I’m reading the NY Times, and all the stories are about ascendant Republicans, Boehner, and even a bonus piece about Dick Cheney.
I can’t believe people voted these schmucks back into power.
Open Thread
by John Cole| 63 Comments
This post is in: I Can't Believe We're Losing to These People
GregB
What about that Hollywood clown R. Lee Ermey who’s calling for a treasonous revolution during Toys for Tots benefits?
Whatever happened to not attacking the President during war time?
joe from Lowell
They’re not really “in power.” There’s no way they can actually enact an agenda. They barely ran on one, just on undoing the Democrats’ agenda.
The people voted to make the Republicans a check on the Democrats’ power, because the people like divided government.
As a resident of Massachusetts, I know of what I speak. With the legislature assured to include veto-proof Democratic majorities, the state is run largely by the Democratic legislative leadership. Hence, this very Democratic state elected several Republicans in a row to be government, specifically because they wouldn’t actually be “in power,” but would serve as a speed bump. When the Massachusetts Democrats nominated a gubernatorial candidate who wasn’t allied with the Beacon Hill Democratic leadership (Deval Patrick), he won easily – because wanted to make sure there was a check, even on the party they preferred.
Ditto Scott Brown’s election, to a Senate that had 60 people in the Democratic caucus.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
It’s all the people who didn’t vote that allowed them back in power.
I’m normally a rather forgiving person, but I am not going to let those asshats who sat at home off the hook, moreso if they knew better.
General Stuck
It’s the Orange Revolution
PaulW
it’s because those schmucks lied, and keep lying, and no one holds them accountable for it.
when the media brings in Kirk Cameron (an actor obsessed with the Rapture) to talk as an expert for mysterious bird deaths, I mean, for the love of God, why didn’t the cable talk shows bring in ACTUAL BIRD EXPERTS to talk on the matter.
The media exists in their own little echo chamber, whose biggest flaw is that they open their windows to that chamber to let all the noise out to a world that has no other means of sorting out that noise. The media invites in their clubby, wealthy friends and they all sit around amenably and chatty and they talk as though they are experts on every topic when they are clearly NOT, and they allow partisan-driven bullshit that flies in the face of honest-to-god facts to go unchallenged, allowing that bullshit to be legitimized and ready for memetic distribution to the bumper sticker industry.
dan
Who’s “we”? It’s the same question I ask when people say “we” get the government “we” deserve. How the fk do I deserve this?
The Moar You Know
You’re buying their schtick too. Last time I checked, Democrats still held the presidency and the Senate.
Only power they’ve got with holding the House is the power to repeat the government shutdown of 1995 – which they will – and the power to repeat the utter and complete fail that came along with it.
Remember Newt Gingrich’s career? Me neither.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@joe from Lowell: That’s an awfully sweet thing to think, but they were hoping to get enough Republicans in office to remove the black man sleeping in the White House. He should be in the shed out back.
And they would be shocked to find that McCain doesn’t get handed the presidency if it were to occur.
PaulW
@GregB:
well clearly to Ermey, the President is not really the President, so he can say whatever the f-ck he likes.
I got a question for Gunney: hey, Sarge, did the deficits that’s bankrupting the United States all begin on January 2009? Was this nation cruising along in financial stability and then BOOM massive deficits everywher? Because I can swear the financial disaster we’re in now has its origins in 2001, when Obama wasn’t even a U.S. Senator!
cleek
NPR, too. they just can’t seem to stop doing big stories about “the new speaker”.
joe from Lowell
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
They, who? On the day the Republicans won back the House, Barack Obama was the most popular national political figure in America.
There were, obviously, some hard-core wingnuts who voted in November, but that’s not most of the electorate, or even most of the Republican-voting electorate.
stuckinred
@PaulW: You recall what happened to him in the head?
Dave
I think the disappointing thing here isn’t that we have to worry about Republicans imposing their vision (can’t happen with a Democratic Senate and WH) but that we are going to have two years of bullshit and theater when we need to keep this recovery moving and deal with a thousand other serious issues. Instead, we’ll get Paul Ryan’s deficit-reduction plan that actually INCREASES the deficit, Steve King trying to demonize minorities for the sin of not being white and Darrell Issa investigating the White House because they bought whole milk instead of 2% for the kitchen.
