Justin's Political Corner

Pete Santilli is the kind of person we normally wouldn’t cover here – an unhinged Internet ranter who exists somewhere to the crazier side of Alex Jones. Santilli’s broadcast – on which he details conspiracy theories on everything from 9/11 to Sandy Hook — doesn’t even have Jones’ audience: he describes himself as “a radio talkshow host ready to take my show to national syndication; that is, of course, if the FCC regulated AM/FM radio stations can handle my truth & honesty.”

But in the past couple of months, Santilli has attracted two major gun activists to his show: National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent, who used the opportunity to call President Obama a Nazi, and Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt, who worked with Santilli to flesh out his theory that President Obama is raising a private army to overpower the U.S. military. Pratt, in particular, is taken remarkably seriously among the GOP – he has been partially credited with taking down a background checks measure in the Senate last month.

So, we started paying attention to Santilli, and we learned pretty quickly what Nugent and Pratt felt perfectly comfortable associating themselves with. On his show last week, Santilli went on a disgusting, violent rant in which he called for the entire Bush family and President Obama to be “tried, convicted and shot” for “treason” (and in George H.W. Bush’s case “involvement with his cronies in the John F. Kennedy assassination”) and for Hillary Clinton to be “tried, convicted and shot in the vagina.”

He then went on to describe in graphic detail how he personally wanted to “pull the trigger” on Clinton – who he repeatedly referred to with a sexual slur – and watch her slowly die in revenge for what he believes was the faking of SEAL Team Six’s Bin Laden raid. 

ow about Hillary Clinton? That frickin’ assbag has not only been involved in drug trafficking out of Mena, Arkansas, okay? Not only that; and all these people try to have this plausible deniability thing, yeah sure, they’re removed, they’re just a bunch of politicians. Well, guess where they got all of the money to acquire the power that they have?

This ‘C U Next Tuesday,’ Hillary Clinton, has been involved in the killings of American troops.  Namely, the mysterious suicide of the emotionally unstable Navy SEAL commander who just so happened to be involved in all of her dealings in the Middle East, okay.  And he just mysteriously got suicided along with everyone else associated with the Clinton family. Miss Hillary Clinton needs to be convicted, she needs to be tried, convicted and shot in the vagina. I wanna pull the trigger. That ‘C U Next Tuesday’ has killed human beings that are in our ranks of our service. 

I want to remind you that in Benghazi, Miss Hillary ‘the fricken’ biggest vagina on the face of the planet’ told troops to stand down and to not go in and interfere with the operation that they set up because they’re moving arms; Barack Obama is moving drugs through the CIA out of Afghanistan and Barack Obama needs to be tried, convicted, and shot for crimes against the United States of America. And if anybody has a problem with that, then you are an enemy of our state.

..

I want to shoot [Clinton] right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say ‘on behalf of all Americans that you’ve killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS,’ … the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama bin Laden thing, that whole fake scenario - because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all - on behalf of all of those people, I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.

The full clip:

h/t: Right Wing Watch

Exposing The Myths Behind The Right-Wing’s Trumped Up Benghazi “Cover Up”

MYTH: The White House And State Department Edited References To Terrorism Out Of Talking Points For Political Purposes

FACT: The CIA Signed Off On The Changes For Tactical, Not Political Reasons. Gen. David Petraeus, former head of the CIA, testified in November that the intelligence community signed off on the final draft of the talking points, and that references to terrorist groups in Libya were removed in order to avoid tipping off those groups. [The New York Times, 11/16/12]

FACT:  President Obama Had Already Referred To The Attacks As An Act Of Terror. On September 12, President Obama  referred to the attacks as an act of terror when he spoke from the White House Rose Garden. One day later, Obama again referred to acts of terror at a campaign event. These comments undermine the myth that edits to a document that were made on September 14, after Obama had already labeled the attack an act of terror, demonstrate that the administration was trying to downplay the role that terrorism played. [Media Matters for America, 5/10/13]

MYTH: Benghazi Whistleblower Gregory Hicks Is Being Prohibited From Talking To Investigators And Members Of Congress

FACT: Hicks Was Interviewed Twice As Part Of The State Department’s Independent Internal Investigation. After Gregory Hicks sat down for an initial interview with the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, he asked for a follow-up interview to expand on issues that he felt needed amplification. And he was granted one. [Media Matters for America, 5/9/13]

