Rumproast wasn’t the only blog to note that yesterday marked the anniversary of John McCain’s most damaging, cynical political act in a career notable for such degradations: Sarah Palin cult site Conservatives4Palin also noted that yesterday was the third anniversary of Snowflake Snooki’s debut speech in the blameless city of Dayton, Ohio.
One C4P operative even created the tag “Sarah Palin Day” to make a sort of official holiday of it, and the solemn event was marked there with several essays to sanctify the occasion. As an inveterate gawker at political silliness and a collector of mangled metaphors and stupefying similes, I was in hog heaven perusing the C4P offerings, which included an essay entitled “Why I’m Still Mad About 2008.” It contained this odd sentence:
Blaming Sarah Palin for blowing it in 2008, is like blaming your dog for not meowing loud enough.
Oookay then. Aside from a few grammatical quibbles, I’m not sure we can improve on that sentence, so let’s just let it stand in all its glory. The end.
Now that the Libyan “squirmish” she opposed has resulted in the apparent ouster of Moammar Gadhafi, America’s Backseat Driver™ has issued some helpful tips on handling the aftermath via Facebook:
First, the White House needs to avoid triumphalism.
Har-dee-fucking-har-har! THIS White House always avoids triumphalism. It’s you Republican jackasses who should have “Avoid Triumphalism” tattooed on your goddamned foreheads.
Second, we must be very concerned about the future government that will emerge to take Gaddafi’s place… We should work through diplomatic means to help those who want democracy to come out on top.
Ya think? I’m sure Hillary is on it, hon.
That said, we should not commit U.S. troops or military assets to serve as peacekeepers or perform humanitarian missions or nation-building in Libya. Our military is already over-committed and strained, and a vaguely designed mission can be the first step toward a quagmire.
A “quagmire” is what the president has thus far avoided in Libya, chiefly by ignoring the advice of the neocon assholes in the Republican Party like your former running mate.
Finally, we must make sure that terrorist groups don’t try to co-opt the revolution, as Al Qaeda is trying to do in Syria. We should continue to use our intelligence assets to monitor the situation in Libya to ensure that potentially dangerous weapons are secured, and that terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda don’t gain a foothold in Libya.
I’m betting Mssrs. Petraeus, Panetta and Morell are way ahead of you, Snowflake Snooki. Along with every other sentient creature on the planet.
People of Libya, be vigilant. May this opportunity be used to build a free and peaceful country.
Don’t the people of Libya have enough worries without being lectured by this raving, egocentric twit? Yep. All of us have, come to think of it.
Now that the Gaddafi regime, which is older than Jennifer Aniston, appears to be collapsing, it’ll be fascinating to watch the post-collapse spin, given the way the conflict was framed by US politicians. Those more sympathetic toward the president tended to describe NATO’s involvement as an “intervention,” as if it featured family members surprising Libya in a room and tearfully voicing their concerns about its self-destructive behavior.
The Republicans, however, have insisted all along that it was a “war,” or, more specifically, “Obama’s war.” Modern-day Republicans are wondrously fond of war, but they made an exception for “Obama’s war.” Even the most hawkish donned love beads and headbands and created colorful “Make Love, Not War” posters to carry as they converged on the Capitol in a massive anti-war demonstration.
Remember Rumproast favorite Vastleft? No? See here. Anyhoo, he produces a highly amusing cartoon series, a recent edition of which was a big hit in certain circles.
Today, Jonathan Bernstein over at Salon provided a detailed explanation of what’s wrong-headed about Vastleft’s doodle. Bernstein used a lot of words. I’ll keep it simple:
Why would Salon find the political opinions of bitter PUMA loser Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild relevant? Well, she can write a big fat check, and…that’s pretty much the beginning and end of her political influence.
Lady Lynn, a jet-setting Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign bundler who ostentatiously threw her support to the McCain-Palin ticket when the peasants in the Democratic Party failed to choose her preferred nominee, once made a laughingstock of herself by issuing forth from Ascott House to call son-of-a-single-mom Barack Obama an “elitist.”
Now she provides wildly incoherent and contradictory reasons for supporting Republican Jon Huntsman against the president in 2012, including that President Obama failed to enact single-payer healthcare and is simultaneously hostile to business and the benefactor of the insurance industry. Her ultimate conclusion:
The man is lost. The man is a loser. The man is not listening to people who might help him. [Like Lady Lynn?—ed.]
