Sunday, March 23, 2014
NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...
...revisiting the Crimea situation, on which rightbloggers have gotten slightly more strategic; though they still tend to get lost in Mad Vlad's eyes -- a worthy adversary, he! He knows how the world really works! -- they are much more interested in painting a picture of a world at war and Republicans the only daddies who can hold the line. Get a few folks who are swayed by this drivel, shove them in the booth with the Klansmen, Ayn Rand freaks, and sadists, and you just might tip the Senate.
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Romney is trying to plug his foreign policy credentials by claiming he could "see the future" in this case.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know he became a god already.
Henninger: "I don't remember a time that any of us have been moved to weep based on a speech about America."
ReplyDeleteI've listened to both Bushes and Reagan. Do tears of laughter count?
"Neville Obama could not be reached for comment... If Neville Chamberlain had a son, he would look like Barack Obama," obsessed Don Surber.
ReplyDeleteAh, you can tell who the real classy bloggers are by how often they lighten the mood with Trayvon Martin material.
and you might just tip the senate
ReplyDeleteBZZT. I'm sorry, but the answer we were looking for was "launch it into a black hole."
This would carry more weight if our friends weren't freaking out over some new damn thing being the end of America as we know it. This week it's Crimea, next week it will be gay sex or a new hip-hop single. Stoics, they are not. They're like the boy who cried wolf, except they also think their fellow villagers are all wolves in disguise.
ReplyDeleteHuh, Romney and Sarah Palin both. Fine company.
ReplyDeleteOn good authority...
ReplyDeleteAt the conclusion of the historic summit where President Obama signed away Crimea, Vladimir Putin fixed Obama with an icy stare, declaring, "And don't even think about messing with Newfoundland, because I'll be watching!" Seeing the president's perplexed expression, he then tore off his jacket and shirt, laughed maniacally and sauntered from the room.
f Neville Chamberlain had a son
ReplyDelete-- he would be Francis Chamberlain (1914-1965).
Not seeing the resemblance.
She can see Russia from her house, he can see the future from his navel.
ReplyDeleteA couple people here have noted something odd about this - for all the bloviating about Obama's "weakness," none of the usual suspects are calling for any kind of military response. Roy mentioned this too, but he also mentioned what I think is the key: Iran. I've been thinking about this, and the whole "weakness" line has been floating around for awhile, but before this month it was always in connection with Iran. Maybe these guys are a little sheepish about suggesting that we teach Russia a lesson by bombing Iran (that line of logic may not work for some stupid reason or another), but it's the only thing that makes sense. These guys have been waiting a decade for this, and they're getting dead Persian blue balls.
ReplyDeleteThing is, it doesn't make any sense from the stated position of the neocons. Even if the President takes some sort of action against Iran or whatever other country is on the PNAC wish list next, they can't possibly think that he's going to follow their road map. We now know that half the people in the Bush Administration thought that plan was crazy - they think Obama's going to run with it? Despite what the FDL crowd thinks, Barack Obama is not George W. Bush. The only conclusion I can come to, then, is...well, these guys love war, even more so than we ever thought. Hell, maybe that's why they're so cool with Mighty Father Putin - he knows when to start some shit.
The neocon remnants remind me a little bit of wargamers. Those guys are exhausting even by geek standards, but they're totally harmless - content to sit in the bar and talk about how they would have handled the African Theatre in WWII. I think it's because they have an outlet. One of these guys gets the itch, he locks himself in the basement, puts on his copy of Patton, and paints pewter figurines for a few hours. Maybe we could get out of this cheap - buy these guys copies of a few Paradox Interactive games and we might never hear from them again. Then again, maybe virtual war just won't suffice after you've had the real thing.
Why are these guys so obsessed with that quote? Of the many things I don't understand about the American conservative movement c. 2009-2014, that's easily on the top fifty most nonsensical.
ReplyDeleteThe neocon remnants remind me a little bit of wargamers. Those guys are
ReplyDeleteexhausting even by geek standards, but they're totally harmless -
content to sit in the bar and talk about how they would have handled the African Theatre in WWII. I think it's because they have an outlet.
Combine the neocon warboner with the corporate sociopath's desire to boost stock prices, and millions die. The neocons are anything but harmless and they should have been sent to the Hague.
Hell, how does the U.S. chastise the annexation of the Crimea and the upcoming annexation of Moldova, when we de facto grabbed Iraq without provocation?
It's an easy OOGA BOOGA!!! and they're lazy.
ReplyDelete"If Neville Chamberlain had a son, he would look like Barack Obama," obsessed Don Surber."
ReplyDeleteSurber should be the very last person to be making observations on other people's looks, thankyouverymuch.
There's plenty of "yer not doin' it rite!!!" going around, and precious little "here's what should be done." They roll out Romney...Romney for the Sunday gasbag shows today, and allow the shitbird to blithely assert that if HE had been elected, none of this would be happening. Of course no one asked him what he would have done differently to prevent it, because that's not the business they're in - they just have to make sure they provide an outlet for the propaganda. Presumably Putin would have been intimidated knowing that the US had a president who believed in the planet Kolob, and if a motherfucker is that crazy, there's no telling what he might do, so better not push it. Or maybe not. We'll never know, because the media exists to give liars a platform for lying, not for informing anyone about reality.
ReplyDeleteJust call him "Swami Romney."
ReplyDeleteOne handy thing about Putin is that he's largely free of ideology. At least he doesn't publicly talk much in ideological terms. The leaders of the Soviet era may have cared mostly about consolidating power, but they also talked about historical Marxism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. For obvious reasons, American conservatives weren't about to get onboard.
ReplyDeletePutin's power grabs don't have any of that lexical baggage. That's why they can idolize him purely as an emblem of butchness.
Meanwhile, Obama will never do what they want him to do. How could he? They don't even know what that would be.
If Don Surber had a son, he would look like Mr. Potato Head.
ReplyDeleteThe best I can come up with is that the idea of black people having sex just makes their brains short-circuit.
ReplyDeleteWell, shit, why not a two-time loser like Rmoney? Hell, they still have Bloodthirsty Bill Kristol on regularly, and he's been wrong about everything for decades. And, why wouldn't an asshole like Rmoney climb up on his soapbox and say, in essence, "here's a big fistful of sour grapes for you." After all, whiny rich guys are all the rage with the news media of late. Can't leave out one of the biggest whiners of the bunch.
ReplyDeleteMekaleka-high-meka-hidey-ho
ReplyDeleteMost of the neocons I see (for example, Fred Hiatt's flock of chickenhaws) are using it to pout for their wars on Iran and Syria.
ReplyDelete~
As best as I can understand, it's a combination of a) Obama explicitly identifying himself as a black man, which resonates their barely-submerged panic at having one of THOSE in the White House, and b) a handy reminder that Obama is not MANLY enough to have sired any sons.
ReplyDeleteAh, how quickly we forget the Time-Traveling Obama Theorem which explains most if not all of modern conservative thought.
ReplyDeleteI think it has another line which reads, "But John McCain Is The Asshole Of Choice."
ReplyDeleteI still prefer "I saw your cock from my house."
ReplyDeleteI think Roy's spot on--this is all about hacking on Obama solely for the sake of chipping away at Dem/indy voter support in 2014 and 2016. They'd like to have a few more wars, but they don't want Obama leading them. Iran has been around as an Islamist state for now, what, thirty-four years? They can wait until a Republican is charge to fuck that particular chicken.
ReplyDeleteBut, hell, these guys can't get enough of Obama-spite, so they're good to go with almost any excuse. Hell, these are the same people glorying in making fun of his jeans and implying that Michelle Obama is giving away state secrets to the Chinese. Hell, you could ask Charlie Manson, and even he'd say these are not normal people.
When McCain dies, I bet the Meet the Press/Sunday Morning regulars will take themselves out too, like a Heaven's Gate kind of thing.
ReplyDeleteAt least Putin has the excuse that he's doing it for the large number of ethnic Russians in the Crimea (and to hang onto that naval base). I'm pretty sure that all the warbloggers rooting for an invasion of Iraq didn't give one single fuck-all for the people of Iraq, and probably thought they deserved everything they got, just for being brown and Muslim. That has to change the character of the equivalency, I would think.
ReplyDeleteI think D was talking about the sit-and-chat strategy gamers there.
ReplyDeletePutin would be terrified of Russia's magic underwear gap.
ReplyDeleteHitch a ride on the Fail-GOP comet?
ReplyDeleteThat's just you being you. Don't ever change.
ReplyDelete[Henninger] also suggested that Putin might next "move on the independence of
ReplyDeleteUkraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan or Moldova."
You forgot Poland. And Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan.
What this world desperately needs is a strong father figure to punch it and have sex with it. That'll teach it to sweep the patio when we ask it to.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if the Crimea takeover should really be counted as some great victory for the Russians.
