I don’t often visit the New York Times website.
There is far too much risk that I might accidentally be exposed to something written by David Brooks, at which point I would have to poke out my own eyes with a pair of chopsticks to save my sanity. At 92, I need to hang on to as many of my senses as I have left. As I noted on a thread the other day, when I was younger and had fortified myself with a good dose of anti-psychotics, I once tried writing a detailed critique of one of Brooks’ articles, only to end up with a page with the words “David Brooks is a dickhead” scribbled one hundred times.* Ever since then, I have limited myself to writing nasty stories about him being humiliated by old ladies and then posting links to them on his Facebook Wall.
Anyway, yesterday evening I was searching for shirtless photos of Aaron Schock – I know it’s wrong, but I have a weakness for men who look like they’d cry for their mommy during sex – and must have clicked on the wrong link.
On its Room for Debate page, to which Mistermix has already referred, the Times has collected together a team of crack political analysts (assuming that by “crack” one means the wide space between the top of a plumber’s shorts and the bottom of his shirt) to debate the question “Who’s Missing From the G.O.P. Race?“.
Surprisingly, the answer is apparently not “Everyone with an IQ over 4 and Sarah Palin”.
Linda Chavez (whose article is wonderfully entitled “Big Egos Need Not Apply”) distinguishes herself by noting that:
The G.O.P. has a deeper bench than the Democrats…
follows it up with the suggestion that:
the Democrats are going to have a tough time with Hispanic voters, who may choose to stay home on Election Day.
and then plumps for John #notintendedtobeafactualstatement Kyl, who would surely have the brown people and the womens lining up twelve deep to vote for him.
As noted, Ramesh Ponnuru’s choice is Jeb Bush. Ramesh is careful to remain forked-tongue-in-cheek:
6) And if nominated, he could save Republicans the expense of buying new bumper stickers by picking Elizabeth Cheney as his running mate.
and even says that:
4) His presence in the race would also force an overdue Republican reckoning with his brother’s legacy. If Republicans really want to repudiate George W. Bush as a big-government conservative, rejection of Jeb Bush would allow them to do so definitively.
Nevertheless, you can feel the hope for eight more years of Bush oozing out of Ramesh like flop-sweat out of Rush Limbaugh’s back at a Snoop Dogg concert.
Fergus Cullen, aware enough to notice that the GOP has little chance of winning with the pack of whackaloons, assholes and magic underpants wearers who have currently thrown their tinfoil-hats into the ring, pines for “A Mainstream Alternative”. One of his choices is Mitch Daniels, which suggests that by “mainstream alternative” Fergus simply means “doesn’t dribble on himself that much when he speaks”.
John J. Pitney Jr and Dan Schnur each disappoint by actually making sense for whole sentences at a time, concluding that only a fucking idiot would choose to enter the race at this point anyway.
My favorite though is Peter Wehner, who inserts his tongue lightly into Mitch Daniels:
… recently delivered the best speech any major G.O.P. figure has given in years.
– frankly a pretty low bar – but then gets so excited about Paul Ryan I expect Petey had to Windex his computer keyboard afterwards:
He’s the author of the most impressive conservative governing blueprint in decades, and maybe ever … offered a comprehensive, wise and politically courageous answer … rock-solid … extremely popular … excels in his style and public discourse … philosophically well-grounded, a passionate and scrappy advocate for his views … eschews dishonest and ugly rhetoric …. personally modest and unpretentious rather than arrogant and morally preening. Paul Ryan, in other words, is the antithesis of Barack Obama.
Personally, I hope all of these people run. The more clowns there are in the primary clown car – painting their faces black and white, honking their horns, squirting each other with confetti made of hanging chads, and waving fetuses made up with sad clown makeup – the better.
* A fond shout-out to JGabriel, who noted that writing out “David Brooks is a dickhead” 100 times is actually surprisingly entertaining.
[Image: Le Trapeziste Et Le Clown – Charles Giron (1850-1914)] [Cross-posted at Sarah, Proud and Tall.]
taylormattd
Who isn’t? Yum.
martha
I know this should gross me out, but all I can do is laugh. I’ve known a couple of these types over the years and this line is PERFECT. Sarah, I’m so jealous of your prose stylings.
(Your line about the Queen looking like a giant yellow peep did almost cost me a new keyboard a few weeks ago…)
MattF
You just wonder… did reality wander off to some ‘special’ place while I wasn’t looking? Do these folks’ care-givers know that that they are out writing stuff for the New York Times? Is there an emergency number I should call?