There are legitimate grounds on which to criticize the president. But Lady Lynn, who backed two candidates who came up short against Mr. Obama and is currently backing a man who has approximately zero chance of winning his party’s nomination, should definitely avoid calling anyone else a “loser.”
Over the past couple of days, Rush Limbaugh “joked” that Kraft Foods will name their new “biracial” Oreo cookie after President Obama and called the president’s bus tour the “White Like Me” tour. I know – dog bites man, sun rises in the East, etc.
But let’s not ever forget that this is the same corpulent toad who receives slobbering tributes from Republican presidents and before whom all Republican office holders tremble. For the most recent example, recall that John Boehner delivered on-air briefings to Limbaugh during the debt ceiling debate. Though his hateful drivel would be more at home on a StØrmfrØnt podcast than on FCC-licensed airwaves, Limbaugh is clearly a key figure in the Republican Party.
So here’s a big boo-fucking-hoo to all the wingnuts who whine about their injured feelings when someone says the Republican Party contains practically every racist shithead in America, and screw anyone on our side who scolds Democrats for pointing that out. When the Republican Party stops kissing Rush Limbaugh’s racist ass, I’ll entertain the notion that they’ve made progress. Until then, fuck them.
I’m reluctant to slag on Jon Huntsman because he seems to be the least insane and / or smarmy member of the current GOP field, but damn:
Presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman has snagged an endorsement in a key battleground state - Jeb Bush Jr, the son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
Rumors of a “major” announcement from the Huntsman campaign have been circulating through Florida for days, leading many to speculate that the former governor himself would throw his weight behind Huntsman. It was his 28-year-old son, however, who accepted a position with the campaign and detailed his support in a statement released Wednesday.
“In 2008, Florida and the presidency went to Barack Obama because he offered hope,” Bush Jr wrote. “To defeat the President in 2012, we need a candidate who will offer solutions. That man is Jon Huntsman.”
This is a major announcement? Gyad, I hope he keeps the “Blanket” Jackson endorsement under wraps for the next few months, or the 2012 election will lack all drama.
PS: In 2008, the Bushling picked Giuliani. So Huntsman’s got that going for him…
As they did during another crisis incident faced by the Obama administration (the BP spill), media types and emogressives are urging the president to get riled up over the shitty economy. Obama is too damn squishy and effete, they complain. So professorial. He lacks “fire in the belly.”
Perhaps they’re forgetting another reality as this beleaguered president tries to manage and mitigate America’s ongoing nervous breakdown: Where they see a too-cool customer who needs to get fired up and start swinging at the opposition, the other half of this bipolar nation sees a scary black man who wants to get whitey.
So this morning Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin at Politico wrote a piece called “Obama Plan: Destroy Romney”. Which, on the face of it, seems like a reasonable thing for Obama to be planning to do. Along with, hopefully, “Destroy Bachmann”, “Destroy Gingrich”, “Destroy Perry”, “Destroy Cain”, “Destroy Ignore Palin” and, well you get where I’m going. Trump, of course, he already destroyed.
So, anyhow, what got the troops all fired up* was the weird choice of “White House anonymous informants” to weirdly tell Smith and Martin that they considered Romney to be, well, weird. And that the campaign would exploit that horrible, awkward weirdness because, after all, Romney is, in a word, weird. (I mean who straps their dog to the top of the car and thinks that’s cute!) Many other bad things could be said of Romney as well. BUT “weird” is apparently dog whistling code for MORMON!!
And as John Cole is reporting Chris Matthews has taken this all the way to SWIFT BOATING! Yes! Dastardly Obama and his Alinsky-iteish cohorts are going to Swift Boat poor Mittens over his weird Mormonish ways.
And of course the campaign of Mittens is suitably outraged over this. As he should be for when has he ever said anything dog whistleish or Swift Boatish about Obama? Oh, um, lots of times I guess.
AND even Jane Hamsher (sorry no linkie) has a few things to say about the dog whistle thing because if anyone knows a thing or two about dog whistles and defamation it’s our Janie!
Couple this with the fact that the election is nearly 15 months away and it’s looking to be a long and weird, very weird, campaign season.
