Needlenose

Could President Obama actually be prepared to hold firm to some position this time in his upcoming round of negotiations with the Congressionals?  Or is he some sort of Republican Manchurian Candidate who will just appear to have some sort of plan or convictions and then cave in on demands to cut social programs (as he did recently with the Bush Tax Cuts for the Wealthy)?  What with extending warrantless wiretapping, keeping Gitmo afloat, ‘surging’ troops in Afghanistan and keeping a sizeable number of troops in Iraq, Obama seems to be hell-bent on keeping the Bush Legacy alive!

*Update* California is a crazy bi-partisan microcosm of the Great American Stalemate.  However, under Jerry Brown’s stern governance, we’ve somehow managed to move forward on a budget before our bonds became Junk.  That’s a mixed omen, with a ray of light indicating that budget deals are possible, however the budget was largely an exercise in painful cuts to education and social services.  It wasn’t all bad, though, as it seems like Jerry was still able to piss off a few Reactionaries – some of the more radical counties want to split and form their own Hicksylvania.  I’d be all for it were it not for the creation of two more Repug Senators.

Then:

Afghanistan Vs. Soviet Union, 1985

And Now:

Afghanistan vs. USA, 2010

If this is progress, I’d hate to see what a downturn in our war in Afghanistan looks like!  Even Karzai wants us out.  Obama, dude, give up on Shrubya’s broke-ass policy, let’s get out of there and out of Iraq!

*Update 12/16/10* Obama shines a turd.

*Update 12/16/10 1:28P* Red Cross points out the turd isn’t shiny and in fact stinks.

Gingrich has been gradually creeping out from the shadows into the limelight since his fall from grace when leading the impeachment crusade against the very popular Bill Clinton.  But the Gingrich of the 90s seems relatively tame compared to the teabaggers and birthers of today – and even compared to Gingrich 2010!

In a recent speech to the reactionary American Enterprise Institute, Gingrich seems to have planted one foot firmly amidst the teabagger camp with his calls to forbid the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero), and the other solidly planted in the Wolfowitz/NeoConArtist era of never-ending war on Radical Islam:

“I believe [Bush] was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said. The U.S. has to “over-match the problem,” he said, adding, “That’s what Americans are all about.”

I wonder if he got the memo that various Repug leaders were starting to bail on Shrubya’s Afghanistan Folly?  Palin/Gringrich in 2012 – the worst of 3 eras of Repug misleadership!  It would be kinda luck the Germans in WWII – invading a bunch of weak countries (Iran, N. Korea), then going crazy and attacking Russia from Palin’s house…I don’t even want to think about the hell they’d create.

GOoPer Senator Dick Lugar comes to the realization that Shrubya’s Afghanistan Adventure is unwinnable.  It’s about time, Dick!  Welcome to the Reality-Based Community.  Shame you didn’t figure that out before the invasion, or read Needlenose back in ’03 on Afghanistan’s slide into chaos – we coulda schooled you!  Now if we could only get Obama to take our advice and start the withdrawal immediately!

Seems like a risky gambit for the Reactionaries to remind voters of Shrubya in the lead-up to the elections, as well as split the Reactionary Jingo Consensus.

Related news, pundit Joel Brinkley writes off Afghanistan, Dumbass Gingrich cracks open a newspaper,  Michael Steele thinks Obama started the war (in his alternative reality shared by scary man-woman Ann Coulter) and our military continues to blow up Afghani civilians.

*Update 7/21/10* HuffPo has video montage of a bunch of Repug pols repudiating Shrubya’s Afghanistan Adventure.  Or is that refutiating?

Carter has built countless homes and negotiated numerous ceasefires after his Presidential term.  Clinton has negotiated the release of innocent hostages and worked to help the victims of natural disasters.

Shrubya doesn’t roll that way. Watch as Shrubya wipes his hand on Bill Clinton’s shirt after shaking the hand of a Haitian:

Biden decries Israel’s illegal colony expansions!  Compare and contrast with the Status Quo Ante, Shrubya’s envoy’s reaction to getting sand kicked in his face.

*Update 3/11/10* We should retaliate for the snub by cutting off their annual $5B handout.  Ingrates.

