Shaking the Etch-A-Sketch

Paul RAyn (R-fudge the numbers) gives Mitt Rmoney (R-fudge everything) enough cover from teabagger wrath that he can once again claim parentage of Romneycare and bring it from exile back into the big house.

ROMNEY: Well, absolutely. I am very proud of what we did, and the fact that we helped women and men and children in our state… And then with regard to contraceptives, of course Republicans, myself in particular, recognize that women have a right to use contraceptives. There is absolutely no validity whatsoever to the Obama effort to try and bring that up.

Unbelievably cynical!

Suddenly, Rmoney will be taking all sorts of reasonable-sounding positions. Mitt is completely insincere, and the truth is unimportant to him. He says whatever he thinks he needs to say, regardless of what he's said before. He's the most consistent liar I've ever watched in politics, even worse than Richard Nixon.

Why we're doomed

See the very end...

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Not because Mitt R-money is the most dishonest candidate since Richard Nixon to seek the White House.

Because soft-headed morons still buy into the transparently stupid bullshit that Jon Stewart deftly dissects in a few minutes.

Exhibit A, Darth Cheney

Anne Laurie on Balloon Juice:

[T]he Republican Party has not recently been stolen by a batch of half-witted bigots, xenophobes, authoritarians, and garden-variety grifters. They’ve had control of the GOP wheel for more than 40 years, at least since Nixon’s triumphant accession to the Oval Office with the help of many of these same fine Heritage Institute ‘statesmen’. They were bad people when they were interning during Watergate, they were bad people when they used Reagan as a figurehead to start the full-scale authoritarian takeover and banana-republic-style looting of our national treasury, and they remain Bad People in Charge even unto this very day.

It's just that the vicious racists who used to be Southern Democrats have joined their particular brand of reactionary wingnuttery to the GOP.

You thought the company town was great

You had it wrong.  Those Appalachian mining towns?  Paradise on earth.  Only the occasional case of rickets.  Wait till you get the inestimable privilege of living in the company nation.


Hans Gruber had it wrong.  Steal $600,000,000,000 (wild guess) and not only will they not find you, you'll have open advocates in the Senate and of course the Wall Street Journal excusing your manifest and continuing racketeering.

[W]e’ll see pro-banker politicians denounce the proposed settlement, asserting that it’s all about defending the rule of law. But what they’re actually defending is the exact opposite — a system in which only the little people have to obey the law, while the rich, and bankers especially, can cheat and defraud without consequences.

Richard Nixon had it wrong.  It's not against the law if the Chamber of Commerce says it isn't.

Alvin Toffler had it wrong.  Corporations won't need their own armies once they've consolidated their hostile takeover of government.

Oh, yeah, I guess you're already privileged.  Though of course your four legs are merely good, not deserving of the rewards that come to your betters climbing over you on two legs.

Forty-two years

Since Richard Nixon took office in 1969, Democrats and liberals have failed to call lies and bullshit what they are.  This is why our public conversation is so filled with bullshit and lies:

[T]his aggressive stupidity politically props up the arguments of the anti-government right. With so many Americans evidently not knowing they receive benefits from the government, it's easy for opportunistic politicians to seize on our "me-first, screw everybody else" culture and misleadingly deride the government as some distant entity that exclusively benefits the "other." And if you don't know that, in fact, you are "the other," then you are more likely to conclude that that opportunistic politician is correct, and more likely to cheer on that opportunistic politician as he/she slashes the programs you directly rely on.

(h/t Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog)

Another Sarah Palin story

... from before she was ten.

Nixon was a piece of ... work, wasn't he?

Roman Hruska mediocrity caucus

A good friend of mine is fond of referring to Republican (of course) Senator Roman Hruska's infamous plea in favor of Richard Nixon's nomination of Harrold Carswell:

"Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?"

The Roman Hruska mediocrity caucus is alive and well - far too well - dying to fling itself headlong into the idiocracy of the past 8 years after only 60 days of Obama. Truth be told, most of these know-nothings who think they know everything were ready to continue with Bushism as if it had been a fabulous success instead of a failure so complete it was almost cartoonish.

Here's a small sampling of today's stupidity in response to a story about ballooning deficits:

Obama stated that "his agenda is still on track". That's where the problem lies. He doesn't care about the consequences of his agenda. Whether it's good or bad for the country, it doesn't matter because it's his agenda.
I wish liberal activists would stick with what they do best, which is just cry, complain, and blame, and leave running the country to experienced competent people.
--dpell632000 March 21, 8:32 AM

Obama didn't "Inherit" the economy....he pursued it. ...
--swordfishhh March 21, 9:30 AM

What's worse than an inept president? A stubborn one.
--feuerbach2 March 21, 9:40 AM
[Incredible! --LL]

Sixty days in, with the disaster of the Bushists in full bloom, it's all Obama's fault. The double standards and memory holes of these people, combined with one-way misanthropy, is simply amazing.

