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If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Come on, man.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

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

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Usually wrong but never in doubt

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Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

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You are here: Home / Sometimes I wish a rain would come and wash away all the scum of the city

Sometimes I wish a rain would come and wash away all the scum of the city

by | 49 Comments

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It wouldn’t be hard to write an artificial intelligence type program that produced this kind of idiocy:

This week, President Obama called him a social Darwinist. The conservative Club for Growth criticized him for wimping out on Medicare and military spending, and Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican, blasted him for not cutting tax rates more drastically.

I figure Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is head of the House Budget Committee, must be doing something right.

It’s not that “if both sides are complaining you must be doing something right” is incredibly fucking stupid the first time someone says it — though it is — it’s that these morons think it’s clever to repeat it a thousand times a day.

Can you imagine thinking such a thing? I simply cannot.

It’s hard for me to have much optimism about a future in which the “paper of record” prints this kind of pap.

Reader Interactions

49Comments

  1. 1.

    General Stuck

    I figure Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is head of the House Budget Committee, must be doing something right.

    That’s out of state, man.

    It’s going to be an ‘up is down’ kind of election, with all the pretty flow of colors from dropping a hit of strychnine laced Purple Micro-dot acid.

  3. 3.

    Cacti

    What makes Paul Ryan such a revolting hypocrite is that he used his father’s Social Security survivor’s benefits to pay his way through school.

    Having climbed up the ladder to a better life, in good Randian fashion, zombie-eyes wants to pull it up behind him.

  4. 4.

    middlewest

    Stalin was criticized by both Hitler and FDR. He must have been doing something right!

  7. 7.

    David Koch

    You talkn to me?

    You talkn to me?

    I don’t see anyone else around here,

    you talkn to me?

  9. 9.

    Hill Dweller

    The AP told me Obama’s embrace of the insurance manadate was moving to the left. Both sides!

  11. 11.

    MattF

    Just to underline the problem here– Stewart’s argument normalizes the arguments of right-wing crackpots. And yes, indeed, Club for Growth-ers and Ron Paul are right-wing crackpots. And when Obama notes this and points out the background of their crackpot ideologies, it’s brutal partisanship, needless to say.

  12. 12.

    Baud

    By the way, the person who’s doing something right in that story is President Obama.

  14. 14.

    butler

    Not to get all Godwin on this, but couldn’t this apply to the Axis powers? Getting attacked (quite literally, as well as philosophically) from both sides must have meant they were doing something right?

  15. 15.

    the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)

    Who the fuck is James B. Stewart and why would anyone give a flying fuck what he thinks, and after Judy Miller and Curveball, anyone who believes anything because it’s printed in “the paper of record” or any other corporate media deserves the ass fucking that they’re going to get as a result of that belief.

  16. 16.

    jl

    What kind of article is this thing anyway? Here is the heading:

    Common Sense
    For All the Furor Over Ryan’s Plan, It’s a Place to Start
    By JAMES B. STEWART
    Published: April 6, 2012

    Is this a blog, an opinion piece, a ‘new analysis’.

    This is an example of tendentious infotainment crud which masks third rate advocacy as news, or analysis for something informative.

    Seriously, what is this supposed to be?

    It is the intellectual equivalent of a puff piece for a magic paste that you rub on your belly to make the flab go away. At least that has to be ID’s as an advertisement in small type someplace on the page.

  17. 17.

    magurakurin

    All the animals come out at the convention – manwhores, caribou pussies, dog buggers, drama queens, bond market faires, oxycotin dopers, jesus junkies. Sick, venal. Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets.

  19. 19.

    schrodinger's cat

    If everyone thinks you are wrong, may be you are wrong. Speaking of Stewarts, is it just me or is Jon Stewart sounding more and more Broderite these days.

  22. 22.

    Suffern ACE

    @butler: They had some good ideas. They just went too far. Or so I used to be told by apologists until it became trendy to rewrite history to make the axis into progressive ground zero.

  23. 23.

    butler

    @the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady): I’d never heard of him, but apparently he’s quite the accomplished writer for the Times. He even has a Pulitzer for journalism for exposing insider trading and other Wall Street Shenanigans, about which he later wrote a book. But that was 25 years ago, so maybe he’s settled into a life of getting paid a lot to churn out the occasional shitty column.

  24. 24.

    butler

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Speaking of Stewarts, is it just me or is Jon Stewart sounding more and more Broderite these days.

    He has recently had one of his temporary spells of Broderitis. I’m not too concerned, they flare up occasionally but the GOP can be counted on to cure it by doing something crazy.

  28. 28.

    Tonal Crow

    How about “If Republicans are doing it, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be wrong”?

  29. 29.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik

    If it’s not a corollary to the Golden Mean Fallacy, it should be: If you’re told you’re wrong by ‘both sides’, sometimes you really are just wrong.

  33. 33.

    the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)

    @butler:

    Ruth Marcus has a Pulitzer “for her intelligent and incisive commentary on a range of subjects”. LOL.

    ETA: Correction: she was a finalist. Still a fucking joke.

  35. 35.

    David Koch

    In truth, Hitler was criticized by both the left and right, which can only mean he was a moderate.

  39. 39.

    Peter

    “if both sides are complaining you must be doing something right” is a direct corollary to to the South Park Fallacy, which is:

    “if two sides are fighting, they’re both wrong.”

  40. 40.

    RSA

    ((Democrat (?* ?x) criticized Republican (?* ?x) for (?* ?z) period (?* ?y) responded (?* ?w))
    (Do you often feel that both sides do it?))

  43. 43.

    Judge Crater

    Stewart really is a turd. He appears occasionally on CNBC to proffer the same kind of smarmy rationalizations for why the super rich are wealth creators and how the rest of us should just worship them and keep our proletarian mouths shut. He’s entranced by the powerful and thinks that the bullshit he spews is erudite and contrarian. He is the salmonella that our rancid world of elite journalism produces.

  44. 44.

    mclaren

    Meanwhile, Obama hits a new low — authorizes indictment of a waterboarding whistleblower.

    The torturers go free, never indicted…but the people who leak the news of the torture to the press? Why, THEY get indicted and sent to prison!

    Celebrate the HOPE and CHANGE! It’s CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN!

  45. 45.

    Gex

    What a novel new idea. If EVERYBODY thinks you are wrong, you must be right.

    Contrarianism is all that matters. What will happen when we are all contrary? Can we get back to studying things and then trying to learn from our studies? Or are we forever stuck rejecting what we learn so we can be cool?

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
    __
    “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
    __
    No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA’s application of the medieval confession technique.
    __
    The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou’s claim.

    Yep. Clearly he was a whistleblower trying to bring down the torture regime, and now he’s a poor innocent being railroaded by the evil Obama administration. The fact that his claims were immediately picked up and promulgated by the right wing media as proof positive that torture works is just a co-inkydink, right, mclaren?

  49. 49.

    Steve S

    It’s not that “if both sides are complaining you must be doing something right” is incredibly fucking stupid the first time someone says it—though it is—it’s that these morons think it’s clever to repeat it a thousand times a day.

    That’s what I think every time some dipshit repeats ‘also, too’ or ‘wait for it’ for the 19,000th time.

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