Football PUMA, Nasty Pancakes, Rush Limb-awe

Looks like we got us a PUMA in the NFL, y’all.  Fox News is reporting that Pittsburgh Steeler James Harrison is standing firm behind his, “I won’t dance, don’t ask me” decision not to join his teammates on their upcoming “You just won the Superbowl, what are you going to do now?” trip to ObamaLand.  Harrison, unlike all those critics he has incurred against him who are delighting in questioning the Defensive Player of the Year’s motives, intelligence, and sanity, doesn’t see the invite as any kind of big deal, and said so, according to ESPN:

“I don’t feel the need to go, actually,” Harrison told Pittsburgh station WTAE-TV. “I don’t feel like it’s that big a deal to me.”

Harrison doesn’t believe the invitation is all that special, saying if the Steelers hadn’t beaten the Cardinals 27-23 with a last-minute rally, “He [Obama] would have invited Arizona.”

Of course, as a black man, Harrison is supposed to be honored to bow at the feet of the ObaMassah, as if the Undercover Brother Barackman was indeed committed to any black people he hasn’t sired or had children with, according to Tonyaa Weathersbee of Black America Web, who sees a connection between Harrison’s refusal to grovel before a conveniently kinda black president and the future of black American male youth:

And when you have a black football player who doesn’t get why it’s a big deal to get his Super Bowl congratulations from the nation’s first black president, then that speaks volumes about why many of them are so confused about so many other things.

Of course, Harrison is just one person, and it would be easy for me to write him off as the stereotypical dumb jock – as other pundits seem to be doing.

But I’m not going to do that – because too many young black males are watching. And the type of mentality that Harrison is showing right now, the type that is about attitude and not substance, is the last thing they need to be emulating.

Maybe Tonyaa should read my “Good Thing I’m Not A Civil Rights Activist” and “Black, Gay, Civil Rights and Church Fauxrage” posts for another perspective on Da ObaMassah and Da Legacy of Da Slave Driver chapter of Black American History.  For the record, as Matt Pawlikowski of the Pittsburgh Examiner points out, Harrison didn’t go see GeeBush when he won the Superbowl in 2006, either.  Harrison says he just didn’t want to go to Obie’s Fauxuntaintop, and has expressed mild annoyance and mock surprise at the media overreaction:

“I’m surprised the media is making a big deal about it,” he said. “ ’Oh my James Harrison must be a devil worshipper!, he ain’t going to the White House!”

As a PUMA, James, all I can say is, I feel ya, bruh.

Next time you consider bashing Nasty Pancakes for being a lying twitch, think of Rush Limb-awe.  I call him that because he’s obviously enthralled with Chris Matthews, his leg and all the little ObaFluffers of MSNBO.  Rush has dared the botwork to refrain from mentioning him by name for 30 days, betting the Axelrovian employees of the Omedia just can’t resist the tingly-legged pleasure of savoring his name as it escapes their lips.  While Rush is a self-deluded, P. T. Barnum-inspired lunatic, if recent memory serves, he has a point.  Besides, Limbo is obviously obsessively glomming the MSNBOts 24/7, or how the hell would he know what they’re talking about?

It’s not that the retaliatory stance is undeserved, however.  The Obministration started it when they launched a “Rush leads the Republicans” AstroTurf slander campaign in the LA Times, soon after the ObaMessiah’s inauguration/coronation.  It was a lame attempt to diminish the effect of Rush’s perfectly reasonable, bullying “eff ewe, Obie,” taunt of, “hell yeah, I hope he fails.”  Of course he does, he’s a Republican, a vocal, in-your-face Republican with a huge listening audience, to be sure, but just a Republican, after all.  However, feeling shrinkage in their nether regions, the West Wing Boyz decided to give Rush a promotion to Dick Cheney’s boss in order to try to  take the GOP down a peg.  It was stupid when the Obacrats did it, it’s just as stupid for the Limbots to return the favor now that the Bushians have consumed their own party from within.

Nasty Pancakes has an approval rating somewhere in the freezing point range of the political thermometer scale, so, anything that deflects attention from their complicity in the whole “you say waterboarding, I say torture,” debacle that can be pinned to her back like a “kick me” sign is a welcome rallying point for the Ragtag Republicans in the age of Baracko Bama manufactured, media massaged, stratospheric poll numbers.  But, before boarding the Obamacan-driven bus Nasty is being forced under, one might want to consider the role of expendable pawn one is assuming in this “CIA Never Lies,” Mo’ Drama Gopbama-produced AstroTurfing mini-playlet collaboration.   Just sayin’.

Back when the whole question of torture was the Republican rah-rah, the Democratic party was not quite in the same boat the Goopers are now, the Senate and the House were pretty evenly split.  But today, nobody on the Dem side, or the Obacrats, (a separate party in our current Democratic/Republican/Obacrat 3-party system, imo) is running p.r. campaigns accusing anyone adverse to “national security at all costs” of being UnAmerican wussies like the Bushstration was then.   Not to excuse anyone’s behavior, but I agree with Joe Cannon, re-writing history as the Republicans are doing now, and trying to point fingers and say, “she did it!” like it excuses their own barbarianism, should not be allowed to stand unchecked.  Nasty P’s got enough stuff not to like going against her, letting the Republicans use her to enhance their righteously dwindling status shouldn’t be condoned.

