Gun company owner, Dan Cooper, forced to resign from Cooper Firearms because he supports Obama.
Not The First Time
The thing that immediately stuck out to me about Palin’s bizarre 1st Amendment comments yesterday was that this didn’t seem like the first time I had her say something like that. It turns out it was not. Here she is a few weeks ago saying something equal parts incoherent and creepy:
As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.
And here she is yesterday:
“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
I am not sure how you interpret the collected deep thoughts of Sarah Palin regarding the role of the press and freedom of the press, and we might know more if we were allowed to ask her questions, but this is a disturbing trend. She honestly seems to think that the role of the press is to serve as stenographers for those in power, cheerleaders for the government at large, and that when they refuse to do so, they are somehow acting not in accordance with her twisted understanding of the Constitution. We need to get this nutjob back to Alaska here she is their problem.
Also, it is important to remember that she has a journalism degree. These are her collected thoughts on something she allegedly knows. Terrifying.
No Kidding, Larry
If the definition of a gaffe is a politician accidentally telling the truth, this is absolutely, positively, one hundred percent gaffetastic:
Asked by the host whether Palin could step in during a time of crisis, Eagleburger reverted to sarcasm before leveling the harsh blow.
“It is a very good question,” he said, pausing a few seconds, then adding with a chuckle: “I’m being facetious here. Look, of course not.”
Eagleburger explained: “I don’t think at the moment she is prepared to take over the reins of the presidency. I can name for you any number of other vice presidents who were not particularly up to it either. So the question, I think, is can she learn and would she be tough enough under the circumstances if she were asked to become president, heaven forbid that that ever takes place?
“Give her some time in the office and I think the answer would be, she will be [pause] adequate. I can’t say that she would be a genius in the job. But I think she would be enough to get us through a four year… well I hope not… get us through whatever period of time was necessary. And I devoutly hope that it would never be tested.”
The most appalling aspect of the groupthink on the right has been the need for many of them to pretend that this this train wreck in heels is somehow fit to be commander-in-chief. BTW- I eagerly await the Eagleburger walkback on this one. Good luck, Larry.
This Is Your Brain On Bush Open Thread
You thought that I was kidding with the drug analogies. Via Sullivan, read the authoritarian Glenn Reynolds explain what happened to the libertarian Glenn Reynolds.
“Some may say, and you call yourself a libertarian. But I have decided I can be a kind of statist, big government, expansive regulation, high spending, low investing, industrial policy, aggressive religion enforcing sort of libertarian. If you look at libertarians for Bush, I would hardly be the first. . . . It’s not so bad really. It feels kind of like when you wake up in the morning and your mind is kind of blank, but in a peaceful sort of way. Rather nice, really. You know, healing.”
Righteous.
***Update***
Oops. Two minutes after writing I realize that I read the post all wrong. Oh well.
Rush!
<del>This Is Your Brain On Bush</del> Open ThreadPost + Comments (20)
Like I Said, Wingnut Bloggers
Many of you are aware that, for years, I traveled in conservative circles. As such, I am still on a number of what are considered conservative email lists. I still get the emails, and I still read them. In fact, I am glad I do, because one of the things that got me out of the current wingnuttosphere is that when I was a Republican, I listened to and read a lot of Democrats. I read the Daily Kos every day, I read Kevin Drum, I read Matt Yglesias, I embraced the Huffington Post. I think diversity of opinion is an important thing, and I like to come to my own conclusions, however addled and foolish I may be.
At any rate, I received the following email on one of my “conservative” email lists the other day:
Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read “Vote Obama, I need the money.” I laughed.
Once in the restaurant my server had on a “Obama 08” tie, again I laughed as he had given away his political preference–just imagine the coincidence.
When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need–the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.
I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I ‘ve decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient needed money more.
I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.
In and of itself, no big deal. The kind of thing that passes as conservative humor, and something that I am sure has ricocheted around right-wing blogs and email lists everywhere. However, listen to Nicole Wallace, one of the chief McCain flaks, today on NPR. Start paying attention at around 3:35 in the interview:
Listen, you go into a restaurant and instead of leaving a tip, you stiff the waitress and give it to the homeless person outside, it is a noble thing to do, it is spreading money earned by that waitress and giving it someone outside.
Sound familiar?
