Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

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

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

People are complicated. Love is not.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

Books are my comfort food!

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

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JEB! = John Ellis Not-Bush 2016

Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: Ripe to Rot

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The Bush crime family, like its spirit animal the shark, are predators who have outlasted their more attractive primaeval competitors in the GOP clades by prioritizing simple vicious bloodlust over flexibility or intelligence. But with the ancient seas of WASP plutocracy drying up and a swarm of even more vicious new competitors evolving to compete in the shallows and the muck, current exemplar JEB! is not doing very well in this changing new environment. There is still plenty of flesh remaining on his carcass, however, so his retinue of remoras and pilot fish have yet to abandon him. Steve Benen, at MSNBC’s Maddowblog:

… Broadly speaking, Plan A for members of Team Jeb was making their candidate look great. Nearly $30 million later, this strategy has clearly come up short. Plan B was making Donald Trump look awful, and that hasn’t gone well, either. But the Politico piece hints at a possible Plan C.

Mike Murphy, the Los Angeles-based ad man running Bush’s Right to Rise super PAC, isn’t about to leave the $75 million left in the group’s bank account unspent and is readying a 15-minute biographical film about Bush. According to another source close to Right to Rise, Murphy has been floating another tactical shift to potential supporters, suggesting that he might spend the bulk of the $75 million to carpet bomb Rubio, Cruz, Carson, Chris Christie – everyone but Trump. The thinking: Making the race into a binary choice between Bush and Trump might be the only way a majority of primary voters go with Bush.

… It’s hard to blame Bush’s super PAC, which is flush with cash, from looking for ways to create the head-to-head dynamic that might work to the former governor’s advantage. Bush’s odds of success are obviously dwindling, but if the party en masse were forced to choose between Trump and Jeb, the latter would probably be pretty competitive.

So, the thinking goes, Team Jeb could spend $75 million trying to get Republican voters to fall in love with Bush (an unlikely scenario), or use that money to tear down Trump (a fool’s gambit), but why bother? It’d probably be easier to devote the resources to bringing down the other candidates between Trump and Bush.

Why not go after just Cruz or just Rubio or just Carson? Because it’s difficult to say for sure where their supporters would go under such a scenario. The result is a bit like a mafia movie in which the don targets all the rival families at once, since anything less would lead to chaotic failure…

Note how metaphors about sharks and mafia dons come so naturally when you think about the Bushes. Also, to Mr. Pierce at Esquire, rabid dogs — “It’s Time for Jeb (!) to Old Yeller His Campaign“:

… To be completely fair, no candidate was less suited to the carnival of souls that this campaign has become than was Jeb (!). He had lots of money, and lots of influential friends, and he even had a mainly undeserved reputation as a Republican with the ability to reach out to minorities. Then, two things happened. He ran facefirst into I, Trump, who found in Jeb (!) the perfect foil—humorless, stuffy, and very easily pantsed on stage. Nobody could have anticipated how truly deformed one man could make our politics. But, for all that, Jeb (!) has proven to be an absolute lemon of a candidate. He has entirely different—​​but no less serious—​problems with English than his brother did. He couldn’t find spontaneity if you gave him the ghost of Robin Williams as a guide. And, let us never forget that The Base has decided that his surname is a curse unto 10 generations, and Jeb (!) is nowhere near the pol to turn all that around in one election cycle. Rubio is younger. Cruz is more conservative. Fiorina is a bigger prevaricator. Ben Carson is crazier. Rand Paul is quirkier. And He, Trump is more, well, everything. Even if you put him at the top of the Single Digit Club, where’s the room for Jeb (!) to run in a Republican primary field?​

It’s not your year, big fella. Just admit it. Don’t go to Vegas next week and stand up there and get your trou’ dropped on you again. (I mean, Jesus H. Christ on a package tour of the Balkans, Rubio embarrassed you last time.) Maintain some dignity. Take the campaign out behind the shed and come back alone. There’s no hope for it now. It’s suffering, Jeb (!), and only you can do it.

Since I lack Mr. Pierce’s generous spirit, I don’t care if JEB! drops out early or late, as long as he’s wasting GOP money attacking the other Repub candidates — and presumably causing them to waste money attacking him in turn — that might otherwise have gone to attacking HRClinton (or whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be).

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Open Thread: Before the Beast Collapses, Completely Drained

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If I made this stuff up, you’d ding me for implausibility. Politico is happy to assure us that JEB! will overcome because “His team is selling a Trump vs. Bush vision that relies on big-money backers ignoring public data”:

Jeb Bush didn’t fix it. His attempted attacks on rivals have fallen flat. His $30 million in TV ads have failed to move his numbers. And now, with the Iowa caucuses less than two months away, he’s polling at a miserable 3 percent nationally.

