"There is nothing magical about a military tribunal. They don’t have necessarily better lawyers than the civilian sector. I think I have a lot more faith in our US attorneys who are nonpolitical than my colleagues on the other side of this debate. We can try them. We should try them. That is precisely, Jay, what our law provides for. And the first time we’re faced with a situation we say, “Oh we’re going to have them go to the military let them torture them for a while, it’s not enhanced interrogation technique. Waterboarding is torture! How would you like to be waterboarded? Try that!" – Bob Barr at CPAC. He was booed, of course.
Category: Awards
Malkin Award Nominee
Hewitt Award Nominee
"There is no polite way to put this: Obama's incompetence is getting people killed," – Liz Cheney, daughter of a vice-president who presided over the deaths of more than 3,000 people in New York City after being warned explicitly that al Qaeda was preparing a major attack on the United States.
Malkin Award Nominee
"This is like our Woodstock. Except unlike the left gathering, our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences, and our notion of freedom doesn't consist of snorting cocaine. Which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama,"- Jason Mattera of the Young America's Foundation, at CPAC.
Cocaine at Woodstock? Seriously? That was the drug of choice?
Hewitt Award Nominee
"I know we're not supposed to talk about Adolf Hitler but this administration is making it really, really tough to ignore some facts out there. … [T]he "Big Lie" was an expression coined by Hitler. And the "Big Lie" is exactly what all of liberalism is. … This is how the OSS described Hitler's psychology: "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or a wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong" — hello, George W. Bush and the Republicans," – Rush Limbaugh, comparing Obama's touting of the stimulus to a "Big Lie."
Malkin Award Nominee
"Thirteen months before 9/11, on the day New York City passed homosexual domestic partnership regulations, I joined a group of Rabbis at a City Hall prayer service, pleading with G-d not to visit disaster on the city of N.Y. We have seen the underground earthquake, tsunami, Katrina, and now Haiti. All this is in sync with a two thousand year old teaching in the Talmud that the practice of homosexuality is a spiritual cause of earthquakes. Once a disaster is unleashed, innocents are also victims just like in Chernobyl. We plead with saner heads in Congress and the Pentagon to stop sodomization of our military and our society. Enough is enough," – Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America.
(Hat tip: Goldblog)
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
"Washington Post Confirms We Are No Longer Capturing & Interrogating High-Value Terrorists," – Marc Thiessen, the day before news broke of the capture and interrogation of the top Taliban commander.
By 'interrogate', of course, Thiessen means torture, as understood by every legal authority in this country and the world before John Yoo's brilliance transformed the legal field. It is this kind of mediocrity, Orwellian newspeak – as well as brazen support of war crimes – that must have led Fred Hiatt to give him a weekly column in the fast-imploding Washington Post.
Hathos Alert
I confess: I've been watching American Idol again this year. I can't help myself. One of my favorites, for a whole host of reasons, was local Washingtonian and football player, Austin Paul. His audition is here. He may be the vainest douche yet seen in the history of American Idol, and it was with a measure of delight and dismay that I watched the judges refuse to send him to Hollywood. Anyway, this is just an excuse to post this fantastic piece of hathos – his own video of his own unforgettable song, Playin' The Piano Naked.
Seriously, just sit back and enjoy:
Poseur Alert
"Indigo, the bookstore in town at which I cannot afford to shop, has a hundred-dollar terran globe, highly detailed and with a mercurial sheen to its lakes, like that T-1000 guy in Terminator 2. If you angle the globe so that the lakes called great are in front and the northern and western territories of the place called Canada are in a line behind, there is a moment when suddenly the whole of Canadian history and its lost worlds shimmers into sense, and the meaningless mercator maps fall away from the back of your head, like so many psychological projections," – David Ker Thomson.
Hewitt Award Nominee
"Embryonic stem cell research is taking the concept of taking a life and using it to conduct experiments so we can temporarily extend somebody else’s life. Let me tell you what I just described. I just described what the Nazis did to the Jews in the death camps of WWII,” – Senate candidate Curtis Coleman, discussing an executive order issued by Obama.
The Dish 