Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

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

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Come on, man.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

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

Republicans in disarray!

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

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

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

The words do not have to be perfect.

After roe, women are no longer free.

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

Second rate reporter says what?

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Soft, Soft Targets

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Soft, Soft Targets

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A little pick-me-up for the early-morning crowd. “Brutal”, as defined by a bunch of WATBs, and their enablers at Politico:

He’s hitting the road, working on new material, coming soon to a city near you.

He’s Barack Obama, stand-up president. Politics, particularly Republican presidential politics, has gotten ridiculous, he thinks. These people aren’t serious enough to be president in Obama’s mind, and he’s got the platform to lay into them, and the natural sarcastic sense of humor to fit the role…

He’s quoting Chris Rock, twisting his mouth into an exaggerated pout for a POTUS-style Grumpy Cat to mock the “gloomy” Republicans, and cracking himself up in the bit that got the attention this week about the Republicans saying they can handle Putin when they’re not tough enough for CNBC debate moderators.

All this helps keep him in the center of the political conversation well past the point when by all rights he should have been lameducked, but it’s more than that: To all the Republicans who used to hit him for not being up to the job of president himself, Obama’s delivering a wry ‘well, get a load of these guys.’

That it drives Republicans crazy — well, that’s just an added bonus…

For all that’s been made of Obama’s not-so-great poll numbers, they’re inching up again. He’s already more popular among Democrats than any of the Democrats running to replace him, and more popular among voters overall than those three — or any of the Republicans.

The president’s rolling his eyes, people who know him say, and he’s pretty sure a lot of people are rolling right along with him. Clearly, he feels that with a little tweak or two, he can be the one who can turn straight news coverage of the latest GOP flareup into coverage of their campaign as a silly food fight…

Obama has been frustrated by the lack of credit he gets for how much the economy has improved since he first was elected president, and some White House advisers feel that as the election to choose his successor really gets underway, he’s uniquely positioned to remind Americans about where things were and where they are now.

“According to this alternative reality that they have created, everything was great until I took office,” Obama said Wednesday night at another DNC fundraiser in one Washington suburb, speaking of the Republicans. “And those were the golden years when we were losing 800,000 jobs, and millions of people were losing their homes, and we were in the middle of two wars, and I came in and just screwed everything up.”…

*************

Apart from a heartfelt tell it Mr. President or three, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Reader Interactions

135Comments

  1. 1.

    David Koch

    For all that’s been made of Obama’s not-so-great poll numbers, they’re inching up again.

    ABC News/Washington Post Poll — Oct 15-18, 2015

    Obama Job Rating

    Approve…………….51%

    Disapprove…………45%

    At this point in his presidency, George W Bush had 29% approval and 68% disapproval rating.

    How’s that for “not-so-great poll numbers” politico.

  3. 3.

    amk

    @David Koch:

    That’s because kenyan muslin is a dictaytor usurper, who is bending the ass-kissing pollsters to his will. Also. Too. He is the weakest prezinent evah.

  4. 4.

    David Koch

    PPP Poll South Carolina Nov 7-8 (Sept in parenthesis)

    Who won the SC Democratic Presidential Forum

    Clinton……………….67%
    Sanders…………….16%
    O’Malley……………..6%

    Who would you vote for in SC primary?

    Clinton………………72% (54) +18
    Sanders…………….18% ( 9) + 9
    O’Malley……………..5% ( 2) + 3

  7. 7.

    MattF

    Wingnut crania will explode before they admit it, but Hillary’s connections with Obama are going to be an advantange in the election. All those planned TV ads that demonize the Kenyan Usurper– oopsie. They’re going to have to try something else.

  12. 12.

    Satby

    Should be a nice day. As to the President, here’s hoping he keeps doing what he’s doing. He’s had a hard 7 years, and I hope he really enjoys his last year in office. He’s more than earned it.

  13. 13.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    The President has good writers, but he’s the best President in my life time in comedic timing.

  17. 17.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    The local news has had a couple of reports the past several months about the Santa Susana Test facility south of Simi Valley. There has been breathless reporting detailing the rocket testing and a nuclear meltdown in the late 50’s as though no one had any idea that these activities occurred there. Really? I remember the house shaking about every week in the mid 60’s when they were testing the Saturn V rocket engines, and a friend in high school told me about the meltdown in the mid 70’s.

  19. 19.

    Satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: it was, but not on purpose. Which made it much less funny.

    My marine son was in Iraq while W did that hilarious bit about looking for WMDs under his desk. I just couldn’t find it amusing somehow.