But hey, all those Democrats who stayed home really showed Obama, amirite?
Suck It Up!
@PaulW:
WTF? omg. fuck.
mk3872
What do you mean you’re “SURPRISED”, John?
I got NO public option, NO Gitmo closure, NO DATA repeal until after the election so I voted BAGGER in 2010!
Oh, and BTW, still no pony or rainbows from that fraud sell-out Obama!
PaulW
@The Moar You Know:
you may be talking about the federal government, true enough, but take a look at the state governments.
Republicans seized control of a lot of states this midterms, and indeed have such control over Texas (supermajorities AND the governor’s office) that the Far Right can honestly rewrite the Texan state constitution to however they like.
And the states, don’t forget, are the ones that CAN go bankrupt, and indeed there’s the worry that a GOP-led state government will go that route so that they can then break the public sector unions (don’t forget, “killing the unions” is Objective #4 right after “Destroy Obama”, “Destroy Health Care” and “Destroy Social Security”).
Welcome to hell. Where a MEDICARE FRAUD is governor of Florida and Texas is about to become the first fully Christian theocratic state (I don’t think even Utah under the Mormons is going to be as strict as these jokers).
Suck It Up!
Gibbs is out ya’ll. Nothing against Gibbs, just excited to see new staff.
stuckinred
@mk3872: fucking moron
kindness
NPR has been especially bad this week with non-stop fluffing of everything Republican. They might mention a Democratic position in their stories but every single time it’s been followed by more fluffing of the right and berating of anything progressive.
Fuck those bastards. They’ll never see another dime from me till they fire the current GM & production staff.
It’s a tough drive in the AM, I get either NPR, crappy local stations or Bob & Tom & Bob & Tom are worse imho.
Carnacki
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): It used to drive me crazy. I used to drive by old neighborhoods I’d canvass and think, “He’s not registered. She’s not registered.” And they don’t want to be registered. They don’t want to vote. When you knock on their door to try to register them, they want to bitch about the way things are, but most of the time they don’t want you to register them.*
*2008 did lead to some satisfy registrations, including an 80 something African American woman who’d never registered to vote before.
Villago Delenda Est
@PaulW:
The thing is, the job of the network “news” divisions is not to inform.
It’s to entertain, to draw eyeballs, so that an audience can be sold to advertisers.
Thus you have “experts” like Kirk Cameron on “news” shows. They are definitely “shows” and not “programs”.
joe from Lowell
@mk3872:
Because the baggers are going to give you a government health care plan, close GITMO, and advance gay rights?
Strategery!
RosiesDad
@PaulW:
No. It’s because unemployment is still up near 10% and the recovery is moving along slowly. So the electorate voted incumbents out. And most of the Dems who lost are in marginal districts that only swung Dem when the electorate last voted incumbents out.
I think this election reflected frustration with government more than an endorsement of Republican positions (or a rejection of Democratic positions). The People want The Government to address the problems that face us. Unemployment, slow economic growth, a massive deficit. (Among other things.)
Don’t hold your breath; Congress isn’t going to meaningfully address any of these things until The People descend upon DC with pliers and blowtorches. Until then, it’s gonna be same bullshit, different cast of characters.
And if I hear one more know it all asshole (Pat Buchanan was the most recent) talk about how the President got the message that America is a center-right country, I may toss my cookies.
Villago Delenda Est
@PaulW:
No.
The deficit sprang out of nowhere just a few seconds after 8PM PST on 4 November 2008. At the same time the networks announced that a Democrat ni*CLANG* had been elected President.
joe from Lowell
@RosiesDad:
This. If Republicans insist on deluding themselves that the November election results were a mandate for their platform, and behave accordingly in Congress and in their primaries, 2012 is going to look a lot like 1984.
