A refuge for a snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals
Atrios has announced the 3rd runner up for Wanker Of The Decade, and it’s none other than Joe Kline.
Which is about right.
Via Gawker, The Daily Caller’s Mark Judge lives in DC and is white. His bike was stolen last week. This means that because DC’s population is mostly black, that Mark Judge is now free to unleash his inner racist upon the Capital, unfettered by “guilt” or “the common sense God gave a spiny echidna” or “humanity”. Handy!
When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.
It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.
And the shattered shards of Mark Judge’s broken soul go flying around in his own personal blame-nado, shredding whatever decency he had left. It gets worse from there.
I decided that I’m just going to let go of my white guilt. We’re all human, we all experience pain in our lives. And black pain is no different than white pain.It felt good to say it: Black pain is no different than white pain. I’m tired of people using the moral authority of past generations for their own personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Soledad O’Brien, a Harvard graduate, acts like she just stepped off the Amistad.
See, here’s what guys like Mark here mean by “white guilt” and that is “I really don’t like black people, and I really want to affix blame for racism in America on them exclusively, because I’m sick of having to keep the presence of mind to not offend them and I really haven’t taken the time to try to understand them outside media stereotypes and the right wing bashing on the President for the last four years, and besides being a racist ass is just easier.”
So yeah, another guy goes and “speaks the truth about blacks” and he’ll be “unfairly persecuted in our overly politically correct society”. Which is where garbage like this always ends up in the end, down the same chute of racism as the rest.
Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one. But of course it’s our fault because we had to have collectively stolen his bike, right? And most of all throughout American history privileged white males have of course been the real victims of the last 250 years, right?
Jesus wept.
[UPDATE] And we have a winner in the “Can’t wait to hear the defense on this one” from MacRanger over at Macsmind.
There are black ass clowns, black racists, black murderers, rapists and even idiots running the country. We have no reason to feel guilty for that. In fact as I’ve told you on many occassions I’m 2nd generation Irish. Never felt guilt, didn’t have to. The Irish had nothing to do with the treatment of Blacks in this country and in fact in many ways were treated even worse.It’s time to push back against liberals who have goaded whites into guilt. In light of the crimes blacks have committed against whites in the last 100 years, I say it’s even. Move on.
Yeah, I call shenanigans on this Politico article this morning:
Ann Romney is the Romney Democrats fear most
Ann Romney’s unexpected rock star status has the political arena buzzing about how her husband’s campaign will leverage her popularity in an election in which Michelle Obama — one of the most admired first ladies in history — will have an outsized and substantive portfolio.Indeed, this 62-year-old grandmother’s contribution to Mitt Romney’s campaign could amount to the most relevant role a wife has ever played in a presidential effort — softening the edges of a flawed and awkward candidate who struggles to connect with voters.
Most of the time I try to avoid the worst of the worst in our media, but sometimes I am in the mood for a little psychic pain. When those urges arise, my go to columnists are Charles Lane at the WaPo and Bobo at the NYT. Many of you will think I should probably go to Halperin, but he’s just so stupid it doesn’t cause me the physical pain that Lane and Bobo do. As far as I am concerned, no one can deliver the kick to the gut that Charles Lane can pack in one of his Both Sides Do It masterpieces. Here’s one of my recent favorites, which I have bookmarked so that whenever I start to feel good about myself or the country, I can read it and be brought back to earth:
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of war.The Democratic National Committee accuses the GOP of a “Republican War on Women,” to go along with its “war on working families” (according to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee) and “Paul Ryan’s war on seniors” (Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky).
Various Republicans accuse President Obama of waging “war on religious freedom” or even, in the words of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, “a war on religion.” According to the Republican National Committee, the president is also waging “war on energy,” the sequel, apparently, to what the House Republican Leadership has called “Democrats’ war on American jobs.”
***Amid the fog of blog posts,Twitter, Facebook, talk radio and the rest, only hyperbole has a chance to break through. Even so, many, if not most, people tune out the parties’ “war” propaganda. The shriller it gets, the less seriously they take it. For any given individual, this is a mentally healthy response.
Multiplied across the entire electorate, however, the effect may be more corrosive. To the extent that sensible citizens tune out politics, they abandon the field to people who are receptive to constant cries of war, war, war — people who are prepared to think of their opponents as enemies.
