Greg Sargent has the goods:
Top Dems Planning Amped Up Efforts To Elevate Rush As GOP’s Public Face
Top Democratic operatives are planning a stepped up campaign to promote Rush Limbaugh as the public face of the GOP — an effort that will include recruiting Dem governors to make this case on talk shows, getting elected officials to pen Op eds arguing it, and running more ads pushing it, a senior Democratic operative says.
Key leadership staff in the House and Senate, and in all the political committees, have been encouraged by senior Dem operatives to push this message wherever possible, the operative says.
“I’m encouraging everybody to go out and say this,” Paul Begala, the well-known Dem strategist, just told me by phone. “I’m hot for this. Let’s get this out every way we can.”
Begala is emerging as a major cheerleader and public face for this effort, though he says he’s not formally directing it. He described the effort as “organic” right now, though senior Democrats are discussing ways to formalize it.
They won’t have to work very hard. After all, Republicans keep falling over themselves to kiss Rush’s ass on just about every occasion. As GOP Rep. Phil Gingrey wrote to ditthead nation:
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and other conservative giants are the voices of the conservative movement’s conscience. Everyday, millions and millions of Americans—myself included—turn on their radios and televisions to listen to what they have to say, and we are inspired by their words and by their determination.
Guys, some advice:
If you want to be the party of hard work and family values, you should probably find someone to be your ideological figurehead who isn’t an admitted drug addict or a suspected sex tourist. Common sense, people.
ABOVE: Mayor Dean Grose
The Mayor of Los Alamitos, the aptly-named Dean Grose, saw a photo of the White House with a watermelon patch and, after blowing snot bubbles all over his city laptop, he pushed the send button. Now he has offered the best excuse ever since George Bush claimed he had nothing to do with the “Mission Accomplished” sign. Grose says he was “unaware of the stereotype that black people like watermelon.” Apparently he thought that the picture was funny because it was showing all the porkumelons in the recently-passed stimulus bill. Or maybe he saw it as a wry commentary that the stimulus bill was so bad that it must have been written by watermelons.
And, of course, if anyone could defend Mayor Grose, it would be “Van Helsing” at Moonbattery, who calls the watermelon patch photo a “harmless joke” and calls a black woman who was offended by it a “fink who ratted [the Mayor] out [and] sacrificed friendship to the motto, ‘Never Fail to Be Offended.’” After all, what’s the point of being someone’s friend if they can’t call you a “nigger”?
Via Roy, I see that Crunchy Con Rod Dreher — a.k.a., the Ned Flanders of blogging — is romanticizing life in the good old, old, old, old days. Like, say, the Dark Ages:
The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad. I answer in the negative.
For those of you following at home, Dreher just called the Enlightenment a net negative for human civilization. You know, the intellectual movement that spawned major scientific and political advances and gave us such thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith and David Hume. That’s a bad thing now. Why? Because of it’s apparently made people happier:
For the libertarian, human happiness is the highest goal, and that happiness is something that the individual is free, within broad limits, to decide for himself. Traditionalism… imposes limits on human choice and liberty… Its telos is not happiness, but virtue. In fact, the traditionalist does not recognize human happiness apart from virtue. A bad man who is content with himself cannot truly be said to be happy, in this view.
Dreher does acknowledge that this view is a “hard sell” for many voters; after all, who’s going to vote for a politician who promises to make people miserable? But in the end, he thinks this return to the Dark Ages may be the only way humanity can save itself from enjoying life:
I suppose that absent a commonly held source of authority from which we can derive binding ideals of virtue, the libertarian ideal is the only workable one for a pluralist community. But I question its durability over time. We are free — but for what?
OK, so obviously Rod doesn’t like drinking, smoking, having sex or listening to that goldurned rock’n'roll the kids are into these days.
And that’s fine! I don’t believe in using the government to force anyone into having a sinful lifestyle if they don’t want one. In fact, I think we have something called “freedom of religion” in this country that guarantees Dreher’s right to self-imposed misery if he so chooses. But what really makes Dreher’s worldview strange isn’t that he wants to live a godly lifestyle, but rather that he wants to force others through the government to live a godly lifestyle as well. This is why he doesn’t just want to roll back the ’60s, but just about every time period in history where witches were allowed to roam the countryside unburned. It’s a weird, weird world he lives in.
