Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

Republicans don’t trust women.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Usually wrong but never in doubt

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

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

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

It’s not hopeless, and we’re not helpless.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

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Open Thread: Empire of Malign Idiots

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“High brow” or low, Rupert Murdoch has a lying moron to suit all tastes.

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74Comments

  1. 1.

    Warren Terra

    I find this “the Jews shoulda had guns and fought back” insanity offensive, of course – but also ridiculous. Leaving aside the fact that where possible many Jews did fight back, what must some asshat dumb enough to say this think about the Jim Crow South? Black sharecroppers did have guns, after all – but they also faced a more powerful and organized racist White power structure, and they didn’t only have guns, they also had families, and loved ones certain to pay the price if they tried to seize some temporary advantage by brandishing a gun in response to oppression.

    I swear, the magical powers these idiots assign to gun ownership …

  2. 2.

    Peale

    Wouldn’t it have been great had we had a presidential debate about what the Jews in Europe should be doing to protect themselves back in the 1930s when it mattered?

  3. 3.

    Adam

    @Peale:

    Back in the 30’s these were the same people jerking off to Father Coughlin and probably starting there own chapter of the German American Bund, I can guess what there position would be.

  4. 4.

    David Koch

    Scapegoating the Jews for the Holocaust – that’s a new one.

    I still can’t figure out how any Jew can vote for christian fascist republicans who want to force them to read christian prayers in school and use them as cannon fodder to achieve their sick cult end-times fantasies.

  5. 5.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @David Koch:
    Waaaaaay too many Jews believe that Israel is a breath away from total annihilation, that the conflict with Palestine, Arabs, and Islam is a black and white war against evil, where peace is impossible because Arabs will only be satisfied by the death of all Jews. I was raised to this idiocy. I have heard worse from relatives. Republicans feed this bigotry, and hate trumps self-preservation in politics. They say ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ like the middle name Hussein makes Obama automatically evil.

  7. 7.

    sharl

    I linked to Jacob Bacharach’s response in TNR to the latest idiocy from Dr. Ben Carson. But he also went all Jeet Heer a couple days ago in his Twitter feed on the same topic:

    The worst thing about Ben Carson’s antisemitic bullshit is that it further effaces the already forgotten history of Jewish resistance in WW2

    2. Myth of the weak cosmopolitan Jew going meekly to his demise especially pernicious: it supports both antisemitism *&* Zionist extremism.

    3. To the former, it confirms his prejudices; to the latter, it justifies the reinvention of Judaism as militaristic settler colonialism.

    4. A grim irony: our sentimentalism about the Holocaust rests firmly on identifying with assimilated urban Jews: a small % of its victims.

    5. Ben Carson, a moron, pictures the Jews of Europe as a bunch of whimpering college profs and dept. store owners being herded out of Berlin

    6. The history of Eastern and partisan resistance throughout the war, pinched between the Nazi and Soviet war machines? A deafening “uhhhh.”

    7. It’s the actual definition of antisemitism, the reduction of a whole people to a single, insulting stereotype.

    8. Wishing for armed Jews implicitly condemns the victims for their weakness. “Why didn’t they fight back?” Of course, they *did*.

    9. In-fucking-deed, the history of resistance in Nazi Europe puts lie to the central myth of private armament. Guess what? An army wins.

    I think he nailed the landing with that last tweet. Too bad it would be lost on the yahoos who most need to understand it.

  8. 8.

    sharl

    @sharl: And in that TNR article there was something new for me, in the second paragraph below:

    …This resistance was not successful. It reveals the lie in Carson’s real central claim. Armed citizens could not prevail against the might of the Wehrmacht. It required the combined power of the Western Allies and the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler, and even then at the cost of tens of millions of lives. But it also reveals the hateful and frankly anti-Semitic assumption that the Jews of Europe stumbled meekly to their own slaughter.

    A grim irony is that the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom was blamed on a Jew with a gun. Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish-German Jew living in Paris, upon learning of the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany, bought a gun and bullets (quite legally), went to the German embassy, and assassinated the diplomat Ernst vom Rath. (An additional irony: Rath, though an anti-Semite himself, had expressed regret at the treatment and suffering of Jews.) A citizen with a gun became one of the gross pretexts on which the Nazis began their Final Solution.

    Again, this actual history will go unheard, if not actively avoided, by the folks who need to learn it most.