When you think of someone as an enemy, it’s harder to contemplate trusting, respecting or cooperating with him or her. Indeed, those behaviors start to look like treason, instead of what they really are: the minimum requirements of democratic life.
On his Web site, Frank Luntz, the erstwhile GOP propagandist whose credits include rebranding the estate tax as the “death tax,” tells potential clients about “transforming mere words into an effective arsenal for the war of perception we all wage each and every day.”
According to Luntz, “We all submit to the power of language, whether we know it or not.”
My fear is that he’s right. All the more reason to stop the wars.
Tell me, after reading that, are you conflicted as to whether you should grab the scotch and slowly drink yourself to death, or just grab a handgun and end it quickly. No one, in my estimation, can bring it like Chuck. He’s the worst of the worst. He’s the Michael Jordan of false equivalence.
At any rate, what columnists have the same impact on you?
Olympia Snowe is retiring from the Senate to become the principal of DC, so she’s handing out grades. Obama gets an almost-F in bipartisanship, because she met with him fewer times than any other President since she came to town in 1976. She hasn’t yet released his grade in deportment, gym or home ec, but I’m sure the DC press will be just as eager to report more irrelevant musings of someone whose enthusiasm for bipartisanship wasn’t quite strong enough for her to engage in the civil, reasonable centrist discourse of a Tea Party primary challenge.
(h/t the fugitive uterus)
Had to do some shopping, so I found myself driving through the country, and snapped this beautiful pic. Wish you could see how yellow they were in real life, because this picture does not do it justice.
At any rate, after spending some time at the garden center, picking up some supplies and some pansies, I was driving home and caught the weekly EJ Dionne/David Brooks wankfest on NPR. During the discussion, the Ryan plan came up, and Brooks repeatedly called it a serious plan and that it took us off the path to fiscal calamity, and then basically lied about it not ending government as we know it. After the second or third utterance of “serious,” I briefly considered plowing my car into the cement base of a highway underpass to make the pain stop once and for all.
Dionne did a good job swatting down Bobo’s nonsense, and Brooks then dutifully ignored him and called it a serious plan again.
As the Affordable Care Act turns two today, the Serious Village Types are contractually obligated to inform us that it was the worst piece of legislation ever conceived and that President Obama is the worst politician of all time for wasting time trying to get GOP votes for the bill, and then going it alone without them, assuring they would vow to destroy the law.
We are assured that everyone hates the bill, left, right, and center, despite the fact that elements of the bill are popular (particularly the parts involving coverage for pre-existing conditions and keeping kids on insurance plans to age 26.) But at this point I think Republicans have vastly overplayed their hand on it for three reasons.
One is MetamorphoMitt. The one thing from his past that he can’t shake away is MassCare. Two, the GOP really can’t stop themselves from twirling their collective evil mustaches when doing things like voting to kill the Medicare cost review board while complaining that Medicare costs too much. The other is the GOP assault on women’s rights, which is seriously driving away voters of both sexes.
All of these are going to seriously put a dent in the amount of damage the Republicans can do in November. And call me crazy, but I think the Supreme Court may punt on the law until 2014 because the mandate isn’t in effect yet, and precisely because the GOP has done zero to replace the law should it be struck down, there’s a fair argument that nuking the law would be a massive burden for the states and for individuals. Indeed, the government’s argument is that without a replacement set of laws, the entire health care system itself could be at risk if the mandate is severed.
Meanwhile, the parts of the law that are going into effect are working slowly and surely behind the scenes, and the law is rolling inexorably forward. I think we’re going to be okay here.
[UPDATE] Sarah Kliff over at Ezra’s House O’ Wonk has a detailed rundown of the changes already made by the law.
I’m going to go ahead and politely say that this is energy best spent elsewhere by Arianna, considering.
The measure of President Obama should be the bar set for him by Candidate Obama. Unfortunately, the way the race has shaped up, the bar is set considerably lower. Take, for example, the questions David Axelrod was asked just before Super Tuesday. They included one about Newt Gingrich’s call for Secretary of Energy Steven Chu to be fired and, of course, one about Rush Limbaugh’s “slut” comments. That’s a pretty low bar for the Obama campaign to jump over. And if, as the campaign moves forward, the majority of the questions President Obama and his surrogates are going to be faced with are simply responding to whatever outlandish statements are coming from the Republicans, that’s clearly not going to be the most productive debate the country could be having. Given the real problems we’re facing, and the fact that a presidential election should be the time to discuss and debate them, the bar should be much, much higher than that.So instead of simply asking President Obama to respond to the most extreme or bizarre Republican statements, how about asking him instead to respond to the boldest and most ambitious statements from… Barack Obama?
