Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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

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

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Their freedom requires your slavery.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

People are weird.

Cole is on a roll !

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Let there be snark.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

I really should read my own blog.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

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Hitting Unsubscribe

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Yesterday Rush Limbaugh issued an obviously sarcastic rant about the killing of bin Laden. Andrew Sullivan’s reaction was that Limbaugh was “going out of his way to celebrate Obama’s singular role”. Even after his readers alerted him that Limbaugh was being sarcastic, Sully added:

Some readers seem to think Limbaugh is being sarcastic. I didn’t.

After it dawns on him that Limbaugh wasn’t serious, and about the time that Media Matters posted the clip embedded above where Rush points and laughs at a Hill item that says essentially the same thing as Sully did, he posts a “world may be flat, opinions differ” item about what Limbaugh said. Finally, seven hours after it was obvious to anyone who listened to the three minutes excerpted above, he begrudgingly admits that “It’s become pretty clear it was sarcasm.”

Because this happened so quickly, the only difference between it and the lengthy Ryan fiasco was that Sullivan didn’t have time to shower his critics with Moore awards for being insufficiently respectful while pointing out the bloody obvious.

I can stomach wrongheaded analysis, different political views, bad musical taste and a whole host of other annoyances if the blog I’m reading at least gets the facts right. Sullivan is wrong on the facts far too much of the time to be trusted on anything, and when he’s wrong, he commits the even worse sin of being unable to issue a speedy and complete correction. I’ve subscribed to his blog for years, but I hit unsubscribe this morning with very little regret and a fair amount of relief.

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He’s a complicated man that no one understands

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One of you wrote something a while ago that I’ve repeated a dozen times in conversation. It was about how police decide who will serve on SWAT teams and the gist was that they ask “who wants to be on a SWAT team” and if you put your hand up that means they will never let you be a on a SWAT team ever. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s a very smart idea, at least to me.

I thought of this when I was reading Bobo’s piece about Osama bin Laden. It’s a predictable profile, Osama has a flaccid handshake yet he inspires hard men, etc. When I read the last two paragraphs, I understood where Bobo and the other neocons are coming from. I can’t promise you that my Bobo obsession is over now, but whereas once I was blind, now I see.

In short, Osama Bin Laden seemed to live in an ethereal, postmodern world of symbols and signifiers and also a cruel murderous world of rage and humiliation. Even the most brilliant intelligence analyst could not anticipate such an odd premodern and postglobalized creature, or could imagine that such a creature would gain such power.

I just wish there were a democratic Bin Laden, that amid all the Arab hunger for dignity and freedom there was another inexplicable person with the ability to frame narratives and propel action — for good, not evil.

I heard this kind of thing from my friends on the left when I was a local blogger a few years ago, that if liberals could believe with the same intensity that conservatives do, we could have our own Fox News, write our own Lee Greenwood songs, and convert some chunk of the Applebee’s-going masses to our cause by sheer force of conviction. It’s seductive, the idea that all one needs to advance the greater good is a few tough-but-tender true believers whose flaccid handshakes go straight to your heart (like a cannonball).

Like most alluring ideas, it is bullshit. Galt’s Gulch and forty-six virgins in heaven motivate zealots precisely because they are part of larger, impractical, unworkable fantasies. A “democratic Osama bin Laden” is an oxymoron, because accepting democracy means accepting compromise, not flying a plane into a building — or refusing to raise raise the debt ceiling — to further some abstract cause.

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You See, I Take These Glasses Off, She Looks Like a Regular Person, Doesn’t She? Put ‘Em Back On… Formaldahyde Face

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Sociopaths live, and we are surrounded by them. Here’s Sullivan awarding Thoreau with a Moore Award for rhetoric showing insufficient deference to the state and to the post Osama bloodlust. The offending quote:

So many awful things have happened in the battles to find this man, so many awful things have been “justified” in the name of responding to his attacks, that killing him won’t fix a damn thing. There is no justice here. He started it, but our leaders have continued it, and it will not stop.

