Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

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

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Peak wingnut was a lie.

No one could have predicted…

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

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

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

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

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

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Second rate reporter says what?

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

In my day, never was longer.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

You are here: Home / Past Elections / Election 2016 / Late Night Open Thread: I’m Not Sure, But I Think Putin Has Challenged the President to a Joust

Late Night Open Thread: I’m Not Sure, But I Think Putin Has Challenged the President to a Joust

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I don’t speak Russian, but it seems as if Putin is planning to go all medieval on someone’s dupa.

Another lance?

Reader Interactions

124Comments

  2. 2.

    Citizen Alan

    I cannot imagine shitgibbon defeating Vladimir Putin in any competition of any kind except possibly a fried chicken eating contest.

  13. 13.

    hellslittlestangel

    I just have a hard time fearing a country where they rinse out and re-use condoms, and where shoe polish is considered a beverage.

  24. 24.

    dmsilev

    @Mnemosyne: If you don’t want to get out of the boat (and I don’t blame you), LG&M has a summary. Yes, it’s asinine. Which is par for the course for Greenwald these days.

  32. 32.

    H.E.Wolf

    A joust, eh? Do I hear the dulcet tones of a young Julie Andrews?
    “Sir Dinadan…”
    #takemetothefair

  35. 35.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    So — Eclipse Day? (EDIT: never mind, I see it’s the 20th.)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Today (well, the day just past) was TaMara’s birthday, but I haven’t seen her hanging around the threads. Smart woman. TaMara, if you see this, hope you had a great day!

  38. 38.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @H.E.Wolf:

    GUENEVERE
    You’ll disconnect him?
    SIR DINADAN
    I’ll vivisect him.
    GUENEVERE
    You’ll open-wide him?
    SIR DINADAN
    I’ll subdivide him.

    Quite possibly my favourite song from Camelot, though I can’t think of one I dislike.

  39. 39.

    Bookeater (formerly JosieJ)

    @Citizen Alan:

    I cannot imagine shitgibbon defeating Vladimir Putin in any competition of any kind except possibly a fried chicken eating contest.

    Oh, I’m pretty sure Trump could out-stupid Putin handily.

  41. 41.

    H.E.Wolf

    @SiubhanDuinne:
    I’m awfully fond of it too! Especially Sir Sagramore.

    SIR SAGRAMORE
    I beg of you, ma’am, withhold your invitation.
    I swear to you this challenge will be met.
    And when I have finished up the operation,
    I’ll serve him to your highness en brochette!
    GUENEVERE
    You’ll pierce right through him?
    SIR SAGRAMORE
    I’ll barbecue him!
    GUENEVERE
    A wicked thrust?
    SIR SAGRAMORE
    It will be dust to dust!
    GUENEVERE
    From fore to aft?
    SIR SAGRAMORE
    He’ll feel a draft!

    …And so to bed. Good night, all you pepys. :)

  42. 42.

    jl

    Nice clip from the Rooskies. It was fun.; People should be proud of their heritage. What was it, a little Ivan the Moneybag chic?

    Edit: I skipped through it, but noted that the Russians have a sword dance too. Trump better get in on one when he visits.

    Edit2: Except the Russian sword dance seems to take skill, and is done by hot chics instead of fat old oil billionaires. But maybe a special edition oligarch sword dance for Trump? We know the weird demands he makes for state visits abroad. He’ll need to do the same for Russia. Or, “I’m puppet! You’re the puppet!” time.

  43. 43.

    Suzanne

    Happy birthday to all the birthday girls and boys. I raise a martini to you all and best wishes for a great year.

  44. 44.

    Suzanne

    Stressful day clothes shopping with Spawn the Elder. I came home, spooned the dog, had a martini, and am now listening to Dire Straits. Le sigh.

    Please remind me that I will survive.

  46. 46.

    Ajabu

    @Suzanne:
    Thank you. August 6th is, in fact my birthday. As well as Jamaican Indepence Day (which my relatives constantly remind me of)
    Trust me, it isn’t much fun becoming an (even more) elderly jazz musician.
    If I had made a more sensible choice of parents ($$$$$$) I probably wouldn’t have to work till I die.
    Oh, well…

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    @Suzanne:

    You will survive. You’ll even have a good relationship with your Spawn again. But you both have to get through adolescence first.

    Have another martini. ? You’re gonna need it.

  53. 53.

    Suzanne

    Now I am listening to “Stigmata” by Ministry, which is pissing off Mr. Suzanne but WHATEVER.