At HuffPost, our plan for 2012 is to vigorously cover both tracks of the election. Which is to say that while we are exhaustively covering the race between President Obama and the Republican nominee, we’re also going to be covering that second track: Obama vs. Obama. And we’ll be covering it in a variety of ways: by comparing the reality of President Obama with the rhetoric of Candidate Obama; by focusing on real underlying problems in the country that are being temporarily masked by a slight improvement in the unemployment numbers; and by using satire.
Look folks, if you’re devoting your considerable reach and power to this re-election battle being about What Obama Hasn’t Done Yet before he gets re-elected to have a chance to do it, I’m going to say that you may not be fully vested in the idea that he should be re-elected, follow? I understand that the President has made some mistakes, and has done things that I don’t agree with, especially when it comes to civil liberties. Considering what he has accomplished, I’m hoping that this will be taken into balanced consideration. When the other party’s response is “Let’s reduce the last one hundred fifty years of American progress to a shiny, slightly concave crater of smooth, blackened glass and take a mulligan on everything after ‘and the Union was preserved’ okay?” I’m thinking the time for holding the President’s feet to the fire on things is, you know, November 7th, and not now. I’m completely willing to have the debate Arianna wants…as soon as we keep the Morlocks, Mole People, and CHUDS in the GOP from eating our flesh.
Even better, I would think that time and energy would be invested in getting NANCY SMASH back her gavel, and keeping the Senate, in addition to keeping the White House. If you haven’t noticed, the Republicans have spent the last 15 months dumping trucks of salt on the earth after covering it with napalm, cat pee, and graffiti that reads “TEA PARTY RULZ.” We might want to do something about that rather than saying “You know, Candidate Obama hasn’t delivered on all of his campaign promises.” Congratulations on that insight and welcome to politics. Keeping those promises will require a Congress not led by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, capiche?
I’d say that I can’t believe anyone in that position would be that dense, but given the person making the call, everyone should have expected it by now.
Expanding on Mistermix’s post below, Kevin Drum writes an article entitled “Barack Obama’s Had a Pretty Damn Good Presidency” and then proceeds to trash him for about 75% of the article, without a trace of irony.
As long as we’re piling on, I’d add a few other items to that list. First,Obama seems to despise the progressive base. He and his associates have made that clear over and over again.Second, he allowed Congress to take the lead on most of his domestic agenda. Whether this was smart or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it makes him seem almost like an observer of events over the past three years, not a commander-in-chief. Third, from a progressive point of view, his record on national security is pretty bad. No, we’re not torturing prisoners anymore, but the NSA surveillance program is still in place, American citizens are being targeted for assassination, the Afghanistan war has been escalated, drone attacks have skyrocketed, the state secrets privilege is still being used with abandon, Guantánamo is still open, and Patriot Act abuse seems to be as robust as ever.
Now, it’s true that any serious accounting also has to include Obama’s domestic failures—most notably his feckless housing policy and his inability to pass cap-and-trade—but both of those were very heavy political lifts. (On cap-and-trade in particular, I think in retrospect that it was just flatly never going to happen no matter what Obama did.) There’s also his weak record on judicial appointments. So could Obama have done better? Was there a more effective way to deal with an unprecedentedly obstructive Republican Party? On reflection, I doubt it. During Obama’s first two years, Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for only 14 weeks. This means that Obama needed two or three Republican votes for every bill, and if he had taken the blustering, partisan attitude that a lot of liberals wanted, he never would had gotten them. Republican obstructionism would have been even more hardened than it was with his more conciliatory attitude. So as annoying as Obama’s “most reasonable man in the room” act was to the progressive base, it was probably his best strategy.
I can’t possibly wonder why that would be the case, nor who could possibly be responsible for such a state of affairs. Sully was right when he said if a Republican POTUS had accomplished what President Obama had done, we’d be carving his likeness into Mount Rushmore. And yet, we’re doing everything we can to hand the country back over to the Banana Splits.
People keep tripping over themselves to come up with explanations as why to President’s Obama’s most famous first has nothing to do with any of this, of course. Those excuses, and the constant dogpiling on the President, are both wearing very thin, and we’re starting to run out of plausible explanations as to why the liberal media is so invested in the “Is this milk spoiled? Taste this for me!” theory of the President’s accomplishments.
