Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The words do not have to be perfect.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

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

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

In my day, never was longer.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Everybody saw this coming.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

We still have time to mess this up!

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

This fight is for everything.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

You are here: Home / It’s you and me forever

It’s you and me forever

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Take a Sarah Palin CPAC speech, have Mark Halperin write a review of it, and you can see why I’m objectively pro-meteor (h/t David Koch):

Best moment: Crowd erupted when she slammed the president’s foreign policy as too meek: “They say we can’t kill our way out of war? Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.”

Reader Interactions

100Comments

  2. 2.

    Morzer

    Eh, it’s just a sad little grifter girl working the crowd of rubes. She’ll be an annoyance and a national disgrace for a few more years, but she’s never going to count for anything when it matters. File her under Minor Vi-aggravations and leave it at that.

  3. 3.

    Elmo

    Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown:
    “Heh heh, Nazi, schmatzi,” says Wehrner von Braun.

  4. 4.

    Xenos

    It is not only twisted and creepy, it is historically wrong.

    We conquered (West) Germany and let the West Germans deNazify themselves. It was not perfect but it was damned effective.

    Contrast that to the Soviets murdering large numbers of people and raping pretty much every East German woman between 9 and 90. Ever wonder why so many fucked up people, including neo-Nazis, come out of the former East Germany?

  5. 5.

    Morzer

    @Xenos:

    Any minute now Romanov from Portland is going to rocket up through the trapdoor in bright red tights to denounce you as a fascist.

  6. 6.

    MattF

    It’s correct to note the connection between Palin and Halperin. Just a disgrace, and it lowers my opinion of Palin.

  8. 8.

    Villago Delenda Est

    I don’t think Sarah quite understands what she’s saying.

    Because she and her fellow asswipes are far more like the Nazis than they imagine.

    Not that I disapproved of the means of dealing with the Nazis, mind you.

    She should be careful what she wishes for.

  12. 12.

    CASLondon

    Yeah, we killed them, except for the ones we left in place to run West Germany’s intelligence service during the cold war, or brought over here to run our space program, or left in place not prosecuted like the thousands who served as camp guards.

    Mythology is a great thing

  13. 13.

    SRW1

    Wailin Palin is quite useful as a surrogate for the stupid. On the other hand Heisenberg was right, you can’t have the stupid measured in that way without affecting its trajectory. It’s a quandry, though her trajectory-affecting ability clearly seems on the wane. She’ll probably end up a carnival barker.

  15. 15.

    Xenos

    @CASLondon: The myth permanently discredited the Nazis in the West, and taking out and shooting everybody complicit would have been a poor strategic choice.

    I work with Germans on a daily basis. I have never run across one whose company I do not prefer to approximately 27% of Americans. That comes from some damn good myth making, as opposed to a toxic kind.

  19. 19.

    appelligo

    “They say we can’t kill our way out of war? Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.

    Well, uh, no. The Red Army did. 80% of all German combat casualties were on the Eastern Front. And it’s not like the Americans are responsible for the remaining 20% — that figure has to be shared, remember, with the British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and French, etc., who were all in the war more than two years before the US was.

  20. 20.

    SRW1

    @Morzer:

    I think the one sentence last paragraph is spot on. GOPers have decided that their Iraq conundrum can be solved via a Dolchstosslegende. Palin’s question of “Did we actually win in Iraq and Afghanistan before we waved the white flag?” makes that pretty explicit.

  21. 21.

    Morzer

    @SRW1:

    They’ve tried that line in various ways over the years and it’s got them the square root of Trump’s IQ.

  22. 22.

    Morzer

    @gogol’s wife:

    He’d become strangely silent before then. Possibly he got tired of being paid in what one commenter here described serendipitously as the free-falling rubble.

  24. 24.

    SRW1

    @Morzer:

    I won’t dispute that, but the strategy works better the larger the distance.
    If it turns out that it still doesn’t do it, it’ll get stuffed back into the poison cabinet for better use later.

  25. 25.

    Morzer

    @SRW1:

    They’ll keep trying, but I think it’s more about wish-fulfillment than any actual achievement. The overwhelming majority of people realize that Iraq was a blunder of historical dimensions and the ensuing chaos in the Middle East isn’t making it look any better day by day.

  26. 26.

    different-church-lady

    @SRW1: Right now her trajectory is the same as a rocket that blows up on the launching pad.

  27. 27.

