Sunday, August 18, 2013
NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...
...about some bold new plans for the GOP that rightbloggers have been giving big up: kicking CNN and NBC off the Republican Debate party train, Mark Levin's "Liberty Amendments," and the guy from Duck Dynasty as a Congressional candidate. This is the sort of experimentalism that makes me nostalgic for epistemic closure.
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So "going mano a mano" and "taking off the white gloves" now consists of running away crying when a TV station airs something you don't like? Wow, I hope they don't really start fighting back, that would be too frightening to behold!
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't matter how they change the window dressings or re-arrange the seating: They're still serving the same shit sandwich they've been peddling for the last 25 years. Tax cuts for the rich and repealing all regulations is still not terribly appetizing. Or nourishing.
ReplyDeleteThey love the manly men. But in a purely platonic way, if you know what they mean.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think you do.
They always seem to think that the packaging is the problem, which, while shit, doesn't even compare to the utter loathsomeness of the message once unwrapped.
ReplyDeleteThat's the funniest Runnin' Scared I've ever read! I love that right-wingers are rallying around the election strategizing of Reince Priebus, aka Thurston Howell the Fourth.
ReplyDeleteBut can the degenerate left find a candidate with the stature to run against TV superstar Willie Robertson? Do you think Bryan Cranston can be talked into moving to Louisiana?
"Andrew Breitbart was investigating the possible collusion between the media and the Democrat Party before he passed away."
ReplyDeleteSo it wasn't actually a secret Obama death ray that killed Breitbart, it was Leonardo di Caprio shrunk down to fit into a microscopic James Cameron mini-sub injecting thousands of tiny cheeseburgers into Breitbart's arteries at once. What terrible lengths they'll go to in order to avoid discovery of their nefarious plans!
The Republicans remind me of the Federalists in the years after they lost to Jefferson and were headed to oblivion. Appointing midnight judges. Changing the rules in various bodies so as to preserve power despite losing elections. Gerrymandering. Proposing absurd, and blatantly anti democratic, constitutional amendments. Desperately maneuvering and scheming to hold on to power wherever they could, at the State, county and local levels, after they had been repudiated nationwide. If they lost at one level, they would work behind the scenes to get the rules changed so that level no longer had effective power. When they lost at the next level they would repeat the process. Becoming a smaller and smaller clique, representing an ever narrower group of interests, until the few remaining elected and appointed officials were all they had left. Their program and policies rejected by the electorate, they nevertheless grimly hung onto power until the bitter end.
ReplyDeleteBy "investigating" they mean he was trying to get a show on CNN.
ReplyDeleteChris Christie will be just another purveyor of those tasty shit sandwiches should he get elected. It makes me want to pound my head on a stump when I read or hear that "even many Democrats" think that Christie is just the guy to work across the aisle and bring us together. The only reason he's considered a fave among establishment Pugs... the ones who are left, anyway... is that next to loons like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or the Duck Dynasty guy, Christie could almost pass for sane.
ReplyDeleteLevin: [The federal government] is the nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer,
ReplyDeleteconsumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer,
health-care provider and pension guarantor.
The Bill of Rights: U MAD BRO?
They're Whigging out.
ReplyDeleteIf Chris Christie manages to lose a lot of weight, I can definitely see him hawking the Shit Sandwich Diet on early morning TV.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, that's a diet that would work.
It makes me want to pound my head on a stump when I read or hear that
ReplyDelete"even many Democrats" think that Christie is just the guy to work across
the aisle and bring us together.
You'll be hearing just that from Cory Booker, soon enough.
~
Levin: [The federal government] is the nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider and pension guarantor.
ReplyDeleteAssuming this is true -- something you can never, ever do when conservatives and wingers speak -- what modern industrialized country's government couldn't be described in similar terms? Even the semi-libertarian paradise of Singapore has a Ministry of Health that's solely responsible for the country's universal healthcare (which is ranked 6th by the WHO. The U.S. has moved down one more notch to 38th in the latest ranking, but still one place above Slovenia! USA! USA!)
I liked Roy's comment that "putting the ship of state in drydock" is seen by this clown as a good thing. With all due deference to Godwin, the eternal question, "How could the sophisticated, enlightened middle and upper classes of Germany seriously support a raving monster like Hitler?" becomes less mysterious by the day. It takes zero effort to imagine these bloggers (let alone the cretins who believe and agree with them) welcoming with cheers and toasts the most repressive, destructive regime the USA could manufacture.
ReplyDeleteGroupthink is bad enough. What we have here, now, is groupmania. But in a bad way.