And these are the ones who can actually frame an understandable sentence.

Tried to make me go to rehab

Ruth Marcus said, "No, no, no." Glenn Greenwald is, of course and to America's benefit, all over the unwillingness of the Washington elite to punish fellow members of their incestuous little club.

Marcus pays insincere lip service to the rule of law. Then, like the conservative caricature of a squishy liberal, she pronounces it all o.k. if the on-going crime syndicate that the Republican Party is will just promise not to do it again. But, in fact, she won't even extract that promise; she only assumes that the next set of punks and lawbreakers will learn from the complete lack of sanctions on their predecessors that the right thing to do is not to break the law of the land.

Let's review:

• Tricky Dick Nixon used his government to subvert freedom and democracy in the name of national security.
• Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his crimes.
• Ronald Reagan subverted the Constitution with Iran-Contra.
• George Bush was in the loop but issued the most transparent lies claiming that he hadn't been.
• Bush then pardoned Caspar Weinberger. Ollie North and John Poindexter got off on legal technicalities.
• Duhbya came into office, his regent a man who learned his dark craft in the Nixon White House, and took us to war on false pretenses. He also subverted the Constitution, the U.S. Code, and 200 years of common practice. Even more than Nixon, he did what he goddamn pleased and dared anyone to stop him. The Marcus-style Democrats failed utterly.
  
• Duhbya commuted Scooter Libby's sentence. Look for more pardons between now and January 20.

I'm sure John Connolly told Whitey Bulger not to do it again. Like that worked.

An observation or two:

• Any political system that is built on self-reinforcing elite courtiers, even one with the trappings of democracy, is not a government of laws.
• The choice between rehabilitation and punishment is a false choice. A just legal system must have both.
• The RICO law has low barriers to standing to bring a civil suit, but it's hard to assess a monetary value to liberty violated.
  

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.

Happy Resignation Day

I admit to some small nostalgia for the 1970s, when the Constitution was preserved, when many Republicans could be and were responsible, when Democrats stood up for themselves and the nation. Richard Nixon was rightly hounded from office on this day in 1974. Then age 16, I had watched his typically bullshit-filled resignation speech the night before, but nowadays I have to give even Nixon credit for two things:

• The country was indeed better off for his resignation, rather than the sure impeachment and conviction that would otherwise have followed.
• He was, it turns out, not the worst the Republican Party could foist upon America with divisive and dishonest manipulation and appeals to the worst in us.

Unfortunately, the young Republicans of the time didn't learn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and the law against their own impulses and will to power. Instead, the lesson they took from White House tapes and Federal Court processes and Gerald Ford's pardon was to fight tooth and nail to keep their misdeeds in the dark.

Dick Cheney and the Bushists now claim openly the Nixonian theory that the President is above the law, as if we didn't evict George III for that exact sentiment - when he had a much better claim under the laws of the time. Darth and Duhbya claim to be above all checks and balances between elections, and the Constitution is honored in the breach if at all. Oh, and the full weight of the Republican political apparatus is doing everything it can, whether legitimate or not, to tilt those elections away from public opinion.

The young Democrats of the 1970s learned to be pussies. That one I don't understand at all.

McCain plays the race card, media whiffs

Here's the sequence:

• McCain ad says, "Obama (did you know he's black?) doesn't belong among previous Presidents."
• Obama mentions this: "You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know." This is the entire excerpt that refers to appearance.
  
• McCain has the unmitigated damn gall to claim that Obama has thereby played the race card.
  

Obama may let McCain off the hook, but I don't have to be charitable. The McCain camp doesn't deserve it.

Not only is this completely and premeditatedly dishonest, it's racist. This bullshit is extruded in McCain's name from the fetid mouths of Tucker Bounds and Steve Schmidt. I don't care whether McCain is personally racist or not; he's obviously eager to appeal to the racists in the Republican base.

And by the way, most of them used to be Democrats, until they found the Democratic Party inhospitable to their bigotry. So they moved to Richard Nixon's Republican Party.

(h/t Charley on the MTA at BlueMassGroup)

Interview someone sane

Does Mark Preston ever talk to a Democrat? Or even a sane Republican?

Ben Stein thinks:

• Karl Rove is the answer.
• Phil Gramm had the psychological recession right.
• Obama's ability to draw a crowd is anti-democratic.
• Evolution is wrong, even though he doesn't understand anything else about it.
  

Preston thinks Stein is well informed, on the basis of speech-writing for Nixon and Ford thirty-five years ago. In fairness, Stein does notice that McCain is running a "pathetic" campaign, but you'd have to be stone dead or Tucker Bounds not to notice that.

