Yesterday Lisa De Pasquale, GOProud’s interim chair, published a piece worth reading in The Daily Caller calling out the gay Left for its vicious treatment of gay conservatives and their supporters while simultaneously deploring bullying:

Dan Savage, the “It Gets Better” project’s co-founder, has been just as vicious toward gay conservatives as schoolyard bullies have been toward their gay classmates. In an MSNBC interview, Savage referred to the members of GOProud, an organization of gay conservatives, as “gay Quislings and useful idiots.” He said they were just “window dressing” for bigoted Republicans. Like a schoolyard bully, Savage ridicules people who are different from him.

In 2007, the Human Rights Campaign congratulated Joe Jervis, the creator of the Joe My God blog, for an award he received for having the best LGBT blog. In 2011, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) awarded Jervis with its “Blogger of the Year” award. At the time, GOProud Chairman Emeritus Chris Barron wrote in The Daily Caller:

GLAAD’s tag line is “Words and images matter.”… Jervis goes as far as allowing calls for actual violence against gay conservatives to stand on his site. On two separate occasions, Jervis has openly ridiculed incidents of violent anti-gay hate crimes against gay conservatives. Apparently, words and images don’t matter to GLAAD’s members as long as the subject of those attacks is someone they disagree with politically.

I’m still working on establishing the order necessary for turning things around for us financially and going forward, but I couldn’t resist writing the following comment:

The Left works very hard to make sure its followers do not understand the full implications of the planned economy that they advocate. It also works hard to ensure its followers do not understand the Right and its ideological diversity. Unfortunately for the Right, its social conservatives preach family values, liberty and fiscal conservatism while practicing destruction of any family with a gay member, religion-based totalitarianism and big government redistribution of wealth for their own pet causes. Their saying one thing and doing another while conducting purges goes a long way toward confusing people about the conservative brand. Speaking to the Right, what we have to do as fiscal conservative/social liberals is to do a better job of holding members of our own party to account for behavior that violates our stated ideals.

Speaking to the Left, we have to work to educate the Left about how destructive their beliefs in planned economies are. This is especially true for the gay community, which thrives due to free market principles because gays as a minority must be entrepreneurs in order to cope with job discrimination. In fact, the gay community is a model of fiscal conservatism and self-reliance because gays can never depend on the government for help. That is why the gay community has so many charities, non-profits and clubs for practically every cause, hobby, sport, affinity and interest. Embracing the Left’s economic principles is suicide for the gay community because a planned economy would never duplicate or support the kind of diversity we have because, for the time being, the government doesn’t take so much money that we don’t have enough left over to spend on what we value.

My observation of Ann Coulter is that she is a woman with a good heart who stands by her friends in good times and bad. She also has many gay friends whom she loves and who love her. I wish I were one of them. The gay Left does not understand what an enormous act of love and courage it is for her to stand by GOProud. Single-handedly Ann makes it impossible for social conservatives to claim that gays can’t truly be fiscal conservatives and national security conservatives. Single-handedly Ann makes it impossible for social conservatives to purge the conservative movement of gays. When social conservatives can’t purge the movement of gay conservatives, that means we get to work with other conservatives for the causes we have in common and through the friendships we develop prove that our equality will make America stronger and more prosperous.

Lisa De Pasquale also is a woman of enormous courage and executive ability. Anyone who objects to her leadership role at GOProud is not a strategic thinker. Lisa was executive director of CPAC for many years. This means that she knows everyone who is anyone in the conservative movement as well as where all the bodies are buried. And that means she is well-connected and people take her calls and read e-mails she sends. She began her public support of GOProud while she was CPAC’s executive director and GOProud is fortunate to have her.

However, I do wish that GOProud would show some leadership in the civility wars and adopt a policy that forbids name-calling. Name-calling does nothing to persuade or educate or inspire people to see the merits of any point-of-view. Instead, it causes hurt and anger and closes minds and hearts. It is time to apologize for past errors and pledge to take the high road from now on.

Note: I will resume blogging as soon as I’ve finished creating order in our finances and my work environment. It is an emotionally demanding process and is requiring all my attention. I appreciate all good thoughts, prayers and practical support in the form of donations (see the “Donate” button in the sidebar) that any of my dear gentle readers wish to share to inspire me and help me through my current challenges. I’m really looking forward to finishing this project and returning to blogging.

