Minority rules

Karl Rove wanted a permanent Republican majority. How passé!

Republicans have long known how to cripple the Senate with a minority of votes, exploiting the filibuster in complete departure from tradition and custom. They've taken a tool of respect and politesse and rendered it as a pillory on the Capitol lawn for ideas they don't like - that is, most of them.

Republicans have figured out how to win the House of Representatives without winning a majority of votes.

The report credits gerrymandered maps in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with allowing Republicans to overcome a 1.1 million popular-vote deficit. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 12 out of 16 House races “despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” The situation was even more egregious to the north. “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”

Republicans are now working to exploit their successful 2010 gerrymandering in the 2016 Presidential election:

Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

If you think the GOP won't try their damnedest to make this happen, despite the obvious likelihood of perennial "victories" by the minority of voters over the majority, you really haven't been paying attention. Were you living in an alternate universe with President Gore?

What do Republicans mean when they tell us we live in a republic, not a democracy? Republicanz rool! Democrats have to be beaten by any means necessary.

Now, about impeachment of President Obama for the completely ordinary act of issuing Executive Orders...

Ron Burgundy without his earpiece

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Karl Rove on an earwig to Duhbya is now even more plausible. But Rick Perry doesn't have Rove.

Bent past breaking

There is no campaign finance law that Republicans will not breach, including the Hatch Act:

According to PowerPoint slides the investigators collected, the briefings highlighted the importance of the "G.O.P. ground game" and talked about the "Republican Offensive," in certain states, while detailing the "Republican Defense" in others.

The investigators also found evidence that the Bush White House improperly classified travel by senior officials as official government business, "when it was, in fact, political," and the costs associated with this travel were never reimbursed.

This was all well known pretty close to real time, but now it appears unlikely that there will be any legal consequences.

 A spokesman for the Office of Special Counsel said Monday that because the administration officials had left office, it no longer has jurisdiction to file any charges. It also said that it had not made a formal referral to the Justice Department to ask it to pursue any possible charges.

A Justice Department official on Monday declined to comment when asked if it might file charges based on the report.

Yet another law gutted by being ignored at the highest levels! You thought we had a government of laws?

The New York Times is happy to imply equivalence without any report or evidence of similar behavior, because in modern journalism it's not allowed to distinguish motes from logs if the logs are in Republican eyes.

The Obama administration, just last week, announced that it was terminating its own version of the Office of Political Affairs, as Mr. Obama decided to move his re-election campaign operation to Chicago, with the duties of the political office being taken up by the Democratic National Committee.

Why would Karl Rove be afraid of being frog-marched?

Follies

On Fox, Karl Rove - no doubt trying to make peace between the Bushists and the teabaggers - says something kinda, sorta complimentary about Sarah Palin. She's supposedly smart to take her book tour into Iowa. Smart? It's completely basic Presidential politics, nothing wrong with it, but nothing newsworthy either.

Yet CNN reports this non-story, this piece of internal Republican politics on their sole-purpose propaganda channel. Because they looove Sarah Palin, at least her picture.

The more she whines about the attention, the more they put her every dingbat tweet out to the public. But! She's wearing leather with lots of zippers!

Psst, is there a bondage angle? CNN could merely ask the question and keep Palin in the ticker for three or four more days with the back and forth. (Palin: "I took a fashion tip from Danica Patrick, but the eastern egghead elite lamestream vegan media doesn't get NASCAR or the natural beauty of animal products.") Ooh, what a schweet dream!

This is the news coverage we deserve. Unfortunately.

But they're not coordinating

The Republican web of lies and smears is sustained by a web of so-called independent groups. They even have the nerve to call themselves "non-partisan."

Yeah, like the Swift Boat Liars were in 2004...

(h/t Mark Sumner on DailyKos)

You lie!

Surprise, surprise, surprise! You'd have to be a gomer not to know that Karl Rove is leading a bunch of deep-pocketed Republican shills to lie, cheat, and steal Congress - oh, and to buy it. But with the media AWOL, there are plenty of gomers:

[T]he sheer scale and dimension of dishonesty and distortion coming from the conservative side of this debate is a very big part of the story. And it's largely going untold.

