Another day, and the slow realization that they’ve been prostituting themselves for frauds slowly sinks in a little deeper at Reason.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.
This really is a full service blog.
The words do not have to be perfect.
A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals
Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.
I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.
Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.
“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”
They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.
Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.
Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.
Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.
Good lord, these people are nuts.
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.
Not all heroes wear capes.
… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.
And we’re all out of bubblegum.
Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.
Technically true, but collectively nonsense
powderfinger
The freeze frame on that YouTube of Nick Gillespie at the bottom is pretty amazing. Black leather jacket, looking cooler-than-thou.
JPL
Boehner spoke about the importance of working hard and education. Any bets on whether or not the repubs will cut funding for Pell Grants?
WereBear
He meant working hard for the education, as Gawd intended. If you’re poor.
Violet
So if you click through to the link, the Reason magazine cover has an arm and the hand is holding a knife like in a slasher film. Get it? Slasher? Haw haw haw.
Then if you scroll down they are asking you to give money to something:
So…DON’T let the government take your money or spend it, but DO give it to us! Give us your money so we can tell other people not to take your money!
Weird disconnect there somewhere.
In other news, the GOP will continue to be the party of deficit and spend.
arguingwithsignposts
shudder. i did not need that glimpse of the Fonzi of Freedom ™ this early in the a.m.
Pococurante
OT: I’m surprised there is nothing on the NPR circular firing squad.
PeakVT
The Reasonoids sound like they need a little talking to by their masters.
Breezeblock
Hearing Agent Orange’s voice (aka Speaker Boner) is like fingernails on a blackboard.
Wait, is it the sound of his voice, or is it the lies and other nothings that his voice is spewing?
amk
These people have been rethugs’ bitches for so many decades that they suffer from battered-wife syndrome.
New Yorker
Better late than never, I suppose.
Oh, and they botched the reading of the Constitution? Let me guess: they forgot the establishment clause of the 1st amendment, the 4th, the 5th, 6th, 14th, and 16th.
p.a.
Oh John, you starry eyed optimist. This momentary lapse into judgment at Reason won’t last. Just follow the money…
Bulworth
I love the bit about “GOP got kicked to the curb in 2006 because they were up to their eyeballs in spending….”
Yeah, OK.
cleek
@New Yorker:
they left out all the stuff that later amendments voided. good stuff, too! like the “slaves count for 3/5 of a person” bit.
cleek
@Bulworth:
yeah, that was my favorite part, too.
nice little closure they got there.
Larv
@cleek:
That, and their fantasy that most independents are actually “crypto-libertarians” who want a smaller government that does less. Project much, Reasonoids?
Murc
Every three months or so, I decide that I’ll give a Reason article that isn’t about police or prosecutorial misconduct a shot. And then I’m reminded why that’s a bad idea.
Well played, Gillespie. Well played. Crypto-libertarians indeed, sir!
kindness
While I have tried to see some daylight in the ramblings over at Reason, I never have been able to catch a glimmer.
Naaa. They are bought and paid for hacks, just like the other crypto-libertarian whores.
RP
“There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.”
chopper
@powderfinger:
johnny ramone never actually died, apparently.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
From the article:
I see Reason has no clue why the Republicans won the House. I bet they can’t explain why they had worse poll numbers than the Democrats and still managed to win.
Stefan
So…DON’T let the government take your money or spend it, but DO give it to us! Give us your money so we can tell other people not to take your money! Weird disconnect there somewhere.
Yes….shouldn’t Reason.com be able to rely on people paying it for a valuable good rather than relying on handouts? And if enough people won’t pay for Reason.com to enable it to stay in business, well, then hasn’t the market spoken and shouldn’t Reason.com bow to its wisdom?
Amazing the ability of people to live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.
Stefan
Oh, and they botched the reading of the Constitution? Let me guess: they forgot the establishment clause of the 1st amendment, the 4th, the 5th, 6th, 14th, and 16th.
No, if you click the link it shows that they missed an entire page because when one of the Republicans reading turned the page, the pages stuck together and he didn’t notice that he’d skipped over an entire section (nor, apparently, did anyone listening).
It’s a clown show from Day One.
Elvis Elvisberg
From the article: well, you’re not winning any fans among the growing ranks of independents (read: crypto-libertarians) who want a smaller government that does less and costs less.
Wow. RP has it right. These guys would be much closer to reality if their understanding of the world were rooted in the behavior of orcs.
Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey))))
Can anybody seriously believe the idiots at that rag are so dumb that they truly believed the Republicans were going to cut anything? How dumb would you have to be to fall for that bullshit?
