Bigots, buffoons and Baldwins

The Wit and Wisdom of John Yoo

From a 2005 debate between Bush administration torture advocate John Yoo and Notre Dame law professor Doug Cassell:

Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

If the president thinks it’s important enough, he can crush the testicles of the child of a terror suspect. I don’t even have a joke for this. It’s beyond appalling.

Continued -

The Dead Parody Sketch

The apocryphal story, probably not true, is that musical satirist Tom Lehrer stopped recording and performing when Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, saying, “satire is now dead.” It may be dead, but some insist on killing it again (and again, and again), as demonstrated by the fact that David Vitter and Larry Craig are co-sponsoring the Marriage Protection Amendment. This bill would amend the constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage, presumably to “protect the sanctity of marriage” or some such nonsense.

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. How do you possibly parody something like this? A married man who paid hookers to dress him up in diapers and treat him like an infant and another married man who tried to arrange gay sex in an airport men’s room are standing up for the “sanctity” of marriage. To quote the late great Molly Ivins, no matter how cynical I get I still can’t keep up.

From the “I’m embarrassed to share a planet and a species with these people” department

If you’re looking for quite possibly the single dumbest human being on the planet, I nominate Rickie Pitre of the Houma, Louisiana school board for his borderline insane reaction to a graduation speech at one of the high schools there. Here’s the background story from the local paper:

Cindy Vo, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, spoke of high-school memories, friends and the future. Then she recited a sentence in Vietnamese, dedicated to her parents as they looked on. “Co len minh khong bang ai, co suon khong ai bang minh,” she said into the microphone.

The 18-year-old graduate told classmates that the line, roughly translated, was a command to always be your own person.

It’s hard to imagine anyone would be bothered by that, but the school board is now forming a committee to “study” the graduations done at the four high schools and make recommendations for new rules. What new rules? Like requiring English only graduation speeches. Seriously:

“As board members, we get to observe the different ceremonies and there’s some inconsistencies I think the board or administration more importantly needs to address,” board member Rickie Pitre recently said in committee. “I don’t like them addressing in a foreign language. They should be in English.”

It was one line, for crying out loud, a gesture of love and thanks for her Vietnamese parents who don’t speak English very well. One line, you dolt. Stupidity on this level really should be physically painful. In a just world, this idiot would walk around in so much pain he would think he’s trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a bowling ball. But no, in this country we elect these people to school boards. Can the rapture just hurry up and get here so we can get these people off our planet? Please?

Turn off those irony meters for this one

Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition says that if Muslims are allowed to claim the same kinds of religious exemptions that Christians do, it will lead to Sharia law being implemented in the US. In a breathlessly ridiculous column on his organization’s website, he says that Muslims are secretly planning to institute Sharia law in the US by suing for religious exemptions from their employers.

All over the United States, radical Muslims are pushing companies to bow to Islamic law known as Sharia. They are doing this under the guise of religious freedom, but the political and cultural ideology of Islam recognizes only Allah as the supreme ruler over the world…

What Muslims are doing has been referred to as “creeping Sharia” – that is, getting companies, communities and states to change policies in order to force everyone to obey Sharia law, a totalitarian system of regulations that govern Islamic theocracies.

And he has several examples. Like this one:

In Minneapolis in 2006, a number of Somali cabdrivers refused to carry passengers with alcohol. The Muslim Brotherhood was behind this publicity stunt. The airport’s initial plan was to cave to Sharia law and create Sharia-compliant and Sharia non-compliant cabs. An Islamic “fatwa,” or order was issued by the Muslim American Society in June 2006 and sent to the Metropolitan Airports Commission. The fatwa stated that Islamic law prohibits Muslim cabdrivers from carrying passengers with alcohol “because it involves cooperating in sin according to Islam.”

Right. And that’s totally different than Christian pharmacists refusing to dispense birth control to customers because doing so would violate their religious beliefs, or Christian doctors refusing to provide fertility treatments to gay and lesbian patients. Totally different. For, uh, special, lucky, magic reasons. Let’s get this straight: when Christians ask employers to accommodate their religious beliefs and excuse them from duties they consider immoral, that’s standing up for religious freedom; when Muslims do the same thing, that’s preparing a theocratic takeover of the country. QED.

Fox News snags a Baldwin

Seeking to maintain their flawless record of remaining oblivious to their own absurdities, Fox News this week brought on a washed-up has-been who kinda sorta used to be an actor and is now an evangelist to comment on celebrity endorsements of candidate. And that quasi-celebrity was: Stephen Baldwin, who promptly declared an argument to be “the most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” No, I’m not kidding. I’ve got video:

Seriously, imagine how inane you have to be to be considered the dumbest Baldwin brother. Don’t worry, Stephen. I hear there’s an opening in the Surreal Life house in season 8. You’ll be bunking with one of the Backstreet Boys and Tito Jackson.