...[a] spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said Linder's decision to retire is another blow to House Republicans' aspirations in this midterm election year.Donkey, please! John Linder, architect of the Fair Tax, has been in office since taking over from his predecessor, Bob Barr. This is the district whose idea of a Democrat was sending wookie-suited John Bircher Larry MacDonald off to Washington until the commies shot him down over the Sea of Japan. The burghers of Gwinnett are suddenly going to... what? Go all Cynthia McKinney on you or something?
Books. Bikes. Boomsticks.
“I only regret that I have but one face to palm for my country.”
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Donkey, please!
Representative John Linder, from the north Atlanta 'burbs, has announced he's retiring. CNN reports that...
Another blow? Was there a first? Wasn't aware that Baghdad Bob had finally found gainful employment with the DCCC.
ReplyDeleteLike that was even a possibility this November for them.
ReplyDeleteGmac
Bonus! Video of Larry MacDonald taking on left-wing pinko NWO conspirator Pat Buchanan. (Because compared to Larry, Paddy Buchanan was a left-wing pinko.)
ReplyDeleteWe need more crazy in Congress.
WOW! I really like that Larry McDonald guy. It's too bad that they don't make donks like that anymore.
ReplyDeleteHe may have been the last congresscritter who was fully briefed in on the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. (Other than the ones who were participating in said conspiracy.)
ReplyDeleteWait, the plane a rabid anti-communist who believed in a worldwide communist conspiracy was riding on was shot down by the Soviet Union? Someone who was a fierce critic of the Soviet Union, someone who constantly inserted documentation of their crimes into the Congressional record just happened to be on an airplane they shot down. By accident.
ReplyDeleteCan you blame the Wookie suiters? Can you really? Is it not plausible that Yuri freaking Andropov would order the shoot down as some kind of power game? I don't think there's any evidence, but it's not an implausible theory. Which, you know, is just a theory.
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
Tempting as the theory is (and I used to believe it myself), it falls apart on the question of cui bono?
ReplyDeleteGiven how close we were to the brink in '83, culminating in the Able Archer festivities late in the year, I don't think the russkies were trying to bag a congressman.
Did they think it was a spy plane? Yes. Did they know it was also an airliner? Most likely. Did they realize there was a congressman aboard, and specifically which one? Doubtful.
Put Bob Barr back in, I say. Or, I'll send Price over there, and Barr can take my district. Need some mutations in the political gene pool now and then, keep it stirred up.
ReplyDeleteLook, the one thing that worked in the USSR was the KGB. I mean, I know it's fashionable to poo poo McCarthy but he was right. There were and are outright Communists in the American government. From Henry Wallace to Van Jones, they've been infiltrating for as long as there have been Communists. Like cockroaches, there's always a few in the walls. Best you can do is keep them out of the Cheerios.
ReplyDeleteSo is it really implausible that some staffer leaked to a friend at the Soviet consulate the travel plans of a Congressman, thinking it would do no harm, knowing that their good friend Ivan truly desired peace, not like that idiot buffoon actor who dared to occupy the White House?
How about they did it just to see how Reagan would react to the shootdown of an airliner and the death of a Congressman? I mean, this is the Soviet Union. They wouldn't think twice about doing that just to goad the US. Remember the ChiComms forcing down the Navy patrol plane early in 2000? Just to see how W would handle himself. Besides, fact is totalitarians do a lot of weird things for not much reason at all.
The whole conspiracy arguing it was forced down either in the water or land interests me even more. Let's it was shot down say the Soviets gave us the wrong coordinates so they could examine the wreckage in private. Or plant some kind of ELINT pod on it and cry to the world press about nefarious American spies (a fuel tank with USA on the side would be all the NYT needed to decry Reagan)
Yet it's just gone. The plane has never been found....which makes me less skeptical of the whole "passengers disappearing into the GULAG" thing. I mean the nation that threw whole tribes into prison camps certainly wouldn't mind doing that to 260 people. If the plane was shot down, how come they never found it? Yeah the ocean is a big place...but surely the combination of modern air traffic control radar and the naval ships that combed the area with sonar should have found something. But it's just gone. I don't know. Stranger things have happened.
As I said, I once believed exactly that.
ReplyDeleteBut the more I studied it, the more convinced I've become that it was a cockup, with Ivan smoking what he thought was an ELINT a/c.
Besides, the KGB at the time was A) Up to its elbows pulling strings in various Western European peace movements, trying to put a rift in NATO over the "Euromissile" situation, and B) Anxiously counting lit windows at Western embassies as part of Plan RYAN because they were painfully aware of their vulnerability to a first strike, which is why they were extremely paranoid and hair-triggery when Able Archer '83 went down.
There's a pretty fascinating account of the KAL 007 fiasco in a book called "Fulcrum", written by a former Soviet MiG-29 pilot who defected. (He says it was ordered by PVO-think Air Nat'l Guard-to cover up the fact that their radars had been destroyed by a storm, and save embarrassment of admitting that a sensitive air base had been rendered "blind".
ReplyDeleteThe book also has some good bits about the Chernobyl disaster, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If you can find it, it's a pretty good read.