Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

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

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

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

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

A Senator Walker would be an insult to the state and the nation.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

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

I was promised a recession.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

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Reader Interactions

79Comments

  2. 2.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    Agreed. One wonders if this is not the sowing of the first seeds for a 2012 primary fight with Obama however. Bayh is that much of an asshat.

  3. 3.

    valdivia

    I know for a fact that Mark Penn was behind Bayh’s decision. He is now running against Obama as a centrist white american. He is the Schoen/Penn candidate. Hope he wastes as much money as possible on that little excursion and gets as bad a result as Fiorina and Whitman. Asshole.

    @Comrade Javamanphil: great minds…

  4. 4.

    SRW1

    Don’t mind that he quit. But he should shut up because he withheld those $10 million in his re-election warchest from the fight. What you wanna do with that dough Evah Bayn? Save them for some plastic surgery?

  5. 5.

    mai naem

    Bayh is still living off his daddy’s name, kind of like the white Harold Ford or the Democratic George W. Bush. And his fee fees were hurt when Obama picked Biden instead of him for veep. Please Evan, you can now go whoring yourself directly to your corporate masters, your wife doesn’t have to be your pimp anymore.

  6. 6.

    Michael

    Me, I just take heart with the obituaries and every old white face I see in them – and realize that with each passing day, there are that many fewer teabaggers.

  8. 8.

    ChrisS

    Well, hell, last night was interesting.

    Awww. but who gives a fuck?

    Ain’t nothing going to get better, the press will beat up the democrats, DFHs will continue to get punched, and America will creep closer to disaster.

  13. 13.

    debit

    I went to bed last content in the knowledge that at least the Dems would hold strong in Minnesota. I woke to find the Strib saying the GOP has taken both the House and the Senate and the Governor’s race is headed for a recount. What is wrong with people?

  14. 14.

    robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles

    Anyone who would go near Mark Penn is an idiot.

    Tell that to Arianna Huffington. Penn’s got a post right under hers this morning. Gross.

  16. 16.

    balconesfault

    From Bayh’s editorial:

    Second, don’t blame the voters. They aren’t stupid or addled by fear.

    But they were demonstrably ignorant – when polls showed 2/3 of the likely voters believed that their taxes had increased and that the economy has been shrinking under Obama, and that the government is going to lose it’s shirt on TARP.

    Thanks Sen Bayh for helping educate people on those points.

  17. 17.

    mai naem

    @Bill E Pilgrim: No, he’ll hippy punch. And then Mark Penn will tell him not worry about winning the primary because Democrats have winner take all primaries and that he just needs to win NY and California.

  18. 18.

    liberal

    @Suck It Up!:

    DFH’s can just shut the hell up. What happened last night and will happen from now is not about them.

    No, but it most definitely is about others not listening to them.

  19. 19.

    amk

    @Suck It Up!:
    Hear, Hear. This is not about them anymore. They blew a golden opportunity of a lifetime by consant whining, playing victims and kneecapping their own.

  20. 20.

    Davis X. Machina

    @debit:

    What is wrong with people?

    A lot of them aren’t very bright, and a lot of them aren’t very nice, and a lot of them are both, and a lot of them vote.

  21. 21.

    Professor

    I am happy for you, Americans. You’ve cut your throats with your own stupidity. Now see the manufacturing jobs go abroad to feed the greed of your masters. American Exceptionalism, sheeple!

  22. 22.

    liberal

    @mr. whipple:

    I wonder what a good way to short the economy is.

    Maybe the market will go up a bit, since the moneyboys luv themselves Republicans, but in the medium run looks like we’re in for a Japanese-style lost decade.

  23. 23.

    curious

    what is he planning to do now? i understand he’s rich enough not to work again, ever. so are we doomed to forty years of bayh-lines? or is he considered a candidate for 2016?

  24. 24.

    El Cid

    I think Evan Bayh is right, actually.

    Not his column, but his point that he thought he could serve America better out of the Senate than in it. I agree.

