Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Reality always wins in the end.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

This blog will pay for itself.

The willow is too close to the house.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Not all heroes wear capes.

How has Obama failed you today?

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Everybody saw this coming.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

What fresh hell is this?

We have all the best words.

Almost as fun as hiking the Appalachian Trail

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Good luck with your asparagus.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Trump is going to draw a dick on that dog with a sharpie, isn’t he?

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

This is how realignments happen…

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Lying Makes the Media Go To Its Shame Place

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I’m feeling bad today for Andrea Seabrook, who quit NPR to start a new project, DecodeDC (via):

And I feel like the real story of Congress right now is very much removed from any of that, from the sort of theater of the policy debate in Congress, and it has become such a complete theater that none of it is real. … I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.

If only she had some form of platform during her 14 years on Capitol Hill, perhaps one that broadcast nationally, which allowed her to report that this kind of lying was going on. Unfortunately she was stifled, just as the rest of the media is about some other lies, those made by the Romney campaign. This is in the context of a bigger point by Ed Kilgore, but it jumped out at me:

[…] the welfare attacks are “new information” because they are just made up, and they are not getting “sustained media attention” because the MSM knows they are based on lies, even if many of them won’t come right out and say so.

I’m sure there are tears on the media pillows over this, but if you take a good look at their faces, you can’t see the tracks of those tears, and you sure as hell can’t tell that they’re upset about those lies, because apparently the best they can do is suffer in silence and pretend that they’re not happening.

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But the stimulus failed

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Things like this haven’t gotten enough attention:

Here’s a poll of economists conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business: “The first question asked whether the stimulus increased employment by the end of 2010. Eighty percent of the polled economists agreed. Four percent disagreed. Two percent were uncertain. The second question asked whether, over the long run, the benefits would outweigh the long-term costs (like paying down the extra debt). Forty-six percent agreed. Twelve percent disagreed. Twenty-seven percent were uncertain.”

Twelve percent is probably pretty close to the crazification factor in economics (I would guess it’s higher but I don’t know for sure).

Yes, the stimulus should have been bigger, I’ll admit.

Add it to the long list of times Obama was merely competent and right, instead of being omniscient and omnipotent.

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First Lady Of The Nation, Last Resort Of A Scoundrel

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Republican First Ladies are all saints, and Democratic ones are all cast iron bitches, apparently.  Two stories indicate that 2012 as an election year means Michelle Obama is fair game.  First, we get one step closer to the n-word…

Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal on Thursday apologized for an email that made fun of first lady Michelle Obama’s hair style and mockingly called her “Mrs. YoMama.”

The emails featured pictures comparing Mrs. Obama to the Grinch, a Dr. Seuss character, because of their similarly wind-blown hair.

“Sorry, just had to forward this latest holiday message,” O’Neal reportedly wrote in the email he shared with fellow Republican lawmakers. “I’ve had worse hair days, but this is pretty funny.”

According to The Lawrence Journal World, O’Neal forwarded from his personal computer the email that said, “I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing Mrs. YoMama a wonderful, long Hawaii Christmas vacation – at our expense, of course.”

Boy, I remember all the horribly racist emails about Laura Bush.  Oh wait, never happened.  And they’ll keep doing it and apologizing only when they get busted as long as they can keep getting away with it.

But the story that shows that the GOP absolutely knows that President Obama and his wife are likeable people?  Michelle and Barack getting the Clinton Second Term treatment a year early with a new “White House insider” book by Jodi Kantor.

The dramatics that surrounded the passage of health care reform — culminating in Emanuel’s near-resignation — reflect the type of struggles that routinely pitted Emanuel against the first lady during the first two years of the Obama administration. The two jockeyed for influence over the president even before he formally took office.

Kantor, who interviewed for the book 33 White House staffers (many on several occasions) but not the president or the first lady, reports that Michelle Obama had “doubts” about the choice of Emanuel as chief of staff. Emanuel, in turn, had been opposed to bringing Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ longtime mentor, into the White House as a senior adviser.

Once the administration began, the frictions only escalated. Emanuel rejected an effort on the part of Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, Jackie Norris, to be part of his 7:30 a.m. staff meeting. The administration did not outfit her with a speechwriter for some time. And the first lady’s office grew so isolated from the rest of the presidential orbit that aides there began, as Kantor writes, “referring to the East Wing as ‘Guam’ — pleasant but powerless.”

Sam Stein, who really ought to know better, gleefully buys the portrayal of the First Lady as pretty much every awful stereotype ever associated with successful black women:  mean-spirited, arrogant, overly controlling, petty and disdainful of her “betters”.  Michelle Obama is an asset to the President and to the country, and just a few days into 2012 it seems the plan is to completely trash her in an effort to sink her husband.

Where have we heard this story before?

It just gobsmacks me to see that as much as folks like Stein complain that Democrats aren’t given a fair shake in the Village media (and they aren’t most of the time) we have Stein guilty of breathlessly pushing this gossipy “Michelle Obama’s really an awful person” nonsense.  I thought the Manic Progressive crew wanted Rahm out of the White House anyway.  Instead, we see that Michelle’s a insecure screamer and the return of The Democrat In Charge Is An Emasculated Wuss from that “bastion of liberalism”, FDL.

And I shake my head as I realize there’s now a concerted effort at the top to lower Michelle Obama’s likeability ratings as low as possible because she is such an amazing asset to the President.  Yes, official Washington hated Hillary Clinton when she was in the White House.  But they absolutely despise even the thought of an accomplished PoC in the position.

