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Home Front: Politix

The Nation Columnist Defends Joe Biden From Tara Reade: ‘I Would Vote For Joe Biden If He Boiled Babies And Ate Them’

2020-05-23

[DAILYCALLERNEWSFOUNDATION.ORG] A columnist for The Nation defended 2020 presidential candidate Joe Foreign Policy Whiz Kid Biden
Joe <q>Foreign Policy Whiz Kid</q> Biden

Joe <q>Foreign Policy Whiz Kid</q> Biden

...We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created ... by the — you know — you know, the thing...
from allegations of sexual assault by his former senate staffer Tara Reade, saying, "I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them."

Columnist Katha Pollitt would vote for Joe Biden even if she believed Reade’s allegations of sexual assault, she wrote in her Wednesday column. "Fortunately, I don’t have to sacrifice morality to political necessity," she wrote.

Reade has accused Biden of kissing her, touching her, and penetrating her without her consent in 1993 when she worked for him as a senate staffer in Washington, D.C. Biden has repeatedly denied these allegations.

The Nation writer listed several examples of horrible things that the former vice president could do that would not prevent her from voting for him and voting for President Donald Trump
...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party...
— including eating boiled babies.

"I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them," Pollitt wrote. "He wasn’t my candidate, but taking back the White House is that important. Four more years of Trump will replace what remains of our democracy with unchecked rule by kleptocrats, fascist
...anybody you disagree with, damn them...
s, religious fanatics, gun nuts, and know-nothings."

The Nation columnist, who has written for the publication since 1980, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that "some people didn’t like my dark humor and comic exaggeration," regarding the boiled babies comment.

Biden has previously said that voters should choose between voting for him and believing Reade’s allegations. "Well, I think they should vote their heart and if they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn’t vote for me," Biden said on MSNBC last week. "I wouldn’t vote for me if I believed Tara Reade."

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Home Front: Politix

Moonbat fratricide: JournoList members trashed Olbermann as "pompous" and "predictable"

2010-07-23

Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller

If you were one of the 400 members of the listserv Journolist, perhaps one of the most vicious insults you could hurl at a colleague is: Youre just like Bill OReilly and Sean Hannity. If the reader holds neutral or even positive views about the Fox News hosts, the insult may not sting. But in the cloistered world of liberal listserv enclaves, Hannityism is a cardinal sin. After all, Fox is a dangerous, deranged cesspool that, possibly, the FCC should be investigating.

The feelings against MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, then, must run deep.
They smile in your face/all the time they wanna take your place/the back-stabbers...
The Nations Katha Pollitt began the groups rant. He and Michael Musto did this whole long riff about beauty contestant Carrie opposite marriage Prejeans breast implants, stupidity, breast implants, tacky clothes, earrings, breast implants. They went on and on about how she was part plastic and pathetic. Youd think they were celibate vegans who spent their lives zen meditating. It was just a whole TV humiliation of her, and it made me feel sorry for her, which wasnt easy, Pollitt said....
Go read all of it.

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Home Front: Culture Wars

Throwing Brit Hume to the lions

2010-01-07

If there were doubt that much of the media is hostile to traditional faith, especially traditional Christianity, that doubt has been drowned in the wake of a vicious verbal assault on Fox News analyst Brit Hume. Histrionic fulminations against Mr. Hume's inoffensive expression of faith expose an ugly strain of anti-religious bigotry that is spreading inside this country's liberal establishment.

Mr. Hume's sin against secular culture came Sunday when he offered, in humble and helpful tones, advice to golfer Tiger Woods to "turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world." The advice might have sounded a little awkward in the setting of a news-talk roundtable. But even in the context of suggesting that Mr. Woods' apparent Buddhism doesn't offer the same "kind of forgiveness and redemption" as Christianity, the newsman's remarks were, at worst, harmless. Yet the reaction of critics gives the impression that Mr. Hume did something really awful like use the "N" word, or - as Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus did - push a government promotion for a girlfriend.

