Mark Halperin thinks it’s how the cast of “The View” feels about it
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.
At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.
Republicans in disarray!
I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.
There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.
Black Jesus loves a paper trail.
But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.
Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.
They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!
We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.
Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!
The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.
“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.
Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.
“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”
When they say they’re pro-life, they don’t mean yours.
“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.
I really should read my own blog.
You are here: Home / What really matters about the Specter switch
TenguPhule
It’s always about them, isn’t it?
Dennis-SGMM
Wrong.
cleek
Mark Halperin stinks.
like blown goats.
slag
Why do you do this to us? Can’t we just live in a world wherein we’re treated like thinking adults by both our government and our media? Is it really so hard?
DougJ
No.
slag
@DougJ: Damn! I knew you were going to say that.
KG
to add to the peak wingnut discussion in the last thread, don’t worry friends, it’ll get more interesting… the Supreme Court heard oral arguments today about Section 5 of the Voter’s Rights Act – the provision that requires “pre-screening” of changes to the voting laws/procedures/regulations in the South.
There’s no decision that won’t lead to the crazy on that one.
Mike S
I like his grades for “the first semester.”
JK
Mark Halperin citing The View for trenchant, cogent analysis of Specter’s defection. This guy is getting dumber by the nanosecond. If I didn’t know who was responsible for The Page, I’d have guessed it was an 8-year old. The Page is the ultimate cotton candy website within the MSM.
geg6
Mark Halperin is no brighter than the idiot teabaggers who are cleverly buying tickets to Janeane Garafalo’s show in Boston in order to protest her remarks that many teabaggers were racist.
I’m sure Janeane is really bummed about that. Perhaps Mark Halperin should buy a ticket to find out how the teabaggers feel about Specter, too.
JGabriel
@cleek:
Does Kaus know?
.
geg6
@Mike S:
Based on Halperin’s grading system, I wish like hell I’d had him for calculus back in my undergrad days. I’d have aced that class.
MattF
These threads keep making me look for “a word that goes beyond…”. A word that goes beyond “floundering”. A word that goes beyond “crackpot”. A word that goes beyond “deluded”. But… I’m done, I have work to do.
TenguPhule
Only in Halperin’s world does complete and utter failure translate into an average passing grade.
Stav
Doug,
Fred Hiatt is about to do a Q&A at 2:30. I know you won’t want to miss it. I’ve got two on the pipeline already. Oh and that was me with the Beavis & Butthead this am.
CT
@Mike S. I’d love to have had some teachers who graded that easy-“let’s see, historically unpopular, hemmoraghing moderates, have no policies, not even effective at blocking Obama-not bad! You can still pull it up to a B in the next 100 days!”
GOP deserves the same GPA as Bluto Blutarsky.
slag
@TenguPhule: Don’t forget: GW got degrees from both Yale and Harvard. Our “soft bigotry of low expectations” extends to pretty much every facet of our social apparatus. But is particularly pernicious among the spoiled rich white boy set, mostly because they generally have the power.
JK
OT
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Karmakin
I have to disagree to a degree with this. I actually think that the way that The View, but more-so, the way that the average person perceives this situation actually is quite important right now.
I explained the situation to my wife this morning, who is a bit politically aware, but doesn’t follow it like we do. When I mentioned it was Specter who switched, her eyes boggled. She thought at first it was some new Republican, a back bencher, but Specter…people KNOW him.
The potential “danger” with the issue is that Specter would be seen as acting in a slimy way politically. But people seem to be ignoring that aspect in favor of the point that the GOP is a sinking ship right now and the rats are leaving.
Library Grape
i’m finding it hard to think of things i hate more than Halperin
Cat Lady
@Stav:
Paul Kane called you a “lefty”. He he. “lefty”. he he he
JK
@Library Grape: What about Bernie Goldberg, Mike Allen, Howie Kurtz, Peggy Noonan, and Joe Scarborough for starters?