The Purple Avenger, a relief blogger for Ace of Spades, has taken on Attorney General Eric Holder over a legal issue, even though the Purple Avenger’s only legal training consists of sitting as a juror on a 45-minute shoplifting trial, skimming a couple of chapters of a John Grisham novel while taking the Greyhound to Chattanooga, and reading part of the Wikipedia entry on the Second Amendment. The masked purple man takes issue with this statement by Holder
I think closing the gun show loophole, the banning of cop-killer bullets and I also think that making the assault weapons ban permanent, would be something that would be permitted under Heller.
To which our Purple Perry Mason of Peoria retorts:
Ahem, the existing law about bullets…27 CFR 478
478.37 Manufacture, importation and sale of armor piercing ammunition. No person shall manufacture or import, and no manufacturer or importer shall sell or deliver, armor piercing ammunition …
If my memory serves correct [sic], this sort of law has been in place since about the time of [sic] Bush V1.0 was in office…which would be just under 20 years ago. Enough time for the AG to familiarize themselves [sic] with it I would presume…unless of course the AG has the mental capacity of a turnip.
Now before Mr. Rutabaga Head goes all snarky and says Holder has turnips for brains, and before he titles a post “Holder beclowns1 self,” it’s probably a really good idea for a guy wearing purple tights to make absolutely sure that he’s right so that he doesn’t wind up, well, beshitting2 himself.
Oh dear, Mr. Avenger, there’s something brown and foul-smelling running down the leg of your purple tights. I think that’s probably because you didn’t realize that the regulations have a definition of “armor piercing ammunition” which doesn’t include all armor piercing ammunition. It only includes ammunition that can be fired in a handgun. It only includes ammunition of a certain composition and doesn’t include other ammunition that can actually pierce body armor. Oh, and another thing, your stain is getting bigger because the “ban” isn’t really a “ban” either. It only applies to manufacturing and importing ammunition and has no effect on private ownership, use or transfer of armor-piercing bullets.
This is why there have been legislative proposals introduced to close these loopholes and is certainly what Holder was referencing. Here’s Senator Kennedy discussing such a proposal:
On this last issue, at the Judiciary Committee’s meeting on March 6, I offered an amendment to close the loopholes in the federal ban on armor-piercing ammunition. Current law lacks a `performance based’ standard for handgun ammunition that can penetrate body armor. Even more important, there are no restrictions on armor-piercing ammunition used in centerfire rifles. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nineteen law enforcement officers were murdered in the last decade after bullets penetrated their armored vests. Fourteen of these officers were killed by bullets fired from .223 caliber rifles or 7.62 caliber assault weapons–and armor-piercing bullets for these weapons continue to be marketed on web sites today. Because it has no place in our society, I offered an amendment banning all such armor-piercing ammunition. The Committee defeated my amendment by a vote of 10-6, with three members not voting.
Now, Purple, go clean yourself up and put on a clean set of tights, okay?
1I thought “beclown” had jumped the shark sometime ago, even among the juice-box and jammies set.
2 Sadly, No! officially-approved substitute for “beclown.”
Shorter Another Dopewad At Pajamas Media:
Above: Pajamas Media
Welcome to the Punk Presidency
Robert Gibbs’ attack on CNBC’s Rick Santelli is just the latest example of boorish behavior from Obama and his team.
Notes:
1 – The author is Tom Blumer of Bizzyblog, an alternate-reality business blog serving the wingnut community.
It’s the New American Tea Party, comin’ at ya with more new Republican ideas.
A visual representation of TARP and a warning against being lame.
This was sent in by Joe Tex Dozier. Hilarity.
Interesting. They have discovered fail pictures, and have succeeded in posting them haphazardly and in rude sequence, but it seems they have not yet mastered the technology to add the word FAIL to them.
We can help with this.
Well then, we certainly seem fixed here.
…Wait, no, it’s not the guy. You’re supposed to scroll down to a series of photos under the ones of the guy. The ones of wrecker trucks that originated like at Fark.com in like 1997.
Heh.
But in other sadder news, Pittsburgh cancelled their event tomorrow? Why?
Rain.