In the end, every civilization dies of stupid, and America will be no exception. I’ve long suspected this, of course, but the point was driven home to me this morning by an email forward I received containing the comments of several wingnut relatives / friends.
First, a little back-story: These are middle-class people who, although they live better than 99% of the inhabitants of the planet are, like me, hurting in this endless economic shitpile and truly worried that things could go all Mad Max if it gets any worse.
These are not stupid people (despite the title of this post and allusion to death-by-stupid above). They can walk in a rainstorm without drowning. They hold responsible jobs. They’re conventionally educated to varying degrees. They’re warm, funny and generous to boot.
But the shit they believe makes me want to want to reverse-engineer the motor on my shop vac to create a high-capacity bourbon-bong for my exclusive use. The email in question concerns President Obama’s presser during the debt ceiling debacle and the response on the Senate floor by Florida’s wingnut pin-up squish Marco Rubio.
Nothing raises my hackles like a political conversation that starts with “both sides do…” because 999 times out of a thousand, what follows is pure, unadulterated bullshit. But here’s that one in a thousand case of true equivalency: Both sides do contain way more than their fair share of puling infants.
First there’s the right-wing freak-out over the identification of self-proclaimed Christian Anders Behring Breivik as a “Christian” and a fan of anti-Islam hate sites like Atlas Shrugs. Sorry, but that’s what he calls himself. And if you’ve spent the last decade shrieking “GLOBAL JIHAD” every time a Muslim jaywalks, you don’t get to yell “BLOOD LIBEL” when one of your fans takes your eliminationist rhetoric to its logical conclusion.
John McCain, who is a “maverick” on the planet where “maverick” is synonymous with “weather vane,” sensed a shift in the wind and took to the Senate floor to denounce the “tea-party Hobbits” who are threatening to toss our economy into the fires of Mount Doom:
The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.
This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.
Of course, McCain neglected to mention that he attempted to foist Angle the Crackpot Hobbit off on America by campaigning for her. Nor did he allude to the fact that he elevated the Queen of the Teatards to the national stage by choosing Quitting Bull as his running mate in 2008.
On the deficit crisis, Ezra Klein says the Republicans have already won:
If you take the Republicans’ goals as avoiding a deal in which they have to vote for tax increases and denying Obama a political victory, it looks like they have succeeded. That success has come with costs—they’ve done themselves political damage, are risking a crisis that could do the economy tremendous harm, and have left the Bush tax cuts unresolved, which means they might end up watching taxes rise much higher than if they’d taken Obama’s offer—but it’s still been a success.
The question is, what happens if they don’t stop pushing?
Did he say “if”? Hahahaha! Still, I’m not so sure I’d characterize the above outcome, if it holds, as “winning,” except perhaps in the Charlie Sheen sense. We’ll see what happens, but the Republicans appear likely to come out of it with some “damn’d spots” that are going to be awfully difficult to scrub away.
Former Presidential candidate John Edwards will have to pay back over 2 million dollars in federal matching funds given to his 2008 campaign for president, the Federal Election Commission ruled on Thursday.
Sure, he’s a creep. But we owe him our endless gratitude for stealing enough primary votes to offset the big boost Hillary received from Rush Limbaugh’s listeners. And without that, we’d never have been able to rig the Rules Committee meeting and the Convention in Denver. So, in a truly unctuous and abhorrent way, he’s a hero, kind of, if you squint real hard.
As John Cole noted nearly two years ago, there’s no such thing as Peak Wingnut—it is an endlessly “renewable resource.” Subsequent events have underlined the truth of that assertion more strongly than perhaps even the most pessimistic of us imagined.
But is there a limit to the credulity of low-information voters and the media organizations that keep them in that state? We may be about to find out.
The limits of the Big Lie won’t be tested on an issue like climate change. The anti-science propaganda on that topic has been so successful that it’s probably impossible to address it in a meaningful way—even if the water starts lapping at our doorsteps in low-lying states.
Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh admonished fellow wingnut Matt Drudge for falling prey to government-orchestrated hysteria over climate change, a phenomenon just about every reputable scientist on the planet regards as a fact. Drudge has served as a primary purveyor of climate change doubt, trumpeting every winter snowstorm as if each snowflake were a repudiation of Al Gore and relying (successfully) on public ignorance to draw conclusions favorable to Koch Industries. A little heat wave heresy won’t change that.
