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Irony has long had a home among the partisans of the conservative persuasion and today’s events are proving no different. McCain apologists like John Ruberry and Pat “Melvinna” Hickey, among others, are attacking a guy who was simply quoting something McCain is alleged to have called his wife…

(In recent days, other McCain apologists have also gone after the recent Democratic National Committee ad which not only quotes McCain’s own words but shows the video clip of him saying those words. Attacking people who quote McCain appears to be par for the course, since more and more of what he says is unfortunately indefensible.)

A fellow who had previously supported Sen. Joe Biden’s primary campaign asked Sen. John McCain during one of his townhall events a question that many people concerned about McCain’s well-known anger management issues have:

“This question goes to mental health and mental health care. Previously, I’ve been married to a woman that was verbally abusive to me. Is it true that you called your wife a cunt?”

Harsh language, but the reality is this questioner was asking Sen. McCain whether or not the reports of that infamous domestic tirade are true (the c-word was precipitated by his wife playfully mussing his hair a bit in front of some other people, who verified that he said it).

McCain’s obfuscation?

“Now, now. You don’t want to …Um, you know, that’s the great thing about town hall meetings, sir, but we really don’t …. There’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language. So I’ll move on to the next questioner in the back.”

The source of the c-bomb report? A book called The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which includes this paragraph:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

(emphasis added)

Of course, this townhall question gets to the heart of McCain’s claims that he’s a “straight” talker, “one of the guys” and, most importantly, “prepared and experienced”…

First, he never answered the question. If the fact-checked report was somehow untrue (and the people who verified that he did indeed drop the c-bomb on his wife were for some reason fibbing) he could have just said so and put it to rest. He could have even “condemned” that four-letter-word since “condemnation” is the bar he seems to prefer for rhetoric he doesn’t like. And, we’ve already learned that once McCain “condemns” something it magically disappears down the memory hole with all those rib baskets and wetnaps simply by virtue of the fact that he is the McCain and the press thinks he talks straight.

So much for that “straight” talk.

Second, Sen. McCain is hardly “one of the guys” given that he dumped his first wife, a former model who had faithfully and anxiously waited for him while he was being held prisoner, because she was in a car accident and got chubby. In exchange, the Navy airman cum politician married a beautiful millionaire heiress. Her wealth has supplied McCain with handfuls of homes (including the site of his ribfest for the lackey media near the resort town of Sedona) and a private jet…. about as elitist as they get.

And, unfortunately, she was the target of McCain’s tirade in which he reportedly used the c-word, a word of which he now says, “There’s people here who don’t respect that kind of language.”

I agree.

Third, is he truly prepared to keep his renowned anger in check?

Did he, as reports verify, or did he not use such disrespectful language to verbally abuse his wife, a spouse who has provided him with so much material wealth in life, simply because she was being playful with her own husband?

And if he did, why did he feel a need to use such a harsh, abusive word and then duck a simple question about it?

As one of his apologists, John Ruberry, has already admitted Sen. McCain has been found in the past to have “poor judgment”.

Is ignoring a voter asking McCain to simply deny or verify-and-explain more of that same “poor judgment”?

Is insulting his doting wife by calling her a “trollop” and a “c***” also a sign of anger issues and yet more “poor judgment”?

Finally, another of the McC-word apologists used the headline “Stay Classy Dems” to whine about the guy who quoted McCain… seeing as how the questioner was asking about what McCain said, shouldn’t that read “Stay Classy McC-word”? Nice spin, but the question wasn’t what was offensive. What Mr. McCain called Mrs. McCain in that hot-headed haranguing is what is offensive.

PS conserv-o-partisans: Even former Biden supporters who are now supporting Obama are Americans, as are all the women McCain might call “trollop” or “c-dash-dash-dash” and, if McCain were elected president, he’d be their president too. Go figure.

Here’s video from that townhall with Sen. McCain refusing to either deny the report or condemn the word…

Con partisans are positively giddy claiming that Sen. Obama is somehow “whining” about Wednesday night’s True Hollywood Story - “On Stage” … “debate”. (Methinks they need to get their mock-o-meters checked. Making fun of how odious that Reality TV programming was is not the same as “whining”.)