FACT: Hicks Was Only Told He Was Not Allowed To Speak With A Member Of Congress Without A State Department Attorney Present. Following the attacks, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) traveled to Libya, seeking to interview witnesses and survivor, including Hicks. Hicks testified that the State Department had instructed him not to speak to Chaffetz without a State attorney present — a condition Hicks says was unusual, but which the State Department says is standard procedure. Hicks ended up speaking to Chaffetz without a State Department attorney present because, according to his testimony, the lawyer lacked the proper security clearance. [Media Matters for America, 5/9/13]

MYTH: Cheryl Mills Tried To Intimidate Hicks After His Meeting With Chaffetz

FACT: Hicks Admitted Mills Offered No Criticism Or Reprimand, Only That She Had Asked For A Report. While being questioned by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Hicks elaborated on a phone call from Cheryl Mills, at the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief-of-staff. Hicks made clear that he had received no direct criticism from Mills. It was the “tone of the conversation,” he testified, that led him to believe Mills was unhappy with him. But MSBNC reported that Philippe Reines confirmed to them that he witnessed the conversation and that it was supportive. [Media Matters for America, 5/11/13; MSNBC.com, 5/8/13]

FACT: Congressional Republicans Are Falsely Framing The Phone Call As “Threatening.” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) repeatedly asked Hicks if Mills was “upset” with him during the phone call. Hicks answered in the affirmative. After Hicks finished describing his phone call with Mills, Jordan immediately characterized it as an act of retribution for not going along with the “cover-up.” Rep. Ronald DeSantis (R-FL) told Hicks at one point that “we need to know who actually gave the order to stand down. I’d like to know why you’ve been demoted, why they — the secretary’s chief of staff called you and spoke with you the way she did.” [Media Matters for America, 5/11/13]

MYTH: Hicks Is Being Punished For Speaking Out And Has Been Demoted And Received Criticism Of His Mmanagement Style

FACT:  Hicks Testified That He Voluntarily Chose Not To Return To Libya And That The Overriding Reason Was Because Of His Family. During his testimony, Hicks said that “based on criticism that I received, I felt that if I went back, I would never be comfortable working there, and in addition, my family really didn’t want me to go back. We had endured a year of separation when I was in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. That was the overriding factor. So I voluntarily curtailed.” [House Oversight Committee Hearing, 5/8/13, via Nexis] 

FACT: Embassy Staff Told ThinkProgress That People Were Upset With Hicks’ Management Style Before The Attacks. State Department employees, who spoke to ThinkProgress on the condition of anonymity, said that the staff was upset with Hicks’ performance since he was first assigned to Tripoli on July 31. Contrary to Hicks’ claim that he was demoted out of retribution,  the sources said that Assistant Secretary Jones’ meetings with the staff prior to Oct. 2 were “entirely” focused on Hicks’ performance as a manager. [“EXCLUSIVE: Embassy Staff Undercut ‘Whistleblower’ Testimony On Benghazi,” ThinkProgress, 5/10/13]

MYTH: The White House Refused To Send A Second Team To Benghazi Because Of Political Motivations

FACT: The Decision Was Made By The Head Of The Military’s Africa Command, Who Was Concerned About Embassy Security In Tripoli. Diplomats on the ground the night of the attacks were concerned about threats to the Tripoli embassy complex, and a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that the assessment of Special Operations Command Africa leadership at the time was that “it was more important for those guys to be in Tripoli” for embassy security. [Media Matters for America, 5/09/13]

FACT: Additional Reinforcements Would Not Have Been Able To Get To Benghazi Before The Second Attack Was Concluded. Transcripts of an interview Hicks gave to congressional investigators show that he said that the flight these special forces were scheduled to take, but did not, was scheduled to take off after 6:00 a.m., local time — approximately 45 minutes after the attack at the CIA annex that killed two people. [Media Matters for America, 5/7/13]

h/t: MMFA

Those who are trying to make the Benghazi tragedy into a scandal for the Obama administration really ought to decide what story line they want to sell.

Actually, by “those” I mean Republicans, and by “the Obama administration” I mean Hillary Clinton. The only coherent purpose I can discern in all of this is to sully Clinton’s record as secretary of state in case she runs for president in 2016.

The hearing convened Wednesday by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) produced a riveting narrative of the chaotic events in Libya last September. But what was the supposedly unforgivable crime?

Did Clinton’s State Department fail to provide adequate security for the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi? In retrospect, obviously so. But the three diplomats who testified at the hearing gave no evidence that this failure sprang from anything other than the need to use limited resources as efficiently as possible.

House Republicans who voted to cut funding for State Department security should understand that their philosophy — small government is always better — has consequences. Bureaucrats have to make judgment calls. Sometimes they will be wrong.