This is why Democrats have been foolish since at least the political maiming of Bill Clinton not to attack Republican credibility at every turn. We need to man up from the bullshit Washington politesse and call a lie a lie - even if we share the cloakroom with the liar. They're not polite to us. Civility that's not a two-way street is not civil.

The truth matters, and we haven't been strong enough in exacting a stiff price from Republicans who are full of shit. Which to a first approximation is every one of them in any position of power.

(h/t Joan McCarter on DailyKos)

Buh-bye

Honesty means more than simply not lying, but Richard Blumenthal (D-buh-bye) failed even the easy test of not lying:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. [emphasis added]

During Vietnam would have parsed as true, but even that phrasing would have left room for deceit. During the Vietnam era would have been still better, with the word era flagging the statement for a bit more interpretive analysis.

Blumenthal could claim - and he has - that he simply misspoke. But there are too many instances of self-interested silence in the face of falsehood to credit this as the slip of his tongue.

The root problem, which should be fatal to his candidacy for Senate, is that Blumenthal has shown a life-long pattern of failure to correct the record clearly and forthrightly. He continues his deceit with this bullshit:

“I don’t know if we tried to do so or not,” he said. He added that he “can’t possibly know what is reported in all” the articles that are written about him.

Bullshit. Politicians care deeply and obsessively how they're covered in the press. They may not see every single article, but they or their staff see all the big stories, especially those in major publications. Nowadays, they all have Google alerts to keep them on top of media all the way down to the smallest blog.

The emotional impact of his reserve service and of seeing the postwar treatment of veterans from in-country could still be true. He could still tell it honestly from the perspective of a reservist. Instead, his claimed experience sounds more like echoing of urban legends than first-hand witnessing to the travails of returning vets.

Here's the principle: If you have to choose your words very carefully to permit listeners to take away a wrong impression, an impression that you want them to retain, you're lying. Never mind that advertisers do this all the time. They're lying too. It's just that your lie while seeking a Senate seat is more corrosive and damaging.

This is especially true of living a lie about being at risk of dying in the service of your country. That's just something that no one should ever fake - or acquiesce in faking.

Even Duhbya didn't try to get away with morphing his defense of Texas and Alabama against the world-wide threat of the Viet Cong Air Force into service in country in Vietnam. Like Blumenthal, he did try to get away with claiming he received no special treatment, also false but on a much smaller scale.

It was John Kerry who put aside offers of special treatment and actually served in Vietnam. That didn't win the Presidency for him, but he at least still has his honesty intact about that very important touchstone of recent American history, no matter how hard Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Liars tried to steal it from him by their own campaign of lies.

Blumenthal should go. But he's obviously too vain to give in to that inconvenient truth.

(h/t to this great post on No More Mister Nice Blog)

Update (5/19): More feet of clay on the Republican side. Lindsay Graham (R-wingy but not wingy enough for teabaggers) repeatedly and persistently claimed to be a veteran of Iraq I, despite never serving in country. (h/t Atrios)

Your pitiful little band

Karl Rove arms the next death star.

Hey! Maybe he did have something to do with the Swift Boat Liars. (Ya think?)

This man is strictly about manufacturing the consent of the governed. Offering a choice to be made rationally? Why would he choose in advance to lose?

Late for April Fools

In the up-is-down, black-is-white world of Republican politics, a Republican occasionally strays off message and says something reasonable. But three?

• Karl Rove tells the frothing wingnuts to take their meds and answer the census. (Well, not in so many words...)
  
• John McCain finally concedes that he's an orthodox conservative without any marketing-driven maverickyness. (Well, not in so many words...)
• Tom Coburn declares a jones for Nancy Pelosi. (Well, not in so many words...)
  

April 1st would have been the perfect day for this - one day a year for Republicans to dispense with their constant outlandish distortions and try to make sense.

The real answer is that they would rather be quoted for saying anything other than answering questions about paying to watch simulated lesbian sex. Showing their well-buried humanity was probably the only gambit extreme enough to get the media even partially off of the Voyeur sex club.

