Leggo my ego

Click image for full Chan Lowe/Miami Herald cartoon.

Battered Democrat syndrome

Making peace with teabagging Republicans is a fool's errand. They look at the past twenty years of increasing right-wing extremism and say, "Not extreme enough! Give me more nativism, failed laissez-faire economics, tax cuts for the very wealthy, and thunderous anger."

Oh, and trumped-up massive grandstanding investigations:

[W]here, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

It's ironic that the Democrats utterly failed to hold Bush administration to account for its criminal acts, yet the Republicans will no doubt create tempests over nothing to hamstring and bloody President Obama. The wingnuts mean to have a culture war, whether we're fighting or not. It's time we defended ourselves, not by acting like Republicans but by punishing Republicans in the public square for the damage and crimes they do.

What gets lost in all the screaming? The idea that government might be a force for a national interest larger than the sum of all corporations.

Why liberals think conservatives harbor bigots

Because they do:

"No mosque in Murfreesboro. I don't want it. I don't want them here," Evy Summers said to WTVF. "Go start their own country overseas somewhere. This is a Christian country. It was based on Christianity."

The theater of the absurd is opening everywhere:

"[Muslims] are not a religion. They are a political ... group," Bob Shelton, a 76-year-old retiree who lives in the area, told The Associated Press.

Shelton was among several hundred demonstrators who recently wore "Vote for Jesus" T-shirts...

(h/t Glenn Greenwald at Salon)

More on Murfreesboro:

"It's a pro-Christian bill," [State Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro,] said. "It was established to protect the First Amendment to keep the federal government from coming in and making a decision on whether or not the church qualified or not to be a church."

But of course Ketron is qualified to decide that a mosque is not a mosque or Islam is not a religion or the First Amendment doesn't mean what it says.

A simple plan

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Sitting duck a l'orange

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

Nostalgia

Remember when Fox and the right-wing media hadn't been out of their basements enough and thought a fist bump was a terrorist gesture?


Well, President Obama did it again, this time on a golf course, well known hang-out of subversives and revolutionaries. The wingnuts must be panicking till their Depends are soaking wet!

What? You mean they aren't? You mean they realize that Fox trumped up nothing into a week of frothing at the mouth? But of course the wingers still think Fox is fair.

It continues to amaze and depress me that this sort of noise machine nonsense extracts no penalty whatsoever from the credibility of the screamers.

Highly pixellated image from Getty Images used under Fair Use as necessary to illustrate this commentary.

Under siege but not alone

[F]alse belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

Why aren't members of the "flat-earth wing" of the GOP angry at their propagandists for such bald lies to them? Because they prefer those lies to the real truth.

The question I see in this: Are these wingnuts going to wake up with a wicked bullshit hangover some day soon, or will our nation grow more polarized to the point where they believe they need to prove their favored lies by force?

Evil or stupid?

Yes.

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Road outrage

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

New York, just like I pictured it

Click image for full Tom Tomorrow/Salon cartoon.

Can you trust anyone?

Fact-checking is a good thing, right?

Here Factcheck.org calls President Obama a liar (again!). Oh, they use the word whopper so as not to use the political press's bête noire and oh so rude lie. But a synonym, no matter how cutely colloquial, still has to answer for the small matter of its meaning.

Here's the gist of Factcheck.org's report:

President Obama claimed that Republican leaders are pushing to make "privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda".

...

Few if any Republicans now in Congress have ever pushed for total "privatization"....

Only one Republican "leader" is currently pushing publicly for Bush-style private accounts, as part of an overall budget plan. He is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the senior GOP member of the House Budget Committee. His plan currently has only 13 cosponsors, none of them in the GOP House leadership.

First, there's the little bit of goal-post moving in "total privatization." Republicans seldom advertise their desired end state, but it's clear from their arguments in favor of private accounts that they fully expect the social insurance of Social Security to wither away, leaving our descendants again free to achieve elder penury.