Ann Coulter is at CPAC and she just mocked Bill Nye the Science Guy’s claim that one of the things proving anthropogenic global warming is that lots of young people believe in it, “On that basis I can prove beer is the greatest beverage ever invented!”

To which Moe Lane said to me, “But it is!”

Ann: “If Ron Paul says it and it doesn’t have to do with foreign policy, then I agree.”

And more Ann: “If you don’t leave liberals in a sputtering rage, you’re not doing it right.”

Question: “Have you ever dated a liberal before?”

Ann: “They weren’t liberal for long.”

Gay Patriot fell into bad company yesterday, by which I mean Peggy Noonan, who is too elitist and envious to understand the miracle that is Sarah Palin, and Noonan persuaded him that our nation’s ills are due to us pampered, spoiled Baby Boomers.

Here is Noonan’s central problem: Obama is deliberately bringing down this country, but he is her Messiah and therefore it is anathema for her even to consider his culpability.

Obama is using debt bombs to destroy the United States as a capitalist democratic republic. We have not lost our way. Obama and his handlers and minions intend to destroy the U.S. economy for their own personal gain. They are doing this on purpose. How is it the innumerable times Obama has said one thing and done another, or said opposite things, has never tipped Noonan off? Why aren’t Obama’s socialist and communist and terrorist cronies — to say nothing of the tax cheats and felons — a continent of red flags for her?

The malaise Noonan is just starting to detect is the confusion that a con artist’s marks feel when they realize the con artist says one thing, but does another. They are attached to their belief that what the con artist said and promised must be true because it is just what they wanted to hear in exchange for handing over their power and money. It takes a long time to get the marks to register that you have to ignore what con artists say and pay attention only to what they actually do, which always will be in their own self-interest regardless of anyone else.

Noonan is only three years older than I am and should remember the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies a little better before making pronouncements that Baby Boomers are too pampered to be able to imagine that America can fail. In the Fifties and early Sixties I remember, we had a constant fear of nuclear war with the USSR that would wipe us all out. This was followed by the Viet Nam war and price controls. In the Seventies we had inflation — I am skeptical that any Boomer who remembers inflation does not dread it almost above all other things — gasoline shortages due to OPEC and double-digit mortgage interest rates due to Carter — and we capped off the decade with 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis.

Most of us also were born before the polio vaccine and while there may have been vaccines for them, I had measles, mumps and chicken pox as a child — illnesses virtually unknown to Gen X-ers. And when the AIDS epidemic came, it was friends my age who died and the survivors my age who led the charge to fight it.

When exactly was this halycon time of untroubled bliss that we Baby Boomers had all to ourselves?

The people I saw at the 9/12 Tea Party March on Washington were almost all Boomers — as a crowd, we were old, gray-haired, fat and a truly amazing proportion of the crowd was either in a wheelchair or using a three-wheeled scooter. Boomers ARE the people who know Obama and the Democrats are trying to bring down America and we are the ones organizing to save her.

Noonan: The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers.

Yes, because we know Obama and the Democrats cook the books.

Noonan: Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008.

Just because Obama and the Democrats told everyone the tide of cash from the stimulus package would create prosperity doesn’t mean it was true. We Tea Partiers and conservatives tried to stop it because we saw it was fake prosperity but REAL debt. Noonan and Gay Patriot — where have you been during all the Tea Parties and town hall meetings?

Noonan: Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.

Actually, for a year or two before the crash, the cable TV news shows had a constant parade of experts forecasting a crash. A number of them were flogging books they’d written forecasting a crash. However, perhaps it was possible to miss their relentless warnings if you only watched MSNBC or just read the New York Times.

Noonan: The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

…

The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Immediately after the crash last September Obama began denouncing the economy and mocked McCain for his efforts to restore people’s confidence in our ability to get through any crisis and to reassure us the fundamentals of the economy were strong. It is Obama who has worked tirelessly to get Americans to stop believing in themselves. And it is the Democrats in Congress who have worked to intrude government into every aspect of our lives to usurp our liberty to solve our own problems.

I [Noonan] talked with an executive this week with what we still call “the insurance companies” and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress “are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” The executive said of Washington: “They don’t understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who’ve said to me ‘I’m done.’” He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, “They don’t understand that if they start to tax me so that I’m paying 60%, 55%, I’ll stop.”

