Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Motown is Joe-Town!

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Books are my comfort food!

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

President Biden is doing good where he can, and getting it done.

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

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

This blog will pay for itself.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

The problem people have with Biden’s age is the color of the VPs skin.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

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Reader Interactions

115Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    I’m trying to imagine what being roasted by Joe Lieberman would be like. Thankfully, I am failing.

  2. 2.

    scav

    Any roasting without hellfire isn’t adequate. I was going to suggest hemlock as a side, but that’s for reputable thinkers.

  13. 13.

    Keith P.

    “Olive oil poached cod”? Wouldn’t that be cod confit? Funny menu for a crowd that probably got off on Obama-arugula jokes. Wish they’d have gotten Gilbert Gottfried or dug up Greg Geraldo.

  16. 16.

    Schlemizel

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Holy Joe was supposed to cleanse the Clinton stain from Al. He was also to be a sop to the conservative wing since Al was supposed to be a raging liberal.

    We all know how well that all worked out. As was pointed out in an earlier thread about Dems who voted against ACA, it does them no good to play up to the conservatives as you will still be painted as a commie.

  19. 19.

    Suffern ACE

    Christ. I really doubt that republicans will roast Cheney. They’ll crack jokes about Obama and Colin Powell.

  23. 23.

    Ash Can

    Is that it for the swag? One lousy coffee cup? Times are hard, I guess.

    And it’s ugly as hell besides.

  24. 24.

    Baud

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I’ve never heard the argument that Joe cost Gore the election. I don’t know how much the V-P matters. I think Lieberman was supposed to help with the Jewish vote in Florida, and maybe he did, but not enough to make the Supreme Court unimportant.

  26. 26.

    Spaghetti Lee

    I think a roast would be a little awkward when the guest of honor is staring ice-cold daggers at anyone who laughs at the jokes. The loaded rifle aimed at the roastmaster probably doesn’t help either.

  27. 27.

    JPL

    @Baud: Wow! Did you hear in Lieberman basically telling the GOP to take Florida cause of the soldiers who couldn’t vote…. The soldiers had voted…it was a joke and Joe fell for it.

  28. 28.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Huh. I always figured Cheney’s roast would happen in the afterlife. For eternity.

  29. 29.

    PurpleGirl

    That coffee mug was all the swag they got… an assistant couldn’t come up with more and better stuff and a proper bag to contain it. At least they should have given attendees ammo, if not a fancy rifle.

  32. 32.

    fuckwit

    @Baud: For me, it was Tipper who cost Al my vote. I never forgave her for censoring rock records. There was no way I was going to vote for any kind of Puritan crusader, or anyone married to one either. Unsurprising that someone married to Tipper would choose Holy Joe as a running mate either– their moralistic bullshit was similar in some ways.

    Of course, I regretted not voting for Gore very soon afterwards. Like Carter, Gore is someone who I came to respect and admire greatly after he left office, but not so much beforehand.

  37. 37.

    catclub

    @Baud: “I’ve never heard the argument that Joe cost Gore the election.”
    Then you have not been listening. I am not even making the argument, but once Joe revealed himself as basically a traitor to the Democratic party, and then repeated the act every chance he could for the next 4 years [with about two notable exceptions*] he was guaranteed to be blamed at some point.

    1. He did actually vote for the ACA
    2. He was important in the repeal of dont ask dont tell.

  38. 38.

    JPL

    @Baud: Joe was of no help during the FL recount. There were stories that vets votes were not being counted and he joined with repubs in letting late votes being counted.

  41. 41.

    raven

    I was going to write that I thought Rachel jumping on the GI Death Benefit holdup was a loser but decided not to. Then I listen to Riechoff tell her “both sides do it”. That’s exactly what I was afraid of.

  42. 42.

    JPL

    @fuckwit: Interesting cuz I really liked the music being labeled. It was a new time in music and I had a son who was only nine wanting the latest pop. Before Tipper, I had to resort to going to kmart and finding a selection of lawrence welk’s greatest hits (not that bad but).

  43. 43.

    Mike E

    check them out at the link

    No.

