Morons
Shorter Washington Post editorial page
- Now that Bush has done our bidding and freed St. Scooter, we’re starting to have second thoughts about the wisdom of commuting a convicted felon’s entire sentence.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
You know what makes me super-duper-wicked angry about this editorial? Not once do they address the most obvious goddamn question imaginable: why did Scooter Libby lie to a jury? These weren’t oopsie-woe-is-me-I-just-forgot lies, they were large, obvious, giant sammich-style lies. They were lies that were considered so egregious that Scoots was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.
Washington officials don’t just tell such lies because they feel like being meanies. They tell them for very specific reasons. To the Washington Post op-ed’s page, those reasons just aren’t interesting. To them, Scooter was obviously just a victim of an overzealous prosecution who just had to nail somebody, and the only way they could do it was by catch poor ol’ Scoots obstructin’ teh justice and perjurin’ hisself.
So thanks, guys. I’m glad you’re doing your job as government watchdogs.
Losers.
UPDATE: I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t kick up the old impeachment drumbeat again:
He did it all for the nookie (come on) the nookie (come on),
So Bush could take this country,
and stick it up his……
I’m pretty sure you mean “our bidding.”
The two words that got me were “convincing evidence”.
As in there is convincing evidence that Scooter didn’t plot to out a covert agent. He fucking lied you douchebag. How is there convincing evidence about what he and Shooter plotted?
Fred Hiatt is this stupid.
Link keeps linking me to a 25 June Richard Cohen column. But maybe that’s just me.
Brad was prolly trembling with righteous anger and copied the wrong link. In the meantime this should do it.
I didn’t read past the subhed, which is: Scooter Libby’s prison sentence was excessive, but so is President Bush’s commutation.
Life’s too short.
Dave Broder needs to have quail with Karl Rove.
Fred Hiatt and the rest of the gang need to go to Sally Quinn’s cocktail parties with Scooter.
Why did Scooter lie? That is irrelevant to these MORANS.
From Josh Marshall.
The Supreme Court made it harder Thursday for most defendants to challenge their federal prison sentences.
…
The justices upheld a 33-month sentence given to Victor Rita for perjury and making false statements. Rita is a 25-year military veteran and former civilian federal employee.
Come on, people: if this doesn’t get your vote as the official Drumbeat of Impeachment, you have no soul.
I think the Drumbeat of Impeachment should be less syncopated and more ominous, kinda like this.
“There was no crime, so how can there be perjury?”
People like that are probably so stupid they would think someone who murders his parents should get leniency because he’s an orphan.
Good call, Matt! I can see the bit between about 3:35 and 4:05 as the bumper music for NBC’s coverage of the impeachment hearings.
An idea whose time has come: “MTV9: The Multipercussion Solo Channel.”
I’m very puzzled. What exactly is it that the WaPo wants Bush to do? Pardoning him is too much, but commuting his jail sentence oversteps the bounds, but doing nothing is too little, so……..he should have changed Libby’s sentence to thirty months of interpretive dance classes?
They actually say in their little editorial:
Perhaps we should send them a copy of the Constitution – it might help to clear up this bit of confusion they are experiencing. Perhaps just a link to a Wikipedia page or two might even help.
Dear Washington Post: GEORGE W. BUSH IS NOT A KING. THERE ARE LIMITS TO WHAT HE IS LEGALLY ALLOWED TO DO. HE DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER TO ALTER A JAIL SENTENCE THAT HAS BEEN ASSIGNED BY A JUDGE. JUDGES ARE PART OF THE JUDICIAL BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT. THE PRESIDENT IS PART OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH. PLEASE CHECK WITH YOUR FOURTH GRADE TEACHER IF ANY OF THIS IS UNFAMILIAR TO YOU. THANK YOU.
*headdesk*
By contrast, the NYT editorial page got it exactly right today. concluding with this:
But then I turn to the opinion page and David Brooks has written the most god awful, insult laden motherfucking piece of dishonest bullshit I’ve ever read in the Times and maybe anywhere else. Really, teh Pantload and K-Lo together after a night of drinking cheap tap beer at a seedy bar, four trips through the Taco Bell drive through and eating six watermelons apiece could not have excreted something as disgusting as his column. It’s behind their pay wall but Somerby has some excerpts and a good but surprisingly restrained analysis. I am sick to my fucking stomach with anger.
That’s the thing about the NYT these days. Judy, Queen of Iraq, is gone. But Michael Gordon, partner in crime, is still there.
And he’s still stenotyping for the neocons, who are now trying to lie us into war with Iran.
Pinch Sulzberger and Donnie Graham.