  11. 11.

    sharl

    @redshirt: Ruckus’ link provides good background on Jeet Heer, but I referenced him due to his notoriety in Twitter-world for lengthy serial tweets; twenty or more tweets in a row on a given topic is not unusual for the guy. Fortunately for his loyal readers, he “storifies” them here, for easier access.
    I’m not a huge fan, but he ain’t bad.

  12. 12.

    sm*t cl*de

    Shorter Fox:
    1. People 75-80 years ago should have resisted authority more.
    2. Black kids are not sufficiently cooperative with authority and totally deserve it when they are shot by police or whackjob vigilantes.

    Ablow is enough of a shitweasel authoritarian that even when the authority is the Nazi party, he will still defend it by blaming the victims for letting bad things happen.

  14. 14.

    sm*t cl*de

    see Peggy Noonan debunk herself in just one paragraph

    That is an awful lot of self-condemnation and stupidity to fit into so few words. Not many people would have the guts to come out and so proudly announce that out of laziness or ignorance, she has not bothered to try to understand the tax proposal she is defending… but she is happy to accept the word of other people that it is identical to the tax proposal she is criticising… because all that matters is that they are packaged with different labels.

  17. 17.

    Ryan

    Did Peggy not actually do some fact checking on Trump’s and Jeb!’s tax plans, or were the martinis already flowing (I first misread debunking as drunking). First off, Trump’s plan is far more generous to the wealthy than the poor, as is John Ellis’. Second, in the case of Jeb!, since when is blowing a new $3.4 trillion hole in the next 10 year budget window good government?

  18. 18.

    WereBear

    @Warren Terra: I swear, the magical powers these idiots assign to gun ownership

    I wonder if that is on purpose. False sense of security that won’t be turned against them; Congress wont allow them. Why?

  19. 19.

    sharl

    @sm*t cl*de: Fox “News” network can get away with all sorts of things, as long as they stick to the kind of bias-confirming and ragegasm-inducing fare that works so well on our old, angry, racist, and ignorant white folks (i.e., a lot of the family members, friends, and neighbors of folks who comment here). It’s when they try to export that shit that hilarity can ensue, e.g., terrorism “expert” Steven Emerson holding forth on the “no-go areas for non-Muslims” in Birmingham, England. Murdoch and Ailes would do well to reconsider trying to export U.S. style media wingnuttery to other countries, although for my own entertainment purposes, I hope they decide to try it again soon.

  20. 20.

    Ryan

    @sharl: An army wins runs counter to their narrative that gun ownership is the only protection against tyranny. They don’t believe the army would win I guess.

  23. 23.

    David Koch

    @Frankensteinbeck: this is true. I have met liberal neo-cons. They’re liberal on 99.9% of issues (to the left of Sanders on many). This isn’t a surprise, there is a long proud history of jewish radicalism. But on the middle east they’re hard right interventionists. They still think Iraq was a good idea, just improperly executed. Are pissed Obama didn’t send 200K soldiers to Syria. Want to bomb Iran. Their ME views are freaking scary.

  24. 24.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @David Koch:
    A lot of them want to NUKE Iran. They see this as a war of genocide, so better them than us. I guarantee you Bibi thinks this way. Many more think it’s a shame things are this way, but it’s inevitable not because Arabs are evil, but because of differing interests that inherently cannot be overcome. Obama early in his presidency said that Islam deserves respect. The more militant Jews heard, and to them that was saying Obama is just fine with thw extermination of the Jews. Like you said, they’re often liberal in other ways, but this existential race war superceeds all other considerations.

  27. 27.

    Fred

    Huntin’ muskets did fine back in 1776! But then the Brits didn’t have air cover or satelite imaging. And they did have to haul their supplies around in ox carts and they had long supply lines back to the beach where they brought the stuff ashore in row boats. Oh yeah, no body armour or tanks and they pretty much had the same kind of singel shot muskets.
    But a brave man with an AR-15 can do a LOT of damage… to a Honda.
    So it’s just the same as 1776!

  28. 28.

    Kay

    I don’t listen to wingnut politicians themselves, but I encounter their supporters regularly and I have heard stories like this one before:

    Carson is not the only one to use this test example as proof of America’s declining schools. It has been bandied about by Rush Limbaugh and is a popular talking point of many conservative politicians, including U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Carson found these questions not as part of his research, in some old library, but from a chain email on the internet, that got Snoped in 1999. The questions actually are from a real graduation test given in Salina County Kansas, in 1895, not the 1830s, and was given to eighth graders, not sixth graders. What Carson and others leave out is that while these were indeed six of about a 50 question test, most kids that took the test, failed. In fact, according to a Salina Journal report that reviewed the test results, only 25% passed the test. And considering that in this area of Kansas, only about half of the kids stayed in school all the way until eighth grade completion, it makes these six example test questions even more meaningless.

