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You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2008 / How Bad Is It

How Bad Is It

by John Cole|  September 16, 20089:45 am| 21 Comments

This post is in: Election 2008, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?

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If you needed any more evidence that this election is going to drive people to madness, check out Daniel Larison. He is so exasperated by the nonsense from contemporary “conservatives” that he is now mocking them with Sadly, No! style shorter posts.

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Previous Post: « Straight Talk Express, Klondike Edition
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Reader Interactions

21Comments

  1. 1.

    cleek

    September 16, 2008 at 10:23 am

    whatever.

    McCain invented the BlackBerry. that’s all i need to know.

    McCain 08!!!

  2. 2.

    Conservatively Liberal

    September 16, 2008 at 10:23 am

    I see Daniel uses WordPress Error too!

    Error establishing a database connection

    ;)

  3. 3.

    Paddy O'Shea

    September 16, 2008 at 10:25 am

    The lipstick is off the mutt. New ARG POll shows Obama leading McCranky 49% to 43%.

    http://americanresearchgroup.com/

    That didn’t take so long now, did it ..

  4. 4.

    photonaton

    September 16, 2008 at 10:28 am

    For all you denigrating McCain for being hi-tech challenged, looks like McCain has been moonlighting in the telecomm industry:

    And on the seventh day…

    And that, my friends, is some straight talk from the Original Mavrick

  5. 5.

    Dreggas

    September 16, 2008 at 10:29 am

    cleek Says:

    whatever.

    McCain invented the BlackBerry. that’s all i need to know.

    beat me to it LOL.

  6. 6.

    photonaton

    September 16, 2008 at 10:29 am

    Oops, late to the party

  7. 7.

    Brian J

    September 16, 2008 at 10:31 am

    Take a look at this bit of nonsense from Captain Ed that Sadly, No! mocks

    so thoroughly. The idea that we are debating the definition of an earmark is ridiculous, particularly when you consider that it’s going against what the Bush administration has defined them as. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: that these people represent the major opposition party or that they could win.

  8. 8.

    Dreggas

    September 16, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Another amusing thing. McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the current economic crisis. I don’t need a commission to tell me just how fucked we are.

  9. 9.

    Brian J

    September 16, 2008 at 10:37 am

    That didn’t take so long now, did it ..

    That comes on top of the four-point advantage Obama has in the Rasmussen poll. If I can see some more polls like the one where Obama was up by four or five in Virginia in states like Michigan and Indiana, I’ll be happy.

  10. 10.

    gypsy howell

    September 16, 2008 at 10:37 am

    McCain invented the Blackberry? With KEYBOARD and all? Gosh, a more selfish ex-POW would have devoted his time inventing a device he could actually USE after his years of torture.

    Not McCain though. Such a mensch… thinking only about all the rest of us able-bodied people.

  11. 11.

    Mary

    September 16, 2008 at 10:38 am

    Paddy O’Shea, ARG shows Obama at 49 for August 30-September 1. The more recent numbers show McCain 48 and Obama 45.But while Obama has lost some Democrats to McCain (err, WTF?), he leads among independents 49-43.

  12. 12.

    montysano

    September 16, 2008 at 10:56 am

    If you needed any more evidence that this election is going to drive people to madness

    I’m there.

    In a letter to the editor in our local newspaper, some dickhead is pimping McCain’s qualifications, while noting “Barack Obama was legally educated, but I do not know by whom”. I imagined a Dr. Evil-style pinkie to the mouth as he wrote that. At which point I was weeping, cursing, and ranting “Columbia! Harvard! Magna cum laude, you simpering asshole!” My wife and daughter seemed a bit concerned.

    Much the same as when John Fund, on Maher’s show, said “Why perhaps (cue pinkie to mouth) even I don’t know what the Bush Doctrine is”, at which point Janeane Garofalo appeared to lose the will to live.

    Local talk radio is consumed with the latest rumor: Obama tried to negotiate with Iraqi officials to delay any withdrawal for political purposes, all of which is based on what some guy said some journalist said an Iraqi radio host told him some Iraqi official claimed.

    Meanwhile, out in the real world, Rome is on fire. The Fed is juggling 10 running chainsaws, and as one might imagine, it’s not going as planned.

