Bill Kristol burps up another column on the most pressing issue of the day, Obama’s lapel pins (or lack thereof):
But Obama chose to present his flag-pin removal as a principled gesture. “You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.”
Leave aside the claim that “speaking out on issues” constitutes true patriotism. What’s striking is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest.
This may turn out to be the dumbest election of my lifetime. They have no issues to talk about, so all we are going to do is to debate Obama’s patriotism.
BTW- check out the comments to this Politico piece about CNN’s patriotism poll. It is almost universal condemnation, and I do not consider the Politico to be a left-wing site. This shit is not going to fly this year.
Zifnab
Oh. My. God. Kristol’s rhetoric was so inane and stupidifying, that it destroyed John’s ability to write a coherent sentence. DAMN YOU,
BEAUCHAMPNYTIMES! DAMN YOU TO HELL!The Other Steve
Bill Kristol must be having a bad year.
Let’s all send him a bunch of flowers.
Incertus
A suggestion for the NY Times–if when Paul Krugman takes a day off, your options are to leave a gaping hole on the Op-Ed page or have Kristol write something, choose the former.
Oh, and replace Maureen Dowd while you’re at it.
Thepanzer
I wear 2 American flag lapel pins at all times, thus making me twice as patriotic as everyone on Fox news.
Seriously, when did the US go communist? Loyalty oaths, patriotism based on national tokens (little red books=lapel pins), domestic surveillance, torture as a method of interrogation and intimidation, constant jingoistic chest-thumping, piss poor economics, lock-step media distractions, intolerance for dissent, politicization of government agencies, constant scandals of party leaders being caught doing in private what the oppose in public (Larry Craig, Mark Foley), etc. etc. etc.
John S.
Yes William the Bloody, leave the salient point aside so you can expound upon irrelevant bullshit.
Ass.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
You know, if the NYT hadn’t blown it on the McCain story, this would be an example of their overarching brilliance.
But since they did blow it, that couldn’t possibly be the case.
(of course, I’m lumping in whoever hired Kristol with who botched the McCain story. but, hey, it’s the internet and I can bloviate)
Elvis Elvisberg
I was surprised to see just how convinced Americans seem to be that most CNN executives are child molesters.
(Via).
Dug Jay
This “pin issue” is pretty silly and the Clinton campaign is too smart to touch it. Sid Blumenthal of her campaign staff is being offered some advice on what they should do, however:
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
Also,
fixity.
TheFountainHead
WHY
/facedesk
DOES
/facedesk
HE
/facedesk
GET
/facedesk
A
/facedesk
COLUMN!?
ThymeZone
See my post to the prior thread.
When McPain speaks, his audience appears to be literally despondent and miserable. It’s all they can do to sit there and take it.
When Obama speaks, his audience is enthusiastic, happy, ready for action.
What does McPain talk about that jazzes up his audience?
Well, he explains how patriotic he is. He explains that Iraq is foreverwar, that we have always been at war with Eastasia. He explains, in Ohio, that the jobs are not coming back. He explains that hope is a fool’s delusion.
Forget the traditional politics. They don’t matter this year.
It’s over already.
TheFountainHead
WHY
/facedesk
DOES
/facedesk
HE
/facedesk
GET
/facedesk
A
/facedesk
COLUMN!?
Jake
Maybe I need more cofee but this shit is making me laugh when I suspect it should make me angry.
According to B.K. and the other fRightend Simians banging away on their keyboards, Democrats and liberals are all terrorist coddling America haters who roam the streets in packs performing abortions on the wives of soldiers. We know this, we’ve heard it for years now. But somehow we’re supposed to forget all of that and recoil in horror from Obama because he doesn’t wear the Patriot Bling?
Like I said, maybe I should be angry but this nonsense has me slapping my knee.
TheFountainHead
Ooops. I broke it.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
TZ, if you were intending to be pejorative, I don’t think that’s the way to go
I’d definitely vote for a guy named “McPain”. Dude, give me a guy named McPain and strap a Browning on him, and he can have his war with Eastasia.
Mary
John, I wouldn’t take that thread at Politico as representative of conservative sentiment. A hell of a lot of Obama supporters are following Ben Smith’s blog on the Dem race, and that’s who you see commenting there for the most part.
Nah, today’s story is Dress-Me-Up-Obama! Whee! Complete with non-denial denials from Clinton’s camp.
Mary
The first salvo.
Mary
The non-denial denial.
Mary
(Whoops! The original non-denial with no additional comment is mentioned but not quoted here.)
Myrtle Parker
I think John’s photo-album of all the indicted/convicted Republicans proudly wearing the patriotic lapel pin would make a GREAT nation wide ad rebutting this meme.
