To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.
K-thug summarizes why no one should be rooting for FreedomWorks/Club For Growth/Beck/Palin in the Republican civil war:
And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.
The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.
To be clear, the Beck/Palin wing is ascendant right now and everyone should admit that. But, as amusing as it was, the Republican debacle in NY-23 should frighten everyone.
Jeroen, Below the waterline.
toujoursdan, Senegal.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
So I see that several wingnut blogs are now comparing the scene Saturday night in the House after the vote, when the Democrats were cheering Pelosi, to this scene:
This is funny for all the usual reasons, but doubly so because some of us can remember past week. If you will remember, when this movie came out, the same species of wingnut was literally FREAKING out about the Star Wars film being anti-Bush. Here is deep thinker and nepotism beneficiary J-Pod:
The whole confusion is reminiscent of the last Matrix movie, which is all about a noble truce between our heroes and the computers that have been using all of humanity as batteries. So that a few people could survive to have orgies in the underground city of Zion, billions of people had to remain in the Matrix. Inadvertently, both Lucas and the Wachowski brothers (who wrote and directed the Matrix movies) reveal with their brainless anti-Bushism the essential cowardly vapidity of pacifism.
Morans.
At any rate, we really need to undertake a project like the lexicon- we can call it Wingnut Movie References, and we can chronicle all their idiotic references to movies. I remember a couple of weeks ago someone at Red State was comparing something to Obi Wan being struck down, and I know these guys are fond of 300 and LOTR references.
Reviewing Republican behavior during the Health Care Reform debate on Saturday, you would think an militant band of spoiled toddlers with Tourette’s had occupied the right half of the House. Or howler monkeys. If it was not the most embarrassing display of bad behavior in recent government history, it is only because of everything else Republicans did lately. When lying didn’t work (they want to euthanize granny!) they tried hyperbole (health insurance reform is LITERALLY THE SAME THING AS STALIN TIMES THE HOLOCAUST!). Then they tried lying again. Then lying plus hyperbole, stamping their feet and shouting.
Normally the side that doesn’t have the law on its side, and doesn’t have the facts either, recognizes that you just lose twice if you throw your credibility and reputation into a losing fight. This fight was clearly different for Republicans, and you know what? They’re right. If the GOP had not pushed the Overton Window way to the right compared with where we started when Single Payer was still on the table (ish), Democratic moderates would have no problem supporting the watered down “moderate” compromise that the House finally passed yesterday. The bills would have steamrolled both houses of Congress with decent support from swing-district Republicans if the party had not made it a hill to die on with an emphasis on die.
Bill Kristol had it right in 1994. If Democrats effectively fix health care then Republicans are screwed. Any health care reform that does not suck even worse would effectively be written in stone as soon as it passed. Realigning their issue set to stay relevant could be quite awkward since Democrats already claimed most of the issues that Americans don’t hate. To stay alive Republicans would need to tack somewhere less crazy, but that would motivate Michelle Bachmann’s twenty-some percent of crazy people to go third party. Those two factors would effectively doom Republicans to share a shrinking back bench with the conservative fruitcake party and their pet schmuck Joe Lieberman.
So yeah, Republicans pulled out all the stops on this one. If they can find another stop before the Senate vote they’ll pull that one too. Pretty much the only institutional incentive not pushing them towards brinksmanship at this point is that desiccated raisin occupying space where most people would have a conscience.
The second most annoying thing about Andrew Sullivan’s latest back-patting exercise is how casually he repaints his part in the right’s psychotic 2003 wargasm as if he was just sensibly skeptical of leftwing extremists. Look, Sullivan has already admitted that he went way too far with the Saddam-lover, weak on terror Christopher Hitchens crap. Everyone but Dan Riehl knows that Sullivan bought wholeheartedly into something truly dangerous during those years. The war propaganda campaign did worse than wreck America’s economy and kill more Americans than 9/11. If Republicans did their job just a bit better, maybe not flushed their brand with Katrina and Shiavo and the Social Security embarrassment, America would be a different place.
Do we have accountability for torture yet? Did Obama rescind any Presidential powers? The last time I checked Glennzilla the government was still making inane appeals to the State Secrets clause. As much as it seems like we stepped a long way from the Bush years, too many reforms barely scratch the first layer of TV makeup. Let’s say the next guy decides that America does torture. What will stop him? A guilty conscience? We are too close to the edge to forget the sickness of Bush’s first term.
That said, I can get why Sullivan does not want to pick the wound daily, even if it leaves useful context unspoken. It galls me a lot more that he implies that ANSWER and Code Pink somehow equal Republican party leaders from Boehner and McConnell all the way down to Assistant Deputy Director of OMFGHITLER. I mean, jesus, I can’t believe that I forgot all the times that Harry Reid got on his knees to beg Code Pink to forgive him over some innocuous remark. The two phenomena are obviously exactly the fucking same.
Mr. Sullivan decries the falling standards of modern Catholicism:
In Onaiyekan, you have a classic Benedict/JP II Archbishop: dumb as a post, sheltered from the actual debate in the West, incapable of argument, and pathetic as a spokesman. The problem with the theoconservative take-over in the Catholic priesthood is not so much its extremism as its mediocrity. And it is mediocre because it has been trained not to thin[k], not to argue, and not to engage the modern world. It has been trained solely for obedience.
