Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label political posturing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political posturing. Show all posts

Friday, February 16, 2024

Texas Paul

  • Republicans are good at phony theatrics and bad at governing
  • Republicans are good at culture war bullshit and bad at policy
  • Republicans are good at sliming everybody to make a point and bad at talking reality
  • Republicans are good at pushing panic and bad at fixing problems
  • Republicans are good at sitting on their asses in recess and bad at doing the work
  • Republicans are good at making promises and bad at delivering on them
  • Republicans are good at looking stupid and bad at being smart

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Today's Today

It just occurred to me that 'today' is an anagram of 'toady'. I wonder what brought that to mind.

Anyway, three years ago today, Lindsey Graham showed his true colors.


 Happy Anniversary, Senator! 



Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Bail Bail And Bail Some More

This is politics - if you want a friend, buy a dog.


Grab 'em by the pussy - stay with Trump
Mock a disabled reporter - stay with Trump
Very fine people on both sides - stay with Trump
Blood coming out of her ... whatever - stay with Trump
Get shitty with a reporter - stay with Trump
Get shitty with a reporter - stay with Trump
Get shitty with a reporter - stay with Trump
and
and
and - stay with Trump
He was rude to me - I'm out.


Candace Owens said Trump's rudeness made her realize he's vengeful, paranoid, lacks humility
  • Candace Owens said on her Daily Wire show that Donald Trump was rude to her.
  • The conservative firebrand said the experience made her "question him as a person."
  • Owens said that Trump is "holding onto a vengeful spirit" and appears to lack a vision for 2024.
Candace Owens, speaking on her Daily Wire show after the midterms, said that former President Donald Trump being rude to her made her question for the "first time" what kind of person he is.

Owens, who once referred to Trump as "the savior" of the free world, described how the former president "actually got upset" with her following an interview with him in which he defended COVID-19 vaccines.

After the interview in December 2021, Owens defended him in an Instagram video, saying that people often forget "how old Trump is" and that he comes from a generation who "came from a time before TV, before the internet, before being able to conduct independent research."

The Daily Beast covered it, headlining the story: "Candace Owens: Trump Is Pro-Vax Because He's 'Too Old' to Understand the Internet."

In her monologue on her Daily Wire show this week, Owen's said she was sharing the "personal story" because "it's something that made me for the first time question him as a person."

The conservative firebrand went on to say that Trump twisted a "completely kind and fair interview."

"That is not being a leader, that is not owning things that you did wrong, that is not owning that you misunderstood something about your base," she said. "That's not growing, that's not developing."

Owens said that was the moment she realized he was "not listening" and made her question if he was becoming "too angry."

Owens said that in previous elections, Trump was "having fun," and "the energy, it was electric." However, she said after the 2020 election, he is in "an angry space" and has become paranoid.

She repeated that "he was so rude to me."

Owens said that there are conversations going on behind Trump's back that deserve to go public. She suggested he is "holding onto a vengeful spirit" and questioned if he has a vision for 2024. "It needs to be more than, 'I'm back,'" she said.

Trump is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid imminently, but The Guardian reported that some advisors and allies are urging him to delay it.

Owens said there's a sense of "trepidation" in Trump, which, she added, was evidenced in him taking a swing at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week. In a flurry of posts on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump called DeSantis an "average Republican governor" and referred to him as "Ron DeSanctimonious."

Trump endorsed more than 330 GOP candidates running for both state and federal offices in this election cycle, but several high-profile candidates lost or badly underperformed in the midterm elections.

Owens said Trump needs to exercise "a little more humility" when he gets something wrong, adding that the midterm results, which saw Democrats maintain control of the Senate, show that Trump and his base are "not sure."

Aside from the usual "conservative" hallmark that they don't care about anything bad that happens, until it happens to them, I think this makes it obvious that she's looking for her next host so as to continue her career as a Political Leech.

Which makes her no different from an awful lot of others. It's just that this seems so blatantly mercenary. She never "believed". She was never committed. She was "all in" only until it went sour. And more accurately, until she recognized her own exposure to risk because people really are getting hip to how bad it is, and how bad it's always been, and what a fucking phony she is.

These parasites seem to take all the shitty things a guy like Trump does and just put them in their pocket, waiting for the right time to bring something out so they have some kind of cover when they bail.

"He was rude to me."

WTF, Candace?

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Today's Political Sideshow



Dear AG Garland,

This Fauci guy humiliated me on national TV by exposing my propensity for political grandstanding, as well as my inexplicable ignorance of science and the peer review process.

And even though he's about my size and a hundred years older than me, we all know I'm not worth a shit in a fist fight, so I need you guys to beat him up for me, OK?

Sincerely,

Senator (and "Doctor") Rand Paul

PS) We're in the same gym class, and today it's dodge ball, so you have to get him before 5th period. Thanks.

