Is Condoleezza Rice a Lesbian?

Answer: I don't really give a shit, but obviously a LOT of Republicans sure seem to think so.

The always hilarious AmericaBlog has a great post up about whether Republicans' fears that Condi might be secretly gay is behind their super-uptight-outrage about a relatively minor comment made in Senate hearings yesterday towards Secretary Rice: "Who pays the price [for Bush's incompetence in Iraq]? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young," Boxer said. "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Boxer is correct, that neither she nor Condi are going to pay a personal price in Iraq. But for some reason, the White House, and conservatives across the board, have jumped on Boxer's comment and gone ballistic over it. AmericaBlog thinks they know why:

One thing I've learned is that conservatives flip out the most when they think you've found their weak spot. ... The moment an enemy hits close to home, conservatives flip out in order to ensure the enemy never dares go there again.

What that suggests in the case of the Condi uproar is that, I think, the White House and conservative activists like FOX News are deathly afraid of Condi's unmarried status and what it might suggest about her sexual orientation. Condi is a potential future Republican presidential, or VP, candidate. She is a rising star (or at least was until the Iraq fiasco) in a party that has few stars left. And if Condi were to turn out to be a bit light in the Manolos, it wouldn't go over too well with the family values crowd that controls the Republican party. ... And while I tended to be agnostic on the Condi-is-gay rumors up until this point, the bizzarely vicious reaction of the White House and FOX News and Matt Drudge to this episode is starting to make me wonder if they know something I don't.

Ahh, Matt Drudge. Yechh.

I honestly don't give a crap if people are Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered or Magikal Faeire Elves. It's when you pretend that you're not a Magikal Faerie Elf in order to get elected, then turn around and use the Government's powers to enact draconian legislation which legalizes bigotry against your fellow Magikal Faerie Elves that I get mad... it's the hypocrisy of Gay Closeted Republicans like Ken Mehlman, David Drier, Mark Foley, Matt Drudge and Shepard Smith smoking a little pole in their private Log Cabin while making it illegal for other non-rich-non-connected gays to go about their lives that pisses me off.

As for Kinda-Skeezer Rice, I've always disliked her not for any theoretical Lesbian tendencies, but rather for her frigidity, her condescending demeanor, her lecturing schoolmarmish tone of voice and her incredible superpower to consistently tell George Bush whatever he wants to hear rather than what's true or what's likely. Besides, I think she's a 52-year-old childless spinster not because she doesn't crave penis, but rather because she craves only the one which she can't have: George W. Bush, or as she has refferred to him, "My Husband.

### UPDATE ###

Condi Rice has now punched back at evil Barbara Boxer. In an interview in the New York Times,

Ms. Rice suggested that Ms. Boxer had set back feminism by suggesting during the hearing that the childless Ms. Rice had paid no price in the Iraq war: "I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn't have children."

First off, since WHEN do Conservatives give a fuck about Feminism? Aren't these the same scumbags who invented the word "Feminazi" to refer to strong career women like Hilary Clinton? You don't get to kick women in the face and then complain when someone walks by and doesn't stop you.

Rice's faux feminism is completely NOT the reason for this comment... read Boxer's original comment again: "Who pays the price [in Iraq]? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families. And I just want to bring us back to that fact."

What part of that can POSSIBLY be misconstrued as an attack on Condi's Feminist Right to have a career? That's a LUDICROUS interpretation.Rush Limbaugh also got into the act:

“Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show.

Once again Limbaugh demonstrates just how BAD his hearing has gotten as a result of his Oxycontin abuse. Boxer's statement CLEARLY had nothing at all to do with RACE. Bringing up the words "African American" and "lynch" and "Martin Luther King Day" is race-baiting of the worst type. Either Limbaugh is being disingenuous, or he's a racist who views all conflict in terms of black-vs-white.

He's in good race-centric-fixation company, though:

Deneen Borelli, a fellow with Project 21, which describes itself as a “leading voice in the African-American community,” said, “I am deeply appalled by Senator Barbara Boxer’s cruel and callous attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

“The debate should have been about the war in Iraq and not a platform to demean Secretary Rice,” Ms. Borelli said in a statement issued by the organization.

Ms. Borelli neglects to mention (as does the NYT) that Project 21 is a far-right Conservative Fringe group, attempting instead to pretend that it represents the entire Africa-American community, something which they do not. Oh, and I thought it was Conservatives who were always bitching when blacks viewed everything through race-relations glasses? Guess what's good for the goose is NOT good for the gander.