    I wouldn’t pee on Dick Cheney if his malfunctioning mechanical heart was on fire, let alone “click” anything that conjures up that sneering monster.

  46. 46.

    ? Martin

    @PurpleGirl: Good lord, I hope that wasn’t part of the calculation. Dems have somewhere less than 0 chance of losing CT or any neighboring state. Gore didn’t even carry Tennessee.

  48. 48.

    Roger Moore

    Sorry, but the only kind of Dick Cheney roast I want to hear about is the kind where he’s tied to a stake and surrounded by fire. I think fire is supposed to deal with blood sucking undead.

  49. 49.

    Belafon

    @Davis X. Machina: It’s been so long since I read that chapter, I completely forgot it. If there’s one verse that the Republicans completely miss it’s this Verse 23:

    “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.”

    5-7 is pretty good as well:

    “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries[a] wide and the tassels on their garments long; 6 they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; 7 they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.”

  50. 50.

    Suffern ACE

    Thinking back at the time, we knew that Lieberman was a moral scold about Clinton and thought he should resign. But did we know that he was such a hawk? Foreign policy wise, he isn’t much different than Cheney.

  53. 53.

    PurpleGirl

    @JPL:
    @? Martin:

    Yes, Gore should have had certain areas locked up; yes there was the problem of the clenis. But some old habits die hard and that kind of regional balancing once worked (Kennedy and LBJ, Nixon and Agnew). It might not have been a large part of the calculation but I think it was part of it.

    ETA: YMMV

  55. 55.

    Mike E

    @PurpleGirl:

    Gore should have had certain areas locked up

    He should have run on the Clinton/Gore record, but instead ran the 2nd worst Democratic campaign for president in my lifetime. That fucking jackass.

  57. 57.

    WereBear

    @Evap: Thirded. But I bailed on him quite a while back. It’s weird to call writing about such twisted things “precious,” and yet that is what it became.

  63. 63.

    PsiFighter37

    @schrodinger’s cat: In my lifetime (from 1986), that’d probably be Dukakis?

    I don’t know, though – Gore was running on a record (and economy) that should’ve spelled an easy win. As for Kerry…ugh. I remember watching the Ohio returns in disbelief in Philly after spending all day GOTVing (we won PA by 2%, thanks to the insane margin we ran up in SE PA) with my fellow College Democrats until 3 AM. I was too young and not invested enough in 2000 to understand the consequences, but 2004 broke my heart.

  64. 64.

    Mike in NC

    The notion of a “roast” for Darth Cheney reminded me of reading about a similar function that was once held for Frank Sinatra. Jackie Mason cracked some jokes about the age difference between Frank and Mia Farrow and was beaten up by goons backstage immediately afterwards.

  65. 65.

    feebog

    This is pathetic. Rummy, Scooter and Holy Joe? That was the line up? Sounds like a casting call for a remake of Night of the Living Dead.

  67. 67.

    Roger Moore

    @PurpleGirl:

    But some old habits die hard and that kind of regional balancing once worked (Kennedy and LBJ, Nixon and Agnew). It might not have been a large part of the calculation but I think it was part of it.

    That’s bizarre, because Clinton/Gore went directly against regional balancing, and they won. You’d think Gore would remember that.

  68. 68.

    piratedan

    @Baud: in his defense, he was ratfucked from the get go…. Nixon himself helped keep the party in disarray during the primary and convention process

  69. 69.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Mike E: Or not
    @PsiFighter37:

    Here, we entertain the radical notion that Al Gore was a solid candidate — about as solid, at any rate, as George W. Bush — and that the 2000 election turned out (give or take a few hundred votes in Florida) almost exactly as should have been expected… Contrary to most observers, we find little to be surprised by in the result of the 2000 presidential election. Of course, we do not pretend to be able to account for the razor-thin vote margins in several states, much less for the extraordinary post-election political and legal wrangling required to adjudicate the eventual outcome. But we do claim that the overall closeness of the fourteenth presidential election of the post-war era reflected the same fundamental economic and political factors at work in the first thirteen. We see no need, and little warrant, to posit either unusual incompetence on Gore’s part or unusual skill on Bush’s
    part. Likewise, we see no need, and little warrant, to posit any significant change inestablished patterns of voting behavior. Our rather unremarkable conclusion is that voters in 2000 behaved much as they have in previous election year

    Presidential Vote Models: A Recount, Larry M. Bartels and John Zaller (PDF)

  71. 71.

