Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

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

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

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

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

In my day, never was longer.

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

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

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

Republicans in disarray!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Tepid Words You’ve Swallowed, Turns Out They’re All Borrowed

Tepid Words You’ve Swallowed, Turns Out They’re All Borrowed

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Guess who, no fair peeking:

If the claims about Giuliani were not preposterous enough, senators were also forced to endure Kenneth Starr’s self-righteous and hypocritical warnings regarding “the culture of impeachment.” Starr had, after all, once run a four-year investigation into obscure land deals, suicide conspiracy theories and intimate sexual details involving President Bill Clinton. Starr would later claim that Clinton’s abuse of power was the “capstone” of his impeachment case, but that did not stop the former independent counsel from mournfully warning senators Monday that “the commission of a crime is by no means sufficient to warrant the removal of our duly elected president.”

If it is true that Trump killed irony years ago, Starr’s opening statement single-handedly exhumed irony’s corpse from its tomb, dragged it across the Senate floor and demolished all obstacles in its path before finally scattering the bones back into the grave, one by one. As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes said, “Does Ken Starr know he’s Ken Starr?” That embarrassing performance seemed only to confirm Trump’s previous assessment of the former Clinton prosecutor as a “lunatic” and a “disaster.”

I’ll give you a hint. He’s a former four-term Member of Congress from Florida whose third wife apparently has a fetish for being interrupted constantly by preening assholes. He also voted to impeach Clinton.

It’s actually a pretty good column. With so many blind pigs finding ears of corn lately, I’m beginning to confuse the opinion section with the farm section.

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  1. 1.

    SalterWobchak

    Joe has been hard on Trump for the past couple of years, ostensibly because he feels some culpability for helping him get elected.

    Oh… who am I kidding?

  4. 4.

    Jerzy Russian

    Christ, what an asshole. Even though he is an asshole it is good that he (apparently) is (more or less) on the correct side here.

  5. 5.

    Probably Not an Asshole mistermix

    @glory b:

    Why didn’t he realize all of this earlier, when it might have helped?

    Never expect someone to accept a fact when their income relies on not accepting it.   Having Trump on his show was good for ratings, so he had him on, no matter the clear danger that Trump posed.

  8. 8.

    catclub

    @SalterWobchak:

    ostensibly because he feels some culpability for helping him get elected.

    Oh… who am I kidding?

     

    how about:  because he no longer finds putting Trump on his show all the time (for free) helps his ratings? Like it did in 2016, when it mattered.

  10. 10.

    ThresherK

    @Jerzy Russian: Eh.

    I met a volunteer firefighter up in the mountainous part of Vermont. Everything about firefighting is tougher up there: The lay of the land, water sources, getting vehicles to the fire, frigid weather freezing everything while it burns. The guy told me these limits, and chuckled and said “We’re really good at putting out foundations!”

    For all the fires he’s started, Joe Scarborough is now vying to be “really good at putting out foundations”.

  14. 14.

    Roger Moore

    @Jinchi:

    So I suppose it isn’t likely to last as long as the Great Wall of China.

    It isn’t intended to be a functional wall.  It’s intended to be a metaphorical middle finger extended at Mexico.  It doesn’t have to last past November 3 to achieve it’s main goal.

  17. 17.

    RaflW

    @Roger Moore:  I’d also expect that the contractor who built it skimmed 30% of the cost, and used substandard materials and slapdash labor to cover up his theft.

  18. 18.

    Sab

    My BIL just died. Vietnam war vet. Multiple bronze stars. Good guy. His surviving siblings including my spouse are reeling

    ETA second oldest of 6 kids.

  23. 23.

    The Moar You Know

    Guess who, no fair peeking

    I missed the “florida” part, which is too bad, because between the whole “third wife who likes being bullied” and “utter lack of shame for impeaching Clinton while protesting that Trump’s Impeachment Was A Shitshow Of Shame”, I thought the dead bang answer was Newton Leroy Gingrich.

  24. 24.

    Immanentize

    @Sab: So sorry Sab.  I knew you told us it was coming, but I had no idea it would be so soon.  He sounds like someone about whom a lot of good will be said and remembered. Stay strong.

  27. 27.

    Mike R

    Sorry to hear of your BIL, he certainly paid his dues.  Sounds like he was loved by family.  Peace to him and your family.

  29. 29.

    Barbara

    @Sab:  I am so sorry.  My brother and several of my cousins have died over the last three years, and it is hard to fathom that I and they are now almost as old as my great-aunt was when we all played together on her farm as kids.

  40. 40.

    opiejeanne

    @Yutsano: Not sure we should care, but I’d bet Pope Francis won’t be terribly sorry to see her go.

    Did she relocate to Rome at all?

  46. 46.

    janesays

    Scarborough’s obnoxious as hell, but I appreciate him being a prominent never-Trumper (even though he had a role in getting him into the White House), because it strengthens support for our side among a lot of apolitical fence sitters. When you’ve got a whole bunch of, “Even these Republicans think he’s criminally corrupt” people (Scarborough, Kristol, Will, Wilson, Jolly, Painter, Boot, Cupp, Schmidt, Wallace, Rubin) out there punditing away about how awful they think Trump is, it nudges some of the mushy middle people to the correct side of the fence.

