Bergdahl's father appears to have been a lifelong Republican

As said before, there may not be a bigger disgrace to suffer by those conservatives that have called this man and his son every nasty name in the book.

In June 2010, Robert Bergdahl, the father of released American POW Bowe Bergdahl, gave a speech at an Idaho Republican Party fundraiser. In one of his first public appearances during his son's five-year captivity, he asked the conservative audience to show compassion for his son's captors—and, in a twist that foretold the plot of Homeland—he alleged that the United States had killed one of those captor's children with a drone strike.

In the past week, Bowe Bergdahl’s case has grown into a full-blown political firestorm. The 2010 speech was not televised, but it was one of the first sparks. It was Robert Bergdahl's first turn as either a tool or technician of national politics in his family's struggle.

The Idaho fundraiser was an election year event, and the day's other speakers—Idaho Senator Jim Risch, then-national-party-chairman Michael Steele, radio host Dennis Prager, and a belligerent stand-up comic named Eric Golub—took the usual shots at President Obama and rallied partisans to donate money to November's cause. (I covered the event as a reporter for AOL News.)

"There are many things that can hurt America," Senator Risch said. "Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban—they can all hurt us. But they can't destroy us. This [Obama] Administration can destroy us."

I expect the criticisms of Bergdahl's father to quickly go mute.  You'll be able to measure the silencing of the fauxtrage by how soon (or late) they get the news.

"I grew up in a conservative family in Los Angeles," he said with a smile. "My father was for Goldwater. He wore a Nixon button in our liberal Jewish neighborhood. I was the lone U.C. Santa Barbara surfer who voted for Ronald Reagan." Many in the audience nodded in approval, and then Bergdahl talked about the work of retrieving his son.

Keep reading if you want a profound lesson in the nuances of war, supporting the troops, and all that.

The only thing I have left to wonder about is if this episode is enough humiliation for conservatives to simply STFU.  And the saddest part is that I doubt that it is.

A Triple Crown at last?

Heart says yes, head says no.  The guru, Steve Beyer, from DRF.com.

Over the past three decades, as the public has cheered for horses to win the Belmont Stakes and complete a sweep of the Triple Crown, some racing purists have been reluctant to lend their voices to the chorus.

Those of us who remember the last three colts to accomplish the feat – Secretariat (1973), Seattle Slew (1977), and Affirmed (1978) – know that they were giants in the greatest era of Thoroughbred racing in America. It would have been almost sacrilegious to put the names of runners such as Charismatic, Real Quiet, War Emblem, and Funny Cide on a short list along with the sport’s immortals.

But as California Chrome tries to become the first horse since Affirmed to sweep the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont, the old worries about blemishing the list of Triple Crown winners hardly seem relevant. After 11 horses since 1979 have lost bids for the Triple Crown in the Belmont Stakes, any horse who accomplishes the sweep will deserve praise and respect – and a place in history.

If this happens Saturday, it couldn’t happen at a better time. The sport has been beset with so many problems that it needs a positive story. What better story could there be than one with a rags-to-riches hero like the ill-bred California Chrome?

The colt has generated excitement, superlatives, and high expectations, and it is hard for many fans to assess his Triple Crown bid dispassionately. But handicappers should not be swayed by sentiment. They are supposed to look at horses and races with cold-eyed objectivity. And an objective analysis would conclude that California Chrome is not the standout that the public thinks he is.

He's not.  In fact this crop of three-year-olds may be the weakest in all of horse racing's long history in terms of speed.  Chrome has still been good enough to beat all comers, but today's finale is longer by a furlong than the Derby.  And in both Derby and Preakness, he was losing ground to a hard-charging second place finisher.  Ominous.

...California Chrome’s edge is almost certain to shrink – or disappear – at the longer distance of the Belmont. California Chrome was tiring at the end of the 1 1/4-mile Derby and was hard-pressed to maintain his margin over Ride On Curlin in the Preakness. It is hard to imagine that he will be as good at 1 1/2 miles.

The four principal challengers Saturday all appear better suited to the distance than the favorite.

Those four are Commanding Curve (who came out of nowhere and blew up everybody's exacta picks in the Derby), Ride on Curlin (third and closing in Kentucky, second and closing in Maryland), Wicked Strong, and Tonalist.

