Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

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

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

He really is that stupid.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

A consequence of cucumbers

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

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

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

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Sarah Palin

The Only Thing Missing Are Nikes, Black Sweatsuits, and a Comet

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Our favorite source of comedy reacts to the debate:

First, I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words.

Eat them.

Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

She also confused our current commander in Afghanistan with a civil war general while being completely wrong about what he said, flat out refused to answer the question put forth by the moderator on several occasions, and at several points entered into what some might call a dream state in which she deviated completely from the topic at hand in order to spew talking points.

Other than her consistent lying about Obama’s votes to fund the troops, the highlight of the night for me was this little hunk of red meat for the Red State fanbois and the 101st Chairborne:

PALIN: Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq and that is not what our troops need to hear today, that’s for sure. And it’s not what our nation needs to be able to count on.

I can not tell you how much it pisses me off to have asshats who never even spent a day in Basic Training pull the surrender/treason nonsense, but beside even that, have we ever had a candidate in a debate during wartime so clearly enunciate the tinkerbell strategy? Clap louder! That is what our boys need! Clap louder, damnit!

I would call Sarah Palin a vapid moron, but I don’t want to be accused of being nasty, so I will just say that she is a perfect fit for the unhinged right.

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Debate Thread #2- Bush in A Skirt Edition

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10:03 pm- Blah blah blah. Straight talk makes an appearance. That has to be part of someone’s drinking game.

10:05 pm- Glittering generalities.

10:45pm- Biden won, but the site crashed. On the upside, we had 5k hits last hour, so the servers were stressed.

I guess my only real bit of clarity tonight is that Palin is a wingnut blogger.

Publius:

Palin, by contrast, didn’t wear very well. Her schtick got old. Like her candidacy more generally, it was a sugar rush that fades quickly. It wasn’t so much that she had any truly trainwreck responses (though there was plenty of gibberish). It was that her mindless memorized cutesy lines and winks began to look like amateur hour in comparison to Biden’s command of facts and policy.

Pretty much.

Early polls paint a significant Biden win- 51-36.


Larison:

Not a Disaster

How’s that for a compliment? There’s no question that Palin was outmatched the entire time, and I am fairly sure that viewers will come away thinking that Biden was the winner and was more qualified for the VP role. Give her credit–she held on through the entire thing, clutching to her prearranged attack points for dear life, and she didn’t say anything that was fantastically horrible. Her statement on civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in Afghanistan would have been atrocious if I believed that she knew any better, but I feel confident that she does not know anything about the situation in Afghanistan. McCain’s campaign is already in terminal decline, so it probably didn’t matter that much anyway. Had she completely failed, it would have made the result more lopsided, but I expect that there will be only a marginal boost for Obama in the next few days.

Consistently, Larison is one of the best bloggers out there. As someone who does not consider himself a Republican, Democrat, or independent, but an actual conservative (“but daddy, you said they were like uinicorns!”), he offers an oblique angle on our current politics that is piercing and worth reading. Unlike much of what I see and read on a daily basis, I feel like I learn something when I read him.

He should win an award for his blogging in 2007-2008. Seriously.

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Pre-Debate Open Thread

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For debate drinking games and what not to get ourselves ready for the debate tonight.

Expectations for Palin are quite low. As long as she does not murder a puppy then potty herself on stage, the pundits will proclaim it a win. And, after reading this, not murdering a puppy and wetting her pants is a step in the right direction:

Katie Couric: What do you think is the best and worst thing that Dick Cheney has done as vice president?

Joe Biden: I’m not being a wise guy here … that I don’t know what he’s done. I mean, there’s not many things I’d pick that I thought he’s done that have been good. But I admire his strength. I admire his willingness to take positions that are completely contrary to popular opinion. But I think that what he’s done has been just, I don’t think Dick Cheney trusts that the American people can make judgments that are in the interest of the country. But the thing I think he’s really, really has done: I think he’s done more harm than any other single high elected official in memory in terms of shredding the constitution. You know, condoning torture, pushing torture as a policy. This idea of a unitary executive, meaning the Congress and the people have no power in a time of war, and the president controls everything. I don’t have any animus toward Dick Cheney but I really do think his attitude about the constitution and the prosecution of this war has been absolutely wrong.

