HotD II

How The Shutdown Taught The GOP To Love Big Government

Bwahahahaha! The GOP has always loved them some big government as long as it's THEIRS! Sorry, Crazytrain, we ain't havin' it.

The Reagan Undead

Short piece by Charles P. Pierce on the holdover trickle-down zombies that ate our nation's face. And planned the shutdown. Please forgive me for the link. These are desperate times. Heh.

Will the sad detritus of the Saint Ronnie administration ever stop fouling American public life? We have Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins on the teevee almost every weekend. We had a whole clutch of the foreign-policy fantasts rehabilitated during the late reign of C-Plus Augustus. And now, this guy, who once advocated concentration camps for student demonstrators, who personally oversaw the most embarrassing "investigation" into the porn industry ever conducted, and who functioned as lookout and getaway driver for the Iran-Contra crooks, up to and including the increasingly dim president himself, comes back to help screw up the nation again. Nobody listens to Gary Hart, but Edwin Meese III still has a place in public life. Wingnut welfare is forever.

At least part of the blame has to be shared by those nominal Democrats who, either through their silence on the crimes of that era, or in their admiration for Reagan's "style" and toothy obliviousness. (The latest of these, alas, is Chris Matthews, who has written a book about how Tip O'Neill and Ronnie made politics "work," and who, between 1980 and 1982, probably sold out truly progressive politics for at least two decades.) A number of truly horrible things were set in motion in our political life in the 1980's. The people responsible never have really been called to account for it. Now, one of the worst of them is back, doing further damage. I am, frankly, stunned.

I'm not. Meese's big brag back in the day was that there wasn't quite enough evidence to indict him when he worked for the Alzheimer's President.

Insufficient evidence to indict. The words are not an endorsement. Yet Edwin Meese III waved them like a badge of honor Tuesday as he announced his long overdue resignation as U.S. attorney general.

They're ba-ack...

Headline of the Day

The GOP Has Been Planning The Government Shutdown Since Last Year. Here’s The Proof

This comes as no surprise.

Word

Click to embiggen

A tip o' the Brain to Hammer the Gods.

The Boehner Bunglers

Paul Krugman

The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
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It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
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Unfortunately for all of us, even the shock of electoral defeat wasn’t enough to burst the G.O.P. bubble; it’s still a party dominated by wishful thinking, and all but impervious to inconvenient facts. And now that party’s leaders have bungled themselves into a corner.

Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.

Not "can be", Paul - "is".

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Republicans Agree to Raise Debt Ceiling
If Obama releases his birth certificate.

Fox News Refers to Government Shutdown as “Slimdown”
Refers to debt ceiling as “Meaningless IOU.”

Obama Tells GOP to “Knock It Off”
“Suck it up,” “cut to the chase,” and “shit or get off the pot.”

Survey: Bible Belt Loves Porn More Than Cosmopolitan Areas
And damn proud of it.

Sunday Emmylou Blogging

This one's for Bear, who noticed...

The Triumph Of The Ratfuckers

An homage to Donald Segretti, the first political ratfucker to call himself that, in the context of what the teabaggers are up to by Charles P. Pierce.

But first a little background. The whole idea of "RF" was started by Big Daddy Roth back in the day. It was "Rat Fink" because we couldn't wear "Rat Fuck" on our T-shirts back then. We knew what he meant. That little hotroddin' rat was an idol and symbol to us teenagers. So was Big Daddy Roth.

The most popular Ed "Big Daddy" Roth monster was Rat Fink. Rat Fink started as a drawing that Ed had put on his refrigerator. Ed "Big Daddy" Roth was a genius at designing cars, but it was Rat Fink that brought him fame. By 1963, teenagers across America were buying Rat Fink model kits and mass-produced Rat Fink T-shirts by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth.
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The Ed "Big Daddy" Roth Gang included: Rat Fink, Drag Nut, Mother's Worry, and Mr. Gasser. They soon became heroes to young kids across the nation who could relate to the stories and themes of the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth gang.

Back to the modern-day ratfuckin' bastards.

As the Reign Of The Morons enters its third day, let us pause for a moment to pay tribute to a political visionary whose entire career presaged the current moment, anticipating the essential dynamic in play in Washington right now in all of its petulant, kindergartenish glory. Let us raise a morning glass to Donald Segretti, the ratfucker.