Linnaeus
@RosiesDad:
Took the words right out of my mouth. It was only a matter of time until the Democratic gains of 2006 and 2008 would be reversed to some extent; in 2010, those reversals were exacerbated by the poor economic situation that people were still in. The party in power got punished for being the party in power.
That said, the hyper-radicalization of the Republican Party is definitely an ominous development. The Democrats still don’t appear to know how to respond to that.
Tom Q
These two years are clearly going to be useless, and that’s not a footnote — there are things crying out to be done, and the loudest Congressional and media voices are going to be shouting we need to run in the opposite direction.
But I see this whole thing as a false dawn for the GOP. The ’12 presidential-year electorate will be even more favorable (demographically) to Dems than ’08 was, and the economy — while hardly thriving — will be more clearly out of recession than it was this past November. Meantime the populace will have seen two years of unbridled crazy from a House that believes its own propaganda. With all that, I’d be unsurprised to see another wide swing (Dem-ward) in the House, and Barack re-elected by the Dems’ strongest margin since LBJ. Then the work can begin again. (Though the Senate is unfortunately stuck with the Toomey turkeys of ’10 for six years)
PIGL
@Linnaeus: The Democratic Party leadership seems to have a response: move further to the right.
Chris
@Linnaeus:
That’s the thing. No one wants a one-party system, but as long as teabaggers control the GOP primaries, we’re guaranteed that the only possible alternative to the Dems will be so radical it’s not even worth considering. So every time the public wants to elect “someone else” because they feel the Dems have screwed up, they’re putting in charge a bunch of complete psychos.
It’s the French election of 2002 all over again, turned into a permanent condition. I abide by the “vote for a crook, not a fascist” principle, but with those as the only two options, it’s inevitable that the fascists will win elections. No, the Dems don’t know how to respond, and I’m not sure how they should either.
HeartlandLiberal
What I find actually sort of terrifying is the total disconnect between the words coming out of their mouths and the reality of our present economic and budgetary situation.
This is compounded by the utter, abject failure of the mainstream media to report based on fact anymore.
I feel like I have walked into a chapter of some morbid
Alice in Wonderland dystopia, where there is really nothing nice at all about the Mad Hatter(s) and the Tea Party.
America has been taken over by a corporate oligarchy and the richest 1% of its population.
The rest of us are treated as ignorant plebs, who can be lied to and manipulated to continue vote against out own interests, because the majority have bought the myths sold by these monsters.
And of course they are all afraid that when they win the lottery, the tax man will take away all their winnings.
Honestly, I did not make that up. I have heard some of my dirt poor and ignorant relatives actually say that.
gene108
2010 is a lesson in what happens when one side gets organized – the conservatives – and stays focused, while the other side – the liberals – total unravels because they didn’t get their magic single-payer pony, Jamie Dimon’s not in jail, and what ever other poutrages kept liberals from fully turning out for Democrats and to drum up support among young and minority voters, who turned out in large numbers in 2008 that propelled the Democrats to victory.
Of course is this a lesson people will learn? Nope. They’ll keep up the poutrages, while the Republicans will laugh all the way to victories in 2012.
catclub
I also hated that NPR seemed to have more coverage of Corker(?)’s speech at the heritage against filibuster reform than actual coverage of filibuster reform.
Never mind that all he said was, you’ll regret changing it when there is a GOP majority -and they run rough shod over the minority. But not mentioning that if the Democrats do not change the filibuster now, that the GOP WILL when they get the majority, anyway.
gene108
@GregB:
FYI, Kenyans cannot be President. No President attacked.
Glen Tomkins
Heightening the Contradictions
It’s not just for old Bolshis anymore. It’s been taken up by one of the two major US parties, and not the sligtly-less-rightwing party, either.
We will have a revolution in this country, and not at all because lefties start one. This one is being started by the only people who can get a revolution going in any even moderately successful country, the privileged and powerful. They have everything, but feel entitled to even more, and will end up with nothing.
lacp
@PaulW: As an added bonus, the state government of Texas will demonstrate to the rest of the nation the wingnut method of handling huge budget deficits. Won’t be pretty.
handy
@stuckinred:
You might wanna get that irony meter checked out.