More living proof that the Paris Hilton tax should not be repealed.
I think I just need to close my eyes and think of unicorns.
OK so this morning in my English 101 class I was teaching basic argumentation and gave an example of a claim of fact: “President Bush will likely pardon Scooter Libby on his last day in office.” After 10 minutes of discussion about how to support such a claim, it became clear to me that not one of my students even knows who Scooter Libby is. Rather than going all medieval on their asses, I asked myself, “What would kingubu do?” (earlier thread reference), took a deep breath, and explained in my best Joe-Friday style. At the end of which one of my students said “The president did the right thing. That guy sounds like a patriot.” Since I’m trying to teach argumentation, I asked for some reasoning. Her response: “I’m from a military family and I just won’t listen to this.”
Jillian, any room on your desk for my head?
Mortician. Couple weeks ago I had lunch with a friend of mine, mid thirties guy, literate, VERY successful high tech salesman in the memory biz. Anyway, I made some kind of Scooter Libby comment and he said “Who is that, anyway. I’ve heard that name mentioned a couple times”.
I didn’t know what to say. I was like, dude, if you don’t fucking care what happens in the world, what happens to your country, what happens to your liberties, if you can’t be bothered to take ten minutes out of your day to understand what these fuckers are doing, then just go ahead and live in ignorant bliss until the whole deal unravels, and then you can be righteously surprised.
Shit…
mikey
Pinch Sulzberger
Did he fall asleep again?
That never gets old.
Lol Durs62.
Mikey, Smiling Mortician:
After Saddam invaded Kuwait hundreds of Americans and foreign nationals took refuge in the American embassy. To these potential hostages Wilson became a hero. At one point Saddam ordered the embassy to turn over all non-diplomats they were sheltering. Hussein threatened execution for diplomats that did not comply. Calling Hussein’s bluff, Wilson held a press conference with a hangman’s noose around his neck; telling reporters that if Hussein wanted to hang him, he’d bring his own rope.
Back in Washington, President George H. W. Bush was becoming impressed with Wilson’s abilities. As his aides and advisors presented plans and courses of action regarding the embassy standoff, the President seemed to always ask the same question: “What does Joe Wilson say?” The President would later call Wilson a “truly inspiring” diplomat who exhibited “courageous leadership.” In 1992, President George H. W. Bush named Wilson the U.S. Ambassador to the Gabonese Republic and, concurrently, to the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe – positions Wilson held until 1995.
OTOH, Scooter Libby avoided Vietnam, just like the rest of the chickenhawks.
So its official! We’re fucked!
Drum beats of impeachment, neh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe2aqYkIbXM&mode=related&search=
I generally dislike her, but this cover ish not bad. I tab out from the video though.
Or, if you feel more… mmmm… je ne sais qoui about it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WATwybCs8TM
The audio is bad, but you get the idea.
More on moran Michael Gordon.
just go ahead and live in ignorant bliss until the whole deal unravels
I wish I could sometimes.
Glenn Greenwald absolutely nailed this entire situation today.
What is amazing to me is how conservatards consider Scooter a “hero” precisely *because* he broke the law and pissed off “liberals”. (And by “liberals” I mean most of the country)
Breaking the law simply because they can gives these people massive hard-ons. They see it as rubbing it in the faces of us lowly, law-abiding citizens.
At least with Oliver North you could say that he did something you might agree with ideologically. With Scooter he broke the law to weaken our national security to further a purely personal vendetta.
Mort, I think I was talking earlier about how I am coming to believe that our entire primary and secondary educational system are set up in such a way as to make sure that young people never, ever, ever, ever learn how to think critically. Because you teach at university, you reap the fruits of that.
Critical thinking would be the absolute death of our current economic system. It would improve our lives immensely – but it means that the very very rich in this country would no longer be able to be very very rich…they’d have to settle for merely being rich.
I went to see Sicko today, and this was the bigger message that Moore was trying to get across in the film – that until we learn to think of ourselves collectively, and make decisions that benefit Americans collectively, we are going to continue to suffer things that no person living in the richest country in the world should suffer.
But the powers that be have done such a good job of convincing us that we should always put ourselves first, and any talk of “collectivism” is auomatically the Evil Road To Communism that we’re just not able to do this.
If we thought critically, we wouldn’t object to single payer health care, because we’d understand that catastrophic illness could happen to us just as easily as it could anyone else – and we’d want to make sure we had some protection against it. We’d also be able to take it a step further and realize that even if it never happens to us, it happens to *somebody*, and if we don’t take steps to make sure those people are taken care of, then we all end up suffering for it. But for some reason, the idea that our fates are intimately entwined with the fates of our countrymen is anathema – is unpatriotic. Critical thinking can slash through this myth in under sixty seconds….and that’s why we can never have critical thinking be the end product of our educational system.
