Fuck all of you in that rotten shithole.
Fuck You, Texas
This post is in: Religious Nuts 2, Assholes, Go Fuck Yourself, Sociopaths, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
This post is in: Religious Nuts 2, Assholes, Go Fuck Yourself, Sociopaths, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
by Zandar| 198 Comments
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter, Democratic Cowardice, OBAMA IS WORSE THAN BUSH HE SOLD US OUT!!, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, WIN THE MORNING
Jeff Greenfield over at WIN THE MORNING decides that this whole “President Obama kicking ass for the last year or so” thing is getting boring, and giving a black President a positive can’t possibly be right, so we’re back to everything is Obama’s fault as to how he has destroyed the Democratic party.
Under Obama, the party started strong. “When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark,” says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obama’s top strategists. “Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in ’06 and ’08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.”
The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began early—with the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.
The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a “progressive” agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.
The really weird part is that nowhere in the entire piece do I see the words “Debbie Wasserman Schultz” who, as chair of the DNC, would ostensibly be the person in charge of the election strategies and GOTV tactics that Greenfield is complaining about, but I guess Greenfield has never met her or something.
Also, there is the small matter of the impressive number of Democrats who lost by running as far away from Barack Obama as possible in 2010, 2012, and 2014 but no, the problem is of course Obama.
That’s the Beltway wisdom, and it will be for a very, very long time.
by Zandar| 115 Comments
This post is in: Glibertarianism, The War On Women, Let A Thousand Watergates Bloom, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
Robert Tracinski over at The Federalist gives the quintessential Glibertarian Douchebag argument on the edited videos attacking Planned Parenthood: If we frame everything using my “facts” then I win.
Of course, it’s easy to use “context” as an excuse to explain anything away. But it’s also easy to view the Planned Parenthood videos through the perspective of your pre-existing animus and seize on the worst possible interpretation of their words, or focus on the one sentence that justifies your hatred while ignoring those that might undermine your justification.
I have (somewhat ironically) a very Christian attitude about this: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. God forbid anyone should pore through any of my own conversations and read them the way people are reading the Planned Parenthood transcripts. So if someone were to ask me what I’m writing today, and I were to respond, “I don’t know, the Koch Brothers haven’t told me yet” (and I’m not saying this exchange has never occurred), I would hope people would understand it as a joke. But someone who wishes me ill would inevitably come along and seize on this as final proof that I’m in the pocket of Big Oil.
If we want to keep the moral high ground when the left pulls this sort of trick on us—and they will—then we need to make sure we’re being scrupulously fair, even to people we hate.
“Let’s have a fair and reasonable debate over subject X using the criteria of fair and reasonable that I get to define in advance” really is one of the oldest tricks in the book. In fact, it’s the entire shtick of The Federalist in general.
Tracinski says the abortion debate in general and Planned Parenthood debate in particular is getting reduced to “memes” by a cartoonish and juvenile smear attempt by the right, then equates that to Dubya’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq as somehow an equivalent move by the left.
What I’m afraid of is that this whole Planned Parenthood controversy is becoming memified, i.e., turned into a self-reinforcing meme.
I’m thinking of the way the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln was used against George W. Bush.
In context, it wasn’t President Bush’s expression of triumphalism; it was for the sailors and aviators on the aircraft carrier, who had in fact accomplished their mission. But it became a stand-in for a narrative about all the reasons lefties didn’t like Bush. Its original meaning disappeared, and the accuracy of that meaning no longer mattered. It became, not a real idea, but a meme, not an argument but a symbol for a collection of biases.
It’s a ridiculous comparison on its face and yet that’s the plan: define what “fair and reasonable” is through Both Sides Do It legerdemain, and then present your carefully defined argument as the only possible and acceptable course forward for any future discussions. He’s literally setting up an argument he can’t lose because he’s made the rules.
If that’s not Glibertarian Douchebaggery 101, I don’t know what is.
by John Cole| 92 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes, General Stupidity, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
Here’s Mollie Hemingway making an interesting comparison regarding the removal of the Confederate flag from public squares:
Basically it’s just such a hysterical atmosphere at this point, that no one can conceive of a person who is against something but also willing to tolerate the expression of that thing. Can we be against Jeff Davis — and also against destroying art and monuments and history just because they involve Jeff Davis?
Symbols are tremendously important, and state sponsorship of symbols is very much worth fighting about. But there are ways to express disapproval of art, monuments and aspects of history without taking the approach of, say, blowing up the Buddhas, to take one recent example.
As they say in the south, “Bless her heart.”
Bonus points for making the rebel case at a rag titled “The Federalist.”
by Zandar| 39 Comments
This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Flash Mob of Hate, Sociopaths, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot, Stuff About Black People Written By a Black Person, WIN THE MORNING
Rich Lowry, in WIN THE MORNING Magazine, with the candlestick, on #BlackLivesMatter.