Would conservative complainers like Anne Leary, John Ruberry and Dan Curry be saying the “hard questions” needed to be answered had it been Sen. John McCain … and if he had been asked a litany of Heathers fodder such as:

• McCain’s role in Keating 5
• when the violence will end in Iraq in order for the proposed 100 (or million, take your pick) years of American deployment to begin
• “Bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran“
• the blonde lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, riding on McCain’s “straight talk” bus
• McCain’s divorce from his injured first wife (who remained true to him as he was held as a POW) and affair before his divorce
• why would John McCain’s Florida co-chair offer $20 to perform oral sex on another man
• Keating 5
• Pastors Parsley and Hagee and their anti-Catholic, pro-Armageddon preaching and why McCain would specifically seek out endorsements from such men
• why did he wear a bulletproof vest and require a large military escort (replete with gunship helos) while declaring a Baghdadi market that has seen many horrific bombings (including within days of his visit) was just jim dandy
• the blonde lobbyist riding on his bus
• Keating 5
• tax cuts for the wealthy while mainstream Americans (the other 90% of us) are struggling
• the blonde lobbyist riding on his bus
• why McCain caved on unAmerican torture
• is McCain Episcopalian or Baptist and why switch if switch he did
• the blonde lobbyist riding on his bus vis a vis McCain’s reputation as a skirt-chaser
• McCain’s record of coziness to lobbyists in contrast to his media persona as a straight talker
• McCain’s relationship with conservative pastors who blamed 9/11 and Katrina on Americans, thus making them anti-America conservatives
• the patriotism of conservative pastors who blamed 9/11 and Katrina on Americans
• is McCain an elitist because he married into a $100 million fortune
• his current wife’s past drug habit
• why Americans should vote for someone like McCain who admits he doesn’t know much about economics and, of all people to advise him, turned to the architect of much of the nation’s current credit woes, especially during a widespread downturn
• would John McCain consider Florida State Rep. Bob Allen for VP
  
• the blonde lobbyist riding on his bus

My hunch is conservative partisans would be hopping mad. In fact, we’d likely be hearing weeks’ worth of “Woe is me, the mean media is soooo snively and (gasp) lib’rul…”

Their concern would likely be especially acute if some of the questions were initially raised a day or two before in an interview the supposedly neutral moderator had with, say, Sam Seder or Rachel Maddow. Seeing as how former Clinton White House staffer George Stephanopolous apparently got some of his “debate” questions in his interviews with conservative pundits Sean Hannity and Steve Malzberg I’m sure Curry, Ruberry and Leary would be fine with a debate moderator using questions verbatim from Rachel Maddow.

Then again, as Mr. Ruberry’s excuse-making declares, those lines of questions also get to a more fundamental query, “Does he have good judgment?” … at least in a push-polling, rumor-mongering kind of way.

If the media is going to buy into these conservative partisans’ character-assassination-as-legit-campaign-tool efforts (and, indeed, further that cause by chewing up and regurgitating opponents’ tired and old attacks for half of a debate) then Sen. McCain ought to answer “tough questions” that have little or nothing to do with what the American people actually care about.

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As an aside… I wonder how long it’ll be before we’re back to being told by these same con partisans that the media is too soft on Sen. Obama.

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(adapted from a shorter DKos comment; h/t to smintheus and georgia10 for their ABC sideshow “debate” synopsis as reference)

Now white conservatives are yelping that Christians are “creepy”? Blech.

MarathonPundit John Ruberry gets in on the conservatives’ streak of anti-Christian smears by quoting heavily from a short-sighted Pajamas Mafia rant by Burt Prelutsky and then diving further off the deep end with his own riff opposing Sen. Obama’s Christian church (Trinity United Church of Christ) and twisting the church’s tenets into an anti-Christian meme only a partisan con could dream up.