*Update 3/15/10* The Empire Strikes Back.  Let’s see if Obama wusses out.

Better not forget the extra foam, barrista, this gun has a hair-trigger!

Regardless of how lame the Obama Administration has been, the recent and upcoming SCOTUS rulings on gun control should be a wake-up call about how wrong the Naderites were about how there is ”no difference between the Democrats and Republicans.’  Shrubya had 8 years to replace retiring liberal and moderate justices with reactionary activists.  The result?  Sometime this summer you are going to wake up one morning in a country where all gun control laws have been abolished.

You can get a preview of things to come by watching the gun nuts parade around with their weapons in our restaurants and national parks.  I bet it won’t be long before we have some dramatic shootout, where one of these unhinged, delusional vigilantes tries to stop an armed robbery and blows away some poor coffee patron.  Or maybe a couple of these loons will shoot at each other, thinking they are stopping a robber!  Hard to guess, but I’m sure it will happen soon, and sure it will be bloody.

Given the current extremists in the court, my guess is that we are one lawsuit away from a similar overturn of Roe v. Wade.

So stop your whining, suck it up and work hard to make Obama successful, now and in his next run – because we are just one Scalia or Thomas heart-attack away from an appointment of a real justice and a non-loony majority.

After years of shameless banner-carrying for the war on Islam and associated Shrubya apologia, the dumbass blogger of  Little Green Footballs says that now the American right wing is too extreme even for him!  The punchline is at the bottom of the article:

“[Charles] Johnson told me that he’d never considered himself a ‘conservative.’”

Yeah, I’ve never considered him a conservative either – the word that springs to my mind is ‘reactionary,’ or ‘war-monger.’

It’s probably not earthshaking news to anyone out there that another former Bush administration employee has decided to write a gossipy backstage memoir of Dubya’s disastrous presidency.

Nor is it likely any surprise that in speechwriter Matt Latimer’s memoir, the Shrub-in-Chief himself is portrayed as both obnoxiously arrogant and childishly naive (not to mention in over his head):

After Chris, Jonathan Horn, and I learned about the president’s $700-billion-bailout proposal and drafted the remarks announcing it to a stunned nation, Ed said the president wanted to see us in the Oval Office. The president looked relaxed and was sitting behind the Resolute desk. He felt he’d made the major decision that everyone had been asking for. That always seemed to relax him. He liked being decisive. Excuse me, boldly decisive. The president seemed to be thinking of his memoirs. “This might go in as a big decision,” he mused.

“Definitely, Mr. President,” someone else observed. “This is a large decision.”

What is amusing, though, are the vignettes that show tiny flickers of self-knowledge from the famed “decider” and “war president”  Consider, for example, this comment on Barack Obama:

After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. “This is a dangerous world,” he said for no apparent reason, “and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.” He wound himself up even more. “You think I wasn’t qualified?” he said to no one in particular. “I was qualified.”

And on Sarah Palin:

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family.”

The split-second between the last two sentences — as the child-president briefly realized his own lack of qualifications and searched for a point of differentiation — must have been priceless to witness in person.

Alas, such self-insight didn’t last long, for either Bush or his minions.  Latimer writes that last fall, Shrubya was miffed about John McCain blocking press access to a joint appearance the two had planned in Phoenix:

Eventually, someone informed the president that the reason the event was closed was that McCain was having trouble getting a crowd. Bush was incredulous. [...] “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an event in his hometown? [...] I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

We tried to move on to something else. But the president wouldn’t let go. He was stuck on the Phoenix event. At one point, he looked off into space and said to no one in particular, “What is this—a cruel hoax?”

Chris [a fellow speechwriter] and I were tickled by that comment. For weeks, we would look for ways to use it. “They are out of Diet Pepsis at the mess. What is this, a cruel hoax?” I went to dinner with a friend. “They don’t have cheeseburgers?” I said, looking at the menu. “What is this, a cruel hoax?”

No, Mr. Latimer.  The cruel hoax was that the egotistical simpleton you worked for was President of the United States for eight years.

Peter Daou was watching Al Gore among the dignitaries at the memorial service for Ted Kennedy… and noted that when Dubya walked in, Al took a sudden interest in what was going on across the room — turning completely around so he wouldn’t come face to face with the Shrub.