    We’re not Morning Joe’s audience – the people who sat out the election last time or only very reluctantly voted for Clinton because they bought into the BS narrative that Clinton and Trump were equally terrible are his audience. If his voice gets a few more of those people to the polls to vote this monster out in November, that’s a good thing.

  47. 47.

    janesays

    @Probably Not an Asshole mistermix: I think like most people in America (including Trump himself), Scarborough probably didn’t really believe Trump ever had any realistic shot of actually becoming president. The conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton’s election was a foregone conclusion made a lot of stupid people even stupider.

  50. 50.

    Miss Bianca

    Holee fucknutz, that was Joe? I mean, I knew he had turned against Trumpski some time ago but day-um…that was some unexpectedly fine invective from that quarter, and it had the added benefit of being all true!

  53. 53.

    brantl

    All the Republican’ts can do now, is lob softballs so that the counsel lawyers can pound the table. They haven’t got one valid argument to make. What a bunch of putzes. Un-freaking believable. What a bunch of sock-nobs.

  54. 54.

    catclub

    @janesays: Scarborough probably didn’t really believe Trump ever had any realistic shot of actually becoming president.

     

    Once you become the the nominee of a major party ( out of two)  you have a better chance of being elected than everybody else in the nation, with possibly one person excepted.

    So Joe only helped him become the major party nominee.

  55. 55.

    laura

    @Sab: I am so sorry for the loss of your brother in law. I hope that your husband and his siblings and their families and friends will find comfort in their grief and that love for each other will lessen the pain of his loss.

  56. 56.

    janesays

    @catclub: No doubt Trump’s chances of becoming president increased dramatically once he became the GOP nominee, but on the eve of the election, FiveThirtyEight was giving him only a 28.6% chance of winning – and literally every other major poll analyst was giving him even lower odds of winning. A lot of people dunked on Silver on 11/7/16 for overestimating the odds of a Trump victory, and on 11/9/16, a lot of people dunked him for underestimating the odds of a Trump victory.

    Most people thought Trump had no real chance of winning – including Trump himself

    A huge part of what made that awful election sting so much is the fact that it utterly blindsided us – I can’t remember a single friend who woke up that morning seriously worried that Clinton might not win. By around 7pm, everything changed. In hindsight we have been able to put the pieces together, but on the night it actually happened, it shocked the whole world.

  57. 57.

    Zelma

    If you haven’t seen it, look at the first version of the rant as performed on his TV show.  It was quite something.  A bit rawer.  You can probably find it on Youtube.  I don’t know if it was ad libbed or planned but it was something.

    I don’t watch Joe and never have.  I’m retired.  At 6:00 in the morning, I’m in bed.  But I have less politically involved friends who do and I think the message is good for them.

  60. 60.

    Spider-Dan

    The irony is that Ken Starr is in the position to make a smart-ish argument on this: he could say that we proved in 1998 that you can’t remove a President from office for obstruction or (whatever). But that would be saying that Trump and Bill were equally bad, which no Republican would tolerate.  So instead we get this obviously dishonest “well of course the President can do as he likes” nonsense.

  62. 62.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @catclub: @Probably Not an Asshole mistermix: Upton Sinclair beat both of you by something more than 85 years:

    It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

    (from I, Candidate for Governor And How I Got Licked, 1934)

    Maybe this version of “mistermix” is “Possibly Still An Asshole” since he couldn’t be arsed to acknowledge the obvious near-plagiarism.

     

     

    @Probably Not an Asshole mistermix:

  64. 64.

    J R in WV

    @janesays:

    I can’t remember a single friend who woke up that morning seriously worried that Clinton might not win. By around 7pm, everything changed.

    I worked to elect Hillary Clinton for weeks — calling into Ohio every evening. It was stressful, because you never knew when you were going to get a MAGAt cursing you and calling Hillary despicable things.

    By the week before the election, I was losing hope, actually. The phone calls became more depressing. By the weekend I had to stop.

    I voted, and here in WV that made absolutely no difference as Trump won WV by a huge margin. That night, by 8 or 9 pm I stopped watching the returns — I knew we had lost, just as I feared. I opened a bottle of good brown whiskey, had some of that to drink, and went to bed.

    Wednesday morning it was exactly as bad as I expected. Won the popular vote by millions of people, lost the Electoral College by just enough. So Sad, Still Sad!

  65. 65.

    J R in WV

    @Sab:

    I’m so sorry for your, and your husband’s , and his family’s loss. It sounds like your BIL was a great guy with courage and accomplishments to be proud of.

    I’ve lost two cousins recently. One was a great person whom I loved and will miss. The other was a religious nut job, a right wing crazed person whom the world is better off without. Hard to deal with, but there it is.

    Hugs and best wishes to you and your husband!

  66. 66.

    Dan B

    @Sab: Sorry to hear about your BIL.  He sounds like one of the great ones if his siblings are reeling.  It’s so har knowing you won’t be seeing someone who gave such joy.

  67. 67.

    Dan B

    @schrodingers_cat:   Thanks for the updates.  It’s very disturbing because I know some wonderful families who live just 3 miles away, or less.  One of them is professor of medicine at a university near Connaught Circle.  To have attacks on any university must be deeply unsettling for her.

  69. 69.

    No One You Know

    @Sab: I am sorry for your loss. It’s a hard thing.  May you and your family know peace, even in the midst of sorrow.

Comments are closed.