Wish me luck kiddies. I’ve got a quart and a half of scotch and I’m going over to read The Corner.
ETA: Jesus. I don’t know if there is enough scotch in the world.
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 335 Comments
This post is in: I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
Wish me luck kiddies. I’ve got a quart and a half of scotch and I’m going over to read The Corner.
ETA: Jesus. I don’t know if there is enough scotch in the world.
This post is in: Election 2012, DC Press Corpse, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I Smell a Pulitzer!, Our Failed Media Experiment
UPDATE: This just in–Rmoney and GOP pull ads from Michigan and Pennsylvania
h/t to commenter JWB
So the AP decided to fact check President Clinton’s speech last night. You’d swear that Ron Fournier was back at AP and taking his direction from Karl Rove, like the old days.
When Clinton brought up the Rmoney Campaign’s recent statement that they weren’t going to be “dictated by fact checkers”, to which Clinton stated “they finally said something I can agree with”, the AP report on that portion invoked Monica Lewinski.
CLINTON: “Their campaign pollster said, ‘We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.’ Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.”
THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were “legally accurate” but also allowed that he “misled people, including even my wife.”
Did Ron Fournier return to the AP, because they suck. Again.Post + Comments (111)
by Zandar| 132 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Getting The Band Back Together, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Bring On The Meteor, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, Our Failed Political Establishment, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
What? You didn’t think you were going to get through the DNC without unsolicited advice for President Obama from The Centrist Concern Troll Twins in the Wall Street Journal, did you? Oh, you silly dears. Roll the tape, Claude!
What voters are looking for—and particularly what swing voters, independents, and disillusioned Obama voters are looking for—is a new direction for America based on fiscal discipline, a balanced budget, and economic growth and leadership.
More than anyone else in this race, Paul Ryan has spoken of the need for fiscal discipline and economic growth—two themes that have been largely absent from the Obama-Biden campaign—which explains a large part of the Ryan-inspired Romney bump.
That bump is like 0.75 points, but who cares. Dorka Schoen and Give ‘Em Caddell need not your facts. Centrist Daleks will Tri-ang-u-laaaaate! And hey, Paul Ryan is a Centrist too! You should listen to his Very Serious Centrist Positions on tesseract marathon running and the joys of children conceived through coercion and force.
For his part, President Obama needs to change direction—immediately and decisively. His campaign strategy has been to divide the country on the basis of class, demonize the wealthy, call for higher taxes and unceasingly attack Mr. Romney. Yet poll after poll has shown that while voters embrace the idea of higher taxes on the rich, it does not translate into votes.
In 2008, Mr. Obama promised to help unite America in a “post-partisan” Washington. But the 2012 campaign has been one of the most negative in memory. What he needs to do is acknowledge that he’s made mistakes and that he wants to pursue a substantive approach to governance. Put another way, he needs to bring back “hope and change” and abandon his divide-and-conquer strategy.
Should he do this before or after he announces he’s not running in November because it’s really tragically unfair of him to have broken such a historic streak of white men running the place, you know. It’s the right thing to do.
It has been said before, but only because it’s so true: Mr. Obama should follow the lead of President Bill Clinton, who emphasized in both his terms in office the need for unity and consensus to achieve fiscal restraint. Inviting Mr. Clinton to speak at the convention Wednesday night is a sure sign that the Obama campaign understands the need to move to the center, if not in substance then in style.
Yet nothing would appeal to independents and swing voters more than if the president were to embrace the findings of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission and make it clear that he too has a plan to revitalize the U.S. economy, reduce the deficit, reform entitlements and spur economic growth through a fairer and leaner tax system.
So President Obama has the unique opportunity to be the adult in the room by handing control of the country over to the nice folks who aren’t all that sure about evolution because the open-minded scientist must question the theory, but they believe tax cuts magically create additional tax revenues because rich people will spring forth from the nothingness like Orks from Warhammer 40K (and reach a collective critical mass of entrepreneurs, a WAAAAGH! of small business owners who will run around franchising at everything, paint their businesses red because they’ll create jobs faster, and leave nothing but career opportunities in their wake of mass construction. Sure).
