Scott Horton, blogging at the Harper’s site, notes that the above work by W.H.D. Koerner is W’s favorite painting. Horton writes:
So in Bush’s view (or perhaps I should say, faith) the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century.
Koerner, Horton notes, was a long time contributer to (drumroll) Harper’s and he offers a link to the painter’s work for the magazine. He also compares Bush’s description of the painting:
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.
with that of Jacob Weisberg (who has a new book on Bush about to be published:
[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.
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.”
So, as Horton points out: “Bush’s inspiring, prosyletizing Methodist is in fact a silver-tongued horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the Bush presidency.”
Another “Friedman Unit,” that is. Notwithstanding all the latest Mission Accomplisheds from Wingnuts, War Pimps, and the batshit-crazy, the General says we need another six months before we can tell whether “we’ve reached a turning point” in Iraq.
At which point, no doubt, we’ll need another six months to see if any perceived gains are merely transitory, as usual.
President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001, according to a study released Tuesday by two nonprofit journalism groups.
“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003,” reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
According to the study, Bush and seven top officials — including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice — made 935 false statements about Iraq during those two years.
I’m torn on this. On the one hand, studying whether the Bush administration made false statements about Iraq seems like a total waste of time. Of course they made false statements. Colin Powell publicly decried the “false and intentionally misleading” statements White House writers prepped for his appearance before the United Nations, while Don Rumsfeld sat on Meet the Press telling the nation “we know” where Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction are.
On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I could find 935 false statements just by spending a few hours on the White House website, starting with a page ironically entitled “Iraq: Denial and Deception” which itself is a cornucopia of misleading statements from the Bush administration about Iraq.
So which is it? Too much time on their hands — taking time to study an obvious given? Or not enough time — seemingly failing to count even a majority of the falsehoods emanating from the Bush Administration??
Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon — Cap’n Special Ed insists that the Generalissimo is still alive, and reports of his death are the mere contrivance of George Soros’s minions.
Fred Thompson, the expected Republican front-runner who spent most of his campaign loping in the middle of the pack, dropped out of the presidential race Tuesday.
He finished third in the Republican primary in South Carolina, behind Senator John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Mr. Thompson had proclaimed South Carolina was his firewall, a state that he hoped would rescue his flagging candidacy. After his defeat, he stopped campaigning, deciding not to follow most of the Republican field to Florida, which holds its primary next Tuesday.
“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement. “I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”
We’re beginning to suspect that the apparently fatal endorsement from Human Events was just another cunning strike at conservatism by that well known pinko, David Horowitz.
The Bush legacy of miserable failure continues. Despite playing Stepin Fetchit to King Abdullah and performing a little dance for his amusement prior to begging for more oil, the Arab world and OPEC producers are unmoved:
Even as smiling members of the Saudi royal family feted President Bush and his entourage this week, presenting the lame-duck leader with an ornamental sword, Saudi Arabia’s most prominent English-language daily stabbed him with a pen over his aggressive Iran policy.
“Whatever threat Iran may constitute, now or in the future, must be addressed peaceably and through negotiations,” said an unsigned editorial in Tuesday’s Arab News.
“In his confrontational remarks about Iran, [Bush] offers no carrot, no inducement, no compromise — only the big U.S. stick,” it said. “This is not diplomacy in search of peace. It is madness in search of war.”
~~~
“All the politicians give [Bush] a very beautiful smile and give him a medal,” said Turki Rasheed, a businessman in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, who runs a nonprofit civic organization called Saudi Election. “But following Bush is a kiss of death. Anyone who goes with that kind of philosophy is out of the race.”
So despite making kissy-face with King Abdullah, Bush’s unchallenged record for non-accomplishment remains unthreatened by his latest World Cruise for the Incompetent.
The United States has been listed as a country where prisoners are at risk of torture in a training document produced by the Canadian foreign ministry.
It also classifies some US interrogation techniques as torture.
The manual - part of a training course on torture awareness for diplomats - also includes Israel, China, Iran and Afghanistan on its watch list.
“You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your niggersflag,” Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated Press.
“In fact,” he said, “if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our niggersflag, we’d tell them what to do with the pole; that’s what we’d do.”
Looks like Huckabee is trying to lock up the unvarnished racist cracker vote in South Carolina:
And a radio advertisement paid for by an independent group used the flag issue to attack Mr. McCain, of Arizona, and praise Mr. Huckabee. “John McCain assaults our values,” it said. “Mike Huckabee understands the value of heritage.”
Especially when that heritage includes such wonderful institutions as slavery, segregation, all-white juries, poll taxes, substandard education, in the racist-Utopia of the Old South.
We get a hint at the problem early on, when Goldberg defines fascism. “Scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other,” he says. But he is unwilling to take as a guide such apparently definitive statements as Mussolini’s (”the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism”) — even while calling Il Duce “The Father of Fascism” — prefering instead to emphasize Mussolini’s youthful enthusiasms for Marx and socialism, which Goldberg accepts as proof that Marxism, socialism, and fascism are all the same thing — that is, liberalism.
As a perhaps semi-conscious defense of this selective reading, Goldberg notes that “as a pragmatist, [Mussolini] was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient” — yet he doesn’t seem to grasp that this statement cuts both ways; if Mussolini was just conning people when he denounced the Left, why couldn’t he have been conning them when he embraced it?
Catch that? According to Pantload, since Mussolini was a socialist when in his youth, he was also a socialist when he came to power as a fascist and renounced everything socialist.
Ultra-conservative batshit-crazy David Horowitz was a notoriously a member of the radical left in his younger days, so it’s clear that he, like Mussolini, remains a committed communist rather than the batshit-crazy paranoid conservative he manifests so obviously, or rather that Horowitz’s Conservative group and the Young Spartacists are the same thing.
In the way that socialists and liberals are also fascists.
ARCADIA, Calif. - Richard Knerr, co-founder of the toy company that popularized the Hula Hoop, Frisbee and other fads that became classics, has died. He was 82.
Knerr, who started Wham-O in 1948 with his childhood friend Arthur “Spud” Melin, died Monday at Methodist Hospital after suffering a stroke earlier in the day at his Arcadia home, his wife Dorothy told the Los Angeles Times.
Knerr and Melin got their start in business peddling slingshots. They named their enterprise Wham-O after the sound a slingshot made when it hit its target.
They branched into other sporting goods, including boomerangs and crossbows, then added toys that often bore such playful names as the Superball, Slip ’N Slide and Silly String.
When a friend told them in 1958 about a large ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version and called it the Hula Hoop.
Around the same time, they bought the rights to a plastic flying disc invented by Walter “Fred” Morrison, who called it the Pluto Platter. Wham-O bought the rights and renamed it the Frisbee.
The rest is amusement history.
“If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun,” Knerr told the Times in 1994. “But I think this country gave us more than we gave it. It gave us the opportunity to do it.”
Melin died in 2002 at age 77.
Besides his wife, Knerr is survived by three children from a first marriage that ended in divorce, two stepchildren, and eight grandchildren.
Services will be private.
Superelasticbubbleplastic was my very first drug! I loved to huff it.