    Ben Carson is being revealed as a crazy person, so that’s him, but an actual US Senator from Wisconsin doesn’t know that everyone didn’t go to school in 1895? Kansas hadn’t even been a state very long. What I especially love about it is it’s intended to show how dumb people are. If that’s what you set out to do, wouldn’t you examine the claim – just check if it’s plausible at least- if it “sounds right”?

  29. 29.

    Pie Happens (opiejeanne)

    @Fred: If you read about the Revolutionary War you discover that those farmers turned soldiers on our side were not very successful after Concord and Lexington because they weren’t really an army yet. The other side was winning the battles because they had an army. Oh sure, our boys harassed them from behind trees but most of the war wasn’t fought in places that provided that kind of cover.
    The Brits did make lovely targets in their red coats, though. Lobsters.

  30. 30.

    bystander

    Thinking that if Jews in Europe had guns they could have thwarted the Holocaust is of whole cloth with thinking that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to assure that private citizens can arm themselves sufficiently to overthrow the US government. These are idiots and our burden in in life is to have to live with them.

    The summary execution of Tamir Rice only underscores the hate, idiocy and hypocrisy of these pukes.

  31. 31.

    srv

    If Noonan thinks she understands the complexities of a tax policy, then tens of millions of other voters will too.

    Perception is reality and Trump gets that.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    I don’t think Republican voters in red states will switch sides based on this, but is interesting that GOP candidates don’t talk about it:

    On the Democratic side, there have been speeches by the presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has spoken about wage stagnation, largely in the context of wealth inequality. But the topic matters to Republicans, too. When asked in a poll to choose one issue that is paramount in deciding their vote, Republicans named the economy and jobs ahead of terrorism, immigration, health care and foreign policy.
    But Republican candidates have either ignored the issue or tiptoed around its edges, as Mr. Trump does when he talks about the offshoring of jobs to China and Mexico.
    It is an odd mismatch — flat wages seem to matter a lot to Republican voters, but Republican candidates are all but mum on the subject.

    It’s a tough thing for “both sides” because wages are flat across the board (college educated too) and unemployment is low- so they can’t turn to the ‘ol relliables- education and job creation. Still, I think it’s a mistake not to address it even for Republicans, because people know it.

  33. 33.

    Pie Happens (opiejeanne)

    @Kay: Those kids in the 1830s would have had to have been mighty prescient:

    Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.

    I’m glad the business about de Tocqueville was cleared up, because I did not remember him writing anything like that and was beginning to think I must have skipped a few chapters.

  34. 34.

    Pie Happens (opiejeanne)

    @Kay: Also, Kansas wasn’t even a settled territory in the 1830s. It didn’t become a state until 1861, so I doubt there were any schools there in the 1830s.

    Talk about not knowing much about history.

  35. 35.

    Kay

    @Pie Happens (opiejeanne):

    Right. I especially love that. Children in the 1830’s had to predict future events or they didn’t pass 8th grade. They really were smart! I;m in a book club with a bunch of GOP women and they tell me things like this all the time. They had another one, from West Virginia, they were passing around about ten years ago.

    What it means to me is the doctor doesn’t even read these things he parrots. He applies no thought to them whatsoever. It’s not just like they’re passing these stupid emails around, either. They announce them publicly, as to “policy”.

  36. 36.

    debbie

    @Kay:

    It would have been nice if someone challenged Ben Carson the way Steve Kroft challenged President Obama on 60 Minutes. Barely even let him respond.

  37. 37.

    Huntly

    Someone got shot outside ATT(Cowboy’s) stadium after the game against the Pats. Why isn’t there an uproar about sports stadiums prohibiting fire arms?

  38. 38.

    SFAW

    @Adam:

    probably starting there own chapter of the German American Bund, I can guess what there position would be.

    With VC funding from Prescott Bush, no doubt

  39. 39.

    Patricia Kayden

    How coincidental that Rightwingers so neatly revise history to advance their obsession with guns. Funny how they never argue that Native Americans should have had guns when Europeans started arriving.

