Wednesday, May 13, 2015

AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO ONE SOME GOOD.

There's been a lot of sputtering among the brethren as Republican Presidential candidates run screaming from W's Iraq War (Washington Times: "As GOP hopefuls flee Iraq War, Rubio to tout hawk credentials"; The Hill: "Rubio: I wouldn't go into Iraq either"). The prize, however, goes to Quin Hillyer at National Review. After some stuff about how Saddam Was a Very Bad Man and there were so WMD (or "weapons of mass murder... WMM — a better term than WMD" -- Hillyer has some marketing skills), he gets to the money shot:
Fifth, while this is only a satellite effect of our involvement in Iraq, it actually served as a net-plus politically for George W. Bush in his re-election effort against John Kerry — a net-plus without which Bush probably would not have won. This is from memory, but I think the “for-or-against” Iraq poll questions in that campaign were about a net wash, but the “who do you trust to be strong in defending American interests” question still favored Bush significantly enough to have made the difference — along with high turnout in anti–gay-marriage initiatives — between winning and losing. And if anybody thinks that subsequent Bush performance made that a pyrrhic victory, I have two names for them: Roberts and (especially) Alito. As frustrating as the Supreme Court is, imagine how badly off the country would be if Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor had been replaced by justices Laurence Tribe and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry. Ugh. 
So, hundreds of thousands dead and Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins, but at least Bush got reelected and a couple of wingnuts on the Court. Purple fingers all around, not all of them caused by gangrene.

UPDATE. In comments, Jay B shorters this one "I like to think your son died so that Sam Alito can deny you healthcare." (All the comments are good, definitionally.)

Plus I'd like to correct "Iraq and our nation's foreign policy credibility in smoldering ruins"; Iraq's may still be smoldering, but the ruins of our credibility are not; they're cool, have kudzu growing over them, and show little evidence of their former exalted state, besides mass.

142 comments:

  1. sharculese10:23 PM

    " — along with high turnout in anti–gay-marriage initiatives — "



    Is this gonna become a thing for wingers? Little asides about the halcyon days when 'no homo' was a positive in election times. Sure yeah, let's have a new form of reactionary tears to nourish us like mother's milk.

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  2. tigrismus10:31 PM

    I have two names for them: Roberts and (especially) Alito. As
    frustrating as the Supreme Court is, imagine how badly off the country
    would be if Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor had been replaced by
    justices Laurence Tribe and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry. Ugh.


    Oh my god, I'm DROOLING.

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  3. tigrismus10:32 PM

    Nope, it's weeping. Sorry.

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  4. PROTIP: Weeping: Eyes. Drooling: Mouth.


    Also, if your nose runs & your feet smell you're built upside down.

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  5. Saddam Was a Very Bad Man and there were so WMD

    Yeah, Rummy sold them to him. Republicans were pretty happy about that back when they still worked, aka the 1980s.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r42oejmpkgw
    ~

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  6. sharculese11:08 PM

    Did Hillyer just google 'liberal law professor?' Does he really think Tribe would have been Kerry's first pick for the court?

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  7. Did Hillyer just google 'liberal law professor?'He picked Hillary Rodham Clinton, so probably not.

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  8. Yeah, they just ended up being not worth shit in the long run. That's the Reagan administration for you.

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  9. "weapons of mass murder... WMM — a better term than WMD"Oh, Jesus "Personally crucified by Obama" Christ, Hillyer. Why not cut to the chase and direly note how Saddam had lots and lots of rocks to throw? It probably would have been somewhat awkward for Colin Powell to appear at the UN with the insinuation that the Iraqi government possessed guns ... though at least that wouldn't have required peddling flagrantly mendacious horseshit.

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  10. There's not much this liberal queermo would like more than the gop constantly bringing up what colossal dickbags Theyve been

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  11. M. Krebs11:28 PM

    Anyone want to feel more suicidal?

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  12. Is this gonna become a thing for wingers?
    They're still coming up with ways to say "uppity," so yes.


    Little asides about the halcyon days when 'no homo' was an electoral winner?Well, how many decades did it take for the Civil Rights Act to stop being an electoral winner for them? They're just optimistically laying the groundwork.

