Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

White supremacy is terrorism.

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

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

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

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Books are my comfort food!

I’m more Christian than these people and I’m an atheist.

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

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

In after Baud. Damn.

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2016 / Open Thread: Minor Historical Anniversary

Open Thread: Minor Historical Anniversary

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From Digby:

14 years ago [today], George W. Bush was sitting on his porch at the fake ranch in Crawford when he received a memo entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States.” It was later reported he told the briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass now.” And then he went fishing…

Any odds of this being raised at tonight’s debate (hahahahaha)?…

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  3. 3.

    Jack the Second

    “It’s amazing, because if you leave this country, people can’t believe he’s our president. There’s a comedy festival in Ireland, like 20 of us go, every single Irish person would just come right up to us, ‘Canya believe George Bush is your president?!’ ‘Yeah, ma’am, I can believe it, but y’know who can’t believe it? Jeb Bush. You know he’s shovin’ pencils in his eyes, goin’ ‘HOW THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN?! I’M THE SMART ONE!'”

    — Kathleen Madigan (link)

  4. 4.

    jl

    Did Jeb! really tweet that Dub was his main man on Middle East foreign policy? I don’t understand twitter well enough to see for myself.

    I guess that would work if they can sell their spin that Obama and Democrats stabbed the successful Dub Iraq invasion in the back.

    But, is the GOP going to win with repeated double bank shots like that over the next effing MORE THAN A DAMN YEAR until the election?

    Edit: GOP now has all the makings of good Key and Peele sketches, done by a group of older white guys who were born for the roles, rather than acting.

  5. 5.

    Waldo

    “What you need to know is that who I listen to when I need advice on the Middle East is George W. Bush.” – Jeb!

    Just one of the many statements Jeb will need to clarify — along with the fresh batch he’s sure to whip up tonight.

  7. 7.

    Elizabelle

    Uh, something else happened, 70 years ago on August 6th.

    Little matter of Hiroshima. Anybody remember?

  8. 8.

    Chris

    Honestly, the farther I get from the Bush administration, the more horrified I get when I do look back. He really was one of the worst things ever to happen to the White House.

  10. 10.

    RSA

    I still remember the title of that briefing being dragged out of Condoleezza Rice:

    I believe the title was, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

  11. 11.

    jl

    @Waldo: Jeb will resentfully claim with a barely suppressed sneer that a stand-alone tweet was taken out of context, and that it misspoke, anyway. And just to make a very minor correction to your comment, Jeb!’s first clarification will itself not be clear, and create more confusion, so there will have to several clarifications before he just says he takes it back. And then he will get pissy when people note that such a thing has happened several times before.

  12. 12.

    Elizabelle

    @Chris: I think he might have eclipsed James Buchanan, because the forces behind the Civil War were in play before he was in office.

    GW Bush was his own disaster bomb, and lied us into Iraq on false premises, even while a lot of the country did not want to go (but we were ignored and now we’re told “everyone!” did it.)

    Is there a worse president in US history? People snark about Warren G Harding, but he was not as effectively awful and had the grace to die in office — he served just over 2 years as President.

    Stealing an election, ignoring climate change, the wars, the tax cuts and fiscal irresponsibility, the “you’re with us or against us” … GW Bush was president at a crucial time, and he failed on all scores.

  14. 14.

    mai naem mobile

    I’ve been looking forward to this debate but I think its going to be a bust. 90mins/10 contestants minus intros and questions equals max 7-8 mins per contestant. Very little time to fuck up.

  15. 15.

    Elizabelle

    5:00 p: bring on Jindal and Fiorina and Graham and Pataki and Jim Gilmore and —

    I gotta find me a drink.

  18. 18.

    Amir Khalid

    Entertainment Weekly has this news about the state of the Mulder-Scully relationship in the six-episode thing next year. Needless to say, I am very disappoint.

  19. 19.

    JPL

    @RSA: If Trump knows that on this date Bush was told that, he will bring it up. Since he doesn’t have a campaign staff to do research, we can assume that he doesn’t even know that 70 years ago we used a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima.

  22. 22.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    @Elizabelle:

    The only ones who could even hope to play in the same league of bad as Bush the Younger were Buchanan and Bush’s own great-odd grandfather Franklin Pierce. But, as you say, shit was a-brewing long before either of those two clowns got near the presidency. Bush took a country that was in reasonably good shape and rand it just ass far into the ground as he could have.