In any case, Obama didn't say 'total'. But that's minor.

No one who has covered politics in Washington for forty years, as the Factcheck writer has, could possibly have missed Republican hostility to Social Security, especially in the past twenty years. But even if he had, a very small amount of googling yields the 2008 Republican Party platform, complete with this on p. 19:

We believe the solution should give workers control over, and a fair return on, their contributions. No changes in the system should adversely affect any current or near-retiree. Comprehensive reform should include the opportunity to freely choose to create your own personal investment accounts which are distinct from and supplemental to the overall Social Security system.

While they don't use the word private, they're clearly talking about private accounts, not social insurance. It would be a foolish and glib quibble for Factcheck to claim that private accounts are not privatization. That's the standard Republican framing, but it's nonsense and should never convince a fact-checker.

Still, it's just a party platform. Who gives a damn about those? It's a document for the national conventioneers who aren't sociable enough to get invited to parties to fight over and feel good about hammering rightward.

Right? There are still no Congressional leaders who advocate privatization, right?

I only had to look at one, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-orange pekoe):

Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, have proposed a better budget solution that curbs spending, creates jobs, cuts taxes, and controls the debt. [emphasis in original]

Whoops! By Factcheck's own estimation, Ryan is proposing Social Security privatization, and Boehner is visibly and audibly supporting his budget proposal. Choosing sponsorship of a bill as sole criterion of support in an election year is too obviously wrong-headed to be merely naive. It's either lazy or dishonest.

Obama's "whopper" turns out to be much more accurate than Factcheck's analysis. What's a citizen to do?

Never turn off your bullshit detector. Bullshit is the characteristic of our media age.

So, why can you believe me?

Credibility is earned, not given. Read what I post. Evaluate my evidence. Check my facts. Over time, I'll either gain your credence or not.

That's the point. Exact a penalty from the credibility of those who bullshit you. Brooks Jackson may have a big media pedigree, but he didn't treat Obama fairly here, and he didn't hold Republicans to account. Why would you believe his next "fact" check? I won't.

Blind faith is practice for conservatism

There's no possible doubt that many people choose the beliefs they take to be true. Reason, as I'm learning the more I read about neuropsychology (currently, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer), is only part of the decision to believe.

Often, a very small part. Some believers intentionally push reason aside for a heady brew of reflex, prejudice, and blind faith in received wisdom. Even if that wisdom was only slightly wiser than the violent and tribal surrounding society of 2000 years ago...

Bushists believe that Duhbya went to church a lot, not because it's true but because they know it. Facts - he didn't - and memory - his absence was reported in real time - don't bleedin' enter into it. Duhbya talked about Gawd all the goddamned time - and talked about prayin' and blessings and reading Scripture (capital S, by gum). Flaying his faith like Elmer Gantry, they're sure that he surely must've been sitting in a pew nearly every Sunday, not just Christmas, Easter, and National Prayer Day. Even if their senses should tell them that he wasn't.

Who you gonna believe - faith or your lyin' eyes?

When Duhbya recently met some soldiers at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on their return home on a two-week break from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other, unspecified billets, one of my Facebook friends, an evangelical Christian, commented about how much the Bushes love our troops. I bit my tongue and didn't ask her for evidence. You can find more of her faithful compatriots among the commenters on the Dallas Morning News site.

There was one previous time that Duhbya greeted returning sailors. Mission accomplished!

But Bush was in office for more than seven years while our troops were in combat in Afghanistan and for nearly six while they were in combat in Iraq, and I don't recall any other time that he greeted them. He never went to greet the fallen in their caskets at Dover AFB (something President Obama had done already ten months ago), and he only went to Walter Reed to see the wounded after the scandal of the grim conditions there broke.

But Duhbya loves him some fighting men (and women).

If you are practiced well at believing in your own personal Jesus and you thank him every time another Vicodin relieves the pain of your kidney stone (Facebook again), you're well prepared to believe that a man who got 4000 Americans killed and many more maimed in a war of choice loves the troops.

