebanon and Libya were small disasters, and the administration's covert CIA activities in Central America leading up to the Iran-Contra scandal nearly destroyed Reagan's presidency. It was, arguably, just as profound a constitutional crisis as Watergate — which engulfed and brought down an earlier Republican president, Nixon — and which would have directly implicated President Reagan had his subordinates not fallen on their swords.

David Frum, the earnest and rational conservative commentator, made a feeble attempt to defend knee-jerk, reactive Republican criticism. A thankless task given Romney's terminal lack of gravitas exemplified by the amazingly stupid remark that any American would have made the same call President Obama did, taking out bin Laden. Excuse me?! All I could think of were the millions of Romney's crazed constituents who, given the chance, wouldn't hesitate for a moment to exercise the nuclear option — a fearsome push-button toy to be directed at those hated "foreigners." Mitt Romney is no longer simply an amusing, out-of-touch mega-rich technocrat. He is dangerously out of touch, not just with voters, but as an automaton to implement the Ryan budget with "five working digits" to sign Grover Norquist's government-destroying bills. Most of all, Romney is an empty suit not to be trusted on any level with the presidency.

Frum made the highly questionable point that nothing has changed in Afghanistan since 2008 when President Obama took office. Nice try, David, but in a country where success is measured by two steps forward, one step back, such claims sidestep the President's main objective, which is to wind down the war responsibly and give the Afghan people a chance; the necessary breathing room for their self-government and democracy to begin taking root. The President inherited this mess from the Republicans and is determined not to abandon it to the fate Nixon's successor President Ford accepted, of helicopters evacuating people from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, 1975.

The Commander-in-Chief has earned the right and privilege to celebrate the killing of Osama bin Laden as a signal and historic achievement of his administration. President Obama has shown us he's got the moves to do his endzone dance. The return to rational, focused, tough-as-nails but non-belligerent Democratic Party foreign policy is cause for all Americans to celebrate. Of all the chatter surrounding President Obama's surprise visit to Afghanistan, Chris Matthews said it best when he was reminded of Winston Churchill in this memorable line from the President's speech:

"As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at home, it is time to renew America. An America where our children live free from fear, and have the skills to claim their dreams. A united America of grit and resilience, where sunlight glistens off soaring new towers in downtown Manhattan, and we build our future as one people, as one nation."

This is from Winston Churchill's speech at the Mansion House, London, November 10, 1942:

I have never promised anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat. Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory — a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers and warmed and cheered all our hearts.

Winston Churchill and FDR are the 20th century's gold standards for leadership in times of war. Yesterday, the American people glimpsed the 21st century standard in President Obama, established almost one year ago outside public view in the White House Situation Room.

To Ratigan, Beltway SCOUNDRELS et al, With The Audacity To Call Themselves "Journalists"

CAN ANY OF YOU RATBASTARDS say it without gagging?! Good on Norm Ornstein for breaking loose of his pseudo-academic C-SPAN/PBS analyses of politics in America to state the unvarnished TRUTH in a simple, declarative sentence: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”

Among the worst media offenders is Dylan Ratigan, the liar and sophist infecting MSNBC's programming, who has (mis)used his big microphone to perpetuate the LIE that both political parties are equally to blame, promote the rise of the Tea Party, and set off on so-called "30 million jobs" junkets while joining Republicans to sabotage every effort by Democrats in Congress to get any kind of jobs bill (or bills, period) passed.

His cheerleading for the Teabaggers' rise to power was, outside Fox, the most irresponsible misuse of political cable programming I have ever seen. Especially considering the hypocrisy, the failure to be objective, to the point he wouldn't identify Democrats (unless when frequently bashing them) by party designation, a common practice everywhere else on the network, and populating his program with neutered "progressives" seemingly under orders not to say negative things about a "certain political party" by name.

Ratigan's loathing of President Obama drives his unbalanced assault on the Democratic Party, the only party which has tried to govern responsibly, with HUNDREDS of bills passed by Nancy Pelosi's Congress killed by obstructionist Republicans. But let Norm Ornstein, who knows more about American politics than Ratigan will ever know in ten Deepak Chopra lifetimes, school the fool on the facts of our political system today: (Not that it would make one whit of difference to a propagandist who LIES with such facility.)

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Published: April 27

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates. 

 It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. 

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach. [...]

[T]he real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. [...] From the day he entered Congress in 1979, Gingrich had a strategy to create a Republican majority in the House: convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority. It took him 16 years, but by bringing ethics charges against Democratic leaders; provoking them into overreactions that enraged Republicans and united them to vote against Democratic initiatives; exploiting scandals to create even more public disgust with politicians; and then recruiting GOP candidates around the country to run against Washington, Democrats and Congress, Gingrich accomplished his goal.[...]

Norquist, meanwhile, founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 and rolled out his Taxpayer Protection Pledge the following year. The pledge, which binds its signers to never support a tax increase (that includes closing tax loopholes), had been signed as of last year by 238 of the 242 House Republicans and 41 of the 47 GOP senators, according to ATR. The Norquist tax pledge has led to other pledges, on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible. For Republicans concerned about a primary challenge from the right, the failure to sign such pledges is simply too risky.

Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented.

In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.

On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship. In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

Republicans often dismiss nonpartisan analyses of the nature of problems and the impact of policies when those assessments don’t fit their ideology. In the face of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the party’s leaders and their outside acolytes insisted on obeisance to a supply-side view of economic growth — thus fulfilling Norquist’s pledge — while ignoring contrary considerations.

Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.

No doubt, Democrats were not exactly warm and fuzzy toward George W. Bush during his presidency. But recall that they worked hand in glove with the Republican president on the No Child Left Behind Act, provided crucial votes in the Senate for his tax cuts, joined with Republicans for all the steps taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and supplied the key votes for the Bush administration’s financial bailout at the height of the economic crisis in 2008. The difference is striking. [...]

We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

This excerpted Op-Ed is worth a complete read, particularly the more detailed history of how we came to this point. (While you're at it, Norm, next time you're on PBS with the clueless Judy Woodruff, please school her on the facts of political life.) And their advice to the media is well-taken. The best political shows on MSNBC are those least patronized by Republicans. Unlike Ratigan, Rachel Maddow is boycotted by Republicans because she compels them to answer to the FACTS and the TRUTH. Her EPIC grilling of Rand Paul was, and remains, unlike anything seen on the so-called "Progressive channel."

Ratigan's political proclivities, mindless rants, and idiotic "solutions" wouldn't be such a turn-off had he an ounce of integrity, such that rather than making sweeping accusations of "both parties" when in fact the Republicans are RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MESS, he didn't "distort reality" by failing to point fingers at the REAL culprits, and name names. But he won't do it because Dylan's "greedy bastards" (criminals, wingnuts, fascists, etc. etc.) are overwhelmingly on the Republican/conservative side. But that would distort his reality. And drain his guest pool.

ANOTHER WINGNUT APOLOGY?! "HOMOPHOBIC [MONICA]? MAYBE YOU'RE GAY"

DON'T TAKE IT FROM ME. That's the New York Times' informed speculation on the latest example of "wingnut humor" (extensively covered in this blog), which isn't "humor" but HATE SPEECH. For those unwilling to entertain the possibility that Fox wingnut Monica Crowley is only the latest in a long line of right wing sociopaths, in the clinical definition of the term, blissfully unaware of the distinct difference between hate speech and humor — hate speech, in this instance against gays, reinforces the hater's stereotype and encourages bullying and hate crimes — then the Times speculation seems tailor-made for Monica:

WHY are political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights so often implicated in sexual encounters with same-sex partners?

In recent years, Ted Haggard, an evangelical leader who preached that homosexuality was a sin, resigned after a scandal involving a former male prostitute; Larry Craig, a United States senator who opposed including sexual orientation in hate-crime legislation, was arrested on suspicion of lewd conduct in a men’s bathroom; and Glenn Murphy Jr., a leader of the Young Republican National Convention and an opponent of same-sex marriage, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge after being accused of sexually assaulting another man.

One theory is that homosexual urges, when repressed out of shame or fear, can be expressed as homophobia. Freud famously called this process a “reaction formation” — the angry battle against the outward symbol of feelings that are inwardly being stifled. Even Mr. Haggard seemed to endorse this idea when, apologizing after his scandal for his anti-gay rhetoric, he said, “I think I was partially so vehement because of my own war.”

It’s a compelling theory — and now there is scientific reason to believe it. [read on ...]

I hate to break it to our friends at the Times, and have to repeat myself, but "tell me something I didn't already know. Right?" It should also be noted that the hate speech Monica claims to be "humor" is a common characteristic of the sociopath, defined in its mildest form as an "antisocial personality, who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience." In short, if the typical sociopath doesn't turn to a life of crime, he or she may end up working for Fox, The Daily Caller or Big Government. In some cases — e.g., James O'Keefe — criminal behavior and employment with right wing media are not mutually exclusive.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, however, the Times exposé of homophobic wingnut brains makes perfect sense. I'm sure Monica would rather crawl into bed with Megyn Kelly than with Roger Ailes or Bill-O The 'Falafel Face' Clown, regardless of whether this could have a negative impact on her prospects for career advancement.

Then there was the de riguer and obligatory wingnut "apology" — I couldn't have scripted it better myself. "Tweeted question" ... Really?! How about, "regret having made insensitive, homophobic statement. Sincerely apologize to Sandra and especially to the LGBT community for any pain I have caused perpetuating a hateful stereotype.":

There is something universal about good humor, which transcends culture and context, and which unites us. The so-called "humor" of wingnuts and "conservatives" is the inverse of that — hateful, nasty bigotry meant to demean people and accentuate the "other."

One dead giveaway between regular, normal folks who may have said something inappropriate, and the constant barrage of "humorous" hate language from these right wing sickos, is the tenor of the expressed apology. A normal person's apology is genuine, heartfelt and contrite. A wingnut's apology (see Limbaugh, Grenell et al) is frequently an insincere qualifier, "to those I have offended ..." As if the problem is with the people who took offense. Therein lies the mental illness. Normal people, indeed most of us, have an internal trigger that keeps us from saying and doing highly inappropriate things. It's called a conscience. 

Take it away, Monica!

Monica's BIFF weighs in from the wingnut leaders camp of the transcendentally clueless :

And to think this IDIOT could have been an octogenarian's heartbeat away from the presidency?! Seriously scary.

Sandra Fluke, the poised and impressive young woman who rocketed to stardom as a symbol of standing against everything decent Americans — men and women — view as abhorrent to our values, only grows stronger the more the wingnuts smear her. There's a favorite song of mine by the great Caetano Veloso that says: "Get up, shake off the dust, and step above it" (Levanta, sacode a poeira, e dá a volta por cima). To borrow Lawrence's signature line, Sandra gets the last word: