Fulfilling his bloggy mission, Zandar points out the stupid in this wingnut-prØn poll, which finds that, according to Americans, the US has lost international standing during the Obama administration:
What a ridiculous poll. If you want to know how the US is perceived internationally by non-Americans, why are you asking Americans?
Good question, Zandar. As it turns out, Gallup released a poll last month that actually did gauge non-American perceptions of American leadership and presents data from 2006-2009:
Everyone knows squishy, effete, elitist Kenyan lawyer Barack Obama is just longing to coddle America’s enemies! Unlike Dick Cheney, who once shot an old lawyer in the face (it was just Dick’s manner of saying, “Outta my way, motherfucker!”), Obama wants to serve terrorists glasses of warm, halal milk, read them Koranic bedtime stories and tuck them into comfy featherbeds with extra-soft pillows.
But damn it all, whenever secret Muslim Obama tries to deliver engraved invitations to Islamic terrorists to please come dine on pork-free goodies on the East Lawn, he keeps accidentally blowingthesumbitchesup with Hellfire missiles! It’s all a horrible, horrible misunderstanding.
There are times when a belief in a literal, Lake o’ Fire hell would come in handy—if only for the hope that a person like Karl Rove will eventually roast in it:
“[D]id Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not,” Rove wrote in his 516-page book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.”
“Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it,” he wrote. “Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the threat of WMD. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq’s horrendous human rights violations.”
“But I am under no illusions; the failure to find stockpiles of WMD did great damage to the administration’s credibility,” he wrote. “Our weak response in defense of the president and in setting the record straight, is, I believe, one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years.”
He goes on to say, “So who was responsible for the failure to respond? I was. I should have stepped forward, rung the warning bell, and pressed for full-scale response. I didn’t.”
Oh, so your regret is that you failed to spin it properly? Please proceed directly to hell.
Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz is an attorney who got through law school without learning that those accused of crimes—even atrocities—have a right to legal counsel. With the help of Fox News and Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney’s “Keep America Safe” organization has been busily smearing lawyers who represented War on Terror detainees, implying that the lawyers and the DOJ that employs them are in league with al Qaeda:
Liz Cheney, who in an earlier time would have impugned the character of Atticus Finch, is a disgrace to her profession and a neo-McCarthyite. That’s not surprising, given her parentage.
Also not surprising is that our stupid non-Fox media pretend not to notice this. They’ve long preferred covering key political battles and national security issues as if reporting on an Octomom-Brangela polygamous Vegas wedding.
The patriarch of the Cheney clan used fear to pull off one of the most expensive, deadly con jobs in the history of the United States. His daughter Liz is expanding the fear-mongering empire by smearing good people who are upholding the Constitution her father and his cronies crapped all over.
It looks like she’ll get away with it, just like her old man did. And it looks like the administration might just knuckle under to the fear-mongers. I hate to be dramatic, but I think this means the War on Terror is over. And we lost.
Well, not exactly, but Petraeus does clearly repudiate the lies Cheney has been peddling about the necessity of torture, Gitmo, etc.:
You’d think something like that might get a little more media play—this is General Surgey McSurgepants after all, the infallible warrior whose dress uniform Bush and Cheney so cravenly cowered behind for so long. I guess Tiger Woods’ confessional stepped on the story. Bummer.
Casual observers may believe Obama beat McCain because of things like effective organization, disgust with failed Republican policies, a VP candidate who wasn’t a booger-eating moron, etc. But the GOP poobahs know better: The party that transformed an addled, daddy-dependent, AWOL, prep-school cheerleader into Commander Codpiece understands the power of image.
Before McCain had even delivered his concession speech in 2008, the people who really run the GOP (hint: the money people, not the tea party yahoos, dittoheads, Paultards, etc.) identified the cause of the loss and were busily engaged in developing a new strategy.
A true creature of the Senate—back when “comity” was a trademark of that legislative body—Biden is famously loathe to “impugn a man’s motives” as Gregory points out. He comes close when he says he can understand Cheney’s impulse to “rewrite history.”
I’ll spell it out: Displaying a unique combination of cowardice and greed, Bush and Cheney panicked after 9/11 and then seized on the country’s understandable shock, grief and fear to lie us into a ruinous war with a nation that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, subvert the Constitution and breach the long-standing international agreements that formed the framework of our moral authority in the world.
The Bush administration ruled through fear-mongering for seven straight years, shamelessly upping the terror alert level to swing elections and playing the terror card at every opportunity. Cheney is afraid that if the citizens of this country ever come out from under their beds long enough to assess the damage he and Bush wrought, they will denounce them as the war criminals and inept, corrupt servants of the rich that they are.
That is Cheney’s motive. Obama can personally hog-tie Osama bin Laden and completely stamp out al Qaeda, and Cheney will continue to call him an effete weakling. It is the only card Cheney has ever had and the only one he will ever play. The only question is how long will he get away with it. Sadly, the answer seems to be forever.
Lots of blogs are getting a sugary schadenfreude high from a Minnesota billboard featuring the Dubya pic shown above, with the caption “Miss Me Yet?”
Even Michelle Malkin replies “No, not really.” Of course, she doesn’t miss him because he wasn’t giggly and murderous enough. Normal people don’t miss him because he’s a fucking subhuman assplug who ruined America to impress his Dad.
I’ve already tried my hand at a funnier, more pertinent Commenters Mrs. Polly, BoredNow and Mr. Prosser jointly inspired the smirky quote above for the man who started two useless wars and set fire to the Constitution…but I’ll bet you can do better keep ‘em coming! Make me laugh and I’ll turn your hilarious gloat-quote into a billboard image, too!
Via TPM, details on the House Republicans’ budget:
First, it calls for big cuts in Social Security benefits for everyone currently under 55 years of age. On top of the cuts it also calls for privatizing Social Security.
Basically the exact plan President Bush tried in 2005. Next, it calls for the full privatization and phasing out of Medicare. It’ll be replaced by a system of vouchers in which instead of getting Medicare you get a voucher to buy un-reformed private insurance.
Weirdly, with all that, the draft GOP budget doesn’t get the federal budget into surplus until sometime after 2060, which seems like a pretty long time. But isn’t this sort of a big deal? House Republicans are poised to run in 2010 on slashing or abolishing the two most popular federal government programs—Social Security and Medicare.
Hmmmm, what should we do? No wait, don’t tell me. Lesseee…bipartisanship? Reach across the aisle? Oh wait, here’s an idea: Nuke the motherfuckers! (In a metaphorical sense, of course.) Sweet weepin’ Jeebus straddling the third rail, just do it.
I don’t think any agency of the federal government should be exempt from rooting out wasteful spending or unnecessary spending. And I, frankly, I would agree with it at the Pentagon.
Did anyone see the GOP response to Obama’s State of the Union speech? I’m biased, of course, but I thought McDonnell’s performance was a Jindal-class debacle, just in a different way.
First of all, it was a huge mistake to stage it in the VA state house before the delegates. It looked like a chintzy knock-off of the real SOTU and invited unflattering comparisons; it was kinda like watching a community playhouse production of the same show you’ve just seen on Broadway—with the script rewritten by the high school debate club.
There’s Obama surrounded by the trappings of office with the Supreme Court, Joint Chiefs, House and Senate in front of him and the VP and Speaker of the House behind him. And here comes McDonnell, shaking hands with a bunch of schmoes no one outside Virginia has ever heard of in a scaled down version of the grand scene that had played before. Pathetic.
In his opening lines, McDonnell said, “It’s not easy to follow the President of the United States.” He should have closed his piehole right then and gone home—we all would have understood! But he droned out the rote GOP-teabagger fusion claptrap—warren terra, federal takeover of health care, snowflake babies, deficits are bad now that Bush is gone, blah, blah, blah.
He even threw in a gratuitous reference to Senator-Elect Cosmo TruckNutz, which was kind of pathetic, particularly coming from a Pat Robertson U grad who looks like the type of televangelist who specializes in slut-shaming female centerfolds.
I didn’t watch the yappy head analysis and haven’t read any wingnut reviews—for all I know, they’re hailing McDonnell as the second coming of Great Reagan’s Ghost. But I thought it was pretty freaking lame.
[...] Obama would seem less like a wimp if he seemed more like a wimp—if he visibly displayed fear verging on panic, just like Roger Ailes (or like Ailes’s fellow Nixonian, Dick Cheney, who similarly seems to live every day in mortal dread of a terrorist attack aimed personally at himself). Obama would seem less like a wimp if he wimpily used the word “terror” as often as humanly possible—the incessant repetition of a word meaning “extreme fear” is, in our political culture, the bizarre mark of toughness.
“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency—social transformation—the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.”
Good Christ, what a despicable creature. I hope he chokes on a bowl of extra crispy chicken-fried Hobbit dicks.
[Updated with gratuitous cute dogs after the jump]
Furthermore, at this point there should be no doubt that if there’s ever a successful terrorist attack that the Republicans will call for the impeachment of President Obama. Or that they would have if Gore was president on 9/11.
Don’t forget that after the successful terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bush’s approval ratings shot up to 90 percent. The Underpants Bomber was a total fail, and, reading the wingnut blogs and Twitters, you’d think President Obama put him up to it. But the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil was a major win for Bush. How does that work?