The Grand Panjandrum
O/T: Cap’n Ed jumps the shark:
Let the good times roll.
4tehlulz
An appropriate name for the blog of Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage. I take it Ed’s countertops have passed the appropriate background check.
Stephen
For a few minutes this morning I daydreamed about patenting a U.S. Constitution lapel pin for people who want to combat this flag pin bullshit – but then I figured that eventually the people who would be wearing them would be those who really want to drag our Constitution through the mud – same as it ever was.
Jake
Avast! The good Capt. is about to become Michelle’s peg boy.
Let’s hope this means he’ll stop running the atrocity that is D-b-D. The fewer outlets the Ultimate Unfunny has into the world of man, the better.
Z
Danzig is advising him? Obama does have some Misfits running his campaign.
Tim F.
WDTPTG.
Tim F.
Longer: why do they pay this guy?
For some reason practically everything that Bill Kristol writes elicits more or less the same response.
Mr Furious
The WSJ on Obama’s response to Pin(head)gate…
Glad we got that terrorist angle right up top in the piece, fucking thugs…
And then the comments…
libarbarian
Since when did Ponys wear lapel pins?
libarbarian
I think a lot of people are missing the point.
The point of B.K.s column really is NOT to say that he isn’t patriotic because he doesn’t wear a lapel pin.
His point is to start to paint Obama as a stereotypical ivy league liberal who thinks that he’s better than the “heartland” Americans who do wear pins.
Its the same old “class-warfare” shtick that they always use – “those smartypants liberals think that they are smarter than you. Vote Republican because we are the party that pretends to share your values and sticks up for you fucking moronic redneck subhuman idiots who almost voted in Huckabee …..er, um I mean ‘good culturally conservative Americans from the heartland whom the Republicans elites most definitely do not exploit for easy votes while mocking behind their backs'”.
tBone
I’m glad all you loony leftists think this is so funny. You know who else wouldn’t wear an American flag lapel pin? Hitler.
ArtB
Unfortunately, the comments to that Politico article have been heavily redacted since last night (yes, I have no life). The first comments were along the lines of “Hussein hates america” “Obama Osama Hitler kills unborn babies” and some straight out “Let’s lynch that n*****”-style racism. I wish those quotes were hyperbole, but they really aren’t …
So the lesson here is that everyone who can express themselves without racist slurs or comparisons to Hitler or bin Laden is appalled by these smear tactics. And the other people probably wouldn’t be voting for a democrat anyway.
Seitz
What they need is for some Democratic pundit to go on a show like Hannity wearing about 40 flag lapel pins, and make a big deal about how he’s 40 times more patriotic than Hannity, who’s only wearing one measly pin. Make a big show of it.
borehole
tBone, God of Win.
Shinobi
Godwin’s FTW. Nice one.
p.lukasiak
CNN should be ashamed of itself, but its not exactly the first time this kind of poll has shown up there (I mean, check out Dobbs’ poll questions), and don’t even get me started on the questions that FauxNews asks…
As to it not flying…. sorry, but when Kristol publishes something like that in the NYTimes, its already airborne.
bdr
You have a far bigger forum than most, so may I suggest, if in fact we cannot call Bill Kristol a pussy and Kristol’s compatriots pussies and their fear-mongering false patriotism pussifying, a solicitation for a word that encompasses all the pussified connotations of pig-Right pussification without the unintentional (in this case) sexism of the word pussy.
Because Bill Kristol IS a pussy in every right-Pig coward-smirking, smackable way.
As for why they pay the guy? Look at the reaction.
AkaDad
I believe it’s unpatriotic to cynically question one’s patriotism.
ThymeZone
As long as he doesn’t let himself be goaded by this crap, I think it works in his favor. For every vote that goes away with this kind of bigotry, I think he nets ten voters who will get out and vote for him just because of this kind of thing.
You are going to see what pilots call “aileron reversal” this year: Turn the wheel left, the plane banks right. The negativity and the attacks are going to backfire this time. The more strident and ugly they get, the more they will backfire.
It’s not because the dumbest voters have changed their minds, its because Obama is attracting people not only to himself, but more importantly to the voting booths, who don’t always vote, but will this time. It’s already in the numbers in the primaries, and it will be there in the general. The GOP scheme of 50% Plus One Vote only works when you can keep a lot of voters at home on election day. Not gonna happen this year.
rawshark
Nazi’s wore pieces of flair.
Z
I think Danzig should tell Bill Kristol to Die, Die, My Darling.
Snark Based Reality
What the hell… Was that a fair and balanced article on Drudge?!?!@!
