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Well, this is nice.  Here’s the follow up to the piece Mother Jones ran yesterday on Glenn Beck.

On Wednesday, Mother Jones‘ Stephanie Mencimer reported that Glenn Beck’s tale of holding George Washington’s first inaugural address, which he recounted at his “Restoring Honor” rally, is—get this—not true. We accompanied the story with a great photoillustration by blogger Mario Piperni. (Piperni gave us permission.) The image, as you can see here, combines Beck and Washington into one character. We love it. But as you can see below, we’re not the only ones:

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Conspicously, Beck didn’t address his George Washington fib. Nor did he give Piperni credit for the image. But we wanted to make sure you had the full story. Anyway: glad you like the image, Glenn!

Cool.  I wonder if Glenn would like this one too?

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Or this one?

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An interesting read in Vanity Fair on the Sound and Fury we know as Sarah Palin.

Palin and the crowd might as well be one. She’s glad to be here with the people of Independence, Missouri, “where so many of you proudly cling to your guns and your religion”—the first laughline in a 40-minute stump speech that alludes to many of the perceived insults she and her audience have suffered together, and that transforms their resentments into badges of honor. Palin waves her scribbled-on palm to the crowd, proclaiming that she’s using “the poor man’s teleprompter.” Of the Obama administration, she says, “They talk down to us. Especially here in the heartland. Oh, man. They think that, if we were just smart enough, we’d be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell ’em, and I do tell ’em, Oh, we’re plenty smart, oh yeah—we know what’s goin’ on. And we don’t like what’s goin’ on. And we’re not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.”

[...]

Behind the curtain, Piper plays with other children, oblivious to the speech. She runs in circles, plays hide-and-seek, poses for snapshots, and generally acts as if she were in another world—until she gets the signal to do her job: march to the podium, pick up Palin’s speech, and allow Palin to make a public display of maternal affection.

On cue, Piper parts the curtain. As the child appears, a loud and doting “Awww” melts through the crowd.

Sarah Palin’s connection with her audience is complete.

[...]

…anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.

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Colleen Cottle, who is the matriarch of one of Wasilla’s oldest families, and who served on the city council when Palin was mayor. She says she and her husband, Rodney, will pay a price for speaking candidly about Palin. Their son is one of Todd Palin’s best friends. “But it is time for people to start telling the truth,” Colleen says. She describes the frustrations of trying to do city business with a mayor who “had no attention span—with Sarah it was always ‘What’s the flavor of the day?’ ”; who was unable to take part meaningfully in conversations about budgets because she “does not understand math or accounting—she only knows buzzwords, like ‘balanced budget’ ”; and who clocked out after four hours on most days, delegating her duties to an aide—“but he’ll never talk to you, because he has a state job and doesn’t want to lose it.” This type of conversation is repeated so often that Wasilla starts to feel like something from The Twilight Zone or a Shirley Jackson short story—a place populated entirely by abuse survivors.

The more you find out about who Sarah Palin is, the more justifiable one’s dislike for her becomes and the greater the difficulty in understanding the motivation behind the people who admire her…the people who write stuff like this.

“We would literally walk across hot broken glass for this woman… She’s our family, and you protect your family; it’s like the mafia.”

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Cameron (Cam) Cardow, Canada The Ottawa Citizen
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Patrick Chappatte
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Bill Day, Tennessee
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Just to give the matter a bit of perspective.

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This NY Times editorial hits all the right notes.

The speech also made us reflect on how little Mr. Bush accomplished by needlessly invading Iraq in March 2003 — and then ludicrously declaring victory two months later.

Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction proved to be Bush administration propaganda. The war has not created a new era of democracy in the Middle East — or in Iraq for that matter. There are stirrings of democratic politics in Iraq that give us hope. But there is no government six months after national elections.

In many ways, the war made Americans less safe, creating a new organization of terrorists and diverting the nation’s military resources and political will from Afghanistan. Deprived of its main adversary, a strong Iraq, Iran was left freer to pursue its nuclear program, to direct and finance extremist groups and to meddle in Iraq.

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There was no victory to declare last night, and Mr. Obama was right not to try. If victory was ever possible in this war, it has not been won, and America still faces the daunting challenges of the other war, in Afghanistan.

For this day, it was worth dwelling on this milestone in Iraq and on some grim numbers: more than 4,400 Americans dead and some 35,000 wounded, many with lost limbs. And on one number that American politicians are loath to mention: at least 100,000 Iraqis dead.

Exactly.  And most important of all…

President George W. Bush tried to make Iraq an invisible, seemingly cost-free war. He refused to attend soldiers’ funerals and hid their returning coffins from the public. So it was fitting that Mr. Obama, who has improved veterans’ health care and made the Pentagon budget more rational, paid tribute to them.

“At every turn, America’s men and women in uniform have served with courage and resolve,” he said on Tuesday night. He added: “There were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hope for Iraq’s future.”

