Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

So many bastards, so little time.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

T R E 4 5 O N

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Let me file that under fuck it.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about it’s history.”

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

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28Comments

  2. 2.

    GSD

    Ah yes, the lectures from the financial and political elites about the bracing and beneficial aspects of impoverishment at the hands of the monied classes.

    I’m looking forward to the Oliver Twistish musicals and happy, grungy faced children singing and begging their little hearts out.

    It’ll be great for all of us, especially the richest of the rich.

    It’ll be all Spam and snappy dance numbers in dirty rags at the poor house. I’m getting excited and I want to thank Michael Gerson for pointing this out.

    I’d also like to thank Phil Gramm for making me not whine about my loserdom.

    Maybe some of the good cheer from the plebes will trickle up to the feudal overlords, they’ll need something to keep them happy now that Dubai is falling apart.

    -GSD

  3. 3.

    MillionthMonkey

    Gerson is basically saying that since crime went up in the 70s, peace and prosperity is what makes us immoral.

    The crime wave ended in the 80s; crime rates dropped successively in state after state in the order that each had phased out leaded gasoline in the 70s. We don’t have to reach straight for economic good times as an explanation for crime. :P

  5. 5.

    bayville

    Tom Joad says:
    "" Thank God for the good ol’ days of th’ Depression. I wouln’t have been able to spend some time with Ma’ & Pa’ travellin’ across the country an visitin’ the beautiful state of California. The peaches there were delicious too!”

  7. 7.

    justcorbly

    You know, I just can’t get interested in using its editorial pages to measure the quality of a newspaper. Just like pundits and other talking heads, editorials are not news.

  8. 8.

    racrecir

    John Holbo on David Frum’s Dead Right:

    The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’.

    And something about Donner party stoicism that conservative columnists would do well to emphasize more.

  9. 9.

    headpan

    Wow. I loathe him, but Frum sewed that up quite nicely.

    I’m sorry, I didn’t click the link. I assume that wasn’t satire?

  12. 12.

    ThymeZoneThePlumber

    Recessions and depressions are brutal beasts that stalk the stragglers, especially retirees and the poor.

    Reitrees = stragglers?

    Retirees are those who "stray or fall behind?" And that’s who is injured in a depression? Just the weak?

    Sorry, once I read a sentence like that I’m done. I’m done with that publication, since they obviously do not employ editing, and I’m done with any discussion of that material.

    The first rule of raising the level of discourse is to raise the standard on what is being talked about. If we are talking about shitty editorial material that wouldn’t get past a high school newspaper’s faculty advisor, then I have better things to do.

    This is shit.

  14. 14.

    D-Chance.

    I agree about WaPo. Just look at this "journalism".

    Obama’s economic plan

    First sentence: President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years…

    OK, the Bush deficits were usually around $400-500 billion (way, WAY too much!). Cut in half is good news, until you read deeper into the column to see that "cut the federal deficit in half" is…

    His budget plan would keep the deficit hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to $533 billion in 2013…

    So his BEST year fiscally is going to be a $533 billion deeper dig in the hole? That’s "ambitious"? WTF? Oh, and the tack-on…

    still high in dollar terms, but a more manageable 3 percent of the overall economy.

    Yeah, nothing like the tired old Republican "% of GDP" talking point to excuse the continued planned raping of the treasury.

    Someone’s extra bedroom in Canada and a mattress stuffed with Canadian dollars sounds good to me about now… because the US is totally fucked.

  15. 15.

    Mike in NC

    Perhaps excess and recklessness are vices that deserve social stigma.

    Will Gerson stigmatize the guy he wrote all those crappy speeches for? You know, the one who decided to invade a Muslim country of 25+ million people with no exit strategy.

    Perhaps frugality and prudence are personal virtues as well as practices that prevent economic collapse.

    Rich wingnuts like Gerson and Bill Bennett are so good at lecturing their inferiors on the subject of virtue.

