Four words, ideological edition

The handful of you who are still tuning in to the endless purgatory of Republican (non) Presidential debates no doubt noticed when John King vacuously asked the four horse's-ass-men of democracy's apocalypse for a single word to sum themselves up. King of course gave enough forewarning that they were able to come up with self-flattering, thematically aligned, bullshit marketing.

That is not what I do, so...

• Newt Gingrich - megalomaniac
• Ron Paul - mammon-worshipping
• Mitt Romney - wealthy
• Rick Santorum - theocratic

(For the wealthy)

Click image for full Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoon.

Orchestration

Orchestrating political protest and expression is not the problem. My side is orchestrating a response too. The problem is orchestration of groups to shout down dialog. That's what the conservatives are doing.

Wingnuts understand that shouting down one's opponent is bad when their people are being shouted down, just not when they're shouting.

Face it, if the Republicans keep this up, eventually someone is going to bring a gun to one of these forums.

Update (8/11): Yep, a conservative showed up with a gun. With a sign advocating bloodshed, though he didn't start that bloodshed. Oh, you thought he wanted to water the tree of liberty with water? He should have been arrested.

All the same deck chairs

You think Newt and Sarah are trying to get on board?

The Republican establishment is ossified, schlerotic. Now they're going to slap a "New Improved" sticker on the packaging and launch a campaign to convince the weak-minded that the same tired formulas are different - because they have a "New Improved" sticker on the package.

Permanent bases, check

Darth is happy with Iraq. Of course.

The point of invading Iraq was to implement the PNAC program: Project American power into the center of the Middle East permanently.

Empire strikes back

Darth Cheney's every statement still requires the belief that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. That alone is reason enough to discount everything he says as insane.

Cheney's excuse for the cupboard being bare is that the Bushists had to spend the money. Yet nearly all of the spending was on Iraq, not on attacking Afghanistan.

Then of course the other big contributor to the deficit was a vast tax cut for the wealthy.

Final vote still to come

Harry Reid's canvassing for more Republican votes for the stimulus. Great, though it's not great that it's in the news. It's clearly not a deal that the Republicans have stopped fighting, and it's good the Democrats are still engaged in defending it against betrayal.

The real story is what the Republicans are doing. Just because Tom Delay is gone doesn't mean they're not twisting arms and hammering their three turncoats (believe me, that's how they see them).

The GOP got to Judd Gregg, after all. What he said two days ago about continuing to serve in the Senate makes no sense set next to what he said yesterday - his probable retirement in 2010. What he's saying now makes no sense in light of his pursuit of the job of Commerce Secretary.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell welcomed Gregg's withdrawal.

"Sen. Gregg made a principled decision to return and we're glad to have him," McConnell, R-Kentucky, announced. "He is among the smartest, most effective legislators to serve in the Senate -- Democrat or Republican -- and a key adviser to me and to the Republican conference. It's great to have him back."

What did the Republican enforcers tell him to make him end his political career?

Not even the cow catcher

Republican DNA has two deleterious traits:

• Utter faith in the so-called free market to solve every problem they care about
• An eagerness for other people to suffer so that they'll become as virtuous as the wealthy (yeah, no shit!)
  

These are people who will still baldly assert despite the locomotive sounds and the dopplered train whistle that the oncoming 4:00 a.m. express is really the light at the end of the tunnel, right up to the moment its impact liquefies their (useless) cerebral cortexes.

John McCain wants a stimulus that's half the already too small size of the Obama stimulus and 50% useless tax cuts to boot. Yep, just one more proof that he was (briefly) honest when he admitted knowing nothing about economics.

We're at risk here. Our kids are going to pay the bill either way, thanks to the Bushist borrow and spend policies. Would they be better off with a revitalized economy or with one coming out of depression?

To me, the answer couldn't be more obvious. But Republicans love to tell us how much better we'll be as people if we get back to basics - like lower wages, less leisure, and gratitude to them for reducing us to penury.

Back to costume critiques

CNN really, really cares whether the President wears a suit jacket at all times in the Oval Office. They think Duhbya's rules of haberdashery were major. The first time Obama is late to an event, we'll probably hear about how prompt Duhbya was.

What a bunch of silly people playing dress-up as reporters, as government officials, as pundits.

I bet the damn House of Saud didn't have to wear jackets.