History suggests that California Chrome will face another disadvantage besides the Belmont’s distance. Not only is winning the Triple Crown difficult, but merely running in all three races is tough for modern-day horses. In the last 12 years, only a single horse has won the Belmont after competing in both the Derby and the Preakness. During that period, six horses ran in the Derby, skipped the Preakness, and won the Belmont. The extra rest is clearly an important edge.

Wicked Strong has that extra rest, plus solid credentials. He was considered California Chrome’s main rival in the Derby, but he couldn’t overcome the outside post in the field of 19. Hung wide at the first turn, he never got into striking position and found himself in heavy traffic throughout the stretch run. Even so, he lost by less than six lengths. The Belmont figures to be very different race.

My Belmont Stakes picks: 1. Wicked Strong. 2. Tonalist. 3. Commanding Curve.

I think that order of finish is as crazy as a Texas Republican convention delegate, but we'll see.

I would be happy to be wrong. But in view of the difficulty of the Belmont’s distance, the possibility that he won’t have another easy trip as he did in his prior races, and the relative freshness of his challengers, California Chrome has too many obstacles to overcome. If he does surmount them, the sport will rightly hail a worthy champion.

Truly.  I cannot discount the favorite, so he'll be in my exotic mix.  I'll throw on the three Beyer likes above, and try to work in General A-Rod, who'll be going off at a long price and will pop if he hits the board.

A day at the races is better than any day at the office, win or lose.

"Chickens for Colonel Sanders", Houston chapter

"Roaches for Raid" is really more precise.  I appreciate Chris Busby's struggles, but I have seen this movie before, and it always ends the same way.

Politics these days is often about black and white, or more accurately, red and blue. Saviors and demons. Labels, not issues. Sound bites, not sound ideas. Falling in line. Or falling out of favor.

And then you have Chris Busby.

[...]

At the University of Houston, the political junkie aligned with the Democratic Party, mostly because of gay rights. He voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, but the stimulus and his disagreement with much of the party platform led to a break from politics.

Then, after the local chapter of the gay-friendly Log Cabin Republicans collapsed, Busby says he decided to help resurrect it. He doesn't agree with every popular Republican stance. On fiscal issues and guns, he's firmly on the right. But he's against the death penalty because he believes it can't be administered fairly. He opposes abortion rights but will back candidates, such as state Rep. Sarah Davis, who do support abortion rights.

Yeah, Busby and I agree on breaking with Obama but probably disagree on the specifics; I thought the stimulus was much too small to be effective.  And we could start and end with the hypocrisy of a person fighting for his own marriage rights while opposing reproductive choice for women, but there's lots of layers to this stinky little onion.

The obvious question for Busby is why he wants to align himself with a party full of so many people who don't want him - a party that, once again this year, denied Log Cabin Republicans a booth at the ongoing state convention in Fort Worth.

He has plenty of answers. One he delivered with a chuckle: "There is a much greater chance in my opinion that the work I do in the Republican Party will eventually change the party's stance to be more equal and open than my participation in the Democrat Party would ever bring about a balanced budget."

Ha Ha Ha.

He says the Bible-thumpers don't bother him. As a young man struggling with his sexuality he found only strength in his Christian faith.

"I've never been a literalist," he said, explaining that Jesus' message of love resonates with him more powerfully than Leviticus' instructions on shellfish and the passages on homosexuality.

"There's just never been in my life any reason to think that two men or two women falling in love is anything that approaches wrong," he says.

And he says there are plenty of Republicans, especially the ones under 40, who agree with him.

Sure, "it's disheartening," Busby says, that Texas Attorney General and Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott has vowed to defend Texas' gay marriage ban. But, Busby will support Abbott because he believes he'd do a better job than Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.

What a thoughtful paradox this young man is.  Meanwhile, in Fort Worth...

The Texas Republican Party would endorse psychological treatment that seeks to turn gay people straight under a new platform partly aimed at rebuking laws in California and New Jersey that ban so-called "reparative therapy" on minors.

A push to include the new anti-gay language survived a key vote late Thursday in Fort Worth at the Texas Republican Convention where, across the street, tea party star U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz fired up attendees at a rally to defend marriage as between a man and a woman.