ReplyDeleteFor starters, any chance of Ukraine joining Putin's customs union is deader than dead. And while the E.U. might not do anything drastic in the short term, in the long term they'll most certainly get a lot more serious about lessening their need for Russian gas. And all the other Eastern European countries are going to try even harder to get into NATO and the E.U. than ever before. Russia's rickety economy is also taking a hit, with $70 billion worth of capital outflows already. And there will almost certainly be a lot more sanctions before all is said and done. And yeah he added about a million Russians, but he also got an almost equal amount of Ukrainians and Tatars who hate his guts for this. I really don't think Russia needs even more disaffected minorities.
I just don't think this an unambiguous win for Putin.
Sorry for the text wall and overuse of "and".
Come to think of it the Mormons really dodged a bullet. If Mitt Romney had gotten in and had gotten into a spat with Putin I imagine that Putin would have started locking up Mormons about five minutes after he cancelled all the adoptions to the US. Leverage is leverage.
ReplyDeleteIf Obama is the British Prime Minister in this fantasy, then who is the American President?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I felt like crying many a-times at the fate of America during "speeches" from them, and every Lee Greenwood playing, flag-fucking brownshirt working to destroy democracy and install theocratic plutocracy since the end of that war the Democrats won.
ReplyDelete[Henninger] also suggested that Putin might next "move on the independence of Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Kazakhstan or Moldova."
ReplyDeleteAnd if he does, it'll be up to the Europeans -- the EU, or NATO, or the Nordic Council -- to do something about it. I haven't heard them asking for US intervention,.
Maybe…just maybe…these guys actually respect the president, and they are just playing their roles in the "good cop, bad cop" routine they learned from The TV. You know, "Work with me here, Vlad, before my crazy partner gets a turn at you."
ReplyDeleteNaahhh…
Hell, you could ask Charlie Manson, and even he'd say these are not normal people.
ReplyDeleteBut under cross examination he might admit they were his kind of people.
And don't forget the Russian Women Wanting American Men--that pipeline would be shut down pronto.
ReplyDeleteThere was some study that came out while Reagan was President where the subjects were given a facsimile of a handgun and placed in front of a TV. Eventually many of the males would point the gun at the TV and pretend to shoot it. The takeaway was that guns actually promote impulsively violent behaviors.
ReplyDeleteI don't know whether they showed images of Reagan, but if they did, that study was somewhat flawed.
He was willing to do his own dirty work and Sharon Tate was stabbed from the front. Quite, quite, different.
ReplyDeletePipeline? Oh, I leave it to everyone else to make the right jokes.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds less bad than having the IMF run your country for a year.
ReplyDeleteNo, no. NO... it's those SHOULDERS! Romney has "shoulders you could land a 737 on", as Roger L. Simon breathlessly informed us before he excused himself to take a cold shower. America needs someone who can take off his shirt and go head to head with Putin in the battle of staged press photos.
ReplyDelete"Putin was changing the map while Europe was saving the climate," declared Liz Peek
ReplyDeleteof the Fiscal Times. "Instead of reducing their dependence on gas from
Ukraine and Russia, the leaders of Western Europe have chosen to combat
climate change. Instead of investing in secure energy, the EU has
invested in green energy, driving up energy costs, reducing
competitiveness, and allowing Putin to remain in the driver's seat."
I think his second part is also valid. There was a point during the 2012 campaign when some of the stupider pundits on the right (and yes, that's a high bar to clear) were proclaiming that Romney, having sired five sons, was therefore "more of a man" than Obama with his two daughters.
ReplyDeleteAdd "Basic Biology" to the long list of things the right-wing blatherers don't understand.
Yeah, if only Europe would invest in "secure energy" rather than in the insecure sun, wind and tides.
ReplyDeleteWhat? Obama is black now?
ReplyDeleteUgh. That and obsessing about Palin's naughty monkeys?
ReplyDeleteEr, actually, Charlie didn't do the stabbing, he let his ladies do that stuff.
ReplyDeleteFrom your lips to God's ear...
ReplyDeleteCharlie's mescaline fueled late night harangues could be the basis of anything from a Charles Murray tract to a California Republican Gubernatorial candidate's position paper. He was just slightly ahead of his time. I was going to add slightly unwashed, but that's just not true anymore:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/22/ca-gop-candidate-for-governor-is-a-registered-sex-offender-commited-manslaughter/
i would like this comment to bounce a basketball off of my head and tell me to squirt a few.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure he was a democrat.
ReplyDeleteI had a sneaking suspicion that was true--that he ran his atrocities along strictly hierarchical lines and subcontracted them out to his workers. But I couldn't bring myself to google it.
ReplyDeleteWhen an American plane went down on its way to/from/? China, President Bush sent a letter saying he was ‘very sorry’ - without apologizing! I’d like to see Obummer try and pull something manly like THAT off. But I suppose he wouldn't send it; he'd just limp-wristedly wave it around, Chamberlain style.
