Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

You can’t love your country only when you win.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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

Everybody saw this coming.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

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47Comments

  1. 1.

    handy

    Mubarak is considered one of the U.S.’s strongest allies in the Middle East, according to the CW these people love to embrace. How was Bush right in light of that?

  2. 2.

    The Dangerman

    Hold on; I thought John Bolton was on record saying that Cairo is a bad thing (Islamicists and all). So, how can W be right about something that is bad (ignoring that the next time that John Bolton is right about something will be the first time)?

  5. 5.

    jl

    Well, surely, all Very Serious People can agree, should agree, will agree that everything good that comes out of this is due to the seeds planted by the visionary Bush II policies, and everything bad is due to the wimpiness/rashness/ineptitude/diabolically clever secret evil coup plotting of the Obama administration.

    Or vice versa if you are a center left talking head needing money and the producers or editors need something to pair with the ravings of the Abrams of the world.

    An interesting question arises:

    Will the reactionary nexus hold, or will the widening gyre of the different aspect of their insane fantasies spin out of control? Will obvious political or monetary advantage guide them to some common BS line, or will they fall apart into warring insane narratives and conflicts, ala CPAC wrt to gays and the murderous Boshevick Daniels?

    This is a trivial issue compared to what is going on in real reality for most people both here and across the world. Perhaps comparable to some French snarkist writing biting satires of how the different people in the royal court pick nits out their wigs. But I guess something that we need to monitor in order to forestall any harmful domestic political fallout.

  6. 6.

    joe from Lowell

    You know, Barack Obama said he wanted to create jobs.

    So, if we stay in a recession for six more years, elect a new president, stay in the recession for two more years, and then start to create jobs…

    Bam! Obama!

  7. 7.

    Violet

    Near the end of the video there’s a section on how “the economy is on the rise, kickin’ into overdrive, unemployment’s staying down.” When exactly was this made? Certainly not in the last year or so of Bush’s presidency. But I forgot. The economic problems are all Obama’s fault.

  9. 9.

    KG

    @jl: I have really come to hate the fact that pretty much everything that happens other than who wins the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA championship, and Stanley Cup is either because of or the fault of POTUS. Can’t it just be that some times, just some times, shit happens? Can’t it be that some times, history just carries us along and there isn’t much any one person can do? Or must it all fall on Caesar?

  11. 11.

    Spaghetti Lee

    I like how the sub-header is “What’s the U.S. Role?” rather than “Should there be a U.S. role?” I’m not exactly a historian, but considering Mossadegh, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet-Afghan war, and of course our two current debacles, when was the last time an extended American meddle in the affairs of a Middle Eastern country went right?

    Jesus, ten years of war and these people still can’t wait to stick their grubby paws into another country. I bet they’d support limited government too, if asked.

  12. 12.

    Jay C

    “Bush Was Right”

    About WHAT?

    SRSLY, WTF was Dubya “right” about? Propping up the Mubarak regime? Like Carter, Reagan, his Dad,and Clinton did before him (and Obama til this week)? – Yeah, brilliant policy innovation there….

    These neocon assclowns have been grossly wrong – proved grossly wrong – about virtually any and every policy they have promoted since they disgracefully got control of US foreign policy in 2001; and yet still, every time some foreign-affairs contretemps goes down, buffoons like John Bolton or Elliot Abrams get trotted out to be given airtime/bandwidth to spout their (typically unchallenged) criticisms of the Obama Admin: usually for doing exactly the same thing they would have done had it happened on their watch.

    Well, except for the “sending in troops” reflex…. maybe.

  14. 14.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @KG:

    No, silly. It’s the economy that is totally dependent on the animal spirits of capitalism and the government can mess it up if it even looks at it the wrong way. Foreign governments, on the other hand, are a department where meddling is compulsory, and will always advance the cause of freedom.

    Sheesh, do I gotta do all the heavy lifting round here?

  15. 15.

    Violet

    @joe from Lowell:
    Heh. I hadn’t watched it in ages, so I decided to look at it. Typical winger stuff, but the economy part cracked me up. At the end of the economy bit I wrote above there’s a line that goes “Revenue is going up, can you say ‘tax cuts.'” Some enterprising Democrat should take that clip and use it in a commercial. The “Bush was right! Bush was right!” bit is a nice counterpoint to the Republicans’ claims that tax cuts are always the answer.

    The economy bit starts at 1:33 if you just want to check out that tiny bit of it.

  16. 16.

    LosGatosCA

    When the POTUS initiates tax cuts that will turn a budget surplus into deficits, passes unfunded Medicare expansion, and starts an unnecessary war just to funnel borrowed money to his campaign donors, then that is on his head.

    When his successor does not even propose to change the fundamentally wrong policies, escalate the war, extend the tax cuts, maintain the assaults on the Bill of Rights then he becomes an accomplice after the fact.

    Nobody is holding Bush or Obama to significantly higher standards than common sense accountability for their own actions and choices.

  19. 19.

    jl

    To be serious, what is going on in Tunisia and Egypt, may be what you call a juncture:

    1. a point of time, esp. one made critical or important by a concurrence of circumstances: At this juncture, we must decide whether to stay or to walk out.

    2. a serious state of affairs; crisis: The matter has reached a juncture and a decision must be made.

    If some semblance or order cannot be restored and progress towards a more open regime made with this new maybe maybe not VP Suleiman (who probably will soon be P after Mubarak retires with lotsa dough), then it may be one of those ‘critical junctures’.

    Seems to me that any normal person with normal human feeling and an ounce of humanity would regard such a very uncertain time with a mixture of hope and dread.

    So, I do not want to think about what goes on inside these hacks who try to make a buck or name or cheap political point out of it by peddling BS to the public.

  25. 25.

    jl

    @hilts:

    Thanks for that link.

    There will be interesting contrasts in the Washingtonian reaction. John Kerry is all for ‘warning’ (who? how? with whose army?) somebody or other not to include the Muslim Brotherhood in the democratic process (one assumes he means a future democratic process that might emerge from the crisis, since most agree that currently there is no democratic process there). Maybe he is warning the Mubarak establishment that they won’t get any money if they do, but he just said that we should not cut off the Mubarak establishment.

    So, I guess unfortunately, while Kerry may have better intentions, he is less coherent than Bolton. Bolton’s arguments are, what you might call consistent, with spots of logic that are valid, but all of it is technically unsound.

    And this from Anthony Weiner, which surprized me a little:

    Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) insisted that democracy is better than the status quo in the Middle East. “Because ultimately, the more Democratic the Middle East is, the less likely it is we’re going to have conflagration and conflicts between countries. That’s my view. I hope that turns out to be right,”

  26. 26.

    jl

    I should become a neocon. I have wild thoughts, see, and am too imaginative, and perhaps have some slight ADHD, and I love to spin tall tales right out of my head as the fancy strikes, so I should make a lot of dough.

    Do you sheeples not see the plot? Right after the Nobama maladministration kills the color coded warnings, this crisis occurs. And we are defenseless now. We won’t know how scared to be.

  27. 27.

    Mark S.

    I’m starting to miss the old guy.

    Well, not really. I’m mostly enjoying watching clueless neocons alternatively support democracy and the Mubarak. When will Rush just tell them which way to go?

  28. 28.

    RareSanity

    @cleek:

    One hundred blessings upon your family, sir.

    I’m not sure what has been going on in the comments lately, I have never seen so much “REDACTED” splattered around before.

    Thank you for the filter…

    Or, in your wise words, “I don’t know what they said, just know that they really like pie!”

  29. 29.

    GHOST OF BIRDZILLA

    COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IS FOR WISHY WASHY LIBERAL PEOPLE WHO FEEL GUILT. NEOCONS ONLY SEEM CRAZY BECAUSE LIBERAL MEDIA TWISTS THERE WORDS OUT OF CONTEXT.

  30. 30.

    Steeplejack

    Just got home from work and haven’t read the comments, but I hope someone explains to me exactly what Bush (allegedly) was right about. I can’t remember him ever saying anything substantive about anything Egypt.

    Guess I will read and learn.

  31. 31.

    Yutsano

    @Steeplejack: There is really only one thing I will give Dubya credit for: he did greatly expand AIDS funding for Africa. And on the whole Medicare Part D isn’t a bad idea on its face but it was such an obvious pharma giveaway the way it was structured. Otherwise he’s still pretty much the Boy Blunder.

  34. 34.

    Villago Delenda Est

    The danger, of course, is that these “people’s revolts” might spread to North America and dispose of our own kleptocrats in the Ceausescu manner.

  35. 35.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    So the fact that Iraq is still a mess means nothing, but an uprising in Cairo, almost eight years after the invasion of Iraq, proves Bush was right?

    That dumbfuck Hiatt, and Katie Graham’s halfwit son, really will print anything.

  36. 36.

    Ed Marshall

    Oddly, there is a U.S. role in this. The riots started in Tunisia because part of the wikileaks dump was a diplomatic cable which spelled out that Ben Ali was corrupt and that his government was a joke and that we would be happier after he died.

    It incensed public opinion that everyone *knew* that Ben Ali was corrupt, and up to this point everyone in Tunisia was sure that we would go apeshit to protect Ben Ali. Finding out that we wouldn’t mind seeing the end him changed things.

  37. 37.

    gbear

    @KG:

    I have really come to hate the fact that pretty much everything that happens other than who wins the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA championship, and Stanley Cup is either because of or the fault of POTUS.

    Actually, the Super Bowl is brought to us by sociaIism.

    That’s why the NFL literally shares the wealth. TV is their biggest source of revenue and they put it all in a big Commie pot and split if thirty two ways. Because they don’t want anyone to fall too far behind. That’s why the team that wins the Superbowl in the next draft, picks last, or what the Republicans would call “punishing success.”

    Baseball… baseball on the other hand is exactly like the Republicans. And I don’t just mean it’s incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Superbowl more than anybody. But the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow up and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is forty million. The Yankees is two hundred and six million. The Pirates have about as much chance of getting to the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton.

    That’s why people stop going to Pirate games in May. Because if you’re not in the game, you become indifferent to the fate of the game and maybe even get bitter. That’s what’s happening to the middle class in America.

  38. 38.

    Ed Marshall

    @jl:

    I noticed John Kerry trying to make foreign policy on the TV to. He needs to STFU. He seems to be winging it.

  39. 39.

    Steeplejack

    @Yutsano:

    Agree on the Africa AIDS thing. But I thought Medicare D is a huge boondoggle–costs more than “regular” Medicare, was a giveaway by the Rethugs but then also something they can use as ammo for their “Medicare is wasteful and costs too much” arguments.

  40. 40.

    J

    Elliot Abrams was in the thick of the Reagan era dirty wars in Central America, and was convicted of lying to congress. One early sign of how bad things would be under Bush was the ‘rehabilitation’ of Abrams. In a just world, he would still be serving time for complicity in the crimes against humanity.

  41. 41.

    Yutsano

    @Steeplejack: It’s only a good thing in that it patched a big glaring hole that Medicare A & B both had: with limited exceptions, neither covered prescription drugs. But when Medicare was conceived a lot of our pharmaceutical advances (and relative expense) hadn’t been thought of yet, so there wasn’t much necessity for it at the time. At some point Part D was an inevitability, it just happened to be designed in the worst way possible for seniors and the best way possible for Big Pharma. The no negotiation rule is really the big tell. I wish ACA had fixed that, but maybe in the future.

  42. 42.

    FlipYrWhig

    @gbear: Good thing the NFL doesn’t have a small group of teams that are consistently top contenders!

    Stupid baseball, where you can always tell who’s going to be in the World Series, like that team that hadn’t won it for 50 years, that team that hadn’t won it for 80+ years, that other team that hadn’t won it for 80+ years, that team that had never been in it before, and that other team that had never been in it before, and that other team that had never been in it before, and that other team that had never been in it before, and every member of the most recent leaguewide expansion… just this century.

    On the other hand, if the Steelers win the Super Bowl, we’ll have had 3 Pats titles and 3 Steelers titles since 2001. If that happened in MLB, people would be screaming and moaning.

    “Baseball” doesn’t have a problem. The problem is entirely Yankees/Red Sox. Yes, the Pirates consistently suck. So do the Cleveland Browns.

  44. 44.

    Mark S.

    @gbear:

    Even less sociaIistic is how soccer leagues operate in just about every other country in the world. Just about every league is dominated by two or three clubs. The losers not only don’t get first draft picks (there is no draft), they get relegated to a lower division.

    You’d think conservatives would love it, but every four years every dipshit at National Review writes a “Why I Can’t Stand Soccer” article.

  45. 45.

    Pococurante

    @Persia: That would not be a good thing for a new government wanting democratic credibility, propping up a terrorist oppressive government that used elections simply to eliminate all opposition.

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