"Conservatives" are a buncha whiny-butt pussies

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Triggering



1. ‘I Never Said I’m a Perfect Person’
If anybody ever responds to your concerns about them by saying that they never claimed to be perfect or that nobody’s perfect, be very, very skeptical.

If “I’m not perfect” were a real defense against criticism, nobody would ever be justified in criticizing anyone’s behavior. But obviously, things don’t work that way. If they did, people could just avert jail time by pleading imperfection.


2. ‘This Is Nothing More Than a Distraction From the Important Issues We’re Facing Today’
These comments aim to convey to Trump’s critics that they’re blowing something out of proportion.

This type of gaslighting comes up a lot in conversations about social justice: “How could you talk about eating disorders when some people can’t even afford food?” “Who cares if queer people can get married when in some places, they’re killed?”

3. ‘This Was Locker Room Banter’
Dismissing something that hurt another person as a joke or otherwise not serious is textbook gaslighting.

4. ‘She’s Playing That Woman’s Card’
Accusing someone of playing a card, like the “woman card” or the “race card,” is also an example of gaslighting because it implies that someone’s trying to find a problem because the problem they’re seeing isn’t real.

5. ‘I Think It’s Pure Political Correctness’
When equality and justice become mere “political correctness” and political correctness is portrayed as a threat to free speech, every social movement becomes subject to attack.

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Dear Mr Congress Critter


Monthly email from my congress critter, Bob Hurt:



I'm no longer willing to make nice with elected officials who're living on my dime while they're so obviously not doing what's in the best interest of the people they're supposed to be representing.  

Now, you may well postulate that by being something of an asshole in my responses, it's little wonder they seem not to be interested in what I have to say, but hey - they weren't listening to me in the first place, so what the fuck difference does it make?

Here's what I wrote back:

“This month, it was reported that over 800,000 people dropped out of our labor force in April -- reducing the labor force participation rate to a 35-year low. Many communities in the Fifth District continue to experience unemployment rates well above the national average, and our rate of recovery from the economic downturn has been weak. That is why the House of Representatives has adopted dozens of pro-growth proposals that would help jumpstart our economy and get us back on track. However, the President and the Senate must join in our effort. It is my hope that in the coming months we will be able to find bipartisan common ground in encouraging job opportunities for Virginians and Americans, and I remain committed to continuing to work toward this crucial goal."

So it seems pretty obvious that you and your GOP colleagues (both in DC and in Richmond) are doing a spectacularly shitty job for us here at home, and as always, you're all more than willing to work very hard to find anyone other than yourselves to blame for the crappy conditions your constituents are struggling with.

You are in charge in the House, Bob.  And you are in charge in both houses in Richmond, Bob.

Stop wasting my time and my money on astoundingly stupid things like Benghazi, and start moving on things like clean energies and Medicaid expansion and public health and a livable wage and other fair labor laws and any number of issues - you know, Bob - the things that might actually help somebody here in CD 5 instead of being solely for the benefit of the cronies on Wall Street and K Street and up in NOVA and Crystal City and downtown Richmond.  These are the things everybody knows will help push the economy forward and help get more of us back on track - everybody seems to know this except you and the nitwit rubes that you scam on a regular basis.

Or is it really that you're doing a terrific job of punishing the great unwashed until they cry uncle and roll over for whatever scraps you and your pimps are willing to throw their way?

I'm not the only one who knows you suck, Bob.  And I'm not the only one who's hip to the tricks.  Some of those rubes are starting to wise up too.

Mike Roberts
Earlysville
434.960.8698
evillemike2009@gmail.com

Friday, January 31, 2014

The Jig Is Up, Repubs

When Jon Stewart goes this far away from his usual centrist perch, something might be changing in a way that feels kinda significant.

(hat tip = FB friend VWE)

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Today's Toon


Just a reminder - "both sides do it" is a good way to keep us from making the kinds of changes we need to make.

Wednesday, January 08, 2014

What About Bob?

Juan Cole is not given to the kind of exaggeration necessary for political slagging.  One of the redeeming qualities of "The Academy" is that generally they understand how important it is to maintain their good standing in the company of their peers; so it's pretty rare for any high-profile academician to stray widely from the fold when it comes to speaking out too strongly about much of anything unless he's very confident of his position.  They're really a pretty conservative bunch - which seems odd, doesn't it? - since all we ever hear is that they're exactly the opposite?  I wonder what that's all about.

Anyhoo - Bob Gates has left our employ, and it's time for him to suck around for his place on the Wingnut Welfare Circuit; but first he has to re-establish his worthiness with the Repub faithful (after all, he went to work for "those people") so he's taken a giant shit on Obama's head no, that ain't it.

