The silliness continues.
There really was a time when I thought Ed was interesting. Then again, there was also a time I would have been writing stupid things like this.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.
The willow is too close to the house.
Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Hot air and ill-informed banter
The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.
Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”
You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.
A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.
They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.
Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.
Good lord, these people are nuts.
Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.
Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.
You are here: Home / Radicals! Socialists! Hardcore Leftist! Palling Around With Terrorists!
Napoleon
It kills me when those clowns complain about Brzezinski. I have never perceived of him as anything but a conservative. In a lot of ways Carter was a conservative (there is a reason Teddy Kennedy tried to pick him off in the primaries).
Xenos
Carter failed, and thus he was a liberal, because liberalism = failure. This is the corollary to the rule that Bush can not really be a conservative, because conservative must always succeed, and Bush is obviously a failure.
Procrustes had nothing on these guys.
cervantes
I have absolutely no idea who any of those people are. I assume that’s just as well.
Comrade Jake
Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman is slowly, albeit surely, making the case that he is the biggest douchebag walking the Earth.
Incertus
What it shows more than anything to my mind is that the terms conservative and liberal are pretty meaningless, devoid of some pretty specific context, so when people like Captain Ed start spouting off like there’s some Platonic ideal of conservatism that he’s privy to and is therefore qualified to pass judgment on all people everywhere, the stupid starts to pile up at an alarming rate.
MikeJ
It doesn’t prove that the terms liberal and conservative mean nothing, it proves that dishonest people say dishonest things.
Why does anyone pay attention to people you know are dishonest?
Zifnab
@cervantes: Cheers to that.
@Comrade Jake: Double Cheers.
@Incertus:
"Liberal" and "Conservative" are only meaningless because we’ve abused their connotations for so long. After a handful of hack pundits, Op-Ed folks, and over exposed politicians turned "liberal" into a dirty word, it just became a fill-in for "person I don’t like" in the right-wing world. Like the word "bastard" or "asshole", the word has been completely disjointed from its root meaning. People think if you disagree with the Republican Party on anything in any direction – be you a socialist anti-corporate free love hippie or nativist anti-immigration boarder hawk – you must be a liberal. The high point, of course, was Johan Goldberg’s "Liberal Fascism" which stretched the definition of "liberal" so far off the page that it really did come to mean nothing more than "horrible inhuman monster".
Since "conservative" is reflexive of "liberal" the former lost its meaning as quickly as the latter.
That doesn’t mean the two terms don’t still mean something in polite, historically astute society. It just means that the tags have been so recklessly abused that people can’t rely on them anymore.
Scott H
I am getting more joy out of seeing Reynolds and Malkin trying to piggyback their way out of irrelevance on the Daily Kos brand (see your Pajamas Media ads).
TenguPhule
The case is still pending a last minute appeal by Doughy Pantsload.
boonagain
Has anyone even touched on the fact that Bush is drinking again quite publicly?
Isn’t he an admitted alcoholic?
joe from Lowell
Like most conservatives, Cap’n Ed is incapable of understanding any issue except through the filter of Democratic/Republican partisan warfare; and even then, through the lens of the Cold War.
To him, Brezinski = Carter = Democrats = Liberal = Left = Detente, and Scowcroft = Reagan = Republicans = Conservatives = Right = Rollback.
And that’s all there is to it.
Napoleon
@boonagain:
I don’t think he has actually publically admitted to it, but its clear when he talks about it, to the extent he does, that he is with a wink more or less admitting to it.
In all seriousness I would not be surprised if he fell off the wagon. The man is a f-up of historic proportions. Either he deals with it through outright denial (and admittedly there is a good deal of evidence that this is how he deals with it) or he has a burden on him that I can not imagine ever having in my life.
libarbarian
The terms have clear meaning.
Conservative = Good
Liberal = Bad
Socialist = Very Bad.
boonagain
@Napoleon:
Did you see the link in my post? The caption reads:
.
I have had my suspicions lately by the way that he has started to look so unkempt, but I had never seen it addressed so forthrightly in a news story before this one.
I agree, he has fucked things up so magnificently that it even has become clear to someone as outrageously stupid as him that we are toast.
Dave
@boonagain:
Ummm…wow. One of his big "character" things was beating alcoholism with prayer. Guess it takes a little more than that…
Montysano
@boonagain:
And why wouldn’t he? I sure would if I were in his shoes. Oh sure, all his buddies have enriched themselves these last years. Right this second they’re searching the sofa for change, ripping the wire out of the walls to sell for scrap, and kicking holes in the walls. Then they’ll take a big dump on the kitchen table and disappear.
