Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The revolution will be supervised.

Let’s show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

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

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

This blog will pay for itself.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

You are here: Home / When you’re on a hill, die, when you’re on two, bring a lot of wingers

Reader Interactions

66Comments

  1. 1.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Obama don’t need no enemies list. All he has to do is say something nice about a republican to make them dead men walking.

  2. 2.

    parksideq

    Yes. SATSQ

    Slightly OT: will Bill Belichick’s decision to go for it on 4th and 2, as opposed to punting, be the proverbial hill that the Pats’ season dies on?

  3. 3.

    DougJ

    Slightly OT: will Bill Belichick’s decision to go for it on 4th and 2, as opposed to punting, be the proverbial hill that the Pats’ season dies on?

    Save it for another thread. I’m still in pain. Jesus fucking Christ. If he’d had a challenge, they would have ruled it a first down. Not a terrible call, but he had possession on the other side of the 30.

  4. 4.

    mcc

    The fundamental problem here is they’ve got an unworkable, unreasonable, fantasy-based ideology and they’re not willing to compromise on it one iota.

    When that’s your starting point, then it seems pretty obvious that you’re going to run into life-or-death battles against reality at every turn.

  5. 5.

    Incertus

    Much as I hope Erickson’s raiders wipe Crist out down here and usher in the new age of Senator Kendrick Meek, I doubt it happens. Big difference between ripping the guts out of a House candidate and a reasonably popular sitting Governor in a state the size of this one, with as many major media markets as this one has. But I assume that they’ll consider any result a win, since they’ll have forced Crist to recognize their existence or some such nonsense.

  6. 6.

    cleek

    here’s a different way to ask the same question:

    Would E2 going to pass up an opportunity to tell people how great GOP dick tastes ?

  9. 9.

    SpotWeld

    … what else is he capable of doing?
    I mean at this point, he has nothing else to offer.

    Until something comes out that he can demand that the kerned bechecked on.

  10. 10.

    valdivia

    OT it’s official–Tapper has now posted on the scandalousness of Obama’s bow. Gawd these people are just predictable and idiotic.

  12. 12.

    jl

    One thing we do know, they will all be orange colored creepy looking white dudes. Lots of races with unhealthy orange soda-pop colored white dudes fighting over the ruins of the GOP, if things turn out well for the rest of us.

    The way Obama has postpartisaned things up so badly, the Democrats will need all the help they can get in 2010. Pray that the wingnuts deliver their futile little political porkchop hills. Those little GOPer battles against sanity may save the world.

  13. 13.

    rh

    Uh oh, Obama just misspoke and said “Taiwan and the rest of… er, and the People’s Republic of China.” I predict there will be roughly 300 links about it on Memeorandum by tomorrow and the John Hinderaker will declare Obama to be an agent of the Chinese gov’t.

  16. 16.

    Max

    @General Winfield Stuck: Tapper seems relatively normal on Twitter. I wonder sometimes if he even writes his blog.

    I just unfollowed Major Garrett, his tweets are just as slanted and dickish as the network he works for.

  17. 17.

    General Winfield Stuck

    @Max:

    Or maybe a stand in writer for twitter. Tapper is not normal, for proof all you have to do is watch Obama’s pressers when it’s Jake’s turn to ask a question.

  20. 20.

    jl

    @valdivia: I will read Tapper, a great white bwana who is kind enough to share his wisdom with us mere serfs. So nice of him. So gracious.

    Speaking of the our idiot overlords, the Wise Village Elder Broder has announced that he has just about had enough of all this ‘thinking’ and ‘analysis’ over what to do in Afghanistan. He has officially put his TV charge of ‘dithering’ into print.

    I do not know what to do in Afghanistan, but I ask, why does soonergrunt not have a colunn while this silly, hysterical, prissy old fraud has one?

    Excerpts below, with my comments in parentheses.

    Enough Afghan debate
    By David S. Broder
    Washington Pest (Post)
    Sunday, November 15, 2009

    “ The president, notwithstanding his earlier rhetoric and actions, has hesitated to resolve the issue. Obama needs to remember what Clark Clifford, one of Harry Truman’s closest advisers, said: that the president ‘believed that even a wrong decision was better than no decision at all.’ “

    (I am a great admirer of Truman, but not sure his example as a ‘war president’ is best to follow. On the other hand, as prezinential leaderizing decidering firing a general would be a decision, and better than no decision at all, so maybe Broder is on to something here.)

