Anne to the Lizay and reader P have already covered Bobo’s “when will Obama make Republicans stop hitting themselves“, but….
I often wonder show much conservative punditarama is stuff the pundit truly believes and how much is propaganda. Obama as evil genius makes for poor propaganda. So I think Bobo honestly thinks that Obama is employing a cynical Machiavellian divide-and-conquer strategy, possibly because some straight-arrow Republican Senator told him so.
Well, good, it is better to be feared than respected. If these morons think that Obama is a gay Kenyan wizard whose magic cannot be resisted, they’ll surrender that much quicker.
arguingwithsignposts
Bobo believes whatever the paycheck tells him to believe. He really is a very stupid man in so many ways, but he wears round glasses and sounds reasonable, so he gets a pass.
Linda Featheringill
?You shook me all night long?
The relevance escapes me.
However, I do like the new depiction of Obama as a powerful, brilliant force. Personally, I think he is a brilliant, hardworking Teddy Bear who now has some power. But whatever.
Raven
” Bobo honestly thinks ”
That’s where you went wrong.
Cacti
O/T but RIP to Stan “The Man” Musial, the greatest St. Louis Cardinal of them all.
Sad day for baseball with Weaver and Musial passing the same day.
Eric U.
I’m getting ads for bullet proof vests. Scary
Baud
The most persuasive propaganda is the one the propagandist honestly believes.
JWL
Or.. and I’m just spitballing here.. or Brooksie just isn’t all that smart.
Tom
@Linda Featheringill: Check Doug’s link to Think Progress in the post. Brooks had a republican politician get a little grabby at a meal.
“BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.”
arguingwithsignposts
@Cacti:
This is not directed at you, per se, but I really don’t understand the “sad day” thing when great people who have lead long, productive lives die in their 80s and 90s. Their productive years in the game are long gone, and those memories are to be cherished and celebrated. It’s not a sad day for baseball. It’s a day for baseball to remember and honor what they did. A sad day for baseball is when a fan dies falling out of the stands, or a young pitcher dies in his prime. That’s my thought, anyway.
BGinCHI
Wow.
They really are stupider than we thought they were, aren’t they?
Cacti
@arguingwithsignposts:
Sad in its finality.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Bobo has been confused for a very long time (why is the world not working according to the way I think it should? I have read many Great Books!), and he is of course a quietly but pathologically arrogant schmuck in the mold of Broder, but I think Michael Gerson is a True Believer, not given the slightest pause by the fact that Obama has not only heard of but read Reinhold Niebuhr:
“forced by the momentum of their ideology”… Goodnight, Rotating Tag Lines, wherever you are.
arguingwithsignposts
@Cacti: In that we ultimately all face our mortality, yes.
dmsilev
The perennial question: stupid or evil? Or both?
SiubhanDuinne
@Cacti: Very sad baseball day. Braves fan here, but gotta love and respect Musial and Weaver. May they both RIP.
eemom
ACDC is FINALLY on Itunes.
Raven
@eemom: So is the Heart Stairway to Heaven.
Baud
@eemom:
Awesome. Obama’s second term already bearing fruit.
Short Bus Bully
There’s a difference between the Grifter set and the True Believers who pay the salaries of the Grifters. According to my Book of Faces feed those true believers really do believe that they need guns to protect themselves from the “government” and that Obama just overthrew the 2nd Amendment with his last round of executive orders and no one is calling him on it.
They really do believe that the military, cops, and federal agents will rise up with them against the tyranny of the Democrats and usher in glorious (armed) revolution.
I try to pin them down on when they plan on opening fire on the police but then they get quiet.
The Grifters on the other hand? They don’t give a fuck about truth as long as the money and influence remains theirs.
redshirt
Obama is everything, and nothing. So dumb he needs a teleprompter! Yet so cunning as to strip of us all of FREEDOM! Also, gay Communist Kenyan alien socialist fascist usurper! Also, a bad Christian.