Let’s be honest: Some black lives really don’t matter. If you are a young black man shot in the head by another young black man, almost certainly no one will know your name. Al Sharpton won’t come rushing to your family’s side with cameras in tow. MSNBC won’t discuss the significance of your death. No one will protest, or even riot, for you. You are a statistic, not a cause. Just another dead black kid in some city somewhere, politically useless to progressives and the media, therefore all but invisible.
The same Memorial Day weekend during which there were nearly 30 shootings and nine mostly young people were murdered in Baltimore, demonstrators were out in force, blocking traffic — not to protest the shootings, of course, but the state of Maryland funding a youth jail in a city that rather desperately needs a youth jail.
When April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks asked White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday what can be done about violence in places like Baltimore, Earnest first suggested passage of more gun-safety laws — even though Baltimore already has some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country.
When Ryan followed up with a query premised on more summer jobs and rec centers as a short-term answer to the shootings, Earnest referred her to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as those of Labor and Education. It was the blind questioning the blind.
Le sigh, le moan.
Pretty sure Starburst Rich here has the full card covered by the halfway point in the tirade, but then again, I think that was his point.
by Zandar| 149 Comments
This post is in: Election 2016, Bring on the Brawndo!, DC Press Corpse, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own, Our Failed Media Experiment, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
When it comes to the Clinton Rules 2.0, It’s not just conservatives working the refs, it’s telling the refs we’re playing Calvinball, where the rules are made up and points don’t really matter. Spongefrommom Loadpants:
When President Bush was selective about who he took questions from, the press ate him alive for it. And Bush was far more open to the press than Hillary’s being (and he was the president). And Hillary is running unopposed which makes the press’s role much more important. Why not err on the side of the truth, particularly when the truth hurts? Every meeting with pre-selected human props should be described that way. Every “event” should be reported in hostile — and more accurate! — terms. “Mrs. Clinton held another scripted and staged event today where volunteers asked pre-arranged safe questions the scandal-plagued candidate was prepared to answer . . .”
I understand the press is liberal, but they also have a very high opinion of themselves. The Clinton campaign is making fools of them. It’s time for some payback.
So according to the luminaries on the right, we’ve reached the point where journalists covering Hillary Clinton at all is now proof that they’re stupid dupes who can no longer be trusted, or worse, partisans in the tank for the Democrats who need to be dealt with. As such, the only option going forward for “fair and balanced” media outlets is to simply and openly attack her at every opportunity.
And that’s not partisan at all, right?
Better question: how many Villagers are going to go along with this?
Forget trying to make the media throw the game, just make a new game where Democrats can’t win.
by Zandar| 109 Comments
This post is in: Getting The Band Back Together, Both Sides Do It!, Flash Mob of Hate, Our Failed Media Experiment, Somewhere a Village is Missing its Idiot
George Stephanopoulos made the mistake of buying the song of the Mighty Wurlitzer and apologizing for his donations to the Clinton Foundation, and as somebody who has been around the noise machine for decades, he should have known that once his blood hit the water, the sharks would come to rip him to pieces.
It has been a rough weekend for ABC News’s embattled chief anchor, George Stephanopoulos, and an even worse Sunday.
On CNN’s Reliable Sources media criticism program, Stephanopoulos’s former ABC News colleague, Carole Simpson, unloaded on the former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton that she said she likes and respects.
“There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” said Simpson, who toiled for two decades at ABC News, notably as the weekend anchor of World News Tonight from 1988 to 2003. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist.”
Thus Simpson attempted to obliterate Stephanopoulos’s claims of impartiality as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up, featuring Hillary Clinton’s status as the prohibitive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
Like Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and another former ABC News colleague, Jeff Greenfield, Simpson said she was “dumbfounded” by Thursday’s revelation that Stephanopoulos failed to disclose $75,000 in recent donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation—this, as he conducted a confrontational April 26 interview with Clinton Foundation critic Peter Schweizer.
“I wanted to just take him by the neck and say, ‘George, what were you thinking?’ Clearly, he was not thinking. I thought it was outrageous,” Simpson said. “And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”
Simpson added that despite Stephanopoulos’s alleged lack of journalistic bona fides, “ABC has made him the face of ABC News, the chief anchor, and I think they’re really caught in a quandary here. While ABC says this was ‘an honest mistake,’ they don’t feel that way. Secretly, they are hopping mad, I am sure.”
It’s kind of hard to feel totally sorry for George the Villager, his Sunday show exists as nothing but empty space to fill with what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed “The View From Nowhere” way back in 2003, and ironically it’s now Stephanopoulos who is caught in this No Man’s Land.
Suddenly his Clintonian past is very much the present, and in the space of a week he’s gone from ABC’s front man to evil Clinton operative, and the long knives are out.
I’d say good riddance to him if there was any chance ABC would install a real journalist at This Week, but then again he was hired for being a Villager in the first place, and everyone knew it. Suddenly that’s an issue and everyone’s circling, looking for signs of weakness.
So yes, I’m torn between seeing somebody who should definitely be in the tumbrel get rolled down the street and hating the sight of another “liberal media” head on the Rough Beast’s wall.
Stinks seeing the bad guys about to score again.