Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
George Bush is on my tv giving a farewell address. I understand this is the norm, but for the life of me I do not remember one from Clinton, Bush, or Reagan.
At any rate, here is a thread to document the inevitable lies.
How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?Post + Comments (145)
Via Alicublog, I see that the Cornerites are taking the time today to celebrate Vince Foster’s birthday as an excuse to bring up his suicide. You will have to read Edroso’s commentary to fully appreciate the right wing ability to raise “serious questions.”
In another thread earlier today about Roger Simon’s hit piece in the Politico about Geithner, commenter Conservatively Liberal said the following:
I think that some in the media world know when a story doesn’t have ‘legs’ and don’t bother with it where some know that it doesn’t have ‘legs’ so they splice a pair on. Why should Simon go check out something and find out that it is nothing when he can report it as if it is something and get his name out there to promote it? No matter that the story is later debunked, Simon isn’t really interested in that.
So while Simon and his ilk do their ‘reporting’, other outlets pick it up and hype it until cooler heads step in with the ‘real news’ that the story is no news at all. Everybody gets their minute in the spotlight and the slur lives on afterward. The system is so predictable that it is boring.
They have been doing this for a long time and they are really good at it. Problem is that the public is starting to catch on and the internet is the reason why. When you can’t control the ‘news’, you can’t control the masses.
What is the point of this post? Allow me to continue the stream of consciousness a bit more, with this post by James Joyner about the fact that the group of “liberals” who met with Obama included Andrew Sullivan, author of liberal screeds such as “The Conservative Soul“:
American conservatism, at least as represented by the Republican Party, has changed too much and not enough over the years. They’ve long stopped pretending to care about fiscal responsibility, merely pretend to care about limited government, and care perhaps a bit too much about fighting losing battles in the cultural wars.
Lots of us — Andy, John Cole, Steven Taylor, Steve Bainbridge come to mind — are less enthusiastic about The Cause as defined by the Republican agenda than we were even five years ago. The Steves and I have remained on the GOP bandwagon and Andy and John have jumped off. That’s a matter of slightly different ranking and weighting systems, methinks, rather than movement to the Left or Right.
I don’t know if I will ever be a member of “the cause” again.
On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, it is both funny and disturbing to look back to how things were eight years ago- I was so thrilled that a republican was about to be inaugurated. I was so excited to vote for Bush in 2000 that I literally could not sleep, and, as always, was at the voting booth at 6:30- 7:00 in the morning, the only person under 60 standing in line.
Now, today, I am so disgusted with the Republican party that I don’t think I will be able to vote for a national Republican for twenty years. I wouldn’t say my positions have changed completely, either. I really don’t feel like there has been a dramatic shift in my opinions. On several issues, I am certainly more to the “left” than I was before. For example, I was never a proponent of gay marriage, and felt that civil unions were more than an acceptable compromise. Not anymore- gay marriage is the future, it is the right thing to do, and those who can’t cope with that reality one day will just have to deal with it when we finally get there.
What has changed, however, is that I have seen a lot of the arguments that come from the Republicans for what they are- just bullshit. I have watched over the past few years and seen how nonsense bubbles up into the mainstream, and how distorted versions of events designed to distract and queer the debate turn an upside down version of events into the “conventional wisdom.” You don’t have to look any farther than the recent attempts to blame the entire financial crisis on Democrats, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and poor minority borrowers. We just spent an entire election season where prominent Republicans thought they really had something with Bill Ayers and Obama’s birth certificate. Of course, months could be spent documenting all the bullshit that has been churned up in the past eight years. The embrace by the right-wing of the idiotic tome “Liberal Fascism” could itself be the subject of lengthy study.
You all know by now what a dork I am, so I am not outing myself when I state that one of my favorite all-time episodes of the X-Files was a show called Folie a Deux, in which Scully and Mulder investigate a man who thinks his boss is a monster. Everyone thinks the man is insane because he insists that his boss is a zombie who eats people brains, and he is driven to madness that no one else can see his boss for the monster he is. He states frequently that the monster “hides in the light.” Eventually, Fox is able to see the monster as the show comes to a conclusion.