    Perhaps there is a distinction between securing our needs and being dominated by our wants.

    Perhaps Gerson will die in a fire. Can’t happen too soon.

  16. 16.

    grandpajohn

    Don’t be cut out by Digby’s reference, that bit is considerably less mocking than its target deserves,

    actually what the target deserves is breaking out buckets of tar and bags of feathers and in reading the comments that followed the article on the WP site, that may still happen
    A newspaper that prints such garbage on a constant basis deserves to go broke and soon

  17. 17.

    Bootlegger

    I admit a fondness for arguments like this

    "Capitalism," argued economist Joseph Schumpeter, "creates a critical frame of mind which, after having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in the end turns against its own."

    Gerson, however, misses the point like a spear with a superball on the tip. More to the point, crime dropped precipitously during the roaring Clinton capitalism and surprisingly didn’t spike during Bush’s homicidal moral relativism. The Great Unwashed Masses demonstrated over the last two decades that it isn’t the Serfs who become amoral during the good times, but the Power Elite who become drunk on capitalism’s gin.

  18. 18.

    ThymeZoneThePlumber

    The Great Unwashed Masses demonstrated over the last two decades that it isn’t the Serfs who become amoral during the good times, but the Power Elite who become drunk on capitalism’s gin.

    That is a great point.

  19. 19.

    Waingro

    "The editorial pages are as bad or worse than the WSJ."

    They’re worse. Everyone already knows the WSJ editorial page is a mendacious, Randian circle jerk. The Washington Post is just pure shit-in the words of Billmon, it’s Pravda on the Potomac.

    Example- They continuously conflate the very real problem with healthcare inflation (and hence, Medicare) and combine it into the propaganda phrase ‘entitlement reform’. An eight-year old can understand that Medicare and Social Security are different programs with different fiscal projections, but the Washington Post just somehow manages to ‘confuse’ this simple concept over and over and over. They’re lying scumbags and they don’t care that they’re lying scumbags.

  20. 20.

    Mnemosyne

    More to the point, crime dropped precipitously during the roaring Clinton capitalism and surprisingly didn’t spike during Bush’s homicidal moral relativism.

    That’s because the surge of crime from the late 60s to the late 80s had a lot more to do with various waves of the Baby Boom getting to prime crime-committing age than it did with some inherent breakdown in American morality.

    Of course, those with a vested interest in keeping the proles down aren’t going to mention that.

  21. 21.

    GuyFromOhio

    I’m now to the point that I no longer consider the Washington Post one of the country’s premier newspapers.

    And, Lo! ‘Tis the demise of the newspaper industry writ large – if your newspaper sucks, no one will read it.

    Dinosaurs, tar pits.

  22. 22.

    sglover

    I’m now to the point that I no longer consider the Washington Post one of the country’s premier newspapers.

    That’s generous. After watching it shill for the Idiot Prince’s Mesopotamian adventure1, I no longer consider the WaPo basically trustworthy. Who the hell wants to spend a nickel on a "newspaper" that either flat-out lies or encourages those who do?

    What the WaPo really needs is Chapter 11. Given their declining readership, this happy fate can’t be far off. Look at the NY Times.

    1 Granted, the paper did have the excellent Walter Pincus puncturing the latest Bush/Cheney Big Lie on a daily basis. Only problem was, WaPo management routinely buried his pieces back on page A-22 or thereabouts.

  23. 23.

    Bootlegger

    @Mnemosyne: Economics explained some of the variance, as did the birth cohort effect and the growth in the prison population. Check out Frank Zimring’s The Great American Crime Decline, by far the most comprehensive analysis of the 90’s crime drop.

  27. 27.

    ricky

    "Perhaps there is a distinction between securing our needs and being dominated by our wants. "
    M. Gerson

    I have blocked an obsessive desire to see Gerson humiliated on "Are You Dumber than A Fifth Grader" by being unable to pay my cable bill.

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