Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Archives for 2009
Hoot Smalley and Other Such Things
This album artwork was emailed to me to commemorate Michelle Bachmann’s latest round of nonsense:
If you don’t understand, read this.
Once We Take Out the Judean People’s Front
Bradley Smith might be on to something here:
Now that Specter’s gone, we can turn to the real enemy – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe! Then the only thing between us and victory will be Graham, Lugar, McCain, Murkowski, Grassley, Hatch, and some of the RINOs in the House. And the Governors, like Crist and Douglas and Lingle and anyone not named Palin or Jindal. And the Supreme Court Justices like the radical Kennedy. But time is on our side. If we get small enough, voters will finally see true conservatism, and then we’ll have to win.
Go read Red State and Hot Air and other “conservative” bloggers and tell me Smith’s sarcasm is wrong.
*** Update ***
The anti-Snowe movement gains momentum:
But while she wants the Republican party to be accepting of her positions on the other issues, she seems to forget that often she doesn’t even pass the “litmus test” of core economic issues. She, like Specter, voted for the stimulus bill package.
I don’t understand well all the consequences of Specter’s defection to the other side, but it seems to me that no matter how painful it might be, that’s probably what the Republican party needs.
She’s a witch!
Once We Take Out the Judean People’s FrontPost + Comments (86)
Shorter Byron York
Sure, polls say Obama and his agenda are wildly popular and enthusiastically supported by the public, but if you don’t count black people, you could say Obama and his agenda are merely really popular.
They just can’t help themselves.
(via email)
*** Update ***
I officially retire from “shorter” posts and will leave it to the masters. I just suck at them.
How Bad Are Things For Jane Harman?
She believes that hiring Lanny Davis as a spokesperson is a step in the right direction:
Rep. Jane Harman has hired lawyer Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, as a media advisor, The Cable has learned.
The enlisting of the heavyweight help is the latest sign that the California Democrat intends to push back hard against what she sees as an attempt by current and former national security officials to damage her reputation by providing alleged excerpts from transcripts of her surveilled phone conversations to the press. In the end, Harman may be able to make a public case that she was the victim of an abuse of power, including by the decision of Porter Goss, a former fellow House intelligence committee member turned director of central intelligence, to authorize a wiretap of her. She may also argue that the leaks of the alleged wiretap excerpts constitute a criminal act that merits prosecution.
After what I saw during the last primary election, I am fully convinced that if Lanny Davis was your lawyer, you would get the death penalty for jay-walking. Harman is so screwed.
(via Ben Smith)
What really matters about the Specter switch
Mark Halperin thinks it’s how the cast of “The View” feels about it
What really matters about the Specter switchPost + Comments (60)
Permanent Republican Majority
Via email, this meltdown just keeps getting better and better:
Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.’s appearance at a Michigan county Republican Party event was scrapped this week after the county chairwoman said that hosting the moderate Utah governor would mean abandoning the party’s conservative principles.
Kent County Republican Party Chairwoman Joanne Voorhees abruptly canceled the party fundraiser scheduled for Saturday.
“The voters want and expect us to stand on principle and return to our roots. Unfortunately, by holding an event with Governor Huntsman, we would be doing the exact opposite,” Voorhees wrote in an e-mail quoted in The Grand Rapids Press.
Voorhees did not specify which issues she felt were contrary to the party’s principles and did not return messages left at the party headquarters and on her cell phone.
The group Campaign for Michigan Families praised the cancellation, attributing it to Huntsman’s support of civil unions, and urged the Oakland and Kalamazoo county parties, where Huntsman is also scheduled to speak this weekend, to do the same.
Jon Huntsman, you all will recall, is the Governor of Utah, and he has an 82% 84% approval rating as Governor and is a very viable way forward for the current GOP. Say it again. He supports civil unions and has an 80+% approval rating. In Utah. He is conservative on almost every issue, but because he supports civil unions, he isn’t pure enough for the current GOP. A telegenic, authentic outsider who isn’t batshit insane. You would think the Republicans would be running to him.
This is the big problem for Republicans. Almost the entire party apparatus at the state level has been taken over by a bunch of lunatics, and few people outside of Georgia and Texas can win a state primary and then go on to win a statewide election. The reason Specter switched yesterday was because the dwindling band of sociopaths who still call themselves Republican in Pennsylvania are so detached from reality, so far removed from the mainstream, and so convinced of the utter infallibility of their own bizarre brand of “conservatism,” that someone like Jon Huntsman or Arlen Specter, who deviated slightly on a few issues here and there, just isn’t pure enough for them. This is the essence of wingnut, the kind of guy Larison was talking about yesterday:
That said, we should not simply dismiss Huston out of hand. He and those like him are the political equivalent of Darwin’s discoveries on the Galapagos: strange, unusual creatures cut off from the rest of the world that deserve to be studied and understood as the weird evolutionary offshoots that they are. It is rare to find people who seem genuinely unaware that Cheney is deeply unpopular and also implicated in atrocious crimes, and rarer still to find people who know this and still think it wise to have him making the rounds on television serving as a leading Republican spokesman. Some might say that Huston is simply a pitiable product of the conservative cocoon, but I say that he can offer us evidence for the strange mutant varieties of conservatism that have developed in isolation from reality.
The only people left in the Republican party are crazier than an outhouse rat and have teabags hanging from their hunting cap. They are the people who feverishly emailed each other stories about Obama’s birth certificate, and who are convinced that joking about Obama’s teleprompter and making impassioned speeches about earmark reform are the only route to electoral recovery. They think Michelle Bachman is on to something and the Colbert Report is truth.
This is only going to get worse.