  57. 57.

    Mnemosyne

    @dmsilev:

    I not only LOLed at this line from LGM, I insisted on reading it aloud for G to hear:

    My God. He‘s one white board and pack of erasable markers from Full Glenn Beckhood, and this is only the lede.

    Also, I now know why certain idiot trolls here insist that “neoliberal” means “new liberal.” Their hero is under the same mistaken impression that he actually understands the word without having to look it up.

  59. 59.

    Suzanne

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Um, Ministry is old people music at this point. That album came out in 1987 or 88. I was in first grade. Needless to say, I discovered it a few years later.

  63. 63.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Mnemosyne:
    From what I’ve seen, Lefties know what ‘neoliberal’ means. The derangement is that they believe conventional Democratic policy preferences are neoliberal. In their bizarro world, we think banks should be unregulated and insurance companies should be set free so the all-powerful Market will fix things.

  65. 65.

    Roger Moore

    @Mnemosyne:
    I don’t think they actually care what “neoliberal” means. It’s an epithet to mean they’re a sellout to the left. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that to them.

  69. 69.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Mnemosyne:
    My impression was that he was referring to Republicans as ‘neoconservative.’ It’s a rhetorical device to imply that we must be neoliberals because putting the words neoliberal and neoconservative side by side sounds clever. That in turn supports his underlying premise that both parties are partners in a warmongering oligarchy, all without making an actual argument to attract refutation.

  71. 71.

    Major Major Major Major

    God am I sick of liberals’ and lefties’ ongoing slapfight over who’s the real bunch of priveleged, out-of-touch tools. And fuck people like Greenwald for stirring shit, and fuck his Russian paymasters for finding such an easy wedge.

  73. 73.

    GregB

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Greenwald is a really horribly corrisive presence on the body politic.

    One can assume if The Intercept were around in Germany in the 1930’s there would have been an endless number of articles attacking trade unionist, Communists and Jewish German’s for being such divisive forces.

  74. 74.

    Mnemosyne

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Right — instead of saying “pseudo-liberals and pseudo-conservatives,” he says “neoliberals and neoconservatives” to mean the same thing. Except those phrases don’t mean the same thing, and he looks like a moron every time he insists they do.

  78. 78.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Fair enough. Apparently my disjointed explanation of my villain’s evil plot in my novel was clear enough to someone else in today’s writer’s group that I think it’s reasonably solid. Now I need to sit down and actually do the beats for that part of the plot, even though some of them will happen off-screen, so to speak.

  80. 80.

    Origuy

    Dupa is Polish for ass, apparently. Joel hanes translated it into Russian as “Ягодицуи”, yagodetsue, but that means buttocks. A better translation is жопа, xhopa, which translates as ass.

  81. 81.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    It’s the curse of trying to write historical fiction that’s at least plausibly based in history. Or, as the author of a fantasy romance whose plot revolved around the history of the abolitionist movement in England put it in the preface of that book:

    A special thanks to Patricia Rice and Susan King, who have had to endure my pleas that if I ever again express an interest in writing a book based on a social movement, they should haul out the Salmon of Correction and hit me.

  85. 85.

    Amir Khalid

    @Mnemosyne:
    Wonderful! Is this going to be one of those novels where the bad guy is the narrator/character who provides the reader’s point of view?

    Just don’t forget us, your fellow jackals, when you’ve become the next JK Rowling.

  88. 88.

    piratedan

    the hardest part of all of this is what we see happening…

    the Trump guys… this is just so far what they’ve already publicly outed themselves doing:

    Perjury – Sessions, Flynn, Manafort, Kushner
    Obstruction of Justice – Trump himself, and who knows how many in his administration are also guilty of this…

    what has been alluded to
    Conspiracy – Pretty much the entire Trump team and quite possibly the entire GOP leadership, maybe even involving RW media in coordinating and preparing spin of news before being fed said news by outside national agencies
    Fraud – campaign contributions from outside agencies into multiple GOP coffer, including the national party and several candidates from the President down to Congressional races
    Election tampering – use of data and money to hack voting lists and develop specific targeting strategies to discourage and disenfranchise voters
    Treason – direct coordination of political attacks on Democrats, using Russian money and intelligence to directly influence the outcome of the election for certain benefits if elected.

    The fact that no one in the national network media is making the leap regarding the above even with the mounting information from sources within the GOP exposing/admitting that despite all of the bread crumbs dropped that there is no speculation offered, especially in comparison to everyone being free to speculate what the possibility of incrimination with Clinton’s e-mails, despite multiple investigations showing essentially that there was zero there for them to prosecute.