    West of the Cascades

    @appelligo: Also, too: the U.S. registered 50 million men for the draft during World War II and had 10 million inducted. The current active military is about 1.3 million. We commandeered private industrial facilities to make war munitions (there was no automobile manufacturing, but government order, from Feb. 1, 1942 until early 1945). People in the United States rationed virtually everything to support the war effort. Is the Grift Queen saying that we should do the same things that were necessary to fight and kill Nazis to kill ISIS?

    How many of the CPAC attendees have volunteered to go off and fight ISIS on the ground?

  28. 28.

    MattF

    @SRW1: Also, the stab-in-the-back legend was very widespread in Germany at the end of WWI, and there was little doubt among the ex-soldiers about exactly whodunit.

    In contrast, the winger version is top-down rather than bottom-up, and is really just a variation on blaming the librul elite. It’s part of any right-wing rant, but has no life of its own.

  29. 29.

    Patricia Kayden

    Not interested in what Dimwit Palin has to say about anything, I am curious about how a President Hilary Clinton will deal with ISIS, however, since she strikes me as a bit war friendly.

  30. 30.

    SRW1

    @MattF:

    I suspect that underestimates the level of cynicism humans are capable off. The biggest proponents, and beneficaries, of Dolchstosslegende were of course the Nazis. Followed very closely, though. by an organization called ‘Der Stahlhelm’, ie WWI veterans.

  31. 31.

    SRW1

    @different-church-lady:

    My comment is not about Palin’s trajectory, its about her role as a surrogate for the trajectory of ‘the stupid’. In other words, she’s an indicator as well as an agent What is diminishing is her role as an agent.

  33. 33.

    MattF

    @Patricia Kayden: Probably not different in substance from what Obama’s doing, although sounding more macho. She’ll have the advantage of making policy While Being White.

  38. 38.

    SRW1

    @different-church-lady:

    WP ated my first reply. It will probably reappear as a duplicate later.

    My comment was not so much about Palin’s trajectory, as about her role as a surrogate for the trajectory of ‘the stupid’, and to some extant an agent of that stupid. What is diminishing is her role as an agent of said stupid.

  39. 39.

    RaflW

    It is increasingly clear that the great sorting that has been happening between the parties has been about intelligence. The Republicans are now solidly the party of stone-stupid people. The Gipper was apparently the start of the GIP. The Grand Idiot Party.

  40. 40.

    Woodrowfan

    @appelligo: Don;t forget Poland! (seriously their troops were active in the west. For that matter, there were Brazilians too.)

  42. 42.

    Woodrowfan

    They should have set up some US military recruiting desks at CPAC for all those Hitler Young Young Conservatives. Would have been the least crowded part of the whole place.

  43. 43.

    WereBear

    She’s a good rabble rouser, and the rabble does love being roused. It’s no different from Kiss fans still showing up for a concert event should one come their way. She’s still giving them what they want.

    Somewhat attractive women saying awful things is like catnip to them. I don’t even want to dwell on why that’s so.

  44. 44.

    Svensker

    @Violet:

    Glad to see DougJ posting again! I mean in addition to the music posts.

    Moi aussi. Did he change jobs again so that now he can? Or is throwin’ caution to the wind? Curious minds are curious.

  46. 46.

    D58826

    @West of the Cascades: It was a different type of war also. Land army against land army. Progress could be measured in the amount of ground taken. ISIL is an insurgency. As we should have learned in Vietnam the only land that you control is the spot you stand on. It became a cliche but the phrase ‘winning the hearts and minds of the locals’ does sum it up. The insurgent largely controls the tempo of the battlefield. He attacks when he is strong and with drawls when weak. Lets face it good old Chairman Mao wrote the book on the subject, even though this type of warfare is as old as mankind. Unless and until the locals turn on ISIL they will not be defeated.

  47. 47.

    Schlemazel

    @Morzer:
    I read & comment on a women’s college hockey forum & I think that same guy has shown up there. though he uses a different name he went off when someone made a joking reference to the end of WWII. I was weird & I really wanted to ask him if he was really that other guy from here.

  49. 49.

    Schlemazel

    @SRW1:
    She is merely a symptom, remove her and the disease will continue merrily rolling along.

    We deserve that meteor.

  50. 50.

    Schlemazel

    @MattF:
    Oh, I think the absence of dangly bits between her legs will compensate for her lower melanin levels in the eyes of the wingnuts.

  52. 52.

    Iowa Old Lady

    It’s CPAC. It’s about like the Iowa Straw Poll–a sideshow that’s entertaining but not worth taking too seriously.

    IMHO, they’ll nominate Jeb.

  54. 54.

