Dave Weigel, at Slate, explains:
The humor comes out of the fact that the sticker’s on a WorldNetDaily jersey. WorldNetDaily: The world’s #1 source for survival seed schemes and for rumors about Barack Obama’s birthplace.
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Tim Tebow was born to missionaries in the Phillippines.
The Washington Post, in its capacity as the company paper for the company town whose sole industry is politics, strives for a jolly tone:
Just 15 months after a huge election victory, members of a fractured conservative movement gathered on Thursday to agree on one thing: If they don’t get their act together soon, the country will really be in trouble…
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CPAC — a rollicking combination of trade show, political rally, and support group for College Republicans — opened with the usual happy tossing of red meat. One congressman used his time to decry mandates for low-flow toilets: “We are a nation of double-flushers!”
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But even in the convention’s early hours, there were signs of the tension that threatens to pull apart the movement. And each of the four Republican presidential campaigns is trying to grab the biggest piece…
Erick “Voice of the Gated-Community GOP” Erickson [warning: Redstate link] is not feeling the familiar excitement:
… This is the seventh CPAC I have been to. The crowd is the least excited I have seen. On the first day, before the candidates have had a chance to bus in their supporters to stack the deck and straw poll, this is the least excited I’ve seen them. The crowd’s heart is with Santorum. But in their mind they do not think he can win.
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Today [Friday], Mitt Romney must convince the crowd he is one of them or at least won’t betray them. Rick Santorum must convince them he can beat Barack Obama. Newt Gingrich must convince them he is still viable…
Of course, those Occupy DC pranksters have yet to make their presence felt, apart from troubling Jonah Goldberg’s sweaty dreams. Given Thursday’s warm-ups and also-rans agenda, Weigel mostly stuck to annotating Craigslist, after-hours room parties, white nationalist speakers, and related far-right fringe fantasy tropes.
Charlie Pierce at Esquire, while not above mocking video-poker proponents and possibly the single dumbest current member of Congress, also has more substantive posts on squirmy loathsomes like the anti-American-unionists:
There was also a panel this morning about how successful the efforts have been across the country to roll back collective bargaining…. Both Gerard Malanga from the Manhattan Institute and Kevin Mooney from the Pelican Institute for Public Policy went on at length about how the movement to roll back union rights was less about the economy than about demolishing organized labor as a political force. They cited a number of polls in which union members were dissatisfied with what their unions were doing for them. They mentioned, at length, how far behind the now truncated benefit packages of public sector workers the benefits offered to private sector union workers are. (This, of course, has a lot to do with the rolling back of unions that started under Saint Reagan in 1979, and because a lot of private-sector pension funds have been looted by succeeding generations of Wall Street sharpies, all of which got blamed at the ground level on the unions who were under assault.) To sow division between private-sector and public-sector unions is a nifty way to demolish the political effectiveness of both of them…
… and a certain self-admitted criminal from the Iran-contra mob, still shilling treason for a dishonest dollar:
I’d forgotten what an unctuous twerp Oliver North really is. Over the years since he dove through a loophole by selling out Ronald Reagan at his trial — which prompted Nancy Reagan to call him a liar — North has made a living fleecing the gullible and producing war porn for Fox News. And then he came to CPAC to honor a veteran who undoubtedly is a better person than North ever has been, if only because the veteran in question never has arranged to sell missiles to a terrorist state in order to finance our own terrorists in Central America. Guy’s got to have standards, after all…
If you’ve only got time (or appetite) for a single piece, at least read Pierce’s “Tenther Heaven, on the Big Screen“, for an introduction to Citizen United’s latest crime against our common heritage.
Warren Terra
Well, when he says that about his fellow conservatives, he’s half right.
Raven
“We must outsmart the liberals. We must outsmart the stupid people that are trying to ruin America,” Mr. Cain said. “We outnumber the stupid people. Trust me, I counted them.”
Linda Featheringill
The Republicans seem to be considering the idea that Obama will be reelected.
I find this very encouraging. We on the left don’t really believe that Obama faces an easy win in November. When he announced last year that he would be running again, I was sad because I thought he would lose. Now, of course, things are better but I still don’t see an easy win ahead of us.
However, it is looking damn possible, and that is a good thing.
Linda Featheringill
@Raven:
I had to laugh at this.
In microbiology, there is a term that means “a whole bunch of bacteria” in a given sample and that term is “too numerous to count”. I suspect that in this country, the stupid people are too numerous to count.
Raven
@Linda Featheringill: That’s why we use percentages.
Egg Berry
@Raven: 27 percent, to be precise.
Raven
@Egg Berry: Thank you, thank you very much.
Egg Berry
I didn’t think it was possible to take an entire hotel back to 1860, but damned if they didn’t do it.
zattarra
I’ve been cataloging. As near as I can tell CPAC this years is a collection of:
White Supremacists
Racists
Homophobes
Succescionists
Misogynists
Hate Groups
Theocrats
Hate Mongers
Historical Revisionists
Whatever the heck Ralph Reed is
Terrorist supporters
Arms Dealers
Insurrectionists
These are the people that Republican Presidential Candidates want the support of and the the two highest ranking Republicans in Congress came to speak and pander to.
Your Conservative Action Committee 2012, you won’t find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Citizen_X
Huh. Ain’t exactly “Give me liberty or give me death,” is it?