Frankensteinbeck
@Short Bus Bully:
If there is one thing the last four years have made abundantly clear, it’s that the con artists have fallen for their own hype. It’s not exactly a rare phenomenon, especially when something happens that rocks their worldview and makes them feel threatened and emotional.
EDIT – Because people do like specifics, I offer you Karl Rove the Ultimate Grifter breaking down on national television on election night because he bought the Skewed Polls. Romney was caught in private admitting it was less about his taxes and more about sticking it to the lazy 47% underclass. They’re now junkies as well as dealers.
Nunca el Jefe
OT: maybe this has already been suggested but shouldn’t the tag be updated to DBag teaching a class at Yale?
Comrade Javamanphil
@redshirt: Nooners whole column this week is how unprecedented Obama has been in being mean to the GOP controlled House. I really hope Biden and Obama high five when they read it.
Bruce S
It’s pretty simple really – Brooks is struggling mightily to retain some sliver of reality in which a GOP “moderate” such as himself is relevant. He basically acknowledged in the column that he was blowing smoke out of his ass. But…hey…at this point in time that’s David Brook’s job description. He’s the designated GOPer to reassure the PBS/NYT crowd that there is some thread of “conservatism” tied to the GOP that isn’t totally fucking nuts or cynical beyond redemption. But, of course, in the land of realpolitique, there isn’t. (Unless, of course, you’re running for governor in a Blue State like NJ.) But as a national party, Brooks is trying to rationalize something that is totally pathological. He as much as says so. He’s not stupid – but he does sound increasingly desperate and frivolous.
Johannes
@Tom: which Brooks still managed to turn into “both sides do it.”
Edited for typo, my bad.
Comrade Javamanphil
@SiubhanDuinne: Born and raised in Baltimore in the 70s and 80s. I have to believe Earl is arguing with the Grim Reaper about whether he is really dead or not.
Marshall
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
This is what happens when you are outplayed in chess, or politics.
piratedan
i’m sorry, but this thread is seriously lacking in the “harumph”s and “heh, indeed” considering the subject matter. Also, where’s the designated troll and the obvious projection post?
Bruce S
@Comrade Javamanphil:
This seems to have become the theme for silk-stocking GOPers. It’s a way of deflecting the fact that they have no influence on the cohort of cranks, crooks and crazies with whom they have cast their lot.
Baud
@Marshall:
Or tiddlywinks.
sb
I read two biographies on Musial and both were boring as all hell because there is only so many ways you can write that Musial was loved by all who played with him, was a wonderful family man… I mean, acknowledging there were a few whose talents were greater, there aren’t many who I would rather have in the clubhouse.
Just a terrific, terrific ballplayer and a first-class human being who didn’t care to glorify himself.
Just One More Canuck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Reminds me of the movie Ruthless People: “This may very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth … perhaps we should shoot him”
Roger Moore
I believe that the quote you’re looking for is that it’s better to be feared than to be loved. The point is that fear is a kind of genuine respect, while most of what a politician gets as love is people sucking up in the hopes of getting goodies.
General Stuck
All the pol capital you see today for Obama, has been in part the unraveling of the GOP, but it is equally so with Obama following faithfully to a high degree, what he promised to do in his first term. Or try to do within the limits of his office. All the glad handing the wingnuts, while not giving them what they wanted, but engaging them as though they had a chance for it, is why Obama owns the GOP right now.
It is not really 11 dimensional chess, so much as an accurate reading of the electorate, the part that was at least open to him as president. And doggedly sticking to it, despite the howls of the pro left and progressives. Building credibility, even from being a bit pollyanish at times, has now paid off with a loyal voter following. And credibility is the golden coin of the realm in American politics.
Coming into office with two wars going on, he has by the numbers, wound both down per the promised plan. And he has methodically rebuilt the economy, or at least breathed life back into it from its deathbed in 2008, bringing the left down on his shit every step of the way. Just enough reform to not kill the patient, but enough to maybe stifle some of the worst practices brought on by conservative governance for 30 years.
