World Cup fallout: Does the prospect of pancakes (or even waffles) justify the scourge of soccer? And what about the scourge of Twitter?

Can the World Cup really be unreservedly evil if it leads to the possibility of pancakes (or even, hypothetically, waffles)?

by Ken

Let's dispose of the obvious questions about Matthew Barzun first.

(1) He's currently the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom -- or in fancier lingo, ambassador to the Court of St. James. So you can tell he must have raised a lot of money for President Obama's presidential campaign(s). Ding-ding-ding-ding! In the first Obama presidential campaign, according to Wikipedia:

Barzun’s small-dollar fundraisers were supporter-driven via online event pages, and replicated throughout the country.

In The Audacity to Win, author and political strategist David Plouffe describes Matthew Barzun’s grassroots campaign idea as “citizen fundraisers” that drove Obama’s connection with supporters.

That was good enough for a gig as ambassador to Sweden. In the Obama reelection campaign he served as national finance chair, after which he had to pack his bags for London.

(2) Yes, he is related to Jacques Barzun. A grandson.

Now, about those pancakes. As Washington Post "In the Loop" reporter Colby Itkowitz reports ("After World Cup loss, U.S. ambassador in London doesn’t waffle on bet with Belgians"):

As we reported a week ago, when a U.S. World Cup championship was still a long-shot possibility, Barzun sent Guy Trouveroy, Belgian ambassador in London, a handwritten note offering a breakfast wager. He’d pay up in pancakes if America lost, while Trouveroy would have to, of course, cook some Belgian waffles for the American staff if the U.S prevailed.

THE ORIGINAL WAGER (IT SEEMS THERE'S NOTHING
MUCH GOING ON IN THE U.S. EMBASSY IN LONDON)

[Click to enlarge]

Which, by the way, prompted a tweeted "joke" from Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz:



Ha ha ha! Say, senator, have you ever thought about abandoning politics for the comedy-club circuit?


ANYWAY, AS COLBY REPORTS, "ON TUESDAY,
THE BELGIANS GOT THEIR FLAPJACKS"

Hopeful chants of “I believe that we will win” transition into a solemn instrumental as the score of the U.S.A. vs. Belgium World Cup game appears against a black screen. Then U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Matthew Barzun appears at the embassy of his Belgian counterpart carrying the goods to cook “American pancakes.” Barzun measures and mixes and pours and flips in slow motion as the classical music soars.

You should probably just watch it yourself.

(Watch out! This is a playlist of "Uploads from USEmbassyLondon." Stand by that pause button. Unless you enjoy this sort of thing.)

Whoa, that's scary! Sorry, I didn't expect anything that alarming. Man, I'll probably be having nightmares for months. (I just hope there are therapists are on call for any kids who happen to view the clip.)

Still, they seem to have meant well, those U.S. and Belgian ambassadors stranded in London with, apparently, nothing better to do. And it shows that possibly some good can come of the World Cup, and of soccer generally, despite its general reputation as a worldwide scourge whose adherents are widely considered to be not merely insane but dangerous. (See my report last week, "There's good news about World Cup fever -- if it's caught early enough, a full recovery is possible.")

As for those Belgian waffles, well, thanks to those gutless wimps on the U.S. team, I guess we'll never know, will we? And as for Twitter -- the lurking villain in this sordid mess -- well, it appears there's nothing to be done.

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Because Cheney Has Gone Unpunished For His Crimes, Someone Else In His Position Will Do Even Worse In The Future

Yesterday everyone was hating on poor little Belgium. It was over that ballgame in Brazil. I'm not in the Ann Coulter camp or anything, but I just don't get any more excited about soccer than I do about baseball or football or bad mitten. And Belgium… well, I have to admit, was always fly-over country for me when I lived in Amsterdam and visited Paris as frequently as possible-- except I drove. When I did visit Belgium in more recent years, I came to appreciate that the food was pretty amazing-- my faves in Brussels being Comme Chez Soi, L'Épicerie, and Les Brasseries Georges-- but I could never get over Adam Hochschild's 1998 historical masterpiece, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, And Heroism In Colonial Africa. A few years ago I did a post about how the CIA conspired with Belgium to murder the first elected-- and last I think-- president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, based in great part on Hochschild's work.

