Wednesday, December 10, 2014

AND STILL NO BENEFITS OR PAID SICK DAYS.

While some of those few citizens who did not know that America tortures people basically for the hell of it got an earful from the Senate report -- you can read the Republican response, which basically complains that Democrats are unfairly making torture look bad -- House Republicans held a witch trial at which Congressmen stepped up to hurl carefully crafted and vetted insults at Jonathan Gruber, a freelance employee who had the poor taste to articulate said Congressmen's main political operating principle. Contract employees, beware and follow the dress code, these fuckers are strict!

Conservatives did their best to hoopla this travesty, many claiming that the Democrats released the torture report just to upstage it and thus vitiate its potentially devastating effects (don't laugh, some of them think Gruber's comments will actually convince the Supreme Court to kill Obamacare). But my favorite angle so far is that of National Review Jim Geraghty:
Americans, you got really upset about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. It’s understandable; you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors. 
That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again.
Difference left unmentioned: Romney was the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and Gruber was a fucking temp. Next week, a janitor at the Capitol will sneeze on the statue of Father Junipero Serra and, when this obvious anti-clericalist's voting record reveals him to be a Democrat, all hell will once again break loose.

187 comments:

  1. coozledad12:26 PM

    you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors.

    These guys eat their own head for breakfast and shit it for lunch. His next article will be about the necessity of literacy testing at the polls.

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  2. LittlePig12:31 PM

    "Oh so they poured a little water over his head a few hundred times. That's not nearly the insult of having someone call the American people stupid! I mean we KNOW they're stupid - they elected us! - but one cannot say that in civil society....

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  3. Giant Monster Gamera12:34 PM

    The Republicans call the American people stupid every day on countless talk shows and news broadcasts, they just been conditioned to not hear it.

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  4. many claiming that the Democrats released the torture report just to upstage itMission accomplished, then, largely thanks to Fox News, which is much more interested in cheerleading for torture than in Grubergategate.

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  5. zencomix12:37 PM

    Remember that time a drunk Dick Cheney shot a lawyer in the face and they got the lawyer to apologize for getting in the way of the birdshot?

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  6. Speaking of "upstaging", I assume Grubergate is the new BENGHAZI!!GATE and therefore the worst worst worst thing to ever happen to America?

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  7. mgmonklewis1:12 PM

    You'd think eventually it would get too exhausting for wingnuts to keep getting OUTRAGED about random things on a daily basis — and especially too exhausting to switch the outrage du jour at a moment's notice, whenever the Noise Machine told them to. Who knew the Art Linkletter crowd had such a boundless supply of energy, as long as it was focused on fear, anger, and bile?

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  8. I get a kick out of Geraghty trying to explain to his broad national audience (sure buddy, I have pipe dreams too) why they should be outraged. It's the partisan equivalent of explaining the joke.

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  9. whetstone1:13 PM

    Amidst all the bottomless horror of the torture report, one thing really struck me, odd as it is.

    "In one instance, involving the death of a CIA detainee at COBALT, CIA Headquarters decided not to take disciplinary action against an officer involved, because, at the time, CIA Headquarters had been 'motivated to extract any and all operational information' from the detainee."

    Extracting "any and all operational information" is pretty fucking hard if you kill someone. Where's your ticking time bomb now, assholes? Remind me how high-value they were again?

    The CIA: will torture a mentally disabled man and play his cries for his family. Will not: fire someone for doing the one thing, by their insane logic, that was wrong. I'm starting to think that protecting the homeland was not priority #1.

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  10. mgmonklewis1:13 PM

    P.S.
    the worst thing to ever happen

    I think you're underselling it. NEEDS MOAR OUTRAYJ

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  11. Man, they must have really been upset at the hidden democratic instructions behind (sic) "I far in your general direction" in Spamalot.

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  12. mgmonklewis1:16 PM

    Good point. The true wingnut doesn't need (or want) explanations. Explanations are for libs, commie! Real wingnuts have been trained to have a ragegasm on demand, like deranged Pavlov's dogs.

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  13. See also the shooting of the friend of the Boston Marathon suspect. They try to question this guy and end up shooting him dead. And no one thinks that's a problem even from a mere intelligence gathering perspective? How fucking incompetent do you have to be to end up killing your interrogation subject?

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  14. gocart mozart1:19 PM

    Good times

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  15. gocart mozart1:22 PM

    I propose that the "Gate" suffix be replaced with "Ghazi" for all future fake scandals. GruberGhazi!!!!!!!

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  16. Interrogator incompetence is something that's kind of hard to miss, especially with the information in the report. I understand why we aren't supposed to bring it up - it unduly legitimizes torture if you focus on how ineffective it is. But even so, at some point you kinda have to point out that the interrogators clearly had no idea what the hell they were doing, and given that these are supposed to be our elite agents this makes it questionable whether anyone should have the authority to torture. If nothing else, it would put a stop to the ridiculous Jack Bauer fantasies so many Americans still hold.

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  17. Ubu Imperator1:27 PM

    If The Onion doesn't summarize Gruber's testimony before Issa's committee as "Dumbass Questioned by Assholes", then they're really missing a trick.

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  18. Gromet1:28 PM

    The scandal and threat isn't that Republicans broke with 200+ years of American policy and character to officially sanction torture. It's that Democrats mentioned it.