    In eight fucking years, I can think of only one thing he did right–and, with the crop of fuckwads running the party today, I’ll give him credit for this right up until my dying breath–he told the anti-Muslim bigots to keep their lousy mouths shut. He did that one thing right, and he spoke up about it. These assholes running today? They’re stoking that shit. It’s hard to believe, but if one of these creatures ever found a way to infest the presidency, we’d be looking back fondly upon the time when we had a halfway decent Republican president like George W. Bush running things.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @Elizabelle: Harding failed conventionally, since his policies were continued by Coolidge. And poor Harding was drunk playing poker and nailing any hot chick he could seduce when not getting close to a nervous breakdown over how he did not have a clue about how to do the job. So, it was not intentional. He was a flunky in a corrupt political machine who got tapped to pull heavy duty work and could not handle it.

    Bush failed unconventionally, and intentionally.

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    @Elizabelle: Yes, but I can’t bear to discuss it on a day so devoted to circus clowns and village idiots.

    There’s still the Nagasaki anniversary.

  25. 25.

    Elizabelle

    @JPL: Dragging the laptop along, but we will see if there’s room to type and not end up with a drunk keyboard …

    Not gonna keyboard this junior never gonna be leaders of USA debate. Got to save my strength.

    Huckleberry talking about HRC: “in her world…” Cuz Dems don’t live in the real one. And he talks about “people who hate our guts.” That subset may be bigger than he assumes.

  27. 27.

    jl

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    Harding failed conventionally, since his policies were continued by Coolidge. And poor Harding was drunk playing p _ K _ r and nailing any hot chick he could seduce when not getting close to a nervous breakdown over how he did not have a clue about how to do the job. So, it was not intentional. He was a flunky in a corrupt political machine who got tapped to pull heavy duty work and could not handle it.

    Bush failed unconventionally, and intentionally.

  29. 29.

    Elizabelle

    @Anne Laurie: Good point. We can commemorate then.

    There are less than 200,000 Hiroshima survivors today; their average age is 80 and up.

  30. 30.

    Elizabelle

    Gilmore: Obama-Clinton policies are leading us into decline.

    Uh huh.

    ETA: He’s mostly reminding peeps who he is. Kind of him.

  32. 32.

    trollhattan

    @Mike J:
    God, she’s fvcking awful, then as now. And yet, considered Highly Accomplished in that special Ted Cruz/Bobby Jindal way.

    But she plays piano, so we’ll always have that. Can we have the Orkin Man report to the Hoover Institute for complete tenting and fumigation?

  35. 35.

    Chris

    @Elizabelle:

    Yeah, “his own disaster bomb” is exactly why I rank him so high. Buchanan and Hoover are the two you hear about all the time, for the Civil War and the Great Depression, but in both cases the crisis had been building for decades.

    Bush? To some extent that was true of him too, the Great Recession had been building ever since the country went insane/Reaganite twenty years before he was elected – but the Iraq War? That’s all on him. So was destroying the budget surplus.

    He’s got some stiff competition from Reagan, another president who didn’t just continue the bad trends of the past but also “was his own disaster bomb” – he dug up disastrous economic ideas that we’d buried fifty years before his day and turned them loose again.

  36. 36.

    Cervantes

    @Anne Laurie:

    Yes, but I can’t bear to discuss it on a day so devoted to circus clowns and village idiots.

    Well, you could compare them to a bomb of some sort — so there’s that.

  37. 37.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Elizabelle: I, on the other hand, will studiously avoid this debate by going for a nice dinner at one of my favorite local restaurants, which has no TV’s.

  38. 38.

    Mike J

    @Elizabelle:

    Obama-Clinton policies are leading us into decline.

    I’m curious what his metric is.

    Probably Wet Blanket. “You’re still around I wonder why, you the number one wet blanket”

  39. 39.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    @trollhattan:

    Damn, she’s beyond awful. I always found her to be truly loathsome on some kind of a visceral, instinctive level. She’s one of those few people who spark deep within my soul an almost irresistible urge to knock her stupid fucking teeth down her throat.

    Tom Cotton does the same thing to me. Even Ted Cruz, somehow, doesn’t rub me the wrong way the way those other two creeps do.

  40. 40.

    Elizabelle

    “They’re coming here, just as sure as I stand here in front of you.”

    Guesses as to who uttered that? You know you know.