TenguPhule
Dick Cheney (80% murder approval rating)
Mary Cheney
Donald Rumsfield
Condi Rice
George Bush
Alberto Gonzales
John Yoo
Judge Bybee
John Ashcroft
Clarence Thomas
Scalia
Roberts
Peggy Noonan
Just off the top of my head.
slag
@Karmakin: No one’s disputing that having the View discuss the issue is a good thing. I, personally, like it when issues of national importance are discussed in popular spheres. But there’s no need for Halperin to point it out to his readers unless he’s trying to magnify its importance. Which is kind of silly unless he’s assuming his readers are completely blind to the utterly obvious fact of Specter’s political opportunism. So, the only reasonable response to these kinds of issues is: “Duh!”.
TheFountainHead
Signs that you’re doing it wrong, for 800 please, Alex.
Library Grape
@TenguPhule @JK excellent examples. sometimes the flame of Halperin hatred blots out all rational thinking :)
Zifnab
@Mike S: I like how you can get expelled and still get a “C” in Mark Halperin’s class. Was he grading papers in Harvard when Bush was taking classes? Because that might explain a lot.
@Karmakin:
That’s where you go wrong. “The View” != “average person”. It’s like interviewing Oprah Winfrey to get an idea of what the man on the street thinks. These are personalities, not people. They’re actors doing a show for the entertainment of the general public.
If Halperin hand run outside and started polling mimes and street magicians in the middle of their act, it would have made slightly more sense as a point of reference.
TenguPhule
Except that on occasion, Oprah and the man on the street agree with one another.
Stav
Doug, after that question you just asked I wish I hadn’t mentioned the Hiatt Q&A. Sick, sick, sick.
David
They have no long term strategy at all. It’s like watching a drug addict just trying to get through the day. Something like deciding to rename the Democratic Party the Socialist Party might make them feel better for a few hours but it does nothing to solve their own problem, in fact, it exacerbates it.
They should have had a four year plan but they shot up their whole stash by the end of the day on January 20th.
geg6
@slag:
Mark Halperin is not only a blowhard and always wrong about the issues. He can’t even keep his Villagers and their proper titles correct. In that same post, he calls Nancy Pelosi the House Majority Leader.
DougJ
I don’t know, have you seen the grades kids are getting at Stanford these days?
DougJ
That was really funny. I was wondering who it was.
Yeah, I’m asking Hiatt lots of questions. Have two answered so far.
But nothing real exciting yet.
Let me know how you fare.
JK
@Library Grape:
@TenguPhule:
I hear you, Library Grape. I think the problem with people like Mark Halperin, Mike Allen, and Howard Kurtz is that they try to pass themselves off as neutral, non-partisan, and dispassionate but if you read between the lines, they are almost always more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Republicans than to Democrats. All the people TenguPhule cites are swine, but they are open about where they stand. They don’t pretend to be above the fray or act as is if they don’t have a dog in the fight like Halperin, Allen, and Kurtz.
Zifnab
@David: But it was such good shit!
@geg6: I assumed Nancy Pelosi, Empress of Congress, Supreme Commander of the Liberal Hordes, and High Priestess of San Fransisco Values held all positions of authority in the DemonRat Party.
slag
@geg6: Wow. I just went and looked at the Page in earnest for the first time in a while. Is there anything on there to which the word “Duh!” would not be an appropriate response? For example, “Limbaugh Slaps Obama With a ‘D'”…Duh!
sparky
@DougJ: we all deserve As since America starts with an A.
why do you hate America?
JK
@slag: The only reasonable response to Mark Halperin 99% of the time is Duh.
JK
A more appropriate title for The Page might be No Shit Sherlock or Really, Ya Think
evie
I saw that post and laughed out loud. The Page (which is more than just Halperin, presumably) is obsessed — truly obsessed — with opinions of the women on the View? Do they somehow think that the quartet is a stand-in for the “Everywoman?” Scary and absurd.
Mr. Stuck
Filed in the pun department under unfortunate choice of words/
Ash Can
@Stav: I LOLed at that. Well done!
Stav
@Cat Lady
Yeah I sent him a few choice comments on that. I used to like PK. I love Bruce so PK was a brother fan, but the past few weeks he has been throwing out epithet after epithet at his liberal readers. (I think Media Matters ticked him on something).
