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.
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.
WaPo columnist David Broder, who joined the Post in 1966 and should have been forcibly retired no later than 1986, pens a mash note to The Frozen Cheesecake, lauding the “pitch-perfect recital of the populist message” she delivered before a motley assortment of birfers, xenophobes, Jim Crow enthusiasts and rage-o-holics at the recent Teabagger Ball.
Like the quintessential Villager that he is, Broder found Palin’s anti-intellectualism particularly engorging:
When he asked her what role she wants to play in the country’s future, she said:
“First and foremost, I want to be a good mom, and I want to raise happy, healthy, independent children. And I want them to be good citizens of this great country.
“And then I do want to be a voice for some common-sense solutions. I’m never going to pretend like I know more than the next person. I’m not going to pretend to be an elitist. In fact, I’m going to fight the elitist, because for too often and for too long now, I think the elitists have tried to make people like me and people in the heartland of America feel like we just don’t get it, and big government’s just going to have to take care of us.
“I want to speak up for the American people and say: No, we really do have some good common-sense solutions. I can be a messenger for that. Don’t have to have a title to do it.”
Broder’s fanboy enthusiasm for Palin swerves beyond self-parody and into meta-parody territory: He is one of the elite, celebrity pundits who created and marketed a phony notion of “real American values,” and now he’s pimping an ignorant demagogue who rode the “real America” express all the way to elite, celebrity pundithood.
This kind of shit would be funny if the machinations of Broder and his ilk hadn’t done incalculable damage to the country by crippling our press corps just when we needed it most. But luckily, a survey conducted by Broder’s own paper reveals that most ordinary citizens—even most Republicans!—aren’t fooled by Sister Sarah’s schtick:
Although Palin is a tea party favorite, her potential as a presidential hopeful takes a severe hit in the survey. Fifty-five percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling.
There is a growing sense that the former Alaska governor is not qualified to serve as president, with more than seven in 10 Americans now saying she is unqualified, up from 60 percent in a November survey. Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.
Maybe there’s more wisdom in “Real America” than Broder and brethren guess after all.
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.
President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more detainees to Yemen where they can be free to rejoin their war on America. Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo, begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor.
Somebody please remind Sarah that she’s an unemployed professional wannabee with a fake book and the moral authority of an Amway distributor. Thanks in advance!
ABC has exclusive photos of the Jihadi Jockeys of Smoldering Vengeance. Meanwhile, Talk Radio and conservative pundits are en fuego with sputtering indictments of Obama, Napolitano, Liberalism, Calvin Klein, Keynesian economics, the Great society programs, hip-hop music, The Catcher in the Rye, elastic waistbands, Smoot-Hawley, public schools and the Bretton Woods Agreement.
I’ve done my part. Now, go and fetch me the most hyperventilating, over-the-top, barely-holding-our-Teabagger-fudge links and selected quotes you can find, my Obot minions! It’s easy as shooting fish in your underpants!
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, (I-Conn) a renowned hawk and one of the foremost champions of the invasion of Iraq, warned on Sunday that the United States faced “danger” unless it pre-emptively acts to curb the rise of terrorism in Yemen.
“Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war,” Lieberman said, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”. “That’s the danger we face.”
Twitter was all abuzz last night about this respectful sparring match between Rachel Maddow and Susan Rice. Yes, it was just as good as everyone was saying. Too bad we don’t see more like this on cable news.