  40. 40.

    Kay

    In other news, the NYTimes is still flogging the Clinton email story.

    Clinton Emails Are New Focus of Benghazi Panel in House. Of course they are, because there’s nothing to Benghazi, so it’s time to conflate “Benghazi” and “emails” because both of those words now have all sorts of special, dark meaning when combined with “Clinton”.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/us/politics/clinton-emails-became-the-new-focus-of-benghazi-inquiry.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&mtrref=www.nytimes.com&gwh=CB8ADE1CB4A5F7A1C29C44495DB685D0&gwt=pay&assetType=nyt_now

    At the end of this election someone should count how many words the NYTimes devoted to “vetting” this one candidate, as compared to the 20 or so other candidates, including Donald Trump.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    Ok, what’s really wrong with the Jews v. the Wehrmact theory is that it wouldn’t be the Jews v. the Wehrmact. If the Jews had had more guns, then regular Germans would have had more guns, so it would have been the Jews v. the Wehrmact + the entire German people.

  44. 44.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    so it would have been the Jews v. the Wehrmact + the entire German people.

    Oh, right – like there was any anti-semitism in Europe at that time. Next you’ll be trying to tell us that there’s still racism in the good ol’ USofA. You libtards will lie about anything.

  46. 46.

    SFAW

    @Baud:

    Yes, I would like to see Ben Carson praise the use of firearms in antebellum slave revolts. Then I’ll take him seriously.

    Why should those darkie immigrants and workers be allowed to have firearms? It’s not as if they are real ‘Muricans, either.

    ETA: And, anyway, you need to wait for his ‘Ludes to wear off before Carson says anything on that. So, 2023, maybe?

  49. 49.

    WereBear

    Sadly, wingnut thinking is probably something that should be studied by neurologists and psychologists (as is starting to happen) instead of being used to govern the country.

  50. 50.

    Baud

    @David Koch:

    I have met liberal neo-cons. They’re liberal on 99.9% of issues (to the left of Sanders on many).

    That’s true for a whole lot of people. Liberal except for the Second Amendment. Liberal except for abortion. We are told that the most important issue to us is the idiosyncratic issue that Democrats may be weak on, and millions buy into it. Different rules apply for assessing Republicans, of course.

  51. 51.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    I think part of harping on the past is better than today is to deny President Obama credit for successes on social issues during his Presidency, which are a continued declining crime rate, despite starting off with the Great Recession, record low teen pregnancy rates and record high high school graduation rates.

    Usually this sort of good news gets attributed to a sitting President.

    I know some of the decline in teen pregnancy is directly due to the Obama Administration scrapping the Bush & Co funding for abstinence only education programs and only funding sex Ed programs with actual evidence of efficacy.

    I really do find it interesting that these social ills of my childhood in the 1970’s and 1980’s, which dominated society’s attention, have been on the decline for my adult life, with some taking a sharp decline during President Obama’s tenure are being ignored with seemingly deliberate attempt.

  54. 54.

    magurakurin

    @Kay:

    They wanna take her down…But it isn’t working. Latest polls from SC and NV

    ruh roh

    Bernie is gonna get creamed. And then on to crush the GOP clown who gets named King of the Clowns.

  55. 55.

    SFAW

    @gene108:

    I know some of the decline in teen pregnancy is directly due to the Obama Administration scrapping the Bush & Co funding for abstinence only education programs and only funding sex Ed programs with actual evidence of efficacy.

    Well, that, plus Bristol Palin hitting her 20s.

  56. 56.

    JPL

    Initially when Carson preached his gun theory and the holocaust, I can see a journalist being surprised. At this point, though, why isn’t he challenged. Jewish people were in the minority in Germany. Maybe Carson should simply be questioned about the size of Jewish population in Germany. Maybe he should be asked about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and what happened.

  57. 57.

    MomSense

    These idiots will say anything to justify their belief that they can somehow resist the tyranny of the US government with their personal arsenals. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed but some of these freedom fighters in waiting are not exactly in fighting form.

    How many of these Rambo ammosexuals could carry 80-100 lb packs filled with gear and ammo, weapons, while running through the woods or suburbs evading the military?

    I don’t see these armchair commandos able to complete basic training let alone SERE?

  58. 58.

    sm*t cl*de

    @JPL:

    when Carson preached his gun theory and the holocaust

    How does that “own guns, resist armed round-ups” theory work for Trump’s plan to round up every undocumented immigrant in the US and put them on trains? Is the Republican base in favour of arming the prospective deportees, or against?

