Slouching Towards Oblivion

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Today's Winner

Charlie Pierce is good clear voice in a very dull crowd, and wins Best Blog Post today.

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, of course, is what the Penguins would have sung, had they recorded "Derp Angel."

We were roaming Iowa watching live politics all weekend, so we only caught a smidgen of a crumb of the Sunday Showz. Which is to say, we only caught a little, but we caught enough to hand the House Cup over to CBS, where John Dickerson continues to adjust the casters on the chair once occupied by former Angevin minstrel Bob Schieffer. After a pretty good bipartisan dose of the old boogedy-boogedy, Dickerson brought out the panel, and we heard this from Ruth Marcus, scourge of teenaged potty-mouths everywhere.

"This was a very ugly week for Republicans in terms of their response on refugees and I think it was something that was exacerbated by the failure of President Obama to explain to people that we weren't crazy to be nervous but to understand their nervousness and to explain it away."


Holy Third Way No Labels! If that isn't the perfect distillation of the vaporlock caused by Beltway conventional wisdom, I don't know what is. (It's even worse than the hairball Fournier coughed up on the same subject, over at the Overlook Hotel, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker.) Apparently, it either has escaped Ruth's notice, or she thinks it's impolite to mention, that the Republican party is completely out of its mind, and that its current front-runner, the Libidinous Visitor, is one step away from invading Ethiopia. How in Broder's name is the president in anyway responsible for the xenophobic rantings of a party gone mad? I know the president has mad Kenyan telepathic skillz, but what precisely would Ruth have him say? "Only worry a little, Americans. We are extremely unlikely to be overrun by exploding Syrian toddlers"? Jesus, these people…

Here's a tip, gang. Short of "I resign," there is nothing the president can say that will stop the Republicans from mongering fear and mongering war and just plain making stuff up. The people who believe this indigestible fried crud are going to believe it no matter what this president says or does. The level of anti-Islamic panic is going to remain the same because it is an election year, and because the Republican field is now led by a guy wrapping himself in out and out fascism, and doing it for laughs. And that's the double truth, Ruth.

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