    And it's just the icing on the cake when you consider the Obama Administration has FOR YEARS done much worse things than mention torture. Remember when they didn't save that one ambassador and their initial talking points had to be revised as new information came to light? And when their IRS made conservative activists obey tax law? And of course the current affront to democracy and civilization: they hired a lawyer to play a minor part in writing a huge law six years ago and it turned out that lawyer had some jerky personal opinions. All part and parcel -- THE GALL OF THESE DEMONRATS.

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  19. DocAmazing1:28 PM

    The American vote is sacrosanct, and that's why the Republicans want to preserve them by preventing people from casting them.

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  20. PersonaAuGratin1:28 PM

    I want to share a bottle of vintage Port Manteau with this comment.

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  21. L Bob Rife1:29 PM

    And were outrageously outraged whenever someone used the term "buckshot" instead of "birdshot" because that makes all the difference, apparently?

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  22. Gromet1:33 PM

    If you don't know exactly how all the parts of a gun work and their proper names, you're not entitled to any opinion on gun laws, libtard.


    Meanwhile, let me share my opinions on capital gains tax law and climate change...

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  23. Brother Yam1:43 PM

    Just have the potential voter spell 'moron' and see what happens...

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  24. zencomix1:45 PM

    I tried explaining to a drunk dick cheney that it's easier to take a lawyer down with buckshot than it is with birdshot, but he said he didn't want to kill him, he just wanted to inflict a bit of pain long enough to get some answers out of him.

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  25. coozledad1:50 PM

    Once you've seen Cheney's birdshot, you lose the habit of speech.

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  26. glennisw1:52 PM

    That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again.
    Didn't Gruber say it ONCE, and some four years after he served as an advisor?
    And I love the notion that the Democrats released a scathing report about the moral bankruptcy and evil of the Bush administration illegally torturing detainees, just to distract the world from a dumb thing some unimportant guy said and a conference a couple years ago. Benghazi!!!

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  27. why will no one write about the revolving door between the cia and the management of america's sports franchises?

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  28. jesus just fuck us all everyone everywhere

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  29. glennisw1:57 PM

    Does anyone wonder, like me, why it's such a big damn deal that Gruber talked about "the stupidity of the American voter," when it wasn't voters that passed the ACA, it was Congressmen?

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  30. glennisw1:59 PM

    It is hilarious, isn't it, that the Republicans's two greatest scandals are based on something someone said on TV once?

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  31. Okay, I'm going to go off on a tangent for a little while. I took a little time to read up on the conservative response to the report - how they're not troubled by the torture but are mortified by the release of the report, and how they're many times more horrified by Gruber and his sinister words. It's sad, but this inverted empathy is nothing new - I've seen it so many times by this point.

    The first time was in some local newspaper article about a do-gooder group giving backpacks to five-year olds whose parents were incarcerated. It was a cute little human interest story, the kind of fluff that papers have always liked and that readers just skim over and move on. But the comments to this article were filled with the most amazing rancor I've ever seen. These people were infuriated, dropping very long comments on how outrageous this was as though it were the worst injustice any of them had ever seen.

    Since then, I've kept track of stories like this and the people who comment on them. Sometimes the paper will use a comment system that allows you to track a person's history, and that's where it gets interesting. Inevitably, these are the kind of people who are compelled to comment on every single story, even if they have nothing to say. You'll see them on a story for something really awful - a mass shooting, a gang rape, an outbreak of disease - and they'll throw out a "Thanks, Obama" or "This wouldn't happen if [insert personal bugaboo]" or some other pithy little remark. You start to think these people are just jaded...and then you hit the human interest story about poor kids getting stuff, and they just explode.

    That's what we're seeing here, this upside-down sense of priorities where so many conservatives spend all of their rage on pointless bullshit and none on something that's genuinely grim. At times, it's downright inhuman. At times, I've wondered what you would have to do to a person to condition them to respond like that. Apparently, all it takes is watching FNC on a daily basis for a few years. Brainwashing is a lot easier than I thought.

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  32. Shorter GOP: You know what REAL torture is? Waking up every day and realizing that poor people might be able to go to the doctor without having to sell a child or two in order to afford medical care.

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  33. Never old:
    http://0.tqn.com/d/politicalhumor/1/S/n/U/moran.jpg

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  34. Give ‘em an inch and they start offering healthcare to sick people. Disgusting.

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  35. See, we should have just piped FAUX into the cells at Gitmo all these years. By this time those detainees would be marching out whistling The Star Spangled Banner and demanding to be allowed to go back to Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan to avenge the deaths of 9/11 on their former countries!

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  36. And they let children into the country who might have been killed otherwise! BASTARDS

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  37. I blame all that Cialis.

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  38. #ethicsintorturereports

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  39. montag22:22 PM

    It is a puzzlement, isn't it? We know it's a calculated hysteria, but, day in and day out, they manage to not only bring it, but make it look natural, too. And none of this tag-team stuff, either--they're doing it en masse.

    In full chorus: "Cabbages, knickers, uh, it's not got a... A BEAK! IT'S OOOOOOOOOOOOOOBAMA'S FAULT!"

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  40. DN Nation2:23 PM

    Yeah, but then Obama fooled voters in 2012 and, um, thingy.

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  41. tigrismus2:25 PM

    Alas, if only Gruber had detained the voters and simulated drowning them over and over until they agreed to support Obamacare.

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  42. DN Nation2:25 PM

    My racist in-laws had an African-American neighbor's house burn down a few years ago. Terrible tragedy, though thankfully the family wasn't at home when it happened.


    In describing this FAMILY'S HOUSE BURNING DOWN, within two minutes my mother-in-law was griping about black cashiers. Within four, Obama.