He's written a book nope sorry, missed again

Wait, I got it: He's offering a good-n-greasy literary handjob to any "conservative" who needs to get his rocks off by hearing another privileged Washington insider calling The Prez a lazy shiftless no-good dirty infantile pickaninny - all in polite-sounding coded language of course.

But perhaps I go too far - and perhaps that's why I'm a low-rent blogger while Juan Cole gets paid pretty good to do this kinda thing a lot better:
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his new memoir is said to have slammed Vice President Joe Biden for having been consistently “wrong” on foreign policy matters over the past four decades.
Gates’s petty gossip about his former colleagues should put an end to the pusillanimous Democratic Party tradition of appointing Republicans as secretaries of defense in Democratic administrations.
There is a lot to like about Gates. He over time became something like a defensive realist. He appears to have helped prevent Dick Cheney and the Neocons from attacking Iran. He warns against the seductive character of drone warfare, and wants a court to sign off on drone strikes. He said he thought any military commander who wanted to take US troops into another big ground war should have his head examined. He is scathing on the grandstanding and sadism of congressmen during hearings.
But lest it be forgotten, Gates’s career has been checkered and he has been consistently wrong about foreign policy himself. To wit:
1. Gates as a high official at the CIA was involved in the 1970s and 1980s invastly exaggerating the economic and military power of the Soviet Union...
2. When he was a high official at the CIA in the mid to late 1980s, Gates was involved in selling Pentagon weaponry to the Ayatollah Khomeini. ...
3. Not only did the Reagan administration in which Gates served as a loyal capo illegally steal weaponry from Pentagon warehouses...
4. Gates was, further, involved in further covert provision of weaponry, including chemicals and biological precursors to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. ...
5. Gates was among the architects of the US policy of giving billions to far right Muslim jihadis (Mujahideen) such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar in northern Pakistan...
6. The Afghanistan jihad waged by Gates and others at the CIA involved pressuring Saudi intelligence also to raise funds for it. The Saudis asked Osama Bin Laden to help as a fundraiser. ...
7. Gates and others in the Reagan administration appear to have downplayed Pakistan’s nuclear program...
8. Gates thinks that the 2007 Bush troop escalation or “surge” was effective. ...
9. Gates was confident in 2008 that a troop escalation in Afghanistan could allow for free and fair elections and actually said that the Taliban held no territory and the security problems in that country were exaggerated.
10. Gates asserts that he believes that once the US winds down its military role in Afghanistan, that country will be on a fairly good track to success. ...

Thursday, March 21, 2013

A Lotta Damn Gall


At first glance, this has to be taken as the self-congratualting chest-thumping crap that guys like Rumsfeld learn to do thru long careers in public service fucking people over "in the name of the king and for the good of the state" (with apologies to Msr Dumas for inviting the inference that Cardinal Richelieu might run a poor second in the Manipulative Assholes Sweepstakes).

If I look at it from only a slightly different angle, I can see a guy who feels alone and loathed and reviled - which is exactly how he should feel if he had any soul or any honor or any sense of humanity at all.  But Rummy gave up on all the civilizing niceties a long time ago.

So fuck him.

Let him continue his little imposture and let the rest of the world point and laugh for  what I hope is a very long dotage indeed.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

A New Thing

Big national campaigns almost always give us some memorable slogans or phrases.

There you go again.
Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy
Welfare Queens

Soledad O'Brien may have come up with one last night.  At about 5:10 she coins the phrase "The myth of the Deadbeat Nation".


And BTW - Bay Buchannan seems to be fairly gasping for air trying to beat this thing down.

Fast forward to the first coupla years of Willard's first term, and imagine what happens when he's faced with some majorly snarled problem in - oh, I dunno - the Middle East or SW Asia or North Africa or wherever.  We'll have Willard out front saying some kinda stupid shit that he thinks only Americans can hear, while his State Dept team is saying something exactly the opposite to the rest of the world because they're trying to keep from being barbecued inside our embassy in Western Fuckedupistan - and then we'll spend the next 7 or 8 years trying to get ourselves out of the shooting war that Sec Def Lyndsey Graham absolutely knew was a great way to settle the issue etc etc etc.

DO NOT put these clowns in charge of anything more complicated than a Saturday morning carwash down at the local high school.

Some Numbers

Willard committed a gaffe by saying what was actually on his mind yesterday.

He said (paraphrasing) 47% of Americans don't pay taxes and are incapable of taking responsibility for themselves, and feel entitled to the money that hard-working real Americans earn.