The only thing “creepy” and “race-based” here is the conservatives’ clearly deliberate misinformation campaign against this Christian church, one of its congregants (Sen. Obama) and its pastor. (Given how much accurate information about Trinity United Church of Christ is now available online as honest Americans explain the church and its tenets to ignorant conservative partisans over and over one can only presume that any such continued misinformation campaign — such as with Mr. Ruberry’s post — is, in fact, deliberate.)

As part of his screed about black Christians Mr. Ruberry, not known for being the sharpest crayon in the box, also quoted from a sermon by Trinity’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in which the good reverend concluded his sermon with a four-letter word. Mr. Ruberry apparently thinks that Rev. Wright’s cussing is, well, naughty.

So?

Not so surprisingly, after I pointed out that Mr. Prelutsky’s myopic retching was unfounded in light of the facts and actual context and that everything in the sermon by Rev. Wright (which Mr. Ruberry questioned) was accurate and true, Mr. Ruberry’s only remaining defense for his complaints was that this church’s magazine gave an award to Louis Farrakhan.

Again… So?

Mr. Farrakhan has received other awards from other organizations. This particular award was given in honor of Mr. Farrakhan’s work at improving the lot of peoples in Africa. For all his many, many faults, one cannot deny that Mr. Farrakhan has actually done work to improve the plight of folks in Africa.

Had Mr. Ruberry perhaps dedicated a portion of his life’s work to the same endeavor he too might’ve earned the award. There’s still time for him since he’s a relatively young guy.

Then again, what on earth does this oddball tangent have to do with Barack Obama? As I noted for Mr. Ruberry, Sen. Obama had nothing to do with giving out this award. Nothing.

It would be as if people went around blaming John Ruberry for the many sad cases of priest sex abuse rocking the Catholic Church in America. He did tell us in this post that he was baptized Catholic, after all. He obviously had nothing to do with it, but he was baptized Catholic and this is an issue in the Catholic Church so, if someone was prone to dishonest smear campaigns, it’s ripe for the plucking, nay?

Wait a sec. Mr. Ruberry has made it clear he despises Sen. Obama through his years of blogposts. Oh, silly me. Clearly, Mr. Ruberry must be infected with Blame Obama syndrome (obviously an evolved form of Blame Clinton syndrome, which seems to have infected many a conservative for well over a decade and a half now).

That explains why Mr. Ruberry would, in the same post no less, both criticize Sen. Obama for “disinviting” Rev. Wright from speaking on stage during his campaign kick-off last year and demand that Sen. Obama distance himself from Rev. Wright. Mighty convenient being able to set up a little Catch-22 for partisan gain, isn’t it?

It also helps Mr. Ruberry and his fellow conservatives avoid having to debate the real issues affecting our country, seeing as how it has been conservative slash-and-burn policies which got our great nation into the “wrong track” state it finds itself nowadays. Imagine that.

Ya know what? It was cloudy and chilly today. Obviously that too was a result of the fact that Sen. Obama’s church held services this Sunday. Obviously.

–

UPDATE: Mr. Ruberry has chosen to defend his indefensible anti-Christian rhetoric with this here reply.

Note my response in kind:

Wow, John. Open your mouth and prove my points…

First, I didn’t attack you. I attacked your lack of reason and rationality. If you consider that to be one and the same then so be it. I notice you decided not to link to the evidence I provided regarding my claim that you’re not known for being the sharpest crayon.

Second, I already answered your hollow complaint (mirroring Mr. Prelutsky’s) wondering why Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith is “fair game” while you seem to think Barack Obama is not being held to the same standard.

…There’s that “sharpest crayon” thing again, so I’ll try to simplify it for you.

It is the social conservatives (aka, Evangelical conservatives, Religious Right, etc.) which are questioning Gov. Romney’s faith. Those same folks (you know of Fran Eaton, don’t you?) are doing the same with Sen. Obama.

These folks are, unfortunately enough, twisting information about both men and both faiths. At least with Gov. Romney, Ms. Eaton had the decency to admit the Evangelicals’ infopimping was misleading and erroneous. Unfortunately for those of us interested in honesty, she has yet to do that with regards to her incessant misinformation campaign regarding the Christians at Trinity UCC.

