Rudy Giuiliani Had Same Mind Wiping As Dana Perino

It was bad enough when former Bush press secretary Dana Perino claimed, “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” After all, anyone speaking for George Bush couldn’t be expect to have that great a grasp on reality. What is surprising is that Rudy Giuliani made the same mistake. That’s Rudy Giuliani, who can hardly say a sentence which is not made up of a a noun, a verb, and 9/11. That’s Rudy Giuliani, who has to wear depends because he pees in his pants every time anyone looking vaguely like they might be a Muslim walks by.

Giuliani must have lost hims memory as on Good Morning America he said, “What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did — one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”

His spokesman tried to clarify this:

The Mayor’s spokesman says that the remark “didn’t come across as it was intended” and that Giuliani was “clearly talking post-9/11 with regards to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil.”

There’s three problems with this. First, it is not what Giuliani said. Second, it hardly makes sense to ignore the big one. Third, it is not even true when limited to post-9/11. There were the more prominent examples such as the anthrax attacks, the DC Sniper, and Richard Reid, along with a number of less discussed examples such as this.

Los Angeles Times Looks Back At Charles Johnson’s Parting With The Right Wing

Last month Charles Johnson gave his reasons for parting with the right wing, which I discussed here. The Los Angeles Times was a bit slower than I was in discussing this. They noted how his parting of ways was received by fellow conservative bloggers:

In Johnson’s mind, he has not really changed but merely shifted his focus. Where once he was preoccupied with national security, staking out a hawkish, pro-military position, he now spends more time focusing on his liberal social views, and gripes with conservatives who disagree. “I like to think,” he told me this week, “I am pretty independent of [the] political winds.”

But not totally immune. As I talked to Johnson in his office, an alert flashed on one of his two giant computer monitors. An angry screed targeting him on another website concluded: “I think a visit to Mr. Johnson’s home might be warranted. Anybody got his address?”

Such veiled threats are at least one reason why Johnson, 56, relocated not long ago. He remains in the Los Angeles area, but now is in a gated community.

The man who once decried vitriol spread on liberal websites now says: “The kinds of hate mail and the kinds of attacks I am getting from the right wing are way beyond anything I got when I was criticizing the left or even radical Islam.”

His reasons for parting with the right are discussed further down in the column:

He believes his disagreements with some conservatives should have become obvious in the spring of 2008 when he slammed Ben Stein for his anti-evolution movie, “Expelled.” In numerous posts since, Johnson has derided what he sees as the right’s anti-science bent. “When they teach their children that,” Johnson said, “they are raising a generation of kids who aren’t going to be ready to deal with the world in which science is increasingly important.”

In recent months, Johnson’s jabs at right-wing icons have been more frequent. He now regularly takes digs at Fox News, vitriolic blogger Michelle Malkin and, with particular glee, Glenn Beck.

He lambasted the Fox star recently for loony fear-mongering over the federal government’s move to take “control” of Americans’ computers when they signed up for the cash for clunkers car buyback program.

Johnson called Beck a “Raving Freakazoid Nut Sandwich,” and when Beck repeated the phrase on the air, the blogger gleefully posted the video on his site.

When anyone asked directly, Johnson said he would tell them he had voted Democratic most of his life — including ballots for Bill Clinton and, in 2000, for Al Gore. Raised a Catholic, he now calls himself an atheist.

His growing discontent with conservatives “had been brewing in my subconscious for a long time.” It was with little planning, he said, that his 10 reasons for a formal parting with the right poured onto the blog one Monday night.

“The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes and off the cliff,” Johnson wrote. “I won’t be going over the cliff with them.”

No one should assume, Johnson said, that pronouncement makes him a committed lefty.

“I am still going to criticize what I think needs to be criticized, whatever it might be.”

This is another example of where the differences between the opposition to the right wing is no longer about ideology but about reality. Other than for a handful on the far left, everyone supports a market economy, even if there is disagreement on the specifics. Pretty much everyone supports defending the country against terrorism–although there are differences of opinion as to how this should be done and to what degree this should dominate our thought. Where rational people really disagree with the right wing is over whether we evaluate issues based upon rational evidence or based upon twisting the facts to fit the biases of the extreme right.

Facebook and Bras

I postponed posting on this so as to avoid ruining all the fun for the women of Facebook , but by now I figure that most FB users have found out what was going on with all those status updates yesterday. I knew something was up when female  Facebook friends who were very unlikely to know each other, such as ones I know in the real world and ones I know from blogs or mutual FB friends, started posting a color as their Facebook status.

Most of the women doing this on Facebook were unwilling to divulge the reason, but once I got suspicious that something was going on it wasn’t hard to track down some who couldn’t resist talking about this on line. The color status were of the color bra they were wearing, both to increase awareness of breast cancer and, according to some, to “confuse the boys.” Here is one  message which was sent around:

Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha .

Some reports claim it began in Detroit, which might explain why I first noticed this coming from someone I know who lives in suburban Detroit, but on the internet it could have also spread there from any location.

Even if I had not found the answer, I might have guessed. Initially the girls had fun by just posting their bra color, but some got more risque by later in the evening. An increasing number of status updates began to say “nude” or “none.” One Facebook friend wrote that she doesn’t own any.

In response to this I changed my Facebook status to: “I don’t care what color your bra is. Let’s just get universal health care so all women can be screened for breast cancer, and receive treatment if necessary.”

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