Under the new proposed plank, the Texas GOP will "recognize the legitimacy and efficacy of counseling, which offers reparative therapy and treatment for those patients seeking healing and wholeness from their homosexual lifestyle."

Restorative, reparative, conversion therapy -- whatever name it goes by these days -- has been completely discredited in the scientific community.  But why would science be persuasive in any conceivable way to Texas Republican convention delegates?

Gay conservatives in Texas could still emerge with a rare victory on a separate issue: removing decades-old platform language that states, "Homosexuality tears at the fabric of society." Stripping that phrasing survived a sometimes-tense challenge from hardliners who not only wanted to preserve it, but wanted to replace "homosexuality" with "sexual sins."

"I really beg my social conservative colleagues to let this issue go," said Rudy Oeftering, a Dallas businessman and vice president of the gay Republican group Metroplex Republicans. "It's your opinion. It's your belief — but it's my life."

If that's considered a victory for the tolerant among the GOP faithful...

As for Delegate Oeftering, he appears to have committed the unpardonable sin of employing the Annise Parker rationale in his argument.  Take him outside the hall and stone him to death.

Honestly, I don't think every single LGBTQ needs to be a Democrat.  There's plenty of room in the Green and Libertarian parties for them to feel welcome.  In fact there are leadership positions available.

But any non-straight person who's voting for Republicans anywhere on the ballot needs to have their head examined (pun in-fucking-tended).  This is the most pathetic, self-loathing, glaring, obvious, against-your-own-self-interest political action that a person can take.  In context, you can almost understand why economically struggling suburbanites buy into the conservative fantasy of tax cuts stimulating job creation.

Not quite, but almost.

It would make more sense as a declarative statement if Busby ate one of his guns in the middle of Richmond Avenue, outside the Harris County Republican headquarters, than it would be to vote for their candidates.

I don't want to imply that Busby should commit suicide over his political cognitive dissonance.  He should however come to his senses about it.

Chris Busby is not ever going to influence anything in any measurable way in the TXGOP.  It's never going to happen.  Never, ever.  Thinking that he can, or will, or even might in the smallest measure is the epitome of delusional behavior.  And I hope someone shakes him awake, sooner than later.

Anniversaries

-- The 70th, of the D-Day invasion of Europe, which for this nation began on France's beaches.

Seventy years after Allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy, President Barack Obama returned Friday to this hallowed battleground in what he called a "powerful manifestation of America's commitment to human freedom" that lives on in a new generation.

"Our commitment to liberty, our claim to equality, our claim to freedom and to the inherent dignity of every human being — that claim is written in the blood on these beaches, and it will endure for eternity," Obama said on a morning that dawned glorious and bright over the sacred site he called "democracy's beachhead."

You'd have thought that resentful conservatives who chose to throw tomatoes at Bowe Bergdahl and his family could have at least looked at a freaking calendar, and perhaps come to the conclusion that the timing of their assault on decency -- between Memorial Day and this day -- was poorly planned.

But no.

-- The 45th, of Houston's Intercontinental airport.

(It) was promoted as the "world's first supersonic jet airport" and one "so big it will have electronic trains to speed passengers between connecting flights." A local magazine, looking back on the opening a year later, said it represented "tomorrow's aviation."

[...]

David Robertson, then 5 but destined to work for the local airport system one day, remembers standing on the observation deck during his tour of the new complex, which had two terminals in the middle of a former cow pasture in an undeveloped area in north Houston.

"We were so excited to see the airport," he said. "It resembled to me, as a kid, what space stations would look like."

A month before Apollo 11 reached the moon under the guidance of Mission Control in Houston, space exploration was on the young man's mind as he toured the lobbies, with sleek black and white color schemes, and the mod furniture in the waiting rooms and baggage areas. He was impressed by the underground train that connected the terminals.

"In the late 1960s, there was still an element of fascination with flying," he said. "I thought by the time I was a teenager I'd be making space trips to the moon. I was sure that's where we were heading."

I can't get over those wide open spaces in the parking lots.