As a Victorian reviewer once said of Shakespeare’s Anthony & Cleopatra: Soooo unlike the home life of our own dear Queen!
Sen. John Ensign has moved out of the C Street house, the Christian home he shared with other elected officials on Capitol Hill that came under scrutiny for its residents’ beliefs and practices and their role in trying to end the Nevada Republican’s affair with a campaign staff member.The red brick town house emerged this summer as the subject of political intrigue — not only as a pivotal location in Ensign’s affair with Cynthia Hampton, but also that of South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who sought guidance there as he wrestled with his own affair.
Looks like there will be no more wetsuit optional Christian seksitime at the C street brothel for Senator Ensign, which means he will probably be really grumpy at the office tomorrow. Then again, since he apparently is into banging the hired help, maybe this just expands his opportunities.
In my earlier incarnation as a local and state blogger, I used to email Ben Smith when he was at the Daily Politics (which is now run by the excellent Liz Benjamin). He struck me as an excellent political journalist, hard-working, sharp as a tack, and a nice guy. And, for what it’s worth, I think he did a great job with on-the-ground reader emails during the run-up to last November’s election.
It’s no secret that the Politico’s business model is to get lots of links from Drudge. It’s why they push the stories that they do—Edwardian hair cuts, ACORN, global warming denialism, and so on. Try reading the comments there on any story and you’ll see teh tell-tale misspelled, ALL-CAPS rants; there’s not much doubt that most of the commenters migrated over from the Drudge Report. I don’t think that anyone from the Politico would dispute anything that I just said.
I know that for journalists today, it’s cold out there, and rough. There aren’t a lot of ways to for an outlet to make money, and, in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably more honorable to whore yourself out for Drudge links than to work for Rupert Murdoch or the Moonies.
So I don’t blame the people at the Politico for doing what they do, anymore than I blame the kids on “The Wire” for getting involved with the drug trade. People need to get paid. But when you read the Drudgite comments on Smith’s piece about Elie Wiesel, it’s a lot like watching Michael Lee shoot someone or Duquan shoot up.
I’m having a hard time mustering up my usual enthusiasm for ranting about all the stupidity out there on the internets today. The possibility of a decent health care reform bill just seems so much more important.
Now that it’s through the House, I can’t imagine that the Senate will drop the ball. We’re going to have a bill. No doubt it will fail to “bend the health care price curve” to Fred Hiatt’s and Ruth Marcus’s satisfaction. And no bout it will be widely heralded as good news for conservatives. But getting access to health care for 30 million Americans matters a hell of a lot more than any of that.
Consider this an open thread.
No discussion of good news for conservatives is complete without mention of Jon Chait’s excellent compendium of Weekly Standard good news proclamations from 2005-2008, which probably were—and this is no exaggeration—the most disastrous run of years for Republicans in modern political history. Most of it’s a twofer, because not only is it all good news for conservatives, it’s all contrarian good news for conservatives: “Everyone thinks that Bush’s low approval rating/McCain’s poor fund-raising and poll numbers/the American public’s dislike of Sarah Palin is bad for Republicans, but if you look beyond the conventional wisdom of our liberal media overlords, you may be surprised to learn…”
Chait makes a good point about the Standard relative to the National Review.
This sort of argument is actually the signature style of the Standard. A magazine like National Review specializes in making the case for conservative ideas. The Standard’s contribution is to assert over and over that Republicans are succeeding, or at least doing better than you think they are. The idea is to buck up your side and encourage them to keep fighting, in order to ward off the self-defeating psychology of losing.
I think another part of the idea is to get your smart-ass, nonsensical good news talking points repeated by Halperin et al. Nearly every example of Kristol hackery that Chait cites is just a more extreme version of stuff that pundits were saying at the time (Broder’s mythical Bush comeback, Halperin’s insistence Dems would get creamed in the 2006 midterms for example).
Most of the stuff I read on the Corner is not like this; frankly, a lot of it is just too weird to get picked up by mainstream media. The Cornerites write strange things because they believe strange things. Kristol is an unapologetic propagandist.
Simp, Aramona Beach, New Zealand. [Aoteroa Aotearoa indeed – ed.]
Cay, Annecy, France.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
Not sure what is in the works today on the show.
The morning bobbleheads should be entertaining. Even money that Mark Halperin or someone else claims the vote yesterday in the House is bad news for Democrats.
Word on the street is that Dems have the votes to get this whole health care huckleberry through the House tonight.
I know some of the amendments suck. But still, we’re one step closer to getting health insurance for tens of millions of Americans.
I have a hard time writing about health care reform without sounding sappy, so I’ll shut up and throw up a YouTube.
DougJ +5
Update. We are at 212.
Update 218!
As recommended by a commenter, time 4:30 of this.
Update update. Maybe this is a link too far. But I don’t think so.
Because I have no life, I’m listening to C-Span while playing Dragon Age, and the dumbest man in the House, Mike Pence, just gave what can only be described as the funniest speech I have heard from the well of the House. I seriously hope someone can put the close up on youtube, because it ended with a call to arms, asking the Democrats to take a stand for freedom and to do battle with this bill, and they will go down in history as defenders freedom.
With Allah as my witness, I expected him to yell Wolverines when he finished. And you have to watch his facial expression when he finished speaking. It looked like he was confused or didn’t know what to do next.
*** Update ***
Boehner is now basically reading Betsy McCaughey’s WSJ editorial today. Just clowns.