Tangential to the topic, but that Amity Shlaes link on Snooki is so weird. She assumes McCain wouldn't have supported a tax on tanning beds because he's pale and of course he'd want to be tan. Does she know how much sun they get in the Southwest? Man's pale because he wants to be. (In Arizona your drive to work is a lot quicker that way.)
ReplyDeleteA solid comparison for the most part, although John Quincy Adams, for one, was actually prescient about a few things. Slavery among them.
ReplyDeleteYou think these guys are sophisticated and enlightened?
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to know what to make out of this mania for eliminating Senate elections. Quite plausibly some gerrymandered state legislatures could pass it, but really it seems to come up only in forums that are of, by, and for the brethren. Even with the most rightwing of the potential GOP Presidential candidates, I can't imagine them going on the stump and saying, "Sorry, but you pinheads are too weak and socialistic to be trusted with the vote."
ReplyDeleteSure, JQA was the Man. But he knew better than to stay on a sinking ship. From Wiki:
ReplyDelete"The Massachusetts General Court elected Adams as a Federalist to the U.S. Senate soon after, and he served from March 4, 1803, until 1808, when he broke with the Federalist Party. Adams, as a Senator, had supported the Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson's Embargo Act, actions which made him very unpopular with Massachusetts Federalists. The Federalist-controlled Massachusetts Legislature chose a replacement for Adams on June 3, 1808, several months early. On June 8, Adams broke with the Federalists, resigned his Senate seat, and became a Democrat-Republican"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams
The National Park Service puts it like this:
"When he lost the Presidential election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams recalled his son from Berlin. John Quincy arrived in Massachusetts in 1801 and the next year was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. In 1803 the Massachusetts legislature elected him as a member of the United States Senate. John Quincy Adams up to this time was commonly regarded as a member of the Federalist Party, but he found its general policy less and less appealing. Moreover, he was frowned upon as the son of John Adams by the followers of Alexander Hamilton and the other strident Federalists.
"Actually, John Quincy Adams was never a strict party man. Ever aspiring to higher public service, he considered himself "a man of my whole country." As U.S. Senator, Adams approved the Louisiana Purchase (1803), refused to take a pro-British stance as the Napoleonic Wars reached their climax, and increasingly aligned himself with the policies of Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State, James Madison. John Quincy's adherence to his own principles in supporting President Jefferson's Embargo Act (1807), at once gained him the gratitude of the Republican Party, the bitter hostility of the Federalists; and 150 years later - a place in John F. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage. Although Adams understood that the Embargo was extremely unpopular in New England because of its harmful effect on the region's economy, he bravely supported the measure because he felt it was the best method to gain British respect of American maritime rights. Adams' devotion to the nation's interest made him an easy target for sectionalist politicians in Massachusetts, who conspired to oust the young Senator at the next election. John Quincy's successor was chosen on June 3, 1808, several months before the usual time for electing a senator for the next term, and five days later Adams resigned. In the same year he attended the Republican congressional caucus, which nominated James Madison for the presidency, and thus loosely allied himself with the Republican Party."
http://www.nps.gov/adam/jqa-bio-page-2.htm
Anyway, my point was not that the Federalists were never right about anything (indeed, as you imply that were certainly better on the slavery issue than the Democratic Republicans) or that all of them were no good, but that their worst tendencies (their elitism, their anti democratic nature, their parochialism, their willingness to bend the rules, etc) became more and more pronounced as they lost popular support. Just as the Republicans have not always been wrong about everything (that Lincoln fellow was pretty good on slavery too), but that they are becoming more and more a distillation of their worst tendencies these days as their popularity wanes.
Not to mention he's had melanomas cut off his face.
ReplyDeleteIt's like a shit onion. You keep peeling back layers of shit only to find...more shit.
ReplyDeleteThe popular election of Senators is an odd thing for the caterwauling cacophonous to be espousing, since it's done so well for them in the last thirty years or so. I doubt that state legislatures could come up with loonier examples than Inhofe, Rand Paul, Chambliss, Tom Coburn, Dan Quayle, Dan Coats, Jeremiah Denton, Mike Lee, etc., or shifty used-car salesmen like Bob Corker, Dean Heller, Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker, as just a few examples.
ReplyDeleteWe'll know when we see a "Heisenberg" on the ballot.
ReplyDeleteThe elevation of Priebus to his post really does indicate their tone (in more than one way) deafness. I mean, I know he was an over-correction for the Steele debacle (Wait, Obama means that Americans like black people now? Huh. Get us one, stat. Wait, they still don't like us? But we have a black guy!). It isn't just his Brock McUppercrust name, or his Whitey McPaleface visage (maybe I'm mis-remembering, but, I see Udo Kier in my mind's eye), it's the wrongness of things the sound of his name evokes.
