"Republican political culture"

[Gentle Giant]

Rule 1: Be an asshole.
Rule 2: Break the law but try not to get caught.
Typical Result: Mission accomplished.

Fallen star blames self, GOP tactics
Jail term served in N.H. phone plot
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | June 10, 2006

WASHINGTON -- For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.

He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes's presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.

But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.

Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state's history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.

In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn't know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats' phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.

``A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. ``I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."

Raymond stressed that he was making no excuses for his role in the New Hampshire case; he pleaded guilty and told the judge he had done a ``bad thing." But he said he got caught up in an ultra-aggressive atmosphere in which he initially thought the decision to jam the phones ``pushed the envelope" but was legal. He also said he had been reluctant to turn down a prominent official of the RNC, fearing that would cost him future opportunities from an organization that was becoming increasingly ruthless.

``Republicans have treated campaigns and politics as a business, and now are treating public policy as a business, looking for the types of returns that you get in business, passing legislation that has huge ramifications for business," he said. ``It is very much being monetized, and the federal government is being monetized under Republican majorities."

Raymond, raised in a liberal Democratic family, became intrigued with the Republican Party during his four years in the early 1980s at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts.

After running a successful US House campaign in 1994, Raymond was picked by then-GOP chairman Haley Barbour to become one of the party's eight regional political directors, overseeing the mid-Atlantic states. He was then hired as chief of staff to a subsequent cochairman of the Republican National Committee, Patricia Harrison. That was followed by his job as deputy political director of Forbes's 2000 presidential campaign. After Forbes lost, Raymond became executive director of the Republican Leadership Council. Around that time, he set up GOP Marketplace, which served as a middleman for telemarketing services sought by Republican campaigns.

The firm was funded with a $246,000 loan from a group of elite Republicans. One of the investors was Raymond's former boss, Barbour, who said at the time he was ``convinced that GOP Marketplace will not only be a profitable business, but will also give Republicans an edge in the 2000 election." Another investor was lobbyist Ed Rogers , who had served as executive assistant to former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu during the administration of George H.W. Bush.

The firm landed contracts worth nearly $2 million during the first two years, typically involving calls to determine where voters stood on issues and candidates. But it became involved in more aggressive tactics that drew the attention of federal prosecutors. The first sign of the questionable tactics was on Super Bowl Sunday in 2002. Raymond's firm had been hired by the campaign of James Treffinger, a New Jersey Republican. Raymond's company was asked to arrange phone calls that attacked one of Treffinger's opponents on abortion without revealing that Treffinger was paying for the calls and to make those calls during the Super Bowl. ``It was shenanigans," Raymond said. ``You put the call in at 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday," which was designed to irk voters who didn't want to be called away from the television. After complaints were raised, prosecutors interviewed Raymond about the matter, but he was not charged.

Ten months later, Raymond received what he called a ``highly unusual" request to jam Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire.

The idea originated with Charles McGee , who was executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, according to court records. McGee, who had served as a helicopter crew chief in the Marine Corps, testified that he learned in the military that ``if you can't communicate, you can't plan and organize," so Democrats would be hampered in their efforts to get voters to the polls if their phones were constantly busy.

But McGee didn't know who could pull it off. ``I had tried two vendors and they both had said no," he testified. So he asked for advice from James Tobin, the Northeast director of the Republican National Committee, who was in New Hampshire to help with Sununu's race against the incumbent Democratic governor, Jeanne Shaheen .

Tobin suggested hiring Raymond. Tobin had worked with Raymond at the RNC and was Raymond's boss during the Forbes campaign. Raymond said in the interview that Tobin initially called him, asking whether such a plan was feasible. ``Anything can be done," Raymond said he responded. Shortly thereafter, McGee called to set up the plan. The New Hampshire Republican Party paid $15,600 to GOP Marketplace, which in turn sent $2,500 to an Idaho company that agreed to place the computerized calls that would jam Democratic lines. GOP Marketplace pocketed $13,100 as profit.