  13. 13.

    zzyzx

    September 16, 2008 at 10:57 am

    I made that same mistake with that ARG poll. I got as excited as I can for ARG and then reread it.

  14. 14.

    Crusty Dem

    September 16, 2008 at 10:57 am

    Come on, it’s well known that Daniel Larison and the American Conservative have a long-established liberal bias.

    For other examples of liberal bias, see also:

    Richard Cohen, Pat Buchanan, Karl Rove, John Farrell, etc..

  15. 15.

    Brachiator

    September 16, 2008 at 11:14 am

    cleek Says:

    whatever.

    McCain invented the BlackBerry. that’s all i need to know.

    Actually, McCain invented blackberries, around 4,000 BCE.

    If you needed any more evidence that this election is going to drive people to madness…

    On the other hand, I think that Krista’s most excellent witticism has gone viral (Palin says she has foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from Alaska. I can see the moon from my house; doesn’t make me a fucking astronaut).

    On this morning’s Stephanie Miller show, someone quoted a variation of this jibe, which then inspired callers to make their case for government jobs:

    I made my kids breakfast this morning. Can I be head of the FDA?

    I’m a nurse and put a bandaid on my husband’s elbow. Can I be Surgeon General?

    I’ve got two potted plants. Can I be Secretary of Agriculture?

    I’ve got barbed wire around my yard. Can I be Secretary of Defense?

  16. 16.

    Dreggas

    September 16, 2008 at 12:56 pm

    AIG is just about hosed. The banks that were talking of helping bail them out are walking away and even though the fed is talking bail out where is that money going to come from?

  17. 17.

    Rick Taylor

    September 16, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    It’s not just the villager’s whose opinion of conservatives have gone down. I’ve gotten to the point where I just despise them. It didn’t use to be this way; I used to think of conservatives as people who emphasized different but still worthwhile values. They emphasized national security where liberals emphasized human rights. They emphasized economic responsibility where liberals emphasized a social safety net. The values on both sides where positive and reasonable people could disagree on the proper balance.

    But now? If you want economic responsibility, go to the Democrats. If you want national security, go to the Democrats. They aren’t perfect, but they’re not the disaster the Republicans have been. They’ve spent eight years in power (six years as a majority, and 2 years effectively effectively killing anything they didn’t want), and what’s the result? We’re mired in a war that we started unprovoked under false pretenses, with no end in sight. The use of simulated drowning has entered the national debate. The projections for the budget deficits are as bad as they’ve ever been (and the current Republican is proposing policies that would make them even worse). And they seem to have brought us to the edge of a fiscal crises, with various huge firms being taken over by the government or going under, while they’re captains get multi-million dollar payment.

    Conservatives are just wedded to ideology. They will not look at what happens in the world and adjust their opinions (those that do cease becoming conservatives). Government is always the problem. Capitalists can always be trusted to enrich us all, so long as we end the evil regulations that hold them back. It doesn’t matter how many times we end regulations and get a catastrophe as a result; the California energy crises and Enron being two examples. I’d hoped that Enron might bring the country to its sense, but then we were attacked, and then the conservatives managed to start a war under false pretenses and change the debate and stay in power. And here we are, seeing the result of forgetting the lessons of Enron.

    Of course by now, we’re not supposed to blame the last eight years on conservative; George Bush is not a conservative at all. I might take people who make that argument seriously if I’d heard them speaking against Bush when he was popular. I might even take them seriously if they spoke against McCain now, who’s proposing the same things. But no, they’re falling in line behind him, even the ones who fulminated they’d never vote for him, even when he selects an unknown unvetted governor to be a heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the land, for brazenly political motives.

    As far as I can see, conservatives have no scruples whatsoever, at least not in this country. If I’m wrong, point me to the ones who are aghast at McCain’s choice of Palin, that he’d put the security of the nation into a neophyte’s hands. Point me to the conservatives who will at least recognize what a disaster Iraq has been and who are willing to learn from it; it shouldn’t take much to recognize a disaster as a disaster. Point me to the conservatives who recognize that there’s more to fiscal responsibility than tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts, and who don’t balance the budget by waving their hands and saying we can cut all that pork. . . somewhere.