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  43. tigrismus2:28 PM

    Or just called them stupid at a conference, apparently there's nothing worse than that.

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  44. redoubtagain2:28 PM

    Treason In Defense Of Slavery Two: This Time We'll Just Call Them "Interns" Boogaloo

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  45. montag22:37 PM

    They must have done something like that to Jose Padilla. By the time he got to trial, after three and a half years, his lawyers said he was useless to help with his own defense, because he was worried anything he might say could harm George Bush's welfare.

    Man, only a 24/7 diet of Fox News could do that.

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  46. DN Nation3:08 PM

    Side note here- They have an African-American family living next door and every time I have the misfortune of talking to her, there'll be some derogatory junk tossed my way about the next-door blacks. They litter. They're all on welfare. They beat their animals. They've got people coming and going, it's like a drug dealing operation. And on and on.

    One of our thankfully short visits down there, I actually got a glipse of the people living there as they opened their door to let some friends come in. This is what they looked like: http://i.imgur.com/sYT2Jjd.jpg



    Meanwhile, the in-laws are poor white racist trash through and through. Know who I'd be distraught living next to?

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  47. KatWillow3:10 PM

    The problem is Gruber stated a factual truth: Americans are stupid. Conservatives can handle torture, financial collapse, climate change, and much much more, but they fear and loathe FACTS.

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  48. Actually, the thing that gets me about all this is how our elite agencies managed to look at nearly a century of experience with winkling information out of people, and decide that none of that means anything.

    During WWI, both the British and the Germans figured out that you can get the vast majority of prisoners to reveal damn near everything they know if you can get those prisoners to trust you. During WWII, American and German interrogators developed this to an artform. Americans used it quite effectively right through the Cold War. And while there were all kinds of cowboy assholes during Viet Nam who went in for torturing prisoners (the infamous Tan Sunhut Telephone was popular, as was shoving people out of helicopters), the really effective interrogators did it the old-fashioned way--by talking gently to the prisoner.

    But I guess Bush and Cheney blew all that off the same way they blew off the Bin Laden determined to strike in US memo. And they got about the same results--a disaster for America.

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  49. Yeah, odd how White trailer trash looks at people, especially Blacks, and immediately starts painting racist pictures that are mostly a reflection of their own bad habits and predilections.

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  50. JennOfArk3:23 PM

    Kinda like this:

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  51. . . . the moral compass it has points due south.

    I thought it pointed straight down to Hell.

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  52. I would like to sign a full confession of my love for this comment.

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  53. StringOnAStick3:27 PM

    FNC brainwashing readily finds a home in someone with an authoritarian mindset, where it propagates like a syphilis spirochete. My dad is one; he was always a Bircher/James Watt lover, but it used to be that my mom could be talked down easily. Now that they are retired and get at least 2 hours of FNC per evening, they are both spiteful, hateful people who see no joy or goodness in the world, just people who "need to be punished". FAUX makes a good portion of our elders into total assholes.

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  54. He fooled them TWICE!

    Besides--just try to imagine how Republicans feel. After all, they've read the ACA thousands of times, voted on it dozens of times, and talked about it on the radio, on TV, on the floor of Congress, and in town-hall meetings across the country. And apparently the Republicans are also exceptionally stupid since the ACA became law right before their very own eyes!

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  55. JennOfArk3:30 PM

    I've heard you talk about this before, String, and I'm so sorry that you've lost your parents to Fox. My mom's husband is 93 and can be a complete asshole (and racist) but he's still a Democrat. If he was a Fox viewer, I'd insist she divorce him.

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  56. Oh, put a cork in it!

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  57. JennOfArk3:32 PM

    I would like to be rectally-fed by this comment.

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  58. Old joke:

    An elderly couple walk into a divorce attorney's office and say they want a divorce. The attorney questions them for a bit and finally says, "You're both in your 90s, and you've been married for 70-odd years. If you've both been so unhappy for the last 40 years, why did you wait so long to get a divorce?"
    "Well," says the woman, "We wanted to wait until the children passed because we knew this would kill them."

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  59. My elderly mother was propagandized for years into all the hatreds one might expect from a steady diet of Fox - especially for minorities and gays, and any movements to expand rights for either. But her oldest and dearest friend was Native American, and her best new pals were the lesbian couple across the street and the two men and a baby next door. When asked if this might be a slight contradiction - between what she had been programmed to feel for the general, and what she actually felt for the individual case - she would sputter for a moment and go silent.

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  60. I can get behind that sentiment.

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  61. StringOnAStick3:38 PM

    Thanks for that, I appreciate it. I always knew my dad was a RWNJ, but watching how much FAUX has turned them both into truly awful people is really shocking (I'm sure the lifelong alcohol abuse has helped). For there to be any justice in the world, Murdock and Ailes need to experience just a smidgen of the misery they've infected the world with.

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  62. montag23:58 PM

    At the time that Abu Ghraib popped into public consciousness, there was mention that many of the Army interrogators trying to get information out of captured Nazis during WWII would just engage them in conversation, and some would play chess with them, counting on them to let something slip if their attention was diverted.

    And along comes the genius and his amorally flexible sidekick, and they decide the best way to approach the problem is to shove the chess set up the detainee's ass and then stomp on him.

    It has to be said: neither Bush nor Cheney were or are smart men. Diabolical, dissembling ("disassembling," as the Moron-In-Chief lectured the press), sinister, clever in their own ways, but not smart. Both of them had a penchant for failing upwards, and that convinced them they were something that they were not. They were, down deep, just a couple of rich, mean, lying fuck-ups.