Monday Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was Secretary of State, wrote about how the national myths of the "civilized countries" like the U.S. and Belgium "mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don't eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do." He was referring too the murder, plunder, slaughter, devastation, torture and massacre the civilized nations, primarily of the Northern Hemisphere, perpetrated against the backward nations of the Southern Hemisphere. And the latest myths about Justice and human rights progress is belied by, for example, the hideous unprosecuted war criminal Dick Cheney. "As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself," wrote Wilkerson, "Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power-- his and his cronies wealth and power foremost-- are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation's supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney."

Cheney even models Leopold: never in the dangerous fray himself (five draft deferments, e.g.), a master of bureaucratic manipulation and intrigue, in love to a fault with secrecy, willing to undertake any crime under the sun so long as it leads to profit, deeply relishing every moment of evil he is able to engineer, and a master of masking it all through adroit, politically-attuned public relations aimed at people too stupid to question him -- all while paying absolutely no attention to what his past clearly demonstrates he has done, thus thoroughly frustrating the decent folks all around him. Leopold to a "T."

This modern man, Cheney, however needs no kingship, no ornate palaces, no personally-owned colony like the Congo; Cheney's writ is the world. It is all of humankind that Cheney would torture, enslave, murder, or plunder if it were required. And Cheney is the ultimate arbiter of whether it is required. Take a look at that face as he tells the American people and the world in 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Now, wait a dozen years and envision the same face, somewhat leaner and-- if possible-- meaner, saying on the editorial pages of his Journal as Iraq implodes: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." He is of course talking about President Obama, not President George W. Bush. Leopold, whom the American poet Vachel Lindsay, has "Burning in Hell...", must be yearning for Dick's arrival because no one, except perhaps for Leopold himself, would register such a claim in the face of such self-demeaning evidence to the contrary.

In the same chapter of his book referenced above, Hochschild writes: "The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting." He is right. But it is more than forgetting. It is an abject lack of political courage to hold people accountable.

In King Leopold's case, Belgium and the wider world want to move on and not look back. Holding people accountable would mean holding themselves accountable. That central Africa is today still an unfolding tragedy of exploitation, commercial rivalries, and indigenous incapacity partly an inheritance of colonialism, matters little. The world moves on relentlessly to fulfill its oligarchies' desires for wealth and power. Suitable rhetoric is developed and delivered to keep the masses quiescent. The Leopolds and Cheneys of the world are privately lauded for their hard-headed realpolitik while appropriately tut-tutted in public. Presidents and prime ministers proclaim that it would be nationally disruptive to hold people accountable for their crimes and, besides, they are more concerned for the future than the past.

Which is why most people in America today live in the moment and in the moment alone. If they realized and cared about the past, if they used that realization and care to make the future better, they would not be able to live in the moment so well. In that respect, Leopold and Cheney are right: wealth and power is all that matters.

There's good news about World Cup fever -- if it's caught early enough, a full recovery is possible

U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard was understandably dejected after the deciding goal scored by Belgium's Romelu Lukaku in the 2-1 U.S. loss. Poor Tim had himself quite a game, with 18 saves on 27 shots on goal (three times as many shots on goal as the U.S. team managed).

by Ken

What a game!

No, no, I'm just kidding. Not only didn't I see the game -- meaning the U.S.'s 2-1 World Cup elimination loss to Belgium today -- I didn't give a good gosh darn about it. I'm just thinking that now, given the result, and while I understand that we're not fully out of the World Cup woods yet, maybe we Americans can cut the crap and go back to our time-honored (and utterly appropriate) grinding apathy toward the entire excruciatingly uninteresting sport.

I know we're always reminded how nuts the rest of the world is for soccer, but could we focus for a moment on that strategic word "nuts"? Is it really so hard to believe that all those people are, at least in this regard, nuts?

There's more than one way to excruciate a crowd. The Brits -- and their imperial and Commonwealth legatess -- love to do it with cricket, which as far as I can tell isn't even a sport, just a bunch of guys standing around with one guy holding a bat and another guy hurling a ball and everything else made up on the spot. I know that Cricket World claims that there actually are rules to the whole imbroglio, but come on, let's cut the kidding.