He felt government doesn’t understand that business in America is run by people, by human beings. Mr. Frank must believe America is populated by high-achieving robots who will obey whatever command he and his friends issue. But of course they’re human, and they can become disheartened. They can pack it in, go elsewhere, quit what used to be called the rat race and might as well be called that again since the government seems to think they’re all rats. (That would be you, Chamber of Commerce.)

Uh, where have Noonan and Gay Patriot been while conservatives have been hollering, “I’m going Galt!” at the top of their lungs since Obama’s inauguration?

Noonan: And here is the second part of the story. While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

Yo, Noonan! The people who intend to break America and who see making Americans disheartened as one of their first steps to complete control are Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd and Frank. Read Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin — and A Conservative Lesbian — for heaven’s sake!

Eric Erickson at RedState.com recently featured Ronald Reagan’s speech from Oct. 27, 1964, “We Have a Rendez-Vous with Destiny.” Reagan — you remember him, don’t you, Ms. Noonan? — had a clear sense of the perils ever-ready to kill America, as well as the clear solution: keep government small, keep taxes low, create the economic conditions that allow entrepreneurs to be filled with ambition and to thrive. He has the video and full text of Reagan’s speech — here is a pertinent excerpt:

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We’ve never had it so good.”

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We’ve raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don’t own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we’ve just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.

As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

Earth to Noonan and Gay Patriot: Reagan’s message in that speech is ever-green. Boomers are out in droves at the Tea Parties and town halls and we are working our e-mail lists and blogs to wake people up to the intentional destruction and confusion Obama and the Democrats are using to destroy capitalism and America. Not only do we have a clear plan for restoring economic prosperity and strength to America, we’ve been demonstrating and rallying in ever-growing numbers and generally shouting it from every rooftop and IP address. What on earth is the matter with you that you haven’t connected with that?

Update, 11/1/09: Smitty at The Other McCain got to Noonan’s column first and illustrates his points with a couple of YouTube videos that are worth watching — I especially liked “The Warrior’s Song,” which will not surprise my regular gentle readers. Smitty quotes Noonan and comments:

[Noonan] This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Absolutely, they can. Just not by you, not by elite North Easterners, not by Progressive thinking. Get the [debris] out of the way. You’re part of the problem, not the solution, Peggy.

Stacy is giving lessons today on “How to offend a woman.” It ends not with a cry, but a demand for coffee.

Stacy, if you want me to get you coffee BECAUSE I am a woman, I’m going to need to know how you take it — with urine, strychnine or arsenic? Name your poison.

Really — you are the father of daughters. Refine your approach and go after the evils of anti-capitalist fake feminism specifically rather than degrading all women — including your own wife and daughters. You are a better man and a better thinker than this.

I also want to point out that many of the bravest and most effective conservatives fighting to preserve the U.S. as a capitalist democratic republic are women who have earned the right to give orders rather than take them: Gov. Sarah Palin, Phyllis Chesler, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Pamela Geller, Debbie Schlussel and Liz Cheney.

Stop attacking the values of liberty and equality for ALL women when your real problem is with anti-capitalist, anti-American zealots who have hijacked the cause of equality for women in exactly the way that ACORN has hijacked the cause of poverty and uses poor people as their hostages and cover for their anti-capitalist, anti-America scumbaggeries.

If it helps, then just think of how much the cause of real equality for women makes the terrorists get their grenade belts in a bunch.

P.S.

I think dear Attila forgot that you are a vegetarian — you are, aren’t you? — so instead of a bison, just slay us a bushel or so of fatted artichokes and that will be sufficient propitiation.

moar funny pictures

I wrote in my “About me” page that my transformation from liberal to fiscal conservative during the fall of the 2008 presidential campaign made me wonder if that was what turning into a werewolf felt like. (Roger Simon, founder of Pajamas Media, wrote in his book, Blacklisting Myself, that he had similar emotions during his transition from Left to Right, but he compared it to getting a sex change.)

These feelings came up first, and were the most intense and bewildering, when I began to read Ann Coulter’s columns and laugh until tears ran down my face. I was enjoying AND agreeing with the work of the conservative anti-Christ! What was happening to me? I could tell I really had the fiscal conservative monkey on my back when I began to go through her column archive at her Web site, www.AnnCoulter.com, laughing and laughing, saying “Tell it, sister!” and then calling Cuban Diva BFF to read Coulter’s columns aloud to her so we could laugh and say “Amen!” together.