    And the marvel of it all is that, even though we know this to be true, know that they are our banality of evil, our Eichmanns, they continue to draw their government pensions, continue to be treated as elder statesmen, and are carefully airbrushed out of the photos depicting their crimes.

    In a way, we shouldn't be surprised about that. Horrified, maybe. Appalled, certainly. But not surprised, because they're exactly the sort of people our elites designed to lead us and rewards when they fail us.

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  63. Christopher Hazell4:06 PM

    Okay, so, the minority response to the report:


    Many of the Study's conclusions and underlying claims are offered as matters of unequivocal fact. As an example, the Study asserts "CIA officers conducted no research on successful interrogation strategies during the drafting of the [Memorandum of Notification] nor after it was issued." Proving a negative is often very difficult, and in this particular case it is difficult to understand how such an absolute assertion can be made without interviewing the affected witnesses or even citing one documentary source that might support such a claim


    Yeah, proving a negative like that is tough.


    You know what's not tough? Disproving it. You hand the committee documents saying when and how you conducted your research.


    Let's rephrase this paragraph:


    Even after several years, the Committee was unable to conclusively determine whether research on successful interrogation techniques were used when drafting the Memorandum of Notification.


    How, may I ask, does that constitute a defense of the CIA? According to the sadistic fucks in the CIA and the Committee Minority, this is one of the CIA's most important programs of all time. The war on terror is so hugely important that any crime is justified in fighting it, but not so important that the CIA should bother explaining or thinking about why they make the choices they do?


    What fucking sense does that make?


    What fucking sense does that make?


    God damn it, fucking Republicans, you're willing to give up your love of small government, your belief in government efficiency and your belief in government accountability in order to defend torture.


    Fuck you so much, you immoral shits.

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  64. Christopher Hazell4:15 PM

    I'm starting to think that protecting the homeland was not priority #1.



    It can't possibly have been, and I want every non-evil person to keep pounding away at this: Even if you somehow think torture is justified, the report exposes profound ineptitude in the actual execution of the program, ineptitude that conflicted with the stated goals of the torture.


    Even if you think torture was justified, this report still damns the CIA.


    Incidentally, I've just started reading a biography of Kim Philby, and the author is clearly baffled and offended that he'd continue to work for Stalin after Stalin killed most of Philby's mentors in his insane purges.


    Spies are kind of a mystery to me, because during the Cold War the people who were deep in the KGB, CIA and similar agencies could not possibly have believed they were working to make the world a better place for the helpless. To think that would've required an insanely delusional worldview.

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  65. Three-Chin Chutney4:22 PM

    Pretty sure we're all in agreement here over this in that both sides are guilty. They both do it.

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  66. montag24:28 PM

    "To think that would've required an insanely delusional worldview."

    And here, you get to the crusty nub of intelligence agencies and the people who run them.

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  67. Three-Chin Chutney4:30 PM

    Little Pig, how's the doxxing gig coming along?

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  68. Ellis_Weiner4:30 PM

    I want to "appropriate" and post on FB the first two sentences of this comment, and indeed, I have done so (w/ some expansion).

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  69. Three-Chin Chutney4:35 PM

    I've started a new website. It's called 4chin.

    It's like 4chan, but it's just for pro-abortion folks and fake rape accusers.

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  70. Ellis_Weiner4:36 PM

    They're not carping on the "stupid" part, but on the "transparent" part. Some Repub bright boy kept pounding Gruber with, "WAS the creation of the Affordable Care Act transparent or NOT?" I was dying for Gruber to say, "Yes and no," and to say that such a question is like asking, "Were the people who assembled the Space Shuttle in a good mood or not?"

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  71. DarkAvengerGonePRIVATE4:38 PM

    Hi my name is Frances and I am a 50 something year old half wetback who is unemployed and I claim to have a 'very healthy' relationship with that fat slob Amanda Marcottey

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  72. Ellis_Weiner4:39 PM

    I of course have seen this a hundred times, but only now do I fully appreciate the star-spangled head scarf and the Cardinals shirt. Well, that's what's great about art, innit?

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  73. DarkAvengerGonePRIVATE4:44 PM

    Can I sign up secretly? I don't want anyone to know. It's the whole privacy thing. You know buddy?

    ReplyDelete
  74. DarkAvengerGonePRIVATE4:45 PM

    Yo Pere, I had to change my profile. I love this secretive stuff. Your Pal, Frank

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  75. Three-Chin Chutney4:50 PM

    Yes. We're thinking of going on a members-only basis. Seeing a lot of demand so far.

    You get a free monogrammed 'Members Only' jacket when you sign up.

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  76. Brother Yam4:52 PM

    I'm happy to see you're pickin' up what I'm puttin' down.

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  77. Small quibble, Gruber is an economist.

    Carry on.

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  78. Brother Yam4:55 PM

    Cognitive dissonance is a cruel mistress. My MIL is the same way. The mind, she boggles...

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  79. WORST THING EVER EVER BEYOND THE GREAT DEPRESSION, WORLD WAR III, 9/11 AND THE END OF THE DINOSAURS COMBINED TIMES ELEVENTY-HUNDRED!

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  80. Shitstain Frank is following me on Disquis. Whatever.

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  81. The PC term is rectal rehydration.

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  82. My wish for people like that is for every policy they push to be enacted into law. And then those people lose all their money and have to live under those laws.

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  83. I have two of his personalities following me. He contains multitudes.

