She needs to be censured. Harshly. At the beginning and end of every day's session for at least a month.

i never really got his working for her in the first place - i'm not saying ed rollins is immune to spin, but he's not typically over in the moonbat corner....yet he signed up to run Princess Sparklebat of Lunar Base 12's presidential campaign.

it's tangential to his slimeyness in taking the position, but...consider this for a moment. the national campaign director for Ronald (praise be unto him) Reagan was sitting on the sidelines looking for a job long enough that Michelle Bachmann could snap him up, rub her crazy all over him.

it's humorous and dismal at the same time. humorismal works.

Vodka Zombie: She needs to be censured. Harshly. At the beginning and end of every day's session for at least a month.

Or until she makes a full and public apology and retraction on the floor of the House.

/will never happen
//if there is any backlash, Republicans will just circle the wagons, and their base will eat that shiat up from upon their crosses.

Lionel Mandrake: usernameguy: "I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Sen. Joe McCarthy level," Rollins wrote in Fox News.

For Michele Bachmann and her followers (and much of the right these days), being compared to McCarthy is a compliment.

Yup..


McCarthy was right, too bad he was an angry drunk.

An excerpt from "Reexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator"
By ARTHUR HERMAN

In the 1970s, it became fashionable to deny or at least avoid mentioning this part of the historical context in which McCarthy lived and breathed. If McCarthy was guilty, the reasoning goes, then those he tormented must be innocent. David Oshinsky could publish a 597-page biography of McCarthy that contained exactly one and a half pages on the Communist Party. As late as 1994, in The Era of McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker could dismiss the charge that Julius Rosenberg gave atomic secrets to the Soviets as "uncertain," and present the Rosenbergs' conviction and execution in 1951 as just another example of anti-Communist hysteria.

Today we know better. Archival materials from the former Soviet Union have revealed that Stalin's intentions were aggressively malign and expansionist, just as America's coldest cold warriors had believed. We now know that Mao Tse-tung was not a progressive nationalist forced into the Soviet camp by American hostility and incomprehension, as revisionist scholars in the seventies like to pretend, but was a brutal and dedicated Communist who enthusiastically embraced Stalin from the beginning. Historians J. E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Ronald Radosh, Allan Weinstein, and Alexander Vassiliev have used new declassified American materials as well as Soviet sources to lay to rest any doubts about the Soviet Union's espionage activities, as well as the Communist Party's active support of it.

The declassified Venona decrypts have revealed to the public the full extent and depth of Soviet spying in America and proved that fears of Russian espionage networks at work in the highest reaches of the government were not fantasy but sober fact. Meanwhile, independent sources from iron curtain Hungary have confirmed Alger Hiss's role as a Soviet spy, just as Russian sources (including his former KGB case officer) have finally definitively established that Julius Rosenberg was a central figure in the Soviet spy network (although the importance of the material he provided on the atomic bomb, and the degree of his wife Ethel's involvement, is still under debate). Even the truth about Owen Lattimore, the most famous of McCarthy's "victims," has finally come out, thanks to a former Chinese espionage agent's memoirs and declassified FBI files, which go a long way to vindicate McCarthy's original charges. In retrospect, the cause McCarthy made his own - anticommunism - has proved to be more valid and durable than the basic assumptions of his anti-anti-Communist critics.

As a devoted Christian, you need to ask forgiveness for this grievous lack of judgment and reckless behavior."

What are we seeing here?

Is it purely damage control or is the derpier religious wingnutty side of the GOP getting a smackdown from the establishment as the schisms within the crumbling organization get wider?

/I can see McCain making the statement on his own but Crazyeyes' ex-campaign manager? Not so much.

I submitted this with a much better headline.

/Something to do with Bachmann's claim of "deep penetration" by the Muslim Brotherhood

Uh Oh Chongo Danger Island!: McCarthy was right, too bad he was an angry drunk.

Doesn't matter if he was right, what he did was indefensible.

Don't forget about Trent Franks, Louis Gohmert, Tom Rooney and Lynn Westmoreland. Trent Franks is on the judiciary committee and the armed services committee. Tom Rooney is on the committee for armed services, agriculture, and intelligence. Lynn Westmoreland is on the intelligence and financial services. And then there's Louis Gohmert who is deathly afraid of terror babies. These 5 all deserve to be punched in their respective genitals.

usernameguy: "I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Sen. Joe McCarthy level," Rollins wrote in Fox News.

For Michele Bachmann and her followers (and much of the right these days), being compared to McCarthy is a compliment.

Exactly. There's been a lot of McCarthy revisionism over the past few years to justify the behavior of the Beckerheads.

Vodka Zombie: She needs to be censured. Harshly. At the beginning and end of every day's session for at least a month.

Don't be silly. Censuring is only for really bad things, like voicing pro-choice opinions during a debate on the evils of abortion.

/But seriously, you're absolutely correct but the odds are infinitesimal.
//Hell, at least half of the TeaPublican party should be censured by now.
///And the rest should be impeached.

In retrospect, the cause McCarthy made his own - anticommunism - has proved to be more valid and durable than the basic assumptions of his anti-anti-Communist critics.

The fact that more recently released documentation indicates that the Russians were spying on the US more than some thought doesn't really do much to excuse McCarthy's overzealous actions which, to be honest, were more reminiscent of the type of purges usually found in the communist countries he allegedly deplored than what one would hope to find in the "land of the free".

Historical revisionism is also something the USSR knew a little something about.