But there’s one significant success that is keeping his campaign alive: Jeb Bush has convinced major GOP donors and supporters that the polls are wrong.

“I am like the Israelites following Moses, and I am not the only one,” said Mike Fernandez, the top donor to Bush’s super PAC, after a new CNN poll showed Bush an astounding 33 points behind the poll leader. “Unfortunately, it might not be that many of us.”

While rival campaigns boast that some Bush backers are making side bets on other candidates, hardly any Bush donors have publicly abandoned him — largely out of unwavering loyalty to an incomparable Republican dynasty and to a candidate many put on a pedestal in spite of his political shortcomings.

“Given the poll numbers currently, you would think there would be these massive defections from a campaign like this,” said Slater Bayliss, a Florida-based GOP operative and longtime Bush ally. “And the reason there haven’t been is Jeb Bush; because people believe he’s in it for the long haul and believe he’s a serious candidate — even in a cycle where serious doesn’t seem to be selling. They like him because he’s serious. Eventually, they think serious will sell.”…

All of Bush world’s operating theories about the race — the idea that a well-funded super PAC would give Bush an edge, that Donald Trump was a passing fad, that a decade-old record of governorship would matter and that the electorate would come around to Bush’s more accepting positions on immigration reform and Common Core — have turned out, so far anyway, to be wrong.

“Jeb just isn’t very talented at this. And the problem is that Jeb has been coddled by a group of people who worship Jeb,” said one high-level Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They ran a campaign based on what they wanted the party to be, instead of what the party was.”…

But in more private conversations, many on Bush’s payroll are turning to resignation and even gallows humor. One lamented to friends about not getting to spend the entire winter in Miami; others have been wondering aloud if the campaign will even make it through January to the first in the nation Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.

“I think staff morale is exceedingly low,” said a Bush donor based in New York City. “I suspect they know they’re in a death spiral now. There’s no getting out of this.”

In spite of those worries starting to bubble to the surface, Bush appears resolved to fight on, still expressing steely confidence to close associates and anyone who questions his viability: “I’m going to win this damn thing,” he’ll often say…

I figured we all deserved a good belly laugh, after this unremittingly grim week.

What’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?

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Open Thread: Third Time’s No Charm, JEB!

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And yet — this being the Republican party — there’s still a more-than-zero chance this mope will end up as the eventual nominee…

From the NYTimes, “Jeb Bush’s New Show of Confidence Is Failing to Connect With Republicans“:

WATERLOO, Iowa — This ought to be Jeb Bush’s time.

He laid out a detailed plan to crush the Islamic State three months before the Paris terrorist attacks. He gave a well-received speech on rebuilding America’s military at the Citadel two weeks ago. He has shown new confidence discussing terrorism, the Syrian refugee crisis and American values, and how they intertwine.

But instead of winning a second look from voters, Mr. Bush continues to be ignored, and to languish in the polls, even as the nation contends with what he calls “serious times that require serious leadership.”

In an appearance at an Iowa military museum here on Tuesday, where a World War II-era P-51 Mustang was suspended overhead, the stage was set for Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, to highlight his credentials to be commander in chief. He detailed his positions on defeating the Islamic State, and invoked his father’s waging of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Yet the crowd of 150 mostly older voters was scarcely stirred to applaud…

Mr. Bush has been the beneficiary of $30 million in television ads in the early voting states, more than any other candidate. One commercial, “Leader,” featured footage from his speech at the Citadel military college in South Carolina calling for a United States-led coalition to destroy the Islamic State “with overwhelming force.”

But the ads have not budged Mr. Bush’s low standing in polls. Of Republicans who named terrorism and foreign policy as their top concerns in a Quinnipiac University survey of Iowa last week, only 4 percent picked Mr. Bush as their top candidate. A national survey by the same pollster on Wednesday gave Mr. Bush 5 percent over all…

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Open Thread: “Whisper Campaigns and Zipper Problems”

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Interesting story from McKay Coppins, at Buzzfeed, on Jeb Bush’s (so far futile) attempts to crush Marco Rubio in advance of the 2016 campaign.

TL; DR (IMO) — First, if thoroughly middle-of-the-road journos like Coppins are willing to attach names to narratives like this, then JEB! is TOAST! (at least in 2016).

And second, the “well known” rumors that Rubio’s financial problems relate to funding his “second secret family” are no more than that. If Marco did have one or more off-registry kids to support, some enterprising fellow Repub would’ve gotten the data out by now. He’s just no good at managing his money, like so many of the rest of us.

… [B]eneath the glossy exterior of his public profile — that of the compassionate conservative, the happy warrior, the good-natured reformer — Jeb possessed a hard-edged, often ruthless political style that ran through his entire rise and reign in the Sunshine State. “He’s been the big, bad kid,” Chris Smith, a leading Democrat in the Florida House, complained to a reporter toward the end of Jeb’s term. “And he’s wielded that power mercilessly.”