Boxer is CLEARLY saying calling Rice a Chickenhawk: she never served, she doesn't have any children or family members who are serving, yet she's thrilled to throw other people's kids into a pointless meat grinder from the safety of Washington D.C. Moreover, Boxer then says that SHE ALSO has no kids who are serving. Point being, neither one of us two powerful broads is gonna have to bury our kid, but lots of other mothers ARE going to have to bury their dead sons because of what you, Condi Rice, are deciding to do here.

And, y'know, absent a dead kid, there aren't going to BE a lot of real-world consequences for Condoleezza Rice when her boss's SURGE-GASM 2007™ fails to produce victory in Iraq. Bush has already proven incapable of firing her incompetent ass (oooh, I referred to her ass, I must be anti-feminist!), so no matter how badly the war goes, her job is safe until 2008. When Bush's turn in office is over, Condoleezza will either return to academia and warping reality for a new generation of moron conservatives, or return to working for her other old employer, Big Oil (see, you forgot that one, dincha?), or go to some kind of Right Wing Think-Tank and attempt to use her Soviet-era mindset to analyze the modern world (like she does for Bush).

"I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn't have children."

It IS okay to be single (albeit a bit suspicious at 52 for a Right-Wing Conservative true-believer...) and it IS okay to not have children (although, y'know, your kind of fundamentalist nutjob supposedly believes that marriage exists exclusively for raising children with standardized gender roles by two parents of the opposite sex). And it IS possible to make good decisions on behalf of the country if you are single and don't have children (though I can't imagine a childless male bachelor getting elected to... well, much of anything in this country, much less President). No, the problem is, Condi, you make HORRIBLE decisions which dreadfully impact this country.

What Happened and Why (And Don't Be Fooled)

The outcome of this election is as clear as it gets. Unfortunately, the Mainstream Corporate Media is out there spin, spin, spinning this election, spreading myths about what happened. The stickiest spin is that this election is somehow a victory for Conservatism and Conservative Democrats... the reasoning being that if Democrats want to stay in power, they have to be more like Republicans.

Sorry, no, not buying it.

In the interests of clarity, let's examine EXACTLY what this election meant versus what everyone is claiming:

(1) This is a devastating defeat for the Republican Party. Excuses are being made that this is "standard 6th-year losses for the President's party." If that's true, why did Democrats GAIN seats in the House in Clinton's 6th year in office? The truth here is that the President and his party are deeply unpopular and out of touch with America's desires. This win for the Democrats is a historically humiliating defeat for Bush and his supporters and they know it. We should be proud enough to acknowledge it and to force the Corporate Media to stop regurgitating Republican Talking Points.

(2) These election results are a resounding rejection of the core, defining premises of Bush's Republican Party. While the war was definitely on voters' minds, this election was NOT only about Iraq. The Democrats who won did so by opposing the main tenets of Bush's GOP: unchecked Presidential power, One-Party Rule, warmongering, war profiteering, bloated Federal deficits, tax cuts for the rich and the corruption which has fed the GOP elections machine for the last 12 years. Nine corrupt Republican incumbents were kicked out by the voters, and that's with the Corporate Media generally ignoring their crimes. When the Ethics Rules are tightened come January, and the investigations begin in earnest, another 9 will probably follow.


3) This election does NOT show support for "Conservatism" or for a new "Conservative Democratic Party."

When the Republicans took the House in 1994, their success resulted from picking off vulnerable Democrats in the South. By contrast, Democratic candidates won Tuesday in every part of the country and in the reddest of red states like Arkansas, Kansas and Indiana. The Republicans are rapidly collapsing into the Party of the Racist South... but even there, they lost incumbents and support. As we saw in Kansas where 9 major Republicans switched parties and ran as Moderate Democrats, the GOP has catered to the deranged Theologist Religious Right for so long that they've alienated middle of the road voters from their own party.

Most devastating for the Republicans, Democrats got 30% of the White Christian Evangelical vote. The message is sinking in for religious people: Republicans stand for power not for Jesus. There's no Christian message in fucking the poor and extending the life of Teri Schiavo, only hate-mana thrown to a small and deranged band of religious extremists. There's nothing Christ-like about scapegoating Gays while molesting Congressional pages. There's no message from God about shifting money from the poor to the rich through regressive tax cuts.

