Just throw a stone into any gathering of conservatives and you are guaranteed to hit one! Two in this case. Sarah “Death Panel” Palin reveals that she is an erstwhile socialist medicine tourist, and anti-gay rights crusader and Repug California State Senator Roy Ashburn admits that he is more gay than Adam Lambert.
I’m not supporting James O’Keefe’s take-down of ACORN, but I thought it was a brilliant and funny bit of political theater. As we all know, his latest ‘caper,’ to tap or otherwise mess with Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones, fizzled out as suspicious staffers called in the fuzz, turning wanna-be political thespians into political miscreants.
So how did Jimmy go from genius to doofus in a single step? First off, hubris, common plight of the young and brash fresh off a recent victory. I guess Jimmy figured he was so gifted he need give nary a thought for the gross difference in scale between pranking an overworked ACORN staffer and the staff of a U.S. Senator.
Secondly, the first prank worked well because it was funny, regardless of your political stripe – and that was especially great because as we all know, reactionaries are so rarely funny!
Maybe Jimmy had something funny planned, but by not leveling with us and telling us what he was really up to, we can only assume it was a ho-hum act of wrong-wing political thuggery. Ergo – doofus.
Imagine this WWII headline:
“Japanese attempt to fire a bullet at American forces. Republicans demand Roosevelt’s resignation”.
Now you’ve got a picture of the basic lack of seriousness and rationality associated with the right-wing claims, and the media’s stenography, about the Lap Bomber incident. The basic premise of the Cheneyites argument is that, while we are engaged in a worldwide war against an implacable and omnipresent foe, if one enemy footsoldier attempts one act of war anyplace in the world, it signifies that everyone in the administration has failed in their duty and must resign. Predictably, rather than pointing out that, when at war, enemies fight back and casualties can occur, the media swallows whole the moronic paradigm of risk-free, casualty-free global war as presented by Cheney and Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra.
The Republican strategy for exploiting politically the failed bombing attempt is conveniently outlined in Murdoch’s house organ for the right, the Wall Street Journal. While Rep. Hoekstra, in a direct mail appeal, calls the Obama administration and Democrats “weak-kneed liberals”, and Cheney clangs his familiar gong of inexperience and mushiness, the best Axelrod can come up with is to call it “unbecoming” of Republicans to exploit national security politically. WSJ notes that the White House has leaked to bloggers the fact that the Yemeni Al Queda leaders are former Guantanamo inmates released by Bush, and has also publicized some high-profile arrests, like the David Headley case. The thing that no-one dares do is question the basic premise that the US can be engaged in multiple shooting wars in the Middle East, while also using unmanned drones to target suspects in multiple countries where we are not officially at war (unfortunately slaughtering a few wedding parties in the bargain), without any cost or interruption to the daily security of Americans at home.
As illustrated by my fictitous headline, if Republicans really believed their rhetoric of war, it would be obvious that wars presume enemies, and enemies fight back. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if some intrepid journalist pointed out the fact that, in war, especially guerilla wars with no borders and no defined state actors, civilians are at risk, and that that is the price of “superpower” status and world policeman actions?
So can Obama and Democrats use this line of argument to bolster their case? Unfortunately, the answer is clear. Unlike the British, who, while thoroughly despicable in their conduct of colonial empire, at least kept the stiff upper lip when the inevitable casualties ensued, the American public, body politic and media is so fundamentally immature that the idea of war without sacrifice (except some poor anonomous farmboys and homeboys whose official portraits scroll by on the evening news) is accepted as the norm, and any hostile act shakes our republic to the core. Any politician who notes that empire has cost, that enemies have resources, and that hypocrisy and abandonment of our core principles, as demonstrated by our support of Israeli exceptionalism and torture for convenience, has a price, would be committing political suicide for stating what any mature advisor would consider obvious.
Would it have been a tragedy if that plane had been blasted from the sky? Obviously, as it is a tragedy that the Taliban has murdered an entire CIA station in Afghanistan. The greater tragedy is the fact that the solidarity in face of war that lead to the defeat of a far more dangerous and implacable foe in WWII has been abandoned by the Babbitts of the Republican right in their desperation to reclaim the right to undo our republic from within, as they have successfully done during every Repug administration in recent history. And the foundational catastrophe of our age is that the press, in its laziness and frivolity, accepts every shoddy premise put forth by the know-nothing caucus as if it’s a serious critique, without once noting that a lie is a lie, or that a failed party with blood on its hands from 9/11 to Iraq to Abu Ghraib to Palestine to the dismantling of our moral legitimacy and economic stability has little right to give lessons in war policy.
