Useless and unwieldy object Mark Penn on terrorism [h/t YAFB, via RawrStory]:
“Remember, President Clinton reconnected through Oklahoma, right?” Penn said, appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball on Thursday. “And the president right now seems removed. It wasn’t until that speech [after the bombing] that [Clinton] really clicked with the American public. Obama needs a similar—a similar kind of ... Yeah.”
Yeah. You’re a freak.
I’ve concluded it is impossible snark about this. Every time you read it, you get stuck in a Dude/Seriously?/WTF? loop for 15 minutes. So here’s a stupid, hastily constructed Blingee. It depicts a human-shaped lamprey who probably thinks President Kennedy’s assassination was great for Robert’s career.
Nancy Pelosi may stay on in Congress and run for minority leader. Failed-quarterback-turned Blue Dog Congressman Heath Shuler says he may challenge her if she does.
Him and what army? The Blue Dogs got their asses handed to them Tuesday. The Democrats in the next Congress will be fewer but more liberal.
Zandar has the story, and to reiterate what I said at his place, the Blue Dogs want Pelosi out because the GOP-Tea-Fox borg has spent tens of millions of dollars demonizing her—using every sexist stereotype in the book and countless homophobic dog-whistles about “San Francisco liberals.”
In 2008, Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos,” which urged Republicans to switch parties and prank-vote Hillary Clinton in the later Dem state primaries in order to “keep her in the race, to keep that party at war with itself.”
This time, he’s reaching out to suicidal Dems, in the hope that they’ll do the job Republicans can’t — i.e., set the stage for a catastrophic primary bid by his favorite Democratic punching bag in 2012.
Fortunately, no Liberal is dumb enough to do Rush’s bidding and help hand him two years of easy monologues about “Hitlery,” “the Hildabeast,” Monica, Chinese campaign money, HillaryCare, Vince Foster, Obama’s “failed” foreign policy and Hillary’s “lesbian” fondness for pantsuits and Huma. But you have to admit that—as concern trolling goes—this demonstrates a profound appreciation of what motivates his targeted victims.
“I think the Vice President is doing a wonderful job.” Well, I guess that’s that. Gonna be real tough to walk that one back after November. She’s enlisted for the duration.
So come up to the lab. And see what’s on the slab. I see you shiver with antici…pation:
And then? Oh figgety fuck!
In summary: Roar!
PS: The Chicago dentist who donated to the Hillary ’08 campaign and then demanded his money back and then used video editing to transform poor Hillary’s perfectly adequate smile into a terrifying Jaws grill is mixed up in this.
Since I am moderating, I got to decide the format, so we are skipping over the speechs and going straight into, after intro’s, the questions. Here’s what I came up with, let me know if you’ve any others you think I should add for the participants. Bowers, of course you know, Matt Lewis is a blogger over at Politics Daily.
Ha ha! What in the hell just happened there? Jerome’s skull is a centrifuge! That’s why things like this happen on his online activism thing-that-exists! Democracy saved! *fart*
[hat tip YAFB for the horrible, horrible Jack Landsman link via Nick]
Well, I hope all of y’all are right with Jeebus, because tomorrow, either Bill Kristol’s outfit or the PUMAs will pull off a political win. You know what that means, right?
Only the destruction of the Eternal FAIL Principle, which is the orange stripe in the plaid fabric of the universe itself. As we noted this morning, Kristol published a hit piece on Delaware teatard Christine O’Donnell, which should have guaranteed her victory over Kristol’s favored candidate.
But then this happened:
O’Donnell’s secret weapon is PUMAs! So if O’Donnell wins, Kristol loses, and the PUMAs finally score a political victory, an unprecedented event in human history.
Whereas, if O’Donnell loses, that means Kristol was right to paint her as too crazy for the GOP primary voters. Needless to say, “Kristol” and “right” have never appeared in the same sentence. Ever.
It seems the Mayans were off by a couple of years.
While many people have questioned his timing, his case for replacing Obama at the top of the Dem ticket is by far the most compelling one I’ve heard to date:
I’m a dentist and I don’t think this country is headed in the right direction.
I’ve seen a number of critiques of the Beck-Palin phenomenon lately that attribute The Rise of the Silver Slurpers to a simple longing for leadership in these tumultuous times. There was this NYT op-ed over the weekend by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, lefty feminists pining for “A Palin of Our Own.”
Since the 2008 election, progressive leaders have done little to address the obvious national appetite for female leadership. And despite (or because of) their continuing obsession with Ms. Palin, they have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of American women in politics.
The left’s failure to nurture and celebrate female politicians has had a significant effect on its policies. In recent years, Democratic majorities and progressive legislation seem to have been built on steady trade-offs of reproductive rights, culminating this year when the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was forced to push through health care reform with a compromise on abortion financing.
An older generation of female Democrats, including Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Pelosi, are about as eager to mount a Palin-style girl-powered campaign as they are to wear a miniskirt on the House floor. For them, proudly or aggressively touting one’s feminist credentials (if you’re actually a feminist, that is) is taboo. It’s considered too, well, female.