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales took a pause from writing love letters to President Obama to aim nasty public hate mail at Mr. Hume, who is renowned as one of the rare true gentlemen in the nation's capital. "Brit Hume was certainly full of something," Mr. Shales ranted, adding that the Fox broadcast legend is "sinking into his own mouth-made mire," and that "darts of derision should be aimed at Hume" for "one of the most ridiculous [remarks] of the year." He instructed Mr. Hume to "first off, apologize," with a snide admonishment that "Hume ought to know that what people are saying right now is a whole lot worse than that he's fading."

On MSNBC, the preternaturally truculent Keith Olbermann said Mr. Hume should "keep religious advocacy out of public life since, you know, the worst examples of that are jihadists, not to mention, you know, guys who don't know their own religions or somebody else's religion like Brit Hume." His guest, homosexual activist Dan Savage, chimed in that, "American Christianity has been hijacked by the lunatics, by the Pat Robertsons ... and by people like Brit Hume, and it's an insult to Christianity, it's an insult to Christians." Also on MSNBC, news host David Shuster suggested that Mr. Hume somehow had "denigate* Christianity" by mentioning his faith on the air.

This is par for the course for a media in which Washington Post book reviewers suggest that the faith messages at the heart of the popular "Narnia" books amount to a "narrow Christian box," where HBO's Bill Maher calls the Catholic Church "the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia," where the Nation's Katha Pollitt accuses the religious right of showing "tolerance of wife-battering," and where a major news magazine marvels at the supposedly "surprising unsecularity" of the American public.

Maybe these media mavens should take Mr. Hume's advice. Their own hatefulness puts them in obvious need of the "forgiveness and redemption" Mr. Hume kindly recommended. A little charity wouldn't hurt, either.

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Olde Tyme Religion

Curse of the Christian-Bashers

2007-02-16

By Mary Eberstadt

Heavens, it's getting crowded in the pews these days--at least with Democratic presidential candidates. Here is Sen. Barack Obama in California's Saddleback pulpit at the invitation of mega-selling pastor Rick Warren. There is Sen. Hillary Clinton with downcast eyes in Newsweek, praying before the cameras in New York's Riverside Church. And there preaches John Edwards, also in Riverside Church, weaving his personal faith into everything from AIDS to the minimum wage. Clearly the push is on to show that, for now anyway, the Democratic hopefuls are just plain folks in the religion department.

All the more reason to plumb the curious episode of Amanda Marcotte, that blogger for the Edwards campaign who resigned on Monday and was followed out the door Tuesday by another technical consultant, Melissa McEwan. Both quit thanks to circulation by conservatives of some of these former staffers' Internet musings. That is to say, in Ms. Marcotte's case especially: scatological Catholic-baiting rants about "theocracy" marked by leering references to the pope and liberal use of the F-word.

So far, so unremarkable. Just being a bilious feminist with a potty mouth doesn't much distinguish one in the blogosphere these days. What does matter is something else: We have here a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moment, in which the fate of bit players becomes emblematic of a larger drama.

For what the blogger tempest really illuminates is a fact that could come to haunt the Democrats as they vie for national office: namely, that their past few wilderness years have also been boom years for the church-loathing liberal/left punditry. As a result, anti-Christian invective now graces (or disgraces) many of the books, magazines, Web sites and blogs to which liberals, including the Democratic elite, habitually look for ideas. One motto of this cottage industry is that the most serious threat to the American republic can be found in, no, not those religious fundamentalists, the ones that first leap to mind after 9/11; but, incredibly, certain other believers--our nation's Christians.

The cover of Damon Linker's 2006 "Theocons: Secular America Under Siege," for example, declares: "For the past three decades, a few determined men have worked to inject their radical religious ideas into the nation's politics. This is the story of how they succeeded." Again, he is not talking about al Qaeda. Other books in a similar vein include Michelle Goldberg's "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," praised on its cover by Katha Pollitt for exposing "the ongoing takeover of our country by right-wing Christians." There is Kevin Phillips's "American Theocracy," which identifies in its subtitle "radical religion" as a "peril" facing the nation. Enter also Randall Balmer's "Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament," which opens with the unfortunate metaphorical notion that evangelical faith has been "hijacked by radical zealots" and closes with a vow about "taking America back."