Is Pelosi lying?  Probably.  But, remember, the Bush administration repeatedly claimed that waterboarding was not torture, and the question of whether it is or not was debated long and hard.  Isn’t that what the whole Bybee memo brouhaha is all about in the first place?  That being said, this is what Time Magazine had to say in December, 2007:

A former CIA interrogator surfaced this week on ABC’s World News Tonight to claim that it had taken just 35 seconds of waterboarding, or simulated drowning, to break 9/11 conspirator Abu Zubaydah in 2002, who then supposedly revealed additional al-Qaeda plots and details that helped the U.S. capture other terrorists. Without elaboration, the former interrogator John Kiriakou maintained that the waterboarding had been approved by the White House. The Administration has commented, “It’s no secret the President approved a lawful program in order to interrogate hardened terrorists” — leaving unclear whether waterboarding falls within the Bush White House’s definition of lawful interrogation. Torture is forbidden under U.S. law, but Attorney General Michael Mukasey has repeatedly refused to say whether waterboarding is torture. But if Kiriakou is correct in his claims, the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah may have been recorded on the hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogation destroyed by the CIA.

Yet because the technique of waterboarding exists in a legal gray area, many members of Congress may prefer a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. Reports published this week in the Washington Post indicate that at least four members of Congress, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, received detailed briefings on interrogation techniques used in the CIA’s secret prisons, and had offered no objection. Pelosi has not denied or otherwise commented on that published claim. (emphasis mine)

So, yeah, she knew.  But so what?  So did everybody.   And everybody is trying to shift the blame to her for the exact same reason she lied in the first place; to cover their own sorry asses like they covered their monkey-see/monkey do eyes, ears and mouths all along.  This year-old Firedog Lake post includes a snippet from the November 9, 2005 New York Times showing that the CIA was fudging its own reservations about waterboarding as torture in a 2004 report:

But the current and former intelligence officials said Mr. Helgerson’s report had added to apprehensions within the agency about gray areas in the rules surrounding interrogation procedures.

“The ambiguity in the law must cause nightmares for intelligence officers who are engaged in aggressive interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects and other terrorism suspects,” said John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the agency who left in 2004. Mr. Radsan, now an associate professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, would not comment on Mr. Helgerson’s report.

Congressional officials said the report had emerged as an unstated backdrop in the debate now under way on Capitol Hill over whether the C.I.A. should be subjected to the same strict rules on interrogation that the military is required to follow. In opposing an amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, Mr. Goss and Vice President Dick Cheney have argued that the C.I.A. should be granted an exemption allowing it extra latitude, subject to presidential authorization, in interrogating high-level terrorists abroad who might have knowledge about future attacks.

I’d bet the farm that when the CIA was briefing everybody to high heaven, they stressed the “waterboarding is not technically torture, per se,” line more than once.  They probably called everybody within earshot UnAmerican wussies, too.   From the Washington Post, December, 2007:

“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’ “

Everybody should just stop lying.  Waterboarding is torture, they did it and they’ll do it again.  Noobody’s closing Gitmo without another Gitmo up and running somewhere else, under the radar; and it doesn’t matter who says what in the dueling Obama and his cousin Dick’s self-righteous, say nothing, finger pointing  speeches.  All this back and forth is just meaningless Sheeple appeasement.  There’s simply no way Nasty P. can go down for this by herself.  All she’s gotta do is lay low and ride it out.  Everybody knows that, too.

That being said, the last person, besides me, that Tough Tootsie Pelousy might want to take advice from, is giving it to her unsolicited and  free.  Mark Penn, Mr. “Caucuses? We don’t need no stinkin’ caucuses!” himself, says Infancy Nancy should just ask for a do-over.   God, I wish Hillary would stiff him and tell him to stick his bill where the sun don’t shine, while, just for one brief, shining, moment, she and the woman who backstabbed her to such disastrously ill effect, could just once, join hands and gave him the double-barreled middle finger salute he so richly deserves.

Politics and bedfellows being what they are, it could happen.

Lastly, and just for giggles, check out Jake Tapper’s mini-rant about OTV, the White House’s “transparent” attempt at an end around the media.  Seems the Celebritician’s staff banned the real pseudomedia from taking pictures of him shooting hoops with the NCAA women’s basketball champion UConn Lady Huskies team.  Like the rest of us, Jake wonders if the Spokesmodel-in-Chief is insecure enough to need even more media fluffing than he already gets.  We PUMAs coulda told him that Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Caesar!) just didn’t want to risk unedited footage leaking out of him getting his ass kicked on the court by a buncha girls.

(video here)