And yet right-wing media types are complaining this morning that the President did not pay tribute to George Bush for implementing the surge.  Amazing.  These people will never acknowledge the damage done by Bush’s immoral war.

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It’s always nice to see one of my illustrations up on a site like Mother Jones.

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R.J. Matson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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David Fitzsimmons, Arizona Daily Star, Tucson AZ
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Steve Breen — The San Diego Union-Tribune
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NYmag has a great piece on how Park51 was chosen as the site for the Islamic community center.

Why stir up all those ghosts, revisit the horror of those sad days? Was this the best way for the Muslim-American community to stitch itself into the grand mosaic of the city, to demonstrate that the followers of Islam were regulation Jills and Joes like the next caterwauling Yankee fan? I mean, how clueless, how tone-deaf could you be?

When I expressed this sentiment to Sharif El-Gamal, the owner of 45–51 Park Place, a nicely turned out, urbane 37-year-old real-estate man who has been buying and selling buildings in Manhattan for the past dozen years, he shook his head with a barely restrained impatience.

“Listen,” said El-Gamal, “do you have any clue how the Manhattan real-estate market works, what is involved? People seem to think that we picked that building to make some kind of point. But that is simply insane. This is New York; no matter who you are, you just don’t choose a building, move in, and take over. Do you know how many places I looked at? I looked at Chambers Street. I looked at Vesey Street, Broadway, Greenwich Street, Warren Street, Murray Street. Maybe half a dozen more, I can’t even remember now. It was only after all that that Park Place came up. Even then, it was the most grueling negotiation of my life. So many times I told myself, Wow, this just isn’t worth it. One minute the deal was on, eight months later it was off. The whole thing almost drove me nuts.”

But didn’t he think twice before buying a building so close to ground zero? Didn’t he suspect that he was putting himself at the center of a hornets’ nest?

“No,” said El-Gamal, who was born at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn and, after some world travels in the company of his father, a Chemical Bank executive, attended New Hyde Park High School in Nassau County. “It never entered my mind,” he said. “Not for a second.”

The story of how he came to 45–51 Park Place began on 9/11, Sharif El-Gamal said. “I was eating in a diner at 61st and Second Avenue when I heard about the planes, and I just started going down there. Everyone was going the other way, but I kept walking. Someone had attacked my country, my city. All I wanted to do was to see if I could help. I was down there for two days. I saw things I couldn’t believe. I wound up in the hospital because the dust affected my eyes. It was after that, I just felt like praying. We weren’t a religious family; a couple of holy days, that was it. I worked downtown, so I started going to a mosque on Warren Street. After a while I stopped in at the Masjid al-Farah on West Broadway, where I met Imam Feisal for the first time. I knew he had been there for a long time, twenty years or more, but I never heard him speak. His sermons were what I was looking for, beautiful, sincere, but American. I thought, finally, an American Imam, someone who talks to me as an American. But the place was so small. It had a 70-person capacity. You could hardly get in.

“That is when it hit me: We needed a building. There were a lot of Muslims downtown, and the places we did have were not pleasant; they were basements, holes-in-the-wall. The message was beautiful, but the surroundings were shabby. They were not places we could feel proud of. So I made up my mind. If this was a real-estate problem, that’s what I did, real estate. I am very good at real estate. Also, I’d undergone a change of life. My business has grown, I have two wonderful children. I signed my daughter up for swimming lessons at the Jewish Community Center at Amsterdam and 76th Street. It is an excellent facility, very welcoming, modern. Then I knew we didn’t need just a mosque, we needed a cultural center, something that took into account the entire aspect of life: our lives as Muslim-Americans in New York. So when you ask me why I would buy a place so close to ground zero, I say, I wasn’t thinking of that. I saw a building. A building that would fulfill a need. I spoke to Imam Feisal about it, and he agreed.”

Park51 – a victory monument for Islamic terrorists?  Nah.  It’s a real estate project put together by Muslim-Americans who recognized a need in their community and went out to get the job done.  Unfortunately, it’s all too innocent a scenario for the Pam Geller’s of society who just can’t get passed their hate.

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(h/t: CrooksandLiars)

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You just knew there was going to be a battle of numbers over how many attended Glenn Beck’s Restoring My Riches rally this weekend.  Numbers have ranged from CBS’s 87,000 estimate to Beck’s own 300,000 – 650,000 figure.  But leave it to Michele Looneytunes Bachmann to take it over the top.

“The crowds were overwhelming, and if you saw the aerials on the Drudge Report this weekend, there was an aerial photo. Unofficially, off the record, we talked to one of the guys from the National Park Police who told us he thought it was 1.6 million. There had to be over a million people there. People were packed in from the Washington Monument all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. And for anyone who’s ever been there, that’s a huge area.”

Why, Minnesota?  Why her?

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