/Texas Schoolbooks FTL.

WhyteRaven74: Uh Oh Chongo Danger Island!: McCarthy was right, too bad he was an angry drunk.

Doesn't matter if he was right, what he did was indefensible.

He believed his work protected Americans from a greater evil nonetheless.

The best and most generous estimate is that during the entire decade of the red scare, ten thousand Americans lost their jobs because of their past or present affiliation with the Communist Party or one of its auxiliary organizations. Of those who lost their jobs, two thousand worked in the government, and in perhaps forty cases McCarthy himself was directly or indirectly responsible for their being fired. In only one case - that of Owen Lattimore - can anyone make the argument that McCarthy's allegations led to any actual legal proceedings, and there a judge eventually threw out most of the indictment. Paradoxically, the fact that McCarthy never sent anyone to prison is also turned against him; opponents claimed that during his entire career, he never actually exposed a single spy or Communist - a claim that is manifestly untrue, as we will see.

In fact, the number of people who did spend time in prison remained small. A grand total of 108 Communist Party members were convicted under the antisubversion provisions of the Smith Act, which Congress passed in 1941 (long before McCarthy was a member) and applied as equally to Nazi and fascist organizations as it did to Communists. Another twenty Communist Party members were imprisoned under state and local laws. Fewer than a dozen Americans went to jail for espionage activities (one of them being Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury). Exactly two were sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

We need to contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941. None had the benefit of any genuine legal protection; Stalin's secret police seized, interrogated, and sentenced the lot. The KGB states that of that number, 681,692 were executed in 1937-1938 alone. Taken with the four or five million people who died in Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-1933, the total number of human beings executed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved to death in those years comes to ten to eleven million. These are official KGB numbers released at the end of the cold war. They are almost certainly low. And during all the years when this was taking place, men and women like Trumbo, Robeson, and Hellman insisted that Stalin was the just and compassionate father of his people, asserted that Soviet citizens enjoyed a freedom and happiness unknown in American society, and celebrated the Soviet Union as the model society for the future. Others, such as Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, Martin Sobell, and Steve Nelson, willingly served the Stalinist regime, as other espionage agents or as part of the Communist underground apparatus.

Lionel Mandrake: usernameguy: "I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Sen. Joe McCarthy level," Rollins wrote in Fox News.

For Michele Bachmann and her followers (and much of the right these days), being compared to McCarthy is a compliment.

Yup...

[4.bp.blogspot.com image 400x358]

But, on the bright side, McCarthyism isn't just for white men anymore!!

Man I would go and piss on that grave. Well worth the public urination charges

Fluorescent Testicle: ... should be should have been censured by now.

/FTFM.
//Grammar Nazi-ing my own posts.

If someone's religion is open game, is a 'Larry Craig husband' like Marcus Bachmann as well?

thatboyoverthere: Lionel Mandrake: usernameguy: "I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Sen. Joe McCarthy level," Rollins wrote in Fox News.

For Michele Bachmann and her followers (and much of the right these days), being compared to McCarthy is a compliment.

Yup...

[4.bp.blogspot.com image 400x358]

But, on the bright side, McCarthyism isn't just for white men anymore!!

Man I would go and piss on that grave. Well worth the public urination charges

While you're at it piss on FDR's grave for the internment of American citizens while looking a blind eye at the plight of the Jews. Piss on Truman for the 100,000 civilians killed in the Fire bombing of Tokyo and the countless who starved due to his politically motivated hesitation to appoint the right man for food distribution in post war Europe. Piss on Eisenhower. His Interstate Highway bill destroyed ethnic urban neighborhoods and allowed the dismantling of an efficient public transportation system which led to our suburban blighted oil dependent society. It's difficult to lead without deserving your fair share of piss.

Uh Oh Chongo Danger Island!:
(quoting some derp) In retrospect, the cause McCarthy made his own - anticommunism - has proved to be more valid and durable than the basic assumptions of his anti-anti-Communist critics.

Lots of people were anti-Communist in those days. It was the cold war. But McCarthy, even if he may have started out with purely ideological aims (which I doubt), ended up as a power-mad dog biting everything in sight. He was just making it up as he went along at that point, and his definition of "Communist" had devolved to mean "anyone who opposes me". That modern conservatives want to rehabilitate him only shows how utterly bankrupt they are.

One could easily argue that by associating "communist hunting" with "ruthless insanity", he may have actually hindered efforts to locate Soviet agents in the US. But the cold war was a crazy time in so many ways...

rynthetyn: It seems like we're at the point now where if Mao was a capitalist these idiots would probably be praising the Cultural Revolution. This us vs. them paranoia is causing them to defend all kinds of horrible things in American history while rushing head long in to repeating them.

If Obama ever comes out against global thermonuclear war, we'll all be dead within a week.

thamike: [a3.ec-images.myspacecdn.com image 510x412]

GAH! DAFUQ is that? Is that Human????

MorrisBird: Uh Oh Chongo Danger Island!: We need to contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941.

No. No, we don't. We need to recognize evil in our midst. Revisionist history is fun and all, but . . . Michelle Bachman is clinically insane. She nearly started an international incident with her paranoid ramblings and she needs help. We are not the former Soviet Union. We do not need to be compared to them. This woman needs to stop before she hurts herself or somebody else.

THIS. Saying McCarthy was ok because those other guys are worse is like arguing that it's ok to beat your wife because women in Afghanistan get beheaded. Also, white knighting McCarthy? Really?