Buchanan Suggests Hostile Interrogation for Farouk

Ideology at its finest. In a Morning Joe chat (video below), Pat Buchanan is plainly scared out of his wits. "This is a War!" he says. He thinks that Farouk, the failed underwear bomber, should be subjected to "hostile interrogation." Farouk is talking. His family is talking and by all accounts, they feel horrible about what their son did. It also looks as though Farouk was an easy target for terrorists to turn. Al Qaeda shouldn't get any kudos for that.

But conservatives are very afraid because fear is what motivates them.
Washington Independent's reporter Spencer Ackerman says Al Qaeda is dangerous but they don't have "Muslim heat vision." Buchanan thinks they do. Ackerman explains the breakdown in security here.
Here's a great read on why we shouldn't be bullied into fearing terrorists. As Ackerman says, fear is what the terrorists want. They want Obama to be a little more Bush-like. To stop all that vacationing and react in chest-thumping horror. I'm so thankful. Truly I am. That those days are over:

The nation gets attacked by thugs on 9/11, nothing more than an organized gang based in Afghanistan, and the nation responds in fear, attacking a country that had nothing to do with the event and killing thousands of innocents, an act that not only does not make the nation any safer but puts it in greater danger. For eight years after that fear and terror was the administration's stock in trade. There were so many color coded terror alerts I had to get a new wardrobe just to make sure I didn't clash. Wouldn't want to wear Yellow or Red on an Orange or Green alert day. So many freedoms were handed over in the name of fear they may never be regained and Benjamin Franklin's head would have exploded.

We had to fear each other for eight years. Fear the evil gays, they may want to get married and then go in to schools and churches and convert you and your children and make them in to a gay. Fear women who want to make medical decisions with their doctors, they may be cold blooded killers of the unborn and must be stopped. Fear anything and anyone different. Fear the illegal immigrants, they're here to take your jobs and your health care dollars. Fear those Hollywood Liberals or they'll do terrible things like give you health care and better education. Fear Russia for whatever reason. Fear China for not giving us any more money and for our incomes drying up. Fear oil running out or the Middle East cutting us off. And most of all, fear the terrorists, because they are, in fact out to get you and you will die.

Fear modified light brights used to promote a movie in Boston and shut down the city (remember the Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle, that literally caused Boston to panic and nearly evacuate?) Fear a simple plane flying low over your city, as New Yorkers ran like Godzilla was coming out of the Hudson simply because Air Force One was having a photo shoot. Fear each other at airports, as every single person getting on a plane is treated as a potential terrorist. So, they could be, right?HP

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Janet Napolitano Clarifies Her Statement on Terror Attempt

Janet Napolitano, who got ripped apart yesterday, clarified what she meant when she said "the system worked." I certainly didn't take it to mean that the system worked, especially after someone got through screening with explosives. Duh. But the media did and so did plenty of Obama critics. There are people with nothing better to do, who live day to day, just chomping at the bit to rip the Obama administration to shreds.
Napolitano got all kinds of criticism yesterday, from her hair to her gender. Sometimes Americans sure seem like common dimwits. People like Pete Hoekstra want the Obama administration to react with more emotion, to show some fear. But that's just not going to happen. Obama also gathers information before he speaks. He is expected to speak today.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Republican Peter King is just scared. It's the conservative way. Hoekstra and others like him (wingnuts) simply believe that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer. They're nuts! I'm appalled that so many like King hold important positions in our government. He's just not helping the situation and his carping is making it worse. He's the ranking member of the Homeland Security committee! He's just as responsible as the Obama administration. He ought to be pointing fingers at himself. King says the administration is stonewalling but why would anyone want to provide information to these guys? For what purpose? How is King going to make this situation better? Obviously, he failed as a HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE MEMBER. After he gets done being a bore, he cracks a joke about Joe Scarborough:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Buchanan Tells Russia Today: It's White House vs. Pentagon

Nutty and extreme, ancient thinker Pat Buchanan goes on Russia Today to say Stanley McChrystal is going to win. Huh? "It's the White House vs. the Pentagon," he says when the reporter asks what's going on in the White House. Huh? He even quotes Sarah Palin and admits it. He describes what he would do if he was in charge of Afghanistan. Huh?