Furthermore, Democrats of all stripes and ideologies won... from the first honest-to-god Socialist to ever serve in the House to Jim Webb, former Secretary of the Navy for Ronald Reagan.

Yes, some conservative Democrats were elected. Some of them are pro-Life and some are opposed to gay marriage. Big Deal. Harry Reid is both of those things, but he's still a clear progressive whose stances on those issues kept Karl Rove from running distracting sideshows the real issues, like he has for the last 3 elections. The same goes for guys like Casey in Pennsylvania... I'd rather have a pro-life Democrat than a theocrat like Rick Santorum any day of the week.

Best of all, for the first time in 12 years, Democrats didn't win by pretending to be Republicans... they won because they emphatically and unapologetically vowed to oppose what the Republican Party has become and to put an end to its destructive one-party rule. No one voting thought they were getting Republican Lite. Democrats won by aggressively attacking everything Bush stands for, not by trying to be a slightly modified and duller version of it like they did in 2000, 2002 and 2004.


(4) The Blogs Won This Election. Many of the Democrats who won were candidates who were supported most enthusiastically by the most liberal blogs who raised money for only a handful of challengers, many of whom won against Republican incumbents in previously red districts: Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, Chris Carney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Nick Lampson, Tim McNerery, Patrick Murphy, Joe Sestak, Jon Tester, Tim Walz and Jim Webb, among others.

Many of those Democratic winners weren't initially supported by the Democratic Party, either... especially McNerey in his race against Dick "I Hate The Earth" Pombo, who got $300,000 or so from the DNC versus the $1.6 million that the GOP pumped into that race. The Blogs and Environmental Movement made the difference in overcoming a corrupt polluter who spent over $7 Million against an expert in Wind Power.

Not every Blog-support candidate won, but that doesn't mean that liberal blogs weren't effective. Bloggers tended to support underdog Democratic candidates who were challenging Republican incumbents... the seats which are the most difficult to win. Most blog-favored Democrats who lost were ones running in extremely red districts against GOP incumbents -- such as Angie Paccione (against the heinous Marilyn Musgrave) and Victoria Wulslin (against the equally disgusting Jean Schmidt) -- and they came very close to winning.

Given those facts, the idea that this election was some great repudiation of the Progressive Blogger Branch of the Democratic Party is wishful thinking by those who wish it were so. The Democrats who won have one thing in common: aggressive opposition to the monstrosities of the Republican Party.

(5) Karl Rove is not All-Powerful and The American People aren't retarded -- or -- You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

For the last six years, Bush and his cronies have run rampant across the political landscape destroying our freedom, limiting our Civil Rights, and fatally wounding the Constitution. They've gotten away with it because they out-strategized their Democratic opponents at every turn.

In 2000, voters bought into Rove's talking points of "Compassionate Conservatism," "Clinton Fatigue," and "No Child Left Behind." Rove pointed Bush squarely at the middle, while simultaneously telling Christian Evangelical Theocracy-lovers that once in office Bush would outlaw abortion, evolution, stem cells and make being gay an executable offense. The mainstream Corporate Media refused to see the truth before their eyes, didn't notice that Bush wasn't sending "dog-whistle" code signals to religious voters (such as constantly quoting from the Bible and obscure right-wing Hymns in his speeches) and pretended that Bush's lies about the failure of his policies in Texas were equivalent to Gore's overstatements about the Social Security Lockbox and him personally inventing the Internet (which he didn't even say).

At the same time, Gore's handlers were telling him to run a Republican-Lite campaign. To aid this, Gore brought on Joe Lieberman, who proceeded to make the election about who loved God more, him or Bush. God, god, god, blah blah social security lockbox, god, god, god, earth-toned suits, God, god. Blechhh. Progressive voters stayed home, Gore won the popular vote and then blinked in Florida when confronted by clear voting fraud. His scrambling attempts to only recount Dem-leaning counties made him appear partisan. When the Supreme Court handed down their illegal and unprecedented ruling, Gore blinked again: Democratic "Leadership" advised Gore to step away gracefully to maintain his future electability, despite later recounts which showed that Gore had clearly won the state of Florida.

Having thus won in 2000, Rove and Tom Delay set about establishing permanent One-Party Rule of America. There was no tax they wouldn't cut, no legislation they wouldn't pass, so long as they got a corporate campaign contribution in return.