Update: For snark, please try "Seeing blue". For something much more serious, try "Killing liberals".

McCNN structures the news

This is pretty minor, just another day's work in the so-called liberal media:

• Half the story is McCain's warmed over law and order Nixonism with a little fillip of earmarks malarkey.
• We get a rehash of the no command experience story.
• Finally, in the rump of the story, we hear that Obama wants to expand faith-based programs, though in a way that preserves rather than assailing the separation of church and state.

For an editor with real news sense, which of these is really the top of the story? Just askin'...

Ebb and flow of historians

Duhbya's right in theory. Historians can get it wrong. Of course, when they move away from a cherished conservative myth, they're revisionists, while they're only coming to their senses if they ever (never!) learn to love Duhbya.

Darth Cheney provides a perfect example:

Vice President Cheney has also argued that history will vindicate Bush. Speaking at a Washington luncheon last week, Cheney recalled that former president Gerald R. Ford was "attacked from every conceivable angle" for pardoning Richard M. Nixon, but he said that "the consensus now is that Gerald Ford did the right thing."

If this is even numerically true, if, it's ripe for revisit and revision. Ford's pardon of Nixon led the permanent Republican apparat to conclude that they could shred the Constitution with impunity. It's a major reason we are where we are today with the lawless Bushists.

In the case of Duhbya's legacy, the contradictions and oozing bullshit of this administration are too great to overcome. Some historian someday will say of Duhbya, "Well, he wasn't the anti-Christ," and Bushist partisans will shout, "Vindication!" It'll probably be a Harvey Mansfield protégé.

Duhbya aggrandizes himself as a stalwart holding the line against an existential threat. He thinks that because Japan and Germany have become democratic allies, Iraq will be. (Why not Iran, too?) Even if one accepts the parallel arguendo, the Americans who made the post-war era so successful with respect to old adversaries planned and improvised, two ground-laying tasks that the Bushists have been unable to manage. They also knew when a real existential threat, communism, was better contained and competed with than warred against. Duhbya and his would-be successor John McCain haven't shown that degree of fine judgement.

Died a-bornin'

Campbell Brown, who is too young to remember, finds some of the common threads that link 1968 to 2008. I'm too young myself to have mature memories, but I remember the titanic struggle America fought to try to grow into the outsize ideals that the Founders and Abe Lincoln and even FDR left still unrealized.

I remember a time when political violence robbed us of the people who might have led us from the mountaintop to the promised land - JFK, MLK, and RFK - a time when hope for a new flowering of freedom and democracy died a-bornin'. And Richard Nixon won the Presidency.

This is why those of us of a certain age feel gnawing fear even as we rejoice at the possibilities and promise of Barack Obama. To live in fear is to die by degrees, but I hope Obama listens to his Secret Service detail.

Image from Wikimedia Commons under CCA 2.0.

Pranking McCain

I'd love to see this prank for the network news cameras: Chants of "four more years" when McCain comes on stage at his next rally.

If a member of Billionaires for Bush could insinuate himself into the crowd and start the chant, I'm sure the Republican true believers would join in. After all, they want to retain all the failed and terrible policies.

But the rest of the electorate has a different take on Bushism, despite their foolish, media-driven willingness to listen the same old bullshit from McCain.

And the GOP political operatives would be stymied. They couldn't very well shush the chant - that would be an even bigger story.

Can you imagine fifty people a day, walking in, chanting a Nixon reminiscence and walking out? They'd think it was a movement.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Tattoo you

Sick (and not with a teenager's positive connotation):

Mr. Stone, who has referred to politics as “performance art,” is a longtime Republican consultant known for hardball politics and a cloak-and-dagger sensibility. He started out as a teenager in the campaign of Richard M. Nixon, and has a tattoo of the former president’s head on his back.

You'd better believe that the Republicans have a strong oppo network that is constantly turning over rocks in hope of finding this sort of crap.

Oversight? We don't need no stinkin' oversight.

It's unambiguously within Duhbya's power (for once) to reverse Gerald Ford's executive order, but it perfectly illustrates his preference for spying without restraint or transparency.

Even when the board had teeth, they were just dentures in a glass by the bed. It's not as if they restrained the Bushist surveillance state in the slightest.

The Globe's illustration for the story is perfect:

• Gerald Ford, who pardoned Nixon and affirmed the evasion of culpability for Republican criminals
• James Baker, who ran the first stage of the Bushist coup, in Florida
• Dick Cheney, emissary of the dark side, who pushed the Bushists toward unfettered imperial power
  

Nixonland

If you love Obama and hate Hillary or vice versa, please go and read Paul Krugman.

W.W.N.D.?

Saw a lapel pin at a party caucus on Saturday: "What would Nixon do?"

No such luck this time.

Click image to see full Mike Lane cartoon.