To repeat, this apocalyptic rhetoric is not being heaped on, say, bomb-toting Islamists but on your churchgoing neighbors next door. Some authors even argue that those neighbors and Islamic "fundamentalists" are joined at the hip. Mel White's "Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right" is one; he warns that Christians want to "forcibly" take back the country.

Not to be outdone is the recent tome "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America," by New York Times reporter Chris Hedges. It delivers more of the same, studded with that tonier F-word, "fascism." Yet despite the book's conflation of prayer groups and jackboots, Publisher's Weekly awarded "American Fascists" a starred review and praised its attentiveness to a supposedly "serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society."

Of course, whatever has been hurled against Christians in books and magazines has been positively restrained by the standards of the blogosphere. Like Ms. Marcotte's more embellished arias, a lot of blog commentary cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

Sophisticates and secularists have always titillated themselves by despising the Bible Belt. But professional Christian-bashers have never been as "embedded" in the liberal mainstream as they are today. And therein lies a problem for Democrats. More Amanda Marcottes are not what the party needs as it scrambles to re-establish its religious bona fides with wary red-staters. No wonder so many Democratic candidates are in church. Now they really have something to pray about.

Ms. Eberstadt is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of the newly released "Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys"

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Fifth Column

Moonbats at Sea

2006-06-14

Katherine Jean Lopez at National Review posts this gem from her inbox:
Dear EmailNation Subscriber,

We know that cruises aren't for everyone but Nation publisher emeritus Victor Navasky and The Nation want to invite you on The Nation's ninth annual seminar cruise. Setting sail from Fort Lauderdale on December 16, the Holland America's MS Zuiderdam will cruise through the Caribbean on a seven-day tour, returning to Florida on December 23.
Yes, seven days of sun, seasickness, seething, and solidarity with the working class on a cruise ship that's priced out of reach of the proletariat!
The dates have been selected to allow families and educators to make the trip. You'll be joining a distinguished group of speakers who will participate in a series of lectures, seminars, conversations and ~~binge drinking~~ cocktail parties over the course of the voyage. Confirmed speakers include Joe Wilson,
(top secret CIA agent--shhhhh! don't tell anyone he's aboard!)
Scott Ritter,
(youth counselor)
Steve Earle,
(washed-up drug-addled folk singer)
Jane Smiley,
(whodat? Did she invent the Wal-Mart smiley face icon or something?)
Jonathan Kozol,
(rich guy who writes about poor people)
Molly Ivins,
(former pro wrestler)
the Rev. Lennox Yearwood,
(whoever the hell he is, he has the coolest name of the bunch)
and Jim Hightower
(alleged radio personality)
as well as Nation writers David Corn and Katha Pollitt and RadioNation host Laura Flanders. They'll join Navasky and Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel in what has always been both an enlightening exchange of ideas and a no-hassle, ~~nonstop Bush-hating frenzy~~ relaxing vacation.

Best Regards,
Peter Rothberg,
The Nation
Imagine: a whole boatload of moonbats. Any chance we can get them to do an audience-participation reenactment of The Poseidon Adventure -- or at least Gilligan's Island?

