Krugman explains how Paul Ryan knows President Obama is responsible for closing an auto plant in his Wisconsin district before the President took office (as Ryan again told the completely bonkers lie in his convention speech last night):
One possibility is that the Serious, Honest Conservative is actually unserious and breathtakingly dishonest. Alternatively, he’s branched out from Ayn Rand, and is now also listening to this guy:
“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”
My life is now complete. Also, I suspect Romney and Ryan are Weeping Angels, only they freeze their stated political positions if they are being directly observed. Otherwise, if you blink, they immediately change their stated political positions and loot your 401(k) instead of feeding on your temporal potentiality if they touch you, and then instantly send you back to the short end of the stick side of the Gilded Age.
Very scary stuff.
SiubhanDuinne
And the ad I’m getting here is for Atlas Shrugged II (tagline: “Real heroes don’t need capes”). We’re going to be seeing a lot of that over the next six weeks or so.
Linda Featheringill
Timey wimey stuff indeed!
This is the stuff that led to the declaration that terrorist threats didn’t happen during the Bush years. And that Obama was in control of [fill in the blank] while he was still a young child.
Wonder if I could use that timey wimey stuff to my advantage?
c u n d gulag
I refuse to watch the Republican Convention.
It’d be like being groped by a Priest, and told that the quickest way to Jesus is by accepting his host in my mouth.
What, too early in the morning?
akaka
Wow Krugman is one hep cat. And bravo to you on the Weeping Angels comparison.
El Cid
In addition, it appears that those entire 8 years of Bush Jr. rule never occurred at all. It has been erased retroactively.
MattF
Also, Krugman detects a pattern in Republican campaign rhetoric:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/unconventional/
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@El Cid:
The Presidency That Never Was is not just confined to the Repups. The Villagers have spent much of the last 4 years erasing that blemish on their reputation as well.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@MattF:
Shorter Krugman:
Republicans are, collectively, lying sacks of shit.
LanceThruster
In a classic case of projection this AM on Morning Joe, Prof. Newtie said, “Democrats lie better than Republicans tell the truth.”
Didn’t Newticles call R-Money a liar in one of the debates?
It’s not so much that Republicurs lie well, but that their base only needs something to hang their hat on as they proudly display their ignorance and arrogance. Hence a whole convention centered around the lie of “We built this!”
Reality has a liberal bias
MattF
@LanceThruster: It was in an interview, and he really did say L-I-A-R. I was rather impressed, truth to tell.
Tom the First
That’s the only newer Dr. Who episode that I’ve seen… it’s awesome. Makes me want to start watching a show. Where’s a good place to start for the new episodes. “New” being defined as post-Tom Baker.
Baud
Obama sent out a fundraising email that repeatedly used the L word.
Kay
I didn’t have to watch the RNC speeches because I’ve heard these same lies repeated in ads or on news programs here since May. Of 2010.
I could deliver Paul Ryan’s speech.
The Janesville/GM lie is new, but that’s hardly worth sitting thru hours of coverage.
I can’t wait for the fact-checker franchise to kick in. So smart that journalists have out- sourced “facts” to a completely new commercial enterprise.
Glenn Kessler, the facts guy, can now write a convoluted, incomprehensible thousand word piece that begins with the founding of General Motors and ends with absolving Ryan of any responsibility. His actual job may be to muddy the waters. I tried to read one of his pieces on the Medicare lie they relied on in 2010 and just gave up midway thru, and I read about Medicare all the time. I think he was hired to make government programs and process incomprehensible.
jwb
@LanceThruster: “Democrats lie better than Republicans tell the truth.” Given the way the GOP is lying this cycle, we could probably say that this statement isn’t even false, since the GOP has doubled down on telling lies so that the truth doesn’t even enter the equation on the GOP side of the ledger.
ericblair
And you mean like Romney is a Cyberman with an expensive wig, and Dick Cheney is a Dalek with a Boss Hogg mask over his “head”? I thought everybody knew that, so I didn’t bother mentioning it. My bad.
So the goopers are messing with the time streams again? Usually a bad idea, unless they reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. That fixes everything.
jayjaybear
@Tom the First: Start at the beginning of Christopher Eccleston’s season (2005?). The whole franchise soft-rebooted with that season, after a 9-year hiatus. NuWho is almost a different show than the older incarnation.
Johannes
If Ryan and Romney are to be stopped, Obama and Biden will have to reconfigure their TARDISes into time cone converters, and create a temporary stable place where history can actually be observed./Christopher Bidmead
Ecod, I am in truth a geek.
Fort Geek
@Tom the First: Aside from Tom Baker, the only incarnations I’ve seen through & through are the Eccleston/Tennant/Smith set. There are some dud stories, but each of those three have The Doctor down solid.
With the new Matt Smith eps coming Saturday 9/1/12, it’s kinda late to get you introduced, but BBC-America is rerunning the older new stuff:
Schedule here.
Ash Can
Awesome.
