Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

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

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The revolution will be supervised.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

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

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

This fight is for everything.

Republicans in disarray!

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / A nuclear era

A nuclear era

by | 101 Comments

This post is in: 

This may be the most awesome passage in the history of wingnut media (via):

Journalists on the campaign trail saw (Lyndon B.) Johnson drunkenly board a plane armed with nuclear weapons and then accidentally drop them on the United States. Luckily, by the grace of God, they did not go off. None of this was reported, while newspapers editors worked in overdrive to portray Goldwater as eager to push the button.

(From Breitbart’s Big Government site.)

Let us savor.

Reader Interactions

101Comments

  4. 4.

    joel hanes

    or the bombadier.

    Help the bombardier!

    Where, after all, are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

  5. 5.

    Quaker in a Basement

    What now? OK, LBJ got drunk. That much I can believe. Then he got onto a plane armed with nukes? And then LBJ–personally–dropped those nukes? And then the press covered the whole thing up?

    Zow.

  7. 7.

    Morzer

    Carville and Begalia

    I think I drove through them once. Nice little towns in Nebraska, as I recall.

  8. 8.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I have it on authority every bit as reliable as “Big Government”‘s that Andrew Breitbart was one of the rent boys servicing various ranking White House officials during the George H.W. Bush administration.

  10. 10.

    Mark B.

    Yeah, I remember that, it was the same year that Junior Samples won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I searched the world over and thought I found true love, but you found another, and bffffft you was gone.”

  11. 11.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Citizen_X:

    The deserting coward was a pilot, but lost his flight status when he refused to be examined by a flight surgeon, per regulations, because the flight surgeon would probably discover that he was self medicating with an illicit alkaloid.

  13. 13.

    Mark B.

    @Quaker in a Basement: the whole goddam thing lacks any shred of plausibility. The president can order pilots to drop bombs, but he doesn’t get anywhere near the aircraft that carry them. Even in the 60s, that shit was pretty well locked down.

  14. 14.

    The Dangerman

    The draconian nature of the Great Society–using taxpayer money to fund the street theatre of the Black Panthers, CONTELPRO infiltrations into the far left, which Goldwater denounced–might never have occurred, and a white backlash avoided.

    Kids, this is your brain on drugs.

  15. 15.

    TS

    Rather scarey that the RWNJs have no idea as to the workings of “nuclear weapons” – and we thought Palin near the red button might be a problem.

  17. 17.

    Petorado

    This is an obvious parody of Brietbart by some hackers. Point of fact: if the Brietbrats really wrote this, they would used the spelling “nucular.” Kerning, bitchez!

  19. 19.

    Morzer

    http://deadspin.com/5989829/is-it-me-or-has-espn-been-taken-over-by-wetbacks-viewers-react-to-tonights-wbc-espn-deportes-simulcast

    Lacking compelling content for a slow Sunday night, ESPN elected to use its loophole in owning Spanish-language rights to simulcast its ESPN Deportes feed of tonight’s Dominican Republic-Puerto Rico game on the network’s flagship station. Any time the WWL introduces a new audience to content usually found on another station, people react poorly. And ESPN’s no stranger to stirring up a racist hornet’s nest, either. So here’s a sampling of what people are saying online about the broadcast, which we’ll remind you cannot be shown in English on ESPN (and is being shown in English just a few channels away on MLB Net)

    An impressive number of people seem to think that ESPN was broadcasting in Mexican…

  22. 22.

    Mandalay

    Somewhat OT, but not completely: What could possibly go wrong now that we have armed cops protecting the kids in our schools?..

    A school district has put its resource officer program on hold after an officer’s gun accidentally discharged Tuesday in a high school.

    Highland Central School District’s superintendent, Deborah Haab, told parents, staff and community members at a school board meeting Tuesday night that the program, begun after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that left 20 students and six adults dead in December, would be suspended while an investigation is conducted.