Yeah, I’ll buy that. President Obama should totally listen to these guys. (Also, Centrist Daleks versus Small Business Orks. Somebody make that happen.)
by Zandar| 54 Comments
This post is in: #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, Our Failed Media Experiment
Since I’m feeling kinda floaty today anyway, I’ll warn you about getting out of the boat into Jennifer Rubin country. Do not go there, brave traveler. It is a silly place.
The latest media obsession (or is it an Obama campaign talking point?) is to demand Mitt Romney explain how his budget and entitlement ideas differ from those Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). When he declines, the media screams, “Evasion!”
Why on earth would Romney answer that, and, more important, does anyone care? If the media is really interested in a compare and contrast exercise they can do their own analysis or ask some staffers. Romney, of course, is running at the top of the ticket, and both Romney and Ryan are running on Romney’s agenda. All Romney need do is explain what HE is for and how that differs from the president’s plans. Is there any voter who will decide to vote for or against Romney because of deviations from the plan his VP has proposed? That would be a first.
The media might have a point if Ryan had criticized Romney’s plans or if his own plans were vastly different from Romney’s. But in basic framework there is no difference between the two. They both want to lower tax rates and expand the base. Both Ryan and Romney want to block grant and reform Medicaid. Both favor a premium-support plan for Medicare. In short, they are in sync on every significant fiscal issue, and Ryan has agreed to be Romney’s VP.
I don’t even have to say anything at this point, she is the tautology of terribadness, the existential essence of ERHMAGERD, the dao of derp.
I’ll say it anyway. Jennifer Rubin is so shamefully awful a shill for Romney, that if his programming included the advanced neural algorithms to approximate embarrassment he’d have to sit her down and let her cry on his synthetic pauldrons for a while until he had to flush his cache. It actually causes physical pain for me to contemplate how bad the other employees of the Post have to feel when they read Rubin’s whiny, adolescent crap. Why somebody in charge up there hasn’t told her “look, you’re pretty much the worst political pundit on the planet, and we would actually gain readership on a sustained basis if we fired you just from the intensity of the euphoria generated by your terminated employment” I have no idea, other than I guess they like what she writes. That thought alone could rip apart suns.
Here’s another thought. The Romney camp should just hire her. They really, really do deserve each other, and she can go on pundit shows and say “Why should Mitt Romney have to answer that question? Who cares?” because why should our media do anything that mitt Romney doesn’t like? Why should they ask questions when everyone knows the purpose of the media is to crap out talking points like owl pellets and nod seriously? Heck, then she could get paid in energon cubes or whatever Romneybot runs on these days and we could all be really happy far, far away from the both of them.
by Zandar| 144 Comments
This post is in: #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, DC Press Corpse, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, Our Failed Media Experiment
Responding to his critics, Kevin Drum breaks out the shovel while standing in his hole and tunnels through a few more strata thick with false equivalence nonsense, looking for the exit.
If we’re at the point where both sides publicly hold that it’s defensible to simply make stuff up because the stakes are so high, we’ve abandoned all pretense of caring about the truth. Nor is the idea that it’s defensible to make up any charge as long as it’s somehow rebuttable much better.
Please note that Drum assumes Harry Reid must be lying, he must be making stuff up. There’s no way Harry Reid can possibly be telling the truth here, right? How does Drum know this? The one guy we know who has seen Romney’s tax returns, John McCain, isn’t saying a damn thing. Not only could Mitt Romney end this farce, John McCain could end this by saying “I’ve seen Mr. Romney’s tax returns when my team vetted him in 2008, and Harry Reid is a liar.” Instead, nothing. It looks like to me Kevin doesn’t care about the truth, but he sure does care about being “right” here.
I’m not even sure how to react to my critics anymore. When a bare minimal standard of decency (no flatly invented stories) is widely mocked as pearl clutching and fainting couch-y, there aren’t really any standards left aside from “whatever works.” All I know is that I want no part of that.