One last weird oddity: When a Democrat has a scandal, every follow-up story recaps all the saucy details. ($90,000 in the freezer!) I had to search through the CNN Political Ticker all the way back to March 30 to find the name of the club that the hard right went to to get right hard.

Taking sides

Ed Hornick of CNN repeatedly casts Republicans in the best possible light, but he covers his complicity in their lies with a pretense of getting the other side. Here's a clear example:

[Karl] Rove discusses the Bush administration's support for the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which Democrats and others have described as torture.

This is just normal amoral media bullshit about whether waterboarding is torture. John Yoo and Jay Bybee covered this question with a thin tissue of bullshit, and they have now escaped sanction for it, but that doesn't alter at all the plain fact that we have sent our enemies to prison and death for using torture, including waterboarding. Bushist apologists, for whom military opinion is fetish, should consider:

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

Hornick thinks he's being objective. He's really siding with the side of bullshit.

[Rove] defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet. He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques.

"When these techniques were first authorized, Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. ...

He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.

The CIA responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.

But the story didn't end there, despite Hornick's willingness to court Rove by implying that it did. Pelosi acknowledged being briefed on the existence of the torture memos but not on the actual use of torture the Bushists intended.

As for whether the techniques were actually torture, Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."

In sum, Hornick and the big media remain willing to abet the Bushists' claim that a century of settled understanding that waterboarding is torture can still be legitimately disputed. The Bushists dispute it; it must be legitimate. Never mind their self-interested redefinition of the word. Yet Hornick and most of the media accept the word of the CIA, also oft-fetishized by Republicans, based on so-called proof that the CIA itself wrote, that Pelosi is not telling the truth.

Stock in trade

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.

Turd blossoming

New year, no change.

Despite Karl Rove's utter and total lack of any credibility whatsoever on any topics other than rank hypocrisy and political hardball, America's media continue to spread his propaganda. It's no surprise that the Wall Street Journal editorial page would print him. It should no longer be a surprise that CNN is happy to go along for the ride.

This is at least the third iteration of CNN's item thrusting forward Rove's concern-trolling of New Year's resolutions for President Barack Obama. The original had lots of negative comments, including one from me, pointing out Rove's arrant bullshit. CNN floated it back to the top of their political ticker by reposting it yesterday. This morning, they floated it up again, like a turd blossoming up from a failed flush, sans the hygienic responses of their readers.

Even though this happens often, wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - continue to flay CNN with all sorts of epithets. "Clinton News Network." "Communist News Network." Doing this shows them to be - not just dissenting or even wrong - but willfully stupid to the point of insanity.

The article of faith for conservatives that the media is filled with liberal conspirators who are aligned against them is just that, an article of faith. Like many of the other things they believe, it is not based on reality.

It's still true that liberals are the reality-based community. 2010 will be another year I'll be here pointing out the constant bullshit of conservatives. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, and most of the Washington Democrats don't seem to have the stomach for it.

Not even a surprise anymore

Bushists lie when they testify. No one screams about perjury and the importance of the rule of law.

A good grilling

Can you make him stop talking?

Click image for full Jeff Darcy/Plain Dealer cartoon.

Still dreaming of a frog-march

Political dreams can come true, so I've learned. Even if it's too late for Joe Wilson's desire to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House, any perp walk that Rove's in would be good enough for me.

I just don't see the Democrats having the stomach for justice. Which is why they got the Justice that the Bushists gave them...

Remembrance of times past

CNN has an item up reporting that Republican Darrell Issa has written a letter to the Obama White House demanding the preservation under the Presidential Records Act of personal emails sent by officials during a brief transition period from personal accounts before the activation of whitehouse.gov accounts. Issa demands answers to his questions by March 4.

The PRA is a good thing, and the Obama administration should obey it. In fact, they consciously and conscientiously have done so:

A White House spokesman told CNN Thursday that all staff were told to forward any official correspondence to their White House e-mail accounts, and added that private e-mail accounts are no longer being used.

“In order to ensure that they were accessible in the first hours and days of the administration, some staff members created email accounts from which to conduct official business before their government accounts were operational,” a spokesman for the White House said in an email to CNN.