    Police Officer Sean McCutcheon for the town of Lloyd, N.Y., accidentally fired his gun at 1:38 p.m. Tuesday in the high school’s hallway, the district said.

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    “Accidentally?’

    As in “Step aside, son. Ah’m a- – ah say, ah’m a-gonna just see what this here big shiny red button does?”

    Ludicrous assertion.

    Also too, the warheads aren’t armed without first going through a complicated procedure.

    In Breitbartistan’s Big Book of Defamation, extremism in defense of assholery is not a vice.

  26. 26.

    Morzer

    @Jennifer:

    That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die

    And, let’s face it, if anyone could lie for all eternity, it would certainly be James O’Keefe’s spiritual father.

  27. 27.

    scav

    We were really going to win the war in Vietnam faster with bombs that don’t go off when we drop them accidentally from a designated driver airplane. Greatest nation on earth in it’s bloody heyday, –just don’t mention the tax rates.

    Now I’m thinking of the Mambo cab from Women on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown kitted with an air force one logo.

  29. 29.

    burnspbesq

    @Morzer:

    Deadspin = Breitbart Sports.

    ETA: the WBC has been all kinds of awesome so far. Netherlands beats Cuba? Italy advances to the second round? Bench-clearing brawl between Canada and Mexico? What’s not to love?

  31. 31.

    YellowJournalism

    The only bombs that LBJ ever dropped while drunk were most likely into the White House commode, the quality of which would be on par with the reporting done for this story.

  32. 32.

    slag

    I almost don’t blame rightwing media for being who they are. They are exactly who I expect them to be. The people I blame for enabling the ACORN episode (and so many others like it) work at CNN, ABC, NBC, and even Comedy Central.

    The tie that consistently binds corporate media and Republicans is their common unceasing impulse to shoot first and ask questions later.

  39. 39.

    Roger Moore

    I think they’re just a little bit confused. They heard that LBJ was drunk from dropping jägerbombs on an airplane and thought that meant something about nuclear weapons.

  40. 40.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Roger Moore: it vaguely reminds me of this:

    Ralph Wiggum: Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me!

  42. 42.

    brad

    @burnspbesq: Not at all, actually. You’re mistaking what they’re covering for their own views, I can only assume.

    Does anyone know what zombie lie this Breitbarter talking about? I’m not familiar with the thing I’m seeing.

  44. 44.

    Spaghetti Lee

    At some point, the conspiracy theories reach a point where you have to assume journalists aren’t interested in money and fame for the theory to make sense. For any journalist, that would have been the biggest story of his career.

  46. 46.

    karl

    Read the article — like how the 1980s Goldwater (his handful of reasonable, centrist opinions led to accusations of senility by his far right former compatriots) is conflated with the 1960s Goldwater.

  47. 47.

    Dead Ernest

    Okay, got this figured out. getting on the plane, LBJ popped, then dropped a red button off his trousers. This news then went through the ‘campfire circle’ of the media where it was morphed into the actor, Mr. Red Buttons (born 1919). He was then mistaken for the actor, Mr. Slim Pickens (also born 1919). Know for his role as the Col. in Dr. Strangelove who rode the bomb dropped out of the plane.
    Nothing to worry about. Just the usual transmission of factual information problems that always happen in our more-than-one-person world.

  48. 48.

    Morzer

    I suspect that our *ahem* “hermeneutic enterprise” would be greatly enhanced by substituting

    “Jim Hoft in a drug-addled, post-masturbatory frenzy”

    for

    “Journalists on the campaign trail”.

  49. 49.

    Radio One

    I’ve decided that I don’t care at all what the conservative weirdos at Breitbart really believe in anymore. They’re like the people who believe in UFOs, or Scientology.

  50. 50.

    ? Martin

    Why on earth would there be nukes on AF1? The most defensively armed plane on earth would have a weapon that it cannot possibly deploy while in service, and which would only put the Presidents life in further danger.

    Only makes sense in Teatardia.

  51. 51.