Y’all should definitely go see the film – if for no other reason than to watch all the employees at a British hospital crack up laughing at Moore every time he asks where the billing department is, or how much the patients pay for this or that service.
More reichtard inanity:
BE SCARED because of islamomooslim terrorists (who failed to accomplish anything) in England. Please, http://www.mellody.co.za/michaela/palpatine/gallery/emperor11.jpg>Emperor Cheney, order the decider to abolish our Constitution.
Actual American troops getting killed in Iraq? The LIBERAL MEDIA is ignoring all the good news!
Surely there was a school painted in England, recently…
Did someone say “giant sammiches?”
Critical thinking can slash through this myth in under sixty seconds….and that’s why we can never have critical thinking be the end product of our educational system.
Yeah. When I’m not teaching college kids, I serve on my local school board — which I allowed myself to be persuaded to do based on my desire to see if I could make a positive difference. Best I can say is I haven’t made a negative difference. It’s pretty damned depressing to see all these K-12 teachers, most of whom really are dedicated, doing their best to design curriculum that would help kids develop thinking skills, only to be thwarted by the huge screaming corporatized national textbook monopoly (in cahoots with the evil that calls itself No Child Left Behind).
“I’m from a military family and I just won’t listen to this.”
While I’m sure this will get you in trouble with the Man, Mort, fail that one. Seriously, she needs a good slap of reality.
NCLB is the single biggest cash transfer of tax revenues to private corporations I think I’ve ever seen. It’s unbelievable – staggeringly unbelievable.
Florida is one of the states that has embraced what they call “high stakes testing” – if students don’t pass certain tests, they don’t move on to the next grades, and if administrators have too many years in a row of failure on the test, the school faces the prospect of having all its employees fired and forced to reapply for their jobs. This is hardly surprising, as the idiot in chief’s brother, Jeb, was our governor when this started.
Needless to say, all teaching is now done directly to the test, and an entire industry has sprung up to sell us curriculums designed for the express purpose of – teaching kids to the test. I spend more time teaching test-taking skills than I do anything else, and I have lots and lots of books to choose between for this, all written for this purpose and sold to the schools at an insane markup.
Hope y’all are happy to know where your property tax dollars are going.
Jillian: Too fucking right.
The FCAT has been a burden on the Florida school system for years, and it simply indoctrinates students into the mindless busywork the corps want of their drones. The flaw in this is of course that the standards they set require an actual education, which is rendered nonsense by the fact that the students only have time to learn the test.
So of course, we do nothing but fail the schools, time and again. And as each school was fucked over, Jeb was sure as fuck pounding the private school voucher program drum, trying to get every clueless parent on board. Because now every student who was going to the flunked school had to go to another school, which was then overcrowded and had twice as many students to teach on how to do the test the next time.
And the public school system flounders and drowns under the program, and nobody gives a fucking shit because the clueless fucking parents are more worried about the buses moving the fucking kids from one place to another. Which as we saw from the Supreme Court decision on Brown, is just one more step in beating the shit out of the educational system in America.
I, luckily, escaped the whole fucking mess while they were treating it as a practice program. And as I never did the busywork of learning how to *do* the test (bubble this dot fully!), and instead learned on my own time and effort the things which would be *on* the test, I passed those fucking practice FCAT tests every time, giving a big fat finger to Tallahassee in the process.
Independence day, a full morning of intelligent, critical blog reading has driven me to decide the rest of my day is best spent sanding and filling the body of my poor old Ford truck.
It is an act that will hopefully assist in keeping me self employed and also serves to resist the continual pressure for me to resign my free-agent carpenter status and return to mind numbing corporate submission. The weight of the increasing dollar, rising fuel prices and the increasing price of retaining my physical health stand heavily on my and our shoulders, with G.W. and his cronies stomping and stomping to increase the weight, to grind us down into headless serfs to serve their interests.
My ability to work on my truck, in a fully equipped garage of course has nothing to do with economic privilege/access and everything to do with trading skill and labor in return for access to tools and other needed skill and labor.
Yes, Jillian, it sure as hell is about cooperative effort and the wingers will continue to beat the drum of individualization as it works so well to destabilize and impoverish us.
I intend today like everyday to perform small acts of subterfuge which illustrate that such pressure to conform and submit can be overcome. Practice with little steps and actions now, revolution or should I say, reformation will come from that.