    And he shares that approach with Sarah Palin, who served Alaska better by leaving the governorship than staying in it.

  25. 25.

    Suck It Up!

    @liberal:

    I’ll start listening to them when they can tell us how to get the votes needed for their multi-trillion dollar ideas. Reminds me of McCain who kept saying he knew how to get bin laden but never told us how.

  26. 26.

    Violet

    Evan Bayh is a pussy. No matter what he does, that comes through loud and clear. America doesn’t like a pussy. Ultimately people won’t vote for him.

  27. 27.

    Bob L

    @Professor: as President Elect Rand Paul put it working class Americans just need face the facts that their roll in life is giving the rich tongue baths so who needs jobs?

  29. 29.

    Violet

    Heavens. Is the word “p u s s y” now a word that kicks you into mod? I can’t figure out any other word in my post that would.

  30. 30.

    El Cid

    I’m curious, though, if Bayh thinks the new TeaTard majority will help his vision of, say, a progressive Social Security system with tailed-off payments to the more affluent. That’s a centrist, reasonable solution, as would be letting the Bush Jr. tax cuts for the wealthy expire (sorry, I just don’t think this will happen soon, perhaps not for a decade) to pay more into Social Security, or other solutions not involving cutting benefits paid out.

  33. 33.

    debbie

    This is what the next two years will be like: I just heard a clip from John Kasich saying that he’d asked the Lord to send him to the Promised Land. I knew it: Kasich is going to be a more reckless version of George W. Bush (if that is possible). How stupid can people be?

  34. 34.

    WereBear

    @Suck It Up!: Reminds me of McCain who kept saying he knew how to get bin laden but never told us how.

    Proof #654687984 that we live in LaLa Land. How on earth did such a thing get ignored? Why wasn’t he pressed to give up his “idea” for the good of the country? What The Hell?

    If only we had an institution of some kind whose job it was to point out the Freakin’ Obvious. Screw “news” and “analysis.” I’d settle for just noticing the Stupid.

  35. 35.

    General Stuck

    The dumbfuckery is going to be plutonium grade for a period of time on the blogs as well as the msm. Good time for a vacation.

  37. 37.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @mai naem: And then does he marry Robin Wright Penn?

    Anyone who would listen to Mark Penn should be checked for pre-existing lobotomies. I read that book of his years back, having no idea who he was, and found it the most annoying, badly-written, idiotic self-contradictory nonsense I’d heard in years. I was listening to CDs in the car and kept wanting to throw things at the stereo but I was driving.

    Everyone has moved to micro trends, he explained. Everyone. There are no macro trends at all because no one is doing the same thing, it’s all everyone doing their own thing. Everyone. It’s so widespread, it’s almost a, what would you call that, a tendency, or…

    It was the best thing I’d heard since “No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”

  38. 38.

    AB

    I need a good video game to play. Also, a computer with specs good enough to play it. But I probably won’t be able to afford one because -> Republicans. Foiled again. :(

  39. 39.

    Violet

    @General Stuck:
    Pretty sure I’ve used it here without being sent into mod, but maybe I’m misremembering. It was a long night and I haven’t yet had any caffeine this morning.

  41. 41.

    NonyNony

    @robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles:

    Anyone who would go near Mark Penn is an idiot.

    Tell that to Arianna Huffington. Penn’s got a post right under hers this morning. Gross.

    I don’t see anyone jumping up to argue that Arianna Huffington isn’t an idiot. At least, she’s the same kind of idiot that generally hangs around with Mark Penn. So this is more like “offering up more evidence” than it is “showing a contradiction”.

  42. 42.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    Yeah, Evan Bayh. The guy who walked away from a winnable seat and with $10 million in his War Chest. $10 million he still has in his War Chest that could have been used by other Dems. Fuck Evan Bayh.

  46. 46.

    Linda Featheringill

    @Davis X. Machina:

    What is wrong with people?

    A lot of them aren’t very bright, and a lot of them aren’t very nice, and a lot of them are both, and a lot of them vote.