But our Dubya won’t escape so easily. He’s got the cold eye of history staring at him, with words like "worst" and "failure" and "disaster" being tossed around. That has to be daunting, even for a dim bulb like him.
T.Scheisskopf
RE: silliness
Let me tell you about the time I was at the strip clubs in Brooklyn, IL…wait…no I won’t.
My shame can trump your shame, standing on its head. ;-)
Napoleon
@boonagain:
I had seen that story earlier in the day or yesterday. To me one drink isn’t exactly falling off the wagon. Having said that though, it seems an incredibly stupid thing to do if you have had problems with it in the past, particularly if you are someone currently in a very stressful situation where you may be inclined to redevelop a dependency as a crutch to deal with your current situation.
I mean if I was bogged down in 2 wars, was caught torturing and eavesdropping on people, and blew up the economy I would be sauced 24/7.
Tony J
Urgh! I followed those links right through to the sewer of teen-angst muscle-flexing over at Hot Air’s comment page and I’ve got to tell you, there’s nothing like sitting in that bath of bobbing turds for ten very, very long minutes to make you feel dirty all over.
So basically, even though no-one on the Right has ever suggested such a thing (so lefties who say they have are just showing how moonbatty they are and should be laughed at, mocked, then ignored), they know in their gut that Obama really is a radical Islamic-Marxist out to destroy western civilisation, but you can’t prove it from his Cabinet picks because they’re just evidence of how he’s really a naive simpleton in a stuffed-shirt frightened by the super-dooper secret history of the Real War on Terror he’s recieved from the CIA into realising that they were RIGHT! all along.
And anyway, because people really know in their gut that he won’t be able to contain his Islamic-Marxist instincts for too long, he’s bound to end up with poll numbers lower than Bush. Proving them RIGHT all along!
How low can they go? It’s Ultimate Limbo over there.
The Moar You Know
@boonagain: Oh shit, that is the last thing we need.
@Napoleon: Yeah, that wink and a nod thing. You really need to check out boonagain’s link. He’s drinking again. Ask the AA’s – one drink is "falling off the wagon". Given his history, that picture has me the most scared of George Bush that I’ve ever been.
Only a couple of months left, This is the last thing we need, Preznit 28% (popularity or BAC, you decide!) boozing his way to the Rapture. Fuck, I hope we get to see Obama sworn in, instead of a nuclear apocalypse.
srv
Jeez John, why don’t you go ahead and marry Larison already?
JL
Over at Marketwatch there was a commenter who mentioned that Obama’s team could not help because they never earned a honest wage like Joe the Plumber. Imagine electing a President who actually wants the average or not so average Joe the Plumber on their economic team.
Incertus
@Zifnab: Which is why I said "devoid of some pretty specific context." On their own, the words don’t really mean anything. People like Captain Ed and Rush Limbaugh and the rest of those dicknecks don’t allow for context–they just use them in the sense that liberal = bad and conservative = good and that’s all there is to it, and we wind up with the discourse we’ve seen for the last 20 years as a result.
boonagain
Well, he couldn’t in San Diego anyway and WV is pretty doubtful.
Napoleon
Personally I hate using conservative vs. liberal, even without the fact that the right has corrupted the meaning I think that the words are all but meaningless. Its an attempt to compress a political universe that is 3D down to a binary choice.
Mr. Mises
“Democrat” means bigger government/higher taxes = bad
“Republican” means bigger government/fucking finance it = good
srv
Oh, I thought you were talking about MUPers here.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Interesting, TZ and I were watching Georgie one day on tv and TZ said to me "is he drinking again?" and I hadn’t actually noticed, but saw it after he said something… I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s probably been drinking for a while (perhaps all along) and now that he’s so lame-duck that they’re trying to get our new president elect to take over the position early, his handlers just don’t seem to care about hiding it anymore.
That’s my thinking and I’m sticking to it.
Indylib
@Napoleon:
The hell it’s not. If you are phsyiologically addicted to alcohol then taking a drink, no matter how long you have been dry is "falling off the wagon".
Alcoholicism is a progressive disease, it does not fade with time. It progresses as if you’ve never quit drinking. If you start up again after years of not drinking, it is like you have never stopped.