  20. 20.

    Baud

    @amk:

    All those tweets pointing out the hypocrisy between killing baby Hitler and the GOP view on abortion are golden.

    As president, I will propose a Stop Future Hitlers Act that will preserve a women’s right to stop future Hitlers from being born.

  24. 24.

    Phylllis

    The rain has finally ended. I don’t think we’ve seen any sunshine for over a week. Off to Charleston for part one of some major dental work.

    Oh, and do I ever love No Fucks to Give Obama.

  27. 27.

    Amir Khalid

    “Not serious enough to be President” is an objectively accurate description of everyone in the 2016 Republican presidential field.

  33. 33.

    Docg

    Christ on a pogo stick. Morning Joe is bitching because he doesn’t know what the University of Missouri President did to warrant being forced out, blaming the national media for his lack of knowledge. Hello, you ARE national media! Perhaps you could get off your ass and interview students and others to get answers. You are no longer a politician, blaming the media is off the table for you now, Clueless Joe.

  35. 35.

    Another Holocene Human

    Don’t look now, but Chuck C Johnson is having another meltdown on facebook. He told Shaun King to kill himself a couple of times and demanded that Shaun somehow get his twitter back. Stupid motherfucker. Apparently he has a bunch of court dates coming up, results of the shit he’s stirred.

    Oh, and Shaun King retweeted that apparently 1008 Americans have been killed by police this year so far. Saw another graph showing there is no Ferguson effect, cop brutality continues apace (which is what I would expect to see, personally), if on a slight secular rise through the entire period.

    Johnson posted some Bell Curve-esque idiocy recently that really made me question his intelligence (I know he’s evil, okay, question is, is he stupid). It was just so incredibly idiotic and non-sensical. “Bell curve determines national destiny.” Bell curve is an artificial statistical construct badly pasted on yaye to population IQ statistics, assuming the IQ test is even correlated to frontal lobe activity and not dominant/elite language acquisition or class status or something like that, you truculent ungulate!

  39. 39.

    Phylllis

    @Darkrose: @Satby: Thanks. I was fortunate to be referred to the Medical University of SC postgraduate dental clinic for the work. Top-notch dentists and about 1/4 the cost.

  40. 40.

    Another Holocene Human

    Fuck, got up early to run an errand, got derailed first by purry critter, then by pouring cold water into my coffee grounds … oops.

  42. 42.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Docg: He could try reading the STL Post Disgrace, much as their website sucks they have one, and there are a # of articles on the whole mess there. Basically, what Wolfe did is nothing. And that was the problem. Apparently Mizzou has a long history of pretending problems don’t exist in the hopes they will just go away. This time people wouldn’t just go away. I’d link a couple articles but they are running a script that locks up my computer.

  43. 43.

    Baud

    W/R/T Firefox, I figured out the reason I couldn’t view embedded tweets is because I had Do Not Track on.

  47. 47.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    I think I’m getting the IR post processing down. I’m really happy with my latest results.

  50. 50.

    Punchy

    @OzarkHillbilly: I dont think non-Missourians understand just what a racist cesspool Missouri (esp. southern MO) is. These issues at MU are not surprising, since pubic unis take a huge % of in-state students and so much of rural MO is as racist and anti-Semitic as they come.

  51. 51.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Punchy: I was a little naive about Mizzou being insulated from the rest of the state, thinking of it as an island of sanity in a cesspool. Not that I ever thought it was immune, just that on campus at least, those things would not be tolerated. But I didn’t go to school there, and have spent very little time in Columbia so I blame it on ignorance.

  52. 52.

    Jeffro

    @Darkrose: I think it actually contains negative fucks at this point.

    Please keep it up, Mr. President. Mocking the Republicans loud and long is not only entertaining, it helps short-term-memory-loss America remember what was really going on back in 2008 (to say nothing of the W years)

  57. 57.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Iowa Old Lady: The football team walking out is what brought the spotlight, and that is what made the situation intolerable. It was all OK as long as they could pretend nothing was going on, but when you are the lead story at the Guardian and the NYT and the BBC and FOX and NPR and CNN and Al Jazeera and… So good on the team and every one who backed them up.

    This is the same team that had no problem with Michael Sam in the locker room, who didn’t say anything to anyone for a year until he said it first. I’m not sure how much credit one should give to Gary Pinkel, but surely he deserves some for fostering an atmosphere that encourages standing up for others..