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  13. Found the audio.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7INlnug3ZI

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  14. Gromet11:38 PM

    I'm sorry, I had no idea anyone was excited about Alito. I thought the spectrum of opinion on him ran from Oh FFS up to Sure Whatever. Really the only thing I know about him is that it turns out joining white supremacy themed alumni organizations is not the career momentum killer I would have thought.

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  15. JennOfArk11:54 PM

    Is that the sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

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  16. JennOfArk11:57 PM

    One word for Hillyer:

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  17. YNWA4051512:01 AM

    I dunno, you can chalk some of that up to the fact that a significant percentage of people at any time in history tend to think of the present as a the worst times evar (with the possible exception of the immediate future), so times that the rest of us recognize as being pretty much shitty with precious little to mitigate can seem like the good old days to these other sorts.

    I mean, how many times have even liberals pointed out how grateful we'd be if today's conservatives were more of a piece with the conservatism of Ike (or even Nixon or Reagan!)? Bush the Lesser was unspeakably awful, but some of the loons who auditioned for or are currently auditioning for the job in the GOP primaries of 2012 and 2016 would only be worse.

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  18. As frustrating as the Supreme Court is, imagine how badly off the country would be if Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor had been replaced by justices Laurence Tribe and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry. Ugh.

    "History will get it right, but it will be fifty or a hundred years from now, and we'll both be dead, so don't worry about it."


    ---George W. Bush

    --

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  19. Brother Yam12:10 AM

    In his Wikipoo page, there is no mention of military service, so yeah, prolly a purple finger is we're gonna get from this sack of manure.

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  20. AGoodQuestion12:29 AM

    First, we did rid the world of Saddam. That is no small thing. He was a menace. We forget now just how much of one he was, but he was a menace indeed.



    You know how if you say a word over and over again it seems to lose all meaning? That little phenomenon may be the one thing keeping Hillyer in business.

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  21. AGoodQuestion12:35 AM

    I'm still not convinced Alito isn't a giant glove puppet operated by Scalia.

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  22. He was just a little too old to enlist, even though the military raised to enlistment age to 40 in 2006 due to the need to staff the Bush Maladministration's foreign adventures.

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  23. Stinking Footsies, Drooling Moron?

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  24. Jay B.2:19 AM

    "I like to think your son died so that Sam Alito can deny you healthcare." -- Quinn Hilyer.

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  25. mortimer20004:27 AM

    Good grief. He not only invents a whole new category of weapon, but concocts a specious casus belli argument for it made entirely of air .
    Furthermore, there is some reason to believe he had even more WMMs, and that he spirited them to Syria, as Israeli intelligence suggested at the time. If that is so, then the whole WMM subject takes on a different light, one that makes the military eviction of Saddam look far better.
    Shameless piece of work -- him and his ridiculous apologia.

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  26. Pope Zebbidie XIII6:10 AM

    Of course he would have picked Obama as planned in Hawaii so long ago. Unfortunately, they had to go to plan B and make Bazza the President.

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  27. Pope Zebbidie XIII6:15 AM

    If Saddam had invaded the US, sodomizing blonde moppets all the way to Mississippi, there'd have been even more justification.

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  28. montag27:11 AM

    Still with the lies about WMDs. It's getting very, very old. Why, George W. Bush could never lie about something as serious as that, so Hussein must have hidden them in Syria.

    We had satellites over the region for gawd knows how long. I once took the quantities of chemical weapons stated by Powell in his little sleight-of-hand-job at the Security Council, converted volumes to weights and then made an approximation from the purported storage areas to the middle of Syria, and to transport that quantity out of the country, it would mean one fully-loaded flatbed tractor-trailer per mile for about six hundred miles, coming and going, continuously, twenty-four hours a day for three weeks. Satellites couldn't track that? And, wouldn't satellites be able to see the arrival point?

    A huge lie blown up to gigantic proportions. A few Russians were seen by the satellites hightailing it north out of Iraq when it was apparent that the shit was going to come down, and that became the "Saddam hid the WMDs in Syria" myth.

    Quinn Hilyer: brazen propagandist or willfully stupid? Or both?

