Save the jets

Of course, Ann Coulter interrupts to bullshit that "they were all Democrats." (Maybe the rich never serve their jury duty either.)

Fact-based economic rejoinder - lalalala

Note that P.J. O'Rourke has nothing but lame jokes. Nonetheless, he'll get attaboys from the wingnuts.

Information-free bleach-drinking half-wit

Tongue in cheeks

I've tried to think of a dick joke subtle enough to be original. But I haven't. Too oxymoronic a quest. So...



Really, what kind of narcissistic prick photographs his own penis? Right, self-answering...

Of course, we all know that every woman in western civilization wants one thing above all else, and that's high-res digital pix of what has to be the least aesthetic visible part of the male body. If you're so in love with your own package that you want to show it to everyone, chances are you're also very proud when you make doo-doo in your diaper.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-putz) could have sent around pictures of his tongue. Take a lesson from Ashley Dupré - she's a pro, after all. From a man, a lingual shot would have been evidence of a sense of humor and an eagerness to please at the same time. That could have brought thumbs up on the online dating sites. (Up where? The P spot? How does that geometry work?)

Look yet again at the difference between Democrats and Republicans. A Democrat commits ludicrous peccadilloes, and that's enough to provoke hissing fleeing abandonment. On the other hand, Newt Gingrich (R-when's Callista's expiration date?) is a serial and ugly adulterer in the party of abstinence, and yet his political people only abandon him because he's mailing it in from a luxurious cruise in the Mediterranean and is too lazy to do the work of touching hoi polloi in Iowa.

Weiner is tweeting his 'nads, while Gingrich wants to tweet his ads. Oh, and Gingrich is fatter than Al Gore, but the media are forbidden from noticing.

Last, I am forced by my contract with the Bloggers' Labor Organization (protector of American BLO jobs) to observe that this is David Vitter watch, day 1441. After getting caught in prostitution scandals twice, which by the way is a crime, unlike tweeting your shlong, however weird that may be, Vitter got re-elected as a family values Republican, and the republic hasn't fallen. Yet.

Bigotry, core Republican value

President Barack Obama (D-tepid centrism except in support of the imperial Presidency) has inspired incredibly frenzied outpourings of anger and hate.  Bill Clinton (D-tepid centrism except about sex) inspired what for its time was similarly frenzied.

The frenzy of delegitimizing the 1992 election worked so well for Republicans that there was no way they'd abjure it this time around.  Sure enough, given the sharp limits on the intelligence, memory, and discernment of bullshit from reality of the American electorate, it worked again in 2010 for the GOP.  Now it will take many Republican electoral failures of much greater depth than 2006 and 2008 to convince them not to be petulant 2-year-olds again every time they lose.

Any Democrat who won the Presidency in 2008 would have faced the refusal of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of the election - no matter how comfortable the margin, and remember that Obama completely kicked John McCain's butt from sea to shining sea.

Hillary Clinton, whom many would now retrospectively elect, would have been trashed again.  Doesn't anyone remember what the wingnuts said about conspiracies to murder, distribute drugs, and corruptly enrich herself?  Wingnuts right in the middle of the GOP.  How could anyone forget their politics of personal destruction?

In the alternate universe where she did get elected, people are wishing that fresh young Illinois Senator had gotten the nod instead.  He has such a sweet personality and such a message of non-partisan comity that surely no one, not even a Republican Party built from the ground up on the model of Lee Atwater's scorched earth politics (with a secret handshake in honor of the failed potential of Joe McCarthy), not even that Republican Party could have put him through the vicious attacks they've put Hillary through.  Yeah, don't call me Shirley.

There's one difference between the way Barack has been calumnied and the way Hillary would have been.  That difference is the birther movement.



Sure, Republicans would have found sex-related ways to attack her, as they did when she was the wrong kind of wife to Bill - no cookie-baking, no juicy divorce suit from the woman scorned, no willing smiling silent deference to men.  They would have attacked her for menses and hot flashes at the same time.  It would have been ugly.

But the birther movement is about Obama being the wrong color.  He's brown, and he has foreign heritage that's not European and not Christian.  How could he possibly be American?  He's not from the right tribe.

No, it's not only race that matters in the Republican platform of bigotry.  They assert religious correctness too.  Catholics (finally!) are o.k. now.  All Irish may apply.  But no Muslims.  They might bring their religious values to the public square, and that means they'll try to enact scary-a, I mean, sharia.