Soccer does have rules, I appreciate, but who cares? The biting guy seems to have some original thoughts about the "game," but it doesn't look as if that's going to take this misbegotten excuse for sport anywhere. Mostly it seems to serve as an occasion for fan riots, which are perhaps to be admired as an extremely primitive form of population control, but again doesn't really make for a riveting spectator experience.

The good news: At least within the borders of these here United States, however, the World Cup has come and gone -- done, over, kaput, finito, terminé. The bad news: In four years (it is four years, isn't it?), it starts all over again. Unless if, when it knocks next time, we're all really, really quite and pretend nobody's home, and maybe eventually it'll just give up and go away and bother some other people.

If by chance anyone feels impelled to invade the comments section to provide incisive, withering commentary on my anti-soccer worthlessness, just stop and consider: Do you really think I -- or any sensible person -- care?

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"Nous Ne Sommes Plus Vos Macaques!"-- Anti-Racist Words That Moved The U.S. Power Structure To Murder A Nation's Founding Father

All little boys grow up under the impression that their country is the best in the whole wide world-- except in the U.S. where we grow up not even knowing that there is a whole wide world out there aside from the land of the free and the home of the brave. So when did I start recognizing that my own country was every bit as bad-- if not worse-- than every other political cesspool through time and space? My atheist dad helped by explaining how religion was an effective system that kept working people from killing the rich crooks who oppressed them. And my socialist grandfather helped by explaining why the U.S. was taking the wrong side in Cuba right around the time I was crossing over into teenagedom. But the ultimate moment of realization came for me just about 50 years ago on the nose.

I wasn't even 12 when I first heard of Patrice Lumumba, then in the midst of agitating for independence for the Congo from the brutal and inhuman captivity of the Belgian royal family. On June 23, 1960 Lumumba was elected Prime Minister on the newly independent country but on Independence Day celebrations (June 30) the Belgian fascists tried one last humiliation by leaving the new Prime Minister off the program. Instead, King Baudouin tried to talk about how wonderful his country's savage and violent regime in the Congo had been. Lumumba took the stage and gave a more reality-based speech that horrified Western conservatives, as reality-based speeches often do:

For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won, a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force... We are no longer your monkeys!

The Belgians helped provoke a secessionist movement-- and civil war-- in Katanga, the mineral rich province they intended to hold onto for as long as they could. On September 15 the CIA backed a coup d’état by Joseph Mobutu, who promptly arrested Lumumba. Mobutu turned him over to the Katanga right-wing rebels where he was murdered by a firing squad commanded by Belgian army officers. Belgians later tried to destroy the evidence of the murder in sulfuric acid but some kept teeth and bullets from the body as souvenirs.

A few weeks ago, we looked at how the Nazi-oriented Dulles Brothers and their Republican Party allies illegally smuggled thousands of Eastern European Nazi war criminals into the U.S. for political purposes. But that isn't all the Dulles Brothers were up to after World War II.

Declassified U.S. cables from the year preceding the assassination bristle with paranoia about a Lumumba-led Soviet Communist takeover. The CIA was hatching plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro and was accused of fomenting coups and planning assassinations worldwide. And Lumumba clearly scared the daylights out of the Eisenhower administration. "In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will [have] disastrous consequences... for the interests of the free world generally," CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote. "Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective."

Even out of office, Lumumba remained under the microscope of Western spy services. His ties to Moscow frightened Washington. His fierce anti-colonialism unnerved Brussels. Belgium finally got its chance at Lumumba after Congolese authorities arrested him in December 1960. Belgian officials engineered his transfer to the breakaway province of Katanga, which was under Belgian control. De Witte reveals a telegram from Belgium's African-affairs minister, Harold d'Aspremont Lynden, essentially ordering that Lumumba be sent to Katanga. Anyone who knew the place knew that was a death sentence.

Firing squad. When Lumumba arrived in Katanga, on January 17, accompanied by several Belgians, he was bleeding from a severe beating. Later that evening, Lumumba was killed by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian officer. A week earlier, he had written to his wife, "I prefer to die with my head unbowed, my faith unshakable, and with profound trust in the destiny of my country." Lumumba was 35.