Chris
I believe one of the GOP think tanks in the eighties actually called for a “Leninist strategy” to undermine Social Security, namely by denying it the funds to operate so that people would lose faith in it and government could privatize. Amazing that they so shamelessly drew inspiration from the people who’re supposedly their worst enemies.
As a spin-off of this; it’s interesting that communist revolutions have never happened in any “even moderately successful” countries, e.g. modern industrialized nations. They only seem to happen in backwards, feudal, third world type states (Cuba, China, Czarist Russia).
In the modern industrialized countries, fascism, not communism, is the totalitarian twin that pops up. Which tends to reward the privileged and powerful beyond imagining.
catclub
unclosed dash of mine on comment 32 I tried to edit…
and FYWP
RosiesDad
@joe from Lowell:
I expect this to be true. Unless some Republican actually steps forward and speaks truth. Don’t see that from the current cast of potential candidates.
Which means that we can look forward to several more years of slightly liberal plutocracy which is somewhat kinder and gentler than the Conservative variant.
RosiesDad
@Linnaeus:
Whereas it should be a massive opportunity. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was great on FTN on Sunday when she pointed out (after M. Bachmann was blathering about the expensive policies of our Socialist government the past couple of years) that it was Republicans that doubled the national debt in the 2000’s with unfunded tax cuts, unfunded wars and a huge unfunded entitlement program.
Dems need to go back to Reagan and remind America that in 1980, our national debt was under $1T and in the following 30 years, Republican presidents borrowed and spent like drunken sailors. And what do we have to show for it?
Everytime the GOP comes out with something that is fiscally bone-headed, they need to be hammered for it. Just because they sound like they mean it doesn’t mean it makes sense.
Marc McKenzie
@Dave: Well, Dave, those same folks were warned time and time again in 2010 that this stuff was going to happen if the Repubs were back in charge…and they didn’t give a s**t, because they didn’t get the public option.
Too much time was spent slamming the administration and Harry Reid instead of going after the real crazies. So, here we are. Will it be bad? Yes. How much so? Remains to be seen.
And yes, I’m still shaking the noggin sadly at the fact that even after eight years of the Bush disaster, and 30 years of Repub bulls**t, people still want to put them in office to run things (into the ground, mind you). If only we had a strong media apparatus to counter them–oh wait, we don’t.
Marc McKenzie
@stuckinred: Methinks he was kidding, stuck.
…at least, I hope he was kidding….
catclub
Since it is an open thread: Why does the majority leader not just ignore secret holds he does not like? Who knows about them anyway? If they are secret, what can the holder do if they are ignored? Go to the floor and announce they had a secret hold on that bit that was just passed?
Marmot
@joe from Lowell:
You say that as if The People really thought these things through, rather than, say, a nutty and ill-informed segment of The People believing that stimulus spending actually causes economic downturns and that “the government can’t create jobs” and that there’s a secret one-world Muslim gov’t conspiracy to give us all a fair healthcare system.
I mean, it’d be nice if The People really did think these things through. But the evidence you offer does not buttress your point.
catclub
@Suck It Up!:
Maybe they can get Lewis Black as a calm bipartisan voice of reason.
ruemara
I made the mistake of watching C-Span while they interviewed Diane Black, incoming Tennesee House Rep. SWEET FUCKING CHRIST ON A CRACKER. A goddamn nurse wants to repeal health care reform to benefit insurance companies. She frigging states that they are going to drop people because they have to keep kids on til they’re 24 (wrong) and keep little kids on without being able to consider their health history (kick of kids who get sick, obviously god wants them to die anyway) The urge to get on the phone and harangue that bitch was overwhelming. I just fucking got up and now I want to slap someone til they bleed. WTF, AMERICA?
Marc McKenzie
@gene108: Sad, but true Gene.
What makes it even more of a sad state is that under Obama, a lot was accomplished. But because progress can (and usually is) slow, and because some–I won’t name names–have forgotten that he’s the President, not the King, and that politics is a complex, gritty, nasty beast, they threw up their hands and walked away griping and pouting.