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  29. Clearly you don't understand how ethics work. It is perfectly okay for Alito to rule on a case involving a company in which he has a financial stake. However, it is a serious conflict of interest for female justices to rule on cases involving reproductive rights because female justices have hoo-ha's that might have had an interest in such rights.

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  30. As YNWS40515 points out, part of it is present-perception as now it's worse than it was back then.

    The other part is that the vast majority of Americans have the memory capacity of a fruit fly. The presidency of GWB was 6 years ago, and that's several lifetimes past. Few alive today recall what it was really like so long ago.

    It's the same way that GWB could announce that "oceans no longer protect us," and have every talking head on TV nodding sagely that Bush had spoken a new and deep truth about a danger that had never existed before in the world. The Soviets with their nuclear arsenal aimed at every American city? No idea what you're talking about! Now we're under existential threat from people who live in caves, shit in holes in the ground, and wave AK-47s around.

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  31. Well, Ward Churchill had other obligations. Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels are all dead. So Kerry's choices would have been limited.

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  32. Some few of us remember at the time reading rebuttals to Powell's fantasy fest from the foreign press. His mobile anthrax labs turned out to be hydrogen generators for weather balloons that the British sold to him. The aluminum tubes that Condi went on and on about were rocket motor parts that the Germans sold to him. And, of course, the yellowcake uranium buy was debunked by IAEA, Blix, the Italians, the Nigerians, the US State Department, and the CIA. And all of this before the war began.

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  33. brandonrg8:04 AM

    "The Surge fixed everything until that traitor Obama came along!" seems to be the history they've convinced themselves of these days.

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  34. GeniusLemur8:06 AM

    "So, hundreds of thousands dead and Iraq and our nation's foreign policy
    credibility in smoldering ruins, but at least Bush got reelected and a
    couple of wingnuts on the Court."

    What could I possibly add to that?

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  35. Shalimar8:12 AM

    imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been under Kerry.

    Awesome, a puzzle that is also a learning opportunity for your kids so hopefully they don't become sociopaths: Try to imagine any way in which the Katrina response could have been even more bungled.


    Bonus round: Try to imagine some way that Democratic over-regulation could have turned the Great Recession into the Suicidal Depression.

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  36. Jack McCoy: Objection, your Honor! There is absolutely no foundation for that assertion, which is incendiary and highly prejudicial and based on no facts whatsoever! For Mr. Hillyer to make that assertion at this point in the trial demonstrates his, his slavish fealty to people whose sole purpose is to whitewash history! Where is his evidence? Where is his--

    Judge: Chambers!

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  37. brandonrg8:15 AM

    I didn't realize they were still trying to pass that story about shipping them all off to Syria.

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  38. Chris Anderson8:26 AM

    The wingnuts are sure that Saddam's WMD (sorry, Hillyer, it's a little to late for us all to adopt your variant propaganda term) are buried in Syria. There's no proof, maybe some intel hearsay from Israel? Anyhow, they're sure, and we know that ISIL includes former Iraqi military officers -- ISIL being only the most heinous of the locals who could make use of these totally real WMD. Now, the wingnuts can buy that we don't know where the WMD are hidden, but how can they convince themselves that nobody in the area of Syria knows? And if anyone knows, why not make the obvious wingnutty conclusion that we've got to invade more to find the WMD?


    I guess we know it's all bullshit to cover their asses, because if they believed the WMD are currently in Syria they'd hafta go get 'em. To not do so would be the equivalent of handing them to ISIL (no exaggeration) and who would do that? Obama, I suppose? --I'm sure it's been claimed.

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  39. Ah, remember when the Powers of Mass Derpstruction thought they would rebrand "suicide bomber" as "homicide bomber"? Great days.

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  40. Ted the slacker8:57 AM

    Shorter Hillyer: You can't make an omelet without a smashing a few countries, killing hundreds of thousands, all at a multi-trillion dollar cost.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  41. There's no proof, maybe some intel hearsay from Israel? Anyhow, they're sure . . .

    Indeed. Some wishful thinking and a sprinkle of half-assed hearsay from the Israelis, and that's absolute concrete proof that WMD existed.