    Chris

    @MattF:

    Yeah. “Do little, but SOUND like you’re running World War Three” was key to the success of Reagan, who seems to have understood that his audience, emasculated as it felt by Vietnam, wanted to FEEL badass again – emphasis on “feel.” Quick and easy victories like Grenada and “shows of force” like Libya, good, but as soon as it looked more difficult (Lebanon), he had the good sense to turn tail and run.

    It worked for about a decade. Unfortunately, Desert Storm happened next, and they forgot it was an act and started to believe they actually WERE invincible.

    If they’re smart, the next Republican admin will go back to the eighties standard. Say much, do little, and let Hollywood action movies take it from there. Sadly, I doubt they’re that smart.

  55. 55.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Chris: Well, none of their kids are going to be put on the line for this, so why not?

    Our ruling class is as tumbrel worthy as the Bourbons.

  56. 56.

    boatboy_srq

    @DougJ @top: She can rely on the old men’s money.

    @appelligo: @West of the Cascades: Prezactly. (I keep trying to write more than that, but somehow it always rolls around to wingnuts banning AP History classes because unExceptionalism.)

  58. 58.

    Violet

    @Svensker: Yeah, I was wondering. On Twitter DougJ doesn’t post only about music so maybe his PTB decided posting on Balloon-Juice would be okay too?

  61. 61.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Xenos: I’m not convinced wartime trauma has as much of an effect on criminality in peacetime as people think. Take for example the degree of trauma experienced by civilians in Japan during WWII and how incredibly low their violent crime rate has been for decades. Also look at the depravity of their fighting forces and again, followed by this enviably low peacetime crime rate.

    I think East Germany’s issues had more to do with Soviet governance. In fact lefty Germans from the West eagerly headed into East Germany during the early days. Unfortunately, things quickly went to shit and East Germany was turned into a prison.

  64. 64.

    RSA

    “Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.”

    Tell it to Osama bin Laden. Oh, wait, that doesn’t fit the framing, does it?

  65. 65.

    Gex

    The GOP’s actual stated policies now: Just kill everyone who disagrees with you. They don’t actually try to dress it up and hide it all that much.

  66. 66.

    Tripod

    @Chris:

    The problem here is RalfW’s comment at 38. The GOP in now the party of the stupid, or the polite Beltway version: home of the Jacksonian impulse in American politics.

    Talladega Nights is probably the best primer/social critique of the bed rock stupidity and crass commercialism of self-described “Americans”.

  69. 69.

    Patrick

    “They say we can’t kill our way out of war? Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.”

    If she likes war and killing so much, then why doesn’t she volunteer to the frontlines? Furthermore, why doesn’t she pay for the cost of it with her own money? Our current taxes aren’t enough to pay for all the wars she is advocating.

  70. 70.

    danielx

    Actually, it was pretty much the Soviets who killed off the German Army and a good many German civilians…and after twenty million odd soldiers and civilians killed by the Nazis, they enjoyed the shit out of it too. By comparison with roughly 420,000 US dead in all theaters…

  72. 72.

    Mike in NC

    Sarah Palin bases her persona on the character from “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS”, a 1975 exploitation flick.

  73. 73.

    Ruckus

    @Patrick:
    They don’t actually want to pay for anything. They just want stuff like a million man army to appear by magic.

  74. 74.

    socraticsilence

    The stupid part of this is how amazingly easy the Obama response Palin set up is: “Half-Governor Palin said I’m too soft on terror…huh, maybe she should ask Bin Laden about that?”

  75. 75.

    azlib

    @appelligo:

    Well, uh, no. The Red Army did. 80% of all German combat casualties were on the Eastern Front. And it’s not like the Americans are responsible for the remaining 20% — that figure has to be shared,

    Amen. Arguably WW II could be called the Germany/Russian war. We did supply trucks which did help the Red Army’s mobility in 1943-45. But the Soviet Union ended up supplying most of the armaments and most of the human sacrifice. We owe a considerable debt to the millions of Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Nazis.

  76. 76.

    slag

    Captain America on whether or not he wants to kill Nazis: “I don’t want to kill anyone. I just don’t like bullies.”

    Republicans’ cheap, ill-conceived, a-historic version of patriotism is very un-Captain-American.

  77. 77.

    Patrick

    @socraticsilence:

    The stupid part of this is how amazingly easy the Obama response Palin set up is: “Half-Governor Palin said I’m too soft on terror…huh, maybe she should ask Bin Laden about that?”

    Beautiful!