John Dickerson, who I usually think of as a firebagging putz, does have an interesting article up, that posits the question can Obama once and for all destroy the GOP, at least the disease of a party it has been. I don’t know about that, but Obama has chosen via current events, to take on the beast where it lives in the paranoid shadows of gun worship.
The problem he faces after committing his pol capital to this project, is a matter of intensity for this issue. The public is behind him for cleaning up some of the neck deep with gun culture we live in, but the opponents of such are very very committed to stop him. So we shall see.
majii
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I don’t think one can get any further down in the cesspool of denial than Gerson, Bobo, Rubin, and the other RW writers, radio entertainers,and pundits. One knows that these paid RW shills have gone over the cliff when they begin believing the BS they write and say. If truth be known, they’ve contributed greatly to the predicament that the republicans find themselves in today. If you write and say BS that has no link to reality, you shouldn’t be “shocked” when the world shows you that you’ve been wrong all along. Instead of admitting that they were wrong, Rove’s contract with Fox News is renewed and Bobo, Gershon, Rubin and others keep their high paying jobs where they can continue to live in their alternate reality and feed the RW low information voters the misinformation they crave. Sad.
PeakVT
Speaking of Bobo, did somebody spike E.J. Dionne’s coffee yesterday? I decided to torture myself and list to the weekly face-off for a change. Dionne started out his part by saying that the debt ceiling was a fake crisis and the real crisis was unemployment being so high still. I was shocked.
eemom
@Raven:
I trust you’ve seen the video of the performance at Kennedy Center…..that was, in fact, awesome.
jayboat
@Bruce S:
hoocoodanode?
Capt Obvious, over and out.
Baud
@General Stuck:
In a way, Mitch McConnell said it best. They put all their eggs in the basket of making Obama a one-termer. Having failed at that, they now have nothing left in the tank except gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, and their coterie of aging sycophants in the media.
majii
@Comrade Javamanphil:
IMO, Noonan has never met an alternate RW universe she would refuse to live in. She is still living in the 1980s, still celebrating St. Ronnies’s presidency and has recently revealed herself as a wannabe graphologist. The sh*t she wrote the other day where she said President Obama’s signature shows he’s an “angry, arrogant, hostile black man” was a prime example of someone who has a huge media platform that they’re abusing. My dad shared a lot of the president’s qualities, including living his life as a black man, being a smart cookie and a great father and husband, and I never viewed him as angry, arrogant, and/or hostile. Noonan’s problem is that she thinks that the president should always kowtow to Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, and the other white men in Congress. She so reminds me of President Andrew Johnson after the Civil War when he said that only white men should be involved in Reconstruction efforts(paraphrasing.) It’s no wonder that she can be a woman and sit silently by as republican lawmakers try to strip us of our ability to make our own healthcare decisions–she doesn’t give a damn what happens to the rest of us as long as a republican is in the WH and they control Congress.
Frank
Driftglass does a most excellent takedown of BoBo. It’s the second half of the post; the first half quotes the other takedowns.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-thing-is-even-if-it-is-just-for.html
I recommend his podcast highly.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Just One More Canuck: Or A Fish Called Wanda:
Bobo: “APES don’t read Reinhold Niebuhr!”
Jamie Lee Curtis: “They do, Bobo. They just don’t understand it.”
@majii: I think it is incumbent on Jennifer Rubin to prove to me that she is not an elaborate hoax. and La Nooners…. The fact that she wrote that crap about Elian’s dolphin-angels in utter and complete sincerity, and she is still taken seriously by the Beltway, is as good an example as any of a dozen others that our political establishment is intellectually bankrupt.
Peregrinus
@PeakVT:
I get the sense that E.J. Dionne gets pretty pissy if you go after his friends or his church, but as long as the debate is on policy is glad to put up his dukes.