In 2001, before 9/11, Bush's popularity was hovering around 39%, the lowest for any President that early in his career. The Republicans were headed towards massive midterm losses. After 9/11, the Republicans used the boogeyman of Osama Bin Laden to scare voters into voting against their own economic and political self-interest. As proof of their weakness, the Democrats were even unwilling to challenge the legitimacy of Rove's terror alert issued in the week before the election. Rove made the 2002 elections a referendum on whether Democrats had the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein. Weak-kneed Democratic "Leadership" like Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were unable to adjust to this new scaremongering reality, unable to rationally prove that Saddam was a paper tiger, express a clear alternative vision for the nation, and voted FOR the President's desired war. Thus, by playing Republican-Lite once again, they were swept from office by the Rove Machine.

In 2004, Democratic "Leadership" decided that instead of a popular progressive Governor who was against the war, the party machinery should instead be rallied behind a career political insider Senator who had voted for the war, a lifetime politician with a career full of procedural votes which could easily be twisted to mean anything the Republicans wanted ("he voted NO on giving our troops body armor"), NO charisma, no ability to speak movingly or clearly to the common man, an excessive love for nuanced speech ("I voted for the bill, before I voted against it), an inability to define his own career successes and a complete inability to fight back when aggressively attacked, either with labels (flip-flopper) or even about his own history (Swift-boats Veterans for Truth).

Faced with The Decider or The Equivocator, America voted for Rove's candidate. It helped that he had anti-gay ballot measures on 24 state ballots to drive his religious hate-filled partisans to the voting booth.

This time around, though, new Democratic Leadership rejected the Republican-Lite theory. Howard Dean, Rahm Emmanuel, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid kept a generally straight line as they marched towards Rove with bayonets lowered: The President is out of touch, the Republicans are corrupt, and the war is probably already lost. Faced with a unified opponent unwilling to play Republican-Lite, Rove's vaunted machine failed; today, he is a rejected loser. Karl Rove's ability to hypnotize zombified Americans with distractions like the New Jersey court ruling on gay civil unions, or John Kerry idiotic comments, or moronic buzzphrases has worn thin. No longer will catchy slogans about how Democrats "support terrorists" and their "San Francisco values" work to divide people like before... so long as Democrats don't allow themselves to stand still and allow the Republicans to define them.

Rovism is dead. Americans see Bush's Republican movement for what it is and have begun the process of smashing it.

(6) The Democratic victory is only one small step towards the restoration of our country, the Constitution and the Rule of Law. This President feels that Congress is irrelevant and has shown a propensity for ignoring any law that it passes and for ignoring any and all rebukes shown him by the Supreme Court. Reversing the damage done by six years of One-Party Rule will take time and concerted effort: there is still accountability to be imposed, subpoenas to be issued, crimes to be uncovered, radicalism to be reversed, and tons of damage to be undone... and none of that will be easy. Democrats still face a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of some Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising corruption.

Lastly, let's not ignore the threats that still face us. Just because Karl Rove didn't wheel Osama bin Laden out in the week before this midterm election doesn't mean he's not saving him for 2008. Let's wait and see some serious examinations of the voting machine results in close elections before we admit that Diebold's machines are fine when they clearly are NOT fine. Let's also not forget the mindnumbing panic and fear that 9/11 produced which allowed this cabal of Authoritarian psychotics to gain absolute control of our country for four years. If another attack should happen, we need to be ready to point out that retreat into Despotism is NOT the answer.

Get to work, Democrats. Otherwise you're just part of the problem.

Election Wrap-Up

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More Sex Scandals On The Way

For many Americans, the recent political news seems more and more like a multi-count indictment, what with Bob Ney pleading guilty to bribery last week, the Tom Noe "Coingate" trial reaching the courts in Ohio, the Duke Cunningham scandal, the investigation into Jim Kolbe's camping trips with pages, Curt Weldon's sudden FBI problems, and lingering questions about Dennis Hastert using highway earmarks to increase his net worth from $300,000 to $6 million by forcing a freeway to go across land he owned. All of this crap is also piled between two slices of sandwich bread known as Tom DeLay and Mark Foley. The bad news for the Republican Party just keeps getting worse and worse and it keeps going on and on, one new corrupt example after another...

the punchline being that President Bush has declared October 15th-21st to be National Character Counts Week. No irony intended, I'm sure, though it abounds, regardless.