I could see a government official talking about Afghanistan or even a military expert, but Buchanan? He represents virtually no one, is kind of loony and it's doubtful he has any clue of what he's talking about:

British Right Wingers Worse Than Ours: Meet Nick Griffin

Imagine someone worse that Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter.

Rush Limbaugh really is a fuzzball next to Nick Griffin, who is overtly racist (believes in "purity" of the races) and anti-semitic. He especially hates Muslims. A lot of Brits were outraged when Griffin was invited on a TV show, Question Time. Griffin doesn't mess around with cute rhetoric.

Ann Coulter, for example, would like to say out loud that Islam is an evil religion, but peer pressure prevents her from saying that.

Griffin just comes right out and says stupid stuff.

On his website, it says "white working class finds their champion."
He believes that ALL immigrants--not just undocumented ones--in Britain should leave. He's sort of like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Griffin is one of those who says the Holocaust is propaganda. In fact, most rightwingers are like Ahmadinejad--raging ideologues. Griffin pals around with David Duke, former head of the KKK.

He believes global warming is a scam:

“Man made global warming is an unproven theory. The science of climate change is in its infancy. The so-called consensus on the issue is the product not of debate but of the suppression of expert dissent.
“Before the political class and the green industrial complex dare to impose a single new tax, sub-standard lightbulb or useless windfarm on the ordinary taxpayer, they need to try to convince the public that global warming is man made, that returning the world to the warmer climate of medieval times would be a bad thing, and that there is anything that Europeans, as opposed to China and India, can do about it anyway.

He uses the same tactics as our rightwingers. He associates himself with ordinary people. It's the equivalent of when our rightwingers talk about "real America" and "true patriots."

One difference between Griffin and our rightwingers, he's not a war monger.

Charlatans like Griffin prey on people's weaknesses. Griffin blames immigrants for taking white people's jobs. This is the time of the charlatan because people are fearful right now. Change is happening--both good and bad--and it's happening at a faster pace. It seems we are truly at a pivotal moment in history where change and progress are bumping up against those who would prefer times of yesteryear. Pat Buchanan, who wrote a few days ago about his fears for "white America," sums up people who are out of touch with reality:

Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.

Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

He concludes by suggesting that he and his kind are America and that they are losing something:

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

Here is Griffin debuting on Question Time:

Do We Lack Moral Courage?

Why, yes we do. That is why whenever Obama pushes something that's good for the greater good, such as healthcare reform, he has to explain "what's in it for you." He can't simply make the moral argument that it's not right to let people with cancer die. As a whole, our society is moving away from the you're-on-your-own mentality. But it will take a few generations before the greater good is what matters. Be warned, in this Morning Joe video, Pat Buchanan continues to show his ignorance and irrelevance. Other than entertainment value, I don't understand why he's on TV at all.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Republicans Have Too Much Ego For Diplomacy

I keep watching these conservative folk, totally joyless about the return of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, totally joyless in the demonstration of diplomacy, and I had an aha moment. Their egos are too large to appreciate such things as diplomacy. They can't share in the joy because they don't see Win Wins. They only see Win.
If the U.S. isn't dominating whichever country we're dealing with, they think of it as weak, appeasing or encouraging the bad guy.

Hillary Clinton was a bigger person, egoless, in this instance. North Korean leaders called her a school girl, yet she was able to defer to her husband to achieve a bigger goal.
Republicans continue to view the U.S. as the big kid on the block who tells everyone else what to do. But that's not the world we live in anymore and they haven't figured that out yet.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

OMG White Men are Scared Out of Their Wits!

I'm appalled. This guy is out of bounds, just like his republican cohorts. Pat Buchanan calls Sonia Sotomayor an affirmative action pick. They also called Obama an affirmative action candidate. Old guys need to be quiet now. I think people of a certain age, brought up in a certain way, lack certain brain synapses to understand diversity and equality and why it matters, not just for fairness sake, but for the sake of a more enlightened society. They'll never get it. Never. It's just beyond their grasp. Rachel tried.