@Tom the First: I recommend starting at the very beginning of the new iteration, with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, because the current group of writers have a fondness and aptitude for story arcs. It makes the episodes all the more enjoyable when you catch the ways they tie in with each other.
Emma
@Tom the First: At the beginning of new. Chris Eccleston, which leads to Tennant, which leads to Smith. Three fantastic doctors with three totally different interpretations.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@El Cid: Well, there was this crack in the universe…
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Tom the First: They are all on Netflix streaming.
Johannes
@Tom the First: Get the DVD of the new series, start with Eccleston. Yes, you’ve missed a lot of the classic show, but the gap from the awful tv movie to the series meant that the new series, while in continuity, is effectively a reboot.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ash Can: River wouldn’t make as much sense without seeing the library first.
Tom the First
Thanks all! Looks like I’ll start with Eccleston.
And @Belafon (formerly anonevent): Yeah, I just got a new TV that can stream Netflix, so on the look out for series I need to catch up on. This seems like a good one.
Robin G.
Best. Post. Ever. (As lomg as it’s not Sally Sparrow they’re cooking on the curtain rod under the overpass.)
El Cid
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Of course there was. And it was brought in by Barack Obama and his Chicago thug mafia.
Jay in Oregon
Neil Gaiman explains Doctor Who in the best way possible.
Every season of the new Doctor Who has an episode that I feel stands out well on its own.
2005 (Christopher Eccleston): Dalek. Reintroduces the classic Doctor Who villains, and explains that the Time Lords and the Daleks effectively annihilated each other at the end of the Time War, leaving the Doctor and a single Dalek as the sole survivors. (We find out later that this is not strictly true.)
2006 (David Tennant): The Girl in the Fireplace. A fun time-travel story where the Doctor weaves in and out of the life of a young French girl, who becomes Madame de Pompadour.
2007 (David Tennant): Blink. Another fantastic time-bendy story, and the source of the video clip above. A young woman finds herself helping the Doctor, who is trapped 40 years in the past, and separated from his TARDIS. One of my two favorites.
2008 (David Tennant): Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Kinda cheating here, since it’s a two-parter, but if I have to pick one episode, it would be Forest of the Dead. Introduces Professor River Song, a woman who has a long, rich history with the Doctor, but is someone whom the Doctor has never met. Yet.
2009 (David Tennant): The Next Doctor. This year didn’t have a full season of Doctor Who; instead, we got 5 TV movies that rounded out Tennant’s run as the Doctor. This movie was my favorite of the series, where the Doctor meets someone who could be one of his future incarnations.
2010 (Matt Smith): The Lodger. The Doctor is separated from a malfunctioning TARDIS, so he rents a room until he can figure out how to fix it.
2011 (Matt Smith): The Doctor’s Wife. Probably my favorite single episode of Doctor Who ever, written by Neil Gaiman. This episode tells you everything you ever need to know about who the Doctor is.
RSA
@Johannes:
That would be my advice, too. I was a fan of Eccleston from his work on Cracker, with Robby Coltrane, and in one or two movies; I was disappointed when he left. But Tennant was amazing.
IowaOldLady
Maybe Ryan thinks Obama has a fluxcapacitor?
Nancy Irving
Looks like R-Ayn has picked up the retroactive stuff from R-Money.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Like everyone else says, start with Eccleston. That first season takes a little time to find its legs (like they couldn’t decide whether the target audience was going to be adults or kids), but once it does it’s a hell of a ride.
Jay in Oregon – you forgot Human Nature/Family of Blood from Tennant’s run. Wherein we find out that you really don’t want to get on the Doctor’s bad side.
Jay in Oregon
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Indeed. That was also a great story. My list wasn’t intended to be definitive, just representative.
A Good Man Goes To War and Let’s Kill Hitler (probably the most misleading title ever) is another great two-parter that sheds some light on who River Song is and what she is to the Doctor.
Matt McIrvin
Talking Points Memo listened to Ari Fleischer so you don’t have to, and figured out the thin reed that they’re hanging the plant-closing story on: a few dozen workers stayed on until after Inauguration Day to finish the plant’s last order. So the closing is totally Obama’s fault, I guess.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/08/ari-mentum.php?ref=fpblg
Both Sides Do It
The weeping angels thing is funny.
My dated tv metaphor would be that their political positions are like Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks. For the most part they conduct themselves in a civilized fashion, but on a regular and unstoppable basis they are embodied by an evil spirit and become the ultimate manifestation of evil.
And then the evil spirit leaves and they’re able to function in polite society for awhile. And then the cycle repeats itself.
. . . yeah in this metaphor I guess America itself would have to be a teenage junkie prostitute who is regularly molested for years before she is murdered. Kinda fits.
Nicole
What we need is for the Doctor to show up and say that Romney looks tired.
Lee
Article on Foxnews.com that Ryan speech was deceiving.
Granted it is an opinion piece, but still
fergie
@Tom the First: Many people say that episode Blink is a good place to start. Or get Netflix and start at the beginning of the reboot 2005. Or start with the current Doctors first episode… The Eleventh Hour. (then backtrack thru number 10, rose, martha, and donna, on back to number 9 and the beginning in 2005.