    On the other hand, the consensus of 99% of the world's scientists, historic flooding along the coasts, historic drought in the Southwest and California, the disappearance of the polar ice caps--none of that is any indication that the climate is changing. And even if it is, it's not man's fault. And even if it's man's fault, there's nothing we can do about it. And even if there's something we can do about it, it would cost too much . . .

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  42. tigrismus9:19 AM

    Hey, my favorability rating of Bush went way up as soon as he left office, too. I approve of the job he's doing now way more than I did of the one he was doing before.

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  43. coozledad9:27 AM

    and devastated a nation by shattering its economy, its state institutions and its very social fabric in a manner that will take at least two generations to repair.



    That goes for two countries.

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  44. I remember that.

    That's why it's especially galling to see media figures like Judith Miller get on the TV and say that everyone had the same evidence and most everyone agreed that the invasion was a good idea.

    That simply isn't so, and I wish people would stop saying it.

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  45. Helmut Monotreme9:29 AM

    There's no evidence that the USA is at all interested in rebuilding.

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  46. Helmut Monotreme9:29 AM

    He is by far a better painter than he was a president.

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  47. Helmut Monotreme9:33 AM

    The New York Times is the first draft of history. Judith Miller was published in the New York Times. History was at a bitchin' kegger and it went really late, and it forgot all about rewriting until the day it was due, so it skipped first period, ran the first draft through a spell checker and handed it in, so now it's history. QED

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  48. His support for immigration reform was a great betrayal for many of them.

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  49. Ellis_Weiner10:32 AM

    Exactly. Obama's refusal to pre-emptively seize imaginary weapons and allow them to imaginarily get into the hands of actual enemies created by Geo. W. Bush is yet more proof of Democratic perfidy.

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  50. Ellis_Weiner10:41 AM

    This. Alas. What's that line about, if there's a conflict between history and legend, "Print the legend"? Sure, but first you have to create the legend. Forget the notion that the right-wing mind can't tolerate ambiguity. It can't tolerate truth itself.

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  51. Upvote for truth, but also for the shruggy ASCII guy.

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  52. coozledad10:43 AM

    But the Bush family still has them all by their racist balls. They know their creatures, and they know just how hard they can grind their faces in the dirt.

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  53. actual enemies created by Geo. W. Bush

    Needs to be pushed.

    W created the political space that gave birth to ISIL. If there's a threat from them, he's the one who caused it. "Kept us safe" my fucking ass.

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  54. The 1% Doctrine only holds when there's people to be blown up and profits to be made from it, y'know.

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  55. Cue counter-speculation about President Gore's response to 9/11.

    T'warnt Bush's invasion of Iraq that got him reelected; it was the periodic fear-mongering from the GOP that the terrorists they wanted to "bring it on" would in fact do so.

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  56. "Every now and again fascist assholes have to pick up democracy and throw it against a wall just to prove we are serious."

    Another version.

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  57. Yeah, "the Surge" that only calmed things down because it was coincidentally at the same time all the ethnic cleansing/killing had been accomplished.

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  58. Never mind we never saw that shipment, as closely as we were monitoring Iraq at the time; plus he somehow packed up all the Iraqi infrastructure necessary for manufacturing chemical weapons at the same time and shipped that over as well - kind of like just packing up an entire car factory and quietly moving it to another state before anyone notices.

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  59. I see all that propaganda money is working. Whee.

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  60. Why the hell do you think Mom & I left?

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  61. You insult fruit flys.

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  62. And when we gave him intelligence so he could drop them more effectively on the Eastasians Iranians we've always been at war with.

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  63. And THAT'S why this pasty white guy loves 'em.

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  64. HAVE PITY UPDATE: Oh, jesus sweet fucking Agnes, my father is on his way here to visit, and he sent me an email yesterday wanting to know what "my plan" is to get myself out of my car and into a job & house. As if I haven't been working on this shit for weeks. And there's always the opportunity for wingnuttery! Whee. It's so much fun when the guy who spent 30+ years making you dependent on him so he could keep control now demands you tell him your plans to save yourself.



    Time for me to rehearse my assertive communication training.