Then I went to CPAC and caught a glimpse of Ms. Coulter in person while she was being interviewed on Radio Row. Just seeing how petite she is touched my heart, especially in comparison to how large she looms as a devil in Left-wing minds, and I was inspired to write my first humor post, “Scent of a Woman.” I hope if she ever reads it, it makes her smile and she can feel that there is real love, respect and gratitude in my heart for her and her body of work.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I checked my sitemeter to see how my campaign to GET DAVID LETTERMAN FIRED is coming along and I spied several links of visitors coming from Ann Coulter’s site. Holy cow!

Ann Coulter — ANN COULTER!!! — linked me, she really linked me!:

Ann Coulter linked my fight to GET DAVID LETTERMAN FIRED!!!

I have to admit, I called Cuban Diva BFF as soon as I saw the links from Ms. Coulter in my sitemeter and didn’t click to see Ms. Coulter’s site until I could share my wonder and joy with her. (Cuban Diva BFF has a generosity of soul that multiplies the joy of anyone who shares their good news with her.)

Cuban Diva BFF lives in Manhattan and is friends with one of Ann Coulter’s body guards. Think about that. Ann Coulter needs body guards because of things she says.

Another conservative columnist whom I love and respect, Michelle Malkin, also needs body guards because she is such an effective and sharp-witted journalist with a conservative point of view.

Like Michelle Malkin, I know what is it like to get beaten up and run out of town by totalitarian feminists because that’s what happened when my late life partner and I conducted a six-year campaign in the 1990′s to get a group LED BY THE TOP LESBIANS IN THE DISABILITY RIGHTS MOVEMENT in Washington, D.C., to make good on their pledges to choose wheelchair-accessible meeting venues. I fell in love with Michelle Malkin for her column on the “Sisterhood of the Protected Female Liberal Journalists” because she made sense of what had happened to me on a much smaller scale so that for the first time I could understand why I had been shellacked, abandoned by almost everyone I thought would have my back and driven out of the lesbian community. Well, actually, I realized I could no longer go into it because I would be with a vulnerable person, my quadriplegic life partner, whom I could not be sufficiently sure of being able to protect every minute.

Which reminds me, have you people forgotten that Gov. Palin was invited by Comcast in October 2008 to go to Philadelphia to do the ceremony of dropping the puck to start a hockey game with the Philadelphia Eagles and how viciously she was booed AND ACCUSED OF BRINGING HER SEVEN-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, PIPER, ALONG WITH HER A HUMAN SHIELD! Gov. Palin loves hockey! Her daughter loves hockey! She brought her daughter to a hockey game! Not only did the crowd feel free to boo Gov. Palin and felt no shame about including her daughter, afterwards a man was inciting the crowd to attack Gov. Palin with cries of, “Let’s stone her old-school!” (See here and here.)

These are some of the reasons why I am determined to GET DAVID LETTERMAN FIRED!!!

David Letterman deliberately and viciously and with malice-of-forethought made vile, sexist attacks repeatedly on both Gov. Palin and her innocent teen-age daughters in order to destroy her career and force her out of politics in order to protect her children. We cannot stand idly by and tolerate the sexism and vicious attacks on our conservative politicians, journalists and columnists AND THEIR FAMILIES. If we do not show our loyalty and guard their backs and take out their enemies persistently and consistently, we really must consider that they could be murdered, especially in light of the recent spate of killings by fanatics.

We also must consider that if conservatives do not show their loyalty and fight for our conservative politicians, journalists and columnists, we really will have fewer talented women — and men — willing to fight for us.

So, please get to work on the consistent, persistent effort required to persuade CBS to FIRE DAVID LETTERMAN NOW!!!

P.S.

My heartfelt thanks not only go out to Ms. Coulter, but also to HillBuzz — which made me realize I had to get busy on this fight — and Instapundit, The Other McCain, Little Miss Attila and more blogs than I can keep track of right now for linking and supporting the battle to GET DAVID LETTERMAN FIRED NOW!!!

P.P.S.

How timely and apropos that Instapundit today linked Why Loyalty Matters: The Groundbreaking Approach to Rediscovering Happiness, Meaning and Lasting Fulfillment in Your Life and Work.