  78. 78.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Best moment: Crowd erupted when she slammed the president’s foreign policy as too meek: “They say we can’t kill our way out of war? Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.”

    Yes, Patton lead the third army in storming Berlin in 1945. Right dumbass

  79. 79.

    Frosty in Dallas

    In a way she is right and President Obama is in many ways following the plan we used in WWII.
    FDR armed England etc in the early days and we stayed out of direct fighting.
    It should also be noted that 2/3 of all causalities took place on the eastern front.
    I.e. let the folks closest to the Nazi’s do as much of the heavy lifting as possible.

    it should be noted that we didn’t kill all the Nazi many live in Illinois driving station wagons and voting for the GOP.

  81. 81.

    Renie

    I can’t tell you how many conservatives I hear saying ISIL is in power because Pres Obama withdrew our troop from Iraq. Then when I say it was Bush who signed the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki requiring us to withdraw the troops, they look at me like I have two heads.

    They live in a fantasy world.

  82. 82.

    rikyrah

    1/25/2015 @ 1:41PM 193,937 views
    Bibi Netanyahu — aka ‘The Republican Senator From Israel’ — May Have Made A Fatal Political Mistake

    Set aside, for the moment, the diplomatic row being sparked by Speaker of the House John Boehner as he seeks to create two conflicting foreign policies for the United States—one pursued by the President and the other pursued by the Congress.

    Boehner’s hubris, in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desire to interfere with American policy while seeking to bolster his re-election campaign, may turn out to be the very political screw-up that will allow the joint ticket forged by the Labor-Hatnuah political parties to bring an end to Netanyahu’s long reign atop the Israeli government.

    According to a Channel 10 poll out this past Thursday in Israel, the joint ticket offered by the Labor-Hatnuah coalition currently stands to grab 24 seats in the Israeli Knesset in the coming election—up one seat from the previous poll—while Netanyahu’s Likud Party is holding steady with just 20 seats.

    The poll also projects that the party leaders atop the Labor-Hatnuah ticket, Issac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, have an increasingly good chance of forming the next Israeli government by assembling a coalition of between 61 and 68 seats in support of their government.

    It turns out that there are no shortage of Israeli voters who don’t care for the idea of their Prime Minister jumping into the middle of America’s internal disagreements over foreign policy and further understand that, at the end of the day, Israel remains deeply dependent upon the United States for critical assistance in the never-ending battle to preserve and protect their nation.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2015/01/25/bibi-netanyahu-aka-the-republican-senator-from-israel-may-have-made-a-fatal-political-mistake/

  85. 85.

    catclub

    @MattF:

    In contrast, the winger version is top-down rather than bottom-up, and is really just a variation on blaming the librul elite. It’s part of any right-wing rant, but has no life of its own.

    I would guess that is because the number of people in the US inconvenienced by those failures in Iraq is small, and mostly made up of people with last name Kagan. Large contrast with the number of people in Germany who suffered in the early 20’s.

  86. 86.

    Mike G

    @West of the Cascades:

    How many of the CPAC attendees have volunteered to go off and fight ISIS on the ground?

    Yes, this is what we need. They could call themselves “The Fat and Furious Brigade”.
    And it would rid of the US of some low-IQ trash.
    This could only turn out well, like the Children’s Crusade.

  88. 88.

    Linnaeus

    I can’t really say that I’m surprised by Palin’s quote. The right really likes to fetishize violence.

  89. 89.

    Tree With Water

    “They say we can’t kill our way out of war? Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.”

    I wonder what Palin would say if she knew that (in the neighborhood of) 85% of Nazi Germany’s dead in WW2 were killed by the godless commies of the USSR. Something profound, I’m sure, like “god works in mysterious ways”.

  90. 90.

    jonas

    @Iowa Old Lady: I agree. In 2011-12, Real Conservatives™ were swearing up and down that some milquetoast centrist (and *cough* Mormon *cough*) like Mitt Romney would get the nomination over their cold dead….and six months later they were all swooning over him as the only thing standing between America and the pending Armageddon of four more years under the Kenyan Muslim Usurper.

    They’ll learn to love Jeb, too, because like Romney, he’ll simply buy the election.

  91. 91.

    Chris

    @azlib:

    Amen. Arguably WW II could be called the Germany/Russian war. We did supply trucks which did help the Red Army’s mobility in 1943-45. But the Soviet Union ended up supplying most of the armaments and most of the human sacrifice. We owe a considerable debt to the millions of Red Army soldiers who died fighting the Nazis.