ReplyDeleteRancid
Rinse (but not a clean one)
Prius
Pubis
Probes
Pus
Preeee-bus. Prebis. Preeebs. Prebuuuuusss.
If you put naming experts together to invent an unsettling name, they would be hard-pressed to come up with something so uniquely awful (and totally made-up sounding).
Oh, it's not a name to which a brand can attach itself comfortably, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it evokes someone whose hobby, passed down through generations, is pulling the wings off flies, and who spends a lot of time in the dark.
They're think they're thinking outside the box with Duck Dynasty? Hell, Father Guido Sarducci nominated ZZ Top for President back in 1984. They won, too, IIRC.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the more I think of it the harder it is to fit JQA with the late-stage Federalists you limn out. And the Democratic-Republicans were morphing into the Jacksonian Democrats, who were obviously not his bag. To the extent he belonged to any party it was probably the Federalists as they existed during his father's presidency.
ReplyDeleteI think C.S. Lewis was going to have a faun named Reince in one of the Narnia books, then decided against it, and the manuscript somehow found its way to Ma and Pa Priebus.
ReplyDeleteSHITCEPTION!
ReplyDeleteI read the rightbloggers and just think "punchdrunk". Ya know, it's that desperate flailing around for something, ANY-FUCKING-THING, that looks like it it won't go nuts-up on them after 15 minutes. I think Mr. Duck sees it as just a waste of money and, as a shrewd businessman, sees that there's more money fleecing the rubes on teevee.
ReplyDeleteAre those from Shit, Georgia or Shit, Washington?
ReplyDeleteOne quick observation: if Daniel Horowitz had ever been required to "sweat and toil," I have little doubt that the effort would have killed him on the spot.
ReplyDeleteDon't these mungers understand that hoping to elevate whining to something vaguely heroic through recycled Churchillisms makes them look downright dopey?
That said, I'm all for even more experimentalism on the part of the wingers. It suits them. "Let's all wear frying pans on our heads! That'll show `em!" "Let's wear our pants backwards! Make a statement!" "Wear two right shoes! Let everyone know the right way!"
Maybe 2016 is the year Frothy's campaign passes out washable stigmata tattoos. Or Rand Paul's flings buckets full of chocolate gold coins at the crowds. Or Scary Sarah begins her events with cross-burnings and machine-gun fire (you just know she's always wanted to). Or Jeb Bush personally torches a public school in every state. Or Ted Cruz dresses up his security staff as stormtroopers.
At this point, it's not as if anything of this is beyond them, or that 20% of the population would cheer them on.
...and if they'd had a virtual monopoly of support from the super-rich, who would consider bankrolling the party a modest investment in the service of keeping said super-rich from ever having to face any onerous laws favored by the general public, they would still be ruling or ruining the country (or both).
ReplyDeleteThe last twenty "rebranding" trial balloons have been nothing but confirmation of this point. "We need to be more about opportunity!" (by promising that this time, for sure, cutting taxes for the rich and repealing all regulations will make trickle-down fall upon you like a rain of bowling balls); "We need to reach out to women!" (by promising that cutting taxes for the rich and repealing all regulations will give your husband his job back which is what you care about, right?); "We need to be the party of ideas!" (by putting the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver out there to lecture us on how cutting taxes for the rich and repealing all regulations is what the true intellectuals like Ayn Rand would want). Etfuckingcetera.
ReplyDeleteThe Red State love for Mark LeVIN's Liberty[sic] Amendments is awesome!
ReplyDeleteDaniel Horowitz: I have realized that elections are not enough to restore our liberty. In fact, it is scandalous that our liberties should be subject to the outcome of elections in the first place. What if we are not successful in electing more Constitutional conservatives? What if the statists outgun us with all the special interest money they received in return for their votes against the Constitution? Should we be denied our liberty just because we lack the parallel resources to convince low information voters that they have no right to infringe upon our liberties?
So let's see. Despite being funded by the likes of the Koch brothers et al, they don't have the "special interest money" that statists have, so how on earth will they elect more "Constitutional conservatives"? The solution: radically subvert and undermine their Most Sacred Text, which will make it even more "Constitutional" then it is now. Magnificent! (BTW, the comments are also trés swell -- apparently there are an infinite number of "amendments" Mark LeVIN didn't even think of!)
