Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

You cannot shame the shameless.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

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

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

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

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

This blog will pay for itself.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

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

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Come on, man.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

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Open Thread: Tap-Dancing Towards Bethlehem Bedlam

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trumps pet goat jeb luckovich

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
.

Sasha Issenberg, at Bloomberg Politics, scored a long interview with the man who seems to stand in as JEB!’s version of Karl Rove. There has not been this much willful detachment from political reality on display since Baghdad Bob went on hiatus:

When Mike Murphy in June took the helm of his longtime friend and client Jeb Bush’s super-PAC, Right to Rise USA, he disappeared from the media, part of a concerted effort not to draw attention away from the candidate. In mid-August, Murphy—a witty narrator of presidential politics who has also guided campaigns by John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Arnold Schwarzenegger—broke that uncharacteristic silence. “If other campaigns wish that we’re going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they’ll be disappointed,” Murphy told the Washington Post in August. “Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem.”…

The political landscape is now very different. After four months of Trump’s dominating both news coverage and polls, advisers to Bush—at least one of whom anonymously promised a “shock and awe” launch of his candidacy—find themselves where they never expected to be: struggling to reach fifth place in many national and early-state polls. Earlier this month, Murphy welcomed Bloomberg Politics’s Sasha Issenberg to his corner office in an unmarked suite in a Los Angeles office building for a candid and wide-ranging conversation about the super-PAC’s activities, plans, and the newly critical mission it has taken on: the Committee to Save Jeb…

Has the tempo of the race been different than what you had anticipated when you first developed a campaign plan?

Well, I knew it would be kind of hyper because that’s the business now. But one thing in hindsight is we got this paper crown of front-runner early that we didn’t want and I don’t think realistically we should have had. Because what happens is when the punditocracy says, “You’re the front-runner,” then they take a bunch of meaningless polls and a Donald Trump or a Kardashian or whatever jumps in and they say, “Now you’re not the front-runner.” So they put you on trial for them being wrong at the beginning. I think we’re getting a little bit of a bad rap on all that stuff but, you know, who cares? We’re going to power through it.

But the pledge of “shock and awe”—your side contributed to that front-runner designation. Things haven’t quite worked out that way.

I’m going to hunt down whoever came up with that. The bigger story was: we showed a lot of financial strength but we always said the voter strength would build slowly because we had to go tell the story. And somehow the punditocracy said, “Well, financial strength means you have to lead every poll and if you don’t you’re a loser.” I think them being wrong about that is something that we’ve been held accountable. I don’t take it too seriously because I keep saying I think the polls are completely meaningless on a national basis, but it’s irritating noise…

How has Trump’s entry changed the race?

It created a false zombie front-runner. He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever. By definition I don’t think you can be a front-runner if you’re totally un-electable. I think there’s there an a-priori logic problem in that.

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Open Thread: PUTZ! JAB!… er, JEB!!!

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Open Thread: Someone Pry That Bottle Out of Ms Noonan’s Grasp

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Homecoming Queen of the WSJ Conventional Wisdom Parade Peggy Noonan has a big sad, because she was licking her lips over the chance to be mean about Crazy Joe Biden instead of that bookworm Hildebeast’s cankles, for a change. “The Biden Eclipse and the Trump Plateau“:

Something big happened at the Democratic debate. It didn’t have to do with Hillary Clinton besting Bernie Sanders or Jim Webb. What she had to do, after the long, battering summer, was show she is up to the battle, ready for it, capable—that she can do this. She did. She was crisp, lively, a presence. In demonstrating that she is up to the race she deprived Vice President Joe Biden of his rationale for getting into it. People say he didn’t have a rationale but of course he did, it just wasn’t something he could say or leak. His rationale, at 72 and having recently experienced great loss, was: The party’s in trouble, the front-runner can’t win, she’s too encrusted by scandal, in an act of heroic sacrifice I’m going to swoop in and save the day…

Too bad! Mr. Biden would have added a layer of affection to a so-far cold enterprise. He would have added an element of old-time normality to the field. He would have been as entertaining in his way as Donald Trump, and it would have been instructive to see how Democrats respond to the entrance of President Obama’s two-term vice president. Who has the party’s heart?…

Luck matters in politics as in life and Mrs. Clinton has now been lucky twice in a short time. Kevin McCarthy blunted Republican arrows on Benghazi, then Bernie Sanders blunted arrows by saying the email scandal doesn’t matter. To many of his supporters, presumably, it did. Now all Democrats have permission not to care. It’s nice to get a pass like that!

And now the one candidate who could have derailed her will likely not get in. She is on a roll…

While we’re sweeping out the bar, someone check if Maureen Dowd has passed out face-down in the ladies’ room, again.

But this is the Noonan nugget that’s really got all us moonbats in an uproar, for good reason:

The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window…

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog hits the tenpenny nail on the head:

… Who really lowered the bar? I’d say it was the party that not only reveres an ex-actor and insult comic named Ronald Reagan but seriously considered him as a possible presidential candidate when he’d been in elective office less than two years. I’d say it’s the party that put George W. Bush and Dan Quayle on two tickets each. I’d say it’s the party that gave respectful consideration to presidential aspirants such as Pat Robertson, Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain. And I say it’s the party that made Sarah Palin its vice presidential candidate, then made her a superstar.

If the bar’s low, Peggy, your party’s voters are the reason.

Noonan, of course, didn’t just somehow overlook Reagan’s career — she was a prime enabler, who first made her GOP celebrity bones writing “morning in America” pap for that second-banana aged-out-of-Hollywood-pretty-boy figurehead. “No, no — Gary Cooper for President, Ronald Reagan for best friend!” we joked. Those were more innocent days.

Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”

Or a B-movie actor, Peggy! To paraphrase Mr. Pierce: Clio the Proclaimer, Muse of History, needs that alcoholic anesthesia more than you ladies right now.

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The Donald Steals The JEB’s Tax Plan

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If you want to argue details, there’s plenty included in the articles linked above. But since EvenTheVerySerious professionals — including contrarian indicator Megan McArgleBargle — have reached a consensus that Trump’s plan is the same old manure in a shiny new gilt-plated bucket, I feel my job here is done.

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Excellent Read: About Those “Terrorist Camps”…

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During my involuntary hiatus, I couldn’t even read Balloon Juice — I was checking Google cache on the regular, but that was spotty & I couldn’t manage to read entire comment strings. So you’ll have to forgive me if this got written up already, but I thought Philip Bump’s Washington Post explainer on the ‘terrorist training camps’ conspiracy theory was too interesting to miss.

Can’t work the auto-links function, so here’s the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/18/donald-trump-and-the-terrorist-training-camps-conspiracy-theory-explained/?tid=pm_politics_pop_b

… “We have a problem in this country: It’s called Muslims,” the questioner began, going on to state that President Obama was himself Muslim. “We have training camps, growing, where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”

Trump’s response met with immediate backlash. He didn’t correct the questioner’s incorrect assertion about Obama’s religion and, further, suggested that his administration was “going to look at that.” Trump’s campaign insisted that the “that” they’d be looking at wasn’t getting rid of Muslims — but rather, those alleged training camps.

Which is itself a weird proposition.

The idea that there are 22 (or, in some iterations, 35) terrorist training camps in the United States appears to stem largely from a 2005 report from the National White Collar Crime Center (https://www.nw3c.org/), a nonprofit organization that receives federal funding. The report, “Identifying the Links between White-Collar Crime and Terrorism,” (https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/209520.pdf) focused on a group called Jamaat Ul Fuqra and the ways in which it used white-collar crime to fund its activities. An appendix to the report indicates a number of places where Fuqra had conducted activities or had training compounds across the country…

Other conservative sites have zeroed in on particular compounds. There’s Islamberg, along the eastern New York-Pennsylvania border, usually described as the “national headquarters” of Muslims of America — which the sites link to Fuqra — in the United States. There’s Mahmoudberg, near Sweeny, Tex., which has received a lot of attention thanks to an accidental shooting in 2002 that resulted in an FBI report (http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/exclusive-clarion-project-discovers-texas-terror-enclave#popup-1) on the compound. And there’s Islamville, in South Carolina, home of a holy shrine (http://www.holyislamville.net/). A Web site focused on Islamic terror called “Clarion Project” released footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoykqCSruY&feature=youtu.be) that it claims shows weapons training in Islamberg…

A lot of the Fuqra’s nefarious activity occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The point of the White Collar Crime Center report, after all, was that Fuqra was involved in white-collar crime, like workers-compensation fraud. That’s tough to pair with spooky music…

So why the conspiracy theories? Because that’s how conspiracy theories work. Conspiracy Web sites often point out how close to New York City Islamberg is — even though it’s really not very close at all. It’s far enough away that Brooklynites see it as a refuge from the city’s noise and activity… In a response to Trump’s comments, a commenter at FreeRepublic.com (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3338327/posts) points to the 2006 arrest of Muslims near Virginia — right near “the Virginia Muslim cemetery [where] the Chechen who bombed Boston was buried.” We’re through the looking glass here, people…

So, there’s “reasons” why those numbers keep getting passed around. The looking glass is warped and cracked, but there are weird images from which the Wingnut Wurlitzer ink-blots a new nutball “explanation” for every purpose…

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Never Forget

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Ya can’t take yer eyes off these bastids, not for a minute!

Monday Evening Open Thread: Never ForgetPost + Comments (241)

Everything Old Is New Again — John Rogers Is Always Right Edition

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Top line from today’s New York Times/CBS poll of the Republican presidential primary:

The proportion of Republican voters favoring Mr. Carson rose to 23 percent from 6 percent in the previous CBS News poll, which was taken just before the first televised Republican debate in early August. Over that same period, Mr. Trump made modest gains, to 27 percent from 24 percent.

In case any of our MSM friends are truly arithmetically challenged, that means that Donald Trump and Ben Carson — two men who have less capacity to fill the office they seek than I do to perform neurosurgery or figure out how to lose money owning a casino — combine to grab half of Republican electorate.

50%.

One out of every two polled.

Damn.

Hieronymus_Bosch_011

The key number, of course, one that I’m sure leapt out to this particular audience, is Trump’s total, that “modest” step to precisely the level that John Rogers identified, so long ago, as the crazification factor:

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —

Tyrone: 27%.

John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

John: Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?

Tyrone: Hadn’t thought about it. Let’s split the difference. Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification — either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.

John: You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?

Tyrone: Does that seem wrong?

John: … a bit low, actually.

Of course, based on the recent polling gains recorded by our favorite lunatic neurosurgeon, we may be in a situation even the great Kung Fu Monkey has not yet encountered.  It’s entirely possible that we could soon see a survey that has both Trump and Carson at 27%.  Do we have non-overlapping magisteria of crazy working now in Not-Your-Grandparents’-GOP™?

Run away! Run away!

Open Thread, my friends.

PS:  Bonus link to Charles Pierce on the special snowflake that is Our Donald.  When Pierce nails an image, that image stays nailed:

Trump is so thin-skinned that, if he swallowed a flashlight, he’d glow like a Japanese lantern.

Hieronymous Bosch, Ship of Fools (detail), betw. 1488-1510. (Unsure on the color correction on this one, folks.  Been decades since I saw it in the flesh).

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