(As any student of Watergate knows, "ratfucking" was the word used by Segretti and a number of other officials in the Nixon White House for the dirty tricks they ran in student elections when they all were at the University of Southern California. Segretti -- as well as his pal, Dwight Chapin -- simply transferred these techniques to our national elections.)

There are two basic philosophical foundation stones to ratfucking. The first is that political sabotage for its own sake is a worthy enough goal. There doesn't necessarily have to be an obvious purpose or obvious logic behind it. Everything is simply tactics. Those tactics either work or they don't. To believe this, of course, one must first believe that all politics is a essentially a zero-sum game of power; you win and the other guy loses. Who rules? Period. One cannot for a moment contemplate the notion that politics -- and therefore, government -- has anything to do with the public good. I trust I don't have to spell out the parallels between this elemental basis of ratfucking and what the Republicans are about in their current campaign of vandalism. This has now entered a time in which we are seeing sabotage for sabotage's own sake. Remember, the conservative rump faction has brought this shutdown upon the country because its members refuse to agree to a federal budget that contains lower discretionary spending than even Paul Ryan contemplated. That's because now -- as Congressman Marlin Stutzman pointed out clearly yesterday -- this isn't about the budget, or even about economics, it's about who wins and who loses. It's about whether or not John Boehner, the castrato Speaker Of The House, can keep his job. The public, as was said during our previous Gilded Age, be damned.

The second basic philosophical tenet of ratfucking is that it is essentially bullying. It is essentially about ridicule and deceit as ends in themselves. [...]
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We are coming into the first weekend -- and therefore, the first Green Room festival -- since the Reign Of The Morons began, so I suspect we will see a lot of ratfucking gussied up as high rhetoric come Sunday. But, for the rest of us, we are living through a living history of sabotage, through a single extended dirty trick. We are all of us, milling around the public square, wondering who cancelled the rally today and somewhere, in a Days Inn near the airport, a clever young man snaps his suitcase shut and moves on to the next town. There is always another rat to fuck, after all.

Ah, Grasshopper, he who fucks the rat will eventually get fucked by the rat he fucked. It is written - he who pitches will also catch.

A Love Letter To Sen. Ted Cruz From a Left-Wing Socialist Hippie Libtard

The last coupla ¶ from a post you should read at The Political Garbage Chute

But one thing is for certain, Senator Cruz. You are going to drag the Republican Party down into the muck and the mire and you have no compunction at all to feel even the slightest bit remorseful for it. You are all Four Horsemen of the Republican’s Apocalypse. You are the Republican House Majority Harbinger of Death — and you will bring about the destruction of the most obtuse, obstructionist, worthless congressional bodies in fifty or more years. That is why I have to love you. You are doing for the rest of us what we cannot do.

You are destroying the Republican Party from the inside, and I for one hope you never, ever stop.

Amen.

We Are Living Through an Attempted Coup:

El Rude-o on the shutdown etc. Links at site.

What the GOP has done, first through the ludicrous overuse of the filibuster and now through the shutdown and the threat of breaking the debt ceiling if they do not get a law overturned, is to use perfectly legal means to achieve their goals. It is, however, a contortion of the Constitution and the rules of Congress that'd make a circus performer say, "How the fuck did you get your head all the way up your own ass?" The ultimate goal of the effort is to undo the will of the people of the United States by forcing the President to accept the GOP agenda.

So let's just call this what it is: it's an attempted coup. (my em)

The Tea Party, having cowed the leadership of the Republican Party, are attempting to stage a creeping coup by using the Constitution against the nation. It's so breathtakingly ballsy it's almost admirable. Fuck, it's even something the GOP laid out in a plan, the Williamsburg Accord. We just didn't pay attention. The nation is currently being wrecked by a tyranny of the minority, and, unfortunately, it's up to the cowards leading the Republican Party to stop it.

And that, dear liberals, dear Americans, is why it's not just economic anxiety that hangs over us like a guillotine blade. It's existential nausea that we may finally reap the seeds of our doom that we planted a generation ago.

I will fight it until my last breath. Obama and the decent people in Congress had better do that too.

"Government Shutdown For Dummies" by Old Fart Rants

You're not dummies. Watch it anyway.

One chickenshit boozehound is holding me, you, and every American hostage over right-wing ideology and fear of losing his cushy job!

Thanks to oldfartrants.