You yourself chose to continue that disinformation campaign with your own anti-Christian screed opposing charity and compassion simply because black people would be the recipients of such Christian generosity. So be it: your choice.

Third, I’m glad you at least grasped my point that even though you were baptized Catholic you have nothing to do with the pedophilia scandal. Too bad you missed the point that even though Sen. Obama attends Trinity United Church of Christ he has nothing to do with Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Farrakhan, a Muslim, is himself not even a member of that church since he doesn’t share the same faith as Sen. Obama, a Christian. Another point you apparently fail to grasp.

Fourth, clearly you’re duplicitous yourself. I know you are, but what am I? So there. Just kidding… sorta.

My point was that you were condemning Sen. Obama for both somehow not distancing himself from Rev. Wright and then for actually distancing himself from the Reverend. You can’t have it both ways (even if you do try to move the goalposts after the fact and change your story ever so slightly). Either you don’t want him to distance himself from the Reverend or you do.

Finally, if you wish to compare yourself to a “White Nationalist Rock” teen girl band be my guest. I gave you the benefit of the doubt — wasn’t going to go there, and certainly nowhere near as far as you did with your soliloquy — but apparently I offered too much benefit and not enough doubt about your motives. (For the record, note the date of this linked post and then skip to the 13th paragraph — I know as well as you who/what “Prussian Blue” is).

But since you apparently wish to accept that crown, maybe you can learn to dance like those two home-schooled twins were taught to do by their mother… that is before your next post pooh-poohing black, Christian Americans apparently just because they’re, well, black and Christian.

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UPDATE 2: Newsweek debunks the baloney

Self-declared pundit and marathoner, John Ruberry, jumps on the Smoking Gun Bandwagon and declares Wednesday was a bad day for Barack Obama. Of course, like former Alan Keyes worker and long-time Obama opponent Fran Eaton mere hours before him, Mr. Ruberry thinks the not-quite-the-whole-story Sun-Times article about this single letter of support that Obama wrote is a big stinky, smelly, smoking gun because … well … just because they say it is, so there.

As political journalist Rich Miller pointed out after actually reading that S-T article, there are several problems for those Obama-haters jumping to the false conclusion that this form letter is their much-hoped-for Obama Waterloo.

For one thing, the letter isn’t very good — it’s got a bunch of typos. If the letter were sent on my behalf, I’d be disappointed in it.

For another, Obama was not the only politician to write a letter of support for Rezko’s senior wellness center project. In fact, the project in question was hardly some exclusive back-room deal (like, say, snagging fast food spots on tollroad overpasses). No, this development project was for a mundane healthcare office and senior care center.

Finally, as Mr. Miller points out, the project was simply seeking a second mortgage, not any grants or special compensation in cash. The mortgage money would, like any loan, be paid back.

Mr. Ruberry goes so far as to say this typo-laden letter is obvious evidence that Obama was “pulling strings for Rezko”. If that’s what he thinks then so be it … but I’ve never heard of a typo-filled letter of support for a senior center being likened to “pulling strings” which usually instead conjurs up images of weasely guys in a dark, smoke-filled back room.

Then-State Senator Obama wasn’t requesting anything unique in his letter (would conservative partisans have us believe mortgages are unique?), and he certainly wasn’t demanding anything at all. It was just a letter of support for what would normally be considered a worthwhile project. I’m sure the pensioners using the facility appreciate the fact it got built seeing as how it’s still in use today, as Mr. Miller noted.

I sure hope Mr. Ruberry never asks any of his legislative representatives (from village hall to Springfield to Congress) to support any projects or plans. Oh, wait. That’s what representatives are there to do — represent us. Hypocritically, Mr. Ruberry has in the past called on his Congresswoman to do certain things he’d like to see get done, and to not do certain things she’d like to do. She doesn’t seem to be listening to him. But he’s still asking her “to pull strings” for him and do what he wants her to do.

