Bully for them

MAGAts like Trump, no, they love him, because they want a bully. They want someone who attacks his rivals, and they don't care about any principles of consistency or morality, much less about knowing anything.

Bullying is the thread that binds them. It's why they drive big-ass trucks even if they're going to an office job. It's their ego that needs the truck, often not their job.

Second Amendment fetishism is about bullying. What sort of pantywaist would need to go to the supermarket strapped? Someone who wants to bully everyone else.

Why do MAGAts hate knowledge? Remember middle school? Nerds got bullied; they didn't bully.

It's not that all MAGAts are men. Remember those girls who got weak in the knees over the bad boys in high school? Yeah, many of them (not all!) eventually took their place inside bully culture. Too bad they failed to figure out how much better life is when you're a partner, not just a cook and baby-maker.

America is in bad shape as a democracy because so many people never grew out of middle and high school.

Fox and friends

I've long said that the purpose of right-wing media is to provide cover for indefensible beliefs, rather than to provide information from which to build defensible beliefs. Many studies have borne this out, and Chris Mooney recaps them in Salon:

Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

Bullies

Reading up on the material in the Fox ignoramus effect, I found some really fun facts from 2008 about Fox's bullying of the rest of the big media (poor widdle babies!).

I had thought that reporters shied from taking on Fox because it might hire them some desperate day when the News Corporation owns all the big media.  Turns out, like Elisabeth Bumiller whose heart went pitty-pat when confronted by the hugeness and brilliance of Duhbya, reporters are mostly scared off.

Even those who will stand up have been bullied enough to hesitate:

Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters — Fox News — a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead.

Fox is like a middle school punk on the street corner when the elementary school lets out.  (h/t mistermix at Balloon Juice)  This is their offense in defense of the ignoramus effect:

In a statement, Michael Clemente, who is the senior vice president of news editorial for [Fox News], said: “The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with.’”

...

For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the “Best Northeastern Colleges.” It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of “Best Party Schools.”

But back to 2008...

Can you imagine any other network than Fox digitally altering the appearance of journalists, Steven Reddicliffe and Jacques Steinberg, whom they're attacking?

The Fox attack dogs making this attack are Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade.  Yes, those two who show the value of competition by competing with each other to be the stupidest man on TV news.  They have the unmitigated gall to call Reddicliffe and Steinberg "attack dogs."

Fox is dangerous to American democracy.

Evita of the nerds

That epithet of Michael Lind's for Ayn Rand by itself makes his piece in Salon worth reading.

The media is building [Paul] Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and [Ron] Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for decades.

Lind thinks conservatives divide into three factions - neocons, the religious right, and libertarians. My very similar division is more blunt - bullies, fundies, and wealthies. No surprise Lind and I see the same three-headed dog guarding the hellish right. It's right there in front of us.

But Lind makes two errors. He thinks the culture war is over:

The Protestant religious right benefited from a backlash against the cultural liberalism of the 1960s on the part of working-class and middle-class white Americans. That backlash, however, appears to have been a generational phenomenon. Younger Americans are less racist, more educated, more secular and more liberal on social issues. Archie and Edith Bunker have passed away, and Gloria and the Meathead voted for Obama.

Demographic hope is not a plan to win the continuing culture war. This war is a long war, and the social reactionaries are playing for a war of attrition and constant social pressure. They're willing to stupidify our schools to maintain the chosen Bible-literalist ignorance of our children, our culture, and our polity.

Lind also thinks that the strong and visible libertarian strain of Republicans dominates the economic conservatives, when in fact it's only their rhetoric that dominates. The Republican Party of Paul Ryan is about enriching the already rich at a cost of beggaring the middle class. Libertarianism helps them do that, but if it got in the way for a second - as it did under Duhbya - it would be like Christian scripture demanding stoning to death for eating shellfish. Forgotten.

Best health care in the world

Here's how broken our health financing system is: We not only spend waaay more total dollars per person on health care than any other nation, we spend more tax dollars per person than everyone else but Norway and Luxembourg. For this, we have millions uncovered, and the health outcomes for those of us who are covered are worse. Are we idiots?

The morons who are screaming lies about "death panels" must really enjoy overspending on less.

(h/t Avedon on Eschaton)

Party crashers

Any political coalition large enough to elect a President has internecine conflicts. While the Democrats' differences have been starkly visible for all of the past fifty years (remember when the House wanted a veto-proof majority against Jimmy Carter?), Republicans have been better at closing ranks and presenting a unified front to the world.