And you know what? Of course they must be aware of the sh**storm the country will be in if the Repubs are put back in charge. But because they didn’t get their magic pony and because Bush and Co. aren’t locked up, then it doesn’t matter, and the rest of us can go pound sand and watch things fall apart while they await the Messiah.
Sorry to be so harsh, but no one should be surprised at what the Rs are going to do over the next two years. They’ve been saying this loud and clear since Obama took office in 2009.
Linnaeus
@RosiesDad:
And the GOP is already backtracking on its promise to cut $100 billion in spending this year. Because that would mean 1) they’d have to specify what they want cut and 2) that would alienate voters who might actually like spending on such things.
If no one’s read this Atlantic article, check it out. Our would-be neofeudal lords and ladies in action.
gene108
@Marc McKenzie:
It’s not the media’s job to be an opposition Party. The failure of the last two years was the right and the left, in this country, kept focusing on the negatives of the Party in power.
When your friends and enemies say you’ve failed, why should an undecided person have a favorable view of you? Or bother to turn out to vote for you?
Liberals really need to understand that they are up against an organized opposition, so they also have to be just as well organized. Actually, they need to be better organized, because right-wingers are better funded.
They need message discipline. When they get 50% of what they want from a Democratic Congress or Administration, tell America the glass is half full and not half empty.
Yet that’s not what is happening. I doubt it will happen anytime soon.
General Stuck
Now this shit is getting completely weird
Howlin Wolfe
@cleek: I don’t remember the corporate media being so sycophantic when the Democrats took over both houses a few years ago. In fact, they still talked to more Republicans than Dems after that.
They really don’t try to hide their corporate bias — the fact that these beltway dopes in the media think the teabag crowd is grassroots shows their complete fail in assessing the situation. The fact that Michele Bachmann never utters one word about the evils of big business — no, it’s always big gummint that’s evil per se — shows the corporate bias. And she is never called out for her utter inanity/insanity.
I think most in the media want to maintain their career paths in the American Pravda organs. They don’t want to get on the wrong side of history, or their corporate overlords.
Marc McKenzie
@gene108: Well said.
However, let’s have at least a shred of hope that some will come to their senses. It is a long shot, but….
Howlin Wolfe
What the hell is going on with this website? I submitted a comment, and now every comment has a strikethrough.
WHAT HAVE I DONE????!!!
Ken J.
My hypothesis: the world changed when Time, Newsweek and US News disappeared from the grocery store news racks, particularly the checkout counters.
The fact that most Americans at least looked at the covers of somewhat-reality-based news publications every week, as part of the ritual of buying food, served as a kind of sanity check on American politics.
catclub
@Marc McKenzie: “But because they didn’t get their magic pony and because Bush and Co. aren’t locked up, then it doesn’t matter,”
All the reporting I saw was that dependable democratic votes continued to be dependable democratic votes, so the firebagger constituency vote just as much as ever.
It was wishy washy ‘independents’ and young voters who did not vote in the midterms.
The firebaggers may have made a loud enough rude noise that those independents became wishy washy. But that assumes they were paying attention, which there is no evidence for.
catclub
@Howlin Wolfe:
Interesting! I do not see strike throughs except in my post #32. That I TRIED to edit and fix. Hence, FYWP
Comrade Dread
******** *****ing mother*****s piece of ****ing **** ***** ************* bloody *****! ass*****s ****!.
That is all.
Svensker
Just out of curiousity, who’d you vote for in 2004?
AxelFoley
@PaulW:
Sums it all up.
AxelFoley
@Dave:
Bingo.
And Cole, your blog is acting up again.
Bubblegum Tate
@Villago Delenda Est:
One thing I have noticed on most right-wing blogs is that while every detail of the economy is currently Obama’s fault directly, the economic conditions from 2000 to 2008 must only be discussed in the passive voice. That mess just, you know, happened, it’s not like Republicans had any hand in it.
Mike in NC
Where I live the wingnuts blame it all on Slick Willie, of course.
mk3872
@joe from Lowell: That was supposed to be snark …