    Redshift

    @TS:

    Rather scarey that the RWNJs have no idea as to the workings of “nuclear weapons” – and we thought Palin near the red button might be a problem.

    Actually, I find that somewhat comforting. I’d much rather they had no idea what they’re doing on the remote chance that they decide the fate of the country requires extreme action.

  52. 52.

    Joey Maloney

    What’s the line on how long before this starts showing up in your crazy uncle’s FB feed as undisputed fact? I want the under.

  53. 53.

    scav

    And the dears are now losing their collective shit about drone strikes on the home front while blithely noting in passing on the way to something important (mean hurty feely politics!) accidental nuclear strikes on the same soil.

  55. 55.

    Morzer

    @scav:

    You wait until they start having visions of a naked Ashley Judd decreeing nucular drone strikes on Kentuckistan.

  56. 56.

    Ruckus

    @The Dangerman:

    Kids, this is your brain on drugs

    In this case assumes facts definitely not in evidence. There may be drugs involved, OK probably are, but there is not one shred of evidence there are brains.

  58. 58.

    cthulhu

    @FlipYrWhig: Well, you learn something everyday. But it was really more of a non-atomic, atomic bomb since the part that makes it an atomic bomb stayed safely in the plane. The implication in the Breitbart insanity was that the bombs (more than one!) were intact atomic warheads. That all magically did not explode. That’s not your run-of-the-mill idiocy.

  59. 59.

    NotMax

    @Minor point.

    “Air Force One” is not a specific craft (although, of course, most often applied to the official presidential jumbo jet).

    Any Air Force plane a sitting president boards is designated Air Force One until he steps off. If a civilian plane, the designation is Executive One.

    Trivia: The plane carrying Nixon to California after he left the White House that last day lost its Air Force One designation mid-flight, the moment that Ford was sworn in. Pilot of that plane had to call air traffic control to inform them of the craft’s new designation.

  60. 60.

    NotMax

    @? MartinMinor point.

    “Air Force One” is not a specific craft (although, of course, most often applied to the official presidential jumbo jet).

    Any Air Force plane a sitting president boards is designated Air Force One until he steps off. If a civilian plane, the designation is Executive One.

    Trivia: The plane carrying Nixon to California after he left the White House that last day lost its Air Force One designation mid-flight, the moment that Ford was sworn in. Pilot of that plane had to call air traffic control to inform them of the craft’s new designation.

  61. 61.

    Fred

    Sorry, I refuse to believe sentient creatures can believe or be so dumb as to write such crap. This has got to be a librul conspiracy to discredit their, uhm, uhh, whatever.

  62. 62.

    mai naem

    This is an awfully written piece. Just, wow. Also, having listened to a bunch of LBJ tapes, I actually find it hard to believe the guy got drunk while he was president. It’s always possible but unlikely.

  64. 64.

    Calming Influence

    “Luckily, by the grace of God, they did not go off.”

    No harm, no foul. Quit yer whinin’.

  65. 65.

    Calming Influence

    In dreams where you’re running around with no pants, tighty whiteys can seem like an epiphany.

  66. 66.

    SRW1

    Didn’t know that LBJ’s fuckbombs were of ‘nucular’ caliber. Come to think of it, though, it sounds plausible.

    But why are the Breitbrats claiming that LBJ dropped them accidentally on the US? For one, there was nothing accidental when LBJ released one and secondly they tended to be precision-targeted. At least in the sense that LBJ avoided collateral damage to the general public.

  70. 70.

    PaulW

    It couldn’t be the Goldsboro B-52 crash of North Carolina, that was 1961 (nowhere near the 1964 Goldwater campaign). They could be referring to a B-52 crash between Pennsylvania and Maryland in Jan. 1964.

    Either way, LBJ couldn’t have been involved in either crash. At that point in his career he’d have sent a stunt double off to fly while he personally handled the money laundering with his land-deal buddy Billy Sol Estes. So you see, even in the mudslinging department, Breitbart’s Bullies STILL GET IT WRONG. >:-)

  75. 75.