RossInDetroit
The GOP has dug itself into such a deep hole that they need until 2016 to decompress on the way back up. I suppose they do have a deep bench in the sense that everyone is sitting on their ass.
gogol's wife
This is a great post. I’m going to read it over several times today when I need cheering up.
Amir_Khalid
@taylormattd:
Shirtless photos of The Situation abound. It’s near enough the same thing.
Spaghetti Lee
@RossInDetroit:
A bench so deep it’s sinking into the ground.
Hunter Gathers
@taylormattd: I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Aaron Schock has about as much interest in women as Larry Craig. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
James E. Powell
These Republican political analysts may sound more cracked than crack, but they know two things will always be true.
First, they can count on the 27% to be there for whomever the Republican elites choose. None of them will stay home, not while there is Kenyan soshulist in their White House. And they will do much more than vote. They will be playing the part of Aggrieved Real Muricans in all those stories that FOX, CNN, and everyone else has already scripted.
Second, they can count on the corporate press/media not only to swallow any campaign bio or narrative that the Republicans give them. These are, after all, the people who had most of the country comparing George W. Bush to Winston Churchill.
We can laugh at them all we want, but they remain formidable and determined adversaries.
MonkeyBoy
While entertaining, going to Amazon and creating or voting up snarky tags on his latest book is more therapeutic.
scav
Schlockmania has hit the UK too: The soft underbelly of the right’s hard abs
JGabriel
Sarah @ Top:
Aw, shucks, thank you ma’am. I love front-page attention; it makes me feel validated.
MonkeyBoy:
I think you underestimate it’s therapeutic value.
Here’s proof of the therapeutic (and entertainment) value in calling David Brooks a dickhead 100 times:
See? It just makes the day a little brighter.
.
taylormattd
@Hunter Gathers: Don’t worry, I’m not a woman. :)
Tone in DC
Isn’t that Clay Aiken?
Just sayin’.
piratedan
just because you have a deep bench doesn’t mean that this single A franchise can compete any better in the big leagues, just sayin’. There’s not an original idea amongst them and the only “guy” with a plan (Cain) is still playing in rookie ball.
Mr. Long Form
So, Paul Ryan is “personally modest and unpretentious rather than arrogant and morally preening….in other words, [he]is the antithesis of Barack Obama.” I think I have finally cracked the super-secret code of wingnuttia: by arrogant and morally preening, he means black and morally black; whereas Ryan is personally white and white. You know, this could be very handy. Cop: “You were driving 50 in a 30 mile per hour zone” Me: “But I’m personally modest and unpretentious — hey look at that arrogant and morally preening guy in that rusted out old beater” Cop: “Oh, yeah, what was I thinking. Here is your $100 CrimeStoppers Reward.”
David Brooks (not that one)
Hope you’re not reading the comments, then. Or we could just go with the seeing-but-insane option.
David Brooks (not that one)
@JGabriel:
Thanks for my new sig block!
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Ugh. That is infuriating. Just on presentation, you’d have to go back to Bush I to find a more restrained and WASPy president. I think it’s more that he’s an ugly, arrogant color.
artem1s
Did the Presidency suddenly become a team sport? How many quarterbacks and pitchers do they think are on the field at one time?
Anoniminous
Having 25 relief pitchers on your baseball team creates a “deep bench” of … relief pitchers. Run into a problem when you have to find someone to play shortstop.
asiangrrlMN
I fucking hate clowns. With a passion. And, that’s how much I hate the current bench of the Republican Party, me and Stephen Colbert excepted, of course.
And, I don’t get the Aaron Schlock, er, Schock thing. Not my type at all. Then again, I’m about as far from a mommy figure as you can imagine, so there’s that.
Ms. Sarah, I was just worrying about you ‘coz you hadn’t really posted in awhile. I’m glad the guardsman’s friend didn’t wear you out completely.
Joeyess
that’s it! one more Bobo post and I’m going to beer bong a gallon of jäger-bombs, walk into the local applebees scream that the “world must go Galt!!!” then proceed to vomit in the salad bar.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Anoniminous:
or, when the southern and midwestern programs began offering football scholarships to black athletes, in order to assuage the small towns they relied on for fans, the programs swelled the ranks of the walk-ons, which effectively gave them a deep but unproductive bench.