Here's an interesting look at where all those freeloaders live:


























So lemme see
  • of the 10 states with the greatest numbers of people Willard considers to be moochers and lay-abouts and shiftless no account sponges, 8 of 'em are standard traditional Red States.
  • 6 out of the 10 states with the LOWEST numbers are Blue States.
(hat tip = Addicting Info)

But remember that in Repub World, this just means they need to vote for Willard so he can show them the error of their ways, and to save them from being further victimized by the Svengali Socialist Obama.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Condi Rice

"Dr Rice has a Chevron Oil Company tanker named after her.  She's a perfect symbol for the corporatocracy..." --Larry Wilkerson

I can't get the audio player to embed, so you'll hafta to go over to truthdig to listen to the interview.

And BTW - I'd like to know how Col Wilkerson doesn't get better traction for the things he'd trying to get us to hear.

Willard's GOP

What in the blue-eyed buck-naked fuck were they thinking?

Old (and maybe a little tipsy?) white guy arguing with an imaginary Obama.  That was the big electrifying surprise?

Really, Repubs?  You wanted us all talking about Clint Eastwood the day after your convention, and not about the guy you just got done nominating for president?



I can get a little squirmy when Alec Baldwin or Barbara Streisand start diving into it, but that Eastwood schtick was cringe-worthy on an epic scale.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Man Factor

I posted a while back about some stupid dust up or another (wait a minute - this is a blog. All my posts are about some stupid dust up or another).

Anyway, one of the big Non-Troversies yesterday was that the White House had sent out "an obviously Photo Shopped" pic of Obama throwing a football.

(to wit:)

So actually, not bad - guy's got decent form blah blah blah.  Why are we attacking it?

Because The Kenyan Usurper must never be seen to possess actual Americanizing characteristics.

Because football good - Obama bad.  If Obama's good at football, then Repub Physics doesn't work anymore, and the pretend universe implodes.

Because part of that pretend universe is totally dependent on the DumAss Dems never thinking to ask, "OK - so what's your guy got?"

Where are all the pix of Romney doing manly things?  Go ahead - Google that one, and get back to me.

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Politicizing Mothers' Day

Ann Romney has a piece in USA Today all about the glories of motherhood and the importance of cherishing our moms.  Wow - way to take a tough stand on that one, Annie.

Go read it if you think you need a little blast of meaningless treacle from about 1915.  For my own self, this is one of those times I wish I could spell the sound I make when I puke.
It's hard to imagine now, but before the birth of my first child, I had never held a baby. Not once, not in my entire life. No baby at home to tend, no niece or nephew to babysit. So you can imagine, the day my first boy was born I felt woefully unprepared.
She tries to make it sound like she's some kinda "regular person".  She isn't.  She'd never held a baby?  Seems odd 'til you take a quick little Google spin thru her old neighborhood, or do a bit of reading on Bloomfield Hills Michigan* where she grew up.  She probably never did any laundry or cooked a meal for herself either.  Not that any of that makes her a bad egg in any way - just that it doesn't make her any kind of kindred spirit with anybody who's ever struggled with any of life's little obstacles.  It's hard to imagine Ann Romney ever being denied much of anything, or a time when somebody wasn't shinin' her ass over one thing or another.
*Bloomfield Hills ... consistently ranks as one of the top five wealthiest cities in the United States with population between 2,500 to 9,999 — it currently is listed at the number four position and in 1990 it was ranked number two,[6] and has the highest income of any city outside of California, Florida or Virginia. The median income for a family is over $200,000. In 2000, 49% of residential property in Bloomfield Hills had a value of over $1,000,000.[7]
Generally, I don't mind when campaign consultants insist on trying to pull this kind of crap; I just wish they weren't always so fucking clumsy and obvious about it.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

The Great American Sing-Off

Obama opens with a quick Al Green bit:


And then there's Willard:


If you feel moved, and you need to sing, then you should sing - but Dude, if you insist on doin' it in public, ya gotta remember there's a hard and fast rule from Karaoke Nite: If you're not Delbert McClinton or Joe Cocker, never EVER follow the black guy.








O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for heroes prov'd
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country lov'd,
And mercy more than life.
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Divide And Conflate

In the Age of Bias Confirmation, the duplicity game can actually be easier to play.  Case in point: Jan Brewer meets Obama at the airport; there's a bit of conversation away from the press that nobody hears; and it produces this graphic:

Cue the raging speculation as the blogosphere goes batty.

Gov Brewer tells 'the mainstream media' (eg: CBS) one thing, and then tells a very different story when she pops up on DumFux News.

Brewer scores the points - and scoring points is really the only thing that matters anymore - because she capitalizes on the opportunity to ambush Obama in public, and because the rubes won't see or hear anything that might contradict what they're led to believe.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Rachel, Rachel

I check in on Rachel Maddow once in a while.  When she wags her finger and gets preachy, I can do without her, but when she sticks to stringing the facts together and connecting the dots, there's no better reporter.