Raymond said he presumed, based on his experience at the RNC, that Tobin had cleared the matter with the committee's legal advisers. [An RNC attorney, Robert Kelner, said Tobin did not consult committee lawyers ``in connection with any phone-jamming scheme."] Nonetheless, Raymond felt uneasy enough to seek advice from a private lawyer. He said he was told, ``I don't necessarily recommend it, but I don't see anything illegal."

By 7:30 a.m. on Election Day, the phones at five Democratic offices in New Hampshire, along with a firefighters' association office that was offering voters rides to the polls , were being jammed by a relentless series of calls that were terminated as soon as they were answered. But, according to court testimony, while the jamming campaign was underway, McGee received a complaint from a GOP official and decided to pull the plug, sending Raymond an e-mail that said: ``New Hampshire GOP. Urgent, urgent, urgent. Please halt all calls for NH project as soon as possible."

Federal law prohibits making interstate calls ``without disclosing the caller's identity and with the intent to annoy . . . or harass any person at the called number."

McGee pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven months. Tobin was found guilty and sentenced to 10 months. The RNC has spent nearly $3 million on legal expenses for Tobin. Democrats say in their civil suit that Tobin placed 115 calls to the White House between Sept. 17 and Nov. 22, 2002, suggesting that some Bush administration officials may have been told of the phone-jamming plan. Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director whose office received the calls, has said the calls were not related to phone-jamming.

Senator Sununu, who was elected by about 19,000 votes, said via e-mail that he never knew about the plot until it was reported in the media. Sununu called the phone-jamming scheme ``illegal, wrong, and just plain stupid -- and those responsible are and must be held accountable." Sununu also said he did not know that one of the investors in GOP Marketplace was his father's former executive assistant, Rogers. Raymond, too, said Sununu and the investors did not know about the phone-jamming. Barbour, now the governor of Mississippi, denied knowledge of the scheme, and Rogers declined comment.

The case could go deeper. Justice Department officials say they are still investigating leads, and the New Hampshire Democratic Party filed a civil suit requesting documents and asking to interview former White House officials who had talked with participants in the phone-jamming plan before it was carried out.

Raymond, who has switched to real estate investment, said the case cost him $500,000 in lost business and money spent on legal fees. ``Things come up where you need to push the envelope," he said of the New Hampshire case. ``The question is whether you step over the bright line. I took steps to make sure I didn't, but unfortunately that wasn't good enough and I paid a steep price."

[Gary Sisco]

It's really a gang or mob culture. Calling it a political culture lends it too much legitimacy and in any case is just another American euphimism.

[GoodSpeak]

The current version of the GOP is ethically corrupt and morally bankrupt.






Thank you, Ralph Nader.

[Gary Sisco]

More fissures still in the repub loyalist base. Hallelu-Jah!

I can only hope that the hard right keeps pushing -- thereby further splitting an already split party. Dividing and conquering themselves, baby. That's what happens when coalitions are based on expedience geared toward the winning of elections (ie the unholy alliance) rather than political principle.

Rice's Offer to Iran Spurs Unease From Right
The move to hold talks on nuclear activities worsens fears that the secretary of State is leading foreign policy down a weaker path.
By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer
June 12, 2006


WASHINGTON — While the Bush administration's offer to negotiate with Iran was winning praise from many quarters, conservative commentator Michael Ledeen sat down last week to write a column with a far different point of view.

Under the title "Is Bill Clinton Still President?" Ledeen compared President Bush's conditional offer to Iran to the Clinton administration's "appeasement" of North Korea in the 1990s. Then, he wrote, it won't be long before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice borrows one of former Secretary Madeleine Albright's trademark big hats "and goes to Tehran to dance with the dictator" — an allusion to Albright's controversial trip to Pyongyang in 2000.

ADVERTISEMENTAs Ledeen's column for National Review Online suggests, the Bush administration's Iran move has compounded many conservatives' concerns about the direction of U.S. foreign policy under the leadership of Rice's State Department. Many fear the administration has lost some of its forcefulness. They are unhappy with the normalization of ties with Libya, the proposed nuclear deal with India, the seeming slowdown in U.S. efforts to democratize the Middle East — which was a cornerstone of Bush's second inaugural address — as well as the handling of the Iraq war.