    And what the fuck today's THURSDAY? I've fucking LOST another day. What happened to Wednesday? This shit is starting to scare me.

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  65. LookWhosInTheFreezer11:21 AM

    It's not so much the presence of the hoo-ha as it is as absence of the penis-of-objectivity, that is the problem. Phallus-wands (especially White ones) have the magical ability to eliminate any potential conflict of interest with one mighty wave.

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  66. Compared to the typical Republican today, Bush appears somewhat reasonable and moderate. The low expectation of soft bigotry.

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  67. Careful where you wave that!

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  68. LookWhosInTheFreezer11:35 AM

    Relevant

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIpDBwgzIu0#t=42

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  69. Magatha11:51 AM

    IS HE BRINGING MONEY??? When he starts the wingnuttery, remind him about family values, and how Mittens said you should borrow a bunch from him because entrepreneurship. I guess your parents are divorced? Unpossible, because family values. Demand to know what his plan is to help the mother of his son. Is he driving? Sell his car while he isn't looking, buy him a bus ticket home, and keep the change. Oof. I guess I'm a little over-involved in this. Backing off now.

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  70. LookWhosInTheFreezer11:54 AM

    Careful with that _____, Eugene

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  71. glennisw12:14 PM

    That and the fact that it's a serious conflict of interest for a single, gay or gay-friendly justice to rule on marriage equality, but it's totally not a conflict of interest for a heterosexual married justice to rule on marriage equality.

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  72. glennisw12:14 PM

    You'll put your eye out.

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  73. glennisw12:16 PM

    Those bathtub self-portraits are compelling!

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  74. TGuerrant12:21 PM

    Homo bomber coming to a straight wedding near you soon! Mazel tov cocktails all 'round.

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  75. A firm, upstanding comment like this deserves more than a flaccid response.

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  76. Some day, I'm going to read "Ward Churchill" and not think of "Ward Connerly"

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  77. TGuerrant12:36 PM

    Prez Jeb will fix it all back up, don't worry. Veep-Forever Cheney will tell him how.

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  78. RogerAiles12:40 PM

    "Rubio: I wouldn't go into Iraq either."

    He's just pandering for the Fighting Keyboarder vote.

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  79. A good example is the fact that George W. Bush said that we are NOT at war against Islam. He wanted to make that clear.


    Today's typical Republican would never be able to say that.

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  80. LookWhosInTheFreezer12:59 PM

    but it's totally not a conflict of interest for a heterosexual married, Opus Dei-Catholic justice to rule on marriage equality.

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  81. TGuerrant1:09 PM

    Once there was a boy who wanted to get his ear pierced. He went home and told his parents about how he was going to use his summer job money to get this cool red crocodile tattoo all around his neck so the croc could bite its tail over his Adam's apple and would always be visible above his shirt collar. OH. NO. YOUNG. MAN. OH. NO.


    So when he came home the next day with a pierced ear, his mother said to his father, "It'll close up and disappear any time he doesn't wear an earring," and then they watched sports.


    Moral: Stop being scared and start being scary.



    Tell your father you've already implemented The Plan by joining the Sea Org, and David Miscavage, a truly great man, says you can't see your family anymore because they're Suppressive Persons who have totally failed to buy any auditing courses.



    Though Magatha's idea about selling his car when he's not looking is good, too. Could combine these strategies for maximum effect and profit (two important aspects of any Plan).

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  82. tigrismus1:11 PM

    And enlightening! After the Segway Incident, I was surprised to see a left AND a right foot!

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  83. tigrismus1:13 PM

    A standing O, perhaps?

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  84. TGuerrant1:24 PM

    After all, GWB was the Love President.

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  85. bekabot2:05 PM

    This comes very close to being a backdoor or backstage admission that the Iraq War was a put-up job — a piece of fuff — intended to distract the attention of the American people and to give them something shiny to look at while their Supreme Court was packed with right-wingers.

    I'm reminded of the moment in the superhero comic when the villain discloses all his plans. The difference is that in the comic that moment is the moment just before the villain gets his comeuppance. I don't think we get to look forward to any comeuppance this time.

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  86. bekabot2:07 PM

    — and then you still can't make an omelet...at least not the omelet you advertised.