Hands down, the most embarrassing piece of “journalism” I have seen in a long, long time:
Where do we start?
1.) The fundamental misunderstanding of what a referendum is. The notion that there is something mutually exclusive in a referendum on Obama and a reminder of where we were when he took office is sophist gibberish at best. A referendum on an elected official is precisely that- you look at where we were, you look at the policies of the administration, and you look at where we are now. Every single President in history has done this. Sometimes they do it for self promotion, sometimes they do it to attack others. Like, for example, this:
You see what he did there? It was a referendum on Carter AND AT THE SAME TIME asking people to look at where they were several years ago. What a concept. Or, exactly what team Obama is doing. And despite Tapper’s insistence, team Obama is doing this not to run away from their record, but to embrace their record, because they (and anyone with a functioning noggin) would agree.
2.) The stuff about his odds for re-election being better if he makes this not about him is just nonsense. If it is about him, you wouldn’t look at job approval (and for some reason, he won’t even use his own news organizations poll numbers), you would make it about personal approval rating, which is still in the 70’s.
3.) The unemployment rate data is absurd- unemployment climbed because we were in a global economic crisis. He took over while the economy and employment were nose-diving, and it has been improving ever since. Tapper wants to blame Obama for a crisis he did not create:
4.) Gas prices were at $1.84 because we were in a global economic crisis, and the bottom fell out for demand:
Remember $4 gas? Soon it will be $2 gas.As the nation’s economy worsens, the demand for oil and gas wanes. As a result, prices drop. And drop. And drop.
The price of gas fell overnight Sunday for the 60th consecutive day.
The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline fell 2 cents to $2.105 a gallon, according to a survey released Sunday by the American Automobile Association.
A gallon of gas has dropped nearly in half since hitting an all-time high of $4.114 on July 17. It’s been nearly two years since prices were this low, according to AAA figures.
Gas prices were much higher prior to the economic collapse:
In the midst of the global economic crisis, they plummeted. Pointing that out and thinking you are on to something is as stupid as noting that bags of ice were probably pretty cheap during the ice age. Pure, unadulterated wankery.
5.) Housing prices? Housing prices? Has our intrepid reporter never even heard of the housing bubble which CREATED THE GOD DAMNED CRISIS:
And many, many economist and experts still believe housing values are still overinflated. Pinning that on Obama is hackery of the first order.
6.) Republicans aren’t motivated in the least bit- it is the Democrats who are energized. Hell, Republican primary voting is millions below what it was in 2008. Don’t believe me, Jake? Ask Huma Khan. You might know her, as she works for ABC News.
I’ve defended Tapper in the past (as well as launching haymakers) and I really do think of the press pool, he is one of the best, refusing to take bullshit answers and showing a tenacity the others lack. But this was the worst piece of journalism I’ve seen outside Breitbart or the WSJ op-ed page. Pure, unadulterated hackery.
This report was devoid of any context, stripped of any insight, and more than likely left viewers dumber than they were before they saw it. In other words, a perfect example of modern journalism. Hell, this wasn’t a news report. It was an audition for Fox News or Politifact. Or maybe to be the future director of RNC commercials.
This piece was Halperinesque.
So the President fielded the questions himself in today’s White House press briefing, and FOX’s Ed Henry couldn’t help himself, earning this:
“Ed, just from a political perspective, do you think the President of the United States, going into reelection, wants gas prices to go up even higher? … Is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense?”
Why Did Pres. Obama Hold His First Press Conference in Three Months on Super Tuesday?
This condemnation of Rush by the WaPo editorial board is a masterpiece in the “both sides do it” genre:
IN A DEMOCRACY, standards of civil discourse are as important as they are indefinable. Yet wherever one draws the line, Rush Limbaugh’s vile rants against Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke crossed it. Mr. Limbaugh is angry at President Obama’s efforts to require the provision of contraception under employer-paid health insurance and the White House’s attempts to make some political hay out of the policy. His way of showing this anger was to smear Ms. Fluke, who approached Congress to support the plan, as a “slut” seeking a government subsidy for her promiscuity.Like other “shock jocks,” Mr. Limbaugh has committed verbal excesses in the past. But in its wanton vulgarity and cruelty, this episode stands out. Mr. Limbaugh’s audience, and those in politics who seek his favor as a means of reaching that audience, need to take special note.