HuffPo is definitely pushing the notion that all that matters is “Democrats in Disarray!” with the First Lady vs. Rahm (and so will the Breitbart types on the right).  Kantor’s NY Times excerpt on the other hand makes it seem like Michelle was the only one who knew that Rahmbo was a purely political creature and she was the brave resistance, protecting her husband.

Both views miss the point.  The issue here is that Kantor’s book and the manufactured political spectacle it creates undermines the First Lady’s role in the White House only when a Democrat is in it.  The greater point is that this is permissible way to treat Michelle Obama (and yes, Hillary Clinton as well) when Laura and Barbara Bush and Nancy Reagan were seen as heroines.  Keeping kids off drugs was apolitical common sense when Nancy Reagan championed it, Laura Bush, librarian, wanted to improve child literacy rates, a truly noble cause.  Getting kids to eat right makes Michelle Obama the most horrible nanny state harridan on Earth who gets booed at NASCAR events.  There’s a component to the attacks on the First Lady that exceed even the hell Hillary Clinton was put through, and it’s that I’m objecting to, specifically the Village playing along like that component doesn’t exist.

2012 is going to be an unremittingly slimy year for the Obamas.  And the worst part is I truly believe part of the reason this is being done is to get Hillary 2012 folks off the hook.  It’s not racism if it happened to the Clintons too, you know.  Patriotism really is the last resort of a scoundrel, and that goes for the asshats in both parties.

And as the top of the post recounts, what Michelle Obama is going through is much worse.  I know how difficult it can be to be taken seriously as an intelligent PoC in America that breaks a number of stereotypes on a daily basis.  I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to have gender bullshit thrown in on top of all that.  Then again, judging from the crazy that’s happened around here in the last week plus, I’m getting a very clear picture as to what all that entails.

And as for Cole’s opinion that the NY times excerpt isn’t a hit piece, that’s again not the point.  The point is that the notion that a strong, intelligent woman advising her husband is “controversial partisan politics” in the first place.  The point is that Kantor’s book can easily be cherry-picked to get out of it what you want to get out of it, hagiography or damnation.  And really, the primary issue is that nobody seems to think that Michelle Obama shouldn’t be subjected to the Village Circus as First Lady, whereas it’s been wildly different before.

We should be asking ourselves why we’re being asked to think about why anything the Obamas do is somehow “unprecedented” or “never been done before” and always in a negative connotation, rather than focusing on the positive “unprecedented” things they have accomplished.  Do I think it’s a hit piece?  Cherry-picked as it is, it’s still not flattering.  The entire book appears to be just trying to pick a fight and sell copy, like most political books.

That should be obvious.

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I Hate That Name That We Came Up With For Ourselves

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So apparently some campaign flack somewhere called out the professional left and called them firebaggers or something. Beyond the fact that it is stupid for OFA members to write shit like this, and putting aside the usual arguments and bullshit that come with any post on this subject, this made me laugh:

“Firebagger” is most likely a combined reference to the liberal blog FireDogLake, founded by Jane Hamsher, and “Tea Bagger,” a less-than-flattering term for Tea Party activists.

Umm, “firebagger” is what they named themselves, back when the fashionable progressive thing to do was to join arms with Grover Norquist and share Rahm horror stories:

Call me PUMA. Call me Firebagger. Call me the last true Progressive standing.

I’ll just call you stupid and leave it at that. It’s also worth remembering that “true progressives” have had it in for this administration before the first year was up, so I’m not quite sure what on earth Glenn is talking about in this post– ain’t nothing going to stop our progressive betters from attacking Obama right on through the election. At which point, no matter what happens, they can claim victory. They can either laughably assert they were the driving force behind his re-election, or they can claim his defeat validates everything they have been shrieking about since day one.

Either way, they are important and here is a link to a 20,000 word exegesis telling you how important they are. And a link to contribute to their PAC so they can continue their IMPORTANT work. Also, too.

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Why We Can’t Win Any Messaging Battles

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All we ever hear is how Democrats suck at fighting, never attack, etc. Here’s what happened when they try:

I retweeted it, because it is a good point. Romney and the Republicans have done nothing for job creation, and there is no evidence Romney even knows how to create jobs, yet all they do is attachk, attack, attack and block any and all legislation. Here is the only other immediate response I saw to Axelrod:

There is just something in progressive/liberal DNA that causes them enjoy attacking each other more than attacking Republicans. We don’t even have to wait for Republicans to rebut Axelrod, we’ve already got leading liberals creating strawmen for them. We don’t need to help them blur the message- that was a clear message, and now it is completely muddled with “What about Rahm?” nonsense. On top of that, my liberal twitter feed has spent the entire day joining with Romney screaming about Plouffe.

And let’s not spend this entire thread bashing Chris Hayes, because he’s really a great reporter and I think he does great work- his work at the Nation and elsewhere is awesome. I’m just talking about the overall phenomenon that I’ve observed in the past few years- Republicans rally around each other and attack Democrats, while Democrats scatter and attack other Democrats. I just simply do not get it. I understand independent thinking and the value of disagreement, but this is a two party system, fer chrissakes. Stop shooting your own team. Here is David Axelrod, doing his best to start a line of attack, and he is knee-capped in 5 minutes or less by his side of the aisle.

It’s amazing, really. And depressing. And I swear to God, in thirty years, today’s progressives will be screaming about Rahm Emmanuel the way today’s wingnuts still think we could have won Vietnam. Get over it, for the love of everything holy.

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