It wasn’t until Rubio dazzled a roomful of donors at the Koch brothers summit in Rancho Mirage that Jeb and his tight-knit 2016 team decided the young senator needed to be neutralized. For their new mission, they adopted a code name: “Homeland Security.” Few of Jeb’s lieutenants believed they would need to subject Rubio to too much browbeating in order to sideline him, and their commander agreed. All he needed was a gentle reminder of his place in the pecking order. And so the word went out to Jeb’s army of foot soldiers: Carry the message…

Meanwhile, Jeb’s ever-expanding political operation made a big show of its fundraising supremacy, particularly in Florida. At an event hosted by his political action committee in Tallahassee, his team branded the donors like cattle, with large red stickers exclaiming “Jeb!” — and then they invited reporters into the formerly private meeting so they could ooh and ahh and tweet about the impressive herd of millionaires…

…[T]he Bush brigade had Florida on full, threat-level-red lockdown, and with the exception of a few loyal backers, Rubio wasn’t getting anywhere in his home state. Meanwhile, as they tried fundraising outside of Florida, they began to notice a curious pattern among the Republican donors who were turning them down. Many of them seemed to like Rubio’s ideas and message, but when they explained their doubts about his 2016 prospects, they often used the same vague, coded language: concerns about the wealth of “oppo” that could drag him down, or the “talk coming out of Tallahassee,” or the importance of nominating a “fully vetted” candidate. This, of course, was nothing new for Rubio. But it seemed oddly top of mind all of a sudden in certain quarters of the GOP money world.

Eventually, word got back to the senator’s camp that Jeb’s close allies in Florida were working to revive the “zipper problem” meme in a last-ditch effort to freeze Rubio out of the race; they were circulating the rumors anew among donors and politicos and cautioning them to exercise due diligence before signing on with his campaign…

Still, most in the Rubio camp had trouble believing that Jeb would personally green-light such a brazen campaign of character assassination against someone who he had, just four years earlier, joyously introduced to the world while choking back tears (or at least pretending to). But one of the privileges of being Prince Jeb was his ability to give an order and then step back in blissful ignorance as a team of duty-bound lieutenants plotted, and strategized, and worked out all the gritty details that entailed “carrying the message.”…

Nice folks, those Bushes. Nature’s aristocrats!

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Today’s Episode Of “Stick A Fork In Him, He’s Done”

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Via Martin Longman writing at Washington Monthly, this by Michael Bender and Ben Brody over at Bloomberg:

In Alabama, one of the Bush campaign’s top targets in March, Bush has endorsements from a member of Congress, a handful of state legislators and statewide officials. Yet, in contrast with Donald Trump or Marco Rubio, Bush wasn’t able to find a full slate of delegates to run on the ballot by Friday’s deadline.

 

DUYSTER,_Willem_Cornelisz_-_Carnival_Clowns

As Longman notes,

This obviously undermines Jeb’s main arguments for his own candidacy. He’s supposed to be competent and experienced. His team is supposed to know what it is doing and have a shot at matching the team the Clintons will bring to the general election contest. He’s supposed to have enough establishment support and resources to not have to worry about things like ballot access that can be a real challenge to cash-strapped and little-known candidates.

The whole Bloomberg piece is worth a read.  The TL:DR version is that while the Bush folks can talk a plausible game about a targeted strategy aimed at amassing delegates (which sounds on superficial reading like an echo of the Obama 2008 mastery of the caucus/primary mix, but isn’t), life on the ground looks very different, and thoroughly unpromising for Team Exclamation Point.

That said, the clown car is full of clowns, so who knows which GOP jester will actually get to 1237 delegates.  I don’t — but a while back I was willing to bet lunch money against Jeb.  I’d lay more now.  Quite a bit, in fact, were I a gambling man.

ETA: I do so love the Juice Commentariat.  For the record:  I used the term “stick a fork in him” because I thought the Secret Service might frown on a suggestion to stick a shiv in someone. Though that would certainly settle the question of whether he or she were done. [PS — Secret Service?  This is a JOKE!  Maybe a crappy one, but mine own.]

Image: Willem Corneliz Duyster, Carnival Clowns, c.1620

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Late Night Open Thread: (Cap) Pistols At Dawn!

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Now this sound more like the Bush family everyone’s come to expect — the patricians who have The Help fight their wars for them. The Very Serious NYTimes, “Bush Allies Threaten Wave of Harsh Attacks on Rubio“:

The cash-rich group aiding Jeb Bush’s White House run has filmed a provocative video casting his rival Marco Rubio as ultimately unelectable because of his hard-line stand against abortion.