We are not calling for censorship. Nor are we suggesting that the ostensible policy issue here — mandatory provision of contraception under health insurance paid for by religious-based institutions such as Georgetown — is a simple one. Those who questioned President Obama’s initial decisions in this area — we among them — were not waging a “war on women,” as Democrats have alleged in strident fundraising appeals.
What we are saying is that Mr. Limbaugh has abused his unique position within the conservative media to smear and vilify a citizen engaged in the exercise of her First Amendment rights, and in the process he debased a national political discourse that needs no further debasing. This is not the way a decent citizen behaves, much less a citizen who wields significant de facto power in a major political party. While Republican leaders owe no apology for Mr. Limbaugh’s comments, they do have a responsibility to repudiate them — and him.
House Speaker John Boehner took a step in that direction Friday: “The speaker obviously believes the use of those words was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in an e-mail Friday morning. But there’s no moral equivalency between the Democrats’ hyperbolic but abstract “war on women” line and Mr. Limbaugh’s targeted attack. Mr. Boehner and others of his stature need to say unequivocally that such gutter rhetoric has no place in their party or in American politics.
Incivility is not a one-way street in America. Far from it: Mr. Limbaugh’s left-wing equivalents have trashed any number of conservatives over the years. Conservatives have a point when they protest that the “mainstream media” don’t always heed their legitimate grievances.
Yet under the influence of Mr. Limbaugh and his ilk, the Republicans risk coming before the voters in 2012, and after, with nothing but grievances. This is what former Florida governor Jeb Bush was trying to tell his fellow Republicans when he observed, apropos of a recent discourse in the GOP primary: “It’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective, and that’s kind of where we are.”
For the good of U.S. political culture — or at least its own political self-interest — the GOP must distance itself from Mr. Limbaugh. In response to listener complaints and, apparently, the promptings of its own corporate conscience, Sleep Train Mattress Centers has quit advertising on Mr. Limbaugh’s show. Dare Republican leaders show less decency?
Who is the left-wing equivalent of Rush Limbaugh?
So Rick Santorum launches a deceitful attack on the Kennedy speech regarding the role of religion in society, lying about pretty much everything Kennedy said, to include the preposterous claim that liberals don’t think “people of faith” have any role in the public sphere, and this is how the NY Times covers it:
Yes, he was just making the case for religious freedom. Your liberal media.
MSNBC dropped conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday, four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book. The book “Suicide of a Superpower” contained chapters titled “The End of White America” and “The Death of Christian America.” Critics called the book racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, charges Buchanan denied.
Speaking of which, Buchanan was quite the amature apologist for Hitler himself, having once said the Fuhrer was “misunderstood” and that the US and Germany should’ve fought on the same side in WWII.
Buchanan took to the ‘pages’ of the Creators’ Syndicate, of which he’s been a long time member.
My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous. The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it “exists to strengthen Black America’s political voice,” claimed that my book espouses a “white supremacist ideology.” Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, “The End of White America.”Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!
Oh, yeah—Open Thread
Fuck that Vichy motherfucker EJ Dionne and his prissy, fussy “the Bishops must be appeased” bullshit:
Politicized culture wars are debilitating because they almost always require partisans to denigrate the moral legitimacy of their opponents, and sometimes to deny their very humanity. It’s often not enough to defeat a foe. Satisfaction only comes from an adversary’s humiliation.One other thing about culture wars: One side typically has absolutely no understanding of what the other is trying to say.
That is why the battle over whether religious institutions should be required to cover contraception under the new health-care law was so painful — and why it was so hard to comprehend why President Obama, who has been a critic of culture wars for so long, did not try to defuse this explosive question from the beginning.
Dionne apparently believes that if Obama had thrown down the current policy first, everyone would have fallen in line, because nobody’s precious fee fees would have been hurt (least of all Dionne’s). In his last column on contraception, Dionne admits the obvious, (“As a general matter, it made perfect sense to cover contraception. Many see doing so as protecting women’s rights, and expanded contraception coverage will likely reduce the number of abortions.”) So this isn’t about policy, it’s just about making EJ feel better about supporting a position that his priest told him was wrong back when he was an altar boy in the 50’s. Many see this as a reason that EJ should be replaced by a “liberal” whose opinions have some relevance to the current century.
