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Governor Bob McDonnell: A Taliban Con-Man To Match Obama


Remember when Candidate Obama promised trillion-dollar give-aways to investment bankers, humongous tax-cuts instead of help for the unemployed, and incomprehensibly wishy-washy healthcare "reform?"

Remember when Candidate Obama promised to maintain "the very same "state secrets" theories of the Bush administration" and "cordon off all secret actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the C.I.A. and its partners from the demands and limits of the law?"

Of course nobody remembers anything about the Obama campaign except bullshit, because there is nothing else to remember, and now, for the bullshit-loving voters of America...

A new star has arisen!

And what does the brand-new Republican Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell really believe?

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

No more rubbers for you fornicators!

Now McDonnell has changed, he claims.

"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."

But out of 15 proposals for a new Republican policy which McDonnell proposed in his thesis at Pat Robertson's law school in Virginia, McDonnell is still enthusiastic about at least ten of them.

During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

Listen up, ye female fornicators and other feminist trash! Your wages are about to crash!

So maybe it's worth examining that long-forgotten thesis, which Bob McDonnell apparently hasn't forgotten quite as much as he claimed, and since a photocopy of it is available online, and space is cheap on the internet, I extracted and appended McDonnell's 15-point agenda at the end of this diary, to save you the trouble of scrolling through 92 pages of theocratic garbage.

But Bob McDonnell didn't carry Northern Virginia and win the governorship by ranting at voters about fornicators and banning condoms! Instead he played those suckers just like... Barack Obama and David Axelrod play that game.

McDonnell avoided discussion of divisive social issues such as abortion and gay rights, crafting his campaign around particular concerns raised by voters from Alexandria to Aldie. He reached out to minority communities and drilled so deeply into local concerns that he was discussing Lyme disease in one neighborhood and Guantanamo Bay prisoners in another.

At a gathering of Hispanics in Fairfax, he greeted the group with "Buenas noches." In Falls Church, he spoke at a Vietnamese American shopping center draped in the colors of the flag of the former South Vietnam.

"He is a household name here," said Shandon Phan, 30, a nonprofit organization worker and a member of the Vietnamese American National Chamber of Commerce. "He runs ads in magazines and TV and radio, and he comes to meet-and-greet events with his wife. It was a very personal touch."

So watch out, Democrats! The Republicans have got a new guy who knows how to play the new game, and incomprehensibly wishy-washy healthcare "reform" along with double-digit unemployment won't send you back to Congress in 2010, or the White House in 2012.

Thesis

Thesis (1)

Thesis (2)a


16 Comments

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Also http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083103045.html

"The thesis is a wistful ode to a bygone 1950s America, when, Mr. McDonnell noted, 70 percent of American families were led by working fathers and homemaker mothers, and "every state in the union made sexual intercourse between unmarried persons a crime." Sounding at times like an Old Testament prophet, Mr. McDonnell wrote that government must discriminate in favor of married couples and against "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators," for "[t]he cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer."

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Unfortunately, this is not a "wistful ode to a bygone 1950s America." It is exactly the Virginia I remember when I lived there in the 1990s.

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So were you a fornicating homo cohabitator in Virginia, or what?

No offense intended! One third of my friends are fornicating homo cohabitators, one third are fornicating hetero cohabitators, and the other third are masturbating metrosexuals.

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I don't even know what a cohabitator is, but I was undoubtedly on McDonnell's list in several places. I'm sure my landlord called me in.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to think of how you might succeed in offending me, Rootie, but despite my tendency toward crankiness, I can't think of a way. That's because you never try to force me to conform, which is the one thing I have consistently balked at throughout my life. I suppose that's why McDonnell's thesis makes me feel sick: It's all about conformity.

Seriously, it makes me want to vomit.

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For the puss now known as ReadyToBlowChunks. And the best offense is a strong defense. Except that doesn't make sense.

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You want the Root to offend you, Gasket?

EASY! Just mention jumping off a 50 foot cliff.

Sheesh. ;-)

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MSM has repeatedly claimed that McDonnell is a 'moderate.' Hmmmph; nice digging, nice memories, folks.

p.s. Ruta- I was searching my hard drive for a photoshopped photo of Geithner, Obama and Summers to perhaps use in a blog. I thought I had gotten it from The Wizard of Whimsy; he didn't have it on is site, so I googles, and lo!and behold! found it at OpenLeft, attributed to one Jacob Freeze. I like it. Is it possible to poach it? Have you used it lately? Will you use it soon?
It is one of the few issues I care strongly about; I have given up on HCR that has anything very good about it, and I think it about time for a coalescing of energies to focus on Finance. The Dems are going to take all the fall for this shite unless we/they change it, and while I would not mind if the Corporate Dems get taken out, the misery for the rest of is is getting too hard to sustain.

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If you mean Obama/Geithner/Summers as the Three Stooges, you're welcome to use it, wendy.

I'm glad you like it.

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Thanks for the research, Rootie, although reading McDonnell's thesis makes me sick to my stomach.

Considering Obama was elected only a year ago, I'd say the Republicans are a quick study and have effectively distracted the national dialogue in that brief time.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone on these boards tried to convince me that Virginia was a purple state.

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I agree about Virginia being more red than purple, but it's still surprising to me that McDonnell carried northern Virginia, which looks demographically all mixed up. Together with New Jersey, it's a very bad day for Democrats... and don't they richly deserve it!

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It's a bad day and a bad omen. Jon Corzine, at least, was a pretty solid Democrat, and now Republicans will fuck up New Jersey and Virginia even more than they already are. That probably means the final total annihilation of social services in those states. When McDonnell, for example, says "unwed mothers," he literally means black single women with kids who receive state support. It's disgusting.

New York is an easy target now for next year. Governor Paterson is weak and the state is hemorrhaging.

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From your link...

"If we don't act now, there will be a problem down the road," Paterson said, referring to December's deadline for more than $5 billion in payments to schools and localities.

He also said Wall Street bonuses would be down 22 percent in 2009 compared with last year. Income taxes paid on these bonuses to stockbrokers and investment bankers account for 20 percent of state revenue.

The solution is obvious! Bigger bonuses for Wall Street moguls!

Triple the bonuses, wipe out the deficit!

Omigod, I'm such a genius!

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I love it; thanks. And let me know if you want Sharpie.

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Here is McDonnell video I'd seen on crooksandliars of him trying to walk back his (ahem) slightly controvertial thesis:

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/bob-mcdonnell-tries-downplay-his-thesis-fo

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"Omigod, I'm such a genius!" It's a wonder, with you patting yourself on the back so hard, Rutie, that you don't break your own neck. Something to be hoped for, I suppose.

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I believe he was pretending to speak as Paterson.

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