Republicans Exploiting Jewish Community to Attack Obama

As this story in the Swamp says, the republicans tried this tactic during the campaign and lost. Remember the nasty chain emails that claimed Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist, the DVDs in the newspapers, the epithets on the waffle boxes, Sarah Palin rallies. They tried so hard.
Dare they go there again? Yes they do.
What a dastardly and sucky little party they are.

Republican congressional leaders are attempting to "drive a wedge'' between President Barack Obama and the politically influential American Jewish community, the way one well-known conservative Republican sees it.

Israel is the wedge.

The GOP attempted to do this, with no real success, during the presidential election campaign, when the Republican Jewish Coalition strove to peel some of the reliably Democratic vote from the Obama camp. Opponents ran ads in Jewish weekly newspapers in South Florida picturing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader who has spoken of the destruction of Israel and disputed the existence of the Holocaust, those ads warning that Obama is ready to negotiate with this enemy of Israel.

And now, as the president moves from the Middle East, where he spelled out his demands for both Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the pursuit of an elusive peace, to Germany, where today he evokes the memories of one of the great tragedies of human history with his visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald and one of the great atrocities of World War II, the firebombing of Dresden, Republicans back home are raising warning flags about Obama's demands and words for Israel.

Pat Buchanan, the conservative cable television news commentator who served as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, said today on MSNBC's Morning Joe that his fellow Republicans are again attempting to "drive a wedge'' between Obama and the American Jewish community. Read the rest at the Swamp

Rush Limbaugh Is A Bore

I'm officially bored of the loathsome fuzzball Rush Limbaugh. Democrats had a good run, used him to the core, proved the republicans are lost, now let's move on because he doesn't look healthy. The only people who care about Rush are conservative men. Pat Buchanan gets silly on Obama's budget. I think Obama's budget is marvelous: 

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This just in, a fuzzball love fest:

Holder Highly Annoyed the Racists

When Eric Holder called the U.S. a "nation of cowards" when it came to race, it really irked the racists.

Conservative Pat Buchanan suggests in an article for Human Events that if you are black or Hispanic, you are more likely to be a gang member, solely because you're black or Hispanic -- not because of a long history of racism, discrimination and poverty. Not because the education that the poor and people of color get is unequal to the education that white people get.

What about slavery? That's not something that easily leaves the psyche. The legacy is passed down from generation to generation and as a nation, we have never confronted what it means to all of us. People like Buchanan like to say that happened a long time ago, so why should it matter?

How do they equate skin color or ethnicity with crime? Do they really believe that black people and Hispanics actually have a different gene or something? That God (we know the Buchanan types are good Christians) gave them criminal tendencies. That they're wired to commit more crimes than white people? That they're inferior because of their ethnicity?

Then Buchanan veers off into another favorite conservative scapegoat, "illegals." Right wing extremist reasoning: If only we didn't have "illegals" America would be a crime free nation. They're taking all the jobs! They're causing all the crime!

For the Buchanan types, illegals equals Hispanics, much in the same way that they believe that Muslims are terrorists. It's so much easier for a small mind to paint a whole swath of people in a manner that fits their world view because to think any broader would mean they would have to change their whole way of life.

Why can't everyone see that this is moronic:

What further proof is needed that mass immigration from the Third World is taking jobs from Americans and driving down their wages when they do find work?

Here is a problem more serious than whether black and white elites are getting together on weekends to gabble about race.

How do these people have such teeny tiny minds? How do we protect our children from their hateful influence? It seems hate is passed down from generation to generation. Fortunately, it seems the younger generation is proving to be more evolved and wiser.

Buchanan didn't talk about gay people in this story, but he may as well have. Because for them, it's gay people who are corrupting the family. Right wing extremists like Buchanan have a scapegoat for everything. They are cowards.

Human Events:
"It is not safe for this nation to assume that the unaddressed social problems in the poorest parts of the country can be isolated and will not ultimately affect the larger society."

Fair point. And what are some of those social problems?

A 70 percent illegitimacy rate in black America, an incarceration and crime rate seven times that of white America, a 50 percent dropout rate in many urban high schools, African-American graduates reading and computing on average at eighth-grade levels.

And about these problems what is the black leadership doing?

