Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The revolution will be supervised.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

In my day, never was longer.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

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

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Not all heroes wear capes.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

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Trying to get back into the swing of doing this every Friday, after an extended period of semi-Galtness. Lots of good stuff, starting with my favorite topic, the 2012 Republican primaries:

  • Rudy can’t fail, he can only be failed: Zandar asks why Rudy Giuliani says he’s in it to win it after his disastrous foray in 2008.
  • Upper Left agrees that in the future, every Republican will run for president for fifteen minutes.
  • Strangely Blogged finds Pat Buchanan flirting with white supremacism.
  • Can’t Explain tells me something I never knew before: that rich people semi-rioted at early screenings of The Rules Of the Game.  Could a movie make rich people semi-riot now or does it take a ballot recount in Florida to accomplish that today?
  • The Commander Guy tells me something else I didn’t know before: Erick Erickson still uses the Drudge siren unironically.
  • Happy Valley News has a video of a teatard version of “Howl”.   I found it funny partly because I find the original poem funny.

Reader Interactions

36Comments

  1. 1.

    liberty60

    Pat Buchanan flirting with white supremacism

    FLIRTING?

    Good God, he has been going steady with it since 1968!

    At this point, they are common law married.

    Not to mention the fecundity of their offspring.

  3. 3.

    Mark S.

    Pat Buchanan flirting with white supremacism

    I think they’re married with ten kids by now.

    ETA: Man, you’ve gotta be quick when it’s slow and high above the plate like that.

  5. 5.

    Ash Can

    I was going to say something along the lines of “Flirting, hell; he’s had it chained to the bed for years,” but ALL FOUR commenters so far have beat me to it.

  6. 6.

    NonyNony

    The Commander Guy tells me something else I didn’t know before: Erick Erickson still uses the Drudge siren unironically.

    I like the fact that Erickson doesn’t seem to have glommed onto the fact that what individual Republicans think about this-that-or-the-other doesn’t matter in the slightest. Only a few of them are allowed to vote their beliefs and then only when the Leadership has determined that their vote won’t matter. So it doesn’t really matter that the Republican Chair of the Energy & Commerce Committee is one of those endangered species of “pro-choice Republicans” – nothing is going to creep by his committee that the leadership doesn’t want to have happen, and Boehner would find his ass hung out to dry in HIS district if anything with a hint of pro-choice-ness were to arrive during his time as Speaker.

    (not going to make a flirting/marriage joke about buchanan … not going to make a flirting/marriage joke about buchanan …)

  10. 10.

    Tom Hilton

    Flirting? They just celebrated their 50th anniversary!

    (Pat Buchanan flirting w/white supremacism jokes were totally passé by Comment 6, but it’s comment 9 now so they’re totally hip again.)

  13. 13.

    AAA Bonds

    The whole country right now is a slow-burn riot by the rich – that’s what that Atlantic piece laid out.

    The rich are angry because they are, indeed, overworked, compared to the aristocratic dream lives they envy; they are equally angry that they are expected to contribute to the national interest when their wealth has been internationalized.

    It’s the only useful remaining point of attack against the rich that I can detect in America: they are vicious hyper-globalists who are bilking and robbing the country because of frustration at national borders, laws, and boundaries. Going there without hopping on Pat Buchanan’s bus is the hard part.

  14. 14.

    Rick

    Logged in just to pick up on the ‘flirting’ line only to find that I’ve been beaten — pummeled actually — to the punch. @Tom Hilton, yours is my favorite. Late, but historically accurate.

  15. 15.

    Laura W.

    Fine, I’ll pimp my own damn (mixed media nothing to do with politics) mosaics blog (where’s Emily? She’s the bestest pimp on the planet). I’m (for the most part) totally underemployed and about to take on grad school loans, which is a keen idea right now, dontcha think? Why not? What’s to lose.

    Over the last two years I’ve had the joy of doing some custom work for a few Juicers, and you can see here, in the most recent post, that two of my favorite projects were for the Chief Juicer’s younger sisters’ dead pets. (The family is sorta freaky like that.)

  16. 16.

    AAA Bonds

    Many folks don’t want to talk about the specifics of Buchanan’s record of white supremacist views because they indict a lot of people in America.

    He openly defended apartheid as a bastion of civilization in Africa and talked about the massacres, rape, and torture there as “whites mistreating a couple of blacks”, and that’s certainly one of the nastier things he said – but he’s just one name on a long, long, long list of people who advanced that view who are still out there, in office, on cable, pushing, crafting, and implementing foreign policy.

  18. 18.

    Lev

    Giuliani might as well run. I fully suspect half the Republicans intending to run are just treating the process as tryouts for FNC punditry anyway. Rudy might want to get a regular show instead of the odd guest appearance.

  19. 19.

