Does anyone really believe that the mild zephyr of packaged controversy between Darth Cheney's daughters Mary and Liz is about equal marriage? Really, it's all about ginning up a fake controversy about which one is the lesbian and which is the arch-conservative Wyoming Senate candidate. Free media!
I can just hear Liz saying, "Carpetbagger, dammit! I mean, teabagger! Ah, crap..."
[T]he Republican Party has not recently been stolen by a batch of half-witted bigots, xenophobes, authoritarians, and garden-variety grifters. They’ve had control of the GOP wheel for more than 40 years, at least since Nixon’s triumphant accession to the Oval Office with the help of many of these same fine Heritage Institute ‘statesmen’. They were bad people when they were interning during Watergate, they were bad people when they used Reagan as a figurehead to start the full-scale authoritarian takeover and banana-republic-style looting of our national treasury, and they remain Bad People in Charge even unto this very day.It's just that the vicious racists who used to be Southern Democrats have joined their particular brand of reactionary wingnuttery to the GOP.
Darth Cheney ran America for six years, and he's an evil man, quite happy to admit his commitment to torture, among other proven lies.
Perhaps the fact that we survived the Cheney regency is cause for optimism. Or, more likely, maybe the other shoes just haven't finished dropping.
Chickenhawks fail at the fundamental moral task of putting themselves in the place of those whose lives are at risk:
For chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney who grew up during Vietnam conscription, deft draft-dodging provided them safety and psychological distance from bloodshed. As the data show, compared to draftees, that distance likely made them feel comfortable demanding other people face death on the battlefield, knowing that they wouldn't face such a fate themselves. Put another way, having avoided the draft, there was no "self-interest" in opposing war -- indeed, there was only self-interest in promoting wars in a media and political environment that increasingly rewarded rank bellicosity.It's no wonder they can't put themselves in the place of the needy. They have no familiarity with the golden rule, the foundation of morality.
The financial failures alone should have been enough to remove Darth and Duhbya from their locations, disclosed and undisclosed, to Leavenworth. Because they abhor accountability of any kind, $6.6 billion was simply pilfered in Iraq.
Who knows how much of it was five-finger discounted by overpaid mercenaries from the likes of Blackwater (now Xe).
Maybe Ahmed Chalabi is thrilled not to have become President of Iraq. It always seemed as though he was in the whole three card monte with the neocons in order to get rich. Maybe it was just a failure of imagination on his part. By now, he may realize that being President only paints a bigger bullseye on your chest.
Then there are the billions we spent putting coats of paint on rubble and calling it public works. We could really use that money to create a few stopgap jobs right about now.
The Gas and Oil Party of two oilmen, Duhbya Bush and Darth Cheney, allowed offshore oil spills to quadruple. You'd expect them to allow child poverty to get worse. Daddy Bush presided over the previous peak of child poverty, and everyone knows they don't give a shit about that. But they let the oil industry get worse too.
Because it's all about the money.
Note: Yeah, I started my day at 5:00 a.m. in a hotel that provided a free copy of McPaper. But vacation's over after a couple of long plane rides, and I'll be back to my usual haunts as soon as time permits at work.
Wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - will believe whatever Karl Rove tells them to extend the lies and the obvious bullshit that led us into Iraq. Wingnuts want to say that they were honorably motivated. They weren't. Ordinary conservatives want to salve the consciences (which wingnuts lack) about the imperial rush to a war of choice. (Aside: Are there any ordinary conservatives left?)
The truth is the Bushists wanted to invade Iraq. Duhbya was no doubt tired of hearing how his father had left Saddam Hussein in power. Darth Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to project American power into a permanent client outpost at the crossroads of the Middle East, in short to implement the neocon PNAC plan.
Republicans lie. Karl Rove lies for a living - and quite a handsome living at that. They do it to get what they want. Because all you have to do to Americans and especially Washington Democrats is wave a bloody shirt, they succeeded. That shame should be on all of us. Instead, the wingnuts revel in it.
In the aftermath of Rudy Giuliani's straight-faced claim that there were no terrorist attacks (none!) during Duhbya and Darth's excellent adventure, Joe Conason asks why we listen to such a fact-free buffoon. Giuliani has someone managed to slide over, not just the shoe bomber and the anthrax attacks and the many attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan; he has managed conveniently to forget 9/11 itself, the one news item that pushed him onto the national stage after his career had effectively ended in widely shared disdain for his ugly personality and for every one of his municipal policies except for community policing.
But it's not just Rudy who should have no claim on our credence. Dana Perino had made the same claim. Mary Matalin had, too. Among others.
The reason this goes is that slow-learning Democrats have failed to assert every damn day that there's nothing a Republican says that you can trust. The media are not going to hold these guys accountable for even being in the ballpark of accuracy. The right browbeat them out of their ref job years ago, to the point that they only call penalties on Democrats - or offsetting pox-on-both-their-houses fouls.
This can be funny, but it's also dangerous. A culture that cannot even grapple with what's true and what's false is doomed.
Yet, all these Republicans will be back on TV spouting lies just as soon as some producer's Rolodex needs them...
There is no reason whatsoever to report on what Liz Cheney has to say about anything. None. It's not newsworthy. It's not surprising. She has no authority or expertise.
Al Gore's son drove his Prius 100 mph. Why doesn't CNN ask his opinion on global warming?
Instead, they're happy to thrust the wingnut propaganda. Easier to lightly massage a Republican press release than to report any messy, hard-to-gather news.
Liberal media? Don't try to bullshit me.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Here's a slash at Darth Cheney with a light saber:
To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.Amen.
Dick Cheney was the best we could do in another awful year for conservatives. We couldn't go with the hysterical weeping of Glenn Beck.
Dick Cheney continues to be held in high regard by CNN and the rest of the Fox-driven media - when he should be held in a high security correctional institution. Despite his proven willingness to lie and inability to distinguish truth from falsehood, CNN still thrusts his propaganda statements forward without any disclaimers other than his own.
If Cheney thinks President Obama has moved far to the left, ol' Darth has lost his mind. The reason Obama has been a disappointment is that he is not even close to liberal enough. A few opportunities Obama has passed up to be liberal:The vice president also said Obama has implemented "radical" far left policies even though he campaigned as a conventional Democrat.
"He got elected as a liberal Democrat, but conventional in the sense of falling within the parameters of the national Democratic Party," Cheney said. "He's demonstrated pretty conclusively now during his first year in office that he's more radical than that, that he's farther outside the parameters…of what we've traditionally had in Democratic presidents in years past."
CNN is still giving the love to Sarah Palin with the headline "CNN Poll: Palin's popularity on the rise". (Juvenile jokes left as an exercise for the reader.) But here's the money paragraph:
"Palin is still not as popular Al Gore [sic] and remains more unpopular than Joe Biden, but her favorable rating is much higher than Dick Cheney's," adds [CNN Polling Director Keating] Holland.All because to quite a number of men, she's a MILF - or that exceedingly narrow category PILF...
... to get bullshit coverage like yet another CNN ticker item on the draft Cheney "movement".
If I put up a cheesy draft Kerry site and issued a one-page press release, would anyone in big media cover my T-shirt business? I seriously doubt it.
Of course, Democrats have to do something, too, and they don't seem to be.
On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.Complete Bushist incompetence, excused and covered by lies from Dick Cheney... Anyone surprised by that?