Look- the intellectual wing of the Republican party is dead. What is left are brain-dead acolytes spreading meaningless and simplistic anecdotes, trite stories, and distilled nonsense passed on that has a more fitting home in AM radio. The McCain campaign, once again, is just a symptom of the real problem- an intellectually incurious and lazy movement in the final ugly spasms of death. The McCain campaign is now, in their interviews with the press, spreading what we can all recognize as wingnut email chains.
RIP, Republicans.
*** Update ***
Via the comments, here the same story is in the letters to the editor at the Chicago Tribune:
On my way to lunch recently, I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read “Vote Obama; I need the money.” I laughed. In a restaurant my server had on an “Obama 08” tie. Again I laughed. Just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came, I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Barack-Obama-redistribution-of-wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need—the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight. I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I’ve decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful. At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment, I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient deserved money more. I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.
—A. Hart, Forest Park
Nicole Wallace, lead McCain surrogate, with nothing to offer but astroturf. This was once a proud movement.
*** Update #2 ***
Sam Adams Hefeweizen is so bad it should be a felony. If Obama does usher in the NEW WORLD ORDER, first on the chopping block are these jackasses for their crimes against the reinheitsgebot. Christ, this is ten pounds of suck in a sixteen ounce bottle. Thank God I have three UFO’s left. This Sam Adams is borderline flat, has no body, a bland to nonexistent aftertaste, and almost a fake sweet quality like it fell into a vat of shitty honey brown. If this was the last beer I was to drink before my impending execution, I would just ask them to give me a piss-jar of Corona or shoot me without having a beer.
This Sam Adams crap was the hefeweizen equivalent of having sex while wearing eight condoms. If someone offers you one, give them the finger.
And The Lambs Lie Down on Broad Street
And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.
And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD. Exodus, Chapter 32.
CBN:
For these and other reasons Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial institutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.
“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”
I guess we can add the bible to biology, chemistry, and the rest of the book learnin’ our modern Christians have no use for these days.
Missing The Point
Patrick Ruffini and the Next Right:
What will it take to turn this around? If you’re a conservative blogger, the question you need to ask yourself is this. Is the main purpose of your blog to express your personal opinion? Or is its primary purpose to build political power for a cause? If you cannot answer yes to the latter, you’re probably not going to be comfortable with making the changes necessary to make online conservatism a political force to be reckoned with.
This is not a criticism, but an observation. Most conservative blogs are still stuck in 2003 — both in terms of the overwhelming focus on media criticism and punditry, and the tendency to outsource electoral politics to the Republican Party. This was in some ways legitimate response to what was happening in 2003-4, when media surrender-monkeys were undermining the War on Terror, Republicans had a kick-butt political operation, and Kos was going 0 for 16.
I don’t fault bloggers for holding on to this point of view in 2003 and 2004. What is unfortunate is that they clinged to it in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 and failed to pivot to the new reality, leaving the Republican Party without a powerful enough force to rein in the self-destructive tendencies of its elite.
Sadly, it’s human nature to cling to the frame in which you came up — traditional media people will never fully reconcile themselves to the blogosphere, talk radio people will always tend to view it as the center of the universe, and even denizens of the “new media” can become easily set in their ways. This is not unlike people who got rich on the housing bubble thinking it could never end. When things first start going wrong, it’s always just a momentary blip, not a sign of an impending crash. Only a catastrophic collapse is usually enough to make people rethink matters.
None of this matters a whit when you have no message, and that is the unenviable position the Republicans are in right now. What is John McCain’s core message? I will tell you, as it is very simple- “Not Obama.” That is it. That is the sum total of the message. He and the Wasilla Wingnut have done nothing for the past two months but provide weak and ugly reasons why you should not vote for Obama, starting with the sneer de force at the RNC and continuing on to the present, where we learn that we should not vote for Obama because some plumber (but not really) is worried about socialism and because Obama knows a guy named Khalidi who does not agree with everything Bill Kristol says about Israel.
That is the Republican message, when they are not busy yelling how different they are from the current President, who just so happens to be a Republican. You would think the folks who routinely mocked DKOS for going 0-16 would figure out the similarity between what happened to the Democats in 2004 and what is happening to the Republicans right now. In 2004, the sum total of the Democratic message was “Not Bush.” You saw how that worked out.
