Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

In after Baud. Damn.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

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The New Stupid Meme

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Is as follows:

Lost yesterday in the frenzy over Scott McClellan’s new book was McCain’s blistering attack on Obama over the fact that the Illinois senator hasn’t been to Iraq since 2006. Indeed, the RNC even released an online clock counting the days since Obama last visited the Middle East country. Then later in the day, the New York Times reported that Obama is considering a trip to Iraq; his campaign, in fact, has been discussing such a trip for weeks. Has McCain boxed Obama in on this issue — because if he does actually go to Iraq, will it look like McCain’s idea?

First, I can not be the only one who remembers this:

So John McCain, in order to prove his point that there are neighborhoods in Baghdad that an American can stroll through safely, tells reporters at a press conference that he just got back from a 1-hour walk around the city. Safe and sound! Though, oddly for a guy running for president, without any TV cameras around. Later it turns out that he visited….

Wait for it….

A market three minutes from the Green Zone. Wearing a bulletproof vest. Accompanied by over a hundred well-armed soldiers. Covered by three Blackhawk helicopters. And two Apache gunships.

The visit was tragically followed by this news a few days later:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Sometimes those fact-finding missions just aren’t what they are cracked up to be.

Second, this is not about time in theatre, because if it were we would be voting for General Petraeus, who has spent a helluva a lot more time in Iraq than John McCain. As have thousands of our guys on their third and fourth tours overseas since this fiasco started.

Finally, where do we even get the notion that the Commander-in-Chief even needs to visit the front lines? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it hurts, and I think when President Bush visited it definitely cheered up the troops- that is something they will remember forever.

But how many days did FDR spend on the front lines in France and Germany? What about Truman in Korea? Johnson and Nixon in Viet Nam? And I am not being snarky, I really don’t know how many days or even if they were on the front lines and am too lazy to research it right now (again, for all I know, FDR may have spent months operating out of a tent in Bastogne, although I think I would have heard about it), but even if they were I certainly don’t think it was used as the basis for why the public should vote for them or why their approach to the situation was better. Believe it or not, modern combat is slightly different from this, in which the Emperor actually was close to the front:

John McCain could set up his campaign headquarters in the Green Zone, and it wouldn’t make his ideas any better.

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Marriage Equality Recognized in NY

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This is certainly good news:

Gay rights advocates had reason to celebrate on both coasts Thursday, with New York set to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere and California preparing to begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples on June 17.

Hours after California issued a directive Wednesday authorizing that date, word came that New York Gov. David Paterson instructed state agencies — including those governing insurance and health care — to immediately change policies and regulations to recognize gay marriages.

I’m sure we’ll be subjected to outrage from the right. Why does this stuff always happen during election cycles? Oh, right, because we’re always in an election cycle.

Feel free to post silly right-wing overreactions to this in the comments.

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McClellan Explains Himself

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The WaPo has a rundown of his Today show appearance:

McClellan, in turn, said it took him some time after leaving the White House to come to terms with his experience there. When the Iraq war started, “my beliefs were different,” he told “Today.” “I trusted the president’s foreign policy team and I believed the president when he talked about the great and gathering danger from Iraq. I believe the president believed it too. He had convinced himself.

“I don’t think this is a book that I could have written two years ago,” McClellan added. “[I] struggled as I went through this book process. I struggled to come to grips with how things went so badly off course.”

More here at MSNBC, and here is the actual interview:

As a side note, I imagine that Irving Janis and groupthink are going to be referenced frequently in the next few years as the Bush administration post-mortems begin in earnest. Janis outlined the symptoms:

In order to make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms that are indicative of groupthink (1977).

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

One of the classic examples of groupthink Janis refers to is the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Keep this list in mind when you watch the video, particularly the response from Rove, Bartlett and others to McClellan’s book. Probably something folks like me should also keep in mind when discussing the Clinton campaign.

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Buchenvald, Not as Bad As Auschwitz, Therefore Obama = Unfit For Command

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How far will the right-wing blogosphere go to promote the meme that Obama is “gaffe-prone” (I know, I know, stop laughing. They did support George Bush unflinchingly for eight years)? This far:

Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war. The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.

Buchenwald, as described by Wikipedia:

Buchenwald concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg (Etter Mountain) near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany (at the time, Nazi Germany), in July 1937, and one of the largest such camps on German soil.

***

Buchenwald (German: “beech forest”) was chosen as the name for the camp because of the close ties of the location to Goethe, who was being idealized as “the embodiment of the German Spirit” (Verkörperung des deutschen Geistes). The Goethe Eiche (Goethe’s Oak) stood inside the camp’s perimeter,[2][3] and the stump of the tree is preserved as part of the memorial at KZ Buchenwald. Similarly, the camp could not be named for another town nearby (Hottelstedt) because of administrative considerations (it would have resulted in a lower pay grade for the camp’s Schutzstaffel (SS) guards).[citation needed]

Between July 1937 and April 1945, some 250,000 people were incarcerated in Buchenwald by the Nazi regime, including 168 Western Allied POWs. One estimate places the number of deaths in Buchenwald at 56,000 (discussed further below).

The Jewish Virtual Libary places the death toll at 33,462. The Jewish Virtual Library also tells us this took place at Buchenwald:

In or about December 1943, and in or about October 1944, experiments were conducted at the Buchenwald concentration camp to investigate the effect of various poisons upon human beings. The poisons were secretly administered to experimental subjects in their food. The victims died as a result of the poison or were killed immediately in order to permit autopsies. In or about September 1944 experimental subjects were shot with poison bullets and suffered torture and death. The defendants Genzken, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick are charged with special responsibility for and participation in these crimes

And this:

From about November 1943 to about January 1944 experiments were conducted at the Buchenwald concentration camp to test the effect of various pharmaceutical preparations on phosphorous burns. These burns were inflicted on experimental subjects with phosphorous matter taken from incendiary bombs, and caused severe pain, suffering, and serious bodily injury. The defendants Genzken, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick are charged with special responsibility for and participation in these crimes.

And here is some more background on Ohrdurf, the labor camp that was the sub-camp of Buchenwald that Obama’s relative helped to liberate, here, including this picture:


Prisoner corpses at Ohrdurf, although not as bad as Auschwitz.


Corpses sprinkled with lime and stacked like wood, but note- not as bad as Auschwitz.

So basically, Obama’s relative helped to liberate a forced labor camp attached to Buchenwald, with approximately 33,000-56,000 deaths, forced medical experiments, chemical weapons experiments, BUT IT WAS NOT AS BAD AS AUSCHWITZ.

This is going to be the longest, sickest election year ever.

*** Update ***

It is depressing.

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Some Perspective

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While I understand the glee that the left-wing is having regarding the White House freakout over McClellan’s book, and while I wholly agree he is a jackass for having stood by and served of the mouthpiece for this administration while they did all this bullshit, there is always the possibility that he did not realize how totally full of it this administration was until he was outside of DC and had a chance to measure the difference between the rhetoric of the administration and the reality on the ground (something that was mentioned earlier on MSNBC), as McClellan was a true believer.

Additionally, and more importantly, I simply can not be the only person who remembers the Democratic freak-out when George Stephenopoulos wrote his tell-all book at a comparable time in the waning days of the Clinton administration. I don’t remember things perfectly, but I could swear the words Benedict Arnold and traitor were chucked around then, too.

So while it is nice to confirm what some of us dimmer bulbs learned too late and what many of you knew all along, remember that every administration considers this kind of tell-all to be an act of treason. That bunker mentality is part of what is so wrong in Washington.

Just saying.

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