Remarkably, despite their thorough beatings the last two election cycles, Congressional Republicans are still united in fealty to discredited economic ideology (low taxation of the wealthy solves all problems) and to anti-sex social conservatism. Sure, there have been prominent dissenters from the GOP party line in the Senate, but the hold of Delayism over the party is choking and almost complete even with John Boehner running it.

Outside Congress in the semi-real world, however, Republican electoral losses have turned the smug self-satisfaction of 2004 into wild unpredictable panic. Who's going to run the party? Surely not Rush Limbaugh, although the wealthy owners of the GOP believe he's still in their camp and know they can't afford to offend him.

Michael Steele is certainly not going to run the GOP. Since he lacks a national constituency, he never was. He was a seat-warmer from the beginning, a way of kicking the can down the road while the factions prepared for their confrontation.

Sarah Palin, who as a world class narcissist is a couple of standard deviations beyond even the commonly narcissistic run of politicians, thinks she should be in charge. That would be hysterical if it weren't so scary.

Palin looks like a threat to take her "gun-toting, churchgoing, working-class whites" and go to a new party, uh, vanity candidacy. I've often advocated a new conservative party to supplant the Republican Party, which I view as irredeemable, but Palin's loose coalition of Idiocrats is not the responsible center-right counterbalance I hope for. A successful Palin party would end the United States (not that I think its success would be likely).

The GOP elites that Rick Perlstein reports on in Newsweek are not the elites that matter. What matters is funding, and Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks are recipients of funding, not nearly so much originators of it. They disagree about Palin, and that's fun to watch, but that's more about the media and general election politics than it is about internal power struggles.

What we're really seeing is the tension that was always there between the three major factions of the GOP. The policies that have really mattered to the party have benefited the wealthies. The bullies and the fundies have had to do with table scraps, and they've noticed again that they don't get the respect they believe they deserve. As always, Grover Norquist's anti-tax management faction has to find a way to pacify the Republican rank and file, who are full of people who don't benefit from Republican economic policies.

Conservative so-called intellectuals don't actually matter in this fight. They are tools to shoehorn propaganda into the media. Perlstein gives them outsize importance.

Bloodthirsty

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a peace-loving nation. We aren't.

Sure, some of us are, possibly many, maybe even a majority. Maybe not. But there's a strong current of blood lust not even a step up from savagery that runs through many Americans' violent and ugly view of the world.

Iran's nuclear ambitions? Don't ask questions. Don't talk. Don't bother with economic coercion. Attack.

To your lastpoint: eliminate their capability now, so they cannot use it later. Do not make the mistake of thinking they won't. and, talking will not get us there. --ronreganfan [sic] (4/9/2009 12:18 PM EDT)

Pirates from lawless Somalia? Don't negotiate the release of their hostages, backed by the threat of force. Attack everyone everywhere.

Yesterday, April 8th, 2009, Somali pirates attacked an American merchant ship. To the government of Somalia, I say the following: You must get contol of your population and end their piracy right now. If you don’t, we will. If ending their piracy means destroying what little there is of your sorry nation, we will destroy your sorry nation. If any Somali pirate ever again attacks an American ship, we will act accordingly. Do not appeal for mercy. Do not mistake our resolve. --camper9574 (4/9/2009 5:22 AM EDT)

Negotiation is not an option. Get Captain Phillips back safely, then take quick and severe action.
If some innocents get in the way then they should not have been in the area. --icepack (4/9/2009 7:30 AM EDT)

These idiots have no idea how vast the Indian Ocean is. (Note: I have no qualms whatsoever about defending shipping. I'm just not willing to kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out.)

North Korean missile? Never mind that Kim Jong Il is probably sick. Never mind that this society will collapse under its own weight quite soon. Attack.

Newt Gingrich says he would have disabled the long-range missile before it ever left the launch pad. --from the CNN story

Yes, the US should have bombed the launch pad as soon as the threat became known. Now the North Koreans will think they can get away with it every time. --Cameron (April 6th, 2009 4:00 pm ET)

Fortunately, many commenters on the Jack Cafferty story of Jingo Newt recognize the Republican war drumbeat for what it is.

This is what the bully faction of the conservative movement has to offer: perpetual war. Fer chrissake, in 2003, they wanted to invade France for merely verbal disagreements with the Bushists.

We're already in theater in two wars, maxed out on both our soldiers and our credit cards. If we fought all the wars the wingnuts want us to fight, we would be on a permanent war footing. And our deficits? We'd never see a balanced budget again.

The stupidest attitude of all that the bully faction of the Republican Party sweats out through every pore is that if you don't agree with their every carpet-bombing knee-jerk reflex, you must want to befriend every enemy and show America's throat to their knives.