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  84. mgmonklewis5:14 PM

    Now that's got a good beat and is easy to dance to. I give it 91/100.

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  85. Look! Here on page 1,126! This "T" was not crossed properly. This completely invalidates the entire report. Indeed, it calls into question the motives of the people who prepared and released this report. Only someone who truly hates America and capitalism would have deliberately failed to properly cross a "T." We need to waterboard some people to find out who's behind this.

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  86. Or they're just dicks. Maybe they'd be less dickish if you could change certain factors in their lives, but the dickishness would still be there.

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  87. montag25:18 PM

    Same here. I think it's his way of saying, "ignore me, willya? Well, watch this!"

    That, or he's just another flasher in a digital raincoat stalking me.

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  88. Sadly, I can see that exact dialogue coming from one of the Congressional Teabaggers.

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  89. It keeps following me as well, and I keep deleting him.

    Just when you though it couldn't get any more creepy and pitiful.

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  90. Republican The Math strikes again!
    Gay couple getting married = Forcing straight people to marry gay people.
    African-Americans killing African-Americans and being sent to jail = Police killing African-Americans and escaping prosecution.
    Some schlub mouthing off = Republican candidate for president making a comment in a private meeting about 47% of the country.

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  91. I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but the GOP would have a completely different response to torture if the victims were guys named Franz. And if the torturers were brown we'd be deafened by the outraged squeals.

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  92. montag25:33 PM

    Ah, well, this is why it's pointless to try to reason with the insane. It's bit like saying there's equivalency between a banana and a thunderstorm. It just doesn't make a lick of sense.

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  93. Projection, always and forever.

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  94. Isn't that 99% of all right wing commentary? HERE'S A BAD BAD THING!! HOW BAD? I'LL TELL YOU HOW BAD...

    Because you don't want people getting outraged about the wrong thing. Heaven forfend.

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  95. davdoodles6:02 PM

    Me too. I guess Frankie Sock-Humper wants us to know what it would feel like to be Matthew Broderick if Jim Carrey's character in the Cable Guy was instead played by a chihuahua turd smeared on a manhole cover.
    .

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  96. A few people have pointed out how this has made the "War on Christmas" rigmarole even more preposterous. It's already the worst sort of self-obsessed, first-world-problem nonsense, but coming as it does so soon after multiple unarmed black men were killed by police officers who just walked away, their talk of "persecution" seems downright cruel. Gotta love these guys - they'll shrug off a dead teenager like it's nothing, but then react to hearing "Happy Holidays" like...well, like their son was just shot by the cops.

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  97. Christopher Hazell6:07 PM

    I was reading the book Top Secret America, and the authors point out that if a social program were as expensive, sprawling, and poorly documented as the war on terror, the Republicans would be going after it with machetes.

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  98. montag26:11 PM

    And, of course, the exegesis is: "IT'S REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD!"

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  99. Gay couple getting married = Forcing straight people to marry gay people.

    They see it as a threat to straight marriage--probably because so many of them are actually closeted gay people and the only thing keeping them in the closet is the force of (highly discriminatory) law.

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  100. (don't laugh, some of them think Gruber's comments will actually convince the Supreme Court to kill Obamacare).

    The Supreme Court will happily subject Obamacare to rectal hummus infusions up to the point of death.
    ~

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  101. John Wesley Hardin6:20 PM

    "It's bit like saying there's equivalency between a banana and a thunderstorm." Well, have you ever tried to peel a thunderstorm?

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  102. Christopher Hazell6:20 PM

    It's not even just that, it's this:


    Majority: The CIA did no research!


    Minority: Nuh-uh, we actually don't know whether the CIA did research.


    Imagine if the situation were reversed:


    Republicans: Welfare fraud is prevalent!


    Democrats: Nuh-uh, we actually have never even studied how prevalent welfare fraud is, so you have no way of knowing that!


    Would any Republican put up with that answer for even a second?


    One of the reasons I despise the Republican party is the way they expect way more rigor out of programs to help the poor than they do out of programs to torture people to death.


    I can't see that attitude as anything but profoundly evil.

    ReplyDelete
  103. Can I interest you in my DVD of banana chasing? We get dangerously close to one banana, and we have some time-lapse footage of a bunch of bananas turning brown.

    ReplyDelete
  104. montag26:24 PM

    It's a wonderful diversion though, to blame a lack of transparency on the Dems. They know the process wasn't transparent, because their own favorite lobbyists were feeding them language to put in the bill--everyone's favorite lobbyists were doing it. Shit, the head staffer on Baucus' committee was an industry flack that went back to the private sector the moment the bill was passed. Billy Tauzin, the Republicans' favorite greasy sleazeball, got a dozen invites to the White House to plead Big Pharma's case, and that damned sure wasn't exactly transparent.

    Fer chrissakes, he might as well have been screaming, "I ASK you AGAIN. IS WATER WET?"

    ReplyDelete
  105. davdoodles6:25 PM

    "The scandal and threat isn't that Republicans broke with 200+ years of American policy and character to officially sanction torture. It's that Democrats mentioned it."
    As always with these self-centered weirdos. Despite their "moral" posturing, they really don't give a rat's arse about torture, gays, abortions or anything besides themselves. They don't care what happens elswhere, so long as they don't have to think about it.
    Where you or I might read The Emperor's New Clothes as a cautionary tale about groupthink, they see it as a story about an uppity little shit who embarrassed his elders by speaking the simple truth.
    .

    ReplyDelete
  106. montag26:26 PM

    Or organ failure.