Comrade Javamanphil
@majii: I actually think her problem is she knows Obama is eclipsing the Gipper and she just cannot handle that reality and so is flinging any poo she can. In an era of unprecedented filibusters, debt ceiling hostage taking and GOP obstructionism, she has the audacity to pull out the “unprecedented” argument against Obama? Saint Ronny is losing…and she knows it.
Roger Moore
@majii:
Shorter Nooners: Obama is uppity.
srv
@Baud: On this day, some celebrate Robert E Lee. Would that they listened:
Frankensteinbeck
@Comrade Javamanphil:
He is. They’ve been singing all of Reagan’s greatest hits nonstop, and are baffled that it’s not working. They remember so vividly banding together – rich asshole and racist asshole and warmongering asshole and religious asshole – and how great Reagan’s lies made them feel. They’re desperate to repeat that miracle.
burnspbesq
@Comrade Javamanphil:
I’m waiting to see Ron Luciano try to throw Earl out of Heaven.
General Stuck
@Baud:
I think a phenomenon we are going to see this second term, as Dickerson described it, are more and more old bulls of the GOP and other elder statesmen of that party, joining with, at least in principle some of Obama’s initiatives, that heretofore have been verboten with the witches brew of current far right republican power structures.
Such as comprehensive immigration reform, and all sorts of popular liberal prog issues the current wingnuts are so deeply kneejerk opposed to right now, with the nihilistic schemes to terrorize their way to getting their way. In some effort to salvage what remains of the republican and conservative brand for engagement and some respect for the democratic processes we live by. As The right wing is in dire danger of getting tattooed as fundamentally un American, outside the 27 percenter class.
We are already beginning to see that kind of attempted rescue. Returning to the prior formula of elections have consequences, and if you lose them, then you play the role of loyal opponent in a temporary minority status, while recognizing the people are currently agreeing with the other side, and your role is to moderate liberal governance with the role of keeping the other side honest and maybe getting at least some of your ideas added to the end results.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
There’s a small problem with that; Hell gets all the umpires.
JasonF
Bobo wants so desperately to be David Broder. And like Broder before him, he has decided that the two parties are symmetrical, and — facts be damned — he’s going to do whatever it takes to substantiate that preconception.
grandpa john
The words “David Brook” and any variations of the the word “honesty” should never be used in the same sentence. The first post said all one needs to know about Brooks
Frankensteinbeck
@General Stuck:
I think a lot of that is despair. We used to find the culture war to be weird posturing, but it’s not. To everyone who thought that America used to be and should be an episode of ‘Leave It To Beaver’, Obama’s election was a sign of existential crisis. His reelection was the proof that it’s over. They fought tooth and nail together for the singular goal of denying him reelection, putting minorities back in their place, and they failed. If they can’t win, many of them will have to ask themselves what they can do.
Maude
@Frankensteinbeck:
Obama said in 2008, power doesn’t give up power easily.
grandpa john
@Roger Moore: her biggest problem is that she is a fucking idiot
redshirt
@Frankensteinbeck: Nice description. Makes me savor the Wingnut Tears all over again. Love them! Fuck the Right Wing!
Xenos
@JWL: The “Brooks is a dummy” approach misses the most important dynamic here. Brooks used to be clever, was a prodigy, a brilliant student by any standard. But he has placed himself at the service of ideologies that are fashioned, and refashioned, as necessary to suport the interests of people.
Organizing his thinking around a system of intellectual dishonesty has made him dumb, made him intellectually lazy and weak. The moral rot of it all has further limited his ability to empathize with others unlike him, and has blocked his ability to want to understand the world better. He has lost his way down some sad little cul-de_sac and lacks the awareness to even want to turn around and reasses what he is doing.
Frankensteinbeck
@Xenos:
I know nothing of his past, but that’s a very plausible description. You can be quite smart and get sucked into a system of rationalization instead of rationality.