Oh, the vapors! Pointing out we’ve done horrible things is so Un-American and such a downer. Hush, you! I’m on a bloodlust high!

Here is Sullivan, a few hours later, discussing the political benefits for Obama of killing bin Laden. And for fun, here is Sullivan quoting Frum, both exuberant that this finally will show the doubters:

David Frum hopes “we have at last seen the end of this ugly insinuation that there is something less than fully American about the black president with the exotic name:

    President Obama has performed the first job of an American president: he has used the power of the nation well to defeat the nation’s enemies and defend the nation’s people. After an interval for celebration of yesterday’s accomplishment, it will be back to politics as usual. But let’s hope that this time, the usual will have this difference: that the administration can be criticized as “liberal” without being libeled as “alien.”

Because, as we all know, there is nothing more American than killing foreigners! Look, I hated Osama too, and I am glad the man is dead and buried where no one can ever build a tomb or monument to his evil, but there is something sick about someone who tries to shut down speech as mild and tepid as what Thoreau wrote and then going on and cheering the political and other benefits. I know which one of the above quotes I find repulsive.

You See, I Take These Glasses Off, She Looks Like a Regular Person, Doesn’t She? Put ‘Em Back On… Formaldahyde FacePost + Comments (214)

And In Programming On Other Channels…

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Not to distract from the day of (ex) Osama (in which I’m wallowing as much as the next fella)…but just in case anyone wants just a touch of variety in their bloggy diet, here’s a peeve I picked up from this a.m.’s breakfast reading.

The piece is actually a good one by Jamer Surowiecki, describing how the long term budget issues facing the US are not those of deficit spending, per se, but of health care costs running consistently ahead of inflation GDP growth [per Acontra below].  It’s a fair account, accurate as far as I can tell on a quick read, and Surowiecki captures the nub of the matter precisely when he writes:

The ideal system, for most voters, would guarantee all seniors reasonable health care, stop the debt from getting out of control, and keep paying health-care providers as before. The problem is that you can only do two of those things at once.

Obama, as Surowiecki correctly notes, opts for door number three — choosing to change the payment structure for health care.

He gets it a bit wrong, IMHO, when he implies that Ryan similarly preserves his own two out of three options.  In fact, the Republican blueprint neither guarantees all seniors reasonable care, nor does its voucher plan control costs, as Surowiecki does say, given that the private insurers the GOP wants to feed (how’s that for a mandate?) have already been shown to be crappier at cost control than Medicare.  But if he is a little too kind to the feckless Ryan — a bit too fair and balanced, as it were — that’s not what gets my goat.

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Meet Cooper

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And in other news…

A little over a year ago our old coonhound passed away. Just a few months before that we had lost another longtime coonhound and pack member. For some months we were left only with the goldfish. Then last fall we adopted Logan, a rescued cat. Around Christmas time I was (like a fool) trying to take the poor thing out for a walk. Walking a cat turned out to be like trying to make sense of Libertarian gibberish. There is no point to it. Now Logan goes in and out on his own and so far, so good. He seems happy and so am I. He even seems at peace with the latest occupant of the house, Cooper. They hang out together, and often wait together at the back door for me to let them in:

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Cooper is a rescued pup. He seems to be a mix of several breeds. We’ve heard dachshund, rat terrier, jack russell and a few others. He does have a decent hound dog howl and that always makes me smile and remember old Ben. He is a small dog–smaller than the cat–and that is interesting after years of living with two big and lazy old hound dogs. He is also pretty damn active. We have been training him and he seems to be teachable–which is also nice.

After a year or so without a dog in the house, it is great to have another one in the pack.

So here is Cooper:

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In the BJ tradition, I may file updates on his progress.

And now that the introduction is done, feel free to use this for an Open Thread.

Cheers

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