Mr. Ruberry goes on to expound on this week’s New York Times article about Sen. Obama, which discusses his on-again, off-again Rezko ties. Now it remains unclear whether or not the New York Times put the article together to assist a certain Junior Senator from New York (who also is currently running for president). Even so, the Times article doesn’t cover any new ground. It summarizes a bunch of news reports from Illinois-based political journalists and just sort of puts it out there that Rezko has been investigated and charged and that Rezko had supported Obama in the past, etc. Mr. Ruberry points out that it includes a detailing of the empty lot matter in which Mrs. Rezko bought a city lot next to the Obama’s new home. Then again, in and of itself, it’s not an entirely unique thing for people who know each other to buy property near each other.

Just to reinforce how uttterly dire Mr. Ruberry wants to claim the Obama situation truly is, he informs us of the highly incriminating fact that Sen. Obama is a Chicago Democrat just like Gov. Rod Blagojevich whose campaign, Mr. Ruberry conveniently reminds us, is under investigation.

Watch out. That guilt by association canard will land you in the clink every time no matter how laughably weak it is.

Say, speaking of guilt by association… It occurs to me that Gov. Blagojevich (his campaign is under investigation, y’know) and Sen. Obama (his is not under any investigation at all) are both residents of Illinois…

Oh. My. Gosh…. I just realized that Mr. Ruberry is also a resident of Illinois who has even been to Chicago (!) himself so, obviously, it’s all highly questionable and may even be improper. I demand the media look further into Mr. Ruberry’s brush with unethical behavior and political gadflies who have been charged with wrong-doing.

Got it?

(Of course, this is not the first time, nor the second time, nor even the third time, that Mr. Ruberry has manifest his loathing of Democrats with silly little houses of canards that don’t stand up to an ounce of scrutiny… now is it?)

MarathonPundit blogger John Ruberry is against educational institutions interfering with student journalists (ie, against censorship).

Illinois Review editor Fran Eaton is for educational institutions interfering with student journalists (ie, for censorship).

Both involved cases of school-funded student newspapers.

Can’t conservatives make up their minds on whether they are for or against censorship?

Esse quam videri is the state motto for North Carolina, a Mid-Atlantic state with which conservative partisan John Ruberry has recently taken issue.

Mr. Ruberry’s main gripe is about a Charlotte city ordinance (it’s not a state law, it’s a city ordinance) limiting the number of flags displayed at a business to three. This has forced Bill Nolan, owner of Steamer’s Sports Pub, to remove 6 of his 9 flags. Esse quam videri is Latin for “To be, rather than to seem” and is quite a propos for the li’l ol’ guilt-by-association canard Mr. Ruberry just posted about this flag issue and a certain former NC Senator.

Unbeknownst to Mr. Ruberry, having such codes on the books is actually a very common practice across the nation.

Cities and neighborhood associations throughout the country routinely enact codes regarding properties and buildings located within their jurisdictions. Code specifications encompass building exterior appearances, commercial sign sizes and heights, duration and size of residential yard signs, and may even include, yes, some limits on flag poles and placement of flags. It’s purely an effort by some cities (not all) to maintain continuity from building to building.

Whether it’s a good practice to put such restrictive codes in place I’ll leave up to the individual cities and homeowners’ associations. I can see where limits on commercial signs are beneficical just by driving through towns which have such ordinances on the books. And certainly codes related to lawn maintenance and weed growth improve everyone’s property values. But I can also see where such a thing can quickly go overboard, as it perhaps has in Charlotte.

But Mr. Ruberry didn’t simply quote the Charlotte Observer and opine about the pros and cons of that city’s flag-limit ordinance.

He took it one step further to dump a little doo-doo on former NC Senator and current Presidential contender John Edwards by ending his post with the needless quip, “This is the same state that sent John Edwards to Washington.”

Does he really hate Dems that much that he has to waste the pixels throwing that completely unrelated jibe out there?

Someone needs to tell Mr. Ruberry that both current Senators from North Carolina are Republicans. The Tar Heel State’s senior Senator (also the former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee) is of course Sen. Liddy Dole (R-NC), wife of 1996 GOP Presidential nominee Bob Dole. The junior Senator who replaced John Edwards is Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), now in the middle of his freshman term. The state has also voted Republican for president in every prez election since ‘68, excepting Jimmy Carter’s ‘76 win.