The next step was to destroy the evidence. Four days later, Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother cut up the body with a hacksaw and dissolved it in sulfuric acid. In an interview on Belgian television last year, Soete displayed a bullet and two teeth he claimed to have saved from Lumumba's body.

What remains unclear is the extent, if any, of Washington's involvement in the final plot. A Belgian official who helped engineer Lumumba's transfer to Katanga told de Witte that he kept CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin fully informed of the plan. "The Americans were informed of the transfer because they actively discussed this thing for weeks," says de Witte. But Devlin, now retired, denies any previous knowledge of the transfer.

Either way, Lumumba's death served its purpose: It bolstered the shaky regime of a formerly obscure colonel named Joseph Mobutu. During his three-decade rule, Mobutu would run his country, bursting with natural resources, into the depths of poverty. It took a civil war to oust him, and Congo has seen little peace since. Today, at least five countries are fighting in Congo and Lumumba's son, an opposition leader, spent several weeks in a Kinshasa jail cell on politically motivated charges.

At the time Lumumba was a hero to progressive young Americans and the CIA's involvement in his deposition and murder was a wake-up call for many, myself included.

Last week my friend Melody reminded me that January 17 was the 50th anniversary of the cold-blooded murder of Patrice Lumumba by the CIA and their Belgian and Katangan stooges. Allen Dulles claims Eisenhower ordered him to have Lumumba killed. Melody wrote that "the events really were important in shaping the fate of the Congo, and Africa in general [and are] a reminder that the US has had it's hand in all sorts of dirty deeds. Although the U.S. media has always chosen to ignore what the CIA did in the Congo and the anniversary was resolutely ignored in this country (NY Times excepted this time), she suggested that DWT readers take a look at the story last week in the Guardian:

Between 1961 and 1973, six African independence leaders were assassinated by their ex-colonial rulers, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, who was killed 50 years ago today.

Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of newly independent Congo, was the second of five leaders of independence movements in African countries to be assassinated in the 1960s by their former colonial masters, or their agents.

A sixth, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, was ousted in a western-backed coup in 1966, and a seventh, Amilcar Cabral, leader of the west African liberation movement against Portugal of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC) in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, was assassinated in 1973.

Lumumba's death in 1961 followed on from that of the opposition leader of Cameroon, Felix Moumie, poisoned in 1960. Sylvanus Olympio, leader of Togo was killed in 1963. Mehdi Ben Barka, leader of the Moroccan opposition movement was kidnapped in France in 1965 and his body never found. Eduardo Mondlane, leader of Mozambique's Frelimo, fighting for independence from the Portuguese, died from a parcel bomb in 1969.

The loss 50 years ago of this group of leaders, who all knew each other, and had a common political project based on national dignity, crippled each of their countries, and the African continent. The effects are still evident today.

Ben Barka and Cabral were revolutionary theoreticians-- as significant as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Their influence reverberated far beyond their own continent. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, organised by Ben Barka before his death, Cuban leader Fidel Castro's closing speech referred to "one of the most lucid and brilliant leaders in Africa, Comrade Amílcar Cabral, who instilled in us tremendous confidence in the future and the success of his struggle for liberation."

The Third World Movement, challenging the economic and political world dominance of the colonial powers, the US, and the neocolonial leaders favoured by the west, would have two short decades of ambition and optimism despite the long shadow of its great leaders' deaths.

Today, it is impossible to touch down at the (far from modernised) airport of Lubumbashi in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo-- in 1961 known as Elizabethville, in Congo (then renamed Zaire)-- without a shiver of recollection of the haunting photograph taken of Lumumba there shortly before his assassination, and after beatings, torture and a long, long flight in custody across the vast country which had so loved him. This particular failure of the United Nations to protect one man and his two colleagues was every bit as significant as that in Srebrenica in 1995, when 8,000 men and boys were killed.

Lumumba's own words, written to his wife just four months after the exhilaration of independence day in the capital Kinshasa are a reminder of who he was and why he meant so much to so many people then, and still does today.

"Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside… History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets… a history of glory and dignity."