    Brian R.

    I gave up counting the many, many historical errors in that piece when it referred to the “Gulf of Tomkin.”

  77. 77.

    Woodrowfan

    @NotMax: What if it’s carrying the Secretary of Education who becomes President when Cylons wipe out most of humanity??

  79. 79.

    Jay C

    @YellowJournalism:

    The only bombs that LBJ ever dropped while drunk were most likely into the White House commode, the quality of which would be on par with the reporting done for this story.

    Which, considering President Johnson’s predilection for doing business while, ummm, doing his business, probably was done with reporters present….

  80. 80.

    Full Metal Wingnut

    @NotMax: But didn’t Nixon’s resignation letter say “effective immediately?” Ford became the President of the United States the moment Nixon resigned. Just like LBJ didn’t need to be sworn in right away, the AF1 stuff was for show.

  81. 81.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Full Metal Wingnut:

    No, the resignation letter said “Noon, Washington time”. He got out of Dodge before noon, so he left DC as President, and the resignation became effective after wheels up at Andrews.

  82. 82.

    Foregone Conclusion

    @mai naem:

    LBJ definitely gave up smoking for his presidency. I think he might have given up drinking as well. He just thought that he owed it to the country not to have a heart attack in office.

    Afterwards? Well, he pretty much drank, smoked and ate himself into the grave in less than five years…

  87. 87.

    Death Panel Truck

    @NotMax: In his speech to the nation on August 8, he said “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in at that hour in this office.”

    His resignation letter, dated August 9, simply read, “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”

  88. 88.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Reading the article it sounds like they meant the quote as a metaphor and blew it. Most of the article is a rant on how noble Goldwater was and how mean LBJ was.

    Not sure of what is the point of rubbish like this. If a politician is to squeamish to throw some mud back in an election then what use is he as president?

  89. 89.

    shpx.ohfu

    @Spaghetti Lee:

    O ladybird
    I have heard you wish to walk me through your garden
    I crave your pardon if I woke you with my big thing
    Ladybird

    O ladybird
    I have heard you wish to walk me through your meadow
    You’ll spread your wings to fly in fright if I’m inside you
    Ladybird…

  92. 92.

    Death Panel Truck

    @NotMax: I had to look up a copy of the letter to make sure I remembered it correctly.

    I was an 11-year old paperboy on August 9, 1974. The paper I delivered the day before had the headline NIXON TO QUIT. My mother was all smiles that day. She hated that fucking bastard.

    The next day’s headline read “Ford Sworn; says ‘nightmare’ over.”

  93. 93.

    NotMax

    @ Death Panel Truck

    One pleasant memory is of a virulent redneck “Love it or leave it” acquaintance, with whom I’d had many a spirited conversation about Tricky Dick.

    After the resignation, the next time I saw him he came up and said, “I’m sorry. You were right all along.”

  94. 94.

    Death Panel Truck

    @Death Panel Truck: Also too, there was a story below the fold on the “NIXON TO QUIT” edition that read “Jackson given secret funds, files show”, to accuse Scoop of being a crook, because both sides do it, doncha know.

  95. 95.

    Death Panel Truck

    @NotMax: I have wingnut relatives who to this day say Nixon got shafted. I avoid talking politics with them. I have a blood pressure problem. ;)

  97. 97.

    Tonal Crow

    Breaking news: Republicans make shit up, and the media don’t hound them for it day in and day out. Also breaking: dog bites man, and HUGE!!!!! sun rises in east.

  101. 101.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Mark B.:
    My folks (escapees from The Sticks) spent a fur piece of their reclining years watching Hee Haw reruns, & there are some immortal utterances that in passing were hammered sideways into my memory, including the discovery that got Junior Samples nominated for the Totie Fields Medal:

    Pi r squared? Noooo! Pi are round! Corn pone are square!

    I can still hear them all on the porch singing, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all…”

Comments are closed.