Bush's slide among foreign policy conservatives came as he was completing a round of attention to domestic base-voter issues such as same-sex marriage, flag burning and estate tax repeal. However, disaffection among his conservative foreign policy critics may not be as easy for Bush to address.

"In conservative circles there's an unease; I wouldn't call it a rebellion at this point, but an unease," said Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "There's an increasing fear that the State Department has taken over foreign policy, and there's been a retreat from first-term foreign policy tenets."

Last month, as Rice rolled out the Iran proposal, her senior staff contacted influential conservative editors and pundits in hopes that a full explanation of the deal would head off criticism from the right.

The effort helped mute reactions, commentators said. But the new initiative has drawn criticism, if not wholesale condemnation, from conservative opinion leaders such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the National Review magazine, and conservative stalwarts such as American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin and former Reagan administration official Frank J. Gaffney Jr., among others.

So far, only a few conservative members of Congress have joined the conservative foreign policy experts' complaints — in public, at least. This is partly because they believe Bush has a weak hand and few options, said Wittmann, now with the centrist Progressive Policy Institute.

Nevertheless, the discontent marks a challenge for Bush at a time when he is trying to rebuild conservative support. Wittmann predicted that elected officials would "eventually follow the lead of the intellectuals" in questioning the administration approach.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Iran proposal had strong support, with the "vast majority saying they favored it, or 'let's wait and see how it turns out.' "

Some conservative analysts say the underlying source of concern is the war in Iraq, which some fear America may lose. They say the administration seems to lack the energy or resolve to take tough positions with adversaries, and may become immersed in drawn-out negotiations with Iran that give Tehran more time to develop its nuclear capabilities.

Many are unhappy that Vice President Dick Cheney has been less of a force on foreign policy, and that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also stepped back from his prominent perch during the first term.

At the same time, some conservatives have gone after Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns, who has been Rice's point man on Iran and India, contending that the veteran diplomat is too ready to compromise. But others say that Burns has become a target in part because conservatives don't want to publicly attack his boss, Rice, who is close to the president and one of the most popular Republican figures in the country.

Several of the conservative analysts say it's unsettling that the Iran deal resembles the stymied nuclear negotiations with North Korea under Clinton, including the offer of light-water nuclear reactors and the possibility of six-nation talks. In 2000, when Albright visited, she was whisked away by leader Kim Jong Il — to a dance exhibition in his honor.

Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview that the offer of the reactors showed "we're doing the same thing" in Iran.

"We can try to put a nice patina on it, but it's rewarding intransigence" on the part of Tehran, which has refused to give ground on its nuclear activities, Rubin said.

He criticized the offer to Iran in part for its lack of explicit sanctions. "We're not really threatening them with anything," he said, calling the U.S. approach "abject surrender."

In an editorial this month, the Wall Street Journal suggested Bush might be allowing himself to be set up by less hawkish advisors in his approach to Iran.

"Perhaps Ms. Rice is right that direct diplomacy is essential to expose Iran's real purposes," the newspaper said. "But given Iran's track record, we'd say the secretary has walked her president out on a limb where the pressure will soon build on him to make even more concessions."

The unease besets not just neoconservatives, who believe the United States must assert itself in reshaping undemocratic regimes, but also more traditional conservatives, who tend to be dubious about such ambitious efforts.

The National Review, which expresses a more traditional conservatism, said in an editorial that the Iran deal would have been justified if it persuaded the ruling clerics to dismantle their nuclear program.

"But the reality is that we have probably given up more than we have gained," the magazine concluded.

Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Defense official who disagrees with the Iran policy, said drastic changes had taken place both in administration policies and the people in charge.

"This presidency is mutating before our eyes, in ways that will only exacerbate the president's problems with his base," said Gaffney, now president of the Center for Security Policy, a think tank.

In addition to their worries about Iran, conservatives have complained about the administration's civil nuclear deal with India, contending that overlooking India's past infractions will encourage other countries, such as Iran, to build nuclear arsenals in defiance of international norms.