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Fifth Column

Gweneth Sez No to America -- Drops by to Pickup American Paycheck

2004-01-21

Edited for length and relevence.
Awaiting the birth of her first child in London (where she lives with her husband), actress Gwyneth Paltrow recently announced that she will not raise her kid in America.
Hey, Gweneth, wanna improve the quality of life in America? Stay in England with your hellspawn. In 20 years when prayers five time a day in England multi-cultural society are imposed along with the âbagâ, you can remind your child about all the ills of the USA.
The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is just too dangerous a place — with all of these gun-toting, super-patriots running around — Ms. P proclaimed.
Dangerous place for leftists such as Ms. ~~Paltry~~ Paltrow
The Oscar-winning actress told a British publication: âI worry about bringing up a child in America. At the moment, thereâs a weird, over-patriotic atmosphere over there, like, âWeâre number one and the rest of the world doesnât matter.ââ
Riiight. The world doesnât matter; sounds Clintonesque, without the patriotism, without the responsibility. Iffin the world doesnât matter, why did Bush go to the UN TWICE to get their blessing for removing Saddam? Iffin the world doesnât matter why do we have several countries aiding us in Iraq? Why? Becuase you run aroud with your fifth column socialist friends and you refuse to pull your head out of your ass to see the world as it really is, not as Comrade Paltrow wants the world to be seen.
If frantic flag-waving werenât enough, the nation apparently is awash in firearms. âAnd the guns in school — itâs not great,â Paltrow complained. Youâd think the legendary gun lobby was handing out assault rifles at the schoolhouse door. (Blame not the NRA, but the ACLU and other proponents of permissiveness, for violence in our schools.)
Show me the guns, girl. Fact is, you canât.
At the time of the Iraq war, the star-spangled girl informed another British interviewer. âI love America and I completely stand behind America. But at the same time, Iâm a free thinking person and I question motives too and I question this war and the motives behind it.â Undeniably, Paltrow is free. Clearly, she has a right to question or oppose administration policy. Itâs the âthinking personâ part thatâs in doubt — especially in an individual above adolescence who introduces a statement with the word âlike.â
You just have been hiding in a cave to not understand the reasons why we are at war. 911? Remember that, or is that âourâ fault?
Ms. Paltrow, military folks are standing in harmâs way to conduct the war on terror. If you canât stand behind those troops AND their mission, at least show your love of America by keeping your mouth shut. As it is, you sound tired and irrelevent. And to me personally: a traitor.
Whatâs Gwynethâs gripe? Is America today truly the weirdly over-patriotic place of the actressâs fevered imagination? You wouldnât know it from the spiritual treason the left gets away with.
Spiritual, my ass. This is not âperceivedâ treason. This is out and out treason with troops in the field and our enemies here and in Eurostan.
Within days of 9/11, liberals like Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, were fretting over modest manifestations of patriotism. (Pollitt says she told her 13-year-old daughter, who asked to fly the flag, âThe flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.â) I donât recall anyone asking the flag-haters to exit stage left. The last time I heard âAmerica, love it or leave it,â was during the Vietnam War.
âThe flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.â None of those things are necessarily bad in time of war.
Most importantly, our public schools continue to teach skepticism about America, if not outright loathing, in the name of multiculturalism, diversity and various victim studies. Still, liberals like Paltrow are intimidated by even these gestures. For the left (including its Hollywood auxiliary) any patriotism is too much. Hollywood believes the dictionary definition of patriotism is: âparanoid, xenophobic, chauvinistic, authoritarian bordering on totalitarian, imperialistic, warmongering â See McCarthyism.â
Hollywood patriotism: Sitting on an antiaircraft gun emplacment which is used against our military forces, visiting Baghdad to inform the world that Bush is worse than Hussein, jerking off abot non-existant Islamic daycare centers, and trying to convince everyone that you love your country: just not enough to allow it to defend itself.

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Fifth Column

Katha Pollitt on the flag

2001-09-24

NRO Kumbaya Watch
"Out Out No Flags" is the title of Katha Pollitt's latest diatribe in The Nation, and the title pretty much tells it. Pollitt begins with a heartwarming anecdote: "My daughter," she writes, "who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I'm wrong the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism."

Then, a concession: "In a way, we're both right," because the American flag is "the only available symbol" and must bear "a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses." (Reading writers like Pollitt, one would think that angry mobs were putting Muslim neighborhoods to the torch while the police looked on.) In the end, mercifully, a mother-daughter compromise ensues: "I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits."

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Fifth Column

Katha blabbers about international criminal court

2001-10-03

Village Voice Katha Pollitt

The government should take the money it would spend on bombs and soldiers and use it to help the wretched Afghan people.

What if the U.S. offered to lift nonmilitary sanctions on Iraq in return for Osama bin Laden, who would be tried at the international criminal court? As for Afghanistan, perhaps the most miserable place on earth at the moment, the government should take the money it would spend on bombs and soldiers and use half of it to help the wretched Afghan people and support those among them who favor democracy, human rightsespecially women's rights and ethnic cooperationand the other half to Pakistan in return for withdrawing its support for the Taliban.