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  87. I like the "sell the vehicle" thing, 'cause I'm sure he has a fucking huge Hot Wheels Ford F-INFINITY penile compensator truck.

    Asssistance w/ Mom? HAR HAR. (Yes, divorced. Special Repug Fambly Values Rules.) He's got it in his head that mom "stole" $10,000 from him that he was going to do Something Very Important with (which here in Reality never actually happened), so he's basically told me I won't get no spondulix from him that might benefit her as well. Which is why he wouldn't lend (LEND, f'fuck's sake) us some money to get a house back in March so we could have avoided all this.



    It's hard to be scary with him; control freak, given to occasional hands-on technique (IYKWIMAITYD). If he was a bug he'd be brightly colored.


    I suppose at least I get a free meal out of this; personally I'd campaign for Golden Corral or something to maximize foodity, but we shall see.

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  88. "Yes, I know the omelet is full of broken glass, metal shavings and screws, but it's a FUCKING OMELET, so eat up!"

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  89. This is more Watchmen territory - the whole "I did it an hour ago" thing.

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  90. Howlin Wolfe2:29 PM

    Thank goodness my nose drips and my feet stink, then

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  91. Ted the slacker2:43 PM

    Patriots eat the omlet they get, not the omlet they might want or wish to have at a later time.

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  92. bekabot2:47 PM

    "Evil Chef"


    1. Lie to customer about nature of omelet
    2. Take customer's money
    3. Fail to make omelet
    4. When customer complains, make poisoned omelet
    5. Force customer to eat while you watch
    6. Cackle uproariously
    7. Watch while customer dies a slow death
    8. Rob customer's body
    9. Sing hymn to the Devil

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  93. bekabot2:50 PM

    "The only reason I would even talk to you pukes is to take up your attention while I do something nefarious...no wait, not even that. The real only reason I would even talk to you pukes is as a digestif to settle my nerves. Bwa ha."

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  94. TV Tropes calls this the Accidental Public Confession:

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AccidentalPublicConfession

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  95. Ted the slacker3:21 PM

    Dulce et decorum est pro privatized-healthcare mori.

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  96. Quiet as its kept.

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  97. smut clyde4:25 PM

    most everyone agreed that the invasion was a good idea

    Apart from all those freedom-hating countries which weren't beholden to Bush, and looked at the evidence and said Nope.

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  98. smut clyde4:36 PM

    And imagine how much more badly bungled so much other domestic policy would have been

    That admission right there needs to be emphasised. "Yes, Bush was a bungler. Everything he touched turned to shit." Hillyer is justifying a $2-trillion invasion as part of the re-election campaign for the second term of an incorrigible incompetent (by his own admission); then struggles to justify that re-election by dreaming up counter-factuals.

    Whose side is he on?

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  99. Whose side is he on?

    Evil, if I'm any judge of horseflesh.

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  100. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person5:10 PM

    He's what you get if you decided the problem with Scalia is he's too principled and wary of corporate power.

    Might be what you'd get, but what you'd *need* is a padded cell...

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  101. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person5:12 PM

    A great big hand, at the very least...

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  102. Marion in Savannah5:55 PM

    You just HAD to do that, didn't you... (I'm just SO very jealous.)

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  103. Marion in Savannah5:56 PM

    Who are you backing in the Preakness? I think I can get some large bets down in time...

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  104. J Neo Marvin6:33 PM

    In a decade of childish gestures that one stood out.

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  105. M. Krebs6:42 PM

    Cue counter-speculation about Osama bin Laden's reaction to the election of President Gore.

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  106. M. Krebs6:50 PM

    Some of them characters ain't ASCII. That dude in the middle is Japanese.

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  107. My gob is smacked so hard; thus doth my jaw slack to the floor.
    Admiration, jealousy both do bespeak the green envy of this comment.

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  108. 10. Act shocked when customer's relatives decide to try to kill you out of revenge.

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  109. Well, and the thousands who marched in the streets shouting "NO!"

    But you'd never know those protests happened if you watched any mainstream media back in those days.

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  110. He does have both of them, but it's sometimes hard to tell because one foot or the other is usually in his mouth.