    ReplyDelete
  107. smut clyde6:27 PM

    $80 million dollars to a quack psychologist for crap advice. Well.

    ReplyDelete
  108. Christopher Hazell6:28 PM

    The thing is, Romney's remarks were an indicator that he would say ridiculous, indefensible nonsense if he thought it would get him ahead, and many people thought this was a bad quality in a leader which would lead to trouble going forward.


    Now, if your reaction to Gruber is "I really don't want to hire him to do anything in the future because he'll be a PR nightmare" or even "I really don't want to hire him to do anything in the future because I value open, clear communication more than he does" then I don't think there are many people who would criticize you for that.


    But the thing is, if we want evidence of how transparent Obama-care is, we don't need to speculate based on the character of the people who wrote it; the law already exists.


    This Gruber thing seems to me to be a bit like saying "Mitt Romney's 47% remarks provide startling proof that he was incapable of managing the Olympics."


    Like, Gruber's remarks are fair game for making guesses about his future performance, but his past performance already exists. If we want to know about it we should look at what he did, rather than what he said.

    ReplyDelete
  109. Gosh, "transparency"?

    Anyone remember Cheney's closed-door energy policy meetings with the energy companies?

    ReplyDelete
  110. Tortured people don't get taxpayer money.

    ReplyDelete
  111. banana chasing


    pardon me while I have a strange interlude with the Urban Dictionary, just in case...

    ReplyDelete
  112. FrankMarcotty6:35 PM

    Can you intro me to your in laws? I really like their thinking style.

    ReplyDelete
  113. FrankMarcotty6:36 PM

    Yo Bro,

    Can you believe all these libtards? Talking about cops the way they are? What a disgrace. My bet. Most are brothers? Thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
  114. "Waterboard that insolent little whelp!"

    ReplyDelete
  115. FrankMarcotty6:36 PM

    My wish. You get a job and contribute to society. Stop being a fookin whiner.

    ReplyDelete
  116. http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2014-11/13/17/enhanced/webdr01/enhanced-17570-1415917663-5.jpg

    Look at them.

    "TORTURE GOOD! HEALTH INSURANCE FOR POORS EVIL!"
    ~

    ReplyDelete
  117. They're in dres-ses, they're in dres-ses...

    ReplyDelete
  118. FrankMarcotty6:39 PM

    Doodles,

    You world class fookin moron. Get a clue. Problem is, you are mentally not stable. Sorry bro, keep sucking on obozo's tits dirt bag

    ReplyDelete
  119. FrankMarcotty6:39 PM

    Did you google or use a dictionary?

    ReplyDelete
  120. Christopher Hazell6:39 PM

    The people who torture them do, though; the report talks about the lack of experience that the two budding serial killers had and the millions of dollars their company was paid, and the way they themselves evaluated the effectiveness of their own program.


    And of course there's all the costs to house the torture victims.


    I can't overemphasize this enough: Even if you are an amoral mercenary concerned only with getting the most bang for taxpayer buck or only with extracting intelligence at any cost, there is a lot in this report that should make your hair stand on end.

    ReplyDelete
  121. FrankMarcotty6:41 PM

    Get a real name jerk off. You and Springsteen can wear your beanie and eat kifitafish together Jew Bag

    ReplyDelete
  122. FrankMarcotty6:41 PM

    Stop following me douche bag

    ReplyDelete
  123. Thing is, nobody is in front of Congress, or even on FAUX, detailing those costs and fretting about the amount of money going to it all.

    Sick thing I just realized - it's like it's been all free.

    ReplyDelete
  124. FrankMarcotty6:42 PM

    Are you and Roy still banging each other in the arse?

    ReplyDelete
  125. FrankMarcotty6:43 PM

    Go pound sand arse hole

    ReplyDelete
  126. smut clyde6:43 PM

    the interrogators clearly had no idea what the hell they were doing

    Various people have pointed out that the CIA's techniques were based on SERE counter-interrogation training... they were using techniques designed to extract false confessions.

    The Wikipedia editors do not pull any punches:
    Mitchell had never conducted an interrogation, had no training as an interrogator, had no expertise in al Qaeda and no familiarity with the organization, did not speak Arabic and had no training in radical Islam.Mitchell nonetheless said he could design and implement an interrogation plan for alleged al Qaeda suspects.[1]
    ...
    In April 2009, the CIA canceled Mitchell and Jessen's contracts, after having paid US$81 million.[1] The CIA Inspector General concluded that there was no scientific reason to believe that the program Mitchell designed was medically safe or would produce reliable information.[7] The CIA agreed as part of the contract to provide legal costs for Mitchell and Jessen of at least $5 M if necessary.[8]

    ReplyDelete
  127. FrankMarcotty6:44 PM

    Hey look it's Pere. Did you get a job yet loser? I see you can't give up the Internet. You must be a fat slob

    ReplyDelete
  128. J Neo Marvin6:44 PM

    It's very telling that one of the troll's worst epithets is to accuse various commenters of having a healthy relationship with someone.

    ReplyDelete
  129. FrankMarcotty6:44 PM

    You still finger banging?

    ReplyDelete
  130. Let me guess - Mirror Universe Tiny Tim, right?

    ReplyDelete
  131. smut clyde6:45 PM

    Just look at it!

    ReplyDelete
  132. When it isn't "fook"in'.

    ReplyDelete
  133. FrankMarcotty6:46 PM

    Yo Bro,

    What's the deal? You still ready to join the young republicans club? I can send you info. Then we can destroy these libtards together.