“Whatever works” is what Romney is doing, lying about the President weakening welfare-to-work rules. “Whatever works” and “making stuff up” is Michele Bachmann’s anti-Muslim witch hunt. “Whatever works” is the racism birther nonsense that continues years after the President put out his birth certificate, and then Republicans screaming IT’S FAKE. Comparing any of these to Harry Reid saying “Mitt Romney paid no federal income taxes for ten years” which is an eminently provable or disprovable thing is not only disingenuous, it’s obnoxiously lazy for a reporter of Drum’s bona fides.
By the way, it’s really not true that every candidate for the past 40 years has released all their relevant tax information. John McCain released only a couple of years of returns, and released none of his wife’s returns even though that’s where the vast majority of his family’s wealth lies. Likewise, John Kerry never released his wife’s returns, which accounted for the vast majority of his family’s wealth. I agree that Romney should release more of his tax returns, and I think it’s fine for Democrats to beat him up about it. But let’s keep our facts straight.
What facts? We have no facts because the people who have the fact refuse to release them. Kerry and McCain played these games. They didn’t end up winning for a number of reasons, but there you are. Meanwhile, we’re treating Harry Reid like he’s 100% the worst liar on Earth when A) we don’t have all the facts and B) Republicans actually do lie all the goddamn time.
I refuse to go after Reid over this, especially to satisfy Kevin Drum’s sense of centrist honor. If Romney proves him wrong then I will say “Harry Reid was full of crap and a liar.” But the “fact” that he’s a liar has yet to be established because Romney won’t release his returns.
Do we get this?
This post is in: Crazification Factor, Open Threads, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Green Balloons, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
Whichever one of you prick bastards put my email address on the “Nutcase Rightwinger Bunker-Builder” forum, may I issue to you a hearty “DIAF, Motherfucker!”
For those who do not wish to read the LATEST whole spew of crazy (there have been more that 10 in two days) can simply read my response to the original writer, some guy with “canada” in his gmail address:
I’m afraid I can’t help you. May I respectfully suggest that you seek the assistance of a qualified psychiatrist? Since your email address marks you as someone from Canada, you’ll be happy to know that unlike the US, the care you seem to need will be covered for you.
God Bless,
Soonergrunt
The whole glorious spew of off the rails/off the meds crazytalk after the jump. In addition to our subject of black helicopters, Russian troops in Colorado, and theraputic doses of Seroquel, Risperdal, and Haldol, and to remind you all that these fuckers vote, please consider this an open thread.
Ha, Ha. Very Funny. It Is To Laugh. alternate post title “WOLVERINES!”Post + Comments (142)
by Zandar| 53 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism, Bring On The Meteor, Clown Shoes, Decline and Fall, Flash Mob of Hate, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
Reasonoid Gene Healy declares that President Obama’s “hope-and-change act”has descended into self-parody. Since it’s coming from Reason, the odds of comedic hijinks involving morose trombone stingers are unintentionally high. His main argument is that the President noting last week that he feels his story hasn’t been told correctly is laughable because the President talks too damn much as it is, and it passes unfiltered through the media apparently so there’s nobody for Obama to blame but himself.
Cue the brass section.
Obama considers himself a sophisticated and nuanced guy, so you wouldn’t think his descent into self-parody would be quite so unsubtle.
Anyone else out there for the explanation that a lack of storytelling, explaining, and inspirational speeches was the great sin of the Obama presidency? According to CBS’s Mark Knoller, in his first two years in office, the president clocked 902 speeches and statements and gave 265 interviews. Anybody who talks that much runs the risk of saying too much. Case in point, this gem from the president’s speech Friday in Roanoke: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Inspiring!
To recap, A) Healy is attacking the President’s supposition that he’s had issues being taken out of context and getting his message across by providing a perfect example of taking the President’s message out of context, with our wonderful media regularly inventing such faux controversies out of whole cloth, and B) there’s little greater self-parody than writing lazy nonsense like this for an outfit called “Reason”. The context of that speech was of course that the President was referring to businesses not building those terribly soshulist public goods: roads, bridges, infrastructure, education, the internet, all anathema to the Reasonoids and their glibertarian ilk. The full passage makes that clear:
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
You can’t make this stuff up, I guess. Glibertarians are just Republican doucheknockers with better vocabularies anyway.