Lumumba would not have been surprised that his successor, Joseph Mobuto was the US strategic ally in Africa for 30 years. Congo was too rich, too big, and too important for the west to lose control as they would have had Lumumba lived.

How ironic that Mobuto was succeeded by Laurent Desire Kabila, whose 10th anniversary of assassination, by his own guards, falls just one day before Lumumba's?

UPDATE: Russ Baker Wants To Make Sure We're Aware Of The Bush Connection

Baker points out that the CIA was a sponsor of Mobutu's and that George H.W. Bush later welcomed the savage kleptocrat and tyrant to America as "one of our most valued friends." Three days after Lumumba was murdered, JFK was sworn in as President of the United States and Baker's nook, Family of Secrets makes a hard to deny case for the involvement of the CIA, Dulles and... George H.W. Bush. From Baker's WhoWhatWhy:

In my book, Family of Secrets, I cite evidence that the elder Bush was deeply involved in C.I.A covert operations during the time in which both assassinations took place. I document his close ties to mining interests comparable to the ones Lumumba himself had angered-- by declaring, as Hochschild recounts, that it was not enough for the Congolese to gain political independence from colonial rule, but that “Africans had to also benefit from the great wealth in their soil.”

More troubling are the many inconsistencies and gaps that I discovered in accounts by Bush and others concerning his activities on and around the day of the assassination, all of which are extensively documented and footnoted. These include:

•    Bush’s noted inability to recall where he was on November 22, 1963;

•    his longtime friendship with George de Mohrenschildt, a mentor and confidant to Lee Harvey Oswald;

•    a declassified FBI memo identifying Bush as a C.I.A officer working with Cuban exiles at the time of the assassination;

•    FBI records documenting a call Bush himself placed to the Bureau on Nov. 22 from a location near Dallas, offering to identify a possible triggerman in the assassination-- a man Bush knew far better than he revealed at the time, and who he knew could not have been the triggerman

•     Barbara Bush’s revelation in her 1994 book, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, that the Bushes were having lunch the week of November 22 with Alfred Ulmer, an old friend who, research shows, was one of the C.I.A.’s experts in deposing leaders.

•    Bush’s close relationship with the military intelligence official whose unit and unit members played an astonishing array of roles on November 22, from forcing their way into the lead car of Kennedy’s motorcade to providing the interpreter who framed Marina Oswald’s statements in a way that implicated her husband.

Were Disaffected Gays Part Of The Shellacking?

Gays "get" irony-- it doesn't pay to screw them over because they don't forget or take it lightly as a community

It's become a truism if not a cliche that the Roman Catholic Church is a sanctuary for mentally ill pedophiles driven by a desire for access to the minor children of the faithful. And one of the countries where the scandal has been greatest lately has been Belgium where the whole hierarchy of the Catholic Church was involved in an organized coverup of the systemic priestly rape of young boys for decades. Pope Ratzinger was furious last summer when the Belgian police treated a meeting of the princes and princesses of his Belgian subsidiary as though they were nothing but a gang of hoodlums, barging into a meeting unannounced, searching the joint after credible allegations were made that cases of sexual abuse had taken place there, confiscating mobile phones, seizing documents, interrogating lordly bishops who have come, over the centuries, to view themselves as above the laws that govern mere mortals.

Although we've been following the Belgian predator priest story closely it was Pam Spaulding who alerted me to the newest twist yesterday.

The head of the Catholic Church in Belgium has said that AIDS is "intrinsic justice" for homosexuality.

Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard also said that elderly priests found to have sexually abused children should not be punished.

His spokesman Juergen Mettepenningen resigned over his boss' remarks, AFP reports.

Discussing HIV-positive people, he said: "When you mistreat the environment it ends up mistreating us in turn. And when you mistreat human love, perhaps it winds up taking vengeance.

"All I'm saying is that sometimes there are consequences linked to our actions," the archbishop said, saying of AIDS, "this epidemic is a sort of intrinsic justice." ... At a press conference, Mr Mettepenningen said of his former boss: "Monsignor Leonard at times acts like a motorist driving on the wrong side of a freeway who thinks all the other motorists are wrong."