  59. 59.

    debbie

    @Satby:

    This is such a dog whistle kind of thing (in a good way). I think the more Obama pokes fun at them, the more the GOP will continue to run against him instead of the actual Dem candidate. This can only be good news.

  61. 61.

    Nemo_N

    Last week, one of the anchors at CNN couldn’t hide her annoyance during the note of the President mocking repugs for their debate whining.

    The media still believes all the bad things that happen to the GOP are cosmic misfortunes, instead of the fruit of their acts.

  62. 62.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Apparently Mizzou has a long history of pretending problems don’t exist in the hopes they will just go away.

    I posted a couple links back on Sunday which I can’t repost without going into moderation, but even African-American faculty members were getting the n-word tossed at them by other faculty members. Stupid kids are one thing, but this is well beyond the pale when supposedly smart people feel free to engage in this kind of behavior.

  63. 63.

    SteveinSC

    Anybody up for a “Diapers for Vitter” campaign? Order a case from Amazon and have them delivered to Vitter’s Senate Office. Make sure to get the cheap ones from China, which would be just the humiliating thing the doctor ordered.

  64. 64.

    Matt McIrvin

    I see zero evidence from the Huffington Post poll aggregates that Obama’s job-approval numbers are creeping up. This is a question where so many polls are taken that there’s no point in looking at individual numbers; there are very good averages.

    Obama’s average job approval crept up fractionally about a year ago, and has been very, very slowly sliding downward since January. But these are minuscule movements; almost everybody basically knows how they feel about Barack Obama by now and the numbers aren’t really going anywhere.

    Ever since Obama’s initial honeymoon period ended around the beginning of 2010, his approval numbers have been basically flat. His reelection campaign managed to shift them a few points up to bare net approval right when he got reelected, but they returned to a slightly worse version of the status quo ante immediately after his second inaugural.

    This level of nothing happening is actually really unusual in the history of Presidents. Usually, you see either a pronounced trend up or down. It probably has to do with the extreme partisan split in the numbers: whether you approve of Obama’s job performance is mostly a proxy for being a Democrat.

  67. 67.

    Matt McIrvin

    …It’s almost as if there’s something inherent and unchangeable about Barack Obama that largely determines whether people approve of him or not. I wonder what it could be????????????

  68. 68.

    Sherparick

    Interesting article in Wonkblog about the effects on Kentucky of voting in a Teabagger Governor who is intent on sabotaging the Affordable Care Act in his state. They find a beneficiary who voted for Bevin and who is now shocked to find out he is likely to lose his health insurance (through Medicaid Expansion) and as result, may die, or at least get a great deal sicker as a result. As H.L. Mencken, who really was not fond of the concept, it appears that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken

  75. 75.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    @Baud: Glad you got it figured out. There are too many widget switches to keep track of these days…

    Cheers,
    Scott.
    (Don’t Track Me Bro!)

  77. 77.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @David Koch:

    How’s that for “not-so-great poll numbers” politico.

    Doubtless the replay will be “dangerous over inflated”

  79. 79.

    Paul in KY

    @Baud: Rod Serling would have done a show about that & when Jeb or whomever comes back from killing baby Hitler, finds out that things are even worse.

    Stalinist type dictatorship rules world

    Less insane fascist than Hitler came to power & conquered world, etc. etc.

  85. 85.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Sherparick: Most people put more time and effort into researching what brand of TV they’re going to buy than looking into the history of the political candidate they’re going to vote for, unfortunately. Bottom line, in the age of Google, there’s no longer an acceptable excuse for remaining ignorant.

  87. 87.

    SFAW

    @Paul in KY:

    Less insane fascist than Hitler came to power & conquered world, etc. etc.

    Why bring Cheney into this?

    ETA: WTF Grung_e-Gene? You couldn’t wait until I was done typing? Heartless bastard.

  89. 89.

    Matt McIrvin

    @debbie: Well, the 2012 election wasn’t technically evidence against that: his average approval number just barely poked up above 50% right when he won reelection.

    And if you go to Gallup’s site and look at the average across all presidents, you see that the average actually does that. Obama’s job approval hasn’t been that far from Average President’s across most of his administration, actually; most presidents are much further off the average one way or the other. For most of his first term Average President was doing just a little better than Obama, now they’re about the same.

    Up through about 2013 you could squint at Obama vs. GWB and maybe come to the scary conclusion that Obama’s job approval trend was exactly what Bush’s would have been without 9/11. But since then Obama hasn’t really lost ground, whereas Bush kept on sliding further and further into the toilet.