So, of course, it's all Obama's fault that these conflicts heated up. It's all Obama's fault that he hasn't yet killed anyone. Never mind that all three of these problems have been going on for years. Nope, the wingnuts' selective amnesia prevents them from ever seeing problems in context, where those problems are more complicated.

Brave new media world

Eric Fehrnstrom waxes nostalgic for the gatekeeping of big media. What he really misses is outlets he can bully and bullshit. He used to know the game. Now he's just another punk.

What matters in the new media age is reputation. Readers who want to judge the credibility of what they read have to remember the names of writers - or their consistent pseudonyms. The publisher is no longer paramount.

After all, the Boston Globe published Fehrnstrom, and, as many of the commenters point out, his credibility is low, approaching zero.

Inside the belly of the beast

Never mind that Tony Perkins got inside the beast's belly by doing more self-service (and self-serving) colonoscopy. He sees the Republican coalition the way I do:

"What has made the conservative movement strong is when you have social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and foreign policy conservatives working together," he said.

Yep, fundies, wealthies, and bullies. Perkins puts his own group first even though it's clear that the wealthies own the Republican Party and steer it.

Perkins, of course, believes a whole heavenly host of things that are bullshit. For example:

"Moderates never beat conservatives. We've seen that in past elections," he said.

I guess a primary is not an election. Go figure. And, of course, John McCain is only a moderate if you're a frothing, quivering wingnut. But that's their story, and they're sticking to it.

They're just ignoring all the moderate Democrats who've beaten wingnuts. But by their definition, all Dems are lunatic socialists, and they can't see any differences after their decades-long one-size-fits-all vilification.

What Sarah Palin means by pro-America

Palin means:

• Pro-war: Patriotism is not about love of country. It's not about liberty and equality through law. It's the rightful last refuge of bullies and scoundrels.
• Pro-secession: Sympathy for the Alaska Independence Party. Yep, politics makes strange bedfellows, literally in this case.
  
• Pro-Confederate: The Second Amendment frames a right of insurrection.
• Pro-fundie: How could a non-Christian be a good American?
• Pro-wealthies: If you tax the largest among us, you tax me.
  

Like Joe Biden, I'm really sick of this crap - and the bullshit, insincere "clarifications" of wingnuts like Palin.

At what, shuffleboard?

John McCain writes another check with his mouth that his body can't cash. I guess he's now afraid that he has to shore up his standing among macho assholes, and you know if he has that much trouble in the bully faction of the Republican base, this election is over.

Slow learners

American voters are that special needs kid in elementary school who keeps making the same mistake over and over again. The kid is sweet but easily manipulated by the class bully to do what the bully wants done. The bully doesn't spend any time actually helping the special needs kid. He uses people.

Of course, the Republicans are the bully. But the special needs American electorate never learns that practically everything the Republican say is either an out and out lie or bullshit puffery.

This story alone should be enough to swing the election to any yellow dog. Imagine the controversy if Hillary Clinton had fibbed about being under fire in Bosnia. Or just remember. American swing voters are incapable of this. They would think that I know all I need to know about England; after all, I changed planes at Heathrow once.

It's not that foreign travel is essential. It's that they are puffing up refueling stops into visits and next door visits to a trip into Iraq.

The Obama campaign -- which has increasingly accused the McCain campaign of deliberately lying in ads and on the stump -- was quick to highlight that story, along with a news report that explored whether the McCain campaign has been sending out wildly inflated crowd estimates.

The McCain team has twice pointed to law enforcement as the source for those estimates -- but the same officials denied to Bloomberg News that they had provided the numbers cited by the Republican nominee's campaign.

"The McCain campaign said Gov. Palin opposed the bridge to nowhere, but now we know she supported it," said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor in a statement. "They said she didn't seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn't lying about?"

For that slow kid, here it is in a nutshell: You can't believe anything a Republican politician says.

Outrageous when a Democrat fights back

McCain's been playing middle school bully for weeks now, and Michael Scherer is offended by the fact that Obama is now fighting back. Some liberal media!

Pander to me

[A]s the Saddleback forum revealed, McCain might finally be approaching his comfort zone on faith.

McCain has finally, finally learned to pander to the fundies, and this elicits a laudatory piece from McCNN.

Born into the bully faction, married into the wealthy faction, thrust by electoral necessity into the fundie faction, McCain is finally hitting the trifecta of Republican politics. Duhbya did this long ago in a different order: Born into the wealthy faction, Roved into a fundie, and Cheneyed among the bullies.