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.’
Answers here:
This: 
Or this:
Who's the Saudi's beeatch?
I sure hope there was no tongue involved *shudder*
Wrong-wingers start the ‘Conservative Bible Project’ to cut out the “Liberal” bits. Seriously? It’s a wasted effort unless they just bite the bullet and delete the New Testament to eliminate all that Jesus stuff about healing lepers (free healthcare), helping the poor (socialism) and general bleeding-heart Liberalism.
The 2,000-plus miles of the Appalachian Trail might be considered a brisk stroll in comparison to the long verbal road South Carolina governor Mark Sanford took in today’s press conference, before finally admitting that his mysterious 7-day disappearance from the state was related to an extramarital affair with a woman in Argentina.
He didn’t have much choice. Once he was surprised by a local reporter at the Atlanta airport (where he’d hoped to evade notice), there was no way to keep the media from dissecting clues about where he’d been, and no plausible cover story he could tell to end the speculation (especially since the real story was already leaking out).
It’s amusing, though, that Sanford implied in the press conference that he was down in Buenos Aires putting an end to the affair. Seven days seems like an awfully long time to spend breaking up, y’know?
Stuart Taylor, Jr., stalwart defender of oppressed white males
Via Atrios and Adam Serwer at the American Prospect, Stuart Taylor, Jr., of the oh-so-overpriced-respected National Journal has decided to delve into Sonia Sotomayor’s undergraduate student days in hopes of derailing her Supreme Court nomination:
Princeton University was guilty of “an institutional pattern of discrimination” against Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, then-sophomore Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a letter published in the May 10, 1974 edition of the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. [. . .]
. . . Sotomayor’s parents had moved from Puerto Rico to New York in search of better opportunities. Those opportunities ultimately came to include her admission to the university that she so sharply attacked. [. . .]
. . . Some may see the fact that Princeton awarded Sotomayor a summa cum laude degree and the prestigious Pyne Prize when she graduated in 1976 as evidence of her unparalleled brilliance in overcoming a “total absence of regard, concern, and respect” for people such as her.
And some may see Sotomayor’s letter as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities.
Wow. Personally, I look forward to Mr. Taylor extending his investigation of Ms. Sotomayor’s past into her junior high school years. Really, why stop at a letter she wrote when she was 19? Surely she did something earlier in her teens that would disqualify her even more!
Also, although my windbag-to-English translation book isn’t handy at the moment, I wonder what “she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities” really means to Taylor — perhaps something like, “We let you in — shut up and be grateful”?
Apparently, uppity women and minorities make Mr. Taylor uncomfortable by not knowing their place.
(P.S. In a comment on Taylor’s article, Michael Bérubé notes that current Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito was a “former member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, the group that was formed as a reaction against the admission of women and minorities in the first place.” No doubt the kind of guy Taylor feels is more respectful of the great institution he attended.)
(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)
The Fascist Weiner
Versus
Wishes he were a pirate in Somalia
Our trans-Atlantic cousins just published a list of extremist bastards that are banned from their country – and it includes several wing-nut U.S. ‘personalities’ such as Michael Weiner. Keep in mind even a potentially rabid dog can enter the UK after 6 months of quarantine!
Of course it’s hard to get too embarrassed – after all, the UK harbors that one-eyed, one-armed Islamic looney, Abu Hamza al-Masri, for whom every day is ‘talk like a pirate day’ and recently harbored the other looney Omar Bakri Mohammed who called for jihad against the government that supported him on the dole.
We really need to kidnap some of these guys, take them to an undisclosed location, and have them do some extreme cage fighting – it would be interesting to see which of them could actually practice what they preach, and which would soil themselves in fear.
Interesting factoid – Omar Bakri’s daughter is waging her own personal jihad against the immoral infidel club-goers of London as a topless pole-dancer! Allahuakbar!