Here in America the LGBT community suffered a serious setback this week at the elections. For although more gays and lesbians were elected to public office than ever before-- including David Cicilline Providence's Mayor who will now represent half of Rhode Island in Congress and Jim Gray, the new gay mayor of Lexington Kentucky-- the NY Times pointed out a very different perspective voters showed in Iowa Tuesday when the 3 Supreme Court judges who had ruled in favor of gay marriage equality were removed by angry, self-righteous bigots.

The outcome of the election was heralded both as a statewide repudiation of same-sex marriage and as a national demonstration that conservatives who have long complained about “legislators in robes” are able to effectively target and remove judges who issue unpopular decisions.

Leaders of the recall campaign said the results should be a warning to judges elsewhere.

“I think it will send a message across the country that the power resides with the people,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor who led the campaign. “It’s we the people, not we the courts.”

But critics of the campaign, including those who see the courts as a protector of minority rights, said the politicization of uncontested judicial elections represented a danger.

“What is so disturbing about this is that it really might cause judges in the future to be less willing to protect minorities out of fear that they might be voted out of office,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law. “Something like this really does chill other judges.”

...[T]he National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association, poured money into the removal campaign. Judges face no opponents in retention elections and simply need to win more yes votes than no votes to go on to another eight-year term. In Iowa, the three ousted justices did not raise campaign money, and they only made public appearances defending themselves toward the end of the election.

Each of the three justices-- Marsha K. Ternus, the chief justice; Michael J. Streit; and David L. Baker-- received about 45 percent of the vote, making this the first time members of the state’s high court had been rejected by voters. The 71 lower court judges on the ballot all easily won re-election.

The justices’ removal will have no effect on same-sex marriage, which will remain the law.

The judges declined requests for interviews but released a statement that decried what they called “an unprecedented attack by out-of-state special interest groups.” The statement defended the system for selecting judges but offered what a veiled warning about populist impulses to remake the judiciary: “Ultimately, however, the preservation of our state’s fair and impartial courts will require more than the integrity and fortitude of individual judges, it will require the steadfast support of the people.”

The defeat was a bitter disappointment to much of the legal community here, which rallied behind the justices, and it was viewed with particular concern in the gay community, which has found state courts more sympathetic than state legislatures.

Like the tip of a spear, gays seem to be leading the way on not being willing to take the bullshit from the country's ruling elites any longer-- at least not as it pertains to using them as scapegoats and sacrificing the LGBT community on the alter of conservative political dominance. As John Arovosis pointed out at AmericaBlog this week, there was a 15% drop in gay support for House Democrats from 2008 to 2010


And that's not because anyone likes the Republicans any better. In fact, it's worth remembering that of the 17 Democrats who joined the 158 Republicans to vote against including the LGBT community in the Hate Crimes bill on April 29, 2009, only 6 will be back in Congress in January: Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN), Mike McIntyre (NC), Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC), and Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), all of whom also voted against repealing DADT. Among those defeated at the polls Tuesday were homophobes and putative Democrats Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL), Chris Carney (Blue Dog-PA), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), Brad Ellsworth (Blue Dog-IN), Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA), and Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS).

The DC Democrats can prattle on as much as they like about their "biggest tent ever pitched," but gays aren't buying it, not if one of the stakes using in pitching it is hammered right up their yoo-know-whats. In fact, if you want to believe some of the polling (albeit suspect polling from an untrustworthy group of right-wing self-loathers) 31% of gays who voted, voted for Republicans on Tuesday, four points higher than in 2008. On the other hand, Michelangelo Signorile, a very trustworthy voice, asked his radio listeners yesterday and got an earful from gays who had nothing but bitterness towards Obama and the Big Tent, some of whom voted for violently homophobic Republicans out of pure spite.

The Pope Is In SHOCK That Belgians Aren't Paying Due Deference To Priestly Child Rapists

Lucky for the Belgians the Nazi Pope has no divisions. The monstrous old bitch is fit to be tied-- and wants revenge. In case you've never heard Howie's Theory Of Religion, let me run that by you real fast before we get to the latest attempts by the Vatican to protect what their employees insist is a hard-earned perk of their jobs-- access to the innocent young bodies of their parishioners' children.