    Lev

    Oh, and I’m doing a group blog over at http://www.librarygrape.com/ now. Been writing a lot about neocons, idiots who think the world is going to end next year, teabaggers and the like. You should check it out, if any of those things tickle your fancy.

  20. 20.

    AAA Bonds

    @Lev:

    I think it’s the new dominant paradigm of conservative politics in America, no joke. In fact, I think it defines the behavior of the Bachmann-Palin-Rand wing of the party, vs. the McConnells and Boehners who honestly still seem a little bewildered as to why they even need to explain themselves to Republicans in Congress.

    The reason why? McConnell and Boehner are of the old school – they want to be on the Hill for life. The Tea Party folks want to be in Hollywood, or New York, or anywhere BUT a grim dorkfest like Washington. D.C.’s just a stop on the way to true greatness.

    It’s now considered a bigger success, and a more heroic calling, to be Father Coughlin instead of Robert Taft.

    And that is why the government may be completely, totally shut down in the next year. It makes for great TV. The debt ceiling is a good way for McConnell and Boehner to square the circle, but if it gets away from them, there is really nothing they can do. They have a mad dog on a leash, and all that means is that when it turns on them, they’re guaranteed to be in biting distance.

  23. 23.

    El Cid

    @AAA Bonds: “Why Business Owners Feel Powerless.”

    Despite these various kinds of objective evidence that the power elite has great power in relation to the federal government, many corporate leaders feel that they are relatively powerless in the face of government.
    __
    To hear them tell it, Congress is more responsive to organized labor, environmentalists, and consumers. They also claim to be harassed by willful and arrogant bureaucrats. These negative feelings toward government are not a new development, contrary to those who blame the New Deal and the social programs of the 1960s. A study of businessmen’s views in the 19th century found that they believed political leaders to be “stupid” and “empty” people who went into politics only to earn a living, and a study of businessmen’s views during what are thought of as their most powerful decade, the 1920s, found the same mistrust of government.
    __
    The emotional expressions of business leaders about their lack of power cannot be taken seriously as a power indicator, for that confuses psychological uneasiness with power. Feelings are one thing, the effects of one’s actions another.
    __
    But it is nonetheless interesting to try to understand why businessmen complain about a government they dominate. First, complaining about government is a useful political strategy. It puts government officials on the defensive and forces them to keep proving that they are friendly to business. Second, businessmen complain about government because in fact very few civil servants are part of the upper class and corporate community.
    __
    The anti-government ideology of the United States tends to restrain members of the upper class from government careers except in the State Department*, meaning that the main contacts for members of the power elite within government are at the very top. There is thus uncertainty about how the middle levels will react to new situations, and therefore a feeling that there is a necessity to “ride herd” on or “reign in” the potentially troublesome “bureaucrats.”
    __
    There also seems to be an ideological level to the business leaders’ attitudes toward government. There is a fear of the populist, democratic ideology that underlies American government. Since power is in theory in the hands of all the people, there always is the possibility that someday “the people,” in the sense of the majority, will make the government into the reflection of pluralist democracy that it is supposed to be.
    __
    In a certain very real way, then, the great power of the upper class and corporate community are culturally illegitimate, and the existence of such power is therefore vigorously denied. It is okay to be rich, and even to brag about wealth a little bit, but not to be powerful or, worse, to flaunt that power.
    __
    Finally, the expressions of anguish from individual corporate leaders concerning their powerlessness also suggests an explanation in terms of the intersection of social psychology and sociology. It is the upper class and corporate community that have power, not individuals apart from their institutional context.
    __
    As individuals, they are not always listened to, and they have to convince their peers of the reasonableness of their arguments before anything happens. Moreover, any policy that is adopted is a group decision, and it is sometimes hard for people to identify with group actions to the point where they feel personally powerful. It is therefore not surprising that specific individuals might feel powerless.

    * I think this is incorrectly stated by Domhoff, because even though the number of political officials from the upper corporate etc. classes, are comparatively smaller in scale, some of the most prominent officials are direct portions of the corporate power elite upper classes. Not to mention that every or nearly every member of the Senate is a millionaire.

  28. 28.

    JPK

    Thanks for the link, DougJ! The Sorrow and the Pity probably offers an even better window into the rancid French ruling class of the time, but it’s not exactly a fun time.

  31. 31.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    Wow we just had an earthquake here, 4.1, centered in East San Jose-ish. Felt a little shaking in Mountain View.

  33. 33.

    DougJ

    @Zandar:

    That guy is crazy. He hates you and the worst he can find is something where you don’t remember what year NAFTA was and then accept his correction?

  36. 36.

    kamper

    Doug,
    Thanks for the link on Tea Party ‘Howl.’ If readers are interested, we also did Tea Party versions of Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou. I’ll be posting them in coming weeks.

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