When is a mosque not a mosque?

Factcheck.org has "debunked" the presence of a mosque in the Pentagon. Muslims pray there, all right, they just do so in a non-denominational "chapel." Well, that does make it sound like something that's comfortably little-c christian, doesn't it? Of course, the ground zero mosque (which is not at ground zero) has also claimed not to be a mosque, rather to be a community center.

The key fact that Factcheck.org raises but fails to compare to rightwing hysteria over Cordoba/Park51 is that Muslims are praying in the exact portion of the Pentagon that had to be reconstructed after the 9/11 attack there. All of them must be triumphalists who are praying for the caliphate to wash infidel America off the face of the earth. Obviously.

Hey, I bet Maj. Nidal Hasan prayed there for the strength to achieve murder in his jihad at Ft. Hood! Call Fox. Let's crank this up. Oh, you mean the Bush administration set this up? Ssssh!

See also Mosqued bawl.

The hand that feeds you

Click image for full Tom Toles/Washington Post cartoon.

No Cuban cigars

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

In lieu of insight

A couple of items you shouldn't miss:

• Stupid American Month - They don't call August the silly season fer nuthin'. Here's a prime example (the book-burning of course, not the interfaith response), though perhaps more bigoted than merely stupid.
• Paul Krugman: "I told you so, again" - It has to be wicked f---ing frustrating to be so right and to have no one in power listen. But at least Krugman is a counterpoint to the raging stoopid at large in the land.
  

Attention deficit

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

Republicans bullshit their constituents about their real aims because their constituents can't make this sort of connection.

Look over there

How is a mosque or other Islamic institution being built a couple of blocks from ground zero going to practically affect the great majority of Americans?

Not at all.

Hardly any of us will attend it. Almost none of us will work on the construction. Very, very few of us will even pass by it.

Oh, sure, thanks to their complete lack of perspective and toughness, millions of conservatives will have the bejeebers scared out of them at the mere thought of Muslims praying toward Mecca five times a day. But they're scaring themselves by looking at their own shadows.

For the price of reassuring a bunch of lily-livered chicken littles, we stand to risk our already tattered Bill of Rights to gain, in return, absolutely nothing.

It's the perfect Republican proposal, filled with nothing but sound and fury.

Minor combat operations have ended

It's great and all that the last combat brigade is out of Iraq a couple of weeks early, but:

Scatterings of combat troops still await departure, and some 50,000 will stay another year in what is designated as a noncombat role.

Even better than careful gradations of Pentagon bureaucratese, American casualties are waaay down in Iraq. It's still important to keep track of the fact that they were actual human beings with names and not just numbers. The most recent and surely not the last was Jamal Rhett, age 24, of Palmyra, NJ.

President Obama kept his promise, rather slowly, to finish up in Iraq. Good for him. But, like many of the better moments of his administration, it's a two cheers moment, not a three cheers moment.

In the end, the neocon Project for a New American Century got what it wanted - a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. The rest of the rationale for going in was all marketing and bullshit. Now we have permanent bases there, more outposts in the empire the PNAC explicitly wanted to proclaim.

Wingnuts redact the Bill of Rights, free speech

The First Amendment packs a lot of power. On freedom of speech, wingers act as though it says:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.

Yep, they leave all the content of the free speech clause on the cutting room floor.

"Dr." Laura believes her First Amendment rights were "usurped" (removed from the throne like a dingleberry!) because Congress some government official her sponsors and affiliates in the private sector outlawed her saying "n*****" charged her with a crime got upset and deprived her of the right to speak radio talk show leverage from happy sponsors to renew her contract.

Because every right wing lunatic has a god-given right to be as ugly as she wanna be on hate radio... And, and, and, they get to say whatever the hell comes into their fevered brains, and no one is allowed to express a contrary opinion.

Sorta the way they view freedom of religion.