    NotMax

    @Baud

    McGovern may have ended with fewer electoral votes, but in modernish times I’d suggest Bob Dole for the most desultory, and worst, campaign.

  73. 73.

    Jeremy

    the 2000 election shouldn’t have been close. Gore and his team ran a stupid campaign based on distancing himself from Clinton, and trying to be his own man.

    He should have had Clinton campaigning with him everywhere, picked a better VP, and stopped sighing at the debates which evaporated his lead in the polls.

  75. 75.

    Baud

    @NotMax:

    I thought we were talking about Democratic campaigns. The problem with Dole was that he simply never had a shot and everyone knew it, including him. He is also very unlikable.

  78. 78.

    Jeremy

    It’s pretty interesting that the Obama Biden ticket is the first winning democratic ticket in many years that didn’t have a southerner on the ticket.

  80. 80.

    NotMax

    @Suffern ACE

    Putting aside Palin for just the moment, yes. Dole was way to obviously just going through the motions.

    @Baud

    If talking just modern Democratic campaigns, would have to go with Mondale, much as I respect and like him as a truly decent human being.

    McGovern never really recovered from the Eagleton thing (though in all frankness no one the Ds might have nominated would have won that year). Although had it been McGovern/Gene McCarthy it would have been significantly, closer, IMHO.

  82. 82.

    JPL

    @NotMax: Even though I knew McGovern was not likely to win, I felt proud to vote for him. The last debate sealed it for me cuz the other guy was slimy.

  84. 84.

    PsiFighter37

    @Jane2: And yet Dole was one of the senators back in the day to vote against the creation of Medicare. Talk about how far the Overton window has moved…

  86. 86.

    NotMax

    @JPL

    Ditto as far as voting for George McG goes, though in my case the debates were not a decision maker; that the other guy was Nixon was more than sufficient.

  87. 87.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Jeremy:

    Even if the Dems wanted to be more competitive in the South, the pickings are slimmer than they used to be in terms of finding a candidate. The Southern Dem is almost extinct, and the charismatic, well-known and nationally popular Southern Dem (Clinton, Carter, pre-disgrace Edwards) even more so. Mark Pryor? Steve Beshear? If the new plan is to have an urban, multi-ethnic, young, educated base as the Dems’ electoral bedrock, those don’t seem like intuitive choices.

    On the other hand…I’d really like Democrats to be competitive in the South again, if only for tactical reasons: It’s hard to build a working congressional majority when you have to write off every state south of the Ohio River as unwinnable. If someone told me that if Steve Beshear was the Vice Presidential nominee in 2016 and it resulted in the Dems winning Kentucky and being competitive in Arkansas and West Virginia and picking up 5-6 congressional seats in that region (I’m being optimistic here) I’d take that, creationism museum be damned. What about the rest of you?

  88. 88.

    mai naem

    Anybody want to bet that there’s not one fucker in the benefactors, co-chairs and patrons whose kid or grandkid served in their wonderful wars. Also too, couldn’t they at least have the guy he shot roast the pig?

  90. 90.

    foggy follansbye

    DougJ, sorry to gush but I just had to check in to say I love your song titles. You are the best on the web at finding the perfect lyric/post title. What amazes me is 90 percent (at least) of the time, you pick an appropriate line, knowing the reader/listener will fill in the line just before or after that is even more appropriate. It is an amazing skill that makes me laugh over and over. Thank you.

  91. 91.

    Mike E

    @Davis X. Machina: No, he assiduously steered his campaign away from “The Clenis” and suffered. Deservedly. During these times of sport and politics you’ll notice how trying not to lose will get you nowhere near victory.
    @schrodinger’s cat: It’s a tie! Dukakis/Bentsen, and McGovern/EagletonShriver.

  92. 92.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Mike E: You will forgive me by sticking with Bartels and Zaller. There’s no reason why the election shoudn’t have been close. Waving the clenis around doesn’t cut it.