Others have charged that the United States has been not moved strongly enough to halt Russia's trend toward authoritarianism. And critics have argued that the administration has done too little to stop antidemocratic moves by the governments of Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Syria and China — despite the president's commitment in the second inaugural to spreading democracy abroad.

Rubin and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that Libya alone changed everything. If the lofty, pro-democracy rhetoric of Bush's inaugural speech defined the president's second term precepts, the normalization of U.S. relations with Libya "marks an effective end to the Bush doctrine," they said.

*

Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin in Vienna contributed to this report.

[Gary Sisco]

From Sullivan:

A blog-plug for two recent columns first posted over the weekend. The first is a review of Steven Miles' harrowing book, "Oath Betrayed." It's his redaction of 35,000 pages of FOIAed government documents that show how the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld torture policy has inevitably entangled medical personnel in the military. Doctors were used to prep torture sessions, to revive tortured prisoners to keep them alive for further torture, and to cover up the consequences of the Bush administration's policy of prisoner torture and abuse. Money quote:

Of the 136 documented deaths of prisoners in detention, Miles found, medical death certificates were often not issued until months or even years after the actual deaths. One prisoner's corpse at Camp Cropper was kept for two weeks before his family or criminal investigators were notified. The body was then left at a local hospital with a certificate attributing death to "sudden brainstem compression." The hospital's own autopsy found that the man had died of a massive blow to the head. Another certificate claimed a 63-year-old prisoner had died of "cardiovascular disease and a buildup of fluid around his heart." According to Miles, no mention was made that the old man had been stripped naked, doused in cold water and kept outside in 40° cold for three days before cardiac arrest.

Hey, this is Bush's America. What did you expect?

******************************

God forbid, ahem, that doctors perform an abortion, however, or put a human animal out of its misery. That just wouldn't be right. And it would violate the utterly sacred Hypocritical Oath.

First do no harm ...


Except ....

And very especially, except when paid ....

[Gary Sisco]

From Sullivan, quoting a fundamentalist preacher and then responding:

Preacher: "If the battle to protect marriage takes even five more years, liberal judges and activists will have destroyed this 5,000-year-old institution, which was designed by the Creator, Himself."

Sullivan: So the Creator of the universe is no match for liberal judges! And 5,000 years can be erased in half a decade. Whoever knew the judiciary had so much power?


*************

Good one.

[Gary Sisco]

Friction? What friction? Friendliest lunch any of us has ever had....

Why can't anyone just tell the straight-up truth anymore? Lying as a way of life and they wonder why people just mock them whenever they move their tongues.

A Spat Over Iraq Revealed On Tape
Rice and Russian Caught Bickering At Private Lunch

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 30, 2006; A20



MOSCOW, June 29 -- The official State Department version is that "there was absolutely no friction whatsoever" between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting of foreign ministers in Moscow on Thursday.

But a recording of the ministers' private lunch, made when an audio link into the room was accidentally left on, showed that "Condi" and "Sergei" -- as they called each other -- had several long and testy exchanges over Iraq. The disputes concerned relatively minor wording changes in the five-page statement issued after the meeting, but grew out of basic differences between the two governments over how to proceed on Iraq.

The State Department's subsequent denial of tensions illustrates how officials manage the information that flows to the public from such closed-door meetings to create an image meant to advance foreign policy objectives. Reporters often have no independent account of such discussions.

At a time of rising tension in U.S.-Russian relations, the two diplomats sparred in sometimes tedious terms for more than 20 minutes over a handful of words in a document that is likely to be quickly forgotten. Other ministers jumped in to cool tempers by suggesting compromises.

During the meal -- the recording picks up the clinking of ice in glasses and the scratch of cutlery on plates -- Rice said she wanted to make a few "small points" about a draft statement prepared by lower-level officials. In particular, she said, she was seeking a stronger show of support for the nascent Iraqi government.

Lavrov demurred, suggesting the new leaders had not done enough to promote national reconciliation.