You see where this is going, don’t you? I understand now why the dirty fucking hippies were driven to near madness by the GOP and the election of Bush. Having watched things pan out the last few years and observed how truly perverted the beltway insiders who dominate our dysfunctional discourse are, I understand Bob Somersby and Glenn Greenwald and others.
I don’t know how much to “the left” I have actually moved on a lot of issues, but I do know one thing. When I see this nonsense from Byron York and Wideload Doughpants, raising their “serious questions” about Vince Foster’s suicide, I know clearly what I am seeing- I’m just watching the monsters hiding in the light, right where they always have been. This time, though, I see.
by John Cole| 67 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
You have to love the right wing’s ability to capitalize on victimization. If it isn’t the War on Christmas or Rachel Ray’s personal attack via scarf, it is something else, and now one of them has managed to elevate what should be a mundane copyright issue into… a national case:
MICHAEL Moore may wind up in court with a prize-winning journalist who claims the mountain-size moviemaker ripped off his most famous photo to use in a George W. Bush-bashing rant.
Last year, to illustrate one of his anti-administration bombasts, the portly polemicist posted on his michaelmoore.com Web site a heartbreaking photo from Iraq of an American soldier carrying the blood-spattered body of a child. The picture was snapped by acclaimed independent war correspondent Michael Yon, who has been very careful about how his images are distributed and goes out of his way to make sure they aren’t used for demagogic diatribes.
Yon – a Special Forces vet who posts regular dispatches from the front at michaelyon-online.com – is considered by many as the “Ernie Pyle of our time.”
Yon has tried to contact Moore for seven months to discuss his unauthorized use of the poignant snap, but hasn’t heard a word back from the director of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Now, the fed-up photojournalist has told his lawyer to ready a lawsuit against Moore for copyright infringement.
Oh, shut up and just file the damned suit. And, as has been noted, this isn’t about copyright infringement, per se, but about ideology.
PS- Michael Moore is fat.
I’m Injured! I’m Hurt! I’M A VICTIM, BABY!Post + Comments (67)
by DougJ| 58 Comments
This post is in: Assholes, General Stupidity
A comment from Zifnab got me thinking:
I think everyone has basically hit all the numbers on this. Of course, we’re well-established and peer-reviewed blog commenters while Roger Simon is a journalist for a small time political rag at the ass-end of the beltway, so its understandable that we would catch things that he could so easily miss.
Why is it that so much of what passes for high-brow, insightful political analysis lacks the factual accuracy of drunken 3 am blog posts? Simon’s hardly the worst example — Richard “teh algebra” Cohen and MoDo are perhaps the most egregious offenders. This exchange (which many of you have probably seen before) sums up MoDo’s ethos quite well:
“Maureen is very talented,” observes Joe Klein of The New Yorker. “But she is ground zero of what the press has come to be about in the nineties…I remember having a discussion with her in which I said, ‘Maureen, why don’t you go out and report about something significant, go out and see poor people, do something real?’ And she said, ‘You mean I should write about welfare reform?'”
The idea seems to be that people like Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen have some special thing, some je ne sais quoi, that is far more important than the ability to fact check, or research issues, or understand basic math.
It’s probably no coincidence, then that we now have a president who no one would claim was all that smart or hard-working, but who (his supporters and more than one journalist claimed) had a magical ability to produce “swift, gut-based solutions to problems“. Sometimes we were told he learned this in business school, other times that it was part of his DNA.
Clearly, there are people with some rare, hard-to-quantify ability, not obviously linked with technical knowledge, that translates into undeniable brilliant success. Steve Jobs is one example. And I know that John believes that Taylor Hicks is another. But it seems more likely that most of this is because getting the details right is hard work that we’ve been led to believe is better left in the hands of minimum wage peons than cluttering up the important time of millionaire geniuses like John Snow and Cokie Robert and Bono.
