A Year Later

We have a President in the White House, who, like the editorial writers and Sunday morning talk show hosts, refuses to call the GOP out for what it is, a batshit insane caucus of religious fanatics, economic fantasists, and shills for an elite that they can't even begin to understand. Krugman, who's Nobel prize in economics for some reason disqualifies him from intelligent discourse in modern American political discussion, cites Elizabeth Drew and says quite simply, that the man has lost the thread:

Even more alarming, however, is her window on what the White House is thinking:

It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less. This was an arguable interpretation. Nevertheless, the political advisers believed that elections are decided by middle-of-the-road independent voters, and this group became the target for determining the policies of the next two years.OK, I’ve never won a tough election. But neither has Obama! The 2008 race was looking close until Sarah Palin and Lehman came along. And as far as I can tell, this assessment both of what 2010 was about and what matters for 2012 is just ludicrous.

As I recall, two things happened last year: voters were angry about the weak economy, and older voters believed that Obama was going to take away their Medicare and send them to the death panels. And so the way to win those voters back is to cut Medicare and weaken the economy?

A further point: even if Obama really does cut spending, will anyone notice? Even people who are supposedly well informed believe that there was a vast expansion of government under Obama, when in fact there wasn’t. So we’re supposed to believe that independent voters will actually be able to cut through the fog — the deliberate fog of Fox, the he-said-she-said of most other media organizations — and give him credit for spending cuts? Remember, whatever he does Republicans will claim that the government is getting bigger — and news organization will report only that “Democrats say” that this isn’t true.

What a disaster.

The real tragedy in all of this is not laughing Boehner, et all, out of the room. There is no crisis, of course, only a manufactured one that allows the poseurs on the Right to position themselves for their cynical political motives. All the while, the safety net is torn, and Obama misses the opportunity to call them out for what they are. They should almost be commended for their shamelessness, and Obama will and rightly should pay the price for giving them the air they need to survive.

That is all

Howard Beale is Looking Sane...

In all honesty, the rodeo clown is slipping into another dimension. Won't be long now....

War Without End

Jesus. Bring these poor kids home. What in the world are we hoping to accomplish?

Many of the soldiers are in the remote valleys of eastern Afghanistan, forested slivers where outsiders—even those from elsewhere in Afghanistan—have never been welcome and the government's writ never really existed.

"If you don't understand the dynamics, you have no chance of getting it right," Gen. McChrystal said.......

The valley never became one of those places in Afghanistan where the coalition could measure progress in schools and clinics and irrigation projects built. Whatever they built, the Taliban destroyed. There is no local Afghan government here to work with.

"Everybody hates them in the valley," Haji Nizamuddin, a tribal elder in Korengal, said of the Americans. U.S. forces "shoot at people, they raid our houses and kill our women and children." Mr. Nizamuddin stressed that he wasn't pro-Taliban. He, like many people in the valley, simply wanted to be left alone, he said.

Serious Matters

It's hard to believe that these people are serious, but I can assure you, they are.

Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

C'mon.

The lies of the Right

Crooks and Liars has a good rundown of the lies that surround the GOP's attacks on lower and middle class Americans, in the form of a number of clearly misleading and wholly inaccurate talking points. First among these is the widely held belief of Glen Beck and Newt Gingrich fans that 40-50% of all Americans 'pay no taxes'. Read the C&L post, as well as this one, which runs down the top ten lies that the right uses. It is the type of crap that the Teabaggers spew constantly, and it has absolutely no basis in fact.

Heed the Apostate

When you are really looking for the most scathing indictment of a particular religion, such as modern american Republicanism, it's always best to seek the opinion of the apostate, the lapsed believers who feel most ashamed of their formerly held beliefs. David Brock at MediaMatters, the recent comments by David Frum, etc.

and, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, of course. Formerly one of the most fervent supporters of Bush, Cheney, and the criminality of their administration, he now sees the GOP for what it is and has been for years: a party that is "proudly ignorant", trafficking in lies, distortions and fear, devoid of ideas but laden with hate. He quotes approvingly from an article that appeared in The Atlantic:

Senior editor for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it all in a nice neat package: Proud Of Being Ignorant.

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.

This is who they are—the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t “have had all these problems,” this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a “Real American” with no demonstrable interest in “Real America” then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

Well said. The GOP is the party of creationists and climate change deniers; nearly every major GOP politician is anti-science, because they know they won’t get any votes if they don’t toe the right wing line. And increasingly, the barely suppressed racism inherent in this atavistic world view is bubbling to the surface, as we see today in Virginia.

Obama isn't perfect, in many ways he has failed those who most fervently supported him, who saw in him a truly transformative liberal cipher. On the other hand, the loyal opposition at this point is a calumny.