    Miss you Bro

    ReplyDelete
  134. FrankMarcotty6:46 PM

    Just shut the fuck up idiot

    ReplyDelete
  135. FrankMarcotty6:47 PM

    God Bless Geore Zimmerman. A true American HERO

    ReplyDelete
  136. FrankMarcotty6:47 PM

    Wow, you are soooooo smart. Fook off douche bag

    ReplyDelete
  137. FrankMarcotty6:48 PM

    Caprio's Copy Pasta??? Loser

    ReplyDelete
  138. FrankMarcotty6:48 PM

    No thanks. Would rather stick my finger up my ass

    ReplyDelete
  139. FrankMarcotty6:49 PM

    I'm horny. You interested

    ReplyDelete
  140. FrankMarcotty6:50 PM

    Do me a favor. Just Fook off

    ReplyDelete
  141. FrankMarcotty6:50 PM

    Hi my name is Frances and I am a 50 something year old half wetback who is unemployed and I claim to have a 'very healthy' relationship with that fat slob Amanda Marcottey

    ReplyDelete
  142. FrankMarcotty6:52 PM

    There you are. I see you haven't changed your picture you half a queer. You look like a pedophile.

    ReplyDelete
  143. FrankMarcotty6:52 PM

    Fook you boi

    ReplyDelete
  144. Speaking of rectal feeding...

    ReplyDelete
  145. FrankMarcotty7:00 PM

    Hahhaha Pere. You fookin retard

    ReplyDelete
  146. I would say we should all get together and get him laid, but I can't see inflicting that on any woman, no matter what she was paid.

    ReplyDelete
  147. montag27:12 PM

    No shit. That's probably one of the strangest aspects of this--it's a fucking free-for-all romp in sacks of money, literally thousands of new programs springing up all over the country, and every one of them a contractor's wet dream. Virtually no oversight, and everyone afraid to say, "no, enough's enough," for fear of being called out as soft on terrorism. I'm surprised Duke Cunningham wasn't running one of `em from jail.

    But, it's part and parcel for Repug governance today--the more they spend on this wasteful, useless and intrusive shit, the more they can claim needs to be cut from social programs. And they're doing their best to permanently institutionalize this spending in the same way that was done with defense at the beginning of the Cold War.

    It's out-of-control bugfuck insane as policy, but there's a madman's logic behind it.

    ReplyDelete
  148. montag27:15 PM

    And that was certainly a bargain price compared to a lot of other expenditures.

    We're long overdue for another Operation Ill Wind.

    ReplyDelete
  149. StringOnAStick7:19 PM

    It's the posture of a 4 year old kid as adopted by this "adult" that really makes it sing.

    ReplyDelete
  150. StringOnAStick7:30 PM

    Feel free to see the interview up on Raw Story, where this asshole says that "actionable intelligence gained through enhanced interrogation" is preferable to "blowing up grannie with a drone". Wait; I thought we were the godless moral relativists?

    ReplyDelete
  151. StringOnAStick7:40 PM

    Revealing even a hint of just how much is spent on the CIA and the black portion of the federal budget is something they've been very, very good at avoiding. It's like they sense it might cause a bit of unrest or something.

    ReplyDelete
  152. montag28:33 PM

    Oh, I think that's well beyond our collective net worth. You could buy McMansions for the homeless with that kind of money.

    ReplyDelete
  153. smut clyde8:55 PM

    I would like to send a bottle of real pain to my sham friends.

    ReplyDelete
  154. smut clyde9:04 PM

    The Emperor's New Clothes
    HC Andersen was an acute observer of denial and the mechanisms of cognitive-dissonance reduction.
    He hit the jackpot with that story... the Danish royal establishment basically pulled him 'inside the tent' and paid him well to remove the element of political satire from his fiction.

    ReplyDelete
  155. smut clyde9:06 PM

    He is also a proud member of Amnesty International.

    ReplyDelete
  156. tigrismus9:06 PM

    No, but I was once struck by latundan.

    ReplyDelete
  157. ken_lov9:17 PM

    Conservatives are pretending Gruber speaks for Obama. That's why they harp on about him being 'the architect of Obamacare' and wave around random bits of info about how many times Gruber visited the White House and so on. The intention is to make people think Gruber's comments were just an echo of the president's.

    ReplyDelete
  158. ken_lov9:24 PM

    The systematic destruction of Gruber will have bad long-term consequences for any professional thinking of accepting contract work for the government. It signals that work connected with any contentious program (and these days that means just about all of them) runs the risk of being unfairly smeared and dragged into the national bipartisan cat fighting.


    I bet many an up and coming economist watching what's happened to Gruber will have resolved to stick to private sector work in future, and that is the community's loss.

    ReplyDelete
  159. Another Kiwi9:26 PM

    Was that for licensing the music they played at the somewhat bewildered taxi drivers and plumbers who had been ratted out by their in laws?

    ReplyDelete
  160. i...neither Bush nor Cheney were or are smart men.


    Bush is your basic dry-drunk rich man's son and his laughably poor record at running anything is well-documented. Cheney, on the other hand, was/is every bit as smart as he was/is wicked. He's a philosophically skewed human being with an out-sized ego who spent a long career studying the byzantine corridors of power in DC and employed all of this knowledge as dramatically as he could while he was Veep. He's a syphilitic sore on the boil of the shit-stained ass of Satan, but he's no dummy. If you can plow through a book that you know you're going to hurl at the wall every few pages, I highly recommend Bartmon Gellman's excellent Angler; The Cheney Vice Presidency. Because we all need a good cry every once in a while.