John Ruberry today links to a Des Moines Register article describing Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s nascent countrywide health insurance plans. In that story, the Register notes that Sen. Obama’s strategy for dealing with America’s healthcare crisis will require an investment of about $50 billion and, using what he must think is “logic”, Mr. Ruberry concludes that “A vote for Obama is a vote for higher taxes” … (go figure).

To pay for it, Sen. Obama proposes restoring the top two income tax brackets back to Clinton Administration rates. Chances are very good that no one reading this blog, nor Mr. Ruberry’s, would be affected by such a move. Moreover, poll after poll has clearly indicated that Americans realize this sort of investment — healthcare — is worthy of our tax monies.

Oddly enough, the never-ending war in Iraq that Mr. Ruberry and other partisan conservatives still support has cost Mr. Ruberry’s hometown of Morton Grove, IL alone well over $57.4 million as of 3:30pm Central today. Moreover, the $430.2 billion-with-a-B national toll for the conservatives’ war in Iraq has cost nearly 9x that of Sen. Obama’s positive proposal to date. According to CostOfWar.com, that amount could’ve covered more than a quarter billion-with-a-B kids’ healthcare for a whole year.

Perhaps Mr. Ruberry is so concerned about Sen. Obama’s lofty goals because he knows that Pres. Bush and the now-defeated rubber-stamp Republican Congreses never actually bothered to figure out how to pay for their Iraq War. Instead, Mr. Ruberry’s Republicans have been spending our kids’ money by putting these combat costs on the nation’s virtual credit card (courtesy of gargantuan loans from Communist China and terrorist-funding Saudi Arabia).

This war is costing our country roughly $100 billion dollars a year (plus the accumulating interest) and Sen. Obama’s plan is only proposed at about half that amount (and with a reasonable, unencumbering means of paying for it). Why is it that Mr. Ruberry is all too happy spending twice the money to wage a horrifically destructive zero-sum quagmire of a war but goes all chicken little with regards to Sen. Obama’s reasonable health ideas?

What sort of inverted, bizarro universe is Mr. Ruberry living in where war is a good investment but health insurance is not?

(Note that according to what passes for Mr. Ruberry’s “logic” a vote for any one of the 11 Republican candidates is also a vote for higher taxes … either that or a default on the Repulicans’ whopping debts to various international adversaries.)

Several conservative bloggers today are commenting on this week’s Republican presidential debate hosted by the partisan conservatives at Fox News. Strangely enough, some of the biggest applause lines of the night came after security salesman Rudy Giulani and others whole-heartedly endorsed torture (specifically water-boarding), something with which both the Dept. of Justice and U.S. Armed Forces — including Gen. David Patraeus — disagree.

And, while conservatives like John Ruberry (whose reaction to the torture Q+A mirrors that of many conservatives) at least acknowledge that Senator John McCain is the only one of the 10 who actually has any standing on the matter of torture (as a former POW), Sen. McCain’s opposition to torture is roundly panned by cons, including Mr. Ruberry. But for promoting torture, Mayor Giuliani, Reps. Hunter and Tancredo, and the others are rewarded with near-rabid applause. (In fact, Rep. Tancredo claims to want our best and brightest to act like a law-breaking fictional TV character … something the Pentagon is strongly against.)

Sadly for the current Republican Party and its base (which seems to grow more extreme by the day), this sort of bizzaro torture fetish fits right along with the 30% of Republican candidates who don’t believe in evolution.

I wonder what our Founding Fathers would have to say about this lot of 10. The United States of America I know is better than this.

Sen. Hillary Clinton is arguably the current Democratic front-runner for the 8-months-hence presidential primaries. That, plus a 20-year-history of Hillary-hate from partisan conservatives, leaves her with a big red bullseye which those nattering nabobs on the right enjoy slinging mud at any chance they get.John Ruberry (who apparently has an aversion to fact-checking) again decides against any research and flies solo with just some stuff he makes up based on memories and tales from “old-timers” in responding to a recent Sun-Times article and a subsequent Rush Limbaugh Show bit about it.