We flew out of Intercontinental a few years after its grand opening on a family vacation to Orlando and Disney World, a period in time when people wore their Sunday best on airplanes, and when -- because there was no such thing as credit cards -- everybody showed up at the airport to pay for their flight with a walletful of hundred dollar bills.

It was a different world.

Conservatives plumb new low in disgraceful attacks on Bergdahl, family

This is as miserable and sorry as they have ever been.  I'm sure they can find a way to dig deeper at some point, but for now... congratulations, assholes.  You've hit the depths of the Mariana Trench.

When an emotional Jani and Robert Bergdahl strode into the White House Rose Garden on Saturday to the share the emotional announcement by President Obama that their son, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl would be returning home after being held captive for five years by the Taliban, it's unlikely they could have foreseen that their family would soon be under  attack by the right-wing media, or that Robert Bergdahl would be depicted on Fox News as a possible terrorist sympathizer; mocked on national television as he awaited a reunion with his ailing son.

They couldn't have foreseen it because I don't think it's ever happened before. I don't think we've ever seen a dedicated media campaign to not only undermine a returning prisoner of war, but to also cast doubt onto the soldier's family; to portray them as un-American even as they prepare for their reunion.

Instead, Fox News has helped transform the prisoner swap involving Taliban detainees into "an increasingly vicious partisan issue," as Buzzfeed described the Republican decision to go into  relentless attack mode, complete with enlisted publicists and strategists, to subvert the return of an American POW.

It's symptomatic of a conservative media mini-mob that now obsessively politicizing everything, and does it all with the knob turned up to 11. 

There was no epithet left wanting, no smear unused.

(T)his was a typical headline from one right-wing site this week: "Bergdahl: From POW to POS?", while The Drudge Report condemned the soldier as a "rat." As blogger Charles Johnson noted, by Tuesday, conservatives at Hot Air and Breitbart had posted no less than 42 Bergdahl items/rants between them. 

On Fox, the debate over whether Bergdahl deserted his post had long ago been settled, so they quickly moved onto the next phase of the campaign, which was suggesting, without any proof, that the U.S. soldier was actually a Taliban sympathizer who might have fought against American forces. "Can you imagine if it turns out that he was actually collaborating," Brian Kilmeade wondered out loud on Fox.

They went after his father's beard, for fuck's sake.

That mindset begins to explain why Kilmeade talked about Bowe Bergdahl's father this way:

I mean, he says he was growing his beard because his son was -- because his son was in captivity. Your son's out now. If you really don't, no longer want to look like a member of the Taliban, you don't have to look like a member of the Taliban. Are you out of razors?

The phrase 'dripping with contempt' barely covers the tasteless attack Kilmeade launched against a father who'd just spent every day of the previous five years trying to secure his son's release. For Fox talkers, that human element is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, Fox contributor Laura Ingraham stressed "More revelations coming out about the left-wing father of Sergeant Bergdahl I mean, left wing doesn't even begin to describe him." So being 'left wing' means you should be mocked while you await your son's return from a Taliban prison?

Taking the cue from the douchebags in conservative media, the Republick politicians sprayed Axe all over themselves to try to mask the foul odor of their reeking hypocrisy.

Recall that Republican Senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte were in favor of bringing Bergdahl home -- until President Obama achieved it. In December, Allen West sneered that the Obama wasn't working hard enough to recover Bergdahl because there were "no camera highlights in it for him"; now that Obama has done so, West says he should be impeached.

So for the ODS sufferers, it's a win-win.  They get to attack Obama for securing a POW's release when they would have been able to attack Obama for leaving a POW behind, or die in custody, if he had not acted.

There may never be a more disgraceful moment for Republicans and conservatives than how they have treated Bowe Bergdahl and his family.  Unfortunately for all of us, however, the worst conservatives in the nation are holding their state convention in Dallas this weekend, and we should expect a rousing game of "Hey, watch this!" from them.  A showdown between the Open Carry Texas goons and the RPT security team assigned to keep them out?  More Abortion Barbie posters?

Use you imagination.  How much lower can Texas Republicans go, with the bar now set in the gutter?  Wading into the sewer isn't beneath them, as they have shown us before.  Septic tank dive, anyone?

Update: Said with a bit more incredulousness than me.