Look, maybe you are afraid of water. But just so you know, over 200 years ago when the real Tea Party happened, a bunch of really pale ethnically British colonists dressed up like Indians and threw the King’s tea into the harbor. They could have died.
Maybe that’s how you people act up in Pittsburgh. But down in Washington, we roll differently. We might have a drizzle, or it could be a deluge. We’re going right ahead with this, because there ain’t no party like a Washington tea party, because a Washington tea party don’t stop. Even for rain.
A Washington tea party.
A dirty Sanchez don’t stop for rain neither, if you know what I’m saying and I think you do.
Mah homey Mr. Sanchez gonna be up late tonight, dawg.
Shorter Charles Murray
Above: Casus bellcurvi? Never liked those people.
Pantload’s really outdone himself with this latest (not-)gotcha:
Questioning the Patriotism of High School Drop-Outs [Jonah Goldberg]
This is an intriguing passage from last night:
And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American.
What to make of that? On the one hand, it shows one of Obama’s great strengths and innovations as a liberal that he can invoke patriotism in a way that doesn’t seem affected.
But I thought invoking patriotism came naturally to fascists! Ein volk, ein reich… you know. Now Pantload’s saying it’s all affect and Obama just does it with less transparency. But then the only thing worse than a real Liberal Fascist is a pretend one, amirite? I imagine a conversation between like minds:
Otto from A Fish Called Wanda: It’s just as our fellow intellectual, Nietzsche (who was, like Aristotle, a Belgian) said: “What? A Great Man? I see only the actor of his own ideal.”
Pantload: Totally! And Obama’s ideal is, like, FASCISM!
N.Y. Post Cartoonist: I gotcher Nietzsche quote right here. “The disappointed man speaks: ‘I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.’” Neener neener!
Pantload: Exactly.
And.. scene. But I digress. Back to Pantload’s post, from which comes a punchline of sorts:
On the other hand, why is it okay to question the patriotism of high school drop-outs when it’s just about the worst thing in the world to question the patriotism of people in other circumstances?
Uh, because urging, even if in the negative, high schoolers to better themselves and their country does not equal smearing political opponents by calling them traitors.
Moreover, I think it says something telling about the current state of liberalism — and the political culture generally — that doing your part to sustain economic growth is a patriotic duty. This may seem normal and natural to people, but this notion is in fact a fairly recent development, with roots in the Progressive era but culminating with JFK’s Cold War liberalism, when outperforming the Soviets economically became a national imperative.
He means, of course, that it’s part and parcel of Liberal Fascism. (Actually, what he’s talking about started in the late Reconstruction Era, if not before. And it is neither liberal nor fascist in and of itself, but then you knew that.)
Update: From a reader:
Mr. JG:
Maybe I’m being too generous to Dear Leader, but I found his reference to the unacceptability of America’s high school drop-out rate to be a remark directed mostly (though subtly) toward black America where that problem is most severe. I would welcome more tough talk to the African-American community, especially coming from someone to whom they’re inclined to listen.
Me: I think this is largely right. I meant to make this point and somehow let it drop from my points. But I don’t think that’s all it’s about either.
Yeah, it can’t be all bad: consider its potential utility in getting the Negroes in line! But that point plus the points before it are merely central to Doughy’s point which has a point, should you decide to take his point (which you surely won’t if you’re a pointy-headed Liberal Fascist Poindexter who typically misses the point, which, the point being, that’s exactly what you are, though you will pointlessly deny it, even when Doughy’s pointing his points right at you.)
No, it can’t be. No, not him again.
Joe the Plumber laughs at Obama’s speech
The PoliticoIn town to promote his new book, “Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream”, Samuel J. Wurzelbacher — aka “Joe the Plumber” — stopped by Americans for Tax Reform Wednesday to review President Barack Obama’s Tuesday address before Congress and offer his own thoughts on American politics and current events.
Subtext: As the turbines spin up for CPAC 2009, and Washington, DC is enhanced with right-wing extremists of every kind, a Politico staffer cries “aah, whatever,” and looks to Grover Norquist and his oompa-loompas for color commentary, lest there be a single Groverless day in the press.