ReplyDeleteYou can also tell the classy ones by how much they cheer for the blood of fellow Americans to be shed. Whether it's "watering the tree of liberty" or "taking needed steps to defend the unborn" or "we need to throw some crappy country against the wall," there's no amount of killing and dying they're not going to root for--especially since they know they and they're kin won't have any skin in the game.
ReplyDeleteThe monsters are due on Maple Street.
ReplyDeleteObviously what America needs is professional Strong Dad, quasi-shadow-president and totally not Boehner-orange Mitt Romney to straighten things out.
ReplyDelete"Hmpf, I'd have done better, nyah!" America dodges another bullet.
ReplyDeleteGet a few folks who are swayed by this drivel, shove them in the booth with the Klansmen, Ayn Rand freaks, and sadists, and...
ReplyDeletea) Now I'm excited.
b) Lets put on a show!
c) Lets eat!
d) all of the above
No, they definitely made that argument, but it wasn't at all implicit in the Trayvon hysteria. That was purely about blackity blackness. I think it really cut the other way, in a way. Obama alluding to the possible existence of a son and essentially "claiming" Trayvon as a son symbolically was throwing down a kind of masculine gauntlet--it was seen as a provocation not as a sign of his lack of masculinity. It was seen as siding with black/male/masculine/violent/thuggery. And they didn't take any detour around calling him "half white" or "the professor" or "limp wristed" when they attacked him for it. He wasn't seen as making up for a lack of masculinity by the statement--he was seen as the agressor revealing the black hand in the previously velvet glove.
ReplyDeleteAnyone ever think that Republican foreign policy is based on their reading of Rich Dad/Poor Dad? http://www.wikisummaries.org/Rich_Dad,_Poor_Dad
ReplyDeleteThis is a rather anodyne summary. I actually read a bit of the original book and its much, much, sicker than the summary makes you think. Basically the "poor dad" is a schmuck who doesn't plan to fuck people over daily in order to make a buck while the "Rich Dad" is an incredible asshole who exults in humiliating other people, even the "son" in order to teach him how to win and crush his enemies.
Upvote for the Peewee's Playhouse reference.
ReplyDeleteI'm not at all surprised that a smarmy punk like Romney would be saying what he said. What amazes me is that Bob Schieffer isn't rolling his eyes and then pounding his head on the desk.
ReplyDeleteTo: Romney,
ReplyDeleteSubject line: re: seeing the future
Text body:
YOU COULDN'T EVEN SEE YOU GETTING STOMPED IN A NATIONAL ELECTION WHEN IT WAS THE MOST OBVIOUS THING IN THE WORLD, FORGIVE US FOR NOT RECOGNISING YOUR PRETERNATURAL POLITICAL SAVVY
Love,
- Warthog
It's all been downhill since we had a president who referred to Vladimir Putin as "Pootie-Poot."
ReplyDeleteThis.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I drove around rural Germany, every barn, house, and structure was topped with as many solar panels as possible, and the skyline had plenty of wind generators. That was 6 years ago, before they started really pushing green energy.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that particular puckered divot is his navel, IYKWIMAITYD.
ReplyDeleteWhy isn't Romney marooned on Loser Island, like Mike Dukakis? I don't recall Meet the Press asking Dukakis a goddamned thing in 1989.
ReplyDeleteWe can only hope.
ReplyDeleteI imagine McCain will get a modern-day Viking funeral. They'll put him on an old aircraft carrier and set it ablaze. Weeping Lindsay Graham will throw himself on the funeral pyre.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why he's trying to plug foreign policy credentials. Ooh, maybe he's going to run again.
ReplyDeleteYeah, grabbed it like a hot potato, and we weren't wearing gloves. With enough anesthetic ointment, our rulers don't feel it, but the rest of the world can smell our scorched flesh. And the Iraqis', too...
ReplyDeleteThey'll put him on an old aircraft carrier and set it ablaze.
ReplyDeleteFor authenticity, they should load him into a plane and crash it into the aircraft carrier.
He looked into Putin's soul first, thereby determining that being called "Pootie-Poot" was his secret weakness. Why else do you think he stopped with South Ossetia?
ReplyDelete"Instead of reducing their dependence on gas from Ukraine and Russia,
ReplyDeletethe leaders of Western Europe have chosen to combat climate change."
Yeah, that cartoon pretty much sums up my reaction. Except mine included profanity, as usual. Reducing carbon emissions increases dependence on gas? Europe would be fracking like crazy if it weren't for concerns about climate change? Norway needs to drop hydrolectric, because it's getting in the way of oil production? What the fucking fuck? [See?]