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  111. If you ignore the worst terrorist attack on US soil in our history, and you ignore the anthrax thing, and you ignore the Saudi bombings, and you ignore all the troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and you ignore all the civilians beheaded by the terrorists . . .

    . . . Bush did keep us safe. But you do have to ignore everything that actually happened during his presidency.

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  112. Magatha7:44 PM

    If only we could schedule an alicublog meet-up for that Golden Corral....

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  113. I've heard rumors of Jeb Bush investing in a fleet of gyrocoptors.

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  114. whetstone9:09 PM

    Shorter Quin Hillyer, plus every pundit who slobbered himself over our grand adventure: "hey, I'm still employed, and I don't see any of those jerkoff hippies who opposed the Iraq War around me. Why wouldn't that work for presidentin'?"

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  115. bekabot9:52 PM

    11. Bomb them while they're attending the customer's funeral...

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  116. bekabot9:58 PM

    ...even if it does them in, which is why it's called a "snackrifice"...

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  117. Chris Anderson10:11 PM

    The "Coalition of the Willing" was so inspiring. Their opinions and insight matter all the time, but really made all the difference at that juncture.


    But seriously, some of them died (just none of the leaders that signed onto the Coalition).


    Truly a model for future actions. The People must be chomping at the bit to reprise this kinda thing.

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  118. Tehanu11:07 PM

    And that ain't sayin' much.

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  119. M. Krebs11:14 PM

    Time for a musical interlude. https://youtu.be/oAo7YeRkJYo

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  120. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:41 PM

    You've set the bar so low I think I hear Chubby Checker's band tuning up in the background...

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  121. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:44 PM

    Still ranks as one of the stupidest things ever uttered by an American pundit...

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  122. AGoodQuestion12:51 AM

    "So where's the omelet, Quin?"
    "It's... resting."

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  123. billcinsd12:51 AM

    and then there's the Enola Gay

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  124. billcinsd12:56 AM

    Patriots do have to deflate the omelet, too.

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  125. smut clyde1:27 AM

    I would like 59 previous Myles-na-gCopaleen-Joke-Stealing offenses to be taken into account.

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  126. montag25:10 AM

    Today, he's come out with his "doctrine." Which is, reduced to its essence, "if I'm President, we're gonna go right on behaving like fucking assholes." I'll give him this: he really is trying for the front spot in the Pinheads on Parade revue.

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  127. That assertion makes sense when you realize that a lot of people think we won WW2 all by ourselves. Vietnam? The hippies and the press gave that one away. Korea? Don't ask. Und so weiter.

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  128. How Looooow can you goooo?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25cyIUh2dz4

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  129. Halloween_Jack10:36 AM

    "Curveball", the sole informant who was the source of the claim that Saddam had mobile WMD labs, said that they were on trucks, but simply because he's a confirmed and admitted liar doesn't mean that the people who benefited greatly from those lies (e.g. Halliburton and their smirking meatpuppet Cheney) can't still posit modes of transportation that can still allow them to be useful. The wily Arabs could have transported them away on Chinook helicopters, or hovercraft, or especially large flying carpets, or spirited away by obedient djinni. They could be in a bag of holding, or hammerspace. They could be you, they could be me, they could be John Bolton's eternally-improbable mustache.

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  130. realinterrobang12:33 PM

    And the Israelis were probably ROFLing about it: "Catch this -- I told the Amerikayim that Saddam sent his WMDs to Surya, and they believed me!!"

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  131. realinterrobang12:36 PM

    I want to get a tattoo in solidarity with this comment. Brilliant.

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  132. Oh, TvTropes! Is there anything you can't do?

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  133. I'd rather have Zippy. He's more responsible and mature.

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  134. freq flag12:58 AM

    They're still coming up with ways to say "uppity,"


    Remember, this is the segment of the population that believes the phrase "take our country back" constitutes a 10,000-word manifesto for real 'Murkins.

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  135. I first read that as "IKEA" and thought: even the big box stores weren't fooled!

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  136. M. Krebs8:16 PM

    B.B.'s best pupil:

    https://youtu.be/RtmW2ek7WkQ

    ReplyDelete