There's an f-word for this kind of anti-democratic shit. Okay, two f-words.
His name is a Jack Vance character.
ReplyDeleteReince Priebus, Galactic Interlocutor
Yeah. And imagine the questions the likes of Hannity and LeVIN will ask Republican primary candidates on FOX:
ReplyDelete• Senator Santorum, do you think Democrats just can't help themselves from being evil?
• Senator Rubio... Rubio... Say, isn't that hisssssspaaannnic?
• Senator Cruz, could you be more awesome?
• Another question for Senator Cruz. George Washington or Jesus Christ. Which are you most like in private?
• A question for Governor Christie from our FOX audience. He asks, "Hey Christie, how did Obama's cock taste?"
I'm guessing that Charlie Pierce's favorite neologism, "foof," is not one of them. (But, it should be. Make that three f-words.)
ReplyDeleteBecause like her hero, Calvin Coolidge, Snooki is a completely media-manufactured creature (but unlike her hero, Snooki is capable of actual humanity).
ReplyDeleteSomething like this. (The Koch-ini would be the ruling party.)
ReplyDeleteHis name makes a lot more sense when you remove the vowels:
ReplyDeleteRNC PR BS
I thought it was a joke about the Duck Dynasty guy, until I read further and realized they were serious.
ReplyDeleteHe's going to have a run for his money against their new political darling, the Rodeo Clown.
The RNC resolution
ReplyDeletesays the networks' planned Hillary programming "amounts to little more
than extended commercials promoting former Secretary Clinton" meant to
"put a thumb on the scales for the next presidential election,"
Since when are they against extended commercials about Hillary Clinton?
"It's time to get beyond these [liberal network] moderators' attempts to
ReplyDeleteembarrass, to create gaffes, to suggest that the Republicans are far
too extreme for the American people," said Tim Graham of NewsBusters.
The most striking thing about the Republican primaries was not just the incredibly stupid and offensive things the candidates said (no, they're not "gaffes" when the candidates clearly meant what they said), but the fact that the Republican audience rousingly endorsed them with cheers and boos all around. No moderator can be held responsible for that.
"It's time to get beyond these [liberal network] moderators' attempts to
ReplyDeleteembarrass, to create gaffes, to suggest that the Republicans are far
too extreme for the American people," said Tim Graham of NewsBusters.
Umm, Tim? It wasn't the questions that killed your candidates, it was the ANSWERS.
Ya got me, pal. Never mind.
ReplyDeleteOr even when you remove the consonants:
ReplyDeleteEe-yii, ee-yii, eee!! Ewww!!
Who should be at the top of the ticket in 2016: Rodeo Clown or Sideshow Bob? (I say Sideshow Bob: he's the one with electoral experience.)
ReplyDeleteDoesn't McCain have melanoma?
ReplyDeleteRence Priebus Lather Rinse Repeat
ReplyDeleteRaunchy Priapism?
ReplyDelete"Now I know some of you thumb-sucking conservatives out there will pessimistically dismiss this as an impossible pipe dream," said Horowitz; "the same people who scoff upon our ability to throw out terrible Republicans in primaries... until we successfully do so." Just ask Senators Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell!
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons why I don't miss the booze is that I can still order up a snifter of schadenfreude. *breathes deeply* Aaaaaah. Totes don't care about some Billy Gibbons-lookin' dude showing up in Congress wearing a weird camo pattern.
Jebbie's problem is that he looks too much like Danny Huston is some of his smarmier movie roles, and Cruz's problem is that he looks (and sounds) too much like a cross between Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchannan, with extra grease.
ReplyDelete"The ban on CNN and NBC extends to their Spanish-language networks, CNN en Espanol and Telemundo, leaving the party with only one major Spanish-language broadcaster, Univision, to partner with on officially sanctioned debates."
ReplyDeleteIs this the tell?
I'm starting to think what all this right-wing febrility really amounts to is circling the wagons. Them redskins (and black, brown, yellow and everything darker than ecruskins) is gonna git us.
Speaking of Charlie, is anyone else getting malware warnings when they try to log on to his blog? And was this one of the assignments that the RNC gave its newly hired techies?
ReplyDeleteMelanoma, megalomania, tomato, tomahto...
ReplyDeleteMark Levin = Grown-up Eric Cartman.
ReplyDeleteI once knew quite a few Wehrmacht veterans and their families. They told me how Hitler fooled them. It involved a grocery cart full of money and the groceries it would buy filling a purse.
ReplyDeleteSharknado for President! Seriously. Sharknado is very much pro-Freegodgundom.