Is it really such a good idea to put so much authority in the hands of “brilliant” know-nothings? Are the Chinese doing this, too? Because if they’re not, I think it’s time to start learning mandarin.
Update: I give Bob Woodward credit for including this in his “10 Take Aways From the Bush Years” column, even if it seems obvious:
3. A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.
by Tim F| 94 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
So you’ll remember that on Tuesday, a DOJ report found that John Tanner, the former chief of the department’s voting rights section, had told a colleague over email in 2004 that he liked his coffee “Mary Frances Berry style — black and bitter.” Berry, an African-American, was at the time the chair of the US Commission on Civil Rights.
Now Tanner is trying to make amends. Moments ago he forwarded to TPMmuckraker a letter of apology he sent to Berry dated January 13.
The backstory compounds Tanner’s predicament.
Schlozman surrounded himself with like-minded officials at the Department of Justice. When he was due to meet in 2004 with John Tanner, then chief of the Voting Section, he asked how Tanner liked his coffee.
“Mary Frances Berry style — black and bitter,” Tanner replied by e-mail, referring to the African American woman who chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1993 to 2004.
Amused, Schlozman circulated the e-mail. “Y’all will appreciate Tanner’s response,” he wrote.
Tanner only apologized after the DoJ Inspector General report on Schlozman revealed that little gem to the general public, over a month after a black guy won the race for President. If Tanner thought that people might misunderstand his little gem then he might have spoken up while his boss was forwarding it around the DoJ.
You know, I can understand conservatives saying incredibly offensive things to each other when they think they have the room to themselves. It’s who they are, and the more ideologically pure a conservative gets the further his private statements get from anything a normal person would say in public.
What I don’t get is how these guys always deny themselves three times when they get caught. People like Tanner always claim that they couldn’t possibly mean to say what they obviously said. Refusing to stand behind what they say suggests an insecurity about their beliefs, a fundamental emotional immaturity. Unlike Aryan Nations types who at least stand behind their (sick, hateful) opinions with pride, all that Tanner has to take home now is shame.
by John Cole| 22 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Democratic Stupidity
Just watched Roland Burris get sworn in to the Senate by the VP, and I think I found the mysterious taint everyone was talking about. I am not sure it is fair to say Burris is tainted by Dick Cheney’s sins, though.
by John Cole| 39 Comments
I really need to stop watching cable news, but I had the idiot box on CNN last night and got to watch this spectacle:
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: No.
But the reason, as you just heard Dana report, that Harry Reid, the Senate leader, wanted to schedule it sooner, rather than later, is, they believe, the longer it waits, as David just said, the more water the ship could take on when it comes to the TARP funding.
And — and David makes a key point, Anderson, because, politically, every day we get closer to that inauguration, and then, on Tuesday, this becomes Barack Obama’s economy. It’s Barack Obama’s bailout money. And it’s Barack Obama who is paying the price for the anxiety. He has a lot of goodwill. He has high public approval.
Even many people who didn’t vote for him want him to succeed. But guess what? They’re still mad about the economy, still don’t think this bailout is a good idea, don’t know where the money is going, and don’t think it’s getting to them on Main Street USA or to the bank on the corner of their street.
And that is now becoming increasingly — and is about to become completely — Barack Obama’s political problem, not John McCain’s, not George W. Bush’s, not the Republican Party’s.
Got it? Obama OWNS the economy the day he becomes President. His fault. That growth during the Clinton years- that was due to Reagan. The bad stuff from 2000 on, that was the Clinton economy, until, of course, the 20th, when it becomes Obama’s.
John King starts a new Sunday show on CNN from 9 am to 1pm. I have been given (not really) an advance copy of the topics:
“Will America survive the Obama economy?”
“Economic malpractice: Is impeachment of Obama off the table?”
“How Obama wrecked the economy before ever enacting one policy.”
Wankers.
Dispatches From the Failed Obama AdministrationPost + Comments (39)