  90. 90.

    rikyrah

    Why Carson’s complaints about scrutiny are wrong

    11/10/15 08:00 AM

    facebook twitter save share group 1

    By Steve Benen

    The more questions arise about the veracity of Ben Carson’s personal background, the more the Republican presidential candidate characterizes himself as a victim of unfair scrutiny. There’s a tactical value to the argument – it’s vastly easier to attack news organizations than defend inconsistencies in his record – that simultaneously panders to far-right activists who remain convinced that President Obama wasn’t vetted in the 2007-2008 race.

    Carson told NBC’s Chris Jansing over the weekend, “I have always said that I expect to be vetted. But being vetted and what is going on with me, ‘You said this 30 years ago, you said this 20 years ago, this didn’t exist, this didn’t.’ You know, I just, I have not seen that with anyone else. Or if you can show me where that’s happened with someone else, I will take that statement back.”

    NBC News’ First Read highlighted some details that Carson may not remember from eight years ago.

    We found a combined 165 New York Times and Washington Post articles that were all (or partially) about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright between the time Obama first launched his presidential bid (Feb. 2007) and his 2008 victory (Nov. 2008). During that same time period, we found an additional 41 New York Times and Washington Post pieces on Obama and Bill Ayers.

    This doesn’t even touch on the conspiratorial questions about Obama’s birthplace.

    ………………………..

    Carson feels put upon, as if he’s been singled out by reporters overeager to pick on him, largely because he’s not at all accustomed to being scrutinized. He was a celebrated surgeon, whose judgment and credibility was unquestioned.

    Now that he’s seeking the nation’s highest office, Carson suddenly finds media professionals asking him about his claims that appear to untrue – and he’s outraged. How dare journalists press a presidential candidate about dubious stories he may have made up. Don’t they understand? He’s Ben Carson!

    http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/why-carsons-complaints-about-scrutiny-are-wrong

  92. 92.

    beltane

    @Matt McIrvin: This is a sharply divided country. There is no way to sugar coat the fact that Americans hate each other. W was that rare president who managed to unite the country by making almost everyone despise him.

    One of the things I dislike about living next to New Hampshire is sharing their media market. The onslaught of ads is like a form of psychological torture. So far, the only candidate from either party with decent ads is John Kasich, who seems to be running in the guise of a New Deal Democrat.

  93. 93.

    rikyrah

    @Docg:

    Christ on a pogo stick. Morning Joe is bitching because he doesn’t know what the University of Missouri President did to warrant being forced out, blaming the national media for his lack of knowledge

    reading your entire post just made me LOL

    let them stay clueless

  94. 94.

    oldster

    Has anyone asked JEB! the obvious follow-up questions yet?

    “So would you abort baby Hitler?”

    C’mon, man–gotta step up!

    Step up and explain to us why a new-born baby is a fair target for assassination, but one hour before this it would be the WORST CRIME EVER to harm a sainted fetus? If infanticide is okay, why is fetus-cide not okay?

    Could it be that your obsession with abortion has less to do with protecting life, and more to do with wanting to control women’s bodies?

  95. 95.

    Amir Khalid

    Speaking of soft targets, here is confirmation via TPM that Dr Ben, the self-proclaimed Most Honest Student at Yale, actually fell for a campus newspaper prank. If this story were the only thing to come out from his past, it would still be enough to disqualify him as a potential President. Now it’s just one of many things.

  97. 97.

    scav

    @oldster: It’s pretty much SOP for a swathe of believers: the strictest obedience to rules and application of censures are for others, those non-believers. Christians are pre-forgiven when it comes to moral trespasses, and besides increasingly only obey the laws of the state when they agree with them. See also the tribe of LEOs that enforce the law (and serve as one-stop operation of trial by peers and execution) while not seeing themselves as bound by all the regulations themselves.

  101. 101.

    Tommy

    @beltane:

    This is a sharply divided country. There is no way to sugar coat the fact that Americans hate each other.

    I tend to disagree. Maybe the talking heads are but the polls show most Americans are for the same things. Huge majorities are for Social Security, sane gun laws, an increased minimum wage, for higher taxes on really rich people. The list goes on and on.

  103. 103.

    Iowa Old Lady

    I’m listening to Rachel Maddow from last night, and there’s a terrifying Iowa preacher saying gays deserve to be executed at an event attended by Cruz and Jindal.

  108. 108.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tommy: It doesn’t matter what things they’re for, it matters what groups of people they hate. Republicans can be for all those things and still have a bone-deep tribal hatred of Democrats.

  109. 109.

