Sunday, December 19, 2010

New uniform, U.S. Army

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'Don't ask, don't tell' defenders were doomed to lose
By Iain Mackenzie, BBC News, Washington, December 18, 2010

And if you're not convinced that John McCain is a deranged, demagogic, homophobic nut case, then read this.


8 comments:

  1. I'd gladly share a foxhole with this gay bruiser

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  2. McCain - an old man suffering from dementia and living in world inside his head that is in the far and distant past . Dementia patients are to pitied and cared for in a hospital

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  3. I entered a couple of comments at my blog on this matter today, but I'm not over here to publicise that, I'm here to say I knew that I could resort to the Congressional Record for some intractable hysterics from McCain, but I had no sense of the scale of the shame he is willing to heap upon himself, for losing influence, to say nothing of elections. The man has justified his life on a disgusting illusion of resistance to torture, and has preserved it in American tactics while ostentatiously flouting habeas corpus (a false compromise he engineered with Lieberman, to which Obama signed on). He truly tortures himself in public as a mode of exposing his incurable sickness. Now we see, as you say, further evidence of his profound unsuitability in the discussion of public policy, much less in its legislation.

    I saved my videotapes of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings of 1991 (when half our Army wasn't born), in which McCain hysterically and persistently berated a female Army colonel for begging for "acceptance." The term - the concept - infuriated McCain then, and not because he demanded a confession from her, which she rejected as immature. The concept infuriated McCain because he cannot accept himself, and begs to rejoin humanity by denouncing it as being as broken as he was. Well, it's too bad McCain was broken, but the lust for breakage which Milbank exposes so well in this column, has simply got to be ignored at last.

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  4. @Anonymous, 9:24AM

    Thanks for the reminder of prior shameful behavior on McCain's part. He really doesn't belong in public life.

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  5. Mc Cain has turned wretched

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  6. I'll believe DADT is gone when Obama actually signs it. I don't trust the man to do what's right, anymore.

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  7. I don't trust the man to do what's right, anymore.

    You have to remember that Obama has always gotten along well with both the left and the right. When he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago's law school, famous as a bastion for conservative legal thinking, he was known to be one of the few liberal teachers in the law school's faculty, yet he was thought quite highly of among his conservative colleagues.

    He will never be a fire breathing liberal lion in the mold of Ted Kennedy, or Harry Truman, or Franklin Roosevelt, but at the same time when Franklin Roosevelt got the first version of Social Security through the Congress it deliberately excluded some sectors of agricultural workers. Roosevelt did that, selling the descendants of the sharecroppers down the river (because Southern Democratic bigots demanded it as the price of passing the legislation), because in Roosevelt's mind even though it was a dirty deal, it still was better than skipping it altogether because getting the perfect bill passed simply wasn't possible.

    Obama works that way, too.

    Do I expect him to go to the mat much for gay people? NO.

    Is he doing more for gay Americans than any president before him has ever done? YES.


    Politics is a fucked up business. It always has been.

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  8. I will not believe, JTC, that DADT is gone when it is signed. I know you do not need a civics lesson from anyone, but let's not forget, it's going to be "gone" nowhere except into that equivocating morass of temporising policy fog which The Washington Post, warmonger to the world, embraced so explicitly in its editorial on December 20th; and it's going to be "gone" into a regulatory and administrative slaughterhouse operated by its enemies, only to be implemented by people who built their military careers on profiteering in bigotry. It's going to need all the watchful vigilance of every gay rights organisation which backed the legislative change, and it's going to need lawsuit after lawsuit to become the law we think it is.

    Correction - I meant "1993" instead of "1991" above, obviously, in the infamous underlying Senate hearings, chaired by Sam Nunn, Strom Thurmond as Minority leader.

    RC offers unassailable context in kind but not, I think, in degree. Roosevelt had more courage, he had more fight, and this is why he increased his majority so enormously. He did not lose by folding, he lost the old-fashioned way, by bleeding. Obama is a waiter for waves, Roosevelt built them. These are material differences; but beneath them, it's well to remember what RC says about Obama's political views and nature.

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