In his post “Park Ridge, Illinois surrounded by farms? A Hillary fib?” Mr. Ruberry engages in some pointless Hillary-hate just for the sake of exercising his typing fingers:

She [Sen. Clinton] recalled Park Ridge was surrounded by farms that relied on migrant labor and that she used to baby-sit the workers’ children, an experience that awakened her to the complexities of the immigrant experience.

That paragraph didn’t pass the smell test with me. However, [S-T reporter Jennifer] Hunter didn’t present those as direct Hillary quotes, so perhaps, Hillary didn’t actually say those things.

Well, she did. Roger Hedgecock subbed for Rush Limbaugh Thursday, and he played that segment of her San Diego speech. What was played matched almost word for word what was reported in Hunter’s report.

Hedgecock asked people who knew about the Chicago area to opine on Hillary’s agricultural exclamation.

…A young Hillary Rodham would’ve been babysitting back in the 60s. [Update: Greg points out in comments that the babysitting was done through a program at the church the Rodham family attended.]

As Mr. Ruberry points out, there were farms in Chicago proper right next door to Park Ridge) even through the 70s. But he also does his best to avoid any real research by talking about a drive he took:

Directly southwest of Park Ridge is O’Hare International Airport. The airport dates back to the 1940s, but it didn’t begin become an commercial airport until the mid-1950s. No farms there. The other sides of Park Ridge are bordered by Niles, Glenview, and Des Plaines. Once you do a quick drive through these suburbs, and it becomes very clear that the majority of the residences in those towns–outside of the recent tear-down constructions, are post-war housing boom units. Those homes probably supplanted farm land, but most of them were built–I would guess–before Hillary Rodham was old enough to babysit young-ins.

Actually, there were farms near O’Hare up until fairly recently — same can be said for other towns next to or near to Park Ridge that Mr. Ruberry “drove through”.

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UPDATE: I comment on the Rogers Park Bench remarks in comments here and also above in a newer post.

Mr. Ruberry over at Illinoize calls recently re-elected Alderman Joe Moore “moronic” and a “liar”. (Ald. Moore, you may recall, is one of the more liberal aldermen, having led city council acts to protest the Iraq War, provide a living wage to big-box employees, and, infamously, ban duck liver.) Says the Rubester:

Yesterday afternoon I watched WGN-TV’s midday news, and Joe Moore made this comment about Tuesday’s’ election:

Whenever you fight for the common guy, people are going to fight back. My opponent was very well funded by some very powerful special interests, Republican interests….

Lies. Gordon did receive multiple contributions from the Illinois Restaurant Association, as well as the group Chicago Chefs for Choice. The last one must’ve had something to do with Moore’s anti-foie gras legislation.

To be sure, both candidates received money from those big bad restaurant special interests (Ald. Moore did receive a check from a Dunkin Donuts, after all, according to his latest D-2). But Mr. Ruberry you know as well as I do that those are not the “very powerful special interests” that Ald. Moore was discussing.

For instance, his opponent, Don Gordon, received at least $60,000 in donations from just one “special interest”: David Herro who helped fund the Swift Boat liars (unclear if that total is $2500 or $5000), the 43rd Ward Republicans ($2500), Ron Gidwitz for Governor ($6500 total), and even losing GOP candidate for Cook County President Tony Peraica ($50,000 total). (To be fair, Mr. Herro has also donated to Democratic candidates and committees, though much, much less relatively speaking — such as the $5000 to Forrest Claypool.)

But Mr. Ruberry wouldn’t know all that because… he doesn’t like to do research to actually base his remarks in fact instead of baloney:

I haven’t [had?] [taken?] [made?] the time to add up Moore’s and Gordon’s contributions

Even Rich Miller (who technically ‘owns’ the Illinoize blog) decries Mr. Ruberry’s lack of research to back up his rhetoric.

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