    Tommy

    @Lamh36: I am not nearly the first to say this, but I like this fuck you Obama. This is the guy I voted for. He doesn’t seem to care what others say about him and doing the stuff I wish he would have done since day one.

  111. 111.

    Tommy

    @Matt McIrvin: Well that is true. My brother married into a far, far right family. It has taken me a few years at family events to convince them I am not this evil person. I once told my brother’s wives dad, I didn’t understand how you have the energy to be so mad all the time. He seemed confused by this.

  114. 114.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    @Paul in KY: The Twilight Zone from about the turn of the millennium had an episode on killing the infant Hitler. No spoilers coming from me.

  115. 115.

    debbie

    @Lamh36:

    Glenn Beck’s using this as proof the students are brown-shirt reps of the fascistic Progressives.

    Even worse, he despairs of the president’s and chancellor’s right to due process. If I thought I could get through on the phone, I’d ask him about Michael Brown’s, Sandra Bland’s (etc.) rights to due process.

  118. 118.

    Gin & Tonic

    @debbie: I don’t get why someone would join a *public* protest action and then try to chase away the media. Isn’t the whole point of a public action to be public?

  119. 119.

    Betty Cracker

    @Gin & Tonic: I’m with you on that. It’s a massive own-goal. I have a post about it in the back room, but I don’t want to step on Doug’s post upstairs just yet.

  122. 122.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    @MattF:

    I’m fine saying “Merry Christmas” on 12/24 and 12/25, but it seems ridiculous to be saying it earlier than that.

    Also, I’m not the only one who feels like conservatives don’t think of New Year’s as a “real” holiday, am I? Because I always assumed that “Happy Holidays” was supposed to be a compact way of saying “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” at least until they started bitching and moaning about it.

  126. 126.

    Seanly

    @MattF:

    And the salt-of-the-earth Americans (you know, morons) who love Trump will gobble that BS up. I can see my FIL being one to chime in about how if only more of “those people” said Merry Christmas everything would be so much better, Never mind the Constitutionality or actual ability of the President to force people to say Merry Christmas, but it plays well with the old & white crowd.

  128. 128.

    gratuitous

    I think what gets Politico’s goat the most is that Obama really does get under the conservative skin. Conservative “comedians” and “jokes” are often so eye-rollingly bad that the only reasonable response is “Don’t be so goddam stupid.” Conservatives then conclude – erroneously – that they have “struck a nerve” instead of just being irritating. Obama’s little digs, however, accomplish precisely what conservatives wish their verbals barbs could do – skewer his opponents with a dose of accutruth, as in the concluding comment from the Politico excerpt.

  130. 130.

    Ajabu

    @Baud:
    Thanks for your concern. I actually checked in after I completed the trip. The last couple of days on the road were a MOFO. Enjoyed a few days playing with my wife and now I’m getting down to the serious business of how the hell do I make a living after the relocation.
    Incidentally, when you’re elected, I’d like you to appoint me to head the NEA. All the arts grant money has disappeared since Reagan gutted it. Those of us who merely entertain have got to eat, also, too.

  132. 132.

    mclaren

    @MattF:

    You better watch out
    You better not cry
    Better not pout
    I’m telling you why
    Donald Trump is coming to town

    He’s making a list
    And checking it twice
    Gonna find out Who’s naughty and nice
    Donald Trump is coming to town

    He sees you when you’re creeping
    Across our border, jobs to take
    He knows if you’re brown with a green card
    So be a white citizen for goodness sake!

    O! You better watch out!
    You better not cry
    Better not pout
    I’m telling you why
    Donald Trump is coming to town
    Donald Trump is coming to town

  133. 133.

    mclaren

    @Baud:

    It’s funny because it’s true.

    This is what happens when an entire political party runs clowns for high office. People laugh.

    Get used to it, Republicans.

  134. 134.

    mclaren

    @Tommy:

    I am not nearly the first to say this, but I like this fuck you Obama. This is the guy I voted for. He doesn’t seem to care what others say about him and doing the stuff I wish he would have done since day one.

    Obama’s doing the stuff you wish he would have done since day one, eh? Like ramming through the TPP?

    Obama talks a great game, but he’s a basketball point guard — he fakes left and moves right. Hillary does the same thing, which is why I’m a Sanders guy.

  135. 135.

    mclaren

    @MattF:

    What’s beyond ‘shameless’?

    The levels of political depravity, in descending order, are:

    [1] Despicable
    [2] Appalling
    [3] Shameless
    [4] Bush-like
    [5] Nixonian
    [6] Reaganesque

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