    Clue: he speaks to generals, the ones he “knows and trusts”

  42. 42.

    Cervantes

    @Elizabelle:

    There are less than 200,000 Hiroshima survivors today; their average age is 80 and up.

    200,000? That must include survivors of the Nagasaki blast as well.

  43. 43.

    Chris

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    The two things I’d give him credit for are contradicting the Muslim-bashers, and actually working to make inroads into the Hispanic vote – two things on which the teabaggers have gone full reverse. At the time, I didn’t really think much about it, because it seemed like the absolute bare minimum you could expect from a presidency almost forty years after the civil rights victories. Good for you, George, you’re not a racist – what do you want, a cookie? But yes, the teabaggers have indeed made it worse.

    The next president will make us look back fondly on George Bush? I believe it. From Nixon to Reagan to George W. Bush, Republican presidencies get exponentially worse each time.

  44. 44.

    Elizabelle

    @Gin & Tonic: But for DougJ, I would be catching up on TDS marathon on Comedy Central, cuz missed most of them first time through. Or washing my hair, or something.

    Bon appetit!

  45. 45.

    Elizabelle

    @Cervantes: It might. Showed up in this NY Times story about

    Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivors Pass Their Stories to a New Generation

    Yet the things that Mr. Hasai saw and felt that day are not recounted by him alone. The person who knows his story best, after Mr. Hasai himself, is Ritsuko Kinoshita, a woman 25 years his junior who is serving as his “denshosha” — the designated transmitter of his memories. It is part of an unusual and highly personal project to preserve and pass on the experiences of atomic bomb survivors, whose numbers are dwindling rapidly.

    … “Even in Hiroshima, memories are fading,” said Hidemichi Kawanishi, a history professor at Hiroshima University. There has been much hand-wringing, he said, over a survey released this week by NHK, the national public broadcaster, showing that 30 percent of the city’s residents could not name the date the bomb was dropped. (Nationwide, 70 percent could not cite the date.)

    …. The number of officially recognized survivors of the nuclear attacks fell by about 6,000 last year, and is now below 200,000. Their average age is over 80.

    Professor Kawanishi called the denshosha project, supported by the city-funded museum, an attempt to preserve some of the moral and emotional influences wielded by those with direct experience of the bomb. Although many survivors have left records of their experiences in memoirs and documentaries, which are widely available to the public, they often end up treated as dry historical records.

  48. 48.

    Elizabelle

    Paul Krugman’s blog: Style, Substance, and The Donald

    Just about the entire political commentariat has been caught completely flatfooted by Donald Trump’s durable front-runner status; he was supposed to collapse after being nasty to St. John McCain, but nothing of the sort happened.

    So now the conventional wisdom is that we’re witnessing a temporary triumph of style over substance; Republican voters like Trump’s bluster, and haven’t (yet) realized that he isn’t making sense.

    But if you ask me, the people who are really mistaking style for substance are the pundits. It’s true that Trump isn’t making sense — but neither are the mainstream contenders for the GOP nomination.

  51. 51.

    Chris

    Also,

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): \

    I can’t believe that George Bush’s brother is seen as a legitimate candidate after eight years of what we went through. How fucking dumb are we Americans that we’re even thinking about this guy?

    I have to say I agree with this. I really hope the majority of Americans agree with us both if he makes it across the finish line, but part of me is still dumbfounded that they’re actually trying to run another Bush when the last one left such a catastrophic mess just seven fucking years ago. If you’d told me just a year ago that he’d be the Establishment’s choice this time around, I don’t think I’d have believed you.

  53. 53.

    Cervantes

    @Elizabelle:

    It might. Showed up in this NY Times story

    … which confirms via “nuclear attacks,” so yes — survivors of both explosions put together.

    Thanks for clarifying.

  54. 54.

    Waldo

    I know it’s unlikely tonight’s debate will turn into the epic poo-flinging free-for-all we’re all hoping for, but what’s the worst that could happen? The candidates are polite, articulate and good-natured? That seems even less likely and wouldn’t help any of them anyway.

  55. 55.

    ThresherK

    I will shite a brick the next time I hear some newsreader come on and announce Jon Stewart is a politicial comedy icon who is retiring after sixteen years of The Daily Show.

    These are all the jackasses who’ve failed to learn the first fcking thing from The Daily Show’s run. No wonder you’re dying, idiots.

    (Special bile reserved for NPR.)