That group, which has raised more than $100 million, has asked voters in New Hampshire how they feel about Mr. Rubio’s skipping important votes in the Senate.

And the group’s chief strategist has boasted of his willingness to spend as much as $20 million to damage Mr. Rubio’s reputation and halt his sudden ascent in the polls, according to three people told of the claim.

Seething with anger and alarmed over Mr. Rubio’s rise, aides to Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, and his allies are privately threatening a wave of scathing attacks on his former protégé in the coming weeks, in a sign of just how anxious they have become about the state of Mr. Bush’s candidacy.

Their looming problem: In trying to undercut Mr. Rubio as unaccomplished and unprepared, Mr. Bush is a flawed messenger. Over the years he has repeatedly, and sometimes lavishly, praised the younger lawmaker, often on camera….

Oh, be fair — Jeb Bush is a “flawed messenger” by every metric; it doesn’t need an uppity young protegee pushing ahead in the queue to make Jeb look like a saggy old suburban WASP.

… [T]he preoccupation with Mr. Rubio is revealing, suggesting not just fury at his challenge to a former mentor, but also a conviction that rivals like Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson have no chance of winning and will collapse in time for Mr. Bush to rise again. Mr. Rubio, the Bush team expects, will remain standing.

For many of Mr. Bush’s longest-serving advisers, Mr. Rubio’s run is a betrayal: Mr. Bush backed Mr. Rubio’s bid for House speaker in Florida and persuaded important donors to endorse him for the Senate. A few of Mr. Bush’s supporters have taken to calling Mr. Rubio “Judas.”…

Any attacks on Mr. Rubio would come primarily from Right to Rise, the “super PAC” that has raised more than $100 million for Mr. Bush. Its top strategist, Mike Murphy, refused to detail the group’s strategy but did not dispute that Mr. Rubio was in its sights.

“Part of running for president is you have to put your big boy pants on and get vetted on the issues, so we know we don’t have a dud candidate running against Hillary Clinton,” he said.

Asked about the multiple videos of Mr. Bush praising Mr. Rubio over the years, Mr. Murphy said of Mr. Rubio: “We all supported him for the Senate. We all support him staying there, because he is far from proving he is ready and experienced enough to be president of the United States in a dangerous time.”…

Mr. Murphy has privately said to several people that Right to Rise would be ready to devote up to $20 million to fighting Mr. Rubio, according to several people told of the conversations. Asked about the figure, Mr. Murphy declined to comment.

Aides to Mr. Bush, meanwhile, have grown weary of conflicting advice about how to deal with Mr. Rubio. After the Oct. 28 debate, in which Mr. Bush criticized Mr. Rubio for missing votes, Mr. Bush’s top adviser, Sally Bradshaw, archly noted on a conference call that the very donors accusing Mr. Bush of being too aggressive had previously encouraged Mr. Bush to go after Mr. Rubio…

Ripe to Rot Rises! And every penny they spend on blanketing New Hampshire’s airwaves and lefty political blogs’ comment threads is a penny they won’t have to spend against HRClinton in the general. Snipe away, Repubs!

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Friday Night Fights Open Thread: Aging White Men, Talking Smack

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darth cheney silences poppy bush

(Nick Anderson via GoComics.com)
.

A Democrat once said “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” Repubs prefer to think of defeat as a bastard child, and the Bush Crime Cartel is busily Jerry-Springer-ing its paternity.

Mr. Pierce explains:

It seems that Poppy Bush sat down with Parson Meacham to hash out Poppy’s life. And who could be a better wingman for the job than the Parson, who’s made a lucrative business out of the Great Man Theory of American history? In the course of their discussions—which, alas, have led to a book-like object—the elder Bush has some harsh words for a certain former secretary of defense of his casual acquaintance.​​

“I think he served the president badly,” Bush told Meacham, Peter Baker of the New York Times reported, quoting the book. He added: “I’ve never been that close to him anyway. … There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.” (Rumsfeld resigned as secretary of defense in 2006 after conditions in Iraq deteriorated. He declined comment about the biography to Fox News…

But then again…

… Poppy ripped Donald Rumsfeld unconditionally, and he said some tough things about Cheney, too, but he also made sure to point out that C-Plus Augustus ran his own shop. Jeb (!) made the same point about who was in charge, and went out of his way to say nice things about Cheney besides…

Why, a political cynic might almost suspect that Darth Cheney had squirreled away some “oppo research” in that man-sized safe he had removed from the Naval Observatory on his way out the door in 2009! Yet however could a man who’d gotten his start in national politics as a CREEPster in Richard Nixon’s administration ever stoop to such low, ungentlemanly tactics?

***********

Supplemental alternate-history weirdness:

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