  89. 89.

    Shalimar

    @Roger Moore: Yeah, I think it is important that neoliberal not actually mean anything. It is a label to identify the other so you can exclude them.

  90. 90.

    fuckwit

    @piratedan: It’ll be the money laundering that gets them though. Tax evasion, money laundering, possibly campaign finance violations.

  92. 92.

    J R in WV

    @Amir Khalid:

    OH, that’s terrific. I’ll look into that site too… I play piano, my teacher saw that I was going to do well with etudes and asked if I would rather learn fundamentals of how to learn the structure of songs and improvise around that. He wrote arrangements for big bands and night club dance bands, which I learned about.

  94. 94.

    lowtechcyclist

    If Trump can take a 17-day paid vacation, so should everyone else. Call your Congresscritters!

  98. 98.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Mnemosyne: Wait, what? I haven’t heard anyone else mention the Salmon of Correction in years.

    *googles* Huh. I wonder what her nym was?

  100. 100.

    OGLiberal

    @Suzanne: I saw that live during Lolapallooza ’92. Al Jourgensen was in a 10-gallon hat swigging on a fifth of Jack. Projected behind him was a video of somebody getting eye surgery.

    Hung out with after the show and he told us his uncle was one of the Cubans who killed Kennedy.

  101. 101.

    randy khan

    @Sab:

    It’s in New Jersey. He did win there, but only by 8 votes out of a bit less than 4,700 cast (and just with a plurality – most people there voted for somebody else).

  102. 102.

    Barbara

    Late to the party, but if you have not read the Atlantic piece on the firing of an NSC staffer named Higgins over a memo he wrote that reads like a paranoid screed from a Hitler wannabee, and I have no other way to describe it, you should. The memo is unintelligible, something like liberals taking down America by using Maoist alternative state tactics. As a Jewish friend of mine once said, I only wish we had as much power as conspiracy theorists think we do. But the sick answer is, any amount of power is way too much for these fascists to endure.

  103. 103.

    JWR

    @Amir Khalid: If you’re stlll around…

    While my theory is nearly nonexistent, I would highly recommend a maybe still available paperback called Chord Chemistry by Ted Greene. His very brief description of the Major Scale, along with its Intevals, (bolded for a reason), led to my learning a lot about what I’d been doing, either right or wrong, (or just for my own entertainment), for years, and opened up a whole new world of ideas for me.

  104. 104.

    Matt

    The funniest part of the sanctions thing is that it seems like Vlad et al are just starting to realize that – just like always – little Donnie is going to fuck them over hard because he’s a liar who can’t deliver.

  105. 105.

    Barbara

    @Matt: Not necessarily even a liar, just someone who can’t deliver on anything that doesn’t depend on selling the rights to his name.

  106. 106.

    Applejinx

    @Roger Moore:

    I don’t think they actually care what “neoliberal” means. It’s an epithet to mean they’re a sellout to the left. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that to them.

    In fairness, if it’s a criticism of a mainstream economic narrative and you’re determined to insist that it’s not a narrative, but simply the way reality is and will forever be constructed, then the safest course for you is to deny there is even a criticism or narrative and insist anyone making such criticisms is hearing ‘blah blah Ginger blah’ and doesn’t understand anything you’re saying. Hence, taking a key passionately argued point of policy difference and saying ‘they don’t even care what it means, they don’t know what they’re even saying, it’s meaningless mouth noises’.

    This does not win votes. That could prove to be a problem. I’m going to tactfully (I hope) suggest that this approach to economic criticism is a bad strategy and you should rethink it: or, if you’re convinced there IS no other economic policy view and are sincere in thinking your balky allies are retarded children who neither understand nor mean what they say, you should rethink being involved in politics, which is an art of persuasion, identification, and assimilation.

    I hope that was a civilized way to put it. This thread showed me kittens. I can’t be too angry in a thread that showed me kittens ;)

  107. 107.

    Barbara

    @Applejinx: In fairness I think less than 5% of the population understands neoliberal as an economic concept. Therefore, given the way Greenwald used the terms it is less than clear that you are right either in the narrow or broader context of your comment.

  108. 108.

    debbie

    @Barbara:

    As a Jewish friend of mine once said, I only wish we had as much power as conspiracy theorists think we do.

    Try and prove that to them. It can’t be done.