Back even before John McCain was born, life was very hard and brutal-- even more so than in Afghanistan today in some ways (not counting the predator drones). Imagine if you had to leave the relative safety of the communal cave every day with a bunch of smelly, grunting Neanderthals and a knobby club you made from a tree and go hunt some animal you could eat-- one that could well be as eager to eat you. Anyone with any amount of natural guile would look for a way to play hooky as fast as possible. Problem of course was obvious. If you didn't join the hunt for the clan's daily bread, you could starve. No one likes a parasite. What to do, what to do...

And then religion was born. Some guile guy got the idea that he could persuade a bunch of dumb Neanderthals he could hear voices from a stone or channel a message from a dead ancestor or a sacred flame. It worked. He didn't have to work anymore! They went out and hunted the saber-toothed tigers and he stayed home and invented tricks to explain what happened to the hunter Smilodon ate for lunch. Much warmer and safer in the cave-- and those nice little children he was left to take care of...

Anyway, there has been so much progress since then. In fact, social parasites have almost completely taken over society. And the chief of one of the biggest, best organized and most richly adorned of the parasitic guilds makes sure that that "special perk" keeps the mostly mentally-deranged applicants coming. So you can only imagine Ratzinger's furor when the damned Belgians-- a country with barely more divisions than his own-- had the temerity to do what other nations, including our own of course, only give lip service to-- putting an end to the age-old relationship between religionistic parasites and defenseless young children.

The incident that so offended Ratzinger happened last week, June 24th at 10:30 AM, to be precise-- at the residence of the Archbishop of Malines-Brussels, where 9 Roman Catholic bishops were gathered for their monthly meeting. Police and court officials barged in just as the meeting was getting started and announced they would be searching the joint because there were credible allegations made that cases of sexual abuse had taken place there. All the princes and princesses of the Church had their mobile phones confiscated; documents were seized, and the bishops, who have always been treated as though they were above the laws of mere mortals-- that's convenient when you're running a criminal operation; it's like Congress-- were all interrogated. No one was tortured. This is, after all, Belgium, not the Inquisition or the U.S. The bishops have been shrieking about the indignity of it all-- the media having been informed in advance-- and claiming that that the tombs of Cardinals Jozef-Ernest Van Roey and Léon-Joseph Suenens, were violated. The Church is astonished, outraged and even contemplating suing Belgium.

This weekend Ratzinger was on the attack.

Once again proving his startling lack of concern over the main point, Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out against what he is calling ‘deplorable’ police actions, after authorities raided a Belgian church believed to be part of the ongoing child abuse allegations.

The church was part of a fresh wave of allegations, in which several priests are believed to have abused children, or have known about the abuse of children.

Computers and accounts were taken, phone records requested, and the church swept for evidence.

“I want to express, dear brother in the Episcopate, as well as to all the Bishops of Belgium, my closeness and solidarity in this moment of sadness, in which, with certain surprising and regrettable methods, searches were carried out including in the Malines cathedral and in the premises where the Belgian episcopate was meeting in plenary session,” he was quoted by the Telegraph as saying in a message that appeared in a Vatican publication.

His anger is sure to raise a few eyebrows.

So far, the investigation into decades of child abuse, and the possible cover-ups by prominent members of the Church, has been met with a significant amount of waffling, pointing fingers, and outrage by a papacy that is appearing more and more corrupt.

While the serious allegations of child rape are showing recent accounts, and the church and priests were treated in the same way that anyone would be in a raid, the Pope has called the actions “deplorable” and “unexpected."

"Unexpected" indeed-- and we're not just talking about Belgian waffles here. Imagine if the Belgians get away with treating the high status parasites like ordinary criminals and governments no longer ignore their crimes and their coverups, and stop allowing them to have safe havens right in the middle of our cities and towns! No telling where it could lead next. There could even be a day far in the future when these guys have to go get real jobs like everyone else-- and deal with their psychiatric dysfunctions without victimizing... the guileless.

Yes, it's another installment of "Know Your U.S. Public Servants": "Ambassador" Sam Fox shares the spirit of Christmas with 1,700 of his best buds

As you sort through your Christmas loot, perhaps coming to grips with the wreck of a life you’ve led, to be filled with such a sad lot of cheap, thoughtless gift-givers, this little item from our pal Al Kamen’s last Washington Post column before taking off on vacation last week may bring a tear to your eye.