W has always appeared to be a "dry" drunk as opposed to a recovering one. A recovering one looks at and tries to deal with th issues that led to the addictive behavior. Dry drunks maintain the same destructive attitudes and a lot of the behaviors, they just do it without the addition of alcohol.
libarbarian
Hai!
In dis Thred, Sike 101 rerez its ugleh hed!
Kthxbye!
libarbarian
I can haz remote piktur-basd sikoanaluhsus?
D-Chance.
RIP, Ari.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
There’s a difference between Bill Frist diagnosing Terri Schiavo via video and TZ and I noticing alcoholism. We both grew up with alcoholic parents, we know what it looks like. Alcoholism is also prevalent and LOTS of people experience the nature of the alcoholic family or friend, and the ramifications of their actions when living with them day to day.
When did Bill Frist live day to day with someone in a vegetative state?
srv
I think his desk was between Jesse Helms and Newt.
GW was a drunk back as Gov. He got it from Barb.
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
Granted they had some difficulties with their faculties, but, they were not quite vegetables. Great for a laugh though, thanks, I needed that. :)
Ed Marshall
If he was shitfaced the whole time, the last eight years suddenly makes a boatload of sense. It doesn’t explain the characters around him who applauded all of it, but it explains much.
libarbarian
Jesus, now I have to "defend" Bush…..
Bush has never been "diagnosed" as an Alcoholic by any doctor or ever admitted to being an "alcoholic". Also, with all due respect to your experience with alcoholics, you have not lived with GWB and know of his history with alcohol through the media. We know he had a "drinking problem" but we don’t know enough of the specifics to know if this was actually alcoholism or just an expression of other issues he had and that does not imply the inability to ever drink again.
I mean, we have one picture of him sipping a drink at some diplomatic event…..
CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII
libarbarian, Bush even admitted he had a drinking problem and solved it with Jesus.
You are not convincing anyone. You must be one of just a few people who have NO clue he was a self-admitted alcoholic. My, my… what strange brew you have there.
AnneLaurie
There’s also an established family history — at least one of Bush’s uncles officially died as a result of alcohol abuse, and if you believe Kitty Kelley, both Prescott & Poppy had what were genteely disguised in a less therapy-friendly day as ‘some difficult times when they may have been a little too eager for five o’clock’. Of course there are people who say Dubya’s self-confessed problems with alcohol were designed to take voters’ attention away from his issues with less socially acceptable substances, but he did say that God & Billy Graham "cured" him after Laura told him "It’s me or Jim Beam". Until recently, his handlers have been careful to specify that any beer bottles seen in Bush’s vicinity were O’Douls, so they did think it was an issue of perception at least.
Tim Fuller
As part of the requirements for being "tagged" myself (by PZ Myers, noted
evolutionary biologist and atheist who posts at Pharyngula, it is my duty to
inform you that you have been "tagged" by me. More info at Pharyngula or in the
post at my website where I officially tagged you.
Enjoy.
bago
Hey there viral marketing douchebags! How does it feel!
Rick Taylor
Oh my god, what incredible morons. If we go to war and it turns out they never had weapons of mass destruction, no biggie! Idiots, idiots, idiots. What the hell does it take to drum in to the human race the simple idea that war is extremely destructive and should always be used hesitantly, as a last resort?
Rick Taylor
What to say. . .
Zifnab
Way back in the day, "War" meant watching loved ones suite up and ride off, possibly never to return. It meant planting victory gardens and going on food rations, skimping on gas and rubber because those resources were needed for the war effort. It meant higher taxes and fewer government services.
We don’t have to suffer any of that anymore. The US Government just throws all the debt on the national credit card. And even then, when you’re drawing down over a trillion a year in tax revenue, you’ve got plenty of money to spare if you want to wax off a third world country.
Someone did the math and found out Republican Presidents perform better during war time. So war is a political ploy, a fund raising mechanism, and an opportunity to employee Lauffer curve economics to cut taxes for the rich. Once we get back to the older way of war, we might see it loss popularity.
Glidwrith
@Rick Taylor:
What will convince them? Did you see one of the very first comments in the link – "war nerds". That is absolutely the best description I’ve ever seen for the sort of people that can’t seem to get enough of Endless War(TM). Don’t grace them with the name of "war hawks", it implies a nobility that they never displayed. "War nerds" fits to a "T" – clueless, rather socially inept, but brimming over with enthusiasm to play the game – at no cost to themselves, of course.
TenguPhule
Actually being shot at by the other side they were so eager for ‘the troops’ to kill.