Well, then, maybe the transgression is that administration officials, for some unfathomable reason, willfully lied when they said the attack was in reaction to an anti-Islam video produced in the United States and disseminated on the Internet.

The problem is that there were, in fact, tumultuous anti-American demonstrations taking place in cities throughout the Muslim world because of the video. President Obama labeled the Benghazi assault an act of terror almost immediately — as Mitt Romney learned in the second presidential debate — but it was hard to imagine that the attack was completely unrelated to what was happening in Cairo, Tunis, Khartoum and Jakarta.

I knew when the moment the GOP screechers were screaming about Benghazi back in September 2012 (and will go on forever), it was just another manufactured scandal to harm Obama, Clinton, and the Democrats.

h/t: Eugene Robinson at WaPo

Wednesday’s Congressional hearing on Benghazi is actually part two of the Benghazi show. Season two in the DVD box set, if you will.

Previously, on Benghazi!

Hillary Clinton, in her last appearance before Congressional committees as Secretary of State, was supposed to collapse at the feet of her GOP inquisitors, helpless before them as they posed for the cameras and delivered Fox-generated storylines. In reality, Clinton’s testimony resembled Neo from the Matrix, batting away nonsense and helping to remind the world why she has a historical legacy of her own apart from her husband.

Now with the latest dog and pony show, we will be treated to more GOP harrumphing and more Fox News alerts that will largely be about old, well-worn nonsense that the conservative media will treat as bombshells but turn out to be nothingburgers.

Pardon my grizzled cynicism, but I have seen this storyline before, with Clinton and Whitewater and breathless mumbles of scandal from the mainstream press that turned out to be nothing.

It’s all as fake as the claim that a tiny Arkansas land deal was an abuse of power. I’ve seen this show before, it sucks and it’s a perversion of our government. In other words, standard issue conservative politics.

More proof that the right-wing fearmongering about Benghazi is just a disgusting attempt to weaken Hillary Clinton’s chances for the Presidency or even the Democratic Party nomination in 2016.

H/T: Oliver Willis at The Daily Banter

Like NFL player Asante Samuel, Rush Limbaugh is a bit flummoxed about why everyone is celebrating the coming out of NBA player Jason Collins. On his show earlier this week, Limbaugh complained that there is excitement for a person’s sexuality being “rammed down everybody’s throat all the time,” but no “tolerance” for people who oppose homosexuality:

LIMBAUGH: Folks, I grew up in a family where people’s sexual orientation, preferences, whatever, weren’t even discussed. Why can’t everybody just put your sexual preferences on Facebook and call it a day? What do we need to stop everything and have a national day of celebration, or mourning (depending on your point of view), or recognition or whatever about this? This tolerance, it only goes one way. So Person X of some national stature announces his sexual orientation as gay, and applause!

It’s a great day for America. We’re really taking giant leaps ahead. If anybody says, “You know, I’m not big on that,” it’s, “You bigot! You racist! You extremist. You homophobe.” There is no tolerance at all here. Not only do these people have to publicly announce it, but everybody else has to applaud and accept it.

Limbaugh went on to juxtapose Collins’s coming out with President Bill Clinton’s scandal with Monica Lewinsky, bizarrely suggesting they were comparable stories about a person’s private sex life — in other words, if Clinton’s sex life was supposed to be private, so too should Collins’s. 

 The gay community has faced real persecution in the century since people first started coming out, and bullying, family rejection, and legal inequality continue to be significant obstacles for them. Just because opposition to LGBT equality has become the minority opinion in this country does not mean that people who hold such positions are now oppressed.

H/T: Think Progress LGBT

For much of its more than 140-year history, the National Rifle Association promoted gun ownership, shooting, and hunting as good, clean, constitutionally-protected fun. That changed in the past four decades as the NRA transformed into a hardline group closely allied with the gun industry and the conservative establishment whose only solution to gun violence is ever more guns. Watch the shift unfold in this collection of ads promoting the organization from the early 20th century to the present.

1920: “Rifle shooting is a mighty fine sport.” This Remington ad in Boys Life declared that the NRA was “a United States Government organization.” It wasn’t, but that gives you a sense of just how tight the gun group and the government once were—before the NRA entered its current state of perpetual freak-out about the feds coming for Americans’ guns. 

1970: “Hunters Beware!” Sounding more like the contemporary NRA, this ad warned about “powerful forces—possibly well-intentioned but ill-informed—working eagerly yet relentlessly to curb and eventually abolish the hunting rights, privileges and freedoms you enjoy today.” Bonus: A guest appearance by future pro football Hall of Famer Chris Hanburger.