    Choices were made. The people as a whole decided they wanted these people in office and in control. And the people as a whole will have to live with the consequences.

    It is not our fault. It is not Obama’s fault. Hell, it is not even Hamsher’s fault. The voters knew what they were doing. They understood the issues. They made their decision.

  47. 47.

    Raenelle

    The difference between this election and 1994’s is that I don’t have to listen to Halperin and his ilk about this election. I don’t have to listen to a bunch of pompous millionaires tell me that Grayson lost because he was too shrill and Obama’s big government is too liberal. Seriously, the nets is comforting. I don’t feel like some lone Cassandra when I read about the world–outnumbered, sure, but not alone.

  48. 48.

    Kryptik

    @Linda Featheringill:

    The voters knew what they were doing. They understood the issues. They made their decision.

    I have to at least call bullshit on this part. They may have known what they were doing, but I sure as hell can’t accept the idea that they understood the issues. When so many people thing Obama raised taxes and somehow was personally responsible for intentionally tanking the economy, when so many people think they’ve already been bilked or something for the health reform stuff, or that they’ve somehow been pickpocketed for things that aren’t even in effect yet…that sure as hell doesn’t scream ‘understanding the issues’.

    They sure as hell knew what they were doing, but what they were doing was influenced by a whole lot of disinformation, which led them to ‘understand’ a whole lot of things that were demonstrably false.

  50. 50.

    Joshua

    Yea, I read that. Shockingly, Bayh’s solution is that Democrats turn into Republicans.

    The past 2 years we saw the Republican media machine go full bore. We saw how the right really controls the media and the narrative. This election was a victory of marketing and propaganda. But of course, the media will never say it, because of course, Republicans control it.

  51. 51.

    Suck It Up!

    @bemused:

    A couple of weeks ago, TPM posted this article from the AP that included the following statements from voters:

    ‘Obama promised to change the tone in Washington. He has focused too much on change and not on the tone.’

    ‘Obama ran as a centrist and now he’s being too liberal. We need balance in congress and Republicans will bring that’

    there was a third one that was equally dumb, I just can’t recall it right now.

  52. 52.

    Shalimar

    @liberal: A Japanese-style lost decade would be so awesome right now. I think that is what we were in for already before yesterday. Boehner and the Teapublicans are going to make it much worse than that.

  55. 55.

    bemused

    @Suck It Up!:
    Many comments on Oberstar loss article in Strib are good riddance to the pork and fed $ Oberstar brought home! Seriously.
    One said, You mean taking tax $ from other parts of the US and bringing them back here. We can live without the corruption IVs of centrist government. Thanks.
    Another, Maybe now the rest of MN can get some of the $ northern MN has been getting for so many years. Sorry, northern MN, the party’s over. (I don’t think this was snark.)
    They truly don’t have any idea that this “pork” keeps rural areas from dying.
    One the realism side, one commenter said the Iron Range will be on a slow starvation diet but one good thing is that with more foreclosures maybe he can buy a place on the lake.
    Another said now that transportation plans on the Range will be dead, he will have to fly into Mpls and take an ox cart up to the lake. “What do you say to an ox? Is it gee or hey-up?”

  56. 56.

    Bulworth

    Sharon Angle, thanks for playing. Now go sit down.

    Delaware teabaggers: thank you for Christine O’Donnell.

    And Joe Miller? Sigh. We hardly knew thee.

  58. 58.

    MeDrewNotYou

    As a Hoosier, let me formally apologize for Evan Bayh. I denounce him, renounce him, condemn his statements, and think he’s a smug fucking little prick. My favorite part of the op-ed?

    A good place to start would be tax reform. Get rates down to make American businesses globally competitive. Reward savings and investment. Simplify the code to reduce compliance costs and broaden the base. In 1986, this approach attracted bipartisan support and fostered growth.

    Let’s cut taxes! That’ll save our economy and get us out of debt! And the very next paragraph is bitching about earmarks.

    @Shalimar: The lost decade produced some of the very best Japanese video games ever, so maybe that’s one of the bright points. I think that’s literally all I have to look forward to now.