The framers of the Constitution had this to say in Article VI of the Constitution:

[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Republicans, even rabbit front-runner Mitt Romney, are happy to promise a religious test as long as it appeals to their bigoted party (as proven by its birtherism):

Republicans don't love religious liberty; they love religious liberty for people who think as they do.

Again, one party in American politics is tepid, easily bullied, and often won't stand up for its own views.  The other is actively evil and opposed to the founding ideas of our nation.  So of course the Republicans project their own opposition to liberal democracy, as framed 225 years ago, onto the Democrats, and the Democrats fail to call them the scurrilous, opportunistic, authoritarian liars they are.

Smells like Founders spirit

(h/t Digby)

Limits of skepticism

In our bullshit-drenched world, a healthy dose of skepticism is nearly always the way to the truth. Bill Maher shows unhealthy skepticism:

Mr. Maher questioned letting someone stick “a disease into your arm,” wrongly implying that the flu shot contains a live virus. The flu shot is a killed vaccine.

He said he did not believe that healthy people were vulnerable to dying from the new H1N1 virus. This contradicts statements from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that young, healthy people from ages 5 to 24 appear particularly vulnerable to this flu. About a third of the 76 children who have died of H1N1 since April have had no underlying health problems.

Mr. Maher also discouraged pregnant women from getting vaccinated. Studies show pregnant women are among the most vulnerable to serious complications from H1N1.

Facts matter, and Maher is 0 for 3.

Take your pick:

• A risk lower than one in a million that you'd die from a swine flu vaccine
  
• A risk conservatively of one in ten thousand that you'd die of the swine flu, though it could be one in 300 in the bad scenario

Rope-a-dope ain't working

Bill Maher tells Barack Obama to man up:

What got Van Jones fired was they caught him on tape saying that Republicans are assholes. And they call it "news." And Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like we dropped "end of life counseling" from health care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page.

Crazy evil morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it.

And he is us

Bill Maher - read him. We might as well laugh as the American heyday shuffles off into idiocracy. All the fact-challenged screamers from health care forums to cable TV "news" won't listen to reason anyway.

Next up, Tom and Jerry

I'll have Bill Maher's Old Barackee.

Click image for full Terry Wise cartoon.

How liberals are different

We still leave our own judgement engaged when one of our own is in charge.

My take: If you're overexposed to Obama, you're probably watching too much TV.

The audacity of soap

"Not really an ideology here, just being a dick."

Now that's something to clean up.

Loving Sarah Palin

With the incredible shrinking Duhbya no longer a good source of much fun - oh, is he still around? - one of the reasons for Sarah Palin's continued pandemic presence is that she's comedy gold. We already have enough economic problems without lapsing into a ridicule shortage.

So, since Barack Obama's ample ears are just not enough to close that gap, here's something the Republicans can actually do for the country: Cough up some more ridiculous posers who are willing, nay, eager to sacrifice their dignity before Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Stephen Colbert.

Click image for full G.B. Trudeau cartoon.

Democratic coalition

It's always fun when Bill Maher and Paul Krugman agree:

Thus [Rudy] Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And [Sarah] Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.

What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you.

Republicans need to stop saying Barack Obama is an elitist, or looks down on rural people, and just admit you don't like him because of something he can't help, something that's a result of the way he was born. Admit it, you're not voting for him because he's smarter than you.

Not hard to sort out which quote is whose, is it? But read them both, and you'll see that Krugman gets in a lot of good, pithy slaps at the bullshit that pervades Republican talking points. Maher? Goes without saying.

Silent penance in some abbey for failed pundits

Just turned off Bill Maher's panel discussion. Is there anything rational about a media culture in which Andrew Sullivan can admit to having finally accepted the scientific consensus on global warming and then belabor Hillary Clinton for not having a strong enough plan to cope with it?

Really, can we at least agree to send the psychopathically certain - and wrong - off to silent penance in some abbey for failed pundits?

Sullivan wouldn't even admit to having been wrong. Instead, he made some excuse about now having the scientific evidence, while slamming the standards of truth of liberals. What a piece of work!

Tucker Carlson should die

On Bill Maher, he's the glibbest, stupidest person ever to speak a complete sentence. He can't distinguish between the New York Times hiring private security and the U.S. Government hiring mercenaries. Isn't that much stupidity inevitably fatal?

You can bet on one thing: If a bus hits him, he'll have his mouth open, and bullshit will be coming out.