There's also the as-yet-unexploded "Hookergate" scandal involving various Republican congressmen taking sex as bribes in return for votes and earmarks for Brent Wilkes, a corrupt defense contractor/pimp who is said to have paid for poker 'n' poontang parties at the Watergate Hotel (yes, THAT Watergate). Duke Cunningham has already been investigated for it, and the FBI has been unable to get the hookers' madame to flip on her Congressmen clients, but a simple examination of Wilkes' money takes us to (on the Armed Services Committee) Duncan Hunter (CA), Chairman - $43,200, Jim Saxton (NJ) - $1,500, Ken Calvert (CA)- $8,000, (Appropriations) Jerry Lewis (CA), Chairman - $86,252, Bill Young (FL) - $6,500, Tom Delay (TX) - $70,000, Henry Bonilla (TX) - $19,500, Joe Knollenberg (MI) - $13,000, Robert Aderholt (AL) - $2,000, John Doolittle (CA) - $103,000, Don Sherwood (PA) - $1,000, Mark Kirk (IL) - $5,000, (Select Committee on Intelligence) Peter Hoekstra (MI) - $4,000, Heather Wilson (NM) - $3,000, Darrell Issa (CA) - $5,000, as well as Roy Blunt (MO) - $21,000, Larry Craig (ID) - $43,000, Benjamin Gilman (NY) - $42,146, Robert Livingston (LA) - $10,000, Devin Gerald Nunes (CA) - $13,000, Ronald Packard (CA) - $11,000, Charles Robb (VA-Senate and the only Democrat on this list) - $17,000, Billy Tauzin (LA) - $18,587 and Jerry Weller (IL) - $10,000. No word on this story lately, so it's up in the air as to whether the FBI is simply waiting until AFTER the election before dropping the bomb, or if the case has honestly gone nowhere.

Ah, but now, there's rumors of yet ANOTHER House page sex scandal, this one involving a 16-year-old female page and supposedly a congressman from Illinois who is supposedly going to resign tonight from the House (but, obviously, not before the House Leadership can get their lies straight this time). Rumor has it that it's a Republican Congressman, which means another pickup for Dems.

Interestingly, there aren't a LOT of Republican Congressmen from Illinois, so it's pretty easy for someone to figure it out in advance, if there is ANY truth to this rumor. We're limited to a suspect pool of: Henry J. Hyde (R - 06), Mark S. Kirk (R - 10), Gerald C. (Jerry) Weller (R - 11), Dennis Hastert (R - 14), Timothy V. Johnson (R - 15), Donald A. Manzullo (R - 16), Ray LaHood (R - 18), or John Shimkus (R - 19). There's also Judy Biggert (R - 13), but we'll go on the assumption that the rumors of Illinois/Republican/Male/Straight Sex are all correct. Pretty much ANY of these guys (except for Kirk who seems somewhat sane) would be great to shoot out of a scandal cannon into a brick wall, but Hastert, Shimkus, LaHood and Hyde are all virulent homophobes.

Shimkus is already toast because of his involvement with the Foley scandal (including allowing Foley ufettered access to pages even after being made aware of Foley's "problems" and hiding the entire scandal from the one Democrat in charge of the pages). I hope it's not Shimkus. I doubt it's Hastert... he'd have to be utterly retarded to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar like that. I'd love for it to be any of the Super Moralists such as Ray LaHood, Tim Johnson, Jerry Weller, or Don Manzullo, all of whom are homophobic war-loving retrograde maroons.

Again, this is all going on the assumption that the rumors of Illinois/Republican/Male/Straight Sex are all correct.

One certainly hopes that it's a Republican, if only to blunt the recent accusation/twist/spin making waves in Evangelical circles that the Foley Scandal isn't a case of powerful Republicans ignoring a child molester in their midst to maintain their political power, but instead a problem created by the existence of a cabal of closeted gays in the Republican Party.

A good straight Male-Republican-Congressman-on-underage-female-page scandal should let ALL the air out of that anti-gay scapegoating bullshit, though probably not in time to head off the Republicans' rumored purge of all gay staffers. I'd feel bad for the gay staffers in question... but they helped write and pass laws which stripped them of their own legal rights when confronted by firing for sexual orientation, so my pity meter is rather low when it comes to self-emasculating idiots.

So, let's see what Dana Milbank's got up his sleeve, shall we? And let's see it before the election.