1982: “I’m the NRA” This famous campaign, launched in 1982, was intended to demonstrate the NRA’s broad appeal. Ads included kids (such as eight-year-old BB-gun enthusiast Bryan Hardin), women, African Americans, cops, and clergy. A more recent version of the campaign has featured NRA celebrity board members Tom Selleck and Karl Malone.

Late 1980s: “Why can’t a policeman be there when you need him?” Fears about violent crime fueled these ads promoting concealed-carry laws. The notion that gun laws are ineffective because criminals break them remains a core NRA argument, as does the idea that armed citizens routinelyfend off attackers.

1995: Bill Clinton is “daffy.” With the number of hunters on the decline, you’d think the NRA would embrace high-profile recreational shooters. Yet in this poster sold to its members, the NRA unintentionally distanced itself from its longtime stance that hunting was central to gun rights, declaring that “Mr. Clinton, the Second Amendment is not about duck hunting.”

1997: “Gun rights are lost on our kids.” Heston promised to lead a $100 million, “three-year crusade…to restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place as America’s First Freedom.” For the kids, of course.

2013: “Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” All the anti-government paranoia, fear-mongering, and liberal-baiting of the past few decades culminated in this video, produced in the wake of the Newtown massacre. By opposing putting armed guards in every school in America, Obama proved himself to be “just another elitist hypocrite” whose kids are protected by the Secret Service.

H/T: Mother Jones

It didn’t take long for Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman to turn a column discussing the persecution of Christians and dissidents in Iran into a warning that President Obama is supporting a “second Holocaust.”

Klayman, who has consistently claimed that Obama is an anti-Semitic Muslim with secret Iranian ties, now argues that Obama has deliberately shown “little resistance” to Iran’s plan to orchestrate a “second Holocaust” and “has given them a carte blanche to continue their mission to eventually wipe all Christians and Jews off the face of the earth.”

Sandy Rios of the American Family Association on Friday said that she isn’t surprised that a large majority of young people support marriage equality because “our children, for the most part, have heard nothing but positive things about homosexuality and its effects.” She blamed TV shows like TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress” for making homosexuality seem “kind of fun,” saying they’ve “only painted [it] with a positive brush.”

However, Rios claimed that “those of us that have been involved in issues related to this know that there’s a very dark side” to the gay community and understand that homosexuality is a “destructive force.”

She maintained that gay rights advocates are “forcing little children to be educated, they call it educated, I’d say sexually abused by information their little ears are not ready to hear,” and once again warned that “homosexual advocacy” brings about “the raping of the innocence of our children.”

Later, she mocked media coverage of her latest statements where she speculated about Hillary Clinton’s sexual orientation by facetiously asking why people were offended by her remarks since schools now teach that homosexuality is “wonderful.”

Rios even said that we are telling children to “engage in experimental sex with their friends, you know encouraged to act out sexually with their girlfriends if they are girls and their boyfriends if they are boys,” and that Bill Clinton “loves all things sexual in general I think, homosexual or heterosexual.”

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

ngered by Sen. Rob Portman’s newfound support for marriage equality and an unofficial pro-gay rights panel at CPAC, Peter LaBarbera of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality is warning the GOP against “trying to ‘out-gay’ the Democrats.”

LaBarbera’s advises Portman and others to treat their gay family members like drug addicts rather than support them, which he says would be “like telling a loved one who is has a drug problem: ‘I love you so much that I’m going to send you a five ounces of cocaine every month, because that’s how much I care.’”

He claims Portman “kicked God to the curb” and that Hillary Clinton, who recently endorsed marriage equality, “blasphemes her Creator.”

“No nation can survive moral decay of the sort America is experiencing,” LaBarbera writes. “It is the height of folly to dumb down conservatism and jettison the wholesome dictates of the Bible and Christianity because the “Glee” Generation has a new idea about sodomy.”

In the midst of the CPAC gathering, news broke that Sen. Portman had flip-flopped on homosexual “marriage” because his 21-year-old son Will is a homosexual. Thus Portman succumbed to the emotionalism and illogic that dominate post-Christian America. Employing some awful theology, he kicked God to the curb — as is becoming habit in a land that increasingly mocks its own national motto, “In God We Trust.”