    “ If the Taliban comes back in Afghanistan, the al-Qaeda cells already in Pakistan will operate even more freely — and nuclear weapons could fall into the most dangerous hands. “

    (Many knowledgeable people would say Broder has it backwards, but I am sure he is a Wise Village Elder who realizes how irresponsible it would be to give out advice about war and peace and life and death without having a thorough understanding of the subject.)

    “ I don’t see how Obama can refuse to back up the commander he picked and the strategy he is recommending. It may not work if the country truly is ungovernable. But I think we have to gamble that security will bring political progress — as it has done in Iraq. “

    (Well, I guess firing a general who wants to git up a big war would not be a case where any decision is better than none. Sorry, my mistake; I see now that I did not have a deep enough understand the wise man’s counsel. People can read the column to see whether there is any thorough evaluation of the pros and cons of that gamble, I do not see any at all other than the doubtful reasoning about poor little Pakistan being at the mercy of Afghanistan.)

    (Broder says that Afghanistan is very important. He must have thought deeply and researched this issue, and written about it before. He certainly must have some record of diligent work on Afghanistan. Matthew Hoh negotiated with local Afghans when he was in the Marines. Ahmed Rashid has reported from there for decades, Barnett Rubin has participated in on-the-ground grassroots development efforts by working with local Afghan business start-ups, as well as doing anthropological work. I am sure Broder has put in some serious study time on this so he can keep up.

    I did a WaPo archives search. I am not willing to shell out the dough the read the whole columns, but from the summaries, it looks like Broder has devoted exacly one column with substantial focus on Afghanistan since we invaded Iran. In 2006, Broder announced that the US strategy was hostage to Karzai in Afghanistan and Maliki in Iraq.

    That certainly increased my confidence in Broder’s judgment. And his insight and innovative out-of-the-box thinking, and general mad pro-active analysis skilz, don’t you think? Silly aged aged pompous ignorant dilettantish old old fools urging war because ‘we have to do something’ has always turned out so well in the past, hasn’t it?)

    ” The leaders of those governments — Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq — came to power through the influence of American diplomacy and American guns. But, in a historic reversal of fortune, they now hold this country hostage to their decisions and their fate. ”

    Broder, WaPo, June 29 2006

  21. 21.

    drag0n

    One of the reasons I like the idea of our Great Books Program is because I think a lot of activists need to read for themselves the great ideas that shape the conservative mind. We need, each one of us, to know what we believe and why we believe it and when it is acceptable to compromise principles for pragmatism.

    Ok, so they need to be told what to believe. Not that THAT was ever a mystery but it was kind of him to spell it out and it says a lot about the wingnuts

  23. 23.

    jenniebee

    Gotta feel sorry for them in a way. They don’t have any concrete goals or anything where they can make incremental progress, they just have abstract absolute principles: “conservative leadership”, “lower taxes” (with no acknowledgment of an acceptable level of taxation above 0), “small government”… they’re unachievable short of reverting to anarchy. And the social agenda is even more unachievable – they can delay making gay marriages legally recognized, but they can’t stop gays from getting married.

    So no, they can’t compromise on their agenda because their whole agenda is to be uncompromising in the face of social change. They can’t compromise on their fiscal agenda either, because their rhetoric (and they no longer have theories about this, only rhetoric) is that however “small” the government is, it should be smaller. That’s not something that’s winnable, because every concession to reality is an insufficiently radical position. Progressives, by contrast, are making incremental progress toward concrete goals (full equal protection under the law for LGBT, universal access to health care). If we compromise, we end up with civil unions and public options instead of gay marriage and single payer, but we still win something, we still move toward our goal. If they compromise, they lose. All they can hope for in a compromise is to move less far away from their goal than if they held their ground.

  24. 24.

    RaptureReadyAndLovinIt

    Your update link has a blog comment in which some guy is glad his WWII veteran dad can’t remember anything, and won’t be traumatized by Obama’s bow!

    Reminds me of my grandmother, who (having witnessed Pearl Harbor firsthand) always referred to “those GODDAMMED JAPS.” I thought they were actually called THOSE GODDAMMED JAPS until I was about 8 or 9 years old. I never heard them called anything else.

    So apparently we are still fighting World War Two. I wish I had known this twenty years ago when I worked for a Japanese company, I could have been a secret agent …..

  25. 25.

    jl

    @RaptureReadyAndLovinIt: So, it was much more dignified, diplomatic, and patriotic when GHW Bush hurled chunks on that sneaky Japanese dictator -or whatever he was?

