Home Again

Yes, I made it back home safely. The flight from Chicago to Miami actually arrived a half-hour early.

So, what did I miss?

-- Well, some people are shocked to find out that Rush Limbaugh is a big fat racist.

LIMBAUGH: Here's [caller] in Lake Orion, Michigan. Thank you for calling. Great to have you on the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It's great to talk to you. I talked to you once before. I've been listening to you for a couple of years now, and I think I'm getting brighter, but there's a lot to be learned. I know I'm no expert in foreign affairs, but what really confuses me about the liberals is the hypocrisy when they talk about how we have no reason to be in Iraq and helping those people, but yet everybody wants us to go to Darfur. I mean, aren't we going to end up in a quagmire there? I mean, isn't it -- I don't understand. Can you enlighten me on this?

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. This is -- you're not going to believe this, but it's very simple. And the sooner you believe it, and the sooner you let this truth permeate the boundaries you have that tell you this is just simply not possible, the better you will understand Democrats in everything. You are right. They want to get us out of Iraq, but they can't wait to get us into Darfur.

CALLER: Right.

LIMBAUGH: There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur?

CALLER: Uh, yeah.

LIMBAUGH: It's black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they're in trouble.

CALLER: Yes. Yes. The black population.

LIMBAUGH: Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela -- who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing.

CALLER: It's just -- I can't believe it's really that simple.

Digby notes that this is a sign of things to come.

Rush says, "you just have to believe your own instincts from here on out," and I think we know exactly what that means. Look for more of this over the next few months as the Republicans make their case against "the Bitch," "the Black" and "the Breck girl." Limbaugh and Coulter and the boys will do this kind of crude dirty work for them, but there is going to be an awful lot of it that's way more subtle.

Yes, it's really going to be this bad.

-- And speaking of bigots, D. James Kennedy, the Jesus-shouter from Fort Lauderdale who preached intolerance and hatred against gays and turned it into a multi-million dollar mega-church thanks to sucking up to the foolish and the weak, is retiring.

The pastor, religious broadcaster, conservative activist and evangelical leader has been in and out of hospitals since Dec. 28, when he suffered a brief cardiac arrest. On Sunday, his family and church leaders made it official.

"Today I am formally announcing the retirement of my dad as the senior minister of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church," Jennifer Kennedy Cassidy, speaking for the family, told 1,700 listeners in the three-steepled white church in Fort Lauderdale.

The announcement, at a joint gathering of all three morning services, ends Kennedy's multilayered efforts to further his vision of Christianity and social values: education, prayer in schools, opposition to gay rights, and other conservative causes. His influence was felt far beyond church walls, to the halls of power in Washington, D.C., and numerous nations where ordinary people heard his broadcast messages and applied his evangelistic methods.

[...]

Kennedy's continuing problems include short-term memory loss and "loss of some cognitive skills," caused by a lack of oxygen to his brain for six to eight minutes after his cardiac arrest, said Cassidy, a registered nurse.

"He has good and bad days," she said. "Some days he's talkative; other days, he's quiet. It's hard for him to articulate his thoughts."

Far be it from me to suggest that he's had a lack of oxygen to the brain for a lot longer than that...

-- Apparently democracy in Iraq isn't working out so well.

Finally, unexpectedly, out of the blue even, we appear to have arrived at a grand cross-party consensus on Iraq: it's Nuri al Maliki's fault and he should be fired. Faced with the tough task of biting the bullet one way or another, pols across the partisan divide seem to have arrived at this as the one position they can get behind and push on the Sunday shows.

Which, of course, puts into a rather sharp relief the simple but less and less often spoken fact that Iraq is a country under foreign military occupation.

But watching the Sunday shows today -- both in what would-be-premier Allawi said as well as the comments of various US political leaders -- you see what's behind the dump Maliki movement: a crystallizing belief that democracy just hasn't panned out in Iraq and that it's time to install a strongman government that can get the country in its grip and calm things down. In Allawi's interview with Wolf Blitzer he basically make this point pretty close to explicitly.

The Allawi boomlet is the other shoe dropping on America's democratizing mission in Iraq. [Emphasis added.]

In other words, someone like...Saddam Hussein?

-- Sen. John Warner (R-VA) may bail on the Republicans when the Democrats bring back the Iraq withdrawal bill.

GOP Sen. John Warner, who wants U.S. troops to start coming home from Iraq by Christmas, said Sunday he may support Democratic legislation ordering withdrawals if President Bush refuses to set a return timetable soon.

"I'm going to have to evaluate it," Warner said. "I don't say that as a threat, but I say that is an option we all have to consider."

Warner, a former Navy Secretary and one-time chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is seen as someone who could influence the debate among senators who have grown increasingly uneasy about the unpopular war.

Warner's suggestion last week about bringing back some troops put him at odds with Bush, who has insisted that conditions on the ground should dictate any such decisions. Warner long has opposed legislation pushing for timetables.

The Virginia Republican said Sunday it would be best for the president, not Congress, to make a decision on withdrawals and that overriding a presidential veto would be difficult. But Warner made clear his view that people are losing patience with the administration's strategy in Iraq, a significant change is needed in September and troop withdrawals were the best way to accomplish that.

"That's precisely what I said to the president. I said, 'Here is an option. You can initiate a first withdrawal. You pick the number, Mr. President. And it would send a signal to the Iraqi government that matches your words,'" Warner said. "His words being, 'We're not going to be there forever.'"

"The president has got to put teeth in these comments that we're not there forever," he added.

Ouch. That's going to leave a mark.

Okay, time to go back to work.