Friday Mashup (4/11/08)

I don’t know if Repug U.S. House Rep Patrick McHenry of North Carolina (pictured here with Incurious George) is the stupidest, most arrogant politician in the country (lots of competition of course), but based on this story, I’d say he’s made it to very near the top of the list.

This is the guy who criticized one of our military for not allowing him to work out at a gym inside Iraq’s “Green Zone” when he visited last March 22nd as part of a congressional delegation (McHenry called the person who told him he didn’t have the proper credential “a two-bit security guard”).

Now, we learn the following…

The Pentagon told a North Carolina lawmaker Tuesday that he couldn’t re-air a video he'd shot in Baghdad after accusations surfaced that he breached operational security in detailing enemy rocket attacks.

…

The new criticism stems from a video that was featured on his Web site last Friday. Shot in the Green Zone, it showed McHenry gesturing to a building behind him and saying that one of 11 rockets “hit just over my head.” Then he named two other places struck by the rockets.

On Monday, a veterans group called VoteVets.org accused McHenry of giving away intelligence information that could have aided terrorist organizations in targeting the Green Zone.

“The bottom line is that whoever launched that strike could take the information McHenry provided and use it to kill Americans in the Green Zone,” wrote Brandon Friedman, vice chairman of VoteVets.org, a veterans advocacy group that has called for troop withdrawal and promoted veterans for political office. “This is why professionals operating in a combat zone are trained not to reveal any battle damage after an attack.”

McHenry pulled the video after Friedman’s post appeared (I would say that the gentleman from North Carolina is a total asshat).

So what kind of a greeting did Jackie Speier, the new California Dem U.S. House Rep taking over for Tom Lantos who recently passed away, receive today as she gave her first speech in Congress?

mcjoan at The Daily Kos tells us here…

…Speier spoke out about Iraq, and the boos and hoots began from the Republican side of the aisle.

"When will we get out of Iraq?" was the most frequent question she heard, she told the House, while campaigning in the special election she won Tuesday to succeed the late Rep. Tom Lantos.

"The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately," she said, as several Republicans loudly booed. Rep. Darrell Issa, a Vista Republican, bolted from his seat and left the floor.

The hoots grew in volume as Speier, a Hillsborough Democrat, continued....

"Why are they booing my mother?" Speier's middle-school daughter Stephanie asked, according to a staffer.

All class, those House Repugs (and by the way, in case you'd forgotten, Issa is the fool who once threatened Henry Waxman...and yes, "do you think he really wants to investigate directly" about Blackwater constitutes a threat).

This story from the Times of London tells us about a new book soon to be published on “the health and medication of world leaders,” and it apparently contains some revelations on the medications administered to former president John F. Kennedy…

In his riveting volume In Sickness and In Power, former Foreign Secretary and medic David Owen reviews the health and medication of leaders over the last century. The chapter on Kennedy is jaw-dropping.

Owen starts by convincingly asserting that Kennedy was much sicker than is commonly appreciated and certainly much sicker than was appreciated at the time. His Addison's disease was very debilitating and needed constant attention.

…

In particular, without the knowledge of his other doctors and at the same time as they were giving him other drugs, he was being tended to by Max Jacobson, a doctor known as "Dr Feelgood" because of his reputation as a provider of amphetamines and pep pills. In time Jacobson's drug treatment became almost a recreational drug for Kennedy. Jacobson was later struck off.

Owen shows that is quite likely that Dr Feelgood, specially flown to Vienna, injected Kennedy with intravenous amphetamine just before he met Khrushchev.

Then later in the year Dr Hans Kraus took control of Kennedy's medication. He demanded total control and began using massage rather than injections to treat the President.

The review tells us that when Dr. Kraus took over, Kennedy regained his stability (from what the book claims as a bit of incapacitation around the time of the Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy was under Jacobson's "care") enough to lead the nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis, that little dustup Dana Perino didn't know about.

Interesting stuff, though; I’m sure we’ll receive a response from a Kennedy spokesperson at some point.

And finally, David Brooks told us earlier that, as far as he’s concerned, “memory is the new sex.”

Well, based on this story, I think the old one is doing just fine, thank you.