I call bullshit on this. First of all, let’s look at the examples they cited: Clinton, Pelosi and Palin. Hillary Clinton is arguably the most powerful woman on the planet, busily running the foreign policy apparatus of the world’s only super power. Nancy Pelosi is the only female Speaker of the House—ever—and a highly effective legislator in that role by any objective measure. And Sarah Palin is…an occasional Fox News contributor, a former second-fiddle on a losing presidential ticket and a half-term governor who quit every important job she ever held.
Sorry, ladies, but I’ll match our record up with the GOP’s on women’s leadership any day of the week. Sure, Palin has a creepily devoted fan base and scads of Facebook friends. So does Lady Gaga. And Lady Gaga has more progressive policy chops.
Two years ago tonight, I wasn’t on Rumproast, so I can only conclude I was shaving the cats, out stealing yard signs or teaching my weekly ACORN class in Physical Intimidation & Document Forgery. But had I known Hillary Clinton was about to deliver the most impassioned endorsement of Barack Obama by any respected public figure, ever, I’d have popped a tape in the VCR and set the Signal Decoder to “Orange.”
They used her to kill Universal Health Care (both times). They used her to beat up her husband. They used her to undermine anti-war Liberals. They used her to demonize powerful women. They used her to bash “entitled Eastern elitists.” They used her to burnish the dull and pitted public images of John McCain and Newt Gingrich. They’ve used her to argue that US foreign policy since 2009 is weak, disjointed, directionless and Israel-phobic. They’ve used her “Alinsky connection” to cast even the most uncontroversial Liberal initiatives as “radicalism.” And now, they’re using her to help enfeebled RINOs and febrile Tea Partiers run against the Obama Administration in the 2010 mid-terms.
After a decade or two, you think they’d come up with a new gimmick. But at this point, it’s so routine, so predictable and such a venerable electoral tradition that it’s like watching a dear old drunken friend run over your dog in the driveway at Christmas—just like he does every year, right before he knocks over the tree and pees in the punch bowl.
Some “Liberals” (and you can guess which ones) are giddy at the sight of Hillary being used, yet again, to kick them in the ass and steal their candy.
It’s not like I have high expectations: The “liberal media” outlet very often resembles Open Mike Night at Miss Huffington’s Home for Hairspray Huffing Hacks.
The HuffPo line-up includes can’t-write-her-way-out-of-a-bowl-of-bean-curd Clinton fetishist Taylor Marsh. Then there’s Lady-Lynn-de-Poopchute-panty-sniffer Amy Siskind. Hell, there’s even BushCo bag man Ken Blackwell—all find a platform at HuffPo because god forbid Fox hogs all the nutbaggery.
But now the site has outdone the combined efforts of even those luminaries by publishing the “Diary of First Lady Michelle Obama” by Laura Ingraham, who is angling to supplant Ann Coulter as the She Wolverine of the teatard set. If you’re familiar with Ingrahamagram’s oeuvre, the piece is about what you’d expect. An excerpt:
Gulf Coast!?! To think I had to waste an afternoon (cut my workout short and everything) to make those Tea Baggers along the Gulf Coast think we give a damn. It’s one thing to go down to Diddy’s or Kanye’s house on Star Island in Miami, but Panama City is a disaster. This place is known for one thing: endless strip malls. Do I look like I shop at Payless Shoes? This is supposed to be our vacation time and I’m blowing half my day in a hell hole like Panama City!!
But what could I do? Axe, Rahm and the rest of the gang told me if we wanted to vacation in Maine this week, one of us had to go placate the oiled up yahoos down South. I’m still mad that Barack had to interrupt our Memorial Day weekend in Chicago to sympathetically stroke some greasy pelicans! But I suppose I must do my part. But I needed this trip like Hillary needs an extra fifteen pounds of thigh fat.
Honestly, I think we’ve done all we can for the Gulf Coast. On my way out of town I even stopped by the Pink Pelican Ice Cream Bar to enjoy a luscious treat called the “Chocolate Hurricane.” (I have to remember to e-mail Ray Nagin about that one.)
Emphasis mine. Aside from an elevated count of sexist, honky-harpy dog-whistles, it’s pretty unremarkable stuff. The only puzzling thing is that HuffPo posted it in the “Comedy” section instead of under “Politics,” which is a bit like covering the Jeffrey Dahmer trial in the “Food” section.
I was going to offer an Ingrahamagram parody diary as a counterpoint, but you know what? Fuck it. Ingraham is not only NOT worth the effort, she’s fully self-parodying and therefore a singularly unrewarding subject.
...so you’re going to have to entertain yourselves by checking out one of the dumbest rivalries in the history of the internets: The New Agenda’s Amy Siskind (and her commenters) vs. Human Event’s Jason Mattera. It’s kinda like what a war between Andrew Dice Clay and Monty Python’s Hell’s Grannies would be like if everyone was huffing ether and repeatedly running headfirst into brick walls. Or something. I mean, you try to explain how some of the brainiacs from TNA seem to think Jason Mattera is a disillusioned Democrat or what in the hell this means:
