Thank Baby Jesus we got rid of that awful Blue Dog Walt Minnick in Idaho — there was no real difference between him and a Republican.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.
Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
We still have time to mess this up!
Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.
We are aware of all internet traditions.
Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.
New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.
Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?
Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.
“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”
Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.
… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP
You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.
Their freedom requires your slavery.
Black Jesus loves a paper trail.
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.
Let’s not be the monsters we hate.
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.
When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?
Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.
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IM
But Minnick of course was not primaried. He just lost the general election.
So what is your point?
Nick
Well, you know, now we can run Alan Grayson’s Idaho cousin and win, or something. Right? I mean Minnick did only vote with his party 71 percent of the time, and if he voted with the party on important issues like against the Stupak amendment, then maybe…wait…he DID vote against Stupak?
uhh.
mistermix
@IM: My point is that there was a lot of bitching about Blue Dogs and their voting records, but the alternative is often some jackass who makes birther jokes at CPAC and votes with Democrats 0% of the time.
Nick
@IM:
I think the point was a Blue Dog is still better than a Republican
Bobbyk
Of course a nearly 20% real unemployment rate had nothing to do with it. If Mr. Minnick had worked to create a better more effective stimulus package the economy would have undoubtedly been better thereby increasing his chances of election.
Good god you NEVER see republicans pushing republican politicians to act more like democrats-it just doesn’t happen.
Chris
“The First Joke, the First Joke! Aslan! Have I made the First Joke?”
“No, my little friend. You have only been the first joke.”
(Thank you, C. S. Lewis).
Comrade Javamanphil
I love the little self-congratulatory smile every single one of these guys gets when he makes this joke. Reminds me of my son when he was a wee lad and he’d just filled his diaper.
Keith G
Seems like a rather harmless laugh line.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@Nick: Or a rabid dog for that matter.
Lysana
Fitting that a Labrador would retrieve a joke from the trash bin.
Nick
@Bobbyk:
Of course it didn’t. This is Idaho dumbass. This is the same district that in the 90s elected a woman who said the EPA was sending Black Hawk helicopters into her state to enforce the Endangered Species Act, and you think Minnick lost because he didn’t vote for a bigger stimulus?
No, you don’t, because there aren’t any liberals in the Republican Party, there are however a hell of a lot of conservatives in the Democratic Party…especially in Idaho.
Corner Stone
@mistermix:
Or some Blue Dog shmuck that votes with the Dems on the 85% of the time it means absolutely nothing and on the 15% that really matter not only vote against D leadership but vocally go against the D Party.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Keith G: Harmless indeed. I cannot imagine what negative outcome could result from constantly joking that the current President is illegitimate.
ploeg
I am confident that Walt Minnick would have given a remark at some other venue that would have been not nearly as stupid.
Observer
@mistermix:
This is silly. Blue Dogs don’t vote with Democrats. Democrat legislation is changed to Republican legislation which is then voted yes by Blue Dogs.
Haven’t hardly seen a Blue Dog liberal vote on anything important.
Beside, what @Bobbyk said. Dems were supposed to fix the economy, not make it worse. B.S tax cuts and a miniscule stimulus allowed unemployment to rise even more than it should have. That’s your problem right there. If Dems can’t lower unemployment while in control of all three Houses, then they’re just run by Blue Dogs and it’s doing nobody any good.
harry
Something’s weird. From my home computer I can only get the mobile site to appear.
I click on the comment links and the regular site appears, but then, back to mobile.
Anyone else having this issue?
JPL
@mistermix: Your point is well taken but imo, the blue dogs ran away from their votes rather than campaigning on their accomplishments. Why would someone vote for them.
Kos or Firedoglake did not cause their losses, the blue dogs are responsible.
NonyNony
@Nick:
This. A thousand times this.
The Republican Party has positioned itself as a conservative party. Lately it’s positioned itself as a batshit insane party but nevermind that for a moment. The Republican Party spent the 80s, the 90s and part of the 00s purging anyone perceived as “liberal” from their party. And the metric for liberal in the GOP has moved so far to the right that, as people like to say, Ronald Reagan is too liberal to be a Republican these days.
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has been gobbling up the people that the Republican Party views as “too liberal”. Which means that the Democratic Party – which is a political machine party and emphatically NOT an ideological party by any stretch – has been steadily becoming somewhat more conservative. (Though, seriously, the Democratic Party is the party of the Military-Industrial Complex – so it’s always been a fairly conservative beast – FDR mostly just knew that if you don’t do things to keep people out of poverty you eventually invite popular uprising, so you give them some socialism to keep the Communists and the Fascists out – that’s still conservative because it’s all about keeping most of the wealth in the hands of the elite – it’s just an argument about the best means to go about doing that).
Liberals can start their own purge, but they’re really in the minority in the Democratic Party. Most of the Democratic Party is made up of people who aren’t necessarily liberal but who can see that they’re getting shit on by the guys who run the Republican Party. This is why the Democratic party’s systematic betrayal of organized labor over the years has been really, really harmful to the overall party. Not that union guys are staunch liberals, but precisely because they’re not. Guys who work in the coal mines in WV will vote in their own interests. But if Democrats aren’t protecting their economic interests, they’ll find something else to vote for. And since Democrats have given the finger to labor fairly consistently since at least Clinton, there’s really no point for a socially conservative WV coal miner to vote Democrat – he might as well vote Republican since the Republicans might actually do something about whatever social issue he’s concerned about.
Trinity
@JPL: This.
PurpleGirl
@Observer: Democrat legislation is…
Democrat IC
Democratic.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Observer:
Needs moar purity.
Purge baby purge!
Nick
@Observer:
It’s a good thing they fixed the economy and not made it worse. Unfortunately they still lost because idiots like you jump all over the lie that they made it worse because they didn’t suck you off.
Zifnab25
Two things:
One – what were we suppose to do to save this guy? I mean, as a hypothetical Idaho resident I’d have voted for him. But I’m not going to fund raise for a guy that rarely votes for my primary issues we I’ve got a host of liberal Dems much more worthy of my support.
Two: It was a Republican wave year, and he lost in a Republican district. Why are we shocked at this. Live by the bumper sticker low info voter, and die by the bumper sticker low info voter. Short of running as a Repub, I’m not clear what would have saved him.
Maybe the goal should be to convince Idaho voters to vote more progressively. Not to run Idaho candidates that talk more conservatively.
Omnes Omnibus
@Observer: The economy was in freefall. The “too small” stimulus and related measures stopped that. A bigger stimulus would have made this better; this is true, but saying the measures taken made things worse is simply not congruent with the facts.
General Stuck
@NonyNony:
A simply fantabulous spot on analysis Nony. Thank you!!
Nick
@NonyNony:
The bleed out from labor voters started long before Clinton. Didn’t Reagan beat Mondale in West Virginia despite Mondale running a very pro-labor campaign?
piratedan
@Observer: i don’t think we can simply paint it with such a broad brush. Giffords caucused with the Blue Dogs, yet she was there for every key piece of Democratic piece of legislation over the last two years. Some of those folks are pure posuers, i.e. Heath Shuler but there are some that are more likely identified as those social moderates, fiscal conservatives. You could label them as former Republican Moderates, Reagan Democrats or whatever you like, but they are out there and they are usually a lot more representative (I believe but I could be wrong) of the minds of the “independants” that comprise the folks that determine who gets elected every four years.
I’m a progressive, but I realise that if I want my legislative ideas to ever see the light of day, then I also have to work for “moderates” and then convince them of my arguments. Working for Republicans doesn’t work the same way because those folks that used to take each issue up on its merits are long gone from the GOP.
Fuck U II: The Duckening
The post is just red meat for the Juicebaggers. You are usually better than this mistermix.
RalfW
In other Republican shenanigans, the Iowans are pushing to force the University of Iowa to sell a Jackson Pollock painting that might fetch $140 million.
Because asset stripping works so well in the private sector, let’s do it to the schools too!
It’s perfect, because the fight over funding public art distracts from the obvious solution that the Republicans don’t ever want discussed: a modest tax increase to allow for a structural, rather than one-off, solution to the problem.
Observer
@Nick: An economy with over 9% unemployment for 18 straight months isn’t “fixed” by any reasonable standard you may want to apply except for the standard of “the soft bigotry of low expectations”.
Observer
@Omnes Omnibus:
The HAMP program made the economy worse. The tax cut deal likewise.
The tax cuts contained in the stimulus made the economy worse.
Announcing the Fed gov’t worker pay freeze made the economy worse.
Not pushing Bernanke and the Fed and not appointmenting anyone to the open Fed slot made the economy worse by omission.
There’s been lots of things over the past 2 years, minor and major, that the Obama White House has done to make the economy worse.
Llelldorin
This is a place where my head wars with my gut. Since I’m a Democrat, I’ll go with my head–but it leaves a bad taste.
My head knows perfectly well that the current Republicans are currently completely insane. I’d always thought that the Birchers were the outer limit of how crazy Republicanism could go, but the current crop seems to see Bircherism as the center, and are happily exploring crazier places.
After growing up arguing with Classic Republicanism, though, it’s really hard to accept that I now have to support candidates who are by-the-numbers what I opposed twenty years ago. Yes, “wrong” is better than “seems likely to eat the furniture and start pogroms,” but the fact that we’ve reached this point is a bitter pill to swallow.
Strandedvandal
I live in Idaho. I volunteered for Minnick’s campaign when he was elected. Minnick is a worthless piece of shit. He ran his reelection by trashing on Obama, by touting his republican voting record, by crowing how he voted against everything Democrats are trying to fix. Screw Walt Minnick, he pissed on every Democrat in this state, and expected us to just shut up and vote for him.
Lt. Slothrop
That was a joke? If so, this guy should replace Leno.
Nick
@Observer:
I guess then FDR never “fixed” the Great Depression with the New Deal, as unemployment didn’t drop below 9% until World War II, thanks for pointing out what it failure it was. I was so misguided all these years.
anon84
@Nick:
You could go back to the ’72 when the DFHs wrested control from the machine (Unions) to make McGovern the candidate and the Unions (Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’) left the Democratic party in the lurch to join hands with the Southern Segregationists.
Nick
@Zifnab25:
In a 50-state strategy, yeah, seeing as he’s the only Democrat capable of being elected in Idaho.
It’s funny that the very people who long bashed Rahm actually agree with his strategies and don’t realize it.
Nick
@anon84:
hmm, and here I thought the DFH liked labor and labor liked the DFH
NobodySpecial
@Nick: Rahm was not a supporter of the 50 state strategy and pretending he was is not helpful. He wanted to concentrate on a handful of districts…the infamous ‘triple bank shot’. Idaho would never have been on Rahm’s radar.
Corner Stone
@Strandedvandal:
Yeah, but did he ever make a birther joke at CPAC?
Because that seems to be the standard mistermix is trolling with in this post.
Corner Stone
@Nick:
Rahm wanted to concentrate funds on nearly unelectable corporatist candidates who would be beholden to him while in Congress.
IMO, no one is agreeing with Rahm’s strategy.
Nick
@NobodySpecial:
I never said he was. Actually I said the exact opposite. Rahm didn’t want to fight for seats like Idaho-1 because the only people who can win are Minnicks. Oddly enough, that’s exactly what Rahm’s biggest bashers have been saying lately.
The 50 state strategy gives you Minnicks. Rahm’s strategy gives you what we have now.
Nick
@Corner Stone:
And I suppose instead we got, what? ELECTABLE corporatist candidates?
NobodySpecial
@Nick: This is, of course, arrant nonsense used to placate the left in this country.
As I’ve mentioned before, the process looks like this according to the persons pushing it.
Step 1: Elect Blue Dog.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Elect Liberal!
Of course, the reality is that they want Blue Dogs and Step 2 never never never happens, because the Blue Dog will not advocate for liberal positions or liberal politicians and will, in fact, run from them at light speed.
Corner Stone
@Nick: Whoooosh.
kindness
@mistermix: Very poor snark indeed. Here you are kicking ‘damn libruls’ because a Blue Dog lost in Idaho. Like DKos or FDL had anything to do with this guy’s losing to an even worse schmuck.
I’ll laugh when you come up with reasoned examples, but kicking DFH’s just because you feel your ‘principled reasoned politicing’ is superior to damned hippies really doesn’t look good on you. It’s pretty damn shallow and unworthy if you ask me.
Now go back to your room without dinner till you find better shit to Front Page about.
Nick
@NobodySpecial:
No, because there is not Step 2 or Step 3. You’re not electing a liberal in Idaho-1 or most of the Blue Dog districts.
Yep, because Democrats in this district ARE NOT LIBERAL! Why is this so hard to understand?
The Ratfucker Assigned To Balloon Juice
@kindness:
Pssst- hey buddy! Over here- You forgot to mention Greenwald!If you want to really rile people up by pretending to come to the defense of people no one’s actually talking about, you gots to throw Greenwald in there. Gives it that extra pop you need to get to that 300th completely off topic post.
Strandedvandal
I actually could see Minnick making birther jokes. He got very close to that exact thing in his campaign commercials. The issue, for me, is that Minnick did not run as a Republican when he got elected. He ran as a centric Democrat. That’s about as good as it will get in this state for a while. He became a Republican as soon as he was elected. He was proud of that. He truly believed that Republicans would vote for him in Idaho because he adopted their platform. Raul Labrador is a douche, no doubt about it, but he’s honest about his doucehbaggery. I’ll never vote for him, becuase his principles and values are totally effed up, but at least he’s honest-ish
Merkin
@NobodySpecial:
That’s exactly what Nick said.
kindness
@Nick: Sorry, I don’t accept that. OK, I do accept that Democrats in Idaho are much more comfortable with conservatives than I might be. But what I don’t accept is that the average conservative is a moron. they aren’t. I don’t accept that the Fox News version of ‘reality’ is the only version even Teabaggers will vote for, especially now that we see REAL Republican values in operation.
Here’s an example, look at all those Teabaggers who are against everything EXCEPT their pensions, their Social Security and their MediCare. Maybe, just maybe if a Democratic party person took the time to point out their supposed leaders (republicans) are doing everything they can to take away their precious benefits so that even bigger gobs of money can be thrown at those who are already exceedingly wealthy, that maybe, just maybe you might be able to convince SOME of these folks that Democrats aren’t their enemy and Fox News lies to them.
So that’s my Step 2 in a nutshell.
Merkin
@kindness:
Meet more of them
Again, meet more of them. I had a debate the other day with three conservatives who proceeded to tell me we have to give Wall St. execs bonuses because the taxes on them will pay for Medicaid, then they said how we have to cut their taxes and people on Medicaid need to get jobs.
Also, how are they going to point that out? Which corporate media outlet is going to allow Democrats to do that?
burnspbesq
@ kindness:
“Maybe, just maybe if a Democratic party person took the time to point out their supposed leaders (republicans) are doing everything they can to take away their precious benefits”
That person wont be able to be heard over the catcalls and cries of “Liar!”
The folks you are trying to reach cannot be swayed by facts or logic. They have their own reality, and they like it just fine, if it’s all the same to you.
kindness
@burnspbesq: Honestly, I have Teabagger friends. These are people I’ve known since college when they were simply surly, not politically crazy. The ones I know (N. Cali) are more libertarian than social conservatives. I’m not sayin’ they’d love them some gay weddings or saying anything good about President Obama, but they are consistent with their limited government notions.
You won’t see that in the Media. You won’t see them on Fox News. They don’t fit the narrative. But they are out there. You can reach people if you hit them with their enlightened self interest. Will they all become intellectually honest about those who want to bury them (repubs)by taking away their lifelines? No. I didn’t say that they would. But some of them, yes. And in tight districts where you have either a Blue Dog or a Republican, that is how you do it. That is your step 2. Will it progress to step 3? No, not in Idaho. But here in California it will. That’s where you go from Markos’ call going from ‘elect more Democrats’ to ‘elect better Democrats’.
So go ahead and say it can’t happen, won’t happen, it’s a waste of time. We all got the time till we don’t any more & then we won’t be here to care.
Paula
Wow, what country have you been living in for the last 10 years? I wanna go there.
Observer
@Nick:
That is correct, FDR never did “fix” the economy in the 30’s. But DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: here’s Nobel prize winner in Economics Paul Krugman explaining how FDR was on his way to “fixing” it until he decided that balancing the budget was more important and subsequently wrecked his recovery.
If you don’t like Krugman, I could find other Nobel prize winners to back that up if you want.
Oh and here’s Krugman again saying in advance how stupid Obama’s been and going to be on fixing the economy.
Gah.
Observer
@Nick:
That is correct, FDR never did “fix” the economy in the 30’s. But DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: here’s Nobel prize winner in Economics Paul Krugman explaining how FDR was on his way to “fixing” it until he decided that balancing the budget was more important and subsequently wrecked his “incomplete recovery” (Krugman’s words, not mine).
EDIT: And just in case you’re reading comprehension has dimished capacity, here’s Krugman’s summary at the end: “Implications for Obama: be inspired by FDR, but don’t imitate him slavishly. In particular, your economic policy should be bolder, not more cautious.”.
If you don’t like Krugman, I could find other Nobel prize winners to back that up if you want.
Oh and here’s Krugman again saying in advance how stupid Obama’s been and going to be on fixing the economy.
Gah.
Thymezone
My policy is to never patronize anything on the web that makes me watch — and listen to — a video just to find out what the fuck is being talked about.
I urge all net users to do the same … just say no to this lazy thuggery.
If the author of anything, anywhere doesn’t take the 60 seconds or so that it would take to quote out the key element of a video or audio file’s content, then fuck it. Click on and do something else.
If the author doesn’t have enough respect for his audience to do that, then I have no respect for that author.
Nick
@kindness: .
Hows that been working so far for you?
Bobby Thomson
Minnick was a fucking racist. Yeah, so is the alternative, but damn. This ain’t 1934 anymore.
Fuck U II: The Duckening
Everyone love and believes Nick the racist ratfucker. He’s so dreamy.
Nick
@Bobby Thomson:
It is in Idaho.