    So I’ve come to the point where I just despise conservatives. It hasn’t helped going to “moderate” Captain Morissey’s site where people regularly post that people like me who oppose the war are traitors and would have been hung in previous times. It doesn’t help when they run a campaign spewing lies about our candidate, or making fun of him by bringing in Paris Hilton. It doesn’t help when I read a conservative snidely go on about how we liberals want to spend other peoples’ money, and I’m spending taxes year after year on a war that any idiot ought to have seen in advance was a horrendous idea. At least when we liberals spend money, someone (aside from a defense contractor) gets something out of it.

    The conservatives have spent eight years in power, and we see the results. If we’re lucky, it will take us the better part of a decade to begin to undo the damage and set us on a sane course, to set our fiscal house in order, to re-establish are tarnished reputation for human rights, to somehow find a semi-stable solution to Iraq, to begin to address the coming energy crises and global climate change. It’s breath taking when you look at the damage done, the time lost, and how much there is to do. And that’s not even looking at bringing sanity to America’s healthcare system.

    So if mainstream reporters have come to the point where they’re beginning to see corruption, it’s because conservatives have pushed things so far that I’m just out of my mind; I never thought I’d feel this way about the major opposition party. I really want this nightmare to end; I want the adults to be in charge, the people who actually to some degree recognize and respond to reality, rather than filtering everything through ideological blinders. Conservatives don’t need to worry about us liberals foisting to many socialistic programs on them; heaven forbid we should ever get universal healthcare. We’re going to be far too busy cleaning up the mess they’ve made, assuming it can even be cleaned up at this point.

  18. 18.

    w vincentz

    September 16, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    For those that don’t know, the blackberry was invented in Canada (maybe when McInsane took a vacation there?).

    Now…the good news about the “melt down”….

    “The good news is that, if the U.S. economy collapses, the Pashtun farmer in northeastern Pakistan, the Iraqi shopkeeper in Fallujah, the Iranian worker in Tehran, and the peasant in Venezuela, will no longer have to worry about being bombed or having their children mowed down by a U.S. helicopter gunship. The U.S. would no longer have the funds to pay for such foreign wars. And because a collapse of the U.S. consumer economy would also drag the rest of the world into a prolonged global slump, perhaps reminiscent of the 1930s, we might actually see a significant enough drop in carbon emissions from idled cars, factories, and power plants that the global warming catastrophe that is threatening us all will be significantly delayed, giving humanity time to come up with a serious long-term response”….

    DAVE LINDORFF

  19. 19.

    OriGuy

    September 16, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Obama tried to negotiate with Iraqi officials to delay any withdrawal for political purposes, all of which is based on what some guy said some journalist said an Iraqi radio host told him some Iraqi official claimed.

    The source of that rumor appears to be Amir Taleri, the Iraqi journalist who claimed that Iran was forcing Jews to wear a yellow star. That was a complete fabrication.

  20. 20.

    w vincentz

    September 16, 2008 at 5:45 pm

    I honestly don’t know what to believe anymore.
    Seriously.
    I was just over at kos where a read a diary detaily a tale of woe about what’s going on in Houston. No food, no water, dead trees all over, parents have 26 pot bellied pigs and a pond they haul water from for the animals… blah blah blah.
    OK Houston people… put your “thinkin” caps on.
    If you feel like you need to bathe, grab a bar of soap and head over to the pond.
    If you need to cook, gather up some of the free firewood. Let it burn down to coals while you take your bath in the pond.
    What to cook?
    How about one of those pot bellied pigs? Invite the neighbors to the hog roast. You’ll survive if you start livin’ and quitcherbitchin’.
    Good bar-b-que first. Sing around the campfire later.
    Ya’ll will get by (though you poor thangs might not realize it now).

  21. 21.

    NYT

    September 16, 2008 at 7:20 pm

    On CNBC.com’s website now:
    “American International Group will avoid bankruptcy with the help of an $85 billion loan from the federal government, in exchange for an 80 percent stake in itself, sources told CNBC”

    The $85B is just a BRIDGE loan.

    AIG bailed out this week.
    Lehmann bust.
    Fannie bust.
    Freddie bust.

    Bush is definitely “sprinting to the finish” all right. Usain Bolt had nothing on this guy.

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