What these libertarian idiots have to choose between are the two parties we have now: The Democrats are, as a rule for a strong and active government, and like to pay for it with adequate and progressive taxation, and they’re faily forthright about it; The Republicans want, as a rule, a government that spews money out to its friends with little oversight, and racks up debt by cutting taxes drastically even as they spend as much as or more than the Democrats, only they lie and say how much they want to slash spending.
I can see why the libertarians wouldn’t be happy with either of these choices, but, really, those are the choices they have. No credible political party could get reelected if it cut spending the way the Republicans claim they want to. Now, if they like the government to spend money corruptly and inefficiently, without raising any revenue, and thereby running up the national debt by the trillions, and they’re against an activist government that pays for its programs by levying the taxes needed to pay for this stuff, then I can see why they’d want the Republicans in office. But to blindly believe that the Republicans are going to suddenly follow Ron Paul’s lead and cut 80% of the federal government is just dumb.
Surely they can’t be that dumb. If they’re serious about having the government they want, they need to do the hard work of building a serious movement. That takes far more work than just publishing a spiffy, hip online magazine, but these guys, for all their talk, aren’t serious. They’re dilitantes. They aren’t activists, they’re just smug, selfish know-it-alls who like feeling righteously indignant.
If I had a magic wand, this wouldn’t be the first thing I’d do by any stretch, but sooner or later I’d get around to waving my wand and switching these goofoffs with some Honduran campesino for a month. Let them live in a bamboo hut with no running water and no lights, no glass on their windows, no mosquito nets, no public school for their children for 30 miles, no government run clinic anywhere nearby when t hey get sick, and for good measure, no laws to keep the palm plantation from dumping all kinds of shit into the creek where they get their drinking water. See how they really like living in their “small government” libertarian paradise. Then, after a month or two, switch ’em back and listen to them sing their new tune.
John PM
That made my brain hurt. I think I need to put a shot of something in my coffee.
BigHank53
These fools have convinced themselves that libertarianism is a Good Idea. They can convince themselves of anything short of snake-handling. And I wouldn’t put money on that.
Moik
If he’s supposed to be the Fonzi of Freedom, how come he looks more like Ponch from CHiPs?
El Cid
@Stefan:
Did they really skip the 14th Amendment? I knew that John Lewis (D-GA) read the 13th.
I figured that somehow they would, or at least the two latter parts about denying office to Confederate traitors and not assuming the debts of the insurrectionists.
El Cid
And this:
Good thing, though, that Boehner didn’t get the “gotcha” question of being asked ‘what newspapers do you read?’.
Tom Hilton
The most (unintentionally) revealing part of that is the line about how Congress has “spent the past 200 or so years radically misinterpreting” the Constitution–as if there were some Platonic ideal of a Constitution that had an existence entirely separate from how it’s interpreted in practice.
Which is just one of the many completely batshit premises on which libertarianism is based.
les
@Stefan:
And I think we all know how pages get stuck together…
debbie
@ Violet:
Shades of Jim and Tammie Faye?
Alwhite
@Tom Hilton:
Yup!
rickstersherpa
Abraham Lincoln gave a speech during the Civil War where he discussed the problematic nature of the definition of the word “liberty.” Hence we have Reason magazine stating that the Constitution has been misinterpreted for 200 years (apparently including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and John Marshall as being among the chief misinterpreters even as they were despite them being present in the original Constitutional Convention, State ratifying conventions, and major participants in the first 10 years of the Republic (and the first 40 in the case of Marshall in his role as Chief Justice). Of course “unconstitutional” means what it has always meant for the last 200 years, for the most part. It means any policy or law I don’t like.
Tom
The edit of the quote is misleading. I saw a clip of this interview last night, and the “name a program that could be cut” question followed a back and forth on whether military cuts were on the table. Boehner said yes they were then Williams said “name a program you would cut.”
It was my impression, and I think Boehner’s, that Williams was referring to what military programs could be cut.
Now, even in this context, I had the same reaction everyone is having today: You’ve promised to cut $100 million from the budget, you’re for military cuts, yet you can’t name one cut proposal off the top of your head.
But, in fairness to Boehner, I think there’s some dishonest editing going on here.
Peter J
@RP:
The original, non plagiarized, and better, version is:
RP
@Peter J:
eyeroll…I put it in quotes. I wasn’t suggesting that it was my line.
Holden Pattern
@Stefan:
Well, in the libertarian worldview, prostitution should be legal, so I think that the good folks at Reason are just ahead of the curve. They’re basically courtesans who service the needs of the ruling class for rationalizing wealth and selfishness. As such, like courtesans of times past, they have to rely on the largesse of their patrons.
Tom Hilton
@RP: The point, though, is that you quoted from a guy who had plagiarized it. That’s not your fault, necessarily, but it is always worth pointing out who said it first.
Peter J
@RP: I didn’t suggest that, check the second link. Your quote is from Value of Nothing by Raj Patel, he plagiarized it.