Unlike Bill Cosby, the heroic Holder was virtually mute. Rather, he is upset that "on Saturdays and Sundays" we don't go to church or hang out together. But why are the free associations of Americans, of whatever creed or color, any of Eric Holder or Big Brother's business?

Having insulted us, perhaps Holder will start doing his own sworn duty.

Buchanan reasons blackness and Hispanicness causes gangness:

Last month, USA Today reported that the FBI estimates there are now 1 million gang members in the United States -- up 200,000 from 2005 -- and these gangs are responsible for 80 percent of all U.S. crimes. From other studies, young Hispanics are 19 times as likely as white youth to join gangs, while African-Americans are 15 times.

These millions of teenagers, and unskilled and less-educated young adults with no jobs and little prospect of finding them, are recruiting pools for criminal gangs.

Who is getting the jobs for which these native-born black and Hispanic young could quality? Illegal aliens hold literally millions of them.

Last week, the CIS reported, "An estimated 6 to 7 million illegal immigrants are currently holding jobs. Prior research indicates they are overwhelmingly employed in lower-skilled and lower-paid jobs."

Exactly what sort of jobs?

"Illegals are primarily employed in construction, building cleaning and maintenance, food preparation, service and processing, transportation and moving occupations and agriculture."

What causes gangness is Buchananness that still pervades this country. Buchanan proved Holder's point -- until racism is dealt with, these larger social issues can't be dealt with. We are a nation of cowards because those of us who know better haven't faced down Buchananness.

Buchanan Rips Fellow Republicans On Auto Bailout

Conservative Patrick Buchanan shames his Southern republican cohorts and he gets kind of stupid about Mitsubishi.

Buchanan: Is the Republican Party so fanatic in its ideology that, rather than sin against a commandment of Milton Friedman, it is willing to see America written forever out of this fantastic market, let millions of jobs vanish and write off the industrial Midwest?

So it would seem. "Companies fail every day, and others take their place," said Sen. Richard Shelby on "Face the Nation."

Presumably, the companies that will "take their place," when GM, Ford and Chrysler die, are German, Japanese or Korean, like the ones lured into Shelby's state of Alabama, with the bait of subsidies free-market Republicans are supposed to abhor.

In 1993, Alabama put together a $258 million package to bring a Mercedes plant in. In 1999, Honda was offered $158 million to build a plant there. In 2002, Alabama won a Hyundai plant by offering a $252 million subsidy.

"We have a number of profitable automakers in America, and they should not be disadvantaged for making wise business decisions while failure is rewarded," says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
DeMint is referring to "profitable automakers" like BMW, which sited a plant in Spartanburg, after South Carolina offered the Germans a $150 million subsidy and $80 million to expand.

Be it BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi or Hyundai, the South has become a sanctuary for foreign assembly plants, for which Southern states have been paying subsidies.

Fine. But why this "Let-them-eat-cake!" coldness toward U.S. auto companies? General Motors employs more workers than all these foreign plants combined. And, unlike Mitsubishi, General Motors didn't bomb Pearl Harbor.

Maddow Interviews Pat Buchanan

For fun.

Republicans Debate Palin

Conservative Buchanan: McCain War Monger

This is the Real John McCain. I know he's been trying to be funny lately and has even ventured into talk about the economy and energy, propped up by his shapers, but we need to be reminded that McCain is a militarist. Diplomacy is not his specialty.




How each responded to the Georgia and Russia conflict:

McCain has called Russia's Vladimir Putin many things, few of them good. He's called Putin "a totalitarian dictator" and famously said he looked into his eyes and saw three letters "K, G and B," a reference to Putin's former employer, the Soviet spy agency. And when hostilities erupted along the Georgia-Russia border, McCain was characteristically bold and quick to act.

He spoke by phone to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and White House National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, then quickly rearranged his schedule to make his statement on the crisis his first event of the day. And he didn't mince words.

"Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," he said in a morning statement.

Obama also condemned the Russian invasion. But he cast a wider net for advice -- including Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and his foreign policy advisors. When he spoke, he was characteristically circumspect.

"I think it is important at this point for all sides to show restraint and to stop this armed conflict," Obama said. The candidates' responses reveal a stark difference in governing style, and both seem carefully calibrated to appeal to American voters.

See the difference?