  96. 96.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    Look:

    George W. Bush “won” in 2000 because his brother was the governor of Florida and was able to cheat the election in multiple ways, most of which were in place well before Election Day.

    The fact of the matter is, Bush LOST by 500,000 votes nationwide. If you want to complain about Gore’s campaign in Florida, go ahead, but the rest of the country got it right

  98. 98.

    Mike E

    @Davis X. Machina: Well, I see your point that you can’t polish that turd any more than was possible and the outcome played out as some had expected. But I am still reeling from his losing to a Bush, an eminently beatable candidate, and unleashed unholy hell on an unsuspecting world.

  99. 99.

    Davis X. Machina

    Remember it was Gore’s election to lose….

    ABC NEWS POLL
    October 2000
    Bush: 54%
    Gore: 41%

    SEPTEMBER 1999
    Bush: 56%
    Gore: 37%

  103. 103.

    mai naem

    I detest Lieberman. I mean I fucking detest the asshole but blaming Lieberman for the loss? You could blame him but you could also blame a bunch of other things. I’m sure Lieberman being a Joo lost some Dems votes in the South. His doing a horrible job against Cheney in the debate didn’t help but,jeez, its not like people realized what a whackjob Cheney was at that point. And, hindsight’s 20/20 but the Repugs had done a real number on the Clenis and Lieberman had done his droopy dog trick in the Senate acquitting Clinton. If Dubbya had been a halfway competent president, I don’t think we would look quite as fondly at WJC as we do and I truly believe WJC is within the top 30 American politicians in history.

  108. 108.

    fuckwit

    @Baud: Gore was a Senator when he let his wife have a hearing for a crusade against heavy metal. It was 1985. I was so disgusted with Reagan/Bush that I was happy to see Clinton win and didn’t care who his VP was. But the idea in 2000 of “First Lady Tipper Gore” was just something I wasn’t prepared to have. Every First Lady seems to go on some kind of cultural-change mission. For Nancy Reagan it was drugs, the crusade against which created all kinds of disgusting messes we’re still trying to clean up. I could just imagine Tipper going on a Puritan rampage against good music if she got into the WH. I had no idea Shrub would fuck the country up as bad as he did, so such relatively minor conerns really were at the top of my mind in 2000. It was a time of first-world problems for me.

    One doesn’t often remember HOW FUCKING GOOD THINGS WERE in 2000. I was rich. Everyone I knew was rich. There was peace, and the cold war had been over for a decade already. Gas was cheap. My friends were becoming dot-com millionaires all over the place. I was young and life was good. My main concerns were first-world problems like censorship and internet encryption and security and privacy. So, yeah, I looked at those two moralistic clowns running and said, I don’t like either of them, fuck it, I’m voting for Harry Browne. And that’s what I did. And within months I regretted it, starting with the stem cell idiocy, and then I realized after 9/11 how very deeply fucked we all were. That was the end of my third-party voting, probably forever.

  109. 109.

    Chris

    @fuckwit:

    I think 2000 cured an entire generation of left-of-center voters of the third party temptation. I can only hope it lasts as long as possible.

  110. 110.

    Bobbo

    @Jeremy: you need to bone get over to Somersby’s blog right quick. The sighing was a media creation (starring Chris Tweety Matthews) that no one cared about – Gore won the overnight polls handily. In replays days later they jacked up the volume on the sighs and made it the story

  111. 111.

    Suffern ACE

    @Chris: yeah. But there’s always the next generation. Cripes, I wonder if Fulani and Nader will give us one more show.

  112. 112.

    Another Holocene Human

    @fuckwit: Well, I wasn’t dumb or reckless enough to vote directly or by default for George W Bush, but I did have to hold my nose voting for Gore and Tipper was a good deal of the reason for exactly the reasons you stated. Hilary was in that too, to some extent.

  115. 115.

    Feckless

    I seriously doubt it will ever be an issue for my travel lodging, but fuck the plaza hotel for eternity. Did Murdoch tip the staff with decapitated kittens? I’d quit a job before I’d do anything for that perverted old bastard and his ilk.

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