Saturday is the start of series 7. I loves me some Doctor!
fergie
scav
And teaser posters from the new series here (Guardian), with The Angels take Manhattan at the end.
Mnemosyne
@Jay in Oregon:
It also tells you everything you need to know about who the TARDIS is, which is something that has never really been addressed.
I’m a Gaiman fan anyway, but he really was the absolutely perfect person to flesh that part of the relationship out.
Original Lee
@Nicole: LOL. Definitely.
Persia
@LanceThruster: To be fair, Democrats probably do lie better than Republicans tell the truth. It’s not like the Republicans have any experience with the latter.
The Other Chuck
One thing about Doctor Who is that it’s about the people, not the technology. If you’re into “hard” sci-fi with a plausible scientific explanation for everything, you might want to adjust that expectation. Sure, parts of it have cool ideas about technology, but for the most part it’s a pure fantastic flight of fancy. It’s just about the only show where I really do enjoy suspending my disbelief.
LanceThruster
@The Other Chuck:
It’s one of the reasons I enjoy LEXX so much.
I’ll have to check out Dr. Who (though I’ve seen snippets of really good episodes with the new guy). The older ones with the guy with Robert Plant hair looks a bit dated to me, but those are also supposed to be classics according to fans.
I was glad to read the comment/link about how you could just dive in and not worry too much about knowing the whole backstory. I’m also glad to see that “The Doctor’s Wife” was suggested to deal with that.
Brachiator
@Tom the First:
If you have the Amazon Prime service, you can stream most of the newer Dr Who series, from Eccleston on, for free. You can also, of course, purchase episodes.
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
And yet, I had seen some on the Eccleston stuff (via PBS stations), and was not at first impressed and I didn’t much bother with the Doctor.
But I jumped in again with Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. The Eleventh Hour had me hooked from the start, especially with the way that it presented young Amy and the somewhat troubled adult that she became.
Went back and filled in the River Song related episodes, and a few of the Tennants. Blink. Then later viewed episodes that were strongly recommended by Who viewers. Have filled in more of the earlier series in my own timey wimey way.
Hmm. A couple more episodes to check out.
The GOP on Who metaphors work well, though it’s more fun talking about the Doctor than contemplating the dreary way that the Republicans try to rewrite their own bad history.
LanceThruster
@Persia:
In parsing the statement, it occured to me that the Republicurs are pretty much incompetent at everything except…on those occassions the electorate is asleep or deluded (or they cheat)…winning elections.
DavidTC
@LanceThruster:
In a classic case of projection this AM on Morning Joe, Prof. Newtie said, “Democrats lie better than Republicans tell the truth.”
To be fair, this could be true. We have absolutely no idea how well Republicans tell the truth. Perhaps they are really really bad at it. Nixon, for example, looks like he was lying even when he told the truth, maybe the rest of the Republicans are like that.
We’ll need for them to start telling the truth to check, though.
Jay in Oregon
@Mnemosyne:
My friend was surprised when I told him The Lodger is one of my favorite episodes; the reason I like that episode so much is that it turns the dynamic on its head: Doctor Who has his normal human companions (we’ll hand wave and say that people like Jack Harkness and Rory Williams at least started out normal) trying to cope with the Doctor’s world. The Lodger has the Doctor trying to cope with ours.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
That’s kind of how I jumped on board, too. I was a fan in the Tom Baker days, but it was Matt Smith who really drew me back. Though presumably for different reasons than yours.
;-)
People who want to jump on board starting with the Matt Smith doctor need to make sure to watch the David Tennant “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” to see how River Song was first introduced to the series. It really adds a lot of depth to that storyline.
(As a side note, I find it fascinating that apparently Stephen Moffat fell so in love with River Song and the way Alex Kingston plays her in those two episodes that he basically cast the entire 11th Doctor series around her character. It really works, but it’s also a little odd.)
LanceThruster
@DavidTC:
We need to send out Diogenes to find a truth-telling Republicur for the control group.
Good luck, Mr. D.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Agree wholeheartedly.
You could also seek out pre Eleventh Doctor Dr Who episodes written by Moffat. So, in addition to “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead,” I would add in, “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances,” “The Girl in the Fireplace”, and “Blink.”
Makes sense in a way. He had written for the show before, and after he decided to become the show runner for the new seasons, his curiosity about River Song perhaps let him see a way to continue the franchise while creating a space for his own additions to the canon. Kinda like building a new room in the Tardis.
@LanceThruster:
Our modern Diogenes would encounter a man who will say whatever you want to hear, and another who lies blatantly. He would probably just blow out his lamp and go home.
(As a side note, I find it fascinating that apparently Stephen Moffat fell so in love with River Song and the way Alex Kingston plays her in those two episodes that he basically cast the entire 11th Doctor series around her character. It really works, but it’s also a little odd.)
'Niques
My first taste of NuWho was the Van Gogh episode. Was immediately hooked, and have watched them all since then. (I still recommend it highly as an introduction.)