"I'm always a little bit sensitive about this on behalf of the Iraqis," Rice shot back. "Here we sit in Moscow or in Washington or in Paris telling them to make efforts on national accord when their brothers and sisters are being killed. I just think it's gratuitous."

Lavrov eventually gave ground, but then protested when Rice wanted to delete a sentence in a section regarding the killing of five Russian diplomats in Iraq.

"Urgent methods are being taken to provide security for diplomats," Rice said. The sentence "implies they are not being taken, and you know on a fairly daily basis we lose soldiers, and I think it would be offensive to suggest that these efforts are not being made."

Lavrov countered that the sentence was not intended to criticize but was "just a statement of fact, I believe."

"I don't believe security is fine in Iraq, and I don't believe in particular that security at foreign missions is okay," he said. He suggested shortening the sentence to emphasize "the need for improved security for diplomatic missions."

"Sergei, there is a need for improvement of security in Iraq, period," Rice said in a hard voice. "The problem isn't diplomatic missions. The problem is journalists and civilian contractors and, yes, diplomats as well."

She continued: "The problem is you have a terrorist insurgent population that is wreaking havoc on a hapless Iraqi civilian population that is trying to fight back. The implication that by somehow declaring that diplomats need to be protected, it will get better, I think, is simply not right."

Lavrov began to respond, but Rice cut him off.

"I understand that in the wake of the brutal murder of your diplomats, that it is a sensitive time," she said. "But I think that we can't imply that this is an isolated problem or that it isn't being addressed."

Other ministers jumped in and suggested compromise language to calm tempers: "The tragic event underscores the importance of improving security for all in Iraq."

Then Rice said she wanted to seek an endorsement of an Iraqi proposal for an "international compact" in which the Baghdad government would have to meet certain broad goals in order to collect aid, similar to a package for Afghanistan. But Lavrov refused, saying the concept was too new and needed more development and support from other countries. He suggested the creation of a forum of neighboring governments to oversee reconciliation in Iraq.

Rice said she worried he was suggesting greater international involvement in Iraq's affairs.

"I did not suggest this," Lavrov said. "What I did say was not involvement in the political process but the involvement of the international community in support of the political process."

"What does that mean?" Rice asked.

There was a long pause. "I think you understand," he said.

"No, I don't," Rice said.

Lavrov tried to explain, but Rice said she was disappointed. "I just want to register that I think it's a pity that we can't endorse something that's been endorsed by the Iraqis and the U.N.," she said, adding tartly: "But if that's how Russia sees it, that's fine."

The two continued to squabble when Lavrov threw out a new concept -- that the new Iraqi government had to answer questions about former president Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction because last week Republican lawmakers in the United States had said there was evidence of chemical munitions.

"I think it's serious," he said. "While we want to support this government, we also believe that this government has something to do to finalize the leftovers of the past, which is basically nonproliferation concerns."

This line of conversation riled Rice, but once again other ministers suggested a compromise that mentioned the idea without endorsing it.

The Lavrov-Rice sparring continued at a subsequent news conference over issues such as Russia's growing control of natural gas supplies in Europe and threats to democratic institutions in Russia.

Reporters traveling with Rice transcribed the tape of the private luncheon but did not tell Rice aides about it until after a senior State Department official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity as usual, assured them that "there was absolutely no friction whatsoever" between the two senior diplomats.

Once the flabbergasted official learned of the tape, he continued the briefing. He paused repeatedly, asking before describing a discussion whether reporters had heard it.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[Gary Sisco]

POLL: BUSH LOSING TFM SUPPORT

A nation divided?

WASHINGTON, May 11 - President Bush appears to be losing support among
a key group of voters who had hitherto stood firmly with the president
even as his poll numbers among other groups fell dramatically.

A new Gallup poll shows that, for the first time, Bush's approval
rating has fallen below 50% among total fucking morons, and now stands
at 44%. This represents a dramatic drop compared to a poll taken just
last December, when 62% of total fucking morons expressed support for
the president and his policies.