  59. 59.

    Peter

    Rachel Maddow put in some pretty scathing criticism of Bayh during last night’s election coverage. If I recall correctly, the money shot was ‘The Democrats will miss Evan Bayh’s senate seat, but I cannot for a moment believe that they will miss Evan Bayh.’

  60. 60.

    stogoe

    @Linda Featheringill @45:

    The voters knew what they were doing. They understood the issues. They made their decision.

    If you believe that, you are far less informed about reality than any of the Low Information Voters could ever hope to be.

  61. 61.

    FlipYrWhig

    @liberal:

    but it most definitely is about others not listening to them.

    You’re right, it turned out that the prescription for electoral success really was sticking up for a progressive vision rather than being Republican-lite. Everyone should have listened to that, so they too could have the last laugh, just like Grayson, Perriello, Kilroy, Hall, and Feingold.

    I am a liberal, perhaps even further left than that. I also am well aware that the people I meet and interact with in the course of everyday life are _far_ to my right politically. Everyone always says, and I used to think, that “economic populism” or something like it can be the common ground that brought people over from voting R to voting D. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The DLC/Bayh view is that tax cuts, deregulation, and less spending are the common ground that can bring people from R to D. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

    Why act like there’s an easy way to make people vote for liberals, such that Democrats’ refusal to use that simple tool proves their stupidity and/or corruption? It’s not fucking easy. I don’t think Obama did it all that well even at his peak in 2008. What he did instead was increase the pool of voters, particularly youth and people of color. How did that fare as a midterm strategy? Not too well.

  63. 63.

    evinfuilt

    How come he didn’t realize 66% of the nation is center-left and …. oh yeah, he made shit up about a center right nation by saying that everyone agrees with him.

  64. 64.

    catclub

    By my count 29 of 54 Blue Dogs lost or did not run for re-election.

    from 54 of 255 = 1/5
    to 25 of 180 = 1/7

    This also means of the 55 democrats who lost or did not run,
    29 were blue dogs – over half

  65. 65.

    suzanne

    @Linda Featheringill:

    The voters knew what they were doing. They understood the issues. They made their decision.

    An embarrassingly large chunk of the electorate can’t find their own asses with two hands and a flashlight. Hell, voters in my state elected a governor even less articulate than matoko_chan, for fuck’s sake.

  66. 66.

    ThresherK

    @stogoe: I’ve been using that phrase forever; thought I was the only one. Nice to see the NYT is doing their best (by running Bayh) to turn themselves into Low-Information Media-lite.

  69. 69.

    liberty60

    Re: “lets win by being more conservative instead of librul.”

    People don’t vote ideology, except as cover for more basic issues like tribal identity or pocketbook.

    Ideology and a label wins when it can demonstrate that it stands for something tangible, something to attack or defend.

    Liberals can demonstrate that we stand for Social Security, and the conservatives want to take it away.

    We stand for safe meat and clean water;

    We stand for fair workplace rules about overtime, and safe workplaces.

    We can win on these basic bread and butter issues; Most GOP voters are not Tehadists, and half the Tehadists are rolling around on Medicare scooters.

    We will win these people back when Boehner begins work on cutting their Medicare benefits, and liberals stand up unapologetically in defense of it.

    Contrary to what the glibertarians think, nobody voted yesterday to cut the Koch brother’s taxes; when Boehner begins talking about closing the deficit we will win by pointing out that ending the Bush tax cuts will do exactly that.

    We win by believing in our message- not waxing ever more feverishly about abstract ideology, but tying our name and brand to things people care about.

  70. 70.

    cckids

    @Linda Featheringill:

    The voters knew what they were doing. They understood the issues. They made their decision.

    I agree that they get to own the responsibility for that decision, but what evidence do you have to verify that they “understood” any issues? Seems to me that in poll after poll, not to mention lots of direct conversations with TP’ers & Repubs they have very little comprehension of anything longer than a bumper sticker.