  109. 109.

    zhena gogolia

    Although the people in that video look kind of sweet and normal, the soundtrack that has been put on the video is Alisa, “Sky of the Slavs,” and it’s some nationalist claptrap. Here’s what Wikipedia says about the band’s leader: “Kinchev was baptized in 1992 after a series of concerts in Jerusalem, and since then Christianity has been the main influence on his direction and his lyrics. Although early Alisa lyrics were typical for Russian rock – social protest and rock ‘n’ roll hype – since the late 1990s their main theme has been ideas of Christianity, as well as Russian patriotism and nationalism. Konstantin is in good relations with the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially Andrey Kuraev. The band has participated in many religion-supporting festivals, such as Musicians for the Christ Savior Cathedral. Kinchev’s fairly conservative religious-patriotic shift was viewed unfavourably by some old fans that liked Alisa for their original ‘rock’ message. Still others are put off by his antisemitism – among other things, he has referred to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a credible source.”

  110. 110.

    Ramalama

    I seem to recall many years ago (maybe not so many?) when military hawks claimed, sneered, about how sanctions weren’t all that effective. There’s nothing in particular that comes to mind so it seems to me that this thinking was widespread.

    But this Putin angling over sanctions – all this effort – shows otherwise. He really hates sanctions.

    Has any newsy person gone into detail / questioned hawks on tv, radio, newspapers about this? I don’t follow news as much as I used to because I spent myself in the run up to the election. A very good friend of mine who is no dumb ass wanted Trump elected.

    He: “as a floor trader (NY) there’s no way Hillary did those deals legally.”
    me: “you mean WHITEWATER?!”
    He: “and other deals.”
    Me: “because she was so powerful? In hick state Arkansas?”
    He: “she had help.”
    Me: “like with Ken Starr? You think if he’d been able to find anything on those deals he wouldn’t have paraded any facts …along with the Monica sex stuff on the front pages of everyone’s newspapers?”
    He: “you’re biased.”

    Many convos over this. I just broke. I don’t speak to the friend about our dear leader. And I can’t even read through my copy of the New Yorker.

    But isn’t all this angling over sanctions, the sheer effort to get them removed, shouldn’t this be talked about as well as the other Russia stuff?

    And if the common cud-chewing wisdom is that there’s only so much oxygen in the room, if that’s true, then doesn’t that poke a hole into the big bubble of 24Hour news coverage?

    Oh my god. This is entirely too long, I must go drink some caffeine before hitting the post comment but..

  111. 111.

    zhena gogolia

    @Matt:

    Donnie has delivered by degrading our country’s stature drastically in a matter of months and putting us in grave danger on a number of fronts.

  113. 113.

    Chris

    @GregB:

    Nah. Greenwald would’ve been a communist. The type preaching “Nach Hitler, uns!” and defending the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

  114. 114.

    zhena gogolia

    And Adam, please, in Russian it’s “zhopa,” not “dupa.” That’s Polish, man!

  116. 116.

    Florida Frog

    @Omnes Omnibus: @Amir Khalid: Thanks! I just bookmarked the page. I am an amateur harpist and have a couple of holes my grasp of theory. It is a treat to hear how you are coming along with your girl. Thanks for including us on you journey.

  117. 117.

    Nora

    @Quinerly: Let’s hope. My husband bet a co-worker Kelly would be out before the end of a month. I’d like to see him win that one.

  119. 119.

    GHayduke

    @Mnemosyne: Greenwald is an asshole. Always has been. I’ll be taking apologies from anybody who ever defended him, or Asange, or Snowden.

  120. 120.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Speaking as an SCA fighter, if the Russians come at us with that crappy shield work in the video, we don’t have much to worry about.

  122. 122.

    Another Scott

    @Barbara: Thanks for the pointer. I missed reading it earlier.

    TheAtlantic is kind of a weird publication. They’ve got some great writers (e.g., TNC), but they also have some people with monstrous history (e.g., Frum). I feel guilty supporting what I like about the place…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  123. 123.

    Origuy

    @zhena gogolia: нет проблем. (Yes, i know that’s not grammatically correct.) My Russian isn’t good enough to understand the lyrics in that video. What was that all about?

  124. 124.

    Vhh

    The line about “he who comes with sanctions..” is a paraphrase of the famous quote from St. Aleksandr Nevsky (voted greatest Russian of the millenium): “He who comes with a sword shall perish by the sword.” Heavy patriotic symbolism there, also adopted by Stalin in WWII.

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