    ReplyDelete
  161. Another Kiwi9:35 PM

    Remember they fired most of the interpreters at the same time.

    ReplyDelete
  162. shocktreatment9:37 PM

    Don't ever stand under ripening Lacatan, either...

    ReplyDelete
  163. shocktreatment9:41 PM

    Never eat bananas in a thunder storm... Go inside.


    Sorrysorry sorry, I think I need a nap or something.

    ReplyDelete
  164. montag29:42 PM

    Nope, I disagree. Cunning, yes. Able to navigate to sources of power, yes. But, this is a man who was consistently wrong about most of the positions he took and the actions he prompted, especially during Iran-Contra. His time as Sec. of Defense was marked by extraordinary incompetence, and no small amount of what can be seen in hindsight as self-dealing. He very nearly destroyed Halliburton in his single-minded determination to acquire a liability- and debt-ridden Dresser Industries, and the only thing that saved the company was KBR's sudden usefulness because of a war that Cheney lied the country into initiating.



    Clever, cunning, yes. Smart, no.

    ReplyDelete
  165. AGoodQuestion10:12 PM

    Jonathan Gruber cares about the uninsured and had some expertise the administration could use. He can also come off as a smug dick. That's one in three things he has in common with Jim Geraghty. Apparently not enough for them to be buddies.

    ReplyDelete
  166. smut clyde10:15 PM

    Apparently Mitchell "had reviewed research on 'learned helplessness,' [...] He theorized that inducing such a state could
    encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information."

    Evidently his review did not go as far as the last decade or two, in which competent psychologists rejected Seligmann's learned-helplessness concept as a laboratory artefact.

    ReplyDelete
  167. AGoodQuestion10:25 PM

    When newspapers run letters to the editor, they've always generally leaned toward correspondents who could write in complete sentences and had at least a thin veneer of knowing what they were talking about. When news organizations display comment sections online you see a lot of people entirely lacking in an informed opinion but with a profound sense of personal spite that they feel compelled to slather over everything. This is a bad thing as far as maintaining your faith in humanity is concerned. It is, however, useful if you want to track certain pathologies.

    ReplyDelete
  168. redoubtagain10:27 PM

    What's going to happen is that the 114th Congress is going to hire favored contractors to do nefarious stuff we haven't even thought of yet, and no one is going to say boo, because Republican. (Blackwater? Halliburton? Contractors.)

    ReplyDelete
  169. AGoodQuestion10:33 PM

    If you don't mind my saying so, coming to this site and hearing stories like that always makes me especially grateful for my own parents. They have a very different perspective.

    ReplyDelete
  170. Kirk Cameron's imam would like a word, if you please.

    ReplyDelete
  171. AGoodQuestion10:38 PM

    Eerily similar to what Pere Ubu says about Jose Padilla, no?

    ReplyDelete
  172. AGoodQuestion10:41 PM

    I remember Mary Matalin went on Meet the Press or one of those depressing gabfests to browbeat everyone into agreeing it wasn't a big deal. Now if Joe Biden was half in the bag and shot some guy in the face would James Carville or any other pundit go out of their way to defend him? Not on his side of the hack gap!

    ReplyDelete
  173. AGoodQuestion10:44 PM

    This is the Yakov Smirnov version. Joke explains you.

    ReplyDelete
  174. AGoodQuestion10:52 PM

    You can make six or seven figures just giving seminars where you explain to law enforcement personnel that Muslims are inherently evil and primitive. In the age of the War on Terror, "fiscal conservatives" are even more full of shit than they were before.

    ReplyDelete
  175. bargal2011:32 PM

    Ha, it's so sweet that you think the torture committed in the last 13 years was somehow a break in the American character of the previous 200+ years.

    ReplyDelete
  176. Ah, so we agree. A fucktard that should be rotting in a jail cell, yet smart enough to live comfortably in retirement and have half the press of the world's greatest power masturbate to his image.

    ReplyDelete
  177. I seem to recall that Bush canned the interpreters because they were gay. Good a reason as any to get rid of one of your most valuable assets during wartime.

    You know, this brings back all sorts of unpleasant memories of how shabbily gay people were treated under Bush--and it was intentional policy, too.

    ReplyDelete
  178. montag211:41 PM

    It is our fate in this age to be surrounded by weak minds.

    ReplyDelete
  179. Pajama boyghazi!

    Didn't quite roll off the tongue the way I thought it would.

    ReplyDelete
  180. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person12:35 AM

    (don't laugh, some of them think Gruber's comments will actually convince the Supreme Court to kill Obamacare)

    Don't cry, they may be right...

    ReplyDelete
  181. 4chin Chutney5:30 AM

    Both sides have a part on this.

    ReplyDelete
  182. Chutney Marcotte8:56 AM

    As liberals we should admit our silent complicity with Obama's drone program that annihilates innocent children. Both sides do it. Just being honest here, innocents dying in the name of counter-terrorism seems a harsher punishment than KSM drinking a lot of water and not getting a full 8 hours of sleep every night in order to save American lives.

    We can do better. We need to stop our charades game.

    Who among us besides me is willing to speak out for some semblance of liberal intellectual honesty? Who will carry my torch when I get exhausted speaking for our side?

    ReplyDelete
  183. What are you? Rational?

    ReplyDelete
  184. billcinsd1:06 PM

    Wait, I thought there names were Leopold Mitchell and Loeb Jesson. Maybe those are middle names.

    ReplyDelete