    Is that where we are now? Have mercy on us, Lord.

    thanks Tapper, for giving this drivel some credibility.

    On the other hand, what if these ninnies tried to write about something important? They could do a lot of damage. Maybe it’s better they stick with this inane journamalistic bread and circuses.

  27. 27.

    Eric U.

    @DougJ: I figure the league got to Belichek and had him throw the game. A lot more interest when at least one team has a winning streak.

  28. 28.

    Yutsano

    @Eric U.: I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Belechik is capable of making mistakes, the point is will he learn from them? Oh and Brady is a tool. If you think your coach is making a bad call you’re the fucking QB CHANGE THE FUCKING PLAY!!

  30. 30.

    arguingwithsignposts

    FTFPatriots! Is it still too early?

    To use the familiar argument from patriot fans – hey, they still could have stopped the colts from scoring. that wasn’t the play that lost it for them. :)

  31. 31.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    I am almost afraid to go into a store for fear that Brawndo will be on the shelves.

    All of the shelves.

  37. 37.

    cleek

    Is est bonus novus pro conservatives.

    “It’s good news for conservatives” is RedState’s basic modus operandi. they’re cheerleaders.

  38. 38.

    kommrade reproductive vigor

    When I saw the NYeT put the Son of Erick front page above the fold, a mouthful of good coffee went to waste.

    If I were a GOPerative and I saw that fake poo flinging cop-hating dim-witted pile of lard were becoming my party’s unofficial spokesperson, I’d beg Dick Cheney to take me hunting.

  39. 39.

    Jason Baur

    @ MikeJ

    Shouldn’t the Red State hed use delendus, or are they attempting a gay joke?

    I think Red State stumbled upon some inadvertent irony by using a feminine adjective to modify a man hounded by rumors about his sexuality, but I honestly can’t believe they actually have the Latin knowledge to have done so on purpose.

    I got a chuckle out of it though.

  40. 40.

    Vince CA

    DougJ: Listen to kid bitzer. E^2 may be able to get away with bad Latin, but we except better of you ;-)

    E^2 should have written “delendus est” since we all can agree thatthat Charlie Crist is a man, not a woman.

    If you care, “delenda est” ends in an -a because “Cartago”, which is what Cato thought must be destroyed, is a feminine noun in the Latin.

  41. 41.

    Ed Drone

    @arguingwithsignposts:

    To use the familiar argument from patriot fans – hey, they still could have stopped the colts from scoring. that wasn’t the play that lost it for them. :)

    Chicago Cubs, World Serious game, pop fly into stands, where a local fan grabs the ball instead of letting the Cubs third baseman catch it. Said fan is blamed for the team’s total collapse, even though there was only one out, and the opponents scored umpteen runs before the last out! In other words, what happened after that was still in the hands of the Cubs, and they blew it.

    Same thing. It was theirs to win, and they didn’t perform. The Colts had a short field, but time was short and a good defense could have stopped them. The Pats didn’t do their jobs.

    QED

    Ed

    PS — My Redskins performed far above their recent level, and leveled the Broncos; will wonders never cease?

  42. 42.

    mclaren

    And yet…

    These wacko far-right nutjobs are willing to stake out a hill to die on, ideologically speaking.

    What hill are liberals willing to die on?

    None, apparently.

    Torture? No problemo. Extraordinary rendition? It makes liberals uncomfy, but it’s not a hill to die on for them. Doing away with that pesky fourth amendment and approving unlimited warrantless wiretapes? Liberals don’t like it, but apparently they’re not willing to actually do anything about it.

    Single-payer health care? Nope, that’s not a hill to die on for liberals.

    So what, pray tell, are the liberal core values?

    Are there any liberal core values?

    Or has it all become about eating arugula and buying hybrid Priuses and strapping the kiddies into childsafe car seats and avoiding using sexist terminology like “chairwoman” or “congresswoman” and instead just going right along with the unwinnable pointless foreign wars and the torture and the kidnapping and the abandonment of the rule of law and feeding the corrupt giant banks as much public cash for their obscene bonuses as they want without ever forcing them to make any of those pesky reforms and feeding the big pharma and corrupt health care companies as much public funding as they could ever want without ever actually demanding any reform, and feeling good about ourselves because we’re, like, you know…politically correct and we’re polite to minorities and we have gay friends?

    Is that what liberalism has degenerated into?

    What’s the hill for progressives to die on? IS there one?

  43. 43.

    Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    One of the reasons I like the idea of our Great Books Program is because I think a lot of activists need to read for themselves the great ideas that shape the conservative mind. We need, each one of us, to know what we believe and why we believe it and when it is acceptable to compromise principles for pragmatism.

    Forgive my ignorance. What Great Books program is he talking about? When I went to St. John’s College, our Great Books program included Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, and a bunch of other evil, evil, evil, non-conservative thinkers. It even had evil gay French guys on it, like Baudelaire and Proust. Is there some other, wholly wingnut Great Books program out there?

  44. 44.

    Randy P

    @mclaren:

    What hill are liberals willing to die on?

    None, apparently.

    Disagree, with respect.

    Get 100 liberals together in a room and you’ll find 100 different hills they are willing to die on, individually. How many times have you heard a variant of “Candidate X is just as bad as the Republicans because they haven’t made my stance on issue Y their top priority in every press release”?

  45. 45.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @kid bitzer: Shouldn’tthat be “Bonum nuntium pro conservatoris id est?” (Making conservative 2nd declension masc sing, of course.)

    Or is this Terry Pratchett Latin?

  46. 46.

    R-Jud

    @Scruffy McSnufflepuss:

    Is there some other, wholly wingnut Great Books program out there?

    I believe it consists of:

    Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
    The Bible (only the KJV, and only the Old Testament, please)
    You Might Be A Redneck If… by Jeff Foxworthy
    Red Dawn (screenplay), Kevin Reynolds and John Milius
    The Pet Goat, Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine C. Bruner

    Obviously Going Rogue will be added to this list. Also.

  47. 47.

    twiffer

    Or has it all become about eating arugula and buying hybrid Priuses and strapping the kiddies into childsafe car seats

    car seats are only for liberals?

  48. 48.

    Vince CA

    DougJ, kid bitzer, Comrade Scrutinizer, et al.,

    I did some more Latin refreshing in my various primers, and “novi, -orum” is the appropriate plural word for news. Nuntius seems to only apply when a messenger brings the news himself. So “good news” is “boni novi” or “novi boni”. I I like the adjective last for emphatic reasons, so let’s say “novi boni”.

    “For conservatives” can either be rendered directly as a plural dative “conservativis” or we can throw “pro” out in front to really push the “a benefit to” angle, to get “pro conservativis” (abl. pl. is the same as the dat. pl. in this declension).

    So we could simply do:

    Ecce novi boni pro conservatis

    “Ecce” means “look!” or “behold!” I sometimes translate it as “check this out!”

    But then there’s this awesome construction where you take “fructui esse (+dat)” to get “for the benefit of”. So I say DougJ changes it to:

    Ecce novi boni fructui conservativis

    I’ve dropped “sunt” because you can do that in Latin (and in Russian, I’m told). And without a verb, it looks so pithy.

    Other Latinists out there, please jump in!

  49. 49.

    Vince CA

    Edit button! I need an edit button! The first suggestion should read:
    Ecce novi boni pro conservativis

    And I’ve been kind with you all. Usually when I write Latin, all of my lowercase v’s are u’s. So I might write:

    Ecce noui boni fructui conseruatiuis

    Soooo beautiful that way, but weird if you’re not used to it.

  54. 54.

    kid bitzer

    “pro conservativis” or “fructui conservativis”

    yeah, they’re both okay, but really all you need is the dative without a preposition.

    i would have used that myself, only i couldn’t remember the dative plural of “moran”.

  55. 55.

    Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    Is there some page where we can make suggestions for the wingnut Great Books program? It would be fun to spoof that.

  57. 57.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @Vince CA: I picked nuntium bonum for two reasons: first, because that’s what my Latin teacher taught in preference to “novus”, and second, because I like the conflation of nuntium bonum with “good news” as it’s seen frequently in the Bible, since nuntium bonum is used in place of evangelium (don’t know whether I spelled that exactly right.) I like that, because it carries the religious flavour of the extreme Right. (By the way, I see that “news” is used in the singular when it refers to one piece of news, whether that news is the salvation promised in the New Testament or whether it is about dying on a hill with Eric son of Eric.)

    I wondered about dropping the est as well, but decided to leave it in for emphasis. I like your way “Ecce!” combined with fructui much better. I clean forgot about that.