I then sent him the thing on the Pats beating the Eagles and we should look forward not backwards…and he said he insults the right too. Maybe I’m sensitive, but I haven’t seen it.
JK
In case anyone forgot, this is the same Mark Halperin who said the following in a radio interview:
BILL GEDDIE: Haven’t we heard all along that [John Edwards] doesn’t like [Hillary Clinton], haven’t we heard this?
MARK HALPERIN: Yes, that’s right. And I can tell you, he’s really skeptical of her ability to be the kind of president he wants. But, he kinda thinks Obama is..he thinks Obama is kind of a pussy. He has real questions about Obama’s toughness, his readiness for the office.he has real doubts about Obama, not just as a president, but as a general election candidate.
Halperin later issued an apology on The Page:
“I’m sorry. In a live radio interview this week, I used a word I shouldn’t have. The fact that I was conveying other people’s words is no excuse for my lapse in judgment. It won’t happen again.”
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/13/times-halperin-_n_86504.html
Corner Stone
@JK:
Do you think this may be the reason the swine flu mutated so easily to attacking humans? Because of these swine people?
gbear
Of course, NPR went with the slimy side on this morning’s news, emphasising that Specter was in mortal danger of losing the republican primary, so the party switch was completely an act of self preservation. No mention that his party had become too whacko for him to stomach.
Corner Stone
From Hiatt at the WaPo in response to DougJ’s swine flu questions:
Wha?
gex
@gbear: Because what we really need is to have NPR carrying the GOP’s water.
Maus
Must we blame shlock Reality TV on the GOP as well? Oh well, can’t argue with demographics.
The Grand Panjandrum
I’ve never been a Halperin fan and after that book he wrote about what it takes to get elected to the White House (which I did read) it confirmed my long held belief that he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. As time goes by it becomes more readily apparent he is essentially a mental midget and doesn’t really have any chops. He’s lazy and seems to draw conclusions from thin air rather than base them on any data.
omen
@Stav:
that was unbelievable. he cast objecting to republicans who mock common sense initiatives that serve the common good in effort to cut their funding as liberals pathetic attempt to politicize.
that’s like insisting that it’s bad form when somebody attempts to stop a rapist.
Stav
I got tow back to back: “Everything is Good For Republicans” and one that didn’t come out the way I wanted it: “Marketing 101”.
Basically my feeling there is that the media builds up “100 Days” cause it’s like a sitcom “Clipshow” special….they are easy to do, they fill the time, but really nobody wants to watch that. Who cares what a bunch of people have to say about the “100 Days”. I love politics and the media and I could care less.
I wish Princeton, NJ would someday reveal himself.
JK
@Maus: Palin knew she wouldn’t have to face with questions about the Bush doctrine, the Supreme Court, the economic stimulus, or global warming.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Corner Stone: @DougJ:
Harvard has the same problem.
Zifnab
@gbear:
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. His base went batshit bonkers or converted to the Dem party. His options were to go batshit bonkers, get primaried out of his party, or switch voluntarily. This just saves him the trouble of pulling a full Lieberman.
omen
that’s another wingnut contradiction. you hear them complaining about “grade inflation” all the time, kids being awarded “As” and token sports trophies just for showing up, in order boost their self esteem – yet they balk at holding republicans accountable for their actions. it’s the same thing, if you ask me. if a politician is negligent and does “F” grade level work, he should pay the price for it.
JK
More insight from the oracle Mark Halperin
Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.
“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”
h/t http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15885.html
Cat Lady
@Stav:
Jonathan Weisman used to say “hello Professor Krugman” to Princeton, NJ.
EJ
Honestly the few times I’ve seen it’s seemed to me that the hosts of The View have smarter political opinions than the average Washington pundit.
Definitely smarter than Halperin.
tc125231
@geg6:
Why do you guys read him? He can’t get any dumber, it’s not really possible.
You have to draw the line somewhere. I know some of you are libertarians, but I long ago gave up reading McArdle because she’s an idiot. Despite claiming to be an economics blogger, she never met a statistic that couldn’t be overruled by Randian ideology.
I mean, stupid is stupid. Why torture yourself?