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Fifth Column

Katha Pollitt's utterance in The Nation

2001-10-05

Brent Bozell

The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.

Likewise the Nation's Katha Pollitt. She is not just a leftist; she is a committed America-hater, as is the Nation for publishing her vicious attack on her country. "My daughter ... thinks we should fly an American flag out our window," Pollitt wrote in her Oct. 8 column. "Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war ...(The flag) has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country."

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Home Front

Sullivan on Sontag

2001-10-19

AndrewSullivan.com
SONTAG HEDGES: David Talbot's interview with Susan Sontag, conducted, so far as I can tell, on his knees, starts with a preposterous amount of throat clearing and excuse making and silly swipes at alleged "censorship." These pampered journalists, who have never seen a moment of real censorship in their lives, and who have marginalized conservative voices for their entire careers in their own organs and field of influence, take the occasion of the massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens to worry about themselves - and preen self-righteously at the same time. Then there's the sheer pretentiousness of it all. I'm particularly fond of Talbot's use of the word "texts" to discuss Sontag's works. (I'm not the first weblogger to notice this). Not books; not pieces; not articles; not essays - but "texts." Ooooh. That must mean she's a real intellectual. The silver lining is that Sontag has now stated her belief in the notion that we are indeed confronting a jihad and that there can be no compromise with these murderers. But the rest of the interview completely belies this view. Item one: if there is no negotiating with these killers, what do we do? According to Sontag, we don't bomb. The Taliban soldiers are just "a lot of kids." We don't even drop food packages, which, in her eyes, are a cover for an unholy war. In fact, you can read this interview again to see whether she has any practical recommendations for our response, and you will come up empty. Like Katha Pollitt, she has absolutely nothing to say, except that we all need to read the latest "text" by Stanley Hoffmann in the New York Review of Books. I'm sorry, but this is self-parody. Her only practical recommendations are that we should stop military action against the Taliban and urge a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Gee, that will terrify the terrorists. They won't dare murder us again after that. She dismisses out of hand the notion that the anthrax attacks could be the work of al Qaeda. She refers to them as "what I think are 99 percent certain to be just domestic copycat crazies on their own war path." Why does she have such certainty? No reason given. When you're that brilliant, why bother with reasons? She further complains that the media has "censored" pictures of grisly horror at the WTC site because it would demoralize the people. Is she kidding? Pictures of severed hands and tangled limbs would not demoralize this country. It would enrage this country. If such pictures have been held back, it is out of respect for the dead and their families, and precisely in order to restrain possible anger. That piece of loopy judgment alone should tell us all we need to know about what planet Sontag is living on. Throughout it all, she denigrates the Brits for their support of the United States and calls president Bush "ridiculous." No, Ms Sontag. It is you who are ridiculous.

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Home Front

Virginia Postrel on Fake Females

2001-10-25

Virginia Postrel
CONDI RICE, FAKE FEMALE: Glenn Reynolds, who is big on the idea of bellicose women, points to this contrary article by Philip Weiss, which relies heavily on a few high-profile intellectuals to prove that women are still peaceniks. Weiss obviously hasn't talked with my facialist, who doesn't understand why we don't level Afghanistan, never mind the civilians and the difficulty of bombing caves. More important, Weiss is a sexist pig, who declares women who don't fit his model a) not really women b) not really serious. Arundhati Roy, Susan Sontag, and Katha Pollitt are important and female. Condoleezza Rice, on the other hand, is merely playing "the trouser role in light opera, the woman wearing a mustache to everyone's amusement." This is a typical move, demonstrating how far American women remain from full public equality. I thought it was bad when that other sexist pig, Paulina Borsook, called me a "token girl" in her book, Cyberselfish. But at least I was just a magazine editor, not the closest foreign policy adviser to the president of the United States.
Just another tiring example of the difference between intellects and intellectuals; Rice and Postrel are both real minds; Sontag, Pollitt, et al., are gasbags in skirts.

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