Monday, October 09, 2006

The Hastert/Foley Scandal - You Can't Spell "Timeline" Without L-I-E.

Josh Marshall and his TPMmuckrakers have put together a brief chronological narrative of what we now know and the order of each revelation:
Hastert now figures he can brazen this one out because there are so many stories floating around that people won't line them up in order and realize what they show.

Read it over and it's hard to come to any conclusion but that that Hastert and especially his Chief of Staff Scott Palmer have been caught in a lie.

I just hope that the House Republicans don't cut and run before George "34%" Bush and
Denny "-52%" Hastert have their October 12 fundraiser for Creepy Pete Roskam.

6 comments:

grand old partisan said...

"For the House leadership's story to be true, you have to believe that this is a topic that just didn't come up in the trio's many hours spent together."

To be more accurate, you have to believe that this topic was not raised by Palmer (Stokke and Hastert being unlikely to raise a topic they don't know about yet), which isn't that hard to believe at all.

So-Called Austin Mayor said...

Cermak,

The Trib's got the scoop: http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2006/10/hastert_and_the.html

-- SCAM



GOP,

Keep repeating it and perhaps one day someone will find it believable.

-- SCAM

grand old partisan said...

You don't think it's possible that Palmer would have kept this off Hastert's desk, for this exact reason?

Anonymous said...

S-CAM,

Apparently you and I merged into one or something.

Fran Eaton thinks I'm you. Now I've truly heard it all.

So-Called Austin Mayor said...

"You don't think it's possible that Palmer would have kept this off Hastert's desk, for this exact reason?"

GOP,

If this is the case, then it is due to one of two things: Either 1) Denny has arranged his office in such a way that he is deliberately kept ignorant of what is taking place in the House of Representative, or
2) Denny has arranged his office in such a way that he is inadvertently kept ignorant of what is taking place in the House of Representative.

Neither of these two management arrangements -- and they are the only two explanations possible under your scenario -- show any sign of leadership or competence on the part of Mr. Hastert.

-- SCAM

So-Called Austin Mayor said...

NW Burbs,

I believe that the confusion is due to extreme right-wingers' inability to think in non-literal terms.

For instance, you might notice that authoritarian fundamentalists have great deal of difficulty distinguishing between symbols and the concepts that the symbol represents, e.g. a red, white and blue flag and America.

In this case, two separate symbols for two separate individuals may have required too much non-literal conceptualization for Fran and her friends and may have driven them to reject the complexity of the reality, e.g. "SCAM is a pseudonym, and NWB is a pseudonym, therefore SCAM is NWB." Right-wing writings about complex subjects are littered with similar simplified -- and inaccurate -- thinking.

In addition, authoritarian fundamentalists often seem to have a hard time with metaphors -- misunderstanding the metaphor's role as a rhetorical device for comparison and, instead, mistaking the compared concepts for literal equivalents. Such subtle thinking eludes them.

One particularly curious thing about the Christian fundamentalists' inability to comprehend non-literal communication is the frequency with which Jesus Christ used non-literal and metaphorical concepts in His teachings.

His extended metaphors are called "parables."

Followers

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