Why Right’s Lemmings Don Suicide Vest

Good article.

The government-sabotaging fervor of the Republican Right – likened by one GOP congressman to “lemmings with suicide vests” – can only be understood from inside the right-wing bubble where a distorted view of the Constitution prevails and actual democracy is disdained, writes Robert Parry.

Long article, go read. The crux of the biscuit:

As Virginian Anti-Federalist leader Patrick Henry warned his fellow slave-owners in urging them not to ratify the Constitution, “they’ll free your niggers!”

The GOP in a nutshell.

Headline of the Day

The GOP Takes Its Clothes Off in Public: It's Not a Pretty Sight, Even for Some Republicans

O the horror! I'm getting an awful visual of Orange Boner and Yertle, and worse, Crazy Eyes Bachmann! I've dragged my computer under the bed and I'm staying here until they put their clothes back on! Hide the children!

Short statement on the debt ceiling by President Gordon

On the theory that the Principal should run the school and not the kindergarteners, I hereby revoke the privilege given to Congress to vote on the debt ceiling, a privilege they have abused due to an inability or unwillingness to do their job of proper governance for the American people. I hereby invoke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The full faith and credit of the United States will be upheld. To the House GOP I say so fucking sue me and suck it, bitchez.

Headline of the Day

If Sabotage of the US Economy Is Terrorism, Send the House GOP to Guantanamo

Were I the Prez, they're only ONE of the domestic terrorist groups I would have kept Gitmo open for.

The Reign Of Morons Is Here

Part of a good rant you should read by Charles P. Pierce:

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
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Among other things, the Library Of Congress is closed as a result of what the vandals have done. Padlock study and intellect. Wander aimlessly down the mall among the shuttered monuments to self-government. Find yourself a food truck that serves monkey brains. Eat your fking fill.

"The elephant must go down!"

Andy Sullivan on the shutdown:

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right. You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.
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I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz. Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.

The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals.

This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come.

Amen.

Common Sense At Last!

Raw Story

Farmers in California may finally begin growing industrial hemp under a new law signed Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Lawmakers have been discussing the proposal since 1999 to allow approved residents to grow hemp for industrial purposes by reclassifying the plant as a fiber or oilseed crop.
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Similar bills have been vetoed four times by three different California governors over concerns about federal laws outlawing industrial hemp, which is considered no different from marijuana under U.S. law.

But U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said the federal government won’t interfere with states that permit the possession or regulation of marijuana.

California lawmakers have said industrial hemp should obviously be permitted, since it’s not even technically a drug.

Governor Moonbeam is working out quite well for my state the second time around! Probably better than the first time.

Flashback

N.Y. Times columnist says the GOP is finally having its ‘60s — and Ted Cruz is the new Abbie Hoffmann

Mopping keyboard, righting chair, change shirt for one with no snot/coffee on it...

“What’s happening here ain’t exactly clear,” Keller said, quoting a 1966 song written by Stephen Stills. “But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their ‘60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis.”

Keller cast the retrograde Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as the “spotlight-loving” Abbie Hoffman, because this is a 1960s analogy, and the tea party was compared to the “manifesto-brandishing” Students for a Democratic Society.
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“To those of us who lived through the actual ’60s, the conservative sequel may seem more like an adolescent tantrum than a revolution,” Keller writes. “For obvious starters, their mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance. Printing up unofficial ‘Obamacare Cards’ and urging people to burn them is a silly parody of the protest that raged 50 years ago. But bear with me.”
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He compares the “libertarian flank” who were drawn to the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s radical movement to the “political freeloaders drawn by the addictive drugs of power and television attention.”
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“Conditions are ripe for the rise of new leaders, some of whom will be demagogues and charlatans,” Keller writes.

Gee, ya think? I think you have a slightly belated grasp of the obvious, Mr. Keller.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Poll: Most Americans Have No Idea Obamacare Launches This Week
Nearly half never heard of Obama.

AIG CEO Says Criticism of Large Bonuses “Just as Bad” as Lynching
Except without the noose, the sudden breaking of the neck and spinal cord and the fact you still have the $5.8 million they gave you for Christmas.

North Carolina Town's School Board Reverses Ban on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
After some faceless, nameless black guy complained.

Pope: Atheists Can Be Redeemed if They “Do Good”
Like, say, give money to the Church.