Schlemizel
BTW – you know if no OWS people pull anything off the pantyload will claim it was because “they was skeered oft” by his manly man threats
Schlemizel
@zattarra:
I think Headly Lamar is looking for them near Rock Ridge
zattarra
@Schlemizel: Actually I was shooting for Mos Eisley
harlana
is it just me or is this the absolute worse CPAC ever, from what i can tell, just in the level of desperation here, it’s really quite spectacle
harlana
and who the fuck are these conservative women?? i hope they are ready to give up careers (most certainly drop out of college) and spit out a bunch of babies and submit to their husbands because that’s where this is headed – they are just too damned stupid to realize that if these guys had their way, we would go back to the times when women were just property
there is nothing more infuriating, to me, than the women who enable these bastards. they would never be where they are today without the active support of the women in their lives and all their female supporters. damn these women, they make me sick.
Egg Berry
@harlana:
Implying that there were better CPACs?
WereBear (itouch)
What I always thought.
Shalimar
@harlana: I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually only let men vote in their straw poll. But of course it has to come after Ron Paul is done with politics or his almost all-male supporters would have him winning by an even bigger margin than he does now.
Baud
Well today will be interesting:
Schlemizel
@zattarra:
Ah, I missed that – but then I think Blazing Saddles is one of the most memorable movies of all time so any time some one starts listing conservative groups I think of good old Headly
redshirt
I LOL’d this morning on the drive, following a minivan with an “Elect Jesus” bumper sticker.
Funny on so many levels – for example, as if the Republican party would nominate Jesus as their candidate.
Hilarious!
Steve M.
Er, I don’t think so. Gerard Malanga a poet and photographer who hung out at Warhol’s Factory. The Manhattan Institute guy is Steven Malanga.
Though I would dearly love to see a Warholian bum-rush CPAC.
Kirbster
It’s a pity we can’t quarantine them in the hotel for, say, the next nine months. They could work on their issues with low-flow toilets and showerheads, lightbulbs, gay marriage, and contraception. With them out of the way, the rest of us could make some headway in solving real problems like high unemployment, an unresolved forclosure crisis, spiralling health care costs, rotting infrastrucure, and how to provide a high-quality education to every child.
Mike in NC
Someday soon these CPAC loons will be having their shindigs in a phone booth, provided they can locate one.
Interrobang
WTF is with the right-wing animus toward low-flow toilets? Sure, they kinda sucked for about the first two years they were available, and then they got the bugs worked out, and now they’re fine. They’ve been more or less standard equipment here in Canada for, god, ten years or more now?
I’m beginning to suspect the whole “you have to flush twice” thing is because most right-wingers don’t actually eat real food (because vegetables are faggy or something, hell if I know), so every time they take a dump, it has the consistency of half-set cement. (Constant constipation would sort of explain a lot of things about those folks, wouldn’t it?) Only explanation I can think of, anyway, but what the fuck do I know? I’m a pinko who thinks conserving water and eating lots of vegetables are good things…
Dave
@Steve M.: I noticed that too, and quickly Googled Malanga to make sure he hadn’t gone over to the dark side. Mo Tucker, drummer for the Velvet Underground, showed up at some Tea Party rallies last year, so there is precedent of a sort for this.
Dave
@Steve M.: I noticed that too, and quickly Googled Malanga to make sure he hadn’t gone over to the dark side. Mo Tucker, drummer for the Velvet Underground, showed up at some Tea Party rallies last year, so there is precedent of a sort for this.
Kane
Is it just me or does it feel like every couple of months the GOP has another convention? It’s neverending. I’m guessing that the Democratic party also has similar get togethers, but if they do, I don’t recall them receiving the same level of media coverage.
quannlace
First light-bulbs, now flush-flow. I know the devil is in the details but honestly, what’s the matter with these people?
************
Was listening to one rightwing radio show (Michael Medved) and there’s already a mad scramble on how position it if the economy keeps improving. The usual ‘it would have been better without Obama or it’s improving in spite of Obama.” But there’s a feeling of futility around that. So now they’re saying they need to revive the deficit ‘crisis,’ If we don’t drastically cut government spending we’re all doomed, DOOMED!
Samara Morgan
Did Weigel miss this?
I got your enthusiasm right here.
Bulworth
Gosh what a party pooper mr. erick is. Religion’s under attack! Communism! America’s at risk! Oh, look over here, a seminar with dating tips for the conservayoungsters…
Samara Morgan
Perhaps Santorum will publically offer Palin a cabinet post in his administration.
;)
Bulworth
@Kane: I was wondering this too. I think there was a Family Research Council shindig in September. They’re all a bit hard to keep track of. But they’re a very oppressed group, you see.
Paul_D
It’s got to be the slowest weekend ever for the DC escort industry.
gocart mozart
Paul in KY
@redshirt: They would certainly nominate St. Paul
Hunter
re: Paul_D #34 and Jonah Goldberg’s “sweaty dreams”:
It’s not so slow on Grindr and Craigslist.
Nutella
@quannlace:
They’re also major fans of gigantic SUVs for the same reason: Their God-given (literally) right to waste the most energy possible so they can be really sure that their grandchildren will freeze to death in the dark.
Gus
Promise me you’ll never again use the phrase “Jonah Goldberg’s sweaty dreams.”
Nemesis
Ummm, if you have to double flush, dude, there is way too much shit emitting from one of your orifices.