Here is a dose of Politically Incorrect truth: homosexual behavior is sinful (read: always wrong in the eyes of God), unnatural, destructive and yet – thankfully – changeable. To become homosexual-affirming because someone you love announces he or she is homosexual is the antithesis of “tough love.” It’s like telling a loved one who is has a drug problem: “I love you so much that I’m going to send you a five ounces of cocaine every month, because that’s how much I care.”

As for “gay conservatives,” beware of homosexuals like Tammy Bruce and GOProud, who sound and act much more like “gay” activists than conservatives whenever their special interest — justifying their own dysfunctional embrace of homosexuality — is involved.

As for the pro-homosexual ”Christian Left,” faithful believers must insist that homosexuality be treated like other sins in the Bible. (Have you ever heard of a “Porn-Users Pride Parade,” or been called an “adultery-phobe”?) Homosexuality is what you do, not who you are, and Jesus Christ has set many men and women free from this besetting sin. Hillary Clinton may be good at politics, but she blasphemes her Creator by using His Holy name to support her faithless push for counterfeit “marriage” based on conduct that God Himself calls an abomination.

It is the height of folly to dumb down conservatism and jettison the wholesome dictates of the Bible and Christianity because the “Glee” Generation has a new idea about sodomy. Instead, principled conservatives need to fight back against politically correct shibboleths and bravely stay the course; defend transcendent Truth against modern, secularist lies; affirm marriage (one-man, one-woman) and virtuous morality for everyone; and return to reason and the biblical idealism of yesteryear.

Porno Pete at its finest.

H/T: Brian Tashman at RWW

After wondering about UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s sexual orientation, American Family Association radio host Sandy Rios is now floating rumors that Hillary Clinton may be a lesbian following the former Secretary of State’s statement expressing support for marriage equality.

Citing Dick Morris, naturally, Rios speculated that Clinton may be a lesbian even though she “can’t confirm or deny anything.”

She added that Clinton has a “love of homosexuality” and consistently “endorsed and embraced all things lesbian and gay.” “We are being caught in this vortex of homosexual advocacy, it’s just amazing,” Rios concluded.

H/T: Brian Tashman at RWW

Last year, the tea party-affiliated group FreedomWorks recorded a promotional video that featured a fake panda performing oral sex on a woman impersonating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to a report published Thursday by Mother Jones’ David Corn.

Two female interns were chosen to participate in the video, according to the report, one wearing the panda suit and the other dressed as Clinton. The video was created ahead of the group’s FreePAC conference, which was held in late July 2012, and it was intended to be shown at the event.

More from Corn on the video:

In one segment of the film, according to a former official who saw it, Brandon is seen waking from a nap at his desk. In what appears to be a dream or a nightmare, he wanders down a hallway and spots a giant panda on its knees with its head in the lap of a seated Hillary Clinton and apparently fellating the then-secretary of state. Two female interns at FreedomWorks were recruited to play the panda and Clinton. One intern wore a Hillary Clinton mask. The other wore a giant panda suit that FreedomWorks had used at protests to denounce progressives as panderers. (See here, here, andhere.) Placing the panda in the video, a former FreedomWorks staffer says, was “an inside joke.” 

h/t: David Taintor at TPM

Texas Republican congressman Steve Stockman announced today that he is “excited to have a patriot like Ted Nugent joining me in the House Chamber” during President Obama’s State of the Union, once again confirming Stockman’s position as one of the most far-right members of Congress.

Nugent in the past has threatened to kill President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

Nugent at a National Rifle Association gathering said that if Obama and his “vile, evil America-hating administration” win re-election then “I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

He also told NRA members that Obama and other Democratic officials are “criminals” and like an animal that needs to be shot.

On Piers Morgan Tonight earlier this evening, Tea Party wingnut Dana Loesch seemed to have trouble defending her position that the Obama administration should be crucified over the Benghazi scandal. When other panelists reminded her of similar situations under the Bush administration (most notably the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq lie that lead us into a bloody and senseless war). While both Morgan and fellow panelist former Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley agreed that serious questions need to be addressed concerning the current inquiry, the current bouts of misogyny and finger-pointing by conservatives like Rand and Loesch only detract from the seriousness of the situation.

Typical of her lack of debate and communication skills, Loesch refused to concede that both Rice and Clinton faced similar scenarios, and her outrage now seems hypocritical in light of her refusal to admit their proven wrongdoing. Her hyper-partisan speech once again proves she’s not interested in actually learning the truth of what happened during that deadly September 11th attack; no, she’s only interested in furthering her own (flailing) political career at the expense of others. 

From the 01.23.2013 edition of CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight:

h/t: Peacock Panache