  59. 59.

    SFAW

    @JPL:

    Maybe he should be asked about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and what happened.

    Well, as all Fox viewers know, the Warsaw uprising was the beginning of the end for the Wehrmacht. The Americans and Brits (and French and a few others) just came in at the very end, for the mopping up, after all of the heavy lifting had been done.

    That motherfucker benefits from the veterans and Holocaust survivors being in their 70s (for the very youngest Shoah survivors) and high 80s (for the veterans), and being in much smaller numbers than when I was a kid in the 1960s – when spouting his bullshit would have earned him a one-way ticket to political Sibirsk. That motherfucker.

  64. 64.

    RSA

    @sharl:

    Ruckus’ link provides good background on Jeet Heer, but I referenced him due to his notoriety in Twitter-world for lengthy serial tweets; twenty or more tweets in a row on a given topic is not unusual for the guy.

    To me this points out a shortcoming of the medium that writers have to work around, but I don’t often see it described that way.

  65. 65.

    Kay

    @gene108:

    record low teen pregnancy rates

    I think part of the reason the teen pregnancy rate drop doesn’t get any attention is it’s really pronounced in black and brown girls. No one is going to give those communities any attention for that because it contradicts a favorite talking point, which is “those people have children they can’t support”. People love the babies having babies/black people theme.

    There was one year- 2006- thereabouts- where my (overwhelmingly white) county teen pregnancy rate (not absolute number) was higher than Ohio’s urban counties and the only reason I heard about it as a comparison is I have a close friend who is a county health department nurse and it jumped out at her.

    I’m gonna wait on the high school grad rates. Rahm cooked his books there and they had to re-calibrate the numbers about a month ago. One of the things you learn when you follow ed reform is to let a stat sit out there for a year. A lot of times they’re questionable/inflated/have ommissions etc. I have questions in this state on how many kids they’re sending to online credit recovery schools and then counting as “graduated”. The kids themselves say they game that system, don’t do their own work, it’s really easy, like that. I think principals are pushing out low performers and sending them online- I know of one in the next county over who definately is- the juvenile judges complain about him.

    Pregnancy is a public health record so less subject to spin.

  66. 66.

    amk

    @Kay:

    what is real pity is that she knew that particular shit storm is bound to come but she went ahead and did it anyway. self-inflicted wound.

  67. 67.

    Matt McIrvin

    @SFAW: I recall the “Nazis started by taking away everyone’s guns” claim being common wingnut knowledge as far back as the 1970s or 1980s, though, when many WWII and Holocaust survivors were still alive, well and outspoken.

  68. 68.

    Kay

    @amk:

    I agree, but I don’t think that excuses the coverage. Donald Trump is the front-runner on the GOP side. Where are his financials? It’s like these “non traditional” candidates are getting a complete pass. Ben Carson is spouting this crazy shit all over the country and he gets very little push-back. There needs to be an incentive so self-promoters or hacks have some downside to getting in.

  69. 69.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    Yes, and thank goodness. While there are a significant number of us-or-them Jews, they do not represent the overall will of Jews in the US, and I’m not sure even in Israel. That single issue ‘kill all Muslims’ attitude is how the GOP Jews ignore that they would be next, however.

  70. 70.

    SFAW

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I hadn’t heard that (or perhaps hadn’t noticed it) during that period. Not sure why, probably was paying less attention at that time.

    Thanks.

  71. 71.

    SFAW

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    the GOP Jews ignore that they would be next, however.

    Which means that they don’t have an especially good understanding of history – from any post-Abraham period.

  72. 72.

    VOR

    @Pie Happens (opiejeanne): Yes, Washington’s army benefited greatly from training provided by Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben of the Prussian General Staff. Even in the 18th century militia was at a huge disadvantage against trained, experienced soldiers. Now throw in air power, satellite imagery, drones, artillery, armor, and so on.

  73. 73.

    catclub

    @sharl:

    Murdoch and Ailes would do well to reconsider trying to export U.S. style media wingnuttery to other countries,

    Of course, given that model started in Australia and England, and was imported to the USA, I can understand why they might think it can travel to other countries.

  74. 74.

    Pie Happens (opiejeanne)

    @VOR: Thanks. I was trying to remember von Steuben but it was the wee hours here and I was finally getting sleepy, too sleepy to look for his name.

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