By definition, any man who can satisfy all three factions has to learn to pander deeply and without conscience and would therefore be a bad President.

Having it both ways

Sums up blood 'n' guts McCain in one sentence:

Sen. John McCain said Wednesday that the crisis in Georgia should not be used to score political points, but his campaign has stepped up its attacks on Sen. Barack Obama's foreign policy credentials.

Anyone want to guess which half McCNN calls out as a story highlight? Yep, it's obvious:

• McCain says crisis should not be used to score political points

While he's scoring every point he can. No shame from him, just advocacy for the use of force whenever there's a question. That's why I put him in the bully faction of the Republican Party.

Raving racist Texas bully vote

McCain has that demographic sewn up tight:

Texas Trail Dog

July 2nd, 2008 9:30 pm ET THAT'S EXACTLY WHY WE NEED THIS MAN AS PRESIDENT. AND THAT AND HIS NOT PUTTING UP WITH OF THE DRUG DEALING ORTEGO CROWD THAT HE JERKED THE FELLOW UP BY THE COLLAR. WE CAN FINALLY HAVE A PRESIDENT WITH GUTS. NOT LIKE THIS CRY BABY BULLCRAP MESS OBAMA IS TALKING ABOUT OR HIS SUPPORTERS. YOU PEOPLE MAKE ME SICK. PLUS JAPANS IMAGE OF AN OBAMA BEHIND THE PRESIDENT'S EMBLEM IS RIGHT ON NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF MONKEYS TRYING TO BE SOMETHING THIEY'RE NOT. IF OBAMA GAINS OFFICE IT WILL REMIND ME OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

If you wanted me to identify some of the ignoramuses mentioned in my last post, ah, here's one.

Trilateral omissions

Tom Tomorrow perfectly captures the fundie, wealthy, and bully factions of the Republican Party, as represented by the three remaining candidates.

And, by the way, what was I thinking to consider McCain only a bully panderer, when he is clearly one of them. Maybe I was confused because he's a paleocon bully, not a neocon bully.

Click image for full cartoon in Salon.

Bullies

Who are the bullies? They're the guys who are the source of the gender gap. They prefer to solve every problem with force. Kid won't say "yessir", smack him around. Woman wants a divorce, submit to this (good fundie cross-over). Female orgasm? Illegal in Alabama unless provided by a man. Addict steals; ten years behind bars with no rehab. Death penalty! Death penalty! Death penalty! Murder/death/kill. The law? The cops are the law, and all the stuff that happens in court is doo process.

Oh, and turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot. Solve all our problems. Any ragheads left? Torture 'em.

Prominent bullies: Rush Limbaugh, John Bolton, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and Duhbya. True to form, physical courage is not required to be a bully, just power. Darth is a bullying wealthy who also exploits the bullies. He'd be the perfect nominee except that he's more despised than even Duhbya.

The great intellecutal, untellicable, unintelligle, smart-ass neocons think they're bullies, but they're really just useful pussies. They have advanced degrees and academic pedigrees - how tough could they really be? Paul Wolfowitz gives himself twirlies without being held upside down in the locker room toilet.

GOP constituencies

Laughing the pretenders out of town leaves three guys who might just possibly win the Republican nomination, and they're a scary trio. One is an open theocrat and Confederate sympathizer. One will clearly and obviously say anything in the whole damn world to win - no, scratch that, it's worse, he'll say everything at one time or another if that will save the best for numero uno. The third is already 72 years old, though half the fossils in the media (think David Broder) would volunteer tonight to have his baby if only they had wombs, and he has deeply offended all the key Republican constituencies.

There are three constituencies that matter in the modern (ouch, oxymoron) Republican Party:

• fundies - a 2000-year-old human-written book is never wrong
• bullies - my country, right or wrong, I'll kick your ass
• wealthies - pro-business means never having to say you're sorry

Sure, there are gun nuts, xenophobes, and racists, too, spread liberally (ouch again) through the first two categories and even leaking into the third (remember Henry Ford?).

The fundies and the bullies do the work and provide the votes, but the wealthies, true to form, own the party and run the show. The fundies are pretty pissed, uh, are waxing wroth over this. The Bill Clinton penis hunt distracted them for a while, but now again they want to be darn sure that they get their turn before the apocalypse. Some of the loonier fundies need their turn to help bring the apocalypse. As soon as possible. No shit!

Because he can't fire 0-Rod

If the Yankees manage to win tonight, Steinbrenner (convicted of breaking campaign finance law on behalf of Republicans) will believe that his threat made the difference. Those Republicans who believe that bullying is the natural right of the powerful will agree.