ReplyDeleteOh, how I wish you haden't said that. They'll take it as a dare.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they're trying to set the stage for having A&E (a 3rd rate cable outlet if ever there was one) broadcast the debates if CNN & NBC are off the menu.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's entirely fair to conservatives. In addition to not having any new ideas in the last 25 years, they've also repudiated all of their less crazy old ones (health insurance mandates, carbon offsets, negative income tax/EITC, modest immigration reform).
ReplyDeleteThough, as Lemieux pointed out at LGM last week, a lot of ideas like the health insurance mandate were supported by Republicans precisely because they had no prayer of actually happening. Back in the good olde days of 13 years ago you couldn't exactly go out and say your ____ plan is to keep doing jack shit about it...
That's definitely not a problem anymore. At this point I'm expecting the 2016 Republican platform will be a box of typewritten pages with nothing but the word "NOBAMA" repeated over and over.
And more welcome in many towns than Republican presidential candidates.
ReplyDeleteThe odd thing about that story - hyperinflation ended 10 years before the Nazis came to power.
ReplyDeleteGiven what's come out of some of the state legislatures since the 2010 elections, I wouldn't consider that a very safe bet.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, Shit, Georgia sounds more likely, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteIt's what you get when you take the mantra of "states' rights" so literally that you start to think that a state government's right to choose a senator overrides the states' citizens' right to vote on that choice.
ReplyDeleteThe reasoning is that it'll improve liberty by making senators less beholden to "special interests" and more responsible to the states that appoint them, because lobbyists would rather evaporate into the aether than go lobby in Albany or Sacramento instead.
I think a convincing argument could be made that the only reason this country's path to democracy was relatively easy is that it occured at a time when there were vast resources still there for anyone's taking coupled with a condition of a labor market more favorable to workers than owners. When there's still plenty for the taking, the powers that be worry less about keeping everyone in their place. Rich men have greater opportunity to do more with resources for the taking than poor men do, so they were guaranteed to get a bigger piece of the pie than anyone else. There's no need to punish the peasants when they don't threaten what's yours because there's still so much to take that doesn't belong to anyone, other than the natives, yet.
ReplyDeleteCompare with the French situation - a rigidly stratified society in which all available resources were already owned. Or think of any poor nation and how tenuous the hold on democracy has tended to be. The more economically stratified the society, typically the more back-and-forth there has been between democracy and autocracy, oligarchy, and other forms of government which enforce a rigid economic stratification.
In short, perhaps we should look at our unique situation as having come about not due to some exceptionality in our character but rather due to dumb luck and a confluence of factors which allowed it to take a course not possible in many other places. Had the country already been settled for several centures prior to the revolution, you can bet your ass that what it looked like and what followed it would have been much different from what we got.
It's kind of funny how you think you know more about it that the old lady who told me the story. there was more to it, obviously.
ReplyDeleteDepends. Eastern Washington is a white-supremacist stronghold.
ReplyDeleteI say we need many more like him. I want to start the Might Ducks chant right now: 'QUACK! QUACK! QUACK!'
ReplyDeleteYeah! QUACK QUACK QUACK! Come on everybody, who's with me? QUACK QUACK QUACK!
Sounds more like circling the bowl than circling the wagons.
ReplyDeleteNow, that's really putting the meta in metaphor.
ReplyDeleteI thought that was self-accredited ophthalmologist Rand Paul's slogan.
ReplyDeleteI still can't read the name without hearing "Reebus Caneebus"
ReplyDeleteIn fact, every time I go there, my screen goes half-black (I can see the content but through a black overlay). If I refresh then it goes away. WTF, etc.
ReplyDelete"...and it's GOT...to be a fake."
ReplyDeleteOver at RumpRoast they refer to him as either Prince Rebus or Rinsus Repeatus.
ReplyDeleteI've usually seen him compared to Master Shake
ReplyDeleteYeah, what possible reason would there be for a bunch of Wehrmacht veterans to make up some bogus yet innocent-sounding explanation as to why they followed Hitler? It is a mystery.
ReplyDeletesome old lady told me that story about groceries. i wasn't going to call her a liar, I believed her.
ReplyDeleteHmm, yes, ex-followers of Hitler certainly deserve the benefit of the doubt when talking about their support of Nazism. You've got me there.
ReplyDeleteHey, asshole. where did i say she supported Nazism? I asked her a question about Hitler, she told me the grocery story. she didn't finish with a Heil Hitler or anything.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure if you had lived in Germany at the time you would have run around spouting your opposition but not everyone is a tough guy like you.