Wednesday’s Norquist cite was provided by the DC Examiner. And heck, David Weigel of Reason also managed to stock the Independent with three stories from his encounter with Mr. The-Plumber, chez Norquist. Here’s one now:
When It’s Time To Party We Will Party Hard
My friend J.P. Freire, the managing editor of The American Spectator, is the brains behind NewAmericanTeaParty.com. When I saw him today after Grover Norquist’s meeting, he was driven, intense — gripping his MacBook like a life raft in the Arctic Ocean, updating the group’s Facebook page and list of sponsors.
I’ll bet they do Twitter too. Twitter is that new thing that’s like burping the alphabet. Republicans are big on it because they have nothing to say.
Freire’s site is only one node in a network of grassroots Tea Party sites, which are protesting the mortgage rescue plan and the more general “recent trend of fiscal recklessness in government.” The main Washington event will be a rally in front of the White House on Friday, at noon.
Genius move scheduling it at the same time as both the Student Luncheon and Newt Gingrich at the Regency Ballroom. All the grassroots will be at one event or the other, leaving nobody to come to the protest but unknown who-people from, uh, world place.
But indeed, ‘recent’ is the word for this recent trend toward risky fecklessness and vice versa in government, notable in its sudden happening and noneness of antecedents. Brazenly and suddenly it happens now, after [cough cough] deficit [cough] every [cough] Reagan [cough cough] Education of David Stockman [cough cough] got away with it for twenty-five years [cough] all blown to hell [cough]. Then this Obama comes along acting like he runs the place.
And it’s a good thing that the Internet — ooh wait, it also looks kind of tight there with the 1:00 Internet Activist Workshop. Whoopsicles! Failopotamus!
Among the ideas that people pitched while Freire was working:
- An appearance from Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher. (He plans on showing up as a reporter for PajamasTV and then commenting on the event on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.)
Perfection would be if he went on Hannity to comment on his reporting on the rally at which he also appeared.
Or, perfection would also be that the person who pitched the idea at Norquist’s place was Wurzelbacher.
- A garbage bag that tea partiers will fill with tea bags. Protestors might write the names of programs they don’t like on the tea bags.
How about silk screened ‘tea shirts’ that have a string and a paper tag hanging off them. You can write things on the tag. No no, our pleasure. If we need an idea later we’ll just think of another one.
- Doing the garbage bag idea, but with cardboard boxes.
See, I saw the garbage bag idea and it was like, Okay, so you put all these tea bags, perhaps with the names of government programs on them, into a garbage bag. And then unless I’m mistaken you’re standing there with a garbage bag.
“Har har, liberals,” you will say to passers-by, “Just guess what’s in this garbage bag right here!”
No, we think you should approach the idea in terms of tea bags coming out of a garbage bag — dumped in a place, given to a person, perhaps made into a giant cup of something which is a pun on the letter ‘t.’ Like if you have ‘reason‘ but someone dumps ‘t’ on it, what then do you have?
But it could be a cardboard box instead, sure.
- A cover of “Take This Job and Shove It,” with new lyrics that would attack the stimulus package.
Shorter Megan McArdle
Above: “Moreover, I myself prefer to burn off leeches with a
stylish Colibri lighter, but ymmv.”
Shorter Michelle Malkin:
Above: Doo-de-doo-de-doot, In-spec-tor Gid-get…
Notes:
1 – Title cf.
2 – Original art came out insufficiently Malkinesque, i.e. lacked bizarre costume and/or angry grimace.
3 – Discarded title: ‘That’s So Ravening!’ caption “Oh snap!” cf.
4 – So you see, the Shorter is unlike the one thing about being a cephalopod: You put on your hat, you put on your shoes, and you’re dressed.
5 – Shorter John Stossel: “Opposite!!! Stimulus works = we are right Obama is wrong!!! ha ha work out details in fin. draft”
[Thanks whichwayisup for the Photoshop inspiration.]
Glenn Beck discusses what would happen if a bunch of hicks rose up and decided to violently overthrow the evil gubmint:
I just don’t get it.
During Bush’s presidency people like me were called traitors on a fairly regular basis because we didn’t show Bush the proper deference when he’d do some goofy shit like choke on a pretzel. Now we have guys on the teevee that are openly talking about armed insurrection against a democratically elected government and it’s considered the most patriotic and pro-American thing a feller could do with hisself.
