David Vitter watch, day 2137, give or take

Today is a great day in the annals (two Ns, so shut up!) of Republican lying adulterers. Mark Sanford (R-only a sin to be a Democrat) will never again be seriously challenged by a Democratic candidate.

According to those exit polls, Mr. Sanford held a three-to-one lead among voters who described themselves as liars, cheaters, or sleazebags.

Once again, the majority of a conservative electorate has proven more committed to ideology than to the personal virtue they bullshit about whenever Ted Kennedy is the topic of conversation.

No big loss, really. Colbert Busch was never going to hold that seat past 2014. Now the Republicans are stuck with Sanford.

Maybe he, Vitter, and their role model, Newt Gingrich, should rent a limo with the up-suspension package and triple date. Oh, the stories they could tell to entertain their dates!

Limits of sympathy

Andy Borowitz:

The decision of Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to support same-sex marriage after learning that his son was gay has inspired hundreds of other Republican lawmakers to stop speaking to their children immediately, G.O.P. leaders confirmed today.

(For the humor-impaired, yes, this is satire. You never heard of Borowitz, huh?)

I want to ask something more serious. Why is it that Republicans are so incapable of sympathizing with people who are different or in need, right up to the point at which someone in their family has a need?

It seems to me that they have a fundamentally tribal and defective moral sense that can't recognize others as deserving their human sympathy.

Update (3/25):  But girls should still submit to barefootedtude and pregnancy...

Rmoney takes a dive

Hilarious ineptitude:

Mr. Rhoades also credited the addition of Rep. Paul Ryan to the ticket for being “invaluable” in scaring off potential voters: “Mitt knew he could get booed off the stage at the N.A.A.C.P., but it takes someone special to get booed off the stage at the A.A.R.P.”

We Democrats and liberals need to aid and abet Rmoney's implosion. The Republicans are showing us who they really are, but it's up to us to let everyone else know.

Maybe a slight exaggeration

Another limited hang-out from Mitt R-money:

Minutes after PETA’s response, Mr. Romney released an amended statement, saying that Seamus Romney had served as C.E.O. of Bain “posthumously.”

Can't trust Republicans with money

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.

Bad judgement day

God guarantees President Obama's re-election:

The Rapture will usefully thin out the Republican field, which, since I assessed it in our current Comment, has already been culled by the departure of Trump and Huckabee. As of tomorrow, Palin, Bachmann, Santorum, and possibly Pawlenty (a Lutheran who attends an evangelical megachurch) will be out of the picture, having been bodily swooped up to Heaven (along with, redundantly, Huckabee).

Back here on Planet Earth, the two Mormons, Romney and Huntsman, will still be in the race, obviously. So will Daniels (mainline Presbyterian), Gingrich (hopelessly sinful), Paul (follower of militant atheist Ayn Rand), Bolton (Lutheran, but no sign he takes it seriously), Johnson (political pothead), and Cain (Baptist, but from the social-justice Dr. King wing).

That will leave eight men scrambling for the support of a very different Republican primary electorate. The religious right will still be a factor, but its numbers will be greatly reduced and those “left behind” are apt to be relative moderates.

Hendrik Hertzberg notices what many liberal pundits have missed.  The Rapture will take a big bite out of the Republican base.  Obama's approval rating could reach two-thirds!

But I'm worried.  God seems to be running late on Revelation.

A friend writes

Yes, a friend really did send me a link to the New Yorker:

At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

And we thought irony was dead

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Remnick vs. Mencken

David Remnick defends the Republican wet dream cover of the New Yorker:

I think you underestimate the intelligence of the American people, to be quite honest.

H.L. Mencken's anticipatory rejoinder:

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

One of the fundamental problems trying to satirize the Republican view of the world is that it's too extreme to exaggerate. There's probably already an email circulating to credulous wingnuts that says, "Even the liberal New Yorker says that Obama is a flag-burning Muslim al Qaeda foreigner with a revolutionary for a wife." (Yeah, true, at a lower reading level and in all caps, but I'm paraphrasing.)

The medium is the message. Remnick went looking for publicity and got it. You think he might be cuing up McCain in Depends?