    Funny enough, the cynical, pragmatic, “realist” (in IR terms) thing to learn from World War Two is “let your enemies bleed each other to death and risk as few troops as possible yourself.” Let the Russians have their day of glory capturing Berlin; meanwhile, we get the harbors up north and the industrialized Rhineland.

    Which is pretty much the opposite of our ME policy. In the Middle Eastern wars of the last fifteen years, the “America” figure that sheds the least blood while reaping the benefits has been Iran.

  92. 92.

    jonas

    Oooh, a reference to kicking the Nazi’s asses. They still gotta go back to that, don’t they? What’s the age of the youngest WWII vet now? About 90? After a while, this is going to start sounding like some French orator trying to rally the patriots by reminding them about who beat those Hapsburgs at Austerlitz.

  93. 93.

    fuckwit

    Can we please stop feeding Snowbilly Troll? We can stop slut-shaming her, or even acknowledging the vile shit that emerges from her mouth.

    She’s a TROLL. She’s trollign the media. Do not feed the troll.

    Seeing her on the red carpet with Al Sharpton put it all in clear perspective. They’re a perfect pair. It’s not about ideology. It’s about trolling.

    She, like Sharpton, craves attention and is adept at doing whatever it takes to get it. Yes she uses sex to get attention, yes she uses stupid, ignorant, inflammatory statements to get attention, she uses whatever she’s got. We don’t have to fall for it.

    Can we all stop feeding the damn troll?

  96. 96.

    Tree With Water

    @Chris:”… the cynical, pragmatic, “realist” (in IR terms) thing to learn from World War Two is “let your enemies bleed each other to death and risk as few troops as possible yourself.”

    George Marshall was confronted by a Soviet General during the Tehran conference (undoubtedly inspired by Stalin himself), who accused the western allies as being too timid in the business of invading continental Europe. The General cited the number of major rivers that the Red Army had already crossed, and the number remaining they would leapfrog on their way to Berlin. By that time (November 1943) Marshall had wised-up from his earlier conceits concerning the realities of invading northern Europe. He responded by stating (I paraphrase): “Defeat of an army while crossing a river is a disaster. Defeat of a seaborne invasion force on the beaches is a catastrophe”.

    The agony of the USSR peoples during WW2 was arguably sealed with the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and probably earlier. The west was faithful to its word to Stalin that it would expeditiously wage war full scale war against Nazi Germany (the Europe First policy). People acquainted with the facts surrounding June 6th can tell you how close run a gamble it was, and Ike’s subsequent (and successful) broad front strategy came at the cost of tens of thousands of allied casualties. The post war configuration of Europe was shaped not by treachery or political machinations, but by the struggles of armies alone.

  97. 97.

    David Koch

    Palin is such a plagiarist and sore loser.

    She stole that line from rank and file bloggers. It’s a retort used when wingnutz say Obama is soft on terror. The smack down line goes, “you think he’s soft on terror – ask bin Laden. Ooops you can’t.”

    And she’s a sore loser because clearly that easy come back to her brain dead insults got under her skin.

  98. 98.

    Jeffro

    Thanks for ruining a classic for me there, DougJ

    (actually you didn’t)

    (but only because I only partly like the song)

  100. 100.

    Nickws

    @Xenos:

    Contrast that to the Soviets murdering large numbers of people and raping pretty much every East German woman between 9 and 90.

    IIRC the German political prisoners who were still being killed in communist political camps at the end of the forties, on German soil, by that point they were dying at the hands of homegrown proto-Stasi officials (these were German jailers who’d been with the Red Army or NKVD throughout the war; I think I have that right). Obviously Germans being held in Siberia had a different experience.

    If you’re saying the _German_ communist police state was only ever staffed with Russians, then, yeah, nah. After the worst Russian-only rampages in Germany were done by the end of 1946, it starts to become a very localised form of oppression.

    In many respects Moscow merely adopted Prussian authoritarian beastliness to its own ends when it set up the apparatus of the GDR that oversaw the oppression of 1950/1990. For instance, I’ve read that the Nazi generals who’d defected to Stalin during the war easily transitioned into life within gilded cages, because they found themselves attended to by German communist officers who were essentially no different than regular heer officers, it’s just they owed their fealty to Uncle Joe’s masses, not Hitler’s volk.

    @appelligo: @danielx: @azlib: @azlib: @Tree With Water: That, too. That’s really what Palin was babbling about; she’s obviously only interested in Hollywood WWII combat ‘history’, after all, not what she no doubt considers that boring stuff which happened after Dönitz threw in the towel…

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