This sort of thing doesn’t really offend me because I think most of Beck’s viewers would back down from starting a new civil war once they learned that it would likely lead to Cheeto rationing. But I am amazed at the sheer cognitive dissonance involved in simultaneously believing that it’s treasonous to peacefully oppose an unjustified war but that it’s patriotic to lead an armed insurrection against the government because they want to pay you unemployment benefits. If there’s a weirder political movement than American conservatism, I’ve yet to see it.
Who would have thought that lonely wingnuts, paralyzed by abject despair, would find their very own Dear Abby or Miss Lonelyhearts improbably tucked away in the Hoohah Institution and would, in their darkest hour, pen soul-searching letters to her (or him) seeking consolation, guidance and hope? Well, if our old buddy Tom Sowell is to be believed, he is being inundated by such letters:
An increasing number of recent letters and e-mails from readers strike a note, not only of unhappiness with the way things are going in our society, but of despair.
So he writes back: Dear Despairing Soul,
Those of us who are pessimists are only a step away from despair ourselves, so we may not be the ones to offer the best antidote to the view that America has seen its best days and is degenerating toward what may well be its worst. Yet what hope remains is no less precious nor any less worthy of being preserved.
Well, I feel much better already. Don’t you?
First of all, the day-to-day life of most Americans in these times is nowhere near as dire as that of the band of cold, ragged, and hungry men who gathered around George Washington in the winter at Valley Forge, to which they had been driven by defeat after defeat. …
Against the background of those and other desperate times that this country has been through, we cannot whine today because the stocks in our pension plans have gone down or the inflated value that our houses had just a few years ago has now evaporated.
Ah yes, the tried and true “at least you don’t have wooden teeth” argument. My mom used a variant of that when anyone would complain about getting socks and underwear for their birthday: “At least you don’t have leukemia, you know.” My guess is that “Despairing Soul” is now thinking he would have been better off writing to Amy Alkon.
Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead. One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs. Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone’s paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?
I know that I for one would survey a heap of nuclear rubble and kick myself over executive pay caps because, you know, in the time it took to pass those caps we could have invaded Iran, blown up their nuclear facilities, converted the population, given Hershey Bars and ponies to everyone and been back home by dinnertime.
It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender — and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb — dropped on New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles — might be enough to get us to surrender. If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.
And it’s not just because we have a hummus-eating eating surrender monkey in the White House. Read on.
How did we get to this point? It was no single thing. The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of “non-judgmental” affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.
In short, we we will surrender to Iran because kids aren’t reading Shakespeare in high school anymore, because we aren’t sending teh gays to butch camps, and, natch, because we gave Slumdog Millionaire, a movie about winning rather than earning money the old-fashioned way, eight Oscars.
The shame of Stanford strikes again.
Shorter “Very” Rich Galen:
Above: Galen enjoys ‘The Fountainhead’, an audiobook read by Scott Rolen
Atlas Raged
TownHall
Monday, February 23, 2009
Notes:
1 – I Am Joe’s Elegant Sentence: “I happened to be watching CNBC when this all took place, although I suspect this may become one of those thinks like Woodstock which, over the years, seven million baby boomers have proclaimed they were in attendance.”
2 – One man’s crisis is another man’s opporotunity.
Shorter Andrew Breitbart:
And now for something completely different, please
The Washington Times
Monday, February 23, 2009
Notes:
1 – Truly is this the swag hunt of the gods.
2 – As AT&T and Google enhance their public reputations, hey, where did the proverbial cake go? Why, the phony-grassroots group called ‘TV Watch‘ has taken it.
3 – Wolverines!
Shorter Blogs For Bush Victory:
Above: Mark Noonan
Notes:
1 – …And there was a great hehhing of indeed.
2 – It might, you know, seem as though a hidden complexity or two would be lurking in a claim that the German Economic Miracle, or Wirtshaftswunder, was caused by deregulation from the Nazi corporatist system — and indeed, it might seem as though such a claim would be more esteemed by market zealots than by scholars of the German Economic Miracle, or Wirtshaftswunder. Such a suspicion would not be unreasonable. Rebuttal in compliance with Fairness Doctrine: Gooble-gooble-gooble.