The current poll, conducted by phone with 1,409 total fucking morons
between May 4 and May 8, reveals that only 44% of those polled believe
the president is doing a good job, while 27% believe he is doing a
poor job and 29% don't understand the question.

The December poll, conducted by phone with 1,530 total fucking morons,
showed 62% approved of the president, 7% disapproved and 31% didn't
understand the question.

Faltering approval ratings for the president among a group once
thought to be a reliable source of loyal support gives Republicans one
more reason to be nervous about the upcoming mid-term elections.
"If we can't depend on the support of total fucking morons," says Sen.
Rick Santorum (R-PA), "then we've got a big problem. They're a key
factor in our electoral strategy, and an important part of today's
Republican coalition."

"We've taken the total fucking moron vote for granted," says Rep. Tom
Feeney (R-FL), "and now we're paying for it. We've let the Democrats
control the debate lately, and they've dragged discourse back into the
realm of complex, nuanced issues. So your average total fucking moron
turns on his TV and sees his Republican Congressman arguing about
Constitutional law or the complexities of state formation in the
Middle East, and he tunes out. He wants to hear comforting, pandering,
flattering bromides and he doesn't want to hear a logical argument
more complex than what you'd find on a bumper sticker."

For Feeney, the poll is a dire warning that Republicans can ignore
only at their peril. "This should send a signal that we have to regain
control of the debate if we want the support of our key constituencies
in the coming election and beyond. We need to bring public discourse
back into the realm of stupidity and vacuity. We should be talking
about homosexual illegal immigrants burning flags. We should be
talking about the power of pride. We should be talking about freedom
fries. These are the issues that resonate with total fucking morons."

But some total fucking morons say it's too late. Bill Snarpel of Enid,
Oklahoma is a total fucking moron who voted for Bush in both 2000 and
2004. But he says he won't be voting for Bush in 2008. "I don't like
it that he was going to sell our ports to the Arabs. If the Arabs own
the ports then that means they'll let all the Arabs in and then we'll
all be riding camels and wearing towels on our heads. I don't want my
children singing the Star Spangled Banner in Muslim."

Total fucking moron Kurt Meyer of Turlock, California also says his
once solid support for Bush has collapsed. "He invaded Iraq and all
those soldiers died, and for what? We destroyed all their WMDs, but
now their new president is making fun of us and saying he's going to
build nuclear bombs and that we can't stop him. Well, nuclear bombs
are even worse than WMDs, so what did we accomplish?"

Laura McDonald, a total fucking moron from Chandler, Arizona, says she
is disappointed that the president hasn't been a more forceful
advocate of Christian values. "This country was founded on Christian
values," she says, "but you'd never know it looking around and seeing
all the Mexicans running around. I thought Bush was going to bring
Jesus back into the government. Instead, Christians are being
persecuted worse than ever before in history, because all these
Mexicans come here and tell Christians that we have to respect their
religious beliefs. So now it's illegal for children to pray in school.
Soon it will be illegal for them to speak English."

Not all total fucking morons have turned their backs on the president.
Jeb Larkin of Topeka, Kansas says he still fully supports Bush. "He is
doing a great job. He is a great president. He is a great decider. I
have a puppy. His tail sticks straight up and you can see his butthole."

And not all Republican lawmakers are concerned about the poll. Sen.
Lamar Alexander (R-TN), for one, does not find it a cause for anxiety.
While he agrees that his party should not take total fucking morons
for granted, they "really don't have anywhere else to go. They're
never going to be able to understand someone like Al Gore or John
Kerry or anybody intelligent and articulate who wants to talk about
substantive issues. Just try having a conversation with one of them
about global warming. They'll say, 'Oh, but Rush says volcanoes
consume more ozone than humans do.' I mean, they're morons! Total
fucking morons!"

"They've got nowhere else to go," Alexander reaffirms with a smile,
"and they always vote."

[willy]

Did you get this from the Total Fucking Moron website?

[sonic1]

The first article is hard to refute. It is the guys own words. And as troubling as it is, not surprising.

[Gary Sisco]

Willy -- Which one?

(rimshot)