    Why in the world do you change v’s to u’s? Is that something to do with ecclesiastical Latin? If anything, I’d have done it the other way. The way I was taught was that originally “u” wasn’t part of the Latin alphabet, and came about later (Middle Ages, I think?) to mark a difference between V used as vowel and V used as a consonant. But again, that was my sainted Latin teacher, who tended to be quite strict in her use of “classical” as opposed to “church” Latin, and who got a real kick out of Latin pornography.

  59. 59.

    gex

    @twiffer: Why does E2 hate Americans who eat food, buy cars, and protect their family? I presume that all “real” Americans get to 1) choose what they eat and 2) choose the car they drive.

    Also, re the Great Books program for wingnuts, clearly RJud did a better job than I.

  60. 60.

    Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    @RaptureReadyAndLovinIt:

    1996-2000. I spent the last 2 years in Santa Fe. I have to admit, the school does have right-wing leanings that eluded me at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that Donald Rumsfeld was a major donor, for example. On the other hand, a good proportion of the students and faculty are ultra-lefty.

    I’d have to say that in demographic terms it’s probably more right-wing than the average college, but it’s by no means a right-wing institution.

  61. 61.

    Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    @gex:

    And Rand. And the Cliff Notes version of Adam Smith.

    Does gay porn count as a Wingnut Great Book? It certainly seems like it should.

  62. 62.

    redoubt

    @Ed Drone: 2003 NLCS. Steve Bartman. It’s not Steve Bartman I’m still mad at, but Alex Gonzalez, Kyle Farnsworth et al. (/Cubs fan)

    Erik bin Erik is the Tail-End Charlie of the Macon City Council. He can’t get anyone in Macon to pay for a sewer pipe. Why should anyone die for his ideas?

  63. 63.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @gex

    @twiffer: Why does E2 hate Americans who eat food, buy cars, and protect their family? I presume that all “real” Americans get to 1) choose what they eat and 2) choose the car they drive.

    It’s not E2, it’s mclaren, who’s just like Erick Erickson if Erick were a frothing left-wing dipshit/purity troll and even more useless and loudmouthed than he already is. I mean sure, Erick is, as Kommrade Reproductive Vigor so aptly put it, a “…poo flinging cop-hating dim-witted pile of lard”, but he at least is competent enough to have set up a website. Something that mclaren, whose knowledge of computers stopped some time around the release of Windows 2K, will never be able to do.

    Like Sanka and Brick Oven Bill mclaren shows up here every once in a while to post nonsense and get slapped around because in real life he has no friends and he can’t afford to pay for the kind of abuse that he so obviously desires. If guys like him or Sanka would just win the lottery they could afford to hire a gay dom to beat them, slap them and tell them that they’re worthless and they wouldn’t have to post stupid shit on blogs to get anonymous strangers to tell them how worthless they are.

  64. 64.

    Wile E. Quixote

    @Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    Does gay porn count as a Wingnut Great Book? It certainly seems like it should.

    It should, but it will be added to a special subsection It’s Not Gay If website. “It’s not gay porn if
    …it’s one of Erick Erickson’s great books
    …you wrap it in a dustjacket from Going Rogue
    …you’ve watched Red Dawn in the last 24 hours.
    …you pretend the guy on the bottom is a liberal.
    etc.

  65. 65.

    Vince CA

    @Comrade Scrutinizer: Good idea with nuntius there for those reasons. In classical Latin (the only Latin I can read) novi is news, but of course “The Good News” in English must have a nifty Vulgate original. Glad to learn it!

    Ecce nuntius bonus fructui conservativis
    or
    Ecce novi boni fructui conservativis

    DougJ should fix it either way :-)

    u’s for v’s is actually classical. Since the Romans only wrote their inscriptions in uppercase (and their “cursive” is bloody illegible), they would write V for V and U and I for I and J. I don’t know when, but when the alphabet got more letters and a lowercase, i and j emerged as separate letters, as well as u and v.

    I can’t figure out why, but most primers have dropped j and just use i for both the consonant and vowel (this had not always been the case, our founding fathers wrote their Latin with a j). But they still maintain the u/v distinction. If you’re gonna drop one, why not the other? Cambridge or Oxford (can’t remember which) uses u for v, and i for j, so I just use their convention.

    I have the book on Latin pornography. It’s a very dry read, actually, but like all cultures, the Romans of old weren’t lacking in very colorful and vulgar metaphor.

  66. 66.

    Scruffy McSnufflepuss

    @Wile E. Quixote:

    In the same vein, we could argue it’s not gay sex if, while it’s going on, you think about Carrie Prejean/Sarah Palin/a bald eagle wrapped in an American flag/some combination of the above.

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