Typical.

This is a painting Our President loves; it’s called “A Charge to Keep,” and GW Bush even used that as the title for his autobiography.

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Here’s what Bush himself says about the picture.

I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

Bush got it wrong. The painting has been traced back to its source, and it turns out it doesn’t portray a Methodist missionary spreading the word on the Texas frontier…it’s something far more appropriate.

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

I laughed and laughed. It epitomizes their mission, alright.

I really don’t understand Republicans

Somebody has to explain the logic of certain Republican values to me. Introducing something called the “Middle Class Job Protection Act” (which is actually, of course, nothing but a massive corporate tax cut), our own Little Miss Chipper Crazypants, Michele Bachmann, thinks this is good news:

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

Once upon a time, we had this thing called the 40 hour work week — the idea was that it was good for the middle class to be able to get a living wage from a reasonable amount of effort. Now we’ve got Republicans handing out corporate welfare and getting excited because the working class has to labor for longer hours in order to make ends meet. I don’t get it. Do they think their local mechanic likes having to put in longer hours grubbing in grease and barking their knuckles and wrenching their backs?

I remember a few rough years when my father had to work two jobs, a day job reading water meters for the city and then doing custodial work in the evenings. It wasn’t because this was a fantastic opportunity to achieve prosperity — it was because he was desperate to pay the rent and keep food on the table. When people are having to work harder, it’s not a sign that the middle class is thriving.

I’ll have to remember this one for when Bachmann tries to run for reelection.

(Hat tip to John McKay)

Huckabee is a raving lunatic

Here’s his latest suggestion: that we we amend the Constitution to be more biblical.

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.”

Whoa.

We have a candidate who openly wants to make the US a religious state, and he’s the frontrunner on the Republican side. There are a large number of people who want this demented fuckwit to run the country. And the pundits of the news media are sucking their thumbs and watching; here’s what one commentator had to say:

Geist further noted of Huckabee that if “someone without his charm,” said that, “he’d be dismissed as a crackpot, but he’s Mike Huckabee and he’s basically the front-runner.”

Popularity excuses all affronts, I guess. Did your mother ever ask you, “If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?”

I’m feeling a bit like I’m watching a whole country merrily running towards that cliff right now.

How bad could Huckabee be?

Jason Wiles delivers a lovely smackdown of Huckabee’s position on evolution. First, he hits him hard on his record as governor of Arkansas.

During Huckabee’s tenure as Governor, evolution education in Arkansas languished in an environment of general hostility and insufficiency. Two anti-evolution bills were introduced in the state’s House of Representatives; textbooks in the Beebe, Arkansas public high school carried disclaimer stickers denigrating evolution; the state’s science curriculum earned a grade of “D” overall and an abysmal “zero” for its treatment of evolution; a creationist “museum” enjoyed state-funded advertising; and evolution was systematically and broadly squeezed out of schools and other educational institutions across the state. Huckabee did nothing to deter any of this – in fact, some of his public statements might indicate his tacit support.

Then he pops him one on what Huckabee has said about evolution — the man is a misinformed moron. Here’s part of an interview with a student…a student who is smarter and better educated than the governor.

Student: Many schools in Arkansas are failing to teach students about evolution according to the educational standards of our state. Since it is against these standards to teach creationism, how would you go about helping our state educate students more sufficiently for this?
Huckabee: Are you saying some students are not getting exposure to the various theories of creation?
Student (stunned): No, of evol … well, of evolution specifically. It’s a biological study that should be educated [taught], but is generally not.
Moderator: Schools are dodging Darwinism? Is that what you … ?
Student: Yes.
Huckabee: I’m not familiar that they’re dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.

I’d like to think this gibbering sphincter is going to crash and burn in the primaries and doesn’t have a chance of getting elected to the presidency, but remember, he won the gubernatorial election in one state…and the electorate of conservative ignoramuses is nationwide.

Kristol? You’ve got to be kidding

I gripe about the NY Times now and then — the newspaper is an infuriating mix of the best and the worst of print journalism. I’ve had a couple of the people who work there stop by in the comments now and then, and I’d love to see one of them show up now and explain something to us all.

William Kristol??!? Jebus. The man has spent years demonstrating that he’s a clueless ideologue who always gets it wrong.

So wy, NY Times, why?

And if you don’t know Kristol’s litany of failure, Tom Tomorrow reminds us.

Are we a Christian nation?

I always considered the US a secular nation, but if certain factions in our government have their way, they will make us a Christian nation by fiat and by falsehood. It’s a sordid story of the religious right trying to pass a resolution that uses phony history to prop up right-wing claims of religious lunacy.

We could be a Christian nation. Another word for that is a Christian theocracy.