Yep, yes we did

David Axelrod already knew. I figured it out. Obama's speech on race turned me from lukewarm to ardent supporter.

"This is why you should be President."

2000-year-old voter guide

Evangelical preacher Loran Livingston tells his congregation, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, that gay marriage is more important than their silly threadbare pocketbooks and that they should vote for President accordingly.

The younger ones get quiet and don't commit to hurting themselves on his say-so about what God thinks.

The older ones keen about where morals have gone during their lifetimes, and that means sexual mores to them, but they are still going to vote for the ticket with the adulterer who ran around on his first wife and the pre-marital fornicator who eloped and delivered a baby eight magic months later.

I have no problem with people making mistakes in marriage or in birth control and learning from them. What I don't like is for people to cut themselves all the slack they need while offering the rest of us nothing but condemnation.

Free market hooey

Why does CNN continue to thrust the discredited and unpopular idiocies of Ron Paul in front of us on a weekly basis? Do they have some contractual obligation to provide a certain percentage of bullshit content that they can't meet otherwise?

The laissez-faire market ideology that Ron Paul and his acolytes endorse has two things going for it: It's simple, and it's coherent. The major problem: It doesn't describe a world that ever existed anywhere, and it couldn't exist. The organization of business works every day to defeat free market conditions because the profit motive is to win, not merely to compete. Enterprises get too big to satisfy the condition of atomicity required by the models that the free marketeers love so much.

CNN should start ignoring Ron Paul in the same way the voters did. The man's a loon. He wants to get rid of the Fed. He thinks the Community Reinvestment Act caused the credit crisis, even though that's bullshit. It's o.k. with Paul if we have a depression, just so long as the government doesn't make any rules that put the common good ahead of opportunities to make a bundle and get out before the collapse.

If we have to have loons on the news, better to have a broader mix of loons instead of the same old loons every week. I hear Bill Ayers is available, but I guess he doesn't have enough money to buy this kind of ego-stroking publicity. Instead, next month we'll see Donald Trump and T. Boone Pickens and who knows how many other right-wing gasbags.

Some liberal media.

Even Rush Limbaugh knows it's over

In fact, even John McCain and Sarah Palin know that they have two chances, slim and none. Meanwhile, Palin is scaring voters away. Of course, Rush would never ask her about that.

Standards of assertion

CNN and John King take sides. It's subtle when they do, but look who they believe.

Here's the Democratic concern:

For 2004, the county switched to touch-screen machines. There were no major issues here. But some local Democrats, including Rep. Robert Wexler, demanded changes because they said the touch-screen system might be vulnerable to fraud and did not, in their view, provide a reliable audit trail.

There are two claims in the Democratic rationale, and both are proven facts, despite King's pose of skepticism. Maybe there were no major problems in 2004, maybe not. No one could tell!

Then comes the Republican claim:

"We could have had nice, reliable computers counting and giving all of us an honest count," [Sid Dinerstein, the Palm Beach County Republican chairman,] said in an interview.

This is well-known to be bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out. You can add up the data as many times as you like and still get the same fraudulent total if the system was hacked. Yet King shows no skepticism toward this claim at all. Such noice computers!

Paper ballots are stable. It takes a lot of effort to dummy up a lot of fake ones. The evidence lives on. Bits, not so much.

Elections are serious business. Republicans want to "protect the vote" with ID measures that we already know will exclude legitimate voters. Democrats want a fair election that will exclude only fraud, and we're willing to take a little more time if needed to get it right. For Republicans, and maybe Florida Democrats, as in 2000, the deadline is what matters most.

It's mind-boggling.

Tastes treyf to me

The vetting of Eric Cantor has the flavor of Joe Lieberman's ass.

McCain can't win by protecting Virginia. He has to win there without a favorite son VP. His people are not so stupid that they don't know this. But Joe needs regular flattery, and that's what this is.

CNN's idea of balance

I normally don't watch political reporting on TV. It's so useless; why isn't there a news network for people who are engaged?

When the reporting line-up is Candy Crowley, Dana Bash, and John King, well, o.k. They're a poor bunch.

But now their analysts are David Gergen, Bay Buchanan, and Roland Martin. Seriously. They've completely amputated the left.

This is why CNN is useless to anyone with perspective.