Thepanzer
What thyme said, plus voters have had 8 years of abject failure compounded with economic pain at home with the promise of even more economic pain on the way unless we change course fast. Americans who don’t normally care unless events touch on them directly are being touched directly in a Mark Foley kind of way.
The voting options for them are pretty stark:
Mcpain – more of the same, stay on course, pass me a lapel pin! Bomb Iran!
Hillary – more of the same, stay on course, pass me a lapel pin, but with a velvet glove over the iron fist. Bomb Iran!
Obama – maybe, just maybe a chance at change or least less batshit insanity. Insanity being defined as bombing Iran while ensnared in a 2-front occupation on the other side of the planet with a bleeding economy and simultaneously pissing off both China and Russia while also simultaneously behaving like such a bunch of cro-mags that our traditional allies would rather hang out with…Russia and China.
Zifnab
Not true. The elections in ’00 and ’04 both had record turn outs on every side of the political spectrum. Clinton actually won and won by more with lower voter turnout than Bush.
But Clinton won the independent voters, as Bush 41 did before him and Reagen (with his Reagen Democrats) did before him. And as Bush 43 did afterwards.
The reason Obama is beating Clinton so handily from state to state is the record number of independent and swing voters he’s attracting to the polls on his side. People who would normally vote for the “compassionate conservative” or the “Morning in America” guy are now voting for our very own Magical Unity Pony.
Punchy
Fixed for folks in Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi
Dork
Cue Neidermeyer’s voice from Animal House:
IS THAT A FLAG PIN…..ON YOUR UNIFORM??
Cyrus
You know, speaking of mind-melds…
Grand Moff Texan
A quick spin around google shows the curious phrase “moral vanity” to be a common expression among rightwingers for when liberals demonstrate that they have values and don’t know what else to say.
.
ThymeZone
What do they call it when wingers demonstrate moral vanity?
I know the answer, of course: Values.
Their “values” are somebody else’s “moral vanities.”
These are interesting, interesting people.
Zuzu
From Kristol’s sleaze piece:
And guess what, Sherlock? He doesn’t wear a frickin lapel pin either !!!!!
And if you asked him why he doesn’t, you can then describe his response as “grandiose” pretending to take a “principled stand.”
God, I wish there was a comments section for that article.
DougJ
The Politico has mostly right-wing commenters, because Drudge links to it so much, in fact.
DougJ
when Kristol publishes something like that in the NYTimes, its already airborne.
I don’t think that’s true. Kristol has very little credibility with anyone. I don’t think Halperin even links to him anymore.
SteveinSC
Hmm, well said Bloody Bill.
sglover
As if our glorious Iraq adventure wasn’t enough, by November you’re going to see an economy in very dire straits. We’re going to see a political blowout like 1932 or 1936.
The good news is that a toxin-laden Republican Party is going to face a shitstorm that it’s had coming for 25 years. Maybe, just maybe, the humiliation will make them question some of their basic assumptions. But I doubt it. I’m hoping that the shitstorm sweeps away hyenas like Kristol, Davey Brooks, etc. It’s hard to see how the op-ed page gasbag gig can go on for very much longer, and some folks are predicting that the think tank sinecures might get a lot more scarce after the Republican pummeling.
I just hope that Obama — who’s almost certain to win, and deserves it more than any other contender this cycle — can navigate through a period rich in problems, poor in resources.
mere mortal
So, if Obama’s claim is that pins are a hollow expression of patriotism, is that not an attack on the patriotism of those who wear them?
If Obama’s claim is that pins are an expression of hollow (or untrue) patriotism, that certainly is such an attack.
But countering the attack is out of bounds? Why?
Kristol’s mistake was “leaving aside” his best argument, that Obama’s “speaking out on issues” is no more profound an expression of patriotism than a pin.
Patriotism denotes love, support, and defense of country. A pin can demonstrate love and support, as can speaking out, but neither demonstrates defense. That requires action. Woe unto Obama if he thinks he can take McCain on that one.
And a decision to abandon one passive show of patriotism (pin) because you’ve taken up another (words) doesn’t make any sense at all, unless Obama really believes pins mean hollow patriotism, not just a hollow expression.
TenguPhule
Say that after you stroll through the pictures of the peopel wearing them….Oops!
Yes, McCain really did a good job defending by selling out his fellow POWs to the enemy under torture. And even stronger defense by giving Bush whatever the fuck he wants at the cost of shitting on the Constitution.
Pins, like magnetic yellow flags, are fucking jokes that mock the patrotism they supposedly stand for. Last refuge of scoundrels and all that.