“Those staff members were instructed to forward any presidential records that they established during that time period, including emails, to their government email accounts to ensure that they would be in compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Those temporary accounts are no longer being used.”

Let's see, has any recent administration failed utterly and often totally to obey this law? Is that possible?

Well, Martina Stewart and CNN irresponsibly aren't going to mention that the Bushist White House tolerated multiple end runs around the PRA. Here are three:

• Use of RNC accounts by Karl Rove and several others
• A complete "outage" of back-ups conveniently during the drumbeating for war in Iraq
• Darth Cheney's assertion that he was immune from the PRA

Where was Darrell Issa during the Bushist violations? He was defending them!

These Republicans wear the logs in their eyes like a badge of belonging. They think we all have early onset Alzheimer's.

So much for mea culpa

Duhbya advocates change!

Of course, it's change back to the past, when he, Karl Rove, and the Republicans could fool enough of the people with bullshit about being compassionate conservatives. What Duhbya wants is to rekindle a story line, not to change any policy:

"I think that we shouldn't change our philosophy." But [Bush] added, "We may want to change our message."

He of course even continues to defend torture:

While President-elect Barack Obama spoke out in an ABC interview that aired today against an interrogation technique known as water-boarding, President Bush defended his administration's policies as legal and necessary. He said he would be concerned if Obama abandoned the techniques used by his administration.

"Obviously, I feel like it would be a problem," Bush said, "because these are tools that we have in place. I do want to -- you know, I firmly reject the word torture.

Yep, it's the word that he rejects, the word that has meant torture for generations. He thinks he can redefine it as his spoiled, rich-boy convenience.

The good news: Duhbya is going to take four years to write his bullshit book.* I'd advise him to wait for the market for wingnut tripe to recover, too. I mean, we all know he's not going to write it himself, and a ghost writer could easily knock out a memoir, uh, amnesoir, in six months. A coloring book? Even faster.

---

* Yes, I'm prejudging Duhbya's "work". While I'd love to hear him own up to the clusterfuck that is was his administration, expecting anything other than rank festering bullshit from him would answer to the classic Einsteinian definition of insanity.

Enemies lists

Karl Rove is going to publish the most desirable badge of honor for intelligent liberals since Nixon's enemies list. Rove's list should enhance the reputations of everyone on it.

That doesn't mean I'm going to buy a copy of his bullshit. I'll let someone with a stronger stomach (and mine is cast iron) slog through it for the names of those secular prophets we should build monuments to.

Even when first printings of this apologia wind up on the remainder table, I wouldn't consider rewarding any of the parties with $2.95.

Bodice-ripper

Just got this bit of fun with Photoshop by email, and it's too hilarious to keep to myself. If I find a link, I'll add it.

Story arc of a smear

Some Republican, in this case Todd Rokita, Indiana Secretary of State, loudly calls for an investigation of a left-wing organization that finds new voters who generally are not Republicans. ACORN tried to register the Jimmy Johns sub shop, he cries, call the law!

CNN has investigative reporters. (Did you know that?) They print up and publish the Republican's Chicken Little bullshit. Oh, sure, they notice that ACORN has a response, but they defer investigating who's telling the truth until some later date.

The RNC just happens to notice this story - no coordination - and is outraged. They pimp the CNN story in their press operation. Other smaller pimps put the lies in bold.

The bottom-feeding wingnut media is a willing conduit for these lies.

Then, ACORN shows documentary proof (PDF, see p. 19) that they in fact flagged the Jimmy Johns voter registration as suspicious and that they in fact fired the employee who submitted it. This is what they have said since the very beginning. CNN writes about ACORN's response, but doesn't actually show the documents. You and I have to find them for ourselves.

No Republican who matters ever renounces the bullshit. They just move on to the next dishonest press manipulation, knowing that the media will never catch on as long as they are paid by organizations that prefer for them to be obtuse.

And I'm not even bringing up the Rove-influenced network of US Attorneys who are primed by the firings of their past colleagues on this very issue to jump on it with both feet.