J R in WV
@Xenos:
This!! Bobo was once an intelligent and well-educated person.
But having to rationalize the positions of crazed, hater bigots calling themselves “Conservative Thinkers” year after year has destroyed his power of critical thought.
Making up reasons Democratic politicians are wrong, when they are so clearly right, has ended his limited power of logical thinking.
He is making himself less intelligent each and every twisted column he must create to earn an income. If it wasn’t so fun to watch it would be sad.
Another Halocene Human
@Comrade Javamanphil: “I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.”
Yes. Savor.
Another Halocene Human
@Bruce S: “Cynical” pretty much is the definition of Realpolitik (dunno about the “beyond redemption” part of it) and Chris Christie is a fucking master.
Another Halocene Human
@PeakVT: Dionne is a ‘liberal on economic issues’ Catholic, who is more Catholic than the pope on what one might call “women’s issues”, such as “are the whorish daughters of Eve human, or demons?” and suchlike.
Another Halocene Human
@majii: she doesn’t give a damn what happens to the rest of us as long as
a republican is in the WH and they control Congressthe dad-blamed gubmint doesn’t stop her from getting her p1llz and v0d|<a.Fix’d for greater accuracy.
Jay C
@Baud:
Well, that’s quite a far bit from being “nothing”! Those gerrymandered districts have ensure over-representation of the Republicans in Congress for at least another three elections cycles (and given them unassailable control over many State Legislatures as well, which will be the real tragedy of the 2010 elections) – as well as giving them time and personnel to work (unabated and undeterred) on more voter suppression initiatives: like their latest trick of proposing proportional electoral-voting by district see “gerrymandering” above); which can do a lot of damage.
And as for that “coterie of aging sycophants in the media“? That’s the easiest thing in the world to deal with: said media will simply find younger sycophants to replace them as needed. Just to take an example: Ross Douthat is 33 years old: you don’t think he’ll still be cranking out his asinine columns (and probably the same ones) forty years from now [shudder!]?
mainmati
So it’s a Harbowl
Robert Waldmann
It is always conceivable that Brooks believes his own nonsense, but I think it is usually safe to guess he is lying. In this case, I think he really hopes that moderates might influence the Republican party. I honestly guess that telling Republicans that extremism is falling for Obama’s trick is a rhetorical ploy. The safe rule is that anything that Obama wants is automatically rejected by Republicans. The argument that what Obama wants is for Republicans to make this obvious by automatically rejecting his proposals is amusingly reverse-reverse psychology, apparently paradoxical, Brooks’s desperate last resort and (I hope) has the additional advantage of being true.
eyelessgame
@arguingwithsignposts: Their deaths provide closure, and reflection on mortality; our lives are all enclosed by death. Closure is not sad, but it is somber.
mclaren
Yeah, when you get the kind of paycheck David Brooks takes home for writing his drivel, you can believe anything. $350,000 a year? I’ll deny global warming and describe Obama as an evil genius with a sinister plan for allowing the helpless Republicans to beat themselves in the face with a baseball bat for that kind of take-home.
Well…I’d think about it, anyway. For at least a minute.
mclaren
@General Stuck:
What a laugh. Do you have any evidence to support that crackpot delusion?
The “elder statesmen” of the GOP are now thieving loons like Newt Gingrich…whose entire presidential campaign staff quit during his campaign in protest over his blatant grifting.
The GOP is now nothing but a hollow shell swarming with bribe-seeking maggots. The fantasy that some Lincolnesque figure will magically emerge from the moral and intellectual cesspool misnamed the Republican Party is on the same level as George Will’s description of the stumbling bumbling fumbling bungling solecisms of the Drunk Driving C-Student from Texas as “Lincolnian.”
Stop swigging the Sterno, guy, and lay off the peyote. Shithole America is headed down in a supersonic nosedive, and the flight crew is stoned while the passengers scream at one another about who gets the most peanuts.