  57. 57.

    Woodrowfan

    @jl: and apparently Harding was genuinely a nice guy,. whereas Bush is an asshole in private too.

  58. 58.

    Elizabelle

    @ThresherK: NPR deserves bile, on many occasions.

    NY Times story, and Jeff Greenfield’s quote brought out derision:

    Jon Stewart, Sarcastic Critic of Politics and Media, Is Signing Off

    … Since Mr. Stewart, 52, started hosting “The Daily Show” 16 years ago, the country’s trust in both the news media and the government has plummeted. Mr. Stewart’s brand of fake news thrived in that vacuum, and turned him into one of the nation’s most bracing cultural, political and media critics.

    With his over-the-top presentation of the news — his arms swinging wildly, his eyes bulging with outrage, followed by a shake of the head and a knowing smile — Mr. Stewart attracted a generation of viewers ready to embrace an outlier whose exaggerations, in their view, carried more truth than conventional newscasts.

    …. “I think Stewart has it both ways,” said Jeff Greenfield, the longtime TV news reporter. “He says he’s just a comedian but he’s more than a comedian and I think he knows that. I spent three decades-plus doing network news but if you ask me today, what do I pay more attention to, John Oliver and Jon Stewart or the evening newscast, it’s not close. I get much more out of Oliver and Stewart when he’s cooking than I do out of those formulaic 22-minute newscasts.”

    “There are a lot of journalists who watch Stewart and envy the freedom he has,” Mr. Greenfield added. “You can’t go on television when you’re a journalist and say, ‘Senator X is a bald-faced liar.’ ”

    Actually, you should indeed say that as a journalist, on the air and in the NYTimes. It’s why the profession is flailing.

  60. 60.

    trollhattan

    @Elizabelle:

    Actually, you should indeed say that as a journalist, on the air and in the NYTimes. It’s why the profession is flailing.

    Exactamundo. They should consider. Doing. Their. Jobs. That would probably net them a TDS guest spot when they publish their memoirs.

    OT. Monday in America.

    An 11-year-old boy has been charged with manslaughter, accused of using his father’s gun to shoot a three-year-old boy in Detroit, US media reports say. The boy was visiting his father in the east of the city on Monday when he took a handgun from the bedroom. He is said to have thrown the gun out into the back garden, retrieved it and jumped into a parked car.

    Later, the three-year-old boy went into the car, was then shot in the face and later died, prosecutors say.

    The older boy appeared in a juvenile court for a preliminary hearing on Wednesday afternoon. He faces another two charges of death by weapon aimed with intent, but without malice, and felony firearm.

    “Candidates, how would your administration curb gun violence?”
    In unison: “More guns!”

  62. 62.

    jl

    @Elizabelle: They don’t have to say the words ‘bald face liar’ to their faces. You can, oh, just to pick a crazy example, do some damn research on what the interview is about beforehand, and note that there is evidence to contradict what they say and ask for a response. You can do a follow-up fact check after the interview. Ohh… gosh, you can have legitimate experts on discussion panels rather than a collection of rancid political hacks and partisan operatives…

    Greenfield is sad and weak and lazy even at making sad and weak and lazy excuses. That response is the best he can do at strawmanning and false dilemma-ing? Yeesh.

  65. 65.

    ThresherK

    Aaaaand CBS Evening News has also led with a “before the sawing cellos” mini-blurb on Stewart.

    Careful, CBS: You don’t want to learn anything from this!

  66. 66.

    ThresherK

    @Cervantes: I actually don’t remember that; that was before my time. He was on that campaign in some capacity, right?

    I’m referring solely to my knowledge of him as a reporter; he used to be much better than he is now.

    (Would that his situation were unique.)

  67. 67.

    Shana

    @Matt McIrvin: I remember a news story about 6 months after Gilmore was elected about all these idiots who weren’t paying their car taxes because they’d voted for him. Not realizing that there still needed to be a law passed to do away with it, not just electing one guy. My first election since I’d moved to NoVA from Illinois. I wish I could say it was a surprise.

    BTW, we still have the car tax, because the law that eventually got passed had a clause that stopped the phase-out if the economy didn’t perform at a certain level.

  68. 68.

    Cervantes

    @ThresherK:

    I actually don’t remember that; that was before my time. He was on that campaign in some capacity, right?

    Yes, he was an assistant speech-writer, pretty much fresh out of college.

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