You remember "Ambassador" Sam Fox, right? You know, the Swiftboaters’ sugar daddy, who was rewarded with the ambassadorship to Belgium (and if financing a band of sociopathic liars to help steal an election doesn’t earn a fellow an ambassadorship, what does?), only his nomination couldn't get out of Senate committee and so had to be end-arounded with a recess appointment? In case you missed it, here’s how the "ambassador" sent greetings from Belgium to his 1,700 nearest-and-dearest:

Merry Xmas From Belgium

GOP mega-contributor Sam Fox, the Swift boat backer who received a controversial recess appointment to be ambassador to Belgium, has arranged for special, one-kilo (2.2-pound) bars of superb, dark Belgian chocolate, stamped with the State Department seal, to be given as Christmas presents.

The Belgians are speculating that President Bush, a renowned chocophile who shopped for chocolates on trips to Belgium in 2001 and 2005, will most surely find one of these under the tree Christmas morning.

That bar would be part of a 1,700-bar order that Fox placed with famed Antwerp chocolatier Erik Goossens, whose company specializes in high-end chocolates. Most likely, several other White House aides and administration officials will be getting the prized chocolates.

"It was quite difficult to do," Goossens told us, requiring "special molds and special boxes." It was all "very fancy. We did our best." That should be more than delicious.

How much would all this cost? Goossens wouldn't touch that one, though he noted that his 52-year-old family company considered it a "prestige project." That probably means Fox got something of a break on the price. And this is a nearly two-ton purchase.

Let's do some cogitating. Goossens's chocolates sell for a little more than $50 a pound in this country. So each bar would cost about $110.

Perhaps Fox could make such a bulk purchase for $150,000. Maybe he will send some chocolate to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democrats, who are still furious at the White House for pulling back his nomination at the last minute and giving him the ambassadorship?

AND IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO ENTER AL'S
"WHAT WAS IN THAT OFFICE, ANYWAY?" CONTEST

Did you hear about the fire in Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney's Eisenhower Executive Office Building lair a week ago Wednesday? "Naturally," says Al, it "has everyone in Washington speculating about its origin. Arson might seem a bit far-fetched to folks outside the Beltway, but it would not be the first time a small conflagration was planned by a White House official."

Which sends Al strolling down Memory Lane, to the crackpot plot hatched by G. Gordon Liddy to firebomb the Brookings Institution--

"as a diversion," he writes in his memoirs--to get into the security vault and steal Daniel Ellsberg's Vietnam War papers.

"We devised a plan that entailed buying a used but late-model fire engine of the kind used by the District of Columbia fire department," Liddy wrote, "and marking it appropriately." The plot included "uniforms for a squad of Cubans" and adequate "training so their performance would be believable."

The firebomb would go off at night "so as not to endanger lives needlessly," Liddy wrote. "The Cubans in the authentic-looking fire engine would 'respond' minutes [later] . . . hit the vault, and get themselves out in the confusion" as real fire equipment arrived. "The bogus engine would be abandoned at the scene."

The decision from higher-ups, Liddy wrote, "was swift. 'No.' Too expensive. The White House wouldn't spring for a fire engine." (Pikers!)

"And now," writes Al, "we have this curious, possibly successful fire Wednesday. So the obvious question is: What did they try to burn? [Emphasis added.] (We'll let the appropriate authorities find the perps.)"

Yes, it's the final In the Loop Contest for 2007. Simply guess what documents or other materials the arsonists were trying to destroy. Could it have been a secret legal opinion from Cheney Chief of Staff David Addington, giving the vice president the inherent authority to set the fire?

Send your entries to hitthevault@washpost.com. Winners will receive an In the Loop T-shirt. You must include your name and telephone number (home, work or cell) to be eligible. And of course, administration officials and Hill folks may opt to enter "on background." Deadline is Jan. 9. Don't delay.

Man, we'd love one of them T-shirts. If you've got any ideas that you'd like to have ripped off--I mean, that you'd like to share--just fire away.

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