Anne Laurie
@artem1s:
As long as they’ve bought off five of the nine refs/umpires…
Ecks
@RossInDetroit: Decompressing? Hell, they’ve doubled down on compression so hard they’re putting pick up trucks into the back of even bigger pickup trucks just so they can get be driven repeatedly back and forth over their fore-brains, in order to compress their neo cortex into a microscopically thin pulp, while leaving enough ancillary pressure on their reptilian hind-brains to keep them swilling wood alcohol and calling thinking it’s tea.
dj spellchecka
if you have a moment, click thru to the times…
each essay has a comment thread and the responses to linda chavez in particular are full of win…
mclaren
As much as I admire your writing, Angry Black Lady, your latest post is a disgrace.
Shame on you.
For shame.
Fisking the first paragraph of your woefully deceptive and hopelessly casuistical post we have the following:
Do you have any hard evidence to show that Greenwald’s article is “steeped” in hypocrisy? Your description of Greenwald’s article as a “screed” itself represents the kind of slanting you claim Greenwald does — so right with your first sentence, you convict yourself of the crime of which you accuse Greenwald…without providing any evidence that you have anything other than a disagreement with Greenwald’s position.
No, he successfully rakes Eric Holder over the coals. Holder is the Attorney General who, you will recall, announced to all and sundry that the Obama Administration was backing off on raiding state medical marijuana dispensaries. Eric Holder’s claim was, of course, a lie. Because Eric Holder has actually stepped up the pace of raids on state medical marijuana dispensaries — he just stopped publicizing them.
So Eric Holder deserves to be raked over the coals for gross hypocrisy, crass two-faced lying, and appalling deceptiveness and misrepresentation.
Shame on you, Angry Black Lady. For shame.
No, that’s deceptive and inaccurate. Glenn Greenwald didn’t “attempt” to rake over the coals Eric Holder’s for his `kill that al-Awlaki guy stance.’
Glenn Greenwald deservedly and almost alone (unbelievably) has hammered at Eric Holder for violating the 5th amdnement of the constitution and the 6th amendment of the constitution and the 8th amendment of the constitution and the 14th amendment of the constitution.
You’re supposed to be a lawyer, Angry Black Lady, so listen up: the fifth amendment of the constitution of the United States requires that no citizen of the united states can be deprived of life or liberty without due process. That’s not “my opinion.” That’s not “some crackpot belief.” That’s not “dirty hippies ranting.” That’s written in the constitution of the United States.
Eric Holder betrayed his oath of office and violated the constitution of the united states by signing off on a brief which claimed that a citizen of the United States had no standing in court to oppose an illegal unconstitutional order by the president to assassinate him.
If you actually are a lawyer, you’d damn well better get clear in your mind that trials and charges aren’t some optional luxury here in America. Maybe in Stalinist Russia they dispensed with trials and charged before killing people; maybe in Pol Pot’s Cambodia the leader could ordered someone put to death without bothering to charge him with a crime.
But here in America, that shit won’t fly. If the government wants to put an American citizen to death, they have god damned got to put him on trial first.
Get that through your head, Angry Black Lady. If you can’t grasp that basic fact, you don’t deserve to be a lawyer.
Now you’ve descended to the lowest kind of sophistry. And in defense of extrajudicial assassination.
If Holder signed off on the brief, he’s responsible for what’s in it. Deal with it.
Shame on you, ABL. For shame. You are playing puerile word games in a failed and futile effort to defend the indefensible murder of an American citizen by a death squad. This is the kind of thing Americans used to condemn back when the El Salvador mirror-sunglassed colonels ordered their death squads to murder nuns.
Now you’re playing word games to try to defend this kind of goddamn atrocity.
What the hell has gone wrong with you, Angry Black Lady?
You of all people ought to be sensitive to extrajudicial murders. Black people have been the victims of lynchings for hundreds of years. I don’t need to tell you the brutal and barbaric nature of extrajudicial killings like the lynchings of the Scottsboro Boys — yet here you are, eagerly trying to justify this kind of unjustifiable and indefensible extrajudicial murder of a U.S. citizen, Anwar Al Awlaki.
Shame on you, Angry Black Lady. For shame.
Provide hard evidence that Greenwald’s article ‘seems to suggest’ what you claim he seems to suggest, or stand revealed as a liar and a character assassin.
90% of the time I’m right with you, ABL, but this time you have stepped in it. You’re gone right off the cliff. You have covered yourself with shame with this post and turned your name into an epithet as excremental and debased as the name of Vidkun Quisling.