Palin: Worst thing, I guess that would have been the duck-hunting accident, where you know, that was an accident. And that I think that was made into a caricature of him. And that was kind of unfortunate.

So, the best thing though, he’s shown support, along with George W. Bush, of our troops. And I’ve been there when George Bush has spoken to families of those who have suffered greatly, those who are serving in the military. I’ve been there when President Bush has embraced those families and expressed the concern and the sympathy speaking for all of America in those times. And for Dick Cheney to have supported that effort of George Bush’s. I respect that.

Just compare those two. One is an answer. The other is a diary at Red State.

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Actually, I Predicted This, Too

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I forget who I was talking to last week, but I predicted this as well:

Sarah Palin plans to go on the attack in tonight’s debate, hitting Joe Biden for what she will call his foreign policy blunders and penchant for adopting liberal positions on taxes and other issues, according to campaign officials involved in prepping her for tonight’s showdown.

The Palin camp is projecting surprising self-confidence in the pre-debate hours, despite the vice presidential nominee’s uneven — and, at some points, peculiar — performances in recent television interviews, the officials say. Top advisers to John McCain privately say Palin’s recent CBS interview was a borderline disaster, especially since it played out in several segments over several days. Tonight will be different, they say.

“This is going to finally put her back into a position where we see her like we saw her the first couple weeks,” a McCain official said. “She was herself. She was authentic, and people related to that. … Tonight, she’ll get into a rhythm. You’re going to see her in a way that you haven’t seen her yet.”

Of course she is going to go on the attack tonight. She can’t answer questions, so all she can do is attack. Additionally, it is easy for her handlers to give her a bunch of talking points to go after the other guy, but it is not so easy to fashion pre-planned thoughtful responses.

This will accomplish several goals:

    First, and most important, it will steer her away from where she is at her shakiest- thinking. She is horrid when required to process a question, and then formulate and provide a coherent response. See the Couric and Gibson interviews.

    Second, it will allow the bobble heads in the media to talk about something other than her answers. The narrative among some in the media will be “What a fighter,” and she “sure showed spirit” and “Sarah Palin was all pitbull, no lipstick tonight.” Expect that kind of idiocy in the media.

    Third, it will shore up the base, as Palin’s support has dropped in recent weeks as it has been exposed she is a know-nothing. Among many in the base, being a combative asshole is a feature, not a bug, and more than makes up for being ill-informed and inexperienced. Among the online right, what matters is not the quality of your response, but how much of a jerk you were to those evil liberals.

    Finally, it may piss off Biden and he may over-react and produce his own gaffe (which he has done quite a bit of, lately).

And, of course, if Ifill presses her on responses when she refuses to answer and instead launches into an attack, all we will hear about for the next month is nonsense about liberal media bias.

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Just Makin’ Shit Up

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Again, it just never stops with these guys:

Sarah Palin has committed yet another political blunder after claiming she had held talks with a British ambassador – talks that never actually took place.

In an answer to questions about her foreign policy experience ahead of tonight’s make-or-break vice presidential TV debate, her aides listed numerous contacts with foreign officials – including Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald.

However the meeting never occurred. Officials at the embassy swiftly contacted the McCain-Palin campaign to inform them of the discrepancy.

A British Embassy spokesman said the error arose after Sir Nigel’s name was listed among those who had attended a US Governor’s meeting in July.

Mrs Palin was at the meeting in her role as Governor of Alaska. However Sir Nigel pulled out at the last minute, leaving his name on the guest list.

Look, it is clear what is going on. Despite their nonsensical efforts to pump up her foreign policy cred with tales of her leadership of the Alaska National Guard and her ability to stare down Putin from the Diomede Islands (forget that she has, you know, never actually visited said islands, and, as such, has never seen Russia from Alaska, not even from her house), it is clear that the campaign is freaking out about her lack of experience. And so, they have done what other inexperienced and unqualified people have done for ages- they are sifting through anything she has done, and inflating the importance to make her look better.

There is another phrase to describe this phenomenon- resume padding. And that is what this is.

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No, Seriously. Tell Us How You Really Feel.

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Rolling Stone:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

Ouch. True, but ouch. And it gets even worse.

See also: The Double-Talk Express. John McCain – Not Ready to Lead.

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