And that is why talks about building a grass roots movement for the Republicans are right now premature- should Obama/Biden win on Tuesday, what needs to happen next is an actual bloodletting in the GOP. They need to figure out what they stand for, and once they figure that out, then a grass roots movement might work. But, for now, when the vast majority of the middle feels alienated by the current GOP, when moderate Republicans are running for the hills and an endangered species in Congress (who is left? Chris Shays?), and the bitter base is calcifying around crazy dead-enders like Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin and Eric Cantor, you need more than a good online presence.
And that is where Republicans are now- they have a fractured and thinning party with no real ideas, loads of purity tests, and a good number of people who could form the intellectual base of the party fleeing for parts unknown. Over the past few weeks, we have learned that the GOP is apparently not big enough for Chris Buckley, Peggy Noonan, George Will, Daniel Larison, Kathleen Parker, and on and on and on. Meanwhile, in typical short-sighted fashion, they are elevating a know-nothing who the vast majority of the center finds appalling to be the new heir to the GOP throne, and the leading lights of intellectual conservatism at the National Review have spent the last few months donning tinfoil hats and screaming about Ayers, Khalidi, Obama’s birth certificate, and a load of other shit that no one cares about, while the bloggers chase down the dozen or so videotapes that are going to really bring an end to this whole Obama thing.
What the Republicans need are not organizational skills. Hell, mention one potential bombshell scandal that will hurt Obama, and every right-wing blogger has their obligatory link up at memeorandum predicting the end. Have any of them sat down and thought how silly they look- by my count, there are any number of videotapes out there that are supposed to end it all. The Michelle whitey tape, the tape of Obama’s mistress, the tape of Obama screaming about how much he hates Israel, the tape of Michelle ranting at API, and on and on and on. But back to the point- as far as echoing messages, right-wing bloggers are great. Remember the old Dan Bartlett quote:
That’s what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.
When it comes to message delivery, these guys are solid. I swear to God there are multiple wingnut blog email lists, because the moment one of them has a crazy idea, it is repeated on every high profile right wing blog within the hour. As a group, they are just not very good at building things, although their skill in tearing people down is unparalleled. Ask Graeme Frost. A quick example:
By my count, this is the umpteenth silver bullet that will finally bring Obama down, and our intrepid right-wing bloggers are on it like ugly on an ape. That callous Obama wants to redistribute the wealth, but he refuses to take care of some distant relative he met once and didn’t even know was in the country. And notice, the gang is all there- Malkin, Hot Air, the National Review, Pammy Atlas- the entire base turned out for this one. Go, conservatives!
A funny thing happened last night, and conservatives missed it, apparently. Last night, a major party candidate bought 30 minutes of time on multiple stations, and presented himself and his vision to the American people. If you missed it, you can watch it here:
Notice what is missing from that, conservatives? Attacks on John McCain. For 30 minutes, Barack Obama talked about what he thinks are the problems currently facing the country, about what he thinks he can do to help fix them, how you can help him, and why it is important to elect him. He did not spend his time telling you why you should not vote for McCain, he spent his time telling why you should vote for him. You may not agree with his ideas, but you can not argue he has them and is presenting them to the country in a clear and nonthreatening manner.
Now, for a moment, consider what the Republican 30 minute infomercial would look like this year- if I had to guess, it would be ten minutes about McCain as a POW, ten minutes of McCain saying he isn’t Bush, and then ten minutes of bullshit smears about Ayers, Khalidi, socialism, celebrity, and maybe Rick Davis could go before the cameras and pull a tire gauge out of his ass. For sheer nostalgia, maybe the lead McCain blogger could put those table-top gamers back in their place again. All the while, McCain could pepper his speech with folksy rejoinders about earmarks. And now that we are done with a hypothetical Republican 30 minutes, how did McCain actually respond to the commercial? In case you missed it, he whinged about public financing (when did that become a Republican cause) and then muttered something about Obama delaying the World Series, and even that was a lie.
What you all need are some ideas. Considering how much you hate people who think, and instead seem to consistently rely on people who act from the gut and don’t blink, I am not sure how you are going to work your way out of the hole anytime soon. Without any ideas, it does not matter what kind of online presence you have. If you don’t believe me, ask John Kerry. This election is not over yet, and anything can happen (I still think McCain has a 50% chance at winning, but I am a pessimist), but there is a reason things are going the way they are going right now. Only a miracle can save John McCain, and miracles, by nature, are not an organizing principle.