    OTOH, my own little silver lining, Sharron Angle is NOT my senator. Tiny mental happy dance.

  71. 71.

    mak

    Funny – saw Bayh’s thing in NY Times and just knew there’d be something here on it. I actually came to BJ before reading whatever predictable dreck he’s written.

  72. 72.

    Larkspur

    We need more Rallies to Restore Sanity. Some of those signs were so good, like the one a guy was holding that said: “I don’t mind paying taxes because I’m an adult and that’s the deal”, or another one that was something like “I don’t mind paying taxes because roads don’t repave themselves”.

    Just stuff to make people think about the specifics, like “Paying my taxes is cheaper than manufacturing my own flu vaccine”. And with that, I’ve run out of ideas. It’s okay; it’s not tragic. I’m just under-caffeinated and a bit sick from some upper respiratory virus, for which I took OTC medicine that, OMG, didn’t contain melamine or antifreeze. I know: real Americans just brew up old home remedies or see it through un-medicated, all frontier-like and stoic.

  73. 73.

    Corner Stone

    @amk:

    They [DFH’s] blew a golden opportunity of a lifetime by consant whining, playing victims and kneecapping their own.

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

  74. 74.

    Corner Stone

    @Suck It Up!:

    DFH’s can just shut the hell up. What happened last night and will happen from now is not about them.

    Yeah, because the electorate really rallied to your uber centrist view of politics and rewarded you! You were right to believe in…whatever the hell it is you believe in! Good for you!

  75. 75.

    Elizabelle

    You could not pay me to read Evan Bayh’s advice in The New York Times today.

    Josh Marshall:

    “Whatever the merits of Evan Bayh’s arguments (in an oped in Wednesday’s Times), given that he walked away from a winnable Senate seat and held on to a $10 million war chest that other Dems could have put to good use, I think what most Democrats would like from Evan Bayh right now is for him to shut up.

    It’s really not about his analysis. He just walked off the field in the middle of the game. Who can respect that? He just has no standing to talk.”

    http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/11/buh-bye_1.php?ref=fpblg

  76. 76.

    mak

    @Bill E Pilgrim

    Everyone has moved to micro trends, he explained. Everyone. There are no macro trends at all because no one is doing the same thing, it’s all everyone doing their own thing. Everyone. It’s so widespread, it’s almost a, what would you call that, a tendency, or…

    I suggest that every time you see “micro trend,” you substitute “micro penis.” It reads better that way.

  77. 77.

    Jrod the Cookie Thief

    Obviously, seeing as were a center-right nation in which people are angry that Obama is too liberal, all the Democrats needed to save the House was for radical far-leftists to wholeheartedly support Obama and the Dems. Surely if the electorate saw that the firebaggers loved everything Obama did, they’d be in a rush to vote D. Naturally. Of course.

    I suppose BJ was overdue for its own version of dolchstosslegende.

  78. 78.

    dww44

    @Kryptik:

    Have to agree with this:

    They sure as hell knew what they were doing, but what they were doing was influenced by a whole lot of disinformation, which led them to ‘understand’ a whole lot of things that were demonstrably false.

    And even more with this:@bemused:

    @Linda Featheringill:
    They understood the issues as they saw them and I would say a lot of them are entirely clueless about the issues. Only their gut feelings count.

    And those are: lower taxes, repeal Obamacare and say no to any reasonable governance for the country.

    Being surrounded as I am in this state which went even more red last night, I KNOW for a fact that not a single Republican would ever vote for a Democrat, under any circumstance (that holds true on the other side of the coin for me). We have to build from the base up in these parts. I, for one, am not giving up. As sick to heart as I am today, I am not giving up.

    Let’s see what the Obama conference call produces this afternoon. It was filled up in minutes. One can watch online at :

  79. 79.

    timb

    As a Hoosier, I made fun of a Republican friend by asking him how it felt to vote a banking lobbyist whore in Dan Coats….

    I then mentioned that I already knew, since I had voted for Bayh twice.

    What a waste of Birch’s legacy

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